'Yeah, but only by nearly getting us both killed.'
'Well, you weren't as stupid as Benek and his friends. If they thought they could sneak up on a Comm Guild operative like that they were sorely mistaken. Fatally so, in fact. I just wanted to make sure you were safe before I made my move. Your father was a good man, Aynushka. He might've been wrong, but that didn't mean he wasn't good. It's why I believed in him all those years.'
'And Benek?'
'I don't know what he told you about Captain Wray, but he was right if he said he was ruthless – but only when it comes to protecting the people on his ship. He's a good man. I've spoken to him and you're welcome to stay, even without your priceless information. Yes, there are people like Benek everywhere. But there's also people like your father and Wray, striving to make things better before the end that awaits us all. What's important is the company you keep.'
'And your company?'
'What, the Comm Guild?'
She smiled despite herself. 'You know what I mean.'
'A courier's life is a pretty lonely one. But I like to think I make a difference, where I can.'
'Does it help?'
He shrugged. 'Sometimes I update the cybel charts that save lives. Sometimes I'm too late and thousands of people are killed. Sometimes I bring money to people that will help them get away from a chaotic and terrible death. Sometimes I have to tell people that their families are dead, or that they were taken by Karists to who-knows-where. I like to think it all balances out. Sometimes even nudges into the positive. Like with you.'
She huffed. 'Me? And what do I do?'
Hess Tremane got up slowly and looked down at her. 'It's a good ship. Good people, poor nomads trying to stay alive and find a safe home. You could do a lot worse, trust me. I've seen it all.'
'And what if I want to see it all too?'
'All of it? The good and the bad?'
She nodded.
'Well, the blueprints might have been a lie, but the manifest wasn't. If you really want to find me, you know where I'm going. Get some rest, Aynushka Rafel. I have people to find and news to deliver. If we ever meet again, then we'll talk.'
He placed his hand on her shoulder, but there was no comfort through the tough plastic of his gloves. She was glad of that. She wanted no comfort now. All life and energy had leached out of her, and she craved the oblivion of sleep. The hold of the Hesperus VII, she knew, was no home for her. For years she had cared for her father, trapped and directionless, and now she had begun to gain momentum in the stars she never wanted to slow down.
All she needed to do was choose the right company. In the haze of mid-sleep she made her decision. If he was gone by morning, she'd just have to follow him all over again.
THE FLESH OF THE WORLD
★
by KARIN LOWACHEE
On a dessicated, dying world, can a ragtag band find escape and mercy?
UPON CROSSING THE LOW HILLS, the Keef decided it was time to kill the child. The stretch of desert ahead of us promised a punishing final week and we were already a bedraggled six. We had started out as sixteen but over the weeks from the city we had diminished, like so many things on this planet.
But to purposely kill a child? The Keef said, "That hunting party twenty klicks behind us is gainin' with every recce." He gestured to Harky, his right hand man and second in command, who was responsible for the bulk of the recon. "Need to dump the deadweight." Both men looked at the child.
This caused uproar with the parent, Mama Rain, though the child-waif was spindly as tinder and required a dedicated haul. There just weren't any arms to spare and Mama Rain was too weak from malnourishment and the arduous journey to continue to carry the child. We had to move faster, or as fast as our derelict tech allowed. Since we couldn't dump the tech, the useless human was the next best strategy.
"Get the Flesh to carry her," Mama Rain said, meaning me, but the Keef bent a baleful eye at her, the rock rod he ground between his teeth wagging up and down when his lips moved.
"The Flesh got the weapons," he replied.
Weapons were the heaviest haul, and out here those were more important than a child who wasn't likely to survive the Maelstrom here or off-planet. The launch itself might kill her so why waste the distance?
"What about the junk heap?" persisted Mama Rain, gesturing to the decrepit Epirian spider drone, disarmed and with two feet missing, the front right and the back left. Which was why they needed me. This thing wobbled along, dented and dirty, its armament dry but able to shoulder some basic haul like collapsed shelter and food. But it was broken and at least I had no trouble climbing out of wadis that would otherwise take half a day to walk around.
"Strap the bairn to the drone?" Keef scoffed. "No. Besides, she'd cook."
With the unrelenting sun on beaten metal, a pale infant would attract the rays.
The sun was setting now. Here on Ada Mas it took half an hour for the blood light to squeeze from the skin of the sky, for the night to strangle it and spew forth the stars. If we were going to kill the child it should be before the sun died because then it would require burying, technically, and nobody wanted to waste our lamp wands on digging a grave. Everybody knew it. We stood around looking at one another, five of us grown beings, including the older brother Fenrys who scratched his arm raw. He didn't protest the Keef's suggestion, but then his gaze had become more and more blank through the trek. He didn't even glance at his sister.
Mama Rain had set the toddler girl on the sand where she swayed back and forth as if some phantom breeze pushed her.
"Get the Flesh to do it," said Harky, meaning to kill the child. "Or we can just leave you both behind." To Mama Rain. Harky, who was the only one with weapons besides me and the Keef. My weapon wasn't even for my use except as dictated by the Keef. Mostly I was just the pack mule. "Flesh don't care and it'll be merciful," Harky added.
They called it mercy but it was survival.
Everyone volunteered a Flesh for the job. I was essentially property, same as the drone, same as the weapons. A debt owed to the Epirians that I was still paying off.
Mama Rain's eyes begged, big and blue, in my direction. The Keef's narrow stare considered me, but before he spoke I shifted the pack of guns on my back. "I can take the child."
"Eh?" The Keef removed the rock rod from his gnawing teeth. It took a lot to surprise him but it seemed possible to do with small things like kindness.
Maybe I was a fool to hang onto a small thing. But one could be a fool for less. "It will be no trouble. I can carry the load and the child."
Mama Rain's hands clasped beneath her chin. Fenrys, for some reason, scowled in my periphery.
"It's gonna die anyway," Harky said with some disgust. "Better now than if that hunting party caught us. Or whatever the hell we might find at the launch."
"We should not kill something before its time." I tilted my eyes up toward the sky. "Isn't that what we fear in the Maelstrom?"
Philosophy was not usually a consideration for the Keef. But he speared me with a glare and turned his shoulder to the setting sun.
"We walk 'til nightfall. Pick up the squab."
*
The child was around four years old and clung to my chest like turtle armour. I had to slump with the load on my back and in both hands. The only other available space for her parasitic grip was a leg, which obviously wouldn't do. It would have been easier to kill her, bury her in the scrub. But easier wasn't kind, and so I marched without slowing, bearing the weight. Mama Rain paced beside me, thanking me like a gibbering monkey.
"I'll leave you behind just to give myself the silence," the Keef barked at her, the thought we all had. A good deed didn't mean you wanted to hear about it forever.
This planet used to be Epirian. When news of the incoming Maelstrom made landfall, the diagnosis was six months. Six months to evacuate a partially terraformed planet of twenty thousand beings. Ada Mas was "diamond" encrusted, the exoterrestrial gem of the Rool syst
em that provided the Foundation with the specific rock required to line armour, ship drives, and the mechanical interior of many weapons. But no industry could withstand the Maelstrom. Nothing would survive and so the desperate scramble began—to tap out the diamond mines and save the craftsmen who could continue to work them into industrial grade plating.
There was a lottery once the essential personnel were saved. Those who won made it off the planet. Those who didn't…fought. Civilian ships became bargaining chips. Or platforms for conspiracy and murder. Soon the descent into sheer survival drove the population mad, dead, or worse.
Out of the rubble rose the Keef, and Harky, and by default—me. Their Flesh. Bioengineered for the diamond mines, impervious to hot and cold, fatigue and disloyalty. Both guard and worker ant. My contract gave me a livelihood and all the necessary modifications for the work, but the debt had to be repaid through time, only then would the Foundation deactivate the implant in my brain, issue my considerable bonus, and send me on my way.
But now none of us were what we were meant to be, we'd all become some remnant of ourselves. Like the spider drone.
The Keef used to be an Epirian contract engineer. He'd been in trouble, same as Harky, that was all we knew. And thus they left him behind. The bitterness of it engraved his skin like the lash of the sun's rays. When word came to Gunturtown that the last launch off the planet was scheduled to leave in three months, out past the Rach Desert—that some part of the population had actually gotten a discarded ship to work? From that point on, the ship was his. It was ours. It didn't matter what agendas the last ship engineers or pilots or crew possessed. Word traveled around that a tent town had formed at the site, ad hoc laws put in place. Nobody knew how long that would last but you could be saved if you proved yourself useful.
Somehow we were going to get ourselves on that launch. The Keef was going to march us over any terrain to get there, with weapons wrested from less trained individuals because it was going to be a fight. Everything was a fight now that we'd been abandoned.
What ships hadn't made it off the planet already were scavenged for parts, for those who attempted to cobble together something spaceworthy with what the Epirian Foundation had left behind. And because of this, vehicles were in short supply too. In Gunturtown they became scarce and thus valuable. We'd started out as sixteen, in three dune runners. In two and a half months, after numerous encounters with raiders and hunting parties, we were down to six beings, no vehicles, a broken spider drone, and a child that should've been dead.
On foot. Being pursued. We drudged across a desert toward a ship set for launch that we weren't one-hundred-percent positive was even intact. The communication network had dismantled just like the population and only word-of-mouth touched us when we happened to pass a settlement, a death camp, a caravan...and those people even bothered to relay information. Oftentimes they didn't, and we didn't, and so the tatters of this world whipped at each other in separate prevailing winds, heralding some impending surrender.
But the Keef didn't act like he would ever give up. It had been established early that he would do anything to survive. I may have been a Flesh, but I adhered to that in this climate, even as I carted a child on my chest.
Despite the Keef's determination, though, nobody wanted to say out loud that we could land up at the launch and find nothing. A fantasy, a mirage. Rumour. The Keef might've started out with some essence of magnanimity, to want to save even sixteen, but that had dwindled just like our food, water, and arms. In the end, none of us were safe from his survival instinct. Just like none of us were safe without it.
*
As the evening light died, the child began to slide from my torso. Falling asleep or just losing strength.
"Broom," I said. The name Fenrys had given her and we all attached to it, because turn her upside down and she looked like one. I didn't want to halt the final steps into dusk, but I stopped and set down my weapons load, and managed to grab the girl before she spilled to my feet in the shadows the scrub cast. I picked her up but she was already asleep. Children and animals leapt so easily into oblivion, trusting it to spit them back up in time.
"We'll set camp here." The Keef looked around at the sand flats and crooked tree beds that lined some border of this wasteland that we were going to be passing through for some days hence.
I settled the girl on the ground as Mama Rain pulled a ragged blanket from her pack and spread it over the insect-thin limbs, up to the point of a chin. Broom slept on and Harky brushed by me, shoving my chest to get my attention.
"Loose ammo," he muttered, pointing to where I'd set down my load. So I picked it all back up and followed the Epirians to the edge of the camp. The scrub provided some shelter from the lowest blows of nature, but it was all relatively open land that could only protect the most meagre weather. The sky didn't telegraph storm but you just never knew. Half-terraformed planets cultivated notoriously unpredictable elements.
"Tent, a single fire," the Keef commanded, and Harky and I began to strip our packs. Mama Rain, Fenrys, and sleeping Broom had to fend for themselves in the settling down, but we'd been weeks at this and they knew the routine and logistics.
Soon the single spout of flames from our ground torch threw shadows and light. Just a couple metres beyond, the desert shut its eyes and created dark.
"How many more days?" Mama Rain asked. She held Broom's head on her lap, stroking through the dark hair with methodical affection.
It was touch one could miss in the desolate roll of desperate living.
I sat across from her and Fenrys, on the Keef's right side, Harky on his left facing out toward the dark. An unintentional square off of origins: on that westerly plain of the fire, family. On the east, we fighters. The boy churned his metal spoon in his cup, creating a low song that Harky provoked to stop by pitching a small stone to the teenager.
The Keef said, "I reckon a week. If we don't run into undesirables." Of both people and natural elements. "Or those hunters don't catch up to us."
It was going to be a brief sleep.
"What's the point?" Fenrys mumbled.
"Eh?" Harky said.
Often I'd noticed their exchanges over the weeks. Usually tense and quiet, but early on Harky had saved the boy's life from a marauder we'd encountered on our way out of Gunturtown. The killing had been bloody and splayed, the way Harky tended to administer such protective justice, and it had taken days to wash the blood from his hands. After shooting the marauder it had been a race between strength and desire to see which would give in first as he beat the attacker with the blunt end of his rifle. Fenrys had stood just out of reach, watching it all with wide open eyes.
Neither of them had forgotten, though Harky had told Mama Rain to shut up in her thanks just as readily as the Keef had today.
Fenrys asked, "What's the point?" and Harky's garnet stare lifted from the scrape of his blade on rock.
"The point of what?" the Keef asked. He showed no concern or alarm; if there was any emotion left in him, it was more readily irritation. In the beginning of our decline he'd been our shepherd, the one who circled the wagons and put the children in the centre of protection. When the first hunting parties formed, other groups realizing all they had left were these last days and they were beholden to no one, the Keef talked about order and grit and the sanctity of our spirits to never give up. A sliver of hope was still enough to see in the dark. Rather than an acid of bitterness at the abandonment of his bosses, he built a fire.
But then it burned too high and began to char his bones. The group fought. Some were picked off in battle. We dwindled in numbers and so did his words. Now he possessed an economy of spirit that could not propel any but himself.
"Say we get there," Fenrys said. "Say the launch does exist. Say we even get on the launch somehow, despite everyone else that's probably there, and we make it off Ada Mas. Say we even get into space. Then what?"
"Then we're saved," Mama Rain soothed, her voice at that lo
w pitch meant for agitated children.
But the Keef's stare was narrow, a smile curling around the edges of the pipemeat he chewed on.
"We ain't saved." The boy didn't even look at his mother. Instead, the heavy eyes stitched to each of our faces, even mine, needling our expressions for a hint of confirmation to his words. "The Maelstrom's tearin' through the stars and there's nowhere to go. All we're doing is buying time at the high cost of—" His hand gestured out: to the desert, to the planet, to some unseen path of souls some believed they possessed.
"If I buy me a few more decades," Harky said, "I won't complain. Neither should you, you're barely a dent off the crater of this world." Another pebble arced over the fire and landed on the boy's lap.
Fenrys brushed it off, fire shadows fanning across his scowl. Making it grow. "Look at all we seen," he mumbled. "We go to the stars, we end up the same."
Dead, he meant. And not necessarily by the Maelstrom. I saw it flicker across his features like bird wings across the shadow of the sun. People occupied and steeped in death grew to wear it like some hard outer mantle meant to hide the raging lava core of fear. For one so young he breathed like a being on the opposite end of life's spectrum, waning with every turn of the moon. But the months had done that to him and to the others, though they kept it to themselves.
"Ain't no point frettin' about the day you're gonna die," the Keef said. "It'll come whether you like it or not."
I opened the book I'd saved from my quarters near the diamond mines. It was a contemplative treatise from some ancient philosopher, expounding on the existence of the cosmos and all of the worlds' creations therein. It was heavy enough in both weight and words to withstand multiple readings. No matter how burdensome my load in the day, I refused to leave it behind. Before we'd become so few and insular, the Keef would ask me to read aloud from it. My soft steady voice would lull the children to sleep and draw the shadows around us as if we were protected. One or two of the children would lean against my arms, drawing the warmth from my body and giving it back.
Tales from the Edge: Escalation: A Maelstrom's Edge Collection Page 17