by Kal Spriggs
“We'll fight with them,” I snapped.
“Fine,” he spat, a big wet blob that landed at my feet. “I'll remember that... and you.” He and his group edged sideways, backing to the crowd for a bit, before they turned and ran.
Jonna stopped spinning her cord and pulled the stone out of it. She nodded at her fellows, and all six of them dashed off into the crowd, passing Ted and I without stopping. She came forward alone and looked Ted and I over. “Well,” she walked around me and Ted, her blue eyes taking us in. “Escaped slaves?”
I didn't answer. Apparently, that was answer enough. “You'd better get rid of your slave implants or you'll be dead in the street.”
“We blocked the signal,” I answered.
“Hmmm, so smart slaves or else your masters have a cruel sense of humor and they're playing with you,” She finished her circuit and paused in front of us. “You're so new you still sound like outsiders, if your accents were any thicker, I'd think you were farmers.”
I didn't think I had any kind of accent. Hers and Francis's were harsh and they spoke in a rapid fashion, the words coming so fast I'd barely understood them. I didn't say that though. “We're not from this world.”
“I got that,” she laughed. She had a remarkably throaty laugh, one that made the tension ease between my shoulder blades. “Do you know where you're going?”
“Ideally,” I hesitated, shooting a glance at Ted, “we want to get to the spaceport and get home.”
“You wouldn't make it,” she snorted. “You need the right visa on your implant for that and you can't even bribe the guards there. The system only allows you through with the right implants, if you don't have them,” she make a clicking noise with her tongue. “You don't get far.”
There's got to be a way around that.
“You can find out yourself,” she said it in a relaxed tone, “head that way,” she gestured vaguely. “Ten blocks. Of course, that's Crooked Dagger territory, and they won't be too happy with you two right now...”
That could be a problem. I hadn't realized I'd spoken aloud until she replied.
“Francis will keep a grudge. He does that well, better than he runs his gang. That's half of why he's still in charge, he kills anyone who crosses him, even in his own gang.” She shook her head, “The Ragabonds aren't like that.”
“You're their leader?” Ted asked.
“I am,” she nodded. “But we don't give free rides and we don't do charity. You want a place, you pull your weight.”
“I can fight,” I said. I didn't really want to join a gang, especially not one that seemed to have rivalries, but even if we just had a place to rest and time for me to heal, it might be the right decision.
“We don't like to fight, fighting draws attention and we don't need attention,” Jonna waved a hand. Then she pointed at the pick I still held in my hand. “Weapons draw attention, the wrong kind. What about you, big guy, you the strong, silent type?”
Ted flushed, “I, uh, know numbers pretty well.”
“That could be useful. You ever do books?”
Ted snorted, “Yeah. That was why Wes-- that is, why our captors kept me around,” Ted finished.
“That's useful,” Jonna said, “if I can trust you.” Her friendly look vanished, “Because I know numbers too, and if I find you cheating, I'll cut you into pieces.” She said it with such a clinical tone that I didn't doubt her. Ted's face went pale.
She smiled again, “But that's a skill you can pay your way with. And you,” she nodded at me, “you can learn useful skills.” She shrugged, “Alright, follow me.”
She led the way down the alley and paused, as we stood there in the street, “Well?”
We hurried to catch up and I bit back a gasp of pain as my ribs grated against each other. “What about your people?” Ted asked.
“They're going to make sure Francis's Crooked Daggers get back to where they belong,” Jonna answered without looking back at him. “Then they're going to steal from all the vendors that paid him. Because Wastrel Market is mine.” There was an iron-hard note in her voice and if I'd had any doubts about why she was in charge, then her behavior would have cleared them right up.
She led the way down the alley and then we ducked through a narrow section, barely able to walk one after the other. The soggy wet rain dribbled down in streams on us and I started to shiver painfully.
Jonna seemed warm enough. Following just behind her, I could see that her cloak was made of multiple close-sewn patches of different types of cloth, along with bits of metal screen and rings sewn in over different areas. It shed the water well enough, while my gray shirt and pants just seemed to absorb more and more of it, growing heavier as we walked.
We emerged from the alleyway off another boulevard. The buildings on this one seemed lower and there were fewer lights in them. She led the way across the street towards a big, broad structure, and then, to my surprise, down a ladder and into a low tunnel next to it. “These are the old utility tunnels, they run all through the Barrens. You can go just about anywhere… if you know the way.”
We wound through those tunnels for a while. They were dim, with light filtering down through grates every ten meters or so. Occasionally, there wasn’t even any of that and Jonna would pull out a small flashlight, just enough that we could pick our way along. I was barely keeping up at this point and my wheezes sounded loud in my own ears. She paused as we came up to a rusty metal door, set flush with the wall. She turned to look at us. “If you ever tell anyone where the Ragabonds lair is, we'll follow you to the ends of the world.”
I stared at her. I wasn't sure what she even meant. Ted came up next to me, peering near-sightedly at the door and then her, “What?”
“It's our safe place,” Jonna answered. “This one has been Ragabond territory for years. The Red Badges would love to know about it, the Crooked Daggers and the Street Tigers too.”
I didn't know if the Red Badges were police of some kind or another gang. But she'd made some distinction about them. Jonna seemed to sense our confusion, “You two really must be fresh off a slave ship, or some kind of special house slaves. Come on, I'm only going to show you this once.”
She reached under the door, down in a hole below it, and I heard a click as she pulled a lever. The rusty steel door clicked ajar and she reached over and pulled it open. I looked around, it wasn't the only door we’d gone past There had been about a half-dozen others, just in this passageway most of them just as rusty and decrepit in appearance. I tried to memorize which one it was as best as I could.
There were stairs on the other side, leading down into darkness, and Jonna waved us in, before making sure there was no one nearby watching and pulling the door shut behind us. From the silence of it, I guessed she or someone else in her gang had oiled the hinges.
We walked down in darkness, one, two, and finally three flights of stairs. The noise of the city had dropped off to almost nothing at this point.
At the bottom level, she produced her little flashlight, just a tangle of wires with a diode and a power pack, I saw, and shone it on the bottom landing. “This way,” she nodded at the far end. The door down here was just as rusty, and she rapped on it, three sharp bangs, then a pause, and two more. A moment later, I heard bars being pulled back. Then the door slid back on track. A young man, leaning heavily on a metal crutch, awaited us. “Jonna,” he nodded. His eyes went to me and Ted. “Newcomers?” His voice was flat, disinterested.
“Newer than you'd believe, Simon,” Jonna snorted. “These two are joining our merry band. This one,” she gestured at me, “is injured. So I’ll leave him in your care. The other one says he knows numbers, so I’ll take him to look at ours.”
Simon flashed her a strange gesture with his fingers, his pointer and ring fingers spiked and his middle-finger and thumb touching. She flashed it back to him, and then led Ted off. “You got trade goods, fos?” Simon pointed at my satchel.
“Not much,” my hands went protectivel
y to the bag.
“If you have food, we share that here, one goes hungry we all go hungry,” he told me. “Jonna catches you hoarding, she’ll strip your hide and dump you in the streets.” He shrugged, “once you’re fit to work the streets, you share your earnings, but any possessions you have now, other than food, they’re yours.”
I hesitated, but I reached in my satchel and drew out the ration bars. Simon gave a whistle, “Ah, nice. Still sealed... we’ll stash those for a hard day.”
“I thought Jonna said you, that is, we had a deal with the vendors at the market?” I asked.
“Which is well and good if they have things to trade. But living at ground level in the Barrens isn’t easy. The Black Cloaks crack down on available food and sometimes they raid the market and take everything,” Simon led the way away from the doors, limping along on his crutch. I could see that his left leg ended in a stump, just above where his knee should have been.
“Why would they do that?” I asked. I wasn’t sure who the black-coats were, but they didn’t sound nice.
“Who knows?” Simon sneered. “Maybe one of their bosses doesn’t like people being there, or maybe the Black Cloaks just want a bit of fun. They’ll rough up the vendors, run them out of the city. Anyone of military age, they’ll throw in the stockades and ship them out to fight.” He sounded particularly bitter when he said that. He paused and patted his stump, “I’m safe from that, but my brother shipped out, that way. He died at Oberon.”
“Sorry,” I said.
“You didn’t send him there,” Simon growled, “you’ve no reason to be sorry. Unless you’re from Oberon and you killed him?”
I shook my head.
Simon continued his limping gait across the large room. Off to the side, I saw a ramp that presumably led up to the street, but there was a set of heavy doors blocking it off just a few meters along. The chamber looked like it had been a garage or something for ground vehicles, but the ceiling was at least six meters up, though it was hard to tell in the dim light.
The only source of lights came from some flickering fires and a handful of portable lamps scattered here and there.
Simon led the way to a rusted container, two meters tall and about ten meters long. He leaned over the front of it, hiding what he was doing, then straightened up and waved at me, “Give me a hand with the door, fos.”
I winced as I bent over to help him, and I could tell he’d noticed, but he didn’t say anything. Both of us together managed to get the creaking metal door open wide enough for him to slip inside. I caught a flash of light as he stashed the ration bars, then another as he pulled something out. A moment later, he slipped out, holding a ragged cloth sack. “Alright, this will be your food for the day.” He passed me over a couple of strips of dried meat and a roll. “We’ll give your friend his when Jonna’s done with him, fos.”
“What’s that mean?” I asked him.
“Fos?” he asked, looking over at me. When I nodded, he smiled, “Fos is fresh-off-ship. I learned it in the slave-pens. A fos is someone who doesn’t understand how the world works, who thinks things should be different and doesn’t know that you don’t change Drakkus, Drakkus changes you.”
I grimaced at that, but I didn’t argue.
He leaned back against the container’s door, forcing it shut with a groan, then started fiddling with the lock. It seemed to be taking him a while, so I moved out of his way and leaned against the side of the container, trying to ignore the ache of my ribs.
I was staring at the wall, just sort of zoning out, when the wall moved.
I blinked and rubbed at my eyes. I was tired and sore, so I thought that might have caused me to see things... but the wall continued to move. Rather, one section of the wall, sixty centimeters or so in length, shifted and then, a pair of bright blue eyes stared at me... and blinked.
“What the...?” I asked, starting up in shock.
“Just a civet, fos,” Simon laughed at my expression.
The “civet” chittered at me and moved forward. It had a low, wedge-shaped head and bright blue eyes, set forward on its face. Its large head bobbed up and down as it studied me. It rose up on its rear two legs, and it brought its forelegs up in front of it. It had remarkably human-like hands, with four fingers and a thumb, though they were all tipped with sharp-looking claws. The civet interlocked its fingers and its head shifted back and forth, staring at me from all angles.
Then to my surprise, it spoke, “Fos,” it chittered, “Fos, fos, fossss.” It hissed out the words, in a high-pitched, voice.
I’m pretty sure my eyes bulged out and I might have stopped breathing.
Simon howled with laughter and the civet joined in, giggling like a child. “Is it... an alien?” I asked after a long moment.
“Nah, just a civet, fos,” Simon answered. “The pharmas, they brought them when they came. They did some tinkering with them and, well, lots of them got free and did some evolving.” He gave a shrug, “that’s the result. They’re plenty smart, they’re quick, and they’re wicked hard to spot.”
I could understand why. The civet’s gray-spotted fur practically vanished against the gray concrete walls.
“The Black Cloaks view them as pests, try to exterminate them,” Simon sighed. “Then again, they treat us that way too.”
“Black Cloaks bad,” the civet nodded.
“Jonna’s got a soft-spot for them, we share food when we can,” Simon flashed me a smile, “they bring us any loose trinkets they find.”
“They’re thieves?” I asked in shock.
“They climb better than you’d believe, they’re small, so they can get into the most remarkable places. And they have an affinity for shiny things,” Simon grinned. “Isn’t that right?”
“Pretty things,” the civet nodded, “not watched.” He scuttled over to Simon, and produced a variety of small items from inside a small pouch it wore, tied across its belly where I hadn’t really noticed it, and began to lay the items out on the ground. A couple of them were Imperial Marks, I saw, probably money left out where one could reach it. There was a comm unit, and then various random bits of shiny metal or bright-colored plastic. Simon in turn laid out a loaf of bread and some of the dried meat. “Fair?” he asked it.
The civet took the food and seemed to consider the exchange, before taking back a few of the brighter-colored scraps of plastic. “Fair,” the civet took a moment to secure its trade goods back in its pouch. Then, faster than I could follow, it turned and bounded away, catching onto the wall at head-height and climbing out of sight in the shadows above.
“How smart are they?” I asked. Trading certainly seemed a lot more intelligent than I would have expected for something that people considered them “vermin.”
Simon shot me a smile, “Smarter than the average fos.” I rolled my eyes at that and he shrugged, “Dunno. Not like we got any tests for them. They live off the streets, same as us.” He grinned at me, “How smart are you, fos?”
I didn’t really know how to answer that. Everything of Simon’s behavior was a little too bitter and mocking to make me comfortable giving him any more information about me.
He watched me, his dark eyes glittering in the faint, flickering light. “Smart enough to keep your mouth shut, maybe you’re smarter than a civet, eh?” He smirked. “Come on, let’s go see Jonna, she’s probably finished showing your friend the numbers.”
***
Chapter 11: Maybe I’m Not Smarter Than A Civet
We went to see the doc sometime later in the day. Or maybe it was early the next day, it was too hard to keep track of time in the dim-lit chamber that the Ragabonds called home.
Like before, Jonna led us, setting a brisk pace that left me huffing for breath and wincing at every step. We wound through various streets and alleys, pausing now and then to avoid a ground vehicle and once ducking into a fire-gutted building while a black skimmer rumbled by overhead. When I looked at her, Jonna mouthed, “Red Badges.”
&n
bsp; The skimmer passed and we emerged from the ruin, heading down more streets until we came to an even more dilapidated part of the city. The gray buildings here seemed to be coated with grime and the rain water in the street floated by with hazy, rainbow colors of oils and more exotic things. Pungent smells like rotting garbage and harsh chemical scents assaulted my nostrils. Jonna led the way up a rickety iron staircase onto the roof of a low building, then through a rusty, creaking door.
Down the corridor, we came to a much more solid barrier. This door was new, the steel surface clearly armored. A display lit up as we approached and various monitors around it glowed, sensing our presence.
“It’s me, Jonna,” she said.
“Who’s that with you?” A booming voice demanded.
“Two fos escaped slaves,” she answered. “Come to see what you can do.”
“Step forward,” the booming voice demanded.
Ted and I stepped forward. I could see a medical scanner above the door, and I felt the hair on my arms rise as it scanned me. So much for medical privacy...
“They got some special tech in them,” the booming voice noted.
“We had to make it so they couldn’t send a kill command to our implants,” I answered. Compared to my ribs, the bruising on the back of my neck didn’t hurt so bad.
“Interesting,” the voice murmured. “Very well. You can enter.”
The door slid aside, its motion so smooth and silent that I wondered at the dilapidated state of the exterior of the building. We stepped into what looked like a waiting room, though there were no displays or anything else to entertain anyone waiting. There were a pair of big, muscle-bound guards, a man and a woman, both of them wearing heavy body-armor and full face masks. I was tall, when I wasn’t stooped over in pain, but these two stood over two meters in height and either one of them was big enough to physically block the doorway. They stood, facing the doorway we’d entered and they had a number of weapons slung, ready for violence. Neither of them acknowledged us whatsoever, their attention clearly focused on security.
