by Lucas Bale
‘I spent five years in the Kolyma fleet, Caestor. I haven’t let my guard down since the first day they dragged me onto one of those Hands. I don’t trust you, and I sure as hell don’t trust her. So you leave her be for now and you can talk to her when she’s well enough.’
The Flame of Tartarus was hidden deep in a canyon that was barely wide enough to contain its considerable bulk. Abraham manoeuvred Skoryk’s freighter along the top of it, then dropped down between the vast canyon walls at the last moment. Weaver turned away from him once the freighter had finished creaking and moaning from settling onto its broken landing stanchions. It lurched forward as one gave way, and Weaver had to support himself on the wall of the passage by the cockpit.
The navigator said nothing as Weaver led her down the docking bay ramp and out into the warm, humid air. She was still weak from blood loss and there was an infection in her body. She would need a transfusion on board the Tartarus, curatives too, but there were automated systems that would take care of those simple procedures. A ship this size, Weaver knew, would have a well-stocked medical bay. Blood would be kept in cryogenic stasis, supported by emergency power systems from the reactor’s core. And even if the reactor had been placed in standby, systems would continue to draw minimal power. Five years sitting here was nothing to a ship like the Tartarus.
It took Abraham a while to decipher the keycode seal to the main blast doors, but eventually they opened, as Weaver had known they would. Gant and Abraham led the colonists on board, the stronger ones supporting the wounded. Those who were able were directed to bunks where they could sleep and recover. The rest, including the navigator, were taken to Medical.
Weaver stood over her, watching her, as the automated systems pumped fresh, new blood into her veins. He felt the huge atmospheric engines of the Tartarus begin to hum, then rumble and growl, and then, when the great ship was ready, he felt the weight of it lifting off. The Seneshal missed us, he thought. We’ll be long gone by the time they arrive. For the first time in a long while, he felt himself relax, just a little. But where are we going now?
The ship pushed through the atmosphere of the planet, trembling slightly as it did so, then rocked as it punched through the tunnel’s breach. Weaver remained with the navigator throughout, and the Tartarus had been inside the tunnel for several hours before the automated systems finished their work. Weaver then led her to a small crew bunkroom he knew he could seal. He sat her on the edge of one of the cots and backed away. Every muscle in her body was tense.
She stared at him. ‘What now?’ she said.
‘How’s your shoulder?’
She glanced at it but said nothing. The medicine on board the Tartarus had saved her life. She knew it, but there was no way she would acknowledge it. Not yet, if ever.
So instead, he nodded and said, ‘Fair enough. Now, we talk.’
‘What is there to talk about? I don’t remember what happened.’
‘You can appreciate that I might find that very convenient.’
‘You’ll think whatever you want to.’
Weaver looked slowly around the room, then back to her. ‘A week ago, I might have considered imposing my own sentence and leaving your body down there. Or I might have taken this ship back to the Core myself, despite everyone else on board. Perhaps I would have killed them, had they resisted me.’
‘Why are you telling me this? What is it you expect from me? A confession?’
He licked his dry lips and continued as if she hadn’t spoken. ‘What we witness in our lives shapes who we are. I know that. To me, our experiences mould our perceptions, and with them, our actions. But I’ve always thought that it’s the choices we make that truly define us. I used to think that there came a point when our perceptions became too ingrained in us, when we had witnessed too much in our lives to become anything else. We had already made our choices. Everything that passed after that simply confirmed who we had become. Now I’m no longer so sure. Do you think it’s possible to see things differently, to make different choices, after a lifetime of experience has already determined our path?’
She hesitated—unsure how to answer, he imagined. Eventually, she said, ‘I think some people can never be defined. I don’t think they know themselves. They just wake up and hope the rest of the day isn’t too fucking horrible.’
‘The stim doesn’t help.’
‘Your kind are in no position to preach.’
‘How long have you been losing time?’
‘My whole life.’
He shook his head. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘You tell me then, if you think you know me.’
‘Your rage is uncontrollable. You’re dangerous to everyone around you because you’re unpredictable. You don’t know what you might do when threatened.’
‘Most normal people don’t.’
‘True enough,’ he said, nodding. ‘But most normal people have a trigger that stops them. A point where they realise what they’re doing. Their conscience won’t allow them to go any further. The horror and guilt consumes them.’
‘You think I don’t feel guilt?’
‘How can you,’ he said, ‘if you don’t believe you’ve done anything wrong?’ She said nothing, so he continued. ‘Your anger is part of who you are. But it came from somewhere.’
‘This conversation is over,’ she said. ‘You do what you have to.’
‘You haven’t actually told me what happened.’
‘What do you want to hear? That he tried to rape me, so I killed him? Yes, he wanted more than I was willing to give, and he thought he could take it. He was wrong. I sell my body for sex, but I choose who I sell it to. He wasn’t the first and he won’t be the last.’
‘Who, before him?’
‘I’m not discussing this with you.’
‘Who else will you discuss it with?’
‘No one.’
‘You killed a man. You can’t escape that.’
She canted her head. ‘Your kind have killed far more than I have.’
‘Maybe,’ he said, nodding. ‘And they’ll be judged one day, just like you.’
‘By who—the Magistratus? I don’t think so.’
‘When did Skoryk ask you to come to Jieshou?’ She blinked, as though the unexpected question had unsettled her. The change of tack had caught her unaware. ‘Was it before or after you killed the man in Brauron?’
‘After.’
‘How long?’
‘A week, perhaps a little longer.’
‘They told you I was coming for you,’ he said. ‘On Jieshou. They told you I was coming—to ensure that you would do what they wanted.’
‘On the way to the Pronos, I convinced myself Skoryk had made it all up. I believed it was a lie, right up until you turned the rifle on me. But yes, he told me someone was looking for me.’
‘You and Skoryk have history.’
‘Fuck you.’
‘He saw you as expendable, and he manipulated you to get me to the Astratus, to the terrestrial below it. I don’t know why, yet. Do you?’
‘No. And I really don’t care.’
‘Why did you fight down there?’
‘What?’
‘You could have waited. Let us kill each other. Possibly even taken the ship from whoever survived. But instead you fought. Why?’
‘Why are you asking me these things?’
Weaver let out a breath that had been building inside him for good long while. ‘I think we’ve both been manipulated,’ he said. He paused before he continued. ‘I lied to you. I’m not Caesteri. At least, not any longer. The Magistratus wants me as much as it does you. They sent a privateering company to kill me, and to attack Skoryk and destroy the shantytowns on Jieshou. I think probably to hide the Astratus and what was going on there. The question is, why? What does it mean to them?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You saw what they did up there? On the ship?’
She nodded.
‘You were
on board?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where are the rest of the crew?’
He saw the change in her expression, the tightening at the corners of her eyes and mouth. The emotion she tried so carefully to hide.
‘I saw one of them,’ she said. She couldn’t conceal the tension in her voice. ‘What was left of him. I didn’t see the others.’
‘I spoke to the chukiri,’ Weaver said. ‘That’s what these people call the men you fought. They took the salvage titan and set the self-destruct on the Astratus. They used the comms line to hail the bridge. To gloat. They told me they had a pilot, and someone he cared about.’
‘They were alive?’
He saw her flinch, her eyes widen. She wanted revenge, he thought. That’s why she fought them. Hate and revenge.
His voice softened. ‘I think you know they wouldn’t have been alive for very long. And I doubt it would have been… pleasant for them.’ He watched her fists clench and her muscles flex. Her pale skin flushed a little. ‘For what it’s worth, I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘They were gone by the time I got there.’
She said nothing for a while, and he didn’t break the silence. In truth, he had no idea what to do with her. Whether she deserved some kind of justice was unclear to him. Perhaps she was telling the truth—maybe she had blacked out as a result of some stim-exacerbated trauma. Perhaps she had been attacked, and what might have begun as self-defence had gone far beyond that once her rage had taken over. She couldn’t claim otherwise—even if she was telling truth. And she was at least in part culpable, whether or not she was deserving of sympathy. Yet there was nothing he could do about that. There was a more pressing truth to reveal now—something more important, he sensed, than punishment for her crime.
You pity her, something inside him sneered. That is your weakness. You allow her to escape justice because you pity her. Yet you seek justice for Jieshou.
He reached over and released her bonds. ‘I don’t know where we’re going,’ he said. ‘Or what is intended for us when we get there. But if I see you as threat to me, or anyone else, I’ll kill you.’
C H A P T E R 24
SHEPHERD’S HAND fell to the grip of his pistol as the two silhouettes slipped between the shadows inside the forest. He couldn’t see much of them, little more than their vague outlines against the bleak ghosts of the trees, so he looked instead to the preacher. He watched the older man stand and straighten, studying the approaching figures himself. There was no urgency in the preacher’s movements, and his tired face gave away little. Are they strangers to him? Shepherd wondered. There’s no joy there. No emotion at all.
Shepherd stood and stepped away from the fire. His hand remained on the pistol. He found comfort in the familiarity of its weight against his thigh, the feel of the wooden grip against his palm. His heart beat hard as they approached, and he found himself thumbing open the safety strap of the holster. He scanned the forest behind them, but saw only the branches swaying in the wind. You wouldn’t be able to see even if there were someone hiding there, he told himself, and the openness of the clearing suddenly irritated him. This place is too exposed. We should have landed somewhere else.
This whole damn thing should have happened to someone else.
That was the problem, he observed bitterly. Too much had happened. His existence, while it could never have been described as easy, had been relatively simple, a life he could largely predict with some comfort. It had been composed mostly of one dubious contract after another when business was good, and more downtime than he could afford when it wasn’t. Yet all that had changed, permanently as far as he could tell, in these last few days.
Peacekeepers in the hold of his ship, one with an armoured hand around his throat, tearing away his last breath. With that thought, Shepherd absently felt his still discoloured neck. The same dry pain was still there every time he took a breath. He kept seeing their dead bodies. He had been wearied by a hollow pain in his gut that had begun the moment he’d watched them tumble through the wind towards the gunships. He ought to have felt no guilt at all, seeing them hit the hulls of the same ships that hunted his own. They wanted Soteria wrecked and burning in the desolate, frozen mountains of Herse. But he did feel it, and it wouldn’t leave him.
His guilt also chose that moment to show him the Consul’s frigates, seconds away from unleashing a fusillade onto his freighter as she fled for the breach. A freighter he had lived with for decades, but which now, he realised, he hardly knew at all.
Yes, he thought. Too much has happened.
‘Boy,’ he said—maybe too harshly, he thought for a moment, but then found he didn’t care. ‘Get back inside the ship.’ From the corner of his eye, he saw Jordi hesitate, then nod and back slowly away towards Soteria.
‘There’s nothing to fear,’ the preacher said quietly. Shepherd noted he didn’t look at him. There’s more to this than he knows—that’s what he told you. Can you believe him, or is he playing you?
‘So you keep saying,’ Shepherd replied thinly. ‘Yet still, here I am, fearing more than enough for both of us.’ He waited for his objection to sink in, then said, ‘Who are they, preacher?’
The first silhouette, slightly ahead of the other, emerged from the shadows, and Shepherd saw a slight man with a smooth face beneath a black beard flecked with grey. He was slim, and clothed in a shabby, threadbare coat and trousers both of which were torn in places and stained by recent blood. Behind him walked another man, clothed in a similar way, and with the same evidence of some not-long-past violence, but he was both younger and taller, with a face marked in part by very obvious Kolyma fleet affiliations. Shepherd eased the pistol a little out of the holster and backed away slightly.
‘You still haven’t given me an answer, preacher,’ he said, the edge in his voice clear. ‘And I’m not about to wait for you.’
‘Keep your temper,’ the preacher said, and he began to walk to meet the shorter man. They stopped when they reached each other, but Shepherd saw no sentiment cross their empty faces. The preacher nodded; the man returned the acknowledgement almost perfunctorily. They seemed to know each other, Shepherd thought, but no affection passed between them.
The preacher turned back to Shepherd. ‘Wait for me here,’ he said, the light from the fire playing across his craggy face. ‘Please don’t shoot anyone.’
Shepherd toyed with the idea of shooting everyone and leaving.
The preacher and the shorter man walked away, still speaking in low voices. Shepherd couldn’t easily catch the words, but for a moment he wondered if what he’d actually heard was in a language he didn’t recognise at all.
He turned his gaze to the Kolyma man, the convict, who met his eyes unflinchingly. Shepherd saw stoicism there—a hardness that mirrored his own of late. And suspicion. He watched the man look him up and down, saw his gaze settle on the pistol. For a while the man said nothing, then quietly he warned: ‘We aren’t alone. You should know that.’
Shepherd stared again at the shadows inside the forest, but he didn’t reply. Of course you’re not, he thought. Fair enough. He nodded, almost absently, and looked back towards the preacher and the newcomer. They were almost completely still as they spoke, looking at one another without displaying the slightest reaction to what the other was saying. They spoke like that for what seemed a good long while, then at last the preacher nodded, and they both returned.
‘It’s time for us to go,’ the shorter man said quietly to his companion. Shepherd was surprised to see the convict’s eyes narrow and his body tense as he shook his head.
‘I’m not leaving them here—’ he began, but the shorter man cut him off.
‘Now is not the time,’ he said softly. ‘We need to get back to the Tartarus. I will explain, I promise you, but not here. If you want to protect those that survived, you must trust me. We can’t let more die.’
The convict flinched, and a complex play of emotions crossed his face. Eventually he nodded, but his expression
was dark. ‘You owe me answers, Abraham. I won’t wait long.’
I know exactly what you mean, Shepherd thought grimly as he watched them disappear into the shadows of the forest. Just trust me, they say. But trust is earned, and none of this makes me want to trust any of you. The exchange between the preacher and the shorter man had been strange enough to make him feel even more uneasy. ‘And us, preacher?’ he said. ‘You have a plan for us now, too?’
‘We have people to pick up, and then a short flight to the other side of the planet.’
‘And who is it we’re picking up exactly?’ Shepherd asked, but the preacher was already walking back towards Soteria and appeared not to hear him.
Shepherd looked up at the stars and sighed. He had turned to head back to the freighter himself when he caught a soft rustle behind him. He looked back to the forest to see two more figures emerging from it. The first was taller and broader than the second, whose bearing seemed more feminine.
Shepherd watched them approach, never taking his hand from the pistol. When the firelight finally caught the leathery face of a tall man, a thin beard framing his chin and lips, Shepherd saw he also carried a heavy rifle comfortably across his chest. Shepherd suppressed the instinct to draw his own weapon. Had the man intended to shoot him, he would have already done it. We aren’t alone, the convict had said, and Shepherd understood now who had been watching from the forest. Well, I get the feeling you’re alone now, buddy, wherever you’re going.
A few steps behind the tall man was a woman. She was slender, dressed in tan leather that didn’t hide the tight threads of muscle on her stomach, arms, and legs. Her skin was pale like ivory, and there were tattoos on her neck. Unlike the convict, hers weren’t Kolyma affiliations. Her sand-coloured hair was tied back and wound in tight coils. Her face was delicate, maybe even elegant, but her expression made it bitter.
‘This is becoming quite a party,’ Shepherd said as the tall man faced him. He was older than Shepherd, perhaps more than fifty, but still appeared strong and fit.
He studied Shepherd for a while, but eventually nodded. ‘Yes, it is,’ he murmured.