Dirty Job Read online

  Dolph picked up the table and rammed it at the Ek, knocking him away from Irene.

  Struggling to my feet, I tripped over something.

  My machete.

  Without a pause for thought, I snatched it up and lunged at the Ek. Akhatli blocked the machete with the rifle barrel, knocking the blade upwards, but I was still moving forward. And even at six foot one, I was a lot shorter than the Ek. My momentum drove the blade into his throat.

  Blood jetted all over the inside of the RV. It spurted into my face, blinding me. I fell on top of Akhatli and rolled away. The Ek thrashed. Lying half on the bench seat and half on the floor, he clutched his throat with all four hands. After a subjective eternity, the hands fell away, uncurling limply. The fountain of blood slowed to a red freshet. Akhatli’s feet twitched, and then stopped twitching.

  I wiped my face with my t-shirt, which only smeared the blood around. I kicked one massive leg.

  Like kicking a fallen tree.

  “Dead,” I said.

  Dolph toed the curls of duct tape on the floor. Hoarsely, he said, “Their sweat has solvent qualities. Dissolved the adhesive on the tape. Forgot all about that.”

  “Well, fuck,” Irene said.

  There was a moment’s silence. Then I forced my mind to start working again. Someone had to take charge. That would be me. “It’s all right. It’s gonna be OK. We’ll sink the vehicle.”

  “Where?” Irene said.

  The RV was still drifting downstream. The current had carried us close to the south bank of the creek. “Right here.” I glanced around the gore-soaked interior of the vehicle. “Take anything that belongs to us.” I picked up the machete, and put on my backpack. “Irene, can you do the honors?”

  “On it.” She moved forward to the driver’s seat.

  I checked again to make sure there were no other boats or amphibious vehicles on the river. I took a deep breath and threw open the side door.

  Then I jumped.

  I can’t swim.

  I sank. My mouth was closed but my eyes were open. I let go of the machete, and it sank. Through the murky water, I saw the bottom of the RV moving away like a spaceship, and then sunlight struck down, illuminating all the drifting leaves and twigs and bits of garbage in the water. Bubbles sparkled in a slow-moving blizzard, reminding me of how the stars of the Cluster look at FTL speed. That is the most beautiful sight I know. I’d always thought I would like it to be the last sight I ever saw.

  We all have to die sooner or later. Sooner … or …

  I thought of Lucy, and began to kick like crazy. All it seemed to do was push me further away from the sunlight. I swallowed water. My backpack was dragging me down, but panic had me in its grip now, and I couldn’t remember how to take the damn thing off.

  The sleek form of a dolphin dived under me and thrashed its powerful tail, swimming upwards with my body draped across its back. When we broke the surface, I spat out water, gasped for air, and flailed so wildly that the dolphin said, around the backpack it gripped in its mouth, “For fuck’s sake! Stop panicking!” Dolph’s voice always sounded higher and squeakier in dolphin form.

  He swam to the north bank of the creek with me on his back. Tree branches overhung the high, undercut bank, dipping down almost to the water. I grabbed a branch that bowed under my weight, got my feet on some exposed roots, and hauled myself up to dry land. On hands and knees, I dropped my head and vomited. I was just as glad to return the water I’d swallowed back to where it came from. Mill Creek is none too clean.

  Dolph climbed up the tree roots, naked, with his backpack over his shoulder. I thought about saying something about his clothes—maybe he should dive for them, maybe they would tie us to the scene—but then I didn’t bother. The water would wash away any DNA evidence, and he’d been wearing generic gear. Printed on the cheap; you get one, two washes out of that stuff, then recycle it. Shifters seldom manage to hang onto their clothes much longer than that, anyway.

  I wiped my mouth and spat. Then I took off my own wet clothes. The day was hot, the air heavy. We squatted, naked, in the undergrowth, and stared through the branches at the RV, which was still drifting down the river.

  A faint pop-pop came from the vehicle. It started to sink.

  Irene threw the side panel open and and jumped into the creek. She didn’t need to Shift to swim. She’d grown up in Shiftertown, a few blocks from the sea. Her head moved slowly towards us, blonde hair darkened by the water.

  “Hard, fucking, core,” Dolph said.

  “Yup,” I said. “She’s all in.”

  I angled a glance at Dolph. I knew he wasn’t all in. He had been ambivalent about this job, even before we killed the Ekschelatan.

  Killed him.

  In the middle of freaking Millhaven.

  That wasn’t in the plan.

  “Nothing like getting a job off to a good start,” Dolph said gloomily.

  Not only was he my oldest friend, he was the person I most trusted at my back. Of course, I trusted Irene, too. But I knew Dolph wouldn’t suddenly do shit like cutting off alien ears. And I knew he could keep a secret. “I went to the hospital this morning,” I said.

  Dolph went still. He had been nagging me to go and get a follow-up test. “And?”

  “It wasn’t a mistake. Dr. Zeb did a brain scan. There were signs of folding. I’ve got IVK.”

  The words were as hard to get out as they had been to hear in Dr. Zeb’s office this morning. I forced the rest of it out in a rush.

  “The average prognosis for survival is five years. Symptoms generally start to present within six months.”

  “Six months?”

  “Initial symptoms include tremors, tics, and bouts of acute nausea.” Dr. Zeb’s words were engraved in my brain. “The tremors gradually become uncontrollable, while digestion also suffers to the point that patients are unable to keep food down. Bottom line, by next summer, I’ll be a twitching, puking cripple. Lucy won’t recognize me anymore.”

  “Does Dr. Zeb know you have Chimera Syndrome?” Dolph said suddenly.

  “Huh? I don’t have it. I had it. I’ve recovered.”

  “You don’t recover from CS. You just learn to live with it.”

  “That’s what Dr. Zeb said.” As a child, I had battled Chimera Syndrome, a genetic disease that occurs in one out of 1,000 Shifters. It’s virtually unknown for patients to live past the age of 12 … not in human form, anyway. I was the one in a million who had made it out the other side. I generally kept my survivor status a secret, as CS carries a stigma, but I’d had to tell Dr. Zeb about it after he scanned my brain.

  “CS scars could look like the initial stages of IVK,” Dolph said.

  “Yeah. But he said that even taking that into account, there were unmistakable signs of folding. It’s not a misdiagnosis.”

  After a moment’s silence, Dolph repeated, “Six months.”

  “Yup. So I have less time than I thought to find the scum responsible, and throw them into the M4 black hole.”

  “You could do that,” Dolph said, “and you’d just be that much closer to dying.”

  “True,” I said. “I want to do it, anyway.”

  Dolph let out a bitter laugh. “So why the fuck are we chasing Timmy Akhatli’s lousy thirty-KGC Hurtworlds run?”

  “Because you’re right. Revenge is a shitty goal.” Emotion cracked my voice. It wasn’t a delayed reaction to killing the Ek, although maybe there was some of that in there, too. It was me trying to be a better person, now that it was almost too late. “Lucy’s going to lose her father. I can’t do anything about that. But maybe I can find out why this is happening. Maybe we can find out the truth.”

  “This is so fucked-up.” Dolph rubbed his face. “I always expected to go before you.”

  Irene was getting closer to the bank.

  “Not a word to her,” I whispered urgently. “I don’t want anyone to know.”

  “How are they not gonna find out?”

  “Not now.
Please, Dolph. I’m begging you. Let’s just focus on the job.”

  “You mean MF’s latest power fantasy?”

  I produced a rictus smile. “What, you don’t believe in the crown jewels of the Darkworlds?”

  3

  I wasn’t sure I believed in the crown jewels of the Darkworlds, either. That’s what Rafael Ijiuto had called the little pendant, knife-shaped, diamond-studded, a few centimeters long, that he had worn around his neck. Pippa had had one, too. Our ship’s bot, Mechanical Failure, said he had seen ones like those before. He claimed they were Urush technology. MF himself was an Urush bot, 1,214 years old, built by the mysteriously vanished race that had been the first to colonize the Cluster. He was way too cranky to be worth anything, even had we been minded to sell him, which we weren’t. But even dumb Urush artefacts were known to command high prices. How much? MF had said it would depend if the item was in working order, but anyway, we were talking about fuck-you money.

  If MF was right.

  Irene believed he was. In her mind, we were already selling the crown jewels on the Techworlds. The first thing she said when she reached the bank was, “You did get the Ek’s customer files?”

  “Right here.” My backpack was waterproof. I opened it and checked, anyway, to make sure the holocubes hadn’t got wet, while Irene climbed out of the water, hauling her rifle and backpack. Her wet clothes clung fetchingly to her body. She had a trim figure, the slight sag of her stomach the only sign that she was a mother of two. I caught Dolph looking as she stripped off.

  “It took me a while to figure out how to sink the thing,” she said. “In the end I shot out the AI. That killed the flotation field.”

  In the shadows of the far bank, the RV settled deeper, taking Akhatli’s corpse with it. When it stopped sinking, the top of the RV’s sun-roof was still poking out of the water.

  “Darn,” Irene said. “Should’ve scuttled it in the middle of the creek.”

  “No, this is fine,” I said. “It’s spoofed, anyway. Time it’s found, all the DNA will be gone.”

  “That’s right,” Dolph said, waggling his eyebrows. He was working too hard to cover up his shock at the news I had shared with him. “You didn’t get bit by the piranhas?”

  “Piranhas are an urban myth,” Irene said. “All there is in that river is snakes.”

  “Speaking of snakes,” I said, “we better get in touch with ol’ python.” I was referring to Martin, my engineer. “Need him to bring MF out to have a look at this stuff.”

  “Just take it out to the spaceport and he can look at it on the ship,” Dolph said.

  “It’s stolen goods,” I said. “Stolen from a guy we just murdered.” I corrected myself: “That I just murdered.”

  “So?” Irene said. Her eyes were very blue.

  “So I’m not taking that through customs,” I said, deliberately missing the point. She was telling me the murder was no big deal. Because what, Akhatli was an alien? Or just because? She was wrong, though. It was one thing killing aliens—or humans—out in the Fringeworlds, light years from the nearest cop. It was another thing right here in our own backyard. I pushed away the rising tide of anxiety. “Better if we get MF to come out to us.”

  “OK,” Irene said. “But you can’t call them from here.” Even though I was carrying a burner, it would be risky to use it so close to the crime scene.

  “Right.” I dropped my hands to the ground, hunched my back, and Shifted into a wolf. When I could speak again, I said. “Hike downstream. Get as far away from here as possible.”

  Dolph Shifted into his other animal form, a black-backed jackal. Irene Shifted into her black panther. We trotted along the riverbank, taking turns carrying Irene’s rifle by its sling in our jaws.

  The woods on Ponce de Leon are a slow-motion biological arms race between invasive species and the hardiest, fastest-growing, most poisonous survivors of the planet’s original biome. We slid like furry ghosts through pufferplants, saberthorns, and upside-down trees, all fighting for the sunlight that trickled down through the canopies of murder oaks filigreed with strangler vines. Narcosloths croaked and birds trilled overhead. We could hear the sound of traffic on Millhaven Road, but for all we could see of it, we might have been a thousand miles from civilization.

  We left Irene’s rifle under a bush, and clawed the vines over it. She was sore at leaving it, but she knew we couldn’t walk out onto Millhaven Road with that. I said we could come back for it another day. In my heart, I never planned to come anywhere near here again.

  I reckoned we covered at least three kilometers before the undergrowth thinned out. We stopped to Shift back and get dressed. We all had spare, dry clothes in our backpacks. Preparedness.

  Human again, we walked out of the forest into the parking lot of a seedy, sunbleached strip mall. Cybernetic implants, print-your-own clothes, instant prescriptions. Several of the shops had gone out of business. Holo graffiti tags defaced their shutters. I remembered what Dr. Zeb had said about no one reining in the small-time criminals anymore, now that Parsec was off the scene. Looked like they had the run of this place. Millhaven ain’t Shiftertown, but it’s close, and coming closer all the time. Shoot a gun north from the other side of Outback Avenue, you would hit a tree, but if you didn’t, you would hit someone in Smith’s End.

  I turned my burner on and called Martin.

  “Got the data,” I said. That was all I could say. You have to assume that phone conversations are monitored. “But I need MF to have a look at it. Can you bring him out here?”

  “I’m at the spaceport.” Martin’s voice betrayed his excitement. “We’ll be there as soon as we can. Where are you?”

  I peered up at the defunct holo sign, just a 2D substrate in the sunlight, above the strip mall. “Millhaven Shopping Center.”

  “Oh oh. Maybe not a good place to hang out.”

  “No choice,” I said. “Waiting for my truck.”

  “You know you’re only ‘bout a stone’s throw from Grizzly’s.”

  Grizzly’s Bar & Grill was the favorite hangout of Buzz Parsec’s crew. The bears drank there, plotted, schemed, and got into bearish brawls, while consuming preposterous amounts of seafood.

  “We’re not that near,” I said. Grizzly’s was also on Millhaven Road, but farther up, nearer to Shiftertown. “It’ll be fine. Just hurry.”

  Hurry.

  Six months.

  Hurry.

  I lit a cigarette and eyed the kids loitering outside a tattoo parlor at the other end of the strip mall. But it was OK, they were normies, not bears. How could I tell? They had tattoos. Shifters can’t get ink. It would go away when you Shift.

  “They saw us come out of the woods,” Dolph said.

  “It’s fine,” I said. “Where’s my damn truck?”

  Irene was impatient, too, gazing up and down the road like her head was on a swivel. “I need to get home,” she said. “I have to help Mia pack.”

  I groaned. “I have to help Lucy pack, too.”

  Our daughters had both been selected for the Shiftertown school district’s annual summer camp. It was competitive: kids had to test in the top ten percent of their grade to get in. Lucy and Mia had both qualified for the first time this year. Was I pleased? I was just about bursting with pride. But right now, the reminder only ratcheted up my anxiety. Summer camp started tonight. This should have been my last day with Lucy. And I was hanging out in Millhaven, with a dead alien on my conscience.

  At last a low-slung muscle bike zoomed up the road. Martin crouched over the handlebars, bulky in midnight-blue leathers. Behind him clung an unusual passenger: Mechanical Failure. Our ship’s bot had all his grippers extended, clinging to Martin and to the bike’s frame. His bendy neck was tucked down, sensor covers squeezed shut. It was fortunate that his chassis resembled a four-foot steel suitcase.

  He toppled unsteadily off the bike. “Never again,” he croaked. “Martin, I kept telling you to slow down!”

  “This from a
bot that’s spent most of the last millennium travelling at faster than light speed,” Martin said.

  “It’s different when you can see the ground.” MF tentatively cracked his sensor covers open and regarded the strip mall. “Ooh la la.” He had spotted the female members of the gang outside the tattoo parlor. They were not what I’d call attractive, but MF wasn’t picky. His sensors extended in their direction as if on stalks.

  “Work first, ogle later,” I said.

  Mercifully, my truck had arrived while we were waiting. We all clambered into the back. Squatting on the blankets I kept to cushion cargoes, I took out the holocubes and cube reader.

  “This technology is ancient,” MF complained.

  Compared to him, it was young, of course. But the Urush knew things we don’t. Show me the human-built bot that’s still working after twelve centuries. “Eks are conservative,” I said. “Can you read it?”

  “Of course.” MF powered up the reader. Ek script scribbled across the dimness, flickering faster than our eyes could follow, even if we could understand the Ek language. MF could understand it, of course. I’d guess he knew every language in the Cluster. Two minutes and three holocubes later, he said, “Here it is.”

  “Machine parts for Mittel Trevoyvox,” I said, “thirty KGCs up front, thirty on the back end?”

  “I am not sure if this actually means machine parts. But yes, the cargo is going to Mittel Trevoyvox.”

  Martin fist-bumped Irene. “It’s on!”

  The Hurtworlds lie between 51 to 58 light years from Ponce de Leon, near the Core of the Cluster. It’s a long journey, and there are other reasons why few people ever go there. The Hurtworlds are living hells. Leper colonies of the fourth millennium, they have nothing to offer to interstellar trade …

  … but we had to go there.

  Because that’s where Pippa was.