by David Ryker
Nobody argued. We headed toward the rising sun as soon as we could get our packs reassembled, and we climbed as quickly as Leka’s lungs allowed us.
After about a mile, I could hear Tomlins wheezing.
“Do you want me to carry you?” I said.
“I’m good,” she said. “The fog’s thinning out the higher we go.”
“The air’s probably getting thin, too,” I said. “Come on. Don’t ruin your lungs.”
“Just let him carry you,” Tomlins said. “Salter. Get down.”
“You chose to come with us,” Mr. Salter said. “You can walk.”
“You’re a miserable bastard, Salter,” Leka said. “I know you can carry me.”
But the fog was indeed getting thinner, and I was breathing easier after we ascended a few hundred more feet toward the ridgeline. Below us, I could now see a line where a yellow-green cloud was filling the valley. It stretched eastward, thinning out toward a hub like the leak in a water tank that flooded a whole deck.
It was strangely beautiful, in a way. Leka and Curtis stopped too, staring down at the stream of toxic vapor.
“Holy shit,” Curtis said. “You said Textiles was nasty, Tomlins. I didn’t think…”
“Yeah, it’s like that sometimes,” she said. “Although they might just be venting all the meso tanks to try and flush out fugitives from the jungle valleys.”
“Fugitives like us, you mean,” I said.
“Or, it could be that one of those damn...Belter, or xeno, or admin or whatever the hell kind of ships hit a meso tank,” Tomlins said. “Or they’re just making a really weird batch of something and the waste gases look like meso but are much worse.”
“Comforting,” Leka said. “Well, at least we know how to find the place, don’t we?”
As we headed east, we had two objectives: follow the path of the toxic cloud coming from Textiles, and stay out of the worst of the cloud itself.
This got easier as the sun rose. The vapor thinned off in the heat, and Tomlins could get off my back. Leka stopped coughing for once, though the color never really returned to her face.
“They ought to give us medical care when we get to the PDS,” Curtis said when we were about six miles out. “At least, if the facility’s still intact.”
“That’s cute,” Garcia said. “More likely than not, the guards have abandoned the place to the prisoners.”
“Don’t speak that shit into existence,” Curtis said. “How are you holding up, Chief?”
“I’ll live,” I said. I declined to mention the less-than-pleasant task of passing parts of a bullet through your kidneys. It’s not great, although it beats heavy metal poisoning in the long term.
About three miles out, we could see over the ridge and catch glimpses of the small city-complex known as Textiles. Here was where every old piece of clothing in this part of the galaxy went to die, and to be reborn as cheap industrial fabric used for everything from discount garments to industrial dust shielding.
A big part of this process involved chemically melting certain kinds of fabric. Those reactions generally smelled bad.
“We should stop and eat,” Leka said. “I could murder some of those powdered eggs.”
“And I could murder whoever invented that process,” Curtis said. “Out of all the food you had to find. Powdered eggs?”
“Better than nothing, Chef,” Garcia said. “Quit your bitching.”
We had bottled water to rehydrate the powdered eggs, but none of us had been smart enough to grab something to cook them with. Curtis had a lighter, but nobody managed to find any vegetation that was dead enough to burn.
By the time we were done looking, the eggs had rehydrated into a spongy yellow mass.
“Fuck it,” Leka said, prodding at it with a fork she’d stolen. “I’m hungry.”
Cold, lumpy rehydrated eggs definitely made the list of the worst things I’d eaten since I’d been arrested. It didn’t matter. We were all so tired and hungry, we kind of went on autopilot stuffing it into our faces. When we’d finished with the eggs, we gave the noodles the same treatment.
They, at least, tasted better. Kind of salty.
We took our sweet time packing our shit up. None of us wanted to admit, I think, how tired we were after half a day of slogging through the jungle. There were no trails out here, and navigating by the landscape meant a lot more climbing up and down and doubling back than I liked.
I only felt it for a second. A shiver, like iron dust rippling when a magnet passes over it. It felt weird, but it didn’t feel bad, necessarily.
For some reason, it made me look up at Salter. Salter was looking at me.
“Did you say something?” Salter said.
“No,” I said. “Did…”
The sound of a Beezer, as heard from the ground, was getting a little too familiar to me. I heard five bursts in a row, then a roar.
“Holy shit!” Tomlins said, pointing east at a massive, blue-green fireball that was rising into the sky. “They must have hit one of the meso tanks.”
A Beezer flashed again, and again the whole sky lit up with a chemical explosion that rose high up above the ceiling of the jungle. Fear rose in my gut as the roar reached our ears.
“We gotta get away from here,” Curtis said. “No way that plant’s PDS survived those blasts!”
“We should at least get close enough to look,” Tomlins said. “We came all this way. We don’t have to go much further.”
“No,” Salter said. “We need to avoid people, remember? Particularly people who’ve just been thrown into a state of chaos.”
“And fresh chemical explosions,” Curtis added. “Those are good to avoid, too.”
“But what if they’ve already fixed and activated the PDS?” Leka said. “Why waste our time and resources trying to find another one?”
I looked at the plumes of orange-yellow smoke rising from the textiles operation. “It’s not that far to the top of the next ridge,” I said. “If the PDS is still intact, I say we go down and see if it’s being used.”
“You think you’ll be able to see it from here?” Leka said.
I gave her a sly smile. Surely, she already knew how sharp my eyes could be.
10
The first hundred yards to the ridge, we walked at a good clip. By three hundred yards, we were running.
By the time we reached the rocky summit, we were all scrambling to get forward with whatever limb would propel us. We could hear the sounds of chaos below, and the summit promised us some clarity on the situation.
Salter was up first. He stood on the highest point and shaded his eyes with one hand as he frowned at the scene below him.
“What do you see?” I said as I joined him on the peak.
“There’s no way the PDS survived the blast,” he said. “Look for yourself. It’s a free-for-all down there.”
I stood beside him and looked down at what was left of the textiles plant. Most of the view was obscured with smoke. “Bullshit,” I said. “The PDS could still be standing and we wouldn’t see it.”
“We gotta get down there,” Curtis said. “Shit, man, look at that! We gotta see if someone needs help!”
“If?” Garcia said. “You take a whiff of that smoke and tell me there’s an ‘if’ about people needing help down there.”
Salter’s face stayed immobile as he turned to Curtis and Garcia. “Wasn’t it you, Curtis, who said we don’t know what kind of crazy we’re dealing with in these facilities?”
“Yeah, I know what I said then,” Curtis said, turning an irritated frown on Salter. “And I know what I’m lookin’ at now, which is a lot of people who are in a shitload of trouble. This isn’t no riot.”
“Not yet,” Tomlins said. “How much do you want to bet we can get there with assistance before…”
“Get in the trees,” I said. “Do it now.”
Even as I spoke, the thump of a quad-copter came from the southeast. We booked it for the forest’s edge,
though it was pretty obvious the quad wasn’t looking for us. It looped around the column of sickly yellow smoke, which was swiftly darkening as some other fuel was added to the fire.
And I felt it again, that ripple throughout my whole body. Something had just been turned on, but I wasn’t sure what it was.
“Ahhh, I see now,” Salter said. He was smiling as he watched the sky overhead. “Maybe the PDS is still standing after all.”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“Whatever struck those tanks wasn’t trying to do infrastructural damage,” he said. A creepy little smile was playing on the edges of his mouth. “It was trying to create a lot of highly visible smoke. Draw the quad-copters in.” He turned and pointed up to the northeast. A vee formation of quads was speeding toward the wreckage of Textiles.
“Oh, shit,” I said.
“Yep, we’d better get under cover,” Salter said. “I don’t want to stick around on high ground for this particular dogfight.”
Even if we couldn’t witness what was happening over the recycling facility, we could hear it. Coalition quad-copters were swarming in from all over, trying to respond to whatever was firing on the facilities.
And they were getting ambushed. Ambushed bad. You would hear the aerial guns rattle for a few short bursts and then be interrupted with the gut-churning roar of a Beezer.
“Do you still think this is Belters?” I said to Salter as we crossed a shallow stream. We were booking it through the jungle as fast as we could, which was not very fast carrying all our supplies and not having a trail to go by.
“You and I both know what Lucky Pavel is capable of,” Salter said, “but even for him this is a little extreme.”
That was the closest I was ever going to get to an agreement from Salter. “We’ll see if there’s anything left of the facility by the time we get down there,” I said. “Whoever these…” I trailed off. “Did you hear something?”
“I heard someone.” Salter stopped in his tracks and looked to the north. He was taking that odd, stiff stance that blood bearers take sometimes when they’re really listening hard - limbs stiff at his sides, legs splayed a little farther apart than natural. Like you’re trying to make your body into a reception tower.
“Hello?” Curtis yelled, stepping in front of us. “Hey, is someone out there?”
“Over here!” The voice in the distance didn’t sound like it was talking to us. “I hear more people!”
“So much for staying away from unknown quantities of crazy.” Tomlins sighed and shook her head. “These people had better be normal.”
“Aren’t we on a prison planet?” Leka asked.
“Relatively normal.” Tomlins gave her a withering glance, then frowned in the direction of the sounds of people crashing through the vegetation. “I didn’t come all this way in this fucking humidity to get mugged by…”
“Oh, yes, you complain about the air quality,” Leka said. “Hey! We’re over here if you want to come murder us!”
“We’re friendly!” A voice came from behind wide leaves, followed by a round brown face. “We’re friendly!” A squat middle-aged woman with her hair in braids came running toward us, followed by a group of scraggly Textiles grunts in ash-stained jumpsuits. She stopped about twenty yards away and fell to her knees, struggling for breath.
A taller woman came rushing to her side, muttering in a dialect I didn’t speak. I picked up concern, affection - this lady meant something to her.
I still approached with caution, my weapon held in front of me. “Did you come from Textiles?” I said.
“What does it look like?” A tall, gray-haired man stepped forward, holding his hands up. Despite his hair color, he didn’t look that much older than I was. Just closer to dying. “We’re harmless,” he said. “We’re just trying to get...get somewhere else.”
“Is your Planetary Distress Signal intact?” I asked.
“I mean, yes,” the gray-haired man said. “But...but you’re not seriously thinking of going there, are you?”
“It’s the only way we’re going to stop these...these whatever they are,” Tomlins said. “We just need to get to a PDS tower.”
“Don’t be foolish,” the taller of the first two women said, looking up from her wheezing comrade. “The guards will have set one of the towers off, if not every single one on the planet.”
“That’s not what I heard,” I said. “Rumor near disassembly is the PDS has been offline for weeks.”
“It is the government,” Leka said. “Can’t trust ‘em to do anything unless you’re watching over their shoulder.”
“Yeah, speaking of the government,” the shorter woman said. “How much charge do you have in that plasma rifle?”
“How soon is it going to matter?” I said.
“I’d give us twenty minutes, the speed we’ve been going.” The gray-haired man looked behind him.
I was noticing other green jumpsuits now, coming out of the vegetation with fearful movements that reminded me of a prey animal. Some of them were limping; others were holding wads of fabric to their torn-up faces.
“Holy shit,” Leka said as she came forward. “How many of you are there?”
“Probably thirty,” the short woman said. “I’m Anderson. Nice to meet you.” She extended a hand from her crouching position. “But yeah. You don’t want to go back to that plant.”
“I don’t want to be on this planet,” Leka said. “And yet, here I am. How many of you are hurt?”
“Twelve,” Anderson said.
“God dammit,” Leka said. She turned to me with a pleading look on her face. “Kev,” she said. “Are you willing…”
“How many guards do you have after you?” I said.
“I’m not sure,” Anderson said. “None of us are armed. Nobody is with us who can’t walk…”
“That’s not gonna last long until I get some clean bandages on some of these wounds,” Leka said. “I don’t have much in the way of medical supplies, but I can do triage.”
“I have a sewing kit,” the gray-haired man said, procuring a folded piece of cardboard from his pocket.
“Would you say more than ten guards?” I said as Leka stepped forward to grab the kit from the man.
“Fewer,” Anderson said. “Look, we should get moving…”
“Yeah, but not far,” I said. “Leka. Get the wounded down that gully behind us a little ways. Salter and Tomlins, with me a little farther down this ridge. Curtis and Garcia, get the rest of the survivors hidden from view.”
“Got it, Chief,” Curtis said.
Salter cleared his throat. “If I may intrude on your…”
“You may not,” I said, rounding on him. “We are hell and gone from the last people to grant you any kind of authority over me, and I’m starting to think that we might not live to see those people again.”
“Are you challenging me, Mr. Collins?” Salter said.
“I have no need to challenge you,” I said. “It’s been made pretty clear who these people are following around in this jungle.”
Salter opened his mouth to respond, but then paused, looking around him at the people he’d been irritating in one fashion or another for the past two days. “You’re taking a pretty big gamble, Collins, that we won’t see the Belters again.”
“It’s a gamble I’m willing to take to protect thirty fucking people,” I said. Hadn’t I ruined at least that many lives while I’d been working for the likes of him? “Besides, if I lose, they’ll know who it was who kept you alive through all of this bullshit.”
“He’s right,” Tomlins said. “If it wasn’t for him, I’d have already put a slug right between your beady little eyes.”
“I’d like to see you try,” Salter said.
I knew for a fact that Belters’ blood was useless if you got shot in the head. The tiny machines required a certain amount of bioelectric energy to operate properly; if your neural systems were damaged enough, they’d all shut down.
; He was watching me, waiting to see if I’d reveal that little bit of information. It could help me, potentially, to be the one to clue them in on the nature of Belters’ blood. Or it could get me killed.
If I got killed, I was never going to see Celeste and Nadine again.
“Let’s cut the drama and get into position,” I said. “You can see how this ridgeline creates a natural funnel, yes?”
“The one that these people were moving up,” Salter said. He was watching me with those fish eyes, trying to sense if I was unnerved or not by our little back-and-forth. He had me confused for someone who gave a fuck.
“Exactly,” I said. “You can bet on it that the guards are gonna be coming along up it, following these people’s tracks. We need to be above them.”
“Good idea,” Tomlins said.
We all started climbing to the northwest, keeping our eyes peeled downhill as we looked for good places to lie in wait.
In the distance, I could hear voices.
“Get ready,” I said. “I don’t think we have a full twenty minutes.”
In fact, we had maybe five or ten before a couple of hoverbikes came careening up the ridgeline, twisting between trees and holding to a couple yards’ elevation.
Tomlins took aim and fired. One of the troopers fell off the hoverbike. The other one bailed with a shriek and rolled away into the bushes.
I set my plasma rifle to fire bursts and fired as I swept my barrel forward across the lead hoverbike. Rider and passenger both fell into the jungle; I heard a burst of solid slug fire coming from the fallen passenger. He was about two-thirty of me, but I couldn’t get a clear shot the way the trees were lined up.
The third hoverbike’s auto-systems managed to get it past a couple more trees before it had some kind of engine failure and careened into a thick, vine-covered trunk.
Tomlins came leaping out of the bush shrieking, throwing a handful of dirt and rocks in front of her as she ran forward in a zig-zag. As crude of a gambit as it was, it worked, and she had time to get six or seven strides down the mountain before her target rose out of the bush to take aim.