“Get up, Corcey.”
Corcey’s eyes flew open, and there was a sharp intake of air. He looked around, left hand sliding to the handle of his assault rifle by reflex. Before him floated Illania and the navigator, her brother Landahl.
[4]“What’s wrong?” Corcey asked the Sniff siblings, still out of it.
“Nothing. We’re orbiting Etam.”
He moved his head back in surprise. About nine hours out of MidbiM, the drugs jarringly wore off and he crashed before he could replenish the dose in his system. Eyes closed, and he vaguely remembered three seconds of darkness before Illania woke him up.
He blinked again, let out a long breath of days-old air.
All he remembered was three seconds of darkness.
That meant he hadn’t dreamed.
When he dreamed, his subconscious unleashed psychotic renditions of the horrors he had lived and died through.
That was why he would frequently stay awake for three or four days straight and had a more than mild addiction to amphetamines: he was terrified of dreaming.
It was only a month ago that the distinction between awake and asleep blurred into the horrid twin nightmares he shifted between.
...thump... ...thump... ...thump...
“What day is it?” he asked at last.
“Thuviasday,” Illania told him. “Only a few minutes off schedule, too.” That was the good news. “We’re now orbiting Etam and Customs Thugs are about to arrest us.” That was the bad news.
Corcey remained motionless.
“Do you understand?” Illania clarified.
“Yes,” he said, unperturbed.
“They’re doqing now. You sure?” she asked, confirming his comprehension.
He nodded nonchalantly.
With that, the two Hamaddi left the bridge to greet the arresting gang at the airloq.
Corcey undid his seatbelt forced himself out of the chair. Gravity was still out, and he floated up and away. Stiff muscles protested as he began to limber up for the day ahead. As he did, he was grateful to notice that his three bags were as he’d left them—the crew hadn’t looted them.
At last Illania returned with the Customs Thugs, three men and a woman in loose leather jackets and bright orange crash helmets with their names painted on them: Cheƒ, Lenny, Sqweekie, and Reese. Lenny and Reese were carrying sensitive equipment for detecting contraband, and Sqweekie was holding Landahl hostage. Cheƒ pretended to be in charge. They’d already checked out the rest of the ship, which was of course empty: the qargo had finished limbering up and was again staring blankly at the far wall.
...thump... ...thump... ...thump...
“You’re all under arrest,” Cheƒ the Chief Thug declared, rising up the wide ladder-stair to the bridge without walking. Everyone but Corcey looked at Illania, who floated up behind him. She nodded reassuringly to her crew.
Crime on New Ra’Math was so bad that it became statistically provable that if you were just there you were somehow involved in something illegal. That assumption spawned the current practice of simply arresting everyone first, then working backwards to find out what the charges would be. It was as big a success as it was a failure. Certain crimes dropped drastically, most remained unchanged, but a new one was created, literally at the top.
Gangs of Customs Thugs arose in power proportionate to the booty gained in arrests from the space trade. If the arrest stood up—and admittedly, back then the chances were good it would—the qargo was confiscated and the ship would be impounded. Within a year, the Customs Thugs had amassed more ships than all New Ra’Math Governments, Qorporations, and Crime Lords combined. Lacking true cohesion, they set up a confederacy on Etam and worked out the Monopoly Concord.
Arrests went on as usual.
Unfortunately for this gang, the Ko’re Asaph looked one bolt away from falling apart, and it might even be a loss to impound it. Illania had spent much of the travel time ship grooming it that way: take anything else, but don’t take my ship.
Being empty of confiscatable qargo also helped.
Lenny and Reese, the two goons with the gear, were doing a very thorough check to make sure.
The Chief Thug’s safety helmet identified him only as Cheƒ. It was unclear if that was his name, rank, hobby, or proof of illiteracy. He noticed Corcey sitting in the corner, sticking out like a sore Human thumb on a Hamaddi hand.
“Hello, Leech” Cheƒ said with an arresting grin.
The name floated through Corcey’s mind, disconnected. Except for a slight no-gravity bob, he didn’t move. His right hand gripped his chair and his left foot curled around the leg for support. His left hand seemed to be scratching the small of his back.
“He’s not a leech,” Illania told him. Both Corcey and Illania had prepared for this. “You’ve got his papers already.”
Cheƒ had given the papers a cursory look, as the crew was normally out of his jurisdiction. Leeches were another, arrestable matter. He found Corcey’s papers at the bottom of the stack. Attached to it was a trade of services agreement. Thaddeus Lebbaeus would provide loss prevention services for free in exchange for Illania providing transportation to Etam for free. Since he was providing a service, he wasn’t a leech.
“Loss prevention?” Cheƒ asked her, incredulously.
“I hired him on for this run, just in case we get jacked again.” Illania sort of swam over to familiar ground: the captain’s chair. It was really the seat of the old YYZ’s chair; she’d kept the armrest controls, took off the back, and just popped some enormous, comfortable pillows on the seat. It was ringed with dead plants and dying invertebrates.
She snagged one of the cushions with a toe claw, and the Empress descended to her throne.
“He’s not leeching, he’s trading,” she clarified of Corcey.
Cheƒ accepted this as plausible, especially in light of the sob story she’d given him at the airloq. MidbiM had already confirmed parts of her heist story.
“Those bags yours?” He called to Corcey, who made no reply. Moored by the strap floated his instrument of loss prevention, his rifle. It was just in arm’s reach, and the strap was knotted to a rail.
Quickly, Illania answered for him, “Yes.”
Cheƒ was disappointed: during an Orbit Arrest, the object was to impound the ship. Crew and their personal affects fell to the next stage, the Point of Entry Arrest.
The two thugs finished a very thorough sweep.
“Ship’s clean,” they said in disappointed tandem.
“Completely empty,” the chieƒ thug growled to Illania, clearly not pleased. Sqweekie shoved her lazer a little deeper into Landahl’s throat.
“I told you,” the captain said calmly, “you’re too late: we already got heisted.” Placatingly, she told him, “look, if I had qargo, I’m sure some of it would either be broken or impoundable. But honestly: you caught us at the wrong time. We’re just here to patch ourselves up. The arrests would get thrown out on the Mercy Act.”
That was the other reason Illania had left her ship disheveled and disrepaired. Mercy Act was enforced by The Law.
Indeed, it was the only thing that allowed her to port at MidbiM.“So phuqin’ what?” Reese cried to Cheƒ. “This tub’s not spaceworthy. Let’s get them for that, impound the ship, and just sell it for spare parts. Who’ll know or care?”
Corcey immediately snapped out of his trance and gazed at the guard.
The man was about five feet tall, wire thin, with short barbs of red hair sticking out from under his headgear. His young face was moon-cratered from horrific acne scarring.
Corcey’s eyes narrowed to two razor slits behind his ever-present sunshades. A malicious hiss escaped his throat.
Where do I know him from? I’ve seen him before. I know I have.
Corcey adjusted his posture as his left hand deftly slipped into the back of his jacket. The tips encountered the holster sewn inside, and undid the strap securing peace, his automatic. Warning lights flashed all over his mind as he ripped through his brain and tried to place the face.
He tried to kill me...
...half a bone coloured moon looked sleepily upon a commune of dune hillocks. The moon’s blue companion was nowhere to be seen. The dunes, the surrounding desert, indeed the whole planet were green due to multitudes of lichen-like bacteria providing virgin atmosphere that had never been breathed until eight months ago. That was when freelance surveyors first found rich pockets of mallardite a few hundred meters beneath the green sandy sea.
The
planet itself had no name; star maps listed it only as
Ignorant
and apathetic of this, NGH-5968 came to the attention of Arpach Shad
Hammadi as being nicely located in their war with the Mustavia Cluster.
It was an ideal platform for the proposed invasion of Aridia. After
millions of years with 0 “higher” life,
The uneasy tranquility of the desert dune scene was slowly undermined by faint whispers of artificial wind. Without warning, a flock of hoverjets in squad diamond formation deftly vaulted the dune, leaving wakes of visible ripples in the lichen carpet beneath.
Standard crew was three. In the nose was the Pilot, Lenyrd, and in the belly was the Gunner, Leech. Between the two crew was Corcey, the Middle Man backup for either.
There was a fourth member on board, a Spook from one of the qorporations concerned with mining rights and nothing more. He had introduced himself as Reese, and then didn’t say another word the whole flight. His group got in touch with the Thunes, and said the Hammadi had struck a deal with his qompany’s rival. Aspects of that were easily confirmable, and some intelligence suggested that Hammadi Admiral Yizzirie’s staff was on-site converting a mining qommunications station into a command center.
Corcey was unclear why Reese was along, but his orders were to drop him off and not get in his way. Corcey’s guess was he was looking for rival qompany plans. But the hoverjets were nicer than anything the Aridians had; gifts from Reese’s people.
In retrospect, Corcey (correctly) suspected the Thunes were manipulated pawns in the mining war, and he always harboured a grudge at the terrible misuse and waste that he later felt Reese metaphorically represented.
Lenyrd saw the surface-to-air missile a fraction of a second before it disintegrated the hoverjet ahead of them. One moment it was there, the next it was a vicious fireburst that he narrowly avoided getting caught in. The close proximity of the explosion sent the hoverjet lurching, and then flying debris sent it spinning.
A second sam sent it crashing.
Corcey flew forward into his seatbelt, and his sunshades flew off the rim of his black cowboy hat. In front of him, Lenyrd was already face down into the control panel. Behind him, where the missile hit, Leech painted the interior non-regulation red.
In grueling slow motion, the searing pain of a burning piece of shrapnel impaling Corcey’s calf. His growl of pain drowned out the warning beepers going off, alerting him to what he was already keenly aware of: the ship was going down.
Without even realizing it, Corcey yanked back on the manual control. The reflex averted disaster by seconds: grainy green terrain zoomed at Corcey, then just as quickly was replaced by horizon and then sky. Then the craft began to buckle severely—it couldn’t handle the lurching climb with its structural damage. There was a chromatic chorus of structural strains from the abused hull. He was able to level off with some difficulty, thankfully not seeing how close the ground was.
After a few moments, he cautiously activated the Automatic Pilot. It hesitantly came on, to his visible relief, with several alarms, to his visible regret. But the craft flew on a complacent course, away from the ambush and the short-range sams making even shorter work of his squadron. They’d flown into a well-stealthed auto-grid, which mechanically dispatched everything in range (and then sent armed roller-drones to the wreckage to make sure.)
In retrospect, it was a conspicuously un-Hammadi ambush, though at that present Corcey wasn’t concerned with why he was dying as opposed to how to prevent it.
Corcey looked over to Lenyrd, who was examining the flight dials point-blank. Corcey liked Lenyrd; he was one of the Craft, and had an inquisitive mind. He strained forward, and hooked his fingers into the scruff of Lenyrd’s jacket collar. Pulling the pilot upright in his chair, the back half of Lenyrd’s head cooperated, but the frontal face remained pasted to the instrument board. Corcey let go, and Lenyrd collapsed back into the control panel with a wet, muddy thump.
Unstrapping himself, Corcey attempted to stand up so he could check up on the other two crew. He instantly regretted it as the weight on his injured leg caused the pain to crescendo. He momentarily considered trying to yank the jagged piece of metal out, wisely decided against it.
Directly behind him, dripping from several weaponry consoles, were the remains of Leech. The disembodied parts were intermingled and indistinguishable. Corcey hardly knew him, so felt less loss. Leach was a farm boy who’d never been to the Athenæum; just an unlucky part of his clan’s conscription quota until Arpach Shad hostilities ended.
Sitting in a swivel chair by the blown-off qargo hatch, the man called Reese sat with his back to him.
A new, annoyingly shrill buzzing came from the front; startling Corcey enough to make him jump up and back an inch, amazingly landing with perfect grace. He saw a ghastly red light flashing beneath facial remains in time with the buzz. A leak in the liquid equilibrium tank seals.
It could wait. Corcey turned his attention back to the last companion of the doomed crew.
“Reese?”
No response.
He limped over to the chair, skirting around a fair-sized hole in the floor paneling. Wiring of multiple colours lay exposed, the tips of many sending blinding sparks at sporadic intervals. Corcey tapped Reese on the shoulder. Even through his gloves, the qompany spook felt mushy.
The tap was strong enough that it caused the chair to spin slightly, and what was once Reese fell out of it.
Chained to one hand was a dark metallic briefcase, which he had been clutching to his abdomen. It was all that was holding his intestines in, and as the body fell to the floor, organs began to waterfall out as the restraint was removed. Landing amid them, the body lay on its side and looked at Corcey.
He was still alive.
Reese was only five feet tall, wire thin, with regulation-length red hair. He wore rose-coloured glasses (one of the lenses now badly cracked), and his face was pitted with massive acne scars. He lifted his free arm toward Corcey; an outsider might have thought he was reaching for help.
The skeletal appendage grazed Corcey’s shoulder, landed on the throat.
And then he died.
The hand went rigid, and Corcey’s snap analysis thought he was being strangled. He backslapped Reese’s already bloody nose and followed the swing through to break the throat grip and cock back for a knockout punch.
He didn’t unleash; looking into Reese’s fogging fish eyes, Corcey then knew through the Ba’alistti that Reese had separated beyond being a threat.
The equilibrium beeping in the cockpit took on a more urgent tone, and the craft began to buckle uncomfortably. It was jarring enough that Corcey had to grab ahold of a fixture, while the lower half of Reece bounced out the open door, entrails eventually dragging the upper along with it. Reese’s remains landed haphazardly over the course of many meters, and quickly began to sink into the lichen sand. Corcey saw the vague, lanky outline in the dunes fade as he slumped against the hatch and rubbed his throat...
...and without even realizing he was doing it, Corcey’s right hand was rubbing the barbed braid circling his throat. His other hand had was melding to the grip of his pistol. There was a burning intensity in his eyes as he studied the Customs Thug holding the briefcase-like scanner.
Reese was thirteen when the Battle for NGH-5968 was fought. He’d never heard of it, because he knew next to nothing about what happened beyond his native New Ra’Math. Reese was young, inexperienced, and already had one boot in his bodybag.
Despite the shielding shades, Reese, Cheƒ, and Illania had picked up on the hateful stare coming from Corcey.
Cheƒ wondered what was going on, and quickly took stock of the situation.
His nose smelled a trap.
His eyes saw the worried confusion in Illania. She wasn’t part of it.
His ears heard the hateful heartbeat of Corcey.
...thump... ...thump... ...thump...
Unfortunately, Cheƒ couldn’t taste anything. A rival Cooking Clan had captured him three years ago, and removed his taste buds under torture to get a recipe.
Meanwhile, Corcey calculated angles and prioritized the showdown.
Reese is holding a scanner, so I don’t need to worry about him yet. Likewise with Lenyrd. Chef I can at least wing before he has time to retaliate. That leaves Sqweekie hiding behind the gravaterarium with a lazer in Landahl’s larynx. If I start shooting, she’d probably take him out first before she could aim at me, so I have a couple of seconds there, too. Decisions, decisions... ...this would be so much easier if we had gravity...
“You know,” Illania quickly said to Cheƒ, “I think I know something that’s broken enough that it might still work.”
Cheƒ’s attention was focused on the maniac who looked ready to blow away one of his men for no reason.
“For your and his sake, I hope so,” Sqweekie told her. Oblivious to anything but greed, she was referring to the Hamaddi twin.
“It’s a spice grinder,” Illania clarified.
That actually got all the Thug’s attention. With out taking his eyes off Corcey, Cheƒ asked “Oh?”
Through association and addiction, Reese, Lenny, and Sqweekie thought of spice as narcotic. Cheƒ thought of seasoning, and was the most interested. He may not be able to taste his food any more, but he could still enjoy the smell.
“What type?” he asked, his attention, like his body, floating between things.
“Come along,” Illania said, motioning everyone to the stair ladder out of there. “I’ll show you, and we’ll see how broken it is.”
Lenny and Sqweekie were game and eager: if you could grind your own spice, you could control purity. It cut cost and worry in half.
Chef sized up Corcey, who looked more like he was going to lunge and bite than lock on and unload. He knew his rookie three-person crew, and knew they wouldn’t stand a chance.
“Yeah, lets take a look at it,” he said, concurring to a withdrawal from the shrinkwrap staring Reese down. Chef’s jurisdiction was just the ship, and Corcey was allegedly part of the crew. That mean he was out of his dominion, and would have to be dealt with separately.
Chef smiled inwardly: he knew who to have conduct the Point of Entry Arrest. With a few words from Cheƒ, Corcey would surely fail the entrance exam.
Illania led the way, and Cheƒ came last, never taking his eyes off Corcey.
Corcey, stoically petrified in his chair, stared back with one hand dangerously out of sight.
He remained that way for an hour, when Illania returned with Landahl and without the thugs.
“We’re fine,” she told her crew, “and we’ll be doqing shortly.”
She went over to Corcey, and told him the truth.
“We have a problem, and it is you.”
Corcey craned his head to face her, looking and listening intensely.
“What the phuq was that?” Her voice was cool and relatively reigned in: she’d had an hour to calm down, most of it spent pretending to be calm anyway.
But she was still pissed.
“You hired me for ship’s security. He wanted to scrap the ship.” Corcey smiled wanly.
“Targshit. I’ve seen that look you had. Shock troops I flew had it right before the doors opened. Boy, you were about to go into berserker mode and not stop ’till you ran out of ammo.”
She almost launched into a diatribe about it, but checked her tongue. Corcey still slouched stonily with his hand on his eight.
“Cheƒ picked up on it, too,” she said, keeping to the subject of their immediate situation. “Cheƒ and Reese seem real keen on arresting you. Look, I don’t know what the deal is between you two, and actually neither do they. Cheƒ figured he burned you on an arrest once, but Reese swore he’d never met you. Idiot’s a rookie, anyway: he’s too young to have terminal enemies.”
“You’re never too young or too old to make enemies.”
“Well, you made one by staring him down with your hand on your piece.”
“And I didn’t even say a word,” Corcey said with unexpected animation, letting go of the chair. He floated up and away, and with his empty left hand, pushed on the hull to propel him away. Inertia carried him over to the central citrus plant. The last vestiges of green were receding. Looking it over, he listened to Illania, who had flown over with him.
“Since I told Cheƒ you were part of the crew, he can’t take you into custody unless you leave the ship. But then Lenny turns out to be a transferee court clerk and lays down the legals for us. He even sited the precedent case, Galactic QomTeq vs. Etam.”
Corcey plucked one of the few green things still on the zilladdi: an under-ripe fruit. Studying it, he patiently waited for her to get to the point.
“Themorus Labias, or whatever your name is...”
“Thaddeus Lebbaeus,” he corrected.
“Thade Laborous...,” she again tried, still mangling the difficult Greek, “...signed on for a ride to Etam. When we doq, our end is done, and they will not recognize you as a member of my ship’s crew. Short of it is, they let us doq under the Mercy Act, but they’ll jump anyone non-Hamaddi who sets paw outside our airloq.”
On the fruit, a leathery slug studded with small snailshells eked out its final hours vainly searching for sustenance. Corcey peeled it off, and discarding the fruit onto the roots, watched the tiny wumbus’zs crawl along his fingertip. The Hamaddi gastropod still could find nothing to save it from starvation.
Corcey trapped it with his thumb, and with his other hand began picking off the tiny rubbery shells. They seemed fleshy, but he knew that they couldn’t be digested by humans, and would rip the plumbing to shreds. The first prisoners to figure out that the wumbus’zs were food died of dysentery from that. Their Hamaddi captors were just as surprised, and even apologetic.
They still had much to learn about each other.
“Can you just tell me one thing?” Illania asked.
Without taking his eyes off the now twisting, writhing wumbus’zs, he echoed “only one?”
Illania watched him prune the gimyl sacks off, and wondered: gee, that’s the best part. He popped it into his mouth without flinching, and bit off a hefty chunk of hide.
Corcey had only eaten wumbus’zs once before, but it was the morning of his last day in the camp. His voice was horse from a four-day harangue, his head ached from being beaten, but the sap from the wumbus’zs soothed his throat and the wretched taste actually distracted him from the headache. When he finished his slimy breakfast, he was dragged to the dungeon, where he argued theology until he escaped.
Worked once, he thought, still trying to chew, maybe again.
“Now, normally I don’t ask questions, Ko’re Asaph, but you pulled this shit on my ship and almost got my brother and my crew killed. And since you are technically a member of my crew, I want to know. Hell, I’m curious. What was the deal back there?”
Corcey managed a grim grin.
“I don’t like loose ends,” he murmured in slurred Hammadi as he forced the wumbus’zs down.
Even behind his sunshades, Illania saw his eyes dilate and focus on something beyond the wall.
...thump... ...thump... ...thump...