_ Hiiro

  The first thought I had when I opened my eyes was that I'd gone colorblind. My four-poster bed, normally a range of earthy wood hues, vibrant dyed silks and ornate inlay scrollwork, was flat black daubed with white. So was the ceiling beyond it. And the walls, and the furniture. It was a curious nightmare, but it was certainly a lot nicer than most, so I closed my eyes and tried to wake up again. My second attempt wasn't any more successful than my first.

  "Good morning, my Hiiro."

  And then there was Bim, wearing nothing but a thin blanket of ash, lying next to me on the half-incinerated remains of my bed. Her skin was a sharp relief from the flat background. Her inviting amber eyes sparkling with impish delight. She was smiling the big loopy grin of a happy idiot instead of her usual bared fangs and piercing eyes grimace.

  I was powerless to do anything but drink in the sight of her. I'd only ever painted in murderstrokes of red, but some small part of me held captive in that moment wanted to capture this perfect instant on canvas.

  I didn't remember much of the fight or celebration yesterday, just little bits that came in flashes. My entire room was charred and splattered with flame suppressant yet the killing flames inside of me felt… sated? More than that, I didn't feel the same crushing dread that'd been haunting me this past month. I struggled for the word and felt like an idiot when I'd finally found it.

  I felt completely relaxed for the first time since I'd left Intatenrup.

  Then the rest of my brain finally woke up and ruined it. I was naked. Bim was naked. Together in the same bed. My guts did their level best to crawl up into my throat while I looked for something that wasn't burnt cinders to cover myself with. Bim seemed content to watch me with her knowing golden eyes, smiling the whole time.

  I couldn't remember anything! But she seemed happy and I felt different, so we must have done something. With the two of us naked in the same bed there was only one something that came to mind. I couldn't remember a damned thing!

  "I'm sorry-" I started, the words slipping from me before I knew why.

  Bim recoiled from my apology, a subtle expression of bemusement creeping around the edges of her radiant smile. Ash fluttered from her skin as she moved, exposing more and more of her supple curves.

  "Why are you sorry? You were magnificent, and are a welcomed balm upon my existence."

  She lazily rolled out of the burnt remains of my bed, the last vestiges of ash falling away and leaving her bare majesty exposed. How could I not remember that from last night? She was a goddess in the flesh!

  "If you are not opposed, I'd welcome the opportunity to do that again once you are sufficiently recovered."

  My body was already betraying my answer before my mind caught up. Do that again? Hell yes… as soon as I figured out what the hell it was I'd even done in the first place. I was torn between digging through the armoire for some clothes that weren't burnt into rags and just throwing myself at her then and there, hoping my body knew what it was doing because I sure as hell didn't.

  A commotion outside the door took the decision out of my hands. Zoe-Esther was trying to steer someone away without breeching decorum and that someone didn't seem to care. A second later Alice poked her head in with a put upon Zoe looking indignantly over her shoulder before I could find anything more substantial than my hands to hide the scraps of my modesty.

  Zoe hide behind her mask of maid professionalism while Alice openly balked at the sight. Her eyes meet mine, the slightest hint of a knowing grin on her lips. Her gaze drifted over to Bim, who hadn't thought to cover her sensual self in the slightest, and Alice's grin widened. She looked back to me, then back to Bim, then back to me, then back to Bim. Her eyes flicked between our faces and our naked flesh in equal measure.

  "Do you mind?!" I demanded, snapping out of my embarrassed stupor.

  Ignoring everything, and pointedly looking at the charred ceiling, Alice found her own voice. "How sober are you and do you know how to swim?"

  Two hours later, everyone who could drag themselves into consciousness mustered to their vehicles. Clancy delivered the details via radio once we got rolling, I could practically envision the bookish man reading off his datapad as he droned on.

  "Short version, we're still employed and our payout just got about ten times bigger. Naturally, there's a few catches. The first being that we're getting a sizable advance, however said funds they're presently tied up in various non-liquid assets and investments. Celio's accountants have given us assurances that the funds are guaranteed up to ninety percent of their market value even in the event of a short sell, however they are also secured with a double-redundant non-fungible encryption— which is quite fascinating, really. Most colony worlds maintain their flat currency reserves on nothing except their word but with Trastorno being an FTL junction, the P-Chit is actually fractionally backed against the Icebreaker Guild's GSaC blockchain, meaning-."

  "Umm. In Standard please?" Lacy asked from my backseat.

  "Right, shorter version. Bullet points and small words…" Clancy had to think about it for a minute. "Celio needs us to go get a few OSDs from one of his sea steads— basically a mansion out in the ocean. These OSDs are the keys he needs to get us our money. Said locale is likely being monitored and any overt approach would be a tempting target for oceanic piracy by the enemy. A small team of divers will boat out nearby and then make a clandestine retrieval. Celio was very insistent on that, he wants no witnesses once soever. This is beyond top secret in his opinion and given that he's effectively putting a lean on all of his legitimate businesses and stealing from his illegal ones, I tend to agree. The remainder of the outfit will be running camouflage at the nearby private beach Celio retains. Should you lose our payroll deliver, it'll be all hands on deck no stone unturned until we get it back."

  "So we're getting a beach day with some paid diving time?" Eric commented, playing with a gold stud in his earlobe in my rearview mirror.

  "So long as you get the money, yes. That about sums it up." Clancy confirmed.

  It was amazing what you could buy if you knew the right people. I was no stranger to the dangerous combination of low scruples and a loaded wallet, but it never occurred to me that you could buy a beach. The thought hadn't even crossed my mind that we were going to a private beach until I drove past the ferrocrete and chain-link fence and read the signs. 'Private Beach - Enforced By Sniper' spelled out in big blocky letters in a half a dozen languages. Even if I couldn't read, the pictographs painted a pretty clear image of what happened to trespassers.

  "That'd be an easy job." Lacy—one of the outfit's leading markswomen— idly commented from my backseat.

  "What?" I asked, flicking my eyes to my rearview.

  "Covering this beach. Small flat target area, high contrast surroundings, cliffside hills for a vantage point and hide, predictable wind, never have the sun in your face. It'd make a nice retirement job."

  "Let's hope Celio phoned ahead to let them know we're coming." I mumbled, glancing up at the cliffs as I made our final approach.

  The mercs hit the sand and within minutes they'd secured a beachhead. Blankets, parasols and loungers were scattered. A handful of different games each had their own spaces alloted. Shovels and buckets appeared near the waterline and sandcastle fortifications followed shortly after. The scent of grilling food and burning charcoal reminded me that most of us hadn't ate since last night at best. It was all so normal.

  Too normal, at least on the surface.

  But then I'd spot a trio of rifles leaning together barrels up at the edge of a ball game. Or I'd notice how every vehicle was parked in a way that we could all run like hell at a moment's notice. Or how those small humble sandcastles were sporting deeper and deeper moats until they started resembling trenches. Even the mercs, myself included, seemed a little too caution to the wind for it to be genuine. It was impossible to see us as anything but a bunch of professional killers. It was obvious in all the small ways: the pale scars and faded tattoos that stood out from tanned skin, the sharp attentive glances at our surroundings, the lean athletic bodies sculpted from combat fitness, the spatial awareness and hand-eye coordination that made every game drag on a little too long.

  "Isn't this a little reckless?" I asked Pauz—a burly inked-up bruiser of a man—as he flipped a meat log on a charcoal grill. "What happened to being at war?"

  "War or no, people need to blow off steam. They need to party, relax and bump uglies in dark. Fighting is part of life. If we stop living just because someone is fighting someone else, we stop being human." Pauz finished, slapping a perfectly-seared rectangular meat brick over some fried eggs then between some leafy greens. He deftly wrapped it all up between thick, split-knuckled fingers and handed over the chow. "We could all be dead tomorrow, so we live today. Anything less is insult to the people that died so we could make it this far."

  "I don't know about that…" I said hesitantly, before starting on my breakfast wrap. Even with such simple ingredients, it tasted pretty good.

  "You may not," Pauz made a show of cracking some eggs, keeping himself entertained with a performance for two. "But they do. Don't knock it 'till you try it."

  Regardless of what the big man had said, I couldn't bring myself to relax. So I tried to relax a little harder, but that was a dead end road going nowhere fast. Knowing that it would either come to me or it wouldn't, I made my way back to the blanket I'd claimed as my little kingdom amidst the soft white sand.

  Bim was there sat upright and cross legged like some mystic meditating, the same half-drunk smile still plastered on her face. Only now the smile didn't quite reach her eyes as she gazed attentively at the beach and the waves beyond.

  "It would seem these activities are enjoyable, though I fail to comprehend why." Bim offered inquisitively.

  "It's a human thing." I said with a shrug. "Though I don't really get it either. We didn't have a lot of ocean beaches back where I come from. Too cold."

  "I'm curious to the appeal of sand. It is coarse, treacherous and has an irritating tendency to cling to everything it touches."

  "Don't tell me you'd rather this be a gravel beach?" I tried to make a joke out of it, but the words came out as more of a conspiratorial growl.

  "Yes, I would. Though my true preference is that we return to your chambers where everything is far more agreeable to the touch." Her gaze drifted to me hungrily, her hands already moving to interlock with mine before I cut her off.

  "About last night…" I started before realizing I had no idea what the hell I was even trying to ask. Bim just stared at me, the hardness leaving her eyes as she played her sight over me. "Was I-"

  "You were magnificent." She interrupted.

  "Oh." I could hear the surprise in my voice. I only hoped she didn't recognize it for what it was. "I'm glad you enjoyed it."

  Whatever it was I'd even done…

  A dark shadow crept over me before I could find the answer buried in my memory. Eric, standing tall and lean at the edge of my blanket, the sunlight barely bouncing off his impossibly dark skin. He threw a duffel bag at my feet without getting any closer than he needed too.

  "You said you can swim. Lucky you. Put that on then get on the boat."

  I'd never sailed a boat before, but since the mercs thought of me as 'the driver' I was forced to learn on the fly. As it turns out, sailing a speedboat was a lot like driving a car once I finally got the engine started.

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  We were moving fast over the open sea, the wind in my face and the salty sea breeze in my various minor wounds and burns. I could have done without that last bit, but the rest was nice. Sailing out into the sea made me realize how much I missed the open roads of my homeworld. I'm sure there were probably a few actual inter-city routes somewhere on this planet, but I'd only seen the winding hilly switchback streets of Crucibab so far and I wasn't a fan.

  Before I could really get into the groove of sailing we reached a chunk of ocean that seemed indistinguishable from any other, but the boat's computer told me to stop here so I did. I took a peek over the side as I dropped anchor and the colors amazed me; oranges, pinks, greens and every shade of blue I could think of— it was like taking a look through a window into an alien world. Some small part of me wondered if this was how Bim saw things, ever-shifting and strange while completely immersed in something you knew of but didn't really understand.

  "Aight, has any of y'all actually been diving before?" Eric asked.

  "Not like this, but I swam fording lines in some rivers and lakes back in the day." I said.

  "Since when can you swim, Eric?" Idris asked as she shook her head.

  Lacy also shook her head while she sighted down one of the bulky waterproof rifles that'd been waiting for us on the boat.

  "Afri-Canis Aanranding," Eric answered. "Amphibious assaulter with the Black Dog Marines, Oorah! Wet navy marines, not void marines. Aight, listen up…"

  What followed was about an hour's lecture of all the ways we could die from equipment failure, or pressure injury, or stupidity, or just about any other way Eric could think of as we all geared up before rolling over the side and into the water. We floundered around for a few minutes looking exactly like a bunch of rookie divers that only had the slightest idea of what we were doing.

  Once we'd gotten the basics figured out and used our fancy underwater rifles to persuade an overly-curious sea beast that it could find an easier meal elsewhere, we finally got on with our job. Eric pulled what I'd thought was a fuel tank off the underside of our boat and turned out to be a missile or something. Once we got it pointed the right way all we had to do was hold on. The sea stead wasn't that far, a little over six kilometers from where I'd parked the boat. We covered that inside of ten minutes— which felt a hell of a lot faster when it was the ocean rushing across my face than it did the wind.

  The water was fairly clear and by the time we'd reached the sea stead, I knew this had to be how Bim saw us. There were underwater ruins and giant monsters and thousands of tiny individual fish swimming in massive schools. I saw colors I'd thought I knew blended and refracted into new, alien hues that weren't like anything I'd ever imagined before. A group of fish that reminded me of empty bags with tails circling like some weird underwater tornado. It was breathtaking— that or my bottled air was getting thin and I was about to die. I was tripping over everything I wanted to share with her until I remembered her drunken smile and the way she'd been ogling me.

  Just what the hell did we do last night?

  I didn't see the thick metal pipes of the sea stead's legs until we'd nearly crashed into them. If I wasn't on the job I could have spent hours adrift at sea thinking about her. But I was on the job and I couldn't goof off daydreaming about waking up next to her or how the killing heat inside of me had changed or what an absolutely mind-blowing night I must have had but couldn't remember.

  I silently cursed a fat clump of bubbles and I headed up to the surface to get to work. I didn't really know what I was expecting but it certainly wasn't another palace in the middle of the ocean. There was maybe three meters of industrial-looking catwalks, docks and random pipes, and then on top of that was a palace. It wasn't as boxy as most buildings I'd seen on world, but it wasn't quite rounded either. The entire thing had one thick coat of off-cream paint that might have been either white or yellow at one point before the elements had taken their time with it.

  Our crack team of amateurs found a stairway we could reach from the water and made the loudest, slowest, most obnoxious covert entry I'd ever witnessed or participated in. Luckily, no one was around to notice except us. Once the worst of the underwater gear was shed and stowed things finally started moving a little more smoothly.

  The ocean palace was huge, so we split up into pairs to speed things up. Celio hadn't been here in years (even if this place looked like he'd just been here yesterday) so his memory of where he'd kept his things was spotty at best. I would have thought the keys to a sizable fortune would be the kind of thing he'd keep a better watch on, but when you got rich enough I guess a few billion was pocket change.

  Idris and I started out slow. Her background must have been a little more upstanding than mine because she wasn't a very good burglar. Fortunately my criminal skills were good enough for two. We moved from one neat and tidy room to the next, leaving disorganized and displaced belongings haphazardly stowed behind us. At a glance, it seemed like Celio had let his maids keep the place tidy after he left. With any luck no one would get fired over the state we were leaving the sea stead in as we ransacked the place.

  It was always a uniquely personal experience to snoop through someone's home while they weren't there. It was a peek into their mind, beyond the image they projected to the world. Even if I'd known nothing of Celio, I came to a comparable image of the man by the time we'd tossed the fifth room.

  This place belonged to a man of unlimited means, there was nothing beyond his grasp and he wanted everyone to know it. Appearances were everything to someone like him. Here was a man who wasn't trying to rob the world blind, he was selling his dream. He wanted to change the world, to save it whatever that entailed, and he needed to be larger than life to do it. I hoped he could pull it off. I hoped his dream would be worth all the blood we shed getting there, but I'd seen the cracks in his mask.

  I knew just how fragile the podium he'd place himself on was. His life was a mirage in a smokescreen, always one strong gust away from being scattered into nothingness. Until his grand dream was realized, it was nothing more than a shimmer on the horizon.

  "Did you find anything yet?" Idris asked, patting down an entire hallway's worth of coats to check their pockets.

  "I've found plenty, just not what we're looking for." I answered. Idris sidled up to me as she kept up her unobtrusive search.

  "You and Bim seemed pretty friendly this morning…"

  "That's not really your business." I answered curtly, glad that our work meant I could keep my back turned to her.

  "I'll drop it."

  "Thanks-"

  "But first I've gotta ask. How did that even work? I mean, she's an alien right? Does she have everything like a normal girl down there? Or was it all… Tentacles, Goop and Hellfire?"

  It was a question I hadn't even thought to ask yet. From what I saw this morning I was pretty sure that was normal for a woman, but I had no idea what it was like past that. I'd never done any more than look before. I really was a damned cherry boy. How the hell could I not remember what I'd done last night! I could have had the best mind-blowing night ever and I'd blacked out like a chump.

  "I don't know. It was… normal, I guess." I finally said after way too long of a pause.

  "What do you mean you don't know? Do you need a comparison?" Idris asked, abandoning her search to fix her attention on me. "Wait! Were you a virgin? Was she your first? Ya Allah that's so cute!"

  I felt my cheeks reddening and for once it wasn't the killing fire inside of me. "No! I mean, nothing happened between us last night-"

  "Botshit. The way she's been drolling over you all day, I know what a girl looks like after she's had a few round trips to cloud nine. So dish. What kind of hardware is she rocking? Inquiring minds want to know! The betting pool is up to a few months pay, I'll split it with you."

  A long, choppy blast of gunfire echoed from the floor above us. I snatched up the blocky waterproof rifle and ran towards it. Idris found her priorities and followed a few seconds after.

  "Normal people run AWAY from gun shots." She hissed.

  "We can't all fight in power armor." I countered, backtracking through the rooms we'd searched until I found a staircase.

  "If I get shot, I'm going to bleed all over you. I'm gonna shit myself right on your lap as I die. I'll-" She kept grumbling, but I stopped listening.

  We took the stairs cautiously. I was pretty sure Idris had her rifle pointed right at my back as I led the way, but I didn't turn my head to check. My own rifle felt like a lead brick, slow and cumbersome in my hands. I wished I had my revolver. And a cigarette. I'd have killed for a cigarette right then.

  I made do with the steady burn of the killing flames inside of me as I crested the stairs.

  Lacy was waiting on a knee in a left-hand doorway, rifle trained dead-center of my skull in that split second before I'd even spotted her. We both lowered our aim. She had me dead to rights and we both knew it. Lucky thing she was on my side. She answered before I could ask.

  "Yeah, that was us. We've got the drives. We can leave."

  I took a breath to respond. It stank of odd gunsmoke, splintered wood and blood. Now that I was closer, I could see flecks of red splattered inside the room she was at. Somewhere buried in my memory, another doorway just like this one had beckoned me closer. It made me want to freeze up but the heat inside my bones compelled me to keep moving forward.

  I saw everything at once. Servants' quarters, housing the skeleton crew that had been keeping this place in order for the master's return; the pattern of the blood, a linear scope of violence from a single stationary attacker to the cowering crowd; Eric clutching a bundle of hardened thumb drives in one hand, a smoking gun in the other; the family, the eldest vainly trying to shield the youngest with their bodies. I saw it all but one thing stood out in my mind.

  A child, no older than three or four, failing to shake her mother awake, blood weakly gushing from the tiny bullet holes in her chest and arms and stomach. The mother didn't awaken. From the blood loss, I could tell that little girl would be joining her family all to soon.

  My fist connected with Eric's jaw before anyone could even blink. He rocked back a step without flinching, riding the blows momentum.

  "What the hell is wrong with you!" I roared.

  "Old guy had the drives, the rest saw us take them. Discreet. No witnesses. Those were our orders." Eric's voice was ice cold.

  "Who were they going to tell!? A nosy fish? There's no one out here but us! They didn't need to die!"

  "They didn't need to be here either." Eric stated, still flat calm. "They made their choice."

  "In case you didn't notice, we're in the middle of the ocean! Where else were they going to go?" I snapped.

  Lacy shifted in place without a word, still standing at the doorway half-in, half-out. She hadn't pulled the trigger but she hadn't stopped it either.

  "Hero, take it easy-" Idris said from the hall.

  "NO!" The word tore from my lips in a snarl. No to calming down. No to this senseless killing. No to being so fucking emotionally detached from what we did every time someone pulled the trigger. "You killed seven innocent people just-" I couldn't find the words. Red-hot rage was clawing its way up my throat. I couldn't think! It was all I could manage not to scream my primal fury at him as my bones burned hotter inside me.

  "People die every day." Idris countered. Still standing outside, still saying in every way but words that her hands were clean. That she wasn't involved with this.

  "How many people do you think we killed yesterday? Six-hundred? Eight? A thousand? Those are just the ones we know of." Lacy added.

  "That's different…" I said, but I couldn't find any conviction to lend the words.

  "Because they chose to be there?" Eric asked, finally dropping his gaze to look me in the eyes. He had his body rigidly under control, but there was a raw hatred burning in his eyes that matched my own. "You might be right about them. Maybe it was different because it was kill or be killed. What about all them regular folks who suddenly had their backyard turned into a warzone? Sure, we tried to limit collateral but shit happens-"

  "Eric," Idris interrupted. "You're not helping."

  "You're right, I'm not. I'm teaching the Rookie a lesson so he doesn't get us all killed." He said, bending over so we could be face to face and he could spit every word at me without looking down. "You want to stand there and pretend your shit don't stink because you don't have the guts to stand by it. Look at them."

  I did, hoping to find enough spite that I could throw another punch without thinking about it. It was a familiar sight that still hit me like a sucker punch to the guts and set the heat inside me burning. How many people had I killed in cold blood? Thirty? Fifty? I could tell myself it was always different, because they were murders or lunatics or they'd done things to kids, but was it? How many times had I painted a wall with an unarmed person and walked away without thinking about it? How many times had I pulled the trigger and turned a blind eye?

  Too many.

  "It's her or me. Them or us." Eric said the words meticulously, an aggravated instructor giving a remedial lesson to a slow student. "You want to live long enough to see a paymail, Rookie? Then get with the fucking program."

  "No one paid you to murder these people." I uttered disgusted.

  With him. With this. With myself. But that wasn't true, was it? We were paid to be here and to get the job done. The flames burning inside of guts whelmed up in anticipation.

  "And how much did you get paid to burn down them slums? Hmm!?!" Eric's composure finally cracked as he spat the question to my face. "Here we are six weeks later and they're still pulling bodies out of the rubble! You got one thing right. I'm a killer, that's what I do. But I ain't no fucking murderer. That's what you are."

  The words cut true. He could have slapped me in the face right then and I wouldn't have noticed. I was a murderer, in every sense of the word and it made my blood boil. My bones were solid flame, my lungs were a blazing furnace and my heart was like the molten core of a star. The temperature in the room shot up ten degrees, then thirty, then a hundred! I was standing in the middle of it with my hands locked into white-hot fists that I wanted to smash into something. Into someone.

  Idris sidled away from the door. Lacy pivoted on the spot, making sure she could snap up her aim any second. I barely noticed either. My eyes were locked on Eric and his on me.

  "You don't like that do you? Truth hurts, don't it? What you gonna do about? Smack me? Shoot me? Burn me up, like you did all them other folks? You gonna murder me too?"

  I wanted to. I wanted to so badly it burned.

  If I called his bluff, I'd kill him and we both knew it. Sweat was beading across his face but I could tell that was just the heat. His eyes were set. He was begging me to show my true colors and get it over with. He was right for all the wrong reasons. If I did, I was only proving him right about me. If I killed him and called it justice then I really was just a murderer.

  With great effort, I throttled the killing heat inside of me.

  "That's what I thought you lil' punk ass bitch. One last thing-"

  His fist was lodged in my stomach before I could blink and it took every scrap of willpower I had to keep from exploding into a fireball then and there.

  "You ever throw hands at me again, I will bust your skull open and bury my foot so far up your ass that you won't ever walk again. Now let's get the fuck out of here so you can go back to playing house with your lil' alien bitch. Don't you dare forget that you're elbow deep in this shit with the rest of us, Hero."