Exile (Tales of the Acheron Book 3)

by Rick Partlow

  “It’s time to stop running from your past,” Jagmeet Singh said, putting a hand on her left shoulder, “and be whole again.”

  She looked at his hand, flesh and blood, against the bare metal of her bionics, visible below her black vest. She’d had the damaged arm replaced back on Brigantia, but the new one was slightly bulkier, and nothing she owned that had sleeves would fit it.

  Yet another reason to do this, she mused with a mild snort under her breath. I can finally wear clothes that actually fit me.

  “The past isn’t too hard to run from,” she countered, “since it doesn’t want anything to do with me.” She shrugged. “But maybe it’s time for an upgrade.” She smiled up at him. “You just want me to have more warm flesh, you lecher.” He laughed. He wasn’t a bad sort for a former contract killer.

  “What can I say?” He shrugged. “I have a thing for older women.”

  About a century older. You’re a cradle robber, girl.

  “All right, Jag,” she patted his hand with a metal one, then headed into the clinic. “Time to move on.”

  Time to see if all my scars were on the outside.

  ***

  David Blackard scraped his trowel over the patch in the wall, smoothing the material down with the edge. Sweat poured into his eyes from under his brimmed hat, and he paused to lift it off his shaved head with his free hand and wipe his forearm across his face. The primary star was beating down on Gennich like the city owed it money, and the cloudless glare was a spotlight on every scar left from the battle.

  He sniffed at the thought. “Battle” seemed a pretentious name for what had happened, but no one seemed to be able to settle on a name for it. It would probably go into the history files as some nonsense like “the Battle for Brigantia.” In reality, it had been half a gangland brawl, half a revolution and half a race riot.

  He frowned. That was three halves, which didn’t sound right. He shook it off and got back to work. Whatever you wanted to call it, the whole nasty business had left twelve deputies and Constable Freeman dead, along with about thirty civilians, a couple of the mercenaries and every single damned one of Jordi Abdullah’s hired thugs. He didn’t know if any had tried to surrender, but they hadn’t accepted any surrenders that night.

  Things were taking steps towards normal now, after a couple weeks, but there was still a lot of work to be done. Raw materials were coming in again from the asteroid belt; but most of the construction robots needed to be repaired, and the fabricators to make those parts needed to be repaired, and the damned fusion reactor had been down for a week before the Belters had loaned them parts to repair that so they could get started with all the rest of it.

  The upshot was, any of the big honking holes that had got shot into everything had to be patched by hand while they waited for the machines to fix the machines to fix the machines. He could see the civilians out in the streets, working on their own store fronts and hotels and bars with old-fashioned cement and concrete and stucco and boards and adhesive and elbow grease, most stripped down to tank tops in the mid-day heat. They waved every now and then, and a couple had brought him and his people drinks once or twice, but no one had offered to help; they had their own work to do.

  The Constabulary had other problems that couldn’t be solved by complimentary lemonade; there weren’t enough deputies left alive and unhurt to police the town and patch the holes and fix the doors and board the windows, and the building had taken the most damage of any structure in the city. So it was him, and maybe one other deputy when they could spare it, but mostly just him.

  “Shit,” he murmured in disgust. How would Abel have handled this?

  He didn’t notice the Tahni until he heard the murmuring from down the street. He looked up and saw them coming, two groups of them with about thirty or forty meters between and he could tell immediately that the ones in the front were the males, the ones behind the females. Their dress was different than he’d usually seen them; their stripped, multi-colored clothing that seemed to be held on by positive thinking was gone, in favor of what looked like more functional, work-oriented clothing. They carried tools as well, shovels and trowels and wheelbarrows, most of which they must have bought locally since their own implements were much different than the human versions.

  At the head of the first column were two Tahni, a male and a female walking together, which he thought was odd. But then he recognized one of them; it was the Matriarch, the head of all their females, the one Jordi had taken hostage in the Constabulary. Not that he could tell one Tahni female from another, but she was unmistakably, unabashedly old, maybe the oldest Tahni he’d ever seen.

  The male…he was thinking that the male looked like about every other adult male Tahni, but then he noticed the brace on his lower leg and remembered the Tahni who’d come here with the hired guns and taken down Jordi Abdullah. What was his name? Kan-Ten? He’d broken his leg killing that other Tahni who’d worked with the cartel, and they didn’t have the same medical technology available in Gennich for Tahni that they did for humans, which was why it still wasn’t completely healed.

  He tossed his trowel down on the piece of wood scrap board where he’d set the bucket of patching cement, then pulled the rag out of his back pocket and wiped his face and hands. He was wearing his sidearm, but he didn’t make a move for it. If these people meant him harm, one pistol wasn’t going to stop them all.

  “Greetings, Deputy Blackard,” the one in the leg brace said as he approached. When he and the Matriarch stopped, the other groups did as well, as neatly as any military unit he’d ever seen. “I am…”

  “Kan-Ten, yeah, I remember,” Blackard interrupted. “And it’s ‘acting Constable Blackard’ nowadays,” he added ruefully, though the intonation was probably lost on the aliens.

  “Indeed,” Kan-Ten acknowledged. “We all mourn the loss of Constable Freeman.”

  “He died preserving my life,” the Matriarch spoke, her English accented nearly to the point of incomprehensibility. “We seek to do him honor.”

  “We are here,” Kan-Ten told him, “to help you repair the damage to the Constabulary. Our females will work inside, while the males are outside.” He made a gesture that looked human, or at least looked like he was imitating a human, an open palm toward the building. “We wish to help. It is the least we can do.”

  Blackard thought about it for a moment, wondering if it was a good idea. But hell, the weapons were all locked up, and most of the rest of the deputies were out handling one call or another. They did need the help.

  “I would be much obliged,” he said with a nod. Kan-Ten stared at him for a moment and Blackard added: “That means, yes.”

  He made the ‘link calls to the few people he had working inside the building, just so no one would freak out. While he did that, the Matriarch and Kan-Ten began issuing orders in their own language, sending their workers this way or that in a bustle of purposeful activity.

  “With this many hands,” he commented to Kan-Ten once everyone was on their way to one job or another, “we might be done with most of the work in a day.”

  The Tahni inclined his head, the closest thing they could come to a nod, another sign that he’d been hanging around with humans for a long time.

  “So, if you don’t mind me asking,” Blackard went on, “why didn’t you wind up leaving with your friends? You were with that group, right, the ones on that ship, the Acheron?”

  “I was. I am, for they were my friends when I had no others. But these are my people, and they need me, for now.” He regarded Blackard with beady, dark eyes that somehow seemed more readable and human to the Deputy than they would have a few days ago. “You are a man who serves the needs of his people, are you not?”

  “Yeah, I guess I am.”

  “Then you know the duty I feel.” He fell silent, watching the labors beginning to unfold around them. His ridged brows inclined toward the trowel Blackard had left behind. “May I?”

  “Sir, you are welcome
to it,” Blackard assured him, laughing.

  Kan-Ten didn’t laugh; but then, he didn’t suppose Tahni laughed at all. He picked up the trowel and began working on the next shattered pockmark left in the wall by a tantalum needle. The Deputy watched him for a second, then his eyes traveled to the other Tahni, working hard despite the heat, moving like bees around a hive, and then to the humans watching them from down the street. There was something new on those human faces, he thought. Maybe respect? Maybe. At least it wasn’t the hate and resentment it had been a few weeks ago.

  “So, how’d you wind up as crew on a boat like the Acheron?” Blackard asked, feeling awkward just standing around and watching the Tahni work. Kan-Ten didn’t look up from the wall as he smoothed out a dollop of patching cement, but there was a look on his face, something that could have been a smile if he were human.

  “Now there, as you humans say, lies a tale.”

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