Mercury's Bane: Book One of the Earth Dawning Series

by Nick Webb

  He froze. “What the hell does that mean?”

  “It means ... we know who it’s gotta be, right?” Rychenkov held up his palms, a gesture of peace. “Pike, I know you don’t want to hear it. He says you’ve been traveling with her, you know her, right? But she was made by them. He sent over a scan of what she is.” His fingers tapped at the screen.

  Pike looked away, his heart pounding.

  “Look at it. Look at it. And what she did in the cargo bay? I mean, our former cargo bay? She left quite a mess down there. And Pike,” Rychenkov’s voice was harsh, his anger barely contained. “No human could ever do something like that. Pike, you were the one who hauled me into this saying I had to accept the truth, right? Now it’s your turn.”

  Pike forced himself to turn his head, and flinched.

  “She’s not human. She can’t be human. She might look human, but whatever they did to her … we just can’t risk having her around. I mean, what if … we’re next?”

  The scan must have been taken at dinner. Nhean was seated, hands forward and holding a fork and knife. He remembered the spread of food Nhean had put out, and felt anger churn through him. Light conversation, toasts ... and the other man scanning them the whole time.

  He studied the scans. Pike knew his own frame in a moment, the tallest of the three. He could see the traces of his bones and a few screws and plates from the time his leg had gotten crushed in a cargo vise. He shuddered involuntarily at the memory.

  The girl ... the girl was almost all metal. It lined her bones. It even extended partially into the ligaments and tendons and muscles. It lay along her bones in a tracery that was half grotesque, half beautiful.

  Everything they built was beautiful. Pike’s hands clenched.

  “She’s not—” he managed.

  “She’s not what?” To his surprise, Rychenkov sat back, watching him.

  “Does it matter? You’re going to go kill her, right? Best way to turn off the beacon?”

  “I want to know why you care. You care when you kill people, I know that. But why do you care about her, specifically?”

  Pike dropped back into the copilot’s chair. His legs were shaking. He let out his breath in a sigh and shook his head. It kept moving on its own: no, no, no. As if he could make it be just by saying the word.

  “She wants to be more than she was made to be. She—we left Nhean’s place because I didn’t trust him with her, and she wanted to do the mission he’d talked about, anyway. I don’t know what she saw on that lab, but I know I’d be bitter as hell if it was me. I’d never go back, I’d just run. She keeps going back. She wants to help us and she doesn’t know any of us. She wasn’t raised with humans, she just wants to help. She ... is human. At least, I thought maybe she’d have the chance to be one when this was all over.” He met Rychenkov’s eyes. “I wanted her to make it.”

  Rychenkov’s shoulders slumped. He let out his breath slowly.

  “You want me to leave you here? I’ll do it quick.” He’d taken out a handheld directional EM scanner, showing a spike of activity from the direction of the cargo bay.

  “No. I’ll come with you.”

  “You’re gonna be seeing this in your head for years, buddy.”

  “I know.” Pike lifted his shoulders. “But I have to see. I won’t fight you.”

  “Right.” Rychenkov stood. “Come on.”

  They both stared at the tracker as they walked. It blipped, faster and faster, as they came around the corner to where the crew lay sprawled and half-conscious.

  She was in the corner, huddled alone and—Pike saw now—entirely defenseless. She’d chosen a tiny space, like any animal.

  She wasn’t a machine. After everything, she wasn’t a machine.

  He was moving toward her, as in a dream, when Rychenkov stopped abruptly.

  “Huh.” The man’s voice was entirely baffled. “Well, I’ll be damned.”

  Don’t draw this out. Pike closed his eyes in pain. “What?” He didn’t look around.

  “You should see this.” Rychenkov’s face was a puzzle. He held the tracker in his hand and looked up as Pike came to stand beside him.

  The bar from the tracker pointed nearby, but not to the girl.

  “This is why you don’t shoot first, I guess.” Rychenkov glanced over. “Fancy that, Pike. Wasn’t your girl.”

  The bar pointed unmistakably at Charlie.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Halfway between Earth and Venus

  Freighter Agamemnon

  The sound of the slap echoed through the cargo hold. Charlie jerked awake with a gasp. His cuffed hands caught on the chair and his face came up, white with shock.

  Rychenkov examined his palm disappointedly, as if he could do better.

  “Talk, you son of a bitch.”

  “What?” Charlie sank back against the chair. “I’m still ... I don’t know—”

  Pike held up the locator beacon. Charlie’s pen. His “good luck charm.” Now turned off, it was slim and elegant, a metal rod with a faint curve to it that suggested the stem of a plant, like the graceful line of an aspen tree. Pike’s mouth twisted as he looked at it.

  Charlie swallowed.

  “Here’s what I don’t get.” Pike crouched down next to him. “By the way, before we start, though ... you might be thinking I’m a straight-talking Earther, not all that good with lies, right?” He saw the flash of contempt in Charlie’s eyes. “Yeah, you’d be right. Didn’t see through you when I should’ve. Unfortunately for you, there’s a few people here who are better at that shit than me.”

  “Who?” Charlie twisted and craned.

  In the shadows behind him, two figures shifted silently. Howie and Gabriela. Pike saw the gleam of a knife.

  “Not important. Just something to think about.” Pike held up the locator beacon again. “So back to what I don’t get—because I’m not all that good with the plots and the lies, you see—why’d you come with me? You didn’t know what she was.”

  Charlie stared at him for a long moment.

  The blow, when it came, sent the chair over sideways and Charlie gave a yell as the its side crushed down on his arm. He arched with pain. Blood was running from the corner of his mouth.

  Rychenkov looked more pleased with that hit. He and Pike both tilted their heads to look at Charlie.

  “It was the best bet.” Charlie spat blood and glared up at Pike. “You smart enough to understand that? I wasn’t going to get anything from that admiral if I stayed around. She keeps her mouth closed—so do all her officers. Wasn’t going to get anything from the rich bastard, either, and his servant’s a useless ass-wit.”

  “So you came with me, because....”

  Charlie gave him a look that said he should know, but flinched when Rychenkov raised his hand again.

  “The more time we spent together, the more you’d trust me.” His voice was desperate. “That was it, that was all. I thought when we got back, you’d find out what their plan was and where the Dawning was and then I could get you to tell me.”

  “That was what this was? You wanted to know—” Pike broke off. He could see it all in his head again: Charlie grabbing at him to demand if she was the Dawning; Charlie suggesting, over and over, that they should give her back; Charlie freaking out as the Telestine ship had approached. “He wants her back,” Pike said slowly. “He’s afraid someone in the Telestine military will figure it out, and he needs her back to take them down. That’s it, isn’t it?”

  Charlie hunched his shoulders and twisted, trying to take the pressure off his arm. “Yeah,” he finally said, his voice hoarse with pain.

  “And you didn’t know what she was. Must’ve been a shock. And then you realized you could turn her in. You turned on the beacon, waited for us to give in and stop running....” Pike looked around himself at the others. “And then what?” He looked back at Charlie.

  “What d’you mean?” But Charlie knew. He had gone still.

  Rychenkov hauled the ch
air up without a word. The knife appeared silently under Charlie’s nose.

  “You can cut a man a lot,” Rychenkov said gravely, “before he dies.”

  Charlie glared ice at him. “Coward. Cock-sucking cow—”

  “Wrong.” Rychenkov twisted his hand.

  Charlie screamed. Blood was running from under his eye.

  “Next time I take the eye,” Rychenkov said. “You don’t need eyes to talk. You don’t need anything but ears and a mouth. You remember that.”

  Pike’s hands clenched. “Charlie.” He tried to keep his voice level. “Talk.”

  “You’re not this cold.” Charlie’s voice was desperate. “You wouldn’t—”

  “Yeah, maybe I wouldn’t. I don’t like this. So maybe you talk, and I persuade him not to kill you.”

  Charlie looked between them.

  “Maybe if you talk,” Pike said quietly, “he’ll like your reason. We know you did it. You admitted you did it. We just want to know why, huh?”

  Charlie’s eye squinted in pain. “Fine.” He hung his head. “But you should know.”

  “Revenge,” Pike said promptly. “The lab crashed. We killed your daughter and your wife. That’s it, right?”

  Charlie began to laugh. His head dropped back. The blood left a jagged trace across one cheek before it dripped onto his shirt, then onto the floor.

  “It was them. It was always them. But you didn’t kill ‘em.” He turned his head, his face warped with hatred. “You would have. You would have left them to die when the labs went down. Just good luck they weren’t there.”

  “So they really weren’t there?” Pike shook his head. None of it made sense.

  “Let me guess.” Nhean spoke at last from the shadows behind Charlie’s chair. Only the faint tremble in his movements betrayed the drugs coursing though his veins; otherwise, he was as elegant as always. “You received word from an anonymous source that your daughter and your wife might still be alive. It didn’t specify them, of course—just that certain missing persons might be found in the labs. You didn’t know who got you that information. It didn’t come through on the normal Rebellion channels, it was just a whisper passed between the communities. Everyone had lost someone, of course.”

  Charlie had gone still. He didn’t look behind him.

  “You had a plan.” Nhean leaned close to whisper in Charlie’s ear. “You talked about it before you joined the Rebellion. You were going to use them. You hated the Telestines for what they’d done, so no one was going to expect it. You’d infiltrate the cell, kill a few Telestines, and then someday you’d get a shot. You’d be able to find your families again.”

  Charlie was shaking. His face was pale.

  “You thought it was all there. That they were on the lab. And then....” Nhean stood. His face was a mask. “Then, when you went into the labs, there was nothing but a comm unit. The Telestine on the other end gave you a choice—he could find your family for you, but you would go back to the Rebellion as his agent. You would betray them when and where he chose.”

  “Yes. That was—yes.” The words were quick.

  Too quick. Pike frowned, confused.

  But Nhean knew. “The others didn’t want to do it, did they?”

  Charlie’s face went still. His shoulders were hunched.

  “There were two others who went with you. Oh, yes, I know about that.” Nhean’s head tilted. “I saw it all. I wondered why it was that I saw two of them die and the other not. Of course, I was rather more occupied with Pike at the time. And I admit, it all rather fell out of my head after that. An oversight. I should have known when you showed up.”

  “He said he’d give them up,” Charlie whispered. “You don’t understand. He was doing experiments on them but he said he’d give them back to me.”

  “He was never doing experiments on them.” Nhean’s voice was cold as deep winter. “They were dead minutes after they were taken, you poor fool.”

  “No!” Charlie twisted in his chair. “Then why—”

  “For this!” Nhean yelled the words at last. “For this. To make you betray us! He didn’t know who, he didn’t know when. He just knew that if he took enough, eventually one of the ones left behind would join the Rebellion—and there, they’d be ready to be turned into his agent. He knew. He’s been planning this for years.”

  Charlie had slumped in the chair. His chest was shaking.

  “Years.” Nhean’s voice finally calmed from the frightful and uncharacteristic rage. “Years, you poor, poor fool. He’s been planning to use you for years.” Nhean finally turned away.

  No one spoke. Even Rychenkov had fallen away in the face of Nhean’s rage—and Charlie’s grief. The man was sobbing, the most broken sound Pike had ever heard. It echoed in the cargo bay as the others looked around, uncomfortable, but still angry.

  The sound of the gun cocking startled all of them. Even Charlie jerked up, out of instinct alone.

  “You … were … not,” the girl said, shaking with rage, “the only person … who lost someone.”

  The gun went off with a hollow crack-boom that raced around the cargo bay. The chair tipped with the force of the shot, and blood streamed away from Charlie’s head onto the scratched and dented floor.

  Chapter Fifty

  Mercury, outside New Seattle City

  Mining Rover Fifty-Seven

  Jeremiah Kim looked up to the sky and saw death approach, swiftly and silently.

  Jeremiah was a practical sort of man. Work hard, keep your head down. Survive. You got whatever work you could, and you did it well, and hopefully your employer kept up their end of the bargain and paid you.

  Did he want to be a miner? No. He’d heard mining was hot, sweaty work even on Earth, before the fuggers, but those mines had never come close to what it was like on Mercury.

  Mercury, where the mines were automated, they said.

  Automated. Yeah, right.

  They had some vehicles, sure, little rigs you could climb into that kept you cool as you oversaw the array of bots climbing down into the depths and coming back up with cages of ore to dump onto the belts.

  Problem was, those bots broke down pretty regularly. Something about it being four hundred and thirty degrees celsius on the surface in direct sunlight, and only hotter as you got down toward the core. That’s why the rolling cities tended to stay just on the terminator between eternal night and day, where the weather was a balmy seventy degrees celsius. But sometimes you get left behind, the sun rises higher, and the parched landscape bakes to a dull, glowing red. That’s when you hightail it back to the terminator. Keep the sun less than ten degrees above the horizon, and you’ll live—that’s what they’d told him.

  They never told him what to do when a Telestine fleet appeared in the sky.

  He’d seen Telestine ships show up before, sure, but always singly or in pairs. Never twenty or thirty at a time.

  Jeremiah leaned back in the seat of his rig and stared up at the activity swarming above. Ain’t nothing for it, he thought. Nothing for me to do. Let the city admins figure it out—he’d ask them what was up when he returned—assuming there was a city still there when he returned.

  Chasm Five had an ore vein that ran deeper than any of the others, and every twenty four months when their long rolling day started over, he had to descend farther into the depths of Five. This was his third time here. The rig always seemed to climb slowly at the end of the shift, too, like it was tired; sometimes it wavered and paused, and he felt an uncharacteristic surge of fear that it would break down and he’d be stuck down here. Nineteen minutes, that’s how long he’d have before the suit gave out.

  Something serious must be going down, because all of the comm lines were lighting up. He propped his feet on the desk and closed his eyes, waiting for his mining bots to return. Ain’t nothing for it, he repeated to himself. They’d call him if they needed anything, and he was far too old to fall for the excitement of everything going to hell.

  You
could only live in this world for so long before that novelty wore off. Hell, you’d think the mines would break anyone of the idea of excitement.

  Ten minutes later, he drove the rig out of Chasm Five and when the scene fully unfolded to his view, he saw what everyone was on the comms about.

  He’d known about the new Exile Fleet, known about the shipyards. Worst kept secret on Mercury. Then again, there weren’t many people on Mercury, and most of them were like Jeremiah—they didn’t care about anything unless it was about to hurt them. He’d never decided how he felt about the Rebellion, in truth. He knew he didn’t buy the passionate declarations their pilots made in the pubs about freedom and dignity and honor.

  But he also didn’t care too much for the Secretary General’s speeches about laying low. He wasn’t the sort to slink around like he was apologizing for being born.

  Yet, he had to admit, it was sure something to see that fleet lifting off. You forgot how big a spaceship could be. Hell, some of these even looked like stations, almost as big as the rolling city themselves. He held his hand up to shield his eyes from the glare as they climbed into the atmosphere, fighters swirling around them in elegant formations. There was something poetic about it. Something that almost made him want to join up so he could be part of this sort of thing.

  It was probably too late for that, though. What with the Telestine ships blocking out half the sky.

  Jeremiah wasn’t a man who whistled a lot, or swore a lot, or—really—said much at all, ever. He didn’t even like to talk to himself in his head. Right now, however, he had a pretty strong internal monologue, and it was composed almost entirely of awestruck swearing.

  And then the first Telestine ship fired, and his mind discovered one instinct that never left the human race: survival. His rig was winding slowly around the tracks that led to the garage complex, and he would be helpless as he slid under the bulk of the battle that was clearly about to start. He watched a human frigate take a penetrating shot to its side and spin out of formation above and ahead of him. It careened and tumbled back toward the surface, righting herself only just before hitting the ground in a blaze of engines that liquefied the tracks ahead.