Dirty Job

by Felix R. Savage

  The technical wasn’t going any further today, even if we could have rolled it right side up. Steam jetted from its crumpled hood.

  Crack.

  A bullet skipped off a stone, raising a puff of dust near Martin’s feet.

  We hit the ground.

  I raised my head and peered across a quarter-klick of sand and stones … at the Traveller rig.

  It, too, had crashed onto its side. It looked like a giant silver maggot with a truck’s head.

  Movement flickered behind its cab.

  At least one of the Travellers had survived. Somehow I knew it was Sophia.

  Crack.

  I ducked my head to the dirt, breathing in the heat of the sun-warmed desert.

  “We have to get away from the technical,” I gasped. “Drenched—in diesel. If they’ve got tracer rounds …”

  A tracer round, fired from that distance, could ignite, set fire to the fuel, and turn the technical into a fireball. Diesel isn’t as volatile as gasoline, but I still didn’t want to take the risk of being crisped.

  We belly-crawled away, keeping the technical between us and the Traveller rig. It felt like crawling over a griddle. The ground had been heated to a scorching temperature during Yesanyase Skont’s long day. Grit got inside my clothes. My shoulder and stomach muscles burned with a deep tiredness that told me I’d already hit my physical limits. I was running on adrenaline now, and I’d pay for it later. If we survived.

  We came to a low ridge, no more than a wrinkle in the desert, topped by stunted thorn bushes. It would do for cover as long as we stayed down. We crawled behind it. When I thought we’d gone far enough, I popped my head up.

  From this angle, the tank of the Traveller rig blocked my view of Sophia and whoever else might be hiding behind the vehicle. There was not enough cover between here and there for them to sneak up on us, anyway.

  It was so quiet that I could hear my own heartbeat in my ears, and the thorn bushes rustling in the breeze.

  “Marty, you got your piece?”

  “Fell outta my holster. Couldn’t lay hands on it.”

  I still had my .22. A lot of good that would do at this distance. If I lived through this, I really was going to start carrying a more powerful weapon.

  “We could run,” Martin said.

  “To where?” I said. “Better stay put. The St. Clare will be here soon.” But would Dolph and Irene be able to find us? We couldn’t radio them our location, because the HF was in the technical. Maybe I should go back for it. It was probably trashed, anyway …

  “They know we were at Camp 32,” Martin said. “They’ll figure it out. Hard to miss two crashed Hurtworlds Specials in this thrillingly diverse terrain.” He nudged Pippa. “Starting to wish you’d stayed at the camp?”

  She had not complained once—about the chase, the crash, or the exhausting crawl over hot, sandy ground. Now she shook her head. “I’d rather be anywhere than there.”

  I rolled onto my back. The sky was beautiful. It had begun to turn a dusty darker blue on the side away from the setting sun. A few high clouds glowed pink. There was not a contrail in the whole vast dome, not a single spark that might be a low-flying ship.

  The St. Clare was not technically an atmosphere-capable spacecraft. That is, she didn’t have wings. Her chunky auxiliary pods could be angled to act as aerofoils, but they provided no lift. So on her short hop from the spaceport to here, she would have to travel ballistically. That meant Dolph would have next to no wiggle room to adjust his trajectory as the ship came back down. He’d have to find us, plot our location, and calibrate his descent, all within a matter of seconds. God, I hoped he had gotten the drugs out of his system. If we died in the desert because he was too fried to fly with his usual agility, I’d never forgive him …

  “What was that?” MF squeaked.

  Moments later, my less acute ears picked up the sound he had heard.

  The growl of an engine, faint but clear in all that emptiness.

  It was coming from the direction of Camp 31.

  I screwed myself around in our shallow dip. It did not hide us from the road. I had a perfect view of the paler strip of desert shooting off to nowhere.

  A cloud of dust on the horizon.

  A black dot.

  A Hurtworlds Special, the twin of the Traveller rig.

  Still I clung to hope—until the ugly tanker stopped, at the place where our technical had gone off the road.

  And Zane Cole got out.

  23

  I should have known. The Travellers had narrowed it down, but not as far as MF had. They’d been searching Camp 31, as well. There were probably “pedlars” in every damn camp around here.

  And we were trapped in the middle of them.

  Zane walked towards us, black coat flapping. Two novices followed him, also in full Traveller gear. The masks were off now. They were letting their pirate flags fly.

  One of the novices jogged towards Sophia’s crashed rig. The other stayed with Zane. She had a shotgun.

  As they came closer, I saw that Zane’s right sleeve ended in a hook.

  I had mauled his hand on Gvm Uye Sachttra. Guess he’d had to amputate it.

  I stood up. Damned if I was going to die sitting down. “I see you went for the traditional look,” I said, gesturing at the hook. “Couldn’t afford a real prosthetic?” My voice sounded loud in the desert silence.

  Zane scowled. He was a big guy, blond hair shaved at the sides. I’d always thought he had the face of a pissed-off chipmunk. I could smell the trophies on his coat, an aroma of leather and rot. “It’s a Traveller tradition to scalp our enemies. This makes it easy … and more enjoyable.” He held up the hook. It was actually a pair of scissors, curved like a sickle. He made the blades clack, a flat, chilling sound. “Step away from the girl.”

  I did not move. “What happened to stealing ships and selling them for parts? Wasn’t that exciting enough for you? What kind of a mess you got yourself mixed up in here?”

  Something flashed in Zane’s eyes. “Why didn’t you just leave it alone, man? You didn’t have to get mixed up in this.”

  “What is it? Urush technology? What? Anti-gravity? Nano-replication? A new FTL drive?”

  Zane’s eyes widened. He laughed out loud. So did the novice standing by his side. “He doesn’t know,” Zane said. For a moment it seemed like he couldn’t stop laughing. A chill went down my back all the way to my knees. “He doesn’t know.”

  “Care to enlighten me?”

  Instead of answering, Zane said, “How’d you find her?”

  “Easy,” I said. “She wanted to be found by us. She didn’t want to be found by you.” I was wondering if I could draw my .22 fast enough to shoot him before the novice shot me. Hiding my thoughts, I glanced in the direction of the crashed rig. The other novice had almost reached it. If Sophia was still alive, when she got here, we would die. She had no interest in talking to me. “Why’re you still working with Sophia, Cole? She doesn’t care about you.”

  Zane shrugged. The sunset was in his eyes, making him squint. He should have moved around us to put the sun at his back. It was a dumb mistake, and one he’d never have made on Tech Duinn. “This is bigger than any of us. How I feel about it, how you feel about it doesn’t matter.”

  “What about Burden? Looked like she was loving on him back there.”

  “Got nothing to do with me.”

  “She made you feel special,” I said, “and then she moved on to the next guy who had something she wanted. And you’re still taking her orders. My God, man, have some dignity.”

  “Step away from the girl,” he grated, raising his hook.

  Then his gaze flashed away from us. Sophia was striding back across the desert with the other novice—and Burden. The bastard was back on his feet, shirtless, with his left arm in a makeshift sling. I should’ve torn his throat out when I had the chance.

  “Over here,” yelled Zane, the good soldier, waving at them, like he expected a
reward for catching us.

  Faster than ever in my life, I drew my .22. I didn’t shoot Zane. He wasn’t the one with a gun.

  I shot the novice.

  She was a young woman with a mass of frizzy hair. A dragon spread its wings on her forehead. She had been someone’s baby once, someone’s little girl.

  I shot her.

  I didn’t have time to aim properly, but I didn’t need to. At ten paces, you can’t miss even when shooting from the hip.

  She clutched her stomach and doubled over, screaming. The shotgun fell to the ground.

  As fast as a snake striking, Martin sprang for it.

  Zane was already whirling. His hook sliced through the air, aiming to claw Martin’s back.

  I fired again. The bullet went through the sleeve of Zane’s coat.

  Martin dived on the shotgun like a rugby player, and rolled on the ground, bringing it up.

  Sophia fired. Running across the desert, she shot again and again. So did the novice with her.

  I charged at Pippa and knocked her to the ground, knowing I was too late. I expected to feel the agony of bullets ripping through my flesh. The impact winded me. Alien sand gritted in my mouth. I raised my head, dragging air into my lungs in great whoops.

  Sophia was still running towards us. She was shooting straight at me. I could see straight down the barrel of her gun, my vision blurred by dust. The gunfire sounded oddly far away.

  A meter in front of me, something fell to the ground with a muffled clink. I watched it roll away. I noticed that the wind had dropped completely. The screams of the novice seemed to be coming from further away. And then I understood.

  It wasn’t the dust that made Sophia look blurry.

  MF stood upright on his wheels right behind me, clutching a fold of Pippa’s shorts in one gripper. A disk-shaped attachment I’d never seen before stuck out of the side of his chassis. He said, “I do not have enough power to sustain a field of this size for long.”

  MF had a force field projector.

  He had cast a field around me, Pippa, Martin … and Zane.

  Zane lay on the ground, spitting out curses. Martin stood over him with the shotgun levelled at his belly. “Put him out of his misery?”

  “No,” I said. “Wait.”

  Sophia slammed into the force field while running flat out. She rebounded, staggered back, and fell on her ass. Martin laughed. I did not.

  Sophia stood up. The novice I had shot was still screaming. Sophia walked over to her and shot her in the head. The screaming stopped.

  Sophia walked all the way around the force field. It was a circular enclosure, about two meters across. We were jammed together in here. Sophia prodded MF’s field projector through the thinness of the field. Then she walked back around to me, smiling with her mouth, not her eyes. “How much for the bot?”

  “Not for sale,” I said, wondering exactly how long MF could keep this up. A few minutes? A few hours? I didn’t ask him, because I didn’t want the Travellers to know. I placed one palm on the field—like touching a balloon, but slippery—and moved it upwards. I didn’t even have to stand on tiptoe before my fingers found the top.

  Sophia swung at my exposed fingertips. I lowered my hand.

  “What are you doing here, anyway?” She had a bruise blossoming on one cheek. Grains of safety glass sparkled in her hair. “Who sent you?”

  “No one. I came for Lucy.”

  “For Lucy?”

  “She deserves to know the truth.”

  “Oh, bullshit, Mike. You thought there might be money in it. Your perspective is so damn limited. You never see any further than the next big score.”

  “I have IVK,” I burst out. “You infected me at the same time as you infected Pippa. I guess you could say that’s given me a new perspective on life. A new outlook. New goals.”

  Sophia covered her mouth with one hand. She turned to Burden, who had limped up to join her. “He’s got IVK,” she gasped. I thought for a second she was crying. But she was laughing. “Oh my God. That’s fucking hilarious. We got him. Shit, Mike, sorry, I shouldn’t laugh, but cosmic irony, much?”

  I scratched my ear, suppressing my reaction. “Guess you might feel differently about that in a while.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “I mentioned I’ve got some new goals. One of them is to put you in the ground before I die.” I didn’t mean it until I said it, and then I did mean it.

  “Oh yeah? Go on.” She ripped her drapey shirt open down the front, exposing her breastbone and the rest of her rose tattoo. It coiled around one of her full, pale breasts as if it grew out of the nipple. “Force fields work both ways,” she said. “Go on, shoot me! Enjoy the rebound.”

  “Ship’s coming,” Burden said, disengaged from the conversation, watching a handheld.

  “I could cure you.” She pushed on the force field. It dimpled inwards under the pressure of her fingertips. Without thinking, I reached for her hand. The slippery thinness of the force field held our fingers apart. “Just give me the TrZam 008 and I’ll tell you how to get well.”

  “Oh, you’re as full of shit as ever, honey,” I said. “There is no cure.”

  “So you’re just going to lie down and die? That’s not the guy I married.”

  As she spoke, the rose tattoo was growing. It curled across both of her breasts and her collarbone, sprouting open mouths and bloody scimitars in place of flowers. The “bruise” on her cheek turned into the squared-off head of the goddess Cipactli, eater of humans. Sophia had a full set of Traveller tattoos. She’d just had them switched off until now. The dark rainbow flooding over her skin both fascinated and repelled me.

  “Don’t let IVK win.” she said, and the Cipactli-head mouthed the words along with her.

  I glanced at Pippa. She was frozen, clutching her pendant in one white-knuckled fist. Then I met Martin’s eyes—hollow with shock.

  Oh. He had not known about my diagnosis … until I just blurted it out. Why had I done that, anyway? Because Sophia used to be my wife, and some stupid part of me had thought she might be sympathetic?

  A sonic boom shook the sky. A bright speck hurtled out of the sunset.

  All of us stared up.

  The approaching ship’s engines echoed around the sky. Fear and hope warred in my mind as it descended, until I made out the four fat auxiliary engine pods, and the rounded “head,” silhouetted against the sunset.

  The Travellers—Sophia, Burden, and the surviving novice—must have been expecting a ship of their own. When they saw that this was not it, they ran for Zane’s rig.

  The St. Clare gimballed its auxiliaries in its final braking maneuvers, and dropped out of the sky on four plasma candles.

  But it did not land immediately.

  It descended to 0.5 VTOL altitude—about 50 meters—and hovered, burning the auxiliaries.

  A missile slammed into the Traveller rig standing on the road. It erupted into a fireball. It was, after all, a tanker full of diesel.

  The three Travellers were about halfway to the rig at that point. They stumbled to a halt on the desert, their escape cut off.

  Another missile screamed out of the launcher and plowed into the crashed rig. Woomp.

  The St. Clare dropped on shrinking jets, with a crackling noise as if the air itself were burning. MF cancelled his force field, releasing us from our shimmering cage.

  Zane immediately tried to run. Martin whacked him on the head with the butt of the shotgun. Grabbing Zane’s arms, we stumbled away from the fireballs, towards the St. Clare. It had landed on the flattest bit of ground available. Thorn bushes burnt merrily under the ship’s tail. Oven-temperature air washed over us as we staggered between the auxiliaries. The sky was still thundering.

  I pushed Pippa up the ladder. She climbed with her t-shirt over her hands, yelping at the heat of the metal rungs.

  MF followed her. He had been holding onto her all the time we were running, as if scared she might get away.

  �
�I’m going back.” I reached for the shotgun hanging off Martin’s shoulder. “I’m going to get her.”

  “No, you’re not,” he grunted, and pointed at the sky.

  A bright glint grew like a falling meteor. Engines screamed like feedback.

  We hauled Zane up the ladder. I was the last in. I burrowed into the airlock chamber and turned around to close the outer door.

  The Travellers’ ship had just landed on the other side of the road. It was, of course, white. The letters on its fuselage said HURTWORLDS AUTHORITY.

  24

  Dolph’s voice boomed over the PA system, which we hardly ever used. “Strap in for evasive maneuvers.”

  I was still in the trunk corridor. The floor tipped up to a steep angle as Dolph opened the main engine throttle, pushing the St. Clare into an ascent trajectory. I grabbed the zero-gee handholds to stop myself from sliding all the way back to the engineering deck. I mountaineered forward, one handhold at a time, fighting the launch gravity. I reached the bridge as the ship lurched violently to starboard. “What are we evading?” I shouted.

  “Autonomous missiles.” Dolph slumped in the pilot’s couch, hands leaping over consoles visible and invisible. “The fuckers were dropping them all the way down.” The ship jinked sideways again. I fell into my seat. On my left, Irene hunched over the weapons console, orchestrating rapid defensive fire from our Gausses. The masers were less useful in-atmosphere; too much scattering and absorption.

  I strapped in and crushed my AR headset over my head. The urgent ping-ping-ping of missile warnings drilled into my ears. I toggled over to the optical feed. Missile contrails and the puffs of mid-air explosions mimicked clouds below the ship. We were already hundreds of klicks away from our launch site, but the computer had just picked up the plasma burst of the Travellers’ ship launching. “They’re coming after us.”

  “Surprise, surprise,” Dolph said.

  “Sophia was there.”

  “I thought that looked like her,” Irene said. “I wasn’t sure if you would want me to shoot her.”