By One
Ava cried hot tears as she hugged her knees to herself. She had managed so far to keep her composure, but she felt like she had nothing left in her.
She was exhausted, scared, angry, and now felt a deep despair flooding over her.
One of hers was gone.
Peters.
There had been so much blood.
She realized now that Dominous had been trying to prepare her for that eventuality. She had not wanted to consider it. She knew that saving her team had been impossible when she set out, but she couldn’t allow herself to believe she could fail—that she would not reunite with her team.
All of them.
Peters was annoying, but he was always trying to make everyone laugh.
She had met Peters through Juarez. They had worked together at Carenton Mining Company on Antola. They had both been transplanted from the surface of Gareth. They met on the shuttle to Antola, having been shipped out at the same time, both accepting fifteen-year contracts to help support their families back home.
They had such similar backgrounds, even though they had come from completely different cities.
They became friends immediately.
They had worked nine years of their contracts before encountering Kane. Ava didn’t know the specifics, but Kane had liked them enough to offer to buy out their contracts if he ever had a ship of his own.
When Kane won his ship and began looking for a crew, Peters and Juarez were on the short list.
It took Kane some time to track them down and then negotiate the purchase of their contracts from the mining company. Juarez had been bullish at the opportunity to be free of their contracts. They had survived nine years in that dangerous line of work, and he was not convinced they would continue to be lucky for six more.
Peters hadn’t been worried.
He never really worried, seemingly never taking anything seriously.
He had agreed to join the
9Lives
because he wanted to stay with his friend.
Ava had been assigned to lead the salvage team when they were away from the ship. She had been chosen not because of her skill or experience, but because she was Kane’s daughter.
She was chosen because he trusted her.
She never forgot that and did everything she could to become the best person for the job.
In the months leading up to their first departure, she applied for every accreditation course she could convince herself might be useful in her role. She learned maintenance and repair. Survival. Welding. Armed and unarmed combat. Suit repair and zero-g survival.
She took piloting simulation courses and read through the manuals for the
9Lives
and the one shuttle they had at the time, the
Cat’s Paw
.
Ava pushed her team—and herself—to familiarize themselves with every piece of equipment and every shipboard procedure.
She had terrorized Juarez and Peters at first, but Juarez was dedicated and pushed Peters to stick with the grueling education and training Ava passed on after each simulation course she completed.
When the
9Lives
was ready to depart with a mostly full crew roster, Ava had a wall covered in official accreditations from the Antola Learning Center.
Her team was ready for the job.
That had been eight long years ago.
Peters had joked about cashing out the first time they landed a big enough haul and returning to his family on Gareth.
They had several well-paying hauls.
Peters stayed.
Ava had asked him about it once, and he laughed.
“I need a bigger payday than this.”
Peters hadn’t fooled her.
He had basically been sold by his family when he was fifteen. He missed them, sure, but the
9Lives
was his family.
And even if that wasn’t the case, he would never leave without Juarez.
Ava had long suspected they were more than friends, that the stories they told about picking up women in bars were bluster.
Juarez,
she thought.
Oh, Juarez.
She gave her knees one last firm hug, rocked forward to bring her center of gravity over her feet, and stood.
She turned, blinking tears from her eyes, and took a steadying breath.
Not much had changed since she last looked.
Ethan still lay sprawled on the floor.
Isaac was still sitting on the ground.
Kane still held Juarez as he sobbed.
“Ava!” Kane shouted. “Snap out of it.”
Ava blinked. Her vision blurred before refocusing.
Kane was pressed against the bars of his cell, yelling to her. Isaac was also standing now, gripping the bars of his own cell.
Juarez had fallen to his knees, still sobbing.
“Yes, Dad,” she heard herself say.
“Ava, the keycard.” Kane pointed toward the helmetless man with the nose bent nearly in half. “He has it on his side. Connected to his belt. Left side.”
Ava felt lightheaded and airy, as though she were emerging from a dream.
She stepped forward and stumbled, landing on her hands and knees beside the body.
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She shook her head to clear it and felt around for the keycard before realizing she was searching the wrong side.
Ava reached across the corpse and found it.
She pulled.
The card came free with a tug, breaking the retractable band that had attached it to the mutilated body. The severed cord snapped backward.
She held the card up and tried to stand again.
Ava drunkenly stumbled toward the nearest cell.
She used the card to open Isaac’s cell and held it out to him.
“Thank you, Ava. It is good to see you,” Isaac said as he took the keycard and moved to free Kane and Juarez.
He then opened Ethan’s cell and began checking on him.
Ethan groaned as Isaac knelt and lightly slapped his face.
Ava smiled as Ethan rolled onto his side and rubbed a palm against his head. A large lump had formed on his temple.
She held onto the bars of Isaac’s cell but remained upright.
Kane rushed from his cell, pulled her away from the bars, and wrapped her in a tight hug.
Ava felt herself lifted from the floor. For a moment, she was weightless as she hugged him back and began crying anew.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” she cried.
“Dad’s got you, rat. You’re okay,” he said softly, gently rocking her back and forth.
He doesn’t know what I had to do,
she thought, remembering the young man with the crushed throat.
Or what she had unleashed.
Dom.
And the mangled corpses he had left in his wake.
“Dad, we need to get out of here. I did something. I don’t think we’re safe,” she said.
“I know.” He gave her a wry, short-lived smile. “We are very aware of how unsafe we are.”
Kane allowed the hug to end as Ava pulled away.
“No, Dad. You don’t understand. Dom, the man who was with me. He is dangerous,” she insisted.
She didn’t have the words for it, but the idea of having Dominous near her fragile family terrified her.
He was so deadly and seemingly unfeeling in his violence.
What if he decided they were slowing him down?
Ava didn’t know why, but she trusted him to keep
her
safe.
Would he do the same for Juarez?
For Kane?
For Isaac?
She desperately wanted to keep him away.
But she felt as though she had no choice in the matter.
“Ava, I need you to be strong for me. We need you to be strong,” Kane whispered.
Then, louder, “We saw the man. We saw what he did.”
He gestured toward the broken body on the floor.
“We owe him. I don’t know where you found him, but we will need more of his help before we get out of this place.”
Kane reached out and gripped Ava’s shoulder.
He squeezed.
She wasn’t sure whether he was offering her his strength or using her to brace himself for what came next.
“Ethan. Juarez. I need you up now. Ava has been kind enough to open the door, and now we have to start pulling our weight. Secure weapons.”
He turned toward Isaac and pointed at the simple metal desk with its thin drawers, stack of data sheets, and data slate.
“Isaac, check whether there is anything here we can use.”
Ethan stumbled to his feet and moved to comply.
As he passed Ava, she felt the urge to reach out to him, but she held firm.
Kane needed her to be strong.
She felt herself growing cold, blocking out what she had seen and fighting the emotions that kept threatening to burst free.
She bit her lip and tensed her muscles.
It was a hard fight.
Ava activated her suit’s external speakers.
“I have the location of your suits, weapons, and other equipment.”
Her voice sounded flat and emotionless.
She checked her HUD for the navigation markers Dom had sent.
“It isn’t far. One thousand feet as the shuttle flies.”
Kane looked at her, surprised, but flashed her a smile that held.
“That is good news. We will still need weapons in the interim.”
He reached down and pulled an autopistol from a dead hand.
Juarez stood and walked like a zombie toward the nearest corpse. It lay on its side, covering one arm and the autopistol beneath it.
Juarez kicked the body onto its back and bent down to retrieve the weapon.
Ethan secured his own gun and looked toward Juarez.
“You good?”
Juarez stared at him for a long moment before slowly shaking his head.
Then he squeezed his eyes shut and slapped himself across the face with his free hand.
When he opened them again, he looked like a different man.
His soft eyes were hard.
His face neutral.
“Yeah. Good.”
Juarez scoffed as though laughing at his own joke.
Ava stepped forward, wanting to grab him and comfort him.
Kane held out one hand and shook his head.
Do not trip that mine right now.
Ava thought better of it.
“Are we ready to go?” she asked.
“Ready as we can be,” Kane muttered.
Then he turned toward Isaac.
“Isaac?”
“Yeah, yeah. There’s nothing here we want. I’m ready to get the hell out of here.”
Isaac did, however, grab the data slate from the desk as he made his way toward the door.
“Lead on, Ava,” Kane said.
Ava led the team out of the room and down the hallway.
She headed in the direction Dom had disappeared.
Ava braced herself for the inevitable discovery of mangled corpses.
The hall was well lit, and her suit detected no bodies scattered through the passageway.
She began to relax but kept her rifle raised and pointed forward.
They arrived at the first marker, which indicated a turn at the intersection.
Ava reached it and looked left.
The hallway was clear and terminated at a double-hatch door.
Then she looked right.
The indicated direction.
The hallway was much the same—a short passage terminating at another double hatch.
The largest difference was the neatly stacked piles of bodies on either side of the door.
Ava quietly counted them.
Five in the pile on the right.
Four on the left.
They wore the same dark red as the other guards, though without closer inspection, she couldn’t tell whether they had been combat personnel or laborers.
She didn’t particularly care anymore.
Ava stepped into the hallway and walked between the piles.
Then she saw what she had been looking for.
A large, fist-shaped hole in the chest of a body on the right.
A perfectly placed shot through the helmet of a body on the left.
Dom did this,
she thought.
She heard the sound of bare feet jogging behind her abruptly stop.
Ava could only imagine what they were thinking.
She refused to let herself care.
She stepped forward and activated the door controls.
Ava was certain these bodies had once belonged to the people guarding or working inside the equipment locker.
Or perhaps they had simply wandered past at the wrong moment.
She had no fear that survivors waited inside and stepped casually into the room.
It was spacious and bright, much brighter than the hallway.
She assumed the lighting helped with properly cataloging and sorting equipment.
Several thick shelves lined the room, holding large, topless storage crates. Some had been pulled out and searched through, while others remained securely seated on their shelves.
With any luck, all of their equipment had simply been dumped into the same crates and stored together.
Otherwise, searching the room was going to require considerable time.
Or considerable luck.
“Okay, boys. Let’s find your stuff,” Ava said, turning toward them.
Kane had followed her inside, with Juarez close behind.
Ethan and Isaac remained near the doorway, inspecting the piles of bodies.
“Ava, could you tell me real quick who the hell this guy you found is?” Isaac asked as he peered closely at the third body down on the left.
Its head had been cleaved vertically.
The brain had spilled out somewhere.