Blood Oath

by David Ryker

  He’d said my activation phrase where she could hear it, and that made sense. But my deactivation phrase - I didn’t even think Salter knew that. Had she known him? Had she asked him questions about me? Were they working together?

  It would make sense. As frightening as Salter could be, there was only one of him, and the Belters would surely have sent backup. Said backup would definitely have taken an interest in getting to know some of my friends at the recycling plant.

  And she’d also probably know where my girls were.

  I stopped in my tracks for a second, a smile on my face. That was it. Even if I was wrong and she wasn’t working directly for them, Leka had to have something to do with the Belters. It was the only explanation that made sense. There was no other way she could have known my deactivation word.

  “What?” Leka turned around.

  I scanned the surrounding street like I had something important to look at. “Nothing,” I said. “Thought I heard something.”

  “That bar up there looks like it’s got an apartment above it,” Tomlins called from across the street. “Windows look intact, even.”

  “Come on,” Leka said. “Let’s go check it out.”

  I realized as I crossed the street behind her that there was a problem in my logic. Leka had killed Salter - had thrown a fucking grenade at him, making sure his Belters’ blood couldn’t save his weaselly ass. If the Belters were keeping me - a con and for all intents and purposes a traitor - alive so they could keep doing their studies on the blood, then why…

  Oh. She had two doctorates, right? Maybe? If she wasn’t lying about that, then maybe she was one of the people assigned to study Belters’ blood. Maybe Salter’s usefulness had simply expired for her.

  Maybe I was next.

  The inside of the bar had been completely ransacked, though a flashing holoboard still advertised the day’s specials in three different languages. We needed our mouthwash masks again to look around - the jungle heat had gotten to a body that lay sprawled over the bartop.

  “Stairs are back here,” Curtis said, using the flashlight attached to his scope to poke around in back by the bathrooms. He waited for me, Tomlins, and Leka to join him before venturing up the narrow wooden staircase. I wasn’t sure how much good four people were going to be if things went sour in here.

  He tried the door handle. It didn’t budge. He turned around.

  “Locked,” he said.

  “Obviously,” Leka replied. “Do you need me to kick it down for you, or…”

  “Fine,” Curtis said. “I hit it by the lock, right?”

  “As close as possible, kiddo,” Leka said.

  With a single, powerful burst of motion, Curtis raised his leg and burst the door off its hinges.

  That brief moment of triumph was dirtied somewhat by the wave of smell that cut through the mask I was wearing.

  “Jesus Christ!” Tomlins said. “What in the…”

  Curtis was already inside, clamping his rag over his nose and mouth. “Aww, son of a bitch,” he said. “Suicide.”

  I walked in the door after Leka. I could feel the dread like a chill in my bones.

  The apartment was a big, plainly-furnished studio with a single bed in one corner and a half-packed suitcase lying in front of a plastic wardrobe. The floor space stretched out as far as the bar did underneath our feet. Along the east wall, untouched kitchen cabinets would have immediately attracted my snooping if it wasn’t for one thing - one person, really - between them and me.

  The apartment’s previous occupant was still hanging, more or less, from a noose he’d fashioned out of a bedsheet. The rafter hadn’t been high enough to break his neck. You could see dents in the wall where he’d been kicking out trying to get traction. I suppressed a shudder at the thought of what must have gone through his head in his final moments.

  Leka pulled a knife from her boot and cut the body down. It hit the floor and fell into a couple of rot-blackened chunks. I grimaced, both at the sorry sight, and the fresh waves of smell the body’s collapse had provoked.

  “Must have decided enough was enough when the invasion first began,” she said. “Or maybe even before.”

  I stared at the corpse on the floor. Some poor sucker, living alone above a bar on a half-poisoned prison world, had decided that this was as good as it was ever going to get for him. I’d known plenty of guys who’d met more or less the same fate during my time. Maybe they didn’t all hang themselves - maybe they chose the bottle or the grief pipe or a life of serving the Belters as their way out.

  But they all seemed to have a little too much in common with me for my own comfort.

  “Hey.” Leka’s voice took on a sudden tone of concern. “You okay, Collins?”

  “Tired,” I said.

  She was looking me up and down, that familiar expression of cold curiosity on her face. “You know, she didn’t tell me you cried,” she said. “I was just trying to piss you off.”

  “Still none of your goddamn business,” I snapped. My ears still flushed at the thought of her even thinking about me in that position. “And you’ve got better ways to piss me off, anyway.”

  “You really, really want to know where I got all my intel on the Belters, don’t you?” she said.

  “I’d like to know a few things about you,” I replied. “I want to know who you really are. I want to know what you know about my daughters. I want to know why the Belters and these xenos are using the same fucking gun. I want to know why…”

  “Wait, what?” Leka said. “Go back. The Belters and the xenos.”

  I squinted at her like she was stupid. “The BZ-219,” I said. “Also known as the Beezer, also known as the specific model of plasma cannon that the first wave of attackers was using to punch holes in this planet.”

  Leka’s eyebrows shot up on her forehead. “Hold that thought,” she said, stepping to the door. “Hey!” she called. “There’s space up here to rest! And the first volunteer for corpse removal duty gets first pick of this guy’s clothes!”

  “Wait, you don’t know what a Beezer is?” I said.

  “Nope,” Leka said. “You’ll have to explain it to me, because the xenos and the plasma weapons are a very interesting topic to my mind.”

  “Are they?” I replied with a sly smile. “Well, then maybe we could make a trade. My information for yours...”

  Leka glared at me. “You’re gonna just hold back mission-critical information like that from me?”

  That was another thing that didn’t stack up about my theory. From the way she talked and acted, I could tell she’d been in a legit military at some point in her life. Belters just didn’t have the vocabulary that Leka had when it came to strategizing - or at least, most Belters I knew.

  I just kept smiling at her. “You know,” I said. “You and I seem to have some pretty different ideas about what intel is and is not critical to this mission.” I stepped aside as two guys came in with several trash bags from downstairs - now those were some thinkers. “We’re going to have to just resolve those if we both want to get out of here alive, aren’t we?”

  22

  I remember apologizing for scaring the buth’ak away - the biggest one I had ever seen, and I had been a clumsy jackass and scared it off before we could get a shot in.

  “Don’t worry so much about it,” Lucky Pavel said to me as we followed the trail. “This forest is seven hundred acres. The chances of meeting a buth’ak that size were...what’s the word. Infinitesimal.” He flashed a gold-pocked grin at me.

  “Still, Mr. Kominski,” I said. “I should have just shot at it.”

  “Ah-ah-ah.” Lucky Pavel shook his head. “We don’t shoot at things.”

  I was almost ten, and it was time for me to start learning how to carry a sidearm. So far, it had been a much more exciting prospect in theory than in practice. It seemed that all I had done was learn the names of the parts and how to clean it and memorize the range rules. This hunt had been my first chance to show Luc
ky Pavel that I didn’t need to stick with the dumb kid stuff anymore.

  And I’d just blown my chance.

  “See, here’s the thing,” Pavel said, spreading his hands wide in front of him. “When you hunt, you don’t waste your time chasing after your game in thick timber like this.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, having no idea how else you’d hunt.

  “We are smarter than that, Kevin. We don’t chase. What we do is we find out where our game is going to be, and we go to that spot, and we wait.” He turned around briefly and pointed a thick, gold-ringed finger at me. “And that gives us plenty of time to get a shot lined up, see?”

  “But how do we know where the game is, Mr. Kominski?” I said. “You just said it yourself. The forest is seven hundred acres.”

  “Now, this is the important part of today’s lesson,” Lucky Pavel said. “I want you to remember this lesson for the rest of your life, because it’s the lesson that’s gotten me where I am today.”

  “Oh yeah, Mr. Kominski?” I said.

  “Yes, Kevin,” he said. He slapped one finger against the palm of his hand. “If you are going to kill something, you must first figure out what it wants, see?”

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  Now, two fingers. “Next, you figure out where it needs to go to get what it wants, or who it needs to see, or what it needs to do to get what it wants. Because then you have established that thing’s routine.” He slapped three fingers down on his palm. “And once you know its routine, you have all the time in the world to get your shot lined up.”

  I nodded. “Yes, Mr. Kominski,” I said.

  “You’ll be good at this, Kevin,” Lucky Pavel said. “You’re not very creative, you know? So you’ll be good at sitting and waiting. We need guys who can sit and wait. Those are the guys who get old and retire.” He chuckled. “Don’t you want to retire, Kevin?”

  “Yes, Mr. Kominski,” I said.

  “See, what you lack in creativity you make up for in good priorities,” Lucky Pavel said. “I like that. That’s gonna see you far in this life.”

  The smell of death hung around the apartment long after the dead men had been removed from the building. I watched one of the planet’s moons drift by outside the big south-facing window while I sat with my legs stretched across the wide cinderblock sill. My thumb kept making an arc back and forth on the stock of my plasma rifle.

  Around me, nearly twenty of the living were sleeping, sitting or whispering with each other in the darkness. You could feel it in the air that they felt safe for the first time in days - shit, in weeks or months or years for some of them. It’s not like this planet was a cakewalk, even before the freaking alien invasion. We didn’t know where we were going next, or how we were going to get there. We had no idea if the next step in our plan would even be possible. But for now, we had a roof over our heads and no guards to watch our every move.

  It was exactly the wrong mood for our group to be in right now.

  I heard shuffling across the floor behind me and turned around to see Anderson in shorts and an undershirt, a dirty blanket wrapped around her shoulders.

  “You can’t sleep,” she whispered.

  “Yeah?” I gave her my best non-threatening smile. “You neither, it looks like.”

  “I don’t like this,” she said. “Something about the location feels off. I know we needed to find some kind of shelter before dark, but…”

  “No, I get it,” I said.

  She stood at the window. I noticed she was wearing a sidearm. “So,” she said. “You and that Leka girl don’t like each other too much, huh?”

  “You’re a sharp one,” I laughed under my breath. “How long did it take you to figure that out?”

  “Look,” she said in the tiniest of whispers, leaning close so only I could hear her. “Whether she’s military or...something else, I don’t trust her as far as I can throw her. And that’s just between you and me.”

  I nodded, looking around the room. Leka was curled up in a corner between the armoire and the wall; Garcia had been given the bed, owing to his walking wounded status.

  “You don’t trust me either,” I said, eyeing Anderson up and down.

  “No, I don’t.” She smiled and patted the strap of her rifle. “But you haven’t put too much effort into winning me over. Leka has. Good distinction between the two of you, I think.”

  I raised my eyebrows and snorted as I looked back out the window, shaking my head. “That made a hell of a whole lot of sense,” I said.

  “Yeah, well.” Anderson said, then stiffened. “Something’s coming.”

  “I know,” I said. “I can feel it. Leka can feel…”

  “No, I mean down in the street.” She pointed down and to the west. I followed her finger and saw them, running toward us with solid-slug weapons at the ready.

  “Shit.” I jumped down to the floor and cleared a chunk of window out with the muzzle of my rifle.

  “We got company!” Anderson said, joining me in spraying fire out of the broken glass.

  Behind us, the room sprang to life. I heard Leka swear as she woke up and fumbled for her solid-slug weapon.

  In between plasma bursts, I peered through the hole in the window to assess the situation below. A dozen, maybe twenty people were running toward the bar. They were shooting, but too low. Novices, probably small-time gangsters who didn’t even know how to charge up a Coalition plasma rifle.

  I stepped closer to the hole in the window and fired a burst that sent two or three of them sprawling to the pavement. Even with my enhanced senses, the glare of the plasma bursts made it difficult to see what was going on down in the street.

  The other occupants of the apartment were starting to panic. People were asking what the hell was going on, who was shooting, if the xenos were back.

  “Tomlins, Okafor, Curtis!” Leka barked. “Come with me and bring your weapons!”

  I heard her running for the door and down the stairs, followed by the footsteps of the others. She was barking orders from the stairwell, coming up with a strategy on the fly for coming out and charging these motherfuckers.

  I took aim again and fired another plasma burst. I could see the low battery warning flashing out of the corner of my eye. They went off early on these models - I would probably have several more minutes of firing time on this power pack - but I needed to get to my pack for the spares Leka had given me.

  That opportunity came before I was ready for it. I hit the floor as a scattered burst of solid-slug fire shattered the window in front of me. My pack was sitting on the floor about ten yards away. I crawled on my belly to it while panic erupted in the room around me.

  “Everyone stay quiet!” I yelled. “They’ll target us if we make a racket!”

  “A racket like those plasma bursts?” Anderson said.

  “Racket or no racket, panic isn’t going to help anyone!” I growled as I got to my pack and exchanged my dying plasma cell for a fresher one. I grabbed the other two and went back to the window with them.

  Below, a rapid series of plasma bolts lit up the street in front of the bar. I could see the attackers turning and running - but the group moved in a weird pattern. First, they ran in the direction they’d come from. Then, they took off in the exact opposite direction.

  “Oh, fuck.” I hit my knees as an all-too-familiar wave of nausea overtook me. My plasma rifle clattered to the ground. It was going to be useless anyway. “Fuck. I hope Leka’s out there getting more solid-slug weapons.”

  “Quiet in here!” Anderson said. “Xenos are coming!”

  “Don’t stay in here!” I said. “Get down to the ground floor.”

  “We should…”

  “Just do it!” I said. “We have a better chance if they have to chase us!”

  We didn’t quite run in the same direction as the people who were shooting at us. We went that way for a couple blocks, then took an alley south.

  It was pointless, said the thrumming in my nerves. They were
coming. They would be on us before we knew it.

  A few blocks away, I could hear shouting and the rattle of a solid-slug rifle. Then a scream, guttural and sky-tearing, extending through the night for a long couple of seconds before silence bit it off.

  I didn’t need nanotech to sense the panic rising in my group.

  “We have to get back to the jungle!” someone shouted. “We’re trapped here!”

  A second ago, the group had been a river of bodies too fast and determined to be cut off by the obstacles in our way. Now, the current was slowing. I could see eyes gleaming in the darkness as people turned around, looking for the closest threat they could find.

  One of the silhouettes pointed at me. “He did this on purpose!” he said.

  “Who?”

  “Collins did!” my accuser continued. “He’s a Belter - they’re always cutting deals with the fucking xenos!”

  I switched the safety off on my plasma rifle. “What the fuck are you talking about?” I said. “I don’t know what those fucking things are or what they…”

  “It’s in his blood!” someone else yelled. “He can’t help it! You know he’s drawing them down on us!”

  I had my back to the wall; a ring of silhouettes surrounded me. I knew that Leka and Tomlins had scored several new solid-slug rifles off the fleeing human enemies. I hoped that they had all gotten into the hands of people with more common sense than paranoia.

  “You have to run!” I said. “The longer you sit here and accuse me of things I didn’t…”

  It was too late. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw what could have been the silhouette of a building. But buildings didn’t move like that, and they didn’t have pointed tops like that.

  I leveled my plasma rifle at it and fired. The blue bursts ricocheted harmlessly off the thing’s energy shield - or were they absorbed? The thought hung in my mind for a long second, before the world sped up around me.

  “Collins!” Leka shouted. “Over here!”

  I took my chance and ran, right through the group of prisoners who’d accused me of calling that thing down on us. I heard someone shriek as the thing opened up its organic guns on our tail. Hard to feel sorry for whoever it was - if there had been a little more running and a little less finger-pointing, we might not be in this situation.