Killing Gravity Read online

  I raise my hands, palms up, and the spectators are flung up to the roof and pinned there. They start yelling, screaming, and generally freaking out, so I push a little harder, crush until they don’t have the breath to make noise.

  With the crowd cleared I can see Mookie, struggling to push himself up off the floor, slipping on the blood beneath him. His face is so battered and swollen, I can only tell it’s him because of the tattoos, glowing softly in the cube’s omnidirectional lighting.

  “Are you in charge here?” I say.

  The man standing over Mookie just nods. His shirt’s off, so I can’t see any rank insignia, but he’s too rough looking to be anything more than an NCO. His chest is covered in tattoos—maroon and black ink, the tragically loyal fuck—dripping with sweat and Mookie’s blood.

  “You got a keycard for the other two out there?”

  His eyes turn to slits and I can see his jaw working, but then he looks up to the ceiling. “Yeah,” he says. He reaches into his pocket and tosses a keycard to the floor in front of me.

  “How many of you had a go at him?” I ask.

  “Just me so far,” he says, breathing heavily. He’s broad, with muscle stacked on muscle. His ears are cauliflowered, and his nose looks like it’s been broken a dozen times and never set straight. I could never beat him in a fair fight, but only assholes fight fair.

  “Guess you’re the only one I’m gonna have to kill.”

  He smirks and takes a step toward Mookie. He kicks out, but before he makes contact I grab his leg with my mind and swing his boot straight into his face. All kinds of sounds come from his ugly sack of meat—the wet crack of his nose breaking, a gurgled scream from the back of his throat, and popping, tearing sounds all along his leg.

  He screams and topples over, his leg a twisted wreck. He stops screaming long enough to breathe, and I hit him with his own boot again. And again and again, until his whole body is flopping about on the floor like a dying fish, as I contort it into this messy, impossible suicide. His face already looks worse than Mookie’s, but I don’t stop until both his skull and foot are mush.

  I pick up the keycard, then walk over to Mookie and help him to his feet. He puts an arm around me and we stagger to the doorway. Once we’re outside I let everyone else drop, and they make an oof in unison as they hit the floor. I flip the cube so the door faces the far wall, then push the whole thing until they’re trapped.

  I lead Mookie to Trix’s pod and he leans against the wall. Her eyes go from him to me, then she starts trying to talk around the gag.

  I open the door with a swipe and undo the strap on the back the gag. “What did you say?”

  “I said, ‘Get this fucking thing out of my mouth.’“ She glares at me as if I didn’t just save Mookie’s life, and then she steps out of the cage and takes her prosthetic arm from the weapon rack on the outside of the pod. She reattaches it and puts an arm around Mookie. “Look what they did to you.”

  “You should see the other guy,” Mookie says, then he looks at me and smiles, but it’s a broken smile made of split lips and missing teeth.

  “What happened?” I ask.

  Mookie spits onto the floor, and it’s more red than clear, more blood than spit. “Troopers drafted from some backwater; didn’t like the fact I’d gone AWOL.”

  “That still something they court-martial you for?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Mookie says, sort of chuckling. “Still, I didn’t think twice about leaving when I met her.”

  He doesn’t specify who “her” is, but I glance past Mookie’s face and see Trix give him a smile that’s half sweet, half guilty, and half gorgeous. I’m not sure if I’ve seen the woman smile before, but in that instant I can see why Mookie fell for her.

  I open Squid’s cage next, and they go around the other side of Mookie. Squid’s movement draws Seven’s attention away from her cleaning, and after I click my fingers she runs up my side and deposits herself into the hood of my cloak. My head is pounding from flinging around so many bodies so soon after all that other chaos, but looking at the state of Mookie, I figure he needs Squid and Trix’s support more than I do.

  “We should go,” Trix says, and I get the feeling her “we” doesn’t extend to me. “Now.”

  Squid nods, then looks at me. “Come with us.”

  “I need to—”

  “You need to get off this station, and my ship’s right here.”

  “If we take her on board, this sort of thing is just going to keep happening,” Trix says to Squid. “She’s bad news.”

  I can’t argue with that.

  “She didn’t have to help us just now,” Mookie says, “but she did. She could have left me for dead, left you two in boxes, and taken any ship in this dock. Hell, she could have taken the Nova and there’s nothing we could have done about it.”

  An alarm sounds for a few short seconds, louder than an exploding starship.

  “What the fuck is that?” Trix says.

  “Gravity warning,” I say. “Same noise on every station.”

  “Something big is coming,” Squid says, “and it’s coming in close. Mars, just get on the Nova; we can argue about the rest when we’re away.” Squid grabs me around the wrist, their hand wrapping around my ancient bracelet, that childhood heirloom.

  I look at Trix and she frowns, then shrugs. I love it when someone has as bad a poker face as I do. Squid yanks my arm as they and Trix walk Mookie toward the Nova. I pull my arm free, but I follow. As we hit the Nova’s ramp the alarm sounds again and we’re tossed forward, thrown off our feet and dumped on the floor. I feel something pulling at my stomach, and my mouth flushes with hot saliva.

  I get up into a crouch and watch as Squid and Trix lift Mookie up from the floor—a feat made easier by the bending gravity outside the station.

  Squid leaves Trix to carry Mookie on her own, and they rush toward the cockpit, yelling commands at Einri as they go. I pick up their slack, and me and Trix take Mookie to the medbay. We sit him down on the bed and Trix starts going through drawers, then flicks a switch to bring the autodoc to life.

  I sit down next to Mookie and look out the starboard viewscreen as the Nova slowly glides out of the hangar. I watch as a massive capital ship twists through the walls of space and time beside the station.

  “Holy shit,” Mookie whispers. I couldn’t have said it better myself.

  It’s easily half the size of the station, though the mass of it is stretched out long. The front is the widest part of the ship, then it steps down three times toward the drives at the rear. It looks like a cricket, like the massive, planet-devouring god of all crickets, marked in the same maroon and black of all MEPHISTO ships.

  “It’s the flagship,” I say. “Briggs is on board.”

  “Briggs?” Mookie asks.

  “It’s a long fucking story,” I say, watching the flagship disappear as we fold into the wormhole and escape.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “I think we deserve to know more about Mariam if we’re going to keep risking our lives for her.” Trix emphasizes my name to amp up the condescension.

  We’re all sitting around the table in the mess hall while Squid leaves the piloting to Einri.

  “We don’t deserve anything,” Squid says. “You know how I feel about personal privacy, boundaries, and the like.”

  “And I respect that when it’s coming from you, Squid, but we don’t know anything about this scrawny bitch. You want to know something I do know a little about? Those assholes she’s running from.”

  “MEPHISTO,” I say.

  “I’ve seen them field all sorts of crimes against humanity. That usually marked the end of our involvement, just in case their latest human weapons thought us mercs were enemies, too.”

  “What’s their deal?” Mookie asks. The autodoc did a decent job mending his face, but he’ll have to find an autodent or bona fide dentist to do something about the lost teeth. “Mephisto?”

  “MEPHISTO,” I say. “Stands f
or Military Experimental Post-Human Specialist Training Organization, and I only found that out after years of sniffing around.”

  “And they’re the ones that”—Squid pauses—”made you?”

  Squid has poured me a coffee, and even though it’s the ersatz shit, it’s got enough caffeine in it to bring my head out of the postbattle fog. I’ve got the shard Miguel gave me in my hand, and when I’m not sipping from my cup I’m sliding its thin edge over the table, listening to that sound it makes.

  “I don’t know if they made me this way, or if it’s a natural gift and they boosted it, but, yeah; I grew up in one of their facilities. They taught me how to fight with my body and mind. They taught the older girls how to fuck,” I say, and I can feel my face pull into a grimace. “Y’know, that whole honey-pot, black-widow thing. I escaped when I was still too young for that.”

  Nobody says anything, but I can see from the looks on their faces that they pity me. Great, that’s the last thing I need. Even Trix looks like she’s softening. Maybe she went through something similar—child-soldiers were a big thing in the ’Riph a while back.

  “Xi isn’t my surname. It’s my designation, like the letter from the ancient Greek alphabet.” I point to the tattoo on the back of my hand—three horizontal lines, the middle one shorter than the others.

  Ξ

  “Alpha was the first group. From what I could research, that was practically a meat grinder. They took these kids and stuck all kinds of experimental implants inside their skulls. The ones that didn’t die on the operating table usually ended up killing themselves, one way or another.”

  “Kids—like girls and boys?” Squid asks. “I’ve only ever heard of female telekineticists.”

  “Yeah, by the time they got up to Delta, they decided the males were too emotionally unstable to wield the power without being a danger to themselves and everyone around them.” I glance at Mookie. “Sorry, dude.”

  He just smirks. “All good.”

  “By the time they got to Xi, the tech was safer. I got a bunch of state-of-the-art implants—ocular, long-range burst modem, pilot interface, sense boosters for poison testing, aural booster, and probably more that I don’t even know about.”

  I activate the shard and see Sera again.

  “Who’s that?” Trix asks.

  “Sera. She helped me escape. I watched her get shot outside my escape hiberpod. I always thought she’d died.”

  “Could she be working for MEPHISTO?” Trix asks.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Could she be a clone of the real Sera?” Mookie asks.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What would she gain from selling you out?” Squid asks.

  “I don’t know; but when I find her, I’ll be asking all those questions.”

  I lift the coffee cup to my lips, but it’s empty. Squid fills it before I need to ask, then fills their own.

  Trix lets out an overly loud yawn, and I have to stifle my own as she says, “Mooks and I are gonna retire for the night.”

  Mookie smiles and takes Trix’s hand, and she leads him toward the door. They stop and talk in hushed whispers.

  “Here we go,” Squid says quietly, but before I can ask what they mean, they glance away and busy their face with a mouthful of coffee.

  “Mars, did you wanna come to bed?” Mookie asks, with Trix standing behind him, making a point of avoiding eye contact.

  “With you? And Trix?”

  He nods.

  I’ve already seen Mookie naked, and to be honest, it was an alright sight if you like your guys hairless—and less is definitely better as far as I’m concerned. And I’m sure Trix would be a demon in the sack, with all that pent-up rage needing release. . . . Plus, it’s not like you see many natural blondes.

  But I’m tired. I’m headfucked. And I haven’t showered since crawling through the filthy vents of Aylett Station. I’m not exactly feeling sexy.

  “Can I, uh, take a rain check?”

  “Sure.” Mookie keeps smiling, and it’s a gorgeous smile, even with the missing teeth; he’s got big lips that look as soft as any woman’s I’ve ever kissed. His eyes twinkle when he smiles, and he’s got an infectious sort of positivity to him.

  “Come on, lover.” Trix grabs him by the arm and they disappear down the corridor.

  “We’re gonna be out of the wormhole soon. You wanna come up to the cockpit?” Squid asks.

  I glance sideways at them and they laugh.

  “I’m not offering a tryst, just company.”

  “You sure?” I say, half joking.

  “You’d know if I was coming on to you.”

  * * *

  The screens along every surface of the cockpit collapse and cascade, then disappear into the wall as the blast shield opens. If you’ve never seen the inside of a wormhole, it’s hard to describe. You know that old saying about how when you look into the abyss, the abyss looks back? It’s impossible to look out into that nonspace beyond our four dimensions without feeling like something is watching you, like some thing out there could just end you.

  I put a hand to my chest and feel my heart beating double-time beneath my ribs.

  Squid smiles. “I got a pacemaker just for this.” They tap on their chest. “A steady heartbeat helps tamp down wormhole anxiety, which you really need. Navigating space, controlling a ship, and managing your crew when you feel like you can’t trust your heart to beat right is enough to drive a person crazy.”

  “All this caffeine isn’t helping, either,” I say, but I finish my cup anyway, because I hate waste.

  Squid laughs. “No, I guess not. Einri, how long until we emerge?”

  “Approximately one minute, though, of course, you understand there is no such thing as time in this place.”

  “Smart-ass.”

  “I thought Einri was sans personality.”

  “No, just sans voice mod. I don’t want some artificial voice construct convincing me Einri is a person. It’s not a person, it’s a ship. Without a voice mod it sounds like a ship. I like things to be clear, you see?”

  “Yeah, I get that.”

  Squid reaches a hand into a pocket and retrieves a small bottle. They lean their head back and drop a black liquid from the bottle into each eye. They pass the bottle over to me.

  “You’ll want to try this.”

  I take it. “The boss is into drugs? I never would have guessed.”

  “These aren’t drugs—though I am occasionally partial to some encephallucinogens when I’m not working . . . which is sadly never. Trust me.”

  I can see the dropper vibrating in my caffeine-addled hand as I lower it to my eye, but I manage to get two drops into each eye, with only one wasted drop. At first all I can see is black, as the viscous fluid coats my pupils. Then it gets absorbed into my body, or reacts with my eye mucus, or whatever it has to do, and my vision pitch-shifts.

  Looking at Squid I see that the soft, flowing luminescence beneath their skin is bright and pulsing. I look out beyond the cockpit window, and for a split second I swear I can see shape or texture out in the abyss, but then we’re out of the wormhole, and I inhale sharply.

  It’s beautiful.

  “Are you sure it’s not drugs?”

  “I’m sure,” Squid says softly, as if we’re at some sort of altar. “They’re made from the deep-ocean cephalopods we introduced to the planet Enud. We’re seeing with their eyes.”

  Each individual star across the vast expanse before us shines impossibly bright, like a midday sun on a clear day, but it doesn’t hurt to look. The planet Dulcinea sits far off in the distance, but even from here I can see the slow meandering of its constant cloud cover in a thousand different hues of purple. Ahead of us, it’s as if I can see the gravity from our start point flowing forward, slight ripples of current in the blackness of space.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  It takes about a week to reach Dulcinea from the system edge. MEPHISTO ships might be able to wormhole in danger
-close, but for anyone else, it’s against flight regulations; enough to earn you a fine, maybe even lose your license, depending on how much of a disturbance you cause at your arrival point. Squid should have gotten away with it at Aylett because of the differential the flagship was throwing, but they won’t find out until they next dock somewhere official.

  “How many times do I have to offer you a job before you take it?”

  “I appreciate it, Squid, but I’ve got to find her.”

  The clouds above us are a deep, roiling purple, but without the Squid drops, the view isn’t quite the same.

  On the ground, the lot looks more like a ship graveyard than a dealership. Hulls in gray, white, black, and silver make up the bulk of the piles of scrap that tower up, forming a giant wall around the stock on display in the central lot. Workshops buzz and flicker with industry down at the western end, but here in the middle, the only industry happening is sales biz.

  “But what about after that?”

  “I’ll still have MEPHISTO after me. They’ll always be after me.”

  “I’ve already got one fugitive on board,” they say, motioning toward Mookie, leaning against the Nova’s sleek shuttle with Trix. “What’s one more?”

  “I’ll think about it, I promise. But that’s all I can promise.”

  A saleswoman approaches us, her face twisted in disappointment after her last potential sale fled from her clutches. Her face goes through two quick transformations, first to perfectly blank, then to friendly, over-the-top excitability—her facial muscles responding to nerve stimulation courtesy of some in-built augmentation. These are the worst kinds of salespeople—the augmented, boosted, and tweaked. Get the right implants and you could perform brain surgery, make art no one has ever imagined, delve into grassroots activism for communities spread out all over the galaxy . . . or you could mess with people’s neurolinguistic programming to make them buy things they don’t need and can’t afford.