He tried to calculate how many hours he’d gone without sleep, but his brain had lost the ability to do math, and Ilus’ thirty-hour day kept screwing up his estimates. A long time was all he could come up with.
He triggered his armor’s medical system to shoot him up with more amphetamines, and was troubled when the HUD told him the supply was empty. How much did that mean he’d taken? Like the question of how long it had been since he slept, it was an insoluble mystery.
A pair of death-slugs were climbing the side of the tower toward a teardrop-shaped window. The plastic that had been stretched across the opening had a few small rips in it, so Holden knocked the slugs off the wall with his shovel and then kicked them away. He rinsed the toxic slime off his boot in a muddy puddle.
The rain had lessened to a drizzle, which was good, but the temperature had continued to drop, which was bad. While the overall light level didn’t change much with the constant cloud cover, Holden had started noticing the day-to-night transition by the appearance of frost on the walls of the tower. It wasn’t dangerously cold yet, but it would get worse. Pretty soon the survivors would be adding hypothermia to their list of unpleasant ways to die.
He bit his tongue until it bled and continued his slow trudge around the tower.
He heard Murtry before he saw him. A quiet, ghostly voice drifting out of the gray rain that gradually resolved into a man-shaped spot slightly darker than the space around it.
“— immediate action. They’ve escalated. We’ll have an argument that we acted with restraint until —” Murtry was saying, but stopped when he heard Holden approaching.
“What are you doing out here?” Holden asked. Murtry was still blind. It was dangerous for him to be wandering around outside. The ground, where it wasn’t puddles, was a slick clay that could take someone off their feet in a heartbeat. And the numbers of slugs driven to the surface by the water had Holden wondering if Ilus was a hollow ball filled with poisonous worms.
“Minding my business, Captain,” Murtry said, not quite looking in Holden’s direction.
“Meaning I should do the same?”
“Glad you followed that.”
The two men stood for a long moment. Far above them, their crews were probably shooting at each other right now. They were enemies, and they weren’t. Some part of Holden’s sleep-deprived, half-broken mind still wanted to make peace with Murtry and the RCE. Or at least didn’t want the man’s death on his conscience.
“It’s dangerous out here,” Holden said, keeping his own voice even and calm.
“That makes it different how?” Again, the clenched jaw cutting off the last word with a snap. His anger gave Holden a thin sliver of hope. Maybe Naomi had gotten out. He needed to talk to Alex.
“I can’t let you get killed on my watch,” Holden said.
“I appreciate your concern.”
It all felt vaguely ridiculous, tap-dancing around the issue. They both knew what was happening. He felt like they were playing poker and only pretending they couldn’t see each other’s hand.
“Can I help you back inside?” Holden asked.
“I have some business to finish up here,” Murtry replied with a meaningless smile.
“When we find your corpse later, I’m going to tell everyone I warned you.”
“If I die,” Murtry said, his smile becoming a shade more genuine, “I’ll try to leave a note saying it wasn’t your fault.”
He signaled the end of the conversation by turning away and mumbling into his hand terminal. Holden left him and immediately called Alex.
“Kind of busy here, Cap,” the pilot said without preamble.
“Tell me we’re busy because you’ve rescued Naomi and everything is going perfectly. Is she on the ship?”
There was a long pause as Alex noisily exhaled into the microphone. “So, that part where I went to rescue Naomi? Yeah. I sent Basia.”
Holden spun on his heel to look back at Murtry. The RCE security chief was still talking on his hand terminal. “We sent the prisoner to rescue another prisoner? If that hasn’t already worked, I think I may be watching Murtry order their executions right now.”
“No no,” Alex said in a rush. “It did kind of go to shit, but the radio chatter I’m gettin’ makes me think Naomi’s fine. In fact, I think she might be escaping on her own and savin’ Basia.”
Holden couldn’t help but laugh. Murtry’s head swiveled, looking for the source of the laughter with blind eyes. “Sounds about right. Where are they now?”
“It’s a little confusin’, actually,” Alex said. “I’ve definitely got Basia’s IFF pinging away outside the Israel. But there’re a bunch of other suits out there. So it’s complicated.”
“Can you, you know, ask?”
“Yeah, no. Basia switched channels on me without leavin’ the old channel open. Not a guy who’s done a lot of tactical comm drills, I’m guessing. I’m hoping one of them starts talking to me so I can get the new frequencies.”
Holden watched Murtry, probably using his radio to coordinate the pursuit of Naomi and whoever else she was with now. He fought down a sudden urge to walk over to the man, knock him to the ground, take his terminal, and demand to know what the hell was going on.
And then he stopped fighting.
Murtry had just started to turn toward him, frowning at the sound of his approaching steps, when Holden yanked the terminal out of his hand and shoved him to the muddy ground.
“Stay down there or I’ll beat you unconscious,” he told the RCE man. Holding the terminal to his ear he said, “Who’s on the other end of this?”
“Who the fuck is this? Where’s Murtry?”
“I’m standing on him right now,” Holden said. “So if you’re part of the team that’s chasing Naomi Nagata, you should stop.”
The man on the other end said, “Comms is compromised, switch to two-alpha,” and the connection dropped. Someone who’d spent some time training on tactical comms, it seemed.
“Alex,” Holden said. “I’ve disrupted their command channel. Go get our people.”
“Not a problem, boss. The situation has clarified some. I’ve got three comin’ aboard.”
“Who’s the third?”
“About to go find out. Alex out.”
Murtry pushed himself to his knees with a grunt, frowning at a spot just over Holden’s left shoulder. “Tough guy when your opponent is blind.”