by Ginger Booth
In its infancy, the Northern League managed to exterminate billions of people. And apparently it lasted two centuries now, successor to the twentieth century Great Powers.
“The boat people are independent,” Three-Eight continued. “Miniature floating family domes, stragglers. Ruled by organized crime.” The werewolf didn’t bother to veil his contempt. “The stragglers here are nothing but failed experiments, subhuman. Is that what you wanted to know, about what happened to Earth since the Diaspora?”
Unheard by anyone else, Fidget clarified, “Someone feeds him information.”
“I see,” Clay replied aloud. “And Killingfield Dome answers to?”
“Pontiac. In Quebec. Indirectly. Killingfield is only a small town.”
“Which must do as Pontiac dictates,” Clay guessed bitterly.
“Mostly we fly under the radar, unnoticed, unimportant. Unfortunately today we’ve caught their rapt attention.”
“I’d like to ask you to leave now.” Clay transfered his napkin to the table in deliberate slow motion, and stood.
“That won’t help you,” Three-Eight informed him grimly. “Or any of us, really.”
20
The Northern League resorted to engineering catastrophes.
Sass came to a skidding halt at a roadblock in the corridor, as a grade’s worth of children filed out of a cafeteria. Four-One knocked into her back, almost sending her into the flock of kids. They milled around, silent and smiling, and linked hands to walk in the halls. They looked to be about eight-year-olds, if she remembered the size correctly.
Sass had seen preternaturally well-behaved children like this once before. Their teacher had his back turned, issued no orders, no warnings. The kids appeared normal human, no metal skull bands, no furry ears. But they were under thrall somehow. She gulped. Her maternal instinct desperately wanted to grab a child to take along. She’d figure out how to restore him to boisterousness, then return to liberate the others.
But no, these children didn’t belong to her.
They’d descended a couple stories since the open-dome plaza. Roof-tops were no longer an option, and this was a long corridor to double back.
“Cut through here,” Four-One said urgently, opening a door to the side. Unlike most, this wasn’t a slider, but a hinged glass door with big red letters, AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. He set off a whooping alarm, though not the red hall lights and warbles.
Sass reflected that she’d been in this dome too long if she could tell the alarms apart. She cast one last glance over her shoulder at the kids. None even looked behind at the loud alarm. Two girls near the back of the line swung their joined hands rhythmically and hummed a song.
She turned and ran to catch up with Four-One, only to have her steps falter again as she reached window walls to left and right. Older children lay here unconscious, neatly arrayed in beds on life support, growing fur or enormous eyes or whatever. She couldn’t help it. She stared in horror at a boy, perhaps ten, whose original eyes were sloughing out as insect-like chitin grew down from his forehead.
Four-One dodged back and grabbed her arm. “Hurry!”
Medical technicians rushed into the hall, looking rather dazed. The pair parted them like bowling balls through pins, scattering them to bounce into the walls. Technicians minding anesthetized children didn’t rise to an emergency very often, Sass imagined.
The short-cut through the disfiguration department ended abruptly at another door to an outer corridor, this one not alarmed, for employees to flow outward. Four-One still in the lead, they trotted down another flight of stairs. Now they went with the flow of traffic instead of against, so they could pass on the left to outrun the sedate passive crowd. A couple floors down, Four-One ran left into a corridor again.
Sass didn’t argue. Her spatial sense still reported they were headed toward the airlock she came in. Though while the going was good, she would have opted to continue down a couple more stories. She needed to lose more altitude soon.
This new hallway was a lower-rent district. Door panels crowded together. The passageway narrowed. Only a narrow strip of ceiling was painted in dim light. Up ahead appeared to be a dead end. But her companion seemed sure of his way, so she continued at full speed.
Until she reached the dead end. She looked to Four-One, puzzled.
He raised his hands and backed away. “I did as you asked!” he cried out to the walls.
Soldiers piled out of rooms beyond him, from the direction they’d just run. The first out the door shot Four-One between the shoulder blades at point-blank range. He fell face-forward on the rubbery floor just a few steps from Sass. A few drops of blood spattered his lynx ears.
You fool, Sass mourned. Someone must have offered him leniency for his help in trapping her, whispering directly into his mind. Four-One was too gullible for this world. Did Riu feed him orders directly? Her soldier years suggested a command chain was more likely.
Her hands slowly rose in surrender, no sudden moves. She tried to tell herself that she hadn’t killed him, not really. His brother soldier did that. But I caused his death. She used him. And her inner tent rat knew that all along. Four-One was a dead man running ever since he shot the doctor. His fault, really, the result of poor training.
Her ear began to speak to her. “Turn around.”
The voice was familiar. She turned to face Assistant Dictator Riu, projected on the smart wall at the dead end. He appeared at the same height as in life, a handspan taller than herself, an arm’s length away, a natural conversational spacing for persons who were not friends.
“You’ve run out of options, captain,” he informed her. “You will surrender to these guards. You will cooperate with them.”
“I will not cooperate with being dissected, or studied like a lab rat.”
“No,” Riu agreed. “That gambit was unsuccessful. And time ran out. We have now received instructions. You are wanted by another dome.”
“For what?” Sass asked bitterly. “To be held accountable for the jets I shot down? In self-defense!”
“Possibly,” he allowed. “But I remind you, I do not care. Captain, my role in the Dictatorship is inter-dome relations. We are a small dome, powerless. A bigger fish wants you. We will be paid for turning you over. It’s as simple as that. And given your first life on Earth, I believe you understand.”
She understood fine. No mercy, no remorse – she’d be turned over. If they could manage it. She pursed her lips and blew out, considering what threat to offer.
And the guard behind her, still at point-blank range, shot her left arm off below the elbow.
In agony, Sass crumpled to her knees, arterial blood pulsing out. She grabbed the ragged stump with her other hand, trying to stanch the flow, her face in a rictus of pain, smelling that all-too-familiar coppery tang. She blew out in short pants, reminding herself desperately that this was not over. Just ignore the pain. Pain was meaningless, a distraction from what was important here.
What was important here?
“Bastard!” she breathed, glaring up at the Dictator, unready to relinquish her rage to reason. She never mistook for an instant that shot was the soldier’s choice. Riu ordered it.
“Fascinating,” Riu observed. “Already the bleeding slows. And then the arm grows back? Are you like a lizard, captain? Does this take long?”
He squatted to address her at her own level, taking meticulous care to ruck up his pants legs neatly on the way down. Only present in virtual, the warm scarlet river, this mess of real life, touched him not at all, emotionally no more than physically. Some evil children took naturally to their training. Sass had known his kind before. Though Mahina offered them too little scope.
“I think, captain, that I can continue blowing off your appendages. Or your head. Or a gut wound.” She flinched. Gut shots were worse.
He flicked the tiniest smile. “And it hurts. And if I do it enough times, you will die. But Pontiac wants you alive. And your ship. How do I accom
plish that? Get your ship to go willingly to Pontiac?”
“What is Pontiac?” she gritted out.
“American High Command.” Riu rose, again taking care of his pant creases.
To his evident surprise, she rose too, brushing ragged flesh off her shattered elbow to drop to the floor. She heard the soldiers behind her take involuntary steps back, to sharply indrawn breaths and stifled oaths. Enjoy the show, you rego tools. She would not mistake them for human again.
“I’m eager to speak to American High Command,” she informed him. “As I said, my interest in visiting your…charming dome…was communications protocols. That I might begin a dialogue. And avoid further shot-down jets. We came to learn what became of Earth.” She pressed her lips flat. She felt the contempt showing in her nose and narrowed eyes, lifted to meet his own.
“You will travel separately from your ship. And order them to follow.”
“My ship isn’t going anywhere. My people are off limits.”
“Your ship will travel to Pontiac. Or they will drop nuclear warheads on it. My dome will not survive a direct hit. Will your ship?”
Ruefully, Sass recalled that she meant to check that point with her engineer. “Yes,” she claimed, but from the look on Riu’s face, she’d betrayed her doubt.
“No,” he concluded. “Tell them.” He pointed to her pocket.
The captain was only too eager to pull out her comm tab. “Clay, Sass. Time to go.”
The sonofabitch behind her shot out her left knee this time. She landed directly on the shredded stump, stabbing agony. She dropped the comm tab as she pitched forward to support herself on her one hand.
Through gritted teeth and sobbing breath, she barely heard Clay’s voice. “…Situation here. Sass?”
“Go, go, go!” she pleaded. “Clay, run!” But she doubted he could hear her whisper.
“I’m coming.” With that, her beloved cut the connection.
Clay, couldn’t you obey a direct order, just this once? “Men!” she spat. Bastards and arrogant fools, the lot of them!
“Perhaps you were distracted,” Riu noted. “And missed your first mate’s response. Lover? Husband? No matter. He will join you here. Your engineer will fly the ship to Pontiac. Or it will be nuked, and you’ll be responsible for the death of my entire town. Expect no sympathy from me, captain.”
“Perish the thought.”
No, there would be no mercy here. Clay, get a clue, dammit! Just blow a hole in this benighted dome. Send them all to hell and get out of here! She’d recover, probably even find a breath mask in working order. Why in hell would he cooperate with these stupid demands? To save Killingfield?
Yes, to save Killingfield, and the stragglers and the chipmunk. Well, the squirrels, at least. They’d already murdered the innocent chipmunk. Because that was how they did it, the Northern League and its legions. Would you rather we kill your son, or gang rape your partner? In the end, her only defense was to lose all her morals, one by one, stripped of all human kindness, a stumbling bumbling automaton, wishing the pain would end.
It never ended. Not in this game. But it was the only game on Earth. Once in the system, you were trapped. She recalled a drug dealer whose kneecap she shot off with no more concern than that soldier who just shot off hers. Simply because she wanted the name of his supplier.
I deserved this. If I’m damned, I earned every penny of it. But my crew doesn’t. We flew away, the hideous dregs and castoffs, the monsters we’d become. And amidst the desperate struggle to survive, our descendants turned human again. But not her. She had no descendants, her ovaries cut out in punishment after her one son was born. She tried for redemption. Others got to die and start over, but never her.
“Promise to cooperate,” Riu demanded. “And we’ll let you heal.”
She gazed up at him, sway-backed to get her chin to jut upward. What, you’re still here? “Screw you.”
“I was afraid of that,” he noted in distaste. And the bastard behind shot off her one good foot.
Mercifully, that was enough for her to pass out. Her nose mashed into the floor. And she knew no more.
21
The culling of New York City, most densely populated of the Northern League’s American cities, is well-documented. They quarantined the region, cut off its food supply, and unleashed a weaponized virus, eventually killing tens of millions.
Sass came to with someone gentling her hair. Tactile memory declared that one was Clay, with her head in his lap. A frown began to crease her brow as her body recognized a warm purring mass draped along her right torso. Fidget snored genteelly. The captain’s nose wrinkled at the smell of dried blood.
That reminded her to check for missing…parts. Yup, still missing left forearm, right foot, and left leg. The bastard shot the joints too. The soldier was out of reach. Clay wasn’t. Her eyes popped open in rage.
“Shh,” he soothed. “Welcome back.”
“You disobeyed a direct order!”
“You say that like you’re surprised.”
She struggled to rise, but felt weak and dizzy. Her head thunked back into his crotch, hard. She easily resisted the temptation to apologize. “I am the captain! I give orders! That’s my shtick!”
“Sorry to emasculate you, dear,” he crooned. “Old habits. I was your boss first.”
He was, and a right bastard too. On Vitality, leaving this godforsaken planet. “Never mind that. Why didn’t you leave?” She heard the honest exasperation in her voice. “One button operation. Get the ship and crew out of here. Was it too much to ask?”
“To leave you behind? Yes, Sass. It was too much to ask.”
“And the mink?” Her voice squeaked upward.
His finger stilled her lips. “We’re not talking about the mink. We’re fighting about us. For the amusement of our captors.”
Only then did she begin to wonder where she was. Leaving her abdominal muscles out of it this time, she lifted the top of her head to take a look. Helicopter, she interpreted the chamber, troop carrier, though she’d never ridden its like. When she was in the army, they didn’t offer nice panoramic windows like this, and the bench seat beneath offered padding. Her one good hand stroked the upholstery, leather, or a good fake. The colors matched the more upscale halls of Killingfield, with its scythe logo emblazoned on the short wall separating them from the pilot and copilot.
Soldiers sat on the bench across the way, blasters in their laps.
She’d seen enough, and dropped her head back. Clay slipped a straw between her lips, of something inspired by orange juice. Oranges and bananas went extinct decades before she was born, wiped out by their own pandemics. She sipped obediently, then groused, “Orange juice doesn’t make blood faster. Never agreed with you about that.”
“I kept careful records,” he countered. “Of my experiments on Vitality. Remember that time you slit your wrists?”
“I slit my wrists a lot of times. So did you.”
“I did, you didn’t. The captain sent me to comfort you, afraid you’d continue to self-harm.”
“Clueless bastard,” Sass agreed. “You tried to off yourself three times for every time I tried.”
“Yes. That’s what I was remembering. Even then, you were always so…” His voice adopted a plaintive note. “Optimistic. And there I was, ordered to cheer you up. Convince you not to kill yourself anymore, that it did no good. A flaming hypocrite.”
“I noticed.”
“But you stopped, Sass. You never tried again after that day. Aside from stupidity. I’ve been sitting here wracking my brain. Was it something I said? Surely not.”
“It was,” she admitted grudgingly. “You claimed this was our second chance. That everything in my personnel jacket was hereby forgotten. Earth never happened. Even my record and screwups on Vitality, erased. Happy birthday, you are reborn into a new world without sin. You said that.”
“Mahina was already racking up sins by that point,” he allowed. “But you gave me hop
e.”
“Thought it was the other way around.”
“Yes, but it worked. Sass, you don’t know what it was like. A cop, the perps you dealt with were small fry. Desperate people doing foolish things, pitiful.”
“Gosh, a romantic. Clay, us poor folk can be assholes and beat our children, too.”
He laughed softly. “Yes, there’s that. But true evil takes power. In my beat, I walked among them.”
“This is relevant how?” she asked archly.
He tweaked her nose. “You are emissary to the downtrodden. Pontiac sounds more my speed, speaking b.s. to power.” She snickered appreciation. “I told Three-Eight I’d walk him and Ivett back to Killingfield, surrender myself to join you. But let my people go. And that would save his sorry dome too. Without the ship for a prize, they wouldn’t dare lose thee and me, or Pontiac would pancake them.”
“You gave them ammo,” Sass mourned. “Now we get to watch each other tortured. I hate that game.”
He sighed. “Same. I told Darren to hit the go button. He nodded. I thought I’d solved that.”
“But instead he stayed rather than leave us behind,” Sass suggested. “We have got to work on obeying orders.” She shook her head in disgust. “Why didn’t you just shoot a hole in the damned dome? The main gun could slice Killingfield like a mango. No loss to the world, I can tell you that.”
He stroked her cheek and met her eyes. “We don’t do that. We outlived Earth so we could become the good guys.”
“That won’t work here,” Sass warned him. “It never did.”
“Maybe it’s worth fighting for,” he argued.
“God save us from late-life converts.” Hadn’t he argued against her Pollyanna ways a hundred times? Or a thousand by now. Clay was the cynic, the cautious one, the wise and educated. Idealism was her department. She stroked the mink and pointedly gazed at it, and back at him in exasperation.
