by David Ryker
“You mean, that thing’s a…”
Without looking, Tomlins turned around to flip the safety off on Curtis’s gun. “The recharge switch is the blue one,” she said, walking her fingers down to hit the recharge lever. “Garcia. You do the same.”
“Oh.” Garcia managed to pack a lot of shame into that one syllable. “Thanks, boss,” he said.
“I didn’t do that for you,” Tomlins said. Her face stayed still as her finger moved about thirty degrees to the right, where I saw something that made my stomach drop a couple inches.
“Shit,” I said.
“Yeah,” Tomlins said. “I did that because there’s two others in the rubber plants across the track.”
6
You could say a lot of things about Salter at this point, and I said some of them as often as I could because he deserved them. But the man could shoot. He could shoot fast. And he could shut up for long enough to do what the Belters’ blood told him to.
I was on the right face; he was on the left. We worked with just as much precision as the Coalition flyboys putting on their annual shows of force on their base planets.
Unfortunately, that chaos made the third creature take initiative. It burst out of the vegetation, revealing its body plan and making me wish it hadn’t.
It was like nothing I’d seen yet: the colors, for one, didn’t belong with any animal of use to the human race. It was red and black, glistening in the dappled light of the jungle as its body moved with the jerkiness of a robot and the precision of a Terran cockroach.
Thank God we had Tomlins with us.
She shrieked as she charged, turning a ballsy straightforward rush into a much smarter rolling approach that took a young woman’s flexibility to pull off. She came up kneeling and fired a burst even as she raised the gun to her shoulder.
“Fuck you, buddy!” She was back up and running to the side as soon as the magazine light on her barrel turned from green to fainter green. “Clip me, Leka!”
That was the downside of a rolling charge. You only resorted to it when a short, to-the-point firing run could be worth the advance you’d score on the enemy.
Seeing that there was little left of the animals we’d hit except smoke and bits of organic ooze, I hit the recharge lever on my rifle and started sprinting forward.
“Kev, what are you doing?” Tomlins said. “You don’t know if…”
I was on that little xeno fucker in three strides, and its head felt weirdly flexible in my hands - like the silicone ballistic pads they give you at the range. But with bones? Who cared? Its vertical neck definitely had bones, and they broke over my knee faster than…
“Kevin, that’s its mouth!”
I got that point by the time Tomlins was done shrieking in terror. I had not grabbed the xeno thing by its head, or by its neck: I got an eyestalk, and the body was actually a pair of jaws on legs. The mouth was full of very recognizable teeth.
“Shit!” Why hadn’t I seen that coming? Why was I reacting like I was stuck in mud?
“Kev!” Tomlins said. “Out of the way!”
I knew enough to use my plasma rifle to shove the xeno thing off me before another volley of solid-slug bursts came rattling out of Tomlins’s location.
“Collins!” Salter barked. “What the fuck are you…”
He was interrupted by Curtis and Garcia leveling their freshly charged plasma rifles at the two other xeno attackers, eliminating what was left of their biological components.
There was nothing left after that but silence and stink. Whatever these animals were, and wherever they’d come from, they weren’t meant to be eaten. Someone had brought them here for the same reason I was here. They were born to kill, and it took a real man to take something down that had no other purpose in this galaxy.
I looked at Curtis and Garcia, who were staring open-mouthed at the smoldering ruins of the xenos they’d just taken out for me. Then, they turned their gaze to me.
“Uh, thanks,” I said. “I owe you, uh…”
“You owe us an explanation,” Curtis said. There was no malice in his voice, just the quiet shake of disbelief. “That’s what I think.”
“Yeah,” Garcia said. “What you did to that thing...I mean, look at your arm.”
I hadn’t noticed getting gashed on the arm in the first place. I should have noticed the rapid-healing that was happening: second by second, you could see new skin stitching itself over ripped tissue.
“Oh,” I said. “Uhh…”
“Haven’t you heard of Flexicort?” Salter said, dismissing me with a wave of his hand. “Half the Belters have it injected, if they do any kind of job on the ground. It heals surface wounds faster than you’d believe.”
I didn’t like the way Leka was smiling at that information, but she seemed to have the same close-lipped smile about everything. I chalked it up to her teeth.
“Okay,” Garcia said. “But I’m not going another yard with you until I know a little more about who you are.”
Salter laughed. “Oh, really?” he said. “Well, you’re certainly welcome to continue along without us.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I don’t know what your mama told you about the Belters, but you don’t last too long if you don’t keep your mouth shut.”
“About everything,” Salter said, rolling ‘everything’ around in his mouth like it was fine cigar smoke.
“Trust me, kiddo,” Tomlins said, standing up and searching around the area. “You don’t want to know any more about your new buddies than you already do.”
They didn’t trust her. Garcia, in particular, was asking me some questions that in another life might have inspired me to shut him up permanently.
“So why did you get all, I don’t know, drunk-acting when that thing rounded on you?” he asked. “It was like you forgot where you were.”
“Because I’ve been on a prison planet for six years,” I said, as I asked myself the very same question. “And they don’t let you in the bar if you get into fights.”
“And Salter only meets him in the bar,” Tomlins added. “And if you don’t meet with your minder?” She drew a finger slowly across her throat, fixing Garcia with a smile that made him shudder visibly.
“You don’t seem that out of practice to me,” Curtis said.
“It’s like riding a hoverscooter,” I said. “Kind of hard to forget once you’ve had to defend your life once or twice.”
“Man, I call bullshit on the good behavior thing,” Garcia said. “I knew a guy who worked on the sorting heap who was the meanest son of a bitch I ever saw. His minder was even worse. Heard he once stabbed a guy for farting on a transport.”
“Maybe he was lower level,” I said.
“Maybe Kev thinks you should shut the fuck up,” Tomlins said.
“I don’t need anybody speaking for me,” I said. “Thanks.” My voice was harsher than I liked to use with people I needed to trust me. I sighed. I muttered a “sorry” to her under my breath.
“If you don’t want people speaking for you, you should try doing it yourself,” Tomlins said. She shrugged. “Just a suggestion.”
“I guess I don’t really have a lot to talk about,” I said. “Why don’t you give them your life story, huh?”
“Sure,” Tomlins said. “It’s the same as yours. Except I didn’t grow up down the street from a whole clan of fuckin’ Belters.”
In different circumstances, that was the kind of remark that I might have taken exception to. But I had more important things on my mind. “Like I picked where I was born,” I said, maintaining my same cautious forward walk through the chopped-up undergrowth in the survee tracks.
“I didn’t either,” Tomlins said. “Neither did Leka. The galaxy throws us all a set of dice when we’re born, and not a one of us got a decent number.”
“I had a decent number on one of my dice,” I said. I glanced at Garcia for a second with a half-smile. “She’s leaving out one thing. I got two girls. One of them’s ten, the
other turns twelve in a week.”
“Aww, he’s keeping track,” Leka said in a sarcastic drawl. “Father of the year, right here!”
“No, really,” Tomlins said. “He never shuts the fuck up about those girls. How he gets on good behavior for them. How they’re gonna be the first people he sees when he gets out of here. How the reason he’s in here in the first place is because he was trying to go straight for…” She paused, raising her hand halfway up.
Even Salter stopped immediately.
Tomlins sniffed the air for a second, shook her head, motioned for the party to move on. “It was a bird,” she said. “Anyway, the girls. Tell ‘em about the girls, why don’t you? You’ve told me enough times.”
I wasn’t really in a mood to tell stories. “Come on,” I said.
“The twelve-year-old’s name is Celeste,” Tomlins said, rounding her voice around the name of my daughter like it was some kind of joke. “Can you imagine having a child born on a space station and naming it…”
“I liked the name,” I said. I made my shoulders relax. If your shoulders relaxed, you were more mobile with your arms. I needed to be mobile with my arms - and the gun I was carrying in them.
“The ten-year-old’s name is Nadine,” Tomlins said. “He’s been saving up for the twelve-year-old’s thirteenth birthday. If he collects enough can tabs and gets Mad Karajik in the right mood, he might score enough to pay for her to get her ears pierced.”
“Isn’t that sweet,” Leka said.
“Look, it’s not my fault I got turned in,” I said. “Their mother got pissed because I wasn’t making as much money.” It was a mistake to turn to Leka as I said it - not for any tactical reason, but because I got the full brunt of her laughing in my face.
“A Belter bitch?” she said. “Getting fed up when her gangster boyfriend stops bringing home gangster paychecks?”
“The Belters don’t pay in checks,” Tomlins said.
“You say that like it’s intimidating,” Leka said, turning to her neighbor and rolling her eyes. “You know what I mean.”
“Yes, I do,” I said.
The women were quiet after that. I could feel them watching me as we walked.
“Man, that’s fuckin’ low,” Garcia said. “Candy would never have done something dirty like that to me. She actually did five years on a prison planet to keep one of my cousins from going down for some deal she was involved in.” He turned around and loosened his grip on his weapon as he spoke. “All she did was drive a truck at a mine, though.”
“Keep an eye on your barrel,” I said. “I don’t want any friendly fire accidents happening while we’re out here hell and gone from the infirmary.”
“Yeah, like being far from the infirmary’s a bad thing,” Curtis said with a dark little chuckle. “Shit. This guy was telling me how he stuck his thumb in the…”
“Man, let a guy finish his story!” Garcia said. “Collins. Or Kev. Whatever they call you.”
“Actually, it would serve Mr. Collins well to stop telling stories about his time with my employers,” Salter said. He dropped back so he was trudging through the undergrowth right next to me. “Besides, the version he’s giving you is somewhat...distorted.”
“Hey, no offense,” Leka said, “but nobody who says ‘my employers’ when they mean the Belters has any business talking about who can and can’t be trusted.” In the silence that followed, she turned to me. “Collins,” she said. “Continue.”
“I don’t know what there is to continue about,” I said. “Linata got sick of me bringing home less and less money. I started talking about moving to a cheaper planet, or even a cheaper city on Scorpio Prime. Money didn’t mean shit if I wasn’t there for my kids, you know?”
“So you really lived on their big ol’ space station, huh?” Curtis said. “With the strikers and the…”
“Man, I grew up down the street from Striker Laurence’s cousin,” I said. “They’re...they do some evil shit, but in person nobody’s that intimidating.”
“Striker Laurence’s cousin?” Curtis said.
“Yeah.” I shifted the grip of my rifle in my hands. “Name was Nikolai. Real nice guy, as far as I knew. Used to pay for all us kids to have birthday parties and New Year’s presents, even though our parents couldn’t afford shit.” I practiced cooling my body using my Belters’ blood. Cooling your body meant letting go of anger. “He seemed a lot nicer than he really was, I guess.”
“How early did you join?” Garcia said. This time, he didn’t swing his rifle’s barrel around as he spoke.
“As early as I could carry a bag of grief from one corner to another,” I said. “Nobody takes pot shots at a ten-year-old. And when they did, I learned to shoot back.”
Mr. Salter cleared his throat. “There’s no evidence, by the way, that the Belters recruit children as young as…”
“Oh, yeah, child soldiers are the main problem with the Belters,” Tomlins said. “Dropping people in acid or flaying them with razor wire is totally acceptable, as long as they don’t recruit children.”
“Hey, they didn’t recruit me,” I said. “When I saw Striker Laurence for the first time, walking out of that black survee with her long coat and her lieutenants next to her and half her face made of metal, that was all I wanted to be when I grew up.” I spat on the ground. “You gotta understand,” I said. “They were the only people I knew in that dump who had anything.”
“And growing up like that is brutal,” Tomlins said.
“Don’t I know it,” Curtis said bitterly. “My mom, she was addicted to grief. I remember my older sisters used to go out, and…” He shook his head. “One of ‘em got tangled up with Belters once, but it wasn’t no big thing.”
“It’s hard to avoid us anymore,” Salter said with a grin that made me sick.
“Yeah, I know,” I said. “Last time I tried to avoid you motherfuckers, my girlfriend turned on me and got me put on a prison planet for the smallest job I’d taken in my adult life.”
“At least you can hate her for it,” Tomlins said.
“Jesus, Tomlins,” Leka said.
“Yeah, thanks for always pointing out the bright side,” I said.
“Hey, there’s the mile marker.” Curtis was pointing at a reflective sign to the right of the road. “We’ve at least made it halfway there.”
Leka was looking around. “And now there’s no point turning back,” she said. “So what’s your story, kiddo?” she said to Curtis. “Since we’ve all gone around the circle here.”
“I was the cook on a ship that did armed robberies,” Curtis said. “Same life situation as you, Chief. Where I grew up there wasn’t anything else to do. You either got lucky enough that some scumbag took you along on a job, or you wound up as damage from the job getting done.” He checked the position of his rifle.
“Yeah,” I said, more out of reflex than anything else.
Curtis shook his head. “Shit. Anyway, I made enough to get my sister out of our hab dome. Her boyfriend wasn’t having it.” He shrugged. “Whatever, man. I’m glad that bastard is dead. I don’t care that I’m in here.” There was pride in his expression, and defiance in his eyes. I liked that.
“What a charming illustration of the difference between professionals and amateurs,” Salter said. He was still smiling. Human suffering made him all happy inside. “I’m here because I’m good at my job. That’s all.”
“Yeah,” Tomlins said. “And that’s why nobody asked you.”
“You should really be more careful, in particular,” Salter said. “When I return to my employers…”
“If we return to your employers,” I said, saying that last part out of my nose, because Salter really brought out my inner toddler. “It’s a long way yet to that ceramics dump, and we don’t know what we’ll find there.”
7
The nice thing about working for the Belters was the places you got to go. Not on work or anything. Just going there, and you could take your whole family a
nd show them things like the pink snow on Nepetar XI.
The equatorial regions of the planet were actually warm year-round, with lush rainforests and scorching deserts. But people could find those on almost any planet that had been terraformed - the process didn’t create many temperate zones when tropical ones were so much more favorable for agriculture.
No, people came to Nepetar XI for the snow. And it was magnificent - some chem tech they used made it fall in varying colors depending on the temperature. I remember waking up one morning, in the little A-frame we rented to live like normal people for a couple of weeks (even though we were definitely normal people, if anybody ever asked). A storm had blown in overnight and left a rainbow strewn across the porch.
Linata woke me up for it. I don’t remember her ever being excited over something I bought her. That was what I liked about her. She appreciated good things. Not California wine or blood emeralds from the Bosphorus System - she wanted to go out and experience what life itself could offer her when I inflated it a little with my Belter money.
The A-frame had a big front window and a flat front yard. The girls were four and six, just old enough to make snow angels and try to clump the loose and flaky snow into balls. Their every footprint muddled and smeared the colors, and pink snow kept falling overhead while I held Linata and watched them. It felt too cold for the colors surrounding us, but the thermometer read fifteen degrees.
I would never have seen that had it not been for the Belters. But in that moment, I knew I had to leave the Belters behind.
“Shit, this is getting steep.” Leka had to stop for breath, resting with her back against a tree. “Sorry. Chem lung.”
“No worries,” I said. I looked around us out of habit, making sure we weren’t being followed by any more unpleasant company.
Mr. Salter was looking around, too. Since nobody in our little posse wanted to make conversation with him, he was doing the smart thing and making himself useful. He’d patrol back and forth in front of us, hoping to catch something moving in the jungle so he could be a hero.
