Blood Orbit_A Gattis File Novel

by K. R. Richardson

  Matheson hadn’t noticed the crowd thickening and slowing until he couldn’t move forward without elbowing the people around him. They glared at him with more open annoyance than he’d seen from Dreihleen before. One or two seemed familiar—from the coffee house? Most of the bystanders were as tall or taller than Matheson, blocking his view of all but the top of the obstruction—a banner that bore the “Relief, Redress, Revolt!” pictograms in bright red and the fleeting view of a man’s head and hands as he spoke to the crowd.

  “. . . Equality among all races of Gattis!” the man was saying. The man’s voice was clear and easy to hear.

  Matheson frowned. He’s loud. Odd among people with such an unusual way of speaking and so quietly that Matheson often had to lean in to hear them and pay close attention to every word. He didn’t see an amplifier. Was this another trick of what the inspector had called “the long breath”? He craned his neck and tried to figure out how the man was doing it.

  “We’re not as worthy as any blue-skinned man or woman?” the speaker continued.

  A few muttered answers came from the crowd, but the audience seemed unsure if they should agree or disagree.

  “We’re less human than people who’re live on the Quay?”

  Now a few of the crowd answered back, “No,” and Matheson blinked at the direct reply. They never just say “no” or “yes.”

  The speaker asked them again, “Are we less human?” He wasn’t saying anything that other rabble-rousers and street corner preachers didn’t, but the man’s passionate sincerity seemed to infect everyone near him. Was this the man Venn had listened to?

  The crowd answered louder, more sure of themselves, “No.”

  “We’re less worthy of fruits of our labor?” This guy doesn’t lock his jaw and they haven’t noticed. But they wouldn’t, because he had them in the palm of his hand.

  “No!”

  Disquiet stirred the hair at the back of Matheson’s neck and he stood quite still. He watched what he could see of the speaker, and studied the crowd without turning his head.

  “Our parents and grandparents—all our ancestors from before First Settlement worked hard as anyone for this planet, heh?”

  “Yes!”

  “They’re build this whole, mighty planet of wonders from Pillars of Archon to Verdan Archipelago, from vast plains of Agria to Exley Trench.” The speaker spread his arms in the air as if he could hold the whole of Gattis in their compass. The crowd shifted and looked upward as if they, too, could see the whole world arrayed in the span of his arms.

  In the gap, Matheson finally caught a full view of the speaker: standing on a small cargo crate, a Dreihle man no taller than average but with the look and presence of a stalking lion—and eyes that gleamed and glittered like Aya’s did. For just a second, the speaker seemed to look right at Matheson before his gaze moved on from face to face, his mouth turning up in the smallest of smiles.

  The man continued, “They’re build this by sweat and toil. We should have less right to fruits of that labor—our labor—than blues and system hoppers and shashen investors?”

  Every Dreihle in the crowd rumbled now, “No!”

  “Is’t right that color of our skin’s dictate our fate?”

  “No!”

  The speaker continued, faster, inflaming the crowd, “Our children should be denied education because they’re yellow, or red?”

  “No!” the crowd shouted and Matheson cringed at the unlikely sound. They’re like the Suvilen—they’ve thrown off who they normally are.

  The speaker barely paused for their reply. “Our young men’re turned slaves or criminals t’get by, our mothers and daughters t’servants and whores?”

  “No!”

  “This impropriety, this inequality, this immorality’s forced on us by unfair laws, created by politicians and businessmen who’re not of Gattis, enforced by weight of arms carried by foreigners and mercenaries—”

  Cold certainty enfolded Matheson and he turned to work his way toward the edge of the volatile crowd. Every move he made brought dark, angry gazes to bear on him, and the nearest clear space seemed too far away.

  “—whose only purpose is t’hold us down!”

  “Yes!” the audience shrieked. All but those who stared at Matheson as he struggled to break out of their midst.

  The creeping edge of panic tightened his chest as he pushed forward.

  “We’re not lie down! We’re not be held down! Pushed down t’be raped and murdered and trampled like mud in the streets!”

  “No!”

  “We’re lie down anymore?”

  “No!”

  “Will we lie down?”

  “NO!”

  “Then rise up!”

  Matheson could hear the orator plainly even with his back turned and the growing mutter of the crowd around him. The sound sent a chill of dread over him, and the feeling of something he’d willfully forgotten writhed like a snake in the back of his mind.

  “YES!”

  “Rise up for relief! Demand redress! And when we’re bear no more, revolt!”

  The Dreihleen in the street let out a collective shriek of mob rapture that cut across Matheson’s caution like a whip. The nearest people turned and grabbed for him . . .

  Matheson swore and bolted, shoving people aside in a panic to break free. The unclear memory of something awful goaded him.

  “This is live, cadets! This exercise is live! Keep your helmets on, keep your shields up! Go, go, go!”

  They rush the doors, orderly, but fast, jumping the short gap to the ground and swarming forward, thrusting the crowd away with the force of interlocking shields and strong young bodies. It’s noisy as a bell tower in hell. His head rings and his vision narrows, discolored and jittery. He has no idea where they are, only that bodies under angry, shouting faces press against them—tall and short, thin and stout . . . so many, and all resisting their push, pushing back, battering at the shields with strange tools, and shouting. Shouting that quickly turns to screaming as they plant their shields on the ground, forming a wall, and aim through the ports in the interconnected plates.

  Electricity cracks the air, ozone and burned flesh stinks in his nostrils. The crowd falls back, the stunned staggering away or being dragged by their nearest companions. The cadets raise shields and thrust forward, making headway through the human tide.

  A pole thrusts through the port on his left, jabbing into his sideman’s arm and sending the other cadet backward. He cannot hear his sideman cry out in the noise. The cadet beyond the fallen man discharges his stun baton at the person holding the pole and takes a step right. He takes a step left, locking the shield edges together again. The squad moves forward, shoving the pole bearer back until the man falls over, vanishing into the churning crowd.

  The cadets surge forward. He feels softness under his feet and spares a reeling glance downward. He’s walking on the fallen pole bearer. His stomach heaves, but it doesn’t have to be because he’s stepping on another human being. They’ve done three jumps in a day and the final orbital fall to—wherever in hell they are. He is disoriented, fatigued . . . jumpwise. They haven’t stopped since sunup to do more than suit up and launch. Jumpwise, that’s all it is. He pushes onward.

  They all push onward.

  The crowd resists. Someone brings a water cannon to bear, trying to hose the cadets back. They plant their shields, crouching and bracing against the pulse of water. A cadet drops a shock baton into the puddle and a chorus of new screams erupts from the crowd. They must be wearing leather shoes—or no shoes at all. He doesn’t know. Only that the insulated soles of his own boots protect him.

  He pushes forward, into the shouting, the crack of electricity, the stink, and the churning, sucking mud until his head is reeling. He can barely see—everything seems to swim and waver in his vision, turning colorless and cold—and he hears nothing but roaring silence and the taut crack of static up his limbs that stabs at his brain.

  H
e doesn’t remember planting the shield, doesn’t know why he does it, but he feels the ground against his shins, so they must be bracing again . . . Then the world swings and the ground kisses his face with azure mud blood stained the color of ripe plums. His vision narrows and darkens . . .

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Day 5: Morning into Afternoon

  Matheson ran, not back toward Aya’s, but toward the canal—into the open where he stood a chance. He wasn’t sure he could stay ahead of the mob. His heart beat too fast and his adrenaline was burning out after the shock of the crowd’s turn and the terrible flash of shattered memory. His broken nose forced him to suck in mouthfuls of the humid air, thick with the stink of slow water and floating garbage. He cut across a corner of the park, then angled through the grove of goldwoods and toward Southern Star Canal—he’d swim the pestilential thing if he had to.

  He swung around the door of the GISA checkpoint at the lock. Closed! No easy call for help and no easy way through. He’d have to take the bridge.

  He didn’t waste time to swear, but switched back through another section of the goldwood grove that cut across the mob’s path. The crowd was falling off, but it was still a dozen or more. They formed a line to cut him off. Shit. Shit! Can’t outrun them . . . He was flagging and the Dreihleen had the advantage of righteous indignation. He had only his fear.

  He whipped left and down the steep, grassy bank that fell back toward the canal below the lock. He ducked, hoping he was far enough ahead to be out of sight for a moment, and threw himself at the staircase that led down to the footbridge. He leapt and caught the ornamental bars, hauled himself, shoulders aching and bruises screaming, into the sub-deck where the old lift mechanism had been before the recent rebuild. He drew his legs in and lay flat against the metal sub-deck, trying to slow his panting and shaking. He squeezed his eyes shut and held his breath as long as he could. It was foolish, but he was already playing the fool and he thought if he could make the blackness behind his eyelids dark enough, he might blot out the jagged fragments of memory that tore at him.

  But, since the memories came from darkness, they played more vividly on his closed eyelids. As he shivered through the assault again, his pursuers passed him, clattering up the stairs over his head and across the canal, the din echoing in his head as the pounding of boots and the screams of the phantom mob as they fell. It just kept going. Over and over. Unreasoning terror held him rigid. Don’t find me, don’t find me . . .

  He lay still in the sub-deck until quiet finally claimed his attention. The air had grown thick and felt too warm to breathe. The bridge deck above him had given up its morning cool. He listened, afraid to move and give himself away, but there was no sound of the angry mob milling near his hiding place.

  He slithered out and fell gracelessly to the ground, too sore and too drained to manage a better exit. How long . . . ? He shot furtive glances over his shoulders. No one near. In the distance he could still hear sounds of anger and saw rising columns of smoke—though he could barely smell it. He didn’t make a move toward it.

  The sun was well up and the air was hot and thick, insects rising off the canal in motes that spiraled on the updraft from the hot metal bridge. He thought of Santos talking about the ramp-up in riot response and hoped the Dreihleen would wise up and disperse before—

  The whine and hollow echo of incoming riot control squads cut into his thoughts. Matheson shuddered at the nightmare they brought back in slashes of memory. He checked his mobile. One message: Dreihleat West Gate Bridge Closure. He’d been cowering under it for almost an hour and had only ten minutes left to get out.

  His muscles quivered with post-adrenaline crash and burned from bruising and abuse as he crossed the bridge out of the Dreihleat. Now he had seen the deep well of rage that tortured Con Robesh and simmered in Dreihleen silence and sideways glances.

  He stepped off the bridge and paused at the stone markers at the edge of the ghetto. Then he looked back. No one followed or waited for him. His paranoia for the past weeks hadn’t been without cause—it just hadn’t been the one he’d imagined. He lifted his gaze toward Rua dos Peixes. Aya. Is she safe? Then laughter as bitter as water poppy choked him. The men she’d named must have been among that mob. Whether she’d known what would happen or not, she was safer without a “shashen mercenary” in her home—especially one who couldn’t remember exactly what terrible thing he’d done somewhere or sometime.

  The gate alarm gonged and the staunch metal gratings grumbled into motion. Matheson turned and walked away from the Dreihleat and the gate ground closed behind him.

  He made his shaky way to a café that lacked a view of the canal and sat down to straighten himself out. His thoughts were tangled and terrifying. There was something lurking in his own mind that he didn’t understand but the incoming tide of it was familiar and it reeked of devastation and ruin. He rubbed his hands over his face, wincing as his fingers passed over the scab in his eyebrow and pressed on his recently broken nose. Gattis was cutting him into pieces and throwing those pieces back like knives. But the place had set its hooks in him, as Aya and the Dreihleat and Dillal had also, and something even more horrific hid in the shadow of the Paz da Sorte investigation.

  The health center’s autopsy room had the distinction of a colored angelstone floor. Whether it was cast that way or had somehow shifted color, this particular floor was a pinkish gray—the color of macerated brain tissue—all the way through. The area beneath Dr. Andreus’s work was dotted with red for the time being, but it would be as smooth and unmarked as the rest of the otherwise empty room once it was hosed off.

  Dillal stood on one side of the table and the doctor on the other. She leaned back, working her shoulders as if they were stiff, and rested her weight on the counter behind her. She looked up from Santos’s body lying open between them, and cast an assessing gaze over the inspector. “I don’t know who I’ll have to cremate first—him or you.”

  Dillal didn’t raise his gaze from the body. “He has family awaiting the remains.”

  “I meant, you’re not so far from being on this table yourself, inspector.”

  “You exaggerate.”

  “And we’ll both know how much when you let me get a look at that. Don’t think I haven’t noticed that you’re keeping the corpse in between us.”

  “I did mention I had a problem, but he is of greater importance in the moment.”

  “No. Your reason for existing is guys like this and if you die at this point, what happened to him and those sixteen people in the Dreihleat will just keep on happening.” Her voice was sharp with annoyance. “You have to survive this or there won’t be any further Forensic Integration Project—and I’ve worked too long and too hard to let you sink it with your belief in your own infallible immortality.”

  “There will be no further FIP if I don’t solve this case, either. Which I cannot do if you won’t tell me what you’ve discovered.”

  Andreus rolled her eyes. “Spare me the disingenuousness. You may not know the particulars, but you must have picked up the trace at the scene. I’m not flattered to be used as a blind.”

  “It was necessary or more people may die. ForTech is not secure and information has already gotten out that never should have. There’s a woman dead in the Ohbata because of it.”

  Andreus glared at him. “How do you know?”

  Dillal looked disgusted. “It could be a coincidence that she was the one who supplied the ammunition used at the Paz da Sorte, that she was shot with the same type of weapon, and that her DNA was identified in my lab only a few hours before. It is possible. If you believe in coincidence.”

  “It doesn’t have to be a conspiracy, inspector, only a villain covering his tracks.”

  “That’s all any of this is,” Dillal snapped. “This system is nothing but villains covering their tracks. That’s what brought you here.”

  “Not to hide,” she shot back.

  “No, you don’t hide much, do you, doct
or? There’s a straight and bloody line of your work from Marshel to Kora to here.” Dillal pointed at his gleaming left eye.

  Andreus leaned across Santos’s body and slapped Dillal’s hand aside. He wasn’t quick enough to turn out of the way and his fingernail cut across the welt that had developed under his eye. Sticky red pus splattered across the wall beside him. He flinched and took a step back.

  The doctor walked around the table, glaring at him, and pushed him against the wall. Her angry gaze swept his face and then she stepped back. “Well, lucky you—it’s only an abscess right now. But you’re slowing down and that’s not a good sign. Six weeks ago you would have caught my wrist and broken it before I had time to touch you. Tell me how this happened.”

  Dillal gave her a wary look. “I’ve told you I have a problem.”

  “Not like this!” She glowered at him and then settled back slightly. “All right, let’s make a deal, here. We’re both heartless bastards and we’re not friends, but we aren’t and shouldn’t be enemies. Neither of us can weather a failure here. Neither of us wants to see this world in flames, and I believe we have some goals in common—though why you give half a damn what happens to these people after what they’ve done to you and yours is anyone’s fragging guess. So this is my proposal. First—stop screwing with me. I’m your surgeon, I’m your ally, and I’m not going to go grass on you. Second—take proper care of the work I’ve done. You want this as much or more than I do and I’ve put a phenomenal advantage into your hands, so treat it with some respect. Third—when you need help that I can render, don’t maneuver and manipulate me, fragging ask. Because if this relationship breaks down to a grudge match we will both lose. I did not slog through three different wars, blood, bullets, and bodies, medical and military tribunals, and dodge death squads to lose! Not this time.”