Tilted Axis

by David Ryker

  The shooter was staring at him, Ward’s wrist locked in his grip.

  He twisted and Ward’s hand opened, the blade landing with a light crunch in the gravel.

  The shooter raised an eyebrow. “I expected more after what I heard about you.”

  Ward gave a toothy, bloodied grin and closed his eyes.

  The shooter's voice came through the darkness. “I was told I have to make this hurt,” he said clinically. “There’s a bonus in it if I do.”

  There was a sadistic glee in the shooter’s voice. He need not have said anything. He could have just stuck the knife in Ward and twisted it. It would have sent the same message. But he wanted to talk. He wanted Ward to know that he’d lost. Moozana wanted Ward to know that he’d lost.

  Ward drew in a slow breath and thought of Sadler. He could see her above him again, her hands around his face like on Ganymede. She was smiling, but she wasn’t saying anything this time. She wasn’t telling him it was going to be all right. She was just smiling.

  A dull clap rang out and Ward’s eyes twitched. He wasn’t sure if it was his heart bursting.

  Then another echoed through to him and he felt a spray of something warm on his face.

  He drew another breath.

  There was a damp crunch.

  The sunlight was harsh on his eyelids, burning them orange.

  He couldn’t hear the shooter anymore. Couldn’t feel his weight hanging above him.

  Hands closed about his shoulders suddenly. Someone was shaking him. “Ward. Ward!”

  “Sadler?” he muttered, gargling blood.

  “Ward? No — It’s Erica. Ward?”

  Sadler came apart above him, her olive skin and dark hair, inverted and shadowed against the night sky, pulling itself to shreds and bleeding out of his mind.

  His eyes flickered open and Erica stared back at him: blond hair and pale skin, definite features and icy blue eyes like sapphires in the midday sun.

  She looked scared, her cheeks flushed like she’d been running.

  Ward looked down at the shooter, slumped forward, arms pinned under him. There was a bullet hole in the back of his head — a wine red spot in the hairless skin. There was another lodged in his shoulder, the metal of the slug half buried in his ballistic vest, shining through his shirt.

  Arza pulled him forward and he groaned, vomiting blood over his thighs as he sat upright before she pushed him onto his side, cradling his face.

  “Jesus, Ward, Jesus,” she kept saying. “Christ. Jesus.”

  She was doing something with his face he couldn’t really feel. He watched her pull her communicator out of her pocket and press it to her face. “Investigator Erica Arza — I’ve got a medical emergency — I need help — right — “ She put the communicator down without cutting it off, letting whoever was on the other end trace the call.

  He coughed and spat more blood onto the ground, his throat clearing.

  Her fingers were in his mouth all of a sudden and felt strange against his teeth. A pain in his gum made him grunt and then the fingers were gone.

  Absently he watched her flick blood from her hands and throw down a shard of shrapnel.

  His stump oozed green liquid onto the floor as she pulled off her jacket and pressed it against his head.

  He was on his back again, head tilted and held to the side, pressed into the jacket, and Arza was next to him. “Are you all right? Can you hear me?” she asked.

  He swallowed, his mouth less full of blood now. He tried to nod but found he couldn’t. Arza had one hand around the base of his skull, keeping him still.

  “Yeah,” he said, his voice quiet. “How did you…”

  She tapped her temple with her free hand, smearing his blood across her cheek, gesturing to her eye. “Never took it out. Worked out where you were, followed you here.”

  “You’ve been watching the whole time?”

  “Not the whole time,” she said weakly. “You were out of range, I think. But since you got back to the city — I’ve seen enough. I tried to work out where you were, get to you — but you kept trying to lose me.” She almost laughed. Ward would have too if he didn’t feel like he was about to die.

  “My father,” she said, “he’s—”

  “Alive.”

  “I know. You didn’t kill him. Thank you,” she said it genuinely, but looked saddened all the same. “I mean, is he… Was he…”

  “No… It wasn’t him. He wasn’t the one,” Ward coughed red onto his already soaked hand. Some spots got on Arza’s dusty boots. “It was Moozana…”

  “Moozana?” She was shocked.

  “Uh-huh. Bastard set the whole thing up.” He was mumbling now. “Ootooka’s. Sadler’s body. Fairbright. The shooter.” Ward kicked limply at the body lying next to his feet.

  “Shit,” she breathed. “Shit.”

  “I know — I didn’t see it either.” He laughed one, seizing, sad note. It was all he could muster. It pained him to say the words, in more ways than one. “But we did it.” He coughed again, his stomach convulsing painfully, full of blood. He’d swallowed more than some. “You did it.”

  “Shh,” she said softly. “It’s okay. We got him. Chang is safe, thanks to you.”

  Ward chuckled a little and winced. “Give it to me straight, doc,” he muttered, losing strength with every word. “What do I look like?”

  Arza swallowed and looked over him for a few seconds before meeting his eyes, forcing a smile. “You’re a stubborn bastard, but you need more help than I can give you.” She lifted his head, taking a look at the side pressed to the jacket, and swore before pushing his head back in.

  She kept smiling at him, and nodding like he was going to be fine. He didn’t believe it.

  “Stay with me, Ward,” she kept saying. “Stay awake. I need you to—”

  She stopped, a distant bang rippling across the rooftops. She froze and held her head up, tweaking her ears at the air.

  Ward felt her leave his side, her hands running over his skin as she pulled away and scrambled to her feet. He had to fight to keep his eyes open.

  She ran to the side and stayed there, staring down at the city. He watched her with his one uncovered eye, her outline visible against the blue canvas behind like a single brushstroke between the building’s edge and the sky. She stayed there for a minute, her hair flowing around her head in the breeze, and then she was running back.

  The sound of rotors and engines began to fill the air.

  Sirens wailed distantly and grew like a murder of crows gathering with the dying of the day.

  Arza fell to her knees, looking grave, her blue eyes ringed in red, her hands shaking as she reached them out and pressed down on Ward’s bleeding stomach, staunching what she could between her delicate fingers.

  “What is it?” Ward muttered.

  She looked at him, unable to find the words for what seemed like an eternity. And then they came, quickly, like a final, world-ending punch to the gut.

  “Chang,” she said. “He’s dead.”

  30

  Four days after Tremel Chang, the UMR’s first Half-Breed prime minister, was assassinated in the middle of Xaraniah Square, in the Martian capital city — his home city — on the final day of his three-year-long tour of the Orion Colonial Axis, Michael Ward Miller reached out for the access pad of his front door, and let himself inside.

  He hobbled across the threshold of his home, pushing a few letters lying on the Martian pine boards out of the way with the leg of his crutch, and moved into the middle of the room, looking around.

  He thought he’d never come back. Guessed that he would have ended up in another kill-room before he ever walked back through the door of his house on Mars.

  He let out a long sigh and tried to scratch his healing face with his right hand. It took him a second to realize that it was missing from the elbow down, and would be until he had it replaced. The med techs had evened off the cut and closed the wound up, but until he could get another ma
de for him, he’d have to make do without. But then again, the sacrifice was worth it. The density of the cybernetic replacement he had was such that it’d stopped most of the force of the shot and deflected a significant portion of the fragments. Some had still caught him in the face and body. But here he was.

  He still couldn’t hear much; his right eardrum was perforated. His right eye was damaged, too. They weren’t sure if it would heal and his sight would return, or if he’d need a full replacement. For now, he had a patch. The side of his face was cut up and throbbing. It had been since it happened. His cheek took the worst of it, a chunk of shrapnel puncturing it and lodging itself between two of his teeth. It was a good thing, though.

  A few millimeters up or down and it would have ripped straight into his skull. His teeth had stopped it, and though Arza had pulled it out of his mouth, the two that it had impacted needed fixing and ached painfully with every breath.

  He had an appointment booked with the orthodontist in two days — all on the SB’s dime of course. Injuries in the line of duty. Only they were pointless. The shooter that they’d gotten wasn’t there for Chang. He was there for Ward.

  Moozana had brought more in, it seemed. Wasn’t taking any chances. Of course, he was in the wind by now, his cover blown. Who knew where he was. Ward surviving wasn’t part of his plan, and with both Erica and him telling the story, things were getting a little close for comfort.

  When the Defense Committee Rangers went to his house to bring him in for questioning, he was already gone. And that was all there was to it.

  The merc from the top of the Calarax building had no affiliations and no identity. He was a shade, just like the others had been.

  They never found any other shooters, but the bullet in Tremel Chang was proof enough they’d been there.

  Chang was hit in the chest from around eleven hundred meters and pronounced dead at the scene. The round had fragmented on impact, like all the others, and though his ballistic vest had stopped some of it, three separate pieces of shrapnel had shot up into his throat and jaw. They were pulling chunks out of him for days.

  If it hadn’t been for Ward’s arm, he’d have suffered the same fate, which was what Moozana had been banking on.

  No one at the Defense Committee knew anything about the potential corruption at the Security Bureau. It had all been swept under the rug before it could get out, courtesy of Moozana and his guys on the take. The shooting at Ootooka’s, the shooter at the docks, the shooters’ hideout. All of it. No one even knew Ward had been put on the case. He’d done it to get him into a killable position, and he’d used Erica just as ruthlessly, hoping she’d serve two purposes, they deduced based on what he’d said to her — reporting back everything Ward was doing, giving him the information he needed in order to get a kill squad into position. And secondly, to leverage Ferlish’s allegiance. Only the first had been bungled and the second hadn’t quite come off as he’d planned.

  Moozana never figured on Ward being such a paranoid bastard, or on Erica warming to him like she did.

  “You need anything else?” Erica asked, stepping into the room beside him and looking around. The villa was modest, set out on a mesa sixty clicks outside the city. One bedroom, an open plan living room and kitchenette. Sparsely furnished. Ward never liked stuff much.

  He shook his head and coughed. “No, I think I’m good. Thanks for the ride.”

  She nodded. “Of course.” She clasped her hands in front of her stomach and clicked her teeth together awkwardly. “So, this is where you live, huh? Not a fan of the city?”

  “For now,” Ward sighed. He didn’t know what the future held. Chang was dead and it looked like the OCA was about to fall into total anarchy. The Thessaly Treaty was already hanging by a thread and most of the original signatories had already retracted their support.

  The UMR and the UN were at each other’s throats already over the assassination. Both had a lot to gain from Chang’s death and fingers were being pointed. It was irking Ward, because they both had so much more to lose from Chang dying, and this was the time they needed to come together, not rip themselves — or each other — apart. Only they couldn’t see past their own prejudices. It was clear there was a third player on the board, but no one was prepared to accept it. By the time they did, Ward knew it would already be too late.

  But what could one man do about that? Especially when he only had one arm and couldn’t walk without a crutch.

  Ward slumped down onto his couch and groaned, feeling at the bandages across his stomach. They’d patched him up well enough, but he was still healing. Even Martian medicine didn’t work instantaneously.

  “Watch you don’t pull your stitches,” Arza said, following him over. Since the shooting, she’d scarcely left his side. The entire Security Bureau had been put on watch and the Defense Committee had taken control of the city, imposing martial law with their Rangers until they could establish who was dirty and who wasn’t.

  Ward didn’t think they’d find anything. At least twenty sentinels and investigators had disappeared along with Moozana. The Rangers were turning them up one at a time. A few had probably gotten off-world, but most didn’t have the connections to make it happen. Everyone’s accounts had been frozen, everyone’s identities put on lock. Every magic eye in the city was looking for them. But, until they were all in custody or confirmed dead, and the ones who’d stayed were cleared for duty, the entire Bureau’s workforce was on indefinite suspension.

  Arza didn’t have much to do, and Ward didn’t hate the company, though he still couldn’t figure out why she was sticking around.

  Maybe she thought someone would take another shot at him. Maybe she just didn’t trust anyone else. Maybe she felt guilty for siding with her father and letting him nearly kill Ward. Maybe she was waiting for Ward to heal so they could go after Moozana. Whatever it was, she’d stuck around and it didn’t seem like she was going anywhere any time soon.

  “Your refrigerator is empty,” Arza said, pulling her head out of it. “Want me to run out for some supplies?”

  “No, it’s okay. I’ll have something delivered.”

  “Do you need anything else?”

  “Honestly, Arza, I’m fine.” Ward let out a long breath and hung his head back. He felt like he’d been run over.

  “Okay,” she said. “Well, I’ll get going then.” She hooked her thumb over her shoulder and slapped her jean-clad thighs lightly. “If you need anything…”

  “Yeah, thanks Arza,” Ward said, smiling at her. “For everything.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  She lingered for another moment, and then turned away, waving to Ward as she did.

  She got to the doorway and paused, looking at her feet. “Huh,” she said, bending down to pick up the few loose pieces of mail. Most things came electronically, but every now and then something paper did turn up.

  One of them was a flier for a new food delivery service that offered 24/7 support to houses outside the city. There was also a letter from Ward’s bank, letting him know that a new credit chip would be available in the coming year and he could have his swapped out at any branch free of charge. And the last thing was a red card that said ‘Sorry we missed you…’

  Arza rolled it over in her hand, looking at it. “Looks like you missed a delivery.” She shrugged and came over, handing them to him. “Expecting something? It’s dated the day we met.”

  Ward looked at it and chewed his tongue. “No, I’m not.”

  “Weird. Says express priority delivery. Must be important. Call the number, they’ll redeliver in an hour, it says.”

  Ward sighed. He just wanted to sleep.

  “You call them, I’ll put some coffee on.”

  He watched her go into the kitchenette, scratching the skin under his eye patch with the corner of the card. She’d take any excuse not to leave. Maybe she thought she’d be the one to catch a bullet if she exposed herself. She’d barely left his side since the Caralax build
ing and had been waiting for him at the hospital when he woke up from surgery. He liked to extrapolate based on incomplete data — it was his gift — but this one he just couldn’t crack.

  As she started spooning grounds into the filter, he called the number and quoted the reference code off the card, giving his full name as he did. The automated response said that it would be dispatched via drone delivery immediately. Whoever had sent it definitely wanted it to come quickly.

  Arza started tidying things away on the counter as she waited for the coffee pot to fill. Ward felt like she was avoiding his eye in case he told her to leave. Was going home such a bad thing? He didn’t have the energy to decipher what was happening behind her big blue eyes, and nor did he want to spend what little he had left trying.

  She brought him a cup after a few minutes and then started walking around his house. She spent a while at his bookshelf, inspecting what he had there. She said idly, “You can tell a lot about someone from their bookcase.”

  He wondered what she thought of his.

  She didn’t elaborate, and he didn’t ask.

  After forty-seven minutes — and Ward knew because he was counting — a thin whine cut the still mesa air.

  “I’ll get it,” Arza said, nearly jogging across the room before Ward could even heave himself up.

  By the time he did reach his feet, she was out on the porch, standing face to face with a hovering drone. Ward hobbled out and she gestured to a magic eye hanging off the bottom of it.

  Ward gingerly lifted the eye patch so it could get a good biometric scan of his face, and then pulled it back down when the screen on the front of it confirmed his identity.

  A storage compartment lowered itself from the body and Arza reached up without invitation and pulled out an envelope, turning back toward the house with it in hand before Ward could get a look.

  The whine of the drone’s rotors faded behind them as they went in and she stopped next to the couch, as if the farther inside she got, the less likely it was for her to get kicked out.

  Ward held his hand out and she gave it to him, pushing her hands into her back pockets as she did. She looked casual — different out of her work-getup. Jeans and a T-shirt emblazoned with the logo of a band that Ward had never heard of. He wondered if she was one of those girls who wore band shirts because they liked the band, or because it made people think they did.