God's War (2 page)

“Where from?”

“The magicians?”

“The ship.”

“Oh, yes. The ship is from New
Kinaan.”

Colonists had been barred from
Umayma for a thousand years. Nyx hadn’t even seen a ship in a decade. Umayma
sat at the edge of everything; most of the sky was dark at night. All she ever
saw moving up there were dead satellites and broken star carriers from the
beginning of the world.

“I’ve corresponded with them for
some time,” Kine said, “for my genetics work. They fight another of God’s wars
out there in the dark, can you believe it?”

“Does the radio work?” Nyx asked. Knowing
aliens were out there killing each other for God, too, just depressed her. She
leaned forward to fiddle with the tube jutting out of the dashboard.

“No,” Kine said. She pinched her
mouth. “How did you lose Tej?”

Nyx wasn’t sure she could answer
that question herself, let alone give Kine a good answer.

“You have any weapons?” Nyx asked.

Kine’s face scrunched up like a
date. “If you can’t tell me that, then tell me who’s tracking you.”

“You giving me the fourth
inquisition?”

“Nyxnissa,” she said, in the same
hard tone she used for quoting the Kitab.

Nyx dipped her head out the open
window. The air was clearing up.

“Raine,” she said.

Kine’s hands tightened on the wheel.
She shifted pedals. The bakkie rattled and belched and picked up speed. Dust
and dead beetles roiled behind them.

“You’re doing black work, aren’t
you?” Kine said. “One of your dirty bounties. I don’t like dealing with bounty
hunters. Raine is the worst of them, and you’re no better, these days. 
I’ll drop you at the gates of Faleen, but no farther.”

Nyx nodded. The gate would be good.
More might get Kine killed.

Raine would bring Nyx in if he had
to cut up half of Nasheen to do it. Nyx had been a part of his team, once, and
it had been a great way of picking up skills and paying off some magician-debts
for having her body reconstituted. After a while, though, he’d started to treat
her like just another dumb hunter, another body to be bloodied and buried. When
she started selling out her womb on the black market, well, that had made the animosity
mutual. He had good reason to track her down now. Reasons a lot less personal
than cutting off his cock.

“Tej was a good boy,” Kine said,
“You kill good men for a lost cause just like Raine.”

“Raine always got us back over the
border.”

“Raine isn’t a bel dame. He’s a
bounty hunter.”

“There’s not much difference.”

“God knows the difference.”

“Yeah, well, we all do it our own
way.”

“Yes,” Kine said, and her hands
tightened on the wheel. “We’re all trying to cure the war.”

Spoken like a true organic technician,
Nyx thought.

“But there is a difference,” Kine
said, turning to look at her again, hard and sober now. “Bel dames enforce
God’s laws. They keep our boys at the front and our women honest. Bounty
hunters just bring in petty thieves and women doing black work.”

Women like me, Nyx thought.

Her black market broker, Bashir so
Saud, owned a cantina in Faleen. The cantina was first. Even on a botched
delivery, Bashir owed her at least half what it was worth. If Nyx had taken the
job in Faleen instead of through Bashir’s agents in Punjai, she’d have half her
money now and wouldn’t be so hard up. As it was, her pockets were empty. The
last of her currency had been eaten with Tej.

They turned off the paved track and
onto the Queen Zubair Highway that bisected Nasheen from the Chenjan border to
the sea. The road signs were popular shooting targets for Chenjan operatives
and Nasheenian youth. Most of the metal markers were pocked with bullet holes
and smeared in burst residue. A careful eye could spot the shimmering casings
of unexploded bursts lining the highway.

If dropping the womb kept Raine and
Nyx’s sisters busy long enough trying to track it down so they could tag and
bag it, she could collect her note, call in some favors from the magicians, and
maybe find a way to clear up this whole fucking mess.

Maybe.

A three-hundred-year-old water
purifying plant marked the edge of the old Faleenian city limits. The city
itself had lapped at the organic filter surrounding the plant for half a
century before a group of Chenjan terrorists set off a sticky burst that ate up
flesh and metal, scouring the eastern quarter of the city and leaving the plant
on the edge of a wasteland. The government had rebuilt the road and the plant,
but the detritus of the eastern quarter remained a twisted ruin. Chenjan asylum
seekers, draft dodgers, and foreign women had turned the devastated quarter
into a refugee camp. A colorful stir of humanity wove through the ruins now,
hawking avocados and mayflies and baskets of yellow roaches. Nyx caught the
spicy stink of spent fire beetles and burning glow worms.

As the dusty ridges of the refugee
camps turned into the walled yards and high-rises of what passed for the
Faleenian suburbs, the massive ship from New Kinaan came into view, rearing above
the old gated city center of Faleen like some obscene winged minaret.

Faleen was a port city, the kind
that took in the ragged handfuls of off-world ships that sputtered into its
archaic docking bay every year looking for repairs, supplies, and usually—directions.
Faleen wasn’t the sort of place anybody off-world came to on purpose. Most of
the ships that rocketed past Umayma were so alien in their level of technology
that they couldn’t have put into the old port if they wanted to. The port
design hadn’t changed much since the beginning of the world, and most everybody
on Umayma wanted to keep it that way.

They drove past women and girls
walking along the highway carrying baskets on their heads and huge nets over
their shoulders. Bugs were popular trade with the magicians in Faleen.
Professional creepers caught up to three kilos a day—striped chafers, locusts,
tumblebugs, spider wasps, dragonflies, pselaphid beetles, fungus weevils—and
headed to the magicians’ gym to trade them in for opium, new kidneys, good
lungs, maybe a scraping or two to take off the cancers.

Kine pulled up outside the towering
main gate of the dusty city, scattering young girls, sand, and scaly chickens
from her path with a blast of her horn. Another cloud of beetles escaped from the
leak in the back and bloomed around the bakkie. Nyx batted away the bugs and
jumped out.

She took one long look at the main
gate, then swung back to look at Kine. She half opened her mouth to ask.

“I’m not giving you any money,” Kine
said.

Nyx grimaced.

“Go with God!” Kine yelled after
her.

Nyx raised a hand. She’d left God in
Chenja.

Kine shifted pedals and turned back
onto the highway, heading for the interior.

Nyx turned toward the two giant
slabs of organic matting that were the main gates into Faleen. Rumor had it
they’d seen better days as compression doors on some star carrier the First
Families rode down on from the moons.

Nyx pulled up the hood of her
burnous and bled into the traffic heading through the gate. She passed the
broken tower of a minaret and walked through narrow alleys between mud-brick
buildings whose precipitous lean threatened a swift death. She didn’t much like
the stink and crowd of cities, but you could lose yourself in a city a lot more
easily than you could out in farming communities like Mushirah. She had run to
the desert and the cities for the anonymity. And to die for God.

None of that had worked out very
well.

Bashir’s cantina was at the edge of
the Chenjan quarter, and the ass end of it served as the public entrance to the
magicians’ gym and fighting ring. Bashir made a pretty penny on fight nights
when all of Faleen’s starving tailors, tax clerks, bug merchants, and renegade
printers crowded in through the bar to watch the fight. The ones who couldn’t
get into the main fighting area contented themselves with drinking cheap rice
wine and whiskey, listening to the steady
slap-slap
of
gloved fists meeting flesh and the damp thumping of sweaty bodies hitting the
mat.

Bashir also made a little money on
the side as a black work broker.

Two tall women with shoulders as
wide as the doorway stopped Nyx at the cantina stoop.

“You have an appointment?” one of
them asked. “It’s private business only until we open for tonight’s fight.”

“Do I look like I have an
appointment?”

“Who the fuck are you?”

“Tell her I’m the bel dame.”

The women shifted on their feet.
“I’ll get her,” the biggest one said.

There was a time when Nyx had
enjoyed throwing that title around on a job. “Yeah, I’m a bel dame,” and “bel
dames—like
me
.” These days the whole dance just made
her tired. She’d cut off a lot of boys’ heads over the last three years. Draft
dodgers, mostly, and deserters like this Arran kid who came back into Nasheen
still contaminated with shit from the front.

Nyx pushed at her sore belly and
rocked back on her heels. She wondered if Bashir sold morphine before noon.

The bouncer came back and said,
“She’ll see you.”

Nyx ducked after her into the dark,
smoky interior of the cantina. Dust clotted the air, and bug-laced sand covered
most of the floor. It was good for soaking up blood and piss.

Bashir sat at a corner table smoking
sweet opium. Nyx could taste it. The smell made her nauseous. Bashir had two
bottles of sand-colored whiskey at the table, and someone had left behind a
still-smoking cigar that smelled more like marijuana than sen. Bashir had two
teenage boys beside her, both just shy of draft age, maybe fifteen. They were
sallow and soft-looking and kept their hair long, braided, and belled. Somebody
had kept them out of training. Letting adolescent boys go that soft was illegal
in most districts, even if they were prostitutes. They wouldn’t last a day at
the front—the Chenjans would mash through them like overripe squash.

“Nyxnissa,” Bashir said. She exhaled
a plume of rich smoke. “Thought I’d seen the last of you.”

“Most people think that,” Nyx said,
sliding next to one of the boys. He flinched. She outweighed him by at least
twenty-five kilos. “Until I show up again.”

“How was your trip?” Bashir asked.
She wore red trousers and a stained short coat but kept her head uncovered. Her
skin was a shade paler than those who worked in the desert, but the tough,
leathery look of her face said her wealth was recently acquired. Like the boys,
she was getting fat and soft at the edges, but unlike the boys, she’d fought it
out on the sand with the best of them in her youth. There was muscle under the
affluence.

“Not as smooth as I hoped,” Nyx
said. She pulled off her hood.

Bashir looked her over with a lazy
sort of interest. “A bug told me you don’t have what we bargained for.”

“I need a drink,” Nyx said, “and
half of what you owe me.” She hailed the woman at the bar, but Bashir waved her
woman back.

“The bug says you dropped the purse
at the butcher’s.”

“I did,” Nyx said. “It was a
high-risk job. You knew that when your agent gave it to me.” She’d been
carrying genetic material worth a nice chunk of money in that womb. Bashir
wasn’t going to let it go easy, no, but bel dames made good black market
runners which made them valuable to people like Bashir—until they got caught.
Word got around when you did business with gene pirates.

Being unarmed made it easier to
resist the urge to shoot Bashir in the head and demand the contents of the
cantina’s till from the barmaid. She was too close to the magicians’ gym to get
away with that.

“It was a substantial purse,” Bashir
said.

Nyx leaned back against the seat.
The boy next to her had a hold of his glass, but wasn’t drinking. Like many
Nasheenian women, Bashir was known to like boys, but these ones were a little
young and soft for a desert matron.

“Where’d you pick up these two?” Nyx
asked.

“Lovely, eh?” Bashir said. Her dark
eyes glinted in the low light. The place was too cheap for bulbs. They were
still using worms in glass. “They were a gift. From a friend.”

Bashir didn’t have friends. Nyx cut
a look at the door. The bouncers had closed it. The woman at the bar was still
wiping the same length of counter she’d been mopping when Nyx dropped in. I
shouldn’t have come, Nyx thought. She should have gone straight to the
magicians and asked for sanctuary. It had been only a matter of time before
turning Nyx in was worth more than a black market purse. But, fuck, she’d
needed the money from this job.

Nyx knew the answer but asked
anyway.

“Who gave them to you?”

Bashir showed her teeth.

“You’ll get shit from the magicians
for crossing a bel dame,” Nyx said. They could take her money, her shoes, her
sword, her
bloody fucking partner
, but they couldn’t
take her title. “How much did you get for selling me out? I’m worth a lot more
than a couple of fuckable boys.”

“Your reputation’s been tumbling for
a good long while, Nyxnissa. The bounty hunters have your name in a hat now,
and if you’re lucky, it’ll be Raine who brings you in and not some young honey
pot trying to prove something by cutting off your head. What would your sisters
say?”

“Leave the bel dame family out of
it.”

“There’s been some stirring in the
bel dame council. Rumor has it they want to clean up this little mess with you
internally, the way Alharazad cleaned up the council. They’ll cut you up and
put you in a bag.”

“Then you and your pirates are
losing a good ferrier.”

“You don’t deliver enough to make
yourself worth the risk. And now you dropped your womb, so I don’t have
anything invested. Putting out a note on you got me a good purse for reporting
a pirate. Delivering you to the bounty office and claiming my own bounty makes
us even.”