Warp World (59 page)

“Kargin’ hopeless.” She stuffed the comm back in her pocket.

Like everyone else, she had watched the newsfeeds of the riots. Unlike everyone else, she was not angry at Eraranat for inciting civil unrest, but for stranding her. Again. No word. Nothing. Old Town was gone and Fis’s comm was dead, which meant he probably was too. So here she was, alone. No job, no scrip, and no hope of either in the foreseeable future. Why had she ever walked into this mess in the first place?

She looked up at the rider. Sure, she had cursed the thing mercilessly at first, but the old bucket of spare parts had grown on her. If the boss hadn’t gone and stirred up the rigla’s nest, she would have been flying in just a few days. And not just flying, but riding in the pilot’s seat. She had been foolish enough to let herself believe that maybe one day, once Eraranat had taken Julewa and she had shown what she could do, she might lead a full squadron.

“Karging stupid!” She kicked a wrench and sent it flying into a pile of scrap metal. “Stupid, stupid, stupid!”

Grenerk rounded the corner with his usual companions Ven and Crat in tow. He cocked his head at her fit and gave her a condescending smirk before proceeding toward the rider. Ven pulled a gauge from his pocket as he headed for one of the access ports on the machine.

“WHOA!” Shan snapped out of her tantrum and rushed to block the rider from the intruders. “What do you walking afterbirths think you’re doing?”

“Lockout and inspection. This rider’s due for seizure in nine days, one of our pilots is gonna fly it out of here,” Grenerk said. He leaned toward Shan and gave her both a nasty smile and a scent of his last meal. “Y’know, a
real
pilot.”

“Seizure?” The insult slipped past Shan as she considered the word. “No. No way. You’re kargin’ with me. Now get your slimy little—”

“Think she’s about to attack me.” Grenerk slid a wrench from his pocket. “Self defense, right guys?”

“Right.” Crat stepped up behind Grenerk, towering over him like a giant spider.

Shan halted, unclenched her fists and forced her breathing to settle. Between gritted teeth, she spoke to Grenerk. “Documents. Show them or I call the Hangar Authority and cite you all for trespassing.”

“We have your documents, Mer Welkin. You’ll find them all in order.”

Shan spun at the sound of a female voice and found herself facing a tall woman holding out a digipad.

“
Pilot
Welkin,” Shan corrected.

The name on the top of the document read:
Efectuary Jul Akbas, CWA, Political Interactions Sector
. What did the PIS want with the boss’s rider?

Her face fell as she read on. The rider was slated for debt seizure. Her old outfit had been given the contract to retrieve and pilot it, which didn’t exactly strike Shan as a coincidence. Worst of all, they would be slapping on an encrypted lockout, which meant it was grounded. Even if the boss contacted her today, she couldn’t take the rider out of the hangar.

“Step aside, Mer Welkin, and let these men do their job,” Akbas said.

Shan was torn between a desire to break the woman like a dry stick and an instinct to run. Fast.

“Do it and get out,” Shan said to Grenerk, her voice flat.

He walked past her with a laugh, deliberately bumping her out of the way. Ven looked down at her with a smirk. “If you need a job, the caj could always use a hand sweeping the hangar.”

Shan bit her tongue as they attached the lockout, effectively chaining the rider in place—

her mind flashed to Ama and her collar, to that small item that exerted so much control. When the lockout device blinked amber, she felt as if someone had pulled her heart out through her chest.

Grounded.

Grenerk and his goons began their inspection. Efectuary Akbas had not moved from where she stood. Without looking back, Shan knew she was being watched.

“Shame.” Akbas uttered the word as if dangling bait. Shan kept her eyes on the rider but Akbas was undeterred. “We understand you come from a long line of pilots. Your mother was top of her class in Aggressor training, completed a series of successful extrans missions, and received commendations from a number of Major House members and other noteworthy Citizens. Only natural you would want to continue the tradition. It is a shame you inherited your father’s genetics.”

Every small muscle in Shan’s body constricted, and she tasted the metallic tang that always preceded a fit of rage. She turned to face Akbas, ready to answer her taunts with a fist. It was, first, the black and silver CWA uniform that made her hesitate, then the look on Akbas’s face. She remembered Fismar’s comment from that night on the warehouse rooftop, about how there were all kinds of caj who thought they were People, just because they didn’t have a graft in their neck. Endowed with the might of the CWA, Shan knew that was exactly how Akbas saw her: as caj.

“Fitting that Eraranat should hire such a failure.” Akbas click-stepped to the rider, where Ven held open an access port. She appraised the guts of the machine, then plunged her hand in and yanked out a fistful of wires and hoses, all recently and painstakingly replaced. “Defective.” She let the craft’s severed entrails drop. “Worthless.”

The words pierced Shan like little daggers.

Akbas issued some parting instructions to Grenerk’s crew, then marched out of the hangar, her steps echoing behind her.

This morning, Shan wouldn’t have believed she could have felt any lower than she did. Now? She dug deep to stand straight in front of Grenerk and the other two morons.

Grenerk let the cowling drop with a loud slam, climbed down the moveable stairs, and kicked the landing strut. “By the way, you missed the carbon scoring on the injectors, Welkin. This piece of trash might have gone up once, but just as likely you would have blown yourself out of the sky.
Defective
, good word all around. ” He laughed unpleasantly and called for Ven and Crat. “C’mon techs, let’s let the former pilot get her tools cleared up.”

Shan watched them leave, a sick feeling rising in her guts, then turned to the rider once more. It wasn’t as if she was about to start believing any of Ama’s mumbo jumbo about machines having souls or anything, but for a little while she had felt some kind of connection to this one. Now, even without the lockout, she would never get this rider off the ground. She barely had enough scrip to catch the autotrans back to the RQ; she couldn’t even dream of replacing an injector assembly.

She walked closer and dropped her head until it rested against the body of the rider. Over. It was all over, before it had even started.

“Stupid.”

Jarin stood behind his desk; two young cadets stood on the other side. His voice rose as he thumped his fist, the words amplified by the small size of his academic office. “If this is what you consider sufficient effort, Cadet Hilfas, then you had best be considering your post-academic career as a Pond-Minder!”

The teenager quailed under the verbal assault, an unprecedented show of anger from the head of instruction. She looked to her companion in grief, who swallowed and braced himself.

“And you, Cadet Vana! What would your aunt Shyl think of this foolishness? The crime is not simply that the two of you collaborated on the assignment, but that somehow your collaboration managed to produce a sum less than the measure of your already mediocre individual competencies!”

He slammed his fist down again. As if on cue, an amber icon flashed on the desktop to announce the arrival of a high priority message.

He glared at the students for a moment longer, a dare for them to reply, then sat and stabbed his finger onto the icon. The display, angled for his view only, showed the missive.

It was sparse text, indication of a signal intercept directed to Segkel’s pilot, the Welkin woman. His lips puckered as he read the message.

Segkel. Or one of his people. But likely Segkel. Alive, somewhere in the barren wastes, and establishing communication.

He pressed another icon and cleared the view on the desktop reader before sitting back in his chair with a weary sigh. He rubbed his eyes with one hand, waved at the offending duo with the other. “Reset of study progress for this cycle in all classes, both of you.”

The pair gasped in dismay.

“But Senior Theorist—”

“Quiet!” Jarin said. “Your punishment will be logged and if either of you has any ambition to ever become a Theorist in the service of the Cultural Theorist’s Guild, you will take this as inspiration to devote yourself to your studies and not to childish affairs. Now, out of my office.”

The cadets paused only long enough to let the door cycle open before fleeing. Jarin rose and walked to the control panel by the door. He sealed the door once more and dimmed the lights before he dropped back into his chair.

“You’re right, Maryel,” he said to the empty room. “For our best hope at salvation, he creates more problems than he solves.”

From the moment she stepped off the autotrans and into the RQ, Shan kept one hand in her pocket, wrapped around her comm. The other hand hovered near the pistol strapped to her waist. She was no stranger to trouble, but her variety usually came in the form of a bar fight or a stint in the hole for lipping off a superior. Eraranat’s brand of trouble was something else entirely.

The streets were quiet. That alone made her jumpy. The RQ was never quiet. She ducked her chin as she passed a tall man, clad in the dark blue uniform of a warden. Since the night of the riot, all areas of Cathind had seen heightened security. But here, where there weren’t unarmed Citizens in need of protection, the sight of security spoke of control from upchain. Far upchain.

A shiver ran down Shan’s back. Raider instinct? She glanced over her shoulder: five People behind her, three she swore she recognized from the autotrans.

She picked up her pace. Back in the hangar, she had thought coming home would make her feel safer. Now she realized escape had been a delusion.

The street veered right; she could see the accessway to her undercity residence in the distance. The crumbling old sewage pit had never felt so welcoming.

Footsteps? Someone was keeping pace with her. She bit her lip as her heart leapt into the next gear. If she was being tailed and she turned around again she would give the game away.

She pulled the comm from her pocket, hand trembling, and pretended to scroll through messages. She raised it to her ear, pausing just long enough to catch the reflection on the screen. There were two of them from the autotrans—one in an olive green jacket, average height, the other with a small black pack slung over her shoulder.

She thought of Efectuary Akbas, ripping out the guts of the rider, and her mouth turned dry.

This time she didn’t change her pace. Instead, as she passed a team of caj collecting spines from out of the stone walls, leftover damage from the riot, she veered suddenly into an alley. She ran, pulling her pistol free as she did.

The caj team’s portable recycler unit provided scarce cover, but it was enough. Back to the wall, she crouched behind the recycler and waited. Mouth open, her breath came in and out in fast huffs. She kept her pistol raised and ready. They would be on her any moment.

Time stretched as she waited; her muscles locked, then began to cramp. Just as she was about to abandon her suspicions as the product of paranoia, a loud commotion held her in place. There was a crash, followed by a stifled cry, the thump of flesh hitting concrete, and the whir of huchack fire.

She would have recognized the sound of a brawl anywhere. But who?

You just going to sit here and let them answer that for you, Pilot Defective?

“Karg!” Shan pushed out of her hiding spot and jogged back to the street, pistol raised. She could see one body down before she arrived—olive coat, average height.

Shan’s breath stopped and it felt as if her heart had, too, but she forced herself forward. The other body was sprawled face down. Both had a well-placed set of spines in the back of their head. To one side of the second body, a stunner wobbled back and forth, as if it had just rolled from the dead woman’s hand.