He exploited the kid shamelessly.
The company gave Kyle a few days off to recover. He spent the time hatching a plan. To get outside the dome, you needed official documents. To do anything on this cursed planet required documents, because then they could charge a fee for it. Kyle began to miss simple bribery. At least it generated less paperwork.
The only open ticket for wandering around the planet’s surface was a prospector’s license. Money wasn’t enough, though: you had to pass exams to qualify. Kyle’s employment card got him past the pressure-suit exam, and his Altair documents let him waive the driving test for an explorer buggy, but there was no way he was going to learn enough about mining in the next few days to get a prospector’s license.
That’s where the kid came in.
The day after the accident, Kyle ambushed him after work, falling in step beside him outside the RDC complex.
“You coming back soon?” the kid asked hopefully, clearly still blaming himself. That made Kyle feel guilty for what he was about to do, but he reminded himself he was doing it for Kassa, too. If he could tell the truth about what was going on, the kid would volunteer anyway. So really, it wasn’t trickery, just basic security procedure—“need to know” and all that.
“I got a better idea,” Kyle answered. “Here, let me buy you a beer.”
Three drinks later, Kyle had him convinced. Now that they were partners, Kyle decided he should start thinking of the kid by name, instead of as that gangly young idiot.
“Bobby, right? My friends call me Kyle. It’s a nickname.” Kyle was still using his fake identification from the storage locker, but he felt Bobby deserved to know his real name.
They shook hands and agreed to meet tomorrow. Then the kid went home to study some more. Kyle spent the rest of the evening trying not to feel dirty. Since everything on Baharain was perpetually dirty, he failed.
Bobby was waiting for him when he got to the examination office. Kyle had come early; Bobby had come even earlier. He looked nervous.
“Worried about passing?” Kyle was. He needed this kid’s help.
“Nah,” Bobby said. “I can do it.”
Kyle shrugged questioningly.
“I didn’t tell my parents. Sent a letter last night, but I didn’t tell them.” Bobby was morose. At the end of the week there wouldn’t be a paycheck to forward to them.
Kyle forced himself to grin. “Don’t worry, it takes days for a letter to get there and back. By the time they can ask, we’ll be staking our own claim.”
“Sure,” Bobby said, but he still looked green.
Kyle took him inside and paid the fee. It cost half the credits he had left. Then he went to spend the rest of his money renting equipment.
“You didn’t get a plasma torch?”
Kyle pointed at the camera in the cargo bay of the buggy. “I figured we’d just take pictures, for our first trip.”
Bobby shook his head. The prospecting license had stiffened his backbone. Now that he had a piece of paper, he seemed to think he was in charge.
“We need a plasma torch, too. Look, there’s a rental store right next to vehicle air lock twenty-seven. We can stop on the way out.”
Bobby hadn’t questioned why they were leaving for a field trip in the middle of the afternoon. The kid was too eager to get his new career started. Kyle pulled over when they got to the equipment store, and shelled out some more credits. For now, he needed to keep Bobby fooled.
They swiped their papers and the air lock let them through. Once you got your documents, the government seemed to lose interest. Probably because there weren’t any more fees to be paid.
Outside, in the harsh light, Kyle accelerated, putting distance between themselves and the dome. Not giving the kid a chance to get cold feet.
Bobby spoke first, shouting over the noise of the buggy and the rattle of equipment. He wasn’t using a radio link. “We’re not really prospecting for metals, are we.” It wasn’t a question.
“No,” Kyle admitted. “I’m after something else. But I needed you to get me out here. Look, you can go back to work in a few days. They’ll still need you.”
“How do I know you aren’t bringing me out here to kill me?”
Kyle laughed, a short bark that was more anger than humor. “A little late to worry about that, isn’t it?”
“That’s why I made you get the plasma torch.”
Kyle noticed that Bobby had the fuel tank on the floor between his knees. His right hand rose up out of concealment, holding the nozzle.
“If I wanted you dead,” Kyle explained, “I wouldn’t have left in the same vehicle through the same air lock.”
“Maybe you were gonna fake an accident. You know, some kind of karmic revenge.”
“Then all I had to do was leave you alone. A kid as stupid as you, somebody is going to clean you out sooner or later. You told me your life story before you knew my name.”
Bobby was silent for a minute.
“Well … I’m learning.” He hefted the plasma nozzle again.
Kyle grinned. “Yes, you are. Now put that thing down before a bump in the road fries us both.”
“It woulda looked suspicious going out prospecting without one, you know. We had to get one anyway.” Bobby dropped the nozzle and put his foot on the fuel tank, to stop it from bouncing around.
“Good call. Okay, here’s the plan. We’re going to mess around until nightfall. Then I go into sector E-3. You’ll wait outside in the buggy. I’ll come back for you, and if I don’t, then you take the buggy and go on home. If they ask you questions, tell them I lied to you.”
“Why?”
The less he knew, the better off he was, but Kyle needed to build some trust. If Bobby thought he was out here to plant a bomb or perform an assassination, he might abandon Kyle the first chance he got.
“I want to take some pictures of the chief executive officer of RDC.”
“Blackmail … I bet that pays better than prospecting.”
The kid wasn’t so innocent after all.
“No, Bobby. I won’t be asking him for money. I’ll be taking the pictures back to Altair, and asking them to arrest him.”
Bobby stared at him.
“I think he had something to do with Kassa,” Kyle said.
They rode in silence for a while, anger radiating from Bobby’s gangly frame.
“I’m going with you,” the kid said. Not arguing, not asking, not whining. Just a statement.
War made people grow up fast. Too fast. Kyle almost turned the buggy around and took the kid home, but he knew it was too late. The young man had a right to strike back at the people who had destroyed his home. There was a war on, and Kyle had made his first recruit.
The sun finally approached the horizon, and their suits started cooling off. As hot and uncomfortable as it had been, it was about to become even worse. The heat you could at least shade yourself from, but the cold would reach you no matter where you hid.
“They don’t even allow flybys over this sector.” Bobby knew way too much about Baharain security, and he kept telling Kyle why their mission was impossible. “What if they have guards?”
“I looked, but I didn’t see any ads for external security staff. If they had outdoor guards, they would have to hire new ones on a regular basis. Nobody could do this job long term without quitting.” Running security patrols in a place where the greatest danger was the air around you was the definition of a dead-end job.
“Cameras?”
“That’s why we’re going over at twilight. The rapidly changing contrasts should confuse any automated surveillance. I doubt they have people watching the entire border.”
They didn’t even have a fence. What they did have was a bright orange post stuck in the ground, with a warning sign. The sign was so old it was illegible. Kyle could see another post a hundred meters to the left, and assumed there would be one to the right somewhere.
The buggy’s navcom lit up, telling them they were on the edge of a restricted area. Kyle told it to shut up. He’d already cut off the buggy’s communications with the dome. Although the vehicle was equipped with satellite tracking, it was only for the driver’s convenience. It didn’t automatically report their location to some central headquarters. The government respected the typical prospector’s paranoia about being followed by their competition.
Kyle drove past the signpost and tried not to flinch. This would be a good place for anti-vehicle mines, but he didn’t really expect any. The insurance liability would be too great for a corporation to stomach. Only governments could leave a piece of ground fatally armed for decades. That was one of the weaknesses of government, in Kyle’s view.
They crept through the growing dark, sticking to the valleys and low-lying patches. There was no vegetation to shield them, but the rock formations were complex and jumbled. In the fading light, they almost looked like trees or houses.
A glow from ahead told him they were getting close. The reflected light from the domes hovered like a halo in the sky.
He stopped the buggy at the foot of a small hill.
“I’m going up on foot to see if I can get a clear line of vision. You wait here and cover our line of retreat. You can drive the buggy, can’t you?” he asked as an afterthought, cursing himself for forgetting to check that detail.
Bobby shrugged. “Sure,” he said. He was a terrible liar.
Lugging the camera and its telescopic lens, Kyle clambered up the steep slope. The hill was treacherous, carved with pits and sinkholes. It resembled a coral reef more than a lump of rock.
Creeping over the top, he saw the valley spread out below. The various domes in the complex glowed invitingly, gentle warm yellow leaking through their transparent tops. Kyle had planned his route to bring him to the backside of the one place in the sector the corporate recruiting literature didn’t brag about. He knew all about the suites and recreational facilities of the rest of the complex. By the process of elimination he had figured out this one undescribed patch had to be where the bigwigs lived.
A distant shadow to the right caught his eye, but when he stared that direction, he saw nothing. The twilight was affecting his vision, too. Aiming the camera at the dome below him, he scanned it, looking for clues, hints, or just an uncurtained window.
Stakeouts were a matter of patience. Typically one waited days for something interesting to happen. Kyle had rented the equipment for a week. But when he saw a person standing in an observation deck, looking up at the stars, he accepted his good luck. He felt he was owed some.
The man was the right height and weight for a twin of Dejae. Clicking the zoom factors up, Kyle narrowed in on the face, running the vid recorder at maximum resolution. And blinked. The man was wearing a mask, an extravagant tribal affair with feathers and glittering gems. He appeared to be having a conversation, but a few minutes of observation convinced Kyle that the man was alone in the room, talking to a comm unit.
Was he getting ready for a party? Maybe life in the executive dome was one wearying masked ball after another.
The man turned, as if interrupted, facing a closed door on the other side of the room. The man crossed the room to open the door, his back to Kyle, and as he walked, he took off the mask and hid it behind his back.
A servant was on the other side of the door. She handed him a drink from a silver tray, curtsied, and left. He closed the door. Before he turned around, he put the mask back on.
Kyle was dumbfounded. There was clearly no one else in the room. The conversation on the comm unit was over; the man relaxed on a divan, alone, sipping his drink.
While wearing a mask.
Kyle recorded the whole insane performance, the masked man finishing his drink, setting down the glass, and wandering out of Kyle’s view. A second later the room went dark. Without backlighting, Kyle couldn’t see through the reflectivity of the dome.
He popped the data chit out of the camera and stuffed it in his suit pocket. Slotting in another chit, he prepared himself for a long wait. His luck hadn’t changed, after all.
Why would someone wear a mask, alone in their own house? His futile speculation was cut short by a sound that was not the wind.
Immediately Kyle began slithering down, trying to escape the view of the dome complex, while looking frantically for the source of the harsh click. To his left a monstrous shape appeared, blotting out the horizon. Kyle jumped, heedless of where he would land, and the hulking brute landed where Kyle had been a heartbeat ago.
Sparks flew from the ground as stone chipped and sprayed outward. In the momentary illumination Kyle could see glittering fangs, bristly hair, and legs. Too many legs. A spider twice the size of a man, with faceted eyes that revealed no humanity.
Kyle crashed back to earth, halfway down the hill. The spider gathered itself, a giant barrel sprouting hideous limbs. A meter wide at the body, with legs twice as long. Its claws clattered on the stone, and when it hissed at him, he could see the faint reflection of silver. Its fangs and claws were capped in metal. He could imagine it in the cockpit of the deadly little fighter-craft on Kassa, searching for targets, seeking out men and women to kill.
And now it was coming for him.
Kyle had faced many weapons, thugs with guns and knives, and once, a jar of acid. He had stared into the eyes of men who wanted to hurt him, to make him suffer and die. But he had never feared being eaten before.
The terror was atavistic. Scrambling madly, Kyle plummeted down the hill, seeking escape or just a place to hide, every step in the heavy gravity like wading through a nightmare. He threw himself into the first narrow crevice he found.
The monster pounced again, sealing Kyle in his tomb. Its fangs gnawed at the narrow lips of stone. It was trying to stick its horrible maw in to bite him, instead of just fishing him out with its legs.
The radio whispered in his ear.
“What on Earth is that?” Bobby was on the edge of panic, his voice trembling and wet. Paradoxically, his terror rallied Kyle.
“GO!” Kyle hissed over the radio. “Get the fuck out of here! While it’s still occupied with me—I don’t think it can catch the buggy. Go, damn you!”
The creature began flaying the stone with its claws. It was going to dig him out.
“Is that what attacked my world?” Bobby was asking intelligent questions, and it was pissing Kyle off.
“Get the fuck out of here! Go get help!” Kyle didn’t have a weapon. He didn’t have room to fight, even if he could get his heart to stop pounding long enough to think about fighting. He couldn’t see anything except the dark bulk of the monster, blotting out the sky.
It stopped, freezing perfectly still. Its motion had been unnatural, inhuman, alien; now it was almost comical. One leg stretched out, claw-first, reaching down to him. It had finally figured out that all that was required was a single puncture of Kyle’s suit.
A flare of light. Sobbing in fear over the radio, Bobby unleashed the plasma torch on the creature, having crawled up the hill unnoticed. Instantly the monster reverted to mindless spider, and sprung on him. The two of them rolled down the hill, disappearing from Kyle’s sight.
He kicked his way out of the crevice. He was too late.
On the plain below him, the spider straddled Bobby, pinning him with half its legs, rising up on the other half. Futilely Bobby cradled the plasma tank for protection, trying to hide behind it. The fangs descended like a jackhammer while Kyle cried out in helpless rage.
Sparks of metal on metal, and then the tank exploded.
The flare was blinding. For a moment Kyle could not tell ground from sky. When contrast returned, all he could see was the horizon, a cardboard cutout standing against a starry background. On his hands and knees he slipped and slid down the hill, every bump rising up to punish him, every hole trying to suck him down.
He collided with something that was not rock. A leg. Groping, he found another. Scraping his helmet on the ground, he tried to bring the scene into the horizon. Above the legs was nothing. Sparkles slowly began to appear. Parts of bodies were burning, but Kyle’s vision could not identify them.
His hearing returned, and he realized the clicking sound was not part of the ringing deafness in his ears. Somewhere out there the creature still moved, trying to stand. That it was severely injured was deducible only by the fact that Kyle was not yet dead.
Crawling on the ground, he picked out the silhouette of the buggy. As much as he wanted to, he could not stand and run, because then he would lose sight of the buggy. As if he could run blind across broken ground, anyway.
The shadow from before, from on top of the hill, flashed through his mind. It had been to the right. This creature had come from the left. There was another one out there, still stalking him.
Scrabbling on all fours knees, dipping his head to keep the buggy in sight, he battered his hands and knees without mercy. It was the longest seven meters of his life.
Crawling into the buggy, he flicked on the exterior headlights. They would give away his position, yes, but without them he simply could not drive. On their brightest setting they revealed only outlines. He could avoid boulders, but crevices would be invisible to him. He would be lucky to survive the first kilometer.
He was still owed some luck. But he wasn’t sure he deserved it.
After five minutes he stopped and turned out the lights. Closing his eyes was unbearably hard. Forcing himself to count to one hundred was the most terrifying thing he had ever done.
When he opened them again, he could almost see. If he drove slowly enough, he would not need the lights. The lights would kill him. Driving too slowly would kill him. Wrecking the buggy would kill him.
There were a lot of ways to die out here, but all of them were the same, in the end. A spider standing over you with shining fangs. Kyle thought about what spiders did with things they caught.
Bobby might have been the lucky one.
But he wasn’t. Kyle’s damned luck held out. Gradually he drove faster as his vision returned, and nothing sprang out of the darkness on him. He found a road, and picked a direction at random. After a kilometer he thought to turn the buggy’s navcom back on. It told him he had chosen correctly. It even warned him about upcoming curves and rough spots.
Damned luck.
Pulling up to the same air lock he and Bobby had left, he was too tired to be worried. The authorities wouldn’t give him any trouble. Dejae-2 couldn’t afford to let people know he had killer spider guards. Instead, he would send an assassin, somebody who had to work outside the system. That meant Kyle had a little time.
It also meant that he had to ditch the fake persona he had been living under. He didn’t think he could even risk going back to his hotel. His documents opened the air lock, but they also marked his presence outside the dome, and every person who returned after the spider died would surely be investigated by Dejae’s agents. He drove in, waited for the scrubbers to cycle the air, and drove out the other side. At least he didn’t have to present a credit stick to pay a fee. All the air locks let you in for free, a reasonable safety precaution. That just meant they charged you double to get out.
Parking the buggy behind a rowdy bar, he left the keys in it. Maybe someone would do him a favor and steal it. He dropped his old documents into a curbside trash disintegrator, and shoved his pressure suit in after it. The machine choked on it, but after a few well-placed kicks it fired up again and shredded the suit. Kyle idly reflected that you could probably shove a body down the damn thing.
All he had left were the clothes on his back, two credit sticks, his original Altair ID papers, and the data chit in his pocket. Bobby had died so Kyle could get a vid of a man in a mask.
Kyle consoled himself with the fact that he would probably die over the same useless vid. Then he found a cheap, cheap hotel room and gave up one of his credit sticks.
Seven hours in the heavy G had drained him, leaving him brittle like a rag wrung dry and left in the sun to parch. He should have collapsed into unconsciousness as soon as his head hit the disposable foam pillow. But the memory of the young man struggling under the spider would not leave him. That should have been him; would have been, if not for Bobby’s heroics. In the grand scheme of things it was just another casualty of the Kassan war, but this one had been on Kyle’s watch. He had never lost a member of his squad before. He didn’t understand how to deal with it.
Only the inescapable fact that escaping from this planet would be impossible, and therefore he would soon join Bobby in death, let him finally sink into sleep.
In the morning he did the only thing he could. It would be what they expected, of course. But he didn’t have a choice. Five minutes in a convenience store and he was deep brown, staining his face with some cheap cosmetic intended to preserve skin in the harsh recycled air, but undoubtedly chemically inert and useless. Then he went down to the docks, to try and find a ride home. A tramp freighter would be his only hope. They would search the passenger liners, like the one he had come on. Not that he could afford a luxury ticket, anyway.
There didn’t seem to be a lot of tramp freighters on Baharain. He wasn’t sure why, and he didn’t dare consult an official registry or government information kiosk to find out. Instead, he went from bay to bay, looking through the windows to see if there was a ship outside. He was tired, anxious, and angry. That’s how they caught him by surprise.
He heard a voice behind him. Soft and yet hard, familiar and yet exotic. Fear bit into his belly like the spider, his stomach muscles contracting involuntarily. He spun, knowing what he would see.
The perfect operative. Always right behind him. Prudence eyed him suspiciously, something glittering in her right hand, while her massive soldier reached out to grab Kyle’s shoulder.
Kyle struck, sinking his fist into Jorgun’s gut. The man was huge, but Kyle would not die without a fight. Jorgun fell like a tree to the ground.
The giant stared up at him in anguish, and burst into tears.