Killing Gravity Page 3

Miguel is talking, but I don’t hear him because my mind is on a ghost. I stare at the image on the shard, and I’m sure it’s her. It’s Sera.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Sera comes into my room late one night, slipping through the shield like it isn’t there. Her hair is messed up, damp, stuck to her head. She’s not in her uniform—the dark green coveralls they make all us girls wear—instead she’s in gray pants, black singlet, and a gray hooded cloak.

  “Come on, Mars, we’ve got to go.”

  She puts a bracelet around my arm, and the skin beneath it starts to tingle. It’s too big, would easily slip off, but with Sera holding my hand the bracelet slides up to my bicep. The bracelet vibrates as we pass through the powershield, and I can feel the tingling all over my skin.

  We walk quickly, but I’m still waking up, so she’s pulling me by the arm. “Mars, come on, quick,” she says, but only softly.

  We leave the dorms, slipping through more powershields and out onto the walkway. The roof is glass, and I don’t know if it’s the first time I’ve seen stars, but it’s the first time I remember. Sera stops, checking a map or instructions—something on a shard she has strapped to her wrist, beneath the sleeve of her cloak—and I stand and stare, craning my neck.

  I remember being happy then, in that moment. Happy moments were rare.

  “Okay, let’s go.”

  My head is still pointed up, watching the wide band of stars through the reinforced glass, and then we’re inside and the roof is metal and the stars are gone. We slip along corridors and pass through large rooms, lit bright white even in the middle of the night. There are rows and rows of cages.

  “What are they, Sera?” I ask, and we stop and look into the nearest cage. It’s a tiny, gray-furred animal, with pointy ears, big slitted eyes, and a tail that flicks back and forth as it watches us.

  “I don’t know, little one.” She opens the cage and reaches in. The animal purrs as she pats it.

  “Can we take it with us?”

  Sera doesn’t say anything, but she picks it up and hands it to me. “Make sure you don’t crush it, okay?”

  It’s so small it can fit in my hand, and we’re moving again, but I don’t see where we’re going because I’m looking at the animal, already asleep and purring softly.

  She tells me to wait and disappears. I hold on to the furry thing, careful not to crush it, just like she said.

  A Klaxon starts up and I wonder if Sera is okay. There’s a sound like dull clapping, and a large group of men round the corner, stomping in unison. They stop. One of them breaks away from the group and approaches me. He says something I don’t understand. He forces my hand open.

  I scream and he flies backward. Before he even hits the ground the other men are pointing their guns at me. I’m holding on to the bracelet so it doesn’t fall off my arm, and I’m holding on to the animal and I’m screaming. I’m screaming, but I can hear them doing something to their guns, getting ready to shoot. I don’t want them to shoot me or the little animal; I don’t want them to shoot anybody ever again.

  The Klaxons are so loud. The explosions are louder, but all I can hear is the chorus of screams, mine and others’.

  There are no men anymore. The walls and floor and roof are red. My eyes are shielded with tears, so I can’t see why there’s so much red. I’m crying because I know.

  “Oh, god, Mars,” Sera says when she comes back. She takes me by the hand again, and her hand is red, the same red that seeps down the walls.

  We run now, and Sera puts me into a little room. I’ll soon find out it isn’t actually a room. She taps at a panel on the wall, looking at the shard on her arm, as though she’s copying something.

  “You’ll sleep, little one, and when you wake up I’ll be waiting for you.” She takes her cloak off and puts it over my head. It pools on the floor at my feet, but it’s warm and smells of her.

  She closes the door, and I look out the little window and see the men. More men, men with guns, and the boss man, Briggs, standing in the middle of them.

  Sera lifts her hand, ready to strike, but I see Briggs’s lips move. Sera stops. Her hand slowly drops, and a soldier opens fire. I don’t hear the sound, I just see more red, and I see Sera fall down and I’m screaming and the room shakes and I’m in space and something metal is shrinking behind me and the stars are all around.

  The stars are beautiful, but there’s no Sera. Sera is beautiful, too.

  She’s right, I do sleep, but Sera isn’t there when I wake up.

  * * *

  A different kind of bracelet slaps around my wrist with a loud metallic clack and brings me back to the present.

  “Mariam Xi,” the man says, looking down at me and smiling. I’ve never seen him before, but I know his type—the maroon suit, the combination of wide grin and dead eyes more disturbing than if he wore his intentions clearly. They call them “caretakers,” but in reality they’re the ones that oversee the experiments, the testing, the surgeries. “I’ve come to take you home.”

  The other handcuff is around his wrist, and I nearly laugh at how stupid he is for chaining himself to me. But then he says, “A busy mind is fire—all-consuming,” and my mind goes blank.

  He motions to some goons standing behind him.

  Everyone in the bar is watching as the caretaker and one of his thugs grab me under the arms.

  “Be careful with her,” the caretaker says softly. “No sharp jolts.”

  The two men carrying me follow the other soldier as he clears a path through the throng of onlookers. I see them watching—it’s about all I can manage—but some part in the back of my too-quiet head is screaming at them, daring the self-proclaimed anarchists to do something about these secret-police fucks.

  I can hear Miguel behind me, whispering loudly, like he’s talking to someone, and I feel Seven squirm in my satchel. There’s mumbling among the bar patrons, and some of them gawk as I’m carried outside.

  Two more MEPHISTO troopers stand on either side of a polyplastic cage on a small hovering platform. One of the grunts opens the cage door, and still I can’t move. I can see myself in the dim reflection of the gray-tinged plastic wall, looking strangely calm as my face hangs slack, watching some bodychoppers milling behind me.

  My heart thunders—at least something’s still working right—seeing the inside of the cage and picturing the needles and the prodding in my future.

  Seven is nearly howling now, and she must get free from my bag, because a staccato of fine claw-points dig into my skin in a flurry up my back. She perches on my shoulder and mraows loudly in my ear. The trooper holding the door open furrows his brow and steps closer. Seven pats me lightly on the face, and when I still don’t respond, she lashes out, clawing my cheek.

  I inhale sharply with a noise like a stifled scream. Seven seems to take it as a command, leaping off my shoulder straight onto the approaching goon’s face, hissing and clawing. Her hiss is a war cry, and the bodychoppers that followed us outside finally react, rushing forward.

  A bodychopper lifts one of the troopers over her head, and her servomotors whine as she tosses him through the Plasglas window back into the bar. There’s a short cheer from inside as the trooper smashes into a table, then they disappear in a flurry of fists and boots and bottles.

  Seven detaches from the guy’s face and leaps back onto my shoulder, hissing at the caretaker.

  My brain starts working again, but only slowly, like a system that’s been switched off for a month and has a hundred updates to install before it can do anything.

  The caretaker looks like he just shat himself. His eyes dart from Seven, to me, to the handcuffs that keep him from fleeing, to the melee gaining momentum around him. I’m still trying to gather my thoughts so I can use them to crush him, when a bodychopper with a metal pincer where his hand should be cuts through the handcuff chain. He grabs the caretaker and charges, slamming into the polyplastic cage with enough force that it tips over, slamming the door; the caretaker�
�s screams come loudly through the shaking walls.

  Miguel weaves through the fight toward me and puts a hand on the shoulder Seven isn’t occupying, saying, “Why the fuck am I putting my neck out?” Then: “We need to get you out of here.”

  He grabs me by the arm and pulls me away. As we move, a pack of bodychoppers follow behind us. They must have better instincts than I do, because as we round the corner, I’m surprised to see MEPHISTO infantry spread across the full width of the Ring One concourse and blocking the path to the vertilators. Their armor looks as insectoid as their ships—bulbous helmets studded with sensors of all sorts, and antennae sticking up from their backs like an extension of their spines.

  The troops walk forward in formation, then stop ten meters away. The bodychoppers stand beside me, eyeballing the soldiers and bristling.

  “Mariam Xi, you are under arrest. You are to come with us peacefully. Violence will be met with violence.”

  “Twenty troops for one skinny lass?” the guy standing next to me says. He has thick, black hair and an accent I’ve never heard before. He’s broad across the chest, but looking at his weirdly proportioned body, I guess he was proper short before he had his arms and legs chopped off and replaced with long-limbed carbon-fiber prosthetics. “Tha’s not very sportin’, now, is it?”

  An android envoy pushes through the line of troopers and comes to a stop next to the lieutenant. Its chassis is matte black, with a single stripe of maroon running vertically down the center of its headless body. Lenses mounted on its chest act as its eyes, and when they see me, the holo-projector on its neck comes to life.

  The image glitches at first, then shows as a pixelated blur in shades of green. Finally a face forms—Briggs.

  “Mars, I’m so glad we’ve finally found you.” The audio is hollow, his voice transmitted across light-years, but hearing him again after so long is enough to make my stomach drop. The image of Briggs beams.

  “Why don’t you show your fucking face instead of riding this fucking droid, you shit-slurping coward.” I can’t help myself when I see him—something about that puckered-asshole smile just makes me angry.

  The bodychopper beside me guffaws and slaps me on the back. I try to pretend like it didn’t hurt.

  “Patience, my dear Mariam; I’ll be there within the hour and we can finally have our reunion.”

  Wherever my stomach dropped to, it’s churning down there now.

  At the far end of the corridor a group of genehackers moves into position behind the troopers, likely coordinated by the stackhead drones that hover in the air above us. I wonder if Miguel is manning one of them.

  The bodychoppers are about exactly that: chopping bits off and replacing them with pieces of artificial tech. The hackers, on the other hand, twist their genes in an effort to become something more than human, or maybe just something different.

  “Why don’t you ask your new friends here to stand down and come along quietly?” Briggs says. “My people are only doing their jobs.”

  The lieutenant hasn’t taken her eyes off me, even with Briggs’s droid standing beside her, the chopper giant’s yelling, and the hackers’ creeping up from behind. I raise an arm to point at Briggs, and every one of the soldiers flinch. I guess they’re the same ones I swatted around from the hull of the Nova.

  “Fuck their jobs and fuck you, Briggs.”

  “Eloquent as ev—” he starts to say, but then I ball my hand into a fist and Briggs’s face disappears. The droid sparks as it implodes, and thuds against the floor.

  I’m about to yell something really badass—just as soon as it comes to me—when the station’s public broadcast system starts up. That’s all that’s needed to set chaos in motion.

  “Attention, attention,” the system begins, but it’s hard to hear over the yelling. “This station is now under martial law. Citizens are hereby ordered to seek shelter and cooperate with authorities. Any persons deemed to have been assisting the dangerous fugitive Mariam Xi will be charged as an accessory to her crimes. We hope you continue to enjoy your stay on Aylett Station.”

  Shiny prosthetics gleam beneath the ceiling lights as the bodychoppers flow toward the MEPHISTO troops. They’re followed by freaks wearing a dozen different subcultural uniforms, and the interlopers are surrounded by thirty or so people, like a giant creature made of limbs, prosthetic and otherwise. The stackhead drones float above, taking footage and seeing if they can do anything without getting involved bodily, and a larger crowd gathers around the fight. I can sense what’s about to happen: as soon as they get bored of beating up the authorities, the Ring One freaks and toughs are going to turn on each other.

  Miguel still has me by the arm. He drags me sideways into a tiny alleyway between tchotchke sellers. The melee disappears from view, but I can still hear the unfolding mayhem.

  “I know where she is,” Miguel says, and I’m too distracted by the flashing lights and automated gadgets in the shop windows to get what he means. “That woman,” he says, and finally it falls into place.

  “Sera,” I say, then I yank my arm free from his grip and push him forward faster.

  “I tracked her back to her ship and tracked her ship out to the ’Riph. I was going to say so, but then . . .”

  “How much?”

  “What?” he says.

  “How much for that intel?”

  Miguel thinks for a second: “From the look on her face, I know this shit is valuable, but do I really want to try to gouge someone who’s got MEPHISTO after them?” He changes from his inner voice and says, “You can just owe me a small favor. . . .”

  “Nothing sexual,” I say.

  “Nothing sexual,” he agrees.

  My ocular implant pings. The data packet is small enough not to need a shard, so I open it for a quick look: coordinates, already formatted for a navigational computer.

  “Miguel,” I say, “I still don’t ever want to fuck you, but right now? This second? I could kiss you.”

  He spins to face me, but I shove him back around and deeper into the alley.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Miguel gives me schematics for the station and points me to an access duct.

  “Good luck,” he says. Then: “Should have at least gone in for a hug.” Before I can thank him he’s gone, back down the warren of alleyways, diarizing to himself out loud.

  I almost stay behind to watch the fucked-up, perfected, tweaked, and/or augmented bodies of the genehackers and bodychoppers go at it. But then I think better; I think of survival. Still, nothing gets me hot quite like extreme and disparate evolutions of the human meat fighting tooth and nail, and sometimes claw and blade and venom-gland.

  As I crawl through the ducts, getting a nose full of dust and rat shit, I burst Miguel, asking for an update on Ring One.

  It’s chaos down here, chica. You always bring the excitement with you.

  I smile.

  Thanks, Miguel, for everything.

  I hit SEND, then sign off before he can say something dumb that makes me regret being nice to him.

  Soon enough I’m back on the outer ring, crouching in a vent overlooking the dock where the Nova is still parked. Squid and Trix are caught in modular polyplastic cages, Squid sitting cross-legged in the corner of their cage, while Trix paces relentlessly. The soldiers took her prosthetic arm away, and even from here I can see the scuff marks in the plastic where she tried to kick her way out.

  I take Seven out of my satchel and stroke her chin.

  “Do you see that?” I whisper. “Squid and Trix, but no Mookie. Where is he, huh?”

  Her only response is to purr while I look around the dock for hidden troops, movement sensors, anything out of place.

  On the far side of the dock is another temporary addition to the architecture of the place—a large cube about five meters per side, with translucent walls and shifting silhouettes marking the inside. It’s either a portable office or an interrogation room.

  “Mookie,” I say out loud, with
out really meaning to.

  I stop patting Seven, and when I push open the grill over the vent, she drops down, sailing gently to the ground on her little arm flaps.

  Watching her disappear from sight, heading in the direction of the cages, I start to wonder how she got so smart. Then I see her come back carrying some sort of six-legged, furry rodent almost as big as she is. She drops it and looks up at me, and I point down at her as if to say Don’t you dare make a sound.

  I lower myself down, then whisper, “Idiot.” Seven starts eating the critter headfirst, crunching its skull noisily. I guess she earned it after helping out on Ring One, but I don’t really want to watch.

  I stalk over to Trix’s pod, eyes still searching for some sort of danger, while behind me Seven munches away.

  I tap on the clear plastic wall, and when Trix spins around and sees me her eyes go wide for a second. She’s got a rubber gag in her mouth and drool seeping down her chin. She tries to yell something, but it’s garbled by the ball gag. I walk over to Squid’s cubicle, and when I tap they open their eyes and smile.

  “You meditating or something?”

  Squid shrugs. “Seemed as good a use of my time as anything.” Seven appears beside me and rubs up against the wall of the pod. Squid scratches against the surface and Seven purrs, as if Squid’s affections could make it through the plastic. “You’re going to have to help Mookie. And you need to get the keycard to let us out.” They point over to the translucent cube and say, “Be careful.”

  “You gonna stay here with Squid?” I ask Seven. In response, she sits down and starts cleaning herself.

  I walk back past Trix as she bashes her head on the wall and yells, but I ignore her and walk toward the cube. Porta-cubes are usually soundproof, but whatever’s happening inside is loud enough to shake the walls. The vibrations send a babbling murmur out in waves, peaking irregularly.

  I reach the door and try the handle. It’s unlocked, so I pull it outward slowly. The murmur becomes a wall of noise, yelling and cheering—the sound of people watching a contest, or a fight. Pushing my head through the gap, I can make out a hollow in the center of the cube, surrounded by at least a dozen troopers. I can only see one person in the middle; he’s looking down toward the floor and yelling, “That the best you’ve got, traitor? I guess I’d be a weak fuckpunk, too, if I went AWOL.”