Kameron Hurley - God's War

“Taite briefed you on the file?” Rhys asked as he buckled on his dueling pistols and shrugged into his black burnous.

Nyx watched him fiddle with the frogged tie at his collar.

“Yeah,” she said, “I looked over the file. Some Chenjan terrorists. Expected to be armed. Good boxers. I sparred with one of them in Aludra a couple of years ago.”

“I expected they’d be friends of yours,” Rhys said.

“I run with a lot of questionable characters,” Nyx said, giving him a sidelong look. “We’re stopping at the storefront. I need to off-load your body.”

“It’s Khos’s body. Is Anneke in?”

“She’s already posted. Less picky about where she spends morning prayer.” Anneke had been one of the easier additions to her crew, once Nyx made up her mind to cannibalize Raine’s team. All Anneke had wanted was a bigger gun.

“I hate this city,” Rhys said.

Nyx nodded at the radio tube jutting out of the dash. “Find something useful on. You have some sen?”

He obediently switched on the tube. It vomited a misty blue-green wash. A cacophony of low voices muttered at them. Local politics. Queen Ayyad had abdicated to her daughter Zaynab four months before, and the talking heads were still preoccupied with what that meant for relations between Nasheen and Ras Tieg. Nyx was more interested in what Zaynab’s policies would be regarding the capture of terrorists. Queens and bel dames did not, traditionally, get along, and the livelihood of mercenaries and bounty hunters didn’t even show up as a line item during the low council meetings. The queen got on best with her decadent group of high-council nobles—representatives from the richest houses in Nasheen, descendants of the First Families. It was a hazy kind of history, and Nyx didn’t remember half of it. Most of her schooling consisted of adding and subtracting bullets and calculating the trajectory of burst guns, interspersed with some theology from the Kitab and exaltations about the power of submission to God—dead words from some other dead world. Actual Umayman history was usually just a nod to how everything that ever went wrong on Umayma was the fault of the Chenjans.

Nyx changed the station. The air tingled, and the voices were briefly garbled, but then cleared up. More news: local gossip. Talk about the upcoming vote on whether or not half-breeds should be drafted. A couple of serious-sounding women discussed the arrival of a ship that had put down in Faleen. Where were all these antiquated wrecks coming from? Nyx thought. When was the last time I saw one?

When you went to prison, she remembered. She grimaced and turned the radio off. It was a night she didn’t like to dwell on. The mist receded. Sound faded to silence.

“You know I don’t poison myself with narcotics and pollutants,” Rhys said, and she realized he was talking about the sen.

Nyx hoped he’d start ranting about submission and God and pollutants.

She could use the diversion.

He rarely disappointed her these days.

“I only drink the blood of my enemies,” Nyx said, “and may be some whiskey and water. Beer with a little lime.”

Rhys snorted.

She considered selling him to a mardana, a brothel populated entirely by men. It was one of her more frequent fantasies.

The hunched black smudge of the city grew closer. Umber-clad women moved along the side of the road, balancing baskets on their heads. Girls herded giant spiders and a couple of dogs along the drainage ditches flanking the road. Some creepers in blue and gold carried baskets of beetles and grasshoppers in tiny wooden cages. Giant drooping nets hung over their lean shoulders.

They passed under the burst-scarred main gate and into Punjai.

Nyx parked outside their storefront, badly, and pushed into the reception area they called the keg. Before Nyx sold bounty services out of the storefront, she had sold kegs of beer to wedding parties and war veterans. Taite started calling it the keg the fourth time a drunken government clerk came looking for cheap booze in the middle of the night.

Taite, another crew member scalped from Raine, was working her com now. Upon her arrival, the skinny pock-faced kid ducked his head out of the gear room in the back and widened his eyes. He was a crackerjack with the com, but he still cringed in the face of her moods, and there were days she wished he had a straighter spine. He must have been in his early twenties now, but in her head he was still just the fourteen-year-old refugee of Raine’s with the Ras Tiegan accent.

“Khos?” he said hopefully.

“Khos,” she said.

“He’s already posted at the location.”

“Fucker,” Nyx said. “Let Rhys know if that fucker calls off. If he gets tangled up with his whores before this job, I’m going to tear up his contract.”

She went back out to get Rhys to help her with the body. The two of them hauled it down into the freezer under the gear room.

When they came back up, Taite was looking jittery. He usually only looked that way after he’d talked to his sister, another refugee half-breed. Nyx had seen her once, looking down at the bakkie from a dirty window when Nyx dropped Taite off. She was prettier than Taite, though just as fine-boned and frail. Neither of them had been inoculated, and they were allergic to everything.

“There’s a problem, Nyx,” Taite said.

“I hate problems.”

“Anneke says Raine’s there trying to pick up our bounty. Khos moved without your leave. She thinks Khos lost the bounty.”

“Shit,” Nyx growled. “Get in the fucking bakkie, Rhys.”

She and Raine had been netting each other’s prime catches for years, ever since she stole Taite and, later, Anneke from him. Taite was the only com tech she knew who could keep a line secure without resorting to venom addiction, but whoever Raine was using now consistently hacked Taite’s com. She had lost her last two bounties to Raine, and now the cockless fuck was pushing for another one.

“Keep your ear to the com. I’m headed there now,” Nyx said.

Nyx hit the juice on the bakkie and plowed through the narrow streets of Punjai. Rhys had the sense to strap himself in and hang on tight. She figured he knew better than to push her when she was pissed off, because he was quiet the whole time.

She drove out to the bounty’s residence, a brick one-level squeezed between three-storied apartment buildings with more modern tiled facades.

The door was already bashed open. Nyx saw scattered parrot feathers all over the street.

She jumped out of the bakkie and ran across the busy street, dodging cat-pulled carts and sinewy rickshaw drivers. She half-reached for her sword but pulled her pistol instead. In close quarters, sword fighting got tricky. She pushed inside.

Lithe little Anneke crouched next to the crumpled body of a blue-eyed boy still covered in feathers and mucus. Anneke jerked her head and rifle up when Nyx came in but relaxed when she saw who it was.

Nyx saw a dead dog with two naked human legs sprawled near the broken lattice of the window.

“Where’s Khos?” she asked.

She heard a stir outside the window, and a big blond dog leapt inside. In dog form, Khos was only about as tall as her hip. The dog shook off the dust and started to shed dog hair all over the floor. Watching shifters change generally put Nyx off lunch, so she looked away as Khos shifted. When she looked again, he was wiping mucus off his immense naked body. Khos was a head and shoulders taller than she was, broad in the face and chest, and when he shook his head, the last of the dog hair purled out around him in a cloud, leaving him with a head of thick blond dreadlocks.

“What the fuck happened?” Nyx asked.

“Raine’s team moved for the—” Anneke began.