She’s gorgeous—alzemangled or not, she’s a person. She does care.
I could love her.
Something naïve invaded his thoughts as he watched her press a combination of buttons on the airlock: You still can. You can love her. Right now. It is meant to be. You’re here for a reason—don’t miss this one too…Your past is your teacher—learn from it, don’t relive it. Stay here. Stay with her. She’s yours…
“Don’t follow me,” she said, and then the hatch opened and she exited into space.
Silently, the cosmos watched a second figure float in the blue light of the tractor beam, drifting toward the Fogstar.
“Come out Pulton. Else not a flower, not a flower sweet, on your black coffin shall be strown, nor will a friend, not a friend greet your poor corpse, where your bones shall be thrown,” said FOD, treading warily through the quiet bay of the Fogstar. He raised his pistol from within his cloak, pointing whichever way he walked. He checked behind cargo boxes and listened, waiting for a sound. He continued toward the cabin, past the lying bodies, climbing a stairwell to the main corridor. At the top of the stairs sat two cargo chests.
“Are you back there, Graice? Don’t let your .HUM file go to waste this way,” FOD whispered, pointing his gun at the boxes as he mounted the steps.
A faint banging sounded on the exterior hull from behind. FOD turned around.
“Sera,” he whispered to himself. He ran back down the stairs. “Stupid girl.” His footsteps clanked loudly on metal as he passed the droid bodies. He reached the door panel and opened the outer hatch. She floated into the airlock.
“I told you to wait on my ship,” he said sternly, keeping an eye on the quiet hangar behind.
“Let me in,” she said. The outer door locked behind her, trapping her. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Keeping you safe. Your uncle paid good money for my protection.”
“What service?” she asked. He didn’t reply. She heard his steps drift back into the Fogstar’s bay, then, barely, she heard him climbing stairs.
FOD checked behind the cargo chests, found nothing, then eyed the corridor leading to the cockpit. Two doors halfway down were open. Past them, a light glowed: the galley electronics hummed with life. He walked steadily, intently eyeing each inch of the rooms as they revealed on either side of the hall.
“You don’t want to test me, Graice. I understand you’re buying time. But I will kill you if you surprise me,” FOD said.
He entered the room on the left. A collection of engine equipment, rifled through, lay piecemeal on the floor. A trail of blood ran from a gutted wall panel: the intership com. Wires jutted from exposed circuitry, their flaming tips carrying the acrid stench of burnt plastisteel.
“Dumb brute,” FOD said, hearing feet move behind. Longjaw rushed in from the opposite room, driving down with a long cut of pipe.
“What the hell’s going on?” Sera yelled. She heard a yelp, then the sound of something heavy crashing to the floor. “Damn it.” She paced anxiously, then tried to open a channel to Mick. He didn’t answer.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” FOD said, staring down at Longjaw. Scabbed blood covered his face, and his raw gums ground into the grate floor under the weight of FOD’s knee.
“You’re as good as dead,” Longjaw groaned.
“Will you stay put if I go collect my things and return to my ship, or will you try to cause more trouble?” FOD asked, the nozzle of his pistol pushing into and reopening a wound on his neck, the aftermath of Sera’s rescue in the bar. “Don’t have much to say now, it seems.”
“Good luck getting away. You’ll need it. In fact, there’s no such luck this side of the universe. No such luck.”
“Thanks. We’ll play our hand anyway. Now stay put, you understand?”
FOD lifted his weight and rose, heading to go collect the droids. Longjaw jumped to his feet and charged after FOD’s pistol hand. FOD sprung around, expecting the strike, and lanced his shoulder with the pipe he’d stripped from him. “No such luck, blackweather fiend.” The pipe impaled Longjaw, then pierced into the wall behind, pinning him in place. “I believe that’s checkmate.”
Inside the airlock, pieces of a broken control panel lay on the ground.
“Finally,” Sera said as the inner airlock slid up. “FOD?”
“Help me get these bodies back to the ship,” FOD instructed from the corner of the bay, hoisting an expancapacitor droid under each of his arms.
“Where is he?”
“Pinned upstairs, bleeding to death. Have a slug at him if it pleases you.”
“Axa?” Sera said.
“The cabin maybe—I didn’t check.”
FOD entered the airlock as Sera walked into the bay. The inner door shut, the outer door opening to space again, and FOD floated back to his ship, The Great Auk, where Mick helped him haul in the bodies.
Sera climbed the stairs toward the cockpit, seeking Axa before helping with the remaining droids. Two doorways loomed on either side of her, one with a doormat of blood. She walked up to it and turned to look in. There, pinned to the wall, was a grotesque monster—a long line of coagulating blood connected the floor with Longjaw’s gaping mouth. His shoulder and neck were torn open, his eyes wide.
“You’re the other whore then?” he said. She paused, glanced back toward the cockpit, then walked up to the maimed bounty hunter.
“I am. Would you like a turn?” she said. She gently pressed into his dying body.
“I would. I would. Get it?” he laughed until he coughed blood in her face. She wiped it away with a smile.
“You’re a human—what happened to you?” she said, placing her hand on his cheek.
“What happens to humans?” he said. “What happens to us?”
“What does happen?” she asked, fondling his chest, tracing a line through blood toward his lower abdomen.
“We die. Wait—I mean—we cause pain, and then we die. That is what humans do—that’s what happens to us.”
“Wouldn’t you appreciate one last time?” she said, unbuckling his pants.
“You’ve got good taste,” he said, delirious, shutting his eyes.
“Feel me,” she said. He tried to move his hand to her stomach, but lurched in pain, paralyzed.
“Feel me, god damn it!”
She took his hand and placed it on her breast, then her stomach, and then lower, to curves Longjaw had forgotten.
“My god—you are warm. They make them as warm as the real thing these days.”
“How does this feel?” she said, her hand sliding down his leg.
“I’m in a dream. I’m not dying—I am dying, aren’t I?” he asked, his eyes suddenly open, wide with fear.
“No. You’re going to be just fine.”
“I am? This isn’t really happening is it?”
“Did you touch her—the girl that was on this ship?”
“She wasn’t as warm as you—I promise,” he smiled, blood spilling from his mouth.
“Is this better?” she said. She drove her fist with all her strength, tearing deep into the tissue of his thigh, ripping it apart, grinding her knuckles against his femur.
“Ple—ease!” he screamed, alive with pain.
A pop sounded, and then another, his leg splintering into pieces, crumbling to powder.
“Is this warm?” she said.
“Stah—hop!” he moaned, staring down at the poking white of his bones.
“Stop—is that a plea for mercy? Did she say that too? Stop? Did it work?”
“Stah-ah!”
Sera drove her balled fist upward, cracking his hip, grabbing it, twisting. She tightened, grinding her finger tips into her palm, slime-powder running down her forearm. Longjaw’s eyes rolled into his head and he went limp.
“Piece of shit.”
She left his body, shaking muck from her hand to the floor as she entered the cockpit. The inner airlock door whooshed downstairs. “You get the rest of the ex-dro
ids. I’m bringing Axa,” she called to FOD.
Axa lay naked across a cockpit chair. Sera stooped down, hoisted her up, and rose to see a vision of horror: a ghoul, with half a face, stood in the corner of the cabin. His arm was extended toward her, his right eye bright with malice, the other clogged by a sunken sphere of leathery scars.
FOD’s third footstep onto the bay floor triggered the blast of a pistol. It came again, then again. Five times the blast rang as he ran up the stairs, gunfire filling his head.
A half-skulled malformation stood in the center of the corridor, waiting for him; behind his feet lay a bloody corpse. He pointed his pistol at FOD and fired.
Mick paced about The Great Auk’s bay, watching the airlock.
What the hell is taking him so god damn long? And her? Jesus. Alone again. Maybe I take the ship? I could make a good run. Would FOD be able to get me? Not if I figured out how to use this ship. There’s enough droids on board to pay for ten jumps.
As he toyed with his idea, the outer hull sounded.
Thank god.
“Took you long enough,” Mick said as the inner airlock door slid up. His jaw went slack, and he lost any further words: Under one arm, FOD carried Axa, and under the other, Sera. He quietly laid them on the floor. Mick couldn’t look. Her face was torn away, her chest hewn from gun blasts, her eyes open wide, her mind departed.
FOD stared for a moment at Mick before reopening the airlock to retrieve the last of the droids.
“I’m sorry Mick, I know how you felt about her. The other’s been raped, she might be dead too. Keep it together. I’ll be back.”
Space watched a lone figure drift through blue light toward the Fogstar.
Your past is your teacher—learn from it, don’t relive it. Stay here. Stay with her. She’s yours…
Mick—can you hear me? She’s dead Mick. I’m sorry—so, so sorry.
Mick collapsed, throbbing raw, as if something, long dead, had woken in him. He convulsed on the ground, pounding his fists against the metal grating. Bits of his flesh stripped away; he ignored the pain—another pain filled him, something dormant since he’d undergone rewiring: He saw the kind mouth of his mother’s mother; he felt Selby’s cold nose brush against him; he felt loved ones close in all around him, warm and snuggling on the couch, in his home. He saw his son running toward him, the joy of the first day of school on his face. He saw Karen’s golden dress, wrapping her celestial body, and then she was naked, dripping wet. She spoke to him:
“Dance?”
Karen, I love you. I am so sorry for what I did to you. Forgive me.
“Here I am.”
51
“Mick, get up.”
A chill ran through his body. Cold metal shook his shoulder.
“Mick, we’re here. We have to drop Sera and unload the expancapacitors,” said XJ.
“What?” Mick sat up in darkness. Blue clouds banded over red peaks in the port window.
Carner’s Post.
Mick jumped from cryo, pulled on underwear, and rushed past XJ into the hull bay. FOD stood over a bundled mass.
Sera.
“What the hell’s the idea?” Mick said. He looked around to confirm XJ’s suggestion: the expancapacitor droids he’d collected were nowhere in sight.
He did sell them.
“No need for them. We need the credit,” FOD said.
“Like hell—I stole those to get her dad and her brother into them. I’ll be damned if I’m going to let her fail that after what I did.”
“No one’s failing anything. You don’t understand Utopia.”
“What the hell do you mean?” Mick said, rubbing his eyes. The hangar door opened, blue glare blinded him. In the windy distance, Carner hobbled to them on a cane. GR rolled beside him, helping transport cargo.
“She was under a misapprehension—that you physically enter Utopia.”
“Well then?”
“You upload to it—that’s it.”
Jesus.
“The whole place—it’s a moving world of .HUM files. The final pinnacle of human ignorance.”
I’m tired of this shit—there are too many reasons to be sad. It’s useless.
“We get paid by Carner, push off this rock, head for Utopia, upload the droids, Axa. You run my job, and I’ll get you home.”
“Is she up yet?” Mick asked, remembering Axa. After they’d regained the Fogstar and lost Sera, it was unclear if she would survive. He’d decided to get into Cryo—leave the waking life. FOD had gladly consented.
“She woke up. Looks like she’ll live,” FOD said, turning to greet Carner.
“FOD,” Carner said. He eyed Mick, who stood nearly naked, condensation on his chest. “Mick.”
“Where do you want her?” FOD said, standing over Sera’s body.
“Stupid girl.” He paused, looked at his niece. “And you? How much did I pay you?” Carner leaned forward, nearly falling. He tried to smack FOD across his jaw. FOD caught him and held him up.
“It was a rogue. Circ-modded beyond recognition. No way to tell he was on board with the other,” FOD explained.
“Bullshit,” Carner sighed. He looked at XJ and GR. “You going to stay good on her promise to them?”
“Yes,” Mick interjected, stepping closer. Carner let go of FOD and looked at Mick.
“She’s running around, doing all this for you, and you get her killed,” he said.
“Mick had nothing to do with it,” FOD said.
“Like hell,” Carner said. He turned to the blue clouds behind him, his wind-stripped smuggling post an aberration on the barren, lifeless world. “It’s all bullshit you know. All of it.”
“I do,” FOD replied.
“And you’re hot—real hot. They have a tag on you and there’s nothing I can do. I don’t think you’re going to make it out of Bessel.”
“We will.”
“And how? To me it sounds like the whole god damn UCA fleet is coming. I’ve been listening—it’s every other transmission that comes through.”
“You know my ship is cloaked.”
“And you know that doesn’t mean shit. And I know what you’re up to. The only thing is—I don’t give a damn anymore, I really don’t. I think maybe you’re right.” Carner looked at FOD’s eyes, hoping they’d explain what words hadn’t.
“We are a plague. You know it. I’m justice for everything else.”
“XJ, what are they talking about?” Mick whispered, sidling to XJ.
“I think it might have something to do with fixing Sera. There’s got to be a way to get her back—up and running,” XJ said.
“You know she’s dead XJ—you can’t revive a cellbot once it’s died. Your alzeimagnetism is acting up again,” GR interrupted.
“So what is it then?” Mick turned to GR.
“He plans to swallow the spread of mankind in a black hole.”
“Of course, not until he’s dropped us off at Utopia.”
“Utopia will go too, XJ,” GR replied.
Could that be it? And counting on me to pull the trigger? Fuck it. As long as I’m out before it hits.
52
The silver streets of Organ World gleamed. A torrent of midday traffic flowed, prospectors riding through the prostitution capital of the planet. Some of them drove past the buildings that housed their very own backup bodies.
“Hey!”
“Yea?”
Axa paused, considering the man who’d flagged her down. He was young—a lineless, optimistic face. He kept scanning the sidewalks, paranoid, as if someone would spring on him; not her usual customer.
“I’m getting off world. What do you say?”
“Do I know you?”
“Axa, you’re Axa right?”
“Yea. And I have to get back to HQ. My day’s over.”
“No it’s not. I have a ship waiting for us. Do you know who the Force of Darkness is?”
“No—what are you after? What kind of clothes are they?”
> “Shh!” said the man. He grabbed her hand and tugged her off the sidewalk.
“Hey!” she shouted. “Help!”
“I’m an organ body.”
Axa froze: she’d never heard of an organ body knowing it was awake, let alone escaping the Understore where they lived. She stared into his life-filled eyes.
“Bullshit,” she said softly, forgetting that he’d pulled her. It made sense—his clothes, his paranoia.
“I need someone to get off world—you’ll play my partner.”
“I can’t—”
“I’ve been watching you for a day now—I know you’re a hooker bot. What I’m talking about is getting out of here—both of us—to Utopia.”
“Utopia? How?”
Organ World seldom paid any attention to the forefront of scientific development—it was an organ reservoir world, and an intergalactic way station for every kind of seedy indulgence. Still, she remembered the gold orb displayed on advertisements, distant and imaginary. Could he be telling the truth? She had suppressed the idea of escape, often wondering why they—whoever had created her—hadn’t removed her capacity for thought. Why not use androids? Because people pay a premium for cellbots.
“The Force of Darkness, he’s going to end this all. Everything.”
“I really don’t—”
“Follow me—the ship’s waiting.”
Black Hull Page 15
