by David Ryker
“You’re conveniently ignoring the reason why you had a hunch,” Leka said. “Whatever’s in your blood, it’s giving you a connection to the things that are trying to destroy us.”
“And it’s not the only way it makes him dangerous,” Anderson pointed out. “When a blooded Belter’s been activated…”
They were both right, weren’t they? I swallowed my nervousness and shook my head. “You have to have the codeword,” I said. “To have full control, you have to be blooded. And I can’t activate or deactivate myself.”
“He’s not lying about that,” Leka said. “Come on. We can finish this chat at the next stopping point.”
We - we, not they, not a pack of prey - were moving east. “Moving” was kind of an exaggeration compared to our earlier progress through the jungle, but when we emerged into a clearing on the mountainside we could see the admin complex with slightly more clarity.
Once she’d sent another scout party out (this one headed by Anderson), Leka approached me. I could see on her face that she had something in mind I wasn’t going to like.
“Notice anything?” she said, gesturing to the gleaming city below us and still a few miles away.
I shook my head. “Too much distance,” I said.
“Vercingetorix.” She snapped her fingers as she said it, like she was commanding a dog to sit. “Now what do you see?”
“You have to do more than say the codeword and mildly annoy me,” I said, a prickle of irritation spiking through my gut at the way Leka had acted.
“Tomlins told me she stopped fucking you because one time you cried afterward.” Leka’s face split into a demonic grin.
“What the fuck!” My face flushed beet red as I turned to Tomlins. First my deactivation word, now the history with Tomlins? What didn’t the woman know about me? I don’t recall there being crying on my part that night, but it had gotten pretty awkward. There was a reason it had been a while since I’d dared to let myself get intimate with someone. “I never…”
“Leka!” Tomlins said, a blush on her face to match mine. “That was supposed to stay between you and me!”
“You did, though,” Leka said, bouncing from one foot to the other in glee. “You had a complete meltdown about your kids and your prison sentence and your shitty family back on…”
“Leka, shut up and ask him what he sees,” Tomlins said. Her voice was suddenly low and sharp-edged. “That was never any of your fucking business, and I never should have trusted you with it.”
One of the things about Belters’ blood is that you cannot attack the person who calls your codeword. They really thought that one through, didn’t they? Badass as Leka was, and probably capable of taking me in a fair fight, I didn’t want to follow my anger’s train of thought any further than it had already taken me.
“Now, look at the city,” Leka said.
As I followed the command, the foaming mix of shame and rage and remembered pain distilled into the simple, clear satisfaction of doing something useful. It was different from being commanded by a blooded Belter - I didn’t feel like I was being dragged by my hair to carry out my orders. I focused my eyes on the city in the distance. Enhanced, my vision could pick up individual survees parked on the streets. I could even read some of the larger billboards.
“Looks evacuated,” I said. “At least, the streets are empty.”
“Can you see into any of the buildings?” Leka said.
“Not at this distance,” I replied.
Leka sighed. “Oh, well,” she said. “Homunculus.”
It was like shutting off a light suddenly in a room with one window. I had to blink a few times to refocus my eyes; getting entirely refocused required a head shake.
“Nice job,” Tomlins said. “I think you broke him.”
“I’m just...adjusting my senses,” I said. “Readjusting. Fuck you.”
“Look, it was a lot to handle for me when it happened,” Tomlins said, backing up with her hands upraised like I was about to attack her. “I’m not a feelings person. That was a rough night for both of us and I needed to vent to someone, okay?” she said. “Just calm down.”
“I’m not going to hurt you,” I assured her. “You know that…”
“Do I?” Tomlins said. “You never really filled me in on how much of a living weapon you are, bud.”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” I said.
“Try me,” Tomlins said. “After the shit we’ve been through in the past few days, I’m willing to believe pretty much anything.”
“I…Okay.” Truth be told, I wasn’t really ready for Tomlins to call my bluff like that. I sat down cross-legged. For a second, I ran my fingers through my hair as I gathered my thoughts. “So, the full story is too long to tell right now, but here are the basics. Maybe if I tell you, you can clue me in on some info I need from you.”
“Yeah?” Leka glanced around us and drew closer.
Tomlins ceased her backing away and took a step toward me.
“Yeah,” I said. “So. I mean, I’ve been running with the Belters since I was about yea big.” I held one hand up at about the head height of a dumb, scrawny kid of about six or seven. “Okay? Those fuckers were the only option I had back on my homeworld, and…”
“Yeah, yeah, sing me a sad song,” Leka said. “When do they give you the blood?”
“They don’t just give it to everyone who works with them,” I said. “You have to be good. You have to complete a certain number of jobs, and your supers have to be pretty fuckin’ happy with you.”
“So you have to be a proven murderer, in other words.” Leka spat on the ground.
“Do you want to be dramatic about shit you already know, or do you want new information?” I squinted up at the former officer - if that’s really what she was. My trust in Tomlins could definitely have been higher in this moment.
“Get on with the story,” Leka said.
“Okay.” I shifted my weight so I was more comfortable. “When I was...initiated,” I said, “they’d been using the blood for about ten years. It wasn’t as well-known as it apparently is these days.”
“I wouldn’t exactly call it well-known,” Leka said. “Well-known like star sirens, or the ghosts in a cruiser’s sleeping racks.”
“Well, it was a classi-fucking-fied secret when it got done to me,” I said.
“Uh-huh.” Leka nodded. “And how, exactly, did they do it to you?”
“Fuck if I know,” I said. “They sedated me until I couldn’t pay a whole lot of attention to what was going on, then they opened my neck up and inserted a whole bunch of tiny, self-replicating robots into my bloodstream.”
“Like Flexicort,” Leka said. “And they never told you exactly what those machines do?”
“They feed on adrenaline,” I said. “They self-replicate. They help me heal faster, use my senses better, build muscle more effectively. They don’t make me smarter, but they can make some people’s thought process faster.”
“It ever make anyone crazy?” Tomlins asked.
I shrugged. It had apparently made me crazy. “You’re crazy by the time they put it in you,” I said. “Although yeah, I’ve heard of bad mental reactions. But it’s not much riskier than anything else you’re doing by the time you make it that far in the Belters.”
“You have to be at the enforcer rank before they give it to you, right?” Leka said.
“Not really,” I said. “But the bosses need to think you’re gonna make it there some day. It’s fucking expensive to put Belters’ blood in you, and they’re still doing studies on it to see how it works and if they can tweak it.”
“Which, I presume, is why you’re still alive.” Leka smirked. “And why you were assigned your little friend I took care of back by Textiles.”
“You have no idea how lucky you got with that grenade,” I said. “That fucking viper’s had his blood almost a decade longer than I have, and he’s a mean bastard once you’ve pissed him off.”
&n
bsp; Leka laughed. “I figured as much,” she said.
“What about the code word?” Tomlins said.
“Each blooded Belter has a codeword assigned to them that does something to the nano tech,” I said. “Usually something from Terran mythology. It kind of makes you...go berserk, I guess. Like some tribal warrior. Your body systems get all keyed up, and you get really aggressive and hard to control. That’s why you keep it, you know”—I cleared my throat and stared at Leka—“a secret.”
Leka smiled, keeping her lips closed. “You really think I’m gonna tell you how I know your deactivation phrase?” she said.
“I told you everything you wanted to know,” I said. “What more do you need?”
“I need to get to know you a little better before you get my whole story,” Leka said, now flashing her ruined teeth. “I’ve done pretty well for myself on this world making sure my information is one step ahead of everyone else’s.”
21
Every city looks greenish or bluish from far away. Something to do with the way light scatters in an atmosphere where humans don’t suffocate. Distance makes cities look so perfect, too, with their spires gleaming in the sunlight and their endless rows of neat windows all empty of life and its messes.
And death’s messes, too.
“Jesus,” Anderson said as we turned a corner to clear the street in front of our group. “Do you think there was some, uh, disagreement about who got to take off in the evac shuttles?”
We were walking through bodies. Most of them wore green jumpsuits. All of the ones in this street looked like they’d been hit with an aerial weapon, which didn’t tend to leave a lot intact. Some had shredded torsos; others were missing limbs or heads. The flattened bullets lodged in the pavement confirmed my suspicion about the guns used - it would be difficult for anybody besides the guards to get ahold of those particular weapons.
I tried to ignore the ones where I could tell they had struggled for cover. They died crawling, hit in the back or simply unable to go on as they left blood and organs trailing behind them.
I could tell when the smell hit Tomlins, because she fell to her knees and started gagging.
“Get up,” Leka said, voice hard with a brutal honesty. “You can’t afford to throw up. You don’t know when we’ll eat again.”
“Fuck you,” Tomlins replied, but she got up.
Beside me, Curtis looked similarly green.
“Hey, man,” I said. “Just focus. Don’t breathe it in through your mouth.”
“This is fucked up,” he kept saying. “This is fucked up. This is…”
“You’re gonna be fine, my friend,” I lied. I had no idea if we were going to be fine. The more bodies we stepped over or around, the less idea I was left with. “Just look away from it if it’s freaking you out.”
“They just got mowed down,” Tomlins said. “They weren’t even armed.” Her voice had shrunk from horror. She was doing the exact opposite of what I suggested, staring around at the decaying carnage with wide eyes and a sheet-white face. “What the fuck?”
“Don’t know what they were expecting,” I said. “We’re not exactly an evac priority in the event of an emergency, are we?” I kicked a fallen casing out of my path - eighty caliber aerial cannon.
“What do you think happened, though?” Tomlins said.
“Guards probably thought it was gonna turn into a riot,” Leka said. “Or maybe it had already.” She was moving deliberately through the street. Instead of the plight of the dead, her attention was on potential threats to the living: she peered in through busted windows, looked through her rifle scope down dark alleys.
As furious as I was with her, she had the right idea. I followed her lead, carrying a half-charged plasma rifle I’d found on a guard’s corpse at the edge of town.
When I’d first taken it, I saw the guy’s still-recent face and felt a pang of...something. Maybe it was pity, maybe it was the sting of knowing that I might live the rest of my life as the kind of lowlife gangster who loots a body.
Walking through these bodies, though, I could understand why Leka hadn’t hesitated to rob wounded guards of every weapon she could find on them. There had been no need to do this; these unarmed prisoners were no threat to airborne guards. Those fuckers had just murdered people in waves, out of nothing but spite.
That was the kind of thing Belters did.
“Hey!” Leka’s face brightened as her focus turned up the street. “There’s a food mart up there!”
Present tense was a little optimistic of her, I thought as I saw what she was running toward. Whoever ran the food mart had been smart enough to put up the security bars before shit hit the fan. But, versus a few hundred prisoners and probably some stray rounds from an aerial cannon, security bars didn’t do shit.
The front of the store was strewn with spilled and damaged containers of food. Watching ahead of her carefully, Leka held up a box of Sacchabites to her ear and shook it.
“Oh, thank fuck,” she said, before putting her fingers to her lips and whistling. “Hey!” she called back to the rest of the group. “Food up here!”
The speed of the response was a testament to how hungry we were after living off electrocuted birds in the jungle for three days. People came running through the wave of corpse stink, leaping over (and occasionally stepping through) the fetid bodies in the streets.
When they reached the food mart, a new massacre began. Tomlins and Curtis had to go in yelling and firing in the air with their plasma guns to stop our own guys from turning on each other over half-empty boxes of corn puffs and deflated bags of Flavocrunch.
I stood back from the chaos, watching the sky above me. Something in my gut didn’t feel right. I scanned the street, double-checking the pattern of bodies I had observed earlier. They were crowded toward the other end of the street - trying to escape xenos behind them, maybe, or trying to crowd some kind of transport in front of them.
That was probably good. That meant, more likely than not, that the food mart hadn’t been…
There were new humans in the city. Yes, the new humans. The Pack from the Forest. They come, they come, they trespass against the Friend. We needed to alert the Friend, who has been so generous to us. The Friend will...
I felt like I was colliding with my own body. The food mart hadn’t been used as bait - that had been my last thought, right? This was my head, and I was standing here, and...
“Hey.” Leka had the nerve to join me at my position, speaking through a mouthful of Sacchabites. “Didn’t know your nano tech meant you didn’t have to eat.”
“You know why I’m out here and not in there,” I said with a glare that would have sent lesser soldiers running. I didn’t know what my nano tech meant or didn’t mean right now, and this was the last person I wanted to see me having this xeno-themed lapse in sanity.
“Yeah.” Leka laughed and handed me the box. “It’ll be interesting to see if we attract any hostiles. The city looks to be pretty much fuckin’ abandoned by this point.”
“Abandonment is voluntary,” I said. “This…” I gestured to the shredded carcasses on the ground around us. “This was a gutting.”
“Yeah,” Leka said. “Kinda wonder who by.”
“You wonder?” I stared in disbelief. “You wonder who had aerial guns while the prisoners…”
“While these prisoners were unarmed,” Leka said. “We’re here to steal a vehicle, aren’t we?” She gestured toward the end of the street. “Who’s to say that we’re the first prisoners to come up with that plan?”
I let out a bitter laugh. “You know, I was just thinking that this is the kind of shit Belters do.”
“Belters,” Leka said. “The Leonid Brotherhood. The Voiceless.” She spat on the ground. “You’re not the only monsters out there in the dark.”
I decided to stuff my face instead of rising to Leka’s bait. There was no sense discussing my...visions, I guess, or out-of-body experiences, maybe, with her. She’d only use
them against me, and that was the last thing I needed. In between bites of stale, sugary goodness, I shrugged and said, “That’s fine. Right now, I only care about being the only monster on this street.”
Among other things, the food mart carried bottles of minty-fresh mouthwash. They had gone largely untouched, which was a blessing for those of us walking among the dead in the equatorial heat.
We ripped off pieces of clothing or blankets and soaked them in the mentholated liquid, then used the soaked cloth as masks while we ventured along the street. Most of us were carrying a few things from the food mart. The slim pickings of snacks and candy wouldn’t last us long, but it would be better than nothing for the time being.
Again, I was walking with Leka and Tomlins, sweeping the street ahead of us for hostiles while we advanced slowly through the silent city. Parked vehicles lined the streets, which were depressingly empty once we got through the bottleneck of corpses that had been mowed down with aerial fire.
“There has to be a quadcopter depot around here somewhere,” Tomlins said. “This looks like the main downtown area.”
“We need a map,” Leka said. “An old-fashioned paper one.”
“Good luck finding one of those around here,” I said. “We’ll find the quad depot first.”
“I know,” Leka said. “But right now, we gotta start looking for some place to take shelter when we lose daylight. I get the feeling that if there’s any survivors, they won’t be very friendly to us coming into their territory.”
She was right, but I decided I didn’t need to stroke her ego about it. I kept on searching the buildings we passed for signs of movement within.
I was trying to figure out how to phrase the questions I had for her. By this point, there were a lot of them. She knew my deactivation phrase. She knew my activation phrase. Despite not being a blooded Belter, she could give me orders that I felt compelled to follow. As far as I knew, the only other person on this planet who know those words was Salter.
