by Tammy Salyer
“Are you cold?” Karl says.
Before I can ask him why he’d think that, I glimpse the gooseflesh that has sprung up on both of my arms, wrists to shoulders. “Nah.” I shake my head. “Just…”
He stares at me, waiting for me to finish my sentence, but I don’t know what to tell him. That I had a sense that, even though we’d rescued these kids from a gruesome end, I still feel like they’re doomed? That I felt a sudden certainty that the last war was the final war humanity would ever fight, because we’re all doomed?
Stepping over to the rations cabinets, I enter the code only the KL crew has and grab him and me ready-to-eats. Handing one over, I let him know I’m heading to the bridge. I don’t want to eat in front of those hungry kids, with their shining eyes crawling over me like grave beetles.
When we’d divided up for the flight to the colony, I’d been relieved that the only ones coming with us were the kids and Mason. The rest of the refugees stayed with the Teibo after we’d transferred all the essential salvage aboard the Orika. None of them had seen the kids before, and the children who weren’t too traumatized to tell us their story said they hadn’t seen their parents since their transport ship had been attacked, less than a week prior. Before those cannibals had been eaten alive by the swarm of crab-things, they must have bragged to each other about their good week of “salvage.”
Trying to shake the creeping feeling thinking about those children and their parents’ fate has given me, I join Venus in the cockpit.
She’s at the pilot’s console, spinning a small object around like a top on one of the flat displays.
“Hungry?” I ask, dropping a nutrition bar on the console between displays.
“Thanks! All clear in the rear?” She chuckles at her pet joke and picks up the object, which I can now see is a ring made of some kind of matte-textured metal.
Nodding, I bite into my own bar and perch on the edge of the navigator’s seat. Trying not to be obtrusive, but curious nonetheless, I comment, “Pretty baubley, what is it?”
“Molybdenum and titanium alloy. It’s a piece off the Sphynx that Jer welded into a ring for me.”
“A…ring? Like, are you engaged or something?”
“Yeah.” She says it with the gushing joy of a kid getting her first magbike, her happiness nearly too big to be contained in the small cockpit.
And it suddenly hits me—in spite of all the losses, deaths, uncertainties, and just the way almost everything in life has become so hard, there will never be a total loss of hope, never be a total loss of what it means to be human. When the scale of everything is out of proportion, happiness and enduring optimism adjust accordingly, but they do not disappear. The realization is a weird contrast to the gloomy feeling I’d just had about the kids, and the competing extremes give me a moment of cerebral vertigo.
I take another bite and chew it, clearing my head. “I’m really happy for you, Venus. He’s a good guy. Actually, he’s a great guy.”
“I know,” she states as a matter of fact, then chomps into her nutrition bar.
I lean forward and start cycling through feeds and data to get a sense of our landscape. “Older satellite images show that it was a fairly good-sized mining colony,” I mention. “Wonder how many people are left?”
“We’ll know in about three minutes. It’s just on the other side of this range. Snap in, Aly.” After confirming by radio the distance and a good landing area with Zeta on the ’Bo, she makes a general announcement to our crew over the com that we’ll be landing shortly.
As we crest the peak of a barren, snow-dusted, twenty-five-hundred-meter mountain, light from two of the suns breaks into weird shadows through our viewscreens, draining the cockpit of any real color, turning everything a simmering sepia brown, like rust. For a few seconds, Venus’s hair appears to be aflame in the glow, and I realize mine must look just as fiery to her. It will be night again soon, or at least nightlike for a few hours. This side of the mountains looks like it will be colder than the cannibals’ side.
She pushes the engines harder, expertly taking advantage of the thermal currents coming down the back side of the mountain range, and the mining colony comes into sight within moments. The Orika, like all ships based on its model, is sleek, solid, and built to take a beating. Mostly interplanetary, they have a range of a few hundred thousand kilometers on a full nuclear-core load and the capacity to carry 750 cubic tons. Mostly, they were commissioned by traders and shippers for local jobs. Nearly one of every five non-Corps vessels in the air were ASHTs—Admin Starclass Hypermaneuver Transport Craft—prior to the war, and being one of the most resilient hull designs ever made, more of them survived it than any other model.
Despite the Orika’s notable carrying capacity, room for personnel is spartan at best. A central shower, a galley that carries up to fifty days’ supply of meals and beverages, a rudimentary med-bay, a private captain’s bunk, which Karl and I are sharing on this run, and a separate general sleeping bunkroom for up to six crewmembers make up the living quarters. Only three people are needed to fly it at once, but backup mechanics and cargo handlers are usually included on the manifest. If something happens in space and you need to keep flying, someone has to staff the engine ports to keep it going. Fortunately, most of the shipping lanes were well trafficked enough before the war that a broken-down vessel was rarely left in the lurch for long.
After the war, these shipping lanes provided the easiest pickings for scavengers and salvagers (though, in reality, I’m not sure there is any difference). We picked up both the Teibo and the Orika herself from one of these orbital highways. The Beachers may have been backwater-planet dwellers, but their combined mechanical ingenuity and engineering moxie are among the best I’ve seen outside of the Obals. Something about living tangential to the “civilized” world brings out qualities in people that seem to be dormant within those whose lives were a clear path of steady and consistent submission from the cradle to the grave.
Sometimes those qualities are extraordinary. Other times—horrifying.
We start a circle around the mining settlement, giving me time to take it in, though we plan to land a few klicks away—just to be safe. It must have still been functioning before the war. Scattered mining equipment and drill pieces dot the area and line the southern edge of a pit in the earth that could easily swallow both the Orika and the ’Bo and still have room for every building within the community. It’s as if the moon were hit by an asteroid, the crater almost too deep to see down to the bottom, particularly in the spreading twilight.
Both scouts come to rest north of the colony. We don’t want to invite trouble or give them an easy target if they’re primed to fight. The fugees will have to walk the rest of the distance, but they shouldn’t complain. They’re getting a couple of bins of water and some food, a couple more bins of medical supplies—even precious antibiotics, at Vitruzzi’s insistence—and everyone gets a weapon and a couple of clips of ammunition. It’s a lot to carry, but they’ll find a way. After we’re prepped to leave, that is. Vitruzzi’s one other requirement is that the orphaned kids come back to Keum Libre. It’ll make rations tight for the trip home, but without someone to look out for them, their fates out here are easy to guess. After Karl’s and my earlier conversation, I’m wondering if he’s thinking we should be part of those someones.
None of the refugees had been happy about our plans to leave them behind, even the ones from the mining colony. I can’t blame them. Regardless, postwar fact number one: altruism is as dead as the Admin. What had Quantum said? We’re not in the search-and-rescue business? That’s the absolute truth. They should be able to make the best of things here, maybe acquire enough salvage of their own to barter for a ride off and a better chance next time a ship comes through. And if Quantum had been right, only a couple thousand klicks from here, there’s a planet ripe for growing all the food they can eat.
I don’t let myself think too much about the extremely high likelihood that not o
ne of them knows a hoe from a combine.
With no reason to leave the Orika—Desto, David, and Zeta can handle any trouble—I dig into a food bar and watch through the viewscreens as we wait for the ’Bo’s cargo hatch to retract.
And wait.
Venus stands up and stretches, then turns as if she’s planning to leave the cockpit.
“Hold it,” I say.
The strain in my voice stops her. “Something bugging you?”
That cold feeling I’d had earlier when looking at the ragamuffin kids comes back, but this time it moves into my spine, making my body feel rigid and brittle, ready to crack. It’s the same instinct that’s kept me alive for this long. Without answering Venus, I click on the com. “Anyone back there? Is the ramp on the ’Bo open?”
After a second Hoogs gets back to me. “I’m in the cargo bay, Aly. The ramp is still closed. Can you ask them what the holdup is?”
I activate our transmitter. “Zeta, it’s Aly. Need any help over there?” Venus stands behind me. We wait for almost a minute—no response.
I switch back to the com: “Everyone, the ’Bo’s crew is in trouble. We need to get—” Before I finish the sentence, an engineering hatch on the other scout’s underside bangs open, and five limp bodies fall to the earth. None of them moves, and they hit one by one, first stacking on top of each other and then tumbling into a disorganized heap, devoured by the ship’s shadow. My heartbeat suddenly fills my ears, the blood roaring through my body and brain like a supernova. I’m outside the cockpit and sprinting for the cargo bay door before the last body has settled. Dimly, I hear Venus’s voice over the intercom, telling the others what we’ve seen.
Skidding to a stop in front of the cargo bin where we keep the larger weapons inside the bay—the carbines, Dragunovs, and Brownings—I enter the code and scoop up my AK-80 as Hoogs lowers the cargo ramp. With everyone closing in behind him and me as fast as they can, we burst outside. But before we can reach the bodies, the Teibo’s jets accelerate to launch torque and force Hoogs and me to our knees, shielding our faces with our arms.
And like that, the ship is screaming forward, gaining momentum before exiting the atmosphere. Leaving a pile of corpses in its wake.
FOURTEEN
“David!” My voice rips out of my throat hard enough to hurt. I’m pulling him over onto his back while Mason and Karl untangle Desto and the others. “No, no, fuck, David, no.”
“There are no injuries, no wounds. No…” Vitruzzi says, kneeling down and patting their bodies intently, checking their eyes, their pulses. “No, wait!”
Frantically, she yanks open her medkit and withdraws a breath scanner, which she holds over Desto’s mouth for a few seconds, staring intently at the readout screen. Her body visibly sags when the device finishes its job. “Just drugged. They’ve just been drugged. Jesus Christ.” She does the same with everyone else—Ryan and the two survivors from the mining colony—then sits hard on her ass, looking shell-shocked.
The nausea that I hadn’t realized I was feeling suddenly wins, and I stagger a few feet away, retching out everything I’d just eaten in a ropy puddle of orangish goo. But it makes me feel better. Walking back to David’s prone form—though now my brain recognizes the movement of his chest rising and falling with breath—I take off my jacket and cradle it beneath his head.
“What the fuck…?” Karl begins, but none of us has the answers.
“Let’s get them inside, get some fluid in them,” Vitruzzi says. “It was a GABA. They should be conscious within a couple of hours.”
The six of us carry them inside. After a short wait, just as Vitruzzi predicted, they begin to regain consciousness, and David is the first to awaken. The twilight outside has darkened to an inky blanket, though the air is thin and cold. We’ve buttoned up the Orika to keep out both the chill and any settlers that could wander out this far to see who we are.
The scout ship’s infirmary isn’t big enough for all five of the patients, so we laid the two fugees and Ryan out on the extra crew bunks we’d screwed into place in the storage room for salvage runs, and keep watch over David and Desto in the crew’s berth. Eleven adults and four children is nearly triple the ship’s normal crew size, making things much, much tighter than they ever should be.
“What do you remember?” I ask David. “What happened after we left the scav camp?”
Vitruzzi monitors his vitals and vision as he blinks confusedly. I glance toward her nervously, my query written on my face: All clear?
“It’s wearing off fine. Nothing permanent to worry about,” she says, then moves over to Desto’s bunk to check on him.
At first David is groggy and seems unclear about what had happened. “Are we home?” He scratches the back of his neck, then finally focuses on me. “We still on Eruo Pium, Twig?” Then: “Jesus, I’m thirsty.”
Vitruzzi had thought of that too and hands him a container of water as I answer, “Yeah. You and the rest of the crew were drugged, knocked out. Do you remember anything?”
After a long drink that seems to bring him back to the here and now, he says, “Desto and I were sitting in the mess having some food. Quantum and one of the fugees came in, and Quantum…he asked me if I wanted anything from the ration locker. I remember hearing it open behind me, seeing the fugee walk by Desto, something sharp in my…” He reaches behind his head and scratches again.
“David, look toward the wall,” I say, then study the skin on the back of his neck when he turns. A tiny scab, the size of a needle prick, shows faintly just to the left of his spine. “Bastards. You said Quantum was be—”
“HAAARRUAH!” Desto shouts and grabs Vitruzzi’s wrist so hard I’m afraid he’s going to snap it off.
“Desto! Relax, it’s me!” she yells, putting her other hand to his chest to try and calm him. Just like David, he starts to blink, trying to focus, then lets go of her.
“What the fuck!” he hollers. “What the…?”
Vitruzzi quickly explains what David described as I pass him the water container. Venus comes and leans through the doorway, her face tight with concern. As Vitruzzi wraps up the story, she says, “The two colonists are awake too. And him.” She points and Ryan steps into the doorway beside her, looking dazed and close to falling over. Beyond him, I catch a glimpse of two of the fugee kids standing in the corridor, their somber eyes wide and questioning.
“Have they said anything?” Karl asks. Then, looking suspiciously toward Ryan, he follows up: “Is Hoogs on the flight deck?”
Venus nods. “Yeah, he’s still trying to hail the ’Bo, but…” She shrugs, the corners of her mouth drooping in frustration. “They told me variations of someone grabbed them from behind, then they woke up here.”
“You think Quantum had something to do with this?” Mason asks from where he leans against the wall next to Desto’s bunk.
David swings his legs onto the floor, ignoring my comment to take it easy, then sits up slowly, gripping the bunk support bar with one hand. “Maybe, unless there was someone else in the room. I only saw the one fugee, the big, blond one who looks a little like—”
“Where’s Zeta?” Desto cuts in.
Vitruzzi looks hard into his face, silent, but I drop my own eyes to the floor.
“Where is she, V? Where the fuck is she?”
“We don’t know. We think she’s still aboard the Teibo.”
His face flushes an alarming shade of purple as he jumps out of the bunk, nearly busting his melon on the sleeper above him.
“Wait, just slow down. You’re not ready to—” I start, but he’s not listening, already pushing past Karl and heading toward the doorway.
“Why isn’t this thing in the air, Venus? What the hell is everyone standing around for?”
The fury in his voice is frightening, and I see the kid Ryan stumble back to get away from what he must think will be an onslaught. It might take the whole crew working together to bring Desto under control—I don’t want it to come to that. Before
he can start barreling toward the cockpit, Karl jumps forward and grips one of his wrists, pulling him to a standstill. Karl puts his other hand on the back of Desto’s neck and brings their faces close enough to stare eye to eye. “Calm down, brother.” His voice is rock solid but compassionate, almost serene. “You gotta smooth out, get still, think this through. You’re not going to help her by losing your shit. We will figure this out. But first you need to get it together.”
Desto licks his lips, his eyes fused to Karl’s, then slowly backs away, relaxed enough for Karl to release his grip.
“Uh.” The voice comes from Ryan. Everyone turns to him, surprised, like they’d forgotten he was there. He swallows and reaches out to the wall as if needing support. “I walked in on them while they were planning it.”
“Planning what?” Desto growls.
The kid’s face is pale, but he soldiers on. “The big one, the blond guy, and your crewmember…Quantum? They were talking about hijacking the ship. Said they could use the cargo to barter for something. I didn’t, uh, I didn’t get what they were talking about. But when they saw me, the blond one grabbed me and then, um”—he looks helplessly at Venus—“then I was here.”
“That sonofabitch,” David sneers.
The conversation between Quantum and me in the locker room bubbles to the surface of my thoughts. “I think I know where they’re going.”