Rebel (Rebel Stars Book 0) Read online

  She wasn't always in the cart, though. Her task entailed delivering the detritus to a dumping ground removed from the site. Often, she had to hop out and scrape accreted ice from the cart. At those times, she was off-camera.

  She filled a bottle with pig and got back to work. On her first delivery, she got out, knocked some ice from the cart, then wandered behind the ridge and poured a stiff drink into her suit's feeder. She crunched back to the cart. No one said a word.

  Her routine became something that would have horrified her mere months ago. Get up, fortify herself against the hangover; head out to cart duty, maintaining her levels throughout the work day; come home to her bunk and get rip-roaring drunk.

  It seemed to work. She made no major gaffes. She rarely spoke to anyone during the day, and they knew better than to bother her at night. She knew it wasn't a genuine solution—it wasn't the kind of strategy you built retirement plans around—but all she wanted was to get through Stem's aftermath. Once they were off Nereid and she was rich, she'd send herself to a spa or a tropical island. Get herself straight.

  On her third day of her temporary solution, she drove the cart from the pit, rolled across the ice, and descended to the hollow where she'd been dumping the detritus. She got out, whacked ice from the cart's sensors and wheel wells. Wandered behind a shelf of ice. And sat down for a drink.

  The sky looked as it always did: a black screen pierced by silver stars. Despite her familiarity with it, she'd spent a lot of time looking up at it lately. It helped to be reminded how small she was, how little of anything there was, how even stars died in their time.

  She cocked her head. One of those stars was moving. At first she assumed it must be a meteor, or a comet inbound from the Oort Cloud, but then its course bent, disappearing behind the shelf of ice. Could be it was one of Benez's ships, but if Parson had expected someone, he would have let them know. She picked herself up and trudged around the protrusion, then climbed the slippery ramp to where the cart was parked.

  As she neared the rise, her comm kicked in. Parson's voice was frantic, high-pitched. "…five seconds. Find somewhere stable and get down!"

  Rada broke into a run, long strides sailing over the ridged ice. Straight ahead, another star grew in size, growing brighter by the instant.

  "Do we have any idea who they are?" Genner said.

  The falling star became a white flare.

  "No," Parson said. "No response at—"

  The star, which Rada now understood was a missile, speared from the sky and disappeared behind a mound of ice. A blinding half-sphere of light burst from the horizon. It swelled upwards, turning red as it burned out.

  "The Turtle," Parson said. "It's…gone."

  SHIP'S LOG: 2

  On the bridge, Tton whirled on me. "This is your fault. You have destroyed us!"

  "Me?" I surged to my feet. "I did nothing!"

  "Your doubt of our cause poisoned our pursuit of the Way."

  "Doubt did not crash the whaleship. Human life persists. Fights on. Perhaps that is the Way."

  "Enough," Captain Ffel declared. "It is done. All that remains is to act."

  Ollot moved to gaze at the screen, the sight of the great ship smoking in the bay. "What are our orders?"

  "There are none. Defeat was not planned for. We decide on our own."

  I bowed to the captain. "I believe the Way has spoken. It has denounced our attack. There is only one thing we can do: pick up our brothers and go home."

  "We cannot give up now!" Tton said.

  Ffel let his limbs hang from his side. "What else is there to achieve? Our army has failed. This ship, this crew, how would we hope to take the planet by ourselves?"

  "We do not have to take it." Tton raised his sensepods from his back, clacking his claws tight. "We can destroy it. Unleash the nukes. Once the clouds have snuffed the last of their sparks, then it will be ours. Who is with me?"

  For a moment, the bridge was as still as the surface of a windless pond. One by one, the crew stood and joined Tton's side.

  6

  As she watched the explosion roil through the darkness, Rada's mouth fell open. She began to speak into her comm, but something stopped her. Later, she would realize it had been survival instinct.

  "Captain," Genner choked. "What do we do?"

  "Let's see if we can talk to them." Parson's voice elevated. "Wish I were outside right now. If I were, I'd hole up. Head down. And stay down until I knew what was going on."

  It sounded like nonsense. Half drunk, Rada took a moment to understand: he was talking to her. She turned and ran down the icy ramp toward the shelf. After taking three steps, she skidded to a stop.

  For the last few days, she'd been down in the abyss. Being in that headspace was agonizing, but if there was a silver lining, it was that it had left her as clear-sighted as she'd ever been. The attackers had arrived and destroyed the Box Turtle without so much as saying hello. Rada knew exactly what was going on.

  They knew about the Swimmer vessel. They'd come to take it for themselves. And to kill those who'd discovered it.

  The Turtle was gone. Their primary source of air, water, food. Rada's suit had enough water and liquid food for three or four days, if she stretched, but lacked air for more than a few hours. There were only two sources left: what her crewmates had taken into the pit, and what she had in the cart. Going back for it would be a big risk—if the enemy was looking to wipe them out, they'd be running bioscans. Rada needed to find shelter, not be scurrying across the open wastes.

  But if the enemy was scanning for them, hunting for them, Rada would be dead within hours either way.

  She turned and loped toward the cart. Her strides were bounding, painfully slow. As she sailed through the air, she ran a mental checklist of the cart, cataloguing its contents and what she could use to transport those contents. Her final bound was too hard: she flew straight toward the side of the cart, coming in fast. She aligned herself feet-first and relaxed her muscles. She impacted, letting her legs collapse, absorbing the force. Being drunk seemed to help—she stayed loose, fluid—and she rebounded, arcing slowly to the ground.

  She climbed in the front cargo hold of the cart and stuffed bottles of O2 into a lightweight silver bag. Over the comms, the crew yelled back and forth. Parson couldn't raise the attackers. Yed argued they should surrender. Genner backed him, reminding the others they had no weapons in the pit besides the pistol Stem had brought there.

  "Won't matter," Karry said. "They're here to kill us. Only choice is whether you want to go out with your hands raised in the air or clenched into fists."

  Rada added cans of food and water to a second bag, along with a first aid kit. She hesitated, then threw in some lightweight ice gear, thinking she might be in for a hike at some point. Besides, it wasn't like it weighed anything. Might as well take everything she could handle. She finished looting the cart and ran downhill.

  Without the Turtle to act as a relay hub, her comm grew patchy. The last thing she heard was Parson: "You're my crew. I'll fight for you to the last."

  She dropped down the ice, making for the base of the cliff. On her previous sojourns, she'd explored a few miles along the bottom of the shelf, sipping from her Plain Grain as she took in the walls of blue and green and white, getting lost in the millions of years of history in their gradients. Over that time, she'd discovered more than one cave.

  She glanced up every few seconds. The skies remained silent. The entry to the first cave was just a few hundred yards from the base of the ramp. She stopped inside to turn on the light on her suit. The ceiling was jagged ice, varying from fifteen feet high to as little as five, but the interior was among the largest she'd found, extending deep into the wall. She could only hope it would be enough to foil the scans.

  She set down her bags of gear to take stock of what she'd grabbed from the cart. Enough air, at current levels, for ten days. Enough food and water for at least that long, more if she rationed. Still, not that much time, i
n the scheme of things. Then again, she had the feeling the attackers wouldn't stick around any longer than they had to.

  That left getting off Nereid. The Box Turtle was toast, as was its shuttle. She was going to have to call for rescue. Her suit's transmitter wouldn't have nearly enough range. Would need to find a way to boost it. Either that, or see if there was anything from the Turtle fit for salvage.

  She was noodling on these matters when the floor lurched beneath her, wobbling back and forth. She fell on her side. The ground jarred again. A heavy roar filled her ears. She was so used to the silence of the suit that this was just as shocking as the earthquake—the ground was transmitting the sound to her.

  Fire shot through her nerves. She found her feet, grabbed the bags of gear, and sprinted toward the cave mouth. The ice beyond it glittered, silver. As she neared the exit, a third quake flung her from her feet. The ground cracked and screamed. Something bulky struck her shoulder. She curled into a ball, covering her head. Smaller bits bounced from her limbs and ribs. The earth shook and rumbled.

  The sound receded. The debris falling on her petered away. She sat up, flakes of ice dropping from her suit. She searched for the entrance, but it was no longer there. The way was blocked by a solid jumble of ice.

  They had bombed the cart. Maybe they'd seen her biosig, too, and dropped one on the shelf above her.

  Rada stared at the ice, dumbfounded. Automatically, her mind laid out her options. Each was preposterous: jury-rig a comm station, stow away on their ship, or walk across the icy, treacherous moon in search of an abandoned dig site that might have an old communication station. Any of those possibilities would have been daunting on its own. Now, for all she knew, the ice had flowed down from the cliffs to leave a hundred feet of it between herself and the outside. She was supposed to dig through it with her hand tools?

  She sat, sweeping aside broken chips of ice. This was how the universe worked. By all indications, it didn't want life in it. Soon, it would have rid itself of one more speck.

  Why fight, then? She had another option. One that wouldn't involve hours of helpless strife and pain. She could drink what was left of her pig. Switch her suit to quit cycling out CO2. And close her eyes and wait to sleep.

  She got out her bottle and held it in her hand. The plastic was insulated but transparent. The liquid inside looked and moved like water. The slightest bit syrupy. Entertainment, therapy, poison.

  One option was reversible. The other wasn't. She liked to think she was that rational. She set the bottle away, got out her tools, and went to work against the wall.

  ~

  She dreamed of Stem. Sometimes when the laser struck him, rather than recoiling or screaming, he reached calmly toward her, not for help or for comfort, but to bring her with him. To become the unknown together.

  She would extend her arm for him, straining her joints, but her feet were stuck to the floor of the alien ship, held fast by the mat-like matter. He stopped reaching. She turned to look down the tunnel and saw that it was endless. When she turned back to Stem, he was gone.

  The drill made the most progress against the rubble. She could pierce it, weaken it, hack it apart in slabs. Its batteries were piezos and when they ran out she slung it over her back and chopped away with her pickaxe, her hatchet, and her icepick. Inch by inch, she cored her way forward.

  It ate up her oxygen much faster than predicted. Nothing to be done about that. Earlier, arms exhausted, she'd turned around to see whether the interior of the cavern held another exit and had found nothing. Her choices were to chop her way out, or be buried here.

  The first day was the worst; her condition soon transitioned into a hangover, and while she allowed herself a nip to ward off the worst of it, she saved the rest in case she needed to kill herself. After that, she sweated it out. Fought her way through dreams that were more distressing by their vividness than because of their content. With no day cycle or other people to keep up with, she slept whenever she grew too tired to go on. She kept time through the alarms on her suit warning her that her oxygen was down to 25%, 10%. The suit was programmed to switch over to backups once they dropped to single digits, but she instructed it to run each canister dry.

  She hacked, drilled, scraped, gouged, and sliced. Her life became the matter of perfecting these techniques. Each time she carved out a fat slice of ice, or reached a spot where the rubble was loose and easily cleared, a thrill pulsed in her heart. She was so defined by the work that when she hammered a pane of ice and it shattered to reveal open ground and the airless sky of eternal night, a crazed pang of disappointment sounded from her gut.

  She put her faceplate to the hole and confirmed the land beyond was empty of attackers. Methodically, she expanded the exit until she could squeeze out without snagging her suit.

  It took a moment to convince herself to step outside. A gleaming scree of ice footed the base of the cliffs. Glancing to all sides, she advanced toward the ramp. This was buried in broken ice, forcing her to pick her way upwards step by step. Several times, the loose pieces shifted beneath her and Rada sprung away, sailing through the air.

  The plateau where she'd parked the cart was a bombed-out, one-sided battlefield. Black scars marred the ice. She scanned them for radiation. Finding trace amounts, she trekked forward through the craters, hiding inside their ridges. Nearing the plain leading to the site and the Box Turtle's landing spot, she hunkered down and belly-crawled to high ground.

  Across the flat land below, the Turtle had ceased to exist as the Turtle, replaced by an irregular circle of charred and twisted metal. A quarter mile away, a new ship sat on the ice, sprawling and square. Rada stared steadily, allowing the camera in her suit a good long look.

  At a point equidistant from the two ships, a large square was cut from the ice. The dig had been unearthed. Beside it, the alien ship rested beneath the stars, a segmented tube. Removed from the cavern, it looked larger. More foreign. She shuddered.

  A few carts and machines stirred around the unearthed ship. Rada continued to take pictures, but the vehicles appeared to be automated, unmanned. Could they be from the Hive? Parson had contacted them a few days before the attack. They'd claimed it would take ten days to get out to Nereid, but maybe they'd lied. Yet who else could have known?

  Skylon. Someone had boasted too much or drunkenly let slip a key detail. Could even have been her. What was his name, the suit from Dison Concerns. Given what had unfolded, him stumbling on her at Shine now seemed impossibly coincidental.

  None of it would matter in the slightest if she couldn't find a way off this rock. She had about four days of O2 left. She backed down the slope and returned to the cave to work things through.

  She saw the same solutions as before. None were good. She couldn't afford to wait. Not with just four days of air left. Hiking for an old mine site offered the chance to turn up a cache of supplies, but the trek would be rough. She'd only have one shot.

  That left stowing away on the attackers' ship. Not impossible. She could hide in one of the carts, let it deliver her inside. They would probably have security around the carts to watch out for such shenanigans, but it felt like the best option of a bad lot.

  She'd need to observe them, see what she could figure out about their schedules and security. She was exhausted from breaking through the wall, though. She grabbed a quick nap.

  Hours later, the beeping of her suit woke her. She waited for the canister to dwindle, then switched to the backup and replaced the spent bottle with a fresh one. She headed back to the vista to do some spying.

  The carts were gone from the site—and the massive square ship was hovering over the alien vessel. As she watched, it thrust away from the surface, the alien ship tucked against its underside. The square accelerated slowly, but within minutes, it was a speck of dwindling light.

  Rada laughed hollowly and sat down. The surface was as still as a painting. There was nothing left but the wreckage of the Box Turtle and the gaping hole where the ali
en ship had been extracted. Her best door had slammed shut.

  She'd been granted a new window, though. If the enemy was gone, she could explore the remains of the Turtle. She got up and bounded across the barren ice.

  Sections of the ship remained cohesive, but for the most part, it was smashed beyond recognition. She sifted through what was left, stirring clouds of fine ash that took minutes to settle back down. She found no air. No comm stations that weren't hideously damaged.

  That was it, then. She'd have to head for an abandoned site and hope to blunder into a cache. The only other option was to wait here for the Hive, but she only had three days and change of oxygen. It would be over five days until the Hive's ambassador was set to arrive. There was no way to make it.

  Unless one of the intact fragments of the ship had sealed itself off.

  Either way, she'd need to go back for the cave for supplies. She loped to it and gathered up her packs, taking everything. Hiking to an old mine was a bad move, wasn't it? Even if it had O2, she wouldn't be able to make it to the nearest site and back before the Hive swung by. If she missed them, it could be weeks or months before another ship came close enough.

  As soon as she got back to the ruins of the Box Turtle, she pulled out pieces of gnarled metal and scorched plastic. Over the next two hours, she brought them to a clean patch of ice and arranged them to spell "HELP."

  Finished, she moved to one of the biggest shards of the ship, circling it, eyeballing its exterior. The first chunk looked good until she saw the punctures near its base. She shined her light inside. The holes penetrated into the interior. Vacuum.

  The second lump of ship was ripped in half down the middle of a set of rooms that might once have been bunks. The bulkhead appeared solid. And much easier to carve through than the hull. She knelt beside it and got out her drill and the first aid kit, taking out a length of flexible tubing and a can of sealant that could be used to patch up broken skin or suits. She positioned the drill bit against the wall.