Blood Binds the Pack

by Alex Wells

  “That one?”

  She glanced up to see Freki, his upper arm now wrapped with a clean bandage, though indistinct shadows of blood peeped through. “One of,” she said, and pushed back up to her feet. “Gotta see if she had friends. But let Geri know we got one at least.”

  “He got one, too.”

  Hob grimaced. “Group this big, guess it makes sense.” Her hand went to her pocket, habit having her go for another cigarette. It was the only thing that helped, sometimes, when she felt like her blood was going to boil over – not from anger, but from too much damn fire. “And with the kind of trouble they were making.”

  As far as Hob knew, the Ghost Wolves were the only group who’d ever successfully – and repeatedly – raided TransRift trains. Before they’d ever even thought to derail the one carrying the Weatherman, they’d made moving snatch-and-grabs, breaking into freight cars and taking the supplies they needed while the trains barreled through the desert. It was a benefit of being a cavalry company of sorts, where even the people who were iffy shots could play circus on a motorcycle before they were ever allowed out. Bandit groups like this one focused on attacking softer targets that moved between towns, normally groups of miners trying to get by under the company radar.

  The reason Hob’s adopted sister Mag – and the growing group of miners out of Ludlow, Rouse, and Walsen that she seemed to be building whether she admitted it or not – had paid the Ghost Wolves to go after this particular group was that it had been haunting their attempts to have meetings, too often to be coincidence. And Mag was certain that there had been other times when they were being watched. Mag’d had a sense about these things ever since she’d been abducted and held in a TransRift corporate lab for almost a week, and Hob wasn’t about to start questioning it when it came attached to a paycheck.

  Hob lit the fresh cigarette with a snap of her fingers. “Think Mag ever gets tired of bein’ right?”

  Freki grunted and turned to head back into the camp.

  Freki found Geri easily in the shredded camp. It was instinct for the twins to keep an eye on each other, a subconscious thing – definitely not any kind of witchy nonsense like Hob or Mag. Freki had always been a keen observer, and he’d known Mag almost as long as he’d known Hob, so it was damn obvious she had some kind of spooky shit going, not that it mattered to him one way or another. He and Geri had been pulled out of an orphan work gang by Dambala and handed over to the witchy old bastard Nick Ravani, and of all the people that had tried to kill one or both of them, there’d never been a witch in their number. Good enough for him.

  Geri straightened up from the corpse he’d been bent over, scrubbing his palms on his dusty leather pants. “You get your arm seen to?”

  “Slow bleeder. Gonna be dead in three days,” Freki said. He grinned at his brother as Geri flipped him off. “Hob found another spy.”

  Geri cussed. “This one makes three.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Yeah.” Geri looked at the torn-up camp. “And we ain’t done yet. Guess we earned our pay.”

  And shit in TransRift’s porridge to boot. Lovely. “I’ll get lookin’ too.”

  “Might as well give all the good news to… Hob at once.” The hesitation there still said the girl to Freki’s ear, but Geri had been changing his tune since he saw Hob turn the Weatherman into ash. About damn time, mostly because Freki got tired of watching his brother posture over losing a fight that had never even been a fight to begin with. They both had better things to do.

  Freki only waved a hand and headed deeper into the remains of the camp. There wasn’t really a section of it that didn’t have someone going through wreckage and bodies; everyone had picked their spot while he was still getting his damn arm wrapped by Davey. As if to remind him of that fact, the wound throbbed. Davey had wanted to put his arm in a sling, and he’d said no. Maybe when they got back to base.

  But he doubted anyone was focused on what he thought was the much more interesting question – what the hell had started tearing things up before the Wolves ever got there? Unless the bandits were a full Mariposa detachment pretending to be outlaws, they would still be a mix of criminals who’d been cast out by their own folk and the blacklisted. Those kind of mixed groups were bound to have squabbles, power plays, fights. Boredom and despair did that kind of shit to people. Maybe this was more of the same, but he’d never seen bandits running from a brawl like that, not all frantic and shitting themselves.

  He wandered the camp, quietly going around the other Wolves and noting the torn tents and camo nets, the threadbare personal belongings scattered across the ground and trampled – along with no small amount of food. There was even spilled water, and to emphasize the fact, he heard one of the Wolves fire into the air, to scare off one of the circling eagles.

  Some of the damage had probably been caused by the raid. But by the time they’d come in, most of the bandits had been at the mouth of the canyon, scrambling over each other.

  He kept following the wreckage and found a smear of blood at the edge of the camp, another spray on one of the canyon walls, dull brown on the shiny black rock. And the sand on the canyon’s flat floor here was churned up, then dug into a channel – something heavy getting dragged. Considering the blood, probably a body.

  Freki drew his pistol, just to have it at hand, and followed the irregular splashes of blood.

  The trail led him up the slope of the shallower of the canyon walls. He looked up and saw a human hand hanging over the edge of a rock above. He had to tuck his pistol back into its holster so he could scramble up the steep, not-regular-enough-to-be-called-switchbacks, mentally calling himself seven kinds of idiot as he did. Well, he always figured he’d go out satisfying his curiosity. It wouldn’t surprise Geri one bit.

  He pulled himself up onto the rock overhang and found the corpse. He squatted down beside – yes, it had been a man, he was pretty sure – and looked at the red ruin that had once been a throat, the torn out cheek. Animals, maybe, though it didn’t look like the work of the circling eagles. He’d seen enough of their leavings to know that. And there weren’t any other large predators on this lifeless dustbowl. The eagles weren’t even native – they were genetically modified water sniffers that the settlers had brought with them, to the regret of their descendants.

  He should go back, he thought. But he also needed the end to this fucked-up story. So he straightened and looked hard at the canyon wall, saw more smears of blood. Right at the height where someone might rest their hand to help them climb.

  He didn’t like this one bit, but he kept going to find a cave, and drew his pistol again. Maybe it was just the wind, blowing past the rocks, but he swore he heard ragged breathing.

  Freki tried to look into the cave, but the difference between bright and dark was too great. He’d have to tell Hati about this, he thought vaguely, as he fumbled a chemical light out of his belt with his good hand. The man had delusions of being a writer, and this shit was right up his alley. It’d make a damn creepy ghost story.

  He shook the light into life and tossed it into the cave. It lit up the narrow interior with a sickly green glow and… that wasn’t a rock over there. It was a person, crouched down, thin arms over their head, rocking back and forth.

  Freki cocked his pistol, aimed it just short of the person’s feet before speaking. He hadn’t survived this long by letting his urge for charity overwhelm his good sense. “Hey.”

  The person sucked in a breath and looked up and–

  It was fucking impossible.

  Fucking.

  Impossible.

  Maybe it should have been harder to recognize the man looking at him, when he had a scraggly beard and ragged black hair and dirt ground into every inch of his skin. But Freki’d spent too many days getting his ass knocked over and seeing that same foxy face hanging over him, grinning while Makaya the Knife laughed in the background and said he still wasn’t ready to play with the big dogs.

  “Coyote?” And it
was impossible, because Coyote had disappeared months ago, swallowed by the sands after his scouting mission to the farming town of Harmony had gone wrong. Abandoned, according to Geri with an extra curl of disgust to the words, by his own brother, the government spook. For a moment, Freki desperately wished that Dambala had been in on this raid, instead of holding down the base thanks to a badly broken leg. Dambala had always been Coyote’s closest friend, and who the hell knew what else, because that wasn’t the kind of shit anyone needed to go speculating about.

  The ragged man – it couldn’t be Coyote, couldn’t – exhaled a sound that was almost a word, but too dry, and stood. And suddenly, Freki was horribly glad that Dambala wasn’t there. Coyote’s mouth was dark and wet with what had to be blood, and Freki recalled the ruined throat and face of the corpse just down the path.

  “Say somethin’,” Freki said.

  The ragged man that had Coyote’s face launched himself forward, hands with broken fingernails outstretched.

  Freki had a split second to make the decision, to shoot or not shoot, and he couldn’t. There was too much horror, either way. But he was also too well trained to be frozen by it – too well trained by Coyote himself, who’d always loved the asshole sneak attack method of doing things. Freki reversed his grip on his pistol in an instant and whipped the butt into Coyote’s face.

  It didn’t seem to make a difference. Coyote’s hands, impossibly strong, gripped his wounded arm. Squeezed. Freki’s vision went red, and he screamed. He hit Coyote three more times with all his strength, just trying to dislodge him. At the third strike, Coyote staggered back, his cheek opened in a long split.

  Panting, Freki moved back out of the cave doorway. “Don’t make me shoot you.” What kind of hell would it be, to find a lost friend and then have to put them down? His own damn fault for wandering, maybe. He felt something wet and hot trail down his arm – his own blood again, thanks to the bandage being ripped aside. Davey was going to be pissed.

  The animal that wore Coyote’s face didn’t seem to hear. He raised his fingers, newly wet and dark, and stuck them into his mouth.

  “What the fuck…” Freki breathed.

  And then Coyote’s eyes went wide and a different sort of wild. He looked at Freki, really looked at him. His voice was a cracked, barely there whisper: “Freki?” Then his eyes rolled back in his head and he crumpled down to the floor of that narrow cave, his head scraping rock as he did.

  Chapter Two

  71 Days

  Full rotation of the arm, vertical axis please. The words floated into Shige’s awareness as impression rather than sound, and he wordlessly complied, slowly swinging his arm in a circle. Two months after having his network implants reactivated upon return from Tanegawa’s World, he was finally used to the flow of information. At first he’d felt like he was seeing ghosts flickering across his vision, odd considering he’d grown up with the network always a thought away. Tanegawa’s World and its necessary backwards technologies had a way of lulling one out of their accustomed life.

  A few lights flickered along the pale green wall of the booth, visual alerts that another round of scans were being done. His attention turned inward, searching for the slightest hint of stiffness, of tendon creaking or bone grinding that would indicate the healing of his shoulder had been imperfect. All felt good, though he’d do his own sort of confirmation later, in the privacy of a scan-locked apartment as he ran through well-learned assassination routines.

  Acromioclavicular and glenohumeral joint function confirmed at 99.999%. A note has been made in your file. Have a nice day, Mr Rolland, the medical computer informed him.

  “Thank you,” Shigehiko Rollins said, very accustomed to the use of his assumed name. The thank you was another strange habit he’d picked up from Tanegawa’s World and hadn’t bothered to break himself of, talking back to various programs as if they cared. He’d be back on that planet soon enough, and being inoffensively polite had served him well.

  Being on time to his next appointment would also serve him well, which meant he needed to be quick about it.

  The door to the booth slid open and he exited, pulling his jacket, the particular dark shade recognized universally as “TransRift Corporate blue” back on. He blended effortlessly into the throng of other personnel wearing the same suit in the same color as he exited the medical suite.

  Shige was an innocuous figure, literally by design. He was well aware that his parents had put a lot of illegal genetic tinkering into his conception after the utter disappointment that had been his older brother. He was of precisely average height, skin a light brown that would blend in with nearly any crowd, black hair straightened from its natural waviness and shaped in the haircut most popular with male-identified TransRift employees. His blended northwest-African and Japanese facial structure had been surgically altered to smooth out the few family-specific features he’d ever carried. No one noticed him, and he preferred it that way.

  An anonymous one among many, he dropped into the main grav slip that made up the Corporate tower’s central shaft. It was wide as a swimming pool, human traffic lanes marked with network-transmitted light overlays. He narrowly avoided a collision with someone drifting up the slip and kicked downward like he was swimming through thick water. The slips in the TransRift building were larger and more comfortable than any he’d encountered elsewhere, state of the art. It was more technology enabled by the strange materials of Tanegawa’s World. And while it rankled with him, that the Federal Union of Systems offices in New Mumbai were practically stone age in comparison – well, that was the whole point of him being here, wasn’t it?

  He spun adroitly to miss another blue suit-clad Corporate peon. If he survived to the end of this assignment, maybe he’d just have to start calling himself “Slayer of Monopolies.” It sounded so much grander than “spy.”

  The New Hazlett Theater had been renovated so often that it was a new building several times over, but the various designers had always been careful to preserve its feeling of age. Most recently, the director of the theater had ordered a cut-off installed that blocked all non-emergency network transmissions, so that patrons would be able to experience theater as it had been centuries before.

  It hadn’t been a popular move for any but the hardcore theater buffs. But that made it ideal to Shige for two reasons: it was much harder for someone to eavesdrop on him there, and the matinee performances tended to be almost deserted. The network silence, so reminiscent of Tanegawa’s World now, was both comforting and slightly eerie.

  He sat in a corner box seat, disadvantaged because it was partially blocked by a column, and waited. The internal silence was almost deafening, with only desultory murmurs and the attendant sounds of the few people shifting around in the not-quite-comfortable seats to keep him company. He was keenly aware of the muffled footfalls that approached him, though he did not look up until their source had slid into the seat next to his.

  The woman, Ayana Tsukui, was not noticeably old, but thanks to modern medical and cosmetic technology, at least on Earth and its near colonies, no one ever did look old until they were so positively ancient that they already had one foot in the grave. Her light brown skin was as smooth as his, her straight black hair hanging loose and without a single trace of white, and her dark brown eyes in her foxy face were utterly piercing. She drew a small sound scrubber from her pocket and set it on the arm of the chair between them.

  “Corey was at the cabinet meeting today as a witness,” she said without preamble. “Making noises about a new technological surge being imminent. I don’t like surprises.”

  Grace Corey was the CEO of TransRift, the person to whom Shige’s nominal boss in his secretarial cover job, Jennifer Meetchim, reported. Well, that answered his question of whether the company would be silent about their potential new discovery, or try to leverage it. “I have been waiting for you to contact me,” he said, keeping his tone even. “I don’t have any other way of safely reporting.”

>   She waved a hand as if flicking away his complaint. “We’re certain this is a preamble to Corey or Sadine–” Hara Sadine was the president of TransRift “–getting put forward as the next minister of Trade.”

  He shouldn’t have been surprised, but still felt the shock of that. It had been a bad practice in some governments a few centuries ago to take people directly out of the corporate hierarchies and place them in high civil posts. They were supposedly long past doing that. And worse, the previous minister of Trade had been one of their ever-shrinking faction’s staunchest allies. He’d heard enough in the executive halls of the TransRift tower to be certain that her downfall had been Corey’s idea. “And no one sees a problem with this?”

  Ayana snorted. “TransRift is still the savior of humanity, the foundation upon which interstellar government is based. They placed Earth back at the center of civilization, where it belongs. We’re very grateful to them, and certain they can do no wrong. Who better to understand the trials and travails of moving people and goods between the worlds?” Her tone was so dry, he could almost taste the air of Tanegawa’s World in it. “The wedding between Devra Sadine and Laura Montejo was lovely, by the way.”

  Shige grimaced. That was another thing that had been on the horizon as he departed for Tanegawa’s World, and he’d almost forgotten – the president of TransRift’s daughter marrying the prime minister’s granddaughter. Nothing at all troubling there, just two young people in love. He pulled a bio-locked memory thread from his sleeve and laid it over Ayana’s hand. “That’s all of my notes, and everything I was able to fish out of the on-planet servers. They deal mostly in flimsies there – the claims about technology not working properly actually are true.”

  “Startling. So they really do need to keep importing all of those unskilled laborers.”

  “Yes and no.” He sketched out what he’d heard and seen, about the so-called witches, the strange alterations that seemed to happen to people, the Weathermen. Ayana’s poker face was second to none, but he could read the disbelief in the angle of her chin.