by Kathryn Hoff
Lies.
My stunner-injured abdomen ached horribly. My back strained as I bent farther to keep her body from falling backward.
Something hard jabbed into my shoulder. The relic. She still carried it under her vest.
Mya began to struggle and squirm, screaming. “No! Let me go!” She ripped off her helmet and threw it into the brush.
I passed the place where the beast had fallen. It was nothing more than a dark mound, its outlines barely visible under a crawling covering of maggots and insects.
With a yell, Mya kicked her legs free and heaved herself off my shoulder. She landed on the broken pavement with a thump.
I straightened my back with relief. “The ship! Mya, run for the ship!”
Come, beloved friends.
Mya blundered off the avenue into the brush.
Damn her. She might want to stay here, but I didn’t.
Danto’s shout came through my helmet. “I will kill him, Patch! If you do not bring Mya to the ship, I will kill your brother!”
I went after her.
This time, I wasn’t so gentle. The insects swarmed around us, seeking Mya’s dripping wrists. I grabbed her arm and spun her toward me.
Maggots crawled on her face. Worms from the bushes clung to my suit, her clothes, and her skin.
I didn’t bother to hit her in the head—Gavoran skulls are too thick. Instead, I punched her in her gut and slung her torso over my shoulder, holding onto her legs in front.
The voices urged me upward. Liars.
I took one step down the slope, then another, and another. I stumbled, but desperation kept me going. With every step, Mya bounced on my shoulder. Every time she began to struggle, I came down extra hard and knocked the breath out of her.
The door to the airlock yawned open. Ten more steps to go, then five, then three. Mya struggled weakly. I stumbled into the airlock and dumped Mya like a sack of turnips.
Hundreds of maggots clung to us. Half a swarm of flying creatures followed us in before I could shut the airlock outer doors. Immediately, they landed on Mya’s skin and began to bite. Worms and insects fed on her face, in her nose and mouth and eyes and on every bit of exposed skin on her arms and her legs.
Peace and joy, the voices sang.
Ancestors, I prayed, give me strength and courage. I pray I am making the right choice.
I closed my visor and hit the sterilization control.
Confused cries came through my helmet receiver, but whatever was happening in the cargo hold was drowned out by Mya’s screams as the burning, blinding blue light bathed her unprotected skin.
CHAPTER 31
The banshee’s cry
It took a long time for the sterilization cycle to run. With my visor closed to block out the light, I blindly fought Mya’s frantic blows as I tore off her clothing. She would be terribly burned, but even through my gloves, I could feel the maggots dotting her skin. They had crept in everywhere, burrowing into her clothes as they would burrow into the shaggy hair of one of the beasts of Nakana.
Peace and joy. Come, beloved friends.
“Quiet!” I sobbed. “Stop your lies.”
Soon Mya’s screams faded, and she slumped, whimpering raggedly in the killing blue light. I raised her limbs to ensure that every surface of her body was exposed to the light. I found the relic on the airlock floor, where it had fallen from Mya’s vest, and exposed its surfaces to be sterilized.
Finally, the light faded out and the inner airlock doors opened.
Filled with fear, I pulled off my helmet.
Danto, roaring in fury, grabbed my arm and threw me to the other side of the hold. The relic slid from my arms and skittered across the deck.
“What have you done?” Danto shouted.
He leveled his pistol directly at my eyes. Somewhere to the side, Jamila screamed and Kojo yelled, “No!”
I shut my eyes. At least I’d die knowing Kojo was alive.
The voices would finally be silenced.
“Aieeeeeeahhhh!” A heart-stopping scream echoed through the hold.
Zing. Instinctively, I dropped to the deck, my arms covering my head.
Zing. The stun pistol fired again.
Confused shouts swept over me: Danto, demanding; Kojo, filled with fear; Rachel, commanding and insistent; Jamila, pleading and near hysteria; Mya, moaning faintly; and over it all, some unidentifiable banshee’s war cry. Ey-ya-walla-walla-scree!
None of it kept out the lying voices trying to lure me back to the ruins.
Thunk.
Sobbing, I opened my eyes.
Directly in front of me, Danto lay crumpled on the deck, his head seeping crimson.
Across the hold, Jamila knelt next to gray-faced Kojo. Grimbold lay unconscious nearby.
But near the door was Hiram, dressed in full mercenary regalia—chest armor, helmet, blade-resistant collar—grinning like a fool.
And next to Danto’s prostrate body stood Archer, swamped in armor meant for a more powerful frame. In his hand was a huge steel wrench.
The wrench dripped blood.
Danto twitched.
Hiram shouted, “Look out, lad.”
Archer brought the wrench down again with the full force of his wiry body. I turned my face away, not wanting to see Danto’s head pulped.
But instead of the dull thud I expected, I heard a sharp crack. The wrench had connected with something much harder than a Gavoran skull.
The relic.
Again and again, Archer pounded the wrench onto the relic until, with a final crunch, it lay in shards.
Sweating and panting, Archer dropped the wrench and knelt beside me. He spared only a glance for Danto, now utterly still, eyes blank and wide.
“I was afraid he would hurt you.” Archer looked around apologetically. “Hiram distracted him and I snuck in. Everyone forgets about me.”
I buried my face in his shoulder. “I never forget about you,” I whispered. “Thank you, Archer.” He blushed and smiled shyly.
Hiram, still grinning, helped Kojo up. “Reminds me of the old days, it does. Like your pa used to say, brains can beat a stunner any day.”
Archer kissed me, a real kiss on the lips. It made me dizzy, or maybe that was just exhaustion.
I sobbed against his chest.
Kojo limped over to hug me awkwardly, holding his splinted arm out of the way. “Thank Zub. Welcome home, Patch.”
“Jamila,” Rachel called from the airlock. “Help me with Mya. She’s still alive.”
“What about Danto?” Jamila asked, keeping her face turned away.
“Dead,” Hiram said. “Archer’s damn handy with a wrench.”
“I still hear the voices,” I said. “Please stop them.”
Rachel’s face tightened. “We will. Captain, get us away from here.”
“Glad to,” Kojo replied. “Hiram, clear to launch. Archer, man the thrusters. Get us off this burzing rock!”
“With pleasure, Captain!”
Hiram grinned and marched up the aft steps. Archer brushed his lips against my hair before striding, head up and lethal wrench on his shoulder, toward the engine room.
We cleared a table for Mya and rushed to follow Rachel’s orders to treat her burns, wrist cuts, bites, and blood loss.
“The sooner we can get her to a medical center, the better,” Rachel said.
“Hiram and Archer came just in time,” Kojo said. “Danto would have killed you. He really loved Mya.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I couldn’t stop Mya from taking off her suit. The voices were too strong.” I shivered.
“Do you still hear them?” Rachel asked.
Come, friends. Peace and joy await.
“Yes. It’s exhausting, having them in my head. We can’t leave that beacon here. If any Gavorans were to follow us, they’d be drawn in like moths to a flame.”
“I agree,” Rachel said. “Patch, I know you’re tired, but you need to prepare a new drone. This one must have gre
nades.”
“Grenades?” Jamila asked. “Are you sure, Rachel? Wouldn’t that violate the Settlement Authority’s laws and regulations?”
Rachel smiled her feline smile. “Screw the laws and regs. I’m a commander, remember?”
Lifting off from the planet without the benefit of a port’s lifters was rough, relying on just our thrusters to overcome gravity and winds. There were some unpleasant moments as the gales in the upper atmosphere threatened to topple Sparrow into the sea, but Archer hit the thrusters full bore and Hiram straightened us out.
As we reached orbit, Jamila helped me pull out a cargo drone. The voices battered at me, as insistent as waves on a beach. Come, friends! Peace and joy!
Terran, I told myself. Free.
As we stepped over the pile of rubble that once housed Suriel, Jamila cried out, “What’s that?”
Something wriggled among the relic’s remain.
Jamila backed away, hand over her mouth.
I froze in horror at the thought of something—Suriel—crawling out of the scraps.
In an orange-and-white flash, Tinker pounced, pawing at the shards.
“Tinker, no!”
She ran away with something wiggling in her mouth.
“Never mind,” Rachel said. “We’ll track her down. Put the remains in the drone. Valuable artifact or not, the relic is staying on Nakana.”
Jamila looked ready to cry.
I swept up the gravel and shards trying not to see if anything was alive among them. I dumped them into the drone, along with the grenades set to detonate on impact. Shutting the payload hatch, I entered the coordinates for the beacon signal’s location and pushed the drone into the airlock. Rachel keyed the launch herself.
Jamila sprayed Prestoscrub all over the deck where the relic had lain.
Peace. Joy. Come.
After we launched the drone, Hiram brought us into retrieval position for the last survey drone. With shaking hands, I maneuvered it into the airlock on the third try and let the sterilization cycle run.
Come, beloved—
Silence.
I fell back into my chair with a thump. “Oh.”
Quiet. Pure blessed quiet. No voices from the planet. No voice from the relic. Nothing but my own thoughts.
It was wonderful.
“The drone has detonated,” Rachel said quietly. “Are you all right, Patch?”
“Yes!” I took a deep breath. “The voices are gone. All of them.”
“Then the drone hit the target.” Rachel nodded with satisfaction. “Captain, we are clear to head for the nearest port.”
CHAPTER 32
Science and belief and secrets to keep
We moved Mya and Grim to the bunks in the large stateroom, where they could be strapped down during our return passage through the wall of energy and debris. Jamila volunteered to help Rachel care for them. I stayed in the engine room, shifting power mods as Archer babied our straining engines and kept our maneuvering rockets aligned.
Exiting the debris cloud was easier than entering, since we didn’t have to fight against the outward expansion of the energy wave. Even so, we had hours of pressure waves and plasma discharges until Sparrowhawk battered her way through the energy wall. At one point, Archer put his arm around me and I wept into his shoulder out of sheer exhaustion. Then the helm called and, white-faced, he turned back to the console. I wiped my eyes and got back to work.
Finally, we burst past the cloud’s energy and debris and once again faced the depressing prospect of the Gloom’s dense ether.
I found Rachel in the stateroom, slumped in a chair.
“Grim is sedated,” she said. “The turbulence exacerbated his concussion and I had to operate to relieve the pressure on his brain. I think he’ll recover. I sent Jamila to get some sleep. She was a rock—helping me drill a hole in a man’s skull while the ship is being battered to pieces is no mean feat.”
“And Mya?” But a glance at her bunk told me her condition—the sheet was pulled over her face.
“Her injuries were too severe.”
I sat at the watch station as Hiram patiently, methodically spiraled through the search pattern.
“We can’t be too far off,” he said, yawning. I pinged the locator codes again, peering into the scanner for a response from the buoy. “How’s Kojo doing?”
“He’s resting. Rachel shot him up with painkillers. She had to reset his arm—the thrust leaving the planet and the pummeling we took getting through the energy wall displaced his bones.”
“Ah, I was afraid of that. He didn’t say anything, but I could see he was hurtin’. He was real tore up over you, you know. When he saw you going off planetside, so happy to be ordered around by those damn Gavs, it shocked him silly.”
I didn’t want to think about it. “You and Archer made a great team, all tricked out in your mercenary gear, and Archer wearing Papa’s old armor.”
He chuckled. “The lad was all for charging in, armed with nothing but a spanner. I figured a little armor to fend off a stun shot wouldn’t hurt.”
“And some razzle-dazzle. What was that horrific yell?”
“Ah, hell. That’s how my ma used to call me in for dinner.”
Ping. Finally, an answer from the buoy.
We began the long limp homeward, backtracking through the dark.
Every two hours, I dragged myself to the drone console to pick up another buoy—we wanted no one following our breadcrumbs back to Nakana. The retrievals were so frequent, I didn’t bother sleeping in my cabin, just nestled under a mound of blankets in the cargo hold with all the lights on and cuddling with Tinker, when she let me. Not that I slept much—every rustle and creak had me jumping up, shaking like a leaf, and madly brushing away imaginary worms. I spent as much time as I could in the engine room—spelling Archer so he could sleep, of course, but also because I didn’t want to be alone.
“Couldn’t we just stop for a bit?” Archer asked. “We all need rest.”
I shook my head. “Some of the buoys have already drifted, just in the few days since we deployed them. We’ll rest when we get to Kriti.”
One buoy failed to answer at all. We quickly abandoned the effort to find it and ran toward the next one like children running past a graveyard on a dark night.
At some point, between buoys, Rachel certified Danto’s and Mya’s deaths and released their remains for disposal. There wasn’t much of a memorial, just me and Rachel at the recycle chute.
I couldn’t bring myself to say a prayer. Rachel just said, “Rest in peace, Danto and Mya.”
At least they were together.
Finally, we reached the last buoy and glimpsed a blur of light through ether haze. With a collective sigh of relief, we turned our backs on the Gloom and sailed toward Kriti.
That night, in the small hours while Rachel tended to Grim, Jamila slept, and Kojo managed the helm one-handed, Hiram and I silently resurrected the pieces of the synthreactor from their hiding places. I packed them into three drones, coded the locators and launched them into orbit around a tiny, inconspicuous moon. Rachel still had the hailer locked, but we had fifteen days to get to Kriti and contact Ordalo with the coordinates and retrieval codes.
Two days later, the Settlement Authority responded to Rachel’s emergency hails by sending three ships to escort us the rest of the way to Kriti, where they imposed an in-orbit quarantine. Dour officers clad in protective suits came aboard to scan Sparrow for any lingering parasites. With the synthreactor gone, I didn’t worry.
Grimbold—recovered enough to resume complaining—was moved to a med center and the rest of us were interrogated by humorless Settlement Authority officials.
Kojo argued bitterly against keeping us in orbit when we desperately needed rest and repair. Finally, they cleared Sparrow to dock at a secure facility on Kriti. Rachel and Jamila left under Settlement Authority supervision, while Sparrow’s crew was kept aboard under house arrest.
I welcomed the chance
to catch up on sleep. We had five days to get out of quarantine, contact Ordalo, and trade the synthreactor for the release of the mortgage on Sparrowhawk and the indentures over me and Kojo.
Two days later I was getting nervous, but Rachel had promised the quarantine would be lifted that day, subject to certain confidentiality agreements. She even brought a cask of ale to help us celebrate.
Archer filled tankards for me and him. “Here’s to freedom,” he said, hoisting one. He was his usual grubby self, cheered not only by the ale but by the fact that he’d had three full days to restore his engine room to sparkling condition.
Rachel smiled. “Kojo, how’s your arm?”
He grimaced as he flexed the fingers of his left hand. “Better. The splint stays on for another two days. It will take a while to get the muscles back. Good thing I’m right-handed—it doesn’t interfere with my drinking.” He hefted his mug to demonstrate.
“Hear, hear,” Hiram mumbled, already happily bleary.
“And, Patch, are you still having nightmares?” Rachel asked.
I scooched over so Archer could sit next to me. “Some. Not as many panic attacks.” In fact, the night before, I had dreamed of Papa again. He hadn’t issued any warnings, but had simply stood near as a reassuring presence. I’d felt overwhelmed with gratitude.
Rachel looked at the four of us in turn. “You understand, all of you are required to keep the location of Nakana secret. The Settlement Authority wants no pothunters looking for old tech, and maybe triggering another beacon.”
“Fine with me,” Kojo said, “I don’t have any problem keeping quiet about that damn planet. That whole expedition was a burzing disaster.”
I took a sip of ale. “I agree with Kojo. I don’t really want to talk about it. But surely people will have questions? Danto and Lyden and Mya, Balan and that other woman Deprata—people will ask what happened to them. And Galactic and Rampart and the Cartel—they all know about the artifact. How is the Settlement Authority going to hush them up?”
“The Authority is not going to hush it up at all, just modify a few details. The main thing to remember is the place we went looking for the planet was not in the Gloom outside sector 377, but in sector 342, and the artifact turned out to be a hoax. The tablet and the rumors that it pointed the way to a Sage planet were planted by Galactic Conglomerate in order to distract their rival, Rampart Militech. It was all a lie.”