Holborn Ninth Life

1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-80336-231-1
Verlag: Titan Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 416 Seiten

Reihe: The Factus Sequence

The Ballad of Halo Jones meets Becky Chambers' Wayfarers by way of 3:10 to Yuma; a clash of law and lawlessness, storytelling and truth in a headlong romp across the stars. After forty years of wreaking havoc across the galaxy, the outlaw Nine Lives - AKA Former General Gabriella Ortiz - has finally run out of lives. Shot down into a backwater at the system's edge, she is rescued by deputy marshall Havemercy Grey. Hav is a true soul, trying to uphold what is right in the heedless wastes. Hav is determined to see justice done. And Hav could sure use that 20-million bounty... But escorting the most dangerous fugitive in the system across the stars is no easy task, especially when decades of fire and destruction are catching up with her, and every gutspill with a pistol wants that bounty. So when Ortiz offers a deal - to keep them both alive, as long as Hav listens to the stories of Gabi's lives - Hav can't refuse. There's just one catch: everywhere they go, during every brawl and gunfight and explosive escape, people say the same thing - don't let her talk...

Stark Holborn is a novelist, games writer, film reviewer, and the author of Nunslinger and Triggernometry and has worked on games and interactive fiction such as Shadow of Doubt (Colepowered Games) and Mars 2020 (BBC). Stark lives in the South West UK.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Holborn, Stark

Leseproben

‘HOLY SHIT, HAV.’ Garrick stared at me in astonishment, before glancing through the wall, as if he could still see Ma Shockney’s bird. ‘Help me,’ he ordered.

Together we carried you from the stable into the tiny Marshal’s office and dumped you onto the scratched floor of the holding cell. In the storm-light, you didn’t look real.

‘What kind of ship was it?’ Garrick asked, puffing. ‘Any other passengers?’

I shook my head. ‘It was small, looked like a Merganser. Don’t know where it came from. The Gat, I think.’

‘A Merganser? No wonder it didn’t make the lanes. Miracle it made it through re-entry.’

We exchanged a look and I reached down to brush back the hair that spilled like ink around your face. The blood had dried into a lurid mask, but beneath it I could see scars: a crooked nose, a thin line across your lip, a brutal round scar on your temple as if someone had once put a gun to your head and pulled the trigger… But before I could look closer, it was gone, replaced by a gaping wound that oozed blood. Nausea rose in me and I scrabbled away.

‘Holy shit,’ Garrick swore again.

‘What is that?’ I asked as the scar reappeared once more. ‘What the hell is that?’

‘Luck scar,’ Garrick’s voice was rough with wonder.

I’d heard of Luck Scars, of course I had: injuries sustained on Factus that did and didn’t exist, so that soldiers fought on after death, or died suddenly and violently from wounds that bloomed on their chests out of nowhere. Moon stories, people dismissed them as. And yet… there you were, lying before me, and the more I stared the more I couldn’t be certain of what I saw. It made me dizzy, trying to see you clearly. It still does.

Garrick unzipped the collar of your expensive flight suit. Beneath was a sweat-stained tank top, revealing taut sinews and muscles like cables. Your chest and arms were a patchwork of scars, a storybook of violence. Some were old and faded, others newer, purplish and puckered, bullets, burns, puncture wounds… And on your shoulder, one that looked deliberate. Two sloping lines and a horizontal slash.

The mark of Hel the Converter. Cold dread ran through me.

‘Basszus,’ I swore. ‘Is she a Seeker?’

‘Whoever she is, she shouldn’t be here.’ For some reason, Garrick sounded angry. ‘She shouldn’t be here.’

At last, he pushed himself to his feet, joints creaking and clicking. ‘Clean her face up. I’ll get the scanner. We’ll run her likeness through the system.’

I wetted a rag with a dribble of water from the dispenser and started to wipe the blood from your skin. As I did, I felt a nameless fear that if I wiped too hard your face would slide off onto the floor to reveal another beneath, and another, and another, never ending. I avoided touching the Luck Scar. Every time I glanced at it, I felt sick.

When I was done you looked older than before, but still youthful; like a child who had aged too fast. People sometimes said the same thing about me.

Sitting back, I took the strange coin from my pocket. It looked like an old credit token, a two-faced Delos piece from before the Luck Wars, when people weren’t afraid to use such things. A snake on one side, eight on the other. I turned it in my fingers. We’d taken tokens as donations at the Intercession House sometimes, where we didn’t have the luxury of fear, but I’d never seen one like this. I thought of Pa out there at the House, alone except for his god in the little sanctuary he’d tried so hard to build, the years lost to the dust, the hard-cracked shell of Father’s grave, his bruised and battered face as he stared at me and said my name…

Hav.

‘Done?’

Garrick stood in the doorway, struggling with the handheld scanner, its umbilical tangled behind him. I hid the coin from view and nodded.

‘Out the way then,’ he muttered, hefting it.

There was a weak flash as the scanner took your image and began to compile, reducing your likeness down to easy digits, to a few scant lines of code that could pass through the mess of networks making up our tenuous link to the rest of the system. The scanner’s screen fuzzed and flickered with the dust storm outside and together we held our breath until it buzzed an affirmation that the upload to the AIM bank been successful.

There was nothing else to do then but wait, as the nickel storm battered the walls of the office and had us wincing every time we heard the creak of the relay above. While Garrick brewed yet another pot of the stomach-burning murk he called coffee, I scraped dried blood from the grooves of my fingernails, waiting to discover whether I had a future.

Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore, and went to find Humble.

The air in the bar didn’t help my nausea, still ripe from the shift of miners who had departed some hours before. Now, thankfully, it was empty.

Do you remember the bar? I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t. There was nothing much to see. Four tables and thirteen chairs and the gritty, grilled floor and the bar-top scratched through its shiny covering down to plastic bone. A faded star chart, Accord posters of rules and regulations and quarantine zones, a Gat shuttle timetable, scrawled handwritten notices about things lost and things for sale.

‘Hum?’ I called.

She stepped from the back room, her headscarf wet with perspiration, nickel dust caught on the fine hairs of her cheek. Ancient mining overalls covered a thin, floral shirt, her pistol in its holster beneath her arm. She’d obviously been out fixing the pumps. Still, she looked beautiful, too beautiful for this place. Proper golden hair to my lifeless grey-blonde, blue eyes to my brown. A face capable of looking sad and soft, rather than pinched and watchful. Some days, it hurt me to see how cracked and swollen her hands were now, how she’d started to succumb to the same skin rashes as the rest of us who had to live outside the bordel’s purified conditions. But she was proud of that. And when I remembered the alternative, I understood.

‘Hav?’ she frowned. She could always see me, my sister, see right through the cracks in my shell to what moved in the dark inside. ‘Are you okay? Did the Dogs do something?’

I swallowed the dry, sour air and shook my head. ‘Where are the kids?’

‘Watching their lessons.’ Her blue eyes narrowed on my fingers. ‘Where are your gloves? What happened to your hands? I’ll get the kit.’

I shook my head, knowing there would be no stopping her. Things festered easy on Jaypea, where our only medico was the mining company quack, who dealt out mood suppressants and signed death certificates. I said nothing as Humble took the old army issue kit from beneath the bar. It had been Father’s, from his war days, and he had always shuddered to look at it, perhaps remembering the way it had bounced on his pack, the way it still held screams in its scratches.

‘Here,’ Humble said, and took my hands, laying them gently on the bar, palms up, as if she were about to do something as dangerous as read my fortune. As if I were a supplicant or a penitent. I wanted to tell her to stop. Not to waste the kit on me. I knew well enough what was in there: four analgesic shots, ten credits each. Two rolls of bandage, five each, the remains of a can of sterile spray, fifteen credits, and what if one of the children cut themselves and there was nothing left to treat them, and what if the usual drogers who stopped here wouldn’t part with any supplies, or if the milestonemonger was shot down before they reached us? But in that moment, I didn’t have the strength.

‘We had Jenken in here earlier,’ Humble said as she worked. ‘Hotter than a droger’s fart about the plans. Said he hadn’t worked himself to the bone building that store for the Shockneys to tear it down.’ She sighed. ‘Reckons Pa feels the same, no matter what he says. Gonna be hell to pay around here before long. Hope Ma Shockney knows that.’ I nodded mutely and she tutted as she sprayed sealant onto my blisters. ‘How did you do this?’

‘Doesn’t matter.’ As the sealant stung and hardened into a thick, shiny layer I turned my hands and took hers. ‘Hum, what if we got out of here? On the next shuttle? Just packed up and took the kids and Pa and left?’

She rolled her eyes at me, as if I were still a child. ‘We can’t, Hav. I owe too much on this place. And you’re tied into your job for another—’

‘I don’t care. We could fly beyond the Gat. We could keep flying to far enough that the Shockneys wouldn’t follow.’

Her sad smile turned into a frown, and in that moment I might have told her everything, might have squeezed my stinging palms and spilled all.

‘Hav,’ Garrick’s voice crackled over the internal comm. ‘Hav, come look at this.’

I took my hands from Humble’s and strode back into the office, secrets beating in my throat.

Garrick was standing over the scanner, his big face grey as protein mush.

‘Look,’ he croaked.

We had run faces through the AIM system before, mostly drifters who’d washed up in the bar, sick and delirious, or the odd smuggler who’d been too stupid or drunk to avoid capture. Sometimes, finding a match took hours, as the relay spooled through the AIM’s A Bank – the most wanted criminals – the B Bank – convicted felons – then C Bank – petty delinquents – and so on.

MATCH, a message on the scanner flashed. MATCH. I met Garrick’s eyes. A match within minutes meant A Bank. The ancient printer was already whirring,...