"Johnny," Dutch said into his ear, "fall," and he fell.
Twenty Hours Earlier
They took the warrant because they needed the money, and because Bellush asked them in particular and hinted they were marked for the appointment from high above. A remote asteroid way out of the Quad, with something built on it that belonged to RAC at some point, but for which no records were retained. One two-person team that went to check it out about a decade ago and never came back.
Dutch wondered why nobody was sent to follow up on it before, but no explanation was on file. She assumed that RAC had something more pressing on its plate at the time and filed the warrant, but it was lost in the bureaucratic coils until somebody dug it out and put it back on the table. There was something comforting in the knowledge that sooner or later RAC came to collect its own, even if that "later" was well and truly late.
Johnny was fairly bouncing in the pilot chair during the pre-flight check, and she smiled a bit at his excitement. They did have a spate of disappointing warrants recently: small-time criminals, retrieving trinkets of little value, guarding unimportant functionaries through boring parties. This one at least promised something different, whether or not it would end up being deadly.
She left him and Lucy to their business and went to get suited up and ready for whatever awaited. Johnny could be easily distracted by whatever tech and shiny while on the ground, but he was one of the steadiest pilots she's ever seen, and she felt as safe with him in space as she could ever be.
In space or out of it, if she was honest with herself, and Dutch hated not being so. They were partners for little over six months, a meager sliver of time, and she already trusted him too much, relied on him too much. Johnny Jaqobis, her partner; the one who liked almost everybody and was pretty universally liked in turn, the one who laughed at her jokes and sat with her in the evenings, quietly and companionably, the one who covered her back and bled for her when needed, the one who told her everything about himself and didn't mind silence in return.
The one who would undoubtedly abandon her if she gave him the truth of what she was.
She checked her weapons, adjusted the armored bits of her suit, cinched the straps, the familiar monotony of the actions failing to distract her. He deserved to know, if only for the reason that sooner or later Khlyen would catch up to her, and she couldn't stand Johnny being caught in the crossfire. He could find a different partner easily, they could nod at each other civilly in Royale when their paths crossed, they could arrange some kind of visitation schedule for him and Lucy...
She couldn't bear telling him and losing him. Stalling was cowardly, and she still stalled, day after day and month after month, and he was still there.
"ETA sixty minutes," Lucy said, jerking her out of the familiar reverie, and Dutch welcomed it with relief. Warrant, after all, was all; it justified many sins, even that one.
"Well," Johnny said, looking at the screens, "I begin to see why nobody cleared this place out before us. Lucy, can you get us in?"
The large asteroid in front of them was encased in a shimmering white force field sphere with no visible openings. It was beautiful, in a way, like a pearl floating in space. Dutch thought it looked inexplicably creepy.
"I'm getting an identification request from the station, John."
"What the hell, how is this thing still functioning? Ah well, it's supposed to be RAC, right? Send it our codes."
After a short period of waiting a melodic, vaguely sexless voice poured out, startling them both. "Team 25698-A, identified and welcome. Please enter."
An opening blossomed in the middle of the force field, forming an airlock. Johnny grinned at her and said, "What do you think, it's a trap and we're going to die horribly?"
She couldn't help smiling back at him. "Most likely. Ready?"
"Always am."
The scene that welcomed them within the station was weird. They found themselves at the edge of large circular plaza, maybe several kilometers in diameter, completely empty except for a looming dark tower in the exact center - straight, polished to a shine and without any openings or ledges as far as Dutch could tell.
Lucy's analyzers confirmed air as breathable before they came in, but she couldn't manage a deep scan of the asteroid due to the interference. As hard as Dutch looked, she couldn't imagine anything here being enough to kill two seasoned RAC agents. Of course, there was never a good time to grow too confident on a warrant.
They only managed a couple steps forward when the same voice, coming seemingly from nowhere, said "Agents, welcome. Please name yourself."
Showtime, she thought. "I'm agent Dutch, Level Five, and this is my partner Johnny Jaqobis, Level Three. Who or what are you?"
The voice ignored her question. It said, "Welcome to the unit cohesion testing program, Agents," and something in it made the skin of her neck shiver -
- and in the next moment, Johnny was awash in a white blinding light, and in the one after that, gone. All around her a horrible grinding noise began, filling her head, vibrating in her teeth. Glossy black walls rose from the ground on all sides; the quasi-airlock behind her back smoothed itself shut.
"Lucy," she shouted, "Johnny! Johnny! Where is he, you bastard?"
Nobody answered. She was alone, the dark tower still looming over the high walls.
She spent some useless time trying to breach the force field at the point where they had come from; it didn't harm her but stayed impenetrable to her shooting or fists. Lucy was unreachable, and Johnny was... Johnny was...
Johnny was, suddenly, back on the comms, voice staticky but blessedly alive. "Dutch? Dutch? Can you hear me?"
She had to slide down the wall and refused to feel bad about it. "I'm here, Johnny, where the fuck are you?"
"Uh," he said with the same relief in his voice she heard in her own, "I don't actually know? I just, I sort of blinked into wherever it is right now."
"What do you see?"
"I... uh, I see a force field above. I'm on some open platform... Dutch, you are not going to like this."
"I'm already not liking any of this."
She could hear his breathing over the comms, not panicky fast yet, but getting faster. "I think... I'm pretty sure I'm on top of the tower we've seen. And Dutch, I think I found at least one of the missing agents."
It was useless to ask if a person who disappeared a decade ago was still alive on top of a tower in the middle of the asteroid, and she still asked. "Are they?.."
"Very, very, very dead. And what's left of the clothing looks, um, scorched. The insignia is still readable, I can - it's Agent Delacroix, one of the two who disappeared."
Damn it all to hell. "Alright, princess, look around your tower bower. Can you get down somehow?"
"Give me some time to check."
She started moving down the path left for her by the walls, listening to him move around, muttering softly under his breath. This was pretty damn bad, but not catastrophically bad yet. He was alive, she was alive; if needed, she would make her way over there and bring the tower down with her teeth.
"Well," Johnny said with false cheer, "the good news are, there seems to be nothing that can scorch people on this platform. Bad news are, there's nothing on this platform, including any kind of door or hatch or stairs access. I think this tower might just be solid all the way down. I'm not getting out of here until I learn to fly real fast."
"Okay," she said, "okay, Johnny. Sit tight. I'm coming to get you out."
The corridor she was walking down suddenly forked; she hesitated between two identical passages, listening to Johnny breathing on the comms. Then something changed in the tower: she saw a faint blue light travel slowly up its length, and when it reached the top, Johnny suddenly yelped in her ear.
"Johnny," she shouted, "what happened, report!"
"I'm okay," came a somehow wheezy reply, "I'm fine, it was something like a small static shock, nothing serious. I'm more surprised, Dutch, honestly. Oh, wow!"
She didn't have time to ask him about the "oh, wow" part; the voice, the one that she was starting to hate in earnest, made a serene announcement.
"Agents, please proceed with the unit cohesion program."
"What fucking program, damn it, tell us!" she shouted into the empty air, and nobody answered.
"Dutch," Johnny said, "something just appeared here. I think it's a map. I think it's a maze. Can you move a bit?"
She made several careful steps down one of the corridors.
"Oh, yeah, definitely a map, and an interactive one, and you need to go the other way. I can see you! Dutch, there's no exits. I can only get you to the tower."
"Exactly where I need to be right now. We'll figure the rest out later, Johnny, after I get you. Lead on."
He huffed a laugh. "It's like I'm playing a sim and you're my player piece. Well, go right..."
She traveled the maze for a while, following quiet directions in her earpiece. She tried to keep track of turns and twists, but even with the anchor of the tower and her own training she had trouble aligning the tentative map in her mind with her actual position. She kept her hand on her gun and her eyes peeled, half-expecting something to burst out at her from behind every corner, but the maze kept being silent and empty.
Her chrono showed her over two hours had passed since Johnny was taken. His voice had grown a little raspy over time; two more light charges had traveled over the tower while she was walking, and every time Johnny had yelped and then laughed and told her it was okay, nothing serious, just a bit of a bite.
She thought the last one sounded like a bit more of a bite, but didn't say it out loud. She kept Johnny chatting, talking her through his decisions about the maze, about latest upgrades for Lucy he was planning, about his comic books; she didn't like the idea of him sitting up there in silence, alone with Agent Delacroix' corpse.
(The corpse with scorched clothes).
The walls stood over her unchanging, uniformly black, without a crack or fissure. The floor under her feet was made out of just as uniform black tiles. No matter how much she resisted, she felt dwarfed, lost, insignificant. Whatever the chrono told her, it seemed that she had been lost in the maze for days, months. She kept moving ahead, alert and yet somehow dazed, until Johnny abruptly stopped midway through some convoluted story about Pawter and Pree and screeched in her ear: "Fall back! Fall back!".
Her legs obeyed him before her brain did, thankfully. She leaped backwards and stared at the patch of the maze in front of her, completely indistinguishable from any other part of the maze she'd traveled through previously.
"What?"
"Uh," he said, "I'm not sure. Can you throw something ahead of you? Something you don't need?"
She unclipped a radiation counter from her belt and threw it forward; not six steps from her, as it clanked on the floor, white laser beams erupted from the walls and evaporated it. Dutch swore softly.
"What," Johnny said anxiously, "what happened?"
She told him, and he repeated her curses more loudly. "Okay," he said, "now I wish I hadn't said it's like a game, because somewhere out there has a lousy sense of humor. I think I can see a grid on the map, and I can - Dutch, can you see something like tiles under your feet? Where the lasers came in?"
"Yes," she said, "they're everywhere. What do I have to do?"
"You have to move exactly as I say, when I tell you. Some tiles seem to be safe and some don't, and - Dutch, some of it is time-sensitive, and I don't know if... Maybe if you went back and tried to contact Lucy or reach the airlock again..."
"Shut up, Jaqobis, I didn't listen to you brag about your gaming prowess for months for you to chicken out on me now. Tell me what to do."
"Okay. Okay. Begin with the third tile on the left, and move only when I tell you, okay? God, Dutch, please be careful. Shit."
She breathed in, breathed out, rolled her shoulders, flexed her legs. She felt unexpectedly calm, steady; this was familiar territory, deadly tests and steady guidance.
"Ready. Third tile on the left, now..."
Time slowed down after that, became liquid and smooth like honey. "Left," Johnny said in her ear, "right, forward, left, left, back, two across, right, stay, stay, stay, right NOW, left, left, left, stop!"
It went on and on and on, and her legs burned and her chest burned and the lasers danced their deadly white dance around her, and at one point Johnny had obviously pushed the command through a smothered scream of pain; she couldn't afford to check if the tower pulsed blue, or let herself think about it. Left, left, right, forward, back, back, stay, stay, stay, move; her body moved along with Johnny's voice before she could process the words, and it was good, it was perfect, like a dance, like a dream -
The air around her was silent and still. "Dutch," her comm said, "Dutch, it's done, it's finished, are you okay? Are you here? Dutch, please tell me you are here."
"I'm here," she said, and her voice was rough as if she was shouting, even though she knew she wasn't. "I'm good."
"Congratulations on passing the task," the voice chimed through the air. "Please note that your time for finishing the program successfully is limited."
"God," Johnny breathed in her ear, "I hate this thing. What does that even mean?"
It was hard to search for the information she didn't want to have through the haze of endorphins, but she persisted. "Johnny," she asked slowly, "be honest with me. Did the last charge hurt more?"
He was silent for a while; she ached to be able to touch him, shake him, be up there with him. "Yeah," he said finally, "yeah. Nothing I couldn't handle, but there was definitely more juice in this one."
(She could hear the word "scorched" hanging in the channel between them, unsaid; her steps had already quickened.)
"Let's not find out what this stupid program means, okay? Tell me where next, player one."
The next several obstacles went in the more or less the same way: a complicated puzzle involving manipulating a vast array of crystals that Johnny walked her through, a furious attack by quick and lithe bots that poured from the walls in an unending wave that chased her until Johnny had guided her through the opening in the maze that closed behind her. Another laser sequence that left her wrung out and drenched in sweat and burned a stripe through her leather sleeve. Every time she relied on Johnny to lead her through, and every time the voice congratulated them in the same recorded words and repeated the same warning.
They didn't really need the warning by this time. The flashes were traveling up the tower faster and faster, and carried more and more power with them. Through the last few Johnny couldn't hold his screams, and his assurances afterward sounded brittle, cracking at the edges. She could feel him unraveling as surely as she was, one thread at a time, and she forced herself to stay steady, to talk calmly, to run at a fixed pace, to breathe easily.
"There should have been two agents, you know?" Johnny said, and she hated how hoarse his voice became. "Have you seen the other one?"
She didn't. She kept looking, too, expecting the body to mark one of the obstacles, but there was nothing. She didn't want to know what that meant.
The end of the race was unexpected, anticlimactic. She stumbled through yet another opening into an open space, a plaza with the tower rising right in front of her, shining and polished and dark and utterly without openings. She was still catching her breath when the voice said "Please enter the final test," and the wave of intense blue light started crawling up the tower walls.
Her breath caught in horror. She could say at a glance that this one was different from the rest; she knew that this was how Agent Delacroix had died.
"Dutch," Johnny said, "say something, you should already be here - wait, you should be able to see me - oh, shit."
She looked up, helplessly, and saw him sit on the parapet and lean down, a ridiculously tiny figure against the black of the tower and white of the force field. He was looking down at the light traveling up. She couldn't see his face and yet could see it perfectly in her mind, the disbelieving horror of it. She wanted to close her eyes.
"Damn," Johnny said. "Damn, Dutch, I don't think I'm getting out of this one."
She said, furiously, "Don't say this, don't - it's a test, it's a task, what did it say on your map?"
She could hear him swallow, heard the dry click of his throat, heard his voice go gentle. "Dutch, the map went out after you got here. I don't - Dutch, Dutch, please don't run, after that. Please, you don't have to, you can stick with Pree and Bellush and Alvis and Big Joe, they will - Dutch, it's not your fault."
She ignored his words for the hitching of his voice, let the rising pitch wash over her. It was unbearable, indecent to hear him so afraid, so - she wasn't going to lose him, not now, not ever, she didn't care what kind of coward it made her, what selfishness it signaled. It was a task, the voice said, a puzzle like all the rest, it was this damned - unit cohesion - program -
About trust. All this time, about trust. She trusted him to lead her here through fire, but the other way around...
He was sitting on the edge now, as if this last bit of distance would save him, and she stared up at him and said, "Johnny, fall."
Her lips were still shaping "trust me", but Johnny was already falling backwards, hands flung out: she could see his silhouette outlined against the tower's side, plummeting down. Her blood roaring in her ears, she whispered furiously, "come on," and again, "come on, come on, come on", and only when the force field came to life and gently caught him, scant inches from the ground, she let herself close her eyes for a moment.
Then she ran forward to catch him, held onto him as hard as she could. "Dutch," he said, "Dutch, Dutch, we made it," and the voice in the air echoed him.
"Congratulations on successfully graduating the program, Agents," it said, and the walls of the maze around them all slammed down into the ground; far across the flat the airlock beckoned, and Lucy was back on comms, repeating a contact request in a loop.
"Let's get the hell out of here," Johnny said, shaky, and she laughed and leaned on him and let him lean on her, and led him towards home.
When they limped back to the ship, Lucy performed a scan and proclaimed that Johnny needed rest and liquids but was out of physical danger, in decidedly chilly tones. Dutch didn't mind the implied censure: ironically, out of three of them only Johnny liked her best. She settled him into bed, brought him water, forcefully restrained herself from tucking a blanket around him, and then stood in the doorway for some time, trying to make herself go away and leave him to rest.
Johnny caught her at that, as he always did, and patted the bed. She sat next to him, leaned against headboard, stretched her legs, felt the comforting compact solidity of his shoulder. He hummed absentmindedly and put his free hand around her shoulders, easy and familiar. They were both silent for a while.
"Well," she said finally, "that was a warrant and a half. What the fuck do you think it was? Can we even prove what we saw out there?"
"I don't know, at some point somebody at RAC had really strong opinions about team building? It's no wonder this place closed down. And yes, we can, I still have Delacroix' insignia with me. What do you think happened to Agent Visser, the other one?"
"I think he ran away," she said slowly, Johnny's last request from before beating in her mind. "I think he heard her die, up there, and just never came back. I wouldn't have."
"Aw, damn, Dutch."
"I wonder why we were sent to check it out, us in particular," she said after a pause, and thought, it had a familiar taste to it, and didn't voice the thought.
They were silent for a while. She could feel him relaxing next to her, muscle by muscle, coming down. "You scared me," she said, finally. "Not when you fell, but when you fell so readily."
"Why not? You told me to."
"That's what scared me! What if I've been wrong? What if there were no force fields?"
"Obviously," he said slowly and patiently, "I should have stayed up on the tower, safe and snug, and gotten grilled by a very powerful electric charge in an orderly fashion."
She punched his shoulder, hard. "Don't be an ass, you know what I mean."
Johnny turned to her, serious now. "Dutch, what's the matter? Of course you could have been wrong, we didn't know what we walked into. I could've gotten you killed at least ten different times when I was getting you through the obstacles, and it didn't bother you, though it sure bothered me."
"It's different," she said. "It's different when it's…"
"When it's you? Dutch, if you ever tell me to fall and I fall to my death, I would die knowing that you tried your very best to save me. Sometimes shit just doesn't work out. I'm okay with that."
She said, in her smallest voice: "You don't know what I am, Johnny."
He touched her cheek, very gently, very slowly, as if she was scared. "I know exactly who you are. You're the best thing that ever happened to me. I don't need your annotated biography to go with that."
She thought, and he believes it, too, and then a moment later, can I just - fall?
Then she took a deep breath, the one that felt like the first from the moment he was snatched away, and stepped into the yawning air.
"Johnny," she said, "can you ask me tomorrow? For that annotated biography. Not tonight, not yet, but. Tomorrow. I will answer."
"Okay," he said, "okay, Dutch," and she pressed her face into his chest and listened to his heartbeat until they both fell asleep.