by David Ryker
Mac snorted, his voice ringing in my ear. “This was your damn idea.”
I flexed my hands in my pockets and glanced over at him, huddled under his Ham, though I couldn’t see that it was doing anything to keep the cold off him. I guess Greg was just more attentive like that. I looked up at his looming figure over me, the icicles hanging off his square body. “They’re late.”
“Don’t stress,” Mac sighed, the shiver in his voice apparent. “They don’t know shit.”
I turned to look at him, standing half a dozen meters away in the gloom — far enough so that if they hit us with a missile or grenade, we’d not both be killed by the same blast. And that was even more likely to happen if we were in our rigs. Out of them, we looked more like we were here to make a deal, rather than to fight — which was what we wanted, even if it did mean losing some fingers to frostbite. “But what if they do?”
“Then we’d already be dead,” he muttered. “Now get your head on straight.”
I gritted my teeth to stop them chattering and huddled closer to the stabilizer jet on Greg’s thigh.
I heard a breath in my ear and then Volchec’s voice, slightly strained. “Alright, guys — they’ve just taken Alice. They think there’s some internal damage — on top of the broken jaw. They said Everett did well, but that initial assessment suggests a bleed on the brain, and some possible brain damage.”
I thought my teeth were going to shatter I was clenching them so hard. Everyone else was silent on the line.
“I’m just bringing her back in,” Volchec said, wrestling the Tilt-wing down through the frigid wind. “Hope I haven’t missed the party.”
“No,” I said, my voice catching in my throat. “They’re not even here yet.” I had to stay focused. Alice was in safe hands now. The Federation medevac had come in hours, which was as good as we could have hoped for. They’d have her fixed up in no time — at least that’s what I kept saying to myself. We’d been in two minds whether to take her somewhere ourselves, but if we did, we’d be losing our one chance at cleaning up what was proving to be one huge fucking mess.
Just as I said it, Greg’s voice rang in my ear, dulcet and comfortable despite the temperature being around twenty below. “I detect an incoming craft.”
The dark clouds split and a little transport ship with a bulbous fuselage and two squared off wings that bent down beside the body swung towards the icy ground, jets firing hard to keep it level. I was guessing it wasn’t their actual ride, but something they’d lifted just in case we shot it out of the sky and they needed to make a break for their actual getaway ship.
It sidled into the natural depression we’d chosen, out of some of the worst wind chill, and set itself down on the ground. The headlights under the cockpit window died and the ship lay still, immediately caked in swirling snow.
My hand flexed again inside my pocket, my grip tightening on the handle of the Arcram pistol there. I’d cut the bottom out of the pocket so that my hand fit snugly inside with the barrel poking through the bottom. It didn’t look like I was carrying it, but the tradeoff was the cold air slithering up my leg and numbing my fingers.
I could pull it out, level and fire in less than a second. I knew. I’d timed it. I’d practiced.
My fingers shook, but I couldn’t tell if it was from the cold or not.
“Holding steady at two clicks,” Volchec said quietly in my ear. “Last chance to back out of this, Red.”
I swallowed hard. I couldn’t. We’d be risking everything if we did. “No. We’re doing this,” I growled, mouth obscured by my collar.
The side doors of the transport craft slid open and a thin light bled into the gloom.
Two figures stepped out one after another, rifles hanging loosely at their hips, fingers casually on triggers. It was Kera and her Polgarian muscle. He dwarfed her as they ducked out under the wing and strode towards us.
I locked my jaw and measured them. “Where’s the third?” I asked under my breath.
“Fish?” Mac asked.
Fish hissed from the back of his throat. “I’ve… Got... It.”
Mac did a little humph of approval but remained quiet otherwise.
A shiver ran through me and buckled my shoulders for a second. I took a breath and unzipped my collar to show my mouth. “You’re late!” I called in the storm, the words dying in the frozen air.
Kera laughed throatily. “We ‘ad to make sure ya weren’t set t’ ambush us, y’know, wit’chu being Federation and al.”
I grunted. “Let’s get on with this, it’s fucking freezing out here.”
“Ah chile, you don’t like dis weather?” She laughed again.
“What assurances do we have that you’re not going to roll on us the second we hand over your man?” I measured my steps in the snow, staying close enough to Greg that if things went sour I’d still be able to duck behind his leg.
Her face fell from a smirk into a scowl. “If ya held up your end o’ da deal, den you have my word.”
“And how much is that worth?”
“It worth a lot,” she snarled, offended by the notion.
I restrained a bitter smirk. Honor among thieves. What a fucked up notion.
“We don’t know ya names, and we never coming back to Telmareen — and we definitely not ever tellin’ nobody we ever here — or else we be puttin’ ourselves in dem Federation crosshairs, ya know?” Her voice was even — no cockiness. I believed her. I don’t think anyone ever wanted to come back to Telmareen. I was sure as hell going to be glad to leave it in our hyperwake.
I took a slow breath, as though I was deciding, and then nodded minutely. “Fine. Let’s do this and get the fuck out of here.”
Mac swallowed. “Fish. Sitrep?”
“One… Minute.”
“We don’t have a minute,” he muttered through set teeth.
I narrowed my eyes. I needed to stall. I turned my head slowly and lifted my hand, making a circular motion in the air. “Bring him in,” I called into the night before looking back at Kera. “So, where’s your third man — the droid.”
She shrugged nonchalantly. “Der only two of us.”
I smiled at her. “He’s out there, right, rifle trained on us? Maybe something bigger?”
She returned it, narrow pointed teeth glinting in the flood lights shining on Greg’s shoulders. “What make you say dat?”
I raised my shoulders and looked around. “Guess I can feel it.”
She ran a blue tongue along her upper lip and tightened her grip on the rifle.
I held my hands up, leaving the pistol loose in my pocket, and stepped back into Greg’s jet wash, feeling the warmth on the back of my neck. I pushed my hands back in and closed my right around the pistol grip as gently as I could.
I could see them starting to get uneasy, casting glances around. They knew there’d been four of us — maybe more, and we were just two as well.
“So where is he?” she asked, voice hardening. The cold was making everyone even more irritable.
“He’s close,” I said reassuringly.
“Volchec?” Mac whispered.
“Thirty seconds,” she replied.
“Fish?” he asked.
There was silence on the line for a second or two and then Fish’s voice rang in my head, a little breathless. “Clear,” he said, and I knew the droid had been taken care off.
I softened slightly. One down.
The rumble of the Tilt-wing’s engines cut through the moan of the snowy wind and then it burst through the cloud bank and sank low to the ground behind us, swinging its lumbering ass around to show us the rear doors. Volchec put it down like a pro and kept the engines idling. I narrowed my eyes a little and looked into the sky like something had piqued my interest.
Kera and the Polgarian both puffed themselves up and pulled their rifles halfway up their stomachs. Everyone was edge. I was trying to play it down, but my heart was hammering in my chest.
The door whined behind me
. This was it.
The rear ramp began to lower and I turned just enough to catch what was waiting there out of the corner of my eye. Volchec was standing, half hidden behind a figure in a heavy coat with a bag over their head, hands tied behind their back.
It was only a moment, but that’s all we needed. Kera and the Polgarian’s eyes moved in, honed on the figure. Whether it even looked like their man, it didn’t matter. The lapse in attention was all we needed.
Mac said, “now,” but it didn’t matter, I was already drawing.
A shot rang out in the darkness and the Polgarian’s shoulder exploded in a plume of dark blood. He howled and the Kera dived left, trying to pull her rifle up. Mac fired, shooting from the hip, the bullet sailing over Kira’s ribs. She pinned the trigger and a stream of fire punched the ground in front of me and swept diagonally upwards, raking across Greg’s hull before hammering the rear end of the Tilt-wing. Greg leaped into the space between them to try to stop the fire and Volchec and the head-bagged Everett scattered and dropped to the ground as sparks danced in the hold, bullets ricocheting around.
I sank low under the stream, and fired twice, my pistol only half raised. The first hit the ground halfway between Kera and me, spitting permafrost into the air. The second winged her outer thigh.
She wailed and I scrambled sideways out of the way of more fire, shooting wildly under my elbow at her. The rear-ramp hummed closed behind us and Greg made forwards. Mac was already charging, chasing the Polgarian down with gunfire as he clawed his way towards the transport. Kera twisted and tried to pump me full of bullets, but she was on her side and trying to make for cover and the rounds buzzed into the air over my head. Fish’s shots from the rifle he’d lifted from the droid echoed all around, sailing wide in the wind, kicking fountains of ice into the air like miniature geysers.
The Polgarian’s yells dissipated as he fell still, dotted with black holes and Mac slowed, turning towards Kera. But she wasn’t firing back anymore. She was on her side, rifle loose in the churned earth, breathing hard. Breath-mist curled into the air in short sharp puffs as blood started to pool under her. One of my bullets had caught her in the gut.
I closed the gap in a few seconds, panting, pistol trained on her chest, and kicked the rifle well out of reach. I stood over her, nostrils flared, steam peeling off my head.
She stared up at me, eyes glassy, little teeth bloodied between her thin lips. She laughed abjectly, the bubbling of blood in her lungs apparent in her tone. The bullet must have punctured her diaphragm and entered her chest cavity. It was filling with blood, crushing her lungs. I tried not to look at the wound, pumping blood onto the pale ground.
“Our man?” she squeezed out. “You kill ‘im, too?”
I shook my head. “No.”
“He dead, then?” Her voice was strained.
“I don’t know. He was gone when we got to the tower. His room was empty.” The words sounded distant, diminished at the end of a gun barrel, like they belonged to someone else.
She swallowed, wincing as she did. “You save your geerl, though…”
I didn’t know if it was a question or a statement, so I said nothing. She smiled weakly again, and then mumbled something in a language I couldn’t understand.
Mac appeared at my shoulder and laid a hand on it, squeezing. “We need to go,” he said in my ear.
Fish’s footsteps rang out in my peripheral as he jogged down off the surrounding rise, long-gun in hand.
I breathed slowly, keeping the barrel on Kera. If I left, she’d bleed out and die anyway, and that’s what we were here for. Mac had said it earlier — dead people don’t talk. It wasn’t an option then, but it was the only play we had now. We had to tie up the loose ends, or risk our own skins. Them or us. That’s what I told myself. Them or us.
“Red,” Mac said, voice harder. “Come on.”
Was I about to execute someone? Did it even matter — I’d already done it, right? If she bled out from my shot, I was killing her anyway. So why was it so damn hard to pull the trigger now?
“Red.” This time it was Volchec. “Let’s go.”
My hand was shaking, Kera’s cold eyes fixed on mine, daring me to pull the trigger, pleading even. She was in pain.
Mac drew a hard breath and squeezed harder. The rear door of the Tilt-wing started lowering behind me again. “This was your idea, Red. You wanted this, remember?”
I wanted to tell him to shut the fuck up, but I knew he was right.
“Do it, Red. We need to get out of here. You can’t just leave her like—”
I pulled the trigger, my eyes snapping closed as I did. When I opened them, she was dead, a little black hole the size of a thumbnail suddenly drawn on the side of her nose. I knew it went all the way through.
Her eyes stared peacefully into the sky and stayed that way as we went back to the ship. They watched as we lifted off and circled in the freezing air and disappeared through the clouds.
In seconds, they froze solid. And then the ice swallowed them all of them up, preserving them forever, just like we left them — Kera, the Polgarian, the droid, somewhere out on the rise, and every scrap of innocence I’d managed to hold onto up until that very moment.
1
Thirteen Months After the Events on Telmareen…
Federation Space Station / Designation: Athena
I stared down at my sweating, calloused palms and curled my shaking fingers into them, breathing out slowly to try and calm my nerves. Too bad it didn’t fucking work.
“Will Airman First Class James Alfred Maddox please take the stand,” Senior Justice Anik said, his voice resonating around the huge, round room.
I swallowed and pushed off the long curved bench, just one of a hundred set on rising steps around the room, more an amphitheater than anything else.
I let myself down the central aisle and stepped up onto the podium in front of the judges. There were five of them, sitting in a row. Anik was in the middle, his embroidered blue sash hanging over his gray military dress denoting his position as the senior justice. On either side of him, two similarly dressed — albeit adorned with less regalia — justices sat, all glowering at me.
I pulled my shoulders straight and clasped my hands behind my back. The podium was circled with a glass lectern inscribed with the Federation’s mantra — One Federation, All People. I stared at it for a second before Anik cleared his throat and peered down over his hooked nose at the file in front of him.
He sucked his gums, the mic dot on his throat causing the noise to echo around the cavernous room. I wanted to turn around, to look at the guys and assure them that I had this down, but I couldn’t. It wasn’t proper. I could feel them staring at me… Volchec, Everett, Mac, even Fish.
Anik pushed the file closed and rested his half-clenched fist on it, propping himself up on his elbow. He looked tired. We all were. This had been going on far too long, and now we were about to put it to rest, one way or another.
“Airman Maddox,” he started, voice droning, “we are here to finally close matters on the investigation pertaining to the events that happened on Telmareen, some thirteen months ago. We are now at the final probationary review, following a year-long investigation. Do you understand the reason for you being here today?” He arched an ancient eyebrow.
I nodded. “Yes.” My voice sounded small and tinny in my head.
He returned it. “Good. Well,” he sighed, scratching the side of his face, “our investigation has been less than… definitive. Your sworn testimony states that while on Telmareen, you and your group—” The word was alien on his tongue — he didn’t know what to call us, and neither did we, really. He shrugged and continued “—were operating under the guise of mercenaries in conjunction with the investigation ongoing at the time, on Telmareen, in order to try to gain access to one, alias, Katherine Fox — known war criminal and wanted fugitive from the Federation. Is that correct?”
“Yes.” I answered more firmly now.
/> “And I’m also to believe that had you not attacked a Federation Iskcara Transport, inside a Federation zoned colony, you would have been exposed as Federation operatives. Is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“And you accept the responsibility for the deaths of the two Telmareen Guard Pilots on that first day — both of whom died as a result of your actions?” He said the words without any emotion, but they still cut deeply.
I lowered my chin. “Yes.”
He nodded and ran his tongue over the front of his yellowed teeth. “And you maintain that you believed, as a result of the evidence supplied to you at the time, that a significant proportion of the Telmareen Guard were operating under the command of Katherine Fox, and that you acted in self defense—”
“And the defense of my comrade, Alice Kep—”
Both eyebrows raised as I cut in and I curtailed my words, resuming my stoic stance instead. He sighed and then continued. “And that had you not fired upon them, you yourself would have perished. Is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“And your report states that you committed this crime against the Federation using information supplied by a trio of confidential informants, who were known to you after landing on Telmareen as a result of contact with one…” He trailed off, lifting the cover of the file. “Rase Barva.”
“Yes.”
“And that you did so in an attempt to lure Katherine Fox out of hiding.”
“Yes.”
“But that in the process, Airman Kepler was captured.”
“Yes.”
“And tortured?”
“Yes.”
“As a result of your actions?” His eyes rested on me and then swept the bench behind me — the one Volchec, Everett, Mac, and Fish were sitting on.
I bit my lip and took a breath. “Yes.”
“Mmm.” The noise vibrated through his lips and rang around the room. “And following that, your confidential informants provided further evidence that Katherine Fox was getting ready to leave Telmareen, believing her operation there to incite an uprising was compromised, a conclusion she drew following the interrogation carried out on Airman Kepler?”