Eva didn’t stop to get comfortable, instead barging into the cockpit where Vakar was piloting the pleasure vessel. There was only one seat, so she stood behind him and gripped the back of it while she swayed with the motion of their flight.
“Thanks for the rescue, hero,” she said, patting his arm with her still-gauntleted hand.
“I apologize for the delay,” he replied.
“You had to hack their commwall, steal a ship, find us, and bust us out. As far as I’m concerned, I’m lucky I still have all my teeth.”
“I also retrieved the robot and mech from where they were being sequestered.” Vakar paused. “Were your calcified jaw structures in peril?”
Eva grinned. “You have no idea. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
They flew toward the spaceport, the spire of Evident Academy piercing the sky like a gleaming ivory horn, and Eva wondered what the hell they were going to do next, now that their only lead had fallen through.
Vakar ditched the stolen ship at the spaceport, after which Min reconnected to La Sirena Negra and they left Abelgard as quickly as her drives could manage. Sue was overjoyed at seeing her mech again, though she seemed even more pleased that Goyangi more or less belonged to Min now. Still, she immediately set herself up in the cargo bay and began repairing the damage to both units, with help from her squad of tiny yellow bots and with the cats diligently pretending to ignore her. Min hovered around her, chattering excitedly about their victory.
Eva, meanwhile, under Pink’s supervision and with Vakar hovering nearby, had grabbed the briefcase for the Protean armor and attempted to follow the instructions for taking it off. After placing her hand in the appropriate position and issuing the mental command, she waited, as unmoving as possible so the suit wouldn’t liquefy her organs or whatever.
“Error 13,” the suit said, as well as popping up a visual message on the HUD. “Command failure.”
“Qué coño?” Eva muttered, repeating the command. The same error message occurred.
“What?” Pink asked. “What happened?”
“It’s not working.” Eva tried one more time, with the same result. Vakar smelled like tar and incense.
“Hey, Cap,” Min asked. “Where are we headed?”
Eva huffed in exasperation. “Stay in the system for now. Pink and I need to talk it over.”
Pink peered into the optical cameras of the suit as if she could see inside. “Any news from your mama?”
“Nada.” Eva went through her q-mail one more time, but there was nothing waiting from her mom. There also hadn’t been a voice message with any more information about Josh’s trail. She tried calling again, but all she got was a generic “Please leave your name and briefly describe the reason for your call,” at which point she hung up because she didn’t feel like talking to another machine.
“Error 13,” the suit quietly insisted. “Command failure.”
“I heard you the first time,” Eva snapped. “Me cago en la mierda.”
“You will have to remove the suit manually,” Vakar said, his smell intensifying.
“Claro que sí, mi vida,” Eva retorted. “Pero no quiero empezarme con esta puñeta—”
“Maybe we should go to Garilia,” Sue said.
Sue hadn’t spoken loudly, but her words seemed to echo in the cargo bay as if she’d shouted them. Eva stiffened, her shoulders hunching involuntarily as she turned to face the engineer.
“No,” Eva said.
Sue flipped the faceplate of her welding helmet open, her brow furrowed. “Why not?”
“Why would we?” Eva asked, but she wasn’t a fool. Her mind had already spun the same web of connections that Sue proceeded to tick off, but she distracted herself by opening the file with the manual armor-removal instructions and beginning to scroll through them.
“Well, everywhere we’ve gone so far, that Pod Pals company was doing stuff at the same time Josh was there,” Sue said, gesturing with her soldering gun.
“The same could be said about Crash Sisters, and that was a bust,” Eva retorted. A pair of cats twined around her ankles and she shooed them away.
“Leroy didn’t go to Abelgard,” Pink reminded her. Eva scowled, not that anyone could see it under the armor. She continued perusing the instructions, which were apparently in a language that didn’t translate fluidly to any of the ones she spoke fluently. She had a feeling “disconnect elbow with wrench” wasn’t entirely accurate.
“The person in charge of that company went to Evident Academy with Josh, too,” Sue continued. “So they knew each other. I don’t think he knew your friend Leroy or anyone else in Crash Sisters.”
Their new villain for the season was a xana, Eva remembered, to her chagrin. Leroy had said there was talk of product promotion, hadn’t he? For the Pod Pals?
Ball Buddies, she thought, chuckling inwardly despite the rising sense of anxiety making her neck hot and spreading to the rest of her body. Another cat rubbed against her boot, its soothing empathy attempting to counter Eva’s surge of emotion.
“It’s the only lead we have,” Pink said quietly. She laid a hand on Eva’s shoulder and Eva shrugged it off.
“No,” Eva said, more forcefully. “Garilia is cycles from the nearest Gate, and we don’t have time to go chasing after another dead end.”
Sue’s faceplate fell and she propped it back up. “Maybe we could try to contact that president person? What was her name?”
“Lashra Damaal,” Vakar said. Eva wished for a moment that his memory wasn’t so good.
“If she’s president of some big company, we’re not going to be able to just send her a q-mail and get a straight answer,” Eva said. “She’s probably got ten layers of software and underpaid employees sorting through whatever goes to her public account.” She scrolled back to the start of the armor instructions and tried to read them again, not that she was retaining a single word.
“I may be able to locate a private address,” Vakar said. “Min may also have some methods to—”
“Can we just not!” Eva exclaimed. The silence that fell in the cargo bay was broken only by the low rumble of a dozen cats purring simultaneously.
“Do you have other ideas?” Pink asked, her eyebrows rising even as she crossed her arms over her chest. Vakar had started to smell a bit minty; Eva hated that he was getting anxious over this.
“We go back to Abelgard and find Miles Erck,” Eva said. “We make him tell us what he knows, then we airlock him for the good of the universe and go from there.” Her suit’s error blinked at her again, and she wished she could rip the whole helmet off at once to be rid of the damn thing. With her luck, it would take her face off with it.
“And if we can’t find him?” Pink asked. “Last I saw, he was getting hustled out of there by Nara Sumas and her new friend. What if he isn’t even on Abelgard anymore? Or if we do find him and he won’t talk? Because we both know he’s a slimy piece of rotten egg. Or if he talks and his information doesn’t help, then what?”
“We’ll figure that out when we get there.”