by Ramona Finn
So, he didn’t hesitate to step into the suit.
His integrated tech on his arm and at his temples assured him that the oxygen levels in the suit were good enough to last a few hours. And that was all he really needed.
He needed, more than anything, to see it with his own eyes. The complete and utter destruction of what had been his home colony. Dahn’s brain wasn’t the kind that noticed things like natural beauty, which he intellectually understood Enceladus had a lot of. Rather, he noticed things like efficiency and order, which Enceladus had also had a lot of. It had been a smoothly running and peaceful colony. The citizens had been kind and had gotten along with each other well for the most part. It hadn’t been a titan of industry the way Io was, with its chemical and mineral exports. But Enceladus, rather, had been a molder of men. The solar system’s finest minds had come from Enceladus. Engineers and scientists, most of whom had been drafted by the Authority, came in droves from Enceladus. Including his grandparents. Who had raised him. They’d both been engineers. Peaceful people. And kind.
But what did any of it matter? He asked himself the question yet again as he left the Authority skip and crunched his way over the silvery dirt toward the city. He could see the first bodies lying on the edge of the city. They must have been technicians, securing the many automated atmospheric systems that were implanted at the border of Hydrogoa.
Dahn walked further, moving on a straight line toward the city center. Horror unfolded inside his chest at an exponential rate with every step. It choked him. There were so many fallen. So many dead.
Everywhere he looked was silent and still. People weren’t supposed to be this still. Only in photographs. Never in reality. Yet, here they were, people completely still on the streets, baskets of goods spilled next to them. And there, a mother with her two children in small, rumpled piles next to her, their hands still clasped together in hers. People with their heads lolled back, slumped in the seats of a street car. There were people spread-eagle and people piled on top of one another, uncountable without their being moved and counted out.
So many bodies. So many souls. Not a single heartbeat among them.
Dahn’s own progress was the only movement as he made his way through the city. He knew the second the atmospheric barrier had stopped working, the stray animals in the city would have perished as well. Just as he knew that the lack of air on Enceladus would keep the bodies from decomposing for a very long time, perhaps forever. They would be perfectly preserved in this horrible tableau of undeserved death.
So many innocents.
Dahn walked the city for an hour before he forced himself to turn back. He never fully admitted to himself what he was doing. That he’d been searching for one face in particular amongst the thousands of the dead. He’d wanted just one more glimpse of the woman who he’d been born to.
The mother who’d left him.
How long had he searched for her through the Database? He’d never known if she was still on Enceladus or if she’d absconded to some other colony when she’d disappeared from his life.
Was she amongst the dead here? Had she died somewhere else?
Or, could it be that she was alive on Europa? Or Earth’s moon? Or – God – Charon? Was she a Ferryman now? It would certainly fit the pattern. The Ferrymen had killed his father. They’d seduced Glade to their side. It would make all the terrible sense in the world if they’d also, somehow, taken his mother from him.
Dahn allowed the sheer volume of his horror to numb him. There simply wasn’t enough room inside of him for a feeling this large. It was like being flattened under a tectonic plate. But flat was good. He welcomed flat. Flat was a feeling he could trust. It wasn’t going to rear up and take him by surprise. Flat wouldn’t destroy him.
By the time Dahn re-boarded the Authority skip, his heartbeat was steady. He felt nothing. And the situation was clear. He didn’t have Glade. Haven was becoming something that Dahn would never again trust. And his entire colony was scraped clean, gone.
Dahn had nothing, and no one, but himself.
In a way, it relieved him. Because he was the only one who knew what he was truly capable of.
Chapter One
I skittered deftly across the floor, avoiding my attacker’s flying kick. A moment later, I just managed to grab him by one bare foot and send him crashing to the ground.
I ignored the cheers and jeers of the tattooed, sneering crowd, all jostling one another to get a glimpse of the fighting ring.
The room was dark and dingy. It smelled of sweat, frustration, and something darker, something as sharp and metallic as panic. There was old blood smeared on the metal floor where I knelt.
My attacker, on his back and not liking the position one bit, reached for the knife at his hip. I was there already, though, ripping his fingers back toward his arm and making him scream in pain.
The crowd got louder, rowdier, and they seemed to inch in even closer.
Sweat coursed down my spine and my muscles vibrated with the kind of bright fatigue that comes from short bursts of extreme exertion. I decided that, yup, it was time to end it. No matter how much the crowd loved it.
I lunged forward, quick as an arrow from a bow, my sharp hand shooting toward his soft, vulnerable throat. But he’d been learning. He caught me at my wrist and rolled away, taking me with him. I growled as I found myself pinned under 200 pounds of grinning man.
It was the smile that did it.
In a furious tornado of moves during which the seconds passed like minutes and I could see every dust mote in the air, every erratic drumbeat in the pulse point of my attacker, the breaths of the crowd like the twin shoots from the snout of a bull, I systematically ended the fight.
I swept his legs, anchored his hip to the ground with one knee, slammed my other knee straight into his throat, and used his own knife for the kill-strike to his temple.
My attacker grinned up at me and showed his palms in the universal signal for I give up.
I rolled off of him quickly.
How come, when we were fighting, his smile boiled my blood like an open flame, but the second we were done, it filled my stomach with helium? It was annoying. His smile was just teeth and lips and a little bit of stubble. Why did it affect me so much?
“Almost had ya that time,” Kupier said as he dragged himself up to standing, dusting off his knees and groaning as he inspected a hand-shaped bruise on his bicep.
“Right, Kup!” Oort, Kupier’s younger brother, called from the crowd. “If by ‘almost’ you mean that it took her sixty seconds to kill you instead of fifty.” I ignored them and inspected the missing two-inch chunk of hair that Kupier had managed to slice from my dark braid right at the beginning of our match. I tossed the braid back over my shoulder with a shake of my head. I really couldn’t care less about the way I looked. Served me right for wearing a braid to a sparring match.
“He’s actually not wrong,” I called to the group of thirty or so observers. As usual, they quieted the second I started talking. Over the month that I’d spent with the rebel group called the Ferrymen, they’d grown more used to me, but they still tended to treat me as though I could murder them with a simple nod. Which, as a government designed weapon of genocide, I technically could have managed – if my surgically implanted technology had been operational. It wasn’t. The Ferrymen had seen to that for everyone’s comfort and safety. Including my own.
Since I’d officially defected from the side of the Authority to the side of the Ferrymen, my integrated tech had been turned off, making me uncontrollable and untraceable by the government. But my tech wasn’t the only thing that made me deadly. I’d been trained by the government for the last five years to be a killing machine in almost every way. And, I’d spent the last four weeks passing that knowledge along in every way I could. Which included hours of combat training every day. It had been Kupier’s idea for me and him to spar at the end of each session.
“It’ll be instructional!” he’d
insisted.
But I knew the real reason he wanted us to do it. Because watching their captain fight a Datapoint at the end of every day was an incredible morale booster for the Ferrymen. Even though I handed him his ass every single time. The group cheered for him when he landed a good hit and they laughed hysterically when I trounced him.
And that was just the kind of leader that Kupier was. Always looking for a way to make his people feel good.
I looked out at the group of motley Ferrymen. With their shaved heads, tattoos, and liberally distributed piercings, they weren’t exactly a bunch of teddy bears. But I couldn’t help but feel an affinity for them. These were the people who fought for freedom in the solar system. The group of people who stood up to the Authority. The group of people who believed in democracy. Who fought with everything they had against the Culling.
Even thinking the word ‘Culling’ had my resolve hardening all the more, as always. I’d been trained to cull. To cut off the brainwaves of citizens who were violent and murderous, thus making the colonized moons of the solar system much safer. Only, I’d found out, little by little, how flawed a system it really was.
This right here, this group of young people looking at me right now, this was my best chance for bringing down the Culling program for good. I looked each of them in the eye as I spun in a slow circle, making sure I had everyone’s attention.
“Can anyone tell me at which point Kupier actually had the upper hand this time?”
“Was it when you drop-kicked him and he hit the ground like a rag doll?” Aine, Kupier’s right-hand woman, asked quasi-innocently. I had the feeling that a long, very unrequited crush on Kupier caused Aine to rather like it when I wiped the floor with him.
The group chuckled at that, as did Kupier. I shook my head, looking around for other answers.
“Right at the beginning? When he got that first hit in?” This was from a Ferryman in the back, Nis. I didn’t know him well, but apparently, he was a killer blacksmith.
“No,” I responded. “I knew that hit was coming and was able to use his momentum against him for the kick to the back of the knee that sent him to the ground. Anyone else?”
“When he chopped your hair?” asked Royta, a younger Ferryman. I was pretty sure she was still training to be a pilot.
“No. That move was inconsequential and a waste of his energy. It did nothing but annoy me.”
“Saved you a trip to the barber,” Kupier grumbled from over my shoulder. I felt him lift the heavy black braid from my back and inspect the end. And, in turn, I watched the eyes of all of the Ferrymen turn speculative and gossipy. The way they always did when Kupier touched me.
I batted Kupier’s hand away and ignored the Ferrymen, just as I ignored Kupier’s chuckle. “No one else?”
A hand in the middle of the group raised and I shifted to see who it was. Bubbles gently zipped through my bloodstream when I saw the face that went with the hand. It was my friend, Cast Europa. The only other Datapoint currently on the Ferryman’s ship. He’d escaped the Station alongside me and a Station mechanic named Wells. But this was the first time that I’d ever seen Cast out and about, mixing with the Ferrymen. Wells – who wasn’t a Datapoint, and thus didn’t have any surgically implanted tech – had started mixing with the Ferrymen almost immediately. Just as immediately, he’d been accepted into the group.
Despite the fact that Cast was friendly, curious, and open to new people, the Ferrymen were naturally suspicious of anyone with a crystal-like computer in their arm and forehead, like what Cast and I had. Though, my tech had higher capabilities and was in my cheek, not my forehead. Either way, the Ferrymen had given Cast a wide berth and he’d done the same for them.
Not to mention the fact that Cast had still been recovering when we’d escaped to the Ray. The last time he’d run a Culling simulation back at the Station, it had almost fried his brain. He’d barely been able to speak for weeks. Now, he was pretty well recovered, even if his speech was still slower than normal. His muscles had slimmed considerably from the lack of use. He’d spent most of the last month in the quarters that he shared with Wells. I hoped very much that this raised hand now was a sign that he might be starting to emerge.
“Cast,” I nodded at him.
The Ferrymen murmured and a few of them did double-takes. Here he was, the other Datapoint, finally outside of his room. They might have started getting used to seeing me around the Ray, but it appeared that having two Datapoints in one room was a little much for some of them. There was shifting and muttering, and after just a second or two, there was a wide berth around Cast.
I was irritated. I didn’t expect everyone to hold hands and sing songs and knit socks for one another. But they’d put me and Cast through the dampener for God’s sakes. Meaning that they’d immediately turned off our tech so that it was utterly useless. What did they have to be scared of now?
“Well, you did just make me eat dirt on the floor of the sparring room,” Kupier commented from over my shoulder. Either I’d spoken out loud or he was a mind reader. I wouldn’t have been surprised to know of either being true. Datapoints, like me and Cast, were known for their strange social habits. They were unemotional and removed and logical over everything else. Kupier was pretty much the opposite of that. His presence buzzed with compassion and humor and humanity. Sometimes I felt like he was a psychic or something. Especially where I was concerned.
I felt his hand clamp over my shoulder as he came to stand at my side. It was a natural motion for him, but I was sure it was also a pointed show of friendship between Datapoints and Ferrymen. He knew that he had to lead by example. His people would never accept us if he didn’t. “Long time no see!” Kupier called to Cast, a big grin on his face. “Are you done with your vacation?”
Cast swiped his shaggy blond hair from his eyes and glanced back and forth between Kupier and I. He was trying to figure out if Kupier was joking or not. I rolled my eyes and shrugged. Kind of like, either way, just ignore him.
Cast shrugged back. “If that was a vacation, I want my money back.”
There were a few surprised chuckles from the group, and suddenly Wells appeared at Cast’s side. In point of fact, I’d noticed that the red-headed kid was almost always at Cast’s side – protective. “I don’t think it counts as a vacation if the Authority almost tortures you to death first.”
Wells’ voice was clear and bitter all at once. And whether or not he’d intended it, his words had quite the effect. Ferrymen peered around to see Cast better, whispering to one another. They might not know what to make of a Datapoint, but they sure knew what it felt like to hate the Authority.
The hardened look on Cast’s typically sweet face left no question as to how he felt about the Authority, either.
I cleared my throat. “Anyways, Cast, you had a comment about the sparring match?”
“Yeah,” he responded, and then he cleared his throat and spoke louder. “I know when Kupier actually had the upper hand on you.”
“Go ahead.”
“Right when you killed him.”
I grinned. He was right. I nodded at Cast to explain.
“Well, you’d pinned his weight down, but not his appendages. He had two free hands and you’d already shifted your weight forward on one hand and had the knife in the other. Plus, when you leaned down, your entire torso was unprotected. You’d have had to absorb a blow or shift everything to block it. On top of that, you left the weapons at your hip completely unprotected. He could have had those in less than a second and then you’d both have had knives pointing at one another’s temples.”
“You’re saying that the only time I had the upper hand was when she was choking me out with one knee and had a knife pointed at my temple?” Kupier asked dryly. He chuckled when Cast merely shrugged, and then he turned to me. “What weapons at your hip?”
I lifted my T-shirt and showed him the small dagger I kept strapped there next to a set of brass knuckles and an almost dainty, serrate
d chain.
“Jesus!” Nis called out. “What do they teach you Datapoints?”
“They teach us that, in order to survive, you have to kill,” Cast replied almost immediately. When I looked up at him, he suddenly looked so much older than his fifteen years. His face was lined and sad, one of his eyes still drooping in recovery.
He’d hit the nail on the head, though, as far as I was concerned. “Obviously, that’s an extremely limited view they give us,” I told the group as follow-up, and every head swiveled back to me. “But it’s also one that we should learn from while we train together. Because if you’re going to be fighting Datapoints, fighting the Authority, then you have to keep this philosophy in mind. We’ve been trained to kill as a means of survival. We don’t see our opponents as more than an impediment to our survival. That means that Datapoints don’t hesitate. And that, right there, that is your major weakness as Ferrymen. Kupier let me choke him out. He didn’t stab me with my own dagger. He didn’t even punch me in the side or black my eye. And I won the sparring match.” I turned and spoke to Kupier as much as I was speaking to the group as a whole. “You can see the humanity in a Datapoint. But a Datapoint will not see the humanity in you.”
Four hours later, well after dinner, I sat on the far end of the cockpit. It wasn’t even an eighth of the size of the control room in the Station, but it was still big enough that I couldn’t distinguish the words between Wells and Royta, a Ferryman, as she gave him a lesson on how to fly the Ray. Wells was interested in every aspect of the Ray, from the boiler room on the sub-level to the way the latrines worked up on the third floor. It hadn’t taken me long to realize that even though the Station had been a hellish place to work, his job there as a mechanic had been one he’d loved. He was deeply interested in the way machines worked, and because of that, the Ray was pretty much heaven for him. It was a genius amalgamation of old technology and new. The whole thing was a patchwork of spliced computers and engines and shields. It looked like crap, but it flew like a dream.