They did so, but one woman, the nearest to them, glared. “What the hell is this? You’re pirates? You don’t look like the kind of pirates we’d expect in these waters.” She was pale and round-faced with bottle-red curly hair that reached just below her ears.
“Nope. And that’s the only guess you’ll get. I don’t make nice with people who kill innocents. Especially not when you’re covering for white slavers.”
Sked grinned, but only to himself. For all of her genius in finding the angles for a job, Akane had never been much of one for piecing together clues in a mystery. She tended to lump everything together and jump to amazing conclusions.
But in this case, it was fine. Sometimes shaking the tree to see what fell out was the best approach.
“What are you talking about? We’re here on a zoological research expedition. We’re scientists. I don’t have to listen to this shit.” She advanced two steps towards them and Akane, without blinking, shot her in the thigh.
The woman went down with a scream and the rest of the people in the room suddenly became very attentive.
Sked stepped forward, covering his shock at Akane’s brutality with a look of determination. Ignoring the sobs from the woman on the floor, he spoke in a loud voice: “You work for ZooDef, a company developing weaponized monsters that everyone knows will probably end up mostly in the hands of terrorists and insurgents. None of you are innocent of anything. We represent a faction interested in keeping the peace, and I need you to show me where the central data store is.”
“Central data store?” the guy asked. “You mean the hard drive where we store our findings?”
“Yeah, whatever.”
“Right here.” He pointed to a computer at his feet, a regular black tower desktop.
“A hard drive? Really?” Akane said. “Are you guys for real?”
“At least we’re not industrial spies.”
Sked was about to argue that one, but thought better of it. He didn’t know who the end buyer of the data he would take was, but he was pretty sure it wasn’t the Boy Scouts or the YMCA. The genetically-modified monster field was becoming quite crowded, and some heavyweight players were getting involved. When that happened, what the wise hacker did was to make one big score early in the game and then stay the hell away from the inevitable turf war.
With practiced ease, Sked pulled the computer out from under the desk, disconnected every cable running into it and began to unscrew the casing with a screwdriver he pulled from his backpack. A number of monitors went blank as soon as the computer was disconnected.
“Bastard,” the guy said. But he didn’t move, and Akane’s gun never wavered.
Five tense minutes later, he held a Hitachi hard disk in his hand, warm from recent use. He’d have time to figure out if there was anything useful on it later.
They backed toward the door. “Now,” Akane said, “I’m going to ask you a question: Are any of you Sabrina Williams?”
Three heads shook. Akane gestured to the woman moaning on the floor. “What about her?”
“No.”
“Good. Where does Sabrina Williams sleep?”
No one answered.
“Do you really want to be shot as well?”
Footsteps pounded on the metal decking outside the room. It sounded like a complete squad of the security team.
“Help us!” It was the woman on the ground who screamed. “We’re in here.”
Sked’s hand was just in time to deflect Akane’s gun. The bullet that would have taken the injured woman’s head off instead ricocheted around the room and buried itself into a monitor. “No more killing. We don’t know if these people are actually guilty.”
Akane glared at him. “They look guilty as hell to me. This is where they control the monsters.”
Someone started pounding on the door. “Open up in there,” a deep voice commanded.
“No. Don’t come in here. We’ve got a little fire. We’ll open up in a second.”
“Don’t listen to them. They’re lying!” the woman on the floor screamed. “Break down the door.”
Akane kicked her in the head, hard. She went down, limp. “Happy? I didn’t kill her.”
“That door isn’t going to hold them very long,” Sked noted.
“Then we go out the other way,” Akane replied, pointing to an exit at the opposite end of the room.
They charged between the workstations.
To Sked’s surprise, the single man in the room, a pimply, bespectacled guy of maybe twenty-five, tried to block his way. Sked simply lowered a shoulder and sent him flying over one of the desks. After the frustration of running and skulking for a couple of days, it felt inordinately good just to rear back and hit someone, even if it was a completely uneven contest.
The door splintered behind them.
“Duck!” Akane shouted, but Sked was way ahead of her. He dove under the last desk before the door.
Gunfire raked the surface above him, causing equipment to explode, glass to shatter and stuff to spark.
Sked crawled under the desks a couple of meters, hidden from view of the trigger-happy security team at the door. When he was a decent distance from where he’d gone under, he risked a quick look.
One guy stood at the door with an automatic rifle which turned towards him when he was spotted. He dove back the way he’d come as another desk exploded into splinters.
“Stop it, you imbecile!” a woman’s voice screamed.
“What? They’re over there.”
“That thing you shot up was the sonar control.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“It’s the only thing keeping the Mosasaurs from attacking this ship. Oh God.”
Ignoring the gunfight going on around her, one of the tech girls walked to the desk under which Sked had initially taken cover. “This is ruined,” she said. “We need to get another one up.”
The guy Sked had shouldered aside grunted. “Not sure we have the parts. And if we do, they’re buried in storage somewhere.”
“Well, find them, genius.”
“I’m not moving until the people with guns leave.”
Taking that as his cue, Sked took advantage of the distraction to crawl to the back door.
“Open it,” Akane said.
“I prefer not to get shot.”
“Wimp,” she replied. But even the impetuous Akane didn’t make a move for the doorknob.
“You!” the woman shouted at the guard in the doorway. “With the metallic dick extension. Get out of here so my colleague can rebuild the transmitter. I don’t care if you have orders to catch the people in here. If we don’t get this up and running, we’ll have much bigger problems.”
“Yeah. Literally,” the tech guy said from the floor, his voice conveying his conviction that he’d just made the world’s funniest joke.
Sked risked a look. The other doorway was temporarily vacant, so he went for the knob on the one he’d arrived at. It opened easily and he rolled into an interior corridor, with Akane a heartbeat behind.
He peered back into the room they’d just left, thinking their escape would cause some sort of commotion, or at least comment, but the three techs still standing ignored them. The man rushed out the door, while the two women poked worriedly at the wrecked equipment on the desk. They spoke in muted tones that Sked couldn’t make out.
That worried him. What worried him even more was that no one was bothering to check on the woman Akane had shot in the leg and then kicked into dreamland. Either no one liked her… or the machine they broke was really, really important.
“You coming?” Akane said, tugging on his sleeve.
“Where?”
“I’m going to open every door on this corridor until I find out where that Sabrina woman is.”
Sked sighed. She was going to be pissed. “No need for that. I know where she is.”
“You do?” her voice was dangerously quiet.
“Yes. It was on the manifest. Fro
m here it should be the… let me see… fifth door on the left.” He hesitated and went on. “I wanted to see if we could figure out what was going on before you went ahead with the hit.”
“Well, are you convinced now?” Ice was warmer than her tone as she advanced in the direction he’d indicated.
“I still don’t know. But I’m sure there’s something very bad happening here. I won’t stand in your way.”
“What gave it away? Was it the fact that guys with guns locked us up or the sudden appearance of the monsters we’d been running from?”
“Let’s talk about this later. This is the door,” Sked said.
They stood beside it, one on either side. Sked noted that Akane had picked up a new, better gun somewhere, probably from the corpse of the guy who’d been on guard duty. Knowing her, she probably had the other one on her person somewhere, as a backup.
“Break it down or try the handle?” Sked asked.
The knob was the better option. He knew it. Akane knew it. The only reason he asked was to align themselves before she did something impetuous.
“I’m not in the mood for handles,” Akane replied, and did something impetuous.
The door, a cheap item of thin wood veneer similar to the one leading to the control room, burst inwards.
Sked followed Akane inside. A woman looked up from a computer: fortyish, with some grey strands. She looked as if she hadn’t slept in a few days, with dark rings under her eyes. The screen showed the feed from a security camera, a black-and-white image. Either the woman was a hacker or she had her own security system… Sked was sure he’d turned the ships cameras off conclusively.
Akane raised her gun and pointed it between the woman’s eyes. “Are you Sabrina Williams?” she asked.
The woman smiled. Her hand on the keyboard pressed a letter. It was a subtle thing, the barest flicker of movement.
But it was enough. Two cages, one on either side of the door, opened with a hiss and a small something hit Sked at waist height, just as he recognized the image on the screen: that was the corridor they’d just walked up.
Sked reacted instantly to the attack. He’d seen enough of the little dinosaurs over the past couple of days to know exactly what was happening. He twisted to one side and felt the cloth of his pants tear at thigh level. Pain shot up his leg and he grunted.
The creature’s momentum took it past and it slammed into Akane, who was already busy with her own little monster. She was bashing it over the head with the butt of her pistol.
Sked joined the fray. He kicked one of the things in the chest hard enough to lift it a foot into the air. When it fell to the ground he jumped on its elongated neck. It squished and held, leather resisting his weight, until, finally, something inside gave out with a wet pop.
Akane was losing her fight, though. Through instinct or luck—or simply to immobilize the hand that had been beating on its head—her creature had bitten onto the gun, just above the muzzle, and was attempting to tear it from Akane’s grip.
Sked pressed his own gun against the creature’s back and pulled the trigger. It dropped away.
They turned back to Sabrina and found that she was gone. An open window told them she’d made it out onto the deck.
“Dammit,” Akane said. “I’m going after her.” She climbed onto the chair and out the same window.
Sked sighed and followed.
Chapter 20
Eddie knew the big Marine broad was going to be a bore about it. He didn’t care.
“Where are you going?” Cora said when he pulled open the door.
“Gotta take a leak,” he replied. “Thought I’d piss over the side.”
“Can’t you hold it?”
“Nope.”
He stepped onto the walkway and closed the door behind him. It was cool to see the sea stretching out into the distance. Darker now. The moon had gone down at some point. He hadn’t noticed when, but it was gone now. It didn’t matter on the ship because there were lights every few dozen yards. Not enough to read by, maybe, but enough to see where you were going.
He hadn’t lied to the nutso soldier woman. He really did have to pee… and the rest of them probably did, too, but they were too chicken to come out here and do it.
Once done, he didn’t head back to the storeroom, however. He didn’t feel like it. The air in there was thick and smelly. Too many people. Too many boxes of food. It might have been a decent-sized place once, but now it was like a rat’s nest. The walls were too close.
He looked out over the sea and simply enjoyed the feel of the tropical wind over his skin. He’d always been a man of simple pleasures: food, sex, violence. He liked to know he was alive, and the feeling of the night on his skin certainly counted. There was no incentive to return to the room where his companions were packed like sardines.
Besides, he had business to attend to.
“Harold. We’re gonna send you some servants for the afterlife. Hope you like lizards.”
He supposed Harold didn’t believe in any of that crap. As far as he knew, his friend had been an atheist. But it didn’t matter. Eddie needed to give his tribute and the lizards were going to pay for what they did.
Also, he wanted to find the body and toss it overboard. Burial at sea and all that.
Eddie wasn’t dumb. He knew he was probably dead meat.
But why go out of his way to avoid it? Without Harold, the Philly Triad was dead, and the Philly Triad was his life. They might put in another boss, but everything would change. There was no real need to go back.
He’d had a good run. If his time was now, it would be epic.
Eddie pulled out his watermelon knife and let it catch the hallway light on its blade. Though it seemed that way, he knew the blade wasn’t perfectly rectangular. It had a slight curve, fattening towards the business side, which hadn’t been there when he bought it. It was something he’d done to the blade without meaning to, sharpening it countless times to remove nicks from when it had caught in bone.
The memories of his entire professional life were in that blade, defying his attempts to grind them out. The curve of the blade, the way the handle fit his hand perfectly, worn where he gripped it hardest—at little finger height. It was as much a part of him as his arms and legs.
And it held, he was certain, the spirits of those whose life-force it had drained. Nearly two dozen people he’d killed with that knife, countless others he’d only relieved of a digit or two, or sliced up a little.
He spoke to those spirits now:
“I know you guys didn’t want to die. Hell, you’re probably still pissed at me for cutting you up. But that was a while ago. You should move on. I need you to help me now, to guide the metal you live in. Add your strength to mine and we’ll do something cool together.”
He waited to see if the metal would respond, show some sign that his request had been accepted by the gods, a glint of blue light or something. After a few moments, Eddie decided that no response was forthcoming.
“Doesn’t matter. I know what I have to do.”
A burst of machine-gun fire sounded from the front of the ship and he smiled. It was like a beacon, telling him where he should be heading. Security guys firing automatic weapons meant dinosaurs… and dinosaurs meant revenge.
It was about more than just the Triad, of course. Harold had been his mentor, his older brother, the guy who’d taken a wild kid who was getting more and more lost by the second and focused those energies into something that could be used for the good of the organization.
Eddie knew they called him crazy. He’d come by the nickname honestly, by being completely out of control, never stopping to think, just charging forward and doing things. He’d been on the path to an early grave, and everyone knew it. It was so obvious that they hadn’t even bothered to come back for him after the River Gang had cut him up. If it hadn’t been for that nurse…
And after that nurse, Harold. He’d been in the pen for his part in the altercation, and when he
got out, there was Harold. Waiting. Another Chinese face, and a man who knew how to break the ice: instead of offering his hand, Harold offered a cigarette.
“You want to live?” Harold had said.
“What’s it to you?” Eddie had responded. That was the kind of guy he’d been back then.
“I think you have talent. I work for people who can always use talent.” Harold was younger then, just starting to make his way up the ladder. Promoted from punk to guy allowed to run a crew. That crew had started with Eddie.
“What’s it pay?”
“You mean apart from keeping you vertical a few more years?”
“Yeah, apart from that.”
“More than you’d ever see with the gang. Plus, you’re getting too old for that game. No more juvie for you.” He nodded towards the prison Eddie had just emerged from. “Next fuckup and you’re looking at doing real time.”
“Speak your piece,” Eddie replied.
That had been fourteen years earlier. Since then, Harold had kept him on the rails more times than Eddie could count. He’d cleaned up after him, buried bodies, provided airtight alibis, bought beer.
Now Harold was dead, food for a pack of wimpy little lizards. If he was going to be killed by a dinosaur, it should have been a big one, something that could bite you in half without even trying.
The first of the creatures he encountered was limping along the walkway in front of him. It looked like it had been in a fight, with a lame leg, a crushed tiny arm and a deep gash along its side.
Eddie didn’t wait for it to turn. He simply sneaked up behind it and, with a practiced swing of the blade, sent the ridiculously tiny head, the size of a large, misshapen orange, bouncing along the path and into the water.
He snorted. Revenge wasn’t about facing enemies honorably. Fuck that. Revenge was about body count.
Onwards.
The stairs leading down onto the container deck came into view. He stopped for a second to contemplate the piles of steel boxes towering overhead. Eddie wondered if he could somehow climb down them to come at the creatures from above.
He discarded the idea. It would take too long. Dawn wasn’t far off, and he wanted to get the work done before then. After daybreak, the guys with machine guns would be able to see him a mile away. Not much you could do with a knife if that happened, no matter how good you were.
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