by Paula Guran
Climbing over roots and formstone she could barely see, the roots smoothly gnarled, the stone cool and rough beneath her hands, the mineral scent of stone and soil was in her nose, and the blue burnings swam at the edges of her sight, beginning to seem more and more like ghost fire in her head.
Then she put her duck suited foot down in the ghost fire, slipped and caught herself. A little cloud of blue sizzled up into the air.
A cache of dust spread around her, in the ranga roots, over the soil, in the crevices of the formstone. Belatedly, she remembered to draw the filter hood over her head, pull on the gloves. The sound of her own breath filled Virtue’s ears; the hood’s disinfectant smell, that made her want to sneeze or retch, burned in her throat.
General had explained the collection of dust in detail—along with gifting her this location, held secret to himself for half his lifetime. Dust was found mostly in tiny caches, little bits of the stuff that amounted to no more than a palmful. Most of the known salvage spots were scraped clean.
Virtue was standing in an unbelievable cache.
Preserving boxes set out and scraping tool in hand, she dug the thin layer of blue fire off a root, scooping it into the first of the boxes. Fibrous when the tool first went in, on contact with it the stuff mutated into a clinging, viscous dust.
By the time the third box was filled with oily, burning blue dust, her skin was sticky with sweat, jump clinging beneath the duck suit. She shook out a cramp in her hand and a twinge in her shoulder. Three boxes full and there was plenty of dust left among the roots, over the soil and formstone.
The lid on the last box sealed with a hermetic hiss and Virtue loaded up to go, the catchnet swinging heavy. Midway back, sudden light leaned through the ranga trees and disappeared the dust—Dayva’s way of calling time.
At isle’s edge, the skiff waited, bumping roots on a gulp of disturbed water. Virtue’s skin prickled and she surveyed the area, but the channel was flat again, netted by the white and gold blaze of the Artace’s main and running lights.
Dayva, with Tao-Jin James lending a hand, hauled the skiff up, rivulets streaming off it in luminous beaded strings. Setting the catchnet on the deck, Virtue stripped off the duck suit and gloves and dropped them in the detam unit. A bitter oily smell clung to the suit and lingered in the air.
“This it?” Dayva looked down at the three preserving boxes in the catchnet.
“That’s it.” They exchanged a silent look. Sitting on the deck was a fortune. More scrip than they might have expected to earn off a job in twenty years.
And there was Tao-Jin James, unknown quantity, in and of whom Virtue suspected any number of things. He stood by the dripping skiff, watching them. Virtue couldn’t tell what she was thinking—wasn’t, maybe. Not, Athra knew, with any portion of her anatomy that thought clearly.
Coming back through the narrow inlet, roots scraping, leaves scratching, hull groaning, tension rode Virtue with steel talons in her shoulders. Tao-Jin leaned over the edge, observing the backwash.
Then they were through, back into the narrow channel they’d come down earlier.
“Hover turbs?” Dayva wanted to know.
Virtue shook her head. “Wait till we get to wider passage. I don’t want to risk her now.”
The channel widened slightly. Then Virtue heard a sound, the ghost of a thump.
“What was that?” Tao-Jin asked. He peered off what was currently the stern.
It came again, under the engine’s low hum, a ghost of a sound, like something big moving water.
“Dayva—”
“Yeah,” she said, fingers moving quickly over comp. They gained speed in suddenly rolling water.
A distinct thump, then, to that portion of the ship under water, like distant, wrong direction thunder. The Artace rocked.
The brakfish rose, off to port, a great shifting just under the water’s surface as it turned back toward them, scales sheened and reflective, an impressive roll of water cascading from a flip of tailfin big as the Artace.
“Engaging hover turbs.” Dayva didn’t ask if it was okay now.
Just as they gained hover, the brakfish bumped the Artace again. The hover turbs went offline and the ship tilted crazily, sending Virtue, Tao-Jin James, and the heavy boxes of dust tumbling across the deck. Dayva hung on to comp with both hands as the Artace hit the water hard, half on her side, then bobbed back.
Flashes of pain as Virtue took the hull hard in one shoulder, then one of Tao-Jin’s elbows in her side. She got a grip on the hull’s edge and pulled herself up in time to see a great shimmer-scaled monstrosity rising out of the Coreyal, water streaming back from a mouth full of teeth.
Teeth definitely longer than her forearms.
The fish dove into them again, screech of those teeth across the hull and again they rocked hard.
“Virtue!” Dayva yelled and flung the harpoon bow at her. The alloy frame hit one palm; she let go of the hull to scramble for it, then wedged herself into one of the seating hollows. Dayva was trying to get some maneuvering room as Virtue pried off the safety, loaded a dart from the chamber and sighted toward the water as the brakfish came round for another pass.
She squeezed the trigger; the shock of recoil punched through her. The dart sailed through the air to wreak no more damage than a rip in the flirting tailfin. Then she had to hang on through another charge. Her hip took the brunt of the hull this time and she almost went over, drowning in a wave of water and losing track of up from down. A hand got hold of her jump and hauled her back.
James.
He ripped the harpoon out of her hands, turned, sighted, and shot as the brakfish leapt, streaming water. The harpoon stood out of the center of one wide, glassy dark eye as the fish floated on the air a moment before them.
Then another screech of teeth, the ship rocked, and they were thrown back under another drenching. Virtue came up onto her knees, coughing, and found the harpoon under her hands. James’ clone was climbing to his feet over across the deck. She was about to give him the ’poon back, considering his skill with it, when Dayva said, in a tense voice, “Virtue.”
She pointed: another fish was coming down the narrow channel. Another fish.
“Bloody void,” Virtue breathed.
James tugged the harpoon from her grip and fell to his knees, sighting over the hull. Rather than watch to see what damage the clone might do with the ’poon, Virtue flung around to scrabble at one of the seat hollow storage areas. Her fingers found what she wanted quickly, two small chem charges she used for blasting in salvage work.
She turned with one in her hand to see the first brakfish falling back to the water with two more ’poon shafts bristling from the same eye as the first. The first fish hit the water heavily, suddenly graceless, just as the second came for its go at them, mouth open, long teeth bristling.
Her focus narrowed down as her fingers primed the charge. The fish rose and she flung the charge in a sure arc, straight for the dark behind long ivory teeth.
A low-pitched, eeling whine filled the air, and before the Artace had stopped rocking from the last attack, the second brakfish was blown out of the water. A breathless moment later, large pieces of fish rained down. Backsplash washed across the deck, chunky with dead fish and blood; the deck streamed water back into the Coreyal. The smell was atrocious.
Dayva still clung to comp, wet and coughing. James was just gaining hands and knees, having been washed clear across the deck. Virtue, thrown to her back, rolled, found the harpoon bow under one hand, gripped it as she rose, barely conscious of doing so.
She eyed the channel, dripping, her thoughts running ahead and behind, circling.
“Dayva?”
“Working on it.”
“What’s happening?” James coughed the words up with water, climbing to his feet.
“Mother—” Dayva pounded on the comp console.
Virtue’s jump clung uncomfortably, her hair plastered to her cheeks, down her neck.
&nb
sp; “Someone put a lure signal on us,” she said softly.
Dayva looked up. “What? How do you figure that?”
“Brakfish don’t hunt in pairs. And they don’t usually hunt ships unless the ships have a lure signal on them—like they use in the regattas. So, someone planted a lure on us. It’s the only explanation that makes sense.”
She saw the clone’s hand go to the hip pocket of his drenched jump, where the shiral was, a look of horror crossing his face.
As they left the dead brakfish, one floating, a huge raft of scale, the other so much flesh and gore in the water, further and further behind, Virtue regarded Tao-Jin James, standing on her deck, watching her.
“Are you going to shoot me?” he asked.
She cast a blank look down at the harpoon bow still in her grip. Ignore him, she decided, with a desperate, half-rational thought.
“How’s it coming, Dayva?” She went past James to the skiff, unlocked the crank with a savage, left-handed yank, started to lower it. She could smell her own sweat, in the wet jump, and the lubricant in the crank mechanism. Red, red, red, the edges of things, and the center was going dark.
“About ready to go online.”
Virtue heard Dayva, distantly, through deep static.
The skiff hit water with a splash and she waved the harpoon at James’ clone, gesturing down to the skiff she could barely see through red darkness. “Get in.”
Dayva looked over.
He lifted a hand, lowered it, shook his head once. “I didn’t know about the tracer.”
The harpoon was slick with sweat in her grip. “Get. In.”
“Virtue—”
“Dayva, shut up.”
The clone shook his head again. “Captain—”
It’s for your own damn good, she thought, but couldn’t verbalize it. There was too much red; she was going to break apart around it. Holding herself in place was like holding—she didn’t know, but it was hard and it hurt and she didn’t know if she could do it if he didn’t—
“Virtue, what the void are you—” Dayva began, but she put her hand on Virtue’s arm and for a breath, just the thought of a breath, Virtue stopped holding it in and there was a loud crack of sound, a surprised sound—
—then a feel of wind across her wet skin—
—and Dayva was sitting on the deck a few feet away, looking surprised, one long-fingered hand spread over her cheek.
And oh drift, oh void, no—
—and she clamped it back down and forced one sentence out of her mouth. “Get him off my ship.”
Something passed between the clone and Dayva; he set the shiral on the deck and scrambled over the side into the skiff.
He was a dot behind them on the Coreyal, left behind in the dark, when Virtue thought to unprime the harpoon and set it back in the rack. Her hand ached, but it was distant.
There was quiet over in the direction of Dayva, the noisy kind of quiet. After awhile, though, she said, “He doesn’t know the code for the rudder.”
“He should have thought of that before,” Virtue answered.
She picked up the shiral in a hand that only shook slightly. First she found the tiny transceiver that was emitting the infrasonic brakfish lure, pulled it off and ground it into the deck under one foot.
Then she pressed her thumb into the center of the shiral’s cloudy opal eye. It identified her chemical signature and a line of light chorused through the sphere as it cleared to a brilliant, hard-edged depth in which her brother Horatio appeared, perfect tiny miniature in her palm.
“Virtue.” Just that, for a moment, his tiny, perfect image regarding her. “I’d like to you to come home now. I have some reorganizing to do among the associations.” It was his voice out of the shiral, as if he were there: clipped, creamy tones. It made the skin on her back twitch.
“Your unique gifts can’t be comfortable off Piranesi. Surely you see that you’re better off here. Eventually someone is going to put you down like a rabid dog. Oh, and if you haven’t figured it out already, James Twelve brought a nice little fish lure with him. I hope you don’t kill him too messily—or, I’m sorry, have you already?”
“Hold.” She set the sphere down, carefully, though there was red rage in her eyes and arms, tidal as the Coreyal’s engineered sea. Red as Horatio’s reorganizing of Piranesi’s associations.
Several breaths strung like water on air, in the dark, bloody, shoreless place. After a minute she could see again. Her hands shook as if with palsy, and familiar pain twisted, bitter with the unreleased Rage that had been building for the last half hour. That she hadn’t unleashed on Tao-Jin James. Horatio would be amazed and chagrined. Now, though, her hands were shaking, hard. The red washed slowly from the air. She was crying, it hurt so much.
He’d wanted her to unleash it on James. Again.
That became clear in the lucid moments that usually followed a Rage. If she’d torn James’ clone apart, come out of the fit to see what she had done—Horatio would have had her. Murder. Off Piranesi such things didn’t go unremarked.
At the very least she would have been sent to an Aggregate stew; more likely there’d have been regen for the emotional wreckage killing James again would have left of her.
Or shipped back to Piranesi, where she’d be safe from the retributions of relatively sane society. Horatio would have been sure to have that option covered.
It would have been the second time she killed James.
It gave Virtue a moment of cold joy to know how it must vex Horatio that she’d taken her genetic file when she’d skipped out.
“That was your brother?” Dayva had set comp on auto and come to lean against the slope of the Artace’s upper carapace. A puffy swelling marred the dark skin of her angled cheek where Virtue had hit her. Her voice was stiff, eyes slanted away.
Virtue considered her, let her own gaze slide away. “Rearranging the world from his little gravity sink, yes.”
Dayva was thinking, one silvery brow lifted high, still not looking at Virtue, anger and hurt shading her eyes. “You’re engineered?”
“Yes.”
“To what?”
“Kill.”
Dayva barked a laugh, then gave a sharp shake of her head. “Waste of genetic tinkering. Plenty of ways to kill without making a specialty human to do it. Why?”
“Have you ever been to Piranesi, Dayva?”
“Is that the answer?”
Virtue nodded.
“I see.” Maybe she did. “You really going to leave that kid out there in the skiff?”
Virtue shifted away, shook her head.
“What about the brakfish?”
Stretching her arms, shoulders cracking, Virtue shook her hands out. “If he’s quiet, they won’t notice him.” She turned to Dayva and said, softly, “I’m sorry.”
Dayva looked at her finally. “Explain it to me.” She didn’t need to add: or forget this partnership. The words were clear as day without the speaking.
“The Rage is triggered by certain sets of circumstances, particular goads or spurs. Evidence of betrayal will do it. It’s . . . very hard . . . to contain it once it’s triggered. It’s supposed to be impossible. You interrupted me at the wrong moment.” She shrugged one shoulder. “I’m sorry, Dayva. I . . . ” Falling silent, she looked away. “I’d never . . . not for the world.”
Dayva shifted. Then she said, “Don’t do it again. Ever.”
“Never.” Virtue considered whether she could actually promise that, then said, “Dayva, maybe . . . maybe it would be better if you found another gig.”
Dayva folded her arms, stared out into the dark over the water. “I’ll keep that in mind. Stay for now. My choice.” The staccato statements drifted through soft air. Then she said, “Virtue, not my business, maybe—but I talked to that kid some while you were down in the ranga digging dust. I don’t think he knew about the tracer. Or what it is that’s got you so kinked about him.”
“He knows—that, at least. He m
ust. He was raised in my brother’s household and he was being paid, by my brother. About the tracer, you’re right, he probably didn’t know.”
Dayva snorted. “So he’s not a saint. What is it about him, anyway? Still not my business, but you did nearly get me killed—and you hit me. You owe me.”
“Slim payment.”
“I’m a philosophical girl. That’s what you like about me.”
Virtue stared down at her hands, still trembling. “I loved someone named James Xu. My brother didn’t like the influence James had with me. So he triggered the Rage with the original James in the kill path. Tao-Jin is one of James’ clones.”
Silence, the slur of water under hovers, race of wind. Her hair was almost dry, whipping into her face.
“Hido has said that the more primitive human chemical responses are at war with our most advanced bio-technologies,” Dayva said, apropos of what, Virtue wasn’t entirely sure.
“The esteemed Hido has his philosophical head up his ass.” She wiped her hair back and twisted it into a knot. “Anyway, Horatio secured the rights to James’ gene set when he saw what a good control for yours truly the model was. James died . . . I killed him. But Horatio keeps bringing him back.”
She glanced at Dayva as she fisted and stretched her hands, shook them out once more. “He uses them like one-shot kive chips, disposable, trying to get me to come back to be his personal berserker.”
“Mother void,” Dayva said, and that was all for a good minute or two. Then, “But the Megrath Reversal overturned ownership rights on adult-formed clones.”
“Except on Piranesi.”
“Oh.” That probably told her more about Piranesi than she wanted to know. “So what happened to the other eleven?”
Virtue closed her eyes, opened them, said evenly, “He tortured one and sent me kives of it. Others might not have been a close enough match, psychologically, or they failed before full realization.” She rubbed at the back of her neck, the corded muscles tense. “There’s a sixty to seventy percent failure rate.”