Him too? I’m surrounded by a bunch of book bugs?
Kalia’s looking at me. Like she’s checking my skin for a tick. I want to ask her what she sees. Then she speaks.
She says, “I can teach you to read, Jaqi. I taught Toq.”
“I . . .” Well, burning hell and the devil. “How did you know?”
She doesn’t tell me. She just says, all evil nice, “I want to teach you. It’s fun. Our nanny didn’t do a good job of teaching Toq, and Quinn wasn’t very patient with him . . .” She gets a bit quiet at her brother’s name, and comes back with “. . . so I did.”
It’s one of the nicest things anyone’s offered me in a while, anyway. “Like, what he’s doing? You point at the word and then you make the sound?”
“Yes,” Toq says. “Look! This says ‘elephant.’”
He shows me the little markings on his page, like I’m going to understand it too. As far as I can tell, those little markings could be a recipe for chocolate cake—damn, this protein pack tastes terrible—but I smile and say, “Does it now?”
“Reading is fun,” Kalia said. “Toq even likes it, even though he’s just learning. Did your parents know how to read?”
“Maybe?” I shrug. Might as well be honest, now the airlock’s open on my secrets. “They might’ve had a data dump for it, but had we no time for reading in the spaceways. If we went into mid-galaxy, we might get force-drafted.”
Oh hell, she’s going to cry again. “I’m so sorry.”
“En’t nothing to be sorry about. Every life’s got its share of scabs.” I touch her face. She’s thinking about her brother, I can tell. “Hey. We’re gonna get you safe, in well.”
“I want answers from the children,” Z snaps. Aiya, he can kill a mood. “Why does the Vanguard want you two so badly?”
“I don’t know,” Kalia says.
“Quinn said you were getting out of known space,” I say. “I don’t know how you were supposed to do that.”
“This.” She taps something and I recognize it, and realize she’s been hanging on to it. It’s that black box they were carrying on Swiney. “It’s not just for hiding us. It’s got a star map, but it’s encrypted. Um . . .” Her eyes are tearing up. I put an arm around her. “Quinn knew the encryption code.”
I hug her close. Damn, we’d better hope that gray-wearing Vanguard bitch didn’t get anything out of Quinn’s head with her sword.
Z reaches for the black box. “May I see?” He lifts it up without their answer, peers at it closely. The thing’s fancier than I thought at first. Little scrolls and curls go along the sides; might be some kind of writing, for those who know lots of kinds of writing.
He lets out a long, slow breath. I can smell it even over my fishy clothes. “This is old,” he says. “Jorian writing, Second Era. I’ve seen the like in a museum. Where did you get this?”
“Dad had it,” Kalia said.
“You’ve been to a museum?” I ask. Z is starting to make me look like the savage.
“Suits can decrypt this,” Z says.
“Aiya. That means you have to deal with Suits.”
“What are Suits?” Kalia asks.
Z’s frowning. A real frown, but not a scowl. “Where are we going?”
“A dark node, and yes, there’s Suits there.”
“Why, exactly, did this node go dark?”
“It’s Bill’s,” I say. “It’s safe.”
“Nothing’s safe,” Z says.
Will he never stop killing the mood?
-9-
Jaqi
WE COME SPINNING OUT of pure space to Bill’s.
My head is hurting; I’ve been up a good thirty-six hours now, and I still couldn’t stomach more than a couple bites of protein. I asked Z to drive at one point, but he said he en’t piloted one of these before, and he wasn’t going to risk us on the drop from pure space in case we hit a gas storm world, or atmos . . . and I figure that was a comment on my navigating skills, and I tell you, this guy is going to take some getting used to, aiya. If he wasn’t so big, I would have slapped him sore.
Bill’s place looms up before us.
“Oh my gosh,” Kalia says.
“What’s a gosh?” I ask.
She doesn’t answer. Her eyes are glued ahead of us. I gotta admit, it’s a sight.
Bill’s started out as a couple of hidey-holes in an asteroid. The original lump of rock still sits at the heart, but since he got it, he’s added two concentric rings, alight with tiny flickering flames from thrusters, turning the apparatus. The rings are obviously cobbled together; circuits and wires and scrap metal and component girders stuck to plasticene sprayed from the hose, dried in lumps as big as our ship. He’s added more raw rock; other asteroids to make a kind of spiderweb of girders and plasticene. Normally he uses the other rocks as guest quarters, or storage, but everything’s dark, no running lights; I’m guessing only the central quarters are even running atmos.
Bill’s got an impressive setup, especially for how it’s cobbled together. But that’s not what’s drawing Kalia’s eye.
See, the running lights of Bill’s are the only light in the sky.
Behind us, the star field spreads out, the pale ribbon of the galaxy running through it. And behind Bill’s, the dark patch of sky—stretching as far as you can see. No stars, nothing.
“You didn’t— That’s the Dark Zone!”
“It’s how he keeps quiet,” I say. “No one goes hunting old nodes on the edge of the Dark Zone.”
“The Navy surely campaigns here,” Z says.
“En’t so. The Navy has nodes inside the Dark Zone they use to attack. Had nodes.” I remember what Quinn said. “Now they’re stuck in there forever.” The kids are staring like the Dark Zone’s about to come alive and eat them. “Don’t worry. It won’t hurt you. On thrusters, it would still take you decades just to touch the edge of that.” It’s always given me the creeps, especially the way that dark patch has grown over the years. But then, I got used to it. This was my home.
My parents left me at Bill’s when they had nowhere else to go. Eleven years ago. Too dangerous to take me when they shipped out, on a rat-scow, illegally scavenging through trash for repurposing material. Or that’s what Bill told me. They never came back.
It en’t a subject I’m fond of. I used to think they died a noble death, or maybe they was still out there. Now I know that the Imperial Fleet most likely saw that rat-scow clinging to the side of their garbage dump, and shot it right off like a bug, killing all the rats, including my parents. Heroic, en’t it? All odds on, my folks died sifting trash.
I grew up in the hallways of this asteroid, back when Bill had nasty old grav that hardly worked. These days the rings turn it all fast enough that there’s a bit of real grav in there, the kind they can generate in ecospheres. Fancy.
“Oh my gosh!” There’s that gosh again, from Kalia. What is this gosh thing? Name of the blueblood god? “What is that?”
Toq screams and grabs my arm.
And that’s their first view of a Suit.
This Suit has five human arms, clad in steelskin. Five arms, like he’s collected them up off the ground.
The arms sprout from a platform running with light and wires, which is wired to a metal girder that connects to the lumps of wires and circuit boards and pistons running from the helmeted head—and then on the other side, another girder arm that ends in another bunch of real flesh arms. Try to imagine replacing your fingers with small arms. You can’t see the face under the dark helmet, and that I am mighty thankful for. If the Suits don’t give you the creeps, you might be a creep your own self.
The old Empire mapped out the entire galaxy and stuck nodes everywhere they could, to keep trade flowing without the need for Jorians to constantly navigate. In the millennia since, lots of nodes have gone dark, the codes lost, the pure-space wormhole simply unused.
The Suits find the old nodes. That’s why you need them, out here in the wild. They are the o
nly scabs in the galaxy who can get nodes working again, by running every code they can collect in every bit of old tech in every scrapyard in every system in the stars. For Suits, though, “tech” don’t distinguish between squishy parts and metal. They all start out organic, and they start cutting themselves up, trading organs and limbs for tech until they turn into evil scary hybrids. They splice brains into their databases, pulling out everything that has a fragment, a memory, a clue as to the tech they’re looking for.
This Suit leaps away from the ring in front of us, floats along the spindle arm of the metal ring. “It’s telling Bill we’re coming.”
“That’s gross,” Kalia says. “That’s really gross.”
Toq makes a little whine and clutches my arm harder.
“No arguing with you there,” I say.
“Who’s in the asteroid? More of . . . more of those?”
“Hope not,” I say. “No, just a rough, with one hand on a gun and the other picking his nose.” Toq doesn’t giggle. I thought it was a good one.
Z’s watching the asteroid as it gets closer. “This does not seem like a place of profit.”
“Bill’s pulled through all the custom in the wild. Just calm yourself down.”
* * *
Araskar
Withdrawal is indeed a bitch.
The shaking and the sweats didn’t last too long. My legs and arms keep going numb, but that I can deal with. The real bitch is, the drugs are all I can think about. A couple of those brain bullets, and I will sink into the music. Two pink pills, and I could hear the sweet, stirring strings of a nebula. I could hear the roiling, thunderous beat within the heart of a star. I could feel it stir me, embrace me, and I would forget this mission.
Instead I get to hear Swiney Niney’s chatter. Animals, probably illegal minor crosses, in the jungle, chattering. Bugs. Dripping water. Mosquitoes buzzing in my ears. And Helthizor, muttering under his breath. “We’re way off time.”
“We’re going the right way,” I say. “Relax. No one’s shooting at us.”
“I wish you would tell me what’s on your mind,” he says. “I’m supposed to be advising you.”
“Emperor Turka wished he could shit without a winch to open his asshole, and look where that got him.”
Helthizor looks back over the crew behind us before he turns back and whispers, “You feeling any better, Secondblade?”
He’s about as sly as a supernova. “I quit.”
“Good.”
“Watch your tone, Helthizor.” My leg is seizing up and going numb. My arm feels too heavy with that gun in it, too. My head is throbbing. It wants to be filled with the music instead of the shitty muck of this ecosphere. “You talk to me, not Rashiya, you understand?”
I expect deferment, or something high-headed, but he just says, “I was worried.”
My destination is at the top of the Swiney Niney hill. It’s the only other color in the jungle green. A thin, crystalline Jorian-built structure, all twisting spires and domes once made to shine in the sun. Now painted solid black. And hung on the gates, a black, enormous skull.
“A Necro temple?” Helthizor says when it comes into view. “I can’t see them reacting well to all of us.”
“That, Helth,” I say, “is why the company is moving on. I will take this myself.” He doesn’t respond, so I say, “Now, Sergeant. I won’t be long. We all go in there together, we’ll spook ’em.”
“Is this another stupid risk?”
“Aren’t they all?” I try to give him a big grin. “Have fun in the woods. Find me a pet monkey. Always wanted one.”
I don’t bother to wait around for what he’s going to say. I’ve got too much to think on right now as it is. I walk to the entrance of the entirely cheerful Necro temple. You wouldn’t think there were so many decorative skulls in this part of the wild worlds.
“Death!” I say as enthusiastically as I can to the skull. “Death!”
It isn’t hard. I sure feel like death.
The gates open.
The Necro temple is the biggest, fanciest building in this shithole. That’s not saying much. I’ve seen pictures, in two, three, and four dimensions, of the one on Irithessa. It takes up its own private island, towers half a mile into the sky, and Necron devotees from all over the galaxy come to learn about the glories of not-living. Then they go out into the wide galaxy, to scream “Death!” at sporting events, and hand out annoying pamphlets in spaceports.
That’s what folks think, anyway. They also run the best black market this side of lost Earth. There’s an astonishing number of Kurguls, minor drones from the big nests, who decide to take up a life in service of the Necro-Lord. Religious tax exemption is just the start of the benefits.
The yard of the temple is filled with remnants of dead things. Bones from animals. Drying strips of hide, still bloody, stretched across sticks in the yard. I nearly trip over them, still stumbling over my tingling leg. It’s my good leg going numb, too. That just isn’t fair.
A cloud of insects soars up into my face. Flies as big as my thumb, right in the eyes. I raise my hand to swat one out of the air.
“Don’t do that.”
The Necro priest has had his face altered. He might have been a Kurgul once, by his squat frame, four and a half feet at the tallest, if he cut the tentacles off his face. Or he might have been a human, for all I know, if he chopped off his nose. I can’t see his eyes to tell. His face is almost a perfect skull, with that empty inverted V of a nose and little black eyes set in sunken eye sockets. Tattoos fester his bare, bulging forehead. He’s clothed in a mass of black that looks like he might have made a deal with some sentient cloth, just to get a big scary cloak. He raises his hand and the flies come to land on his arm, like falcons returning to their master.
“Salutes. I’m Araskar.”
“I know, Vanguard. You’ve caused a lot of trouble.” A thin red tongue emerges from between those bare teeth and licks them. “A lot of death. And you carry a weapon for your own death. Presumptuous.”
He’s looking at my waist, where my short soulsword—really just a knife—sits, waiting for the moment I dishonor myself enough to use it. “I know your lord pretty well by now, I think.”
“Presumptuous.” He turns and goes inside.
Inside, the incense hits just a bit thicker than the stink of the air. Suppose if you’re constantly sacrificing animals and stripping their hides, things can get a bit smelly, even for this shithole. The inside of the temple is dim, only lit by phosphor candles, throwing reflective, dancing light everywhere. The smoke bugs my eyes, makes them water, but hey, why complain about that when my twitchy body is screaming for drugs?
An adept scurries around like a bug, his head down, cloaked.
On the table, there is a very large dead thing. As far as crazing crosses go, it’s a work of art, a mishmash of humanoid components and insect, with four mandibles emerging from the sides of its head. Two burly legs clad in black boots emerge from the tail, and a massive stinger thrusts up, glistening with venom, from the chest. Someone put all the parts in strange places.
“That was our NecroWasp,” says the priest.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” I say.
“We will repair it. It is dead, and it was dead, and it will fight for Death.”
I raise my hand, showing him the steel scrip of the letter of credit. The candles make pinpricks of light off the surface. “I need information.”
He laughs, low and loud. “That’s not worth anything, not until the galaxy’s settled down. Since Irithessa fell, hard matter only. Or codes for dark nodes, what the Suits trade in. Have any of those?”
“Afraid not.” I didn’t think that would work anyway. I step forward. “I made a nice offering to your boss. And I’m not afraid to do it again.”
That tongue goes over those teeth again. It reminds me of a worm scurrying over rocks. “I would love to join our Lord in glorious death.”
“Oh, walk out the airlock.�
�� Religious types. “I just want answers.”
The adept comes closer, mixing a bucketful of some stinking slop. Something black, and stinking, and probably organic. He’s painting the NecroWasp’s body with the stuff. I catch him looking at me.
Old to be a Necro adept. A Zu-Path, chubby face, with those warty growths, and an eye patch.
“Perhaps we will take your credit,” the priest says, suddenly. “Come with me. I will attempt to answer your questions.”
“Hold on.” I grab the adept’s arm. He yanks it away from me, digs in his cloak for a gun, but the priest pulls his own piece out almost as fast as I draw my soulsword.
The priest trains his gun on me. “I would hate to offer you to our Lord without the ceremonial preparations. Please leave.”
“You stink worse than the rest of this hole,” I tell the Zu-Path. “You hiding from something?”
The shards in the priest’s gun hum. The Zu-Path eyeballs my sword. The priest mutters something inaudible through his teeth.
“Come on, you’ve got that nice soul you don’t want to lose,” I say.
“I don’t know a thing,” he says. “I’m just trying to stay out of the way of—you types.”
I don’t know about that. He chose to come in here, not hiding, and he’s eyeballing that letter of credit. It takes top-quality-vat balls to approach someone who would kill to get to you.
“He is an adept of Death,” the priest says, “and that is all you need to know.”
I take a chance on asking the Zu-Path words. “Formoz of Keil. You know him?”
“You could say that.” The Zu-Path’s one eye flashes back and forth from me to the priest’s gun. “He was liquidating. Offering a couple billion to anyone willing to shuttle his kids off Keil to the wild worlds. I heard about it through—through a fella I know. There was a whole network of us in on it. I was supposed to pass the kids off here. Waited for my contact for an evil time—at least a few days past deadline. Then I heard you was involved—you Vanguard. I took a walk, and when I got back, my ship and catch were gone!”
“Adept!” The priest looks angry now; that is, if you can read expressions in that skull of a face. “You are to forget these things, in the service of Death!”
Starfire, A Red Peace Page 7
