Chapter 9

Remma's hardsuit held him at stiff attention as he watched Torru prepare to launch the bomb. If this job went off well, he was going to try to convince Denna to buy a softsuit. They were twice the cost, but Remma was sick of feeling like he couldn't fully bend his elbows. Nobody could get work done like that.

"Careful with it," he said, fretful as a new mother. "That cloaking device is really finicky."

"I'm being careful," Torru said, his voice laced with irritation. "Please let me do my job and I won't tell you how to do yours."

"Sorry," Remma said. "I didn't know you'd be so touchy."

Torru muttered something rude that Remma pretended not to hear. The bomb slid into the firing chamber with a disconcerting rattle. A moment, a sharp sound, and then Remma could see it through the viewing port, gliding through the darkness to its resting point several kilometers away. Soon it was small as a distant star, and Remma could no longer see the light he'd attached to the cloaking device that would turn off if the device stopped working.

Hence the hardsuit. He'd have to go out there and monitor the bomb up close.

He didn't get paid enough for this shit.

With the bomb launched, it was Remma's turn. He and Torru walked down the corridor to the launch room. Well, Torru walked; Remma, encased in his suit, waddled.

Denna was waiting for them in the cramped launch room. There was one airlock for escape pods and another for people, and a bank of controls that Torru drew down from the ceiling. The blue walls seemed too close. A fourth person wouldn't fit. There was barely room for Remma in his hardsuit.

"Don't fuck it up," Denna said. "If the bomb doesn't go off, the job's a wash, and you're responsible."

Great. No pressure.

"There won't be any problems," Remma said. He couldn't guarantee it, but that was what Denna would want to hear.

Denna stood and watched as Torru did a few final checks and then nodded permission at Remma to enter the airlock. Remma pulled on the helmet of his suit without saying anything. He had no final thoughts to share.

The airlock hissed around him as he pushed through the membrane. Inside the narrow chamber was noticeably colder. He waited, listening to the tinny sound of his own breathing, and then the door ahead of him irised open and he was sucked out into space.

The stars were always the first thing he noticed: how many there were, a bright scatter all across his field of vision. He spun for a few bewildering moments before he was able to stabilize the suit, and the stars made a blinding smear that settled into individual points. He was out among them, alone with the ship growing smaller behind him as he activated the suit's thrusters.

The suit was climate controlled, but he still felt the chill of space creeping in through every seam. Nothing felt more vulnerable than leaving the ship in a hardsuit. Out here, he couldn't rely on anyone else to help him or save him. He only had his own wits and the few tools he carried with him, magnetically attached to the front of the suit. If anything went wrong, it was up to him to figure it out.

His breathing took on a harsher edge of mounting panic. He forced himself to breathe deeply and slowly. Panic was death. He was going to be fine. He couldn't die out here and abandon Sol on the ship.

If he got through this, he was never doing a spacewalk again. If that meant leaving the crew, so be it. He was tired of working for Denna anyway.

The suit sailed through the dark void. He couldn't see the bomb yet, but he had the coordinates locked in, and the display in his helmet told him he'd be there in less than five minutes. Far in the distance, he could see a ship moving, maybe the Noszverru merchantman they were targeting. If so, it was right on time.

"Everything okay?" Torru asked through the helmet's radio.

Remma chinned the switch to reply. "Okay so far. Waiting to get eyes on the bomb."

"Let me know when you see it," Torru said, and then silence.

Remma waited. The nearest planet glowed purple below him and to his right, a gas giant circled by countless moons and satellites. An orbital station, more or less the size of a moon but moving more quickly, came around the curve of the planet and spun away from him. He breathed in and out. Nothing like a spacewalk to make you realize the crushing insignificance of your own existence.

The bomb appeared at last, a small metal shape growing quickly larger. At the top, the cloaking device clung to the bomb like a crab waiting out high tide on a rock.

Remma narrowed his eyes. The light wasn't on.

"Fuck, fuck," he muttered to himself. Maybe he was wrong. He was still a ways out, but—no, he wasn't mistaken. Sometime between the launch and now, the cloaking device had stopped working.

Well, he couldn't say it came as a shock. He would have been more surprised if everything went off without a hitch. None of Denna's plans ever did.

He had been hoping to avoid getting too close to the bomb and being caught in the EMP blast. He hated the thought of being helpless in his suit, floating there like detritus and waiting for Torru to rescue him. But there was no helping it. If he didn't act, the whole scheme would unravel.

And so what if it did? What if he did nothing and let the merchantman discover the bomb? He tried to think through the implications. Merchantmen didn't typically have much in the way of weaponry because it added too much unnecessary weight to the ship. Even if they were able to deduce the source of the bomb, they wouldn't attack the Tozren ship. At most they would file a report with system security, and that could be a problem, but Denna would be out of the system before it could become too much of a problem.

As for the implications for Remma himself—it was perfectly plausible that he might fail to get the cloaking device working again. He was afraid, though, that Denna's tolerance of Sol relied on Remma's usefulness, and that if he proved to be less useful than expected, Denna might become less willing to keep Sol alive.

It wasn't worth the risk of rebelling, even in such a small way. Remma would do his job, and maybe at the end of it he would get Sol home.

He activated the radio as he moved himself closer to the bomb. "Cloaking device is down. I'm going to see if I can fix it."

Torru swore fluently. "I told Denna this was a bad idea?—"

"It's only a bad idea if I can't fix it. Give me a few minutes." Remma toggled off the radio again. He preferred to work in silence.

The bomb was small enough for him to hold cradled against his suit with one arm. He carefully detached the cloaking device and opened up its access panel. It had switched itself off again somehow, to Remma's extreme annoyance; there was no way that should have happened. He pushed the toggle back into the proper position and felt the cloaking device hum to life against his glove.

"Now stay like that," he ordered it.

The light on top of the device blinked at him cheerfully, promising nothing.

Remma released the bomb and moved himself away, well out of the expected flight path of the merchantman. He kept his eyes on the blinking light. Something wasn't right. The switch had been in the correct position when the bomb was launched; nothing should have been able to move it.

A dark suspicion bloomed in Remma's mind. Denna hadn't said where he got the cloaking device from, and Remma, like a fool, hadn't asked. Depending on the source?—

As he watched, the blinking light went out again.

Okay. The cloaking device had an AI.

That was a problem.

He chinned on his radio. "Where's the merchantman?"

"Headed your way, four minutes from entering blast radius. Why?"

Remma switched the radio off again without replying. Okay. What was his plan?

He could see the merchantman, now that he knew it was on its way: a dark shape blotting out the stars, moving with deceptive slowness at the near-head-on angle Remma was viewing it from. Four minutes wasn't long, but if the cloaking device was going to switch itself off again as he expected, he needed to wait as long as he could before he acted.

He got himself and the bomb into position and turned on the cloaking device again, keeping his thumb positioned on the switch so it couldn't turn itself off. Then he waited. The merchantman bore down on him. His heartbeat thrummed in his ears. He could hear his breathing grower faster, and again forced himself to take deep breaths. If he panicked, he would make some stupid mistake and he'd die.

The merchantman drew close enough that he could see its name painted on the underside: Orange Gemini Fifteen.

Okay. Go time.

He took a deep breath—calm, calm. Then he let go of the bomb and fired his thrusters as high as they would go, jetting himself out of the way of the ship just barely in time to avoid getting turned into a fine mist of atoms. The ship passed above him, gliding overhead like an ocean leviathan cutting through calm waters.

The bomb went off silently. It made a bright burst that blinded Remma for a moment. He shook his head, a startled reaction to the sudden darkness before his eyes. Then his vision cleared, and he could see the ship still gliding on its same trajectory, but with all its lights out.

Shit. It had worked.

Remma let out a long, unsteady breath. He hadn't died. That was good.

He switched on the radio. "Torru? Can you hear me?"

There was no response. His radio was fried along with all the other circuitry in his suit. That was fine. Torru knew the plan. Remma would wait, and soon enough a shuttle would come out to get him.

Slow, steady breaths. Calm. Now that his oxygen recyclers were out of operation, the only air he had left was what was in the suit. If he breathed too quickly, he'd burn through what little there was.

From his vantage point, he watched as their own ship approached the floundering merchantman. Grapples shot out to clutch the freighter and draw it close in preparation for boarding. As long as the merchants didn't resist, there would be no casualties, and they'd be on their way in a few hours with their ship intact. Denna was ruthless but not bloodthirsty, and that was one of the things that had kept Remma on his crew for this long.

He waited for the shuttle Torru had promised. It would come any minute, surely. Torru wouldn't leave him stranded.

He waited. His suit floated away from the joined ships, still moving from the force of the thrusters he'd had going until the moment his suit went dead. Surely any minute now the shuttle would come. Slow breaths, calm.

Then, at last, he saw the shuttle emerge from the side of the ship above him, turn, and head in his direction.

To hell with saving oxygen. He took a deep, relieved breath and huffed it out again, the exhalation gusting in the closed space of his helmet. He was safe.

He would see Sol again.