“Then what happens to us?” Timas looked at her.
“It’s tricky right now.”
Timas stood up, wobbly on his feet. He could feel the swaying of the airship under him. It trembled and bucked about in the air.
He made his way, leaning against the wooden crates, to the prow where Katerina sat in a ball, hugging her knees.
“Katerina.”
“Go away.” She didn’t look up. Her hair hid her face.
“I’m sorry about all this.” He felt horribly guilty, knowing that for a moment he had condemned her to this while hoping to avoid it himself. It felt slightly right that he’d been hit and dumped here.
She pushed her hair aside. Tears dripped around the edge of the silver eye. “I had a life. I had a life. And I got unlucky enough to be thrown in with you in this primitive mess. I’m a damn hostage, Timas. And everything I know and love has disappeared. There is nowhere else to go. No lower.”
“We’ll all get through this.”
“It’s all lost. That man, he just gave me away like I was property. Take her, she’s an avatar, he said. But I’m not anyone’s property. That’s what you people out in these ramshackle cities are like, maybe, but I’m an individual with rights.”
She covered her face again.
“Besides, who can trust you?” she murmured at her knees. “I saw you bargaining with Pepper. Didn’t work out the way you had planned, did it? And now who trusts you. Not me.”
Timas turned around. She was right. He’d not earned her trust.
The hatch opened, a thick shaft of light spearing out from it. A ladder rolled down, and several armed pirates climbed down with it. They pointed at Timas. “You, come with us.”
Timas looked at Renata, who shrugged. Nothing she could do.
The men hauled Timas up onto the next floor of the airship, a long corridor with rooms off to every side. The airship had once been a large passenger ship.
“Hello, Timas,” said Luc.
Timas turned around. Luc stood there, wrapping a thick, heavy strap of leather around his right fist. Several pirates stood around him with big grins.
“Luc . . .”
“I said I’d make you pay.” Luc stepped forward as the hatch dropped shut. The pirates who’d pulled him out stepped back, giving both boys plenty of room.
“They were real.” Timas held his hands up. “We saw aliens. Pepper proved it, they’re hiding on the surface somewhere.”
Luc hit him in the stomach. Timas folded to the ground, the breath punched right out of him. “You tore me away from everything, Timas. My brother, and then my family.”
Timas gasped for air as the next punch came. The pirates laughed as Luc continued hitting him. Timas fended it off as best he could, but each punch bruised his arms and shoved him to the ground.
He kept his head protected and curled into a ball. The pirates laughed. “Get up, fight back.”
Timas didn’t give them that; they’d crowded around hoping for a spectacle. He didn’t have the strength to fight Luc, they were mismatched in every sense of the word.
But if he could survive this beating, maybe he could find something down below to carry on him for the next one.
The pirates got bored and pulled Luc off Timas. “He’s still worth something.” One of them pushed Timas back to the hatch. “You’ll get your fun, Luc, just take it a piece at a time.”
Luc stood, blood from Timas’s busted lips and cuts staining the leather strap. His hair hung disheveled around his eyes. “You had me banished,” Luc spat. “But I still had friends in the upper layers. I came to the smugglers sniffing around and told them Pepper would be transported out as soon as I heard. When I found out you came with them, that became my price for helping out.”
Timas let them lower him back among the Aeolians. Renata looked up at them. “Is this what we can all expect from you, beatings?”
“So far it’s just him,” the pirate shouted back. “But keep making noise, I’m sure we can come up with something for you.”
Timas flopped to the floor. “Don’t antagonize them,” he whispered.
Renata stood over him. “This is unacceptable.”
Timas crawled away from them, ashamed of seeming so weak. His ribs ached, his arms hurt from the punches and kicks, and his face was cut up.
He found a corner between the curved wall and two crates and curled up there.
In the dark, time passed swiftly. Renata came to him with a bowl of meat and potato soup. Timas swallowed the whole bowl’s contents and gave it back.
Half an hour later he looked around and crawled behind a crate near what looked like a drain. He was too nervous, his stomach roiled, and he found himself using a finger to provoke the response he craved.
He saw Katerina moving around to stare at him from the front of the storage space. He looked away.
Listless after throwing up, he just lay staring at the ribbed ceiling, listening to the footsteps of their captors and distant laughter.
At least his mother had left with Pepper.
That was a small thing.
And they would all know he had been right, about the aliens. There was a small measure of satisfaction in being proved right.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Pepper sat on the docked rescue ship, Jaguar scouts guarding him. Ollin had taken Itotia to meet the pipiltin. No doubt a meeting to discuss what to do about the current situation.
Itotia returned through docking tube after a good hour. She’d not talked to him for the entire flight. “The pipiltin want to turn you back over to the Aeolians, for goodwill. They’ve confiscated Heutzin’s gold and the credit you gave him. They’re trying to use it to get Aeolian help to repair the cuatetl.”
Pepper shook his head. “They’re too focused on the micro.”
“They won’t consider paying for Timas’s ransom with your own money.” Each word cracked out from Itotia’s thin lips. “The welfare of Yatapek comes first, they say.”
“Politicians,” Pepper muttered, disgusted. “The mining machine is unimportant.”
“Even the pipiltin know things are getting crazy out there.” She sat on the seat next to Pepper. “The Aeolians aren’t responding. The pipiltin are getting ready to take an airship to one of the nearest Aeolian cities. They want to send an envoy.”
“I’m sorry,” Pepper said.
Scarlett looked at them both. “Not as sorry as your son will be. I want my damn money.”
Itotia stood up. Pepper would have expected a slap, but Itotia punched the pirate captain in the stomach. It caught him off guard. He staggered back, winded. Itotia turned and grabbed Pepper’s shoulder. “What can you do?”
Kill the pipiltin. Destroy the envoy’s airship. Instigate a coup. Kill everyone who kept annoying him. Pepper rubbed his forehead. “Get me Heutzin and the spare groundsuit parts.”
If he could get properly mobile, all of those options opened up. Including going to the surface and leaving this circus behind. Finding the aliens would give him a better handle on what exactly the Swarm was looking for.
He looked back up at her.
“And then what?” she asked.
“Then I can do something about it all. No more dicking around dealing with people, but something serious.” He locked eyes with her.
“And my son . . .”
“Getting me a groundsuit is the best thing you can do for your son.” In the big picture of things. Pepper had no idea what the pirates wanted with a particular young boy like Timas, but it couldn’t be good.
But he wasn’t lying to her, not in the big-picture sense.
“Then you’ll get groundsuits. But you know you can’t fit in one, what limbs you have are too muscular.” She stared at him, and Pepper stared back. He’d revved his body’s metabolism up. Already his temparature burned. Sweat trickled down his back and stomach as his body literally began eating and destroying the weight and tone he’d been putting back on. He’d fit. If it meant mobility, h
e’d walk into the room tomorrow looking like a scarecrow.
Usually he only burned himself up like that for energy. In desperate combat. But now, Pepper only warred with himself to become xocoyotzin.
The staring contest ended. Itotia folded her arms. “I’ll make Ollin delay the flight a full day. You have twenty-four hours. Heutzin will come pick you up and get you to the parts.”
She walked back out, sweeping past Scarlett without a second glance. Four Jaguar scouts came in after her, but they surrounded the pirate captain instead of Pepper.
Itotia came later in the night to Heutzin’s workshop. She stood in the doorway. “You look sick,” she said.
“I’m burning my body up”—Pepper raised a hand up—“to fit the suits.”
She looked around. “You could have the house, on the upper deck.”
Metallic air, dingy light, grease, and oil hung heavy throughout the workshop. Pepper gestured at the hundreds of pieces of groundsuit scattered across the tables set against the cramped walls. “I’m happy enough.”
“Do you have everything you need?”
“I have all I need, plus more tools.” He used his leg to push the wheeled stool he sat on over. “What are you doing down here?”
“Checking up on you.”
Pepper picked up a helmet visor and peered into it. He plugged it into the thick, rusty collar of a chassis. It lit up, green diagnostics scrolling over Itotia as he looked through it at her.
“You know, even if I get this thing working, you’ll need to prepare for the Swarm.” Over the last few hours the silent cities had come back to life. They broadcast a bewildering array of claims throughout Aeolian information space. Everywhere Aeolians gathered a new element of confusion brewed. The cities sent out information saying Pepper was a League agent, trying to undermine the cities. Others claimed a Ragamuffin invasion neared. Or a League invasion neared. People talked to odd-sounding, stiff, and familiar faces of old family members or friends who told them that everything was okay aboard these cities and the Aeolians could return.
Some Aeolians believed them, enough to confuse the matter further when the Swarm began to add its votes to the Consensus. Aeolians agonized over how to withdraw the right to vote from its own physical citizens on suspicion of being part of the Swarm.
All this visitors relayed to Pepper in snippets. If the Consensus kept falling apart, invaded physically and democratically, Pepper realized Yatapek soon stood alone.
“How do we prepare for the Swarm?” Itotia snapped. “You failed against them. The Aeolians are failing against them. What can Yatapek do?”
Pepper set the visor down and picked up a piece of paper. “You have metal and wood. You can make these.”
She took the diagram from him. “What is it?”
“It’s called a billhook. An ancient polearm, used very successfully in several battles on Earth. The edged bit on the end should let you form up formations with a good reach against the Swarm. Eight, ten feet, you can lop heads quite nicely if it lets us get close enough for hand-to-hand combat. I assume you don’t have too many personal firearms in the city?” And the Swarm couldn’t arm every one of its members. The clumsiness of individual Swarm units suggested to Pepper that fast, effective marksmanship from their side wouldn’t be something Yatapek would have to worry about.
Itotia shook her head. “Rifles for the Jaguar scouts, but there are, maybe a few hundred of them.”
“You’ll need to arm everyone: women, children.”
“You think it will come to this?” She leaned against the door frame.
Pepper nodded.
“The pipiltin will not allow it,” Itotia said. “They think we will remain safe by obscurity.”
“I gave you the design. If you choose to build them, or use them, that is your decision. If you choose to wait and see what will happen, that is also yours. I just know that if it were me, I would at least like to die doing something to face my killer.”
Pepper blinked away sleep. He had a long night ahead of him. When he’d rubbed his eyes and looked back up, Itotia had left.
Heutzin arrived just after she left, carrying two large boxes full of spare bits, electronics he’d scavenged from all over. He dumped them onto the table.
“Good.” Pepper knew the suit models. Somewhere deep in his past he’d used similar enough designs. “You’ll be glad to hear that one of the units still has a lot of juice, it was disconnected in an accident. It’s working again.”
Heutzin glanced at the half-assembled mechanical torso on the bench. “Just like that.”
“Don’t think lower of yourself. I have centuries of battlefield experience, including stripping and reusing crap like this. Get some of your assistants in here. This needs to be reassembled by dawn. In the meantime, I need you to help me to a communications center. I need to see if I can talk to any Ragamuffins in orbit.”
Heutzin still stared at the groundsuit pieces. “Are there any units that will fully power up?”
“No.” Pepper shook his head. “We have about four hours power on the one that is working.”
“That’s not a lot.”
Pepper agreed. But four hours of mobility would be better than none. And with some tweaking of the suit’s design tolerances, four hours could be a lot of havoc.
“Get me that communications setup, Heutzin.”
Heutzin shifted his belt. “I could get in trouble.”
“You’ll get in more trouble if you don’t help.”
“Again, you threaten.”
“I just need things to move, Heutzin. We’re still sitting around, waiting for fate to decide for us, when we need to be forcing fate’s hand.”
Without the strange avatar, Katerina, to help him figure out what was going on in the outside world, Pepper felt a bit nervous about timetables. The Swarm could be on its way already.
Most of the dilapidated cities near the Great Storm, like Yatapek, settled by Azteca immigrants from New Anegada, used shortwave radio to communicate back and forth. An ancient standby.
Through the crackle and hiss Pepper found that four of those cities still remained online.
A third of the Aeolian cities remained online and chatty, but they were buried deep in planning how to repel the Swarm and keep its infection contained.
Too little too late.
It took three hours to get things set up to scan orbit and call out, but eventually Pepper found a Ragamuffin ship. A few moments were spent exchanging prompts and codes, and then the familiar dialect of someone from New Anegada came through the tiny speaker.
“This the Midas Special, Jack Richardson speaking. Pepper, you all the way down there for real? We been hearing all kinds of reports about you getting move about, jailed. What the hell going on?”
He caught them up. The Ragamuffins had picked on some of what was happening, biological warfare of some sort. But they weren’t sure if a League threat had arrived.
Pepper wanted to know about the Ragamuffin response. “Is the Dread high council moving any big ships closer?” They would have been hearing cities go silent, and picking up on some of the chatter. Anything suspicious usually prompted the Dreads to get some military might close to the problem in case things went sour.
“Moving slowly, but moving, man,” Jack replied. “This still the DMZ, seen? They don’t want provoke no war with the League. But all the merchant ship up here, fifteen standing to.”
“Doing what?”
“Keeping it lockdown. No traffic allowed between habitats up here, no traffic allowed into orbit. You move, we fire.”
“That violates the DMZ also.” Cautious leaders everywhere, on Yatapek, throughout the floating cities, and back home.
“Only because we trying help Chilo. The other problem, ain’t a single League ship here in orbit. They all hiding. We think they getting mass up for a big push, we seeing ghost images, that kind of thing.”
So a fleet was building itself up out there. No doubt the League used
their merchant ships to house military elements as well, camouflaging intent. Now it waited.
The Swarm would destroy Chilo, and the League would mop up.
“Nothing entering, nothing leaving,” Jack said from orbit. “We waiting. Worse comes to worst, we clean from up high after we figure out what the League trying. You on your own for a good while if you staying down there.”
Pepper could only think about the images of the sterilized planet the crew aboard the Shiek Professional had seen.
And on this open channel, he couldn’t talk any further specifics. He faced the Swarm alone if he didn’t leave.
And then Jack added, “You get youself high enough and hail, we pick you up. We be around.”
Pepper squeezed the old transceiver in his fist and left the pieces on the bench by the radio and had Heutzin take him back to the workshop.
Time to see about getting him to the surface to contact these aliens. If he could figure out exactly what the Swarm was after that would help. And he would have to see about recruiting these secretive aliens into the fight.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Another beating. Timas again offered no resistance, choosing to protect his head as best he could while Luc exacted his revenge before a laughing crowd of pirates.
This time Timas woke up on the bottom of the storage space when the Aeolians splashed water on his face to revive him. One of the men had a large bruise across his face.
He didn’t want to talk to them. He took his soup and scuttled off into another hiding spot.
Timas found himself unable to keep down yet another meal, though. He found the drain again and jammed his index finger down his throat. It came easily.
Katerina, instead of pretending to ignore him, got up from her own corner of despair in the gloom. “What the hell are you doing? Are you sick?”
He held up a hand. “No, I’m not sick.” He felt good. Light, ready to fight, and in control. That’s how he felt. He might be locked up in the storage area of the airship, headed who knew where, but Timas never felt freer.
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