The Razor's Edge

by Seanan McGuire

  McCallum brought the stun gun up and fired. The lieutenant jerked and fell. McCallum stepped over the body, followed by Omata. Their job was to take control of the station or, failing that, to protect Pedy and Hardin.

  A Legion sergeant appeared up ahead. He was armed and blocking the tubeway. “Hold on,” the legionnaire ordered. “I need to see …”

  McCallum shot him with the stun gun, but it was a waste of time. Unlike the navy officer, the noncom was wearing Class 1 “active” body armor, which protected him from a wide range of electronic weapons. He was bringing his weapon to bear when Omata shot him in the head. Twice.

  The second hole was half an inch from the first, and thanks to the suppressor mounted on Omata’s long-barreled pistol, the shots produced very little noise. The sergeant fell over backwards and landed with a thump.

  McCallum knew that he should have felt something. Regret? Sorrow? Something. But he didn’t. The Legion was the enemy now … and so was the sergeant.

  An alarm began to bleat. Cameras were mounted in the tubeway, and once the noncom’s vital signs stopped, the Legion’s onboard Command and Control computer warned its operator. That meant the shit was going to hit the fan—and the chances of a successful takeover plunged to zero. “Implement Plan B,” McCallum said. “Omata and I will hold the main corridor, while Pedy and Hardin plant the charges. Go.”

  Thanks to information gathered by Fenton and her spies, a diagram of the platform’s layout was projected on the inner surface of each team member’s visor. That’s how McCallum knew that the first responders were likely to follow the main corridor aft.

  The first wave appeared quickly. There were about eight of them, which represented roughly half the legionnaires on board. They opened fire immediately, or half of them did. Those in the rear couldn’t fire without hitting the soldiers in front of them. And, as low velocity bullets whipped past the opening to the tubeway, McCallum readied a flash grenade. Omata, who was on the other side of the passageway, did likewise.

  “Now!” McCallum said, the legionnaires continued to push forward. The grenades sailed up the corridor, landed, and went off. The flashes were calculated to momentarily disable the defenders’ HUDs. McCallum and Omata took advantage of the opportunity to step out and fire their weapons on full auto. They were using armor piercing ammo in spite of the fact that they were on a pressurized space station because, thanks to their emergency space suits, the team knew they would survive a sudden decompression.

  As the gun smoke cleared, a horrible scene was revealed. The bulkheads were red with splattered blood. All of the legionnaires were down. Most were dead. But, judging from the moans, at least two were still alive. “Let me help them,” Carla said. “Then I’ll come back.”

  “No can do,” McCallum replied. “They’re legionnaires. They’re down, but they aren’t out. One will grab you, put a gun to your head, and attempt to negotiate.”

  Carla was about to argue with McCallum when a hatch opened and a legionnaire fired from the crawlspace below. The blast from his short-barreled energy weapon struck Omata and killed her. She fell. McCallum barely knew her, but felt a stab of sorrow.

  McCallum was about to respond when a second defender dropped from a hatch above. McCallum’s first impulse was to bring his submachinegun to bear, but strong hands reached out to grab his harness and pull him close.

  Both men knew how to fight hand-to-hand, and both meant to penetrate their opponent’s armor. McCallum was wielding a vibro blade, which could cut through durasteel, and the other legionnaire had a hand laser. The air sizzled as the weapons swept from left to right. Arms blurred as a series of lightning-fast blows were thrown and blocked.

  Meanwhile Omata’s killer was climbing up out of the crawlspace. Carla’s pistol was in its holster. As Carla drew the weapon, she was surprised by how heavy it was. What had McCallum told her? “Pull the trigger, and keep pulling it.” She did.

  The recoil came as a surprise. Her hands wobbled, and bullets flew wide, but two struck the target. The first flattened itself on the legionnaire’s armor. The second punched a hole through the legionnaire’s visor. He fell like a puppet without strings.

  Pedy’s voice came over the radio. “Pull back to the ship! Hardin and I are inside the compartment where the beacon is located and we’re surrounded.

  “The timers have been set. You have five minutes to board and haul ass. One more thing … Hardin wants someone to adopt his dog. Pedy out.” The message was followed by a click.

  Carla was still absorbing the news when McCallum grabbed her arm. His opponent was laying on the deck with both hands wrapped around the vibro knife’s hilt. He was trying to remove it from his chest. “No,” Carla exclaimed, “don’t do that!”

  But it was too late. The knife came out, followed by a spurt of blood. The legionnaire’s helmet hit the deck and his hands fell free.

  McCallum pulled Carla into the tubeway. “Come on!” They ran side by side.

  The lock was open, thanks to the steel bar, and McCallum jerked it loose. Steel clanged on steel as it hit the deck. Carla saw the glowing green button and slapped it. There was a whining sound as the hatch started to close. McCallum slipped through the gap.

  “I’m breaking contact,” Blackburn announced, as the second hatch opened and closed behind them. “Hold on … It’s gonna be a rough ride.”

  Carla and McCallum were thrown into a steel bulkhead as Blackburn hit the throttles and the Queen took off. “Three Imperial fighters are headed our way,” Blackburn said. “We have a two or three-minute lead. I’m going to put the ship into a steep dive, re-enter the atmosphere, and look for a place to pancake in.

  “Once we hit, grab your packs and bail out. I’ll be right behind you. Oh, and one more thing, the space station blew. The beacon was destroyed.”

  Any happiness that Carla might have felt was washed away by the knowledge that Hardin, Pedy, and Omata were dead. She’d barely known them, but would never forget the sacrifice they’d made, or the cause they’d died for.

  McCallum and Carla lurched back and forth between makeshift handholds as they made their way back to the seats and the packs that were strapped to the deck beyond. They held hands once their harnesses were fastened. That was a first, but it felt natural.

  The ship shook violently as it entered the atmosphere. A loose bolt rattled across the deck on its way forward, and Carla closed her eyes. “One of the bastards is on our tail,” Blackburn said tightly. “A missile is locked onto us …”

  The explosion shook the ship. The Queen rolled 360 degrees and hit. Unsecured items flew every which way. The ship topped a dozen trees before finally coming to rest in the treetops. McCallum threw the harness off and jumped to his feet. “I’ll check on Blackburn. Drag our packs to the belly hatch and drop them to the ground.” Then he was gone.

  The plan made sense. Carla freed herself and made her way to the hatch, where she flipped a protective cover out of the way. A red button was waiting. Carla pressed it. There was a bang and a puff of smoke as the hatch blew off and crashed through the foliage below.

  The first pack was falling as McCallum reappeared. He held a coil of rope. “I’ll tie this off. Slide down, grab your pack, and get ready to run. I’ll be right behind you.”

  “What about Blackburn?”

  McCallum shook his head. “The ship hit a tree. The cockpit collapsed.”

  Carla felt numb as she slid to the ground. Both packs were waiting and, by the time McCallum arrived, Carla was ready.

  The jungle exploded around them. Trees came crashing down, a chunk of metal whirred past Carla’s head, and McCallum waved her forward. “That was a cluster bomb. Come on!”

  They ran, and ran some more. Ducking, dodging, and sometimes crawling as they sought to put distance between the ship and themselves. They had just topped a rise when an explosion shook the earth under their feet and a pillar of fire pushed a mushroom-shaped cloud of smoke up into the sky. The Solar Queen was no more.
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  Aerospace fighters continued to circle overhead, but the ground attacks stopped as the fugitives went into hiding. “Their scanners can detect both movement and heat,” McCallum explained. “But, so long as we remain still, our heat signatures won’t seem to be significant.”

  The strategy worked, and the fighters peeled away ten minutes later.

  After emerging from their hiding place, the couple made their way to a clearing and the edge of a cliff.

  “I lost four people,” McCallum said miserably. “You were supposed to shoot me.”

  “Not unless you began to hallucinate,” Carla replied gently. “And you didn’t. Plus, each did what he or she wanted to do. Had to do.”

  McCallum nodded. “It isn’t that simple, but thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” Carla said, as she kissed him on the cheek. Then, as McCallum placed an arm around her shoulders, a gentle rain began to fall. Carla felt the cool droplets touch her skin. “Look!” she said. “A rainbow!”

  McCallum looked out over the jungle and there it was. The multicolored arch was reaching westward to a point where it lost definition. Rainbow’s end.

  The Woman in Green

  D.B. Jackson

  Boston, Province of Massachusetts Bay, 8 July 1775

  Ethan Kaille crouched beside the dirt road, concealed by swaying grass on the Roxbury side of Boston’s Town Gate. The stink of mud soured the air. Flies and midges swarmed him each time the hot breeze settled. Sweat tickled his face and neck.

  He counted a total of eight British regulars by the guardhouses. One or two more might have been inside. The men held muskets and wore uniforms of red and white. Their steel bayonets flashed like fish scales in the sun’s glare.

  He watched the soldiers for some time as they chatted and laughed, but they did nothing unusual. They appeared no more watchful than they had when he observed them the previous day, or the one before that. Equally important, their numbers had not increased. He had seen no more than ten guards at the gate at any one time. Morning, evening, midday—the count remained about the same.

  Ethan eased away from the road on his hands and knees, taking care to make no noise and to disturb the grass as little as possible. He had cloaked himself in a concealment spell before approaching Boston’s Neck. Had he stood and waved to the men, they wouldn’t have seen him, though they might have spotted his shadow, or noted the parting of the grass around his legs. His conjurings could fool the unsuspecting, but not the sun or the earth.

  He crawled a long way before he risked standing. Even after that, he placed his feet with caution, hindered by the limp he’d acquired nearly twenty years before as a convict laborer on a Barbados sugar plantation. A heron eyed him from the edge of the marsh—beasts and birds saw through his spells—but a pair of fishermen in a dory near the shore appeared oblivious of his presence.

  He found his skiff as he’d left it: resting on the mud in a small cove near the Patriot lines at Roxbury. Pausing beside the vessel, he pulled a handful of grass from the ground and whispered, “Fini velamentum ex gramine evocatum.” End concealment, conjured from grass.

  His spell thrummed like a bowstring in the ground beneath his feet. At the same time, a glowing figure winked into view beside him, russet like a rising moon, but nearly impossible to see in bright daylight. This ghost, his spectral guide, appeared each time Ethan conjured and allowed him access to the magick that dwelt along the boundary between the world of the living and the realm of the dead.

  Ethan hadn’t felt the concealment spell while it was in place, and he didn’t sense its absence now, but as he pushed the skiff onto the still water and hopped in, another fisherman waved to him, confirmation that his removal conjuring had worked.

  He rowed away from the Neck, giving the British positions at either end of the causeway a wide berth. Eventually, he angled northward and made for the narrow strand near the stillhouse at Hill’s Wharf.

  Most who sympathized with the Patriot cause had long since abandoned Boston for Roxbury and towns farther inland, leaving the city to the lobsterbacks and their Loyalist allies. But a few remained, their sympathies hidden, their labors on behalf of liberty clandestine.

  One such worked in the distillery. Without the help of this man, the attack Ethan and the others had planned for this night would fail, at the cost of many lives.

  Ethan paused in his rowing to retrieve a fishing pole and net from the bottom of the skiff. He leaned these on the hull at the vessel’s prow so that they would be visible to all. Then he resumed rowing and oared the skiff to the strand. Here, close to the heart of Boston’s South End, his was one of many small boats navigating the shallows of the harbor. He couldn’t keep from being seen, but he could do his best to blend with the daily flow of fishermen and peddlers to and from the city’s wharves.

  After shipping his oars and dragging the skiff onto the strand, he hurried up Hills Lane, a small alley between houses that led to the main road fronting the South End wharves. He paused in the shadows, pulled his knife from his belt, and cut his forearm. Whispering in Latin once more, he cast a warding over himself, a spell that would protect him from physical harm. Magick hummed in the cobblestones and the ghost reappeared before him. In the shade, Ethan could make out more of the specter: the chain mail, the Plantagenet lions on his tabard, the trim, graying beard, and the familiar frown on his lean, luminous face. Long ago Ethan had named the ghost Uncle Reg, after his mother’s temperamental brother.

  “You have something you’d like to say?” Ethan asked.

  Reg’s scowl deepened. To Ethan’s knowledge, the ghost was incapable of speech. Certainly he had never heard the spirit utter a word. That didn’t mean, though, that he couldn’t have some fun at Reg’s expense. A creature as splenetic as this one deserved mockery every so often.

  “You know why we’re here,” Ethan said, sobering. “The conjurings are a necessity.”

  Still clearly displeased at having been disturbed, the ghost began to fade. As he did, another spell growled beneath Ethan’s feet, an answer to his own. Reg took form again, his hard, gleaming gaze finding Ethan’s.

  “Where did that come from?” Ethan asked.

  The ghost shrugged, shook his head.

  Ethan wasn’t the only conjurer in Boston, but of those who were likely to be in the city now, with the British military controlling the streets, there were few he trusted. This could have been a benign conjuring from one of them. He thought it more likely, however, that the spell had been cast by an ally of the Crown.

  Seconds later, the magick reached him, twining around his legs like an invisible vine climbing a trellis. A finding spell.

  Somewhere in the city or its environs, a conjurer was reaching out with magick, hoping to locate other spellers. Likely the person had sensed Ethan’s spell and wanted to discover its source. Ethan had no desire to be found or to lead the conjurer to his friend in the stillhouse.

  “Could you tell where it originated?” he asked the ghost.

  Reg turned a full circle, his brow knotted. At last he pointed to the north.

  “Cornhill? Or farther? The North End?”

  The ghost gestured with an open hand. Farther.

  “Good. Thank you. But you should leave me now. I’m easier to spot with you beside me.”

  Reg nodded and melted into the shadows. Ethan stepped onto Essex Street, but turned westward, instead of toward the distillery.

  He made his way to Newbury Street, the largest thoroughfare in this part of the city, and entered the first establishment he saw, a clothier’s shop. A small brass bell jingled as he opened and closed the door. The shop smelled of wool and lambskin and clean linen. The proprietor, a gangly, white-haired man, pulled his attention from the young gentleman he was helping to peer at Ethan over the spectacles perched on his nose.

  “I’ll be with you in just a few moments, sir.”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  Ethan lingered near the door, staring out the window, whic
h offered a clear view of the avenue. His gaze skipped over the people walking past. He couldn’t recognize a conjurer on sight—his powers didn’t run so deep—but he thought he might notice someone who searched the street as he did.

  After a few minutes, the clothier’s customer crossed to the door with a whisper of silk. He wore a green ditto suit and a tricorn hat that made the one on Ethan’s head look shabby and worn. His eyes flicked over Ethan, taking in his stained breeches and threadbare coat. A sneer settled on his square face as he let himself out of the shop.

  The draper joined Ethan at the window. “I’m sorry to keep you waiting, sir.”

  “Not at all.” Ethan scanned the street before forcing himself to face the man.

  “You wish to buy a suit? Or a new coat perhaps?”

  “A suit,” Ethan said. “Linen. No waistcoat.”

  “Very good, sir. Did you have a color in mind.”

  He glanced out the window again. “Blue, I think.”

  Kannice’s favorite color. She would be pleased were he actually to have a suit made. Not that he would wear it with any frequency. But she would find occasions for them to fancy up, and he would feel like a fop each time.

  “I have some material here,” the clothier said. He strode to the back of the shop. “Fine linen,” he went on, his voice carrying. “Just in from Ireland. I believe I have several shades of blue.”

  Ethan nodded, though the man couldn’t see, and continued to survey the lane.

  Soon enough, he spotted a woman who was distinguished by her behavior more than her appearance. He pressed himself to the wooden frame of the window and watched.

  She was petite, dressed in a green satin gown with a lace stomacher and yellow petticoats. Strands of auburn hair peeked out from beneath a white cap. Ethan guessed that she was no more than twenty years old. She walked slowly, affecting an air of nonchalance that Ethan distrusted. Her gaze struck him as too keen, her bearing stiff with tension.