CHAPTER 025

DEAL

I jolted awake on the floor of the walk-in. When I tried to move, my jacket peeled away slowly from the puddle of congealed blood I’d collapsed into. I was surprised to find that my hands and legs were still free. Michelle remained similarly unbound.

“You’re awake.” She helped ease me up into a sitting position. “Are you hurt?”

“Nothing like he’s going to be.” I tentatively checked the back of my head for damage. Apart from bruising and a small trickle of fresh blood, I was intact. “It was Burke, wasn’t it? Posing as Vatel.”

She nodded, putting on a brave face. “I recognized him from my research. He had a gun. He said if I made any noise or tried to run he’d—”

“But he didn’t.” I cut her off knowing that her thoughts would tend toward regret, baseless assessments of what she could or should have done in a moment that she never could have prepared for. “What’s important is that you’re okay. I’ll be fine, and we’ll figure this out together.”

“I should have done something.” Her statement was a mixture of guilt and rage. “All this time I spent blaming the Wilders and Denaros for Emilia’s death when really it was someone else altogether. Then I find myself face to face with that…that animal, and he slips right through my fingers.”

“Well, he couldn’t have gone far. And there’s no sense in beating yourself up. If anything, it’s my fault for not figuring it out sooner.”

“How could you have?”

“Burke has been the missing link the entire time. Who else would want to hurt both Wilder and Denaro, and on top of that, you sister? The only person who saw themselves as a victim of all three. Wilder overlooked him. Denaro ignored him. And Emilia’s the one who reported him to the authorities.”

“What about Archie Tamsworth?”

“Other than you, he was probably the only person on the ship who could have recognized him. By the time I left Archie last night, he was still insisting on finding someone to complain to about the garlic in his food. I wonder if he’d managed to talk his way back here to give the chef a piece of his mind, but found a nasty surprise instead.”

I looked around the prep area. Vatel, or at least Burke in his guise, had been plenty comfortable using this space for an ambush. Perhaps he had perfected his technique the night before. A dented shelf situated right about head height drew my attention.

Waving off Michelle’s offer of further help, I dragged myself to my feet. A closer look at the crushed-in metal turned up a brownish stain flaking from the metal surface. Alongside it were a flurry of red cashmere fibers consistent with Tamsworth’s scarf.

“This is where it happened,” I told her. I rapidly reassembled the crime scene in my head. “Burke must have recognized Tamsworth at some point and lured him to this isolated location before shutting him up once and for all. There was no way he could risk his secret getting out, not after he’d gotten this far. Doing it back here would explain why the body was so cold. A loss of temperature is natural during decomposition, but Tamsworth felt nearly frozen. Burke must have stashed the body here until he could drag it back to Tamsworth’s suite via the utility corridors and hide it in hopes that no one would notice he was missing until…”

“Until what?” Michelle jumped in anxiously.

“I’m not sure,” I admitted. “But there’s no way that his endgame was killing Matteo. He was collateral damage. Burke needed some way to get that prototype out of storage and back into his hands, and he knew just enough about behind the scenes at Stellar Engines to make that happen.”

“How could he have known so much if he’s been in hiding this entire time?”

“He had to have had an inside line to the company. If he could hack Denaro’s passenger list to get Wilder onboard, there’s no knowing what other kind of private internal messages he could get his hands on.”

Michelle exhaled deeply in frustration. Her breath came out in frosted plumes from between bluing lips.

“Did it get colder since we came in here?” I asked, rubbing my hands together.

“It did. Right after he locked the door, the compressor kicked on.”

“Then we need to get out of here.”

“I tried.” Michelle was doing her best to remain calm, but a creeping note of panic was evident. “He disabled the access panel.”

“And it’s a magnetic lock,” I recalled. “Nothing for us to pick, no way to break through.”

I scanned the shelves for anything that might help with our escape effort. As tempting as the carving knives on the cutting table were, they were useless to me. I couldn’t pry the door open with them, and stabbing Burke was not an option. I needed him alive. Odds were that this was not a solitary operation. There were too many moving parts. He might have been a talented engineer, but this scheme was far too complex for any one individual to manage. I already had a working theory, but that would have to wait. I pushed the thought aside and continued my search.

A familiar bulge in the chest pocket of a blood-spattered apron hanging from the wall sparked my imagination. Sure enough, it contained a mostly empty pack of cigarettes. I was halfway there.

“Michelle, are you a smoker?”

“Occasionally after dinner, or when I am working on a tight deadline, but I don’t see what that has—”

“A lighter. Do you carry one?”

She patted the pockets of the casual outfit she’d thrown on before joining me.

“No, I didn’t not bring one with me.”

“Shit. That’s all right. Do me a favor.” I handed her the smallest carving knife and the pack of cigarettes. “I need you to disassemble these. Cut the filter off, then one long slit down the side of what’s left. Put the filling in one pile and then the wrapping papers in another. Can you handle that?”

Michelle nodded resolutely. Giving her something to stay busy would hopefully keep her mind off our dire predicament.

“Good. Let me know when you’re done.” I left her at the cutting table and went to look for the atmospheric sensor. I found the saucer-sized disc affixed to the ceiling over heaping bushels of leafy greens. I kicked the baskets out of the way and looked for something to stand on. Given the height of the shelving, I would have expected to find a ladder or footstool of some sort but came up empty. A tug of the closest rack showed that it was bolted firmly to the ground. I extended my arm above my head. As expected, the sensor remained well out of reach. That was fine. We would cross that bridge when we got to it.

A shiver ran down my spine. It was getting colder. Judging from the crystals forming on the items in the open dairy case, staying here much longer was not an option. Our bodies could only stand subfreezing temperatures for so long before they shut down entirely.

“I’m finished,” Michelle said through chattering teeth. I snagged a block of Kerrygold from the dairy selection and headed back to the butcher’s corner.

I ducked my way through the swinging cuts of meat, already hard as wrecking balls. Michelle stood next to the table, arms crossed over her chest, doing the best to ward off the chill. I took my jacket off and draped it across her shoulders.

“That’s good work,” I said, noting the small stack of curled rolling papers. “Now we just need a way to light them up.”

“I’m not sure smoke signals are going to do us much good in here,” she feebly quipped.

“Ha. All we need to do is trip the smoke detector. That should trigger the failsafe on the door.”

I bent down to untie my shoe and slid it off. Michelle waited until I had removed my sock to comment. “You know, paradoxical undressing is one of the symptoms of fatal hypothermia. Should I be concerned?”

I slid my bare foot back into my shoe and tied it. Next, I peeled the foil wrapper from the Kerrygold and put it next to the rolling papers. I stuffed the frozen pound of butter into my dress sock and knotted it off.

“Probably.” I whirled the improvised flail around to get a feel for it, then brought it crashing down onto the far end of the cutting table. It cleaved a dent straight through the heavy steel top. “But not for me.” I threaded the loose end of the sock through my beltloop and lightly tied it in place. It was a far stretch from my Ratifier, but at least now I wasn’t empty-handed.

“I’m not sure whether you’re a genius or insane.”

“Me either.”

I shaped the foil into a bowl and lined it with the cigarette papers, then dusted the bottom with loose tobacco. I grabbed two knives and had Michelle follow me back to the sensor.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

“All right, now when this catches, you’re going to hold it while I pick you up so you can reach the sensor.”

Michelle nodded, hunching over to preserve what little body heat she had left. I had to work fast. I had never been a Boy Scout, so I only had a vague idea how to start a fire from scratch. I placed one knife point-down in the makeshift kindling and ran the other blade down its spine. Apart from a hideous noise and a terrible grinding sensation, it produced nothing. There was no spark. No heat. Hoping Michelle didn’t notice, I repeated the motion. A pinch of loose tobacco jumped out of the flimsy bowl. I scooped it back in and tried again.

“N-n-no luck?”

“Still trying to find the sweet spot is all. Gimme another second.”

“I th-th-think I need to s-s-sit down,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper.

“You can’t do that. You need to stay up and moving around to keep your circulation going. Besides, heat rises. The floor is the worst place you can be.”

“N-n-not all of us got to t-t-take a nap. So. Tired.”

“One more minute, Michelle. Stay with me.”

My fire starting attempts became more desperate. My fingertips were too numb to notice the nicks and cuts I’d accumulated until I started to bleed onto the white rolling papers.

“Fuck!” A wayward slash raked my knuckles on the way down. Reacting to the sudden flash of pain, I hurled the knife blindly. It clattered against a distant wall.

“W-w-we’re not going to make it, are w-w-we?” Michelle, still wrapped in my jacket, was doubled over, teetering precariously.

“There’s gotta be another way out of here.”

I went to the walk-in door. Sure enough, the access panel was disabled. There was no margin around the door to pry at, no lock to break. We were fucked.

Then my comex bleeped. I pulled it out to find that although I still had no signal, there was a simple, one-word message from an unidentified sender: Fridge?

Yes, I typed back. It didn’t matter who was on the other side. Anything was preferable to freezing to death.

The cold slowed my brain enough that it took me a moment to realize that the woosh of a magnetic lock releasing came not from the door in front of me, but the wall behind me. I spun around to find an innocuous wall panel cracked open. G peered at me from the utility corridor behind it.

I blinked at her in disbelief, unsure whether I was hallucinating again.

“What are you doing hanging out in here? It’s freezing.”

It was definitely G. I grabbed Michelle and all but dragged her out into the relative warmth of the service tunnel, then slammed the door behind us.

CAT licked at my fingertips as we trudged down the concealed hallway, trying to restore feeling to our limbs.

“Onions.”

“You’re right, bud. I should have listened to you from the beginning. Why would Matteo have smelled like onions if he never made it to dinner? Or Tamsworth, when he hadn’t eaten any of them?”

“Onions bad.”

“All right, you don’t have to rub it in.”

G, leading the way, focused intently on her gadget.

“How did you know where to find us?” I asked.

“The bad guy did a good job cutting off the main comms network, but he missed one of the auxiliary channels. I managed to tap into it. Since I scanned your comex, I could tap into its location data. I knew you said to go somewhere safe but after you hadn’t moved for a while, I figured you needed help.”

“You did a great job, G. Thank you. You and that gizmo deserve a raise.”

“If you’d really like to thank me, you can tell me who it was so I can take this gizmo and shove it up—”

“Whoa now.”

“His name’s Ted Burke.” I’d thought Michelle was too busy thawing out to pay attention, but the color had returned to her face. “He killed my sister.”

“And my uncle.”

“And probably a whole lot more people if we don’t find him soon.”

“So what’s the plan?” Michelle asked.

“I need you to get back to your room. If G can open you a channel, get in touch with Frankie Denaro to let him know what’s happening.”

“What about Lunar Security?”

Selfishly, I waffled. Captain Fox and I had been playing pretty fast and loose with the rules for the last couple days.

“See what Denaro thinks about it first.”

“What about me?” G butted in. “What can I do?”

“Your job is to get Michelle back to her room. Then it’s back to the original plan. You get CAT somewhere safe and wait until we reach Luna.”

“But—”

A booming voice seemed to come from everywhere all at once.

“Greeting, passengers of the Lunar Express. My name is Ted Burke. I’ll be taking over as your captain, starting now.”

“No buts. Now get me back to the main deck, pronto.”

I emerged from the utility corridor into a thankfully empty room. I sprinted across it and exited into the hallway. Stunned passengers stood frozen in place, trying to make sense of the rambling proclamation issuing from the intercom system.

“You might know me better as Chef Vatel, but more likely, you don’t think of me at all. Why would you, with all your glitz and your glamor, ever pay attention to a lowly member of the crew? I assure you, that will be changing soon.”

I worked my way toward the flight deck, unsure of where else to go.

“I’ve been accused of committing the heinous crime of trying to profit off of my own achievements. My career was ruined, my name dragged through the mud, all for something I did not do. Was it my prototype that was sent to Stellar Engines? You’re damn right it was. A work of genius. Of art. But I was not the one who sent it.

“Still, I was punished. And now you shall be as well. You see, there’s been a secret ingredient incorporated into each and every one of the meals you’ve eaten so far. A pinch of nanobots, invisible to the naked eye, programmed to destroy the cyberware that you think makes you so special. Unfortunately there’s a significant chance of side effects, namely immediate death. You thought you could buy your way into being gifted and talented, but all you’ve done is seal your own fates.”

More passengers crowded the halls now, pouring out of their doorways, staring vaguely toward the speakers embedded in the ceiling. I wove my way through them, shoving when needed. Soon the flight deck was within view. None of the guards that should have been stationed outside were anywhere to be found. I feared the worst.

I threw the door open to find the room in chaos. Fox and his officers barked orders back and forth as they frantically struggled with their instrument panels.

“Where is he?” I shouted.

“No idea. The whole security team has been dispatched to find him. Wherever he is, he’s got us locked out of our systems—navigation, propulsion, the whole thing. If we don’t get control back, we’re going to enter the Lunar atmosphere too fast to avoid a crash.”

“I’ll find him.”

“See that you do.”

I’d tuned out Burke’s manifesto during my terse conversation with Fox, but keyed back in when reentering the hallway.

“…so I’ll make you all a deal. My original plan was to wait until you’d reached the Denaro Foundation Exposition and activate the nanobots all at once. What a scene that would be. Watch as all of the system’s best and brightest collapse in unison, proving the futility of technology at an event intended to celebrate it!”

He broke out into laughter, which quickly dissolved into a wheezing cough.

“Unfortunately, it seems that is no longer an option, as there is a meddler on board who has gotten in the way of my plans. Lunar Security forces will be waiting for us when we land, all over the loss of two unremarkable individuals. C’est la vie, I suppose.

“Instead, I will settle for the head of Vance Wilder. Not literally, of course, unless you are so inclined. Find him and bring him to me. Don’t worry about where; I can see your every move, and once he is in custody, I will be in touch.”

“And what if we don’t?” an older man in his pajamas yelled at the ceiling.

“Then I will activate the nanobots anyway. Sure, there will be no one around to see you suffer except for yourselves, but it might make me feel better. The choice is yours.”

The intercom went dead. The passengers congregated in the hallways began to panic, conferring with one another in various states of fright and anger. I caught snatches of their conversations as I pushed my way through the congestion.

“Now normally, I’m not one to bargain with terrorists, but in this case—”

“—it’s either him or us…”

“But how can we be sure he isn’t bluffing?”

As much as I disliked Vance Wilder, there was no chance I was going to let him be ripped to shreds by a bloodthirsty mob. I recharted my uncertain course for his room

I rounded the corner to find a well-dressed crowd already gathered outside of Wilder’s suite, pounding the walls and yelling for him to show himself. I shoved my way to the front of the throng and tried to clear a space around his door.

“Everybody needs to calm down,” I yelled over them. “You’re all better than this. Think about it.”

“What’s there to think about?” a woman near the back responded.

“Let us at him!” a man shouted back.

“You’re doing exactly what Burke wants. He’s using you as his tools to prove a point.”

“I don’t care!” another man joined in. “I don’t want to die!”

“No one does,” I tried to reason, “including Vance Wilder. I get it. You don’t like him, but you’re not murderers. There’s gotta be a different way.”

“There’s no time!”

“Look,” I said, loosening the sock from my beltloop. “If you want to get to him, you’re going to have to go through me.”

They were on me all at once, clawing, grabbing, tugging. There was little force behind the few clubbing blows that landed, but I remained in danger of being suffocated, or crushed underfoot. The canopy of their writhing bodies obscured my view. I lashed out with my elbows, trying to clear enough space to operate. It was impossible to see who I hit but I could feel each connection with a soft gut or a brittle ribcage. Finally, I had enough room to breathe.

“Back the fuck off!” The butter-laden sock arced through the air, clipping a tall bearded man behind the ear and dropping him where he stood. I reversed its momentum, swinging a backhanded strike that bounced sickeningly off the painted cheekbone of a woman attempting to gouge me with her nails. A downward hammer blow splintered the forearm of the man with a firm hold of my sleeve. He shrieked and released his grip to cradle his useless limb. Unencumbered, I was off to the races.

It unfolded like a symphony of violence. I cleared more space by kicking and shoving anything I couldn’t swat with the loaded sock. An errant blow shattered the glass of a tasteful landscape mounted to the wall, sprinkling shards down onto the wounded. The mob’s courage collapsed under the frenzied assault. The inner circle scrambled to retreat, forcing those on the outer edge to move with them or be trampled. I rained shots down on their unprotected backs and skulls as they escaped, making damn sure there was no chance of them turning back.

“Motherfuckers!” I shouted, booting a stumbling man in the ass to send him face-first into the opposite wall. “I’m trying to fucking save you!” I yanked him back up by the collar and sent him on his way with a shove.

I doubled over, heaving, trying to catch my breath. My shirt was torn and spattered with blood. My hand ached from my death grip on the sock. I shook it out, trying to get the feeling back in my fingertips.

The door opened behind me. “It’s about time.” Wilder stood in his entryway in a beige flannel suit, adjusting his full Windsor. “You know, when I pay for—”

My fist rocketed out, catching him flush in the jaw. I watched his eyes roll back in his head as he slumped forward into my arms. I dragged him back into the room and dumped him unceremoniously onto the floor.

“Stay. In. Your. Goddamn. Room.”

My comex buzzed. It was G. I pulled the door shut behind me and locked it. “Whatcha got for me, kid?”

“You’d know if you ever checked your messages.”

“Sorry, things got a little busy over here.”

“I traced the frequency of the intercom announcement back to its source. A random comex that was patched into the mainframe.”

“Burke’s?”

“I guess. I marked it with a tracker and sent you a map of the ship. Follow the dot and you’ll find him.”

I pulled up the map and took a second to orient myself.

“Is that him in the tunnels?”

“They’re utility corridors,” she reminded me.

“Okay. And you can see where I am?”

“Yup.”

“Can you get me back there from here?”

With the woosh of a lock releasing, the wall panel behind the window popped open.

“You’re gonna have to build me one of those things,” I remarked, only half-kidding.

“For a price.”

“How about we talk about it after I’m finished here?”

“Deal.”