by Rick Partlow
He made an abortive attempt to lift me up again, but I could tell that the strength was going out of him, and finally he went utterly limp. An atavistic rage filled me, and I almost felt like holding the choke until the lack of air killed him; but the thinking part of my brain knew that could take minutes, and I might not have that long before I passed out. I let him slump to the ground, then limped slowly over to where my pistol had fallen. The laser carbine was closer, but the pistol was mine, almost a part of me after all these years.
“Fuck,” I hissed as I bent to pick it up; and agony coursed through my chest and the world started spinning around me. My fingers closed on the grip and I went to one knee for a moment, trying to breathe despite the pain it caused.
A thought forced its way through the haze inside my head, and I glanced over at Marquette. He wasn’t moving, wasn’t breathing. His eyes were wide open and he’d gone very still, a pool of his blood spreading beneath him. He’d fancied himself a bad man, a scoundrel, willing to sell anything for a price; but he’d wound up giving his life to save mine.
I heard a low moan and saw Israfil beginning to stir, coming slowly back to consciousness. I pushed myself off the ground and stumbled back over to him. He looked up, ice blue eyes clearing, staring at me with fanatical intensity out of a face caked in blood.
“Surely,” he croaked, his voice harsh and distorted through a mouthful of broken teeth, “in this holy place, you can’t take away the…”
I put a round through his forehead and his skull popped like a child’s balloon, spraying a lifetime’s worth of memories across the smooth, ancient stone. He jerked in one last spasm of firing nerves, then slumped face-down to the floor, joining the Predecessors in extinction.
“You talk too much,” I mumbled at his corpse.
Then the world began to spin uncontrollably, and the ground rose up to meet me and everything went black...
Chapter Twenty-One
I had a vague sense of movement. It was the first sensation that clawed its way through the darkness, and hard on its heels was a grinding, stabbing agony that was nearly unbearable until I instinctively dosed myself with painkillers from my pharmacy organ. I opened my eyes and saw that I was being carried over someone’s shoulder, and my broken ribs were not happy about it.
“Put me down,” I rasped, my mouth as dry as sandpaper.
“’Bout damn time you woke up,” Victor said, tossing me down off his shoulder and onto my feet, then steadying me when I nearly fell over.
I looked around and saw that we were back up in the entrance cavern; the afternoon glare of the system’s primary was showing through the crooked crack in the wall that led out onto the mountain. Sanders was standing beside me, a hand on my arm, helping Victor to keep me upright. He passed me his canteen and I swallowed a few gulps of water, soothing my parched throat.
“You okay, Boss?” He asked me, concern in his voice carrying through his external speakers.
“I’ve been better,” I admitted, “but I’ve also been much worse, so there’s that. How did you find me?”
“We found the hole pretty quick,” Sanders told me, “but it took us a while to figure out what it was.”
“He fell down the damn thing,” Victor told me, chortling as he thumped Sanders on the arm. “He was trying to stick his head down there and shine a flashlight into it and he fucking slipped on the algae slime and fell into it.”
“Anyway,” Sanders interrupted the bigger man, annoyance in his voice, “we heard the gunshots, but by the time we got there, the fun was over.”
“It wasn’t that much fun,” I assured him, my hand cradling my ribs. It hurt to breathe and the air was thin out here. I wouldn’t asphyxiate, not quite, but I felt like I couldn’t get a full lungful of air. “Let’s get out of here and see if we can contact the ship.”
I hoped we could, because I sure as hell didn’t want to be stuck here with no food and not much water. I kept one hand on Victor’s arm as we stepped through the narrow entrance, trying not to slip, and shaded my eyes with the other. The primary was dull and red and monstrous in the sky, larger than a sun had any right to be.
“Kane,” I transmitted over to my ‘link. “Do you read?”
There was no reply for several seconds, and I was beginning to worry that he’d lost the battle against the assault shuttle.
“This is Divya.” I blinked in surprise at her transmission. Why would she be answering my call? “Are you okay? Did you find the High Priest?”
“We’re all fine,” I assured her. “Israfil and his people are dead. Have you contacted Bobbi on the lighter?”
“Yes, they’re good where they are for now. I told them we’d come dock and pick them up after we checked on you.” She paused. “The ship took a hit to the rear atmospheric stabilizers before we took out the shuttle and Kane is busy figuring a workaround.”
“All right,” I sighed. Not bad. I hadn’t thought we could pull this off without any casualties. “We need a pickup but the terrain is pretty rough here. Tell Kane to land at the plateau where the Cult shuttle touched down.”
“Roger that, we’ll see you there as soon as we can.”
I looked at the trail and shook my head. Ten kilometers in thin air with two broken ribs wasn’t going to be fun.
“Look at the bright side, Boss,” Victor urged. “It’s all downhill from here.”
***
I don’t know if it was the genetics or the nanites or the pure cussed orneriness that got me down that damned mountain; but whatever it was, it was spent and gone by the time we came within sight of the plateau. I dragged my boot soles across the sand and dust and didn’t have the energy to lift them a millimeter, and the only reason I didn’t ask Victor to throw me over his shoulder and carry me the rest of the way was that I knew how badly it would hurt.
The nanites had repaired some of the damage in the two hours it had taken us to make our way back down, but broken ribs weren’t something that could be patched up in a couple hours, even by a bleeding edge nanite suite. They’d drained me of every spare calorie to do what work they could, though, and I had nothing left. Which was why it took me three tries to register what Sanders was saying to me.
“Boss,” he repeated, shaking my shoulder in a way that would have made me punch him in the face if I’d had the energy. He pointed across the plateau. “Didn’t there used to be just one life-pod?”
I rubbed salt and sand out of my eyes and tried to focus. The shuttle was still there, and so was the pod we’d landed in, split in half and sunk a half a meter into the sand from our landing. But a couple of hundred meters off to the right of the assault shuttle was a second life-pod, its braking chute still whipping gently in the wind, the smoke still rising from the explosive bolts that had separated its sections to free its occupants. They were gathered around it, one of them sitting with his helmet between his legs, vomiting noisily and messily, while the other two stood by impassively. One of the two was short and stocky and wearing Marine Recon style armor and helmet, while the other had stripped off most of his vacuum gear and bared his bionic arms to the reflections of the red giant sun.
“So,” he said, his Russian accent drawing the word out, “this is the treasure trove of the Ancients. It looks like a shit-hole.”
It was Anatoly, that much was obvious, which meant that the one puking was Vilberg and the short, armored figure was…
“Bobbi?” I said, my voice little more than a hoarse whisper, but enough to carry it over my ‘link.
“Jesus, Munroe,” she said, walking over to me. “We thought you all were dead.”
“What are you doing down here?” I asked, curiosity and an overwhelming sense of wrongness giving me the energy to speak a bit more coherently. “Did something go wrong on the lighter?” I gestured towards Vilberg, who wasn’t throwing up anymore but still looked green around the gills.
“The lighter was a piece of cake,” she waved the idea away. “Skeleton crew. I think Israfil too
k almost everyone he had left with him down here. Vilberg just got airsick on the burn down from orbit. We couldn’t find Marquette, though.”
“He’s dead,” I informed her grimly. “Israfil and his people, too. But Divya told me she’d contacted you and told you she and Kane were going to check on us first before they went back to pick you up.”
That stopped her in her tracks a few meters away from me.
“I never heard a fucking thing from either one of them,” she insisted hotly, hands clenching into fists. “That’s why we took the damn life-pod down, because they weren’t responding. We figured Kane and the bitch bought it fighting the shuttle, and we didn’t want to get stuck on a ship with no engines and a deteriorating orbit.”
“What the fuck, over?” I blurted, feeling my face screw up into a mask of anger and confusion. “Hold on a second.”
I stepped away from her and grabbed at my ‘link, bringing up the ship’s frequency. “Nomad, this is Munroe, do you read?”
A long pause, followed by Divya’s voice again.
“I read you, Munroe,” she said calmly. “Are you at the landing site yet?”
“Yeah, we are,” I snapped. “And so are Bobbi and the others, and she says you never contacted them! They took a fucking life-pod down to the planet because they thought you’d been shot down! What’s the deal?”
“I’m sorry, Munroe,” she told me, sounding sincere. “Kane’s been totally immersed with the ship’s computer for hours now, trying to fix the damage. I must have misunderstood what he said; you know his idiom can be hard for me to figure out at the best of times. But we’re coming in now to get all of you. We should be there in less than a minute.”
I wanted to yell at her some more, but I honestly didn’t have the energy for it. I shook my head in disgust and turned back to Bobbi.
“You catch all that?” I asked her. I’d included her in on the transmission.
“Sounds like a load of shit,” she told me bluntly.
“Good,” I snorted. “Glad it’s not just me. Anyway, we can ask her ourselves in a minute.”
No sooner had I said the words than I heard the whine of the jets in the distance. I looked around in the opposite direction of the route into the mountains and caught a glimpse of the matte grey delta of the ship, still a pinprick on the horizon. It grew in size with startling swiftness, burning in hot and low over the badlands to the south, raising a faint cloud of sand and dust in its wake. I blinked at the image, stepping forward a few meters as if that would make it clearer to me. Kane was bringing her in way too fast. Maybe it had to do with the damage to the ship, but I couldn’t think why.
I was still trying to figure out what he was up to when the proton cannon erupted and a line of white-hot energy blasted the assault shuttle into an expanding ball of fire. The shuttle was hundreds of meters away, but the concussion was enough to slam me backwards and send me rolling across the sandstone, forcing what little air I had out of my lungs and nearly driving me back into unconsciousness. I couldn’t move, couldn’t draw a breath, could barely focus when I pried my eyes open.
Bobbi, Sanders and Victor had been wearing full armor, with their helmets on, but they’d been closer to the explosion than I had, and they’d been tossed even farther. I could see them moving, could see Victor trying to crawl out of a patch of fiercely burning wreckage, but none of them looked too ready to get up and start fighting.
Vilberg was out, collapsed not too far from the life-pod, blood flowing from his forehead. I couldn’t tell if he was breathing, but he definitely wasn’t moving, and I didn’t know if he ever would again.
Anatoly…was standing exactly where he had been, like an oak weathering the storm. His clothes were shredded and I saw blood seeping from a half-dozen serious wounds in his torso, but he was conscious and still on his feet. Between one eyeblink to the next, he was in motion, running towards where the Nomad was coming down on billowing clouds of fire from her belly jets. She was just a few meters off the ground, her landing gear locking in place, and Anatoly was sprinting faster than any human I’d ever seen except Cowboy or one of his Glory Boy commandos, racing full out in an obvious attempt get onto her boarding ramp the second it opened.
The cyborg was only about thirty meters away when the Gatling laser turret rotated out of its sheath on the cutter’s belly and opened fire. The multiple laser emitters flared in a chain eruption of hyperexplosive charges, with a sound like a high-pitched thundercrack---just a short burst, not more than ten rounds. But in that fraction of a second, Anatoly ceased to exist. He’d disappeared in an explosion of vaporized bodily fluids and sublimated metal, as if he’d never been.
The ship hovered on her belly jets and rumbled forward, throwing up a huge cloud of dust and sand as she approached…me. I had to squeeze my eyes shut to block out the debris, tried to cover my head with my hands because I didn’t have the breath or the energy to roll over away from the hot blast.
I felt impotent and useless and desperate all at once, and I clawed feebly at my shoulder holster, trying to pull my pistol out before the belly ramp completely extended. I’d just managed to clear it and was gasping for air, working up the strength to push it out to arm’s length and point it in the right direction, when I saw the backlit, armored figure striding down the ramp, hands filled with a Gauss rifle pointed directly at my center of mass.
“I want you alive, Munroe,” Divya said, her voice coming through my ‘link’s ear bud like she was standing right next to me, “but barely alive will work, too. Drop the gun or I’ll put a round through your spine, then toss Kurt out of the auto-doc---and the airlock---and let you heal for the rest of the trip back to Earth.”
I thought for just a second about making her do it, just on the off chance that she’d miss and I’d have the time to take a shot at her; but I’d never known Divya to say she would do something and then not be able to follow through. I let the gun fall away and didn’t resist as she walked down the ramp and slipped a neural restraint web over the back of my neck. It would have been pointless. Between the hypoxia, the injuries I’d already had and the concussion from the shuttle explosion, I was about as threatening as a cranky toddler.
The web activated, and suddenly I couldn’t even feel anything below my neck, much less move it. I felt like a disembodied head being dragged up the ramp by Divya, and I was surprised she could do it one-handed even in the lighter gravity here. I could hear my armor scraping against the rough surface of the ramp like it was happening to someone else, and then I was being dumped on the deck of the utility bay while Divya hit the control to raise the hatch.
She shoved the rifle into a locker, then pulled off her helmet and tossed it in behind the weapon, not bothering to stack either of them neatly before she slammed the door shut. Her forehead was beaded with sweat, her normally perfect hair mussed and tangled, and the expression on her face was hard and cold.
“I could strap you in back here,” she mused aloud, “but I think I’d rather have you someplace where I can keep an eye on you.”
As the ramp closed and shipboard air filled the bay, I finally began to feel like I could get a full breath again and some of the mental confusion I’d been experiencing began to fade. Enough that I was finally able to form a coherent sentence. I wanted to demand to know why the hell she was doing this, but I thought I could guess that part.
“Where’s Kane?” I asked her instead. “What did you do with him?”
She was bending down to drag me up the passageway by the back of my armored vest and I could see the sour face she made at the question, but she didn’t answer. When we got to the cockpit, I saw why. Kane was still in the pilot’s seat; he hadn’t moved a centimeter from the last time I’d seen him. And he never would again, not of his own accord. Half his skull was blown away and his blood stained the port bulkhead in an obscene splash. I could smell it strong in the cockpit and the stench was enough to raise bile in the back of my throat.
My gut clenched and I fel
t an intense sadness for a man who’d never had the chance at anything like a normal life. I’d tried to be his friend, tried to convince him he didn’t have to let his past make him abandon his humanity…maybe because I was trying to convince myself of the same thing. I remembered the intense fear of death I’d heard in the voice of the dying Skinganger back in Shakak, and I wondered if maybe that was the real reason Kane had been trying to replace his flesh with something artificial. I wondered if he’d had the time to be afraid, or if death had come too fast even for that.
“I apologize for the mess,” Divya was saying, the words only penetrating my consciousness a few seconds after she’d said them. I realized she was yanking me towards the navigation console to strap me into the acceleration couch there. “When we get back into zero gravity and I can finally move all that heavy metal, I’ll dump him out of the airlock and spray some cleaning gel down to get rid of the smell.”
“You think West will reward you for this?” I asked her, bitterness welling up in my voice and overwhelming the scorn I’d been trying to convey. “You think this is what he wants?”
She laughed softly, with a tone of genuine amusement as she fastened the straps across my paralyzed body, and I wanted nothing else at that moment than to kill her as painfully as possible.
“I don’t give a shit what West wants,” she said, testing my restraints with a solid tug on the straps before she dropped into the copilot’s seat and began taking the ship through manual takeoff preparations. “I don’t give a shit what Andre Damiani wants either, anymore.” She shot me a self-satisfied grin. “I’ve had a better offer, Tyler Callas.”