by Rick Partlow
The brothers shared a look, like this was a conversation---or maybe an argument---they’d had with each other many times before.
“We tried to fit back in after the Fleet took Demeter back from the Tahni,” Victor began.
“We got jobs with the reconstruction,” Kurt cut in. “They were hiring any warm body that would work, and going back to college classes wasn’t an option in the short run. There wasn’t any college, there weren’t any courses, there weren’t any professors alive even.”
“But after a while,” Victor went on, “it seemed kind of…”
“Empty,” Kurt supplied. “Meaningless.”
“Yeah,” Victor agreed.
He walked over to a refrigerator set in the wall and pulled out a beer. He held one out to me, but I shook my head. I’d never liked beer, which made me the odd man out as an enlisted Marine. Kurt nodded and Victor tossed him a bottle, then grabbed one for himself and sat down, popping it open.
“After what had happened during the occupation,” Victor said, swallowing a sip, “after what we’d done and seen, running buildfoam dispensers and pouring concrete felt like the most boring thing in the galaxy. So, we both went and tried to join up with the Marines.” He looked over at me and shrugged. “We figured we could do some good that way, maybe help end the war.”
“But it ended before we got the chance,” Kurt said bitterly, taking a long gulp of the dark beer. “We were waiting for our flight to Inferno when the local Fleet office got the word that there wouldn’t be any more recruiting classes accepted for the next six months because they were throwing everything they had at the Tahni homeworld and there weren’t resources left for training.”
“Yeah, I remember,” I said, nodding. Inferno had been one giant buzzing hive of activity, as everyone with a trigger finger got shipped out for the last, big push.
“So we just watched while guys like you won the war and killed the Emperor,” Victor took his turn. I was glad I hadn’t accepted a drink, because I would have spit it up right then. I actually had killed the Tahni Emperor, almost by accident, because he’d been behind cover I’d wanted to use when we hit the Imperial Palace. I’d made sure no one had found out about that, though, with Cowboy’s help. “And we finally couldn’t take it anymore, so we begged for work on an independent freighter heading anywhere else. They dropped us here, and we’d just about ran out of money when a fight agent found us.”
“It wasn’t too hard at first,” Kurt put in. “The war was just over and not that much tourist travel was happening, so we were mostly fighting locals who wanted the purse. By the time competition got tougher, well,” he shrugged, “so had we.”
“And have you found this more satisfying?” I wondered.
They shared that same look as before.
“No,” Victor admitted. “Not anymore. At first, maybe. It was…” He shrugged. “What’s the word? Something you feel in your gut?”
“Visceral,” I suggested.
“Yeah, that. But lately, I feel like we’re just going through the motions.”
“What are we gonna’ do if we leave here, though?” Kurt demanded, his reaction seeming like something he’d repeated before. “We don’t have enough money to get anywhere except Hermes, or maybe somewhere in the Solar System. It’s not like we’re qualified to do anything other than kill people or beat them up.”
“I have a job, if you two want it,” I said. They looked at me, with a mix of curiosity and hope and for an instant, I felt like a total shit. These people had been my friends, once upon a time. “I’ve got to tell you right up front: it could get you both killed, and we’ll be so far up the ass end of nowhere, no one will ever know.”
“Doing what?” Victor asked me.
“I can’t give you the details here,” I said. “But you’re going to be out in the Pirate Worlds, killing people who probably have it coming. And you’ll get paid enough that you can buy a ticket anywhere you like when it’s over.”
“Who are we working for?” Kurt wanted to know. His squared-off face was worked into a thoughtful frown.
“Someone high up in the Corporate Council, that’s all I can tell you.” Hell, it was all I knew. “But the go-between who’s been dealing with me is Cowboy.”
“Cowboy?” Kurt repeated in disbelief. “That Fleet Intelligence guy who was on Demeter with us?”
“Yeah. He’s working for the Corporates now and he looked me up because he needed help and thought I could do the job.” I felt bad misleading them, but I didn’t especially want to expand the pool of people who knew about my past.
“Do you believe this is on the up-and-up, Munroe?” Victor asked me, and in his eyes, I saw a trust that I knew I didn’t deserve.
“I think the money is on the up-and-up,” I said, trying to be as honest as I could. “The job…” I shrugged. “I can’t say whether he’s telling me everything, but maybe I don’t need to know everything.”
Victor looked over to Kurt and the younger brother nodded.
“All right, Munroe, we’re in,” he said, standing and offering me a hand. I shook it, my own hand swallowed up by the slab of meat.
“You guys are the first, then,” I told them. “Pack your stuff, we leave as soon as you’re ready.”
Victor laughed softly, staring into nothing. “You know, Munroe, we’ve been here two years, and I don’t think there’s a damn thing besides the clothes on my back that I’d want to bring with me.”
“He’s right,” Kurt said. “Give us ten minutes to clean up, then we can get the hell out of here.”
“Meet me at docking slip A243 in two hours,” I told them. “I still have one more stop to make.”
And I didn’t think this next one would be anywhere near as easy.
Chapter Four
Belial wasn’t just a world, it was many worlds, each nearly as distinct from each other as any of the human colonies, as different as my mother’s penthouse in Trans-Angeles and the shack Sophia and I shared on Demeter. It was the matter of a short ride in a lift car from the brutal, Dantean hell where I’d found Victor and Kurt to brightly-lit, cheerful playgrounds full of fantasy characters where those willing to pay the price could engage in ViR worlds so immersive that you could feel and smell every detail without the need for surgically implanted interface jacks.
I walked through clouds of hypnotic holographic advertisements, offering the chance to lose yourself in never-never lands of dragons and elves and flying horses and unicorns, the gravity just light enough that it combined with the colors and images to buoy your spirits to the point where those fantasies seem delightful instead of banal. It seemed surreal to me, after coming from the land of pain, as if I’d stepped from the night side of a world to the day side in one stride. The faces there were smiling and hopeful rather than guilty and titillated as they’d been in the land of the dark, and I even saw some children here, despite the fact that Belial was not a place to bring them.
I didn’t know why he’d asked me to meet him here, but I found the place easily enough. It was much like any of the others, except in this one they advertised that they catered to people with ‘face jacks. With military vets, professional net-divers, and more and more spaceflight crews sporting the implant jacks, it was a growing customer base. And with the jacks, you could really immerse yourself, the way you never could with stimulator suits or neural halos.
Inside the studio, there were individual bays you rented by the hour, with a four-hour limit to keep people from becoming so lost that they forgot to eat, drink or take a dump. They were sealed until the time was up, but each had a small, two-dimensional screen on the door to show you what adventure the person---or, in some cases, people---inside the room was having. I passed by knights riding powerful horses through battlefields turbulent with clashing orcs and humans, under skies darkened with arrows; past elves watching fairies playing in shadowed meadows under trees that towered hundreds of meters overhead; and past a man and woman swimming without equipment
a hundred meters beneath the surface of an impossibly blue ocean, surrounded by a pod of narwhals.
Then I was at the door whose number I’d been given, and I paused in front of it, watching the video playback. Rugged mountains towered high above the spires of a medieval castle and the small village built up around it. Forks of lightning crackled through the sky and the mountaintops were hidden in black clouds. Out of those clouds, from somewhere high above the tree line, a dragon descended like an aerospace fighter, bat-like wings spread and carrying an impossibly massive, dinosaur-like body with a spiked tail and dark red skin, scaled like a snake.
Down on the grey, crenelated walls of the castle, I could see the horror in the eyes of the human soldiers guarding the battlements. They were dressed in chain mail and carried halberds; some dropped them and ran screaming in fear for the stairs to the lower levels, while others ran to the heavy ballista set in the battlements. Bolts two meters long shot outward into the night, searching for weak spots in the gigantic reptile’s armored hide, but the dragon was moving way too fast for them to aim accurately at night. The bolts arced away and were lost in the darkness, and then it was too late.
The gigantic beast slammed into the castle tower with a shoulder as massive as a small starship and the whole structure shook and cracked and began to buckle. Men screamed as they pitched off the top and went tumbling twenty meters to the ground, and then the dragon was standing in the courtyard of the castle, ignoring the bricks and debris still falling around him. Dozens of armored warriors rushed at him, clutching spears and halberds like talismans; but the beast reared back and sucked in a breath, then spewed out a raging stream of fire that engulfed the whole courtyard, playing over the humans and setting them alight.
The dragon ignored the dying warriors running or writhing as the flames consumed them; he spread his wings, threw back his head on his serpentine neck and roared into the night, sending out a flare of billowing flame. Then the screen went dark and the timer above it went to all zeros. The door opened automatically with the click of a lock sliding away, and swung outward towards me. I stepped back to let it by, then blinked as the light inside the little room flickered to life.
The man standing in the center of the chamber wasn’t a dragon, but he also wasn’t entirely human anymore. He reached up to unplug the leads from the interface jacks implanted in his temples with fingers of shining, bare metal, as supple and articulated as metal could be, but bare silver all the way to his shoulders, where they disappeared under a black, leather vest. More bare metal climbed up the back of his neck, stretching all the way up to where the left half of his face should have been. The eye on that side was a glowing, red ocular, the ear a round, concave disk. He wore shorts just to make it more visible that his legs were cybernetic as well, again bare silver metal rather than the flesh-toned prosthetics they could have been.
The flesh that was left was pale white, baby-smooth and hairless, a sign it had been transplanted in a crude clinic. The biological part of the face had been handsome once, with a strong jaw and a straight, narrow nose, and a single, green eye like a jewel set in a twisted mask. That eye fixed on me as he turned, and he nodded.
“Sergeant Munroe,” he said, his voice raspy from damage to his vocal chords. “Been a while.”
“Ensign Kane.” I returned the nod. He didn’t offer a hand and neither did I. “Or did they make you a LT-JG before you mustered out?”
“Never checked,” he admitted, his tone dismissive. “People call me Kane.”
“And people call me Munroe,” I said. “I haven’t been a Sergeant for almost as long as you haven’t been an Ensign.”
“Fair,” Kane acknowledged, brushing past me as he left the studio and headed for the exit with long, swift strides.
“I haven’t seen you since you got my ass off the Demeter,” I said, walking quickly to keep up with him. “How did it happen?”
He stopped then, impossibly abrupt, and I nearly stumbled as I tried to avoid walking into him. He stared at me with an unnerving, bisected glare of red and green.
“Most people are afraid to ask,” he said, the rasp making it sound harsher than it might have. I shrugged in return.
“If you were uncomfortable with it, you wouldn’t flaunt it like this.” I nodded at the way he was dressed.
He nodded, half his mouth turning up in a smile. Then he started walking again, and I followed.
“It was during the push to Tahn-Skyyiah,” he said, referring to the Tahni home-planet. He seemed uncomfortable speaking about it, I thought at first. Then I changed my mind. He seemed uncomfortable speaking at all, and particularly in long sentences, as if he were out of practice.
“I was with a task force sent to take out a Tahni outpost that controlled a key jumpgate hub that we wanted to open up lines of FTL communications for the Fleet.” He didn’t even breathe hard despite I was having to nearly jog to keep up with him. “I was taking a squad of Marine battlesuits down to take their base dug into a moon around a gas giant. We were hit by a missile and went down, the whole flight crew was killed except me, and I got messed up…bad.”
We were heading for a lift bank, but not the main one. This one was stuck into a corner of the level, away from the businesses, near the restrooms and showers. It also required an ID scan, and he had to use his retina for that, since he lacked a palm for a DNA read. I stepped in behind him, and we were alone in the car, the first time that had occurred since I’d been on Belial.
“Most Fleet ships have med bays equipped with auto-docs,” I said. “They should have been able to at least fix you up enough for cloned transplants.”
“Problem was,” he said, “the cruiser hit a mine. Destroyed.” He caught my eye and smirked. “Marines took the Tahni base, but all I had was a Corpsman with a medical kit until relief arrived.” The green eye blinked, but the red one didn’t. “Twenty days.”
“Shit,” I murmured, trying to imagine what that must have been like for him, with those sorts of injuries and limited medical supplies.
“Fleet med-techs did the best they could,” he went on in his uncomfortable rasp. “But I needed a full clinic, weeks in biotic fluid to fix me. By then, I’d stopped wanting to.” He held up a metal hand, flexing it. “This is who I am now.”
The lift doors slid aside and I felt, to my surprise, what seemed like over one gravity weighing me down. The farthest out I’d been towards the rim was the Earth-normal section spun to one apparent gravity. This had to be beyond that, in the very outer edge of the station, up against the water tanks, just inside the meters-thick nickel-iron walls. I didn’t even know there was an inhabited level that far out.
The hallways were narrow and dimly-lit, though not as dark as the level where I’d found Victor and Kurt. There were no markings, no advertisements and no guiding voices in your ‘link’s ear bud suggesting where you might want to go next. The people walking by in those corridors didn’t seem happy or festive, just tired and annoyed, and some perhaps resolute on reaching a bed.
“You work here,” I deduced quickly. That hadn’t been in his file, but then it hadn’t contained much about him at all.
“Data security,” he said. “Twelve hours on, twelve hours off. Gets me enough for room, food and the game once a day.”
“You like it here?”
“No,” he answered immediately. “Need more money.”
“For what?” I wondered. “To go home?”
“Don’t have a home,” he declared, as he stopped with a metal clomp on the bare rock of the floor in front of an apartment door. Another retina scan and we were through it.
The apartment was basically an empty room. There was one table and one chair in the kitchen, beside the food processing unit, and that was it; just bare, white walls and a single light. He waved at the chair and I sat in it. He stood; I had the sense that he didn’t need to sit to relax.
“So, what do you need money for?” I asked him again.
He was silent for a long mome
nt, and I thought maybe I’d pushed things too far. Then he answered me.
“I want more.” He motioned at his arms, his legs, his eye. “More metal, less flesh.”
“Why?” I blurted, feeling my eyes go wide. It wasn’t the answer I’d expected.
“Flesh is vulnerable.”
I didn’t know what the hell to say to that, so I got to the point.
“I need a good pilot,” I told him. “One who can double as a net-diver at need, and handle a gun in a fight. The job is in the Pirate Worlds, and it’s dangerous as shit, but the pay’s enough to get you wherever you want to go and…” I trailed off. “Replace whatever you want replaced.”
“Yes,” he said immediately, without a trace of hesitation in his face or his voice.
I didn’t ask if he was sure, didn’t ask him to reconsider. He hadn’t asked who he’d be fighting or what he’d be fighting for; it was obvious he didn’t care. I wasn’t comfortable with that, but I also wasn’t in a position to be choosey.
“Can you be ready to leave in an hour?” I asked, pushing to my feet with the flats of my palms on his table. It creaked beneath me, cheap plastic.
“I can leave now,” he said. He walked to a closet and pulled it open, revealing a small shoulder bag, open and stuffed with clothes. He zipped it shut and slung it over his shoulder.
I looked around the room, barren and impersonal.
“Yeah, I guess you can.”
***
“Who the hell’s this?” Victor asked as he and Kurt floated into the utility bay of the Wanderer, duffle bags hanging off their backs. They were both staring at Kane, who was wedged into the small Engineering station that was in an alcove between the utility bay and the passage to the cockpit, plugged in via his interface jacks as he ran systems checks on the reactor and the drives.
“Kurt, Victor,” I introduced, catching myself against the bulkhead as I floated back to make room for them, “this is Kane. He flew a Marine lander in the war, and he’s going to be our pilot.”
