Gaylen went after the other three, and Kiris was at the ready and slammed the door shut the moment he stepped out onto the roof.

“There’s no lock,” she said.

“Wouldn’t be much of an emergency escape otherwise,” Manvis pointed out.

“Well, let’s just hurry down, then!” Gaylen said.

Chutes were bundled up on the edge of each side of the roof. There were still no signs of a city-wide emergency, nor any response to the catastrophe still going on within the Red Tower. Maybe the gassing had coincided with some grand plan for subverting the city’s entire authority structure. Maybe it was just bad luck. Maybe Undercity Greiko was a shithole he was never going to visit ever again.

It didn’t matter, for now they were finally hobbling towards a damn escape route.

It was halfway across the roof that Gaylen saw an air vehicle approaching from the upper rings, slightly higher than the tower roof. It was a second later that the door behind them burst open, and the marbozi came through.

A plasma shot came from the hoverer and hit the mob. The plasma did what it did to unarmoured bodies, and passed through several. The vehicle picked up speed, and another shot came. That one went through two marbozi, but of course the rest continued coming.

It was Herdis, with that trusty rifle braced against her shoulder, while Bers managed the controls. She hadn’t received elite sharpshooter training, but her targets were tightly packed and not making any effort to not get shot. So it was no surprise that her third shot dropped multiple marbozi as well.

The rest were tripping over their dead ilk, slowing the charge. It bought time for the hoverer to reach the roof. Bers hadn’t been trained to be any kind of pilot whatsoever, so his stop was sudden and jarring, almost throwing Herdis off her feet.

She had brought her rifle, and he had brought his long-handled axe, and the moment they were above the roof he leapt from the hoverer. Bers dropped half again his height, and ran straight at the oncoming beasts, with a beastly roar of his own. Herdis regained her footing, and for a moment she seemed about to aim her weapon again, but now Bers was in the firing line.

The man’s name came to the tip of Gaylen’s tongue, but Bers’s blood was up, and Gaylen decided not to waste his breath.

Herdis grabbed the controls, and lowered the hoverer down to the roof. It was a simple old thing, with a big but simple business logo on its side. She’d probably rented it in a hurry.

Gaylen took over for Kiris and helped Jaquan bundle the injured janitor into the vehicle. Then he looked back.

Bers was doing his thing: Combining his brand of frenzy with speed and experience. With some strength behind it, keremak went through flesh and bone almost as easily as plasma did, and each swing of his axe was a killing blow. Sometimes a double one. There was a certain economy to the way the man moved and timed his swings, taking out marbozi with great efficiency as fast as they could gather to him. Muscle memory was probably doing most of his thinking, but his muscles knew how to kill.

Still, a part of the man’s success in battle had to do with the sheer shock effect he inflicted, and that was a non-factor to the marbozi. They just rushed on, and Bers took a hit. The striker was dead a half-second later, but the next one got a hit in as well, and for a couple of seconds Gaylen wondered if he was about to witness the last stand the man always seemed to be courting. But there was a limit to the crowd that came charging up the stairs, and while the window Bers had to land each strike visibly narrowed, he ran out of foes before it closed.

After a few seconds, he was just standing amidst a pile of hacked-up bodies, and raised his axe high up with both hands. He let out a triumphant, adrenaline-fuelled yell.

“Bers!” Gaylen shouted.

The man didn’t turn. He stood where he was and took deep, loud breaths that had a growling tone to them. Gaylen worried he would charge down the stairs in search of more marbozi.

“Bers!”

Gaylen banged on the side of the hoverer.

“Police! Questions! Trouble! Let’s not stick around!”

“HA!”

Bers turned around, a happy, feral grin stretched across his ugly face.

“HA!” he shouted again as he started walking, and banged a fist on his chest. “Kweilo! Fun!”

“Yeah, yeah.”

Gaylen got into the hoverer, and Bers followed. Someone was going to have to clean a lot of blood out of the seats.

Herdis manned the controls and took them back the way they’d come.

“I got your message,” she said to Gaylen. “At least snippets of it. Enough to know where to come. The rad-shield trick worked.”

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

Gaylen noticed the bundle of material on the hoverer’s floor. It was a simple way to get guns through basic scanners.

“I paid the tram operator for a max-speed trip to town, just me and Bers,” the woman went on. “Then I rented this thing, no haggling.”

“Message received,” Gaylen said, and was happy to finally lean back into cushions. He exhaled. “I’ll pay you for the expenses.”

“Good.”

She glanced backwards.

“What was all that?”

“A little reminder that being part of an unfairly treated social group doesn’t preclude one being an evil smear of shit.”

“You’re in a mood.”

He sucked in a long inhale, then let out an even longer exhale.

“Yeah, I’m in a mood.”

He looked over at Kiris and Jaquan. They looked circa how he felt. But as his gaze lingered, they looked back. And they came to understand the point of it.

“We made it,” Jaquan said.

Kiris nodded.

“We made it,” Gaylen said. And he was very happy about it.

Then there was Manvis. Gaylen found the man staring at him.

“Th… thank you,” the janitor said in a shaky voice, clearly coming down from everything that had just happened. “I… I don't know what else to say. Just… thank you.”

“Sure,” Gaylen said, and felt himself stiffen a bit. “We’ll drop you off on the rings. If you want to repay us, just wait an hour or so before giving anyone a description of us.”

They took a quick rinse at a cleansing station, then hurried to the tram station. The operator could clearly tell that something heavy had gone down, but money kept her silent and focused on her job. No call came in from the authorities to stop along the way, and no security detail was waiting on the other end, in the dock yard.

The weapons were back in their wrappings, and Herdis took them back to the Addax.

“Prep the ship,” Gaylen said to Kiris, then asked the nearest person where to find the dock manager. Two minutes later he was standing before the man, and wasted no time on pleasantries.

“I don’t know how much you’ve heard already, but Chairman Macario is dead, as is the entire Trade League leadership. The one responsible is also dead. I don’t know what’s going to happen next, but I do know that there is going to be chaos, and I’m near-certain that ethnic relations in Undercity Greiko are going to crater in the coming days. Why don’t you give yourself an advantage, and just take those soil nutrients off my hands, and release that rhodium from the warehouse?”

Thirty minutes later the planet was shrinking behind them.

“So, on to Gingunn Station?” Herdis asked from the copilot’s chair.

“Yup. On with the job.”

Gaylen needed a rest. But he’d rest easier with some distance between him and that whole mess. One never knew if some power player or law officer would want to pull them back into it.

“That was good timing back there,” he said. “And good thinking. I’ll miss you when you’re gone.”

“Yeah.”

The woman looked at the starscape in front of them.

“This has all been interesting. It’ll be good to go back home. But maybe I will look into doing this part-time. Maybe. It does bring in a lot more money than my usual job.”

“Well, if you do decide to hit the lanes again, you know how to get in touch. Now, you should probably give everyone a little medical check. Start with Bers. He might be hiding a concussion again.”

“Will do.”

That left Gaylen alone in the cockpit for a few seconds. Then Kiris’s reflection appeared on his instruments.

“Have a seat,” he said, and she let herself sink into the copilot’s chair.

She didn’t say anything right away. Just observed him in calculating silence.

“I am no Chanei,” Gaylen said. “But I think I’ve become pretty good at reading you, specifically. You’re about to drop some analysis on me, aren’t you?”

“Would you like me to?” the golden woman asked.

“When you ask things like that, is it a stage play? Playing along with the way society expects conversations to go?”

“To a degree,” she admitted.

“Well, I’ll play my part: Yes, I want to hear.”

“I noticed your reaction to that janitor giving his thanks. And I’ve seen it before. You’re uncomfortable with being treated like a good person, because you’re uncomfortable with facing the possibility that you might actually be one.”

Gaylen stared ahead. For a moment he considered pointing out that the janitor’s universal access and knowledge had been useful. But he hadn’t known who the man was when he charged in. It hadn’t any kind of measured, strategic decision. And Kiris knew it just as well as he did.

“You risked yourself to save a stranger,” Kiris went on after a bit of a silence. “I wouldn’t have. I would have left him to his fate, and looked after people I actually know and care about. Jaquan would have done the same, although he would have felt bad about it.”

“I would have dropped him if the horde started to catch up with us,” Gaylen said.

“Well, who wouldn’t? There are times when the only person that can be saved is oneself. But as long as there was a chance, you worked to save his life, and got me and Jaquan to go along with you. And as for Oleg… righteous fury is an interesting look on you.”

Gaylen waited a few seconds to respond, to find a tone that wouldn’t sound too ornery.

“Are you going somewhere with all this, Kiris?”

“Not really. I suppose I’m just saying that… the past doesn’t have to define us. And maybe you should work on giving yourself a break.”

Maybe.

For a while they said nothing, but it was a comfortable silence. Gaylen just kept the ship on course for the lanes, Kiris slouched in the chair, and they both let that whole horrible adventure drain out of their system. But inevitably the time to speak again came.

“I want you second in line for Herdis’s checkup,” he told Kiris. “You took a beating in that siege.”

“I’m as sure as I can be that I’m just bruised,” she told him. “But yes. I’ll let her look at me.”

“We’re going to get some rest, finish the delivery, then stop somewhere decent for a proper rest.”

“Mm.”

There was a gleam in her eyes.

“Hotel room?”

He turned to her and smiled.

“Of course.”