by David Ryker
“You’re missing my point,” Leka said. “Why are we going into the jungle in the first place?” She twisted her lips into an approximation of a long-suffering smile.
“So that we’re not around when the Belters come to destroy…oh.” Tomlins nodded. “They left the good shit intact. Maybe they’ll come back to loot it.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “That could be a Lucky Pavel move.”
“Lucky Pavel?” Leka said.
“One of the younger strikers,” I said. “That’s like...I don’t know, a commodore or a colonel in the military. Still low enough for a combat role, but higher than anybody else.” I could feel Salter bristle beside me as I mentioned Inside Information. I ignored him. “He likes to do things his own way.”
“And, might I add,” Salter said, “doing things his own way could involve negotiating with…”
“Bitch, you’re welcome to find that out on your own,” Leka said, turning on Salter with the kind of open hostility that only went with not knowing Salter personally. “It could be your Lucky Pavel. It could be xenos. Shit, it could be an inside job by one of the administration people who’s sick of getting his pay raise requests denied. The rest of us…”
“Oh, no. I’m afraid that where I go,” Salter said, “your dear Mr. Collins goes as well.” He gave her another one of his weird smiles.
“Doesn’t look that way to me, sweetheart,” Leka said.
“Oh, it is,” Tomlins said, cringing as she looked from Leka to Salter. “It’s a long story.”
“I have two kids,” I said. Again, my habit of speaking before I realize that people can hear me. This time, I figured I might as well let my mouth keep running. “I’ve been here for six and a half years. I have thirteen and a half years left to go, if I can survive the op.”
“Only twenty years?” Leka said, stepping back with her disbelief etched on her face. “For a Belter enforcer?”
“How do you know he was an enforcer?” Salter said.
“Because they sent you to watch over him in prison,” Leka replied with hatred dripping off her voice. “They just kill the ordinary dipshits.”
I had to smile at that, even if I knew it looked bitter. She was one hundred percent right, and she still didn’t get the picture. The tech running in my veins wasn’t just expensive. Rumor was, it was experimental to boot - and the Belters needed the data that Salter was collecting. “I want to stick with my twenty-year sentence,” I said. “Salter has information on me that could make sure I never see my girls again.”
Leka nodded. “Ah.”
“Yeah.” I looked at Salter. “So where he goes, I go.”
“Well, that’s sweet,” Leka said, turning her eyes back to Salter. “So.” She bobbled her head slightly as she let out a nasty little giggle. “Do you also have blackmail on the thousand other inmates who survived this first attack?”
“I wouldn’t number it at a full thousand,” Tomlins said. “More in the seven, maybe eight hundred range. I saw a lot of walking wounded, and the riots are going to kill dozens more before tonight’s over.”
“That’s right,” Leka said. “What are you going to do when the Circuit Brotherhood gets pissed on real liquor and comes out looking for asses to beat? You got blackmail on the scrubbers?”
Tomlins was grinning now. “My friend has a point,” she said. “Pretty sure I saw Three Finger Andrews among the living. Some of his crew, too.”
For a second, fear crossed Salter’s face. “All the more reason to ally ourselves with the Belters,” he said cautiously.
“Honey, what I am trying to convey to you,” Leka said, “is that even if this was a Belter attack, the Belters are not going to do shit for us. They might do a little shit for you, but so far they’ve left you here in a prison for three years and then blasted the shit out of the op where they knew you were staying.” She shifted her weapon from one across-the-chest grip to the other. “They don’t seem to think it’s their problem if you pissed off Three Finger Andrews. What do you think your odds are if I decide to agree with them?”
She shouldn’t have done that. I could see it in the way Salter’s face hardened; I could hear it in Tomlins’s quiet sigh of dismay. She had brought out facts, and she had laid them out in front of Mr. Salter in a way that Mr. Salter didn’t like. We were all going to pay for it now.
“You know,” Mr. Salter said, “I am not a gambler by nature.” He looked Tomlins up and down, in the slow and awkward way he did when he wanted her to notice him looking at her. “But I would wager that if you two ladies abandoned us to our fate, we would last...somewhat longer when confronted with the likes of Three Finger Andrews.”
Now, in my opinion, Tomlins could probably skin Andrews alive before she even bothered finding a weapon to do it with. But something about Mr. Salter’s personality gave a confidence-sucking quality to his voice. When he used that voice on you, it could make you question the number of legs you had or the color of the sky.
“Hold on a second,” Leka said. “Are you implying that…”
Tomlins held up a hand. “He’s right,” she said. “We need his protection, and we need Collins’s protection, or we’re not going to make it whether we stay in the city or not.”
“If we go into the jungle, we’ll be fine,” Leka said. She turned to Tomlins and pointed a thumb at me and Salter. “Let’s ditch these losers and…”
“With what supplies, Miss Military?” Tomlins said, standing up and turning to face Leka. “We don’t know what’s out there in the jungle, and we don’t have anything that’s going to help us stand up to it. We can’t shoot a fucking gut infection from bad water!”
“So we get some supplies, and…”
“Supplies from who?” Tomlins said. “Even if we do split up from these guys, we need to stay in the city until we’re prepared to survive in the jungle for a while. And even if the Belters come back for their...their creature,” she said, “You two are going to need more backup than just me and Leka.”
“You sound like you’re getting to your point,” I said.
“So let me get to it,” Tomlins said. “If we go west from here, we’re going to run up against a riot. If we go east, we can make it back to what’s left of the breaker line.”
“Do you think anyone actually survived the blasts that hit that part of the operation?” Salter sounded incredulous.
“I dunno,” I said. “Other than the H2 engines, that was one of the less, uh, explosive parts of the recycling op.”
“And it was hell and gone from the circuit stripping vats,” Tomlins said. “We’ll at least find more, uh, intact bodies in that direction.” From the way she said ‘intact,’ you could tell that the most important part of a corpse to her was what it was wearing.
To the west, I could hear the guttural tattoo of a fully automatic solid-slug rifle.
4
By the time Nadine was born, Linata definitely knew. She made me wait until she woke up one morning at the crack of dawn to do her makeup, and then she let me show off the photos of my second little baby.
I had been a Belter for twelve years by this time. I was in the middle of my first really ugly assignment. Up until then, I had mostly been a transport guy. I’d been a good transport guy. I kept things running without drawing attention to myself. My body count was low - not because I was soft, but because I ran a tight, high-class operation.
But no matter how tight your operation is, in the Belters, there’s always that small and inescapable chance that someone’s going to screw you. Sometimes, someone’s going to screw you and they’re going to spill blood on your team. And I made it twelve years in the Belters without having to get blood back for my team.
Twelve years is a long, long time.
I was in a landing shuttle when I showed off the first pictures on my infotab. We were closing in on our mark, we had a twenty-minute weather hold, and I had to lighten the mood with my lieutenants. They clapped me on the back and congratulated me, remarked o
n how much like me Nadine looked, even though she only had my big crooked nose.
I got home that night and I was shaking, and there was my little pocket rocket zooming across the floor in her Wheelie Walker. And there was my princess on the couch, glowing with happiness, attended by the wife of a man I’d just watched commit an unspeakable murder at my command. And they both smiled at me, and they invited me to share one of the last bottles of California wine in existence.
And I drank the wine that my princess poured out for me. How could she not have known, as she handed me that glass? How could she have not seen that the last spark of humanity had drained out of my eyes watching that man’s body burn?
“You have the cutest babies I have ever seen,” Mrs. Salter said. She was a better fit for this life than Linata. She had expensive taste, a gift for social sabotage, and a winning smile that could hide more lies than a planetary ring could hide Coalition ships. “I’m jealous. Silas doesn’t want to do the treatments just yet.”
I remember thinking, in that moment, that Sy Salter must be smarter than he looked, because there was no way that fish-eyed little sadist was the only one hitting that. There was no sense paying for treatments so your wife could have the lawn guy’s kid.
Linata laughed. “You are so sweet, Maybelle,” she said. “But let me tell you, the two-year-old is lucky she’s cute. Do you see that white upholstered dining set over there?”
The smile on Mrs. Salter’s face matched the emptiness of her husband’s eyes; she was here, she was listening, but she did not give a flying fuck what any other human being said or did or thought. Maybe they were a good match after all.
I never did find out if the Salters had much happiness in their marriage, because it was long over by the time I got indicted. I was right about one thing, though: Mr. Salter was a lot smarter than he looked.
“No, no, no,” he said as he came back up a side shoot of the ditch we were walking through. “That’s another dead end. I can tell from the shape.”
“Yeah, we know,” Leka sighed, rolling her eyes. “It’d be nice if you’d tell us what that shape is.”
“Don’t you know the rainfall on this world has been steadily increasing over the last decade?” Salter said. “They dig new ditches every year to accommodate all the runoff. The newer ones are less eroded and have a V-shape.” He spoke as if expecting everyone present to be wowed by his ditch knowledge.
“You’d think there’d be more people travelling this way,” Leka said, nervousness close to breaking the film of contempt over her voice. “It’s a lot easier than trekking over the shitshow above ground.”
“I don’t expect that most people have briefed themselves as thoroughly as I have on these ditches’ layout,” Salter said. “I’m glad I took it into consideration when I was assigned to this job.”
“Hey, Kev,” Tomlins said. “Did you ever tell Leka about why Salter got sent here?”
“Because it’s fun to torment your old boss?” I said.
“The chemical bitches killed the old supervisor,” Tomlins said in a stage whisper directed at Leka. “Time they took him out of the stripping vats, there was nothing left but his e-plants.”
“I was minding my own business,” I said. “Not my fault Mr. Chess couldn’t stop putting his nose where it didn’t belong.”
Mr. Salter bristled. “If you’re trying to intimidate me…”
“Oh, lighten up,” Tomlins said, glancing at Leka as she dared to mouth off to him. “Amazing you’ve lasted this long without learning to take a joke.”
Salter knew when to stop talking, but only barely. You could see him muttering under his breath as he resumed his position at the head of the party. That’s where I wanted him, if he was going to carry that solid-slug rifle.
Not only could I see him there, he’d also be easy pickings when we inevitably had company.
There was just no way, I kept thinking, no way we were the only group of survivors who’d thought to go to ground down in these ditches. Hell, there had to have been people hiding down here from the initial blasts. Every one of us except Salter was tense and twitchy; we held our weapons tight and stayed close together in the shelter of wide leaves and wrecked machinery.
And up ahead, there was a sound. A deliberate sound.
I stopped, and so did the women. Salter kept going, though his posture got a little more long-necked and he started taking slower steps.
“He’s just got to be the badass, doesn’t he?” Tomlins whispered.
“Hey, quick question,” Leka said, just as quiet. “Since, uh, since the Belters aren’t coming back for him, and since he’s...uh…”
“A piece of shit.” I nodded in acknowledgment.
“Yeah,” Leka said. “So why don’t we, you know.” She cocked her head toward him and made a sudden, uncomfortable-looking gesture with her neck.
I frowned. “I have my reasons,” I said.
“Reasons,” Leka said. “Such as?”
“I’m not gonna go into it,” I said. I’d learned to phrase it that exact way when I was explaining...or rather, not explaining, what I knew of how Belters’ blood worked. If I said “I don’t want to go into it” then I sounded like I had a mysterious, probably sexy, secret that was just begging to be interrogated. No. I wasn’t going to explain what was going on, and if you asked me I was likely to get kind of pissed about it. So I started phrasing it a little more firmly.
I really didn’t have to explain that killing Salter myself, if it was even possible, might summon far worse things that we’d have to deal with.
Leka just shrugged and went “hmm.” Like it was something funny that she was well familiar with.
I looked at Tomlins. Tomlins looked back at me and raised her eyebrows, like did I want something? I could think of no reason that Tomlins would know about my Belters’ blood, let alone share the secret with the sketchiest slugger on her block.
Salter turned around and came walking back toward us. “All clear,” he said. “We can keep moving…”
“Incoming!” Leka yelled, hitting the ground as a volley of plasma bursts came diagonally across the ditch.
Didn’t have to tell me twice. I grabbed Tomlins and pulled her to the ground with me, repaying the favor from earlier. There were two shooters up ahead - it only took a moment for the adrenaline to hit the millions of tiny machines swimming in my blood.
The nice thing about Belters’ blood, and the reason it’s completely wasted on chucklefucks like Salter, is that it gives you time to think. Two shooters. They’d been lying low, real low, until we were almost on top of them. Maybe an ambush?
But the shots were going wild, which made me wonder if there was enough experience behind those rifles to pull off a real ambush.
I had time to get my rifle into position. I fired a shot right to the side of the more enthusiastic of the two shooters. “Hands up!” I said. “We come in peace!”
So. They were smart enough to figure out there was a better shot in front of them.
“Who are you?” a man’s voice called.
“Inmates from the breaker line,” I said.
From his prone position, Salter motioned for me to shut up. I showed him exactly what finger he could use to insert that notion where the sun didn’t shine.
Probably twenty yards away, behind some dense vegetation, I could hear arguing in a dialect I didn’t speak. My Belters’ blood could catch the gist, though - we were strangers to them, but we looked like we were friendly.
“Where’d you get those guns?” I said, hoping to keep the conversation in our command.
“We came from Sorting,” another male voice said. “What do you want?”
“There’s a riot down by the commissary buildings,” I said. “You don’t want to go down there. We’re trying to get away before they come back.”
“Before who comes back?” The first male voice was now joined by a face - young, brown-skinned, barely graced with a little black moustache.
“Why don’t we all come out and put our weapons…”
“It’s just the two of us.” The young guy came out and put his gun on the ground in front of him before raising his hands. “I’m Curtis. Come on, Garcia.”
Another guy of about his age, way taller, with a scar running down the side of his shaved head, came stepping nervously out of the bushes. He dropped his gun on the ground sloppily; the impact sent a plasma burst harmlessly into the side of the ditch.
The two young men jumped sideways. For a second, Curtis clung to Garcia’s arm before Garcia shoved him away.
“Don’t know much about how to handle those things, do you?” I got up into a crouching position without letting my weapon’s barrel move toward them.
Curtis shook his head no. “You guys, uh, army?”
“Not exactly,” I said. “How many years you have?”
“I’m on five out of ten,” Curtis said.
“Two out of twenty-five,” Garcia said.
Neither of those was a long sentence for this planet. They were both probably small-time smugglers or drug runners. Neither of them looked rough enough to have done anything with the big pseudocats. But then again, Salter looked like Salter.
“What’s your plan?” I said.
“We were gonna go to the commissary buildings,” Garcia said. “Who’s coming back? The, uh, the ships with the guns?”
“You saw a ship?” I said.
“Of course he saw…”
I waved Salter into silence. “I need to know what, specifically, you saw, and how it was that you saw it.”
“Look, man, we were on a fume break,” Curtis said. “We were minding our own business, right, and I ducked into a ditch to take a leak when I heard this...I don’t know how to describe it.” He shook his head. “I guess kind of like the charger on that thing,” he said, pointing to his rifle, “right before it’s ready to shoot.”
“Yeah?” I said. “And then what?”