Ninth Life E-Book

Stark Holborn

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Serie: The Factus Sequence
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 491

Beschreibung

The Ballad of Halo Jones meets Becky Chambers' Wayfarers by way of 3:10 to Yuma; a clash of law and lawlessness, storytelling and truth in a headlong romp across the stars. After forty years of wreaking havoc across the galaxy, the outlaw Nine Lives – AKA Former General Gabriella Ortiz – has finally run out of lives. Shot down into a backwater at the system's edge, she is rescued by deputy marshall Havemercy Grey. Hav is a true soul, trying to uphold what is right in the heedless wastes. Hav is determined to see justice done. And Hav could sure use that 20-million bounty... But escorting the most dangerous fugitive in the system across the stars is no easy task, especially when decades of fire and destruction are catching up with her, and every gutspill with a pistol wants that bounty. So when Ortiz offers a deal - to keep them both alive, as long as Hav listens to the stories of Gabi's lives - Hav can't refuse. There's just one catch: everywhere they go, during every brawl and gunfight and explosive escape, people say the same thing - don't let her talk...

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Praise for Stark Holborn

Also by Stark Holborn and Available from Titan Books

Title Page

Leave us a Review

Copyright

A Word on what Follows

Proctor’s Note

Ext: Artastran Mine Workings, Night

Int: Charis, Night

Verbal Testimony Given by Former Gat-Runner ‘Bilge’ Jacody at the Rabadan Rest Stop, Western System

A Report on Conditions in the Prodorian Penal Camps by Sestre Lamentation Prosguetel, Detectoress of the Munificence

Jaypea Preacher Arrested

Jerichan Freighter Robbed in Daring Dead Line Heist

Proctor’s Note

Death Report

Dead General Alive on Factus?

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also Available from Titan Books

PRAISE FOR STARK HOLBORN

“I loved Ten Low. Combining the taut characterisation and clever wit of Stark Holborn’s spectacular Westerns with some splendidly inclusive and innovative sci-fi, this is a wonderful fusion of Firefly and Joanna Russ, with a Ennio Morricone soundtrack.”

JOANNE HARRIS, BEST-SELLING AUTHOR OFCHOCOLAT, THE GOSPEL OF LOKIAND MANY MORE

“Mad Max meets Firefly – and that’s awesome.”

CLAIRE NORTH, AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR OFTHE FIRST FIFTEEN LIVES OF HARRY AUGUST

“A fantastic, punchy SF action story, full of blood and grit and bitter pasts.”

ADRIAN TCHAIKOVSKY, AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR OFCHILDREN OF TIMEAND MANY MORE.

“Stark Holborn continues to impress. Great characters and a blistering pace.”

GARETH POWELL, AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR OF THE EMBERS OF WAR SERIES

“The future of space westerns, Ten Low showed me the most vibrant desert world since Dune. A stunning blend of pulp and literary exploration leaves the old guard masters in the dust.”

ALEX WHITE, AUTHOR OF THE SALVAGERS TRILOGY

“Stark Holborn’s writing is clever, original and thrilling.”

R. J. BARKER, AUTHOR OFTHE BONE SHIPSANDAGE OF ASSASSINS

“An action-packed SF adventure with an intriguing majority female cast?OH, HELL YES!”

STINA LEICHT, AUTHOR OFPERSEPHONE STATION

“I loved this from beginning to end. There are furious fight-scenes, down-and-dirty characters and incredible world-building. Stark Holborn grabs you by the throat on page one and never lets you go!”

CAVAN SCOTT, BESTSELLING AND AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR

“A gritty space western that fans of The Mandalorian should lap up. As always, Stark Holborn makes us feel immediately for the characters to the point where we’ll follow them through hell. And we do.”

PAUL CORNELL, AUTHOR OF THE SHADOW POLICE AND WITCHES OF LYCHFORD SERIES

“Holborn shows what a rich imagination she has.”

THE TIMES

“Packed with wildly memorable female characters and the pacey prose keeps things whip-cracking along.”

SFX

“Holborn has crafted a surprisingly cohesive, bad-ass space western full of adventure, tragedy and terror, that still manages to handle its mission with relentless fun.”

SCIFI NOW

Also by Stark Holborn and available from Titan Books

Ten LowHel’s Eight

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Ninth Life

Print edition ISBN: 9781803362984

E-book edition ISBN: 9781803362311

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd.

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First edition: July 2024

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

© Stark Holborn 2024

Stark Holborn asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

You told me you had died eight times and that this would be the last. I didn’t believe you then, thought it was just another one of your tricks, a way of getting inside my head.

That was before I saw what you could do. What you were. No human could die eight times.

But you were more than human.

You were already halfway to the stars.

Fragment from The Testimony of Havemercy Grey

A WORD ON WHAT FOLLOWS

AS A MILITARY proctor, my task is ostensibly a clear one: locate, collate and evaluate information relevant to the subject at hand, and present it in as objective a way as possible for posterity. However, the very presence of this note should suggest to you that – in this particular instance – my task has been impossible. I have already been forced to insert myself into this dossier in a way I find at best uncomfortable and at worst irresponsible. But there’s simply no way around it.

Don’t let her talk is a refrain that arises again and again in relation to the individual investigated herein. I never spoke to the woman; indeed, she was deceased long before my involvement. And yet, in the act of compiling an account of her life, I suspect I have done the very thing I was warned against.

If I were a superstitious or indeed a religious person, I would say that she knew about me, that she foresaw my presence and sent her words out across space and time to burrow straight into my brain.

After much deliberation, I have left the above comment intact as an example of my difficulties with this subject.

Objectively, this dossier is a collation of materials relating to the life of Former General GABRIELLA ORTIZ, Implacabilis, Hero of the Battle of Kin, known at various points throughout her life as ‘The Dead General’, ‘Dolores Lazlo’, ‘Orts’, ‘La Pesadilla’, and perhaps most famously, the outlaw ‘Nine Lives’.

Owing to the nature of her activities, factual details about Ortiz are scant and limited largely to her early years. I have tried, where possible, to verify the accounts provided, but this has proved a fruitless task. Some witnesses deny their original testimonies. Some accounts differ only in the minor details, while others are wholly contradictory. The most substantial portion of this report consists of fragments of the now notorious ‘Testimony of Havemercy Grey’, broadcast to the black-market tangle after the explosive events of Ortiz’s final days. This log was recovered from the tangle in a damaged and fragmented state. It is possible that other portions exist within bootlegged copies, but at present they remain lost. Narrative techniques have therefore been used to translate the log into long-form prose more easily parsed by readers. While every effort has been made to retain the veracity of the recordings, there are necessarily sections where compilers were forced to use greater creative liberty than is ordinarily recommended.

Therefore, I would advise future readers and researchers to take what is presented herein as a speculative document rather than a factual one: a work of vernacular history, an attempt to provide a framework within which to understand Ortiz’s mythos as a potential cult hero to millions across the system.

Don’t let her talk. An impossible maxim. She has already begun to talk, through me.

And you are already listening.

Military Proctor Idrisi Blake

AT FIRST I thought the ship was just a figment. No one flew out here if they could help it, so far from Jumptown or the mine’s landing dock. But when I peered at the scuff’s locator the glitching screen confirmed my sighting, told me that what I was seeing was real: a ship falling from the sky. A ship running a scrambler to hide its name. Bandit, then, smuggler, outlaw, merc. Human, Pa always said, even if he still wore a black eye or blood-crusted lip from the last encounter. Always human.

The storms on Jaypea were bad that day, jostling the scuff as it buzzed a few feet above the ground. I gripped the handlebars hard to keep it steady, hands stinging as the toxic dust worked its way into my skin, into the blisters that rawed each palm, my quick pink flesh weeping the tears my eyes wouldn’t. Hadn’t had blisters like that for years. Not since I left the House, stopped digging Father’s twig garden. My gloves were gone, and I knew that soon the skin of my knuckles would be cracked and inflamed, but still I hung on, rode on, until the call sign blinked and vanished.

If not for the winds, I would have heard the crash. As it was, I only saw it: a red bird burning on the dust, spewing smoke into the air. A small ship, a Merganser maybe, not meant for Gat-jumping, let alone a ditch dive from orbit. I stared up at the Gat, barely visible through the nickel clouds, the red lights of its vast ring structure gleaming dully, like beads of blood on a wound that never healed, a hole torn into the flesh of space. It looked like the ship had tried to veer away from the official lanes as if intending to pass us by and fly straight for the Dead Line. Only someone desperate would have risked it.

Had I known who – what – that ship held, I might have turned the scuff and ridden away. Might have sold everything on my body and maybe my body itself to buy passage to another place. Peeled myself from history and sent it spinning off without me. But I didn’t know. I had no idea what was waiting.

Sometimes I think it was sheer luck, how we were thrown into each other’s paths. You would have said it wasn’t luck, that it was a road we had been on since the carbon that made us first collided and fused into being. Entangled roads we had already been walking for a thousand years before either of us were born.

All I know is that if I hadn’t gone to the Intercession House that day, none of it would have happened. I wouldn’t have been out, riding the bone-white wastes when I should have been behind my desk at the station with a cup of murk at my elbow. I wouldn’t have looked up and seen the smoke of your falling through the nickel snow that swirled constantly beneath the terraform. But I had. And so, in this world, I dismounted and walked towards your wreckage.

*   *   *

The heat of it kept me back, the creak and groan of hot metal and sizzling plastic. I walked around the dying bird, one step, two, three, the grit crunching beneath my boots, unable to do anything to put an end to its suffering. I saw blood, bubbling on the broken glass of the nav windows, dripping red into the white dirt. It led around the wreckage, a crimson trail, all the way to you.

I thought you were a war ghost. I’d never seen one during the day. They usually came at night, riding the wind, stumbling between worlds. But you looked so real, with the blood, and the footprints, stumbling away from me…

A heartbeat, a blink and the storm light changed, turning darker. I waited for you to vanish too, but you didn’t. So I took a step forwards.

You fell to your knees, like someone in grief or penitence. You see, I didn’t know you then. Where were you trying to walk to? There was nowhere to go. Your suit was torn, the dust drinking down the blood, the oxygen tank on your back half ripped away, but still, you tried to rise.

I took out my charge gun and levelled it, the blue fly of its sight landing on your back. I might have called a warning, can’t remember now, but you made no sign of having heard so I reached out my un-gloved hand to touch your shoulder.

You moved so fast it was a blur. All I knew was motion and pain, the gun tumbling from my grip before I could fire. An elbow drove into my face, cracking the plastic of my helmet, sending me sprawling backwards into the dust, and I knew – without doubt – that I would die there, that nickel snow would fill my eyes and eat away my skin and no one would ever know what had happened.

A shape filled my vision through the spidering plastic: the barrel of a pistol, a hand caked in dust and blood, a silhouette against the blind sky.

I don’t know why I did it. Perhaps my fathers’ teachings were lodged in me deeper than I thought and I wanted to die free of the helmet, so my atoms would find God. But in the second before you pulled the trigger, I wrenched the visor of my helmet up and looked into your eyes.

I saw the face of a killer – a mask of gore, black hair like dried snakes, blood lodged in the deep grooves beside your nose and mouth, eyes like bullet holes punched in flesh that locked on mine and widened in shock.

“You,” you said, and fell.

Fragment from The Testimony of Havemercy Grey

Accorded Military Division: Air Fleet

Personnel Information

CLASSIFIED: Grade III & Above

NAME: Gabriella Ortiz

PLACE OF BIRTH: Frontera, Felicitatum (Previously known as Jericho)

RANK: Captain-General Western Air Fleet Minority Force (C Class)

DECORATIONS: Distinguished Conduct I & II. Valour in Flight. Bolito’s Fury. Fleet Service Medal. The Procella Crescent.

OFFENCES (known): Treason. Murder. Assault. Dereliction of Duty. Insubordination. Theft of Accorded Military Property. Fraternisation with the Enemy.

OFFICIAL CONVICTIONS: None known.

CURRENT STATUS: Deceased [Aged 45 years, 7 months]

FORMER STATUS: Deceased [Aged 13 years 5 months]

SUBJECT BIOGRAPHY:

Gabriella Ortiz was born on the moon of Felicitatum – known before the Limit War as Jericho – in the electronics warehouse-city of Frontera. The oldest of three children to parents Itziar Ortiz and Samble Gilby, who both worked as security for Frontera’s elite foreperson class.

At age six, the Free Limits launched a strike upon Frontera, intended to disrupt technology production. Of her family of five, Ortiz was the only survivor. After processing as an orphan, she was assigned to one of the Accorded War Camps in the medical district-city of Asclepius. It was from here – at the age of six years and four months – that she was recruited to the Accord’s Minority Force Programme, and shipped to a training camp on the moon of Tamane. (See accompanying information.)

After passing initial physical and cognitive tests, Ortiz was selected for further development at age eight, and began a rigorous military training, education and enhancement programme on the military-owned planet of Voivira. Excelling in every activity – and showing particular strength in physical combat and military strategy – she was assigned at age nine to the role of second lieutenant in the Minority Force’s C Class, where she quickly progressed, becoming first lieutenant within six months, and captain within a year. After several successful field operations she was fast-tracked for promotion and given her first command of an agile Air Fleet company known as the Bolts: a search and destroy outfit tasked with tracking and eliminating Free Limiter guerrilla units. Ortiz proved herself a brilliant and ruthless strategist, achieving exceptional results in combat operations across contested space and attaining the highest capture rate of any Minority Force captain to date. On one notable occasion, after tracing a Free Limit strike crew to a hidden enemy space station known as The Forward Kin, she ordered an audacious rapid assault, leading the charge herself. Though vastly outnumbered, the Bolts attacked with such precision and rapidity that the Limiter force was largely destroyed, along with the station’s fuel and weapon caches, forcing a surrender and securing Ortiz the rank of general within the Minority Force, the moniker ‘Hero of the Battle of Kin’ and the coveted Procella Crescent.

For the next two years, General Ortiz continued to make a name for herself within both the Minority Force and the Accorded Companies, fighting on many of the Limit War’s most dangerous fronts. (See detailed history of military engagements.) Though she was criticised by some for unorthodox tactics and generous interpretation of orders, these qualities were nevertheless coupled with an exemplary success rate and a fierce loyalty to the Accord, and at age thirteen she was named commander of the Western Air Fleet of the Accorded Nations. This decision was not unilaterally approved of within higher command, and was most notably protested by Infantry Commander Salazar Fan, who was vocal in his assertion that the Minority Force were little more than propaganda tools.

Soon after this, the Free Limits launched a deadly biological weapons attack on the cadet training camps of Tamane, resulting in eight thousand, eight hundred and eighty-four casualties: a mis-step which cost them many of their allies and heralded their ultimate defeat.

Following the close of hostilities, General Ortiz continued in her position, and was assigned to peace-keeping duties in the Western Sector. It was here, en route to a minor insurgency on the satellite moon of Prodor, that her ship experienced a fatal malfunction and crashed on the desert moon of Factus, leaving no survivors. At age thirteen years and five months, General Gabriella Ortiz was officially declared deceased.

This, by all accounts, was the first time she died.

WHEN YOU COLLAPSED onto the bone-coloured dirt I thought you had died right in front of me. You looked small in death, and I almost laughed, a desperate, choked laugh at the course my day had taken. But then I peered through my cracked visor and saw that your chest was moving, that you were breathing.

You.

My nose was bleeding but I picked myself up from the spot where I should have lain as a corpse and scrambled for my gun. My wrist ached as I levelled it at you, expecting you to rise at any moment.

You didn’t. No surprise, really. The fact you were alive after a crash like that was a miracle. Or something else…

Edging forwards, I kicked at your leg. Nothing. Up close, I could smell the wreck on you, blood and smoke and sweat and something I couldn’t name, sharp and clean, like the smell of the dunes when the nickel snow settled. A metallic odour, too. It was coming from your suit: Delos steelsilk, I realised, light as air and tough as tungsten. I’d never seen one like it. Not even the Shockneys could afford something like that.

You still held the gun, fingers locked around its grip, but I wrestled it free, stuck it in my own belt and worked up the courage to look at your face.

It was covered in blood, glistening in livid streaks like the glimmerworm makeup the workers wore in the bordel, settling into the deep grooves around your mouth, between your eyes. Sweat-matted black hair threaded through with silver like the lines that glinted between a droger’s train. Not young, but somehow not old either.

I sat back in the dust and took a gulp from the oxygen spigot on my vest, blotting my nose with a blistered hand and trying to clear my mind, trying to think. Whoever you were, you were running from something.

It came to me, like a seed splitting open to reveal white and unformed matter within: that your presence here might be more than a coincidence. That it might be them. The hairs on my neck rose. Hours ago, I had prayed desperately for a way out, and now here you were.

The nickel snow in the air grew thicker and the filter in my suit gave a plaintive bleep as it kicked up a notch, working on maximum to keep the dust from my lungs. Soon the storm would be at its height, and would cover my tracks, burying everything beneath a layer of sickly yellow powder.

That’s what made my decision. I bent and took hold of that priceless suit and began to drag you towards the scuff. At the time, I didn’t understand how someone so small could be so heavy, as if your bones were filled with mercury, not marrow. As I hauled you up into the sorry box, your hand flopped and something slipped from your fingers, landing in a puff of dust. Something round, like a coin, its pattern picked out in blood.

Without thinking I grabbed the thing and stuffed it into my pocket.

I’d already made my first mistake that day. What I didn’t know is that I had just made my second.

*   *   *

I made it back to the station with the storm on my heels. The white day had turned dark, the yellow light on the comms tower beating weakly. The station itself wasn’t much to look at: three pre-fab habs, welded together to form a U shape, huge fuel canisters languishing in the dirt like rust-bellied slugs and a four-berth dock for larger ships that no one ever used. Home.

Any relief I felt at making it back before the storm vanished when I saw the bird idling in the yard outside. A large, blue, low-altitude bird, wearing only a thin coat of nickel dust rather than a hard-baked shell, like everything else on Jaypea. Bile rose in my throat. A visit from Ma Shockney was only ever a bad thing, but now, after today… I started to shake as four men in oil-black body armour emerged from the ship. Were they here for me? Could I run?

But it was too late for that. They had already seen me, they could chase me down in minutes in that ship of theirs. I had no choice but to ride the scuff into the stable, haul the rattling doors shut behind me and pray to the God of my fathers that Ma Shockney didn’t yet know what I had done.

She stepped through the stable’s airlock before I had even removed my helmet, flanked by her favourite dog, a six-foot slab of blonde Brovos-raised resentment called Rotry Gaun. Rotten-Eye, we called her behind her back, for the permanent eye infections she always had from too much cid and not enough hand-washing. She looked me over as Ma Shockney strode into the stable.

‘Where have you been?’ she demanded.

Ma Shockney was everything Jaypea wasn’t. Where most people were lean and grey-rimed and rough-skinned, she was somehow saturated: hair dyed extra-blue to bring out the black, cheeks silvery-sculpted, clothes of hues so vivid they hurt to look at in this place where colours faded within hours. Even her eyes shimmered like slick oil, from where they’d been polarised against the light.

I looked away. ‘Out to the House.’

‘What happened to your face?’ Gaun slurred at her shoulder.

I sniffed, heart kicking hard. ‘Nothing. Nosebleed.’

Ma Shockney’s eyes narrowed. ‘You’ve been with my son.’

‘No.’

She scoffed, and I don’t know what would have happened if Garrick hadn’t stepped through the door to save me.

‘Deputy Grey has been out on a call,’ he said, elbowing past Gaun. ‘What is it that you wanted with them, ma’am?’

Shockney’s eyes left mine, but I still felt the weight of her gaze, like the crescents of nails dug into flesh. Deputy Grey, Garrick had called me. But to Ma Shockney, I wasn’t the law, or anything like it. I was just Hav. Hav the gasrat, Hav the freak, Hav the preacher’s kid. Hav the nothing.

‘The new mining site,’ she barked. ‘I expect there will be some resistance. I want you there when we break ground. Both of you.’

Garrick’s expression didn’t change. ‘That’s a job for mine security,’ he said. ‘As members of the AIM we’re supposed to remain impartial in—’

‘Oh Al,’ Ma Shockney smiled, her cherry-stained lips twisting. ‘Have you made the mistake of thinking you actually work for the AIM again? They don’t even know you exist. You’re a file number to them, a checked box in some low-grade government archive on Prosper. You could be mechanical dogs and it wouldn’t make the slightest bit of difference. But here I am, the one who pays your wages, asking you to do a simple job to protect the property that keeps this sorry rock alive and breathing.’ She raised one painted brow.

Garrick inclined his head, gloved hands locked together as if he wanted to crush the voice from Ma Shockney’s windpipe. Thing is, she was right. We weren’t the law here. We were just ciphers, legal requirements for the mine to function. Vests on sticks. The uniforms were official enough. Mine had belonged to the dead old man before me, and the dead young woman before him; the crescent moon embedded in the deep blue fabric was dulled and scratched. A symbol of authority that no one saw when they looked at us.

‘Ma’am,’ Garrick nodded.

Shockney made a scathing sound. ‘And you,’ she threw a glance my way. ‘If you see my son, tell him he is expected in Management and will be docked a week’s pay. Maybe that will shake this fetish for gasrats out of his system.’

I forced myself to nod, hands clenched behind my back. The sting of my blistered palms kept me steady, reminded me what was what. That, and the thought of you, slumped out of sight in the sorry box.

Neither Garrick nor I spoke again until Gaun and Ma Shockney had swept out of the stable, leaving the odour of wealth behind them. Only when I heard the roar of their birds lifting off did I take a ragged breath.

‘Thank you,’ I murmured.

Garrick only nodded and took a tin of cid from his pocket, opening it carefully to dip a little finger into the pale, sparkling powder. Cid – Lucidity – was a fear inhibitor, reins for the mind, more valuable than water to many who worked on rocks like this, close to Factus. I grew up hating the stuff, the way it made people look at horrible wounds in their own flesh and laugh, the way it erased consequences from their minds. Ben used it. A flash of memory returned, his mouth twisted cruelly, his eyes dull and swamped with certainty…

‘Bad day,’ Garrick said, closing the tin. ‘We’ll have spooks tonight.’ He blinked. ‘How’s your old man?’

I shrugged, as if my head weren’t spinning, as if my throat weren’t stinging with bile. ‘Same.’

He grunted. Wouldn’t insult Pa, not to my face. Perhaps not even in the mine’s benzenery. It was one of the things that made him different.

‘You see Ben Shockney out there, or not?’

A stab of pain, like someone taking a wrench to my insides. ‘No.’

‘Thought you might have had a word or two to say to him about the plans for the new mining site.’

‘Well, I didn’t see him.’

He shrugged, turning away. I glanced at the sorry box. What I was about to do defied everything I’d grown up believing. ‘Garrick,’ I said. ‘On the way back from the House, I saw something.’

‘What?’

‘A crash landing. A wreck.’

His head snapped up. ‘Why didn’t you say? Any survivors?’

Mutely, I unbolted the door of the sorry box and let it fall open to reveal you there, slumped and bloody. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘One.’

Fragment from The Testimony of Havemercy Grey

BREAKING NEWS MYstellular auditors, the Premier of Delos Mx Lutho himself is dead. That’s right, the immortal magnate of metal, Nickel King and Big Boss of Business has succumbed at last, not to infirmity but to the assassin’s blade, or the assassin’s pistol, we’re not quite sure! But what we do know is that Mx Xoon was murdered yesterday by a lone assassin named as the infamous outlaw Nine Lives herself, who currently remains at large. Good news if you’re a bounty hound, the Accord are offering a reward of up to 20 million creds for her capture. That’s one juicy bone! Did she do it? Will Lutho have the last laugh? All the news from the cruise here with me, Lester Sixofus, currently beaming from Zi’baq IV and feeling fine…

Audio transcript of a news bulletin from interstellar DJ LesterSixofus’ non-stop wire show, ‘Perpetual Notions’

‘HOLY SHIT, HAV.’ Garrick stared at me in astonishment, before glancing through the wall, as if he could still see Ma Shockney’s bird. ‘Help me,’ he ordered.

Together we carried you from the stable into the tiny Marshal’s office and dumped you onto the scratched floor of the holding cell. In the storm-light, you didn’t look real.

‘What kind of ship was it?’ Garrick asked, puffing. ‘Any other passengers?’

I shook my head. ‘It was small, looked like a Merganser. Don’t know where it came from. The Gat, I think.’

‘A Merganser? No wonder it didn’t make the lanes. Miracle it made it through re-entry.’

We exchanged a look and I reached down to brush back the hair that spilled like ink around your face. The blood had dried into a lurid mask, but beneath it I could see scars: a crooked nose, a thin line across your lip, a brutal round scar on your temple as if someone had once put a gun to your head and pulled the trigger… But before I could look closer, it was gone, replaced by a gaping wound that oozed blood. Nausea rose in me and I scrabbled away.

‘Holy shit,’ Garrick swore again.

‘What is that?’ I asked as the scar reappeared once more. ‘What the hell is that?’

‘Luck scar,’ Garrick’s voice was rough with wonder.

I’d heard of Luck Scars, of course I had: injuries sustained on Factus that did and didn’t exist, so that soldiers fought on after death, or died suddenly and violently from wounds that bloomed on their chests out of nowhere. Moon stories, people dismissed them as. And yet… there you were, lying before me, and the more I stared the more I couldn’t be certain of what I saw. It made me dizzy, trying to see you clearly. It still does.

Garrick unzipped the collar of your expensive flight suit. Beneath was a sweat-stained tank top, revealing taut sinews and muscles like cables. Your chest and arms were a patchwork of scars, a storybook of violence. Some were old and faded, others newer, purplish and puckered, bullets, burns, puncture wounds… And on your shoulder, one that looked deliberate. Two sloping lines and a horizontal slash.

The mark of Hel the Converter. Cold dread ran through me.

‘Basszus,’ I swore. ‘Is she a Seeker?’

‘Whoever she is, she shouldn’t be here.’ For some reason, Garrick sounded angry. ‘She shouldn’t be here.’

At last, he pushed himself to his feet, joints creaking and clicking. ‘Clean her face up. I’ll get the scanner. We’ll run her likeness through the system.’

I wetted a rag with a dribble of water from the dispenser and started to wipe the blood from your skin. As I did, I felt a nameless fear that if I wiped too hard your face would slide off onto the floor to reveal another beneath, and another, and another, never ending. I avoided touching the Luck Scar. Every time I glanced at it, I felt sick.

When I was done you looked older than before, but still youthful; like a child who had aged too fast. People sometimes said the same thing about me.

Sitting back, I took the strange coin from my pocket. It looked like an old credit token, a two-faced Delos piece from before the Luck Wars, when people weren’t afraid to use such things. A snake on one side, eight on the other. I turned it in my fingers. We’d taken tokens as donations at the Intercession House sometimes, where we didn’t have the luxury of fear, but I’d never seen one like this. I thought of Pa out there at the House, alone except for his god in the little sanctuary he’d tried so hard to build, the years lost to the dust, the hard-cracked shell of Father’s grave, his bruised and battered face as he stared at me and said my name…

Hav.

‘Done?’

Garrick stood in the doorway, struggling with the handheld scanner, its umbilical tangled behind him. I hid the coin from view and nodded.

‘Out the way then,’ he muttered, hefting it.

There was a weak flash as the scanner took your image and began to compile, reducing your likeness down to easy digits, to a few scant lines of code that could pass through the mess of networks making up our tenuous link to the rest of the system. The scanner’s screen fuzzed and flickered with the dust storm outside and together we held our breath until it buzzed an affirmation that the upload to the AIM bank been successful.

There was nothing else to do then but wait, as the nickel storm battered the walls of the office and had us wincing every time we heard the creak of the relay above. While Garrick brewed yet another pot of the stomach-burning murk he called coffee, I scraped dried blood from the grooves of my fingernails, waiting to discover whether I had a future.

Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore, and went to find Humble.

The air in the bar didn’t help my nausea, still ripe from the shift of miners who had departed some hours before. Now, thankfully, it was empty.

Do you remember the bar? I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t. There was nothing much to see. Four tables and thirteen chairs and the gritty, grilled floor and the bar-top scratched through its shiny covering down to plastic bone. A faded star chart, Accord posters of rules and regulations and quarantine zones, a Gat shuttle timetable, scrawled handwritten notices about things lost and things for sale.

‘Hum?’ I called.

She stepped from the back room, her headscarf wet with perspiration, nickel dust caught on the fine hairs of her cheek. Ancient mining overalls covered a thin, floral shirt, her pistol in its holster beneath her arm. She’d obviously been out fixing the pumps. Still, she looked beautiful, too beautiful for this place. Proper golden hair to my lifeless grey-blonde, blue eyes to my brown. A face capable of looking sad and soft, rather than pinched and watchful. Some days, it hurt me to see how cracked and swollen her hands were now, how she’d started to succumb to the same skin rashes as the rest of us who had to live outside the bordel’s purified conditions. But she was proud of that. And when I remembered the alternative, I understood.

‘Hav?’ she frowned. She could always see me, my sister, see right through the cracks in my shell to what moved in the dark inside. ‘Are you okay? Did the Dogs do something?’

I swallowed the dry, sour air and shook my head. ‘Where are the kids?’

‘Watching their lessons.’ Her blue eyes narrowed on my fingers. ‘Where are your gloves? What happened to your hands? I’ll get the kit.’

I shook my head, knowing there would be no stopping her. Things festered easy on Jaypea, where our only medico was the mining company quack, who dealt out mood suppressants and signed death certificates. I said nothing as Humble took the old army issue kit from beneath the bar. It had been Father’s, from his war days, and he had always shuddered to look at it, perhaps remembering the way it had bounced on his pack, the way it still held screams in its scratches.

‘Here,’ Humble said, and took my hands, laying them gently on the bar, palms up, as if she were about to do something as dangerous as read my fortune. As if I were a supplicant or a penitent. I wanted to tell her to stop. Not to waste the kit on me. I knew well enough what was in there: four analgesic shots, ten credits each. Two rolls of bandage, five each, the remains of a can of sterile spray, fifteen credits, and what if one of the children cut themselves and there was nothing left to treat them, and what if the usual drogers who stopped here wouldn’t part with any supplies, or if the milestonemonger was shot down before they reached us? But in that moment, I didn’t have the strength.

‘We had Jenken in here earlier,’ Humble said as she worked. ‘Hotter than a droger’s fart about the plans. Said he hadn’t worked himself to the bone building that store for the Shockneys to tear it down.’ She sighed. ‘Reckons Pa feels the same, no matter what he says. Gonna be hell to pay around here before long. Hope Ma Shockney knows that.’ I nodded mutely and she tutted as she sprayed sealant onto my blisters. ‘How did you do this?’

‘Doesn’t matter.’ As the sealant stung and hardened into a thick, shiny layer I turned my hands and took hers. ‘Hum, what if we got out of here? On the next shuttle? Just packed up and took the kids and Pa and left?’

She rolled her eyes at me, as if I were still a child. ‘We can’t, Hav. I owe too much on this place. And you’re tied into your job for another—’

‘I don’t care. We could fly beyond the Gat. We could keep flying to far enough that the Shockneys wouldn’t follow.’

Her sad smile turned into a frown, and in that moment I might have told her everything, might have squeezed my stinging palms and spilled all.

‘Hav,’ Garrick’s voice crackled over the internal comm. ‘Hav, come look at this.’

I took my hands from Humble’s and strode back into the office, secrets beating in my throat.

Garrick was standing over the scanner, his big face grey as protein mush.

‘Look,’ he croaked.

We had run faces through the AIM system before, mostly drifters who’d washed up in the bar, sick and delirious, or the odd smuggler who’d been too stupid or drunk to avoid capture. Sometimes, finding a match took hours, as the relay spooled through the AIM’s A Bank – the most wanted criminals – the B Bank – convicted felons – then C Bank – petty delinquents – and so on.

MATCH, a message on the scanner flashed. MATCH. I met Garrick’s eyes. A match within minutes meant A Bank. The ancient printer was already whirring, spitting out a likeness and I lunged for it, pulling the page free.

A face stared back at me, empty carbon eyes and a tangle of hair. Your eyes, your face. Your name.

Fragment from The Testimony of Havemercy Grey

WANTED

THE FUGITIVE GABRIELLAORTIZALSO KNOWN ASNINE LIVES

FOR THE BRUTAL MURDER OFDELOS PREMIER MX LUTHO XOONARMED AND DANGEROUS

REWARDALIVE: 20,000,000DEAD: 1,000,000

WHEN I WAS a kid there was a poster of an Air Marshal in the prop station. It was one of the brightest things I’d ever seen, all saturated blue and silver in that place where colours didn’t stick longer than a week or two.

The Air Marshal on the poster was female-presenting – the silver crescent badge on her vest glowing as she held her hand to her forehead in a salute, against a backdrop of brilliant stars. Her skin was deep brown and shone like polished stone, not pocked and bubbled by hives like almost everyone else I knew. Her eyes were luminous, and she stared ahead as if she could see a lifetime of honour and truth. For the Future, the poster said, in glittering silver letters.

I spent long minutes staring at her whenever my fathers went for fuel, as if she were an icon, like the madonnas or orishas or murtis that the miners and freighters carried with them. When I was scared, I’d even pray to her, though never when Pa could see. Father caught me at it once, murmuring words to the poster with my hands clasped, but he only shook his head at me and looked sad.

I asked her to protect us, to watch over us as a marshal should, to keep us safe from storms and nickel sickness, cancers and infections, from miners on the run who would steal our supplies, from the gangs who snatched the refuge my fathers offered at the Intercession House and dealt out violence in return. From the Shockney family, who operated with impunity in the space left by our marshal’s blind eye.

Carrow, that marshal’s name was, and he was nothing like the woman on the poster. He was tired and crumpled, with a pot belly like a still and a sour mouth and bad eyes that leaked yellow fluid from an augment gone wrong. He drank to keep the terror at bay, rather than take cid, and died of that. When they said we’d be getting a new marshal, I prayed the AIM would send someone like the woman on the poster.

So when I saw Garrick, I was disappointed. Stocky, white-haired, red-eyed Garrick who had been a gaffer at the mine; Garrick, who somehow had the foresight to put in an application to the AIM just before Carrow bit the sky, who boiled his uniform and shrugged it on the day after we sent his body off in the shuttle.

I often wondered whether Garrick needed the cid because he saw more than he should, with his asteroid-born eyes. He was like that sometimes. Had hunches about things that might happen; threw miners into the station’s drunk tank before they started fighting, took the charge pack out of a gun minutes before someone tried to fire it. In other places it might’ve got him persecuted as a bad omen, called If-sighted, fatesworn, troublecrow. Here, it just got him looks and mutters. We were too close to Factus for comfort, so no one said it. But I’d never seen Garrick so much as touch a dice or coin.

I didn’t like him at first. He seemed too sullen, too sober and serious, thanks to all that cid. But when Humble left and began to get into trouble with clients, when Father died and Pa became a whistling bone of grief, when a gang of miners stole our mule, Garrick was there. Not always, not shining like the woman on the poster, but often enough that his presence began to feel like relief – a sip of warm water to clear the tongue.

Garrick was the only one to stand up to Ma Shockney, sometimes. He made me see that the crescent moon on our vests held some power – weak and flickering perhaps, but power all the same. Perhaps the only kind available to someone like me.

I never fathomed why he took me on, save that there was a spare deputy’s vest and a pair of gloves and no one else sane or sober enough to fill them.

The first time I tried on that uniform, I looked like a kid playing dress up, skinny arms rattling in the sleeves, head like a fluffball of dust above the collar. So I cut my hair short and severe with Humble’s kitchen scissors. It didn’t help, just made me look even younger. But when Humble saw me in that uniform, she said she was proud. Father said nothing. Ben, he laughed and laughed. Maybe that’s why I did it, in the end.

The poster of my Air Marshal remained on the wall outside the office, leaching pigment with every passing year until only a ghost of the woman remained and I realised she was nothing but a withered childhood god. A dream. A lie. Nevertheless, when Garrick swore me in, my shoulders itching beneath the third-hand marshal’s vest, I looked into the poster’s faded eyes and could have sworn that she was smiling.

But on that day, I felt utterly out of my depth. Garrick looked terrified as he stared at the poster. ‘It can’t be her. The system has it wrong. Just someone who looks like her.’

‘She’s got the scars. Didn’t she fight in the Luck Wars? The stories say—’

‘The stories say she’s dead.’

I shook my head. I knew it was you. Even unconscious your presence felt powerful enough to blow those walls clean away. I grabbed Garrick’s arm. ‘You said yourself it was a ditch dive. What if she was running from something? Who else could have survived it?’

Garrick didn’t seem to hear me. ‘We have to call this in.’

I stared at him. We never called anything in to the AIM. We had never needed to. All of Jaypea’s disputes were dealt with on-site by the legal proxies of the Jaspal-Pero Mining Consortium – in our case, the Shockney family. It was a deft bit of jurisprudence, a loophole just wide enough to accommodate an asteroid this size and its ever-shifting community of miners and hawkers and mercenaries and stranded drogers. That was why we were here, in theory.

Garrick met my eyes and, for the first time, I saw through that hard-weathered mask to the man he was beneath; not Garrick, who’d worn the marshal’s vest for so long it had become part of him, but Al. Angry, resigned and scared beneath the cid – so scared that at the age of fifty-eight he might be dismissed, cut loose from this rock to drift with no marshal’s pension, no safety line to save him.

‘We have to call Shockney,’ he said.

He turned to the wire terminal and I felt it, like ten volts through my tendons: the chance this offered. I shoved past him and put my hand over the transmitter.

‘No.’

He was sweating, losing precious fluids to anxiety. ‘Move, Hav.’

I thrust the crumpled paper under his nose. ‘Look at it. Look at the bounty on her.’ Garrick’s eyes narrowed, as if dazzled by the light of a future too bright to contemplate. ‘Twenty million, Garri. For her live capture. One million dead. And we have her. We captured her. That money is ours.’

His mouth hung open and I smelled the stale coffee on his breath, caught a glimpse of his missing bottom teeth, eaten away by nickel poisoning and never replaced. I saw him hesitating on the ledge of convincing himself, and knew I needed to push him over.

‘What if this was them?’ I whispered, neck prickling with the knowledge that I could be summoning our death by even mentioning them. ‘What if they wanted her to land here? Wanted us to find her? What if it isn’t just luck?’

Something rippled through Garrick, like a shudder before sickness, and he reached reflexively for the tin in his jacket. When he looked up, his expression had changed.

‘Garri?’

He shoved me aside, reached for the transmitter and ripped the power umbilical from the wall. The screen went dead.

‘We have to keep this quiet,’ he said, voice shaking. ‘Did anyone else see you bring her in?’

I shook my head, blood thudding through my skull. ‘What are we going to do?’

‘Whatever it is, we have to move fast. If she was running, she was being chased and once whoever it was traces her flight path, every bounty hunter in the sector is going to be down on this place. Twenty million credits…’ Garrick let out a strange croak of laughter as he rooted through the drawers. ‘Where’s the nearest station with access to that kind of money?’

‘Delos?’ I tried, thinking of its oily blue shimmer in the sky, so far away it might as well have been imaginary.

‘Too big, we’d never pass unnoticed.’ Spinning, he wrenched open a cupboard, rummaging through two decades of accumulated trash – old masks and dead charge packs and yellowing AIM directives no one had ever read – before pulling out a battered star chart. He flattened it on the desk, weighing it down with his sludge-filled coffee cup and I leaned in, smelling old sweat and new sweat and the bitter tang of fear and hope.

‘We’re here,’ he muttered, pressing one blunt finger to the very edge of the chart, to an asteroid field and a tiny dot labelled JP-V among a cluster of other dots. My eyes skittered over the vastness beyond, the impossible distances between planets and moons, military satellites and huge, orbiting stations. Not to scale, it said, and part of my brain short-circuited trying to imagine the reality of the system: that anyone could ever travel as far as the Home Planets; ever stand beneath the sheeting rain of Prosper or crane their neck to see the sky-roofs of the teeming warehouse cities of Jericho. I pulled my eyes back to that far left corner, our corner, and the familiar shapes I’d seen projected on the schoolroom walls: the gum-pink mass of our nearest planet, Brovos, the cluttered blue ring of industrial Delos, the criss-crossing flight paths that stretched between Gats, thread veins that fed the system, all of them cutting off at the dead flesh of the Deregulated Zone; a hashed-out area that hid the haunted, outlaw moon of Factus, and beyond it, the Void…

‘That’s where you were going,’ I whispered, without meaning to. ‘You were trying to get home.’

‘There,’ Garrick jabbed a finger at a dot. ‘There’s a major AIM station on Prodor, in Slakstad. They’ll be close enough to Delos to transfer the credits.’

I stared. Prodor… All I knew was that it was a swampy mining moon, populated by convicts and ex-convicts and people desperate enough to risk their lives for work.

‘Have you ever been there?’

Garrick licked his dry lips. ‘Once.’

It was a short flight in the scheme of the system, perhaps a week, but impossibly vast for someone like me, whose boots had never left the dust of this rock, not even to take the shuttle to the Gat.

I glanced into the cell, half expecting to see you gone, faded back through the world, into another where you actually belonged. But there you lay, a fallen star, a woman-shaped hole in reality. My heart gave a beat of horror and wonder and terror as I realised what we were about to do.

‘We’ll need a ship,’ I said.

Fragment from The Testimony of Havemercy Grey

IF WE ARE to understand the course of Ortiz’s life, we must at least attempt to understand the Luck Wars. So then: it is widely accepted – but not verified – that she fought in them as a young woman on the side of a faction known as Falco’s G’hals. Some say she died there, at the Battle of Artastra and that another woman took her identity thereafter. Some say she sold her soul to Hel the Converter for the power to repel the Accord’s forces. Some say all of this is true, or none of it and to comprehend it at all you had to have been there and kept your mind in more or less one piece, a status which few, if any, can claim.

I am instructed to present the facts. A difficult thing, when there are none. A simpler question: what can we officially say about the Luck Wars? This: nothing. They never happened. There was no war. Only a minor contretemps between gangs scrapping over little bits of turf, pitiable skirmishes between factions desperate to write themselves into the history books by spattering the pages with their brains. A badly glued cluster of satellites yelling and shouting and making a mess until the water ran out and they went back to being insignificant.

And the stories of whole battalions that ceased to exist from one moment to the next? Factan propaganda. Combat trauma. Rumour and spin. No war. No horror. Nothing so ground shattering. Just an irritating splinter which the vast body politic of the Accord was barely aware of.

But of course, even the smallest of splinters can fester.

There’s a joke among us archivists. When it comes to the Luck Wars, pick a story and stick with it. Anything else will drive you mad.

It’s not really a joke, now that I come to think of it. Especially not when it’s true. How can one study the past when it literally re-writes itself before your eyes? I have seen casualty lists change between one blink and another, read a lieutenant’s account of fighting alongside their deceased comrades one day only to return and find no record of its existence the next. Anything that touches the Luck Wars is tainted with unreality. Spend too long thinking about it, reading about it, and you feel your own mind start to slip through the cracks between the worlds. I was never the same after I read those documents. It was as if someone had laid bare my brain, excised small chunks and carried them away. Sometimes, when I hold those documents in my mind, I fancy I can feel parts of myself, in other worlds where I shouldn’t be.

The Luck Wars never started, never happened and have never ended. Even so I have lost colleagues to them, victims not of the battlefield but of archive desks. Good people. Good scholars, with minds not easily corrupted by superstition and delusion. But once they began to read about the Wars, they could not stop, chasing a truth that didn’t exist. They lost themselves within an ever-changing labyrinth until the thread of sanity slipped from their grip, forever.

I have visited some in the institutions where they now reside. Sometimes, I think I see endless dunes reflected in their eyes. Once, I took my lost friend’s hand and saw that her nails were thick with dark sand.

The archives have been sealed. I do not have the clearance to access them. And so, I must tell you nothing.

Except perhaps this: I once dreamed that I had finally been granted access to the vault where records of the Luck Wars are kept. I opened the door of that cavernous room to find it contained nothing but a single, old-fashioned bulletin tab on a shelf. I took it up and woke its screen but there was no ink on the other side, just dark sand, forming words I could not read. I tried to press the buttons, but my fingers plunged through the surface of the tab as if it were rotting flesh, plunged down into sand that rose to fill my eyes, my throat, my nose and I choked when I felt it moving beneath the surface of my skin in the same way it had moved beneath the screen, forming living words inside my veins, writing that impossible history inside me…

Military Proctor Idrisi Blake

IWATCHED YOU, SLUMPED there in the cell. The station’s thin walls rattled with the gathering storm, sent my nerves jumping. Had anyone else seen you fall? There were few enough people who could have, out here. Perhaps a dozen, crazed wildcatters and loners like my father. The rest were in the mine or in Jumptown, huddles of light and warmth where people sheltered in each other’s shadows.

The taction cuff on your wrist flashed blue, in time with your heartbeat, steady and slow, making a mockery of my anxiety. The other flashed on Garrick’s wrist. He hadn’t locked it yet. Taction cuffs were an AIM invention for marshals in the outer system who had to transport felons across great distances to the nearest facility. No need for a chain when they were bio-rigged and proximity linked: if a felon strayed too far or tried to attack, their cuff would release a charge, first to shock, then to stun, then to kill. We had never used them before.

No one knew you were here, I told myself. An hour, less, and we would be gone, away from the station, from what lay behind me in the wastes… I took a breath, feeling a crash of panic building. Garrick kept a supply of cid capsules in his desk, to augment the pure powder he used daily. Rapidly, I crossed the room and opened the drawer. Ampoules rattled in the bottom, fewer than I had thought. Before I could think twice, I took one up, bit off the end and dripped the oily, shimmering substance into both of my eyes.

No need to wait long. The pain in my chest faded, the hairs on my neck lay down. The world flattened like paper, lost its edges until it was all simple, all clear. Wind was just wind. Dust just dust. No voices, no bodies, no worlds but this one.

But when I looked at you again, your eyes were open, staring at me through blood-matted black curls. Dead?

‘You are––’ My throat dried. ‘You are under arrest for the mur… the murder of Lutho Xoon.’

I was doing it all wrong. Fumbling, I held up my arm in the AIM salute. ‘I, Deputy Air Marshal Havemercy Grey, hereby place you under arrest for the murder of Lutho Xoon, and… and other crimes. You do not have to speak but anything you do say may be recorded for the purposes of conviction by an Accorded jury.’

‘You,’ you said.

‘Did you hear me? You are under––’

‘I heard.’ Your head lolled. ‘Where is this?’

‘Jaspal-Pero Mining Satellite V.’

You laughed, a ragged sound. ‘Jaspal-Pero. Guess I had one left after all.’

‘One what?’

You peered my way. ‘One death.’

A shiver found its way through the cid. ‘You’re not dead.’

Wheezing, you felt at your torso, pushing aside the metallic suit. That’s when I saw it: a large rust-coloured stain, soaking your vest from hem to rib. In the centre, it gleamed fresh.

‘Not yet,’ you said.

The cid was the only thing that kept me from shrieking for Garrick. I should have called for him, I knew that, but there was a strange thrill in being alone with you. My name on the arrest record, my part in all this… perhaps it would be enough.