Blowback

by Lyn Gala

  “We going back to the ship now?” Tom asked. He didn’t like the flashes of emotion on Da’shay’s face. If something brought her grief, he should enjoy it. Yet when she got that pained expression on her face, he could feel a nameless sort of guilt—as if he should fix something. She tilted her head to the side and sighed.

  “No,” she said wearily. She turned back toward the shops and started walking. The leash forced Tom to walk behind.

  Da’shay’s seemed happy enough to go shopping and ignore all Tom’s very pointed hints about heading back to the ship. Avoiding the Kratos would be a sound tactical strategy if they knew for sure the Kratos was safe, but they didn’t. Da’shay was acting as if their ruse had worked and whatever asshole had come into Tom’s room had dismissed Ramsay and the crew as harmless.

  And now that Tom had a good chance to think on it, he wasn’t even sure what that had all been about. He’d expected some sort of brain scanner, but the man hadn’t even come back and Tom had been left to slavers. Da’shay moved away from the terminal where she’d been searching for vehicles and headed toward an escalator. With a sigh, Tom followed. He’d fight when the time came, but this weren’t it.

  She made it halfway toward the escalator before she stopped to look in a glass fronted store tucked in along the side of the carved stone corridor so that the window cast a bright ray of desert sun onto the jewelry. Several people were already there, pressed close to the glass, and Da’shay stopped just a few feet short of them, her head tilting as she looked in the window.

  Fuck. Slavery and window shopping. It was two nightmares in one and Tom was chained up so he couldn’t even shake her until her neck snapped. She turned and looked at him, blinking fast as though she were coming up out of water.

  “Should go before crystals shatter in water,” she said.

  “Reckon we should,” Tom agreed even though he had no idea where they were going. After a brief period where he could almost understand her, she’d gone back to being all crazy.

  She gave a nod and headed for the escalator again. A man didn’t move fast enough and Da’shay shouldered him out of her way, sending him face first into a wall. Tom bit his cheek to keep from grinning too much as the guy spluttered and then fell silent when he saw it was a genta that’d done it. If all genta were as unsociable as Da’shay, Tom figured the whole race would have been invited to leave human space a long time ago, but he wasn’t sure she even noticed just how much she was annoying others.

  “Diamond in water. Sharp and sharp,” she muttered as they rode down the escalator.

  “Don’t care,” Tom muttered back soft enough that the woman in front of Da’shay wouldn’t hear. Others tended to get flat-out offended when Da’shay let Tom speak his mind. Slaves around here all had a beat look to them. Even if they weren’t beat, they weren’t treated any kinds of right because their eyes would skitter away to the floor the second they’d made sure they weren’t going to walk into any walls.

  Tom’s ma had that look after Lester’d been born. Lester was her third, but he was sickly in a way that Andy and Tom hadn’t been. It was as if Lester’s illness had sapped something out of her, and when he died before learning to crawl, she never had been the same. The two boys right after that, Carl and Evert, were monsters from about the time they’d been born, one right after the other in the middle of an ugly night full of screams. His ma had never taken them to task the way she had him and Andy. It was as though she was worn down to nothing.

  Made him want to punch someone, seeing slaves with that same beat-down look his ma always got. That were the part of slavery that he couldn’t stomach. He’d seen it when he’d been on the Anne Regina. The ship had been tasked with transporting rescued slaves and more than one of them had demanded to be given back to some owner. They’d had scars and they’d try to make it sound like they’d deserved it.

  Tom had survived a grand total of sixteen days on the Anne Regina before the captain had transferred him off. He couldn’t even remember the captain’s name now. He supposed it didn’t actually matter. When Da’shay got off the bottom of the escalator and headed toward one more crowd of people, he followed.

  “Strings lacing together time.” Da’shay started hurrying through this more crowded area, shoving people when they didn’t move fast enough for her liking, and Tom followed. Outside a shop with a picture of a small vehicle sitting on top of wheels taller than Tom, she stopped.

  Pulling open the door, she pushed past four other people to get to the counter. She was definitely in an antisocial mood today.

  “Hey. There’s a line,” the man at the front of the line complained.

  Her hand snaked out and punched him in the nose and she never even looked over. “Want a sandcar,” she said to the employee behind the counter, putting a card on the counter. The man she hit sailed back and fell to the floor, but then he pushed himself up into a crouch as if he was ready to launch himself at Da’shay. Tom had no problem with hitting Da’shay, but it just wasn’t right to hit her when her mind was slipping gears. Besides, Tom wasn’t sure what that would do to his legal status if she went and got herself arrested for killing the twerp, and unless Tom missed his guess, that was pretty much where this was headed.

  Before the guy could attack, Tom moved between Da’shay and her latest victim. “She ain’t in a mood for games,” Tom warned him.

  That seemed to shock the man right out of wanting to attack and Tom watched the employee at the counter hurry to get Da’shay what she wanted. He probably wanted her to go away as fast as possible, which wasn’t such a bad goal.

  “Move, slave.” The man made his disgust more than clear, but then Tom had been disgusting middle class folks with his grammar and his manners and his spotty use of showering facilities for pretty much all of his life.

  “Don’t think so, little man,” Tom said, making a point of looking down at the guy. Even with his hands cuffed behind his back, Tom figured he could probably take him, but he wasn’t sure what that would do to his legal status either. He hated how much ignorance he was suffering these days.

  The man stepped forward as if he was going to hit Tom and Tom braced himself, but another one of the customers from the line caught the guy’s arm. “He’s new marked and he wasn’t the one who hit you.”

  “Don’t need your help,” Tom just about growled, but a sharp jerk at his neck told him that Da’shay was finally paying attention. He closed his mouth and indulged in a quick fantasy of shooting her in the back of the head and watching her fall.

  She leaned around Tom and looked at the man she’d hit carefully. “Could kill you,” she announced in a real clear voice. Tom couldn’t quite figure out why that made the two men go white as ghosts until he looked down to see a gun in her hand.

  “Ain’t nice to aim those at folks,” Tom said, feeling a twinge of amusement at the irony of him telling someone else that. Usually it was Ramsay saying something like that to him. He debated moving in front of her because he was almost sure she wouldn’t shoot him, and if she did, that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. However, he really didn’t want to get gut shot for some fancypants who got upset about his place in line. Security had to be on their way here. Even if Da’shay was a genta, people had a right to expect she wouldn’t act too crazy. If she went and made pointing guns at people a regular feature of her day, the authorities were going to get cranky. As much as he couldn’t stomach being Da’shay’s slave, he really, really couldn’t stomach being in some fucking auction.

  “Should leave,” Tom tried again. Da’shay blinked, her eyes still focused on fancypants. “Fucking hell, shoot him or don’t, but enough with the just standing around,” Tom finally complained.

  She looked at him. “Diamonds hidden in the waters, ready to cut.”

  “Don’t fucking care. I’d rather we get gone before someone goes making a fuss,” Tom told her. The woman who’d been in line made an unhappy little noise and Tom figured he’d offended her with either his language or his
lack of playing submissive for his owner, but he couldn’t bring himself to give a damn.

  “Want a sandcar,” Da’shay said to the man behind the counter, tucking her gun into her pocket and acting for all the world as if she hadn’t just threatened to shoot a man. Tom studied the hang of the fabric suspiciously. The weapon wasn’t pulling, which meant she had a hidden holster, probably under a slit at the bottom of the pocket. He wondered if that was new or if she’d been carrying a weapon the whole time.

  “I have our best model waiting for you. I embedded the code on your car and the solar panels are fully charged. If you go to the garage level right behind here, you’ll find it in slot 102 on level 17-7.” The man froze and looked at Da’shay with growing concern. Tom could almost read his mind.

  “I got that,” Tom offered the man. No need to leave him to worry that Da’shay was going to wander their garage terrorizing the customers.

  The man’s gaze flicked to Tom, but he didn’t respond as he handed the card to Da’shay. She took it and headed toward the stone arch where a huge escalator waited. Instead of steps, each level of the escalator was large enough for several people and even had a short bench on one side.

  Da’shay pulled sharply on the leash and Tom muttered a few curses as he followed her to the escalator. She claimed the bench and that left him standing as the whole thing shifted downward in a spiral. It wasn’t all that easy to keep his balance with his hands cuffed, so he focused on that while the levels appeared, each with a number lit in neon green.

  “Drowning in diamonds, little slices for mice to chew,” she said softly.

  “Uh huh.” After a few levels of offices, they were now being taken past garages full of atmosphere hoppers and cars and in the distance it even looked like a small shuttle. Tom filed that away for future use. Level 17-8 was mostly cars and Tom shifted closer to the edge of the platform so he could step off, but Da’shay didn’t move and that pulled the leash tight.

  “Cutting all the darkness so the light blinds,” she complained softly when he looked back at her.

  “We’re getting off here, so if you want that car you ordered, get off your ass,” he suggested.

  She reached up and scratched her shoulder. “Miss your gift.”

  Tom snorted. That gift was about when things started really to go south for him. Hell, he still wondered if her turning slaver didn’t have something to do with the fact that Tom had nearly gotten her killed. Tom figured that was good reason for holding a grudge, but he doubted that she understood what he’d done. She might be qualified as a pilot and other ships might have called her crew, but Tom was fairly sure she wasn’t mentally competent to understand much of anything. When he was the smart one in the room, they were definitely in some serious shit.

  “This is it.” The angle of the escalator meant that their section slid along at floor level for several yards before it went behind the rock and curved down to the next level. “Now, pea brain,” Tom said, stepping off and really hoping she came with him. If she didn’t, his leash would drag him back onto the escalator and they’d have to find another way back to this level. Luckily she followed him off.

  Looking around, she seemed to finally engage with the world. “Have to hurry,” she said as she looked down the two aisles and actually picked the one marked with the right numbers.

  “Why?” Tom searched the shadows for some sort of danger and pulled at his cuffed hands again. He hated being helpless. “Something coming?” She shook her head as if she were a dog coming up out of water. “Fuck, I don’t know why I bother to ask you. Ain’t like you’re a font of useful knowledge.”

  They reached the right slot and there was a sand car with tires so tall that Tom couldn’t have reached the top even if his hands were free. A ladder hung down from the side and led up to a small pyramid shaped cabin perched six or seven feet up between the wide set tires. With tires nearly five feet wide, this was going to be a beast to drive. He looked at Da’shay suspiciously.

  “Hey, you listening?” he asked. She turned to him with an expression he couldn’t even pretend to understand. “You can’t go having one of your spells driving this. You’ve got to focus. No wandering off and being a pea brain.”

  Her eyes narrowed and she moved closer, her body predatory as she reeled the leash in and Tom was left suddenly remembering why Da’shay scared him in the first place. There weren’t many people in the universe who could put fear into Tom Frieden, but Da’shay skipped right to the top of the list as she wrapped her fist around the leash and held it just under his collar. She pressed him back into the tire, pinning his cuffed hands. If push came to fighting for his life, he still had his feet free, but she’d put him in stupid little sandals that were no good for kicking and she wasn’t exactly the easy sort to kill.

  “Drive off the road and vultures wait to pick your bones. They can’t have you. You can’t let them eat you one gulp at a time.” She said the words with a fierceness that made Tom think carefully before answering.

  “If you drive off the road or if I do?” he asked.

  She sighed and rested her forehead against his, her hair tickling his skin. But she still had a death grip on his leash. Tom felt a familiar sort of desperation to fix whatever he’d done wrong. It wasn’t a good feeling knowing that this woman who was so powerfully annoyed with him had all the power.

  She sighed. “Vultures picked my bones, whole thoughts gone.” She looked up at him. “Panic.”

  Tom didn’t answer. He figured it wasn’t all that hard to tell he was starting to feel that. Hell, anyone would panic being one day into slavery, so he wasn’t even going to feel like less of a man for wanting to run around breaking random shit.

  She looked off into the distance, her eyes focusing on nothing. “Vultures will pick at you if they know. Lead them from the wounded nest. But the bird that flies sends the vulture back to the eggs.”

  Tom cocked his head, wondering if she was starting to make sense or if he was just losing his mind. “Vultures don’t hunt like that,” he pointed out.

  She looked up at him and made a grim face. “Nibbling at panic. If you panic, they’ll nibble at you.”

  He sighed and looked around. “Ain’t like I can get far anyway. I’m willing to put off this fight for now, so you show me where we’re going and I’ll keep you from driving this beast over some crowd of church-goers. Deal?” he asked.

  She studied him, her arm pulling the leash tight so that his collar dug into the back of his neck. “Not fight for now,” she whispered. She pulled the leash down and Tom sighed. Fuck. She wanted some proof he wasn’t going to fight now. Well he’d already lost most of his dignity, so he lowered himself to his knees and clenched his teeth to keep himself from calling Da’shay all sorts of names.

  She moved around toward his side and knelt on the floor beside him. When she uncuffed his hands, Tom brought his hands around to the front and rubbed the reddened wrists. They were sore from fighting the cuffs and he watched Da’shay carefully. They’d seemed to have reached some sort of truce and he didn’t want to change that.

  “Out where waters aren’t full of diamonds we can fight,” she promised him before she stood up. She still had his leash in her hand and he watched as she unwound it from her fist and then laid it down his back so that it followed the curve of his spine. Then she stepped back and watched him. Tom got to his feet and went to the ladder on the driver’s side and started climbing up to the door. He pulled, but it was locked.

  “I need the card,” he said. She held her hand up with the card and Tom took it and unlocked the doors. He went to hand the card back to her, but she was gone. He blinked, wondering what happened, but the passenger side door opened before he could climb back down the ladder and go looking.

  Da’shay leaped into the passenger side and looked at him. “Hurry,” she said impatiently. “Supplies are at dock 15-2. Have to get away from the diamonds.”

  They may have reached a truce, but she was still crazier than
a genta. Tom climbed the rest of the way up into the cab and cursed when his leash got caught in the hydraulic valves near the door. Untangling the metal links, he settled himself into the driver’s side. If it weren’t for the collar around his neck and the lasered brand on his chest, this would almost feel normal. And that scared Tom more than just about anything else in the world.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Tom fought the wheel and engaged the rear hydraulics as the sand from the dune started sliding under them, dragging them back down the hill Tom was trying to drive them up. The car whined as Tom put it into a new gear. They were nearly to the top. Tom could see the crest of the sand dune, and behind it, more sand. If Da’shay didn’t tell him where they were going soon, Tom was about to call off their truce. The on-board scanner said there was nothing out here.

  The car hit the top of the dune and Tom shifted to keep them from flying down the other side.

  Da’shay had been in back and now crawled between the seats. “You gonna know when we get where we’re going?” he asked.

  “Yep,” she agreed, settling into the passenger seat. “Can only hear the distant screeches of diamonds across the glass.”

  “Uh huh.”

  She looked at him and narrowed her eyes. “Do you want to fight here?” she asked.

  “What?” He put the car into a lower gear as they started to slide on the sand. “Look, I’m not looking to get my ass kicked.” Tom would love to fight, but he really didn’t have any illusions about fighting a genta in hand to hand combat.