Suicide Run Read online

  "Not the Compact or Metis?" asked Tishla.

  Suicide did not add, "Nor Hanar." That call would have come from Tishla herself. "With everyone's loyalties so divided, Amargosa takes precedence over everyone else. At least until we decide who we are, and who we join with. Though Metis pretty much defers to Amargosa on such matters while they hold provisional authority here."

  "Whole thing makes my head hurt," JT added. "I'm already working for the colony, so I'm going with her."

  "Find out Governor Best's wishes," said Tishla. "I can keep Naomi with me until he tells me otherwise." She gave a serious look to Suicide. "I'm taking the baby back to Hanar in a couple of days, assuming the governor is still incapacitated. Let him know he has but to say no if he wants her back in New Lansdorp."

  "What about the local authorities?"

  "If it were Athena in Governor Best's custody, I would want him to keep it a secret, too. Communication between me and him only. He knows how to contact me. Tell him…" Her eyes lowered to look at Naomi, then rose again. "Tell him, in this case, I serve him. And Jayne. If I give the baby back, it will be only to them." She took the baby from her breast and lowered her into a makeshift basinet. "No one knows I'm here but you two. Tell the governor. No one will know when I return to Hanar. I will do whatever he asks of me." She covered herself again.

  "You're a good woman, Tish," said JT.

  She crossed over to him and licked him on the cheek, the way Gelt often did in lieu of kissing. "Be safe." She glanced at Suicide. "Both of you."

  RETROACT: 386 IE, 46 years earlier

  Shandug, Tian

  Cui Jiao-long stalked his wife's hospital room, his jaw set hard. "She's small. She doesn't look like a pilot."

  Cui Ya glared at her husband. "Jiao-long, she's a baby. She's barely over two kilos."

  He pressed his lips thin. "I produced a baby who is almost too small to live."

  "There are babies that are born weighing only two hundred grams. Your own wing commander, if I'm not mistaken, and no one will ever mistake him for tiny."

  "I failed."

  Ya rolled her eyes. "You're a throwback to Earth men of the past. Anything less than perfect threatens your masculinity. Jiao-long, this is your daughter. Your beautiful baby daughter. She needs you, and you need to stop being such an ogre."

  Jiao-long turned and looked out the window of the hospital room. Metallic gray skies darkened Shandug, the capital of Tian, while rain slashed the windows. It came down so hard it blurred the lights of the city. Occasionally, lightning briefly showed the Mongolian Mountains to the northwest in stark relief. "I can't help it, Ya. I can't help thinking she should have been bigger, stronger." He turned to his wife. "She looks like a baby poet."

  "Jiao-long, honey, I love you. But you're being an ass. You're this girl's father. And…" She sat up with obvious discomfort, which meant Ya had taken over the conversation despite Jiao-long's stern demeanor. "I need my husband to step up and be a man. Not a little boy. I didn't marry a little boy."

  Finally, he smiled. "I thought I was your little boy."

  Ya tried to stifle a smile and failed. "Be serious. I offered to let them plant the baby in an artificial womb. She'd have grown bigger, and doctors could monitor her progress more closely."

  "Ya, you know that…"

  "…You're a traditionalist. The problem is you're clinging to traditions that were outmoded in our ancestral land long before they started this world. And not everyone here is Han. There's a whole side of the continent that's nothing but American Afros and Euros who want nothing to do with their ancestral homeland. We're Tianese, sweetheart. Let's raise our daughter to be Tianese."

  Jiao-long finally relaxed. "If you say so, dear."

  "I say so."

  The nurse came in holding a bundle. "Major Cui?"

  Jiao-long turned to face the nurse. "Yes?"

  "Meet your new daughter." She handed him the bundle.

  He could not help it. The little creature with his wife's eyes and his jawline, or the hint of his jaw line beneath the baby fat, locked eyes with him.

  And screamed. Instinct drove Jiao-long to bounce the baby and coo at it. He bent down so Ya could hold the tiny thing. As Ya took her, he reached out his finger. The baby reached up and seized the finger. Immediately, she stopped crying.

  Jiao-long's chest filled with warmth. He would later deny it, but he felt tears forming in the corners of his eyes. "So, little one, maybe there is a bit of dragon in you after all." He looked up at his wife. Her look told him he could never lie to her about the tears. So be it. Ya deserved to see him at his most vulnerable. "So, what do we name our little poet?"

  Ya kissed the little girl on the top of her head. "I like the name Yun."

  The Mandarin name meant "cloud." He liked it. "So, she's like a dream to you."

  "And you," said Ya. "This may be our only child. She is a dream come true."

  "And dreams are like clouds." He leaned in and kissed his daughter on the back of her head. Then he stroked his wife's cheek. "Yun it is."

  2

  The land west of New Lansdorp, Amargosa's capital, lay beyond a river gorge. Rolling hills stretched toward the wayward planet's rising sun. While Suicide watched the sunrise and sunset everyday she was home, she never could get used to the planet's retrograde rotation.

  She saw the smoke before she arrived at the Colony. Black and thick, it made a smear in the morning sky marring a perfect blue. She set her comm on the traffic control channel. "Colony Control, this is Goldeneye, en route on an unscheduled flight. Do you copy?" Only static responded. "Colony Control, Goldeneye, requesting approach vector. Do you copy?"

  Something flashed by the Falcon's port window. She craned her neck to see what it was, then looked down, hoping to see something on the ground. The moment she spotted the crashed commuter shuttle, something slammed into Goldeneye. The right side of her console lit up. "Like a Christmas tree," JT would have said. Suicide hoped she'd never see such a tree. Especially if its lights told her she had lost the right airborne engine and its accompanying stabilizer. In orbit, the Falcon would have drifted, having thrusters enough to park it in a fairly stable orbit. At five thousand meters, gravity and drag reigned supreme. The Falcon turned on its side and began its dive.

  Suicide used the orbital thrusters to level off her descent. The Goldeneye would not have a smooth landing, but she could prevent a fatal one. Maybe. The speed of her descent slowed, but the ship still moved at seven hundred klicks an hour. She could slow the ship with the remaining airborne engine and some of the starboard thrusters, but she still required lift. The flight computer protested that thrusters were not rated for atmospheric flight, that fuel leaked at an alarming rate, and that her trim was deteriorating.

  The ship started clipping treetops. She did not fight it as the ship's speed would do more damage to the trees than to the hull. And trees at these speeds made excellent braking.

  Maybe not excellent. When the ship emerged from the forest, it spun laterally. Suicide gave up fighting it with thrusters. JT is going to kill me for losing his ship, came to mind first. Who the hell is shooting at aircraft? came second.

  Pitch black came third.

  The lycanth had bad breath, which meant the wolf-like creature had hunted just before joining the rescue effort. The stench hit Suicide in the face as she woke. She flinched when she saw the beast's bared teeth inches from her face. Only its warbling, a language she would never understand, told her this one was sapient.

  "Hey, boy," she said in a weak whisper. "What are you doing on this side of the world?"

  The lycanth growled and stood on its hind legs, revealing its larger than average height. It looked…

  Miffed?

  "Oh, you're female." Suicide felt a little bit of strength returning to her voice. "Sorry. Always seems to be the males of your kind I meet."

  The lycanth gave a grunt that not so much acknowledged the apology as it signaled the subject was closed. She dropped to
all fours again and warbled in a tone of concern.

  "Let me check." She began by moving her feet, then bending each knee in turn. Nothing hurt below the waist yet, but she had to move her hips. Her back and head were another story. She lifted her arms and squeezed her hands into fists before stretching them. "Unless I have a wound you're not telling me about, I think I'm okay. I'll need to get out of this seat first."

  The lycanth grunted again, turned her head, and yowled at someone outside. Suicide hoped it was a Gelt settler. They could translate the lycanth's incomprehensible language. Instead, a human woman appeared, trying to maintain her balance as she navigated from the aft of the ship. Suicide recognized her, knew her to be about seventeen now. The woman carried herself as someone much older and in authority. War did that to some people. JT had been one. There were four others, two of them now off-world.

  "They don't call you 'Suicide' for nothing," said the woman.

  "Ellie Nardino. What are you doing here?" Suicide struggled with her restraints, which had somehow remained locked after the crash. Normally, they slackened to allow crew and passengers to escape the craft.

  "Saving your butt," said Nardino. She made her way to Suicide's seat and triggered the release. "The good news is the ship put out its own fires. The bad news is it'll never fly again." She looked around. "Where's JT?"

  "Walden, pretending to be a civilian." A frown tugged at Suicide's lips. "I supposed that's going to change now."

  "Well, he'll need a new ship, anyway."

  Suicide pushed herself out of the pilot's seat. Her shoulders moved fine, but pain shot through her back. She would not know how badly until she exited the ship and could move. "Who's shooting at anything overhead?"

  Nardino's eyes narrowed. "We found a few abandoned railguns, the shoulder-mounted jobs like we used in the war. Don't suppose that's war surplus, do you?"

  Suicide used her arms to support herself as she made her way aft, her back protesting any movement. "I know Amargosa's status is in limbo as long as Metis is technically the parent world. But I seriously doubt either world has started counting war machines as personal arms." She made her way into the passenger compartment and down the ramp at the far end, where a wide hatch had opened.

  Outside, she stretched, her back popping. Some of the pain dissipated immediately, but not all of it. She would need to see a doctor or a chiropractor before she did anymore flying.

  Nardino bounded down the ramp, her time in the resistance doing nothing to contain the spring of her youth. The lycanth trotted along on all fours, panting like some mutant German shepherd born with gigantism. She rose on her hind legs once she hit the ground, towering over the human women.

  Suicide looked up at the Goldeneye. Her heart sank. The starboard stabilizer had been sheered completely off, and the jet engine on that side hung blackened and cracked along the hull. The main orbital thruster on that side of the ship no longer existed. She suspected it now lay kilometers back in a trail of blackened scrap metal along with the remains of the stabilizer.

  "Wow," she said. "I've had some hairy landings, but I don't think I've ever done it with half the ship destroyed."

  The lycanth grunted, as though she understood what Suicide talked about. The beasts could understand Humanic, at least somewhat, but they had lived as hunter-gatherers before the Gelt invasion. Even now, the sapient ones still preferred wandering the forests and hunting for wild game. Yet during the last days of the Gelt occupation, Suicide had seen what they could do. They handled weapons. They talked to humans via defecting Gelt, who could extrapolate languages in mere hours. They rendered medical care and pulled downed pilots from their stricken craft.

  And at Nardino's command, a pack of them devoured a warlord in the most bizarre Section 11 execution she had ever witnessed.

  "I thought you were on the far side of the planet with her kind." She pointed to the lycanth as she spoke to Nardino.

  Nardino shrugged, her fur wrap shifting as she did. "Madam Best sent word to me. The pack I'd been staying with followed me to a contact post. We came here as soon as we could."

  "You've heard from Jayne Best?"

  The lycanth's grumble told Suicide not to get her hopes up.

  "She disappeared before I could get here." Nardino began walking toward a bat wagon, a military-grade articulated vehicle used by the settlers since long before either woman had been born. "She called as soon as her husband was shot."

  "Any sign of the daughters?" She opted not to tell her about the baby.

  "The surviving Thulians told us she'd sent the infant daughter off someplace safe." Nardino stopped and leveled a hard gaze at Suicide. "And if you know where, I don't want to know. Not until we know what's going on?"

  "Which is…?"

  Nardino looked off to the west. The smoke still rose, thick and black, but in separate columns now. "Someone tried to take out the Thulian Colony."

  A chill went down Suicide's aching spine.

  "They haven't destroyed the Colony," said Nardino. "But they'd have been better off if a tornado had passed through it."

  The smoke rose from the center of a town that had not existed two years before. Four buildings burned around the edge of a crater. They produced most of the smoke. Beyond the blast site, several buildings smoldered, their polyglaze windows shattered. Colonial Guard, local police, and volunteer rescuers scurried about the place, no civilians in evidence.

  "I got here just after the blast happened," said Nardino. "We evacuated everyone to the hills beyond the Colony."

  "The Clinic?" asked Suicide. The Clinic had been the whole point of the Colony, the center of Thulian presence in this part of space now that they had collapsed the Yaphit Pass. Here, human immortality would become a reality, not just something achieved through periodic treatments.

  "Underground." Nardino guided the bat wagon over to an area filled with emergency vehicles. "You'd know that if you'd accept their invitation."

  "I'm not ready to be immortal." Suicide climbed out and looked around at the devastation. "Yet." Some mornings, she questioned that herself. She followed Nardino to a nano-tent that had been setup as a clinic. The tent had been configured for a large amount of people, but Suicide could see where the fabric strained in a few places. "Camping gear?"

  "Half the emergency services were in the blast zone," said Nardino. "According to the acting chief…"

  "Acting chief?"

  Nardino's gaze went back toward the crater and the burning buildings. "Fortunately, Madam Best put part of law enforcement and emergency services in the Colonial Guard barracks outside of town." A Gelt man in a medical smock approached them. Nardino turned to face him. "Doctor, this is Commander Cui, who's working on behalf of the provisional government. She crashed on her way here. Can you look at her back before she gets started?"

  The Gelt gave a little head bow. "Commander, I'm Healer Hert." He paused. "Yes, I'm aware that's a pun in one of your languages. Would you come this way?"

  Suicide followed him to an empty examining table and removed her tunic when Hert asked. The Gelt man ran his finger up and down her back, pressing in certain spots.

  "I didn't see any Gelt outside," she said. "Are you all hiding in here?"

  Hert found a particularly tender spot and pressed the heel of his hand into it. When Suicide grunted from the shift beneath her skin, he said, "My people are well aware we're still seen as invaders. The city's on fire, so we're keeping to the shadows until things calm down. You'll notice Chapaan came to us with only lycanths and other humans."

  The use of Nardino's war name made Suicide smile. The remaining Gelt settlers on Amargosa still revered the girl, even if she went over the pole to get away from people, human or otherwise. "So, you're from around here?"

  Hert took Suicide by the shoulders and turned her left, then right. Her back cracked several times, once rather uncomfortably. "I'm actually a xenobiologist from Hanar. The First Citizen sent me to see if we could apply Thulian techniques to my
own species."

  Suicide, despite Hert wrenching her back, smiled. Would he, she wondered, be shocked to know that same First Citizen, at that moment, stayed in a shabby lake cabin in the Plains, cooking and cleaning for a human pilot barely old enough to drink? She decided to keep that to herself. "You're not a physician."

  "Oh, I very much am. And I learned human medicine from Dr. Troughton, the First Citizen's personal physician." Hert pushed on the center of her back. The vertebrae snapped into a new position.

  Suicide found she could suddenly move pain-free. "That's incredible. Have you studied human anatomy long?"

  "The human and Gelt spines are remarkably similar," said Hert, "to the point where I just need to feel the spine. The same type of pressure resets the back into position for both species."

  She wondered, as Hert gave her back her tunic, how the two species could be so similar yet have radically different molecules driving their respective genetics. As the shirt came down, she found herself face-to-face with a man in a Colonial Guard uniform. He was a euro, but his slightly off-color skin tone pegged him as Thulian.

  "Commander Cui? I'm Colonel Fisher Sheridan, barracks commander for this enclave." He thrust a hand at her. "Glad to see you made it here in one piece."

  She shook Sheridan's hand. "Colonel in the Guard. And you're Thulian?"

  "Sent here before the collapse of the Pass," said Sheridan.

  "Who's shooting at aircraft? And how did someone hit the Colony, anyway? Amargosa practically has its own small Navy in orbit."

  Sheridan pressed his lips thin. "Metisian and Hanarian ships. It's almost like the Compact doesn't want us back now. As for who's shooting, we'd like to know. We only know we were hit by a needle."

  "A needle?" She had not seen one of those since the Polygamy Wars. "Pretty surgical. Surprised they didn't go for the Clinic."