Tanaka said, “No,” and tried to stand, then let herself collapse again. Look how hurt I am. It was only half bullshit.
“Hurry up,” Holden said, and started to lead the girl past her.
Burton reached down to grab Tanaka’s arm and yank her to her feet. He was very strong. That was good. It would make him overconfident. Tanaka let him pull her up, pushing hard with her legs as she rose, and snapping her other arm up to drive her palm into the underside of the big man’s chin. His head jerked back from the impact, but his grip on her left bicep didn’t loosen.
He raised his other arm and threw a massive fist at her face. With his hand gripping her, she couldn’t dodge, so she whipped her head to the right and slapped at the punch, shoving it to the left. It still grazed her cheek, and the impact was enough to make that side of her face go numb.
The motion brought him in closer, and Tanaka threw herself backward, letting the momentum of the punch and her own weight yank Burton off his feet and on top of her as she fell.
He let go of her arm, trying by reflex to catch himself, and they both hit the ground. He landed on her like a falling tree, driving the air from her lungs. She was ready for it, though, and threw up an elbow that caught Burton in the throat as he dropped. He made a sound like an injured duck and rolled away, clutching at his neck. Tanaka bounced to her feet and looked for the girl. The swimming world whirled around her. She gritted her teeth and ignored it.
The girl was hiding behind Holden, clutching at her dog and staring at the melee, her mouth a round O of surprise. He was digging around at his feet, trying to pick up his dropped gun.
Tanaka could see hers, lying in the grass not too far away. Diving for it to take a rushed shot at Holden would be risky with the girl so close by. She raised a hand instead. “Holden, wait.”
“Leave him out of it,” Burton said behind her, “we’re not done yet.”
Tanaka spun on the ball of her foot and lashed out with a kick at the spot the sound was coming from. The big mechanic casually swatted it away. He looked none the worse for wear after a throat strike that would’ve killed most people. Something was wrong with his eyes. They were flat black. She remembered reading about someone with eyes like that. She didn’t remember who.
“I’ve read your file,” Tanaka said, backing toward Holden and the girl. She didn’t have time for a boxing match with the strange-looking man with the eerie black eyes. Not when her best shots didn’t seem to even faze him.
“Yeah?” he asked, moving toward her.
“It said we killed you,” she said. “Any other time, I’d stay to figure that out.” The girl was so close that, if she could just get her balance, she could take two steps, grab her, and be running before the others knew what had happened. Tanaka would place bets they wouldn’t shoot at her if she had the kid in her arms.
“You’ve got time,” Burton said.
Tanaka turned toward the girl and then stopped short. Holden was standing in front of her, his gun in his hand. The eyes that had seemed frightened a moment ago were now flat, emotionless, cold. That’s bad.
“No,” he said. “She doesn’t.”
Before Tanaka could even start to move, Holden’s gun went off three times. She felt the three shots as hammer blows to her sternum. All three, center mass. Kill shots. She hadn’t been certain until that moment that he had it in him.
Tanaka staggered two steps toward the edge of the path and then collapsed on her face. The three slugs from Holden’s gun pressed into her chest where the nanofiber undershirt had caught them, like daggers in the deep-tissue bruise they’d left in her flesh. She ignored the pain and lay very still, holding her breath.
“Shit, Cap,” Burton was saying. “I think we shoulda kept her.”
“We have to go. We have to get out of here. Now,” Holden replied. He sounded angry. Based on her reading of his file, Tanaka would have bet he wasn’t mad at the mechanic. He was angry he’d been forced to shoot someone. For all the shit he’d seen, the Laconian interrogator’s psych evaluation said that Holden had never really grown comfortable with violence.
Don’t come check my body, Tanaka willed at them.
“Let’s get out of here before more of them show up,” Holden said, and the three of them started walking away.
Moving as little as possible, Tanaka inched toward her gun. When she was able to put her right hand on it, she risked turning her head to see where they were. Holden and Burton were side by side, the girl between them. They were about forty meters away. Not a very long shot. Not for her. They were both wearing old Martian light body armor. The high explosive rounds in her pistol would go right through it. There was some risk of fragmentation hitting the girl, but it wasn’t likely to be fatal. And fuck it. A little bruising might do the bitch some good.
Tanaka rolled onto her back and sat up. She aimed at Burton’s back. He was the more dangerous of the two. Kill him first. She lined up her sights between the big man’s shoulder blades. Took a long breath, let half of it out, and pulled the trigger.
The round slammed into his back and blew out his chest like someone had swapped his heart with a grenade. Tanaka shifted her aim to Holden, who was already spinning, gun in hand. The big man took a couple more steps and fell over. She lined up on Holden’s chest, then jerked her head as something cut a groove across her scalp. The report of the gunshot arrived a split second later.
He figured out the body armor, Tanaka thought. He’s taking the headshot.
She moved, scrambling for cover in the grass and trying to line up her next shot. Holden was standing still, pivoting slowly at the waist to put his sights on her. It was a race now, and she was sighted in on his head, ready to pull the trigger and end it, when someone slammed a sledgehammer into her cheek. The other side of her mouth exploded out. The pain barely lasted long enough to notice, and everything was gone.
Interlude: The Dreamer
The dreamer dreams, and her dream carries her deeper into intimacy with vastness. All through the wideness and flow, she sparkles and the sparkles become thought where there was no thought before. The great slowness remains, soft and wide as the icy cold and all-encompassing sea, and the slowness (drifting, languid) shuffles and reshuffles itself. The sticky and the slippery, the bright and the dark, the moving and the moving for there is no true stillness in the spark-filled substrate, and the sparks become a mind. The dreamer dreams, and others dream with her, not just the ones at her side, not just the bubbles of salt, but the dance that they make. She dreams the dance, and the dance dreams her back. Hello hello hello.
Once, and gone so far away there were only the first thoughts to think it, the it was like this: the ball at the center of down, and the shell at the edge of up, and between them the slow dancers and the sudden dance. Watch watch watch, the grandmothers whisper, and their voices become a chorus, and the chorus says something else. The dance wants, and it pushes to the edges of everything, the skin of the universe. The dreamer dreams the dance and the dance dreams and its dreams become things and the things change the dreams. Desire and longing for desire bumble over eager forward and make new things to dance with. A brain growing the wires that form itself, thoughts flow from one substrate into another, and the great curiosity spins and makes and spins and learns. It presses down into the heat at the bottom of everything. It presses up into the cold, and it cracks the vault of heaven. The cold and hard of up yields to the dance, and the lights that they are meet lights that they are not.