No one could even send food.
“Guarantee it,” she said.
“What?” her assistant sounded shocked.
“Do your best to keep the guarantee unofficial,” Gennefort said, and signed off. Then she leaned against the Disty building, and felt the flimsy structure shift ever so slightly.
She hoped this decision wouldn’t backfire on her as badly or as quickly as the last one had.
She hoped if bodies were ever discovered in the sand that provided Wells’s base, she was no longer Mayor of Wells City.
In fact, she hoped she was long dead.
She never wanted to live through anything like this again.
Fifty-nine
Flint kept a tight grip on his laser pistol as he slowly lowered it. He hoped Norton wasn’t smart enough to ask Flint to drop it and kick it over. Flint wanted to catch Norton as he came to fetch the pistol himself.
Norton watched with a half-smile on his face. Then he glanced at the console, which was clearly his goal. Flint wondered if Norton would bother to return to the Moon, or if he would kill everyone, and take the Emmeline out of the solar system.
“Now,” Norton said. “We’re going to—”
He stopped and tilted his head, obviously listening.
Flint listened too. Scuffling in the corridor. Voices came with it.
The other six had arrived.
Norton turned slightly. “Wait, everyone,” he said. “I don’t want you to get any closer. You—”
Flint saw his only opportunity.
“—don’t quite understand what’s happening here. Our pilot—”
He raised his pistol.
“—and I are having a stalemate. He—”
Fired.
Norton must have seen the shot from the corner of his eye. He twisted slightly and leaned away.
The shot caught him in the arm—the arm holding the disc—and Norton’s hand jerked upward. The disc flew from it. Norton kept twisting, then tripped, and fell into the hallway.
A woman screamed, and one of the men shouted something unintelligible.
The disc rose toward the ceiling. Flint hurried forward, thinking he might catch it, and didn’t reach it in time. He winced as the disc clattered against the floor.
Norton sat up, his face gray, and scrambled for the disc, but Flint reached it first. He snatched it with his free hand, unbalancing himself.
Norton grabbed Flint’s foot and pulled him over.
Flint landed on his back, the air rushing from his body. He clutched the disc in one hand, the laser pistol in the other, and tried to sit up. Norton still had a firm grasp on his foot. Flint gasped for air, seeing black dots across his vision.
The other six came into the room.
“Stop him!” Norton screamed. “He’s kidnapping us.”
But they didn’t move. They stared at the whole tableau as if it sent them back to the helplessness of their childhood.
Flint finally sat up and aimed the laser pistol at Norton. “Let me go,” Flint said.
Norton’s grip grew tighter.
“Let me go or I will kill you this time,” Flint said.
“And contaminate all of us?” Norton asked.
“If I have to,” Flint said.
Norton let go. He used that hand to brace himself, his skin going even grayer.
“You don’t know how to use that disc,” he said. “It’s dangerous.”
Flint didn’t answer him. Instead, he looked at Weiss, who stood in the front of the group.
“Would you people be kind enough to hold him down?” Flint asked.
“What did he do?” Weiss asked.
“I’ll replay it for you,” Flint said. “Just help me first.”
Apparently, that was the right answer—the fact that they had come upon the attack and the fact that Flint’s system had made a recording of it seemed to convince the group to take Flint’s side, not Norton’s.
They surrounded him. Two of the men held him down, careful not to touch the smoldering hole in his shoulder.
Flint stood. He carefully set the disc on the console, then reached under it and removed one of the pairs of handcuffs he kept in the cockpit. Then, holding the laser pistol in one hand and the handcuffs in other, he walked toward the group.
The seven of them watched him walk across the cockpit as if he were twenty times larger than he was. Their eyes were huge, their mouths thin. Even Marcos, the beautiful one, no longer looked sculpted. She looked frightened.
The men continued holding Norton, and he too watched as if he couldn’t believe what he saw. The air smelled faintly of burned flesh, and Flint knew he would have to take care of Norton’s wound.
“Turn him for me, will you?” Flint asked.
The men helped Norton up. Norton was hurt worse than Flint had thought. The pistol had shot all the way through his arm; the back of his shirt was scorched.
Flint looked up. A matching scorch mark marred the panels near the door.
Norton staggered slightly, and Flint tightened his grip on the laser pistol, although he didn’t bring it all the way up. He wasn’t sure if Norton was staggering from his injury or faking a loss of balance as a way to get to Flint’s laser pistol.
“Hold him carefully,” Flint said, not relinquishing the pistol.
He snapped one lock on Norton’s right wrist, then without using his other hand, snapped the other lock on Norton’s left wrist.
“All right,” Flint said. “You can let him go.”
Norton staggered again. His skin was even grayer than before.
“He needs treatment,” Vajra said.
Flint nodded. “Let’s get him to the brig and we’ll do what we can for him there.”
“You have a brig?” Weiss asked.
Flint shrugged. “This ship has all sorts of surprises.”
But he wasn’t going to share what they were. He didn’t say anything. Instead, he went back to the console, and picked up the disc.
He didn’t see any trigger on the surface. In fact, the disc just looked like a piece of plastic. He held it closer to one of his scanners, and it didn’t register the disc as a live device.
Flint suspected he had been bluffed. He wasn’t going to let Norton know that, however, and he wasn’t going to mention it to the others.
Flint slipped the disc into a built-in drawer in the console, a drawer that opened only to the touch of his warm fingerprint. Then he joined the others. He kept the laser pistol in his hand and walked behind them, telling them how to get to the brig.
No one spoke.
When they arrived at the brig, Flint grabbed the first aid kit outside it and handed it to Vajra. “Take care of him.”
“How do you know I can?”
Flint shrugged. “You strike me as competent.”
She went inside the small room with Norton and the two men. They laid him on the wall bed, and ripped open his shirt. Edges of the fabric had burned into the wound.
“What if he dies?” Weiss asked Flint softly. “Doesn’t that make us contaminated, according to all that Disty stuff?”
“He won’t die.” At least, not so that anyone knew. If Norton died before the rendezvous with the Disty, he would not be part of the passenger list. Flint would claim that Armstrong made the mistake in the count. He would also make sure the remaining six backed him up.
But he said nothing about any of that now. He watched Vajra follow the instructions playing on the kit’s surface about how to handle a laser burn. She was doing well. If she had messed up, he would have stepped in. He’d treated more than a dozen of those wounds over the years in his work as a Space Traffic cop.
Finally, Vajra finished. Norton still hadn’t opened his eyes, but his normal skin tone had returned and his breathing was even.
“So,” she said, as she picked up the kit and stepped out of the tiny room, “are you going to tell us what happened?”
“Better yet,” Flint said, “I’ll show you. But first, l
et me make sure he’s secure.”
Flint closed the clear reinforced plastic door, then snapped the lock open and touched the surface in five separate places. He didn’t care that the six passengers watched his movements. Like so many locks here, this was keyed to his fingerprint, but the fingerprint had to be part of a warm, living hand.
Then he turned around. The six looked like adult-sized children, with their large eyes and their solemn expressions. He had frightened them.
Norton had frightened them. Norton had frightened him.
Flint smiled at them, and this time he made sure his smile was warm—the smile he had used as a police officer, after someone went through a major trauma. A reassuring, you’re-safe-now smile.
“He really didn’t want to go back to Mars,” Flint said. “And frankly, after all you people have been through, who could blame him?”
“But to shoot him,” Vajra said. Her voice was soft. “You didn’t have to do that.”
“I didn’t see any other choice,” Flint said.
The six didn’t move. He had frightened them too.
Which was probably good. They’d stay away from him for the rest of the trip to Mars.
Sixty
Sharyn Scott-Olson was in the middle of her twentieth autopsy. The body, spread out on the table before her, belonged to a young human male. He was covered with bruises. His skull had been crushed, and so had his rib cage. Clearly, he was one of the many corpses she had seen that day that had been trampled to death.
What she had to figure out—besides his identity—was whether he had died from the crushed skull or the crushed chest. And if she couldn’t figure it out quickly, she would set him aside and move to the next corpse, already waiting on a tabletop for her.
She didn’t look behind her. She didn’t want to see the amount of work that awaited her and her assistants, all of whom were working as hard as she was.
She kept mental score of the numbers she had already seen, but she couldn’t tell anyone how many had been Disty and how many had been human.
By the end of this, she knew it would all be a blur.
One of her links pinged. She sighed and requested the urgency level, without taking her hands from the corpse’s battered arm. The response was quick: urgent.
She directed the message to a nearby wall screen. If it was bad news or good news, she would have to tell them anyway, so she figured why not let them listen in?
The face of Gavin Trouvelot, the human liaison to the Disty in Sahara Dome, appeared on the screen. Apparently, the image sent back to him allowed him to see the activity in the lab, because he visibly recoiled.
“Sharyn?” His voice was hoarse.
“Right here,” she said. “I have more work than is humanly possible to ever finish, so make this quick.”
“Good news,” he said. “The Disty believe they have a way of decontaminating the Dome and everyone in it.”
The noise around her stopped. She let go of the corpse’s arm “How?”
“They found survivors of the massacre. They’re coming in now from the Moon. It’ll take a while, but they’ll eventually get here. I thought you’d want to know. You’ll all be fine. We’re setting up priorities here, and we figure since you’ve suffered under this cloud the longest, your office should be among the first to meet with the Disty.”
She blinked at his image. Obviously, no one was giving any of this much thought. She even had a guess as to how the reasoning went: the morgue dealt with the Death Squad off and on; they’d see if the ritual worked or not.
“I appreciate it,” Scott-Olson said.
“Um—” Nigel started from beside her, but Scott-Olson waved her bloody, glove-covered right hand at him.
“However,” she said, “we’re really busy down here, and—”
“Still, I think this would take precedence,” Trouvelot said.
She resisted the urge to shake her head at him. “It would be a waste of their time. We would just get recontaminated.”
“How—? Oh.” His gaze flickered downward. “When the autopsies are done, then?”
She suppressed a sigh. “It’ll be a while. When we finish with the recent victims, we still have to deal with the corpses from the massacre.”
“Oh.” Trouvelot frowned.
She didn’t ask about the skeleton. She hoped that the Disty had found someone to decontaminate Scott-Olson’s lab team for that too, but she doubted it.
Maybe the best she could hope for was that the Disty would forget that one small detail.
“Is there anything else?” she asked.
“Um, how do we determine where you fit in?” Trouvelot asked.
“I’ll have you work with Nigel,” she said, and signed off. Nigel made a choking sound beside her. When she looked at him, he rolled his eyes.
“Don’t I have enough to do?” he asked.
She let out a small, humorless laugh. “Don’t worry. He won’t contact us again for a while. We might even have to contact him when it comes time for our decontamination.”
Nigel wheeled one of the finished corpses toward the back room. He no longer seemed squeamish about anything. When he reached the door, he stopped. “It is good news, though, isn’t it? The decontamination?”
It was much too late. All of these people, as well as the Disty and the people in Wells and other parts of Mars, would still be alive if someone had taken care of this sooner.
Maybe Costard had done some good after all. The survivors were coming from the Moon. That Retrieval Artist had said he had some leads.
At least things weren’t going to get worse.
“It’s good,” Scott-Olson said. “In fact, it’s the best we can hope for.”
Sixty-one
Mars floated in Flint’s viewscreen. The red-and-brown planet looked like its sandy surface had been mixed with blood.
He had all of the Emmeline’s defenses on high alert. Every angle of his ship monitored the exterior. He needed to know the moment something showed up on his sensors, and he needed that something evaluated. Too many Disty ships had exploded or been crippled because other ships crashed into them.
He wasn’t going to die because Mars’s Space Traffic Control system had gigantic holes.
Flint had taken other precautions. The six remaining survivors didn’t know it, but they were locked into the passenger wing of the ship. They had no access to the maintenance areas or the cockpit—something he should have done when they first came on board.
Norton was still in the brig, where he would remain until the Disty came for him. He was seriously injured, but not in any immediate danger. With proper medical attention, he would be just fine.
Flint would tell the Disty that.
But he wouldn’t tell them about the small disc that Norton had brought onto Flint’s ship. Flint had made a study of that disc, and he was convinced that it wasn’t a weapon at all. Norton had been improvising, and he had done it well. Still, Flint kept the disc in the small locked drawer on the console.
So far he had sent two messages to the surface, and had received no reply. He wasn’t sure what he would do if the Disty refused to contact his ship. He had made certain that his survivors had had no outside access since he got within range of Mars’s various systems, but he wasn’t sure if things had changed.
His long-range sensors pinged. A square ship, completely black, was heading toward him from deep space. He put his weapons systems online and sent a message, asking the ship to identify itself.
The reply came quickly: “Disty vessel 665443: Death Squad. We have been appointed to rendezvous with your ship. Respond.”
Flint let out the breath he had been holding. “We’re waiting for you, Disty vessel. We were told you will dock with us?”
“We will. You will prepare for the docking.”
Then the Disty signed out.
Flint watched as the ship got closer. Its design wasn’t classically Disty, but it fit into the Death Squad configurations. He had
studied a lot of Death Squad ships when he had worked Space Traffic Control so that he would recognize them when they came through.
The Disty ship reached his ship. Then the Emmeline shook as the Disty ship’s grapplers attached. He heard faint bleets of nervousness coming from the game room. The poor survivors were probably more worried than they had ever been.
Perhaps they were even regretting their decision.
His outside cameras caught the entire maneuver. The grapplers were black and efficient, pulling his ship closer. Then the Disty ship sent its tunnel along the arms of the grapplers, creating an easy environment for the Disty to board the Emmeline.
Flint kept his main doors locked. He wouldn’t open them until he was certain he needed to. He did, however, unlock the outside doors.
He stayed in the cockpit as he did this. He wasn’t going to greet the Disty until he had seen them.
Ten Disty filed down the tunnel and into his airlock. They were so small they all fit into the tiny space. They were wearing black over their bodies. They wore a white cord around their necks. From the cord, a sheathed knife hung. Flint had only seen the knife blade once: it was also black, made of some kind of tempered glass, the strength reinforced through some sort of secret technique. The knife’s dual edges were sharp enough to slice off a finger without much effort, and the flat part of the blade had little ridges that left slivers of glass inside the skin of anyone who touched it.
Those knives were used in many Death Squad rituals, including vengeance killings.
The Disty closed the exterior door. The tunnel remained attached to his ship. One Disty tried the interior door, then looked at the others. The look rippled through the crowd of Disty as if they could read an answer on the back wall.
“Your interior door is sealed,” said one of the Disty.
“Standard precaution,” Flint said. “I had to wait until the exterior door was sealed.”
He opened the interior door, set the ship on autopilot, and grabbed his laser pistol, putting it in the holster he had saved from his police days. Then he left the cockpit. Before he walked down the corridor, he shut and locked the cockpit door. The lock was keyed to his left palm print.
Buried Deep Page 32
