‘Tis thine to ruin realms, o’erturn a state,
Betwixt the dearest friends to raise debate,
And kindle kindred blood to mutual hate.
Thy hand o’er towns the fun’ral torch displays,
And forms a thousand ills ten thousand ways.
Now shake, out thy fruitful breast, the seeds
Of envy, discord, and of cruel deeds:
Confound the peaces establish’d, and prepare
Their souls to hatred, and their hands to war.
- Virgil, the Aeneid
Betwixt the dearest friends to raise debate,
And kindle kindred blood to mutual hate.
Thy hand o’er towns the fun’ral torch displays,
And forms a thousand ills ten thousand ways.
Now shake, out thy fruitful breast, the seeds
Of envy, discord, and of cruel deeds:
Confound the peaces establish’d, and prepare
Their souls to hatred, and their hands to war.
- Virgil, the Aeneid
Chapter One
The rains soaked the central green expanse of the University of São Inácio de Azevedo. Luka stood beneath the awning of the university-owned faculty apartment complex, shielded from the wet splats of water that flung from the roof’s drainage channels. The campus was quiet in this pre-term period. The only people in the university’s buildings were faculty and graduate students.
Luka squinted up at the clouds, the wind driving spray into his eyes. The rainy season had come early this year, Dr. Barbosa had told him. Usually the rains followed the students back to campus from harvest. She had wondered aloud how the rains would affect a colony already at the end of its means.
Dr. Barbosa—Fátima, as she had asked him to call her—taught history. She said it was important, even—perhaps especially—out here, where days were filled with the work of basic subsistence from dawn to dusk, to learn what had come before. It was exactly this attitude that had drawn the attention of the Resistance and likely that of the Union, if Sal and Tynan’s algorithm was to be trusted. And Luka did. He trusted the algorithm because he had to; it was his only hope for saving the people who were disappearing.
The Resistance had seized the momentum of their attack on Hermia and leaned into it. The yearlong growth of the command structure was codified, and Rhodes had given them a formal name: the Human Resistance Movement. Sal created six more devices like the one that had taken down the enhanced personnel on Hermia, and their operations teams in the colonies used them to attack Union shipyards. With the beginnings of a fleet, they had more colonies openly supporting them.
Luka had spent much of the last five weeks since Hermia traveling, bringing in academics and political dissidents from far-flung colonies to join their movement. In the rare days when he was on Swallow’s Landing, he spent every minute not occupied by briefings at Jaya’s side, her hand enveloped in both of his, her eyes still and closed beneath pale lids.
He checked his palm drive. No messages from Swallow’s Landing. He knew silence was probably good right now, but half of him was still back there, deep in the tunnels. He flexed his hands. This was the job. This was important—he had been the one to argue for it. And yet he couldn’t help the squeeze of impatience in his body, raising his blood pressure and driving his mind back to the base.
A roll of thunder resonated in his chest. Few figures moved through the driving rain, and those who were unfortunate enough to have to traverse the squall bent forward against the sheets of water, hoods pulled over their faces.
Good, Luka thought. No one would be looking their way. No one would notice them leave.
Fátima appeared in the door behind him. She was a petite woman—the dark locs twisted into a messy bun on top of her head added significantly to her height, and yet she still barely came up to Luka’s shoulders. With her full lips painted deep red and a floral scarf fluttering against her neck in the wind, she was a burst of color in the gray exterior. She had a single duffle bag slung over her shoulder, as Luka had advised. One bag; there wasn’t time for anything more.
“Got everything?” Luka asked.
“Everything that matters,” she replied.
Her hand clutched something. She stopped and put her bag down, opening her hand to reveal a silver necklace gleaming in her palm. She fastened the clasp around her neck, patting the small pendant before arranging her scarf over it.
“I took the drive from the console like you said. I’m not sure I did it right.”
“That’s okay,” Luka said. “We just don’t want to leave it for them to find.”
“I understand,” she replied in an even tone.
She had been remarkably calm since Luka had knocked on her office door and told her why he was there. Fátima Barbosa had been speaking up about the overreaches of the Union peacekeepers on São Inácio in the preceding months. Her involvement with student protests had made the colony’s local news, but hadn’t spread much farther. But Luka, working with the search algorithm Tynan and Sal had devised, understood that where the average Argosian might not be interested in news about historians at small colleges on the outskirts of Union space, Union intelligence certainly would be.
People continued to vanish quietly throughout Union and szacante space. At least, from a distance their disappearances were quiet. Luka had arrived too late more than once to find the oppressive stillness of a home recently abandoned, the violence of shoes waiting at the door, of tea left steeping and long since grown cold.
Fátima patted at her scarf again, and then hoisted the bag over her shoulder. “I’m ready.”
The downpour only strengthened as they made their way to the port. Luka wrapped his rain jacket more tightly around him and wiped wet strands of hair from his forehead and eyes. As they drew closer, the Atonement’s blue standby lighting filtered hazily through the thick air.
The platform lowered as Luka and Fátima approached the ship, and Van Rossum’s white-blonde buzz cut poked out.
“Welcome back, boss,” she said. She extended her hand to the professor, who shook it warmly. “Corporal Eveline Van Rossum. Welcome aboard, Dr. Barbosa.”
“Call me Fátima, please,” the professor said. She pushed her hood back, splattering droplets on the airlock floor. Shoes squeaked on the damp metal as Luka and Van Rossum escorted her inside.
As the platform retracted behind them and the airlock whispered shut, they emerged into the central room of the ship. Van Rossum stopped in front of the two other marines they had brought with them—Jialong Guo and Darla Baker, both colonists who had been training with the Resistance for a few months. Guo and Baker sat around a table, a holographic strategy game hovering in the space above it.
There should have been another person here, and Luka noted their absence with the same sick feeling that had been following him since their last stop. A civil rights lawyer from Ipoh Baru, whose home had been abandoned when they arrived.
Luka swallowed the bitterness in his throat. They should have started earlier, but it wouldn’t help to look back. At least they were doing the work now. At least some would make it out.
Van Rossum took Fátima’s bag from her and secured it in a storage compartment.
“It’s about an eighteen-hour journey back to HQ once we jump to FTL,” Luka said. “There’s a room in the back if you need a quiet space to rest, and we’ll throw together something to eat in a couple of hours.”
“Hope you’re not picky,” Van Rossum cracked. “Travel food around here isn’t very fancy.”
Luka slid into the pilot’s seat and began setting the controls for their departure. “We have an assortment of prepackaged food. Not exciting, but it fits all the dietary restrictions.”
“And it lasts for-fucking-ever,” Guo complained.
Luka shot him a wry grin. “We could eat it for months, whether we like it or not.” He turned back toward Fátima, who was standing in the center of the room. “Strap in. There will be plenty of time to get comfortable once we’re in FTL.”
She nodded and took the nearest seat, securing the jump straps around her hips and chest. Van Rossum checked the rigging and then secured herself in the copilot’s seat.
They received clearance from the port and lifted off, crossing the airspace of São Inácio de Azevedo in moments. Fátima watched the viewscreen as the planet grew smaller. She let out a deep sigh, and Luka felt that sigh in his own heart.
An alert on the console drew his attention. Van Rossum turned her gray eyes to the same blinking red lights, and then she exchanged a concerned look with Luka.
“What is that?” Fátima asked.
“Union ships,” Luka replied.
“Fuck,” Van Rossum muttered. They were still too close to the planet to jump away, and as Luka counted the Union frigates that appeared on his screen, a chill went down his spine. The Atonement had false identification now—good documents, well forged. The Union ships might ignore them—what was a small passenger vessel to them?
Unless they were here looking. The Union had beaten the Resistance to their last pickup. What if they were only a little slower on this one?
Luka swallowed, his hands poised over the controls. The space around him was hushed—the only sounds were the beeps of the ship’s alerts and the soft breath of the life control systems.
The Union ships headed toward the port after they blinked in. Luka altered their own path to avoid them—standard space traffic etiquette.
He held his breath. He watched the screen.
The blinking red lights of the Union vessels shifted, altering their trajectory to intercept the Atonement.
“Fuck,” Van Rossum said again.
“Brace,” Luka warned, and he turned them hard.
Inertia slammed Luka against the side of his seat and sent blood rushing away from his head. He tensed his body, holding himself upright against the strength of their acceleration.
“Incoming comms,” Van Rossum said. “They’re sending a warning. Ordering us to surrender.”
“Like hell,” Luka muttered. He pulled out of the turn, skirting back along the colony’s airspace boundary. If he moved fast enough, he might be able to lose the Union ships on the other side of the planet. Frigates were fast and maneuverable, but not as fast as the Atonement, and if they were lucky, the Union ships would have already decelerated when they hailed them and would lose a few precious seconds changing their momentum.
Luck was not how Luka liked to operate, but he knew sometimes it was all he had.
In the screen, two of the red dots peeled off to follow them.
“They’re warming up their pulse cannons,” Van Rossum said. “Ten seconds to viability.”
“Are we in range?” Luka asked.
Van Rossum grimaced. “Yes.”
Luka checked the readouts on the console. He was pushing the Atonement as hard as he could. To one side, he could see Fátima gripping the sides of her seat. To the other side, the marines were watching the screen with rapt attention, their faces strained.
“Eight seconds,” Van Rossum said.
“I’m going to try to take us back down,” Luka said.
“Planetside?”
“They might not fire on us if the colony is behind us.”
She laughed bitterly. “Yeah right.”
Luka scowled. He knew she was right. But the atmosphere would alter the effectiveness of the pulse cannon beams. It might soften the blow, perhaps give them a chance to escape while the cannons were recharging. If nothing else, he’d rather eject into air than empty space.
“Three seconds,” Van Rossum said.
Luka felt the bump as they crossed into the first layer of the atmosphere. The heat shield temperature gauge glowed yellow, a safe level.
“Weapons firing.”
“Brace for impact,” Luka said. He heard Fátima take in a quick breath. He counted down the delay in his head, and then the ship shuddered.
The temperature gauge had shot up to a dark red-orange. Not great, but it was holding for now.
He pulled them out of their dive, skirting through the atmosphere. The Union ships followed, their trajectory wider, closing in.
“How long?” Luka asked.
“Twenty seconds to full charge,” Van Rossum replied.
Luka pushed the Atonement harder. The ship trembled around them, a dreadful shiver of metal. Luka’s mind tried to fly ahead, to think beyond escape and to survive, but his navigation required all his focus.
Van Rossum counted down in a grim, flat tone. The heat shields pushed into the red. If they could just get out of the line of the Union’s beams, if they could just round the planet a little faster…
She reached one, and Luka shouted again to brace.
The ship bucked. Inertia heaved him to the right and didn’t let up. They were in a spin. Luka grasped at the controls, fighting the dizziness that pushed in, the pressure on the edges of his eyes. He righted them, but they kept dropping.
“FTL drive is down,” Van Rossum said.
The console lights winked, guttering out and then flashing back on.
“Nav system is fucked too,” she announced.
“I’m bringing us down,” Luka said.
“What?”
“We’re losing altitude. We can’t jump away. We have to land.”
He saw her out of the corner of his eye as he struggled against the ship’s attempts to drive them down into the surface of the planet. She hesitated only a split second before turning her head and shouting back to the marines and their civilian passenger. Her voice was lost to Luka as his focus narrowed.
The map display gave him topographical readouts alongside the video feeds. They were far from the port, far from the small town that housed the university. Deep jungle stretched across this part of the planet, a tangle of emerald foliage and deep blue shadow.
Luka wasn’t sure what lived in the wilds of São Inácio, but at least there, they would be difficult to track. He shouted a warning as they approached the canopy. His eyes scanned the forest, flickering back and forth. There.
He broke through the trees, alarms blaring as branches cracked and the ship pitched. The ground rose to meet them.
Everything went black.
When Luka woke, the alarms still wailed, a keening that echoed in his ears. His left wrist hurt, and moving his fingers sent a searing pain through the joint. His head throbbed—he reached up to touch his face with his good hand, and his fingers came away bloody. Dark red painted his shirt in a roughly vertical stripe, trailing from where his head wound had dripped down his neck.
He remained still for a moment, taking an inventory. Feeling for any abnormalities, any pains or tingling or unusual absence of sensation. He was sore where the safety straps had held him in his seat—he would be bruised, but a deep breath brought no sharp pains, so his ribs weren’t fractured despite their ache.
He raised his head, and his vision wavered only slightly, so he unstrapped himself from the pilot’s chair, holding his left wrist against his chest and fumbling with his right hand. Van Rossum was slumped over the console to his right, eyes closed. Her arms were scraped up from contact with the lights and switches on the panel, and a purple bruise had already spread across her forehead. He checked her pulse—a strong beat pressed against his fingers, and she stirred under his hand.
“Don’t move just yet,” he said.
She groaned in response, but stayed bent over, bringing her hands up to cradle her head. Behind them, Guo was already up and helping an unsteady Baker stand. Fátima was awake, too, dabbing with her fingers at a wound on her cheek. She hissed as she touched it, but she seemed to be moving easily.
Luka scanned the room—the ship’s structure was intact, but some of the internal panels had come loose, and their gear had been ripped from its organized assemblage. Weapons were strewn across the floor, protein bars and water bulbs scattered. Fátima’s duffel bag had burst, clothes settled around it like fallen leaves.
“How long?” Luka asked Guo.
Guo shrugged. “Not sure. I woke up before you, but you were already moving before I could get up.” He gestured to the tangled mess of straps behind him.
Luka crossed to Fátima and knelt in front of her, helping her with his good hand to loosen the fastenings. Her face was calm, but her hands shook.
“Are you okay?” Luka asked. “Does anything hurt?”
“Everything?” She met his eyes, reached up toward her face again. A shallow gash traced her cheek, from her jaw up to just below her eye.
“I’m getting a first-aid kit,” Luka said. “Stay there.”
Guo was bracing Baker, who was limping and struggling to breathe deeply. Luka opened the panel where they stored their medical supplies and stuffed handfuls of bandages, antibiotic cream, and repair accelerant into his pockets. There were a few braces—he would need Guo or Van Rossum to help him put one on his wrist. At least it wasn’t his dominant hand.
When he turned around, Van Rossum was out of her chair. Her eyes were alert, the bruise dark purple beneath the platinum bristles of her hair.
“I’m okay,” she assured him. “Some pain meds will set me right.”
“Nausea?”
She shook her head. “It hurts, but I can see straight and I can balance.”
“We should keep an eye on it.”
“Fine,” she said. “But let me help.”
Luka nodded to the open first-aid panel. “The professor’s got a scrape. She seems fine otherwise, but patch her up and run a scan to make sure nothing else is wrong.”
“On it. You got a gusher on your face.”
Luka winced. He could feel the trickle of blood on his cheek—slow, so he knew it was clotting. “You can stitch me up when you’re done with Fátima.”
Two needs strained against each other. The need to check everyone carefully, to make sure their wounds weren’t life-threatening, that shock and adrenaline weren’t hiding serious injury. And the need to get out of here as fast as they could—before the Union set ships down and followed them. A crashed vessel would be relatively easy to find, even in dense jungle. Even after Luka disabled the search-and-rescue beacon that would otherwise be pinging every comm array on the colony. Five people moving quietly through the underbrush, disappearing into the wilds—that would be a lot harder to track.
They patched up the worst of the damage to their bodies and picked up the scattered supplies. Medical items, food, water, and weapons came with them. One spare change of clothes each. They had only four bedrolls. Someone would need to keep watch while the others slept, anyway. Luka packed a water filtration system into his backpack and a tent into Van Rossum’s. Everything else they left behind.
Luka sent a message to Swallow’s Landing before wiping the ship’s system and disabling its broadcasting capabilities. The Union wouldn’t be able to use the Atonement’s flight history or messages to track the Resistance back to their base.
Now, they just had to stay away from the Union forces long enough for someone to come for them. The Resistance would be able to track their locations from their palm drives once they had a ship in-system—everyone except Fátima was connected to the Resistance’s network. He had to hope it was enough.
It had been pouring rain in the capital, but out here—thousands of kilometers from the sodden university campus—it was just humid. The air was thick with water and the alien calls of local wildlife. Van Rossum led them slowly, at first climbing carefully around the plants to avoid leaving a trail from the ship, but after a few hours of walking she began cutting away at the flowering vines.
Outside of the cities and cultivated farmlands, most Union colonies were still wild. The first settlers had been brought by the corporations who had purchased land rights to the early extrasolar discoveries, paying the cost of their transit by hacking away at alien plant life and controlling the populations of alien animals. A euphemism as mild as most, one which hid the truth of the brutality of early colony life. It was easy to see it now, in the parts of the colony that could not be tamed or had been deemed not worth the investment.
Van Rossum stopped to throw up, and her face was pale when she turned back to the group. Luka handed her a bulb of water, which she drank gratefully.
“Might have some nausea now,” she said, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.
“Yeah,” Luka said. “Figured. We should find a place to camp so we can rest.”
“Gotta put some distance between us and the Union.”
“No good running from them if we run ourselves to death.”
Van Rossum considered that, then forged ahead. “Just a little farther.”
The ache in Luka’s wrist demanded his attention, but he forced himself to focus on his steps and the space around them. Sweat dripped from his face, tinted rusty brown as it washed away the dried blood. After a while, the color brightened, the fresh red of new blood. The wound stung, and so did his sweat as it dripped into his eyes.
They walked in silence, their breath reserved for pushing them forward, away from the danger of their downed ship. The light was soft through the leaves and vines, so soft that at first Luka didn’t notice it diminishing until it was the same deep indigo of the blossoms cascading down from the branches overhead.
Luka stopped them to set up camp the next time they paused to catch their breath. Baker was still limping along with the support of Guo, whose face was beaded with sweat and flushed pink from the effort. Fátima’s eyes were glassy, though she hadn’t complained once in the arduous trek. Her bright scarf now bound her dark locs back from her face, the cut on her cheek already scabbing over beneath the butterfly suture. A bruise spread purple against the cool-toned brown of her skin.
Van Rossum took a swig from her water bulb and secured it back in her bag before she began to cut away the plant life around them, making a clearing for their tent. Guo helped Baker sit and pulled out his first-aid kit. Baker was pale, her olive skin almost yellow.
“How are you feeling?” Luka asked Fátima.
She was squatting, balancing elbows on knees as her back expanded with deep breaths. The silver necklace fluttered at her neckline, and Luka could see the pendant clearly now—a small, teardrop-shaped stone.
“Were they coming for me?” she asked.
Luka met her eyes. It was a lot for one day, he worried. A weary, disheveled commando showing up at her door and warning of imminent danger, followed by a shipwreck on a foreign part of her home colony. She was out here with four complete strangers, bleeding and sweating. But she looked at him with determination in her eyes alongside the fear. So he gave her the truth, unembellished.
“Yes, most likely.”
She nodded. “You got me out just in time, then.”
They had. That was something, at least. Fátima’s breathing slowed, and she stood.
“Let me help,” she said. Her eyes went to his wrist, which Guo had strapped into a brace and secured with a sling. With Guo tending to Baker and Luka one-handed, Van Rossum had her work cut out in setting up camp.
“There’s a shelter in Van Rossum’s bag,” Luka said. “She’ll need help putting it up.”
Fátima inclined her head once, then walked away to join the blonde marine. They were a study in opposites—Fátima short and soft with dark hair piled on her head, Van Rossum tall and sinewy and her scalp visible through her short-cropped pale hair—but they worked with the same steady focus.
Luka did what he could around the campsite. He pulled the bedrolls awkwardly from bags one-handed and set them inside the tent. He gave Baker a shot of the strongest painkiller from their trauma med kit and sent her to bed. The rest of them crowded around in a circle as the light faded, the sky lapis blue between the trees.
Van Rossum emerged from the trees wiping her mouth again.
“I’m checking you for concussion symptoms morning and evening,” Luka told her as she took a seat beside him. “Until I give you the clear, you’re to get eight hours of shut-eye every night. Guo and I will handle the watch. I’ll take first.”
Van Rossum looked like she was going to protest, but Luka held her gaze and she backed down. He handed her another bulb of water.
He pulled a protein bar from his bag and opened it with his teeth. The jungle around them came to life as the light faded, the whistle of birds and hum of insects growing. A dark shadow swooped from the branches above, capturing something in its mouth before winging away. With the Atonement offline, his palm drive was limited to the light-speed communication of electromagnetic waves. They no longer had a quantum communicator to interface with, so he couldn’t confirm that his message had made it to Swallow’s Landing or that anyone was coming for them. But that was the procedure, and he had followed it, the knowledge old and familiar in his body.
Their only job was to wait. And try to stay out of the reach of the Union commandos who would be combing the jungle in search of them.
Luka squinted up at the clouds, the wind driving spray into his eyes. The rainy season had come early this year, Dr. Barbosa had told him. Usually the rains followed the students back to campus from harvest. She had wondered aloud how the rains would affect a colony already at the end of its means.
Dr. Barbosa—Fátima, as she had asked him to call her—taught history. She said it was important, even—perhaps especially—out here, where days were filled with the work of basic subsistence from dawn to dusk, to learn what had come before. It was exactly this attitude that had drawn the attention of the Resistance and likely that of the Union, if Sal and Tynan’s algorithm was to be trusted. And Luka did. He trusted the algorithm because he had to; it was his only hope for saving the people who were disappearing.
The Resistance had seized the momentum of their attack on Hermia and leaned into it. The yearlong growth of the command structure was codified, and Rhodes had given them a formal name: the Human Resistance Movement. Sal created six more devices like the one that had taken down the enhanced personnel on Hermia, and their operations teams in the colonies used them to attack Union shipyards. With the beginnings of a fleet, they had more colonies openly supporting them.
Luka had spent much of the last five weeks since Hermia traveling, bringing in academics and political dissidents from far-flung colonies to join their movement. In the rare days when he was on Swallow’s Landing, he spent every minute not occupied by briefings at Jaya’s side, her hand enveloped in both of his, her eyes still and closed beneath pale lids.
He checked his palm drive. No messages from Swallow’s Landing. He knew silence was probably good right now, but half of him was still back there, deep in the tunnels. He flexed his hands. This was the job. This was important—he had been the one to argue for it. And yet he couldn’t help the squeeze of impatience in his body, raising his blood pressure and driving his mind back to the base.
A roll of thunder resonated in his chest. Few figures moved through the driving rain, and those who were unfortunate enough to have to traverse the squall bent forward against the sheets of water, hoods pulled over their faces.
Good, Luka thought. No one would be looking their way. No one would notice them leave.
Fátima appeared in the door behind him. She was a petite woman—the dark locs twisted into a messy bun on top of her head added significantly to her height, and yet she still barely came up to Luka’s shoulders. With her full lips painted deep red and a floral scarf fluttering against her neck in the wind, she was a burst of color in the gray exterior. She had a single duffle bag slung over her shoulder, as Luka had advised. One bag; there wasn’t time for anything more.
“Got everything?” Luka asked.
“Everything that matters,” she replied.
Her hand clutched something. She stopped and put her bag down, opening her hand to reveal a silver necklace gleaming in her palm. She fastened the clasp around her neck, patting the small pendant before arranging her scarf over it.
“I took the drive from the console like you said. I’m not sure I did it right.”
“That’s okay,” Luka said. “We just don’t want to leave it for them to find.”
“I understand,” she replied in an even tone.
She had been remarkably calm since Luka had knocked on her office door and told her why he was there. Fátima Barbosa had been speaking up about the overreaches of the Union peacekeepers on São Inácio in the preceding months. Her involvement with student protests had made the colony’s local news, but hadn’t spread much farther. But Luka, working with the search algorithm Tynan and Sal had devised, understood that where the average Argosian might not be interested in news about historians at small colleges on the outskirts of Union space, Union intelligence certainly would be.
People continued to vanish quietly throughout Union and szacante space. At least, from a distance their disappearances were quiet. Luka had arrived too late more than once to find the oppressive stillness of a home recently abandoned, the violence of shoes waiting at the door, of tea left steeping and long since grown cold.
Fátima patted at her scarf again, and then hoisted the bag over her shoulder. “I’m ready.”
The downpour only strengthened as they made their way to the port. Luka wrapped his rain jacket more tightly around him and wiped wet strands of hair from his forehead and eyes. As they drew closer, the Atonement’s blue standby lighting filtered hazily through the thick air.
The platform lowered as Luka and Fátima approached the ship, and Van Rossum’s white-blonde buzz cut poked out.
“Welcome back, boss,” she said. She extended her hand to the professor, who shook it warmly. “Corporal Eveline Van Rossum. Welcome aboard, Dr. Barbosa.”
“Call me Fátima, please,” the professor said. She pushed her hood back, splattering droplets on the airlock floor. Shoes squeaked on the damp metal as Luka and Van Rossum escorted her inside.
As the platform retracted behind them and the airlock whispered shut, they emerged into the central room of the ship. Van Rossum stopped in front of the two other marines they had brought with them—Jialong Guo and Darla Baker, both colonists who had been training with the Resistance for a few months. Guo and Baker sat around a table, a holographic strategy game hovering in the space above it.
There should have been another person here, and Luka noted their absence with the same sick feeling that had been following him since their last stop. A civil rights lawyer from Ipoh Baru, whose home had been abandoned when they arrived.
Luka swallowed the bitterness in his throat. They should have started earlier, but it wouldn’t help to look back. At least they were doing the work now. At least some would make it out.
Van Rossum took Fátima’s bag from her and secured it in a storage compartment.
“It’s about an eighteen-hour journey back to HQ once we jump to FTL,” Luka said. “There’s a room in the back if you need a quiet space to rest, and we’ll throw together something to eat in a couple of hours.”
“Hope you’re not picky,” Van Rossum cracked. “Travel food around here isn’t very fancy.”
Luka slid into the pilot’s seat and began setting the controls for their departure. “We have an assortment of prepackaged food. Not exciting, but it fits all the dietary restrictions.”
“And it lasts for-fucking-ever,” Guo complained.
Luka shot him a wry grin. “We could eat it for months, whether we like it or not.” He turned back toward Fátima, who was standing in the center of the room. “Strap in. There will be plenty of time to get comfortable once we’re in FTL.”
She nodded and took the nearest seat, securing the jump straps around her hips and chest. Van Rossum checked the rigging and then secured herself in the copilot’s seat.
They received clearance from the port and lifted off, crossing the airspace of São Inácio de Azevedo in moments. Fátima watched the viewscreen as the planet grew smaller. She let out a deep sigh, and Luka felt that sigh in his own heart.
An alert on the console drew his attention. Van Rossum turned her gray eyes to the same blinking red lights, and then she exchanged a concerned look with Luka.
“What is that?” Fátima asked.
“Union ships,” Luka replied.
“Fuck,” Van Rossum muttered. They were still too close to the planet to jump away, and as Luka counted the Union frigates that appeared on his screen, a chill went down his spine. The Atonement had false identification now—good documents, well forged. The Union ships might ignore them—what was a small passenger vessel to them?
Unless they were here looking. The Union had beaten the Resistance to their last pickup. What if they were only a little slower on this one?
Luka swallowed, his hands poised over the controls. The space around him was hushed—the only sounds were the beeps of the ship’s alerts and the soft breath of the life control systems.
The Union ships headed toward the port after they blinked in. Luka altered their own path to avoid them—standard space traffic etiquette.
He held his breath. He watched the screen.
The blinking red lights of the Union vessels shifted, altering their trajectory to intercept the Atonement.
“Fuck,” Van Rossum said again.
“Brace,” Luka warned, and he turned them hard.
Inertia slammed Luka against the side of his seat and sent blood rushing away from his head. He tensed his body, holding himself upright against the strength of their acceleration.
“Incoming comms,” Van Rossum said. “They’re sending a warning. Ordering us to surrender.”
“Like hell,” Luka muttered. He pulled out of the turn, skirting back along the colony’s airspace boundary. If he moved fast enough, he might be able to lose the Union ships on the other side of the planet. Frigates were fast and maneuverable, but not as fast as the Atonement, and if they were lucky, the Union ships would have already decelerated when they hailed them and would lose a few precious seconds changing their momentum.
Luck was not how Luka liked to operate, but he knew sometimes it was all he had.
In the screen, two of the red dots peeled off to follow them.
“They’re warming up their pulse cannons,” Van Rossum said. “Ten seconds to viability.”
“Are we in range?” Luka asked.
Van Rossum grimaced. “Yes.”
Luka checked the readouts on the console. He was pushing the Atonement as hard as he could. To one side, he could see Fátima gripping the sides of her seat. To the other side, the marines were watching the screen with rapt attention, their faces strained.
“Eight seconds,” Van Rossum said.
“I’m going to try to take us back down,” Luka said.
“Planetside?”
“They might not fire on us if the colony is behind us.”
She laughed bitterly. “Yeah right.”
Luka scowled. He knew she was right. But the atmosphere would alter the effectiveness of the pulse cannon beams. It might soften the blow, perhaps give them a chance to escape while the cannons were recharging. If nothing else, he’d rather eject into air than empty space.
“Three seconds,” Van Rossum said.
Luka felt the bump as they crossed into the first layer of the atmosphere. The heat shield temperature gauge glowed yellow, a safe level.
“Weapons firing.”
“Brace for impact,” Luka said. He heard Fátima take in a quick breath. He counted down the delay in his head, and then the ship shuddered.
The temperature gauge had shot up to a dark red-orange. Not great, but it was holding for now.
He pulled them out of their dive, skirting through the atmosphere. The Union ships followed, their trajectory wider, closing in.
“How long?” Luka asked.
“Twenty seconds to full charge,” Van Rossum replied.
Luka pushed the Atonement harder. The ship trembled around them, a dreadful shiver of metal. Luka’s mind tried to fly ahead, to think beyond escape and to survive, but his navigation required all his focus.
Van Rossum counted down in a grim, flat tone. The heat shields pushed into the red. If they could just get out of the line of the Union’s beams, if they could just round the planet a little faster…
She reached one, and Luka shouted again to brace.
The ship bucked. Inertia heaved him to the right and didn’t let up. They were in a spin. Luka grasped at the controls, fighting the dizziness that pushed in, the pressure on the edges of his eyes. He righted them, but they kept dropping.
“FTL drive is down,” Van Rossum said.
The console lights winked, guttering out and then flashing back on.
“Nav system is fucked too,” she announced.
“I’m bringing us down,” Luka said.
“What?”
“We’re losing altitude. We can’t jump away. We have to land.”
He saw her out of the corner of his eye as he struggled against the ship’s attempts to drive them down into the surface of the planet. She hesitated only a split second before turning her head and shouting back to the marines and their civilian passenger. Her voice was lost to Luka as his focus narrowed.
The map display gave him topographical readouts alongside the video feeds. They were far from the port, far from the small town that housed the university. Deep jungle stretched across this part of the planet, a tangle of emerald foliage and deep blue shadow.
Luka wasn’t sure what lived in the wilds of São Inácio, but at least there, they would be difficult to track. He shouted a warning as they approached the canopy. His eyes scanned the forest, flickering back and forth. There.
He broke through the trees, alarms blaring as branches cracked and the ship pitched. The ground rose to meet them.
Everything went black.
When Luka woke, the alarms still wailed, a keening that echoed in his ears. His left wrist hurt, and moving his fingers sent a searing pain through the joint. His head throbbed—he reached up to touch his face with his good hand, and his fingers came away bloody. Dark red painted his shirt in a roughly vertical stripe, trailing from where his head wound had dripped down his neck.
He remained still for a moment, taking an inventory. Feeling for any abnormalities, any pains or tingling or unusual absence of sensation. He was sore where the safety straps had held him in his seat—he would be bruised, but a deep breath brought no sharp pains, so his ribs weren’t fractured despite their ache.
He raised his head, and his vision wavered only slightly, so he unstrapped himself from the pilot’s chair, holding his left wrist against his chest and fumbling with his right hand. Van Rossum was slumped over the console to his right, eyes closed. Her arms were scraped up from contact with the lights and switches on the panel, and a purple bruise had already spread across her forehead. He checked her pulse—a strong beat pressed against his fingers, and she stirred under his hand.
“Don’t move just yet,” he said.
She groaned in response, but stayed bent over, bringing her hands up to cradle her head. Behind them, Guo was already up and helping an unsteady Baker stand. Fátima was awake, too, dabbing with her fingers at a wound on her cheek. She hissed as she touched it, but she seemed to be moving easily.
Luka scanned the room—the ship’s structure was intact, but some of the internal panels had come loose, and their gear had been ripped from its organized assemblage. Weapons were strewn across the floor, protein bars and water bulbs scattered. Fátima’s duffel bag had burst, clothes settled around it like fallen leaves.
“How long?” Luka asked Guo.
Guo shrugged. “Not sure. I woke up before you, but you were already moving before I could get up.” He gestured to the tangled mess of straps behind him.
Luka crossed to Fátima and knelt in front of her, helping her with his good hand to loosen the fastenings. Her face was calm, but her hands shook.
“Are you okay?” Luka asked. “Does anything hurt?”
“Everything?” She met his eyes, reached up toward her face again. A shallow gash traced her cheek, from her jaw up to just below her eye.
“I’m getting a first-aid kit,” Luka said. “Stay there.”
Guo was bracing Baker, who was limping and struggling to breathe deeply. Luka opened the panel where they stored their medical supplies and stuffed handfuls of bandages, antibiotic cream, and repair accelerant into his pockets. There were a few braces—he would need Guo or Van Rossum to help him put one on his wrist. At least it wasn’t his dominant hand.
When he turned around, Van Rossum was out of her chair. Her eyes were alert, the bruise dark purple beneath the platinum bristles of her hair.
“I’m okay,” she assured him. “Some pain meds will set me right.”
“Nausea?”
She shook her head. “It hurts, but I can see straight and I can balance.”
“We should keep an eye on it.”
“Fine,” she said. “But let me help.”
Luka nodded to the open first-aid panel. “The professor’s got a scrape. She seems fine otherwise, but patch her up and run a scan to make sure nothing else is wrong.”
“On it. You got a gusher on your face.”
Luka winced. He could feel the trickle of blood on his cheek—slow, so he knew it was clotting. “You can stitch me up when you’re done with Fátima.”
Two needs strained against each other. The need to check everyone carefully, to make sure their wounds weren’t life-threatening, that shock and adrenaline weren’t hiding serious injury. And the need to get out of here as fast as they could—before the Union set ships down and followed them. A crashed vessel would be relatively easy to find, even in dense jungle. Even after Luka disabled the search-and-rescue beacon that would otherwise be pinging every comm array on the colony. Five people moving quietly through the underbrush, disappearing into the wilds—that would be a lot harder to track.
They patched up the worst of the damage to their bodies and picked up the scattered supplies. Medical items, food, water, and weapons came with them. One spare change of clothes each. They had only four bedrolls. Someone would need to keep watch while the others slept, anyway. Luka packed a water filtration system into his backpack and a tent into Van Rossum’s. Everything else they left behind.
Luka sent a message to Swallow’s Landing before wiping the ship’s system and disabling its broadcasting capabilities. The Union wouldn’t be able to use the Atonement’s flight history or messages to track the Resistance back to their base.
Now, they just had to stay away from the Union forces long enough for someone to come for them. The Resistance would be able to track their locations from their palm drives once they had a ship in-system—everyone except Fátima was connected to the Resistance’s network. He had to hope it was enough.
It had been pouring rain in the capital, but out here—thousands of kilometers from the sodden university campus—it was just humid. The air was thick with water and the alien calls of local wildlife. Van Rossum led them slowly, at first climbing carefully around the plants to avoid leaving a trail from the ship, but after a few hours of walking she began cutting away at the flowering vines.
Outside of the cities and cultivated farmlands, most Union colonies were still wild. The first settlers had been brought by the corporations who had purchased land rights to the early extrasolar discoveries, paying the cost of their transit by hacking away at alien plant life and controlling the populations of alien animals. A euphemism as mild as most, one which hid the truth of the brutality of early colony life. It was easy to see it now, in the parts of the colony that could not be tamed or had been deemed not worth the investment.
Van Rossum stopped to throw up, and her face was pale when she turned back to the group. Luka handed her a bulb of water, which she drank gratefully.
“Might have some nausea now,” she said, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.
“Yeah,” Luka said. “Figured. We should find a place to camp so we can rest.”
“Gotta put some distance between us and the Union.”
“No good running from them if we run ourselves to death.”
Van Rossum considered that, then forged ahead. “Just a little farther.”
The ache in Luka’s wrist demanded his attention, but he forced himself to focus on his steps and the space around them. Sweat dripped from his face, tinted rusty brown as it washed away the dried blood. After a while, the color brightened, the fresh red of new blood. The wound stung, and so did his sweat as it dripped into his eyes.
They walked in silence, their breath reserved for pushing them forward, away from the danger of their downed ship. The light was soft through the leaves and vines, so soft that at first Luka didn’t notice it diminishing until it was the same deep indigo of the blossoms cascading down from the branches overhead.
Luka stopped them to set up camp the next time they paused to catch their breath. Baker was still limping along with the support of Guo, whose face was beaded with sweat and flushed pink from the effort. Fátima’s eyes were glassy, though she hadn’t complained once in the arduous trek. Her bright scarf now bound her dark locs back from her face, the cut on her cheek already scabbing over beneath the butterfly suture. A bruise spread purple against the cool-toned brown of her skin.
Van Rossum took a swig from her water bulb and secured it back in her bag before she began to cut away the plant life around them, making a clearing for their tent. Guo helped Baker sit and pulled out his first-aid kit. Baker was pale, her olive skin almost yellow.
“How are you feeling?” Luka asked Fátima.
She was squatting, balancing elbows on knees as her back expanded with deep breaths. The silver necklace fluttered at her neckline, and Luka could see the pendant clearly now—a small, teardrop-shaped stone.
“Were they coming for me?” she asked.
Luka met her eyes. It was a lot for one day, he worried. A weary, disheveled commando showing up at her door and warning of imminent danger, followed by a shipwreck on a foreign part of her home colony. She was out here with four complete strangers, bleeding and sweating. But she looked at him with determination in her eyes alongside the fear. So he gave her the truth, unembellished.
“Yes, most likely.”
She nodded. “You got me out just in time, then.”
They had. That was something, at least. Fátima’s breathing slowed, and she stood.
“Let me help,” she said. Her eyes went to his wrist, which Guo had strapped into a brace and secured with a sling. With Guo tending to Baker and Luka one-handed, Van Rossum had her work cut out in setting up camp.
“There’s a shelter in Van Rossum’s bag,” Luka said. “She’ll need help putting it up.”
Fátima inclined her head once, then walked away to join the blonde marine. They were a study in opposites—Fátima short and soft with dark hair piled on her head, Van Rossum tall and sinewy and her scalp visible through her short-cropped pale hair—but they worked with the same steady focus.
Luka did what he could around the campsite. He pulled the bedrolls awkwardly from bags one-handed and set them inside the tent. He gave Baker a shot of the strongest painkiller from their trauma med kit and sent her to bed. The rest of them crowded around in a circle as the light faded, the sky lapis blue between the trees.
Van Rossum emerged from the trees wiping her mouth again.
“I’m checking you for concussion symptoms morning and evening,” Luka told her as she took a seat beside him. “Until I give you the clear, you’re to get eight hours of shut-eye every night. Guo and I will handle the watch. I’ll take first.”
Van Rossum looked like she was going to protest, but Luka held her gaze and she backed down. He handed her another bulb of water.
He pulled a protein bar from his bag and opened it with his teeth. The jungle around them came to life as the light faded, the whistle of birds and hum of insects growing. A dark shadow swooped from the branches above, capturing something in its mouth before winging away. With the Atonement offline, his palm drive was limited to the light-speed communication of electromagnetic waves. They no longer had a quantum communicator to interface with, so he couldn’t confirm that his message had made it to Swallow’s Landing or that anyone was coming for them. But that was the procedure, and he had followed it, the knowledge old and familiar in his body.
Their only job was to wait. And try to stay out of the reach of the Union commandos who would be combing the jungle in search of them.
