by Rick Partlow
Beckett saved me. She was running clumsily, inexpertly in the low gravity, and she would have been an easy target if the last guy had even been looking at her, but he only had eyes for me. I threw myself to the side as he fired, feeling the scorching heat of his blast just before it cut off as Delia Beckett smashed a rock down on the side of his helmet.
It stunned him, enough to send his blaster carbine flying away, but she’d missed his faceplate and those helmets were meant to take punishment. And panicked or not, this guy was a professional. He swiped a hand backward at Beckett and she jerked away, her sharp cry a burst of static in my headphones, and it was only then I noticed the knife. The blade was short and curved and finished a matte black, almost invisible in the shadows below the domes.
My first instinct was to shoot him. Knives are no joke, even when you’re not in a spacesuit, where any cut deep enough to penetrate at a key point can be fatal. You walk into a knife fight, one of you is going to the hospital and the other is probably going into the recyclers. I had no qualms at all about putting a round through someone threatening me with a knife, Marshal or not.
But my gun was empty, and Dog was down and I was fairly certain Beckett had a rip in her suit. I reversed the carbine in my hands, wielding it like a club, and waded into a knife fight like a huge idiot.
The guy was fast and he knew how to use that knife. He slashed at me with an upward flick of his wrist and the blade skittered off the blaster’s emitter housing with a scrape of metal on metal that set my teeth on edge. I curled the butt of the gun around in a tight arc, not swinging it wildly to avoid telegraphing my shot, and felt the crack of connection. I’d had to aim carefully. His forearms and the backs of his gloves were armored just like mine, but there was a weak spot at the wrist—there had to be or else he wouldn’t have been able to rotate his hands. It was a gasket, tough and resilient but not much of a cushion; when the buttstock hit, it struck the radial nerve. I knew that because the man’s fingers opened up and the knife flew free.
I wasn’t on the same radio frequency as the security guard, but I could see his lips moving through his faceplate, and I was pretty sure he was cursing in a stream-of-consciousness free flow, holding his wrist and letting his eyes dance around between me and Beckett…and his carbine, which was between the two of us, laying half-buried under a layer of volcanic dust.
I waited for him to make a reach for it, prepared to club him down with my empty gun, but Beckett moved first. She threw herself forward, digging the carbine out of the dirt and squeezing the trigger before she even had it pointed at him. White-hot energy beams sprayed wildly, none coming within a meter of the security guard, but that was enough for the man. He turned and ran, following the same path back as the first of them, barely ahead of the last burst of blaster fire Beckett sent chasing after him.
“That’s enough,” I told her, grabbing the barrel of the weapon to make sure she didn’t accidentally shoot me. She let free of the gun and rolled over onto her side.
This close, I could see that her face had gone pale and I began searching for the rent in her suit. I knew there had to be one and I was hoping it wasn’t somewhere vital. I found it easily, its surface scabbed over with frozen blood. She’d taken the cut to her elbow gasket and it was a ragged enough hole that the suit hadn’t been able to automatically seal the way it was designed.
“Hold still,” I cautioned her, reaching for the emergency repair kit every spacesuit was required by Union regulations to carry on its tool belt.
Hers was right where it was supposed to be and I yanked open the hard, polymer pouch and pulled out the sealed plastic bag. The applicator inside it was crude and single-use, basically a tube of fast-drying glue, but I had to hope it would get her back to the ship before it failed. I spread it liberally over the slice in her gasket, slathering it all the way around her elbow joint just to make sure I didn’t miss anything.
“Don’t try to bend your elbow,” I warned, holding her arm out stiff. “I think it would be okay, but this stuff might get brittle and I don’t want it to start cracking.”
She nodded inside her helmet, the instinct of someone who didn’t use spacesuits very much, and I patted her on the shoulder comfortingly before rising and forcing myself to go check on Dog. I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to see what was left of him. Charred fur and blackened, jagged metal were all that was visible from the shadows where he’d curled up.
Just like a real dog, going off somewhere to die alone.
Most of the damage was to his rear left side, the leg there almost blown off, but the beam had penetrated through, deep into his interior workings. Maybe into his isotope power pack, maybe even into his CPU. He didn’t keep it in his head because that would be vulnerable. Instead, it was at the center of his chest, which should have protected it, but…
“Can you hear me?” I asked, hoping against hope he’d answer over my radio and tell me what a useless meatsack I was. “Dog?”
He didn’t answer, but his head moved. Just a few centimeters, but his eyes flickered open and focused on me. He said nothing and I wasn’t sure if that meant his radio was damaged or his higher mental functions were fried. The first was reparable. The second…well, if I got him to one of the very few, very restricted AI service centers open only to Union law enforcement and military, they might be able to swap out parts and get his brain functioning again, but this was AI we were talking about. The consciousness of a human or an AI is a transcendent property, dependent on quantum uncertainty and the butterfly effect.
It wouldn’t be him anymore.
“Just hold on,” I said, not knowing if he could hear me, or if he could understand me even if he did. “I’ll get you out of here.”
I scooped Dog up like a baby. He wasn’t dead weight, but then he wouldn’t be, not with mechanical joints. He felt like a bag of spare parts and my gut churned at the sensation of him.
“Can you run, Delia?” I asked, not looking back at her.
“I think so.” Her voice was weak and winded, and I didn’t trust her words but there just wasn’t any choice. I couldn’t carry both of them and reinforcements would be coming.
“Follow me, then. And if you can’t keep up, say something, because I won’t be looking back.”
“This is bad.”
Delia Beckett’s voice was strained and breathless and I thought if I turned and looked at her, she’d probably look just as bad through her helmet. I didn’t bother because there wasn’t a thing I could do about it. Instead, I crouched behind the sensor beacon pod at the edge of the landing pad and directed my attention toward the Charietto.
At least, I consoled myself, they didn’t have her surrounded. They didn’t have enough people for that. This was a small outpost and they had to be looking for us inside and out, which only left three of them to guard the ship. Well, to guard the ship on the outside. I was sure they had someone covering the airlock umbilical from inside the docking bay. The three guards carried blaster carbines but they weren’t patrolling. They didn’t seem to have much of a concept of discipline in this group of chuckleheads, which would have been so much more advantageous if we had guns.
Instead of maintaining a perimeter around the landing platform, the three of them were clustered beside the main boarding ramp, which had been left open, probably to discourage us from trying to get on board from inside the base. Hard to sneak on board through the docking umbilical when the ship was filled with sulphur dioxide. Those were the two main entrances, the boarding ramp and the utility airlock, and both were covered. Let me rephrase that…those were the two entrances they knew about.
“Stay here,” I told Beckett, then touched her shoulder and pointed to Dog. He was motionless, a brown lump of fur on the platform beside us. “When I signal, you bring Dog and haul ass. Can you do that?”
Now I did look at her and it was just as bad as I’d imagined. Her face was drawn and slightly green, her skin slick with a fine sheen of sweat. It had been a hard climb
and I think she’d had a little sulphur dioxide leak into her suit before I’d slapped the patch on—not enough to do serious damage, but enough to make her feel sick. She’d toughed it out and made it up here, though, which had impressed me.
“I will get him on board,” she insisted through clenched teeth. “I can’t promise I’ll be able to stand up after that.”
“I think we’re all going to need a nice long rest after this.” I patted her arm, then ducked around the sensor pod and ran toward the ship.
It was a foolhardy thing to do. I knew it, knew deep in my gut the odds were about even that one of them would turn around at just the wrong time, or someone inside would check a monitor and see me, and that would be that. There was nowhere to hide out here, just a hundred meters of open ground between me and the ship. I ran in a skating motion, trying to stay low to the ground, not wanting to risk a normal gait because the bounding step would have sent me meters into the air. It felt painfully slow, but in reality, I was eating up distance meters at a time in the low gravity, and it was only seconds before I was up against the port rear landing jack. I hugged it like a long-lost friend, taking a moment to catch my breath.
Just touching the ship made me feel less vulnerable, though that was illusory, psychological. A nightmare vision of hell stretched all around us, and the grey metal of the dome seemed less a sanctuary from the outside than just a different sort of damnation, and the Charietto was the only shelter we had. If I could get into it…
There was a maintenance hatch under the delta wing just beside the landing jack. Normally, it would have been pressure-sealed off from the rest of the ship and there would have been no way to access the main cabin through it, but the ladies and gentlemen of BramCo had opened the boarding ramp and exposed the interior to the thin and poisonous atmosphere here on Hanuman. I pushed in an access panel two meters up in the underside of the wing and reached through to twist the lock for the hatch. It dropped open, swinging down like a pendulum, and would have kept its back-and-forth arc if I hadn’t stopped it with a firm hand.
Darkness was inside the maintenance crawlway, a cramped, squared-off tunnel barely wide enough for a grown man to wiggle through it. The prospect of trying to squeeze into it, the possibility of getting stuck in there and being helpless, waiting to die, made my testicles crawl up inside my belly and weep. But there wasn’t any other option. Surrender likely meant death, our bodies disposed of in some volcanic crater where no one would ever find them.
I jumped to get a hand-hold, then pulled myself up into the tunnel, kicking my legs behind me to push all the way inside. It was hard getting a full breath in the crawlway. Every time I tried, my shoulders pushed against the sides and I wanted to scream. I made my mind blank through an effort of will, picturing a beach, hot sand, the warmth of the primary star high above and the cool waves lapping against my legs. Slowly, my breathing came back under control.
I stretched my left arm out in front of me, tucked my right shoulder in and started moving forward. The edges of the spacesuit’s environmental pack kept catching the top of the tunnel every time I scooted my lower body upward, and each time it did, I had to let the air out of my lungs and press my chest into the floor to get it free. Finally, I figured out I would need to pull myself forward a few centimeters at a time with my lead arm, pushing off with the side of my trailing foot. It was maddeningly slow and I longed for a full breath, for the opportunity to fill my lungs with air.
It’s just ten meters. It’s nothing. You could cross it in twelve big steps. Four or five in this gravity.
The lighter gravity was the only saving grace. If I’d been in standard gravity, I’d have been totally screwed, unable to breathe or move at all. As it was, I nearly missed my exit. I knew where it was, approximately, had seen it from the other side many times, but it was pitch black inside the crawlway and even if it hadn’t been, my suit’s faceplate was pressed up against the wall and I wouldn’t have seen anything but dust and corrosion.
My lead hand missed the catch for the access panel and I couldn’t even feel it through the suit’s chest armor, but it happened to catch on the gasket over my right knee. I closed my eyes, hissing in frustration, and edged backwards. When my hand found the catch, I fumbled with it for a moment, unable to see it, trying to remember how to open it. I don’t know what I did, but the panel gave way, swinging downward and taking me with it.
I bit back the cry of surprise trying to burst free as I fell through the hatch into the ship’s utility bay, then went ahead and yelled because it was contained inside my helmet and no one would hear it but me. And God’s honest truth, I was just so happy to be out of that crawlway I wanted to yell just for the sheer sake of it. With the low gravity, I didn’t even bust my butt falling to the deck, just absorbed the landing with bent legs and steadied myself against a work bench.
The ship was dark and seemingly deserted, but I ran to the weapons locker anyway, retrieving a blaster before I did anything else. Blasters are tools and I try not to get too sentimental about them, but I have to admit, it felt good having the gun in my hand right then. I checked behind me to make sure the guards hadn’t come on board and snuck up on my six, then I ran to the cockpit.
I’d had long minutes inside the crawlway to think about this, and I probably needed a few minutes more because it wasn’t a great plan, but it was all I had. At least it was simple. I hit the controls to warm up the reactor, which happened fairly silently and was hard to detect from the outside unless someone was watching through a thermal filter. It didn’t take long, but I kept checking over my shoulder every two seconds, the blaster in my right hand aimed back behind me just to be sure.
When the indicators reached the green, I already had both hands poised over the command console and I hit the control to cut loose from the docking umbilical and fed power to the belly jets with two quick, stabbing motions. This was the tricky part. The guards outside would notice the turbines spinning up even in the thin atmosphere, and I couldn’t close the belly ramp yet.
“Beckett!” I transmitted, scrambling out of the cockpit and back to the utility bay. “Now! Make for the ramp!”
I didn’t wait for her reply. I had other things to worry about. Like my conscience. I knew the guards would try to come up the ramp to figure out what was going on once they noticed the jets warming up, and I knew I was a good enough shot to kill all three of them before they made it into the ship. But I didn’t really want to kill anyone else. I’d killed one man today already, and I was fairly sure I hadn’t had any choice in the matter, but that didn’t mean I was free to just slaughter the rest of them indiscriminately.
For one thing, I wasn’t a Union Marshal anymore and I only had the right to shoot someone in defense of myself or others. A jury might decide this was self-defense, since I was on board my own property and they were acting outside the law and could have been charged with false imprisonment, but I didn’t really think this would ever come to trial, so that was a secondary consideration.
The main thing was, I didn’t want to become a killer. I’d killed a few people in my day, a couple just a few days ago, but I wasn’t a killer, wasn’t someone who it came natural to. I had met men and women like that, had arrested them, had shot them down in the street, and had even worked with a few of them who’d manage to sublimate their killer instinct into something socially acceptable. Those Marshals who were natural killers weren’t bad people, but they had to constantly struggle with their nature, constantly remind themselves who they were. I knew who I was and I didn’t want it to change.
But I also had a responsibility to bring Beckett in alive, doubly so since I was the one who’d chosen to expose her to the danger here. I ducked behind a corner of the utility bay bulkhead, aimed my blaster and waited.
The first one up the ramp was running wildly, arms akimbo as if he expected some technical glitch rather than any real opposition, the look in his eyes that of a man who was deathly afraid he’d screwed up hard and had to
fix it before anyone found out. I shot him in the left hip. An extremity shot would have been safest, but I wasn’t confident enough to try one at that range, not with his arms and legs flailing about. I cringed as I saw him fold up, saw his mouth open in a scream inside his faceplate. The blaster bolt had probably broken his pelvis even through the armor of the spacesuit and I knew it had to hurt like a son of a gun on top of the emotional shock.
His carbine had been hanging loosely by the sling and he’d dropped it when he fell. I resisted an urge to go secure it because the others would be coming. They’d hear his scream and they’d be on their way before they understood his warning.
They came together, one right behind the other, which made it a harder shot. The one in front was a woman, or at least I thought so from her size and what I could see of her face through the helmet’s visor. She had her carbine at her shoulder, carried at low-ready, much more on the ball than the first guy. I shot for the carbine and got her right shoulder. Light flashed from the vaporized armor and she went down as if she’d run into a wall.
She writhed on the floor, trying to get up to her knees, trying to reach for her gun, but I put another round into the carbine and hit the power pack this time. It blew in a halo of white light a meter across and she fell back again, hands going instinctively to her face and coming up short against her helmet’s visor.
The second shot almost got me killed. The last of them was coming up just behind her and he saw me, saw the shot and knew exactly what was going on. He had his carbine to his shoulder, had me dead to rights and even as I swung my pistol toward him, I knew I wouldn’t be in time.
Delia Beckett plowed into the man’s back shoulder-first and his shot charred a black crater into the bulkhead instead of my face. The security guard stumbled forward off-balance, and Beckett tumbled to the deck beside him, Dog spilling out of her arms as she fell. I stepped out from behind the bulkhead, moving across the three meters separating us and grabbed the guard’s carbine by the emitter housing, pulling him into a flat-footed kick to the chest.