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The door slid open with a hiss, Luo Ji still tethered to the panel beside it, glowing fiber optics threaded between himself and the Tyrannical Ambition. He was angry, and he was stressed. He glanced wildly up and down the corridor. Coast still clear. Alright. He could do this. He could. He withdrew quickly from the panel and adjusted his augmentations: nothing but a normal arm beneath the normal sleeve of a perfectly standard Tyranny uniform. A stolen Tyranny uniform which, he was grateful, fitted him perfectly– someone had clearly been doing some espionage on Blue Rain, since adaptive textiles had not been in the data packet Luo Ji had reviewed – at fever pitch, in his cloaked transport pod, fucking warning lights blinking everywhere as he worked to get a secure mooring against one of Tyrannical Ambition’s maintenance locks. (Luo Ji excelled at many things. Flying was not one of them.)
Luo Ji closed the wall panel and feigned calm. He had reached a more public part of Tyranny’s flagship, and it would, in theory, be fine if someone saw him here. Unlike on Happy, it was doubtful that everyone on the Tyrannical Ambition knew everyone else. Besides, he was wearing a technician’s uniform. Nobody noticed technicians.
He pulled his tablet from his pack, initiated a program that would look like unintelligible diagnostics to the average person, and started down the corridor.
Perhaps it was the fear coloring his senses, but Luo Ji found the Tyrannical Ambition oppressive and unwelcoming. The metal walls were dark and cool to the touch. He hadn’t realized how fond he had grown of Happy’s organic nature– there was no pulse, here, when he brushed against the ship. There was no warm consciousness to reach out to, only an exceedingly rigid AI, dangerous at the edge of his mind. Luo Ji kept himself delicately shielded. He made himself as small as his adult body would allow and tried to project insignificance.
Luo Ji had grown skilled at staying under the radar as a child. Even more so, as an adolescent, after the augmentations had begun – after they had noticed his intellect and had wanted to play with it (so clever, the doctors had said, and he had felt proud; he’d had no idea). He had adapted to the shadows after that. He had made a living off data-only channels, scavenging information to collate and to sell, always staying out of sight.
It took a moment, surprisingly, to return to that mindset. Eighteen months with Ye Xiu’s crew was the problem. It was harder to disappear, after having been pushed so insistently into the field – after being asked for options mid-fight, or to run calculations while a friend stood at gunpoint, or to skirmish alongside them with his little drones. As if he had the skills of Tang Rou. As if he had the bloody-minded strength of Steamed Bun.
Fuck Steamed Bun, getting himself caught like this. Fuck him. Luo Ji was never meant to be the rescue crew, even if he was the reason–
Whatever. Happy was too far away. There wasn’t time.
Luo Ji kept moving. Scanning. Processing. He got lucky: a room with an un-networked terminal, everything layered in a fine film of dust. He booted it up, listening to the sounds of an operating system he hadn’t heard in at least eight years. He found an old schematic: there was command, the dorms, the brig. It was unlikely to have changed significantly, and most of the crew was asleep right now - Tyranny, according to his data packet (and his observations) ran on skeleton crews for ‘night’ shifts, promoting a steadier circadian rhythm for improved health, unlike on Happy where it was… chaos, as far as Luo Ji was concerned. (On Happy, people ate when there was food, and slept whenever they weren’t fighting or training or repairing things. Luo Ji would stumble across them everywhere: Qiao Yifan curled around his turncoat of a boyfriend, half-hidden behind the hydroponics. Blue River, drooling beside a computer interface, Ye Xiu’s patched jacket draped carefully across him. An Wenyi, snoring softly in the infirmary, her eyes still half-open.) It was different, in Tyranny. Here, there was order.
Luo Ji would, once, have felt more at home here, he knew. Even now, he told himself, it would surely be better than waking up hunched at his desk or propped against the unexpected warmth of Steamed Bun.
He brushed his palm along the wall again.
He missed Happy’s heartbeat.
He pulled himself together and nodded, polite greeting, as crew members passed him, their black-and-red uniforms as neat as his own.
Turn left. Twelve and a half yards. Turn right. Pass a heat exchange panel. Turn another right.
Luo Ji moved with studied calm as he walked through the dorms and skirted around command. It was only when he entered the service corridor hugging the brig that he reached for his arm again, rolling up his sleeve and bearing down on the pressure point that slid back his skin and revealed the alterations beneath. He worked fast, fingers flying, and then took a small drone from his pack and directed it ahead of him. He counted: one, two … twenty-nine, thirty, before following, one eye closed to better interpret the data being relayed back. One guard on duty. He could handle one guard. He could.
He could pretend he wasn’t terrified.
He updated the drone’s instructions. It worked itself through an air vent and did as he had asked. As soon as the guard crumpled to the floor, drone no longer detecting a pulse, Luo Ji triggered its most recent upgrade (months of work! months of grinding, months of talking Fang Rui through what he needed to steal, months, all used up with a few lines of code). Luo Ji and the drone switched places, complex matter-transference placing himself within the locked brig.
Outside, the drone sparked and dropped to the floor.
It was an unpleasant business, to find himself suddenly standing on the dead guard. Death, Luo Ji thought, not for the first time, was considerably more disgusting than people said. The smell of shit and piss permeated the room, undercut by the stink of cooked flesh where the drone had made closest contact.
He stepped off the body and knelt, taking keycards from its pocket. He headed down the brig hallway at a jog.
Not Steamed Bun. Not Steamed Bun. Tentacle person. Holy shit, woman with half a face. Not Steamed Bun.
Steamed Bun.
Luo Ji unlocked the cell, hissing, “Sit the fuck down, it’s me, it’s Luo Ji, back the fuck off,” because he figured Steamed Bun would be ready to shank the next person he saw. He was slammed against the wall even as he spoke, but Steamed Bun wasn’t– stupid, exactly (his mind was off the rails, he was unpredictable, but he wasn’t quite stupid, Luo Ji was mostly sure). What clearly began as an attack became a hug by the end of Luo Ji’s sentence. Steamed Bun’s body stank of sweat and blood as he pressed against him, his long blond hair fallen across Luo Ji’s definitely-not-wet eyes.
“Aw, I knew you had it in you!” Steamed Bun cheered.
Luo Ji snarled, but he didn’t fight the embrace. He allowed himself forty seconds. He counted them: forty whole seconds, where he let himself feel something. Then he reached for the security of his resentment. He focused on the way Steamed Bun stank; on the way he had one hand curled carelessly across Luo Ji’s bared augmentations, making them filthy with fingerprints and grime. He shoved. Hard.
They undressed the guard, and Steamed Bun stripped and changed clothes. Luo Ji stared at the wall and definitely not at the battered lines of Steamed Bun’s bare body, reflected in the metal. He was angry again by the time Steamed Bun was in Tyranny colors and stinking in a whole new way: blood and sweat and piss and death. Luo Ji glared, pointing at a chair, and braided his long hair tightly, helplessly attempting something resembling regulations. He tried to ignore how shiny it felt, a reminder of how briefly the man had been imprisoned, of how quickly the damage on his body had been inflicted, and of why.
Luo Ji stared uneasily at the braid in his hand.
“It’ll have to do. We need to be gone before everyone wakes.”
“Lead on, little bro!”
“Don’t call me that,” Luo Ji said. After eighteen months, it was mindless habit.
He rolled his sleeve down, arm open beneath it.
It was going to be much harder getting Steamed Bun off the flagship than even the miracle that had been getting himself on. Luo Ji’s chest felt tight. They used the guard’s keycard to get back out into the public corridors. The first person they passed looked at them twice. So did the second. Steamed Bun was too big, too bright, too bruised at the edges, and he grinned like he wanted to either fuck them, or fight them, or possibly both, no matter how Luo Ji tried to elbow him into submission. Luo Ji decided not to wait to see what the third person would do. He took out two more drones from his pack and set them to the floor. They took off at speed, spidery legs flashing silver.
“Nice! You brought your doggies.”
Was it too late to put the fucker back?
The drones disappeared into vents. Not three minutes later, they must have found the right things to chew because alarms sounded.
“Bro… Now there’ll be guards and shit.”
Luo Ji was withering. “And you’re dressed as a guard, and I’m dressed as a tech. Do you not see how this helps us?”
He led the way, running beneath the cover of chaos. The halls filled with people: some with tablets, some with weapons, others with empty hands and sleepy faces. The general confusion let them run all the way back to the airlock, where the transport pod was docked, and that should have been that except Zhang Xinjie really was as clever as his reputation.
Luo Ji felt like weeping as he set all his remaining little drones to self-sacrifice, a ring of explosions and danger around them. Steamed Bun threw whatever was at hand and then scooped Luo Ji up, his fiber optics barely retracted after checking their pod still was on the other side of the airlock. He fumed at being carried like a sack of grain, but then Steamed Bun had them out, and Luo Ji was being dropped in the familiar shape of the co-pilot’s seat.
The sound of Tyranny fury grew quiet as the pod’s engines whirred.
Luo Ji inhaled. He let his fiber optics slide into the comforting space of the pod’s control panel, even as Steamed Bun disconnected them from the Tyrannical Ambition.
Steamed Bun, damn him, flew the same way he did everything else: wildly and irrationally, self-taught and unfairly skillfully. Zhang Xinjie might be carefully trying to plot their flight path, Luo Ji thought, but he barely cared: they were safe, now, with Steamed Bun at the helm, and spirits help anyone who tried to follow them, as he coaxed the transport pod into hyperdrive long before any normal standards said was acceptable.
Luo Ji exhaled. He relaxed into the comforting hum of the transport pod – less alive than its mother-ship but aware enough to offer him the data it was collecting on its pilot. Luo Ji made a note of what to tell An Wenyi, later, when he inevitably bullied Steam Bun into her infirmary.
“Thank you,” he mumbled. “For letting yourself get caught, so they couldn’t get me.”
Luo Ji was never meant to be the rescue crew; he would have handled being the beaten prisoner even less.
He drank in Steamed Bun’s smile but tuned out his words.
He adopted his crewmates’ habit instead and slept where he sat.