The Jack's Story (BRIGAND Book 2)

by Natalie French

  "What’s your student number?"

  "11982," I replied.

  He flipped his arm over and pulled up his sleeve, then punched at the inside of his forearm. A holographic image hovered a centimeter or so above his skin – an image of me, my student records.

  He glanced over my file and then turned his hard stare on me once more. That stare said he could kill me as easily as pissing. I didn’t doubt for a second that he could rip out my innards through my nose.

  "Family?"

  I shook my head.

  "Where do you live?"

  I remained silent. I didn’t want to be disagreeable, but I also didn’t want the moms receiving unexpected visitors on my account. Military types, especially marines, had a tendency to tear up the decor. So I didn’t say anything. I resigned myself to the fact that my silence would probably piss him off. That he’d wrap that hand around my skinny neck and squeeze. Instead, he smiled. His teeth were big and white, with a little gap in the center..

  "You’re ok, kid." He said. "I’m Gunny Ripla. What do you call yourself?"

  Automatically, I almost replied with "Boy" but I stopped just in time.

  I needed to be someone. I needed to have a name.

  So I blurted out the closest thing I could think of. "Roy! My name’s Roy, Sir."

  He raised one eyebrow. "Interested in the Marines, Roy?"

  "Yes, Sir." I didn’t need time to think, time to process. For a dust eater from the Depot this was the rough equivalent of discovering a wealthy relative. I wasn’t going to let it slip away.

  "Good. Anyone you want to say goodbye to?"

  I thought about the moms, about Nanette and Sophie, but I shook my head again. I didn’t know what would happen if I went back there and I wasn’t going to endanger my chances of getting out – or their business.

  Ripla nodded. Maybe he understood more than I was giving him credit for. "We leave tonight, Roy. I’ve spent too long in this place already."

  "So have I, Sir. So have I."

  I stepped beside him, in rank. Ripla put his big hand over my shoulder and gave me one pat on the back.

  That’s how I joined the Marines – I was ten years old.

  CHAPTER THREE

  I was good at it. Fighting I mean. I was good in training. I was better when it mattered, in combat.

  They tagged me early for Boarding Specialist – the marines who led the way in a ship to ship assault. I loved being on point. I’d eventually grown into my big feet. A late bloomer – that’s what I was. I got so big that I almost didn’t fit into my assigned role – the destroyer, the bringer of chaos, a Rip Jack. Most of the other guys in my specialty were smaller – made it easier to fit into shipboard passageways. I didn’t much like tight spaces – so I tore them open. Worked just fine. I was big and mean and crazy enough to hack my way through a ship’s hull with nothing but a power axe and my trusty puncher. I loved how scary that made me.

  But then the claustrophobia started getting to me something fierce. I never talked to the doc about it – no sense talking about something you can’t change. The sleep tubes they stuck us in for long orbit travel were just too damn small and when you’re out in the black for as long as I was... well you get shoved up in those tubes one too many times and sometimes you go a little apeshit.

  That’s how I found myself in front of Ripla again – in the infirmary of the Dawson's brig. The docs had been in and out, asking me questions about where I grew up, about how I felt about my mother, not knowing my father, about my military 'career'. Of course I didn’t give a rat’s ass about those things. I just didn’t want to be shoved into a plastic sphincter and drugged into a coma anymore.

  Then Ripla showed up. At first I thought he was there to help the docs – to open me up – get someone in here that I respected. But I should have known better. Ripla was a master at one thing – recruiting. He used to tell me, "Anyone’s son will do but only I can spot the special ones." I knew he meant the best or the worst, all depends upon what the Corps needs.

  I sat across from him in a cold metal chair at a white table. He tossed down a folio that lit up with text and images, of me. My file.

  "I hear you busted up a transport pod."

  I shrugged. "Got tired of being a suppository."

  He raised that damned eyebrow again, except now I noticed there was gray hair popping out in spots. "I hear you busted up three marines too."

  I scowled. I did feel bad about that, but I wasn’t about to admit that I didn’t remember doing it. I broke a couple noses, Crawleys’ jaw, and maybe rearranged Ricker’s shoulder. They’d only been trying to help me. I didn’t want to admit I’d lost it.

  He swiped through some pages on the folio. It was all a show and he knew I knew that. Hell, he didn’t even need the folio. He was a Jack like me. He had access to all of my information through his cuts. Could even call up caps of the incident directly to his occulars. The folio was old-school. Tactile. A prop.

  "You here to decommission me, Gunny?" I didn’t want this drag out any longer than necessary.

  He leaned back a bit in his chair and steepled his fingers together under his chin, the most thoughtful gesture I’d ever seen from him. "No. I’m collecting people for a special assignment."

  I didn’t move.

  "You interested?" he asked.

  I almost smiled at the memory of when he first recruited me. But I wasn’t a beat up Depot grit anymore. I had skills. We both knew I what I was.

  "Does this special job involve long rides in small places?"

  Ripla smiled. "No. Mostly inner system stuff. No tube hops."

  I nodded. "And I suppose it would be off the record then?" He knew I had received intelligence training. Inner system meant inter-faction shit. Which meant politics. Off grid, with high probability of getting dead.

  Ripla nodded. "Deep. And pretty lethal."

  I smiled. "Just the way I like it."

  "I have some questions for you first."

  I leaned back in my chair slightly and let my arms drop to my sides. "I got nothin’ to hide, Sir."

  The smallest smile pulled at the corners of his narrow lips. "Alright then. Let’s get started."

  Then he did go to his cut. He shared a connection to a doc in white medical utilities. I recognized him. The Dawson's head-cracker. Staff-level brass. Probably went straight from school to a desk. Guess he was too scared to see me in the skin.

  The pink-skulled doc cleared his throat and asked, "Do you think about death?"

  I shrugged. "Not really."

  "Do you have a death wish, or do you fear dying?"

  I leaned forward and rested my forearms lightly on my knees. "Look, we’re all dying. It’s just a question of how fast. It’s the only thing I know for sure, so ‘no’ I don’t fear it, I don’t think about it, and I’m not trying to hurry things up."

  I leaned back and folded my arms up high on my chest over the thick slabs of my pectorals.

  The little pink doctor opened his mouth, ready with more questions, when Ripla cut the link and he disappeared. Then he leaned forward on the table. "What are you afraid of?"

  I leaned forward and looked him squarely in the eye. "I’m afraid of never finding anything worth living for."

  Ripla closed the folio and slipped it into the breast pocket of his spotless gray fatigues. Then he extended his hand. "Marine, you’re hired."

  I was eighteen. It was the day the last of whatever innocence I had left became doomed. The day I became a Technician.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Technicians. Not the most creative name, but accurate. Our official designation was SOF-3 and we actually were repairmen of a sort. When someone in the Confed hierarchy fucked something up so badly that it couldn’t be fixed, we got the call.

  Unlike the Marines, unlike pretty much any military unit worth the time it took to train them, we had no history, no traditions. Whoever first created SOF-3 was so far off the record that we weren’t entirely sure if we were e
ven sanctioned. But money and gear and transportation showed up when they were needed. They fed us and housed us, repaired us when we got broken. Sometimes it almost felt like an honest living.

  Then they sent us to Marajo Lift. Into the Depot.

  The Depots are the lowest wards of the Lift Cities, vast cargo moving areas that encrust the lift’s foundation. Docks and warehouses hulk behind gigantic airlock doors that keep out the reek and the dust, and the heat, of Earth’s barren surface. Most of the seven or so billion people who live in Marajo Lift call the Depot home. It’s a brief, dangerous and dirty existence. Fine dust invades whenever the outer airlocks are opened to take in materials scavenged from the denuded surface. Crowding is unimaginable. Every available space is occupied by people and dust.

  They gave us a few days in the Upper Wards before we went in. Shore leave. Like the regulars get.

  I was thinking about what it would be like to have an actual life when I woke up that morning, with a couple of slags, whores like my moms, draped over me. The smell of their fluids and their perfume was only slightly less cloying than the aftertastes of yeast and vape that clung to the insides of my sticky mouth. My tongue was dry and a little raw, as if I’d been licking cardboard or possibly the floor of the bar where I’d met Shenu and, well, I couldn’t remember the name of the second one. Shenu’s bright orange hair splayed across my torso, obscuring my dark chest hair, and I thought about Nanette, one of my moms from so long ago.

  Shenu’s mouth hung slightly open in sleep, a slow ooze of saliva seeped out of her mouth, and mixed with our commingled hair. It seemed so intimate, far more so than all of the other positions I had seen her body in last night. Intimate for me to watch her in sleep, drooling and twitching from time to time at whatever demons occupied her dreams.

  I closed my eyes, fingered the curls of her hair and remembered...

  Nanette. In my mind’s eye there was blood oozing out of her parted lips, instead of spit, and her hair was dark with pools of red-black crusting her wild, orange mane.

  I’d gone home to Entebbe Lift for a few days. Except it wasn’t home anymore. The moms lost their place, a slutseller had killed their Morg and taken it from them. They found Nanette dead too, the back of her neck punctured all the way through to her throat. Rosie told me she’d been talking about quitting, about maybe going to the Belt. Anything to get out of the Depot.

  I couldn’t find Diedra and Sophie. Rosie was still around. Her stammer and nerves worse than ever, she pleaded with me to leave. Even for a dumb grit like me, it didn’t take long to connect a couple of dots. I’d been with the Technicians for a while, too long really. They knew I wanted to retire and, in my gut, I knew it was them – whoever it was in the Confed hierarchy that paid us. I was useful and they wanted me to stick around. So they just deleted whatever home I might have had to go back to.

  I pictured Nanette telling them, in loving detail, how they could fuck themselves, preferably in holes not normally used for things like that. I tried not to picture what happened, how she looked when they killed her.

  And so I ate my rage while I missed Nanette – and sought out whores with orange hair. I waited and thought about how I would track down whoever it was gave the order – the ones who kept me so firmly on my leash.

  I rolled a rope of Shenu’s tightly curled locks between my fingers, felt the coarseness of the hair and remembered how silky Nanette’s had been. As I tried to untangle my legs and torso from the sleeping women, I chuckled a little, thinking the docs would probably stain their tighty-whities over this little scenario. I’d never been with a woman who wasn’t a slag, but I didn’t always have to pay. Most women found my mahogany skin and warrior’s musculature appealing enough. They were more than happy to throw a freebie my way in return for a little protection now and again. Favors for favors.

  But I paid Shenu every time – usually two to three times her rate. She wasn’t that pretty. She never smelled too pleasing and she’d had her right foot crushed by a passing loadwalker when she was nine. Her prosthetic appendage was a size bigger and two shades darker than the other one. Made her walk a little lopsided.

  But that hair...

  I gently rolled her off of me and the other one, the blonde whose name I still couldn’t dredge up, curled closer to her, pushing her milky breasts against Shenu’s back. Shenu sighed in her sleep and cuddled into the softness and warmth behind her as I eased away from her front.

  I covered them both and watched them sleep for moment. They'd have to wake up soon. The room was only paid for another hour.

  As I gathered my pants and shoes my comms cut politely asked for my attention, three small chimes that sounded like they were squarely in the center of my skull. Showtime.

  Most of us use cuts, small cybernetic implants, that make us better at something. Not surprisingly, most Marines decide to gear up their combat skills. But I’m already good at fighting. Not much a cut’s going to teach me there. So I stick to intel and comms.

  There were a few seconds of lag while my cut logged through multiple challenge layers. The Confed had gotten a lot more security conscious after a Combiner hacksquad punched straight into some poor bastard’s skull and took control of his augments. They plucked a couple of zettabytes out of the Confed’s command & control AI before the guy bled out.

  Eventually, the Commander’s face appeared, floating at eye level, 22 degrees to my left.. "Get your virgin sphincters up and outta whatever crab-infested squat-hole you’ve been wallowing in, gentlemen. We got privs today. 13:00. F dock."

  The image blanked and I willed my cuts to standby. I checked the time that faded into my vision, low and to my right. 11:52. I had an hour to get dressed, maybe find something in my kit to rinse my mouth with, and get to the docks.

  We were supposed to have three more days of down time in this shit city. But that’s the nature of being a Technician. We were always on call.

  I pulled on my clothes, dropped a wad of cads on the black metal nightstand, enough for both of them to take a week off from customers if they wanted, quietly let myself out, locked the door, and paid the room attendant for another 4 hours. I told him to be sure they weren’t disturbed.

  I rolled up the sleeves of my shirt as I spoke to him, revealing part of the tattoo that traveled from wrist to neck – florid italic script that read "TIMEANT ME ANTE MORTEM" he didn’t need to be able to read Latin to know that it meant. "Fear me before death", the motto of the Confed Marines.

  The attendant nodded quickly and muttered, "Yes, Sir."

  I smiled as I walked away. I couldn’t help but enjoy the respect that tat could buy. If he’d known I was a Technician, he'd probably have pissed himself.

  I made it to F dock at 12:55. Our squad, five of us in all, were assembled by exactly 12:59.

  Jordy, the closest thing I had to an actual friend, was amped on babies so bad he could hardly stand still long enough to hear the briefing. His green eyes were ringed with pink and his shoulders bounced as we formed up. Not a good sign. If he was using that much off duty, he was heading for a blowout. They’d fix him up and get him back to the unit soon enough. But the neurological repair was never quite perfect. He’d shed an IQ point or two in the bargain.

  Hart, Sceet and Ripeye were a little hard as well. From the looks of their eyes, maybe as much as Jordy. The veins on Ripeye’s massive biceps thumped visibly, but I could never get a good read on his condition. His right eye had been completely vaporized by a Combiner slugger during an airlock breach. The other had been saved only by corneal implants. His machine eyes were impervious to the telltale signs of Baby Blues.

  I looked to Sceet, his perma-grin manically accentuating his blindingly white teeth. Hart stood still, stoic, his scalp reddened under his white-blonde buzz cut. Adrenaline rush.

  It was shaping up to be an amusing night.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Our assignments weren’t called missions, or work. No, we were privileged to be sent somewhere. Privileged to
work. Privileged to kill.

  The others loved it, were fueled by it. I wouldn’t lie, I appreciated the rush of combat too. But mostly it turned out to be like any other job. Once you do a thing over and over, told to perform, no matter how special, it’s still work. With this job – it was work mixed with blood, and a bunch of other of bodily fluids. Maybe I was just losing my zest for it all.

  Jordy told me once that if I would just get on the babies I’d get more out of our privs. More fun. He was probably right and it was that thought that scared me enough to never take the damn things. There was a part of me that knew I shouldn’t get to enjoying this line of work too much.

  We all linked up to a group comm that Hart opened up. We were told we would take a prisoner – a Morg by the name of Tatreen. Morgs are genetic chimeras designed for labor. They've been the cheaper alternative to robots for a hundred years. They’re big, strong and bred to be as loyal as they are stupid – although they seem to be less of both than their owners think. They’re everywhere in the System, a massive underclass with its own culture, society and lore.

  Morgs are designed to possess a powerful empathic tendency. Their makers wanted them sensitive to the needs of their human masters – and easier to control. It worked, but it also turned them into mystics. And maybe something more.

  In training they’d told us that Morgs claim they can sometimes communicate with beings from another realm, they call them Voudoun, after the 18th Century Haitian practitioners of shamanistic magic. It sounded like a lot of bullshit to me, but the stories had been there for generations. There were Morgs who could see into places that weren’t there, talk to things that didn’t exist. Sometimes, if you fucked with one of them, those things would fuck with you back. Nasty, bloody, wrenching things.

  Just stories. But best to kill them quick. Just in case.