IV. Charge

"These people ever hear of anything besides holographic locks?" York muttered. His legs were already aching from the awkward crouch he'd been in for the past fifteen minutes, and his fingers felt stiff and sore and clumsy, because hey, massive blood loss not all that long ago. He'd been trying to tease a particularly precise sequence into place, but every time he got close, he had to shy away or risk tripping an alarm, and it was starting to get beyond annoying. "I mean, at least go for a little variety! You crack one holo-lock, you've pretty much cracked 'em all."

"Have you ever actually cracked a holo-lock?" Connie murmured, and wow, somebody had definitely been spending too much time around Wash. She straightened from where she'd been watching him work and went back to her nervous pacing. "Why exactly are there locks to keep things in the cargo bays, anyway? That seems needlessly complicated."

"I was just thinking that," North said. He had to have a serious crick in his neck by now, the way he'd been leaning over York's shoulder this whole time, which really wasn't annoying at all. "What kind of cargo have they been shipping? And what's with the jamming signal?"

Connie's pacing stopped as she turned to look at North. "Yeah, I was kind of wondering about that. We haven't seen them use that sort of thing before."

York, putting maybe a little more of his attention into the conversation than the lock, just about fumbled a finger through a curve that might as well have been labeled, Press here for instant guards and terrible death! He bit back a curse aimed at the inventor of the holographic lock, and a renewed throbbing took up residence in the back of his skull.

"I don't know," North said. "Keeping the Mother of Invention off their backs?"

"Sure," said Connie, and she had her arms crossed like she was cold, but she was leaning forward insistently. "They seem to be awfully efficient at that. And I've gotta wonder, where exactly are our guys, anyway? Surely they've figured out the jamming signal by now."

York sighed, pushed the lock into a stable standby mode, and sank back on his haunches, rolling his wrists and flexing his too-tense hands. "They could be mounting a rescue as we speak."

"Sure," Connie said again. "They seem really motivated to make sure we're all okay."

York scratched at his visor in lieu of rubbing his temples. "Just say what you want to say, Connie."

North raised a hand. "Whoa, easy," he said. "Just keep it down, okay? This deck seems abandoned now, but we don't know if they sometimes send guards down here or what." He paused, then added, "York, you all right? You seem-"

"I'm fine," York said, and turned back to the lock. With one rough swipe, he bypassed the last level of security, risking about a dozen alarms in the process and by some miracle missing every single one. Better lucky than good. The door chimed. "Let's get going."

The corridor beyond had the too-clean, pristine look of an area that didn't see much foot traffic, and for the first time York wondered about interior sensors, surveillance, mass readings. With all the confusion in the evac, a few extra bodies probably wouldn't be setting off any alarms, at least not until the chaos had settled and they could start taking stock. Time was important, right now. They had to move quickly and carefully.

"Okay," he said, "let's try for radio silence from here on in. And let's not make this any bloodier than we have to—you see someone, you try to get past without 'em noticing. They see you, you knock 'em out. Our objective is to find a communications center that we can use to broadcast our position on the Mother of Invention's frequency."

Connie straightened, drawing her pistol, and he heard a faint hum as she activated her hologram projector's interface. "What if we see their leader?"

"Then I guess we have a pretty great hostage," York said, and tried not to think about how that was the sort of thing the bad guys said. "Radio silence. Hand signals only. Sync?"

"Sync," North said, and Connie only hesitated a moment longer before echoing him.

The ship's layout was fairly standard, modular, lots of empty space, clearly meant for something bigger and better than shuttling around a single platoon of soldiers. It had a weirdly unfinished feeling about it, and judging by the brief glimpses he'd gotten on the beach, it was way, way undersized for the amount of cargo space they'd snuck through. Just picturing how much bigger this ship was gonna get was putting a horrible lump in the pit of his stomach. What the hell were these guys planning?

Another security console barred their progress, and he held up a hand to signal North and Connie to take up flanking positions while he worked. This lock, thankfully, was a whole lot less holographic, and a whole lot easier to hack, matching up almost exactly with the simulation he'd been practicing when this mission had come down over the wire in the first place. Fifteen seconds later, the door hissed open.

"Ah," he said. "Hi."

So, okay, maybe this deck wasn't entirely deserted. So maybe one room on this deck was occupied. So maybe that one room housed, y'know, a few people. A few dozen people. A few dozen people in full armor who were slowly turning to look up at the source of the disturbance.

In the awkward silence that followed, North murmured, "I don't suppose you can just shut the door?"

"Um," York said. "That would be a no."

North exhaled. "Okay," he said, and then there was a bang that made York flinch back, and the first soldier in the room fell to a perfect headshot. The sparking hum of Connie's hologram darted out ahead of York, soaking up the first startled burst of fire, Connie herself skating in its wake, and then York was stumbling forward into cover behind a row of lockers, pulling his shotgun and downing the first hapless idiot who started around the corner after him.

The thing about fighting with only one good eye was that the whole depth-perception thing wasn't quite as bad as he'd feared. He did a lot of his fighting up close, he'd fiddled with his HUD so that it warped his perspective just enough to make distances more obvious, and when it came right down to it, a shotgun to the face was pretty damn effective, whether or not the shot was perfectly centered.

No, the thing that got him was the blind spot, and the ache that started in his good eye when it strained to compensate. There was something deeply unsettling about knowing, through experience and battle-honed training gone subliminal, that someone was coming up on your left, but not having the confirmation, the certainty. He felt like he was constantly fighting someone with Connie's armor mod, someone who could split off doubles that would fade and flicker when he looked straight at them. And the longer he fought, the harder he focused, the more his head would ache and his stomach would turn and he'd get dizzy and sick at the way his perceptions weren't quite lining up right, would never quite line up right again.

The Director claimed the new AI would help with that. York didn't see how, but at this point, he'd be willing to try anything.

The first guy fell, and York barely had time to pump the shotgun before a second one stumbled into exactly the same position and crumpled in exactly the same way. Nobody else followed, which was a sure sign that these folks were seriously well-trained—on some of his more memorable early missions, he'd taken down five or six would-be chargers before they'd gotten the message. That meant either North and Connie were making a substantial distraction, or—

Yeah, just like that, a little itch at the left side of his head. He'd always been good at trusting his instincts, so without turning his head he slammed an elbow back, caught the soldier coming up along the other side of the lockers, throwing off her aim, and that was the cue for her buddy to come up on York's right. That was an easy fix, because the soldier on the left had started frantically firing her SMG. All it took was for York to step away from between the two and let them mow each other down, with another two shotgun blasts to help them on their way. Easy.

Sure. Except he was already breathing hard, and his HUD was flickering a warning about oxygen levels and the risk of a renewed hemorrhage and a collapsed lung, and right, yeah, the whole almost-dying thing was getting really fucking old right now. But there was no time to complain because someone with a rifle was flanking him and he needed cover right now, right fucking now—

The guy with the rifle stumbled, then pitched forward with a knife in his back. York had just enough time to glance across the room and see Connie watching, just enough time to nod a quick thanks at her, before he had to slam himself back into cover as a sniper round whined past his exposed head.

Yeah, catching his breath was really getting to be a problem now. He was wheezing quick and shallow, and he was pretty sure the dizziness wasn't all just from overworking his good eye. Someone else was already up close, one of the guys with the fancier-looking armor, some sort of insignia on his chest. He slammed an elbow into York's gut, dancing away from the clumsy attempt at return fire, and spun back in to ram the heel of his hand under York's chin, snapping his head back and into the locker behind him with a force that sent stars across his vision.

Coughing, York managed to duck the next hit, a closed fist aimed at the side of his head, and dropped into a clearing kick to buy himself a little room. Why the hell was this guy going easy on him, why the hell was he pulling punches that should've been deadly, why the hell weren't his buddies rushing in to seize the advantage, why the hell wasn't he shooting or stabbing or, hell, launching explosives? That was seriously fucking unsettling, because it meant this guy wanted him alive, and nothing good could ever come of that.

The guy moved again, fast and quick and sure, and this time York feinted left and fired right. The edge of the shotgun blast caught the guy in the side, peppering his armor with divots and cracks that stood out in strangely perfect detail in York's vision, and then his vision wavered and blurred and his chest was aching again and he couldn't breathe, he couldn't breathe. He dropped his shotgun and fell to his hands and knees, his gasping drowned out by his armor's alarms. The guy staggered back, looking confused, and only then did York recognize him as the Insurrectionist leader, the guy they'd been hunting down all this time.

Hey, he thought, fuzzily, what do you know. Mission accomplished.

The leader recovered quickly enough, slamming York back against the lockers, keeping one hand tight around his throat-and, okay, points for style, but choking him seemed redundant at this point-and bringing a pistol up with his other hand, jamming it under York's chin. "Hey, assholes!" he yelled. "Drop your fucking weapons or I blow his head off."

Blearily, York wrapped a hand around the leader's arm, tried to use it to leverage himself a little more wiggle room so he could figure out where the heck the others were. Connie wasn't far away, standing stock-still with her back to a wall, a small pile of bodies at her feet, two bloodied knives in her hands.

"Hey, I hear you," called North, and how the hell had he actually found time to clamber up on top of a row of lockers? He very slowly and carefully set down his sniper, raising his hands. "No need to do anything rash, okay? Don't hurt him. I'm coming down."

"So just fucking do it," the leader snarled, and York's attention snapped back to him when he felt the grip around his throat slacken a little. The shotgun blast had done more damage than he'd thought, judging by the blood trickling down the guy's side.

Slowly but steadily, his breath was coming back, and York was a firm believer in his very own personal motto that there wasn't a hopeless situation out there that couldn't be improved with a little witty banter, so he croaked, "Hey, it was worth a shot. Can't blame us for trying."

He saw the guy's finger tighten on the trigger of his pistol, and had a panicked moment in which he revised said personal motto to include an exception for times when someone had a fucking gun to his throat, but the leader got himself back under control, eased off the trigger again. "You just killed a lot of my friends," he hissed, instead. "I'd watch your mouth."

And just for a second, York let himself think about Wash, about South, about Carolina. Just for a second, he pictured the way it would go down: he'd brace himself against the locker behind him, slam his right foot into the leader's injured side, switch his grip on the leader's arm into a grab and drag the pistol out of range, slam his other fist into the elbow, snap it so the leader was pointing his own pistol to his own head, reach over and pull the trigger—

York did none of those things, because he could see North hopping to the ground, unarmed, and because he could see Connie dropping her own weapons, stepping over the bodies surrounding her with hands held palm-out, and because he'd kinda promised them they were all gonna make it out of here alive. So, yeah, he did none of those things. But just for a second, he thought about them, and just for a second, they felt really fucking good to think about.

"Fuck," the leader muttered. "Throw 'em in the brig for now. We'll deal with them later." He shoved York into the hands of two particularly large and burly guys with guns. York considered trying his winning smile and clever banter on them, but he was still a little out of breath, and so he settled for sketching a rueful shrug when North and Connie jogged up to join him.

"Uh," said one of the guards. "The brig's not done yet. Sir."

The leader made a very small sound that nonetheless managed to communicate infinite frustration and bottled-up rage. One of his hands was pressed to the wound in his side. "Then find somewhere secure to put them."

"How the hell'd they get on board, anyway?" one of the guards muttered, and hey, with an opening like that, York couldn't resist.

"I'd watch your back," he murmured. "What makes you think we're the only ones?"

A hand clamped down viselike on his shoulder, but the leader had heard his little parting shot, judging by the way he started barking out orders as soon as their group had turned away. North, walking next to York, blew out a faint breath of a laugh. "You just don't know when to keep your mouth shut, do you?"

"It's part of my undeniable charm," York said, and Connie snorted, and for a second he could just about believe everything was gonna be okay.