Benjamin Allocco
DEATHFORM
Chapter 1
Standing at the airlock door waiting for his ship to be boarded, Jack Kind fights the disorienting pull of memory. Twenty years old again, sheened in sweat, he wears nothing but a pair of piss-speckled tighty-whities. The barracks has already emptied. Stomping boots echo through the bulkhead. Screams rebound. When FROST soldiers burst into the room, he drops his weapon and dives to the floor with his hands on the back of his head.
“You alright?” Dino says.
Back to the present. This is his freighter. The war long over.
“Fine,” Jack says.
The airlock prep chamber is filled with equipment. Reinforced lockers house helmets and hardware. There’s a bench bolted to the center of the floor, a reminder that this is little more than a high-tech dressing room. Not the most glamorous place to die.
The proximity alert went off during dinner. A ship beelined toward them, small and armed with an illegal plasma cannon. Jack hailed but there was no response. He ordered the rest of the crew to the panic pod, but Dino stayed with him, so now they wait, while on the other side of this door unwelcome guests scrambling along their hull like insects seeking blood.
The way Dino’s standing, Jack can tell he’s ready for a brawl. Because at 6’6” with long tangled hair and the facial features of a caveman, Dino Vitale has never lost a fight.
Jack has. Plenty.
A mechanical whirring draws their attention behind them, to the far corner of the prep chamber where a defense turret takes aim. Jack frowns into the lens. He clicks the portable communicator dangling around his neck, a black cube about the size of his palm.
“Hunter,” he says. “I told you to stand down.”
Her voice buzzes through the speaker: “Just trying to cover our bases.”
“Don’t. We’re complying.”
“Well, shit.”
He can’t blame the crew for being upset. They’ve held to their delusions of dignity. The notion that there are lines which cannot be crossed. It’s a feeling he has come to resent.
Hunter says, “They’re opening the outer airlock.”
Jack wipes his hands on his jeans. “How many?”
“Five.”
“Armed?”
“Yes.”
He says to Dino, “Do not fucking move unless I say.”
“Okay.”
“I’m serious.”
“I realize that.”
They have faced their share of touchy situations. Close calls with law enforcement. The kind of people you throw money at until they let you on your way. Plus the occasional raiders with their clunky ships that can barely escape Earth’s gravity, but they always quit once they scan Bel and find the turrets.
This is different.
Hunter: “They’re pressurizing. Fifteen seconds.”
For a moment, he wonders if he will throw his body to the floor in surrender.
The door zips open. Frigid air rushes in with that faint electric burning smell that lingers after a spacewalk. Bodies and movement. Men with rifles pointed. They wear blue formfitting suits, like soldiers wear, though these lack insignia. A leader breaks from the pack, comes forward shouting.
On reflex, Jack hikes his collar to hide the tattoo.
The leader jams his rifle into Jack’s gut and shouts, but the words are muffled inside his helmet. His face is small and red. He forces Jack into the corner next to a fire extinguisher, and for a moment, Jack is back at Camp Gertrude, awaiting a beating from the guards who would only leave once he was face down on the white concrete, frozen blood sealing him in place. Then the man in the spacesuit grabs his hair and yanks him upright, and Jack sees that he is not one of the guards he used to fear so badly. He is a goddamn pirate.
The man lets him go and steps back and opens his hands. An impatient gesture.
“I can’t hear you,” Jack says.
The man’s face screws up.
Jack screams, “I cannot hear you!” He taps his ear.
The guy lowers his rifle uncertainly, slaps at the clasps around his neck. Another pirate helps him. When the helmet comes off it reveals a head of sweaty black hair and Asiatic features. The guy is young. Mid 20s at the most. A pink scar runs from the left corner of his mouth to his ear where a patch of hair is missing, folds of thicker scar tissue there instead. When he speaks again, his broken English places him somewhere in Venus’s system. “Where is a cargos?”
Jack hitches his thumb toward the inner hallway.
As freighters go, Belinda is on the smaller side, but the cargo hold is still stadium-sized. Rows of grav suspension containers—26 of them, though she can hold up to 100 of the 40-footers—rest under a high ceiling of white strip lighting. Jack takes the pirates inside, wondering how they intend to load these massive crates aboard their vessel.
They ignore the cargo, fan out and walk the rows. Jack and Dino look on, helpless.
The leader circles back. He holds his helmet under his left arm, rests the rifle in the other, hip-level. “Where is a cargos?” he says.
“Not sure I follow,” Jack says. He gestures at the containers, but he’s got a terrible sinking feeling.
“Other cargos, Mr. Kind. Do not play game.”
Jack winces. There’s no sense in pretending.
He leads them to a blue crate with a black circle on its side, walks the perimeter and stoops to release the straps. “Stand back,” he says.
Hesitantly, the pirates obey.
He clicks his portable. “Belinda, target container 1187 for selective Zero-G.”
Nothing happens.
“Belinda, you there?”
Belinda has been glitchy for years, ever since he switched off her AI. According to Stetson, it’s something to do with encrypted files and fragmentation. You’re not supposed to tool around with such complex software, but Jack prefers things old-fashioned, with a human at the helm.
He tries again. “Belinda. This is Jack Kind. Target container 1187 for Zero-G.” Under his breath, he adds, “Please.”
“Yes, Jack.” Her voice comes monotone through his portable.
The air shudders.
Dino helps him heave the container from the floor. Even in microgravity, the thing is hard to lift. Something twinges in his back as he strains. The container rises, rotates slightly. It floats, suspended, about chest height in mid-air. They hold to the bottom handles and guide it a few feet down the aisle. Jack has to hang off the side to pull it back down. He asks Bel three times to reengage the gravity before she does.
There is a silver door in the floor where the container had been. At gunpoint, Jack lifts it open. It’s heavy and drops with a bang, revealing a darkened compartment with a ladder built into the side. The pirates hop down one at a time. Jack shoves his hands in his pockets, an attempt to stop their shaking. Hunter and the others will be watching from the turret above. The pirates already noted and dismissed it. They know he’s too smart—or maybe too stupid—to give the order. Make a run for it and hope Hunter has been practicing her aim. Hope there’s nobody watching from the attack ship.
No. He has caused enough death in his lifetime.
He hears the hiss of pressure releasing from the suspension crate down there. The pirates hoist up their take. Five rectangles, the largest ten-feet tall by seven-feet wide, each wrapped in white foam and delicate brown paper. Paintings. Art. Cultural artifacts. Stolen from the catacombs of cultures shattered by the war and reduced to contraband to be sold on the black market. He doesn’t know what the paintings are of or who they’re by or what they mean and he doesn’t give a shit. They equate to a great fuckload of money. That’s what matters. Because even if the pirates don’t execute Jack, there will now be a buyer on Earth who has paid for something that will not be delivered. And the seller—one of the most dangerous men in the solar system—will hold Jack responsible.