Ninth Life

Book 3: The Factus Sequence

by Stark Holborn

Genres: General Fiction; Westerns; Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

The Ballad of Halo Jones meets Becky Chambers’ Wayfarers by way of 3:10 to Yuma; a clash of law and lawlessness, storytelling and truth in a headlong romp across the stars.

After forty years of wreaking havoc across the galaxy, the outlaw Nine Lives – AKA Former General Gabriella Ortiz – has finally run out of lives. Shot down into a backwater at the system’s edge, she is rescued by Deputy Air Marshall Havemercy Grey.

Hav is a true soul, trying to uphold what is right in the heedless wastes. Hav is determined to see justice done. And Hav could sure use that 20-million bounty...

But escorting the most dangerous fugitive in the system across the stars is no easy task, especially when decades of fire and destruction are catching up with her, and every gutspill with a pistol wants that payday. So when Ortiz offers a deal – to keep them both alive, as long as Hav listens to the stories of her lives – Hav can't refuse.

There's just one catch: everywhere they go, during every brawl and gunfight and explosive escape, people say the same thing – don't let her talk...

Release date: July 23, 2024

Publisher: Titan Books

Print pages: 336

Sample

A WORD ON WHAT FOLLOWS

AS A MILITARY proctor, my task is ostensibly a clear one: locate, collate and evaluate information relevant to the subject at hand, and present it in as objective a way as possible for posterity. However, the very presence of this note should suggest to you that – in this particular instance – my task has been impossible. I have already been forced to insert myself into this dossier in a way I find at best uncomfortable and at worst irresponsible. But there’s simply no way around it.

Don’t let her talk is a refrain that arises again and again in relation to the individual investigated herein. I never spoke to the woman; indeed, she was deceased long before my involvement. And yet, in the act of compiling an account of her life, I suspect I have done the very thing I was warned against.

If I were a superstitious or indeed a religious person, I would say that she knew about me, that she foresaw my presence and sent her words out across space and time to burrow straight into my brain.

After much deliberation, I have left the above comment intact as an example of my difficulties with this subject.

Objectively, this dossier is a collation of materials relating to the life of Former General GABRIELLA ORTIZ, Implacabilis, Hero of the Battle of Kin, known at various points throughout her life as ‘The Dead General’, ‘Dolores Lazlo’, ‘Orts’, ‘La Pesadilla’, and perhaps most famously, the outlaw ‘Nine Lives’.

Owing to the nature of her activities, factual details about Ortiz are scant and limited largely to her early years. I have tried, where possible, to verify the accounts provided, but this has proved a fruitless task. Some witnesses deny their original testimonies. Some accounts differ only in the minor details, while others are wholly contradictory. The most substantial portion of this report consists of fragments of the now notorious ‘Testimony of Havemercy Grey’, broadcast to the black-market tangle after the explosive events of Ortiz’s final days. This log was recovered from the tangle in a damaged and fragmented state. It is possible that other portions exist within bootlegged copies, but at present they remain lost. Narrative techniques have therefore been used to translate the log into long-form prose more easily parsed by readers. While every effort has been made to retain the veracity of the recordings, there are necessarily sections where compilers were forced to use greater creative liberty than is ordinarily recommended.

Therefore, I would advise future readers and researchers to take what is presented herein as a speculative document rather than a factual one: a work of vernacular history, an attempt to provide a framework within which to understand Ortiz’s mythos as a potential cult hero to millions across the system.

Don’t let her talk. An impossible maxim. She has already begun to talk, through me.

And you are already listening.

Military Proctor Idrisi Blake

 

 

AT FIRST I thought the ship was just a figment. No one flew out here if they could help it, so far from Jumptown or the mine’s landing dock. But when I peered at the scuff’s locator the glitching screen confirmed my sighting, told me that what I was seeing was real: a ship falling from the sky. A ship running a scrambler to hide its name. Bandit, then, smuggler, outlaw, merc. Human, Pa always said, even if he still wore a black eye or blood-crusted lip from the last encounter. Always human.

The storms on Jaypea were bad that day, jostling the scuff as it buzzed a few feet above the ground. I gripped the handlebars hard to keep it steady, hands stinging as the toxic dust worked its way into my skin, into the blisters that rawed each palm, my quick pink flesh weeping the tears my eyes wouldn’t. Hadn’t had blisters like that for years. Not since I left the House, stopped digging Father’s twig garden. My gloves were gone, and I knew that soon the skin of my knuckles would be cracked and inflamed, but still I hung on, rode on, until the call sign blinked and vanished.

If not for the winds, I would have heard the crash. As it was, I only saw it: a red bird burning on the dust, spewing smoke into the air. A small ship, a Merganser maybe, not meant for Gat-jumping, let alone a ditch dive from orbit. I stared up at the Gat, barely visible through the nickel clouds, the red lights of its vast ring structure gleaming dully, like beads of blood on a wound that never healed, a hole torn into the flesh of space. It looked like the ship had tried to veer away from the official lanes as if intending to pass us by and fly straight for the Dead Line. Only someone desperate would have risked it.

Had I known who – what – that ship held, I might have turned the scuff and ridden away. Might have sold everything on my body and maybe my body itself to buy passage to another place. Peeled myself from history and sent it spinning off without me. But I didn’t know. I had no idea what was waiting.

Sometimes I think it was sheer luck, how we were thrown into each other’s paths. You would have said it wasn’t luck, that it was a road we had been on since the carbon that made us first collided and fused into being. Entangled roads we had already been walking for a thousand years before either of us were born.

All I know is that if I hadn’t gone to the Intercession House that day, none of it would have happened. I wouldn’t have been out, riding the bone-white wastes when I should have been behind my desk at the station with a cup of murk at my elbow. I wouldn’t have looked up and seen the smoke of your falling through the nickel snow that swirled constantly beneath the

terraform. But I had. And so, in this world, I dismounted and walked towards your wreckage.

*   *   *

The heat of it kept me back, the creak and groan of hot metal and sizzling plastic. I walked around the dying bird, one step, two, three, the grit crunching beneath my boots, unable to do anything to put an end to its suffering. I saw blood, bubbling on the broken glass of the nav windows, dripping red into the white dirt. It led around the wreckage, a crimson trail, all the way to you.

I thought you were a war ghost. I’d never seen one during the day. They usually came at night, riding the wind, stumbling between worlds. But you looked so real, with the blood, and the footprints, stumbling away from me…

A heartbeat, a blink and the storm light changed, turning darker. I waited for you to vanish too, but you didn’t. So I took a step forwards.

You fell to your knees, like someone in grief or penitence. You see, I didn’t know you then. Where were you trying to walk to? There was nowhere to go. Your suit was torn, the dust drinking down the blood, the oxygen tank on your back half ripped away, but still, you tried to rise.

I took out my charge gun and levelled it, the blue fly of its sight landing on your back. I might have called a warning, can’t remember now, but you made no sign of having heard so I reached out my un-gloved hand to touch your shoulder.

You moved so fast it was a blur. All I knew was motion and pain, the gun tumbling from my grip before I could fire. An elbow drove into my face, cracking the plastic of my helmet, sending me sprawling backwards into the dust, and I knew – without doubt – that I would die there, that nickel snow would fill my eyes and eat away my skin and no one would ever know what had happened.

A shape filled my vision through the spidering plastic: the barrel of a pistol, a hand caked in dust and blood, a silhouette against the blind sky.

I don’t know why I did it. Perhaps my fathers’ teachings were lodged in me deeper than I thought and I wanted to die free of the helmet, so my atoms would find God. But in the second before you pulled the trigger, I wrenched the visor of my helmet up and looked into your eyes.

I saw the face of a killer – a mask of gore, black hair like dried snakes, blood lodged in the deep grooves beside your nose and mouth, eyes like bullet holes punched in flesh that locked on mine and widened in shock.

“You,” you said, and fell.

Fragment from The Testimony of Havemercy Grey

 

Accorded Military Division: Air Fleet

Personnel Information

CLASSIFIED: Grade III & Above

NAME: Gabriella Ortiz

PLACE OF BIRTH: Frontera, Felicitatum (Previously known as Jericho)

RANK: Captain-General Western Air Fleet Minority Force (C Class)

DECORATIONS: Distinguished Conduct I & II. Valour in Flight. Bolito’s Fury. Fleet Service Medal. The Procella Crescent.

OFFENCES (known): Treason. Murder. Assault. Dereliction of Duty. Insubordination. Theft of Accorded Military Property. Fraternisation with the Enemy.

OFFICIAL CONVICTIONS: None known.

CURRENT STATUS: Deceased [Aged 45 years, 7 months]

FORMER STATUS: Deceased [Aged 13 years 5 months]

SUBJECT BIOGRAPHY:

Gabriella Ortiz was born on the moon of Felicitatum – known before the Limit War as Jericho – in the electronics warehouse-city of Frontera. The oldest of three children to parents Itziar Ortiz and Samble Gilby, who both worked as security for Frontera’s elite foreperson class.

At age six, the Free Limits launched a strike upon Frontera, intended to disrupt technology production. Of her family of five, Ortiz was the only survivor. After processing as an orphan, she was assigned to one of the Accorded War Camps in the medical district-city of Asclepius. It was from here – at the age of six years and four months – that she was recruited to the Accord’s Minority Force Programme, and shipped to a training camp on the moon of Tamane. (See accompanying information.)

After passing initial physical and cognitive tests, Ortiz was selected for further development at age eight, and began a rigorous military training, education and enhancement programme on the military-owned planet of Voivira. Excelling in every activity – and showing particular strength in physical combat and military strategy – she was assigned at age nine to the role of second lieutenant in the Minority Force’s C Class, where she quickly progressed, becoming first lieutenant within six months, and captain within a year. After several successful field operations she was fast-tracked for promotion and given her first command of an agile Air Fleet company known as the Bolts: a search and destroy outfit tasked with tracking and eliminating Free Limiter guerrilla units. Ortiz proved herself a brilliant and ruthless strategist, achieving exceptional results in combat operations across contested space and attaining the highest capture rate of any Minority Force captain to date. On one notable occasion, after tracing a Free Limit strike crew to a hidden enemy space station known as The Forward Kin, she ordered an audacious rapid assault, leading the charge herself. Though vastly outnumbered, the Bolts attacked with such precision and rapidity that the Limiter force was largely destroyed, along with the station’s fuel and weapon caches, forcing a surrender and securing Ortiz the rank of general within the Minority Force, the moniker ‘Hero of the Battle of Kin’ and the coveted Procella Crescent.

For the next two years, General Ortiz continued to make a name for herself within both the Minority Force and the Accorded Companies

fighting on many of the Limit War’s most dangerous fronts. (See detailed history of military engagements.) Though she was criticised by some for unorthodox tactics and generous interpretation of orders, these qualities were nevertheless coupled with an exemplary success rate and a fierce loyalty to the Accord, and at age thirteen she was named commander of the Western Air Fleet of the Accorded Nations. This decision was not unilaterally approved of within higher command, and was most notably protested by Infantry Commander Salazar Fan, who was vocal in his assertion that the Minority Force were little more than propaganda tools.

Soon after this, the Free Limits launched a deadly biological weapons attack on the cadet training camps of Tamane, resulting in eight thousand, eight hundred and eighty-four casualties: a mis-step which cost them many of their allies and heralded their ultimate defeat.

Following the close of hostilities, General Ortiz continued in her position, and was assigned to peace-keeping duties in the Western Sector. It was here, en route to a minor insurgency on the satellite moon of Prodor, that her ship experienced a fatal malfunction and crashed on the desert moon of Factus, leaving no survivors. At age thirteen years and five months, General Gabriella Ortiz was officially declared deceased.

This, by all accounts, was the first time she died.

 

WHEN YOU COLLAPSED onto the bone-coloured dirt I thought you had died right in front of me. You looked small in death, and I almost laughed, a desperate, choked laugh at the course my day had taken. But then I peered through my cracked visor and saw that your chest was moving, that you were breathing.

You.

My nose was bleeding but I picked myself up from the spot where I should have lain as a corpse and scrambled for my gun. My wrist ached as I levelled it at you, expecting you to rise at any moment.

You didn’t. No surprise, really. The fact you were alive after a crash like that was a miracle. Or something else…

Edging forwards, I kicked at your leg. Nothing. Up close, I could smell the wreck on you, blood and smoke and sweat and something I couldn’t name, sharp and clean, like the smell of the dunes when the nickel snow settled. A metallic odour, too. It was coming from your suit: Delos steelsilk, I realised, light as air and tough as tungsten. I’d never seen one like it. Not even the Shockneys could afford something like that.

You still held the gun, fingers locked around its grip, but I wrestled it free, stuck it in my own belt and worked up the courage to look at your face.

It was covered in blood, glistening in livid streaks like the glimmerworm makeup the workers wore in the bordel, settling into the deep grooves around your mouth, between your eyes. Sweat-matted black hair threaded through with silver like the lines that glinted between a droger’s train. Not young, but somehow not old either.

I sat back in the dust and took a gulp from the oxygen spigot on my vest, blotting my nose with a blistered hand and trying to clear my mind, trying to think. Whoever you were, you were running from something.

It came to me, like a seed splitting open to reveal white and unformed matter within: that your presence here might be more than a coincidence. That it might be them. The hairs on my neck rose. Hours ago, I had prayed desperately for a way out, and now here you were.

The nickel snow in the air grew thicker and the filter in my suit gave a plaintive bleep as it kicked up a notch, working on maximum to keep the dust from my lungs. Soon the storm would be at its height, and would cover my tracks, burying everything beneath a layer of sickly yellow powder.

That’s what made my decision. I bent and took hold of that priceless suit and began to drag you towards the scuff. At the time, I didn’t understand how someone so small could be so heavy, as if your bones were filled with mercury, not marrow. As I hauled you up into the sorry box, your hand flopped and something slipped from your fingers, landing in a puff of dust. Something round, like a coin, its pattern picked out in blood.

Without thinking I grabbed the thing and stuffed it into my pocket.

I’d already made my first mistake that day. What I didn’t know is that I had just made my second.

*   *   *

I made it back to the station with the storm on my heels. The white day had turned dark, the yellow light on the comms tower beating weakly. The station itself wasn’t much to look at: three pre-fab habs, welded together to form a U shape, huge fuel canisters languishing in the dirt like rust-bellied slugs and a four-berth dock for larger ships that no one ever used. Home.

Any relief I felt at making it back before the storm vanished when I saw the bird idling in the yard outside. A large, blue, low-altitude bird, wearing only a thin coat of nickel dust rather than a hard-baked shell, like everything else on Jaypea. Bile rose in my throat. A

A visit from Ma Shockney was only ever a bad thing, but now, after today… I started to shake as four men in oil-black body armour emerged from the ship. Were they here for me? Could I run?

But it was too late for that. They had already seen me, they could chase me down in minutes in that ship of theirs. I had no choice but to ride the scuff into the stable, haul the rattling doors shut behind me and pray to the God of my fathers that Ma Shockney didn’t yet know what I had done.

She stepped through the stable’s airlock before I had even removed my helmet, flanked by her favourite dog, a six-foot slab of blonde Brovos-raised resentment called Rotry Gaun. Rotten-Eye, we called her behind her back, for the permanent eye infections she always had from too much cid and not enough hand-washing. She looked me over as Ma Shockney strode into the stable.

‘Where have you been?’ she demanded.

Ma Shockney was everything Jaypea wasn’t. Where most people were lean and grey-rimed and rough-skinned, she was somehow saturated: hair dyed extra-blue to bring out the black, cheeks silvery-sculpted, clothes of hues so vivid they hurt to look at in this place where colours faded within hours. Even her eyes shimmered like slick oil, from where they’d been polarised against the light.

I looked away. ‘Out to the House.’

‘What happened to your face?’ Gaun slurred at her shoulder.

I sniffed, heart kicking hard. ‘Nothing. Nosebleed.’

Ma Shockney’s eyes narrowed. ‘You’ve been with my son.’

‘No.’

She scoffed, and I don’t know what would have happened if Garrick hadn’t stepped through the door to save me.

‘Deputy Grey has been out on a call,’ he said, elbowing past Gaun. ‘What is it that you wanted with them, ma’am?’

Shockney’s eyes left mine, but I still felt the weight of her gaze, like the crescents of nails dug into flesh. Deputy Grey, Garrick had called me. But to Ma Shockney, I wasn’t the law, or anything like it. I was just Hav. Hav the gasrat, Hav the freak, Hav the preacher’s kid. Hav the nothing.

‘The new mining site,’ she barked. ‘I expect there will be some resistance. I want you there when we break ground. Both of you.’

Garrick’s expression didn’t change. ‘That’s a job for mine security,’ he said. ‘As members of the AIM we’re supposed to remain impartial in—’

‘Oh Al,’ Ma Shockney smiled, her cherry-stained lips twisting. ‘Have you made the mistake of thinking you actually work for the AIM again? They don’t even know you exist. You’re a file number to them, a checked box in some low-grade government archive on Prosper. You could be mechanical dogs and it wouldn’t make the slightest bit of difference. But here

 I am, the one who pays your wages, asking you to do a simple job to protect the property that keeps this sorry rock alive and breathing.’ She raised one painted brow.

Garrick inclined his head, gloved hands locked together as if he wanted to crush the voice from Ma Shockney’s windpipe. Thing is, she was right. We weren’t the law here. We were just ciphers, legal requirements for the mine to function. Vests on sticks. The uniforms were official enough. Mine had belonged to the dead old man before me, and the dead young woman before him; the crescent moon embedded in the deep blue fabric was dulled and scratched. A symbol of authority that no one saw when they looked at us.

‘Ma’am,’ Garrick nodded.

Shockney made a scathing sound. ‘And you,’ she threw a glance my way. ‘If you see my son, tell him he is expected in Management and will be docked a week’s pay. Maybe that will shake this fetish for gasrats out of his system.’

I forced myself to nod, hands clenched behind my back. The sting of my blistered palms kept me steady, reminded me what was what. That, and the thought of you, slumped out of sight in the sorry box.

Neither Garrick nor I spoke again until Gaun and Ma Shockney had swept out of the stable, leaving the odour of wealth behind them. Only when I heard the roar of their birds lifting off did I take a ragged breath.

‘Thank you,’ I murmured.

Garrick only nodded and took a tin of cid from his pocket, opening it carefully to dip a little finger into the pale, sparkling powder. Cid – Lucidity – was a fear inhibitor, reins for the mind, more valuable than water to many who worked on rocks like this, close to Factus. I grew up hating the stuff, the way it made people look at horrible wounds in their own flesh and laugh, the way it erased consequences from their minds. Ben used it. A flash of memory returned, his mouth twisted cruelly, his eyes dull and swamped with certainty…

‘Bad day,’ Garrick said, closing the tin. ‘We’ll have spooks tonight.’ He blinked. ‘How’s your old man?’

I shrugged, as if my head weren’t spinning, as if my throat weren’t stinging with bile. ‘Same.’

He grunted. Wouldn’t insult Pa, not to my face. Perhaps not even in the mine’s benzenery. It was one of the things that made him different.

‘You see Ben Shockney out there, or not?’

A stab of pain, like someone taking a wrench to my insides. ‘No.’

‘Thought you might have had a word or two to say to him about the plans for the new mining site.’

‘Well, I didn’t see him.’

He shrugged, turning away. I glanced at the sorry box. What I was about to

do defied everything I’d grown up believing. ‘Garrick,’ I said. ‘On the way back from the House, I saw something.’

‘What?’

‘A crash landing. A wreck.’

His head snapped up. ‘Why didn’t you say? Any survivors?’

Mutely, I unbolted the door of the sorry box and let it fall open to reveal you there, slumped and bloody. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘One.’

Fragment from The Testimony of Havemercy Grey

 

BREAKING NEWS MY stellular auditors, the Premier of Delos Mx Lutho himself is dead. That’s right, the immortal magnate of metal, Nickel King and Big Boss of Business has succumbed at last, not to infirmity but to the assassin’s blade, or the assassin’s pistol, we’re not quite sure! But what we do know is that Mx Xoon was murdered yesterday by a lone assassin named as the infamous outlaw Nine Lives herself, ...