I lifted an aching hand. “That’s it.”
Mong nodded. He instructed the pilot to bank.
We docked the ship in an equipment yard behind the warehouse. We stepped out onto the weed-eaten hardtop with Mong’s gunmen crouched low, guns trained on the open ground, casing the joint on the odd chance there was anyone about. No one was about. I caught a faint, acrid whiff of Brisis’s scummy air. My ears perked up at the purl of the river flowing alongside the service road over the sound of a gentle wind.
Brisis was as I remembered. A brittle coal-sulfur smell lingering in the air, random wreckage and rusty forklifts left to disintegrate, the sullen quiet of a violent past of rage. One of the original slum worlds. Here, only broken factories lurked, steeped in sullen disuse, abandoned dingy warehouses with a creepy vibe. The place seemed eerily deserted.
We passed only broken cement blocks and a corrugated tin watchhouse in the center of the yard, which looked, for all purposes, empty. We trudged up the back and around the side of the warehouse, our boots crunching on the gravelly asphalt.
They herded me along, pushing me in no gentle fashion when I lagged. I was desperate. My mind wandered to Wren. I had a sick feeling I’d never see her again. Glad she got away. Hoped she’d stay the fuck away from Mong.
The yellow sunlight hurt my eyes. Too much time spent in artificial light on ships and space stations.
My blood quickened. I knew once they got their grubby hands on the amalgo they’d waste me. At all costs, I must find a way out of this, throw a monkey wrench in their shit plans.
But how?—I had no weapon. Four against one. Mong and his telekinetic powers were unbeatable. I looked down at my throbbing hand, a comical pretzel of fingers that didn’t work, and might never work again.
More flashbacks. Those silly dreams of how I’d wanted to be a rocket engineer as a boy. Before my parents and friends had been wiped out by warmongers storming our planet, before I’d been passed from refugee camp to camp. How I’d resolved to get myself out of that ghetto, ultimately becoming a gangster, the only way to get ahead fast. Look at where it got me. Now I was back on Brisis with a Star Lord up my ass…
“Move, Rusco.”
“I have to take a piss,” came my sullen growl.
“You can piss later. I want my amalgo.”
“I’m going to piss my pants, if that’s any concern of yours.”
Balt laughed. “Go ahead. We won’t much mind.”
Mong looked over and cast me an impatient glare. “Go with him.”
Balt took me over to the watchhouse, the smug fuck, some twenty paces away, nudging me with his rifle. Weeds and long grass blades poked up through cracks in the tarmac, caressing the tin siding. If I could fake the barbarian out, get one solid hit to the balls or some sensitive place, smash his nose, maybe I could make for that rusty fence and hop it over to the thickets.
With that limp of yours, Rusco, you’d be lucky to make it twenty feet before getting gutshot. And that hand? Good luck getting over a fence.
But they’re going to kill you anyways. You want to die like a pig with lead in your brain, or die on your own terms?
Does it matter? Death is death, Mr. Rusco.
Mong seemed to be reading my thoughts, hovering around as I unzipped and heard a heavy boot fall behind me.
“Any problem here, Balt?” his deep-throated voice rasped.
“Nah, just Rusco being an old woman with a finicky bladder, slow as dogshit.” He came close and smacked me on the shoulder, breathing down my neck. “That pecker of yours sawed off or something? Hurry up.”
I held up a hand. I let warm spray sprinkle the tin siding, sniffed the sulfury air, maybe my last polluted breaths yet. As I zipped up, I darted eyes around the desolate yard. Death inched closer.
“Get going,” Balt grumbled. They herded me up to the warehouse, then busted through a boarded up door with the ends of their rifles.
We came into a gloomy equipment bay that I remembered opened up to a loading area. The place had maybe an extra layer of dust and rat dung, cobwebs and reek of spilled oil. Several grubby rooms spread out along the wall. I could see activity here. Bootprints etched in the dust. Somebody had been storing cargo here, and then moving it from time to time. Large wooden crates, dozens of them. They lay stacked against the wall.
“Anything familiar?” grunted Mong.
“There,” I lifted a mangled hand to the first room on the left. Toward a battered door, leaning on its broken hinges. They prodded me along, cursing and wrinkling their noses at the musty stench that hit them when they entered the room and thrust me forward.
“Search through that pile,” I said.
They kicked through the bags and broken pieces of wood and metal strewn in a corner. From the likes of the broken machinery and tubs, at one time, I guessed, this had been some sort of meat grinding facility or canning factory.
Balt’s face lit in a sick grin. The tech was still there—in that pile of junk amid the rat dung and the mice
