Page 83 of Spark Transform

Wutala leaned in close with a wide, predatory smile. “That’s for my friends and my lab.” With her left hand, she pulled out a beamer. “This is for me.” She shot Hujuru point-blank in the chest. With a flick of her wrist, she retracted the neurowhip and kicked the lifeless body over. Arco knew she’d always remember that Hujuru looked both remarkably surprised and thoroughly annoyed as she died.

Wutala holstered her weapon and turned her dark, calculating gaze on Arco. The crew chief stepped over the fresh corpses, her boots crunching on the littered floor. “Just so you know, Charrascos, you personally now top Pennington-Smythe’s hit parade. The CPS has more kill squads than there are mold spores in Ridderth.”

“The price of fame,” Arco replied, her voice steadier than she felt. She kept her hands clearly visible, acutely aware that Wutala could order her crew to execute Arco and her entire team right there. “Are you going for the bounty?”

Wutala shook her head and let out a short, humorless laugh. “You are a magnetar for trouble. Take your team and your sparky loverboy and get out of my city.”

Arco didn’t know why Wutala was giving her grace, except maybe Wutala had enough on her plate. She was going to have to live with the aftermath of the storm and the raids. A surge of sympathy washed through Arco. “Will you and your crew be okay?”

Surprise flickered across Wutala’s face, momentarily softening her hard expression. “Yes. We know the spaceport better than the employees.” She gestured casually to her heavily armed crew, who were gathering the spoils of the skirmish. Without another word, she turned and disappeared into the shadows of the maintenance corridor, her people melting away behind her.

“Clear!” Rustom called from the far side of the gravcart corral. He waved them forward, leading the way toward the loading airlock doors and Soleil’s waiting ship. Tōn Ko emerged from the bot storeroom, carrying Nilsson’s limp body carefully over his shoulder.

Arco slipped her hand into Brenner’s as they broke into a steady jog. He tightened his fingers around hers, offering a brief, tentative smile before refocusing his attention on the path ahead. More than anything else, that smile made Arco’s heart skip, fueling her desperate sprint toward the stars.

Chapter 29

Planet: Mabingion • GDAT 3242.228

The heavy airlock doors of Soleil’s cargo ship slammed shut with a gratifying, final thud. Renner exhaled a breath he felt like he’d been holding since Wutala’s crew had melted into the darkness of the spaceport.

Ex-Jumper Murtazo met them in the corridor, handing out earwires as a workaround for the lack of a working announcement system for the ship’s comms. He put it in his other ear rather than remove the team earwire. More ex-Jumpers he recognized from Soleil’s studio secured crates in the load-out area while Murtazo told them where to find jump seats in the dock and scattered haphazardly across the various levels. “The ride to orbit might be b-b-bumpy.”

Rustom guided Tōn Ko, who still carried an injured Nilsson, toward a lift that would take them to the ship’s autodoc. N’Dwama and Minan followed.

Arco frowned at Murtazo. “Where are the kids?”

Murtazo looked surprised. “What kids? We don’t have any k-k-kids.”

Arco shot Renner a baffled look. He leaned in close to her ear. “Underage. No family permission. Kids will swear on the CGC seal that they snuck on board.”

Arco paused a second, then laughed when she understood. The sound warmed him.

He steered Arco toward a pair of jump seats tucked into the corner of the load-out dock behind several strapped-down crates. His red angel was still his responsibility.

As he and Arco hooked the safety webs across their seats, Haseem’s tenor voice chimed over the new ship-comms earwire. “Hi, Arco. Hi, Brenner. Nilsson is secure in the autodoc. The short-term prognosis is good.”

The subsequent launch felt like surviving a flitter crash every thirty seconds. Renner clenched his jaw as the ship shuddered violently against the century cyclone. The jump seats protected their spines and heads, but nothing shielded them from the chaos in the hold. A supply cabinet burst open, sending an explosion of loose tools and tech flying across the deck. The gravity compensators fluctuated, turning Renner’s stomach into a nauseating knot. He glared at the massive crates strapped nearby, waiting for the restraints to snap and crush them all to a pulp. The engines roared like they were bolted directly to the walls behind their heads. He’d despised the gilded padding of the luxury deck of the stellar cruise liner they’d taken to Concordance Prime, but getting battered in a freighter hold tanked on an entirely new level.

“In the good news department, we’re clear of the spaceport.” Renner recognized the voice as Josh DeGuilian’s, Soleil’s tall partner, who sometimes showed up for class. “We’ll probably get charged with disregarding a shutdown order, but they’ll have to find us first. In the disagreeable news, because of the storm, we’re about fifteen minutes to orbital distance. And in the bad news department, we might have extra obstacles to dodge. The crashes at the spaceport weren’t because of the killer century snowstorm. They were deliberate acts of terrorism by a minder rights group calling themselves the Libertas Core Network or Shattered Chain.”

A chorus of shock flooded the comms. “What the fuck?” “Who?” “Why?” Vicious curses filled the channel. Renner tightened his grip on his web and scowled at the universe. Fuck the “bumpy ride.” How was he supposed to protect the woman he loved from that?

“Here’s part of the manifesto. It’s on every public channel,” Josh added.

A new voice filled the comms, vibrating with fanatical zeal. “...control the skies, but no more. We are the kinetic energy of the tide. The Citizen Protection Service speaks only the language of death and destruction. Today, we are speaking in sparks. Today, they reap the stellar winds. We now control all airborne vehicles across the planet. The ground embraces the fallen sky. CPS Marshal Temhathor is the first. The remainder is metal rain that will burn the sorrow. This is the day—”

The voice cut off, and Josh spoke again. “There’s twenty minutes more like that. Essentially, Shattered Chain claims to have taken control of the planetary TCS and is using anything flying as projectiles aimed at anything the CPS has its name on. The Ridderth Military Base, the testing centers, even the private homes of officers. You get the idea.”

Arco tapped her earwire. “The bit you played has quotes from the Ayorinn Legacy quatrains — metal rain, speaking in sparks.”

“Yeah, the manifesto is littered with them,” Josh replied. “Maybe it’s misdirection, or maybe they’re true believers.”

It took Renner a minute to realize he recognized the voice’s accent and the deep rage in the precise delivery. Be’un, from the resistance group he and Haseem had walked away from just a standard month ago. She was definitely a fanatic, but the only thing she believed in was hate. He had to admit her attack was every bit as devastating as she’d promised, but the collateral damage was too costly. She and the rest of the group were gliding high on unexpected power. He couldn’t blame them for reveling in being on top for once. But in the end, they were no better than the CPS, who destroyed an entire office building in Arazak to silence one professor and sent a fucking spider mech after one journalist. His journalist.

Beside him, Arco pulled out her pink tablet. Despite the teeth-jarring turbulence, her fingers danced across the interface as she subvocalized. Her relentless focus always impressed him, but her dedication and dexterity were awe-inspiring.

Two minutes later, Arco’s voice came over the ship-comms earwire. “I did a quick dive for trends. Someone leaked an order by Pennington-Smythe for a blockade at the Mabingion system jump point. However, the military fleet isn’t due for another standard day at the earliest. Ridderth is smoldering. It’d be worse without the storm, because the rest of the major cities are on fire. The manifesto hit every public network before the government even knew to look for it, much less suppress it. The news is already trending throughout the galaxy net. People are panicking, trying to get out of the cities. The other big news is that the CPS is closing the Ridderth base entirely and relocating all affected CPS staff and families to other planets. CPS Minder Corps employees are reportedly leaving their posts in droves, but that’s unconfirmed. I can’t tell if that was before Pennington-Smythe’s raids started or after. Shattered Chain couldn’t have picked a more effective time to take over the traffic control system and bring their metal rain.”