Spin the Sky (43 page)

Fortunately, they aren’t the gunmen’s targets. Moon buggies with large guns mounted to them come barreling down the streets, full of livid screaming Ithacans. Argos is driving the lead buggy and screaming angry taunts at the men in Nullball uniforms.

“Run home, you pathetic excuse for pirates!” shouts Argos as he speeds past.

The men in Nullball uniforms take cover and spread out with military precision. Nausicaa pulls him back into the shadows, but Trevor catches a glimpse of his grandfather Larry leaping off a moon buggy, draped with bandoliers of grenades and waving a gun bigger than his leg.

“Stop firing and we may spare your worthless lives, you stupid thieves!”

The thieves in Nullball uniforms apparently don’t appreciate this suggestion and they open fire again. Trevor and Nausicaa are safe for now, but it’s loud and more than a little scary. Trevor hears jeering hoots as the buggies go bouncing past, firing back at the raiders for all they are worth.

“Run or die, you bastards!” old Larry screams as he shoves a grenade into the gun he is holding. Trevor hopes that gun is actually a grenade launcher and his old granddad isn’t just over-excited and about to blow himself up.

As he aims the launcher, Larry screams, “You ain’t getting my life or my cows today. Nothing. All you bastards get today are grenades.” Then the old man falls back as the gun goes off.

The grenade smacks into the side of the building and kicks up a shower of rubble. Judging from the yelling down there, Larry has actually managed to hurt someone. Trevor laughs and cheers, coughing through the thick pungent smoke that the grenade leaves behind.

Larry turns at the sound. When he sees his grandson, a huge grin spreads over his face.

“Trevor!”

Trevor waves.

“Trevor, you’re alive!” his granddad crows. Then the old man glances around and wipes the joy off his face, replacing it with fear and consternation.

“Trevor, what are you doing here? Get home now! And don’t breathe in any of that smoke. You’re too young. That was one of my special grenades. Got it from my Rasta friends.”

Trevor wants to explain about his leg, but he can’t yell loud enough over the gunfire. He sees Larry hop back onto the buggy and shout an order to the driver of his buggy. It begins making its way towards where Trevor and Nausicaa hide.

Unfortunately, the Nullball fighters have grenades too. One of them catches the rear wheel of Larry’s buggy and the explosions sends the little vehicle slamming into the wall of the building next to Trevor’s hiding spot.

Trevor sees his grandfather get up and shake himself dazedly. The buggy’s driver bleeds heavily from a gash, but at least he is conscious and moving. Turning to look back at the enemies, Trevor sees a man taking aim at Larry. Before he has time to think about it, Trevor leaps out of the alley. He throws himself in front of the bullet aimed at his grandfather.

Trevor hears Nausicaa’s scream from far away. He wishes he kissed her before. He hopes that this will save his granddad and not be just a stupid stunt that gets him killed. He also hopes dying doesn’t take very long or hurt very much. Trevor watches the man pull the trigger, the bullet racing through space and time to end his life.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

H
igh above Ithaca, an army buzzes angrily. Mostly the buzzing comes from the killer bees. Or at least Cesar imagines they buzz although he can’t actually hear them. The bees showed up just a while ago, much to his delight.

Calypso could have been talking crazy when she sent that message earlier. You never know when its just talk and when they actually do something at the Spider House. In Cesar’s experience, splicers are a bunch of braggers. The bees add a certain amount of insane festivity to the tense standoff between Cesar’s impromptu hodgepodge army of supporters and the menace of the three large and heavily armed Seven Skies vessels that Mach commands.

The bees are about the size of a closed fist and apparently totally fine flying through hard vacuum on little retractable solar sail wings. Cesar doesn’t see how they can fly so fast, but they do. They swarm around the ships like an angry rain cloud before forming a funnel-shaped cloud that pours itself into Ithaca.

This is probably a good thing since the Seven Skies raiders inside Ithaca have control of the docking bay. Meanwhile, Cesar’s friends effectively keep the Seven Skies ships from landing on Ithaca, but they can’t seem to push them away once and for all.

“God, why doesn’t he just give up and go?” screams Penelope with frustration after they watch the fighting for over an hour. “He won’t be able to take off with the herd now. We won’t let him land and, even if he did, we’d just send someone to follow him while we regroup.”

Cesar has their little ship bobbing and weaving through the crowd of ships, striking small hits on the three giants. He makes a rude gesture at his comm screen as, once again, another ship blocks what would have been a solid hit.

“There are too many people out here,” he replies. “We’d be better off if some of them went home so I could kill these guys and go take a shower.”

Penny laughs bitterly. She is strapped into the copilot chair and taking shots at the enemy ships with a neutrino blaster whenever she can. She is surprisingly lethal for a woman who has never fired a weapon larger than a shotgun and hasn’t set foot on a ship in fifteen years.

The comm crackles and then the speakers hiss out Mach’s malevolent laugh, “Well, this is fun, boxing with the rabble like this. I’d love to stay and play, but I’m bored now and I think we’ve made a big enough mess for you. Sorry about your colony and all.”

Penny falters for a minute as Mach chuckles satanically. Cesar can see the color drain out of her face when Mach says, “My men tell me they’ve killed the crap out of Trevor and Larry Vaquero. Oops! Guess Ithaca will have fewer mouths to feed. Too bad since we slaughtered all your cows for you.”

The comm beeps off. Cesar watches Penny. She’s like a shipwreck unfolding before his eyes, grisly and mesmerizing. Her lower lip quivers and her pale hands tighten on the trigger. Cesar knows what she is feeling. Waves of nauseating despair crash against his heart. The taunt about slaughtering the herd barely registers after what he said about Trevor and Larry.

“He’s lying,” Cesar croaks.

Penny nods vacantly.

“He has to be.”

Penny nods again, but Cesar doesn’t think she is listening. She’s not really in there right now. That’s fine. Cesar isn’t in a talking mood anymore. He’s in a
“killing Uri Mach”
mood. And he means to make the most of it.

Cesar banks the ship hard and it darts forward past the fray of small ships surrounding Mach’s three larger.

“We may die now,” he tells Penny.

“Thanks for letting me know.”

Then the rage takes over, pounding its heartbeat rhythm through him. It makes his movements sharp and defined as his thoughts all bend to a single goal. The ship moves like an extension of his lethal rage, performing every screaming death wish shot with pinpoint precision.

•

When it’s all over, the wreckage is everywhere and the screaming on the comm is deafening. Cesar is well and truly spent. He stares at the destroyed remnants of Mach’s ship, listening to the other ship captains howling in triumph as they fall back, allowing the junker ships in to clean up the debris.

“You are a god!” screams the Hathor pilot. “Only a god could have brought down Mach’s fleet with one tiny ship!”

“How did he do it? I was sitting here watching and I still don’t understand how he did it!” came pouring in on every channel.

The team from Rasta Nation comment, “I would not have thought to use a grappling gun to spear our pallet of marijuana bombs and sling it into the enemy ship like that.”

“He had some help!” huff the revolutionaries of Alpha Seti Six in perfect unison.

“Once again, Cesar the Scorcher stops the fight by being the most ruthless bastard in space!”

They praise his bravery and insanity. Their words fall on deaf ears. Cesar stares at the burning wreckage, all that remains of Mach’s three huge ships, with unseeing eyes.

Ithaca is safe, but Mach’s voice replays in his head. Trevor is dead? Larry is dead? The man must have lied. The alternative is unthinkable and yet Cesar can’t turn his mind to anything else.

The words whirl around in his brain long after they lose all meaning for him. Cool hands slide over his, gently pulling him away out of the pilot’s chair.

“Cesar, let’s go,” Penny whispers to him.

Her small cool hands pull his face around so that Cesar is forced to look her in the eye. There is so much he needs to tell her, so much they must talk about. He has to find the words that will make her love him, even though Cesar knows that with Trevor dead, all is lost.

Penny pulls him into a hug. He slumps against her, feeling her heart beat against his chest. Her breath moves in and out, warming them both.

“Cesar, we should go,” she whispers again. “We should go down to Ithaca.”

“No,” he murmurs back.

He doesn’t want to go down there. Not if he is going to have to see Trevor and Larry dead. Then Penny will slip away from him and that will be it. He’ll have lost everything after all. Cesar just doesn’t want to do it.

Penny gently wraps her hands around his face and pulls his chin up, forcing him to meet her eyes again. She smiles at him through tears.

“Come on, husband,” she says gently. “Let’s go home.”

Cesar pulls away, shaking his head. He’s going to run, hide, anything. He can’t go down there.

Her palm stings his cheek sharply when she slaps him. Hard. Cesar whips his head back and sees her pulling back her arm to do it again.

“Pull it together, Cesar,” she growls when he grabs her arm to stop her. “Get your rear in gear and get me home. I need to see my son,” Penny orders in a voice full of steel and menace.

Cesar sighs.

She has a way of making her point. He drops back into the pilot seat and turns the ship towards Ithaca without a word. The comm crackles. He really needs to reset the thing so it stops playing every incoming message. All the ships in the air seem to want to chatter at them all day long.

“Mom? Dad? Are you guys alive up there?” Trevor’s voice floats over the blackness of the void.

“Trevor!” cries Penny, flying to the comm in front of Cesar even though there is one sitting right in front of her.

Pushing Cesar out of the way, she calls joyfully back: “Trevor! Trevor! Tell me you aren’t hurt!”

“Uh, well. I’m a little banged up, Mom, but it’s fine.”

Cesar doesn’t mind being pushed in the slightest. He is busy dancing for joy listening to Trevor’s repeated assurances that he is doing just fine. When Cesar hears Larry growling and cussing, he experiences a moment of nausea as his entire digestive tract unwinds, relieving tension he didn’t know he’d been carrying. His stomach has been one big knot since the last time he saw his son and it’s finally untwisting itself.

It takes a few minutes to set the course for Ithaca’s dock, but once he does she joins him in dancing around the tiny cabin with joy. They kept repeating to each other that it’s over. Larry says they have all Mach’s men in Ithaca rounded up. Mach’s ships are utterly destroyed. Trevor is safe. It’s over. For Cesar, it hasn’t sunk in yet.

He pulls Penny close, wanting the solid feeling of her body against his. That, at least, he can understand. She stiffens as he wraps his arms around her.

Pulling back, he looks at the frown on her face.

“What?” he asks.

“Exactly,” she says, folding her arms across her chest. “Now what? What happens next?”

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

“T
he bullet would have killed me, but Argos stepped in front of it,” sobs Trevor over the man’s lifeless form.

Nausicaa holds his hand and sobs with him. Penelope is miserable over the death of a friend so close. Argos was unquestionably family. It’s awful.

Penelope is also miserable over how distracted she is by questions, mainly about this strange girl clinging to her son. She is crying about Argos, but she can’t stop glancing at Trevor and that girl. She wants to hug her son about eight or nine thousand more times to assure herself he is actually alive and well. This girl is in her way.

“I’m just fine,” roars Larry from a cot across the room. Lupe stands over the man, pushing him back onto the cot every time he tries to get up.

Since Larry actually dislocated his shoulder firing grenades at Mach’s men, getting pushed back onto the cot by Lupe hurts him quite a bit. He grimaces to cover the pain, still trying to insist he can get up now. Lupe says he can’t and she’s winning the argument. Larry is also trying to grab the tequila bottle Lupe pried from his hands. He is just as unsuccessful at that.

Lupe wipes away her own tears and shushes him. “Stop your silliness, old man. Lie down. Let them mourn poor Argos in peace.”

Penelope hears him loudly whisper back, “I don’t need to lie in the cot like an invalid. I just need a drink to clear my head.”

Lupe hisses in reply, “You’ve had five drinks already and they haven’t cleared your head.
Madre de dios
, you’ve had a lifetime of drinks and they haven’t done your head any favors, Mr. Vaquero.”

Penelope hears nothing more from Lupe and Larry for a long time. She notices that Trevor is favoring his right leg and she’s itching to check out the left leg. Sprained ankle? No, too much blood.

Trevor is covered in blood and this Nausicaa girl sticks to his side as though they are married. Trevor doesn’t look so bad that Penelope is really worried but enough to make a mother want to build a tower and stick her kid in it. If Trevor needs stitches, Penelope wants him in the medibox as soon as possible. And then he needs a haircut. And who is this girl?

Then she hears her father-in-law grumbling, “If you’d ever start calling me Larry, maybe I wouldn’t need to spend so much time drowning my sorrows in alcohol.”

Penelope glances back just long enough to see that Larry has taken Lupe’s hand. Lupe is using the other hand to sob into a lacy embroidered handkerchief the size of one of Penelope’s skirts.