by Audrey Faye
May limped a little closer. Not close enough to be a threat, but close enough that she and Odachi presented two divergent targets.
“And now you have a choice, Emmaline Gutierrez. You can kill us and this ends here. A lot of people on both sides of the war get hurt. Or you can let us vanish. Let me work to leave something other than mass death and destruction as my legacy.”
Emma had no direct orders. At the very least, her superior officer was guilty of murder and dereliction of duty. He’d killed Dauber and nearly killed her under orders. But those orders were illegal by any interpretation of the rules of war.
“Taro,” May said softly.
Odachi nodded and lowered his weapon, leaving himself open and unguarded. She could kill them both in the span of a few heartbeats, report in, and be a war hero. Move up in the ranks. Maybe even end up an officer.
A tiny sound startled her. Just a small scrape from the station side of the docking bay door. By the time she recognized it, the manual release had triggered and a wounded soldier lurched through, dragging his leg behind him.
Before Emma could react, he fired his weapon. Odachi crumpled to the floor. The smell of cooking meat and burned polymer filled the room. May cried out and it broke Emma’s momentary stasis. In a smooth movement, she whirled and fired. The injured soldier’s eyes widened before he fell. A ten centimeter hole smoked in the center of his chest.
Her hands shaking, Emma stepped over to where Odachi lay and pressed the hot barrel of her gun into his temple, growling incoherently. He didn’t move.
“Emmaline.” May’s soft voice penetrated the buzzing in her ears. “Is this your choice?”
“Can you do it?” Emma asked, not taking her gaze from Odachi.
“Do what?”
“End the war. Save civilian lives.”
May took a deep breath. “Yes.”
She pulled the muzzle of her gun away, leaving a perfect circle of red behind and kicked Odachi in the leg. “Get up. Get up now.”
He groaned and his eyes fluttered several times before he could focus them. The security officer had hit him in the left arm. The material of his uniform shirt was melted into the wound. So much for a pilot with two good arms.
“Go. Get the hell out of here.”
May limped over to the fallen Odachi and helped him to his feet. “Thank you.”
“Don’t. Just don’t. I didn’t do this for you.” Emma looked back at the soldier she had just killed. He could have been any of her squad-mates in the 24th. Someone she was sworn to protect and fight beside.
No longer.
She was no better than Odachi. There was no honor in this. In any of it. Not in a Commonwealth that killed its own. Not in a war that targeted civilians. And now she, too, was guilty of treason. She stood up and aimed the gun at her own temple. At least she couldn’t be court martialled if she were dead.
May reached up, covered Emma’s left hand with her own, and pushed it down. “No. There’s been enough death on my account.”
Emma blinked back tears. The doctor’s earlier words filled her mind. So no one can use me as a weapon anymore.
That’s all any of them ever were. Weapons. Tools to be manipulated and scrapped when no longer useful. Scientist, soldier, flitter, gun. It was all the same.
She slipped the gun into her right hand. Her injured hand. It shook slightly. “No,” she echoed, but she was responding to a different imperative. As May exhaled and relaxed, Emma lifted the gun. And she shot her own left arm at point blank range.
Heat seared through her and the pain followed. Her anguished howl filled the docking bay. The room slid sideways and she stared up at May, confused. When had the scientist gotten so tall?
“Why?” May’s voice was a horrified whisper. She knelt at Emma’s side, her hands fluttering uselessly in the air beside her.
“Hey, look, no blood.” Emma stared at the burned ruin of what had been her shoulder and upper arm.
“Why?” May insisted.
There were tears rolling down her face. The doctor was crying for her. For her.
Odachi looked down at her. “I’m sorry.” He turned to Dr. May. “We have to go. Now. Or never.”
“We can’t leave her!”
“Trash the docking bay,” Emma said. “Drag me out of here and set charges.” Her voice seemed to come from someplace very far away. “Do it!” Everything made sense now. They had to leave. Make it look like they’d blown themselves up in the process. She had to stay. Stay to cover their tracks. And with her gun hand ruined, she would never be just a weapon again.
There was a strange logic to her thoughts. She stared at Odachi. “Get her out. Don’t waste this.” The nerves in her left arm were screaming and it was getting harder and harder to focus her vision. “If I ever see you again, you’re a dead man.”
May squeezed her right hand and everything went black.
An insistent beeping interrupted the silence. Emma tried to lift her arm to swat the noise away, but her arm didn’t listen to her.
“Welcome back, Corporal.”
She blinked her eyes open. Bright lights nearly blinded her.
“I’m sorry. We couldn’t save it.”
That’s why she didn’t feel any pain. It was okay. Being alive was a surprise. She just wasn’t sure it was a welcome one.
“Are you up for a visitor?”
She wasn’t sure she was ready to stay awake either, much less talk to anyone.
Voices slid past her and she let them. It had nothing to do with her. A chair scraped along the floor.
“Corporal, how are you feeling?”
The voice was familiar, but it was shrouded in haze and she couldn’t identify it.
“Can she hear me?” the man asked.
“Yes, Commander.”
Commander. Commander Brent. Emma’s thoughts sharpened to a knife’s edge. Brent. And it all came flooding back. Dauber. The dead soldiers. Odachi. May. Treason. Treason and lies. She glanced back at where her left arm should have been. It was an empty place covered by a thin sheet.
“Corporal?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What the hell happened up there? The salvage team is still combing through the wreckage.”
She closed her eyes again. Good. No one would know what she had done. “Odachi killed them. The security detail.” The man Emma had hit was so clear in her mind. His expression of surprised betrayal would be with her forever. Her own heart ached with an echo of her kill shot.
“What about Doctor May?”
Emma sighed. “Dead.”
“Tell me.”
She drifted off again and started at a rough touch on her right arm.
“Corporal?”
He wasn’t going to leave her alone until she gave him some kind of answer. May’s voice echoed in her mind. Emmaline, is this your choice?
She had made a choice. It may have been her first real choice in a lifetime of obeying orders. “Odachi thought I was dead. I trapped them in the docking bay. Set my powerpack to overload.”
“What happened to Dr. May, Corporal?” Brent’s voice was as insistent as the station’s alarm had been.
May’s earnest gaze shone in her memory. There were so many dead. Too many. What were two more in the official record?
“Dead,” Emma repeated softly. “She’s dead.”
LJ Cohen is a novelist, poet, blogger, ceramics artist, and relentless optimist. After almost twenty-five years as a physical therapist, LJ now uses her anatomical knowledge and myriad clinical skills to injure characters in her science fiction and fantasy novels.
The events of this story take place approximately forty years before the start of Derelict: Halcyone Space book 1, available now.
Sign up for LJ’s occasional newsletter for publication news, sneak peeks of works in progress, and free short fiction. You can also find her on Google+, Facebook, and Twitter.
Falling
A Girl From Above Story
Pippa Da
Costa
Trapped in a scrappers rig with a woman he’s been hired to kill, Caleb Shepperd is beginning to wonder if this job could be his last.
I
Falling
Girl From Above
Do you know what the biggest lie in the nine systems is? It can’t get any worse. It can always get worse. Unless you’re dead. I wasn’t dead, yet. But I’d soon wish I was.
“This is your fault, Captain.” Francisca’s voice bounced around the empty silo’s innards. She tugged again on the rope knotted around our wrists, yanking my arms and bumping her back against mine. She’d said, “Captain,” but what she’d really meant to say was, “Asshole.” It would have been a step up from the names she’d been calling me since we’d officially met a few hours previously, right before we’d been thrown inside a water-storage silo.
Shafts of rust-orange light pierced the dark, spilling in through what looked like phase-bullet holes. At least we wouldn’t suffocate. Sweat beaded at my hairline and crawled down my cheek. “I’m not sure how this is my fault when you’re the one who told Jin exactly where he could shove his rig.”
She muttered something that sounded distinctly Spanish and fidgeted, elbowing me in the ribs. This close, she smelled like lavender soap—that cheap brand fleet used. Much of fleet’s used stock found its way to the out-of-orbit recycling rigs—scrappers, like this one in the Jotunheim system. All the crap in the nine washed up here.
A smile pulled at the corner of my mouth. If she’d just relaxed, I could’ve slipped the ties, but she hadn’t sat still since Jin’s guys had dumped us in the silo. If she kept wriggling, my thoughts would soon start a’wandering. It wasn’t every day I was tied to a woman, even under duress. For her, anyway.
“You’re supposed to be some kind of criminal mastermind, right? Jin’s paying you for a reason. How are you going to get us out of this?” She twisted her head, glaring over her shoulder.
She must have been thinking of another Caleb Shepperd. “Criminal, yes. Mastermind, not so much.” I was a fixer. Jin had paid me to fix her. The old man didn’t like new and unknown folk in his backwater corner of the nine. She’d been taking the prime smuggling runs from his tight cadre of usual guys by undercutting and outflying them. Making waves, Jin had called it. Exactly why the old guy wanted her gone didn’t matter. I’d do anything for credits, but after I caught up with her on Ganymede and shadowed her runs between there and the Jotunheim system, it became pretty clear Jin shouldn’t have been hiring assholes to kill her. He should have been recruiting her.
Fran lifted her head, bumped it against mine and growled out a curse.
“Sit still,” I grumbled, digging my fingers into the ties to test their strength.
I’d seen her flare up in front of Jin like she owned the rig, not the other way around. She had to be outright nuts or stupid to rattle him. Maybe both. Although seeing Old Man Jin lose his sedate cool was almost worth the trip to his silo.
She was wriggling again. “I’ll die of old age before you get to the rescuing,” she said. Her hands twitched, and the ties fell away.
Tingling rippled up my arms. I rolled my shoulders, working out the stiffness. Fran was already on her feet, tapping the point of her dagger against her thigh. Dark shadows crowded her face, hollowing her cheeks and pooling in her eyes. In the light, her features—when not snarling—were an alluring combination of Spanish elegance, full lips, and sharp cheekbones. Soft and hard. But in the silo’s smothering dark, the only pretty thing about her was the sly spark in her eyes. I’d seen that spark in her sideways glances when she’d unleashed a verbal tirade. It was there now, like she knew she was better than me in every way and I was something she’d like to scrape from her boot. She was probably right.
“You had a knife the whole time?” I asked, massaging my arms through my flight-suit sleeves, trying to work some feeling back in to the muscles.
She’d been frisked. Which meant she’d had the blade in her boots, or somewhere real close and personal.
“I’m always armed, Captain.” She held out her hand. “Unlike you, I haven’t survived in the black by looks alone.”
Something told me if I took her hand, I’d be in for more trouble, not less. I should kill her. Keep it simple. Get away clean. It’d be a whole lot easier that way. Her tank top revealed enough muscle to show she’d put up a decent fight, and she was quick too. She’d proven that when clocking one of Jin’s heavies in the face. But she wasn’t a brawler. Jin’s guys had kicked her legs out from under her and manhandled her under control in seconds. Her tongue was clearly sharp though—and her wits too.
I took her hand and let her yank me to my feet. Soft hands, smooth skin. That lean figure of hers was trained, not earned through manual labor. She still had the dagger out. I’d run a check on her dataprint when tracking her, and there was nothing in her past to suggest she’d use the weapon on me. Still, life in the black changed people.
Running a hand through my hair dislodged bits of grit. I wiped the sheen of sweat from my face and considered all the questions I needed answers to. Things hadn’t exactly gone to plan. “What’s a girl like you doing smuggling for scrappers?”
She made a dismissive pfft sound. “What’s an ex-fleet captain doing hiding out in Jotunheim?”
I turned away and scratched at the back of my neck, pretending to examine the silo while hiding my face. So she knew I wasn’t just the captain of a tugship. She knew who I was—who I’d once been. If I told her why I was keeping a low profile, she wouldn’t believe me. Or she would. And then I’d have half of fleet’s armada bearing down on my ass. I’d kept off their radar this long. Some backwater smart-ass bitch wasn’t going to change that.
Expression back under control, I smiled—my default response when challenged. “Get me drunk when we get off this stinking rig and maybe I’ll tell you.”
“When we get out this silo I’m leaving your worthless ass and this godforsaken corner of the nine behind.” She tucked her dagger back inside her boot and straightened. Her smile was a slippery thing, and when combined with her sly glances and her down-the-nose looks, it made it quite clear she had me pegged. She couldn’t be much older than me. Maybe mid-twenties, but by the way she carried herself, chin up, shoulders back, she was a woman used to being right.
“Youngest fleet captain to earn his stripes?” She huffed a laugh when all she got from me was a scowl. “Don’t look so worried. Doesn’t matter who you are out here.” She looked up and examined the silo’s cap. “Boost me.”
She wasn’t getting out of here without my “worthless ass,” but I wasn’t escaping anytime soon without hers either. The silo cap would push off easily enough. But what was to stop her leaving me once she’d climbed out? She already knew I was ex-fleet and Jin’s fixer. She’d probably already decided she knew my type. Shit, even I’d leave me behind. If she suspected I was being paid to kill her, she’d have already tried to stick me with her dagger.
“I don’t think so.” I scratched at my chin. “I’m stronger than you. Boost me, and I’ll lift you out.”
In the gloom I could just make out how one of her dark eyebrows lifted. “And I’m supposed to trust you?”
“Do you see anyone else here? I sure as shit ain’t trusting you, honey.”
“Why did Jin put you in here?” She started circling the silo, and me, kicking at the desiccated garbage strewn about the floor.
I swallowed, or tried to. Machine dust tainted the air, lacing my tongue with a metallic aftertaste. “Because I’m the asshole who tracked you through three systems and two jump gates, watching you profit from his loss. By the time I told him what I knew, he’d decided he didn’t need me no more. Jin likes to make inconvenient people—like you—disappear.” There were a dozen silos like ours in the scrappers yard, and I’d bet credits on some of them harboring more of Jin’s enemies. Couple that with all the heavy crushing and metal-harvesting machinery, and it was almost too easy to grind human body parts to d
ust and scatter them in the black. I’d seen the old bastard smile while doing it.
She stopped her walk and faced me, closer this time.
“You can glare at me all day,” I said. “But the longer you do, the more time Jin has to strip both our ships clean and think up new and exciting ways of dealing with nuisance smugglers.” Rolling up each sleeve, I checked I had the cap directly above. “Boost me, honey.”
Her eyes narrowed.
“C’mon.” I beckoned her forward with a curl of my fingers, enjoying the way her scowl touched me in all the right places. “I don’t bite. Unless you want me to.”
She sauntered close and cupped her hands between us. “Pinche idiota.”
I didn’t speak a word of Spanish, but I sure liked how it sounded on her lips. “Ready?” I settled my hands on her shoulders, surprised at her softness. I’d expected her to feel as hard as steel, just like her words.
She rolled her shoulders beneath my grip. “As I’ll ever be.”
I barred a smile from my lips. She wasn’t going to give an inch in anything. Stuck in a silo with an asshole smuggler, and so far she’d taken it like it was just another day in the black. Most folks would be having a hard time battling panic. Not her. She had to know Jin had her number punched. So what was she afraid of?
I planted my boot in her hands and bounced off my back foot, reaching up to shove the silo cap free. It clattered down the sloped sides of the silo and landed with a clang on the platform outside. Fran boosted me again. I gripped the rim and heaved myself through.
The cavernous insides of Scrappers Rig 19 resembled a vast engine. The hungry rig gobbled up decommissioned ships, devoured anything of worth, and then melted down their remains. From my perch on top of the silo I could see three ships on the decom belt: a dilapidated warbird that looked as though it had been around since before the Blackout, the skeletal remains of a fleet freighter, and Fran’s Pelican-class smuggling ship. I winced. Its guts had been torn out. Welders sparked, and metal clanged and chimed. That bird wasn’t flying again. I could just make out Jin’s orange-jumpsuit-clad guys picking through the remains like vultures back on old Earth. We were far enough away, clad in dark enough clothing, and surrounded by enough machine noise not to be noticed.