Dirty Job

by Felix R. Savage

  “They kill some Travellers, maybe,” Morshti shouted. “If nothing else, it will serve as a diversion.”

  We came out on the riverbank. The houses went right down to the water here. The river was frozen over. Morshti stepped out onto the ice. “If it’ll hold that two-hundred-kilo freak,” Martin muttered, and strode after xim, followed by Robbie and Ijiuto. I hung back for a second, remembering how I’d almost drowned in this river seventeen years ago, thinking about the cold black water under the ice. Then I followed. The ice was covered with snow. I sank in up to my ankles. Cold wind blew down the river, tossing flurries into my face. My self-defrosting Fleet snow goggles kept it out of my eyes.

  Upstream, the bank bulged out into a walled promontory. That was the power plant. The walls looked much higher up close than when I had seen them from the 15th floor of the MTEV building—ten sheer meters of dirty stone, ominous in the whirling snow. How were we going to get in there?

  Gunfire spat, this time from the other side of the river. I glimpsed muzzle flash. The Sixers over there had spotted us, and evidently took us for enemies.

  We ran, slipping on the ice. We were strung out: Morshti in the lead, Martin behind xim, then Robbie, then Ijiuto, with me bringing up the rear. Robbie had the satchel with the grenades and spare ammo in it.

  Morshti stumbled. Fell. Rising on one knee, xe returned fire with two rifles at once. That’s the advantage of having six arms. With one rifle, xe aimed at the Sixers across the river. With the other, xe peppered the jumble of buildings this side of the power plant.

  The Travellers on sentry duty had seen us.

  That diversion didn’t last long.

  Martin added his fire to Morshti’s. I found the Travellers with my scope, in the top floor of the tenement-style building nearest to the power plant. The building was missing its roof. The Travellers crouched behind the sheared-off walls. I knew they were Travellers and not Sixers because they had only two arms apiece. If that didn’t tip me off, the black coats would have. I fired at them as I ran to catch up with the others, feeling the Butterfly kick against my shoulder and upper chest.

  Robbie ran up behind Martin, and past him, fumbling in his satchel. He threw a grenade. It fell down into the street between the Travellers’ building and the power plant. Red light blossomed around the corner of the building. The building slowly collapsed, taking the Travellers with it.

  “Missed,” Robbie gasped.

  “Hey, it worked.” Against my better instincts, I stopped to help Morshti up. Xe had taken a bullet in the top right arm and was bleeding through xis camo, cursing in the Ek language.

  The ice creaked.

  “Remind me whose bright idea it was to come this way?” Martin said.

  Ahead of us, the ice ended in a lacy shelf. A moat of black water separated us from the power plant.

  “They’re venting hot wastewater straight into the river.” I stood stock-still, feeling the ice creak under my feet. “It’s melted the ice.” Emergency cooling, in a nuclear fission plant, means flooding the fuel rods with water. Lots and lots of water. All that water then has to go somewhere. I could hear the emergency pumps throbbing like a giant heart over the whistle of the wind.

  We were trapped. Radioactive water ahead, Travellers on one side of us, Sixers on the other. Martin and I shot at the Travellers scrambling over the wreckage of the collapsed building, forcing their heads down. But now, through the gap, I could see the Traveller ship, a monster standing on its three duck-foot engine pods on a sheet of glassed rubble, facing the wall of the power plant.

  The tank had scored some hits. A region of the hull on the starboard side was crumpled like paper. That ship would not be flying again. But that didn’t mean it was no longer dangerous. People climbed on top of it, heading for the .50 turret. When that gun opened up, it would sweep us away like a steel broom.

  I stared up at the wall beyond the black water, tipped back my head, and shouted at the top of my lungs, “MF! Mechanical Failure!” The wind seemed to carry my voice away. “MF, are you there, buddy? It’s me! Mike!” The snow swirled into my face. “I’m sorry, MF! Can you hear me? In God’s name, MF! Help!”

  Ijiuto threw down his rifle. For an instant I thought he’d been hit. Then he ran towards the Travellers—betraying us the first chance he got. Robbie dived after him.

  Abruptly, Ijiuto vanished. Robbie stopped short. A crack ran through the ice, right between his legs, scissoring them apart.

  Ijiuto thrashed in the water.

  A small, suitcase-shaped object flew over the wall of the power plant, trailing something beneath it.

  The Travellers on top of the ship shot at it.

  MF bobbed like a suitcase-shaped swallow, making himself an unpredictably moving target. He swooped low over us. The thing trailing from his chassis was a ladder, such as sea rescue crews drop from helicopters. Morshti grabbed it with all five of xis working hands. “Marty! Robbie! Climb!” I shouted. Once they were on the ladder, I seized it, hooked my knees over the second-to-last rung, and let myself hang upside-down. My rifle bashed me in the face. I snatched for Ijiuto’s flailing arms, twisted my fingers into his coat, and took his weight in my shoulders as MF rose into the snow.

  Why did I save Ijiuto? I should have let the bastard drown. I just didn’t want to let the Travellers have him back.

  MF’s levitation bubble had expanded to the size of a three-storey building to lift all of us. It sheltered us from the snow like a roof. Swinging upside-down, fighting to keep my grip on Ijiuto’s wet coat, feeling like my arms were pulling out of their sockets, I glimpsed the shocked faces of the Travellers on top of the ship.

  One of them was Sophia.

  Our eyes met for an instant.

  She whipped her rifle up and fired at me.

  Thank God she was such a bad shot.

  MF dropped over the top of the wall. We landed in a heap on the ground among the dingy prefab buildings of the power plant. When I untangled myself, I found a bullet hole in the hood of my parka. Whoa. She came pretty close to getting me this time.

  Justin stooped over us, beaming delightedly. “My friend, my friend! I knew you would come back! Have you brought us some more good luck? We sorely need it.”

  “Dunno about that, but I’ve brought you something else,” I said, hauling Ijiuto to his feet.

  49

  The Sixers put Morshti in chains. Ijiuto they did not, despite my pleas. They felt sorry for him because he was soaked through, and on top of that he turned out to have been grazed by a bullet. Blood trickled from the fingers of his left hand and mingled with the water dripping from his clothes. We straggled into the control room. Amid old-fashioned banks of dials and readouts, Sixer technicians were frantically working to keep the nuclear core cool. We went on down a flight of stairs too deep for human legs, into the power plant’s safety bunker.

  It was a peculiar room. Pillars rose from the floor here and there, ending in double-bed-sized surfaces that were chest-high on me. The Sixers had piled these “tables” with computers, hazmat garments, and dirty dishes. Cots lined one wall, some occupied by exhausted Sixers. A radiation counter, steadily beeping, beeped faster when we came in. It took me a moment to notice the walls. One wall looked like frosted glass. Around all the other walls writhed faded cloisonné murals of four-legged, long-necked, shaggy-furred Urush having sex.

  MF goggled ruefully at the alien orgy. “This was an Urush temple. This was the holy of holies. Those are altars. Oh, I don’t mind! Time passes, and times change.”

  “The Urush had a religion based on sex?” I said.

  “Is that any stranger than your religion based upon a crucified God?”

  A boom rumbled through the room. The floor vibrated.

  “The Travellers are firing the ship’s railgun at the curtain wall,” MF said. “The Urush used to say nothing could get through exodiamondite. That may have been true once, but after thousands of years, everything starts to decay. I estimate they will break
down the wall by the end of the day, if they do not run out of shells first. Where is the St. Clare?”

  *

  The St Clare was still sitting at the spaceport. The water, LOX, and LN2 tanks were full. Dolph had run pre-launch checks, and then run them again. He’d messed with the HF awhile, but he couldn’t get through to me. Olthamo had lifted Burden’s all-frequencies jamming protocol, but I was sitting in a former Urush temple underground. It might be true that nothing could get through exodiamondite; radio waves certainly couldn’t.

  With nothing to do except wait, Dolph was restless. He told me later that he’d started thinking about how he stayed behind on Yesanyase Skont before this, and the reasons why.

  He put on his polar gear and trudged over to the graveyard. He visited with the Artster for a while, talking to him under his breath, telling him what was going on. His breath clouded white in the air, and as if transferred up from the frozen ground to him by some process of living memory, the old deep hunger for oblivion, the need I’ve never really felt and can only imagine, took hold. He started fantasizing about a little something to take the edge off. But he realized what was happening, he said. Realized that being around Artie, even in spirit, brought out the worst in him. And he further realized that he had come out here on purpose, so he’d have an excuse for getting high. He kicked the cross so hard it hurt his foot.

  Then he went back to the ship.

  And he went to the first-aid locker.

  We didn’t carry any strong medications on the ship as a rule. Shifters don’t need them. But Smith, in addition to having every last ding and dent on the St. Clare fixed, had restocked our first-aid locker with a pharmacopoeia fit for a front-lines unit, including the latest Fleet-approved formulation of the drug we used to call shabu.

  Dolph said he only took half the recommended dose, but I think it was probably more than that.

  Then he went and sat in the open airlock with his feet up on the wall of the chamber, chain-smoking.

  Waiting.

  *

  “Wonderful,” MF said bitterly, when I told him the St. Clare was at the spaceport. “And even if we could contact Dolph, the ship cannot land here. What sort of a rescue is this?”

  Martin said, “Bet Dolph could put down inside the compound. Sure, it would be risky, but he lives for that shit.”

  “You are referring to the apparently open ground beyond the cooling towers,” MF said. “Look.” He rolled over to the only orgy-free wall of the bunker and shone his integrated lamp straight at it.

  I caught my breath. A circular area of the wall seemed to dissolve under the powerful beam. No, it became transparent, like glass, or … what did MF say? Exodiamondite.

  Suddenly, we were looking out into daylight. This bunker was actually built into the side of a shallow bowl within the compound. The falling snow obscured Sixers patrolling the curtain wall. And at the bottom of the bowl, more Sixers stood guard underneath a fancy arrowhead spaceship.

  “The temple had its own launch pad,” MF said. “The ship is of more recent vintage.”

  Hope lit me up. We might be able to use that ship to escape. Call Dolph, link up with the St. Clare in orbit. “Where did that ship come from?” As I spoke, I realized the answer. It was the same ship that Irene had spotted on a barge at the spaceport last time we were here.

  “Justin stole it under cover of darkness,” MF said. “He is a most enterprising young man.” He blinked his sensor covers rapidly. “Don’t get your hopes up, Captain. He will not let you have that ship.”

  MF had read my thoughts. “Why not?”

  “Because he intends to use it himself.”

  Justin came back in with Pippa.

  “Mike! Marty! Oh my God!” Pippa hurried over to us. Her face blazed with happiness. In the short month since we last met, she had gained a massive injection of self-confidence. Gone was the defeated, tearful IVK victim. Her hair was brushed sleek. She wore a cape-like sweatshirt over thermals and wide trousers, all evidently cut-down Sixer garments. She was at it again, restyling charity gear to her own liking, just as she had done on Gvm Uye Sachttra. That was the girl I saw before me now—the cheeky, precocious knife-seller from the refugee camp. Pippa had got her mojo back, and then some. A new poise infused her carriage; she looked like … a princess.

  Watching Justin wrap his lower set of arms possessively around her shoulders, I realized her transformation was probably due to good sex, and lots of it.

  When a boy and a girl are in love, they can’t hide it even if they try. They can’t keep their hands off each other, even in the direst circumstances. So Pippa and Justin petted each other’s hands and toyed with one another’s hair while the Travellers battered at the wall outside. Justin gestured normally with his free set of hands and talked to us, explaining how he’d cleverly stolen the spaceship, as if he and Pippa weren’t practically having sex with their clothes on.

  Well, he’d probably never had a girlfriend before. Sure, he was 25. But he had been groomed to rule from childhood, and spent his adulthood in a miserable marriage to an alien. No wonder he had fallen hard for this sweet girl whom we, like the chumps we were, had consigned to his protection. And Pippa herself? She’d spent much of her young life hustling to keep herself and her cousins alive. She’d known hard times, but she may never have tasted love ... until she met the young king of New Abilene-Qitalhaut.

  Trust me to show up and harsh their buzz.

  Without trying to soften it, I told them everything: the Iron Triangle, Smith’s threats, my mission to retrieve the TrZam 008. I also told Pippa that Jan and Leaf had been fostered, and were thriving. That news brought a smile to her face, but it dimmed as she stared narrowly at Ijiuto, who was sitting in the opposite corner, guarded by two Sixer toughs, dripping and miserable.

  “Of course. Now I recognize him. Rafael, born of Ludmilla and Jan.” I frowned; I’d thought the last Rafael in the Tree was born of Cornelia and somebody, but I let it go. “He’s the New Gessyrian pretender to the throne. Gran always warned us that he might come looking for us someday. New Gessyria won the war, but they wouldn’t consider their victory complete until the Old Gessyrian line was extinct. That’s what she said. Oh, I wish I’d taken the threat more seriously.” Pippa’s lower lip suddenly pushed out. Jan and Leaf may have resented their authoritarian grandmother, but Pippa must have loved the old woman. Her eyes sparkled with tears. She picked up one of Justin’s hands and rubbed her face against his broad palm, wiping the moisture away. “So he did come looking for us.” She raised her voice and shouted in Ijiuto’s direction. “Why couldn’t you just leave us alone?!”

  “You stole the Code,” Ijiuto yelled at her, in a tone of raw fury that made his Sixer guards close in threateningly.

  “No, you stole it,” Pippa shouted. “You attacked Old Gessyria on purpose to steal the Code!”

  “Your grandmother was a liar,” Ijiuto shouted. “The Code was ours, and you stole it! We were only defending our intellectual property rights!” One of the Sixers hit him, and he subsided.

  “Oh, don’t you sound educated,” Pippa said, digging her fingers into Justin’s knee. She was sitting beside him on one of the cots. She shouted across the room at Ijiuto, “Defending your intellectual property rights! Is that how you describe a war that left fifteen million dead?”

  “Fifteen million?” I whistled softly. I’d had no idea the Gessyrian civil war wreaked destruction on that scale.

  “Oh yes,” Pippa said. She slumped against Justin’s chest. “I was born on the carrier that had just delivered a counterstrike to New Gessyria. After that, it carried the last six thousand survivors of Old Gessyria to the Cluster.”

  Justin told the story. Pippa must have told it to him in private, with plenty of breaks for tears and kisses, but it was too emotionally charged for her to relate to anyone else. So she just sat there, half-covering her ears, sometimes covering her eyes, and we got the tragedy of the Darkworlds filtered through the perspective and v
ocabulary of a Sixer. It was oddly appropriate. Justin himself, after all, was another royal heir, of another planet that had suffered through the hell of war. He knew whereof he spoke, although he’d never been to the Darkworlds, any more than Pippa had.

  This was the gist of it. Five hundred years ago, in the late Age of Adaptation, a convoy of human colonists reached the system that would later be known as the Darkworlds, and they saw that it was good. Not one but two human-compatible planets orbited a star of 1.2 solar masses with a human-friendly radiation spectrum. The colonists made landfall on the second and slightly smaller planet, which they named Gessyria. They broke up one of their colony ships to bootstrap power generation and industry. They flourished under the guidance of their hereditary monarchy, which they had determined to be the least bad of all political systems (Justin spoke approvingly of this choice), and after fifty years or so, they planted another colony on the third and larger planet. This then became known as New Gessyria, while the original colony turned into Old Gessyria. A prince of the dynasty went out to rule the new colony as a satrapy of his father’s dominion.

  Anyone with minimal knowledge of history could have predicted that that wasn’t going to end well.

  But in fact, disaster struck from a different quarter. Not politics, but nature, landed the Gessyrians a one-two punch.

  First of all, New Gessyria turned out to be tectonically restless. A massive volcanic eruption spewed ash into the planet’s atmosphere, borking the colonists’ solar power and killing their crops. They suffered through three years without a summer. They converted their remaining spaceships into power plants and synthesized food out of local resources, but that killed more of them than the bitter cold.

  At almost the same time, a shower of meteors struck Old Gessyria, causing quakes and tsunamis which washed away three-quarters of the colonists, and all their remaining spaceships.