Blood Oath

by David Ryker

  “The unlawful arrest, you mean?” I said.

  “Dad, don’t mouth off,” Celeste said. “Mom said it’s your mouth getting you in…”

  “Baby, can we forget about what your mom is saying for just a second?” I said. “She is really mad at me right now, and she doesn’t mean everything she…”

  “Daddy, just come home!” Nadine said. “Just tell them you didn’t do it! Because I know you didn’t, and Mommy’s not going to take us away!”

  “Hey. You need to go with your mom,” I said. I remember how much effort it took to keep my voice steady. At that point, I thought she was going to testify against me, which could have been...what do the lawyers call it? ‘Real Fucking Bad,’ I think, is the legal term. “Mommy’s gonna take good care of you, okay?”

  I thought she was gonna testify against me, and I thought I was going to wind up frying out somewhere in the Void, another gross example of why smart boys and girls don’t fuck around with the Belters. I thought that this was gonna be the last time I saw my daughters. I didn’t want them to see their dad having a total mental breakdown right in front of them because he was gonna get the death penalty. So I held myself together. Somehow. No matter how much it hurt inside.

  “I don’t wanna go with Mom,” Celeste said. “Not unless you’re there with us.”

  “Sweetheart, I promise,” I said. “As soon as I get this mess sorted out, I’ll be right there with you guys again. Okay? And no matter what happens with me and your mom, I love you. You know that, right?”

  Maybe it would have been better if Linata had testified. Maybe it would have been better if I were dead, just another piece of space trash without any hope or purpose in the universe.

  Having no hope at all is, some say, better than facing up against impossible odds. And what I could see through the jungle looked pretty much impossible to me.

  “We can’t stay in this place for long,” Leka said. Her voice was getting fainter and scratchier as we neared Textiles. “I’m gonna start puking.”

  “Too bad we’re here to find a body,” Tomlins said. “Come on, hun. You stay put right where you are and we’ll rendezvous.”

  Leka made a dissatisfied noise in the back of her throat and shoved her gun at me. “Then take this,” she said. “Someone needs to have a proper weapon against these things.”

  I took the weapon, making brief eye contact with Leka. It was plain to see on her face that she knew...something about me. But what? And who’d told her? And why?

  Those questions were all going to have to wait until later. The wail of tearing metal brought all our attention out past the treeline.

  Thank God it was just a burned-out piece of equipment continuing its slow collapse under its own weight. Still, it didn’t help my mental state. We were all on edge, sure we were going to come under attack any second now. I’d been in more than my share of firefights during my time with the Belters. But none of them had prepared me for going head to head with some unknown xeno invasion force. Besides, I’d been doing hard labor on this dustball long enough to go rusty.

  Stay sharp, I admonished myself. I knew getting lost in my head was a sure ticket to ending up very dead, very fast.

  We had stopped to rest at the lip of a gulley that ran a few dozen yards down to the edge of the crater where Textiles used to be. The closest tower thing was nearly a quarter mile away. I didn’t know how comforting that was supposed to be.

  Viewed from a distance, the destruction of the plant had been breathtaking. Up close...well, we were lucky to get a breath in. I could see - and smell - why Anderson and her people had been so afraid to come back here. We’d picked a particularly mangled section of the plant’s southwestern edge for our entry point. Here, I figured, we could move around among the smoke and ash and falling metal without being seen too easily by either the xenos or any guards who might have a reason to hang around. To be honest, I wasn’t sure which one I was more worried about. Any guards who hadn’t fled probably had a bad motive for being here, and I doubted they’d want witnesses.

  “Well, it’s now or never,” Simms said, crouching beside me as he surveyed the wreckage. “I think I see a guard uniform over there.”

  He was pointing to the remains of a brickwork tower about two hundred yards away. To get there, we would first have to scramble down a steep, eroded slope of poisoned red and yellow clay. That would put us in an alley that had once led around the back of this edge of the plant, between some kind of ex-conveyor belt machine and the edge of the jungle.

  “Must have been a watchpost,” Tomlins said. Without waiting for further instructions, she started bounding through the vegetation toward the slope of crumbling dirt.

  “Here we go,” I said as I followed after.

  Simms and Okafor were right behind me as I followed Tomlins’s path. It was a good thing she had gone first - nimble and clever, the ex-thief had spotted a route down to the pavement of the alley with plenty of flat spots, rocks, and roots to keep us from tumbling down in a heap.

  She stopped to wait for me and catch her breath, hands on her knees, back heaving with the exertion of her short journey. I had to make this fast, I realized. I wondered how much airborne poison my Belters’ blood was filtering out for me. I wondered how much more Simms and Okafor could take.

  “You guys okay?” I said, turning around.

  “Yeah,” Simms said. “Let’s just not waste any time.”

  The smoke down here smelled sickly-sweet. Probably best to avoid thinking about what combination of chemicals and carcasses was causing that odor.

  We followed Tomlins through the destruction on a twisting path. Nobody could be certain whether danger was coming from above, behind, the side, or even below. We moved with the paranoid arrhythmia of a wounded prey animal.

  Behind me, I heard Simms coughing. I turned to see him doubled over, covering his mouth but not the trail of blood that was leaking from it.

  Okafor moved in front of him. “He’s fine,” he said. “He just has a touch of asthma.”

  My Belters’ blood did not give me the kind of enhanced social skills needed in a situation like this. “Right,” I said. Truth be told, Simms was not the worst possible person to be coughing up blood in this situation.

  He stopped hacking long enough to motion for me to move forward. “Meet me back here,” he said. “I’m...I’m out of…” He was interrupted by another coughing fit.

  “You heard him,” Tomlins said. “That body’s just up ahead.”

  Leave it to Tomlins to home in like that on a corpse. She was moving up a pile of rubble now, testing each piece with her foot before asking it to carry her weight.

  Okafor and I followed quietly. Okafor kept looking back at Simms. His jaw was tight; I could see worry in his good eye.

  “You guys buddies?” I said.

  “We were on the same crew,” Okafor said. “You know what’s kind of funny?”

  “No,” I said. Could anything be kind of funny right now?

  “Our job was spraying flame retardant on the heavy-duty production textiles,” he said. “Motherfucking flame retardant.”

  Actually, that was pretty funny. “I don’t suppose you have any of that shit lying around?” I said.

  “I said flame retardant, not electro-laser retardant,” Okafor said. “We don’t have to worry about fire unless we hang out here way too long.”

  I had no intention of doing that. Tomlins was waving to me from across what used to be some kind of street. With her free hand, she was tugging on the corpse’s arm.

  He was a young guy, relatively. Time spent in the textiles operation had roughened his skin, but he had still been carrying good weight (and none of it in tumors) when he’d died. Hadn’t been fast, though. A fallen beam had crushed his legs, and it looked like he’d bled out from the femoral artery.

  Naturally, our first instinct was to search his clothing for his comm unit.

  “Fuck, where is it?” Tomlins said. She had given up on goin
g through the guard’s pockets while those pockets were still attached to the guard; his jacket was spread out on a piece of flat riprap in front of her. “I know they all carry the fucking things…”

  “Hey, is this what you’re looking for?” Okafor was standing a little ways down the heap from us, holding a thin, silver rectangle of metal.

  “Shit, that’s it,” Tomlins said. “Bring it up here!”

  “Do you know how to work those things?” I said.

  “Not really,” Tomlins said, turning to me as Okafor clambered back up to join us. “I was hoping you would.”

  “I can try,” I said.

  “No need.” Okafor smiled as he returned, panting, to the area on the heap where the guard was lying. “We have everything we need to open it right here.”

  “Open...oh.” I nodded as I watched Okafor use the dead guard’s fingerprints to activate the comm unit. A metal protective screen opened up in a widening spiral, revealing a round luminous display that was flashing red.

  “Distress Mode,” Tomlins read aloud. “Wait in Place for Evac. So.” She turned back to me with a smile. “I guess we don’t need to go activate the PDS after all.”

  “Wait in place?” I said.

  “They told all of us to wait in place,” Okafor said. “At first, we thought it was a joke. And then the second strike hit.”

  “Huh,” Tomlins said. She had a curious expression on her face. For a second, her eyes stopped their perpetual scan of the surroundings to zero in on the comm unit.

  “What?” I gave her a quizzical look.

  “We’ll talk on our way back,” she said, pocketing the comm unit. “We don’t have time to burn.”

  “Talk about what?” I said, scrambling down the rubble heap after Tomlins.

  “You know, it’s one thing for the guards to abandon the prisoners to a xeno attack on a place like this,” Tomlins said. “But I have to wonder. Whose idea was it to abandon the guards here with us?”

  “They didn’t abandon the guards,” Okafor said, shaking his head.

  “They sure didn’t try too hard to save them,” I said. “Tomlins is right. Something’s fishy about this.” I squinted around at the smoky wreckage of the textiles plant. I was missing information here, and even worse, I didn’t know what information I was missing.

  “I’m surprised you’re not insisting that we go back to see what it is,” Tomlins said.

  “I only had one objective with this plan,” I said. “Go and make sure something is getting sent out from the PDS tower. That objective has been achieved.” That was why I had lasted so long as a transport guy. That was why they had liked me. I was never big on doing extras.

  When we got back to Simms, he looked a little more alive than he’d been when we had last seen him. That was good, maybe. He stood up slowly when we got close to him, managing a little smile and wave.

  “Is someone sending a signal?” he asked.

  “Someone is,” I said. “Not sure who. They’ve been giving pretty goddamn useless instructions to the guards stationed out here.”

  “Might be some kind of internal thing,” Okafor said. “You know how power struggles get.”

  “Or it might have something to do with the swarms of xenos landing,” Tomlins said.

  “Could be both,” I said. “Now’s not the time to argue loudly about it.” I kept walking the way we had come, back toward the treeline where Leka waited for us.

  “What are we gonna do now?” Okafor said.

  “That depends on a few things, I guess,” I said. “First, we’ll see if your buddy Anderson has a plan of her own by the time we get back to your group.”

  “And you don’t have a plan?” Okafor said.

  I smiled bitterly at him. “I got a plan,” I said. “Get the fuck off this planet, do it as soon as possible, and disappear so I can go find my kids.”

  “That sounds like a good idea to me,” Simms said. “You want anybody coming with you?”

  “Not particularly,” I said. I frowned, kicked a piece of broken concrete that lay in the path in front of me. “You might have noticed that I haven’t mentioned where exactly my kids are right now.”

  14

  The sun was setting by the time we made it back to the main group. I was carrying Simms on my back; Okafor had Leka on his. Okafor was starting to get tired. I would take a long time yet before the machinery in my body started to run low on power.

  Curtis and Garcia had been set to look out for us from the top of a vine-covered knoll; Curtis whistled as we passed underneath.

  “Hey!” he said. “You’re not dead!”

  The sudden, loud voice made me jump and nearly drop Simms. What a shame that would have been.

  “Dumbass,” Curtis said, elbowing his companion.

  “Come on back here,” Garcia said, descending the knoll a few yards to talk a little more quietly to us. “We found a good spot to stop and rest. All of us, even the injured.”

  “Cool,” Tomlins said. “We found more xenos. Bigger ones.”

  Both Curtis and Garcia froze, looking past us.

  “They have more pressing priorities than us,” Tomlins said. “But I think there’s going to be more coming down to the surface.”

  “Oh, shit,” Curtis said, fear dilating his eyes. “We have to tell the others - and where’s Salter?”

  Leka made an exaggerated shrug gesture with one arm and said, “Gee, I don’t know” in the world’s least convincing tone.

  “He didn’t make it,” Tomlins said with her usual satisfied smirk.

  Curtis and Garcia were both staring at us with wide eyes, like they’d never seen a gangster get quietly taken out back and shot - or grenaded, as it were - in their lives.

  “Uhh…” Curtis blinked, looking Leka up and down.

  “Were you guys able to get to the PDS?” Garcia said, motioning for Curtis to stop gawping.

  “Put me down,” Leka said. “No. We did the next-best thing and grabbed a comm unit off a dead guard.” She pulled the silver rectangle from her pocket and held it up. “Someone’s broadcasting a distress signal.”

  “Someone?” Curtis said.

  “Hey, I’m good to walk, too,” Simms said. He didn’t sound good to me, but it wasn’t any of my business if he wanted to hack his lungs out to impress a girl who didn’t look too impressable.

  “Yeah, someone,” Tomlins said. “We can hash out the fine details once we’re somewhere we can breathe.”

  Slowly, and with more than a little quiet bitching, the five of us followed Curtis and Garcia up the knoll. We traversed it in a spiral to the southwest; our path took us to a steep, rocky outcropping where Garcia paused and waited for the rest of our party to catch up.

  “It’s a steep climb from here,” he said, “but the smoke isn’t too bad where we are.”

  “Thank God,” Leka said. “I feel like I’m dying.”

  “You sound like you’re dying,” Tomlins said.

  “You’re all better off than some of the guys who came up from Textiles,” Garcia said, shooting a thin look back at Tomlins. “Anderson lost three of the people she brought with her.”

  “Oh, shit,” Tomlins said. “How?”

  Garcia shook his head. “Smoke was too much for their lungs,” he said. “Okay, and one guy had internal bleeding from a shrapnel wound. But the smoke’s not helping any of us, is my point.”

  “Shit, I guess not,” Leka said. “Do you think the xenos know that about us?”

  That thought sent a shiver down my spine. If their biotech was interacting with mine, was there some possibility it knew more about me than I thought?

  “Let’s hope not,” I said. “I wanna get off this planet before they get to know our species any better than they already do.”

  The main group had found themselves a nice, semi-clear spot on the side of a rocky hill. Rainfall and poor soil had contributed to a relative lack of vegetation, except for some kind of palm that clung to the rocks by thick, fingerlike roo
ts that were exposed to the air.

  Under normal circumstances, I would have thought the hillside too steep for a resting spot. But right now, it was fairly brilliant - it was shaded from the sun, it provided us with aerial cover, and its location on the lee side of the hill kept us sheltered from the worst of the smoke blowing in from Textiles.

  “See that path?” Curtis said, pointing upward at a trail that looked like it had been whacked roughly out from the jungle by people tearing leaves with their bare hands.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Tell me that wasn’t here before.”

  “Oh, hell no,” he said. “But it goes to the top of this hill.” His finger meandered in the air a little bit and stabbed an invisible point in front of his face. “We can see the breaker facility, where you guys came from. And we can see Textiles, and we can see…”

  “So you saw the, uh, the big xenos at Textiles?” I said.

  Curtis shook his head. “Must not have been that big,” he said.

  “Better hope you don’t find yourself corrected on that one,” I said. “Anyway.”

  “Anyway,” Curtis said. “We can see Textiles, the ceramics dump, and what Anderson thinks is the…”

  “I don’t think it’s the admin complex,” Anderson said. “I’ve been appealing my sentence so fucking long I can do the nav blindfolded from the bottom hold of a quad.”

  She was walking up slowly, her weight supported by a stick she’d broken off of something. I didn’t need my sharpened senses to pick up the sadness that hung over her like the smoke we were trying to escape.

  “How’s, uh…”

  “Nguyen didn’t make it,” she said, shaking her head. She glared at me. “And nice job on Simms. Real great having one of our military guys at death’s door. Just...super. Fucking. Productive.” Her voice got quieter as the sentence went on, and a gleam of hatred joined the sadness on her face.

  “Simms volunteered,” I said, feeling lame.

  Anderson spat on the ground (and, I assumed, my excuse). “But like Curtis was saying.” She pointed her makeshift cane up the path. “We can see every populated patch of dirt for miles from up there. One of them just so happens to be an admin complex.”