The Jack's Story (BRIGAND Book 2) Read Free Page B

about death?"
    I shrugged. "Not really."
    "Do you have a death wish, or do you fear dying?"
    I leaned forward and rested my forearms lightly on my knees. "Look, we’re all dying. It’s just a question of how fast. It’s the only thing I know for sure, so ‘no’ I don’t fear it, I don’t think about it, and I’m not trying to hurry things up."
    I leaned back and folded my arms up high on my chest over the thick slabs of my pectorals.
    The little pink doctor opened his mouth, ready with more questions, when Ripla cut the link and he disappeared. Then he leaned forward on the table. "What are you afraid of?"
    I leaned forward and looked him squarely in the eye. "I’m afraid of never finding anything worth living for."
    Ripla closed the folio and slipped it into the breast pocket of his spotless gray fatigues. Then he extended his hand.  "Marine, you’re hired."
    I was eighteen. It was the day the last of whatever innocence I had left became doomed. The day I became a Technician.

CHAPTER FOUR
    Technicians. Not the most creative name, but accurate. Our official designation was SOF-3 and we actually were repairmen of a sort. When someone in the Confed hierarchy fucked something up so badly that it couldn’t be fixed, we got the call.
    Unlike the Marines, unlike pretty much any military unit worth the time it took to train them, we had no history, no traditions. Whoever first created SOF-3 was so far off the record that we weren’t entirely sure if we were even sanctioned. But money and gear and transportation showed up when they were needed. They fed us and housed us, repaired us when we got broken. Sometimes it almost felt like an honest living.
    Then they sent us to Marajo Lift. Into the Depot.
    The Depots are the lowest wards of the Lift Cities, vast cargo moving areas that encrust the lift’s foundation. Docks and warehouses hulk behind gigantic airlock doors that keep out the reek and the dust, and the heat, of Earth’s barren surface. Most of the seven or so billion people who live in Marajo Lift call the Depot home. It’s a brief, dangerous and dirty existence. Fine dust invades whenever the outer airlocks are opened to take in materials scavenged from the denuded surface. Crowding is unimaginable. Every available space is occupied by people and dust.
    They gave us a few days in the Upper Wards before we went in. Shore leave. Like the regulars get.
    I was thinking about what it would be like to have an actual life when I woke up that morning, with a couple of slags, whores like my moms, draped over me. The smell of their fluids and their perfume was only slightly less cloying than the aftertastes of yeast and vape that clung to the insides of my sticky mouth. My tongue was dry and a little raw, as if I’d been licking cardboard or possibly the floor of the bar where I’d met Shenu and, well, I couldn’t remember the name of the second one. Shenu’s bright orange hair splayed across my torso, obscuring my dark chest hair, and I thought about Nanette, one of my moms from so long ago.
    Shenu’s mouth hung slightly open in sleep, a slow ooze of saliva seeped out of her mouth, and mixed with our commingled hair. It seemed so intimate, far more so than all of the other positions I had seen her body in last night. Intimate for me to watch her in sleep, drooling and twitching from time to time at whatever demons occupied her dreams.
    I closed my eyes, fingered the curls of her hair and remembered...
    Nanette. In my mind’s eye there was blood oozing out of her parted lips, instead of spit, and her hair was dark with pools of red-black crusting her wild, orange mane.
    I’d gone home to Entebbe Lift for a few days. Except it wasn’t home anymore. The moms lost their place, a slutseller had killed their Morg and taken it from them. They found Nanette dead too, the back of her neck punctured all the way through to her throat. Rosie told me she’d been talking about quitting, about maybe going to the Belt.