Blood Oath

by David Ryker

  And on a recycling op, nobody really cared too much if some sorry sucker got his head blown off when an H2 engine inevitably reached its violent end.

  “Tomlins!” I yelled as I rushed away from the engine, dallying for a couple of seconds by the base of the ladder down from the shutoff switch. “Hurry up!” Even with the way my senses worked, every nerve in my body was telling me to get the hell off this scaffolding.

  “I’m hurrying!” Tomlins was scrambling down the ladder.

  “Just jump,” I said, more softly. “I got you.”

  “You’d fuckin better!” That was about as sweet as Tomlins got with me these days. She pushed backward on the steel rungs and fell down toward me; I caught her and set her on her feet.

  “Now, run!” I said, grabbing her by the hand and pulling her along with me. “When this thing blows, it’s gonna make a big goddamn hole in the ground!”

  We got lucky that day. All personnel (even Parker and Vinny) got off the scaffolding before some engine malfunction sparked a gas burst. I was the only one who thought to thank Tomlins - or maybe I was the only one dumb enough to think that she cared about or wanted my thanks.

  “Oh, anytime,” she said, cupping the rectangular plastic half-bottle they’d served me her thank-you drink in. She was on the small side, with dark brown hair and hazel eyes that fit in with her feline personality. She was always smiling about something.

  I’d met her this afternoon at our usual spot, a good-behavior bar built out of a storage container they’d bolted and cabled to a rock formation on one of the hillsides. From our seats at the arc-cut window we could see most of the Housings Department from here. Scaffolding and machinery wound through the tree-strangled hills like a perverse mechanical watercourse, painted red to disguise the inevitable jungle rust that started eating metal as soon as it was exposed to the planet’s atmosphere.

  Supposedly, they’d done studies that showed we wouldn’t get cancer from whatever was eating the metal. Supposedly, one of us was going to live long enough to find out if the studies were right.

  “How long do you think they’ll take to get it out?” I said. Just northeast of the massive vats where the tungsten crews did their extraction work, the cratered remains of the breaker line were still smoking despite the firefighters’ best efforts.

  “Oh, I think that depends on a few things.” The voice behind me was quiet and velvety. The personality attached to that voice?

  “Mmm. Mr. Salter.” I spun my bar stool around to face my favorite “fellow inmate” on this overgrown dirtball.

  “Kevin Collins.” The tall, thick man’s mouth spread in a lifeless smile as he spoke my name. “You’re looking like you’re enjoying your new assignment.”

  “Yeah, I assume I was, uh, supposed to live through that,” I said, jerking my thumb back behind me at the window. I took a drink of my “iced tea” and licked my lips.

  Beside me, Tomlins kept sipping on her definitely non-alcoholic, guard-approved beverage and staring out the window.

  Mr. Salter’s face returned to a more natural position while he looked me up and down. Shit like this was why I could trust Tomlins and not Mr. Salter. Sure, they were both complete animals. It was just, Tomlins had at least enough respect for her fellow predators not to try and put a nice face on it. Salter, on the other hand…

  “Don’t worry,” Mr. Salter said. “Whatever happened there was, indeed, an accident.”

  “It was indeed,” I said. Not knowing exactly what kind of biotech the Belters had stitched inside his arm, I decided not to take a particularly mocking tone with him. Knowing what priority the Belters put on Mr. Salter’s job, though, I felt like I could get away with a snide little smirk.

  Now, all the pretense was gone. He was just another one of us. All instinct. No heart. Nothing behind the eyes.

  “What do you want?” I said.

  “I want you to use your downtime and be useful for once,” Mr. Salter said. “Rumor in the gym is, you and your, uh, friend here both got three days of rec leave for your contributions to the op’s efficiency.”

  “Yeah, I think that means the scheduling officer didn’t get the raise he asked for,” I said. “They’ll have me back on that line as soon as…”

  “As soon as you’ve come back from circuit washing,” Mr. Salter said.

  “Circuit washing.” Again, I didn’t feel like I had to fake any enthusiasm for this conversation.

  “Rotelle’s getting impatient about that package, Collins,” Mr. Salter said. “What do you say you turn your sudden stroke of luck into our sudden stroke of luck?”

  “We’ve got luck now?” I said.

  “You’ve always had luck,” Mr. Salter said. As he spoke, he slithered up right next to me and pretended to scan the barroom with his eyes as he took a cigar from his pocket. “Luck that you got sent here with just the grief smuggling convictions. Luck that nobody leaked any of the info about the job on the Vassily. Luck that you might still see your…”

  “Okay, okay, I get it,” I said. I didn’t need this salt viper telling me about the reasons I’d booked it out of that engine shaft, the reasons I was the sorry sucker going down in the first place. More to the point, I didn’t want my daughters’ names in his filthy mouth. I didn’t like that he might know where Linata had taken them. I didn’t like that he might want to know.

  “I’m so glad we understand each other, Mr. Collins,” Mr. Salter said. He took a lighter from his green prison jumpsuit’s pocket and waved the flame in front of the cigar’s tip as he puffed. He liked to take his time enjoying life in front of people. It reminded them of who he was. More importantly, it reminded them of who they weren’t. “It makes it…”

  The lighter’s flame disappeared. Mr. Salter turned around.

  On top of the bar, one of the guards yelled, “Incoming! Incoming! Defensive positions!”

  “What the fuck!” Tomlins leapt off her bar stool and mom-armed me to the ground along with her as the dark interior of the bar lit up bright blue. You could feel the heat from the passing blast, but it wasn’t aimed at us: a roar of exploding gas and warping steel filled our ears shortly before a scatter of shrapnel filled the air above our heads.

  I dragged Tomlins and myself closer to the outer wall of the bar. Maybe not as secure if something came through the steel, but nice and sheltered if any more hot, jagged metal came through the window. Mr. Salter could go fuck himself. So could whoever was screaming at the main bar.

  I did feel bad about that, later. But just then, we all had our own problems, all right? The guy died, though. And I did feel bad about it.

  Mr. Salter did not die. In fact, Mr. Salter came scuttling over to join us as quick as you please. His eyes had gotten big. He’d abandoned his cigar.

  I glared at him. My heart was pounding. There was a lot going through my head just now, and very little of it was fit to say to Mr. Salter. “Did you hear what I heard?” I said.

  He nodded.

  “That better not be what I think…”

  Another bright blue blast lit up the inside of the bar. Again, we heard it score a hit on our op’s machinery - and on its inmates. More screaming this time, and worse.

  “They’re aiming for the vats!” someone yelled. “They’re aiming for the vats! Get the PDS online!”

  Who was ‘they’? Could someone see the ship that was firing at us? Was that the type of gun I thought it was? Was that gun no longer unique to the Belters? I hadn’t felt this kind of panic in years.

  “PDS has been offline for two weeks!” someone yelled back.

  “Bullshit!” the first voice yelled. “They can’t have the PDS offline for…”

  “There’s no fucking budget!” someone yelled. “Let’s get out of here!”

  The frantic tone of that voice matched the pounding of my heart in my chest. If the vats blew, there was a good chance we’d all get roasted inside this bar. I wasn’t sure, at this point, exactly what concoction they used in circuit stripping;
all I knew was that working the vats was a short-term job and a really good threat. So it probably burned hot.

  “Shit.” I got up to my hands and knees and pulled Tomlins with me. “We gotta get out of here, too.”

  We were far from the first or second ones to have the idea. I had to look for a good line to get through the doorway that avoided getting tangled in a panicked mass of human flesh.

  Behind me, Mr. Salter was tugging on my jumpsuit’s leg. “I’m not on grief, right?” he said. “That’s a BZ-219 if I…”

  “Yeah, I know it’s a Beezer!” I said, kicking him away. “We can figure out why it’s shooting at us later!”

  “What’s a Beezer?” Tomlins said. We were crouched underneath a table, which was bolted to the floor of the shipping container. The shipping container that was bolted to a rock formation high on a hillside.

  I was about to tell her that the Beezer, or a BZ-219 if you were a pedantic asshole, was a very rare xeno-sourced plasma cannon that was used exclusively by the Belters, at least last time I had known about this kind of thing. I wanted to go on and explain that the Belters shouldn’t have a reason to target this rinky-dink recycling op in the middle of nowhere, which made me wonder if it was still just the Belters who used that gun. I wanted to explain in detail precisely how bad this was, and what it meant, and how badly we needed to start making ourselves scarce if we wanted to live through the upcoming whatever-the-fuck.

  But just as Tomlins asked her question, another blast hit the hillside we were bolted to. The whole bar shifted sharply downhill with a crash of glass and a great swell of panicked screaming, and the last thing I was able to say before the chair hit my head was, “Hold on to the table!”

  2

  “Kevin, get up!” My mother’s eyes were bloodshot, her hair stringy and falling in her thin face. “Get on up, boy, before someone sees and goes calling the Corps!”

  I remember trying. I remember being really, really heavy for some reason. I knew something wasn’t right, because it sounded like my mother’s voice was glitching.

  “Get on up, boy!” she kept saying. “Do you want to get taken into the care home again you have to get on get on get on…”

  And I was up. I sat up suddenly, gasping, struggling against whatever it was…

  “Chill, Kev!” Tomlins said. She was crouched at my feet, holding something. “You’re bleeding like a stuck...what? I mean...you were bleeding like a stuck incubation sac. A second ago.”

  “The cut must not have been as bad as I thought.” Mr. Salter was still with us, it seemed. Unfortunate. “Told you.”

  “Shut up,” Tomlins said. “Kevin, can you hear me?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said. I realized that I was probably rapid-healing, and Tomlins had probably been staring at my leg while it happened. I drew myself up into a crouch on the floor.

  Which had a holoposter of Krystal KlouDDD glued to it. It took me a couple of slow, addled seconds to figure out what the hell was going on. I was on the wall. Right. Someone had blasted the bar right off the mountainside, and I had lived to tell the tale.

  But for how long? “The vats,” I said. “Did they get the vats?”

  “Just focus on your breathing,” Tomlins said. “You’ve been out for, uh, a little while…”

  “It was a sudden attack,” Mr. Salter said. “They took the vats out, and the entire breaker line, and it’s been quiet for about five minutes.”

  “Fuck,” I said. “How long was I out?”

  “Long enough to scare the piss out of…”

  “About fifteen, maybe twenty minutes.” Mr. Salter was giving me one of his long, cold looks. It was a look that held a million words inside it. Lots of those words ran along the lines of “Shut the fuck up about what your body is doing right now.”

  “Ugh,” I said. “What...what happened?” I started looking around the bar. I could see the dead scattered around me, and some of the living searching among them. Were they searching for friends? Searching for valuables?

  “Well, it looks like you got your bell rung good, for starters,” Tomlins said. She was now crouched on Krystal KlouDDD’s shimmering cleavage. “Can you tell me, uh, what day it is?”

  “Tuesday, April sixteenth,” I said. “I’m in the good-behavior bar on Bathys 2, and the current Coalition C-in-C is, uh, Fleet Admiral Myra LeDormeaux-Whittington.”

  “It’s LeDormand,” Mr. Salter said.

  “Sir, can I have a second?” Tomlins whipped around to glare at him before returning her attention to me. “Well, at least you kept your smart ass intact,” she said. “Fuck’s sake. I thought you were going to bleed out from that…”

  “It was a minor cut at most,” Mr. Salter said. “You don’t have enough medical training to know when you should be worried and when you shouldn’t.”

  “You know, Salter?” Tomlins said, sitting back on her heels. “You have a point there.”

  I always liked seeing that son of a bitch genuinely confused.

  Tomlins’ face lit up the way it did when her mind was finished percolating. “Hey, Kev, can you walk?” she said. “I have an idea.”

  “What kind of idea?” Mr. Salter said.

  “Those guns that fired the blasts. They belong to the...the guys, right?” She said it quietly, so nobody else in here could hear her.

  I nodded. “Yeah,” I said. “Which means…”

  “Which means they’re coming back, yeah,” Tomlins said. “So we should go find my neighbor. She used to be a nurse.”

  “Yeah?” I said. “Her and half the distribution convicts on this planet.” They didn’t send people to Bathys 2 because they’d, say, killed a bunch of people for the Belters and done boss work on a couple of ugly planetside jobs. People wound up on Bathys 2 for things like selling grief and stealing Norbotrinol from the nurse’s station at work.

  “But I know my neighbor,” Tomlins said. “She’s smarter than the average asshole on this rock.”

  “If she’s smart, why don’t I see her around here?” I said, gesturing around to the place where people got to go when they were smart and kept their heads down and didn’t start drama.

  “Because she was smart enough to get sober while she was here, asshole,” Tomlins said.

  “Oh.” I must’ve been nearly healed by that point, because that little ping of shame hit me like a broom handle. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry,” Tomlins said. “Come up and let’s get out of here before they come back and use this thing for target practice again.”

  No matter who you were, no matter how well you behaved, you ate and slept in the same hab block the whole time you were living on Bathys 2. Tomlins lived in a women’s block a couple miles away from the breaker line. Usually, convicts got on their scheduled survee shuttles to be transported to and from their assigned job sites. Today, everyone was more or less walking home.

  By “more or less” here, I’m talking about the special kind of foot travel that people do when someone’s been bombing the shit out of their city, setting it on fire, or blasting it with a Beezer. Some people are walking through the streets dazed, disoriented, trying to figure out if it’s safe or not.

  Others, smarter, know it’s never going to be safe here again. They dart to and from shadows, waiting and watching and finding their next hiding spot before they move again.

  I was never used to being described as very smart. What I was pretty used to was walking right down the middle of the boulevard, another Belter right behind me, watching the destruction around me as I followed a local guide.

  To be honest, it made my skin crawl a little. It was too much like my younger days - before Linata, before the girls. Before I had something to survive Bathys 2 for. The tingle of memory made my heartbeat pick up in my chest; I could feel my vision sharpening slightly. I felt like I should have a plasma rifle of my own ready in my hands, and the storm coat of a Belters enforcer on my back.

  But maybe that was just my Belters’ blood, responding to some
signal I couldn’t understand even if they explained it to me. Belters’ blood had a mind of its own, they said, and once it was in you it made you think different. And it was in me, all right. Circulating in my veins, whether I liked it or not. Although I had to admit, it had come in useful today.

  “How are you doing?” Tomlins paused and turned around to check on me.

  I started exaggerating a limp on the leg that had been injured, and now decidedly wasn’t. “I’ll live,” I said.

  Tomlins squinted at me, holding the gaze a little longer than she would if she didn’t suspect something. But she nodded. “We’ll have Leka check you out when you…”

  “No you fuckin’ won’t,” I said, my voice a low growl. “The only reason we’re going to see her is so there’s more of us when the Belters come back.”

  “More of us to skin alive,” Salter said. “You’re lucky you have me with you. I might be able to talk them out of…”

  “You really think we’re going to get one on one with someone in the Belters who cares?” I didn’t turn around to address Mr. Salter. “Moron. The only way we’re going to make it through this is if we slip into the jungle and keep to ourselves for a week or eight.”

  “Oh, you think we’re going to survive in the jungle,” Mr. Salter said. “Did you bring enough cello-wrapped cookies from home for three whole nights? Maybe a blanket from…”

  “Better go into the woods than get blasted at the recycling op again,” Tomlins said. “I think Kev’s right. I think you’re not important enough to bother with.”

  “Not with big guns,” I said, grinning back at my own personal Belter snitch. “No, my friend. They’re busting up this recycling op for some other reason, and you and I are just acceptable collateral damage.”

  “Not with our...abilities,” Mr. Salter said, glancing down at my leg. “They’ll be coming for us personally. We know too much.”