The boy sees me coming. He keeps firing.
There is no way I can stop the tank firing on him. No way to disable or destroy it before the plasma tears his fragile body into two. I launch into a dive.
I hit him hard, but there’s nothing I can do about that.
I curl him up in my one good arm and allow the momentum of my run, and the weight of the Widow, to do the rest.
We roll for maybe thirty metres, but I keep my arm rigid around him like a cage. There’s no doubt it will hurt him, but it might be enough to save his life.
A cluster of sensors tell me the plasma has struck about the area where the kidneys might be in the human body. They also tell me that dozens of systems in that area have shut down and that my right leg is receiving intermittent signals from the main neural pathways. I can hardly walk, let alone run.
I stumble, half-carrying, half-dragging the boy and head for the cover of one the compound’s low buildings. I know the tank will reach us in seconds.
I throw him down and lean against the wall, trying to formulate a plan.
The clock reads four minutes, eight seconds. Less than a minute and they’re out.
There is only one play left.
I glance down at the boy and wish, in that moment, he could see my face, instead of the demon from his nightmares. But he can’t. “Go now,” I say. “I’ll get you the window you need to escape.”
He knows they can’t make it out without this; he knows I am not coming. I allow myself to believe I can see something approaching forgiveness in his eyes.
I lift the bandolier of grenades from his shoulder, and turn away from him. I slam a reload into my remaining railgun as I turn the corner and open fire.
It was never my intention to escape. As I listened to my interrogator, I could not help but analyse what he was saying and what that meant for the war. When They had finished their bombardment, they occupied what was left of our colonies because we were easily subjugated. Most colonies have been annexed and are now governed by Them, and what is left of humanity exists at Their whim and within Their prison of night.
But the resistance has been able to attack heavily guarded compounds and surgically remove precisely what it needs to control Widows. They were able to disable and attack my Battle Group in the drop zone. They knew we were coming. Their weaponry, even though it is a scarce resource to them, is military in origin. Now, this last raid might begin to turn the tide in the war.
There is only one way the resistance could have obtained all that information and materieclass="underline" they have informants in positions of considerable responsibility. If I know this, and if I am captured, then so will They.
There is only one way to protect that information.
I was once an immortal weapon of war, but now I can finally find peace in death. A permanent sleep from which I will never wake—and no more will die by my hand. I have found my retribution. I have given humanity the tools to free itself.
In my mind, I can see an orange flower, moving gently in the breeze as the darkness comes.
I am death.
Yet finally, I am gone.
Nicolette Barischoff
Pirate Songs
Originally published by The Future Fire in the anthology Accessing the Future
The floater turned out to be one of those shiny, sky island multi-deck passenger deals that would occasionally completely lose its shit in the middle of a jump.
This one would have been alright—various backup systems humming away, fifty or sixty first-colony licensed pilots determined to discover just what went wrong—had it not jumped straight into something else. Probably a garbage scow; there were a lot of garbage scows this far out. Now, the ship just drifted, listing and rolling like a fat, pretty corpse.
The Dustpan’s crew all had their faces flat against the port windows, eyeing it like a bunch of dogs with tongues out. That was the only reason Rumer had let them go salvage. You pass up a big, beautiful floater like that, you never get your men to do anything useful ever again.
We don’t got the time or space to pull her apart, he’d told them. No scrapping. Get yourselves something small and shiny and get back.
For the most part, they’d listened, filling up their suit-packs with the sorts of little things you always find on a floating hotel like that; alcohol in expensive-looking bottles, VR games with an obscene number of attachments, the palm and wrist PCs that were only considered valuable out here where nobody could afford them. Bottles and needles from a well-stocked sick bay, cards, cash, the turtles out of an elaborate terrarium…Kell, the mutinous asshole, had tried to haul back two of those sultry-voiced concierge kiosks, and a broken servitor droid.
Rumer wasn’t sure which of them had brought back the girl.
She looked to be about fifteen, but to Rumer Pilgrim, anybody not born and raised out of New Pelican looked young.
She didn’t have to be conscious to tell you she was far from home, either Earth or first colonies…German, Canadian, American, some single-nation settlement; she was that same kind of glass-house pretty. Well fed, with pale, untouched, swany skin, and a long, long waterfall of hair that somebody brushed out for her every morning, and a pale pink mouth that looked like it was used to pouting. When her eyes did flicker open for a split-second at a time, he could see they were a pale and brittle green.
The crew crowded around that narrow infirmary bunk for a full day and a half. Diallo, a skinny kid from the pan-Africas with half a field medic’s education and a permanent shit-eating grin, actually left the pilot’s chair to bandage her head wound. And Kell, his lecherous one-eyed bulldog of a first mate, seemed to think he was going to wake her by flicking her nipples.
“Haven’t even seen one like her in a while,” he said, rubbing his scrap glass eye, a sort of endearing nervous tick once you got to know him. “Kind of forgot they made ‘em like this.”
“With two eyes and two whole titties?” said Diallo. “Not every woman’s like your New Pelican dock-workers, Kell. Back up, man, an’ stop gettin’ in the light. This one’s never seen anything ugly as you.”
Kell grinned. “I’m sure she’ll just love that child-fucker smile you got.”
Rumer ignored their dick-swinging. “Who brought her?” he asked.
Diallo shrugged. “She was the only thing alive on that boat, Captain, her and that mess o’ turtles.”
Rumer frowned. “Bad time to have a hitchhiker, you forget that already? What’re you thinking we’re gonna do with her when we have to make our drop?”
“Don’t ask me,” said Kell, “you ask me, we shouldn’t have the stuff in the first place.”
“Right. But I didn’t ask you, and we do have the stuff, and we’re going to have to make a drop before much else happens.”
“You mean before the shit’s no damn good to anybody, or before big Papa Kang figures out who took it and sends a team after us? Because I can guarantee you that second thing’s already happened.”
“I’m thinking, Captain,” said Diallo, making the sort of diplomatic silencing gesture that made Rumer like him, “she is very far from home. She might help. With carrying, with distribution. In exchange for passage, you know.”
Rumer cocked his head. Nodded.
“It’s useful to have someone who looks like her, where we are going, what we are doing. People trust someone who looks like that. Nice pretty white face. They’ll take it from her. No need to tell her where it comes from.”