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Lethal Cargo
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1
Moments after we touched down on Gvm Uye Sachttra, an antique floater bumped over the dirt field we’d been assigned as a landing pad. Several natives jumped out. They were about five foot high, furry, dressed in colorful diapers, with long muzzles crammed with teeth. “The St. Clare?” they said, through a ruggedized box hanging around the boss alien’s neck, which translated their clicks and hisses. “Twenty standard tonnes of food aid and agricultural implements for the refugees?” They wore lanyards identifying them as employees of Help the Hungry.
“That’s right,” I said. “If I could just verify your IDs.” They stretched out their forearms, and Kimmie, my admin, scanned the credit dots embedded in their blackish flesh. They checked out. It’s always nice to meet honest aliens.
While we were unloading the crates, the boss alien said, “Travellers.” He or she cast a dirty look in the direction of the vine-swaddled conifers that edged the pad.
“I know,” I said.
The spaceport sprawled along the coast north of the refugee camp, and several rocky barrier islands. We were on one of the islands. The Travellers were on the next one over. One ship, a sow-bellied cruiser daubed with thermal paint pictures of the macabre Traveller pantheon. Two prizes, already hacked up and stripped of saleable parts.
“Lousy rotten demon-worshipping pirates,” the alien’s translation box said, while its toothy mouth hissed.
I’d have smiled if it wasn’t so true. “Pretty much.”
The alien nudged me. We were standing on the top deck of the St. Clare. I was wearing jeans and a parka, wishing I had brought a heavier coat, white-knuckling through a bad hangover. “This is a good ship,” the alien said. “You could take ‘em out. How about it?”
The alien wasn’t wrong about my ship, anyway. I was justifiably proud of the St. Clare. She was military surplus, but not from the Fleet. She’d been the imperial flagship of a two-bit alien emperor who had been deposed shortly after commissioning her. I’d picked her up second-hand, and although she wasn’t perfect, I steered my thoughts away from what we called our “mechanical failure.” Not only was the St. Clare fantastically tough, she also boasted the armaments of the warship she had originally been. Forward of the superstructure, the elongated truss supported a flat top deck 50 meters long, which ended in a”‘head” whose serrated jaws concealed the mouth of a powerful railgun. We also had two turret-mounted large-caliber Gausses, plus a maser point defense system, and dual missile launchers on the belly for 360° coverage. Better have it and not need it than … yeah. All too often, we did need it.
“How much?” I said.
The alien named a laughable sum.
I shook my head. When I was in the army, I had killed people for peanuts. But those days were long behind me. Nowadays, I wouldn’t even consider it for less than seven figures. “If I hit them on the ground, it would depend on how accurate the strike was, but their antimatter containment ring might blow. Then you wouldn’t have a spaceport anymore.”
“Our chief-one-appointee made a deal with ‘em,” the alien said gloomily. “They get to sell their stolen goods at our spaceport. We get to live. Probably.”
And people wonder why aliens don’t like us. As one of the two great powers in the Cluster, humanity poses as protector of all the little guys who got caught on the hop by our third colonization wave, and forever lost the chance to develop spaceflight capabilities in their own way and in their own time. To be fair, if it wasn’t us it would have been the Eks, and we’re nicer than they are. But space is big. Ungraspably, horribly big. The Fleet can’t be everywhere at once. And unfortunately for our image, most of the predators out there are human, too.
Such as the Travellers, whom I had reasons of my own to detest. But I was trying not to think about that. Bitterness is ugly.
Dolph, my business partner and pilot, climbed down from the top of the bridge. He was tall and skinny as a rifle on legs, with a black ponytail straggling over the collar of his coat, and binos slung around his neck. “That ship has a HERF mast,” he said.
“Charming,” I said.
“Plus you have to figure they’ve got auto-nukes,” Dolph said. “There are clamps on the ship, nothing there. They probably left ‘em in orbit.” He scowled up at the clouds.
Auto-nukes—autonomous nuclear missiles—are also illegal, for a very good reason. You can’t tell ‘em from regular sats, until they fall on your head. I crunched some vitamins and chased them with black coffee from one of those self-heating bulbs. My hangover receded some.
To be honest, any sane captain would have bailed at that point. But I was too experienced to back down … and too broke.
“God, it’s cold,” I said. Dust hazed the distance. This whole strip of coast had been deforested. Even in human form, I could smell woodsmoke blowing from the refugee camp, and the tang of the sea.
Martin, my engineer, lowered the final crate of food aid into the floater, and we got down to the best part of the process: collecting our fee. Kimmie, wearing two pairs of fingerless gloves, processed the balance of the aliens’ payment. This far out from the Heartworlds, accepting payments is a dicey business. All transactions have to be physically cleared through the nearest node of the EkBank, which in the case of this planet was four light years away. Normally, we’d stick around until all our payments had time to clear, so we could chase up anyone who tried to stiff us. That could take days. I was not planning on sticking around here, but I knew that Help the Hungry was good for it.
Click, and I was 50 KGCs richer. That was payroll and operating expenses covered for the month, plus a few KGCs over that I could salt away for my daughter’s education. What I told her was that I was in the aid business.
The boss alien sidled closer to me. “You are not really human, are you?” the translation box whispered.
I looked down at the odious little creature. “Sure I am.” I was six foot one, with light brown hair that I kept short so it wouldn’t flop in my eyes. My open, square-jawed face served me well in business negotiations. I looked more built than Dolph, but sadly, not all of it was muscle. That’s what you get for spending too much time in freefall, and more time sitting on your keister.
“No, you are not.” The alien seemed quite sure of it. “You do not smell like a human.” It pointed a claw at Dolph. “Nor does he.” Martin had gone off to fetch the refuelling stand from the edge of our pad. Irene, my weapons officer, had just come out of the ship with her second-best rifle slung over her shoulder. The alien pointed at her. “She is not human, either. All of you smell like … animals.”
“Hot damn,” Dolph whispered to me. “Sniffed out by an alien on Planet Back-Asswards.”
“What about me?” Kimmie said. She was wearing a purple coat, to match her purple hair. She had a sweet, round face. A ruby sparkled in her nose.
“You are human,” the alien said, and hissed at her. “Goodbye,” it said to me. “Please give our regards to the team at head office.” All the aliens went down the port ladder head-first, like squirrels, then got in their floater and drove away. The levitation field, now compressed down to a few inches, bumped over every little irregularity in the ground, making the cargo jump up and clatter. There’s a reason floaters are not more widely used.
Dolph was laughing. “Good thing most people don’t have that keen of a sense of smell.”
“We are, too, human,” I said. “Homo sapiens versipellus.”
“Phooey,” Kimmie said. “I’m just a boring mainstream human.”
I smiled at her. “If all mainstream humans were like you, the Cluster would be a better place.” She was the youngest of the crew, as well as the only normie. I had a soft spot for her.
Irene was climbing the ladder to the top of the bridge. That’s what we called the three-storey armored superstructure, but most of it was the cargo hold. The actual essentials were safely tucked away below. While Dolph unloaded the remaining cargoes, I followed Irene up the ladder. The wind was like a wild thing, trying to rip me off the exposed rungs.
I knelt beside Irene behind the main radar dish, automatically falling into old habits of concealment from enemy spotters. From up here, we could see the Traveller ship over the untended hedges on the shores of the islands. This spaceport really was a dump. There were hardly any proper landing pads. Mostly you were just putting down on hardened dirt. In many places, rocks poked through like bones sticking up from a dessicated carcass. Most spaceships can cope with less than perfectly flat surfaces—the St. Clare certainly could—but all the same, it was an accident waiting to happen. Then there was the native greenery that had been allowed to grow up between the pads. A real mess.
There were two pads in between us and the shore of our island; one held an Ek landing shuttle, the other was empty. In fact, most of the pads nearby were unoccupied. Travellers can clear out a spaceport faster than rats in a kitchen. Despite what you may have heard about space piracy, the easiest place to steal spaceships is on the ground. The Travellers’ standard m.o. is to scream down out of a blue sky, land practically on top of their targets—they’re good at flying, I’ll give them that—and overwhelm them with high-speed ground assaults. Then they’ll fly their prizes away, sell ‘em or break ‘em up for scrap, spend the proceeds, and repeat.
They were selling, not stealing, today … probably. That margin of doubt was what had persuaded all the sane captains to leave.
“Looks like we missed all the fun,” Irene said. She measured the distance to the Traveller ship with a professional look in her cool blue eyes. “I could make that shot.”
“In this wind?”
“Sure,” Irene said. She was a vet, as were Dolph and I. But whereas we had been in the special forces, Irene had been a sniper. She probably could make that shot. She was the best marksman I’d ever met, or rather markswoman—55 kilos dripping wet, with fine blonde hair pulled back in a severe ponytail, and a husband and two kids at home.
“Those ain’t worth the antimatter in their containment,” I said, eyeing the Travellers’ prizes, a tramp freighter smaller than the St. Clare and a harp-backed scow. “Anyway, we still got a few more cargoes to deliver. The small-lot crap.”
“You’re the boss,” Irene said, making a face. “I’ll just stay up here and keep an eye on them.”
Figures in black coats moved around outside the Traveller ships, mingling with aliens and humans who were probably dickering for the stolen ship parts. They were too far away to make out any of their faces. I thought about going back down to borrow Dolph’s binoculars, then decided against it. I was better off not knowing.
I helped Martin hook up the water hoses to refill our reactant mass tanks, which involved dragging the refuelling stand across the pad on its rusty wheels, unkinking the hoses, attaching new sediment filters, and swearing like mad. At least it got us warm. While we were doing that, more customers arrived to pick up their stuff, and another floater delivered our return cargo—twenty tons of amateurishly packaged shipments for Ponce de Leon, mostly pre-processed rare earths, and some luxury items such as pelts and rare timber.
“Start loading,” I yelled up to Dolph.
“Can’t,” he yelled back.
“Why the fuck not?”
We were all grumpy. We always looked forward to getting there, after days in the field: shopping, going out for a drink, mooching around and feeling the dirt under our feet. Even on a semi-civilized Fringeworld like Gvm Uye Sachttra, there’s intel to be picked up and connections to be made, the lifeblood of the logistics business. Sometimes we’d make a side trip into the country and get in some hunting. All scrubbed off the agenda, because of the Travellers.
“Still got one shipment hasn’t been collected,” Dolph yelled.
“Oh, for—” I let loose with some curses that should have turned the air blue. “Which one?”
“The toy fairies.”
I cursed some more. Some whimsical individual had ordered 9,000 electronic toy fairies from a Ponce de Leon supplier. Leaving aside the frivolity of shipping expensive toys to a refugee camp, it wasn’t that unusual a shipment. Half of what we typically carried was aid and relief supplies. The other half was low-quality consumer electronics. Aliens love that junk.
I checked my phone. The customer’s name was Rafael Ijiuto, and he owed me eight KGCs. That was the difference between buying Lucy a new holobook or not. I tried to call the guy. My phone wasn’t working. No connectivity.
“I’ll go look for him,” I said resignedly. “Coming, Dolph?”
“Can I come, too?” Kimmie yelled.
“No, sweetheart,” I said. “It ain’t safe out there.” Ignoring her look of outrage, I climbed the ladder to get one of the toy fairies out of the hold. It would help Rafael Ijiuto to identify us, since I didn’t know what he looked like and vice versa.
The packaging was unusually heavy-duty: each fairy was encased in an airtight, opaque plastic bubble. I ripped one open with a knife and took the fairy out.
It had four wings, two for gliding and two that acted as a rotor. Basically, it was a fully functional drone masquerading as a toy. Lucy would love it. I decided to give her this one as a present. Rafael Ijiuto wouldn’t miss it, and I would not have time to pick up anything better here.
I fastened the remote control bracelet on my wrist and pressed the up arrow. The fairy rose into the air, its wings and long tresses sparkling luminously in the dimness of the hold. Watching the thing circle above my head, I unaccountably shivered, like someone had walked across my grave.
The fairy turned its head down towards me. The violet eyes in its plastic face froze me with a malevolent stare. I took a careful step backwards, watching the thing without blinking. For an instant I was back on Tech Duinn, stalking through the undergrowth, scarcely breathing …
I came back to myself when my right hand closed around the butt of my .22. Flushing with embarrassment, I turned the toy off. It fluttered down placidly to my wrist. Tense, much, Starrunner? It was just a toy. Good thing no one had seen me overreacting like that.
There was a junky old electric buggy sitting under the trees. Dolph and I got it started, after some fiddling with the battery connections, and drove down the coast to the refugee camp.
2
We spotted Travellers here and there on the main drag of the camp, browsing the stalls. They typically flew with huge crews, twenty or thirty people to a ship—their ground troops. The tattoos on their faces flickered and writhed, rendering them unrecognizable to facial recognition technology—not that there was any surveillance in a place like this, anyway. The skirts of their hideous black coats ballooned in the wind, permitting glimpses of the weapons strapped to their bodies.
The locals could have overwhelmed them at any time, a hundred to one. But whoever controls orbital space controls everything on the ground. That’s just how it is, and that’s why a few lunatics with auto-nukes can roll right over millions of dirtsiders, leaving a trail of pain behind them, like grass flattened by heavy tyres.
“At least it ain’t Cole’s clan,” Dolph said.
“How do you know?” I said. “The attrition rate is something insane. We probably wouldn’t recognize any of them by now.”
Yuriops cut across our path, their horns making them fully eight feet tall, while the sensing cilia of stargends nodded to avoid the cat’s cradle of power lines overhead. Eks fingered the local wares with their four hands. They knew the Travellers wouldn’t mess with them. Humans were their preferred prey, and sure enough Dolph and I were almost the only humans left … apart from the refugees manning the stalls. Cheap, flickery holo greeters in front of the stalls touted deep discounts, and desperation tinged the patter of the salesfolk.
“I need one of those,” Dolph said through the bandanna covering his nose and mouth. I followed his gaze to a stall selling knives. Big, little, electrified, poison-tipped, auto-barbed, with grips made for hands that had five fingers, four, eight, or none. This place really did have everything. You wouldn’t take it for a refugee camp, but that’s what it was. The people manning the knife stall were as human as we were, probably more so. The eldest looked about sixteen. The youngest was no bigger than my own daughter. Some years ago, a human colony had fled a war on the far side of the Cluster, wound up here—and here they had stayed, and multiplied. The natives were signatories of the Sapient Refugee Convention, jointly formulated by humanity and the Eks, and co-signed by all other biologicals, whether they liked it or not. They may not have appreciated being told to turn over a piece of their planet to several thousand homeless humans, but it had paid off for them. With typical human ingenuity, the refugees had transformed this barren coast into a shopping mall.
“Yo, big guy,” the teenager at the knife stall called out. “Wanna put some steel in your holster?”
“She’s talking to you, Mike,” Dolph said with an amused snort.
I gave the girl a second look. Dirty blonde hair hacked off at her shoulders, dust-colored skin, charity trousers and sweatshirt retooled into something more punk than refugee. A knife the size of a machete rode at her hip. But it was her eyes that caught me—gray, smoky, smouldering with the same desperation that gripped everyone in camp.
“Or you need a place to stash your blade? Got something just the right size.” She pumped her hips, lifted her machete an inch clear of her scabbard, and laughed. She was a child, but she had the voice of a forty-year-old smoker, and a line in cheap innuendo to rival any streetwalker.
I practically had to put Dolph in a headlock to stop him from heading over to the stall.
“That’s a genuine messer,” he said in anguish.
For Dolph, it was all about the knives, not the girl.
“Gotta find this guy first,” I said.
“Yeah, keep on walking,” the girl shouted after us. “Whaddaya expect from a man with a toy fairy?” Her little friends giggled shrilly.
I glanced ruefully up at the fairy whirring above my head. The dust had turned its costume and long tresses gray. It didn’t look spooky at all now.
We reached a crossroads in the maze of the camp. Humans and aliens queued at the eateries. A crowd surrounded a chained Kimberstine haulasaur that was doing tricks. I even saw a couple of the Travellers in the crowd. Dolph muttered obscenities at their backs. I shook my head.
Suddenly, the toy fairy rose up to a height of twenty feet. I hadn’t touched any buttons on purpose, but maybe I triggered something by accident. The thing let out a sinister peal of mechanical laughter, and began to swoop around, scattering fairy dust. Dolph and I watched open-mouthed as the stuff blew over the crowds and stuck to faces, cilia, horns, and tentacles. It was just glitter. We were standing up-wind. Nevertheless, Dolph got some sparkles on his hair, and my watch cap would probably never be the same. The crowd let out that soft unguarded ‘oooh’ you hear when people have witnessed something unexpected and magical. Even the Travellers blinked in surprise. The Kimberstine haulasaur let out a melancholy roar.
The wind caught a last voluminous cloud of glitter and carried it away over the tent roofs.
“Did you mean to do that?” Dolph said.
“Nope,” I said. “I don’t think it’s working right. I’m gonna find something different for Lucy.”
The fairy descended towards us. I reached up and grabbed it. It struggled, its rotor trying to whirr in my hands. I found the power switch and turned it off. “Let’s eat.”
We were in the middle of a surprisingly good meal of ugali and stewed chicken—food aid remixed into something bordering on cuisine—when Rafael Ijiuto finally showed up.
“Hi,” he said. “I’m Rafe. You must be Mike.”
I swallowed my mouthful of food and half-stood to shake his hand. Dolph hooked a free crate with his foot. Ijiuto lowered himself onto it.
He looked to be in his twenties, hair buzzed to a quarter-inch all over, biscuit-colored scalp showing through. The hair was biscuit-colored, too, with a coating of dust. Making no concessions to the fact that he was sitting in a fast food joint in a refugee camp, he wore a suit and tie, the business-formal template that has stood the test of so many centuries it’s practically encoded in male human DNA. I have a suit myself somewhere. At the moment, however, Dolph and I were both in jeans and heavy coats. Ijiuto’s sartorial style helped to mask any anxiety he may have felt. He didn’t look scared, he just looked cold. He ordered a cup of tea. The wind snapped the awning over our heads. Aliens and humans alike shouted at each other to be heard.
I had to lean in close to Ijiuto to catch his words. “OK to pick up the cargo directly from your ship?”
“Sure,” I said. “We’re on pad one-sixty-five, out on one of the islands. You got a vehicle? We’re talking four large crates, one hundred kilos each.”
Ijiuto nodded. “I’m going to hire a truck.”
“I’ll need the balance of your payment at that time.”
“No problem.” He was looking at the toy fairy. I’d set it in the middle of the table, where it had been drawing admiring stares from aliens who’d seen the fairy dust display. Dolph had spilled beer on its wings. “I love this product,” Ijiuto said. “Only humans would think of something like this.”
“To humanity,” Dolph said, knocking his beer stein against Ijiuto’s tea cup. “The only species in the Cluster with the gall to charge 300 GCs apiece for a mass market drone with a frilly costume.”
“To human audacity,” I said, wryly.
“Huh,” Ijiuto said. “See those tattooed freaks walking around? They’re human, too.”
“We’re a versatile species,” I agreed.
We finished eating, paid the bill, and walked back towards the parking lot. Ijiuto was swiping at the screen of his phone. “I can’t get through to the truck rental people. Can’t even get a dang signal. I’m going to have to go over there. Catch you up at the ship. Pad one-six-five, right?” As he spoke, he was already angling away from us.
“Yeah,” Dolph said to his back. “What kind of refugee camp doesn’t even have decent phone service?” He snickered. Dolph had a strong sense of justice, in his own way.
His face changed. The almond eyes above his bandanna widened. He threw an elbow into my side.
I spun around and saw someone I had hoped never to see again, and yet had dreamt of meeting again, pretty much nightly for a while. Those were bad dreams. Bloody dreams.
The reality was worse.
A few meters away stood a blond, heavily tattooed man in a black leather greatcoat, glowering at us.
It was.
Zane Cole.
The man my wife left me for, seven years ago.
3
Zane might’ve walked away. Or I might’ve.
Then he decided to recognize us, after all. He stopped walking. Dolph and I had already stopped. We stood face to face.
The wind gusted over us, making Zane squint. I saw the white in the frown lines he’d acquired on Tech Duinn.
He mustered a normal voice. “Well, hey! I wasn’t expecting to see you two chunks of space debris this side of Ragnarok.”
My palms were damp. Heat surged through my veins. Intellectually, I knew I was angry at the wrong person. Zane had not forced Sophia to leave me, after all. She had walked away of her own free will. But I still felt like punching him to a bloody pulp.
Dolph stepped in. “Where’d you jack those ships?” He let Zane know that we weren’t buying his ‘hey ol’ war buddies’ bullshit.
“No law against selling hulks,” Zane smirked.
“There is if you made them into hulks.”
“We’re contributing to the local economy,” Zane said. “You here on business?”
Dolph ignored the question. Stepping in closer to Zane, he growled, “How many bank accounts you had yanked so far? How many postulants you burned?”
Zane had odd scraps of leather and hair hanging off the lapels of his coat, decorated with beads and such. I could smell them from here. “You haven’t tanned those properly,” I said. “Remember how we did the deer hides on Tech Duinn? We built smoke pits out back of the FOB.”
“It ain’t easy on board a spaceship,” Zane said with a smile that made me want to claw his eyeballs out of his skull. “How’s the shipping business these days?”
The weird thing was how little the black coat had changed him. He always had been an aggravating lightweight, even when we served together during the war. Our war, the one that liberated Tech Duinn and killed my youthful illusions about humanity. It should not have been a surprise to me that one of our own would become a Traveller.
It had surprised me—totally blindsided me, in fact—when my wife left me for this selfsame renegade.
Black spots danced in front of my vision. I realized I needed to breathe. I inhaled a lungful of dust, and felt something solid in my right hand. I was gripping the butt of my Midday Special.
Zane had to be armed, too. But Dolph was distracting him for me. He wouldn’t have time to draw his own weapon before I could drop him. I could practically taste the blood that would gush from his wounds …
Snapping out of my violent fantasy, I reminded myself that I was forty-four years old, responsible for the livelihoods of a dozen people. Furthermore, we were being watched by assorted beady-eyed natives, refugees, and aliens. I pictured Lucy’s face.
I said, “So how’s Sophia?”
Sophia. Never Sophie or Sophs. My ex-wife’s name suited her perfectly, conjuring the dark-haired elegance and pensive gaze that I had fallen in love with. I’d managed to forget the world-weary sneer more often seen on her face towards the end of our marriage.
“Sophia!” Zane said. “Man, I haven’t seen her in ages.”
“What?”
“Yeah, man. She left the life.”
I was speechless. All these years I’d been picturing them together.
“She washed out?” Dolph said. “Or you burned her?”
“Her? No way,” Zane said. “She just decided it wasn’t for her. It happens. I guess we’d all like to get in touch with her, but …”
“Why?” I said.
“Why’d she leave? Search me. You can’t make this kind of money in the Temple.” This was how the Travellers referred to mainstream society: the Temple, with them on the outside, going their own way. Having insulted us, Zane pushed back the left sleeve of his ghastly coat. We both twitched. But there was no weapon sheathed on his forearm. Instead, a chunky silver watch glittered amidst his arm hair. “Check it out. Genuine Urush fortunometer.”
“That the kind that tells your fortune as well as the time?” Dolph said.
“Yeah. Got it for 60 KGCs.” Zane was simultaneously boasting about what a good price he got, and bragging on his spending power. I wouldn’t net 60 KGCs in profit this whole trip.
Dolph flicked the watch contemptuously with a fingernail. “Don’t need a fancy timepiece to tell your fortune,” he said.
“How not?”
“I can read the future,” Dolph said. “It holds a severe ass-kicking for you if you don’t get outta our faces right now.”
Zane drew back. His face reddened. “Shifter assholes,” he said. “Shouldn’t be allowed off the leash.” He walked away, the bits of dead people on the back of his coat bouncing.
“You got ripped off,” I yelled after him. He kept walking, but I thought his ears turned redder. “That’s a fake for sure,” I said to Dolph, forcing myself to speak in a regular tone of voice. The Urush—the extinct alien race who are thought to have been the first intelligent species to conquer the Messier 4 Cluster—left behind odd bits of tech that still work after all these years. I had heard of their fortunometers, but no way had Zane scored a genuine one in a refugee camp for a mere 60 KGCs.
“Yeah,” Dolph said. He glanced at me.
“I thought they were still together,” I said.
“Maybe she wised up,” Dolph said.
We got in our buggy and drove back through the residential part of the refugee camp. Ragged tents surrounded open fires where people were cooking their messes, reminding me that the smell of woodsmoke was not only the smell of home but also of extreme poverty. It was terrible to see humans living like this. But I’d seen similar scenes, and worse, in a dozen different parts of the Cluster. Space colonization ain’t easy, even without Travellers preying on the weak.
A few klicks brought us back to the spaceport. As we drove onto the causeway that connected the mainland to our island, the Ek shuttle that had been parked next to us took off, drenching the world in noise and filling the air with dust. We bumped through the racket onto our island.
I stopped the buggy.
“I don’t believe it,” I said, over the fading thunder.
“What?”
“Zane. I think he was lying.”
“He lies every time he opens his mouth,” Dolph said, “but why would he lie about that?”
“Because he didn’t want me to know she’s here.”
“He said she left the life.”
“Yeah, and as we’ve already established, he’s a liar. I’m gonna go see if she’s here.” I opened my door.
Dolph reached across me and held it shut. “That’s about the most boneheaded thing you could do.”
I didn’t wrestle him. We weren’t kids anymore. I stared out the windshield at the alien foliage pressing in on the road. “She left me without a word of explanation, Dolph. I deserve some kind of a fucking explanation. And so does Lucy. I haven’t told her anything. But she’s eight. She already wonders why she doesn’t have a mommy like other kids. Pretty soon she’s gonna start asking me questions, and what the hell am I supposed to tell her? I tell her enough goddamn lies as it is.” The words nearly choked me. “About what it’s like, what we do out here.”
“We don’t do anything bad,” Dolph said uncomfortably.
“Oh, not that bad, no. We deliver our cargoes. No contraband within five light years of the Heartworlds. We occasionally kill people, but only if we’re paid a lot of money for it, and no one will ever find out. I agree, nothing that bad.”
“You left something out,” Dolph said. “We try to help other human beings. In some ways, that’s the worst job of all.” He popped his own door and stretched into the back seat for his backpack. “Those motherfuckers bring the whole species down. I’ll go.”
“Jesus, no! You can’t—”
“I’ll just go and see if she’s there.”
“If she is—”
“Then I’ll pop her,” Dolph said, “for having the bad taste to leave you for that fucking faggot.” He grinned. “Just kidding.”
“Douche,” I said, with feeling. We had known each other since we were five, playing with stick guns in the forests of San Damiano.
“You’re the captain,” he said, “and that’s why you get to go back and make nice with the customers, while I have all the fun.”
He melted into the thickets.
I drove on, cursing violently.
4
My guts knotted with worry as I parked beside the St. Clare. It looked like we were dishearteningly far from ready to go. Power lines still trailed from the ship’s belly across the dirt field, feeding ship’s power into the grid. Places like this, you pay your landing fee with electricity. At least the refuelling stand had been rolled away. Kimmie sat on a bale of pelts beside the ship, writing up our manifest.
As I swung my legs out of the buggy, a ragged, undersized female accosted me. I had to struggle for a minute to place her.
“Mister, can you help me?”
That voice. Throaty, husky. It was the teenager from the knife stall. She was still clutching her cruddy plastic case of knives.
“Sorry, kid,” I said. “I’m kinda busy.”
“They got my cousins, mister. Please.”
“What happened?”
“They did a sweep along the main drag. I hid. They took Jan and Leaf.” Her eyes were huge with desperation. Her brash patter and precocious attitude had melted away. Now she was just a girl—scarcely more than a child—in mortal panic. “Please!”
“Oh, Jesus,” I said tiredly. “They took them to their ship?”
“Yes. It’s over there,” she said, gesturing, as if I might not know where it was.
“Irene,” I yelled.
Kimmie trotted over to us, leaving her holobook on the bale of pelts. “Mike, she says they came through and took all the children. It’s the most heinous thing I ever heard of.”
“You are young,” I said. I walked towards the port ladder.
Kimmie walked fast to keep up with me. Her face set in the expression of flinty judgement that was the flip side of her sweetness. “We’re really asking for it,” she said.
I slowed my pace, making a show of patience. “Asking for what, Kimmie?”
“When the shit hits the fan, you know who’ll be to blame? Us. Humanity. For what we do to each other. For what we do to ourselves.”
“People are horrible to each other, Kimmie,” I said. “We were horrible to each other with stone knives and catapults. We were horrible to each other with revolvers and cannons. And now, we’re horrible to each other with spaceships and nanotechnology. The more things change, the more they stay the same.”
The girl understood humanity better than Kimmie did, She yelped, “I can pay you, mister!” She fished in the neck of her charity sweatshirt and lifted out a pendant. It looked like a three-inch, slightly curved dagger in a sheath studded with diamonds. “These are genuine diamonds!”
“Sweetheart, I got bigger diamonds than that in my ship’s bearings.” I started up the ladder.
As I climbed, I scoped out the next-door island. The coast was rocky and choked with thickets. I had to figure Dolph had got at least that far by now. The channel between the islands was only about ten meters wide, choppy, laced with foam. I could tell it was shallow, ‘cause waves broke on a ridge of rock in the middle of the channel. At low tide, you could probably walk out to these islands from the beach.
Irene came to meet me on the top deck, wearing a surgical mask, holding the business end of a high-pressure air hose. She must have been cleaning the dust out of the barrels of the Gausses. She believed in being prepared. “Where’s Dolph?”
“Over there,” I said, pointing.
“Oh, for the love of God, why’d you let him do that?”
I hesitated. Irene was blissfully ignorant about the whole Sophia saga—I hired her long after that all went down, so all she knew was that I had a daughter I was raising on my own. Matter of fact, her daughter and mine were best friends. Stripping away all egotistical pretense, I was plain scared Irene might think twice about letting her Mia play with Lucy if she knew that Lucy’s mother was a Traveller. Or had been one. Which was it?
“That kid says they got her friends,” I said at last. “Where’s Dolph’s binos?”
“I left them up top.”
I climbed up the second ladder to the top of the bridge. The binos were lying behind the radar dish, next to Irene’s second-best rifle. I fitted them to my eyes. More people were now milling around the Travellers’ pad. Yuriops, stargends, several of the furry natives … and a whole lot of human children. The binos brought their little faces right up to my eyes in heartbreaking clarity. As I watched, another duo of Travellers marched up the road, herding several more kids.
I went back down to the top deck. “I’m going over there,” I said, not quite meeting Irene’s eyes.
“And do what, Mike?”
“I’m not sure yet,” I said. “Tell Marty to go ahead and load the cargo. I don’t think that joker Ijiuto is ever going to turn up.”
“I’ll cover you,” she said, heading for the airlock. “I’ll just go get my other scope.”
“Thanks.”
“Should I tell Marty to unload Ijiuto’s crates?”
“Hell, no. He hasn’t paid me. We got enough mass allowance to take ‘em home. At least that way we get a kill fee.”
I climbed down to the ground on the starboard side of the St. Clare. Glancing underneath the ship, I saw Kimmie sitting with her arm around the refugee girl, consoling her. She had even given the girl her purple coat. The sight of them together made me feel strangely alone, and less than human.
Carrying my tactical backpack, the twin of Dolph’s, I walked across the dirt field to the trees lining the back of our pad. I pushed the vines aside like a curtain, letting them fall back into place behind me.
In the dim greenish shadow under the vines, I stripped off my clothes. Stuffed them into my backpack.
Took a deep breath, hunched my shoulders, and Shifted into a wolf.
5
I’m a Shifter. Hundreds of years ago, extreme genetic modification was all the rage. The fad passed, but it left behind pockets of alt-humans with significant differences from mainstream humanity. We Shifters are the largest alt-human community, and if you listen to some people, we’re the most dangerous. In my opinion, the reason people say that is because unlike other alt-humans, we’re indistinguishable from normies.
Until we Shift.
Most Shifters have one, or at most two animal forms committed to muscle memory. Me, I have a bunch. But for the past couple of years I’d been favoring my gray wolf. I liked this beast’s power, speed, and sheer scary factor.
The wolf also excelled at stealth. I flowed through the curtains of vines, carrying my backpack in my teeth. Ecosystem contamination is always a risk when you hang out your shingle as a trading post. These invasive vines, which I recognized from Ponce de Leon, had killed most of the conifers stone dead. Bone-dry needles and twigs littered the ground. My wolf did not crack a single one of them underfoot.
With a map in my head, I turned west at the corner of our pad and followed the next hedge to the south coast of our island. That Ek shuttle was long gone, so I did not have to worry about someone spotting a predator that belonged on a planet 7,200 light years away. Scrubby native bushes grew right down to the coast of our island. Staying under cover, I peered out of the brush at the mainland and the next island over.
No one was driving along the coast road. I was too low down now to see anything of the Traveller ship except its tail antennas, meaning they couldn’t see me.
All clear.
I jumped into the channel.
Hell, that was cold.
For an awful minute I couldn’t find the bottom.
I can’t swim a stroke. Not as a human, nor as a wolf. Jumping into the water had been an act of faith and calculation. I had assumed the channel was walkable, based on how much of that rock in the middle was sticking out of the water. Was it deeper than I had thought?
My claws scrabbled on the sandy bottom. I raised my head and gulped air—and the next swell lifted me off my feet again.
I kind of hopped across the channel, timing my lunges to the swells that surged through the channel to break on the distant beach. It was terrifying. The swells also dragged me inshore, so I ended up crossing the channel at a diagonal angle.
I didn’t lose my backpack.
I scrambled up a low crag and crawled into the bushes, soaked and shivering, with the taste of salt water in my mouth. I shook myself like a dog, then slunk uphill. The bushes got thicker. The leading tendrils of the invading vines entwined their tops. Now I was stalking under a roof of green leaves, which grew higher and denser as I got in among the dead trees on the edge of the Travellers’ northern pad.
All the way, I sniffed the air. A wolf has a much more sensitive nose than a human being. This is one of the biggest advantages of tracking in animal form. Unfortunately, the smoke and dust that saturated the wind covered any scent of human beings, except for the occasional punch of latrine odor where someone had snuck into the bushes to do a number two.
I doubted the Travellers had anyone posted in these woods, anyway. What would be the point? They wouldn’t be able to see out.
Chinks of daylight showed through the green roof ahead.
A sudden impact knocked me sideways.
I danced my feet under me and dropped my backpack in a silent snarl. Even before I felt the impact, I’d smelled a familiar scent: jackal.
The jackal now standing nose to nose with me was much bigger than a real jackal would be—almost as big as my wolf, and my wolf was bigger than a real wolf, tipping the scales at 82 kilos, same as me. Nothing is gained or lost in Shifting.
“Gotcha,” Dolph said, around the strap of the backpack he held in his teeth. Our animal forms were exact replicas of the Earth originals on the outside, but not on the inside. Shifting wouldn’t be much use if you lost your ability to talk.
“Well?” I said.
Dolph’s ears went back. “She’s not there. I’ve been watching them for the last forty minutes. I scouted all around the pads where they parked their prizes … she’s not there.”
“Maybe she’s inside the ship,” I said.
“Mike, she’s not there.”
“Goddamn,” I said. “I guess that asshole was telling the truth for once in his life.” I felt strangely empty. Only now did I realize how much I’d built up the possibility of seeing Sophia in my mind. I had even begun to plan out what I’d say to her. I read a book on deprogramming once. It said that you should try to produce an emotional connection to their former life by showing them the faces of loved ones.
“Never mind,” I said, emptily. “What’s going on?”
“It’s weird as hell,” Dolph said. “All these kids.”
I pulled myself together. “That girl from the knife stall showed up at our pad, asking for help. She said they took her cousins.”
We dropped our backpacks under a tree and flowed through the last few meters of the woods. The smell of the Travellers now reached us. Poorly cured leather, cigarettes, unwashed funk, and … hot chocolate?
Crouched flat, we parted the vines with our noses, a millimeter at a time.
Aliens milled, buying shit from the Travellers. In addition to ship parts, they also sell pirated software, that kind of thing. Kids were running around everywhere. There must have been two hundred of them. Some sat on the ground, eating candy and drinking hot chocolate. The Travellers were handing it out in paper cups. It came from a hospitality tent where the Travellers were showing off their digital wares on display screens.
Over this bizarrely festal scene loomed the Travellers’ ship. It was a monster. As high as a three-storey building, it measured a good 200 meters long from head to tail. A trio of tubular auxiliary engines supported it off the ground. Intricate thermal ceramic inlays decorated its fuselage and flaring engine bell, depicting figures from the Travellers’ mixed-up mythology. All of us try to keep some part of old Earth alive in ourselves—wolf; jackal … but the Travellers have cherrypicked the worst of our ancestral traditions to create their own pantheon of outcasts, spanning from Loki to Cthulhu. Whether they actually believe in these grisly gods is up for grabs. I suppose it depends what you mean by belief.
I picked out the kids from the knife stall without much difficulty. All the humans here looked kind of samey. Our ethnicities are muddled these days; the distinctions between normies and alt-humans have taken their place as our primary way of sorting ourselves out into categories. But you do still get similarities among people who all come from the same place. These refugees tended to unruly blond or brown hair, dark eyes, muddy beige skin. So did the kids I was searching for. But something else distinguished them from the others. They were the only ones who looked scared.
Terrified out of their wits, in fact.
The little girl I’d noticed before, who was about Lucy’s age, held a cup of chocolate without drinking it. A boy of twelve or so gripped her shoulders as if he thought they were about to be pulled apart.
A Traveller was talking to them, gesticulating impatiently.
Spaced out around the edges of the pad, more Travellers stood guard with battered old assault rifles. They were facing in, not out. I watched the one closest to us for a few minutes. His eyes had an unblinking, glassy lustre. His coat flapped in the wind.
Dolph and I retired into the woods again.
“Where are their parents?” I growled.
“Maybe they don’t have any parents.”
I made myself calm down some. “They couldn’t fit all those kids on that ship.”
“Nope,” Dolph said, “and they’re too young to be burners.”
This business of “burning” people was how the Travellers maintained their access to the financial system. They played an endless cat and mouse game with the EkBank. As fast as the Eks identified them and closed down their accounts, they recruited new postulants to open burner accounts. Tragically, the Cluster’s many failed and suffering colonies offered them a near-limitless supply of potential recruits. They left nine out of ten burned in their wake, dumped far from home, or sold off for body parts … but you have to be eighteen to open an EkBank account.
“This must be their new thing,” I said. “Recruit them young. Brainwash ‘em hard. Make them repair the outsides of ships in the Core. They’re probably going to take the ten smartest ones, and leave the rest wishing they’d been chosen. Hearts and minds.”
Dolph’s neck fur hackled. His ears were all the way back. “Well, what are we waiting for?”
I glanced up at the chinks of sky visible through the roof of vines. The light had not changed since we touched down. This planet had a long day.
“They screwed up,” I said. “They’re too close to us. They can’t nuke the St. Clare without nuking themselves. So I think we can get away with it, if we move fast enough.”
We talked it over for a few minutes. Then I held my backpack down with my teeth while I used a claw to activate the radio clamped to its strap. We had these little FM radios—they only worked over short distances, but they did work, even in places with no connectivity. “Irene,” I whispered. “Come in.”
“Reading you.”
“You in position?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Where are you? What’s the plan?”
I told her.
“There’s a .50 cal turret on top of that ship,” she said.
“I saw. But they can’t lower the elevation of that thing far enough to shoot up their own pad, even if they wanted to. It’s for area clearance.”
“You should’ve at least taken that alien’s money.”
“Point,” I said, laughing. I cut the connection. I thought about how maybe I was about to die. “Well,” I said to Dolph, “let’s do this.”
We split up.
Dolph went west around the pad, to the other side of the ship.
I went back to the location of that doped-up postulant and crouched directly behind him.
I gave Dolph a count of twenty to get into position.
Then I gathered myself and leapt out of the vines, pouncing onto the postulant’s back.
6
I knocked the postulant flat on the dirt. He smelled like prey, and I couldn’t resist clawing him up a bit. I ripped his trophy coat with my teeth and tore the skin of his back to ribbons. When he stopped fighting me, I left him lying. I kicked his rifle into the woods with a hindpaw, and dashed towards the two kids from the knife stall.
Some of the guards loosed off rounds, but we were fast-moving targets, and they couldn’t get a clear line of fire. The aliens, and all the kids, were screaming (or hooting, or lowing) and fleeing. A thought shot like a meteor across my mind: the Travellers were the worst predators in the Cluster, yet these folks were running from a wolf? That’s fucked up.
Before I could reach the kids, a Traveller the size of a yuriops plunged towards me with an axe cocked high behind his shoulder. An amateur with the weapon, he telegraphed his blow by shifting his weight. I anticipated the downwards sweep of the blade, danced outside his guard, and sank my teeth into his right forearm. His sleeve tasted like old cheese. I broke his elbow by twisting the arm the wrong way, and jumped over him as he crumpled.
Another Traveller charged in from my left, swinging at me with a katana. His two-handed grip suggested he had a clue about swordsmanship, but I was ready to bet he’d only ever practised on a human opponent. I leapt off the ground, all four feet together. His swing went under me, and his own momentum carried him into the collision.
I was already panting, tiring from the intense exertion. But in a head-on collision between a human being and a four-legged predator, the predator wins. Katana dropped his sword and jerked both arms up to protect his throat. I knocked him to the ground—I was bigger and heavier than he was—and mauled his forearms. The taste of blood filled my mouth, bringing a hit of exhilaration. I left him leaking and sprang clear.
A black-and-brown blur wove through the fleeing crowds: Dolph. I almost laughed as I realized the Traveller guards were no longer attacking us. They were trying to reach their ship. Dolph took his pick of targets and leapt on a postulant’s back. His pointy, almost dainty-looking jaws closed on the man’s neck.
In the same instant, my peripheral vision caught movement behind the tent. A rifle muzzle peeked out from behind it, pointing in Dolph’s direction.
I hurled myself at the tent. It collapsed under me—on top of the rifleman. Human forms struggled inside the folds of grubby nylon. I stepped on them to reach the rifleman. His hand emerged, groping for his weapon. I was about to bite the hand off when I saw the knock-off Urush fortunometer on the hairy wrist.
Heaven forgive me.
I bit it off anyway.
Well, not quite. The wolfish joy I took in savaging my enemies did not quite blind me to practical considerations. The little voice of caution in the back of my head, that had saved my life many times on Tech Duinn, warned me not to go too far.
So I didn’t literally bite his hand off. But I made sure he would be looking at an amputation or a long and painful reconstruction. I sank my fangs into his palm. His blood gushed into my mouth. His screams filled my ears. His bones cracked between my incisors. I wrenched my neck sideways, ripping muscle and sinew, tearing his hand into two floppy prongs, one of which was only attached by a bit of skin. The pinky was also hanging by a flap. I bit it off—
—and a bullet carved a furrow through the fur on my back, close enough to sting.
I spat out Zane’s pinky, dropped him, put my head down and sprang at the Traveller standing on the steps of the ship. He was a big blond with all the tattoos and the raised worm-casts of clan scars on his neck and face. He had come halfway down the steps to make sure of his shot. I could see the black circle of his rifle barrel, a hole through to eternity. I was dead for sure—
Blood gouted from the Traveller’s throat. He stood stock still for a moment, making a whistling noise as he tried to breathe through a windpipe that wasn’t there anymore. Then he dropped his rifle and toppled headfirst down the steps. His head hit the steps with a clonk like when you slap a steak on a cutting board.
I landed on his back. Panting, I kicked his body the rest of the way down the steps. Although I didn’t know for sure what had happened, I could guess: Irene had saved my ass.
She’d hit him in the throat from a distance of what we later calculated, using a sat map of the spaceport, to be 952 meters.
With an 11 kph wind gusting unpredictably.
There’s a reason her old unit, the Ghost Gators, was known as the best sniper outfit on Tech Duinn.
She kept shooting, leading her targets as they scattered. Faint, distant cracks reached us on the wind.
Carried away by violence, I had almost forgotten what we were here for. Now I remembered. From this higher vantage point, I spotted Dolph near the trees. He was dancing around a group of children, snapping at them. The boy from the knife stall swung at him with a stick.
I leapt off the steps and hit the ground running. I bowled into the group of children, knocking them over, and got my teeth into the little girl’s sleeve. Dragging her half off her feet, I sprinted towards the woods.
The boy followed. I thought highly of him for that.
The minute we got into cover, I let go of the girl and gasped, “Don’t be scared. We’re human.”
She stuffed the tail of her shirt in her mouth. Her face glistened with tears and snot.
We had not fled a moment too soon. The ta-ta-ta-ta-ta of automatic fire erupted behind us. Leaves fluttered down and pale gashes appeared in the woody stems of the vines.
“Run!” I snarled.
We didn’t have time to go back for our backpacks. We ran flat out. I wasn’t sure if the kids knew they were being rescued, or if they were running away from us. I didn’t care, as long as they went in the right direction: away from the Travellers, towards the shore of the island.
Stumbling through the coastal brush, we cut the corner and caught up with the Travellers’ fleeing customers on the causeway. They provided cover for our escape. At the mainland end of the causeway, Dolph and I chivvied the children down to the beach. The tide had come almost all the way in. There was only a taupe thread of beach left. We dashed along it, with the waves licking our paws and the kids’ sandals, and scrambled up onto the causeway of our own island.
The kids were done in, Dolph was limping badly, and we were exposed out here. I was wondering if we could make it back before the Travellers spotted us, when an electric buggy bounced out to meet us. I had never been gladder to see Martin. He said severely, “I feel very left out.”
“Sorry,” I said. “It was kind of impromptu. Hop in, kids.”
Reassured by the sight of a human, the children squashed into the passenger seat of the buggy. Martin opened the back door for me and Dolph to jump in, then floored it.
We jolted across the causeway, between the hedges, and turned the corner onto our pad. The bales and crates were gone from around the St. Clare. Martin confirmed that he had loaded the cargo. Another vehicle stood next to the ship—one of the spaceport’s rental pickups.
Rafael Ijiuto stood beside it, arguing with Kimmie.
“He showed up after I finished loading,” Martin said. “Wants his stuff.”
“Uh huh,” I said.
Martin parked the electric buggy next to the airlock. I clawed the door open and jumped out. I noticed that Ijiuto had a rifle in his pickup, the type known as a dino gun. Maybe he was planning to get in some hunting.
“Hey, Ijiuto,” I said.
He turned to me, registering shock that a wolf was talking. “You guys are Shifters?”
“No, I just happen to be a wolf right now,” I said.
“Ha, ha. Hey, I got nothing against Shifters. I was just surprised.”
“I understand that you want your cargo,” I said. “Well, too fucking bad. If you had showed up in a timely fashion, I’d have delivered it with my compliments. But now it’s at the back of the hold, behind twenty tonnes of rare earths and pelts strapped down in the precise distribution that won’t mess up the center of mass of my ship. So you’re not getting it. Sorry. Feel free to contact our complaints hotline.”
Ijiuto’s mouth opened and shut. “But,” he said lamely.
The kids spilled out of the buggy, shouting. “Pippa! Pippa!” The older girl was climbing down from the port airlock, in such a hurry she nearly fell off the ladder. The three children hugged. Their joy brought a tear even to my hardened eye.
Kimmie marched up. “Excuse me,” she said to Ijiuto, and bent down to speak to me. “Mike, I’ve been talking to her. I think we should take them with us. You wouldn’t believe what their lives are like here. They’ve got no future. No hope—”
An engine thrummed. Dust spurted up from the wheels of Rafael Ijiuto’s pickup. He had jumped back into the driver’s seat and reversed away from the ship. The pickup bounced away across the pad as fast as it could go, and vanished around the hedge.
“Well, that was easier than I expected,” I said.
Dolph held up his right forepaw. “I stepped on something,” he said. Blood oozed from a nasty cut on his pad. “Think it was a sword.”
He melted into a quaking mass of flesh, hard to look at, which resolved twenty seconds later into a naked man.
Shifting often has a revivifying effect. I can’t quite quantify it, and no one has ever proved it scientifically, but it feels like it kind of “resets” your neural system, so you get a respite from whatever was troubling you. That’s why I was able to bite a man’s hand off in wolf form, and that’s why Dolph stopped fainting from blood loss as soon as he became a man, and staggered upright, cradling his cut hand. Back in human form, he looked pretty shocking; stark naked, his straggly black hair loose, his mouth and chin smeared with Traveller blood.
I mentally shrugged, and Shifted back into human form, as well.
Kimmie was pushing the two younger children towards the ladder. Naked and shivering in the icy wind, I grabbed her arm. While the little girl and the boy climbed up to the airlock, Pippa hovered anxiously, her eyes popping at my nudity.
Kimmie had seen it before. She folded her arms. “Under the terms of the Refugee Convention, if they land on Ponce de Leon, the government’s required to help them. Anyway, we can’t leave them here.”
I could still taste Zane’s blood in my mouth. Now that I was in human form again, it was no longer a good taste. I spat on the dust. I had no time for this argument. We had to get gone. If enough of the Travellers had survived to launch their ship, we would be in trouble. “All right, all right,” I said. “Whatever you want.”
Kimmie broke into a smile as pretty as spring flowers. “You’re the best,” she said, and then a spaceship took off from the other side of our island. The noise drowned out her voice. It drowned out everything.
I made a move to get around her to the ladder. She sidestepped.
And then her head exploded.
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A Cauldron of Stars, Chapter 4
I’m a Shifter. Hundreds of years ago, extreme genetic modification was all the rage. The fad passed, but it left behind pockets of alt-humans with signficant differences from mainstream humanity. The Shifters are the largest alt-human community, and if you listen to some people, we’re the most dangerous. In my opinion, the reason people say that is because unlike other alt-humans, we’re indistinguishable from normies.
Until we Shift.
Most Shifters have one, or at most two animal forms committed to muscle memory. Me, I have a bunch. But for the past couple of years I’d been favoring my gray wolf. I liked this beast’s power, speed, and sheer scary factor.
The wolf also excelled at stealth. I flowed through the curtains of vines, carrying my backpack in my teeth. Ecosystem contamination is always a risk when you hang out your shingle as a trading post. These invasive vines, which I recognized from Ponce de Leon, had killed most of the trees stone dead. Bone-dry leaves and twigs littered the ground. My wolf did not crack a single one of them underfoot.
With a map in my head, I turned west at the corner of our pad and followed the next hedge to the south coast of our islands. I only had to break cover once, where a group of refugees had set up house in the corner of the empty landing pad. I dashed between their tents, leapt over their pit latrine, and disappeared into the next stretch of hedge before they properly knew I was there. Startled cries faded behind me. Most likely, they would not even be able to put a name to this predator from the planet their distant ancestors had come from.
However, anyone would think it was weird to see a predator lugging a tactical backpack in its teeth.
Fortunately for me, scrubby native bushes grew right down to the coast of our island, giving me an unseen vantage point to scan the mainland and the next island over. No one was driving along the coast road. I was too low down to see anything of the Sunderer ships except their scorpion tails, meaning they also couldn’t see me.
All clear.
I jumped into the channel.
Holy hell, that was cold.
For an awful minute I couldn’t find the bottom.
I can’t swim a stroke. Not as a human, nor as a wolf. Jumping into the water had been an act of faith and calculation. I had assumed the channel was walkable, based on how much of that rock in the middle was sticking out of the water. Was it deeper than I had thought?
My claws scrabbled on the sandy bottom. I raised my head and gulped air—and the next swell lifted me off my feet again.
I sort of hopped across the channel, timing my lunges to the swells that surged through the channel to break on the distant beach. It was terrifying. The swells also dragged me inshore, so I ended up crossing the channel at a diagonal angle.
I didn’t lose my backpack.
I scrambled up a low crag and crawled into the bushes. I was no longer covered with Kimmie’s blood. Instead, I was soaked and shivering, and the cut on my cheek—now a wolf’s hairy cheek—stung from the salt.
I shook myself like a dog, then slunk uphill. The bushes got thicker. The leading tendrils of the invading vines entwined their tops. Now I was slinking under a roof of green leaves, which grew higher and denser as I got in among the dead trees on the edge of the Sunderers’ northern pad.
All the way, I was sniffing the air. A wolf has a much more sensitive nose than a human being. This is one of the biggest advantages of tracking in animal form.
Unfortunately, the reek of rocket fuel and combustion byproducts that saturated the wind covered any scent of human beings, except for the occasional punch of latrine odor where someone had snuck into the bushes to do a number two. I wasn’t going to find the sniper with my nose. I doubted the Sunderers had anyone posted in these woods, anyway. What would be the point? They wouldn’t be able to see out.
Chinks of daylight showed through the green roof ahead.
A sudden impact knocked me sideways.
I danced my feet under me and dropped my backpack in a silent snarl that would be a smile, if wolves did human expressions. Even before I felt the impact, I’d smelled a familiar scent: jackal.
The jackal now standing nose to nose with me was much bigger than a real jackal would be—almost as big as my wolf, and my wolf was bigger than a real wolf, tipping the scales at 82 kilos, same as me. Nothing is gained or lost in Shifting.
“Gotcha,” said the jackal, mushily, around the strap of the backpack he held in his teeth. Our animal forms are exact replicas of the Earth originals on the outside, but not on the inside. Shifting wouldn’t be much use if you lost your ability to talk.
“Kimmie’s dead,” I said.
Dolph’s ears went all the way back. “How?”
“Sniper.”
Dolph cursed for about thirty seconds straight. Then he said, “She was just getting good at handling MF’s tantrums.”
“Yup.”
“They want a feud, don’t they?”
“He was aiming for me.”
“Sure?”
“Pretty sure.”
“The only surprising part is I’m surprised. That faggot asswipe. If he wanted you he should’ve drawn down on you in the parking lot. I thought he was going to let it go.”
“He’s not a sniper. You see anyone up top of their ships?”
“Couple of maintenance guys.”
“Anything else?”
“They’re selling shit out of the back of their ships. Bootleg skins. Body-mod packages. They’ve even got a surgeon doing implants. Line’s out to here.”
“Let’s do a recce.”
We dropped our backpacks under a tree and flowed through the last few meters of the woods. Crouched flat, we parted the vines with our noses, a millimeter at a time.
I froze.
I was looking at the legs of a Sunderer drang.
The junior soldier, identifiable as such by his black gaiters, stood with his back to us, casually holding one of those fancy-schmancy assault rifles with all the gewgaws. He was watching the crowd of people—refugees, shoppers, alien tourists—around the Sunderers’ impromptu ship boot sale. The intricately graffitied ship itself, as high as two houses and resting on a pair of auxiliary engines like duck feet, blocked the wind from several large screens, on which the Sunderers were showing off their digital wares. A line of people waited outside a grimy tent. I didn’t see Zane.
I did see the “maintenance guys” on top of the ship. They were tending to the ship’s .50 cal turret.
No freaking wonder that round had taken Kimmie’s head off. Our “sniper” had been the Sunderers’ .50 cal gunner.
The good news was they couldn’t lower the elevation of that thing far enough to shoot up their own pad, even if they wanted to. It was for area clearance. The Sunderers do a lot of that.
Dolph and I retired into the woods again.
His jackal’s big rabbit-like ears twitched. His lips curled back in a snarl. “Beast mode,” he whispered. It was a statement of intention, not a question. I still could have said no.
But the memory of Kimmie’s death overrode my misgivings. The very sight of these rapacious scumbags had revived the fury I felt when we met Zane. “Beast mode,” I confirmed. My heart was already starting to thud in anticipation.
We split up.
Dolph went west around the pad, to the other side of the ship.
I went back to the drang’s location and crouched directly behind him.
I gave Dolph a count of twenty to get into position.
Then I gathered myself and leapt out of the vines, pouncing onto the drang’s back.
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A Cauldron of Stars, Chapter 3
“Where’s Dolph?” Irene said in a low voice as I reached her perch.
“Over there,” I said, pointing.
From up here, we could see over the hedges, all the way to the island next door. Irene’s tension told me she had spotted the Sunderer ships, too.
I kept climbing up the ladder until I reached the top of the bridge. Irene followed me. We squatted behind the main radar dish, automatically falling into old habits of concealment from enemy spotters. Irene had served on Tech Duinn too. Whereas Dolph and I had been in the special forces, she’d been a sniper.
She measured the vista with a professional eye. The Sunderers’ launch pads abutted the coast of the other island. The coast itself was rocky and choked with thickets. I had to figure Dolph had got at least that far by now. The channel between the islands was only about ten meters wide, choppy, laced with foam discolored by chemical runoff from the spaceport. I could tell it was shallow, ‘cause waves broke on a ridge of rock in the middle of the channel. At low tide, you could walk out to these islands from the beach. The tide was about halfway in now.
There were two other launch pads in between us and the shore of our island, one empty and one holding an Ek landing shuttle. But the shuttle did not block our line of sight to the Sunderer ships.
“I could make that shot,” Irene said.
“I don’t want any trouble with them,” I said.
“So what’s Dolph doing over there?” she said.
I hesitated. I didn’t want to lay my personal issues on her. She was blissfully ignorant about the whole Sophia saga—I hired her long after that all went down, so all she knew was that I had a daughter I was raising on my own. Matter of fact, her daughter and mine were best friends. Stripping away all egotistical pretense, I was plain scared Irene might think twice about letting her Mia play with Lucy if she knew that Lucy’s mother was a Sunderer.
“I told him to savage them ruthlessly, like the security guys should’ve done if they weren’t fraidycats,” I said at last. Irene laughed. I felt the sting of my own hypocrisy keenly.
Mercifully, the arrival of Rafael Ijiuto saved me from having to explain any further. The shock of running into Zane had driven my customer clean out of my mind. He bounced across the pad in a rented pickup. I swarmed down the ladder to greet him, and asked Kimmie to process the balance of his payment.
This far out from the Heartworlds, accepting payments is a dicey business. All transactions have to be physically cleared through the nearest node of the EkBank, which in the case of this planet was 18 light years away. It aided my peace of mind to see that Ijiuto had a credit dot: a fingernail-sized holo embedded in the skin of his left arm, which he obligingly rolled up his shirt sleeve to show Kimmie. The dot shone traffic-light green, proving that he had credit in the system. If he didn’t, the dot would go black as soon as he was within range of a wireless signal, because the daily EkBank drones that fly to all planets in the banking system carry a record of the entire blockchain. You can’t outrace your own blockchain, unless you have a ship that’s faster than an FTL drone, in which case you’d be so damn rich you wouldn’t need to. Ijiuto had gotten himself a tattoo around his credit dot, kind of like a coat of arms.
He transmitted the payment from his phone, Kimmie tapped on her holobook, and I was 120 KGCs richer. With luck maybe 10% of that would stay in my pocket as profit.
“You’re Mr. Popularity, huh?” Ijiuto with a crooked smile. He nodded at the refugee children, who were still hanging around, staring at Kimmie’s holobook like they’d never seen one before. Maybe they hadn’t.
“Give ‘em a inch …” I muttered sourly.
“Truth,” Ijiuto said. “I’ll help someone that helps themselves. But don’t come looking for handouts, know what I mean?”
“That’s it.” I had him pegged as the type of entrepreneur most likely to succeed in the Cluster: the type that looks for the sale in every situation. For an instant I envied him for his youth—he couldn’t be a day over 25—and the abounding opportunities before him. Then I put those unproductive thoughts out of my mind. “I’ll unload that cargo for you right now,” I said heartily.
I climbed the ladder once more, while Ijiuto backed his pickup closer to the ship. Irene was still up on top of the bridge, pretending to clean the laser comms array and keeping an eye on the Sunderer ships. We have a cargo handler bot: it’s a fixed robotic arm mounted in front of the cargo hold, which is the bottom two-thirds of the ship’s superstructure. I climbed into the handler operator’s seat. At the touch of a button, the door of the hold began to rise, with a grinding sound I didn’t like. It opened six inches, and then crashed shut again with a thunderous boom.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” I muttered. I reached under the seat, searching for the jack to open it manually. Yes, this had happened before. It’s all part of the joy of owning a second-hand ship.
No jack. I remembered that Dolph had taken it down to the ground this morning. I went down the ladder again. “Just be a minute,” I called to Ijiuto with a smile, knowing it would take more than a minute if the motor that opened the hold door had gone.
“No problem,” Ijiuto said, gazing quizzically at me as I searched around for the jack.The back of my neck burned with embarrassment.
The refugee kids had backed off when they saw me come down the ladder, but now they drifted back to Kimmie. Evidently they had broken down her resistance. I should have seen this coming. Kimmie was a sweetheart. She liked ethereal pop music, ballet workouts, and hot chocolate with cinnamon sprinkled on top. Her black bangs hung straight across her forehead, framing a round face. She had a poster of Mt. Everest in her cabin—yes, that Mt. Everest, the one on Earth, ye olde home planet of humanity, where none of us had ever been. She said it inspired her.
Why do I remember these details now? What good does it do?
At any rate, she was showing the older girl stuff on her holobook. But then she got up (leaving her holobook with the kids, a big no-no) and came over to me. Big-eyed with sincerity, she said, “Mike, I’ve been talking to them.”
“Not now, Kimmie.” There was the jack on top of a bale of cargo. I grabbed it and started back to the ladder. Kimmie kept pace with me.
“They’re smart kids. The older girl—her name’s Pippa—she knows her way around all the standard IT tools. Says she’s even worked with AI.”
“I know what’s coming next,” I said. “You want us to give them a ride.”
“They just need to get to Ponce de Leon. You know, under the Convention, if they land on the PdL, the government’s required to help them. I think we should help them get there.”
“Kimmie, we don’t have the mass allowance.” I settled on an argument she wouldn’t be able to counter with emotion. “Look at all this crap.” I pointed at the various amateurishly packaged small-lot shipments lying on the ground around the ship. I had to load this stuff into the hold as soon as the toy fairies were unloaded. We were contractually bound to haul it all to the PdL, and given my usual practice of maxing out the ship’s dry mass capacity, there just wasn’t any room for refugees, no matter how deserving they might be.
Kimmie’s face set in the expression of mulish obstinacy that was the flip side of her sweetness. “You know what their lives are like here? They’ve got no future. No hope.” I made a move to get around her. She sidestepped, cutting me off. “All they have to do is get to PdL, then they’ll have a chance—”
That’s as far as she got. Then her head exploded.
I was standing an arm’s length from her. I closed my eyes reflexively. Warm globs spattered my face, neck, and hands. Pain stabbed my cheek, and I knew I had just been jabbed by bone shrapnel from Kimmie’s skull.
I knew, because I used to live on a world where this kind of thing happened. It was called Tech Duinn.
My brain said Sniper and He was aiming for me.
He was aiming for me, but Kimmie stepped into his crosshairs while he was in the act of pulling the trigger, during that long instant after you commit your body to a course of action, when it’s too late to take it back.
I heard the crack. At the same time I hit the dirt.
I yelled, “Irene!” I popped my head up. All three of the kids had also hit the dirt. I knew all about their lives, right then. I could see Pippa’s sneakers sticking out from behind a bale of local pelts. She looked to be lying on top of the littlest kid. Protecting her. Her right sneaker had a hole in the heel.
I knew none of the kids had been hit, because there’d only been one shot.
One shot, one kill, as we used to say.
Rafael Ijiuto had not been hit, either. He had made the smart decision that his cargo was less important than his life. He was driving away across the pad as fast as his rented pickup could go.
Kimmie’s body lay at the foot of the ladder. Her blood puddled on the chemically hardened dirt. Her head was gone. Correction: I was wearing it. She had been a full foot shorter than me, and my brain said He wasn’t trying for a headshot. He aimed at your center of mass.
Another crack split the air. I paid it no mind, crawling underneath the ship. I already knew the sniper was not close. The sonic boom had taken too long to get here. I also knew his weapon did not have facial recognition targeting or smart ammo that could recalibrate in flight. Because if it did, I’d be dead.
Underneath the ship, a robust lattice of metal trusses at head height supported the auxiliary engines. The underslung missile launchers blocked my view forward, but I figured there were no enemies in that direction.
The shots had come from the south. From the island where the Sunderer ships were.
If I was correct about that, the aft port auxiliary engine would now shield me from the sniper. It rested on the ground like a prehistoric whale’s flipper. Keeping it at my back, I crawled to the kids.
Their faces were white under the dirt. “Mister,” the boy said, “you got blood on you.”
Ignoring the comment, I beckoned to the older girl. What had Kimmie said her name was? “Pippa. Follow me.” I rose to a stooping crouch and led the kids aft.
The boy yelped. I turned around and saw he wasn’t behind me. He’d gone to peek out around the aft port engine, and seen Kimmie’s body lying at the foot of the ladder.
I seized him by one bony shoulder and hauled him back. “That could be you if you don’t do as I say.” I turned to Pippa. “See that ladder?”
A ladder reached down to the ground on the starboard side of the fuselage, identical to the one on the port side. Pippa nodded.
“We’re going to climb that. I’ll go first. If I get shot, y’all come back down here and don’t move until the cops arrive.”
“What cops?” Pippa said. “This’s a free-fire zone.”
I cursed inwardly, having suspected as much. If the natives believed in the concept of policing, this wouldn’t be classified as a Fringeworld, and the Sunderers wouldn’t’ve just shot my admin’s head off. “Move it,” I said curtly.
Every minute I was on the ladder, my spine tingled. But no shot came, and I heard nothing except the wind until we were all on top of the fuselage, crouching on the starboard side of the bridge. Looked like I’d figured it correctly. There was only one sniper, and now I had a three-storey armored superstructure in between us and him. We called it the bridge, but most of it was the cargo hold. The actual essentials were safely tucked away below.
I figured it wasn’t a huge risk sending the kids below. They’d be safer inside the ship than they were out here. Martin, my engineer, and Mechanical Failure were down there, anyway.
I slapped the plate of the starboard airlock hatch, unlocking it with my palm-print. The hatch cover slid back smoothly into the hull.
“Get my scope,” Irene’s voice floated down from the top of the bridge.
“Which one?” I called back.
“The 20x tactical Dayforce.”
Pippa stopped me. “I’ll get it,” she said. “Where is it?”
I started to tell her no, then reconsidered. I didn’t have time to rummage through Irene’s tip of a cabin. “Ask the bald guy.”
I sped them on their way into the airlock with a slap on the littlest kid’s rump. I just hoped they did run into Martin first, not Mechanical Failure.
In the same motion, I leaned inside the cramped airlock chamber, opened a locker, and took out my tactical backpack. I shrugged it onto my shoulders.
Irene looked down from the top of the bridge. She was lying flat on her stomach, her head and the muzzle of her second-best rifle silhouetted against the gray sky. Figured she’d had it close to hand with Sunderers in the area.
“Kimmie’s dead,” I said.
“I know,” she said.
“If they come for the ship, hold them off until I get back,” I said.
“Why are they shooting at us?” she said.
“That’s the ten million GC question,” I said, not quite lying. I didn’t know that it was Zane Cole’s gang shooting at us. I just strongly suspected it. I realized that if we all lived through this, I was going to have to fill Irene in on my history with the Sunderers, such as it was.
I closed the airlock, descended the ladder, said a Hail Mary in my head, and sprinted towards the trees lining the back of our pad.
I knew that the wind was blowing onshore, perpendicular to the sniper’s line of fire, and with the amount of variation in its strength, he’d have a hard time dialing his windage up or down fast enough to shoot accurately. Especially at a moving target.
All the same, I was gambling with my life, and the only thing that drove me to it was the thought of Kimmie’s poster of Mt. Everest, and her body lying on the dirty ground of an alien planet.
Halfway there, I heard a crack. My brain said Irene and my legs kept running. I hit the treeline without slowing down, crashed into a curtain of vines, and stumbled to a halt.
I pushed the vines aside like a curtain, letting them fall back into place behind me.
Then I stripped off my clothes in record time. Stuffed them into my backpack.
Took a deep breath, hunched my shoulders, and Shifted into a wolf.
Keep reading Chapter 4
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A Cauldron of Stars, Chapter 3
“Where’s Dolph?” Irene said in a low voice as I reached her perch.
“Over there,” I said, pointing.
From up here, we could see over the hedges, all the way to the island next door. Irene’s tension told me she had spotted the Sunderer ships, too.
I kept climbing up the ladder until I reached the top of the bridge. Irene followed me. We squatted behind the main radar dish, automatically falling into old habits of concealment from enemy spotters. Irene had served on Tech Duinn too. Whereas Dolph and I had been in the special forces, she’d been a sniper.
She measured the vista with a professional eye. The Sunderers’ launch pads abutted the coast of the other island. The coast itself was rocky and choked with thickets. I had to figure Dolph had got at least that far by now. The channel between the islands was only about ten meters wide, choppy, laced with foam discolored by chemical runoff from the spaceport. I could tell it was shallow, ‘cause waves broke on a ridge of rock in the middle of the channel. At low tide, you could walk out to these islands from the beach. The tide was about halfway in now.
There were two other launch pads in between us and the shore of our island, one empty and one holding an Ek landing shuttle. But the shuttle did not block our line of sight to the Sunderer ships.
“I could make that shot,” Irene said.
“I don’t want any trouble with them,” I said.
“So what’s Dolph doing over there?” she said.
I hesitated. I didn’t want to lay my personal issues on her. She was blissfully ignorant about the whole Sophia saga—I hired her long after that all went down, so all she knew was that I had a daughter I was raising on my own. Matter of fact, her daughter and mine were best friends. Stripping away all egotistical pretense, I was plain scared Irene might think twice about letting her Mia play with Lucy if she knew that Lucy’s mother was a Sunderer.
“I told him to savage them ruthlessly, like the security guys should’ve done if they weren’t fraidycats,” I said at last. Irene laughed. I felt the sting of my own hypocrisy keenly.
Mercifully, the arrival of Rafael Ijiuto saved me from having to explain any further. The shock of running into Zane had driven my customer clean out of my mind. He bounced across the pad in a rented pickup. I swarmed down the ladder to greet him, and asked Kimmie to process the balance of his payment.
This far out from the Heartworlds, accepting payments is a dicey business. All transactions have to be physically cleared through the nearest node of the EkBank, which in the case of this planet was 18 light years away. It aided my peace of mind to see that Ijiuto had a credit dot: a fingernail-sized holo embedded in the skin of his left arm, which he obligingly rolled up his shirt sleeve to show Kimmie. The dot shone traffic-light green, proving that he had credit in the system. If he didn’t, the dot would go black as soon as he was within range of a wireless signal, because the daily EkBank drones that fly to all planets in the banking system carry a record of the entire blockchain. You can’t outrace your own blockchain, unless you have a ship that’s faster than an FTL drone, in which case you’d be so damn rich you wouldn’t need to. Ijiuto had gotten himself a tattoo around his credit dot, kind of like a coat of arms.
He transmitted the payment from his phone, Kimmie tapped on her holobook, and I was 1,200 KGCs richer. With luck maybe 10% of that would stay in my pocket as profit.
“You’re Mr. Popularity, huh?” Ijiuto with a crooked smile. He nodded at the refugee children, who were still hanging around, staring at Kimmie’s holobook like they’d never seen one before. Maybe they hadn’t.
“Give ‘em a inch …” I muttered sourly.
“Truth,” Ijiuto said. “I’ll help someone that helps themselves. But don’t come looking for handouts, know what I mean?”
“That’s it.” I had him pegged as the type of entrepreneur most likely to succeed in the Cluster: the type that looks for the sale in every situation. For an instant I envied him for his youth—he couldn’t be a day over 25—and the abounding opportunities before him. Then I put those unproductive thoughts out of my mind. “I’ll unload that cargo for you right now,” I said heartily.
I climbed the ladder once more, while Ijiuto backed his pickup closer to the ship. Irene was still up on top of the bridge, pretending to clean the laser comms array and keeping an eye on the Sunderer ships. We have a cargo handler bot: it’s a fixed robotic arm mounted in front of the cargo hold, which is the bottom two-thirds of the ship’s superstructure. I climbed into the handler operator’s seat. At the touch of a button, the door of the hold began to rise, with a grinding sound I didn’t like. It opened six inches, and then crashed shut again with a thunderous boom.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” I muttered. I reached under the seat, searching for the jack to open it manually. Yes, this had happened before. It’s all part of the joy of owning a second-hand ship.
No jack. I remembered that Dolph had taken it down to the ground this morning. I went down the ladder again. “Just be a minute,” I called to Ijiuto with a smile, knowing it would take more than a minute if the motor that opened the hold door had gone.
“No problem,” Ijiuto said, gazing quizzically at me as I searched around for the jack. The back of my neck burned with embarrassment.
The refugee kids had backed off when they saw me come down the ladder, but now they drifted back to Kimmie. Evidently they had broken down her resistance. I should have seen this coming. Kimmie was a sweetheart. She liked ethereal pop music, ballet workouts, and hot chocolate with cinnamon sprinkled on top. Her black bangs hung straight across her forehead, framing a round face. She had a poster of Mt. Everest in her cabin—yes, that Mt. Everest, the one on Earth, ye olde home planet of humanity, where none of us had ever been. She said it inspired her.
Why do I remember these details now? What good does it do?
At any rate, she was showing the older girl stuff on her holobook. But then she got up (leaving her holobook with the kids, a big no-no) and came over to me. Big-eyed with sincerity, she said, “Mike, I’ve been talking to them.”
“Not now, Kimmie.” There was the jack on top of a bale of cargo. I grabbed it and started back to the ladder. Kimmie kept pace with me.
“They’re smart kids. The older girl—her name’s Pippa—she knows her way around all the standard IT tools. Says she’s even worked with AI.”
“I know what’s coming next,” I said. “You want us to give them a ride.”
“They just need to get to Ponce de Leon. You know, under the Convention, if they land on the PdL, the government’s required to help them. I think we should help them get there.”
“Kimmie, we don’t have the mass allowance.” I settled on an argument she wouldn’t be able to counter with emotion. “Look at all this crap.” I pointed at the various amateurishly packaged small-lot shipments lying on the ground around the ship. I had to load this stuff into the hold as soon as the toy fairies were unloaded. We were contractually bound to haul it all to the PdL, and given my usual practice of maxing out the ship’s dry mass capacity, there just wasn’t any room for refugees, no matter how deserving they might be.
Kimmie’s face set in the expression of mulish obstinacy that was the flip side of her sweetness. “You know what their lives are like here? They’ve got no future. No hope.” I made a move to get around her. She sidestepped, cutting me off. “All they have to do is get to PdL, then they’ll have a chance—”
That’s as far as she got. Then her head exploded.
I was standing an arm’s length from her. I closed my eyes reflexively. Warm globs spattered my face, neck, and hands. Pain stabbed my cheek, and I knew I had just been jabbed by bone shrapnel from Kimmie’s skull.
I knew, because I used to live on a world where this kind of thing happened. It was called Tech Duinn.
My brain said Sniper and He was aiming for me.
He was aiming for me, but Kimmie stepped into his crosshairs while he was in the act of pulling the trigger, during that long instant after you commit your body to a course of action, when it’s too late to take it back.
I heard the crack. At the same time I hit the dirt.
I yelled, “Irene!” I popped my head up. All three of the kids had also hit the dirt. I knew all about their lives, right then. I could see the oldest girl’s sneakers sticking out from behind a bale of local pelts. She looked to be lying on top of the littlest kid. Protecting her. Her right sneaker had a hole in the heel.
I knew none of the kids had been hit, because there’d only been one shot.
One shot, one kill, as we used to say.
Rafael Ijiuto had not been hit, either. He had made the smart decision that his cargo was less important than his life. He was driving away across the pad as fast as his rented pickup could go.
Kimmie’s body lay at the foot of the ladder. Her blood puddled on the chemically hardened dirt. Her head was gone. Correction: I was wearing it. She had been a full foot shorter than me, and my brain said He wasn’t trying for a headshot. He aimed at your center of mass.
Another crack split the air. I paid it no mind, crawling underneath the ship. I already knew the sniper was not close. The sonic boom had taken too long to get here. I also knew his weapon did not have facial recognition targeting or smart ammo that could recalibrate in flight. Because if it did, I’d be dead.
Underneath the ship, a robust lattice of metal trusses at head height supported the auxiliary engines. The underslung missile launchers blocked my view forward, but I figured there were no enemies in that direction.
The shots had come from the south. From the island where the Sunderer ships were.
If I was correct about that, the aft port auxiliary engine would now shield me from the sniper. It rested on the ground like a prehistoric whale’s flipper. Keeping it at my back, I crawled to the kids.
Their faces were white under the dirt. “Mister,” the boy said, “you got blood on you.”
Ignoring the comment, I beckoned to the older girl. What had Kimmie said her name was? “Pippa. Follow me.” I rose to a stooping crouch and led the kids aft.
The boy yelped. I turned around and saw he wasn’t behind me. He’d gone to peek out around the aft port engine, and seen Kimmie’s body lying at the foot of the ladder.
I seized him by one bony shoulder and hauled him back. “That could be you if you don’t do as I say.” I turned to Pippa. “See that ladder?”
A ladder reached down to the ground on the starboard side of the fuselage, identical to the one on the port side. Pippa nodded.
“We’re going to climb that. I’ll go first. If I get shot, y’all come back down here and don’t move until the cops arrive.”
“What cops?” Pippa said. “This’s a free-fire zone.”
I cursed inwardly, having suspected as much. If the natives believed in the concept of policing, this wouldn’t be classified as a Fringeworld, and the Sunderers wouldn’t’ve just shot my admin’s head off. “Move it,” I said curtly.
Every minute I was on the ladder, my spine tingled. But no shot came, and I heard nothing except the wind until we were all on top of the fuselage, crouching on the starboard side of the bridge. Looked like I’d figured it correctly. There was only one sniper, and now I had a three-storey armored superstructure in between us and him. We called it the bridge, but most of it was the cargo hold. The actual essentials were safely tucked away below.
I figured it wasn’t a huge risk sending the kids below. They’d be safer inside the ship than they were out here. Martin, my engineer, and Mechanical Failure were down there, anyway.
I slapped the plate of the starboard airlock hatch, unlocking it with my palm-print. The hatch cover slid back smoothly into the hull.
“Get my scope,” Irene’s voice floated down from the top of the bridge.
“Which one?” I called back.
“The 20x tactical Dayforce.”
Pippa stopped me. “I’ll get it,” she said. “Where is it?”
I started to tell her no, then reconsidered. I didn’t have time to rummage through Irene’s tip of a cabin. “Ask the bald guy.”
I sped them on their way into the airlock with a slap on the littlest kid’s rump. I just hoped they did run into Martin first, not Mechanical Failure.
In the same motion, I leaned inside the cramped airlock chamber, opened a locker, and took out my tactical backpack. I shrugged it onto my shoulders.
Irene looked down from the top of the bridge. She was lying flat on her stomach, her head and the muzzle of her second-best rifle silhouetted against the gray sky. Figured she’d had it close to hand with Sunderers in the area.
“Kimmie’s dead,” I said.
“I know,” she said.
“If they come for the ship, hold them off until I get back,” I said.
“Why are they shooting at us?” she said.
“That’s the ten million GC question,” I said, not quite lying. I didn’t know that it was Zane Cole’s gang shooting at us. I just strongly suspected it. I realized that if we all lived through this, I was going to have to fill Irene in on my history with the Sunderers, such as it was.
I closed the airlock, descended the ladder, said a Hail Mary in my head, and sprinted towards the trees lining the back of our pad.
I knew that the wind was blowing onshore, perpendicular to the sniper’s line of fire, and with the amount of variation in its strength, he’d have a hard time dialing his windage up or down fast enough to shoot accurately. Especially at a moving target.
All the same, I was gambling with my life, and the only thing that drove me to it was the thought of Kimmie’s poster of Mt. Everest, and her body lying on the dirty ground of an alien planet.
Halfway there, I heard a crack. My brain said Irene and my legs kept running. I hit the treeline without slowing down, crashed into a curtain of vines, and stumbled to a halt.
I pushed the vines aside like a curtain, letting them fall back into place behind me.
Then I stripped off my clothes in record time. Stuffed them into my backpack.
Took a deep breath, hunched my shoulders, and Shifted into a wolf.
Do you like what you’re reading? Buy me a coffee! The more coffee I get, the faster I’ll put up the next chapter 🙂
A Cauldron Of Stars, Chapter 2
Zane might’ve walked away. Or I might’ve. Nothing of what followed need have happened.
Then we decided to recognize each other, after all. Zane stopped walking. Dolph and I had already stopped. We stood face to face.
The wind gusted over us, making Zane squint. I saw the white in the frown lines he’d acquired on Tech Duinn.
He mustered a normal voice. “Well, hey! I wasn’t expecting to see you two chunks of space debris this side of Ragnarok.”
My palms were damp. Heat surged through my veins.
Intellectually, I knew I was angry at the wrong person. Zane had not forced my wife to leave me, after all. She had gone of her own free will. But I felt like punching him to a bloody pulp.
Dolph stepped in. “Did they forget to check IDs when you applied for a landing permit? Or you just lied to them?” He let Zane know that we weren’t buying his ‘hey ol’ war buddies’ bullshit.
“Who are you calling a liar?” Zane said. “We’re legit. Paid the landing fee and everything.”
“Guess it’s true what they say about the natives,” Dolph shot back. “They ain’t very freaking smart.”
“Other way round,” Zane said, still acting injured. “They’re smart enough to not discriminate. You here on business?”
Dolph ignored the question. Stepping in closer to Zane, he growled, “You scouting this place for a Sundering?”
As the trophies decorating his coat proclaimed, Zane Cole was a Sunderer. He hadn’t been one when we were in the special forces together. He had drifted over to them after the end of the war. Our war, the one that liberated Tech Duinn and killed my youthful illusions about humanity. It should not have been a surprise to me that one of our own would become a pirate … an exile from human and alien civilization, one of the Sundering tribes who gloried in a reputation so macabre, not even the Eks would mess with them.
It had surprised me—totally blindsided me, in fact—when this selfsame renegade walked off with my wife.
She had said she was bored with me. Bored.
Black spots danced in front of my vision. I realized I needed to breathe. I inhaled a lungful of dust, and felt something solid in my right hand. I was gripping the butt of my Midday Special.
If you’ve been in the army, you know you don’t need to be walking around encrusted with macho leg jewellery. A .22 is sufficient for most close-quarters situations. Especially when it is loaded with soft points.
My Midday Special would suffice to put Zane Cole on the ground right now. I could practically taste the blood that would gush from his wounds.
Snapping out of the fantasy, I reminded myself that I was forty-five years old, responsible for the livelihoods of a dozen people. Furthermore, we were being watched by a hundred beady-eyed natives. I pictured Lucy’s face.
I said, “How’s Sophia?”
Sophia. Never Sophie or Sophs. My ex-wife’s name suited her perfectly, conjuring the dark-haired elegance and pensive gaze that I had fallen in love with. I’d managed to forget the world-weary sneer more often seen on her face towards the end of our marriage.
“She’s good, man, she’s good.” Zane managed a weak smile. Pirate or not, at least he had the decency to feel awkward about the situation.
What I really wanted to know was if they were still together. But I was too proud to ask.
“You treating her right?” Dolph said bluntly.
Zane pushed back the left sleeve of his ghastly coat, making both of us twitch. But there was no weapon sheathed on his forearm. Instead, a slender lady’s watch glittered amidst his arm hair. “Got her a present. Genuine Urush fortunometer.”
Well, there was my answer. He wouldn’t be buying Sophia presents unless they were still together. I wondered where she was right now. Jomborg? Calthutitan? That still wouldn’t tell me much, as the Sunderers’ nomadic fleets of hellships seldom stay in one place for long.
“That the kind that tells your fortune as well as the time?” Dolph said.
“Yeah. Got it for 15 KGCs.” Zane was simultaneously boasting about what a good price he got, and bragging on his spending power. I wouldn’t clear 15 KGCs in profit this whole trip.
Dolph flicked the watch contemptuously with a fingernail. “Don’t need a fancy timepiece to tell your fortune,” he said.
“How not?”
“I can read the future,” Dolph said. “It holds a severe ass-kicking for you if you don’t get outta our faces right now.”
Zane drew back. His fair face flushed an angry red. “Shifter assholes,” he said. “Shouldn’t be allowed off the leash.” He walked away, the bits of dead people on the back of his coat bouncing.
“You got ripped off,” I yelled after him. He kept walking, but I thought his ears turned redder. “That’s a fake for sure,” I said to Dolph, forcing myself to speak in a regular tone of voice.
“Yeah.”
The Urush—the extinct alien race who are thought to have been the first intelligent species to conquer the Messier 4 Cluster—left behind odd bits of tech that still work after all these years. I had heard of their fortunometers, but no way had Zane scored a genuine one in a refugee camp for a mere 15 KGCs.
“What kind of Sunderer is he anyway,” Dolph said, “buying shit instead of just taking it? That’s gotta be against the pirate code of ethics.”
I made a gesture that meant I was grateful to Dolph for having my back—always and forever, amen, bro—but I needed him to shut the heck up right now.
He got the message and fell silent, after spitting out one more comment: “Makes me think less of the natives.”
I nodded. Even if the Sunderers had promised to be on their best behavior, the natives shouldn’t have let them land. Most spacefaring species don’t even allow them in-system, at least not willingly.
Admittedly, these little furry guys were not quite a fully-fledged spacefaring species. They contracted out their planetary security to a human outfit, one of the private military companies that flourish in the Fringe, beyond human territory proper. I guess this outfit didn’t want to risk any of their brittle old military surplus ships by telling the Sunderers no.
We saw the Sunderer ships as we drove in our rental buggy across the causeway connecting our island to the mainland. There were two of them. They peeked out from behind a hedge on the lee side of the next island over, about one klick away. Dust hazed the scene, and ships were constantly landing and taking off, rattling the bones in my head and stirring up even more dust. But there was no mistaking the angular dragon-heads of the hellships—sculptures welded together from steel plate—or the whip-like tails coiled over their backs. These “tails” were actually HERF masts, illegal weapons that could paralyze an enemy ship by killing its electronics. Illegal is no barrier to the Sunderers. Some people were moving around outside the closer hellship, setting up what looked like tents.
I strained my eyes, trying to see if one of them was Sophia. She might have come here with Zane. But it was no use. The figures could have been men, women, or even human-sized aliens. There are a few alien Sunderers, and they wear the same baggy, handmade crap as the human ones.
“Dolph?” I motioned towards the hellships.
“Uh huh.” He was staring in that direction. He’d seen them.
As we bumped off the end of the causeway onto our island, Dolph said, “Let me out here.” He reached across me and killed the buggy’s electric engine. The little vehicle drifted towards the shoulder.
“Dammit.” I spun the wheel to stop us from going into the ditch. “What’s the idea?”
“I’m just going to take a look around.” He popped his door. “They won’t even see me.”
What should I have said? Don’t? He was doing exactly what I wanted to do, and both of us knew it. I had trouble, oftentimes these days, stomaching my own petty hypocrisies. For better or for worse, my frayed sense of my own dignity prevented me from telling Dolph to get back in the car like a good little Shifter. I settled for, “Don’t kill anyone.”
He grinned at me. “I’m shocked, shocked, that you would feel the need to say that.” As he stretched to grab his backpack from the back seat, I glimpsed his gun inside his coat. It was a pocket Gauss of Ek manufacture. Of course he had it on him, just like I had my Midday Special. Uimphathat was known to be a dangerous place. “Couldn’t ask for better cover,” he said, raising his eyes to the horizon, and slipped out of the buggy.
What he meant was that this spaceport was a Godawful mess. Located about four klicks from the refugee camp, it had grown without a plan and with only minimal infrastructure. There were hardly any real landing pads. Mostly you were just putting down on hardened dirt. In many places, rocks poked through like bones sticking up from a dried carcass. Most spaceships can cope with less than perfectly flat surfaces—mine certainly could—but all the same, it was an accident waiting to happen. Furthermore, tenacious local greenery had been allowed to grow up between the pads, and around the water and cryo-fuel tanks on the coasts of the islands. This was a heavily forested planet—from space it looked green. It was just around the refugee camp that every last sprig had been uprooted, presumably by the refugees themselves. Nights can get cold out here.
Anyway, these untended, house-height hedges, blanketed by invasive vines, blocked my sightlines as soon as I drove onto the island. Tents filled in the gaps in the hedges and encroached onto the launch pads. Some of the refugees apparently preferred to live here, despite the noise. Having seen the housing provided for them further down the coast, I couldn’t blame them.
Pad 165 was much like the others: a dirt field equipped with water sprinklers and a movable fuelling stand. My ship sprawled in the middle of it like a beached plesiosaur. Around the ship lay bales and boxes of this and that which we were contracted to take back to Ponce de Leon. Kimmie, my admin, sat on a crate, writing up our manifest. There were several other people around, who I barely looked at, assuming they were the owners of all this crap. Then, as I swung my legs out of the buggy, one of them accosted me. She was a ragged, undersized female. I had to struggle for a minute to place her.
“Mister, you got a minute?”
That voice. Throaty, husky. It was the teenager from the knife stall.
“Sorry, kid,” I said. She had brought two of her little friends. “I’m kinda busy.”
“Where’s the other guy?” She stayed with me as I walked up to my ship. The other kids straggled, regarding the ship in awe.
“Irene,” I yelled.
The girl persisted, “Gonna let you in on a special deal. Two for one. I shouldn’t be saying this, but it’s hot stock, know what I mean? Gotta move them.” She grinned. The grin stopped me in my tracks. It was so … joyful, despite her awful life circumstances. And yet when it went away, I could still see that hint of desperation in her eyes. “Just have a look, whaddaya say?” She opened a cruddy plastic case and brandished a knife to show me as we walked.
I grabbed her hand and twisted the knife out of it. “I say don’t wave a goddamn blade at me. Or anyone.” I seized the case, fitted the blade back in, closed it, and tossed the whole thing to one of the other children. “You pull a knife, you’re just bumping the odds of getting stabbed yourself.”
She stared at me, nursing her fingers, and said quietly, “I live here, mister. I know.”
Irene, my weapons officer, looked down from the top of the ship’s fuselage. She was wearing a coverall and surgical mask, and holding the business end of a high-pressure air hose. She said, “I tried to get them to go away, Mike.” She shrugged and went back to cleaning out the barrels of the hull-mounted guns. We had two rotating large-caliber Gausses, plus a maser point defense system, and dual missile launchers on the belly for 360° coverage. Better to have ‘em and not need ‘em, than need ‘em and not have ‘em.
Irene was as tough as they come, but I would bet she hadn’t tried very hard to make the kids go away. She had two children of her own. Moreover, her shrug said the same thing as Kimmie’s silence: You’re the captain. Your responsibility.
“Kids, we’re not buying,” I said, heading for the port-side ladder. “Try the next pad over.”
“Mike? Is that your name?” The girl changed tack. “You heading back to PdL after this? Matter of fact, we’re looking for a ride. You take passengers?”
Her tenacity would have made me smile, on a better day. Now it exasperated me. “No passengers,” I grunted, starting up the ladder.
Another of the kids, a boy of maybe twelve, spoke up for the first time. “Mister, this is an awesome ship.”
I didn’t disagree. My ship actually looked enough like a Sunderer ship that we got grief from folks who’d never seen a real one. It had a ‘head’ whose serrated jaws concealed a powerful energy cannon—but my ship’s head was rounded, with a sort of a goofy grin. The cuddly lines continued through its fat fuselage. Its four wings looked like flippers, although in fact they were auxiliary engines. Up top, a jumble of retrofitted point defense systems and a cargo crane resembled a bunch of luggage tied on top of your minivan. No doubt its first owner had been mightily disappointed. I suspect he had asked for something that looked like a hellship. What he got was this, and now I had it, second-hand. It could do half a gee of constant acceleration for days, or turn on a dime in FTL, and you wouldn’t feel a thing. I shrugged off the kid’s praise, but I was keenly aware that I must look to them like the possessor of impossible riches.
A man with his own spaceship.
And bills to pay.
And the ex-wife from hell.
And Zane Cole’s gang of Sunderers, coincidentally on this planet at the same time as me? The Cluster was too big for that to be a coincidence .
Continue Reading Chapter 3
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A Cauldron Of Stars, Chapter 1
I strolled along the main drag of Uimaphathat Refugee Camp with my old Panama at a jaunty angle and a sparkly fairy flying two feet above my head. Dust blew like smoke on the wind of this unmemorable Fringe planet, which rattled the cat’s cradle of power lines overhead, and tangled the banners hanging out in front of the stalls. A herd of horned, seven-foot yuriops rudely cut in front of me and my business partner, Dolph. I frowned at the remote control bracelet around my wrist, punched a button, and jacked the fairy up to a height of ten feet, to keep it visible above the crowd. Many aliens are much taller than humans.
And it seemed like every species in the Cluster considered Uimphathat to be a hot shopping destination.
I was never going to find this guy.
“I want one of those,” Dolph said through the bandanna covering his nose and mouth. I followed his gaze to a stall selling knives. Big, little, electrified, poison-tipped, auto-barbed, with grips made for hands that had five fingers, four, eight, or none. Uimaphathat really did have everything. You wouldn’t take it for a refugee camp, but that’s what it was. The people manning the knife stall were as human as we were, probably more so. The youngest of them was no bigger than my own daughter, eight-year-old Lucy. The eldest looked about sixteen. Thirty years ago, a human colony had fled a Sundering in the core of the Cluster, wound up here—and here they had stayed, and multiplied. The furry, long-nosed natives were signatories of the multilateral Refugee Convention, and also knew a money-making proposition when they saw one. With typical human ingenuity, the refugees had transformed this barren swath of coast into a shopping mall.
“Yo, big guy,” the teenager at the knife stall called out. “Wanna put some steel in your holster?”
“She’s talking to you, Mike,” Dolph said with an amused snort.
I glanced at the girl. Dirty blonde hair hacked off at her shoulders, dust-colored skin, charity trousers and sweatshirt retooled into something more punk than refugee. A knife the size of a machete rode at her hip. But it was her eyes that caught me—unexpectedly dark, smouldering with a hint of something like desperation.
“Or you need a place to stash your blade? Got something just the right size.” She pumped her hips, lifted her machete an inch clear of her scabbard, and laughed. She was a child, but she had the voice of a forty-year-old smoker, and a line in cheap innuendo to rival any streetwalker.
I practically had to put Dolph in a headlock to stop him from heading over to the stall.
“That’s a genuine metalforma,” he said in anguish.
For Dolph, it was all about the knives, not the girl.
“Gotta find this guy first,” I said.
“Yeah, keep on walking,” the girl shouted after us. “Whaddaya expect from a man with a toy fairy?” Her little friends giggled shrilly.
I looked up ruefully at the fairy. It had four wings, two for gliding and two that acted as a rotor. Its costume and long tresses had been sparkly before the dust of this planet turned them gray. It could sing nursery rhymes, although I had it on mute, figuring the humiliation of walking around with the thing was bad enough as it was. Basically, it was a fully functional drone masquerading as a toy. I was planning to give this one to Lucy, if it didn’t get too wrecked—and I had 8,999 more of them to deliver to one Rafael Ijiuto, wholesaler, at Uimaphathat.
If I could find him.
“He’s still not picking up,” Dolph said, pocketing his phone in disgust.
“So we’ll do this the old-fashioned way.” I peered at the screen of the remote bracelet and punched buttons. “Extreme mode: engaged,” I intoned.
We had reached a crossroads in the maze of the refugee camp. Humans and aliens were queuing up at the eateries. A crowd surrounded a unicylist doing tricks. The fairy rose up to a height of twenty feet, let out a peal of mechanical laughter, and began to swoop around, scattering fairy dust. I hadn’t actually tried this function before. It was impressive. Dolph and I watched open-mouthed as the stuff blew over the crowds and stuck to their faces, cilia, horns, and tentacles. It was just glitter. I had made sure we were standing up-wind. Nevertheless, Dolph got some sparkles on his hair, and my Panama would probably never be the same. The crowd let out that soft unguarded ‘oooh’ you hear when people have witnessed something unexpected and magical. The unicylist fell off his machine.
The wind caught a last voluminous cloud of glitter and carried it away over the tent roofs.
“If that doesn’t get his attention, nothing will,” I said. “Let’s eat.”
We were in the middle of a surprisingly good meal of ugali and stewed chicken—food aid remixed into something bordering on cuisine—when Rafael Ijiuto finally showed up.
“Hi,” he said. “I’m Rafe. You must be Mike.”
I swallowed my mouthful and half-stood to shake his hand. Dolph hooked a free crate with his foot. Ijiuto lowered himself onto it. He looked to be in his twenties, hair buzzed to a quarter-inch all over, biscuit-colored scalp showing through. The hair was biscuit-colored, too, with a coating of dust. Making no concessions to the fact that he was sitting in a fast food joint in a refugee camp, he wore a suit and tie, the business-formal template that has stood the test of so many centuries it’s practically encoded in male human DNA. I have a suit myself somewhere. However, at the moment Dolph and I were both in jeans and heavy coats—it was chilly on this planet. Ijiuto looked cold. He ordered a cup of tea. The wind snapped the awning over our heads. Aliens and humans alike shouted at each other to be heard.
Ijiuto declined to raise his voice. I had to lean in close to him to catch his words. “OK to pick up the cargo directly from your ship?”
“Sure,” I said. “We’re on pad one-sixty-five.”
The refugee camp’s spaceport had grown in step with its fame as a shopping emporium. It now sprawled for miles along the coast, and over the rocky barrier islands.
“We’re out on one of the islands,” I said. “You got a vehicle? We’re talking four large crates, a hundred kilos each.”
Ijiuto nodded. “I’m going to hire a truck.”
“I’ll need the balance of your payment at that time,” I mentioned.
“No problem.” He was looking at the fairy. I’d turned it off and put it in the middle of the table, where it had been drawing admiring stares from aliens who’d seen the fairy dust display. Dolph had spilled beer on its wings. Guess I wouldn’t be giving it to Lucy, after all. “I love this product,” Ijiuto said. “Only humans would think of something like this.”
We drank to that. “To humanity,” Dolph said, knocking his beer stein against Ijiuto’s tea cup. “The only species in the Cluster with the gall to charge 300 GCs apiece for a mass market drone with a frilly costume.”
All joking aside, human solidarity matters in a place like this. If your fellow humans don’t have your back, who will?
“But it isn’t just a mass-market drone, is it?” Ijiuto said, his flat young face suddenly creasing with concern. “It’s got parental controls?”
“Of course it has,” I said, shifting into salesman mode. I took the bracelet off and showed him. “Here’s where you can lock it, and I guaran-freaking-tee you the firmware is secure against hacking. You know who’s got the hardest network security in the Cluster? Not arms manufacturers. Not governments. Toy makers. They know no parent is going to touch anything that could be vulnerable to malware.”
“He would know,” Dolph put in, jogging my elbow. “His daughter doesn’t even get to have a phone.”
“Maybe when she’s sixteen,” I said, thinking fleetingly of the girl at the knife stall. In a few more years, my Lucy would be that age. But what a gulf lay between this world and ours. “Or maybe when she’s sixty.”
Ijiuto laughed, but now I was wondering where I’d be in another few years. Still hauling cargoes to the most dangerous, unsavory, and politically non gratis worlds in the Cluster? Still hustling to make payroll for my crew and salt away a little something for Lucy’s education? At least I did not have a mortgage on my ship. I owned that baby free and clear. That’s not to say I had no problems in that area—but I kept my thoughts from straying to what Dolph and I called our “mechanical failure.”
“Bottom line,” I said. “This is the hottest-selling toy on Ponce de Leon this year.” Our home base, Ponce de Leon, is one of the Big 3 worlds of humanity in the Messier 4 Cluster. It sets the tone for human colonies throughout the Cluster, and the more impressionable alien species as well. “You’re going to be able to name your price.”
“Oh, I’m sold,” Ijiuto said, with the first smile I’d seen out of him. I relaxed. The 1,200 KGCs he still owed me were as good as in my pocket.
We finished eating, paid the bill, and moseyed towards the Uimaphathat parking lot. At this end of the main drag, the natives had more of a presence. They cowered in the booths of various relief and aid agencies, their cuddly appearance belying the most relentless bureaucratic minds I had ever encountered. I had had to pay an outrageous landing fee to these little teddy-bears. “We also brought a shipment of food aid from Help the Hungry on PdL,” I mentioned to Ijiuto.
Did I want him to think I was not just a mercenary bastard like most indie freighter captains? The truth was, Help the Hungry had paid me market rates to ship their cheap and nasty protein bars. I’m not in the business of helping people for free.
“You wonder how much of it is going to reach the refugees, you know?” I said, motioning to the Help the Hungry booth, where a congregation of natives were chomping on what looked suspiciously like my protein bars.
“Yeah, it’s a shame the way these people get exploited,” Ijiuto said, in a completely uninterested voice. He was swiping at the screen of his handheld. “I can’t get through to the truck rental people. Can’t even get a dang signal. I’m going to have to go over there. Catch you up at the ship. Pad one-six-five, right?” As he spoke, he was already angling away from us.
“Yeah,” Dolph said to his back. “What kind of refugee camp doesn’t even have decent phone service?” He snickered. Dolph has a strong sense of justice, in his own way.
Then his face changed. The almond eyes above his bandanna widened. He threw an elbow into my side.
I spun around and saw someone I had hoped never to see again, and yet had dreamt of meeting again, pretty much nightly for a while. Those were bad dreams. Bloody dreams.
The reality was worse.
A few feet away was Zane Cole.
The man who stole my wife.
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Keep Reading Chapter 2
The Chemical Mage Chapter 4
Colm slid into the shadow of the byre, taking care not to step on the dead Ghosts sprawled against the wall. Lacking a battlesuit, he was vulnerable to enemy fire, so careful, careful, and remember that when you’re away from your ship you haven’t got eyes in the back of your head.
With a hurried glance, he took in the other buildings huddled at the cliff’s foot. He had grown up around farms, although his father was an entertainer and his mother a nurse. They had crofters for neighbors, so he was fairly familiar with the workings of mixed crop and livestock operations. Drumlin Farm was just a big croft on a distant moon. Cows here, chickens over there, that’d be the hay barn where they also kept the horses if they had any. Sad little heaps of feathers lay among the dead Ghosts. A gut-shot dog had dragged its own intestines halfway across the farmyard before dying. Colm’s heart twisted at the sight. What a desperate waste.
Movement beyond the hay barn. He flattened his back against the stone wall, gripping his machine pistol. But it was just plastic rippling in the night breeze: a row of polytunnels shredded by machine-gun fire. A truly ferocious battle had raged here.
“Vike?” he whispered. “Smythe?”
She’d said, I’m going inside.
Cursing under his breath, Colm skittered from shadow to shadow until he reached the cliff.
He knew exactly what he should do, having seen this shambles of a battlefield.
The same thing Smythe and Holmundsen should’ve done.
Return to the gunship and call for reinforcements.
But he also knew that they were the reinforcements.
Colm had been the only pilot in the ready room tonight.
The Fleet was stretched so thin on Upsandra d2, they were coming apart.
Oh, sure, the Unsinkable would send another gunship eventually. Maybe at first light, three sols from now. By that time, the two half-baked kids Colm had the pleasure of calling his crew might be dead.
He ducked under a garage door into, surprise, a garage. It was as dark as the devil’s arsehole but the smell of machine oil and biodiesel fumes gave it away. He stumbled against a tractor and got his back against a wheel taller than he was. Let his mouth hang open, listening.
There were certain advantages to operating without a battlesuit, apart from the obvious one that you didn’t need a fuel cell to move your arms and legs. For instance, you could hear better without a tangle of electronics in the way. It made no sense, but you just could.
Now Colm heard a faint rumbling noise from deeper within the cave complex.
Survivors?
Or just machinery?
Survivors operating machinery?
Surely not even colonists could be that dumb.
Colm could guess easily enough how this disaster had come about. As everyone knew, the Ghosts had been probing this archipelago for years. When they were Stage One, you just had to be vigilant: stamp them out before they had a chance to multiply, and for Christ’s sake don’t leave the battery in your car overnight. All powered equipment had to be carefully protected when Ghosts were about. But time and again that simple directive had proved to be too much for civilians. They forgot, they slipped up, they left a combine harvester sitting out in the back field with half a kilowatt of juice in it, and that was what must’ve happened here. Hello, Stage Two Ghosts, with rifles and shotguns and a strong enough grasp of guerrilla tactics to capture another power source, and another one, multiplying their numbers every time. Soon there’d have been enough of them to lay siege to the farm. At that point the colonists would have swallowed their pride and begged the Marines to come save them, but it had already been too late.
Two platoons of Marines could hold off any number of Ghosts … but only until they ran out of ammo.
Ritualistically, Colm cursed the duty officer who had denied the first medevac request from Drumlin Farm, and the OIC who had not appreciated how much danger his troopers were in, and everyone in the whole chain of command stretching all the way back to Earth. They’d all failed. Now it was up to him to not fail, too.
Sweating, he thumbed off the safety of his machine pistol. Twelve rounds in the magazine, another twelve in the spare. What a joke. He should’ve taken a Ghost gun from outside, but like everyone, he instinctively loathed the idea of touching Ghost stuff. Who knew where it came from?
He edged away from the tractor, only to bump into something else. Tines stuck up at thigh level. A rotary tiller. Without having to check, he knew it would be out of juice. The very fact that the lights were off proved that Ghosts had got in here and drained the power out of the whole farm.
So where were the Ghosts now?
And where were Smythe and Holmundsen?
He fumbled his way to a door in the back of the garage. Following the rumbling noise, he tiptoed down a narrow passage. His boots kept meeting soft obstacles. The floor was tacky. He was almost grateful for the darkness.
Outside, the night had been warm, but in here it was cold. Gooseflesh-cold. See-your-breath cold, if it weren’t so dark. The cold and the dark and the smell of death combined into a poisonous brew of fear. He stopped walking, slumped on the wall, eyes straining wide in the darkness.
28 months to go.
I don’t want to die.
Smythe. Holmundsen.
He flogged himself with the names of his crew, but fear dulled his concern for them, made him selfish.
He’d have turned around and made a dash for freedom if he had not, at that moment, seen a door faintly outlined in the wall opposite him. The light seeping between the hinges was very dim. Had his eyes not been dark-adapted, he wouldn’t have been able to see it at all.
He crossed the passage. Laid his bare left hand on the steel. Vibrations tickled his palm.
Yup.
The noise was coming from behind this door. Maybe someone was alive in there.
He did not give himself any more time to be afraid. Stupid bloody swing door had no handle, so he couldn’t pull it towards himself. He mule-kicked the door open and flinched back to the side of the doorway—
—just in time.
A shot roared, pulverizing the silence. The bullet ricocheted off the far wall of the passage. Stone chips flew in the dim light from the door, which was swinging shut again.
“Stay the fuck back!” roared a voice from inside the room.
“Vike?”
“S-sir?” Holmundsen’s voice shifted from furious defiance to childlike hope.
“I’m coming in.” Colm slid around the door as it closed.
The light came from machinery mounted atop a concrete platform. It gleamed red and green on the side of an enormous steel tank, on the belt buckles and buttons of Ghost corpses littering the floor, and on the face of Holmundsen, who sat at the bottom of the platform, legs sticking out in front of him, pistol in his lap.
In here, the noise was factory-floor loud. A smell of sulfur masked the odor of death.
Colm hurried to Holmundsen, avoiding the dead Ghosts. “You OK?”
“Nope.” Holmundsen gave a strained smile. A hand fluttered to his hip. Blood glistened on his leathers. “Fucking Ghosts. Know what they were doing?”
“What?”
“Feeding the grinder—” Holmundsen jerked a thumb at the big tank— “with bodies. Their own dead. And ours.”
“That’s new,” Colm said, playing down his revulsion. “I’ve heard of dropping in the odd sheep, if you don’t want the health inspectors to get a look at it.”
He knew what this towering cluster of pipes and tanks was. A farm like this got most or all of its power from biowaste. The juice in the fuel cells of the tractors, rotary tillers, and so on? Generated by the vehicles’ biodiesel engines, which fed front-end reforming hydrogen cells. The lights, the fridges, the computers, heating in winter, AC in summer, dairy processing machinery, whatever else the colonists had? Same deal. They’d either be powered by a biodiesel generator, or by process heat from biodiesel production.
And how do you make biodiesel?
With a thermal depolymerization plant.
Like this one.
In goes biowaste, out comes green gold.
Dead bodies, though.
Fucking Ghosts.
“Was this all of them?” Colm said.
“I think so,” Holmundsen said. “Turn it off, sir. I can’t reach.” Meaning that he was too hurt to move.
Colm was already climbing the steps onto the platform. He wanted to have a look at Holmundsen’s wound, but shutting down the TDP plant came first. He had no idea how long it would take for it to draw more Ghosts, didn’t even know how that worked. If the eggheads had theories about how and why Stage Two invasion occurred, they didn’t share them with lowly first lieutenants. All Colm knew was—turn off the power. He frowned at the displays, threw switches. The intake tank stopped grinding. The vibrations lessened.
But did not stop.
The generator was still running. Some quantity of biodiesel had already been produced, and it was fueling the genny, which had to be around here somewhere.
He ducked under pipes, said to Holmundsen, “Didn’t know you were a farm boy,” less because he cared than to hear Holmundsen’s voice, keep him talking.
“Not,” Holmundsen said, from the far side of the platform. “Forestry management. My parents. In Norway, they clear-cut the forest on a rotation. Put the unusable wood into massive TDP plants. We used to follow the clear-cutters all spring and summer, making sure that no rare plants get shredded. I was home-schooled.”
“That explains your lack of social skills,” Colm said, still talking just to talk. Generator, generator. “Jesus, it’s cold in here.”
“It’s colder in Norway.”
“Why do they clear-cut the forest?”
“We had to do something after the oil ran out.”
“Ha, ha.” Here it was. He’d been looking for a squat steel cabinet. Instead the generator was an anodized red torpedo, mounted on shocks, with its own set of computer controls. These colonists had had everything. Except the common sense it would have taken to save their own lives. As he bent over the display, it lit the fog of his breath green. Why was it so cold? He could scarcely feel his fingers …
“I’m just kidding,” Holmundsen said. “The clear-cutting is to eliminate sitka spruce. An invasive species. After they finish, it looks like a bombed-out whorehouse. But it’s not like they cut down everything. They have to leave enough trees for the woodpeckers.”
“There’s twenty-five kilowatts coming out of here,” Colm said. “But where’s it going?”
He felt like a complete idiot. If the generator was running, the lights should be on, at a bare minimum. So why were they still in the dark?
“Oh,” Holmundsen said. Colm whipped around.
A wave of cold washed over his face.
Sparks wriggled from the generator. Colm drew back sharply. It looked like the generator had turned into a Tesla coil, but instead of one large streamer, fifteen or twenty little streamers snaked through the air, spitting off fractal spikes.
When you lay your hand on the outside of a vacuum chamber with a Tesla coil in it, the streamers jump to your hand.
But these streamers were not jumping to Colm. They converged on a point between him and the biodiesel intake pipe feeding the generator. He stared, trying to make sense of the weird phenomenon.
The intake pipe rippled.
No, the air was rippling, as if he were looking at jet engine exhaust, but it wasn’t hot. It was icy cold.
The rippling turned into shimmering, and the shimmering got denser, sucking up the streamers of electricity. And this dense shimmer, this cold hole in the air, this impossibility, congealed into a shape.
The shape of a person.
The streamers died, leaving a faint glow that outlined a ghostly man.
Six feet tall, give or take an inch.
Stark-ass naked.
Except for a jaunty forage cap with the earflaps hanging down.
Brown hair stuck out under the forage cap. Gold insignia glinted on the cap, too blurry to read.
Not so the eyes in the knobbly-chinned, big-nosed face. Colm had never seen such lively eyes, sparkling with humor and curiosity.
Frozen, terrified, he stared … and the man smiled at him.
Solidity spread outwards from that smile, ghostly extremities resolving into pale flesh, arms and neck marked by farmer’s tan lines.
“Sir,” Holmundsen gasped.
His voice broke the spell.
This was not a man.
It was a Ghost.
Colm lunged to the generator controls, slapped the power switch.
The Ghost moved. Colm ducked—pure reflex. A steel blade crunched into the computer display, shattering the screen into pixelated mud. The Ghost had a sword, where there had been nothing in his hands before, and he was lunging at Colm, raising the blade overhand to stab—
Colm threw himself backwards off the platform. It was not a planned move, just panic. He managed to twist in the air so he struck the floor with his left hand and knee. His other hand was already reaching for his holstered pistol.
The Ghost jumped off the platform. By the time he hit the floor, he was no longer naked. He wore a short-sleeved khaki shirt and trousers, lace-up boots covered with dust. The sole of one boot flapped like a tongue. An undecorated leather scabbard slapped his thigh. Colm noticed these irrelevant details as he made the split-second judgement that he didn’t have time to draw and fire. He sprinted away, around the platform.
The Ghost pursued him, the loose sole of his boot slapping on the floor: thud-slap, thud-slap.
Holmundsen was trying to push himself to his feet. He brought his pistol up, his eyes like saucers.
Colm tripped on a corpse, fell, rolled. Holmundsen’s rounds passed over his head, eviscerating the air. Echoes piled on top of each other.
Thud-slap.
The sword whistled down, through the space Colm had vacated a micro-second before. The long, deathly-sharp blade bit into the Ghost corpse Colm had tripped on.
More shots from Holmundsen, and then a curse and a shout, “I’m out!” Colm raised his head to see Holmundsen frantically ejecting his magazine.
Thud-slap.
Colm rolled onto his back, drawing his pistol in the same motion. He fired and missed. Yes, you can miss at point-blank range, when the target is moving, when the target is a Ghost with a freaking longsword, a new twist on the madness that’s scrambled humanity’s understanding of the universe. We thought we finally had it all figured out, and then the Ghosts show up.
No one understood where they came from, much less how. Colm knew that they came out of nowhere, but this was the first time he’d ever seen it happen. It had undermined his confidence and dulled his reflexes. He fired again. Missed again, and then had time to scramble to his feet, because the Ghost was charging past him
Heading for Holmundsen.
“No, you fucker,” Colm screamed. He levelled his pistol, but he was scared of hitting his co-pilot.
The sword rose and fell.
It met Holmundsen’s neck. Holmundsen’s head fell off. it bounced on his thigh and rolled across the floor. Blood gouted from the stump of his neck, spraying the Ghost, turning his homely face into a horror mask.
Colm howled like an animal. He emptied his magazine at the Ghost, then bounded to Holmundsen’s body. The last he saw of the Ghost, it was crawling away on hands and knees, taking cover behind the platform of the TDP plant. Colm hoped he’d fatally wounded the fucker but he did not have time to chase it down and make sure. He had the idea that he might be able to save Holmundsen if he reattached his head right away. You could do that with limbs, provided you had a dose of regrowth accelerator on you, which Colm did, a single-use syringe in his belt pouch. It took him a couple of seconds to realize that of course that wouldn’t work with someone’s head.
Holding the gory, slack-jawed thing in his hands, he let out a scream of rage and despair.
A long, fluffy length of carpet wriggled out from behind Holmundsen’s seated body and dragged itself onto Colm’s knees.
“What the mortal fuck?” Colm said. He dropped Holmundsen’s head.
“Help,” the carpet murmured.
“Now I know I’m going mad,” Colm said.
In that surreal moment, when the whole world seemed to have lost its marbles in one epic implosion of gore, his training took over. His hands reached for Holmundsen’s body, lifted the dogtags from around Holmundsen’s neck stump, stuffed them in his pocket. He checked Holmundsen’s belt for spare magazines and dropped them into his own ammo pouch. Then he stood up and started for the door.
The talking carpet had wrapped itself around his hips. It was awkward, so he uncoiled it and hung it around his neck like a scarf.
As he reached the door, the grinder started up again behind him.
The Chemical Mage will be published on October 1st, 2017.
The Chemical Mage Chapter 3
Meg cleared the outbuildings one by one. She wasn’t a farm girl. Grew up in Tokyo, thinking that produce grew on supermarket shelves. She didn’t know what all these sheds and barns were for. What they had become was abattoirs. Ghosts lay everywhere, cut down by rifle or machine-gun fire. It didn’t help that they looked so goddamn human.
Her breath rasped fast inside her helmet. She had the bleed valves of her suit open, exchanging suit air for local air. It carried the smell of manure, mingled with the stomach-turning reek of death. Blood glistened black on the cobbles in the light of the gas giant. She trampled the snarled wire of an outdoor chicken run. Pulped Ghost parts testified to a Marine’s effective grenade throw. But where were the Marines?
She radioed Colm, showed him the mess. “And I can’t raise Erik. Or anyone.”
As she spoke, she looked up at the limestone cliff towering over the farmyard. Several large caverns yawned at the cliff’s foot, partially shuttered by slat doors like the one on her garage back home. Inside this massif, she knew, the colonists had made their dwellings in a network of caves and tunnels, some carved out by water seeping down from the clifftop, some shaped by human machinery. It made sense to live pueblo style on Upsandra d2, given the sweltering summers here, and also the risk of predators. Apparently this moon had some really choice wildlife. Flightless birds as mean as hippos. Turtles that climbed trees and spat poison.
But now something worse had come to Upsandra d2.
The same thing that had come to Sirius A c.
Ghosts.
Meg shuddered, and took a fortifying sip of sweet, gritty juice from her battlesuit’s hydration nipple. She knew what she had to do, little as she liked it.
“I’m going inside to look for survivors.” She didn’t give Lt. Mackenzie time to talk her out of it. She ducked under the nearest garage door, popping upright with her combi levelled, swinging to cover a wide arc.
Dark.
But not to her, not with every kind of sensor known to man embedded in her helmet.
Night vision showed tractors and other farm machinery, haphazardly parked. Everything lurid green.
Workbenches, a mechanic’s pit.
Infrared revealed several spots of warmth in the cab of an enormous tractor.
She climbed up.
OK, so that was three of the missing Marines.
“Hey, sir …”
Shit, of course, she was inside a mountain. The rock was blocking her signals. He wouldn’t be able to hear her.
Swallowing, she inspected the corpses. The Marines had died in their suits, but with their visors open, which was weird. Why would they have opened their visors? Because what had happened after that was they’d got shot in the face. Boom, strawberry jam. Still warm.
Meg’s gorge rose, and on the point of throwing up inside her helmet, she crossed over into detachment. This always happened. The tipping point was different every time, the result the same: things stopped affecting her emotionally. She wasn’t sure if this made her a horrible human being, or a good soldier, or both. Anyway, it was convenient. Dead Marines stopped being people who’d signed on the dotted line like her, gone through basic training like her, groused about the war like her. They became facts to analyze and react to.
These Marines had died in the cab of the tractor because they’d been planning to drive it out of here. But the Ghosts had got to them first.
What a bunch of numbskulls. Rule number one when engaging Ghosts: do not operate powered equipment. That made modern warfare pretty freaking difficult, and obviously you had to make exceptions for your personal equipment and weapons, but there it was. Everyone, even civilians, knew that if there were Ghosts around, electricity would draw them like flies to shit. Why? Who the hell knows. Just one of the charming traits of our enemy.
Meg took the rule about powered equipment seriously, but all the same she now broke it. She leaned across a dead Marine’s lap and switched on the tractor’s engine, just long enough to see the fuel cell’s charge indicator rise up and then sink back to zero.
Yup. Totally drained.
As good as graffiti scrawled on a wall: Ghosts Were Here.
Meg jumped down to the floor with a clang. She looked around the cavern and shivered. All these big, powerful vehicles. A feast. The Marines must’ve brought them inside to try to keep them out of the Ghosts’ clutches, but that obviously hadn’t worked.
Was there anyone left alive here? Hiding, maybe? Once bitten twice shy, gone off-grid, scared to operate so much as a radio?
“Vike?”
Her suit was sending out an auto-ping every ten seconds, so anyone with a radio would know help had arrived. Now she added her voice, boosting it through her radio and her suit’s external speaker.
“Vike, where are you?”
No answer.
“If you get yourself killed, I’m gonna be really pissed,” she mumbled.
She headed for the back of the cavern, where night vision showed doors leading to the rest of the pueblo.
An important question kept bouncing around in the back of her mind.
These Ghosts were Stage Two. The kit she’d seen outside confirmed it. Bolt-action rifles with fixed bayonets. Pudding-bowl helmets. A shotgun or two.
But what if they transitioned to Stage Three? What would happen then?
Despite her emotional detachment, she felt cold. Her teeth were chattering.
The Chemical Mage Chapter 2
The medevac request had come from a settlement called Drumlin Farm. Colm called the local artillery command post, located in a former mountaineering base camp on the island’s central peak, and asked them to lay off shelling the area until he got in and out. Just a professional courtesy. They said sure, we’re out of ammo, anyway. With Marines, it could be hard to tell when they were joking.
Anyway, no shells exploded below as Colm dropped the gunship towards Drumlin Farm. No tracer rounds lit the dark terrain.
Hot LZ? This didn’t even look like room temperature.
But the field sergeant on the radio sounded panicky, breathing hard, like he was running and talking at the same time. Holmundsen fed Colm the livestream from the guy’s helmet cam. Tight-curved, rough-hewn stone walls. A spiral staircase. The fighting had moved inside.
Colm simultaneously lowered the gunship onto his coordinates and watched it descend from a short distance. The sergeant had climbed onto some kind of balcony or lookout point. He leaned on a carved stone balustrade, helmet cam rising and falling as his shoulders heaved. The inverted blue candle-flames of the gunship’s plasma exhaust lit up the night. Another reason not to go down after dark: you made yourself into a big fat target. VTOL-capable, the gunship had secondary thrusters under its wings, pointing straight down. Colm had diverted the xenon-135 component of the exhaust to storage—that stuff was highly radioactive, not to be spewed all over friendly troops—but the un-spiked water plasma still glowed bright enough to leave after-images on your vision.
“Bang,” the sergeant said, making gun-hands. The ship-light silvered the backs of his battlesuit’s gauntlets. “Just to set your mind at ease, these Ghosts are Stage Two.”
“Very reassuring,” Colm said. Stage Two meant mortars. Those shells could actually do some damage to the gunship. He throttled back the combustion chamber’s output, aiming to get down fast—
“Incoming,” Smythe snapped. She pulsed the shockwave generator, the gunship’s key defense against explosive rounds. A pressure wave rushed outwards, generating a sonic boom. The sergeant on the balcony flung himself flat. Fuses triggered, the incoming shells exploded in mid-air.
Not far enough away.
Pain spasmed through Colm’s port wing. Half a dozen points of agony pulsed under the skin of his left arm. Shrapnel.
“Oh jeez, sorry,” Smythe cried. She had nothing to be sorry for. She had the best reflexes of any gunner he’d ever flown with.
Colm muted the pain and dropped the gunship the rest of the way to the ground. The jacks bit into soft, uneven soil. The jolt rattled their teeth in their heads. Not his cleanest landing ever. Residual exhaust heat incinerated vegetation, ringing the gunship in fire.
The computer fed him a detailed damage report. Shredded thermal tiles, not on the leading edge of the wing, thank God, but he didn’t fancy taking off again with damaged insulation. “I’m gonna slap a patch on that.” He sprang off his couch, while Holmundsen engaged in a shouting match with the field sergeant.
This was definitely not a routine triple call scenario. But right now Colm only cared about his ship. He bounded aft, grabbed tools from lockers in the annular space behind the crew cabin, and unsealed the side airlock with a thought. Pale smoke rolled in. He switched off all the lights, not to make the ship any easier a target than it already was.
Holmundsen brushed past him and dug in the ammo locker. Came out with a handful of spare mags for the machine pistols they wore as sidearms.
“Where’re you going, Vike?”
“Sarge said the casualties, plural, are somewhere around here.”
The gunship crew were not supposed to leave the bird.
“Lost him,” Holmundsen explained. “Last thing he said was ‘Ghosts are on the stairs.’”
“What a clusterfuck,” Colm said. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
Holmundsen replied with a snigger. Colm was well known for bending the rules. In Colm’s own opinion that explained why he was still alive, but he tried not to be a bad example to his crew. Both of them were younger, on their first enlistments. Holmundsen’s pessimism was a defensive pose, his bravery the real thing. Colm watched him jog away across the smouldering field, remembering what it was like to be 25 and feel invincible.
The damaged wing claimed his attention. He manhandled a collapsible ladder down to the ground, propped it against the trailing edge of the wing, climbed up. Dull pinpricks in his left arm told him exactly where the shrapnel had hit. Esthesia implants had their detractors, chiefly among squeamish types who opposed any kind of body modification, but Colm, like most working pilots, would not be without his implant. Instead of having to sort through readouts on a clunky HUD, he experienced his ship’s status physically. Saved a ton of time and guesswork.
He could also see through the gunship’s external cameras, via his infolenses—electronic lenses implanted between his own lenses and irises. It was like having eyes in the back of his head, slightly offset by the fact that he was now crouching on the wing.
Smythe clambered down the steps behind him. She carried a combi—the standard Marine rifle with grenade launcher attachment—on a sling.
“Not you, too,” Colm said.
“Vike’s heading for the farm. He’s such a fucking idiot. He might need help getting back.”
“Right. Thing is, I was briefed that there are still civilians at the farm. So if you get that far …”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope.” You had to admire colonists. They hung on like grim death while the Ghosts fired mortars at them. All too often, they died for their right to call a piece of some alien planet home. “If you find any of them, offer them a ride.” Colm wasn’t here to evacuate civilians, but he was rapidly getting the impression that the next command decision regarding Drumlin Farm would be to order its abandonment. The radio silence from the Marines on the ground was ominous. So was the fact that the Ghosts had not lobbed any more shells at the LZ. It suggested the enemy was busy with other things. Spooked by the damage to his ship, Colm wanted to get back in the air pronto, but at this point the gunship might be the only way out for whoever was still alive here.
“You’re the best, Collie Mack,” Smythe said. She blew a kiss off her armored gauntlet and ran across the field, straight through a stand of burning crops. The flames licked over her steel greaves and cuisses.
Colm wasn’t too worried about her. Unlike him and Holmundsen, she had a battlesuit. These were only issued to the Marines, but gear got passed around on the Unsinkable, sold and resold. Meg kept her battlesuit in tip-top condition. It would take a direct hit from an artillery shell to get through that armor.
He squeezed buckyball paste into the holes, smoothed it out with a spackle knife, finished each patch with four-ply carbon nanotube sticky tape. By that time, the smoke had cleared away and he was getting hot in his leathers. They weren’t really made of dead cow, of course, but the same carbon-fiber stuff used for motorcycle ‘leathers.’ The opposite of breathable. He unsealed his visor and inhaled the air of Upsandra d2. The lingering acrid smell reminded him of winter muirburns, when farmers would burn back the heather for better grazing come spring. But that had been in Scotland, where he grew up, and this was 48 light years from Earth.
After the momentary déjà vu passed, he detected an alien perfume in the air, a hint of peppery tartness. On the other hand, the crops he had inadvertently incinerated were just good old terrestrial wheat.
All human-habitable planets have a lot in common. Soil is soil, water is water, sky is sky. That illusion of familiarity was what got people, convinced them to put down roots on distant worlds.
But the night was warmer than it had any right to be, and so bright that the finger-leaved trees at the edge of the field cast shadows on the charred wheat. Both the warmth and the blue-tinged ‘moonlight’ came from the turquoise-striped crescent dominating the sky. An omnipresent reminder that this was an alien world.
The silence felt intense, meaningful, a kissing cousin to the hiss-whoosh of incoming shells, infused with the same promise of death.
Colm climbed down from the wing. Returned his ladder and tools to their storage places. Approved his own repairs, thus cancelling the ghostly pain in his arm. Drank some caffeinated orange juice.
Holmundsen’s transponder winked out.
“Vike! Gimme a sitrep, you reindeer-fucker. Over.”
Colm had a radio transmitter implanted in his jaw. Holmundsen had the same implant, so he couldn’t have lost his radio without also losing his head.
“Smythe, come in.”
“Copy.”
“Vike just went dark.”
“I know. I’m almost at the farm. I’m diverting to his last known location.”
“Roger.”
Colm returned to the cockpit. Control was trying to get hold of him, wanting to know why he was still on the ground. He put them off by reporting the mortar fire incident, without mentioning that Smythe and Holmundsen had gone walkabout. No need to get everyone in even more trouble than they were already in. He kept his voice level and calm, although his internal FUBAR-o-meter had spiked into the red zone.
“Hey, sir—” Smythe broke in on the FM channel.
“Yeah?”
“I’m at some kind of outbuilding.” She shot him a picture of a drystone byre roofed with solar panels. Ghosts corpses sprawled across the doorsill, littered the paved barnyard. Anger heated Smythe’s voice. “Looks like our guys died hard.”
“Died?” The carnage was shocking, but Colm saw no Marine bodies.
“I can’t raise Vike. Or anyone. I’m going inside—” Her transmission broke up.
“Smythe!”
Static.
“Smythe!”
Silence.
Oh, Christ on a bloody bike.
Moving fast, Colm grabbed his sidearm. Got a couple of spare mags from the ammo locker. Holmundsen had taken all the armor-piercing rounds, damn him. Well, Ghosts didn’t wear armor, anyway.
Colm swung down to the ground. Charred wheat puffed into carbon dust under his boots. He folded the airlock steps up behind him with a thought, sealing the ship. He was not concerned about leaving it, since he could operate its flight controls and point defenses from anywhere within radio range. He set the external sensors to maximum sensitivity. Now it would let him know if it saw so much as a bunny rabbit, or whatever the hell the Upsandra d2 analogue of a bunny rabbit was.
He loped across the field, into the darkness of the finger-leaf forest.
The Chemical Mage Chapter 1
Beep. Beep. Beeeeep.
The duty officer on the flight deck of the Unsinkable, an FTL-capable supercarrier, took the call.
“Sorry, Sarge, we cannot launch a routine medevac after dark. Call back at first light.”
Colm Mackenzie, having opened one eye without being fully aware of it, went back to sleep. Curled on a storage chest in the ready room, he dreamed of the Free Church Manse. The derelict property overlooked Staffin Bay on the Isle of Skye. It was a short walk down to the stony shore.
Beep. Beep. Beeeeep.
“Sorry, Sarge. We cannot fly a priority medevac at this time. Call back at dawn.”
Colm walked the coast road out from Portree. The miles flew by under his dream-sneakers. He hurried through the windbreak of pines around the Free Church Manse, clutching his brand-new deed of ownership … and stopped short at the sight of a moving van parked outside. Windows open, decorators carrying out rotten skirting boards and a rusted hot water boiler. Children’s voices carried on the wind like the cries of seagulls. With the inevitability of dream logic, someone had beat him to it, bought the manse before he could. Happened every goddamn time.
Beep. Beep. Beeeeep.
“OK, Sarge. You got it.” The duty officer raised his voice. “Emergency medevac! Man your spacecraft!”
Colm uncurled, the dream dissolving into the funk of overheated circuit boards and stale sweat. He sat up in 0.5 gees of artificial gravity. His co-pilot and gunner sprinted out to the flight deck to initiate systems checks. Colm shook out his leathers, which he had been sleeping on, stuck one leg in, and hopped over to the duty officer while wriggling his other leg into the EVA-rated flight suit. “How bad is it?”
While the duty officer briefed him, the globe of Upsilon Andromedae d2, projected on the end wall, spun to display a blood-red electronic pushpin. The medevac request had come from the moon’s smaller archipelago, on the Upsandra d-facing side. This was going to be hairy. When you deorbited at night, you plunged through belts of intense radiation accumulated during the day, as the moon’s magnetosphere interacted with the more powerful magnetic field of the gas giant it orbited.
“Two platoons pinned down, taking heavy fire. Captain Best in command. Could be a triple call scenario,” Colm said to his co-pilot and gunner as he climbed into the cockpit of the gunship. Triple calls happened frequently: a field sergeant would keep upgrading the severity of his medevac request until he got to yes. So they were going to be flying into a hot LZ to evacuate a Marine who mightn’t even be wounded, might just have decided he was fucked if he’d fight another step. That happened frequently, too.
Colm was on his second enlistment. Four more months until he got rotated back to support duties. 28 months until he was his own man again. Would the Free Church Manse still be waiting for him? Who knows? He had given up hope of surviving that long. All he could do was be vigilant and do his job to the best of his abilities.
The launch platform rotated, pivoting the gunship to face the outer wall of the flight deck. Half a kilometer long, the cavernous deck held a sparse handful of gunships and larger dropships. All the rest were down on the surface of Upsandra d2, or had already been lost. The flight deck was in hard vacuum. Rampies in hi-viz skinsuits swarmed around the other craft, repairing and refueling them. They all retreated to the safety zones on the launch platforms when the deck lighting dipped from blazing white to ominous red. “Ready,” Colm said. He flexed his toes, ensuring the landing gear of his gunship gripped the platform securely.
“Warpig Ten, you are cleared for launch.” Warpig One through Warpig Nine were no more. Eleven and Twelve were out there somewhere. Like Colm, they were being slotted in any old place to fill holes in coverage. The colonel in command of the carrier’s air support division was fondly known as the Rat—he chewed through ships and crews like they were made of cardboard.
“Roger that, Zero,” Colm said. “Launching on my mark …” He inventoried his bodily sensations one last time. Everything checked out. Co-pilot Holmundsen and gunner Smythe were strapped into their respective couches, faces invisible behind their visors. “Mark.” He pulled the launch trigger.
Power flooded into the rail launcher under the platform. Like a tiny maglev train, the platform zoomed towards the wall, carrying the gunship with it. Hydraulic doors gaped ahead. At the end of the rail, an elastomer catapult snapped the platform back—this part was fully automated—and hurled the gunship into space.
The little ship fell away from the Unsinkable like a bottle chucked out the window of a 3-kilometer skyscraper. The Unsinkable might be one of Earth’s largest and most capable capital ships, but like all spacecraft designed never to land, it was an unaerodynamic mess to look at, solar panels and zero-gravity field generators and other bits and bobs sticking out all over its length. The gunship was a thing of beauty in contrast. It at least had wings. Colm used to fly commuter jets in his former life, and he still maintained the Cessna Mustang was the most beautiful aircraft ever built.
At the recommended minimum separation distance of 5 klicks, he opened the throttle. A mixture of water and xenon plasma gouted out of the aft engine bells. The gunship heeled over and dived towards Upsandra d2.
The Earth-sized moon orbited Upsandra d, a gas giant ten times as massive as Jupiter. Vivid sapphire and turquoise bands striped the giant’s waning crescent.
Upsandra, a bright G-type star, flared at the top of Upsandra d’s limb, then slid behind it.
The gunship fell into night.
“I see lightning, I see lightning,” chanted Megumi Smythe in a little-girl singsong.
“This better be a real emergency,” Erik Holmundsen said grimly.
Upsandra d2’s atmosphere sprouted a tail of particles ionized by magnetic field interactions. Charge built up during the day. At ‘sunset’—the moment when the shadow of the gas giant crawled over the moon—it reached spitting point. Electrostatic discharges fanned from the poles like sheet lightning. The fireworks obscured the geography of scattered islands below, and the remaining lights of human colonization.
“Cross your fingers,” Colm said. He flipped the ship—a sensation like somersaulting—and dived into the storm.
99 times out of a hundred, you’d be fine.
The other time, you’d be Warpig Two, who got struck by a discharge. All systems DOA. Went into a tumble and burned up on re-entry.
Colm’s luck held. They got through the electric storm A-OK.
So now they only had a couple million hostile Ghosts to contend with.
The night was looking up.