“Well,” Araskar says, “all the better to steal from them.” Araskar points at various pieces of his drawing in the sand. “Once I get in well with the other fighters and managers, I disable the incinerator. You fly up the incinerator, then once you secure the mining works, we can start moving material out. There’ll be loading barges in the mining area. Have them meet up with your drop ship, lash them together, have Jaqi jump you back here through some dark nodes.” The Matakas are silent, no wings rattling, so Araskar adds again, “And then put some matter in the nest queen’s hand.”
“Why you care about this prison?” Swez says to Araskar.
Araskar speaks to Swez, but he’s got one eye on me. “There are people in there I’d like to speak with.”
Swez don’t bite on that, thank God and gosh. “You haven’t mentioned the guards. Crosses?”
“The guards are Nbossoobissobashoolu.”
Everyone looks at him all confused for a second, mostly because that en’t a word you often hear from tongue and lips. “Blobs,” Swez says. “You didn’t tell the nest queen that.”
“Fluid sentients. In an explosion, they can discorporate and come back together. Safest bet around all those hyperdense oxygen cells.”
“Hm,” Swez says. “We don’t like this.”
“You saying your people can’t take on a bunch of blobs? They don’t die easy, but they’re not exactly Imperial Marines.”
“We cannot afford shards in that space. Not that they would work on fluid sentients. We will need to disable those guards before the mission begins. At least weaken them.” Swez chews, and mutters something to his buddy. I know a bit of Kurgul, and I hear the words nest queen rewards double-crosses too . . .
“Aiya, scabs,” I say. “Let me speak.”
The Matakas turn and glare at me. They hate humanoid females, what with us being neither worker nor queen.
Everyone else seems to be glaring at me too, though. To be fair. I am their Chosen Oogie What Just Ran Off.
“I know Matakas got a vault full of disease. I know because you made all of Ecosphere 118 in Resenti sick to pull off a heist. Left a heap of bodies.”
“Why are you speaking, female?” Swez snaps. “Be quiet.”
“Make them blob guards sick. Just sick, mind you. Not killing.”
“I want this female to be silenced, as she should be,” Swez says to Araskar.
“Why?” Araskar says. “She’s just told us what we need to do. What sort of biochemical weapons do you have in your vaults?”
Swez grumbles, and those wings rattle. “A few.” He avoids looking at me and speaks, again straight to Araskar. “We may have a pathogen that can make the fluid sentients discorporate, to a degree. For a few days they will have difficulty managing their shapes. It will give certain other kinds of sentients some troubling symptoms as well. Mania, and perhaps hallucinations.”
“What other sentients?”
“Mmm, a cross may have problems if he is given an enhanced dose.”
Araskar nods. “I’ll risk it.”
“Let me call our storehouse manager. She will not be pleased to use a favorite pathogen.”
I start walking toward Araskar. Swez raises his shard-blaster. “Just need a moment to talk, scab. Me and Araskar, on our lonesome.”
“We’re partners now,” Araskar says. “You put a gun on us, the nest queen hears about it.”
Swez lowers the gun. “Reflexes is all. Just a bit of free advice: never trust a female that hasn’t produced any larvae.”
Funny thing is, that en’t nearly the worst thing I’ve heard off these scabs out in the dark. You should have heard what the crickets, with their three sexes, none quite like a humanoid’s, used to say.
Araskar crosses the camp, and comes to stand next to me. I smell the remnants of shards on him, burning hair, burnt skin. Smell something weird and tangy too. Makes me kind of hungry.
“So, how’d you know this about the prisoner? You pulled it out of gray girl’s head?”
“That’s what these swords are made for.” He taps his soulsword. “When someone’s taking intel to their grave, you need a way to get it. The Empire had to believe we weren’t sentient to treat our memories this way.” He looks like he thought of something. “You should carry the other sword. From Rash . . . from the woman I killed.”
“En’t touching that thing!”
“It’ll let us talk without the Matakas overhearing.”
Aw hell. He had to say something useful. “You reckon we’ll use that?”
“You think we won’t?”
I can’t think of a thing to say. It all sounds mad. “By the devil and Earth that was lost, what makes you think we’ll get anywhere?”
He smiles, almost a real smile, stretching out that scar in his chin. “Faith.”
“Don’t give me that, slab!” I stop, and I don’t talk, because truth is, I’m a mess here. I want to run. I want to run so fierce it burns me up. I was made to run. I been doing it every chance I get. I even ran here.
But it won’t work now.
I hate to say it, but there en’t anywhere left to run to. And the whole galaxy’s after me now. Oh, the reward’s out for Araskar. But I looked the devil in the eye, and he knew me. I won’t forget that no matter how far I run.
Like Araskar said, I got to be the chosen oogie of space. It en’t true, but I got to act like it.
“All right,” I say. “I’m in with whatever you think’s best, slab. Still don’t like you, though.”
“I don’t need more friends.”
“Counter-resistance. Needs a better name.”
“Resistance, rebellion, revolution . . .” Araskar shrugs.
“You en’t allowed to pick names. I reckon . . .” Hang on, that’s it. “Reckoning. We gonna make John Starfire reckon with what he done.”
“The Reckoning. Day one.”
He puts his hand out, and we shake on it. Two dumb crosses. Like he’s reading my mind, he says, “Not what we’re made for.”
“Not in the least.”
“Get back over here, crosses,” Swez yells. “We do this, you work for me.”
Well, this is a hell of a start.
-5-
Araskar
OUR SHUTTLE, only big enough for myself, Z, and X, flies out into space. Toward the node, and toward the job.
Behind us, Trace glows, even from a far distance, the lights of the Suits’ infrastructure gleaming. Farther behind the planet, the moon orbits, that little scrap of desert where Rashiya’s body is buried.
In front of us, a black patch blots out stars across half the sky. The Dark Zone is close here, in these wild worlds.
Between us and the vacuum beyond, where I can’t see it—no one can, and only Jaqi has even the faintest sense it’s there—a node.
“Take us through, Jaqi,” I say into the comm. And I touch my soulsword, and I feel the resonance from the one she now wears, the one that Rashiya once had. Twenty hours.
Not so hard, slab. Talking through the swords tends to give you a headache, but as I’ve already got a headache from withdrawals, I haven’t noticed like Jaqi has.
How’s the sword feel?
Don’t like wearing this sword, slab. Don’t like thinking on what it’s done. This is the sword killed that poor kid Quinn. Because Rashiya didn’t come out of a vat, the psychic resonator in her sword, by nature, adapts to the user. It explains how Jaqi used a sword before, when she stabbed my old commander Terracor.
Watch Swez and his drones. They go off-plan for even a second, you let me know.
Aiya, slab. The Reckoning away.
The node opens up. In we go, to pure space.
For half a second, I think I might hear the beginning of music. For half a second, all the glorious things I used to get from taking the pinks—and then the node spits us out, we spin into space, and everything is silent again.
The music’s gone. Jaqi gone, the music of pure space gone, and my whole body aches with i
ts absence, my head throbbing, my testicle twisting, my burns all the more painful without her nearby.
Z’s voice pulls me out of the pain. “Shadow Sun Seven. I am . . . I am impressed.”
I turn my aching head and look at our objective.
From this angle, we look up, at the swell of the Threg’s head and the swell of the body extending beyond it.
I’ve seen some big bugs in my time, but this is the biggest bug in the entire galaxy. A head the size of a decent ecosphere, a huge swollen body stretching into space beyond that, so big that you might mistake it for a moon. I can just make out, from the floodlights, the running lights of the barges, and the flare of jets and incinerators, under a mess of running lights and circuitry where there were once several swollen eyes and probiscises.
We’re going to fly straight up its gullet. (Which is better than the way Jaqi’ll come in, as the incinerators vent out the other side.)
“Here we go,” I mutter. “Down the hatch.”
Running lights increase as we get closer. Tiny ships run alongside the skin of the thing, looking for breaches, reconnecting miles of wire and ducts and checking vents, pumping a stream of extracted carbon dioxide and other gases into space. A click, and our comm automatically tunes to a transmission—advertisements. “Is the Resistance resisting trade? Is the fall of the Empire the fall of your stocks? Come to the best market in the galaxy, no questions asked, customs and tariffs only what you’re willing to pay!”
I move to flip off the communicator, and Z stops my hand. He listens, and then growls, “There is money changing hands here. Far more than on Swiney. Cade should have taken me here.”
“To think first of money is the way of dishonor,” X says.
“That is not what I mean,” Z growls.
“If I thought only of profit, I would do well here,” X says.
“I do not think only of profit,” Z says. “I know the meaning of honor.”
“You—”
“Shut up,” I snap. They’ve been fighting all day. I suspect it has something to do with the way Z and Jaqi disappeared into their quarters back on the drop ship, and made enough noise—and enough music—to wake a sleeping Shir.
The running lights of the prison gleam off a load of hyperdense oxygen cells, like giant irregularly shaped marbles, loaded into a nearby barge that is meeting up with its loader to go through the node.
Given that nearly everything in the galaxy either lives off an oxygen mix or has been crossed with oxygen breathers to be able to live off the mix, the stuff mined here is a mint. Reverse-cell generators, with their layers and layers of algae, can make breathable oxygen, but even the compact ones take up a lot of ship space and fuel. The only other option is to compress hyperdense cells of planetary air. One hyperdense cell, tapped slowly, is good for at least one standard mission. Much easier to store, if more volatile. But that means getting them off-planet—unless you find a creature, like a Ruuzan Threg, that both lives in vacuum and will consolidate the oxygen for you.
Three hundred years of war against Andelaxan pirates means lots of hyperdense oxygen in the bellies of these things. And lots of prisoners needed to cut it out.
I hit the comm. The screen flickers, and a bored-looking fat Kurgul drone appears.
“Customs here. You a vendor?”
“Pit fighter,” Araskar says. “I sent it over in the application packet. Zaragathora. Eater of Flesh. I’m the manager.”
Behind me, Z says, as if no one heard me, “I am Zaragathora. I have come to compete. Also she has come as well.” He motions to X.
“Lady X,” she says. “A tested fighter.”
“Zaragathora.” He gets the blank look that shows he’s paging through computer screens. “Last competition on Swiney. You one of Cade’s boys?”
“I left Cade’s employ.”
“Hope so! Cade’s with the asteroids, word has it! Cafe Out-the-Airlock, table for one!” The Kurgul laughs and rattles his wings, a deeper thrumming sound than the little Matakas made.
Z ignores that. “This cross is my manager now. I am willing to fight in open melees, but I will reward you handsomely against seasoned competitors.”
The fat Kurgul rattles his wings for so long I think he must be having a damned heart attack. “Lots of trouble there at Swiney. Lots of complication.” He mutes us, talks offscreen for a while, then says, “Got someone higher-up for you to speak to.”
The screen flickers, and comes up on—a Necron.
Not one of their priests, but a cross. Nothing like my short-lived pet, the NecroWasp, though, which was an ugly mix of everything dead and mean in the galaxy. This guy’s a monument. He’s got the skull-face, but it sits below an enormous forehead, which rises into an intricate bone crest. He wears black armor and two curved knives sit at his waist. His head scrapes a tall ceiling. Like some sort of freaky statue, commissioned by a madman.
“You’re the boss?” I say. I suppose a pit fight is a decent place to worship death.
“He’s the protection. I’m the boss.”
I didn’t even notice the guy there with the “protection”—partially because he’s down at the edge of the screen. A short guy, but not just short—nondescript. The most boring features I’ve ever seen
Weirdly, Z and X both go totally silent.
I resist the urge to look at Z and put on my best smile, trying to look friendly despite my scars and bandages. “Nice to meet you. What can I call you?”
“My people call me the Boss. Boss Cross if you have, heh, a sense of humor.”
“Okay, Boss Cross, what’s this about my best fighter being off the lists?”
“Zaragathora, Eater of Flesh. Very good record, with the right people, but one of Cade’s, and delisted after Swiney Niney.” He gives a very nondescript shrug and a very nondescript smile. He is somehow every minor clerk in the galaxy all at once. “You can appreciate that any business, even one such as ours, runs by a code. Any trouble with the authorities, either old or new, and . . .” He makes a hand-washing motion.
I wait on Z to say something. But he doesn’t speak.
That’s strange. I figured he’d pop right up and explain how much honor he’s stashed, and he’s the greatest fighter in the galaxy, and he’s got a huge honorable . . .
But he doesn’t say anything. Neither does X.
“No Resistance trouble on our end,” I say.
“Your face inclines me to believe otherwise,” he offers.
I try to give him a grin. “I’m retired. A war hero. Got the papers and everything, if you want to see them.” I don’t have anything of the sort, but given that the Resistance was terrible with paperwork, I can fake it. “Why don’t we sit down over a drink and I’ll give you the truth of Swiney?” I say. “Let my Zarra on the list, and let me bend your ear.”
“You are free to board and enjoy yourselves. I may take you up on that.”
“Well information here. And fine fighters.”
“Come aboard. Enjoy yourself. We may talk.”
And then we’re back to that fat Kurgul again, explaining our clearance to land.
That’s not much, but it’ll get us on board. We’ll have to figure it from there. I turn to Z and X. “You could help me do some of the talking next time.”
“It is him,” Z whispers. “Ancestors truly have looked on this mission.”
“I recognize him as well,” X says. “He must die by our hand.”
“You know this Boss Cross?”
“We called him the Faceless Butcher,” X says. “He murdered a million Zarra, a generation ago, when the Empire’s mines expanded.”
“The entirety of clan Karras-rrr-Seriya,” X says. “The Empire gave them a commandment to leave their ancestral land, and they would not. The next day all were gone. Strong men, mighty women, but children and elders as well. Their land poisoned, their people a memory. The galaxy turned a blind eye.”
“It is well known among our people,” Z says, “that the Faceless Butch
er uses a complex psychic resonator so that he will not be recognized. It is attuned to pure-space transmission frequencies. In person or on comm, you will not recall his appearance.”
“That’s . . .” I was going to say that was crazy, but I realize that I have no recollection of what Boss Cross looked like. He was just . . . boring.
“The psychic resonator is also designed to damage recordings and pictures, but a few unaffected pictures survive. We study them. Every pore. The shape of the nostril, the cowardly slope of the forehead.” Z is speaking now like he’s reciting something. “Our elders show us those pictures, and each young Zarra memorized every feature of the Faceless Butcher, memorize the words he said when he murdered our relatives. I vow that before we leave Shadow Sun Seven, he will be dead for his crimes.”
“That’s not really . . .” I start to say.
“I too vow,” X says. “I will stand with you, Zarag-a-Trrrro-Rr-Zxz.”
“It’s great you’re on full-name terms, but—”
“Then together we shall shed his blood, Xeleuki-an-Thrrrrr-Xr-Zxas.”
“We must. Let us vow by blood.” She whips out a knife.
“Yes, our blood now will seal this—”
“No, it won’t!” I stand up and snap. “That is not the damned mission. This is a quick extraction. Our job is to get the virus into the air, turn off the incinerator, and get out!”
“You do not give me orders, Araskar Cross,” Z says. “You are a soldier, and you know nothing of honor in killing—”
“I know plenty about killing. More important, I know about keeping a mission going, and you are a soldier under my command now.”
“I am no soldier.” Z makes it sound like a dirty word.
I don’t move. “You know where this Faceless Butcher is now; you can come back later and get him. I’ve done a lot more extraction missions, and killed a hell of a lot more people than you, and you’ll take orders whether you’re a soldier or not.”
“What?” Z’s frown gets even more chiseled and angry. “You have not. I have surely killed more in combat than you.”
“Endanger this mission, you endanger Jaqi and the children.” I turn around and start piloting the ship toward the bug’s mouth.
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