Blood Oath

by David Ryker

  As I followed him I glanced to the east, where the xenos were still advancing through the street. They were searching for something - perhaps for a way through.

  “Don’t mind the boys!” Salter called from the rooftop, dangling his smug face over as I climbed up after him. “They’re not even sapient when they combine into a form that large. Takes too long to process information.” He brought his sidearm to bear, and I fired mine - but the move had been a feint. I wasted a whole burst of shots on empty air, and then I had to climb to the side to avoid the bullets as they came back down.

  My stomach sank at the realization that I’d fallen for his game. I’d come out here and started wasting ammo on him, while he separated my team from the powerhouse they needed by their side.

  But if I was already being dumb, that would make me even better at playing dumb. Right?

  “Asshole!” I said. “You’ll kill me the moment I surrender to you.”

  “Will I?” Salter said. “I suppose I could go back to Lucky Pavel without his favorite science project.” He was still close to the ledge. Perfect. I just needed to keep him there.

  “Lucky Pavel’s done with me,” I said. “You just want the satisfaction of looking in my eyes when you kill me.”

  “I really do,” Salter said. “But sometimes, Mr. Collins, we have to put what our supers want ahead of what we want. You never learned that, did you?”

  I exaggerated my grunting and panting as I finished my climb. Let him think he’d hit me. Let him think he’d weakened me. “I learned all...all I needed to know about you,” I said. “There’s no surrender. There’s no forgiveness.”

  “That’s what I thought when the Kras’ilik found me,” Salter said as I came onto the ledge. I draped myself over, watching him with one eye while I paused to catch my breath. “I thought I was…”

  He should have been holding his gun ready. That’s what I was doing with mine. I brought it around and emptied the magazine right into Salter’s chest, filling him with holes from my few remaining solid slugs.

  His body thrashed in the air as he was propelled backward. I was instantly reminded, to my great satisfaction, of the way our craft had tumbled through the street. He landed about twenty feet away, twitched a couple times, and was still.

  The silence on that rooftop was immense. For a second, I didn’t move a muscle. I was frozen in disbelief that I’d just pulled that off.

  And what a good thing that was, because I hadn’t. Salter wheezed as he took a mighty inhale, palpating the wounds on his chest.

  “Fuck.” I scanned the rooftop until I found where he’d dropped his gun, and I ran to grab it.

  “Don’t bother,” Salter gasped. Even as I picked it up, I could feel how light it was. “It’s been empty this whole time.”

  Of course. I turned around to see Salter sitting up, a wretched grin on his pastier-than-usual face. “You didn’t ask me about the boys,” he said. “You didn’t ask why they were here.”

  “The boys?” I pointed to the two xeno monsters that were now both watching us. Fuck. I knew I couldn’t survive a blast with a Beezer - but then again, neither could Salter, and I knew that at this range there would be no differentiating between us.

  “Yes, yes.” To my horror, Salter stood up and started breathing, slowly and shakily. His blood had already retreated back inside the holes in his chest. “The boys. You see, the Kras’ilik have made some...some modifications to me,” he said. “In order to make me better at serving our mutual friends.”

  I ran at him. He ran at me. I swung the pistol like a club, and he grabbed it as well as my wrist, sending me flying over his head and smacking down into the rooftop below me.

  “Fuck!” I gasped as my vision blurred for a moment.

  “Of course, this far away from the boys you won’t be able to experience the full breadth of what I’ve gained,” Salter said. He reached for my head, and I bounced off my ass to hit him in the chest with a double-barrel kick that sent him flying backward.

  I jumped up to my feet. “You mean, they’re charging your blood now?” I said.

  “You narrow-minded fool,” Salter said, sliding backward in a crouch and leaving red skidmarks on the roof. “They’re charging my whole body!”

  Behind him, I could see our battered shuttle rising above the roofline. If the towering xeno things were linked to Salter that deeply, there was no way I could let him get distracted. They must be feeding him information, camera angles from all angles, and God only knows what else. I ran at him again as he rose, switching my track at the last half-second so that his reaction was aimed at the wrong space in the air.

  I stabbed one leg down to the ground and spun around on it to send a roundhouse kick straight into his kidneys. He was already pitched forward, so the blow sent him flying. I came down and jumped forward to tackle him; together, clawing and punching at each other, we went rolling across the rooftop.

  He got his hands around my neck. “You have no choice!” he said.

  I kneed him in the nuts and his grip weakened. “There’s always a choice!” I growled back as I fought to my feet.

  “Not for you,” Salter said, sweeping one leg around and tripping me up. “You know what happens if you kill me! You know my blood will bring more of us here down on your head!”

  I caught my balance and stepped back to Salter. I was swaying on my feet. “Let them come,” I said. I had my orders. My orders didn’t mention consequences.

  “Why are you doing this?” he said. “Do you really think that bitch will help you get Nadine and…”

  “You don’t get to speak their names!” I roared, crouching down to pick Salter up by the throat. “They’re my family!” I brought his head down onto the concrete below him.

  I could see his eyes lose focus for a moment. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I got the vague sense that I was supposed to be doing something else at that moment. I ignored it. Salter’s blood was hot on my hands, and it made it hard to get the grip I needed on his neck.

  I slammed his head into the concrete again. “You think you’re so far above me, don’t you?” I said. “You think you’re a free man!”

  Salter was gagging, grasping with weak hands at my fingers. “Stop…” he wheezed. “Please…”

  “That’s right, beg for your fucking life!” I screamed in his face. “Beg for it!” This time, I could feel his skull crack when it met the concrete. His mouth started moving rapidly; his eyes flitted back and forth in their sockets.

  “Say their names now, you filthy fuck,” I said as I kept slamming his head into the rooftop. He was dead. He wasn’t getting any more or any less dead as I pulped his brain against the pavement - but my blood was up and I was full of rage and hate. And it felt good to have Salter’s blood on my face, to feel his nervous system’s last spasms struggling against my grip. I could do this all...

  “Jesus Christ! Collins!” Leka’s voice was high and exasperated. “Stop bashing that carcass and get in here!”

  Truth be told, I wasn’t sure exactly how they got me back into the shuttle. Leka was giving me orders, and Curtis was helping me walk. I was injured, but I wasn’t sure how. I wouldn’t be injured for long, I knew that much.

  “Remain calm,” Leka kept saying to me. “Remain calm.”

  You think that bitch will help you? He’d asked me. You think that bitch will help you? He knew. He knew who Leka was. He knew who Leka was, and I’d killed him before I found out. Shit. I’d killed him. I’d killed him and his blood was going to send a distress signal to...

  “Remain calm,” Leka said.

  “I can hear you, you know,” I said.

  I felt it again, that wave of sadness I’d felt when I’d killed the big xeno - but heavier. Gone! Gone! Gone! The Friend is Gone! Gone, the Friend is gone!

  “But are you listening?” Leka said.

  I blinked and shuddered as I dragged myself back into my own head. “Where are we?” I asked.

  “We’re retreating to
the jungle,” Leka said. “We’ll be lucky if this tub even makes it that far. That blast fucked us up real good, and there’s heavy damage to the craft.”

  “The others,” I said. “We have to find…”

  “There are. No. Others.” Leka’s face was grim; she was crouching over me eating a packet of chips. “If they wanted to live, they should have stuck with the people who were trying to keep them alive.”

  I shut my eyes and put a hand over my face. It was a logical choice, I knew that - but the thought of abandoning the people I’d just been fighting to save made me sick with sadness. My own, human sadness.

  “Hey, you came back for us,” Okafor said. “And we’ll go back for Simms and the wounded.”

  “Yeah,” Tomlins said. “You know, I bet our party was enough of a distraction for the xenos that they left those guys alone.”

  I was becoming increasingly aware of a massive headache.

  “Now, I need to know,” Leka said. “Are there any others out there like Salter?”

  “Like Salter?” I said. Switching my eyes’ focus from Tomlins to her took more effort than I liked. Sometimes, that’s just how it was when my tech was healing me. “You mean, shit, what’s the word…”

  “Are there more blooded Belters out there who could be controlling those xenos?” Leka said.

  “Fuckin’...I don’t know,” I said. Had she noticed my out-of-body moments? Was she catching on to what the xenos were doing to me? “Are there?” I said as I struggled into a sitting position. I was on the floor of the control room, on the upper deck near Anderson’s seat. “Since I guess the two of you, uh, know each other.”

  “Huh?” Leka said.

  “You and Salter,” I said, smiling slightly at my clever distraction. “He knows who you are.”

  Leka shrugged and held one hand up. “Yeah?” she said. “Look at my fucking teeth. You think I spent two years in the sobriety program without figuring out who the local grief dealer was?”

  “I need to trust you, Leka,” I said. “I...I can’t trust you if I don’t know who you are. None of us can.”

  Leka looked around at us. “You don’t need to trust me,” she said. “I’m not some half-machine supersoldier who goes berserk on a codeword.”

  “You do seem to control one, though,” Tomlins said.

  “Fine. Homunculus,” she said, snapping her fingers. I didn’t feel the usual slackening of my brain that happened when someone used my deactivation phrase. Maybe that was the difference between being controlled by a blooded Belter and being controlled by a regular person - if a regular person could even partly control me.

  “So?” Tomlins said. “You can control him again any time you want.”

  “Any of us can,” Leka said. Bullshit - she had to know it was bullshit, too. “But you know what you’re risking if you get killed before you deactivate him.”

  “That wasn’t your point, though, was it?” I said.

  “No,” Leka said. “You’re smarter than they give you credit for.” She looked up, made eye contact with everyone standing around her. “My point was that if you don’t think you can trust me, you can all take me out right now without worrying about Kev here getting out of control and beating one of you to death.”

  Silence hung over the room.

  “No?” Leka said. “No takers?” She held her hands out and stood up. “Come on. One of you has to have some ammunition. You could even try using him.” She pointed at me.

  “Fuck you,” I snapped.

  “Sit down,” Anderson said. “I have to land this thing.”

  “Looks like you’re stuck with me, big guy,” Leka said, crouching down next to me again. “Unless you wanna take the chance to kill me while it’s convenient.”

  I shook my head. “Just because I don’t trust you doesn’t mean I’m willing to kill you over it,” I said. “I’m gonna need you on my side if they send backup out here after Salter.”

  26

  The transport’s engine didn’t give us a whole lot of choice about where we landed. Anderson managed to keep its ground thrusters working, wailing and whining, for about a mile into the jungle before she was forced to prevent a fire by cutting power.

  “Goddammit,” she sighed as we made a graceless descent through the tree canopy. “Brace for impact, folks.”

  Thankfully, the tree canopy was thick enough to soften the blow of the impact. Now that I was calmed down enough to feel the wounds left by my fight with Salter, I was more than a little bit sore. My Belters’ blood was still healing me after it had been deactivated, but it was working more slowly than it had been. Everything was working more slowly than before.

  Leka and Tomlins did their best to help cushion me as we came to rest. Down below, I could hear Curtis and Garcia swearing.

  “Ow,” I said, my voice weak.

  “Sorry,” Tomlins said. “At least we kept you from slipping off this floor.”

  The craft had come to rest at an oblique angle, with the ramp unusable and the sunroof only a few feet off the ground. Anderson and Tomlins were out first; Leka and Curtis picked me up and handed me out to them like so much inconvenient, bloody luggage. I tried to fight, at first, but I had to admit that I was pretty damn weak at the moment. Besides, Tomlins had always been good at manhandling me.

  “Jesus, Kev,” Tomlins said. “You smell fuckin’ bizarre.”

  “Like burned plastic,” Anderson agreed. “Must be all that xeno bullshit that got on you while you were bludgeoning that son of a bitch.”

  “Really?” I said. “I can’t smell anything.”

  “You’re probably in shock,” Leka said. She and Curtis were helping Garcia down to the jungle floor. “I would re-activate your blood, but…” She winced. “Shock makes you stupid.”

  “Nah,” I said. “I come like this naturally.” I was, right now, feeling slow in the head. But at least it had been a few hours since I’d gotten a random flash like I was somewhere else - somewhere only one of the fucking xenos could be.

  “You might have a fair point,” Leka said. “Still, I want you to lie down and rest until your body’s taken care of itself a little better. You look like you have some nasty traumas to your head and neck.”

  I had to laugh at that. “Oh yeah?” I said. “You should see the other guy.”

  Leka was not amused. “Curtis, check the ship,” she said. “See if we have a rattle or a pacifier we can give this asshole until he comes back to his senses.”

  I remember the first xenos I ever dealt with. They were octopods, semi-aquatic by nature and never in a good mood when they had to deal with landlocked species. The ones I met were subcontractors for the guys who built our custom spacecraft - long story short, they were a cheap source of some rare and valuable liquid methane compounds that we needed to boost our engines.

  “This seems like an unusual job, Mr. Kominski,” I said as we walked into the amphibious lounge. Understatement of the century, given that my boss was fully buck naked as we walked through the steamy corridors of a hotel basement on Cybele 4.

  “This is not a job, kid,” Lucky Pavel said. “This is...what’s the word. Hustle.” He chuckled as he took a couple towels from an attractive attendant who wore nothing below her explosive collar.

  Were I just a couple years older, I would have been dying a thousand awkward deaths as we walked through the limestone formations that made up the seats and tabletops of the amphibious lounge. Warm water ran from the walls and bubbled from the floor; attractive youths of several species and configurations bustled to and fro carrying plates or escorting customers. They all wore explosive collars, and they all ducked fearfully out of Lucky Pavel’s way as he came swaggering through. Were I a couple of years older, I might have considered that I was no more free than they were.

  “Ah-ha,” he said. “There they are. My friends!” Lucky Pavel walked ahead of me and waved. I had my orders. I was to stay behind and wait - wait until he said the magic word.

  The xenos did not
look happy to see Lucky Pavel. In fact, they both dove beneath the surface of the pool they were in as soon as they saw him coming.

  “My friends, what’s wrong?” Lucky Pavel’s voice never lost any of the warm, friendly roundness that it had to it. “I only wanted to catch up!”

  That was it. That was the magic word. I put my hands in the pockets of my swim trunks and made sure I still had the credit sticks I’d been given. Lucky Pavel stuck both of his huge, hairy arms down into the pool and pulled two xenos out by their tentacles.

  That was when security started making their way over. No problem at all. I made sure I was in the way of one of the guards who was walking my boss’s way, and I tugged on his sleeve.

  “Hey, mister!” I said.

  “What in the…” The guard turned around and looked my scrawny frame up and down. “You’re underage.”

  “A shrewd observation,” I said, doing my best to mimic the way my bosses talked. “And because of that, my employer and I want to thank you for helping keep this establishment safe.” I bobbed my head over in the direction of Lucky Pavel and the two...the one and a half xenos, actually, who were now catching the attention of the entire establishment.

  The guard looked at the credit stick. He glared at me. “No weapons allowed in here,” he said.

  “You see that he’s unarmed,” I replied, pointing at my boss.

  What had gone unsaid here was that a Thrallak’s tissues weaken very quickly when they are removed from saline water. Hard water, like the water you find in mineral springs underneath seedy gang-run hotels, will almost be enough to keep them healthy.

  But if you pull them out and expose them to air for a few seconds, it’s remarkably easy for a human to rip one apart with his bare hands.

  “Hmph.” The guard put the credit stick in his pocket and made a hand signal to his counterpart. Both of them turned around and went back to what they’d been doing earlier.

  The surviving xeno began to plead with Lucky Pavel in a dialect I didn’t speak. Pavel responded in the same tongue, making his points very clear with illustrative hand gestures. This went on for a few minutes. Soon enough, Pavel approximated a handshake with the Thrallak and turned around, leaving it to clean up what was left of its companion.