Conviction (8 page)

“What was that?”

My head jerks up at the sound of David’s voice. I’d started to doze with my forehead pressed into my knees.

Then I hear it, too.

Gunfire.

We both jump to our feet, bracing for…who knows? Running bootsteps pass our doorway, their owners not pausing to give us a heads-up on what’s going on. But the sound coming from outside, though faint, is definitely gunshots, multiple, and not just small arms. In fact, it sounds like the patrol unit is getting a dose of the local hospitality just like we had the day before.

David and I are both on our feet instantly. The firefight’s cadence picks up, then we hear running again, coming from the other end of the corridor outside our storage closet. A retreat?

Four rapid shots burst past the doorway, sounding to my ears like funeral bells. Then silence.

I look at David. He stares back. We both shrug and do something incredibly stupid. Together, we pound on the door, yelling to be let out. Confined by the small room, our voices sound hollow and powerless. But it’s a bad idea to be found by accident if scavs have overrun the Corps squad and are in the process of stealing the ship. They can have it, but we need them to know we’re not part of the patrol unit. Maybe they’ll even let us go.

“Shh!” David says suddenly, and I catch what he’d heard. Shouting comes from somewhere in the ship, but I only hear garbled, distant syllables, not enough to make out what’s being said. “They know we’re here.”

With no other options, we both stand back from the door and tense into fighting stances.

“Aly and David Erikson?” someone says from just outside.

“Yeah,” says David.

“Stand back.”

Our visitor—rescuer or rival?—disengages the lock, and the door slides open. A tall, fit blond man stands in the corridor, his Kaldor 75 pistol aimed casually in our direction. “Rajcik thought you’d still be here.” His icicle-blue eyes skate over me in one long sweep, and the side of his mouth twitches in a grin that says he likes what he sees. “Now I get why he wanted new meat on the team. Good news, you’ve unofficially been pardoned. This ship’s not Corps anymore.”

He motions us out, and we follow him cautiously toward the scout’s embarkation ramp as I piece together what had just happened. It’s clear enough that Rajcik and his smuggling crew, of which our doorman is a member, attacked the patrol unit and won. He knew we were aboard, which means—

We step out into blazing afternoon sun, the heat and piercing light hitting me like a bullwhip. In a second my eyes adjust, and I absorb the sight of five hideously mangled uniformed bodies lying in unusual, almost theatrical, sprawls around the ship’s ramp. David and I step past them into the shade cast by the scout’s starboard elevon foil, instinctively moving out of the glare. The quiet and dead soldiers are all the info we need to see that the danger, for now, has passed.

Rajcik has his back to us, shielding his eyes as he scans the sky to the east. I follow his gaze and see another ship, a small shuttle like the type used for a planet-side hop, coming in to land. Unlike normal civilian crafts, this one sports a protruding turret over the engine intakes, with a barrel measuring at least thirty mike-mikes. I glance again at the corpses, now understanding why they so closely resemble shredded meat. Clearly Rajcik is a take-no-prisoners kind of smuggler. The thought should disgust me, but I seem to be fresh out of sympathy for my ex-fellow Corpsmembers.

The shuttle settles with a quiet hum about ten meters away, and Rajcik turns and appraises us. “So which one of you has a four-leaf clover in your pocket?”

“You knew they were coming for us, back at the bar. You left us as bait, didn’t you?” David accuses him, having drawn the same conclusion I have. “You didn’t even warn us!”

“Why would I?” Rajcik asks, his voice menacing. “You don’t work for me. I’m not your friend. And I’m sure as hell not interested in saving your asses at my own expense.”

“Then why this?” I ask, gesturing at the litter of corpses.

Instead of a response, he reaches out and pats the scout’s stern, as if it’s a cute, cuddly puppy. “I answered that question back at the canteen. This is worth quite a bit in common currency. But that still leaves your e-craft.”

As the sentence finishes, his attention jerks away and focuses sharply on something behind me. Before I can spin around, Mick Temple erupts into a shambling run toward us from the cover of several small land transports parked a dozen meters distant. “Drew!”

David suddenly grabs my shoulder, and I turn.

“Everyone get the fuck on the ground, or this scav dies.” Soltznin, holding Drew in a chokehold with the Bowker pressed to his cheek. The panic in her expression is only moderately tempered by the fury in it.

“Soltznin!” I yell. “What are you doing? He’s just a kid, for Christ’s sake!”

She stands at the threshold of the scout’s embarkation ramp, half-in and half-out, not even acknowledging me. Drew looks frightened, pasty white. More like a child than a teenager. They must have been detaining him in a different holding area on board. Wherever it was, Rajcik’s crew overlooked it, and Soltznin—lucky again—had been there too. Did she go straight for the kid to use as a shield when the shooting started? The thought turns my stomach. One of his eyes is blackened and swollen, and his lip is split. Whatever she’d done to get the drop on him, it’s clear he’d gone down fighting. Good kid.

“You”—she juts her chin at Rajcik, who stands still and alert, one hand grasping the stock of a Sinbad auto-pistol, the other still resting on the scout’s metal skin—“tell everyone on that shuttle to get out here. Now!”

Rajcik doesn’t move.

“And drop that pistol!”

He still doesn’t move.

From my periphery, I make out the blond guy and the scarred woman from the bar standing at the ready nearby. How many more of Rajcik’s crew are around, tucked under cover?

I try again, keeping my voice as reasonable as I can. “Soltznin, look. Just let the kid go. You can get back on the scout and take off to whatever fleet cruiser you want. There are way too many of these smugglers for you to fight, you must realize that.” Subtext:
You’re going to die the second you let down your guard.

“Dad,” Drew cries.

“Let him go, you bitch!” Temple yells, fear giving his voice enough strength to overpower the sickness weakening him.

She glares at the group for a second, then focuses back on David and me. “Fucking traitors, both of you. Cowards.”

She adjusts the arm clamped tightly around Drew’s throat and starts to say something else. Before she can, the kid reaches up and grabs it, simultaneously letting his body go as limp as one of the corpses at his feet. Soltznin is pulled off balance and staggers as he yanks her arm away, straightens his legs, and lurches forward.

She shoots him directly between the shoulder blades. His body leaps into the air, his arms spread wide, as if he’s trying to fly like a bird. Then he collapses into the red sand, twisting as he comes down so that he lands on his side, his head turned to the sky. I can’t pull my eyes from his face, even as the sound of Rajcik’s Sinbad echoes Soltznin’s pistol shot.

“NO! Not my son!” Temple screams, rushing forward to stumble and fall next to the body of his dead kid.

David’s hand is still on my shoulder, and he squeezes it hard, ready to pull me into flight if we need to. But we don’t. Soltznin lies in a pile, blood pumping from a gash in her throat, her eyes desperate, pleading.

The world goes sharp-edged and gray. All noise wicked away to a subtle background hum. Again with the killing, the kids dying for no reason besides being born non-citizens, the Corps taking life like it’s nothing more than an exchange of currency. I want to laugh at how it’s going to end for Soltznin.

Instead of going to Drew—I can’t bring myself to look at him and have his face join those of so many others like him in the caskets of my memories—I approach Soltznin, absently kicking her Bowker off to the side. Her hand presses to the wound, the sleeve of her uniform becoming instantly drenched with dark red. I feel nothing for her, neither hatred nor concern nor resentment. A matching stain spreads over her jacket on the same side, where a second shot from Rajcik landed a few centimeters beneath her collarbone. I merely stare. Numbness protects me right now, Drew’s pointless death too disturbing to allow through my armor. If that makes me a coward, so be it.

Temple’s sobs sound like gravel and glass crunching beneath tires. Someone comes up beside me. Rajcik. Soltznin’s eyes leave mine and look at him. He squats and wraps his fingers around the hand covering her wound, pulling her arm away and holding it. His expression as he watches her bleed to death is the coldest void in the galaxy. She doesn’t struggle. In a second, she’s gone.

Numb.

The smuggler rises. “MacCready, bring the case.”

“Fucking mess,” David says. “What a fucking waste.”

I seek out his green-blue eyes with mine, wondering what happens next. I had it all figured out, but after this nothing feels like it makes sense, not right now anyway. Maybe not ever.

The blond smuggler steps up to us and drops a metal case, about the size of an ammo box, at our feet. He turns to Rajcik. “We need to split. She may have had time to warn the ship that’s been moving in from nightside since yesterday. It’s probably her ride.”

Rajcik nods, then says to David and me, “What’s in that box is for the e-craft. A deal is a deal.” He turns back to the man he’d called MacCready. “You and Ortiz take that one. I’ll fly this. We’ll settle them in the bunker for now. Meet us there.”

MacCready answers, “Got it,” then gestures to the scarred woman, who follows him to the e-craft.

Rajcik faces us again. “You have five minutes to get anything you want off that ship.” He pauses and stares acutely into my eyes, as if watching the chaos happening in my mind, and liking what he sees. “Or—you can stay on board and fly with MacCready to our depot. My offer hasn’t expired.” He then gives me that mummy-skull smile again and walks past us up the ramp and into the scout.

I look at Temple, still kneeling over Drew’s body, his tear-wet face a dead gray color, his eyes haunted and bleary. Like he’s already a ghost.

A deal’s a deal.

Squatting, I open the case MacCready had dropped. Inside are several thousand marks of common currency. I scoop out half and walk over to Temple.

“If you’re going to bury him, you better do it before that Corps ship sends down a patrol. You don’t want to be anywhere near here when they find these bodies.”

Temple doesn’t acknowledge me.

I kneel and shove the currency into his hand. “Take this and whatever Rajcik paid you, and take your other kid, take Pete, off this rock. Buy him false citizen papers and find him a way to the Obals. Whatever it takes. You have to make sure this doesn’t happen to him. You got it?”

His fist tightens around the cash, and slowly his eyes meet mine. He doesn’t speak, but I think he does get it.

I turn back to David. “I’m going with them.”

David puts a hand up and rubs his forehead hard, as if he’s trying to wipe out all memory and impressions of everything that has just happened, maybe more. I hear him sigh heavily. He bends over, closes the lid on the currency container, and picks it up. Then he walks up to Temple.

“Here.” The metal case hits the ground with a dry clunk and falls to its side. “I’m so sorry. Let’s go, Aly.”

Rajcik’s depot is a remote abandoned mine descending so deeply into the planet’s crust that not even the Corps’s most powerful geophysical spectrometer is going to penetrate. The cold, dark hole is a partial luxury right now, a respite from the hell above, but not the hell inside.

We’re aboard his flagship, the
Temptation
. Originally assault ships manufactured for Corps use, the line was decommissioned a few years earlier and all the surplus sold as salvage. Rajcik’s made some modifications and reconfigured the hull’s interior to haul more cargo, also building a quick-launch ejection bay for the shuttle carrying the Nagasaki, the retractable long-range orbital that had turned the security patrol into flesh confetti. Though the Corps had yanked out all the weapon capabilities before selling the ships, Rajcik’s overhaul allows it to fight again.

David and I haven’t spoken much in the last few hours. The fact that he’s come with me tells me all I need to know about what he’s thinking. We’re sitting in a sectioned-off nook in the cargo hold, killing time with canteens of water that are untouched as Rajcik and his crew decide what they’re going to do with us.

He sighs, the breath ending in a noise like he’s choking. For a second, I think he could weep.

“We are so fucking flawed,” he says. “How could it all go so wrong?”

Seeing my older brother starting to crack doesn’t help me hold together my own fragile shell. Encouragement isn’t my specialty, but I try. “Everyone is flawed, David. We aren’t any worse.”

The words drop from my mouth like the sigh of a war-weary veteran. But then, that’s all we are. Shells of people who missed out on the good things life was supposed to offer—through no fault of our own—and were left to scrape through the waste that remained. That’s what led us here, and that’s what I have to hold on to or go crazy. Maybe, like David is doing right now, we can’t help but pick at the scars left by the mistakes we’ve made, even if our mistakes were the only choices we had.

The furrows in his forehead deepen, and he turns to look at me. The soldier in him is trying to bear the weight of this truth, though the slump in his shoulders seems like it will never straighten. “Maybe it’s our flaws that prepare us to do what’s right,” he comments, the shadow of a half smile crossing his mouth.

I’m too tired to return it. The hope in his words is real, but I’m not capable yet of feeling much hope. The memory of Drew’s dead face and his father’s keening agony haunts me, no matter how much I try to forget it. The Corps and the things the Corps has done through my good soldierly hands haunt me. If I ever want to escape seeing Drew’s glazed eyes, I have to become the ghost that haunts them in return. Maybe Rajcik is the way to do that.

Sensing my resolve, David gives me a nod. Standing, he starts toward the hatch. “Let’s meet the rest of our new crew.”

“They can’t be any worse than Soltznin, right?”

He shrugs. “Like you said, we all have flaws.”

“And demons,” I whisper, not knowing if he hears me.

The scarred woman Rajcik had called Ortiz is working in the hold, organizing crates and inventory. She wears a sleeveless shirt that reveals well-muscled, though almost equally scarred arms. My eyes follow her automatically, and I realize the mark I’ve been observing high on her right deltoid is actually a Corps tattoo. She, too, had been one of us. One of
them
. Her being here, among this crew of cutthroats, gives another stir to the nauseating mix of emotions going on inside me. She’d been a cog in the death machine; now she’s not. It’s a choice, the same one David and I had made. Now, like her, we have to find a way to live with it.

Rajcik steps into the hold, walks over, and pushes a crate at me with his foot. “Open it.”

The crate is packed with a stolen shipment of handguns, all tagged for Corps.

“Do you know how to disable the DNA readers on these weapons?” The look on my face must be all the answer he needs. “Teez,” he says, “come show them.”

Ortiz walks over, but before she says anything, Rajcik pushes the crate’s lid shut, then sits down atop it. He holds a finger up, telling her to wait one. “Couple of things you need to know. The Admin Ministry of Security has put out a bulletin, warning that all deserters will be charged with treason and executed. That’s what you have to look forward to if you’re caught. If you’re going to be part of my crew, getting caught isn’t an option. I have trade secrets to protect. Do you understand?”

Do we understand? I stare into his face, where the meaning of his statement glows in his eyes.
Don’t get caught or you die, one way or another.
I snort humorlessly.

Surprisingly, Rajcik smiles, as if we’re sharing an inside joke. “Don’t worry, though. We’re smarter than the Admin or the Corps. And now we have you two, which only increases the advantage. After what went down today, I can see you’re loyal, and loyalty is a commodity I can use.”

David and I say nothing.

“Second thing, and this is good news. We’re hearing that a group of wire-rat subversives has managed to fuck up the central Corps personnel database. They’ve lost the data on at least half their forces, including lifemarker IDs and DNA.”

David jolts. “You’re saying the Corps can’t track us?”

“Exactly. If your records are part of the data that was destroyed, and the Admin’s backups have been hit too, you no longer exist.”

“If they catch us, they won’t be able to tell we’re deserters,” I comment. The full weight of this realization slams into me.
I don’t exist.
Is this the freedom I wanted?

Does it matter?

“We take off in an hour for a job. You get to start earning your keep.” He stands and nods to Ortiz. Before he exits through the hatch, he pauses and turns back. “You need to know that whatever the Corps might do to you if they catch you will never be as bad as what I will if you cross me.” He remains still, studying us, ensuring we understand completely.

Involuntarily, my eyes drop to his scarred knuckles, and I clench my teeth against what I might say. An ally isn’t necessarily a friend, or even truly an ally. Soltznin proved this. Whatever comes in David’s and my future, I won’t make the mistake of trusting someone again, but I know I can believe Rajcik on this. He’s a man of pure conviction. And that’s all the truth I need.

~ ~ ~

Thanks for reading! Would you like to know what happens to our intrepid heroes and villains? Follow Aly, David, and Rajcik on their next adventure in
Contract of Defiance
: Spectras Arise Trilogy, Book 1.