It bought me enough time to stop the spin, though the plasma thrusters were off-line and any chance to outrun my pursuers was now gone for good. The Pendragon shuddered from the impact of multiple cannon shells, and I managed to blast the attacking bot to pieces before the cannons fell silent and the heads-up told me I was out of ammo.
I could only push maximum CO2 through the secondary thrusters and watch the last five bots close in for the kill. It was probably my over-adrenalised imagination, but I sensed a certain predatory anticipation in the way they formed a circular kill-zone around me, like a pride of lions savouring the cornered gazelle’s last seconds.
I would like to record that my final thoughts consisted of a sober reflection on the many failures and regrets of my life, enlivened by the occasional bright moment of joy and humanity. The way Consuela looked that first time, Janet’s smile, Sherry and Joe’s friendship, poor old Freak’s exile… But that would be a big fat lie. I felt only fear and frustration, forced it down into a hard ball of burning fury and lined up on the bot at twelve o’clock with every intention of diverting all remaining power to the thrusters and ramming it.
So it was with a mixture of surprise and disappointment that I greeted the sight of it exploding before I could begin my bid for glorious oblivion.
A Galahad class suit flashed past my visor at no more than arm’s length, blazing cannons taking down two more bots as its missile rig spat shrikes at the others. A brief exchange of tracer and it was over, no more bots, no more shipyard.
The Galahad formed a jagged black silhouette against the vast disc of Ceres as it came closer, the opaque visor fading to reveal the occupant. “Always make your sims tougher than the real thing, right?” Lucy said with a grin.
“You were supposed to stay with your mother,” I replied.
“Relax.” She pouted a little. “Momma gave me a hall pass.”
“What?” I realigned to view the Malthus II, finding it had begun to reverse course. It was already sixty klicks away, the distance increasing with every second. I could see three growing points of lights off her starboard bow, the blue glow of plasma thrusters on full power. Scarabs on an attack run.
“Mom?” Lucy said in a faint voice.
“You promised her immunity,” Mina reminded me, speaking via the comms laser so Lucy wouldn’t hear.
“She’ll still find out,” I said. “One day.”
“I know. When she does… Tell her… Tell her if there’s ever another war, she’s to run very fast in the opposite direction.”
“What are you doing?” Lucy demanded as the Malthus II shrank ever smaller. I thought about the canister of plutonium I had placed in the back-up reactor and realised I’d never checked to confirm it had been returned to the stores.
I glanced over at Lucy, seeing realisation dawn on her face and knew her mother was speaking to her via the comms laser. She screamed as the sun-flare erupted and her visor went black against the glare, screening out the wave of photons that would have fried her retinas.
I turned back to watch the end. Even a five kiloton blast wasn’t enough to completely destroy a ship the size of the Malthus II, although it proved more than capable of snuffing out the attacking Scarabs in three brief flickers of vapourising matter. The hab-cluster disappeared in an expanding globe of pure white fire along with half the accumulator, the remaining wreckage splitting into two rapidly spinning chunks, soon shredded in the blast wave. The debris field flattened into a thin, narrow river, curving around us as Ceres’ gravity took hold. It seemed the dwarf planet was destined to have its own short-lived ring system.
I could hear Lucy weeping and found I had not a single word of comfort for her. Instead I checked the Pendragon’s auto-repair system, finding all leaks sealed but also less than five percent CO2 remaining. Plus the stealth-ware was trashed and the scanning gear barely functional. On the bright side I still had nearly seventy-two hours’ worth of air.
I drifted, listening to Lucy cry, watching the new ring system order itself into a surprisingly beautiful double disc arrangement, twin rivers of glittering detritus… disturbed by the sleek form of a single Wraith ascending from Ceres.
“You got any ammo left?” I asked Lucy.
“Huh?” she sniffed.
“Ammo. Do you have any?”
“Hundred-twenty cannon shells…” She trailed off as she caught sight of the Wraith. “Just as pretty as I thought it would be.”
I had to admit the Wraith made a fine sight as it came to within two hundred metres, stealth-mode inactive so the reflected light from Ceres gleamed on the smooth lines of the hull, unmarred by any view-ports or comms gear. It was a real symphony of single purpose engineering. Death made flesh.
The Wraith fired its retros and came to a dead halt, a faint snick of static then a voice, soft and heavy with grief. “Like my new ship, Inspector?” asked Jack.
“It’s Chief Inspector,” I said.
“I’m sure they’ll remember when they carve your name on the memorial.”
“Must’ve been a difficult theft,” I said. “Even for you.”
“You’d be surprised just how much confusion a thermo-nuclear explosion and an asteroid storm will cause. Plus, Markov was kind enough to bequeath some useful hacks, made short work of the airlock seals… And the weapons systems.” A small opening appeared in the nose of the Wraith, a circle of black within black. “Lucy, we’re leaving.”
“Mom’s gone,” she replied, voice hoarse.
“I know, and there’ll be time to grieve later. But for now, every CAOS Security boat in this half of the Belt just registered two nukes exploding in Ceres orbit. We have to go.”
“I said, mom’s gone!” she snapped back. “She’s gone. She needed to hide, so I hid with her. And I’m done hiding, Jack.”
Silence, vast and cold like the surrounding vac, the black circle still open on the Wraith’s nose. “Before I let you on my boat,” Jack said, and I knew his full attention was now on me. “I had a crew and a family. You don’t really think you’re going back to the Slab for a hero’s welcome, do you?”
“Leave him alone!” Lucy fired the Galahad’s thrusters, putting herself between me and the Wraith.
“You think this piece of shit is going to work an immunity deal for you?” Jack raged. “I know his kind. He’ll wring you dry and stick you in immersion for the next decade.”
“I don’t think so. Anyway, ten years in immersion is better than five more minutes shackled to you.”
“Get out of the way, Lucy!”
“Hey, Jack,” I said. “Did you take the safe with you when you blew out of the Dead Reckoning? I bet you did. Looked inside yet?”
“What?” he demanded, voice very low.
I peered at the title through the cellophane, aged but still readable. “‘After the Gold Rush,’” I read. “And there’s an autograph. Who exactly was Neil Young anyway? Shadrak said he’s the only thing you really care about, next to money of course.”
The Wraith hung there, a gleaming black sculpture of death, pregnant with menace. The perfect vessel for the perfect pirate.
“You said it yourself,” I told Jack. “The clock’s ticking. At least this way you get a chance to steal it again one day. Or maybe you hate me enough to burn it up along with me, and your daughter of course.”
“I’m not his daughter!” Lucy stated. “I never was.”
“Lucy, please…” Jack began.
“Enough!” she snarled. “Kill if you’re killing or go if you’re going.”
Another minute of silence, every second ticking by so slowly I wondered if the Wraith didn’t have some kind of time-dilation ability. Finally, a soft, choked grunt, “I loved your mother. And I love you.”
Lucy said nothing and the black circle in the Wraith’s nose disappeared. The sleek form turned end over end, fired secondary thrusters to get clear then slipped into stealth-mode, its trajectory betrayed only by the swirling vortex of debris left in its wake.
“Would’ve been handy about now,” I agreed. The silence stretched.
“You knew, didn’t you?” she asked. “What my mother was running from.”
“Sure.”
More elastic silence. “Well?” she demanded.
I dredged up a real-life story from memory. “It was the largest fraud in the history of the orbiting corporate sector. Happened just before the war, some say it caused it, at least partly. Forty billion UA secured on worthless mining shares, all based on false profit estimates cobbled together by a conspiracy of geologists and engineers. Lotta people lost their life savings, suicides, bankrupt banks, the whole shebang. Screwed the orbiting economy for the best part of a decade. Most of the offenders were caught, each of them got thirty years, real-time years. Guess your mom didn’t want to miss you growing up.”
“Oh,” she said. “That’s pretty bad, I guess.” She turned back to Ceres. The ring system was already starting to dissolve, the twin rivers breaking up as the dwarf-planet gathered the junk to her breast. “Pity it didn’t last.”
“Yeah. Listen, if my air gives out first, I’ve recorded your immunity deal to the Pendragon’s memory. When CAOS Security gets here, the call sign is White Wolf.”
“White Wolf,” she repeated. “What’s it mean?”
I watched the last of the rings disintegrate, Ceres now showing a dirty grey line around its equator. I wondered if anyone would bother to clean it up. “It means I’m done with this,” I said. “And I’m going home.”
END
An Aria for Ragnarok
Chapter 1
She said, “Your scars are gone.”
I said, “Don’t rub it in.”
She smiled. It wasn’t much of a smile, more a brief curl of her too-red lips and a barely perceptible dimple in her too-white skin. But still, a smile. “Been looking for you,” I went on. “Leave of absence, the university said.”
“Not through choice. But I did make good use of the time.” Her eyes swept over my face again, the face I’d chosen on return from Ceres, the same face I’d left with almost a year ago, albeit now sans scars. Fixing them wasn’t my idea and my reaction to the first glance in the mirror had sent the CAOS Defence med-tech scurrying from the room in mortal panic. My less-than-polite requests for another procedure were refused on ethical grounds; apparently there’s a limit to how many face-changes a human body can tolerate, and I’d reached mine.
“You were someone else for a while,” she said, head tilted at a familiar angle and eyes narrowed. “Weren’t you?”
Secrets are a waste of time around her, I reminded myself, saying nothing.
“When you stood me up I got worried,” she continued. “Went to the bar. Marco couldn’t tell me anything. No bags packed, no sign of a struggle. You were just gone. So I called Chief Inspector Mordecai. At first she seemed just as worried as I was.”
“Janet…”
“She got me and Joe assigned to a special investigation, did a forensic sweep of the bar, then suddenly she lost interest. Told us to do the same. Of course we couldn’t. We kept on digging, trying to get the media interested. Oddly, considering the most celebrated hero-Demon on the Slab had up and disappeared without a trace, no one seemed keen on the story. Then one day the faculty president called me in and told me I was suspended without pay. Certain irregularities in my expenses, he said. If I hadn’t been a hero he’d have fired me, he said. Joe got transferred to crime-scene clean-up.”
The Colonel, I knew. Being thorough, the bastard. I held up the bottle I’d bought at the most expensive plasma-boutique this side of the Axis. It was made from hand-crafted black glass and had a florid, Renaissance style sketch of a marmoset on the label. “Sweeter than pine-martin, I’m told,” I said.
She barely glanced at the bottle, laser-like perception at full power now. “Exocore Mining lost one of its biggest ships off Ceres not long ago,” she said. “The largest astro-navigation disaster of recent years. There are an awful lot of crackpot conspiracy theories flying around the smart-net about it. Everything from a battle between Belter clans to a thwarted alien invasion. Some amateur radio-astronomers even claim there was a nuclear exchange. Maybe you heard about it.”
I held out my second offering, a flat square encased in what I hoped was tastefully restrained gift-wrap. “I know you’re not supposed to reveal the price of a gift, but this…”
“Are you actually serious?” she asked in a low whisper, a snarl creeping into her voice and lips revealing overlong canines. I was suddenly glad I’d asked her to meet me in a public space. Memorial Park was one of Chief-of-Police turned Mayor Arnaud’s voter-friendly projects, half of the once decrepit Yang Twenty-Three given over to broad grassland and copses of maple and acacia. A boating lake and several splash pools for the kids added to the generally idyllic appearance, though the burgeoning corruption scandal surrounding the park’s construction added an authentic Slab-esque ambiance to the place. I’d been surprised Janet had wanted to meet here, given the vast array of UV lights in the ceiling, receiving a terse text reply by way of explanation: I’m UV resistant. Racist.
We stood near a picnic table, her staring at my gift, me unable to tell her anything and not wanting to lie. “You’ll like it,” I said when my arm started to ache. “Promise.”
She blinked, sighed then took the gift, and the bottle. We sat at the picnic table as she tore away the wrapping, unable to contain a small chirp of surprised delight at the revealed album cover art. “This…” she said, fingers playing over the tableau of Luke and co., before coming to rest on Vader’s respirator. “This can’t be genuine.”
“Original motion picture soundtrack,” I said. “Third pressing, according to the Jed I bought it from. Said if it’d been a first pressing he wouldn’t be running a crappy record store.” I tried a smile which earned me only a raised eyebrow so I felt the need to elaborate. “I went away because I had to. Now I’m back. Isn’t that enough?”
“The death-toll at Ceres was considerable,” she said. “Though no source seems to agree on the exact number.”
“And that’s the way it’ll stay.” Another raised eyebrow. More elaboration needed. “Take a look,” I said, gesturing at the surrounding park. Nearby a Splice-elf couple were holding hands with their little boy as he splashed in the fountain. Beyond them a group of older kids, werewolves and un-Spliced, were engaged in the rough and tumble Slab version of Lacrosse. “What happened… what I did. None of this would be here if I hadn’t. Including you. And you’ll just have to trust me on that.”
She returned her gaze to the album cover, didn’t raise it when she said, “Are you done? I mean; out, discharged, retired. Whatever they call it.”
White Wolf, I thought, recalling that final meeting with the Colonel. That’s what they call it. He’d offered promotion to major and the opportunity to recruit my own team. I told him to shove it and if I ever set eyes on him again one of us wasn’t going to survive the encounter.
“Yes,” I told her. “I’m a Demon again, and that’s what I’ll be until they pension me off or, more likely, fire my ass.”
“Joe,” she said, finally looking up to meet my gaze.
“Already reinstated. Got him appointed to Special Homicide. Which brings me to my second reason for asking you here. Technically, you’re still an accredited Special Investigator, with a distinguished record to boot.”
“I think I’ve chased after enough monsters for one lifetime, thank you.”
“Not like this one.” I took out my smart and called up an image on the holo display.
“Handsome fellow,” she said, watching the miniature head and shoulders revolve. “I take it this is the face of your arch nemesis?”
“I present Mr Mac. Criminal kingpin, murderer, drug and people trafficker and a thousand other bad things. Want to help me catch him?”
“I’m otherwise engaged.”
“I know you haven’t been back to work, even though they reinstated you.”
“With a letter of exoneration and back-pay, which I guess was due to your influence. However, the manner of my suspension left a bitter taste. When it fades I’ll go back. In the meantime, I thought I should finally write another book.”
“Greeks or Romans?”
“Actually, I’ve gone all modern for this one.” She held up her own smart. Like most tech she owned it was an older model and it took me a few seconds of squinting to read the fuzzy display.
“A Narrative History of the CAOS War.”
“It’s a criminally neglected subject,” she said. “Do you know that, to date, there is no comprehensive, unbiased account of the conflict? And the CAOS Official History is an error-ridden piece of propagandist drek.”
“Sometimes it’s best to leave the past alone. Let the next generation sort the truth from the lies.”
“A refrain I’ve become familiar with recently. I approached CAOS Defence, Central Governance and all the veteran groups I could find. So far I’ve managed to interview only half-a-dozen people, none of them major players.” She paused to smile, a better one this time, though a little more calculating than I’d’ve liked. “Like you, Alex.”
I gave a brief laugh. “Major player?”
“You forget all that digging into your background I did before I came to you about the DeMarco murder, and I did a lot more after you went missing. You took part in the Langley Raid, perhaps the most important event in the whole war. Not to mention that space battle you told me about. Added to that, I suspect there are a lot of doors you could open. Veterans might be reluctant to talk to me, but not you.” She angled her head, black eyes twinkling. “If you really want to make it up to me, that is. Not that this isn’t lovely,” she added, hugging the album to her chest.
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