“Oh my Gods,” Triel said. “Where am I? What was that?”
Jetta took a step back. “You’re aboard a stolen Alliance fighter, and we just docked at a refueling outpost in the Vrea sector, outside the Sister planets. That was zopramine, but I didn’t get the whole dose in. You have to stay awake to guard the ship while I go and get supplies—it isn’t safe here.”
Triel looked her up and down as her memories trickled back. “Jetta—you helped me. I was Falling...”
“Yes,” Jetta whispered.
The Healer’s eyes narrowed. “You helped me by... I saw you.”
Jetta blushed and fumbled for her second sidearm. “Here, take this,” she said, handing Triel the weapon. “I’ll be back in an hour.”
“Wait,” Triel said, grabbing her arm. The look in her eyes was one Jetta had never seen. It was akin to curiosity and surprise, but what lay beyond that she couldn’t—or wouldn’t—read. “Don’t go. I want to talk about what happened.”
“Not now,” Jetta said, pulling away again. “I’ll be back in an hour. I left the medkit over there in case you need anything. Oh, and a com so you can get a hold of me if something happens.”
“Won’t the Alliance come looking for us?”
Jetta pointed to a missing service panel. Wires and datachips were severed or dislodged from the motherboard. “I took care of any carrier signals, and Jaeia knows better than to come after me. Besides, they have their hands full right now.”
“Jetta,” Triel tried again, but Jetta quickly cut her off.
“One hour, I promise,” Jetta said, lowering the access ramp.
However much she might want to, Jetta didn’t look back as she resealed the ramp.
Jetta took a moment to study her surroundings. The dock was crowded, jammed with homemade starcraft that looked like scrap jobs assembled from recycled parts. Most likely a local port, and with its population overwhelmingly Sentients of Vreaper or human ancestry, it was probably near one of the displacement colonies.
Jetta had ripped the Alliance patches off her pilot’s jacket, but she couldn’t hide the telltale cut of the uniform. She kept her helmet on, hoping that she would look like any other dog-soldier or Jock that liked to steal military vessels.
“Nice bird,” someone snorted.
Jetta looked to her left where a man with a crooked nose was smiling at her, leaning against his ride. His pink prosthetic arm whirred as he rolled his cigarette between the plastic fingertips. It had been a long time since she had seen an artificial limb, especially one so antiquated. On any of the Homeworlds they could have regrown the arm from his own stem cells, and most black market clinics could weave tissues from flesh-farm stock. Sporting a prosthetic—especially after the war with the Deadwalkers—was brazen, almost heraldic.
“They recharge fuel cells around here?”
The man snorted. “You kiddin’? Take a closer look.”
Jetta used the zoom in her helmet to examine the refueling station. It had fuel cell inputs, but the base chargers were dead.
“They ain’t even got ethelneprolol for fifth-class flying pieces of gorsh-shit. This place is as dry as every other godich port from here to Breck’s Pass. Chakking government.”
Jetta frowned, but realized she might be able to get some of the other things they might need. She turned to go, but the man wasn’t through with her.
“Hey, I know a guy that’ll buy military bird like that.”
Jetta played her part as she tried to pass him. “You don’t know anybody that rich.”
The man stuck out his prosthetic. “You must be new to these parts, otherwise you wouldn’t disrespect me like that.”
Jetta was close enough to the prosthetic to read the small inscription near the thumb. It was in English, but all of the words translated in Common. Advanced Robotic Technologies. It sounded familiar—important—so much so that it took the man reaching for his weapon to break her gaze.
“A little jumpy, aren’t ya?” he said, flipping over the knife in his hand. “Just wanted to show you my goods. You look like you’re lookin’ for something.”
He pulled out two boxes from the storage cell on his bike, cutting along the seams to reveal his prize. Inside was pure methoc, dyed pink, glinting under the dome of lights and filtered gray sunlight.
“Can’t buy this in the mainland. Give you a deal.”
“Thanks, but I don’t like your flavor,” Jetta said, trying to walk away again.
The man grabbed her by the collar, but she didn’t struggle. He was human, and she could sense his real intentions, his desperation, as he got up in her face. Only her helmet separated them as his breath fogged her visor. “I ain’t like you, alright? I don’t got nuthin’ to lose, see? It’s easy for you Jocks—it’s easy for everyone else. This is all the gorsh-shit I got left.”
It was too easy to slip behind his eyes; humans were always easy reads. Already a wanted man, he had murdered the original dealer of the methoc and was trying to buy enough fuel to jump out of orbit and make it to the Tannus Belt. But Jetta knew from the way his thoughts laced together that it was a self-deception. With as much debt as he had, there was nowhere he could hide.
But when she tried to pull out of his mind, her senses were ensnared by the unexpected.
Memories jerked by in random order, and it took everything she had to make sense of the sudden outpouring. She saw herself lining up in Dominion concentration camp, arguing for food with another prisoner before the butt of a gun connected with her face. She woke up with a gut full of hot iron fear as Deadwalker ships touched down in the smoldering wreckage of a city. The ceaseless gunfire didn’t drown out the mechanical clicking of the spiny creatures that spilled out of the buzzing ships, chasing after her with insect quickness.
Reeling backwards in time, she woke to the smell of smoke in her tent. When she ran out, invaders were torching her colony. She turned to find her mother, only to come face to face with a black-masked soldier who was quick to chain her to a line of other captured Deadskins. Outmatched, she marched into the giant cargo ship, trying to stay on her feet as the others screamed and backed away from the electric bite of the shockwands.
Back in the recent past, she relived his agony as he traded the use of his body for freedom aboard the trade ship. She had known females to do it, but never males.
(I don’t want to see—)
She couldn’t peel herself away, so she hurtled forward, finding herself back in a crowded city, huddling next to a steam vent under the unforgiving winter sky. Rain and snow fell in slushy sheets, soaking her to the bone as passersby shot her looks of disgust. She was beyond hungry, beyond rational thought. Jetta knew that feeling all too well, and she recoiled against that truth as she picked through the soggy trash outside a restaurant. It was too much like Fiorah, too much like her old life.
Except this man didn’t have two siblings to share thoughts and emotions with, and he didn’t have their ability to steal knowledge and experience. Alone in an unforgiving world, he was forced to beg, something she had seen Galm do but had never been reduced to herself. The humiliation was maddening, even through a borrowed memory, and when she experienced his first drink, the burning stream of alcohol brought welcome relief.
Stealing was easier, quicker, and in the dispirited waste it was the only thrill left. She ran down an alleyway, stolen gambling chips stuffed under the stump of her arm as she plowed through piles of trash and flung herself over a retaining wall. The man had stopped caring altogether. He no longer took simple precautions, and he no longer cared who he stole from or killed. And in the depths of his mind, she felt his longing for the sweet release of death as those who chased him drew nearer.
Jetta bristled against his blatant self-destruction until his memory was wiped away and replaced by the most gruesome experience she had ever absorbed. Her arm was pinned to a chopping board, tourniquet tied tightly around her upper arm. Limbs and organs, preserved in stasis cylinders around the room, bobbed
in yellow biogel. Screaming and struggling did nothing. The butcher approached, meat cleaver in one hand, derma-abrader in the other.
Jetta kicked backwards, pulling out before she could see the rest. “Get away from me!”
She couldn’t show pity or he’d know she had been in his head, but the strain in her voice gave away her fear. She had seen the flesh farms through other eyes before, had submerged herself in the bleak undertow of street life more than once, and she had known war and poverty from many different perspectives. But she had never slipped that far, especially unguarded, and never had she been transposed so viscerally into a memory as traumatic as the one she had just witnessed.
“Get out of here—you’re worthless,” he said, laughing at her.
Her eyesight was still fuzzy and ringed with halos as her mind struggled to adjust to the sudden telepathic severance. Time slowed to a crawl and every movement, every sensation exaggerated. The spray of spittle from his mouth hit her uniform like buckshot and his laughter, shrill and bombastic, seemed to blow out her eardrums.
Clutching her helmet, she watched in horror as a phantom shadow manifested from somewhere beneath his skin. Jetta shook her head, hoping it was just a hallucination. But when she looked back, black-curled brume seethed from every pore of his body, pulsating and slinking towards her like snakes as he continued to laugh.
Jetta surprised both herself and the man when she slammed him against his bike. He was bigger than her, but that meant little against her augmented strength.
When he tried to stab her with his knife, she broke his wrist, muffling his screams with her gloved hand and driving her knee into his gut. The crunch of his neck as she wrenched it to one side came with sickening gratification, and as he went limp in her arms, his psionic tune fading into nothingness, relief washed over her in waves.
But as the shadow vanished and she let him slump to the ground, the reality of what she had done fizzled away her solace. Guilt congealed into a cold weight in her belly. Stupid, she told herself. She had seen all the dreadful things inside him—there was no salvaging him, no way to undo the horrors that had mangled his life. He was as much deadweight in her heart as he was in society. Then why were her actions still hard to swallow?
The answer came to her in the twisting of her stomach: (I wasn’t strong enough. I couldn’t handle his pain. I hated him for the way he made me feel.)
Jetta looked around, making sure she hadn’t made too much of a scene. Several bystanders had witnessed the event, but when she made it clear that they could take his possessions in exchange for their silence, they didn’t seem to care.
She hurried away from the ensuing scuffle and toward the center of the floating dome, where sagging housing structures and businesses competed for space. It smelled faintly of beggar’s oil and the merlik powder her uncle had used to cover up the taste of mold.
Most of the shops were barren or abandoned, “no supplies” scrawled over unlit signs. Graffiti artists paid no attention to her as she walked by, her boots crunching on the broken glass littering the walkway. With every step her despair offinding what she needed grew, as did her awareness of being a foreigner in such a place. She knew what the sidelong glances meant and felt multiple presences falling in step behind her.
Up the strip was a dilapidated building with a broken neon sign hanging over a barred door. She didn’t know the symbols, but by the look of the junk displayed in the window, it was a repair shop and the closest she would come to what she was looking for.
A small crowd of humans was milling around the front door, periodically peering over their shoulders as goods exchanged hands.
“Hey! What’s your kind doing here?” one of them shouted at her. The red rings under the woman’s eyes and jaundiced skin showed she was in the end-stages of the M. eserepthia parasite infection, a condition easily cured in the Homeworlds.
Why hasn’t she gotten treated?
In her heart Jetta knew the truth. Deadskins this far out were on the run, unsponsored, unregistered, and had never had access to the variety of technology taken for granted by the humans in regulated space. Humans like her.
Jetta squared her shoulders and shoved through the crowd, ignoring their curses as she entered the shop. She slammed the door behind her, nearly unhinging it with her force. The little bell attached to the top rattled, protesting its mistreatment.
“I don’t appreciate your entry.”
Jetta couldn’t see who was speaking to her over the drifts of half-assembled machinery and indiscernible piles of metal housing and wires, some of which reached the ceiling. It looked like the dust-covered innards of some huge, antiquated central processor, which she couldn’t imagine had much value or use.
As she waded through the mess, Jetta minded her step, careful not to disturb the towering piles or the various collections of black fly husks. She spied some of what she needed at a counter near a register: cable rope, hand tools, and even some batteries—though on closer inspection corroded acid ringed the casings.
“What can I help you with?”
Jetta finally caught sight of the proprietor, an old man tinkering away behind a workbench under a strange green light. Tufts of white hair stuck out from beneath his headgear, which bore lenses and optics that bobbed up and down as he chewed on the end of an electron probe. His face unshaven, he looked like he hadn’t changed his shirt in weeks.
“I’m looking to buy any cable rope you have, batteries—working batteries—and that bundle of tools over there,” Jetta said, pointing to the hand tools near the register. “And food rations.”
Still under the protection of her pilot’s helmet, she surveyed the room and picked up some unusual readouts on her visor. She carefully punched in some commands on her sleeve to run a cross-analysis.
“This is a repair shop, not a supply shop,” he said, wiping his greasy hands on his apron. “And there aren’t any food rations around these parts. Not since the Alliance quit sending provisions. Besides, I wouldn’t sell to your kind anyway.”
“My kind?” Jetta said.
He got in her face, his eyes magnified a hundred times by the lenses. “Jocks. Go rip someone else off.”
“I’m not a Jock,” she said. She laid a handgun on the counter and the man jumped back. “For trade. I’m not here to hurt you.”
He looked her over with a suspicious eye before picking it up and inspecting it. “Military grade. Dual-phasic, relatively new. Still has full charges. I’ll give you three hundred for it.”
Jetta huffed. “Don’t rip me off. And I don’t want cash.”
“Cash is all I’ll give you. I know your kind—startin’ trouble, doing the Devil’s work. I’ll give you cash so you’ll go get high. Maybe your heart will give out, save me the trouble.”
It would have been easy to kill him, to take what she wanted and leave, but her most recent murder was fresh enough in her mind to make her pause. Jetta swallowed her anger and tried again. “For a man with a back room full of gold, you’ll need something like this for protection.”
His smiled quickly dissolved into a frown. “Get the hell out of here!”
Jetta grabbed him by the collar and threw him on top of the counter before he had time to try for his pistol. “I’m tired. Give me what I want. It’s more than a fair trade.”
Because of the lenses, his irises were the size of her palms. “Wait a minute—I know you. I know that voice.”
“What?”
“You’re Commander Jetta Kyron. Warchild of the Starways. The Slaythe. I’ve always wanted to meet you.”
His collar shook in her hands. Her mind anticipated the way his brittle bones would feel snapping between her fingers, and the temptation grew stronger with every breath she took.
“Please,” he whispered. “I mean no disrespect. If you let me go, I’ll show you something you need to see.”
Jetta thought of the man she had killed earlier, how easily his neck had broken, and became aware of the sweat pouring d
own her neck and forehead.
(He does not deserve his skin—)
—I wasn’t strong enough—
A chill shivered through her, loosening her grip. The old man didn’t take any cues and rolled out from underneath her, catching himself on a pile of scrap metal. He cut his hand but quickly wound his apron around the wound. He gave her a cautious smile, showing yellow teeth pitted by age and disease. “Come, friend. Please.”
A conflicting mix of self-reproach and disappointment made her stomach knot as Jetta followed him to the back room concealed behind advertisements for a brand of cola that had long been out of business. There she saw what her helmet readings had picked up: gold. A few bricks lay in an open safe next to a molecular oven.
“How is a man like you in possession of gold and all this equipment?”
He shook his head. “Nobody would expect an operation like this in this dump—did you?”
“You’re not trading gold?”
“No. I melt it down and mix it with Tremanium. The combination makes an excellent conductor.”
Jetta looked around at the half-finished robotics lying in bins and on tables under special lighting fixtures. Some resembled human torsos, others arthropods with multiple limbs and shiny metal carapaces. Ghostly images of flesh stretched across mechanical skeletons surfaced in the back of her mind, draining the blood from her face.
“Who and what are you?” Jetta said, ripping off her helmet.
“I’m an advanced robotics and nanotechnics engineer,” the old man said, backing up against the wall as she approached him. “My name is Edgar Wallace. I come from a long line of specialized engineers.”
“What are these things?” Jetta said, shaking one of the creations until a limb fell off and clattered to the floor.
“They’re artificial life forms—please, be careful,” he said, gingerly plucking the creature from Jetta’s hand.
“A.I.? You know that’s illegal without a permit. Are you in league with the Motti?”
“Goodness, no,” he said.
Jetta perforated his mind, and he grimaced. He was older, human, and she knew her talents would overwhelm him.
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