by M. ORENDA
The drone skates back, tossing in wild jerks.
Voss tumbles off it, rolling along the rock.
Petra fires her pistol at the machine’s exposed control deck.
Voss joins her with his assault weapon, the two guns crackling, her adrenaline spiked to the pulse of a jumping pistol grip. Sparks spill from under the armor. The Sentinel collapses on its arms, going lifeless.
Voss keeps shooting it, ejecting one magazine and snapping in another one to blast its lenses, shatter control boards.
“Enemy coming over the wall!” the sniper warns.
An armed fighter, clad in a black suit, leaps over the ridge, followed by another. The sniper’s engaged, taking out rockets teams, too many charging at him.
Petra takes aim, standing her ground, pistol firing.
One fighter drops.
Her gun clicks empty.
And Voss moves in, larger, faster than the men struggling to jump in front of him and raise their weapons. He grabs the closest one and slams his helmet against the rock, shattering the visor. Then he starts shooting.
It happens fast.
Quick. Controlled. Ruthless.
The threat is over.
Voss and the sniper continue to fight, but the return fire ebbs, no longer a stream, no longer a clatter, but a trickle of one or two weapons.
“Blackheart Two, approaching on your six.”
And there it is, a group of NRM guards behind them, running through dust, through wreckage, taking positions along the ridge. More guns, more strength, eager, excited faces, ready to finish what little has been left for them.
Return fire falls silent.
It takes a moment to breathe again. The voices on the comm are distant. The sound of the wind is so much closer… that cold hiss of apathy through speakers, Mars spreading her cloak of dust, swallowing whatever destruction humans have shed across her desolation.
The slope glows with hot wreckage, motionless fighters.
Petra stands rigid, jaw clenched… alive… more than alive.
She can hear it in the Assaulters, in the guards. She can feel it in herself, in the flood of irrational triumph, that fleeting kiss of invincibility, the fulfillment of revenge that she’s felt before, climactic and pure.
You didn’t kill me. Not because you couldn’t, but because we stopped you.
She looks at Voss. His attention is focused on the slope, his expression hidden by a mirrored visor. He’s cold, surgical in his assessments… listening, clarifying, giving orders.
After a moment, he looks at her. “I need you to give up those weapons now and open the station for us. Do you understand?”
Yes.
And no…
And it doesn’t matter.
Two guards approach, and she relinquishes her empty pistol, her empty rifle, knowing that there’s nothing else to be done. Open the doors. Give up Niri and somehow watch them take her away… somehow start over. Take the losses she’s brought upon herself, pieces of her life tossed out in the open with no hope of ever fitting back the way they were.
“Take her into the station below,” Voss tells two of his men. “She’s not to address the others. Find a secure compartment and hold her there.”
“Hold?” Petra murmurs.
“Until a ship arrives for your transport,” he says, regarding her from behind that faceless visor. “You’re under arrest, Petra.”
GHOSTS
ARSIA MONS REGION
MARS DATE: DAY 10, MONTH 10/24, YEAR 2,225
Voss stands amid the wreckage, taking a moment to show respect, listen to the voices of the dead. No one reads a battlefield the way an old soldier does, drawing the face of his enemy from charred metal and strewn corpses, shrapnel blown through suits, armor ripped off, open wounds frozen instantly.
It’s his science, its horror greyed to technical normalcy, the clawed tracks of the beast he hunts. Its breath slips through the cold murmur of wind, and the moment is intimate, his feel of it, the shape and dimension of his enemy, its last movements here, its loss and confusion.
You’re a novice at war, but you’re dedicated. You don’t know how to fight Assaulters, but you’ll learn quickly. I’ve depleted your resources, but you have more. You came in through the atmosphere, undetected until the last minute. Your operations are off the grid, maybe off the planet, which is expensive and requires complex logistics. You’re able to conceal all of this from the NRM, which means you have powerful support hiding in plain sight, somewhere in Red Filter.
“You ready, Col?” Wyatt asks, accustomed to Voss’s battlefield eccentricities and prepared to wait if need be, though the night is cold and no one’s getting any younger.
“Talk to me,” Voss says.
“Cockpits in the ships are blasted to hell. Some of the damage was done by internal self-destruct units, maybe triggered remotely after the fight was obviously lost… looks like everything identifiable got wiped out. I mean, there’s a lot of evidence here, but these guys are obviously worried about getting caught, so I doubt they left any smoking guns. The soldiers are young, multiple races, though the number is slightly in favor of Oriental descent, no ID implants… so they’re either not citizens, or not identifiable as such. No fingerprints either.”
“Did any of the suits self-destruct?”
“I don’t know yet… maybe. You’re thinking we’ve got fanatics on our hands? Last few might have pulled the switch rather than be captured?”
Voss doesn’t answer, but Wyatt reads his silence easily enough.
“Shit,” he says.
“Skimmer One?” Voss asks.
“Yeah, we got lucky… fortified cockpit, designed to separate and ditch with jets firing upon ship disintegration. Skimmer One pissed all over himself, but he’ll live to fuck up another day. All the skinnies are good. Everyone in the station’s good. The psycho’s good, hearing good voices in her head and wants to come back with us. Logan’s good. So… we have zero casualties.”
Voss nods, knowing it won’t be the case next time.
“Then again… not like we got ‘em all,” Wyatt says, always in-sync.
“No.”
“Tangling with these guys is going to get real complicated, real quick, when they actually get some more time training on those shiny weapons. I think I actually saw a few knocked down by recoil. All and all, though, they put up a good fight.”
“Yes.”
“Makes you wonder how long your girl would have lasted with that bolt-action rifle,” Wyatt laughs under his breath. “Like… thirty seconds.”
“My girl?”
“Well, yes, sir,” Wyatt says, playing innocent. “In your custody, right? Going back to Fort Liberty to answer for all this… face her crimes… ”
Voss narrows his gaze on the horizon, the thin glow of dawn seeping through the dust. “How long until a transport arrives?”
“A few hours.”
Voss nods, trudging up the slope. “I’m going to talk to her.”
“Yes, sir,” Wyatt replies under his breath, following slowly behind. “I imagine that’s going to go spectacularly.”
Silence. Things done. Things not done. It all comes to the surface when no one’s watching. Lying flat on a bunk, in the semi darkness, one fluorescent light glowing from under a nest of metal cabinets… it’s got the look and feel of the future, of holding cells, and prisons, and no freedom beyond what the mind provides.
Only hers doesn’t.
There’s no gentle dreaming. There’s no serene meditation. She’s restless and neurotic in close spaces without hope of movement. No windows. No horizons, no glitter of stars. Quiet places are the loudest, the most damning.
What for? For a girl you know nothing about? For guilt? For pain?
Better to have been murdered up on the rock than to suffer a lifetime locked in Wexler’s chains, beaten down by three meals a day, every day, the same day, brought low by those with vapid appetites and power to wield. She’s survived too much
for sitting still, and far too much for bowing at anyone’s feet.
“Fuck,” she mutters, pressing her palms against her eyes. “Fuck.”
There’s a soft ping of boots on floor grates, the approach of someone… curt words exchanged with the guard outside. Then the door screeches, swivels open, and Voss enters, dressed one of the tech suits, seeming to fill up all the space.
The door closes behind him.
“You here to gloat?” she asks.
He sighs, taking a seat on the opposite bunk.
“I should hate you for arresting me,” she says, refusing to look at him. “But I can’t because you did it with such miraculous ability. Never seen anyone fight a Sentinel, I thought… ”
It goes quiet.
She glares at the ceiling.
He waits.
“You do this,” she says. “I hate this.”
“Hate what?”
“You just let me talk myself into a hole, every time. It’s some damn Assaulter interrogation technique.”
“No,” he says. “It’s not.”
“Just let them talk themselves into a hole they can’t get out of, make them admit all the ways they were wrong.”
“No.”
“Get out,” she hisses, worn too thin to hide the hurt. “You got me. Wexler’s wanted me under his thumb for years, and I fucked up big now… so he’s got his excuse, doesn’t he? Not enough that he’s got the power to say who belongs on this planet and who doesn’t. Not enough that he’s got the power to make fortunes, and destroy lives, but he’s got to put me in the middle of his scheming, and lock me up when I slip. Of course, that’ll cost—years of incarceration—so maybe a convenient accident, and just so. Better that then no vodka, and pissing for cameras for the rest of what remains. No decent smuggler would accept such.”
“Are you done yet?” he asks. “Because that hole just gets bigger.”
She pushes up from the bunk, facing him on her feet. Of course, he’s made her too mad to lie still, like he was always going to. Everything’s gone. Fear and exhaustion have taken their toll, and anger’s too much for what she’s got left. She wants to push him, beat those shoulders, smack that scarred up beard, but she clenches her teeth instead, jabbing her finger at the door. “Said it all.”
“You have,” he replies, watching her from the bunk. “But I haven’t. I don’t want you in a cell, Petra. I want your help.”
She glares at him. “What?”
“Someone you know is trying to kill us.”
“What?”
“You know all the power players in Red Filter. You know what they buy and how they buy it. You know what their capabilities are and what sympathies they have. You know what they do behind Wexler’s back.”
She laughs, bitter. “You want a snitch?”
“An advisor.”
“No.”
“You’ll be at Fort Liberty. Not in a cage. Not in a prison, I promise you that. You’ll work with me, give me names, leads, help make sense of new intel. You’ll be safe. Your people will be safe.”
“Which means prison.”
He draws a frustrated breath. “What do you think your options are here?”
“Not helping you to destroy my business, for one.”
“What business? The people who attacked you aren’t going away. Even if they don’t end up killing you, they’ll succeed in killing Niri eventually, and I thought you cared about that.”
“Don’t you dare—”
“And they might just drag this planet into war while they’re at it… and neither Earth, nor Mars, can afford that. The last blow to advanced human civilization… that would be bad for business, don’t you think?”
It goes quiet again, only it’s a different kind of quiet this time. She looks away. “You don’t understand. People like me can’t live in Fort Liberty, and no one would tolerate you keeping me there unless it’s in a prison cell. I get disguised to walk through those airlocks—not because people don’t know who I am, but because they don’t like seeing me passing through those halls. It makes everyone nervous. They tell me their secrets, desires, fetishes, because I’m good smuggler, impossible to shock, the daughter of a willow house girl… a whore with blood on her hands. They trust me to do good business, to be a good thief and good liar when it comes to protecting what I know. You march me through those doors as your advisor, and they’ll turn against both of us.”
“It doesn’t have to be public.”
“It will get public,” she replies. “The elite know everything. And what they don’t know, they find out. They know you. They know you’re a hero. They trust that, an’ so do I, because I’ve seen you shining like a god, near invincible… but not even a god can have a lawless whore on his arm… not in Red Filter.”
“When did we go from smuggler to whore?”
“You don’t know me.”
“I know you better than that,” he says, reminding her of words spoken in the dark, of what’s been learned and shared between them, vodka-laced and windblown. “You’ve done bad things. I understand that. So have I. You have ghosts. I have ghosts. You lost your daughter. I’ve lost a dozen kids who felt like sons, and more who were my brothers, good men and women who died under my command. I’ve bled, and I’ve lost, and I’ve raged, and I’ve hurt people, and broken things… I don’t know who you think is invincible, but I’m no hero, and certainly no god, and I might just know what a willow house Geisha kisses like.”
She lost her breath somewhere in the middle of that, and stares at him now as if he’s changed dimensions in front of her.
“You don’t know me.” He throws it back at her.
And he’s right. Never has he been more right.
He rises from the bunk, leaving her no choice but to face him, because he’s close… and because he’s Voss. “You’ve done nothing but lose money, tell the truth, and fuck up trying to do the right thing since we met. I’ve never seen anyone fail so spectacularly at not caring. I’d have to assume, at this point, that if one of your many lives involved being a coldhearted mistress, you were awful at it.”
“Just trying to make me like you,” she whispers.
“You already like me.”
He’s pressed up against her, daring her to move and prove him wrong.
She doesn’t, because she can’t. It feels too good.
Petra wets her lips, and he doesn’t ask for further permission. He leans in to kiss her, starting off gentle and becoming less so. It’s thinly disguised dominance, all Voss, all man, all solid mass, the same fire that faces monsters and rips panels off drones, always closer under the surface than what he allows to show.
His arms draw her up like she’s barely there, his mouth seeking her approval, parting lips, teeth, teasing her, and gratified by the catch in her breath.
A reward for him, a hint of triumph… and a slow descent for her, wanting him in the most urgent way, a way that comes from knowing who he is, from being drunk on his skin.
“I want you,” she whispers. “Like this.”
“Like this… ” he murmurs.
Petra reaches up and pulls the zipper of his suit down, smoothing her hand underneath the fabric. She strokes her fingers over the tattoos under his collar bone, crisp whorls of hair, his skin hot to the touch.
Then she kisses him there, and he tastes like salt, like mech armor and sweat, when no drug could possibly be more intoxicating.
His hands slip into her hair, the burden of responsibility slipping through his fingers, his breath hungered as she sinks lower.
It’s both surrender and attack, the need now mutual, raw, bodies lost in the heat. At some point, he’s no longer gentle because it’s no longer what she’s asking for, and his harshness brings release, her nails buried in his back, her body arching underneath his, eager for his violence and rocked into oblivion.
The fluorescent light in the compartment flickers. Air and water hiss through the pipes. Minutes slip by, each a reminder of what canno
t last. They lie together, old enough to be good at it, to fit in just the right way and warm each other, drift in those circular currents that slip between lovers and strangers. Voss is patient, doesn’t attempt to end it, which she takes for the gesture that it is.
Still…
“Best thing you can do is let me go,” she says.
“Is that what this was about?” he asks, amused.
“You know it wasn’t. This was a straight transaction.”
“A transaction?” He strokes her shoulder. “Ah, woman… there is something so wrong about you.”
“You must like it.”
“I must,” he admits. “You’ll get killed if I let you go.”
“No, I won’t. I’ve learned my lesson.”
“I don’t even know what that means.”
“It means I’ll help you,” she says. “By now, the word is out that I tried to steal Niri for myself. Everyone will assume I did so for profit, and I can use that to my advantage. That will make it easier for me to find your plotters.”
“Like I said, you’ll get killed.”
“No. I know what to do. I know how to spin this. I know who to tell, and what to tell them. I won’t get touched. If you take me back to Fort Liberty, you’ll be throwing it all away… your best source of information.”
Voss goes silent. His fingers stop their slow circling on her skin. She can sense the distance growing between them, him getting colder by degrees, which she takes as a sign that he can’t argue with the logic.
“I’ll help you,” she says. “But I need my freedom.”
“And what guarantees do I have?”
“None.”
“And what do you get out of it?”
“Citizenship, and the freedom to live wherever I please, a merchant license for rare trade, immunity from prosecution from all previous adventures, and protection of my wealth, for my lifetime… if I help you to find your plotters and stop them from killing that girl.”
“Nothing much then,” he says, frustration sharpening the words.
