She must have thought I was struggling too much. “I’ll help if you need me to,” she said, “but it’s better if you can do it yourself.” She’d brought me a dark blue, long-sleeved pull-over. No buttons. Raven had been thoughtful.
She turned away, giving me the privacy I needed to pull off my hospital gown—however clumsily—and wrestle my shirt on.
“We found you near the crash site. If you’d landed any closer, you would have been dragged down to the bottom of the ocean with it. As it was, you were lying there unconscious in a shallow crater. Your drop suit was still intact, but getting you up off of there without the recovery vehicle falling through the ice was a bit of an engineering feat.”
I was busy with the painful procedure of pulling my pants on when she said that, but it still struck me as funny. “I’ll bet it was.”
“That took a few hours, and we didn’t know if we could get you out of there alive or not. The dropship commander was incredibly helpful, despite the fact that he’d just lost two men on this mission. He wanted to know why the ship crashed, and we didn’t know what to tell him at the time. We’ll have to fabricate something for Section 3 so there’s closure if he checks.”
“I didn’t have much of a choice when I threw that grenade. She was about to escape.”
“So you thought, what, I’ll just take out the whole ship and kill all three of us?” She tossed an imaginary grenade and mimed a huge explosion with her hands.
“No, I figured we would survive because of our drop suits. I’d been through much worse in Arbiter gear and walked away perfectly fine. I just didn’t want her to get away.”
“Well, I’m afraid that Arbiter was not as lucky as you were.”
“He was already dead. She shot him with an energy weapon as soon as I threw the grenade. I take it she didn’t make it either?”
“On the contrary. She intercepted an escape pod in flight and boarded it shortly before the crash.”
I laughed at that, my laughter becoming a dry cough that made my head hurt. “I can’t believe she made it.”
“We could say the same for you,” Raven pointed out.
I pulled the pants up the rest of the way and laid back, somehow exhausted. “It honestly pisses me off that two Arbiters had to die, and she still got away. Not to mention this.”
I raised both my arms.
She glanced over in my direction. “You don’t look as bad as all that.”
She came over and adjusted my shirt, pulling the two sleeves out to cover my wrists. “That’s better. The escape pod’s maximum range limits her possible travel vectors. She couldn’t have left the Jovian system, so I wouldn’t say she’s escaped for good.”
“Even so, she’s not a careless woman. We’ll be lucky to find her again.”
“You’re right about that. The fact that you survived an encounter with her is the most impressive thing about this entire story.” I hadn’t realized any part of my story seemed admirable to Raven, but maybe she was just being sarcastic.
“Any idea of who she might have been?”
“We know exactly who she is, thanks to the scan from your dataspike, although we hadn’t expected to see her again. We all thought she was dead. Oh, you have some blood on your face.”
She stood and went back to the counter, where she rifled through the cabinets and pulled out a hand towel. She ran it under the tap to wet it and wrung out the excess.
“Is she some kind of criminal boss I haven’t heard of, something like that?”
Raven sat on the edge of the bed and put her hand to my cheek, then she gently turned my head to get a better angle as she cleaned my face. “Her name is Katerina Capanelli,” she answered. “She’s former Section 9.”
She’d said it so deadpan, I just blinked for a moment, waiting for the punchline to the obvious joke. When she said nothing as if expecting a response on my part, I was at a loss. “Katerina Capanelli,” I repeated.
“Yes, Andrea’s other mother.”
I had certainly not expected to get dragged so deep into Andrea’s personal history. “She did remind me of Andrea, actually. Now that I think about it.”
“They’re not biologically related.”
“That’s not what I mean. It wasn’t really in how she looked, it was more in how she moved. Like Andrea, but, I don’t know. More practiced? Smoother.”
“That fits her reputation. Katerina used to be field commander. Flawless martial skills, impeccable strategic instincts, proficient in psy-ops… she had it all. She’s still a bit of a legend around here.”
“Raven, I had all of my training here when I first joined Section 9. No one said a word about her.”
“They did, though. You just didn’t know it. She wrote the curriculum for half of those classes. When the instructors gave field scenarios, half of those stories were about her.”
I didn’t know what to make of this, but it did account for Katerina’s reluctance to kill Section 9 agents. “So what happened to her?”
“I’m not certain.” Raven shrugged. “Katerina was always somewhat abrasive. I used to interpret her behavior as confidence, but in retrospect I think it was arrogance. She was the best, and she knew it. She had no patience for fools, and in her eyes that was nearly everyone else. Except her daughter Andrea, though there were times when even she failed to meet the standard. Katerina was a hell of an agent, but she wasn’t the easiest woman to work for.”
“Did she go MIA? You said you thought she was dead.”
“Yeah, about two years after I joined Section 9, she disappeared on a mission and was presumed dead. I think Andrea suspected something, or maybe she just wanted closure from knowing exactly what happened, but I believe she investigated Katerina’s disappearance on her own. She didn’t seem surprised when Thomas found her on the dock footage.”
“What did she say?” I asked.
“Nothing. After we brought you back here, Andrea called up the Operator and got Samara Markov cleared to enter the facility. Then she told us she was going to call in a favor and collect a debt. Dr. Markov showed up a day or so later, but there’s been no word from Andrea since then.”
“So, you think the debt was—”
“To track down Katerina.”
I thought back to my first encounter with Katerina, and how effortlessly she had handled us in the ruins of Artorias. “I’m not sure Andrea can handle her alone.”
“Neither am I, honestly. Katerina taught her everything she knows, and I doubt she’s lost a step. I’m a little worried.”
Based on what I’d seen of Katerina’s fighting skills, “a little worried” was a bit of an understatement. If Katerina wanted her daughter dead, it was unlikely we would ever see Andrea again.
“How did Katerina come to be Andrea’s other mother in the first place,” I asked.
“I don’t know the complete story. Andrea is not exactly the most communicative person.”
“That she is not.”
Andrea would sometimes open up to a degree, but only when she was trying to achieve a specific end. If she shared something personal, it was more of a management tactic than anything else. I considered her a friend, but I really wasn’t sure if she saw me the same way.