“Digging at Bones” is free on this website for this week only. It was originally published in Boundary Shock Quarterly, edited by Blaze Ward. If you’d like a copy of your own, you can get it from online retailers or get a copy directly from me right here. I hope you enjoy it!
Martel is a special agent. A gravedigger of sorts, on a covert mission to the barren planet Abarsis.
He’s about to find that even non-human cultures can clash in the most painful of ways..
Digging at Bones
In darkness, Martel stepped quietly up to the steel examination table.
The laboratory was cool this time of night. It smelled of rock, which made sense given the chamber had been gouged straight from the cliffs of basalt that covered the planet’s northern hemisphere. Abarsis was a desert planet where daytime temps made it hurt to breathe and where everything that moved could either sting, bite, or claw. Tack on the existence of the Sendak colony Martel was now technically trying to rip off, and this ball of dirt became a certifiable death trap.
A crosshatch of moonlight sliced through windows to illuminate the desiccated remains of the body that lay across the table, flat on its back, ribs catching the glow of that moonlight, its oblong, fleshless jawbone frozen in a perpetual scream. A mass of fused bones clumped at the pelvis. One foot jutted out perpendicular to the table, tarsus hanging in open space.
So this was Dom Dima.
If his intelligence was right, Sendak scientists were still performing tests to determine her exact heritage, but the bones were already identified as biologically female and showed the proper iron deficiency to qualify. It was enough for the Spirit Leaders of the Five Tribes, a collective ancient culture that inhabited zones around Epsilon Eridani—a still-young star system though the Five Tribes were not—filled with a few crappy planets, lots of dust and debris, and one craggy-assed belt of asteroids that may make for a new planet some day long after the Spirit Leaders were gone.
They claimed her as their own, though, the Five.
Calling her Dom Dima, queen of ancient myth and a member of their collective. They were also the people paying him to “rescue” her before the body was desecrated any further.
People will do anything if they think it will keep them in power.
He was to take Dom Dima back to them, where they would use her as proof to their people that their once-great civilization could rise again. Martel placed his hand on the table, suddenly anxious about the idea of touching the remains. He pressed his dry lips together. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. She was bigger than he expected. He wasn’t sure if she would fit in his transport bag.
The click of a plasma rifle echoed in open space.
“What do we have here?” came a voice.
His jacket concealed weapons but he would never get to them before the guard could shoot, so, hand’s up, Martel turned.
She was tall, with rippled arms and muscles that came from the legendary regimen members of the Sendak Royal Guard were expected to complete each day. Her rifle was one of the big jobs, pumped by a CO2 recycler. Its targeting laser remained steady over his chest. The guard stepped into a slash of moonlight and Martel saw her face—smooth and orange under the helm, her eyes dilated, one iris a thin circle of deep purple the other a ring of gold. The ridged brow of the Sendak was less prominent with her.
“You are alone.’”
“Can’t find anyone who’ll take me in.”
Not laughing, the guard stepped closer, rifle still targeted.
He had been studying Sendak security for a long time. Three more guards would be nearby. Chances were she had already called them.
“She’s their queen,” he said, glancing at the body.
“As if anyone can know that,” the guard replied, her eyes taking a set.
“They seem pretty convinced.”
“The Five merely desire to own the galaxy.”
“And the Sendak don’t?”
“We will never be like the Five.”
Martel said nothing. He had more pragmatic concerns than arguing political history with an underpaid guard. The Five may be push-overs when it came to interstellar politics, but they didn’t like being cheated. Failure to deliver Dom Dima’s remains would be painful at worst, fatal at best.
A clamor of footsteps came from the distance. Other guards.
“Will you come with me,” the guard said, “or do you prefer I shoot you to avoid your buy-back?”
“I see you understand the Five,” Martel replied.
“I understand thieves.”
“I don’t suppose you would just let me go?” Martel said. “I can make it worth your time.”
“And make the same bed you’ve made for yourself?” She shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
“Pity,” Martel said.
She shouldered the rifle. “Shall I take care of you?”
“No,” he said. “I’ll come with you. That way at least I get the free tour.”
She laughed then, which made him happy.
A moment later three other guards surrounded him.
Martel gave in. This wasn’t how he planned it, but he couldn’t say he was surprised.
#
The air system made the interrogation room cool and humid.
Dim lighting came from three battery-powered cans pointed to the ceiling, leaving shadowed patterns in the pockmarked walls. Two hard-backed chairs sat facing each other across a ramshackle table made of light metal.
The guards removed all of Martel’s weapons except for the molecular blade he’d hidden in the lining of his belt. They strapped him into one of the chairs. When they were finished, Martel’s feet sat squarely on the ground and his arms were wrenched behind him. He twisted his wrists and wriggled his feet. The restraints were fibrous.
This was good.
Plan A was to get out cleanly, but fibrous restraints meant he could go with Plan B if necessary, and given the strength of the knots Plan B was looking more believable every moment.
Martel scanned the floor, which was hard stone and covered in grit. He wondered how much blood this room had seen, and, more important to the matter at hand, how much more it was going to see before the two suns rose.
As expected, the interrogator was a small Sendak, thin and male, obviously older, with his leathery skin sagging in places and creased with wrinkles in others. He was also in possession of an angry streak that had been triggered by being rustled out of bed in the middle of the night. Despite the anger, he wore his regimented bearing as if it were a garment. Over that, he had on a pair of heavy mountain pants and a poncho-like shirt that billowed when he made sharp spins, which, while pacing the short span of the room, he did often. Unlike the guard, his fingernails were clean, buffed, and filed to sharp points. The ridge of his brow was prominent. His eyes glimmered in the cold light. His skin flared to red when he was angry.
Though it had been years, Martel recognized him immediately.
Ralik Dantae—the Sendak who ran the network of “refugee camps” humans had been driven to before the Earth was finally turned into an untold billion chunks of rubble tumbling through space. The Sendak had been younger then, of course. Ambitious. Before commanding the final destruction of the planet, the interrogator had visited the same Huntsville relief camp Martel had been herded into. It was this visit that eventually saved Martel’s life.
The guard turned to leave.
“You stay, Yenia,” the interrogator said. “I may need you.”
The guard stationed herself beside the door.
Martel could see her better now.
She was younger than he was, but she had seen as much wear and tear. The skin of her bare arms showed as many scars as his would if his jacket wasn’t covering them. Her body was corded muscle, her face formed with that sense of cruelty that appeared to come natural to the Sendak. In this lighting, her skin was dark red rather than orange. On the whole, she cast a striking figure—the type of person he would have wanted to paint back in his school days when painting was a thing he did.
The interrogator crossed his arms and sat against the table.
“Who are you?” he said to Martel.
It was test, of course. Martel felt the presence of the bio-marker against his neck where the guards had done their work earlier. They had his DNA. He wondered how much they already knew.
“Martel Marks,” he replied.
“That is correct,” the interrogator replied.
“Do I win the grand prize?”
“You are human.”
“You don’t say?” Martel looked to his legs, his chest, arms, and, finally, his shoulders. “I would never have guessed.”
The interrogator stood over Martel. This close, the smell of his breath made Martel gag. “You were born in Io colony but moved quickly,” he said. “Ex-military, ex-insurance muscle, now a ‘freelance investigator.’”
“Sounds impressive, doesn’t it?” Martel replied.
The list hadn’t included his arrests or the three cycles he had turned in the Lavon correctional facility. Nor did it have a few other things he would rather be private. But they already knew more than he expected. The rest was just a matter of time.
“You work alone because you are uncomfortable with others.”
He shrugged. “It’s a feature,” he said. “Not a bug.”
It was true. Plan his work, work his plan—keep himself responsible for himself. It was safer for everyone involved. Besides, he didn’t like following directions, and every time he got together with someone else, they eventually got around to trying to tell him what to do.
That was how he had approached the Five, after all.
A one-man team. Silent. Stealthy. Deadly if need be. Working alone meant he could move fast. There were fewer lips to silence if anything went wrong.
“Do you care to explain what you are doing here?’”
Martel shrugged. “Let’s say I’m exploring an opportunity.”
The interrogator’s lips bent over his mouth. He took a wheezing breath through the thin nostrils that ran under his cheekbones, then gave Martel’s chair a swift, savage kick.
“Do you think we’re playing a game?”
“All of life’s a game now, isn’t it?” Martel replied.
The back of the interrogator’s hand struck Martel so fast he didn’t have time to brace. Heat rose across his cheekbone. He took a breath to get his bearings.
This Martel remembered, too.
Ralik Dantae did not like to be played with. Which was, of course, the point. What the Five did not know would not hurt them.
At the doorway, the guard’s face showed amusement.
She was trying not to listen. Obviously failing.
Looming above, the interrogator’s eyes were on fire
“Who is your controller?”
“Isn’t it considered bad business to give up that kind of information?”
The back of the hand struck again.
This time Martel was ready, though. He used the blow’s energy to press hard against the table, yanking on them. When he recovered, he rolled his neck around and worked his shoulders as if to absorb the pain further, again leveraging the motion to strain against the ties. His wrists wriggled. His fingertips barely touched the upper range of his belt. When he folded his hands just right, he could get a fingernail under the restraint of his left hand. As Ralik rubbed pain from his fingers, Martel reviewed the Sendak’s physiology, remembering the heart’s position high and to the right.
“Your strength is admirable,” Martel said, running his tongue inside his mouth as he caught his interrogator’s gaze. “But I still have all my teeth.”
Ralik Dantae’s eyes drew to pinpoints. “Why are you here?”
Martel glanced at the guard. “Is it really a secret the Five Tribes want their icon back?”
“And you believe in their religious fervor.” Urgency radiated from the interrogator at this. He was interested in Martel’s association. He could use it, Martel saw. To
“Some would say the Sendak aren’t much different.”
“We are creatures of science,” the interrogator spat.
“Since when do creatures of science destroy entire planets for no good reason.”
The Sendak grew silent. His expression drew tighter and more inquisitive before a vague sense of recognition came. “I see,” he finally said.
Though Martel didn’t have DNA scans to work with, the Sendak wasn’t the only one who knew how to do research. His comment carried some of that information. Told his interrogator that Martel knew who he was. That Martel knew at least something of Ralik Dantae’s past. That after his performance on Earth, Ralik Dantae had risen another rung on the Sendak ladder of power but he was an adequate administrator at best. His career had stalled out shortly thereafter. Now he was old, and the system had discarded him. The fact that he had been shopped out to this crappy geological lab on a planet no one cared about spoke volumes as to how far the one-time Sendak director of Solar System Operations had fallen.
Couldn’t happen to a better guy.
The interrogator motioned the guard.
Yenia came forward.
“Strike him,” he said.
Her movement was too fast for Martel to see, but sudden fire erupted over his cheekbone.
The taste of blood filled his mouth, and as he recovered the throbbing heat along his jawline suggested it was in the process of growing twice its size. On the upside, the blow helped him press on the restraints again. His fingertips could now slip under the strap, the other hand felt for the ridge on the backside of his belt.
When his vision cleared, he saw a new energy crackled in Yenia’s gaze.
She was good at her job. Fully present. Engaged in the moment.
The interrogator’s voice broke his thoughts.
“Tell me, Mr. Marks.” Ralik Dantae stood beside the table with a fresh aura of the sense of self-importance that comes from assigned power. “How does it feel to be the last of a dead species?”
Yes, Martel’s first bullet had hit its mark.
“Suddenly not so talkative now? Is your tooth loose?”
“Humans are still here.”
“Rule Seven,” the interrogator replied. “When a home planet is gone, it’s only a matter of time before its denizens are absorbed. This is the way of things, Mr. Marks. Established science. The only variable is time.”
“Sounds like religious crap to me.”
The interrogator motioned the guard.
Yenia hit him again, and a river of blood flooded over his tongue.
He stretched his neck and blinked his eyes, shrugging as if to absorb the pain. His cheek felt raw now, and a line of hot liquid rolled down his jawline. His finger, however, was able to slip down the belt’s inner slot—far enough that he could hitch the weapon out. The blade was thin and flexible, but stout enough for a solid thrust if the angle of attack was good.
He would get only one shot, though.
The Sendak pulled the extra chair around the table, then sat down, leaning in close.
“I want the name of your controller,” he said.
Martel twisted the blade into the gap between the restraints and his wrist, turning it on its side and feeling a burn as the point nicked the inside of his wrist.
“Do I need Yenia to hurt you again?” the interrogator said.
“I think she would like that.”
“The only thing that matters, Mr. Marks, is whether you would like it.”
Martel ran his gaze from Yenia’s boots to her helm. “She’s attractive enough.”
This time Yenia hit him without being directed. Her left fist landed across his face with enough force to make his head snap.
“Yenia!” the interrogator said as he stepped between them.
“He asked for it,” she replied, her chest gently heaving.
“That is not your place to say.”
“You have to admit she’s got a point,” Martel said, catching her gaze, which was full of disdain for Ralik Dantae.
One of his teeth was, indeed, loose.
“We will address this insubordination later,” the interrogator said, ignoring Martel’s comment.
Martel sawed the blade back and forth as Ralik spoke. So close.
The Sendak brushed his orange fingers over his shirt as if to straighten it, then returned to the chair. Yenia’s attack had thrown him off his game, and it took a moment to gather himself back.
“How did you get here?” Ralik finally said.
“I have a ship.”
“Our system sensed no intrusion.”
“It’s a very small ship.” What they didn’t know about his sensor shield wouldn’t hurt them.
“Where is it?”
“The southern ridge of the grand desert,” Martel said, lying outright for the first time. If there was any chance of him getting off the planet alive, it would depend on his ability to get to the ship before they did.
He sawed the blade up and down, ignoring damage he was doing to himself.
One restraint gave away, and his fingers tingled with the flow of fresh blood.
He bore down harder. One more strand.
“What did you have against the Earth?” Martel said, hoping to buy time.
“I’m the one asking the questions.”
“You don’t remember me, do you?” Martel said.
The Sendak’s eyes drew into slits. Martel tried to remain a blank slate.
The blade broke through another restraint, and the fiber fell from his wrists. Martel caught it in his free hand.
The rawness of the coils against his fingers made him flash on “Draft Day,” the process wherein the Sendak allowed each of the Solar System’s remote mining companies to save a hundred workers before they destroyed the Earth.
Martel had been twelve.
He remembered hard dirt against the bottom of his feet.
The open sky above the holding pen had been overcast and grey as a storm came in from the west. It smelled like fire. He could still picture corporate buzzards circling the herd. Some of the candidates cried. Some pretended to be tough, others stood in disinterested silence. Mostly what Martel remembered was that none of them had showered in days, and many hadn’t eaten in nearly as long. Those were the ones culled first.
When Draft Day was complete, the Sendak executed the rest of their plan.
“You were actually there,” Ralik Dantae finally said.
The lilt in the interrogator’s voice got under Martel’s skin.
“I guess we all have a skeleton or two in the closet”
His eyebrow ticked up.
He grasped the handle of the weapon, and hours of practice came to bear.
Prepare the blade. Manipulate it into position. Keep the telltale motion in his shoulders and upper arms from emerging.
“Do your employers know they are funding a vengeance quest, or do they think you actually care about their Dom Dima?”
“You destroyed my home.”
Ralik Dantae spread his arms.
“Tell me, Martel Marks, is that not what humans did?”
His glance flickered to see the guard staring forward, her eyes drawn as tight as her lips.
He would never free his feet before she could react, and the chances of defeating a Sendak Guard with that kind of disadvantage were … not high.
But no plan is perfect.
Martel rose from the chair, and, in a single strike, drove the thin blade hard into the Sendak’s chest cavity, twisting it through the cartilage cage that housed the Sendak’s innards, and driving the blade into the upper right where his heart would be.
The interrogator stood in shock, breath frozen, his eyes wide, mouth gaping to expose the graying ridge of teeth under his leathery lip. The feeling of warm flesh was solid against the blade. The odor was suddenly harsh with the salt of Sendak blood.
He had done it.
Martel may not make it out alive, but as he felt the breath coming from Ralik Dantae’s lungs he remembered his mother and sister’s faces as he was led away and they were left behind to die.
It was done, he thought. If nothing else came of him, this much, at least, was done.
Off-balanced, Martel’s feet tangled in the chair and he fell to the ground with an impact that, amid the screech of metallic chair legs against stone floor, took his breath away.
Ralik fell too, backward over the table, landing with a thud.
Metallic chair legs screeched against stone, then everything went silent.
Martel was breathing hard. Adrenaline pulsed over every nerve in his body.
He pushed himself up against a cold wall, the chair still tied to his feet scraped the ground awkwardly as he brought his knees to his chest.
The guard pulled her rifle, but the interrogator raised a hand.
“Stop!” Ralik gave a strangled call.
She froze with the weapon pointed toward Martel.
Then, blade still protruding from his chest, Ralki Dantae pulled himself upright on the table edge. Dark blood oozed around the weapon, attaining his shirt.
He laughed then. An empty chuckle, as vile as it was tired.
He used both hands to pull the blade from his chest, grunting with pain as the extraction occurred. Then he held the wound with one hand and the knife with another. Blood rolled over the fingers at his shoulder. When he was done, he slid off the tabletop to stand straighter.
“You didn’t know I’m a mirror, did you?” the Sendak said.
“Mirror?”
“My heart is on the wrong side of my body.”
Martel frowned. “Son of a bitch,” he said. The restraints bit into his ankles.
Ralik winced as he turned Martel’s blade in his fist. “That’s life, isn’t it? All that planning and you still come up short.”
“I suppose that means your twin got all the virtue in the family.”
“Rest assured my brother received as much virtue as I did, Mr. Marks. It’s just in the tip of his left thumb rather than his right.” He examined the knife. With his other hand, he pressed harder to staunch the blood. “Now, however, since I need to go to the medical center, I think it’s time we draw our little game to a close.”
“Finally,” Martel replied, fighting an urge to edge along the wall.
“Yenia?” he said, motioning with Martel’s blade. “Please do the honors.”
The guard leveled the plasma rifle.
“Set it on wide scatter,” the interrogator said. “We don’t want to take a chance that our friend here is also a mirror.”
Yenia, pulled the weapon up, flipped a switch, then leveled the barrel at the interrogator and pulled the trigger.
Ralik Dantae collapsed backward amid a spray of dark blood.
The clatter of Martel’s blade hitting the floor was obscured by the juddering screech of the table. When things quieted, The Sendak was sprawled against the far wall, and the odor of charred flesh filled the room.
“Wh-what was that?” Martel said, stammering as he tried to get his bearings.
Yenia grabbed the knife from the floor and cut the restraints from his feet. Then she pulled him up by the shoulder. “Can you walk?”
“I think so,” he replied but did not move. His original question hung on his gaze.
“My people are honorable,” she said, glancing at the dead Sendak. “We do not believe in genocide. What the director said…I did not know.”
“I see,” he replied.
And in Yenia’s gaze, he did see.
The Sendak were no different from humans. Leadership does what leadership does, and Sendak leadership had taken liberties with the truth. Whatever the education of a Sendak guard consisted of, Yenia hadn’t known that a defenseless Earth had been executed. She hadn’t understood the merciless root that lay under the skin of her people—just as his human ancestors had never been able to fully come to grips with that same core of evil that tucked itself into their nature.
In the end, though, she had seen it. And she had acted on it.
She glanced at the door as she handed him his belt. “We’ve got to hurry if we’re going to get you out of here.”
“That feels better,” he said as he buckled it on and pulled on his weapon.
“I assumed as much,” Yenia replied.
#
When they left the facility, one of the planet’s two moons had dipped below the surface, the other gave a reddish hue as it too edged downward. The air was still warm. Even in the nighttime, the surface of Abarsis was harsh.
“You’ll need to go quickly,” Yenia said as they stepped out of the last stairwell and stood in a darkness-cloaked niche at the wall of the cliffs.
“You’ll blame me for the killing, right?” he replied. “When you get back? You’ll say I stole your weapon and blew Ralik away”
“My weapon is keyed to my DNA. No one else could operate it without reconfiguration.”
The answer hit Martel hard.
She had saved his life, that much was certain. The swelling of his cheek spoke to the price she would pay when the truth came out. He put his head against the cliff wall and felt its sharp surface press against his skull.
He’d underestimated her every step of the way.
Or worse, he’d been guilty of the same thing as Ralik Dantae had been—he’d discounted her, seen her as nothing beyond a simple guard who believed single-mindedly in the Sendak cause. Even when she saved his life, he assumed she’d simply made a split-second decision to save him. But saving this human life meant she couldn’t return to her post without facing a Sendak tribunal, and Yenai had known the Sendak would trace the blast that killed Ralik even as she was pressing it off.
Life as she knew it was over, and yet, still she had saved his life.
“I can’t believe you did that.”
Yenia’s gaze gleamed in the darkness. “Would you not have done the same for me?”
The question caught Martel unprepared. Yes, he thought. That’s exactly the kind of dumbass move he would have made. It made for a hard way of life sometimes, but at least he could sleep at night. In a twisted logic, that was why he was here, after all. He wanted to enact justice. Right a wrong. Something in Yenai’s expression said she had dug down to the bone to see that in him. Perhaps that flicker was what caused her to help him in the first place.
“What are you going to do now?” he said.
“I’ll find a way.”
“No,” he said without thinking.
She frowned and for an instant, he was worried that he’d bit off more than he could handle. He worked alone, after all. Plan the work and work the plan. Could he trust a Sendak? Even one that had just saved his life?
“Join me,” he said anyway.
“I don’t think that would be wise.”
“Look. I’m a pain in the butt to work with, and I’m sure you’re going to have a billion issues to screw yourself up over—I mean, I had my share of crap to get out of my system when I cut myself loose, too. But it’s lonely out there sometimes, you know? Sometimes it’s nice to have a friend.”
She took a long and uncomfortable moment.
“You’re serious.”
“I see who you are.”
The sound of her drawing a breath came slowly.
“We’ll need to go get Dom Dima first.,” she finally said.
“Dom Dima?”
“You think I’m going to let the Five kill my partner because we left a bag of bones on the planet.”
Smiling made his jaw hurt from where she had struck him earlier. Life would certainly be a lot easier if the Five weren’t tracking him down.
“Come along,” she said, motioning him back to the stairwell. “I know a shortcut.”
He gripped his gun and followed her.
“Have I ever told you you’re my hero?” he said.
“Not yet,” she replied. “But there’s a first time for everything.”
Copyright © Ron Collins
This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.