The Jack's Story (BRIGAND Book 2)

by Natalie French

  I gritted my teeth and strained at my body. My hands twitched, but I still couldn’t muster enough control to wipe my bloody nose, much less stand. My voice was a thick mumble. Still, I tried to sound stronger than I felt. "Trand, just let her go. You know as well as anyone how fucked up the Confed is these days."

  Trand barked a short, choppy laugh. "Fucked up for sure. But they’re going to give me more cads than I can ever spend. And, to be honest, Jack," He spat the word contemptuously. "I’m tempted just to keep her for myself. You ever see anything like this?"

  Holding her aloft by her tortured arm, he released her torso, letting her dangle limply half a meter above the floor.

  He held out his left hand for a moment, as if admiring his manicure and then, with inhuman speed, snakelike extensibles emerged from each of his fingertips, writhing and questing as if possessed of their own intent. Each tendril sported a tiny, mouthlike gripper that gnashed and snapped, reinforcing the illusion of a nest of coiling reptiles. With a tenderness that made my guts clench in revulsion, he gently laid his open palm on Trig’s abdomen.

  "Ah... so soft," he sighed. His extensibles paused for a second and then grabbed and thrashed. They tore at her with blinding speed, shredding her clothes as if they were vapor. Little cuts and nicks appeared, trailing thin tracks of dark blood over her white skin. I could see bruises already forming on the ribs of her left side. Two, maybe three broken.

  First her torso, then her hips and her legs, Trand roamed his hand over her body, stroking, touching, stripping until nothing remained but her boots and the bit of her sleeve trapped under the fingers of his right hand. Her magnificent body hung limp, trailing blood from dozens of little wounds, while he turned her one way and then the other, admiring his work.

  "You know, I think I’ll plot a low energy orbit when I head in-system. Couple of months and she’ll be begging me to keep her. What do you say, Roy? Think she can learn how to please a real man by the time we get to Marajo?" His hideous snake hand slid over her breasts, letting the extensibles snatch and tug at her nipples until they were abraded and raw, then moved down over her belly and between her legs. He cupped her pubic mound and lifted, pulling her back against him, grinding her buttocks into his groin.

  Through a blur of helpless fury, I saw Nanette – her naked body ripped and ruined while her life leaked into her bed – the scene the little Morg had conjured for me. He had shown me the unflinching cruelty of the people I’d served. The loss, the betrayal, the horror all flew together into a single point in my skull, the black hole of my rage.

  Clumsily, blood running over my lips and down my chin, I struggled to my knees and bellowed, "NO!"

  And then I stopped. Someone else had screamed at precisely the same time.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  "The Trand must not do this."

  The Belter. He stood facing Trand, his too-big head tilted slightly to one side, extensibles waved vaguely from mounts just below his collarbones. A gash, ringed by a blue welt, adorned his forehead. "This one has a glow – not like any other. The Trand must not destroy such a thing. The Trand will not."

  Trand laughed that strange, hacking laugh. "Shut the fuck up Cruase. I own your contract. Without me, you wouldn’t even have air to breathe. Go build your little bots and leave the man stuff to the men." He lifted Trig higher, tipping his head forward.

  I pushed with everything I had and staggered to my feet. He’d kill me. But he wouldn’t touch Trig again before I was dead.

  Trand leaned down and clamped his teeth into Trig’s left shoulder, the top of the trapezius. He bit down like a starving animal consuming its prey, jerking his head up with a flap of her flesh in his teeth. Blood covered his chin and flowed down her chest. With the desperation of the damned, I lunged awkwardly toward them, but the Belter was faster.

  He rushed forward and snaked his extensibles into Trand’s arms, the harsh ticking of electrical shocks almost obscured by his exultant roar of, "NO! She must live."

  Trand dropped Trig, letting her fold into a tangle of white limbs at his feet. He stepped over her slowly, eyes fixed on the Belter, hands extended. The Belter simply stood and stared at him, not seeming to grasp the danger he was in. Trand grabbed him by the head. He was actually going to do it. He was going to rip off the Belter’s head.

  I toppled toward Trand, knowing all of us were doomed. But, until nerves ceased firing and muscles stopped contracting, I wasn’t going to stop.

  Trand gripped the Belter’s oversized head and lifted. The Belter squeaked as his feet left the floor and I was sure his narrow neck would give way at any moment. But then he reached out with his extensibles again. This time, one of them grappled the scalpel sticking out of Trand’s neck. The other shot directly into his face, into his mouth. Trand made a coughing sound and arched his back as if every muscle in his body had clenched simultaneously. The Belter slipped from his grasp and fell clumsily at his feet. My opening...

  Willing my limbs into motion, I grabbed Trand by the throat and hauled him backwards, slamming him down on my knee. If it had been me taking that fall, the impact would have crushed my C2 and C3 vertebrae, severing my spine and killing me instantly. Trand, not so much. He was stunned all right, but that wouldn’t last. He was going to get up again. And then he would kill us.

  I threw a desperate chop into his throat, hoping to slow him a little longer. It hurt like I’d broken a couple of bones. I was about to hit him again when a shadow passed over us.

  Trig.

  She landed astride his massive chest, right arm held tightly across her abdomen, the black scrap of her sleeve still incongruously enclosing her wrist. Her left hand held the other scalpel. In a single smooth motion she drove her weapon down at Trand’s good eye... and into his open hand.

  Trand gripped her savagely and squeezed. She couldn’t help it. As he crushed her wrist, her fingers opened involuntarily and the scalpel fell from her grasp. In slow motion, I watched the silvery blade tumble away from Trig’s fingers. It was as if the entire universe had contracted to a single object. I reached...

  And it landed in my open palm.

  I flipped the little knife, catching it again in a reverse grip, and pivoted. Hand and blade swooped down in an economical arc, following a path as inexorably driven by physics as the orbit of an entire world.

  In the moment of contact, as the scalpel pierced the sclera of his good eye, Trand looked at me and knew.

  Fear us bitches. We’re coming.

  Trig sat there for a moment, staring at Trand, at the knife embedded in his brain. Then she looked up at me, her eyes the color of Europa’s frozen plains. She reached out with her good hand and wiped her thumb over my upper lip.

  "You had a little bit of blood on your face." Her smile was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.

  And then, without any fuss, the universe went black.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  "Wake up marine."

  I opened my eyes to a blue-white gaze that, strangely, seemed to be rotated ninety degrees, one eye above the other. What I couldn’t figure out was what those eyes were. Why were they hovering in front of me?

  Then I remembered.

  Trig.

  I tried to sit up, but I couldn’t move my head. It seemed to be welded in place. I tried to speak, to ask what the hell was going on, but my mouth was bone dry and all I managed was, "Guk."

  "Hold on. Don’t try to move yet." The eyes receded and I could see Trig’s face, the high collar of a parka framing her chin.

  "How do you feel? Any pain? Can you see me clearly?"

  Such odd questions. I felt... oh. Even my feeble efforts at movement set off a pounding wave of gut wrenching pain inside my skull. I could feel my stomach contract and I retched a little, an autonomic dry heave.

  "What happened?"

  "Concussion. Bad one. You had a bleed in the right occipital lobe. If Cruase hadn’t helped me get you back to the ship and into the autodoc, you’d be dead.

&nb
sp; "The ship... Where are we?"

  "Cruase undocked us. We’re a hundred clicks off Ceres. He says we’re in a parking orbit."

  "Shit. Let me up. We need to go. They’ll find Trand and then they’ll come for us... Wait." An awful realization came to me. "There’s only one autodoc on this ship. You..."

  "You were dying."

  "I’m fine," I lied. "Let me out of this thing. You’re hurt."

  Trig tapped something and the gentle pressure of the autodoc’s restraint fields faded. I sat up, grimly ignoring the vertigo that swept over me. Only then did I notice I was naked. "What the hell... oh right." The autodoc couldn’t work through clothing.

  I saw Trig’s eyes sweep over my body, stopping briefly at the scars – and I have a lot of them.

  "Funny. I never realized it before, but you remind me of someone." With her left hand, she touched the pale pockmarks that stitched my left pectoral. "She had scars too."

  Trig was wearing the parka I’d given her a few hours ago, closed to the neck, the right arm hanging limp and empty. I stood, doing my best to look strong and at ease, despite the pain and nausea.

  "Let’s get you cleaned up."

  She stood quietly while I undid the fastenings of the coat, her eyes following my hands, glancing occasionally at my face. I opened the heavy garment and carefully slid it from her shoulders, revealing beauty and ruin enough to clench my throat in anguish.

  The bite on her shoulder was red and inflamed, the missing patch of skin already crusting over in a dark, brittle scab. The bruises on her left side had spread, seeping blue and purple almost to her hip. Tiny cuts and bite marks were everywhere, clustering on her breasts and groin.

  Almost reverently, I knelt and unbuckled her boots, helping her step out of them one at a time. With surgical gauze and sterile water from the crash kit on the wall, I swabbed away the blood from her body. I could feel her tense as I worked, her breath sharply drawn. Suddenly I felt self-conscious, aware of my every motion, every brush of my fingers on her soft white skin.

  "Why didn’t you let him take me?" she asked. "You could have been rich."

  "Because you don’t deserve what they’d have done. What Trand would have done." Heat swelled in my belly. The rage, my fuel, was still there. "Because you don't leave squadmates in the hands of the enemy."

  "Is that what we are? A squad?" She smiled faintly.

  "It’s a start." I grinned. "Now shut up and let’s get you in the doc. You’re gonna be down for at least ten hours while those bones knit."

  I lifted her carefully, doing my best not to disturb the worst of her injuries. She hooked her left arm around my neck and leaned silently against my chest, resting her head in the hollow of my throat. Her hair smelled warm and a little musky. The touch of her body against mine was almost too much, I could feel a swelling pressure that left me both aroused and ashamed. Biology could be such a selfish bitch sometimes.

  I placed Trig gently in the doc and touched the diagnostic panel. In seconds, the display lit up with warning indicators, yellow for minor, blue for moderate, violet for the serious stuff. There was a hell of a lot of violet on that screen. The doc hit her with 4 cc’s of morphine and her eyes drooped almost instantly.

  "Roy..."

  She’d never called me that before. I leaned forward, my face close to hers. "Yeah?" I whispered.

  But she was out.

  I was too tired to clean up. I just threw on some old fatigues, shipboard grays from my days in the Corps. The ID stripe above the left breast pocket always brought an ironic smile to my lips: 'NONE'. No last name? No problem. The Corps had a rule for everything.

  As I made my way to the cockpit, I saw our servbot hovering in the open hatch as if it was watching something. Bright flashes of actinic light strobed from somewhere to the right – the co-pilot’s seat. What the...?

  I shoved the bot out of my way and stepped into the cockpit. The Belter, Trand’s weird little minion, had the entire instrument panel torn open. He had a fusion welder in one hand and completely incomprehensible bits of technical stuff clasped in his extensibles.

  "What in the ever loving fuck are you doing?"

  "Modifications. Improvements. The Cruase can pilot so much better with direct control. Not to worry. Very little risk of injury or death." He positively beamed at me.

  I dropped into the pilot’s couch and looked at the nav panel. "How long before we can boost? We need to be gone."

  "Not long. Perhaps another hour. But there is no urgency. Stealth parameters have been improved by 56%. They will not see us."

  I glanced over at the strange little man tearing the guts out of my ship and smiled. Then I leaned back and closed my eyes.

  "Take your time then. I need a nap anyway."

  And, just like that, there were three of us. Not a bad number when you don’t want people in your business. I could get used to three.

  I'd been a Jack, lived that creed for so long it was welded into my bones, but maybe now it was time to figure out something different. Something real.

  Something worth living for.

  A PREVIEW OF BOOK THREE

  Book Three

  The Belter's Story

  The lavender-white icedigger groped for traction, rocking from side to side on its back. Its dozen thickly armored anguipods waved helplessly. At the tip of each snakelike appendage, a pair of titanium-silicate pincers opened and closed reflexively, grasping for aid that would never come.

  I watched its desperation closely, offering no assistance, until Jase came by and hooked the toe of his boot under the creature's ten centimeter carapace, flipping it upright. Slowly, dorsal plates flexing as it plodded across the broken floor of the chasm, the digger worked its way back toward the clump of violet nodules wedged in the ice; towards its home.

  "What are you doing out here, Crom?"

  I didn’t like it when he shortened my name. A 'nickname' he said. I didn’t feel like reminding him for the millionth time that my name was Crom-ley. So I stuck with the question at hand. "I'm watching a digger struggle for life. At least I was…"

  Jase cocked his head to the side and regarded me from behind blonde eyelashes. His helmet was faintly fogged near the collar-ring, obscuring the serious set of his mouth. His green eyes scrutinized mine and we sat with mirrored attention. Neither one of us blinked.

  "Why do you do that?" he finally asked.

  "Because I can."

  I knew he could feel the turmoil inside me. Long ago, I'd come to realize that our shared DNA made us more aware of each other's mental state. I knew it even though I didn’t understand it.

  I didn’t tell him that watching the suffering of these creatures somehow calmed my turbulent thoughts. I’d been watching the diggers for a long time. They seemed to feed off of the deposits of violet-colored nodules that threaded through the ice. We called the stuff europine, after the moon of Jupiter we call home.

  Speckled with black and purple, the nodules were everywhere in the rilles. We found them in clusters, more as we descended, closer to the Ocean. They were mostly mineral, metallic silicates, kind of like geodes, except their interiors were full of organics, really valuable ones - the kind you need if you're going to try to make food in the Outer. Before we discovered these strange little rocks, Earth and Mars pretty much had a chokehold on our food supplies. For the people who make the Outer their home, europine was freedom.

  We mined the nodules now. Hundreds of tons every year. It was slow work. The ice was too unstable for heavy equipment, forcing us to gather the nodules by hand. And the diggers were everywhere. They always flooded out of the ice during shift changes. Well more shuffled really. They weren't very quick. But there were thousands of them, most no bigger than the palm of my gloved hand. I could scoop them up by the dozens whenever I cared to, whenever my curiosity needed satisfaction.

  I knew there was so much more to Europa than what we could see. Even after generations of living here, we had only the dimmest notions of what we
nt on under the ice. There was an ocean down there. Salty, warmed by the heat of the moon itself, filled with living things we never saw. We didn't care. Yes there was life on Europa, for all the good it did us. Everything was full of metal silicates. You couldn't eat them. You couldn't use them for anything. And so we scratched out our living by picking up purple rocks and selling them to the Trade Guilds at Mundus. Nobody much gave a damn about the rest.

  But I'd seen something. My bots seemed to act differently around the europine deposits. They seemed to be attracted to it, almost like the diggers - which had no logic to it whatsoever. Whenever I was in the rilles, my little ZB6 utility bot didn't malfunction as often, and would unerringly seek out a nearby europine deposit and just sit there, hovering close, almost as if he was studying the stuff. I intrinsically knew that his behavior was an answer to a problem I hadn’t known existed - but I was determined to figure it out.

  Jase didn’t care about any of that, so I didn’t bother explaining it. Jase preferred the company of people to bots, which was a little unusual for a Belter. We aren't the most social lot. I would never have told him, but I considered myself to be one of the lucky ones in that he seemed to prefer my company over most others.

  I guess you could say I felt a close affection for Jase; that I loved him. That's not something Belters do. Love. We procreate out of necessity, and under careful controls. We understand the notions of siblings well enough, but in the Outer, they're exceedingly rare. If a Belter is lucky enough to be able to reproduce at all they usually only do it once. But our parents got two for the price of one, something that almost never happened in the Outer. There hadn't been a recorded birth of identical twins for well over a century.

  Jase was the better looking one. We were supposed to look the same and we did. At least we used to. I knew why we didn’t anymore, but I wasn’t about to tell him – not yet.