Чарли Андерс - Six Months, Three Days, Five Others

“Listen,” Palm Strike tells Sasha. “When we get to the drug lab, I’m going to need you to hang back, okay? You to see what happens next, that’s fine—but don’t get in harm’s way. I can’t be hurt, not really, but you can.”

“I’m going to get hurt, one way or the other, if we don’t fix this. I chose to come along and help. We’re in this together.”

“Yeah. Just, I don’t know, be careful. Your mom would kill me.”

Upriver from town, where the water is still relatively clean, a red building houses an industrial laundry facility. A dozen people with guns and machetes are guarding it in the middle of the night.

Palm Strike signals for Sasha to take cover, and uses the river to mask his footsteps, sloshing only slightly as he wades upstream. Then he climbs a jagged rock, leaps, and catches the edge of the building’s roof with one hand. Moments later, he drops off the other side and lands on top of the man with the biggest gun. After that, it’s one big knife fight in close quarters, with Palm Strike using the high gravity to his advantage for a change, staying low and letting his opponents overbalance. He brings his forearm down onto one man’s neck, while headbutting the woman who’s trying to choke him. Gently. No life-threatening injuries. He executes one move straight out of Rene’s high-gravity dance routine, but there’s no time to dwell on the past.

In the midst of the fracas, Palm Strike keeps moving, heading for the door they were guarding, which leads to a basement.

In the basement, there’s a giant vat of ochre sludge, surrounded by people wearing masks and smocks. They’re all shooting at him. He’s finally starting to like this planet.

Becky Hoffman is still asleep when Palm Strike comes through her bedroom window. The tableau is so reminiscent of Dark Shard visiting Luc’s bedroom that he has to shudder. He gets out of the way long enough to let Sasha slip in behind him. Hoffman sits up in bed and stifles a gasp when she sees his dark shape looming over her bed. “Deveaux?” she says. “What the hell are you—”

“I solved the food problem,” he growls. “There are billions of tiny mites that live in the soil around those trees, the ones you destroyed with your terraforming procedures. They eliminate the toxins and acidity from the soil. They’ll have to be reintroduced to your growing areas, which will be a slow painful process. In the mean time, though, the bugs themselves are high in protein, renewable, and easy to transport.”

“That’s great news.” She blinks. “Why didn’t you just come to my office in a few hours to tell me?”

“Because three people tried to kill me tonight. I couldn’t figure out what secret was so important they’d be willing to kill to protect it. Everybody knew they were trading drugs for food, so that couldn’t be it. And meanwhile, I still couldn’t work out where they were putting the food they collected from the addicts. Until I finally realized: there was only one place on the drug dealers’ route at the end of the night that they could be leaving the food. The colony’s food dispensary. Where it came from in the first place. And that led me to you.”

“It’s a perfect system.” Misery displaces Hoffman’s last traces of sleepiness. “We hand out the same food rations, over and over.”

“That’s insane,” Sasha says, from the foot of Hoffman’s bed, where she’s standing. Hoffman startles, noticing the girl for the first time.

“We would have run out of food by now,” Becky Hoffman says to Luc. “We would all have starved.”

“Don’t explain to me,” Palm Strike snarls. “Explain to her .” He jerks a gloved hand in Sasha’s direction. “She’s one of your people. She was born here. This colony is all she’s ever known. You have to explain to her.”

“You’re too young to understand,” Hoffman pleads with Sasha. “We—I—had to make impossible choices. There wasn’t enough food. And it was a mercy. The people who use our drug don’t feel any hunger pains, and they don’t even notice their bodies shutting down. It gives people like you and Clarissa, good people, a chance to survive.”

Sasha stares at the colony’s leader, her mom’s boss, with tears streaming down her face. Luc has to remind himself she wanted to see this. “I don’t…” she gropes for an unaccustomed formality. “I don’t recognize your authority any longer.”

“I didn’t set up the drug operation,” Becky Hoffman says. She’s sweating, and inching her hand toward something under her pillow. A silent alarm? Her guards are already taken care of. “I found out about it. I told them they could work for me, or be executed. I turned it into a way to save the colony. This was the only way to ration the food that wouldn’t lead to riots.”

Becky Hoffman makes her move, pulling out a power-welder of the sort that you’d use to repair hull damage on a starship in flight. It’s the size and shape of a big fork, like you’d use on a pot roast. At close range, it would tear a hole in Palm Strike that even his healing mojo couldn’t begin to fix. He’s already on her, trying to pin her wrist, but she slips under his guard. She brings the power welder up and activates it, bringing it within a few centimeters of Palm Strike’s chest.

“Now,” he tells Sasha.

Sasha squeezes the remote she rigged up, and an explosion in the distance rattles the survival module so violently the emergency impact alarms go off, like a dozen electronic goats bleating. Hoffman’s grip loosens on the power-welder long enough for Palm Strike to knock it out of her grasp.

Palm Strike looks into Hoffman’s tear-soaked face and unleashes The Voice. “That was your drug lab. Next time, it’ll be your office. Your days of choosing who gets to live are over. You are going to help me fix this mess.” And then Palm Strike gestures for Sasha to go back out the window they came in. He takes the power-welder with him.

Luc digs until his arms are throbbing, and he’s waist deep in the hard, unyielding earth. Probably deep enough—he doesn’t want to hit one of those underground hot springs. Then he clambers back out, and tosses the helmet, safety vest, gloves and leggings into the hole. It’s not like burying the actual Palm Strike costume, but close enough. And if he needs safety gear later, he’ll know where some’s buried.

“Do you want to say some words?” Sasha asks. She’s hit a growth spurt, and her wrists and ankles are miles long. Even in the higher gravity, you get human beanpoles. Amazing.

“Don’t be stupid,” Luc grunts.

“We are gathered here today to remember Palm Strike,” Sasha intones.

“Cut it out,” Luc says. “Seriously.”

“He was a good man, even though we never knew who he really was. Some said he was a sea slug that oozed inside some old safety gear and pretended to be a man. But he fought for justice.”

Luc tunes out her terrible funeral oration, starts filling in the hole. He pauses just long enough to turn and look out at the farmland, where they’ve managed to transplant a handful of the “trees” from the other side of the geyser, and a few acres of sorghum are being planted. Too close together. You’ll want at least a couple feet between plants, or the mites will shred the roots. He’ll need to talk to McGregor about that. He’s almost done filling the hole, and Sasha is still nattering.

“—and he dedicated himself to helping people, unless they had really gross teeth or bad breath, in which case they were on their own.”

Luc slings the shovel over his shoulder, and wrestles with the temptation to tell her to shut the hell up for once. Instead, he just shrugs and says, “I knew this was a bad idea.”