Broken: A Plague Journal (10 page)

“We?”

Kath hesitated, cleared her throat. “You don’t have to know about this.”

“Do you think I’d—”

“No.” She squeezed his hand, let go. “But they’d kill you if they knew about it.”

“Tell me.”

“I’ve met someone.”

Berlin stood in a silence only that phrase can assemble.

Kath remembered her indiscretion, stumbled through clarification. “There’s a woman who can help.”

“Help what?”

“She comes from the outer. Came in months ago on a transport. Just something about her...”

“Who?”

“She knows what to do. To make it right.”

“Kath—”

“She’s not like us.”

“If you’re talking about—”

“She wants to help. Not just this planet. She can make it right again.”

“Make
what
right?”

Kath’s hands balled to fists at her side. “The last war.. Nothing’s been the same since. Planets in slavery, One ruled by machines and nears. Gods dropped into the slumber. Nothing’s right anymore.”

“We had to fight that war.”

“But we didn’t have to become this.” Her fingertips traced the insignia on her chest, moved to her temple, where the metallish uplink writhed under her skin. “We didn’t have to give up our—

“It was for the best.”

“
Whose
best?”

“Our best. It had to be done.”

“We’re killing the system! The stars can’t support us anymore. The energy load alone between the two—”

“That’s why we need the lumbers. Deep galactic survey missions, colonization hives—”

“We have all that we need right here. We’ve just forgotten how to live within our means.”

“We can’t turn back now. We’re pushing the saturation mark as—”

“We don’t
have
to be pushing the saturation mark.”

Berlin felt the throb of the comm uplink, but kept it static. “You can’t be talking about—”

“Planet One alone uses eighty percent of the system resources.”

He said nothing.

“A lot of bad people on Planet One.”

“Not all.”

“They started the war.”

“The war’s over.”

“It’s not over. Not yet.”

He’d never heard her talk like this: such determination. Passion. He never suspected that she felt so strongly about the civil war that had split the binary system a decade before.

“If we take out One, we solve everything. Decentralize the machines’ power. Make room for real people again.”

She reached out. His response was uncertain, but he did hold her hand.

“And you know someone who can do this?”

“A woman from the outer, where the planets still burn. She says she can kill the machines.”

“And her name?”

“Maire

shook from the release of the shiver, stilled. The headless form in front of her fell to the floor in a splash of destabilized proteins.

The gun an extension of her arm, she turned, slowly enough to stir a ripple of widening eyes and furrowing brows in the circle of people before her weapon.

“I’ll ask again. Who can give me a ride into the Drift?”

A jagged chuckle from behind was the only response to her inquiry. Its distance from perceived origin to her ears spoke of safety, but the whisper behind her eyes still warned her to be wary of a drawn weapon. Weapon and head first, body trailing not far behind, she met the source of laughter with a sharp inhalation and her firing finger poised on her shiver gun’s trigger.

“You’re already in the Drift, woman. Come on, sit down.” His hands waved off the concern of onlookers. Business returned to that particular brand of normal that only the edge of Black thrived upon.

He wasn’t short, but short enough, and he wasn’t fat, but fat enough. He leaned forward in his chair and poured another steaming cup of fermented protein gruel for himself. Tilting it toward Maire, he wordlessly offered and she wordlessly refused with the wrinkling of her nose bridge and the downturn of her lips.

“You’re looking for something, this far out. What is it?”

His enormous brow sloped down into a hooked nose. Underneath, two black eyes blinked away drunkenness and crawled over her body, darting imagined tonguetips over erectile tissues. A badly repaired cleft palette barely drew attention away from the ledge of his underbite. His voice reflected more than simple physical impairments.

“Speak to me, woman. I’ve saved your life by inviting you to my table. You stink of sex, of women. Blood and fear, rage. You’re desperate for something out here, looking for something, and I’m the man who can lead you home.”

There were no machines on this vessel, at least none of the thinking machines from the last war that now held the inner planets of the system in a death grip. Her thoughts flashed to Kath and the trees, Michael and the

“You’re a mercenary?”

“A trivial term at best.” He sipped from his meaty cup. “An appropriate term at worst.”

“I need a ship, and a team of—”

“Slow down, woman.” Black beads surveyed the mess interior. “You can’t just come to my home, kill a member of my crew and expect service immediately. First I have to get to know you.”

Her gaze was the empty that encompasses all of fury.

“I’m going to ask you a bunch of questions, and I want them answered immediately.”

“And if I—”

“If you refuse, I’ll have my troops space you into Seychelles. Not a nice way to die.”

Eyes dimmed.

“What’s your name?”

She placed her shiver on the tabletop and thumbed the echo chamber release.

“Maire.”

“Where you from?”

“Seychelles Edge, two-seventy under.”

“A local girl!” He grinned through teeth that were somewhat there, mostly broken. “But you’ve been gone a while, haven’t you?”

“Long enough.”

“Fantastic.” Another sip, his eyes still gouging into hers, and now a playful flash. “So that’s where your taste for flesh came from. Your entire family? Friends? Did you have to eat your children, or did you escape before—”

Her bared teeth and a barely-audible hiss cut him off.

“Poor girl. You stink of inner worlds. Why’d you come back?”

“Business.”

“Yes, business. You need a ship, and troops. And you’re heading deep into the Drift, looking for something. Sounds like standard fees are in order.” He pulled a data panel from a pocket at his side, placed it on the table. His fingertip traced over schematics. “We can work together.”

“This isn’t your usual fuck-and-run. I’ll need the best vessel you have, your strongest troops, your—”

“Tall order from a stranger.”

Her eyes scanned the ceiling, fell back to meet his. “I can see you fought in the wars.” She tapped her temple, indicating the regiment brand not gracefully gracing his own. “And this vessel,” she waved around them, more indicating the raucous crowd drinking goofy gravy, smoking the copper from old wires, and savagely fucking in the darkened corners of the mess than the superstructure of the gutted ship itself, “is an Inner Worlds destroyer from the machine conflicts.”

“Your point?”

“You hate the machines. I’ve not seen a single thinker since I arrived, save that glorified abacus with which you’re about to take my order.”

His frown, a constant until now, explored deeper definitions of itself.

“There’s something out there in the Drift right now. I need to go get it.”

“And why’s this ‘something’ so important to you?”

“It’ll be important to you, too.”

“And why’s that?”

“Because when I have it, we’ll use it to kill all the machines forever.”

He smiled.

Back arched, she swung down through the cockpit tube, her grasp on the ladder releasing when she felt the not-unpleasant suck of the vacuum chair on her buttocks and thighs. She adjusted her robe to allow a better grip.

“You don’t have to wear that here, you know.”

Cork had paused long enough from his startup routine of toggling switches and locking interface ports to his wrists and eyes to crawl his vision over her drab-draped form. His tongues absently explored the corners of his mouth.

“I get cold.”

“Right.”

She wondered how the mercenary had managed to squeeze through the access tube into his nest. Rolls of hairy flesh poured over his pilot chair, pulsating to the suction. His breasts dwarfed her own. Above, his cardiac shield heaved for breath. She checked and double-checked the enclosure on her garment.

“Comfy?”

“I guess.”

“Okay. I’ll lock you into waste systems—”

“No.” She couldn’t take the risk of slaving into the ship if the urethral, vaginal, and anal links were fully aware biosensors. Cork would find out in an instant that she wasn’t exactly normal anymore. “I can hold it.”

His eyes narrowed. “Suit yourself.” His hand waved over the dashpanel. He grunted as his body loosed to the ship’s probing and gave a satisfied exhalation. “You can clean up the mess yourself if we hit rough water. And shitting on my boat costs double.”

The bulbous drives forward and above the cockpit began the resonance cycle. Maire felt the vessel shudder and jerk against the docking grips.

Tickle.

She studied the panel, the levels, the systems. “What’s your mix?”

“Dark, seventy over.”

“How’s she run?”

“She gets by.” Cork patted the viewshield affectionately.

“Try boosting the dark level to seventy-two five. It’ll compensate for outside interference from resident dark streaks as we get farther out.”

Frown. “Ever sailed the Seychelles, woman?”

“Just trust me.”

“Fine.” He bumped up the level of dark matter in the shred drive to 72.5%. The vessel immediately calmed, the drives above them shivering steadily instead of randomly. “Well, shit. You’re just full of surprises, aren’t you?”

“I try.”

The shred peeled away from the belly of Cork’s destroyer and fell into the black endless of Seychelles, the jungles of empty, the machinery of night. Maire felt the ratcheting of the mercenary sleepers as the pods fell into place in the chain of the vehicle. Snaking through the debris of ancient and [recent] wars, the shred spermed around the hulks of abandoned warships, metal worlds whose interiors had been torn into the suck and cold. Occasional freeze-dried soldiers sparked and ceased before the forward energy sweeper.