Damn kid. Damn me, for taking them out of that hole.
Shards fly everywhere. In a place like Swiney, where just about everyone is doing a scabby deal, one death trips every trigger finger. I hate it, but I have to drop Quinn’s dead body.
Me and the kids run from the firefight. En’t never run like this, trying to make every stride longer. Z runs right next to me, loping strides eating up the soupy ground, and then he’s staring back at me, because he’s pulled ahead. “Run!” he says—well, it’s more like a roar—“You soft meat, run!”
Toq, the boy, stumbles and falls, and his sister, holding his hand, goes down with me. Kid just saw his brother die, and not even a soul gone free, but half sucked up into some crazy cross’s soulsword. And Kalia is crying. And the ship en’t getting any closer. And I’ve got just a few charges left in Cade’s gun.
And—gray-clothes is chasing us.
I grab the kids, hoist them to their feet. Z swings Toq up onto his shoulders like a sack, and we run.
In a place as shady as Swiney Niney, there’s a couple thousand ways in and out of the port. Folks build enough private tunnels, side tunnels, hidden trapdoors, and eventually the custom officers don’t try to keep up—they just blow you out of the sky if you en’t paid the proper bribes, and let you get to port the way you want. So we see a mighty honeycomb of tunnels come up, and it’s both good and bad news.
“Kalia, I need you to think. Think. Which one did you come—”
“You stupid meat!” Z snatches the gun out of my hand. “No time!” He fires a dozen shards off at the cross.
Gray-clothes raises her soulsword and the shards split, fly away, break into flickers of light. Damn. That is one juiced cross.
“Give me that.” I snatch the gun away from Z. “Kalia, Toq, get in the tunnels!”
“Are you—” Z cuts himself off. “If you have magic, do it.”
Ha.
I shoot again.
Again she throws the shards off like they’re nothing. Damn, damn damn.
I’m a cross. In theory, I have the same powers she has. Right?
But I can’t do else, so I reach out like I reach out for nodes, same way I reach out when I’m going into faster-than-light space. Feel around for a node, except this time—
I feel it. Like she’s screaming in my head.
I push at her like I push when I open a node—and damn, I don’t know if it’s doing a thing, but I squeeze that trigger.
She raises her hand, but the shards don’t splinter. They batter her backward, blast her face and chest. She en’t bleeding, but she’s thrown against the nearest wall by the force of the shot.
Well, Starfire bless me and shit my pants. I did something . . . Jorian.
Z lets off that good, long roar, and starts for her prone body. I grab Z’s arm—a bit like grabbing a clump of molded steel—and pull. “Come on! Come on!” I could use this slab.
“I’m not leaving this undone.”
“They’ll kill you! Come on, the money! Those kids are worth money!”
He tosses me into the tunnels. The gravity-wells suck me up, spin me around, and down I go.
The tunnel spits us out into a suspended port hallway, one of the metal arms that extends from the ecosphere. All along the tunnel, periodic openings show the port arms of spaceships and, more often, empty space behind a sense-field as the ships have gone flying off.
The port tunnels are filled with every Swiney Niney scab running for deep space, bouncing along in zero. The lights along the roof are flickering on and off. Roars and vacuum-pops echo as ships tear away, hardly even taking the time to disconnect, breaking bits of plasticene from the port arms, littering space with debris. Kurguls and Rorgs and crickets and Zu-Path are zooming through the stinking zero air, bounding from wall to wall around us.
Right in the middle of this horror show, Kalia and Toq float, holding each other, crying.
Kalia looks up. “Jaqi—I’m sorry—the ship isn’t there. It’s not here.”
Z comes flying out of the tunnel after me and crashes into me, throwing me against the bulkhead, rebounding against him—as if he en’t nearly killed me enough today! “Q-36, your brother said. We are . . .” I check the listing on the wall. “Three levels up.”
Z grabs the edge of the window and presses his face against it. “What are we looking for?”
Palthaz’s ship is a . . . “Zerrek T-15, as I recall?”
“There’s one down three levels.” He looks at me, those tattoos wrinkling all the wrong ways, because he actually looks, for a second, a bit scared. Before he gets back to snarling. “If no Vanguard. Can you get in?”
Kalia swims up to us, brave girl, looks out the window. “There’s a bad lock on one of the hatches. We can break into the ship. But you’d have to get a suit and crawl out along—”
“Later. Let’s run.”
It’s not as hard as you’d think, getting down those three levels. If gray girl gets her sense together, she would still have to chop through quite a few scabs to get to us. Z, on the other hand, can get through. He knocks scabs aside like he’s a miner clearing asteroids—and none are going to stop and mess with him, especially in zero.
There’s the ship, Palthaz’s baby. Really, a baby. The Zerrek T-15 is the shape of a baby’s fat head, with two bulbous cheeks, one giant bulbous forehead, and . . . a disconnected port arm. Must have been hit by another ship in the wrack.
Palthaz’s ship is starting to list and drift away. What should have been our port tunnel is a sense-field holding in the atmos, with nothing but space beyond.
Well, I reckon if I just shot a cross in the face, I might have a bit of good luck left.
“Oh no,” Kalia says.
“That’s the bad hatch, en’t it?” I say, pointing to a bit where the running lights flicker irregular under a black handhold. It en’t far. About the distance of the main square of Swiney. Not far at all, give or take a few feet of cold dead vacuum.
“Yes. I think so. I don’t remember.” Kalia’s voice trembles. “You can’t reach it without a sui—”
“Throw me, Z,” I say.
He doesn’t hesitate.
Crosses are designed in those vats to take a little punishment. We can hold our breath a good ten minutes. Hard vacuum will kill us, but not so quick. And we can sail through one of the cheap stun-gun sense-fields that Swiney Niney uses to hold back airless space.
Of course I forget to take a good breath when Z hurls me, hard as a blackball, against the field. It shocks me, but I pass right through with only a tingling jolt, and there I am, in shorts and a tank top, sailing like a dumb frozen rock through space.
The cold rips through my skin into my innards. Everything is deep and dark and quiet. Overhead, ships spin away and thrusters blast into vacuum and shards light up the dark, but the crazing has no sound.
My eyes go blurry as the moisture in them freezes. My chest is a giant empty hollow. I can feel my lungs collapsing in on themselves without air.
I sail over the surface of the ship. My first attempt at a handhold fails; my freezing fingers don’t clutch fast enough. My body spins around, and all around me blackness and the lights of Swiney Niney’s port, and I’m right near flying past and flying out into the deep black all on my own and I flail and—catch the next handhold.
Hand over hand, on the black frozen plasticene, to that bad hatch, before my insides completely collapse. I’m all over shaking and cramping, and all around me is just darkness and space and horrible silence, and I yank at the hatch, hoping the lock is just plain broken and doesn’t need any kind of jury-rigging.
Luck holds. It pops open. A puff of warm oxygen blows out, freezes in the space around me before the autofield engages, keeping atmos in the ship.
I dive right through the field, and I’m tumbling through Palthaz’s ship in zero, and it’s warm, Starfire bless, and aiya it’s full of the sweetest oxygen since Earth was lost.
It takes a minute to find the cock
pit and fire it up. A long minute. A minute in which I see the node light up, a few miles out from Swiney, and damned if a real-life Vanguard ship don’t come through.
It’s big and black, emblazoned with that Resistance symbol, that flame thing. It sends out a heavy barrage of shards. Warning shots for now.
That cross, then—the one killed Quinn, probably the same one killed Cade—she’s Vanguard, like Palthaz said. Did I get myself into trouble with the Resistance now?
Swarms of little insect-looking fighters erupt from the belly of the Vanguard ship, blasting bright, big-as-people shards across the black of space at the traffic jam around us. Swiney Niney’s collective ships are making for the node, but now that ship’s blocking it. They’re jostling, swerving, spinning around each other, scraping off circuitry and crashing.
There’s two pirate nodes, gone dark, out here in addition to the official one, but not everyone will be able to reach them.
I can.
I bring the ship back around, to dock again. I can see Kalia and Toq and Z, still waiting at the shield. I en’t never done a port arm extension, on the fly, hard stop, and this ship flies like a bucket.
Luck? You there?
I take the ship in and throttle back, front thrusters firing, trying for a hard stop.
The port arm grabs my ship’s connector. The ship lurches forward, bends the arm, and all the metal around me screeches and groans, and I think for one Imperial minute that I’m about to tear apart the whole dock and send those kids flying into space.
And then the ship lurches the other way, resting back. Luck’s there.
We’re connected. Z and the kids run into Palthaz’s ship, through the bent port arm.
Once they’re in the main of the ship I disconnect and dive, down, down. Palthaz’s done good work with his big baby of a ship; it maneuvers well around bigger ones. He was smart enough to leave the grav and the enviro controls on manual; those bigger ships are moving slower because of their automated systems; I’m firing only on engine power and making out like a fly from a swatter.
Shard-fire brightens space around us, catches our port arm, blows it to bits, which sends me crashing against the wall, my head bursting with stars for the tenth time today, and I can hardly distinguish my bad vision from the star field outside from the shard-fire. At least I don’t have to worry about retracting a bent port arm.
“Wake up!” Toq is shaking me. His face is still a mess of tears. “Please, God! Kalia says she can drive if you just wake—”
“I’m awake.” And I can do one thing better than any scab in this burning galaxy.
I reach out, find the node, a connection to the hum and throb of pure space. While all the other ships are scrambling to hit it right, their node-engines roaring and straining, running codes and connections, I bring pure space right to us.
To the paths across black, faster than light and time, out of the fire and death.
“Hang on.”
* * *
Araskar
It’s not going to end with bluebloods, or even humans, not till the whole galaxy goes dark.
I know it’s foolish. I know I oughtn’t, but here I am, sitting in my quarters, second-guessing myself, overthinking the battle.
I didn’t have to send Joskiya. I could have pulled back, or gone myself, or done it on better timing. I keep seeing her, that moment she was scrambling through the mud and that shard turned her head into a pile of meat. I could have gone myself. And the approach! We dropped in too close, but that was because I knew Terracor—knew he would rather use a planet-cracker than target one hot spot. I had to get in there or watch him crack the planet.
And that’s a whole other problem. I don’t trust my superior.
And then there’s what the old Marine said.
It’s not going to end with bluebloods, or even humans, not till the whole galaxy goes dark. What did he mean by that? Why did an Imperial Marine cross say it?
Sit in your bunk with these kinds of thoughts long enough, and there’s nothing to do but take the entire batch of pinks.
My mind quits racing. I can hear the vacuum beyond the ship, a vast emptiness where molecules and atoms float in isolation, sounding their singular pinging notes against a dark hum. I can hear the stars, their nuclear hearts roiling and playing low, thrumming notes that vibrate out through the darkness.
“Secondblade?” The words come swimming out of the blue haze.
I try to move my mouth, but it doesn’t work all that well. “Mm.”
“Secondblade, are you in there? We’ve arrived at the rendezvous and it’s . . . you need to see.”
“Mm.” That tongue doesn’t quite work at the best of times. I try to get up—doesn’t work. I finally find something like words. “Minute.”
“Yes, sir.” After a moment, “Looks like we’re in for a time, Secondblade.”
Terracor’s going to pull my synthskin tongue right out of my head if he sees me like this. I’ve got to get up. Doesn’t matter if my dumb leg refuses to work. Dumb legs. Neither one is moving. I’ve got to get up . . .
I don’t know how much later it is when someone is banging on my door, and I manage to get enough words out to say, “Give a hand . . .”
It’s Helthizor. The kid’s been through at least half of what I have, starting on planetfall to Irithessa, and that must be why he doesn’t say anything when he comes into my bunk and sees me stoned halfway to the Dark Zone. He puts an arm around me. “Come on, Secondblade,” he mutters. “On your feet.”
I’ve never had this kind of comedown before. We stagger through the halls of the ship, him muttering, “You need to look like you’re walking, sir,” while I keep thinking at my legs to walk, indeed, walk, and they don’t do it. Anyone who stops to look gets a glare from Helthizor, and “You have work.”
We get outside the bridge, and he whispers, “You’ve got to move, sir.”
“Trying,” I mutter. Hey, my fingers flutter. Look at that. I raise my arm a little, and it falls back down. “Trying.”
Helthizor sighs, and opens the door onto the bridge.
Terracor spots it immediately. “What’s wrong with him?”
“That new leg’s not grafting right,” Helthizor says. I nod, hoping I look more like a fellow who’s suffering from bad synthskin than a half-cooked scab. “What’s going on?”
I get a good look at this ecosphere where we’re docking. It’s a mess. Ships are spinning in space, firing at each other, racing to reach the node. Our gunners fire a round of what were probably meant to be warning shots. A few of them connect.
“Just the usual scabs who hang out in this sort of area,” Terracor says. “Our mission was compromised. Public confrontation, and in a place like this, one public confrontation tends to set off another. Who knew that there was a nest of Kurguls trying to move illegal guns right behind our man?” Terracor eyes me. “Stamp your boots, soldier.”
I try to bring my hand to my forehead to salute. My fingers move. Progress, aiya?
* * *
As we line up to depart the ship, I nod to Helthizor. He nods back. He’s a good kid, and owes me his life a couple times over. It’s a decent bet that he’ll keep quiet. He didn’t keep me on the bridge with Terracor long.
I can feel just about every part of me. Good. Arms are tingling, legs appear to be solidly on the ground. I can feel my eyebrows, the roots of the hairs in my skin. That’s a funny thing. When was the last time you were aware of your own eyebrows? This is why everyone should try some good drugs. Nobody really appreciates their eyebrows.
The main square of this scummy, sweaty ecosphere is a wreck. A couple of Kurguls are lying dead in the center of it, and shard-marks spread across the concrete buildings, mark the rubble that is thick in the square.
Right in the middle of it all stands Rashiya, leaning over another dead body.
I stumble a bit on my numb feet, and catch myself on Helthizor’s shoulder. My slugs all grind to a halt behind me.
&nb
sp; “Did you know she was on this mission?” he asks.
My numb tongue matches right up to my numb brain, as I wait, thinking through what to say. “Nobody tells me anything,” I slur.
She’s frowning as she bends over another body. This one’s human. It’s a boy, and he’s almost got the pale look of those who get a soulsword in their guts. Almost, but there’s too much blood for it to have been a soulsword.
“Secondblade.” Rashiya looks me straight in the chin. No eye contact for her.
“Lieutenant,” I say.
“Not lieutenant anymore,” she says, looking back at the body.
“Got promoted?”
“Not really.”
Black ops, then. She’s taken on some dirty work for Daddy. “Spread out and comb the square, Helthizor.”
I nod to him. Not that he needs me to confirm her order. “What happened?”
“This was the target,” she says, nudging the boy with her foot. “He confronted me publicly. I wish he had known how much of a mistake it was.”
The boy doesn’t have the full pale, wispy look of a body that took a soulsword. Looks like Rashiya got a good cut in, but couldn’t finish the job. The kid is young. No more than sixteen. Eyes open, cheeks red from tears.
I hate it when they die crying.
Helthizor is calling out positions for our unit. I take the opportunity to grab onto Rashiya’s arm. “I believe we owe each other a private briefing.”
She points toward one of the concrete warehouses that surround the square—one empty of goods, by the look, with a good portion of the door blown out by shard-fire. “Cozy,” I say. We start toward the warehouse—and my legs freeze up, and sound rushes up, a thick, roiling cacophony of notes that falls on my ears like a wall—till the whole galaxy goes dark—
“You there, Secondblade?” Rashiya asks.
I lick my lips. “Yeah.” It comes out as a mumbling grunt from my bad tongue. I’m cold in this stinking heat. I look up to see her eyes, for the first time. She’s actually worried. I half smile, aware of the way the corner of my mouth still won’t turn up. “Stamp your boots.”
Starfire, A Red Peace Page 5