Aurora Burning: The Aurora Cycle 2 Read online

  “They’re the biggest outfit with a salvage yard on Emerald City,” Fin explains. “Maker’s bits, if we had the credits, we could get a chariot worthy of our status as notorious interstellar criminals, but …”

  “We don’t have the credits,” Tyler points out, grim.

  “Please tell me we’re not considering buying the sewage ship?” Scarlett says. “Because I don’t think I’m dressed for that.”

  Kal glances at Scar, one silver eyebrow rising. “How would you dress for that?”

  “Wait, wait a minute … ,” I whisper, my breath sticking in my throat. “Fin, stop scrolling, go back to …”

  My tone stills everyone in the room. Fin lifts one hand, swipes it from right to left like a conductor, scrolling slowly through the ships in the salvage yard.

  “There, stop there!” All eyes turn to me as I stand slowly, pointing at one of the ships on the wall.

  “Auri?” Tyler asks.

  “That’s the Hadfield,” I say.

  Tyler walks closer and squints at the display. Fin punches up the entry, expands it, and there it is. Right out of my memories and into the waking world.

  It looks a little like an old Earth battleship, long and cigar-shaped. The hull is blackened, long gashes are torn down its sides, and the metal looks like it was liquefied in places, but I’d recognize it anywhere. The ship I climbed aboard two weeks and two hundred and twenty years ago, setting out for a new life on Octavia III. A life that’s gone now, along with everything and everyone I ever knew.

  “Maker’s breath, you’re right, Auri.” Ty shakes his head, staring at the Hadfield with a kind of awe. “Last time I saw her, she was being ripped apart by a FoldStorm. How did anyone get hold of her?”

  Fin shrugs. “Search me. I’m guessing a Hephaestus salvage team stumbled across her in the Fold after you rescued Stowaway here? Specs say she’s in a mega-convoy heading for an auction block on Picard VI.”

  “Why would anyone want a piece of junk like that?” Scarlett glances at me. “I mean, no offense …”

  “None taken,” I murmur.

  “Says so right here,” Fin nods. “ ‘The most famous wreck in the age of Terran stellar exploration! Own a genuine piece of history!’ ”

  “We have to get to her.” The words are out before I realize I’m speaking.

  Tyler turns from the display to face me. “What for?”

  “I don’t know. I just … feel it.”

  “Is it your gift, be’shmai?” Kal asks.

  “Maybe.” I glance around at a sea of uncertain faces, realizing that as much as they’re growing to trust me, the legionnaires of Squad 312 are going to need more than a gut feeling. “Look, we know I’m supposed to stop the Ra’haam from blooming, right? Otherwise it’ll spread through the Fold and consume the galaxy. But we don’t know anything about the Eshvaren. And they’re the ones who set all this in motion, who somehow made me into … whatever I am.”

  Kal stands slowly by my side, peering at the Hadfield’s wreck. Of every race in the galaxy, the Syldrathi are the only ones who truly believe the Eshvaren ever existed. The light from the projection plays across his violet irises as he speaks.

  “And you believe we may be able to learn more about the Ancients aboard?”

  “I don’t know,” I admit. “But I do know something happened to me on that ship. I was just a regular person when I stepped into that cryopod, and when Tyler pulled me out, I was …”

  I glance at my reflection in the helmet again. The stranger looking back at me.

  “… this.”

  “They might have salvaged the black box,” Fin says. “The flight recorder would tell us if the Hadfield ended up anywhere she wasn’t supposed to, if anything unusual happened that the instruments could measure. When. How. Where.”

  “We will be better equipped to support Aurora’s mission if we understand the nature of it,” Zila agrees. “And the ones who gave it to her.”

  Kal nods. “Know the past, or suffer the future.”

  Tyler glances across at Scarlett for a long moment. She tilts her head, gives an elegant shrug.

  “Okay,” he says then, his fingers tightening around Shamrock. “It’s a place to start. And we don’t have any other clues to go on. Sun Tzu said, ‘If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear a hundred battles.’ ”

  “Who’s Sun Tzu?” Fin asks.

  “An old dead guy,” Scarlett replies.

  “And we’re taking his advice because … ?”

  Tyler’s eyes are on the Hadfield, and I can see the fire in them as he speaks. “We know a little about our enemy. Let’s learn something about our friends.”

  “Okay,” Scar replies. “Can we start by learning how we get off this junk heap?”

  3

  SCARLETT

  My girls are too big for this uniform.

  Don’t get me wrong—I love my ladies. Chi-chis. Ta-tas. Whatever euphemism you want to use. Those days when you’ve managed to sculpt the perfect cleav and you can hear people’s necks snapping when you breeze past? Yeah, that. They’re a fantastic idiot detector. (Hint: I don’t blame you for peeking, but if you’re talking to them rather than my face, you have failed the Test.) They’re often a lot of fun to have around at night.

  But some days, they’re just a bitch to own.

  I’ve got to hold on to the damn things when I run, for starters. I’m not doing that to point them out to you, people—it just hurts if I don’t. Good bras are expensive, and you have to wash them extra carefully or you quickly find yourself buying another expensive bra. Don’t get me started on the whole underwire thing. Humanity is a race capable of interstellar travel, and nobody’s invented a bra for girls my size that doesn’t feel like prison. Here is a truth universally acknowledged—taking that thing off at the end of the day is the single greatest feeling in the world.

  Sorry, boys.

  And then there’s moments like this one. Trying to defy the laws of physics by compressing matter into a space far too small for it to fit. I’m sure Zila has an equation for it somewhere in that big brain of hers: Area.ñ−[Bewbage+æ{where. æ=brassieredensity}] = PAIIINNN.

  “I always hated physics,” I mutter, adjusting myself for the seventeenth time.

  “You what?” Tyler asks across comms.

  “Nothing,” I sigh.

  Zila and I are marching along Section 12, Ceta Promenade of the Emerald City docks, wearing the uniforms of two operatives of Earth’s Global Intelligence Agency. We stole these outfits during our daring heist back on the World Ship, right off the bodies of two GIA goons who tried to arrest us. Tried being the operative word—Legionnaire Kaliis Idraban Gilwraeth, adept of the Warbreed Cabal, took those GIA agents apart like jigsaw puzzles with his bare hands.

  I admit I used to get a little hot and bothered watching Kal work. Our squad’s Tank isn’t at all hard on the eyes. But I can tell from the not-so-secret glances they’re constantly exchanging that he and Auri have got some kind of Thing going on now. So, solidarity among sisters, I must now (mostly) avert mine eyes. Le sigh.

  Pity, I’ve never dated a Syldrathi before… .

  ANYWAY, stolen uniforms usually mean ill-fitting uniforms. Though I swear this thing didn’t fit as bad the last time I put it on. But nobody in the squad can lie half as well as me, and posing as a GIA operative is a con I’ve run before. So I’m clad head to foot in charcoal-gray nanoweave, doing my best to walk it like I own it. Zila is marching beside me, studiously ignoring my eighteenth attempt at bap adjustment by watching Adams’s public denouncement of us on her uniglass again.

  “… this squad has clearly gone rogue. They have violated our trust. They have broken our code. Aurora Legion Command offers every assistance …”

  “Do you ever have this problem?” I ask her.

  Zila mutes her uni, glances up at me.

  “PROBLEM? ”

  “You know,” I say, waving at my chest. “Size … fluctuation.”

/>   Zila tilts her head, her voice turned even flatter than usual by the GIA mirrormask. “HORMONE CHANGES DURING OVULATION CAN LEAD TO SWELLING. ESTROGEN PRODUCTION PEAKS JUST BEFORE MID-CYCLE, AND THIS CAN CAUSE ENLAR—”

  “Um, Scarlett?”

  “Yes, Finian?”

  “You and Zila are still transmitting.”

  “… So?”

  “Um … never mind.”

  “Good answer.”

  Tyler breaks in before anyone can dig themselves too deep. “Okay, Scar, we’re on your six, about three hundred meters back. Clock us?”

  I glance behind, see Tyler and the rest of the squad lurking in the shadow of a refueling station. They’re dressed in stolen coveralls to fit in with the rest of the dock crowd, hoods or jetball caps pulled low to cover their features. Emerald City is a pretty civilized place, and the SecDrone patrols are regular overhead—it’s a risk to be out in the open like this, is what I’m saying, especially with that bounty on our heads. But if we’re going to get to the Hadfield before it ends up at auction, we’ve gotta get off this station. And with our Longbow down and out, that means getting another ship.

  “WE SEE YOU, TYLER,” Zila reports.

  “We’ll be watching through your uniglasses, so keep them handy. If you run into trouble, bug out and head for the transit station.”

  “Relax, little brother,” I say. “I’ve got this.”

  “Not a doubt in my mind.”

  “Gooooood answer.”

  “The ship we’re looking for should be coming up on your right.”

  I scan the crowd around me, grateful for once that I’m tall enough to see over it. And if you think being a six-foot-tall girl sounds like a party, I invite you to try buying pants that fit. Or finding a boy who isn’t weirded out about being shorter than you.

  The spaceport is on Emerald City’s upper level, closest to the dome of charged particles that keeps the poisonous atmosphere at bay. These docks are just as colorful and frantic as the city’s bazaar, though there’s a different kind of urgency up here. The security lockdown caused by our gremp-related escapades lasted twenty-four hours before the authorities were forced to lift it, which means every ship in port is now a full sol behind schedule. Captains are roaring at their crews, auto-dockers and refuelers are working at redline, the air is abuzz with loader drones.

  Off to our left is the transit station, a dizzying tangle of transparent tubes zipping people and freight off to other levels. And to our right, on one of the midsized landing pads, I see a sleek, almost retro-looking cruiser.

  She’s gunmetal gray, heart-shaped, highlighted by long white racing stripes down her flanks. The name Opha May is sprayed near her bow. Prow? Eh, I don’t really know the difference. To tell you the truth, I’ve never been interested in spaceships. I slept through most of my mechaneering classes, apart from a four-week stint in third year when I was paying attention to impress a boy.

  (Liam Chu. Ex-boyfriend #32. Pros: Wrote me love songs. Cons: Cannot sing.)

  But Tyler tells me the Opha May is a good ship. Small enough for a crew of six. Fast enough to outrun most trouble and punchy enough to fight off the rest. And if my baby brother knows about one thing besides infuriating me, being a know-it-all, and having perfect hair, it’s ships. It’s one of the reasons he and Cat get along so well.

  I mean, got along so well.

  Oh hells …

  And just like that, my eyes are burning again. My heart is aching at another reminder she’s gone. I’d known Cat since kindergarten. We were roomies at the academy for five years. And it’s stupid, but it’s the little things about her I miss most, because they were the constants in my life, and it’s so continuously obvious they’re gone now.

  I miss the way she’d talk in her sleep. Hide my socks in a friendly attempt to drive me totally insane. Borrow my stuff without asking. Those little touches from Cat all day, every day, were how I knew she was around. They were the reassurance of her presence. And her presence meant I always had my best friend with me. I always had my partner in crime. I had all the bigger, harder-to-articulate things that came with Cat being a part of my life.

  I found a stick of her eyeliner in my bag last night, and I cried for an hour.

  So I let myself feel it now. Let it wash over me for a moment that seems to last forever. I don’t want to deny how bad it hurts, because in some way that’d be denying all she meant to me. But then I breathe deep and push thoughts of Catherine “Zero” Brannock from my mind. Focusing on what I need to do.

  Because that’s what Cat would want me to do.

  Zila and I walk toward the Opha May, and the crowd gives us a wide berth. I bet it’s not often that agents of the Global Intelligence Agency travel this far out from the Core, but their reputation as People You Do Not Mess With ensures that even among this mob of aliens from across the ’Way, nobody messes with us. Burly Chellerian workers take one look at our uniforms and step aside. Packs of sour-faced toughs in union colors part like smoke. I swear even a loader drone scurries out of our way as we step up to the landing pad. I think about the faces of the people we found inside these uniforms, Auri’s dad and the rest, all of them totally corrupted by the Ra’haam. And part of me wonders just how far that corruption spreads.

  I push the thought away for another day and look over the small group of men and bots at work on the ship in front of us. The crew is a mix of skin tones, but all of them are Terran. Which, of course, is why out of every vessel in the Emerald City dock registry, Ty picked this one.

  “That’s the captain on the loading ramp,” Finian says over our uniglass link. “The shouty male with the fur-thing on his faceparts.”

  “It’s called a mustache,” Tyler says.

  “It’s called disgusting, Goldenboy.”

  “It appears as if a skenk crawled onto his lip and expired,” Kal says.

  “Right?” Finian agrees. “Human body hair, ugh.”

  “Wait,” I hear Aurora say. “You mean Syldrathi don’t grow facial hair?”

  “No, be’shmai.”

  “… Do you grow it anywhere else?”

  “Could we PLEASE,” Tyler says slowly. “Keep our minds. On this job?”

  I hear a small chorus of apologies across comms, and I can’t help but smile. Dysfunctional as our little family is, at least it’s starting to feel like a family. I look around the bustling landing pad and do indeed spy a short, shouty man with what seems to be a dead caterpillar glued above his mouth. He’s dressed in a flight suit and magboots. He’s haggard, his face red from roaring at his crew, the bots helping with his cargo, and random passersby. He looks old enough to be my dad.

  I mean, Dad died when we were eleven, but you know what I’m saying… .

  “All right.” I nod to Zila. “Let’s work some magic.”

  “THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS MAGIC, SCARLETT,” Zila says.

  “Watch and learn, my friend.”

  We stride up to the Opha May’s captain, our shiny boots ringing on the deck. He doesn’t even glance up from his uniglass.

  “Josef Gruber,” I say, using the name Fin hacked off the dockside servers.

  “Who’s asking?” the short man replies, still not looking at me.

  “By authority of the Terran Registration Act, Article 12, Section B, we are hereby commandeering your vessel.”

  Now I’ve got his attention. And as he finally looks up into my face, I’m using all the years of training in the one class I didn’t sleep through to sum him up. I may not have had the best grades. I wasn’t the best shot or tactician or pilot. But Scarlett Isobel Jones is still damn good at what she does. And what she does is People.

  He’s running on around four hours’ sleep. It’s been about six months since he was home, and he misses it. I can see one of his eyes is cybernetic, and from the blotching of veins on his nose, he likes a drink. Looking over his craggy face, his stance as he squares up to me, I can feel hostility. Disbelief. And a little bit of fear.

/>   “You’re kidding me, right?” he growls.

  “I assure you, Captain Gruber, we are deadly serious.”

  He looks around the dock, incredulity fighting with anger.

  “We’re sixty million light-years from Terra,” he spits, his lip caterpillar wobbling in fury. “What in the Maker’s name is the GIA doing out here?”

  I lean in on his fear button. “As we explained, Captain, we are taking possession of your ship. You are a Terran citizen; your ship is subject to Terran law. Believe me when I say you do not want me to lodge a report of your noncompliance in my mission debrief.”

  I hold out one gloved hand. It doesn’t shake. Not even a little bit.

  “The passkeys, please.”

  Gruber’s crew has stopped working now, gathering around us in a small, hostile semicircle. The captain is glowering up at me. I’m using the same tone of voice as every academy instructor who ever disciplined me for tardiness or chewed me out for late assignments or cited me for talking/sleeping/ making out in class. All those teachers who warned me I’d never amount to anything.

  And with a series of curses I’m far too ladylike to repeat, Captain Gruber reaches into his jacket and hands me a set of glowing passkeys.

  Shows how much my teachers knew.

  “Good work, Sis,” comes Tyler’s voice in my ear.

  “I am a Jones.”

  “What?” the angry little captain says.

  “You and your men have five minutes to remove your personal belongings,” I tell him. “Please ensure the ship is fueled for departure.”

  “Five minutes?” he sputters. “What about my cargo?”

  “You may lodge compensation forms through the GIA webnode.”

  I turn my back, already looking for Ty through the crowd.

  “THANK YOU FOR YOUR COOPERATION,” Zila tells him.

  I can feel the captain’s stare between my shoulder blades. His shame and anger at being taken down in front of his men. But I’ll say one thing for Terran bureaucracy—the last place in the ’Way you want to be is on its bad side. You’d have to be idiots like us to even consider it. And with another curse, Gruber barks at his men to get their things together.