Blood Oath

by David Ryker

  “It was just for a second, because I think it had some stealth shit going on,” Curtis said. “But you know how when there’s a slekma coasting overhead and it’ll be almost invisible until it turns its wings?”

  I didn’t know what the fuck a slekma was, but I nodded. “Sure,” I said, because I could work out what he was talking about. And it worried me.

  “So you didn’t see a ship, is what you’re saying,” Salter said. I could tell from the insulting confidence in his voice that he, too, was a little concerned about what this kid had seen.

  “He saw what he saw,” Garcia said. “And I saw it too. It was vee-shaped, like one of those old-school Coalition interceptors.”

  “That’s not possible,” Salter said. “The Coalition has never and will never have access to that gun.”

  “And who are you?” Curtis said.

  “Someone who knows,” Salter said, drawing himself up to his full height.

  “So you know?” Garcia said. “How?”

  “They look like cops,” Curtis said.

  “I’m not a cop,” I said. “Leka back here was in the Coalition Forces. Salter’s just an all-purpose slimeball, in here for eighty. Trust him. He knows.”

  “If you’re not a cop, and you’re not Coalition, then what makes you the chief of this outfit?” Curtis said. He had picked up his gun again. His barrel discipline was unsteady.

  “Why don’t you join up with us and find out?” I said. “You look like smart guys.” They didn’t. “We’ll be safer out there in a bigger group.” We would.

  “Safer from what, though?” Garcia said. Whether they were conscious of it or not, the two of them were stepping slowly closer together, back-to-back.

  “Well, isn’t that just the million credit question?” I pointed at a low spot in the hills. It wasn’t near the main track that led from section to section of the planet-sprawling recycling center, but it looked more or less passable. “We’re gonna get supplied up and head that way.”

  “Supplied up,” Curtis said. “But you just said there was a riot at the…”

  “That’s right,” I said. “Now, you’re welcome to go try your luck down at the commissary buildings there. Let me just ask you one question.”

  “Sure,” Garcia said. “Go ahead.”

  I pointed at the weapon he’d gotten off a dead guard. “What is the make and model of the gun you are holding?” I said.

  The expressions on his face were easy to read: puzzled at first, then embarrassed, then furious. He wouldn’t last long among the real predators, the ones who clawed their way to the top when things like this happened. “Fuck, man, I don’t know!” he said. “I grew up in a fucking cadmium refinery! I don’t know shit about all this mil-tech.”

  “That’s not a problem with me,” I said. “Now, with those guys down at the commissary?” I jerked my thumb backward in the direction of today’s impromptu warzone.

  As if to underscore my point, a pair of Coalition quad copters came swooping out of the sky. I could hear the sound of megaphones demanding better behavior of the prisoners raiding the commissary. It wouldn’t be long before ground forces came to back them up - if there weren’t some ground forces already riding in on those quads.

  “Yeah,” Curtis said, nodding as he gently prodded Garcia with his elbow. “I could see where they might have more of a problem with our, uh, familiarity with the weapons here.”

  “You’re a smart guy,” I said. “You’ll pick this shit up in no time. Now what else did you pick up off the dead guards?” I jerked my thumb toward the foreboding tree line. “We’re gonna have to get creative here if we want to survive in there.”

  5

  The Bathys system, as far as I knew, had been terraformed as kind of an interstellar hunting lodge for some very rich eccentrics who weren’t so rich anymore. The Coalition had seized the whole asset, killed off all the animals that hunted human beings, and used it to store garbage of varying types. Some planets, rumor had it, were cold, rocky forests or arid deserts without a tree to be seen.

  This one was mostly jungle, and where it wasn’t it was swamp or a recycling operation. The recycling plant was increasingly gaining ground on the swamps, largely because the boggy ground was cheaper and easier to put giant machinery in than the steep hills full of thick and twisting trees.

  It kind of reminded me of my homeworld. There was a lot more water back home, of course, and most of the population wasn’t currently serving out a prison term. But right now, the smell of fire and the general air of panic kind of made me feel like I should go to the apartment and see if my aunt had made dinner.

  “This guy’s not carrying anything good.” Tomlins had all but stripped the latest corpse we’d come across on our trek to the jungle’s edge. “Look, Kev, I don’t think we…”

  “Ssh.” I held up a hand. “Do you hear that…”

  “That’s that sound!” Curtis was suddenly behind me, scanning the sky for a glimpse of the returning ship.

  My heart jumped, thumping up into my throat. They were back, goddammit! “Get down!” I yelled. “Get down!”

  There was probably no need. A blast from one of the attackers hit the ground close by; the earth shook, and our whole little party was doing our best to bury our bodies among the big leaves of the ground-covering vines.

  “Told you they’d be back!” I said, not too happy to have been proven right.

  In the distance, I could hear the sounds of panic escalating near the commissary. I could hear the rattle of the quadcopters’ machine gun fire. More blasts answered it, and I heard an explosion that accompanied a flash of harsh white light.

  “Holy shit,” Curtis said, grabbing Garcia’s sleeve. “We gotta get out of here!”

  “Not right now, we don’t,” I said. “We’re invisible from the air right now, and we’re in good cover. Once this is over, we high-tail it to the jungle.”

  “With no supplies,” Tomlins said.

  “What about the ceramics dump?” Garcia said, pulling away from Curtis’s grip.

  “What’s there?” Tomlins narrowed her eyes. “That’s a couple miles’ hike from here. Uphill.”

  “I know,” Garcia said. “That’s why they have their own little commissary. Maybe it hasn’t been hit yet, or maybe there’s not as much rioting there.”

  “And what if it hasn’t been hit?” Salter said. “The dump will surely be crawling with guards, and they’ll all be on high alert…”

  We all stopped to stare up as another round of plasma blasts came spewing out of a ship I couldn’t quite make out through the clouds. They were gunning for the big crowd of people at the commissary, weren’t they? I could hear people screaming as the remaining quadcopter retreated.

  “My friend, the Belters are not coming back for us.” I watched Garcia’s and Curtis’s reaction to the name. Both of them were smart enough to start looking real nervous, first at each other and then at us. Good. “If the ceramics dump has guards, we figure it out. We might get lucky and find out that they just got hit.”

  Curtis was the first to take the conversation back to the Belter thing, clearing his throat nervously before he spoke. “Hey, so you’re with...with…”

  “He is,” I said, jerking my thumb at Salter. “I’ve been informed that my presence is no longer…”

  “I’m afraid that’s not how it works, Mr. Collins,” Salter said. “But no, you will not be active serving with us anymore.”

  “Like I said, I’m not exactly in their good graces,” I said to Curtis and Garcia. “Mr. Salter here is what you might call my babysitter while I’m sitting here doing time.”

  Garcia’s eyebrows shot up slightly. “Oh, so I’m not the only babysitter around…”

  “Doing how much time?” Curtis asked.

  “Twenty,” I said.

  Garcia spat on the ground. “Belters killed my cousin,” he said.

  “Yeah?” I said. “I’m very sorry.”

  He picked up his weapon and hef
ted it across his chest, revealing that his grip was barely any steadier than Curtis’s. “Sorry?” he said.

  “Yeah, sorry,” I said. “That’s all I got for you right now. You can try to take it with my dead body, or you can take it with my living ability to get you through the next few days alive.” I casually turned the safety off on my plasma rifle. “It’s all up to you what you wanna do.”

  “How do I know you’re not gonna put a bullet in my back the moment it’s convenient for you?” Garcia said.

  “Because this thing doesn’t fire bullets,” I said. “It slings a plasma pulse in three different settings.”

  “Yeah, I know that, smart-ass!” Garcia said.

  “Look, I don’t know why that gun is firing at us or who’s firing it,” I said, “but that’s a gun that only the Belters use. That I know of.” I shot a look at Salter that wasn’t accusing but wasn’t exactly friendly either.

  “Yeah?” Garcia said. “And who did the Belters get it from?”

  “From someone,” I said. “I was never important enough to them to get a full explanation of everything they did.”

  “Important enough to get a minder while you’re imprisoned,” Curtis said.

  “You think they’d send a creature like this out to watch over someone important?” Tomlins stepped forward and clapped me on the back. “Nah, man. Kev here’s a solid dude. Just grew up in the wrong neighborhood, you know?”

  “What, are you in with him?” Garcia said.

  “Me? In the Belters?” Tomlins laughed. “Nah. I worked independently.”

  “Tomlins here was a small-time terrorist in the Nafir system,” Mr. Salter pointed out in his most helpful of tones. “Her work was sensational, but it would not be up to our standards for...cautiousness.”

  “And what about you, then?” Garcia pointed at Leka. “You’re pretty cocky with that gun of yours, too.”

  “I’m just another ex-military junkie,” Leka said. “They kicked me out and then had the civilian police arrest me because it was cheaper than military jail.”

  The two young men exchanged a long look and stepped back together from the group as they conferred in whispers. Once again, my Belters’ blood let my ears pick up the gist of their conversation. I would have smiled if it wouldn’t have been a tell.

  “Okay,” Garcia said, picking his head up from their conference. “We have a deal. We’ll stick with you guys and go up to the ceramics dump.”

  Behind him, Curtis didn’t look so sure about that conclusion.

  “And once we’re there, you’ll follow my lead,” I said. “Now, let’s get a move on. Do you guys know the best route through these ditches?”

  “Not really,” Curtis said, stepping forward to catch up with Garcia. “We’re just hiding down here trying not to get…”

  To the west, there was a roar and a burst of white flame. I couldn’t tell what had just shot the fleeing quadcopter, but something had. Curtis was probably right about whatever stealth technology these sons of bitches were using.

  “Mr. Salter, get back in front,” I said. “We’ve got to get to the ceramic dump before this shit gets any worse.”

  The track between this recycling op and the ceramic dump was made and maintained by big, two-track crawler survees that chewed up the ground and the vegetation alike. It certainly made navigation a breeze, but actually moving along the road was slow going.

  Besides, if we actually walked in the survee track we might be seen. I didn’t know what exactly might be watching us. I wasn’t exactly expecting a warm welcome down at ceramics.

  So we were clinging to the edge of the track, watching the sky and our six-o-clock with equal worry on our brains. The slightest noise was enough to send all of us scurrying for cover, even Salter, who was trying to put on a show about being the bravest among us.

  Curtis and Garcia were putting on a show, too. At least theirs was helpful: they were watching the way I and Salter held our rifles and trying to keep up the flank, protecting the women in the middle as if Tomlins and Leka weren’t the most dangerous part of our crew.

  About a mile up the hill, we heard the sound of two more Coalition quads heading toward the recycling op, the opposite direction from us. I made for a tree, only to have Leka redirect me toward a clump of plants with huge foliage.

  “Premnoids,” she said. “Exothermic leaves. They’ll mask your heat signature.”

  “Huh.” I looked up and touched the underside of a leaf. Sure enough, it was warm to the touch. “Shit. They teach you botany in the forces?”

  “They use the juice to cook grief,” she said. “Thought you’d know that.”

  I shrugged. “I was a transport guy,” I said.

  Garcia laughed at that. “Oh yeah?” he said. “Like, running the shit?”

  “Something like that,” I said. Truth was, they only called it ‘running’ when you were measuring it in grams. What I did was...what I did was in the past, for starters.

  “I didn’t think the Belters had their own runners,” Garcia said. “They had me set up as a minor supplier to my hab dome. I had six or seven strippers who used to run it for me.”

  “Used to,” I said.

  “Didn’t Belters kill your cousin?” Tomlins said.

  “Of course they did,” I said. “He got caught.” I gave Garcia a sympathetic look. “Eighty years, huh?”

  “Twenty for each girl who died.” Garcia’s face clouded. I could see the muscles working beneath the skin to contain the emotion. “It was an accident, man.” He shut his eyes and shook his head. “Candy and I were gonna get out, man. We were gonna, you know.” He shrugged and started rubbing a spot of dirt off the chassis of his rifle, glaring at it while his jaw clenched and unclenched.

  I decided not to ask if Candy was one of the girls who died.

  “I know,” I said. “I...I know.”

  “It’s still fucked up you got eighty,” Curtis said. “Yours were accidental.” He spat on the ground. “Me? Now, I’d kill that motherfucker twice if they’d let me.”

  “You got twenty for murder?” Tomlins was on five of one-twenty. She raised a single eyebrow.

  “Plea bargain,” Curtis said. “This guy was threatening my sister. I shoved him on a balcony. Railing broke.” He set his lower jaw forward and raised his chin.

  “Aww, shit,” Leka said. “They can’t get you for murder on that!”

  “Maybe they could, maybe they couldn’t,” Curtis said. “But if they questioned my sister, they were gonna take her kids away.”

  “You gotta do what you can for your family, man,” Garcia said, giving Curtis a look of quiet approval. “The Coalition doesn’t give a fuck about us. The hab councils don’t give a fuck about…” He looked up suddenly.

  I heard it too. Not a mechanical sound (and thank God for that), or the lumbering of a humanoid in heavy vegetation. And then, which was worse, was that I didn’t hear it.

  Without thinking, I put my hand out flat - the standard military signal for silence. Leka nodded, and so did Salter and Tomlins. You didn’t need to be in the Coalition Forces to be smart enough to learn a little tactical sign language.

  It’s just an animal. When you used Belters’ blood to communicate with other people who had it, you could get your point across a little clearer. But that’s all you could do - get the point across. I heard the sentence in my own voice, directed at Salter, the way I’d have phrased it.

  That was why the Belters had originally started using the xeno-sourced nanotech, actually: it made people suggestible, made them think they’d come up with an idea that had been ‘suggested’ to them by another blood-bearer. Apparently, it was really good for what the bug-legged bastards they’d gotten the tech from called “organizational cohesiveness.” All of them carried the blood, and so almost none of them asked questions.

  Humans, it turned out, don’t work that way. You sew some tech in us that makes us rapid-heal and fine tunes every nerve in our body, we start noticing. We start thinki
ng maybe it wasn’t our idea to make an example of the Gully Gang. Maybe we even start asking some questions we weren’t ever specifically told not to ask.

  The whole ‘subtle communication’ thing doesn’t really play to the strengths of our species, you know?

  “Hey, what’s going on?” Garcia asked.

  “Quiet,” Tomlins said. I should have been watching her. Her whole body was tense, oriented uphill toward a thick mass of bushes. I saw her thumb on the power-up lever; my eyes keyed in; I could almost feel the tension of the thumbnail against the lever.

  If she’d been a fellow blood bearer, I could have actually felt it. Wasn’t sure how.

  “Shit, dude.” Curtis leaned close to whisper in my ear, all the bravado in his voice replaced by nervousness. He pointed to the clump of trees, but he didn’t need to. I could see the shape protruding from the vegetation.

  That was one of the things I’d known before I’d gotten in with the Belters - how to look for something that shouldn’t be there. It wasn’t enough to look for a weird color, or listen for noises. The idea was to look for a solid outline, a shape that was out of place with the rest of the shapes in the area.

  With this one, that wasn’t hard.

  “Do you know what that is?” Curtis continued, his voice a whisper barely loud enough for my enhanced senses to hear. “Because I don’t have a fuckin’ clue.”

  “Join the club,” I said.

  “Didn’t this place used to be a hunting preserve?” Curtis said. “Maybe it’s...maybe it’s some kind of exotic game animal.”

  “If it’s a game animal, we should be fairly safe,” Leka said.

  “You don’t know the kind of people that buy up whole worlds for hunting preserves,” Tomlins said. She was watching the shape in the bushes. I wanted to call it a face - it had spots on it that could be eyes, and it was rotating in the way that animals usually rotated their faces. Or whatever it was they used to collect audiovisual information.

  “Not really,” Curtis said. “Why should I?”

  “Hunting prey animals is a sport for poor people,” Tomlins said. “And we are about to start living large.”