The Belter's Story (BRIGAND)

by Natalie French

  Then his weapon stopped. I didn't know if it was empty or had malfunctioned from being fired for so long. It didn't matter. The ocean of diggers surged up and over Rox, burying him in carapaces and claws. Armored as he was, sooner or later they would breach his suit and then —

  STOP! it took me a moment to realize I hadn't spoken aloud. Jase. Whatever you are. Please. Don't do this. They didn't know. How could they?

  I could feel Jase and the others. They were there, but they were silent. Something else hung at the periphery of my awareness and I noticed the tendrils that curled among the europine nodes nearby had become brighter and more distinct. There was something being said that I couldn't hear.

  The tide of diggers subsided and I could see Rox again, prone and awash in a pulpy mass of shredded diggers. There were little wisps of vapor jetting from his armor, in the joints, where he was most vulnerable. They hadn't torn him apart like Jase, but there wasn't much doubt his suit had been breached.

  I picked my way across the wreckage of a thousand dead diggers and wiped a thick lavender sludge away from the faceplate of his helmet. His somashell was still functioning and, though unconscious, he was still alive.

  Even without his armored combat suit, Rox was far too heavy for me to carry. I dragged him a meter at a time by gripping his arms and then throwing my weight backward. It was exhausting, but I got him through the opening of the cavern and then stopped, waiting for my respiration to slow and my suit's scrubbers to catch up with all the CO2 I'd produced.

  As I paused to get my breath, Rox stirred. I heard his wordless grunt and leaned over to look into his helmet. His eyes were open, but muddy and unfocused. The monitor on his suit began flashing an urgent blue. His vitals were sinking.

  I could see the somashell still glowing inside his suit. He hadn't lost pressure. I checked him for obvious injuries. I'd been through this with Jase. I wasn't going to let it happen again with Rox.

  Nothing.

  I tried to roll him over to check his back. Digging my gloved hands under his shoulder and hip, I gripped whatever I could and heaved. In his suit, Rox must have weighed at least three hundred kilos. I was barely half that, and skinny. He rocked part way onto his side and then fell back. I wouldn't be able to push him all the way over.

  But that was enough. Dozens of tiny diggers scurried from under him and then, to my horror, I saw one inside the faceplate of his helmet, grasping at his cheek. Blood began to well.

  I'd never seen, or even heard of such a thing. It was something wholly new. I wasn't even sure what they were doing. Eating him? No. We were just as useless to them as they were to us. Laying eggs? The biology of that made no sense whatsoever. The simplest explanation was that they were just another way to kill us. A weapon. Or maybe antibodies would be closer.

  There wasn't time to drag him to safety. His monitor blinked with increased urgency. I stared down at him, finding a moment where the Cromley part of me wanted to believe in something as futile as wishing. I strained my eyes and breathed out, "Please," fogging the inside of my helmet.

  Maybe it was the fog, or the intensity of my concentration, but just as the diggers emitted a faint glow like that of the nodules, I noticed similar traces on Rox. Or in him. I couldn’t be sure if it was residue of the creatures, or a part of Rox, but I had to act. So I did the only thing I could think of. I tried to see into Rox.

  I focused on the glow that surrounded him, not the somashell, but the glow that his body emitted. In it, I could just barely make out little anomalies, tiny eddies of violet.

  With some idea of what to look for, I realized I could spot the tiny diggers, and there were many, clustered underneath his torso, doing what they were made for — digging.

  I knew I couldn't get to them physically. And even if I could, I wasn't a surgeon. There was no way to pluck them out of Rox's body.

  But maybe I could drain them — the way my companions drew from me.

  Jase, help me. We have to stop these things, but I don't know how. I reached back and tugged on Su’s compartment and the feeding wire sprung free. I sliced a small hole along the forearm of my suit and allowed Su to take over guiding the wire into my vein. Then I probed into one of the blood-slicked gaps in Rox’s knee joint and jabbed the wire into him.

  He didn’t even react.

  Connected to him now, through blood and tissue and energy, I narrowed my attention to one of the little eddies in the colors that swirled around Rox. Imagining a cup of cool water at my lips, I sipped… and then I felt it. A tiny rush seemed to flow into me and suddenly I felt more… alive.

  Like so many things, it was hard until it was easy. Once I knew what it felt like, the act was almost instinctive. One by one, I found the diggers inside Rox's suit and pulled the life from them. In less than a minute, they were gone.

  But the damage was already done. Rox's body had been penetrated in who knows how many places, which meant internal bleeding. He was still dying. And then it came to me. If I could pull, maybe I could push.

  I focused again. This time on Rox. His life force glimmered with an orange hue that varied in intensity over his injuries, as if his body was struggling to keep his glow from sifting out of his flesh.

  I knew this would cost me, but I was out of time and ideas. I bore down, trying to focus my attention on my own glow. I pressed hard, imagining a powerful cataract jetting between us. Almost instantly, I could feel the sensations of feeding, but more intense. For a moment panic froze my diaphragm and halted my breath. Fatigue swept over me in a fierce wave, swamping my awareness to within a whisper of blackout. But it worked.

  Feebly at first, then with increasing urgency, Rox struggled to sit upright. "Bitch!" he grated. I halted the flow from my glow into his as I strained against the vertigo that spun the cavern around me.

  "You're okay, Rox. But we need to get out of here," I croaked as I yanked the feeding wire free and let Su reel it into her housing.

  There was a pressure building at the fringes of my mind. It loomed like the mass of Kuyper comet hurtling in silence toward the Inner. Something was happening. A decision had been made.

  The mountainous expanse of europine spheres before us surged and then spilled away, revealing a phalanx of the most massive diggers we'd ever seen. They moved with slow deliberation. Advancing toward us with obvious hostility. For a tiny moment, I felt the voice of Jase/Su/Other, halting, thin, as if it was being crushed under the weight of something huge beyond comprehension. Something as big as the world.

  Destroy…

  I didn't know if Rox heard it too, and I didn’t stop to ask. It didn't matter. He just acted the way any soldier might act when cornered by the enemy.

  He fought.

  Rox reached up to a device affixed to the outside of his suit. He flipped open a safety cover and pressed the button underneath. The little orbs we'd placed around the entrance to the cavern detonated. A white hot flash blotted everything and my hypersensitive perception was completely overcome. I was blind and deaf. Incapacitated. And, in my head, I could hear an inarticulate howl of agony as if a billion lives were snuffed in an instant.

  The war with Europa had begun.

  CHAPTER SIX

  "What did you do?" Rox stared at me from the float-bed, dark brows pulled inward and down into what seemed to be his favorite expression. Our infirmary had a single autodoc and supplies were limited. The medics had only patched up the worst of Rox's injuries. He'd spend weeks recovering the old fashioned way.

  "The best I could. We made it out." I knew that wasn't what he meant, but I hoped he'd leave it alone.

  "No. I mean to me. I feel different." His green eyes wouldn't leave mine. No matter where I looked, I could feel them following.

  "Nothing. I dragged you out. You set off the… whatever those were. I helped you climb back out of the rille." I used the same tone I'd always used with Jase when he pressed me for things I didn't want to talk about. Facts, nothing more.

  "I don't remember everyth
ing. But I do remember burning. It seemed like everywhere. My whole body was on fire. And then, I don't know what happened, but the pain faded and I could move."

  He stared hard at me. "Now I feel odd. Like everything's closer. Like I can see past people, or maybe into them. It's hard to describe. I know it was you, Cromley. "

  Suddenly, he smiled. " Merde. Listen to me. I sound like a fucking civilian. Do I give an actual shit? I'm not dead and I have you to thank for it."

  Rox grinned and reached out with his right hand, palm down. "Mortem, Jack."

  I stared at him for a moment, confused, but sensing that this was one of those moments that always made me uncomfortable. It was the Jase part of me that understood what Rox was doing. Don't be stupid, Crom. He's trying to thank you.

  I moved to clasp his hand, but he sat up, grabbed my wrist with his left hand and positioned it under his, hands gripping forearms. "Like this. Now you say, 'Fear me, bitch.'"

  I did and Rox laughed, "Hah! That's how it's done. You’re now an official honorary Confed Marine."

  I smiled back at him. It was an honest smile, one without annoyance or confusion or hesitation. It felt good, like something important had just happened. Or at least something worth remembering.

  They shipped Rox out on the next transport. He went home, but we had nowhere else to go. We were up against something far bigger than we were. As big as the world for all we knew. The diggers surged out of the ice in places that had once been safe and, even though we fought them with everything we had, they killed us by the dozens. Then hundreds. Then more.

  Sardar was lost in the first attack on our hab. A huge digger tore through the shielded wall as if it didn't exist and destroyed the entire habitat. I was in the reclamation crew that found what was left of his body — it fit easily into one of the collection bags we used to gather europine. Madera died a few months later, along with a whole contingent of other miners who lingered a little too long in the rilles. We'd learned to work fast, to swarm a lode and then run. But sometimes the diggers were quicker.

  There were no longer ceremonies for the dead. No energy for mourning. There wasn't time. We knew the thing we fought was alive. We knew it was fighting us because we were hurting it. No, we were killing it. We didn't care — any more than our ancestors cared about the thousands of life forms that were eradicated on Earth before the Irezi built their arcologies and moved whole biomes to Mars.

  This was survival.

  Our strategy and justification were simple. Without the nodules, we would die. If taking those nodules killed something, then so be it. Belters can be stubborn when it matters and the europine, whatever it was, never had much hope of stopping us. It took years and thousands of lives, but our engineers devised defenses. Our supervisors hired mercenaries with heavy weapons to raze diggers by the millions.

  We adapted. We conquered. We won.

  I adapted too. Or perhaps 'we' is the better word. Whatever it was in the europine that had changed Su was changing me too, but it wasn't a one-way transformation. My brain became our brain. Jase and Su and fragments of the diggers that I drained all merged into 'us'. There was still a part that we recognized as my former self, the Cromley, but we were becoming a true composite. In time, we devised augments that could carry our other selves, and the burgeoning talents that came with them, inside our body. We no longer needed our fixbot or our suit to be who we had become.

  Our Jase part was heartsick at the destruction — on both sides. He yearned for reconciliation that could never happen. He ached for Sardar and Madera, his father and mother. And he never quite forgave the Cromley for telling the Belters about the cavern.

  The others inside of us radiated primitive distress whenever a new lode was invaded. That was the hardest part for all of us. Because even from the little fragments we assimilated, we understood they were a united consciousness, spread through Europa's crust and connected by energy. That seemed exotic and strange at first. But all life is energy. Only the way it was packaged differed. And we felt the death of it every time we fought them.

  The Cromley part of us grew tougher. More pragmatic. We knew it was happening, but we didn't mind. The Belters would live. Others would die. It had always been that way. Far better to be predator than prey.

  The others in us gave us the senses we needed to stay ahead of our enemy. We no longer let them communicate, but their presence allowed us to see in ways that nobody else could, an advantage we used without pity. We were the colony's most effective scout. When we warned of an attack, everyone stood to the ready. When we led an incursion, they followed with confidence.

  We became famous among the Belters of Europa, almost legendary.

  Which is how Laena found us.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Laena stared at us, her expression hovering delicately between anger and disbelief. "That's not funny, Cromley. You know Jase and I were close."

  "It's not a joke. We — he would never do that to you. Jase is here." We touched our temple. "It's hard to explain."

  We were sitting in her family's tiny kitchen, where we always seemed to end up. Doing what we always seemed to do, talking far into our downtime. There were six and a half hours left before we had to be back on duty, but we didn't want to leave. We never seemed to want to leave. Laena had been one of Jase's friends — a strange word among Belters. But then Jase had never been a real Belter at all. Now we all felt what he felt. We didn't understand it, but it we were glad it was there.

  We didn’t know why we had revealed our secret, a secret we had kept for more than six years, but our time with Laena had changed us, maybe as much as the europine. We felt an urge to share all of us with her. Not just the Cromley.

  Her voice went hard, but she looked down at the table between us and moisture gathered in her dark eyes. "Try."

  "We… It started before the war, even before Jase found the first nexus."

  "The gigantic europine deposits? Everybody knows about those. It's part of history now. Jase was killed. You, of all people, would know that." Laena's voice grew huskier and she looked down at her hands. "I cried for a month, Cromley."

  "So did we. Yeah, everyone knows he was attacked, but nobody knows that we saved him — part of him anyway. We've never told anyone before. Who'd have believed us?"

  "And why tell me?" She looked up at me under narrow eyebrows, straight black hair framing an oval face.

  Long bangs feathered over her brow. Her eyes were so dark they almost seemed to have no iris at all. Her skin had a golden tone, unusual in a Belter, that gave her an exotic look. She was beautiful in a way that was entirely her own and we could feel Jase's remembered affection. He had never told her, but he'd loved her. Now we all did.

  "Why now?"

  We struggled to explain — to put into words all of the horrors we had endured. Whole sites gone dark without warning. Families, entire clans, erased. Would she understand the rush of joy the Jase had felt when we saw her again after all this time?

  For a long time, the Belters of Europa had been scattered and desperate. The Guilds wouldn't help us, not unless we paid. So we found our own solutions. Laena had been part of that. The Jase remembered she'd always been bright and technical. She'd gone to a lab in one of the orbiting habs. She'd been there for years, working out ways to fight an entire moon. But now she was back and, for us at least, the war no longer seemed so grim.

  "Because, when we saw you, we remembered. The Jase part of us was so happy. After all the pain. After so many were lost. Because we do this…" We waved a vague hand at the two of us.

  Without thinking, we brushed the back of her hand with our fingertips. "Almost everyone we know is gone. But, out of nowhere, here you are, even more beautiful than the Jase in us remembered."

  Laena's eyes searched ours, as if seeking confirmation, or maybe madness. "You look so much like him now, Cromley. Older. But your eyes. I remember those eyes."

  She turned her hand over, letting her fingertips slide over the insi
de of our wrist. Her touch burned electric and her glow seemed to flow into ours. In it, we sensed the ache that rested on her heart more eloquently than words could convey. We felt the faint throb of blood coursing through her, radiating warmth, the gentle musk of her skin. Pheromones drifted from her and each molecule that crossed the space between us spoke its primal language, one chemical word at a time. Curious… Attracted…

  As her fingertips brushed the skin of our wrist, we looked deeply at her, capturing her gaze in ours. "There's something else."

  "You mean something weirder than you and Jase sharing the same body?" Her smile guttered like a flame in a stiff breeze.

  "Maybe." We smiled too, savoring the simple connection, wanting more. "We can show you."

  A fresh wave of complex molecules rose from her body, her armpits and groin, Intrigued… Afraid… I could hear her heart triphammering and see the subtle flush rising above her collarbones.

  "Will it hurt?"

  "It's never felt that way for me."

  "What should I do?"

  "Just… see."

  We spread our fingers over her bare forearm, watching our glows swirl and blend. With no conscious effort, we knew what to do. A tiny probe extended from our index finger, no longer than a centimeter, no thicker than one of Laena's gleaming jet colored hairs. It was a refinement of Su's first clumsy wire. This one ran under the skin of our chest and arm, down our wrist and into our hand. The tiniest prick, and we pierced the soft flesh at the inside of her elbow. Laena's eyes flicked downward at my hand and then returned to mine, but she never flinched.

  Cromley’s body had nourished us. Now Laena would do the same and, in return, we would show her what an infinity of words could never begin to describe. We reached out, tugging at the colors that enveloped her, pulling them into ours, feeling her warm strength flowing into us. The sensation was poignant. It was heart wrenching.