by Ann Aguirre
“Came to you with what?”
Martine’s dark eyes were grave. “Proof of Conglomerate atrocities, incursion on civilian civil liberties, and evidence that they were ignoring due process.”
“Shit. War crimes?” This wasn’t what she’d expected at all.
“Exactly. Against Nika’s wishes, I went public with the information, and they labeled me a traitor. She was taken into state custody, detained indefinitely.” The other woman took a deep breath, as if the memories hurt even now.
“So you cut a deal to save her.”
“Yep. I go quietly to Perdition, and she goes free. Traitors are the worst of the worst, you know. It doesn’t matter what the government does to its citizens, apparently. They’re above the laws they write to govern us.”
“So you’d never killed anyone before you went inside?”
“In combat, sure. I saw some action in a few skirmishes, doing colony work for the Conglomerate. But that’s . . . different.”
She wanted to reach out, but she didn’t know how to connect with anyone besides Jael. It was kind of a huge deal that she wanted to. Besides, the other woman might not welcome a hug or a pat or whatever the hell women did to comfort each other. This would have to do, just listening in the half-light.
“I hope Nika’s safe,” Dred said finally. “And that your sacrifice wasn’t for nothing.”
Martine’s voice was so quiet she could barely hear it. “Me too.”
30
Hide and Seek
Jael stopped outside the quarters he shared with Dred, listening to the rise and fall of female voices. Seems like she has company. He continued to the common room, where a handful of men were snoring. A few were propped up on the tables; others had passed out underneath them. Between Ike’s wake and the celebratory revels, Queensland had been liquored up a lot lately.
Cook was the only man who looked remotely sober, so Jael headed for the herbal teapot. He wasn’t ready to face Dred in any case; he still had to figure out what he was going to do about what had happened with Vix and Zediah. The taller man greeted him with a jerk of his chin. It seemed to Jael as if he was always around. Does he ever sleep?
Silently, the chef poured him a cup and raised his brows.
“You’re playing bartender?”
The other man shrugged.
He considered unloading his troubles but he didn’t know him well enough to be sure he could be trusted, and the sort of vague advice he could receive without telling Cook everything made it seem like a waste of time. Moments like this, he missed Einar most, as he might’ve turned to the big man. But he could already imagine what Einar would say: Tell Dred. Someone else will figure out the hydroponics garden.
But with Ike gone, there was no guarantee anyone was smart enough to keep food production up. So he’d sit on this problem and hope it didn’t get worse while they dealt with Vost and his wrecking crew. He had been sitting alone long enough to see the bottom of the tin cup through the yellow liquid they dubbed tea when the beetle-browed recruit ambled into the common room. Jael glimpsed an interesting exchange between him and Cook, just a quick gaze, a nod, nothing more, but it made him wonder. There were always silent intrigues going on, and Tam used to be top-notch at keeping track of them.
To his surprise, the lout came over and sat with Jael. “Not drinking tonight?”
“Somebody has to keep a clear head.”
“Did the Dread Queen kick you out of bed?” The other man smirked.
Jael barked out a laugh. “If she had, you’re the last one I’d tell, mate.”
“It’s an interesting setup you’ve got here. Name’s Pietro by the way.” He didn’t seem to take offense to the rebuff.
Something about this conversation struck Jael wrong, but he couldn’t put a finger on why. “How come you aren’t drinking?”
And why are you roaming around during downtime?
“I was playing cards with some of the boys earlier. Won a bunch of chits from the ones who were.” A glib answer, convincing even. “I won’t be on watch for a ten-day stretch now. That’s what I call being a gentleman of leisure.”
He couldn’t find anything to object to in that statement other than the obvious smugness, but hell, he’d enjoyed hustling a mark in his time. There was a certain satisfaction in proving that you were smarter than other people thought, and if you could get people to underestimate your abilities, all the better. This was certainly no worse than anything else he’d heard in here and better than a lot of it.
So why’s my skin crawling?
Past experience had taught him to pay attention to these moments, so he half closed his eyes, paying attention to the unsteady skitter of Pietro’s pulse and the sour tang of nerves percolating beneath his skin. Once Jael zeroed in, he took in the nervous tic in the other man’s jaw, along with the faint sheen of sweat on his brow. Pietro drummed his fingers on the table, but before Jael could call him on it, the convict pushed to his feet.
“Nice chatting with you, but I’m late for an appointment with my bunk.” Pietro hurried out of the common room, as if he’d successfully stalled him.
That was enough to send Jael back to Dred’s quarters at a run, but to his relief, he still heard the rise and fall of her voice, along with Martine’s. He closed his eyes on a sigh of relief and turned away.
Lucky bastard. You get to live another day. But I’ll be watching you.
* * *
“CAN you find out for me how much the mercs have hurt Mungo and Silence?” Dred kept a hand on her head, making Tam think that, like Martine, she had a raging headache.
“How much did you drink last night?” he asked.
“Unimportant. Can you do it?”
“Absolutely. I won’t engage . . . I’ll just go on a fact-finding mission to discover how many men they have left.”
“That would be useful information.”
“As you like. Feel better, my queen.” The gentle irony in his tone prompted a scowl from the woman, then Tam headed toward the barricades. Ordinarily, he would take Martine out with him, but she couldn’t move without moaning, not an asset on a silent run.
Halfway across the common room, Katur stopped him. “I overheard your assignment, and I wish to accompany you.”
“Why?” It was best to understand a prospective ally’s motives.
“Though my people have been assimilated into Queensland, I’m still in charge of their safety. If I lack knowledge regarding our enemies, it compromises the effectiveness of my leadership and my decision-making abilities.”
He didn’t ask if Katur could move quietly; the alien had been slipping around, probably inside Queensland itself, without Tam’s knowledge for turns. So he nodded. “Will you show me the best route to Munya?”
“Of course.”
“Then welcome aboard.”
“One moment, please.” Katur signaled to his mate, who nodded. “I’m ready.”
“It’s impressive that you two maintain a close relationship, in spite of all of the challenges,” Tam said, heading for the barricades.
“Our love would be a pale, weak thing if it couldn’t survive privation as well as plenty.”
While that might be true, Tam had often seen couples devolve into spitting accusations over lesser trials. Katur took the lead, showing him an alternate route three levels up. Though this was part of Queensland, they no longer had the men necessary to protect it, so the corridors had an abandoned air. Dred had made the right decision when she tightened up their boundaries, but she’d also yielded a fair amount of territory to protect her citizens.
Katur tilted his head, presumably listening for movement. “There’s a patrol one level down, directly below us.”
He raised a brow, impressed. “Hold or move?”
“We don’t want to be out in the open if they climb to this deck
, so get to cover as quickly and quietly as you can.”
Tam followed the other male, boosting silently into the ducts, then he pulled the grille back in place. The repair work made a metal ping, and, beside him, Katur froze. That might be enough to alert the aliens, but—then he heard voices.
“My audio picked it up, too. This way, I think.” Tam recognized Vost’s voice, and soon the full group of mercs appeared.
He took a head count and was dismayed to see how many were left, despite all of their small victories. Beside him, Katur was so still as to seem catatonic, hardly even breathing. If they find us, we’re dead meat up here. Since rifles added weight and weight added to the sound of passage, both he and Katur were armed only with small knives in case fighting became unavoidable. Long moments passed while the mercs tromped beneath them.
“There’s a trail in the dust leading off this way,” a merc said.
“Looks like one of the maintenance units.”
Vost sighed. “Then maybe that’s what we heard just now.”
“Probably. We’re not gonna find a hidden way into this zone, so let’s go kill some more of those smelly mooks. Their turf isn’t nearly as well defended.”
Dred will be glad to hear that. Tam counted it as a blessing that the mercs couldn’t find the paths the aliens had carved because if they woke up some morning to find this many armored soldiers wreaking havoc inside their borders—with only a single Peacemaker for counterattack—then the game would be done, and he hadn’t yet put all his pieces in play.
Katur waited a full five minutes after the mercs departed before moving or speaking. “It bodes ill for us that they’ve decided we’re too strong for a frontal assault. Sooner or later, they will find a vulnerable gap, some weakness no one has foreseen.”
“Unless we kill them first,” Tam said grimly.
The alien’s eyes gleamed in the dark, hinting at better-than-human night vision. “How do you propose we do that? It has taken some of our finest people and all of the resources we can scrounge to kill a few.”
“I’m not sure yet,” he admitted. “But it’s been proven time and again that if one is cautious and watchful, the opponent will make a mistake that proves to be his downfall.”
“The same could be said of us,” Katur murmured.
Interesting. He’s a pessimist.
Tam didn’t address those words. If you focused too hard on the dire nature of reality, it could paralyze you. “Let’s get the intel for Dred and warn her that we spotted mercs pretty close to our perimeter. I have some plans to make.”
* * *
VOST led his men away from well-defended territory. So far, he’d found only abandoned rooms and corridors though some of them showed signs they had seen recent use. Guess we’ve forced them to tighten the border. It was small comfort when his men had expected the facility to be clean by now; none of them had predicted losing a full squad to the scum incarcerated within, convicts with primitive weapons, no less. Vost led the column through the corridors, checking each turn while he mentally mapped the facility. He was down to his last few drone cams, and he still didn’t have an accurate picture of the layout given the way the cons had barricaded some shafts and hallways and cut holes where there had been no passages before.
“You all right, boss?” Redmond fell into step with Vost. Since the unit moved two by two, nobody seemed to think anything of the maneuver.
If he wasn’t the unit commander, he’d admit to being worried. But even though Redmond had been with him for a lot of turns, he couldn’t say so out loud. An odd sensation skittered down his spine. “Fine.”
“I feel like someone’s watching us.”
“Me too.” That much he could acknowledge. “Probably some enemy scouts have eyes on us.”
“I don’t like it. I don’t like any of this. You think maybe we should pull out? There will be other jobs.”
None that pay like this one.
“We’ve taken some losses, but we’re not out of the game. Once we wipe out the other two pockets of resistance, we can fix full attention and resources to burning down the bastards who hit us with the poison grenades and acid pellets.”
“If they’ve got the know-how to build shit like that, I wonder what else they can come up with,” Redmond said.
It was a prudent concern, one Vost shared. “They also have that Peacemaker. The suit never said anything about their having heavy droid defenses.”
“They must’ve hacked it,” the other man guessed.
“There are others on station. If they can, I can.”
“Is that your plan to minimize losing more men?” Redmond asked.
Vost nodded. “We’ll go kill some mooks because they die fast and easy. Too bad there are so fragging many of them. After that, I’ll program my last drone cam to look for a Peacemaker. Even a broken one would serve. I’m sure I can get it running again.”
“Then we’ll send it in to soften up the smart ones?”
“That’s the plan. While it draws their fire, we can roll in behind and wipe them out.”
Redmond smacked his armored fist against his palm. “It’ll be fun to see their faces when we surprise them for a change.”
“Agreed. I’ve had enough of their ambushes. This may be their home ground, but I’ve won harder battles against cleverer men.”
Redmond seemed to take heart from his tone, and when he punched the air in anticipation of triumph, the rest of the men followed suit. The mood was much improved as they moved toward the stinking compound full of carrion eaters. Vost had encountered cannibals before, and now he wondered if eating human flesh made you stupid, because these men had no grasp of strategy or tactical advantage whatsoever.
Then a stink hit him, so foul it almost made him puke inside his helmet. He choked down the bile while quickly adjusting the filters on his sense array. No, definitely don’t want to smell this. The stench made him think there must be a group nearby, but instead his unit stumbled into a huge room full of grisly artifacts. There was human skin stretched across a tanning rack and a pile of polished bones on a crafting table. Through his faceplate, it looked as if someone once used this place to create armor and weapons out of the dead.
“This . . . this is seriously fragged up,” Casto said. “No wonder the Conglomerate wants these monsters dead.”
“They should’ve just been executed in the first place,” someone else muttered.
“If we execute people who kill, we become murderers, too.” Casto seemed to be imitating the political commentary of some talking head. By the tone, Vost guessed Casto thought they should bring back the death penalty.
“We must’ve taken a wrong turn,” he said. “This doesn’t look like the way.”
“I think we’re close to the silent watchers,” Redmond put in.
Duran muttered, “Those bastards are creepy. They cut out their tongues.”
This place sent a chill down his spine. In his time as a merc, he’d seen some awful shit, but superstitious as it sounded, this place felt saturated in evil. He gestured for the men to move out by whirling his finger in the air.
“There’s no battle here. They’re watching, but they won’t engage in a stand-up fight.”
Casto shook his head. “Man, I hate this place. We can’t leave soon enough.”
“I understand. But we finish the job done first.”
I hope.
31
The Storydance
“Between 100 and 120 of Mungo’s left. You can’t be sure on Silence?” Dred paced, rubbing her temples. The headache had receded, but she didn’t like hearing that Silence had gone to ground.
Tam shook his head. “Her entire zone was deserted. I’ve spied on them before, but they’re definitely in hiding now.”
“Probably to stay away from the mercs,” Jael guessed.
Dred nodd
ed at him. “But it’s bad for us not to know how many of them have survived the chaos.”
Jael said, “If I know anything about Silence, I’d say most of them. Her people are like cockroaches. They scuttle into the walls and skitter out when it’s dark and you least want to see them.”
“Good analogy.” She turned to Tam. “Did you stay for the fight between the mongrels and the mercs?”
He shook his head. “The mercs were still a ways out after we completed our survey of Munya. I thought you needed the intel as soon as possible.”
“I hate the fact that they were right upstairs, and we didn’t know it.” Dred balled her hand into a fist, but there was no outlet for the frustration. “They have drone cams, armor, rifles, kinetic grenades—”
“I could liberate some of their equipment while I know they’re busy in Munya.”
Dred stopped pacing. “If you can do it without being caught, then move. Take as much as you can carry.”
“I’ll see if Calypso and Martine feel up to some light burglary.”
“Thanks, Tam.”
The spymaster paused. “You might wish to consider letting the men cut loose as you did last night. Open up the still and let them celebrate.”
“Is that a good idea?” Jael asked.
“We have a little breathing room. Mungo should keep Vost busy for a bit.”
Tam’s opinion was enough for Dred. With a nod in parting, she beelined for Cook, who had taken over from Ike in terms of provisions. “Do you feel like throwing a party?”
The chef cocked his head in silent inquiry.
“The mercs have turned their attention to Munya, so we’re safe for now.”
Cook nodded at that. Some Queenslanders lived for moments of drunken forgetfulness, and as long as Dred doled them out regularly, she could keep them in check. If the liquor dried up permanently, however, she might have a riot on her hands.
At Dred’s signal, Jael vaulted up onto a table as Cook sent his assistant to retrieve bottles of rotgut. “Thank the Dread Queen, gentlemen, for tonight she’s hosting a party.”