by King, Sara
Anna Landborn stared at him.
“Do you understand the conditions?” Unit Ferris asked, returning to his seat against the desk.
“You’re kidnapping me.”
“I’m giving you a chance to think about my offer.”
Anna Landborn snorted. Then she laughed. Then she went quiet.
Then, facial muscles tensing, she looked at him once last time before she went to the bathroom and locked herself inside.
When Unit Ferris did not hear the compost collectors activate, he amplified his hearing. Then he smiled.
Anna Landborn was crying.
Chapter 12
Cold Knife
Veera unlocked their cuffs as soon as their ship was out of sight over the treetops.
“Thank you,” Patrick said, wincing as he pried the blood-crusted metal from his wrists. Young Dave handed him the bundle of nanostrips and he started applying them to the cuts. Only the sound of the adhesive being removed punctured the silence that followed.
“One you boys mind explaining what that was all about?” the elder Dave asked. The huntsman looked the least upset of any of them, though his gaze was deadly. He was fingering the big knife he used for skinning starlopes. “‘Cause I really want to know.”
“Patrick, here, just gave the government all our names because some pretty little squid batted her eyes at him,” Jeanne said. Her dark stare was enough to give him goosebumps. “Isn’t that right, Pat?”
“Damn right it is,” Milar asked. “I sure as Hell didn’t do it.” He crossed his arms over his chest and scowled at him. He was still naked, and hadn’t asked to borrow someone’s coat. No one had offered.
Patrick grimaced. “I didn’t realize she was—”
“Didn’t realize?” Milar snapped. “She asked you to name all the pilots in town and you don’t think anything of it?” He waved a dragon-tattooed arm in the direction of where their ship had disappeared. “Do you realize the little squid is running off with our ride to spill her guts to the Coalition while we hike twenty miles back to town? Do you realize we are dead men?”
Patrick reddened. “Maybe she wouldn’t have been in such a hurry to escape if you didn’t keep telling her we were gonna dump her in the Shrieker mounds, Milar. You were terrifying her.”
Milar stepped closer, until they were eye-to-eye. “Terrified is better than skipping off in our ship, you stupid bastard.”
“The only reason she skipped off in our ship was because—”
“Quiet!” young Dave shouted.
Milar and Patrick turned, blinking at him.
“Listen,” young Dave said, peering at the treetops behind them. “It’s a long ways off, but the engines are going ballistic. Almost like she intentionally put it in a stall.”
The seven of them paused to listen. Sure enough, the engines were roaring full-throttle, and the sound of trees cracking was audible even above the screaming mechanics.
Milar glanced at Patrick. “Think the little squid was lying about being able to fly?”
“No,” Jeanne said, shaking her head. “She was bristling with titanium, and I’ve seen those electronics before. They only put the body nodes on their best operators. I pray to God I never encounter one on my Yolk runs. Those types can fly a Shrieker through Hell, if they had to.”
A grinding screech cut her off. There was series of loud snaps from the forest in the distance, then silence.
“She went down,” Milar noted.
“Then your ship malfunctioned,” Jeanne said. She shrugged and took Wideman Joe by the arm. “Whatever. It’s your problem, now. C’mon, Joe. Let’s get you back home.”
Then, as she was passing, she stopped and said, “And Patrick?”
Patrick looked up.
Jeanne’s glittering green eyes darkened over her human-molar necklace. “If you ever give my name out to a coaler again…”
Reddening, Patrick said, “I won’t.”
“Good.” Jeanne turned. “Come on, y’all. Let’s leave these boys to their own hole.”
Veera was the last to leave. She sighed and patted Patrick on the shoulder. “Come back with us. I’ll fly you two back to the crash site. It’ll be easier to spot from the air.”
“Screw that,” Milar said. “I’m not giving her another six hours to play with my ship.”
Veera looked at Milar and sighed. “I was young once, too. Had a grand ol’ time of it, too.” She glanced from Patrick and to Milar and back. “But boys, I think you might’ve bit off more than you could chew, with this one.” She cleared her throat uncomfortably. “I know Wideman’s shown you some things…” Her eyes found Milar and stayed there a long moment, then she gave the treeline an unhappy look.
Milar’s face darkened. “Don’t worry about the coaler tramp. I’ll take care of her.”
Veera laughed. “I’m sure you will.” She shook her head. “No, I wasn’t talking about that. I was talking about this war that you two are so set on.”
Patrick groaned. “Veera, not again…”
She held up her hand. “Just before I got Milar’s call, I heard a report on the waves. Seems like a whole village fifty miles south of the Snake went quiet about five hours ago. Town called Cold Knife. A crag-hunter went in to investigate after his mother didn’t answer her phone. He found every soul in the place dead. Most lined up and killed out in the fields. Government boot and soldier tracks everywhere.”
Pat felt himself go cold. The shock must’ve been written across his face, because Veera gently patted his arm. “Just wanted to warn you. The others will know soon enough.” Then, in silence, she followed the other pilots back to town.
For a long time, neither Milar nor Patrick spoke. Then, softly, Patrick said, “We took her just south of the Snake.”
“Yeah,” Milar muttered. His face had gone hard. “The little squid got a list of names out of you—who’s to say she didn’t find a few minutes to make a call, too?”
Horror at what they had done overwhelmed Patrick. “We got a whole village killed.”
“No,” Milar snapped, turning on him suddenly. His face was livid. “She got a whole village killed, Pat.” Without another word, he broke into a purposeful jog in the opposite direction as Veera and the others. Towards the ongoing sounds of the crash.
Seeing the way his brother was moving, Patrick suddenly felt a pang of fear for the girl’s safety. He had seen that look before, the day they found their sister. Eight regiment fighters had died within the next eight days, their bodies buried in little mounds near where Milar had shot them in the head. Patrick started to call out, then stopped himself.
Why should he?
She’d called her buddies and they’d wasted an entire town.
Whatever his brother did to her, it was well deserved.
Patrick turned and went to catch up with Veera and the others. He wasn’t going to stop Milar, but he didn’t want to see it, either. Even when they’d avenged their sister, he had never been there to watch his brother mete out justice. He had helped Milar drag them onto the ship, then had quickly found something else to do, well out of earshot.
Milar had been all too happy to have them to himself.
Afterwards, Patrick had never seen the corpses, since Milar always had them buried by the time he returned, but judging from how long it took his brother to radio him back, shooting them in the head wasn’t all he did to them.
Patrick just hoped that when Veera flew him back with the salvage ship, he didn’t happen to spot the little unmarked grave.
Chapter 13
Alone with Milar
Tatiana woke to a faceful of console.
Groaning, she lifted her cheek off the bloody controls and immediately began to choke on the burnt-rubber smell wafting through the cabin in hazy black layers.
Tatiana struggled to find the release catch on the seatbelt, then threw the shoulder straps off and slid to the aluminum floor, dizzy with fumes and the blow to the head.
Concussion, she
thought, sleepily. The fumes weren’t so bad on the floor, and she’d never been so tired in her life. Off to one corner of the cockpit, she could see orange tongues of flame licking up from the wiring under the copilot’s instruments panel. Somewhere, an alarm was going off.
Engines, she thought, dizzy. She’d never shut them off. Even then, they were shoving the nose of the craft through the trees, plowing slowly through the forest like a derailed train.
Biting back a cry at the spike of agony in her shoulder when she moved, Tatiana crawled back up to the pilot’s chair and hit the shutdown sequence with her good hand. Then she fell from the seat and hit the floor hard. Immediately, Tatiana’s lungs emptied in a scream as a blast of searing pain arced through her shoulder and up her neck.
She blacked out.
Tatiana woke on her back, gasping, her right arm limp and immobile. Her spine felt like it was on fire, and one of the nodes in her chest had been loosened by the impact with the safety harness, and even then blood was leaking from its ruined coupling, pooling between her breasts.
Heat to one side of her face brought Tatiana’s attention back to her surroundings.
The fire was still burning, and while the heat itself wouldn’t kill her, the fumes were already turning her vision a dark shade of red. Or was that the concussion?
Tatiana was so tired she couldn’t think.
She lay there for what seemed like forever, fighting sleep. The level of the smoke was growing closer to her face with every breath, trapped in the cockpit by the sealed hatch, and yet she couldn’t bring herself to care. All she wanted to do was close her eyes…
No.
Instinct made her roll over and start crawling toward the exit. Smoke swirled around her, searing her lungs, making her feel like she’d swallowed liquid plastic. Gagging, she reached the hatch and touched it open.
Milar was standing on the other side, fully dressed. A belt of cargo rope kept his pants on his hips.
No, her mind whispered. That is not possible. I saw him leave…
For a moment, she thought it was another illusion, something the crazed egger’s hallucinogenic vegetables had left her.
Then he squatted in front of her and jerked her head up to look at him. There was no mistaking the firm grip on her chin as his fingers pried at her scalp and came away scarlet. Then he grunted and released her, standing again.
He moved out of the way as a cloud of smoke billowed out ahead of her, then, giving her a dark look, stepped inside and wrenched a fire extinguisher from the wall above her head.
Tatiana lowered her forehead to the floor, feeling the sticky pull of blood in her scalp as she listened to the sound of a fire extinguisher behind her. Her eyes were drooping shut again.
“Hey.”
A foot nudged her in the side. Gently first, then harder.
Let me sleep, Tatiana thought.
“Hey, dammit.” Big hands grabbed her arm and wrenched up.
Tatiana screamed.
The hands dropped her.
She hit the deck hard, though she barely felt her lip split against the metal flooring. She was so tired. She closed her eyes again.
Milar reached down and tugged her over onto her back. The motion ground at her shoulder and the loose node in her chest and Tatiana whimpered, squeezing her eyes shut against the pain.
“Aanaho, that’s a lot of blood.” To her horror, Milar unzipped the front of her jumpsuit. She tried to push his arm away, but he just batted it aside and reached down to prod at the loosened node. He grimaced. “You want the good news or the bad news, sweetie?”
Tatiana closed her eyes.
“The good news…” Tatiana shuddered as he pushed the node back into place, feeling metal and synthetic anchor lines sliding back under her skin and through her flesh. “…is that it didn’t come all the way out.”
Thinking about the arteries it would have severed if it had, Tatiana felt sick. She swallowed down bile.
“Also, I’m pretty sure you broke your collarbone. Wouldn’t be too surprised if you knocked your brain around a bit, too. But that’s not the bad news.”
The tone of his voice forced Tatiana’s eyes open.
The darkness in Milar’s face was terrifying. “The bad news—for you anyway—is that it looks like my brother decided to leave the two of us alone for awhile.” He had a knife in his hand. He tapped it on his thigh as he smiled at her, his lips parted cruelly.
Tatiana started to sit up, but Milar’s hand came within a centimeter of her injured shoulder and hovered there, in warning. She slumped back to the deck.
“I want you to tell me something,” Milar said, his yellow-brown eyes watching her face closely. “And I want you to think about it really hard before you do. All right?”
Tatiana licked her dry lips, tasting the blood there. Dazedly, she nodded.
For a long moment, Milar just squatted in the hall, watching her. Then, quietly, he said, “Did you call for your friends to rescue you? Does anyone else know we captured you?”
He’s getting ready to kill me, Tatiana’s panicked mind thought. Fear—as well as the clean air from the open hatch—was rapidly dragging her back to her senses. He wants to know if there will be any retribution. He wants to know if he’ll take the heat when they can’t find me.
She opened her mouth.
Milar touched her lips. “Think about it, sweetie. No lying. One way or the other. Did you call anyone?”
Tatiana froze. There was something about his voice that set off warning bells in her mind.
If I tell him I called, her mind argued, then he’ll keep me alive as an insurance against when they come to rescue me and—
But they didn’t know. Tatiana was all alone. To the world, she was dead, and she was looking up at her grim reaper.
Milar was going to kill her.
Lie, part of her screamed. You lie and at least he’ll spare you a few more days.
“Yeah,” Tatiana said, stronger than she felt. “I called. Told them everything. They’re gonna find you and crush your pathetic little rebel hideout and drag you and your idiot brother back for correction and I’m gonna laugh.”
Milar’s face hardened. “Really.”
“Sure are,” Tatiana said. “I told them about you and your brother and blowing up my soldier and pulling out my lifeline and kidnapping me. Told them the name of your ship, and about Wideman Joe—”
Milar’s face had grown increasingly dark until she mentioned Wideman Joe. Then he cut her off suddenly. “Stop,” he said, frowning. “You told them about Wideman Joe?”
“Yeah, and how I’d escaped and was on my way to the base and I even gave them my coordinates, so you’d better hightail it out of here right now.”
A sudden clearness came over Milar’s face. “You’re lying.”
“No I’m not.”
“Really?” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the cockpit. “You made your call from here?”
“Yeah,” Tatiana said, though she was growing suspicious of the odd look on his face. “Why?”
Milar stared at her for the longest time. Then he cursed. “I knew it didn’t make sense.” He held up a thumb and forefinger in front of her face. “You were this close, you little government squid. You realize that? This close.”
“What are you talking about?” Tatiana snapped. “I made the call right after I left you and your friends off. They know where I am and they’re going to come rescue me any minute, so you better run while you still can, creep.”
Milar’s face eased into an amused smile. “Really. And you made the call from here. On my ship.”
“Of course!” Tatiana said. “It was the first thing I did.”
Milar snorted. “Let me show you something, sweetie.” He got up and went to the pilot’s console. From underneath, he yanked open the two cabinet-like doors, exposing the wiring underneath. “See this?” he asked, pointing to what looked like a molten lump of slag with industrial, multi-colored wires leaking out of it
.
But Tatiana had already recognized it. The communications unit. An old land-rover model, probably jury-rigged to fit in the ship because the owners were too poor to buy a ship-grade device. It was a sad little thing, and its useful distance only about two hundred kilometers.
The nearest base was about two thousand.
“I made the call to a Yolk factory,” she amended, her face heating.
He slapped the cabinet shut, openly grinning, now. “You never made any calls, did you?”
“Of course I did,” she said, though they both knew he had caught her.
Milar lowered himself back down beside her and leaned back against the wall as he watched her. The knife caught the light as he held it out between them. He tisked. “I told you not to lie.”
Tatiana froze, realizing it was the same knife she had made him use to cut off his clothes.
He dangled it between his fingers, smirking at her, obviously thinking the same thing. There’s nobody to save you, sweetie, his piss-brown eyes said. “So where should we start?”
“I made an earlier call,” Tatiana said quickly. “From my soldier. While Patrick was looking at the inside. I had a com unit on the ground. I told them everything. They said they were going to take both of you and everyone you knew back for correction.”
Milar stopped twirling the knife and his gaze fixed on her darkly. For a long moment, he said nothing. Then he pointed the knife at her, eyes narrowing. “I said no lying.”
“I really did—” she began.
Milar moved more quickly than she ever thought possible for someone of his size. In an instant, he had dragged her almost into his lap, the blade at her throat. “You didn’t call anyone, did you, sweetie? You’re all alone out here. Just you and me and that great big grave you just carved yourself with the nose of my ship.”
Tatiana knew she was going to die.
“Now,” Milar said softly, leaning down until his face almost touched hers. “Last chance, sweetie. You call anyone?”
“No,” she whispered, closing her eyes. Tears stung at the corners. “I never got a chance to call anyone, you stinking colonist crawler.”