“You do that, Cutter.”
I didn’t bother rolling my eyes at Mack. I just focused on the words scrolling through my implant. I was still focused when I had a horrible, horrible thought. Pulling up the maps Tens had provided of the rear courtyard we were being ported into, I made an overlay of the shuttle pad at the nearest port.
“Sonuvabitch,” echoed through my skull, as Mack and Tens saw the problem.
Yeah. Cos that courtyard was just the right size. Right?
And who was to say that the Skymander lord would come into the starport like any ordinary person who chose to answer to a planetary government?
“You have a nasty turn of mind.”
Well, well. Delight had joined the party.
“I like it.”
I wasn’t sure if that was a compliment.
“Suck it up, princess.”
Yeah?
“Don’t start, Cutter.” Mack.
Fine.
I went back to my files, and let the big kids chow down on the latest curly twist I’d thrown them. It was almost fun to see them so bent out of shape.
“Yeah, laugh it up, kiddo.” Tens.
I ignored him, too, choosing to run through the plan we’d discussed, once more, and pulling in choice bits of the new files for comparison. It made me wonder where the initial information had come from.
Tens swore, and disappeared from my head.
I couldn’t help it; I snickered.
And Mack gave me a clip upside the head.
“Ow!”
And he was immediately worried he might have actually caused some damage.
He had a point. I checked the implant, searched for pain, or anything else that might mean things were starting to go wrong—breathed a sigh of relief when I found nothing, and felt Mack relax as well.
“Keep reading—and don’t tell Doc.”
We settled back into reviewing the files, recreating the journey from the ground floor to the upper levels from the security feeds the ship had taken from my first implant during Melari’s retrieval. I don’t know when Mack joined me running through the corridors I’d remade in my mind.
“Good idea,” he said when we reached the top, for the third time, weaving our way between the cages, and dodging the diseased hands reaching for us as we went.
“Stop,” he said, when we reached the other side. “It’s time to eat—and then Doc needs to check your implant, again.”
I hadn’t realized I was tired, until he’d interrupted me, but, once I pulled myself from the files, I felt exhausted.
“You know you twitch when you run those scenarios.”
Delight had re-joined us.
“Be glad that’s all I do,” I told her, remembering how Tyler had needed a whole room to himself during training. That boy, you put him in a sim, and his entire body went along for the ride. You had to make sure he was unarmed, or that nothing was loaded, or he made one hell of a mess. It only took one sim for us to discover how he worked, and we never forgot.
“What?”
Because Mack and Delight were both looking at me, and I realized that I had sounded exactly as tired as I felt.
“You need a break,” Mack said, and I opened my mouth to argue, but he didn’t let me get a word in, “or Doc is going to kill me.”
That shut me up. Doc wouldn’t just kill Mack; he’d kill us both—and I didn’t want to find out how he planned to use the sharp-and-pointies in his clinic to make me regret ever crossing him. I was happy knowing he would... Okay, happy probably wasn’t the word to describe it, but just knowing he would do exactly as he said was enough.
“Let’s go eat.”
15—Incursion
We made planet-fall late the next day, and Doc still wasn’t happy with me going along.
“Remember what I said about not letting her get thrown around,” he said to Mack, and then turned to me. “No overdoing it.”
He handed me a wrist band.
“Keep it on. It monitors how you’re doing. I don’t like it, and I’ll get the teleport team to pull you out, early.”
I glanced at Mack, wondering if I could hack the monitor, and he gave the slightest twitch of his head that said I’d damned well better not.
“I got you, Cutter,” came Tens in my head, and I hoped to all the stars that he’d shielded that from the Doc.
“Don’t make me come up there.”
I snickered.
Obviously not. Either that, or Doc had used some of his own tricks to follow Tens’ communications. I sensed consternation from the comms tech, and knew that how Doc had managed to hack his link was going to distract him until he’d solved it.
“Not now, Tens,” Mack snapped, his voice jolting through our heads. “Doc. Get off the line, or you and I are going to have a problem.”
I was surprised to feel it when Doc left my head, not so surprised to feel the monitoring band tighten around my good wrist. It sent a frisson of fear shuddering through me, and I hoped to all the heavens that it wasn’t rigged to explode.
That thought made Mack momentarily freeze.
“Doc?”
“I’m not you, Mack.”
Well. Ouch!
“Shut it, Cutter.”
We took a final check of our weapons and equipment, me stuffing more ammunition and energy clips in the handy pockets my latest combat outfit came with, as I wondered how long this one would last... and then I spotted several slim tubes of explosive sitting to one side of Mack’s equipment.
“Can I have some of those?”
He gave me a puzzled glance.
“You know how to use it?”
I rolled my eyes.
“Odyssey-trained, remember?”
“They cover that in Basics?”
His surprise brought a smirk to my lips.
“Not exactly,” and Delight gave an irritated huff.
“Don’t tell him,” she added, turning to me. “I don’t want to know.”
And I remembered that the skinny boomers hadn’t been part of the Basics curriculum that we’d been given. I blushed, horrified to realize I’d nearly given away a secret shared in confidence. Mack, of course, was immediately interested, but Delight was surprisingly resistant to the idea of discovering exactly who had revealed the how-tos, or when it had occurred.
Well. That was a connection worth checking.
“Don’t you dare,” Delight said. “That’s
