The beer in this shit hole tasted disgusting. The company was even worse. I stared into the dirty tin mug sitting on the pitted and worn bar top before me and forced myself to drink it.
It was better than the alternative.
Thinking.
Remembering.
Feeling too much.
“Bartender,” I growled. “One more.”
He grunted and filled the mug to the brim. The Claxian could have pointed out I’d had half a dozen such mugs already. It could have clicked its beak at me and told me I was running low on chits. It could have done any number of things, but no one gave a flying flux here on Delphini B.
The Delph was a puss-filled pimple on the arsehole of Zenthian space where they sent the creatures they wanted the rest of the known systems to forget about to moulder in hellish conditions until they wished for their own death. It was an intragalactic cesspit of disgruntled aliens. Not a Zenith to be seen amongst them.
They were sent elsewhere. Wherever they had undoubtedly sent my navigator.
I sighed into the mug and then tipped the rim to my lips and downed the frothy, slightly acidic brew. I almost retched it back up again, but I was low on what passed for chits on this planet, and this was breakfast.
I burped and tasted the shit tonic all over again.
“Nasty,” a cloaked figure said off to the side.
I ignored him. There were two of him, so I was outnumbered, and I really couldn’t have given a shit.
I waved the mug at the Claxian. He clicked and clacked away at me in agitation, and I slammed down the last of my currency. His feather-covered fingers snatched the chit up in a lightning-quick move, and my mug was filled with the elixir of disgruntlement.
Defeat.
Disappointment.
I could go on, but you get the picture.
I’d been here four Standard weeks.
The first week was one fistfight after another until the locals decided I wasn’t worth the effort to flux with. The next week was spent recovering from the injuries I’d sustained.
The last two had been spent trying to forget why I was here. That I’d knowingly killed a member of my crew. That I’d failed to protect my navigator. That I’d abandoned my engineer. That I’d done my duty to my planet and destroyed evidence of our growing technological know-how from the tech-hungry Zenith collective.
That’s not why I was official here, though, was it?
In doing all of that, I’d also taken out half a dozen Zeniths who’d been trying to gain access to my ship. That’s why I was on this shit hole prison planet with no way off it and a lifetime ahead of me fighting for chits and drinking shitty beer.
Six counts of murder.
Six consecutive life sentences on Delphini B.
I took a decent mouthful of the beer and grimaced.
“I hear you’re the man to ask for a favour,” the cloaked creature beside me said.
I said nothing.
“That you do…things for chits.” He nodded toward my beer. “For beer.”
I took a swallow of said beer and kept silent.
“I need a being disappeared.”
“I’m not that kind of hire.”
“What if I told you, I could get you into the Delph’s low-security area.”
“There is no low security area.” This was it. For the rest of my life.
And I didn’t even feel like I was being hard done by.
I deserved this.
My tongue rolled over my right rear molar, but when the sensor activated, no voice sounded out inside my head.
I did hear other voices on occasion, though. Remembered voices. They haunted me. Zy’s shocked yell when I ordered the self-destruct that would kill Doc and destroy the Harpy. Odo’s stunned sounding “Captain?” No drawl. Just disbelief that I’d do it. Actually order the death of a member of our family.
Cassi’s goodbye to me. Non-judgemental. Just Cass. AIs don’t judge. Even third-gen AIs. They do as instructed and calculate the possible outcomes for you afterwards.
But there was no afterwards for Cassiopeia.
For the Harpy.
Or for Doc.
Flux! I needed more beer.
“This man, this human, is doing bad things,” the cloaked figure murmured at my side. “Things decent beings don’t tolerate.”
His English Standard was good. Barely an accent. But he wasn’t human. His shape outlined beneath the cape was clue enough. But the way he said ‘human’ sold me on his alienness.
Rhodian, I thought.
I flicked a gaze across the space between us to his hands. He was missing a finger, so he wasn’t a synth. I’d seen synths here. But they kept to themselves and everyone else sure as shit kept away from them.
I wondered what life on a shit hole planet like Delphini B was like for an artificial being. At least they didn’t have to drink the shitty beer.
I downed the last of mine and stood up. I was out of chits, and this Rhodie was shitting all over my buzz.
The room spun. The corrugated tin walls warped in and out as if Cassi was playing a trick on me and messing with the gel on the Harpy’s bridge.
But this wasn’t the Harpy, and Cass wasn’t here, so I took a step away from the support of the bar.
And fell flat on my face in the dirt.
“I can see I’ve made a mistake,” the Rhodie grumbled and slipped off into the twilight.
“Bye!” I offered with a wave of my hand as I licked scum and crud off my lips and chin. I rolled over and stared up at the ceiling of the hut that constituted the best little bar and whorehouse on the Delph.
“Hey, sailor,” a female voice crooned next to my ear. “You need a hand?”
Fingers rummaged deftly through the empty pockets of my worn jacket and then started patting down my trouser pockets one after the other in quick succession. One got a little too friendly, and I laughed.
“Sorry, love,” I slurred. “Think I’m beyond that kind of fun right now.”
“And you’re skint.” She departed much as the Rhodie had.
“Pick self up,” the Claxian behind the bar said in amongst a flurry of clicks. “Dirty floor.”
“It is a dirty floor,” I agreed.
“No. You dirty floor.”
“Give me a minute. Maybe ten.”
“You have five.”
And just like that, I was remembering again.
I wanted to curl into a little ball and weep. I managed to curl my legs up to my chest, but the Claxian wasn’t having any of that. A clawed foot kicked me in the stomach and then feathers tickled my neck as he grabbed the collar of my jacket and hauled me to the entrance of the bar.
“Alright! Alright! I’m going,” I said and struggled out of his hold.
Claxians weren’t strong, but they were mean. I broke his hold and stumbled away, leaving the shitty joint under my own steam.
The world spun around me but even drunk I’m not an easy mark. I’d proved that a time or two over the past four weeks. The shadows watched me with wary eyes and the occasional hungry ones. But they soon lost interest. If I was walking — stumbling — away from the best little bar and whorehouse on the Delph, then I was out of chits and not worth bothering.
Tomorrow, I’d have to seek employment. Or what passed for it on this rat-infested rock. Even hangovers required food at some stage and nothing was free on the Delph.
I managed to make it to a shack I’d been using the past couple of nights, but some fluxhead was already there and wielded a metal bar at me. On a good day, I would have charged at that. Today was not a good day.
Too many memories.
Maybe it was the anniversary-like feeling one month felt like. The fact that a page on a New Earth calendar had been turned since I’d lost my crew, my ship, and Cassi. It had required a toast. Not that I’d toasted the occasion. But the beer was still very much in my system, so I raised a hand to the empty sky, the stars beginning to twinkle above in impotent temptation, and said, “Here�
�s to the Harpy and her crew. May they be remembered fondly.”
Then I sat down with my back to a rock and closed my eyes.
It was a stupid thing to do. Only idiots and drunkards sleep out in the open without a weapon in their hand. I had weapons. Weapons even the nimble fingers of a whore couldn’t find. But I hadn’t bothered to get one out where it would do me any good should I get jumped in the middle of the night.
So when the rope tightened around my neck and my back hit the dirt, and I started to get hauled backwards through the grime of what made up the central street of the biggest township on the Delph, I had nothing to cut the fluxing thing with.
My hands scrabbled to loosen the coarse material from around my throat. I gagged and struggled, my head pounding, my eyes watering, my gut-churning. And then, hey! My heart decided to work overtime, and my chest began to ache.
Panic ensued as dirt and stones and piss, and flux knows what else worked its way into every crevice I had. I couldn’t breathe properly anymore. I could feel my eyes bulging. My throat felt raw. My lungs burned. My ears were ringing, but I could just make out the guttural grunts of whoever had decided payback had been earned.
I’d pissed off a few people in the limited amount of time I’d been here. I have a knack for getting on the bad side of creatures from all over the galaxy. Evidence of such a character trait was obvious in my current surroundings and the predicament I was now in.
The arsehole trying to strangle me in such a public way was clearly one such being I’d offended. I couldn’t see who it was. But I didn’t need to, to know I was in trouble.
Sanity filtered in through the lack of oxygen, and I started to fish around inside my shirt for a knife. It was taped to my abdomen, not in place a whore would look for money or anything else knife-like.
The tape was good. I hadn’t wanted the knife to slip and chop off any body parts I was fond of. So it took a few efforts to release it. Plus, you know, not being able to breathe and being in a full-on panic wasn’t helping.
But I just managed to rip the thing off along with several hairs and a good portion of the upper layer of my skin when the rope changed angles, and I was suddenly hanging from a tree branch, my feet a couple of centimetres off the ground.
Those couple of centimetres might as well have been a chasm because I couldn’t stretch my toes far enough to relieve the tension on my neck and throat.
And the world was starting to go dark.
I twisted one way and then the other, and my arm felt too heavy to lift, but I gave it a damn good try. The knife knocked against the rope but didn’t part the strands, and then I tried again only to have a long-fingered hand wrap around my wrist and pry the knife from my grip.
My arms fell down, uselessly at my sides. I opened my mouth and closed it a few times like a fish out of water; blinked my eyes too many times to count to try to clear my blurry vision. I wanted to look the fluxing bastard who was killing me in the eyes.
Two inky black orbs stared back at me out of a hood that hid most of his face.
“Zenith,” I mouthed.
He said nothing. Just watched me silently suffocate.
I’d made a few enemies on Delphini B. But none of them had been Zenith because Zeniths weren’t imprisoned with the scum of the universe. They were better than that — even the criminal ones.
But I’d also not made any friends.
I had a tendency to kill my friends, so making more seemed like a really bad idea when I first got here. I kinda wished I’d managed my grieving process a little better. Maybe the Claxian barman would take pity on me. I had spent a fair few chits in his place of employment.
But he wasn’t one of the faces I could make out in shadows of nearby alleys and buildings watching this lynching. Most of them meant nothing to me, but one seemed vaguely familiar.
His cloak was more so.
The fluxing Rhodian who I’d turned down at the bar.
He met my frantic and pleading gaze and then silently turned away without a show of emotion.
For a moment, I felt more alone than I had ever felt in my entire pathetic existence. And I hadn’t even known the guy’s name. Or who he wanted me to kill. If only, eh?
If only I’d heard him out.
If only I’d not been fall-down drunk.
If only I hadn’t been carrying an asteroid-sized rock of guilt and despair and condemnation around with me.
Well, I thought bleakly, if this was to be my end, perhaps it was fitting.
The Harpy was gone.
Cass along with it.
And Doc. Shit, the doc was dead because I’d followed orders.
I’d thought my days of following orders were well and truly behind me. But once a Jameson always a Jameson, it seemed. I couldn’t bleed that honour and loyalty out of me.
Flux. What a mess.
The hooded Zenith watched on, immobile, silent, patient.
Turns out asphyxiating by hanging takes longer than you think. I swung around, my limbs heavy, my eyesight dimming, my chest a ball of fiery agony.
I couldn’t even relieve it with a moan.
Tears coursed down my cheeks and dripped off my chin and jaw. It was an indignity that I could have done without. I think I might have even pissed myself.
The ignoble end of Kael Jameson, Captain of the Harpy.
I closed my eyes. I let go of whatever was holding me, tethering me, to this plane of existence. I didn’t believe there was another plane I’d ascend to. You get one shot at this life, and I’d screwed up mine.
I thought of Cass and Odo and dear fluxing god, Doc.
And I thought of Zyla.
Where was she? Was she dead? Was she being tortured like she was being tortured two doors down from my cell on Ceres? Had she told them what they wanted to know even if it wasn’t the truth? Had she kept her secrets?
I’d never know and for some reason that sucked.
My body started to go numb. Release was a blessing. I’d had enough of this dancehall. What I wouldn’t have given for a plasma gun.
Something sizzled in the air. Shouts sounded from so far away. I felt heat which was puzzling because moments before I’d felt nothing.
And then my body came apart as every single bone in it fractured. Or, at least, that’s what it felt like hitting the dirt. My hands acted of their volition. Maybe survival is hardwired into us. I tore at the rope around my neck, which was miraculously loose enough for me to get grubby fingers beneath it.
And then I sucked in life-giving air which burned all the way down my windpipe.
I gasped and hacked and spat and heaved; my body wracked with agony, my vision blurred with heated tears and black spots which had nothing to do with my relief.
And then I heard the sound of plasma rifles, or maybe just one rifle; it was hard to tell because whoever was using it was mightily pissed off with the state of things.
The cries of desperate prisoners started to reach me through the thinning fog of near-death, and I could just make out some shouts of vengeance. In Earth Standard.
“You wanna a piece of me?” the human male shouted. “Take that! And that! And what do you think of that? Don’t like it? Take it up with the committee!”
I shook my head, urging my vision and senses to return to normal. Or as close as they could after eight or so mugs full of Delphini ale. And having been strung up to die with my neck squeezed into a noose made of coarse Flexi wire.
Slowly the world came into focus. Reality returned. Recognition slammed into me.
Odo stood with his legs shoulder-width apart, plasma rifle in one beefy hand and a mini-railgun in the other that somehow still didn’t dwarf the size of his enormous mitts; dirt and dust clung to his boots and worn trousers. I stared at the hem of his pants for too long, cognition sluggish.
“Now would be a good time to get up off your arse, Cap’n,” he drawled and shot at a shadow as it shifted.
“And go where?” I asked, my voice a rasp.
&
nbsp; He spared me a look and then splattered the side of a building with plasma fire.
“Where do you think? Off this Godforsaken shit hole of a planet.”
“No ships.”
“How the flux do you think I got here?”
I stared up at him, a strange and bizarrely unwelcome sensation seeping into me. Hope.
I didn’t want to trust hope. I didn’t want to let it in. But it’s a slippery and clever adversary and damn near impossible to deny once you spot it.
“Please don’t tell me you left it where others could find it,” I managed to grumble as I staggered to my feet.
Hey, no stumble! Life was looking up. At least the last few minutes had sobered me enough to stand without falling down on my arse.
“Camouflaged.”
We could do camo. But it was expensive. The Zeniths were better at it than the rest of the galaxy.
“Shit,” I said, drawing a weapon. “Who did you rob?”
Odo laughed, a booming, crazy sound that thundered into the street as loud as the railgun.
“Didn’t steal it,” he said, starting to walk backwards down the street, still firing his weapons. “Borrowed it.”
I grimaced. Wasn’t I in enough trouble with the Zeniths already?
“Don’t worry, Cap’n,” Odo said cheerfully, enjoying his sojourn onto the prison planet fully armed. “I got this.”
I doubted it. I really did. But I wasn’t about to look a gift horse — or a gun-toting engineer — in the mouth.
“OK,” I said, not sounding particularly enthusiastic. “Lead on!”
“Haven’t had this much fun in ages,” Odo remarked and blew up a hut.
Chapter Five
Odo hadn’t borrowed the racing pinnace; he’d hired it. That’s what he explained as we dodged an ever-increasing amount of desperate prisoners, making our way to wherever he had stashed the unlikely rescue vehicle.
“Just enough room for two,” he said with a wink. “It might get cozy, Cap’n. But when have we ever shied away from sharing things?”
“You’re the one who likes double dates,” I growled softly.
“More the merrier, I say.”
I’d always thought that Odo was compensating for something. It wasn’t his size. He had size in abundance. It wasn’t his prowess; I’m embarrassed to admit that I have heard the compliments the ladies have given him on occasion.
Absolute Zero (The Sector Wars, Book 1) Page 5