Ghosts of Punktown Read Online Free PDF Page A

longer queasy about inhaling it. At first, it had been thought that the gas had inorganic origins...until it had been determined that it was a byproduct of decomposition. In a way, the Ha Jiin were correct in deeming it the spirits of their ancestors. It was a trace of themselves, surviving them, lingering in the air.
     
         More glowing spheres set into the walls. Stake followed the chant, which wavered as if the person uttering it were underwater. He followed the blip of light on his wrist scanner.
     
         He turned down another branching hallway, ducking through a latticework of tree roots that had grown through cracks in the low ceiling. Peripherally, he kept aware of the holes dug into the walls to either side of him. Men, women, children. Dead for centuries, many of them. But it wasn’t the dead he feared. Some Ha Jiin soldiers wore a wrist device that deflected the probing of scans such as the one Stake used. And Ha Jiin soldiers, lying on their bellies in these honeycombs, had been known to fire rifles at scouts such as himself.
     
         A circular chamber opened beyond, the terminus of this particular passageway. From the threshold, Stake saw a man in a Ha Jiin soldier’s uniform squatting over a body on a wooden slab. His hands were working, working, back and forth with a moist sound. He mostly blocked the body before him, but Stake glimpsed the man’s hands and saw they were yellow. Stained with a mineral solution.
     
         Stake took his first stealthy steps into the room. His thumb paused on the toggle of his pistol. Life or death, at a simple flip of a switch.
     
         The hunkered soldier was not chanting so much as he was sobbing. And it was his heavy accent that had prevented Stake from understanding the word he sobbed, before.
     
         “Sorry,” the man was croaking in English, over and over as he slathered on the preserving mixture. “Sorry. Sorry. Sorry...”
     
         Now Stake could better see the body that lay on the slab. Even partially covered in yellow pigment, he could tell that its flesh was not blue. The body was that of a dead Earth female. She had short hair like a boy’s, her features looked Asian, and she must have been about nineteen. Her Colonial Forces uniform lay folded nearby, where the man had removed it. He had undressed her. And in that moment, that was all Stake could think of. With gritted teeth, he stepped closer and pointed the gun.
     
         A pebble crunched under his boot. The Ha Jiin whirled around, his black eyes flashing laser red, and Stake shot him through the front of his throat.
     
         The man pitched back, eyes wide, across the bare legs of the yellow-painted Earth woman. He stared up at Stake, trying to mouth words, but only blood bubbled up over his lips. Stake didn’t need to read lips to understand the word he was mouthing. Over and over.
     
         The man had scars on his face – two horizontal raised bars on his right cheek, and three on his left cheek – to indicate the number of family members he had lost in the war. Family members he might have carried down into this very sepulcher, and coated with yellow mineral as he had been doing to this teenage girl he had killed.
     
         “Sorry,” the man mouthed, dying. “Sorry...”
     
         Stake shot him several times in the face, to erase that haunting visage.
     
         But he had only transferred it to his own. As if the man’s ghost had fled his body in that instant, to possess him.
     
     
     
    4
     
         He was well, they assured him. The skin of his chest was not too tight. Was he sleeping all right? Did he need some meds for that?
     
         Cal Williams had looked away from the doctor’s face, unable to meet his eyes. The man’s skin tone suggested some African ancestry in his mix, but his eyes had something of a slanted look, too. It seemed all the eyes of the city were Ha Jiin eyes, watching him, no matter what face