The Mammoth Book of SF Wars (68 page)

He didn’t understand how she knew what he needed, or why she would help, but in the vulnerability of this half-dream he simply answered,
Thank you
.

She murmured, he didn’t know what, only that it soothed. He lay with his head in her lap, and eventually the grief receded enough for him to doze fitfully.

Some time later, the door scraped open. “Commander?” a man said in the dark.

Soz spoke. “Here, Carlon. On the bed.”

The man cleared his throat. “Uh … oh.”

“I’m just sitting here, Doctor,” Soz growled.

Carlon, a doctor apparently, spared them any comment on the sleeping arrangements. “Got a message from the mainland,” he told her. “They’re evacuating colonists offworld.”

Soz said only, “Good,” but her relief washed over Hypron. “How’s the patient?” Carlon asked.

“He woke up for a while,” Soz said. “He’s sleeping again.”

“If he woke up, he’ll live.” Carlon sounded far more pleased than Hypron felt about it.

The covers rustled as Soz eased Hypron’s head back on the pillow. He heard more than felt her slide off the bed. “I need to get back to work,” she said.

“No, you don’t,” Carlon told her. “You need to sleep. My file here says you’ve been up thirty-two hours straight.”

“My biomech web makes stimulants to keep me awake.” Her voice receded as her footsteps crossed the room. “Believe me, after we straighten out this mess I’ll sleep for a day.”

Hypron listened to their voices fade. They were evacuating the colony? The last he had heard, Corporate wouldn’t let anyone leave, or at least they would neither authorize nor cover the costs of departures, which was equivalent to forbidding them, since few colonists could afford offworld transport or obtain documents for resettlement without help. Rumours had circulated that Corporate was blocking offworld communications even as they assured the colonists everything would be fine.

Liars. If they had evacuated earlier, Oxim would be alive.

“Here.” Soz rolled Hypron’s chair up to the dichromesh glass that made up the entire north wall of the living room. With people to help him into the seat, he didn’t need it so near the floor, so he had raised the seat.

“Thanks,” he said, his voice rusty. This was the first time in ages he had looked out the window, which had stopped being transparent several years ago. Captain Yaetes and his people had fixed it, and now they were repairing the door. Another woman was sitting at the console by the far wall, working on the house EI.

Soz stood behind Hypron. Her reflection showed in the glass as she looked over his head and through the window-wall. Two sailors from the racer were outside with Rex Blackstone, the other Jagernaut. As Hypron watched, they slid a raft from the dock into the sluggishly roiling sea. Oxim’s pyre. They had built it from dismantled pieces of the house. It seemed a fitting end for what remained of their home, which Hypron would have to abandon when he evacuated.

The other crew here inside the house joined them at the window. Outside, Rex lit the torch he had made and laid it in the dried sea-vines heaped on the raft. Flames soon engulfed the pyre. The raft drifted away from the dock, burning brightly in the bitter sunlight.

A tear ran down Hypron’s cheek. Soz rested her hands on his shoulders, a simple gesture, but welcome. The fresh scent of her bath soap drifted around him. She thought she was shielding her mind, and probably she was from anyone else, but he felt her mood. She mourned with him, unable to close his grief out of her mind. He affected her, he wasn’t sure how, but she
noticed
him. Desired him. How strange. Although some women had found him attractive before his illness, most of those among the colonists preferred rugged muscle-bound types. Yet Soz
really
liked the way he looked. Whatever features and body type appealed to her, apparently he had both. She didn’t care that he was different; it troubled her only because she realized how deeply it bothered him. In a different world, he would have savoured her unexpected interest.

Today he could see only his brother’s pyre.

“Goodbye, Oxim,” he said softly. “Sleep well.”

Eventually the flames died and the raft sank beneath the mud. Rex returned to the racer with the two sailors, and within moments the craft was nosing out into the sea. Yaetes and the others went back to their repairs. The captain had sent Rex with the ship so the rest of them could work here with Soz on plans for relocating any survivors they found.

“How long will it take them to reach the mainland?” Hypron asked, watching the racer.

“Normally, about six hours,” Soz said. “But with their search, it’ll take longer.”

He turned his recliner so he was facing her. “I doubt they’ll find any settlers alive. Those people your orbital system located are probably pirates.” The words were sour in his mouth, for he knew now how Oxim died. The doctor had done an autopsy. Beaten to death. The murderers had left their brand on him, a pirate tattoo, as if he were another notch in their list of crimes. Hypron didn’t know where to put his fury. He hated even more that it had happened right outside their home while he had lain inside, exhausted and asleep.

Soz murmured, and a mental glow spread over him. He wondered if she even knew she was doing it. He thought of the way she had held him last night. She believed she was clumsy in offering comfort, awkward with words. She had no idea. She didn’t need to say anything. These moments with her gave him so much, the balm of human touch after he had lost everything.

She sat on a stack of crates someone had carried inside, bringing her eyes level with his. It seemed incongruous that one of ISC’s most notorious killers had such a sweet face. He wished he could paint a holo-portrait using special lights for her hair, the way it glistened black, then shaded into wine-red and ended in metallic gold, tousling around her shoulders. She had changed out of her uniform into a blue snug-suit that did nothing to hide her curves. He didn’t believe she was a combat machine. Her mind was a sun, warm and vibrant.

Then again, he only picked up her outermost thoughts. She wasn’t armed now, but he had seen her cleaning that gun of hers in the bedroom earlier, a mammoth weapon with a thick, ugly snout.

“What will you do after you evacuate?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I’ve nowhere to go.”

“No home?”

“I grew up on an asteroid. I was a miner.” He hit the heel of his hand against his useless thigh. “I can’t go back there like this.”

“So you can’t work?” Soz asked. Then she winced. “Sorry. That was rude.”

“It’s all right.” He didn’t mind. People here went out of their way to avoid mentioning his illness. Most wouldn’t even look at him, as if one glance would cause them to catch whatever was killing him. He preferred Soz’s matter-of-fact acknowledgement that yes, he was sick.

“I’ll find something,” he said. What, he had no idea, given his lack of training for anything except hard labour. Even healthy, he would have less value to prospective employers than a labour robot, because unlike him, bots didn’t require food or sleep.

“Secondary Valdoria!” a man called. “You better take a look at this.”

As Soz stood up, turning towards the door, Hypron glanced over. Captain Yaetes was standing in front of the view screen by the door, which they had fixed, and he was staring hard at whatever showed there. Looking through the window-wall, Hypron saw a mud-frigate docking outside, looming and ugly, its weathered masts pocked and leaning.

Pirate ship.

Soz scowled at the frigate, annoyed again, as with the mud monster. Sailors in ragged shirts and trousers were disembarking from the noxious vessel, men and women with tarnished filter masks. Some were armed with projectile pistols, others with laser carbines.

“Well, shit,” Soz said.

Yaetes pressed his hand against the new door, which offered a dubious protection given that they hadn’t yet installed its lock. “They’ll kill us for this homestead.”

“Not on my watch,” Soz said. She really wished creatures, human or otherwise, would quit hampering her attempts to rescue these people. Twelve pirates had stepped onto the dock, and three more were in sight on the frigate. Although the masts indicated the vessel could travel by sail, she had no doubt it possessed powerful engines as well. “They must have good tech shrouds for that ship. Illegal shrouds. Otherwise, we’d have known they were here.”

“How would we know?” Yaetes asked. “My racer doesn’t have surveillance equipment.”

“I do,” Soz said. “It’s part of me.” She studied the invaders as they strode up the pier. From outside, they couldn’t see through the window-wall, but they probably knew how many people were inside. “They must’ve been watching us. When the racer left, they moved in.”

Carlon came over and handed Yaetes a projectile pistol. “Seven of us,” the doctor said. He motioned towards the pirates. “Fifteen of them.”

Hypron clenched his fist on the arm of the recliner. “I won’t surrender my house.”

Soz felt his calm – and his fatalistic determination. He would rather die than leave his home to pirates. He would fight them for as long as he breathed, however he could manage, until they killed him. Well, hell. She didn’t intend for anyone to die.

“What weapons do we have?” she asked.

Yaetes glanced at Hypron and hefted the pistol. “Any besides this?”

Hypron shook his head. “Just that.”

The captain tapped the holstered gun on his hip, a second pulse pistol. “I have this.” To Soz, he added, “And there’s that monster you were cleaning. That’s it.”

Three guns. Soz nodded. She could work with that. “Don’t challenge them. Stay calm, and they won’t see you as a threat.” With that, she strode for the bedroom. She distantly felt the minds of the pirates. Her training in empathic surveillance let her dissect that vague impression; they wouldn’t kill the people here right away unless they felt threatened, but it wouldn’t take much to push them over the edge.

She picked up the people in the house more clearly. Yaetes had tensed like a cable pulled taut, but he was calm. Although Carlon didn’t want to fight, he would if necessary. The woman who had been fixing the EI was scared, but Soz didn’t think she would panic. The other man and woman were more tightly strung, more of a risk. Hypron wasn’t scared, he was
angry
, furious over his limited ability to defend his home.

Soz pulled back from their minds. She couldn’t risk too strong a connection; her empathic ability could cripple her in combat if it swamped her in the emotions of other people in the battle.

Inside the bedroom, she grabbed her jumbler off the desk. As she checked her weapon, the door of the house slammed open.

“Real subtle,” she muttered. Banging doors offered no tactical advantage, so why do it? All they achieved was to reveal that they wanted to make a big entrance. That kind of bravado often came with overconfidence or a need to prove themselves that could be a weakness. She felt an ego from one of the intruders as big as a narcissist’s mirror. Another reason they wouldn’t start killing right away; he wanted an audience.

Node, activate jumbler link
, Soz thought.

Activated
, her spinal node answered. It sent pulses to biothreads in her body. They linked to sockets in her wrist that connected to her gauntlets, which could transmit messages to her jumbler. A sense of
linking
came to her as the gun locked on her neural patterns, clicking her into a well-known mental space. She released the safety on the weapon with a flick of her thumb.

A voice boomed in the front room. “All of you, over by the window. And someone get that coward hiding in the bedroom.”

So they knew she was here. No surprise there. If their shrouds could hide a fuel-powered frigate, their sensors were probably similarly advanced. She walked into the hall, but it was still empty, another sign of their overconfidence. They expected an easy capture here. The only working exit from the house was the front door, so she had no obvious means of escape.

Soz held the jumbler down by her side as she entered the living room, neither hiding her weapon nor offering challenge. Yaetes, Carlon and two of the crew were with Hypron at the window. The woman who had been working on the EI now stood by the console, her face pale. The pirates, five women and seven men, were filing in through the front doorway. Damn mud-slugs. They had damaged the new door that Yaetes and his people had worked so hard to replace.

A muscular man with a craggy face and buzzed black hair was pulling off his filter mask. The huge ego emanated from him. The frigate captain, probably. Mesh nets and rivets studded his dark clothes. All very intimidating, supposedly, but none of it actually looked functional.

The captain scowled at Soz, his gaze raking over her jumbler. “What the hell is that? Throw it here, sweet cheeks.
Now
.”

Sweet cheeks? Screw him. Soz knelt on one knee, moving carefully, never taking her gaze off the captain. She set the gun on the floor and gave it a push, sliding it over to him.

Mode four activated
, the gun told her, communicating via her spinal node. As the frigate captain picked it up off the floor, her gun added,
This handler is hostile
.

Get readings on him
, Soz thought as she stood up.
Physiological data, body language, verbal analysis, everything
.

Reading
, the gun answered.

The frigate captain turned the jumbler over in his hands. “What ammo does it shoot?”

“Abitons,” Soz said. “Anti-particles.”

He glanced up sharply. “I’m not stupid, sweet cheeks. Try again.”

So. They didn’t have lie detectors in all that ornate hardware they were wearing. She kept her face bland as she changed her truth to a lie. “It shoots serrated pulse projectiles.”

“Where’d you get it?” He sounded more curious than worried. “Jorman Fringe Market,” she said. It was a lucrative venue for smugglers.

He looked her over. “You a private operator?”

“Just trying to survive,” she said. Nothing too cocky, but neither did she want to appear afraid.