Earth Singer

CHAPTER TEN

Smoke billowed skyward from the building as the atmos of the Vigiles touched down on the scene to restore order. Another lifeless body was dragged out onto the street by their feet.

That made four.

Emergency medics leaped into action, their atmos landing in tandem with the Vigiles, who moved immediately to cordon off the area.

'Is this all of them?' Triana shouted to two exhausted Militari ahead of her. Without answering they slumped to the curb, along with the body they had just dragged with them. She knelt down in the midst of the prone figures, touching her left thumb and forefinger against the shoulder of the nearest. A bracelet on the same wrist projected key vital signatures across her forearm. Signals picked up through the fine sensors woven into her glove. She moved deftly from one body to the next gathering more vital data and creating a mental picture of the incident that had taken place there.

'We got one more!' Another metallic voice yelled from somewhere inside the cloud of smoke rising from the nearest building. A soldier emerged carrying a body over his shoulders. He dropped it roughly on the relative safety of the roadway before he too collapsed to the curb.

'Status?' Another medic joined Triana.

'Just stunned,' she replied. 'They all are. Looks like they were hit by a stunner.'

'How can you tell?'

'Here,' she gestured towards the motionless body between them. 'Smell this one.' The second medic leaned forward and immediately took on a look of disgust. Triana never lost a chance to mess with the new blood.

'Smells like piss.' The second gagged.

'Smells like an ass kicking,' she replied.

Half a dozen dazed and shell-shocked Militari stumbled around the street gasping for fresh air or clutching twitching limbs. She counted five more bodies splayed out around her. Motionless, but otherwise no signs of any wounds.

She left the second medic with the soldier on the ground and made her way to check on the others.

'Get these ones some shots! The muscle relaxants,' she called out, gesturing to the soldiers with twitching arms or spasming legs. The bracelet on her arm began to flicker with blue like in unison with her earpiece, indicating and incoming call. Triana pressed the earpiece and stood silently for several seconds.

'Understood,' she answered, releasing her finger from the earpiece.

'Double time, all of you. Stick'em and move em.' She marched her way towards the smouldering entrance of the building where the last two Militari soldiers had emerged. 'RoadTrak inbound, we have two minutes!'

She peered down at the soldiers. She didn't need her finely tuned sensors this time.

'Over here! This one's bleeding' She knelt down beside the solider. A knife wound. Triana flicked a small gun-like object from her med belt and pressed it to the wound. Pulling the trigger a rush of white foam poured into the injury, instantly forming a thick crust and plugging any further blood loss.

'He'll live,' Triana glanced down at her bracelet. 'ONE MINUTE!'

+++

'Shut it down.'

Draig ignored her instruction and her gun, busying himself with the various panels of the ship. He moved from one end of the small cockpit to the others, pressing buttons and twisting dials. At one point he was forced to squeeze past Vesta's weapon in order to reach a lever behind her.

'Where do you keep getting those things?' he asked, nodding at the weapon. He did not bother waiting to for an answer. With a well-practiced leap, he perched himself in a worn pilot's seat and attacked yet another panel of blinking lights and numbers.

'I'll shoot.' Vesta would. She had played along with Draig's plan long enough. She was caked in black soot. Her skin was dotted in burns from crawling through a hot ventilation shaft to escape the building they were trapped in. How Tawn had made it at all, and while carrying Deallus, was a mystery she had had no time to unpack. Every muscle in her body ached with the exertion of their escape across town and into the concealed hangar. They had raced onto the nearest slag-heap of a ship to get Deallus to a med-bay. She and Tawn had only just found the bandages and lasblades to cauterise his wounds when the engines spooled to life. She should have known Draig was up to something.

'I don't think you will,' Draig's confidence was irritating her trigger finger.

'Why not?' she spat back. The thought of blasting him right in his disinterested face was more comforting that it should be.

'Which reason would you like?' came his distracted response.

'The fact that I'm the only one piloting this junk heap? The fact that we are in the middle of an atmo-skip and one wrong move will flash fry us all? Or how about that it's just bad manners?'

Draig pulled gently at the controls in front of him. As if handling a newborn brute-calf. Outside the cock-pit, the view shifted between the black of space and blue-grey gem of the Servile IV. A gentle red glow forming and vanishing and forming again as the ship skidded along the planet's atmosphere. Atmo-skipping was a pretty intense manoeuvre, even for an experienced pilot. The friction superheats and ionises the air around the ship, making it impossible to track. It was also the reason the life expectancy of smugglers in the Regnum was measured in days rather than years. Draig, was apparently capable of performing the manoeuvre with only half his attention. Turning away from his controls and talking directly to Vesta, in a show of either bravado or psychosis.

'Or,' he continued, 'how about the fact that we made a deal?'

Vesta did her best to swallow her anxiety as she watched the ship skipping along the planet's atmosphere with an inattentive pilot at the helm.

'We had a deal,' she said, 'and leaving the planet was not part of it.'

'To be fair, you did say you wanted to get off that rock,'

Draig paused for a laugh that wasn't coming.

'Besides...' The ship shuddered and Draig burst into a minor flurry of activity, as he wrestled the ship through the turbulence. Momentary losing his air of breezy disregard. 'You let us go, and I give you the leader of the whole resistance. All your wildest wet dreams come true. I imagine that's what you Vigile's fantasise about anyway. What's a little space travel?'

'No one said we were getting off-world!'

'You think the leader of the whole resistance is on Servile IV? The High Heretic himself? Master of all that keeps your Tetrarchs up at night?' Draig's chuckle seemed a little half-hearted as the ship jolted and bucked, alarms sounding all around the cockpit.

'Stop showing off!' came a crackling version of Tawn's voice from an intercom somewhere in the cockpit.

'Sorry!' Draig replied. 'Little distracted.'

'Well get undistracted, I almost removed Deallus' other eye,' Tawn snapped.

'Well you get up here and take her gun then!' Draig quipped back.

Tawn sighed audibly. 'Where does she keep getting them from?'

Vesta allowed herself exactly one-eighth of a smile. Imagining the bemused look on Tawn's face. And the mere thought of the sinewy brute trying to perform delicate surgery. Maybe it was the exhaustion, but she felt herself becoming more and more disarmed by the motley company she found herself in. She lowered the pistol.

'So where are we headed?'

'You wouldn't have heard of it.' Draig performed a final heave of the controls and the ship all at once ceased to rattle in turbulence. Instead slicing through the black of space.

'I suppose if you had there wouldn't be much of a heresy now would there?' He continued. 'Anyway, the fact is we're going. Once we're safe from your friends and I have your word we'll stay that way, I'll give you the Dragon.'