—and three of the spiders lifted suddenly from the station’s surface, heading straight toward her.
Her heart skipped a beat, but she did nothing. The skimmer was designed to function in a planetary atmosphere, so it had a more substantial outer shell than the spiders were used to; it was also streamlined to reduce drag, so there were few edges for them to grab onto. If these three attacked, she might have enough time to shake them off before others joined the fray. Right now her best bet was to continue on her course as a legitimate visitor would do, following Jericho’s instructions to the letter, sending out all the signals one would expect from a regular transport vessel. If he was right about how they operated, that would be enough to hold them at bay. But damn, they were hard to ignore! Tully and she had nearly gotten killed in the Oberon system.
The three came close and circled the skimmer once, twice, three times. Apparently whatever they saw satisfied them, for they finally returned to their perches. She exhaled loudly in relief. Apparently Jericho had been right about how to deal with them.
She pulled the skimmer into orbit between the inner ring and the core, so its sensors could search both surfaces for a viable entrance. Various anomalies were displayed for her to evaluate, some of them downright bizarre. In one place she found a jet suit that had been tethered to a strut like an abandoned pet; what sense did that make? Surely anyone with a brain would strap on his nav jets before he exited the station, not after. But not far from that, the ship located a small emergency hatch on the core itself, probably designed for human maintenance crews. Hopefully there was some kind of maintenance facility inside, tied to the station’s global systems.
She directed the skimmer to position itself so that her own escape hatch was directly over it. It had no mooring seal, but that wasn’t a problem; the skimmer was equipped to adapt to whatever kind of tech it encountered. Compared to some of what Tully and she had dealt with, this was hardly even a challenge. An expandable tunnel extended from her own skimmer to the structural ring surrounding the maintenance hatch, adapting itself to fit the ring and establish an airtight seal. A short time later the ship told her SEAL CONFIRMED.
Now the big question: to arm, or not to arm? It was best not to look belligerent when confronting unknown agents, and she knew that anything she carried on her could be detected by the station’s security. But this was hardly a casual visit. And besides, she was supposed to be a bounty hunter, wasn’t she? It might look suspicious if she wasn’t carrying something.
She decided on a compromise, and chose a few of her more subtle options. A coat lined with safeskin. A set of taze rings. A collapsible shock rod. After some consideration, she added a shock pistol to the collection. It was small enough to fit into an outer pocket, and unlike the other choices, wouldn’t require her to be close to an opponent. The rest she left behind. Anything that might damage Shenshido or release toxic substances into its air supply was not likely to be tolerated by its masters. Of course, she had her usual folding blades and a coil of razor wire hidden in her boot soles: not easy supplies to get to in an emergency, but unlikely to be discovered by hostile parties. The blade had gotten her and Tully out of some tight spots in the past.
Tully . . . She sighed. How she wished he was present to share this adventure with her! And not only because she could use the backup. She missed his wit, his energy, even his annoying quirks. She’d brought his most prized memento along with her, to remind her of him, and though the colorful glass phallus looked ridiculous strapped into the pilot’s chair, it was oddly comforting. As though his spirit was still with her, ready to have sex with any new Variant race they came across.
She stuffed some additional emergency supplies into her outer pockets, then headed over to the skimmer’s escape hatch and pulled it open. A few feet below her, the status readout on the station’s hatch proclaimed that the temperature, pressure, and air composition inside the station were within acceptable human parameters. Good. She unsealed the small hatch, hesitated for a moment, then pulled it open. A small ladder led down into darkness. It was far from inviting, but at this point anything that wasn’t going to attack her was acceptable. She ordered the skimmer into lockdown, then began to climb down through the opening. As soon as her head cleared the hatch’s frame, it closed automatically behind her.
She was in.
The lights hadn’t come on, so she was left hanging in cave-blackness. Not a good start. But as she called up the icon that would trigger the emergency light on her headset, overheads finally flickered on, revealing the stark gray walls of a very small airlock. Big enough for one person with standard gear, maybe two people at most, but no more. She climbed down to the floor of the lock and positioned herself in front of the inner hatch, staring directly into the sensors that would be taking her measure. “Open lock,” she ordered. For a moment she thought it wasn’t going to respond; then it unsealed, revealing a small staging room with a narrow door at the far end. Tools and pressure garments festooned the wall like holiday ornaments—which confirmed her guess about this being a maintenance facility—but there were no people anywhere. She took a moment to listen for any sound of human activity before she started across the room. Nothing. The place was as still as a morgue.
Now I am officially breaking and entering, she mused.
Beyond the staging room was some kind of engineering center, filled with monitors and consoles and conduits, its walls lined with cabinets whose contents she could not begin to guess at. She inspected a few of the work stations, but none of them had what she needed, so she kept looking. A network node overhead blinked at her, indicating that the station’s innernet was operating, but she didn’t trust it enough to let it connect to her brainware. At least not until she knew what had happened to all the people here.
Finally she found a small office with a floor-to-ceiling bank of security monitors, and she sat down at the main desk and activated the manual controls. A map of the station was easy to summon up, though it was far from detailed. The two uppermost levels of the station core were mostly offices and meeting rooms, with a few interconnected labs. The levels below were unmarked, save for titles spaced evenly around the station: Biome 1, Biome 2a, Biome 2b . . . this place must have been a biological research station once. What if some disease had gotten out of control and killed everyone? Could that explain why there wasn’t a person in sight? For a brief moment she questioned the wisdom of her visit. Then curiosity crowded out her unease, as always. The danger was perversely invigorating.
She copied the map onto a chip, then decided to take a look at Shenshido’s transit log. The system wouldn’t let her into its secure files, but she managed to access a summary of activity that was part of the public record, and scrolled through the data from two years back, when Shenshido had first gone dark. If something odd had happened on the station, that might be reflected in its traffic patterns. But there was nothing out of the ordinary: no grand convoy coming in to assist the station, no organized evacuation going out. Shenshido had descended quietly into silence.
That means most of the people who were working here probably never left, she thought. Are they dead, or . . . what?
She finally closed the transit files and called up the data that Jericho had asked for: Shenshido’s communication history. He’d given her a program that would gather the information he needed, so she loaded that and watched as data scrolled across the screen. In theory, it would reveal what signals had come in to Shenshido around the date of the Harmony explosion, and hopefully where they came from. But she wasn’t adept enough at interpreting such data to know if she was collecting what he needed. She would have to deliver it to find out.
If he shares that much with me, she thought bitterly. Once I deliver what he wants, he’ll likely shut me out again, like Guild folk always do. They’re happy to use us, but they don’t see us as equals. A flicker of ancient resentment stirred in the recesses of her brain, and she had to fo
rce her thoughts away from it. He’s always treated you decently, she reminded herself.
When Jericho’s program had accessed and recorded everything it could, she tucked the chip back into her headset and called up the map for her own use. Information on what had happened to the people here would be valuable to Jericho, so she would take a look around and see what more she could gather.
She left the engineering complex to explore the rest of the station. Hallway after hallway. Room after room. The further she went, the more eerie it seemed that there were no signs of trouble anywhere. Every automatic system was functioning perfectly. Lights came on when she entered a room and shut off when she left. The data stations she found in a few offices were operational, but passcoded. She searched a dozen offices and meeting rooms, tested a dozen computers, opened the cabinets in a dozen labs, looking for some kind of clue. She did find one room where some furniture had been broken up, and it looked like there were pieces missing, but there was no way to tell what they were without reassembling everything.
Finally, exasperated, she decided to try the labs on the next level down. She used the map to locate the nearest staircase and headed toward it, nearly tripping over a floor-scrubbing bot along the way.
The ambush came without warning. Projectiles suddenly flew at her from both sides of the hall: long, sharp rods that shot out of the air vents and slammed into her armored coat. Arms, shoulders, torso. The safeskin solidified momentarily as each rod hit, preventing it from piercing through to her flesh, but that did nothing to lessen their momentum. Projectiles battered her body like hammers as she fell back, trying to get out of the line of fire. Then one of them struck low on her leg, beneath the hem of her coat, and she could feel it bite deeply into her leg. An arrow. Shit. What were arrows doing here? At least there were no more of them coming at her; whatever trap she’d triggered seemed to be limited to a single volley. She started to back away from the area, watching the walls as she did so, wary of any other openings that might harbor weapons. Then she hit the bot again and stumbled, nearly falling. But no. Wait. There was no bot there. She’d stumbled over nothing.
Shit.
Her right foot was numb now, and coldness was rapidly spreading up her leg. What the hell had been on that arrow? She tried to pull her pistol out of her pocket, but it took all her concentration just to close her fingers around the grip and pull it out. Then her legs collapsed beneath her, and she fell to her knees in the middle of the hallway. Get up! a desperate inner voice urged her. Get out of here! But whatever poison had been on the arrow was too powerful; fiber by fiber, her muscles were giving up the fight.
They came then, rushing at her from doorways and intersections nearby, half a dozen humans in worn jumpsuits, primitive weapons in their hands. Knives. Spears. Bludgeons. She tried to lift her arm to fire at one of them, but the limb wouldn’t obey her. Spots were swimming before her eyes. I’m going to die now. The thought was oddly distant, like it belonged to someone else. This is what dying feels like.
Someone was standing over her with an axe. A fucking axe. He looked like an illustration from a vid game. She wondered if she would feel the bite of his weapon, or if she had become too numb for that.
“STOP!”
The man with the axe hesitated. The label on his shirt said Cisco Tech, Ru noted. A company name. What a strange thing to notice when one was about to die.
“Stop!” the voice repeated.
She blinked as footsteps approached her, trying to fight off the darkness that was closing in. A man crouched down by her side: weathered skin, black hair streaked with gray, a short beard to match, and cruel eyes. Such cruel eyes. His headset was black and coarse in texture—faux wrought iron—and shaped like the hand of a great clawed beast, talon-tips framing his face. He stared at her for a minute and then reached out and grabbed the collar of her coat and pulled it down, so that the lining was visible. “Safeskin! There’s no safeskin on this station. Where did you get this?”
She wanted to push him away, but her body would no longer obey her commands at all. It was getting hard to breathe. She had no strength to talk.
“You’re from the outside,” he challenged her.
Somehow she found her voice. “Yes.”
“You have a ship?”
Even in her drug-addled state she was alert to the danger lurking behind the question. She managed to shake her head. “Dropped me off . . .”
“But they’ll come back for you, yes?”
She didn’t know what answer would keep her safe, so she said nothing.
The man stood. The others kept their distance from him, she noticed. Out of respect, or fear? There was something about him that made her skin crawl. “We bring her back with us,” he announced.
“But Ivar.” It was a woman’s voice. “If she’s one of them—”
“We bring her back.” He glared for a moment to see if there would be any further protest, then nodded toward Ru. “Rollo, you carry her. Be careful. She has value.”
Value, Ru thought numbly. I have value. Someone pulled her up from the ground, but her legs were a million miles away. Maybe today is not my time to die.
Then darkness swept that final thought away, and all was silence.
We are the beasts in the night, stalking the Terran campfire. We are the voices in the darkness, whispering things no Terran wants to hear. We are the eternal Other, feared and reviled, and no flowery words or diplomatic platitudes will ever change that.
(Excerpt from a propaganda ’cast of the Hausman League. Author unknown.)
HARMONY NODE
TRIDAC STATION
BEHOLD THE outworlds, Khatry thought, as he gazed out into the galactic darkness. No sun blazing in the heavens, to provide warmth and light. No planet or moon within view. No band of orbiting habitats, so densely clustered that one could barely catch sight of the Earth between them. Just the blackness of space, punctuated by space stations so distant that their external lighting could barely be seen from his observation deck.
Emptiness was good, Khatry mused. Emptiness had potential. Space with nothing in it was space that a man could develop however he liked.
There were times when the CEO of Tridac Enterprises (Harmony Division) missed Earth. But there were more times when he didn’t—times when he gazed out upon the vast expanse of unclaimed space and felt a sense of primal awe. His ancestors had experienced that same awe, gazing up at the night sky from the plains of Africa. They had assigned names to the darkness, and made offerings to it. To them the stars were spirits, guides in the night, whose favor must be courted and whose wrath must be feared. Little did they know that someday the heavens would lose their magic, as a multitude of man-made satellites brightened the night sky, outshining distant suns.
The ancient spirits were dead now. Their temples had been claimed by more modern gods, whose prophecies were voiced as Terms and Conditions. He, Victor Khatry, Earthborn, was their priest.
A soft chime alerted him to an incoming message. “Receive,” he commanded.
A holo of his personal secretary appeared in the center of the room. Through its translucent substance he could still see the stars. “Jack Grimm is here to see you, sir.”
He nodded. “Send him in.” As the image of the secretary faded, he said, “End display.” The stars surrounding him vanished, the room brightened, and the features of his office became visible once more. In its center was a sleek wooden desk he’d had shipped in from Earth, back when he first arrived, and everything else was designed around it. The desk was made of real wood, not a synthetic. Never mind that it had cost him a small fortune to bribe the Terran authorities to allow native wood to leave the home system, and a second small fortune to ship it here. Ancient kings had thrones made of gold and silver; Division CEOs had desks made of real wood. The message was the same.
Grimm looked like one would expect a man with that nam
e to look, harsh and dour. Khatry disliked him, but he knew he was good at what he did and would keep quiet about the things that mattered. “You have something to report?”
“Just wanted to tell you, Bello’s done with. Killed by security bots from Shenshido. He triggered them himself, so none of my people had to get involved. No one will be able to trace this back to us. Or to Tridac.”
“So he took the bait.”
Grimm snorted. “Fled like the boogeyman was after him.” He grinned crookedly. “Which it was, in a manner of speaking.”
“You’ve seen the body.”
The grin faded. “There’s no body. Ship’s converter overloaded during the attack, the whole thing blew—anything as fragile as human flesh, I figure was vaporized.”
“You figure.” Khatry’s tone was chill. “I prefer certainty.”
“The spiders scanned for life support after the explosion, found nothing. No human could survive out there without it. He won’t be troubling you again.”
He never troubled me before, Khatry thought. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. A fatted calf who wandered too close to the altar. “And the evidence?”
“The spiders delivered all the debris to me, but a lot was lost in the explosion. What do you want done with the stuff we’ve got?”
“Make sure all identifying marks are gone, then deliver it to our scav contact.”
He nodded. “And the message on the gift card should be . . . ?”
He considered. “Tell him I would be pleased if his people stayed clear of Shenshido for a while.”
The crooked grin returned. “I doubt he’s planning a return trip. Their last visit didn’t go so well.”
“Feel free to remind them of that.” When Grimm didn’t move he said, “Is there something else?”
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