The Belter's Story (BRIGAND) Read Online Free PDF

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    "The best I could. We made it out." I knew that wasn't what he meant, but I hoped he'd leave it alone.
    "No. I mean to me. I feel different." His green eyes wouldn't leave mine. No matter where I looked, I could feel them following.
    "Nothing. I dragged you out. You set off the… whatever those were. I helped you climb back out of the rille." I used the same tone I'd always used with Jase when he pressed me for things I didn't want to talk about. Facts, nothing more.
    "I don't remember everything. But I do remember burning. It seemed like everywhere. My whole body was on fire. And then, I don't know what happened, but the pain faded and I could move."
    He stared hard at me. "Now I feel odd. Like everything's closer. Like I can see past people, or maybe into them. It's hard to describe. I know it was you, Cromley. "
    Suddenly, he smiled. " Merde. Listen to me. I sound like a fucking civilian. Do I give an actual shit? I'm not dead and I have you to thank for it."
    Rox grinned and reached out with his right hand, palm down. " Mortem, Jack. "
    I stared at him for a moment, confused, but sensing that this was one of those moments that always made me uncomfortable. It was the Jase part of me that understood what Rox was doing. Don't be stupid, Crom. He's trying to thank you.
    I moved to clasp his hand, but he sat up, grabbed my wrist with his left hand and positioned it under his, hands gripping forearms. "Like this. Now you say, ' Fear me, bitch. '"
    I did and Rox laughed, "Hah! That's how it's done. You’re now an official honorary Confed Marine."
    I smiled back at him. It was an honest smile, one without annoyance or confusion or hesitation. It felt good, like something important had just happened. Or at least something worth remembering.
    They shipped Rox out on the next transport. He went home, but we had nowhere else to go. We were up against something far bigger than we were. As big as the world for all we knew. The diggers surged out of the ice in places that had once been safe and, even though we fought them with everything we had, they killed us by the dozens. Then hundreds. Then more.
    Sardar was lost in the first attack on our hab. A huge digger tore through the shielded wall as if it didn't exist and destroyed the entire habitat. I was in the reclamation crew that found what was left of his body — it fit easily into one of the collection bags we used to gather europine. Madera died a few months later, along with a whole contingent of other miners who lingered a little too long in the rilles. We'd learned to work fast, to swarm a lode and then run. But sometimes the diggers were quicker.
    There were no longer ceremonies for the dead. No energy for mourning. There wasn't time. We knew the thing we fought was alive. We knew it was fighting us because we were hurting it. No, we were killing it. We didn't care — any more than our ancestors cared about the thousands of life forms that were eradicated on Earth before the Irezi built their arcologies and moved whole biomes to Mars.
    This was survival.
    Our strategy and justification were simple. Without the nodules, we would die. If taking those nodules killed something, then so be it. Belters can be stubborn when it matters and the europine, whatever it was, never had much hope of stopping us. It took years and thousands of lives, but our engineers devised defenses. Our supervisors hired mercenaries with heavy weapons to raze diggers by the millions.
    We adapted. We conquered. We won.
    I adapted too. Or perhaps 'we' is the better word. Whatever it was in the europine that had changed Su was changing me too, but it wasn't a one-way transformation. My brain became our brain. Jase and Su and fragments of the diggers that I drained all merged into 'us'. There was still a part that we recognized as my former self, the Cromley, but we were becoming a true composite. In time, we devised augments that could carry our other selves, and the burgeoning talents that came with