by David Ryker
“She must think there’s a chance we’re gonna live through this,” she said. “If we were one hundred percent gonna die, no way she’d pass up an opportunity to tell us everything she knows about you and how she knows it.”
“Fuck off, Tomlins,” Leka snapped back at us, catching up a couple of steps. To me, she said, “You know she makes shit up, right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “But this is one of those times when I’m fairly inclined to believe what she says.”
“Look, when you smoke grief you meet some of the weirdest fucking people in the galaxy,” Leka said. “That’s how I know what I know about you. You’re not the first blooded Belter I’ve met.”
“Who was the other one?” I said. “We all kind of know each other. It’s expensive to put the tech in.”
“I don’t think I like you enough to tell you,” Leka said.
“I think you’re full of shit,” Anderson scoffed, elbowing Leka in the side. “I think you’ve been listening to stories from old spacers like me, who’ve fuckin’ tangled hard with the Belters and come by our knowledge honestly.”
Leka narrowed her eyes at Anderson. Obviously, she wouldn’t be caught in a trap that easily.
“I used to eat people like you for breakfast,” Leka said, her voice suddenly low and dangerous. “You think I know a lot about one of the more secretive cartels in the galaxy? Think about what I know about a lowlife smuggler captain.”
“I wasn’t no lowlife…”
“Lowlife ought to be a compliment to you,” Leka said. “To both of you.” She pointed to Tomlins. “I…”
From up ahead, I heard a sharp whistle and the sound of a solid slug rifle.
“Get back!” Garcia screamed. “Get back to the group!”
My heart started picking up its pace in my chest; my muscles tensed, and my senses sharpened. I could hear crashing up ahead, and I saw the thick blue light of a huge plasma burst through the trees. I heard Garcia howl in pain. The sound was all I needed.
“It’s one of the big ones!” Curtis was yelling. “Shit! Someone come help!”
As I sprinted past her with my plasma rifle half-ready, I saw Leka spit on the ground and swing her gun into position. “Well,” she said. “I guess it’s time for our boy here to show us what he’s worth.”
I remember the first time my Belters’ blood fully activated. I was seventeen and Lucky Pavel himself had said my codeword in the middle of a firefight with some Chroma Kids over a payment dispute. I never felt bad for what happened that night. The Chroma Kids were the kind of gang that deserved to have a blooded Belter unleashed on them once in a while.
I don’t remember the exact details of what I was doing, because that’s part of the reason they inject you with adrenaline-reactive nanotechnology. I remember the feeling, though. The drive. The urge to hunt and tackle and kill before your enemy does the same to you.
It’s more intoxicating than any drug. I’d hoped that I would never feel that rush again.
My ability to form memories got better as I got more used to having my Belters’ blood activated with the codeword. After a few years, my memories were so clear that they started featuring in my less pleasant dreams.
I don’t know why that stopped after a while. Linata told the prosecutor it was like I shut down, like I was no longer a human being. Like when she looked into my eyes, the man she’d fallen in love with was long gone. Replaced by an un-person that woke up and went to “work” and came home and bought her nice things.
That would have hurt hearing it in the privacy of my own home. Which I had. Hearing it in front of the judge and the jury, while my ex broke down in tears, was like being gutted. I remember that she left out the part about me buying her nice things.
But if I was shut down when my Belters’ blood was inactive, I was the exact opposite when someone said my codeword and my adrenaline really got running. I could feel everything - my own fear, the sticky sweetness of the humidity on my skin, the tang of blood in the air, the panic in Curtis’s voice as he came running back toward me.
“Don’t go back there!” he screamed. “It’s one of the big ones!”
But Garcia was still back there, and Garcia wasn’t in any shape to come back to us. For a second, I was furious with Curtis for abandoning his friend to the xeno that had surprised him.
And then I saw the xeno, and my anger was immediately replaced by a weird mix of fear and understanding.
The thing was huge, for starters. “One of the big ones” didn’t really cover how big it was compared to one man.
And it had an organic gun. Because of course it had a gun. I aimed my own plasma rifle and fired.
The thing across from me walked on seven spiny-jointed legs, and when I fired it took the first two shots of the burst before setting back on five of them and crossing the front two in front of it. The legs crackled with electric blue light. My plasma shots ricocheted, sizzling through the jungle and dying.
I got down before one of them hit me. “What the fuck?” I said to nobody in particular.
The thing’s body was tall and pointed, and a rotating turret sat atop it. The gun tried to hit me a few times as I jumped through the underbrush on my way toward it. Maybe its first purpose wasn’t eating humans, at least. I didn’t want to die. But if I did, I figured getting shot was infinitely better than getting eaten.
“Collins, what are you doing?” Garcia was on my two-o-clock, about forty yards away from me. “Get back to the group!”
Fuck that. I hadn’t let those scouts through us to get to the wounded, and I wasn’t going to let this fucking thing through either. I grabbed my weapon’s stock to raise it like a club.
A nasty shock went through my body; I slowed for a second as I realized I was wielding one of the rifles we used to cook food.
The thing about Belters’ blood was that sometimes it tended to make my thoughts stack up on top of each other. “I grabbed the wrong rifle” took about a heartbeat to turn into “I bet I can use this to shock the ever-loving shit out of this xeno if I pull it apart to use like a stove.”
With my bare hands, I ripped off parts of the weapon’s casing that we usually pried off with a screwdriver. I kept running in a zig-zag pattern as I disconnected a couple of the wires, which created a potentially nasty arc of electromagnetic energy if I pulled the weapon’s trigger. So far, I had been too unpredictable for the creature to hit with its big gun. I needed to get close enough before my luck ran out.
“Go back!” Garcia screamed.
I took two strides and a huge flying leap with the gun held above my head in both hands. I pulled the trigger as I hooked the weapon around one of its legs and started firing. An excruciating burst of energy pulsed through me, and I screamed in rage and pain as I held the firing, half-destroyed plasma weapon close to the thing’s body.
Whatever I was experiencing, something told me, the xeno was getting it worse. It started to let out high-pitched shrieks as it flailed backward, trying to disengage me from its leg. But I only clamped tighter around it, letting the shocks pulse through both our bodies.
“Jesus, Collins, let go!” Anderson’s voice cut through the haze of pain and shock I was in. “Collins! Collins, it’s down! Let go!”
It was still moving. If it was still moving, I had a problem with it. I kept firing the plasma weapon.
“Let me handle this!” I heard Leka’s voice in the distance, and now closer: “Collins!” she said. “Get off! Get...oh, what is it - Homunculus!” she called. “Homunculus!”
At the sound of my deactivation word, I felt my whole body go limp. I heard the weapon clatter away as my exhausted, battered form slumped to the ground.
The xeno’s huge limb twitched, throwing me to the side. I felt time speeding up - or maybe I was slowing down. I heard the fire of solid-slug weapons, and I heard a throaty cheer of humans making a kill in a pack. I was suddenly lying on my back, looking up at the green jungle canopy.
It occurred to me for a
second that Leka would know what those trees were. It took me a couple more seconds to realize that Leka knew my deactivation word. A deep, cold dread seized my spine.
“You waited this long?” I said as her silhouette appeared above me.
“Like I said.” Leka’s face cracked into a snaggletoothed grin. “I thought you might be useful.”
“How…” I was trying to process what was happening with a brain that had just been half-cooked by my enhanced state. “How did you know…”
“A lucky guess, I say,” Anderson scoffed. “You hear rumors, if you hang around long enough in certain circles, of how the Belters’ technology works. I guess some of those rumors are true.”
“Leka, I need your first aid skills!” Tomlins was crouched over by Garcia. “He’s bleeding pretty bad…”
“Shit,” Leka said. “I’ll be right there!”
When Leka disappeared, I rolled over on my side to see what I’d just done. The huge xeno was starting to crumble. I saw chunks of it disintegrating on the ground with a sound like tumbling pebbles.
How did she know my deactivation phrase?
“Holy shit,” Anderson said. “You really killed that thing.”
“I thought you knew what a blooded Belter was capable of,” I said.
“I...I mean, I’d heard stories,” Anderson said. “And I’ve certainly seen what you fuckers are willing to do without bringing the biotech into it.”
“It’s a little more intense in person,” I said. I forced myself to sit up; the exertion of fighting the big xeno had made me dizzy. I knew something was still wrong, but what? Why were we still here? Why were we not running?
Out of nowhere, like a door slamming open, the urge to sob hit me in the chest. I covered my mouth, eyes bulging in my head. A wave of sadness had washed over me, the same kind of sadness I’d felt when they’d read the verdict to me and I saw my girls’ faces cloud with tears. Gone, gone, gone…
And then it was like I snapped back into myself. What the hell?
I could see other members of the group standing around the fallen xeno, staring at it or searching the jungle for evidence of more. I saw more than one fearful glance get shot my way; I could pick up the apprehension at being around me.
“You were a fuckin’ savage, is what I saw,” Anderson said. “And then Leka called you off, just like that.” She was standing awkwardly, her weapon held defensively in front of her.
“I’m not gonna hurt you,” I said. “At least, not now.”
“Not now?” Anderson said. Genuine fear crossed her face as she looked me up and down. “What would have happened if someone would have gotten in your way while you were tangling with that thing?”
I shrugged. “Like I said,” I told her, “I’m not hurting anybody right now.”
20
I remember the first time I met a supermodel. I would have been about eight. Already, I was on my way to attaining all my dreams. I was smarter, now, and my little jobs for Lucky Pavel had brought home enough groceries that I got tall all of a sudden.
Give it a couple years, and all that money was going to lead to my mom having real meltdowns. The kind she used to have before she had kids.
But in the meantime, the road to being famous had opened up in front of my eager feet. And it was my new boss, a Real Man, who held all the keys to open it even further. The road was wide, and flat, and paved with little plain packages that I just had to be smart about delivering without being seen.
The supermodel’s name was Kyari Vaxen. Yeah, the same Kyari Vaxen who did Ho-alition Spankover 7, but this was back when she still had a modeling career. Back when she was famous. Really famous.
“Okay, kid,” Lucky Pavel said as he put our survee back into land mode and started crawling up the ramp to the artificial island. “Remind me what we discussed.”
“We’re gonna go meet your friend, Mr. Kominski,” I said. In my head it was “your famous friend,” but I was smart enough to know that my boss got upset when you talked about how famous his friends were. “And I’m gonna keep her company, and get her whatever she needs, and call you if she tells me to call you.”
I looked nervously to him for approval. I was seasoned enough to know what happened when my boss got upset. Just because he had saved me from getting beaten for no reason didn’t mean that Lucky Pavel was above beating the shit out of a kid. He was the first grown-up besides my mom I’d seen kick someone until they stopped moving.
“Smart kid,” Pavel said. Water was sliding down the windows of the survee in sheets as we made our way onto dry land. “And what are we gonna look at?”
“Absolutely nothing, Mr. Kominski,” I said. “I’m not gonna talk to anybody, I’m not gonna ask any questions, and if anyone asks me, I’m gonna say I’m looking for my sister backstage.” I wasn’t sure if ‘don’t look at anything’ applied to the red carpet we drove slowly past as the survee made its way across the beach toward the hotel. The flash of cameras and the thump of music made it almost impossible to ignore the spectacle, but I tried.
Isla Carmina was, technically speaking, a free-floating extraction rig in the Achilles Sea. After they’d run through whatever it was they were extracting, it had been turned into a tropical pleasure barge of continental proportions. Massive unseen engines kept it out of waters controlled by Coalition city-states, and similarly invisible acts of grace by the Belters made sure it was the place to be for all kinds of excess.
Pavel drove us to a dark garage underneath the hotel. We got out, and one of Pavel’s friends took the survee to park it. This was one of those places with private elevators that you had to enter a code to access. We walked over to the elevator dock and waited. I said nothing, looked at nothing, asked no questions.
In reality, we were probably only there for about a minute before the door opened. Nobody ever kept the Belters waiting. To my little mind, it seemed like we were there for an hour. The paper package sewn into my trouser cuff (because who wants to be seen searching for grief in a little boy’s pants?) seemed to get heavier by the second.
I remember how my heartbeat picked up when the elevator doors started glowing. In a second, they would open, and I would meet four of Kyari Vaxen’s gorgeous bodyguards, dressed in nothing but creative diamond necklaces and couture rifle straps. That day, and the three wonder-filled days after that, I would get my first taste of the dizzying heights I could reach with just a little help from people like my boss and his friends.
But first, Lucky Pavel would say something to me that would stick with me for the rest of my life.
He turned to me and said, “Remember one thing, kid.”
“Yes, Mr. Kominski?” I replied.
“When you start getting out here and doing these jobs on your own, you know, you’re gonna run into times when all your troubles seem to disappear at once.” He took his vapo out of his coat pocket and held it to his lips. A fruit-scented fog enveloped his head as he continued. “When you’re surrounded by danger, see, any idiot can be careful.” He turned to me and smiled as he tapped his nose with one finger. “It takes a real smart guy to be careful when the danger disappears.”
Once Leka had gotten the bleeding to subside, Garcia could stand up. Once Curtis cut a crutch for him out of a strong branch, he could sort of walk.
There was no question about keeping him with us. I didn’t care how much it slowed us down. We were dead meat anyway, more likely than not - why not be dead meat together with our newfound buddies?
“Party B, reporting back!” Okafor spoke quietly as he reappeared from the jungle ahead of us.
We were moving slow for a number of reasons. Leka had decided that it would be safest for the main group to sit still and watch the jungle while the scouting parties went ahead; we made no movement until the next hundred yards of jungle had been inspected by at least five scouts. Neither of us mentioned it, but Garcia and I were both obviously glad to spend some time off our feet.
“What did you find?” Leka said.
“Nothing,” Okafor said. “The whole area’s silent.”
“That’s good,” Garcia said.
I nodded in agreement, trying to picture where we were on the…
On the mountainside. They’re moving east - a pack. A pack. Almost twenty of them, yes, almost twenty walking slowly and…
And I snapped back into myself. What the fuck?
I made a noise in the back of my throat that made Garcia turn to me.
“What?” he said. Like almost everyone else in our group, he’d been treating me with a mixture of suspicion and awe since our last tangle with the xenos.
“Something about this just doesn’t feel right,” I said quickly, trying to conceal the fact that my skin was crawling with unease. What had just happened? What had I just seen? Why did I feel like I had heard the voice of one of the xenos in my head?
“What, like there should be more of them out there?” Garcia gestured with his crutch to the ‘empty’ jungle ahead of us.
“Should implies a certain lack of confidence,” Leka said. “Nothing we’ve seen so far gives me a reason to believe that these fucking things aren’t waiting for us to let our guard down.”
“Do you think we’ve even managed to hurt them?” Tomlins said. She stood up slowly, stretching her arms and legs with a barely perceptible yawn. “What if they’re, you know, just disassembling and reassembling?”
“It’s possible,” Leka said. She gave me a suspicious look. “Although it seemed like Collins did some real damage while he was destroying a statistically significant part of our weapons inventory.”
“I just finished the job,” I grumbled. “And you’re welcome, by the way.” I helped Garcia get to his feet as best he could.
“I’ll thank you when you explain exactly what the fuck it was you did,” Leka said.
“How many times do I have to tell you that I don’t know exactly what I did?” I asked. “I had a hunch. I followed the hunch. The hunch worked.” But had it been my hunch? I felt like I was losing control of my mind.
