Ariam taps her mobile’s keypad, forwarding the lab report to the Ryr. She’s headed to the observation room door and into the surgical theater when the Ryr is done reading.
“You understand that?” she asks.
The Ryr stares at Ariam as she enters, in her scrubs and messenger bag, with nothing between them now but Kybek and the wires holding the Ryr to the vitals monitors. The robotic arms of the autosurgeon hang overhead. The Ryr doesn’t reply.
“It means you’ll die without blood. Blood I can give you. Blood that’s infected with our plague.”
The Ryr types: Humans are sickly. I am a king.
“Without human blood, you’ll die before your ships even get here.”
The Ryr regards her. The room has the chemical smell of disinfectant.
“With human blood, you might die years from now, unless—”
The Ryr types: I do not fear death.
“So I’ve read. But do you look forward to it? We can give you years of life back.”
And a terrible death.
“A slow death, yes,” she says. She walks toward the Ryr. “Unless your people find a cure.”
The Ryr turns his head but not his eyes. Kybek looks from the Ryr to Ariam and back. There is no cure, texts the king.
“Not yet. But your people are great and wise, are they not? Perhaps they can find a cure when their king’s life is at stake. Perhaps you can show them that you’re not afraid of human sickness.”
I’ll be contagious. You have infected me already.
“You’ll be contagious to a point. It’s not the same among your species as it is for mine. No sexual contact. No sharing of blood. You can do that.”
You are trying to trick me.
“Are you willing to bet your life on that?”
The Ryr licks his teeth. The Ryr looks at Kybek. The Ryr types out: If I die, my people will take revenge on the human fugitive. That is all you are trying to avoid.
Kybek says, “We are willing to—”
“We are trying to avoid your death, Ryr,” says Ariam. “Above all. If you live, you can work with the quiruth authority to get satisfaction in this case. If you die, you die here, alone, and the human pilot outlives you.”
The Ryr snarls to himself. I want that fugitive and his ship returned to me.
Ariam looks the Ryr over, trying to decide whether to make her play now or wait. She thinks of Lowry, withering away in a ryric prison for the last few years of his life. She thinks of him disintegrating into dementia and dying amid uncaring ryric prison guards. She thinks of him in that little ship, alone in space, his face lit only by his scanner console. “You mean you want the data he stole to be returned.”
The Ryr snaps his mouth shut. What data?
“Whatever signals he intercepted out there in your space. Whatever his ship has on its memory drives.” She folds her arms and leans back on her heels. “Am I wrong?”
And the pilot. I want the pilot.
Ariam looks at Kybek, then back to the Ryr. “That’s not—”
The Ryr makes a face that resembles a smile, but Ariam doubts that’s what it is.
“The pilot is a separate issue,” says Ariam. “You can take that up with station control and local law enforcement. If you live.”
Kybek looks at her with wide, worried eyes.
“Do you want to live?”
The king, still staring at Ariam, slowly types out: Yes.
Kybek coughs. “You’ll accept human blood? Infected blood?”
Give me the blood.
Ariam’s mobile beeps for her. “Thank you, Ryr,” she says, turning to leave. When she’s back outside in observation, she looks to her mobile. It’s Gwoma. “Gwoma, please tell me I’m not a liar.”
Gwoma’s little pixelated face tilts to one side. “You’re not. Lowry’s memory drive was loaded with signals intercepts from ryric space.”
Ariam exhales.
Kybek comes out of the surgical theater. “I didn’t think—”
Ariam holds up a finger to Kybek and says into her mobile, “I got the Ryr to agree to human blood but he’ll want us to return that data. Will station control agree to that?”
Across the room, through a glass wall, Ariam sees Gomig signing in to the surgical operations room.
“I’m still sorting that out,” says Gwoma. He looks off-camera. “I have to go.”
“Call me when you’ve talked to the precinct officers and to control.” She thumbs her mobile off and pockets it. She looks at Kybek.
“You did it,” says Kybek. “Now you just have to get the pilot to agree to it.”
“That’ll be no problem,” Ariam says. “The Ryr had easy math to do—a few years is more than zero—and Lowry’s got nothing to lose. It’ll be no problem.”
*
“No way,” says Lowry.
Ariam and Lowry sit on opposite edges of the bed in his terrarium. Kybek watches them from outside.
“Lowry,” she says. “There’s no danger to you—”
“I’m not worried about that. I just don’t see why I should save the life of something that wants me dead.”
“Saving the Ryr’s life would be a show of good faith to the quiruth, who might be in a position to protect you.”
“They’ll let me go?”
Ariam looks him in the eye, considers it. “No. That’ll just make the Ryr’s people furious and spark more trouble.”
“Then screw that—”
“But the quiruth can arrest you for reckless endangerment, and have you serve out your sentence among the quiruth instead of sending you back to face ryric punishment.”
“That’s not right. I haven’t done—”
“Lowry.”
He gets to his feet, zips his flight suit shut. “No! Screw that! I was trying to avoid a wrongful—”
“Lowry, knock it off.” Ariam looks away, looks back to him. “Do you think we’re stupid?”
“What do you—?”
“Your ship’s memory drive is full of ryric signal intercepts. You weren’t salvaging human tech or artifacts, you were spying on the Ryr’s people so you could sell their data.”
“Where did you—”
She tosses him the bag of tortilla chips. “My friend is a salvage captain and his people are always on the lookout for transponder signals from human ships near the borders around here, so they can snag them before the ryric get to them. No human ship came by. The closest one he’s found in months was one on a vector out of our solar system, and it was way off. That’s where he found those,” she points to the bag of chips.
“The transponder on the ship was dead. I just—”
“Dead like your RFID tag?”
Lowry smiles out a mixture of shame and acceptance. “Shit.”
“Even the Ryr’s personal transmitter was read by the systems in here. But you’re a blank space on my monocle. You disabled your transmitter so that you wouldn’t be giving off signals the ryrics could trace. Am I right?”
“Maybe it’s just not working right,” Lowry says, but even he doesn’t believe it.
“Lowry, you’re a thief, just like the Ryr says. Now you can live out the rest of your life on a quiruth penal colony or deep in a ryric prison barge. You can let a creature die, that you have the power to save, and do yourself a favor at the same time. Or you get petty revenge, I guess, and suffer for it.”
Lowry comes back and sits down. He opens the bag of chips. “My dad used to say that we’re approaching the end of a human era. Living inside the ellipsis at the end of the human sentence. Maybe there’s more coming we just can’t see, or maybe we’re closing in on the end for real.”
Ariam nods. “Yeah.”
“So now I have to live out the rest of my life in captivity?”
Ariam looks away at nothing. “There’s just thousands of us left. What we do now defines how our species will be remembered. We have just a few years, in the grand scheme, to save ourselves or make our legacy as a species—as
a people. You’re an ambassador for a vanishing culture. But you chose to spend the years you were given, these few years, stealing. And you caused a terrible accident.” She looks back at him. “You’re not helping to save your species. You’re not making us any better loved in the galaxy. I think you’re getting off lucky.”
Lowry fishes a chip out of the bag then offers the open bag to Ariam. She takes one.
“Yeah,” he says.
“So now you can do something else. Something that might tell the Ryr and his people what humans can be like. Right?”
“Yeah.” He licks salt off the chip. “Yeah.”
“So you’ll do it?”
Lowry nods.
Ariam bites into a chip. It bends in her mouth, soft and stale.
*
The door to Ariam’s hospital room slides open as Gwoma enters wearing a heavy, ugly sweater and coveralls.
“Doctor Keown,” he says.
“Gwoma,” Ariam says, delighted. “Tell me you brought wine. With the amount of blood I’ve given, it won’t take much.”
“No.” He sits down next to her bed. “I have news for you, instead.”
“I heard that the Ryr is going to be all right.”
“His ships are inbound. Won’t be long now. The human pilot is going to be held by the quiruth authorities for the flight accident.”
Ariam nods.
“And station control,” Gwoma says, “has decided to suspend your invitation for another term at the hospital.”
Ariam smiles to herself. “I don’t think I was staying anyway.”
She and Gwoma sit in silence for a while. A nearby monitor shows a quiriuth nature show about microscopic life in Loyagrammer’s atmosphere. They pretend to watch it together.
“I was thinking about something you said,” Gwoma says.
“Yeah?”
“About your oath?”
“The Hippocratic?”
He nods.
“What about it?”
“‘Do no harm,’ you said.”
“Yeah,” she makes a face. “Here’s the thing. I never took the oath. I was never sworn in by any human institution. Human hospitals were in shambles when I was a kid. I prefer to think of my vow as ‘do net good.’”
“And you think that’s what you did?”
“I saved lives today and maybe helped to save a lot more.”
“You spread a fatal disease.”
“I turned the resources of a rich and powerful nation toward finding a cure.”
“A hostile nation.”
“Yeah, well. One thing at a time.”
Friends Like These
Matt Forbeck
I was just about to toss everyone the hell out of the party when the Imperial Dragon’s Guard came busting through front door of the Quill and took care of that unpleasant detail for me. One minute, everyone was hunting down my last nerve and jamming it with red-hot brands The next, the door exploded into the main room, nearly taking off Thumper’s head.
You’ve never seen a room clear out so fast.
You can hardly blame them though. The Quill isn’t one of those high-class open-air places you find higher up the mountain here in Dragon City. You know, the ones with the wrap-around balconies that give you a clear view of the blue sky and the distant sea.
No, the Quill is a real dive, the sort that accommodates all types, by which I mean the scum of the scarred earth. It’s not stuck down in Goblintown, mind you. The clientele’s halflings or humans mostly, with the occasional elf or dwarf slumming it down here with us short-timers. The kind of folks that the real powers in this world don’t much care for if they bother to think about us much at all. You know: my friends.
We’d all gathered around that night to toast the memory of Gütmann on the anniversary of his death. We hadn’t gotten that far into it before we’d started in on each other again. There was a reason we didn’t get together much after he died. None of us could stand each other any more.
Honestly, if we’d stood together against the squad of crimson-coated guards that stomped into the room, we would have been able to laugh them away. We had them outnumbered and outclassed. There’s something about seeing a bunch of jackbooted elves in uniform come storming through a door, though, that stabs the fear that you’ve done something horribly wrong right through your heart until it jabs you square in your fight-or-flight button.
Of course, the fact that every one of us was guilty of something or other countless times over didn’t help. Just being in a bar like this where they served dragonfire was enough. The question wasn’t whether or not we deserved to be locked up. It was which of our many crimes we’d be charged with in the end.
“This is a raid!” said the captain of the squad, a humorless elf by the name of Yabair. “Freeze, or we’ll fire! No one needs to get—Hey!”
No one listened to him. Not one of us. We scattered like cockroaches before an uncapped light. All except for Kai.
Righty slipped out the rear window. Never mind that it looked out over a six-story drop straight into the cesspool into which every bit of this sector of Dragon City’s sludge ran. Even without the fingers on his left hand, he’d still be able to scale that wall better than I could walk across the floor.
Danto spat out a horrible word and then disappeared. Whether he turned invisible or disappeared or just decided to blink out of existence entirely, I couldn’t tell, but I knew I couldn’t duplicate the effort.
Thumper disappeared behind the bar, and Kells and Cindra—who’d been waiting for him to serve up their drinks—vaulted over the polished wood surface to join him. They knew about the trapdoor hidden back there, just like I did, the one through which most of the tavern’s dragonfire deliveries came. Keeping low, I charged after them, hoping to follow them to safety.
That damned orc Kai, though, chose that moment to stand up and square off against the guards. He produced a double-barreled shotgun he’d been hiding under his table, hammers back and ready to fly. Without a word, he leveled the gun at the captain’s chest and let loose with both barrels.
The buckshot glinted hot and white as it ricocheted off the captain’s enchanted chestplate. The force of the impact alone knocked him back off his feet and sent him sprawling through the doorway behind him.
That’s when the bullets started flying. The rest of the guards spun their pistols toward Kai and started firing. The gunshots cracked louder than thunder inside the Quill’s rock walls. One of them pointed a wand at the orc instead. It was a military-issue model, straight and uniform, milled by a machine, with a handle encased in some creature’s scaly skin.
I didn’t want to stick around to see what it might do.
I dove over the bar, crashing through a pair of half-full steins, and smashed into wall behind the bar. It hurt a lot less than a bullet would have, I’m sure.
I landed on my back, and before I could turn over onto my knees, something else came over the bar and kicked me right in the gut.
“Sorry, Max,” Moira said as she scrambled off me and toward the trapdoor. I tried to answer her, but I was having too much trouble breathing right then to manage it.
The tow-headed halfling grabbed the iron ring on top of the trapdoor and yanked. It didn’t move. She turned and snarled like a cornered dog. “Some dragon-damned friends,” she said. “They bolted it from the inside.”
“Bastards,” I said. In my head, I made plans to beat my inevitable fine out of them when I found them.
More gunshots rang out. A bottle burst open over our heads and showered us in shards of glass and expensive dwarven rum.
“Cease fire!” someone shouted.
The barrage kept going.
“Stand down, you jackasses! I said, cease fire!”
I put a hand over Moira to protect her. “Keep your head down,” I said. “Once they run out of bullets, they’ll stop. Then they’ll scoop us up and take us downslope.”
I’d never seen Moira’s bright blue eyes so panicked.
She scrambled around behind the bar, searching for a way out. “You don’t understand,” she said, her voice rising to a keen. “I can’t get caught. Not now.”
She pulled a switchblade from her pocket and popped the stabby part free. She jammed the tip into the seam of the trapdoor and tried to pry it open.
“You’ve been picked up in a speakeasy before,” I said. “You know the score. It’s just a slap on the wrist.”
She glanced at me, and the guilt shone in her eyes. She gave the knife one last try, and the blade snapped in half.
“CEASE FIRE!”
The bullets stopped. All I heard was the stomping of boots and the low groan of someone who hadn’t managed to get out of the way of all that lead.
“Moira Erdini!” someone said. “Come on out! You are under arrest!”
I goggled at Moira. “What did you do?” I wasn’t asking about her knife.
“I’m in serious trouble, Max,” she whispered as she turned toward me. “You can’t let them take me.”
I’ve seen Moira face down a vampire. I watched her spit in every one of a hydra’s faces. I’d never seen her so scared.
“All right,” I said. “Hide.”
I put both hands over my head and waved them above the edge of the bar. “Don’t shoot!”
“Stand up!” a hoarse voice said. “Slowly!”
I did.
Yabair stood there in the center of the room, flanked by guards on four sides and circled in an expanding halo of smoke. Two carried pistols. The one who’d been responsible for most of the destruction carried a rune-encrusted submachine-gun, the barrel of which glowed as red as a blacksmith’s forge. The fourth held a wand with a cold-iron tip.
Holes pocked every wall in the room and the floor and ceiling as well. Tables had been tipped over and glasses smashed. The smell of spilled beer and liquor wafted through the place, cut by the sharp, distinctive stench of brimstone and cordite.
Kai still stood at his table, frozen as solid as a statue. He’d been reloading his shotgun when the guy with the wand had zapped him with a paralysis spell. His face had frozen in an ugly twist, the kind you see in candid photographs when you’re caught with your eyes half closed. It takes a lot to make Kai uglier than he is, but that did the trick.
Everyone else was gone, and that scared me more than anything else. If the guards had allowed the others in the bar to slip away, then they really did have only one damned thing on their minds: Moira.
The New Hero Volume 2 Page 15