Qarotti, Eron 14, 5531 – First Shift

Drusira approached the out-ward entrance of the Dragon’s Lair, hoping that the hooded figure she saw standing in the dim yellow light wasn’t actually as familiar as it seemed. Instinctively, she dropped her gaze to the snow, only realizing belatedly what she had done. Watching the light play over the snow, she realized how unusual it was that the light was on in the first place. The out-ward entrance was the more discrete one, used by legit employees and less-than-legit hirelings like herself. The core-ward entrance was meant for visitors to the rec-hall throughout any given solar.

It was then she noticed the heavy rifle held in the figure’s hands. Drusira generally kept herself as far from guns as possible, but she’d learned to recognize when one could be brought into the conversation at a moment’s notice. This one was aimed in her general direction, as deceptively lazy as the grip was.

She was three mitras away when a voice emerged from beneath the hood.

“[By the Father’s aching balls, what now?] Hey, that’s far enough.”

Hope evaporated in her chest and the night replaced it. Drusira froze in her tracks as much from fear as much as the command. There was no doubt. Nordique was a common enough tongue to hear in the colony, but there was no mistaking the rest. The accent, the gravelly, unwell quality in the voice. She’d recognize it anywhere.

“Hood down,” Uncle Roberre said. “Let’s see that face.”

She reached up slowly, making sure he could see her hands were empty. She pulled back the hood on her light thermal coat, giving the wind an opportunity to snatch at her hair. Her uncle didn’t remove his hood, but he did let a darkly amused chuckle bubble out from beneath it.

“Well, ain’t this a surprise! I ain’t seen you this lunar. I was starting to wonder if you’d been picked off by one of the vermin that crawl around in those tunnels of yours.”

Despite the frigid air, Drusira felt her cheeks flush with heat. She shifted her feet in the snow uncomfortably, hating herself for it. She tried to brush the comment and its implications aside. “I need to get in, got a delivery to make, Onc.”

“You’re still such a child,” Roberre said. She could imagine the cruel slash stretching across his face in the approximation of a smile. “A little teasing, and you get so upset. Maybe I hit true?”

She felt it. The urge to rise to the challenge, to answer his accusations, to be drawn into yet another argument about the spiritual decay she was destined for unless she embraced the Father. She managed to suppress the urge by shifting her focus.

“Why is the light on?”

Roberre looked up at the overhead light, the shadows on his face chased away as the hood tipped back. His pale, bald head and short but midnight black beard emerged. When he looked back at her, it was with anger, confusion, and, amazingly, fear.

“Something bad happened, that’s what.” He searched the night to either side of her. “Blood will flow and heads will roll for this, Niz. Mark my words.”

“What was it?”

“Best you don’t know. Best I don’t say, at least. I don’t know nothing, and if someone asks, you better say you don’t know nothing, either.” He bared dirty teeth and spat in the snow. He moved aside and pointed at the door with his chin. “Now, go on. I need to finish my e-cart before they call me back in.”

Drusira stepped past him into the building. Roberre pulled his hood up as she did, obscuring his face once more. As she entered the stairwell, the smell of coppery human blood hit her half-frozen nostrils, brushing aside the stink of old piss. Wrinkling her nose, she peered up at the top floor through the stairwell as it coiled and climbed. Though the building usually had at least a dozen people in it at any given moment, not a single sound found its way into the stairwell. It didn’t feel right.

The deathly silence was broken as Drusira began making her way towards the third level. Her boots, made of lightweight metals, made clicking sounds as she climbed, the echoes fluttering around her.

She took the stairs two at a time, the effort warming her up quickly. Her thermal coat was long, nearly to her ankles, and the heat had gone from comfortable to stifling in seconds. While the material was thin, it proved very well insulated. She peeled the coat’s magnetic seals apart and clouds of steam escaped. Simultaneously, the coat’s white surface shimmered and turned a non-reflective black.

Speculations bounced in her mind, buzzing around her thoughts like over-eager drones from an EnterNet feed. She knew what the Dragon’s Lair was. She’d known since her mother started crawling home to their complex half out of her mind on dragon’s blood, covered in a chemical reek and leaking whatever ‘donations’ she’d accepted from the ‘Generous Sīdus’ of the evening. But nothing violent ever happened there. Everyone was too busy rutting or getting high to want to hurt anyone. But that was unmistakably blood in the air, and the way Roberre had looked…something was wrong.

It was only as she opened the door onto the third level, and she caught the scent of human blood mixed with something nauseatingly sweet that she remembered the last time the Lair had felt like this. Less than a cycle ago, she’d had to make another delivery to the twins, and the hallway had smelled just like it did now. Eyes wide, she looked around. Dragon’s blood. That was what she smelled mixed in with the rest. Had more dragons died?

Drusira didn’t hate the animals that the twins harvested to make their drugs, but she didn’t exactly care about their well-being, either. She understood that it wasn’t the animals’ fault, they were being exploited, just like everyone else in the system. Fact was, however, the Dragon’s Lair was the only source of dragon’s blood for the colony. No one else had managed to keep the tarnished things alive long enough to get much out of them, let alone to get them to reproduce. If they were down even one dragon, that meant that there could be big changes to the landscape if other orgos could step in and pick up whatever slack appeared.

She stepped onto the third level and cautiously made her way to the right. She looked down the hallway towards the room where she knew they kept the dragons. Three armed men peered through the open door of a room at the far end of the hall, pointing things out and nudging each other. It was the third door on the right-hand side of the hall, and if she remembered right, that was the one they called the harvest room.

The weak hall lighting glinted off something that drew her attention. On the floor plates between her position and the guards, spatters of dark liquid formed a trail. It started in the room they were fixated on, travelled across the hall to a room she couldn’t see, and then ran past where she stood to a room behind her, lined with thermal coats. She retreated away from the corner, taking care to watch her step. As quietly as she could, she made her way to the left, where the twins’ office and living quarters were.

Voices drifted to her as she crept closer. She recognized two of them right away. The twins of course. But there was a third, feminine voice she picked out humming and buzzing through the gap in the twins’ office door. The metal frame was warped and rusted in places, and the reader-plate next to it was broken. The door itself had been slid most of the way closed, leaving a gap only a few cems wide. It allowed a slash of bluish light to spill into the hallway. The third voice was filled with a barely restrained rage. The twins sounded terrified when they responded. Drusira started turning things over in her mind, trying to fit them together.

Who’s this, now? She brought herself up short, suddenly smelling an opportunity.

Her actual job had been to hand-deliver a data-stick from a Father-forgotten orgo called the Ashen Veil. She pressed a gloved pair of fingers against her coat’s left breast, and felt it in the secret pocket she’d cut into the lining. The conversation in the room, however, presented an intriguing new possibility.

Runners could, technically, transport information just as easily as physical things. If the twins were scared of her, she was probably their boss, the person called Malice by the other tunnel runners. If so, there were a lot of people that would pay to know what was going on in that room.

Drusira began to move again, as silently as possible, making her way cem by excruciating cem. She sidled up to the doorframe, keeping the slim opening on her right. The third voice had was clear enough at that distance that Drusira had no problem understanding it. She was also close enough to recognize the fuzzy quality of a holo-call at the voice’s edges. She relaxed a degree. So Malice wasn’t physically in the room, at least.

“—Consider what happened the last time someone interrupted our operations under your supervision. Alevgeni’s fate will be a comforting bedtime story in comparison to what I have in store for you if I can’t find other means to satisfy my obligation. Are you familiar with that term, ‘Obligation?’ I ask because it seems like you have difficulty fulfilling the ones you owe me, quite literally to save your tarnished fucking lives.”

Obligations? To who? Who in the Father’s spacious asshole was above Malice in the colony’s underworld? Hm. What if it was someone not working with the criminal outfits? That’d be something, wouldn’t it?

Drusira considered the Circle. Ridiculous. The Knights and Keepers would both execute Malice on the spot if they knew half of the rot she was supposed to be involved with. All the illegal firepower and gang enforcers in the galaxy wouldn’t save her if she ran afoul of them. Once, Drusira had seen a Knight face down a fully armed kill-squad from the Unseen Serpent, and walk out of the wreckage covered in blood-frost and steaming gore.

The underground orgos? The so-called resistance had some decently sized pull despite their pitiful states. Still, for the most part, they were either terrified of Malice or wasting bodies trying to break her. Drusira couldn’t imagine fear as the motivator, but what about raw annoyance? Could she be trying to buy peace from one of the others?

“Malice, please, we can make this right,” a feminine voice said in the room, terror shaking each word to pieces as it emerged. Taelina.

“Please. I wouldn’t trust either of you to throttle a colony stray in an alley. I’m going to have some of my associates pay Veshrin and his doctor friend a visit. Then we’ll tidy everything up while I consider whether or not the Lair needs new management.”

Veshrin? Drusira had never heard the name, but she filed it away in any case.

“I don’t see why this is our fault, honestly. We hired him, but you cleared him.” A deep, masculine voice, obviously sulking. Lyulian.

Silence stretched on before Malice responded, in a tone as biting as the wind outside, “I’m going to come down there and get rid of all the distractions in that fucking building, starting with the one hanging between your idiot legs.”

Taelina said something plaintive in Martian, then burst into tears. She continued talking, but only half of it sounded like Germaine. Her voice was too thick for Drusira to understand after a moment, so she gave up trying. Lyulian started apologizing profusely. Apparently he’d finally gotten enough blood to his brain to realize who he was mouthing off to.

While they were busy, Drusira decided to risk a glance into the room. She shifted and strained forward until she could snatch a big enough glimpse. Taelina was sitting at the large dingy ultra-plastic desk that the twins thought made them look official. It dominated the tiny common area flanked by their bedrooms. Her back was to Drusira, her blonde head rising just above the back of the old chair she sat in. Lyulian, gangly limbs crossed, stood on her right and leaned against the desk. Though his chest faced Drusira, he was looking at Taelina, his long nose in distinct profile. Between them a head and shoulders emerged from a holo-field projector sitting on the desk. Drusira was at the perfect angle to see it.

A woman with sharp features and a generous mouth glared at Lyulian with a single furious eye. The other was covered in a self-adhering patch of some kind of dark material. Drusira didn’t recognize her. She was certain at least that she would never forget that face, or the way her spine seemed to fuse in place when it felt like Malice’s eye settled on her position.

Drusira yanked her head back so fast she had to catch her balance. She stopped breathing. Her heart may have frozen solid. It had only been an instant but that had been enough. In a flash, all thoughts of extra rations and amateur espionage evaporated.

Was she crazy? She was only sixteen. Malice could kill her. Kill her. Drusira scoffed mentally. If the twins caught her, they’d kill her themselves. She didn’t have an affiliation to hide behind. She was risking her life, and for what, extra rations? What was the point to more rations if she wasn’t around to spend them?

That was enough to finally convince Drusira that she had been reckless enough with her life for one night. She pushed off the wall and, as quickly and quietly as possible, made for the out-ward exit. She ran down the stairs when she hit them, her boots clicking the whole way. She sealed the thermal coat across her torso as she went, causing the surface to return to its white state as the heating elements activated.

She popped through the door, and found the area around the entrance…empty. Roberre was nowhere to be seen, thankfully, and within a few long strides of her legs, she had built up momentum and was off into the night.

Drusira only remembered that she hadn’t actually done her job when she officially stepped off of the Lair’s plot of land, but by then she’d decided that no force on the world’s frozen ass could force her back into that building. If the Ashen Veil had a problem with that, well, then she’d take her chances. Maybe she could trade them something else to calm them down. If they couldn’t be calmed, maybe she’d trade for a place to hide with someone else. She knew the blood production was slowing down, and that someone named Veshrin and his doctor friend were about to meet terrible ends at the hands of Malice. Unless Veshrin turned out to be someone important, his death wouldn’t amount to much, but the blood aspect was probably worth her weight in rations—she hoped.

The ring’s buildings started to flow past faster as she found her rhythm. The soles of her boots steamed as they melted any ice or snow they came in contact with, teeth biting deeply and giving each step a sense of solidity. Her thoughts turned towards the next clients on her list. Following the mental map she had developed, if she went through the access tunnels in the next ring over, she’d come out—

Something flew past Drusira’s face, and a half-second later, a puff of snow exploded to her right. She was so startled she lost her balance throwing herself to the side. She crashed into the snow and rolled to a hard stop against a pile of snow at the foot of a building. When she landed she bit her tongue and had to swallow the shriek that tried to burst out of her.

She looked around wildly. She lay in the shadows cast from the building as the moons glowed behind it. Half of the buildings around her were lit, with inhabitants moving around behind the glass or frosted bio-plastic sheets. None of them were looking outside. The foot-path was empty, the closest people tiny dots seemingly half a sextant away. She scanned the roof edges of the three- and four-level buildings to her left, but there was no one there either.

She got to her feet, fighting the bone-deep cold trying to devour her legs due to the snow caking them after her fall. She turned around, intending to run back the way way she came and find another route to a safe tunnel, but stopped before she made it two steps.

Less than ten mitras away a vaguely cylindrical speeder had materialized, hovering just above the snow. The thrusters at the front and rear burned with turquoise fire. Dismounting it was a long-limbed figure. Fixed to its face was a black, featureless mask, but by the white-blonde hair dancing on the wind it was easy to recognize Lyulian Zvezhan. In his left hand he held a pole roughly three-quarters as long as his arm. One end, dangling near the snow as he drew himself to his full height, swarmed with arcs of blue lightning.

“She said someone had been watching us, and here you are,” he said good naturedly.

“Wait,” Drusira said. Before she could stop herself, she blurted, “I didn’t hear anything!”

To her surprise, when he responded, he sounded regretful. “You know, good runners are hard to find, and you’re the best. Quick, efficient, discrete. In fact, I hear you’re the fastest of all the runners in the colony. Fast like you could have been one of the corpo-athletes for the Games, if you hadn’t had the misfortune to be born here like Tay and me. It’d be a waste to kill you, I think.”

Hope, tiny but bright, flickered to life inside her.

He lowered his head, as if in thought. “Malice knows someone was watching, but…she doesn’t know who. I could give her anyone, and it’d probably work. But Tay knows it was you. If I come back without you, it’ll be my ass that’ll pay the price to keep her quiet, so I can’t just let you go.”

Because she didn’t know what else to say, Drusira uttered a soft, “Oh.”

His head snapped up. “I have an idea. You’re fast enough that Tay might accept it if I tell her you escaped. I missed my first shot—not a lie—and you got spooked and I lost you in the rings. But we have to make it real.”

Drusira’s brows came together. “I…I don’t understand.”

“Run, silly thing. You need to run.”

“Why can’t you just let me go? You just said that your sister would believe it.”

“She’s very good at seeing through my lies, unless I believe them, at least a little. Besides, don’t you think you can outrun me? This is basically the same as letting you go, no?”

“But…the speeder.” Her focus shifted to it, floating just behind him. No matter how fast she was, she couldn’t outrun that thing, even if every path were fully cleared.

He nodded, the light from the stun-rod reflecting off his mask’s smooth surface. “It doesn’t seem very ‘fair’ if I’m on a speeder, and you’re on your own two feet, does it? You’re right. Alright, you’ve convinced me. You run, I give chase, both of us on our own natural abilities. How’s that sound? Better?”

Her gaze swept the windows of the buildings still showing signs of life. She didn’t see anyone walking the halls or in any of the rooms now. They had all vanished into the void.

“Oh, come on, zayetu, you know where you are. None of these people would care if I were to start cutting you open right here on the path. I doubt the sextant’s Knight is anywhere nearby right now, either. Now, answer me, are my terms acceptable?”

Drusira didn’t answer in words. Instead, she turned on her heels and started pumping her legs, driving her boots through the snow. She ran for her life. Lyulian’s laugh chased her.

After maybe half a minute of flat out sprinting, and enough turns that she felt close to lost, she slowed. Her heart pumped powerfully, her body buzzing with adrenaline. She had covered enough ground that she felt safe risking a look over her shoulder. She was stunned to discover Lyulian’s form appearing at the mouth of the alley she had just emerged from, stun-rod glowing and clouds of powdery snow rising around him.

She pushed herself even more, pouring on speed, her heart practically humming with terror. Impossible. How had he caught up to her? He was taller, but he was also heavier, and the snow was treacherous to anyone without the right gear.

Time ceased to have any meaning. There was only the next step, and the step after that, on and on through the night. She passed between two four story residential complexes set a mere body-width apart, the passage between them soaked in shadow. When she emerged on the other side, she turned to the right and took off towards the tunnel access she was most confident she could find in the area. She didn’t bother asking any of the people she dodged around or shoved out of her way for help, knowing that Lyulian was right. They wouldn’t involve themselves.

She passed by a single hut on an absurdly oversized plot of land nestled between two large buildings, and cut across its lot. A crackling bolt of light flew past her left temple. She screamed and threw herself forward, tucking into a roll. She bounced off one of the poles marking the corner of the lot, and felt something crack in her right shoulder.

The momentum carried Drusira most of the way to her feet, and naked desperation did the rest, her boots finding enough solid ground through the snow to keep her hurtling forward. She tasted blood, and her nose and face burned from the cold. The entrance she was aiming for was just in the next ring, an unsecured hatch outside a rec hall undergoing kind of maintenance. She begged her body to carry her a little further.

Her lungs desperately clawing for air, Drusira lost her footing and stumbled across a patch of snow. She collided with a building, narrowly avoiding landing face-first. She had almost crashed into the door panels, the reader less than five cems from her skull. She was dazed for a second, the world pulsing brighter and going soft. She blinked rapidly, and forced herself to look in the direction she’d come from. Lyulian was less than thirty mitras behind her, and he didn’t even seem winded. She gaped in horrified wonder. She had felt herself slowing, but had wanted to believe it would be enough. How could he be so fast? He moved with a machine-like precision, his head steady, one arm pumping as the other tried to aim another shot from the stun-rod.

The door hummed behind her as it opened. There wasn’t time to think. Before Lyulian could fire, Drusira threw herself through the opening, running into a round-figured middle-aged woman in a thick coat. The woman screamed, arms flailing as Drusira rode her to the ground and immediately rolled off her. Drusira landed on her injured shoulder and screamed, clutching it with one hand while forcing herself to her feet.

They were in a hallway lined with mail slots, and it looked like it cut through the building, with two doors appearing across from each other at the mid-point. Without offering a second glance at the fallen woman, she started running again, knowing Lyulian was right behind her. She had just passed the mid-point doors when the woman screamed again, but it quickly turned into a gurgle. Drusira looked back, and in a flash saw what had happened.

Lyulian had jammed the sparking end of the Stun-rod into the woman’s throat, and her body was doing a hideous dance in place, her limbs moving spasmodically. He loomed over the woman, and turned his attention to Drusira again just as the woman went limp and fell to the floor, bonelessly. Snow and waves of cold blew into the hallway with Lyulian as he stepped over the woman’s body. The chill blowing across her cheeks prompted Drusira to get moving.

She pounded a frantic beat on the door’s release button, and it popped open with a hum and puff of pressurized gases. She was passing through the door when something hit the back of her coat. The scent of burning chemicals filled Drusira’s nose. The coat turned black and fell open, the electromagnetic seal failing along with the heating coils. She didn’t break stride to investigate. Only one thing could have happened, and the fact she was still running meant that the stun-round hadn’t possessed enough charge to affect her after killing the coat.

The Lustrathiran cold stabbed into any flesh it could reach, thousands of fangs sinking into her at once. She felt like she was going to pass out if she didn’t stop to breathe. She could feel herself cry, but she couldn’t hear it over the sound of blood in her ears. Visibility had fallen drastically since the chase had begun, wind blown snow shrouding everything around her. She forced herself to keep moving, trusting her memory of the area. She was close, very close. She had to be.

Finally, she could see it just ahead. A boxy, windowless building sat across from the one she’d just left, surrounded by snow-shrouded industrial equipment and empty Silverbound chassis. She hobbled around a piece of industrial equipment over three mitras tall, and began crying with relief. There it was.

The hatch she was looking for had been set into an alcove in the side of the building at waist level, just to the left of its out-ward entrance. Anyone could open it if they knew how to force the right wires to touch once they removed the loose panel. It didn’t matter if the coat was dead, the tunnels were heated, and once she was in there she’d be safe. Lyulian would have to stop chasing her, he wouldn’t know the tunnels like Drusira did.

Ten mitras.

Five.

Zero!

She knelt down, ignoring the pain in her shoulder, and started to reach for the loose panel in the side of the alcove. Her gloved fingers had just begun to pry it free when something stung her between her shoulder-blades. Her body went involuntarily rigid, her spine snapping straight. She was aware, distantly, that she was standing. She heard herself gurgling, felt herself lose control over her body, and then, as suddenly as it had burned through her, the wave of energy stopped. The world rushed back in, drawing close as if to catch her.

She fell backwards in slow-motion. She heard herself land in the snow, ice crunching beneath her weight. The building rose above her, drawing her eye up and up, towards the heavy clouds that had blown in at some point, blotting out the moons. When had that happened?

Then she saw the speeder descending towards her, and the figure on it. It was smaller than Lyulian, that much was obvious even at a distance. It landed outside of her peripheral vision, and she was forced to stare at the sky, unable to move, unable to do anything but listen to the footsteps as they approached her.

Snow kicked up by the figure landed on Drusira’s face. The figure knelt and leaned into her field of view. The same white-blonde hair hung around the figure’s face, which had been obscured beneath a mask like Lyulian’s, reflecting Drusira’s wide eyes and terror stricken face.

“Sometimes, knowledge can be a weapon used against you,” Taelina said. She sounded like one of Drusira’s teachers back when she’d still attended lessons. “You looked behind you because that’s where the threat you knew about would be coming from.”

Lyulian’s voice came from a short distance away. Drusira could hear the fatigued edge to his voice. She took no satisfaction from it. “Father’s balls, Tay. I had her!”

“She was about to get away! I even gave you a head-start. Don’t sulk, Loolie,” Taelina responded. Her voice was light, even playful, in a way that felt entirely out of place. “I won.”

Drusira tried to speak. Nothing came out but unintelligible moans. Her body seemed so far away. She couldn’t feel the cold anymore, or the pain in her shoulder. It was as if she were simply locked out of her own controls.

“Yeah, sure, congratulations,” Lyulian said.

Tears rolled down Drusira’s cheeks. She tried to scream, but all that emerged was a formless negation. Drusira couldn’t even shake her head when Taelina forced her to meet her gaze with gentle but firm pressure as she knelt over her.

“Tell me, lisibei,” Taelina said, running her gloved fingers over Drusira’s lips, “Do you like to play games?”