Blood Oath

by David Ryker

  “Good job, kid,” he said to me, patting me on the back with a slimy hand as we walked out. “Very smooth. Very low drama. Good, high-class deal all around.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Kominski,” I said. I remember how cold my face felt after watching that. I remember being a little sick to my stomach, but not wanting to mention it. That was the first job I’d done with Lucky Pavel after our hunting trip. That was the first time I’d ever seen him kill somebody up close and personal like that.

  “You know, every species in this galaxy can coexist in peace,” Lucky Pavel said to me. “We just have to know two different things about each other, you know?”

  “Oh yeah, Mr. Kominski?” I looked up at him; he had that look on his face like he was going to say something I needed to remember.

  “Number one,” he said, laying a finger across the palm of his hand. “Every species out there is stronger than us in some respect.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. “And number two?”

  Lucky Pavel always got a chuckle out of it when I predicted the way these lessons went. “Yes, number two.” He smacked two fingers across his palm. “Thing number two is that in some way, every species out there is much weaker than we are.”

  “And that’s it?” I said.

  “Yep,” Lucky Pavel said. “Secret to interplanetary peace and quiet, right there. You just need to remember those two things.”

  Even at ten, I knew too much about my bosses to believe that Lucky Pavel had any interest in interplanetary peace. Quiet, though - he was an expert in making sure that things went and stayed quiet. Quiet was something you could count on with him. It had nothing to do with peace.

  As the sun rose over the jungle, I slipped in and out of restless sleep. Lucky Pavel was not the only figment of my past that danced around in front of me as my body healed itself. Nadine and Celeste asked me when I was coming home, begged me to get back with their mom. Linata spat in my face and told me what a worthless father I was to my babies. My mom wanted her damn vapo-packs, and she wanted them now.

  I’ve had better hangovers from the Belters’ blood than the one I had that morning. Then again, I’ve also had much worse ones. At least this didn’t involve any visions out of a xeno’s faceplate.

  The warmth of the sun on my own, human face was therapeutic, and my companions let me sleep my weakness off while Anderson and Curtis tried to figure out how to repair the transport.

  I wasn’t sure what time it was when Leka sat down beside me and handed me a bag of chips.

  “Hey,” I said. “Thanks.” I took the snack from her and gingerly raised myself into a sitting position. My head didn’t hurt nearly as badly anymore.

  “How you doing?” Leka asked.

  “Alive,” I said. “I can probably walk, if…”

  “No,” Leka said. “We’re going to need your strength when we get back to the city.”

  “Right,” I said. “Do we, uh, have any plans for that?”

  “Fix this thing, for starters,” Leka said. “Then we need to figure out some kind of anti-xeno weapon. No fuckin’ way we’ll be able to get off the planet with those sons of bitches hanging out.”

  “Agreed,” I said. “And we’re running out of plasma guns to destroy them.”

  “Yeah,” Leka said. “So what we need to figure out is a Rhys-Jankowski current generator that we can charge off alternating current.”

  I knew just enough about how to boost a hoverbike’s engine to know that creating a Rhys-Jankowski current was different than generating a regular electrical current. Not “different” like “use a different tool,” either, but “different” like “go get a qualified engineer.” But then again, I didn’t have two doctorates.

  “You used to be some kind of scientist, right?” I said.

  “Used to be,” Leka said. “Kind of hard to get research funding right now, for some reason.”

  “Do you think we could take the xenos out with a regular electric current?” I said. “I mean, just because we’ve only used the current in the plasma guns doesn’t mean it’s the only current that works.”

  “That sounds like a risky experiment to run,” Leka said.

  “Too bad you don’t know anyone who’s really good in high-risk situations,” I said.

  “Big guy, you are a high-risk situation,” Leka said. She patted me on the shin. “If the xenos capture you…”

  “Oh, fuck,” I said. “They probably know my activation word.”

  “They probably know more than that,” Leka said. “I don’t want you facing off against them by yourself. I don’t care about your trust issues.”

  “I don’t have trust issues,” I said. “You have sketchiness issues.”

  Leka rolled her eyes. “Kev, I’m done having this conversation,” she said. “You will find out what you need to know about me when you need to know it, same as everyone else in this dump. My point is, we are all in this together against the xenos, and nobody’s going to get to go out there and play hero.”

  “Fine,” I said. “I’m not much of the hero type, anyway.”

  “God, shut up.” Leka shook her head. “Anyway. You may be right about a regular electric current. It’s just...we would be running an experiment, and we’d be staking all our lives on your guess being right.” She wrapped her hands around her knees and sighed as she watched Anderson running ropes to strategic places along the chassis of the transport.

  “As opposed to staking our lives on...what, exactly?” I said.

  Leka shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “Mostly, I came over here to explain the problem I’m having until a solution magically pops into my head. See, we have a way to get the voltage we need, and we have a way to condense the quasi-particulates.” She brushed a strand of hair out of her face and squinted at the shuttle.

  “Right,” I said, nodding while staring vacantly ahead. Science had never exactly been my forte.

  “Now, If we had twice as much voltage, we could just, you know.” She made some gesture with her hands that was even less comprehensible than her words. “Just kind of sarcophagus everything in there and eventually a plasma burst would...oh!” She stood up all of a sudden. “Oh, shit!”

  I turned my gaze up to her and said, “What?”

  “No, maybe you’re right?” She put both hands on the sides of her head.

  “I’m right?” I said. “About what?”

  “Goddammit, I can’t believe…” Leka ran back to the spaceship. “Anderson!” she yelled. “Anderson, you’re not gonna fuckin’ believe how goddamn stupid I am! It was right in front of me the whole time and I didn’t see it!”

  “See what?” Anderson stood up and threw the end of a rope toward Leka.

  “It’s kinetic biofeedback!” Leka yelled, as if that phrase made sense to anybody except for her. “Those huge, hulking collections of xenos are generating so much alternating current, they have to use those big exo-skeletons to condense it into those Rhys-Jankowski circuits which create the plasma bursts!” she said. “Those Beezee guns are basically excretory mechanisms!”

  “Wait, so you’re saying…Hold on.” Anderson took the rope between her knees and rappelled slowly down the hulk of the wrecked transport shuttle.

  “She’s saying they’re shitting on us,” Curtis said, an amused smile on his face as he watched Anderson descend to the jungle floor.

  “Even better!” Leka put a fist in the air. “All we have to do is find a big length of conductive wire, string together some of these EMZ-line generators, and figure out some kind of...some kind of harpoon, maybe.” She stabbed her index finger at one of her fists. “Anyway, we put all those together, and we can make them shit themselves.”

  “To death, right?” Curtis called from the top of the transport.

  “Of course she means ‘to death,’” Anderson barked in reply. “Anything worth doing at this point in the game had better involve something dying!”

  27

  I wouldn’t have survived my childhood
in this galaxy if I’d made a habit of asking too many questions when I wasn’t sure how something worked. As long as it worked, my job was generally to pick it up and shoot something with it - not to wonder how or why it worked.

  That being said, it was a real stretch to say that our stolen transport shuttle worked. Its engines ran, for the most part. Its thrusters had pretty good intermittent power, at least on the right side and in the back. It had cupholders.

  And now, the back half was occupied by every auxiliary motor and generator that Leka and Anderson could dislocate using the small stash of emergency tools stored on board the shuttle.

  “Are we sure this thing’s gonna get airborne?” Garcia said. He and I, as the walking wounded in our party, had been assigned to the task of stripping copper wire out of all the air conditioning units and connecting the lengths to form a giant harpoon cable.

  “Who’s we?” I said. “I don’t think we made it on the engineering committee, here.”

  “For shame,” Garcia laughed.

  As the sun rose over the jungle, we’d been watching Leka and Anderson go from praising each other’s genius in nearly erotic terms, to full-on blood feuding about some technical bullshit, to being best friends and lab partners again. The cycle repeated itself several times, and it never got boring.

  And I was healing, which was nice. It’s hard to enjoy a morning assigned to a sitting-down task when sitting takes effort.

  I stood up and stretched, grateful for my newfound lack of pain and exhaustion.

  “Bastard,” Garcia laughed. “You should have grabbed a sample of Salter’s blood. I could use some super-healing right now.”

  My own laughter didn’t have nearly as much good cheer in it. “Be glad that I didn’t,” I said. “That shit functioned as a homing beacon for the xenos before. I bet they only made it more powerful while he was hanging around and partying with them.”

  “Partying with electro-monsters,” Garcia said. “What do they drink? Silicone sealant?”

  “I assume it’s mostly huffing the fumes off a can of connection cleaner.” Curtis was walking toward us, trying to wipe some of the grease from his filthy forearms. “How’s the wire stripping going?”

  “It’s going,” Garcia said. “How long a range do we want to have with this thing?”

  “As long as possible, is what Tomlins said,” Curtis said. “But we don’t have much longer until takeoff. They’re almost done fixing the stabilizers on that thing.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “The stabilizers too? Why don’t we just steal another ship?”

  I knew the answer without having any disconcerting visions: because Salter’s death would have sent a distress signal out to the Belters. If we were intensely lucky, they’d write his loss – and mine – off as unfortunate side effects of running a galactic crime syndicate.

  Unfortunately, it was looking like we had used up most of our luck on staying alive so far.

  The shuttle got airborne without the ominous whining from earlier. I didn’t know how, and I didn’t ask. I was just happy that Anderson was able to control our altitude - I didn’t want us getting any higher than we needed to be for our approach to the city.

  “Visuals look good,” Anderson said. “Um. Looks like we have an aerial patrol over the city.”

  “What kind of...ahh.” I walked up behind her and cringed at what I saw on the holodisplay. A wedge-shaped formation of pyramid craft was cruising over the rooftops.

  “Ahhh is correct,” Anderson said. “Actually, I might go for an Aagggghhhh! Or an Aww fuck me instead.” She chuckled, the way old spacers did when they were staring down a situation that did not merit laughter from normal people.

  “You ready to go?” Leka spun the co-pilot’s seat around to face me.

  “I’m ready,” I said, “if you think I’ll really be more useful to you when my blood’s activated.”

  “Oh, I don’t think you’ll be more useful.” Leka rocked the chair back and forth and pursed her lips as she considered me. “But if you’re right about Salter’s blood working as a beacon…”

  “Which he might well be, judging from all this air traffic,” Anderson said. “Gonna be honest - this looks more like they have some human strategists on board. Specifically, Belter strategists.”

  My stomach sank - had those visions meant that the xenos were peeling information out of my brain? Were they hacking into my mind to use my own knowledge against my human comrades?

  “There could be other explanations,” Leka said. “It could be Belters involved, yes. It could also be that the xenos reabsorbed Salter’s consciousness, or one of their own strategies, or just a coincidence that sucks for us.”

  “But it’s probably more Belters,” I said, praying that it wasn’t my own knowledge being used against us. “So, someone friendly needs to activate my blood before…”

  “Question,” Anderson said. “How come Leka could de-activate you and re-activate you, but Salter couldn’t?”

  “Salter didn’t know my deactivation word,” I said, staring at Leka. “It would have meant he could take control of me from my supers.”

  Leka gave me a grin that showed her teeth. She said nothing.

  “Honey, you need to cut the crap,” Anderson said, turning a humorless face to her. “If you’re one of them, you need to tell us now, while we can still cut a deal with you. I may be on a prison planet, but that doesn’t mean I’m some nobody who can’t swing with the…”

  “You people really think I’m one of them, don’t you?” Leka said. “Why is it so hard to believe that a regular dysfunctional smart person couldn’t get addicted to grief and lose a really fucking good post in the Coalition forces?” She shook her head and stared at me, and in that moment I knew the awful truth. She really was who she said she was. The rest of us were only speculating and fantasizing about what would be convenient.

  “So he was right,” I said.

  “So who was right?” Leka said. “Salter?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “He...I thought you might know where my daughters are.”

  “I don’t,” Leka said. “And you know what else?” She cocked her head to one side and squinted at me.

  “What?” I said.

  “There’s a lot of other sad dads out there with missing kids, and I’d bet my life plenty of them are missing their kids because of you.” Her voice was low and deadly sharp; she leaned forward in the chair and locked her gaze on mine. “If you help me, I might one day find myself in a position where I can reach back and help you. Shit, I might get back in the good graces of the Coalition if I can help them re-take this planet.”

  “Okay, kids, show’s over,” Tomlins said. “A xeno ship just took a hostile track toward us.”

  “Shit,” Anderson said. “Leka, you are some kind of liar. You know that?”

  “Technically, I never lied to anyone,” Leka said as she stood up and walked to the corridor behind the control room. “You were all perfectly happy to make up your own stories about me. All I had to do was go along with them a little bit.”

  I followed her down the corridor, glaring. That still didn’t explain how she knew my deactivation word, but now might well be too late to press the matter any further.

  Our weapon was housed in what had once been the right rear passenger compartment. Leka and Anderson had removed the rear bay doors and as much of the side wall as possible in order to give us room to throw our harpoon.

  And it was very much a harpoon - in fact it was a sharpened piece of railing that had once run the length of a corridor inside the ship. It was insulated along part of its length by elastic bandages and seat stuffing.

  I was to grab the insulated part so I could throw the harpoon, because the strength I had when my blood was activated was the best propulsion option we had at the moment.

  I followed Leka down the corridor and into the compartment where we had the weapon. She grabbed a seat back for balance and started the generator.

  “Vercingetorix,
” she said.

  As she said the word, I could see clearly the pyramid-shaped xeno ship that was making a beeline toward us. Fear seized my gut, and I felt the machines in my blood heightening my every sense.

  The closer the ship got, the more I could feel a certain...something coming from it. It was almost a feeling like pain or anger. It didn’t like me, not anymore. And I had never liked it to start with.

  “I’m staying in my own fucking head,” I growled at the approaching ship. “You can’t…”

  “Use the weapon!” Leka said.

  I grabbed the metal spear by its insulated handle. To my immediate relief, it didn’t electrocute the hell out of me as I brought it back behind my body. I twisted on one foot as I put my whole weight into throwing the fucking thing.

  “Nice,” Leka said as the harpoon flew forward in a graceful arc toward the xeno ship. “Nice! The fucking thing works as an electromagnet!”

  I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I could have been aiming completely blindly, and the spear still would have hit the target. The xeno ship was thinking as fast as I was. It instantly tried to reverse, but only succeeded in slowing its progress before our weapon hit it.

  The ship spasmed for a second like a being made of flesh and blood before dissolving in mid-air. I felt a vibration in my body like an agonized shriek; the sudden pain in my head made me collapse to the ground.

  “Shit!” I said. “I think I can feel them dying!”

  “Stand back up!” Leka said, panic in her voice. “There’s another ship coming!”

  I barely had time to react and see what she was talking about before the xeno ship fired its plasma gun at us. There was a massive, world-rending noise as a plasma bolt sank right into the transport’s chassis. They had missed the weapons compartment - at least with this shot.