God's War (20 page)

The bakkie screamed under her. She
caught the smell of burning bugs, death on the road. She glanced back and saw
smoke and dead beetles roiling out from the exhaust. The way was narrow and
twisted, and as she climbed, the grasslands turned to a forest of oak hybrids.
She took the turns too fast.

Nyx kept checking the mirror. She
spent a moment too long looking and nearly lost herself on a narrow turn. She’d
seen the other bakkie.

They were still behind her.

She kept a sharp eye out for turns
off this road. She didn’t want gravel tracks or logging roads. The bakkie would
get stuck, and she’d be for shit.

The black bakkie was right behind
her. She could just see their faces now. The big woman in the driver’s seat was
definitely Dahab. Not a doubt in her mind. Dahab had a new team with her—and
not bel dames from the look of them.

And she had a real good feeling they
weren’t with Rasheeda. That threw a whole other contagion into the mess.

Nyx twisted around another curve.
Raine had taught her to drive when she was nineteen. It was the first thing he
taught every member of his crew. She knew how to pedal her way out of a tight
spot.

Nyx heard a shot, and ducked.
Checked the mirror again. The woman riding shotgun with Dahab was doing what
people riding shotgun did.

Nyx dared not take her hands off the
wheel. Even if she could clip off a couple shots with her pistol, the odds of
her hitting anything in or around that bakkie were slim.

She reached a crossroads. Right
would take her further up into the hills. Left was down into the coastal
valley. Down meant she would have to put a lot of faith in her repair of the
brake line.

Fuck it.

She veered left and barreled down
the hill. She disengaged the clutch.

Heard another shot.

Something exploded against her back
window.

That wasn’t good. Organics. A fever
burst? Something worse?

She grabbed at one of the bursts on
the seat next to her and lobbed it out the window. Heard a satisfying pop as it
exploded on the road.

The bakkie squeezed around another
narrow turn. The cover of the woods was thinning out. She saw a house set back away
from the road. If she couldn’t lose them, she had to fight them.

Fight Dahab.

Nyx ignored the house and kept on
the road.

She came down a long stretch and
turned. The road abruptly changed from pavement to gravel. Logging road.

The bakkie skidded on the sudden raw
stretch. Nyx hit the far left and far right pedals, and all four wheels twisted
sharply, giving her some traction.

She looked back. Missed a turn. She
spun the wheel and tried to recover, but she was trying to recover on gravel.

The bakkie slid clean off the road.

For a long, hopeful moment, she
thought she’d be all right. But as she braked and twisted the wheel, she saw
she wasn’t going to avoid the big tree in front of her.

The bakkie smashed into the oak
hybrid with a loud, wet crunch: a giant crushed melon. Bugs exploded from the
hood. A rain of leaves dropped onto the windshield. Nyx’s torso thumped into
the steering wheel, knocking the breath from her.

The sound of hissing beetles and
spitting fluid filled her ears.

Adrenaline flooded her body. Nyx
pushed at the door but couldn’t find the handle for some reason. She leaned
over and reached for one of the bursts on the floor.

The barrel of a very large gun
pointed in at her through the passenger side window.

“Don’t fucking move,” Dahab said.

Nyx didn’t move. She was still
trying to get her breath. Her fingers clutched empty air.

Dahab’s two squirts were opening up
the driver’s side door.

“Let her out,” Dahab said. “Watch
her hands.”

Dahab was an imposing woman—not just
tall, but broad and fat. She could bench about a hundred twenty kilos, if Nyx
remembered right. She’d lost an arm at the front, so her right arm was a
lighter color than the left, courtesy of some dead foreigner. She had a wide
flat-cheeked face and piercing eyes. Her teeth were stained red.

Dahab gestured with the gun. “Out,
Nyx.”

The squirts each took one of Nyx’s
arms and hauled her out of the cab. The council had moved a lot faster than Nyx
anticipated, but she didn’t know yet what the decision was. Dahab hadn’t
blasted her face off in the cab, so they probably wanted her alive. But there
was a lot you could do to a woman and keep her breathing.

And she still wasn’t sure where
Rasheeda fit.

Nyx’s chest hurt—a dull, throbbing
ache. She hadn’t heard anything break, but what would she have heard above the
crunch of the bakkie?

She loved that fucking bakkie.

Beetles crawled over her feet.

While the women held Nyx, Dahab
reached into the cab and pulled out Nyx’s pack. Nyx hadn’t brought anything
with her relating to the off-worlder, but then, Dahab likely knew more than she
did about Nikodem Jordan.

“Rasheeda and Luce told you to fuck
off, Nyx,” Dahab said.

Nyx sized up the women next to her.
One was a stocky battle-scarred runt who looked like she’d just come off the
front. The other one was a pretty half-breed woman who could have sold blood to
bel dames. What was she doing collecting notes? She could have been a radio
star.

Something buzzed at Dahab’s hip. She
grabbed at it, shook it, and put the transceiver to her ear. “Yeah,” she said.
“Uh-huh. We’ll be there.” She put it away, said, “Put her in the trunk of the
bakkie. We’re late for a meeting.”

“Leave her here?” the pretty one
said.

“You’re staying with her. Suha and I
will meet up with you in an hour. I can’t have her going where we’re going.
They’ll check our rig. Get her weapons off first.”

The women took off Nyx’s pistols,
took her extra ammunition, took her whip, found the dagger and pistol strapped
to either thigh.

Then they dragged her to the trunk
and popped it open.

Nyx thought about trying an escape.
Instead, she looked down the barrel of Dahab’s rifle and got in.

It was a tight fit. Nyx lay curled
up on one side. They shut the trunk. It all went dark except for a rusted-out
patch in the floor near her head. She pulled at the blanket covering the rest
of the hole and peered through. She couldn’t see anything but the churned soil
around her bakkie’s tires.

A sharp edge dug into her shoulder
from behind. She twisted around so that she faced the rear of the trunk. She
pulled back the blankets and kicked the toolkits down around her feet.
Sometimes Anneke’s manic obsession for collecting guns did more than empty
Nyx’s bank account.

Nyx felt a jabbing pain in her
sternum and stopped and took a deep breath.

Dahab had known Nyx when she was a
skinny little bel dame without any idea of how to arm herself. Dahab had
cleared her of the obvious weapons, the sort of stuff some young kid would
carry, but Nyx had learned a thing or two since then.

Nyx brought her heels up behind her
and reached her hands back. She worked one of the razor blades out of the sole
of her sandal and used it to cut open the package.

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.