Edda
ANNOS MARTIS 238. 2. 4. 05:09
Today, Edda is a farming village in the middle of nowhere, fifty kilometers east of New Eden in a wide-open plain. The people who live here survive on subsistence farming and selling handmade goods to the đibui in the Warren. Villages like it are a dime a dozen across Mars, but Edda is special because of its past. Until the CorpComs took over, it was a hub for mining distribution, with hundreds of storage buildings, but with the rising oceans and the end of the guanite trade, most of buildings have fallen into disuse and have been stripped for scrap metal. There is, though, a cluster of buildings still standing in center of the old distribution center. It’s here where Vienne hits the brakes and the abused red war truck comes to a halt.
As soon as it stops rolling, I jump out and kiss the pavement. “Dry land. Thanks be to the Bishop, I survived!”
“Methinks the lady doth protest too much,” Mimi says.
“Meaning?” I ask as I hop to my feet and take a stretch. It’s been a long, exhausting, but informative ride.
“Meaning,” she replies, “that you are developing a penchant for melodrama. Would you like me to calculate a behavioral trajectory that would eliminate it?”
“Keep your paws off my melodrama!”
Vienne slams the door as she gets out. “Did anyone ever tell you that you’re funny?”
“Many times.”
“They lied.” She covers her brow to block out the dawn’s light shining in her eyes. “You said it would be here, but it’s not.”
I lean on the hood of the truck next to her. “Sure it is.”
I put two fingers in my mouth and whistle reveille. A few seconds later, a rolling door opens, and Pinch walks out from a storage building thirty meters away.
“Took you long enough, Chief. Chief?” Pinch says, and her eyes meet ours, searching for the man she expected to find. “Where is he?”
Vienne and I step aside, revealing Aziz sitting on the front seat. His head is bandaged, and he’s conscious, which is more than I expected. The chief is one tough hombre.
“No!” Pinch shouts and runs toward the truck. “Aziz!”
“He’s fine. They both are,” I say, trying to catch her. “We patched them up.”
“Both?” She rushes past us and almost jumps into the seat with Aziz. She grabs his right hand, pressing it against her heart, while caressing his cheek with the back of her fingers. They both talk, but I can’t hear what they’re saying. Don’t want to.
“Well,” I say. “Never saw that one coming.”
“Because you’re as dense as Krill’s skull,” Vienne says. “But I have to admit I didn’t see this one coming, either. How did you know?”
“Pinch never seemed like the kind to desert her crew,” I say, walking toward a storage building with a fresh gasoline stain on the pavement. “And Sarge seemed like the kind of fossiker not to notice that or care. All he wanted was the money and maybe Pinch for a bonus, but Pinch told Aziz she’d meet him in Valhalla. I put two and two together.”
“With the aid of my mathematical calculations,” Mimi adds. “Not bad,” Vienne says, “for a turtle.”
“Oh, I’m not done yet.” I lift the rolling door to reveal a velocicopter parked on a huge shipping pallet.
In the copilot’s seat, knitting a jumper, her face fresh scrubbed, is a surprisingly calm Charlotte du Save. Sitting next to her is the pilot, his hands bound and a gag over his mouth. When he sees us, he starts hollering through the gag.
“Shut it,” Charlotte says, and pokes him with a knitting needle.
“She’s very calm, considering,” Vienne says.
“That’s because I made a deal with her.” Pinch appears behind us, supporting a very weary but alert Aziz. He really is one tough hurensohn. “If she came peacefully, I’d make sure she got to see her husband.”
“Husband?” Vienne and I say in unison.
“That is right,” the Razor says, appearing at the rolling door, using the steel frame to support himself. There’s blood pooling on his bandaged shoulder, but it doesn’t seem to faze him. He’s every bit as tough as Aziz. It must run in the family.
“You’re here!” Charlotte yells, and jumps out of the cockpit. She runs across the tarmac, letting out a sound that’s part giddy laugh and part scream, and throws her arms around his neck.
The Razor grunts but doesn’t stop her. He wraps his good arm around her waist and closes his eyes. “You are safe. We will go home now.”
Charlotte leans back, wiping the tears from her eyes. “You’re wounded!” she says. “Did they do this to you? I will stab their eyes out!”
“No.” The Razor looks at his brother, then at me, then at Vienne, who places a hand on her armalite. “Like most of my wounds,” he says, “this one was self-inflicted. So if you must stab anyone, you must stab me.”
Charlotte buries her face in his neck, and the Razor grunts, feeling the pain but not willing to let her stop. After a few seconds, he moves her to his side and takes her hand in his.
He looks at me and nods. “Thank you for sparing me and tending my wound,” he says, “But I am afraid that your name will be mud for helping me.”
“My name is Jacob Stringfellow,” I say. “You can’t get any muddier than that.”
“Perhaps I may now take the war truck back to the Warren?” he says, looking at me and Vienne. “Since it was mine to begin with.”
“It’s not my decision to make,” I say, and look to the chief for an answer.
Aziz makes the sign of the Regulator and bows. “May Lakshmi bless your days together.”
The Razor bows in return. “May she grant the same wish to you,” he says, and they turn to go. Charlotte throws an arm around his waist and drapes his arm around her neck, acting as his crutch. For the first time, he sags a bit, and he lets her carry some of his weight.
Charlotte helps her husband into the passenger side, then runs around and jumps into the front seat. The engine starts on the first try, and she puts it in reverse, waving to us and beaming. It strikes me how young she is. How young we all are, really.
That’s what I want, I think—an idea that surprises me, it’s so unexpected. I look back at Vienne, who for some reason has locked eyes on me, and a shiver runs down my spine. We hold the gaze for a couple of seconds; then, with a cough, I break it.
“Just out of curiosity,” I ask Aziz to get rid of the awkward moment, “what’s your brother’s real name?”
“Our parentals named him Festus,” he says.
“Yeah,” I say. “Probably a good idea to stick with Razor.” I look back at the velocicopter. “So where does that leave us? What about the pilot and his copter?”
“We are going to be using the pilot’s services one more time before we let him go,” Aziz says, his voice getting softer. “We’ve got some unfinished business with Medici.”
“Fair enough,” I say. The Orthocrat deserves whatever they decide to dish out. “In the hubbub, I forgot to ask—where’s Sarge?”
“Sarge couldn’t make it,” Pinch says with a smirk. “He got off the copter twenty kilometers from here. The first step was a doozy.” She points to the hydraulic lifter still attached to the flat the copter is resting on. “Can one of you give it a push into the open?”
I start toward it, but Vienne puts up her hand.
“I’ll handle this,” she says. “You and heavy machinery don’t mix.”
“Hey!” I protest.
“Based on the available data,” Mimi says. “I would have to agree with her theory.”
“So now you’re ganging up on me?”
“I prefer to regard it as providing support,” she says.
Vienne honks the horn on the lifter, and I jump out of the way as she expertly guides the velocicopter into the clear, lowers the flat to the pavement, then backs into the building without looking. She kills the engine and wipes her hands, then winks at me.
“Told you so,” she mouths.
I respond in the most mature way I can muster—by sticking my tongue out at her.
“Monday’s child is fair of face,” Mimi recites. “Tuesday’s child is full of grace. Wednesday’s child is full of woe. Thursday’s child has far to go.”
“What’s with the poetry all of a sudden?” I ask.
“During the journey, I had the opportunity to access several dormant data cells.”
“You know I carking hate poetry, right?”
“Affirmative,” she says. “However, I enjoy it, which means you will just have to suffer.”
While Vienne and I are busying acting like a couple of children, Pinch helps Aziz into the copter. He sits in the copilot seat, while Pinch moves to the back.
She cuts the pilot’s bounds and warns him, “Do what we’re asking, and you’ll keep your life and the copter. Capiche?”
The pilot flashes a thumbs-up. “Roger that.” He hits the engines, and with a squeal, the rotors kick in and the blades start turning.
Aziz opens his door and waves us over. “Sorry it turned out this way,” he says to Vienne, his voice soft but firm. “It was not the payday you expected.”
“Money isn’t everything,” she replies. “But it was fun while it lasted.”
“Charlotte’s with her husband, so we got it right in the end,” I say, even though too many hostiles lost their lives in the process. But that’s a thought I’ll save for another day.
Aziz turns to me. “Vienne was right about you, Durango. You are a good soldier and a master strategist. I am honored to have fought beside you.”
“Enough with the mush,” Vienne says, and pulls me away as the rotors start chopping the air apart. “You’ve got a job to do, right?”
We back up and watch as they lift over, dropping our visors to block the swirling dirt and debris. Our eyes stay on the bird until it’s disappeared from the sky. And just like that, it’s only the two of us standing among row after row of empty storage buildings. A cool wind blows through, stirring up dust and erasing the tracks that the truck left.
“No truck, no copter.” I turn to Vienne. “I guess we’re hoofing it from here.”
“Looks like it,” she says, and bumps my shoulder.
We start walking east, which seems as good a direction as any. At least there’s a new sunrise to enjoy.
“Hey,” I say. “Think there’s anything good to eat in Edda?”
“Probably not,” she says. “So what’s next for you, since we got squat for this job?”
“First I have some business with a man named Lyme,” I say, “and then I reckon I’ll need to find a job or two to earn some coin. A jack’s got to eat, right?”
“For this job of yours, would you happen to be looking for a crew?”
“Probably,” I say. “Know any decommissioned Regulators who might be interested?”
“Maybe,” she says. “If the pay’s right and the company’s good.”
“Like the food in Edda,” I say. “They’ll both probably stink.”
“Makes no difference to me. Everything stinks on Mars,” she says, and stops. “There’s just one thing,”
I turn to face her. “What’s that?”
“From now on,” she says, poking me in the chest. “I do the driving. All the driving.”
“Oh,” I say, grabbing her hand, which she does not pull away. “I thought you’d say you wanted your own crew.”
She laughs and leans closer. “Me? I’m a soldier, not a leader.” She pinches her bottom lip, considering an idea. “Still, a soldier could do worse than follow a cowboy into battle. Don’t you think?”
“I dunno about that,” I say. “I’m not sure I can ever live up to the example Mimi set. She left some awful big boots to fill.”
“Don’t worry, Chief.” Vienne lets go of my hand and punches my shoulder. “I think you’ll grow into them.”
I blush, a knot caught in my throat. “I sure hope so.” But I’m not counting on it.
Without another word, we both turn toward the towering Olympus Mons, the tallest volcano in the solar system, and for now, our guiding star back to New Eden. From there, who knows what will happen? But with Vienne as my partner, I like our chances.
“Would you like me to calculate the odds of your success?” Mimi asks.
“No thanks,” I say as I brush the back of Vienne’s hand ever so lightly. “This is something we’ll have to figure out ourselves.”