Fault Tolerance by Valerie Valdes

Author:Valerie Valdes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-08-02T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

Powers Combine

By the time Eva and Vakar cleaned the cables and installed the new battery, Momoko and Sue had driven away the remnants of the attacking fleet. There had been at least two Artificers among the fighters, one of whom had reportedly become some form of crab or arachnid while grappling with Momoko; that was new, and creepy, but all that mattered was Momoko sent him packing.

The mechs sustained virtually no damage, which made Eva feel slightly vindicated for her risky choice, but also increasingly weirded out by how overpowered they seemed to be. Sue excitedly told her about how she used a giant blade to slice an engine off the destroyer before Momoko blew it up with an energy weapon, and Min screeched in delight and jealousy, demanding to have the next turn with the mech. As if they hadn’t almost died, and the fate of Earth wasn’t still a horrifying potential disaster looming ahead of them.

Then again, a win like this could do a lot to make the impossible feel like it wasn’t.

Pink and Momoko retreated to the med bay with Leroy, who was slowly coming around with a lot of quiet care. There wasn’t a plan yet for saving Earth, but there was at least intent, and that was the first step toward hope and away from despair.

Vakar threw himself into repairs, and Eva let him. He needed to feel control over something as much as she did, and it was frankly the most useful thing he could do until they had a firmer sense of what their next steps were.

Joe was back in his room. Eva almost would have thought Tito was using him to track their ship, except his access to Artificer intel was a more likely explanation. Antimatter had said they were either using the monoliths to monitor Gate travel or they had some way of accessing the Gate logs directly. And as plans went, hoping your sniper’s ex-girlfriend would whisk him away during a firefight so you could have a mole on the enemy’s ship? It was convoluted and not a little absurd to contemplate. That didn’t mean Joe wasn’t being used, but Eva continued to creep closer to trusting him.

Eva sat in the mess with a tazita of espresso, thinking. Their top priority had to be getting the missing mech back. That meant finding either Miles Erck or the mysterious and strange Smedley, who was so elusive that Vakar had been planted on a random asteroid for weeks in the hopes that he would eventually show up. Of the two, Miles was more likely to surface somewhere, or have left a trail Eva could try to pick up. She could start where she’d dropped him off before the trip to Brodevis, assuming Vakar and Min weren’t able to find more recent information through their usual channels.

“Cap, there’s someone outside looking for you,” Min said over the ship’s speakers. “I think it’s the Proarkhe from before?”

“Antimatter,” Eva said. “I’ll be right there.”

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