Category: Song of Many ’Verses

1.
The Wreck of the Santa Clara

There was a storm brewing miles out over the Caldera as John MacNamera approached the Tailwind Tavern. If he was lucky, he thought, it might wait to strike the base until after his launch window. But luck was suddenly treating him as a passing acquaintance, at best. After the last several hours, he wondered if it had deserted him altogether.

The inside of the pilots’ dive bar did nothing to ease that feeling.

The place was only a third of the way occupied, during what—for most bars around Caldera Base, at least—was Happy Hour and the busiest time of day. In the Tailwind Tavern, it felt more like Last Call was approaching. The bartender was wiping down the counter, carefully cleaning around a man who appeared to be taking a nap by his half-filled drink. Further down the bar, two women eyed him with suspicion. One table held a group of men playing a card game. Aside from a few lone drinkers, most with dinners in front of them, the place was empty. Toward the back, a lone diner was barely visible in one of the booths.

He took a deep breath and walked back to the booth and the man he was supposed to meet.

“Mazigh?” he asked as he approached. It was an odd name; Lady Shirah had told him to pronounce it as if he was saying Mazeer, with a hint of something guttural at the end of the r. The seated diner inclined his head in a nod and gestured for MacNamera to join him.

He sat down across the booth from his contact, studying the pilot.

Mazigh appeared to be in his late thirties. His close-cropped black hair was threaded with silver, his olive skin unwrinkled except at the corners of his eyes and mouth. His features, like his name, seemed to point to an Old Moroccan heritage. He was almost absurdly good-looking, enough that MacNamera had to wonder why he was scraping by out in this corner of nowhere and not starring in adventure vids coming out of New Hollywood. His daugh­ter—

It was hard to even think of her without something catching his heart in its fist and squeezing.

His daughter would probably have watched every vid, multiple times over, starring a man who looked like this guy. At least, so said the girl’s mother, who seemed worried that Audrey had come back from her time away more than a little strange. Her definition of “strange” made him wish, once again, that he’d never left Audrey on Deckard’s World in the first place.

“Would you like something to eat?” Mazigh asked. He had a tagine of fragrant stew in front of him, half eaten, beside a glass of something that smelled strongly of mint but not at all of alcohol.

MacNamera shook his head. “I’m fine, thank you.”

In truth, he had no appetite at all. He probably ought to eat something, but the thought of food was repulsive at the moment. His mind was too utterly consumed by the worries that the last day’s worth of messages had brought him.

Mazigh, he realized, was studying him every bit as intently as he had been studying the man. “Tell me about your daughter,” the pilot finally said. “What has happened to her, exactly?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Not exactly. She was back with her mother on Deckard’s World, going to college, and suddenly she disappeared. Her mom says she left one message, telling her to take her younger daughter and go into hiding. Audrey said something in the message about someone from the last time she’d been missing coming back—”

“This is not the first time your daughter has disappeared?” Mazigh leaned forward, his eyes—just a shade or two lighter green than Audrey’s, MacNamera noticed—intent.

“No. It isn’t.” He gritted his teeth. Before “M” and the Lady Shirah had directed him to this contact, his own attempts to recruit help had been an abject failure.

“This the same daughter who went missin’ six or so years ago and was gone for nearly two years?” one pilot had asked. “I remember you stakin’ out every transport that came in, that whole time, in case she was on board. Turned out she’d never even left Deckard’s World. Why you goin’ kitin’ after her this time?” He and his friends had laughed and had gone back to ignoring MacNamera in favor of watching a jai alai vid.

“She disappeared a month before her thirteenth birthday and was missing for twenty-two months. Her mother knows very little about what happened to her during that time, but this time, she went offworld. Booked passage to New Queensland on a ship called the Santa Clara. It vanished one Star Jump into its route.”

At the mention of Star Jumps, the other man’s eyes cut over to his.

“A long jump?” he asked with odd intensity.

MacNamera shook his head. “They weren’t even half a day out from the system.”

“And no contact since? No beacon check-ins?”

“It came out of the jump fine, checked in with that beacon, and never checked in with the next, the one that would have led into the second jump.” MacNamera felt his stomach twisting again at the thought of all the things that might have happened, might be happening.

“Whatever happened occurred in U1 space, then,” Mazigh mused. “I may see why I was recommended to you.”

“You came highly recommended,” MacNamera replied, still a little confused about that. “Both by the investigator on Deckard’s World who contacted me after Audrey disappeared, and by Lady Shirah.”

That made Mazigh blink; apparently he found that as surprising as MacNamera had. “This investigator. What’s his name?”

“Didn’t tell me more than an initial. M. Audrey’s mother told me he’s been assigned to her case for years, ever since she reappeared. I’ve never been able to find out much about him, and I have tried. He’s Federacy, but that’s all I know.”

Mazigh’s frown had deepened. He lifted his glass of—was that mint tea?—and took a thoughtful sip. Then he seemed to come to a decision. “Do you have a picture of your daughter?”

MacNamera pulled out his comm, opening it to the image he’d been looking at all too often since the news had come and turning it toward Mazigh. A young woman’s face appeared on the screen, beautiful if he did say so himself, with enormous green eyes, prominent cheekbones, a pixie-pointed chin and a quirky smile, dark blonde hair flowing to her shoulders. Audrey in her first college yearbook photo. He could still see the tiny maker of mud-pies and catcher of fireflies hidden behind the newly-adult face.

Six years ago, after coming out of cryo and learning that his daughter had become a missing person not long after he’d left Deckard’s World, he had been terrified that she’d been on her way to Furya. Even Lady Shirah’s promise to intercept and hide the girl if she arrived, before the Quantifiers could learn she was there, hadn’t eased his anxiety. The new situation was even more petrifying.

Mazigh’s breath hitched for a second. “This ‘M’ asked you to come to me, specifically? As did Lady Shirah.”

“Yes.”

The man nodded. “I understand now. I will, of course, help you. No one’s child should be alone in the ghost lanes.”

Mazigh gestured to the barkeep; a moment later, he was settling his check as his food was packed up for him.

“You are licensed to fly a Star Jumper?” MacNamera asked, aware that somehow everything had just sped up.

Mazigh nodded and slipped his payment card back into a small wallet, taking another card out and offering it to MacNamera.

It was a pilot’s license, identifying him as Yedder Mazigh, born in New Casablanca on Tangiers Prime, rated to fly most military and commercial craft.

Retired military. Like I was, before…

He shut that down, shut all of it down. There wasn’t all that much he regretted about the last six and a half years of his life, except how they had impacted Audrey… and, apparently, were still impacting her. But he couldn’t think about it without it starting to tear him to pieces.

“What’s your price?” he asked as he gave Mazigh back his license.

The pilot shrugged, slipping the license back into his wallet and pocketing it. “I’m sure your offer is a fair one. Shall we go? I presume you already have a ship.”

Feeling a little stunned, MacNamera nodded, rising as Mazigh rose. They were, he realized, exactly the same height. “A Dassault Z-437. Can you fly one?”

“I can, and I have.” Mazigh led him toward the exit. “It’s a good choice for a rescue mission.”

“You need to stop and get anything?” MacNamera asked, still trying to figure out how things had turned around so quickly.

Mazigh nodded at the bartender, who fetched a duffel bag from behind the counter and handed it to him. “I have everything I need in here.” He said something to the bartender in another language, one MacNamera didn’t recognize, and got a reply in the same language. “No need for us to delay further. My affairs are in order.”

The man, MacNamera soon discovered, was not especially talkative. The walk back to Caldera Base, less than half a mile away, was silent, but gave him a chance to observe his new companion. Mazigh moved like a trained soldier.

“Where’d you serve?” he asked as they neared the entrance to the base.

“Tangiers Space Service,” Mazigh said. “Sol Track Protective Division.”

A combat pilot, MacNamera thought. Still young enough to be serving. Can’t even be forty yet. “Why’d you leave?”

“L-4 injury,” Mazigh said after a tiny pause. “It healed, but not before I got so sick of being behind a desk that I resigned my commission. I piloted commercial ships for a few years after that. They said I was fit enough.”

People at the base seemed to know and like Mazigh, something that eased MacNamera’s nerves a little more, although it made him wonder why they had never crossed paths before. Nothing could ease his nerves completely. Every time he thought of his daughter, they jangled again until he wanted to scream at the top of his lungs. But it only took an hour for everything to be settled and for them to be given a launch window. Lady Shirah had been true to her word and had smoothed the way for him with Federacy Command; he had already been placed on emergency leave and his Lieutenant was prepared to take over.

As they approached the Z-437’s ramp, though, Mazigh turned to him with a serious look.

“You do understand, I assume, that in a moment I will become the captain of this ship,” the man said.

That brought MacNamera up short. “And?”

“And in spite of your rank, you will be required to follow my orders. So I want to be clear that I will not issue orders all that often, but when I do it is because they are necessary. For your safety, and mine, and your daughter’s when we find her. The law, however, will require you to follow them when I do. I want there to be no misunderstanding.”

“Fair enough.” It was something he hadn’t thought about in his headlong rush to save his little girl—an adult now, yes, but barely—but he really should have.

Gotta do what I gotta do.

Prior to liftoff, he was surprised to see that Mazigh checked the engine area and, in particular, the Star Jump drive, resting his hand on it for a moment with an odd gesture and murmuring something under his breath. But that, he ultimately decided, was the only non-textbook thing about the pilot.

Launch was uneventful, Furya’s usually stormy skies seeming almost cooperative and the storm over the Caldera still distant. They cryo-slept in their seats on the way to the Santa Clara’s last known position, skipping over the week it took to get there. MacNamera was glad of the cryo; a week of fretting about his daughter’s fate might have driven him mad.

The space between the end of the Santa Clara’s first Star Jump and the start of the second was vast, covering fifty million kilometers in each direction. Mazigh began running a sensor sweep of the region immediately. MacNamera found it difficult to sit still, so close to answers and yet still unable to grasp them.

“So,” he observed after a while, trying to fill the silence before it could unhinge him, “your name… doesn’t sound very Arabic.”

“It’s not,” Mazigh answered, his mouth quirking slightly. “It’s Tamazight. Or, as most of your people would say, Berber.”

Huh. There was an oblique rebuke in there somewhere, he thought. “What’s it mean?”

“It was gifted to me by a good friend of my family. ‘Yedder’ means ‘he will live.’ And ‘Mazigh’ is an auspicious surname among my people. It means ‘he is free.’”

“The whole name was a gift?”

Mazigh smiled, turning back to his controls. “The most important part of it was. What do you know of the circumstances of your daughter’s first disappearance?”

MacNamera groaned, leaning back in his seat. “Truth is, not much at all. Last time she just dropped out of sight. Her mother thought she’d run away, but… when she came back…”

“Was something unusual about her return?” Mazigh seemed focused on the scans he was running, but MacNamera had the odd feeling that the man was paying closer attention than he seemed to be.

“Yeah. It turned out that she’d been in WitSec for most or all of the time she was missing. Nobody could get her tell them where she’d been or what had happened. One of the conditions of her return was that she could never talk about any of it at all. And once a week, a Federacy operative came to the door to escort her to a rendezvous with her ‘handler,’ who her mother never once got to see herself. That ‘M’ guy.”

“An extraordinary situation for a child her age to find herself in,” Mazigh said after a moment. “Is there much espionage, or organized crime, on Deckard’s World?”

“I never knew of any, but that isn’t my field anyway.” MacNamera let out another gusty sigh. “Do you think the first disappearance and this one are connected? Something from back then showing up, like she said?”

“Possibly. You said she told your ex-wife to go into hiding with her younger sister—”

“I never said she was my ex-wife,” MacNamera snapped, frowning. Who was this guy?

Mazigh smiled at him, shaking his head. “You didn’t have to. You referred to her as ‘her mother,’ not your wife, every time you have mentioned her. And this little sister… you have not referred to her as your daughter, either. A half-sister from another marriage, I presume?”

Well, damn. He’d gotten all suspicious for a moment over a good deduction. Just because Mazigh seemed more committed to the mission than he ought to be…

“Apparently, your daughter was afraid for their safety as well as her own when she disappeared. Did this ‘M’ say whether she used her own name, or a false name, when she boarded the Santa Clara?” Mazigh continued running scans as he spoke.

“Her own name,” MacNamera said, seeing where Mazigh was going. “She was laying a trail, wasn’t she? Trying to draw someone away from Deckard’s World. Away from her mom and sister.”

“It would appear so. That suggests a genuine threat, one probably connected to her prior missing time. Are you sure that she wasn’t offworld during that period?”

“Nobody’s sure of anything,” MacNamera grumbled. “Her mom told me she insisted that if she ever talked about anything that had happened while she was gone, people could end up dead, and that if everybody kept trying to get her to talk, she might get disappeared again. She never wavered from that once.”

“Interesting. And she was how old, again?”

“A month shy of thirteen when she disappeared. Almost fifteen when she came back.”

“Kids that age are very rarely good at keeping secrets,” Mazigh mused. “Except for the truly important ones.”

Maybe it was meant as a reassuring statement, but MacNamera was only feeling worse with each passing moment. If whoever had driven Audrey into WitSec had found her, and was dangerous enough to force her headlong flight off-planet—

“I have something,” Mazigh said. “A distress beacon. Very weak, but…” He began flipping switches and plotting a course.

It took another hour to reach the beacon. MacNamera’s heart pounded in his ears the whole time.

“Oh fuck,” he breathed, as the Santa Clara finally came into view.

The vessel drifted in the darkness, barely visible, no lights illuminating it. If its bulk hadn’t blocked out the stars behind it, they might not have seen it at all. As they approached and their lights touched it, a gaping breach in its hull became glaringly obvious.

My little girl…

“Tislilel…” Mazigh murmured, before maneuvering the Z-437 closer. Once in range, he deployed multiple tethers and brought their airlock within a few meters of the jagged rent in the hull.

“Let’s suit up,” he told MacNamera. The combination of determination and dread in his face was confusing, as if he was the one expecting to find the body of his own daughter within.

All power was out within the Santa Clara. There was no artificial gravity, and the only light came from their suits. The ship, it appeared, had still had at least partial power when it had begun to depressurize; bulkhead doors had closed around the breach, but one of them had only closed 90% of the way. There was no more pressure differential on the other side to prevent them from reopening now, but very little appeared to have been blown into space.

They found half a dozen corpses behind one of the bulkhead doors, floating and frozen, all shot in the chest with energy pulses.

None of the dead were Audrey.

Two of the bodies appeared to belong to an elderly couple, matching wedding rings on their gnarled and frozen hands. The other four were children.

“What kind of mon­sters…?” MacNamera heard himself gasping. He had seen far worse things, but the murder of children was something he could never possibly become inured to. Mazigh, he noticed, had bowed his head and had his fists clenched tightly.

“Come,” the pilot said after a moment. “We must see the rest of the ship.”

They spent hours quartering every level but found no more bodies. Mazigh was able to restore the artificial gravity when they passed through the engine room… and seemed oddly disturbed by the apparent removal of the Star Jump drive.

“Pirates?” MacNamera asked Mazigh as they reached the flight deck. That thought filled him with new terror. His daughter was young and beautiful enough that he feared the uses such criminals might be making of her. It was a struggle not to imagine it…

“Doubtful,” Mazigh said, shining his light around. “Pirates would not have murdered the children unless they had also murdered everyone else. The horrible truth is that for pirates in the trafficking business, children are primary targets. I’ve rescued enough to know. If whoever did this had any intention of trafficking your daughter or the others, they would have done the same with the children. This is something different.”

MacNamera watched as, turning away, Mazigh began reactivating the flight deck’s emergency power systems.

“The batteries are nearly drained, but there should be enough to let us see the ship’s final hours—”

“Good,” a strange, raspy voice said from the doorway. “Let’s take a look at what happened.”

MacNamera was impressed to see that Mazigh was an even faster draw than he was.

“Easy, guys,” the stranger said, his hands moving away from his sides, fingers spreading to show they were empty. “Easy. I’m here lookin’ for answers, too. You salvagers?”

“No,” Mazigh said. “You?”

“Nah. Name’s Toombs. I’m lookin’ for someone who was on this ship. What the fuck happened to it?”

MacNamera started to put his gun away until he noticed that Mazigh had gone completely still.

“Alexander Toombs?” Mazigh asked, danger suddenly in his voice.

“Y’heard of me?” It was hard to make out much detail of the man’s face through his pressure suit, but he seemed to be smiling. “I’m flattered.”

“Don’t be. Give me one good reason not to shoot you right now, merc.” The tight fury in Mazigh’s voice was alarming.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. What’d I do to you?”

“Not to me,” Mazigh said, keeping his gun trained on Toombs as he walked closer. “Tell us who you are looking for on this ship, and perhaps I won’t shoot you.”

“Nobody impor­tant—”

“Say. Her. Name.” Mazigh cocked the gun.

Her name?

“Fine! Fine. You win. A girl named Audrey Mac­Namera—”

MacNamera brought his gun back up and joined Mazigh in aiming at Toombs. “What do you want with my daughter?”

Toombs froze, staring at him. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he drawled. “Colonel John MacNamera in the flesh? They let you come lookin’ for your girl this time?”

“You very likely will be,” Mazigh spat. “Are you the one she was fleeing?”

“Prob’ly,” Toombs admitted.

“Why?” MacNamera demanded. “She’s barely more than a kid!”

Toombs looked over at him. “You got no idea where your kid was six years ago, do ya? Or who she was with.”

“She was in WitSec,” MacNamera growled. “I’m pretty sure interfering with someone under Federacy protection is enough of a crime that we could turn you in for a bounty if we wanted.”

For whatever reason, what he’d said made Toombs bray with laughter. “WitSec? That’s a good one. I’m bettin’ that fakin’ bein’ in WitSec is an even bigger crime. Gotta say, your little Jack B. Badd has skills.”

Jack B. Badd??? How did this man know his childhood nickname? Dear God, did Audrey use it as an alias?

He’d told her so many bedtime stories about a boy with that name…

“More than you know,” Mazigh was saying to Toombs as he confiscated the other man’s sidearm.

…the fuck…?

“Do I know you from somewhere?” Toombs asked him.

“Doubtful.” Mazigh backed up to the control panel, keeping his gun trained on Toombs. “Understand that whatever fate Audrey met on this vessel will be yours as well.”

What the fuck, MacNamera found himself thinking, is going on here?

The screen flickered to life in front of them as Mazigh activated its controls. In a moment, a mosaic of images spread out, most of them entirely still. “I have begun the playback two hours before the feeds end. Now… I am deactivating any feeds that aren’t picking up any motion, until something appears on them.”

In a moment, only the feed from the flight deck itself was live, where a single crew member was killing time tossing wadded up papers at a miniature basketball hoop.

“Looks like whatever happened, it was during the night cycle,” Toombs observed.

“Lo, the Master of the Obvious speaks,” Mazigh grumbled. His gun hadn’t wavered.

Another feed flickered to life as a young woman, dark blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail, emerged from behind a door and entered a corri­dor—

“Audrey,” MacNamera breathed. Near him, Mazigh murmured that strange word again. What the fuck was a tislilel?

His daughter looked around the corridor, walked over to a posted map, and then set off down the hallway. The feed followed her from camera to camera as she went. When she arrived at the galley, she read the “Closed Until 6:00 AM Standard” sign before sighing and walking over to a touch screen. A moment later she started down the corridor again.

They watched as she located vending machines and, taking a card from the bulky money belt under her Deckard Tech U sweatshirt, purchased an array of junk food that she carried to a nearby lounge. There were people in the lounge, but they had apparently been so still and quiet that the motion recorders on those camera feeds had lost track of them. Audrey settled onto a seat against one of the blank picture windows that looked out on the nothingness of Star Jump space, eating her junk food as she gazed out at it.

Odd. It almost seemed as if she could see something through the window. She looked more attentive than someone staring out at nothing.

A man walked over to her and tried to make conversation. MacNamera found himself bristling; the guy was almost twice her age. But apparently he didn’t get anywhere and retreated a moment later, his body language almost screaming discomfort. Audrey didn’t start laughing until he and his friends had left the lounge.

Ten more minutes passed, and then the empty window filled with darkness as the Santa Clara returned to normal space. A moment later, Audrey leaned forward, frowning…

…and then leapt out of the window seat and ran for the comm panel. Even as she grabbed at it, the ship rocked violently. Suddenly dozens of the feeds were active.

The shipwide pandemonium made it difficult to follow what happened next. They caught glimpses from a few cameras of Audrey trying to reach the escape pods, and—

“Well, fuck me,” Toombs gasped.

“Pass,” Mazigh replied, but both men followed his gaze to one of the steadier feeds.

Men in strange armor were climbing through the hull breach. As MacNamera watched, they spread throughout the ship, gathering up all the passengers and crew at gunpoint and forcing them back through the breach. One emerged from a darkened corridor where no cameras worked, propelling Audrey forward, his hand clamped onto the back of her neck. She looked frightened but unharmed.

“Who are these people?” MacNamera grated out.

“Necromongers,” Toombs answered. “And you’re never gonna believe who their boss is these days.”

A final Necromonger emerged from the darkness, returning to the breach carrying a smallish box trailing wires.

“Baraka,” Mazigh muttered. “What do they want with the Isomorph Drive?”

“Hey,” MacNamera growled. “Focus. This is about my daughter.”

“As is that,” Mazigh said, half to himself.

“What are they going to do to my girl?” MacNamera demanded of Toombs.

“Guess that’ll depend on her old friend,” Toombs said, shaking his head. “’Bout a year ago, word is the old Lord Marshal of the Necromongers got hisself assassinated by none other than Richard B. Riddick. He’s in charge of them now.”

Some of the tension left Mazigh’s frame. “Then she may be safe.”

“What?” Who was this guy? “You even know who Riddick is?” MacNamera knew all too well; He’d had to redesign half a dozen security systems because of the man.

“Your daughter,” Toombs drawled, “ran with Riddick for a while back when she was missin’. They were friends. Maybe more than.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” MacNamera demanded, even as he saw Mazigh nodding.

“She was one of three survivors of the Hunter-Gratzner crash,” Mazigh told him. “Riddick was another. He protected her in its aftermath and attempted to see her to safety.”

“Attempted?” Toombs demanded. “He broke her out of a hospital and took her and another girl with him to Shakti Four—what the fuck is so funny, guy?”

“She never went to Shakti Four,” Mazigh chuckled. “And Riddick didn’t break her out of the hospital. She broke out on her own.”

Enough, MacNamera thought, was enough. He turned his gun away from Toombs and pointed it at Mazigh.

“Okay, enough of this shit. Who are you and how do you think you know my daughter?”

Toombs snickered, looking both amused by this turn of events and curious, himself, as to the answer.

Mazigh glanced uneasily at the mercenary. “It’s a fair question, but I can’t give you answers in front of this man. He isn’t cleared to know them.”

MacNamera aimed for the spot directly between Mazigh’s eyes. At the very least, it would shatter the man’s face plate if he fired. “You’d better rethink your position or you’ll be taking everything you know into the black.”

For a moment, Mazigh looked affronted. He gave Toombs a weighing glance and then sighed. “Very well. On your head be it. I met your daughter five and a half years ago. On Tangiers Prime.”

“Tangiers Prime?” Toombs practically exploded. “No fuckin’ way! I was on Tangiers Prime and—”

“And she was one step ahead of you the whole time,” Mazigh said. “She and Kyra Wittier-Collins.”

Kyra Wittier-Collins? The Black Fox of Canaan Mountain? His little girl had been palling around with Big Evil and the Black Fox?

“They had stowed away on the Scarlet Matador,” Mazigh continued.

“Son of a shit,” Toombs griped. “Stowed away? No wonder we couldn’t find them among the passen­gers…”

MacNamera had heard of the Scarlet Matador. This was not getting better. “Didn’t everybody die on that ship? Some kind of exotic pathogen?”

“That’s the official story,” Mazigh told him, “but no. Only eighteen people among the passengers and crew died. Your daughter, and Kyra, saved everyone else. There was no pathogen. It was a Level Five Incident.”

A Level Five Incident? His daughter had Threshold Syndrome?

What… the fuck… had happened six years ago?

“Who are you?” MacNamera demanded again.

Mazigh glanced uneasily at Toombs again before giving him a rueful smile. “The name you know me by, Yedder Mazigh, was gifted to me by your daughter when she saved my life one final time. She made the ID you examined, and which I have been using for the last five and a half years. My real name is Colonel Gavin Brahim Tomlin Meziane, and yes, I know that’s a mouthful. You may call me Tomlin, as she preferred to.”

Toombs was staring at him, open-mouthed. “Ain’t you supposed to be dead?”

“Indeed.” Mazigh’s gun stayed pointed at Toombs as he walked forward toward MacNamera, once more indifferent to the gun aimed at him. “Your daughter, among my people, is a beloved hero. She and Kyra saved hundreds of lives five and a half years ago, including mine. I owe her my life several times over. You have nothing to fear from me. I only seek to repay any portion of my debt to her that I can.”

MacNamera lowered his gun, stunned. “And how are you gonna do that?”

“If the Necromonger Armada has her, then that’s where we will go.”

“What?” Toombs practically yelled. “Are you crazy?”

“I told you before, Toombs, you will share Audrey’s fate, whatever it is. As will I. I owe her my life, and much more than that. There is no way to truly repay the debt I owe her. For her,” Mazigh—no, Tomlin—said, locking eyes with MacNamera, “I would storm the gates of Hell itself. I will go there with you now.”

For the first time since he’d gotten word of Audrey’s second disappearance, John MacNamera felt a stirring of real hope.

“Just fuckin’ great,” Toombs grumbled, ruining a perfectly good Heroic Moment. “Held at gunpoint by a pair of suicidal do-gooders.”

Tomlin rolled his eyes, shook his head, and then grinned at MacNamera. “Let’s go rescue your daughter.”