“You’re know about this?” she demanded.
“Some. Not all. Not until today. The missing visitor bears an uncanny resemblance to Oso, and this man—” Dillal added, pointing at Matheson—“my IAD, my hound, your lover—was one of those troops.”
“We didn’t know,” Matheson murmured. “I didn’t know.”
Dillal started to squat beside him then winced again—Aya hadn’t done any lasting damage, but it was enough for a few hours’ discomfort. He sat on his knees instead and spoke in a scathing tone. “Explain to me what you didn’t know.”
Matheson uncurled a little. His posture was the mirror of Dillal’s but he shivered and stared at the white pebbles of the garden as if they had become the violet mud of Camp Donetti.
His voice was hollow. “We were told it was a training op. Live, but insignificant. Legal. We didn’t know where we were going or what was going to happen. We were one of many units inbound. I don’t know how many. It’s a blur—a nightmare I had for a while, then lost, and found again when I got here. I don’t remember . . .”
“How is it that you don’t remember?”
“Maybe I didn’t want to. Maybe it’s just . . . We scrambled through so many jumps, trans-orbitals, warp bubbles . . . By the time we were boots down we were all jumpwise.” Matheson took several slow breaths, his posture loosening slightly. He shook his head. “Now . . . seeing that . . . I remember pieces—the push, losing my sideman . . .” his expression crumpled into confusion, and his breath and voice shook as he continued, “stepping over a downed man. But I don’t know what I did to him. I remember water and shock sticks and screaming. I don’t remember the chase-down. I remember kneeling, though I don’t know why I did it. I don’t even know how long—” He raised his head to look at Dillal. “How long was it?”
“Forty-eight minutes.”
Matheson shook his head, his gaze drifting to a distant point. “It’s a blank. Days’ worth of blank. I don’t remember forty-eight minutes or how long we were in transit, or even the date we left Fresnel.”
“FSA,” Dillal added. “Fresnel Security Academy. That was the insignia of the officer who retrieved you.”
Matheson nodded. “There were three training officers . . . I woke up in the academy medical unit, told I’d taken a fall. I didn’t have a head wound, didn’t feel concussed, but I couldn’t remember what had happened.” He shuddered and took a long, settling breath. His gaze refocused on Dillal’s face and his voice was stronger when he continued. “I had nightmares for a while—I told myself that’s all they were—but they stopped. When I got to Gattis, I started feeling like I was under constant surveillance, like there was something wrong just out of sight, but . . . I thought it was the system, the oppression, the bigotry, or maybe even the signs of my family’s tendency to stick their fingers into planetary pies and stir until the shit rises. But it’s not them, this time. It’s me.”
Matheson felt wrung out and slightly dazed. He watched Dillal get to his feet and pace stiffly until he had to stop and lean against the door. He’d missed the cause, but from the look of it, the inspector had been hit in the nuts. Matheson winced sympathetically.
Dillal scowled at him for a while. “It’s not you,” he said, “though I wish I could say that it was.”
Matheson felt less kindly about the egg-scrambling, and he wouldn’t argue his own condemnation, so he stayed where he was.
Aya shifted a chilly stare between him and Dillal and came to her feet like a storm cloud rising. “Now you’re neither blame nor defend him? Why? And why you’re do nothing when this’s happened?”
The inspector snorted and a flicker of disgust crossed the right side of his face. “I, too, was in training. I had no authority then and there is little enough I can do even now. What I can do I am doing.”
“And that’s what?”
“Finding the men who murdered your neighbors. Including Tchintaka if he is responsible. As he was responsible for this fiasco today and what happened at Camp Donetti—your darling revolutionary was there.”
“How you’re sure?”
Dillal pointed at the Peerless MDD still lying on the white stones. “I have the testimony of that recording, and of the files. He was there. He incited the riot that left one-hundred eighteen people dead! What more would sixteen in a jasso matter against his glorious, stupid dreams of revolution?”
Matheson’s stomach clenched.
“You’re not know he’s t’blame for Paz,” Aya objected.
“No, but you believe it yourself or you wouldn’t have turfed him to Matheson. Don’t worry,” he added in an acid tone, “I’ll not arrest him until I’m certain. But I will find out, and if it is him, I will take him.”
They were oblivious of Matheson, locked in their mutual spite as he crouched there, unsure of his own claim on innocence. They’ll turn on me if I get between them. And I might deserve it.
Aya snarled at her brother. “For your own dreams? Your own anger?”
“Anger is my natural state,” Dillal responded. “It’s why I am as I am—what I am. It’s how I’ve survived. You are as responsible as I am for the monster you believe me to be.”
“I?” she replied, raising her eyebrows. “I’m do nothing to you!”
“Nothing?” Dillal’s tone was nearly too bitter to bear. “Leaving a child of mixed race alone in the Ohbata is a death sentence. You hadn’t the fire in you then to bash in my head, so you left it to someone else.”
“I’m a child—alone! My parents’re dead—”
“As were mine. But you have a community, a place, clan and kind. I have a grandfather who wishes me dead and a sister who gave me to him.”
“Not for that! And you’re alive, still.”
“Because I’m too stubborn to die, and I’ve too much yet to do.”
“To find who’s kill my neighbors, or to chase th’ambition you’re give your eye for? Is Dreihleen who’re leave here, Dreihleen who’re under the boot of the Corporation’s own you, Djepe. Not ulfeshté like you.”
The heat of Dillal’s anger drained away and, even at a distance, Matheson felt chilled as the inspector’s fury turned cold. Aya’s anger faded to horror as her words hung in the silence between them.
Quietly, Dillal said, “I am half Dreihle and no one owns me. You know nothing of my ambition, Aya.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Day 5: Afternoon into Evening
Dillal regarded his sister with a somber gaze. “You think so little of me that you find it hard to believe I have a motive other than my own advantage. That anyone who is not pure Dreihleen bleeds as you do. You listen to Tchintaka’s rhetoric—that those who are red and those who are yellow are equally oppressed—yet still cling to your bigotry like a drowning man clings to the wreckage that will drag him under.
“The color of my skin doesn’t matter. I bleed the same as you—from the same injury, the same hate and fear. This system devours its own young. It’s broken and can’t be fixed by spitting in the Corporation’s face. Bloody revolution is a romantic notion, but one doomed to failure. Violence only plays into the hands of Corporation House and gives it justification to destroy us—justification Tchintaka gave them at Donetti, and then he slunk away to hide when his plans went wrong. Once begun, the purge will only spread, until not a single native Gattian remains alive whose skin is not blue. Perhaps I am beloved of none and born to die, but I will at least make this life count.”
“You’re one man,” Aya started. “How—”
“How?” Dillal interrupted. “By subterfuge. By whispering in the giant’s ear, gaining its trust, and then slitting its throat while its back is turned. This system’s destruction is my ambition, not to become the master of it as Tchintaka dreams,” he shot a glance at Matheson, who’d almost thought himself forgotten, “nor hand it, drenched in innocent blood, to new overlords as Central System would do. This is why I’ve done everything I’ve done since . . . since Agria.” He directed his gaze to the
rooftop gravel and fell silent as if he had said something he hadn’t meant to.
Shaken from his own thoughts, Matheson frowned. “Agria?”
“I trained there. Agria Corps. GISA Internment Control from the age of sixteen.”
Matheson studied the inspector as the humid afternoon wind swept over the rooftop with a stink of destruction and the rattle of sweep transports incoming. “You’re a subversive. A bigger idealist than I am.” And likely no more innocent. I see. “You’re a deeper, darker revolutionary than Aya.”
Dillal glanced at him and shrugged. “More practical, perhaps. No less hopeful.”
Matheson got slowly to his feet. “That,” he said, pointing at Dillal’s face. “That’s how—that’s why you chose to undergo . . . all of that.”
The inspector gave a particularly bitter smile. “Yes.” He touched the bloody mark under his left eye and ran his finger along the new patch of spray skin that covered the edge of the prosthetic frame. “This is my weapon and my lock pick—my way into the system that refuses to let anyone more colored than a blue sand beach rise above the bottom tier. I have broken myself, given up everything else so that I can burrow under the skin of the beast and turn it against itself. I didn’t expect . . . this,” he added with a small gesture between them. “Nor to have so little time to try.” He paused to rub behind his left ear and up the back of his neck, wincing and shaking his head as if an insect had bitten him.
“If I can’t persuade Pritchet that today’s demonstration is unconnected to Paz and Camp Donetti, he’ll have little choice but to let Corporation House do as it will here,” he continued. “If we can’t arrest—or at least name—the men who perpetrated the massacre at the Paz da Sorte before the Ohbata connection becomes common knowledge, the corporation will have its excuse to expand its action to all the ghettos. It will no longer matter that everything they’ve done to the Ohba and the Dreihleen is illegal. Troops will descend like the monsoon, and the charter’s promises of equal shares to the native races will be nothing but a puzzle for future scholars to argue over.”
Matheson stiffened, electrified with the connection that had finally come together in his mind. “The charter . . . Neme mentioned it, and Santos said ‘the charter is the problem’ and I didn’t get it. The Dreihleen and Ohba are also native—or as native as you can get on a terraformed planet. The Corporation oppresses them, encourages the idea that they’re immigrant workers, and tries to imprison or kill them so they won’t have to pay reparations when the charter’s reviewed in eight years!”
Dillal gave a small nod. “Yes.”
Aya frowned at Dillal and said nothing. He turned his discomfiting stare to her. “I could have stayed in Agria.”
She shifted her gaze aside, looking at the white pebbles on the roof, then at the mobile lying on them. She picked it up, turning it over and over in her hands before she stopped to stare at the display again. It was still frozen on the image of Matheson with the lavender hues of blood-soaked mud covering everything, every face and body, every weapon. She shut her eyes and turned her head away from it.
Miserable self-hatred chilled Matheson as he realized that she was refusing to look at him. She turned to her brother. “Is better you’re not.” Her jaw tightened. “I’m . . . can’t like you. Can’t change so quick as you’re want me to. But I’m try.”
Dillal stared at her, his expression keen with some difficult emotion. He closed his hands into fists at his sides, and then he looked away, breathing harshly. “You won’t fail. You’re too strong.”
Then he turned toward Matheson with an irritable jerk of his head, hissing through his teeth. “That noise . . .” he muttered, touching the back of his left ear again.
A cloud of black-winged macaws rushed screeching into the hot air under the warbling of prox alarms. Dillal’s gaze flashed up, over Matheson’s head to the sky just above the rooftops. He looked horrified. “No . . .”
Matheson and Aya turned as the next sound hit—a whining roar and crash that shook the building under them. A white transport with GISA’s orange star-and-stripe down the side bucked and wallowed in the sky, one engine cowl ripped open and spewing smoke. The spinning duct tore itself to pieces around the stabilizing strut of a much smaller package drone. The horrific vision Matheson had every time he went aloft on Gattis hung in front of him for a moment as the smaller craft was flung groundward in smoking chunks.
He stared, startled from his self-recrimination and aghast as the larger transport groaned and shuddered into a wing-over. It plunged toward the canal. A hard grip on his arm shook him, and he looked down at the inspector, who yanked him toward the door.
“It’s sweep transport.”
“What?” Matheson asked, still too stunned to think clearly.
“Prisoner transport,” Dillal shouted as he yanked Matheson into the stairwell. “The Dreihleen swept up by the riot unit are in that lifter.”
Matheson’s “Shit!” went unheard as the building heaved and shuddered under the rolling impact of the transport hitting ground outside. He almost fell down the stairs following the inspector out to the street. His muscles and bruises protested, but he ignored them and ran toward Yshteppa Park.
The transport had hit upside down and gouged a shallow trench at the edge of the sloping lawn. A long line of goldwoods and grass leading to the canal edge had been ripped out before the skidding transport had hit the side of the bridge and spun into the water. One stubby stabilizer was crushed into the bridge structure and the vehicle had jammed cabin-down under the water’s mucky surface. The exposed belly of the transport was blackened, but intact—no one would be crawling out of it through any lucky holes. If anyone was still alive inside, they’d have no option but swimming out.
A milling crowd of cits and tourists was already gathering along the opposite side of the canal. More people rushed to the edges of the accident track and closed in on the wreckage from the Dreihleat side. Matheson reached for his mobile, but it was still in the loft with Aya. The riot unit would have to call it in.
Matheson ran as fast as his aches would allow and got to the canal edge with the first of the mob. Dirty, bloodied civilians shouted and ran up and down the length of the wreck, looking for survivors or a way in. Matheson didn’t pause. He kicked off his shoes and dove for the water, sucking in less air than usual as his bruised ribs protested.
He hadn’t swum in months and he was sore but there was no other option. It was dark under the transport’s bulk and the sunlight didn’t penetrate far in water that was cloudy with blue sand and garbage. He kicked down and saw movement in the flickering illumination behind the transport’s transparent front plate.
Matheson swam to the window. Water was only half way up the cabin interior—so some of the emergency seals were intact, but not all, and anyone inside didn’t have a lot of time left to get out. Once the doors were open, the transport would flood quickly. He pounded on the window, and something bobbed against the clear plate. A boot . . . a leg . . . Merry hell. The pilot was still strapped in, head down below the rising water.
An SO in standard uniform—no riot gear, no helmet—struggled in his direction from deeper in the cabin, blood running down the side of his head and face as he stumbled and fell in the water. The SO dragged himself back up on the inverted pilot seat and scrabbled at the window in panic. He made a “help me” gesture. Then he pointed down and drew his thumb across his throat.
Matheson’s lungs tightened with a need for air. He tried to make a reassuring gesture, but he wasn’t sure the man inside understood him. He turned, swam toward the transport’s nearest door, and grabbed the handle. It twisted and the hatch moved a little. Then it jammed in the warped frame. The pressure to breathe increased as he tried to force the hatch open. Bracing his feet on either side of it, he yanked upward as he pushed hard for the surface, every muscle in his bruised back screaming.
He felt the door wrench farther open as he shot upward, toward the chopped and scattered l
ight. He didn’t know if it was enough or if the man in the pilot cabin—or anyone else inside—could get out before the transport filled with water.
He broke the surface and gasped for air. His chest felt ablaze from the ache of his ribs and the burn of carbon dioxide in his lungs. He thrashed in the water, trying to orient himself, and spotted the inspector and Aya near the bridge. They ran toward his position, pushing people out of the way.
Three Dreihleen splashed to the surface nearby, up from the transport below. Then they paddled blindly toward the nearest way out of the canal. A body in GISA riot gear floated into the wake of their motion. More Dreihleen surfaced as Matheson swam for the verge.
Dillal knelt down and pulled him from the water. Matheson hadn’t expected the strength of his grip and winced as the inspector’s hand closed on his bruised forearm. Matheson shook his head. “Pilot’s dead. Not sure how many left down there. Door’s jammed partially open. Cabin’s flooding.”
“Can you go back down?”
“Not long,” Matheson admitted. He panted and struggled against desperation and imminent failure. “Bruised ribs—can’t breathe deep. Someone’s gotta go in. Can’t wait on extraction, now the door’s open.”
Dillal looked toward the Dreihleen gathered along the canal, but they began scattering as a team of SOs ran toward them from the south side of the park. He muttered something under his breath and stripped off his coat, shouting, “Aya! Dive!”
Blood Orbit_A Gattis File Novel Page 29
