Absolution

by Rick Partlow

  He flopped backwards onto the ramp and kept falling, head over heels, unable to stop himself. I fired three quick shots off from my pistol into the landing platform surface at the end of the ramp, each hit producing a mushroom-cloud flare, and it was enough to send him running back for the airlock, probably trying to get help.

  “Hurry!” I urged Beckett, grabbing the wounded and stunned female guard by the arm and dragging her toward the ramp.

  She jerked against my hold, but the shoulder wound, and the sulphur dioxide it had let seep into her suit before the automated repair systems had sealed the breach, were both working against her and her resistance was weak and ineffectual. I pushed her down the ramp and she went backwards off her feet, rolling down to the base and not trying to get up.

  Beckett was coming up behind me, dragging the last of them by the shoulders. He was unconscious, probably put out by the suit’s automated medical systems, and I could see the grey goo of the repair gel oozing out from the lining around the hole in his hip. He’d live, I told myself. They’d both live. At least I’d done my best to make sure they’d both live and that was all I could hope for under the circumstances.

  The unconscious guard slid down the ramp on his back, then tumbled sideways when he hit the ground and came to a halt face down on the surface of the landing platform and didn’t move. I hit the control to close the ramp and ran back to the cockpit.

  “Strap in!” I warned Beckett, not bothering to fasten my own safety harness before I fed power to the jets.

  The Charietto leapt into the sky on columns of fire, pushing me down into my seat, and I had never been quite so happy to be off the ground as I was at that particular moment. I slipped an arm through the seat restraints with desperate haste before hitting the main drives, hoping Beckett was smart enough to do the same. Boost pressed me backwards with merciless efficiency and the ship headed upward through the thin atmosphere at a steeper angle than she would have from a habitable world, nearly straight up.

  I took a second to fasten my harness, then shut off the insistent, inane demands from the facility’s traffic control, still threatening to turn me into the Marshals, the Navy and maybe the Boy Scouts if I didn’t return immediately to the landing platform and surrender.

  That would have been a whole lot more convincing if you didn’t keep trying to kill us, I thought at them. I could have broadcast it, but there was no use rubbing salt in the wound. Better they think we still didn’t know what was going on.

  The important thing was, they didn’t have armed ships to chase after us…

  “What’s that?”

  Beckett’s voice startled me. Not that she was strapped into the copilot’s position besides me, I’d expected that. It was just that hearing anyone except Dog talking to me during this sort of tense situation seemed wrong. I glanced over and saw she was pointing at a blip on the sensor screen, coming not from Hanuman surface or orbit but from a point just past the gravity well that could only mean the closest hyperspace jump distance.

  That was an assumption, and I’d always had drummed into me as a cadet that when you assume, you make an ASS out of U and ME, but I felt like it was a justified one. Because this was the same ship that had attacked us over Morrigan, the same silvery delta shape right down to the scar of battle damage I’d left on her with our blaster cannons.

  “Well,” I murmured, “I suppose I should have expected this. Since when has everything not happened at exactly the wrong time?”

  “Who is it?” Beckett asked and I remembered she wouldn’t have any training in reading a ship’s tactical display.

  “Our old friends. Can you handle the blaster turret? Because I can’t fly this thing and shoot both.”

  “I’ve never done it before,” she admitted, as if it were something to be ashamed of.

  “You see that bare spot on your right? The one that looks like there should be something there?”

  “Yeah,” she said after a minute. “That’s where it is? The guns?”

  “Reach underneath and flip up the panel.”

  She fumbled with it for a moment in silence and I wondered if I was going to have to go open it up for her when she barked triumphantly. The joystick and flat panel display swung upward into place and her hands hovered above it as if she were afraid she’d blow the ship up if she touched the wrong control.

  “You see the big red button beside the joystick? Hit that to arm the turret.”

  I remembered she wouldn’t have the codes, so I unlocked the controls from my station with a thumb on the ID panel.

  “It turned on,” she said, sounding excited, like that had been half the battle.

  On the tactical display, the mercenary’s ship was angling to intercept our course, trying to jump us when we broke orbit before we could reach minimum safe jump distance.

  “When you twist the joystick around,” I told her, trying to keep the words calm, trying really hard not to raise my voice, “it turns the whole turret and your view with it. It can be a bit like looking through a soda straw, so if you lose sight of the enemy ship, sneak a look up at the main screen and get an idea of our orientation, then try again.”

  “Okay,” she said, eyes narrowed and focused on the targeting screen as she played with the joystick. “I think I get it.”

  “To fire, just push the trigger on top of the joystick with your thumb, but use short, quick bursts. You don’t want to overheat the guns and crack our crystals. Got it?”

  “I think so.”

  “I’ll let you know when we’re in range.”

  Which was going to be depressingly soon, given how fast both ships were moving. Man, I wished Dog were here. It felt strange flying into trouble without him in the cockpit. It felt way too much like being alone.

  “I have the ship in the gun camera,” Beckett told me. “It looks big. How long do I have to wait?”

  Answering her question took longer than it should have. Dog would have been able to wrangle a calculation in a second, connected to the ship wirelessly through the link between his computer brain and the ship’s. I had to scroll through a menu in the sensor display and try to tie it into the gun’s software, which was a pain because the gun was a secret system and we didn’t want to make it obvious we had it.

  But finally…

  “Thirteen seconds,” I told her. “Ten.” The fusion drive rumbled its vibration through the ship, the ride getting smoother as we left the vestiges of Hanuman’s thin atmosphere. “Five.”

  Agni glowered at us as we left the realm of his children and entered his heavenly domain, meddlesome mortals, always bringing trouble with us.

  “Three, two, one. Fire!”

  They shot first. I could see the red flash of their blasters passing by us only meters away, still ablating shielding just from heat and radiation, sending a slight shudder through the ship at the outgassing of metal. A miss, but a near one, and I threw us into an evasion pattern, kicking the maneuvering jets this way, then that, starboard, up, down, port, just micro-adjustments to keep us in motion in their targeting screens.

  “Delia?” I asked, looking over at her from the corner of my eye. “Any time now.”

  “Every time you move the ship, I lose target lock,” she complained and I felt a vague irritation.

  Was this how Dog felt around me all the time?

  Another incoming burst, this one closer, and yellow warning lights flashed on the damage control display as it told me we’d just lost a centimeter of armor plating at the edge of our port wing. Nothing vital unless we had to land in an atmosphere, but I didn’t like having bits blown off my ship, even if I wasn’t using them at the moment.

  “Just shoot at them, Delia,” I told her. “Even if you don’t have a solid lock, it’ll keep them thinking about saving their own hides and less about ventilating ours.”

  “All right, all right,” she said, clucking impatiently, her face locked in concentration.

  We were three minutes from minimum safe jump distance
, which seemed like an awful long time right at the moment.

  Finally, she fired. I couldn’t hear the actual discharge of course, probably wouldn’t have seen anything if I’d been outside looking, but the computer simulated the energy pulses as stuttering red lines across the main display, connecting us with the silver delta of the enemy ship for a moment. It was still barely visible across the brooding face of Agni and the angry reds and yellows of Hanuman, but it cheered me up just a bit.

  “I think you hit them!” I told her, trying to sound encouraging. At least, the thermal readings had showed a bloom on their portside near the bow, which could have been a hit. “Keep at it. Short bursts.”

  I was struck by a memory of teaching my son how to shoot at the police range, how his eyes had lit up the first time he’d hit the target with the training blaster. My gut clenched at the image and I wished for just a moment that the mercenaries would blow us out of the sky and put me out of my misery. I clenched my teeth and forced the feeling inward, locking it in that tight, cramped little space inside me where I kept all the hurt.

  I worried, sometimes, what was going to happen when that space got too full and blew like an ancient steam boiler. I hoped whoever was on the receiving end deserved what they were going to get when it happened.

  The Charietto shook like God had decided to kick her in the ass and I forgot all about my personal problems. I checked the status board and saw yellow lights flashing all along the aft end of the ship, including the main drives, the reactor and the hyperdrive. All a nice, cheerful, canary yellow and with a wonderful buzzing musical accompaniment to let me know they were serious. I threw the ship into a barrel roll, spinning her like a top to make it harder for the other guys to hit us in the same place twice. We were far enough up in Hanuman’s gravity well that our ship’s gravity field had taken over and I didn’t feel the centripetal force, which was just as well, because just the sight of the view on the screen spinning around was making me motion-sick.

  “Shoot at them, Delia,” I told her, the words coming out strained as I began to imagine money flying out of my banking account on little wings. “Please shoot at them, as a favor to me?”

  “It would be easier if the ship weren’t rolling,” she told me, but I saw her thumb push down on the trigger. She whooped in triumph and a look at the sensor display told me why.

  The mercenary ship was breaking off, pulling away from us at top speed, a glowing red and white thermal bloom showing at the juncture of her port wing and fuselage, the tell-tale signs of an atmosphere leak. Beckett had nailed them good. Hope surged in my chest as I glanced from the threat display to the navigation board. We were at safe jump distance and there was no way they could latch back on before we were in hyperspace.

  We’d made it, we were safe.

  “Great job, Delia,” I enthused. “Get ready to jump.”

  I had already fed in the coordinates for the Panicle, for Government Central. I jammed down the control to send us into hyperspace. Just a short, cross-system jump and we’d be home free. What could go wrong?

  Well, about that…

  Reality twisted into a Mobius strip and I had this vague sensation of being kicked in the groin by the universe over and over like I owed it money. I was strapped in, and I was fairly confident the artificial gravity hadn’t failed, but I simultaneously felt as if I were drifting in the blackness of space…and then everything snapped back like a well-worn rubber band.

  I tried to make my eyes focus. They didn’t seem to want to work in conjunction with each other and everything was a blur and I could hear Beckett retching not too far away from me. I hope she’d used the spacesick bags. Behind the puking sounds, there was an insistent beeping, a warning tone from the ship’s computer telling me I’d been a bad boy and the ship didn’t like me anymore.

  My vision swam back into clarity and I found out just how badly the ship disliked me. We were at the Panicle all right, only a few kilometers out from the massive collage of scrap metal. We were nowhere near the Government Center though. The mess below us was very familiar, unmistakable. It was El Mercado. That wouldn’t have been a problem, normally. I could have contacted traffic control and requested a course to the Government Center, then fired up the drives and coasted on over there, just a few thousand kilometers away.

  But…

  “What’s wrong?” Beckett asked. “What happened?”

  “Slight misjump,” I told her. “Nothing fatal. Just a couple little malfunctions.”

  “What’s malfunctioning?” she demanded, wiping something yellow and disgusting off her chin.

  “Communications,” I said with a shrug. “Hyperdrive. Main engines. Reactor.”

  Her eyes widened with each word and I let her be scared because one of us should be able to let the fear show, and I couldn’t afford to. Not yet. Something flashed on the screen, something about 20,000 kilometers away but I knew it immediately.

  “Oh,” I added, “and the bad guys? They just got here.” I shrugged. “We may have a problem.”

  Chapter Twelve

  “Can’t we call for help?”

  Beckett had, for some reason, taken off her harness and was hanging over my right shoulder, staring at the command display as if the picture were any prettier from this side of the cockpit.

  “We could,” I said, trying to keep a tight rein on my temper because I so dearly wanted to curse right then. “Except for that whole part about our communications array being burned out.”

  “What are we going to do, then?”

  “Mercado station,” I called over the ship’s commo board, ignoring Beckett. “Mercado station, this is the independent transport Charietto declaring an emergency. I have multiple system failures and I need to dock immediately.”

  I didn’t wait for an answer, using the only propulsion I had available, the maneuvering thrusters, to kick the ship forward into a docking approach vector. It was just as well I didn’t wait, because none was forthcoming.

  “Why aren’t they answering?” Beckett wondered.

  “Gosh, I dunno,” I said, trying to concentrate on following the suggested course projection on the navigation screen. It wasn’t easy. I was a middling pilot and this was a job for an expert. “Maybe because El Mercado is run by criminals and their traffic control personnel are just as crooked as everyone else there, on sale to the highest bidder. And maybe they…” I pointed at the sensor display where the mercenary ship still shadowed us, not rushing in but not running away either. “…are bidding right now.”

  “Can’t we make a counter-offer?” She was getting a bit shrill, close to panic, and I sympathized. I was on the ragged edge of panic myself.

  “I got nothing but this ship and a robot Dog, lady,” I said with a tightness across my chest that I told myself was from the damage to the ship. “And both are pretty much going to cost more to fix than they’re worth at this point.”

  The only reason I wasn’t more worked up about how much it would cost to repair the damage to my ship was the fact I was pretty sure I’d be dead long before the bill came due. That, and I was trying to dock with no guidance and no beacon.

  “Mercado control, unless you tell me not to, I’m going to dock at the closest unoccupied bay. Please respond.”

  Nothing. My eyes flickered over to the reaction mass readout for the maneuvering thrusters and saw I had maybe another thirty seconds’ worth of fuel. Grey walls were rising on either side of the Charietto, but I barely noticed them from the corner of my vision. My concentration was locked on the computer-simulated grid framework, its glowing lines trying to guide me into the empty docking bay between a cargo shuttle and a small courier.

  This was the hard part. I had very little fuel left, which meant I had exactly one try to get the lock lined up with the umbilical, and I had to do it with one burn. Did I mention I was a middling pilot?

  Metal scraped on metal and the vibration rattled the hull and set my teeth on edge, but then there was a solid thump and th
e light on the docking indicator flashed green. What was a few more scrapes when half the ship’s systems were down? I blew out a breath and yanked loose my quick-release, scrambling out of the pilot’s seat.

  “Hurry!” I urged Beckett, pushing her ahead of me out of the cockpit. “We need to go!”

  “Go where?”

  I checked my gun belt. I’d had the gun at my hip when I’d sat down, but I was paranoid the blaster had slipped from its holster while I’d been in the acceleration couch. It was still there and I patted it for reassurance. I went to the utility cabinet and grabbed another blaster, handing it to Beckett.

  “Keep that in your holster until I tell you it’s time to pull it,” I instructed her firmly. “I know you don’t have much shooting experience and I’d rather not have you put a round into me or some innocent bystander, so you’re going to keep your hands off this unless I say so. Right?”

  She nodded, the motion a bit jerky, as if her neck was too tense to move naturally.

  “But where are we going?” she repeated.

  I ignored her again and went to where Dog lay motionless on the deck just past the belly ramp. We had very little time, but I just couldn’t bring myself to leave him there like a discarded trash bag. I scooped him up in my arms carefully, as if he could feel the discomfort, his body feeling natural and lifelike except where his leg had been blown nearly off. It was jagged and metallic and it jabbed painfully into my bicep. I endured it and set him down gently on a fold-down acceleration couch, pausing, waiting for any sign of…well, not life, I suppose. Any sign he was aware of what was going on.

  “Come on, you miserable cuss,” I urged him. “Tell me how useless and stupid I am.”