Under Shadows

by Jason LaPier

  Another figure ejected from the smoke, this one with purpose. Arms pointing forward, legs stretching behind. A massive, all-muscle man brandishing a bulky laser pistol. Stripped to nothing but bare yellow skin and colorful tattoos. He took aim.

  Runstom yanked his blaster loose. “Drop your weapon!” With the gun raised, the charge reading glared at him from the back of the piece. Seventy-six percent and not a shot taken.

  The Waster fired, brilliant blue-and-white light screeching forth. The tech had only enough time to turn his head before his body was spun, twisting and burning and screaming. Runstom didn’t wait to see the final result. He fired on the Waster.

  The blaster hummed in his hand, issuing forth its own jagged mess of blue light that went wide to the right of its target. The charge indicator blinked double-zeroes at him. Having used both hands to aim, he drifted helplessly away from the floor.

  “Sonova—”

  “Stanford!”

  The room lurched as he was pushed from underneath. Another blue flash lit up the air below him. He slammed into the ceiling with a grunt, and the useless blaster tumbled from his hands. Zarconi’s body cascaded into his, and then they rebounded. Once again suspended, drifting, not close enough to ceiling, wall, or floor to grab anything.

  The Waster’s flight had taken him all the way to the transport the tech had been working on. With a thud, he managed to grab a handle on the side of it. He shook his gun and yelled something incomprehensible at it.

  Runstom recognized the model: an older military laser pistol. Devastatingly effective, especially in a zero-gravity situation like this, but it generated a great deal of heat and could not be fired in rapid succession. At that moment, tiny mechanisms inside the bulk of it were rearranging heat sinks, prepping it for another shot.

  He could hear the ready-ding across the several meters of distance between them. The Waster grinned and leveled it at him. Instinctively, Runstom had pulled the submachinegun from his back. Squeezed the trigger.

  The blue light missed him, only because his own gun recoiled. It kicked upward with each bullet, and simultaneously kicked back. In the space of a short breath, five or six rounds had given him the sensation of falling backwards. With a short shriek, Zarconi had gripped him tightly.

  They were still drifting, though moving at an angle. Given a few more seconds they would reach the floor. Or they would be fried by laserfire. He looked back. Any ship would do, but the patroller at the rear of the dock already had his ident loaded into it by the control room. No overrides necessary.

  The Waster shook his gun and cursed. A streak of red across one shoulder. At least Runstom had clipped him. He could try again, but didn’t know where the recoil would send him. Other figures emerged from the dissipating cloud at the innermost side of the dock.

  Looking back and forth over his shoulder, he lined up the gun opposite the patroller. Braced it with one hand over the top to keep the upward kick under control.

  “Hold on!”

  He felt Zarconi’s grip tighten. Squeezed the trigger. Short bursts. The patroller behind growing in size at every glance over his shoulder. Until it was on top of them.

  They slammed into the side of it and Runstom felt himself rebound. He twisted and flailed, grabbing only air. Then his body jerked to a stop. Zarconi had him by the strap of the submachinegun, her other hand gripping a handle near the fuel access port.

  He tried to shout, but only a cough came out. She pulled him close, and his body pressed against hers. For a second, met her eyes. All that was visible behind the stained leather wraps. She blinked, showing him her green eyelids.

  Then she released the strap. He grabbed the nearest handle and pulled himself to the top, to the cabin access hatch. It slid open immediately at the touch of his encoded gloves. Another explosion. He didn’t look to see it. Could feel the heat. Close enough. He dropped into the cabin. Zarconi right behind him. Closed the hatch. Strapped into the pilot console.

  “I’m putting the co-pilot console into emergency mode,” he said. “Won’t have access to everything, but it won’t check your authorization.”

  “Okay,” she said, sliding her form into the space beside him.

  “Get the dock to move us to a launch tube.” He tapped furiously, kicking the engines into an emergency pre-start warm up.

  He glanced at the monitors around him. The outer cameras showed the chaos they had escaped. The chaos that would be upon them in another thirty seconds. He flipped off the cameras and concentrated on encouraging the progress meters as they calmly ticked off percentages of readiness.

  *

  The distant pain that had ferried Dava out of consciousness greeted her when she returned. There was a dullness, an evenness to it. Like ice that had melted back into liquid, free to spread through the form of its container.

  She couldn’t move. Well, she could twitch. With effort, she could turn her head. Through panicked thrashing, she discovered her arms could only move at her shoulder, her legs could only bend at her hips.

  “Whoa, Capo.” Half-Shot, appearing through a haze like some summoned demon. “We got you all splinted for a reason. Lights.”

  The world turned piercing white and Dava flinched. The room quickly coalesced in her vision and nausea washed over her. She closed her eyes tight. “Where are we?”

  “Out. On our way home.” She felt Half-Shot’s touch. Checking on her, then fading away. “We’re still on the transport. It’s got a pretty fancy med bay, lucky for you. Unlucky is that it’s only got Warp, no Xarp. So it’s gonna take us a while to get back to base. But that’s more good luck for you, because you need the rest.”

  She opened her eyes the minimum needed to see his face. “The others?”

  “Four ships altogether,” he said with a blurry half-smile that quickly flattened. “When Johnny Eyeball and Freezer showed up with a bunch of our Wasters, we grabbed the pilots and split up. Not everyone got out of course. Waster headcount is thirty-six.”

  Strange that it comforted her. And hurt her. Those saved and those lost – they all affected her. She felt an urge to know names and faces. “You got a list?”

  “Yeah.” There was a long pause and she tried to focus on his face. “Dava … Moses.”

  She sat upright, which would probably have been painful for her had there been any gravity to fight her. Of the names she desired, Moses hadn’t come to mind. As though her default state of acceptance was one where Moses was always okay. Then it all came back.

  She was wearing projectile-resistant armor. Nice and thin stuff, not great against anything explosive or too hot, but plenty good at deadening bullets with its responsive fibers. The impact from the autocannon had still done plenty of damage. She couldn’t tell with the opaque tubes covering her arms, legs, and torso, but she could guess. Bad bruising, broken bones, and probably a few lacerations from where the big gun had managed to penetrate.

  But Moses and Jerrard had no such protection. They weren’t even clothed. The way their bodies twisted in the rain of bullets. Bile rose in her throat.

  “Into this, into this!” Half-Shot jammed a plastic jug to her face, forcing its soft opening around her mouth. Not much came up, but at least she hadn’t booted all over the med bay. Vomit in zero-G would not improve her mood.

  “Where is he?” she gasped when she was able to.

  He looked at her grimly, but she saw resignation cross his face. Like he wanted to force her to rest, but changed his mind. The thought drained all warmth from her chest. If he was letting her see Moses now, did that mean there wasn’t time to wait?

  Half-Shot tapped at the loose straps and pulled her away from her bed. Dava was again thankful that there was no gravity pushing against her battered body, but the stiff tubes meant she was more or less invalid, forced to rely on him to get her around. He navigated her through a central spherical connecting passway. The bay was segmented into small chambers, about eight of them, with doors in the center. They went from hers to another.<
br />
  Moses was in similar wrappings. Where she could see his skin, it was gray ash. She coughed at the sight.

  Half-Shot pulled her to the bed. “The tubes have all kinds of repair robotics in them.”

  Now she could see that there were readouts drifting around the tubes. She realized that her own tubes also had the dancing markings, but not nearly as much as those wrapped around Moses. Graph lines, numbers, progress indicators, and cautions decorated him like some bizarre, poor-taste art display.

  “Dava.” The deep voice rumbled through her like thunder.

  She glanced at Half-Shot, who showed a rare moment of surprise. Like he hadn’t expected Moses to be able to speak, to even be awake. He looked back at her silently, then attached a nearby strap to a hook on her waist to keep her from free-floating. He pressed a comm into her hand and gently pulled her thumb over the button at the bottom of it. She couldn’t even see it because of her limited mobility, but she could at least press the button. Half-Shot nodded to her and drifted away.

  She was quiet until she heard the opening and closing of the hatch. “Moses. I’m sorry.”

  He coughed in short, rasping breaths. Laughter, she realized. “Sorry as shit,” he said. “Nothing to be sorry for. You got us out.”

  “You can make it,” she said softly. To herself, more than to him.

  “Bah, the bots are doin’ all they can,” he said. His eyes were closed. “But they ain’t magic.”

  She twisted her body, and with painful effort, managed to grip his bedside with her free hand. She walked her fingers up the edge until she felt his. Then she listened to his breathing. Deep and steady.

  “What are you going to do when you get home?” she said.

  “What am I gonna do?” More of the laughing cough. “You mean who’s gonna spacewalk?”

  She tightened her grip on his hand. “That fucker Basil Roy, he was behind the ambush. And I know Jansen—”

  “Forget all that, Dava.” His voice found new strength, and hers died in her throat.

  “Why?” she said weakly.

  “It doesn’t matter. I been running around this galaxy for decades. There’s always some motherfucker tryin’ to game me.”

  She let it all bubble up and out. “Moses, wake up! These motherfuckers did game you! They fucked us bad! Half of Space Waste was in prison for fuck’s sake! People died!”

  “Ain’t what I’m talkin’ ’bout,” he said firmly. His eyes pried open to meet her stare, though she could tell it pained him. “You got to think bigger, Dava. I always told you that.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” she said, her voice cracking.

  He closed his eyes again. “What’s most important to you?”

  She swallowed. “You are.”

  “Bigger, Dava. Who am I?”

  “I don’t—”

  “Who am I? Who am I to you? What am I to you?”

  A question she never knew the answer to. Friend. Mentor. Father. But not her father, because she had a father. And a mother. “Family,” she whispered.

  “What about Tommy?” he said, opening his eyes again.

  She looked down. “Please don’t.”

  “What about goddamn Tommy-Gun, Dava?”

  She coughed down on a sob. Friend. Soldier. Supporter. Sister. “Family.”

  “Johnny,” he fired, voice growing louder. “Dan. 2-Bit. Barney. Seven-Pack. Lucky. Jerrard. All the rest of the glorious bastards you risked your goddamn life to break out of that prison! What about them, Dava?”

  “Family!” she yelled. If she could move her arms she would have beat it into his face. “They’re my goddamn family.”

  “Finally broke you,” he whispered, eyes closing. “I knew you had it. Got what I could never get to.”

  “What do you mean?” she said quietly.

  “You love the bastards,” he grunted. “But it wasn’t easy, was it? Not because they’re all bastards, but because you didn’t want to hurt when you lost them.”

  “You don’t love them?”

  A long sigh came out of him, causing a shimmer among the readouts along the tube around his chest. “I tried. But I also tried not to. There is a universe where Space Waste can be a family. But it wasn’t the one I was living in.”

  The past tense grew the hole in her stomach. “Moses, don’t you think they love you?”

  “Doesn’t matter.” His face scrunched up, eyes still closed. “I didn’t build this for love. I built it to break shit.”

  “But you built it.”

  “I built it to kill, Dava. I built a machine of death and destruction. I built it because the human race had gone backwards. Consumerism, conformity. Work, shop, work, shop. We don’t fit. They’re breeding us out. It’s a quiet war, Dava. And I built a loud-ass war machine to fight it.”

  She nodded along with his words. The memories she held, the reasons she joined. Waking up after a long stasis trekking from Earth. Waking to find that they’d jettisoned her mother and father. Sickness. Not welcome in the new world. And then they forced her to live in those domes. A black girl among pale-while ghouls. The children, such bastards. She was a disease to them, rejected by their immune-system reaction.

  So the day the tall, strong, deep man whose skin was darker even than hers came along and winked at her, she knew she’d leave with him. Not yet old enough to be free, but he’d freed her anyway.

  “We keep up the fight,” she said. Her words sounded lame. She didn’t have his fire, his courage; only his anger. His bloodlust. “I’ll kill them. All.”

  He hissed, something between a sigh and a laugh. “I don’t doubt you could. But see, I been thinking lately. For years now. Been thinking about this war I been fighting.”

  “You have to keep fighting,” she tried.

  His bunching face dismissed her. “No, Dava, just shut up for a goddamn minute and let an old man speak his last words.”

  “Moses!”

  “Dammit, Dava!” The eyes came open again and she lost her breath. Everything inside her was sucking away, like her insides were nothing more than the vacuum of space. She froze in his stare. Finally, his face relaxed slightly. “I said I been thinking. Thinking that the reason I ain’t yet won this war has to do with strategy. I mean, tactics, we got them in spades. We can strike smart. We can breach. We can steal. We can destroy.

  “But these are all tiny victories. These are like fixes for a junky. That’s what I am now, Dava. I’m a junky, looking for the next kill-fix. I thought Rando Jansen was gonna help me get into a real strategy. Something long term.”

  “He’s rotten,” Dava managed through a weak whisper.

  Moses grunted. “Probably so. But anyways, don’t matter. Ain’t a war that can be won this way. The way to win is to make a family. To make a home.”

  “We have a home. We’re going home.”

  He laughed in earnest. “Girl, I know you ain’t had a real home, maybe in all your life. But that collection of shit flying through space is just a base of operations. It ain’t no home.”

  “But it’s ours,” she said into her chest.

  “Aye, that it is,” he said. “It’s been good to us. But lemme ask you something: you understand this war of mine, right? What if we actually won?”

  “I – I don’t know.”

  “See what I mean? What does it even mean to win at what we’re doing?” He paused, but only for effect. She wouldn’t have an answer and he knew it. “So I started thinking what’s the best-case scenario here? What would make us happy?”

  She tried to speak but could not. She had moments of happiness. Back at the base, in the bar with her buds. But they were people she kept trying to push away, to keep at a distance. Not true happiness. It wasn’t allowed, not by the rules she lived by. And before, well there’d never been happiness. The domes were pure depression. She had to go all the way back to the days on Earth. Before she understood what kind of shit lives they were living, crammed into filthy shelters. Before she knew that food
and water were more than just different brown liquids varying only in thickness. The happiest moment was the day her mother cried so hard Dava thought she was dying. The day Dava learned that it was even possible to cry from joy. The day they learned they were getting tickets on the Doomed-to-Domed ship.

  “A new home,” she said. The words were hers, but she didn’t know she’d spoken them. She only heard them after the fact, long after they’d left her mouth.

  “A real home,” Moses whispered. His fingers tightened around hers. “Space Waste needs a real home. That’s how we win this goddamn war.”

  They rested in silence. Her floating there with her stiff limbs, him strapped to a bed. The poor-taste art crawling up and down his body. They were silent, lightly flexing each other’s fingers. Assurance that the other was still there.

  His eyes opened. “Dava, there’s something else.”

  “What?” she said, getting close to his weakening voice. “What is it?”

  “The green guy.” The vacuum back in her stomach. Thinking he’s fading away in that moment. Not making sense. Until the next words. “The green cop.”

  She cocked her head. “From the barge, and Sirius-5? The one who stole our dropship? Busted up some ring of corrupt cops?” She remembered following the broadcasts of some of the aftermath after that day on Sirius-5. Developing both respect and contempt for the idealist justice-seeker who’d spent months poked, prodded, and praised by the media.

  “Yes.” Moses coughed lightly, and she drew closer to keep him from overstraining his voice. “I met him at the prison.”

  “Really?”

  “Dava, watch out for him,” he said. He took a breath, pulling deep for the strength for a story. “My brother, Bishop. You never met him. Did you know I had a brother?”

  “No,” she said quietly. It pained her that she didn’t.

  “Bishop, a beautiful man. A Romeo. Fell in love with his own Juliet.”

  “Who are you talking about?”