The Down Home Zombie Blues

The Down Home Zombie Blues by Linnea Sinclair Page A

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Authors: Linnea Sinclair
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“food,” she touched her fingers to her mouth, “nap.” She closed her eyes and tilted her head.
    She heard him suck in a short breath. “Don’t do that.” His voice was low.
    She opened her eyes. “What?”
    “Nothing. So we have time to clean up, eat, sleep. Then what?”
    “Then we go back down and we kill.”
    Herryck breezed through the sliding doorway again. “The captain says he’s ready for you now, Commander.”
    Finally! She needed the old man’s input on this, though she knew there was a good chance she’d catch hell’s wrath over Petrakos. With that, however, she’d already formed some answers. “On my way,” she told Herryck. The door closed behind the lieutenant. She rose. Petrakos’s hand on her arm stopped her.
    “Where are you going?”
    Her conversation with Herryck had been in Alarsh. She summarized. “I must report to my captain.”
    He was silent for a moment, then he lifted his chin slightly. “Send me back down.”
    “Back…?”
    “Home. Bahia Vista. My house. Structure,” he added.
    “No.”
    “I have a job. Duty.”
    Don’t we all?
She understood a little more about his job. It wasn’t dissimilar to hers, though on a smaller scale. She very definitely understood duty. She was doing hers now. “No.”
    “If I don’t show up at the department,” he glanced at the metal band on his wrist, “by eleven-thirty, noon, people will be looking for me.”
    “Then they won’t find you.” She shook off his hand, stepped away.
    He rose quickly, but she saw him coming, because she’d spent her life training for moves like that. She spun, bracing, pistol aimed at his chest. He stopped short, evidently not expecting that she’d see him. He was breathing hard.
    He was a big man. She had to remember that, had to stop equating nil-tech with nil-abilities. His wide shoulders and muscular arms strained the fabric of his collarless gray shirt. But his wasn’t stupid brawn. He had training; he held the rank of sergeant in a dirtside security force. He’d taken out two orbitals on a zombie the first time he ever used a G-1. That kind of ability damned near matched her own.
    She respected that, but there was simply no way she could oblige him.
    “My sincere regrets to you,” she told him. “But no.”
    “But when we go back down—”
    “I go back down. My team. Not you.”
    “Why?”
    She shook her head. Questions, questions. She’d already explained. “Our problem. Our solution.”
    “My planet!”
    She nodded knowingly. “Regrets.”
    “Okay, okay.” He held up both hands, backed up a step. “Your problem, your solution. I get it now. So put the gu—the pistol away.”
    She didn’t, but she did lower it.
    “After that. After you kill the zombies. Then I go home?”
    Hell’s wrath. She hated this part. It rarely went well with nils, who illogically tied their identities to an orbiting ball of dirt or, worse, to one locale on that same ball of dirt. Spacefaring cultures were so much easier to deal with. “Regrets.”
    It took a moment, then his face hardened. “Regrets?
Regrets?
What the fuck do you mean by ‘regrets’?”
    “Fuck?”
    His hand fisted against his mouth again, and he abruptly shifted away from her. He was angry, very angry. But he was comporting himself rather well, considering the circumstances. She gave him credit for that. She’d dealt with far worse from nils.
    He lowered his hand, turned back, and spoke with slow, controlled deliberation. “Am I to stay on this ship for the rest of my life?”
    “No.”
    “No?” Surprise flitted over his features and, damn, there was a hopeful tone in his voice.
    “Relocation.” She hoped he understood that word. “New residence. New structure.” It was inevitable that—in the hundreds of Guardian missions over hundreds of years—certain locals would become involved, as he had. In advanced societies that had space travel and an awareness of—if not relations with—other galactic cultures, the

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