Her Brother's Keeper - eARC Read online

  “Did you read that from your eyepiece?” Carlos asked, standing next to her.

  “Yeah, but I already knew which one it was. I know her captain. Nice lady named Blackwood. She had dinner at my house. It was no big deal.”

  “Really? That’s crazy.”

  Annie’s expression sunk. “My dad is leaving on that ship. He’ll probably be gone for over a year.”

  Carlos’ expression softened. He very lightly patted Annie on the shoulder, but quickly yanked his hand away, as if he thought she would bite. “I’m sorry. Why is he leaving?”

  “Work. It’s a long story.”

  “You want him to stay, don’t you? It’s okay. I’m close with my papa, too.”

  “No, that’s not it.”

  “You don’t want him to stay?”

  “No, I want to go with him!” Annie insisted, looking up at her friend. “I want to be on that ship! I want to go to space! It’s not fair. Dad doesn’t even really want to go, we just need the money. It’s my dream and I can’t go.”

  “Do you really want to leave? Things aren’t so bad here.”

  Annie looked up into Carlos’ big brown eyes and felt her face flush again. “No…no they’re not,” she said, managing a smile. He moved closer to her then, gently taking her by the hand. Her mind racing, her heart pounding, not knowing what to do, she closed her eyes and let it happen. Their lips touched, butterflies fluttered around in her stomach, and she wanted to melt. Then the ground started to shake. Wait, she thought. The ground is shaking.

  Pulling away from Carlos’ embrace, Annie ran forward to the fence and watched, in awe, as one of the ships lifted off from its launchpad. Her eyepiece identified it as the Amerigo Vespucci, a merchant vessel registered on Earth itself. She was tall and sleek, a new design from the heart of the Concordiat. The ground shook and a huge plume of dust and smoke spewed forth as she lifted off like a volcanic eruption. The fires of her fusion rockets were nearly blinding as she throttled up and began to accelerate. She watched the ship roar into the darkening sky, leaving a trail of smoke behind it, for what seemed like a long time. The rumble of her engines faded as she disappeared over the horizon.

  “Wow,” she whispered. Carlos coughed awkwardly. Annie spun around to face him, hands behind her back. She could tell she was blushing. “Sorry about that.”

  “No, I am sorry,” Carlos said sheepishly. “I was an ass. I didn’t mean to…you know. I’m sorry.”

  “What? No! No, no!” Annie said, stepping forward and looking up into his eyes. “That was…that was amazing. I just…I’m sorry I’m such a schiz. I get distracted easy. My mom says I get that from my dad.”

  “So,” Carlos said, looking around. “What do you want to do now?”

  Annie raised an eyebrow and folded her hands across her chest. “I don’t know what you think you’re going to get, cowboy, but let me tell you something…”

  “No no no!” the young man pleaded, the color draining from his face. “That’s not what I meant, I swear!”

  Annie softened her expression, smiled, and shook her head. Before Carlos could protest anymore, she shushed him. “I’m just teasing you, stupid. I’m sure you don’t want to sit out here and watch ships lift off with me all night.”

  “I will if that’s what you want to do,” he said. “But I’m hungry.”

  “Me too. You want to get something to eat in town?”

  “I know some places that are good. Do you like tacos?”

  “Everybody on New Austin likes tacos,” Annie said.

  “There’s also a party tonight, if you want to go.”

  “I heard about it. People say it gets crazy.”

  “It’s not bad. Everyone is easygoing. No drama.”

  Annie looked longingly at the spaceport one last time. “You know what? Let’s go. I haven’t been to the city in years. I never get to have a life. Tonight, I’m going to have a life. I’m going to have fun and not worry about tomorrow.”

  “Don’t you ride tomorrow?”

  Annie frowned. “Okay, I’ll worry about one thing that happens tomorrow. I ride in the afternoon. When is your event?”

  “A little earlier than yours, but still after lunch.”

  “Good. I want to sleep in in the morning.”

  Carlos’ jaw fell open. “What?”

  Annie punched him in the arm and laughed at him. “You’re so easy to mess with. It’s adorable.”

  * * *

  After the sun had gone down, as New Austin’s twin moons rose into the night sky, Wade found himself driving the rented van on the way to the evening’s entertainment. Their destination was a popular bar called Denim & Diamonds. It was a stereotypically New Austin establishment, complete with twangy Western-style music and line dancing (which New Austin classified as a Heritage Art Form), but the drinks were cheap, the beer was good, and they had plenty of pool tables. Wade didn’t like to drink much, so he volunteered to drive the van so everyone else could have a good time. They could’ve simply hired an autotaxi, of course, but why spend the money when Captain Blackwood had already paid for rental vehicles?

  Denim & Diamonds was jumping, but Wade had screened ahead and reserved a table for the team. He sipped water for the next few hours while the team caroused, drank, laughed, and enjoyed greasy bar food. Marcus didn’t drink that much, but he got goofy when he’d had a few, and was laughing at Randy Markgraf’s dumb jokes. Randy didn’t stay too long; he lived in Aterrizaje and went home most nights, preferring to sleep in his own bed. Marcus said he’d be going to bed before it got too late; Annie was in town for the big rodeo and he wanted to watch her ride the next day. Hondo took an autotaxi back to the ship so he could screen his wife and children, as he did nearly every night. Ben Halifax was last seen leaving the bar with two pretty young women, and had them both laughing and giggling as they went out the door. The brash, loud, abrasive mercenary certainly had a way with the ladies. It was baffling.

  Ken Tanaka, despite his reserved, quiet demeanor, lightened up after a few shots of sake and whiskey. He was off at the billiards tables with Marcus, who was teaching him to play pool. Marcus was so good at pool that Wade had accused him of being some kind of wizard. He’d spent half the night whupping all comers and winning a few credits in the process.

  Wade found himself alone at their table, sipping a fizzy soft drink and feeling a little bored. He didn’t abstain from drinking on any religious grounds. He just didn’t like the feeling of being drunk. He didn’t like the loss of control or cognition. It was a personal quirk, but he’d seen enough of his compatriots in the fleet get in trouble from alcohol-related incidents that he thought of it as an advantage. He’d never had to go stand in front of the CO and explain some ridiculous behavior from the night before. No, being sober allowed Wade to execute shenanigans without getting caught, and usually without being suspected. He smiled at the thought.

  “What’s so funny?” It was Devree Starlighter. Wade hadn’t noticed her come back to the table. “Where is everybody?” she asked.

  “Marcus and Ken are shooting pool. Everybody else left, and I think those two are going to want to go after they finish their game. Where have you been?”

  “Dancing!” she said with a grin. She’d had a few drinks and was a lot bubblier than usual. “I’ve lived on New Austin for almost three years now and have never been line dancing. I can’t believe how fun it is!”

  Wade couldn’t help but size the lovely sniper up as she sat down next to him. She had dressed the part for a night of line dancing at Denim & Diamonds: short denim skirt, cowboy boots, sleeveless blouse, and a cowboy hat. All of the stuff was brand new, but she wore it like it had been made for her. Despite being a little tipsy, she gracefully crossed her legs after sitting down.

  And what nice legs they are, Wade thought, trying not to stare. He could see the line where flesh gave way to prosthetic, but it was barely noticeable at a glance. There was another such fine seam on her arm.

  “See someth
ing you like there, buddy?” Devree said, with a twinkle in her cold blue eyes.

  Wade felt his face immediately flush. He’d been caught staring. Smooth, he thought to himself. “Uh, sorry,” he managed. “I was just…you know, your prosthetic.” Yeah, that sounds reasonable.

  “They’re pretty realistic, aren’t they?” Devree said. She hiked up her skirt a little and slid a finger along the fine line where biology met machinery. “I’ve seen a lot of people with ugly gray replacements, where they look like robots. That’s the fashion in a lot of places. I paid the extra for the insurance coverage to get the top quality replacement parts, and I’m glad I did.” She took a sip from a bottle of beer.

  “You can barely even tell they’re not real,” Wade said.

  He fell silent when Devree grabbed his hand and placed it on her thigh. “Right?” she asked. “It’s okay, touch it. My legs use the heat produced from their normal operation to make the synthetic skin warm to the touch. It feels almost like real skin, doesn’t it?”

  “It…uh…it sure does,” Wade managed.

  Devree’s expression softened. She sat up a little straighter, pulled her hemline back down, and looked apologetic. “Oh my God, I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m embarrassing you.”

  “No!” Wade protested. “It’s okay.”

  “Oh, I’m sure you enjoyed that,” she said slyly. “But this is unprofessional. I just haven’t dressed up and gone out in a long time. I sure as hell shouldn’t have had that shot of tequila. Nothing good comes of it when I drink tequila. That’s how I ended up married.”

  “You’re married?” Wade asked, mortified.

  “No! I mean, I was. Not anymore. Back home. I went to the academy with him, we were young, we were stupid, we got married on a crazy impulse, and it was a terrible idea. We lasted six months before we split. Luckily, getting divorced on Mandalay is pretty easy.” She chuckled.

  “Well, I’m sorry it didn’t work out,” Wade said.

  She shook her head. “It’s better this way. His name is Heath, and we’re still friends. Marrying another cop is a bad idea anyway. Too many work problems get brought home.” She took a sip of water from a glass on the table. “What about you? Are you married?”

  “Me? Nah. I, uh, wouldn’t have been touching you like that if I was married.”

  “Oh really?” Devree laughed and shook her head. “You’ve been on New Austin for a while though, haven’t you?”

  “I immigrated here…it’ll be four years ago, four local years I mean, next month.”

  “What in the world brought you all the way out here?”

  “I lived on Hayden, like Marcus. We were stationed at the same place. There’s this giant CDF base outside of the city of Langley, I mean, a huge base. Probably fifty thousand personnel there. I lived on base, in bachelor quarters. I’m glad I did, actually. Langley is a shithole.”

  “I’ve heard that,” Devree said. “I’ve never been on Hayden, but you don’t hear a lot of good things about it.”

  “They got the hell blasted out of them by the Maggots during the War. Hayden isn’t that big, and it’s like eighty-five percent covered by ocean to begin with. The Maggots leveled most of the terraformed landmass, and I mean they obliterated it. If you go up north there are crater fields stretching as far as you can see in every direction. They say it took years for the dust to settle. There are the ruins of cities and towns, parts of ships that survived reentry, all kinds of stuff, but almost no one goes up there. The colonial government tries its best to keep people out. A lot of the ruins are still radioactive from the Maggots’ particle beams, they say, and the place is a graveyard. They don’t want grave robbers looting what little remains.”

  “That’s…depressing,” Devree said. “Mandalay is beautiful. It didn’t get hit in the war. The terraformed zone is huge, and outside of that it has its own ecosystem. Plants, animals, everything. There are jungles of these…well, they’re not really trees, but they kind of do the same thing. Some of them are eighty meters tall. When they bloom, it’s the prettiest thing. They turn dozens of shades of bright colors. If you see it from a distance, the whole forest looks like a bowl of candies.”

  “Wow. I don’t really know much about Mandalay. What’s it like in those forests?”

  “Oh, you don’t go into the forest, not if you don’t need to. There are all kinds of things that will kill you there: plants that will wrap you in vines and suck the juices out of you, animals that will swallow you whole, even a kind of fungus-type stuff that’ll dissolve you in acid. The local wildlife doesn’t care that it can’t digest our alien protein. Everything on Mandalay wants to kill you. The terraformed zone is surrounded by a fifty-meter-high wall to keep the native species out as much as possible. But you didn’t answer my question. What brought you out to New Austin?”

  “Huh? Oh. Well, like I said, Langley isn’t a great place to live. The remaining inhabited landmass is crowded. They had this big population boom after the war, with refugees from other colonies moving in and people deciding to have a lot of kids. I guess a brush with extinction triggered the “go forth and multiply” instinct. Most people around Langley live in these massive arcologies. Each one is a self-contained little city, hundreds of stories high, with thousands or tens of thousands of residents, shops, services, you name it. The place is so crowded there aren’t enough jobs for everybody. With that kind of unemployment, crime is high. The government starting cracking down more and more on the crime, and it just got to be ridiculous. There were police checkpoints all over the place, the government monitors electronic transmissions, there were cameras everywhere, and where there weren’t cameras there were robots following you around, recording everything you do. They used to joke that you couldn’t swing a dead cat without breaking ten different laws, but one time I watched this crazy homeless guy literally swing a dead cat around, by the tail, outside the northwest gate of the base. Right in the middle of an intersection! Turns out, that is illegal. This cop tried to talk him down and he hit him, you know, with the dead cat. Right in the face. Three other cops shot the guy and dragged him off while the first cop tried to wipe, I don’t know, whatever juices come out of a dead cat, off his face.”

  Devree snorted loudly, trying not to choke on her water as she laughed. “I shouldn’t laugh. They shot an obviously disturbed man. It’s screwed up. Still funny, though.”

  Wade continued, “I know, right? I swear to God, that actually happened. That’s when I told myself that I needed to get off that fucking rock. The worst part is, even with all the heavy-handed policing, the cameras, the searches, the checkpoints, it’s still not safe to go into some places in the city. The gangs there are well armed, and they fight with each other and the cops all the time.”

  “Holy shit. I can see why you left.”

  “Yeah. I knew I wanted to get out of the Defense Force, but I sure as hell didn’t want to live anywhere on Hayden. There are places that aren’t as bad as Langley and places that are really nice, but there are no jobs in the not-bad places and I’m not rich enough to live in the really nice places. I found these advertisements for emigration to New Austin, and it looked amazing—wide open spaces, clear skies, fresh air, plenty of room, low crime, and a government that minds its own business. I said, sign me up!”

  Devree took a long sip of water and ate some of the tortilla chips that were left in the basket on the table. “That’s what they told me when they offered me a list of places I could go. No crime syndicates on New Austin, they said. No native ecosystem trying to kill you, either. Just mild weather and friendly people. At least that’s what they said.”

  “If you don’t mind my asking, what happened to you? Mandalay is an Inner Colony world, right? What brought you out to the frontier?”

  Devree stirred the ice in her water for a moment, thoughtfully, as if trying to decide what to say. “I was a sniper on one of the Colonial Enforcement Bureau’s tactical intervention teams.”

  Wade raised an eyebro
w.

  “Yes, we called them TITs,” Devree said with a grin. “It’s actually a really prestigious unit, and it’s hard to get into. The regular Police Academy was tough, but the selection course for the TITs has something like an eighty percent washout rate. Not a lot of women make it through, but I did.”

  “Your prosthetics are…extensive. How did you get them?”

  Devree held up her artificial right arm, and examined it quietly for a moment. “That’s kind of how I ended up out here. I was flesh and blood when I went through the academy. I mean, afterwards, they gave me the usual boosters to keep me in top shape, but I got through selection on my own. These,” she said, indicating her prosthetic legs, “these are the result of an attempt to kill me.”

  “Jesus,” Wade said quietly. “How bad was it?”

  “Both of my legs were traumatically amputated above the knee. My right arm was mangled so badly that it couldn’t be saved. My left arm was in better shape, but I lost fingers on the hand. I had extensive internal injuries, my eardrums were burst, I was temporarily blinded by the explosion, and I had extensive second and third degree burns.”

  “Explosion?”

  Devree nodded. “We’d been cracking down on a crime syndicate called the Black Hand for over a year. When we started, they ran a good portion of the capital city of New Dawn. When all was said and done, they were on the run, but they didn’t go out without a fight. There was a standoff. We had one of their big-time players, son of one of the Black Hand’s bosses, surrounded in a warehouse. We busted him in human trafficking and smuggling. He took one of the kids hostage.”

  “Kids?”

  “Yeah, kids. They were his cargo. There’s still a market for that kind of shit in some places, I guess. He took a hostage, this terrified teenage boy. My spotter, Samseer, was with me. I took the shot. I blew that son-of-a-bitch’s head clean off, through a skylight, from this really tall communications tower nearby.”

  “So what happened?”

  “The syndicate boss went insane. He had his few remaining loyal soldiers just start wreaking havoc in New Dawn. They killed police officers, judges, lawyers, city and government officials, whoever they could take a shot at. It got so bad that the governor declared a state of emergency and sent in the Colonial Guard. But the Black Hand had eyes and ears everywhere, even in the Enforcement Bureau. Somebody talked. They found out I was the one who made the shot.”