Blood Oath

by David Ryker

  If it hadn’t been for my enhanced senses, I wouldn’t have noticed Leka walking up behind me.

  “Hey,” she said.

  I whipped my head around and reached for a weapon I hadn’t carried in years. “Oh,” I said. “Hey.”

  “You okay?” she said.

  I shrugged. “Better off than I could be,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Leka said. “I feel you.”

  We both sat in silence, or as close as we could come to silence while stripping every available scrap of meat from the bones we had in our hands. When Leka had cleaned hers, she cracked it open with her fingers and started sucking on one of the jagged edges.

  “You really want to know about my kids?” I said. Out of nowhere.

  Leka looked up at me, more than a little of a feral animal behind her eyes. I liked that. It might not make her trustworthy, but it made her someone I could relate to.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I mean...I’m curious, Collins. It’s, you...you seem like you used to be a really fuckin’ bad dude.”

  I had to laugh at that. “Yeah,” I said. “I...I worked for the fuckin’ Belters, Leka,” I said. “What do you expect?”

  Leka shrugged. “But the kids,” she said. “Nadine. Celeste. Your traitorous bitch of an ex-girlfriend.”

  “Right,” I said. “Yeah. I mean, it’s like I told you when we first met. I...I just couldn’t do it anymore, Leka,” I said. “Having kids, and being a father, and realizing what it meant to kill people with families.” I shook my head and bit down on the bone until the end shattered.

  “How sweet,” Leka said. “How long did that take you?”

  “Couple years,” I said. “I dunno. I...it’s weird, once you get on the inside with those people.”

  “Does the biotech mess with your brain or something?” Leka said.

  “Pretty sure it’s the constant fucking bloodshed that messes with your brain,” I said. “But I could be wrong.”

  “You know, next time we run into the xenos, I have an idea,” Leka said. “It’s not, uh, the safest idea I’ve ever had.”

  “Yeah?” I said. “Safety’s not high on my list of priorities right now.”

  “Good,” Leka said. “Because I think the issue with the xenos and your biotech is, you know, kind of being on the wrong frequency.”

  “You don’t know a fucking thing about…”

  “Of course I don’t,” Leka said with a snaggletoothed grin. “I don’t know shit about anything.”

  I was too tired to tell if she was being sarcastic or sincere. What if she did know more than she was letting on? My exhausted mind didn’t even want to wrap itself around that question, or what I should do in response.

  We were both watching as the news of the xeno landing spread through the camp. You could feel the hope being sucked out of the air. We were survivors, yeah, and we’d made it through the first attack - but why? What was the point of even trying to stay alive if we were abandoned to these things by the Coalition?

  “You know,” Leka said. “I, uh, I keep a pen and some paper stowed away in one of my pockets.” She patted her jumpsuit.

  “You have a lot of pockets in that thing,” I said.

  “And a good thing now, isn’t it?” Leka said. “Anyway. If you want to, you know. Write something to the kids.”

  “Something that’s gonna wind up in a xeno gullet with the rest of me,” I said. But the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to at least have a shot of one last word getting off this fucking place. “Would...would you carry it instead?”

  “Yeah,” Leka said. “I dunno. I feel like my odds of surviving aren’t any better than yours. I don’t have anything, uh, special in my blood.”

  I snorted. “Well,” I said. “You see how much good it’s doing me.”

  17

  My letter wound up being brief.

  Dear Nadine and Celeste, I wrote. If you’re reading this, then I’m not going to make it home. Something bad happened on the prison world where they sent me, and the last thing I did was try to escape and come home to you.

  After I started writing that piece down, I realized I was going to have a hard time keeping it together. If I couldn’t keep it together, what good was I going to be to the rest of these people?

  I don’t have a lot of time to write. I love you both more than you can even imagine. I hope that when you think of me, you think less of the bad times and more of how proud I am of both of you. I love you so much. See you on the other side. Signed, Your Daddy.

  It was better than nothing. It would have to be enough. Whether I ever got to be a dad again was up in the air. Right now, I had to be one of the leaders of this sad little carnival.

  Or maybe ‘increasingly nervous little carnival’ would be a better description. To put it mildly, the group of survivors was on edge. Anderson’s recounting of our recon mission was more gently worded than anything I would have delivered. Still, the knowledge of what we’d seen out there was causing panic to spread quietly through our little encampment.

  There was no good way to say “Those things are stronger than us, and now they’re out there eating us.”

  Not just eating us. Lots of things thought humans were tasty. Some of those things were considered by humans to be beautiful, noble, and generally worth the effort of coexisting with.

  It was different with things that herded you into a group and started picking you up like pieces of fried protein paste. That was a different kind of predator.

  Anderson approached me with her hands behind her back and her face pressed into a frown. “I don’t know what else to tell them,” she said.

  “Not much else to say,” I replied. Words of comfort weren’t going to be enough unless those words of comfort added up into a better plan than we had so far. “You got any ideas of where to go from here?”

  “Other than the admin complex?” Anderson said. “Nah,” she said. “Right now, I think I’d rather be shot by the Coalition than fucking eaten by one of those things.”

  “I think I’m with you there,” I said.

  I got up on a rock and put my hands to my mouth. A sharp whistle drew the attention of pretty much everyone in camp.

  “So, we know it’s pretty bad out there,” I said. “I say we try to get to the admin complex. Even if we wind up getting re-captured, it’s better than getting eaten.”

  “What about getting executed?” a young man said.

  “Execution I’ve seen before,” a gray-haired woman said. “If I’m going to die on this planet, I think I want it to be something where I know what’s going on.”

  A general murmur of agreement rose up from the crowd. Part of me couldn’t believe we were having this discussion. Part of me wasn’t surprised, given the way my life had gone so far. Heads, execution, tails, getting gnawed on by a giant, discordant xeno cockroach. What a fucking choice.

  “So what’s our plan once we get to the admin complex?” another guy said, folding his arms against his thick chest. “Turn ourselves in?”

  “Yeah, and what about the wounded?” said a thin young woman who wore her hair up in a twisted kerchief.

  “Look, I don’t know exactly how this is going to pan out,” I said. “But we have to get farther away from the ceramics dump. The xenos look like they’re setting up a base camp there, and the closer we get to the admin complex the closer we’ll be to someone who can help us.”

  “Ideally, we’ll steal some type of vehicle,” Tomlins said. “I think there’s more than one person among us here who can help with that job.”

  A couple nervous threads of laughter came back from the crowd.

  “And there’s more people than that who probably can’t make it to the admin complex,” the thin young woman said. “What about them?”

  “You’ll have to trust us to come back for you,” I said. “What’s your name?”

  “Devoucoux,” she said.

  “Devoucoux, do you want to be the, uh, defender of the wounded camp?” I sa
id. “In the highly likely event we have to separate?”

  “I’m not leaving them behind,” she said. “So I may as well.”

  “Give her a gun,” I said to Tomlins. “We still have a few hours of daylight left. We need to get moving while we can still see a foot in front of our faces.”

  Our group only made it a couple miles before the sun started to go down too much for us to see. People were weak, hungry, and starting to get pissed off at the people leading them on this adventure.

  Going rooting around under logs and rocks for dinner was not helping morale.

  Now, in my personal opinion, insects are incredibly underrated as a food source. Ideally, you should fry them in batter or do something similar to make them crunchy and spicy. It’s a quick, cheap meal you can find on almost any planet or space station, and it’s good greasy calories that will keep you going. If you can ignore all the legs.

  But even I will agree that raw insects are just about as appealing as raw poultry offal.

  “This is disgusting,” Curtis said. He had just forced down a mouthful of grubs we’d found under the bark of some kind of pinwheel leafed tree. They were abundant, which was good. But they were grubs.

  “We should have brought oil from the ceramics dump while we had a chance,” I said. “We could at least cook them.”

  “Cooked grubs,” Garcia said. “I guess that’s at least better than what we have here.”

  Anderson laughed. “Life’s tough,” she said, spitting out a leg of something. “It’s tougher when you need to get from Point A to Point B in a jungle.”

  “I don’t see why we can’t go out and get another one of those birds,” Curtis said. “It wouldn’t be a waste of ammunition with the plasma rifles. Some protein would probably help the wounded.”

  “And we can use Simms’s little grief-cooking rig to fry it,” Leka said. “I like your style, kiddo.”

  “Plus we can scout the terrain ahead of us,” I said. “We’ll strike off early in the morning. Before the sun starts to rise all the way.”

  “I’ll wake you up,” Anderson said. “I’m taking the second night watch.”

  I was finally getting worn out enough that my body was letting me sleep. When Curtis roused me, my first instinct was to deck him.

  Instead, I grunted. “Is it time?”

  “Yeah,” Curtis said. He handed me a plasma rifle.

  I took it as I got up from my hammock. The blanket had sunk down low in the few hours I’d been asleep, and my ass was wet from dew. That was the kind of thing that got you woken up right away as you started walking through a jungle.

  Plasma rifles at the ready, Garcia and Curtis followed me on ahead of the main group. I led us on a track that traversed a steep ridge, above the line of haze that seemed darker and greasier this morning.

  When the trees cleared, you could see that Textiles was still very much on fire. We had to get away from that as well as the xenos. I didn’t like the way Simms had been coughing in his sleep while we’d been creeping out of camp.

  When we hit a waterway, I went uphill a short way until I found some rocks we could sit on while we waited. It was in view of the stream, but we could conceal ourselves pretty well in the vegetation.

  “So this is it?” Curtis said.

  “Yep,” I said. “Now we just wait for something to come for a drink up away from the smoke.” I looked up and down the valley. “If we hear the party coming behind us, we move ahead of them. Repeat the procedure until we kill something edible.”

  “Sounds like a plan to me,” Garcia said. “Especially the sitting and waiting part.”

  “How’d you learn to hunt?” Curtis asked me.

  “It’s pretty simple,” I said. “You find something your target wants. You go to where your target has to go to get what it wants. Even better if it’s something your target needs.”

  Curtis nodded, silent and wide-eyed. I didn’t have to spell it out for him that I’d been trained on human beings. After everything the Belters had put me through, lying in wait for some dumb local fauna was a cakewalk.

  And we didn’t even have to wait long. My enhanced senses homed in on the sound of massive wings beating against the air, then streaming downward toward the gap in the canopy that signified a waterway. I began to point up, and opened my mouth.

  Curtis fired his shot before I could even tell him about the bird’s approach. I saw it spiral to the ground, body intact, about a dozen yards away from us.

  “Nice shot!” I said.

  “Shit, dude, I think you hit it in the head,” Garcia said. He got up and clapped Curtis on the back as Curtis stood and tried to figure out where his kill had fallen.

  “I think it’s by that tree,” Curtis said.

  It was not by that tree. I don’t know if the lifeless body had flopped over underneath that vine, or if I’d just misjudged where the bird had landed, but I thought I was losing my mind. Curtis, Garcia and I had to form a search line and systematically comb a twenty yard square of the jungle where the damn thing had fallen.

  “There it is!” Garcia said at long last, reaching down into a cluster of vines and pulling out the giant, headless carcass of the bird.

  “Oh, thank God,” Curtis said. “And thank you.”

  “Hey, keep holding it up by the feet,” I said. In my jumpsuit pocket I had a knife Leka had given me for this exact task.

  You had to dress a carcass out in the field as soon as you could, Lucky Pavel had taught me once upon a time. If you left the organs inside the body cavity, they kept the meat warm. Warm meat spoiled. Spoiled meat killed you and all your guys.

  “Did you bring the offal sack?” I said.

  “Yeah.” Garcia held out a cloth bag knotted out of someone’s shirt. I deposited the edible organs in it; we left the rest where they lay.

  Lucky Pavel wouldn’t have done that. Lucky Pavel would have said something about attracting predators and scavengers to our camp.

  But in the situation we were in, anything smaller than those xenos wasn’t a predator. It was more along the lines of fast food delivery.

  When we returned to the group, you could see the eager hunger on the survivors’ faces. They were all but ready to move out from camp, even the walking (and piggybacking) wounded. When they saw us, a delighted murmur started moving around like rainwater hitting sun-parched clay.

  Anderson came walking up to us with Simms’s improvised cooking pan in her hands. “You did it again, boys,” she said, something close to a smile on her face. “And here I was starting to think you were wasting time on a bullshit mission.”

  “Even if we didn’t get anything, we would still have found water,” Garcia said.

  “Probably poisoned,” Anderson said.

  “Guess we’ll find out.” Garcia handed her the skinless carcass of the bird. “Here you go,” he said. “Work your magic.”

  “It’s my magic, actually,” Simms said, grinning joylessly as he came up behind Anderson. “Hand me a plasma rifle.”

  I took my weapon off my back and handed it to the ex-officer. He sat down and popped off one of the safety plates, then fiddled with one of the wires and gestured for Anderson to hand him the plate.

  “I haven’t seen someone actually do that in ten years,” Leka said as she joined us. “You basically just electrocute the meat until it’s cooked.”

  “How do you keep from electrocuting yourself?” I asked as Anderson helped Simms balance the cooking pan on top of the rifle.

  Leka shrugged. “You cook carefully,” she said. “Or you’re too fucked up to notice you’re getting shocked. I thought you dealt with grief runners.”

  “Runners, yeah,” I said. “Cookers, no.” That was a partial lie, but I never really made a point of hanging out with people who cooked grief.

  What Simms was doing wasn’t much less sketchy. He was operating his makeshift stove by pulling the trigger from underneath the weapon. Every few seconds, he had to stop and take a break to cough.


  At first, I attributed it to the smoke coming off the bird’s carcass. But as the fits of racking and wheezing grew longer, I turned to Anderson and raised an eyebrow.

  “He’s got the asthma bad today,” she said. “It’s the smoke in the air from Textiles.”

  “Yeah,” Simms said, though his voice was barely audible and he had to turn around and spit into the bushes. “The farther away I get from it, the better off I’ll…” He started hacking again. This time, the cough sounded deep, and it didn’t stop.

  As he crawled away from the cooking bird, Leka took over pulling the trigger. The joy of having food in our immediate future was being taken over by the dread inspired by Simms’ coughing. How long before more of us succumbed to that shit?

  “How long has he been like that?” Garcia asked quietly.

  “Since I met up with him after the attack on Textiles,” Anderson said, just above a whisper. “He says it’s asthma but I think he got a face full of something in one of the explosions.” She looked at the ground. “He’s been getting worse.”

  But even as she spoke, Simms got up off his knees and steadied himself on a tree. He turned around and gave us a bloody-toothed grin.

  “All good,” he said. “Anyway. It’s nothing that a little home cooking can’t fix. Right?”

  “Right!” Anderson forced a smile onto her face. “I’m sure a little food will have all of you guys feeling a lot better.”

  18

  After less than half a mile, I was carrying Simms on my back. He was far lighter than I’d thought he would be. When he coughed, his whole body would rattle with exertion.

  “Sorry,” he said after he spat on the ground and narrowly missed my shoulder.

  Little as I liked him, I didn’t feel like yelling at someone who was probably dying. “You’re all good,” I said.

  “You’re going pretty strong, considering all we’ve been through,” Simms said. “Is it true you’ve got biotech implanted in you?”

  “Who told you that?” I said.