Molly rocked back on the balls of her feet and fell onto her butt. Her mind reeled. She watched Walter through the glass as he lined the seam up in back, pulling the band into place. His brow furrowed in a mask of concentration, of thoughts forced to the surface. It was a look Molly remembered well from their time on Drenard. But nothing else about her predicament made sense. The Wadi turned circles in her lap, obviously agitated. Molly turned to the hallway beyond one of the glass walls. Sensors and cameras twitched on extended arms, their eyes winking with red lights. She wasn’t sure if it was the cameras or Walter’s thoughts that brought them, but their hosts didn’t take long to arrive.

Four uniformed men strolled into view, weapons lolling in hip holsters. They lined up along the hallway and stood frozen as statues.

Through the transparent cubes stretching off beside her, Molly could see a fifth figure walking their way. He was a stick of a man, and his long strides seemed a bit . . . off. It took Molly a moment to realize it wasn’t his legs that made the gait seem strange: it was the lack of swinging arms.

He marched past Molly’s cell without even looking her way. He nodded toward the glass wall before Walter.

Two of the uniformed men moved forward. One of them waved his hand in the air, which caused the partition to lift into the ceiling. Walter seemed relieved. He brushed imaginary dirt off his flightsuit as if removing the embarrassing stain of having been unfairly incarcerated.

His smug expression melted, however, as the guards seized him. They produced a set of restraints—metal bands with a silver cord between them—and clasped them on Walter’s frantic wrists. They then pulled him into the hallway.

Molly could hear him hissing in frustration through the thick glass partitions. She watched as one of the guards bent and retrieved Byrne’s arm. He rummaged around in the towel and extracted the other, then turned to the former owner of the arms, smiling, and Molly realized where she was. She was with the Bern, up in their fleet. The fact registered without making sense.

Byrne nodded to the man holding his arms. He jerked his chin to the side, and Molly watched intently, wondering if they were going to reattach the things right there, if he was going to torture her with them once again, if her destiny was to be choked to death by those hands and somehow she had teased fate or delayed it.

But the guard didn’t even pause by Byrne. He ran urgently past Molly’s cell and on down the hall, as if those arms would save someone’s life if they arrived and were transplanted in time.

One guard was left holding Walter by his restraints. Two others came for Molly. The glass wall slid up, and they entered her cell brandishing another set of the metallic cuffs. Byrne stood behind and between them, helping form a wall. Molly backed up against the steel panel behind her, feeling her body tingle with the urge to fight, to claw and lash out, to scream and kick, to die in that box rather than be taken anywhere. A million ways to move surged through her at once, all the lessons she’d learned at the Academy, the new things Cat had taught her, all of it cancelling each other out.

She stood—frozen and bewildered—as they reached for her. The only thing she was aware of was the Wadi, which had returned to its cave in her hip pocket. She could feel it in there, vibrating and unable to act—just like her.

The only other thing spinning through her mind was this latest act of duplicity from someone she thought was her friend. That was the true paralyzing force, the thing that made it impossible to move, to resist the guards as they reached for her. It was the powerful shock brought on by this betrayal, this final betrayal perpetrated by the infernal Palan known simply as—

Walter Hommul.

Part XXII - Walter

“Not all that shines is golden.”

~The Bern Seer~

33 · Palan · The Raid

Heavy clouds pressed in over the solitary continent of Palan, draping a deeper level of darkness onto the black city below. Shadows upon shadows clung to Walter like a film of oil. They slid across his metallic skin in dark pools as he stole through a dimly lit alley. Just ahead of him, two Senior Pirates led the way, their twisting route curving through the blackest part of the Palan night. Behind, two Junior Pirates-in-Training could be heard padding along after. Walter hurried to create some distance. He already considered himself more like those ahead of him than his fellow inductees behind.

Overhead, another roll of thunder tumbled through the city, reverberating off storefronts shuttered for the rains.

A habitual chill ran up Walter’s skin in response to the noise, his silvery lining pleading with him to get indoors. He ground his teeth and ignored the temptation to hide. There was more at stake for him that night than a mere promotion to Full Pirate.

The two figures ahead paused at an intersection and signaled for the others to stop. One of the moderators peeked around the corner while Donal and Pewder half-collided, half-clung to Walter’s back. The two boys, both Walter’s age, were frequent allies in his illicit raids. They had just enough potential to be useful to him—but not so much potential that they could try out for a clan higher up than the lowly Hommul.

Walter felt an unusual degree of annoyance at their presence. Almost as soon as the final test had begun, they had morphed in his unsettled mind into something other than onetime allies and future clan-mates. They had become rivals to be dispensed with, mere pawns in a game meant for much bigger things.

“Okay, let’s go.”

The lead pirate dashed across the empty street, leaping over the wide Palan gutters with practiced ease. The rest of the column followed; they ran between unoccupied cars leashed to floodposts and across old cobblestones worn smooth by the floods. The five shadowy forms slithered like a single snake into the alley behind the Navy headquarters and gathered amid bags of rotting trash. The two instructors calmly indicated the locked comm box bolted to the rear of the building.

A grumble of thunder rattled nearby windows. The group had little more than half an hour for all three of them to pick the lock and hack their way through the Human Navy’s defenses. If they passed this final test, they would win full status. If not, it would be another year of Junior Pirate menial duties and zero pay.

Walter leaned close with his pick set and noted the scratch marks around the locking mechanism where previous teams had conducted their tests. That year’s graduation challenge was to piggyback the Navy’s longdistance array and send a prank message to Earth HQ. It was elementary stuff. The hard part was to perform with the rains looming and the moderators watching.

Walter chose the proper pick from his set, but before he began his work on the lock, he patted the ID card in his chest pocket to make sure it was still there. Nobody but he knew it yet, but that year’s challenge was going to be quite a bit different from what the Clan leaders had planned. There was more to promote that night than Walter’s status, alone. The entire Hommul clan was about to be lifted by the floods.

And not even Walter knew how far . . .

•• Two Days Earlier ••

UNAUTHORIZED COMPONENT DETECTED_

PROGRAM WILL TERMINATE_

END OF TRIAL PHASE_

Walter hissed at the computer. He slapped its side with his silvery hand. Bending over the terminal, he tried another hack he knew.

The machine beeped. The words INVALID ACCESS_ flashed across the screen, and then the entire unit began shutting itself down.

Now Walter was pissed. He shoved the keyboard aside, pulled out his multi-tool, and ducked behind the whirring unit. There was an access panel there. The first three screws came out easily enough—whoever had last worked on the thing had barely taken the time to hand-tighten them. The last one, though, was stripped bare; the business end of the screw was bored out and smooth, completely ruined by the previous attempt to fix the unit.

“Explains why they tossed it,” Walter murmured to himself. He folded his multi-tool away and pried back the opposite corner of the panel with his deft fingers. He kept yanking on it, bending the panel in half until the head of the last screw snapped off and skidded across the floor.

“Flood me,” Walter said.

He tossed the stupid panel aside, pulled his multi-tool back out, and shined its light into the Automated Breathing Machine’s cavity. A motor inside began dying down, whirring to a pathetic stop. Soon after, the loud air pumps ceased operating. Walter could hear a cooling fan continue to run along in a wheezy rattle, the only other sound besides a steady beeping from the display screen warning him that the machine was powering down for good.

Walter traced the ribbon cable from the display back to a control board. The first thing he looked for was the line out to the speaker cable. He found it and gave the wires a quick snip, shutting the flank out of that stupid beeping.

With it stopped, Walter found he could breathe again, his flush of anger subsiding. Part of him wanted to reach in and mangle the blasted machine, but he couldn’t do that. He needed to get it working again, and fast. He thought about it logically: The ABM was just an artificial lung, right? Beyond the security systems that forced users to pay the lease and upgrade the software, it was just a device for purifying and moving air. He felt along several wiring harnesses and tried to deduce their function. Entire mechanical systems had been replaced in the machine’s belly over time. It looked like three generations of Palans had been cobbling the device along from a poor selection of scraps. He could see parts that belonged to taxicabs, parts that might as well be in a spaceship, parts that looked like they were hand-made right there on Palan. As for the pumps, there were two of them, but the original was little more than a rusted ball. The new one seemed to be working fine, but some sort of trial period had ended, and now it was being rejected like a poorly transplanted organ.

Walter studied the problem. He pulled the knife out of his multi-tool and scraped some of the rust off the original pump. It looked like water coolant from above had dripped all over it for a period of time, destroying the mechanism. Even the electronics board was toast, all the solder connections black, bubbled, and touching. Walter forced his head into the cavity and studied the board more closely. Above him, the last cooling fan sighed to a quiet stop as the machine fully booted down. Walter felt a bead of sweat run through his stubbled head and trickle behind his ear. He stuck the point of his knife behind one of the socketed chips in the original pump board and gently pried it out.

The chip popped free, and he could see the socket had remained dry, even though the connecting pins were completely shot. He turned to the other, newer pump and found the corresponding chip. He pried it out and replaced it with the original, hoping to fool the component detector.

Nothing.

Walter smacked the pump with his fist and cursed. He had another vision of tearing the guts out of the machine, but the sensation soon drained away. He went back to the old pump and scraped around the base of another chip. He wasn’t sure what he was doing, but at least it was something. At least she wouldn’t be able to say he didn’t try. He pried out the second chip, a little less delicately this time, and the small black rectangle of integrated circuit fell to the bottom of the unit.

“Flanking flanker!” Walter spat. He reached through the tangle of wire and hoses for the small chip and heard his mother groan in agony.

Walter pulled his head out of the machine and peered around its side. His mom, a half dozen tubes and wires snaking all around her bed, had begun to stir from the lack of air. She clawed feebly at the mask over her mouth, her eyes wide with fear. Walter felt the blood boiling below the surface of his skin. He felt a powerful urge to run to her, to hold her hand while she finally slipped away, but he couldn’t. He wouldn’t let the flanking machine outsmart him.

He dove back into the bowels of the antiquated unit, a medical outcast from some Terran world, no doubt donated to the residents of Palan to assuage away Human guilt for otherwise ignoring them. Walter parted the cluttered web of wire and shined his light into the deep pit of the machine. It looked like the floods themselves had once settled there. Bits of broken plastic and metal formed a jumbled layer in the bowels of the unit. The metal shavings from numerous drillings and cuts were sprinkled over everything, the shiny flakes turning to rust. A black slime seemed to hold it all in place, the drippings of grease and hydraulic fluids having turned into some tar-like substance. Walter played his light back and forth across it all, looking for an innocuous bit of black IC chip. He grumbled to himself while his mother gurgled behind him, asphyxiating. The machine seemed to spin around his head, his world tumbling out of control.

And then he saw it: a speck of black on a ball of orange rust. Walter reached down, his hand shaking with anxiety. He clasped the chip with trembling fingers, even though he had little hope that the piece would actually fix the flanking unit. It didn’t matter. He just needed to be doing something, anything, fixing whatever he could.

He blew on the back of the chip to remove the flecks of rust before turning to the new pump. With his knife, he pried the corresponding chip out of the working control board and let the thing fall into the bottom of the unit. He pressed the rescued chip into the empty socket and waited.

Nothing.

Walter hissed to himself. He turned to his mother’s bed, ready to deal with what he’d been putting off emotionally and mechanically for so many years, when he noticed he wasn’t the only thing hissing. There was a whir of air coming from the breathing unit. A fan had begun spinning, and then a motor chugged to life. A worn belt squeaked over a poorly balanced flywheel. Walter turned to the screen, his heart thumping, and saw green phosphorous text burst across the display:

RESUME? YES/NO_

Walter hurriedly jabbed the “Y” and hit enter. The tubes leading away from the machine lurched and kicked as fortified air surged through them once more. He spun around to his mom, following the wires and tubes, and saw her arms falling to her bed and away from the fogged mask over her mouth. Walter let out a cry of relief, of sorrow and frustration and anger. He sat on the edge of the bed and held his mother’s thin, feeble hand.