Shadow Sun Seven

by Spencer Ellsworth

  Damn it all to hell and the Dark.

  I spit them out onto his shirt.

  He keeps fighting me, for an admirably long time until the enormous amount of pinks I jammed down his throat takes effect and he struggles less and less, Boss Cross’s body going into the limp, stupid mode that I remember so well.

  The elevator rumbles. NecroSentry coming back. Probably a personal assault alarm on Boss Cross’s body. I have maybe three seconds. And I’m on fire with the need for drugs.

  “Admirable,” Rashiya’s ghost says. “Don’t you want to at least take some of that for later?” She points to the mess on Boss Cross’s shirt. “Or kill him?”

  “Killing him,” I mutter, hating how my body is screaming for the drug, hating myself for giving it up, “would attract a lot more attention than making him look like a sloppy drug-addled fool.” I drag him over to the door, scan his wide-open, vacant-staring retinae.

  The maintenance door opens.

  Up I go.

  The maintenance route to the nerve center is a tight tunnel, winding up through metal and meat both, mostly around neural links as thick as my arms. I hear Reveks, chattering in the distance, but luckily I don’t meet any.

  I reach an entry area before the nerve center. Rashiya knew all the access codes for this place; I enter a series of five codes, hoping they haven’t changed the codes since she got her intel.

  The field vanishes.

  “You’re welcome,” her ghost says.

  I go to the bug’s brain.

  It’s dim in here, lit mostly by the screens, and light coming through windows that look down into the pit. Reveks man the works, little ratlike things hunched over the controls. Nerve tissue pulses overhead, sending electrical flashes through the room. They’ve wired much of the machinery, in a strange Imperial parallel to the Suits, into the original nervous tissue of the Threg. I suppose if the electrical system is there, you should use it.

  Lucky for me, the stink of old insect meat and the chemicals they use to preserve it is strong here. And the lack of security is keeping them too busy to smell me.

  “Someone messed with the fuses on thirteen! Got a whole network down there!”

  “Look at that—this fellow’s just trying to snatch a hyperdense cell. Where’s the blobs?”

  “Door just opened. Boss being evil nosy?”

  One of them flips on the camera in Boss Cross’s office, showing him in a state of stupefaction. I take a minute to thank the Starfire that they were distracted while I shoved pinks down his throat. “Aiya, look at this!”

  “Thought I smelled pinks.”

  “En’t like the boss—aiya, look at that! Blackout at customs! Where are the blobs?”

  “All sick, aiya!”

  “Someone gonna rob us blind, them blobs don’t get better!”

  Rashiya speaks in my ear. “You remember the schematic? You got it right out of my head.”

  I do remember, thanks.

  I crawl in the dark, under desks to an empty station. The Revek who manned it has gotten up to run down a few levels and fix another problem.

  Incinerator. I page through a few sets of schematics. Incinerator.

  There it is. Right where I though it would be. It works off a normal sub-routine; all I have to do is disable it and they won’t notice until it starts to get a bit backed up and they have to reboot, by which time Jaqi will have done the work she needs to do, and the Matakas will be well into the mines, stealing barges full of oxygen.

  Not just the incinerator, though. The prisoner’s in 2416; I also disable the auto-record feed along that hallway, so that once we’re gone, the Resistance won’t be able to pull up pictures of Jaqi and the others.

  Work’s done here. Ten minutes to spare. Look at me, accomplishing a mission for once.

  “Boss doesn’t get high. Something’s funny here.” Two Reveks chirp their way along next to me. Overhead, the nerve tissue pulses, and I press myself as small as I can under the desk. “Smell anything?”

  “Can never smell a thing in here. But . . . yeah, I smell them pinks. You think someone’s double-dipping?”

  Hell, I should have disguised my smell. Should have rolled in anti-oxitate or . . .

  “You double-dipping?” They chatter in some Revek patois I don’t quite get for a moment, and then the first voice says, “You best share! I get tired of this evil smelly place too, aiya!”

  “Got weed, not pinks.”

  “Aiya, now I heard they go real fine together. You sure?”

  The other Revek chatters something that sounds a lot like exasperation. “I share, you tell me what the Boss wanted with that catch, aiya?” another one asks.

  “En’t no catch,” he chirps. “Just a couple of soulswords from customs. Boss wanted to check the frequency and serial number on the resonator, to see who it was issued to.”

  Frequency and the serial number on the resonator, to see who it was issued to. Except, supposedly, those kinds of records have been destroyed. Soulsword registries passed through one of the central financial databases on Irithessa. In theory, the registries were all destroyed by the Resistance. But that’s only if John Starfire has even stopped production of new crosses in the vats.

  If he hasn’t, we’ll never beat him.

  Those vats could produce ten thousand troops a day, ready for war within a week.

  And if Boss Cross did what I suspect he was smart enough to do and reached out, John Starfire now knows I’m on Shadow Sun Seven.

  Also, I’m stuck hiding under a desk, with no clue how I’ll get out. And ten minutes to go until I have to talk to Jaqi through the swords a few feet, and a million miles, away.

  I wouldn’t have had to deal with any of this if I had got high.

  -11-

  Jaqi

  IT FEELS RIGHT, TO be sitting in a cockpit again. Feels right to have my hands on thruster control, coming up close on a node that’ll take us to a job. I en’t used to working for myself, after all. En’t too bad to have a place to go, a job to do, a catch to make. Even in a stimmed-out little Kurgul rustrider.

  “Any day now, cross,” Swez says.

  “We just hit the twenty-hour mark,” I say. “Take it easy, drone. I’ll get us there.” I reach out to the node and—

  Music.

  Normally, taking hold of a node is just a thing I do. Like pissing or stretching after a long sit in the captain’s chair. This time it’s different. I hear that music, running through all of me. Like it’s rain falling into my ears and hitching a ride through my bloodstream, notes meeting each other and merging together down in my guts. Pouring up out through my eyeballs. Like light through a scrap of worn fabric.

  And we’re through the node.

  “That way, female,” Swez says. I barely hear him. I can’t quite put a feeling to this. I feel like I touched something of the miracle there. Like I found what you might call God, or the Starfire.

  “Female!”

  I blink, look around the cockpit. “Jaqi?” Taltus asks. He puts a hand on my shoulder. “Are you all right?”

  I force myself to look down at the controls for the drop ship. “That music,” I say, mostly to myself. “Why now?” Why a node?

  I blink and see Shadow Sun Seven on the viewscreen: a big huge bug looming in space, about as big as ten ecospheres and some small moons.

  “Take us in, female! Stop wasting time!”

  I don’t answer Swez, as he don’t deserve it. I pilot us toward the incinerator in the bunghole of this big old bug.

  We’re jamming everything we can, using the Kurguls’ own home-grown system. Turns out that one reason they’re such good smugglers is that they can use the same frequencies they speak to their nest queen on to jam Imperial communication.

  The things you learn in the wild worlds.

  The ship lurches one way and another as I try to compensate for the usual problems with trajectory coming out of pure space. Makes it harder that my whole body feels like I just got the slack-s
hakes, or maybe had a fine cocktail. That music made me feel mighty strange.

  Were there words to it?

  “Female, are you paying attention?” Swez snarls.

  “Yes! And this damn thing is still touchy,” I mutter. They must have hooked up another skim-box I didn’t fix. I breathe on this stick and it takes a hard left.

  I fly with the traffic, as the main port cut into the bug en’t far from the incinerators. And quite a bug it is. Never seen a thing quite like this. The front of the thing is all lights and ships swarming, and then the back is a massive swollen belly and carapace, stretching into space. Thing could swallow up Swiney Niney about fifteen times. Bigger than most asteroid mines. The skin is made up of these thick scales, hard like plasticene, reflecting the running lights of the oxygen barges and the drop shops and maintenance craft that run along it. It’s so big I figure we will hardly be noticed, which is a fine thing, but I en’t so sure I can find the incinerator without Araskar’s help.

  So this is it. This is where we take our first step in our Reckoning. Up a bug’s hole.

  Jaqi.

  There he is, right on cue, like a fist whacking the inside of my skull. Slab, you there?

  You can get in. Incinerator tunnel 14-ZC. And then, a moment later, I may be in trouble.

  Araskar? Nothing. Araskar?

  “Correct, female!” Swez growls behind me. “At this speed you’ll crash into the side of the station!”

  “Hang on, drone,” I say. “Just trying to keep your blood pumping.”

  “Are you worried about those maintenance ships?” Taltus says.

  “Unless they see us go in, en’t no difference. Shady place like this, there’s lots of ships in the neighborhood. Usually dumping cargo.”

  “Dumping cargo?” Kalia asks. “What do you mean?”

  “Well,” I say, “if we was, in the old times, running a load of guns that was too hot even to take in port at an evil scabby spot like this, we’d stick out an anchor—a set of smart thrusters on a net, see—and leave the catch out in the dark. Thrusters are programmed to stay within a certain vicinity, so barring a comet or another ship, you’re solid.”

  “Oh,” Kalia says. “That’s interesting.”

  “Best to go far,” Swez says, pulling that hat down again. “I prided myself on finding a dumped catch, in the days when I worked the spaceways. A good sonic bounce will pick up everything you need.”

  Oh, I should have figured that, with everything else wrong with them Kurguls, he was a catch-grabber.

  “Pilot us in, female.”

  “Working on it, drone.” I reckon Swez and I have reached an understanding, and that understanding is that he annoys the hell out of me.

  I guide us down, a few miles under Shadow Sun Seven. I may be all turned around by miracles and Bibles, and hungry—again—but I can pilot.

  Here’s the trick. I set the drop ship pointing “up.” From here, I can just see, with the naked eye, flares of the incinerators.

  “The incinerators are still working,” Kalia says, nervousness showing through.

  “Just one tunnel he disabled,” I say. “Place like this has at least a few dozen trash tunnels. You get better flames if you put a set of six medium-sized tunnels down, instead of one big hind-hole tunnel. Don’t you worry. We’ll be in and do our part and be out.” And we’ll meet a scab who lived through a year in the Dark Zone, and knows what’s going on in the mind of the devil.

  Only thing I can read is distance charts, and I reckon I got this charted well. We’re a good mile out, and once thrusters fire to put us on course for the tunnel, I need to turn everything off so we don’t blip no long-range. Thrusters have got to fire right. Just right, to bring us in at the angle we need.

  I run the numbers a few times, and looked at the charts, and I find the tunnel Araskar done talked about, this 14-ZC, and I figure that a three-second burn would be good on any other drop ship with any other thrusters, but just to be safe with this touchy thing, we ought to give it a two-second burn.

  Burn. Thrusters fire. I shut off everything in the ship.

  As the lights shift off and the reverse-cells grind to a halt, Swez says, “Minimal talking.” We en’t got a ton of atmosphere, and it’s got to last until we get up inside the prison’s oxygen.

  Up we go, toward the bug’s hind-hole.

  We pass in and out of the paths of a few floodlights; it won’t matter much until we get a lot closer. Then we best hope the ash and frozen clouds around the incinerator hide us from any naked eyes peeping the sensors.

  It’s hard to, by sight alone, figure on which one of them vents we’re going into, as the vents are discharging smoke and ash and bits of half-burned matter, freezing the minute it hits the hard vacuum.

  Everyone winces as bits of frozen matter ping off our hull. It’s thrice-sealed synthsteel, made to take a shard hit, and no debris should punch a hole in it, no matter how fast it was ejected, but still, en’t a good feeling to hear things pinging off your hull, when they should be getting et by the sense-field.

  We barrel up through the mess. Smoke. Ice. Little bits of other trash.

  “Wish I could see,” I mutter.

  And for a second, I get my wish. For a second, the chunks of rapidly freezing matter part, showing one tunnel not flashing with fire like the others—and we are not on course. Way we’re going, we’ll leave half the ship on the left rim of that tunnel.

  “Shit, turn it all back on!” I flip the switches, and Swez snarls, “What are you doing, female?” but I en’t got time—I need a little bit of controlled thruster burn—and I get it, and I fire the thrusters to put us back on course, but we’re going in a lot faster now—and there’s the open end of the incinerator, and I have to use thrusters to correct, to push us right up, into the smoky tunnel.

  The ship groans and screams. It’s hit Shadow Sun Seven’s gravity now, the artificial gravity field used to push material down these tubes, and we lurch fit to give the bends. My stomach turns around ten times. I hear one of the kids puke. Thankful to my cross genes I don’t do that.

  The thruster burn carries us on, damnably fast, too fast. Our ship catches the wall of the incinerator tube and screeches, the kind of long, groaning scream that you know en’t doing any favors for anything in this ship. An injector jet, what would normally be shooting flame, flies off the tunnel, crashes against our windshield, rocks the ship. I fire thrusters again, trying to stay in the center of the tunnel.

  “You shouldn’t have anything turned on!” Swez yells.

  “Shoulda coulda!”

  The other Matakas are yelling too. And the kids. And Taltus, I reckon, is praying. Lots of noise. Our ship lurches again, and damned if that don’t feel like a blown thruster, now jerking us around whether I want it or not.

  “Jaqi, we need to power down, sss,” Taltus says, all calm-like. “They’ll have seen us on the long-range by now, but they will consider it only a blip if we power off.”

  “How we going to brake?” We may be pushing against an artificial gravity well, but we still entered this tunnel going too fast.

  “We’ll have to trust the gravity to stop us.”

  “We can’t—” I stop that. En’t no other option, not when I don’t know if our forward thrusters are working. I pull the power and everything shuts off—and we go careening up the tunnel, still going too fast for that artificial gravity to slow us down. Careening up and up and—

  I hear something. Some door up there’s opening. Now this en’t great either—

  A cascade of fleshy bits comes down the tube, and smacks into our ship with a loud wet slop.

  The ship groans and shivers, and the metal screeches with the stress, and we come to a halt, held in an evil blanket of meat.

  “What the hell is that?”

  “That, I suspect, is the by-product of cutting hyperdense oxygen from miles and miles of lung tissue, sss,” Taltus says. “It is leftover muscle and lung tissue, bloated with water and chemicals
used to break it down. God puts interesting challenges in our way.”

  “Delicious.”

  “Well, it’s slowed us down.” En’t done the ship any favors, but we come to a stop. Now we’re packed in a tight layer of pink squishy bits. “Time to get out and swim.”

  Swez growls at my back, and the hum of a shard-blaster prepping fills the cockpit. “Swim fast, female cross.”

  * * *

  Araskar

  You wouldn’t think I could be this patient. Maybe it’s the drugs.

  “It’s not the drugs. You’re more patient than you think. You waited me out, after all. Fooled me, pretended to be on my side while you were planning to kill me.” Rashiya’s ghost sits, tapping her fingers idly on the control panels in this dimly lit room.

  I wait under the desk until both Reveks get up, and I reach over and grab my soulswords, long and short, at last.

  And the music rushes through, the sense of Jaqi so close I could almost touch it.

  Jaqi. You can get in. Incinerator tunnel 14-ZC. I add, though I’m not sure whether it’ll matter, I may be in trouble.

  I attach the swords’ sheaths to my belt, with the same precise moves I practiced for years in the Resistance.

  Now, how to get out?

  “Well,” Rashiya’s ghost says, “we’re inside the thing’s actual brainpan, which means there’s going to be a wall of tissue and plasticene between us and the exoskeleton. Which means, if you cut through a wall, without cutting through any connections, you should be able to find some area I can crawl through.”

  I slice through the nearest bit of untouched meat, what seems to be just a cell wall. I can’t cut much, but through my sword, I feel the resistance of a layer of plasticene along with the brain matter.

  I squeeze through the hole.

  It’s immediately colder in here—and I recognize the heavy material above me as the inside of the Threg’s exoskeleton. This is good. I crawl out and around layers of preserved flesh and plasticene together, around the enormous nerve clusters now being used to run the Imperial system here. I’m just between the structure within the bug and its skin.

  It takes a while to find my way back, but I manage to stay out of sight behind a platoon of Reveks crawling along the cell walls a hundred feet down, and follow them through more tunnels.