by Gwynn White
Sparrow and Dottie still stood outside, their faces skyward.
Sparrow’s glowing green eyes were filled with horror.
Keva stepped back out to see what happened, afraid she already knew.
The debris of a miner’s ships rained down from the sky in pieces.
The mining vessel that passed it on the climb exploded.
Keva took in a sharp breath. The shot came from the military ships. They were shooting the ships out of the sky.
The boom and concussion blast hit them as they watched the sky fill with fire.
Anger bloomed in Keva’s gut. She gripped her blade handle harder than necessary and reentered the building. Machines that Keva didn’t know the names to fill the large space, making it feel small. The roar of engines rumbled through the air. A second repercussion blast rocked the area, dirt falling around her. The engine noise warbled then righted itself as it relocated its rhythm.
“Stay here.” Keva glared at Sparrow and Dottie to make her point before opening one of the large metal doors and sliding inside the dark room. The antechamber of the water processing and air purification center had nothing inside but one of Wilbur’s personal guards.
Inside the door, someone grabbed Keva’s arm.
She spun and stopped in surprise as she stared into a face so like her own. She’d almost forgotten what was it was like to turn around and see what might as well have been herself in the mirror. “Ritta,” she breathed.
Ritta was the same height, had the same color hair and eyes, same facial structure. But her hair was straight and pulled back in a severe braid, and she wore a black uniform with the Zervek crest on the shoulder. She gave Keva a tight smile and glanced over her shoulder.
What was Ritta doing there?
She closed her eyes for a moment and shook her head before looking back at Keva. “I shifted my worm offline for now, but I can’t hold it off for long.”
She’d been injected with a mind worm?
“You can't be here,” Ritta hissed. “They know you’re alive.”
Cold washed over Keva. Damn it.
“But more than that, I think they’re using you because when your face came up, I wasn’t the one who erased it. Tinga wasn’t either.”
“Then who did?”
“I don’t know, but someone very high up didn’t want you to be seen. I caught you on the newsfeed, and when I logged back in later to delete it, there was no record. Completely wiped.”
Shit. “How did you escape? How did you find me?”
“I didn’t. I’m on a mission.” She gestured to her uniform. “We’ve been rented out to the Zervek’s to plant the detonation device.”
“Seriously? You work for the Elite now?”
“I don’t have much say in who I work for.” Ritta stared at Keva hard. “You’re here for Batch D-65?”
Keva wasn’t going to answer that because if Ritta, who had a mind worm, was asking, then this had to be a trap.
“It’s the Syndicate, isn’t it?”
Keva didn’t answer.
“Of course it is. You can’t trust them.”
“But I can trust you? You’re still chipped and you have a worm.”
“Did they send you to save people or grab the bioagent?”
Weapon. “Both.”
“Liar.” Ritta glanced around and pinched the bridge of her nose. “Look, I’m almost out of time and you have to get out of here before this thing in my brain betrays us both. I’m heading up to the roof. Don’t tell me your plan. Just go destroy that fucking thing.”
But that wasn’t Keva’s mission.
Ritta turned, stopped, and then gave Keva a quick hug. “I’ve missed you, little sister.”
Keva reveled in the firm hug for a moment. “You, too.”
Ritta broke away and pointed toward a large bay door. “Hurry.”
On the other side of the door, Keva ran into two more soldiers dressed the same as her podsister. Were they private militia for the Zervek’s or more military for hire? It didn’t matter, she was going to take them down either way.
“Where’s your child emperor?” Keva sneered, one blade already in her hand.
“Man enough for you sweet thing,” one of the guards approached, fingering his pistol but not taking it out.
His mistake.
Keva whipped her blade toward him, impaling his throat.
The second guard called out, screaming at her to stand down, but she was already on the move, swinging her weight around as she turned in a crouch and pulled another blade from her boot. She threw it as she stood up, turning just long enough to pull the first blade from the guard’s throat before hurling it into the air toward the second guard.
The additional knife throw hadn’t been necessary though: the first had struck in the middle of the guard’s forehead, sinking its thin sharp metal deep into his brain. He was dead before he had a chance to even notice the blade was coming.
She pulled out both blades from the man’s body, the one in his chest making a slippery sucking sound as it slid out.
She opened the door for Dottie and Sparrow. “Entrance is clear.”
“What…?” Dottie began but stopped as Keva wiped the blood and brain from her knives and holstered one, keeping the sharpest of the two, a gift from Evelyn after her first successful mission, in her hand.
The three of them slunk down a long hall, Keva entering each room first, but finding no more guards. That cocky son of a bitch thought two paid guns could keep her out. She was going to enjoy slicing his throat.
In the main room, large mechanical processors whirled as they scrubbed the air and water of as many toxins as possible. Out here in HUMP getting anything clean enough for human life was impossible, but the machines did their damnedest to try.
In the middle of the room, next to the intake valve for the water processor, stood Wilmur Zervek, his arms crossed.
“Stay here,” Keva hissed before stepping out into the main space.
His gaze locked onto Keva as if he’d known where she would be as if he’d been expecting her.
He probably had.
She didn’t care.
“I had a feeling I would see you here,” Wilmur said in a sneer. “Did you bring my whore?”
“What a catch,” Sparrow muttered under her breath from behind one of the large chemical depots for the toxins scrubbed out of the air. “I’m going around the back.”
Keva didn’t even nod, keeping their presence a secret from Wilmur. He’d asked about Dottie without knowing she was right there. So, if he had video surveillance of the area, it didn’t cover the warehouse.
Wilmur stood on the edge of the water containment tank, which was buried underground and had a long rectangular opening that branched off throughout the area. A small metal cylinder sat beside him with a blue glowing screen and a tube running into the tank.
“Did you think you were going to save this save this little shithole of a settlement today, Kadira Saqqaf?”
So, he wanted to chitchat? She needed him away from the device so Dottie could look at it and see if she could disarm it. “No.”
“Then, what are you here for?”
“Batch D-65.” Keva moved in slow steps closer to Wilmur.
He glanced at her feet and smiled, noting her progress. “Who are you working for? One of my competitors?”
“I am not at liberty to say.” She fell into the Elite speech patterns easily. Who knew? She might survive, might need people to think she’s Kadira Saqqaf again, even if she didn’t have the ident chip anymore.
“What do you imagine you are going to accomplish here?”
Keva shrugged.
“There are much bigger things in play here, little girl, things that you couldn’t possibly understand.”
“Why not enlighten me?”
He shifted to follow her, turning away from the device.
Dottie took that opportunity to shimmy toward it. She looked at the panel, and her eyes widened
.
Wilmur didn’t even look at her. He just reached down and set his hand on her head. “Hello, Whore. It is wonderful to have my property back.”
Keva raised her pistol. “Take your hand from her.”
“Or what? You will shoot me? I think not. Do you know why?”
Keva didn’t.
Wilmur pulled Dottie’s hair, jerking her head.
“Because you are the only one who can defuse this,” Dottie said. She looked up and met Keva’s gaze. “It’s biometrically coded to his DNA. I can’t hack it.”
“So? We kill him and use his body to disengage it, even better.”
“And,” he said with a smug smile, “you have six minutes.”
The muscles in Dottie’s neck strained as Wilmur pulled on her hair, lifting her up against his leg. “It won’t work,” she squeaked out. It’s coded to his DNA and locked with a coded algorithm.”
“So? Numbers are what you do, right?” Keva lifted her throwing arm and aimed her blade at Wilmur’s head.
“It would take more time than we have.”
“Five minutes,” a robotic voice called from the metal box.
Five minutes and he wasn’t leaving? “You have a fail-safe, so it doesn’t go off while you’re still in blast range.”
“I am—” He craned his head on his neck. “—immune.”
“How—” Keva mimicked his movement . “—sure are you?”
He raised a disdainful eyebrow, dismissing her. He grabbed Dottie by her long, pale braid and pulled her to her feet.
Dottie stood, crying out in pain.
“I’m going to kill you slowly, little whore, and no one will even cry for you. Your mother won’t even have a body to bury after I’m done with you.”
Keva needed that chemical, but she needed him to disarm it first. “Why don’t you turn this thing off? It won’t help you kill her slowly if she dies right away, will it?”
Wilmur slow-blinked his gaze to her. “She won’t die right away.” A sick smile slithered onto his face. “She will die painfully as her body reinvents itself.”
“I don’t think you understand DNA.”
“I doubt you do, either.”
“Let the girl go,” Sparrow shouted behind him.
Wilmur gave Keva a dry look. “You brought more friends?”
Keva shrugged. “I doubt you’re as immune as you think, so why don’t you just disarm the bomb and let’s go on our way.”
He narrowed his eyes at her.
She’d slipped up with her language. She wasn’t going to fret over it too much. They were all about to die.
A shot rang out.
Wilmur clamped a hand to his belly, blood oozing through his fingers. He stared at Keva in stunned disbelief. “You shot me?”
“No,” Keva said, closing the distance. “But she did.” She slammed the handle of her knife against the back of Wilmur’s head.
He released Dottie’s hair and slumped to the ground.
“Okay. You have his body and his metrics,” Keva said. “Use them to turn this thing off.”
Wilmur smiled smugly. “You still need the combination.”
Dottie knelt beside it, rubbing her head with one hand. “He’s right. He could give us the wrong code and then it would go off sooner.”
“Four minutes,” the robot voice said.
Sparrow glared at the man. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
The bomb was right there, within her reach. All she had to do was—
She grabbed the handle, stashed her pistol, and ran for the door. It was surprisingly light.
“What are you doing?” Sparrow asked, running after her.
She couldn’t take the device, couldn’t disarm it. “I’m getting it away from the water and air source. Might save a few people.”
They ran. The number of people in the streets had depleted, but there were still too many. Keva didn’t want to think about it as she stumbled over and around people just milling around, smiling at one another.
“Three minutes.”
“Where are you going to set that thing?” Sparrow asked.
“Outside the walls?”
“No.” Dottie stopped her with a hand on her arm. “The underdome will keep the agent contained to the town. If you take it out there, you could kill so many more than just the people who live here. You could kill all everyone who tried to save them!”
There weren’t any good solutions.
“Leave it here.” Sparrow put her hand on the arm that held the device that would release Batch D-65 into the atmosphere. “It’s far enough away from the water and the air regulator. Maybe the contagion won’t spread as far. Maybe the explosion won’t do as much damage.”
There were too many maybes. Keva set it down, and they ran. Through the streets, yelling at the miners to leave the drugged people behind and run. Hale and his crew were nowhere in sight. The Tencendor wasn’t in the yard with the other ships.
The sky was no longer on fire.
They ran, leaving everyone inside Red Sky to die.
At least, Keva hoped not. Maybe they’d helped.
Maybe.
27
An invisible force knocked Keva to the ground as she neared her ship.
A thunderous roar overwhelmed her ears.
Dirt and pieces of metal flew past her.
Then the force ceased, and debris rained down on her.
And a ringing in her ears drowned out any other sounds.
Keva dragged herself to her feet, taking in the scene. People lay on the ground, covered in red dust.
A rock had smashed into the head of the man beside her. His blood pooled around him, making a thick, red mud around his bearded lips.
A piece of metal stuck out of the leg of a woman just on the other side of him. Her mouth was open as she sat up, but Keva couldn’t hear her as she grasped at the metal with her hands.
Another man picked himself up off the ground, a stick jutting out of one side of his head. His eye was swollen and nearly fell out of the socket.
Keva looked for a shock of pale hair.
Dottie stirred, picking herself up gingerly. She jerked and hunched forward, cradling one arm. Her lips moved.
All Keva heard was ringing.
Sparrow pulled herself to her feet and shook off the dust like a true HUMPer. She daggered her surroundings with blazing green eyes, the orange of her hair and face muted by the red dust that clung to her. She saw Keva, motioned to her in a gesture that asked if she was all right.
Keva nodded and gestured back.
Sparrow nodded and went to Dottie.
Dottie didn’t appear to be broken, but she favored her right wrist.
Probably sprained. All in all, not bad. Not bad at all.
Keva stood and looked toward the town.
The walls of the surrounding buildings were half down as if they were the peelings on a half-eaten piece of fruit. The protective field of the underdome was gone, leaving the settlement even more exposed to the impurities of the HUMP terraforming toxins. But the people of Red Sky could survive that, if they didn’t breathe in any of batch D-65’s bioagent, at least for a time.
More horrifying were the body parts littering the area from Batch D-65’s delivery mechanism’s explosion. They’d completely underestimated the destruction the delivery would cause.
Sparrow tugged on Keva’s arm, and the three of them stumbled to the Scarlet Harpy.
Some of Keva’s hearing returned. Her senses had been engineered for a quick recovery to injury. “ILO,” Keva said, not shouting because ILO wasn’t deaf. Keva was. “I need a status report.”
ILO sent a message through the direct chip in her arm. Go to the communications room.
Keva led Dottie and Sparrow down the hall after closing and locking the hull door.
Dottie sank down into one of the chairs, pulling on her ear and yawning.
“Can you hear me?” Keva asked.
Sparrow raised an eyebrow at
Keva. “I doubt she’ll be able to hear for at least an hour.”
“You can hear?”
“Part of my engineering.”
“Mine, too.” Keva turned to the wall of monitors. “What happened out there?”
“It seems your assessment of the situation was partially correct,” ILO said. The monitors pulled up several images throughout the town. Most were of utter destruction. But where the bomb hadn’t killed, and the bodies weren’t maimed, people writhed on the dirt street covered with an orange dust. “If my readings are correct, and the data Dottie collected before we arrived can be relied on, the results would have been much different if this bioagent had been added to the water and to the air purification system.”
“How?” Sparrow grabbed one of the bottles from the table in the back, her hand shaking slightly, and poured three tall, stiff drinks, handing them out.
“Right now, only those in the immediate blast area were infected with Batch D-65, most of the injuries you are seeing are the result of the explosion’s cascading damage. Had the delivery mechanism been deployed in the water purification system the main ingredient would have reacted explosively.”
“So,” Keva said, accepting her glass and downing it in one gulp before reaching out for a refill, “the explosion would have been worse if we’d left it next to the water tank?”
“No, the explosion would have been minimal as the reaction would have been contained within the molecules, but the way it would have bonded to the water would have made the situation worse. Fewer people would have died from the blast, but the entire settlement would have been affected by the chemical compound and suffered from its effects, instead of only those in its immediate proximity.”
“Can you tell what the bomb was supposed to have done?” Keva asked.
Dottie sniffed at her glass, still holding the one wrist close to her chest. She took a sip and let it settle her expression calm.
Keva didn’t have a medkit, and she didn’t know where the Tencendor was. Hale at least had a medical bay.
Dottie was hurt, but she should be okay.
“Yes. If my readings are correct, when the bomb went off, there should have been enough force to initiate a chemical reaction between the bioagent and the water. When it combined with the water, the result would have been sufficient to turn the water into steam, which then would have been sucked into the air, purified, and then released.”
