Topic: Mercator Arc
Updated June 7 2011
The Daughter
The rain. Mil Kariden had been on Mercator long enough not to notice it; the damp and wet, and the steady susurration faded into the background ambience of non-experience. Except now.
Now, under the dark heavy sky of late afternoon, it was his world, a barrier through which he moved at haste, stinging his face in a sideways torrent, an amercement for his lapse in judgment, battering his eyes, forcing him to squint and to take his hand from the slippery handlebar of the trike to wipe his eyes as he tried to keep sight of the indistinct courier moving steadily up the traffic congested street. He felt cold anger at himself. And at that foolish bitch.
He flung water out of his eyes, found his fingers rubbing the left side of his jaw as if tracing the Raven mark. Kariden’s anger churned. He lowered his naked head, and pressed on, racing toward imminent disaster.
Toward Daphia Ulden.
“What do you know about her?” Ganton had studied Kariden from the left side of the backseat of the chariot, out of the corner of his eye, his head bent a nudge to his right shoulder as if that was as far as he was willing to allow it to move, not wanting to fully acknowledge the man sitting beside him.
“Well . . .” Kariden pushed himself more upright. From what he knew and heard about her, he found her petulant and irritating. It angered him a little, because. . . . She could be so much more than a drunken floozy. It was like she was pushing something better within herself down into her depths. Like the way her father executed Raven trespassers by drowning them in the sea. Dropping them off the pier. Kariden shrugged. “She’s a socialite. Hangs out at Mauhager’s.” He stared out the window at the people pressing through the covered boardwalk. “Why?”
“He wants somebody to look after her.” The “he” being Loddo Ulden, the man that held Raum’s place in Cratertown. “Just for a few days. It might be nothing, but. . . .”
“Like a body guard?” It came bored.
Ganton caught the tone and glanced at him. “You can handle these guys.”
“Alright,” Kariden sighed. “Who are they?”
Ganton made himself comfortable. “Vanity Vain has made orbit. Captain Hasco has had his filthy eye on little Miss Ulden, an interest the Boss finds impermissible. It’s likely they will land. And it’s likely that Hasco will send his special boys to collect on that interest. You’re not gonna let that happen.”
Kariden said the first logical thing that came to mind. “Why doesn’t she just stay at home?”
Ganton face washed red and he swept a hand across to Kariden, grabbing the lapel of the man’s rain coat and jerking him to himself. The Raven boss slipped into northern Pavic, a language suited to profanity. “Because she is Daphia fucking Ulden, and Daphia fucking Ulden gets to fucking do what she fucking well wants. She’s going to Mauhager’s and you are going to be there to watch her fucking back.” He shoved Kariden against the sidewall. “You have a fucking problem with that?”
Kariden saw the driver steal a quick glance into the gunner’s box where he and Ganton sat. He wiped spittle from his face and collected himself. Could he kill this man and get away with it? Not likely. A problem? “No. None what so ever.”
Ganton refused to look at him. He licked his lips. “Here’s the flash.”
Kariden accepted the information packet loaded with the profiles of miss Ulden’s entourage, and Delavantae Hasco and his crew. These were men, Kariden found, seeking proper levers to move the well entrenched.
Mauhager’s wasn’t exactly Mil Kariden’s favorite place to be. Not his crowd. Not his scene. A lot of preening and shallow vanity. A place populated by those fortunate and wealthy enough on this rock to believe that image was everything. Kariden despised them for their willing blindness to the brutal realities of the world . . . of the worlds . . . this one and the others he had called home. The open space of the main dance floor, with its pulsing, repetitive music made him feel vulnerable in a way he could not define. As if the ceiling—and the floors above it—could be ripped away and everyone exposed to furtive dangers lurking outside.
He hated that he could not even drink to escape the mind dulling activity around him. Daphia Ulden, on the other hand, did nothing but.
He had been introduced to her by her father’s right-hand man in one of Ulden’s limousines, a long, low vehicle whose useless magnetic levitation system had been replaced by a wheeled chassis. Daphia resisted the idea of a body guard. She argued she didn’t need one. When they were alone and on their way to pick up the rest of her group, she accused him of being one of her father’s spies. He tried to assure her that he definitely was not. “That you know of,” she said with a hint of derision. He was going to ask her what she meant, but she zoned out, escaped into whatever cyberscape her weave manifested.
He took in the measure of her beauty, finding that he hated it. She didn’t belong here on this drenched rock. She belonged on Pavona, in the high society of elite snobbery. Or perhaps Cenestra, where, it was said, womanhood was held in the highest esteem, where a man would just as soon kill himself than dishonor a woman. He shifted in the seat, and as much as he wanted to look away from her, he could not.
Daphia seemed both fragile and resolute. She sat relaxed but with an inner tension, as if paranoia wormed through her core. Those half-moon eyes of hers were closed, and her mouth moved with the barest of motions, as if she were singing the lyrics to songs only she could hear. He wanted then to still her mouth with his own, to hold his hand against her face, under the soft spill of blond hair.
You’ve been with too many doxies to have such unbidden desires, he chided himself. She deserves to be more than an object. Deserves more that you.
Here in Mauhager’s, it dismayed him to see her throw herself into abandon, to waste herself with drink after drink, and to see the vials of venom scattered on the table, to hear her peals of laughter, and the slurred trains of conversation.
She had not permitted him to sit at her booth, and he had taken up residency in one near hers, alone in his space, as if in a bubble. For two days he watched her party from this place, across a wide aisle, often through a crowd of people. He had tagged her clothes with dust so that his weave could monitor her position when he couldn’t actually see her. When she left to go home, he escorted her, then went home himself. He met her at the Ulden estate when she was ready to go out. She said little to him. They moved in their own worlds and she did not seem to want to invite him into hers.
Kariden brooded, bored. He drank nonalcoholic beverages. He used his weave to browse the local cyberspace. He tapped his weave into the club’s optic security arrays to watch for Hasco’s crew. Daphia partied. She never looked over at him. This went on for hours.
“Mil skumpin’ Kariden,” a cheerful and quite drunk voice said. It carried the distinct clipped and lilting accent of a Heil Thericon native. Doxon plopped into the booth beside him. “Thought ya hated this place?” His broad grin stretched the marks on his jaw. His eyes were glazed rascals.
“I’m on duty.”
“Ah duty,” the man said, settling back into the booth. “What might that be, eh?” He drew a draught of bock from his dark brown bottle.
Kariden pointed across the way. “Babysitting.”
A throng of partiers had cluttered the aisle and Doxon scrambled to his feet, nearly knocking his bottle over, his head craned to see over the stream of moving people. “Oh,” he gasped in awe, and dropped back down, rocking the table. “Ya lucky bastard. I wouldn’t mind cozyin’ up to that prim, I tell ya that, eh. Ya gonna take a shot at it? I know I would. She’s drunk half the time. Not like she’d put up much of a fight.” His grin took up half his face.
Kariden frowned. Taking advantage of her never crossed his mind. Despicable to even consider it. But he wouldn’t chide Doxon for that. “The Boss’s skumping daughter? You’re out of your freaking mind.”
Doxon laughed and grinned. “I got her in here,” he said , tapping his skull. “It works just the same.”
Weave simulations.
Kariden had nothing to say to that. There was a market for sex sims and he wasn’t surprised Daphia Ulden had been virtually replicated. She was a celebrity.
And she was moving.
Daphia had stood and was waiting as her best friend scooted out from the depths of their booth. They headed toward the lavatories. “I’ll be back,” Kariden said wearily, standing. He followed the two women, as if sentenced to some menial useless duty.
Both were head turners, lustful men and envious women craned their necks and nearly stumbling as they cut a swath through the crowd. Maylee’s petite, dark hair, and overabundant bosom contrasted Daphia’s tall, blond, slimmer form. Kariden trailed them, his weave pulsing a feeling of over there from the tracking dust sprinkled on the Boss’s daughter’s clothes whenever he looked in her general direction.
The women darted into their lavatory. He thought he might as well go himself since he was here, and stepped into the men’s room.
When he came out Maylee cornered him. She stepped close to him, backing him against the wall, said “Hi,” breathlessly as she looked up into his face with large beseeching brown eyes.
Annoyed, “What do you want?” She pressed against him, her oversized breasts squashed against his torso. He raised a hand to her upper arm to either push her away or hold her in place. He did not like this simply because he enjoyed it.
“I’ve seen you looking at me.” She put a flat hand on his chest, feeling the muscle through his jacket and shirt.
Who could help it? Kariden fought the urge to glance down at the breasts pushed against him. He sighed. She knew what he was doing, that he was keeping an eye on Daphia. He shot a glance to the wall, in the direction the weave indicated she happened to be. He looked down into Maylee’s soulful pleading eyes. Under other circumstances . . . “I wasn’t looking at you.” He looked over her shoulder, to the crowd beyond who paid them no attention. “Move. I’ve got a job to do.”
Maylee gave her best flirty laugh. “Yeah, I’m sure.” She pushed herself closer to him, he could feel the heat of her body seeping into his. She ran her hands under the lapels of his jackets, down his chest. “How ‘bout you work me over.” She nuzzled her head under his chin, her hair tickling his throat.
“I’m protecting your friend,” fell out of his mouth in a thick mumble. She felt so good against him.
“She can take care of herself.” Maylee arced her head back, her throat taunt and exposed, a vein strummed to her heartbeat. “Take care of me. I’ll take care of you.”
Kariden looked away from her, toward the stream of young women exiting and entering the privy. From this angle, he could not see the door. And from the loitering groups between him and the door, he could not see the women coming and going with any clarity. Daphia’s signal was still pinging from inside the privy, but it wasn’t moving.
This situation didn’t feel right.
He pushed Maylee away. “Yeah, I bet you will. Doing a good job of it so far.” She held onto his arm as if she could stop him, her fingers raking down until they touched his hand. He jerked away, moving toward the restroom.
Maylee rushed after him, pleading at the back of his head, “You don’t know what’s going on!”
No, he didn’t. And Kariden did not care. Maylee coming on to him was unwarranted and felt like a diversion. He was going to find out why. He pushed himself in front of a young woman with an explosion of color shifting hair at the lavatory’s door. Face hot and scowling, he ignored her gasps of shock and burst into the ladies’ room, his weave locking onto the tracking dust’s signal.
The shouts from the other women were sudden, but as soon as they saw the marks on his face like smeared slashes of ink, they quieted; they gathered their things and left with hushed murmurs. Raven business. Poor girl. What did she do?
A row of doors to privacy rooms ran along the wall to his left. Over there. Behind that one, his weave pulsed. He rapped on the door. “Daphia?”
Scurrying sounds came from behind the slate of cheap pressed particle wood with stained, chipped lavender paint, but no answer. He tried the knob. Locked. “Unlock this damned door,” he shouted in no mood for games.
Someone moaned inside. Moaned in fear.
Kariden stepped back, and kicked the door in. Daphia screamed as he slammed the door into the wall.
The topless girl shoving a blouse to her hanging boobs as she crouched by the short sofa was not Daphia. “She said I could have ‘em,” she explained, clutching Daphia’s clothes, her eyes wide and her body trembling.
Kariden shouted a curse and fell back through the door. He spun on his heels in the empty lavatory and bolted toward the exit. Yanking the door open, he nearly ran down Maylee standing just outside. “Move!” he shouted to the milling throng blocking him. He shoved people away.
“You can’t save her,” Maylee cried after him. “She doesn’t . . .”
He didn’t hear the rest. Doxon’s surprised face loomed out at him as he raced onto the main floor. “Daphia,” he panted. “She’s changed her clothes. She’s leaving.”
“Yeah, I know,” Kariden shouted, tapping into the security feeds. “She’s played me for a fool.” He doubted she had been drunk at all, having her weave breakdown the alcohol. And venom. She had time to watch him, learn his moves and habits. Distract him with her little sexy friend.
Dammit! How did he skump this up? He was supposed to keep an eye on her, keep her out of danger, and damned if she didn’t slip right past him with the oldest trick. He was better than this. Should be! He felt a begrudging respect for Daphia Ulden.
Ulden.
As clever and cunning as her father.
He rushed through the crowd shouting “Out of the way! Raven business!” His words parted them as he threw the outside optic feed overlay into his field of vision. It panned across the people cluttered boardwalk, scanning the taxies and limos and trikes parked outside. A break in the throng and a flash of leg in the maw of an open door of a courier-turned-limo. The sleek leg drew into darkness and the door shut.
Daphia’s leg. She had the legs of a goddess. He knew them well.
By the time he had burst out of the main doors and stumbled to a halt under the awning, the limo was halfway up the block. The club sat off a main street, a curving road fed its entrance, a roof covered a majority of the road to keep the party-goers as dry as possible. Walkers who came in from other streets stopped at kiosks, handing slips to old women with handheld hot air dryers. No one came into Mauhager’s wet. Taxies and trikes cued along the side street; the disembarked fares crowded under the awning. Several Ravens were out and about as well. None of them took an interest in what Kariden was doing. He was soon surrounded by people, like a boulder in a stream. Their cacophony drowned out the rush of pouring rain pounding the awning like a billion tiny hammers. The mummer of a hundred conversations seemed to blank his mind.
He had to move dammit. Do something!
They were getting away with Daphia.
Ganton would kill him. Personally.
Kariden’s eyes fell upon a trike. A couple climbed out of the side-coach.
The nascent Raven pushed himself through the mob without explanation, shoving people aside with groping hands, ignoring their shouted condemnations, or feeling their angry swipes. The trike driver looked at him, round, blank face under a wide floppy brim. Kariden skirted around the side-coach and shouldered into the man sitting on the seat above the rumbling engine. The driver flew back from the impact, nearly being run over by a courier that slammed to a halt. “Raven business,” Kariden said, throwing a leg over the seat and settling down atop it. He gripped the handlebars and put the trike into gear then sputtered into traffic.
He fought his way through the vehicles, accelerating in bursts through openings, screaming in his mind for them to get the hell out of his way. The downpour drenched him as he reached the intersection, stinging his face in a blinding grayness. The treacherous Cratertown traffic yielded no rights of way; drivers took their chances, pulling in front of each other, dashing across the intersection. Larger camions seemed to push smaller trikes to the side like a bow wave. The heavy rain caused a lull in the vehicular melee, everyone slowing. Kariden stood up on the trike’s foot pegs and scanning over the traffic. The courier was like thousands of other war surplus vehicles crowding the streets: indistinctible. He saw several in both directions, any one of them could be carrying Hasco’s men and Daphia.
Kariden cursed himself. He should have been ready for anything, any surprise, but he let complacency get the better of him. He had been expecting someone to try to nab her, not she running off with them!
He slung water from his face with an angry hand; his hat remained crushed in his overcoat’s inside pocket. Should he notify Ganton? Or Dessero? They would ride his ass to his last living breath if he couldn’t take care of this himself. Kariden tapped into the local wavecast and selected the Raven’s secure channel, gaining access to the live optophonic feeds. He zoomed into his current sector, chose the street. Camera views bloomed into his vision. He felt the seconds slip away, every lost moment of inaction expanding the gulf between him and success.
He felt feverish as the weave calculated, warming the blood in his brain, searching the images flashing in, comparing glimpses of heads and faces against Daphia’s. The images flickered in kaleidoscopic frenzy too fast to him to absorb the features. The trike’s engine whined under him, a throbbing heat. Horns blatted for him to move. Kariden looked back over his shoulder, hoping the Raven tattoo would work in his favor and quiet the impatient drivers behind him. If they could see through this murk.
There! Waves of blond hair pressed against a door window. To his left, heading to the main concourse. The weave matched the courier to the image he got from Mauhager’s security feed. Definitely them. The visual feeds vanished except for one overlay the weave ran, tapping into the nearest available feeds to follow the target. He throttled the trike into traffic, nearly getting clipped by a taxi, the side-coach rattling over the ruts in the road.
The street lay dense with slow moving trikes, cars, and trucks. The side-coach denied him passage through tight corridors, impeding his process. He would have to get rid of it, and pulled over swiftly. He looked down and back at the suspension hinge as two young men scurried over in ponchos and swung the coach’s front facing door wide. They climbed in giving Kariden a destination as the Raven fought the slick pin out of the hinge. Once free he dropped the pin into a puddle and twisted the throttled, jerking the—now—bike forward without so much as a word or look back at the surprised, shouting men.
The limo stopped, then turned right onto the main highway, heading south to set of rising switchbacks that lead to the spaceport beyond. Kariden doubted very much that he would catch them following the roads as he sped between couriers and camions. There was a covered bazaar filling a network of alleys to his right. He pulled off the street into it, engine blatting and farting.
Goods of anything he could image were being sold from kiosks, carts, and racks. Ponchos and raincoats, hats and umbrellas, all a sea of color, made a formidable wall. He thumbed the horn button, making it cry out a horrible bleat of weariness. It turned heads, but the sight of his oncoming bike made the people rush to the side, crushing against each other to avoid being ran down. He made a tight left turn, the back wheel spinning across the slick naked rock, slinging silt and rainwater across vegetables and hanging meat. Someone nearly kicked him over as he gunned forward. He was shouting, what he would never recall. The small engine whined and screamed as he rolled the throttle, the noise like a calling wildcat smelling blood in the air. A vegetable or fruit splattered across his shoulder. Something small and hard struck him in the back. He had no time to worry about these trivial assaults. He drove like hell through the panic he caused, leaving in his wake a churning sea of angry sellers and buyers.
The alley bottlenecked near the street it let out onto. The throng of people had nowhere to go, their faces grew larger, slack and shocked by the knowledge of impending disaster. They tried to move like startled cattle. A man at the side held the tongue of an unhitched, two wheeled cart, his tiny truck parked close to the wall. The man stood frozen into inaction.
The limo was making its unhurried way down the street beyond. If Kariden didn’t stop it now, he would be chasing it all the way to the spaceport. They would eventually discover him and try to put an end to his pursuit. He needed to get ahead of them. The gate across the back of the cart hung open, a miracle. Kariden gunned for it.
He only saw the metal tongue fall out of the man’s hand as he jumped backward for fear of his life. Kariden hauled back onto the handlebars, pulling the front wheel onto the limb of metal, using the cart as a ramp to fly over the ducking, scattering mob below. The jump wasn’t as well as he hoped it would be with the cart tipping under the weight of the bike, and he came down on top of someone, the back wheel striking the person’s shoulder. The bike bounced hard onto the leveled rock and twisted out from under him. Kariden flew away, rolling through puddles with as much grace as a catapulted corpse.
He hurt everywhere and staggered to his feet, pushing his foot down snug into his loosened boot. His gun had fell out somewhere; he spun around looking for it. The mob huddled against one another frozen, dropping moans and cries. He found the gun and hefted it from a puddle. When he didn’t aim or shoot at anyone, but limped toward the mouth of the alley to the street, some in the crowd bolted as if released by command to the person he had struck. It pained him to walk away, to not assist the injured by his actions, but Hasco's men must be stopped.
Kariden left the bike idling on its side, the engine puttering and groaning, and finally coughing itself silent. The gun felt heavy and purposeful in his hand. It was an older Mekmore model with a revolving cylinder filled with five power cartridges. His weave tapped into the gun’s system. Kariden set it to full discharge. That gave him five high powered pulses. The optic feed wavered as a new overlay, a bright pip like spot of blood showing the calculated point of impact.
People, indistinct in their rain gear, huddled near the entrance to the alley, just off the step of the boardwalk, watching the scene inside with the sullen faces of morbid curiosity. A few walked away with shrugs and chatter to their companions. Of those that stayed, eyes tracked his face. His mark. Others saw the gun, large and menacing. Some stumbled backward to give him passage.
The Raven halted at the edge of the boardwalk. Stinging needles of hard rain pelted him. Wind pulled his overcoat open. He felt nothing. Passing vehicles drove past him, within arm’s reach, splashing him with filthy water and silt. He cared not. He leveled the gun, his weave augmented his eyesight. The courier carrying Daphia came into view as the taxi ahead of it hove out of Kariden’s line of sight. His vision zoomed. The two men in the front seat were unaware of him, even as people seemed to move in slow motion like ripples in a puddle in reaction to a man aiming a large handgun. The man in the back seat sat close to Daphia, pressing against her. Her blank face looked at nothing, eyes in a narcotic haze, lids half closed like stuck shutters. He hair splayed against the side window like a snapshot of blond sea spray.
For a moment Kariden though the man had no hand as his arm seemed to rest along her stomach, then he realized the hand was tucked into her blouse, knuckles moving under the fabric. The man wore a lunatic’s grin. Kariden was dimly aware of the man in the front passenger seat turning his head to look at the action in the back seat. His weave confirmed the identity of the men as being Captain Hasco’s crew. Kariden saw only the red spot of the Mekmore’s targeting sight holding steady over the temple of the man molesting Daphia.
His hand like a spider, groping.
Kariden fired via the weave, not trusting the slow reaction of his finger. The first pulse shot out the hexagonal barrel, the report nothing more than an electric snap, and bored a hole through the windshield. As soon as the cylinder rolled over into place, the Mekmore fired again, the pulse zipping through the molten glass and gouging a hot spike of energy into the accosting man’s skull, vaporizing twists of brain. He lowered the gun, firing the last three shots into the courier’s engine, the actinic flashes like small thunderbolts.
He was peripherally aware of the people under the boardwalk falling back upon one another like blades of tall grass being pushed by wind as he released the gun’s chamber to let it fall open to spill the discharged casings while his other fingers reached into his coat pocket for another load of power cartridges. Kariden thumbed them into their slots, a figure standing as a lone target. The courier’s engine coughed and stuttered into death. The driver cranked the steering wheel, pulling the vehicle over, his face a grim mask of revenge. The vehicle crashed into the splash-guards of the boardwalk, cracking and splintering the cheap pressed particle wood. People shouted under the din of rain. The traffic on the street never stopped.
Daphia’s limbs were in frantic motion, pushing and kicking the corpse away from her, eyes and mouth wide in horror, disgust, anger. The front doors of the courier threw open, the men climbed out. Kariden advanced down the boardwalk toward them, gun held out. His targets crouched behind the cover of their doors. The Raven shot three neat holes through the passenger door, ending the man behind it. The driver, protected by the nose of the car, sprung up with a machine pistol in his hand. It bleated thunder, spitting hard cold bullets everywhere.
Holes punched through the splash-guard panels. Flakes of rust exploded from the iron posts supporting the roof of the sidewalk. Buzzes flew past his head, became thunks in the brick wall behind him. Chips and grit of brick and mortar stung him like the needles of rain. Invisible fingers tugged at the open wings of his coat, at his sleeves. Something like a hammer struck his left upper arm, passing suddenly into a white hot heat coring through his flesh.
He felt no pain as he dropped into a crouch behind the riddled splash-guard. His left arm hung weak, unwilling to help him. I should be dead. The marks on his jaw tingled as if Raum’s dark fingers were touching him there, pressing his ownership into Mil Kariden’s soul. And something else as well, a remarkable feeling of invulnerability, as if the concept of Raum was a protective cloak he could wrap around himself. The kicker was that he had not yet had audience with Raum; his twin-smear tattoo was nanotech, like the rank insignia of a lieutenant as opposed to a captain. He wiped his jaw with the back of the hand that held the Mekmore, rubbing at the tingling as wood exploded around him. I really should be dead.
Self-preservation kicked in with a dump of adrenalin. He shuddered, shocking himself out of a trance and immediately rolled to his left, up the boardwalk toward the courier and Daphia. His injured arm was practically useless, soaking his shirt-sleeve in warm blood. It didn’t hurt as much as he thought it should, and wasn’t sure if it was the weave damping the pain, or if it just wasn’t supposed to hurt very much. The blatting of the machine pistol ended. Kariden popped up. The driver ducked down, moving toward the back of the courier. Daphia had opened her door, struggled out, and sat immobile against the filth of the back tire. Kariden leveled the gun in her direction as he stepped closer, the red pip jostling with each heartbeat against nothing but space soon to be occupied.
But the machine pistol emerged from back behind the courier, the driver’s arm extended to clear the height of the car’s roof. The gun clattered, dousing the area with a wild spray of bullets. Without a second thought, Kariden swung the red pip over the gun. The actinic flash silenced it. The man dropped the useless hunk of metal and remained unseen.
“Daphia. Move,” yelled Kariden. “Get the hell out of there!” Beyond the curtain of rain pouring from the boardwalk’s roof, she did nothing.
Then it was too late for her to do anything at all.
She jerked as the driver grabbed her and used her body as cover and as he pulled her through water and silt toward the back of the courier. Kariden raced forward in a lopsided gait, his gun hand cupped in the other, his weave ready to fire. The driver came up slowly with Daphia, pulling her head back by her drenched hair, arching her throat. A hard glint of metal rested under her chin. The driver held a knife, not a dust formed blade.
“My weave’ll bleed her out if my brain functions stop,” the driver barked. Mil Kariden believed him. A weave could remain active shortly after its host’s death, and could be instructed to articulate the body by emulating the muscles. Even dead, he could carve Daphia to ribbons before Kariden could stop it.
“Drop your gun,” the man added. He had a broad hard face, deeply tanned and deeply lined. He too was without a hat and his short bristly hair dew-tipped dead grass. His mouth stretched tight in a relentless grimace. He stood unwavering, solid, feet apart. Daphia leaned against him, seemed to be held upright by the man’s arm as it moved from her hair and crossed her breast, his fist clutching the collar of her soaked blouse. She moaned, but it was the sound of a sleeper being bothered by a senseless dream.
Kariden guessed she was out of her mind on venom. Stupid bitch. Had she any idea what these vile men were about? Or what trap they had set for her? He wasn’t about to let these bastards leave with her. “You’re not getting away with this,” he said, stopping where the courier had smashed into the splash-guard, the Mekmore unflinching in his steady hands.
“I said drop it!”
“You gonna kill her?” Kariden needed a way into the man’s weave. A weave could be impenetrable to signals by simply not being receptive to radio transmissions. But Hasco’s kidnapper wouldn’t isolate himself completely. He would have a backdoor cracked open for secure communication. Such an entrance would be barred by barrier locks. Kariden had no doubt that given time, his weave could mount an assault and gain access and control. He didn’t have that time.
The man’s face twitched, as if suppressing the desire to wipe clear his rain soaked eyes. “I don’t think you want to find out.” He pressed the flat edge of the blade against the supple skin of her throat. Daphia struggled and let out a gargled gasp. She coughed on the rain, twisted her head to the side.
No, Kariden did not want to test the man. The kidnapper had his back against a wall, a wall named “Mission Failure”, and he might very well kill her if he thought his own escape impossible and his own death imminent. Kariden let the gun lower.
The man began to back up, dragging Daphia’s clumsy feet with him. While his weave was closed to Mil Kariden’s, there was another that was fully open: the one that belonged to the dead man behind the passenger door. That weave was defaulted open to allow anyone to capture the dead man’s memories that it had cached. Kariden tapped it, seeking the communication protocols Hasco ordered his men to use.
Kariden advanced slowly, ignoring a call ping from Ganton.
Traffic had stopped, the streets had mostly cleared. People were afraid of being caught in possible crossfire. Only a few watched from doorways, and windows, and the thresholds of the nearest alleys. Horns blared from the intersection. “You should let her go,” said Kariden steadily. “Ravens are coming.” He wanted to be a block away with a striker rifle’s scope overlaying his vision, the man’s head in his crosshair.
The man with the knife at Daphia’s throat laughed. “Fuckin’ bunch of amateurs. What are you going to do? Nuke the street?”
Mil Kariden said nothing. He could feel the man’s body like a ghost near his own. He transferred the laser pistol from his right hand to his left, lest he truly drop it. He seemed to occupy two bodies, he could feel the stance and motion of the man’s, oddly and disturbingly contrasting his own. He fought the urge to stumble backward and to bring his fist up near his throat. However, it was the hand where he concentrated his focus. He forced his hand to be the man’s, and he could see the awareness in the man’s face as he too began to feel the position and motion of Kariden’s body.
Kariden fought to open his right hand, his fingers taunt, trembling. He was aware of the man—Cobin—trying to both hold Daphia in place and pull the hand that clutched her away, pointing it at his own head as if holding a gun.
The intention was clear. He aimed to kill Kariden with his own weapon, as if by suicide. But Kariden’s weakened, gunshot arm flailed uselessly in flares of pain. He fought to lock out most of the man’s motor functions to release his hold. Cobin could, of course, disengage his weave, but then Kariden could end him with no harm to Daphia. He pressed on, the muscles in his both arms cramping under the strain. Cobin had a damn fine weave.
A weave flash nearly broke both men’s attention. A courier from the north, from the spaceport, approached. More of Hasco’s men. It was enough surprise for Kariden to the take the edge over his opponent. Cobin cried out in agony and defiance as the knife tumbled free. The heavy blade caught in Daphia’s drenched skirt, and for a moment as he raised the Mekmore, Kariden thought Cobin would reach for it. Instead it dislodged as the kidnapper tried to duck behind Chief Ulden’s daughter. He never had a chance.
Kariden’s weave dropped the link and, taking the gun with his other hand, raised his good arm superhuman fast. With an electric click, a bright flash gouged a channel through Cobin’s forehead. Both he and Daphia slumped. She tried to catch her fall by reaching for the back of the courier, but her fingers slipped and she fell to her butt.
Kariden leapt over the splash-guard amidst a spattering of hand claps from the bravest onlookers. Always entertaining, he thought humorlessly as he rushed to Daphia’s aid. The other courier had not made it far up the street, but the men were out and running toward them. They weren’t coming to talk.
Daphia looked every bit of a disgraced and drunken tramp, rain soaked like a wayward pet, sullen in its misdeeds. Mil grasped her forearm and pulled her up. “You need to detox. Now.”
“Your arm’s bleeding,” she said, lolling against him.
“Yeah,” he answered, looking up the street at the running figures. “Weave’s taking care of it.” The rain began to lessen to lazy sheets of sprinkles. That was not exactly a good thing considering the hand cannon he saw one of the men carrying. Not much would disperse the laser pulses chirped from that weapon. Kariden planted a hand across Daphia’s back, wet curls tickled his fingers. He pushed her into a crouch. “Run with me. Toward that alley.” He pointed with the Mekmore.
They bolted, but he found himself half dragging her along. Now, she was screaming.
He heard the sound of a thousand electric relays snapping shut in rapid succession. Their shadows jerked and jittered across everything in front of them as blossoms of blue-white flashes tore into the courier behind them, boring channels of hissing slag and acrid vapors. It was a wonder they weren’t hit.
Not bad, anyway. Kariden felt pinpricks of heat pepper his back from highly attenuated laser pulses; the bursts lost most of their energy cutting through the vehicle behind them. Bright blooms flashed against the far brick at the entrance to the alley, sputtering like grease dropping on hot coals. Kariden pushed Daphia, hard, so that she stumbled and fell screaming across the threshold of the alley under the sporadic pulses of killing light. He saw wisps of smoke drift from a lock of her hair. The side of his face seemed to explode into light. From the near wall, sparks of molten brick like embers from a cutter’s torch showered him, burning his face and neck, and dying against the dampness of his coat as he lunged into the alley after Daphia. He thought the mistake the gunner was making was that he was running as he was firing.
Daphia yelled an incomprehensible barrage. He was shouting in anger at her to move. . . . To just shut up and move. . . . To get off her ass and skumping run down the alley. He had a street view overlay showing the men making their way down the lane toward them. Ganton’s comm signal was a bell ringing in his head. He silenced it, pushing himself on his butt with the heels of his boots to the wall behind him, sitting in trash and odorous water. He checked the Mekmore revolver, dumping out the spent cartridges and thumbing in new ones. He labored for breath, his heartbeat slamming in his neck. Daphia had only moved a few meters away, shouting that she wanted to leave. It made no sense to him for her to say that and to stay put as he planned his assault.
He stood jittery and sick, his weave ready for its task. He looked at Daphia. She sat in a puddle, her legs curled beside her, naked and gleaming where they were not smeared with filth. One scrapped knee bled, the red trickles washing away with the rain. Her right arm supported her weight. Her face held the anguish of a dream shattered, a dark hate underneath. Her words tore into him. He could not think about what she was saying. He moved to the wall in front of him, near the smoldering pits blasted into it.
Hasco’s men approached. Kariden’s torso felt hot as his weave began to broadcast boosted signals on his enemy’s protocol channels. As he moved toward the boardwalk, their visual fields popped up as little videos in his own. They were not aware of his penetration. The one on point had the rapid fire pulse culverin. The man behind him held a compact carbine and was watching to their rear. The other was coming up the boardwalk, a surprise element, pistol pointing straight-armed to the deck.
Kariden exhaled and sent the command to white-out their vision as he stepped out of the alley. He drew the sight of the Mekmore to the one carrying the rapid fire laser as the men stumbled in their surprise. Point Man’s face flashed and Kariden did not wait to watch the body drop before he swung his gun at the man down the boardwalk whose visual feed vanished from his overlay. The megajoule pulse went into his eye and his knees unhinged.
The other man switched off his weave’s visual input and shot a volley of wild bolts at Kariden. The Raven bodyguard stooped clear. The shots stopped and Kariden found the last man retreating toward his vehicle. Kariden raced out into the street. Stopped. Got a clear shot of the running man’s back. Hesitated. He watched the man scramble into his courier; the nervous driver rammed into a car behind them, managed to get it turned around, and sped off.
Kariden dropped his aching arm, mindlessly tucking the gun into the holster inside his coat. A giddiness of survival against great odds flooded through him, seeming to rise from his feet and gurgle out of his mouth in barks of laughter. His grin pulled his face tight.
He turned to the alley, spotting Daphia stagger out in a daze. Drenched and filthy, her wet clothes clinging to her form, she stumbled toward the shot-up courier. Kariden watched her with distant amusement. Her bare feet stepped through cold puddles, indifferent to what bodily fluids may be mixing with the rain. She stepped around the body of the first man he shot as if that man was merely sleeping off a night of heavy drinking. She bent for something in the remains of the courier, her need outweighing her image or her comfort.
Kariden wanted her. He wanted to grab her and spin her around in celebration of being alive.
Daphia yanked her purse free and nearly lost balance. Kariden helped her back to the dry refuge of the boardwalk. She trembled under his hands.
“You’re safe now,” he said.
She gave no reply, her fingers scrambling through the contents of her purse, frantic with nervous energy. She found the thin vial with the blue liquid and let her bag slip from her other fingers to crash with a soft surrendering thump at her feet.
This was her need? Venom! Anger boiled over Kariden. He swatted the vial from her fingers. It bounced and spun on the decking. Kariden crushed it under the toe of his boot. Daphia gasped in both pain and surprise. She slapped him hard across the cheek. The Raven tat stung.
Face hot, he found himself taking her roughly by the upper arms and pulling her body towards his own. Her eyes were wide. Wild. The raw look of her was more than he could bear. He could wring her neck, or. . . . He pressed his mouth to hers before he knew what he was doing. She beat her fists against him, her knuckles like hard little pebbles.
After he let go of her, after she drew in a lungful of air, and as her eyes, full of pained questing wonder, tracked his, she yelled at him, “Why did you do that?”
His heart hammering in his chest, he shrugged. She needed a good kiss and he wanted to give one to her, but he had not the courage to say those words. He simply repeated himself as if it were all the reason he needed. “You’re safe.”
Her face pinched with incredulity. “I don’t want to be saved! I wanted to go, and you’ve killed them! I hate this skumping place! I hate it! I want to leave!” Daphia broke down into hard wrenching sobs. Kariden reached for her but she broke away.
He was not expecting this and felt a guilt he hadn’t earned. Naïve and ungrateful little bitch. “Not with these men.” His voice was cold.
She glared at him, her mouth and eyes hateful. “They were going to set me up on Cenestra.”
The words were a knife twisting his guts. She belonged on Cenestra, but. . . . “They lied to you.”
Daphia searched his face with her eyes. “I don’t believe you.”
He pointed to the body of the man that held her at knife point. “He would have killed you. And do you know why? Because if they could not have you, they’re not going to let anyone else have you.”
“They were trying to make you leave. They were trying to kill you!”
Kariden attempted to make weave contact. “Drop your barrier.”
“No!”
“Drop your barrier Daphia. You need to know the truth.”
She turned to run, but he was quicker, leaping and grasping her, pulling her toward him. “You’ll see it,” he snapped, dragging her screaming defiant form to Cobin’s corpse.
His hand closed tight around her wrist; the microscopic wirve ending of his weave slipped out of his skin and bore painlessly into her, finding and connecting with her own weave. Daphia moaned as she felt the connection. Kariden splayed his fingers across the corps’s forehead, his weave making physical contact. “Hasco is more dangerous than you realize.”
She shuddered as pure knowledge slammed into her.
Daphia understood vaguely the chaotic economics of Cratertown. Mercator had wealth in elements and minerals rare on other worlds. And wealth, of course, in venom. With laborers came a need for entertainment; drugs, alcohol, and prostitution became the main vices. There were men and women who desired to be chief suppliers. They cut deals. Paid favors. Did all manner of activity illegal on the civil worlds of the Pavonan Expanse. Not all got what they wanted. For those that did not, some resorted to violence, to extortion, to kidnapping.
Delavantae Hasco had no intention of taking her to Cenestra. He had every intention of holding Daphia hostage until he got the sweet deals he wanted.
Mil Kariden, linked to Daphia as he was, caught the gist of her thoughts and the currents of her emotions. She expressed ironic amusement at Hasco’s plans. Her father would not care; she would not be a lever used against him in any manner. Daphia, who had been nothing for a long time but a little girl wanting the adoration and love of her father was nothing more than a liability against his plans for holding power in Cratertown.
Kariden wanted to break off from the black feelings that were seeping into him, but Daphia had gathered a glimpse of another bothersome detail. She had never wondered where the doxies had all come from. Sure some were local girls, and she suspected they all were, but here was Captain Hasco’s true cargo: young women and teen girls promised better lives, scammed from their frontier worlds and sent here, to Mercator, to Cratertown, indentured or sold as outright slaves into prostitution. Both he and Daphia saw those women in Cobin's memory cache, packed like cattle in containers. Hasco wanted to cash in on being the chief supplier. Loddo Ulden declined Hasco's business. He had no need for off-world doxies.
Hasco figured that if holding Daphia did not change the old man’s mind, she’d be an ample coin to trade favors among other business partners.
It wasn’t even a quarter of a minute since he first grabbed her wrist that that knowledge of Hasco’s plans prompted her to snatch her arm from Kariden’s grip. She fell back in revulsion, angry and disgusted. Sobs rattled out of her as he gathered her in his arms and walked her back to the boardwalk, now clustered with curious people.
Kariden set her down near her purse. “Your father is a bastard. He doesn’t deserve you.” Daphia sniffled into his shoulder, mumbling unintelligibly. He added, “You want off this miserable rock, I’ll get you off.” He did not know why he was promising her this. He had no idea how to go about it without anyone knowing. But he wanted to do it. Had too. “I’ll go with you.”
Around them the street was coming alive once more, returning to its old self. Daphia pulled back. Her pale blue eyes searched his, one to the other as if seeking one in which to anchor. “Why?”
He brushed strands of wet hair from her face, let his finger linger too long against her cool skin. He thought of dead men. “This place is killing us.”
She nodded slowly, then looked up over his shoulder, dread settling over her. Kariden craned his neck around. Ganton stood looking down at them under his tricorn. He looked around at the scene of carnage. “Aren’t you just a goddamned hero,” he spat.
Kariden stood, pulled Daphia up. “I did my job.”
Ganton scowled. “You’d better answer my fucking calls. You put her life in jeopardy. You should have called for backup.”
“You said I could handle them. I did.” And who was putting her life in more harm? Men like Hasco? Or her father?
Ganton held his cold gaze for a few seconds. “You watch your fucking mouth, boy.” He held his hand out for Daphia. “I’m taking you home.”
She hefted up her purse and gave Kariden a lingering gaze as she stepped past him. He wanted to take her someplace safe, to some out of the way hotel, or to his apartment. He made no move to stop her, or Ganton.
Other Ravens and a few unmarked associates watched Kariden as they waited for Ganton to join them in the street. Their faces held begrudging respect and ghosts of fear after seeing what he had done to Hasco’s men, at what they could not do. Kariden hated them.
To the south came a resonance in the air, a subsonic disturbance felt more than heard. Kariden looked toward the spaceport throwing its melon-orange glow against the darkening low cloud deck. The prow of a massive bulker crept over the skyline and the high rim of the crater. It’s blunt nose began to tilt upward, raising like a truncheon to smash the city below, yet slipping into the murk above, it’s exotic fields swirling the clouds. Faster it climbed until it was gone behind the hazy barrier to the sky. No one paid it any attention as men came out into the street to fight and haggle over the remains of the shot-up courier. Other men with children loaded the bodies on carts, to later tease out the weaves for whatever arcane purposes, eventually sending the remains to one of the many pyre pits. Moments later a blue glow diffused through the clouds, growing brighter, the clouds more turbulent, then the thundering rumble of the spacecraft’s engine slammed down upon the city. Hasco made his escape.
Kariden watched Ganton assist Daphia into his chariot. She held his gaze until the door was shut, severing them from one another. Seconds later it drove off, leaving Kariden standing in light drizzle that stopped and went as if it couldn’t make up its mind to rain. A sudden rent in the clouds let in a blast of fiery, pink sunlight from the red giant slipping behind the western rim of the crater. He realized how late it was and nearly stumbled from the fatigue he had not allowed himself to feel.
Something caught Mil’s eye in the puddles before him. One of Daphia’s shoes, or what was left of it. He lifted it from the water, a white high-heel stained the color of yellow teeth in the ugly light, scuffed and grimed, heel snapped off. It was a shoe not meant to be in inclement weather. It deserved better: warm cozy bars, or hanging aloof from her toes as she curled her legs under her body while lounging on a plush, comfortable sofa.
He patted the pointed toe of the shoe flat against his palm while looking around for the other, enjoying the solidity of it and the knowledge that it was Daphia's shoe. He didn’t see its mate, so he shoved it into the deep front pocket of his greatcoat and started walking along the boardwalk, through the growing crowd of people shying out of doorways and resuming their business. He kept his hand in the pocket and the shoe in his hand, like a talisman.
It's funny how a story turns. I never planned that Mil Kariden would seek to escape Mercator with Daphia Ulden. But it does offer solutions to other problems I saw with forthcoming episodes.
Now I can get back to finishing "Presage".
