by Sara King
Well, screw logic. Dallas lifted her lips from her teeth. “Then she’s in for a surprise, ‘cause I’m gonna blow her pretty little island to pretty little bits if she tries to stop me.”
Reenactments
Athenais was amused when the doors opened and Juno walked in with twenty Warriors carrying old-style automatic combustion rifles. She was not amused when they began shooting. The shifters ran, but the projectiles mowed through the decorative brush, leaving them no place to hide.
Athenais was one of the first to be hit. She fell backwards with the force of the bullet, feeling as if she had gotten hit in the chest with a hammer. All around her, the shifters were falling, hitting the ground, screaming in alien tongues. One by one, their bodies changed, one final shift as their lifeforce left them. Even Paul lost his human form, becoming a mottled orange and brown, taking on the amorphous shape of an amoeba.
In a daze, Athenais heard Juno walk up to her.
“This one’s not dead,” she said, her face perfectly calm.
Like she’s talking about the lawn, Athenais thought.
Boots thumped on the grassy ground as one of the Warriors stepped close and shot Athenais in the head.
Pilot of freighter B-89, please report to the loading bay for your next assignment.
Grumbling, Dallas sat up and checked the clock by the wall. Almost three in the morning. Outside, the rain was blasting against the inch-thick window panes, which had risen from the sills early that night, as the storm was worsening.
Pilot of freighter B-89, please report to the loading bay for—
“I’m coming!” Dallas shouted into the comset, probably a bit too loud. She slipped her feet into her boots and tugged on her spacer jacket. The place had no mirror, so she ran her hand through her hair a few times and splashed some water on her face. Outside, lightning brightened the sky in intricate forks of blue and purple. On the nightstand, the electric lamp was flickering as even the internal power systems bowed to the storm.
Dallas took a brief glance outside and immediately felt ill. Seventy foot waves crashed against the base of the Wall and wind-whipped sprays of ocean water shot up another eighty feet, blowing over the top of the Wall in sloshes the size of houses.
“They want me to fly in that?” Dallas suddenly didn’t feel too good. The little cargo vessels were barely airworthy as it was, but it looked like hurricane-force winds, with ocean swells that could swallow up unsuspecting ships like mountains rising out of thin air. The engines were delicate, too. An overload of water could bring them to a grinding halt, and her ship didn’t carry a lifeboat.
Biting her lip, Dallas left her room and hurried down the corridor and down the six flights of stairs to the ground level. She tried not to look as the ocean pummeled the inch-thick glass there, straining to get inside the walls, making the stone under her feet shudder.
Anxious to get away from the windows, she hurried up to the loading bay and glanced around. The dockmaster was directing a group of men hoisting huge boulders into the back of a freighter. All around her, soaked men in nothing but Stranger loin wraps were loading piles of rocks and debris into every ship in the dock. Ships were coming and going at unnerving speeds, dripping rain and buffeted by the winds as they launched themselves over the wall.
As soon as the dockmaster saw Dallas, he came toward her at a jog.
“We’ve got a breach in the wall on the eastern side,” he shouted, panting. “Every pilot is reassigned to containment runs until the storm gives out. Get your ship and start plugging the hole.”
“But the B-89’s barely even skyworthy. I go out in that weather and it’s gonna go down.”
“Then make sure you land in the breach!” the dockmaster shouted at her. “Now move!” He turned and began haranguing a work crew, Dallas forgotten.
Dallas began jogging toward the B-89, but then hesitated. With all the activity in the bay, Retribution still remained abandoned. She glanced all around her, trying to find any sign that she wasn’t totally alone with her ship. Eventually, her eyes settled on Retribution once more. Above, the wind thrashed the sides of the wall, pummeling the dock with sheeting rain. Somewhere nearby, one of the tarps they had thrown up to shield the workers from the rain had collected too much water and poured loose, dousing an entire work group with water. They dropped their burden on another worker, who began to scream under the enormous rock. The dockmaster started shouting for a stretcher and men ran to help them roll the boulder from atop the screaming dockman.
Dallas heard none of it. She stood in the rain, her heart pounding, seeing nothing but her ship. If she went to it instead of following the dockman’s orders, they would know. Without Stuart, the second time they took her to that little white room, she would lose herself. She would no longer be Dallas York, but some mindless drone working for the Empire shipping crates of pottery for the rest of her life.
Her feet started moving before she realized she had made up her mind. She walked up to the airlock, hit the button, and stepped inside. On the other side, she caught one last look at the chaos at the dock before the door shut, leaving her in silence. She entered the code to lock the door, then turned and made her way to the bridge. As she walked, the lights came on around her, a welcoming glow that sent tingles down her spine.
Home. She was home.
Inside the bridge, she entered her codes into the security panel. The words that followed were music to her ears.
“Welcome Captain Dallas York. Personal preferences now in effect.”
The first thing Dallas did was delete Juno’s profile from the ship’s database. The second thing she did was make it so that the ship would never again allow her onboard.
Satisfied, Dallas sat down in the captain’s chair and caressed the firm metal of the controls. They weren’t the simple up-down, left-right controls of a planetary spacer. Instead, it had two main foot pedals that controlled the slipstream pull and the main engine thrust, eight thruster controls on the stick that, when twisted, each added extra power to a different point on the ship, and an array of levers that corresponded to twenty different burners for delicate interspace maneuvering and trajectory adjustments. And that did not even include the three hundred other buttons and switches spreading out before her, controlling everything from autopilot to sensors.
Gazing down at the complicated expanse of controls, Dallas felt a rush of happiness. Finally. She had her ship.
The click of boots on the metal floor behind her made Dallas stiffen and turn.
Tommy was advancing on her, a metal pipe in his hand. He lowered it when he saw her face. “Dallas?”
“Tommy?”
“You have orders to fly this somewhere, Dallas?” he looked confused.
She grinned up at him. “Nope.”
For the first time in her memory, she saw the Colonel smile. “Then what are you waiting for?” He set the pipe aside and sat down in the navigator’s seat.
“Might want to strap in,” Dallas suggested. “It’s gonna be a bumpy ride.”
When Athenais sat up, the sound of twenty rifles being shouldered welcomed her.
“Hello Juno,” she said, peering up at the woman tiredly. The small, petite woman was surrounded by a couple dozen large, muscular men with rifles and combat gear that Athenais recognized from the losing side of the Second Utopian Wars. Ground forces, shifter battalion. Seeing that, Athenais sighed. “Got your yearly dose of slaughter in, eh? I was wondering how long it would take.”
Juno actually hesitated. “You knew I was going to kill them?”
Athenais shrugged. “Rabbit and I were just so happy to hear you were alive, we paid everyone we could find for news. We were all kinds of curious why you’d be paying such nice prices for shifters. Turns out, your son was executed in the same way. Group of POWs mowed down by shifters in UWII. It wasn’t hard to guess what you were planning, especially since you’ve been buying shifters consistently for three thousand years and you only had a dozen in your ‘colony.’” She cocked her
head. “Oh, and it helped that you’re a completely predictable, narrow-minded fool who styles herself as smarter than God.”
Juno’s face tightened. She obviously didn’t believe she was predictable. Athenais found that part particularly funny. Juno, smart cookie that she was—she was, after all, the one who had pieced together what Athenas’s father had done to them—also had one huge, glaring fault. She really did think she was smarter than God. After all, she had the Doctorates to prove it.
“If you knew, why didn’t you tell them?” Juno peered at her, tight-lipped with disbelief.
Athenais shrugged. “If I was about to die, I wouldn’t want to know about it.”
“You had no idea.” Juno’s mouth twisted in a smile. “You’re bluffing. Just like you always do. One big show of courage, a hurrah wherever you go, when you’re really just full of shit.”
Athenais sighed and stood up. “Tell me something, Dr. Berg,” she said, looking down at the curvaceous woman as she dusted herself off. “Professional to layman or Guiding Light to infidel, or however you wanna put it….” She waved her hand dismissively. “Isn’t it a little psychotic to re-create your son’s death every year?”
As Juno’s face darkened, Athenais went on, “Hell, I’m just pulling terms out of my ass, here, but isn’t that kind of obsessive reenactment oh, I dunno, some sort of a mental disorder?”
She knew she was getting through to the woman, because her already-flat eyes went cold.
“You know,” Athenais insisted, “creating something that never happened over and over again so you can feel better in your head?” She tapped her skull, enjoying the way Juno’s face started to contort around the edges. “What’s that fancy degree of yours say about that kinda thing? You felt guilty you weren’t there or something? Gotta make it up to him somehow? Ease the shame for not being there with him when he died? For not stopping it?”
For a moment, it looked like the smaller woman might hit her. Then Juno’s face went into a deadly calm, a sheet of ice frozen in a smile that chilled the bones. It was the creepy kind of look that meant that Juno knew something Athenais didn’t. The bitch was a master at it.
Lazily, Juno said, “You wouldn’t be smiling if you knew I left your lover floating in the path of a storm a few days back. He was tied hand and foot in the bottom of a boat. The fool tried to pretend he was you.”
Athenais nodded. “And I’m sure he’ll be back here any day now.”
Juno laughed. “Don’t be stupid. He’s drowned or shark food. Or both.”
“That was a nice touch,” Athenais noted. “The sharks. Considering your shark attack as a kid, woulda thought you’d want to avoid the things.” She cocked her head. “Or maybe that’s a reenactment, too?” Athenais saw the ways Juno’s eye glittered and she laughed, shaking her head. “Man, you’d make a clinical psychologist’s wet dream.” She gestured at the beefy guys with guns. “Some truly textbook shit you’ve got going on here, Juno.” She snorted. “And I don’t even read the textbooks.”
Juno peered at her like a cobra that had earned multiple PhDs in the fields of Psychology, Biology, and Chemistry, back when people cared about degrees. “That was you in the boat.”
“Yep,” Athenais said. She flicked a bit of shifter gore off of her arm. “Seems you still got a bit of a problem on your hands, don’t you, babe?”
Juno lost control of her features a second time, and Athenais saw rage beginning to paint her face a pretty shade of purple. “How?”
Athenais shrugged. “I had help.”
“Who?!”
“Well, it was…” Then Athenais paused examined her fingernails. “Actually, on second thought, I think I’ll let you wonder what part of your precious regime is falling apart.”
Juno watched her in a prolonged silence, radiating her hatred like a lightbulb. Athenais pried dirt from under a fingernail, then flicked it at the grass.
Finally, Juno said, “I don’t even own ships that can navigate to the bottom of the underwater ravines of this planet, Athenais.”
Athenais looked up, her brow creasing at the change in subject. “What are you talking about?”
“I’d like to see this mysterious helper of yours rescue you under ten miles of water, tied to an anchor.”
Athenais stiffened. Now that sort of thing was not funny. “Juno, don’t.”
“Oh, now we’re being polite, are we? Have you lost your nerve, Athenais?”
“You’re goddamn right I lost my nerve!” Athenais shouted. “Ten miles?! Don’t you dare. Nobody deserves that.”
“I’ll spare you if you tell me where your alien lover is hiding.”
Athenais allowed her panic to show, now. “You think I know that?”
Smiling, Juno said, “I think you’d hide it from me if you knew.”
“You’re right.”
Juno shrugged. “I’ve heard the pressure is enough to crush every bone in your body.”
“Juno, please.” Too late, Athenais realized it sounded like begging.
Juno’s eyes lit up. “Is that fear, Athenais? The great space captain is afraid of water? How interesting. I guess we’ll have to cure you of that.” Juno turned toward the door.
“Juno!” Athenais cried, reaching for her. “I just came here to get my shifters and go. I didn’t want to pick a fight.”
Juno half-turned to give her a crooked smile. “Oh, but you did, Athenais. And you, with your puny little monkey brain, thought you could outsmart me.” She gave an amused, patronizing chuckle. “Your ship will leave as soon as the storm clears. We’ll see if the Potion is smart enough to grow you some gills.” She left, followed by the twenty riflemen.
Once Athenais was alone, she realized she was shaking. She fisted her hands and closed her eyes. No one would do that to somebody. Juno was just trying to scare her.
Ragnar stared at the orange-brown bodies swinging from the wall in the rain, feeling oddly calm. There was no mistaking the mottled patterns of the central nucleus. They had killed Paul and Morgan. They had killed everyone.
Ragnar slid back into the shadows, ignoring the tearing hunger in his stomach.
They would pay.
He squared his shoulders and stepped out into the light, dressed in the armor of a Warrior he had killed. He was rapidly losing weight, but that didn’t matter now. All that mattered was finding a way to get out a message. Juno would pay for L’kota deaths in blood.
Spine rigid, he began climbing. Staircase after staircase, he didn’t realize he had reached the upper floor until he turned a corner and there were no more stairs to ascend. Ragnar turned, found the door to the com room, and kicked it open. He performed a yeit, long fangs growing from his jaws as he metabolized his old teeth, his muscles growing taught and lean, claws sprouting from the tips of his fingers.
The ten men and women operating the com room began to scream.
Stuart rushed up to the com station, panting. Ragnar sat against the wall outside, wiping his bloody mouth on a rag.
“Ragnar,” he panted, coming to a wary halt outside the station, “what did you do?”
Ragnar said nothing. Didn’t even look up at him. Just kept wiping blood from his lips.
Apprehensive, Stuart slowly eased the door open behind the shifter and stepped into the com room. The scene inside stunned him.
Crimson splashed the walls, the floor, the controls, the equipment. Lightning lit up the windows in red-pink flashes. Unrecognizable body parts lay sprawled across the floor in pools of red. Blood spattered the ceiling in arcs and smears. It was the device in the center of the room, however, that caught Stuart’s eye. Stuart went over to it and stared. Heart pounding, he shut it down. Too late. The device had sent its message. Stunned, he walked back to the entry in a daze.
“You made a beacon.”
Ragnar continued to stare across the room, through the window beyond. Outside, the rain pounded against the glass, the wind rattling down through the com equipment on the ceiling.
S
tuart was silent a moment. “It’s our heads, you know.”
“Doesn’t matter anymore.”
Stuart sighed inwardly. He should have prepared himself for this. Shifters were notoriously moody. Even more so than humans, when given the right trigger. Squatting beside the shifter, he said, “What about Athenais? She’s somewhere on this planet, too. Don’t you care about her?”
“Athenais will be fine.”
Stuart glanced out the window at the storm. “I was hoping I could stop you from doing something stupid, but now that it’s too late to do that, I’m going to make sure it’s not the last stupid thing you ever do. Get up.” He stood, offering his hand.
Ragnar didn’t move.
“Get up, Ragnar.” He nudged him with a foot.
Ragnar slashed out at him with claws that Stuart had not noticed earlier. They left three deep gashes in his leg, just inches away from the hamstring.
…and the femoral artery.
“You son of a bitch.” Stuart kicked Ragnar in the face. The shifter tumbled over, dropping the rag. When he looked up at Stuart, he bore long fangs, red with blood.
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Stuart said, as the weakened L’kota snarled up at him. “We’ll finish this later.” He kicked the shifter again, laying him out on the floor. He flipped him over and, with one knee keeping him pinned, he pushed a node into his palm and pressed his hand into the small of Ragnar’s back. The direct current that he applied to the neural center sent the shifter into convulsions. His teeth, claws, and hair fell out as his body instantly reverted back to its natural state. Stuart winced as the stomach compartment became visible—he could see five distinct fingers, as well as what looked like a human jaw.
Stuart pulled the cargo sack from under his belt and flipped it open. Then he proceeded to lever the shifter into the bag. When he was finished, he knotted the sack and hefted it over his shoulder.
The gashes in his leg made for slow going, but at least Stuart could manipulate the capillaries to somewhat staunch the flow of blood. Starting down the stairs, however, Stuart began to wonder if he would need a new body by the time he got them to safety.
