Kameron Hurley - God's War

She heard the other bakkie start up, heard muffled voices.

She pulled open the package and reached inside. Her fingers met cold metal. She unwrapped the gun and ran her hands over it to get a feel for what it was.

X80 scattergun, dual organic acid barrels.

Tirhani made, if she guessed right. Those fucking sheet-wearing martyrs had claimed neutrality for more than a century and still sold the best firearms on the planet.

Nyx checked to see if it was loaded. No, but when she shook it, she could hear liquid in the barrels. The acid part worked, anyway.

She held the gun to her chest and waited until she heard the bakkie pull away. When it was well gone, she got to work shifting both her body and the gun toward the other side of the trunk.

The squirt pounded on the trunk. She froze.

“You’re kinda quiet!” the girl yelled.

Nyx didn’t answer.

Nyx waited and listened. When nothing else came, she went back to moving.

Organic acid wasn’t a fun thing to use in a tight space. She pulled her burnous over her face and torso. She took a deep breath and wedged her feet up against the trunk.

She pressed the barrel of the gun against the trunk lock. The other end got stuck on the trunk hinge in the back.

Nyx flipped the trigger mechanism to what she hoped was acid-only and squeezed.

The gun went off.

Fluid from both barrels hit the trunk and hissed as the compounds came together.

The blast sent a splatter of fluid back at her. She kicked at the trunk. Kicked again. Acid was eating through her burnous.

“Goddammit!” Nyx yelled, and kicked again.

The trunk popped open, and she came out gun first, tossing away her burnous as she did.

The girl had her gun out.

Nyx shot first.

The girl squealed and clawed at her face.

Nyx grabbed the girl’s discarded gun and shot her in the face again, this time with bullets. It was red and messy.

Nyx pulled out her toolkits and wiped them down. She wiped the trunk clean too. She took out the other mystery package and found a second weapon, a 42.40 sniper rifle. No ammunition, though.

She searched the dead squirt and came up with some change and some extra rounds for the gun. No paperwork, no transmissions. Dahab wouldn’t have left that sort of thing on a squirt. Nyx wiped the blood off her sandals.

She put the bakkie in neutral and pushed it away from the tree and surveyed the damage. There were a couple of broken hoses and a giant red gash in the cistern that bled bug juice and lube. She could work a temporary patch, but from the look of all the dead and dying beetles floating in the pooling organic feed at her feet, she wasn’t going to have much of a colony to work with, and she needed more coagulant. The gash in the cistern wasn’t healing over right.

She needed to work fast. Dahab would be back.

It took just under an hour to get the bakkie sewn up enough to start and another half hour to let the bugs rejuice. Even then, Nyx had to push the bakkie onto the road. Her chest hurt, and she had to stop and rest twice to catch her breath and ease the ache.

Dahab had taken the duffel bag out of the cab, but Nyx still had a buck in notes sewn into her dhoti and some cash stowed under the dash. The bag had contained the last of her sen, though. She was going to have to finish this trip sober.

She walked around the front of the bakkie to get in and came face to face with a giant, flat-backed millipede busily devouring the spilled contents of her cistern. The insect was a good meter long. It reared up at her and hissed.

Nyx reflexively jerked the acid spray on her rifle. The insect made a high-pitched whirring sound and started to smoke. She finished it off by bashing in its fist-size head with the butt of her rifle.

Fuck, she’d be glad to get back to the interior.

Nyx got the bakkie moving. It broke down twice. She stopped at a farmhouse and asked for directions to Jameela. She hadn’t had a chance to see her face, but it probably didn’t look great. The bakkie was worse. It was no wonder the coastal folk looked at her funny.

She finally turned in to Jameela, a bustling seaside town that supported the towering breeding centers looming behind it—row upon row of barracks, courtyards, labs, health centers, mess halls, and a single mosque. The first time the Chenjans blew up a breeding center, Nasheen had nearly given up the war.

Nyx dropped her bakkie at a local tissue mechanic’s and walked the rest of the way to Kine’s complex.

Kine lived in a tenement three blocks from the breath of the ocean. Nyx didn’t know how she could stand the salty death stink of the sea. After Nyx followed her brothers to the front and their mother died at the compounds, Kine had retired to the coast and gone into organic tech. She studied reproductive theology, working on a cure for the war.

We all fight the war our own way, Nyx thought idly as she climbed the stairs. She knocked at the heavy door. When no one answered, she pressed her palm to the faceplate on the door. Bugs stirred beneath her fingers, lapped up the secretions on her skin. Working at the breeding compounds got Kine extra security. All that time at the coast—at the compounds, nose in a book, moving magician-trained bugs across a dish, locked safe behind secure doors at the edge of a soupy sea, her only company the words of the Kitab and the violently conservative women she shared her days with—it was no wonder Kine had come back wearing a hijab to mark her as one of the fundamentalist followers of the Kitab, the Kitabullah.

Kine had, however, tailored the house to admit blood kin. Nyx was the only blood kin Kine had left. Their mother had borne the five of them—three boys, two girls—in one pregnancy at the breeding compounds. She hadn’t been interested in having any more. That was before women had quotas.

The door slid open. Automatic doors creeped Nyx out.

The first thing Nyx saw was one of Kine’s long coats and a crumpled hijab on the floor. Kine didn’t leave her clothes on the floor. Her place was always immaculate.

Nyx didn’t call out for Kine. She unshouldered the scattergun. She tended to be a better shot with fluid at short range. She stalked into the flat.

I’m a bloody fucking fool, she thought. Of course the council wouldn’t have authorized killing Nyx in so short a period of time. But they would have happily authorized the slaughter of everyone around her. Her chest hurt. She needed to find Kine and call the keg.

There was a broken lamp in the main room. Dead glow worms littered the floor. Nyx nudged one of them with the toe of her sandal. They were still soft. It had been an hour, maybe two. She had missed them by an hour.

Nyx poked around the kitchen, found a couple of drawers open. Had Kine been looking for a weapon? Had she known there was someone in the flat?

Nyx checked behind all the doors as she moved, cleared each room. Kine had put up blank-faced portraits of the prophet in the living area, and hung some gaudy inscriptions from the Kitab alongside them. In her bedroom, though, Kine kept pictures of the five of them, her kin, embedded in the walls—glowing, partially animated portraits of better days. If you got too close, you could see that what made the images move were multi-colored layers of rug lice. The faces of their brothers laughed back at Nyx: Amir, the oldest by an hour; brilliant Fouad; and skinny little Ghazi, the runt.

By seventeen, all the boys were dead.

Nyx pushed open the bathroom door.

Kine lay in the tub, mouth open, one arm flung over the edge. The water was rusty and full of shit. The room stank. Congealed blood blackened the floor.

Nyx got close enough to see that most of the blood had come from a long tear in Kine’s gut. Her bowels had let loose—before or after she expired, Nyx didn’t care to know. Kine’s eyes were black holes of blood and eye pulp. They’d finished her off with two shots to the head.