Lethal Cargo Read online

I climbed up the second ladder to the top of the bridge. The binos were lying behind the radar dish, next to Irene’s second-best rifle. I fitted them to my eyes. More people were now milling around the Travellers’ pad. Yuriops, stargends, several of the furry natives … and a whole lot of human children. The binos brought their little faces right up to my eyes in heartbreaking clarity. As I watched, another duo of Travellers marched up the road, herding several more kids.

  I went back down to the top deck. “I’m going over there,” I said, not quite meeting Irene’s eyes.

  “And do what, Mike?”

  “I’m not sure yet,” I said. “Tell Marty to go ahead and load the cargo. I don’t think that joker Ijiuto is ever going to turn up.”

  “I’ll cover you,” she said, heading for the airlock. “I’ll just go get my other scope.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Should I tell Marty to unload Ijiuto’s crates?”

  “Hell, no. He hasn’t paid me. We got enough mass allowance to take ‘em home. At least that way we get a kill fee.”

  I climbed down to the ground on the starboard side of the St. Clare. Glancing underneath the ship, I saw Kimmie sitting with her arm around the refugee girl, consoling her. She had even given the girl her purple coat. The sight of them together made me feel strangely alone, and less than human.

  Carrying my tactical backpack, the twin of Dolph’s, I walked across the dirt field to the trees lining the back of our pad. I pushed the vines aside like a curtain, letting them fall back into place behind me.

  In the dim greenish shadow under the vines, I stripped off my clothes. Stuffed them into my backpack.

  Took a deep breath, hunched my shoulders, and Shifted into a wolf.

  5

  I’m a Shifter. Hundreds of years ago, extreme genetic modification was all the rage. The fad passed, but it left behind pockets of alt-humans with significant differences from mainstream humanity. We Shifters are the largest alt-human community, and if you listen to some people, we’re the most dangerous. In my opinion, the reason people say that is because unlike other alt-humans, we’re indistinguishable from normies.

  Until we Shift.

  Most Shifters have one, or at most two animal forms committed to muscle memory. Me, I have a bunch. But for the past couple of years I’d been favoring my gray wolf. I liked this beast’s power, speed, and sheer scary factor.

  The wolf also excelled at stealth. I flowed through the curtains of vines, carrying my backpack in my teeth. Ecosystem contamination is always a risk when you hang out your shingle as a trading post. These invasive vines, which I recognized from Ponce de Leon, had killed most of the conifers stone dead. Bone-dry needles and twigs littered the ground. My wolf did not crack a single one of them underfoot.

  With a map in my head, I turned west at the corner of our pad and followed the next hedge to the south coast of our island. That Ek shuttle was long gone, so I did not have to worry about someone spotting a predator that belonged on a planet 7,200 light years away. Scrubby native bushes grew right down to the coast of our island. Staying under cover, I peered out of the brush at the mainland and the next island over.

  No one was driving along the coast road. I was too low down now to see anything of the Traveller ship except its tail antennas, meaning they couldn’t see me.

  All clear.

  I jumped into the channel.

  Hell, that was cold.

  For an awful minute I couldn’t find the bottom.

  I can’t swim a stroke. Not as a human, nor as a wolf. Jumping into the water had been an act of faith and calculation. I had assumed the channel was walkable, based on how much of that rock in the middle was sticking out of the water. Was it deeper than I had thought?

  My claws scrabbled on the sandy bottom. I raised my head and gulped air—and the next swell lifted me off my feet again.

  I kind of hopped across the channel, timing my lunges to the swells that surged through the channel to break on the distant beach. It was terrifying. The swells also dragged me inshore, so I ended up crossing the channel at a diagonal angle.

  I didn’t lose my backpack.

  I scrambled up a low crag and crawled into the bushes, soaked and shivering, with the taste of salt water in my mouth. I shook myself like a dog, then slunk uphill. The bushes got thicker. The leading tendrils of the invading vines entwined their tops. Now I was stalking under a roof of green leaves, which grew higher and denser as I got in among the dead trees on the edge of the Travellers’ northern pad.

  All the way, I sniffed the air. A wolf has a much more sensitive nose than a human being. This is one of the biggest advantages of tracking in animal form. Unfortunately, the smoke and dust that saturated the wind covered any scent of human beings, except for the occasional punch of latrine odor where someone had snuck into the bushes to do a number two.

  I doubted the Travellers had anyone posted in these woods, anyway. What would be the point? They wouldn’t be able to see out.

  Chinks of daylight showed through the green roof ahead.

  A sudden impact knocked me sideways.

  I danced my feet under me and dropped my backpack in a silent snarl. Even before I felt the impact, I’d smelled a familiar scent: jackal.

  The jackal now standing nose to nose with me was much bigger than a real jackal would be—almost as big as my wolf, and my wolf was bigger than a real wolf, tipping the scales at 82 kilos, same as me. Nothing is gained or lost in Shifting.

  “Gotcha,” Dolph said, around the strap of the backpack he held in his teeth. Our animal forms were exact replicas of the Earth originals on the outside, but not on the inside. Shifting wouldn’t be much use if you lost your ability to talk.

  “Well?” I said.

  Dolph’s ears went back. “She’s not there. I’ve been watching them for the last forty minutes. I scouted all around the pads where they parked their prizes … she’s not there.”

  “Maybe she’s inside the ship,” I said.

  “Mike, she’s not there.”

  “Goddamn,” I said. “I guess that asshole was telling the truth for once in his life.” I felt strangely empty. Only now did I realize how much I’d built up the possibility of seeing Sophia in my mind. I had even begun to plan out what I’d say to her. I read a book on deprogramming once. It said that you should try to produce an emotional connection to their former life by showing them the faces of loved ones.

  “Never mind,” I said, emptily. “What’s going on?”

  “It’s weird as hell,” Dolph said. “All these kids.”

  I pulled myself together. “That girl from the knife stall showed up at our pad, asking for help. She said they took her cousins.”

  We dropped our backpacks under a tree and flowed through the last few meters of the woods. The smell of the Travellers now reached us. Poorly cured leather, cigarettes, unwashed funk, and … hot chocolate?

  Crouched flat, we parted the vines with our noses, a millimeter at a time.

  Aliens milled, buying shit from the Travellers. In addition to ship parts, they also sell pirated software, generic meds, illegal drugs, that kind of thing. Kids were running around everywhere. There must have been two hundred of them. Some sat on the ground, eating candy and drinking hot chocolate. The Travellers were handing it out in paper cups. It came from a hospitality tent where the Travellers were showing off their digital wares on display screens.

  Over this bizarrely festal scene loomed the Travellers’ ship. It was a monster. As high as a three-storey building, it measured a good 200 meters long from head to tail. A trio of tubular auxiliary engines supported it off the ground. Intricate thermal ceramic inlays decorated its fuselage and flaring engine bell, depicting figures from the Travellers’ mixed-up mythology. All of us try to keep some part of old Earth alive in ourselves—wolf; jackal … but the Travellers have cherrypicked the worst of our ancestral traditions to create their own pantheon of outcasts, spanning from Loki to Cthulhu. Whether they actually believe in
these grisly gods is up for grabs. I suppose it depends what you mean by belief.

  I picked out the kids from the knife stall without much difficulty. All the humans here looked kind of samey. Our ethnicities are muddled these days; the distinctions between normies and alt-humans have taken their place as our primary way of sorting ourselves out into categories. But you do still get similarities among people who all come from the same place. These refugees tended to unruly blond or brown hair, dark eyes, muddy beige skin. So did the kids I was searching for. But something else distinguished them from the others. They were the only ones who looked scared.

  Terrified out of their wits, in fact.

  The little girl I’d noticed before, who was about Lucy’s age, held a cup of chocolate without drinking it. A boy of twelve or so gripped her shoulders as if he thought they were about to be pulled apart.

  A Traveller was talking to them, gesticulating impatiently.

  Spaced out around the edges of the pad, more Travellers stood guard with battered old assault rifles. They were facing in, not out. I watched the one closest to us for a few minutes. His eyes had an unblinking, glassy lustre. His coat flapped in the wind.

  Dolph and I retired into the woods again.

  “Where are their parents?” I growled.

  “Maybe they don’t have any parents.”

  I made myself calm down some. “They couldn’t fit all those kids on that ship.”

  “Nope,” Dolph said, “and they’re too young to be burners.”

  This business of “burning” people was how the Travellers maintained their access to the financial system. They played an endless cat and mouse game with the EkBank. As fast as the Eks identified them and closed down their accounts, they recruited new postulants to open burner accounts. Tragically, the Cluster’s many failed and suffering colonies offered them a near-limitless supply of potential recruits. They left nine out of ten burned in their wake, dumped far from home, or sold off for body parts … but you have to be eighteen to open an EkBank account.

  “This must be their new thing,” I said. “Recruit them young. Brainwash ‘em hard. Make them repair the outsides of ships in the Core. They’re probably going to take the ten smartest ones, and leave the rest wishing they’d been chosen. Hearts and minds.”

  Dolph’s neck fur hackled. His ears were all the way back. “Well, what are we waiting for?”

  I glanced up at the chinks of sky visible through the roof of vines. The light had not changed since we touched down. This planet had a long day.

  “They screwed up,” I said. “They’re too close to us. They can’t nuke the St. Clare without nuking themselves. So I think we can get away with it, if we move fast enough.”

  We talked it over for a few minutes. Then I held my backpack down with my teeth while I used a claw to activate the radio clamped to its strap. We had these little FM radios—they only worked over short distances, but they did work, even in places with no connectivity. “Irene,” I whispered. “Come in.”

  “Reading you.”

  “You in position?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Where are you? What’s the plan?”

  I told her.

  “There’s a .50 cal turret on top of that ship,” she said.

  “I saw. But they can’t lower the elevation of that thing far enough to shoot up their own pad, even if they wanted to. It’s for area clearance.”

  “You should’ve at least taken that alien’s money.”

  “Point,” I said, laughing. I cut the connection. I thought about how maybe I was about to die. “Well,” I said to Dolph, “let’s do this.”

  We split up.

  Dolph went west around the pad, to the other side of the ship.

  I went back to the location of that doped-up postulant and crouched directly behind him.

  I gave Dolph a count of twenty to get into position.

  Then I gathered myself and leapt out of the vines, pouncing onto the postulant’s back.

  6

  I knocked the postulant flat on the dirt. He smelled like prey, and I couldn’t resist clawing him up a bit. I ripped his trophy coat with my teeth and tore the skin of his back to ribbons. When he stopped fighting me, I left him lying. I kicked his rifle into the woods with a hindpaw, and dashed towards the two kids from the knife stall.

  Some of the guards loosed off rounds, but we were fast-moving targets, and they couldn’t get a clear line of fire. The aliens, and all the kids, were screaming (or hooting, or lowing) and fleeing. A thought shot like a meteor across my mind: the Travellers were the worst predators in the Cluster, yet these folks were running from a wolf? That’s fucked up.

  Before I could reach the kids, a Traveller the size of a yuriops plunged towards me with an axe cocked high behind his shoulder. An amateur with the weapon, he telegraphed his blow by shifting his weight. I anticipated the downwards sweep of the blade, danced outside his guard, and sank my teeth into his right forearm. His sleeve tasted like old cheese. I broke his elbow by twisting the arm the wrong way, and jumped over him as he crumpled.

  Another Traveller charged in from my left, swinging at me with a katana. His two-handed grip suggested he had a clue about swordsmanship, but I was ready to bet he’d only ever practised on a human opponent. I leapt off the ground, all four feet together. His swing went under me, and his own momentum carried him into the collision.

  I was already panting, tiring from the intense exertion. But in a head-on collision between a human being and a four-legged predator, the predator wins. Katana dropped his sword and jerked both arms up to protect his throat. I knocked him to the ground—I was bigger and heavier than he was—and mauled his forearms. The taste of blood filled my mouth, bringing a hit of exhilaration. I left him leaking and sprang clear.

  A black-and-brown blur wove through the fleeing crowds: Dolph. I almost laughed as I realized the Traveller guards were no longer attacking us. They were trying to reach their ship. Dolph took his pick of targets and leapt on a postulant’s back. His pointy, almost dainty-looking jaws closed on the man’s neck.

  In the same instant, my peripheral vision caught movement behind the tent. A rifle muzzle peeked out from behind it, pointing in Dolph’s direction.

  I hurled myself at the tent. It collapsed under me—on top of the rifleman. Human forms struggled inside the folds of grubby nylon. I stepped on them to reach the rifleman. His hand emerged, groping for his weapon. I was about to bite the hand off when I saw the knock-off Urush fortunometer on the hairy wrist.

  Heaven forgive me.

  I bit it off anyway.

  Well, not quite. The wolfish joy I took in savaging my enemies did not quite blind me to practical considerations. The little voice of caution in the back of my head, that had saved my life many times on Tech Duinn, warned me not to go too far.

  So I didn’t literally bite his hand off. But I made sure he would be looking at an amputation or a long and painful reconstruction. I sank my fangs into his palm. His blood gushed into my mouth. His screams filled my ears. His bones cracked between my incisors. I wrenched my neck sideways, ripping muscle and sinew, tearing his hand into two floppy prongs, one of which was only attached by a bit of skin. The pinky was also hanging by a flap. I bit it off—

  —and a bullet carved a furrow through the fur on my back, close enough to sting.

  I spat out Zane’s pinky, dropped him, put my head down and sprang at the Traveller standing on the steps of the ship. He was a big blond with all the tattoos and the raised worm-casts of clan scars on his neck and face. He had come halfway down the steps to make sure of his shot. I could see the black circle of his rifle barrel, a hole through to eternity. I was dead for sure—

  Blood gouted from the Traveller’s throat. He stood stock still for a moment, making a whistling noise as he tried to breathe through a windpipe that wasn’t there anymore. Then he dropped his rifle and toppled headfirst down the steps. His head hit the steps with a clonk like when you slap a steak on a cutti
ng board.

  I landed on his back. Panting, I kicked his body the rest of the way down the steps. Although I didn’t know for sure what had happened, I could guess: Irene had saved my ass.

  She’d hit him in the throat from a distance of what we later calculated, using a sat map of the spaceport, to be 952 meters.

  With an 11 kph wind gusting unpredictably.

  There’s a reason her old unit, the Ghost Gators, was known as the best sniper outfit on Tech Duinn.

  She kept shooting, leading her targets as they scattered. Faint, distant cracks reached us on the wind.

  Carried away by violence, I had almost forgotten what we were here for. Now I remembered. From this higher vantage point, I spotted Dolph near the trees. He was dancing around a group of children, snapping at them. The boy from the knife stall swung at him with a stick.

  I leapt off the steps and hit the ground running. I bowled into the group of children, knocking them over, and got my teeth into the little girl’s sleeve. Dragging her half off her feet, I sprinted towards the woods.

  The boy followed. I thought highly of him for that.

  The minute we got into cover, I let go of the girl and gasped, “Don’t be scared. We’re human.”

  She stuffed the tail of her shirt in her mouth. Her face glistened with tears and snot.

  We had not fled a moment too soon. The ta-ta-ta-ta-ta of automatic fire erupted behind us. Leaves fluttered down and pale gashes appeared in the woody stems of the vines.

  “Run!” I snarled.

  We didn’t have time to go back for our backpacks. We ran flat out. I wasn’t sure if the kids knew they were being rescued, or if they were running away from us. I didn’t care, as long as they went in the right direction: away from the Travellers, towards the shore of the island.

  Stumbling through the coastal brush, we cut the corner and caught up with the Travellers’ fleeing customers on the causeway. They provided cover for our escape. At the mainland end of the causeway, Dolph and I chivvied the children down to the beach. The tide had come almost all the way in. There was only a taupe thread of beach left. We dashed along it, with the waves licking our paws and the kids’ sandals, and scrambled up onto the causeway of our own island.