He just sighs, looking down the barrel. “You a cross,” he says. “You’re good for food anywhere. Haven’t you heard? You rule the galaxy now.”
“That don’t help me on Swiney Niney,” I say.
“I can get some meat for you, but you swear to get away. I can’t afford trouble with a cross.”
“What kind of meat?”
“Matters, does it?”
“Not really,” I say, and lower the gun. “As long as it was breathing once and it’s salted now.”
He scuttles off.
This is the business of being a smuggler—you’re always going to pretend to be a cold bastard. And something has Palthaz spooked evil, enough that he isn’t acting like a smuggler should act at all.
So I follow him.
What? This scab is obviously protecting one evil catch. The crickets give good work, but if I can go into mid-galaxy without fear of being conscripted, then Palthaz is a better bet.
Palthaz has done a few legitimate jobs carrying Imperial matter. And apparently being a cross is now a ticket to respectable. I still can’t get that through my head. I could go mid-galaxy, if I wanted to.
All the way to Irithessa? Why not? See the capital of the Empire. Will we even call it the Empire anymore? I could wander around them museums, with the remnants of the old galaxy. I could see me a couple of plays, like a lady. I could drink as much as I want and have some real nice times with fancy boys and girls.
Palthaz scuttles into a little tunnel that runs under the hill of green moss. On second look, it en’t really a hill. More like a clump of roots, from some tree that’s long been cut down. I en’t dumb enough to go into the tunnel after him, but if I eyeball the thing right, there’s a gap between roots.
I crawl in, scraping my back, squeezing through a thick layer of soil and between two monstrous roots. I squirm on past a big root, and then another, until I see light coming from below. The roots interlock here; a set of rafters for some kind of hidey-hole. Seems like it would be a great spot for a smuggler, but a few things are off—the place is wet, brown water dripping from above (and soaking me, as if I didn’t have enough sweat doing so already), and it stinks like that Necro-Thing’s armpit. Any smuggler who cared about his goods would have dehumidified the place and cleared it out a bit. This is more of an animal’s burrow. This far underground, Palthaz shouldn’t have to worry about lighting the place up bright, either. But he doesn’t have good light, just a few glowing lamps.
“I need some of the food,” Palthaz says. “Bargaining.”
Another voice—young man, by the sound of it—says, polite as you please, “I’m sorry, but we need as much food as we can take.”
“You’ll do fine on protein packs. Learn your place, boy—you en’t a damn blueblood no more.” That near-panicked note in Palthaz’s voice is now blending into anger.
Another voice. Young girl. I squirm around for a look, get lower in the roots until I can see. There are three humans down there with Palthaz. Tall guy, probably about sixteen, on Imperial reckoning. Girl, younger, maybe ten, and little boy, maybe five. They are dirtier than even I am, and haggard, but the clothes they wear are easily real cotton. Before they crawled into this hole, those clothes were evil expensive. Bluebloods on the run.
“I’ve got a cross on my tail, Quinn!” Palthaz spits the words out.
The teenage boy draws back. “What?”
“If I didn’t owe your papa my freedom . . . this en’t worth those damn crosses!”
Did Palthaz wrong the Resistance or something? He’s muttering now, and I can’t hear it. The Resistance couldn’t afford to make enemies of smugglers, last I checked.
“We’re safe, though,” the young girl says. “Right? The machine is still masking us?”
“Long as it works.”
So, this is the moment my luck for the day decides to keep on going the way it’s been going. I shift around in those roots to get a good look, but the problem with those kind of roots, in swampy ground, is that they shift with you. Like now, when they shift me right out into Palthaz’s secret chamber.
Palthaz does fire this time. Good thing he’s spooked; he missed even at point-blank. I jump up and shove Cade’s gun in his face. “Not a move or you get two eye patches!”
Another barrel rams my back, between my ribs. The teenage boy says, “Don’t move, cross, or I’ll kill you like you deserve.”
-4-
Araskar
THE MOONS OF KEIL are all fume and furnace; artificially imposed atmosphere, just enough to keep running a weapons manufacturing plant that makes the Dark Zone seem friendly. The air is reverse-cell oxygen that tastes like metal; the fine mist of mud and blood, added to the smoke, almost improves it.
From our muddy pit, the munitions plant looms on the horizon, taking up the sky, stacks and towers upon stacks and towers. Up above a gas-waste ship took a hit and the air itself is still burning, streaks of fire catching in the sky. It’s exactly the kind of thing I hoped to be done with by now. Nope, still in the shit. Only now it’s not for the glory of the Resistance, it’s for the glory of consolidation.
Doesn’t have the same ring, does it?
“Sir!” Helthizor, fellow veteran of Irithessa and my new second in command, runs back down the hill, zigzagging, clutching his rifle in a ragged arm. “Must be an entire batch of Marines up there. Stripped of their badges, but definitely Marine-quality crosses.”
“A whole batch.” I look around at my boys and girls. Squad of fifty, now down by ten. One terrifying planetfall, two days of hard hiking through slaglands, where anything but a vat-grown cross would be poisoned, and here we are, well and truly in hell. “We have the advantage in brains.” No one comes out the vats dumber—and tougher—than an Imperial Marine cross. I hold up my comm. “Hold, Helthizor. They don’t see us yet.”
Helthizor collapses next to me, in the mud. “I don’t see how we can finish this mission.”
“Keep your mouth shut if that’s what comes out,” I say. I look around the squad, my little slugs, my reasons for living. Joskiya meets my eyes. Just last week, she passed her translator test. Was in for a promotion, and well deserved, to intelligence, but she passed it up in order to go into this hell with us. I look around and I see a good thirty kids who could have lived long lives elsewhere but took the chance on the Vanguard. I see ten others who have lived through way too much to die here.
All in the name of consolidation.
I grab my comm and signal Terracor, the high-and-mighty Firstblade, head of the Vanguard, and the biggest shit in space. Might be intercepted, so I’m bouncing the wave off a couple of our different signal points, and it takes a minute to register. “Blindside, this is Darkside, you copy?”
A minute later. “Speak clearly, Darkside.”
I try to make that fake tongue enunciate. “We got an entire batch of Marines with the suborbital guns. I need support, and I need it now.”
“Not until you make a pickup zone.” I can practically hear Terracor shaking his head, and it’s only the delay in the communiqué that keeps him from interrupting me like always. “They’re running targeted EMPs, flame-sheets, and nuke-busters, and they can run them as long as that factory’s working.”
There’s only one answer to that. “Understood. I guess we’d better shut down the factory.”
“No one will judge if you pull back,” he says. “I called for a planet-cracker.”
“There’s a hell of a lot of innocent folk on this moon,” I say. “I won’t crack it.”
“Mostly humans,” Terracor says. “We don’t need the moon.”
I shut the comm off. Terracor’s useless once he gets on the subject of humans. Seems like all my superiors are. I get that the bluebloods were all humans, but not all humans are bluebloods.
I look back at Helthizor. “Any chance you caught the make of their big guns?”
Ten minutes later, I’m telling all of them the orders, watching their faces as they all realize that t
his is probably it, the mission that ends them.
Irony continues her legendary career as a cold bitch. Being vat-cooked crosses, my freshly trained slugs look, for the most part, exactly like my dead friends. Helthizor has the same template as my batch-mate Barathuin, that same heavy set of shoulders, young-looking face, and for all that he’s not the swordsman Barathuin was, they even hold their blades the same. I was with Barathuin when we picked our names. We lost our virginity the same night. He’s gone, and here’s his replacement, about to get killed again. Joskiya looks just like Karalla, she who carried around that projectile weapon for years and never got to use it.
Almost makes you think the Empire had it right, the way they don’t give their crosses names.
My hands are shaking. I close my eyes and think of the little pink pills. Just keep these slugs alive, and you can go back to the music.
“Helthizor, you wait for the signal, and then you bug on up the hill too. No tougher than crawling up the Bastard,” I tell them, referring to the hill we trained on back on Irithessa. “Be glad I made you do extra sessions. Stamp your boots and open your sheath.”
They repeat it. “Stamp your boots and open your sheath.”
I really don’t think this will work.
We zig and zag up the muddy hill, until I can see the emplacement just above us. Three big guns, shipbreakers, meant for suborbital heavy fire. As Helthizor said, they’re Keil standard make. Oh, and there’s also every other kind of gun you could imagine—gatling, rifles, rockets, good old pistols, and each Marine wears a scarred soulsword. The mud gleams red, reflecting the shards in the guns that are heating up.
I signal Salleka. She’s covered herself in mud, and squirms through the red-lit ground slowly, toward the first of the big guns. By some miracle, the Marines don’t spot her, so she just has to squirm through a little wire—those EMPs make it so a shard-field won’t stay up, so the Marines are only guarded by old-fashioned thin wires.
I sit there and hold my breath. I would go myself, if there weren’t so many rules about the Secondblade doing things like that. Still feels wrong to let these kids take all the risks.
Time for Joskiya. She’s even muckier than Salleka, and she squirms along, real close to the ground, just like a worm in the mud—but one of those Marines spots her and opens up. He gets her right in the head. The shard flashes bright red, takes a divot out of the mud, tosses her brain-bits everywhere.
Kid should have taken that promotion.
The Marines are searching for us now. I signal Salleka—she’s alone out there now—and I hiss, “Fire!” into the comm. From below, Helthizor sends a jet of fire arcing across the sky; from the Marines’ perspective, it could be a low-level flare-up from the gas-waste ship, or an attack. They fire over us, at his position, and Salleka scrambles under the heavy gun; working quick, she breaks open the panel underneath.
Keil guns, even the big shipbreakers, are cheap. Only takes a few crossed wires to blow one up.
My third, Iniyor, crawls through the mud toward the second gun, past Joskiya’s body, but another Marine has his eyes open, and he sees her and hits her, leaves her wounded, moaning in the mud—maybe dying, maybe alive—if we don’t make some gains, the med bots won’t be able to figure it out.
They change the direction of their fire, too close to our location, kicking mud up into my eyes. But Salleka’s finished with the first big gun; she slips away into the mud, over the barrier and toward the second gun. She gets tangled up going back through that wire. Not moving fast enough.
The big guns all have to go, or this moon gets cracked, and us with it. So I stand up.
They turn their fire, and I run, and the only thing I have to knock those shards aside is my damn soulsword, but my little slugs stand up and cover me, firing enough that they take out a good chunk of the Marines. I slide in under the second big suborbital gun just as the first one goes.
Salleka did good work. The first big gun blows all its artillery-grade shards and takes all the Marines around it to pieces. I get the second one wired well enough before a shard blasts away a good chunk of the synthskin on my bad leg. I stand up and it’s close quarters; I immediately lock a soulsword with some Marine who has a death wish. I push him hilt-to-hilt and then I turn him around, shove him against the gun just as it blows.
Artillery-grade shards break apart from the big gun, hit the Marine, rip apart his armor, rip apart his skin. He shields me fair well. I go flying, holding the soggy meat that was the Marine’s body, and I land in a mess of weaponry, my ears ringing, my skin burning. The third big gun has toppled over. I lash out with my soulsword, grab my pistol. Can’t see much, or hear a thing. I’m just striking at nearby shapes until one of my squad gets behind me and pulls me down the hill.
“Stay down, sir,” says the fuzzy voice of one of my slugs.
“Hell no.” Through my blurry vision, this slug looks like Rashiya. No, can’t be Rashiya. Rashiya had a unique face, home-grown.
“Sir?”
“I’m not dead yet!” I stand up and shove my body forward.
It’s all grit-work from there. Enough Marines are left that we have to try and cut them off from the weapons depot, and there’s plenty of sword-to-sword, plenty of shards in the head, but my little slugs are tougher even than these tough bastards.
One Marine gets away, goes up the hill toward their bunker. I chase him, for all that my vision is still blurring and the metal bones of my leg are exposed. I chase him right into the dark bunker. Stupid. Once I get in there, he’s holding a charge and it’s flashing red, lighting up his face.
He’s older. Mess of scars and wrinkles. First time I’ve seen an Imperial cross who lived more than a few months.
He doesn’t throw the charge. “Why?” he asks.
I raise my pistol.
He talks again. “Your leader has sold us out to the devil, boy. All to get rid of a few humans.”
I keep my pistol trained on the guy. If he throws that charge, we’re both dead. If I shoot him, I might get out in time. But . . . “You got information, you can come in.”
He laughs and shakes his head. “I’ve been to the Dark Zone. I’ve looked the devil in the face. Your John Starfire is no different. You watch, boy. It’s not going to end at bluebloods, or even at humans, not till the whole galaxy goes dark.”
He presses the activator and throws the charge.
I catch it and throw it back.
I toss myself backward in time for the bunker to blow, and roll down the hill, fetching up against some nice sharp rocks.
Not dead yet.
* * *
We’ve almost made the place presentable a day later, when Firstblade High-and-Mighty Terracor comes to see me. We’ve got pets—local scavengers, equal parts black feathers and thin scaly tail, tearing into the flesh still left after we burned the bodies. That’s the kind of life that finds a foothold on a weapons-making moon. We’ve got bunks—in the mud away from the depot, given that we’re still sitting on a mountain full of shards, and of course, the latrines are properly stinking. You’d think, with all the work that folk do in the vats, someone could make a cross that didn’t have to shit. It’s as close to a home as I ever get.
Terracor’s face is its usual scowl above the black beard. He sits down across from me, and doesn’t even take the rations bar I offer. It’s a good thing I just came down from a good five-hour session with the music. I can about stand his cold-ass face.
“Scored you a weapons deposit,” I say. “You could say thank you.”
“I’m not going to thank you for taking this kind of risk,” he says.
“The Vanguard always takes point,” I say. It’s how they got their reputation. Terracor wants me to pull back a bit, manage the missions from the ship’s deck, but I’m not about to do that—I would have to take double the drugs I am already taking to live with myself.
Terracor sits next to me. “I’m worried about the human,” he says. “The owner of these weapons
.”
“Someone I should know about?”
“Formoz of Keil. Head of Keil Quality Vats.”
“I know that name,” I say. “That’s the fella who diverted my whole batch to the Resistance. Sent a good number of the crosses from his vats to freedom. I ought to shake his hand.” It takes a minute to register. “You telling me that this—all this—was owned by a sympathizer?”
“He’s dead,” Terracor says. “You can’t shake his hand.”
“Wait, why the hell did we attack a facility that was owned by a sympathizer? Why were there Imperial Marines protecting it?” He doesn’t answer. “I asked you an important question, sir. I have a right to—”
“I’m not convinced I can trust you, Araskar.”
Funny thing: Terracor comes from my same template. Only his thicker beard and a scar on his forehead mark him apart. But I’ve never had any of my slugs mistake us, because I could never look that much of a cold bastard, calling in a planet-cracker for one weapons depot.
“I suspect, sir”—I only call him that when I want to grate his skin—“that you are under orders to tell me the truth about this mission.” And if he won’t, the Resistance be damned, I’m taking my slugs and going home.
He stares at me. One of his eyes is synth, vat-grown replacement nerves; you couldn’t tell. “Formoz of Keil, who owned this facility, had high-level intel. My orders were to secure the moon by whatever measures the Vanguard could take.” He sighs. “But, apparently, Formoz bugged out in an escape ship, right when the battle began, and was shot down by some random gunner. So he had some kind of intel, leaked from levels even above me, and now we have no idea.”
These pieces are not coming together. “Terracor, this Formoz was a supporter of the Resistance. And you’re telling me that we attacked his own facility, charged in, and— Dark take me, did he actually hire Imperial Marines to protect him from the Resistance?”
“You need to stop asking so many questions, Secondblade.”
I’m too angry to shut up. “Tell me there was a good reason for today, or I walk.”
Starfire, A Red Peace Page 3