The Apocalypse Ocean (23 page)

Kay couldn’t stop staring at Thinkerer, trying to pull the pieces of her mind together. She realized that she’d
trusted
him. He was a blank slate, a robot, a machine, and because she couldn’t read him, she’d projected onto that clear space.

Everything she’d been assuming had been wrong.

But could they trust Tiago’s story?

“Tiago?” she asked. She wanted to ask him more about what he’d
seen
. She could sort through what he thought he had seen, what he had actually seen, and what he’d come to believe if she interrogated him. But it would take time.

Time they didn’t have. Not with Thinkerer standing there calmly.

Trust me, Tiago’s face screamed. Trust me. I believe what I saw. He was staring at her, as if willing her to do something.

But she couldn’t.

There was no trust left.

There’d never been any there to begin with, until Thinkerer built it up. Then snapped it.

But there was always anger.

The bump of the small pistol in her belt nagged at her. So she reached down and pulled it free. When she aimed at Thinkerer, he looked at her, unconcerned. “What do you think that will accomplish?” he asked.

Kay couldn’t say. She was out of words. Out of plans. She couldn’t see any further into the future than just simply … pulling the trigger.

It cracked. She was expecting more of a kick. More of an explosion. But it wasn’t a large gun. It just made a loud pop sound.

But the explosion of activity it set off was more extreme.

Nashara leapt out from behind Pepper, a machine gun in either hand battering away at Thinkerer’s torso. He’d been stepping toward Kay, calmly raising a hand. The bullet Kay had fired had stung Thinkerer’s cheek, knocking his head back and exposing that odd bronze sheen underneath. But the shot hadn’t killed or hurt him.

Neither did any of the skin-peeling chatter of shots that ripped over him now.

The constant impact of bullets physically forced him to stagger back for a split second, and then he pulled his hands up to his face and leapt forward.

Nashara collided with him. They spun for a moment, Nashara prying his fingers apart so that they couldn’t squeeze the detonator. Thinkerer threw Nashara against a bulkhead. The steel gonged, and her head left a dent in it. But she held up Thinkerer’s right hand, still clutching the detonator, with a self-satisfied grin. “You lost something,” she said.

“Get down,” Kay hissed at Tiago. “Get away.”

He scurried her way, keeping low.

Pepper ignored the fight. In the seconds since he’d provided cover for Nashara getting her machine guns ready, he’d ducked over to the control panels and started tapping out control sequences. Monitors flipped their images over from showing large individualist ships thundering their way up into the air, to showing scripts and overlaying the images with arrows and vectors and other information Kay didn’t understand.

The
Saguenay
rumbled, and Thinkerer glanced over, realized that something was happening, and took his eyes off Nashara.

She took the opportunity to close with him and ram a knife into his eye socket. Thinkerer reached up and grabbed at it, and she flipped another knife up and slammed it home.

Pepper crouched and fired the thrusters.

Saguenay
trembled. It was minor at first. Then it built. And slowly, with a tortured scraping sound, the spaceship began to shove its way across dirt and debris toward the wormhole over the dusty remains of the streambed.

Thinkerer tore at Nashara, trying to get at the detonator, but she balled up and kept it away from his grasping, remaining hand.

The golden robot raised his broken stub of a wrist and started stabbing her with the metal wreckage of it. Nashara winced as he plunged it deep into her ribs, but stayed put.

The spaceship’s skin ripped and tore as it ground across boulders, and Pepper increased the shaking power. Thinkerer slammed Nashara’s head into a beam again and again.

He sparked, something long cleaving through his chest. Another one of Nashara’s ridiculously long knives spitted him. She picked him up and ran across the cockpit with his body and slammed him into the wall.

This time, Thinkerer left an imprint in the solid metal.

Nashara’s clothes were bloody, Kay noticed, and she left a trail of red across the floor as she ran.

Then the wall slapped Kay in the back and catapulted her across the room as the ship struck something. She threw her hands up in front of her as she struck a console and bounced.

Blood trickled from her forehead as she hung onto the edge with her fingers and looked down. The front of the cockpit no longer existed. The screens were gone. There was just blackness. The entire ship shook and rattled, thrusters holding them in place. Pepper had flipped the
Saguenay
face first into the wormhole.

He held himself in place calmly with one hand, looking somewhat like a crouched gargoyle, and tapped commands with the other.

“It’s shoved too far in, we’re going to rip the front of the ship off when you trigger it,” Nashara shouted.

Pepper didn’t show any sign he heard. His coat brushed the edge of the wormhole and disappeared into it. He pulled his booted feet up under him with a grimace.

Thinkerer began struggling to leap at Pepper. Nashara grabbed him by the boot. She held up the detonator between them, and then let it drop. It tumbled away, down into the wormhole below. Thinkerer leapt after it. 

Nashara grabbed his legs and held him dangling in the air. Thinkerer sliced at Nashara’s arms. She let go, and he fell away into the black void.

Kay needed to focus. Her own fingers were slipping. She was going to follow Thinkerer over to the other side any second now.

“Grab my hand,” said a voice.

She looked up. It was Tiago. He’d pulled himself up and wrapped his legs around a chair and straps.

But she’d broken him, she thought. Once she let go, she was in his hands. And what happened next? He’d let her go once she dangled in the air. Let her drop through that wormhole after Thinkerer.

She couldn’t read him right now. She could see the capacity to do that. She could see that he was considering it. And she could see that he was fighting it.

She slipped further. Maybe it was better this way. To find out what was on the other side. To go after Thinkerer and make it pay for what it did to her.

That was a quest that felt right.

She couldn’t hang on any longer. The joints of the remaining fingers holding on cracked and gave up. She dropped.

Tiago caught her wrist with a grunt. They hung for a moment over the wormhole, and then she scrambled up over him to grab the straps, using them pull herself onto the side of a console. She pulled herself out of the cockpit from there.

Light flashed from in the cockpit. Metal screamed. The world twisted itself inside out, and a loud thump reverberated up and down the
Saguenay
as the wormhole killer was fired.

The void underneath her snapped away, replaced with rock and rubble. 

The entire ship started to fall over onto its side.

The
Saguenay
collapsed. Tiago felt the impact ripple through the superstructure. Deck plates buckled and roofs collapsed in. Dust swirled and added to the chaos, and he clung to the straps, waiting for something to fall and hit him.

But despite the groaning and screeching, nothing did.

Everything fell silent.

Pepper appeared through the dust. “Where’s Kay?”

“I don’t know,” Tiago coughed. “She crawled up higher.”

Pepper picked Tiago up and pointed him toward the light. “Get outside, Nashara’s there. Keep an eye on her.”

Pepper moved further into the gloom of the wreckage of the
Saguenay
.

Tiago put an arm over his mouth and carefully stumbled through the wreckage of the cockpit out into the light.

Nashara lay propped up against a boulder, a mangled arm limp in her lap. She was leaking from stab wounds all over her body. Tiago ran over to her, looking around for someone to help.

“Look up,” she said.

He ignored her. He could see distant League figures trudging along the carved-out trail the spaceship had left behind in the dirt. He waved at them. Someone there should be able to help her.

A bloody hand grabbed the back of his head and forced it up. “Look,” Nashara ordered. “The dead zone’s gone. They’re fighting.”

Five long cylinders passed overhead and the sky lit up with the crackle of energy weapons. Seconds later a rolling thunder swept across the valley.

The individualist ships responded. Two of the human ships were sliced in half by some invisible force.

It was clear they were outgunned by the individualist weapons, but both League and Xenowealth ships kept on hounding the new alien ships.

The individualist ships fled toward Trumball, heading to hide deep in League territory, League and Xenowealth ships harassing them all the way until they disappeared behind the mountains.

Pepper rejoined them after the League medics stabilized Nashara. He’d spent half an hour searching the remains of the spaceship.

“Will Nashara be okay?” Tiago asked him.

“With the dead zone gone, yes,” Pepper said. “She’ll heal. The League soldiers will help. In fact, most of the League is working with us until we get this new threat contained. We worked together once to fight off an alien threat. I guess we can do it again, despite our disagreements.”

“Where’s Kay?”

“She left a letter outside the cockpit.” Pepper started walking away.

“A letter?” Tiago didn’t understand. “What did it say? I don’t understand.”

Pepper didn’t answer. He walked off to follow the medics carrying Nashara away. Tiago followed him. As he hurried to catch up he noticed that the end of Pepper’s trench coat was now two feet shorter, cut cleanly and exactly where it had been hanging just inside the wormhole.

To Tiago, Market-square still looked just as it had last month. But underneath, so much had changed. The newspapers still hung in their racks. But now they ran headlines like INDIVIDUALIST SHIPS CLASH WITH FORCES AROUND GAPTHIS. 

There was a lot more about a change in League parliamentary proceedings that Tiago didn’t understand. The individualists had only gotten a few ships through, but packed aboard them had been the ability to create hundreds more.

A small war had blossomed somewhere out beyond Trumball. But the individualists were losing. Too few of them had come through. Their magical technology could only do so much.

But the Xenowealth’s technology – that had done a great deal here on Placa del Fuego. There was the new clinic on Fulstrom Street. Dentists were getting retrained. They had machines that could grow new teeth.

Tiago walked his way into the house where he’d been imprisoned by Kay. Nusdilla and her mother sat in the foyer, the immense, ridiculous foyer, and their faces changed to shock when they recognized him.

“Tiago!”

He hugged them both. No doubt they’d given him up for dead when he’d left. There had been rumors of the Doaq attacking people he’d been seen with. The ice ship attack. He’d gone missing. And now he’d turned up and asked them to meet him in the lobby of this house.

“Everything is changing,” he told them. “Our island, the outer worlds. I’ve even been to some of them.” He was bragging. For Nusdilla. But he couldn’t help it. He’d earned at least some of it, hadn’t he?

“I helped Nashara. And Pepper. And in return, they’ve given me some things, and I wanted to pay you back.” He looked at them. There were times when he’d been alone and sick, and they’d fed him. They’d helped him build his niche. They had treated him like family, and like a common thief, he’d run from them for a chance to make money and never looked back.

But he’d come to realize that he loved the island when it had been threatened with destruction. And more importantly, he loved the people he’d lived with.

He didn’t want to leave.

Nashara understood. Pepper less so. But they’d given him the house, and several more. Kay, they said, didn’t need them anymore. She wasn’t coming back to the island. She’d said so in the letter Pepper had found.

He’d wanted to ask, but then didn’t.

It didn’t matter anymore. He wasn’t scared. Not after everything he’d already seen.

So he’d taken the houses and places Kay once owned, and helped people crammed away in hidey-holes and gutters that he’d once known.

And for himself, he’d take a room in this house. He would enjoy the space. The comfortable beds.

Some good food.

“There’s this school opening,” he told Nusdilla. “It’ll help us learn Xenowealth technology. It’ll help us learn anything we want. I was hoping you would go with me.”

And when she nodded and smiled back, Tiago couldn’t help thinking that here on Placa del Fuego, things were going to be all right.

Even when the rain alarms went off.