by Andrew Post
“If the brothers were already here at the port, why didn’t they go after Coog themselves?” Aksel asked Karl. The Pynes above were too far out of earshot to hear him.
“They’re following the girl onto the frigate. Just get Coog. You lose him, it’s on both of us.”
After sending one last withering glare up at Tym and Raziel, Aksel followed the chark breadcrumb trail and rushed to the stairs that seemed to lead not to the boarding area for commercial frigate flights but the hangar for personal starships below.
Quick-stepping down, he found an expansive, shadowy room, mostly still holding the shape of the original cavern, fitted with a network of catwalks suspended by bulky chains. Among the catwalks, waiting ships varied from the star-cruiser yachts to rust-bucket moon hoppers. The trail ended here.
“Which one?” Aksel said, scanning the catwalks for a man with no nose.
“The Praise to Her.”
He charged off again, the hanging catwalks gently rocking under his pounding feet.
He nearly ran right past it. With Praise to Her painted on its side in a sweeping, gilt font, the beleaguered starship, crusty with rust, was at least thirty years older than Aksel.
He wanted to jump from the dock onto the wing, but the fact that Adeshka was built next to a canyon gave him pause. The view ahead offered a possible future, one that included a long, screaming tumble to the river below. It was a mile wide but looked like a blue string from up here.
Was Coog even inside?
The starship was completely enclosed with any sort of windshield made unnecessary by electronic eyes set about its flat, featureless snout, like some creature that’d never seen the suns and unloaded sight by traditional means on the road of evolution. Just as Aksel spotted the hatch on its side hidden among the swirly script of the ship’s name, the ship’s engines kicked on, whirring low.
That answered that.
Aksel swallowed his fear of heights—one he’d developed when Dreck Javelin shoved him out of the Magic Carpet. He leaped on, feet clanging on the metal, then walked up the wing toward the hatch.
When he tossed it down, the bag held itself in place by a magnetized bottom. Kneeling, Aksel withdrew the drill. He set it barking against the hatch’s hinge, a golden torrent of sparks stinging his face.
In immediate reply, the ship drifted out of its divot, the catwalk abandoning Aksel. The engines’ murmur sharpened into a shriek. It’d be impossible to jump off now. He tried to ignore that fact and pushed the drill harder.
“Have him?”
“Patience, Karl.”
With a deafening, one-note fump of its forward engines, the ship leaped away from the dock. The soles of Aksel’s loafers squealed as he was sent skidding. Netted in the antennae on the ship’s cheeks like catfish whiskers, he had an unwanted view of the Déashune River again.
Heart pounding, he dragged himself up and tottered to the hatch. The bag had remained put. Next to it the drill spun on, the handle whipping around, bit still buried.
Aksel snagged the spinning drill, squeezed the trigger, and leaned into it. Its motor struggled, but the hinge finally gave with a snap. He wasted no time in moving up to the second, last hinge.
Cool air rushed around him as the ship puttered toward the hangar door. The midday suns illuminated the canyon’s deep ruby stratum, a sight Aksel would’ve found pleasant any other time.
As the drill sank, liquefied metal pushed up around it. Hitting something disagreeable, it twisted out of his hand. He reached, halting an inch from the wing’s edge as the drill somersaulted into the open air—and was sucked into the starboard air intake, banged around a bit, and released in a gray puff.
Aksel blinked. Well, shite.
The Praise to Her exited the hangar’s humid darkness—out over the canyon, suns splashing warmth onto Aksel’s back.
The vessel tipped, setting itself for a straight punch toward the upper atmosphere.
Unwilling to take another fall from a starship quite so soon—or ever—he scrambled through the contents of his bag and withdrew a harness. Flopping the round magnet beside his bag, Aksel fed a rope through its hoop. The ship’s inclining didn’t stop, refusing to wait for Aksel to get his harness around his legs and waist.
The minute his shoes lost traction, he’d just gotten the last clip set. Not a second later the starship barreled toward the sky, engines roaring, the harness biting into his legs. Dangling and deaf, feeling as if his face would be peeled free by the wind, Aksel reached up for his bag.
Coog twisted them up through the clouds.
Dragging his face upward against the mashing force, Aksel reached above his head for the next tool. The bag’s magnets surrendered. But before setting off on its long descent, the bag struck Aksel’s shoulder in a farewell kiss. Spinning in his harness, he watched it tumble, dispersing its jangling contents. Stuff for every eventuality in the tasks the Pynes sent him on—torture tools, small knives, stun guns—all now rained back toward Adeshka.
He thumbed up his eye patch, and the barrel sprang from the socket, a metal shaft telescoping like a well-oiled spyglass. After chomping down on a bullet, Aksel triggered with a single thought: Bang. It hurt to use.
The hinge shattered, and the hatch flopped open. His arms ached with the effort as he pulled himself up the tether inch by inch. The moment he got near enough to the ship’s artificial gravity, he was assisted aboard with a vertigo-inducing tug.
Getting to his feet, he noticed all of Coog’s stuff that’d been scattered in the breach. Apparently stealing one of his former comrade’s starships wasn’t enough. There was a month’s worth of food and, secured by netting to the bulkhead, bulging potato sacks lumpy with assorted valuables. Not that Coog could really be frowned upon for stealing from the Odium’s stolen stash.
Moving quietly, he kept his gaze set on the cockpit door ahead. His DeadEye’s barrel remained out, ready, wumwumwum still bouncing around in his wind-blasted ears.
The door flung back wide.
The pirate was framed in the doorway, one arm in a makeshift sling, scattergun in his other hand.
The ship filled with thunder. Aksel contributed some of his own with a quick thought: Bang.
Belly burning, Aksel grunted to sit up and pressed a hand over his shredded shirt as the white spider silk slowly shifted to crimson.
Agony doubling him over, Aksel ambled in. The cockpit door hung open, flopping in the turbulence. Coog, trouserless, nose flung off in the fray, lay across the ship’s controls, a smoking hole in his chest.
Below the pirate’s dead eyes, the black triangle in his face where his nose had been was now a tiny volcano, a river of red running over its edge. Aksel fleetingly remembered why so many of the Odium were missing parts and how each one had been removed so cleanly. He’d experienced it himself, when Dreck Javelin had removed a square of flesh from his palm to mark him ex-Odium.
He took a seat at the helm, noticing a button with a red M on it. Hoping it’d do what he assumed, he crushed it under that scarred palm.
A little med-bot, dumped from a ceiling panel, righted itself on spidery legs and scuttled about the cockpit. It estimated Coog, determined he was well past help, and turned to Aksel. Lifting his shirt helpfully, Aksel pointed out the chewed mess of his belly. Chiming its comprehension, the bot sprouted a syringe and jabbed him without warning. Aksel sighed as pain bled away. He felt nil as the bot tweezed out pellets. He didn’t dare watch.
Arrayed around the dead pirate’s body were vidscreens offering multiple viewpoints of the ship’s surroundings. Aksel wiped blood away from one. Cement cubes arranged under the hazy atmo-bubble fell away, and Adeshka withdrew behind them. The autopilot dutifully pushed them in the direction it’d been tasked to. But where?
“Tell me you at least got something out of him before you killed him,” Karl said. Aksel could practically hear the big man rolling his eyes.
Aksel glanced at his copilot, who gazed vacantly at the ceiling; then he turned
away so that Coog was again on his blind side. “We didn’t exactly have tea and catch up.” He retracted his DeadEye and closed his lid over it. “Too busy, you know, shooting at each other and whatnot.”
Karl sighed. “Raziel’s not gonna be happy.”
The twin joysticks danced, tweaking the yaw and pitch with the gracefulness only a computer could execute. “Have you heard from the brothers?”
“Last update from Tym, he said they were currently boarding,” Karl said grimly, clearly still stuck on the arse-chewing they could expect.
The ship pushed through one bank of clouds into blue skies only to be enveloped by the next cottony swell.
“I’m going to guess they’re planning to set a ransom with her.”
“Well, they wouldn’t have to take that risk if you’d gotten something out of Coog, learned what she already has.”
Aksel doubted Raziel would allow someone dear to Clyde to slip away when already so close—like trapped on a frigate with him, for instance, as that girl was now.
“What was I supposed to do, let him shoot me? Wait. What’re you talking about? What risk?” His throat dried. “Oh, shite. They were at the port this morning. Did they do something to one of those frigates? Interrogating pirates is one thing . . .”
“What interrogating? You shot him. I heard the
whole thing.”
“What are they going to do?”
“Where are you now?” was all Karl said.
“Still on Coog’s ship.” A smaller vidscreen displayed the various programmed destinations, waypoints scattered on the horizon, marking cities and towns near and far. Among them, one, the farthest away, blinked in the ice caps. The Odium’s home base? Aksel repeated the coordinates to remember them: negative nine-nine-one; positive one-two-one. Could prove valuable.
“Turn back. They want to get the girl before they reach Geyser. You should follow. Might get messy.”
“What do you mean, messy? Did they do something to that frigate? Did they know she was going to be getting on that thing, or . . . the hell’s going on, Karl?”
“All they said is they need you to follow because they might need to get off early.”
Aksel drew a deep sigh, freed it. He made his hand reach over to disengage the autopilot and quickly grab the joysticks before gravity did something spiteful. Grumbling, Aksel brought the ship around in a wide one-eighty. During the hard banking turn, Coog slipped, his head clonking against the floor.
“Apologies, mate.”
CHAPTER 5
Tour Guide
The tent was up and had automatically camouflaged itself to appear like any another Lakebed boulder. Inside, Clyde waited out the rain. As he would nighttime. All his life, the involuntary watchman. He observed the sleeping young man, whom he’d begun thinking of as Bandit Boy, just as he’d sometimes watched Mr. Wilkshire and, more recently, Nevele. Never having done so himself, he often wondered what it was like to sleep. Or dream.
Even Rohm, inside Clyde’s pocket, had fallen asleep. Getting up carefully to not disturb either of them, Clyde unzipped the tent door and stepped out under the suns, which were now starting to shine again, just in time for dusk.
He salvaged what he could from the wrecked buggy. In the first-aid kit, he found a snakebite info pamphlet, which he used for kindling for a fire. There was no food other than Rohm’s cheese, so Clyde got a handful out for Bandit Boy, arranging wedges of it on a rock near the small blaze.
Once confident the fire wouldn’t go out on him if he left it alone a moment, Clyde returned to the tent.
There was a shuffling within. When he unzipped the door, Bandit Boy was awake, saucer-eyed, gaze flicking between Clyde and the dead man in the far corner. Clyde thought something like this might happen and had rolled the body over so the man was facing the tent wall. Clyde couldn’t be certain but felt confident that waking up with a dead person staring at you wouldn’t be pleasant.
“I brought him in only to get him out of the rain. Out of respect,” he said.
“Ya dinnit need to do that.” Bandit Boy withdrew from the body an inch, wincing as he pushed off with his injured leg. “Wicked sumbitch dinnit deserve it none.”
“How’s your leg?”
“Well, I got shot. So I reckon it hurts.”
“Sorry. I’ve—”
“Never been shot before? Well, take it from me, mister, it sucks.” He kept shifting his weight, unable to find a comfortable way to sit. “Think I could get out now?”
“Certainly.” Clyde offered a hand.
Bandit Boy waved it off. “Juss lemme. Move.”
Clyde stepped back.
With some difficulty and a lot of cursing, Bandit Boy stood, balancing on one foot, and hobbled from the tent. “What time is it?”
The sand was steaming, the late-afternoon suns cooking the water from it.
“Not sure.” Clyde was glad for the ebbing heat, but soon they’d have another problem, the desert’s notoriously cold nights. “I’ve got some food for you here,” he said, indicating the cheese wedges.
Rohm popped his head out of Clyde’s pocket. Apparently his nose worked even while he was dreaming. “Hey, that’s mine!”
“We need to share.”
“We nothing. You don’t eat, which means I have to share.”
Chin to chest, Clyde shouted at the critter in his pocket, “He’s our guest!”
“Quick refresher: he tried to kill us.”
Clyde had no argument against Rohm’s last point, but he apologized to the boy for their unpleasant behavior and offered him a hunk of Asthwadla-azu cheddar.
Accepting it, thanking him, Bandit Boy gave it a sniff, then a hesitant nibble.
Rohm grumbled something about an unrefined palate.
“Yer dumb as hell if yer thinkin’ of kidnappin’ me. My daddy’s mah only kin, and he’s already done demonstrated how much he cares for me.”
“Kidnap you? Why would you think we’d kidnap you?”
Turning the orange wedge of cheese, he studied where he wanted to bite next. “Juss what folks be sayin’ of you.” Shrug. “That’s all.”
“Who’s saying these things?”
Bandit Boy said around a mouthful, “I dunno. It’s everywhere out here. Juss what’s bein’ said. Had no reason not to believe it, I guess.”
Remembering there were more important things to tend to, Clyde ducked into the tent, took the dead swordsman under his arms, and dragged him out. His face was washed of color, and his jaw hung loose—flash-frozen mid-yawn, it seemed.
Lips twisting, Bandit Boy set aside the cheese without taking another bite.
“Sorry.” After letting the man down gently, Clyde returned to the overturned buggy to retrieve the collapsible shovel.
As he fumbled around inside the buggy’s trunk, Bandit Boy asked if Clyde had any smoking mold.
“No,” he said, struggling with the shovel that refused to spring open, “I don’t have any smoking mold.” With a metallic shrick, the tool became a standard-sized shovel in his hands, surprising him. “Besides, how old are you?”
“Eleven. Not that it matters none. I been smokin’ since I was in diapers. What, you some kinda goody-goody? You eht folks’ souls, and yet yer gonna gimme some daggone talk about smokin’?”
“I’m not a goody-goody, and I don’t eat people’s souls.” Clyde walked off a few paces, decided here would be sufficient for a bandit’s grave, and drove the shovel into the wet sand.
From his pocket, quietly enough that Bandit Boy couldn’t hear, Rohm suggested Clyde leave the bumpkin out here to learn some manners.
“I can’t do that,” he whispered as he dug.
“You know what they say about Lakebed people, don’t you, Mr. Clyde?”
“I do, yes,” Clyde grumped, tossing a shovelful aside, then another.
“While they may hold a certain revulsion toward anyone who eats souls, as far as their fellow man—”
Clyde jammed the shovel in hard.
“Rohm. I said I remember.”
“Then maybe you should keep an eye on him. Not have your back to him.” Rohm turned around on Clyde’s shoulder. “You’re lucky to have me for a second set of eyes.”
Over his shoulder, Clyde peeked at Bandit Boy sitting by the fire, transfixed by the flames.
“Maybe I’m not the only one who’s had lies spread about him,” Clyde said.
With narrowed eyes, Rohm swayed each time Clyde bent to shovel again. “Yeah, well, just wait until the cheese runs out . . .”
Twisting side to side, Clyde finally freed the second of the harpoons spearing the dead vehicle. It was a gruesome thing—with a bifurcated tip accounting for half of the six-foot harpoon’s length. Hopping down, he staked it at the head of the mound, an impromptu grave marker. After offering the second harpoon for Bandit Boy to use as a crutch, Clyde asked if he wanted to say anything for the man.
“Sure. Here lies Uncle Lou. Good riddance.”
Clyde turned. “He was your uncle?”
Testing his crutch with a few exploratory stabs, Bandit Boy shrugged. “So. Where to, mister?”
“Somewhere to get you medical attention. You’ll need to be our guide, though.”
“Well, there’s towns thataway.” He pointed what Clyde assumed was east—with setting suns burning the horizon on that side of the sky. “But I doubt you’ll be wantin’ to go anywhere near ’em.”
“Why?”
“Recall how my daddy and uncle when they saw yer face? Folks in any town out here are like to act the same. Some braver might even try an’ kill you if they believe there’s reward in it.”
Clyde drew a deep breath. “Regardless, we can’t exactly have you not see a doctor. Perhaps we can get you near a town and part company at the outskirts.”
Bandit Boy squinted at him, a hand up to shield his eyes against the suns. “Why you care so damn much?”
“Because I do.”
Bandit Boy chuckled. “Hardly an answer, I reckon.”
“I can’t not,” Clyde said. “Satisfactory?”
Bandit Boy eyed Clyde’s belt where he’d tucked the boy’s rust-eaten handgun. “Think I might have that back?”
