Greenshift

by Heidi Ruby Miller

  “Sean already doesn’t like you,” she said.

  A little twitch jumped into David’s jaw thinking that she cared what Sean might think about tonight.

  “And Kenon will never let up about it. Soli would make an official record of every time we looked at one another and say it was part of her archivist duties when we all know she can be nosy. And Geir, well, when he gets back, Geir would actually think it’s about time, considering I told him how much I liked you. Besides, it’s kind of exciting to sneak around.”

  “You confided in Geir?”

  “Of course,” she said, like it should have been obvious.

  David wasn’t sure how he felt about that—not that he didn’t like the other Armadan, even if Geir chose a life outside the fleet. David just found he disliked how every guy around was more comfortable with Mari than he was. And Geir was halfway around the system right now.

  David used his wrist reporter to lower the gangway to the Bard so that by the time they reached it, they could walk straight on board. As he suspected, no one was in sight. Soli and Kenon probably spent the night with their amours and Sean was no doubt brooding in his suite or drinking and dosing in some bar in the Latulip Underground.

  Despite David and Mari being alone, or because they were alone, the apprehension slithered back under David’s skin, putting him on high alert. He finally admitted that it had nothing to do with Mari or being caught with her. Feigning nonchalance, he scanned the shadowed areas around their berth and the next one over. It seemed fine.

  Then the shadows moved.

  Training took over, keeping his heartbeat steady, but readying his muscles and mind for action. “Mari, head inside the Bard.”

  The moving shadows morphed into six figures, all male. Judging by their slate grey workers’ pants and stained shirts, David guessed they were Lower Caste laborers from the dock. Clothing was really the only way he could ever identify Lowers, because to him, they looked an awful lot like any other Socialite, except the homogenized contractors. But don’t say that to any of the old money Socialites from around here—they claimed they could tell just by looking at a person what their genetic background was. Of course, a lot of Socialites only saw what they wanted to see.

  It was then David noticed two contractors in the neighboring berth fifty meters away. Both males stood in the shadow of a dormant cargo off-loader that towered as high as a three story building so he couldn’t quite see the men’s faces, but he already knew who they were. And the clandestine nature of Killian and Ward’s presence said they’d be no help with the ambush threatening Mari and him.

  The dock workers wielded an array of tools from an electronic wrench as long as David’s forearm to simple lengths of chain with massive links. And the men weren’t afraid to brandish the makeshift weapons with ominous intent. Even a half-hearted swing of that electronic wrench could crack a man’s skull in half. The same went for the bone-snapping links in those chains. But it was the hidden dangers that concerned David the most. Whatever they weren’t advertising was undoubtedly nastier than something from a tool chest or construction site.

  Mari curled a hand around his forearm.

  He gently peeled her fingers away and whispered, “Mari, I need you to head for the ship and pull up the gangway as soon as you get inside.”

  “I’m not leav—”

  “Please, Boston.” He used her given name forcefully in hopes she understood the gravity of what he asked.

  She scrutinized the men circling closer to them, then nodded in agreement. He noticed fear in her wide eyes, but she squared her shoulders and walked toward the Bard.

  One of the men, dangling a chain and wearing a grease-stained hat, altered his course to intercept her.

  “You take another step toward her and I will break both of your legs.” David’s sharp tone stopped the man’s advance.

  Mari paused before picking up her pace. Though David watched her climb the gangway, he kept each of the men in his periphery and was aware of their positions. He also noted the contractors finally moved a little closer, taking up prime spectator spots, eager for the fight they had been cheated out of earlier.

  What kind of men let others do their fighting for them?

  “This isn’t your berth,” a man with cropped blonde hair and prominent brows said. He was most likely the leader of this bunch, but maybe only because he looked a few decades older than the rest. David made careful note that the guy held nothing in his hands.

  “Why do you care?” David rotated his left shoulder just enough to keep the hat-wearing worker and his shorter companions in sight. “I doubt the six of you could scrape together enough money for your own ship, so I’m sure you aren’t the ones renting this space.”

  “Armadans are always so tight with money. They think they have more than everyone else in the system.” The blonde man elicited a few mirthless laughs from his cohorts. Though he halted a good ten meters away. David didn’t miss the bulge in his waistline that confirmed the man had a ranged weapon, like an illegal cender or pack of razor discs, which could inflict damage from a safe distance.

  The last two men, more grizzled than their older counter parts, flanked David’s right. That was a bad idea—they had put the Bard‘s landing gear between them and an escape.

  Lots of hard, protruding surfaces on that landing gear.

  He was about to step toward them when a blur of movement came at him from the other direction. Hat guy swung the huge chain at David’s head, the effort bobbling his balance. David ducked and twisted away before the metal links made contact. He kicked backward into the man’s mid-section and knocked him off his feet.

  The amber berth lights overhead glinted off metal back by the landing gear. The grizzled men rushed him with screams that belonged on a battlefield, not an urban dock. One brandished an electronic wrench, the other a sledgehammer. Snatching his first attacker up off the ground, David yanked the man in front of him just in time to take the full brunt of the wrench’s blow. The splintering of a shoulder and clavicle was almost as loud as the man’s screams. It stunned the guy who had swung the wrench long enough for David to shove his human shield into the man and propel them both into the landing gear. Their bodies hit hard and bounced down to the concrete.

  The next man swung the sledgehammer at David’s face. His opponent found out the hard way that Armadans didn’t sacrifice much speed for their bulk. David caught the man’s wrist mid-swing and jammed his fingers between the radius and ulna, pinching the sensitive tendons in a fleet technique used to disarm an opponent. The wrench fell from the man’s grip and clattered to the cement. He connected a lucky left hook to David’s jaw. David responded by forcing the man’s arm by the elbow across his back until he heard the pop of a dislocated shoulder. The man screamed for release.

  The leader ordered the last two men to move in, but they dropped their chains and went for more lethal weapons, a couple of small flat razor discs secreted in their waistbands.

  David swung his screaming shield into the discs’ path. The multi-pointed blades thudded into the man’s shoulder and jaw. He thrashed and pulled at David’s wrist reporter, trying to pry his way out of the Armadan’s iron grasp. Though the reporter cut into David’s skin, he never lost focus and fielded a projectile coming from his left by whirling his human shield around. David’s reporter finally broke free as the barrage of razor discs smashed into the wounded man. The edge of one disc snagged David, leaving a rough gash in his forearm.

  He tore the disc out and flung at its owner, piercing the guy between the eyes and dropping him onto his knees then the dock. David spun around, the shield more difficult to maneuver as dead weight. It may not have been as advantageous as donning his Srmdana armor, but David gave up that nice piece of equipment when he left the Protector. He braced for a third volley.

  Two more men rushed him.

  Did you learn nothing from this guy?

  David dropped the body, snatched up a wrench, and met both chargin
g men head on. They hesitated in their attack, probably from seeing a man two heads taller and fifty kilos heavier than them brandishing a wrench singlehandedly that they could barely wield with both hands.

  There was no hesitation on David’s part as he smashed his makeshift club into the first unlucky bastard’s rib cage, and as the dock worker doubled over, David followed through with a blow down across his back, laying him out face first on the concrete.

  “Shit.” The blonde man’s expletive drew David’s attention to the cender he now gripped in a shaky hand.

  Spinning behind his second attacker, David pulled him in tight against his body, using the wrench to choke him. He was smaller than the last shield, the top of his head barely reaching David’s sternum, but he’d have to do.

  The gunner released an electric bolt before aiming. The shot sliced just above David’s head.

  “Don’t shoot. You’re going to hit me.” The other man’s voice grated in the chokehold.

  The blonde man fired three more times into the sky behind them. David didn’t flinch. He’d stared down cender fire, rifle fire and cannon fire. An aging dock worker with a cender ranked just above rude waiters on the list of things that scared him.

  The gunner turned as Killian and Ward closed in on unhurried steps. “You said there wouldn’t be any voyeurs.”

  Ward fired his cender, a barely discernible hazy blue wake dropping the blonde dock worker to his knees. The man’s weapon clattered to the concrete before he pitched forward onto his face.

  From this distance David couldn’t tell if Ward had dialed down his gun, rendering the man unconscious, or dialed it up for the kill. Still he smelled the ozone and burnt flesh all the way over here, and the hair on his arms was still standing from the surge of static electricity released into the night air.

  David kept tight hold of the man squirming in his grasp, just in case Ward was still in the mood to shoot.

  He aimed his cender at David, no doubt thinking it over. Killian sauntered up to him and said, “I guess we should call in a med team and a prison transport. Why don’t you take that guy off the retired captain’s hands?”

  Ward lowered his weapon, but it took him a good ten seconds before he finally holstered it, and only then because the errant voyeur the blonde man had seen floated closer to the scene.

  The Media, ruining lives or spreading justice for entertainment. For once he was glad of society’s obsession with transparency.

  David pushed the dock worker in Ward’s direction, making sure his hands would be full as David walked away.

  He crunched over pieces of his wrist reporter that were now spewed across the concrete. At least they weren’t bits of his skull. The dock workers, if they even worked here, could have caused him more bodily harm if they had had the foresight to catch him unawares. Or maybe they thought they had.

  David looked back to watch Killian and Ward making arrests and calling in clean up and med crews as the voyeur recorded their every move. They’d come off as heroes, maybe get a bonus from the Embassy.

  Killian called out to him. “We’re going to need a statement from you later. Have a good evening.”

  A sick little thought entered David’s head—if that stray voyeur hadn’t happened by and witnessed at least part of the incident, Killian would be rounding David up, too, either for prison or the morgue. That had probably been the plan. Still might be.

  “That was amazing,” Mari said, peeking down from the top of the gangway. Her heart raced. “Smashing those guys’ heads together. Throwing that one guy around like he was a doll.” Then her praise turned to concern when David stepped into the light.

  “Are you okay? You’re bleeding.”

  “I’m fine.” He pushed the manual control to raise the gangway.

  “What happened to your reporter?” she asked.

  “What happened to you locking yourself safely inside?”

  She ignored his parental tone. “You may have needed help.” She wiped blood from David’s lip with her thumb and examined the nasty gash on his arm. “Come to the med suite. I’ll patch this up for you.”

  “Out of curiosity…” As they walked, he put his uninjured arm around her in a protective gesture, still unsettled that she had been in harm’s way. “What would you have done?”

  “When?”

  “If I had needed help?”

  She searched his expression to see if he was making fun of her, but found his face full of earnestness.

  “I would have called for someone to come… and help.” She giggled a little as she said it, realizing how absurd it sounded out loud.

  “Yeah, you could see those contractors were ready to jump right in,” he said.

  Mari could smell the tell-tale hint of antiseptic in the air before she activated the lights in the med suite. The soft blue of the floor and ceiling cut down on the glare.

  “You didn’t need them.” She willed away the little tremble in her voice and her shoulders. Maybe David would think it was the cold instead of the incident just now, but he was smarter than that.

  He squeezed her closer and kissed the top of her head as they strolled past the green glass cabinets to the surgery.

  “You’ll have to sit down so I can reach you,” she said.

  David sat in one of the floating chairs, which didn’t really float, only looked like it because they were attached to the wall by a support on their backs.

  “Do you get into a lot of fights, like Sean?” she asked, searching the cabinet shelves for disinfectant and mender patches.

  “I haven’t been in a brawl since last year, and even then it wasn’t my idea,” David said. “Fighting is more my brother Ben’s style.”

  “Which brother is Ben?” Mari asked.

  “The one who bugs the shit out of me.”

  “Thought so.” Mari placed all the medical items she needed on the counter beside David, but kept a pair of scissors in her hand. “Maybe I’ll get to meet him one day. Like when you take me to see the forests at your family’s estate.” She hoped the reminder of this evening’s earlier conversation about the beautiful mountains on Yurai would push away the ugliness of the recent violence.

  “That would be nice.” The way David responded sounded like he had already considered taking her.

  She forced herself not to read too much into it and focused on sewing him up. “I’m going to have to cut off your sleeve.”

  “I think the shirt is pretty much a loss anyway.”

  “Well, you looked really nice in it,” she said.

  He gave her a little smile for the compliment.

  “Did you have to do this for the miners often? Perform little surgeries?” he asked.

  “Sometimes more than little ones.” She didn’t like to think about those days of tending to sick miners who barely had anything to live for anyway. They were often worse off than many of the Lowers here at the Hub, little more than indentured servants, paid by the ton. Just work, then home for a few days, then work again. Some even smuggled in their sons to get a bigger load out quicker—for what? A few extra items from the only store around, owned by the mining corporation? She shuddered, thinking that would have been her life…still could be.

  “I was enamoured to a miner, or rather my family arranged the betrothal,” she said, needing to share this information with David because her memories snapped at her in agitation. “I never accepted his proposal, and I’m not sure my family really forgave me for embarrassing them like that.”

  David remained silent so she kept talking.

  “I couldn’t do it. It felt so suffocating there, and not just because the air quality is so bad.” Mari’s voice became low. David ran his palm up and down her back.

  “My sisters are only a couple of years older than me and already have several amours. I was a late start. I mean,” she said quickly, hoping he didn’t pick up on the real implication of her words, “I just didn’t want to get married.”

  “Well, you are still a teenager
,” David said.

  She shrugged out of his touch and put her fists on her hips, a mender in one hand and disinfectant solution in the other. “My age has nothing to do with it. I didn’t want to marry that guy. Or any of the other ones I would have ended up with had I stayed on Deleine. They were nice, hard-working guys, but they were complacent, happy to spend the rest of their lives at jobs they hated.”

  “I’m proud of you for leaving, for following a different path than was laid out for you. That took courage.”

  “Thank you.” The earnestness of his expression took Mari’s breath away. She looked away quickly, afraid he would be able to read her emotions. She had never had this kind of reaction to any man. Maybe because David was so much of a man. Strong, mature, commanding, smart, confident, good-looking—she could list his attributes the rest of the night, but he needed her to sew him up right now.

  “I should put a couple of sutures in here before I put the menders on. The cut’s deeper than I thought. Does this hurt? I can give you a stim patch.” She swabbed the disinfectant over the area again, trying to be professional but unable to ignore the delight of touching David so intimately, of feeling like she was taking care of him. Most of her life someone had taken care of her, she was happy to be the responsible one for a change.

  “It’s fine. Just another battle scar.”

  “Oh, I’ll make sure it doesn’t scar.” Then she asked, “Do you have real scars on your body?” Mari assumed the military had the most advanced healing and reconstructive technology in the system. Even her miners could walk away without many visible souvenirs of their wounds.

  “I kept a few as reminders,” David said.

  “Really?” Mari suddenly felt a little too warm next to David in the med suite. “Can I…see them?”

  “They’re not all that exciting,” he said, but showed her a halfmoon scar near the crook of his elbow. It was only a couple of centimeters long, but she was surprised she had never noticed it before.

  “What did you do?” she asked.