by Rich Larson
“You two are in this together,” Basta snarled. “I’m taking your ears off, first.” His shiv skimmed along Nyx’s jaw, up to the fleshy nub of his earlobe. “Then his balls. Then maybe one of you’ll tell me why the fuck he’s here.”
Nyx opened his mouth, but only managed a whine as the shiv drew its first drop of blood.
Then a white plastic meteorite plummeted from the ceiling and smashed Basta to the floor. He howled as the medroid’s legs churned for grip. Nyx scrambled; he didn’t see the needle go in, but he heard the flesh puncture and felt the fine mist of blood flick out into the air. Basta shrieked. When Nyx looked again, the droid was straddling the Woadskin general’s neck, sucking a carmine torrent through its fuel tube, and Basta was writhing, kicking—
Limp. The medroid whirred upright, scanners winking. Basta’s men, who’d been rooted watching, dropped Boniface’s arms. One of them retched.
“I’d leave, if I were you,” Boniface said. “It regains its appetite pretty damn fast.”
Dying nerves sent a final shudder through Basta’s legs, and the men bolted. That left Nyx and Boniface to watch the medroid skitter its way back up the wall and onto the ceiling. It flattened itself down, retracting its spidery limbs, before squeezing into the vent shaft and vanishing from sight.
Boniface turned to his brother. “Hello, Nicholas.”
“Bo.”
“I wasn’t sure if you were getting the final messages,” Boniface said, straightening his jumpsuit. “About the additive. And the other chemicals.”
“You could have told me that homicidal junkbucket was going to pop out of a unit’s stomach like a fucking—”
“Your seller told me it was the only way to smuggle it through.”
Nyx dropped down on the edge of his pad, hiding the shake in his legs. “Didn’t tell me it was programmed for the additive, either. What if I’d been nosing that batch? Motherfucking thing would have gone after me, too.”
Boniface snorted. “I broke you out of that habit a long time ago.”
“I’ve been in here a long fucking time,” Nyx snapped. “I could have started up again, how would you know?”
“I know you, Nicholas.”
“Because you’re so wise.” Nyx gave a dry laugh. “I bet mum never thought you’d end up in here with me, right? Both sons in the slam, the deadbeat and the family man.”
“We both know you didn’t have to end up here. You could have—”
“Gone to work on the pharms for the rest of my life, been someone’s bitch, doing the mix-work they’re too cheap to hire AI for. What did that get you, huh? Besides two rotting lungs.”
Boniface shook with a cough. Nyx’s eyes flickered away.
“This king under the hill,” Boniface croaked, when the cough subsided. “This Capricorn. You trust him to help you once he’s on the outside? You trust him with your life?”
“Yeah, I do. With your family’s, too.” Nyx squirmed. “He always pays back, good or bad. They’ll keep. He’ll make sure they keep. You can trust it.”
“I don’t have any other choice.” Boniface’s voice was brittle. “Not one.” He scanned the cell, eyes moving quickly past Basta crumpled on the floor, and when he spoke again he was business-like. “You cook in here? You have equipment?”
“Been here a long time, Bo.” Nyx pointed back to his cubby-hole. “Got the equipment, got the precursors. You remember how to cook a psychotropic?”
“I think we’d do best to wait until after they come for the corpse.”
“Hope they flush him,” Nyx said, staring down at the body. “Capricorn wasn’t in the freeze three days before those fuckers broke pacts. Rooted Johns in the yard, did Murr and Damola in the showers.” His glob of spit missed just to the left of Basta’s head. “Just a week, everyone was either dead or taking a Woadskin tag. Was only me left.”
This time Boniface looked away. “I didn’t know about that.”
Nyx shrugged. “Hard to work all the details into one infopacket per fucking month on the state of chemical engineering.”
Word spread like a hantavirus: Grigio Krewer was wreaking his vengeance from the grave, via black-market retrofitted medroid, and five Woadskins were already dead, Basta included. The power vacuum was the biggest problem, but a rogue droid gave the sweepers ample excuse to come down with full body armor and autoguns.
“They should be moving us soon,” Nyx said, stashing the last baggies in his jumpsuit.
“And your sweeper friend is sure about the EMP?”
Boniface was at the wash basin, first for his chemical-stained hands, now for everything else. His pale skin had a greasy tinge to it, looking almost like wax. He was scrubbing himself down to nothing, scouring the last loose hairs and skin particles, and one fingernail cracked against the basin as he set the brush down.
“Yeah, it’s like I guessed it. They’ve got an hour to try to flush the thing out, then they cut timecost and drop the EMP. If the, uh, the avoidance AI is good as you say . . .”
“It is.” Boniface wiggled the nail free with a slick wet scrape; Nyx cringed.
“Then sixty odd minutes from now, the EMP goes off.” Nyx paused. “Speaking of time estimate. What did they give you?”
“Keeping on with the aggressive gene-chemo, I could maybe hold out another three months. Medical AI projects a cure in twelve to fifteen years, and I didn’t make the money cut for medcenter cryo.”
Nyx nodded. “I never got to meet your girl. She old now? What did you name her?”
The yellowed nail clattered into the basin. “Sybil,” Boniface said. “Seven, now.”
“Shit.” Nyx scratched at the tattoo on his collarbone. “Does she know she’s got an uncle?”
Boniface turned from the basin, and the lines of his face softened just slightly. “No,” he said. “She doesn’t know you exist. She doesn’t know I’m here. She thinks I went to a better hospital in space.” He stuck his hollowed nailbed under the tap; water stuttered out. “But her mum’s going to tell her everything, and if the plan goes off, I’ll tell her someday, too.”
The arrival of a sweeper guillotined the conversation. “Pack your parkas, units, everyone’s going to the freezers until we sort this droid shit out.”
Nyx rearranged his face, back to his customary squint. “Fucking finally. Can’t feel safe in my own damn cell these days.”
“Get along.” The sweeper waved them towards the door with his chitinous black autogun. “If you don’t want frostbite on your cocks, better find somewhere warm to put them.”
They joined the stream of orange jumpsuits all filing out of their cell block. Sweepers herded from the sides, more liberal than usual with the stunsticks. The air buzzed thick with tension. Nyx saw a Woadskin staring at him, then at Boniface, but he didn’t approach. With Basta dead, the most immediate problem was succession. Nyx knew there were still enough Neo-Mara and Sixers in the block to make things messy if the Woadskins didn’t get their shit in order.
A customer tapped Nyx on the shoulder; he jumped.
“Got me something, chemist?”
“Don’t fucking do that. But yeah.” Nyx pulled out two of the baggies. “Got Samir’s, too, but tell him pay comes first next time.”
The customer took both, gave Boniface an up-down, and melted back into the orange jumpsuits. A moment later, one of the Sixers came sniffing. The sweepers were distracted, and by the time the crowd reached the corridor gate to the freezers, half the prisoners had already bumped the new batch. Nyx had helped the circulation with a few more uncharacteristic giveaways.
“This is the prep-room?” Boniface asked, as they packed into a blue-gray chamber with machinery dangling from the shadowed ceiling.
“Yeah. Decontamination, blood tests, all that shit to get you cryo-ready.” Nyx paused. “I mean, ideally, you’d be getting a saline pump.”
“Beggars can’t be choosers.”
“Listen up, fuckers!” One of the sweepers had followed them inside, rol
ling back his facemask. “You sit tight right here with me and Dirk during this little droid hunt. Anyone starts shit, they’re going in iso. Start shit in a big way, well, autoguns get buggy like anything else.”
The other sweeper hauled the door shut behind them with a pneumatic hiss and metal click.
“This’ll be done soon,” the sweeper continued. “The motherfuckers in entry / re-entry are going to learn to spot when a unit’s fucking robopregnant, and you’ll be back in the block before you know it.”
The prisoners were milling, rumbling. Nyx nodded his brother towards the back of the prep-room, where a metal-and-plexiglass door led to the freezer itself. He tried to peer through the frosted porthole.
“Been inside twice, on scrub duty,” he said. “Eerie as fuck in there.”
Boniface coughed into the crook of his arm, then straightened. “How did you meet him?”
“Capricorn?”
“Yes.”
“Saved me from being someone’s socket,” Nyx said shortly. “Told him I could cook, he got me my own cell. All the glass, all the precursor I needed. We ran this place.”
“And he stamped you.” Boniface traced his own skin, mirroring the zodiac inked into Nyx’s collarbone. “Like livestock.”
Nyx’s eyes went cryopod cold. “He made me family. I wanted the tag. He was a father for me.”
“We had a father.”
“Don’t even fucking remember him,” Nyx said. “Only pretended to for mum. All I remember is the hologame outside the hospital. But I guess he was a vegetable anyways, by then.”
Boniface started to cough again, more loudly this time, and when it ended he didn’t speak. Nyx sat down on the cold floor; a moment later Boniface did the same. A Sixer and two Neo-Mara were engaged in fierce hushed conversation. Lost-looking Woadskins camped in the corner. A few games of craps and one short-lived fight broke out.
Nyx and Boniface watched, and waited.
It started with Samir from the lunar colony trying to gnaw his own fingers off. His crew pulled his bloody hand out of his mouth before he did real damage, but a moment later half of them were flat on their backs, laughing madly at the ceiling.
“Fifty-eight minutes,” Boniface said. “You always did have a way with timed release.”
“Yeah. Be ready to haul ass through that door soon as the EMP drops the lights.” Nyx swallowed. He slapped his brother’s shoulder. “She’s seven, yeah? She’ll remember you. Should even recognize you in a decade; you’ll look the same.”
“Thanks.”
“Likewise.” Nyx gave him a push towards the door. “If it works.”
“Chemist!” Dirk’s crackly shout blared across the room. “Get the fuck over here, man!” Nyx threw his brother a salute, then turned and ambled over to where two baffled sweepers stood over Samir. The man was rubbing himself furiously against the floor.
“What the fuck did you give them?” the other sweeper snarled, snagging Nyx by the arm and hauling him forward. “What the fuck did you do?”
“Bad batch, unit,” Nyx said, wrenching his arm back. “Bad batch, is all.”
“He’s fucking panned.” Dirk shook his helmeted head. “So’s the crew. You do this on purpose?”
Nyx raised his hands. “No, fuck no. I like repeat customers.” He checked the time display on Dirk’s faceplate. “Get him to infirmary if you want. Shouldn’t your boys have dropped that EMP by now? Said we were stuck here for an hour, max.”
“They can’t pinpoint the thing,” Dirk said, with a snort of static. “Hoping it wandered into a furnace and fried itself. It’s not in the cells, not in the vents.”
Nyx’s spine tingled. He froze, then snapped his head up towards the ceiling, to the spires of dangling machinery. He searched the deep shadows for a flash of spidery legs or winking of red optics. Nothing.
“How many units bumped?” Dirk demanded.
Nyx pulled his gaze down. Pandemonium was spreading from all four corners now: he saw Sixers swatting at invisible insects and Woadskins howling into each other’s faces. Boniface had disappeared. Some sort of disturbance was building at the end of the room, inmates rippling towards and away.
“Don’t know. Plenty.”
“You fucking waste,” the other sweeper snapped. “I’m going to call in for tranqs. Fuck this.” He chinned his mic, but his mouth slackened and formed no words.
Nyx followed his eyes to where the inmates’ panic had reached crescendo. They were splitting off, backing away, as the medroid skittered through. Its carapace was crusted over with half-congealed blood, and traces of the most recent refuel dripped red in its wake.
The machine halted in front of Nyx, scanners flickering over his face. Nyx watched the laser move down his chest like a sniper’s sight and thought of all the nights of cooking, sweating into his facemask, squinting at the froth and hiss of reaction. He thought of how much additive had seeped into his pores.
“Don’t move, chemist,” Dirk muttered, but Nyx’s legs still shook as the medroid clambered slowly up his body, hanging off his shoulder like some cold metal fungus. Its wicked syringe snaked out from the underbelly, glinting razor-sharp.
Nyx probed his mummified mouth with his tongue.
“Autoguns don’t miss,” the sweeper said, taking aim. “You’ll be fine, unless there’s some crazy fucking ricochet.”
Nyx wanted badly to shake his head, and then everything happened at once. The medroid levered off his shoulder, springing for Dirk as Dirk strangled the trigger. Half the autogun slugs slammed into metal body; Nyx saw the droid crumple mid-flight, then he was shoved down and felt the spray as the other half of the bullets tore wet holes in the inmate standing behind him.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Nyx choked, scrambling to his feet. Boniface helped haul him up as they turned to see the eviscerated medroid scrabbling for purchase on Dirk’s faceplate, needle scraping and sliding off at angles.
The other sweeper was screaming into his helmet, screaming for them to drop the EMP, it was in here with them, drop the fucking EMP. Inmates surged all around, erupting; Nyx saw a Sixer shiv drive through a Woadskin neck, an inmate clutching a stump instead of a finger.
Nyx and his brother fell back as the Neo-Mara dove into the crush. “That autogun software isn’t worth shit,” he gasped. “They have to drop it now, if they don’t drop it now . . .” On cue, he felt a whine shiver through his teeth, and in the same instant the lights blinked out. Nyx grabbed Boniface’s arm in the dark as bodies rushed around them. “Get to the door. Ten minutes till the locks resynch.”
“They’re killing everyone.” Boniface’s voice was shaky. “You need to hide.”
“Get going,” Nyx said, and when the emergency lights thrummed to life, sickly green tubes along the floor, his brother was gone.
The EMP had reset the palmprint lock that led to the freezer, leaving it a tabula rasa for Boniface’s sweating hand. With the room devolving into a full riot, nobody watched as he slid the door open, releasing a billow of cold, and slipped through. At first he was in icy darkness, then, as the lights came back on, he was forced to shut his eyes.
When he opened them, he saw the freezer, high-vaulted and surfaced in stark white composite. It made him think of cathedrals, and the cloudy cryopods lining the walls of sarcophagi. Boniface went to the end of the row, footfalls echoing. He could dimly hear the clamoring inmates from the other side of the door, but only just.
At cryopod 114, he stopped. It was identical to the others, a slick white cylinder with blue-green vital displays splashed across its glass top, spare nitrogen canister and the emergency override tucked away exactly where the schematic had shown.
Boniface’s long breath unfurled in a slink of steam. He gathered himself, and pulled the handle.
Emergency resuscitation flooded the bloodstream with an adrenaline cocktail, jumpstarted the muscles and hotwired the heart. It could kill. But his brother had been certain that it wouldn’t kill Capricorn. Vacuums sucked away the sus
pension gel in thick slurps, and when he peered Boniface could see the faint silhouette of a tall thin man.
The pod gave an electronic bleat; Boniface pulled it open. The man inside was gaunt, black-browed, and his naked body was covered in constellations, in an inky starmap that covered him to the neck. Above cobalt blue tracery, his face, the one Boniface had paid the cosmosurgeon to match, was lean and pale. Capricorn twitched once, and then his eyes sprang open, a deep cold blue that matched his tattoos.
With one atrophied hand, he seized the tube snaked down his throat and pulled. It came free with a wet rasp, and Boniface took an involuntary step backward at the spray of fluid.
“You’re me, now,” Boniface said. “Boniface Morrow, brother to Nicholas Morrow, sentenced to life term on the asteroid by clerical error.” He began peeling off the orange jumpsuit. “And I’m you.”
Capricorn’s eyes tunneled holes in him. Boniface couldn’t be sure he could even hear.
“The inquiry goes through tomorrow. You’ll be transferred to a minimal security gravity prison.” Boniface shook out the empty jumpsuit. “Nicholas will explain things. Nyx. He says you pay your debts.”
Capricorn’s eyes flickered. He moved one hand to the edge of the pod, and with a fierce twist, hauled himself over the edge. He grunted; Boniface could see the man’s limbs shaking as he pulled the canister of liquid nitrogen out of its cradle beside the pod.
“We have to reskin you,” he said quietly, looking again at the ink constellations webbed across Capricorn’s pale body, an endless night sky.
Capricorn nodded his pale head. When Boniface offered him the bunched sleeve of the jumpsuit, he ignored it, clenching his teeth instead. The nozzle turned with a hiss, and Boniface set to work, quickly, methodically.
The man stayed silent as the nitrogen burned, peeling away his skin with a wet sizzle that crept the nape of Boniface’s neck. He moved from Capricorn’s ankles upward, watching tremors run through the muscle with every spray. When it was finished, his body was flayed raw and glistening.
“It’s chemical burn,” Boniface said. “From a cook gone wrong in Nyx’s cell.” He helped Capricorn into the jumpsuit, zipping it all the way up. His shiny pink skin was so cold it stung. The fabric stuck at it. “Can you make it back to the door on your own? The lock is going to reset in three minutes.”