How Dark the World Becomes

by Frank Chadwick

  “The big mistake people make is thinking that just pointing the gun at someone will be enough, that then they’ll drop their weapons and do whatever you say; but they won’t. Trust me, they won’t. If you just point it at them, they will kill you, and then they will kill Barraki and Tweezaa. Do you understand that?”

  She looked terrified now, and I half expected her to start crying, but she didn’t. She nodded.

  “What if . . . what if there are a lot of them?” she asked, her voice trembling.

  “Well—no way to sugarcoat this. If there are more than one or two of them, you’re probably going to die. The real question is what you want the last act of your life to be. Do you want to die sitting in a chair doing nothing? Or do you want to take as many of those murdering cocksuckers with you as you can? Me, I’m inclined toward option two, if for no other reason than you never know—you might get lucky, and even when you go down, you might hurt them enough that they leave the kids alone. But you can’t get lucky unless you give yourself the chance to, and you can’t do that unless you shoot.

  “People say, ‘You’ll do that over my dead body.’ This might be where you find out what that means.”

  And you find out how much of you is real and how much is just good intentions, I thought, but there was no reason to say that.

  She looked down at the pistol in her hand, took a deep breath, and then nodded.

  “You have to go?” she whispered without looking up.

  “Yup,” I answered and stood up. “Gotta go now. As soon as I’m gone, clean up all that broken tile. If they come, and they see the tile, they’ll look up and see the mirror and you. Otherwise, they’ll be focused at eye level and below, and you’ll have a little edge. Okay?”

  She nodded.

  “Okay,” I went on. “If I come back, it will probably be in less than an hour, but if it takes longer, don’t freak out. There’s no script for stuff like this; I’m making it up as I go, so don’t take anything for granted.”

  That was really all, but for some reason it didn’t seem like enough.

  “If I don’t come back, try to get to the Long Shot. I think you’ll be safe with Ping. There’s about twenty thousand in bearer drafts in the lining of my black carryall. You’ll need that. Well . . . good luck.”

  She nodded, still without looking up, and I left. As I walked down the corridor outside, though, I heard the door open behind me, and she called after me, “Please come back safely, Mr. Naradnyo.”

  Well, that was the plan.

  * * *

  I had scoped out the security camera coverage a couple times already—force of habit—and I’d checked it again on our way back from the restaurant. There was heavy coverage in all the commercial spaces, with wide-angle full-spectrum lenses, but in the residential areas the coverage was token at best—cheap little cameras with lots of dead spaces, not that tough to slip past or fox if one of your resume entries reads “cat burglar.” Of course, there were no public security cameras inside anyone’s residence, nor were there public cameras covering the doorways. If you wanted to record your visitors, you could put in your own outside security camera. Rosen, of course, didn’t have one—not even a hidden one, and I know how to find those. It made sense. Any recordings he made of visitors could be grabbed up in a search; if you’re in the revolution business, it’s probably better to not have any records like that lying around.

  I took a deep breath and reminded myself that the people on the other side of this door were intent on murdering two children, and that they would certainly succeed in doing so unless I stopped them right here. Harden your heart, Sasha.

  I knocked on the stateroom door, and I could hear a brief, muffled conversation inside. I almost started laughing. Anyone who thinks you have to be a genius to outsmart the provosts for a couple years has a very idealized view of law enforcement. Of course, if this guy really was in as deep as Turncrank suspected, then sooner or later even the provosts would catch up with him, but later didn’t fit my schedule.

  And even if Rosen was a total idiot, that didn’t mean he couldn’t pull the trigger on Barraki and Tweezaa. In fact, it sort of helped in a way. Smarter revolutionaries would be able to figure out something that might actually make a difference; it took morons to kill little kids for lack of a better idea. People have this notion that really smart people are the dangerous ones, but that’s not always the case.

  The door opened after a minute, and Rosen smiled when he saw me.

  “What kept you?” he said, as if this was his plan all along.

  “We alone?” I asked, and he nodded. Lie number one. I had the silencer clipped onto the Hawker, and I raised it and pushed it into his midsection. His composure slipped for a moment, but then he smiled again.

  “No need for that, friend,” he said.

  “I’m not your friend, so cut the crap and back up.” I answered, pushing him back into the room and closing and locking the door behind me. The layout was the same as our suite, except it was a one-bedroom unit, which simplified things. The closed bedroom door was to the right, so I turned him with his back to it and lined myself up so his head was between me and the peep lens. He was about my height, which was convenient.

  “Gun,” I demanded. He looked at me for a moment, then shrugged, reached into his waistband in back, and brought out a gauss pistol and handed it to me: Zaschaan-made, judging from the runes on the frame, but with a Human-friendly custom grip. Nice long-barrel job like Ricky used to use—had used to try to kill me, come to think of it. It fired 4.4x30mm smart-head flechettes. The nose stayed hard to punch through thin metal or composites, but deformed against liquid or soft tissue, so it would mushroom and tumble inside of you. I put the Hawker away, thumbed the selector on the gauss pistol to burst, and pointed it at him.

  “Three steps straight back,” I ordered, and he did it.

  “You want me to put my hands up?” he asked with a smirk. I didn’t bother to answer.

  “What’s it going to take to make you leave us alone?” I asked, although I was pretty sure I already knew the answer.

  “Just walk away,” he said. “There’s no need for you or Dr. Marfoglia to get hurt.”

  “No, the kids, too. Barraki and Tweezaa.”

  He shook his head and looked away, and almost smirked again, as if amazed at now naïve I was. One thing was sure, he was way too cocky for me to have the only live gun in the room. Carefully, Sasha. Very carefully.

  “We’ll pay you,” he said. “Kolya said you were a criminal. All criminals have a price. What’s yours?”

  There was that name again—Kolya.

  Not that I even considered selling the kids out, but I could tell he was lying now. Lie number two. The only payoff he had in mind for me and Marfoglia was a forty-four-thirty flechette. If you’re ready to kill a couple innocent kids—whether for money or for the revolution—what’s a couple adults, more or less?

  “There’s no way I can get you to leave those two kids alone?”

  “Not unless you kill me,” he said defiantly, and he sort of smiled, knowing I wouldn’t call his bluff. To this day, I have no idea what made him think that.

  I raised the pistol and aimed it at his forehead, and his eyes got really big.

  “No, wait!” he cried out, and he dove to the side, which is exactly what I needed him to do. I fired a six-round burst through where his head used to be and got a really nice grouping around the peep lens in the bedroom door. There was a heavy thud from the other room and Rosen got an odd, panicked look on his face.

  “Abby?” he said. “Abby?” he shouted, desperation in his voice.

  “Abby ain’t there,” I told him. “You’re on your own now, pal. No backup, just you and me. Now, tell me about Kolya Markov.”

  “You killed Abby?” he demanded. He looked around the room, eyes wild, as if he didn’t recognize where he was. He ran his hands frantically up into his hair, and then started sobbing.

  “No, no, no . . . ,” he wail
ed, shaking his head.

  I don’t get it.

  Do people like him think that they’re the only real people in the world? They make these cold, emotionless plans to kill people, maybe hundreds, even thousands of people, as if their victims were just characters on the vid, and then congratulate themselves on how dedicated, or farsighted, or iron-willed, or whatever the fuck they think they are, they are. But when somebody they know falls down, that’s different. That matters! All of a sudden, it’s all that matters.

  He was starting to get hysterical, so I put a six-round burst into his foot to bring him back to reality. He fell to the floor, writhing in pain, and I took the opportunity to stick my head into the bedroom and make sure of Abby. She had her own gauss pistol in her hand, but I hadn’t given her the chance to use it. Abby had been looking though the peep lens when I fired, and the light composite material of the door had shredded and come away in big chunks when the flechette burst had ripped through it, but I could still recognize her from her clothes. I closed my eyes for a second to blot out the sight.

  Willing, enthusiastic child killers, I reminded myself. Not really my kind of gal after all.

  Careful not to step in any of the blood, I came back to where Rosen was writhing on the floor. I sat in one of the chairs by the coffee table, took out the three autoinjectors, and picked out the anti-shock/doper combo. It would deaden his pain enough to make him lucid, and the doper would loosen his tongue. It wasn’t a magic truth drug, but lying would take an effort. I leaned over and injected him in the neck. It took effect almost immediately. He relaxed a little, opened his eyes, looked around, and then slowly sat up.

  “Is she . . . ?”

  “She’s lying down,” I said.

  He sat there on the floor, still kind of crying, but groggy as well, looking around in a daze.

  “Is that my toe?” he asked, pointing to a bloody lump on the carpet. I looked at it.

  “One of them,” I answered. “Now tell me about Kolya Markov.”

  Still disoriented, he looked around for a second, swallowed, and then nodded.

  “Kolya and I knew each other from the Ram Brigade, on Nishtaaka. He was a ferocious fighter, terrifying sometimes.”

  Yeah, tell me about it.

  “We were in different cohorts, so I never knew what happened to him. After the brigade laid down its arms, most of us took the pardons and went home. In my heart, though, I never gave up. A lot of us didn’t. The day is coming when—”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I interrupted. “Kolya.”

  He nodded. “I heard from him again about a year ago. We had gotten covert access to some of the sealed AZ Tissopharm records, and there were some patents. One of them was for an addictive designer euphoric, Varoki-specific . . .”

  “Laugh,” I said, and he nodded.

  “Yes! That’s what Kolya decided we should call it. We had the molecular formula, and he already had an underground resistance organization on Peezgtaan, so we decided that was the best place to start distributing it, since it had been developed there. Sort of poetic.”

  “An underground resistance organization?” I repeated. He nodded.

  Well, Kolya always had a creative way of looking at things.

  “What better way to fund our operation than with a drug we could sell to the Varoki?” Rosen added, and smiled.

  “Let me get this right,” I said. “Kolya Markov was actually financing your operations out here by selling Laugh?”

  “Well, we didn’t have positive revenue flow yet. We were still putting a lot of money into getting the production labs on line, and he didn’t have the distribution operation up and running—there were a lot of difficulties, things you probably wouldn’t understand. But eventually it will fund our revolution.”

  Riiight.

  “He knew I was based here for the better part of the year,” Rosen continued. “As soon as the K’Pook broke J-space, I got a flash transmission through the station’s public comm center. It was in a plain language code, of course, but Kolya alerted us to the fact that the Tissopharm heirs were on the K’Pook, with a woman and a man—a criminal named Sasha—and it was our chance to strike back at the e-Varokiim.”

  Strike back?

  “They’re kids,” I said.

  “Nits breed lice,” he answered, which didn’t mean shit to me—are nits like little lice or something?—except that it didn’t look like I was going to change his mind about this, especially since I’d killed his lady love.

  “So, did you blow the Brukata?”

  “Yes. We’d been planning a move like this for some time.”

  “You did this just to slow us down?” I demanded. That seemed unlikely.

  “No. Your arrival was coincidental. We did it to draw KKa-117 here.”

  Varoki never used to name their commercial ships, but they picked up the habit from us—Terrakultur on the march. They still don’t name their warships. KKa-117 was the Co-Gozhak cruiser in close orbit.

  “Why?” I demanded. He just smiled.

  Oh, great! They were going to take out a cruiser. And then what? I doubt he’d thought much further, but I knew I didn’t want to be anywhere near when that shit hit the fan.

  “How many people you got here on the station?” I asked. “Other than the bald guy in the sushi bar.”

  He looked startled that I’d made his man, but he bristled to cover it.

  “Dozens!” he answered. “And if you kill me, they’ll hunt you down and kill you, no matter where you go. But . . .” The wheels were starting to turn in his head—I could almost hear them grinding and whirring. He licked his lips and went on. “I . . . I can see now that you’re not going to give in on this. There’s been enough Humans killing Humans, and I have more important work to see to.”

  He looked over at the bedroom door, and I thought he was going to start crying again, but he didn’t.

  “Let’s just call a truce, before anyone else gets killed. You, Dr. Marfoglia . . . even the two Varoki . . . can all just walk away.

  Lie number three.

  SIXTEEN

  I knocked on the door, opened it with my key, and called inside, “It’s me, and I’m alone.” I came in and looked up at the mirror. Marfoglia was sitting in the chair, the LeMatt in both hands and aimed at the doorway. I closed the door behind me and locked it, and then turned to look up into the mirror again.

  “It’s okay. It’s all done. I’m back, I’m alone, and you can put the gun down.”

  She was still holding it up in both hands, but she was trembling now.

  “Okay, safety on. Remember how I showed you? Is the safety on? Check the safety: the little button on the hammer.”

  She looked at the pistol then, tried to put the safety on, but she started shaking uncontrollably and the pistol fell out of her hands onto the carpet. I walked in, picked it up, put on the safety, and lowered the hammer. Then I looked at her. She’d buried her face in her hands and was shuddering violently.

  I knelt down in front of her.

  “It’s okay. You did fine. We’re—”

  I reached out to pat her shoulder, and when I touched her, she popped me in the mouth with her fist, really hard, almost put me back on my ass. Then she started flailing wildly at me, sobbing hysterically, and I just brought my forearms up to cover my face and let her go, taking it on my arms and shoulders.

  This was a situation I’d never encountered before, and I was kind of at a loss, so I guess my plan—if I really had one—was to hope she got tired quickly. In the old stories, sometimes the hero puts a hysterical dame out with a clean clip to the jaw. That never entered my mind—and besides, the one time I ever hit someone on the jaw with my fist, they ended up needing dental work, and I really hurt my hand.

  Fortunately, my “plan” worked, and in a minute she sort of collapsed back into the chair, hands covering her face again, and sobbing. The door to the kids’ bedroom opened and Barraki stuck his head out, eyes wide. I turned to him, but I didn’t make any e
ffort to get him to go away. If I did, he’d just wonder what was going on, and probably be more frightened than by the truth, so I motioned him over.

  “Boti-Marr had a bad scare,” I told him, “but she’ll be okay. Come here and give her a hug.”

  I figured she wouldn’t pop him in the mouth. I could already feel my own lip starting to swell up.

  He came over and hugged her, and she sat up to hug him back, wiping away some tears.

  “Help me get her to her bedroom?” I asked him.

  “No,” she said, still crying, but not as hard. “I’m okay.”

  We helped her anyway, one of us on each side, got her to her bed, and then she curled up on her side in a ball, on top of the covers, still crying softly. I put a spread over her, and we left her alone. I closed the door to her room behind us, and Barraki looked up at me.

  “What frightened her so much?” he asked.

  “Everything. I guess it all just built up to the point that it boiled over there for a minute. You know, she gives this impression of being tough and cool and always in control. I just figured something out about her: it’s all a bluff.”

  “A bluff?” he asked, unfamiliar with the word.

  I nodded. “An act, for you and your sister. She’s . . . you know . . . an economic consultant, for cryin’ out loud. A high-end, jump-set executive. She’s no more used to all this shooting and running than you two are. So she’s in way over her head, and I guess she’s just been hanging on by her fingernails all this time. Why? Because you two needed her to. She’s all you guys have got right now.”

  “We have you, too, Sasha.”

  That kind of caught me by surprise, and for a moment there I had a hard time finding my voice. I put my arm around his shoulder.

  “That’s right, pal. You got me, too.”

  * * *

  We moved over to the Long Shot at about three in the morning. Of course, time of day didn’t mean much on the station, except in a pretty arbitrary sense, but the kids were tired anyway, especially after all the excitement, so even the zero gee of the station’s central shaft and the cargo level wasn’t the novelty it had been earlier. Turncrank met us, floating at the cargo lock.