Page 75 of Spark Transform

The tension in the dock space spiked, thick and palpable enough to choke on. In his days under Davidro’s sadistic thumb, Renner would have been gathering lethal electrical power to salvage a deal about to go down twisted. The best he could manage now was a desperate attempt to pull enough ambient charge to shock the two minders holding him, and maybe create a distraction.

Wutala tilted her head, her dark eyes studying Arco as if trying to decode a complex cypher. “I asked you once before. Who is Brenner to you?”

Say nothing, Renner willed Arco silently. Don’t give Wutala a lever.

Arco’s eyes flicked to him for a fraction of a second, then swept over Wutala’s crew. “Yours is an unusual crew. You aren’t just jackals sharing the same cage. You’re family.” She pointed a thumb over her shoulder toward her team. “These are mine.” She shifted her chin toward Renner. “He’s my Khenzan.”

Renner had no idea who Khenzan was, but Wutala obviously did. She tensed, a flicker of raw, unguarded emotion crossing her beautiful face.

After a long, agonizingly tense moment, Wutala gave her people a curt nod. “Make the trade.”

Renner didn’t know what tipped the scales in Wutala’s head, but he was profoundly grateful. Arco’s power with words was remarkable. He had never been so fiercely glad to have her on his side.

The sifter and the telepath propelled him forward, then shoved him forward. Tōn Ko and Minan caught him, taking his weight as he maintained his staggering, pretend-pinzai-head routine. As they half-walked, half-carried him toward the exit, Arco stepped forward, executed a rapid biometric reset on the percomp, and tossed it to Wutala.

With breath-holding wariness, Renner, Arco, and the security team backed slowly out of the dock space. Wutala’s crew remained planted amidst the crates, their postures equally watchful, waiting for any sign of a double-cross.

The moment the heavy exit doors slid shut behind them, sealing them in the wide, chaotic terminal hallway, Renner straightened his spine. He took his own weight, though he kept his head slightly bowed and his movements sluggish just in case Wutala had surveillance bugs in the corridor. Minan efficiently slapped a secure comms earwire onto his jaw.

“N’Dwama will be here shortly,” Minan subvocalized over the team channel. “She’ll help you.”

“Where are we going?” Renner subvocalized back. He wasn’t entirely sure his words were decipherable. His lips and tongue felt thick, even less cooperative than his bruised brain and rubbery knees.

Arco’s voice filled his ear. “That ship that launched right after the crash was our ride off Mabingion. Probably didn’t want to be caught in the lockdown. Luckily, our tall friends from the studio are having a party in the west terminal freight dock, and we’re all invited. Unfortunately, we have to go through pissed-off passengers again to get there.”

Renner’s foggy brain couldn’t make sense of the logistics. Soleil and her Jumpers were here? At the spaceport? And why were passengers mad? He swayed slightly as Tōn Ko guided him through a knot of stranded, yelling passengers. For the first time in his life, Renner was actually looking forward to letting a sifter get inside his head to clear the fog.

Chapter 26

Planet: Mabingion • GDAT 3242.228

The floor under Jane Pennington-Smythe’s feet swayed a little as she stepped through the doorway of the control cab of the military mobile ground command unit. The behemoth vehicle was now her new operations center.

Jane was just in time to see the unit’s five-meter-tall gimbaled and segmented treads crush a row of civilian ground vehicles in their path. The driver, standing instead of sitting, whooped in glee. The navigator, properly webbed into her side chair, rolled her eyes.

Jane’s senior aide, Boroslova, had selected the GCU crew from the regular military’s Ground Division. The pilot’s antics were getting on everyone’s nerves, but he operated the transport-sized vehicle with skill. It was better suited to broken-field terrain in a combat zone than to urban environments. Howling storms didn’t faze it, but narrow city streets and sharp corners did. Jane regretted the damage to the city’s infrastructure, but emergencies took precedence.

“Corporals,” said Jane, encompassing both operators with her glance.

A look of dismay flitted across the driver’s face as he eyed his chair, then stood at rigid attention. “Orders, sir?”

“Have you seen Subcommander Boroslova in the last fifteen minutes?”

They both shook their heads.

Jane nodded. “Carry on, then.” She tilted her chin toward the panoramic view through the cab’s bubble. “Don’t break any more of the city than you have to.”

She left, hoping her command visit would rein in the driver’s excess. She’d take any success she could get at this point.

The short walk to her command office took her past the tunnel-shaped kitchen, which smelled of burnt coffee and the ever-present mold of Ridderth. She’d never been in GCU before, and found it to be a curious mix of admiralty swank and utilitarian ugly.

She kept up the pretense of serene and confident control until she shut and sealed her office door. Stumbling to a visitor chair, she sat without grace, fighting nausea and a flush of sweat. Her head pounded. Jumper-rated energy chems jangled every nerve in her body. She fumbled the protein paste tube out of her overcoat pocket and squeezed the nasty contents into her mouth. Hopefully, that would make her stomach shut up.

The bad news had started soon after she’d ordered the closure of Ridderth’s spaceport.

The first catastrophe was when CPS Marshal Temhathor’s shuttle and three military escorts crashed in a frozen lagoon at the outskirts of Ridderth. All four ships were a total loss and all sixty-seven service members died. Only a forensic investigation would discover if it was the bad storm, bad piloting, or bad decisions that destroyed them.

The second blow was the stunning notice that the CPS was decommissioning all its bases on Mabingion. The notice said that regular military ships were already in transit to ferry the vast majority of employees to their new duty stations on other planets. Those ships would leave in seven days. A second wave of ships would arrive later to ferry equipment and move families and households.