by David Ryker
But we were still going down. We had been hit somewhere critical - I heard the engine shriek as it died. Rooftops below were rising up to meet us.
“Get us out of here!” Leka said. “Now!”
There was no need to even give that order. I grabbed Leka and jumped free of the shuttle as it careened to the ground.
We landed on a rooftop; I rolled with Leka protected in my arms, bouncing with muted pain across the pavement until an air conditioning box stopped our trajectory. From the litecrete under my body, I watched the shuttle crash to the ground a couple of blocks away and saw black smoke rise from the head.
“They hit the head compartment!” Leka said. “Anderson’s in there! We need to go back!”
“You said to get us out of here.” I grabbed her by the wrist and began running away from the wreck, from the xeno ship that was still hovering above us.
“Collins, take us back!” Leka screamed. “If we don’t have Anderson, we don’t have…”
And a good thing I was running, too - if it hadn’t been for my sudden reversal on the rooftop, we might have been hit by one of the xeno ship’s plasma bursts. I could feel the heat coming from the explosion. Sand and rubble hit my back, stinging like the tongues of whips.
“Oh, shit!” I shouted, sprinting forward as adrenaline filled my bloodstream. I had almost died. Leka had almost died. Something like nausea, then terror, then the bizarre urge to laugh all hit me in rapid sequence, amplified by the machines in my blood.
I was in range. In range of what? In range - and it was like I was experiencing all my previous visions at once, but in a businesslike tone as if they were addressing the Friend. They didn’t like me anymore, but I was the only one left on this world. The only one of my kind.
Something like the phrase main menu: attack, select target, mission controls ran through my head. It wasn’t that clear, like someone was saying something to me under a pool of water, but somehow I understood what it meant.
What the fuck were mission controls? I wanted to scream, but instead I shook it off and started running.
Report to superiors? Abort mission? Rescue...
Now, I did scream. I had to scream, I had to get whatever the fuck that was out of my head before it drove me insane. It felt like having needles shoved through my brain. It felt like an ice treatment for a cancer. It felt like getting acid in your eyes, but the mental version. So I screamed.
Out. Out. I needed it to get out. It didn’t want me to want that, but...whatever I said. I kept screaming.
The xeno ship suddenly ascended about fifty yards higher. Its surface seemed to shimmer for a second. I braced for another burst, but none came. It was like the ship was frozen in mid-air, although I could see no visible thrusters or engines.
“What did you do?” Leka yelled as we ran toward the wrecked ship.
I grabbed her and held her up as I jumped off a rooftop. “I don’t know,” I said as we descended.
Leka shut her eyes and braced for impact, but I bent my knees and set us down relatively gently. “Please don’t drop me,” she said.
“I’m not gonna drop you!” I slung her over my back, remembering how slow she was compared to me when my blood was activated. She weighed surprisingly little; her weight barely slowed me down as I ran for the wreck.
“Collins, what did you do to that thing?” Leka said as we neared the remains of our shuttle. Curtis was putting out fires on an unconscious Garcia’s clothing. Okafor and one of his guys was dragging a third out of the rubble - Anderson?
Not Anderson. Actually, I could see no sign of Anderson or Tomlins, only a bunch of black smoke and the occasional burst of electrical energy from our weapon’s power generators.
I set her down gently on her feet beside me. “I don’t know,” I said. “What is…” I looked up, searching the sky for the thing that had just been attacking us.
“It went...I don’t know how to explain it,” Leka said. “It just went flying off into space. Just disappeared. It took another one with it when the other one went to investigate.”
“Guys, Anderson’s not gonna make it!” Tomlins was running from the wreckage, half her face splattered with blood. “We have to get out of here before the engine blows!”
“And go where?” I said. “What’s wrong with Anderson?”
“She’s dead, is what’s wrong with her,” Tomlins said. I could see from the tear streaks in the dirt below her eyes that she was telling the truth. “Broke her neck trying to escape the fire in the engine room. She’s dead, and these engines are gonna blow and take all of us out with her if we don’t move!”
Dead? How could she be dead? I’d just been talking to her!
“The main admin tower’s not far from here!” Leka said. “If we can break in…”
“How the hell are we going to break into the admin tower on a prison planet?” I said, but even as I was saying it I was picking her up on my back. That wasn’t because of any order - it was just because she was light and she was going to slow us down if she tried to run alongside us to the admin tower.
“I don’t know how we’re going to do anything from here on out,” Leka said. “But given the way this city looks, I’d be surprised if half the systems in that thing have even been locked in the first place.”
28
The closer we got to the admin tower, the heavier it weighed on me that Anderson was gone. That tough, badass little woman would never side-eye me again, and I hadn’t even gotten the chance to thank her properly for coming to my rescue.
I hadn’t even gotten the chance to ask her why she’d done it - she knew she probably couldn’t trust me, knew that she was risking her life helping me out with the shuttle stealing plan instead of leaving me to my fate with Salter. Hell, as far as I know she had made herself tolerate me because she was stuck with me for the foreseeable future.
I’d appreciate that. And now I was never going to get to tell her.
The admin tower rose above the center of the city, a couple miles south from where we’d originally entered yesterday. Today, we’d been making a beeline for it when the xenos attacked. Our craft had crashed about a mile away from it.
This part of town had been largely shielded from the chaos that had seized the northern end of the city. There were no piles of bodies here, no blockades of vehicles. Shops had been boarded and barred, and the streets had been cleared for evacuation.
“I bet there’s a planet-hopper around here somewhere,” Leka said. “Look for atmo-breaking domes…”
“I know what an atmo-breaker looks like,” I snapped back.
“Nobody’s making you carry me, you know,” Leka said.
“Yeah, well, nobody’s getting anywhere if we let you walk,” I replied. “We need to get the hell out of here as fast as we possibly can.”
“Incoming!” Tomlins said, pointing to the sky.
I knew it. Three xeno ships were converging on us, readying their guns as they neared our party. For a second, they hovered overhead as if looking at us. As if looking at me. I could feel my spine tingle, like another vision was approaching.
I put Leka on her feet. “Run,” I said before putting a hand to my mouth. “Main Menu!” I yelled at the sky. Anderson was dead. I could be about to watch Leka die in front of me. Shit, I was going to die. I was looking down the barrel of a xeno plasma cannon and yelling at it.
“Main...oh.” I fell to my knees as a wave of input hit my senses. Main Menu: Attack, Seek Target, Mission Controls, Ship Statistics, Attack, Seek Target, Mission Controls, Ship Statistics…
“Seek Target!” I screamed, clutching my head. I wanted this to end. I couldn’t handle three of them at once. I was tasting copper in my mouth.
I could see myself, I could see Tomlins. We were kneeling on the ground, we were running through the streets. I could see us making our way through the jungle, I could see people running panicked through city streets.
“Kev, whatever you are doing is stupid,” Tomlins said. �
��Kev! Can you…”
“He’s talking to them,” Leka said, awe in her voice.
No I wasn’t. They were talking. I was just trying to process the information. How was I supposed to tell them to stop targeting me? How could I…
I remembered back at the ceramics dump. I brought up that nauseating feeling as I watched a big xeno monster pick up humans like they were Sacchabites and devour them whole. I concentrated all the hatred, all the desire I had in my body to kill, on the image I had in my head. That’s what you should be targeting, I told the ships.
Maybe it was a stretch to ask them to kill some of their own kind. But the ships were feeding a different set of images into my head. Images of xenos, smaller and larger, stalking through streets and picking their way through the wreckage of recycling ops.
“Yes!” I said. “Seek target!”
“What are you...oh, fuck,” Leka said as the ships dispersed above us. “Did you...did you just give those things orders?”
My head was swimming. I collapsed onto my hands and knees, sweaty and nauseous like I’d slammed a quart of bootleg alcohol the night before. I couldn’t speak. There was nothing in my body to vomit, and my body considered that a real crying shame.
“Kev, are you okay?” Leka was on one knee beside me, a hand on my back.
The last thing I remember was groaning, and the pavement of the street approaching me.
When I came to, I was lying on my back in the dirt. Above me was the underbelly of a space cruiser, busted open by some unfortunate collision and partially dismantled for repair.
“Hey,” Leka’s voice said above me. “You okay?”
“Uhh.” I didn’t know where I was. I wasn’t sure who I was. Right. Kevin Collins, father of two and the foolhardiest son of a bitch ever to be imprisoned on Bathys 2. “What’s happening?”
“Well, that’s a good question!” Leka said. “Um, you looked like you had a fucking stroke. The alien ships left us alone. I assume that was all, uh, intentional.”
“I could hear them in my mind,” I said. “They wanted me to control them.”
“They what?” Leka said. “You could hear who in your mind? The xenos?”
“Yeah,” I replied, starting to move my limbs to make sure I hadn’t really had a stroke. “I could...it started when they first attacked us. I could hear menu options in my head. Not just my head. It’s…” I made myself sit up. The effort was almost too much; blood rushed to my head, and I steadied myself on the ground with both hands.
“Jesus, Kev,” Leka said. “You do not look good.”
“It hurt,” I said.
Leka was quiet for a couple seconds. “Yeah,” she said. “It looked like it hurt.”
It seemed obvious to me what had just happened. “They must have homed in on my Belters’ blood,” I said. “After Salter...after they met Salter they probably thought I was friendly.”
“Jesus,” Leka said. “And now you’re the only blooded Belter on the planet...shit, it makes sense, doesn’t it? What did you tell them?”
“I told them to go target the other xenos,” I said.
“Okay, that also makes sense,” Leka said. “Uhh, I mean, they followed orders. They are fighting each other now.”
“Huh.” I nodded. My brain was too fried to process this any further. “Where are we?”
“We found a shipyard,” Leka said. “We’re gonna get off this fucking planet. Just as soon as Curtis and Garcia get past that ship’s security systems.” She pointed west, to a little planet hopper that looked just big enough to get a few people out of orbit.
“They weren’t all used for evac, huh?” I said.
“Most of these weren’t used for a reason,” Leka said. “And I’m sure that one has problems. But it’s intact, and it’ll get us somewhere besides this fucking planet.”
“Yeah?” I said. “You got a plan for what we do when we get out of here?”
“Not really,” Leka said, smiling at me without showing her teeth. “I said we’d get somewhere besides this planet. I never said anything about surviving the launch into orbit.”
But we did survive the launch into orbit, and the planet hopper’s main issue appeared to be a minor coolant leak that could be mitigated with a garbage bag and some elbow grease. There was even some good non-perishable food onboard.
We were short a pilot. Anderson’s absence hung like a heavy drape over our entire crew. That’s what we were now, I guessed - a crew of a small ship in a big, mostly empty galaxy. We could go anywhere from here, if we had the time and the patience. The Bathys system wasn’t that far away from the Maranta system, which had a lot fewer prisons and a lot more places to hide.
But did I want to hide?
From up here, you could see Bathys 2 burning. The xenos hadn’t just hit our section of the planet - I could see smears of toxic smoke rising from recycling sites all over the prison world. I wondered how many other parties like mine were down there. I wondered how Simms and his crew were doing.
A mile or two from our little craft, a satellite whizzed by, its lights blinking some code that might never reach a living person. The orbital space around us was empty. Not one Coalition ship had come to aid this planet.
If I hadn’t known before that the Belters were behind this attack, I would have known it by the utter absence of backup. This was what they called a ‘planetary trade.’ Someone gave them something they wanted - be it guns or spacecraft or rare ingredients for drugs, fuel, or weapons - and in return the Belters would bribe or assassinate the people who you’d call in the event of an alien invasion. Their friends would arrive to find the world a sitting duck, and if they wanted to they could destroy and recolonize the whole thing.
“Hey.” Leka appeared behind me at the portal I was staring through.
“Hey,” I said, turning around. “Looks like you got the ship all up and running.”
“For the most part,” Leka said. “It’ll be interesting to see how she handles lightspeed. But we should be able to get out of here and disappear somewhere safe.”
“What about the wounded?” I said.
Leka’s face was grim. “Their chances aren’t great,” she said. “And we need to get the fuck out of orbit as soon as…”
“Not without Simms!” I said. Anger flushed in my belly as I turned to face her, clenching my fists. After all we had gone through to give our wounded a fighting chance, and she wanted us to leave them behind?
“Let me fucking finish my sentence, nano nuts,” Leka said. Her voice was hard and sharp. “We need to get the fuck out of orbit as soon as possible. Whatever you did to the xenos, it threw them into chaos, and you haven’t had the presence of mind to tell us what you did.”
“I don’t know what I did,” I said. “I…” I looked around the small lounge that they were using as my sick bay - or was it my quarantine or my new prison? “Leka.” I softened my voice as I looked her in the eye. “Can I...well, can I ask you what your first name is, for starters?”
“It’s Sihana,” she said. “And you’re not going to distract me that easily.”
“I’m not trying to distract…”
“Then fucking explain yourself,” Leka said. “Because I know enough about your Belters’ blood to give you the benefit of the doubt, here, but the rest of the crew wants a good reason not to shove you out an airlock before you bring those fucking things down on us.”
“Then find an airlock,” I said. “Because I have...I have no idea what’s happening to me.” I backed up to a seat and collapsed down on to it, elbows on my thighs and head in my hands. “It started back by Textiles, Sihana.”
“If you wanna call me something besides my last name, you can call me Captain,” she said. “What started back by Textiles?”
I could see other faces in the doorway that Leka had left open. “I started seeing...visions,” I said, staring past her at Curtis and Garcia and Tomlins. “Visions like I was one of them.”
“One of the xenos, you mean?�
�� Leka said.
“Do you think they were hacking into your biotech?” Tomlins stepped forward, cautiously, looking me up and down like I was about to grow red and black chitinous spikes.
“Maybe,” I said. “But then, they’d be hacking into...into whatever Leka has.”
“I don’t have biotech like yours,” Leka said, drawing back like she’d been insulted. “And I certainly haven’t been having...visions.”
“Well I have,” I said. “But it’s more than just seeing things. It’s like...it’s like I’m there.”
“Is that what’s happening when the xenos act all, I don’t know...friendly with you?” Curtis said. “Like they don’t want to kill you?”
“I bet it had something to do with you shocking that one,” Garcia said.
“That is when he started acting weird,” Curtis replied. “Do you think they can, you know…” He waved his hands like a puppeteer pulling strings. “Control you and shit?”
“We’re gonna find out if we let these xeno ships get any closer to us.” Leka was looking at a command data tablet. “Come on, Curtis,” she said. “We need to make the jump to the Maranta system.”
“What about Simms?” I said. “What about the wounded?”
“What about them?” Leka said. “Now that the xenos are fighting each other, maybe they’ll have a fighting chance. If we fuck around in orbit, we won’t have any chance at all.” She looked past me, at the people in the doorway. “What do you say, crew?” she said. “Do you buy his explanation?”
“I buy it,” Tomlins said. “For whatever that’s worth. He’s not a very good liar.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Lucky Pavel always said I wasn’t too creative.”
“I don’t know if I buy it,” Curtis said. “But like you said about Leka. I don’t wanna see anybody else die today.”
“Yeah, but ‘anybody else’ includes me and you,” Garcia said. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, Collins, I like you. But what if you draw those fucking things after us?”