Star Scrapper, page 29
“What do we do now?” I asked.
37
Lara didn’t answer.
Ned didn’t even say anything.
The sound of the Buzzard working was all that could be heard in space.
In the silence, I wondered if Edgar’s family was killed as well. I had more questions than I could even begin to contemplate, so I put one to words just to fill the cab with something.
“Was it more Inquisitors or the Consortium military or Prefects who destroyed the Port?” I asked. “And how did they track us? And why do all that?”
I had more but I didn’t put voice to them.
“Do you actually want to know?” Ned asked in answer. “I was able to access the Port’s security systems and have a clear picture of what happened at the port.”
“I want to know,” I said and turned to Lara who was still just staring at the gyre, looking as though she might scream or bury her knife in my chest at any moment. I couldn't tell for sure but knew better than to push for any answers at the moment.
“It was all three with the aid of the Consortium Navy,” Ned explained. “At first, they surrounded the port and said that it was being seized under Inquisition authority. All of the pirates who tried to flee were pursued and eradicated. Then, the port itself was boarded and swept.
“A handful of Inquisitors backed by Prefects and Marines began tearing their way through the port, destroying businesses and terrifying citizens. They weren't shy about killing or harassing, more than happy to wreak absolute havoc on anyone they came across,” Ned said, his voice breaking.
“They destroyed whatever they wanted, making an example of everyone they came across. Even tourists who had committed no crime and done nothing except be at the wrong place at the wrong time, suffered at their hands. It was a disgrace of the highest magnitude.”
He stopped speaking for a long moment and I waited, unable to say anything in response.
“When we met, I had believed in the Consortium with absolute dedication, with the unwavering faith in the system I was brought up to trust. It was a faith that I thought was well founded and something that I was proud to be a part of.
“Witnessing what I just did, I don't know what I believe anymore. From the moment we met John Gregory, I knew that the Inquisition was a zealous arm of the government, but I had hoped that it was just a vocal minority cut off from actual authority. Now I realize that this thing that I helped to create, that I lost friends to defend and that I believed in more than anything else in this universe, has been perverted. It has been corrupted and destroyed.”
“I'm sorry, Ned, that must be a hard pill to swallow,” I said, and I meant it. Though it wasn't quite the same as losing a family member, Ned had lost everything he had believed in. It was a tragedy in its own right, and I was sure he felt as lost as I did.
“Thank you, but it pales in comparison to what you are going through,” he said. “Edgar was obviously a good man and wanted to be there for you no matter what you had done or what you were running from. He died because of my very existence, and I will do my utmost to help you right this wrong. In whatever way you see fit.”
I almost couldn't bring myself to ask the next question, but I had to. “Did you see it?”
“I did,” Ned said, his voice so quiet that I instinctively reached out to turn up the volume on the speaker before realizing it was just the sound of his grief. “Inquisitor Gregory knew exactly where he was going and what he was doing.
“After he had killed your uncle and the others had cleared out the port, he sent them all away to wait for you. As we predicted, it was a trap.”
“And it would have worked if not for you,” I said. “Thank you, Ned.”
“It had to be done and I'm just sorry that I couldn't help you guys sooner or actually kill the bastard. I wish I could have done more,” he said miserably.
“You did everything that you could, and we got out of there alive,” I reminded him. “That’s a lot.”
“You couldn’t have stopped her from destroying my ship?” Lara asked in the tone of an accusation, her voice cold and detached.
“I was still trying to mask my presence, I'm sorry Lara,” Ned said.
“Mask your presence?” she hissed. “The Inquisition knew we had been there, knew who we were, what difference did it make that you were hiding yourself?”
“I didn’t have all that information at the time and did the best I could as I gathered more intel,” he snapped back, sounding testy now.
“Gregory was already on us when my…” she began again but stopped speaking, folding her arms and curling inward.
I had seen this before. This miserable reaction when she was truly wounded. I had been respectful of the fact that she didn’t want to talk about her past, but I also had to ask, “Why does that ship mean so much to you?”
She turned on me with eyes raw with tears. “What does the Buzzard mean to you?”
“A lot,” I admitted. “Lutch left it to me.”
“You understand then,” she said, letting the words hang. “It was his. I was going to carry on his legacy and…” She trailed off, pulled out the blade he had also passed down to her, and stared at it.
“I’m sorry, Lara,” I said. “For all of this. From the second we met up, your life has become worse.”
She looked up from the weapon, a single tear rolling down her cheek.
“I feel the same way about both of you,” Ned said, his words cutting the air. “I had no idea that my very existence was going to change both of your lives for the worse.”
“Edgar is dead,” I croaked. “Your ship is gone and a connection to the past, severed. Ned, your entire belief system has been destroyed.”
“We know!” Lara shouted.
“But it isn’t our fault,” I continued over her. “We are blaming each other and ourselves but we didn’t make this world. We are all victims of it. And we can’t just sit here and snipe at one another until we all feel too shitty to go on.”
“You’re right,” Ned said, his tone not quite matching his words.
I turned to Lara who was back to gazing at her blade.
“You don’t have to keep helping, Lara, you’ve done so much,” I offered. “I’ll take you anywhere you like and I’ll repay you when I can. For all of it.”
“You still don’t get it!” She jumped up from her chair, pointing the tip of her blade at me. It wasn't meant as a threatening gesture but had that effect all the same. I leaned back in my chair, holding my hands up defensively.
“Get what?” I asked.
“I’m not going to leave you now, I’m not going to just disappear when you need me,” she screamed, another tear rolling down her cheek.
“Okay,” I said quietly.
“Hank,” Ned put in. “For a man who seems to understand people pretty well, you have one big blind spot.”
“No,” Lara said. “You don’t have to.”
“You’re right,” Ned answered. “You should.”
Lara glared down at me. “You left me.”
“What?” I asked.
“You left me that night,” she said again. “When you met Lutch, you just dropped me. You know I was happy for you and never expected you to bring me with you, but I didn’t think you would just go with him and never talk to me again.”
“I visited,” I protested meekly and before she could even speak again, I continued, “No I didn’t. Not enough… I was so happy to have found someone, to be out of there that I guess I just forgot about you and everything you had done for me.”
“You did!” she screamed, letting the years of pain I had caused her out in her words. “Your life had changed, but mine didn't. I needed you more than ever, and you weren't there. Even when you visited, you weren't there. You would send little absent messages, not respond for days or weeks, and eventually, not at all.
“You were the person I was closest to in the whole world, and you abandoned me like it was nothing. After losing my parents, I didn't think I could have my heart broken again, but I did. It took me years to recover, years to become a new person and escape the version of me that you had left behind, and then you came crashing back into my life.
“I knew things wouldn't be the same the second that I saw you, but I never thought they would become like this.”
She trailed off and I said the thing that I needed to have said a long, long time ago. “I'm sorry.”
She nodded but didn't answer.
“Only now do I understand how sorry I am. I thought it was just that I showed up and messed up your life as it is, but I didn't realize I had also messed up your life as it was.”
She wiped the tears from her face, letting it grow hard once again. “I've blamed you for so long,” she said. “But you also made me the person that I am now. If you hadn't left me, I would never have needed to forge my own path. I would never have snuck on that ship and... and changed my own fate.”
“Don’t give me credit for that,” I said and meant it. “Whoever you became after me was not because of me but because of yourself.”
“Oh, I'm not giving you credit,” she said with a wobbly smile. “I'm just saying that your actions set me on a path. And, maybe now, they will again.”
“You really want to stick with us?” I asked.
“I would get out if I were you,” Ned joked.
Lara chuckled and shook her head, her hair falling in front of her face. “I shouldn’t but, as I said, I’m not going to abandon a friend like some other jerk I know.”
“It takes a real talent to be that nice and that mean all in the same sentence,” I observed, and she did a little curtsy.
“Are we going to be okay?” I asked after a beat.
“We are,” she answered. “But man, oh, man do you owe me.”
“I don’t want to think about how much that is,” I grimaced.
“The ship was nice when I got it, but I also put all of my earnings into it, so, you know…”
“Are you sure you don’t want to stab him just a little,” Ned asked with a laugh. “I mean, he really blew up, quite literally, your whole life.”
“Not helping,” I said as Lara eyed her weapon again.
“Like he said,” she began. “It’s not on him. Not really. And it’s not on you.”
“I guess that means we all have to go prove that the Enemy AI weapon is real,” Ned said excitedly.
I nodded. “Sure.”
“But first,” Lara said, and I looked puzzled at her.
“What?” Ned asked irritably.
“We have to go see Resh and try to get the bounty off your head,” she said. “If I’m stuck on this ship for the foreseeable future, I don’t want to run the risk of being blasted out of the sky by a far better equipped bounty hunter.”
“Fine,” I said. “Let’s go see one of the most dangerous men in the universe.”
38
It felt odd going back to Bussel. Even though it was home, somehow, it felt distant to me now.
“When were you last here?” I asked Lara who seemed to be lost in her own moment while we guided the ship down to the planet’s surface.
“I haven’t been back since I left,” she said. “When I left, I thought I left this place behind.”
“But you have a relationship with Resh?”
“A working relationship,” she clarified. “And it’s all predicated on my work. I have picked up many bounties for him, securing a strong position in case I ever wanted to come back here. But I haven’t had any reason to visit him or chat in person or anything like that.”
“I see,” I said, realizing once again that I didn’t actually understand the life of a bounty hunter in any practical sense. “You seem to have had a really clear plan for yourself.”
“I did,” she nodded. “I never wanted to be caught off-guard.”
“I really ruined that,” I noted, my guilt still at the forefront of my mind. And, as I was beginning to realize that this would happen often now, I thought of Edgar.
I believed what I had told Ned and Lara: that I wasn’t the one at fault. It was Inquisitor Gregory who killed my uncle. But I also lead the Inquisition right to his door.
At that moment, though there was little that could be done about it, I wanted revenge. Not only on Gregory himself, but also the system that allowed it.
This time it wasn’t just about finding the weapon and protecting the people of this universe from the threat waiting for it, but also about changing a broken system.
Our relationship with the machine had swung too far one way and we had only ended up hurting ourselves as a result. I would help Ned and hopefully, change the universe for the better as a result.
But first, I had to get out from under the thumb of a crime lord.
We dropped down toward the planet’s surface and after a moment, Resh’s estate came into view. As soon as Kilara Vex had asked for an audience, we were quick to get an invitation, but I had worried what was going to happen when the Buzzard came in for a landing. That was, until Ned reminded me that with the registration signaler removed, no one would know what ship we were operating until we had landed. And it was a safe assumption that the hired thugs protecting Resh’s compound wouldn't have an encyclopedic knowledge of all of the starships in the universe.
This was confirmed when we landed and four big bruisers were waiting to greet us and escort us straight to Resh. Lara and I were fully masked and in our full bounty hunter regalia as we stepped from the ship and out onto the landing platform which abutted the estate itself built into the side of Mount Bussel: the mountain which overlooked the city of Bussel—unsurprisingly, the namesake of the planet of Bussel.
Beside the platform was an expansive garden, the green of the plants and grass dulled by the yellow orange sky. There were people tending to the flowers and trimming the hedges, but no one was walking or appreciating the grounds.
“Kilara Vex, welcome,” a Kyrog guard in a fine suit said. Though his words were friendly, his demeanor was all business.
Stepping through a flower arch into the garden, more thugs fell in around us and I worried that the moment I pulled down my mask, they would simply beat me to a pulp.
Guess I’ll find out, I thought, with more armed goons stationed around the garden following us with their eyes. The Kyrog guided us into a small hedge maze, taking us this way and that before we reached the center where a staircase flanked by two marble statues led down into the mountain.
At the bottom of the stairs, the Kyrog ran a card over a reader and the door slid open.
Stepping into the estate there was not the subterranean layer of tight metal walls and security systems that I had been expecting. Rather, we were asked to take our shoes off so as not to damage the carpet but we were allowed to keep our weapons because, apparently, they would be useless here.
“The room is fitted with a specially adapted inertial damping field from a starship to slow and stop anything above a certain minimum mass traveling above a certain velocity ,” the lead thug informed us. “Bullets hit the floor before they make it even a meter.”
The comment seemed to be less a threat and more posturing. Just a way of letting us know that we were powerless in this place. As if being surrounded by a dozen armed guards didn't give one that sense already.
“What about particle weapons?” I asked.
The Kyrog fixed me with all his eyes and then grinned mischievously. “You wouldn't even wanna find out what happens if you fired one of them in here.”
“No, see, that answer actually just makes me want to find out even more,” I told him with a half-smile, but he hardly reacted to my words.
Once our boots were off, we followed the man from the little anteroom out into a beautiful open space of white carpets, elegant seating at ornate tables set with fine cutlery and a huge window that lined the entire far wall, looking out over the city.
“Everything the light touches is Resh’s domain,” Ned whispered in our ears before chuckling at his own comment, though I wasn't sure why. Resh did all but own this planet and much of the sector.
My feet sank into the thick carpeting, and I wanted to wiggle my toes but knew better than to do so. We continued past a grand piano and paintings of what I assumed were Resh’s family members. There were more guards around the room and one standing by a security panel, watching everything that was going on in the mansion.
The entire home was beautiful and opulent and far too fine for a place like Bussel.
When we reached the far side of the room, all the men but the Kyrog stopped. A massive gray hand knocked lightly on the door, announcing our presence and it beeped before swinging open.
We followed the bruiser in, and he stepped to the side, allowing us to approach Resh’s desk, which was positioned in front of more massive windows so that the sinking sun bathed the room in a blinding orange glow. The backlit man stood from his chair and walked over to us.
I had only met Resh once before when he had been making the rounds in the city and came by the shop to threaten Lutch. Seeing him now, I still felt as intimidated as I had at the time, though he was markedly older.
His face was tanned and leathered, his once jet-black hair streaked with white. His shoulders were wide and squared at ninety degrees with his neck and his nose bent at an unnatural angle at two places. His ears were cauliflowered, and the suit he wore looked as though it had to be sewn onto him, it was so tight over his muscles. Though he was undoubtedly twice my age, he looked as though he could still throw a punch that would flatten even the most seasoned boxer in one hit.
“Kilara Vex, as I live and breathe,” he said with a light affect, as though they were old friends. He didn’t have to make a show of acting threatening, everything about the man and his environment did that for him.
“Resh,” she said, extending a hand. “It's good to finally meet you in person.”
“Likewise,” he said, shaking her hand before holding it out for me. “Who's your friend?” he asked, addressing her and not even looking my way.
