“Thanks, Spider…” Marcus growled, not caring how Lash’s shoulders slumped with his words. He turned and headed towards his quarters. “I’ll be tinkering with this, trying to figure out what the TSI was trying to do with it.”
“Sir, there is a section-wide alert, it went live moments ago.”
“What is it, Gideon?” Marcus asked, not even pausing as he continued towards his quarters.
Gideon then turned on an alert. It was a monotone voice repeating the same thing over and over. “The Crawl are active. This entire sector is now under quarantine.”
“What do you mean the Crawl are active?” Marcus shouted at the AI of the ship.
“According to my sensors, the Crawl are active in this area. This is now a quarantine zone.” Gideon’s voice was bright and sunny. For a moment, Marcus wanted to find a computer worm to destroy Gideon’s AI matrix.
Marcus rubbed at his eyes. “This is insane. There were three drones, and they are stuck on the Shelby. Defective. Effectively dead.”
“What do you mean defective?” Lash asked.
“It banged around, unable to move. It came at me, but it was more like those old 2Ds of zombies from Old Earth.” Marcus saw the look of fright on Lash’s face. “It seemed pre-occupied by something. They aren’t that smart.”
“Like the old rage ones?” Lash asked, even the robotic voice was a bit hesitant.
“No, the old, old kind, Romero’s shamblers.” Marcus started to move towards Lash, dragging a foot and groaning. He smiled when she backed away, giving him a revolted sneer.
I truly hate those movies. She frowned at him, trying to keep herself beyond arm’s length of Marcus as he lurched towards her, groaning, “Brrrraaaiiiinnnssss.”
Marcus stopped after a moment. “You get what I mean, right? There were three, and one was defective. Let’s get underway.”
“I don’t think so,” Lash said. “My drones are picking up at least four of them on the Shelby.”
“So, now what?” Marcus shouted from where he stood in the corridor close to his quarters. He held onto the canister and looked at it, and a part of him wanted to smash it open from anger and the other to crack it open to find out what secrets it held. He knew what Gideon was reporting meant they had to cut and run. He also knew the AI would have already reported the sighting to the Martian Defense Force. The Junker would have about two hours to make themselves scarce before they would become a target by the MDF as a potential threat vector. Of the many things he remembered about his former job as an MDF enforcer, neutralizing Crawl threat vectors was the worst. Most of them were just dumb scavengers, or idiot kids thinking they could skirt The Line or a quarantine zone for a chuckle or quick score.
He heard Lash walking towards him, pointing towards the common area. There, she went to the holo-map and keyed in a sequence to start up the map, to display the map of the area of the Belt that Junker worked in currently. It was nicknamed The Sargasso. Hundred of thousands of kilometers wide and even that number was undercutting it. A majority of the pre-Crawl ships lay dormant in the region, no one knew why. All of them drifted to this area and collected in the one region since the Dark Years, and there was no reason for it. The MDF and a few Belter ships kept patrols, yet there was little to spare from The Line to do much. Now, with a quarantine in this sector, the other scrappers and scavengers would have even less to work with. It was something all of his fellow junkologists knew and pondered over as they sat in their taverns and bars, drinking and telling stories about what they found, passing information, truth, and falsehoods for jokes or revenge, to actually paying back a favor. No reason to give all the competition the complete truth all the time.
“What are you showing me?” Marcus asked, looking at the display, rubbing at his left thumb absently before balling up his fist and thumping it to his side.
“This,” she said, stabbing her fingers towards a blue section of the map. When she did, the area expanded, zooming in on a smaller slice of the Sargasso. Then, light yellow, blue, green, and red marks appeared on the holo-display.
Marcus looked it over with a critical eye. It displayed where the Junker had been scavenging for the last several months, he realized. His eyes spotted several junk sites Lash and he’d visited with nothing of value found, marked in yellow. A green site meant a potential target. A blue light was something they’d found potential and wanted to go back to investigate later. The last one was a broken dreadnought that Marcus had thought would have more ordinum. His thumb started to burn for a heartbeat then stopped. “What exactly are you showing me?”
“See how the blue sites and the green are closer together?” Lash asked.
“Yeah, we found a few things we need to go back to. You said so yourself, we were going to hit the outliers first,” Marcus said, releasing his marked hand from the too-tight fist. The pain was starting to burn more and more, and the time of relief was shortening. Why is the formula failing so soon?
“There is a concentration of them here,” Lash said, pointing to the cluster of about ten dots, half green and half blue. “This,” she said, pointing to one green dot which expanded it. “Is the Shelby.”
The dot turned blue.
“Wait, why did you change it to blue?” Marcus asked.
“There were things there that looked of interest to me,” Lash said. “Even through your helmet captures. I spotted—"
Marcus rolled his eyes. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because you were busy with the Crawl drone,” Lash sent with a smirk on her lips.
Marcus shut his jaws with a click. He indicated that she should continue.
Lash gave him a nod. She then took out a laser pointer and started to move it from one blue dot to another. “Do you remember what I said about these three ships?”
Marcus thought back. He was stymied for a moment, then looked up, “Something about them all being pre-Crawl.”
“Right. I thought they would be the safest to hit, and they were.”
“And, we found some good stuff there. But, what does this have to do with—”
“I’m getting to that,” Lash said. She took a breath. “Each of them also had some Crawl activity on them after we left.”
Marcus cocked his head. “I didn’t see any.”
“Not that kind of activity,” she said. She then tapped the side of her pale temple. “There were impressions left behind by Crawl drones, and there was something odd about them.”
Marcus snapped his attention back to Lash. “Wait… Why didn’t you say anything?”
“Say what? ‘Oh Marcus, you know I am feeling like there are Crawl around. Perhaps we should be more careful?’”
“Yes!” Marcus shouted. “Freaking slagging Spider! You could’ve warned—"
She winced. “No need to shout,” she said, shrinking away slightly.
Marcus groaned and settled a moment. “Look. We have a probe that is probably worth lots of money. We need to get out of here and head to Jupiter and—”
“That isn’t possible,” Lash said a cutting gesture.
“Why not?”
“The quarantine zone extends for two AUs that way. If we fly through it, we are, as you like to say, slagged.”
Marcus rubbed at his face. His left hand started throbbing, making it harder to concentrate. “So, you are saying we can only plot a course to Mars to be safe?”
Lash nodded. “Looks like.”
“Well, wonderful,” Marcus said. “I hate Mars.”
“And the planet doesn’t care for you either,” Lash said with a half-smile.
Marcus gave her a sidelong glance. “Oh, it does. It hates me too.” He rolled his head back and forth. His neck was hurting from the sudden strain to his body. He needed to relax. And get that formula worked out. “I need to rest. Can you—"
“How do you know?”
“Know what?” Marcus asked.
Lash looked at him critically. “How do you know the planet Mars hates you?”
“Sir, yes sir,” Lash said with a mocking smirk and saluted.
“Funny,” Marcus said.
“Always,” Lash sent with a smile. The smile was cold and didn’t touch her eyes.
Marcus rolled his eyes and stalked off, ripping off the gloves of his space suit as he entered his quarters. “Be in my quarters for a while. Hit me up when its chow time.”
Chapter Five
Marcus looked down at his tablet and frowned at the picture of his ex that appeared as the screensaver. He’d saved the picture from one of the few times they had actually had fun together on a vacation to Gods’ Home in the shadow of Olympus Mons. Marcus was trying to tickle her as Lisa laughed, pulling away from him, her blonde locks dancing in the light of the dome. The next image showed Lisa coming towards him with a pillow, her tongue sticking out as she “snuck up” on him. He closed his eyes before seeing himself from five years back, kissing her in his new MDF uniform before he went on his first patrol.
Without looking, he swiped at the tablet to banish the images and reveal the course of Junker. The large red blotch of Mars as the endpoint of the course plotted made him sneer more. Never wanted to go back there, he thought. With the Jovian system out of his reach for the moment and the Belt a cluster of factions and splinter groups that survived off rock drilling and barely clung to life, it was the only place to go. No one else had the ability to utilize, or even afford, the tech. With the Jovian system cut off, there was only one place.
Mars.
“Slagging Hells, I hate that planet.” He slipped a finger over his tablet to banish the course of the Junker to show his list of contacts on Mars. The tablet had the last info on the various dealers in stolen tech he had cobbled together from before he left Mars, he’d hoped for the last time. He always thought he’d never need it. Better to have and not need, he thought when he’d left three years ago. He’d been with Lash for half that time. He’d kept in contact with Hazon, the partial owner of Junker, but had been dodging him recently. Marcus hoped to get enough credits to stay off Mars and maybe try for a Jovian colony once they were done with this run. Wherever he could go that was far from the Eridani.
There was something that still bothered him about Lash. Something never felt completely right. With her reluctance to tell him about the Crawl, her supposed inability to sense them sounded like so much dross, and he was having second thoughts about this partnership. It wasn’t the first time, yet there was something about this time that rang hollow to him. At first, he thought it was the fact she was an Ilas, the Eridani name for a myth used by the peppermint freaks when creating the hybrid project. Marcus knew his bad feeling was something else. After months of teaching her techniques for scavenging and learning new ones from her, the thought drifted away. Something didn’t feel right with the recent chain of events. Couldn’t they have found a drifter colony in the Belt for safety? Nemesis and Vesta weren’t outside the realm of possibilities, according to his calculations. Lay low on a Belter drift colony, then beg, borrow, or steal fuel to get to the Jovians after a month or more. Lash had said otherwise, and Marcus was trusting her more and more with those calculations. But then he was never as good as she was at fuel costs. With astrogation, they were both on par with each other. Hence, he still let her pilot while he dealt with other issues.
Besides, he was just the scavenger—junkologist—he corrected himself, loving the self-given name he’d come up with. Made him sound more professional, classier.
Deep down, he knew the real reason he didn’t want to go back to Mars. Well, reasons. Lisa… and the Eridani.
His hand felt a sudden flare of burning pain, as though he shoved his hand into a fire. The burning and throbbing came with each heartbeat. As he balled up his hand, he knew he couldn’t put it off much longer. Coming closer together, within an hour of each other. Don’t have much time. He was about to stand when the door chime went off, and Lash walked in.
“I could have been busy,” Marcus said, looking up with a sour look. “You should wait until I give you permission to—"
Lash shook her head. “I’ve caught you jerking off before. Besides, I peeped a touch—only a touch—to make sure you weren’t indisposed this time. You’re worried about going back to Mars.” Her voice had the same tinny quality even off the comms. Her face pinched up. “And, you’re in pain. Marcus, what—"
Marcus could tell she didn’t like the voice, but he didn’t want her in his head. “Yeah, because we have to go back to Mars,” he said while shoving his mind-worm in place.
“You think I want to go back to Mars? My kind are still shot on sight in most cities.”
Marcus opened his mouth to brush her off when she said, “Something about that probe,” she said, her eyes flicking to it to change the conversation.
“What?” Marcus asked, glad for the change.
“Something about it gives me the jimmies.”
“The what?” Marcus asked, raising an eyebrow.
“The creeps? The shakes? Something is weird about that thing, and it makes me feel uncomfortable.”
“Already noted, Lash. You just don’t like much pre-Crawl tech.”
“Uh-huh,” Lash said, looking at him and then at the vox box on her chest. “Sure. I hate some of it. Only because it’s such an enigma that I doubt anyone will figure out what half this stuff is.”
Marcus shrugged. “It gets us creds. You call into Jeff? Make sure the weasel knows about—”
“Yeah, Jeff has been warned to divert our signal.”
There was a spike of pain, and Marcus gritted his teeth. “What is this—”
“Tell me about the pain.”
Marcus shook his head. “You should be in the cockpit, monitoring things. The moment the Junker kisses the first buoy, he’s going to know I’m headed back.” Not to mention her. “Please Lash, I need—"
“You really think Hazon is going to do anything except demand his cut?”
“It’s been six months. Can’t really fake not getting messages when I’m at his back door,” Marcus said, taking a deep breath. He walled off his mind to the worst of the pain, but he still felt his hand shaking in his pocket.
“I’m sure you’ll think of something,” Lash said. “You’re better at—”
Marcus’ hand throbbed with an intense burst of pain. He growled, “Why are you—”
Lash held out the small vial of dark off-blue and green dust, her face twisting in a sneer. “You wanted more of this, didn’t—”
Before she finished, he snatched it from her hand. “Yes. Holding out on me?” His voice strained. The spike of pain drove all other thought from his mind. He yanked out the small rack of chemicals he’d used for fighting the little nano-bastards, chemicals scraped and stolen from places in the ship, from food concentrate, and from other wrecks they’d salvaged. He had already created a tincture of dark-green syrupy liquid. It was an amalgam of dozens of chemicals that Marcus learned, through trial and error, helped prevent Eridani tech from working properly. Adding a few pinches of the ordinum made a slurry the color of raw adobe. Here goes nothing.
Pulling out the small injector rod from the lab table, he slapped the vial with the concoction into the device. There was a hiss, and the light on the injector went from red to green. It meant the vial’s seal had been punctured and was ready to be injected. Marcus’ hand spasmed with pain. “Bout damn time,” he muttered. He paused, looking at Lash. He wanted to chase Lash out, but she had helped him and collected the ordinum more often than he wanted to admit. And she’d saved him from the drone earlier. He shoved away his worry and looked at her as she was about to leave. “You can stay.”
“You sure?” She asked, cocking an eyebrow ridge. “You’ve always chased me out before.”
He sighed. “Yeah. Just a small injection,” he said, biting back the pain. “Stick around and see.”
“Ilas aren’t very comfortable around medical tech of any kind, really,” Lash said, her eyes flittering from one apparatus to another in his quarters, trying to look at anything to avoid looking at Marcus or what was in Marcus’ hand. “Bad memories,” she said with a small shiver.
“I’m sure,” Marcus said. He brought the injector tip down towards his inner wrist, kissing his flesh. Without looking, he pushed the button and felt the nanosecond of pain as the cocktail of ordinum and a handful of other chemicals surged into his bloodstream through a small, self-closing seam created by pressure. There were seven heartbeats before his hand felt as if he dipped it in acid. He grimaced yet didn’t say anything. It is only a sensation, he told himself over and over. Only a sensation. He watched as Lash looked at him, a look of horror on her face. “I suggest you not peep at the moment,” he said as the pain started to wane.
“Too late,” she said, her face twisting with sympathetic pain.
“What did you see?” Marcus said, grabbing at her with his left hand, the injector dropping to the deck, ignored.
She tried to cringe back, but he caught her wrist before she could move, pulling her closer. She was taller and lanker, but not as strong as Marcus.
“What did you see?” He shouted the question.
Looking at him, Lash’s face twisted with a shocked, pained look stamped on her face, then a look of abject horror hit her. She sent, “The Eridani. Why are they in your—"
Marcus grunted and shoved her backwards, hard. “Do you know what the Eridani say they are to humanity?”
“They are Saviors to the human race.” Her voice was monotone, spouting the lie told to all children born after the Long Night. Marcus thought he detected a trace of sarcasm in the robotic voice as she spoke.
“They’re fakes and cheats. Liars and worse, they gave humanity false hope.” Marcus said, flopping backwards onto his bed, a sudden weariness overcoming him from the injection. “They aren’t the great and powerful Saviors of humanity.”
Junker Blues: Mars: Junker Blues series Page 4
