How Dark the World Becomes (40 page)

“All my life,” he said, “I’ve seen some people try while others just go through the motions. What makes them different, do you suppose?”

I shrugged. No clue.

“I don’t think they’re smarter—the ones that try,” he said. “I don’t know that they’re better people, deep down inside. I don’t think they’re less frightened when things get tough.”

I looked over at Marr, who was curled up on the couch and reading Adam Smith—again—and I smiled. What she’d done . . . I had no idea where she’d found the courage, and courage is exactly what it took, because she’d been absolutely terrified every step of the way. Terrified—but not petrified. She’d always taken that next step, no matter what. Where does that come from?

I looked back at Ping, and he was looking at Marr, too. He looked at me, smiled, and nodded. 

“Everyone has intentions—good and bad, noble and base,” he said. “Everyone wants to fight the good fight, but also wants to run away and hide and be safe. Everyone wants to stand out and wants to blend in. Everyone wants to lead, and wants to follow. Makes you wonder sometimes who we really are.”

“We are what we choose,” I said.

“
Argh
, I think you’re on to somethin’ there, matey.”

*   *   *

Five days after we broke J-space, we started our deceleration burn for orbit around the inner gas giant. We’d grab the shuttle in-bound from there—or at least Marr, the kids, and I would. Ping and a couple others were leaving by priority military shuttle. So that meant a good-bye.

Tweezaa cried; Barraki almost did. They both kissed
Boti-Joe
, and Tweezaa gave him a long hug. He said his good-byes in aGavoosh to them, and then English to us. 

“Take good care of that lady of yours,” he said as he shook my hand. 

“Take care of yourself, Cap’n.”

“
Argh
,” he said, nodding.

And then he was gone, and it felt quiet, and odd. We’d become like a family, and now someone was missing. 

Like
a family. But we weren’t a family. 

That evening, after the kids were in bed, I led Marr into my room. She was smiling—we’d been taking turns sleeping in each other’s rooms, whichever one we felt like when the urge struck us—which was usually right after the kids were down. But tonight I sat her down on my bed and pulled my black carryall out from the closet.

“There’s something you need to see,” I said, and I opened the carryall. I still had our travel documents there, and my traveling cash, but there was something else. I took it out and handed it to her. She read it, then looked up, confused.

“A return voucher? From Akaampta to Peezgtaan? I . . . I don’t understand.”

“Once you and the kids are safe, I’m going back, Marr. Unfinished business.”

“It’s because of Dr. Zhan, isn’t it?”

“In a way, but . . . not that way. Look at the date on the voucher.”

She looked down again.

“You were
always
going back?”

“Yes.”

“To her?”

I shook my head. She thought for a moment, then understood, her eyes growing wider in surprise.

“Why . . . that was the plan all along, wasn’t it? Pretend to run, get the three of us away . . . and then go back.”

“Yes.”

She frowned in renewed confusion. 

“But
why?”

“Like I said—unfinished business. Not mine, Kolya’s. He won’t let this rest until it’s settled between the two of us. Killing June was just a start. He’ll destroy the clinic, the soup kitchen, the agency, everyone who worked for me, everyone who ever helped me, everyone I ever helped. He’ll do it slowly, as he gets around to it, when the mood strikes him, but he will do it. He’ll figure if he keeps at it long enough, eventually he’ll strike a nerve, make me want to come back and take my revenge.”

“But you don’t kill people for revenge,” she said.

“No.”

“You kill people to keep them from doing things.”

“Yes.”

She sat there, staring at the wall, her expression bleak and hopeless in a way I’d never seen on her before. Then she shook her head. 

“But . . . you thought you’d have surprise, Sasha, that you’d go back before he started killing anyone, before he expected you. Mr. Washington would make peace, you’d be gone . . . then you’d come back. That was it, wasn’t it?”

I nodded.

“But you
haven’t
got surprise, Sasha, not now! He killed Dr. Zhan, and he’ll be expecting you—maybe not for the right reasons, but that doesn’t matter. He’ll be
waiting
for you.”

“I know.”

“Doesn’t that change anything?”

“No, Marr. Unfinished business—that has to be finished, one way or another. And it has to be me. Nobody else.”

“Why?” she asked, voice trembling.

“I told you I ran with a bezzie pack when I was a kid. Kolya was part of it, too. I’m a few months older than him, and when we were kids, I was bigger, looked out for him, kept him alive a couple times.

“There were other gangs, older kids—bad news. One day a half dozen of them caught Kolya and me foraging out of our normal run. We weren’t that afraid of them when we were close by our nests, since we knew all the small holes and narrow passages we could get though and they couldn’t, or would slow them down more than us. But out in unfamiliar streets . . . all we had was speed, and Kolya’s leg was banged up from a fall a couple days earlier.”

I stopped for a moment and closed my eyes, and I remembered the smell of old mold and garbage and cook fires, remembered the metallic taste of my own blood from the glancing blow one of them had landed on my cheek before we broke away and started our long, desperate run. I heard the echoes of their howling pursuit.

Marr touched my arm, and I opened my eyes and looked at her, but the ghost images of the street remained all around us.

“We made it a block before Kolya went down. His leg gave out. I stopped to help him up, but he yanked his arm away, just sat with his back against a trash can, and smiled up at me. ‘Run, you stupid fucker,’ he said. ‘I’ll hold them off.’

“So I ran, because that’s how we survived. And they got Kolya. I think he must have figured he’d slow us and we’d both get caught, so he went down on purpose, to make me go on alone. Payback for the times I’d saved him.”

“They beat him up?” Marr asked quietly. I laughed softly, probably not a very nice sound.

“Some. Then they kept him for a couple weeks, passing him around as their group bitch.”

“A little boy?” she asked quietly, horror in her voice.

“Boy, girl, didn’t much matter. Whatever was handy. Ever watch young baboons?

“Well . . . Kolya got a sharp piece of metal from somewhere. One day he used it on one of them when no one else was around. Cut his throat. I guess that was the second thing on him he cut. He got away, and we joined up again.”

“At least he survived,” she said.

“No he didn’t,” I said softly, and I felt like crying—crying for my old pal, trapped inside a nightmare all those years, until the only way he could go on living was to become the nightmare. 

“So . . . it’s between him and me,” I said. “I owe him that. I’m sorry, Marr. Believe me, I am so sorry. I thought maybe we . . .”

Well, there was no point in finishing that thought. But she looked at me, and after a moment she just reached over and took my hand and held it to her cheek, and I felt the dampness of her tears. 

Take good care of your lady, Ping had said. Yeah. And the first thing I did was break her heart.

*   *   *

The next day the four of us got on the inbound shuttle and started the final stage of our journey together. What I didn’t know—couldn’t have known—was that only two of us would get off that shuttle alive. Some things you’re better off not knowing.

THIRTY-ONE

Four days inbound, Tweezaa and I were walking from our quarters around the big wheel to the club deck when I felt myself become a little heavier for a moment, then a little lighter, like being in an elevator when it starts up. Tweezaa felt it, too, and she giggled. 

I didn’t.

If birds stop singing . . . 

Either I was nuts, or we’d just done a docking maneuver, way the hell out in the middle of nowhere. I tried to activate my comm link to find out where Marr and Barraki were, but all I got was a high-pitched screech. Somebody was jamming the comms. If they were jamming, they might be tracking, too, so I ordered my link to power down cold.

“Tweezaa,” I said and knelt down so we’d be face-to-face. She looked at me and stopped smiling. I held up two fingers.
“Gikaa-doe,”
I told her—
hiding place two
. Her eyes were suddenly enormous with fright, but she nodded. She turned to go but then stopped, turned back, and put her arms around my neck and hugged me. I held her close for a second, then said
, “Nktu!”
Hurry!

Then she was gone, running back up the wheel toward the quarters area. 

Good girl.
There was a place near housekeeping where she could wriggle into a life-support feed trunk, get way the hell back, where they’d never see her. A bio-sniffer could find her, but this would at least buy us some time. 

The captain of the transport had made a point of giving me back the Hawker 10 when we left—he’d said he’d had particular orders from Commodore Gasiri to make sure I got it. I’d started carrying it again, and I was glad, but now I wished I’d given a little more thought to ammunition. I had ten in the grip and two more magazines in my pocket—that had seemed like a lot more this morning, when any threat was potential and abstract, not right here in my face. I could go back to quarters for more ammo, or I could look for Marr and Barraki. Not that tough a choice. I drew the Hawker as I started running toward the club deck. 

I made a mental map of the shuttle as I ran, and tried to get a step ahead of whoever was coming after us. Anyone who docked had to dock with the shuttle’s spine, since it wasn’t spinning. Then they’d go E.V.A. and enter the maintenance trunk of the big wheel. Once inside, they’d head down (away from the spine) into the wheel and out in different directions, trying to cover as much ground as possible before anyone knew what was going on. 

The shuttle’s command crew had to know this was going on; the collision-avoidance sensors would have been going off like crazy. So either the command crew was dead, or they’d gone along with the docking maneuver. But if the command crew were dead, the docking maneuver would be unnecessary: without control, everyone on the shuttle was already dead but just didn’t know it yet. So the command crew was alive, and had gone along with the docking maneuver without alerting the passengers.

That meant that the docking was either official or it was pretending to be official. Maybe right now the command crew was on tight beam to Akaampta Orbital trying to check their bona fides, but the time lag would be—what?—an hour or more. That was plenty of time for the bad guys—if they
were
bad guys—to get in and get out. 

And if they weren’t bad guys, why jam the comms? Better to just monitor the comms and take your time.

I got to the door of the club deck, and half a dozen diners looked up in a mixture of surprise and annoyance at the drawn Hawker. I did a quick scan, but there was no sign of either Marr or Barraki. The purser saw me and headed toward me, anger clouding his face.

“Put that away!” he ordered, pointing at the Hawker. “You know the rules in the dining compartment.”

I lowered the pistol but didn’t holster it. 

“Has Dr. Marfoglia or Barraki been here?” 

“Put that away, I said!”

“Tell me why we just docked with another ship, and I will.”

That stopped him, and he looked uncomfortable.

“I . . . don’t know. There must be a good reason.”

“They didn’t
tell
you?
The purser?
Tell me where Marfoglia and Barraki are, right now.”

He looked around nervously and licked his lips, starting to put the pieces together. When it came to smarts, this guy was no Walter Wu.

“I . . . I think they were going down to Observation.”

I headed for the elevator, but it opened just before I got to it, and the two guys inside, still suited up but without their pressure helmets, took one look at me and started shooting.

*   *   *

In the confined space of the club deck, the pistols had roared like thunder and had left my ears ringing. I dropped the empty magazine from the Hawker’s pistol grip and loaded magazine number two. I have a vague memory of people screaming and china breaking behind me. Both of the dead guys in the elevator were packing identical Rampart Auto-10s with the serial numbers burned off. On the elevator ride down, I stuffed one of the Ramparts in my waistband, and half a dozen magazines into my pockets, and I felt a little less naked. I checked the rounds in one of their magazines—simple hollow points, not poisoned pills. That was
really
good news, since I was bleeding from a glancing shot to the left side of my rib cage and a shallow through-and-through to my right thigh. The ribs hurt worse right now, but the thigh was probably going to slow me down more. But the bullet missed the bone and the artery, so I was still in business.

I have no memory of actually shooting the two guys. 

I looked at them, really looked at them for the first time, and got a funny chill down my back. I
knew
one of these guys—I didn’t know his name, but he’d run Lotto cash for Kolya, back on Peezgtaan. What was a Piss-Can Lotto runner doing fifteen light-years away from home? 

Okay. Think, Sasha, think! What does this mean? 

Everybody thinks that trained assassins grow on trees or something, and that any time anybody with a pocket full of money wants somebody gotten rid of, it’s easy—just call the Assassin’s Hotline or whatever and there will be all these unbelievably deadly killers just waiting for a job. But it doesn’t work like that.

Not that there aren’t incredibly deadly professional killers; the opposition had hired two of them, brought them in from off-world, but Bony Jones—praise his memory—had dropped them. That meant that whoever was behind this had to improvise. Kolya was all there was available, and once they hired him, he had to move fast. No time to bring in additional help from off-planet. When it turned into a chase, it was still better to chase with the people you knew—no way to keep a lid on things if you start broadcasting what’s going on and what you need done. Hence, this Lotto runner—and who knows what his buddy did for a living—filling in as killers, all with their matching untraceable Ramparts, probably from the same production lot.