The Spider and the Fly Read online

  ***

  Markus sat crouched behind a slab of stone, idly stroking his empty pistol as he tried not to think about how much a pack of angry Dowd would revel at the prospect of tearing him apart. It would have been one thing if the building had just been full of angry Kali locals—they disliked humans plenty, but they would have been civilized enough to talk to him first. Hell, even a squad of enraged V’rath would have been an improvement; they would have squashed him so quickly that he’d have barely felt anything.

  But the Dowd…the Dowd were unlike any other species he’d ever encountered. Their hatred of humans was so raw, so primal, that he wouldn’t put anything past them. Human colonies on the fringe were rife with rumors about the Dowd kidnapping people and then cloning them for use a slave laborers. He wasn’t sure if he believed that, but he still didn’t relish the idea of charging helplessly into a building full of them. His psychogenetically enhanced bones and muscles could only do so much without his psionic abilities to complement them.

  I’m at the window, Jen said into his head. Rodani’s definitely in there, and I don’t think they’re interrogating him. They seem to be waiting.

  They know someone’s coming, Markus reasoned. Rodani probably picked up my message and told them what it meant, and now they’re baiting a trap in the hopes of capturing a genuine Mire operative.

  We might be able to use that—they may let you inside, she said. Head to the door.

  Markus sucked in a deep breath. Right. Here goes.

  He stood up from his cover and made his way towards the building, half-expecting a sniper shot to blow off his head before he made it. But the path was clear, and once he reached the door he rapped his knuckles against the wood.

  “Coveri?” an unmistakable gurgly Claggoth voice asked. “Is that really you?”

  “It is,” Markus replied. The tension in the other man’s tone was palpable, and he wondered if the Dowd and their bizarre sense of hearing could detect that or not. “I heard you’d gotten yourself into a bit of a bind here, and I thought I might stop by and bail you out.”

  “Come on in—the door’s open.”

  Mentally crossing his fingers, Markus pushed open the doorway and stepped inside. The building’s interior was, unsurprisingly, just as run-down as the exterior; it didn’t look like anyone had actually lived here in years, possibly decades. Most of the walls had collapsed or been knocked down, and he doubted it had power. What it did have, however, was a single Claggoth man sitting in a chair at the center of the only room, his wide, bulbous face even greasier than normal. And standing next to him on either side were tall black-skinned aliens without ears, eyes, a nose, or anything else to distinguish the ovoid lump between their shoulders from a random ball of bone and flesh.

  “I wouldn’t move,” Rodani warned. “There are more of them upstairs.”

  Markus slowly put his hands up. “Why do I get the feeling they aren’t your new business partners?”

  [You had an accomplice,] one of the Dowd said in the unsettling half-hum, half-groan that passed for their language. Without the linguistics implants feeding the translation directly into his brain, Markus would have had just as much luck understanding a cow. [Where is she?]

  “I came alone; I don’t usually work with others,” he replied. At the same moment, he stretched across his mindlink to Jen. Now would be a good time.

  Move two meters to your left, she ordered. And cover your ears.

  [Lying means pain,] the Dowd said. An instant later one of his comrades stepped forward with a pistol in one hand and a crackling electrical prod in the other. [Where is she?]

  Markus took the opportunity to shuffle away to his left and tilt his outstretched hands a bit closer to his head. “She went back to the ship. She just wanted to make sure I made it here safely.”

  The Dowd leader twitched with his hand, and the guard lunged forward with the prod. Markus tensed, fully expecting the agony of an old fashioned electrocution—

  It never came. Instead, the world exploded.

  The top-level window shattered as a pulse blast burned through the transparisteel frame, and a millisecond later the head of the Dowd guard next to him ruptured like a potato inside an overcharged food processor. Markus dropped prone and clamped his hands over his ears, and even as the rest of the Dowd tried to track the newcomer, a small grenade soared in through the window. It detonated before it reached the floor, and the high-pitched shriek made Markus’s teeth rattle and his bones ache. To humans—or any species with similar auditory capabilities—low-powered sonic charges were rather annoying. They induced temporary deafness and sometimes even nausea. To Rakashi, Thursk, or other species with much more attuned hearing, they could do permanent damage. But to the Dowd, a species whose sight was based entirely upon vibration, it was the equivalent of dropping a flash grenade a meter in front of their eyes. It would completely blind them for several seconds, possibly more.

  For a Spider, that was nearly an eternity.

  Markus was dimly aware of Jen firing as she leapt in through the shattered window, and soon after Dowd bodies were raining from the rafters with smoldering holes in their chests. The ones on the ground recovered more quickly, and they were at least able to spin about and fire wildly in her general direction before she gunned them down. Twenty seconds later, it was all over.

  “Thanks for the warning,” Markus grumbled as he rolled back to his feet, his own voice barely audible to his still-ringing ears. Jen hopped down from her perch in the rafters and trudged over the rubble to stand in front of Rodani. Claggoth had relatively weak hearing compared to the galactic standard, but he still didn’t look like he was enjoying himself. Of course, the burn marks on his flesh where the Dowd had already tortured him probably weren’t doing him any favors, either.

  “The Damadus,” she said, leveling her pistol straight at the alien’s oversized head. “Where is it?”

  “Money first,” Rodani rasped as he propped himself up on his right three arms. “Then we can deal.”

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” Markus snapped. “Did you miss the part where we just saved your ass from the Dowd?”

  A thin stream of air seeped out through his lips. Maybe his fat head was about to deflate on its own and save them the trouble. “I’ll give you a discount, then.”

  “Unbelievable,” Markus muttered. “Look, in case you didn’t notice, my partner here is pretty good at what she does. I suggest you start talking before you make her angry.”

  “He doesn’t need to,” Jen said, her eyes narrowing in concentration. “It’s somewhere in the Tartarus Expanse, in orbit of a bluish moon…”

  “What?” Rodani yelped. “How do you—?”

  All four of his gross little eyes popped open wide, and he choked down a staggered breath as he mouthed a single word.

  Spider.

  Markus couldn’t help but feel a little insulted. He was a Spider too, with abilities that were every bit equal to hers, and he’d been working with this idiot and his boss for months. But then, Markus didn’t go around advertising his special powers…though given Rodani’s terrified reaction, perhaps he should have. It might have gotten the Mire a better deal on some of their earlier shipments.

  “She can pluck it all from your mind if she wants to,” Markus warned, “so I recommend you make it easier on yourself and start talking. What did you tell the Dowd?”

  The Claggoth’s head shook for another few seconds as he stared up at the woman in front of him, his warped mind probably conjuring up all the horror stories of what Spiders could do to people without ever physically touching them.

  “They only know the system, not the exact coordinates,” he insisted. “It will take them days to find it.”

  Markus grunted. “Well, that’s something, at least. So how about you tell us the exact coordinates, then? The next time I talk to Foln he might even consider giving you some pity pay for it.”

  “The Xundrata System,” Jen whispered, h
er eyes little more than slits now as she continued to pillage the alien’s mind. “It’s in orbit of the second moon of the third planet.”

  “No!” Rodani shrieked, grabbing at the sides of his head. “No!”

  “Easy,” Markus said, putting a hand on Jen’s arm. “You got what you wanted.”

  She visibly relaxed and let out a deep breath, then tapped the holopad on her wrist. “Thexyl? We have the coordinates.”

  “Good, I was starting to worry.”

  “Did you notice anyone hanging around the ship?”

  “No, nothing unusual. Given the size of the group you just found, the Dowd might not have bothered with other sentries.”

  “Maybe,” she murmured. “Prep the ship for launch. We’ll be back shortly.”

  “Understood.”

  Jen closed the channel and turned back to Markus. “We need to go. Now.”

  “Right,” he said. “I suppose I still can’t convince you to give me a real weapon?”

  She grunted and gestured towards the door. He sighed and glanced down to Rodani.

  “So what about him?”

  “My mission on Briton Chalo was to kill Pasek and anyone who worked for him,” she replied, swiveling her weapon about. “Better late than never.”

  “Wait!” Rodani screamed, his hands flashing in front of his head. “I surrender! I’ll do any—”

  She fired. The smoldering remains of the body flopped down on top of the other corpses.

  “What the fuck was that for?” Markus gasped, reaching out to grab her arm. “He didn’t even have a weap—”

  The implant shocked him before he got within a meter of her, and he tumbled to the hard floor as the strength left his legs.

  “He was a thief, a murderer, and a terrorist supplier,” Jen said coldly. “I decided to do the courts a favor. Now get up and start walking.”

  In between his staggered breaths, Markus tried to swallow the lump of bile rising in his throat. He knew he shouldn’t bother shedding a tear for Rodani or Pasek or anyone on their crew no matter how useful they might have been as suppliers over the years, but somehow killing an unarmed man like that…

  He’d done it himself, of course—many times over, in fact. The Widow didn’t train her agents to be merciful. He’d once shot a six-year old Fly’s parents right in front of her, then dragged the kid back to the program. She was eleven now, assuming she hadn’t failed out and been converted into a Drone, and in another few years she’d be out on assignments, killing or capturing her own people just like he had.

  Markus grit his teeth together and glanced up to the woman standing over him. He’d left that life behind for good, but when he looked up into Jen’s blue eyes for any trace of remorse, all he could see was pain…pain, bitterness, and determination.

  And for the first time since he’d seen her charging up the stairwell on Briton Chalo, he wondered if the woman he’d left behind on Typhus—the woman he’d loved more than anything in the galaxy—was gone forever.

  Or maybe, just maybe, she’d never really been there at all.

  “I’m coming,” he groaned as he tried to stand. “I guess we better hope the Dowd don’t have any reinforcements between us and the ship. Or a fleet waiting for us in orbit.”

  “Like Thexyl said, it’s likely this is all they left behind,” Jen said. “They weren’t expecting a Spider.”

  “Yeah,” Markus whispered, glancing over his shoulder to the smoldering heap of corpses. “I hope you’re right.”