Sly Mongoose (11 page)

A third infected stood in the shadows. But it didn’t approach.

Pepper pushed Grenada off and stood up. She rubbed her forehead and groaned, wiping the blood off with the back of her hand. Pepper spotted a deep bite mark on her wrist. He stared at it as more shuffling echoed down toward them from the end of the corridor.

He yanked her up to her feet. “Come on, we have to move.”

“We didn’t commit suicide,” Grenada murmured.

Pepper looked down at the knife she had near his ribs. “You trying to get yourself killed?”

“I already dead. You see the bite mark. A few hours, I shuffling after
you just like them. And no one go know everyone in this ship didn’t commit suicide.”

“I will.” Pepper kept them moving slowly forward at the third zombie, the two of them in a staring contest.

“The captain given up on living, true. The passengers getting infected, the crew done lost. But someone got to survive and tell everyone what had happen here.”

This was why she didn’t kill him. “So what are you going to do?”

“Keep you alive. So you can tell everyone what happen.”

Pepper shot the third zombie, and the fourth and fifth he found lurking in the shadows around the bulkhead. Between the two of them they’d emptied the clip. He handed Grenada the gun. “Not doing much for me right now.”

“But I can get you more. From the galley.”

Grenada and Pepper followed the tunnels alongside the ship’s core. Every door had a manual lock that could open it. They’d all been dogged automatically from the cockpit, an attempt to slow down the infected crew, but Pepper could still make his way around the ship. Safety features were on their side.

Within thirty minutes Grenada guided him to the galley. She tapped a quick combination into a wall safe behind a hand-painted picture of the pencil-like
Sheikh
hanging off a station dock over a red-clouded planet.

The safe housed his short sword, as well as a variety of ship’s weapons. Pepper picked a shotgun, his sword, and more ammo for Grenada’s handgun.

They both limped into the freezer and shut the solid doors behind them. “Until we both heal,” Grenada said. “Then we begin killing the zombies. Once they dead, then I take care of myself. You call for help as the ship coasts.”

Adjusting his core body temperature to compensate for the cold and huddling deep into his trench coat, Pepper set out to wait.

His breath formed a cloud in front of him as he leaned his back up against a large crate of frozen dinners.

Pepper could feel his thigh kneading a bullet slowly back out of the wound. A familiar post-battle dull ache. The other two shots were clean, the ragged holes closing up as his hyperactive body did its thing.

“I’m getting tired of being shot,” Pepper said.

“I don’t think you ever go stop getting shot at.”

“Nature of the business.”

Grenada laughed and wrapped her arms around herself. “I work hard, to undo it. Both my parents lived station-side near the DMZ. Border clash between the League had flare up one day, and they attack us. My parents rushed me into a pod, shot me out into the dark for a week. That’s how long it take before the autobeacon trigger and someone came looking.

“But they wasn’t there when I came home. There was no home.”

Pepper looked at her huddle tighter than the cold should have made her. “They destroyed the station?”

“Claim it an accident.”

Pepper watched his breath form crystals in the air in front of him. “What about Canden?”

“She go understand. You give her grief.” Grenada looked down at her feet. “But she’s solid, down deep. This trip pushed her close to being able to leave the ship.”

“A captain leaving their ship?”

“She never wanted it. Inherited it with massive debt overhead. Struggling to pay maintenance, struggling to pay fuel. Resenting getting order by the Raga council to ship troops she can’t afford to just to help save all of we, while she getting ruined. She tired of bankruptcy, she tired of this ship, the same corridor, same tight spaces. Swore she’d leave them when she was young, and now she struggling to get it paid enough that she could sell the
Sheikh
and get out.”

“And you by her side.”

“Who else would take me? I was in an orphanage. After I had see you speak on Nanagada once, I had decide that’s what I want. Joined the Mongoose, trained up and joined the Tangent Run mission, strike back at the League in they own territory. Revenge.

“Never figured on coming back. Getting assigned to some merchant ship in charge of my own unit. I wanted to die out there, taking them with me. I was a cold child, Pepper.” She looked at him with even colder eyes. A soldier of desperation.

“Canden adopted you.”

“Was me and her, my men and her crew. Raga council can’t afford to train up new fighters like us. Always promising a rotation, never able to afford it or getting the men. League always pressing at the border, trying to search and grab we ships for dumb reasons. It goes on and on, never stopping. Now they get us. And I don’t want to disappear, a name on a roster on a distant ship fighting to keep the border between us and them.”

She looked away from Pepper, too exposed and no doubt unsure how to handle it.

The decades of dealing with the permanent revolution out past the DMZ had left refugees everywhere. Human beings struggling to take control of their own destiny in the throes of throwing off their shackles. And failing.

“They’ll know what you did.” Pepper grabbed her shoulder. “Trust me.”

“Thank you.” She cradled her face in her hands. “But now we have a whole other problem.”

“What’s that?”

Grenada looked up, head cocked, listening to something in her inner ear. “Canden just decided to plunge the
Sheikh
into Chilo’s sun. The infection spreading too quick. One sure way of ending this.”

T
he
Sheikh
shuddered its way through the new course corrections that would plunge them into the cleansing nuclear fires of Chilo’s sun. Grenada and Pepper made their way through the maze of corridors, bulkhead by dogged bulkhead. The ship had transited the wormhole leading into Chilo and continued a heavy bout of acceleration, forcing them to anchor themselves on walls that flipped into angled floors due to acceleration.

“She using up all the fuel. She given up,” Grenada said. “No sense conserving antimatter when you know you all dead.”

“Point.” Pepper dropped off a ladder to the bulkhead’s surface, the thrum of the
Sheikh
passing through his heels. They moved at double-time: two gees acceleration.

They would whip right past Chilo, with Pepper stuck on the doomed ship.

“There are emergency pods. We get you launch early, you should live to get pick up.”

“What about the passengers in the great room?”

“Canden say you don’t want go there.”

They moved together in silence, Grenada taking point as a human shield of sorts, but one armed with a shotgun and with pistols dripping off her waist.

The first attack came from the front. Like any past encounter Grenada pushed forward, closing the distance and firing a burst with the shotgun that obliterated the zombie’s head in a spray of blood and brain tissue.

But the second attack came from under the floor panels behind them.

Pepper whirled as the heavy grates clanked and dropped to the side. Three zombies clambered up, unsteady on their feet, but moving quickly to surround him.

He shot the one to his left in the head, decapitated the one on the right by sword, and kicked the one in front of him backward into the uncovered pit under the floor.

Grenada stepped forward and fired the shotgun down at the top of its skull.

The loud echo rolled throughout the ship.

“That was a trap,” Pepper said.

“They getting smarter.” Grenada cracked the shotgun open and shoved more rounds in. She snapped it back closed. “We need to think of them as different than zombies.”

The stumbling, biting, and moronic behavior of the infected people in the great room had faded away. Now the zombies still moved slowly, but they had gained intelligence of some sort.

“Move.” Grenada pushed him forward. “They go be coming after that gunshot sound something serious.”

Pepper resisted the push. He walked back over to the bodies and poked his boot at the crumbling spikes growing out of the body’s shoulders. “What are these?”

Grenada looked at him. “Do I look like a biologist to you, man?”

Pepper drew the sword and walked over to the decapitated zombie. He sliced the throat open and pushed aside petals of flesh. “Vocal cords look like they work, but I haven’t seen any of them do anything but groan. How are they coordinating?”

“Fucking telepathy? Who knows, who cares?”

“I do.” He poked at the spikes again. “Ask Canden to scan all the wavelengths. Ask her if she’s detecting anything.”

“You think they growing antenna?”

Pepper sheathed his sword again. “Maybe. Or maybe all that synchronized touching is how they talk and plan. It’s a question someone needs to ask. If they can coordinate, that’s a problem for us.”

“Still don’t explain why they getting smarter. Even if they could talk, the early ones was dumb.”

“I don’t have an answer.” Many feet moved with purpose toward them in the distance, shuffling footsteps echoing down to their ears.

“Let’s move.” Grenada raised the shotgun. “I don’t have much time before the fever coming for me.” Beads of sweat stood out on her forehead.

“And Canden?”

“She ain’t hearing nothing. Now move.”

Pepper looked down at the corpse. “Okay.”

Ten minutes later they stopped. Both bulkheads ahead filled with shuffling bodies waiting for them to try and step through.

“All they want do is bite you once,” Grenada said.

“Maybe.” Pepper walked forward. “But they didn’t circle around behind us. They didn’t even try and spring a trap like back there.”

“They learn better?”

“Or they really, really don’t want us coming this way. Any other places we can reach a pod?”

Grenada shook her head. “Low budget. Keep them in the cargo hold. Can’t afford to retrofit the ship out with passenger pods all throughout.”

“Lucky for us,” Pepper muttered. The nightmare continued. Then a horrible thought occurred to him. “They’re escaping the ship.”

Grenada looked down at the waiting shadows. “Canden say she ain’t detect any launch. Yet.”

Pepper turned and started walking away. “We don’t have long-range communications. These things got smart quick. They’re going for the pods.” He was going to have to find another way off the ship.

But Grenada stood still behind him. “If that’s true, we have to take them all down, secure the hold with the pods in it.”

“And it looks like most of the infected crew is standing between us and the pods.” Pepper wouldn’t make it through without a bite.

“You want this shit unleashed in Chilo? Traveling back to New Anegada? I know you got friends there, I know you have strong connections, and you go turn you back up on them just like that. You that selfish?”

Pepper stopped. “There’s no guarantee we can stop them.”

“Giving up without a fight? Now that’s something I never thought I would see from you. All that legendary shit-kicking just that, legend?”

He turned around. “You dewey-eyed innocents and your freaking stories. I don’t save lives, I don’t join causes, I’m no hero, I play to be paid. Paid well. There’s got to be another way off this damn ship.”

“What were you doing past the DMZ watching a Satrap die?”

“I like seeing my enemies suffer.” Pepper stalked forward and stared down at her. Fuck her. He’d gone because he was missing something, and he wanted to watch the creature suffer to see if it would fix that rage inside.

But it hadn’t made him whole again. He was still the same person, still casting about for something he hadn’t found yet. Lost memories, lost friends, lost worlds.

“That’s it?” Grenada smiled. “Just a field trip?”

“It’s easier to go where they ask you, do what they tell you. Then the mistakes, they aren’t your fault. I need that, I need that after all the things that I helped happen.”

“You helped found the free worlds here. New Anegada wouldn’t exist without you. We all in your debt.”

“Stop that. Please. No one is in my damn debt.”

And Grenada laughed. “Is responsibility you scared of.”

Pepper pushed her aside. “No, that’s not it.”

It was her. Her and the hundreds of others he’d attached himself to. Close friends, colleagues, brothers in arms. All dead. “The alien machinery inside me, the hundreds of years I’ve lived as a result. Everyone dies around me. And I’m tired of trying.”

“You’re muddling through some damn crisis. Pepper, I’m dying!” She grabbed his shirt. “There is no other fucking way off this ship but through them unless you want jump out in nothing more than a spacesuit, which will land you in the sun with us, only you’ll be a couple hundred miles over that way.”

“No other way.”

“You need a pod. We need stop them. And I want you to tell them we saved them. You understand? I never asked them for much, other than a chance at revenge, and I know what you saying. After Tangent Run I had nothing, until I came here. This is my family, and they’re dead, and I want everyone to know why. Can you just do that little thing for me?”

Pepper looked back down at the zombies. If that was the only way off the ship . . . “How many crew were there on the ship?”

“I would imagine that’s the rest of them there, waiting to stop us.”

Really.

“I need more ammunition. Then we come back this way.” Pepper said that out loud. Then he turned his back on the crowd waiting for them.

She’d said he couldn’t get away from the ship unless he jumped off in a spacesuit. A good idea, that.

He walked back up through the ship, Grenada behind him.

“Where are the spacesuits?” Pepper asked.

“Service airlock. Few hundred feet ahead. You ain’t going for more ammunition?”

“The dumbest thing you can do in a battle is play on the enemy’s chosen field. Running through a corridor surrounded by those things. I’d have been bitten.” And maybe she knew that and had tried to use him to help stop them by dangling the promise of getting away alive in front of him.