by Rick Partlow
“So,” he said, his Russian accent drawing the word out, “this is the treasure trove of the Ancients. It looks like a shit-hole.”
It was Anatoly, that much was obvious, which meant that the one puking was Vilberg and the short, armored figure was…
“Bobbi?” I said, my voice little more than a hoarse whisper, but enough to carry it over my ‘link.
“Jesus, Munroe,” she said, walking over to me. “We thought you all were dead.”
“What are you doing down here?” I asked, curiosity and an overwhelming sense of wrongness giving me the energy to speak a bit more coherently. “Did something go wrong on the lighter?” I gestured towards Vilberg, who wasn’t throwing up anymore but still looked green around the gills.
“The lighter was a piece of cake,” she waved the idea away. “Skeleton crew. I think Israfil took almost everyone he had left with him down here. Vilberg just got airsick on the burn down from orbit. We couldn’t find Marquette, though.”
“He’s dead,” I informed her grimly. “Israfil and his people, too. But Divya told me she’d contacted you and told you she and Kane were going to check on us first before they went back to pick you up.”
That stopped her in her tracks a few meters away from me.
“I never heard a fucking thing from either one of them,” she insisted hotly, hands clenching into fists. “That’s why we took the damn life-pod down, because they weren’t responding. We figured Kane and the bitch bought it fighting the shuttle, and we didn’t want to get stuck on a ship with no engines and a deteriorating orbit.”
“What the fuck, over?” I blurted, feeling my face screw up into a mask of anger and confusion. “Hold on a second.”
I stepped away from her and grabbed at my ‘link, bringing up the ship’s frequency. “Nomad, this is Munroe, do you read?”
A long pause, followed by Divya’s voice again.
“I read you, Munroe,” she said calmly. “Are you at the landing site yet?”
“Yeah, we are,” I snapped. “And so are Bobbi and the others, and she says you never contacted them! They took a fucking life-pod down to the planet because they thought you’d been shot down! What’s the deal?”
“I’m sorry, Munroe,” she told me, sounding sincere. “Kane’s been totally immersed with the ship’s computer for hours now, trying to fix the damage. I must have misunderstood what he said; you know his idiom can be hard for me to figure out at the best of times. But we’re coming in now to get all of you. We should be there in less than a minute.”
I wanted to yell at her some more, but I honestly didn’t have the energy for it. I shook my head in disgust and turned back to Bobbi.
“You catch all that?” I asked her. I’d included her in on the transmission.
“Sounds like a load of shit,” she told me bluntly.
“Good,” I snorted. “Glad it’s not just me. Anyway, we can ask her ourselves in a minute.”
No sooner had I said the words than I heard the whine of the jets in the distance. I looked around in the opposite direction of the route into the mountains and caught a glimpse of the matte grey delta of the ship, still a pinprick on the horizon. It grew in size with startling swiftness, burning in hot and low over the badlands to the south, raising a faint cloud of sand and dust in its wake. I blinked at the image, stepping forward a few meters as if that would make it clearer to me. Kane was bringing her in way too fast. Maybe it had to do with the damage to the ship, but I couldn’t think why.
I was still trying to figure out what he was up to when the proton cannon erupted and a line of white-hot energy blasted the assault shuttle into an expanding ball of fire. The shuttle was hundreds of meters away, but the concussion was enough to slam me backwards and send me rolling across the sandstone, forcing what little air I had out of my lungs and nearly driving me back into unconsciousness. I couldn’t move, couldn’t draw a breath, could barely focus when I pried my eyes open.
Bobbi, Sanders and Victor had been wearing full armor, with their helmets on, but they’d been closer to the explosion than I had, and they’d been tossed even farther. I could see them moving, could see Victor trying to crawl out of a patch of fiercely burning wreckage, but none of them looked too ready to get up and start fighting.
Vilberg was out, collapsed not too far from the life-pod, blood flowing from his forehead. I couldn’t tell if he was breathing, but he definitely wasn’t moving, and I didn’t know if he ever would again.
Anatoly…was standing exactly where he had been, like an oak weathering the storm. His clothes were shredded and I saw blood seeping from a half-dozen serious wounds in his torso, but he was conscious and still on his feet. Between one eyeblink to the next, he was in motion, running towards where the Nomad was coming down on billowing clouds of fire from her belly jets. She was just a few meters off the ground, her landing gear locking in place, and Anatoly was sprinting faster than any human I’d ever seen except Cowboy or one of his Glory Boy commandos, racing full out in an obvious attempt get onto her boarding ramp the second it opened.
The cyborg was only about thirty meters away when the Gatling laser turret rotated out of its sheath on the cutter’s belly and opened fire. The multiple laser emitters flared in a chain eruption of hyperexplosive charges, with a sound like a high-pitched thundercrack---just a short burst, not more than ten rounds. But in that fraction of a second, Anatoly ceased to exist. He’d disappeared in an explosion of vaporized bodily fluids and sublimated metal, as if he’d never been.
The ship hovered on her belly jets and rumbled forward, throwing up a huge cloud of dust and sand as she approached…me. I had to squeeze my eyes shut to block out the debris, tried to cover my head with my hands because I didn’t have the breath or the energy to roll over away from the hot blast.
I felt impotent and useless and desperate all at once, and I clawed feebly at my shoulder holster, trying to pull my pistol out before the belly ramp completely extended. I’d just managed to clear it and was gasping for air, working up the strength to push it out to arm’s length and point it in the right direction, when I saw the backlit, armored figure striding down the ramp, hands filled with a Gauss rifle pointed directly at my center of mass.
“I want you alive, Munroe,” Divya said, her voice coming through my ‘link’s ear bud like she was standing right next to me, “but barely alive will work, too. Drop the gun or I’ll put a round through your spine, then toss Kurt out of the auto-doc---and the airlock---and let you heal for the rest of the trip back to Earth.”
I thought for just a second about making her do it, just on the off chance that she’d miss and I’d have the time to take a shot at her; but I’d never known Divya to say she would do something and then not be able to follow through. I let the gun fall away and didn’t resist as she walked down the ramp and slipped a neural restraint web over the back of my neck. It would have been pointless. Between the hypoxia, the injuries I’d already had and the concussion from the shuttle explosion, I was about as threatening as a cranky toddler.
The web activated, and suddenly I couldn’t even feel anything below my neck, much less move it. I felt like a disembodied head being dragged up the ramp by Divya, and I was surprised she could do it one-handed even in the lighter gravity here. I could hear my armor scraping against the rough surface of the ramp like it was happening to someone else, and then I was being dumped on the deck of the utility bay while Divya hit the control to raise the hatch.
She shoved the rifle into a locker, then pulled off her helmet and tossed it in behind the weapon, not bothering to stack either of them neatly before she slammed the door shut. Her forehead was beaded with sweat, her normally perfect hair mussed and tangled, and the expression on her face was hard and cold.
“I could strap you in back here,” she mused aloud, “but I think I’d rather have you someplace where I can keep an eye on you.”
As the ramp closed and shipboard air filled the bay, I finally began to feel like I could get
a full breath again and some of the mental confusion I’d been experiencing began to fade. Enough that I was finally able to form a coherent sentence. I wanted to demand to know why the hell she was doing this, but I thought I could guess that part.
“Where’s Kane?” I asked her instead. “What did you do with him?”
She was bending down to drag me up the passageway by the back of my armored vest and I could see the sour face she made at the question, but she didn’t answer. When we got to the cockpit, I saw why. Kane was still in the pilot’s seat; he hadn’t moved a centimeter from the last time I’d seen him. And he never would again, not of his own accord. Half his skull was blown away and his blood stained the port bulkhead in an obscene splash. I could smell it strong in the cockpit and the stench was enough to raise bile in the back of my throat.
My gut clenched and I felt an intense sadness for a man who’d never had the chance at anything like a normal life. I’d tried to be his friend, tried to convince him he didn’t have to let his past make him abandon his humanity…maybe because I was trying to convince myself of the same thing. I remembered the intense fear of death I’d heard in the voice of the dying Skinganger back in Shakak, and I wondered if maybe that was the real reason Kane had been trying to replace his flesh with something artificial. I wondered if he’d had the time to be afraid, or if death had come too fast even for that.
“I apologize for the mess,” Divya was saying, the words only penetrating my consciousness a few seconds after she’d said them. I realized she was yanking me towards the navigation console to strap me into the acceleration couch there. “When we get back into zero gravity and I can finally move all that heavy metal, I’ll dump him out of the airlock and spray some cleaning gel down to get rid of the smell.”
“You think West will reward you for this?” I asked her, bitterness welling up in my voice and overwhelming the scorn I’d been trying to convey. “You think this is what he wants?”
She laughed softly, with a tone of genuine amusement as she fastened the straps across my paralyzed body, and I wanted nothing else at that moment than to kill her as painfully as possible.
“I don’t give a shit what West wants,” she said, testing my restraints with a solid tug on the straps before she dropped into the copilot’s seat and began taking the ship through manual takeoff preparations. “I don’t give a shit what Andre Damiani wants either, anymore.” She shot me a self-satisfied grin. “I’ve had a better offer, Tyler Callas.”
I closed my eyes and tried to stifle the moan that wanted to escape from somewhere deep in my chest. She was working for my mother.
“When?” Was all I could say in response.
“Did you really think a professional like Van Stry would bother attempting chemical interrogation on me?” Divya laughed again, either pleased with herself or pleased with my cluelessness. “No, she was rightly certain that I would be safeguarded against such things. Instead, after making a show of it for a while, and then finding an excuse to send Calderon and the others out, she made me an offer. She knew exactly what the Sung Brothers were sitting on here, and she played me a recording from Patrice Damiani offering me a position of my own choosing if I made sure she received the location of this planet and not her brother.”
The jets screamed back to life, sending a rumble through the deck and I tried to think of some way, any way out of this. I’d been in more dire situations, and I’d certainly faced more dangerous enemies, but Divya had managed to catch me at just the right time, with just the right version of a knife in the back. And that seemed to make it feel so much worse, somehow…
“Yo, bitch.”
I could turn my head even if I couldn’t move anything else. Kurt Simak was standing in the cockpit hatch, buck naked except for the pistol in his big fist, his long hair still plastered back to his head from the biotic fluid of the auto-doc. I knew he hadn’t been scheduled to come out of it for hours yet, and then I abruptly understood that Kane had seen death coming, because it had to have been him that gave the command to the ship’s computer to start the process of waking Kurt up early. The look on Divya’s face was one of annoyed surprise, like someone out for a nice walk who’d just stepped in a big pile of shit.
She made a move towards the controls, maybe trying to get us in the air so he wouldn’t dare shoot her for fear of crashing the ship. It wasn’t fast enough. The sound of the gunshot was a high-pitched crack that I could feel in my sinuses in the confines of the cockpit, and the impact snapped Divya’s head forward. Her life spilled over the control panel and she slumped against her seat restraints, fingers twitching reflexively towards her goal but coming up just short.
Chapter Twenty-Two
“That’s your story, is it?”
Cowboy wasn’t looking at me. He was staring out across Springbok Canyon towards the distant Edge Mountains, the place where it had all started, over a hundred and fifty years ago with the discovery of the wormhole map. Proxima Centauri was setting over the canyon and the stretched-out rays bathed the landscape in a beautiful, red-gold glow. I didn’t know why Cowboy had chosen to meet for the debrief on Hermes, except that it was where Bobbi and Sanders spent their down time, and I really had no clue why he’d dragged me way outside Sanctuary City to have our after-action report in person. Unless he was planning on killing me somewhere nice and secluded.
“That’s what happened,” I confirmed, trying not to let my hand stray too close to my shoulder holster. Even after the upgrades I’d had, Cowboy could be on me before the weapon cleared my jacket and he could stick that pistol up my ass sideways if he wanted to.
He was a tall, rangy man with brown hair swept back into a pony tail, and a rugged, craggy face tanned and weathered by dozens of worlds. His black jacket and gloves were real leather, probably hand-made in some colony craft shop from an actual animal, rather than grown in a vat and sold in a boutique on Earth for premium prices. The holster at his waist was real leather as well, and the rocket pistol that filled it was heavy iron, made about the same time those first explorers set foot on Hermes. It was an antique compared to mine, but I had no doubt it was just as deadly despite its age.
“So, you managed to catch up to the Cultist lighter before they got to minimum safe jump range,” he restated the report I’d given him, “then disabled their engines and boarded her to try to find this mineral scout captain…”
“But they doubled back on us,” I repeated, using every trick I’d learned to make my voice stress, heartbeat and respiration consistent. “They sent a squad back to the auxiliary repair dock where we’d moored the Nomad and tried to take her. I left Kurt, Kane and Divya on the ship for security, and they managed to stop the attempt, but Kane and Divya were both killed.” I paused, not having to affect the stab of pain I felt at the thought of Kane’s death. At least Vilberg had made it, after a few days in the auto-doc.
“We cleaned out the rest of the Cult crew, including their High Priest, but they killed Marquette, the mineral scout, before we could get to him.” I shrugged. “I guess they decided if they couldn’t have the Predecessor tech, no dirty infidels should have it either.”
“I could check your logs, you know?” He turned away from the failing light, his gunmetal grey eyes piercing me with a discerning stare. “When I gave you that ship, I made sure I could keep tabs on it.”
“Check it,” I invited him, waving in the general direction of the spaceport. “You won’t find anything that contradicts my report.”
Mostly because Kane had hacked the spyware West had left on the ship’s computer well over a year ago and substituted his own programming that let us enter data manually and make the logs say whatever the hell we wanted.
West held his stare for a moment more before shaking his head and grinning ruefully.
“Aw hell,” he muttered. “You accomplished the mission anyway.”
“We always do.”
“And you know,” he went on, the grin morphing into something less pleasant, “we
have a general idea of the sector where Marquette was scouting. And we have a shitload of Corporate Council mineral scouts we can send out to survey it. Losing Marquette will slow things down by a couple years, but Monsieur Damiani is a patient man.”
I nodded, knowing he was right. I was only delaying the inevitable, but it was all I could do, for now.
“If that’s it,” I said, “I’d really like to go home.”
“Sure,” he agreed readily. “I’ll call you when we need you again.” That unpleasant grin again. “After all, I know where you live.”
***
It seemed like months since I’d set foot on Demeter, and just the feel of its dirt under my boots took a weight off my shoulders and made my breath come easier. It was nearly midnight local time when we touched down at the port, and I waved a silent goodbye to Victor and Kurt before I climbed into the utility rover and headed for home.
I didn’t call ahead because I was sure Cesar would be asleep and I hoped Sophia would be too. I liked slipping into bed next to her and surprising her when she woke up to find me there. But when I headed down the drive towards our house, I could already see that the exterior floodlights were turned on; and when I got past the stand of oaks that butted up against our backyard, I saw Sophia standing on the concrete pad where she’d parked her rover.
She was darkly beautiful in ways that went beyond the physical, and I felt a familiar pang in my chest at the sight of her…that quickly switched to concern when the glare of the headlights revealed the agitated look on her face and her nervous, fidgeting stance.
Something was wrong.
I pulled the rover up behind hers and got out, circling around the car and taking her in my arms. She was colder than she ought to have been in the autumn night and I could feel her shivering.
