We never learn.
We’ve settled, by the last count, six hundred and eighty planets, and we still haven’t learned one simple truth: screw with nature and it never turns out right.
Never.
"You were in the war," the man in gray said, looking at the unit tattoo on the back of my right hand.
I just nodded. He was paying for this meeting, and if he wanted to waste the hour making small talk, that was his business. Didn’t mean I had to.
It was raining, but then again, it usually was. The Terraforming Authority issued bright, cheery reports that this was a stage to be expected in the final process of converting Whisnant to an Earth-normal world. Whisnant being Whisnant, and the Authority being the Authority, no one believed them.
I didn't know his name; I just thought of him as Gray Man. His remaining hair was gray, his eyes were gray, and he was dressed in a fashionable gray tunic with every crease hung just so. The suit looked tailored and expensive. Expensive clothes are a good sign.
He was still staring at my hand.
"Special Forces?" he said. "Combat-enhanced?" he looked at me with an indecent eagerness for the answer.
I shook my head. "Medic. Some standard combat enhancement, but mostly boosted healing, manual dexterity and enhancement to the immune system."
He took a small sip from his glass of ale and stirred a stray drop across the table with his forefinger. "You have an unusual occupation for a former medic."
I shrugged. "My wife has expensive tastes."
It didn't take us the whole half-hour to reach agreement on the target and the terms, since I rarely negotiated. We agreed on the standard method of payment: half up front, half on delivery of evidence that the job was completed. Gray Man said that he knew of my reputation, and that he would accept news of the man's death as proof. I didn't actually have to deliver the target's head to him as I had done for other employers. We didn't shake hands.
After Gray Man had left, I ordered a glass of whiskey and drank it slowly while waiting for the rain to let up. It never did. The whiskey was a disappointment as well. I drank it anyway.
After an hour, I sighed and pulled up the hood of my coat. I cursed the Terraforming Authority, the Colonial Government and the Confederation in general as I slogged off through the downpour to my apartment building.
The door at the top of the stairs was closed as always, and I killed the hall light before entering. The room was pitch-dark. All the windows were blacked out with at least three coats of the heaviest black paint we could find, then caulked shut. My eyes tried to accustom themselves to the darkness, but black is black. I heard the shower running.
"Honey", I said loudly. I didn’t want to startle her. “I'm home."
The shower cut off. In a moment, the bathroom door opened. Laura reached back and flicked the light on. She was outlined for a moment in the doorway before she closed the door behind her. The light coming from beneath the badly hung door was sufficient for me.
"Thanks," I said.
"You're welcome." I felt, rather than saw, Laura pass by me in the gloom and heard her settle onto the bed. I saw a brief red flash as her eyes caught and reflected the light from the bathroom. She was nude from the shower, and in the dim light, she looked like a statue carved of dull obsidian. Her skin was jet-black. Her shaggy, shoulder-length hair was black as well, and her eyes seemed to be all pupil, except where they caught and reflected the light. The only other glimpses of brightness were the flash of bone-white teeth as she smiled at me. She flexed her fingers and I could see the whiteness of her claws extending and retracting. She was nervous about something.
"We've got work," I said.
"Oh, good," Laura said. "We haven't been out to dinner in ages. And me with nothing to wear." Her voice was light, but I could recognize that tone in her voice.
She wasn't nervous; she was hungry.
"You need something before we go?" I asked.
"No, no..." she said. "I don't want to weaken you..."
"You'll need to keep your strength up," I insisted. "I'll be all right."
She gave in so quickly that I knew she was starving. "Okay." I held out my hand and sat down. I felt her gently take my arm and grasp the elbow. I felt her long canine teeth scrape along the arm, searching for the vein in the crook of my elbow. There was a brief pain, then numbness. I leaned my head back in the chair as my wife fed.
The last years of the Colony Wars were madness. Ten years of slaughter and atrocity on a planetary scale had driven both sides over the edge. Both sides wanted a super weapon, something that would break the stalemate, and they were willing to pour money into any crackpot idea that might do it. Somebody on our side thought up the idea of a commando that could live off the blood of the enemy. It would be a perfect instrument of terror. The Nightriders were the result.
They worked better than their designer's wildest nightmares. They moved only by night, inhumanly fast, inhumanly strong and inhumanly vicious.
No one stopped to think that under all of that, they were made from human stock.
And no one stopped to ask what they would do with a brigade of combat-trained vampires when the war was over.
After Laura had fed, I held her in my arms as we lay together.
"So why do they want this guy killed?" she asked me.
I shrugged. "It doesn't matter."
She was quiet for a minute. Then she said, "It used to."
"No it didn't," I said. "They pointed you at a target and you killed it. You never asked who or why."
"That was different."
"And how is this different?"
"We're on our own now."
"That's for goddamn sure," I said.
"It should mean something," she said. "We should care why we're doing it."
"I do care. We're doing it to keep you alive. That's enough for me." I felt a flash of anger. "If you get tired of being alive, Laura, you just go outside and show yourself in public. Let them know that one of the Nightriders survived. The people who made you will hit this whole city with a tailored virus so fast it'll make your pretty little head spin. And then you'll be dead. Just like the rest of the unit." I stopped. She was crying. I sat down on the bed again and took her in my arms. She burrowed against my shoulder and shook as the sobs racked her body. "I'm sorry," I said.
"I don't want to die," she whispered.
"That's good," I said. "I don't want you to die, either."
After it got dark, we went to work. She glided soundlessly beside me, darker than the night that surrounded us. She was dressed in a standard Infiltrator suit, which absorbed all visible and most invisible kinds of light. When we got to the alley beside the house, I looked around to make sure no one was coming. I turned to her.
"Have a good day at work, honey," I said.
"You too, dear." As always, she had only fed enough from me to take the edge off her hunger, but it had gotten her adrenaline flowing. She kissed me lightly, then went over to the side of the building and clambered up the drainpipes to the roof, looking like a shadow against the rough stone. She vanished when she reached the roof. She would find her way to our destination along the rooftops.
I walked through the streets, which were beginning to get crowded in the early evening. It had stopped raining for once, but it was still humid. GEV’s kicked up tendrils of thick mist from the pavement as they roared by. There weren't many of those; Whisnant is a metal-poor world, and most ground transport had to be brought from off-planet at great expense. Every other building was hung with brightly colored plastic party lights. The lights were clarly from an identical manufacturer; someone had apparently recently unloaded a freighter-load of the cheap gimcracks on a population desperate for color and decoration. The mist caught the lights, making the crowded streets look almost festive.
It took me an hour on foot to reach the spaceport. The homes built of the local stone had given way to pre-fab residential modules and the occasional office complex. Just outside the perimeter of the port itself, there was an area cluttered with a scattering of small, cheap hotels. I went to the address that the man had given me.
As I stood outside regarding the place Laura's voice came from the alley behind me. "I thought it was supposed to be women who are always late."
"How long have you been here?"
"Long enough to have done some recon. No worries. The target's on the third floor. There are stairs and an elevator. He's got a small suite, with a sitting room, then the bedroom next to it. There are two guards, one outside the door and inside the door in the sitting room. No one on the roof or the balcony."
"No one's expecting an attack through the window."
"Not on the third floor. I can go in through the window and neutralize the main target, then take the guards before I let you in."
"I thought you said there were two of them."
"No problem. They're your basic goons. I could take them in my sleep."
"No. I don't want to take chances. You take the inside guard, and I'll get the other."
"Are you sure? I know what that does to you."
"I'm sure."
"You're so good to me." I heard a rustling behind me, then she was gone.
I went in through the front door. I could see why the freighter captain had brought his own security. The attendant in the lobby was leaned back in his chair, his hat pulled down over his eyes. He didn't wake up as I passed through and went up the stairs.
When I got to the third floor landing, I slowed down and walked as quietly as I could. I put my ear to the thick door at the top of the stairs. I heard the rhythmic creak of floorboards, getting closer. Someone was coming.
I faded back against the wall and drew a small pistol from beneath my coat. The door didn't open. I put my ear back against the door and heard the floorboards creaking again, farther away this time. I silently opened the door a crack and looked.
One of the guards was walking away with the slow tread of a sentry. He had his hair styled in two sharply curving horns that swept up and back from his head. Height of fashion, I supposed, but it made him look like an idiot.
I withdrew a thin rod from my jacket pocket and twisted each end in opposite directions. The rod separated into two equal sections and I pulled them apart. It was impossible to see the single strand of razor filament, a few molecules thick and nearly unbreakable, extended between the rods, but I knew it was there. The molyfilament garrote was favored among Whisnantn street thugs, and I had made its use “my” trademark.
I let the door close and put my ear to it, waiting for the sound of the guard's tread to return. I heard the creak-creak approach, stop, and begin again. I threw the door open and sprang for him, one handle of the garrote held in each hand. I whipped the cord down, my hands crashing down onto his shoulders. The filament caught the horns of his ridiculous hairstyle and sliced them off neatly. I pulled backwards, quickly but steadily. There was a strangled noise and blood spurted, then gushed as the cutting line sliced through flesh and muscle. When the filament hit bone, there was a slight resistance, then the guard's head fell free, striking the ground at the same time as the rest of his body. I leaped back, but some of the blood spattered me.
I began shaking. The head had rolled slightly, and I was looking into the man's eyes, eyes wide with shock and terror. My shaking got worse and my teeth began to chatter. I sat down on the floor.
The things I do for love.
It took me a minute to get hold of myself, and when I did, I looked up. Laura was standing over me, her coal-black skin glistening slightly in the hallway light.
"All done," she said, as she licked a smear of blood off her upper lip. Her tongue was scarlet against the darkness of her face. "Are you okay?"
"Yeah," I said and stood up. "It gets easier."
"That it does," she said.
I entered the hotel room. There was no sign of the other guard in the outer sitting room. I went into the bedroom. Laura had laid them out side by side.
She had taken the captain in his sleep. His eyes were closed and he looked peaceful. The guard, on the other hand, had the same wide eyed look as his dead partner, the look of someone killed by a nightmare. Both of them looked shrunken, diminished, by death and blood loss. There were familiar puncture marks high on each neck. On the floor next to the captain was a shiny metal case with an impressive looking series of locks.
I used my garrote to sever each man's head below the puncture marks Laura had left as she fed. There would be no evidence of exactly what had killed them unless somebody checked the amount of blood and noted that it had come up short. So far, no one had. Laura took the severed heads and put them in a black bag slung over her shoulder. "Wonder what's in the case?" she said. There was a hot edge in her voice. She was so jazzed, she was practically vibrating. I was in for a long, strenuous night.
"None of our business," I said firmly. "We got what we came for. I'm going to go get us paid."
"Right. See you at home." She turned towards the balcony as I went into the outer sitting room. When I did, there was a man standing in the doorway. I had time to notice the hat and register that it was the man who I had last seen asleep in the lobby before I heard a metallic shing-shing like a pair of swords being drawn from metal scabbards. I felt a pair of sharp blows in my chest that knocked me backwards. Slug thrower, I thought before I toppled over backwards. Probably a railgun. Guess he wasn't asleep after all.
The guy was good; he almost got a shot off at Laura as she came out of the bedroom. But almost no one is a match for a hundred and fifteen pounds of trained, genetically engineered and combat-enhanced commando, especially one whose husband had just been shot. She tore out his jugular with her teeth as one claw punched through his chest wall seeking his heart and the other ripped into his vitals. He was dead before he hit the ground.
I was in surprisingly little pain, but there was a reddish cloud around the edge of my vision that closed in as I lay there gasping. Only got me in one lung, I thought. Lucky me. So I'll bleed to death before I...
When I regained consciousness, I was in our bed. Laura was in a chair next to me. She leaned over and kissed me on the forehead.
"Honey," she said gently, "You have got to lose some fucking weight."
I was still groggy. "What..."
"They double-crossed us," she said. "Probably trying to get out of making the payment and make it look like a simple robbery at the same time. I had to carry you out of there. Nice to know I still have it." She made a comically exaggerated muscle.
"You couldn't have carried me down the outside of the building."
"Nope. Had to use the front door."
I closed my eyes. "Did anybody see you?"
She shrugged. "No more than half the city, I think."
"They know you're here. They know what you are. We have to get you out of here."
"I think it's too late," she said. "A pair of military choppers buzzed the area this morning. Unmarked, but stealthed and whisper-moded. They're all over the city, spraying some sort of vapor."
"An aerosol," I said. "A tailored virus."
"I suppose I should be flattered," she said. "All that fuss for little old me."
"Maybe the rain will keep it from being as effective."
"Yeah. Maybe."
I managed to sit up. I held out my hand. She didn't try to draw away as I touched her forehead. She was burning with fever.
Within two hours, I was up and around. I felt detached and light-headed; the pain in my chest seemed to belong to someone else. Three cheers for combat enhancement. Even shot through one lung, I could stay on my feet until I dropped. Laura was huddled under a thin blanket on the bed, which she periodically threw off as her chills turned to fever. I sat on the bed next to her and stroked her hair. Her eyes were closed and her body was racked with waves of trembling that came every minute or so.
"Billy," she whispered.
"No, honey," I said as calmly as I could. The hallucinations were coming sooner than I had expected. "It's Jess. Billy's dead."
She opened her eyes. "Dead?" she whispered. "How?"
"He took a fletcher burst in the chest." I said. "It was a long time ago."
She closed her eyes and sobbed. "I tried," she said. "I tried..."
"I know." Billy had been her squad mate and her lover. She had tried to put herself in the way of the flechette rounds that had shredded him. She had come close to succeeding.
After a few minutes she stopped sobbing and went to sleep. I got up and wet a cloth in the bathroom sink and put it on her forehead. All I could think to do was make her as comfortable as possible. I had dosed her with every antiviral agent and immune-system enhancer I had managed to steal against just such an eventuality, but military viruses shifted their attack every time they were stymied. Eventually they wore the victim down. It was only a matter of time.
Some time later, I jerked awake. Laura was up and crouched on the edge of the bed. Her claws were fully extended and her eyes were wild. "Where are they?" she hissed. "Goddamn sonofabitching medical puke, WHERE ARE THEY?"
"They're gone, Laura," I said. "They were killed." She continued to stare at me, uncomprehending.
"They'll come for me," she said finally.
"No," I said. "Try to remember. They think you're dead. The L.T. told them you'd died and I'd gone AWOL." In the enormous cluster-fuck that the withdrawal from Kalenda became, both my Lieutenant and the Security detail that had come for Laura bought the farm. A pity. The L.T. had been a decent guy, for an officer. We had used the confusion to get off-planet in an overcrowded troop transport and disappear when we reached the rally point. Now it looked like our luck had run out.
Suddenly, part of her memory came back to her and her face crumpled. She threw herself into my arms and began crying again.
A long time ago, they used dogs specially bred and trained for war. At the end of the war, they were judged too dangerous to live in peacetime society, so they got a bullet in the head as a reward for their faithful service. Now, in a more civilized age, they used tailored viruses, keyed to the special genetic makeup of their targets. If Laura hadn’t been under my care in the evac hospital when Project Nightrider was terminated, she would have died, too, sealed in her barracks and gasping out her last breaths with the rest of her unit. I wasn't worried about myself. Another gift the Army had graced me with was an enhanced resistance even to military-grade viruses.
Suddenly I stopped. I thought about that for a minute. Then I pulled Laura's head up to my throat. "Laura," I whispered. "Laura. Time to eat, honey."
"S'alright," she mumbled. "Not that hungry..." I had only fed her from my own veins before when she was at the point of starvation.
"Please, honey," I begged. "Do it."
She was slipping into unconsciousness again, too far gone to argue or to notice that I was offering my throat this time, not the smaller veins of my arm. I felt the sweet sting of her fangs, the cold, then numbness. She drank a bit, then tried to pull away. I held her to me. She struggled for a moment, half-aware, until reflexes took over and she continued to feed.
I began to feel tired. I struggled to stay awake. I didn't know if feeding on my blood could transfer enough extra antibodies to protect her, but I couldn't think of anything else to do. Besides, if I could keep her strength up, maybe she could fight it off. If it didn't work, we would probably both die, but if she was going to go, I didn't mind dying myself. That was the last thought I had before the darkness claimed me.
I awoke briefly. I was freezing cold, but the effort of getting up to get a blanket was too much to even imagine. My mouth felt like it was full of hot sand. I was lying by the bed. I couldn't see any more of Laura than her hand dangling over the edge of the bed. I tried to take her hand, but the effort was too much. I slid back down into the darkness.
Someone was holding a cup to my lips. I actually moaned with the pleasure of the liquid on my tongue. Who knew water could be so delicious?
"Idiot," I heard Laura's voice say. "Asshole. Moron."
I opened my eyes. She was sitting on the bed next to me, tears glistening on her cheeks. Her hand trembled a bit as she held the cup and her already thin face was gaunt. But she was alive.
"Nice to see you, too, honey," I whispered.
"Don't joke with me, you son of a bitch. I could have killed you."
I shrugged. "Seemed like a good idea at the time."
"And did you think about what that would do to me?" she said. Her voice broke. "Do you think I wanted to live if that was the price? How did you think I'd feel then? DAMN you!"
"Yeah, that's me," I said. "Only thinking of myself as usual. Can I have some more of that water?" She put the cup back to my lips. If I could have gotten up, I would have fallen at her feet in gratitude. I finished another cup, then I said, "If you don't mind, honey, I think I'll take a little nap." I passed out again.
The next time I awoke, there was a tube running into my arm. I looked up and saw a bag of plasma substitute hanging from a metal rack next to the bed. The bag was marked "Colonial Medical Authority, Whisnant Sector." I was feeling a little stronger than I had before. Laura was asleep in the chair next to me. The metal case I had seen in the hotel room was sitting on the floor beside her. She opened her eyes.
"You're not going to cuss me out again, are you?" I said.
"Maybe later. I figured out what it is that we stole," she said.
"What?"
"Icepick. Military grade. Fast, slick, and as far as I can tell, unbeatable."
I tried to sit up, but I obviously wasn't doing THAT much better. I lay my head back down, which made thinking easier. An icepick was the ultimate hacker's tool, used to defeat or evade a computer system's defenses without setting off alarms. Having a good icepick was like having a master key to every computer in the city, which is why civilians even possessing one faced years in prison.
"You broke into the hospital to get this," I said, gesturing towards the plasma substitute.
"Broke in, hell. I had it delivered."
I closed my eyes. "Not smart," I said.
"Not as stupid as you think." She patted the metal case almost fondly. "This baby is slick. The hospital's shipping and receiving department is entirely automated. I sliced into the hospital system. Once the delivery was made, our little friend eliminated all traces it had ever been there. It’s got automatic subroutines that cover its tracks. It's almost as if the damn thing is alive, and paranoid as hell on top of that. I have some plans for this little beauty, if you want to hear them."
"We do have some scores to settle."
"Exactly. When you're feeling better." She grinned. "I had more than medical supplies delivered."
Two weeks later, on another rainy night, I stood at the foot of Gray Man's bed. He was surprisingly calm for a man looking down the twin barrels of a Kirov-34 smart assault gun. I had loaded the top barrel with standard flechette rounds that would burst into a thousand lethal splinters if fired. My thumb rested on the stud on the gun's side which would fire the larger bottom barrel. I had loaded that one with four fat, extremely expensive, and highly illegal Nemesis rounds. I had given the gun's "eyes" a good look at Gray Man and they had shared the information with the Nemesis' miniature brains. When fired, the Nemesis rounds would use their onboard memory to track their prey, using visual, olfactory, and infrared cues to follow him until their tiny rocket motors burned out or they buried themselves in the target and detonated.
Gray Man sat up slowly. "I assume you're here about our property," he said evenly. "I can assure you, we will pay very well for its return."
"I'm keeping it," I said. "As compensation. You haven't paid me the rest of the fee, and you tried to kill me, but I figure the icepick makes it even."
"Sorry, I cannot agree to that."
"You forget who has the gun."
"And you forget where you are."
"Your security system is good, but it's temporarily out of service."
"Which is why I don't just depend on computerized systems for security," he said. I felt the pressure of a gun muzzle against my neck. "Drop your weapon," the man behind me said.
I dropped my arm and let the weapon slide to the floor. Gray Man stood up. He pulled a hand-held railgun from beneath the covers. The man behind me quickly secured my hands with a loop of sticktite. He made it tighter than strictly necessary, but I didn't think it would do any good to complain.
"Now," Gray Man said. "Where is our property?" I said nothing. Gray Man shook his head. "You will tell us, eventually. You know you will. You don't have the kind of courage it takes to resist when we start cutting away parts of you." He laughed contemptuously. "I always thought the taking of the heads was a tad baroque, but I enjoyed it. It showed real style. Now, of course, the truth is out. You're no assassin. You didn't even have the balls to shoot me when you could have. And now your little Nightrider bitch is gone, and you're all alone. And that's how you'll die. Alone and screaming."
"Wrong, shithead," Laura's voice came from behind me. There was a gasp of expelled
breath and a horrible wet ripping sound. My back was suddenly soaking wet and
the smell of blood filled the air. The pressure of the gun at my neck was abruptly
gone. Gray Man's jaw dropped. That’s what happens when you come face to face
with your worst nightmares. The whites of his eyes showed as he raised the railgun.
"Wrong twice," I said, and stepped on the firing stud of my rifle with my right boot. There was a pair of sharp barking noises as the Nemesis rounds left the barrel. In microseconds, the rounds went into seek mode, found their target and arced up from the floor. They exploded in Gray Man's chest and blew most of him across the wall behind him.
"Nice shot," my wife said as she used her combat knife to slice through the sticktite. Now let's get rich," she said, stepping over the body of the man behind me. She pulled the icepick from its case. "Where's the asshole’s computer?"
***
"Good God," the man at the head of the huge trunk said as he and another porter wrestled it up the boarding ramp of the shuttle. "What are you carrying in this thing? Bodies?"
"As a matter of fact, yes," I said. "That's my wife in that coffin. I'm taking her home to be buried."
They almost dropped the trunk. "B-b-buried?" the foreman said.
"It's the custom. We must lay our dead to rest in our native soil."
He tried to keep his face neutral--for what I was tipping him, he should at least try--but the idea obviously repelled him. He tried to change the subject. "Sorry, um, sorry to hear it sir. How did she, ah...?"
I moved the drapery aside to show the Biohazard stamp on the coffin. "Musashi Virus."
He did drop it that time, swearing. I was glad we had thought to fully pad the inside with crash-webbing.
"WATCH it, you idiot!" I snapped.
"Screw you, buddy!" the man snapped back. "No one said nothin' about..."
"It's sealed and approved by the Quarantine Board."
This would undoubtedly have come as quite a surprise to the Quarantine Board. Our "little friend," as Laura called it, had gotten some interesting credentials for us. The Biohazard stamp was to keep the curious or the criminally inclined from investigating and discovering that the "coffin" held a very live, if not totally human, body. Laura was in the box, unconscious, her metabolism slowed to a crawl to save oxygen. Another Nightrider talent. "The faster you get it on the ship, the less time you have to worry," I said icily, every inch the outraged bereaved husband.
They grumbled, but hoisted the box back up. "We'll need to tag this for the transfer to the liner," the leader of the group said. "Which baggage compartment..."
"It goes in my stateroom." That had been the cause of some argument with the representatives of the shipping line. But enough credits flashed on their screens changed their minds.
I put my hand on the coffin and sniffled a bit. "I just can't bear to be parted from her."
The men looked at each other. The one who thought I wasn't looking rolled his eyes. Crazy, his look said. They were wrong. Only poor people were crazy. As rich as we were now, the worst I would ever be was eccentric.
"I owe her everything," I went on. "She made me the man I am today."
"Yes, sir," the men said in unison as they picked up the coffin.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
J.D. Rhoades was born and raised in North Carolina. He has worked as a radio news reporter, club DJ, television cameraman, ad salesman, waiter, practicing attorney, and newspaper columnist. His weekly column in the Southern Pines, North Carolina Pilot was named best column of the year in its division for 2005. His first novel, The Devil’s Right Hand, was released in 2005; Good Day in Hell, his second novel featuring North Carolina bail bondsman Jack Keller, was released in March 2006. He lives, writes, and practices law in Carthage, North Carolina. His website is at http://www.jdrhoades.com/
Return to Winter 2006 Table of Contents © 2006 SPINETINGLER Magazine - All rights reserved |
