Perdition (Dred Chronicles 1)

Tam turned as the lights flickered. “That means a ship’s coming in.”

Because the machinery was so old, it stressed the circuits. The ship couldn’t efficiently light the whole vessel as well as go into lockdown. It had been a while since she’d headed toward the docking area to assess the new fish. She wasn’t greedy for bodies, like Grigor and Priest were. Grigor fed on fear, sometimes literally, she thought, and Priest brainwashed his recruits into thinking he was the living incarnation of some god. They worshipped him over in Abaddon, which was what he called his section of Perdition.

She cocked her head, knowing it was a scary look. “Want to go see what the universe has thrown away today?”

Tam nodded. “We lost a few guys in the skirmish with Grigor.”

Most of their daily conflicts occurred with Grigor or Priest, the two greatest threats to Queensland. Grigor had been here longest, and he was constantly pressing to see what new areas he could claim. Dred had the bad luck to be his neighbor. With Priest on one side and Grigor on the other, she was fighting constantly to maintain her territory.

Sometimes, however, Mungo came out in search of blood; and you had to fight hard against his people. They were the hungriest in the ship. He was a short, red-haired man with a bushy beard, pale blue eyes, and rosy cheeks. By his appearance, one could be forgiven for guessing he was harmless . . . right before he ripped out your throat with his bare hands and tried to eat your face. She’d heard that Mungo liked children best . . . for all kinds of things, and those preferences had gotten him thrown into Perdition early on.

They prey on weakness. Uncertainty.

She had little of either left in her. Whether her decisions were right hardly signified. Nothing mattered in this hole. The smart ones gave up and died; maybe they found the afterlife the priests and holy women had promised, shortly after her arrest. At first, during the trial, she had missionaries in her cell every day, trying to save her soul, trying to sell her on Mary’s grace, but after everything she’d seen, everything she’d done, she couldn’t believe.

Could. Not.

The awful cast of her ability had burned anything like faith out of her. Over the years, she’d learned to block it out—to read darker emotions only of her own volition. Otherwise, she lived with a barrage of other people’s violence drumming in her skull. That was probably why she’d snapped. Maybe her sentence would’ve been lighter, at a different facility, if she could have brought herself to whisper those words of remorse the judge so badly wanted to hear.

But she couldn’t. Because she wasn’t sorry for a single murderer she’d put down. From the tone of her trial, it was clear they thought she was insane—and it would’ve only made her case worse if she’d admitted to being an unregistered Psi, using illegal gifts to hunt down psychopaths. Though Dred had heard that less than 3 percent of humanity possessed talents like her own, Psi Corp required all Psi-positives to be delivered to the nearest training facility, where the company oversaw their upbringing. As a kid, Dred hadn’t realized she had any particular ability, and when she left home, the die was cast.

Besides, what that ancient Old Terran philosopher had written so many turns ago was true, after all. He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. She had become what she despised most . . . and she belonged here.

I am the Dread Queen.

“Come,” she called to Einar, who caught up to them at a jog.

“How long until docking?” he asked.

“Half an hour,” Tam guessed. “When everything goes dark, we’ll know they’re here.”

She scanned the dingy, rusted-metal corridor walls. “Let’s see how far we can get.”

During docking, recruiters didn’t interfere with each other, even if they crossed borders. This one time, it was allowed, because otherwise it would be impossible for any group to augment its numbers, save the one in closest proximity. On this side, that would be Priest. He cared only for adding worshippers, but it often took longer for convicts to succumb to his brand of brainwashing. It wasn’t the sort of thing that made for a quick pitch. Still, she didn’t linger in Priest’s territory. Since they moved fast, they reached the second set of doors before the lights went down, and the barricades came up, along with the energy fields that would fry anyone who tried to cross. A few distant screams told her that some convicts had a timing problem.

Uneasily, they shared the space with Silence’s people, unusual, because the quiet killer didn’t often take an interest. But it had been a while for her, too. Silence must have advisors who let her know that if she killed too many of her own people out of sport, then she wouldn’t have the numbers to drive off anyone intent on taking her territory. There were six in all . . . and Dred’s was among the largest, with space on all decks. The lifts didn’t work, but she had shaft access, which meant her people could sneak around the ship unseen. Tam was particularly good at it.

The neutral zone lay just past the docking bay, a shantytown inside the prison ship, where fish often huddled until they realized it was worse there than when they affiliated. Townships had rules, at least, enforced by the leader’s people. The neutral zone had only one—take what you can. It was impossible to sleep there without being robbed, raped, or shanked, sometimes all in the same night. And so she’d tell anyone she deemed worthy of a second look.

That was the extent of Dred’s pitch: Come with me, and you may not die. There was no reason to be more persuasive. The smart ones listened.

In the dark, it was eerie, with only the red glow from the nearby shock field and the crackle of electricity. Silence’s people didn’t talk, even among themselves, and their behavior made for an uneasy truce. Tam kept a hand on his shiv, eyeing them with wary attention. On her other side, Einar played the role of gentle giant, but he wasn’t gentle. Nobody inside Perdition was. If they’d been sent up on a wrongful conviction, then they learned to fight, or they died.

Einar had been inside longer than Dred, and she’d been here for five turns before she got tired of etching hash marks into a sheet of metal to mark the days. Forever wasn’t a number anyway. It just was. At her best guess, she had thirty turns beneath her belt, give or take. She’d been killing for three years before she got caught. Before she got cocky. At the height of her career, she’d thought they’d never figure it out.