Death Drop (28 page)

“Thank you, Ghost! Be careful and remember when you need protection…” Lilietha tapped her finger on her forearm and the brilliant black-flecked blue of her right eye vanished from the sides and then flashed to life again as she winked at Dezmara.

“Thanks, Lil,” Dezmara said and she pulled the collar of her jacket high over the sides of the kranos. She stepped into the shadows on the outskirts of the square and headed for the tormented figure of King Gamuun and the entrance to The Boneyard. Dezmara was a master of stealth, and although she had perfected the art of invisibility, she couldn’t shake the feeling that Gamuun’s spirit was watching her every move.

Despite the uneasy feeling growing in the pit of her stomach, Dezmara moved steadily toward The Boneyard. She slipped unnoticed past the throngs of traders, merchants, pilots, and thieves that scuttled about the great stone courtyard trying hard to make the day’s wages. The sights, sounds, and smells assaulted her senses as she knifed through the crowd. Merchants shouted out their offerings in a hundred different languages from behind their carts and brightly colored blankets. Thick clouds of smoke wafted haphazardly through the courtyard, gently depositing the scent of tender, cooked meats on the passersby. Wild hikeons, no doubt escapees from a past trader’s cage, perched from among the trusses and the heads of the great statues, swooped down in kamikaze dives for scraps of food dropped or otherwise discarded on the plaza floor. Filthy evidence of the large hikeon population could be seen splattered on the statues and, when by chance it could be seen between the heavy footfalls, on the ground itself. The nuisance fliers, however, seemed to be the boon of at least one entrepreneurial merchant whose cart carried a sign that read “Hikeon Hats for Sale—because hikeon poop burns if it gets in your eyes!” Musicians, with their hats and instrument cases upturned and open, strummed lively tunes and struggled, red-faced, to belt out songs over the din. Pilots stood by hand-drawn signs with the names of planets and systems, both near and far, and their prices for transport.

It was barely organized pandemonium and Dezmara kept her eyes peeled. She knew that the few vestiges of the free universe were havens for hard cases and criminals looking to swindle or bully their way to easy profits. It only took her a moment to notice them—two questionable characters, adolescents if she had to guess, moving in the opposite direction and working the crowd to either side of her. It was a classic, small-time game, but these pickpockets were a little more sophisticated than most she had seen. They had divided the circular marketplace into equal pieces—Dezmara assumed quadrants—with two other boys employing the gambit behind her. They began at the outskirts and slowly picked their way through the crowd, robbing each unsuspecting traveler of their belongings as they brushed past them in the hustle and bustle of the bazaar. Normally, she would have gone out of her way to teach them a lesson—she despised thieves. It was a small distinction since she herself smuggled black market cargo with no questions asked, but she never willingly or knowingly took something that didn’t belong to her. She was in logistics—plain and simple. She also took comfort in the fact that a huge percentage of the items she transported would be available through normal galactic shipping companies and independents if it hadn’t been for the Durax and their hellhounds the Berzerkers. The thieves were lucky she was in a hurry; then the boy on her left made an abrupt change of course that put him directly in her path. Perhaps they weren’t so lucky after all.

She could see the crook plainly as he brushed past the people in front of her. His face was smeared with the smoke and grit of the marketplace and splotches of purplish skin peeked through the grime. He had four ridges of bone that protruded several inches from his skull. One bisected his face vertically, running from the top of his head and stopping inside his upper lip, only to continue on the other side, down his long chin and onto the underside of his jaw, where it disappeared just before his throat. This outgrowth was flanked on both sides by similar but shorter protrusions that ran from somewhere on the back of his cranium and stopped just above each eye socket. The fourth ring of bone divided the youngster’s face horizontally and ran under his deep-set, gray eyes. This lateral extrusion curved onto the sides of his head and tapered into his skull just before two large holes that Dezmara assumed were his ears. Just below the point where the two main nodulations intersected, she noticed two fleshy pockets of skin that flexed open at their tops like a bellows as he breathed. She made a note that, along with the ears and eyes, this was a spot she could strike without mortally wounding him if he should resist her instruction. The boy kept his eyes fixed on the floor in front of him and relied on his delicate sense of touch to help him perform his foul craft. In a place like this, filled with so many bodies moving in every direction, no one thought twice about a little bump until it was too late.

Dezmara let her jacket come open so it lapped lightly at her sides as she drew closer to the little thief. She saw his eyes flicker for an instant and she knew he had taken the bait. She purposefully brushed back the left side of her jacket with her hand so it revealed the bulging coin satchel fixed to her belt. He was now only a few feet in front of her as he angled to his left. Dezmara took another step forward and then the distance between them vanished as the left sides of their torsos softly collided and then separated like wayward asteroids in the Straits. Dezmara was impressed. She almost didn’t feel the satchel being taken.

She reached across her body and grabbed the boy in the bend of his elbow, and even before the young brigand had started his revolution, she knew she had made a terrible mistake. The knife’s edge passed within microns of her helmet—0.56 microns according to the orange numbers on the heads-up-display—as she turned her upper body away from the boy’s murderous attack in a purely reflexive move. And then everything slowed down. Dezmara watched with morbid curiosity as the blade glided by, its surface reflecting the faintest glint of the yellow lights high overhead. She could see the dirt-stained threads of fiber that locked together and formed the boy’s jacket sleeve as it darted past.
“So much for goin’ easy on the kid,”
she thought to herself.

Her timing was perfect and as his dagger drifted by, she hooked her left hand up and caught the inside of his forearm. She pulled back toward her while smashing the heel of her right hand down on his wrist. Popping sounds erupted from his hand and he let out a devilish howl as he dropped the weapon. The fluidity of her movement was like a mortal dance—a violent ballet. Dezmara slid her right hand from the thief’s arm and caught the knife by the handle as it fell, tip down, toward the floor.

She pulled the boy’s limb over her head, forcing his fingers to open in front of her. In a flash, the steely blade was buried up to its small hilt in the meat of his palm. Before he could cry out again, Dezmara wrenched his injured arm behind his back, clamped a gloved hand over his bony mouth, and pulled him so close he could feel the heat of her breath escaping from the kranos. There was no possible way anyone could make out what was going on: the bazaar was too congested. If a spectator did happen to glance them out of the corner of their eye, they would have looked like lovers or old friends embracing one another.

“You’ll never pick another pocket with
that
hand,” she said. The electronic voice of the veil program sounded cruel and cold, and that was fine with Dezmara. “Now tell me, my little would-be murderer, who would’ve gotten my purse at the end of the day if you’d actually killed me?” She slipped her hand from his trembling lips so he could answer.

“Fuck you—you bastard—you goddam freak! I ain’t sayin’ shit—AAAARRRHH!” The thief squealed as Dezmara twisted the blade in his hand. “P-p-portmaster!”

“Why am I not surprised. Now you and your three buddies are going to set up shop.”

He looked at her with seething hatred and then in pain and confusion as she torqued the knife handle again. His face shook vigorously in submission and she continued.

“Stand at the north end of the square. Make a sign that says, ‘We have stolen several items today. Describe what you are missing and we will gladly return your valuables.’”

“You’re outta your fuckin’ mind, man! The portmaster’ll kill us so you can just kiss my”

Dezmara snatched the knife from the thief’s bloody hand and pressed the warm, slick metal against his throat. “Then you have a choice to make. Die now, or do as I say and beg for your life with your master. The choice is yours, but I promise you—your life is worth far more to him than it is to me.” She pressed on the knife until his skin split beneath it and a small stream of green blood glided silently along its edge before pooling against the hilt and falling to the ground in large drops. “If I press any harder, this face will be the last you ever see.”

The thief stood silent; shaking in Dezmara’s deadly grasp.

“Choose!” she demanded.

The thief nodded his head emphatically and Dezmara eased the knife away from his throat. He pressed the fingers and thumb of his left hand over the large, bleeding hole in his right as she wiped the blade clean on his shirt.

“I’m gonna walk back out of The Boneyard in fifteen minutes and cross the plaza; I better see you and your friends when I pass by.”

He grimaced as he clutched his wound but did not answer.

“And one more thing. If I see or hear that you’ve hurt anyone that comes looking for their stuff, I’ll finish what I started.”

The thief looked up from his hand but she was gone. He looked around him and in the direction of the old statue of that pitiful weakling, Gamuun, but he didn’t see the masked psycho that put a hole in his hand and damn near cut his throat. The sonofabitch had vanished into the crowd.

“Too bad you ain’t comin’ back from the yard alive,” he said as he spat on the dirty stones at his feet before he, too, slipped into the sea of people and disappeared.

***

The orange numbers ticked down against the green background in the kranos as Dezmara maneuvered easily through the melee and toward The Boneyard.
Twenty-five meters
.
Twenty meters
.
Ten meters
.
Five
.
Zero
. She put the sole of her right boot on the step in front of her and gazed up as she tapped the controls on the helmet. The staircase was instantly outlined in orange light as
the
Ghost’s
computer crunched the requested information and sent it back to the kranos.

“Fifty-six steps, twelve meters high,” she said as she read the data on the screen. She paused and looked beyond the top step at the gruesome entrance that hovered there. The doorway to her destination was a cave; perfectly excavated between both sides of King Gamuun’s carved rib cage so that it gaped open in the center of his abdomen. She looked at the statue’s legs to either side of her and couldn’t help but notice how much the staircase itself resembled an undulating river of Gamuun’s insides spilling from the yawning hole torn in his body down to the floor. A foreboding feeling crept into her mind again as she leapt onto the staircase. She dashed forward, legs burning, taking the steps in twos and threes, trying to subdue the fear with her effort. The numbers on the display inside the kranos flashed rapidly as they descended until she flew from the last step and was swallowed by the opening below the fallen king’s chest.

The darkness of the tunnel lasted only a few seconds, and Dezmara passed beyond its curved walls and found herself standing at the edge of another plaza with a domed ceiling. Instead of the dull roar of the teeming market she had just left, the enclosure echoed with the harmony of chorused voices singing in a language Dezmara wasn’t familiar with. The room was similarly shaped to the bazaar outside, but the walls ran vertically from the floor for quite some distance before arching abruptly, and it was smaller and more intricately decorated. The roof came together in a patchwork of curved pockets with ornately carved borders. Dezmara adjusted the vision controls on the kranos to get a better look at the beautiful detail work. Large rectangular expanses of colored glass, masterfully melded to depict various scenes of the plight of the Trinitons, encircled the room and ran from floor to ceiling. A brilliant light shone from behind the translucent panels and painted the room with their somber depictions in a riot of color. The warmth and the richness from the panes betrayed their origins and the cold, gray chamber itself, and Dezmara felt torn in two by the conflict. Her mood shifted to the macabre as her eyes followed the particles of dust that danced through the air in the colorful streaks of light and floated silently to the ground.

The chamber floor was a large semi-circle that covered two thousand square feet. A large path of smooth, bare stone skirted the center of the room along the curved walls of colorful glass and disappeared into two caverns on the back wall. Dezmara would have scarcely noticed the openings if not for the assistance of
the
Ghost’s
mainframe and her technologically advanced head-wear. She was standing frozen in place, her eyes fixed on the ground at the center of the room. Now she knew why it was called The Boneyard.

Chapter 24:
Kings and Pawns

T
he dull gray light that fell across Colonel Jerrel Abalias’ face was barely noticeable against his white skin, and it gave no warmth. He cracked his eyes and moaned as he rolled to his back and touched the hard, rough floor under him with his hands. He waited for a hint of heat to tingle into his fingers, but nothing happened; the room was as cold as he was. His head was pounding and he felt like he had just woken from a bad nightmare he couldn’t remember when a distant voice called to him in the dark.