Orphans In the Black: A Space Opera Anthology Read online

  He released him, straightened. “Take this Water Guild bitch to the river. Use a blade. Blaster’ll make too much noise.”

  Three of Haro’s men were selected for the grim errand: one that walked ahead of their sorry little parade and the two men that buoyed Luc up, one at each arm. Their progress was a half-drag, half-floundering over the gravel and weeds at the edge of the landing field.

  “Bet you wish you’d paid me, eh, friend?” the man on his left growled.

  “Thought crossed my mind,” Luc slurred, stumbling.

  He could feel the pharm ebbing from his muscles. His control over his body was returning, but not quickly enough. His foggy brain teetered on the edge of panic. He tamped it down and focused on his breathing. Counted their steps. Forty yards, a little under. He pictured how he would kill them.

  Their awkward march stopped.

  They stood at the crest of a steep slope. The distant floodlights of the landing field picked out the suggestion of movement far below. He could hear the mutter of the river.

  The man to his left released him. Luc sagged against the captor on his right, using his momentum to drag the man off balance. He pawed at him in a pantomime of desperation and affected a sobbing plea: “Please. This is a mistake.”

  Luc clutched at the man’s greasy fabric coveralls until he felt the metal shape. A blade.

  The man pushed him off with a disgusted grunt. “Die like a man, at least.”

  Luc’s heart quickened with the elation of coming violence. His body wanted it, craved it. That was what the Regime had made him. He grinned in the dark. The blade was in his grip now.

  “Watch him! He’s got m’knife!”

  They were all wary now. Tensed. Circling him like a trio of raptors.

  The tackle came from his left. He bent with it, sagging. They fell to the weeds. A sharp rock gouged at his spine as he turned with the attacker, using his momentum to push the body aside. His legs wrapped the struggling torso, squeezed as he took the blade to the vulnerable neck. The body went slack.

  Luc rolled. A heavy boot narrowly missed his skull. He sprang to his feet. They swung at him, their moves untrained, inefficient. They were street brawlers, not trained killers.

  Another blade slashed out of the darkness. Luc timed his dodge too late. The blade bit into his stomach. Blood cascaded in a warm wet rush. Already he could feel his strength leaking, along with the blood that ran down his leg. Adrenaline could only do so much.

  The wound shifted him into a defensive posture, rocking his weight from foot to foot as the men circled. They could wait him out now. Watch him bleed. Pick at him, like carrion birds circling dying meat.

  One of them lunged, and Luc sprang back to counter it. His right foot met only air— the steep edge of the riverbank. The darkness and their circling had stolen his sense of orientation. A blade found its home in Luc’s ribs. White-hot pain coiled out from the spot. His knees buckled.

  “That’s for Chaths,” a gruff voice hissed against his neck.

  Then came the shove. For one heady moment, Luc floundered in the night air like a blind bird. And he fell. It was forever. It was seconds.

  He tumbled down the river bank, bounding against rocks and sending out sprays of gravel. Something unyielding collided with his left knee. He heard a sharp wet pop that created a world-ending agony. Even as he drew in breath to scream, he plunged into frigid black water.

  The mad rush of the current swallowed him. Half-glimpsed boulders slouched by. He was moving far too swiftly to stop, though he grasped blindly for anything solid. The icy water sapped his strength and squeezed his injured ribs. His arms and legs were already leaden. The agony of his knee dimmed. He sputtered in gasps of air from the relentless tumble of waves. He’d never been immersed in water before, had never been trained to swim. Tasemar was largely desert, after all. And he’d come here to drown.

  A dark shape loomed ahead, a boulder crested at the river’s center. He readied himself, fighting the panic that would drown him just as surely as the water.

  He collided with the boulder, his fingertips brushing its side, slick with dynasties of algae. Then the river claimed him once more, sweeping him off into the night.

  “He dead? He looks dead.”

  “Ain’t dead, Tika. His stomach’s movin’. See?”

  The voices invaded the glassy pain in Luc’s head. There was something wrong with their pitch. High. Almost musical.

  “Lookit all the blood. Gross!”

  Gravel crunched as footsteps approached. He could feel soft, damp earth under his face. Sunlight pressed against his eyelids. His left arm was numb, pinned beneath him. Water chortled nearby. The river. He cracked one eyelid and took in feeble green weeds and clumps of moss poking from a pool of rank brown water.

  “Tika, don’t! What if he’s dangerous? We should tell Mahir.”

  “Don’t be a baby.”

  Luc sensed the voice’s owner stoop over him. He tensed his muscles. It drove a spike of pain through his stomach. He lashed out with his right hand and seized a child’s tiny ankle

  An ear-piercing screech stabbed his water-clogged ears. “He’s got me! The dead man’s got me!”

  Wincing, Luc released his grip. The child skittered away in a splash.

  He rolled onto his side in time to glimpse two children disappearing into the mouth of a cave along the riverbank. An uncontrollable bout of coughing shook him. He pushed up on hands and knees. His left leg revolted in agony. He told himself to crawl. Then, like a sluggish animal, his body complied.

  He collapsed, allowing his face to press to the cool mat of dead, soggy leaves. Disconnected, he noted the bloody trail in his wake, like a man-sized snail. He shut his eyes.

  The morning suns carved a yellow square on the simple plaster wall of the room. Luc watched its slow progression. That was how he counted the time here: the march of the light cast on the wall and the periodic chant that echoed from the unseen world beyond this room. One of many, it seemed, within the walls of the Temple of Miseries.

  Three days. Maybe longer.

  By now, he could maneuver his body from side to side in the narrow cot without too much pain. Meals had advanced from watery gruel to the chewy, dense bread that was gritty with the sand that seemed to permeate everything. At least he could now feed himself, chewing carefully around the empty socket in his jaw, the ever-present reminder of his circumstance.

  Temple of Miseries. How appropriate.

  His thin blanket reeked of incense and the salve that covered his wounds. Always the same man ministered to him—a withered husk, Mahir, the elder-priest. He spoke to Luc with desperate cheerfulness in heavily accented Commonspeak that often decayed into Tasmarin.

  Luc sat at the side of the bed, gave himself to a count of ten, and lurched to his feet. The pain that thundered through his left knee was monstrous. He pitched forward, hooking his hands into the window frame on the opposite wall.

  The colored glass window swung out with an uneven creak and the cool morning breeze met the sweat on his skin. Gritting his teeth, Luc took in the view of Macula, laid out like calcified rings below the temple mount. To the far left was a wedge of the landing field, butted up to the streets of the lower city. Holding up a thumb, he blocked out the view of the tavern and the brothels that had grown like barnacles to its sides.

  Haro and his friends likely assumed him dead. Part of Luc longed to pay retribution, but it gave way to another, darker revelation. Notker had known about the water nymph mark and the danger it would create for him in Macula. It had been the old man’s means to be rid of him—the worthless conscript that did not belong with his elite pack of pure-bred killers.

  Luc’s pain-soaked brain found that an easy idea to slip into. It would have been simple enough to have him disappear into some murky fate, the casualty of a lawless colony. His death would prove some point on Notker’s behalf, work as some political tool or anecdote.

  He was cut off from the Seekers and the Regime,
the only life he’d known since childhood. Gia, for all her feral hatred, was his only means to returning. He had to find a way to signal her. It itched at him like the healing under his bandages. It stung his pride to admit he needed her help. Could he trust her to actually come to collect him? Perhaps she was in collusion with Notker to rid themselves of him.

  Lucky number three, indeed.

  He squeezed his eyes shut and pushed away from the sill as if he could reject the mire of thoughts. Pain licked up his leg and stole his strength. Luc toppled sideways into a pair of elderly arms.

  “Here, my friend. Let me help you,” Mahir said with a grunt. Well into his second century, the man had begun the inglorious descent into old age, yet he showed impressive strength as he guided Luc back to the cot. He insisted on calling Luc “brother” or “friend.” The titles made something squirm guiltily inside Luc in a way he could not name.

  “The Fates return your strength by the day. Good to see you moving around,” Mahir all but shouted. His hearing was deficient.

  Luc presented him with a smile. “Perhaps it’s more likely your care.”

  Mahir waved a dismissive hand and turned his attention to a basket set on a rickety table near the door. Glass bottles clinked as he rummaged. “I patched you up, like an old tinkerer. The Fates set you upon my Path and provided everything else.”

  With a small gasp of victory, Mahir found the bottle of medicine and scuffed back to the bedside.

  Luc drank from it. By now he’d become accustomed to the bitter taste of the herbal pain remedy. As an augmented conscript, his body required far more than an average Eugenes for a full effect, but he took only what Mahir presented. It was enough to dull the edges.

  He thought longingly of the med kit and its bone knitter hidden in the dusty shadows beneath the floorboards of his rented room.

  “As you are feeling well enough to move around, I will return with crutches.” Mahir paused, seeming to consider his next words. “Perhaps tomorrow or the next day you can join me outside. There is something of a favor I may ask. Forgive me, but we need a water broker’s talent.”

  The tattoo. The Fates-damned tattoo. The old priest had to have seen it. At least he’d not taken him for some organized crime lackey. Yet.

  “Talent?” Luc asked.

  “This old man is almost too ashamed to ask one so injured.” Mahir shrugged, ducking his head. “I will understand, of course, if you do not feel well enough for the challenge.”

  “What is it?” Luc asked. He suspected Mahir’s embarrassed pauses and wording were meant to manipulate him. But he did not care. It offered an escape from the sameness of this room. After all, what task could an elderly priest give that would offer a true task to a soldier of the Regime?

  Mahir grinned happily. “It is a simple thing really.”

  “Simple, my ass.”

  Luc scowled at the corroded interior of the pump exchange. The thing was three decades old. Its AI had grown senile during that time. And, Luc suspected, mildly passive-aggressive, although he knew that lower level interfaces did not possess personality subroutines.

  “Please restate command,” said the pump’s AI (a Hydrolux Prime, announced a peeling decal on its side) with an uncertain orange glimmer. Glaring, Luc smacked the center processor hub and the AI powered down again.

  In preparation for his assignment, Luc had given cursory attention to a file on pump design in case he actually needed to perform the occupation that he claimed. But of the few models he’d reviewed all were simulations, and most of those had reliable AIs to help troubleshoot issues.

  Lip curling in disgust, Luc scraped away the heavy coating of yellow slime algae that coated the piping and flung it to the sandy floor of the shed. Despite the shade, the heat of the day made the metal-clad room into an oven. He could imagine the hot air slowly cooking his lungs.

  They live in a swutting desert. You’d think they’d take better care of their well system. Did they think their Fates would send them drinkable water if they prayed hard enough?

  Luc straightened, wincing at the twinge it created in his knee. After the first hour of battle with the thing, he had sought out Mahir to explain that the problem was hopeless. Yet the old priest had been so persuasive, suggesting that Luc was only being modest and encouraging him to take another look.

  He finished tightening the seal and snapped the casing into place. With a final glare at the device, daring it to misbehave, he powered it on. The pump gave an uncertain sputter, threatened to stall and then smoothed out into an even stroke. Luc released a victory cry that the machine drowned out.

  After an awkward battle with the crutches, Luc backed out of the shed, pausing long enough to throw an obscene gesture at the pump. It chugged along, impassively.

  “I am a warrior of the Regime. I will never falter,” he hissed at it in Regimental.

  Incredible. I’m quoting Decca at machines now. He shook his head and allowed the door to slam closed.

  A boy stood beside the shed. He was dressed in a dun-colored tunic like the other orphaned children that Mahir’s people had taken in. Luc got the sense he’d been watching him for some time, the noise of the pump masking his presence. One of the boy’s arms was a withered thing, curled in upon itself, skeletal and useless. He turned a blue-eyed gaze—another impure trait—up at Luc.

  A genetic skew. Inwardly he cringed. If he’d been born in a breeding kennel, a child like this would not have been permitted to live a day after his birth. The cullers would have seen to that. He ignored the revulsion that twitched in his stomach. It was the reaction of a soldier of the Regime.

  You’re just a water broker, he reminded himself.

  “What do you want?”

  “Mahir told me to come help you,” the boy said in halting Commonspeak, staring down at the ground between them.

  “You? Help me?” Luc did not hide his astonishment.

  “I can get around better than you.” The boy puffed out his chest, eyes flitting over Luc’s crutches.

  “Maybe so.” Luc maneuvered his weight onto the crutches. “Too late. Work’s done.”

  “Whatever,” the boy muttered, moving away.

  “You were at the riverbank when they found me. Weren’t you?” Luc called. He could recall children’s excited voices and small feet racing away.

  The boy stopped, blinking at Luc under the brilliant sunlight. “Thought you were dead. Never seen so much blood.”

  “And yet I live.”

  “Tika says that someone tried to kill you.” The boy fixed him with a sly look. “You in some kind of gang?”

  A question that Mahir had been too polite to ask.

  “A misunderstanding.” As truthful an answer as ever. “They thought I was someone else.”

  “Misunderstanding?” the boy said expertly. “That was bad people straight out tryin’ to kill you, mister. Weren’t no misunderstanding.”

  “And you have experience with such things?” Luc raised an eyebrow.

  The boy’s face went stony. His eyes slid down to the left. “Bad people everywhere, I reckon. Don’t know where they’ll turn up sometimes. Don’t matter to them if you’re a kid, neither.”

  A fair assessment.

  “What’s your name?” Luc swiveled after him.

  The boy’s frown deepened. “Why?”

  “So I know what to call you.”

  “No,” the boy replied, rolling his eyes. “I mean why would the men think you were someone else?”

  “You ask a lot of questions,” Luc said.

  The boy canted his head, studying him. “What were you saying just now? What language was that? Sounded weird.”

  “You’re weird.” It felt juvenile and stupid the moment he said it. Trading barbs with a child. Luc felt his ears burn.

  “I weren’t the one talking to myself.”

  They regarded each other in silence. Then, like a peace offering, the boy spoke. “Balish. My name’s Balish.”

  Before he
knew he was doing it, he answered: “Luc.”

  He winced but covered for it by shifting his weight against the crutches. He’d given his real name. Then again, maybe it was the smarter move. If the boy or the priest told of an injured stranger found half-drowned, Haro might hear of it. It made better sense to abandon the false name of Tarsk Cleo.

  “That don’t sound Tasmarin.” Balish’s eyes narrowed shrewdly.

  “Really? I hadn’t noticed.” Luc pivoted back onto the breezeway that lead back to the common hall of the monastery. The room reeked of incense, but at least it was out of the sun.

  “Sounds like an off-world name.” Balish maneuvered past him.

  “And you know a lot of off-worlders?” He kept his eyes ahead, feigning concentration on using the crutches.

  “Not anymore,” Balish replied, leaving Luc to stare at his receding back.

  It took two long weeks for the swelling in Luc’s knee to subside. Simple movements evoked an unsettling painless click deep in the joint, more felt than heard. He worried something was growing back wrong, and still could not manage more than a shambling lurch without the aid of the crutches.

  When the pain in his leg drove him from sleep at night, he stared up at the ceiling. He fantasized about returning to his room, finding the med kit undisturbed, fixing his leg. For embellishment, the A4 would be there too, miraculously. He’d locate Haro and exact revenge.

  The voice of reality soon intervened. His best bet was a long hobble down the hill and presenting himself in all his grubby glory to the first Regimental officer he could find willing to hear him out.

  From there… what? He stumbled over the thought. How would Notker greet this?

  Certainly, it would be deeply satisfying to see the disappointment on old man’s face when he returned to the Monican. But it failed to bolster him. It felt hollow, strange. Like his knee, something else was growing back wrong, but in a deeper place that even a med scan could not detect.