Waypoint Kangaroo (40 page)

*   *   *

Jessica and Oliver lead me up to the bridge. Colonel Brutlag welcomes me aboard, and I radio Captain Santamaria to give a status report. The X-4 transport and its escort fighter are flying on the spaceward side of the ship, so we can communicate with
Dejah Thoris
using my emergency comms dish.

According to the tactical displays here, we have just over three hours until
Dejah Thoris
passes “waypoint zero”—colorful X-4 terminology for the point of no return, beyond which no space vehicles in range can deliver enough thrust to deflect the cruise ship from her collision course. It'll take a full three hours for the tug inside the pocket to build up enough momentum to crash through the shielding around
Dejah Thoris
's reactor.

We're only going to get one chance at this.
Correction:
you're
only going to get one chance at this, Kangaroo. No pressure.

“Very well,” Santamaria says. “Thank you, Mr. Rogers.”

“Any sign of Wachlin freaking out?” I ask.

“Not yet,” Santamaria says. “Let's hope he thinks the spacemen picked up the tug.” It's plausible—this boat is big enough to carry several smaller vehicles. All Wachlin would have seen from engineering was a radar blip disappearing.

“Has anybody come up with any more brilliant plans in case this one fails?”

“Maybe you should ask your friends over there.”

Right. I'm just the blunt instrument. “Wait one.” I mute my microphone and turn to Oliver. “I assume you've got something in the works?”

“We contacted Mars Orbital Authority,” Oliver says. “They're evacuating all vessels from orbit and diverting incoming traffic. Four tugs, one frigate, and several cargo freighters are moving to intercept
Dejah Thoris.
”

I relay the information.

“Cargo freighters?” Santamaria says. “They pressed private spacecraft into service?”

I turn back to Oliver. He glares at me and points at the console. I mute again.

“Tell him they volunteered,” he says.

I unmute and tell Santamaria.

“I won't put any more civilian lives at risk,” he says. “Call them off.”

“Hold on.” I mute and prepare for Oliver's inevitable outburst.

“Does he understand the meaning of the word
volunteer
?” he says. “MOA ordered those freighters to evacuate. They refused. I don't think the entire US-OSS fleet could dissuade them. Or maybe the captain would like to speak to the Martians himself and explain, in his own words, why they should
not
participate in the primary effort to save their planet from mass destruction!”

“Okay, I'm going to paraphrase that,” I say.

“Just wrap it up,” Jessica says. “We need to talk. In private.”

Really not looking forward to that.
I turn back to the console without meeting her gaze.

“The freighter captains refused MOA's orders to evacuate,” I say. “They're not going anywhere until they know their homeworld is safe.”

After a second, Santamaria says, “Please give the Martians our thanks.”

“You're going to do that in person, Captain.”

“Very well.”

*   *   *

The X-4 transport has four decks, not including the cockpit, and a sizable cargo bay. Oliver leads Jessica and me to the mess area while the X-4s prepare their part of our crazy plan to rescue an entire cruise ship and save the planet Mars.

I start to ask what happened with the audit back at the office, but Oliver puts a finger to his lips and pulls out a small, disk-shaped device. Jessica closes and locks both doors leading into the mess area while Oliver attaches the disk to one wall and fiddles with it.

I take a breath, preparing to criticize their paranoia, and my nose informs me that there are foodlike substances in the vicinity.

I don't know if it's stress, or if my constant overeating for the last week and a half has miscalibrated my body's sense of hunger, but I'm starving. I grab two packets of field rations out of a storage cabinet and scarf them down cold. When I turn back around, Jessica is holding out a bulb of red liquid.

“Electrolytes,” she says. “Drink it.”

I take the bulb and wash down my so-called food. A warbling, buzzing sound fills the room. It takes me a moment to recognize it as “pesticide”: anti-eavesdropping masking noise. Oliver's device generates sound in irregular, unpredictable patterns, and also vibrates the surface it's touching to keep nosy neighbors from listening in.

It's unbelievably annoying.

“Is that really necessary?” I ask Oliver.

He stares at me for a moment, then says, “The
Director
of
Intelligence.
”

I look at Jessica. She's pounding her fingers against a touchscreen computer tablet. “So what do we need to talk about?”

“How do you feel?” she asks.

“Fine.”

“You're dehydrated. Finish drinking that bulb.”

Of course. I always forget that Jessica has full remote access to my cybernetic implants. It always feels like a breach of privacy, until I remember that I don't have any privacy on the job.

“How big was that last portal?” she asks.

“Fifteen meters diameter,” Oliver replies.

Jessica looks at me. “Fifteen meters is the widest you've ever opened the pocket, and the last time you did it, you fainted.”

“Well, I'm fine now, as you can see. All that training must have paid off.” Science Division loves to make me open and close the pocket in different simulated situations, for hours on end, while measuring my brain activity.

“You're dehydrated,” Jessica repeats. She turns the tablet to show me a bunch of medical readouts. “Cortisol levels are still elevated, acetylcholine saturation is low. Drink two more bulbs of vitamin water, then go take a nap. You have less than two and a half hours to recover.”

“I don't need to recover. I told you, I'm fine.” I finish the red drink and stick the bulb to the nearest table.

Jessica lowers her tablet and nods. “Okay. Open the pocket.”

“What?”

“Open the pocket.”

I shrug. “What do you want me to take out?”

“Nothing,” she says. “Just open the portal. Show me you're fully recovered.”

“With or without the barrier?” I ask. I'm doing my best to stall, because I don't want to admit she's right, and I'm hoping another minute or two will make a difference.

“Open the damn pocket, Kangaroo.”

I glare at her, then turn and look at the far wall. I concentrate as hard as I can on opening the pocket. Nothing happens.

“You know, that noise is really distracting,” I say, pointing at Oliver's bug-killer.

Jessica nods at Oliver. He taps the disk, and the room becomes eerily quiet.

“Go on,” Jessica says.

I put out a hand to focus my concentration and try again. Still nothing. I cycle through the first reference objects I can think of, attempting to pull each one:
pink elephant, blue elephant, orange elephant, white elephant …

After a minute, I slam a fist against the table and curse.

Jessica opens a cooler, rummages through it, and retrieves a blue drink bulb. “Drink this one next.” She pulls out a green bulb. “Then this one.” She sets them on the table and removes the empty bulb.

“Is the goal here to get my tongue dyed completely black?”

“Each color indicates different vitamins and electrolytes,” she says. “You need the variety to rebalance your system. And your body needs sleep to make that happen.”

Might as well get this part over with. I take a big gulp of blue liquid and make a face. “I don't suppose you brought any alcohol with you.”

She frowns. “No drinking on duty.”

“I'm just saying, some liquid courage would make these more palatable. And a bit of the hard stuff would also help me get to sleep.”

“You don't need to worry about that,” Oliver says.

I've finished the blue drink and am halfway through the green one when I realize what he means. “No. Oh, no. What the hell did you—”

My muscles go slack before I can finish the sentence. Goddamn Surgical.

 

CHAPTER FORTY

X-4 transport—Crew berths

90 minutes from waypoint zero

I wake up zipped into a sleeping bag on one of the lower decks. I do feel better after my chemically induced nap, but I'm never going to admit that to Jessica.

Something pokes into my chest as I wiggle out of the sleeping bag. I unzip my jumpsuit and find an encrypted agency file tucked inside.

I instinctively hide the plastic document sheet and look around to make sure I'm alone. It's completely unnecessary—the display surface appears transparent to the naked eye, and will only be readable to someone with the right scanning implant—but it's a reflex.

Oliver and Jessica must have left it. Why didn't they just hand it to me? I blink my left eye into decryption mode, move my fingers to enter my passphrase, and wait for my implants to process the file. After a second, the agency logo appears overlaid on the sheet in my HUD, along with phantom controls for paging through the data.

I swipe over to the first page and have to read it twice to make sure I understand it.

When I get to page three, I realize I'm clutching the sheet so hard the plastic is starting to deform.

I take several deep breaths to calm myself and finish reading. Then I go to the bridge.

I find Oliver there with Colonel Brutlag and the pilot. I ask if I can have a word alone with Oliver, and wait until we're in the mess area and he's turned on his bug-killer before slamming him up against the wall.

“What the fuck!” I say, waving the file in his face.

“Lasher thought you should know,” Oliver says.

“Lasher,” I say, “is a deceitful, two-faced, manipulative bastard.”

Oliver frowns. “And this is somehow news to you?”

“He lies to
other
people.” I had resolved not to lose my shit, but I'm not sure I can hold it together. “He doesn't lie to
us.
”
He doesn't lie to
me.

“You read the whole file?” Oliver asks.

“Who the fuck are you talking to? Yes!”

“Then you know he couldn't take the risk!” Oliver says. “Lasher knew there was a security breach within the agency, but he didn't know if it was a leak, a mole, or some kind of technology exploit. Not until you requested Alan Wachlin's service record. Lasher was able to pull that thread and discover Wachlin's connection to D.Int.”

I feel a surge of pride. They wouldn't have discovered that without me. Score one for insubordination.

“And then military police arrived to escort Surgical and me out of the office,” Oliver continues. “We realized we weren't actually in trouble when they strapped us into a high-gee US-OSS clipper, but we didn't know the whole story until we rendezvoused with the X-4s.” He scowls at me. “At least you got to enjoy a seafood buffet.”

It was a pretty good buffet. I shake my head. “Lasher should have trusted us.”

“He
did
trust us. He just couldn't
tell
us. He didn't know who might be listening.” Oliver points at the file. “He repositioned thirty-eight other operatives in addition to the three of us. And he moved everyone under nonofficial covers. That's a massive operational deployment, and he did all the paperwork himself. He must not have slept for a week.”

“I could have exposed Wachlin and Bartelt sooner,” I say. “I could have gone after the cargo immediately. I could have stopped them before they hijacked the ship.”
I could have saved Xiao.

I could have protected Ellie.

“You could have gotten yourself killed,” Oliver says. “We couldn't prep you without raising suspicions. You would have been on your own, facing two trained killers. They would have made short work of you and anyone else who got in their way.”

“You don't know that.”
I could have tried.

Oliver shakes his head. “How many contingency actions did Wachlin demonstrate after the hijacking, when you and the crew were attempting to re-take engineering? Sakraida has been planning this for years. Your biggest advantage was Bartelt and Wachlin not knowing who you were or what you could do. You had to wait until the right moment to use the pocket, for maximum effect.”

“I don't know if anybody told you,” I say bitterly, “but people have been dying out here.”

“We didn't know what they were going to do. They could have tried to steal the ship, or destroy it, or ransom the passengers. We couldn't defend until we knew how they would attack.”

I know he's right. That's the worst part. Paul's always right.

“
We
could have taken an educated guess,” I say.

“Save it for the debrief,” Oliver snaps. I guess he's had enough of me for once, instead of the other way around. “We still have work to do. If you're done with that?” He tugs the file out of my grip.

“Why tell us now?” I say, releasing the plastic sheet. “He must have known this was going to piss off every last one of us. Make us feel betrayed.”

“I was curious about that decision as well.” Oliver touches invisible controls at the corners of the document, and it shrivels up and vaporizes in a puff of acrid smoke. “Lasher said he wanted to notify everyone that they were, in fact, deployed on mission. To be ready for new orders at any time. And he wanted to remind you of your objectives and priorities.”

I cough out an angry laugh. “My objective is pretty simple. Stop
Dejah Thoris
from crashing into Mars.”

Oliver stares at me. “Your priority is Mars.”