by Tammy Salyer
“Anyone on the range fire twice in the air. Otherwise, watch out.” He lowers the handset and waits for a moment, scanning the field. There’s no sound to alert us anyone else is here.
“All right, Erikson. Ever ridden one of these?” He gestures toward the bike.
“Sure.”
“Good. Right here and here are your triggers, and these toggles adjust the barrels up and down about twenty degrees from center. They don’t have a left or right pan mechanism. I couldn’t get enough angle out of them before hitting the tank. But that’s what steering is for. The bullets are caseless, so don’t worry about them ejecting and burning your legs. But the thing that makes it a challenge is the kick. You’ll ride forward just fine, but fire those guns and you have to compensate for the recoil.” He turns to look me over, gauging my reaction to the task.
The size of the bike is daunting. It will hold itself upright once it gets going; that’s not what I’m worried about. It’s the fact that if I lean too far on a turn without enough momentum, this behemoth will pin me to the ground as if it were a bulldozer parked on a mouse.
Smirking bravely, I climb on. As I start to pull the bike off its kickstand, a hydraulic activator helps it extend, pushing off the ground and raising the bike to riding position. When I have control of it, I jump on the starter and the kickstand retracts. “Any thoughts on what you want me to hit?” I ask as the engine rumbles to life, growling at the same pitch as Desto’s laughter.
“Anything that looks scary, babe.”
I visually measure the distance and angle to a blasted old piece of mining equipment, adjust the right gun, and fire. The steering apparatus bucks furiously in my hands, vibrating as if I’d grabbed an electric fence, and jagged metal spikes bloom around the new hole that appears in the mining junk. The bike maintains perfect balance. I glance at Desto with a nervous grin. His return smile is full of both approval and pride. However overblown his libertine act, the guy knows his shit.
I’m about ready to twist the accelerator when he says, “Hold it” and opens a storage box mounted behind the seat. Keeping the bike locked tightly between my thighs, I pull on the pair of heavy plastic goggles he hands me, tighten up the strap, and move out.
Weaving throughout the range, I cover several branches of the circuitous paths, adjusting to the bike’s feel. It handles smoothly, only the shocks reacting a little stiffly. But then they’re calibrated for a man who easily outweighs me by forty kilos, maybe more. At first, I’m cautious, almost jittery, but nervousness quickly gives way to a sense of natural easiness. The rig almost drives itself. All I have to do is maintain control while firing. Its power is intense, and the accuracy of the guns is a lesson in perfection. I do two or three loops just for fun, carefully aiming at targets that come within range, returning to where Desto waits, with real reluctance. As I pull up and kill its inertia, the bike’s heaviness seems at odds with its graceful motion.
Desto’s grin is total approval this time. “Outstanding! Where have you been all my life?”
I grin back, weirdly pleased to have made a good impression. “I think I missed a couple, but as fast as it goes, no one would have time to return fire anyway. How do you reload when you’re dry?”
“You can’t while it’s moving. She’s more of an escape than an attack vehicle. Spray and pray and get the hell out of there.”
We spend the next two hours practicing firing drills. Ingrained military maneuvers, part of my DNA after years of training, come as natural as breathing. Desto shows me some new ones. My shots are either dead on, or close enough to matter, but he never misses. When midafternoon shadows begin to pool between the hulking wrecks, we switch to laser sights and continue practicing. Finally, hunger and fatigue bring an end to the fun.
As we prepare to head back to the hangar, a sudden movement at the north end of the range catches my attention. There’s a man there, or what used to be a man. He’s deathly pale, dressed in rags, his face covered with red, scaly lesions. He leans against a rusting turbine that once belonged to a midrange transport ship, staring at us with filmy eyes that continually blink and squint. The symptoms are all too easy to recognize.
“Desto, do you know that guy?”
His head swivels on his muscular neck to follow my line of sight. “Solar stoner. Junkies from a little town east of here wander over to the range sometimes. They usually don’t have enough of a brain left to figure out how to get back. I’ve seen a few of them
‘accidentally’ wander into the line of fire. It’s a pain in the ass to clean up.”
About what I thought. Sometime in the last couple of decades, a scientist discovered a compound that he hoped would cure the ubiquitous cases of melanoma caused by the system’s binary stars. During the testing phase, he discovered that instead of blocking damaging UV light, the compound catalyzes with it and induces feelings of intense euphoria in anyone who ingests it. It has virtually no effect if you stay out of sunlight, but the addictive effects were too much of an instant hook for a lot of people. Word got out, and the process for making the compound with it, and people like the guy at the end of the range started popping up everywhere. If taken over a long enough period of time, the product and overexposure to sunlight turn these pathetic addicts into walking zombies, bodies filled with cancers and diseases, and brains fried like rotten bacon. There’s no way to recover from the effects once they’ve gone that far. Like any junkie, they can be dangerous if they don’t get their fix. That is, until they become too weak to do anything but fester and waste away. The name solar stoner is as good as any.
Desto’s comment about a nearby town ignites my interest. “There’s a town in the area?”
“Yeah, but you don’t want to go there. Full of lowlifes and crooks. We keep the Beach free of their kind.”
Does he realize the irony in what he said? I’m one of their kind.
“We shake down anyone from that gutter-ghetto who comes over here. More than a few have tried to take what we’ve got. They just don’t seem to get it that you have to work for what you get in this life. No free rides. Besides, we’re always ready for them, me and her.” He pats the Thresher assault rifle that he’d used on the range, now resting in a scabbard along the frame of the bike. “You ready?”
I jerk my chin over to the stoner by the turbine. “What about him?”
“Can’t do anything for him. He doesn’t have long.” He revs the bike and I barely manage to grasp his shirt in time to keep from tumbling off the back.
* * *
The short ride back to the hangar isn’t fast enough to keep my worries from catching up with me. I’m sure it’s too soon to have heard back from Rajcik, but every hour that passes could be one hour closer to David’s death.
Desto skids to a stop next to the Sphynx. As I climb off the beast, Bodie walks over. He grins at Desto, very straight teeth gleaming through the tendrils of his beard and mustache. “Hey man, can you give me a hand with this toolbox?” He indicates a container sitting at the base of a ladder propped against the Sphynx.
“Bodie! Bring me that cylinder torque, will you?” The voice belongs to a pair of legs emerging from the rear hydraulic compartment. It’s Strahan, leaning so far in that only the tips of his toes are skimming the ground. One of his feet is black-booted but the other is still encased in its brace.
Bodie and Desto both take an end of the toolbox. With his free hand, Bodie tosses me a wrench. “Here, Erikson, hand this to Karl. Thanks.”
I approach the legs and hear muted cursing. “I’ve got your wrench.”
“Great, sweetie. Just lay it on the cart there. No wait, hand it to me.”
I’m confused for a second and then chuckle when I realize that he thinks I’m someone else. “Here you go.”
He emerges from the hatch so quickly it’s almost as if the ship spits him out. “Oh, shit. Erikson. I thought you were….you sounded like…um, I thought you were someone else.”
“Yeah, I got that.” It’s hard
not to laugh at his embarrassment as I hand him the cylinder torque. He just stands there for a moment, appearing to be at a loss at what to say. So I make it easy. “Have you seen Vitruzzi?”
A faint red blush still tinges his cheeks. Sensitive after all, it appears. “She’s up in the com annex. You know how to get there, right?”
I nod and walk to the lift. When I get to the top, Vitruzzi is sitting in a chair in front of the massive satellite console, listening to something through a set of headphones. I allow myself to hope for a second that it’s a message from Rajcik.
“Anything?” I ask.
She swivels around and looks at me with a mixture of disappointment and worry. My own features shift, mirroring hers.
Removing the headphones and laying them down on the desk, she says, “We’ll try again at 2000. That’s about twelve hours since you sent the first message.”
Twelve hours, but the chances are still slim that enough time will have passed for him to respond. It would take approximately three hours for the transmission to get there, another three to get back, with a narrow six-hour window in between where he’d have to be monitoring for new messages from the uplink satellite. It’s possible he’s not even checking at this point, having given David and I up for dead days ago. Or the Admin could have traced him and severed his access. There are a million things that could keep him from getting that message. Thinking of it makes the balloon of anxiety in my torso swell tight, close to bursting.
“And if there’s nothing, what then?”
“Then we’ll have to take our chances with Vilbrandt.”
I meant what would happen to me if Rajcik doesn’t come through with the plans, but I don’t pursue the answer. The severity of her expression makes it clear that her biggest, and only, concern is figuring out how to rescue the other crew from the Fortress. I’m here as a token of hope, one that can be chucked if there’s no more reason to hope.
As if she hears my thoughts, Vitruzzi says, “You know, Erikson, if Rajcik doesn’t respond, there isn’t a hell of a lot you can offer us.”
I keep my features neutral and my eyes very steady. “You can’t keep me here forever.”
“Nothing is stopping you from running. You’ve seen that. But I think it’s fair to warn you that the Admin has newscast your theft. There’s an at-large notice for you and Rajcik both. Everyone with a receiver from here to the moons of Spectra 4 has seen your faces. There’s also a reward.” She pauses, inspecting my expression.
My features feel as if they’ve turned to stone, rigid and cold, hiding the fear behind them. T’Kai had agreed that the operation would be anonymous. Any Corps soldier who asked the wrong questions would be charged with dereliction of duty and sentenced indefinitely to Keum Libre. If Vitruzzi is telling the truth, and I have no reason to think she wouldn’t be, either T’Kai hadn’t kept that part of the bargain or they’d gotten to David and made him talk. It wouldn’t surprise me if T’Kai double crossed us; he’s a typical self-serving Admin politician, but if it was David…I know my brother. If he talked, it took drugs and torture. Imagining how much he’d resist before they could break him turns my guts to antifreeze. And if he told them everything he knew, why would they keep him alive?
“They’re calling it theft of Admin property, downplaying it. But they want you and Rajcik bad, that’s certain.”
“So you could turn me in and collect the reward. If Rajcik doesn’t come through, what’ll stop you?”
“Besides the fact that my crew and I are the reason they haven’t caught you already? Nothing. Except that’s not the way I do things. I know something about you, Erikson, that you either don’t realize about yourself, or you’re trying very hard to hide.”
“And what’s that?”
“You’re not as much of a greedy cutthroat as you pretend you are.”
I chuckle rudely.
“You want to know what my proof is? The way you risked your neck to help Karl on R’Kadia. If you didn’t care about anyone’s ass but your own, you wouldn’t have done that. You could have jumped on that elevator without a second thought. But you didn’t. It’s automatic for you to look out for others…”
“When it’s in my own interest,” I finish for her.
She’s quiet for a moment, letting that sink in. “I don’t think it’s about getting rich for you. We all have our reasons for doing what we do, and I think yours are about getting even, getting revenge. I know what the Corps is like. The stories make it out this far. A soldier has to follow orders, whether she likes it or not. You deserted for the same reason you work with an arms smuggler.”
“And what’s that?”
“You want to get back at the Admin for trying to make you a killer. That’s not you, even if it’s easier for you to tell yourself it is.”
Vitruzzi’s words splash over me with the same harsh effect of alcohol poured over an open wound. She’s right, but it’s a hard truth. I hide behind my battle-hardened armor so I don’t have to think about who I may really be deep inside. I buried the soldier I had been under layers and layers of carefully tended forgetfulness. What kind of person follows the inhuman orders that I had to follow? Telling myself that I had no choice doesn’t make any difference. I’m no more willing to know the answer to that than I am to let my brother die without traveling to the edge of the galaxy, to hell if I have to, to save him. So I bury the guilt and I bury the hate I have for the Admin and the Corps. It doesn’t matter. It’s bigger than the universe. So fuck it, let me forget my feelings, and my reasons, and just get rich. “What’s your point, Vitruzzi?”
“What I’m saying is this. Most of the people in Agate Beach feel the same way you do. But instead of giving up, they went the other way. We’re really living, Erikson. We have friends, family, and a future, and we’re doing it our way. We are not controlled and we make our own choices about how we lead our lives. There could be a place for you here, if you want to know what real freedom is.”
“But you kept your citizenship. You still work for the Admin. Is that what you mean by freedom?”
My words are unnecessarily callous, and her face hardens. “I’m not a hypocrite. I do what I have to because I’m a doctor. Working for the Admin gives me access to the equipment and supplies I need so that the people here don’t die needlessly.”
“So you want to pass judgment on me because I don’t pretend to be a good citizen? At least I’m honest about being a thief. Where did Brady and your crew get those weapons they carry? Found them in the desert? And what about those solar seeds? Don’t try and tell me your legally contracted transport operation is squeaky clean. Maybe you think you have me figured out, but your business isn’t exactly going to win you a ‘citizen of the year’ award.”
Her reaction is instant and vicious. “Who the hell do you think you are?”
“Hey, am I interrupting?” Neither one of us had heard the lift that brought Bodie up.
Vitruzzi rises, her shoulders stiff and her eyes blazing with anger. “No, we’re done. Be back here at 2000.” Brushing by me without another look, she steps onto the lift and disappears.
Bodie watches her leave, eyebrows raised in concern and curiosity. When she’s gone, he turns to me and asks, “What was that about?”
I already regret what I’d said. What good does it do to make Vitruzzi my enemy? Don’t I have enough to worry about? “Nothing important.”
“Yeah whatever, Erikson.” He stares crossly at me, the way you stare at a child who has tried but not succeeded in lying to you. “It’s all right to tell me it’s none of my business. Anyway, I’m headed to an observation platform topside to take an air quality reading. Want to join me? It’s a helluva climb.”
I have four hours to kill, each one promising to be more frustrating than the last. Anything to take my mind off the waiting. “Yeah, sure.”
“Here, put this on. It’s dark in there.” He hands me a light attached to a head harness and we begin to climb up a steel ladder hanging from t
he wall beside the lift platform. It soon disappears into a narrow tunnel drilled into the rock.
I count two hundred and fifty rungs as we climb before he stops. A giant lock tumbler grates noisily into place, and a waterfall of sunlight blazes past his frame, dazzling my upturned eyes.
“Sorry, I should have warned you. It’s pretty bright after being in the tunnel.”
I follow him up the last couple of rungs and over the edge of the tunnel mouth, my arms grateful for the reprieve.
We’re standing on a small platform, maybe one-and-half by two meters, with a metal railing. From up here, the midafternoon sunlight scorches the planet as far as my eyes can see, turning the goose bumps on my arms from the cool cave into tiny, hot stingers. I feel the way ants must feel when wicked children level a magnifying glass over the top of them, but the sensation passes quickly as I take in the panoramic view.
Bodie unslings his backpack and now holds a small sensor wand in one hand and an analysis pack in the other. He waves it around and checks the readout from the air tester.
“Why check the air quality? Is there an atmosphere converter on this planet?”
“No, I just do it for my amusement. I used to be a geophysicist with the Ministry of Engineering before I came out here. It’s habit.” Aside from a catch in the back of his throat, as if he’s getting over a persistent cough, his voice is almost back to normal.
“Sounds like a good job. Why did you give it up?”
He gives me a reluctant sideways glance before answering. “I lost my citizenship when I quit working for the Admin. We were researching unique life forms on the Obals and trying to convert them into incubators for specimens from the first Earth. You know, cows, horses, that kind of thing. I just couldn’t stomach it. I thought we should leave them be and learn to live with the natural environment, at least what’s left of it. The Admin disagreed and threatened to strip my funding. Said I was ‘jeopardizing essential scientific research’ or some shit like that. I decided selling out for a few bucks wasn’t worth it. So I quit.”