by David Coy
“Hey . . . uh . . . Habershaw . . . ”
“What?”
“You’d better take a look at this . . . ” Lavachek said, handing the scope to him.
“That’s what I said, goddamn it,” Habershaw barked. “Gimme that thing.”
“I hope you haven’t had breakfast yet,” Lavachek added. Habershaw put the scope to his face and looked. “Breakfast is my favorite meal of the . . . day . . . ” His voice trailed off.
The men were carrying the body directly across his field of view, one guard walking backwards, so Habershaw had a perfect, unobstructed view of it.
The thing was human. At least the parts were human. The heads, bald and mottled, rolled around on their necks as if the thing or things were semi-conscious. It looked to be two or perhaps three bodies or parts of bodies fused into one. One of the arms, attached at some point near a hip region, was flailing and slapping at random. One of its multiple legs dragged a bent foot in the dirt as if trying to stop or slow down. Another kicked at the air in slow motion.
He couldn’t hear from that distance, but he could see that one of the heads was trying to talk, the mouth working slowly, repetitively, like some dumb thing. It was large and heavy, and the men were struggling with its weight, shifting their hands from time to time to get a better grip. They stopped, finally, and put it down. One of the men grinned and shook his wrists as if he’d been carrying a sofa.
“What the fuck is that?” Habershaw asked weakly.
The thing tried to crawl away, the arms and legs pawing at the dirt slowly in hopeless, opposite directions. One of the men put his foot down on a crawling arm to hold it still. When they had rested, they picked it up and continued, lugging it across the field, walking almost sideways now.
Habershaw handed the scope to Lavachek. Lavachek shook his head, then took another look through the scope.
“Where in Hell did they find that goddamned thing?” Habershaw asked.
“Damned if I know."
Habershaw leaned on the railing with a deep frown on his face and watched Lavachek watch. He wasn’t very interested in seeing it anymore.
“What are they doing now?” he asked Lavachek, then turned to look for himself.
Lavachek shook his head. “Hang on,” he said.
The men carried the thing to the very edge of the jungle. Lavachek could see what looked like a pit dug into the ground there. The pit was large, perhaps five meters square. The thing seemed to sense the pit’s closeness and started to struggle even more violently, its arms and legs waving or clawing at the ground.
The men stood there for a second, swung the creature once and tried to heave it into the pit. It went no distance at all. It fell hard on the edge of the pit with a jolt Lavachek could almost feel. When it rolled in, Lavachek could swear he heard it hit with a heavy thud and a sick groan.
One of the men pulled a pistol out of its holster, aimed and fired down into the pit three times. The shots went off silently in the scope, reaching their ears a second later.
“They killed it, didn’t they?” Habershaw asked, turned in the opposite direction.
“Yeah, they killed it. Hey, uh, move back,” Lavachek said taking Habershaw by the arm. “Move back inside.”
When they were safely out of sight, Lavachek turned to Habershaw, his face ashen.
“I’ve seen some strange bullshit over the years . . . ” Lavachek began.
“But nothing like that.” Habershaw finished. “That goddamned thing was human, I don’t care what you say.”
“More or less human,” Lavachek replied.
They stood there silently for a moment, staring at nothing. Habershaw shook his head. Lavachek raised up on his toes and stretched his neck to peek over the railing. “They’re going inside,” he said. “I don’t think they saw us.”
“Now what?” Lavachek asked.
Habershaw stared, his lips pursed. Thoughts were racing through his head. Some of them ran face first into brick walls. Others hurled themselves off cliffs. None of them survived long enough to give his confused mind any direction whatsoever. “I have no idea,” he said
“Did they find that goddamned thing in there?” Lavachek asked. “They must have, Bill. Or no, maybe it was a Siamese twin thing that they brought with them. Yeah, that’s got to be it. They must have brought the thing with them from Earth and somebody, probably that Jacob fuck, decided to kill it. That’s got to be it,” he said with his hands. “It was a mercy killing. That’s probably all it was.”
“Why in hell didn’t they just kill it back at the settlement?” Habershaw asked. “Why drag it out here to kill it? Why put the goddamned thing in a pit you could park a truck in?” Lavachek thought it over. His thoughts were bumping and falling and crashing like Habershaw’s. He craned up and took another peek at the ground below.
“This is bad. ” he said.
“What is it?” Habershaw said, craning up, too.
They could see the two soldiers carrying another multi-limbed creature toward the pit. This one hung limp and ,still, perhaps
already dead.
Lavachek looked through the scope. He didn’t want to. “Another one?” Habershaw asked.
“And just as ugly,” Lavachek replied. He put the scope down and moved toward the rear wall. When he got to it, he leaned there for a second, then slid slowly down onto his butt. “We’d better stay out of sight.”
Over the next hour, they watched as the two men made over a dozen trips to the pit carrying some appalling humanoid amalgam. Sometimes, they’d shoot into the pit or wave the effort away with a tired hand. Fatigue and the morning’s hot, red sun ultimately took its toll. Finally done, they lumbered back into the structure a last time and did not come back out.
“This is some very strange doings, Lavachek,” Habershaw said, peeking up over the rail.
“We should tell somebody what the hell’s going on.”
“Who? Who in Hell would we tell?” Habershaw blurted out, “and what in Hell would we tell them? We don’t know what’s going on.”
Lavachek shrugged.
“Right,” Habershaw agreed. “I don’t know, either. I say we just go blind and deaf and go about our business and forget about this. Those goons’ll kill us if we make any trouble.”
Habershaw rubbed his face with both hands. Bill Habershaw wasn’t one to ask the big questions. One awoke each morning at the break of day, went to work and paid down one’s debt. Life was simple—hard but simple. There were no questions to be asked, the answers of which weren’t already known. You did your job, and the big questions took care of themselves.
Until now.
Now this—this weird bullshit below. Something was far out of whack—torqued way over and twisted farther than he could have ever imagined. This was the damnedest thing he’d ever seen. It was probably the damnedest thing anyone had ever seen.
One group had all the goods, and all the weapons, and all the food, and all the tools of survival. Without those tools and without the power, the contractors were quite literally, slaves. A new world had arrived far worse than any he could have constructed in his worst nightmare.
And one twisted bastard owned all of that—in fact, he owned the whole damned planet.
“Goddamned bastard,” he said.
“I agree with that. They are indeed bastards.”
“No, I’m talking about one in particular—Jacob. This whole damned thing is his doing. And you can bet that whatever it is they’re doing inside, he’s got something to do with it.”
He stood up and leaned on the railing as if he were going to vault over it and charge the fortress single-handedly.
“I’ve had it,” Habershaw said. “We have to do something. This shit cannot go on. I have no contract with the Sacred Bond or their goddamned Council. In fact, I’ve got no contract at all.”
“We ain’t got shit,” Lavachek said. “Without a contract, they’ve got it all."
“All that could change,” Habersha
w said over his shoulder.
“How?”
“Because right now they don’t have it.”
“Sure they do.”
“No, they don’t.”
“Who’s got it?”
“Joan—every piece of it—all neat and bundled up.”
He took out his phone and called Joan’s office. She’d just be getting in, probably pouring her first cup of coffee if she had the time.
8
Peter knew something about weapons. He had read a lot about them. His father had spent many years in the military and when he passed away, he left Peter a sizable library on the subject.
The Council’s police had no shortage of weaponry. They’d been bringing their toys down from the transport, without assistance from Joan, for the last few days. Everybody knew they could slaughter them at will. They didn’t have to shove it down their throats.
Stored in the back of warehouse Number Two was an array of light- to medium-weight projectile weapons, mostly multipurpose, rapid-fire rifles. There were some shoulder-fired rockets, as well, and a container or two of mortars. There were two e-beam weapons, but those had arrived in parts and needed special assembly. Using focused microwave energy, e-beam guns were seething destruction on living flesh and left most other material intact. They had been officially outlawed for thirty years. It was no surprise that a band of hired renegades would have a couple of the most terrible portable weapons ever devised at their disposal.
The real prize was way in the back of Warehouse Three. Peter knew right where it was because he saw them bring it in and stash it. They’d waited until night to bring this one down. Peter had been working late and was shuffling some of the lighter crates near the front of the warehouse when the crewman drove right past him with the container perched on the front of the
lift. Peter told her about it right away.
At first Joan was furious. But that was yesterday. Now she was glad the goddamned thing was there. The reason was simple: she was going to steal it.
* * *
“Once you get your hands on that thing, there’s no turning back,” Habershaw told her on the phone. “When they find out it’s gone, they’ll kill every last one us to get it back.”
“They’re not going to know it’s gone,” she said confidently, “until it’s too late.”
“Explain,” he said.
“I’m moving everything in Three to the docks tomorrow. When I get about half of it moved, I’ll open the rear doors where the bomb is and continue from that side. If it comes up, I’ll tell them the lift traffic in front is too heavy and that I’m doing it to split up the work. I’ll tell the guys to make sure they crash some containers into each other—they do that anyway when they get rolling—just to make the point. By the time the assholes catch on, I’ll have the bomb stashed away somewhere else and a mountain of containers on the dock. If they want it back, I’ll tell them the goddamned thing is buried in the stack and that it’ll take hours to dig it out. I’ll dummy up a manifest that shows it in the stack, something like that, and tell them not to worry about the goddamned thing. Besides, I don’t think they want to draw too much attention to it. I’m sure they thought they were bringing it down in secret. Secret from us, that is. That’s why they’ve got it squirreled away like that. I’m sure the Council knows about it.”
“What if they stop you before you get it moved?”
“Then I’ll give it back to them. Hell with ‘em. Nobody told me not to move it. It’s my warehouse, right?”
“You’d better hope they believe you.” Habershaw said.
“Fuck ‘em,” she replied.
“That attitude will get you killed,” he said with sharp edges of both anger and worry in his voice.
“Fuck ‘em,” she repeated.
“What if they want you to dig it out? What if they want to
see it?”
“Bill, I’m gonna have so much goddamned activity around that dock and warehouse, they won’t know what the hell is going on. I’ll get it back to them—it just won’t come from the stack. Oh! whoops! Here it is! Damn! I thought it was in this pile of shit. They’re not gonna watch that close anyway.”
“They might. It’s a damned nuke.”
“Then I’m screwed. I’m screwed anyway. What’s the difference?”
Habershaw sighed through his nose. She was a loose canon. But if anybody could pull it off, Joan could.
The plan was to steal the nuke, hide it where it would do the most damage, then threaten to use it. As long as they had the nuke and the power to detonate it, they’d have some say about what happened next. The bomb would give them back their future by providing more than a little leverage against the Council. If she set it off—she’d tell them—The Sacred Bond of the Fervent Alliance would have to fend for themselves on this hostile planet without benefit of slaves or weapons or human comforts. If they didn’t get their way, Joan would vaporize the last remnants of human technology. The survivors would be forced to live like savages. If it came to it, Joan was sure she could do it. At least it would equalize things. When the bomb atomized the zillion tons of human goods, now collected in one relatively small spot, the contractors would have nothing, the mercenaries would have nothing, and the Sacred Bond would have nothing. People would die; that would be unavoidable. But people died anyway. She had it all thought out.
But the goal wasn’t to set the bomb off and turn the last fragments of human civilization to gas. The goal was to distribute the power. The mercenaries had to go. They could go back to Earth—every last goddamned one of them. Most of them would probably prefer that. The weapons would be destroyed, most of them anyway. Once those goals were achieved, a new collective Council would be formed with representatives from both sides on it. That Council, made jointly of contractors and settlers, would govern the fledgling society on Verde’s Revenge.
No work without representation. Joan had read her history—and no more torture or executions either.
“Be careful, Joan,” Habershaw said.
“Hell with ‘em,” she said.
By three o’clock the next day, Joan Thomas was in possession of a one-half-kiloton, residual-radiation-free, protonuclear exploding device weapon, complete with instructions on how to deploy it, arm it and detonate it. Exploded close enough, it could easily destroy the Bondsmen's entire living cloister. Regardless of where it was detonated, the damage would incapacitate the settlement or wound it mortally. Exploded in the unoccupied storage warehouse compound, the resulting devastation would make living on Verde's Revenge very unappealing proposition. It was the perfect bargaining chip.
The bomb itself was about the size of a lunch box, egg-shaped with a smooth and shiny anodized surface. There was a launcher like a big tube and a suspensor attachment and a guidance system for it, but she wouldn’t be needing those since she wouldn’t be launching it or sending it at anything. The remote detonator was small enough to fit in her shirt pocket. It had three buttons on it. The bomb came with an attachable handle for carrying. The instructions for using it were written on the inside of the container’s lid in language a child could follow. There were big red cautions and Danger! icons all over everything. She’d seen plenty of those over the years, but none quite so flashy or insistent.
She slid her hands down around the bomb and pried it out of its depression. She turned it around. It was much heavier than she thought it would be. It wouldn’t destroy the entire settlement, but was certainly capable of wreaking substantial damage to it. It was the perfect bargaining chip.
“Wow,” she said.
She sat cross-legged in front of the open container with the nuke in her lap and studied the instructions for a minute longer. Then she put it back, closed the lid, pushed the case across the floor and crammed it between the bed and the wall. She covered it with the dirty clothes from the hamper.
She dialed Bill’s number.
“I’ve got the cookie,” she said when he answered.
“T
hey don’t suspect? It went as planned?”
“Planning is my middle name.”
“Where is it?”
“In the bedroom.”
“In the bedroom?” he almost choked.
“Right.”
“No,” he said. “Get it out of there. If they suspect it’s been stolen, that’s the first place they’ll look.”
“Bullshit. It’s the last place. Think about it, Bill.”
He did. “Okay. How big is it? The bomb itself?”
“With a little work, I could hide it up your ass,” she said. “That’s not funny.”
“Sure it is.”
Christ, he thought. She’s a wild hair. She’s perfect for this shit.
“So where do we plant it?” he asked.
“Guess.”
“Joan,” he said solemnly. “This is serious. Please don’t screw around.”
She huffed into the phone. “Fine. We put it under the transmitter between warehouse Three and the dock,” she said. “It’s an unlikely spot, kind of out in the open, but there're plenty of vegetation in between the supports to hide it in. The transmitter is right in the middle of everything. If it goes from there, it’ll take out ninety-nine percent of everything they own, mostly the storage warehouses.”
That wouldn’t be all it took out. If the bomb went off anywhere near the settlement, people—perhaps a great number of people—were going to die. As far as he knew, the blast could destroy the warehouses, the contractor’s shelters and the cloister, too.
“Joan?” he asked.
“What?”
“Would you set that damn thing off—if it came to it?”
He expected some hesitation, a moment’s reflection based on the gravity of such a decision.
“You bet,” she said instantly. “Look it’s a big bomb but it’s not going to destroy everything. Just what we want to blow up.”
