by Jake Bible
“Gonna need him,” Pasha said. “And you don’t want the heat keeping him will bring.”
Roak glanced down at Hail’s corpse then at the rest of the carnage.
“It’s pretty Eight Million Godsdamn hot already,” he snarled at her. “A little more heat won’t make much difference.”
Pasha only blinked at him.
Roak took a closer look at the death that filled the passageway.
“Where’d you train?” Roak asked. “This isn’t standard GF wet works. You grow up in a death cult? One of the private corporations that pluck orphans off the streets? Or’d you have a mysterious mentor that saw the killer potential inside and made you see your worth in the weight of blood and bodies you’ve left behind?”
“Self-taught,” Pasha replied.
“That so?” Roak replied. “But you work for the GF, yeah?”
“I do the job that needs doing,” Pasha stated.
“For the GF.”
“Give me the old tech and you and I won’t have an issue.”
“Why didn’t you take him before?” Roak asked.
Pol whimpered and began to sit up.
“What’s…?” was all the old man managed. He coughed a few times then slumped back into a pile.
Roak nudged him with his boot.
“Yeah, stay like that,” Roak said. “Nothing to see here.”
“Roak,” Spickle said.
“Roak,” Sath said.
“I got this, guys,” Roak replied to the Maglors. “Do me a favor, will ya? Do a little shopping while I chat with the young woman here. Can you do that?”
The Maglors blinked up at Roak. He sighed, his fists bunched.
“Weapons and magazines,” Roak explained. “Get us some guns. We’ll need them.”
“You don’t need anything,” Pasha said. “Give me the old man and you’ll be able to slip away.”
“Yeah, I don’t slip,” Roak said and nodded at the bodies that filled the passageway. “You think the Edgers will let this go? Nope. I’m now their number one target.”
“You flatter yourself,” Pasha said.
“Probably, but self-flattery has kept me alive this long. The point, Pasha, is that the Edgers are going to come at me hard. Pol is my only bargaining chip if I want off this station alive. Take him from me and I’m a dead man.”
“Roak a dead man? I doubt it. You worm your way out of these types of situations for a living. That’s why they hire you for the impossible jobs.”
“Edgers want me dead. Binter wants me dead, I’m sure. Skrang on the way. GF on the way, yeah? My ship is gone. I may have gotten a little more impossible than I expected.”
Without looking down, Pasha wiped her bloody blades along her pants, smearing the red across the thin material that Roak was positive could hold up to a pistol blast. His armor could handle a pistol blast too, but the blades Pasha held at the ready? Roak wasn’t so sure.
The woman had sliced and diced her way through a passageway of Edgers to get to him and the old man. Many of the dead had armor on similar to Roak’s, some even had heavier armor designed for battlefield combat. Pasha had gotten through the seams and joints of that armor like she was opening cans of canned terpig stew.
“Boys,” Roak said.
The Maglors hadn’t moved a muscle.
“Stay right there,” Pasha ordered when the Maglors twitched like they were going to do something.
“Want to live? Want off this station?” Roak asked them. “Get me a weapon.”
“Don’t,” Pasha warned as her right hand moved so that her blade tip was pointed directly at Spickle and Sath. “You won’t make it a couple steps. I promise.”
“We like Pasha,” Spickle said.
“No more like Pasha,” Sath said.
“Why?” Spickle asked. “Hail friend.”
“Hail good friend,” Sath added.
Pasha grimaced then frowned as she looked at Hail’s corpse.
“I didn’t kill her.”
“You not save her,” Spickle said, Sath nodding vigorously in agreement.
“I was busy,” Pasha said, indicating the violence she’d perpetrated.
“You could have gotten here sooner,” Roak said, joining in on the shamefest in hopes that it would rattle Pasha enough to give him a little more luck when the fight happened. And Roak knew it would happen and he’d need the luck with Pasha. “Only a minute or so sooner and Hail would still be alive. That woman helped look after you.”
Pasha barked a pained laugh at Roak.
“Helped look after me? Roak, she made sure I was the best girl whore I could be. That’s it. She didn’t help look after me other than to tell me what wash to use with each species of client. Hail looked out for Hail.”
“She wanted to get you off this station,” Roak continued, although he suspected his argument wasn’t doing much good. He had to keep her talking until the Maglors pulled their heads out of their monkey butts and got him an Eight Million Godsdamn pistol. “That has to count for something, yeah? She could have ditched you. Left you behind and saved only herself. But she wanted to take you and the others with.”
Roak grinned.
“What?” Pasha snapped. “You think this is funny? What’s wrong with you, Roak?”
“We don’t have time to get into that,” Roak replied. “And I was thinking of Coult. Must have come as a shock when you started cutting. He would have never seen that coming. Not from Pasha, his friend. Why did you kill Coult?”
Roak kicked at the Maglors and they finally unfroze.
“Leave the weapons,” Pasha barked.
“We die if you don’t try,” Roak said. “Leave the monkeys alone, Pasha. You scared of a couple of Maglors? You scared of me when I have a pistol? I just watched what you can do. I doubt I’ll be able to check the charge on a pistol before you have my belly open and my guts in your hands.”
Spickle and Sath moved carefully away from Roak, step after cautious step, their eyes locked onto Pasha. She watched them for a second then shook her head and frowned.
“Go ahead,” Pasha said. “I was going to let you two live. You want to die then that’s your choice. Unless you give me the old man after you give Roak his weapons. He’s right. He won’t even get to check the charge on a single one of the pistols you end up handing him. He’ll be dead before his hand touches the first grip. That leaves you two. That means you will have to give me the old man or die. That is how this will play out.”
Neither Spickle nor Sath responded. They simply continued moving slowly until they reached the first body and dragged a pistol out from underneath what remained of the corpse. The barrel of the pistol was sliced away. Spickle looked at Roak.
“Sharp knife,” Spickle said.
“Very sharp,” Sath agreed.
“Seven Satans,” Roak swore as he studied the blades Pasha held a little better. “What are those made of?”
“Same thing the rest are made of,” Pasha replied.
She turned her body slightly and the passageway’s halogens revealed blade after blade after blade tucked into sheaths up and down her body. Face on they were camouflaged, almost impossible to detect. Pasha turned back the other way to reveal even more. She smiled as she taunted Roak with the revelation.
“This is over, Roak,” Pasha said with full confidence. “You need to get with the program and admit you lost this bounty. Sometimes jobs don’t work out.”
“We’re going around in circles,” Roak said. “You keep talking, I keep talking, neither of us saying anything new.”
“I got one,” Sath said and held up a nice-looking Blorta 65 laser pistol.
“Too bad,” Pasha said.
Roak dove to the ground as Pasha flung the knife. But the blade didn’t go anywhere near him.
There was a squeak and cry then a slight thump as Sath fell, a blade solidly sticking all the way through his head, the tip coming out from between his eyes.
Spickle screamed and leapt at Pasha,
but she swatted him aside easily. Roak rolled across the dismembered corpse he’d been eyeing the entire time and came up with an RX31 Plasma assault rifle. He opened fire.
35.
The first blast caught Pasha in the left shoulder, but she rolled with the impact, dropping to her ass then tumbling backwards, coming up in a crouch, a blade leaving her extended fist before she’d stopped moving.
The second blast took out the blade that was flying end over end at Roak’s head.
The third, fourth, fifth, and sixth blasts hit nothing as Roak rolled to his right and fired only to lay down some cover and keep Pasha from grabbing another blade. The ploy worked for the third, fourth, and fifth blasts. Pasha had regrouped by the sixth blast and Roak barely got his body out of the way as a blade sliced the air where his non-armored arm had been a blink of an eye before.
Roak heard the blade thunk into the wall. Into it, not off it. Through the metal alloy the wall was made of. Roak kept firing, not even bothering to aim as he rolled and rolled to get some distance between himself and Pasha’s attacks.
The blades flew, sticking into the floor where Roak had been a microsecond before. It was like a trail of knives were left in his rolling wake. Then he was stopped by the bulk of a Gwreq corpse and one of the blades found its mark. Roak grunted as the flesh along the outside of his bicep of his exposed arm was split open. Even with the loss of momentum from slicing into Roak’s upper arm, he heard the blade continue flying and still embed itself into the wall behind him.
The rifle clicked empty, but Roak was ready. He’d clocked every weapon in sight in the blood-coated passageway. Using the Maglors to fetch him weapons had only been a distraction. One that got Sath killed. But Roak had told all of them back in Hail’s cabin that folks would die.
Razer was under siege. Civilians like Hail and her group weren’t built to survive a siege. Roak had known that from the beginning. What he didn’t know was one of the group would end up responsible for the majority of the deaths.
Roak snagged an H16 carbine as he rolled up and over the bulk of the dead Gwreq, using the huge stone-skinned corpse as cover. He barely made it as three blades went thunk, thunk, thunk into the far side of the dead Gwreq. Roak half-expected to see one of the blades come slicing through the body right at him. Considering what he’d witnessed of Pasha’s abilities so far, he wouldn’t have been surprised at all.
But the body kept the blades back and Roak checked the H16 to see how much charge he had. Almost full. Good.
“Pasha, you can quit anytime,” Roak called out from behind his corpse cover. “I am going to kill you before this is done, so save your ass and take off. Tell your GF owners that Roak got in your way. They’ll understand.”
Roak waited, but there was no response. He shook his head and reached out until his hand found the severed head of an unfortunate Halgon, an elastic race of people that resembled a poison dart frog mixed with a rubber band. Roak lifted the head up high and waited for the blade to take it from his grip.
No blade came.
“Pasha? There has to be a way we can come to an agreement,” Roak said. “I agree to not kill you if you agree to leave and not look back. How can you say no to that? Pretty Eight Million Godsdamn fair, in my opinion.”
No response.
Roak looked for another severed head that was close enough to grab, but they were all out of reach. Anyway, he figured Pasha wouldn’t fall for the second attempt. Not that she fell for the first attempt.
Roak narrowed his eyes, put the H16 to his shoulder, and said, “Pasha? You still out there?”
He came up firing where he thought Pasha would have moved to. His brain calculated the best spot of attack, if he were her, and he put six blasts in that spot before he realized he was shooting nothing.
Pasha was gone.
So was Pol.
“Oh, you have got to be kidding me,” Roak said as he stood there, hunting the floor for signs of which direction she went in.
There was too much blood everywhere for the footprints to show up. Some of the blood was congealed and would have shown footprints, but a lot of the blood from one species was reacting to the chemistry of the blood from other species, keeping both liquid and loose. No footprints.
“I’m an idiot,” Roak said to himself. “A total idiot.”
“Yes,” Spickle mumbled from a collapsed heap up against the far wall. The Maglor disentangled himself from a pile of body parts and shoved up onto his feet. He glared at Roak. “You are idiot. Idiot get Sath killed.”
“I own that,” Roak said. He glanced at the dead Maglor. “I didn’t want it to—”
“Shut up,” Spickle said as he struggled to wipe gore from his clothes. “Roak shut up.”
Roak shut up and began to search the area for any sign of Pasha’s escape. It took him a while, but he finally saw a bloody smudge at the far end of a branch of the passageway, close to one of the station’s bulkheads. Roak snagged a few magazines for his H16 and a KL09 that was still gripped in a Slinghasp’s hand. Roak had to break the fingers to get the pistol free. He tucked it into a holster and started off towards the bulkhead.
Then he paused, walked back, snagged a few of Pasha’s blades she’d left behind, and added those to his arsenal, tucking them into his belt.
He returned to the bulkhead and keyed it open, stepping back with the H16 up and ready to blast at the flurry of blades he expected to be heading straight for him. The next passageway over was empty. Except for a few more Edger corpses.
“Follow the bodies,” Roak mumbled.
“Follow the nose,” Spickle said, one of Pasha’s blades gripped tightly in each paw. He passed Roak and marched straight down the center of the passageway. “You get lost. I find Pasha and Pol. You kill Pasha. Make up for Sath. Then we leave.”
“Good plan,” Roak said. “Lead the way.”
Spickle paused and turned to look back at Roak. “You only alive because Spickle help Pol. We need ride. You have ride. I kill Roak if not for ride.”
“Fair enough,” Roak replied and nodded towards the end of the passageway. “Can’t help Pol until we find Pol. Show me where he is and I’ll kill Pasha. Not a problem.”
“Big problem,” Spickle snarled and continued moving.
“Okay. Ya got me on that one,” Roak agreed. “She’s good.”
“Better than Roak,” Spickle said.
“Not sure about that.”
“I sure.”
“Just follow the smell,” Roak snapped.
Spickle kept walking, Roak kept following.
They reached the next passageway and Roak readied for the attack. No attack came as the doors opened. More bodies, but no Pasha or Pol.
“You sure this is the right way?” Roak asked.
“Bodies don’t lie,” Spickle said.
“True, but—”
“Not like Roak lie,” Spickle interrupted.
“Okay, kiss my ass, monkey boy. I didn’t get you into this mess. You got yourself into it. I came here for Pol. You all were the ones that inserted yourselves into my job. You want to blame someone for Sath? Blame the woman that killed him, not me. At no point have I ever said I was the good guy here. That’s on you, pal.”
“Roak suck it,” Spickle replied.
Roak had to smirk at that.
They kept moving. Two more passageways, three more, four.
Bodies the entire way, but no Pasha or Pol. Roak was becoming impatient.
“I smell you,” Spickle said when they reached the eighth passageway. The bodies had thinned out by the seventh. “Frustrated. Stop. I find.”
“We’re running out of time,” Roak said. “The Skrang will be here soon and turn Razer into scrap.”
Spickle laughed. “Skrang turn into particles. No scrap left.”
Tenth passageway. Eleventh then twelfth.
Lucky thirteen was the charm.
The doors opened and Roak barely had time to flatten himself against the ground to avoid b
eing shredded by plasma blasts. He returned fire and dropped two Edgers as he jumped back to his feet and stormed the passageway, his H16 barking away the entire time.
Two more Edgers fell under his attack before Roak realized they hadn’t been shooting at him at all. There were a good dozen Edgers in the passageway firing wildly at a constantly moving Pasha. She had the Edgers panicked enough that they were pulling their triggers without even aiming. Roak watched two Edgers fall from friendly fire.
Pol was shoved into the far corner of the passageway, a meter from the doors, his face grey and slack. Roak had no idea if the old man was still alive or not.
“Get Pol,” Roak ordered Spickle.
The Maglor didn’t argue and began threading his way through the battle before him.
Roak had a choice to make. He wasn’t exactly picking sides, but he also couldn’t fight two fronts at once. He took a knee, took aim, and began taking out Edgers. He was pretty sure he caught the glimpse of a smirk on Pasha’s face when she tumbled by close enough for him to see her features.
Then she was gone and back to killing Edgers with her hands of many blades.
36.
A Dornopheous came at him fast, the being’s putty body undulating its way through the chaos with a KL09 aimed straight for Roak. Roak dodged to the side and sent half a dozen blasts at the thing, but Dornopheous were so flexible that the being easily avoided the attacks.
Roak had a feeling the thing would reach him, so he’d saved the best for last. He let the H16 lower, confusing the Dornopheous enough that the being didn’t see Roak snag one of Pasha’s blades from his belt.
When the being was within reach, Roak cut it to pieces, took the KL09 from the dead guy’s putty grip, jammed a blade into the charge receptor, and tossed the overloading pistol into the fray. Roak tucked into a ball, his armored back to the group of Edgers.
The pistol exploded and the passageway was filled with pained screams and yells of agony as KL09 shrapnel tore through the Edgers. Roak didn’t hesitate. He untucked and began firing again with the H16, changing out the spent magazine for a new one when the weapon powered down. He kept firing until the rest of the Edgers, including the wounded, were dead as the Dornopheous Roak had left in pieces behind him.
