The Belter's Story (BRIGAND)

by Natalie French

  She placed her hand on ours. The touch was warm and dry and smooth. Like every centimeter of her, her fingers were without flaw and we could feel her sensing her own unblemished skin on ours. Contact.

  "Ohh. I see." Her body tensed against the wave of unprecedented sensation that washed through us. She was enthralled. We felt her rapture. For a moment, she was overwhelmed by the sheer novelty of it. For a moment, her attention flagged.

  And we struck.

  The Reverend Mother's instructions had been simple enough. Show her how to rob the energy of another. Use our connection to help her understand how it feels, how it's done. What she never anticipated, was the fact that we could do more than pull at her glow. We could push.

  With all the force we could muster, we threw our energy into her — blazing, battering, diving through our sense of her, following her own perception into her most delicate recesses. There was no finesse, no art, no deception.

  Connected, she was instantly aware of everything we did. Our only hope was to move so fast and hit so hard that she would have no time to react.

  We could feel her reeling, falling away from our assault. But then we felt her comprehension. She knew what we’d done. You are so clever, little Belter. But I think you underestimate me.

  She could never match us in precision and control, but she had already grasped the concept. The Reverend Mother moved to kneel before us, placing her hands on either side of our face. And then she began to pull.

  We were out of time. Our gambit had failed, but if we could manage one final attack, perhaps we could overwhelm her defenses and jar her nervous system into a temporary shutdown. With the desperation of the condemned, we bore down on her. Giving, quite literally, everything we had.

  We choked her with our glow. We shoved our energy into her until she quaked and sweated. We could feel her toppling. And then, with a sensation that, more than anything, felt like being disemboweled, something tore loose.

  As the Reverend Mother fell away into blackness, the Cromley saw what we had done and wept his desperation.

  Jase.

  Laena.

  Gone.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  We were destroyed.

  The thing that remained after the battle with the Reverend Mother was empty and twisted. It had aged decades in seconds. The energy it had poured into the Mother nearly bled it dry, leaving a husk that was old beyond its years. It moved and spoke. It ate and shat. Thoughts still formed in its ruined brain. But it cared for nothing. It was nothing.

  Its one feeble act of defiance, its single pitiful gesture against the devastation that now defined it was its name. It was no longer Cromley. Nor was it Jase or Laena. They were gone, but it would honor them in its pathetic way. It would name itself from bits of them, tokens that would keep them in its memory forever. From now on, It would be Cruase.

  We never heard what happened to the Mother. She was unconscious, but alive, when we made our escape. With Neeshta's help, it was a simple thing to slip onto a transport bound for Mundus.

  Surviving was so much harder. The Belt has always been an unforgiving place. There's no such thing as unemployment there. The equation is brutal and simple. You find work or you die.

  For a while, we got by on odd jobs. We were always good with bots and Mundus has millions of them. It was a meager life at best. We didn't care. Death would have been a welcome release, but we were too cowardly to seek it. Instead, we trudged out our gray and featureless existence — our penance. We sold ourselves for food and water and oxygen.

  The Trand bought our contract from a recycler. He ran a bot shop not far from the port and business was good enough that he needed a tech. The recycler owed him money. The Trand took us in trade.

  He was a big man with short dark hair and a hard set to his mouth. He'd been a marine once, but he'd gotten himself shot up so badly that it was cheaper to retire him. His left eye was artificial and so were parts of his legs. He never tried to disguise his prosthetics. In fact, he seemed to enjoy how they made him look.

  He was naturally strong, and he liked using that strength. Intimidation was, by far, his favorite sport. No surprise, then, that he wanted to be stronger still. And so we bought our life by giving him the thing he wanted most. Piece by piece, limb by limb, we remade him. Even his friends feared the thing we created.

  We were terrified.

  "Cruase, get in here." Trand's raspy voice was, for once, unburdened by rage.

  "See this?" He motioned to a little transparent plastic box in which a tiny gleaming object nestled amidst a spray of hair-fine, glassy filaments.

  "An augment. Unusual design. It radiates — we have seen this before." The violet glow of europine was unmistakable.

  Despite the damage done to us all those years ago, we were still who we were. We could still see the energies of life. We could still remember the rush. The need. We fed it when we could. In Mundus, there are plenty who hover at the margin of survival. We took no pride in what we did. No pleasure. We fed, but never all the way. The hole in us was unfillable. We swore we would never try.

  "Do you know what it does?"

  We knew it was a test. It was always a test — to see if we would hold back. Or lie.

  "It distorts nearby energy fields. Collapses them."

  "Install it. I want to try it out." He scowled down at us. "Fuck it up and I'll rip that knobby head off that skinny neck."

  We nodded and picked up the device. "How will we know what to do?"

  "It's self-documenting, dumbass. Just install the motherfucker." I'll tell you when to use it.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The Trand was running the particle furnace at full power, shredding alloys down to base metals for new parts. The heat was unbearable, but we never complained. We wouldn't have dared. We sat at the workbench, assembling a batch of actuators, enduring the heat for as long as we had to before the Trand would allow us to rest.

  When they came through the door, when we saw her for the first time, the shock was like a physical impact. We dropped our microadjuster, barely aware of its clattering descent to the floor.

  We had never seen anything like her. Her glow was brilliant white, blinding, so bright we couldn't bear to look. So captivating we could do nothing else.

  We looked at the dark-skinned man with her. He was big, though not as big as the Trand. Obviously another soldier. We could see his suspicion from across the room — his glow flickered with reds and yellows. He was wary. Protective of the woman at his side. We felt a twinge of jealousy at that, and maybe a touch of relief.

  Without any conscious intent, we stared at her. It was impossible not to. Except for the straight black hair that swept down to just below her jawline, she looked nothing like the Laena. Nor did her glow. This woman was tall and fierce and confident. And more. We saw it in her glow. We sensed it in her posture, scented it in the chemistry of her skin. She was something we knew of, but had never seen. A creature more subtle and just as deadly as the warrior who accompanied her. The goddess was a wraith.

  Even as the thought formed, we despised ourselves for it, but we wanted her. More than anything. We wanted to inhale her and bask in that extraordinary radiance. For the first time in a very long time we wanted something. We wanted her. With us. Forever. We dared not hope, but perhaps the hole could be filled after all.

  She stared at us and we tore our eyes away, looking down at our work without seeing it. Averting our gaze from her We reached down and retrieved the microadjuster, clipping it into one of the extensibles mounted high in our chest, above the pectoral muscles, close to our shoulders. We'd installed them years ago to make working in low-g environments a little easier.

  The Trand greeted the soldier as a comrade, clasping his arm in much the same way Rox had clasped ours so many years ago. They even spoke the same ritual greeting. A marine then. A Jack.

  We knew the Trand had used a neutralizer on them. We could feel the tingle, the tiny EMP that came along with the d
evice's effect. And we could see that the marine knew exactly what had happened.

  He put his arm around her, his posture relaxed, but we could see his tension radiating in brilliant green. Fight… Flight…

  We stood and moved around the workbench. We commanded our bots, dozens of them, to come to us and a swarm of little spidery machines formed around our feet. We didn't know what the Trand wanted, but we knew that we must not allow him to gain whatever it was. We didn't care about the marine. All we wanted was her.

  "Cruase, you know what to do." Trand's voice was flat and hard.

  Now we understood. The purpose of the augment Trand had given us was to collapse nearby energy fields. We knew what a wraith could do. And we knew that, with those fields gone, she would no longer be able to use one of her most potent skills.

  We wanted to warn her and took a hesitant step forward. The marine saw us and moved to defend her. We faltered, not sure what to do. We didn't wish her harm. We only wanted —

  Then we had it. The timing would be tricky, but if it worked she would be safe from whatever the Trand had in mind. At least until we could come up with a way to get her away from here. We watched her with all of our attention and, an instant later, were rewarded with the tell we sought. Her glow warned us of her intentions just before she stepped into one of the pockets wraiths use. We triggered the augment.

  Instead of being blocked from entering the pocket, as the Trand had planned, she disappeared. We had done it. She was secure. Our eyes, aglow with the excitement of our small victory, shifted to the marine — just as he drew his sidearm and threw it. Straight at us. The last thing we saw was a brilliant flash of white and then the gritty floor swooping up to meet us.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Awareness returned to us like the flipping of a switch. We heard sounds of struggle. We smelled blood and sweat and pain.

  The marine was injured. A gash had opened the back of his head and he was struggling to rise from the floor. The Trand stood against the far wall, our goddess suspended limply by one arm from his huge fist. She was naked except for her boots and narrow tracks of dark blood trickled from countless little wounds all over her body. Her glow, still bright, was tinged with the colors of suffering. Our first impulse was to rush wildly to her aid, but then we understood. She wasn't unconscious.

  She was lying in wait.

  The extensibles of Trand's left hand were writhing and clutching at her white skin. "What do you say, Roy? Think she can learn how to please a real man by the time we get to Marajo?"

  He slid his machine hand, the hand we had built for him, down between her legs and lifted her against his pelvis, grinding himself into her from behind. Anger flared inside us. We saw now what the Trand wanted. What he must never have.

  "NO!" Our shout was drowned by the marine, who yelled at precisely the same moment. He had made it to his knees and was trying to force himself to stand.

  "The Trand must not do this." We stepped forward. We needed to be close. "This one has a glow — not like any other. The Trand must not destroy such a thing. The Trand will not."

  "Shut the fuck up, Cruase. I own your contract. Without me, you wouldn’t even have air to breathe. Go build your little bots and leave the man stuff to the men." He lifted her higher and leaned his head forward, clamping his mouth down on her, between neck and shoulder. He bit hard and lifted his head, tearing skin and trailing blood down his chin.

  "NO! She must live." We closed the distance between us, our chest extensibles lashing out. They gripped his arms and we threw a high voltage surge into him. His hands opened reflexively and she fell to the floor. As she crumpled, we saw her eyes slit open just the barest bit. She was looking for an opening.

  Even at our best, we’d never been a fighter. Before we could react, the Trand was on us, his massive hands gripping our head, lifting us into the air. In moments, our skull would be a bloody sack of mush plucked from the stalk of our neck.

  Then we noticed the little knife embedded in the Trand's throat, no doubt left there by the dark haired woman as she'd fought him. If we could grab that and find another conductive spot, we might have a chance. In desperation, we reached out again with our extensibles. We gripped the knife with our left and shot the right one straight into the Trand's mouth. This time, the electrical surge went through his medulla and he spasmed, falling backward, releasing his grip.

  The marine hooked his hand around the Trand's neck as he fell, slamming him down onto his knee. We didn't doubt the move would have crippled, maybe even killed, a normal human. But our skeletal augments had made that impossible. The Trand might be stunned, but he was far from dead. We had built him too well for that.

  And then the goddess made her move. We never even saw her coming. One moment, she was a tangle of naked limbs on the floor. The next, she was straddling the Trand's torso, her other knife at the ready. Unfortunately, the Trand had the advantage of his augments. He grabbed her wrist and forced her to drop her weapon, but then, almost as if they had planned it, the marine caught the blade and drove it into the Trand's good eye. He went limp.

  Still astride the Trand's massive chest, she smiled and leaned forward, wiping her thumb over her companion's upper lip. "You had a little bit of blood on your face." Her humor and affection brushed over him leaving faint vortices of pale blue.

  Before he could respond, the marine collapsed, unmoving, on the floor.

  "Oh no." The woman moved quickly to his inert body, rolling him onto his side and checking the pulse in his throat. She lifted his eyelids, first one, and then the other.

  "He's in trouble. I need to get him back to our ship. Do you have something I can use to carry him?"

  "We —" With no idea how to proceed, we paused, calculating odds of his survival against odds of our escape, against how long it would be until the Trand recovered enough to kill us. Patterns and probabilities raced through our head, but a single certainty remained — she must live. We stuck with that.

  "You must live."

  She fixed her steel gaze on us. "I'm not leaving without him."

  "The Cruase can help transport him to your ship, but we cannot guarantee his recovery. If we assist, you must promise to see to your own survival first. We will attend to the —"

  "His name is Roy. And yes. Now hurry. Please."

  We retrieved the float lift Trand used for heavy equipment. It wasn't easy, especially with her right arm, which was broken, held uselessly against her abdomen, but we managed to get him draped over the floater's bed and covered with one of the coats they'd been wearing.

  Once he was secured, she lifted the other coat and struggled into it. Then, before we could react, she reached out and touched our hand. It was too much to bear. We could feel her. Just one taste. Just one little tug and we would know the essence of the goddess. We wanted her so much, but we knew that, once we started, there would be no stopping. Ever. We quivered with the struggle inside us but, with that struggle, emerged. A hint of something we hadn’t felt for a very long time. Something that felt remarkably like happiness.

  "Thank you for helping us. We'd have been done if you hadn't stepped in. I'm Trig."

  We had had already been dead, for so many years, but now elation overpowered us and we laughed aloud. Of course she didn't understand. Her scowl was to be expected. We, on the other hand, were ecstatic just to be in the presence of this impossible creature.

  "We are Cruase. Come. We should leave. The Trand will destroy us if we stay too long."

  "What are you talking about? He's dea… Oh shit."

  The monster was beginning to stir.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The float lift was too big to fit into the airlock of their cargo lifter and we were forced to drag the unconscious marine inside. Fortunately, the sick bay was close by. It was exhausting, but we got him stripped and into the autodoc.

  We watched the Trig frantically punch the doc's command pad with her one good hand. We could taste the distress that flared fu
chsia over her body. We knew that flavor all too well. She didn't want to lose him. She feared she already had.

  "We must undock. The Trand will follow us."

  Trig never looked up. She stared at the doc's status display and murmured, "Stupid marine. Don't you dare die on me."

  We found the cockpit on our own and took the ship into a 100 kilometer parking orbit. There were hundreds of vessels around Ceres and we were just one more. There would be plenty of time to do what was needed.

  It was obvious this wasn't just a simple lifter. These people must have had military connections. The ship was far too well equipped for what it appeared to be. A quick survey of the command console revealed weapons controls, even a stealth system. With patience, and a little tuning, we were able to boost its efficiency by more than half.

  We returned to the sick bay where the Trig was still watching over the Roy. She had pulled a chair close to the autodoc and was leaning against its transparent enclosure. Her eyes were closed, but her glow told us she was still alert.

  She straightened as we entered. "I felt the ship move. Have we undocked?"

  We explained what we had done and then asked, "Your friend, the Roy, will he live?"

  "I think so. It was close, but he should be ok. Thank you, Cruase. You saved us all." Her blue-gray eyes spoke even more poignantly. He would live and she was glad.

  Summoning all of our self-control, we placed our hand on hers. Her glow was quiet, but still blinding and we were forced to avert our eyes. The desire to join with her was overpowering.

  "No more than you saved us."

  Her quiet smile almost made us weep.

  We hadn't thought this was how we would leave the Trand, although we had known the day must come. When we escaped the horrors of Europa and the Mother, even in our crushed and ruined state, we had hoped never to be a slave again — to others, to desperation. And yet that was exactly where we ended up, as if our fate was to forever be held in thrall, always with the same singular option. Endure.