by eden Hudson
***
Scal—as I learned from the first mate’s mouth—tastes exactly the way it smells, like high-proof arson accelerant. It also stings when it comes into contact with the more sensitive areas of the body, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing if you like a little pain with your pleasure.
After we finished, the first mate rolled off her desk—a much larger wooden version of the one in my and Carina’s cabin, that stood just high enough for the exertion we’d put it through—and excused herself to use the head.
I plopped onto her bunk—also much larger than both of mine and Carina’s put together—and checked the SilverPlatter app.
The Knight Superior had finally gotten off his ass and sent Nickie’s unfinished report. I changed the timestamp to reflect the late hour, then sent it through to Carina. After that, I pulled up the real-time display of her wristpiece. She must’ve been alone, because she opened the report as soon as it came in.
I reread it as she did, looking at it through her eyes. Nickie’s nauseating description of how his fiancée’s alleged death made him fall apart became romantic—beautiful even—when inside Carina’s headspace…that is, right up until he pulled a move straight out of her apostate father’s handbook and turned his back on their God, searching out the Satan-serving vocor and trading her a fragment of his soul to resurrect Carina. By the time Nick got to the part where the vocor disappeared in the shuffle of a gang task force raid, and Carina escaped from the Soami prison pit, returning to Emden and letting Nickie in on the little secret that she wasn’t actually dead, Nick was looking irredeemably stupid. And that was where Nickie-boy’s report cut off midsentence. Even in my readthrough from Carina’s perspective, the sudden stop read as if Nick had realized just how much trouble he would be in when he filed this report. It looked as if he’d had a sudden change of heart and decided not to incriminate himself after all.
When Carina had reached the end, she zipped back to the top and started scrolling down again, this time more slowly. She would be analyzing every word on this readthrough, but she wouldn’t find anything out of character or syntax for Nickie. I hadn’t rewritten any of the report after I dug it out of his wristpiece’s laptic backup, just deleted the half that mentioned hiring one devilishly handsome thief, and then anonymously sent it along to the appropriate authorities.
I licked my lips as I watched Carina scroll through the report again. I could still taste a faint trace of scal. The image of her mouth glistening after she’d pretended to take a drink at dinner burned in my brain.
The door to the head opened, and First Mate came out. She eyed my junk, and a smile crept across her face.
“On the bed this time?” she asked.
“Nope.” I fished my shorts out of the legs of my khakis and pulled them on.
“Wait.” Her brow crinkled with confusion, and she glanced back down, inspecting my rigging to make sure she hadn’t imagined it standing back up to full mast. “But…don’t you want to?”
“Just because my body wants to dump a teaspoon or two of the best genetic material in the Revived Earth into every hole it sees doesn’t mean that I’ll do it,” I said, stepping into my khakis. “And I certainly won’t do it more than once. It’s called self-control, drunkie. You should try it out sometime.”
“I—what?” Apparently, her brain was too addled from the alcohol to grasp what I was saying.
“Willpower,” I said, zipping my fly. “Restraint. Self-discipline.”
She shut her eyes and pressed her fingertips to her forehead. “You’re leaving because of self-control?”
I pulled on my black undershirt. “Yes, but you’ll always have whatever semblance of significance you’ve assigned to this meaningless hookup. If you’re sober enough to remember it when you wake up, that is.”
On my way out the door, I grabbed my tourist shirt off the bunk.
The First Mate said “What?” again. I let the door slam shut behind me. I put on my tourist shirt and straightened it as I headed down the hallway.
When I made it back to our cabin, Carina was already in bed, pretending to be asleep. I turned all the lights on.
She groaned and jerked the pillow over her head. “It’s the middle of the night, Van Zandt.”
“Actually, it’s just after two a.m., which means it’s technically morning,” I said, throwing my tourist shirt on the desk under my bunk.
“Lights off,” she snapped.
“Icebreakers don’t have voice sensors, Carina,” I said, sitting on the edge of the desk. “You would remember that if you weren’t sloppy drunk on pirate scal.”
“I do remember. I was talking to you. Lights off.”
“Say please,” I said.
One of her hands snaked beneath the covers, then came out holding a shrap grenade.
I did a double take. “Holy balls, Carina! I thought you were joking about sleeping with a grenade in your pocket!”
“Shut off the lights,” she growled from beneath the pillow.
“Put that away, you fucking psycho!”
“Lights. Off.”
My instinct was to reach for the room’s control panel before, after, or while shitting myself, but I resisted.
“You won’t blow up a ship full of innocent bystanders,” I told the pillow over her face.
Her thumb came to rest on the detonation button. “At two in the morning, I’d blow up a planet full of innocent bystanders if it got rid of one asshole who won’t turn the lights off.”
I giggled and killed the lights. “Jeez, you’re a mean drunk. Does this mean the captain couldn’t satisfy you?”
“Not everyone who takes the time to listen to other people is trying to get laid, Van Zandt. Just you.”
I started peeling off my clothes and stuffing them into the Dirty side of my bag. It was dark enough in the cabin that she wouldn’t be able to see me, but I kept my shorts and undershirt on.
“What were you trying to gain from tonight, Carina?” I asked her, digging out a towel. “Proof that you’re desirable in spite of that artist’s rendering of a polar ice cap on your face?”
She didn’t answer me.
“If that’s what you were after, you should’ve tested it out on somebody a little less desperate,” I said. “That old man was not representative of the kind of predator you want to attract.”
A Carina-pause. “But you are?”
I threw the towel around my neck. “I’m more predator than you can handle, sister. That’s why you want me so bad.”
“Yeah, I’m sure that’s it.”
I could feel her rolling her eyes as she said it, really selling it to the darkness. But I could also hear the smile in her voice.
I grinned and headed for the head. I felt her smile in my chest the whole time I showered, and when I was done, I climbed into the bunk and fell asleep with it etched onto the backs of my eyelids.
NINE:
Nick
Nick Beausoleil stood at the edge of the clearing around Re Suli’s little tin shack, staring off into the trees toward the river. He’d been ordered to stay close by until Het came back with the witch’s mysterious guest, but his disabled wristpiece weighed on his mind. If he could get Het alone while the witch and her guest were talking, maybe he could lay out his offer for their mutual escape. Hopefully the kid was as eager to get free of Re Suli as Nick was.
Off in the blackness, some jungle predator yowled. Maybe an onca or a hogzilla. Not a leviathan, Nick knew that much. After just barely managing to kill that slough-monster before it killed him, he was sure the thing’s rib-shaking roar would haunt his nightmares for the rest of his life.
Trees and underbrush crashed out in the jungle. Something was coming toward the clearing.
Nick hunted the ground for a weapon. A log of split wood was the best he could find.
The crashing grew louder. Dead leaves crunched, branches crackled, and vines shook whole trees as whatever the creature was ripped them out of its way. Nick grabbed
the stick by its smaller end and set his feet.
A pale shape, low and close to the ground, popped out of the trees like a chubby ghost. Nick’s fingers tightened on the improvised club, but his hyper-focused eyes recognized Het just before he swung.
Out in the jungle, the crashing noise went on. It hadn’t been the kid.
“Fine night, ain’t it?” Het said, tucking his hands in his overalls’ bib and grinning.
“Sure.” Nick went back to watching the trees for the mystery creature, club at the ready. Sounded like the thing was about to explode out of the jungle and smash right into him. On second thought, he stepped sideways and added his other hand to the club. This thing sounded big enough to require a two-handed swing.
“Ya better not,” Het said.
Nick shoved the kid behind his back, then realized what he’d said. “Why not?”
“’Cause that there’s Miss Re’s guest.”
Brambles at the edge of the clearing shook, then were torn out of the way.
Tect. The word flashed in Nick’s head as the metal-mounted corpse stepped into the clearing. He cocked the club back instinctively, but Het’s shout stopped Nick before he could swing.
“Miss Re! Miss Re, I brung Miss Sol!”
The Tect stared Nick down, maybe checking his face against whatever shared database their tribe used. Nick did the same, comparing the cyborg to his mental database. It had been a woman while it was alive. Without better lighting, he couldn’t tell how much the organic tissue had decayed. In the moonless darkness, it could almost have passed for living. Pale flesh filled out its body, with no obvious desiccation or oozing.
Instead of whole limbs replaced with machinery and mechanical add-ons like Nick had seen in the recon footage and recovered bodies of Tect scouts, this one seemed to be a fully intact cadaver mounted on an articulated metal frame. Long-shanked screws bore down into the flesh from each rod, anchoring the metalwork to the bone. The rods were each three-quarters of an inch in diameter, and laid out along the major lines of its body, with rudimentary hinges at the jaw, neck, shoulders, elbows, and knees. The frame stopped at the wrist of each arm, with the Tect’s gray-white hands hanging limp and useless at the ends.
Disgusted as he was, part of Nick’s mind couldn’t help but redesign the framework as he studied it. He would add hydraulics to increase mobility, switch out the hinges for joints that mimicked those in the human body—sockets here, pivots there, hinge joints only where it was natural—hollow the skeleton to make it lighter, half-inch rods at the largest with a network of smaller supports, articulated down to the fingers to allow for grasping—
“Welcome home,” Re Suli said, coming up on Nick’s right flank. As usual, the witch looked like she’d just woken up in the middle of an erotic dream. “How was the trip in?”
“Het said you had somethin’ for me.” The Tect spoke slowly, robotically, the metal framework moving its lower jaw open and shut to form the words.
Nick scrutinized the motion, looking for clues as to how it worked. Did the cyborgcromancy initiate electrical impulses in the brain to move the muscles, or did the magic flow through the framework to move the body like a puppet? That backstabbing thief had called cyborgs “dead man robots” and said they used the brain as circuit boards, but why go to the trouble of adding a metal framework if it wasn’t somehow necessary?
Re Suli stretched, groaning softly, then adjusted her headband. “Just some plans for the damnedest amphibious tanks y’all’re ever gonna need, and about thirteen tons of startup material to build your first. All that, and a citroni fresh offa the Guild tree. Might even turn out to be a better catch than the last one.”
The Tect’s head jerked downward, then up in increments, looking Nick over from bottom to top. “How’s this nameless nobody better’n the Child Butcher himself?”
“I’ll tell ya how,” the witch said, hooking her thumbs through her cutoff’s belt loops and cocking her hips toward the Tect. “He’s got the know-how. He fixes up the Guild’s machines and armor and builds ’em new ones. He can recite back to you every single weak point they got, every corner they cut, and he can design and build you somethin’ a sight fancier.”
“Like hell I will!” Nick snapped.
The Tect’s eyes narrowed at the sight of Nick’s outburst, but Re Suli just giggled.
“Nicolai Éloy Beausoleil,” she said, “you’ll keep your mouth shut ’less one of us asks you a question. Then you’ll answer that question and shut your mouth right back up.”
The second the compulsion hit him, Nick snapped his mouth shut.
“Won’t you?” the witch said.
“Yes,” he snarled, then shut his mouth again.
The witch spread her hands at the Tect as if to say, See?
“He’ll sabotage anything he works on,” the Tect said. “You’d do the same. I’d do the same. Think of all we’ve done to give them their payback. Would you let one of them order you around?”
Nick didn’t break eye contact with the cyborg.
The witch smiled sweetly. “I keep forgettin’ you didn’t have no parents to beat you when you backtalked. My new toy here don’t have no choice but to let me order him around.” She explained the soul jar to the Tect, then said, “I ’spect he’ll give sabotage a good go, but we’ll get around that with some careful wordin’, won’t we, sugar?”
The blanket order to answer any question she asked forced Nick to grit out, “Yes.”
Re Suli tweaked him on the cheek.
Nick jerked away, angry and eerily certain that he’d gone through those exact same motions with his mom the last time he and Carina had had dinner with his parents.
When he looked up again, the Tect was studying him.
“How much do you know about cyborgcromancy?” it asked.
TEN:
Jubal
The Mirror Shard made berth at Dispatch Station 11 late the following afternoon. The captain invited us to stick around long enough to eat supper with him again, but I said no before Carina could open her mouth and polite us into the world’s most boring trap.
“You thought much on that treasure and what it’s really worth to you?” the old barnacle asked, eyeing her. “No shame in waiting at the station until another ship comes along. I know Farrelli and Bly’d be glad for the company.”
Carina gave him a perfect reconstruction of a fond smile and held out her hand to him. “Thanks for exercising your right to worry over us, Captain.”
The old man squinted at me to make sure everybody knew I wasn’t the one he would lose sleep over, then took her hand between both of his withered, leathery mitts and squeezed.
“You take care of yourself, girl. Good as you can.”
When Carina was finally done letting the old fart drool over her, we toted our baggage out into the blizzard topside.
As soon as we stepped onto the deck, the wind blew straight through the hundred-odd layers of top-of-the-line biothermal pants I had on and tried to frost my berries. The last time I had been hit with that kind of mind-destroying cold, I’d been cave diving in the Devil’s Icebox, one of the natural springs inside Rensselaer Cave. I whooped my appalled dismay at the blizzard’s attempt to rape my bones—the sound was ripped away immediately by the screaming wind—and shuffled as fast as I could without slipping and breaking something on the already iced-over deck.
The snow was blowing so thick that I couldn’t see more than a yard in any direction. One of the crew directed Carina and me to a rope he’d strung from a grommet on the icebreaker’s mizzenstack to the dispatch station’s front door to prevent anyone going ashore from getting lost and wandering off into the whiteout. I shouted a few grateful-sounding curse words at him that the storm stole as well, then I hooked my arm around the rope and fought my way down the gangplank. I thought I heard Carina yell something, too, but when I looked back all I could see through the snow was a bulky gray shape her approximate size following along behind me.
I was
starting to wonder whether we’d ever make it to the station when a large gray box appeared just ahead.
“Almost there; come on!” an androgynous voice shouted.
Knowing I was close enough to shelter to not only see its outline, but hear someone inside yell put considerably more hustle in my getalong. Half a dozen snow-logged steps farther, and I was on the front step.
Ducking out of the wind and into the station’s entryway brought the cold down from Fuck You and Your Bone Marrow to a much subtler Die Shivering and Blind After Your Vitreous Humor Freezes Solid. I shoved past the hefty source of the androgynous shout. It slapped me on the back in welcome, almost knocking me down.
“Get yourselves in here!” the woman shouted, not bothering to lower her gravelly voice to inside levels. She was dressed in a heavy sweater that wasn’t thick enough to explain away her bulk. She clapped Carina on the back, too, then slammed the door. “Heat’s better downstairs! Got some coffee on, get in, get in!”
“Carina’s God help you if it’s that chicory sludge trying to pass itself off as real coffee,” I said through chattering teeth.
The big woman let out a rolling belly laugh as if I’d been joking and pointed us toward the lower level.
“Downstairs, downstairs,” she said. Even when she wasn’t shouting, her boisterous voice rebounded off the walls and battered the cochlear membranes. “The Commission learned quick to build into the snowpack here; not enough insulation in the world to make an aboveground shelter worthwhile. The name’s Farrelli, by the way. Stationmaster.”
“Xiao,” Carina said, picking up the woman’s energetic cadence, but not trying to match her volume. “Good to meet you.”
“You as well, Xiao, you as well!”
I was halfway down the stairs to the lower level when I heard Farrelli ask, “Damned beautiful, eh?”
I looked back up. Carina had stopped just inside the door and was staring out the tiny window at the blizzard.
“It never snows in Emden,” Carina said. “The closest we have is ice storms.”
“Never snowed a day where I was from, either,” Farrelli said. “Just poured rain. A year here and I wouldn’t hear of leaving. The snow is so peaceful.”