Hurley's Heroes Collection 2015-2020, page 38
Anneke leaned out the side of the cargo bakkie, shotgun first, and Nyx had to just take a minute and rub her own head at the crazy of her team. At least Anneke got things done, even if they were often done extravagantly.
Anneke parked and jumped out of the cab. She was little and lean, wiry, all muscle and reflex, nearly as dark as a Chenjan. She had hacked her hair short, and it stuck out in all directions, obscuring her face and hampering her vision, so she nearly knocked into Nyx with her gun.
“Good, great,” Nyx said, batting away the stock of the shotgun. “Let’s all get the fuck in before we wake up half the neighborhood.”
They all piled into the back of the cargo carrier, just a framed hauling bed that had been tented over in muslin and painted and waterproofed. The tented roof would be shit in an accident, but it shielded them and their cargo from prying eyes. Anneke had kept the existing data canister pickups in the back, and acquired two uniforms. Nyx didn’t ask what had happened to the people who’d had the uniforms before her. Maybe she’d swiped them from a laundry somewhere. Anneke was resourceful.
Nyx peeled off her clothes and yanked on one of the blue- and-yellow uniforms. It was too small in the ass and the hips. She kept on her own sandals, not only because nobody they would encounter was likely to see her feet, but also because she kept razor blades hidden in the soles of them.
Taite, too, dressed in a uniform, which was too long and baggy on him, and slipped up front into the passenger seat. A Nasheenian woman and a foreign man driving one of these cargo bakkies wouldn’t be questioned. Anyone else on the team, and they were inviting way too many extra stops.
Nyx settled in up front and waved back at Khos. He tapped the horn, and Nyx turned on the juice to the bug cistern and cranked them back out of the alley and onto the deserted street. Anneke peeked in from the back, parting the muslin curtain that shielded the back from the cab. Her face and the barrel of her gun were lined up side by side. She was grinning
like a fucking maniac.
“Super excited about this one, boss,” she said. “Never been to a data lake. Should I bring some swimming gear?”
“Too late to go back for it,” Nyx said. “Rhys!”
“North until Adnan Street!” he yelled from the back. “Good!” Nyx said. “You cozy back there?”
“No!” he said.
“Good!” she said, and grinned. She liked it when her plans panned out.
The security detail stopped them twelve miles from the location of the data lake facility.
Nyx slowed down when she saw the traffic ahead of them queuing up at the checkpoint. “I need a way around!” she yelled at Rhys.
“There’s no way around,” he said, and poked his head through the curtain. His eyes widened at the checkpoint. “This is . . . not optimal.”
“Not at all,” Nyx said. “Any ideas, Taite?”
Taite shifted in his seat. “Our papers aren’t going to stand up to close scrutiny,” he said.
“It’s not military,” Nyx said, squinting. “Looks like order keepers. Routine, then.”
“I don’t like this, boss,” Anneke said.
When Nyx glanced back, Anneke wasn’t visible, but the barrel of the gun was. “Goddammit, Anneke, put that shit away,” Nyx said.
“What are you going to do?” Taite said, quietly.
“Let me think,” Nyx said. They rolled forward with the queue as the bakkies ahead of them were released.
“Are they searching any?” Anneke said.
“One of them,” Nyx said. It was hot up in the cab now that they weren’t moving fast. The air was dead still. She watched the order keepers direct three women from a bakkie two up from them and pop open the trunk. One rolled under the bakkie. She didn’t see any magicians helping out. It had to be routine. What a fucking time to get caught in some random security check. She had bad papers, a stolen cargo bakkie, a Chenjan in the back, and a half-Chenjan woman with a shotgun, too, and some half–Ras Tiegan with a questionable record when it came to com hacking. There were lots of cards she could play with them—they were just order keepers, not bel dames, not military—but that also meant it would take longer to get through the protocols with them. Order keepers didn’t know her the way bel dames or military did. Order keepers hated people like her.
“Boss,” Anneke whispered.
“Shut up,” Nyx said. “I’m thinking.”
The bakkie ahead of them moved up alongside the two order keepers. The driver held out her papers. She was waved through fast, long before Nyx had any sort of real plan in place. Faintly, Nyx heard Anneke muttering something in the back.
Nyx pulled up alongside the order keepers. They were lean women, both in their early thirties, hair shorn short. The one nearest the cab door looked tired and bored, but the one behind her was clearly fired up on her own importance. Anneke’s muttering had gotten louder, and Nyx prepared to drown it out by bellowing.
Nyx fixed both order keepers with a broad grin and handed them her forged passbook for the rig and her identity. “Hot as hell out here, eh?” Nyx said. “Sorry they got you doing this shit. You come down from the north? Know how the weather is up there? Roads further north?”
“I don’t,” the woman with Nyx’s papers said, peering at them. The sun rode high over the woman’s shoulder.
Nyx persisted. “Back behind us, the road was washed out.
Saw some folks who—”
“What are you carrying?” the woman asked.
A yell from the back, more muttering, louder this time. Goddammit Anneke, Nyx thought. Keep your goddamn cool. Had Anneke taken a stimulant or something?
“Huh? Oh, recycling data casings. Anwar. The war bonds place. Confidential stuff headed to a data lake.”
“Open up the back, please,” the woman said, handing Nyx back the passbook.
Nyx forced her grin into a grimace. “Oh sure, sure, just have to check with the boss. Confidential stuff.”
“Open it,” the woman behind said, and she pulled her pistol.
Nyx held up her hands. “Sure, sure, we’ll open the back. No problem. No—”
The shotgun blast was deafening. A wave of sound cracked the air, right behind Nyx’s head. Her ears rang, the tinkling of a bell tone, high and warbling.
Screaming, behind her, “Fuuuuuuuuuuuuck. Fuuuuuuuck.” Nyx stared at where the woman with the pistol had been. She was on the ground now, a pile of muddy meat, and there was coppery wetness all over Nyx’s face; she tasted it on her
lips, rolled her tongue over it.
The other order keeper was fumbling at her belt for her own pistol, panic-stricken face fixed on Nyx.
“Don’t pull,” Nyx said, and her own voice sounded muted, far away. “Don’t pull it. Stand down.”
Nyx opened the cab door, huffing herself out. She stumbled over the body of the order keeper. She reached for the other one, but the panicked order keeper was getting her bearings now, her resolve hardening, and Nyx knew, knew then, and in that moment, the woman didn’t look thirty, but twenty, and it was all over, it was all about to be over. Coppery blood. Taste of death.
“Hush,” Nyx said, as the pistol came up. Nyx neatly relieved her of it, yanking it cleanly from her hands, turning her own pistol back on her. “Hush now,” Nyx said. “Over now,” and Nyx pulled the trigger. Clean shot through the head, tiny hole in the front, splattering out the back.
“Hush now,” Nyx said, and then muted stillness, the high ringing in her ears, the tone.
“Nyx! Nyx!” Her name.
She turned, pistol up, finger on the trigger, aiming to fire.
She squeezed.
“Fuck!” Khos yelled.
He had run out from the bakkie, leaving it idling behind them. The bullet missed him; Nyx wasn’t a great shot at range, and went clean through the tented backing of the cargo bed.
Khos had his arms over his head, for all the good that would do, Nyx thought, and dropped the pistol.
She moved automatically. Hit him on the shoulder. “Get in. Follow,” she said, yelling because she couldn’t hear anything properly, still. “Gotta dump the cargo bakkie.”
She turned, then looked back, said, “The bodies. Keep the bodies.” She always needed bodies. Might as well take these, too.
There were two more bakkies coming down the road, hurtling toward the checkpoint. They didn’t have much time. It was possible they had already been seen.
Nyx and Khos loaded both bodies into the trunk of the bakkie. Nyx kicked through the checkpoint until she found the fat round form of a dragonfly. It tried to fly away, but she mashed it with her fist and threw it in the trunk with the rest. It was the only recording bug she found. It was possible it had already sent the images it had seen somewhere else, but these were usually only pulled up after the fact.
Nyx slid into the driver’s seat. Everyone inside was yelling. Anneke was screaming in the back, wailing like she was dying, “Let me up! Let me up! I didn’t mean to! I’m all right!”
Taite was talking, too fast, too low, she didn’t catch the words. She turned up the juice to the cistern and drove.
Nyx drove and drove, turning down little-used roads, country highways, dusty backwaters, until they came to some burnt-out wreck of what had once been a waystation. The others had calmed down by then, silent and numb, and some of her hearing was back. The first sun had already gone down, so they were bathed only in the deep blue light of the second sun, already headed back under the horizon with its sister.
Nyx got out of the cab. “Wipe it down,” she said. “No blood. No hair. Nothing. Keep the uniforms, our gear. Get into the bakkie. We’ll have to dump the bakkie, too, eventually.”
“We need to do something,” Taite said. “Those were order keepers.” He hunched next to the side of the cargo tent, right near the bullet hole. “They didn’t do anything to us. That was murder, Nyx.”
“Fuck you!” Anneke said. She pushed more sen into her mouth, though it was clear she already had a lot of it.
“We’re not sending Anneke back to prison,” Nyx said. “Shit happens.”
Khos kicked at the dirt. “Nyx, I—”
“I didn’t ask for your opinion,” Nyx said.
Rhys, softly, “Is this data worth innocent people’s lives?” “Is living worth your life? Is dying? Life doesn’t mean any-
thing,” Nyx said.
“This is catshit,” Taite said.
“Suck it up,” Nyx said. “We dump the cargo bakkie here. Get real friendly again, folks, because we need to share our own bakkie until we can dump that somewhere, too.”
Khos drove this time. Nyx rode up front with him, and Rhys, Taite, and Anneke sat in the back. Nyx had taken away Anneke’s shotgun and put it in the trunk with the bodies. Whatever Anneke had been on, she was coming down from; she had the shakes bad, and they had to stop twice to let her vomit.
The road was soothing in the dark, and Nyx took some pleasure from that. The air cooled fast at night in the desert, and it felt good after the cloying heat of the day. They holed up at a falling-down way house across from a battered can- tina, both of which smelled like urine, but they were the only buildings for as far as any of them could see, and that was something.
“Plan’s fucked,” Nyx said, eating a roti while sitting on the edge of one of the two slender beds. The blankets felt gritty, just like the floor. She crunched grit between her teeth. “Let’s inventory what we’ve got. Taite?”
He sat back on his heels against the far wall, wrapped in a blanket. Rhys was rolling out his prayer mat in anticipation of evening prayer, and Anneke was kneeling beside him.
“The uniforms,” Taite said, “some junk data casings from the cargo bakkie. Our weapons. Two dead order keepers.”
“I think we should abandon the job,” Rhys said. He knelt on his prayer mat, facing away from Nyx. “It’s just a data retrieval job. We’re not saving a child or even hunting down someone who killed someone else. We don’t even know what it is.”
The call to prayer sounded, tinny and warbling, from the cantina next door. It only got through a few lines before the muezzin gave in, maybe because he was asleep, or vomiting, or just because she figured nobody was listening, but Rhys and Anneke went through their prayers.
“He’s not wrong,” Khos said. He lay full length on the other bed, though Nyx was going to tell him to move to the floor soon. “Two people are dead. Order keepers, yes, not bel dames or military, but we aren’t exactly tough to spot.”
“This isn’t a discussion about going back,” Nyx said. “That’s not a topic. This isn’t a democracy. I’m not a fucking Hedian or progressive Tirhani or some fuck. We are discussing the plan we need to come up with to finish the job that we con- tracted for.”
“We should have just stolen her leg,” Taite said. “Fuck you and the fucking leg,” Nyx said.
Silence descended as they listened to Anneke and Rhys finish their prayers. Nyx fixed her look on the windows, which they had covered over in bedsheets. The windows here weren’t filtered, not out here to hell and gone, but simply patterned carvings to reduce the amount of sunlight that suffused the room.
Rhys finished his prayers and rolled up his mat. “I’m not going any further,” he announced, as if he were some fucking mullah with a fucking spine.
“You walk out like you did on that last job,” Nyx said, “and I’ll fire you right now and take away your little passbook. Then what happens to you when you try and walk the fuck out of here, in this shitty little border town? The women here will skin you alive.”
“Could we try and be constructive?” Khos said. “I want to get to sleep sometime tonight.”
“The road was the safest way in,” Taite said curtly. “There’s too much security outside the main road. You don’t take any route to a data lake that isn’t an authorized one.”
“Why can’t we go in on foot?” Khos asked.
“There are layers to the security onsite,” Taite said. “You’ve got concentric and even overlapping forms of security. There’s a toxic layer of gas on the very edges of the compound. Then you’ve got the wasp swarms that patrol in random patterns. There are plenty of other layers they change all the time, bugs coded to eat you, paralyze you, and what have you. Then there’s the acid lake itself, and the human security teams, which patrol every thirty minutes. The only way in is with a cargo bakkie that can get through the areas already desig- nated for the cargo bakkies. That’s the safest route.”
“So we’ll tell them we were hijacked,” Nyx said. “We’ve got enough blood and shit on these uniforms now to look the part. We say we were hijacked and just walk down the cargo bakkie road.”
“That won’t hold up,” Taite said. “Our identification papers didn’t even hold up to order keepers. With the cargo bakkie, we’d have a chance they wouldn’t look too close. Without it, they’ll scrutinize everything we do.”
“It’ll hold up if we sell it,” Nyx said. “Really sell it.” “I already know I won’t like this,” Khos said.
Nyx jabbed a finger at him. “You, Anneke, and Rhys pose as hijackers. Me and Taite will stay in uniform. You push us along ahead of you as hostages. They sure as fuck won’t take the time to look at our papers during a standoff.”
“And how exactly,” Rhys said, “are you going to get us to the data lake? They’ll deploy every one of their security people and all of the facility’s features to take us down.”
“You leave that to me,” Nyx said.
“Yeah,” Khos said, “I’m definitely not going to like this.”
Nyx expected the compound to be something extravagant, but of course, the less conspicuous it was, the better. They stole a new bakkie at a little town thirty kilometers from the site and drove to within two kilometers to survey the site. Big cargo bakkies arrived irregularly. Nyx sat up on a rise overlooking the road and only saw one in the hour she spent gazing through her specs.
“We could have kept the old bakkie, with this plan,” Khos said as she walked back down to the bakkie where he waited, puffing away at his ridiculous pipe.
“I was a sapper during the war,” Nyx said.
“Yeah, you never fail to mention that,” Khos said.
“And I figured out all sorts of shit about a person after they blew something up,” she continued. “The less we leave behind, the better.”
“Not convinced of this plan,” Khos said.
“You’re only saying that because you loved the other one, and it was shit.”
“I did love the other one,” he said, “and it was shit.”
Nyx went to the trunk where Anneke was gearing up and started equipping her own weapons. Taite and Rhys were huddled under the ruin of some old building, sharing a bulb of water in the scant shade.
“Sorry about what happened, boss,” Anneke said, not look- ing at her.
“Shit does happen,” Nyx said.
“Thought she looked like someone I knew in prison,” Anneke said.
“I get it,” Nyx said. “Being high as fuck didn’t help, either.” “Sorry, boss. Won’t happen again.”
“No,” Nyx said, “it won’t. Or we’re done. No catshit. We’re done.”
“I hear you, boss,” Anneke said.
They piled into the bakkie and drove right up to the compound gate. When they were within range, Nyx and Taite got out, hands up. The others stayed in the bakkie; Nyx figured they would be easier targets in the open if there were snipers posted, even though Taite figured that wasn’t likely.
“Open up!” Nyx said. “These guys hijacked our cargo bak- kie. Stole a lot of data.”
Khos let off a couple of rounds into the air, for emphasis.
There was a flurry of confused activity in the station. A swarm of red beetles left the station and headed off deeper into the facility. It was dusk again, moving to dark, and Nyx stood out there in the heat and felt the night come over them, waiting on the shit-eaters to get their shit together.
