by Rick Partlow
His eyes moved and I gasped. A stray spark flared from his mangled leg joint as he tried to move it, then stopped.
“Fuck, what did you let those assholes do to me, you useless meatsack?”
His voice was muted, distorted, as if he were speaking through a wall of cotton, and his mouth didn’t move to match the words, but the question squeezed the breath out of me, somehow and I sagged against the chair.
“The ship’s badly damaged,” I told him, “and we’re stuck on El Mercado with no comms. I have to take Beckett and try to get somewhere we can call for help. Do you want me to try to rig up a backpack to take you with us? Or can you walk on three legs?”
“I could walk on two legs, dumbass. But my power couplings are fried. I had to reroute three of the feeds just to get my voice synthesizer working again. I ain’t going anywhere and I sure as hell ain’t going to play Yoda sitting on your back while you run around doing backflips and swinging from vines.”
“Play who?” I asked, frowning.
“Oh, good God, Masterson.” There was disgust in his voice, even if it didn’t reach his eyes due to the facial muscle fibers lacking power. “You really have to get a classical education. Get going before they catch your stupid ass sitting here like an idiot.”
I nodded, realizing he was right but not liking it.
“Are you going to be okay here?” I felt stupid asking it, felt sure he was going to try to make me feel even more stupid.
“I’ll be fine,” he insisted, surprising me with his lack of insults. “I just need time for my internal repair systems to do their job. Cover me up with a blanket or something before you go.”
I blinked, uncomprehending. “Are you…cold?”
“Don’t be any more of a dumbass than genetics require, Masterson. If anyone manages to break into the ship while you’re gone, I want them to think I’m an old suitcase or something, so they don’t steal me and sell me off for spare parts.”
“Right.” I grabbed an old duffle bag out of the tiny closet under my bunk in my cabin, stripped a blanket off the bed and returned to lay them both gently atop Dog. “We’ll be back as soon as we can,” I assured him. It felt wrong leaving him there, felt like I was abandoning him, but we couldn’t stay any longer.
“Yeah, yeah,” he mumbled, his voice even more distant and muffled through the cover. I was pushing Beckett toward the airlock and barely caught his final words, spoken just as I hit the control to open the inner airlock and we stepped inside.
“Hey Grant…don’t get killed.”
It was the nicest thing he’d ever said to me.
There was something different about El Mercado. It was hard to put a finger on it, but I could sense it. The crowds were still there, as they were no matter what time of day it was. They had a nominal day-night cycle, a dimming of the exterior lights that didn’t accomplish much except to give criminals a more psychologically welcoming environment to do bad things. It was night, but there were just as many beggars, pickpockets, street vendors and travelers as any other time I’d passed through the spaceport.
There was a tension in this night, though, something I could feel, could sense even if I couldn’t have told you what gave me the impression. I thought for a moment it was just my own tension filtering my sensory input, making me paranoid, but I knew that wasn’t it. Contrary to popular opinion, Marshals and others whose professions involve violence and the threat of violence don’t have better instincts than anyone else. They’re just more trained to listen to them.
I took a class on it in the Academy. We notice things subconsciously that never penetrate through to our thinking minds, subtle cues ingrained in us by millions of years hunting and being hunted on the African savannahs. Eyes meeting ours even if we couldn’t quite make them out, heads turning in the periphery of our vision, sudden changes of movement meant to not be seen. They all merge together into a nagging feeling that something is not quite right.
And something was not quite right.
“They’re watching us,” I told Beckett, leaning back over my shoulder to make sure she heard me.
I’d told her to hang on to the rear of my gunbelt so we didn’t get separated…and so she could watch our backs. It wasn’t the most comfortable thing in the world, someone’s fingers clenched around your belt, yanking you off balance at inopportune times, but I figured it was better than me turning around and finding out we’d been separated in the pressing crowd.
There was something else bothering me about the crowd. The usual beggars and drug dealers and vendors hawking their wares were all there, but not a one had tried to sell me anything or ask me for money. They actually moved out of our way as we pushed through the spaceport and not once did I have to block a hand from trying to snake into one of my pockets.
They knew who I was and they wanted no part of me tonight. It was like walking through a nightmare, but when we left the port and moved into the transportation hub, I felt no relief. The crowds in the port had been a sort of insulation around us, but once we were past the train station, it was stripped away and it seemed as if we were naked, bugs on a plate for the whole world to see.
“Where are we going?” Beckett asked, voice faint as she faced away from me, casting a longing look back at the trains.
I’d considered chancing the trains, hoping the armor of all the tourists and business travelers might keep us safe a little longer, but the possibility of being cornered in an enclosed train car and having a gunfight in the midst of all those…well, not innocent bystanders, but bystanders nonetheless…didn’t appeal to me. I’d seen the results of indiscriminate gunfire in public and I didn’t need anything else burdening my already strained conscience.
So, we walked. When I had passed through the tunnels and corridors and open streets of El Mercado before, I’d always thought of myself as an outsider, watching the degenerate squalor from above. I’d been a hunter, stalking my prey, unworried, untouchable. Now I was the hunted.
“There’s a public communications hub near the center of this place,” I told Beckett, finally answering her question. “It’s not used much. The cartels and the gangs and the crime syndicates have their own secure ways of passing messages, the companies that actually do legal—or quasi-legal—business here have dedicated antennae they rent, and most everyone else wouldn’t care enough about anything outside this station to bother making a call. But it’s Union regulations that every space station have a public communications center, so it’s there. We have to get to it and send a call out to Government Central, get the Marshals out here to pick us up.”
I was talking to Beckett, but my eyes were on the passers-by. They were the usual clusters of young men and women—segregated by sex for mutual protection. There were boy gangs and there were girl gangs, but there were no mixed gangs. Any girls who hung out with the boy gangs were arm candy and vice versa. It was a fascinating sociological study and I’d read about universities sending in researchers to try to document it. Most of them had gotten themselves killed.
They were staring at us. Every eye on every young punk who passed turned our way, some careful to wait until they thought we wouldn’t notice, some unabashed and unafraid. But they knew who we were, I was dead certain sure of it. I tried to walk faster, but all that wound up doing was getting me into trouble quicker.
The path to the Communications Center led through a utility tunnel, a joint between two sections of the station patched together roughly when it was originally being assembled from spare parts. It was a natural choke point, and the gangs knew it. One of them was waiting for us there. Boys. Seven of them, which would make them one of the smaller groups around here, or maybe this was all they could get together on short notice.
I slowed, then stopped, scanning the half-circle of them blocking our way. Their clothes were bright and flashy and hung off of them in a style that had become fashionable because it was supposed to be a call-back to when the underclass starved and their hand-me-down clothes hung off of t
hem. Now, of course, there was free soy paste and spirulina powder and free autochefs to make it taste halfway decent, and free fabricator time and a lot of free clothing patterns and if anyone went hungry or wore hand-me-downs it was a style choice.
But anything to make yourself look like a victim, I suppose, particularly when you spend most of your time as a predator. I saw two guns among them, both black-market shotguns, but there might have been more concealed under untucked shirts or jackets. A few more had blades, their metal matte black and almost invisible in the dim light of the junction tunnel. Their eyes were cloaked in the shadows, as if they were trying to hide the fact they were human, maybe from us or maybe from themselves.
“We need to back up,” I told Beckett, putting a hand on her arm and gently pushing her backward.
“Should I draw my gun now?” she hissed in my ear, slowly taking two steps back.
“No. Wait until we don’t have any other choice.”
Four more of them stepped out of the shadows at the other end of the tunnel, behind us, and I dragged Beckett to a sudden halt. I drew my blaster, keeping it at my side.
“Nobody has to get hurt here,” I said, loudly and clearly, eyes darting back and forth between the two groups. “Just get out of the way and let us through.”
“’Fraid we can’t do that, vato,” one of them said, shaking his head in mock sadness. He was the tallest of them, maybe three or four centimeters taller than me, though probably the same weight. He had a shotgun tucked under his arm as if it were a fashion accessory. “You ain’t going nowhere.”
“What’s your name, kid?” I asked him, keeping my voice steady.
“My name’s Fuck You,” he replied with a sneer.
“Okay, Mr. You,” I returned, “I know there’s just the two of us and you fellas have eleven, but let me tell you how this is going to go down. The second anyone makes a move toward us, I kill you.” I raised the blaster slowly and settled the barrel in a line for the kid’s chest. “No questions asked, don’t matter who actually moved, you get it first, because you’re the leader and you got a gun.”
“It don’t matter if I…,” he started to spout some sort of bravado, but I cut him off.
“Then I’m going to kill anyone else holding a weapon,” I continued. “And if you think you can get to me before I do, well…” I nudged Beckett. She stared at me without comprehension and I sighed. “Draw your gun now, Delia,” I told her quietly.
She nodded and fumbled the blaster out of its holster, holding it at an awkward high ready.
“She ain’t as good a shot as I am,” I confessed, “but she don’t have to be. She’ll just watch my back and spray pure hellfire at anyone who gets too close.” I grinned. “At this range, she can’t miss.”
I was seriously hoping the bluff would work…mostly because it wasn’t a bluff. It was exactly what we’d have to do if they attacked, except I was going to try not to kill the ones I had to shoot. That was a chancy thing when you’re putting a blast of plasma into a human body, though. Even a hit to the leg or shoulder can do enough damage for someone to die of shock before they get to a medic.
The one who’d spoken seemed to be considering it seriously, licking his lips with the nervous energy of a lizard in the sun. I thought he was sweating, but it was too dark to be sure.
He made the wrong decision.
“Get ‘em!” he yelled, obviously thinking this was going to be like a movie, or maybe like one of the other strong-arm jobs his gang had done before. He raised the shotgun one-handed, like an idiot.
I blew his right hand off. He screamed, falling backwards onto his butt, cradling the blackened, charred stump to his chest, the shotgun clattering to the ground. Everyone else stared, as if the horrible wound was a slap to the face, waking them up from the dream-like idea they could take me. Well, not everyone. The other guy with a gun, probably a close buddy of Mr. Fuck You, got off a shot. The flechettes, or birdshot, or whatever it was ricocheted off the pavement and hit nothing I could tell because he was panicked.
He was even more panicked when I shot him in the left foot. More screaming, more rolling on the ground in pain. I shot twice more in quick succession and blasted the shotguns to melted slag before anyone else could think to try to pick them up. Then I holstered my gun and smiled broadly to hide the churning in my stomach.
I’d maimed two teenagers. They could recover, if they sought immediate treatment. The hand and the foot could be grown back. And it was the least violent solution to the problem that I could think of on short notice, but none of that made me feel any better about it. And now I had to try to bluff my way through the rest so I wouldn’t have to shoot anyone else.
“I’m feeling generous today,” I told them, keeping my face and voice hard and implacable. “I didn’t kill anyone…yet. Get your friends to the clinic before they die of shock and maybe we can keep it that way.”
Feet shuffled and a chorus of muted mumbling accompanied their slow and ignominious retreat, punctuated by the screams of the two wounded kids as they were hoisted up between their friends. In seconds, they were all out of sight. Except for one.
He was the youngest of the group, his hair a mass of tangled, mismatched styles and colors, his expression fearless and petulant.
“It won’t matter,” he declared, brash and unafraid. He jabbed a finger in our general direction. “You’re both still dead.”
“How would you know, kid?” I asked, unimpressed. It was easy to risk your life when you’d hardly even lived. That was why wars were fought by the young.
He pulled something out of his jacket pocket and I tensed, thinking it was a weapon. It was a folding tablet, one of the cheap, recyclable ones they give away at public entertainment centers. He tapped the screen to bring it back to life and turned it around so I could see.
It was us. Beckett and me. Our pictures, mine from my bounty hunter license, Beckett’s from her wanted file. I didn’t know the page he’d pulled up, but it was undoubtedly part of the local underground network, the encrypted and anonymous tangle of nooks and crannies hidden in the free public nets where criminals could advertise and brag and exchange services. Beside our photos and files, there was a price.
I whistled soft and low.
“Is that a comma or a decimal point?” Beckett asked, her eyes wide, her face pale.
It was a study in irony. I had a bounty on my head.
The boy laughed, the sound high-pitched and manic. His eyes were feverish and I knew he had to be on something. But then, they all were.
“Enjoy the rest of your life, assholes.”
And then he was gone, melting back into the shadows with the rest of them, and we were alone.
“We’re dead,” Delia Beckett said so softly I barely heard her even in the still silence.
“That,” I admitted, “is a distinct possibility.”
Chapter Thirteen
Congress with the Beast hadn’t changed at all in the few weeks since I’d last enjoyed its hospitality, but my reception at the front door was less warm and welcoming than last time.
“Give me one fucking reason,” Nikki Cortez snarled behind the muzzle of the shotgun, “why I shouldn’t just kill you right now, lawman.”
My eyes flickered from one side of the entrance hall to the other, noting the position and weaponry of each of the three bouncers Nikki had called in the minute she’d seen me. They weren’t the same ones I’d seen last time, which probably meant she’d had to hire new ones after our little dust-up. Two women and a man this time, all around the same height, all three with shaven heads and matching black suits in what seemed like an effort to make them look more professional. The women carried sawed-off shotguns similar to the one Nikki was holding on us, while the man had a compact handgun, a slug-shooter from the looks of it.
I still felt confident in my ability to take out all three of them if it came down to it, but that wasn’t why I was here. I noticed Beckett’s hand flirting with the blaster at he
r hip and I shot her a warning look.
“I’m not a lawman, Ms. Cortez,” I reminded her. “I’m just a bounty hunter. I didn’t get your ex-husband in trouble, I just did what I got paid to do. And if you talk to Abel, he’ll tell you I treated him fair and tried to give him as good advice as I could.”
“I don’t give a shit if you tucked him in at night and read him a Goddamned bedtime story, cowboy!” Nikki snapped, bringing the shotgun barrel even closer to my face. “What do you want with me?”
“I need your help,” I told her, bracing myself for the flood of scornful laughter I knew would soon follow.
She didn’t disappoint.
“And why would I want to help you?” she asked once she’d gotten her breath back from the hysterical cackling. She was not a pleasant person, but she’d gone out of her way to try to help her ex-husband, which showed she must have a special place in her heart for fools and the weak-minded. “There’s a reward for your heads that could pay off my mortgage on this hole and let me finally sell it off to some sucker and move out of El Mercado. Why shouldn’t I take it?”
“You’d get the money,” I allowed, “and you’d also get the blood it’s coated with.” I cocked an eyebrow at her. “You’ve been around the block. You know nothing comes that free or easy. People are gonna hear about this. The Marshals already know what bounty I’m here to bring in and they know I was heading for Government Central. You don’t think the Marshals have an AI running through the nets round the clock?”
I shook my head. “They may not find out who’s behind this with both of us dead, but they’ll damn sure know who ratted us out. How long you think you’ll have to enjoy the reward before they lock you up for conspiracy to commit murder?”
That seemed to hit her where she lived, and I could see the barrel of the shotgun waver just slightly.
“Let’s say you’re right about that,” she said, just the slightest crack in her mask of belligerence. “That still don’t mean I should help you. I could just kick both your asses back out into the street and be done with you.”