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1. Eternal Peace, or: The Other Side of a Contract
The explosions were continuous now, grinding through the asteroid's interior. Metal fragments and rock rained from the ceiling without pause. The emergency alarms had lost any rhythm and become pure noise.
But Mail Noa's eyes had narrowed at something else.
With this much violence happening to the structure around them, the platform where Temperance and Essel Bowler stood was entirely stable. An energy barrier had deployed over their heads with a precision that suggested it had been ready before the first charge went off.
"...I see. So it isn't an external attack."
Mail's voice cut through the sound without effort.
Temperance produced a terminal from his coat without expression and confirmed that the base's self-destruct sequence had entered its final stage. He looked down at Mail with eyes that had no feeling in them.
"We don't pursue those who leave. You fulfilled your contract. I promised you eternal peace."
Mail understood immediately.
The organization kept its word. Complete the job, and you were free. No lie in that. But whether 'free' meant alive and intact — that had never been specified. The cleanest silence was the permanent kind. A body in the debris of a destroyed asteroid told no stories.
It had been designed this way from the beginning.
A steel beam came down nearby, close enough to move the air against her. The blast wave threw silver waves across her face.
Beside Temperance, the old woman in the heavy fur coat wore the expression of someone who had received exactly what she'd ordered. Her thin fingers were wrapped around the girl's shoulders like something that intended to keep what it had.
If the organization's purpose — and Vizalde's — was retribution for a first failure, then what happened to the girl now that she'd been delivered was not difficult to imagine.
That was when Mail Noa's face changed.
For the first time since she had entered this base.
"Hehe..."
A clear, bright laugh. The kind that belonged in warm rooms.
Mail turned to face Essel directly, and smiled. Not the smile of someone who had walked through a hundred situations like this one. The smile of someone who was at home in afternoon light, looking at the person she loved most in the world. Completely, unmistakably — Shutia Mace.
"I've done a perfect job."
Mail's face. Shutia's voice.
Temperance's brow moved — one sharp, suspicious twitch. Essel's satisfaction curdled into something else.
"What is wrong with you, you mad dog. If this is defiance in your last—"
The old woman's contempt didn't finish.
Because the 'girl' Essel had been holding so proudly began to blur at its edges, like heat shimmer over metal. A sound — glass cracking, electronic. And then the shape of Lumie Alnilam lost its color entirely and came apart, sliding from Essel's arms as a translucent, semi-liquid gel that spread across the floor and pulsed with failing holographic static.
"—What—?! What is this—?!"
"A custom piece. I hope it was worth the price, Madam."
Shutia's voice, completely. Spoken through Mail's face.
She was already moving as the words left her mouth.
"You—! Mail Noa—!"
The first real emotion crossed Temperance's face, and he pulled a high-output beam pistol and fired without hesitation.
Shutia didn't look back. She ran — cutting zigzag through falling ceiling sections, each step placed ahead of the shot that was going to the last position, the heat rays catching the metal floor where she'd been and turning it to liquid. Explosions building behind her. The dock was ahead and everything between here and there was trying to kill her and she had no attention left for any of it.
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2. Downstream of the Edge, or: A Ghost Reappears
"Hah — hah — hah—!"
She ran with the hot wind at her back, through the dim corridor that led to the dock. Rock in tons coming through the ceiling. The floor tilting and lurching under continuous detonation. She deployed the electromagnetic shield in bursts to deflect debris, hit the ground once and kept moving, threaded through the geometry of a structure coming apart around her.
(The dock ahead — there might be nothing left — but if there's even one abandoned small craft somewhere—)
The self-destruct sequence was almost complete. She had no guarantee the hatch was still intact. No guarantee anything was still on the other side.
She found the final blast door, tore the electronic lock off the panel by hand, pushed.
"—oh."
She stopped.
In the center of the launch catapult, where she had expected fire or nothing — a ship sat in its berth.
The Luna Geist. Her ship. The one she had set to autopilot toward Subaru Station.
It was here.
"Why — you came back—?!"
She was already running up the ramp as she said it, through the hatch, into the cockpit.
In the pilot's seat: Lumie Alnilam, trembling in small precise ways, both hands on the console, fighting the ship's systems through the shaking with everything she had.
"Lumie — why didn't you leave—?!"
Lumie turned. Tear-streaked. Composed anyway.
The main monitor showed the thrusters at full charge, sparking, ready.
"I kept you waiting. ...Now — let's go!"
She pushed the throttle down.
The Luna Geist released everything it had stored and tore through the collapsing dock into open space.
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3. A Conversation in Moonlight, or: A Lady's Resolve
The clock goes back a little.
Before the rock field base. In the narrow cargo hold of the Luna Geist, on the way there.
Lumie's escort and pilot had been placed in the hold — alive, immobilized by electronic restraints, none of them harmed. Lumie herself sat in the co-pilot's seat, unbound.
She had her small shoulders pulled in, and she was looking at the silver-eyed operative with the expression of someone choosing to be afraid rather than not.
"...Your purpose is me. Then please return the others safely. They were only trying to protect me."
Mail said nothing. She reached up, found the switch behind her ear, and pressed it.
A soft electronic tone. The nano-gel of the Light-Refraction Biometric Disguise Skin released, and the silver waves became gold, and the cold eyes became warm, and the person sitting in the pilot's seat was Shutia Mace.
"You're — you were — at the rescue—!"
Lumie's eyes went wide.
Shutia turned to face her, apology visible somewhere in the angle of her brow, and crouched down to Lumie's level.
"I'm sorry for frightening you. ...Would you be willing to hear me out for a moment?"
What Shutia told her was this: there was an old contract she had no choice but to honor. If she didn't, the threat extended to someone she loved. And if Lumie was delivered to the organization in person, her safety afterward was not guaranteed.
"I'm going to send the Luna Geist back to Subaru Station on autopilot. The real you stays on this ship. What I'll be bringing to the base — is this."
Beside Shutia, an amorphous substance had been quietly taking shape. By the time Lumie looked at it, it was her — indistinguishable in every visible detail, down to the warmth it radiated.
Lumie understood immediately.
"...I don't know all of it. But I understand that you want no one to be hurt. That came through clearly."
She looked at Shutia without looking away.
"This is the most I can do in return. I am an Alnilam, after all. Father insisted on piloting and engineering as part of a proper education — I can handle a ship."
"Hehe. I'm glad to hear it. ...If I'm not back in time, take off immediately. The autopilot is already set for Subaru Station. ...Understood?"
That was the agreement they had made.
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4. A False Harmony, or: An Approaching Threat
"That was the agreement — so why were you still in the dock?!"
"I believed you would come back."
Back in the cockpit, the disguise fully dissolved, Shutia — gold hair again, entirely herself — took over the controls.
The Luna Geist threaded the asteroid field's debris at speed and broke into open space. Behind them, the base Temperance's organization had been using completed its collapse — a slow bloom of light in the dark, becoming dust.
"That should be the end of it. The contract is done, the base is gone... Lumie, I can't thank you enough. Because of you I'm going to be able to go back to—"
Pip. Pip. Pip pip pip pip pip pip—
Every monitor in the cockpit went red simultaneously.
High-pitch alarms, all of them. The radar showed three heat signatures closing from behind at a speed that registered as wrong.
"What is happening?! The base exploded—!"
"Temperance's pursuit—?! No — these heat signatures — this isn't the organization's ships—!"
Shutia's expression closed down as she gripped the controls and pulled up the external camera feed.
Through the debris cloud of the collapsing asteroid — three interceptors, closing fast. Not the organization's combat craft. The most current military interceptor configuration of the neighboring allied state of Vizalde — Wahrheit-class — Essel Bowler's personal escort unit, drawn from the Arms Administration's direct command.
"She doesn't give up—! Lumie, belt tight — I'm going to have to fight our way out of this!"
The Luna Geist, carrying Shutia and Lumie through black space, turned to face a threat that had a nation behind it, and accelerated.