by David Ryker
That was fair. Convenient as it had been for me today, having Belters’ blood was the kind of thing that – if people found out about it – would keep me from seeing my girls again.
“What if there was someone here to meet them?” Tomlins said. “What if we activated the PDS…”
“Oh, please,” Mr. Salter said. “The PDS has been offline for weeks. There’s been no budget to fix it.”
“Then we’ll have to fix it ourselves,” Tomlins said. “If I could keep that fucking Faud 140 in flying shape for six years, I can probably figure out what I need to do to fix a beacon.”
“And even if you can fix it, do you really think the Coalition Fleet will send forces to defend us?” Mr. Salter laughed. “This is a prison planet! We’ve been sent here to work, die, and beg for mercy the whole time we’re doing it!”
“Don’t pretend to be one of us,” I said. “And if this is your fault, don’t lie to us about it.”
“I haven’t done anything that I’m aware of,” Mr. Salter said.
He was probably right. The kind of suck-up that took a prison planet assignment to keep tabs on a con was not likely to have the nerve or the talent to do something that’d really piss off the Belters. Especially if that con’s only value lay in the expense and difficulty involved in installing his Belters’ blood.
I took a couple of steps toward him anyway. He was about my height, but I’d held on to some of my ability to loom over people.
“You sure about that?” I said.
Mr. Salter’s face hardened. He straightened his jumpsuit. “Quite certain,” he said. “You’ve seen me pretty much every day for three years,” he added. “Both of you know I haven’t had time to go playing politics with the Belters.”
“Well, I hope you’re…”
“Tomlins?” A harsh woman’s voice came pealing from the shadows of a blasted-out gallery. I noted then that the Beezer had ripped a nice-sized crater out of an administration building. There was a row of bodies lined up on the dusty concrete of the plaza in front, most of them dressed in the blue and gray of Coalition staff. “Tomlins, is that you?”
A heavyset female figure came popping up on a pile of concrete rip-rap that had once been the front of some appeals hall or processing center.
“Leka!” Tomlins ran forward, waving her arms. “Leka, come here!”
For a second, the figure on the rubble looked back. I knew I liked her when she shrugged and flicked both hands in the air before sprinting down from the pile of rubble. She ran smoothly, her legs anticipating every obstacle in the way between her and Tomlins.
“She seems like trouble,” Mr. Salter said.
Well, that just cemented it. “I dunno,” I said. “I’m getting a pretty good feeling about this one.”
Leka and Tomlins embraced for a moment; they exchanged a rapidfire conversation before they both ran back to me and Mr. Salter. Leka was a tallish woman, well over forty with a cute square face and square-rimmed black glasses. She wore a fluid-resistant jumpsuit and had the kind of pallid, jaundiced complexion that came with time working in circuit stripping. Her hair was going gray in a hurry; she wore it pinned up on her head with a single rusted iron spike.
“What’s up, guys?” she said with a mouth full of grief-blasted teeth. I cringed at the reminder of my former life, of the things that I had once done. “Tomlins says you need an engineer.”
“Oh, so she’s that kind of sober,” Mr. Salter said. “Charming.”
“Who the fuck is this asshole?” Leka said, pointing a finger in Salter’s face. “Have you ever had a real problem in your life, you…”
“Leka, we are literally on a prison planet,” Tomlins said. “We all have real problems.”
“Whatever,” Leka said. “So which one of you is wounded?”
“The big guy,” Tomlins said.
“They’re both big guys,” Leka said. “You.” The pointing finger was directed at me now. “I saw you limping.”
“It’s really nothing,” I said. By this point, a pretty good portion of my Belters’ blood had fucked right back off out of my clothes and inside my body where it belonged. I showed a clean, torn leg of my jumpsuit to Leka and Tomlins.
Tomlins stepped back. “I swear to God, Kev, you were bleeding out when I finally found you. You got shrapnel in your leg, and Mr. Salter pulled it out, and…”
“And I think you might be the one who needs her head checked,” Leka said, patting Tomlins on the back. “But it’s okay. You’ve had a rough day.”
Tomlins shoved her away, her face scrunched like she was pushing off a harassing sibling.
“And we’re going to have a rougher day if we stand here talking in the street,” Mr. Salter grunted. “Come on. We’ve found your friend. Now, what are we doing?”
“Now we’re going to a PDS, which Tomlins explained to me,” Leka said. “And I just think that is a great idea that we should all take part in.” There was bitter laughter in her voice, but not on her face. “Do either of you guys want guns?”
“No, I don’t have…” And then I realized what she’d just said. And then I actually felt happiness for the first time that day. “Oh, you said do we want guns.”
Leka nodded slowly at me like I was a child. “Yeah, the vats crew decided that there weren’t going to be any survivors in the administration building,” she said. “It’s kind of a mess in there. But I hid a stash of weapons underneath a big block of concrete.”
“Oh, nice,” Tomlins said. “Uh. How big a block of concrete?”
“Well, that’s why I was so happy to see you with two big guys,” Leka said with a wide, close-lipped smile. “Because I thought it would be genius to wind up a big fuckin’ roundhouse kick and knock over a big, vertical slab that it would take at least two people to move horizontally. Didn’t quite think that plan all the way through.” She mimed what she had done, adding a sound effect that bore no resemblance to anything being kicked.
Mr. Salter and I weren’t sure how much a normal person would be grunting and struggling with a block of concrete this size. So we struggled a lot.
“Come on, guys,” Leka said. “I know it’s big, but I think the two of you can…”
“Oof!” I kept saying. “It’s not...it’s not that heavy. It’s just awkward.”
“Come on, man,” Mr. Salter said. “Your legs! Use your legs!”
Tomlins was on point, and my Belters’ blood could feel her getting more and more nervous. “We should probably do this fairly quickly,” she said, looking over at a group of guys who were fighting over the bodies of two fallen guards. How long was it going to be before they noticed where the guards’ weapons had gone? How long was it going to be before they noticed us?
A few blocks away, I could hear the rattle of solid-slug fire. The juicy pulse of a plasma rifle - and then a couple other plasma rifles - answered it.
On this planet, you had to wonder who was shooting at whom. I had been able to stay out of administration drama for the past year or so, but I had seen firsthand how much infighting there was and how vicious it could get. Shit, there was a good likelihood that someone in the administration was responsible for these attacks. They were sudden, they were short, and they seemed designed to cause chaos.
Chaos that was going to overtake us if we didn’t get out of here in a hurry.
“Okay, on three,” Mr. Salter said. “One...two…”
“Three!” I made sure not to pick the slab up too quickly. That was one of the things you had to learn to go incognito once they blooded you: normal people lift things slowly and with no shortage of bitching.
Another of the things you had to learn, as part of being a Belter in general, was how to identify, disassemble, reassemble, maintain, and fire pretty much every weapon available in the galaxy. Which was good, because Leka had managed to scavenge a pretty good selection from the administrative building.
“Shit,” Tomlins said. “Did you get these all off corpses?”
“I got
them off wounded,” Leka said. “See, I’ve got student med creds now that I’ve gotten through the sobriety program, and…”
“And you got access to the wounded guards,” Tomlins said, a smile growing on her face as she looked from the corpses to her neighbor. “Brilliant.”
“I mean, if I get caught I’ll definitely lose the med creds again,” Leka said, her triumphant smirk fading a little.
“So let’s not get caught.” I hopped down into the pit where Leka had stored the cache of weapons she’d liberated from our overseers. I picked up an Armco 85, a nice sturdy Coalition-issue plasma weapon that was more or less compatible with seven different models of power packs. There was a time, when I was younger, when I would have smiled to heft that beast of a machine in my hands again. When Leka had first brought up the subject of guns, I thought I might be still living in that time.
But I guess maybe I wasn’t. Maybe the Belters’ blood hadn’t permanently corrupted my soul like Mr. Salter claimed. Because what I felt like, hefting that gun, was getting to the PDS and getting this over with before I had to have it in my hands a second longer than necessary.
3
Later on, Linata would claim that I’d lied to her about who I was. She’d claim that she never would have gone through the treatments for me if she’d known; she’d tell my girls I was a monster for tricking her into having them.
That was what always stung the most, when she’d tell the girls to their faces.
Celeste was the one who really looked like me. My super said it was because I had animal energy, said it was some primal thing about imprinting your mark on your offspring and driving away other males, I don’t know. My super was smoking a lot of grief back then, a lot more than we ever dared let on to the striker who supervised the supers.
I shouldn’t have shown him the photos. When I showed him the photos of my little baby asleep on Linata’s chest, when I showed him the one good thing I had done in the galaxy to date, that was when things started to fall apart.
But they fell apart in style, I will say that. You don’t just have a baby in the Belters and show your super some pictures and go home. No, no, no. Even I knew better than that. There was a Belter who lived down the street from me growing up - long story, but I knew that births and namings and weddings and funerals were like a competition for these people. I knew what I was getting into when I answered my super’s question: what was Big Kevin smiling about so suddenly?
If Linata didn’t know who I was in the morning, she knew by the end of the day. First, my super sent three handsome apprentices over. Two women and a man, all instructed that they were to clean the house and change the diapers and cook a fucking yardbird in sinachi sauce if Linata wanted. They were also instructed to help “The Missus” receive, care for, and retain the rest of the gifts that started showing up.
By this time, I’d been in the Belters for ten years, and I’d had Belters’ blood in me for eight. I’d survived the Coalition raid on Nylan 4; I’d done backup for Lucky Pavel on two-thirds of his transport jobs. I’d served Striker Armstrong and Striker Patel and even that old battleaxe Striker Laurence without once getting reprimanded. I made a point of keeping quiet, of staying sober when I was on duty. Like I said, I’d grown up down the street from a Belter. I didn’t want to make anyone in the organization into my enemy.
Too bad I didn’t think about the consequences of making them my friends.
Lucky Pavel had been promoted to Striker by the time Celeste was born. He sent a convoy of survees to Linata’s townhouse, surrounding a brand spanking new Viltna Corta XX with the amphibious package. The convoy left after Pavel paid his respects to his niece-by-law. The Cortna XX stayed behind. Striker Armstrong was visibly annoyed by it as he and his wife came by with an indentured personal chef. It was well known that Pavel was gunning for his position of favorite with the board.
Patel and Laurence sent similarly modest gifts: Patel set up a no-limit line of credit in his name with Home Farm Interiors (for the nursery), and Laurence sent over not one but three personal shoppers rigged with the most stylish explosive collars money could buy.
And that was before the lower-ranking Belters started showing up at the door with their families in tow. I used to kiss her on the forehead and say “See ya, Princess” before I headed out the door in the morning; that night, I came home to a queen enthroned in a state of shock.
“Hey, honey,” she said to me when I walked in the door. She was sitting on the couch in a silk bathrobe and an antique Terran tiara, awkwardly holding her feet out so a cosmetica droid could fuss over her toes. Celeste was asleep next to her, swaddled up in what I assume was a really fashionable baby seat. “I met some people from your, uh, public relations firm.”
“Yeah?” I had been in the Belters for ten years. More than once, I had been forced to admit to a girlfriend that my money and my odd hours and my business trips could not be explained by working for galactic celebrities. I would admit that I had been telling a few white lies here and there - a few white lies that had spiraled into a whole fake story about my life where I wasn’t working for the Belters.
So I was used to having this conversation - but with other women, with women who had not just given birth to my perfect baby girl. I was taking off my long coat. The whole house smelled like garlic shrimp - real shrimp, farmed in the local ocean. “I was showing my boss some photos of little Celeste.”
“Yeah, he told me that,” Linata said.
The silence that followed was something that stuck with me. It would come to me lying on my cot at night. It would come back to me working on the breaker line at the recycling op. It would come back to me in the chow line. It would come back to me trying not to hear Fucked Up Ferris crying while he jacked it in the showers.
See, I liked silence. Silence was one of the very first nice things I ever got to have in life. I can remember the first time I ever got to just shut a transport cabin door and have a few square feet of space to myself. Not hearing anybody, not smelling anybody, not feeling anybody’s body heat clashing with mine. Growing up in my family, you learned to appreciate a good silence.
And so when Linata didn’t say anything after that, I just thought it was one more nice thing that the day had brought to me. What could be better than me, my princess, and my sweet baby girl, all just hanging out in peace and quiet? I just kept on taking my coat and boots off like this wasn’t the beginning of the end of my life.
“This is bad.” Tomlins held a damp rag to her face as she returned from her recon mission.
Whatever that silence from Linata had meant, we were hell and gone from silence right now. We could hear the sounds of a riot coming from the group of administrative buildings where they stored supplies. Since there were only four of us (three, if you acknowledged that Salter wasn’t a real human being) and a shitload of them, we decided to send the sneakiest one in first while we waited in the shelter of a burst water tank.
“How bad?” Mr. Salter said. “What’s left of the buildings?”
“Everything,” Tomlins said. “Now, I’m sure it wasn’t the Belters who shot at us. But whoever it was, they didn’t touch the commissary, or the main infirmary, or the big armory. So now everyone else is touching all of it, and they’re not being gentle.” She sank to a squatting position on the rusted floor of the water tank. It was one of the more stable structures after the blast, and even it groaned ominously as its surface cooled in the humid air.
“Goddammit,” Leka said. “I knew I should’ve…”
“No you shouldn’t,” Tomlins said, holding out a stifling hand to Leka. Her exasperated face told me she was used to Leka coming up with grandiose plans. “We have to get away from here. Every survivor left in this goddamn op is fighting over the supplies.”
“That’s not Belter tactics,” Leka said. She was standing up, pacing around the warped interior of the water tank with her weapon held across her chest. One of her weapons, at least - she had acquired a big plasma rifle
and several solid-slug and plasma-burst sidearms which had disappeared into her jumpsuit. Not that it was on the top of my mind, but I swore that her chest had gotten bigger and lumpier since we’d first met.
“The fuck do you know about Belter tactics?” Tomlins said with a laugh.
“It’s a long story.” Leka ran a tired eye over me and a contemptuous eye over Salter. “You two ever hear about that freighter that wound up in a surface collision in the Morgana System?”
I shook my head blankly while Salter chuckled. We were both seated on a massive chunk of cement that had been blown into the water tank from a nearby ex-building, draining it suddenly and creating our entrance.
“My squad was sent to clean up the wreck,” Leka said, fixing the full brunt of her lethal gaze on Salter. “Took us three hazmat crews two weeks to do mitigation for all that ferminite.”
“Funny coincidence,” Salter said, his mood brightened by memories of homicide. “I was involved in cleaning up after that accident as well.”
“You’re ex-military, huh?” I was a little puzzled at that one. Her age and her teeth didn’t exactly match up with a shining career in the Coalition Forces.
“Very ex,” Leka said. “You try doing toxmit for four straight tours without taking samples from the vaults.” She spat on the ground. “Whole squad was doing it. I was just the one who got uppity with the sergeant.”
“And so you were made into an example,” Salter said. The trouble with his smile was that it didn’t seem designed for a humanoid face. “Sounds...somewhat familiar.” He was looking at me, looking right through my skin and into the parts of me that might get arranged on a sidewalk somewhere if the Belters decided to turn me into an example.
“You could say that,” Leka grunted. “Fuck.” She adjusted her grip on her rifle. “At least I’m sober now. I know my sergeant’s still hooked on that shit.”
“Honey, focus,” Tomlins said. “You, Sergeant Hardass, should know that we have to get prepped before we disappear into that jungle, or we’re never going to appear back out of it again.”