“Just that once.”
“No-o.” Pippa smiled tartly. “I believe I caught you trying, shall we say, a covert infiltration on no less than seven occasions. I broke your ribs on that last one.”
“Oh,
that,”
said Franco. “I was just, you know, showing a bit of crewmate solidarity.”
“You’re a sexual deviant, and you should learn to keep your pickle to yourself. So, gentlemen, I will bid you a long goodnight. The ship’s advanced enough to deal with SCAVS, Tickles, SPAWS and Blay Stars if the need arises; anything more serious and it’ll dredge us up from whatever deep and miserable hells our consciousnesses have conjured.”
“Tickles?” Cam had entered, black case gleaming and prissily devoid of sausage grease.
“Yeah,” said Pippa. “When you use any umbilical there are risks, because you’re touching on VoidSpace. That’s where these things live. The SCAVS are like giant octopuses floating on the fringes of real space; they’re black, practically invisible, but sometimes certain breeds will pulsate with blue glimmers through their trailing tentacles. They have long bulbous arms, and teeth that can eat through hull armour.”
“Can’t you just blast them out of the way?”
“A single tentacle would encircle this craft about ten times, Cam, and their armour plating is legendary. They’d eat us for lunch, then spit us out and look for dessert. Not something I’d mess with. And Tickles are swarms of high density, high concentrate coreolic acid; starts off sounding like rain on a ship’s hull, but in reality it’s the little bastards launching themselves at hull armour in tight choreographed formation dives. Eventually—quicker than you’d think—your spacecraft is like a sponge, you get hullbreach, decompression and you’ve got a craft full of exploded organisms. These things are not too bright, though; they have a vegetable sentience, but that’s about it. They’re not forcefully aggressive; just kind of aimlessly destructive, in a nice way.”
“How come you don’t have these files, anyway?” said Franco, waving his shot-glass wildly in the air. “I thought you had...” he affected an effete voice, “‘a Machine Intelligence Rating of 3150.’”
“I do not have Eternity Memory, I am a PopBot. I tend to be more specifically functioned. I was destined for the Galhari market; my mem-mods were area specific.”
“What about Pippa’s logic cubes? In her skull?”
“Algorithms supplied by Fortune. I have the intelligence, just not the data. With the right codes you would be amazed at how dangerous I can actually be.”
“Woo-hoo,” said Franco. At that point Keenan and Pippa exchanged a glance, and Pippa took the near-empty bottle from the table and screwed the cap firm with finality.
“Too many years in a sanatorium,” said Keenan gently. “He just wants to live it up a bit. Yeah?”
“However, we have agreed a mission,” said Pippa. “A certain amount of professionalism is expected.”
“But it’s a mission that won’t, technically, begin for another fifteen days. I think it’s definitely time we got some sugar coma-time. Come on, let’s put the maps away. We’ve plenty of time for planning when we’re fucking dead.”
Keenan and Pippa carried a fast-failing Franco to his SleepCell and rolled shut the door. He began to snore immediately. Keenan leant against the wall, laughing.
“Just like the old times,” he grinned, face suddenly youthful and filled with a boyish charm.
“Yeah, just like the old times.”
There was an awkward silence, and Keenan felt the avalanche rush between them, like a mammoth crevasse widening with every passing breath. He licked his lips, was about to speak, but Pippa gave a single shake of her head. She moved off down the corridor, and with a silent curse Keenan followed.
Within hours, Keenan and Pippa had arranged their kit, checked one another’s navigation data, and entered their private SleepCells. Cam switched into the digital void: the world of offline. The Hornet powered down.
In the darkness of Franco’s SleepCell, his eyes flicked open and gleamed against the artificial night. He sat up. Everything was quiet. He pulled out a small bottle from his clothing, opened the cap, and shook free a blue pill. He stared at it for a while, then swallowed.
Moments later, Franco left his SleepCell and moved warily, unobserved, around the downtime ship.
The days ticked down.
Twenty hours from The City, the sleeping inhabitants were slowly brought round using KT injections. Pippa was the first to rise, and stood in front of the sink gazing at her reflection and examining the myriad of tiny lines that creased her face. Getting old, slowing down, soon be fish food
.
She smiled, opened the inset cupboard above the small ship sink, and stared hard at the scissors that sat there, lengths of inconsequential metal.
Scissors
.
Damn.
She breathed deep.
Pippa stared at the scissors for a long time, but made no effort to reach out, no effort to touch this simple item of gleaming steel. Pippa didn’t touch scissors. She had vowed never to touch scissors until the day she died.
Aged nineteen Pippa had been the most skilled killer her Combat K instructors had met. She was fitter, stronger, more agile, more lethal than most recruits who passed the hallowed hallways of The Silver Academy. She’d been chosen outright, not for standard K Class infantry infiltrations; no, they had special instructions for this little lady. After all, her mentor, the late great General J. K. Cameron, had rescued her from a hostel for teenage criminals at the request of his niece, one of the kind-hearted incarceration officers there, and somebody who recognised an esoteric quality within Pippa’s cold moody atmosphere, which she believed could be nurtured, developed and engaged.
Brought up by her father—Daniel—after her mother’s early departure, Pippa had led a sheltered life. She remembered little of this premature maternal severance; only it had something to do with alcohol, and a lot to do with violence. Daniel had been a heavy drinker even from the early days, working hard-labour in the shipyards of a rapidly expanding human empire glorious against the backdrop of new stars. He earned good money completing dangerous work on the external fitment of Class G cruisers, the testing of military lasers, and occasional Mechanical Integration, one of the most highly paid and hazardous vocations in the exploding Sinax Cluster. However, his good money was spent at a spiralling rate on the Ijak, Twaz and Jataxa he loved.
Pippa would arrive home from school. If the apartment was quiet, she knew it would be an OK night. But if, as happened five times out of seven, music was blaring from four open windows, the apartment ablaze with violet anti-insect light, the door ajar by just a few inches; well, Pippa knew she was in for a bad gig.
When her mother had lived at home, it would begin with drinking. Father drinking, and her mother, Anna, drinking as a basic cushion of absorption for the abuse inflicted on her unworthy soul: the digs, the mistreatment, the poking of the finger. Yeah, Daniel was good at that, emphasising his point with a jab of the index to shoulder, chest or abdomen. It would deteriorate into arguments about money, food, clothing for Pippa. The arguments would sometimes fizzle out with Daniel too intoxicated to climb from his dominant chair in front of the vidscreen. Other times they would rage around the apartment like a hurricane. Pippa would flee to her room, hide under her covers with either her music turned on full so that it rattled the walls and blanked out the screaming, or a simple pillow over her ears to block out the hate. It was normal. This was all normal, right? Everybody had a home life like this; all those other kids at school and the academy, there was nothing wrong with it, and Pippa dragged herself through a miserable existence unable to speak, unable to communicate her angst, unable to simply
scream.
Then—mother left. Pippa was hazy about the circumstances. But she remembered the huge purple bruises on her mother’s face; remembered Anna holding her ribs, words wheezing through black pulped lips, eyes frightened and darting around the apartment; a woman scared for her life.
It changed the dynamic of their little trio. Suddenly, Pippa, aged a delicate twelve, had been forced into the position of lead female and matriarch. Despite her youth, Daniel’s attention had transferred to her—the new victim on the block—for his evening onslaught. Verbal at first, cursing the government, cursing his job, cursing his lack of wealth pissed down gutters and urinals of tek-bars and, when exceptionally drunk, pattering golden over the contents of his wardrobe. But then, as night follows day, so physical violence followed rhetoric: a stinging slap, to arm, or thigh, just to emphasise the argument, you understand love, just to highlight a particularly important point. And the finger—Pippa called it the Finger of Justice—pointing, stabbing, accusing; and hurting, always hurting. But it was all right; surely everybody went through this, didn’t they? It was normal, all about growing up. All her friends must be experiencing the same. It’s what parents did. Just the way it was.
Pippa did grow up, introverted, sullen, moody, she kept herself to herself and did her work as best she could until a group of seven girls decided she would become the next victim and target of childish playful schoolyard bullying... smug, slimy, peroxide perms and orange tans, long and leggy and as beautiful as cadavers. They attacked, and in the whirlwind that followed Pippa left three maimed and six in the hospital, one in intensive care. Nobody fucked with Pippa after that. They left the quiet demure sullen girl with the grey eyes and the black bobbed hair alone; just the way she liked it.
Back at home, Daniel got worse. His pay increased, and so his drinking increased. He managed to drag himself into work every day but it was suffering, until a disaster on a high-gantry left four colleagues without limbs, and Daniel was dismissed facing public social charges of technical incompetence.
Instead of improving Pippa’s life, it made it far, far worse. Instead of starting to drink in the evening, Daniel used his dollarcard and began when he awoke: that first crack of the bottle and a cigarette before climbing from decadent soiled sheets. Pippa endured all agony of depravation, obloquy, humiliation. She was dragged across the floor by her hair, denied TV, food, clothing; even electric. She was forced to wash in cold water and endure a winter without heating, and was locked from the house when she was a minute past her curfew. She was kicked unconscious, scratched, gouged and punched; but worst of all was that finger, the Finger of Justice: prodding, poking, stabbing, highlighting the arguments of an inebriated arsehole. And slowly, slowly, slowly, Pippa began to hate every look, every touch, every word, every breath. Hatred grew and festered, and built until every single second of every single day she felt she would explode
.
One day, everything changed.
Mother came back. She looked good, healthy, hair a glowing sheen, eyes bright. Daniel was on the verge of unconsciousness in his chair, nodding like a lobotomised monkey. “Come on,” she said, red lips smiling at the look of sudden hope in her bruised daughter’s face, “you’re coming with me, princess.”
“But what about...”
“Him?” she snarled. “He can rot in a hell of his own creation.”
Pippa ran to her room, packing meagre belongings into a small case. As she was struggling with the latches she heard raised voices, and a cold dread settled like cancer over her heart. She ran back to the living quarters, just in time to see Daniel strike Anna down, a brutal right hook that broke the woman’s nose, twisting her head at a savage angle as she struck the liquor-stained carpet. Anna lay still. Her neck was broken. Blood trickled from her eyes.
Pippa stepped forward. She did not feel anger or hatred, did not feel a rush of hot blood, did not pass through seasons of building rage. She was cold: as cold as the tombstone, as cold as the Void.
“Father, what have you done?”
“Fucking whore, fucking bitch,” he slurred, slumping to his knees and staring with the feral look of the alcoholic: no compassion, no empathy, no understanding of his poison, of what he was, of what he had become: a slave, a slave to the piss, a willing victim of the demon in the bottle. “Who does she think she is? Take you away from me, will she? I don’t fucking think so! TAKE YOU AWAY FROM ME?”
Pippa stepped forward as Daniel’s stabbing finger came up. Pippa’s gaze locked to that finger. To her it embodied everything: the hatred, the stupidity, the abuse, the violence. She smiled. It wasn’t a real smile. It was a release.
Her hand dropped, scrabbled on the table. She found something there: long, metallic, unyielding.
In silence, her fingers curled around the slender form of the scissors.
And her eyes went hard.
Pippa gasped, stared up at herself in the mirror as if coming up from the depths of unconsciousness. Hands shaking, she took a deep breath and closed the cabinet door. Nobody knew about her past: not her Combat K instructors, not her team, not even Keenan. To some extent her father’s abuse explained the ease with which she dispatched those of the male sex. But she knew it went deeper, far deeper to a place she did not want to revisit... a bottomless well of a simple nightmare. Her father had created a demon, and often that demon walked the world. Meeting Keenan, loving Keenan, she had been exorcised of the cancer in her soul. But in casting her away, in rejecting her love, Keenan had brought her wrath and her violence back tenfold.