by T Q Chant
Sam started to relax. This wasn’t normal – it was so far beyond normal – but the guys were starting to loosen up a bit.
Well, two of them were. Fassetti maintained a stony silence from his seat by the door, watching her with dark eyes.
“What do we do now?”
“Can’t send a distress signal, what with the sat being down. The hopper ain’t jSpace capable. We’re kind of stuck until the next supply run comes through.”
The sat being down. Sam had used the system, had sent a distress call. Maybe Cho and the others hadn’t realised it was still functional. She opened her mouth to say that she’d already covered the comms, then closed it again as her mind flashed to the system she’d cracked wide open and then left unlocked. Some of the software she’d used was wholly, deeply illegal. Maybe right now wasn’t the best time to mention she’d got into it. There was only so far her little lie about getting access codes would go – there was no way they would have handed out the codes to the long-range comms, and Cho would know that.
But why the hell lie about the sat being down?
Unless Traver had been lying about the sat still being there, if he didn’t want to bother with the extra paperwork and had just assumed situation normal on the planet. Satellites failed and fell out of the sky for perfectly natural reasons, after all.
“Yes, deputy?”
Realising Cho was speaking to her, she started. “That could be more than a standard year, sir.”
“Yes, yes it could. Unless the fact we didn't handshake the lugger caused any concern?”
“Nah – everyone just assumed the system was faulty, didn’t even look to see if the satellite was still there.”
“And yet they landed you anyway.”
“You know the regs, Marshal. Lugger’s job was to drop me off. Fuel and supply margin meant hit safe maximum distance and shoot me at the planet. Fuckers.”
“Thought I did know the regs, apparently they've changed since our last supply of fresh blood was delivered.” Cho watched her with her completely unexpressive eyes.
Rule #4 – When you’ve lied, stick with the lie. “Yeah, that one surprised Traver too. He wasn’t keen on handing the codes over.”
Cho snorted, relaxed in her chair. Relaxed a little, anyway. “Corp policy never really made sense, and we’re always the ones who suffer,” she said mildly, putting her boots up on the desk.
Sam nodded with as much enthusiasm as she could muster, unable to shake the feeling that she was being tested. “But, hey, it’s a pay cheque and we all signed up for it.”
Fassetti made a soft noise, somewhere between a snort and a sigh. She caught him and Okafor exchanging a significant look.
“We’d best crash out,” Cho said, her flat voice cutting across any further discussion. “Long day tomorrow. Everyone pick a bunk.”
**********
Sam couldn’t say why, but that night was probably the worst night of sleep she’d had since finding the freezer full of severed heads. Maybe it was relief at finally finding other people, or rather being found by them – even a week of isolation had done fucked up things to her head.
“Yeah, keep telling yourself that, Sam,” she muttered as she dressed. Maybe it was just not sleeping in the cell – she’d bunked in Cho’s ready room. Plus the guys had been active in the night, going in and out of the building, she assumed walking a patrol, and they hadn’t tried to be quiet about it.
She had to admit to herself, though, that there was just something a bit off about Cho and Fassetti. Okafor seemed ok, but obviously quite in awe of the Marshal.
“What’s the plan for today?” she asked over their breakfast of nutrient gruel and compressed coffee.
“We need to secure the colony site so that we can start bringing people back in, at least to carry out salvage work. Still not sure if we’ll return here or re-establish at the secondary site.”
“Which means catching whoever it is running around out there.”
“Correct, Deputy. Bring them in or bring them down.”
“They could be one of your own people, Marshal.” She gave Cho a level, assessing look. “I assume our main effort will be to bring them in voluntarily?”
“They could be one of our people gone mad, or someone marooned by the raiders,” Cho shot back, obviously ruffled by being challenged. “But we’ll follow policy.”
“Let me reach out using the announcer. Already got through to them once like that, I think.”
“They give you the codes to that as well?” Fassetti's voice was a harsh whisper; she couldn’t quite work out if that was put on or whether his vocal chords had been damaged somehow. It was the first time he’d spoken in her earshot.
“Nah, it had been left unlocked,” she replied, gambling that the public announcement system would have been outside their jurisdiction.
“Fucking civvies,” Cho grunted. “And no, no reaching out. We’ll do a standard grid search of the buildings. Cane, stick with me as you don’t know the site. Okafor and Fassetti, start at this end and work towards the middle, we’ll do the opposite.”
“That’ll take forever, Chief!” Sam protested. “We should try to talk whoever it is in.”
There was a cold silence in the room. Sam met Cho’s unblinking stare. “If they wanted to come in, they would have. They also probably wouldn’t have left a threatening message in a freezer full of dead folk. We will do it my way, Deputy, and you will not argue with me again.”
Sam looked away with a mumbled ‘sure thing’. “I’ll get kitted up.”
Cho maintained a stoic silence as they walked out to the initial point for the search, not far from the wooden shack. “One building at a time, you clear and I’ll backstop.” She almost smiled when Sam opened her mouth to question why she had to do the hard work. “Benefits of command.”
Sam pushed into the first block, Enforcer up even though she had absolutely no expectation of seeing anyone. Standard policy though.
“Remember, check your corners!” Cho called after her, a note of malicious amusement in her voice.
“Stranded lightyears from anywhere civilised, and it’s the same old shit with the boss.”
It took her twenty minutes to go through the building meticulously, room by room, senses strung right out, nervous despite herself that she would come face-to-face with some raider bastard. She’d had a cursory look through most of the buildings in her hunt for supplies, but this was different. She was forced to immerse herself in abandoned lives as she went through the tiny, identical apartments and see the ways in which their former inhabitants had tried to make them unique, take possession of the space. Pictures, throws, an attempt or two at art using indigenous materials.
Before they came here, those leaving their old lives behind to get new soil under their feet would have had to make hard decisions. Costs of boosting stuff out of a gravity well and shipping it over lightyears were not inconsiderable. Each colonist, each family, would have had a tiny mass allowance for non-vital personal items. If anyone had been in the same place for any length of time, much of what would have accreted about them would have been sold or given away, only the most precious things being carefully packed into crates.
It had all been abandoned in a rush, value lost in the mad dash to stay alive.
Sam was physically and emotionally exhausted by the fifth building. “This is getting us nowhere fast,” she snapped at Cho.
“Thought you were a security specialist, Cane?” the chief asked casually, leaning up against the wall. She touched her earbead. “Go ahead, Fassetti.”
Sam took a pace away from the Marshal without looking away from her. There was something in the studiously casual posture, in the way that she stared into the distance while listening to her deputy, that put Sam right on edge.
Cho glanced at her, eyes unreadable.
“What’re you waiting for, Deputy?” Cho asked, breaking into her thoughts and gesturing towards t
he entrance to the next block with the muzzle of her pistol.
She nodded, jerkily, trying to behave normally. Straight through and out the back. She was pretty sure the colony site was big enough that she could keep ahead of them, could stay hidden until off-world support arrived. Commsat destroyed, my arse.
“Remember the corners,” Cho growled from the doorway as she went in. She didn’t trust herself to speak, just nodded sharply and made a show of going around a corner using full tactical movement, kicking open the first door and sweeping the apartment within.
She stopped dead in her tracks. Written on the wall opposite the door, in the same big red letters, were the words ‘I told you to run!’
She spun out of the apartment. She saw a dim shape at the far end of the landing, her intended escape route. “That's about far enough,” came Fassetti’s hoarse voice, and then the first round hit her.
CHAPTER FIVE – CAUGHT IN A LIE
“Your main mistake was the lie about being given the access codes,” Cho told her from the other side – the good side – of the cell door. “Honestly, I think I would have found it more believable if you’d claimed that I’d left the system unlocked.”
Cho squatted down to Sam's eye level as, slowly and painfully, she pulled herself up into a sitting position on the cot.
Her whole body hurt, right from the throbbing pulse that pushed at the back of her eyes to the burn as sensation returned to her toes. “So that’s what getting shot with a stuncap is like,” she muttered groggily before forcing her eyes to focus on the security chief on the other side of the clearplex cell door. “What the fuck is going on here, Chief?”
“I was going to ask you the same question. You’re good, whoever you are, but you didn’t think to lock the admin building systems and Okafor was able to work out that you’d cracked them, not used a key. He’s pretty handy with the tech stuff.”
“Whoever I am? You been reading the villain cliché book, Chief? You know who I am.”
“Seems to me that you’re the only villain here. The ware you used to crack our systems was pretty sophisticated, and I’m guessing wholly illegal.”
Sam watched the Marshal carefully, biting back on a number of things she wanted to point out, things she knew Cho had lied about. She didn’t want to let on exactly how much she knew, and right now Cho seemed to be in a sharing mood. Okafor being the tech expert of the trio was a useful piece of information.
Cho pulled her pad out of a pocket. “What’s the pass code for this?”
Sam shrugged. “Seem to have forgotten it, Chief. Must be the aftereffects of the stuncap.”
“In a few minutes, Fassetti is going to come in here and he’s going to help you remember. Meanwhile, Okafor is going to try to crack this open. We’ll see which breaks first.”
She smirked inwardly at the idea that Okafor could break the encryption, but kept her expression neutral. Then the implication of the first part of Cho’s statement sunk in. “Are you seriously telling me that you’re going to have one of your security specialists beat on another one?”
“You’re not one of my deputies.”
“I am Security Specialist Samrit Cane Kokhani. I admit I used illegal software to access some systems in the colony, but fuck’s sake Chief, I found the place empty. I was just trying to survive!”
“Survival is not the be-all and end-all, and we shall see if you are truly who you say you are.” Cho stepped very close to the door, close enough that if the solid block of material wasn’t between them, Sam would have had a damn good go at ripping her throat out. “And whoever you are, you are not one of my deputies.”
Something in her eyes, the tone of her voice, made Sam shrink back against the wall of the cell.
Cho turned and strode away, Sam’s precious pad in hand, leaving her to her fear.
Except she wasn’t going to give the fuckers the satisfaction of showing it. The fear was there alright – no sane person wouldn’t be scared at a time like this. Either way she cut it, it looked bad. Her best hope was this was just a case of mistaken identity, that these guys were out for some vigilante justice, payback on someone they’d decided was in league with the raiders. And all she needed to do was convince them otherwise.
The other options did not bear thinking about. Sam glanced up at the pixer located over the door to the cell block. The running light was dark – odd that they hadn’t reactivated the systems. Come to think of it, they didn’t seem to have the remote locking system on the cell doors active – just a shame they had fully functional manual locks.
She stood, stretched, loosened her shoulders and took stock. She was down to her jumpsuit and boots – the rest of her gear was piled up with the supplies she’d left in the neighbouring cell, with the conspicuous absence of her Enforcer.
Her pack was there, though. Pressing herself up against the cell wall, she gave it a careful visual once over. Everything looked intact, including the sensor suit she had grafted onto its primitive computer brain on day three. The visual sensors were aimed away from her. She tapped on the wall. Nothing. Tap a little bit louder. Still nothing.
“What are you trying to do, Cane?” came Fassetti’s menacing snarl behind her.
She spun round, back pressed to the cool plex. The ‘deputy’ had changed out of his issue gear and now wore a close-fitting vest and dark trousers. His arms were roped with stringy muscle and heavily inked.
“So you do believe me when I say who I am?”
He gave her a smile that was almost warm. “Sure, whatever. The Marshal, she’s not sure, which is why I’m here.” The smile went as suddenly as it had come as he closed the door behind him. She doubted that was the only reason he was there.
She slid along the wall, hopped up onto the low cot to give herself a little bit of elevation. She hated this bit; she’d never had much time for physical violence.
“The fuck is going on here, Fassetti?”
He lashed out almost casually, blindingly fast, his open hand catching her cheek and toppling her sideways. “Curse not,” she heard him say through the ringing. Blood tasted iron in her mouth. “What is happening, Cane, is that we are going to get to the bottom of who you are and why you are here.” He righted her, patted her jumpsuit straight. He seemed – dispassionate. She was pretty sure the damsel in distress gambit wasn’t going to work here.
She tried to rise, but he shoved her back down, hard. “Now the Marshal, she thinks you’re going to break pretty easily. I think you are stronger than she realises, and I hope you’re going to prove me right.”
She squirmed out of his grasp, backed up as far as the opposite wall. The noise of the blows and her shouting had breached the threshold for the pack’s audio sensors and it had whirred into life. “Man, you must have disengaged your safety protocols,” she shouted.
He looked at her quizzically. “I do this out of love, Sam,” he said, his voice quiet. “I do this so you may find yourself anew in the fragments of yourself.”
She managed to block the first two blows, elbows tucked in to her chest and hands up over her face as he came in with a one-two-three. Number three connected with her ribs, winding her and knocking her sideways.
She wasn’t going to take it lying down, came off the wall with a kick aimed at his kneecap, jab towards his eyes. She wasn’t a fighter by inclination, but she’d been around enough people who were to pick up the basics.
Her first attack he stepped away from, the second he blocked, caught her wrist and threw her clean off her feet, sending her spinning into the far wall. Something popped in her shoulder and she screamed, dropped as the fist came in again. He didn’t make a noise as he punched hardplex, grunted as she rolled under him and kicked him in the side of the knee. She screamed when his boot caught her up in the midriff, driving what wind she had recovered out of her with a gasping sob.
He straightened, giving her time to recover herself enough to pull herself up. She wiped tears from her eyes,
spat bloody phlegm to the side. “Love, huh?”
“I looked into myself, and accepted who I am. I have a gift, and out of love I use it.”
“Gone nuts, more like,” she snarled. She knew that would earn her a blow, was too slow to get out of the way. Stars exploded behind her eyes, more blood flowed. She heard more than felt her nose break. “Son of a bitch, that's going to ruin my good looks.” She grinned at him through the blood, which actually gave him pause. “To my biomet, crash response!” she shouted suddenly.
The pack – its safety protocols disengaged at her previous command – hit the adjoining wall of the cell at speed. Confused by her cry, Fassetti spun round at the thud.
She took his knees out from under him with both feet, launched herself forward as he went down and knocked him flat, landing hard on his back. “Break my fucking nose, will you?” she grunted. He jackknifed, trying to throw her off, but she rode it and put everything she had into smacking his head against the floor. Blood sprayed as his nose went and she got a proper cry of pain from him. After the third blow he stopped struggling lay under her gurgling.
“Fucker,” she panted. Her heart was crashing in her chest and the room spun around her as she dropped sideways off him and crawled towards the door – the door he hadn’t locked behind him, because his compatriots wouldn’t be able to unlock it remotely if something happened to him in there.
Something like getting the shit beaten out of him by a woman who weighed sixty kilos soaking wet.
He clawed at her ankle and she kicked back savagely, breaking fingers, then pulled herself up and stamped down on his head. “Stay!”
It seemed to take her forever to lever the door open and limp through to the next cell, which mercifully stood open. The pack was still valiantly trying to reach her biomet signature, but its front was so badly crumpled by persistent ramming of the intervening wall the front fan was utterly buggered. She sighed, looked down sadly. She didn’t have time to repair it now. “Deactivate,” she told it, then dove in for the things she needed.
