by Nick Cole
That probably shouldn’t have passed mid-core code.
Rechs rolled into a family’s living room as their wall came apart, letting in the wind and rain from the dark outside. The family was sharing of a meal of a local crustacean soup known as pengicheula, but they stopped, spoons halfway to mouths, and stared in disbelief at the armored stranger who had just landed in their midst.
The man—a husband, a father—stood. “My wall!”
As if on cue, the dropship reversed her thrusters and came in close to hover by the gaping hole Rechs had created, pivoting so the door gunner could fill the room with overwhelming blaster fire.
Rechs saw a husband and wife with six children. Doe-eyed with mouths open in disbelief. Not one of them was aware that they were seconds from being riddled with blaster fire. A war crime that would be hushed up with all the usual payoffs.
“Not today!” grunted Rechs. He pulled his hand cannon from its locking thigh holster, switched to full auto, and nailed the door gunner several times before the man could line up his shot. The gunner landed on his back on the cargo deck of the dropship, mortally wounded.
The pilot checked his six and then went for the yaw thrusters to bring about the other gunner on the opposite door. Rechs took a few steps forward and unloaded in successive concussive bursts on the pilot’s canopy, smashing the glass just above the pilot’s flight helmet. Freaked out, or message received, the pilot chose life over target acquisition and rocketed away from the ramshackle tower.
Rechs immediately threw himself through the gaping hole in the wall, leaving the family safe and in one piece, albeit utterly soaked from the wind and rain.
Five levels down and fifteen stories up from the docking bay where the Obsidian Crow was berthed, dropship number two, apparently weary of tracking Rechs’s frantic bumblebee path down the face of the cobble-work city, loosed one of her missiles as Rechs ran along the top of a gas refinery.
Rech’s HUD warned him that he’d been acquired for lock by an air-to-ground missile live and loose. He was not in the best place to be.
Without needing a voice command, the armor’s ECM generator attempted to break the lock, succeeding at the last viable moment. The missile sidewindered off into the night and exploded harmlessly out across the skyline.
But the dropship likely had more than one air-to-ground missile.
Rechs ran along the top of the octagonal refinery tank as the dropship stabilized her altitude and readied to fire again. Emergency and hazard lights washed everything in bloody red and extreme-caution yellow.
Switching course at almost a dead run, Rechs made for the edge of the tank, taking a straight line that would unfortunately speed up the pilot’s missile lock. The bounty hunter fired at the pilot as he moved, hoping to rattle him. Get him to fire short or wide. Or not at all.
Then Rechs was leaping. All too well aware that what jump juice was left was precious little. And that the next stop was fifteen stories down.
Flying out into the darkness, feeling the clutch of gravity, Rechs stabilized his hand cannon with both hands and aimed for the repulsor intake of the dropship.
Most combat dropships have graphene baffles that are activated if the ship’s micro-sensors identify incoming fire. Ideally, the baffles lock in place to shield the intake for a brief second, ablating the energy blast—and then shutter open again afterward, allowing the dropship to maintain lift uninterrupted. The repulsor intake is the most critically vulnerable system of the dropship design. Losing even one of the two mains is an almost guaranteed splash. Auto-rotation might still save the crew… but that’s hardly a guarantee.
Rechs wasn’t thinking about that or any of the science of lift versus weight. Or of ablative graphene baffles. He simply knew, from ages of warfare and exposure to war machines, where stuff was weak.
Equipment changed. But destruction was constant.
Shoot the intake repulsor just like you did during the assault on Hatreides VII during the Synth Wars. It’ll go down.
A bright line of gunfire and ricochet drew itself across the wing and repulsor housings of the dropship before Rechs landed three shots inside the intake. The graphene baffles activated as intended, but they were designed to deflect energy-based blaster fire charged around a minuscule bolt. They weren’t designed to stand up to a depleted-uranium fifty-caliber slug fired from a hand cannon. Kinetics excelled in places where energy failed.
The baffles shuddered and disintegrated, sending even more debris into the energy-converting repulsor. Which immediately malfunctioned and exploded. Oily black smoke mixed with the inky night as Rechs, now in freefall, descended away from the wounded dropship.
No doubt the pilot was now frantically switching to damage control and auto-rotation procedures instead of worrying about that missile he had intended to fire.
And Rechs was falling at ninety feet per second. Heading for the hard duracrete of the giant hangar docks that served Minaron’s freighter traffic.
05
Rechs oriented his feet toward the ground and expended the last of the jet’s jump juice in an attempt to slow himself down. He knew it wasn’t enough. The old Mark I armor would have to absorb the damage. And what it couldn’t, Rechs would.
He hit the wet and hard overhanging roof of a berth and felt all his wind leave him. His next breath was sharp and pained. A few broken ribs for sure. And he was rolling. Rolling down the steep sloping face of the overhang toward the main docking passage that ran along the outward-facing freighter berths.
Each rotation of his battered body inside the armor was like a series of rabbit punches to his screaming midsection. But he bit down on that and did everything he could to hold on to his hand cannon. A weapon he’d carried for as long as he’d worn the armor. He didn’t want to lose it. He liked that gun. A weapon almost singular in a galaxy full of cheap knock-off blasters that killed people just as dead as the overpriced models the Republic armed its servicepeople with.
The bounty hunter splayed himself out flat, attempting to arrest his slide. But Mark I armor is heavy, and its weight carried him down the overhang’s face until he felt his legs slide over the edge, the start of a drop that would end twenty meters down. Rechs stubbornly held on to his hand cannon as his free hand grasped for something to hold. He found nothing, but still managed to catch a small and ironic break: the momentum of his slide sent him just across the gaping drop and into a far wall, part of a symmetrical twin of the roof berth he’d just fallen from. He hit hard against it and dropped onto some shipping containers. This fall was much less than the twenty-meter drop that had menaced him before.
The containers collapsed in slow motion, dumping Rechs onto the wide, concrete floor of the sublevel.
He landed on his hands and knees, feeling at first as though something more than his ribs had been broken. But he was all right. Smashed. Bruised. Beaten. But all right. Nothing else screamed snapped or fractured in that endless horrifying moment when such things reveal themselves and take precedent over all else in the mind.
“Attention!” bellowed a message from the station AI. Yellow hazard strobes sent swimming lights across the deeps of the curving hall. “Minaron Security Services has advised the Port Authority that a situation is in progress. All berths are locked down until further notice. Please seek shelter at this time and do not attempt to interfere with security operations. Attention…”
Rechs checked the big numbers on the outward wall of the passage, looking for lucky number fifty-two where the Crow was waiting. Behind these numbers freighters waited to be loaded and set free, jumping away to all the foreign and exotic destinations of the galaxy. Or sometimes disappearing forever.
Docking bay seventy-eight.
Rechs’s ship was still a long ways off.
The bounty hunter stumbled forward, ignoring the pain as he forced himself into a trot.
“Mast—uh, Capta
in Rechs.”
It was G232, formerly “Fancy Pants,” the bot Rechs had rescued from a falling ore freighter six months ago before the shootout on Cassio Royale. He’d had every intention of setting the thing free. Or even selling it, if that was what it wanted. But in the six months since what the news networks had called “a deadly gang shootout” with “the infamous criminal Tyrus Rechs” instigating a “massacre,” Rechs had avoided the larger systems and more populous stations where the bot could be freed or sold. He’d had to avoid attention, even going dark on an old dead drop he used to call the Dog House. Other than a quick trip to have a coder perform some special work, he’d lain low, only darkening the airlocks of lonely old sensor stations along the less-used runs out toward the edge of the galaxy. Places like that had little use for an admin and protocol bot. And so Rechs had kept the bot, which seemed content to serve there as well as anywhere else.
The problem was that Rechs didn’t like having anyone do anything for him. He rarely needed it and felt that the bot would make him soft. Make him reliant. So the bot often merely waited in the central lounge of the Crow, its optical receptors looking up hopefully whenever Rechs passed through on his way from his weapons workbench to his rack. Which were generally the only places he occupied—besides the flight deck when the Crow was in jump. Not that the old souped-up freighter was large enough to have many places to get lost inside anyway.
And on those occasions when Rechs passed the bot, he tended to look away. The hopefulness and helpfulness the thing emitted, the wish to somehow be of service… it bothered Rechs, for reasons he couldn’t quite place. It made him uncomfortable.
So he hid from it. From G232. Which even he admitted was ridiculous.
“Is the bot in the omni-gun?” grunted Rechs as he heaved himself past bay sixty-five.
“As I have stated, Captain, this is very unwise. The homicidal runt is advocating blasting the walls of the berth to—and I am quoting here just so you know it’s not me making these insane little threats—‘to unlimber the guns for use on the savages.’”
“Good,” muttered Rechs. “Do it.”
The little Nubarian bot was a relic from the last days of the Savage Wars. A gunner’s mate on one of the big dreadnoughts, the bot had seen action at Morrae, the Reef, and the Battle of Oaen System. Rechs had needed someone to operate the Crow’s lone defensive gun, the powerful omni-cannon, when running from pursuit. He’d hoped the ship’s AI, Lyra, would take more of the flight duties, leaving him free to man the gun as needed, but for some reason she was hesitant to do much beyond run the systems and engines. Actual helm and flight made the new AI skittish. And for various reasons… Rechs didn’t want to push her. So he’d purchased the Nubarian bot from a salvage yard at a junk station out along the rim run to Sychar, if only just to handle the gun.
“I don’t think that’s ‘good’ in the least, Captain. Imagine the consequences if—”
“Things have gone completely dumpster-shaped. The likelihood that those two destroyers in orbit are going to intercept our departure is fairly high. So buckle up and—”
Blaster fire smashed into a service pylon just outside bay fifty-eight. Local station security in riot armor had deployed, and a team ran straight into Rechs coming off an intersecting tube.
“Still,” continued the indignant bot over comm regardless of the screaming blaster fire in the background, “I would like to register…”
Rechs tried a few shots with the hand cannon. While nothing was broken, something was definitely sprained. In the time since his fall, the muscles had stiffened, and working the hand cannon felt like trying to chew while on oral deadeners.
“Relaxers!” grunted Rechs to the suit’s HUD as he tagged the affected area.
The armor’s medical suite pumped him with a local muscle relaxer. Until it kicked in, he hugged wall and fumbled for a banger to toss.
G232 was still at it. “… bots are here to assist. Not to destroy. I find his wanton disregard for life… unseemly.”
Rechs tossed the banger at the security team in the tube and waited for the flashbang explosion. Then he did his best hobble-run down the passage toward bay fifty-two.
Security types weren’t usually much of a threat, but anyone with a blaster was potentially lethal. Fact. And if the station was working with Nether Ops, then that security team would alert whichever elements were nearby to intercept.
Rechs checked the algo worm he’d left inside the Port Authority. All bay doors were locked down, but that was an easy thing for the worm to deal with.
“Worm,” said Rechs into the ether of the comm.
He got an acknowledgment squeal from the embedded hunter-killer algo.
“Activate breach and disable all the locks. Fry the tractor.”
But at that moment, the worm’s status switched to inactive inside Rechs’s HUD.
Someone had found it. Found it and nailed it.
“Plan B…” muttered Rechs as he approached the massive blast doors that guarded bay fifty-two.
Behind him he could hear the boots of more security teams converging on his position. In sufficient numbers, even local security types became a serious threat. But if this was like all the other times, their orders would be to capture, not kill. Because the House of Reason wanted him alive—for now.
“Three-Two!” shouted Rechs, as badly aimed blaster fire chased him into the shifting darkness of the yellow strobes that undulated across the corridor. “Tell the little bot to target the bay doors and fire!”
G232 was slow to respond. “This will surely be a violation of the flight safety and standards regulations that govern this—”
“Do it!”
Rechs slammed against the wall.
Another security team, coming from the opposite direction and seeking to cut the bounty hunter off, arrived a few bays down. The two squads of local security had Rechs pinned down.
“There he is!” yelled the new team’s sergeant. “Blast him!”
So much for being captured alive.
Then the little bot fired, blowing the mechanisms of both doors to shreds. As well as much of the duracrete frame and wall that guarded the bay.
The security team that had moved to intercept was in the middle of a charge, firing at Rechs, sensing the opportunity for all those secret millions the House of Reason had been quietly promising everyone for the capture—or, apparently, kill—of Tyrus Rechs. Dreams of wealth beyond imagining must have occupied their last seconds before the ship’s blaster, a powerful one, designed for ship-to-ship warfare, disintegrated the doors and sent molten duracrete fragments flying out across the passage. Smoke and steam filled the corridor, and Port Authority emergency damage control klaxons began to wail.
Overhead extinguishers filled the passage with a white chem-cloud.
Now! Rechs yelled to himself, forcing his battered body to move to the opening.
The bounty hunter passed the dead and mangled security team in their fancy armor lying amid the melted slag and blasted rock where the doors had once been. Amazingly, one stunned security guard stood there virtually untouched, ignoring Rechs and examining his own body as though he couldn’t believe he was alive. As though he’d hit the lottery of all time.
Rechs ran past him, into the bay, and straight for the boarding ramp of the Obsidian Crow as more blaster fire came from farther down the passage.
The muscle relaxers were finally kicking in, a bit late for Rechs’s purposes. The pain wasn’t gone, but it was fainter now, calling out like some friend that promised a meeting soon.
Lyra had the engines already warm and filling the bay with dull shimmering waves of ridiculous power. Vent cables and power hookups had been auto-disconnected.
Rechs slammed his gauntlet onto the boarding hatch controls, bringing the ramp up behind him and sealing the ship off from any would-be boarders. He ran for t
he flight deck, peeling off his helmet and his gauntlets, and threw himself into the captain’s seat. As his fingers swam across the controls of the Crow, G232 came to stand in the entrance to the flight deck.
“The little devil is carrying on about wanting to shoot more savages, sir. Really! I do advise that we shut him down and add an inhibitor restraint for good measure. His murderousness knows no—”
“Secure for takeoff, Three-Two. This is gonna get hot, and we still have to get by those two destroyers in orbit. Tell the little maniac he’s going to get all the target practice he wants in the next thirty seconds.”
“Oh my…”
Rechs had the Crow’s three landing gears up, repulsors engaged. He pivoted the ship for departure from the bay. Beyond the impervisteel-latticed windows of the center-mounted cockpit, fresh security troops stormed the bay, shooting at his ship. Then the view swam away and Rechs saw nothing but open sky. Dark and stormy though it was.
A second after that he punched it. The Crow roared away along the lower levels of Minaron.
06
“Captain, I’m tracking three Repub interceptors, Lancer class, coming in from above.” Lyra’s warning came in her increasingly-as-of-late cautious tone.
Rechs swiveled away from the deflector array panel and took control of the Crow’s yoke and throttle. “Set up a jump calc. Nearest executable.”
“Computing now,” replied the ship’s AI.
A moment later three fast-moving Lancers, twin ion engines screaming blue murder, shot down out of the upper atmosphere’s dark cloudscape. Forward blaster fire smashed into the Crow’s deflectors, triggering an alarm bell and starting a light show across the energy management panels at the back of the flight deck.
“We’re hit!” shrieked G232 indignantly.
Rechs flicked off the power management alarms and reoriented the deflector shields for a chase. The Lancers, fast but taking forever to turn after the intercept burn, picked up his tail and gave chase through the turbulent upper atmosphere.