Year 206
New Federal Era
Tilmfork Fringe Colony
“The Rainy Season”
The day was choked; Darren was closing quickly with at least thirty harriers; and Noa's iron was a-barking. She backpedaled against the drowned turf, losing her footing and crashing onto her hip. She slipped, scrambling out of the mud, and ran away from the shanty-town she had called home. Her fingers were oily and couldn't squeeze the trigger if it came to it. It would. Noa wasn't sure if she saw a rock up ahead, and hoped she didn't. If she did, that was where she would make her stand. Climbing it would be a bitch.
When someone in Tilmfork said the day was choked, they meant one of two things. There were times when the sun set and the moon hadn't risen. It wouldn't rise for hours. In the meantime, all was dark. You listened to the bug song and made love. Otherwise somebody meant that, say bless, so curse, it was a dying day. Sometimes that just meant a death of profession or success. Noa hoped that was the case. She was a horse breaker, a dancer, and a killer. Her business could die in spades.
The good news was she hadn't heard them shoot yet.
Noa stamped heavily through the swarth ramp that grew down in the valley. The leaves' humid stick on her legs – their cuts and rips, peeled loose to her wince. It was wearying. Noa could grin later maybe. She hoped she wouldn't lose her leg. Take her livelihood, her life – not her limbs! She knew people with metal limbs, which hummed low sounds. They treated those limbs like hands of God. Harrow her mind. She hated them.
She had brought herself to one of the many small, sloppy ridges, seeing now that it was, of course – high water for Hell – a great boulder, cast off from the steep hillsides, that lay ahead. Her fingers worked away at the mud against her shirt, letting her rifle painfully strike her sides in free swing for the moment, strapped over her shoulder. The boulder was close enough that the growing cramp and ache would only matter once this ended. Her fingers were more important.
Even with her fingers, her feet still slid gracelessly on the rock's lowest holds. If it were less humid, she might have seemed more worthy; but the tears began to roll down her face and she strained her arms to lift her body without the aid of her feet, which could find no anchoring. Without even a proper hold on the rock, she heard the first bullet. She felt a brittleness in the rock and saw the bullet had plunged into it only an inch from her hand.
She had run out of time to climb the rock and gain cover and advantage. Now she had to brace herself for the worst beneath this dripping rock. She watched her shadow grow another inch, knowing her harriers also had the advantage of shadow from their backs, the setting sun. Noa was glad that the glare was gone at least. Without reason to suspect Darren's men would be so fortified for a trade arrangement, she hadn't bothered to pack heavily for a mid-morning shoot.
The assassination had gone monstrously wrong. She had stopped crying, dazed in a sense by the first bullet, but the tears returned now hotly. So she began firing.
Darren had been in her sights. He was speaking with a Federation ambassador. The trade proposed would have given the Federation complete freedom to begin mining operations in the [Place Name] Valley. The Federation hadn't even landed a ship in this colony for thirty years. That Darren had let them now was a testament to how much he stood to gain. In exchange for the Federation's imposition, which would also include installing a Minister of Affairs to advise the colony's governor, Darren would be granted a seat in the Federal Senate.
What Noa hadn't expected was the sudden hand at her throat, or her own determined shot despite it. She put out Darren's eye, but it wasn't a direct shot; and it exited through his cheek. That she had escaped – involving an imaginative resort to children's play, a spastic wriggling that wrenched her free from her captor and returned to her a fierce crack above her brow against a chimney corner – looked less and less like luck.
Her fingers gripped the trigger well enough, the mud in her joints mostly smeared against her shirt now, stinging the skin beneath as the air sapped heat. She was already reloading. Her body worked its unconscious pattern. Her body wanted to kill.
She had been running from Darren and his guards for hours, had lost them for the afternoon, and wandered farther into the valley than she had ever intended in her life so far. The valley, its dense, sprawling mass, was famous for causing gruesome accidents: twisted and torn limbs, the bites and stings of the big bugs, which were lethal with venom, or the less bodily disappearing fate. The valley's growth hid many pockets where you could fall through but never resurface. When exposed, some were dry pits – as dry as the valley allowed. But others were filled with the rains, and stayed inescapable because of the strong, knotted grasses that grew over them. You could walk across most ways, but the single wrong step that dropped you might not open the other way.
Thus Tilmfork had stayed small and unexpansive in the valley, moving out along the hillsides, where the trees and bush thinned slightly, and where there were sometimes old troves: machines found in the cliffs and slopes.
Had six dropped yet? Noa didn't know. The bullets poured quickly now in both directions; and she kept low, laying herself reluctantly – instinctually – in the stick. It came up to her chin. She hesitated to breathe. Its fumes smelled noxious; and for the first time she wondered what the rains were uncovering in this valley where the ground was poison, only weeds grew, and the hills oozed their black run-off.
Darren and his men had stopped, close enough that they were now each looking for what cover the valley could afford. Some had found thick bracken, while others looked this way and that – inexperienced guards, some Noa knew. The colony was still small enough that you knew most people your own age. She took down Randall with a shot to the head. Bucky fell with a poor shot to his leg and howled in pain. For Noa's concern, that was good enough for her survival.
She rolled in the muck, giving herself a cheap camouflage. At the least maybe they would shoot a less vital part of her.
She tried to keep her eyes narrow. Then she felt a slip. The pooling, seeping floor stretched and yawned; and Noa fell through sideways, but her leg caught in the valley's trap. For a moment she hung, suspended ten feet above the bottom of this mouth of the earth, her leg shaking wildly to free itself. She felt it loosen, and felt the ache in her side dull her senses for a moment as she worked every muscle to escape.
Then she heard a thunderous roar. The fire of iron was distant; and this was her body sounding. She was shot. For whatever fortune, it was enough to shake her leg loose from whatever held it, and she plunged, slamming onto her face and wrists which had tried to support too much weight too late to be effective. She heard another crack and drew her eyes away from her firing arm.
Few bones mixed with empty, waxe-like carapaces marked the place she had fallen and one corner of the hollow, which was perhaps an entire ten feet wide and stopped a foot or two short of the great boulder, Noa thought – a wonder that its weight had not widened it in however many intervening years since its tumble or fall from the valleyside. She could now hear voices approaching, and Bucky's damped shout: “Roderick, get your sorry ass back here and help me up! That's not funny!” The closer voices were quieter until Darren broke.
At first he laughed. He laughed hard. Noa wondered if it was only her mind's phantasm she heard of him sniffling back a tear. And she pictured that tear coming from his god-fucked ruined eye, and what sick residue mixed with his tears and ran yellow down his face until it gathered in the pinched pocket between his nose and cheek. He slapped his knee, fat and smacking even through the shifting and dripping roof. But he was still soured, of course. The eye was hardly worth a grudge, but the valley had stolen his satisfaction, imprisoning her here till she starved. Noa counted to three, cupping her hands over her ears, and pulling her body in a tight ball, her rifle arm pointing from her shoulder down in front of her stomach to her thigh, where her hand sat with splayed fingers. It was a good shot, she was forced to realize when she moved it. Her forefinger twitched in a grieved attempt to move it but fell limply extended.
At three the shots pounded through the muck. Her foot burned and crunched and she bit her tongue to hold back screaming. Each bullet traveled in a pattern: first the gun's signature crack, the sound of a big, hard gun; second, the sound of an air bubble bursting in a bucket of water and the water rolling into it's place; third, a sharp whine as, she pictured, the bullets ran wires and walls through the space between the cavern's top and its walls and floor; last, except for the one that struck her foot, a dull squish. The roof was black and lightless except for tiny rips where many bullets had poured. Those rips still showed the faint and dying purple illumination of the sun at the horizon. It would set in five minutes. If Darren was arrogant, she could move then. Otherwise she might not be able to move until after morning, when Darren could, if he was cautious or especially daring, peek through to see her body.
Thankfully he was arrogant. He always was, from what she heard. Of course, a contract was a contract, except in the cases of friends and family. The mediator had told her as much. He told her that Darren would meet the ambassador at the North Plaza, and from there they would be escorted to [Place Name] Hall. Talks would not take place in the Hall but rather on the [Place Name] Walk. The Walk was an enclosed courtyard several miles long. He also told her that security at the walls would be minimal. He told her his name was Andrew Lighton. It might have been another lie if he was clever. Or it might have been the truth. If she hadn't fallen in this hole, she would have traced the name nonetheless and killed the man whose face she knew. She would have made it slow. She would have danced for him first, raised his interests, worn a mask. Then she would have gotten close, real close. It wasn't usual for a real dancer, of course, but she never held back a spontaneous performance. The originality was the show. She would whisper nothing in his ear, just swishes and warm breath. At her home he would drink. She would cut him into pieces, taking his head first because his terror was unimportant. His total destruction was, or would have been, in someone's eyes.
She wondered what that was – pride or fear or another imagining – that told her to kill him for his betrayal. Was it practical retribution, or moral justice? She suspected the latter. If she had escaped clean, she could have expected to never see him again for what would have been his failure. He seemed a nice enough man, but her mind turned over his signs: the hush of business perhaps quieter than necessary, menacing, worried about being caught, corrected, turned out for the deceiver he was; the subtle touch of his hand that seized her arm when she promised Darren would die easily, to charm her to ease his pretended concern and, so doing, unravel her own natural cautions. She could see clearly his design. It was wicked.
The men's footsteps did not begin immediately. They stood around and laughed and began to tell their stories about seeing their shot hit Noa in the shoulder and knock her down the hole. But the sun had set. The sky grew dark, the faintest light only visible. From in the hole, Noa imagined the full moon and smiled.
It wouldn't be so bad to die beneath the full moon – or the moon as it waned if she survived the night and starved on mudwater. She had grown up on a ranch, and had relished nights when her parents would let her sleep in the barn. She would sleep on the loft by the window and watch the lights, both the native stars and the lights of excavated devices running on empty.
She stretched herself on the ground, smoothing her hand across the slick floor for comfort. The men had gone, and now she was alone in the mires. Her hand created waves on the grime, smearing it back and forth, thinning it, feeling the cold, smooth texture, and a sudden hardness, and a wail of her nails against it: metal. Her eyes stood open in her terror to look at what she had just struck. She convinced herself for what might have been ten minutes by the subtle signs of the moon that she couldn't look. But eventually curiosity held her, and she succumbed, and looked. And it looked back.
She leaped from her place, howling as she threw weight on her shattered foot, falling backward into the mud wall, her eyes fixed on two yellow lights, barely there, textured and glassy. It didn't move, and neither did she for some time, when finally she willed herself to crawl forward, whimpering over her injuries, and recognizing what should have been obvious and had escaped her mind in its frightened state. This was one of the old machines.
She spared a look at the pinpricks of light up above and, satisfied, began flinging globs of mud to dig around the machine. The ground filled in around it each time except for a shallowness barely discernible that kept her digging. She could see bolts and places where metal plates fit together. She could tell now that the eyes were the machine's lights, encased in glass. When she had finally dug around it to see where it was sitting, the sky almost seemed to be turning blue again, the hail of dawn, and she was exhausted. The machine was perhaps five feet tall, round, and there was a clear door, which she opened.
A skeleton sat inside - man or woman, she didn't know, in a green uniform with stars on its breast. She could tell it had crashed, this pilot had perhaps been shot, or maybe distracted, but the dash had lights still. How many years had it sat unused, and still it worked. Bugs scurried on the floor, and she pulled the dead pilot from the seat and stamped at them, clearing the cabin, and then stepped inside.
It was a tight space. She couldn't imagine what it was for, but there was one clear button. It was red and prominent on the dash. She stepped back out of the ball and unloaded what shots she still had at a single point in the ceiling. Mud fell, but she couldn't tell how much had really thinned above. She hoped it was enough as she shoved the machine until the lights pointed toward where she had shot.
She got back inside. There was a screen, which must have given a forward view at some point. But it had failed. She found a harness for herself and secured it, then pressed the button.
The machine hurtled into the sky - the moment it broke through the mud was so quick she had missed it - and Noa passed out. She awoke to blue-haired girl, and a room made of metal, certain she was dead, or dying and finally imprisoned in a nightmare of her last memories.