the barrier rolls back to admit us.
“I knew I’d be glad I didn’t leave you to
the rats,” Kez says weakly.
“Is that how it was? Coulda sworn it was
the other way around.” I tease her to keep her
distracted. Only a couple hundred meters to
my ship, then she can rest.
I end up dragging her those couple
hundred meters. She’s stumbling with every
other step. Finally, at the Marie’s ramp, I
scoop her up and carry her the rest of the
way. She doesn’t protest.
I settle her into a passenger cradle. No
copilot’s chair for her now. She needs to
rest, not be distracted by the view. “Ape,” I
say to her brother, who is struggling to stow
the large box in the passenger baggage
locker. There are cargo bays designed to
hold containers dozens of times the size of
that box just a few meters away. I don’t
mention them. Let him struggle. Unfriendly
little fucker. “There’s a recycler over there.”
I nod at the decorative panel that covers the
passenger recycler. “Your sister needs
fluids.”
“Yeah, okay.”
Finally, no bullshit. Maybe he actually
cares about his sister.
I linger to make sure he’s being
appropriately attentive, then go and fire up
the Marie’s engines.
Chapter 5
Kez misses the takeoff, and I miss her
wide-eyed sense of wonder. After I clear the
spaceport, I set the autopilot and watch the
lights of Kuus fall away behind me. Pull a
packet of chillied soyu strips out of the cold
tray under my seat and chew them
meditatively.
The chrono in my eye says it’s just
coming up on two. I’ve been awake for
twenty hours and I should be more than ready
to take a cat-nap during the flight to New
Brunny. But I’m not. What I mostly want to
do is go and check on Kez. A quick glance at
the ship’s passenger monitor shows she’s
still awake, messing about with her
backpack-of-many-tricks. I could help her
get to sleep. Keep her company until she gets
drowsy. Offer her my shoulder as a pillow.
I flick off the monitor.
Fucking her is one thing. It’s been a long
time since I’ve had a woman I didn’t have to
pay for and she’s more than willing. Helping
her down in the tunnels was in my self-
interest. I want to get paid, and that’s not
going to happen unless her box is in New
Brunny by five. But none of that is a reason
to get tangled up with her. Getting tangled up
with women ends badly. Usually for them,
but also for me. Losing Marin fucking ruined
me for a year. Before Marin there was
Mouse, who died in our cell. She swallowed
her own tongue rather than endure another
rape by a prison guard she’d pissed off. I got
ten life sentences added to my tally for what
I did to the guards, but it didn’t bring Mouse
back. Before Mouse, there was that girl on
the Galaxaura, who was happy enough to
hump me senseless for the three days of the
flight, but once we docked, knocked me out
and disappeared without even telling me her
name. And so long ago I can barely
remember what she looked like, there was
Selly. I had less than a month with Selly
before Mother Superior caught us fucking
and I got shipped off to juvie.
It’s ended badly, every time.
Maybe this time will be different.
That’s Marin’s ghost thinking. Still
reaching back from the grave to fuck with my
head. Experience is a fine teacher, and she’s
taught me to use women for the one need only
they can really satisfy, and stay away from
them otherwise. Getting tangled with them
just leads to running gauntlets of monsters.
Like tonight.
I should drop Kez and her box and her
orangutan in New Brunny and be on my way.
I don’t have any flights scheduled for a
couple of days, but I was offered a long hop
that I turned down because I’d have to go
probably still open. It would get me away
from Kuseros for the better part of a six. Or I
could spend the next couple of days at my
place by the river, getting drunk and
watching star-set from my deck. Either way,
I don’t have to see Kez again.
Either way seems unbearably bleak.
I could have gone to ground somewhere
after I escaped Tol Seng. Somewhere too
hostile for human settlement, where my only
concern would have been surviving day-to-
day. But Marin ruined me for that, too. She
made me want to be around people again,
after I’d sworn off the whole fucking
species. She made me want to live, not just
survive. Ninety-nine percent of humanity is a
disappointment. But then there’s that one
percent. That one percent like Marin. Like
Kez. That one percent makes enduring the
other ninety-nine percent worthwhile. That
one percent makes enduring everything I’ve
had to do to bury myself and live as Snow
worthwhile.
Crumpling the empty bag of soyu strips
so the packaging disappears in a flash of
moisture, I give in, and go check on my one
percent.
She’s lying in her cradle, across the row
from Ape, who is already snoring, his mouth
open wide enough to catch a Roystean
superfly. She meets my eyes when the door
snicks open. Rolls her eyes when Ape emits
a particularly loud snore.
I climb into the cradle next to her. The
cradles are too small for two side-by-side,
no matter how friendly. I lower the plaz
barrier between the cradles and Kez reaches
for me. I take her hand in mine. Her hand is
dirty, blood-streaked; so’s mine. I rub my
thumb across her knuckles.
“Don’t you want to try to get some sleep?
I’ll wake you before we hit New Brunny.”
She bites her lip. Avoids my eyes. “I
think . . . I think I might have bad dreams.”
I slide my arm into her cradle, ease it
around her. The contours of the cradles make
it awkward, but she settles into my embrace
and I pull her as close as the cradles allow.
“Fuckin’ rats’ll give anyone bad
dreams,” I say.
“Do you ever have bad dreams?”
“Yeah.” Nightly. Everything I’ve seen,
everything I’ve done, what wakes me up
every night? That last moment with Marin.
Watching the light die out of her eyes.
“How do you get to sleep?”
“Truthfully? I have this big teddy bear.
His name’s Ralph. Whenever I have bad
dreams, I cuddle up with Ralph.” I’ve never
had a teddy bear. Or anything to cuddle with.
Last time I cuddled with a woman was on
Enlyoss. Back when my face was still
healing and I was laying low, I shared a
crash pad with a street urchin named Joh.
Fucking kid wasn’t more than thirteen. One
night she climbed into bed with me,
whispered something about monsters, and
fell asleep against my back. I never closed
my eyes all night, and left Enlyoss the next
morning. Kid was in bed with the biggest
monster on the planet, even though she didn’t
know it.
“Can I call you Ralph?” Kez whispers,
her voice thinning with exhaustion.
“Yeah.” I stroke the fine wisps of her
bangs off her forehead. “Ask him nicely and
Ralph will dream the bad dreams for you.”
“Will he?” Her voice thins down to a
bare thread of sound.
“Yeah, he will.”
It takes her a few minutes to slide through
exhaustion and blood loss into sleep, but it’s
only a few minutes. I let her settle into a
deep sleep before I sit up, slide my arms
under her shoulders and knees, and lift her
out of her cradle. She murmurs but doesn’t
wake. I lie back down in my cradle, settle
her on top of me, her head on my shoulder,
her arms folded against my chest. I pull the
flight webbing around us, fasten it over her
back, and put my arms around her, enclosing
her body in mine. Even if we hit some
turbulence, she’s not going anywhere. Then I
close my eyes, focus on her soft, warm
weight against me, and let myself drift off.
If there are any bad dreams, Ralph
dreams them for me.
Two hours of sleep isn’t enough, but it
takes the edge off my fatigue. It restores Kez
more than me. She looks bright-eyed when I
wake her. I envy her the resilience of youth
for a moment, then put it aside as I head up to
the flight deck. I’m a long way from old.
She joins me after a few minutes, alert
and freshly scrubbed. She’s pulled her
dreadlocks back with a black band again.
Having seen the light show and the edged
monofilament she wears in her hair, I
wonder what else she’s got hidden in there.
She straps herself in to the copilot’s chair
and watches our descent through the
threatening clouds avidly. “New Brunny’s
not such a safe place right now,” she says
after several minutes. We’re still some
distance from the city, but beneath the
clouds, the pre-dawn sky is stained with
smoke. Fires still burning from last night’s
riots. Feels like I’m back on fucking Phogath.
“Yeah, I know.” I tap one of the monitors
between us, which is scanning for the
signatures of anti-aircraft weapons and other
deterrents to flying New Brunny’s friendly
skies.
“I don’t think the riots have reached the
spaceport, though.”
“No?” I haven’t heard anything one way
or the other. But I haven’t been listening.
New Brunny’s not a place I fly into
regularly. “How far from the port to the
drop?”
“They’re supposed to meet us at the port.
Dock 216 North.”
I nod. I know where that is. Hell, I think I
flew into it on that run I did for the
Chiangles. Maybe all Kuseros’s smugglers
use the same berth.
As I’m tapping the dock number into the
ship’s computer, the monitor between us
beeps. I glance at it. See what I least wanted
to see.
Anti-aircraft weapon detected, it tells
me. Fuck.
“Make sure you’re strapped in,” I tell
Kez. Flick on the intercom and relay the
same warning to Ape. This time I check the
monitor to make sure he’s heard and obeyed.
Putting him on the deck during a routine
takeoff is one thing. Turning him into a
human pinball while I evade missiles is
another.
Ahead of us, the ground blooms. Once,
twice, three times. Then a barrage of small,
bright lights. Covering fire for the missiles.
I rotate the Marie’s engines. Drop her
nearly straight down. Below the missiles and
covering fire. Low enough to break a few
windows in the housing blocks below. Red
warnings light up across the control panel;
klaxons blare. I bump them off with my
elbow as I fight the g-force to rotate the
engines again and bring the ship back up to a
minimum safe altitude.
The tracer fire’s gone overhead, but two
of the missiles are heat-seekers. The monitor
flares again. ‘Acquiring,’ it tells me.
“Yeah, acquire this.”
I open the Marie’s powerful engines,
flick on the auxiliary booster for a little extra
kick, and throw the ship into a roll. The
Marie doesn’t have any weapons – too
conspicuous for a civvie short hopper – but
she’s got speed, and some kick-ass
countermeasures. When I estimate we’re
over the missile emplacement, I drop a set of
the countermeasures. In the rear monitor, they
heat quickly to a red glow. They’ll attract the
missiles, which would be hard pressed to
catch the Marie at this speed anyway.
I flip open a red latch marked
‘Emergency Only.’ Wait until we’re out of
range of the blast. Tap the panel under the
latch.
Behind us, there’s a brief flare of bright
white light. Then the lights on the ground
wink out, in a spreading circle from where
I’ve dropped the countermeasures.
Kez, straining to look in all the monitors
at once, whispers, “What was that?”
“E.M.P.”
“Elec-electro—”
She probably doesn’t know what E.M.P.
is, since it’s rarely used against civilians. To
save her any embarrassment, I say, “Electro-
magnetic pulse.”
“I thought the cities were, you know,
shielded.”
They are. Against the constant E.M. wash
off Kuseros’s binary star. But the bomb I just
dropped was about a thousand times
stronger. “Not from this.”
“Wow.” She looks a little green, whether
from the Marie’s rotation or because of the
devastation I’ve unleashed on the ground, I
don’t know. I even the ship out and survey
the monitors. Most of the city’s western
sprawl has gone dark. Fuckers won’t be
firing anything at anyone for a while.
I ease back on the roaring engines and
turn the ship towards New Brunny’s northern
docks.
By the time we reach the dock, the clouds
have delivered on their promise and rain
sheets off the Marie’s flight canopy. I settle the ship onto the landing pad; st
are out the
rain-lashed view screen as the engines cycle
down. Remember sitting in another ship,
staring out another view screen into the dark,
and listening to Conro gurgle his last. I
should have killed that fucker twice for what
he did to Marin.
I flick off the main engines. Bring her
down to stand-by. I’m not sure what’s
waiting in the dark, but I want to be able to
leave quickly if it turns out to be unfriendly.
I run through the pre-flight, so there’s
nothing I need to do other than power up the
engines and release the landing clamps. As
I’m finishing the pre-flight, I focus on the
chrono in my eye. Zero-four-forty. Still a
little time to kill.
“You ready?” I ask Kez.
She’s been watching my preparations
attentively. Like she’s trying to memorize
what I’m doing. At my question, she shakes
herself, then nods.
“Thinking about trying her yourself?” I
flick the flight controls over to the co-pilot’s
console. The display in front of her lights up.
She snorts. “I’d fly into the nearest
mountain.”
At least she recognizes her limitations.
No false bravado. I admire that about her.
“You could learn.”
She turns in the copilot’s chair so she’s
on her side. Props her chin on her fist.
Watches my face with those hugely dilated
kitten eyes the same way she watched me
prep the ship. “You could teach me.”
“Flying lessons are expensive.”
“How much?” she counters.
“Five hundred hard a lesson. Thirty
minutes. Plus expenses.”
“Expenses?”
“Fuel. Handcuffs. Paddles. They add up.”
She gives me that mischievous grin.
“Guess I’d better save my credits. Where did
you learn to fly?”
“Long time ago.” I shrug.
“I didn’t ask when, I asked where.”
Tenacious kitten. “Dacondier system.”
“What were you doing out there?”
Killing civvies. “I was with S.A.W.L.
You know what that is?”
She nods. “Space Marines, right?”
Close enough. “Yeah, long time ago.” I
reach under my chair, tug out the cool-tray
and pull out two plaz bulbs. Toss one to her.
“More fluids for you.”
Kez opens the bulb and takes a drink. It’s
just water, but it’s decent quality water. Not
the desalinated shit she’s probably used to.
And it tastes, mmm, it tastes like water
always tastes when you’re thirsty: like life
itself.