Apocalypse Nyx

by Kameron Hurley

  “Plan’s fucked,” Nyx said, eating a roti while sitting on the edge of one of the two slender beds. The blankets felt gritty, just like the floor. She crunched grit between her teeth. “Let’s inventory what we’ve got. Taite?”

  He sat back on his heels against the far wall, wrapped in a blanket. Rhys was rolling out his prayer mat in anticipation of evening prayer, and Anneke was kneeling beside him.

  “The uniforms,” Taite said, “some junk data casings from the cargo bakkie. Our weapons. Two dead order keepers.”

  “I think we should abandon the job,” Rhys said. He knelt on his prayer mat, facing away from Nyx. “It’s just a data retrieval job. We’re not saving a child or even hunting down someone who killed someone else. We don’t even know what it is.”

  The call to prayer sounded, tinny and warbling, from the cantina next door. It only got through a few lines before the muezzin gave in, maybe because he was asleep, or vomiting, or just because she figured nobody was listening, but Rhys and Anneke went through their prayers.

  “He’s not wrong,” Khos said. He lay full length on the other bed, though Nyx was going to tell him to move to the floor soon. “Two people are dead. Order keepers, yes, not bel dames or military, but we aren’t exactly tough to spot.”

  “This isn’t a discussion about going back,” Nyx said. “That’s not a topic. This isn’t a democracy. I’m not a fucking Hedian or progressive Tirhani or some fuck. We are discussing the plan we need to come up with to finish the job that we contracted for.”

  “We should have just stolen her leg,” Taite said.

  “Fuck you and the fucking leg,” Nyx said.

  Silence descended as they listened to Anneke and Rhys finish their prayers. Nyx fixed her look on the windows, which they had covered over in bedsheets. The windows here weren’t filtered, not out here to hell and gone, but simply patterned carvings to reduce the amount of sunlight that suffused the room.

  Rhys finished his prayers and rolled up his mat. “I’m not going any further,” he announced, as if he were some fucking mullah with a fucking spine.

  “You walk out like you did on that last job,” Nyx said, “and I’ll fire you right now and take away your little passbook. Then what happens to you when you try and walk the fuck out of here, in this shitty little border town? The women here will skin you alive.”

  “Could we try and be constructive?” Khos said. “I want to get to sleep sometime tonight.”

  “The road was the safest way in,” Taite said curtly. “There’s too much security outside the main road. You don’t take any route to a data lake that isn’t an authorized one.”

  “Why can’t we go in on foot?” Khos asked.

  “There are layers to the security onsite,” Taite said. “You’ve got concentric and even overlapping forms of security. There’s a toxic layer of gas on the very edges of the compound. Then you’ve got the wasp swarms that patrol in random patterns. There are plenty of other layers they change all the time, bugs coded to eat you, paralyze you, and what have you. Then there’s the acid lake itself, and the human security teams, which patrol every thirty minutes. The only way in is with a cargo bakkie that can get through the areas already designated for the cargo bakkies. That’s the safest route.”

  “So we’ll tell them we were hijacked,” Nyx said. “We’ve got enough blood and shit on these uniforms now to look the part. We say we were hijacked and just walk down the cargo bakkie road.”

  “That won’t hold up,” Taite said. “Our identification papers didn’t even hold up to order keepers. With the cargo bakkie, we’d have a chance they wouldn’t look too close. Without it, they’ll scrutinize everything we do.”

  “It’ll hold up if we sell it,” Nyx said. “Really sell it.”

  “I already know I won’t like this,” Khos said.

  Nyx jabbed a finger at him. “You, Anneke, and Rhys pose as hijackers. Me and Taite will stay in uniform. You push us along ahead of you as hostages. They sure as fuck won’t take the time to look at our papers during a standoff.”

  “And how exactly,” Rhys said, “are you going to get us to the data lake? They’ll deploy every one of their security people and all of the facility’s features to take us down.”

  “You leave that to me,” Nyx said.

  “Yeah,” Khos said, “I’m definitely not going to like this.”

  Nyx expected the compound to be something extravagant, but of course, the less conspicuous it was, the better. They stole a new bakkie at a little town thirty kilometers from the site and drove to within two kilometers to survey the site. Big cargo bakkies arrived irregularly. Nyx sat up on a rise overlooking the road and only saw one in the hour she spent gazing through her specs.

  “We could have kept the old bakkie, with this plan,” Khos said as she walked back down to the bakkie where he waited, puffing away at his ridiculous pipe.

  “I was a sapper during the war,” Nyx said.

  “Yeah, you never fail to mention that,” Khos said.

  “And I figured out all sorts of shit about a person after they blew something up,” she continued. “The less we leave behind, the better.”

  “Not convinced of this plan,” Khos said.

  “You’re only saying that because you loved the other one, and it was shit.”

  “I did love the other one,” he said, “and it was shit.”

  Nyx went to the trunk where Anneke was gearing up and started equipping her own weapons. Taite and Rhys were huddled under the ruin of some old building, sharing a bulb of water in the scant shade.

  “Sorry about what happened, boss,” Anneke said, not looking at her.

  “Shit does happen,” Nyx said.

  “Thought she looked like someone I knew in prison,” Anneke said.

  “I get it,” Nyx said. “Being high as fuck didn’t help, either.”

  “Sorry, boss. Won’t happen again.”

  “No,” Nyx said, “it won’t. Or we’re done. No catshit. We’re done.”

  “I hear you, boss,” Anneke said.

  They piled into the bakkie and drove right up to the compound gate. When they were within range, Nyx and Taite got out, hands up. The others stayed in the bakkie; Nyx figured they would be easier targets in the open if there were snipers posted, even though Taite figured that wasn’t likely.

  “Open up!” Nyx said. “These guys hijacked our cargo bakkie. Stole a lot of data.”

  Khos let off a couple of rounds into the air, for emphasis.

  There was a flurry of confused activity in the station. A swarm of red beetles left the station and headed off deeper into the facility. It was dusk again, moving to dark, and Nyx stood out there in the heat and felt the night come over them, waiting on the shit-eaters to get their shit together.

  The bakkie door slammed behind her. Khos came up behind Nyx and wrapped an arm around her and put the pistol to her head, yelled up at the guards. “You want to see me kill them right here? Open the fucking gate or you’ll have two bodies out here!”

  That did it.

  The gate opened, and they went through.

  Khos held Nyx firmly against him; he was a hot, solid presence, and the stink of him was heady and not unpleasant, like an earthy whisky barrel. She wanted to fuck him again, which she was sure he knew. But then, it was natural to want to fuck somebody you worked with all the time. She’d wanted to fuck everyone on her team at one state of drunkenness or another. And flirting with death was the best drunk of all.

  Taite, Anneke, and Rhys got out of the bakkie. Khos moved away from Nyx, and she turned back and gave Rhys a little salute.

  Then they all scattered.

  The explosion was impressive, even by Nyx’s standards. She had packed the bakkie with explosives from a cache set out fifty kilometers away by an old acquaintance of hers, one she would owe big some other time. As it went up, Nyx dove into the ditch along the side of the road, crawling as fast as she could, hunkered low to the ground to avoid any lingering tox
ic gas from the first circle of the data lake’s defenses.

  The bodies from the trunk would mingle with the mess from the bakkie and the leavings from the explosives themselves, creating a morass of shit for these people to wade through for days, let alone the hour or so Nyx needed to fish the fucking data lake.

  She met up with Rhys and Taite, just ahead of her, both crawling and coughing as the force of the blast pushed the toxic gas back their way. Nyx caught the hint of lavender in the air, and shuddered. “Stay low,” she said.

  Anneke and Khos would double back and meet them on the other side of the data lake, using the distraction of the explosion to cut through the fence and wait for them in a second getaway vehicle. Nyx was really glad she’d gotten half her fee up front, because expenses on this job were piling up.

  Dusk turned quickly to full night. Rhys led the way, intuiting it with bugs or some shit.

  “The swarms,” Rhys said, after a long period of silence, and Nyx chanced a gaze up at the tall, willowy structures ahead of them.

  “Trees?” Taite said.

  “Those aren’t trees,” Nyx said.

  They were buzzing swarms of flesh beetles, all organized into massive, clawlike shapes. They made a whispery sound, all their bodies moving and clacking over one another.

  “Single file after me,” Rhys whispered.

  They crawled after him, Taite in the middle and Nyx coming up last.

  “What about hornets?” she called.

  “Those are out, too,” Rhys said. “I’m trying to warn them off. The explosion has confused them. The effect may wear off soon, though.

  “Ah!” Rhys said.

  “What is it?”

  “Stuck,” he said.

  It was nearly pitch black. The light they did have came from far behind them, in the still-burning car. Emergency vehicles had arrived, and there were at least half a dozen boots on the ground. They didn’t have much time before the distraction became a real problem.

  Nyx moved ahead. The ground here was getting muddy. She felt down the edge of Rhys’s leg and unhooked his trousers from a jutting bit of metal.

  “There you go,” Nyx said.

  “Great, ah—” and Nyx thought Rhys swore, but that couldn’t be right.

  He tumbled past her, sliding down the bank ahead of them. Nyx grabbed him, yanking him to a halt. The end of his burnous tumbled ahead of him, sinking into a muddy morass of water.

  “Lake!” Rhys said, and pulled his burnous out. It hadn’t melted, but it was certainly destressed.

  Clouds rolled over the sky, giving them glimpses of the moons, which shed a brief glimmer of light over the broad, flat plane of the data lake. It was a soupy mess, like vomit, not a lake, but Nyx supposed that “data vomit” didn’t sound as nice when you were marketing your trash service.

  “I’m going to act as lookout,” Nyx said, “up above the bank. They’re going to get their shit together and send out a party to look here for us soon. We’ve got ten minutes. Do your shit and then let’s get out of here.”

  “Ten minutes my ass,” Taite grumbled once Nyx was out of earshot, but Rhys wasn’t so sure they even had ten.

  “Do it, deploy it,” Rhys said. He stayed away from the swarms, most still moving in scattershot patterns around them.

  Taite shrugged off his pack and pulled out a complex web of data beetles in perfect casings that they had custom made after their dip in the garbage chute. Rhys understood the principals behind it, as it was tailored to speak to the other types of casings that shared the same organic chemistry.

  Rhys watched Taite toss it out into the lake like a net. It sank into the slurry. Taite kept hold of one end; soft blue lights flickered up the filaments as little bits of organic code sparked connections.

  “Hey, hold this for a minute,” Taite said, and before Rhys could reply, Taite put it into his hand and was scrambling further down the bank.

  “What are you doing?” Rhys hissed. “We have five minutes!”

  “That was metal back there!” Taite said. “There’s some chips down here. All sorts of stuff ends up here. Just a little bonus. Hold on. It’s two minutes!”

  Behind them, the swinging arc of patrol lights cut through the darkness. Rhys ducked, instinctively.

  “Hey hey!” Nyx called down at them. “Hurry up!”

  Rhys peered at the net. He wasn’t sure when it was done. He was just going to have to yank it out and they would run out with what they had.

  “Rhys!”

  “We’re coming, Nyx, for—”

  A swarm. He felt it, suddenly upon them, and he cried out, too late, “Taite!”

  Taite screamed. If the search party wasn’t out for them before, it was headed their way now.

  Rhys dropped the data net and ran to Taite, sending out spidery commands to the swarm to disperse. It buzzed angrily at him. He stood over Taite as Taite’s body jerked and shuddered. Rhys spread out both hands, focusing all of his energy on the swarm, compelling it to move on, to fracture, to break. It pushed toward him, the buzzing louder now, more menacing.

  “Break,” he murmured, “break.”

  The swarm thrummed, and he felt the shift in their path as they swarmed past him and over him, headed back to the site of the explosions.

  Rhys grabbed Taite and hauled him up. Taite jerked forward, tongue lolling. “Help me, Taite,” Rhys said. “Try.” Rhys heaved Taite back up the bank, scrambling to the top where Nyx waited, half crouched, partially outlined by the still-roaring explosion. He wondered, again, what sort of accelerant she had used.

  “You’re just in time,” Nyx said. “Can see the patrol lights coming.” Her gaze swept the pair of them.

  “He’s paralyzed,” Rhys said. “Take him.”

  Nyx didn’t move. “Where the fuck is the data?” she said.

  “I left it,” Rhys said. “I knew we were out of time. Let’s go. The patrol.”

  “Oh, fuck you,” Nyx said. “You left the data? You should have brought me the goddamn data and then gone back for him, you lazy, cowardly fuck.”

  “I’m cowardly? No,” Rhys said. He could see the lights coming, fast: flame flies. “If you’re so brave, you go back for them. I’m not risking another—”

  She pushed past him, knocking him so hard he dropped Taite and tumbled onto the sand after him. “Curse you, Nyx!” Rhys spat.

  “Already fucked!” Nyx called over her shoulder, and disappeared over the dune.

  Nyx slid down the bank and ran to the edge of the acid sea. The lights of the data net blinked at her as they continued to drift down, down . . . Rhys had just let the whole fucking thing go, just dropped it. All this catshit, and he had dropped it. For what?

  She ran, and kept running, because in her head she heard him, again, and heard herself, calling him a coward. Fuck it.

  Nyx ran into the acid sea and grabbed the netting into her arms and hauled it back out. The slap of the acid was sharp, a burn that seared the skin of her legs and arms; little droplets wet her face, making burn marks, no doubt, and she slogged back up onto the bank with the net and the little casings that had adhered to the ones in the net. She bundled them up even as she rubbed soil onto her burning arms and legs. The lights of the patrol were closer. She broke from the edge of the lake and ran for the other side of the compound where they were due to meet Anneke and Khos.

  She saw Rhys already ahead of her, dragging Taite with him. Taite had already regained some function, as he was moving his legs, slogging beside Rhys. Nyx tripped, banging back onto the bank. She tasted blood. She’d bitten her tongue.

  The patrol was right over the dune. She stayed down, not daring to reveal herself when they were nearly on top of her. She raised her head only as they passed, just in time to see their light illuminate Rhys and Taite getting into the bakkie.

  The bakkie juiced up and peeled away from the broken fence just as the patrol arrived; Taite nearly fell out. They hadn’t even had time to close the door.

  The patro
l ran back past her, heading for their vehicles. Nyx pressed her face to the ground, clutching the data net. Her skin was peeling off, and there were swarms of flesh beetles out here, big enough to make giant trees, and this is where she was going to end up, fucking dead beside a data lake for no fucking reason. Why did she die? somebody might ask, if anybody bothered to ask or anybody knew or cared, and they’d say, Who the fuck knows? She needed some rent money.

  Nyx rolled over and gazed up at the sky. Clouds had moved back over the moons, cutting off the stars, too, so all she saw was blackness. Like looking inside of herself, a constant loop.

  Sound of tires on sand. A heavy bakkie hurtling her way.

  A shout, “Nyx! Get the fuck in!”

  Nyx scrambled up, snatched the data net, and bolted for the hole in the fence. On the other side, the bakkie was swinging around again. Anneke drove, and Khos was in the front passenger seat, arm outstretched, reaching for her.

  She grabbed his hand, and he pulled her in.

  They peeled away from the fence a second time and blazed off into the darkness, no headlights on, burning off toward the bumpy road they had mapped out for their escape. Nyx tossed the data net onto the floor at her feet and looked out the back, keeping an eye on their pursuers, whose vehicles still hadn’t managed to get around the wreckage near the gate.

  She caught Rhys’s eye; he sat in the back, wrapped in his burnous. When he saw her looking at him, he closed his eyes and pretended to sleep.

  They drove hard for an hour without pursuit before Anneke eased up on the juice.

  “You hurt?” Anneke asked. Nyx was in the front, squeezed between her and Khos.

  “I’ll need a witch.”

  “Sure thing,” Anneke said. She never took her eyes off the road.

  The bakkie rolled up outside of a little town called Ikraam, or that’s what Rhys said it was called on the map. Anneke found the hedge witch, and got the witch to come to the little abandoned adobe shack at the edge of town where they were squatting.