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  Trace held up his glass. “A tribute, to our fallen comrades. Drink to their memories, people . . . and enjoy the second feature. Boys, go suit up. You’ll take the flyer.”

  Pete started to protest, but Tommy’s hand clamped down on his arm, gripped it tight enough to bruise—and then Lee and the surly Cole were behind them, herding them toward the door.

  “Have fun,” Trace called, and someone laughed, and that was all, it was decided, they were going outside and they were going to die, and no one gave a shit.

  “Tommy,” Pete said, but Tommy only shook his head. Behind them, Frank Cole cursed a couple of times. Lee said nothing. Pete swallowed, his throat dry, his heart pounding, and kept walking.

  * * *

  Trace Berdella could take a flying fuck, Frank decided, pulling on the too-tight envirosuit. So could the rest of ’em, for that matter. Buncha pussies, that’s what. Praise be that his ticket home had finally arrived; he was more than ready to get out of this bug hole and back to the world.

  He leaned against the wall, jammed on the boots. It wasn’t fucking fair. He’d made the run to the pens four times since coming to Fantasia, he went when it was his turn, just like everyone else—but he was out, bag and baggage, Moby had brought the happy news that that back-stabbing snitch bitch was dead and he could go home. It would be just his fucking luck to get eaten on his last day.

  The two fish were getting dressed at the bench in the corner. Brothers, someone had said, just here for the drop. He noted a resemblance; they both looked scared shitless.

  “Fuck you, too,” Frank grumbled, not too loud, but if they heard him, that was okay, too. He wanted to pound someone, pound ’em good. Raif or Mighty would be ideal, for getting him into this, but he’d take what he could get.

  “You say something, Frank?”

  Lee, already dressed and armed, stood by the flyer in the dim cavern of the compound’s “garage,” a wide tunnel just west of the drop-ship dock. There was another ATV, but it was packed full of repair shit, burn panels, and sheet ’crete. Frank was tempted to repeat himself, but didn’t. Lee was rank, too high on the ladder . . . Besides which, there was that story about Aldrete, and Frank had heard it too many times from people who’d been there—been here, actually, it had happened on Fantasia, when the compound had just opened—to dismiss it as myth.

  Story was, guy named Kim Aldrete, one of Msomi’s buddies, had tried to turn traitor, looking to land a cushy job in the private sector. Stolen some formulas or some shit. Msomi caught him and turned him over to Lee, who dragged his ass up to Fantasia, no cryo—Lee spent the whole ride up torturing the guy—and he had then personally dropped Aldrete in front of a nest. He’d put a suit on the sorry asshole first, too, to make sure he’d stay alive during the bugfuck.

  Frank had heard a couple of versions, variations on what, exactly, Aldrete had done to deserve such a shitty demise, but Lee’s part was always the same. Frank wasn’t afraid of anyone or anything—hell, he’d beaten on a lop once for even suggesting it—but he understood that there were guys who had bigger sticks than his, and he didn’t have a death wish. Not usually, anyway.

  “Frank?” Lee was still waiting, eyebrows raised. “You talking?”

  “Not to you,” he answered. He nodded toward Lee’s piece, a semi-automatic rifle. “What am I carrying?”

  “Shotgun,” said Lee.

  Frank grunted approval. They were old-fashioned, but he liked the weight. Plus, he was no marksman. He walked to the gun rack, picked up the weapon, and grabbed a buttstock bandolier, to load on the way out.

  “So, we going or what?” Frank asked.

  Lee raised his voice to the brothers, who were still getting their boots on. “Either of you know how to shoot?”

  The younger one spoke up. “Yeah, I used to hit the indoor range every now and then. I wasn’t great, but my groupings were pretty—”

  “Pilot?” Lee interrupted.

  The other one nodded, kept his mouth shut. Thought he was a hog, that one. His little brother was a lop, but Pilot wasn’t going to back down from anyone.

  Lee pointed at the gun rack. “Take the Glocks,” he said.

  Frank smirked. Pussy guns. Made out of plastic.

  “We’re going to hop to the site, set down in the lock behind the pens, and finish the feed. Then the two of you can drive the ATV back here.”

  The younger one looked stricken. “What do we do if—I mean, how do we use the lock? The defenses, I mean. To keep them from coming inside?”

  “Ops will get it,” Lee said. “The run’s programmed, too, you won’t even have to drive.”

  The pilot spoke up. “I can drive.”

  Lee smiled at him, a soft, creepy smile. “You don’t trust us, pilot?”

  The pilot didn’t say anything, only walked to the rack, his brother at his heels like a scared little dog. Frank grinned. Trace was an asshole for picking Frank, but he’d chosen a good pair for the ATV ride home, couple of dumbfuck fish. Should be entertaining. No one would miss ’em if they met the same fate as Mighty and Raif. Of course, no one would miss Mighty or Raif much, either. Mighty had been okay, he’d volunteered for a lot of the pen runs, which made him acceptable in spite of his being a total monkey mouth; Raif, though, was always trying to bulldog everyone, get favors and shit for being big and mean. Frank considered that poor form, since that was his own deal up on Bug Rock, and he was bigger and meaner than Raif.

  Leslie, Frank thought, and chuckled. Poor dumb dead fuckers. It really was bad luck. Accidents had happened before, of course, real ones and setups. Couple of times, people on the feed run had been taken out. There was the thing with the other pilot, right before Frank had come up, gotten a ten-ten furlough. And the first manager, he’d been bugfucked when a lock at the pens had mysteriously failed and he’d mysteriously been pushed out of it. Word was Trace had done it himself, though no one claimed to have witnessed anything. But that was years ago. In the ten months that Frank had been on Fantasia, Mighty and Raif were the only bug fatalities he’d seen.

  Lee locked down the gun rack once the brothers had collected their weapons and gotten into the flyer, a clunky old beast that only seated eight and made a shitload of noise, part copter, part hover-drive. Lee fired it up as the rest of them piled in behind him, rolling it toward the lock before they had time to belt in.

  Frank took a deep breath, enjoyed the rush as the first lock opened up. Trace was still a fucker, but saying goodbye to the bugs wasn’t such a bad way to spend his last day at Fantasia. Not if he got the chance to plug a few.

  The second lock opened and the flyer rolled through—and into a clamor of screaming, clawing bugs, more of them bounding across the twilight rock to get to the vehicle as the rotors starting spinning, the drive heating up. A bug popped up by the side window, its jaws-within-jaws snapping out to leave a trail of slime on the thick, scarred plexi, half a meter from Frank’s face.

  Frank laughed, laughed again when Lee hit the drive, roasting the handful of the bugs behind the flyer as it lifted into the thin, dark air. He was looking forward to going home, no mistake, getting away from the lags and lops and bam-bams that lived at Bug Rock, getting away from fucking Trace Berdella and his stick-ass druggie girlfriend, but he would miss some of the little things.

  The bugs screamed, leapt high, trying to reach the rising ship, and Frank settled in for the ride.

  * * *

  The bugs were running yet again, and this time, there was nobody to see it but Ray. Vin had finally gone off to catch some sleep, now that they knew they had a definite window—Msomi’s ships always stayed at least twenty-four hours, to load up—and the rest of them were sleeping or eating or whacking off elsewhere, Ray didn’t know or care. He’d had another taste of lRic and was pacing the main cabin, thinking about Trace Berdella, thinking about the past.

  They’d actually met in their early twenties, he and Trace, both of them working for a small-time dealer on the west coast, a guy called Nicky Yaz
. Trace was a smart guy. He had grown up in foster homes—alcoholic mom, sans dad, etcetera—but had still managed to earn himself a full tech scholarship to a decent college. He’d gone into the biz after being kicked out of school for beating a guy half to death in a bar fight. Ray had actually grown up in the same neighborhood as Nicky Yaz. They’d been drinking buddies through high school, and he had decided to take up his ol’ pal’s job offer when he realized that being a starving artist sucked dick. Nicky hadn’t been anything to write home about in the brains department, but he’d had titanium balls and a hefty trust fund, more than enough to get himself a crew and a supplier. Trace and Ray had both been in management—organizing border hops, mostly, jamming sensor systems by hacking into various law enforcement mainframes. Trace did most of the computer shit, Ray managed the mules, arranged for deliveries on either side. They hadn’t been tight, but they’d gotten along well enough—two reasonably bright guys going into the subs together. They had different lifestyles, though. Trace was all wrapped up in some chick he was banging—guy had some serious issues about women, no shit—so he wasn’t up for hitting the clubs after hours. Ray was working to make connections, always looking for ways in which to advance his career. When Nicky Yaz found himself on the wrong end of a splatter gun—Nicky’d had the bad habit of dating crazy coke-fiend leather boys, and one of them had taken offense to Nicky’s ongoing inability to keep it in his pants—the operation had fallen apart. Trace had gone on to work for Msomi, and Ray had spent three miserable years trying to get his own op up and running, getting totally fucked in the ass by a series of financial mishaps. He had started working on a new plan.

  He’d run into Trace picking up take-out one night, and they’d spent a few minutes shooting the shit, catching up. Trace admitted that he was having relationship issues with his girl—big surprise—and also that Adrian Msomi had moved him up through the ranks pretty fast, something Ray already knew . . . just like he knew Trace liked take-out Thai from Neung’s. Ray had mentioned that he was looking for work, they’d swapped a couple of calls . . . And Trace had offered him a job with Msomi’s organization. Real entry level shit, too, managing neighborhood distribution.

  “Fucker,” Ray spat, suddenly livid with rage. Trace had gone out of his way to mention the strings he’d pulled to set his old buddy up in a suckass job, acted like it was some grand fucking gift when he was running the whole goddamn Rim—

  He spun around the empty cabin, found a wall to slam his fist into. The pain was electric, powerful, and he hit it again, again, imagining Trace’s smug, laughing face, his brain sizzling with clean red fury. Finally he felt the bulk of his anger passing, and stopped. His hand was hot and bleeding, but it didn’t hurt. He heard someone shifting around in the bunkroom, but no one came out. They knew better.

  He grabbed a tube of antiseptic cream out of the med kit on the wall and smeared some across his purpling knuckles, amused by his tantrum. He’d set Trace up to offer him a job—so what that the job sucked? It didn’t matter, not in the slightest.

  Ray had taken the position and immediately started searching for angles, asking questions—never too many, never in a way that made it look like he was asking—and within six months, he’d been ready to make his break. One of Msomi’s rivals was looking to buy some information—coordinates for Msomi’s main manufacturing facilities—and was willing to set the seller up with a real job on his team, upper management. Ray knew about Fantasia, but only through the vaguest of rumors. Everyone talked about it, but no one knew anything, which was okay; Ray had given Msomi’s rival—cool Japanese cat called Murakami—the oil rig location, off the new Gulf Coast. He’d been well paid—that, plus the capital he’d walked away with when he’d run out on Msomi had been enough to get him a startup of his own . . . which had been extremely fortunate, as it turned out, since Murakami had gone and gotten himself killed trying to raid the facility. Some happy asshole had tripped a detonator and sent about two hundred million bucks’ worth of MX7 into the sea, along with that promised position in upper management. Ray was suddenly looking at no protection from Msomi’s wrath, which was legendary.

  “Didn’t need a fucking stepping stone, though, did I, didn’t need a fucking umbrella,” Ray said, and grinned, starting to pace again. He’d dropped off the ’net and gone right into production, lRic, mostly, a fucking awesome drug that he’d quickly come to appreciate on a personal level. With lRic—licorice was an idiot name, he refused to call it that—you could think big, plan big. The drug brought in some big money, too, which he’d reinvested into his op, making a name for himself in a relatively short period of time. He had capital and a ruthless temper, which he’d learned to channel into his work, and he was finally ready to branch out.

  He grinned wider. He already had a 7 plant set up, but getting hold of the starter chemicals was crazy expensive with all the restrictions that had to be maneuvered around. With what he got from this tap, he’d finally be financed into his rightful place, at the very top. The fact that Trace Berdella was running Fantasia, that had been kind of the ultimate irony . . . and had also turned out to be the key he’d needed, once he’d bribed the shit out of that pilot, Mullin. It all fit together, it was like he was destined to—

  The aliens started to shriek, their voices rising up outside, and then they were running again. They’d done it earlier, too, presumably chasing after one of the compound’s vehicles. Ray had made sure the vehicle wasn’t headed their direction, then ignored it. He’d heard about the animal pens.

  Now, Dave Hess leaned out of the bunkroom, his expression carefully neutral. “You need anything, boss?”

  Ray stopped pacing long enough to dismiss him with a wave; Hess ducked out of sight, and Ray stepped to the screens, assuming he’d see someone moving back toward the compound. Instead, the system showed an airborne moving out, same course as the ATV.

  Somebody’s going after the first. Accident? Maybe they just needed to do some kind of maintenance work . . . Although no one had come out of the compound in the last six days. The sudden activity was suspect.

  He briefly considered waking Vin up, then decided against it. He would monitor the situation himself. No way was he going to sleep, anyway, not until they were on their way home, fat fucking nest egg in cargo; he could take a full watch. Besides, he wanted Vinnie at the top of his game, leading the boys into battle.

  Ray pulled a small vial from his pocket, squeezed a drop of the precious liquid onto his tongue and turned to the wall monitor, calling up the outside feed, watching them run. Pathways surged and crackled through his mind, the monsters screamed and ran, it was all so fucking beautiful, like dark poetry.

  Soon, soon, he thought, and started to pace again.

  5

  Below the ancient flyer, the aliens shrieked and chased, climbing over each other, fighting to get close. It was like the drop to the compound—had it been only a couple of hours ago? But the XTs were much, much closer, and therefore exponentially more horrifying, in Tommy’s opinion. His heart pounded as the small ship flew over the racing multitude, seemingly just out of their clutching reach. He wished he were piloting instead of Lee, so he’d have something to do besides be terrified, but Lee hadn’t suggested it. Short-hop flyers were made to be flown by just about anyone, and Lee had obviously had experience.

  You drank too much, anyway, he reminded himself. Not that he felt anything but stone cold sober. Watching people die—and then being recruited for the same job that killed them—seemed to have that effect. Still, he felt recklessly stupid for drinking. He shouldn’t have, and had no excuse for it besides being tired and frustrated.

  The big, unpleasant con sitting just behind Lee, Frank Cole, kept muttering to himself, alternately grinning and scowling as he looked out the front side window, running a hand over his stubbly head. Between the flyer’s drive and the mass of XTs, Tommy couldn’t hear what he was saying, which he thought was just as well. Next to him, Pete concentrated on his gun, ejecting the m
agazine, looking in vain for a safety; Glocks didn’t have them. He was tense but seemed to be holding it together okay.

  Tommy tried to breathe deeply, to keep himself sharp, to keep the adrenaline running through him from taking over. The feeling was unhappily nostalgic. When he’d been an idiot kid he’d gone on a few “borrowed” rides—and had once had the misfortune to be in a car with a couple of guys who’d decided to rob a convenience store. Associates of acquaintances, tripping on licorice—lRic, God only knew how they’d gotten their hands on it, it was a rich man’s drug; caused a kind of cheerful megalomania, spiced with bursts of violent temper. As soon as they’d stopped in front of the place, he’d taken a walk—and he remembered feeling that same kind of fear, walking away from the hot car in a neighborhood he didn’t know, aware that a gun was being waved in someone’s face right behind him, wondering if he was going to hear a shot or feel one in his back. It was a shit feeling, not knowing what was going to happen, but knowing without doubt that it was going to be bad.

  The ride was brief, even with Lee circling the “pens,” a cave system in a long, sloping hill of black rock, coming back to it from the northeast. There seemed to be fewer aliens the further out they went, Tommy assumed because of where their primary nest was located. Or maybe they had multiple nests, he didn’t know. He felt some measure of relief when he saw where they were going to set down—inside a tall, hollowed dome of rock, covered and camoed, essentially the same design as the one they’d dropped to earlier.

  As they lowered toward the opening hole in the dome some thirty meters off ground level, the XTs closest tried to climb to get to them. The walls were nearly vertical near the top, impossible to scale; still, they tried, some of them attempting to leap the last ten meters, jumping and crashing backward, tails lashing, shrieking constantly. They weren’t even close, but Tommy’s gut knotted further each time one jumped. Lee carefully lowered the flyer into the black, the lock smoothly closing behind them.