Cut Off (10 page)

"Funny you should say that," Tristan said. "The crater's full of drugs. Fields of them. Enough to fund a kingdom."

6

"Whoa there," Sprite said hoarsely. Ness' ring flung faint light over his face, paling it. The room beyond the doorway was as black as a cave. "Didn't mean to sneak up on you."

Ness moved his thumb toward the buttons that served as the pistol's trigger. Something moved in the corner of his eye. He glanced at Sebastian, who was flailing a single tentacle.

"What?" Ness signed with his free hand.

"What are you doing?" Sebastian replied.

"Eliminating the witness."

"He moves to you like he knows you. Is he your guide? Why would you shoot your guide?"

Ness backed up a step to better watch Sprite while continuing to pay attention to Sebastian. He signed, "Because he's seen you."

"What's going on, buddy?" Sprite said. "I can't help but notice you've still got a gun on me. Sir."

"Quiet your mouth," Ness said. To Sebastian, he signed, "Why not?"

"Is his death to the service of the Way? Or to the service of us?"

"I thought we
were
the Way."

Sebastian eyed him soberly, then gestured, "Such thinking is the best way to lose the Way."

Ness let out a long breath through his nose. "That's cheating."

"It is truth."

"Work out a deal. We need to move." He lowered his pistol and put it away. Out loud, he said, "Sorry, Sprite. Caught me by surprise. Whatever you think is happening, it's not how it looks."

"Really?" Sprite edged forward, eyeing the two aliens. "Because it
looks
like your little tech business has an ace in the hole."

Behind him, the two aliens resumed their silent negotiations. Ness went to check the hallway, then ushered Sprite inside the vault and closed the door. "Guess you're with us for the moment."

"Right. Who exactly is
us
?"

"I've never seen the gladiator before tonight, if that's what you're asking."

"Just the other guy?" Sprite's eyes darted side to side. "How exactly did you two come to be in business?"

"Long story. And not a terribly believable one."

Sebastian gestured for his attention, then signed, "Releasing him. Don't trust him."

Ness nodded. He got out his gun, but kept it by his side. Sebastian went to work on the chains. Lasers flashed. Iron clanked to the floor; Ness winced at the racket. Sprite backed up until he bumped into the door. Once Sebastian had the last chain off, the gladiator flexed its limbs, forming an expansive, tree-like sphere that seemed to invade every corner of the room. Ness' elbow twitched, but he managed not to step back.

The alien shrank on itself, touched the tips of two tentacles together—a sign of respect/honor—and exchanged more gestures with Sebastian.

"He was betrayed," Sebastian told Ness. "Handed here by those he thought were his gutbrothers."

"That sounds...deep," Ness signed.

"Deep? It is treason so cold it freezes the sea."

"That's what I mean. Why would they do that?"

Sebastian spoke more with his counterpart. Two of his tentacles swayed in confusion. "It is part of the deal. For trade."

"
Trade?
With the casino? What could they possibly want?"

Sebastian gestured with the gladiator again. He tightened his smaller pincers to his body: a frown. "Food. Their supplies failed."

Ness snorted out loud. "What, they don't know how to farm? Too good for Earth algae?"

"You insult me when all I tell you is what I am told."

"Sorry," he signed. "Anything else?"

"He says his betrayers are not far. Another island. To repay the debt he owes us, he will show us."

"You trust him?"

"I do not trust him as I trust you. But to betray us for this would be a crime like that his gutbrothers did to him."

Ness nodded slowly. "Either that or they handed him over to the humans because he's an asshole. Pardon me, a..." He found himself unable to complete his thought, as they'd never worked out a sign for "cloaca."

"Do we pursue?" Sebastian signed.

"That's what we're here for, aren't we? Seems to me—"

The door swung open behind them. Light glared inside. Everyone whirled. A man in a black uniform gasped, breaking the silence. He blurted something in Chinese and reached for the submachine gun slung from one shoulder.

The gladiator sprung forward, hammer-pods whipping through the air. Gunfire exploded in the tight room, so loud Ness pressed his palm against his ear. The alien shuddered and fell to the floor in a cloud of yellow blood. The guard swung his gun toward Sebastian. Sprite, looking terrified, punched him in the back. It wasn't much of a punch, but it rattled him. Ness and Sebastian drew down on him at the same time. Blue beams creased the air and sizzled through the man's flesh. He screamed and dropped straight down.

Ness' ears rang so hard he thought he might be sick. He ran past Sprite and cleared the entry. The tunnels were empty, but that wouldn't last for long.

"Time to go," he signed to Sebastian.

Sebastian pointed to the ground. "The Swimmer isn't dead."

"Can you carry him?"

"Not if we are to move."

"Then he might as well be. Come on!"

With all this passing in silence, Sprite bent to pick up the guard's gun, then raised his eyebrows at Ness. "Care to fill me in?"

"Appreciate your help," Ness said. "But it's time we made our exit."

"Smart plan. Know how to get out of here?"

"I was thinking of getting crazy and using the way we came in."

"I see," Sprite nodded. "You mean the same way the guards are going to be coming in."

"I suppose you owe us a hand." Ness moved to the door. "The first one probably followed you down here."

Sebastian was gesturing to him from behind, but Ness only had eyes for the door. He entered the tunnels and Sprite took point, running down the harsh concrete hall. Their footsteps echoed behind them, along with the irregular staccato of Sebastian's spiked feet and the soft slap of his tentacles. Sprite swerved left at a four-way intersection and ran past a series of doors, a few of which were open, showing a chaotic mixture of hotel towels, soap, and robes, along with racks of batteries, dry rice, and tubs of what smelled like dried fish and squid.

They made another turn. Ness thought he heard steps far down the tunnel. He turned, taking his light with him. Panic shivered down his veins. He had the sudden recall of the tunnels below Hanford, in the midst of a meltdown; of his brother helping to stop it and the gunshot that had ended his life. He stopped running.

"What are you doing?" Sebastian signed.

"Call the sub."

"Stop stopping!"

"Call the sub!"

Ness pressed himself into a doorway, raised his pistol, and sighted down the dark hall. The racketing footsteps drew nearer. A circle of light appeared around the far corner, swinging wildly. Ness fired a quick burst. The blue line of his laser illuminated three men in black uniforms. He dropped one, swung the beam over to a second. The men cried out and dropped prone. Machine gun fire blatted down the hall, punishing and deafening, bullets whining from the concrete walls. Sebastian signed swear words with a spare tentacle and fired on the two men. One shrieked and curled up, shrimp-like. The other got off another few rounds before Ness silenced him.

"Oh my
god
," Sprite said. Still staring, he straightened and backed down the hall. "Right over here."

Sebastian had been fiddling with a glossy metal button. As they neared a doorway, he gestured to Ness. "They are moving. In five minutes we may join them."

"Then let's get out of here and find some place to bunker down." He repeated the sentiment out loud to Sprite.

Sprite opened a thin metal door. "Upstairs is locked, but somehow I don't think that'll be a problem."

They entered the stairwell. It was moist and disused and smelled like the puddle of water sitting beneath the stairs. They headed up to the ground floor and found it locked. Ness and Sprite moved back down while Sebastian set to it with a laser. Metal globbed from the lock. The door sprung open. They emerged into an alcove that was hidden from the main halls like a curve of the appendix. Sprite led them through the maze to another set of locked doors. Sebastian lased the lock and they were back out in the warm and humid night.

Ness took a moment to orient himself. They appeared to be on the north edge of the hotel. The sub was also north, around a bend in the adjoining peninsula. Throughout much of his life, he'd been the type to prefer others to make the first move, or at least to discuss the options before leaping one way or the other, but the last few years had taught him that 90% of getting anywhere lay in taking the first step. He took a quick look around, then sprinted past a gazebo to the boulevard beyond. At the road, they hit a roundabout and Sprite pointed them to the west. They ran past an unfinished construction dig of unearthed rock and overgrown grass.

A park sat to their right. North along the shore, lights shined from another casino. Ness moved into the trees beside the road and signed to Sebastian. "Hide in the park?"

"Yes. Another minute for the sub."

They jogged up an embankment into the untended shrubs bordering the park and tucked themselves into the trees. Ness got out his binoculars.

"We shouldn't have left the warrior," Sebastian gestured.

Ness took a long look at the road. No sign of movement. "I'm sorry, were you related?"

"How does this matter?"

"He was dead, right? Or next to it?"

"That is not the Way."

Ness gritted his teeth. "Seems mighty Way to recognize when a life is lost and that no more should be thrown after it."

"It offends. He was our brother-in-need."

"And I was in need of not taking a bullet in the spleen." He forced himself to take a breath. "What should we have done instead?"

Sebastian was still for a moment. "Made the effort."

"Which was?"

"The 'was' is not specific. Make the effort."

"How am I supposed to do right when you won't tell me what right is?"

"What does your inside star tell you?"

Ness gave a groaning laugh. The inside star. Could define it as a "conscience," but it was all too easy to file away Sebastian's concepts under their human equivalents and lose all understanding of what the alien was really saying. The business about the earth wanting to be "right," for instance, to be used in the appropriate way, wasn't some Green Party, liberal hooey about not polluting, or stopping global warming. It ran much deeper than that. Much more
weirdly
.

It was like the time he'd gotten in a discussion with a Jewish guy on Reddit. Ness had read some of the Old Testament and had absorbed enough popular culture to think he knew what Judaism meant—don't eat lobster, do wear a funny little hat—but over the course of a discussion that lasted until 3 AM, and delved into Rabbinic texts Ness had zero exposure to, he came to know how little he knew.

There had been a lot of wisdom in it. A lot of
logic
. Careful arguments that could only have been composed by dedicated people, with a keen understanding of morality and human nature, spending generations thinking about shit. Though Ness had only entered the discussion to show the other guy what a dunce he was—if there was a faith gene, Ness lacked it; his mother, rest her soul, had been the type of Catholic whose faith began and ended with the three-inch wooden cross on her bedroom wall—he closed the chat in a place of respect.

Course, it had all been so far removed from his understanding he'd forgotten all the details within days. All he was left with was the lobster, and the yarmulkes, and the vague idea that some of its believers were pretty cool people.

Magnify that unfamiliarity times a thousand, and you got Sebastian's religion. Philosophy. Whatever you wanted to call it. There were times Ness despaired of ever understanding it, and wondered if he only bothered with it because he had nothing else left.

Yet its difficulties made the act of pursuing it feel virtuous.

"My inside star," he gestured to Sebastian, "says that everything is such a mess it's a wonder
any
of us are alive."

"Each star is surrounded by an ocean of black," Sebastian replied. "Still, it shines."

"Easy for them. Stars are a million billion tons of fire."

"The consciousness you carry is more of a miracle."

"Really? Feels more like a curse."

"Then that is why you are bad at feeling it." One of his tentacles twitched up. "The sub approaches."

Ness nodded and turned to Sprite. "Listen, our ride's here. You've been a great help. If we turn up anything interesting, I'll drop off a present at the House of the Lion."

"You realize at this point I'd be disappointed by anything less than my own spaceship." Sprite grinned and stuck out his hand. "Good luck."

Ness shook hands. Across the road and past the rocky shore, a tower of steam vented from the placid waves. Sebastian rose from the cover of the leaves. Ness joined him, crossing the boulevard. As soon as Sebastian stepped tentacle on the weedy median, machine gun fire rattled the darkness, the muzzle flashing in an orange aster some hundred yards to the south.

With bullets searing the air above his head, Ness' first instinct was to throw himself flat, but Sebastian hunkered down and charged toward the sea. Ness squeezed off a few shots, the beams as bright as the lights above the Galaxy. With his position revealed, he popped to his feet and sprinted after Sebastian, whose tangle of scurrying limbs made him look like an ambulatory tumbleweed.

More shots rang out, three-round bursts from the south and the east. Ness crashed through the thicket lining the road. The shore was just ahead. Sebastian was already wading into the black waters. The channel between the two islands was hardly five hundred feet across and the sub had been forced to idle eighty feet off shore to avoid snagging the bottom. When seconds counted, it could take a heck of a while to swim eighty feet, particularly when you were wholly clothed. It would take Ness much longer to get to the sub than it would take the casino gunmen to run down to the shore.