Gates of Hell

by Susan Sizemore

  “Where are we?” It wasn’t a wealthy neighborhood, but it certainly wasn’t a slum, either.

  “Res Area Five, if that means anything to you.” Roxy shook her head. “It’s not important.” Dee scrubbed at her eyes with the back of her hands, staining them with rubbed-off makeup. “Bright out here. Let’s get inside.”

  It was bright to Roxy; her pupils didn’t adjust properly anymore as an after-affect of the healings. But Dee was all Terran… Wouldn’t a Terran see this twilight as a dim ending to a dull-pewter day? “Got a headache?” Roxy asked her friend.

  The look she received was full of bitterness. “Yeah. Are you coming?”

  Roxy let it go and heaved herself out of the car. She didn’t really wake up until her thin sandals encountered the cold, rough concrete of the street. She shivered as she slogged after Dee, who was . already at the top of the steps. “Natural environments are so unpredictable,” she added as she came up behind Dee. “Where are we going, anyway?”

  Dee threw an impatient look over her shoulder. “Inside.” She forcefully pushed the door open, letting it bang against the inner wall for added emphasis. “Come along.”

  Roxy followed Dee into the darkness. The interior dimness was restful on her strained eyes, but the silence of the interior of the building was even more eerie than the open emptiness of the street. The place felt deserted, as empty of residual emotions as it was of people. The residents had been gone long enough for the basic things that lingered and made up the aura of a place to also have packed up and gone. “How long have we been on this planet, anyway?”

  Dee didn’t answer her question. Roxy followed the silver-garbed figure ahead of her and recalled all the riots and looting she’d heard about. There was no evidence of intruders in this long, dark hallway. The doors they passed were evenly spaced, made of some dark-stained local wood. All were decorously closed, the nameplates covering the locking mechanisms neatly in place. The place was safe enough, she concluded. It just wasn’t anyone’s home anymore.

  They soon found out the elevators weren’t working any better than the lights. Dee swore inventively and led Roxy to a staircase. They were three flights up before Roxy began to feel the presence of Sag Fever. No, she told herself firmly as they approached one specific door and the awareness itched stronger into her senses. It was a person with the disease, not the Sag virus itself that she was feeling. What the hell was the matter with her? You are trying to hide the fact that there are sentients suffering from yourself, she concluded. Well, stop it. All right, all right. But distancing myself is so much easier, she pouted. Unfortunately, that wasn’t how koltiri healing worked.

  Dee halted at a door, so Roxy stopped behind her and waited while Dee bent to peer at the nameplate. The etched markings were hard for even Roxy to make out in the shadowy hallway. Dee continued to squint at the plate for so long that Roxy eventually told her, “It says number 508.”

  “Then this is the place.”

  “There’s someone very sick in there,” Roxy told her companion.

  “That’s what I’ve been told.” Dee flipped the nameplate up and touched the code buttons.

  “Power’s off,” Roxy reminded. “Place like this wouldn’t have auxiliaries.”

  Dee growled at her. “Yeah. Right. So I’m not used to breaking and entering.” She pushed on the door and it swung open without any resistance. “But I might take it up.” She stepped inside and Roxy dutifully followed. She was beginning to feel like a loyal puppy.

  The windows opposite the door were large ovals; they let in enough light for Roxy to make out the lumpy blanket piled in the center of the bare room’s carpet. Dee let her pass and Roxy sighed loudly as she approached the blanket. She touched a bulge she thought was a shoulder, shivered with surprise and snapped irritably, “Martin Braithwaithe, what the hell are you doing here?!”

  The lump did not reply.

  Dee leaned over her and suggested, “Dying?”

  Roxy threw back the covering. “Not if I have anything to say about it.”

  She did a quick survey. Her brother-in-law was barely breathing, and he was pale. Considering Martin’s normally dark-chocolate complexion, this was definitely not a good sign. She touched sweat-slick skin. His body was starting to shut down, and his mind was very, very far away. “This is bad.” Leave it to Martin to have a really terminal case of Sag Fever. The man always had to be so damn thorough about everything. She deepened both physical and mental touch on him. “Cover me, I’m going in,” she muttered to Dee as the space between herself and her patient narrowed and began to disappear.

  ———

  A deep voice rumbled seductively in her ear while fingertips traced lazily down her back. Roxy moaned and pressed herself closer to the hard, muscular body. She nuzzled his bare throat, tasting the musky salt of dried sweat. She savored the taste and scent of Terran skin, and bit down, not hard, but enough to make him gasp with need. She threw her thigh across his while her hand eased between them to unfasten—

  “What the fuck is going on here?” Roxy shouted as she scrambled back across the floor. She stared at the kneeling man from across a few feet’s distance. He seemed to be trying to get his breathing under control. “Martin?”

  He blinked, covered his ears, and grinned at her. “You always this loud?” He blinked again and took his hands slowly from his head as he asked, “You really here, Roxy, or am I dead?”

  “You’re not dead yet.”

  “You’re both dead,” Dee corrected Roxy. She took a seat on the carpet between them. “Or would have been in about five seconds if I hadn’t been invited in on that little porno extravaganza.” She looked meaningfully at Roxy. “Kindly put those back where Viper found them.”

  Roxy took time out from an internal struggle to get her hormones under control to look down and discover that her halter had been pushed down around her waist. How inconvenient. Or convenient, depending on how you looked at it. She hastily rearranged her clothing.

  “And you a married woman,” Dee tsked righteously.

  Roxy rubbed her temples while Martin said for both of them, “I don’t remember a thing.”

  “I’ve heard that before,” Dee said. She swatted him on the back of the head. “And here I thought you were sick.”

  “Ow! I was. Caught the damned bug and got left here while… “

  Roxy felt Martin’s emotional guard go up. She also suddenly recalled a vivid bit of his subconscious life. “You were hallucinating about Reine. And something the two of you did back in the Belt.” She tossed hair out of her face and pretended offended pride—she was too tired to feel the real stuff. “Even you mistake me for my sister.”

  “Nonsense. You’re prettier. But she’d kill me if she found out I died hallucinating about someone else. If I’d known you were coming I’d have added you to the hallucination.” He smiled reminiscently. “Jail bait though you were back then.”

  Roxy remembered Martin’s outrage when he’d found out she was thirteen, though he hadn’t been much over eighteen himself. He’d personally dragged her and Reine into a cutter and back to Terra, lecturing them about the dangers of the Belter lifestyle the whole time. He and Reine had gone back to a party that lasted a week as soon as they’d dropped her off in Haifa. She almost stayed inside the memory, as it was far more pleasant than the soul-deadening tragedy of the present. Of course, there had been tears and shouting and teenage drama at the time.

  “Reine was seventeen and knew what she was doing,” he said, as though he was the one reading her mind. “You were a baby.” He leaned over and put his arm around Dee’s shoulders. “Thanks, Groupie,” he said, and kissed her on the cheek.

  “For what?”

  “For bringing Roxy. How’d you find out I was here?”

  “How’d you know it was me who—?”

  “It’s a groupie’s job to be sensible and take care of players. You’ve lived up to the code.” Dee made a rude noise.

  “You’re right,
as usual,” Roxy informed him. She did her best to clear out the mental fog that kept trying to envelop her. This time she had the dregs of physical arousal to deal with as well. This was a very different side effect than she was used to from a healing, and could only suppose that responding to Martin had something to do with his being telempathically linked to her sister, since she shared a link with her sister as well—in a different way, of course. All this connectedness was too much to try to straighten out… besides, she’d always had a crush on Martin and she wasn’t going to try to pretend otherwise. “And you have an overactive libido, too, Viper,” she added. No reason she should take all the blame.

  “A healthy libido. Which is more than I could say for the rest of me until you showed up. How’d you find out I was here?” he questioned Dee again.

  Dee squirmed out of Martin’s friendly embrace. Her fiercely angry aura lit up the night for Roxy. “Nosy Security bastard,” Dee snarled at him.

  “Doing my job.” His tone was mild. “Please tell me that you’re not trying to protect your dealer, Lieutenant Nikophoris.”

  Dee’s shoulders slumped, then moved in an uncomfortable shrug. Her gaze dropped from Martin’s. “Maybe.”

  Roxy didn’t understand a word of this exchange. “Dealer? Your dealer? Stev Persey’s a dealer. Dee?”

  “Roxy!”

  “Thought so,” Martin said.

  “Dealer?” Roxy repeated.

  “Roxanne—” Martin began.

  “Leave her out of it!” Dee pleaded.

  “We’re all in it, Groupie,” Martin responded. He had kept the same gentle tone and emotions throughout the whole odd exchange. Roxy wanted to hit him.

  “Explanations, or somebody goes out the window,” she told them, trying to sound like a senior officer from the most badass special forces commando group in the United Systems.

  Of course it probably didn’t help that Dee was also a veteran of the Tigris’s many combat missions and that Martin was the second most dangerous man in the United Systems. Maybe the most dangerous, because he was the only one who could actually control that crazy husband of his when Rafe Aquilar went on one of his rampages. Martin was always calm, always cool, always calculating, a psychologist as well as a security specialist. And none of this defined exactly which of them was currently in charge of whatever this situation happened to be. No, she reversed her thinking, if Martin Braithwaithe is on Bonadem, it will be for a reason that involves the protection of the United Systems. So conditions are no doubt such that Commander Braithwaithe outranks Physician Merkrates and Lieutenant Nikophoris.

  Or maybe he was just passing through and decided to stop by and contract Sag Fever… Which brought the three of them to sitting in an abandoned apartment wearing civvies and talking about drug dealers. She supposed asking Martin what he was really doing on Bonadem would only get her a ‘Need to Know’ answer. Roxy didn’t bother to ask and concentrated on Dee while she was momentarily lucid and more or less awake.

  Dee sidled across the floor to sit cross-legged between Roxy and Martin. She sat very straight, staring into the darkness for a long time. Roxy waited, wondering if she was being patient, or was just too exhausted to push anything. She looked down at the rug, noticing how her, Dee’s, and Martin’s shadows criss-crossed and blended into each other. She supposed it was the double dose of moonlight coming in at odd angles, or maybe she was seeing shadows that weren’t even there.

  “I’ve been getting samples of the drug,” Dee’s tired voice finally floated out of the shadows.

  Roxy wondered why she felt a shock of fear instead of joy at hearing this news. “Yes?” she prompted after the silence returned and she decided she wasn’t patient after all. Martin leaned back, his palms resting flat on the floor behind him. Roxy found his persistent patience disconcerting. And she didn’t like the way he was controlling this information exchange by letting her be the one to draw Dee out. Security bastard, she echoed Dee as her energy-drained body began to ache with hunger.

  “Street name for the drug is Rust,” Dee said. She shot a look at Martin. “I suppose you know that.” He nodded. “Glover came looking for some for you.” He nodded again. “Not to Persey, but to a girl that works for Persey. Persey wouldn’t deal with him directly. Bucon politics?” Another nod. “The girl also works for Glover. She knows the Belt and the Games; remembered me from there. She told me about you.”

  “The rest is history,” Roxy added. “Say thank you, Viper.”

  “Thank you, Dee,” he said dutifully. “For arranging to save my life.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Roxy waited in silence, forcing Martin to be the one to ask the thing she could feel but didn’t want to acknowledge. “You addicted to Rust, Dee?”

  Dee made a sound somewhere between a sigh and a sob. “Probably. I’ve been trying to find out the ‘cure’s’ effects.” Her cynical laughter spread to the corners of the empty room. “I’ve learned that without the Rust the user dies—either of Sag Fever or withdrawal, whichever comes first.”

  “Oh, Dee__” Roxy banged her fists hard against the floor. “Why didn’t you—?”

  “Come to you the last time I caught the fever?” Dee cut her off.

  “Yes.” Roxy wearily closed her eyes. Her head ached and she longed to slip back to comfortable incoherence, but she kept still, refusing to give in to the urges to either weep or sleep.

  Dee’s furious voice answered her out of the darkness. “Because the dealers don’t deal unless you’ve got the fever. Without the infection, you don’t find the cure.”

  “Nasty,” Martin said softly.

  Roxy detected a certain amount of appreciation for the dealers’ methods from her security officer brother-in-law. “You worked undercover for too long,” she told him. “Motherfucking Bucon bastards,” she added. “Exploiting a ready-made market. Wonder how long since the Bucons first encountered the fever? Looks like the source is somewhere in their territory.” Martin gave her a sharp look.

  “Leave it to the best chemists in the galaxy to turn a profit on the only known treatment,” Dee complained. “Leave it to the Bucon’s crazy culture to hide what they know and dispense Rust like any other recreational they deal in. And I haven’t just been using Rust,” she told them. “I remember my job. Every now and then the euphoria—which I suspect wears off after the first few days of taking Rust—clears up long enough for me to do some lab work. I’ve turned samples over to Callen, as well. There’s a whole series of tests being set up in the hospital chem lab. If I can synthesize it, we can bypass the dealers and start treating Sag Fever on a massive scale.”

  “Euphoria.” Roxy closed her eyes and let her shielding come all the way down for a whisper of a moment. What she took in was cool curiosity from the well-shielded Martin, and something like lightning-laced perfume swirling through Dee’s senses. “So that’s what euphoria’s like.”

  A hint of contempt bled into Dee’s emotions. “Roxy… Rust feels good. I’m having more trouble staying lucid right now than you are.” She laughed. “Who wants to be lucid?”

  “Me,” Martin answered. “I told Glover I didn’t want any drugs. Not that I particularly wanted to die, either.” He shrugged.

  “See?” Dee pointed accusingly at him. “You wouldn’t have said no if I’d offered Rust instead of Roxy.”

  “No, I wouldn’t have, I suppose,” Martin acknowledged. “Not with my record of recreational chemical intake.”

  “Recreational,” Roxy repeated, whispering the word to herself. Something was itching at the back of her mind, but the jumbled, everyday confusion made it impossible to catch the significance. Roxy took a deep breath and shook a lot of hair out of her face. It had gotten terribly unruly of late, there being a great deal of truth to the saying about koltiri hair having a mind of its own. “All right, Nikophoris,” she announced. “Time for my part in this experiment.”

  “Yeah,” Dee agreed quickly, moving to within touching distance. “I’m get
ting sick of mindless elation anyway.”

  “Then let’s get down to it. I’m tired.”

  “Wait a minute,” Martin cautioned. He held out a hand toward Dee as Roxy’s fingers touched her shoulders. “What part… ?”

  ———

  “Oh good, you’re awake.”

  “What’s so good about being awake?” Something shook her shoulders. After a certain amount of rumination on what was being done to her, she decided the torture instrument was probably a hand. If it was a hand, it was at the end of a wrist. Maybe she could break the wrist in retaliation. Then she realized that the touch was a gentle one; she just hurt all over and any touch burned like fire. “Stop it,” she pleaded.

  “What?”

  “Touching me.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Oh.” No, she wasn’t being touched anymore, was she? Wonder when it stopped? Does it still hurt? No. Not now. “Now, what was it I wanted to ask Martin?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea.”

  The familiar voice had the crispness of autumn wind in it. “Oh wild west wind,” she murmured, and tried desperately to get the darkness back. The dreams hadn’t been pleasant, but… What had she dreamed, anyway? And how did she know she was awake? And how long would this stream of consciousness nonsense go on? “Of course you wouldn’t. Who are you?” Roxy lifted what she thought was her head from what she thought was a pillow. Only when she opened her eyes a hairline crack, she realized she was upright; not necessarily standing, but not lying down, either. Sitting? “How long have I been like this?” She had a theoretical notion that some time must have passed—if only because she always seemed to be waking up with great gaping holes in what used to be a not half-bad mind. These days, the once not half-bad mind sort of resembled a cratered surface after many asteroid storms. “Asteroids do not concern me,” she said, and giggled, and wondered what was so funny.