Snowburn

by Frost, E J

  “What’s he got?”

  “I told you, he doesn’t talk about his condition. I’ve heard it’s genetic. He’s G2, so maybe it’s L.T.R.E. I don’t know. I’m not a medtech.”

  L.T.R.E. Long-term radiation effects. Common on planets settled in the last century, when dirty reactors powered the terraforming plants. The first generation after settlement died young from exotic cancers. The second generation died young from chromosomal aberrations. The third generation’s got a mutation or two, but they’re mostly clean. Kez is fourth generation at least. If Tyng’s second gen, he’s much older than I guessed, and his disease could easily be something I’ve never heard of. There’s not much point in treating L.T.R.E. in G2s, or even studying the various syndromes. Like G1s, G2s are going to die of something, sooner rather than later. That Tyng has lived this long says something for his constitution, and his financial resources.

  “How long’s he been sick?”

  “Since I’ve known him.” She shrugs. “But he’s worse recently.”

  If Tyng recruited her straight out of the Academy and she’s a few years older than Kez, that’s a decade at least. Long time to suffer from L.T.R.E. I pop the last cube of yokan, crumple the packet so it dissolves in a puff of moisture, and tear open the next one. “How recently?”

  “A few weeks. Maybe a month. His son died, I’m sure you heard. That will take a toll on any man.”

  Sokun Tyng died doing something mysterious in the tunnels of Kuus. Where Kez and I recovered a crate full of adrenal glands that went to Tyng’s lieutenant. “Yeah, but was he worse before or after his boy was killed?”

  “Who says Sokun was killed?” she asks archly.

  “Sounded like I said it. Answer the question.”

  “Before.” She picks the nail of her pinkie finger with my knife. “I don’t think I want to play this game anymore, Manny. It’s boring.”

  ‘Cause she’s given away more than she wants to. “We’re done when I say we’re done.”

  She flicks the knife at me. Aiming for the padding between my knees. I gauge her throw. Just before the blade sinks into the cushion, I pluck it out of the air. Roll it over my fingers until the tip is pointed at her. “Wanna try that again?”

  “I have blades of my own.”

  “Are you any better with ‘em?”

  “Should we find out?”

  I nod. “In a minute. One last question.”

  “In the public toilet at the dock, while I was waiting for you and Kez.”

  She has a sense of humor. Drier and edgier than Kez’s, but it’s there. She could even be likable, if she wasn’t such a bitch. “I’m not interested in where you took your last dump. I want to know if Kez is right. Why’d Tyng send you after Kimpler?”

  “Does there need to be a reason?” She smiles, and that smile is pure psychopath. Something in me responds to that smile. But it’s a left-over piece. From before Marin. Before Kez. That left-over piece is dying, and the rest of me’s turned off. “He gave me instructions. There doesn’t have to be a why.”

  “Yeah, but is there?”

  “Maybe. Kison takes loyalty very seriously. If Stou betrayed him in some way, even a small way, that would be enough. I’ve heard—” She lifts her shoulder. “It doesn’t really matter what I’ve heard. Kison wants him dead, so I’ll make him dead. The reasons don’t matter.”

  “Maybe not to you.” I finish the last of the yokan. Tuck the shiv back into my wrist sheath. “Bet they do to him. What’ve you heard?”

  “I heard that Stou double-crossed the Kuus Pack. I don’t know how, and I don’t care. That’s all I’ve heard.” Erin waves her hand languidly. The gesture looks strange on her. Affected. It’s not something Kez would do. It’s something Erin’s picked up from someone else. Someone she admires. Tyng would be my guess.

  I rise slowly, keeping an eye on her in case she tries a parting shot. She fidgets again. Really doesn’t like being watched.

  And something hits me. Something I wouldn’t have understood without knowing Kez. Erin has never felt safe. Not ever. Kez doesn’t bat an eye when I watch her. If anything, she grows more relaxed. Because she feels safe. Erin’s never known any kind of safety, and her defenses are cranked up so high that she goes on hyper-alert when she’s even in the presence of another predator.

  I almost pity her for a moment.

  The vicious smile she gives me as I move towards the door kills that sensation before it has time to take root. “I’ve enjoyed our little chat, Manny.”

  I chuckle. “No, you haven’t. Neither have I. But we both got somethin’ out of it. Enjoy my ship.”

  “Enjoy my sister. While you can.”

  “Yeah.” I pause for a moment, lean against the metal doorframe. “I wouldn’t bet on Tyng, if I were you. Take my ship and leave Kuseros in your wake. When I bring Tyng down, his empire’s gonna collapse. Lotta people’ll be lookin’ for payback. I wouldn’t be around then, if I were you.”

  The vicious smile dies and she stares hard at me. “Are you testing me? I’ll tell Tyng the first opportunity I get.”

  “Ain’t a test.” She lives in a weird, fucked-up little world if she thinks Tyng sent me to test her. “I’m tellin’ you ’cause you started off as Kez’s sister. She hates what you’ve become, but it wouldn’t bother her if she didn’t still care. You dyin’ in the middle of all this will just fuck her up.”

  “So it’s really all about Kez.” She shifts, not fidgeting this time, but turning her body away from me. Rejecting what I’ve said, and the motives behind it.

  “You ever think it wasn’t? I can walk away any time. Only thing keepin’ me here is Kez.”

  “She’s not yours,” Erin says, and there’s a lot of bitterness in those few words. The bitterness of someone who has never been everything to anyone. I recognize that bitterness because I’ve felt it, too. “She never has been. She’s his.”

  “We’ll see. Not long to Golden Sands now. Buckle up.” I nod at the flight webbing, which she’s unwisely removed and left slack in the cradle. If Kez decides to practice her inversions, it won’t just be Erin’s lunch that ends up on the ceiling.

  Kez twists in her chair as I stroll back onto the flight deck. Her eyes are so wide, I can see the whites all the way around the rim of blue. “You have a plan, right?”

  I lift an eyebrow at her. “Don’t I always?”

  “For how to get your ship back – you have a plan? You’re not really going to give it to her!”

  I squat beside her chair. Take out the packets of yokan, open one and offer her a cube. Her jaw firms and her mouth compresses into a narrow pink line. Stubborn kitten. “Say ahh.”

  “Ahh-fuck! You’re not giving her your ship!”

  I turn the cube around in my fingers and regard it seriously. “I don’t think she’s gonna eat you,” I tell it, before popping the cube in my mouth and chewing contentedly.

  Kez looks like she’s about to spit fire.

  I hold up my hand. “First, don’t think I missed the fact you were eavesdroppin’.” Her expression grows ever more mutinous. If she really was a kitten, all of her fur would be standing on end by now and the claws would be out. “Second, I brought you yokan so you could eat while I talked. But if you’re gonna mouth off at me, I’ll eat it all myself.”

  She opens her mouth. I place a cube of yokan on that pink kitten tongue, without letting my fingers stray too near her teeth. She might decide to snap. I love how fierce she gets when she’s pissed. “Better,” I tell her, when my hand escapes injury. “I don’t give a fuck about the ship. Plenty other ships to be had. Might even buy one together, you an’ me.”

  That has the intended effect. The anger drains out of her like I’ve opened a stopcock. Everything softens. Her pupils dilate. She glances at the front viewer again instead of keeping her eyes locked on me. When she looks at me again, I’m holding another cube of yokan and she accepts it readily.

  “It was worth it,” I tell her. And it was. Kez
wants me to find a way out of this without killing Tyng. I might have to do that, despite my preference for ending it bloodily. Erin’s given me a couple of pieces to move on Tyng’s chessboard. A few more, and I might be able to check-mate the old bastard. “Whatever Tyng’s got, he doesn’t have very long. That alone’s worth the ship.” I offer her another piece of yokan. She leans toward me to take it. Lingers close enough for me to smell the sweet soap scent of her hair. I stroke her cheek with my hand. Let my fingertips trail over the soft skin of her neck. She leans into my touch. “Kimpler’s gettin’ his ticket punched ‘cause he had some part in Tyng Junior’s death. Junior died in Kuus, playin’ with the rats. Your sister says Kimpler double-crossed the rats somehow, and I’m bettin’ it was over a box of glands. Either the one we got outta there, or a previous shipment. Put that together with Tyng’s illness, and we’ve got ourselves the beginnings of a theory.”

  “Tyng needs the glands for himself? What does he have?”

  I shrug. “No idea.” And I don’t give a shit. What I care about is that, finally, I’ve got some leverage. “He needs them. Doesn’t matter what for. We got them for him. So if he needs more, he might be willing to bargain.”

  She shakes her head against my hand. “That’s not worth your ship.”

  I feed her the last cube of yokan. Straighten and pop my knees. Kiss her fuzzy head before sinking into my chair. “No? Should I go back in there and tell her the deal’s off?”

  Kez grumbles and fusses with the flight controls. “Why? Do you want another chance to check out her boobs?”

  I chuckle to myself. Jealous kitten. “You saw that, huh? Notice anything else?”

  Kez shrugs one shoulder. “I noticed they’re not real.”

  “Yeah, I noticed that, too.” I spend a moment checking her course. Let it sink in that I wasn’t impressed by her sister’s cleavage. “There’s a better approach to Golden Sands.” I plot it for her. “You can ride the thermals rising off the desert almost all the way in. See? Saves fuel.”

  She scans the course avidly. Nods. “Got it. Does that always work over a desert? Did you do that going into New Brunny?”

  “No. Tell me why.”

  She thinks about it for a moment, her brow furrowed. Eyes flicking over the navigational display. Then she grins. Her full, mischievous grin that’s more of a turn-on than her sister’s bare tits. “It was night.”

  That’s my smart kitten. “That’s right. By midnight, desert’s cooled off. You’ll get a little lift comin’ over a desert at night, but nothin’ like right now. See how to go in?” When she nods, I ask, “Notice anythin’ else?”

  “About flying over the desert? There’s a lot of dust. I had to switch to infrared.”

  “Durin’ my conversation with your sister.” Now that she’s thinking logically again, she might be able to focus on something other than her sister’s tits.

  “Oh. Well, she wasn’t lying. At least not that I could tell. Maybe she’s gotten better at it since we were kids.”

  “She lie a lot when you were kids?”

  Kez shakes her head. “She’d rather cut you to pieces with the truth.”

  “Yeah, that hasn’t changed.” Her constant reminders of Tyng’s plans for Kez had some sharp fucking edges. “Anythin’ else?”

  Kez scratches her dreads. “I’m not sure. Maybe.”

  “C’mon. Out with it.”

  “Well, she doesn’t seem all that crazy about working for Tyng anymore.”

  Kez’s peopleometer is still in fine working order. “Uh-huh. Seems like she might be lookin’ for a way out.”

  Kez stares fixedly out the viewer at the desert. “She doesn’t deserve one. I know what you’re thinking.”

  I bet she doesn’t. Has nothing to do with her sister and everything to do with how much I’m gonna enjoy teaching her to fly in space. Whole different set of rules. And then there’s the whole humping-in-zero-gee thing. That’s really something to look forward to.

  When I don’t say anything, she continues. “You’re thinking Tyng recruited her. Turned her into what she is. That’s not how it happened. Erin’s always known exactly what she wanted to be.”

  “A killer?” That would surprise me. I’ve always known I was different, but I didn’t start out in that dumping-ground on Paggen thinking I was gonna kill people when I grew up. I just wanted to be a soldier, like half the other boys I knew.

  “No, rich. She’s always known she wanted to be rich. She didn’t care how she got there. Who she had to work for. Who she had to hurt. What mattered is that she’d never have to eat rats again.”

  Having eaten a decent amount of rat in my time, I can understand that. If she has a talent for killing people, I can’t fault her for exploiting her talent. You can’t always choose who you work for. I found that out the hard way with S.A.W.L. And you can’t always decide that it’s only the deserving who’re gonna die. I found that out the hard way in slam. I don’t think Kez and I will ever see eye-to-eye on this one. But it doesn’t matter. Like Tyng’s illness, it’s just another point of leverage. “Whether she deserves it or not, if she wants out, an’ we can help her . . . you see where this is goin’?”

  Kez sighs and slumps in her chair. “I see where it’s going. I don’t have to like it though, do I?”

  “No, you don’t have to like it.” She’ll do it though, because she’s a pragmatist. Like me. “An’ we don’t have to give it away. We get as much out of her as we can before I give her that key.”

  Kez nods.

  “So, you wanna go make nice with your sister, or you wanna land the ship?”

  Kez grins. “Is that a trick question?”

  I figured. I flick on the landing controls and turn them over to her. Looks like I get to continue running interference with Erin-the-Assassin.

  Chapter 19

  Kez needs more help on the landing than she did on the lift off, but landing is always trickier. The dock at Golden Sands is an aerial dock, a series of landing pads and platforms built thirty meters above the yellow dunes that give the settlement it’s name. The Marie is on the large side of the ships that can dock at Golden Sands, and we have to circle several times until a platform large enough for the Marie clears. As we begin to drop towards the platform, landing talons reach up and grab at the Marie’s gear. A raptor platform. They’re not the easiest landings. I help Kez as she settles the ship in. It’s a bumpy landing. Not really Kez’s fault. Raptor platforms suck. But I can see that it unsettles her. She wipes sweat off her upper lip as we unstrap our flight webbing.

  “You did just fine, kitten.”

  “Did I? That felt bad.”

  “Raptor platform. Even experienced pilots hate them.” I reach under my seat and pull out two bulbs of water. Stock’s getting low. Normally, I’d top up after the run, but there’s no point in restocking for the killer call-girl. In fact, I’ll need to strip some supplies out of the ship before I turn it over to her. She can have those fucking tortillas, though. “Toast to your first landing.”

  She tinks her bulb against mine and we wait for the dock to signal the ship, sipping in companionable silence. Finally, a triangle on the Marie’s flight console lights up. The panel above the credit reader says, “Welcome to Golden Sands. Docking fees are two hundred credits per day. No credit will be given for partial stays.”

  “Friendly,” I remark.

  Kez pulls out her backpack. “I’ve got this.” She opens an interior compartment in the backpack and fishes out a credit wand. Slides it into the triangular slot and holds her thumb against the IdentiPad at the top of the wand until it beeps. “How would you have paid?”

  “Whaddo you mean?” I ask.

  “I notice you don’t use soft credits for anything.”

  Observant kitten. “They’ll usually take hard credits if you talk to the right person.”

  “Not everywhere.”

  I shrug. “I’ve never met anyone I couldn’t persuade.” Or kill, when gentler methods didn�
��t work.

  She grins as she stows the credit wand back in her pack. “You are very persuasive.”

  I rise and stretch. Hold my hand out to her and help her out of her flight chair. She rolls her head until her neck pops. “Ooo, do you get sore?” she asks.

  “You were concentratin’ too hard. You won’t when you’ve had more practice. C’mere.” I turn her around and stroke the tension out of her neck with my thumbs. “You know what I used to do after a flyin’ lesson? To relieve the tension?”

  “Mmm, no idea.” She melts against me. Her head lolls. She lets her backpack drop to the floor and reaches around to rest her hands on my hips. “Whatever it was, you’re not allowed to stop what you’re doing.”

  I lean in so my mouth’s against her ear. “I used to wank off.” Over and over. Until I passed out. Worked great. I didn’t suffer any of the stress-related problems the other trainees suffered. I even looked forward to flight training.

  “Oh, okay, I take it back. We can do that instead.” She pulls at my hips so my groin bumps her soft ass. “I want to watch.”

  Naughty kitten. “Why would I jerk off when I’m with you? Fuckin’s a thousand times better than goin’ solo. ‘Sides, we just did that.” Not that I’d object to doing it again, but I’d rather the next time was in a bed, or zero-gee, or at least somewhere we can take our time.

  “Two whole hours ago.”

  I chuckle and nuzzle her dreadlocks. “We’re on the clock.”

  Kez sighs. “About that, I’ve been thinking.”

  Could be dangerous. “Yeah?”

  “Maybe this Shaker guy rents other stuff. You know, beside skimmers.”

  “What do we need beside a skimmer?”

  “A catapult.”

  The image of catapulting her evil minx of a sister over the channel into the Cloudlands tickles me. I laugh. A full belly laugh. “Bet she’d fall right outta that titty-sling.”

  Kez giggles. I tuck her into my chest and hold her tight until our shared laughter dies down.

  “Let’s go get the blue bomber,” I tell her.

  Kez nods and when I release her, picks up her backpack and slings it over her shoulders with a smile.