Reciprocity
“Breathe deep. You have never been more alive.”
When the assassin dropped out near Alpha-Richard, the comms panel pinged with a backlog of messages. Every time he visited his boneyard in the Gammas, he dropped comms and went silent for a spell. He didn’t like having any particular patterns in his mode of operating, but that was one. His people knew. They also knew to be careful about what they said, how they represented any bit of information about his whereabouts or intentions. If he was in the Gammas, off the grid, that was not something that ever got shared. And when he was available, he made sure that his people kept some of their business contacts waiting anyway, just so no one would be able to infer anything from their response time. As long as the right people got killed eventually, within reason, reliably, the Murkist’s reputation would remain as steady as Athos. There was almost never a mark urgent enough to alter the course of business. All his people knew this.
So when Kai Rex appeared in his backlog with a message that his best contact, Dittra, wanted to see him in person on Alpha-Origgi, he knew it was no casual matter. It was far enough out of the norm that if it had been any other messenger than the eldest son of Mirsong Rex, he’d have been highly suspicious of the message. He might have even thought it was a trap. A meeting in person meant one of two things—a betrayal by means of drawing him to a definite location, or something so sensitive comms could not be trusted. The Murkist didn’t trust much anyway, but everyone had to trust certain things and even certain people. He trusted Kai and Mirsong Rex, their history and their interests. And he trusted Dittra.
The assassin altered his agenda with the expectation that Dittra would have something of either galactic or personal importance. He didn’t even stop at Richard. The Murkist made a hard turn and set a course for Origgi.
When he and Dittra met in the concourse, apart from the usual stares he got from his unusual size, the Murkist didn’t sense that anything at Ash-Vedal was off. Everyone seemed to be going about their business as normal, despite the recent incursions the Trasp and Etterans were making into the Letters, spreading their mess all over systems they had no business doing their fighting in. The assassin’s assumption that Dittra’s message had something to do with the Letters Offensive was the most reasonable one. It was also incorrect. Dittra handed him a piece of paper—unhackable. That he personally brought the message meant he didn’t even trust a currier with the intel.
“It’s personal, boss. Something long overdue,” Dittra said.
“Can it wait?”
“That’s for you to judge. Everything I can tell you is now in your possession.”
He glared at Dittra. The Murkist was getting the sense that Dittra might have brought him to Origgi for something that didn’t warrant the interruption of normal operations. Dittra merely nodded back at him reassuringly.
“Until next time then,” the Murkist stated to his associate.
He didn’t even stay for a drink, much less a meal and a bed. If there was any chance he had been drawn there somehow under false pretenses by Dittra’s little piece of intel, the sooner he got off Origgi, the better.
He jumped out of the system in the direction of Aurelius. The Murkist’s next job was back that way, but that changed the instant he unfolded the slip of paper Dittra had handed him. On it was a name and a set of system coordinates. The name was Lioba Nikuba, and the coordinates didn’t matter the second he saw the name. Wherever Nikuba was, he was going.
The Murkist shook his head as he tried to place the system coordinates. The numbers certainly weren’t familiar. Just eyeballing it, he guessed the system was somewhere in Etteran space—on the other side of Etteran space really, the outer reaches of the Guild. Civilization as anyone knew it stopped out that way.
Once he entered the numbers, it was immediately apparent why the location was unfamiliar. There was nothing out there. The system was clear on the other side of the Goneys. The only thing out there, as far as he or anyone in the Letters knew, were Etteran passive surveillance stations meant to alert the Guild if the Trasp aimed to sneak in their back door. Rumor had it the Etterans even had a few posts on ice moons out that way, but the Guild kept their deployment patterns in those distant areas a tightly guarded secret, like everything else they did.
“The Goneys,” the Murkist muttered, shaking his head.
It didn’t make any sense that Nikuba was all the way out there. He briefly contemplated the intel, wondering who Dittra’s source was—whether someone actually was setting a trap, not on Origgi but out there.
What did make sense was the secrecy. Nikuba had proven himself to be one of the slipperiest bastards in the galaxy. How he’d escaped the Murkist for so long was a question the assassin was burning to answer. Leaky comms of some unknown variety was one possibility—hence, Dittra’s precautions. No name had ever been on his list for even half as long as Lioba Nikuba. “Overdue” Dittra had said.
That was a fact.
If Lioba Nikuba was all the way out in the Goneys, the Murkist decided, then he was going too.
By the time he got out there, the Murkist had stewed for nearly a week over the layout of the tiny system Dittra’s coordinates had pinpointed in that vast swath of vacant space. The survey map, he figured, had to be Etteran, and, he guessed possibly half a century old. So it was certainly possible some reclusive peoples had broken off from the Guild or Protectorate to avoid the war, setting up a cylinder group out in lonesome space. But there was nothing on his chart.
The Murkist had a modified Precops clone that ran in fragmented pieces on several different processor sets—one of his many secrets—that allowed someone in his profession to bypass the AI’s ethical protocols. That Precops had no idea he was serving an assassin, largely because that Precops was technically seven different Precopses, none of which were consciously aware they were even operating.
During the transit, the Precopses had plenty of time to identify the likeliest scenarios for human habitation in the area, so when he dropped into that dim obscure star system, the Murkist immediately began to survey for signs of civilization.
He spent several hours taking a full set of passive scans from the array. There were no ships, and no pings came in, nor were there any conventional EM signals floating around. That cursory glance was just the beginning of his search.
The Murkist scoured the system for nearly three days for some sign of anything, and when he’d finally ruled out any of the options on the AI’s checklist, he reached the point of decision: exhaust more time trying to track down that one mark who got away, and probably find nothing, or eat the lost time for what it was. All in all, even without catching up with Nikuba, he decided the chance he’d taken on finally killing that scumbag was worth the wasted days, and, he thought, it would be worth a few more days if there were anything worth checking into in that nothing place.
“I want you to do some modeling,” the Murkist said to the AI’s coordinating node. “Calculate the probability the original survey missed planetary or lunar bodies in the system sweep. Compare against gravitational data observed in our search of the system.”
“Processing,” the node replied in its generic voice.
One of the drawbacks of that fragmented AI was that it wasn’t nearly as responsive as an ordinary Precops would be.
“There is a seventeen-percent chance the survey data’s inaccuracies are significant enough that a small planetoid or lunar body could have been overlooked.”
“Compare against current gravitational data. Identify likeliest probable locations.”
It took about ten minutes for the system to spit out a list of five coordinates in order of their likelihood of existence.
The Murkist took a look at the locations and probable sizes of the anomalies. They were all planetoids, most of which were out beyond the outer reaches of the dim sun’s radiance. The third on the list looked interesting—distant, probably a ball of rock or methane ice if it existed at all. It was a nine-minute FTL jump on the way back to the Battery, a worthwhile stop just to turn over every last reasonable stone.
When those nine minutes were up, the Murkist dropped into the darkness far enough from the dim little sun that even at the outer reaches of its gravitational influence, it was hardly more than a bright star. He scanned the space in front of him visually. Nothing.
But his modified AI system chirped, informing him of a gravitational influence. She was out there, that ice ball. Within a minute, spectroscopy was returning limited data. It wasn’t a little rock at all. It was a proper planet—point-six-four G according to the system’s gravitational data. A big ice ball. There were traces of water and an atmosphere that was kicking off plenty of tiny particles into the darkness. The ship’s array was returning hydrocarbons—CO², traces of Oxygen, even fusion byproducts in miniscule amounts.
The Murkist decided to have a closer look.
He didn’t find what he expected—a cylinder or smaller Sternwheel-style station orbiting the icy body. It didn’t seem to make sense that a group of loners would fly this far out into uninhabited space and setup shop on a rock that didn’t at least have four-fifth’s normal gravity when they could just keep flying and find a better fit farther out, possibly with better light. But, to be thorough, he decided to orbit and take at least a cursory survey. It was possible it was more of a camp than a colony. And, about three quarters of the way around the planet, nearly thirty degrees up from the body’s equator, buried under a sheet of ice, the array picked up a heat signature.
Nothing about it made sense. It was a large enough signature that it was no camp. Definitely an outpost. Yet there was no sign of ships on the surface, certainly not Nikuba’s. But the subsurface thermal signature was large enough that it had to be something much more significant than any gang Nikuba could have thrown together out here.
The assassin didn’t like anything he couldn’t see clearly, and this dark ice planet was a proper mystery, and so were the people living under its surface. He decided to execute a high-elevation flyover, dropping a pair of drones to survey the ice for unnatural disturbances. He knew some of the Etterans’ tricks, hiding countermeasures in the ice sheets. That thought prompted him to contemplate the possibility they could be Trasp agents—some sort of staging post. He had no desire to fly into a Trasp death trap. But the drones picked up no countermeasures. From the data they returned, it didn’t even seem they’d been passively surveilled.
Another decision. The Murkist stroked the stubble on his chin.
The Precopses’ coordinating node chirped again. Along the outer perimeter of the area the drones scanned, they’d picked up a structure under a thin cover of ice and snow. It seemed like a door. It was such an odd set of circumstances that the Murkist even considered for a moment the possibility he may have inadvertently stumbled upon the Columns. But the gravitation and some of the other system details didn’t track with the history he knew. He also considered that such history was decidedly foggy even before it was ancient, though.
“Who the hell is down there with him?” the Murkist bellowed to no one.
He let out an angry growl at his own intemperance. What was he supposed to do, though, wait Nikuba out? It was entirely possible Nikuba had been in there for all the years he hadn’t been seen in the Battery. He wasn’t going to wait any longer, and he wasn’t going to let him slide, not that man.
The Murkist tapped the flight controls, setting an obscure and serpentine landing pattern.
When he reached the surface, there seemed to be no more outward reaction about his presence out on the ice than there had been when he was in orbit. Zero response. For all he knew, the people inside that bunker were oblivious to his presence. With each approaching movement he made toward this mystery colony, their continued silence became increasingly more conspicuous. He decided to put a stop to the games.
He pinged the door on a broad spectrum of channels.
“I know you’re in there. I am outside your door. I’d like to talk. We have plenty to discuss.”
The Murkist waited. The minutes ticked away. He spent it reviewing the modeling the Precops system was running with the data compiled from the drones and the ship on descent. There was a colony down in some kind of silo. A deep cylindrical vault hollowed out of the rock.
Twenty minutes passed. The system was having a difficult time assessing population numbers—anywhere from a thousand to half a million people could’ve been down there.
“I am not a problem you want to ignore,” he stated when he pinged again. “You’re going to want to talk to me. The sooner, the better.”
It was another full ten minutes without any reply. The Murkist was contemplating next moves—how best to send a message without burning a bridge. He needed these people to open the door after all.
Suddenly, his floatscreen flashed up above the front panel. An aging but serious face glared back at him.
“Who, sir, do you think you are to come to our doorstep issuing demands?”
“I made no demand but a conversation. As for my identity, it may not precede me out here, but I assure you I’m not soon forgotten after I depart.”
“I should think not, with a face like that. What business do you have here, sir?”
“I have reason to believe you are harboring a man who is escaping a justice that is richly deserved. It makes me wonder what sort of people would knowingly give sanctuary to such a man. I don’t want to think such things of a people who are unknown to me. It is far more reasonable for me to believe the character of the man you are hiding is simply unknown to you. Perhaps, at the very least, I could offer you a more informed choice about the man in your midst.”
“You presume much.”
“I also see much. And I travel much. And I know much. I also enjoy talking. Perhaps we could discuss this matter face to face.”
“You are the law?” the man on the screen said.
“Of a sort,” the Murkist replied.
“I see. Some sort of bounty hunter. You have the look. We don’t deal with such types.”
The man seemed to step forward as though to close the screen.
“Who do you deal with?” the Murkist barked at the man. “Perhaps you should ask yourself who it is better to deal with. That would be one way of putting it.”
“Perhaps you should consider whether it is wise to threaten people you don’t know, sir.”
“Lioba Nikuba. That is who I seek. The cost to you of giving him to me is zero. On that you have my word. Should I have to take him, though—for that, the cost remains unknown. Only a fool assumes a debt that isn’t his own.”
When the floatscreen flashed off, the Murkist couldn’t help but blurt out, “Fool!”
It irked him. This was just posturing. Wasteful. He hadn’t scoured every outpost on the Letters for years to find Nikuba to be turned away by some graybeard hiding him behind an imposing bunker door. He’d sooner blast the planet in two and scrape what remained of the bastard out of the smoking crater.
He pinged the door on the channel the old man had closed.
“I will give you a day to come to your senses. Give me Nikuba and I will leave your little haven in peace.”
He closed the channel. He’d found that his face, his voice, and the open-ended questions he left about what would happen if people didn’t meet his demands were often more effective than threats. He didn’t have a plan yet. A bunker like that wouldn’t be easy to breach. It was a dilemma worth sleeping on after a long few weeks in transit. The weak gravity would be a welcome treat—enough of a pull to feel like he was somewhere real, yet it was weak enough it wouldn’t tax the assassin’s tremendous bulk.
He set the Precopses to monitor the ship’s perimeter and stepped into the back to lie down and doze.
The noise that roused him wasn’t what the Murkist was expecting. It wasn’t the presumed leader he’d spoken to over comms. It was something much closer and more direct. The alert was chirping as well, but it sounded as though something had struck his hull, but he couldn’t be sure whether he was dreaming.
“Up. Up!” the Murkist shouted, meaning for the Precopses to put up a floatscreen with the nature of the alert on it.
Suddenly, there in front of him was video of the exterior of the ship, and there was a creature outside, but the scale seemed off. He rubbed his eyes and looked again. It seemed to be a tiny person in a spacesuit, and this rather clumsy dwarf of some kind appeared to be attempting to lift a chunk of ice beside the craft—not a large fragment of ice at all. Yet the tiny person struggled mightily at both lifting the ice while keeping its balance and tried, yet again it seemed, to strike the bottom of his hull by hurling the icy fragment upward.
“What the hell is this?” he grumbled.
Again, he smelled some sort of trap—a seemingly harmless provocation to get him to step outside, he wondered? The more he examined the figure, he couldn’t help but think it must be a child, not a dwarf—some type of mischief? Or perhaps these people were so craven and weak as to send a child out to do their dirty work, testing the waters while hiding behind a kid.
There was nothing else suspicious on the surveillance; but then, it wouldn’t be a halfway decent trap if he could see it.
The Murkist headed to the back, put on his belt, activated his nanosheet, and stepped into the airlock on the side of the ship opposite the ice-hurling child.
It had no idea he was coming until it was too late to run. Even in the darkness, inside the suit, the Murkist could see by the way the child’s body recoiled in horror at his approach that if it was bait, this child, it was certainly not expecting to be snatched up the way the Murkist did, grasping its tiny body so firmly about the spacesuit’s collar with a single hand that fleeing became utterly impossible, not that the terror hadn’t frozen the child in place anyway. In his hand, he could feel the frailty of this small human. It did feel human when he snatched it up, tucking the child under his arm as he stomped back toward the open airlock, audibly crunching the ice beneath him as he returned to the warmth of his parked ship.
He carried the figure all the way up to his flight deck. It didn’t flail or resist, and he couldn’t quite see its face, as the front side of the suit was facing away from him, and the tiny person inside it seemed to be struggling to hold up the weight of the helmet, which sagged toward the floor and away from him.
When he sat, the Murkist stood up the little space suit in front of his jumpseat, trying to assess the features of the tiny person inside, which were obscured by a thin fog on the inside of the faceshield. He could see the little person’s chest rising and falling rapidly inside the suit, hyperventilating almost.
“Remove the helmet so I can see your face,” he demanded. “I don’t intend to hurt you now. I probably would pull your head off with it if I tried to remove that helmet for you.”
It was the frailest human he’d ever laid his massive hands on. Its shaking hands made it seem like the little thing would never get the helmet off.
“Go on,” the Murkist said. “Calm yourself.”
Finally, after several stops and starts, the helmet came off, and the occupant, a tiny girl by the looks of her, bobbled and then dropped the helmet to the deck from her tremoring hands.
“A child?” the Murkist stated. “What were you doing outside my ship, girl?”
“I’m not a child,” she replied, her voice unmistakably child-like.
“No?”
“I’m a woman.”
The little girl’s reply evoked a snorting laugh from the Murkist. To him, she looked like she could be no older than ten or perhaps twelve years old, but as he looked over her face in the dim ship light, she did have an odd look about her.
“You should be in bed little one. Your mommy will be missing you.”
“I’m twenty-six years old.”
“And barely taller than my knees.”
“You’re a giant, and we’re small.”
The Murkist looked her over again, considering. He grabbed her jaw with his thumb and forefinger, pressing open the girl’s upper lip to examine her teeth. He looked perplexed.
“Take off that suit,” he told her.
The girl immediately crossed her arms, shrinking back away from him.
“Do you honestly think there’s a thing you could do to stop me if I decided to do it for you, little one? Do as I say. I have no mind to harm you.”
She took a deep breath, and unclipped the collar. Then, she unzipped the suit-top and removed her hands and arms, one at a time, letting the firm outer shell drop to her waist. Again, she crossed her arms as though to hide herself from the enormous assassin’s gaze. The Murkist delicately took her wrists with two fingers for each arm, pulling her arms down by her side, then turning the girl sideways, surprised by what he saw. Her anatomy suggested she wasn’t lying.
“I’ve never seen a woman so small,” the Murkist said, puzzling over the discovery. “What are you?”
“We’re small. My people are just small.”
“Humans?”
“Of course humans.”
“All of you?”
“Not all of us are exactly the same size, obviously. Like you, for instance, you’re much larger than any of the other ...”
She stopped suddenly, realizing she might be revealing more than she should.
“Go on, please, little one.”
“My name is Shiann. Please don’t call me that. It’s demeaning.”
“Shiann, then. The other what?”
“Well, we know we’re small. And, occasionally we do trade with normal-sized humans. But you’re the first giant I’ve ever seen.”
The Murkist laughed. “I am no giant. I’m just a big person. No one would mistake me for a different species. You ...?” He considered for a moment. “You would probably be mistaken for a child until someone took the time to look closely. All of your people are like this?”
Shiann nodded.
“Even that bearded idiot I spoke with on the floatscreen?”
“I don’t know who you mean.”
“Some elder with a gray beard and a bad manner. You’re telling me he was a tiny little thing like you?”
“The Chief Magistrate,” she replied nodding. “He’s only a centimeter or two taller than me.”
The Murkist laughed. “Tricksters. I suppose you’d have to be. How did you get so small?”
“We spent generations in space on a colony ship. We had to gradually reduce the spin gravity to lessen the stress on the main spire, plus caloric reduction by necessity. Then, I’m not sure how much biology you know, but epigenetic switches flipped and we adapted to that environment over time.”
“I’ve never heard of such a thing, which is funny. How come nobody’s ever heard of you? Why are you hiding out here?”
“Our ancestors had bad experiences and decided the best thing for our people would be to stay amongst our own kind.”
“Probably because they did stupid things, like throwing chunks of ice at a stranger’s space ship. Or insulting them to their face while hiding behind their bunker doors, like your magistrate in there.”
“I can’t account for his words,” Shiann replied. “As for the ice, I meant no harm, only to get your attention. I apologize if it caused any damage to your ship or consternation to yourself.”
The Murkist laughed. “Damage? Unless you injured yourself in the attempt, there was no damage done, and this conversation? I’d call it curiosity, not consternation.” He paused, stroking his chin. “Shiann, do you know the name Lioba Nikuba? I came here looking for a man—one of us—our size. Well, not my size exactly, but you know what I mean.”
“I don’t know that name.”
“Allow me to rephrase. Is there a normal-sized man inside that bunker with you.”
“Yes. We know him just as Lii. I think the council of elders may know who he is, but the rest of us don’t.”
“This man?” the Murkist stated, raising a floatscreen from his wristband and flipping to a headshot of his most elusive target.
Shiann nodded. “That’s him. Yes. Lii.”
“Thank you for your honesty,” the Murkist said. “I so appreciate honesty.”
“What do you want with Lii?” Shiann asked.
“I don’t suppose I can praise your honesty and then lie to your little face with my very next words, can I?” The Murkist seemed to ponder the matter for a moment before stating simply. “I’ve come to kill him. I am a killer. That’s what I do.”
Shiann took about the deepest breath her little body could inhale. “You’re serious?”
“I’m as serious as a man can be. I don’t suppose you’ve met too many killers inside your bunker there.”
“No.”
“You might’ve thought twice about tossing chunks of ice against the bottom of my hull,” the Murkist stated, grinning.
Shiann’s eyes got wide.
He shook his head. “I am not an animal, Shiann. I kill only very specific people for very specific reasons.”
“And what specific reasons do you have for killing Lii?”
“I will tell you. However, in friendship there must be reciprocity. I would like to know something from you first.”
“That only seems fair, but I cannot tell you something as honest as you have, Mr. ...? Come to think of it, you haven’t told me your name, and you already know mine. Reciprocity, right?”
“You’re a sharp one. They call me Murkist.”
“Murkist? I’ve never heard a name like that before. It does sound like a good name for a killer.”
The Murkist smiled. “Reciprocity. I’d like to know why you came out to my ship. Clearly you wanted to speak to me for some reason.”
“May I sit down?” Shiann asked, looking down at the hand the Murkist still had grasping her about the waist. “I won’t try to run.”
“Please,” the Murkist said, gesturing toward the other jump seat on the deck. “If you sit on the floor, I’ll have to strain my neck to look down at you.”
He released Shiann slowly, afraid she might collapse into a heap without his support, but she stood just fine and took a step toward the jump seat, only to realize it was nearly at chest height.
“I haven’t climbed on a chair like that since I was a child.”
Without so much as getting up, the Murkist reached over with one hand and lifted the young woman up and onto the seat. Sized as it was specifically for the Murkist, it seemed as though she was crawling into a giant’s chair.
“I could have made it,” she protested. “It’s just this spacesuit is awkward.”
“Of course,” the Murkist said. “Now, please.”
“Okay, Mr. Murkist. I am not a killer. I am a teacher. For four years now I’ve been teaching students—sixteen-year-olds. I teach them our history.”
“History is important. We must know it to know who we are.”
“You are very well spoken and very astute for a killer, you know.”
“But I am the only killer you’ve ever known. It might be that one doesn’t last long in my profession by being a fool.”
“People pay you?”
“Quite handsomely. Yes.”
“You’ve killed many people?”
“If it weren’t for my ledger, I’d have lost count long ago. One must keep accurate accounts regardless of the profession. But, please, do continue, Shiann.”
“The problem is that I’ve learned things in the last few years, ever since Lii arrived—whatever you called him—the man you came to kill. Some things have happened that made me question our entire history. I believe it’s all lies. Everything I was taught. Everything I taught my students. I believe our elders know the truth and refuse to share it.”
“Lioba Nikuba has told you this?”
“No. His presence has exposed ... I’m not sure how to say it. He is not a good man—”
“That’s a fact.”
“Our elders. I never expected they would allow anyone to get away with the things he’s done. But they have some arrangement.”
“What type of arrangement?”
“I don’t know exactly. He’s not the only one. We’ve had others over the years—contacts. Only the council of elders knows what the arrangements are. We are not completely isolated. But Lii is the only one who they’ve allowed to stay here.”
“He stays here all the time?”
“He comes and goes, but sometimes he stays for months. I think when he goes he does business for the elders—something they value to allow him to get away with the things he does.”
“To the women?” the Murkist asked.
Shiann nodded, clearly upset by the mention of it.
“To you?”
She shook her head.
“You need say no more. I know the character of the man.”
“My friend Essi is one. She’s like a sister to me. We teach our children that killing is wrong, but when you told me you came to kill him, I had a feeling in me that I’m not so sure ...” She shook her head. “It wasn’t that I thought it would be wrong. It was that I hoped you would succeed.”
“You, Shiann—you are interesting. I can say I have not had a conversation this interesting in a long time. For various reasons, most of my conversations are very much one-sided.”
“People are afraid of you, I’m sure.”
“That would be one reason, yes.”
“Why do you want to kill him, Mr. Murkist?”
“Just Murkist, please,” the assassin said. “The quick and simple answer is that I would be paid well to do so, Shiann. But Lioba Nikuba is of special interest to me, both because he has proven so elusive for so long and because he is a particularly vile creature who deserves to die a long and painful death. Most people I kill do deserve to die, but usually only marginally so. Some find themselves on the wrong side of bad money. They’ve broken unbreakable rules, crossed uncrossable people. I do most of my work for the money. There’s no particular pleasure in it. Not overly so. Nikuba I’m going to enjoy killing.”
“Can you tell me why?”
“I can. Perhaps, Shiann ... I’m wondering. I have a problem with that bunker door of yours. Clearly you know how to get in and out.”
“You wouldn’t fit how I get in and out, Murkist. Plus, there’s no way you could get to Lii inside without drawing attention to yourself.”
“That isn’t what I had in mind.”
“What did you have in mind?”
The Murkist looked over at her, seemingly taking a measure of the person. He took a deep breath as he assessed, struggling to see past her diminutive stature as she sat there enveloped by the gigantic-looking chair, the arms of the spacesuit dangling loosely about her tiny legs.
“Would you like to help me, Shiann? Do you think you could do that?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never hurt anybody before.”
“You wouldn’t have to hurt him directly, just sneak into his spaceship. You seem to be good at sneaking around.”
“Yes, but ...” She shook her head.
“You have doubts about, what? Culpability? Guilt?”
She shrugged.
“My only doubt is about your courage. In the moment, are you going to freeze up? Shrink from the task I put before you? Suddenly have second thoughts about participating in the death of another person?”
“That’s possible. You saw how my hands shook when you snatched me up.”
“Well don’t get snatched up then.”
Shiann laughed, and the Murkist smiled. But she still looked doubtful, troubled by the prospect.
“You should know about him—who he really is. You know a part of it, sure. One part. I know the rest. Then we can talk about the cost.”
“The cost?”
“The cost, yes. I don’t do what I do for free, so it wouldn’t be fair of me to ask anything different from you.”
“Reciprocity.”
“Exactly. You might think it’s strange for a killer like me to say, but I am enjoying our conversation, Shiann. What I am about to tell you about Nikuba, you may find it troubling, but you should know. I don’t take any joy in disturbing you.”
“I understand. Please, Murkist, I want to know why you must kill this man.”
The Murkist went through Lioba Nikuba’s history thoroughly. He left nothing out.
Nikuba appeared in the criminal underground in the Alphas, first as a runner for a gang that smuggled contraband materials across the Trasp lines using confederates within the Protectorate.
He graduated to selling petty amounts of narcotics in a minor city on Beta-Kol. As far as the Murkist knew, that was where Nikuba first began to explore his ambitions beyond the traditional business model for peddlers of narcotics. Nikuba noticed a pattern—that the people who fully fell under the spell of the addictive chemicals he and his people sold tended to quickly and dramatically destroy their lives. That, Nikuba discovered, was where the real money was, and he aimed not at the small sums they could pull from selling the drugs themselves, but from systematically addicting unsuspecting, stable, moderately-wealthy clients in order to place them in increasingly compromising positions, both personally and then financially.
He used a small cohort of service employees, mostly baristas, to slip subtle amounts of the cerulean, a stimulant, into a target’s coffee. The mark would suddenly go from stopping for coffee at the shop once or twice a week to making the coffee a part of their daily routine. Then, when that no longer satisfied the craving, multiple visits daily, until inevitably, when the need became too pressing, they would go looking for something stronger.
Shiann needed context. She didn’t understand what a barista was, but she drank tea herself and understood the comfort of such a calming daily ritual.
The Murkist then explained the specific situation whereby Nikuba came to his attention. In that case, the victim was a mother with two young children—a three-year-old and an infant. She started coming for coffee each day and was served by one of Nikuba’s collaborators. Before long, the young mother was suffering headaches and desperately seeking relief in the form of stronger more regular fixes.
This concept was unknown to Shiann. Her people only used very mellow substances that helped to induce a relaxed state when used in conjunction with deep meditation. The Murkist explained that the cerulean was hundreds of times more powerful in its psychoactive affects in higher doses. Under its influence, the sufferer was all but powerless to act in any other capacity than to secure the next dose, almost as though possessed by a demonic spirit.
In the case of this mother, Nikuba and his subordinates demanded only money at first for her relief. Soon, though, Nikuba began to demand more. It started with minor betrayals at first, token transgressions—trading him the vase that her husband’s aunt had given the couple as a wedding gift. Then he demanded her undergarments. Then it was a peek beneath. Before long, Nikuba demanded even more. The point wasn’t just to debase and degrade the mother but to capture footage of every demeaning moment. The small token betrayals and the major personal sins then turned financial, into compelled withdrawals from the couple’s savings. All the while, the addiction became more desperate, the mother more erratic. Every bit of it done before the innocent eyes of her unknowing children, thankfully too young yet to comprehend. But they witnessed everything, absorbed the energy of it, the dark places, the dirty deeds.
Then, just as the young mother was teetering on the edge of breaking, Nikuba promised to reveal everything, to send footage of all her indiscretions to her beloved husband. Only one thing could make it all go away, but Nikuba told the mother he wouldn’t tell her, not until she had her mind set right. He gave her a large dose of the narcotic, so that she was so far gone she had no idea what she’d done once she regained her senses.
She returned home some days later, dazed and reeling, to find that her husband had gone, had taken the children somewhere safe, somewhere away from her, and that he never wanted to see her again. In the end, Nikuba had revealed everything to him, and in the chaos that ensued as the family’s lives fell apart, they had no idea that their savings, their investments, their equity, all signed away by biometrics and secure key sets under the spell of the cerulean, all of it was suddenly gone, and so was Lioba Nikuba, to the next outpost, the next victim.
This young mother couldn’t cope with the despair of losing her family, and while suffering under the throes of withdrawal from the drug, she became the ultimate victim of the scam when she finally took her own life.
The husband’s only consolation was that he had been able to get the children to the safety of his parents’ home. But the children’s father was left a broken man, destitute, depressed, and disillusioned. For some time, the thought of what had unfolded was too painful for him to confront. When he finally did, though, he began to think, began to remember, began to doubt that the woman he had known so well could have freely walked down that path on her own. And then that man, he got angry. And he went looking for answers.
The more he explored, the more obvious it became to the father that he and his wife were not isolated victims—the tactics were too slick, too well practiced, not an exploration of a pilot operation but an execution of a refined script. And this fact enraged the husband even more—that he was not the only one, and there were not just a handful of victims like him but a host of them—men and women, younger, older, now all isolated, all broken, destitute and powerless to strike back. Many were still addicted, psychologically shattered, shades of their former selves.
The husband talked to anyone who would listen—all the people he thought might have pull in the darker places in society where men like Nikuba operated. And eventually, the story got spread.
Several years later, by the time the husband’s story got to the Murkist, the name Lioba Nikuba was being heard in the Lettered Systems. He was no longer a petty criminal but someone serious people had begun to watch more closely.
The Murkist told Shiann that the most powerful syndicate in the Lettered Systems had heard the father’s story and put a price on Nikuba’s head. As he’d told her before, a handsome sum, to right a wrong and eliminate a growing rival at the same time. Such a ruthless and unconstrained competitor couldn’t be allowed to grow in power and influence any further.
The sum was too large for Nikuba to survive it if he’d remained in the Letters. And yet somehow—and now the Murkist knew exactly how—Lioba Nikuba had been able to elude the dark hand of retribution. The Murkist asked for Shiann’s tiny hand in closing the final chapter on that family’s story with the only small consolation that remained. Lioba Nikuba needed to rot in the Murkist’s boneyard for all eternity.
When the Murkist had finished relating Nikuba’s history, Shiann agreed that she couldn’t think of a punishment too harsh for the things he’d done. And she had no doubt he’d done them. Experience had told her that he wasn’t just capable of that degree of evil, Lii seemed to enjoy inflicting it on others. He deserved what was coming.
“But so do the others,” she said.
“Others?” the Murkist asked.
“These servants—what did you call them? The ones who set this mother on that awful path by tainting her drink.”
“The baristas, yes. You have good instincts. As I said, you’re a sharp one.”
“I’d have started with them, forced them to talk—made them reveal where Nikuba was. Is that how you found him?”
“Shiann, you surprise.” The Murkist grinned. “Some of Nikuba’s associates did escape. Some others met a bad end. But none of them understood the scope of what they had been doing. They didn’t know much, certainly not where to find Nikuba when he ran.”
“Still, I don’t know,” she said. “I’m not sure if I can help you.”
“If not you, then who, Shiann? I can offer you two certainties. One, if we do nothing—if you say no and I fly away from your home and leave this matter unredressed—I can promise you that Nikuba is not finished victimizing people weaker than him. You next, maybe? Another dear friend? Even a stranger. That is the pattern of his life. We can prevent that from ever happening again. The second certainty, I promise you, is that I will not simply let it lie. And whatever I have to do to make a corpse of that man inside your bunker will be far more destructive and far less elegant than the clean and relatively painless solution I am offering to the problem—our shared problem. Some things the universe calls you to do. Why do you think you were outside my ship, hurling ice at it?”
“I only wanted to know if you knew something about the outside world, about our ancestors, how I could talk to someone who knew our real history.”
“Yes, you mentioned you’d become disillusioned by the belief your elders were lying to you. Obviously, I don’t know anything about that. But we spoke earlier of reciprocity. I do have a spaceship, and it’s a big galaxy with a lot of people in it with great knowledge about the past. And I have a way of finding out the truth about things.”
“I imagine so, Murkist.”
“So, Shiann, allow me to put it to you plainly. If I promise to help you find you your answers, will you assist me in killing the man you call Lii?”
“What would I have to do?”
The details weren’t important yet. What mattered were the broad strokes, the actions the Murkist needed Shiann to take behind those imposing bunker doors.
First, he needed surveillance. He needed to know what ship Nikuba was in. Doubtless, it was some smaller kind of starcraft cruiser, but in order to direct his new conspirator, he had to know the exact layout of the ship. There were two components that needed to be tampered with precisely, the first being the atmospherics and the second being the FTL control arm.
Shiann, for her part, explained what the concerns would likely be inside the bunker—that the elders primary focus would be in maintaining the colony’s secrecy. Any time a ship even passed through the system, they watched it closely. To have the Murkist sitting outside their bunker was a tenuous situation. But, she also explained, that wasn’t something the Chief Magistrate would ever reveal to an outsider in communications. It was likely why he had been rude to the Murkist, hoping he would fly off without understanding the desperate degree to which his people wished to remain unknown to the peoples back in the Battery Systems. It also occurred to Shiann, as she was explaining their perspective, why the elders had allowed Nikuba sanctuary, even as he abused their people: who could be more motivated to preserve the bunker’s secrecy than one who relied upon the fact it remain hidden? That he was a vicious and remorseless individual with considerable resources and illicit connections made him all the more useful a partner.
She advised the Murkist to tread lightly in dealing with the Chief Magistrate. It was still possible, though unlikely, that the elders may decide Nikuba was no longer worth the trouble. For his part, the Murkist believed he understood what would happen if he threatened to reveal the colony’s location. When he left, so would Nikuba, and he would put a price on the Murkist’s head large enough that there might be someone stupid enough or desperate enough to try to collect on it. Messy. Noisy. Inelegant.
He pondered further as he sent Shiann back home with an encrypted earpiece that was too big for her tiny ears and a mission to capture images of Nikuba’s ship. They planned to meet again the following night. She needed to return before the people began their day within their bunker. She was sharp, he told her. She was useful. She was good at sneaking around.
The Murkist set the Precopses to monitor the surroundings as the daylight star of the system’s distant sun came over the horizon, barely a bright pinprick in the darkness. Then he went to sleep again.
When he woke, the Murkist pinged the old man again, this time waiting nearly a full hour for a response. Now, though, he wasn’t agitated. He was confident he would win either way. In many ways, he preferred that the old man hold out on him. He’d take Nikuba either way, but to do it despite that tiny bearded potentate, right under his puny nose, that, he decided, was preferable. And, despite his profession, the Murkist didn’t relish destruction. This ordered bunker society, despite the flaws he never doubted it had, was an accomplishment to be admired and left alone, not destroyed. And he had no idea what havoc would befall the people inside if he had to engage in brute-force tactics. If that little old man gave up Nikuba, it would be an acceptable outcome, but he certainly didn’t expect that when the Chief Magistrate’s face popped up on his floatscreen again.
“I see you’re still out there, bounty hunter.”
“Your eyes still work, old man.”
“Well, what do you want? You pinged me.”
“I would like Nikuba, as I said,” the Murkist told the little magistrate.
“I don’t know what I can do for you, sir. You’re welcome to sit out there for as long as you like. We cannot stop you from parking your ship.”
“You have not denied that Lioba Nikuba is in there with you. All you’ve been is insulting and evasive.”
“If I told you he wasn’t here, sir, would you believe me? If I were to make that claim you would demand evidence. You would want to come in and see for yourself, and even then, even after you’ve disrupted the peace of our colony, you still wouldn’t believe that he’s not here, because you’ve made up your mind.”
“Because he is in there with you. You’ve now insulted me to my face and insulted me by thinking me a fool. Such actions have consequences. I told you as much before.”
“Yet here we still sit, same as before.”
“Funny thing about today,” the Murkist replied. “It’s never the same as tomorrow. We’ll speak again.”
He spent several hours that day working with the Precopses to chart vectors. For something to appear seamless, it takes hours of meticulous planning. Where were the likeliest outposts Nikuba would maintain contacts? Based on his old patterns, where would he flee? How best to plot a thousand disruptions in a flight path and choose the right one before Nikuba stopped breathing? Out here, there would be no ships to relay his position. Get it wrong and one could search for a hundred years and never find his ship. And that? That would be very unsatisfying, not to mention unprofitable. It took time to make sure murder wasn’t anticlimactic. He enjoyed the theatrics of it. He was not above admitting it. Seeing Nikuba to the next life, that was one thing. Seeing that it was done correctly, that was the Murkist’s forte. No one could appreciate these hours but him.
The daylight star was waning by the time the Murkist finally heard from Shiann. She was excited.
“There was a meeting,” she declared, breathing directly into the earpiece’s microphone.”
“Hold it to your ear,” the Murkist told her.
“Okay, okay. Can you hear me still?” she whispered.
“Quite clearly.”
“Well, there was a sudden meeting. I had to feign illness and dismiss my class. Lii was called before the elders, and that was the time I was able to get into the great room where he parks his ship.”
“You took images, Shiann?”
“Yes. As you showed me. They are in this device, I think. I don’t know how to get them out.”
“I will see,” the Murkist replied, pulling up a floatscreen and uploading the data from the earpiece he’d provided his new collaborator. “Excellent work, Shiann. You are a great little sneak.”
A video of Nikuba’s ship came in, revealing clearly that he was still using the same little cruiser he’d fled the Lettered Systems in years before. The Murkist had a robust archive detailing the internal specs of nearly a thousand passenger vessels. Nikuba’s ship, though, he’d had those very specs on file for years.
“Will this help?” Shiann asked, whispering directly into the earpiece again.
“You’ve done a splendid job,” the Murkist told her. “Now, the next step. I need you to come back out to my ship tonight as soon as you know you can sneak out.”
“I’m very tired.”
“Yes. I’m sure you slept very little. This is part of the work. Prepare yourself, Shiann. Our work isn’t done so long as Nikuba remains behind those bunker walls.”
There was a long pause before she finally responded.
“I’ll come out tonight as soon as I can, Murkist. I won’t fail.”
Almost nobody knew exactly how the Murkist worked, except that by reputation, the people he targeted simply vanished, the only evidence the proof of delivery he provided his clients, who all knew better than to disclose any of the details of their dealings.
It was cowardly the way he did it. He admitted as much to himself. But it was no less than almost all of his targets deserved, and it was just as courageous as the tactics taught by the Etterans or the Trasp—to avoid a fair fight, to stack the odds in your favor as far as you can, and to strike when the enemy least expects it. Honor and valor were tales living men told each other to paint a pretty portrait of themselves while creating more young fools for them to vanquish in future battles.
He did not regret the fact that Nikuba would wake up helpless and terminally stuck, completely unaware of how it had happened to him. In fact he relished the idea. He saved his theatrics for the occasional public spectacle to sow fear. Stories of those theatrical moments, along with his great size, kept everyone presuming he was some keen fighter. He certainly was most deadly in a fight, but the Murkist fought most of his battles like a spider—more furtively even, for even the spider is forced to that moment where it must confront its flailing victim to bind it to its fate. What would they think of him if they knew, the Murkist often wondered.
He thought of it mostly in the moments when he was preparing the vials.
The sabotage everyone expects of spaceships is mechanical—some device secretly wired into the control nodes. No less expected is the cybernetic bug or worm implanted in the central processors that control the ship’s systems.
The Murkist’s preferred mode of sabotage more resembled medieval magic. The potions he mixed were viscous liquids with incredibly sophisticated nanotech infiltrators suspended in the solution. When poured onto the proper places, the solution adhered to the metal and worked its way into the systems the Murkist intended to disable. The nanotech was programmed to blanket the active electrical signals at a programmed time, locking out those critical control mechanisms. Worse for the unsuspecting victim is that by then, the liquid had so long ago diffused that there is no chance of discovering the source of the breakdown unless the victim knows to look for it specifically. Instead, though, the Murkist imagined all of them went through their standard troubleshooting guides, over and over, and some of them, the clever or the paranoid may have even gone looking for an external device or made desperate attempts to debug their software. But those attempts would always be short lived before the target passed out cold.
The Murkist spent the afternoon programming the microscopic drones inside the tiny vials that he would hand to Shiann that night.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
Late that night, when Shiann ventured out to the Murkist’s vessel, no ice was needed: the assassin was expecting his new protégé. She arrived, he thought, totally unprepared. Her eyes looked weary and unfocused, and she seemed to expect this visit would be another conversation of the type they’d had the night before.
“We are working,” he told her, his tone more of a teacher than an overbearing boss. “This business we are engaged in, it is the most serious business. Life and death. Should he catch you in his ship you will be lucky to escape with the same treatment your friend got at Nikuba’s hands. If I caught you in my ship, I would snap your neck without a second’s consideration when I was finished interrogating you. Do you understand me, Shiann?”
“I do, and I’ll try as hard as I possibly can to work well,” she replied. “But as I told you before, I’ve hardly slept now for two days.”
“You may sleep soundly when we finish. But first we must work. Wait here.”
The Murkist left Shiann standing on the flight deck, still in her suit. This time, she removed the suit entirely, and when the Murkist returned, she was standing beside the massive passenger’s jumpseat in her socks and undersuit. The Murkist had been exaggerating that she only came up to his knees. She stood before him, her eyes slightly above mid-thigh, looking up at the gigantic killer. He handed her a cup that seemed tiny in his hands—a child’s portion in his world. In her hands, once he passed it down to her, it was large enough that she needed both hands to grip it properly.
“Last night we spoke of coffee,” the Murkist said. “Now you’ll drink it yourself. It will keep your mind sharp.”
“No cerulean in it?”
The Murkist couldn’t quite tell whether she was joking. “Just coffee, but if that’s your first cup, you’ll certainly feel its effects. Drink it down and get your mind right.”
She sipped and puckered up. “Bitter.”
“That’s how you know it’s working.”
The Murkist propped her up before the front panel, kneeling on the captain’s chair. He brought up the layout of Nikuba’s ship and forced her to memorize it.
She quickly understood the character of the operation. The killer was a professional, and he prepared as such. She found herself jittery and suddenly wide-eyed. He sat, in the meantime, adapting some program to the inside of Shiann’s helmet, and when she declared that she had memorized the ship’s layout, he told her to sit and placed the helmet on her head.
On the front of her faceshield, a VR simulation of Nikuba’s ship appeared. The Murkist talked her through the simulation—her route, the objectives, the tasks at each key point, every movement down to the number of steps.
Then he brought her back to practice opening similar panels in his ship to be sure she had the hand strength to access the two nodes she was tasked with sabotaging.
Next, he brought her to the back of his ship. He taught her to walk, stepping silently with her back to the wall, her eyes scanning front and then back each few steps, her bare feet kissing the deck, remaining prepared at a moment’s notice to crouch in the shadows.
They rehearsed the entire operation, from her entry at the back gate to her exit mere minutes later.
“But how will I get into his ship?” she asked when the Murkist seemed satisfied with her progress.
He explained that Nikuba’s ship was a common model, not a military vessel. The security was basic, intended for civilian passengers. He handed her a box that didn’t open, about the size of her fist, which he called a fob, explaining that they just needed to dial in the right frequency.
“The Precopses will open the ship for you in the time it takes you to approach it.”
“What’s a Precopses?” she asked him.
“Nothing you need to trouble yourself with just now. The last thing ...”
The Murkist brought her back to the flight deck, where he pulled the two vials he’d prepared for the operation from a secure compartment beneath the front panel. The vials, tiny in his hands, wouldn’t fit in her pockets.
“You’ll need a bag that fits tight to your body,” he told her. “This is why we practice.”
“Right,” she concurred.
Then the Murkist instructed her to practice opening the vials, the tops of which snapped open for him easily with the application of a finger’s pressure. But it seemed no amount of effort Shiann applied with her little hands could pop the vials open.
“This work is filled with the most unexpected obstacles,” the Murkist declared. “You get some rest while I remove this one.”
Shiann crawled up on the rear jump seat and shut her eyes. When the Murkist returned, gently shaking her awake and waiting patiently while she regained her senses, he had two new vials in his hands, color coded to the targets, this time with a long cap that gave Shiann plenty of leverage to work off the top.
“Now we’re ready. Do you feel ready, Shiann?”
“I do,” she answered. “I just need to wait for the right opportunity.”
“I’ll be in range to speak if anything comes up. Do it just like we practiced and you’ll be fine.”
Shiann tucked the vials and the fob inside her spacesuit as she suited up. She took a deep breath before putting on her helmet and stepping out to sneak back into her little bunker world.
The Murkist didn’t expect to hear from the girl. She had the earpiece in the case of an emergency, but he had emphasized the virtue of silence. The barefoot silent assassin practiced comms silence as well. He instructed Shiann to sleep the rest of the night and then assess—to look for her opportunity, and when the moment came, to take that opportunity without a second’s hesitation.
Oddly, he found himself unusually invested in this little plot. When the night passed without a word from Shiann, and then still nothing the following day, he was almost tempted to ping the earpiece. There was no loss to the Murkist if she failed. He was taking no real risk. Yet as the hours continued to pass into the evening, he struggled to close his eyes. He couldn’t stop wondering how long he should give the girl before deciding that she was a lost cause. Surely Nikuba wouldn’t have the courtesy to let him know what had happened, not unless he wanted to gloat or make the catastrophic mistake of thinking he could bargain with the Murkist for the girl’s life.
He was half dozed off, somewhat aware that he was dreaming, handing Shiann a dose of something in that medicine cup he’d served her coffee in.
“Help,” her panicked whispering voice seemed to echo into his room.
He was lying on his side. The Murkist had no idea what time it was. He wasn’t even sure whether it was part of the dream.
“Murkist,” Shiann’s voice came again.
“What’s wrong?”
“He came back. I’m on the ship, and Lii came back.”
“He’s inside with you now?”
“Yes.”
The Murkist could hear her breathing heavily in the background.
“Get small. Stay silent, like we talked about. Take long, deep breaths. Slow your heartrate and your breathing so you can hear where he is. Visualize the layout of the ship. You know where to hide. Breathe and remember.”
“Okay. Okay.”
“Have you placed the materials yet, Shiann?”
There was a long silence.
“I ... I can’t do it now. He sleeps on the ship. I can hear him now, moving around.”
She was panicking.
“He’s going to catch me. I can’t do it.”
“Of course you can. The challenge has been put before you. This is the calling of exceptional people. We do not do easy things. We do difficult things. You are not teaching the history of your people anymore, Shiann. You are writing it. Right now. You are writing it because you are the courageous one, the one who can.”
There was another long silence.
“Find a place to hide and wait for Nikuba to go to sleep. Then you’re going to sneak about and place the materials just like we practiced. He couldn’t possibly be expecting you.”
She didn’t answer, but she must have keyed the earpiece. He could hear her breathing. He listened for what seemed like minutes. The Murkist could hear movement, the rustling of clothing against the comm device. It was in her pocket. He could hear her tiny heart beating away. For what seemed like an eternity it pounded and pounded. Then, as the minutes passed, Shiann’s heartbeat began to slow.
He sat on the edge of his bed waiting.
Finally, almost twenty minutes later, he heard her clothes rustling again.
“I think he’s sleeping,” she whispered into the earpiece.
“Good,” the Murkist replied. “Perfect opportunity. Are you going to do it?”
“I’m going to wait a little while,” she replied. “I’m hidden.”
“You have all the time in the universe, Shiann. Breathe deep. You have never been more alive.”
It was nearly a full hour before the Murkist lay back down and tried to shut his eyes again.
“I’ve done it,” her voice came through his room.
He could hear her rushing somewhere.
“Did you get out?”
“I’m on my way back to my flat. I don’t know if he woke up when I closed the hatch, but he didn’t see me. He’s not chasing me.”
“Slow down then. Walk.”
“Right.”
“Go about your business as normal, Shiann. Teach your history classes. Smile. Talk to your friends like nothing has happened, and leave the rest to me.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to threaten your magistrate to come back with a nuclear-powered rock drill and a company of strikebots. And then I’m going to leave.”
“You’re going to come back for me, right, Murkist? You promised me, remember? Reciprocity.”
“Sit tight. I’d be a fool to turn my back on such a unique talent. You will hear from me again soon.”
“If there’s anything I can do here before you come back, please let me know.”
The Murkist thought for a moment. “Everything can be a weapon,” he replied. “Very quietly start a rumor that a very large, very angry assassin is planning to break open your bunker with an industrial rock drill if your Chief Magistrate doesn’t give up Nikuba. Tell a few of your most talkative friends. That may just move things along.”
“Good. Yes. Consider it done.”
The Murkist didn’t make a major show of it. Even a fool like that old Magistrate would see through any attempt of his to fake his way through some histrionics. He merely pinged the Magistrate’s channel again with a data package. It included detailed specs of a powerful nuclear drill, along with a video demonstration package of a common model mid-sized Etteran strikebot, and the following brief lines of text: When compacted for deployment, my ship can accommodate twenty-six such strikers. Will return soon. If I find Nikuba in your bunker when I breach it, you die with him, old man.
The Murkist did make a show of his ship’s departure, hovering for long enough on takeoff to kick up a tremendous cloud of vapor, much of which was methane, such that when he fired the main plasma rockets, even with only trace amounts of oxygen free-floating in the atmosphere, a very visible column of flame lit up the ice sheet. And inside the bunker, no doubt, the rumble of his engines could be felt through the entire colony. That was the tumult outside, short-lived but powerful in its effect.
Inside the bunker, despite the Chief Magistrate’s best efforts at quelling the rising disquiet in the populace, questions were being asked. Quietly, in the vacuum of reliable information about the ongoing events, there was a young teacher only too happy to whisper clarity, and before too long that whisper spread to others, until it became a clamor.
True to his word, the Murkist did return to the little outpost. Four days had passed, and much had changed inside that bunker. Their Chief Magistrate, who’d promised them that the outsider would assure long-term stability, now faced a revolt. The people had only tolerated Nikuba’s crimes because they believed the lie that his presence was vital to the colony’s security. Now, with that lie laid bare. The people inside feared an imminent invasion, even after the Magistrate and the council of elders had acceded to their demands and evicted the outsider. The people were restless. They questioned their leadership, and for the first time in generations, they feared for their future.
None of this was evident outside the bunker when the Murkist landed. The only discernible difference he could see was that the buildup of ice above the bunker door was self-evidently diminished. What had been a robust sheet days before had nearly vanished but for a collection of broken shards gathered at the bunker door’s bottom, a telltale sign that the door had been opened to accommodate a ship’s departure. But the Murkist, of course, knew that already.
He wasted no time once he set down, killing the engines and pinging the Magistrate once the whining of his rockets had died out. This time, the old man didn’t keep him waiting.
“Where’s your rock drill? You know we can see you out there, don’t you?”
“I’m well aware of your capabilities,” the Murkist replied.
“I can see well enough that you’ve returned empty handed. What do you want now? Come to issue more idle threats?”
“I want Lioba Nikuba, but you know that already. Why would you ask me what I want when you know it plainly? Has something changed I’m unaware of, Magistrate? I usually have a good sense of things, and my senses tell me that something is different.”
“Nothing has changed, sir. You are still sinfully ugly and full of empty rhetoric. Lioba Nikuba is not here, and I am not letting you inside our bunker.”
“Interesting that you deny his presence now, where before you didn’t. Perhaps you’re not as clever as you think you are, old man. But as you said before, you can do nothing to stop me from waiting outside for Nikuba to emerge, and so I shall.”
“Stay as long as you like, sir. You’re never getting in.”
“So you’ve said.”
The Murkist grinned and closed the channel.
There was no further communication between the bunker and the ship that day. Later that same night, suddenly, to the surprise of everyone still awake keeping watch behind those bunker doors, with no forewarning or explanation, the ship’s engines began to hum. A minute later, the blinding glow of the Murkist’s plasma rockets flared, then gradually diminished into a pinpoint of distant light against the black of space. It was only two days later when a young history teacher’s absence was noted that the people inside that bunker began to put the pieces together.
“Is he really in there?” Shiann asked, nodding down toward the pillbox beneath her in the Murkist’s rear storage hold.
She was hovering over the coffin-like chest, weightless, a look of reverence mixed with disbelief on her face.
“He’s in there.”
“There’s no way he can escape?”
“He’s quite incapacitated, just as I found him.”
“And now?”
“Now you know what comes next for him.”
The Murkist couldn’t tell by the look on her face what Shiann was experiencing, but it looked more like curiosity than regret.
“Where will we go next? I mean, to do the ...?”
“You will be going to a safehouse of mine for a few days. The next part is not for you. Not this time.”
“A safehouse?”
“It’s just as the name says. Safe. You’ll have plenty of time to begin to research your history there. I will be gone a couple weeks at least. I need to make a stop before I take Nikuba to his final destination.”
The Murkist gestured toward the pill box with his head.
“You’re going to come back to help me, right?”
“Insofar as I can, Shiann. I am behind in my work. This Nikuba business has set me back. But I gave you my word I would help. Reciprocity. And you have certainly delivered on your part.”
“It’s time to wake up now.”
The Murkist’s voice echoed in his ears. Even through that mask, the eyes never lied. Like all the others’, Nikuba’s eyes swelled with surprise and confusion. He didn’t recognize the place, but he didn’t need to recognize it to know what it was. That was not a place you wanted to wake up in. Nikuba’s eyes absorbed the stark reality of his surroundings—a dull red, toxic fog, a gas mask over his face, the giant figure of the assassin standing over him, the skeletons in a distant row facing him, each tied to a chair about the arms and waist, the same as he was. Following weeks of incapacitation in the pillbox, Nikuba hardly had the strength to struggle for much more than a moment. He didn’t even bother crying out through the mask.
“It’s funny. The eyes don’t lie,” The Murkist said. “You have been unconscious for over a week, yet the mind is still surprised to wake up and realize that you are dead. In all that time incapacitated, the mind didn’t once think that, but suddenly in that first moment of consciousness, the shock is unmistakable. It’s the most curious thing. If I ever murder a neuroscientist, I shall have to ask him about it.”
The Murkist slapped the side of Nikuba’s masked face gently several times.
“Pardon the digression. No doubt you know who I am. You’ve gone to great lengths to avoid this moment, Mr. Nikuba, and here we still are. I have to say, I have been looking forward to this day for a long time. The easy thing for me to do would’ve been to kill you back in the Goneys. I’ve gone to a lot of trouble to bring you here to my boneyard. This is the part I enjoy more than any other part of my job. I like to imagine what the people I kill must be thinking in this moment. It’s hard to say, and only you know for sure, but I do like to talk and sometimes I imagine it must just drive people crazy at a time like this, but then it must also occur to them at such a moment that the second I stop talking, well, that’s probably the moment they’d wish more than anything that I’d start talking again.
“Usually when I bring people here—all those skeletons you see before you, those were people once—and they almost always ended up here so that I could interrogate them without anyone disturbing us. And they almost always had something new or useful to tell me. But you, Mr. Nikuba, you’re a special case. I already know far more about you than I ever cared to know. And torture? I’m a professional. I did not bring you out here to torture you, you’ll be happy to know, I’m sure. I brought you out here for a different reason.
“I spend a lot of time in my spaceship, Mr. Nikuba. It gives me an inordinate amount of time to read. People are always surprised at how well read I am. They don’t think about that, all the hours I read. And lately—you won’t be too shocked to hear this, I’m sure—but I have been absolutely fascinated by the concept of an afterlife, reading about it incessantly. Almost all the peoples of the Earth had some version of it, and I have been reading and pondering. You probably haven’t thought much about it until now. We’re going to explore that concept for a moment if you’ll indulge me.
“My absolute favorite afterlife tradition—you might be able to tell from the aesthetic of this place—it’s hell, the devil’s hell. It has quite a story. It resonates, you see. The story kept a lot of people in line for thousands of years, the belief of that place, the fear. They believed the sinful would burn eternally in lakes of hellfire. Even that is a curious torture of a kind, just the concept of eternity. I don’t think the peoples of the Earth could appreciate it the way we do, we spacefaring peoples. We see an eternity of a sort every time we travel. The infinite of space is before us quite often. We’re not wired to properly fathom it, but we understand that we could set a course and cruise forever and still never arrive. Eternity is like that, only with time. Imagine the worst pain you’ve ever experienced consuming you whole and then on top of that, forever. That’s part of why hell resonates.
“The place also supposedly smelled of sulfur and something called brimstone. I sometimes wonder if any of the rocks in this place are brimstones. I doubt it, but that would be poetic, wouldn’t it?
“Anyway, the reason I’m going on about hell, is that it struck me as I was delivering you here, that if hell is real, you are the one person in this boneyard I am certain that you are going the instant your life ends. And it also struck me that it would be particularly cruel of me to send you there entirely unprepared for what awaits. You’re going to need training, Mr. Nikuba, before you go. I am a fair man. I will not allow you on your way before you are properly prepared. Very shortly I’m going to stop talking so your training can begin.
“But as you are a very special case, and today is a very special day, Mr. Nikuba, together, we are going to make some history. For every skeletal figure before you in this boneyard, I have been the last person they’ve ever encountered in this life. I’ve seen them all off, so to say, to hell or some other afterlife if there is one. But today being a very special day, I am not going to kill you, Mr. Nikuba.
“As I understand it, part of your business model was to use associates. I imagine you had to train your associates to ensnare your victims. So I thought, with you in need of training, that I might train an associate of my own, introduce him to the traditions of my boneyard.”
The figure that emerged from behind the Murkist was nowhere near as imposing, just a regular man of regular stature obscured from view by the same masks they were all wearing in that toxic red haze. The man came forward and stood in front of Lioba Nikuba. Even if he’d met the man before, he couldn’t have recognized him.
“I don’t believe you’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting this man,” the Murkist continued, “but I am certain you’ll remember his wife. Her name was Naori. You knew her some years ago on Beta-Kol. Her husband, my associate, has been waiting many long years now to set eyes on you, Mr. Nikuba. I don’t doubt you’ll remember his name from the mortgage and the securities you collected in it after you destroyed his life. I’m going to stop talking and leave you with him now. Best of luck on your journey.
“I’d like to introduce you to Yakoun Dittra. I’m quite certain he will see that you are well trained before you go.”
The Murkist put a hand on Dittra’s shoulder and gestured to the dead man in the chair. Then he turned and walked from the boneyard back to the quiet comfort of his ship.