by Rick Partlow
There would be a fraction of a second when their trajectories intersected, and nothing not made of electricity and neurons could have calculated the boost just right…and no computer would ever think to do it. The two bodies in space were only three meters apart when she screamed into the interface and the Acheron Transitioned yet again, using the capacitor charge she’d been saving for a second shot at the cutter. Earth-normal gravity returned for the first time in days and she took advantage of the lull of a few seconds to turn and look through her physical eyes at Ash.
He was staring at her in disbelief, somehow still conscious after all the brutal acceleration, his mouth hanging open, his eyes wide.
“Sandi,” he said slowly, his voice a dry rasp. “You know I love you. But you’re completely fucking nuts.”
She giggled at that, and thought that it was probably the wrong response. The part of her still paying attention to the interface noticed the second capacitor bank had recharged and she brought them back into realspace, the Earthlike pull of the gravity field fading as the star-filled black replaced nothingness.
They floated nearly motionless in space, a million kilometers out from the barge. Beside them, tumbling slowly, its velocity stolen by a dimension where such things had no meaning, was the railgun projectile. It was harmless now, unless someone or something was luckless enough to run into it out here in the vasty deep.
“You’re also the best damned pilot I’ve ever met,” Ash admitted.
“You keep up that kind of talk,” she said with a broad grin, “and I’m going to rip your clothes off again.”
“Later.” He waved a hand behind them. “We’d better get back and let them know we’re not dead.”
“Not yet.” She looked back with the ship’s eyes at the image of the barge, just a bright star among many, moving so fast and yet so slow. “Day’s not over.”
***
Jovan Fisher shuffled morosely, hands jammed into his jacket pockets as he paced the same three-meter stretch of pavement over and over. The street light was old, and half-broken, and long past the date it should have been serviced, and three meters was as far as its faded and attenuated glow would reach.
If Portillo came out to check on him, he’d yell at him for staying in the light, and he’d yell at him for having his hands in his pockets, and he’d yell at him for not being more like his old man, most likely.
Fuck him, Jovan thought, staring into the shadowed uncertainty of the back street. This place sucks.
It was hot in the daytime and freezing at night, and the bars and clubs sucked, and the locals were ugly as sin, and there wasn’t anything to do even when Portillo or Lombard weren’t sticking him with one stupid, pointless job or another. Like keeping watch on the warehouse’s back entrance.
Who the hell is going to be breaking into some random warehouse in a whole street full of empty warehouses? It’s bullshit. Portillo put me out here because he’s never liked me.
A shudder went up his back and he cursed softly, pulling a cannabis chew from the bag in his pocket and sticking it between his cheek and gum. Portillo would get on him for that, too, if he saw it. He didn’t like people using when they were “on duty.”
“On duty,” like we’re in the fucking Marines or something.
At least they’d let him carry a gun. Its weight was solid and comforting on his hip, even if he’d only fired it a couple times. Maybe he’d get to kill someone while he was here; he knew some of the older types looked down on anyone who wasn’t blooded. Maybe if he popped his cherry on this job, Portillo would cut him some slack…
Something hit him in the sternum, something so fast he didn’t see it, something so hard it drove the wind out of him and left him breathless and helpless and curled in a fetal position on the cold, damp pavement. His thoughts were a haze of fiery desperation and agony; he didn’t even try for the gun, and some small part of his mind that was still coherent realized that something was tugging at his belt, yanking the pistol from its holster.
“P..Portillo?” He tried to yell for the older man into the pickup for his ‘link, but the word came out as an inaudible croak.
A finger pried the ear bud out and he heard a distant crack as it was destroyed, then something that must have been a hand, but gripped as tight and unyielding as an industrial exoskeleton, grabbed his ankle and began dragging him away from the back door of the warehouse. His jacket rode up, and his shirt beneath it, and pavement burned at the skin of his back and he wanted to cry out but lacked the breath. Darkness swallowed him up and he tried to thrash and grab at anything, but then he was being jerked to his feet and slammed against the cement block wall of one of the many abandoned buildings in the industrial district.
Someone loomed over him, tall and clad in black, his face lost in the shadows, and a grip as hard as steel clenched at his throat, squeezing just hard enough to warn him not to call for help. He finally managed to suck in a breath but it did nothing to alleviate his rising panic. No one could move that fast.
What the hell is he?
“Do you want to live?”
The voice was smooth, and deep, and sonorous, like one of the computer constructs that the news networks used to narrate the stories. But behind it, there was something sharp and cold and jagged, like broken glass.
“Yes,” he mumbled a reply, nodding vigorously. He could feel the scratches on his back itching and burning, but he ignored them, trying not to move, not wanting to give the man any excuse to kill him. He’d discovered very abruptly that, more than women, more than drink, more than drugs, he wanted to survive this night.
The hand at his throat flexed and tilted Jovan’s head back until their eyes met. A single ray of illumination fell across the face; it was bland and nearly expressionless, almost more machine than human, with dark hair cut close to the scalp. There was something strange about the big man’s eyes, something uneven about the way the stray gleams of light reflected off of them, and Jovan guessed that one was biological while the other was bionic.
“Tell me again,” the big man demanded, those uneven eyes boring into his. “Make me believe it. Do you want to live?”
“Yes,” he repeated emphatically, trying to nod against the restrictive grip. “Yes, I want to live.”
“That’s very good.” A lopsided smile twisted the bland face into something much less pleasant. “Then let’s have a talk.”
Chapter Six
Gallatin’s Quality Glassworks was the sort of place that simply didn’t exist anywhere in the Core worlds. Korri Fontenot had seen its like in the Pirate Worlds, of course, but even in the Periphery it was something of a throwback. On Earth and the Core colonies, everything was transplas, and the only glass you’d ever see was an antique in the private collection of some Corporate Council executive showing off for their friends. But out here, everything that came from Earth or the Core cost money, including the machinery to manufacture transplas, and the petroleum needed for that manufacture, and the machinery needed to drill for that petroleum…
Silicon, on the other hand, was all around them, and turning it to glass was cheap and simple. Windows were crafted from it, and kitchenware, and artwork and furniture, and this place had all of that, out on display in rack after rack as if they were in 19th-Century London. Of course, each item could be fabricated to order, which was not so Victorian, but Mr. Gallatin also offered hand-crafted glassware for a substantial premium.
Fontenot decided that she liked the place…though it probably looked homier and more welcoming with the lights on, and without the smashed-in door. Michael Gallatin would probably have agreed, if he could have talked with the sole of her boot pressing down against his throat.
He was a heavy-set, older man, weathered and lined with the years in this dry, harsh climate and with a bit of silver in his bushy, dark hair, but still healthy and strong and probably very unused to being tossed around the room like a rag doll. It was hard to see in the low light, but he had the makings of a nasty br
uise along his right jaw, and his left shoulder might be dislocated---she wasn’t a doctor or anything, but it had that look. He had an apartment over the shop and he’d been down the stairs with a gun in his hand perhaps ten seconds after she’d busted through the door.
“Why you sleeping over your shop, Michael?” she asked softly, and his eyes darted toward her, fear beginning to set in, now that anger was fading. “I know you have a house outside town, a family there.”
He didn’t seem like he was going to answer, so she twisted that left arm just a little bit and he squealed and started babbling.
“Not…safe here in town, with the damn Tahni,” he grunted. “Have to keep an eye on things…”
“Why would you have to worry about the Tahni, Michael?” Just one tiny bit of pressure on that arm again and Gallatin let out a high-pitched screech. “After all, you’re the one paying the vigilante hit squads to attack them, aren’t you?”
Fontenot took her boot off his throat, kneeling down to put her knee into his chest instead. It was a big chest, muscular beneath a layer of fat, but his ribs creaked under the weight of her. He tried to grab for her with his free arm, but she brushed it aside easily.
“I saw them come here, you know, just this afternoon. I recognized the big, good-looking guy from yesterday in the street, so I set loose a few insect drones and saw you pay him. Paper tradenotes, Michael?” she scoffed. “That’s so cliched. Surely, even in a place like this, you could have come up with a dummy account and done the transfer remotely.”
It didn’t seem as if he was going to reply to that, but just a slight squeeze on that left arm was enough to get him talking again.
“It’s how Antonio wanted it!” he insisted. “He gives me the cash, I hire the men!”
“Now we’re getting somewhere,” she said, satisfied. She even let up a little on his chest. “Who’s Antonio and why can’t he hire the men himself?”
“He’s an off-worlder.” The words were grudging, but the man finally seemed as if he understood just how much trouble he was in. “He came here a few months ago for a visit and asked to meet with me. Said he’d heard about my shop down in the Tahni district being burned down, and thought that wasn’t right, so he agreed to bankroll me to help me get through it.”
His expression was almost apologetic and she tried not to snicker at how ridiculous his bushy hair looked pushed down under his head on the hardwood floor. “I was close to going under, without the trade from the other shop…there are people off-world who want Tahni crafts, and barter at that shop was the only way I could get my hands on them.”
“And hiring the thugs was his idea?” she guessed. At his nod, she went on. “So, where’s this Antonio now? How do you get in touch with him?”
“I don’t know! I never contacted him…he seemed to know when I needed more money and he’d just show up.”
Shit, she thought sourly. This might be a whole lot of trouble for nothing, then.
“What does ‘Antonio’ look like?” she asked. It was a longshot, but she knew a lot of the La Sombra enforcers by sight. If she at least knew who she was dealing with, she might be able to get inside their decision loop.
“He’s dead sexy.”
Korri Fontenot was a soldier; she’d been one for over a century. She didn’t freeze at the unexpected voice, even though it seemed impossible that anyone had been able to get by the insect drones she’d left on watch. There were ways to jam those. She just moved, throwing herself forward into a shoulder roll and trying to yank her pistol out of its holster as she flipped into a crouch facing back toward the door.
The sonic hit her before the gun was halfway clear of the hand-tooled leather, slamming into her like a physical thing, a screaming brick wall of sound that blew her backwards off balance into a display case. Glass shattered all around her, but she barely noticed it, convulsing helplessly as consciousness began to fade.
The last coherent thought she had before the darkness closed in was that she knew that voice. You’d never mistake it once you heard it. Her bionic eye recorded the face that went with it as he loomed over her, smiling cruelly. He was a sharp-edged man, with not a hair on his head, not even an eyebrow, and a dark light in his eyes that spoke of untapped depths of depravity. And his name wasn’t Antonio.
It was Jordi Abdullah.
***
Kan-Ten felt the need clawing at his spirit, growling and spitting and thrashing inside his chest, barely contained. His fingers clenched against the rough, jagged edges of the rock wall that separated the males from the females and he tried to use the pain from the sharp lines of granite and basalt digging into his skin to force his brain to work.
It both helped and hurt that there were so many females---twenty-four of them, three times the sacred eight, clustered in a layered defense, youngest on the perimeter and the planetary Matriarch at the center, guarded and protected above all else. They swayed in the traditional dance of warding, its motions designed to distract the gathered males from the chemical fires blazing brightly inside their endocrine system. The blend of the colored strips of cloth in their robes waved with the motion like a calming tide crashing against him. With so many together, it was difficult to separate them into individuals, to find one on which to focus his uncontrollable desire. But the combined scent of so many females also sought to overwhelm his control, to drive him to madness.
He could see that same struggle in the eyes of his brothers on this side of the wall, see tensed shoulders and combative stances as they began looking at each other warily, cautious of challengers. No weapons were allowed in a Concord for just this reason, though his hand ached for one and paranoia gnawed at him.
Concords were rare and he was surprised that Vala-Kel had been able to convince the Matriarch to agree to one. She was under no obligation to listen to anything the males had to say, and his friend was a comparative newcomer to this settlement. He looked over at Vala-Kel, having to tear his attention away from the females to do it. The warrior stood tall, controlled and composed, and Kan-Ten wondered if he had taken drugs to calm his need. They were available, but they were known to dull the mind and were forbidden by the priests back when there had been priests, and most males avoided them…though there had been a growing percentage of males who’d taken to them as recreation since the war.
Vala-Kel’s features flickered and writhed in the dancing shadows of the torchlight that was the only illumination inside the Sanctuary. The torch-pits were dug every one-eighth of the distance from the center pit, where the Flame of the Path burned always, kept up by the priests. Well, it used to be maintained by the priests, before the humans had outlawed their caste for inciting the Tahni to uprising. Now, lay volunteers kept the Flame, the same ones who maintained the Sanctuary building. Everyone in the colony, male and female, had worked in turn constructing the Sanctuary; it would be the first structure built on any new world, a place for the sacrament and the Concord.
Here, on a world shared with the humans, the Sanctuary was built as far away from the city of Gennich as possible, nearly thirty kilometers distant from the center of town. It had taken an hour to reach this place over the rough, dirt roads even with the all-terrain trucks the settlement council had provided, and Kan-Ten was fairly certain he couldn’t have found his way back through the winding, canyon roads without the aid of the navigation program on his ‘link. The females had arrived before the males, before dusk, as was the tradition, and their vehicles were parked on the opposite end of the Sanctuary’s lopsided ovoid so that they could leave through a different exit, on the other side of the meter-high wall.
“Leader of the council,” the Matriarch’s protégé called, standing above the older female, arms outstretched. She was middle-aged herself, but strong and comely still, and she would make a good replacement for the Matriarch when the older female passed. “You have called for Concord! Why do you bring the male and female together, if not to mate?”
Her tone was harsh, and when the head o
f the Council of Males, Rya-Jan stepped forward to reply, the set of his shoulders and the tilt of his head was suitably apologetic.
“I humbly beg the pardon of the Matriarch,” Rya-Jan spoke the traditional phrase, “but the Path requires the Collective Will of all for such a decision.”
The Matriarch was ancient, her skin lined and leathery, her eyes nearly invisible under brow ridges grown more pronounced with the years. She seemed skeletal inside her flowing robes, but when she rose from her stool, it was with a graceful, effortless motion that spoke of a strength of body and of will still not completely sapped by time. She stepped up behind her protégé and rested a hand on the younger female’s shoulder for support, head tilted backwards as if to get a better look at Rya-Jan and the others.
“I am present,” she said, her voice raspy and harsh, but still strong and carrying. “Speak your piece, warrior.”
It was an honorific, Kan-Ten knew. Rya-Jan had never been other than a craftsman, either here or back on Tahn-Skyyiah.
“A warrior comes who would lead our people on this world,” Rya-Jan said. He brought Vala-Kel forward with a motion. “Shin-Tan-Vala-Kel is a true follower of the Path, a servant of the Will of the Emperor. I would have you hear his words.”
“Things cannot continue as they are,” Vala-Kel began without preamble. His voice carried like a professional orator’s, Kan-Ten thought with a bit of envy. “The human colonists grow bolder every day without their government’s forces around to keep them in check. Eventually, there will come a point where they no longer fear their own law enforcers; and when that day comes, they will move on our district, and on the female compound.”
He inclined his head. “I know we all will sell our lives dearly, but they outnumber us four or five to one in this place, and many of them have guns, while we are not allowed to possess them, and the ones we do have could be seized by their Constabulary at their pleasure.”