by Matt Thomas
The weapons shifted to the right and heard the man yell something that didn't match his actions. Osc squeezed the trigger again, but Lind reacted, slapping the massive arm as hard as he could. The resulting shot caught Suksi in the thigh instead of the chest. Osc lurched towards Lind, which made no sense until he understood what the man was yelling. The same thing that witnesses were yelling. That Lind had just shot the two women. Lind slid out of the way as the other man fell towards him, again using his quickness to beat brute strength. As the man fell, he grabbed Suksi by her arm and pulled her out away from the crowd closing in on the scene of the shooting.
"What the fuck was that?" He shouted.
She moaned, cursing, as he shoved her into a disused emergency stairwell. They made their way deeper into the station, her hobbling down, leaving a trail of blood in spite of her efforts to keep pressure on the wound. In the dim yellow lights, he placed her down on one of the landings. Her leg continued to pulse blood. He removed her belt, tightening it around her thigh until the blood flow slowed to a trickle.
"Donovan was a decent person." He snarled at her.
"So am I." She spoke through gritted teeth. "You think I set this up so he could shoot us both?"
Lind refused to admit out loud that it wouldn't make sense.
"Why the fuck would he do that?"
"Same reason he asked you for that transmitter." She said, taking a cautious look at her wound through her tattered pants. "Vannin probably told him to."
"So you do know who Vannin is."
She let out a long groan as she tried to keep the weight off her now useless leg. "Of course I do." She spat, "He's like a litmus test for people like me who... fuck..." She quickly looked away after seeing the bullet wound. "Who make money on the other side of The Contract. If you don't know who Vannin is, you're not a player."
"So who is he?"
"Vannin's basically you. He's like, a flip side version of you. He's an enforcer keeping everything running under The Contract."
"What is that supposed to mean? We... the Thirty-Twos... make The Contract work."
"Yeah, you're worried about the terms of The Contract. Vannin's worried about the spirit. He keeps the people in power in power. He controls the chaos that you can't touch." She tried futilely to wipe off some blood. The streaks just returned a few seconds later.
"Like what?" Lind ignored her condition, desperate for answers.
"L2H, Sadko, Qinlin, Ephemeris, they all know that every government in history had its dark side, like every economy has a black market. They knew they couldn't sterilize everything. People are too creative for that. Like me. But they wanted to keep their fingers in whatever was going on that guys like you couldn't find or hadn't gotten to yet. So Vannin goes around, makes sure that no one gets too greedy or messes up business too much, he's got a carte blanche to do whatever the fuck he wants. You'll never get a call because some dude got thrown out an airlock on Vannin's say-so. You ever have someone get killed or something got destroyed, you head to wherever only to get called off and have it ruled a suicide or accident? That's Vannin. Chances are there was something really dirty that needed to get done, he got it done, and everyone keeps making shit loads of cash. The system keeps revolving. But if Vannin asks you to do something. You fucking do it. Fast."
"Why does he do it?"
"I would imagine he gets paid ridiculous sums of money."
"No, I mean . . ."
"I'm not his fucking counselor." She snapped, her words echoing off the bulkheads. "I've met the guy exactly once for about fifteen seconds. All I know is I was scared shitless."
"What did he want?"
She shook her head. "I'm still scared shitless, Michaels."
"So why would he spend all these resources coming after me?"
"You're probably upsetting the balance somewhere."
The could hear shouts several stories up. Someone pounded on the door, but it didn't open. "It's not going to take long for people to start looking in here." He said.
"Look, you get me down to the lower docks, and I'll make sure you get off this moon. That'll be our trade."
He leaned down and threw her arm over his shoulder, shoving her to her feet. "Saving your life up there didn't do it?"
"It doesn't do me any good if you leave me here to die in this stairwell, does it?"
They struggled down several more flights, pausing as the hacker caught her breath and complained about the pain in her left leg and numbness in her right.
"I don't supposed you know someone who can fix you?" Lind asked.
"Yeah." Was all she managed. "Just get me to the docks."
The temperature dropped with each set of stairs. Once water started condensing on the metal walls, they knew they were close. Lind slammed into the door repeatedly before it's rusted hinges gave way, and he stumbled into an alleyway that reeked of fish. "Do you have any idea where we are?" He asked.
"Yeah," she said, breathing much harder than she had when their descent began. "We're near where they offload the subs of all the cheap harvest that just gets killed and mashed up."
"Where to now?"
She pointed to the right where Lind could see men and women crossing a busy intersection. He followed her guidance until he found himself surrounded by fishermen, staring straight ahead as they lugged crates of dead animals on their shoulders. "There's a medic station down here on the left."
"You sure you want to go there?"
"I know a guy."
Sure enough, she did. As soon as Lind dragged her in, for the first time since they emerged on the level people seemed to notice her. One man in particular, with rings around his eyes and a dirty pair of scrubs, rushed over calling her by name. They spoke in rapid Cantonese. He nodded, eyes darting back and forth to Lind. Lind transferred Suksi's weight to the medic who escorted her into the back.
"Wait." Lind called. She convinced the medic to stop moving. "What about our deal?"
She waved him over, and Lind leaned his head close to hers. "Stay down here, and tomorrow morning, go to pier forty-two. I'll have a kid named Bo waiting for you. He can get you to the surface and then off-world." She whispered.
"Do you trust him?"
She shook her head. "No, but he's not going to know who he's waiting for."
"Thanks. Take care."
"Go fuck yourself." She managed a smile before disappearing into the back.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The night passed slowly, as Lind wandered around the docks, trying not to establish a pattern, hoping he could blend in with his pale complexion and without reeking of fish. He looked over his shoulder instinctively, jumped when loud noises broke through the steady hum of a fishery at work. At one point he retreated into the stairwell that had brought him there, sitting on the metal stairs in the near dark while his heart pounded. Fear kept him from going anywhere else, fear he would miss his opportunity and fear that someone would recognize him. That no one had followed them down the stairwell perplexed him all night.
The tide of people changed as the night shift left and the day shift arrived. He had no specific time, just a dock number and instructions to meet a young man. So, much earlier than perhaps was practical, he went to the dock and waited. Unlike the other industrial areas he had wandered during the night, this one remained empty and isolated from the passages carrying constant deliveries of food and materials from elsewhere on the moon. Set aside from the main thoroughfare, Lind wondered what the pier was designed for if not regular traffic. He'd heard of shuttles that went from the depths of the moon through the ice for special deliveries. Maybe he qualified.
Eventually, a few crew members arrived, pushing carts filled with servicing equipment down the long, narrow hallway that, at the moment, lead nowhere. Several cast glances in Lind's direction, but no one spoke to him. No one looked young enough to match the Suksi's not-so-detailed description of "kid." From the looks of things, a ship would dock shortly and Lind was just some passer-by in the
way.
Someone tapped on his shoulder as he watched them unload. A young man, perhaps twenty, stared up at Lind. With a remarkably clean jumpsuit and nothing in his hands, he looked as out of place as Lind. "Are you here to see me?" The boy asked.
"I think so. Are you Bo?"
The contact nodded. "Wait here, please." Before he explained anything, the boy turned around and walked away, leaving Lind standing as lost as he had been a moment before.
Now, Lind worried. He had made contact, yet nothing happened. He swayed from side to side, cracking his knuckles and trying to watch everything around him at once. Minutes went by, and yet the pier got more busy. He was looking over his shoulder, away from the main concourse towards the end of the pier, when, as though some unspoken instruction had flowed to all the workers, they stopped what they were doing, no matter the stage of completeness, and vacated the pier. Lind watched, staring down the pier hoping to catch a glance of whatever they ran from.
"Agent Michaels."
The voice, unfamiliar to Lind, came from behind. The man standing there, the boy, and another anonymous figure standing behind him at a respectful distance, kept his hands clasped behind his back, his lip curled up in a hint of a smile. Under other circumstances, Lind might think him to be a hotelier of some kind, checking to make sure Lind's exile was satisfactory. The curl in his long brown hair tucked behind his ear. Nothing about him screamed threat or violence. The man remained calm. Had he not seen the same face captured in the security video from the Guppy whose crew he had slaughtered.
Lind didn't respond verbally. Meeting John Vannin face-to-face sucked the energy right out of him. His shoulders rotated forward. His eyelids drooped. The exhaustion from the previous weeks, the sleepless nights, the paranoia and anger going back to Kay bleeding out in his chair while air rushed out of their ship, burst through. The exploding Marlin, the mole planted on his own ship, his flight under the frozen surface of the moon, couldn't help him avoid the moment. Even though it was only a few feet from his right hand, the hatch leading to the black ocean might as well have been on Earth.
"I'd like to talk." Vannin said.
The thought just appeared. It may have been anger, it may have been a certain sense of logic, but it was not depression. No matter how much hope he had lost, no matter how he felt that all of his herculean efforts had failed him and that he was out of tricks. He didn't lunge for the emergency hatch release because Lindsey Michaels, former Special Agent appointed under Article Thirty-Two of The Contract, had given up. Lind told himself that as he did that, using one stiff-arm to deflect Vannin and the other the reach for the perforated glass next to the nearby hatch, jamming his fingers as he broke through and grasped the lever behind it. He fell, using all of his weight to yank down on the mechanism. The hatch cracked only slightly, but that was enough.
Water, far below freezing, sprayed through, some freezing at the drop in pressure into icy particles, most tearing into the gateway. If alarms blazed, Lind couldn't hear over the roar. He got a glimpse of Vannin's minions running away, but lost sight of the man himself as the foam and spray enveloped Lind. The pressure and buoyancy knocked him off his feet, and he tumbled. Arms, legs, and head slammed into bulkheads. He kept trying to keep his eyes open, even as the cold and the water sucked the air out of him. As the tunnel vision closed in, he kept searching, hoping to find confirmation that at least Vannin would go with him.
But all he could see was white.
Then black.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Awake. Not dead.
Lind figured the pain meant he wasn't dead. It existed, for one. It wasn't enough for one supernatural post-death option and too much for another.
Something clicked and whirred. A fan. The skin on his arms and back dimpled. Hairs stood on end. An efficiency blanket, really a panel of flimsy yet expensive plastic, crinkled over his nude body. He felt blisters down his throat into his lungs, and it burned to breathe. Something hummed in the background, a slight vibration. The tug holding him to the table tingled like artificial gravity.
His eyes stung, with light bleeding through his eyelids. So he opened them. After the initial blast of light faded, his vision resolved.
If he stretched his arms, which he had no desire to do, he could have touched the cabinets lining either side of the small room. He recognized some shapes as testing and analysis equipment. An airlock jutted out from the bulkhead; a retractable airlock.
Lind woke up on a Mako. Just like his. The phantom Mako. This compartment, the one on the top deck behind the cockpit running along the starboard side, would have held all of his forensic and investigation equipment. Instead, it held an unfamiliar hodge-podge of electronic devices he had never seen. He wondered how many of them came from Suksi's shop.
His clothes were piled in the corner. The contents of his pockets set out upon the counter top. The quantum transmitter hung on a peg by the airlock. Towards the forward end, the hatch remained open to the central corridor. Lind could hear nothing outside but the ship's functions. Lind tensed his muscles to sit up.
Lighting shot through his back, twisting and contorting his spine. He squirmed and writhed, doubtlessly letting out as much of a cry as his raw airway would allow. His muscles pulsed as they contracted, sucking away his breath until he could no longer tell how much pain he was in.
Lind kept his eyes squeezed closed and didn't want to open them again. He reached towards the small of his back, feeling a small block covered in tape. He touched it, and the shocks started again until he passed out.
At least, Lind thought he passed out. It didn't matter if he did. He remained on the table, in pain, cold but also sweating. The shocks had made their point. He wasn't to move until permitted to.
"Hey!" Lind shouted. His voice bounced off the metal bulkheads.
"Vannin!" He tried again when he got no response.
The hatch swung shut, operated remotely from the cockpit. Lind thought back to his last voyage on his own ship and wished he had had a similar feature. It could have kept that Hitchhiker under better control. It wouldn't have changed the ending, but it may have made those weeks of travel more bearable if he could have trapped the man somewhere and forgotten about him for a day or two.
After some experimenting, Lind discovered he could shift and roll to his side, but the sensor only went off when he tensed his core enough to sit up. So he carefully found a comfortable position, kept his eyes closed, and tried to stay warm in the slight chill. A perfect captive would have planned an escape, or taken some kind of effort to get the jump on his captor. But Lind was too tired. The drastic action he had taken down on the moon failed in every conceivable way. Coming-to on a ship that may as well have been alien, knowing what he did about his sociopathic captor, had not increased his optimism. Instead, he wished the crushing, freezing water had done what he'd intended it to do.
So he waited, shivering, mitigating the pain as much as possible.
Finally the door opened, and John Vannin entered so relaxed he may as well have been walking into his living room. In a way, Lind supposed, he was. The man wore nothing more sinister than a loose-fitting set of coveralls, just like ones Lind had worn so many times. He leaned against the airlock and stared down at his prisoner.
"Sorry it took so long. I had to get us out of atmosphere and away from the moon." Ran a hand through his hair and stifled a yawn.
"Why am I here?" Lind asked, wheezing through his dry mouth.
"I need to know what you know, and whom you've told what you know." Vannin responded. "You've tracked down a lot of information in a short time, and I need to know what damage control I need to do. If I'd let you drown, like those other poor kids down there on the station - nice job by the way, that was the closest attempt in a long time. It was ballsy; it's too bad all those others had to die for you to fail. Anyway if I'd let you drown, then I wouldn't know what, if anything I had to do next. So you're here."
"Torture's not very effective."
>
"I don't want you to tell me something I don't already know. I know a great deal about what you've been doing. More importantly, I don't want anyone else to know what's happened. So if you lie, or you're wrong, it doesn't matter to me. It only matters to me if you're right. So, I guess you could give me the run down now, save yourself some pain."
"And, what, you drop me off at the nearest station? Thirty-Twos come pick me up and lock me in some cell for a bunch of murders you framed me for?"
"Let's be fair. I only framed you for one murder, and that wasn't even my idea. That was Suksi's minion showing a little initiative, part of side-gig helping anti-corporate terrorists, no doubt. I'll take care of that later. You, however, did kill everyone else."
"The Hitchhiker. Whatever his name is... was. Parker. I didn't kill Parker. He threw himself out the airlock rather than talk to me because he was afraid of you."
Vannin raised his eyebrows just enough. "See, that's interesting. You told me something I didn't know after all. I hadn't gotten a chance to go through your ship's surveillance when I showed up on the moon. You just saved that kid's family. Good job. But to get back to your original question, my plan is to see if you'd be interested in helping me out. You were pretty good at tracking down the leads you did, you were pretty ruthless on the station, drowning everyone and potentially even yourself just to get to me. Finding out you didn't kill Parker is a bit of a letdown, of course."
"I wouldn't do that."
"Do what? Kill those people. But you did..." Vannin grinned, almost like a tease.
Lind shook his head. "Do whatever it is you do."
