“Of course. The skin changers from Magmalava. I played against one once—Cydonia Face. He routed me with a straight, the swine. What does that have to do with anything?”
“Megan was a cutis nova, like her mom and pop. It made her volatile as hell during puberty. That’s when the whole chameleon thing starts, you know. And I’m talking crazy volatile, one minute meek as a kitten, vulnerable and sweet, the next a hellcat like you’ve never seen. I still have the teeth marks and the claw marks to prove it. But I was young when they took me in, so I’d gotten to know her before the change. I knew she already had both those sides to her. The cutis nova just cranked them up, polarised them for all to see. If anything, it brought us closer together. After she’d calmed down, she’d feel so bad about her violent outbursts, and I’d tell her it wasn’t her fault, she’d cry in my arms, sometimes fall asleep there. I think those were some of my favourite times, just holding each other on that mangy spare armchair in my room. Completely open about everything. About how we’d always be close and no matter where either of us went, the other would go too. About Mom and Pop, how what they were doing was dangerous and illegal—blockade running could have easily brought other colonies into the civil war—and how they couldn’t keep it up forever and we’d lose them when they were caught, we’d be scragged off to some Neo Christian orphanage, maybe never see each other again. So we’d plan to run away, like all kids do in that kind of life, I guess. Join an interstellar theatre, go prospecting out past 100z, start up our own seashell business on one of the Pacintic moons.
“Years later, when she had full control of cutis nova, she passed for the Vike Academy. First time out. That’s actually a helluva thing. You need extraordinarily quick reflexes to handle multi-fighter combat. And a versatile mind. It also meant that I’d probably lost her for good. Vike training is three years minumum, five if you qualify for advanced officer training; and after that it’s an intense career shipped all over the galaxy.”
“So what did you do?” Lindsay steered them around a wide open fissure in the ground.
“I practiced like hell and took the exam. Mind control meditation, multi-tier brain exercises, fighter game simulators in the arcades, the works: I trained my ass off and got in! Fluked it, my pals back on Fourmyle said, but you don’t fluke the Vike. This dumb plank has some skills, lady. Buried deep down, maybe, but I got ‘em. I don’t need to tell you how shocked Megan was when I showed up to take the oath next to her on swearing-in day. Happy as I’ve ever seen her. A little disappointed, too, maybe, because I think the main reason she applied for the Vike in the first place was to start over, to leave that dead-end lawless life behind her. Suddenly I show up, the embodiment of everything she’s trying to escape, and she’s torn in two again.”
“You loved each other, right?”
“It was pretty lonely for a while. I was nowhere near her class, so I’d be warping my spine around remedial algebra while she’d be hopping from celestial navigation to multi-fighter combat to alien diplomacy. I hardly saw her those first few months. Then one day I clocked her with a bloke, one of her junior instructors. They were kissing in the arboretum. So as you can imagine, after bouncing off the walls in my dorm for a few hours, I figured that was that. All that talk about us always being together, no matter what, was just her cutis nova talking all along; it was bullshit; she’d betrayed me, didn’t even care if I stayed or not. That night I packed my bags and wrote my flunk-out letter. I’d have taken the first shuttle to anywhere and never looked back. But something strange happened.”
He wrapped his arms around her midriff. “Mind if I change position for a bit? It’s getting sore keep leaning back like that.”
“Sure, go ahead.” The idea of him draped all over her in the middle of such a personal recollection, let alone the tingly physical sensation it brought, sent her mind spinning. Her tiredness? Gone. Her capacity, even desire for a happy ending? Behind every rapid heartbeat. And she realised she hadn’t been this close to anyone in a long time. Imagining herself curled up with him on that mangy old armchair, completely open and honest like this, was every girl’s fantasy. Except for the mangy part. Maybe if he shampooed it first. But he’d been far more forthcoming than she’d expected. So much so, it threatened to pull the rug out from under her own deception. She never could resist spilling her guts to someone this honest. It reminded her how much she hated this criminal world of lies. Once, long ago, had she been as naive as young Finnegan?
Probably not.
Bess’s speed had begun to wane while they’d been talking—not hugely, but consistently, the odd kph here and there—yet Lindsay’s rotation of the throttle grip had not eased a single micro-notch. The bike was slowing of its own accord. If it kept this up, she’d have to tell Finnegan. But not just yet, not unless it became serious. His effusive reminiscence and cozy proximity to her were not things she wanted to lose.
“So what happened?” she asked.
“I never got out the gate. There’d been a Sheiker attack on a diplomatic summit on the 100z border. Ambassador Shin Gunto was killed.”
“Holy crap. I remember that. It’s what led to the war.”
“Yep. And they called the lot of us into action. Even us juniors had to divide our time between studies and remote combat patrol. Real vike simulators. Real vike fighters at the other end of the signals. Megan and I were moved into a new section of the academy, to make room for an even fresher wave of freshmen. It was overcrowded, but I enjoyed every minute. No more competition. No more picking apart your weaknesses. It was all about using your assets. You did whatever you did best, to plug in the gaps in what they had, to help the cause. And Megan and I got to see each other every day, hang out after hours, or do physical fitness together, sometimes even work the same fighters. It was kinda like being back at home.
“That lasted for maybe four months. Then they built six new Vike forward command outposts, and decided to ramp up the training curriculum for the most promising freshmen. Which included Megan.”
“But not you?”
“But not me. I’d improved quite a bit, but she was more or less a prodigy. All cutis novas have a prodigious talent for something. Hers was mental agility.” He gave a long, controlled sigh. “So we were due to be separated again at the end of the year. I sulked. She reassured me, said we’d always keep in touch. But the same thing happened all over again: different classes, different dorms, different social circles, and that asshole young NCO instructor started calling on her again. In combat, if you come up against an impasse you just keep your finger pressed on the trigger until there’s no more impasse. But in here—” She guessed he meant his heart, “—you shoot at the impasse and you’re only destroying yourself. The impasse stays an impasse. You can’t win.”
“So what did you do?”
“Nothing. I’d come too far in my training to flunk out, so I put my head down and got on with it. A couple of months later, out of the blue, I was hauled in front of the review board, ordered to testify in a disciplinary hearing. It turned out Megan was pregnant. Her Vike career was finished; they don’t permit trainees to get pregnant, not with such an intensive curriculum, and not with how much it costs to train a recruit. But she testified that she’d only slept with one person while in the Academy. And I knew who that was.”
“The asshole NCO.”
“No. Me.”
“Wait. You’d gotten her pregnant? Your sister?”
“Adopted sister. Not blood related.”
“No, but I bet—with you having the same surname—they weren’t exactly sympathetic with you either.”
“Both expelled, with immediate effect, for conduct unbecoming. I heard the word ‘incest’ muttered a few times among the panelists.”
“Evil bastards.”
“A rule’s a rule. You break it, they break you.” He let go of Lindsay’s waist, resumed his old position.
“So Megan went back to her folks?”
“She went home to have the babies—twin girls,
Lydia and Teresa. Never told Mom and Pop who the father was, though. I reckon Pop would have killed me if he’d found out. After that we drifted around the outer colonies, me, Megan and the girls, picking up freight haulage work wherever we could find it. When that dried up we turned to blockade running, smuggling; most of those items on my resume you mentioned, Megan and I tried for a while. We were happy, I guess, in our own way, but she’d always wanted to escape that life. So to make more money, enough to dig us all out of it, she started signing us up for riskier ops. Not low-level smuggling. Heist getaways. Raids on research installations. Posing as ISPA agents to ambush illegal prospectors and confiscate their hard-earned cash after they’d traded. Things you don’t walk away from without leaving a body or two in your wake, or at least the threat of one.
“She started going alone. Taking on merc partners, the sorts of people we’d never have gone near once, even with Mom and Pop. All for bigger paydays. Bigger and bigger stakes. But she always came back, put the clips she’d earned in a magno-safe we toted around every damn place we stayed. I got to hate that fucking thing. It was like an hour glass, filling with money instead of sand, counting down the time till something bad happened. But she always came back. That prodigious mind of hers could adapt to any task she set it to. Careful, devious, weighing the probablities of risk and gain in any enterprise. We could have left with upwards of a few mill, but she didn’t think that would be enough for us to leave that life behind once and for all. ‘When the safe can’t take any more, then we’re safe,’ she’d say. And she’d go out again. Sometimes I’d go with her. Sometimes she wouldn’t give me the choice; she’d be gone before I woke, if it was a job that required ‘finesse’—that was how she’d put it. Said I was about as diplomatic as an asteroid to the skull. So I’d just have to hold my breath. And anyway she always came back.
“Then one day she didn’t.” He paused, shuffled position, rocking the bike. “I only found out what had happened days later, over the local system podnet: on her way back from boosting a shipment of twenty Vike drone fighters—just like those she’d been training to fly at the academy—a rival party had intercepted her. Rather than start a firefight, they offered Megan’s merc crew an alternative: kill her and they could have an even bigger cut of the profits. So they did. Slit her throat right there on the bridge, then jettisoned her out into space like some discarded bit of salvage that wasn’t even worth its weight in haulage.
“They were all arrested when they reached a nearby port. Probably because they hadn’t stuck to Megan’s plan. And one of the mercs was forced into confessing exactly what had happened, who Megan was, where she lived, every detail of their previous ops. The ISPA police arrived at our apartment while I was picking the girls up from nursery, on a Monday. They seized every clip we’d ever earned, emptied the safe, and put out a warrant for my arrest. So I fled with the girls to another colony, shipped them back to Fourmyle first thing, so they could stay with Mom and Pop. I knew I’d never be able to give them the life Megan wanted for them, not if they grew up with me. No, I had to continue where she’d left off, claw together what I could when I could, however I had to. That was the last time I saw Lydia and Teresa.
“Weeks later I returned in disguise to watch the men who’d killed Megan hang. All eleven of them. ‘For crimes numbering beyond measure,’ the executioner said. No mention of the only crime I cared about.”
“And that’s when you began the career that led you here,” Lindsay observed.
“That’s when I vowed to give Lydia and Teresa what their mom never had.”
“But you must be worth millions now, all the jobs you’ve done since. Tens of millions.”
He scoffed loudly into his mouthpiece; the chilling crunch made her ears whistle. “I’m worth shit, lady. I am shit. The jobs I do, the people I work for, the clips I make: a reeking galactic pile of shit. But at least when it reaches the girls it becomes more than that. Or a chance of something more than that. Megan would have wanted it that way. It has to be that way.”
“So you don’t keep a single clip you earn? You send it all to your Mom and Pop, for Lydia and Teresa?”
“Most of it.”
“And the rest?”
“Goes on Bess, mostly. On her pyro refills.” He slapped the bike’s flank. “I wouldn’t have gotten far without her. She’s the only one I trust now.”
“How about me?” The tiredness talking, going out on a very narrow and precarious limb. Too late to take it back. His openness had had the effect she’d feared—made her desperately want to reciprocate, to come clean herself. Dumb. Very dumb. He might be a wounded, tragic killer in need of a big hug, but he was still a killer. And she was altogether too killable where she sat.
“What about you?”
I’m Lori Malesseur. Lori Malesseur. I suck life and bite off penises. I hired this asshole. I need him to get me across the border. I want what he’s smuggling, nothing more. I’m queen bitch Lori Malesseur. “Huh? Nothing. I’m just glad you told me. You’re nothing like I thought you’d be, Finnegan.”
“Oh I am, lady. I’m exactly what you thought. Don’t let my investment fool you. You hired a son of a bitch, you got one.”
“True.”
He snorted a laugh. “So you know who I am. How’s about we learn a little something about the helpless Miss Malesseur?”
“Sure. But it’ll have to wait.”
“Why?”
“Because Bess has been steadily slowing down.” Her perfect excuse to nip his interrogation in the bud. To demonstrate, she choked the throttle to maximum, relented, choked it again. “Goddamnit, she’s really running slack.”
“Hey, what the fuck are you doing?” He snatched Lindsay back by the shoulder, stood tall to see over her. “You’d better not be hurting her.”
“Hurting her? Finnegan, she’s a mach—”
“Shut it. Stop her, and get off.”
The harshness of the sun didn’t register until she stumbled off the bike and rubbed the back of her neck. Jesus. The skin was burned raw. Her hair had streamed behind her all the while they’d been speeding. Now she had to tie it up inside her headscarf so that it didn’t touch the tender flesh. The tops of her hands, too, were pink and sore. “Well?”
“She’s overheated.”
“Yes, I am.”
“Don’t give me any shit, lady. Unless you can find us another place to hide out, we’re screwed. She needs an hour to cool down and recharge.”
Lindsay was already scanning the desert behind them. No sign of the sand cloud or the glints of glass and metal. But—but their trail ripped a wavery line of dust all the way to the horizon. Sure, it would rise, dissipate, settle, but their pursuers would neither dissipate nor settle; they’d rise into view at any time, and that would be that. Imprisonment, torture, execution for espionage and murder and for making so many burly people look so stupid.
She turned to join Finnegan in looking for somewhere to hide. Tumbleweeds galore, but even they’d forgotten how to tumble. There wasn’t a lick of wind. The desert to the northwest appeared to have teeth of some description—a row of erect stones covering half a mile or more. Conical in shape, if she wasn’t mistaken. Both she and Finnegan pointed at the same time. “Steeler hollows?” she suggested.
“That’s my guess too. And that’s our play.”
“But aren’t they, you know—”
“Poisonous. Yep. Kill a man in seconds.”
“Then we’re looking elsewhere, surely.”
“Be my guest. But you’ll have to look on the way.” He took a swig of water from the container, holding it with both hands due to its weight. Then he tilted it for her; she drank straight from the pour, and splashed her face and the back of her neck. Jesus, it stung like hell. But that was what she needed. It would keep her wide awake for hours more. Finnegan got on the bike, patted the passenger seat for her. “Bess can make it that far, then we’ll have to let her cool.”
“And the steelers?”
“They need to stay cool.”
“Yeah, right. How many rounds have you got in that cannon of yours?”
“Enough.”
“For what?” She knew perfectly well. Best not to dwell on that, then.
“Just hang on, lady.”
The fastest Bess reached on her way to the hives was fifty kph. Her speed over the final hundred yards or so dipped to a little below 5 kph. Overheated wasn’t the word; the poor bike was cooked. Hell, they could run quicker than that. Then Lindsay remembered her limp, the bullet wounds that had re-opened, that had started to leak again back at the cave. She’d felt subsequent twinges, aches, even the odd gouging pain in transit. But she hadn’t had time or the chance to check the wounds properly.
As Finnegan pushed the bike behind the row of large, coarse pocked edifices shaped like upside-down wax funnels, she hopped away, unpeeled the leg of her suit, lifted the bandages, and inspected the holes. The skin around them was black, veiny. The blood bubbled a little. And worst of all, they smelled like the year-old contents of a Magmalava farmer’s fridge.
She swallowed hard, inflaming her dry, sand-coated throat, and collapsed. No hope left to ingest, or even to stand up for. Her leg was infected beyond saving, no question. No goddamn question. She’d seen it before. And out here, without antibiotics, she now had two choices, and only two.
Amputate it...or die.
***
An inkling of what it would feel like to be relieved of Lori Malesseur jived at the back of his mind, trying its best to revert him to that default mode of cocksure self-reliance that had come to define him this past decade. It made him gag. He could have run out on her at any time, dumped her flat; hell, he needn’t have picked her up from the Aguarbor tree in the first place; but here he was, and here she was, and he didn’t regret a thing. Megan would be proud of him, so would Mom and Pop. And despite Malesseur’s reputation for tying up all loose ends with a noose, the repercussions of this misadventure if they made it back—for instance, her father might decide to scapegoat Finnegan to spare his daughter’s politically embarrassing involvement—didn’t matter a jot. Right now, here in this acrid-smelling hollow, she was worth saving. More than that, he had to admit, and God help him, she was his kind of girl.
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