The Belter's Story (BRIGAND)

by Natalie French

  "What if we can't —" But we knew the answer before we asked. We could smell the pungent musk rising from her. She felt the unstoppable craving that welled inside of us.

  Laena put her hands on either side of our face and lifted us to stare directly at her. Her violet eyes afire with anticipation. "Don't stop. Never stop." She pulled our mouth to hers and our tongues stabbed hungrily in their shared space. Then she pushed and rolled on top of us in one smooth motion, our mouths still pressed together.

  She reached down and gripped us, pulling hard, sliding skin over muscle, driving an impossibly sweet ache into our groin. She speared herself down on us and it would have been impossible to identify the source of the animal sigh that escaped into Laena's tiny room. She could feel herself gripping the length of us with tightly bunched muscles. We felt her thrill of pleasure, mixed with pain, as we pushed deep, as if we could push so far that we would physically become one. Everything we did, we did for both of us.

  Slowly at first, then more urgently, we moved, sensing and then fulfilling each other's deepest, unspoken wants. There were no secrets. No questions. We knew with perfect instinct when to touch, to stroke, to pause.

  Elbows braced on the bed for leverage, we thrust up inside her. She stretched her arms above her head, and our bodies pressed seamlessly into one another. We kissed her again and she pressed her open mouth to ours, sucking hard at our tongue, an urgent moan resonating deep in her chest.

  Our glows were so intermingled now, we could no longer tell one from the other. They enshrouded us both, twisting and writhing like the tendrils we'd seen in that cave so long ago. We touched in every possible way we could manage and every new square centimeter brought thousands more filaments into play. Millions. Sensation poured into us, growing more powerful with every touch.

  Energy flooded through billions of connections, swelling us with what felt like limitless strength. And, in that moment we knew Laena's every thought, every feeling, every cell that formed her, every emotion that defined her.

  Mere affection could never have been so honest or so complete. We folded into one another over and over, recursing so far that there could no longer be any concept of where one ended and the other began.

  When it came, our climax was a white hot singularity that burned away everything with savage release.

  Leaving nothing behind.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The moment it happened we knew. We felt it. Of course we did. Even if we'd wanted to, we couldn't have stopped it. But we hadn't want to. Not for a millisecond.

  At the instant of our transcendence, the connection broke and rapture turned to horror.

  Just like that, she was gone. Memory spun back through us, fueling heartbreak with every captured moment. Her eyes. Her fingers. Her breath on our cheek. Her humor. Her acceptance.

  Gone.

  Laena was dead. Killed by the ones she had trusted most. The ones who loved her. The ones who sucked her dry.

  The Jase raged and wept in the dark spaces of our shared psyche. The Cromley withdrew into crippled silence. Perhaps because they had no way to comprehend what we felt, the Su and the other were mute. With nothing holding us together, we shattered into helpless inaction.

  We had been cradling Laena on the bed for so long. Her body had gone a little blue at first, drifting toward gray as silent hours passed. No hint of her magnificent glow remained. She was as pale and lifeless as the surface of Europa a hundred meters above us. We sat and we held her, never noticing the ping of the comm or, later, the pounding.

  The jerking squeal of the door being pried open finally roused us and we looked up at Kittar, Laena's sire, the man who fathered her. He held a pry bar in one hand and we thought for a moment he intended to use it on us. His glow projected anger, but at what wasn't clear.

  "What happened?" His square jaw was clamped tight, forcing the words between his teeth.

  "We killed her. It was our fault. Please tell someone. They need to arrest — They should do something."

  Neeshta, Laena's mother, slipped into the room behind her husband. She was beautiful, like her daughter, but more delicate. Same hair though. Same eyes. A fresh wave of grief broke over us and an involuntary sob ravaged the back of our throat.

  Neeshta moved to kneel by the bed. She touched her daughter's lifeless gray hair and then looked at us intently. "Cromley, it's important that you tell us what happened. Every detail. Don't leave anything out."

  And so we told them. All of it. While we clung to the withered husk of the woman who had loved us.

  Neeshta listened silently, prompting only now and again when we lost momentum and, as we told her our story, we saw, as if from a long way off, how deeply tragedy had cut — until Laena. She had been the fleeting spark in a lifetime of darkness.

  "Tell me again about the glow. Do you see it now? Around me? Kittar?" Neeshta's gaze was focused, like she was looking into the glare of the sun.

  "Yes. We can see it, but it's more than that. We can feel it too. You're curious and tense. You're a little afraid of us."

  Neeshta's pheromones spiked suddenly. Danger… And, in that moment, we realized there were things here that we weren't seeing, things we were failing to comprehend. She had lost her only child. Where was Grief… or Rage… or Retribution…?

  We glanced up at Kittar who still stood impassively in the broken doorway. His glow seemed muddy and we could smell his tension. From meters away, he was radiating Combat…

  Without knowing why, we knew something was wrong. Deeply. Terribly. These weren't the grieving parents of an innocent girl killed by her lover. They felt clinical.

  We rolled poor Laena's corpse from our lap and leaped, naked, toward the door. Focused as we were on the tool in Kittar's right hand, we never even saw the crippler in his left until it hit us in the ribs.

  All the skeletal nerves in our body fired at once, sending every muscle into a spasm that tore fibers and strained ligaments to their breaking point. Clenched in incomprehensible agony, we toppled to the metal floor, hitting hard and tasting blood. No doubt a facial bone or two had succumbed to the impact. But we did nothing except lie immobile and drool red.

  Kittar's booted feet appeared in front of our eyes and his grainy rumble filled our ears. "What do you want to do with him?"

  "Take him of course. You know how important this is." Neeshta's voice was flat and businesslike.

  We felt the sting of an injector and darkness began to close from the periphery of our vision. As we faded toward unconsciousness, we heard another voice. One that only we could perceive.

  "Jase, Cromley, this is very important. You must not tell. Don't let them know I'm here."

  Laena.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  She soothed our horror and stilled our anguish. The Jase and the Cromley were overcome at first. To lose and then regain something so precious… There wasn't any need for words. All that we were, each part of us, was laid bare to every other. We knew, with infinite trust, the simple purity of our motivations. Each of us cared for the other without pretense or reservation. Our atonement was automatic and complete.

  Love does indeed forgive everything.

  Once she was joined with us we understood it all. The Laena's parents had, of course, engineered our meeting. In the beginning, it had been an innocuous enough deception. Cromley had become famous for his ability to sniff out the nexi. Someone powerful wanted to know why. Because Laena had known him when they were young, because she was beautiful and bright, she was the perfect foil. She would uncover Cromley's secrets. Nothing more.

  But after that first time, when we had fed from her, when we had shown her what we could see, everything changed. What neither of us knew was that they had been watching — all of it and that Laena became expendable, bait in the trap. She'd had no idea at the time of course, but she had been sacrificed by her own parents long before she was the agent of our betrayal.

  And so we became a slave.

  We weren't like the
Morgs, who sweated and died because they were cheap, but we toiled and suffered all the same. Kittar and Neeshta were with us. They were slaves as well — or perhaps taskmasters. The whip hand. The serf who stands above the peons, privileged but no less in thrall.

  They studied and measured. They probed and they tested. Although, sometimes their immediate goals were obscure, they never concealed their intent. Under their scrutiny, we came to understand the energy of living things in ways we could never have imagined, an unexpected benefit of our servitude. We saw them so clearly. Each creature had a specific collage of colors and emotions that we came to recognize.

  And we helped them build things — a device that could block energy sources within a few meters. They called it a 'neutralizer'. From that, they engineered a scanner that could detect beings like us, anyone with the capacity to manipulate the energy of life. We were a means to an end. When they understood what had happened to us, what made us, what we could do, they would dispose of what was no longer required and move on.

  We needed a plan. It helped that the Laena knew where we were — one of the orbiting research habs above Europa. There were transports, mostly to the Belt. If we could find a way onto one of those ships, we might have a chance to disappear.

  How we might accomplish such a feat, we had no idea. We were confined — a small room with bed and sink and toilet. They were careful about getting too close to us, especially Neeshta. That was understandable. And sometimes we did wonder what it would feel like to kill again, what it would feel like to grab hold of the blackness that enveloped her, breathe it in and suck it from her completely. But we would never do to her what we had done to Laena. The thought of Neeshta invading our union was so abhorrent that we would have gladly died before taking her life that way.

  To gain time, we kept our value high. We cooperated. We complied. We waited. Eventually, we earned a few privileges. A smattering of educational sensos, limited network access. They began to bring us small creatures, mostly diggers gleaned for experimentation, to sustain us, after they realized we would age quickly without the life giving energy they afforded.

  These people weren't deliberately cruel. If anything, they were frightened. We saw it in their glows — each of them infected with the same dull midnight hue. Something potent and terrible loomed over them and drove them. They would do anything to avoid the wrath of that power; even give up their own children. We wondered what it was that could intimidate these people so.

  Then one shift, without any fanfare, she arrived.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  She glided through the lab with Neeshta in tow, a gaggle of minions strung behind them, all in black. Her sable robe clung like adoration to the flawless contours of her body, its neckline plunging from shoulders to navel. Her elegance was a tangible force that pushed those around her into an instinctively servile hunch. They never dared look at her.

  Her skin was ethereally white and her glow was like nothing we’d ever seen. It reached darkly from her in all directions, a shadowy nimbus that radiated command and fear. As she approached us with long, confident strides, we could sense… nothing. All the familiar odors of skin and clothing were there, but we couldn't read anything else from her. We wondered that such perfect control was even possible.

  The woman in black stood close, apparently unconcerned about whatever danger we might represent.

  "So. This is the one?" Her cool blue eyes held ours without the slightest effort.

  Neeshta stepped up beside her, a half pace back, close enough to be heard, yet respectfully out of view. "Yes, Reverend Mother. This is Cromley."

  The woman in black smiled, perfect lips drawn back over perfect teeth, blue eyes sparkling with invitation. Our involuntary response was over which we had no control. We smiled too. She was so beautiful that, for a moment, our only urge was to please her.

  "You’ve been a great help, Cromley. For that, we thank you." She tilted her head slightly and her smile fell away, leaving a tiny pang of loss behind.

  She terrified us. Not because of what she might do to us, but because of what she could do if she understood us.

  "We're nearly done here. Your extraordinary gift will be a little less extraordinary soon. And then — the things we’ll do." Her smile returned, but without its former warmth. The chill of it pierced us.

  "Done? You mean we can go home?" We knew better of course, but we couldn't resist the perverse impulse to ask.

  "We?" Her blue gaze pierced our own.

  We realized our blunder too late, but we tried to cover. "We… Us." We gestured at the others in the lab around us.

  She drew her gaze across the others around me. Belters. Awkward, pallid, with deep-set eyes. Then she stared at us as if she were inspecting a lab specimen.

  "Don't be stupid. We know everything. We know what you do. We know how it protects you from the ravages of time. We know that you can draw the lives of others into yours."

  She continued to stare, the blue of her eyes cold and unblinking. Then she traced her index finger, with the red pointed nail, down our cheek. "How many are you I wonder?"

  We swallowed our resolve and drew a long breath to bolster our courage. "If you let these people live, if you leave them in peace I… we will do what you ask."

  Then she laughed. "I wouldn't kill them —" and she motioned to Neeshta and the others who loitered nearby, darting nervous glances at one another, "to persuade you. I’d kill them because they’re useless."

  She stopped and looked into my eyes. "But yes. I will allow them their pathetic existence. And you will indeed do what I ask."

  She turned and her silky black robe rolled on the air at her calves, following obediently behind her.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Days passed. We had no idea how long it would be before the woman in black returned, but we knew we were out of time. Caution no longer mattered. We were doomed anyway. With nothing to lose, we took risks.

  With the Su's help, hacking the main network was simple enough. Inserting our biometrics into the all-access security group was much more challenging, but the Laena had worked here. She knew enough of the right security codes to get us in. When the time came, we could hide aboard one of the little shuttles that were constantly making runs between Mundus Habitat and Europa. Although they usually operated on auto, shuttles were all equipped with life support and manual controls. If we could find the right opening, we'd be able to slip through it.

  Then, during downtime, Neeshta came to our cell. She was alone and didn't bother with the usual protocols. No restraints. No careful avoidance of our touch.

  Tired as she looked, she still reminded us of Laena and we felt a twinge of the old loss. The Laena's comforting presence resonated inside us, Sometimes we miss the way things were too. But there's nowhere else we would rather be.

  "Cromley. Or should I say Cromley and Jase and — " She paused and her eyes glistened in the dim light. "Laena."

  "You have no reason to trust me. But I needed you to know —"

  "That you led us to kill your daughter? For what? Science? Money?" We weren't in a mood to be kind, especially the Laena.

  "Survival. She would destroy us all. Everyone. To get what you have." She looked down at her hands and our gaze followed hers. They were shaking. We could see the depth of her fear and her sorrow, in shades of deep navy, coursing the length of her body.

  "Who is she?"

  "She is the highest of the Mandate of St. Nicolo. The order of the Wraiths. Her grasp of energy is incomparable."

  "And now you've made her like us. Do you have any idea what that means?"

  Neeshta flinched as if we had struck her. "She's already begun the treatments we devised. Her strength is growing, but she doesn't have your experience. She doesn't yet know what you've learned. But she will get it from you. You have to know that she'll find what she seeks. You… we will not survive the process."

  We knew then what we had to do. What we had become, no one like her could ever b
e allowed to attain. We never sought this power but the damage we had done was almost beyond comprehension. Given what we knew, this woman, this creature would become something almost inconceivable. We would stop her. Or she would end us all.

  Neeshta stared hard into our eyes. "She's coming for you. At the start of next shift. She means to learn how you took my child." A single tear welled from the corner of her eye and tracked in silence down to her lips.

  "I don't know if you can fight her, but if you can, we'll try to help you. We owe you that much." Neeshta rose and hurried out of our cell..

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  We were seated in a small room, our bodies cradled in impossibly expensive float chairs. No comfort, it seemed, was denied the Mother Most Revered. We were positioned close to each other, close enough that contact was a simple matter of reaching out a hand. The lighting was subdued, almost dim, but we could see her glow well enough and even her superb control couldn't completely mask her anticipation.

  One of her attendants placed a vaper in our grasp and we took a long pull. The familiar bite at the back of our throat, the surge in the intensity of her colors, we knew them well and, despite our fear, we luxuriated in the familiar rush of excitement that followed.

  The Reverend Mother lifted her own vaper, drew and then released a lavender cloud. We noticed that her artfully sculpted lips were pale and unadorned. No makeup. She wanted nothing that might hinder contact.

  She smiled that wondrous smile, which we reflexively returned before we could even begin to consider an alternative. "Now show us."

  The prospect of assimilating Neeshta had been repulsive enough, but to consider such intimacy with this woman was, in thought alone, almost enough to destroy us. And so we had devised a plan, a chance to catch her off guard. Success might buy us freedom, or at least a fighting chance. If we failed…