JAL
From the bottom of the fence, Jal could barely make out the rings of barbed wire at the top. Good ol’ prison garland, for when thirty decs of chain link weren’t enough of a fuck you for trying. The back of his neck itched, like they had themselves an audience out in that fog. Eyes, watching from somewhere just out of sight. Could’ve just been his imagination, but in that fog, he wouldn’t have known otherwise.
“What kind of cargo you think they were running?” He didn’t really mean to ask; probably didn’t matter much, anymore. Staring up at those gleaming metal teeth, though, he couldn’t help himself.
Saint, only a few steps away, kept an eye on the dry-rotted forest. Always had his head on a swivel—the kind of man who didn’t enter a room without clocking every exit, choke point, and scrap of cover, and damned if he hadn’t made it his personal mission to beat that lesson into Jal’s brick-hard head. Helped turn a wet-behind-the-ears miner boy into a half-decent ranger, when odds were better he’d wind up a corpse. For that, Jal supposed, he ought to be grateful.
How that weighed against what Saint had done to him, ditching him the second something better came up and blackballing him on the way out the door … Jal had never quite worked that out.
Those intimidatingly observant eyes turned to him. “Why?” Saint said. “Thinking of setting up shop?”
Jal couldn’t hold his gaze long; he’d stared down more near-death experiences than any one chump should, but his courage drew the line at Saint. “The barbed wire.” He turned back to the fence, nodding toward the top. “If they didn’t want visitors, you’d think they’d angle it out. Harder to climb that way, ’less you’ve got a ladder handy. But they angled that in. It’s more like—”
“Like they were trying to keep something in,” interrupted the augmented with the pearly hair. Jal still hadn’t caught her name, and she still hadn’t given it.
Nice hair, he thought. Shitty manners.
But she’d given him food, so she was good in his books. Turned out, he did like strawberries and cream, though he wouldn’t have turned up his nose at much of anything edible. Anything to replace that raw, hollow ache of hunger, because you never really got used to it. Resigned to it, sure, but never used to it. He might’ve snuck a couple more meal bars from the cabinet as he’d left the sick bay—stashed them in his pockets, in case the next meal wasn’t so easy to come by. He’d find a way to thank her for them, later.
For now, she seemed preoccupied. She’d posted up near a pile of old cargo crates, rooting around in her bag for … something. Again, she hadn’t said. “Cap, you got the records?”
“The Trust discovered the planet,” Eoan said through his earpiece. Another one of the captain’s conditions: Can’t have one of my operatives incommunicado in the field.
“Discovered by some schmuck prospector and bought by the Trust,” the augmented translated wryly.
“Not keen?” Jal guessed.
“I mean, if you’re into money-grubbing interstellar overlords, they’re the shit.”
“I think they prefer the term conglomerate,” Eoan suggested, but not without a fine dash of irony. “They terraformed it, built up the depot, operated it during the photovoltaic mineral rush.”
“When was it decommissioned?” Saint asked.
“Last year,” Eoan replied. “Although the last recorded shipment was nearly a year before that. Nash, dear, did you leave something on the ship?”
Nash. That was the augmented’s name, and she grumbled something rude under her breath in response to hearing it. She’d pulled a few things from her bag since they’d started talking, but unless a tiny knitted cat, a pair of socks, and a medkit could get them over that fence, he doubted she’d found what she was looking for.
For fuck’s sake, though, what was she looking for? They’d been standing outside that fence the better part of five minutes, and he still didn’t know why. “It electrified or something?”
She snorted. “No.” Like it was obvious.
“You ain’t gonna check?”
For a second, he thought she was only shaking her head; then he realized she did it to swish her two ponytails back and forth. The filament strands shimmered in the light—some kind of sensory tech, he guessed, but Biomech augments weren’t his area of expertise. “I have,” she said. “I am. If I were standing this close to a current that strong, I’d know about it. Ergo—”
“Not electrified.” Which meant that whatever they kept waiting for, he didn’t have to keep waiting for it, and he’d take any head start on that Guild beacon that he could get. A Guild beacon meant a Guild ship, and a Guild ship meant Guild computers. Systems. Access. It could get him what he needed, but only if he got there first.
He took a few steps back from the fence, gauging the running start he’d need to get his hands to the top. Imagining the give of the chain link, the traction of his boots, whether he’d jump off his third step or fourth. It’d been so long since he’d gotten to really stretch his legs; a thrill ran through him at the thought of finally getting to run.
“What are you—” he heard Nash start as he took off, but then the world narrowed to soft dirt and long strides and the rattle of chain link under his boots as he launched himself up the—
His backpack straps snapped taut against his shoulders and chest, and all that upward momentum he’d built suddenly gave way to his old friend gravity. He managed to land on his feet, less from his own reflexes and more from the hand still holding the haul strap of his backpack.
Saint gave the strap another tug, pulling it—and Jal—away from the fence. “Still leaping before you look,” he grunted, and for a second Jal was nineteen years old again and flat on his ass on a training mat. The same disapproving look stared back at him now, only without that old got you again, kid humor to soften it.
He gritted his teeth and shook the specters from his head. “And you’re still jerking people around.” He tugged his backpack loose, wincing at the throb between his shoulder blades. Nonlethal still packed a hell of a wallop, and Jal had the fist-sized welt on his back to prove it. “I wasn’t running, just going on ahead. Little bit of advance recon … that’s how this works, ain’t it?” That was how it’d always worked, after Saint left. Crew after crew after crew. Mutant went first, like a rat across a minefield. He’d been custom-made to play that part, and he’d played it well. Nobody ever gave him a choice. “Been a few years, but I can still do my job. If you’d fucking let me.”
Saint let him go, but not until he’d put himself between Jal and the fence. No trust. “If you’re out here, you do things our way. Understood?”
“Your way—”
“Involves a plasma cutter,” Nash interrupted, shoving a cartridge into a sleek little hand torch with a gleeful glint in her eyes. Seemed she’d found what she was looking for. “So let’s take the chest-pounding about three steps to your left, or I’ll be blowing you both out like birthday candles.”
While Jal’s way would’ve gotten him over the fence a few minutes ago, he had to admit: Nash made quick work of the fence. Didn’t matter what kind of metal it was; the plasma cutter sliced through it like sun-warmed wax, until they could all slip through into the dunes of piled-up shipping crates and left-behind equipment on the other side.
“Think I preferred the dead trees,” Nash said, tapping her nails against the side of a shipping container. Jal had seen them from the hill, just a handful of them scattered like jacks between the fence and the first hangar. Not the sign of a thriving commercial empire like the Trust, but of a smaller operation. “Smugglers?”
Probably. The Trust logo on the containers was a knockoff, and not a good one. Not much Guild presence out this far to keep the crooks and hustlers in line, and Jal’d had enough run-ins with the likes of them to know he didn’t care to do it again.
“Must’ve moved in after the Trust pulled the T-form plug. Thick forest, decent atmosphere—they probably had a good month or two before the place went full death trap,” she continued, grimacing as her fingers came away from the container black. It was everywhere: a fine, dark powder coated every surface and hung suspended in the fog, shaping itself on the harsh breeze. Like ash in smoke. Like disaster. Miners were a superstitious breed, and in the chilly, hazy stillness, Jal couldn’t shake the sense that something terrible had happened here.
Nash just wiped her hands, smearing inky tracks on her green satin bomber, and carried on behind Saint. Superstition probably wasn’t her bag.
They rounded the corner to another shipping container. “Ever feel like you’re being herded?” Saint muttered from the front, and if he hadn’t before, he did now. Thanks, old man. Jal spared a glance toward the wrist-thick chain on the container’s door as they passed, frowning. The key still jutted out of the padlock.
“Don’t feel right,” Jal said, quietly. “Operation’s too big for a couple months. They must’ve been here before the decomm. Wouldn’t be the first time the Trust decided to, uh, sublease.” Profits ran out before the Trust’s license did, so they backed off and looked the other way while someone who could make some caps, did. If a few of those caps wound up in the Trust coffers, then who’d complain?
Jal had seen it himself, a time or two. Last job he worked for the Guild, they’d run down some scavengers for labor trafficking. Tracked them to a warehousing planet under license to the Trust, but whatever under-the-table deal they had must’ve soured, ’cause not three hours after Jal’s crew landed, mercs rolled in with guns blazing to run the scavs off—caught Jal’s crew in the middle of it. Like as not, nobody’d ever proved the Trust had backed the scavs, but everybody knew. At the intersection of shady business and spilled blood, you could usually find Trust caps and a big-ass gag order waiting to sweep it under the rug.
Which all sounded good and sensible in his head, but he couldn’t get the rest of the words out. Out of practice, he told himself. Just out of practice. But Nash and Saint had stopped to look at him, to listen to him, and he didn’t know when that’d gotten to be so foreign, so daunting, but it was. He didn’t have a place in that conversation—didn’t have a place with them. The way they trailed each other through the maze of containers, traded point back and forth without breathing a word to each other, it was clear they’d gotten used to just the two of them. When Nash reached the end of the last container between them and the hangar, Saint stopped before she even signaled. Completely in sync, like one pulse beat inside ’em.
It stung. The feeling caught him by surprise, a twisting screw in his sternum and a meek, miserable thought: I had that once. A lifetime ago, and a day that felt like yesterday, he’d had it, and he’d lost it, and in the sea of all the things he used to have, he hadn’t even missed it.
He missed it now.
“You can’t decomm an inhabited planet, miner boy,” Nash said, and even with her voice right in his ear, he almost missed it. Fuck, she hadn’t stopped looking at him, a scrutinizing little wrinkle to her brow. But just like the ash on the container, whatever she was picking up from him, she brushed it off and went on, saying, “Not a lot the Union will make a stink over, but they’d give the Trust hell for that.”
To Jal, it’d always seemed like a funny way to run a system. The Trust, with deep pockets and no workers; and the Union, with hordes of workers and nothing but pocket lint. He didn’t claim to have a grasp of civics, but he could never quite figure how two things so dependent on each other to survive could rightly be expected to keep the other in check. Might’ve been where the Guild came in—the neutral third party in a universal tug-of-war. Except they’d never had the numbers, and even a ranger had to eat, so maybe the only real neutrals were the ones outside the system altogether: the smugglers giving Union and Trust alike the finger, and the agitators haranguing ’em both in the name of the so-called Little Guy.
Saint hummed, glancing around the corner of the container. Nothing but open flatland left between them and the hangar, surrounded by high ground. They call that a barrel, Saint had told him once. And we be the fish. If Jal had to guess, he’d say they were holding back for Eoan to finish a sweep with the drone. If everybody else already knew, though, he wasn’t about to ask.
In the meantime, Saint said, “It’s happened before,” and it took Jal a beat to remember what they’d been talking about. Really needed to dust off those old conversatin’ skills. “Trust hands somebody the keys to the house for a while, then runs them out when they’re ready to close it down.”
“Must’ve run them out in a hurry,” Nash said. “Looks like they just dropped everything and bailed.” Boxes of supplies left on their pallets, still-cinched tarps splitting like dry skin, machines collecting dust with keys in the consoles—the Trust didn’t have much patience for loiterers, but damn.
“Saint?” said Eoan’s voice through the earpieces. “No signs of life from up here, and I’ve got an open door on the near corner. Proceed with caution.”
Jal took that as his cue, sprinting from behind the container toward the near corner of the hangar. From a distance, he couldn’t make out much more than the vague shape of the building; but as he got closer, peeling paint and corrugated metal came into view, and a warped steel door hanging on one straining hinge. Through the crack, Jal could only make out darkness inside. Should’ve left off the specs, he had time to think before the other two caught up, and Saint’s hand on his shoulder put an end to thinking for a second as Saint hauled him back from the door.
“Next time, wait for the signal,” Saint said, with the kind of calm that really wanted to be not calm, but Saint never let loose like that. Not in the field.
“Captain said proceed,” Jal replied.
“With caution.” Saint’s flinty eyes narrowed, but he let Jal go and turned to Nash. “Behind the door?”
“Nothing,” Nash said, holding her GLASS up to the opening. “Nothing moving, nothing warm. Probably nothing that’ll kill us.” Her word seemed good enough for Saint, because with a shoulder to the wall and a pistol in hand, he pushed open the door.
Tried to, anyway.
“Need a hand?” Jal didn’t mean to sound like an ass, honest.
Saint’s eyes got narrower, though, so he’d probably taken it that way. “There’s something behind it,” he said, then he gave the door a harder shove. That one did the trick. Too well, maybe. The door banged open on bone-dry hinges, and all of a sudden—
Thump.
They all jumped back a step as something fell through the door. Jal didn’t recognize it, at first. His brain couldn’t process the strange, shrunken shape sprawled out at their feet. But piece by piece, it made sense of the dirty, crumbling cloth and the thick sort of leather stretched over a vaguely familiar shape.
“Fuck,” he whispered. It was a corpse.
It was true, what they said, about how some people reacted real different in certain circumstances. Saint had his IR monocular out and his pistol sighted through the door before the dust started to settle, and Nash knelt next to the body, tugging on gloves. Poking and prodding. Taking samples. Jal tasted something on the back of his tongue—strawberries and cream, he thought queasily—and stepped around the body to peer over Saint’s shoulder.
“See anything?”
Saint angled the monocular Jal’s way, mouth stretched in a thin, grim line. “See for yourself.”
Jal used to get a kick out of NVLs. If he wanted night vision, he took off his specs and went on his merry way. But normies like Saint, they had their goggles, and their scopes, and their monoculars, and they still only saw the dark in fuzzy, fish-eyed shades of green. He always thought it was funny.
This … wasn’t funny.
Bodies. Dozens of them, like the one at the door, faces stretched-taut and shrunken, skin gone ochre and rotten and hard. Slumped against shipping crates, propped in chairs slowly falling apart under them. God, he couldn’t imagine what it must’ve smelled like; he caught himself holding his breath, and stunned seconds passed before he remembered his mask.
We shouldn’t be here. That bad feeling grew teeth, sinking them into the top of his spine. The dead were meant to be buried or burned, not put on display in some grisly dollhouse.
Undeterred, Saint moved inside, and habit pulled Jal along behind him, stepping over the legs of the body by the door. Boots still tied, watch still on its wrist, battery long dead with no sunlight inside to power it. The bodies showed no signs of violence—no drawn guns, no wounds, no damage to the doors and walls. Just a silence. A still-frame aging, cracking, fraying at the edges.
“It’s like they just sat down,” Nash said, soft as a sigh, sliding past him into the hangar. Her GLASS cast a faint bluish glow through the cramped space, piled high in the corners with boxes and crates and webs of cracking, yellowed cellophane, and disappearing into the haze hanging thick in the rafters. Barely enough room in there for the pot-bellied cargo ship hunched in the middle, hatch dropped and a pair of bodies tipped into each other beside it, an ashtray and a shriveled box of tars between them. Hollow eye sockets, lids closed and sunken, watched him from frozen faces, and he decided he’d preferred the woods, where the stares all hid in the fog. “Like they dozed off and didn’t wake up.”
Saint put his monocular away and turned on his headlamp. Must’ve figured their only company wouldn’t mind the light. “Any idea what happened?” As Nash knelt beside another body, he didn’t stray far—just to the right, along towering shelves that gave way to another storage container. From the scuffs and staining on the concrete, it seemed like a more or less permanent fixture.
“I don’t know,” Nash said, awful steady-on for a woman swabbing mummy cheeks and scraping skin samples onto tape. “Hitting this many people at one time—I’d say some kind of gas. Aerosolized poison. Whatever it was, it happened fast.”
Must not’ve hurt, Jal thought, strangely relieved. Seemed damn near every thought he had lately felt strange, out of place, out of context; hadn’t had time for them where he’d come from, he supposed, and probably needed to figure them out before he got where he was going.
The unmistakable, metallic slither of chains brought Jal’s attention back to Saint. He’d stopped in front of the shipping container, and by the time Jal caught up, the chain from the double doors had finished pooling on the ground at his feet.
“Key was in the lock,” Saint said. Just like the one outside. Just like all the ones outside, and as Saint eased the creaking doors open, Jal was suddenly sure—surer than he’d been about much of anything in a while—that he didn’t want to see what was inside.
In a way, he already knew.
“Christ.” It wasn’t quite shaken, but it was probably as near to it as Saint got without the sky falling. “What—?”
“They were smugglin’ people,” Jal said. More an answer to his own question, the one he never ought to’ve asked, than to Saint. Weren’t more than a handful of them in the container, clustered together in groups. Friends. They’d had friends and families and names and stories, and now they were just remnants. Just husks.
He crouched next to the nearest body, tugging its pant leg from over its boot. The old, cheap canvas had gone brittle and crunchy, so stiff it stayed right like he’d tugged it as he leaned back on his heels. “Ankle monitors.” Shit. Not as spiffy as Captain Eoan’s little patch, but a couple dozen milliamps would slow a man down just as surely as a neck full of nanites. “Shipping out to workers’ camps, most like. Convicts and debtors.” He stared down the length of the container, wishing Saint had a stronger light, so their faces couldn’t shift in the dark. Hardened skin to wind-chapped cheeks, twisted claws to knuckles gone puffy and red with chilblains. The sense-memory of stale sweat and piss soured his breath as Nash approached, soft footfalls fading into his own too-quick heartbeat.
“Budge over, miner boy,” Nash said, kneeling beside him. “We should take one of these monitors back to the Ambit, see if it’ll point us to whoever the hell these people were.”
“Careful,” Jal warned as she reached for it. “They bite.” A joke, but not. It didn’t matter anyway, because Nash didn’t seem to get it. Bad at this. Really fucking bad at this. He rubbed the back of his neck, sheepish and uneasy, and offered by way of explanation, “Fiddle with ’em, they’ll zap you ’til you drop.”
Nash did something fancy with her multitool—the kind of flip-turn around her index finger that would’ve suited a knife or gun—and smirked. “We haven’t met,” she said. “My name’s Natsuki, and I don’t fiddle.”
Far be it from him to argue with that. He pushed to his feet, only too happy to leave her to it and reclaim some distance from the corpses and the container and everything they dredged up. Better not to look too hard. Better not to think too hard. And the farther away he got, the more the world settled back into itself. No more familiar faces, no more tired eyes and heavy hearts. Just strangers in a silent grave, nothing more.
Clear of the container, he’d just started to breathe a little easier when his earpiece crackled to life. “Saint?” Eoan’s silvery smooth voice had gone clipped, and something about it turned Jal’s snarling dread all the sharper. He’d heard of AI with feelings. Wasn’t that hard, he reckoned; just signals and chemicals, and if humans could work out what to do with them in a decade or two, surely AI could, too. For all he’d heard them snort and shout and snicker, though, he didn’t think he’d ever actually heard one startled. “I think I’ve found the source of the signal.”
“Good?” Jal asked. Should’ve been; they’d found what they came for. But for all Jal didn’t claim to know the captain, it sure as slag didn’t sound good. “Where is it?”
“You’re going to want to hear this first.” And for a moment, there was silence. That same unsettled silence from the deadwood forest, like cobwebs in his ears. A nothing, nobody, nowhere kind of silence that didn’t belong where hearts still beat.
But then, he heard the scream.