Perdition (The Dred Chronicles) (2 page)

Then her gaze lit on a man near the back. At first glance, he looked young, but his eyes refuted the initial assessment. Though he was slim and clean, with a crown of shining blond hair, his summer-sky eyes held a hardness that came only from turns of fighting, violence, and despair. He might well be the most dangerous man on the ship.
Time to find out if he’s stable.
Giving Tam and Einar the order to guard her, she closed her eyes and let slip the dogs of war.

2

The Pale Knight

She’s a beautiful killer, this princess in chains.

Her swagger amused him, especially the way she’d gone still and quiet, eyes closed, as if in some medium’s trance. But it gave Jael the opportunity to study her, even with the bodyguards to either side. They didn’t know it yet, but if he meant her harm, the two most dangerous men in Perdition stood no chance of keeping him from doing as he willed. The rest of the bodies belonged to human flotsam, no more important than refuse washed up on a lonely shore.

But this woman shone.

It wasn’t just her long, lean form, tautly muscled and sinuous. Nor was it the gleam of her skin, artfully embellished with tattoos that curved around the graceful slope of her shoulder, played peekaboo where the strips of rough fabric gaped across her rib cage. Chains wrapped around her forearms, both weapon and adornment. They weren’t merely for show, either. In an instant, he assessed how much weight they would add to a blow and judged it significant. Steel links also wrapped her boots, which hit her at midthigh. They were thin and worn, as though she never took them off. Her brown hair fell in a multiplicity of braids, trinkets woven carefully here and there, so that when she tilted her head in response to something she saw with senses other than her eyes, they clacked.

Nobody else would’ve heard it beneath the din. That was part of his unique heritage.

Heh. Heritage.

All told, she presented an interesting package, but it didn’t explain her behavior. Jael took a step toward her, and the blond hulk at her side growled deep in his throat. Scars covered him like a map of roads he shouldn’t have traveled, and the implicit threat moved Jael not at all. He’d faced worse. Killed worse. Even if this was allegedly the worst place in the galaxy, at least it was full of humans and not wretched, chattering Bugs.

“You will not approach until bidden.”

“I’ll do whatever I damned well like,” he said softly. “And I’d like to see you stop me.”

The giant took offense to his tone. Maybe they would’ve danced then, but the woman opened her eyes; they were green, like the rolling hills on a world where he’d killed . . . a lot of people. Funny, he could recall the exact shade of the treetops with the veined leaves glimmering in the sun but not the name of the planet.

She raised her hand, shielding him. It entertained him, that show of power. “This one could be of use. He’s not mad . . . yet . . . for what it’s worth.”

“How do you know?” he asked, not much caring.

In a place like this, there would be petty despots. Factions. This was a sunless world where madness and depravity reigned. At least he knew not to expect order, which was a leg up from the idiots with whom he’d been forced to share transport. A few of them had found interesting ways to hurt each other, so that the ship stank of sweat and blood and urine by the time it docked. A look from Jael had been enough to deter any but those truly determined to die.

And he obliged. He had artistic hands, made for killing.

“I read you,” she said.

He eyed her in surprise. “I don’t come with a manual.”

Though she was closer than she knew with that statement. Unease prickled on his skin. Her henchman would prove no threat, but this woman bothered him. As he stared, someone jostled him from behind. In reflex, he spun, drove an elbow into the fool’s throat and ended him with a closed fist to the temple. Precision work. Perhaps he should feel some flicker of regret, but the man wouldn’t be here if he wasn’t a bastard.
It doesn’t pay to crowd me.

“You’ll do,” she said, as if that had been an audition.

“Unlikely. I have issues with authority.” He turned away. The whole ship was a danger zone, but instinct told him to get the hell away from this one.

“Do you have issues with going hungry and living in filth?”

Ah. Bribery.

“Usually,” she went on coolly, “I’d say, ‘come with me and you may not die’ but I can see you’re fierce enough to protect yourself, even in Shantytown. But it’s a disgusting cesspool compared to what I can offer you.”

The slight, dark man on her left spoke up. “It’s clean in Queensland. Plenty to eat, comparatively.”

Jael cocked his head. “Bed and board? You must ken I’m a cut above. Is that the best you can do?”

“You’ll never know. Good luck in Shantytown. Mind you, don’t let Silence’s people haul you off. They’re a bit odd. And Mungo’s folk are worse. But if you wind up in Abaddon with Priest . . . well.” Her words trailed off, and he was meant to wonder what she knew.

It was blatant bait. Obviously, she knew the lay of the land. And she intended him to sink the barbed hook deep into his mouth like a good, curious fish. Ripping free might hurt like hell later, but he healed fast. That was the beauty and the horror of it. Not a single wound he’d ever taken in his life showed on his skin. Instead, he carried the scars elsewhere, damage so deep that he’d become a human-shaped thing. Ironic, because that was what they’d wanted him to be, so many turns ago, the fate he’d fought so hard to avoid.

“Queensland,” he repeated mockingly. “How precious.”

The giant stirred and growled again, taking another step toward him.
Don’t,
Jael thought.
I’ll have to kill you.
There was a macabre serenity about knowing even a severed spine couldn’t end him, but the horror and pain lingered. The period afterward was most horrendous, where he lay paralyzed and helpless, feeling what his enemy did to him yet there could be no release; he was tied to his broken meat like a cursed devil from the old stories. So he feared no violence. Not anymore. The universe was an infinite sea of blood in which he could swim but never drown.

“I’m bored,” the woman said then. “Best of luck, pretty lad. You’ll need it.”

She spun on her heels, threading toward the dark corridor beyond. The lights flickered, yielding an intermittent burst that made it look as if she glided, taking only one step for every meter. Despite her leather and chains, she was graceful. Quiet. And he could hear so many things.
Too many.
This place would drive him mad in short order, and it wasn’t as though he had far to travel.

He expected her to pause to give him a chance to reconsider, but she didn’t. In fact, she’d already written him off. That tore it. With inhuman speed, he closed the distance between them and leapt over their heads, dropping down into a fighting crouch before them.

“Maybe I was hasty,” he said. “It’s a curse.”

“Come on then. We can’t linger.”

Her two minions fell back, talking softly. Jael heard every word though they were trying to be subtle. This was a skill he didn’t advertise, but he could’ve told the woman at his side that she had slight arrhythmia.

“What do you think of the fish?” the blond giant asked.

“Too soon to say. He seems smart enough . . . and skilled. Not crazy.”

“Do you think she took him because he’s pretty?”

“What do you care?”

The giant sighed. “Because I’m not.”

Hm.
So the big scarred brute had a thing for the princess in chains.
I wonder if she knows.

Before he could calculate how the information might serve him best, he stopped cold, held up a hand. Occasionally, his acute hearing proved useful in other ways. Jael could also hear the slight hitch in her breathing when the décor changed. New territory, he guessed. She was afraid, but the adrenaline kicked in. The woman beside him was ready for a fight—wanted one—and that was . . . enticing.

“Party guests on the way. Shall we show them a good time?”

She nodded. “Let’s.”

He had no weapon, but it didn’t matter. The enemy couldn’t have anything more than shivs, chains, hunks of metal forged into something equally primitive. There would be no blasters, shredders, or disruptors. Which made for a fine melee . . . for him, anyway.

Jael whirled into battle as the convicts broke from the shadows. They all wore the same colors, and they carried homemade knives. They radiated a desperate, frantic air; he’d seen the same light in the eyes of holy warriors—fools convinced they were dying for a holy cause instead of just dying.

Punch, block, roll. He came up behind his target and broke his neck cleanly from behind. The giant’s surprised grunt told Jael the other man was surprised he had the brute strength to manage the maneuver. Everyone was, until they realized he wasn’t normal. That he was other. Then the whispers would start, even here.

It was hard not to stop and watch her because she was beautiful like a ferocious storm. Her chains twirled and lashed. He leapt them while the henchmen held back, clearly worried about getting in her way. But he wasn’t afraid of a misdirected blow. It was only pain, his old friend, his nursemaid and mother. She hit him once, and he shook it off, finished his kill.

There were ten bodies on the ground when he stopped moving.

“Priest’s people,” she said, not even breathing hard.

That meant less than nothing to him, but in time, he’d figure out the politics.

The trek through the ship was enlightening in other ways. Anything that could be stripped, stolen, or recycled had been. In places, whole wall panels were missing, and others showed signs of hard use, pocked with holes and rust and ominous stains. The floors showed just as much wear, to the point that it was miraculous Perdition held together at all.

“What’ll happen when someone pries off the wrong piece?” he asked.

She cut him a wry, appreciative look. “We’ll asphyxiate. No great loss, right?”

That might do it. A jolt of anticipation startled him.
I could die here.
And it wasn’t an awful, terrifying thought. It was like the promise of sunrise at the end of the longest, darkest night. Another man might raise a fist and rail because he hadn’t asked to be born. But Jael could only whisper in his own head:
I didn’t ask to be created.

But that was too pathetic. He’d grown accustomed to his status as renegade science project. Even took pleasure in killing the people responsible from time to time. Not all of them, of course. Some had to live because otherwise, how could they enjoy turns of tortured fear?

He smiled.

“What did you mean when you said you read me?”

“I’m Psi,” she said flatly.

He actually stumbled. “Oh, shit. You’re not a mind reader, are you? I hate those fookers. Always poking about, looking for your darkest secrets.”

She surprised him with a husky laugh. “No, though I’d keep busy for a thousand turns in here if I were. You can’t go five steps without stumbling over some ass with a dark secret.”

“I don’t have any. So what then?”

“I find killers . . . and I feel how they go about it. If it’s rage or pleasure-driven.” She was holding back, he could tell. The way she bit her lip to prevent another round of explanation.

But it was enough for now. He’d charm the rest out of her later. Women liked him; or they always had, right up until it was too late to reconsider. When you got right down to it, there was a monstrous face beneath his smooth skin.

“And me? What did you see?”

“You’ve taken pleasure in killing but not in a psychotic way. Your pattern felt . . . organized. Like you were righting a wrong, real or imagined. You don’t kill in anger. In fact, you’re mostly cold, pretty lad, like a field of endless snow.”

How right she was. It shook him a bit, so he summoned a caustic smile. “Look, I’m properly undone. Watch now, you’ll have me weeping. Do you think you could fix me, queenie?”

“No,” she said. “I can’t fix anything. I can only break it. Or kill it. But you’re welcome to come sleep in my boneyard.”

“Now there’s an offer I can’t refuse.”

3

Bad Omens

Dred had told him the truth, as far as it went.

Reading him had been instructive . . . and unique. She’d never encountered anyone with so much pale energy, limned in darkness. Otherwise, there was little color to him at all, as if emotion had rarely touched him. In fact, he only offered curls of cobalt blue, like a dark sea one could drown in, the color of sorrow. So he had been sad . . . and he’d frozen thereafter. His past became a mystery wrapped in that context, but it would remain unquestioned. She didn’t need to know his secrets.

As she’d said, everyone had them inside Perdition, crimes for which they’d never been charged or convicted, sins that had driven them to darker deeds. There was some solace in the bottom of the abyss; this was where people rolled to a stop after an interminable fall.

After the fight, they didn’t speak again. She led the way quickly through the other borders, and she didn’t stop until they reached the dubious safety of Queensland. The sentries snapped to attention as she crossed with the three men behind her.

“Anything to report?” she asked.

“Nil.”

Sometimes it was a colossal pain in the ass to guard so much ground. On bad days, it felt futile, like conflict they invented to keep themselves from going mad from the realization that their lives were pointless. Such nihilism would destroy her if she let it.

Dred nodded at the guards and led the way past into the heart of Queensland. She tried to imagine what it looked like to the fish—tawdry, she supposed, and full of delusions of grandeur, relics of Artan’s rule. This had been a fitness room at some point, where the workers could train on the machines or run laps if they preferred. It was a good-sized space, and she’d divided it up in sections for various functions. Everyone had a job to do, as work kept her men from killing one another. Well, most days. If the tensions ran too high, she ran death matches to settle grievances. The betting distracted the convicts. Most of them were simple souls with rotten teeth and low aspirations.

“Get something to eat,” she told Einar and Tam.

It was a dismissal; they left without a second look.

“You’ve carved out quite a kingdom here,” the man beside her said.

“Not me. I only stole it.”

“Possession is nine-tenths of the law. Isn’t that what they say?”

“It is, but that doesn’t mean I built this.” After listening to Tam’s advice, she’d made some improvements, though. Artan’s idea of organization had been somewhat lacking.

He shrugged. “In here, keeping it seems like a fair achievement.”

“Don’t pretend to be kind. Don’t flatter me. I brought you here because I recruit the best of the dregs, which is why my territory doesn’t lose a single centimeter.”

“Oh, I
like
you,” he purred. “What’s your name?”

“Dred.”

“That must be a prison handle. No mother would name her daughter Dread.”

“It’s a nickname. D-R-E-D.”

“Must be short for something.” He cocked an inquiring brow at her.

Dresdemona Devos,
she thought. But she didn’t confide such things in her fish.

“Must be,” she agreed aloud. “What should I call you?”

“I’m Jael,” he answered.

“JL? What does that stand for?” The moment she asked, she recognized the tactical error, as she’d done the thing she just chided him over.

“Whenever you feel like exchanging stories, queenie, we can brew a nice cuppa, share our deepest feelings, and give each other matching tattoos.”

She offered her sweetest smile. “The hydroponics lab
does
keep us in sweetleaf tea. It’s not the finest blend, but the plants are hardy. Even gross mismanagement can’t kill them.”

“Splendid,” he muttered. “And it’s J-A-E-L since you were kind enough to share a spelling lesson with me.”

“Excellent. Now I know how to write your name when it comes time to draw lots for the worst missions.”

He suppressed a smile, as if her acerbic nature delighted him. Dred didn’t want him to approve of her; she only needed him strong and willing to fight. Yet she sensed this man did as he pleased and only pretended to obey. She couldn’t claim he hadn’t warned her.

Back in Shantytown he’d said,
I have issues with authority.
In Perdition, however, that was like saying,
I kill people.
Other convicts would just shrug because it was a given. They didn’t send people to a whitefish lockdown like this one for stealing baubles.

“Does this place have a still?”

“In fact, it does. But you’ll have to earn your ration cards. I can’t have all my men drunk at once. Bad for business.”

“Death
is
your business.”

Her smile widened. “And business is good.”

“I knew you were going to say that.” Dred saw how he choked his response, buried the flare in his blue eyes that looked like a tiny spark, flickering within the purest heart of flame.

“So you’re Psi as well,” she said, deadpan. “Precog, I suppose? Tell me, how does my story end?”

“Not with a bang but with a whimper.”

“That’s how everyone goes out, I reckon. Unless they’re gurgling.”

“I never whimper. Or gurgle.”

“What’s your specialty?” she asked, sobering.

It wouldn’t do to like him, or to encourage teasing. She’d learned not to get attached. People died all the time in border battles, invasions . . . sometimes by their own hands. Over time, she’d discovered it was easier to go numb. The convicts who chose to live in Queensland weren’t her people. They were pawns to be used or sacrificed according to her convenience. She’d do well to remember that.

“Unarmed combat.”

“That’s convenient, as we’re fresh out of guns.”

Before Dred formulated her next move, walleyed Wills broke from the curious onlookers; it was hard to talk to him because she never knew where to look. His head offered a plethora of unfortunate features from the carbuncle on his neck to the nose that sat nearly sideways on his face from so many untreated breaks. And there were his eyes . . .

Of course, he held his bag of bones. And he wouldn’t go away until she let him read what they presaged about this new arrival.

“Is this a good time, ma’am?”

Not really.
It never was, but Wills got downright irrational if she refused to let him exercise his gift. As psychoses went, this one was relatively harmless . . . and preferable to his setting things on fire. Wills made up for the annoyance by being able to fix damn near anything.

“Never better,” she said, humoring him.

Jael fell into the spirit of the thing, leaning forward as Wills dumped the fine bones into his palms. They came from rodents that infested the ship. They’d come in with some shipment of supplies, turns ago, and multiplied like mad. She ate them when she could catch them, but the things had mutated over the turns, likely due to exposure to radiation from the aging ship. The only blessing was they could no longer fit in the ducts and panels to chew the wiring.

Muttering, Wills sliced his fingertips and handled the bones, then he spat in the bloody mess and juggled the bones and bodily fluids in his scarred palms. He whispered words in a language Dred didn’t know and cast the augury. A primitive pursuit, but she didn’t object.

Wills drew in a sharp breath. “Bad omens. Bad.”

“What do you see?” Dred always asked. It never mattered.

The man’s head came up, clarity in his muddy, miscast eyes for an instant. “Kill him now. Chaos comes. The dead will walk. And he’ll cost you everything.”

“Thanks for your counsel,” she said, as if she hadn’t heard such fire-and-doom tidings before. “I’ll consider what you’ve said.”

Wills bowed once, twice, thrice—he did everything in threes—and hurried away to cleanse his bones. The man beside her pushed out a breath, as if he hadn’t realized he was holding it. Tension lingered in his shoulders, and she wanted to reassure him that Wills was full of shit. But she didn’t comfort convicts.

“He’s quite a character. Is it always this exciting?”

“Indeed. And sometimes we have jugglers. Want something to eat?”

“Don’t be kind,” he said, casting her words back like shards of ice.

“I’m not. You need nutrition to stay strong. You’re no use to me if you can’t fight, and I’d prefer not to cast your corpse down the chute just yet.”

He
laughed
at that. Here was a man who laughed at death. And he meant it; this wasn’t bravado, designed to impress her. His amusement echoed with layers, sincerity and . . . longing. Did he
want
to die, then? How . . . intriguing.

“I’d like a meal. There was nothing on the transport.”

She nodded. “The system managers don’t care if you starve or kill one another en route. If you do, then it’s less burden on the existing resources.”

“It’s a business like any other with profit and loss statements. I bet they don’t send much.”

“No,” she acknowledged. “We make do.”

Besides boundaries and limited space, aggression that sometimes had nowhere else to go, townships battled for limited resources. If she lost ground, it might cost her the hydroponics lab they’d built. Not all the settlements had them. Mungo’s people relied on the capricious Kitchen-mates, which had to be fed a steady influx of organic matter to create food. Dred tossed corpses into the chutes for processing, which fertilized their plants, but Mungo took a different route, and his dead became something else, something hot and delicious for the table.

She quelled a shiver. It would be impossible for her to eat a steaming roast, knowing it had been a person. Even understanding how the Kitchen-mates worked didn’t help. The meat might go in as human, but it would be broken down and processed and regenerated until the cellular structure matched the recipe that had been input. So unless a freakish cannibal did the programming, it wouldn’t be human flesh that emerged.
And yet . . .

“Something wrong?” Jael asked.

“No more than usual. Let’s find you some food.”

There was always a pot of vegetable stew bubbling away, and since it was close to the third meal of the day, she found bread cooling on the table. At her nod, Cook cut a generous slab. That was both the man’s name and his job. He didn’t speak or fight much, but he had a way with produce, and he knew his way around the kitchen. She’d recruited him because he was big, but as it turned out, he’d rather use his knives for chopping. Dred had often wondered how Cook ended up here, but he wasn’t helpless. If you pissed him off, he’d slit your throat and go back to dicing veggies for the pot.

Once he got the food, Jael ate quickly, arms curled around the bowl to keep anyone from taking it. He used the bread to clean the dish, then handed it back. All told, it took less than five minutes.

“Been a while?” she asked.

He shrugged. “I can’t remember when last I ate.”

Dred didn’t pursue the subject; it was too personal. She just needed to brief him and walk away. Let him find his own path.

“This is Queensland.” Briefly, she outlined the size of her holding. “Once you have a chance to rest, I’ll put you on the roster. You’ll have shifts at various borders . . . and sometimes there will be people to kill.”

“That’s it?”

“More or less.”

“What do you do for laughs?”

She took that to mean the men, not herself personally. Dred couldn’t remember when she’d enjoyed . . . anything. Except his conversation. Which made him absolutely forbidden fruit.

Walk away. Don’t go down this road. It ends in a sheer cliff with blood all over the rocky ground.

But she couldn’t resist one last exchange. “Drink. Gamble. Copulate.”

He flashed a white, wicked smile. “Occasional murder leavened with debauchery and vice? This sounds divine.”