Xantoverse Shadowkill (5 page)

But why not just have Hela do it? There was ample opportunity doing the firefight.

It dawned on then. She wanted Kina to do it. What better way to spread misery and hate to have her son’s best friend, perhaps only friend, do the deed. It’d hurt them both, and Miriam knew it. Which meant, she also knew that Kina was working to get into the Wraiths.

That left just one more epiphany—there was a leak. Either it came from Dzagnev or Lanat. Her head spun at the thought. All this time, for the past five standard years, she’s looked up to the Wraiths as an elite entity, both in terms of their skills but also in their honor.

And now it appeared that they were as corruptible as Miriam Cauder, Felek and the rest of the stinking station. She walked further into the bar and slumped down onto a seat within the booth. Placing the pistol on the table she let her head drop into her hands as she let out a long sigh. What the hell was she doing?

Take the advantage.

But was it worth it anymore?

Perhaps there was another explanation—perhaps Miriam was a Wraith and this was just a test. Everything with them was a test until you got in, and since they arrived in Hollow Space, no one had got in, or at least no one to Kina’s knowledge. She’d come this far, could she throw it all away for sentimentality?

Tai slipped into the booth opposite her, carrying a bottle of slow-wine that had survived the shoot out. He popped the metal cap and slid it across the table. “What’s up, Ki? You ain’t upset over some blackmark scumbags, are you? We can sell the bodies to the processors. Not a bad return—will cover the cost of ammo at least.” He flashed her a grin when she looked up.

There he was.
Her
Tai. The Tai she’d known for all of her life. The Tai who took her from one scrape to another, but always in one piece and always alive. “Thanks,” she said, ignoring the wine. “For everything.”

“What do you mean?” he asked, concern furrowing his brow. “This ain’t like you. What’s going on?” He leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table.

Kina picked up the pistol.

“I know I’ll hate myself for it,” she said, looking into his eyes. “But there’s just something I’ve go to do.”

CHAPTER 4

Tai sat back with his hands up
. “Kina, what the hell? I don’t understand.”

The pistol shook in her hand. She turned away, unable to look at him any longer. “I can’t believe they made me do this,” she said, returning her gaze.

“Who? Talk to me, what’s wrong?”

“Everything. My life’s a mess, and there’s only one way out.”

“And you think killing me will fix this mess?” he said, but not with a tone of accusation, but of understanding.

“No,” she said eventually after a long silence, dropping the pistol to the table. “It won’t.”

“Then what?”

She pulled out the scroll, laying it flat on the table. “I need to kill the Wraiths. And I’ll need your help—if you’re willing.”

Tai dropped his hands and leaned in. “Paper! Shit, girl, you know what would happen if the Drift’s catch you with this? You’ll have to go to them, put it through the official compulsory purchase channels.”

“It’s not the damned paper, Tai, it’s what’s written on it. It’s a contract. Read it.”

Tai lifted the scroll and the words. He slammed it down. “What? There wasn’t even a reward for my head? That’s disappointing. I don’t work on my bad reputation to be contract-killed for nothing. Way to deflate your best pal’s ego, Ki.”

“You silly bastard,” Kina said, catching his infectious smile. “No payment. Well, not initially anyway. This was my ticket into the Wraiths and a future of security and wealth.”

“And you decided not to take it?” Tai shook his head. “Your friendship is admirable but you’re all kinds of stupid, girl. You should have taken it. It’d have set you up for life.”

“What’s life on the station without good friends?” Kina said.

“I’m touched,” Tai said. “But you’re still stupid.”

“I know. Probably best I don’t join the uptight assholes after all, eh?”

“Probably best—though that leaves us with a conundrum,” Tai said, reaching for the slow-wine and taking a deep gulp.

“And that is?” Kina took the bottle from him and downing her own mouthful, enjoying the burn as it warmed her throat and belly.

“How to find and kill those uptight assholes. I refuse to let the originators of a credit-less contract for my life exist. I have a reputation, after all.”

“Thanks, Tai, really… but I think I ought to do this myself. It’s my mess, I should deal with it.”

“No chance. I’m in. Where do we find these Wraiths?”

“I have to meet them on a specific hulk out in the Graveyard—with your head to prove I’ve done the deed.”

“Well, we can take the
Mary-May
, but I’ll keep my head attached to my neck if you don’t mind. When are you due to meet them?”

Kina checked her mechanical watch. “We’ve got half a cycle or so.”

“Right, let’s go back to yours and make a plan. My apartment is compromised while Mother dearest works on some scam that’ll no doubt make my life more difficult.”

“Tairon Cauder making a plan? Now you’re worrying me,” Kina said, passing him the wine.

“Extreme circumstances and all that. I’ll leave Jack a note and credit all this damage to Cauder Industries. I’ll be right with you.”

Tai gave her a wink as he got up and headed to the bar to find a pencil and a note-chit. Kina stretched her arms and worked the stress from her shoulders. As she watched Tai go through the bar’s possessions for writing materials she thought on what Hela had said:
Take the advantage
. If Kina and Tai were successful in taking out the Wraiths, they might have one more target to deal with. Now
that
would be a difficult conversation.

Although there was no love lost between Tai and his mother, she doubted he would be happy with the thought of having her assassinated.

***

Kina and Tai stepped out of the elevator onto level sixty-eight—one of the better slum levels, not that that was saying much. A slum’s a slum and there’s no getting away from that.

Kina paid the operator a ten-credit-note to keep quiet about having seen them.

The stench of sweat and boiling vegetables filled Kina’s nostrils. Tai’s face squirmed with the smell. “You need to move out of here, Ki, this place is foul. Come rent one of my places.”

“I can’t afford your rates.” She stepped over a still body in the cramped corridor. She couldn’t tell if it was dead or whether it was just the typical krunk junky debris of the slum levels.

“We’ll have to figure something out,” Tai said. He dashed to the right when the door to his left flew open and a huge shaved vul, wearing no clothes, fell out, pushed by a large human woman. The vul’s genitals slapped against his leg as he scrabbled on the floor to grab the credit chits.
Another vul-whore!
That was the third one Kina had seen up on this level in the past week. It was getting out of hand. She had to get a new place before the damned vuls set up shop right here in the corridors.

“Now that’s just wrong,” Tai said.

“Jealous?” Kina said with a mischievous smile as they came to her apartment. She fiddled with the lock—it didn’t require a key now that she’d modified the mechanism so the landlord couldn’t come in while she was out and rifle through her underwear—or worse.

“Nah, I’d never want to be shaved like that.”

They stepped inside the apartment. Kina closed the door behind him. She was about to return a quip about him being hairy like a vul under his shirt when the sight and the smell hit her hard, making her turn away from the scene and instantly retch.

“Holy freck,” Tai whispered. He moved further in, blocking Kina’s view. “Someone’s left you quite the message, girl.”

Kina’s head spun as she wiped her mouth. Sweat poured down her face, stinging her eyes, making the scene before her blurry. It was the only way she could cope with the image. Hanging on a nanowire, and still swinging, was the naked, flayed body of her lover, Galeia.

Someone had flayed her back, the skin peeled and raw. Blood covered her body, now dried and dark, indicating it was done some time ago. Her face was blue, bruises covered her skin where it wasn’t cut or flayed.

Shaking with grief and anger, Kina stepped forward and blinked the tears from her eyes. Although she had only been with Galeia for a few days, she’d come to really like the girl, enchanted by her innocence and charm.

To do this to her was beyond callous. Kina touched the cold corpse skin as Tai searched the room, moving stealthily around the tatty pieces of furniture Kina and Galeia had recently purchased from the flea market down on level minus-sixty-one.

“I’m so sorry,” Kina whispered. Galeia’s puffy face looked down at her with open, pitying eyes. “You didn’t deserve this, sweetheart. Tai, can you help me get her down? We’ll put her in my room until I can arrange a more suitable burial—this one will not go to the reclamation vats.”

“I understand, Ki, I understand.”

With Tai’s help, Kina carefully cut the nanowire and unwrapped it from around Galeia’s neck. Deep dark ridges cut into her skin where the weight had pulled on the nanowire. They took her to Kina’s room and laid her out on the bed. Her limbs were cold and stiff with rigor mortis. Closing the door behind her, Kina stepped out into the living room and collapsed into a worn armchair.

She leant forward and sobbed into her palms. Sometimes she wished she could get away from
Haven
, but with the dead planet impossible to get to the surface due to the atmosphere and lack of appropriate ships, and Hollow Space preventing anyone from hyper-jumping out of here,
Haven
was the only place left—apart from going to live on a hulk Out-Of-Sight of the station where even fewer rules applied.

That wasn’t an option.

Neither was leaving
Haven
.

The only thing left open to Kina now was vengeance. Commander Haggard and his gang of Lawkeepers wouldn’t be interested in this. They were mostly powerless and uninterested in anything that required investigation. The last investigator they had was brutally murdered by a Blackmark enforcer.

On
Haven
, the rule of the deal and negotiation was all that kept the place from descending into complete chaos. Murder was just an everyday hazard of life here.

Tai sat next to her and threw his arm around her shoulders. “I’m sorry about your girl, Ki. Really. She seemed like a nice kid.”

“She was. Just fun, you know? No drama. She was something good in this world of shit and corruption. And look what it did to her.”

“I know,” Tai said, pulling her in close. “That’s life here though, ain’t it? Sadly, there’s no room for the just or the innocent. It’s why we’ve survived, Ki, and why we’ll deal with this as we’ve always done.”

“How’s that?” Kina asked, looking up at her friend who she had for the briefest of moments considered killing for a secure future with the Wraiths.

“With bullets and blades. Here, I found this on the floor.”

Kina took one of the familiar note chits from his hand. Made from pulpy vegetable fibers, it was the only paper allowed to exist beyond the Great Library run by the Drifts—anything else was bought by those living treelike entities at a compulsory sum where it was archived and any information that could be gleaned from it was recorded into the eternal enzyme books.

This note, however, had no such information of archival quality. It had just a single character: a large X.

The call sign of the Wraiths, and a warning to her.

“They knew,” Kina said. “Even before giving me this contract, they knew I couldn’t do it. Galeia must have been dead for at least a cycle by the looks of her. Those bastards did this before putting me through the test…”

“There’s something else.” Tai produced a scroll.

Kina knew what it was even before he unrolled it and handed it to her. Another assassination contract. She held it open to the amber algae lights and read it, trying not to tear it apart with rage.

“Those freckers…” The Wraith’s had issued an open contract on both Kina and Tai. Such a contract must have cost a fortune if the reward of thirty thousand credits was to be believed.

“Good sum though,” Tai said, grinning at her. “Must be twenty for me and ten for you.”

“Nah, it’s fifty-fifty. So who’d you think took this out? Your mother, perhaps? Not many people on the station could afford to put up the capital for a contract like this.”

Tai shrugged. “It’s possible, but she’d never get rid of me while I owe her money. Either way, we’re gonna need to get rid of Dzagnev and Lanat quick-sharp if we’re to avoid being hunted by every two-bit gunslinger on the station.”

“There’s already been too many deaths today,” Kina said. “But if there are to be two more, then it’s not going to be us. For Galeia’s sake, the Wraiths have to be stopped.”

“So it’s gotta be a trap, right? I mean, having you come to the hulk with my head and all. If they’ve got a contract out on both of us, I can’t see them just happily accepting you arriving as though nothing has happened. And the way they’ve left this contract, and your sweetheart here, it seems to me they’ve left a very clear message.”

Kina stood up and stretched the tension from her back. She paced back and forth across the blood-stained floor as she thought about the situation. “First task then, track them down. I suspect they’re still on the station. I don’t think they’d risk luring us out to a hulk—everyone on the dock would recognize the
Mary-May
, and you know how it is with the lesser salvages, they’ll follow like ticks on a degas. That’s too much attention for their liking.”

“Given their reputation, how the freck are we supposed to find them? For all we know, they’re set up in the dark levels,” Tai said.

A floorboard from outside her apartment creaked. She had purposely sawn through the metal deckplate as an early warning system. She dropped the contract onto the beat-up chair and indicated for Tai to take the right side of the door as she leapt over the broken coffee table to stand with her back to the left side.