“My name’s Tatia,” she said.
Except accents change and to Nikos it sounded like minoms-Tatao, but he got the drift. “I’m Nikos,” he said. “I have to kill you.”
The woman understood “kill” and “you”. “Why?”
“It’s The Way.”
She looked at him with a sad little smile on her face. “In my country we shake hands first.”
He got the drift of that too. A little strange, but when his own people were executed for The Way they were calm, often happy. Also stoned out of their soon-to-be-extinct minds.
“Stay away!” shouted the Prog, too late.
One moment Nikos was standing there, one hand holding the weapon, the other outstretched. The next flat on his back, no weapon in his hand and sharp, grinding pain between his legs.
* * *
There was a collective sigh from the crowd. Tatia saw a black-cloaked human produce a large sword. He was in a small group of similarly dressed humans, together with several others in really objectionable multi-coloured robes, with headbands even. The priesthood/government and their enforcers, she assumed. She suspected a colony gone very wrong.
“And the fuck is all this about?” Tatia pointed what had to be a weapon at the woman who’d cried out. Her forefinger was on the button. The woman fluttered her hands in a protective gesture.
“You have to die,” the woman said. “It is The Way.”
Tatia was getting to grips with the accent. “Not my way.”
“It has to be,” she insisted.
“And yet I’ve got the gun.”
“We are many.”
Tatia saw the crowd begin to move towards them. The black-cloaked male flourished his sword. A creature the size of a large rat with four wings flew between her and the colonists. It had blue tentacles for a face. She wondered how alien the colonists had become. Did it matter? They wanted to kill her.
“Time for a change,” Tatia said. She pointed the weapon at the man with the sword and pressed the trigger.
A small ball of blinding-white plasma left the weapon and moved towards the man. He dodged left. So did the plasma. He dodged right. So did the plasma. It would have been kinder if it had sped directly at him. Instead it moved like a dog playing with its master, until he accepted his fate and crouched down, whimpering. The plasma ball vanished inside him. The man suddenly stood up straight and tall and rigid, arms at right angles, eyes staring.
He dissolved, slowly. Skin becoming opaque, then melding with muscle, fat and bone as he fell to the ground. A human thick soup oozed out from under his cloak.
The crowd moaned. Release, not anger. That was strange.
Tatia stared up at the sky, trying not to vomit. She saw a cloud that looked a bit like Australia, deliberately thought about Melbourne’s antique trams until her stomach settled, then slowly looked back to the ground. The man was now a soggy lump. The crowd were slowly dispersing. She could smell marijuana in the air, which could explain some of the strangeness but not all.
“You,” she said, gesturing to the teenager, “fuck off back home.”
Nikos scrambled painfully to his feet and ran off, part doubled up. He was followed by the priests and their guards. Only the woman remained.
“You got a shitty system,” Tatia said.
“It is ours.”
“Why didn’t you run?”
“To kill you.” She produced an ancient Glock 17 automatic pistol, a revered relic from Earth, pointed and pulled the trigger, even as Tatia desperately brought her own weapon to bear.
The woman pressed the trigger again. Nothing happened.
Tatia smashed her weapon into the woman’s face, watched as she crumpled to the ground, then reached for the handgun. “You had the safety on,” Tatia said, surprised by her own calm, which remained as she fired two bullets into the woman’s chest. Tatia pocketed the Glock, turned back to the pod then changed her mind. “You look about my size,” she said and pulled off the woman’s boots. Thought a moment, then took the headband. She had no intention of wearing it, but guessed it was ceremonial.
The crowd milled around as the Progs tried to exert control. They failed. One of the Adjustors raised a sword to force obedience. Many in the crowd snarled defiance. He swung the sword in panic and cut deep into a woman’s arm. She screamed, the crowd went silent for a minute... and then attacked him.
A kilometre away, an alien sphere about two metres across, warty, grey-green skin, wearing a metallic belt with various pouches and containers, floated a metre or so off the ground. It could be the twin to the one killed by the Houston posse. It could be observing the sudden collapse of a society. Aliens, who knows?
* * *
Tatia went back to the pod and waited for the Originators to take her away from all this. The same grating sound as the force fields snapped. The ship began to rise.
She watched the planet recede beneath her and thought how the colonists had been expecting her.
Être, mourir, ça suffit.
> I’m thinking in French, Mom? To be, to die, that’s it?
< It was a bad experience, dear. Think of something good.
Her first real boyfriend had been French Canadian. He’d taken Tatia – maybe accepted, because she wanted rid of the virgin thing soon as – with passion, sensuality and kindness, a combination rare in a sixteen-year-old boy. And in many adult men. Where was he now? Perhaps back in Sault Sans Marie, although he’d talked of becoming a trapper in the Wild. If so, she wondered how he’d be on an alien planet.
Think about the Originators, who wanted her dead but couldn’t do it themselves. So set her up for others to do it?
Except she wasn’t dying. She was surviving.
Ça va sans dire. She was a survivor. It went without saying.
Enlightenment: Neither Originators nor their owners could kill Tatia themselves. Or maybe kill anyone, bad for their karma, so subject races did it for them. Sun Tzu might have approved, but in reality that kind of
