She unslung the Fryger and held it across her body. “My name is Emery and this mech is called JI. We’ve come here peacefully but you seem to have other ideas.” She was gripping the metal too hard, making it shake, but she couldn’t calm herself.
These men were not her friends. That was clear. Not with those voracious grins.
The Scav leader drawled his words slowly, as if for a child to understand. “We hear you are a human and also that humans are expensive things. Though trading with Mekkers is not our desire, the Grounders don’t mind this. The money we like.” He shrugged. “Mayor Spine is willing to trade. We won’t hurt you, not if you lay down your weapon. Keep that mech under control. Speak no words to it. Otherwise we will shoot you. You cannot w –”
The mercenary bastards. And...that was when she shot him.
Killing was not her desire, but she was not going to give up her freedom.
Unfortunately her nervous fingers had brushed one of the extra buttons. The button did extra things.
Like it blew a hole the size of the space shuttle in the Scav leader and a few of his men behind him. Bits of them rained against the white stone fence. The living ones scattered, hiding behind the fence and the rubble from the fence behind the dead Scavs, where her shot had carried onward and razed a path of destruction.
“Fuck,” she whispered then JI grabbed her and towed her into the building at speed. Shots went spang as they bounced off his armor.
After that, things went, she figured, somewhat pear shaped, but on the plus side she learned what all the other buttons did. JI advised her not to use the red button again, as the weapon would run out of power too quickly. However, a yellow button created a handy translucent shield, in an arc to either side of the Fryger. The gun still fired exceptionally accurate shots up to that hundred yards or so, and they went through stone as if it were yogurt. Not cheese – cheese was harder to penetrate.
Half an hour later, the building was in rubble around them. The spire had crashed to the ground to her left. The Scavs had suffered casualties, but from her shots, not from JI. There was a whole warband out there, not just ten or so.
JI had developed a pacifism problem. He couldn’t kill, no matter how he tried.
There was a lull in the fighting.
“I am sorry, Emery. If I could remember how I felt when I killed before, I might do it now.”
Considering the state his brain had been in when they’d first met, it wasn’t really a great surprise that something had gone wrong.
He was shielding her rear with his body, but couldn’t shield her completely. Even if he could create a ball of metal by wrapping himself around her, she’d have to emerge eventually.
“I’m screwed, aren’t I?”
She turned onto her back and stared at what was left of the pockmarked ceiling. A few stray rounds came in through the wall holes and spun by overhead, leaving trails of blue and curling wisps that sifted down through the dusty air. Once upon a time, she’d thought the bullets here were just bullets. Wrong.
The Scavs were doing something. She could smell their designs. Sneaking up in some new way perhaps, and she was so hungry, it was beginning to make her feel weak.
Killing their leader had been the worst thing she could’ve done, from what they’d yelled at her. Damn males and their retarded views of vengeance.
“Tell me if you see anyone coming, JI.”
“I will.”
“What am I going to do?”
“I do not know, Emery. I see only surrender. Or me carrying you through the town.”
“I’d still get shot.”
“Yes. Or we keep defending this area.”
“And then I get shot. You can walk out anytime, you know?”
“They might take you prisoner still? Sell you to the Mekkers? And no, I will stay with you, Emery.”
“Well.” She cleared the ugly blockage in her throat with a swallow. “If I die, you run like hell. Promise.”
The sound she heard in her mind was a sigh, though JI stayed silent.
“I messed up,” she murmured. Hated messing up.
“No, you did not. They did. I doubt all the people here are the same. We were just unlucky.”
“Unlucky they’re greedy shits. Motherfucking money. I’m expensive? The worst compliment I ever heard.”
“I should have come in with the main mech.”
Now JI-mech was guilt-tripping. The Mekkers would laugh.
“No. You would’ve crushed the houses and they’d still have hated us.”
She frowned, flexing and tightening her fingers on the gun. There was no answer, though she’d found out killing was easy when she hated and feared enough.
The star in the garden lay among rubble, and perhaps that was where it belonged. Their religion seemed perfectly happy with slavery.
Going back home to Earth was her only other option and as likely as stepping through the nearest door and finding Narnia.
“The weapon must be very low on power by now, Emery.”
Oh. She hadn’t thought of that.
Though she didn’t like the idea at all, she wondered if suicide was a sin on this world.
“Wait. I’ve thought of something else. You have to leave me. I just need to hold out here long enough for you to bring your main body here.”
“Even if I can contact my baby mech when I reach the perimeter of this town, the probability of this succeeding is –”
“Don’t tell me.” It was a tiny probability, of course.
She might be dead by the time he returned, one way or the other. “Go.”
She remembered the day she’d stood on the plain and the crushed grass beneath her nose, the lemon scent. How had everything turned out so poorly?
Poorly? She snorted at her ridiculous word choice.
Chapter 35
Mako sent the Ramm burning across the sky. This was going to be the most ridiculously dangerous maneuver.
From a perch on a low hill outside town, he’d watched them get into this chaotic situation. Scavs, Grounders, seemed everyone was trying to kill her and this useless aux-mech that did nothing but let projectiles bounce off it.
He’d jury-rigged the DRAC missile, calculated spin, velocity, and everything he needed to know so he could do this without squashing anything. And that was the whole problem, landing this giant multi-tonned vehicle on top of a soft, squishy woman without killing her. He wasn’t allowed to squash Grounders either. This town was off-limits and a happy trading partner to the Swathe.
A pity they’d flattened some of the best bits of the town already.
Scavs? He’d make jam from them if he could.
Those same delightful Scavs from which he wanted to make jam were mounting a small rocket launcher, aiming it as he travelled. Close, this was going to be so close.
The aux-mech had left her for some reason, looked to be making a line for where the main JI-mech was parked. If she could’ve rendezvoused with that, she’d have easily escaped.
Smart woman, but too late. Way too late.
Houses, roads screamed by beneath him. When he reached the battlefield, the Ramm went into a lunatic spiral that felt as if it’d wrench teeth from sockets, then lurched into the reverse spiral, at the precisely correct second. He zipped open the door and flipped out into mid-air, unwinding the high tensile rope through his chainmail gloved hands, coming down right on top of her...
With a slam that knocked the breath out of him.
And her.
The scream of the engines covered any noise she might have made but her arms flailed outward, and she dropped the rifle.
The rope slithered off across ground and air, dragged by the Ramm, and the very tail end of it whacked across his throat. Coughing like his life depended on it, which it did, he inhaled things best left on the outside of his lungs – this place smelled of dust, blood, and plants.
The Ramm settled to the earth with a grand crunch and sizzle where a garden had once been, simulta
neously providing a fair range of cover from the warband that surrounded this place.
Recovering from his paroxysm of coughing, he moved to grab her neck, and she slithered out from under him, rolling several times then clawing to her feet.
A glimpse of her must’ve stirred some Scavs as bullets whizzed through the ragged gaps in this back wall.
“Get the fuck away from me!”
He waved his hand at the rifle, wiggled his own Kolk 55 pistol with its barrel pointed upward. “You’ve lost your weapon, Emery. Come over here before they shoot you. If you get yourself shot after all this chasing of you and that JI-mech...”
It wasn’t something he liked contemplating.
“What? You lose a bounty? I’m free, Mako!” She spat as if his name was disgusting to speak. “I’m staying free.” The dust had powdered her face and arms. Sweat trailed through it, leaving her eyes as her starkest feature. Terrified eyes.
“You think you’re free?” He let the Kolk dangle by his leg. “You’re not. No one is. I don’t want to see you shot, mangled, bleeding. That’s all.”
“Don’t believe you.” She looked around while talking, clearly searching for a way out.
“I’ve seen a lot of death. I want you alive and well.” He leaped the gap and she backed away another few yards, into a corner. “Do I want to keep you as mine also? Yes. You’re coming with me. The Scavs are creeping through this building already.”
Not quite. On the way in, they were gathering but not quite inside.
Something bigger than a bullet whammed a new hole in the wall beside her and he took the chance and leaped again, dragging her down into the rubble, with his bodyweight and hands. She managed an elbow in his guts before he flipped her over onto her face.
Winded twice in a few minutes. Lucky, he didn’t throw up.
Recovering, wheezing, propped up on his forearm, he dragged up his Kolk and jammed the muzzle into Emery’s neck below the black collar.
“Be still! Don’t move!”
She panted through her teeth, and if ever a man could feel rage teeming in a woman, it was now.
Summoning every bit of nerve and strength he had, he stood, yanking her with him and hiding behind the remains of the corner pillar.
“You bastard,” Emery muttered, cricking her neck as if to get away from his gun.
“Still doesn’t mean wriggling.”
“I was away. Free,” she whispered to the wall she faced. “Why’re you doing this?”
“You call this free? More like dead.”
Quiet now, apart from the ticking of the Ramm’s cooling engines.
He saw how she’d survived.
The rifle she’d lain behind...made the air shimmer before it.
“It has a shield? Never seen a weapon do that.” Another example of how civilization was winding down, not up.
“Lucky you,” Emery grated out. “Fuck. I bet you fractured my ribs.”
“Nope, you’d be screaming more.”
She reached up as if to grab his gun hand, and he ground the muzzle deeper into her neck, harder. “Don’t.”
“I’m not going back with you. I’d rather die!”
He glanced up and around. “The Governance wants you dead or lamed anyway. Now shut up or you’ll compromise this.”
“If you want me dead, why –”
“Never said that. They do. The Governance. I want you alive and well. Think! They, out there, want to kill you. The Governance wants to. I’m the only one who doesn’t. I’m trying to help you. Now shut up if you want out of here. You’re going to have to trust me.”
“Trust?” Her body shook with silent laughter. “Me, trust you?”
He looked down at her. Frowned. “Yes. I know, but you have to...Emery.”
Nothing was said to the count of three, then: “You’ve been using my real name, mister.”
“Yes, I have. Now be quiet.” He raised his voice. “Don’t shoot that mothering rocket you have out there unless you want me to shoot my bigger one and blow this whole town to pieces!”
“A rocket?” Emery said softly.
“What?” someone shouted from beyond the shattered stone fence.
“You heard me! I have a DRAC missile in that Ramm ship and my ship is programmed to fire if I am killed or if I don’t return within five minutes, or if anyone else tries to board it! Now you can fire your rocket that I saw you setting up into that open door on my vehicle and maybe you’ll do some good but more likely you’ll set off the DRAC.”
Silence, which he took for encouragement.
“I’m taking this escaped slave into my ship and I’m leaving.”
“No, you’re not! Stand up and talk. She killed our leader and cannot be allowed to leave. I declare a parley!”
“They want to talk? What’d you do to them, girl? Scavs talking to a Mekker?” Before she could answer he jammed her into the pillar with his body. Getting to feel her lush ass against him was some compensation for the troubles. “I need your hands at your back. They’re not going to like seeing you free and frankly neither am I.”
She didn’t move, hid her hands at her front. “You said to trust you, asshole. Besides, I vowed to die rather than be a slave again. To them or any Mekker.”
“I do enjoy the idea of you as my slave. That’s a truth, and I can’t easily convince you that I have your best interests close to my heart. You decide. Live or die. I’m your one hope, far as I can see, Emery. Live...or die. You get nowhere in life by dying.”
He dared to rearrange her hair across her neck, watching the lighter hairs on her nape, the movement of her skin as she breathed.
“Girl, I can offer you so much more than this.”
The heartbeats counted slowly today.
“What’re you doing?” screamed the Scav.
“Wait!” He continued only for her. “I want to get us both out of here alive. I can talk to the Scavs. They want your blood. I need to convince them I’m going to do worse than kill you.” He inhaled, exhaled slower. “Trust me.”
“And your gun’s in my neck. How can I...”
He ignored that; let her figure her own way through the facts. So many holes she might find in his logic, but he was her one and only choice.
“I don’t want to do this. Fuck you and everyone out there.” But she slowly put her hands behind her.
Without pausing for any niceties, he tied her hands together then dragged her toward the sunlight. “Parley! Coming out.”
A tall Scav emerged from behind the rubble, sauntering forward until about halfway to their position, with a long rifle laid back across his shoulder. The telescopic sights on the rifle warned he had ambitions as a sniper. With Emery’s upper arm in his grip, Mako advanced to meet the man, his pistol by his side.
That Emery wasn’t dragging her feet or shaking and was walking as if this was pleasant stroll, made him respect her more.
“Would’ve got her by now if not for that shield.” His mouth held a thin smile.
“She shot your friend?”
“Leader. And others.”
“She’s a good warrior then.”
The Scav grinned. “You seek to get me to admire her prowess? That weapon had a lot of firepower. A beest could kill with it. She still murdered our leader. Vengeance must follow.”
“Then you will have it. The Mekker Governance ordered me to bring her back for justice, for punishment, probably the spear.”
“You fuck with me.”
Mako blinked. Too much human was upsetting his languages. He’d heard the Scav insult as the human one. “No, I don’t fuck with you. Truth.”
The Scav leaned in and his greasy brown hair swung before his eyes. “I know what humans are. Shiny hair, nails. She is one. They have lots of that Factor H you Mekkers crave. You’re going to treat her like a blood whore and feed her fancy food, keep her well, happy.”
“This one?” He holstered the Kolk, then turned Emery around and slapped her across the face. It echoed in the
ruined garden and spun her to her knees.
Her gasp and stare of venom weren’t faked. Good.
“Truth. They will want her lamed and tied onto the spear. You know our spear?” The Scav nodded. “I signed a document declaring this was so – that I would bring her back for their justice.” He said the next part loudly so other Scavs would hear. “I signed in blood! That she will suffer terribly! You know what will happen if I disavow that. Bad karma.”
The Scav sniffed, his beaked nose twisting as he seemed to consider, and he let the long gun hang down at his side.
More easily swung up and fired, Mako noted.
“I see no document here.” The Scav clicked his tongue, his eyes flicking like clockwork.
The man was on some drug, and the Scavs had many. Some were made from the fermented dung of animals, or so it was rumored – a dangerous and unpredictable man.
“In my ship, I have that doc.” He jabbed his thumb at the Ramm. “I can get it but it’s just as easy to show you how little she is valued. You think I’m going to pander to her whims? Going to feed her cake and roast meat. Wine and dine her?”
The quicker this was decided the better. Take too long and this Scav might shoot him and damn the whole town to destruction, theoretically. He wouldn’t seriously damage her to prove this, but prayed what he planned would do.
“You give me her and I will give you...” Despite her squeals, he dragged Emery to her feet by the hair and over to the one garden seat that was intact. Then he tore the front of her shirt, pulled down the bandeau top beneath, and twirled her to face the Scav. If this alienated her from him, he’d just make sure he fixed it, later. Alive not dead was the aim.
“What?” The Scav’s eyes were on Emery’s bared breasts.
“You get that fancy gun she used on you.”
“Nice.” That might’ve referred to her tits or the gun. “Very nice.”
He figured the ancient weapon would have some power cell they’d have trouble charging. It was worth the risk. He forced Emery to her knees and bent her over the bench, worked the back of her pants downward until her ass was fully exposed. He’d wondered about getting hard with everything happening around them. Turned out, it wasn’t a problem at all.
Acquired Possession (The Machinery of Desire Book 1) Page 17