Nethereal (Soul Cycle Book 1) Page 5

  Teg now had all the time in the world. He waited until his target was fully facing him. Then, with his dominant right hand he fired twice more with identical results to his first volley.

  Teg scanned the intersecting halls in each direction before tending to his victims. He shot them both twice more—once in the chest and once in the head—before dragging their corpses into the alcove fronting the door they'd guarded. The effort set his wounded back to throbbing, but he didn’t let the pain distract him. He deposited the bodies out of harm's way; then crouched before the door and applied the Formula.

  First, he concentrated all of his attention on the immediate vicinity, taking in every detail and making certain that nothing seemed out of place. When none of his senses raised an alarm, he felt safe to proceed.

  Next, he took an ebony rod liberated from one of the Enforcers and waved it over the door. The lack of a reaction ruled out most Worked traps.

  Continuing the process begun in the first step, Teg made a thorough visual inspection of the door. When he was satisfied that there were no hair-thin tripwires or concealed explosives, he moved on to the last and riskiest part of the test. Removing his supple leather gloves, he ran his fingers across the surface of the door and its frame, minutely feeling every rivet and seam. When the examination was concluded, Teg held his breath and pressed his ear against the cold metal hatch. The only sound was the moderate ringing caused by the rifle’s report. Nothing moved on the other side.

  With a sharp exhale Teg replaced his glove, crouched down, and tried the handle. The latch’s click made his muscles tense more than the recent gunfire. He eased the door open, moving back as it swung toward him. As soon as the opening was wide enough to peek through, he did so and found the room empty of people but filled with potentially useful things.

  Teg returned to the vestibule and dragged the corpses into the storeroom. Then he shut the door behind him. Confident that he could work without being disturbed, he searched the dead Enforcers and turned up another zephyr. He removed the magazine, emptied it, and loaded four bullets into each of his own pistols.

  Teg holstered his guns and set about gathering the items he needed. He carefully balanced a canister lid atop a lighting tripod, affixed a couple of candles to the lid, and lit them with his pocket-sized ether torch. After covering the burning tapers with a glass pitcher, Teg used ventilation tape to ensure an airtight seal.

  Taking a deep breath, Teg drew his splinterknife and cut holes in the bases of five plastic drums plastered with warning labels. Crystal clear liquid spread across the floor, smelling like a distant storm. This done, Teg exited as quickly as prudence allowed, taking one of the bodies with him.

  Once he’d dumped the corpse in the antechamber Teg returned to the storeroom. He attached one end of a thin wire to a steel ring on the tripod and crept outside while holding tightly to the other end. Leaving the door cracked just enough to admit his hand, he fastened the cord’s loose end to the inner handle.

  Teg was turning to leave when inspiration struck. He reached back into the room with a surgeon's care and pulled the second corpse’s limp hand through the opening. Then he padded back to the intersection, looked both ways, and took the twisting passage that would place him atop the mountain.

  Teg gave the guildsmen ten minutes to spring his trap, and they didn’t disappoint. Knowing the volatility of super-concentrated ether, he abandoned stealth for speed when the first muted explosions thundered from below.

  Teg emerged from the fiery maze onto the peak’s level plain. Wrathful howls and the staccato crack of gunfire filled the stifling air. He was dismayed—but not surprised—to find a dozen or so pirates battling three times as many guildsmen.

  The mercenary accounted for five Enforcers at the cost of his remaining ammo. Still greatly outnumbered, he drew his knife and prepared for close combat.

  A guildsman advanced and raised his rifle. Teg lobbed his blade into the weapon's forestock and immediately regretted the act. But his foe was thrown off guard, and Teg used the distraction to close the distance. It was too late to shoot by the time the Enforcer saw him coming. The guildsman thrust the rifle’s shoulder stock at his foe’s face, but Teg angled his upper body perpendicular to the blow, evading it by a hair’s breadth.

  Teg grabbed the rifle, clasping one hand over the breech and the other under the forestock. Then he gave the weapon a sharp twist, pulling it toward himself. The gun came free of its owner's grip, and Teg seized it. He performed the maneuver his opponent had attempted; pistoning the rifle’s butt into the guildsman’s face and shattering his jaw. Another Enforcer tackled Teg from behind, spilling both men onto the hard volcanic plateau.

  Teg barely registered the keening whine of the Shibboleth's drifters. The ground shook, and black geysers of rock sprayed upward as the ether-runner launched its forward torpedoes. Teg knew that the torps were of middling yield, but their human targets would have met prettier ends in the blades of a combine.

  The ship landed within fifty yards of where Teg and the Enforcer wrestled. The guildsman fought like a rabid lion, commanding most of Teg's attention. But soon, the mercenary heard a shrill whirring that caught his notice. Daring to take his eyes from his opponent, Teg saw that the Shibboleth's rotary cannon had started spinning in preparation to fire. Furthermore, it was pointed in his direction.

  “No! No!” Teg screamed in visceral denial. He threw all of his weight into a desperate roll that wracked his tortured back and spun the Enforcer into the space he’d just occupied. Then the flash and thunder of the cannon cast him into a sightless void.

  He thought his mother hummed a song that she saved for the rare occasions when his father was home. But then Teg remembered that his father was years in his grave. He opened his eyes—actually, they'd already been open; but now they could see again. Teg found himself staring into a pair of bright silver eyes. He didn't find their color odd, but the face they peered from was upside-down.

  “Teg?” asked a beautiful, hauntingly familiar voice. “Tegren?”

  Teg's composure returned at the sound of his right name. “Only my mom calls me that,” he told Nakvin, who leaned over his supine form.

  “We're evacuating,” she said. “Wake up and get on the ship.” Then she stood, straightened her robes, and started up the Shibboleth's boarding ramp.

  Wincing from the pain in his back, Teg stood. Only then did the Enforcer's disembodied arms release his midsection and drop lifeless to the ground.

  Jaren rounded on Crofter. “What in the Nine Circles was that!?” he cried. The Shibboleth’s forward gunner had fired into close combat involving his own crewmates. The reckless stunt had almost disintegrated Teg. In fact it would have, had the swordarm’s roll ended an inch too short.

  Crofter returned Jaren’s look but quickly averted his eyes. “I don't know!” the gunner whined, his voice rising in panic. “Firing the torps made me feel like I was finally giving the Guild some payback. Then I saw that Enforcer wrestling with Teg, and I thought, 'what's this gun for if it can’t pick off one more piece of Guild trash,' right?”

  Teg emerged from the armory as Crofter finished his sentence. He'd obviously heard the rest, because he drew a pair of fresh zephyrs and opened fire at the gunner's feet. “What's this gun for?” Teg asked between each shot. “What's this gun for?”

  Bridge personnel hit the deck to avoid the ricocheting slugs. Crofter tried to flee but found his movements controlled as if he were a puppet and Teg's bullets the strings.

  Jaren was sympathetic to his swordarm’s wrath, but punishing the gunner’s recklessness by endangering everyone else only compounded the problem. The captain drew his own zephyr, but Teg suddenly folded to the floor, revealing Nakvin standing behind him brandishing her poisoned dagger.

  “He needed the rest, anyway,” she said.

  “Is he dead?” Crofter asked, still standing on one foot.

  Nakvin shook her head. “I just gave him a scratch. He should come to sometime
tomorrow—unless we leave him on his back and he chokes on his own vomit.” The caveat sounded closer to a suggestion than a warning.

  Jaren’s order emerged in a harsh monotone. “Get him to his quarters.”

  “We've got a Guild courier coming in hot from the west,” Deim said from the Wheel.

  Jaren turned to the young steersman. “Get us out of here.”

  “Where to?”

  “I don't care. Away from here. Anywhere.” Jaren slumped back in his chair and watched pillars of smoke rising from the fires that consumed his dream of an independent Tharis.

  9

  The weeks that followed the Melanoros raid blurred into a series of narrow escapes from the ever more remote hideouts where Jaren and his crew sought refuge. No matter how far they ran, the Guild was always close behind. The constant ordeal pushed crew morale to the limit.

  Seeing Ambassador's Island through the Shibboleth’s bridge canopy made Jaren feel at ease for the first time since fleeing Tharis. Despite it singular name, the old way station was actually two asteroids joined by a bundle of girders, ducts, and walkways. The dual structure hung idle in space, its knobby surface dark.

  Jaren thought back to his last visit. Back then the Island had sustained a mid-sized customs office plus numerous shops, eateries, daily and hourly rate lodgings, and a theater. He’d since heard that a collision of two celestial bodies had placed the Island at the expanding edge of a rubble cloud. Now that he saw the tumbling debris field wryly dubbed the Pebble Mill, Jaren understood the station’s abandonment.

  This place is about to get a whole new clientele, Jaren thought with growing excitement. His plan to gather a pirate army and liberate Tharis had gone up in flames, but Dan had salvaged his dream from the ashes with a simple change of venue.

  “Take us in,” Jaren told Deim. Realizing that his junior steersman hadn’t been to the Island before, he added, “The entrance is in the middle of the bigger rock.”

  Deim found the dock with no trouble. Most of the berths were filled: for the first time in years, to judge by the look and odor of decay.

  “Nakvin, Teg, and Deim will debark with me,” Jaren told his twenty remaining crewmen. “The rest of you stay put and lock up tight till we get back.”

  Jaren led the way through a transparent tube extending through space to the smaller asteroid, where only a decrepit bar remained open. He strode through the door and into the raucous, liquor-soaked heart of the first pirate conclave since time out of memory. The freelance community had shrunk in recent years. As a result, most of those present knew each other by reputation if not by appearance.

  A scattered chorus of grunts and applause greeted Jaren as he took a seat at the bar with his senior crew. Though he didn’t expect many more attendees, custom demanded that stragglers be given time to arrive. Fielding the crowd’s questions about internal politics and swaying fence-sitters who doubted that anyone could beat the Guild gave Jaren plenty to do in the meantime.

  Half an hour later, Teg was on his fifth round of rye liquor. Deim was nursing his second beer, and Nakvin still sipped idly from her first glass of red wine. Jaren's mug of mead stood full on the dirty counter while he scanned the motley crowd.

  Jaren's eyes kept wandering back to Dan, who held forth at a corner booth playing cards with the Oison brothers and some newcomer—a Kethan, by his speech. Dan’s laughing eyes never left his table mates. His gnarled hands shuffled and dealt by feel.

  A thought not his own occurred to Jaren: What’s bothering you?

  Shame warmed Jaren’s cheeks when he realized his transparency. Nakvin had noted his watchfulness and was communicating in her peculiar way of skipping words and going straight to ideas. He ignored the question, preferring to stay alert rather than repeating his blunder at the fortress. His sense of impending doom had returned, and it centered around Dan’s table. As Jaren watched, Dan folded his hand, excused himself, and vanished through the door behind the bar.

  Jaren remembered his drink but found he wasn't thirsty. He picked absently at Teg’s plate of heavily salted, breaded vegetables and watched the kitchen door for Dan’s return. What was his gut telling him? Was Dan walking into an ambush? Jaren was about to have Teg check the kitchen when his eyes began to burn and the muscles in his neck and shoulders to cramp. Jaren reached for his zephyr, but his head was swimming. His vision clouded and went black.

  Nakvin was contemplating her wine glass when her vision briefly fogged. I hope I'm not allergic to the vegetables, she thought just before her three companions slumped face-down onto the bar.

  With a start, Nakvin cast frantic glances around the room. All of the other patrons sagged unmoving in their seats or lay sprawled upon the floor. Most of them still seemed to be breathing, but none stirred. She checked her associates’ vitals and was relieved that their pulses, though slowed, were still detectable.

  Nakvin realized with growing alarm that someone had meant to sedate the whole conclave, yet she alone remained awake. Calming herself, she weighed her options. A glamer would rouse a few of the victims, but singing might alert the culprits. The best course of action was to wait for her enemies to show themselves. She dropped back into her seat, let her upper body collapse upon the counter, and lay still. Her half-closed eyes stayed focused on the door.

  The front doors banged open, admitting a pair of men whose slurred Byport accents, staggering gaits, and pungent odor betrayed their drunkenness. Nakvin doubted that these two had masterminded the mass poisoning. Their indiscreet entrance, combined with their dumbfounded expressions, convinced her that their timing was mere dumb luck.

  The two besotted latecomers took a moment to digest the scene before them; then they began looting the comatose pirates with frantic glee.

  One of the men: a scraggly bear of a fellow, swaggered up the center aisle toward the bar; leaving his younger, slimmer, and even filthier accomplice to work the area near the door.

  An unwelcome note of recognition lit the larger man's face. “'Ey! I know them folk!” he announced like a priggish exam candidate. “That there's old J. P. what's supposed to be one o’ them ever-buggerin’ Gen!”

  “Them's just stories!” his partner snorted. “Don't nobody live more'n a hundred years; ‘specially not no jacker!”

  Nakvin's muscles tensed. The years had acquainted her well with all the slurs lobbed by sodden louts. Those who took offense at Gen could be unruly if given a free hand, and these two were mice in a granary.

  “It's ‘im,” the stout one said. “And ‘e's got this rich little pudding with ‘im. Lets ‘er take the Wheel they say, but she's more useful when a bit o’ trampery's called for.” The bearish sot drew a short, hooked knife. “Seems game for a bit of pro bono work.”

  Nakvin's hand was inching toward the hilt of her own blade when the kitchen doors swung open. Dan emerged from the back wearing a bug-eyed gas mask and packing a scatter gun with its barrel cut down to a nub.

  “Stand down, Blackwell,” the old man's muffled voice warned. “You got your share. Now why don’t you and Jones there crawl back into the sewer?”

  Blackwell stared dumbly as if struggling to understand Dan’s ultimatum. But he drew so quickly that his pistol cracked twice before the shotgun thundered in response. By the time it did, Dan was teetering backward, and his blast sent tile fragments raining from the ceiling. He fell behind the bar amid a cloud reeking of blood and smoke.

  “You can get up now,” Blackwell drawled. “Saw you flinch.”

  Nakvin realized with sudden dread that he was talking to her. There was no point in pretending; even less in cowering like a frightened child. She calmly rose and faced the bearish gunman. Blackwell’s antiquated revolver wasn’t trained on her, but she had no desire to test his speed. She leaned against the bar to disguise her hand’s retreat from her knife.

  “’Ere’s the lay,” Blackwell said. “You take off that fancy smock and toss it over yonder.” He motioned with his gun toward a table on her left.
<
br />   “Right here?” she asked.

  “Isn't nobody ‘ere will mind,” he said, the gun barrel sweeping in a lazy half-circle. “Just me and Jones.”

  Jones, who’d been busy rifling through pockets, paused to watch the show.

  “Look at my eyes,” Nakvin said, hoping that the man’s bigotry would conquer his lust. “Do they look human? Don't you wonder why I'm the only one who missed the slumber party?”

  Blackwell shrugged. “Don't much care.”

  Nakvin lamented that Blackwell’s hypocrisy rivaled his prejudice. “It’ll take more than gunning down an old man to intimidate me,” she said.

  “This'n might’ve been a ‘andful,” Blackwell said, indicating Teg's inert form. “An' that Gennish piece makes a big racket.” His cracked lips parted in a yellowed grin. “Don't ‘ear much o' you but that you can make a man do other than ‘e would a 'tween the sheets.” He stepped toward her, gun raised. “I’ll ‘ave it t'other way round.”

  Jones giggled from the back of the room. Behind him, Nakvin saw a set of eyes like live coals brooding in the shadows of the doorway. There would be no way to contain the carnage unless she acted quickly. “Stop ogling me, and turn around,” she warned Jones.

  Jones looked over his shoulder. When he did, the vicious grin vanished from his face. His eyes and mouth gaped wide.

  “What's she waggin' ‘er tongue about?” asked Blackwell.

  Jones squatted down and squinted into the darkened hallway. “It looks like a dog—at least partways. Got tusks and a lion’s mane.”

  Blackwell gave Nakvin a close look down the barrel of his gun. “Call off yer dog.”

  “What makes you think I can?”

  “It looks t' have the same devilish mark as you.”

  “You could be right,” Nakvin said, “but there's something you don't know.”