The Freelancer ship closed in. The enemy's stronghold was out in front of the Pelican, if not all around it: Wash had seen from the Mother of Invention how space was littered with the detritus of the scrap yard and the nebula the color of sea water.
Connie looked at him with the lights of the drop bay making bright white points on the flanges of her mask, and nodded.
In the radio silence after that Carolina stamped down from the navigator's seat and sat down at the head of the row, just glancing over Wash, Connie, North and South on the other side of the blood bay, and the row of empty, metallic black seats. After the sudden drop out of the Mother of Invention and the news that York hadn't been able to open the Insurrection leader's hangar, they were all tense and eager. Wash's armor felt clumsy and heavy, unsettlingly new since the jet pack had been adhered to the magnetic clasp between his shoulder blades. He rolled his shoulders while South ribbed North and Connie nodded at him again, this time an admonition to settle down.
Surely Connie's shoulders were hunched and tight under the armor, her skin pale, the birthmarks constellated over her shoulder blades. She had not been antsy last night, the night before the big push into enemy territory and the attempt to capture the Leader. While York had joked and drank, Connie had been steady.
Wash mentally shook himself just as North finished his reply, and Wash turned to Carolina instead, wanting to include her in the banter of the nervous team. "How are you feeling? Are you up to this?"
Carolina, cold. "Say what you wanna say, Wash."
He hadn't even meant to bring Sigma up, but as soon as she demanded a topic he knew that the AI was the only one he could talk, the only one either of them were considering. "It's just- giving up your A.I. was a big deal. I thought maybe-"
"I'll be fine. Worry about yourself."
Wash immediately swung his head around, looking at the other side of the bay. The engine steadily droned.
"It's too late to worry now," Connie said, glancing at him and past him to Carolina.
"Stay focused," Carolina said, and Wash and Connie raised their shoulders and pushed their jet packs against their seat backs in identical response.
He wanted to say more but didn't think it would be received well, except perhaps by North: Sigma was the elephant in the room and would stay that way as long as Maine was in recovery. Wash settled his shoulders in their new pose up against the back of the seat, feeling the bodysuit shift under his armor. He hoped that York's failure - and the Director's decision to fire on him, what was with that? - wasn't a sign of things to come. The ship where the Freelancers sat was ultimately, however skilled 479's hands were, a target. They moved in an arc that at hundreds of miles an hour felt appallingly slow, waiting for the Insurrectionist Longswords to loop around.
The enemy ships did. The Pelican shook, and 479 cursed. "All right, this is your stop! Opening rear bay."
Wash stood up at the same time as the others. Connie was just in front of him and easing to the left to make space between the jetpacks. There was no need in outer space to adopt anything like the V-formation of geese flying in atmosphere, but backwash from one jet pack could push another person off course, and they had trained to be wary of each other. The Freelancers pranced and shifted, while the starting gate tipped downward from the ceiling and the roar of the engine grew quieter as space dampened it. That was the first disorientation: Wash had expected it to be louder.
They kicked off. The blast from the jetpack was reassuringly direct, not wobbly or spurting. Carolina cruised to the front of the group as Wash glanced behind. Already the Pelican was diminishing, 479 going her own way and distracting the starfighters. He saw Connie beside him, her hands open like a child feeling the wind outside a car on the freeway -
I don't like 'Connie.' It makes me sound like a kid.
"Right! All together!" Carolina led the pack. "Use your jets sparingly - course correction only. You don't wanna end up like Georgia."
"Wait, what happened to Georgia?" Wash asked. Had he heard that code name before? It didn't sound familiar. It didn't sound like a name from a safety briefing.
South's voice grated in his ear. "Nobody knows, they never found him."
"Are you sure these things are safe?" Wash almost gulped.
"Yeah," South yelled.
He clenched his teeth to keep a faltering whine from coming out of his mouth. Another glance at Connie, at Carolina, at the dots in the distance that might be stars or enemy ships. At the great cluttered ring of the junk station, coming closer. He could see bright blue force fields, and tried not to think about what happened to Georgia, or what if the team couldn't get in, or if the jet pack bucked off his back. Nervousness hurt productivity but it prevented mistakes too, increased awareness, reminded him that he was good enough at this to know when he was bad at it.
Wash worried so much precisely because he felt that worry was a form of prophecy.
Connie's voice echoing in his head had come from a conversation they had weeks ago, after a mission that left her disappointed and souring. She had checked her guns at the armory and come to the locker room with the others. After they left she stayed sitting there, her shoulders hunched as she alternated between staring at the floor and at the leaderboard. Wash had been at the threshold before he turned back for her.
"It's not your fault, Connie."
The conversation had carried on from there, wisping and whipping. She had always been hard on herself. He wondered whether she had always been hard on others.
"It's not about you. It's about him, them. The missions, the rankings - this is a selection process, Wash. He's filtering us. And he's hiding something, Wash. And I'm going to find out what."
Her shoulder rocked under his hand.
She scooped up her mask and stood with it thrust away from her. He knew that she felt an aesthetic dislike for her armor that had gradually become a discomfort, or a dissatisfaction: she was also, like Wash, not taken to symbolism.
Then she shook her head slightly, her hair waving across her face. Closed her eyes, as if to brush at the strands with her lashes. "And don't call me Connie. It makes me sound like a kid."
She pushed the helmet into his hands.
"Call me CT."
He had not taken his mask off in front of her because he did not think expressions were important. Gross movements translated to the armor, and a sigh or a shrug was almost more noticeable coming from an armored person than from a clothed one. When he glanced at the leaderboard, she noticed.
Later, she found him in a study room, his head leaning on his crooked arm as he studied a field manual about infiltration. The Director had suggested they might be hitting bigger targets soon - hard targets, the whole Alpha team against however many Insurrectionists were thrown at them. The letters were dim blue on a black background. They had seemed like an assault when Wash entered the room but had adjusted as he sat, attuning to the level of light, and became comfortable.
She opened the door quietly and he turned to see her holding a hardcopy of some other booklet in her hand, the paper flopping, the Freelancer symbol emblazoned in blue on the top sheet. She looked intently at the text in front of him, suspiciously at first. Then her eyebrows lowered and she came closer to the screen, turning her back to him. They had this in common: a slightly logophiliac focus. She was wearing a brown jacket, the seams done in aggressive black stitches that climbed over her shoulders and haloed the thick cuffs.
She sat heavily on a seat next to him and wheeled closer to the screen. Heat seemed to wash off her back. The light from the textbook sat in a bathic blue curve over her cheek as she looked at the screen.
He spoke quietly. "I was reading that."
"Infiltration?" she said.
"Of fortified locations."
"We'll be needing that soon."
"Uh-huh."
This conversation brought them back to a pleasant neutrality after their last one.
Still looking at the screen, she said, "You can call me what you want."
He drew back. "Are you sure?"
A violent shrug. He reached out and patted her arm and she self-consciously shifted closer. The gesture made them intimate again.
"I think of you as Connie." He bent his head toward her. She smelled metallic, with her natural scent underneath bold and sweet like cedar. Wear armor long enough and a person practically sweated the proof out.
"It's not something I think of as an endearment."
When he stiffened, afraid that he had insulted her, she reached up to clumsily pat his leg. "Call me what you want."
But what do you call yourself? He wanted to ask, but something in her tone told him that she was playing at brevity, like the brittle attitude of their previous talk would come back, like she was so aware of the leaderboard it might as well be right in front of her instead of rooms and walls away.
She learned forward and pointed at the text, a paragraph under a subhead that talked about approaches from space. "I can't quite figure this out. This part here..."
The Freelancers broke on the space station like waves on a shore. Connie had positioned herself at the edge of the formation because she was a mid-range fighter: Wash and North could work from afar and Carolina and South would throw themselves into the front. Connie had armed herself lightly, and now, as she saw the hanger filled with vehicles and the dark-armored Insurrectionists lurking among them, regretted it.
She glanced at Wash just before the hanger roof closed over them all, just as the half-strength of the threshold's gravity pulled them down.
She still considered herself tied to the code name Connie. That didn't mean that she didn't keep her desire for the others to call her CT: Carolina and North especially could be patronizing. She had not been lying or obfuscating when she told Wash that Connie was not an endearment: she loved his voice more than the words he said and his meaning more than his voice.
The gunshots started. Carolina jumped again almost as soon as she hit the floor, but Connie and North immediately started running across the gray-green floor and made for the edges of the room. Connie got off two shots toward a blurring, dusky human form and started toward the back of the room. They were meant to infiltrate and cripple the Insurrectionists as much as they could, with their primary objective being the capture of the enemy leader: without York, they were simply not expected to do it as quietly.
Carolina was going straight down the middle. Carolina's fight was so far out of Connie's league that it was almost physically out of sight. Metal shrieked as vehicles and people collided in midair, and Connie felt viciously, suddenly frightened of Carolina in a way that almost made her sick to her stomach.
She thought of the white number one slashed across the leaderboard.
Then she put her head down and ran, feet clanging on the floor. For a moment she was alone, the sniper rifle coughing and kicking behind her as North found a place to stay, her own feet beating at the metal floor. Then a person with the rounded half-mask of the Insurrectionists, almost more like her helmet than Wash's was, barreled around a corner between two towering crates.
She shot him twice, before he could even raise his gun; the guilt was deep and immediate. Her next step landed in the crook of his elbow, and she looked down at the fabric of his uniform, idly grinding her toe against the floor.
He wore an insignia, and the metal of his gun was not scratched or blemished. It was not what she had expected from a desperate colonist; nor was the scrap yard itself.
She pushed forward. When the protective row of boxes ended she saw Wash skidding into place behind a u-shaped console. He hesitated over the controls, fingers spread and crooked.
The moment she stepped out to cover him she heard his tone change. He had been speaking, adding to the teamcom white noise of commands and curses, when his voice gained a sharp edge along with the quaver he had affected since the mention of Georgia. (Lost, mythic Georgia - he had stuck in Connie's head too, but she could check the roster when she got back to the ship.)
"Hey guys? Things might get a little ...floaty."
Metal crashed and strained in the center of the room, and Connie saw Carolina poised mid-air against the brighter blue of the force field, her back arched, her crystal-backed rifles both graceful and toothy.
The ground eased away from Connie's feet.
"Enable grav boots!"
It happened so fast that Connie could not have separated her decision to do that from Wash's advice. She felt her stomach lurch again as imagination told her that gravity had returned but her inner ear denied it. She started toward Wash on her first step, and through the narrow oval eyepieces of her mask saw him notice her. He reached out, one foot floating, and gestured at her to come closer with his left hand while his right clumsily hovered just off the console.
She turned to catch what was obscured in her peripheral vision, checking the wall behind her that contained the door Wash was supposed to open. Empty. Carolina was tearing up the hangar, South supporting her, North's gun sending yellow lines of light across the room. Connie would not be surprised if a sealed bulkhead cracked soon.
Wash keyed the right button. Gravity returned just as Connie got close enough to him to touch, and she turned around once to sweep their surroundings with her two pistols. A moment later she ducked as an indistinct, horned shape reared toward her like a new horizon, and she found herself on her knees next to Wash, his shout fading in her ears, the Warthog that had flown over them crashing with a dull scraping sound across the floor and into the wall behind them. Wash pinned her wrists in his hands in a gesture that could have been fear or euphoria or relief.
More crashing and footsteps. Carolina's voice came over the comm, and Connie and Wash stood up in a response that was almost Pavlovian. "They know we're inside. Wash, North, secure that hallway. South, see if you can access the leader's location. We don't leave without -"
A loading door in the back of the hanger, now to Connie's right, opened up. Three figures stood there, dwarfed by the hallway designed to accommodate two Warthogs abreast but lit in severe cross-cuts of light and shadow from the low ceiling. Connie recognized the pill symbol on the leader's chestplate.
"Get them!" An unfamiliar voice yelled, and gunfire lanced out. Connie immediately dashed to the side, feeling bullets crash against her armor like something much larger and heavier than they were. The armor dissipated and transformed the hurt. Wash was still standing beside her, his rifle now pointing toward the door as he snapped his head around toward the enemy. Carolina blurred into view trying to take them head on, and dashed to the right at the last moment.
The Freelancers had, without thinking about it, effectively ambushed the Insurrectionists in their own ship.
The leader had planned for that, though. That same voice shouted "Now!", and one of the soldiers lifted a heavy rocket launcher.
The rocket exploded right behind the console. Wash and Connie both crouched down as the explosion rained shrapnel onto them.
A foot away, Carolina grabbed a broken, twisted slice of the console.
Before the lights even died behind their plastic sheaths she was whipping it two-handed toward the leader. The metal folded against the wall just as another rocket exploded; the comm was filled with shouting and the air with smoke.
Connie backpedaled, knowing from her HUD that Wash and Carolina were flanking her on either side. When she saw a dark figure against the wall, she fired. The Insurrectionist wasn't hurt enough not to move, and Connie closed in, determined to finish one job before she moved on to the next.
A moment later, the leader was beside her. The round-topped helmet blankly stared, looking cartoonish and bulbous next to the Freelancer armor she found most familiar. He clutched a battle rifle tightly to him.
Connie shot to disable - the Insurrectionist bent over, and then another one of his troops stepped out from the side. Connie fiercely wished that she could project a shield like North.
Wash stepped in, blasted the other Insurrectionist away. Connie shot the leader twice, hit once.
The rocket launcher boomed again. This time the hit was closer; the remains of the console arced over Connie's head like a storm, and she felt the explosion in her ears despite her aural filters. She hit the ground on her forearms and knees and saw the Insurrectionist leader stumble across her field of vision, the gun swinging limply in his hand as he headed toward Wash.
Connie heard a groggy voice intrude into the muddled white noise of the battle, one she hadn't expected - "Hey, guys?" York, rescued or escaped somehow from his drift.
Carolina was pacing her, but Connie saw her pause when York spoke.
The leader reached Wash in a few long strides. He swung his gun like a bat, slamming it against the side of Wash's head. It clearly dazed Wash; he stumbled to the side, and for a moment Connie had a terrible vision of the Insurrectionist simply raising his gun and shooting Wash point-blank.
She lifted her pistol. Before she could do anything Carolina was there, though, grabbing the Insurrectionist by the shoulders. She simply swung him away, back toward the door where he had come from. His troops were there, one with a rifle and one with a rocket launcher. Connie fired, thought she might have hit one of them, and grabbed the top of the twisted wreckage of the console. She jumped, putting it between herself and the other Freelancers and also shielding herself from the trio. Carolina was bent over Wash, helping him up.
York's voice rang out again. "I'm coming! I'm coming. Don't start without me."
Carolina stood up. Connie could see her over the barrier. "Help York!" Connie yelled. "I've got this."
Connie jumped back over the slab of metal as Carolina stalked around the side, toward both York's voice and the leader's former position. Wash was sitting up, moving gingerly but comfortably.
The minute he planted both feet on the floor, the Insurrectionist with the rocket fired again.
Connie had been turning away from Wash to face the threat. The blast caught her square in the front, lifting her up, rolling her over and over the remains of the console. She lost track of Wash, of everything, in the dizziness. One pistol was wrenched out of her hand, but as she finally jolted to a stop on her back she pulled the second one closer to herself. The door to the interior of the ship was close behind her, black, the air there seeming more still than in the hanger now filled with explosives and gunfire.
She realized that a piece of the console had fallen on top of her: not nearly too big to move, but something she'd have to get her hands on.
Before she made her next move, the leader stepped on the console that was trapping her legs, turning the metal from side to side, and looked down at her.
She aimed her pistol at him. She could hear York babbling, Carolina saying she'll go back for him, Wash breathing.
Someone grabbed at her shoulders. It took them two tries to get a handhold on the armor and by that time Connie had kicked free of the console, the strength of her armored legs nearly knocking the leader across the room. The Insurrectionist behind her was a big man, but her armor was without question stronger than his. She got to her feet and aimed her gun again.
The leader hit her from behind with the butt of his gun. The pistol bounced out of her hand, and she hit him once in the shoulder with a frantic punch before he lifted the piece of the console. The metal was disintegrating at the edges but it was just the right size and weight to push her a few feet like a riot shield and knock her through the large door. The second soldier and the one with the rocket launcher were nearly on top of her now, firing over the piece of the console as it fell. She shot one, only dented the armor. The leader screamed, shot her twice equally as ineffectively, and charged through the door.
She didn't see until it was too late that he had either hit the door controls or ordered it to close remotely as he ran. The light shifted, everything becoming closer, with shorter shadows as the door slammed across.
Connie could hear someone - it must have been Carolina - pounding on the door, the metal shaking. Carolina would have to go back, though. Wash might be hurt, York had fallen out of the sky. The mission had, from the first, been a loss.
(Partly because of me, Connie thought. I dropped the ball.)
After the sealing of the hall door, the world outside her mask went quiet, but she could still hear shouts in the comm, York with a constant string of words. Wash was silent. Someone, maybe him, was breathing rhythmically and loudly, so even that the evenness sounded forced. The three Insurrectionists were still surrounding her. Connie struggled.
"Good enough, good enough," the leader was yelling, and Connie thought of the last white line on the leaderboard where her name wasn't and felt her shoulders slump. There was a crackle of static.
The leader said, "Get us out of here. We'll never get the package back right now!"
The Sarcophagus, she thought. The thing Wash captured during the heist, while I was covering Wyoming.
"Get the helmet off her or she'll call the others," the leader said, and when the gunner reached for her mask she pushed him back and headbutted him. He pushed back, but she had the armor, and when she pushed again he went farther, sprawling across the hall.
The leader pointed his rifle at her, so close that she could see the narrow aperture at the end of the gun. "You're surrounded. Your troops won't be able to get through that blast door without a bomb big enough to kill us all. Quit trying and we won't kill you yet."
She said, "Why not?" a response she regretted so fast that she almost bit back on the words.
Something - Carolina, undoubtedly, if not Wash also - slammed against the blast doors again. They didn't quite shake.
There were more soldiers coming down the hallway from the other direction, with pistoles and rifles, weapons more suited to the hallway than the silent woman with the rocket launcher still behind her.
She could fight her way out of here - and she wanted to - she had not unclenched her fists yet, and she felt the desire to push off into a kick with every step she took. The ugly brown-black sheen of the floor repulsed the balls of her feet.
Or, she could find out what the Insurrectionists wanted. The leader's words had not sounded like those of a colonist seeking independence...
"What do you want?" she said.
The leader's round mask swiveled toward her and then back. "We didn't want anything. We were on the defensive. But now we've got you, and the process can be accelerated."
She opened and closed her fist. When she didn't say anything he said, "Convenient," and turned away.
The leader raised his hand, and Connie was reminded of the Director standing over the training floor, FLYSS amplifying his voice. The leader must have done something similar, must have recorded a message that would be tight-beamed to 479's Pelican or snuck into the Mother of Invention, or - Connie didn't know, and it surprised and frightened her that the Insurrectionists could get a message to the army that easily. But the leader spoke like the Freelancers were arrayed right in front of him. He crowed; he gestured with his empty, gloved hand while the other held his gun under his arm.
"I'll give her back, if you give back what you stole! You have three days to decide." His voice was breathless but not frenetic. "Meet us at the Longshore Shipyard, or she dies. That's it." He sounded more childish than she had expected, but maybe that was because he was closer to her age than the director's. Her guards were masked and she couldn't tell their ages either, but there was an air of disheveledness around them.
He ended the transmission and turned to Connie. "Take the helmet off!"
The other Insurrectionist troops had surrounded her by now. She did. She shoved her helmet at the rocket-wielding woman, who had to take one hand off the rocket tube to take it; her clumsiness gratified Connie.
She was put in a cell. When she was left alone she rushed the door and stopped inches from it, her fists raised, and shook her head.
One step back, and the black walls seemed like the extent of the world. For the first time she really felt her fear, sat in it, wished that she had her helmet with all of its screens and controls.
She stepped back again, felt the stiffness in her muscles where she would ache tomorrow. The desire to fight and the desire for information - to answer her question, to remove the prickling sense of suspicion that had started when the leader had mentioned the package - warred with each other. Ransom. Convenient indeed. Now she could gather information from the inside - and she would do it, no matter how they thought they were keeping things from her. She already had. She would not yet sleep.
Wash cursed, steadily and creatively, inside his head. Carolina was altering the topography of the hanger, tearing away the pieces of wall and console that had been shredded by the grenade, standing lost at the edge of the locked door. York walked dizzily, drunkenly toward them from behind - Wash could see him on his HUD - while South began to yell that they ought to get out of here, there was another ship coming, what happened over there?
York was bringing Delta. Maybe that would help, somehow. York, the locksmith, could get Connie back, and Delta, the gift they were all fighting for, could save her. The side of Wash's head ached, near his temple, and he thought he could feel blood sticking the padding inside his helmet to his skin, even though it was more likely the automatic spurt of anesthesia.
And worse - Connie had disappeared. Wash's fear of the jetpacks had been unfounded. It had been a distraction, while the real message of the prophecy had waited in the shadows to be found -
Connie had ended up like Georgia.
Carolina was calling out for her, but both she and Wash had seen the door close behind the Insurrectionists, and Connie with them.
Wash turned just as York got close enough to see.
"Pilot says we've gotta go!" York panted. "Incoming."
"We're just going to leave her?" Wash said.
Carolina turned toward them, predatory, her golden eyes flashing. "We've got to go. Get out of here."
She pushed between them and the men followed, carried along in her wake: Wash's mind struggled, but he followed the current.
"Where's Connie?" South asked as they needed the force field again, passing the detritus of the fight.
"She's gone," Carolina said, and Wash felt the truth of that - for the purposes of this mission she was. He cursed himself for that later but now there was just the rush into space, the terror of the bomb floating in space next to them, 479's frantic, controlled push toward them. The Freelancers landed in the blood bay with their arms on one another's shoulders. Wash hesitated, but the thought that Connie was dead or that getting back to the Mother was the only way to rescue her, he wasn't sure which, propelled him even as the terrible idea of Georgia prickled and bit at his spine. Georgia-
Didn't matter any more. He did not have room for two panics in his head, and therefore picked the nearer one.
An hour later, Connie was moved.
The Insurrectionists had a ship. She couldn't tell how big it was, but it docked with the scrap-yard space station and Connie had the feeling that it matched the Mother of Invention for size. They had enough men that she didn't think she had seen the same one twice. Again she sat, wanting to hit something but knowing that it wouldn't do any damage to the walls, as the ship moved.
The Freelancers' mission had never been going to work.
Their objective had been to pluck the Insurrectionist leader out of his stronghold. The Director had been wrong, though, about where that stronghold was. The Insurrectionists had not captured the scrap yard and the cryogenics plant. Instead, the ship had ferried them there and left them, each group with its own assignment.
It's not a stronghold, she thought. The scrap yard was never a stronghold. It was just a location, an asset. We kept hitting them - because they were protecting the hard targets.
But where was their heart, then? The ship?
If she was in their heart, maybe she could continue forward on the mission of cutting off their head.
She berated herself for not knowing about the ship before, although she could not have known. She wanted to listen at keyholes, but now she was in a cell and could not. She wondered whether the Director had known and berated herself for not knowing that too. The man who had created the leaderboard might be vindictive enough, at his worst, to throw his agents into a real-world fight that was rigged.
(Would that man come to rescue her?)
Wash could. Connie missed him powerfully. If he was here he would be pacing too, working at the lock, until, discouraged and confused, he would sit. Not too different from herself. He would be missing her, blinking in patterns that had he been wearing his mask would have called up her channel and her name.
It wasn't Wash's decision to make. Instead of sitting in the cell, he was surely pacing in the Pelican, afraid to say her name to Carolina. Connie would not have been but she did not blame Wash. The Director was the one who could choose where to send him, and Wash was comfortable being commanded in a way that Connie only somewhat understood. The Director would want to answer the ultimatum. Connie was also sure that he wouldn't hand over the hard-won Sarcophagus. He valued it, and his agents' work, that much.
She paced back and forth, trying to use her footsteps as a rhythm that would focus her thinking.
(She had dropped the ball.)
The Director's desire for the Sarcophagus might save Connie too, though. He would come back for both. In the mean time, she could try to pick apart these strategies of the Insurrectionists' - if they had been telling the truth about ransoming her. She needed to wait, to find out what she could, and take the rescue mission when it came, whether or not it was more rescue than mission.
(Whether or not she deserved it.)
She had never lost everything at once before, but it all came down to the same small failures.
She should have done something different. She had lost track at some point, lost the drive or the thread of thought that would have kept her away from this place.
Connie seethed.
By the time they got back to the war room the Director had been issued an ultimatum.
The message had been transmitted crudely and primitively, a wide blast of information that anyone nearby could pick up. That potential breach of security was not a concern for either side of this small war: 'nearly' meant very little against the size of a star system, and there were no other ships around to hear.
Bring the Sarcophagus to Longshore or we'll kill Connie.
Wash wanted to snap the leader's neck.
Leonard Church's calm was both infuriating and reassuring.
The Director called a debriefing and they stood around the projection table in the war room, tense, Carolina's words infecting the air above the table.
Connie's gone.
"What happened out there?" The Director slammed his hands on the table, uncharacteristically hostile, and Wash flinched back. York and South, on either side of him, did not. Maine stood passively on the other side of the room, just turning his head back and forth between the Director and the team.
Carolina did not flinch. "They must have been targeting us, sir. Connie was the easiest to grab. They took her and ran, and that's when we heard about the nuke." It did not sound like she was making an apology.
Wash's relief when the Director replied that they would not be pursuing Connie and the leader immediately did not come from cowardice. Wash did not enjoy having an excuse not to, even an injunction against, getting in the Pelican and attacking the Staff of Charon. Its bomb had spooked them all, and FILSS was working on how much of a payload a ship that size could carry.
The counselor worked on other plans, asking Carolina what she had seen.
"Has the agent been injured?"
The agent. "No."
"Where has she been taken?"
"We don't know. Presumably the ship."
"We don't know much, sir." The counselor looked up at the Director.
"We know that they will have settled on Longshore. Send in scouts first. Wyoming, and Florida," the Director said. The two men nodded. "Then the big guns."
Carolina said, "They'll be dug in."
"Then we dig them out," the Director said. "Send everyone."
"Excuse me, sir," Wash said. "What's our first priority here? Getting the leader, or getting Connie back?"
"Our first priority has not changed, Agent Washington. If it comes to that, Agent Connecticut is an acceptable loss. We simply need to again present the enemy with bait."
Wash pressed his fingertips against the tabletop, the nonreactive edge from which nothing would grow, and wanted to grab something.
Patience, he thought. His thoughts blue and black like the room, metallic instead of bruised.
"You will be called when you are dispatched," the Director said. "Dismissed!"
He turned his back on them, walked toward the sweep of viewport where Alpha was ensconced: the Freelancers were left to huddle around the table, claiming it as their support during mourning.
(No, Wash thought. No reason to mourn yet.)
Carolina got to him before the mourning did, rounding on him, parroting what he had said to her hours earlier. "Wash. Are you up to this?"
It caught him off guard with its frankness. "Ah, yes. Ma'am. I...want to go!"
She sighed. "Wash, you shouldn't even be going on this mission. This isn't a rescue fantasy."
He reached out. "But I-"
"The fact that you care about her won't help her."
He looked to York for help, but the gold mask was unusually expressionless. York didn't even shrug.
The last rescue person they had had to rescue had been York. That must have meant something to Carolina.
Wash looked back at her. "You sound like you know what you're talking about."
"Stay focused." She added, as an afterthought, "You're good at that."
Wash was left with the same empty-handed gesture when York finally did move, just almost patting him on the shoulder on the way out. The others dispersed: Wyoming and Florida together as usual, North and South talking about when they would get their AI. The Director stood a long hall away, talking to the Alpha.
Wash hung his head.
Connie missed Wash so much that it translated into missing everyone. She wished that she could be out in the Insurrectionists' camp just sitting, talking, if it meant that some human interaction could remind her of him.
At the same time, the ache was specific: the memory of the books and brochures he laid out on his desk, the last time she had seen the armor over the back of his leg just before she had stood up in the hangar. She grew lonely in her boredom.
More pacing lead to her going over the same thoughts over and over, wearing grooves in her synapses as surely as her boots wore them in the floor. The Insurrectionists were living in the partially abandoned shipyard with their buildings rusting under them. As bored as she was, they were too with hiding and licking their wounds: she heard them outside shouting and taking potshots and birds.
And then, someone visited.
It could have been any of the people wearing helmets whom Connie had seen when she was let out to use the bathroom, but now Connie could see that this Insurrectionist had a mass of feathery blonde hair.
Connie said, "What do you want?"
The Insurrectionist stood just inside the open door, her hands folded over the symbol on her chest. "What do you want? You people keep attacking...us."
The woman had hesitated. Connie pressed. "The colonies or yourselves? You're talking about the colonies, aren't you?"
The Insurrectionist hesitated again, and Connie thought she understood more now. These weren't farmers angry that the UNSC was trying to take away their right to bear outdated arms. These were something else - hired guns. Why were they going after the Director specifically?
Connie said, "Do you know what they're trading for me?"
"They're not trading anything. It's not about you."
"What does that mean?"
"We just want the...our...property back."
Connie tilted her head. "So why are you here?" She pointed at the ground. "In this cell?" Behind the Insurrectionist woman, Connie could see brown dirt and the horned front half of a Warthog. If she could grab that car, she might be able to make an escape. That assumed that the shipyard was on a peninsula, though - what if it was an island?
"I was curious. You don't look dangerous."
I'm not, Connie thought. I'm not even number six at being dangerous. But thank you for leaving the door open, so I can see the lay of the land, and whether any vehicles have been moved today.
Where is my helmet?
You don't look dangerous, she considered saying, but decided against it because it was useless and also untrue. The woman had a knife strapped to her hip and there was no reason for her not to be dangerous.
But Connie was the one in power armor, and when she took one step forward and the other woman stepped back she thought that maybe she should escape right now.
Footsteps crunched on the gravel. The leader looked around the corner, with his helmet still on and Connie's under his arm. One side of the Freelancer helmet had been peeled off, revealing the cavities holding speakers and computer chips. With a shock that sickened her Connie realized that she hadn't even considered the data they could pull out of the helmet if they had a competent slicer. They still wouldn't be able to tell when the other Freelancers were coming - even if another Freelancer had called Connie's channel, they were too far away - but they would be able to get records of who she had called recently and how the helmet's life support and HUD worked.
The leader looked in. "Quit talking to the prisoner!"
The woman lowered her head and glowered.
"What did you tell her?"
"I didn't tell her anything she doesn't already know." Her hand on her knife, the woman turned her back to Connie. A moment later both of the Innies swept out and slammed the door, both silently knowing that their fight - their conversation, their whatever it was - should not happen here. Connie silently cursed their discretion.
Her mask. She wracked her brain for what other damage could be done once they had that technology, but she couldn't think of anything they would not already know. It was the Insurrectionists who knew what the Sarcophagus was. Connie had thought beyond the fact that it was her job to retrieve it for the Director, but she still did not know what it was. Her poor performance during the heist had kept her away from the Sarcophagus after, as if it exuded reflections of her shame.
It did seem strange that the Sarcophagus had seemingly not helped them in any way.
What was the Director doing with the box? Was there evidence in the starship somewhere, some floating Mother of Invention basement or some lockbox hidden in plain sight? Maybe she had passed the secret in the halls, slept three floors above it, heard in in Alpha's or 479's voice and never knew what she had heard. Maybe someone else had heard it, and squirreled it away deeper out of ignorance or loyalty. Maybe Internals were more efficient then they looked.
She didn't want to dwell on that, though, so sat back and took one deep breathe, unable any more to smell the sea because it was so familiar, and told herself to relax. She had her mission cut out for her. Nothing was missing. An aphorism written on a tattered inspirational calendar from two years ago: Don't look back, because that's not where you're going.
In the cell by the greasy sea, Connie planned her escape.
When the Pelican landed, Wash was already standing.
He had lurched across the blood bay and grabbed a handhold as soon as the Pelican's engine noise cut out. Carolina pushed past him with one fanged alien weapon in each hand, throwing herself into the sky.
York and the twins followed, just splashes of color before Wash dove too. The wind shook him, threatened to invade the pocket of quiet air inside his helmet.
Wyoming and Florida had scouted enough to create a digital wireframe model of the place in the war room, but when Wash landed on his feet he was still disoriented for a moment by the cluster of ugly brown buildings around him. The sea sloshed to his left, his sight of it blocked by an alley between two corrugated walls.
The Pelican did not have space to land, and the descent had been dramatic. Wash landed on one knee, pressing his right palm against the dirt before pushing up again and standing with his back to a circle of Freelancers. The Insurrectionists had known they were coming: 479 had announced it to their tentative air controller on the radio. Carolina had led the group in treating the exchange like an invasion, though.
Insurrectionists assembled from behind crates, inside sheds. A woman stood up from where she had been sitting on the running board of a Warthog and sharpening a knife.
The leader held a rifle in one hand and Connie's dissected helmet under the other arm. Wash gritted his teeth. The leader walked toward the group of Freelancers who had fallen from the sky like his was the dramatic entrance, swinging his hips, cocky.
Carolina stepped forward. "You first."
The leader was still masked. "Did you bring our item?"
"It's the size of a Jeep. Where are we supposed to put it? Bring our agent out and the Pelican will do another pass and drop the package."
The Insurrectionist huffed. "Fine."
He waved back at the woman with the knife. She stood up lazily, seemed not to understand his directions. He waved again and she moved to a door in the wall not three feet from her. There? Wash thought. They had kept her right there? The significance of this was stunning and useless.
The woman reached inside the room and pulled Connie out. The Freelancer looked unhurt, although her anger was etched deep into her face, her brown eyes threatening to storm.
The leader wasted no time. He waved, an expansive gesture. He knew the size of the Sarcophagus, Wash thought, and must know that it would be precarious and dangerous to drop.
Carolina put her hand to her ear and called the cavalry.
Meanwhile Connie stared at Wash for a second, a raw blast of emotion before she narrowed her eyes and turned away, keeping the Insurrectionists from knowing that she favored any one person just in case they started to bargain for more. In that flare of expression Wash looked up and felt his cheeks redden with love and anger. He would play nonchalant, while she was there.
Then he would fight.
While Wash looked around and South impatiently tapped her foot on the ground, 479 maneuvered the Pelican into the sky over the center of the scattered buildings and brought it down slowly.
The Director had brought it to the Pelican personally, watching white-suited grunt troopers wheel the cart. "Be careful with this, Carolina."
She was standing beside the cockpit, overseeing. "What's in there, sir? Is that really it?"
"Something to help you," he said. "Just give it to them. Like I instructed."
Maybe there had been a smile in her voice. "Yes sir."
Carolina never explained, but both Texas and Maine had been missing that morning and Wash did not doubt that they were acting as reserve. Maybe there was equipment in the diamond-shaped Sarcophagus case, maybe vehicles. Certainly not what had been there when the Freelancers had captured it.
Dirt flew in white clouds from under the Pelican as it descended. Wash saw Connie, the only one not wearing a helmet, turn away and her fringe slide across her face.
The Pelican idled. "Get it while it's hot!" 479 yelled, and the leader, with some hesitation, ordered two of his people to stand with their guns raised at the back of the ship and two more, ducking against the wash of the VTL jets, jump inside the blood bay and drag the edifice out.
"Be careful!" Was there worry in the leader's voice as the Sarcophagus tipped to the ground? Wash watched from across the corridor of dust flying at the back of the Pelican as Connie shifted back a little, her expression one of concern. It'll be all right, Wash wanted to tell her, wanted to project it like sound through the comm. We've got something that will save you.
With the box standing up on the ground the leader drew a square instrument of some sort and scanned the Sarcophagus. Wash was afraid that he would detect the changes, but whatever he had read pleased him, elicited only a nod. Carolina signaled for 479 lift away. They all moved back as she did, leaving the leader and the box in a wider no-man's-land than before, Wash's gaze fixed on Connie now despite his reservations. Everyone would be watching her anyway. It was the leader's turn.
"Come on," the leader said, and the woman took Connie by the arm and lead her forward. Connie hunched her head and glowered for the walk. Wash was almost shaking. It was Carolina who stepped forward, though, glared at the Insurrectionist woman before she dropped her hand, and gestured, her arm like a bar between them, for Connie to move safely past the invisible line around the Freelancers.
When Connie did cross over, she stood stiff. Wash reached one hand out, dropped it again. Just before he looked up at the Insurrectionists she did the same thing.
"Okay," the leader said, his head bobbing. "Back up. Back up!"
Carolina took one step back.
Wash and Connie were only starting theirs when the Sarcophagus shook.
"What?" The leader glanced at it, back at the Freelancers.
"Isn't it supposed to do that?" Carolina said.
"No," said the leader, as if he knew what had been in it -
The top of the onyx Sarcophagus flew off. Wash put his hand up to block flying debris, but the top simply fell over with a dull thud onto the dusty ground, Insurrectionists and Freelancers alike flinching at the sound.
A white armored figure unfolded, standing up inside the box. Wash saw his shoulders first, then the back of his mask.
Maine rolled his head and cracked his knuckles.
He burst out of the box like a Warthog, stumbling as he knocked the Sarcophagus shell over. Wash would only see Sigma later, when the fight was in full swing: Carolina down to a pugilstick and fighting the woman with the knives, North and South at a distance, vehicles roaring. Wash became separated from both York and Connie almost at once: two Warthogs roared in, and whether they had intended to or not herded him to a wide open space near the sea. (The Pelican was still up there. 479 would be looking down, hands loose and sweating on the controls, and any of her weapons would take out the Freelancers too.)
Wash looked around for Connie and felt a rush of air behind him. A Warthog grazed him, sending him reeling on his toes. Static in his video made it look like it was raining. He turned and snapped his rifle to bear just as York made some crack behind him and Connie appeared out of nowhere.
She landed in the second seat of the Warthog, dipping one knee onto the floor for a moment before scrambling upright. She killed the driver with a blast to the throat, fast and bloody, and pulled the body across the seats to throw it across the side. Wash stopped in awe and fear.
He spent the rest of the fight in the Warthog, crouched low and firing at Insurrectionists who thought ducking out of the way of the wheels would save them. Connie's driving varied from effective to frenzied to bumpy and frightening. She had hit the side of a prefab building and was spinning the wheels as she tried to back up when Wash spotted the leader.
He was backing away from Maine, a rifle in one hand and an axe in the other. Maine stalked forward, the wicked-looking half-moon shape of the Bruteshot swinging in front of him, Sigma burning at his side.
Connie shifted gear into park, raised her gun. The wall was at such an angle that Wash would have to learn across her to take the same shot. She stalled, watching as Maine took his first swing and the leader narrowly dodged it.
"Do they want him alive?" she said.
"Uh, I think it's optional."
She fired. Little yellow bursts rose up around the leader's feet when she missed. She pushed the gearshift over and moved forward just as the gun-blade and the ax clashed, and Wash jumped out of the car, feeling like he finally had a clear shot.
Sigma said something. It might have been "Oh, by the way," or "You're in the way." Wash fired at the Insurrectionist just as another man jumped from a rooftop, this one more heavily armored and carrying a turret gun. Something chattered, like laughter from an old doll.
Wash fired twice at the newcomer's mask before he could think about it. Both shots hit, cracking the helmet. They would have knocked the man backwards if not for the heavy backpack balancing him, rooting him in place. When he fired again, Wash ran.
Florida jumped down from the rooftop too, and Wash saw Wyoming still silhouetted against the sky. They had surely been fighting the big guys up there. Florida waved Wyoming down, but the other Freelancer shook his head, refusing.
The turret gunner turned toward Florida. Wash broke into a run and fired once at the back of his hands and once at the back of his neck.
The second shot drew blood; the first knocked the gun aside enough for Florida to charge forward shooting.
Wash drew his combat knife. The turret gunner crouched, trying to get Florida out from inside his range.
Wash threw the knife into the slit between the gunner's helmet and shoulder armor. It stuck.
The gunner reeled, moving forward even as Florida got more shots in, and who knew what signals his brain was receiving now - he made a sound like a chattering cough, too loud and strange to be a death rattle, and an echoing noise laughed from the other side of the pavement.
Wash ducked behind the first gunner as a second one, almost identical and garishly painted and laughing that mechanical laugh, blasted holes into the wall to his left. The body shook, and Wash jumped to the side again just as Florida did the same. The second gunner turned, and Wash realized that there was no angle he could use now to get out of the way.
The Warthog roared and sped into his field of vision. Wash threw himself aside blindly, felt the vehicle graze his leg. Connie slammed the man with the chain gun into the low seawall. Wash saw the tow hook tug at the cloth under his armor and looked away; when he looked back the burst of yellow paint distracted him from the gore.
Connie waved. "Get in, get in!"
He jumped into the Warthog, almost overbalancing. When he learned toward her Connie reached her arm around his shoulder and tugged him over even further in a brief, martial gesture, squeezing her eyes shut and knocking her bare forehead against his faceplate.
On the other side of the open space an Insurrectionist with bare arms had backed Maine up, leaving the leader to fight South and York. He had knocked Florida back. Carolina was still elsewhere, she and North occupied by what sounded like jetpack-equipped soldiers on the other side of a warehouse. No Tex. Where was Tex?
The Warthog lurched, and Connie spend back toward the open ground and the rest of the fight. Maine was holding his own, fighting faster than Wash had ever seen him now that Sigma could act as a second pair of eyes.
When they passed the leader he turned and targeted them, firing two shots that bounced off the metal next to Wash's legs.
Maine fired. The blast almost knocked the Warthog to the side, the wheel wrenching under Connie's hands. A moment too late she realized just how close to the sea they were and turned back, away from a three-foot drop that lead to a dock. By the time she wheeled around again Maine had fired more shots in the leader's direction, a slurry of colors and cloud, and Carolina was yelling for the team to move out.
The Pelican descended and they left the Warthog and the shell of the Sarcophagus behind. "Should we take it?" North asked as they gathered at the ramp, Wyoming, Florida, and Maine still facing out in case another attack came.
"That wasn't part of the mission," Carolina said. "Leave it."
Sigma turned around while Maine was still facing the outside. The little AI's calm voice was reassuringly certain, but Wash noticed that Connie's bare expression looked cynical and unhappy, her top lip curling up as if she'd smelled something rotten.
"The leader is dead," Sigma said. "The mission is complete.
"Are you sure?" Carolina looked directly at him. "I didn't see."
"His vital signs are gone. His body was blown into the sea."
Wash could practically see the sudden conflict in Carolina's head. She wanted to see a body: she wanted proof, because the death or capture of the leader had been the goal of their mission all alone, before Connie was captured. Wash felt his own conflict, a falling sensation in the pit of his stomach as he realized that he or Connie should have had the chance to get revenge on the leader themselves. It faded fast, though - Carolina was number one. Everyone else listened to her.
"It'll be on the video," 479 said from inside, her voice muffled since it came through the external speakers from the other side of the ship instead of the comm. "But they do have Longswords and we should be getting out of here whether you cut the head off or not."
"Get inside," Carolina snapped.
The Freelancers marched. Connie ducked past Wash, and for a moment stood on the ramp entirely preoccupied with and stunned by the fact that she was back and that she was standing in front of him.
She smiled, put a hand under his elbow.
Carolina shouted. "Let's go!" and Connie said it again, to Wash, a quiet echo, and they trotted up the ramp.
The next day Connie stood proudly in front of the Director at the debriefing, happy even at the dismissive way he acknowledged that she had survived.
"Performance beyond the mission parameters..."
She enjoyed even that grudging appreciation. This adventure wouldn't get her on the board, but for now, that was all right.
Later, Wash mentioned casually that they had fled the scrapyard because of the nuke, and her eyes widened.
"They had a what?"
She hadn't known.
For a time, she was preoccupied with worrying about him.
He thought that she was all right, was not shaken by her experience, but really she was waiting for a time in which she felt it was right for him to worry about her. She did not feel that she deserved worry and so slid away from it. But as much as she buried hers he wore his heart on his sleeve and pushed her, with small looks and touches and considerations. The other Freelancers were friendly to her too, after her capture: setting aside food for her, cracking kinder jokes than usual. The Director pulled her in to talk to Internals not just once but once a day for three frustrating, frightening days.
Carolina regretted leaving the mission when they did, until the Director told her that the Insurrectionists had stopped attacking. The head had been cut off. Even more mollifying to Carolina, it had been done without Tex. Connie sensed a quietude in Carolina that had been missing.
Wash once offered Connie a cup of coffee while she was sitting in the mess hall studying a datapad, the board glowing behind her. It had become mundane: her name was still not on it. She felt less about that than she expected. Maybe the reaction was waiting, and would come later, or maybe it was, for a reason she could only speculate upon, gone. Either way, the small gesture of Wash pushing a trifecta-branded cup toward her made her start talking.
They talked for a long time - what was it like, what were you thinking, the terrible feeling of the Insurrectionist's body dragging across the Warthog's seats.
They sat across the table from one another for hours, occasionally looking at and touching one another's hands, the light unchanging, the air growing clammy.
The Freelancers play-fought their way to the training floor before watching North, recently escaped from under York's headlock, stand in the middle of the expansive room and work with Theta.
Connie enjoyed the spectacle, holding the replacement mask, with its new, cream-colored lips, that she had been issued.
Not thinking, yet, about what she had missed - what Sigma was planning, that the Director had been attacking the Charon corporation and not the other way around, that the Director had not only gotten smarter as his enemies did but less desperate as they became more desperate - and yet still feeling that there was a grotesque aspect to childish Theta facing turrets.
And not thinking, yet, about the one component recovered from her helmet, picked up by Texas on a mission as unique as Maine's - the small grey casing of the recovery beacon.
Author's Note: This was based on a tumblr prompt that read, in brief, "AU where Connie doesn't discover the Director's data, and instead gets kidnapped." It got a little too long for my tumblr drabble repository. See completelysane dot tumblr dot com for more commentary.