Grimspace (2 page)

I'm just staring at him, mouth half-open. As soon as I
realize it, I find something to say, anything. “Who the hell are you?”

“March,” he tells me.

“That a name or an order?” The smart-ass answer comes naturally, even as I'm trying to figure out his angle. What matters is why he's here, and I'm not sure why I haven't queried him.

Maybe it's because I know it can mean nothing good, this illicit entry to my cell, and this is a way of postponing my all-but-inevitable hop from the frying pan to the fire. Such a quaint descriptive when we've been cooking with molecular agitation for so long, but in my circumstance it's just too apropos.

Besides, he'll tell me anyway. His type always does. He has an agenda, and it doesn't matter a damn whether I'm on board with it. Doubt anyone's ever told him no and made it stick.

“Take your pick,” he says, shrugging. “We need to get you out. You have three minutes to decide, Ms. Jax, and the clock is ticking. How tight is procedure here?”

When the AI comes out of its maintenance subroutine to find (a) an unapproved visitor or (b) Sirantha Jax missing, Klaxons are going to make this place sound like a bunker in wartime. But I shrug. Honestly, I have no idea. Perlas Station isn't anywhere I've set foot before, and it wasn't a conscious choice this time. This was simply the closest port from Matins IV, where the salvage crew found me, quite inconveniently, alive. I've often wondered why they didn't just finish the job and let the accident go unexplained, a tragedy that the Corp could sweep beneath the metaphorical rug. Dead men tell no tales, and dead women tie up loose ends.

“What makes you think I'm going to leave with you?” Even as I say it, I'm thinking about it, and I'm aware of the seconds winding down. I have to decide fast. If I don't leave, Newel, the Psych who asked me to describe burning human flesh, yes,
that
one…he's coming again today. He'll be overseeing my “treatment,” now and forever.

Deep down I know it's move or die. Haven't I been imagining desertion the whole time I've been locked up in here? Trying to figure out a way to escape? And now it's been handed to me, I'm like a caged bird, afraid to venture beyond the bars, terrified of what lies beyond. That's new. I didn't used to feel like that, used to be the first to dive into free fall.

Maybe this is a trap. Maybe they
want
me to do this, and I'll be killed during my escape attempt. But at least this way, I have a chance. Here in this cell, I'm a trapped rat, and given the choice, I'll always opt to go down fighting.

“Because you have to. They're not investigating anything, Ms. Jax. This isolation and the so-called dream therapy they're forcing you to undergo, it's not standard. They're trying to break you. They don't want to know what happened; they just want to make sure you're in no condition to talk about it. Ever. And when you crack beneath the stress, they'll write you off and bury you beneath piles of policy. Ninety seconds, Ms. Jax.”

With an inward jolt, I realize he's right. Nothing they've done to me is conducive to healing. That's not the goal at all. Most likely, I was supposed to fall apart by now. What jumper could live without her pilot and not go mad? Especially when forced to relive the event, over and over and—

When I cracked, I wasn't going to be sent to Whitefish. Instead, I'd wind up in the Corp asylum where they hide the broken ones. All of us snap, sooner or later—you can't spend so much time jacked into grimspace without losing part of yourself. Jumpers know the risks and yet the drive toward exploration, the need to be the first to see a new rim world, make first planetfall with our pilots, these things fire us along an ultimately self-destructive course. We're a little crazy, the J-gene carriers, or we wouldn't be able to handle grimspace in the first place.

With that, I make my decision and push to my feet. “Let's go.”

There's nothing here I want. All my personal effects burned up on Matins IV, and so I'm ready to follow this guy into the unknown, trusting wherever he's taking me is better than where I am. That's a hell of a hope to pin on a stranger.

I half expect him to want to talk some more or outline a plan, but he's on his feet as well, expedience ruling the day. That's a welcome change from the bureaucratic bullshit I've dealt with for the last ten days. I doubt the COs wipe their asses without forms in triplicate.

“Need you out of the uniform,” he tells me, so brisk that I don't think even for a moment he's angling to get a look at the body beneath. “They'll probably guess you're making for the docking bays, but it'll help if they can't get a vis-ID at a glance.”

He intends me to strip, but I know it's not prurient interest. Even before, I wasn't anything special to look at: lean, strong, and energetic, a good partner in bed, but not because I was beautiful. I think that might be tied to the J-gene as well, the hunger for sensation. People don't understand my loss; the Psychs poke at it with morbid curiosity. Intellectually they know it's bad for a jumper when her pilot dies, but they don't understand the relationship.

Imagine for a moment—lover and brother and guardian and partner and—

There are no words. Even if a jumper never sleeps with her pilot, there are still bonds that can't be articulated to the layman. He's the one who watches while you're lost in grimspace, the hands on the ship controls that interpret your signals as you cue the jumps. Every time you jack in, he's the reason you come out safe again. Perfect trust, perfect symbiosis; there comes a time when words aren't necessary anymore.

Well, I can't waste any more time on hesitation. March hands me a plain brown coverall, and I change quickly under his watchful eyes. My whole body's webbed with faint purple burn scars, souvenirs of the crash, so if he has any sense, he'll look away. But he doesn't. He just stares, eyes on mine. I don't trust him, and he doesn't seem to like me, so we make a perfect match. Dressed, I look like a san service worker.

He finishes the makeshift disguise with a bottle of Spray-bond, aerosol colorant used by part-timer punkers who want to be able to wash out their weekend revels and return to the office looking respectable. In my case, dark hair goes grungy gray, and suddenly I've aged twenty-five years. It's not hard to alter how I move because I feel physically stiff from my incarceration. At a nod from him, I stuff the Corp gear down the recycler, and then he manually keys the door open.

“Unauthorized exit from crew quarters!” my AI sings out maybe thirty seconds later as alarms begin to sound. I feel faint satisfaction at having thwarted it, even as we move off. “Unauthorized access to artificial intelligence Q-15. Recommend initiation of lockdown. Unauthorized personnel detected in detention level C.”

In the distance I hear booted feet coming to investigate. Shit. We hasten down into the corridor, and I can't tell what time of day it is because the artificial lights never alter. Station life would drive me crazy. I need a natural cycle, which is why I often linger planetside after Kai and I—flinch away from that thought, as I follow March at a dead run. God, I hope that's not a prophetic thought.

The Psychs don't realize the reason I'm not completely nuts, since I've been running a lot longer than most, is that my early life granted me the ability to compartmentalize. Just shut stuff off, lock it away. In a room inside my head part of me may, in fact, already be gibbering mad, but I don't let that one out to howl. Just like part of me mourns Kai, curled up in a corner, sobbing like a child. And the rest of me functions.

Just like now. Can't help wondering what I've gotten myself into, but then I've never been one to wait around. And just what in the hell does he
want
with me—if this isn't a Corp trap? I have a bad feeling and a stitch in my side, but March isn't breaking stride, and damned if I'll let him outrun me.

Right before the first checkpoint, a pair of Corp security drones stumbles on us, and he never slows, diving between their blue laser fire like this is all part of the job, coming up beneath in their blind spot. Brute force—he crushes them together, smashing their sensors, so their feed to the security station goes black, then he slams them again in a spray of sparks. I hear the low whir of their tiny thrusters slowing, then they drop, heavy, inert. Maybe two corridors over I hear more booted feet. They're coming to investigate the outage of the two drones.

“Move,” he tells me fiercely as the second set of alarms kick in.

Orange alert? Holy
shit
.

That means they don't care if they take us alive.

Up till now, I had always thought of the Corp as a friendly Big Brother, hand out to help, interested in exploration, in science and discovery. And sure, they had a military arm, but that was for defense and protection, not for assault. Now I'm wondering just what I don't know about the Corp, what else they do, quiet and smiling, while yokels lap up their adorable ad campaigns about little boys pointing at the heavens in awe as a shooting star carries the Corp logo overhead.

“If they've gone into lockdown, we won't be able to use the doors,” I pant, as he makes for the security station at a brisk walk, not unlike the pace one would use if a bit pressed for time for a moderately important business meeting. “Are you
crazy
? We're going to have to fight our way through half the Corp—”

He ignores me and lays out the first guard with a hard hook before the poor bastard hardly registers we're there. Even with alarms sounding, you just don't expect a man in a suit to fight like a gladiator; you expect him to stride up, and say politely, “I'm sorry, I'm quite turned about. Do you know where the lift is to the hydroponics gardens?” The second man, March takes by the throat and stares into his eyes. I don't know what the frag that was about, but the man just crumples, lying up against the wall as if he's about to piss himself. And once more, March keys the door open, and he's hauling for the next point without looking back.

We pass two more security doors exactly like that while Klaxons blare and more teams deploy. One hand on my cramping side, I can't help but think this is the crappiest rescue I've ever seen and I want
answers
, not that I'm a hundred percent sure I needed rescuing. Maybe that was lack of sleep and paranoia and the general creepiness of Psych Officer Newel. I may have just fragged up and made things way worse for myself, ruined my career and put my fate in the hands of a maniac.

As we hit the freighter bays, a gray squad opens fire. They aren't telling us to halt or to surrender. Mother Mary of Anabolic Grace, they really want to fry us. I dive in behind a ship and growl at March, “You owe me some serious answers if we get out of this alive.”

He shoves me toward the boarding ramp of a cutter that's seen better days. From his manner and the way he's dressed, I expected a big hauler or a sporty little cruiser, something with a high price tag and a lot of amenities. Not this junk bucket that looks like it should've been decommed
before
the Axis Wars. The gray squad closes on us with military precision, using cover and working the perimeter in a metric circle. Soon they'll be on us, boarding the ship. A laser blast sears the metal at my feet, and I fall back, farther up the ramp.

Talk about ass choices. I've got this shit bucket and a nutcase or a bunch of gray men coming for me.

He reads my look and shrugs. “However she looks, this ship is sound. Can you jump, Ms. Jax? Our lives depend on it.”

Jump? But I don't have a pilot.

My look or my mind? Because he adds, “Yes, you do.”

My throat tightens, and I feel a fist curling around my intestines. It's a cramp, rising nausea. It's being told you have to remarry before your husband's cold in the grave. Before I can say a word, he boards. No more conversation. It's up to me now. Stay or go. Reluctantly, I admire the fact that he doesn't bullshit, doesn't explain, doesn't persuade. Maybe he knows I can't resist a mystery or a challenge or both. Or maybe he just knows I'm not looking to die today, because the gray men are almost on me.

I follow.

The inside of the ship restores my faith in benevolent
deities.

Controls are new, shiny, and everything's well maintained, clean, from the corridors to the cockpit. It's almost like they're using the exterior as camo, nothing to see here, just another struggling ship. And that's probably not too far from the truth.

It's an eight-seater, at least I see that many places where crew can strap in for a jump. Possibly she could carry more, but there'd be no guarantee what would become of them while passing through grimspace. Generally, only refugees are desperate enough to take the risk. But there aren't six other people on board. In fact, I just see three, now gazing at me, although there may be more in medical or the holds.

“I got her,” March says, as the boarding ramp seals behind us. “Use the override launch codes Mair gave us, and let's go.”

I can hear the impact of gray-squad lasers striking the hull. Luckily, the Corp's response time isn't good here on Perlas; they've grown complacent, unable to imagine anyone could challenge their authority or breach their security. Something tells me—times they are a-changing.

The others busy themselves right away, as if there's no question he's in charge. While they're not talking to me, I study them one by one: an older man with the heavy musculature that signals an upbringing on a high-G world and another man of indeterminate years, slim and androgynous. The older man, silver hair, neat goatee, runs a device across my temple and smiles. “Positive ID,” he tells someone over a comm unit, and I'm left staring at him in bewilderment. Last, there's a woman around my age, blond, butch. She regards me with open animosity, and for a moment, I can't breathe, just scorched by the look in her gray eyes, but then the look's broken like someone cutting a live wire. There's even a resultant explosion.

“Shit,” she says, leaning down to punch some things into a terminal, pulling up maps and grids. Even I know that the blinking red square is not a good sign.

The older man takes off at a dead run in response, and March disappears through a sliding door. Not much for talking, that one. Yeah, okay, I understand—action's imperative. But still, I've been in solitary for over a week; I want to know something about the people taking me away. Is that too much to ask?

Shit, it
is
. Someone's finally thought to get the freighter bay turrets online, and the hull's now being hammered. We've got to get out of here. Like, ten minutes ago.

Of them all, I have no idea who my pilot is supposed to be. That's not a good sign. A jumper is supposed to feel instant rapport—how else can I trust him? The Corp offers hundreds of candidates up for evaluation. In its way, the relationship is more important than marriage, more lasting and more vital to my welfare. I had a husband once, but he couldn't handle coming second to Kai, and he left me, several spins before I actually noticed he was gone.

I'm not
ready
for a new pilot, not even one hundred percent sure I can do this. I mean, I'm not fried. It's not that. There comes a point in every jumper's life where she knows she's at the limit—next time she jacks into grimspace, she's not coming back. Navigating those beacons will be the last thing she does, but it's like being an addict to almost any chem. You know it's killing you slowly, but you can't quit, don't even want to, because the pleasure outweighs your fear of consequences.

And I guess most of us would rather go out in a blaze of glory, burned-out, than to be one of the saddest folks alive, someone who used to own grimspace and knows she can't anymore.
Knows.
I haven't hit that boundary yet myself, but I don't think I want to retire. I didn't become a jumper to die old and gray.

But there's a knot in my stomach, and I feel like I'm waiting in a seedy hostel for a stranger, unfaithful, like all the years with Kai, first friends, then lovers—so much more—meant nothing. My palms feel damp, cold, and I wipe them on my thighs while the ship shakes. Before, it was all exhilaration, pitting myself against phenomenal odds and coming out with my mind intact, guiding my ship and crew safely to our destination. I'm the reason we rule the star lanes, me. Sirantha Jax. Well, me, and folks like me, J-gene carriers. There's so few of us; we're treated like Corp royalty.

Until we burn out.

Until we kill our pilots and crew and have to run—

Enough.

“Where the frag is Jemus?” March emerges in fatigues, a black shirt, and a combat jacket, which make him look bigger, meaner but compelling, a fact I resent because I hate how he superimposes himself over Kai's memory, just standing there. This gear suits him better than formality, strips away all pretense of civility and civilization. Kai was slim and boyish, no matter his age. He was, in fact, three years my senior when he died, but nobody would've ever guessed. “And why aren't you in the nav chair yet?” To me.

“Bad news,” The woman says, looking grim. “The turrets did some damage in the holds and the power coupling—”

March grits his teeth. “If something needs repair, get your ass down there and fix it. What the hell does that have to do with—”

“If you shut your gob, you dickless wonder, I'll tell you what it has to do with Jemus.” The ship rocks, and I grab on to the safety harnesses that hang like webbing from the cabin ceiling. “We're screwed, stranded, and no repairs are going to help.” She brings up an image on-screen, clearly from medical, and even I can tell that the guy on the table isn't getting up. His head's, well, open.

Please
don't tell me that was my pilot.

“Why me?” I say aloud.

“What the frag was he doing in the holds?” March growls, pacing like a caged animal. We're losing precious time; the ship's going to open up like an Old Terra tin can if we keep sitting here.

“He won't—wouldn't—fly without his lucky hat. One of the san bots took it to storage because he left it in the lounge the last time we played mah-jongg,” the doc puts in quietly. I hadn't realized we were on a two-way feed, but it makes sense. He steps away from the body with a heavy sadness that makes me like him instinctively.

“Isn't there
anything
we can do?” They all look at me as if surprised to learn I have a voice. “Get weapons online, something.”

The young man with the disquieting eyes tells me, “All that would accomplish is a wanton waste of life. I'm Loras.”

Seems like an odd time to be thinking of introductions, but what the hell. “Sirantha Jax.”

To my surprise, the blond woman answers, although she doesn't say it's nice to meet me. “Dina, ship's mechanic, part-time gunner, engineer, whatever needs fixing.” She indicates the vid display with a tilt of her head. “The doc is Saul. And now you know the names of all the people you've killed. Maybe.”

“Frag you,” I tell her, without even asking what she means. Frag her for thinking she knows what happened on Matins IV. She wasn't there. I'm the sole survivor, and even I'm not altogether sure. My dreams tell different stories, day to day. I'm not certain I can trust any of them.

Dina adds to him, though she's still looking at me, “After the
Sargasso
, I can't believe we have her on board. When you heard Svet died in the crash, you said—”

Shit.
I've run away with people with a grudge, and hell, maybe they have cause. I brace because this woman seems ready to gouge my eyes out.

“Dammit.”
The word sounds wrenched from March. Dina and I both turn, on the verge of going after each other, even with the ship about to come down around our ears. “I can do it,” he adds, in the tone of a man who has volunteered to be fed to the giant thing that lives in the volcano. “Let's go.”

“You're a pilot?” Dina regards him with puzzlement and dawning hope.

He doesn't answer her, glaring at me like this is my fault. March—whatever reason he took it up, whatever reason he stopped, he wasn't a pilot for the thrills, like Kai, no he's an older archetype, dating all the way back to the conqueror Cortez. It's not enough to discover new lands, but he has to see the natives bend at the knee, too.

The fact that I have to place my life in his hands makes me sick to my stomach. I'd never have chosen him, not in a thousand years. There's too much dominance in him, too much that doesn't care what's damaged as long as he gets his way. And I think he knows my reaction by virtue of my expression or some alchemy that I haven't pinned down. He doesn't seem like a typical Psi, but he reads my thoughts too close for comfort.

“Get your ass in the cockpit,” he says. “We came a long fragging way, and we're not stopping here just because you aren't sure you like me.”

“Where's the jumper who got you here?”

Finally, it comes to me, the question that's been bugging me. Outside the ship he said,
Can you jump? Our lives depend on it.
Perlas is too deep for any ship to hit without jumping; there isn't a far cruiser outfitted that can haul the straight space between those two points. People have died trying. So why then does everything hang on me?

Another explosion; shit, we don't have time for this. The ship won't hold much longer. Dina hisses, and I wheel on her, instinctively bracing. She
really
wants to rush me now, I can tell, but instead she just exchanges a laden look with March, who nods. Giving permission?

“It was her last run,” the other woman tells me in a voice sharp and hard as the surface of Ielos, a winter world on the rim.

Last run.

March knows the moment I parse that. Their jumper understood that it was suicide—that she'd never make it out of grimspace intact, not this time. Thus gambling their fate on getting me on board, getting me in the nav chair. When did I become someone worth dying for?

This changes everything. They sacrificed their jumper to get me out of here, so we're going. I'll jump. She died for me. Intellectually, I know someone on this crew put her down, like an Old Terra horse whose wind's been broken. Too great a heart, body can't contain it. It's a kindness most don't have the guts to perform.

“What was her name?” I need to know.

“Edaine.” It's the woman who answers me, once again.

I can see in her eyes that she's grieving. That's why she hates me. It isn't personal so much as the fact that Edaine died for me, and Dina wasn't ready to let her go. Whether they were lovers or the mechanic simply loved her, it's not my business. But I can respect loss. Understand it. This ship isn't ready for a new jumper any more than I'm ready for a new pilot. Something flickers in my brain pan, part of my classical Old Terra education, long since discarded for the thrill of grimspace.

He must needs go that the devil drives.

Yeah, that. Sod what we want. We've got to play the hand we're dealt. Not so long ago, I could call my soul my own. Clean. Contracted to the Corp, sure, but I didn't owe any karmic debts. But now I've got Kai and the rest of the crew weighing on me. Plus seventy-five souls who relied on me to transport them safely to their destination, among them the beloved Miriam Jocasta, freely elected Conglomerate representative to all the tier worlds. Now add to that body count this unknown jumper, the pilot in Med Bay, and I'm feeling like a brick. I don't say another word, just head for the cockpit.

It's time.