Absolution

by Rick Partlow

  “You say you want money, right?” I prodded. “Clean money you can do something with?” I held my hands up, palms out. “I got a bounty coming from Ms. Beckett here, a sizable one. It’s yours if you hide us out for a few hours and help me get a message to the Marshals at Government Central.”

  Nikki frowned, the gun slipping even farther downward.

  “How sizable?”

  I pulled out a folding tablet from my jacket and scrolled through its menu until I found where I had downloaded the open bounty, then passed it over to her. Her eyebrow went up at the amount.

  “And you’d sign all that over to me?”

  “The minute you put the call in to Government Central,” I promised. “As soon as I hear the Marshals are on their way to pick us up, the money’s yours.”

  Nikki was silent for a long moment, then she caught the bouncers’ attention and jerked her head back toward the front door. The three of them seemed to relax slightly before moving out back to the entrance.

  “All right, cowboy, you’ve got a deal. But on one condition.” At my questioning look, she continued. “If those fucking animals out there figure out where you went, if they come in here after you, the deal’s off. I’ll hide you out here for a little bit, but I ain’t shedding any blood for you.”

  “Fair enough,” I agreed. “Where do you want us?”

  “This is fucking creepy,” Delia Beckett said, pulling her knees up to her chest, trying to get farther away from the deactivated pleasure dolls crowding around us.

  We were back in the repair and storage room where I’d found and arrested Abel Schiff not all that long ago, and yes, the irony was not lost on me. The lights were dim and we were both squatting in a dark corner, the robots sprawled out on the floor on either side of us, their legs stretched out like we were all taking part in some disaster drill. Some were naked, some clothed provocatively, others stripped of their flesh, horrifying metal skeletons staring at us in the dark.

  “Yeah, it’s not my favorite place,” I admitted, “but at least it’s a shot at getting out of this without anyone else shooting at us.”

  “Do you think you can really count on this Nikki to help us? You arrested her husband.”

  “Ex-husband,” I corrected her absent-mindedly, my eyes exploring the room from my seat by the wall. “And no, I don’t guess I’m really counting on her to make the call, though it’d be nice. But staying out on the street would have been suicide.” I finally hit on what I was looking for, a portable programming stand for the robots, nestled into a corner on four round casters. “Delia, can I ask you a personal question?”

  She blinked, shook her head at the sudden shift of conversational gears.

  “Sure, I guess.”

  “Have you ever programmed a pleasure doll?”

  Not only could Delia Beckett program a doll, she also had the computer know-how to tap into the brothel’s security monitors using the neglected data terminal half-hanging off the wall, its left-hand mount broken. I didn’t remember it being that way when I’d arrested Schiff. Maybe the tech they’d hired to replace him had anger issues.

  “Where’d you learn this hacking stuff?” I wondered. “I thought you worked in the shipping department.”

  “Jake taught me,” she said, tracing a command line on the touch screen as she held it upright with her other hand. A shadow passed across her face at the mention of her ex-lover’s name and I wondered if she’d ever get over him. Then again, I still hadn’t gotten over Janie, so who was I to talk? “He used to hack into the entertainment net at Hadur and reprogram the filters so we could watch this ridiculous computer animation show he loved. It was supposed to be written by an illegal Artificial Intelligence, so it was proscribed by the company, but it was probably just a couple of college kids making up the silliest, most awkward shit they could think of.”

  “Yeah,” I said, nodding as a memory nagged at the back of my mind. “That’s…Panomi, right? My son used to watch that.”

  “You have a son?” she asked him. “Are you married?”

  The air went out of me in a soft hiss. “I was. My wife left me right about the same time as I lost my job as a Marshal, and took Luke with her. I haven’t seen him in…” I squeezed my eyes shut, not wanting to share the tears welling up there with anyone else. “…a good long time now.”

  “Why did you lose your job?” she asked, voice subdued and solicitous yet also curious. Maybe she wanted to know what sort of man she was trusting with her life. “You seem pretty good at this sort of thing.”

  “There was a senior Union Representative named Tomas Caty,” I told her, realizing we hadn’t gotten around to that story yet, “who kept coming up on my radar in chatter from arms dealers we were monitoring. I looked into it and it seemed as if a lot of hijacked arms shipments we investigated had passed through his office at one time or another. So, I decided to look into him, but I was expressly told to back off.”

  “But you didn’t,” she guessed, turning the terminal screen around in her hands and pulling off a panel to expose circuitry. “You have a multitool handy?”

  I nodded, fishing the instrument out of a pouch on my gun belt and handing it to her.

  “No, I didn’t,” I confirmed. “I was keeping it quiet, thought I was being clever. Trying to work it into my normal investigations by concentrating on the suspected illegal weapons smugglers who I had a hunch were involved with Caty. My partner knew what I was doing and tried to warn me, but I couldn’t let it go. And when Caty’s name finally came up in an exchange between the smuggler and his source, I skipped my commander and went straight to Caty’s office and tried to question him about it.” I chuckled softly, trying to keep the bitterness from welling up again. “That went about as well as you might expect. And after his lawyers kicked me out on my ass, I got called into my captain’s office and threatened with demotion and reassignment if I didn’t back off.”

  “And you still didn’t?” Her eyes went wide.

  “I didn’t have the chance. Caty’s data protection techs claimed they found monitoring software on his systems and that I was the only one who could have installed it. They tried to press charges, tried to get me fired.” I pressed my thumb and forefinger to either side of my head, rubbing at a sudden pain in my temples. “I told everyone I didn’t do it, but he’d managed to penetrate the central systems and leave a trail of data bread crumbs all pointed back at me. I was going to get demoted, reassigned, it would kill any chance of promotion for years to come. And I messed up. I went to his office and punched him in the face. And that was it, my career was over, my marriage was over. And I couldn’t even contest the custody of my son because I’d had to plead guilty to misdemeanor assault to avoid jail time.”

  “Sorry.”

  I grinned. I couldn’t help it. She was looking at life in prison for treason, if the various people trying to kill us didn’t succeed first, and she was sorry my life had gone off the rails. She seemed to get the joke, too, because she laughed, almost unwillingly, before her attention went back to her work.

  “Got it,” she announced, closing the panel on the back of the display and turning it back around to scroll through a menu. “And here’s the feed from the security system…”

  She trailed off and one look at the screen told me why. The first of the multiple sub-displays was the front entrance, where we’d been intercepted by the bouncers. There were five strangers standing in the entrance hall, four men and a woman, and they weren’t locals. You could tell by their clothes, by their hairstyles. They screamed corporate in their dark-colored, thousand-credit business suits that weren’t exactly uniforms but close enough. They were tailored well enough you couldn’t even see their guns until they pulled them out and pointed them in Nikki’s face.

  “Those aren’t the guys from the street,” Beckett said. I tried not to roll my eyes at the statement of the obvious.

  “Those,” I informed her, my gut roiling, “are the guys from that ship that followed
us here. Those are corporate mercenaries, if I’m not mistaken. Former military, probably from the 82 Eridani system. The peace deal put them out of work, but not for long.”

  Nikki had her hands up, the usual pugnacious defiance gone from her eyes in the face of the professional killers.

  “If she’s good to her word,” Beckett said, “we’re fucked.”

  “Get everything ready,” I said, looking around the room, trying to find the best place to hide.

  I’d been doing that since we arrived here without much luck and the situation hadn’t improved. There was a storage closet, but it was stacked with crates of spare parts that would have taken a half hour to move and left a way-too-obvious pile of boxes sitting in the middle of the floor.

  “It’s all set up,” she told me, tapping a final control on the screen before she pressed the button on the side to turn off the display. “As long as your ‘link is putting out the signal, we’ll be fine.”

  Somehow, plunging into the task of hacking into the brothel’s systems had distracted her from the fear and anxiety and somewhere along the line, she’d become calmer than me. Which was embarrassing, given that I was supposed to be the hardened, callous bounty hunter.

  “Over here,” I decided, motioning for her to join me in the far corner of the room.

  I drew my blaster and crouched down, trying to blend in with a row of pleasure dolls locked upright and leaning against the faded, cracked wall. Beckett squeezed beside me, warm and human in contrast to the lifelessness of the robots, robbed of even the illusion of reality.

  “Do you think you can get them all?” she wondered, staring at the dull metal emitter of the gun.

  “I doubt I’ll get any,” I confessed. “If things go the way we hope, there’s going to be too much stuff between us and them. But I don’t want to die for lack of shooting back.”

  “Should I take out my gun?”

  “No. They might bring Nikki in here with them and I don’t want to risk shooting her by accident.”

  I knew they were coming, which was probably why it seemed to take forever for them to get here. I concentrated on controlling my breathing, not wanting the movement of my shoulders to give away our position the second they walked in. Would they just walk in shooting wildly, blasting the whole room? Did they want Beckett alive?

  “They were in here a few minutes ago.” That was Nikki, her voice coming from just outside the door, a bit too loudly for it to be a mistake. She was trying to warn us, for which I gave her some ethical credit.

  At least I wouldn’t have to hand my bounty over to her…

  The door burst open and one of the mercenaries rolled through on her shoulder, compact blaster held out in front of her. I made not a sound nor a move, trusting the shadows and the sex bots to keep me hidden. The woman was slim and short and looked like she weighed no more than forty-five kilos, but there was a razor-sharp edge to her face and what I’d come to think of in my career as killer’s eyes, cold and dark and dead. She’d put a round through my head and not lose a wink of sleep about it, if I let her.

  Behind her, the others filed through the door, peeling off one at a time to different sides of the room. When the last one came through, it was movement enough to trigger the dolls. That had been the tricky part, the part Beckett had labored at for nearly an hour, how to get the dolls to activate when we needed them to without us having to move, to push a button or speak a command or anything else that would draw attention—and gunfire—in our direction.

  I’d thought of motion detection, knowing the dolls must have the sensors for it. Beckett had wondered how I’d known so much about pleasure dolls, but some things you just pick up when you do this job.

  The doll we’d chosen was unassuming, rather restrained given the nature of the place. No leather, no frilly lingerie, no physiologically unlikely anatomy. Just a fairly normal-looking simulacrum of a younger woman with bobbed red hair, wearing an oversized T-shirt, just in case anyone got sentimental about their first college girlfriend, I supposed. She looked up, smiling an eerie, lifelike smile and launched herself off the repair table without a sound.

  To their credit, none of the hit team screamed like three-year-olds. I would have screamed like a three-year-old. The closest to the table was a broad-shouldered, smooth-faced man with slicked-back brown hair and pinched features, eyes too close together, mouth too high. He’d been designed by nature rather than a genetics lab, his parents probably working stiffs on Dagda. He threw himself backwards, teeth clenched, and fired his blaster instinctively, one-handed.

  It was a hell of a shot, especially under stress, and it sheered the top of the redhead’s skull clean off in a shower of sparks. Unfortunately for pinch-face, pleasure dolls don’t keep their power supplies or CPUs in their head. Just because humans are forced by evolution to put everything vital in such an exposed spot doesn’t mean robot designers are.

  Where a mop of red hair had been was now a shower of sparks and a halo of white smoke and the robot was howling, and I wondered why it would be programmed to howl but then decided I didn’t want to know. It slammed into pinch-face and wrapped his torso into a loving, inescapable embrace and he squawked as the air went out of his chest. The others were moving to help, but they’d been so wrapped up in stopping the redhead that they hadn’t noticed the rest of the sex bots.

  Some, of course, had been too damaged or disassembled to get them functioning, but every pleasure doll with a charge in their power pack and a working CPU moved, surging forward as one…and so did we. Metal and fake flesh and high heels clapped against the tile floor and two dozen generic come-ons blended into a wordless gabble, an undertone to the shouts and the crashing of work tables and an endless flash-crack of blaster fire.

  The shots were un-aimed, wild, panicked, and any one of them could have hit Beckett and me. I slitted my eyes against the flare of plasma energy and followed the press of the pleasure dolls, Beckett’s hand in mine, my blaster at the ready in case I had a shot. All I saw was the bare flesh on the back of the sex bots and I wasn’t ready to fire at random hoping to hit something because not attracting attention was sort of the whole point.

  I shouldered aside thrashing bodies and couldn’t tell if they were human or robot, could barely tell when we burst through the doorway into the hall outside because everything was spilling out of the room with us. There were shouts and exclamations and doors were swinging open up and down the hallway, heads popping out like prairie dogs, and people started to run.

  Bodies crowded around and I pulled Beckett closer to me, lowering my shoulder and pushing like I was back on the high school football team, trying to get a first down on third and inches. People or robots or whatever was in front of me moved, not just from the pressure of my shoulder but also from the urge to get out of the building. The entrance hallway was meters away and I could see the glare of advertising placards out in the street, and I thought we were home free.

  Then pinch-face was right in front of me, a bruise already forming on the right side of his cheek from something, anger in his beady eyes and a blaster pointed our way.

  I shot from instinct, from training, but that training betrayed me. I aimed center mass, harder to miss at the middle of his chest, but these were professionals and he was wearing body armor underneath that fancy suit. The jacket and vest and shirt burned away with a fringe of flame and a puff of smoke, but the slate grey of the energy armor was still visible beneath it and the man didn’t go down, just staggered backwards from the heat.

  And then we were out, pouring into the street in a wash of humanity and running alongside the crowd. Guilt twisted my stomach, guilt at using innocent civilians for cover, but abandoning the throng meant heading right back into the teeth of the hit team, and I couldn’t bring myself to do that to Beckett.

  I risked a look back and saw the business suits filtering through the crowd, a few dozen meters back but still coming, inexorable, inescapable. A blaster fired from somewhere behind me and the
energy beam splashed against a wall with an explosion of liberated water vapor and an antiphonal chorus of screams. People ducked, scattered, ran even faster, and so did we. My pulse pounded in my ears, my breath chuffing and uncontrollable, and I was caught up in the panic of the masses, but running through the crowd was a temporary solution, guaranteed to get us and others wounded or killed.

  I spotted the signs for the local train station and made a split-second decision, mostly because the crowd was heading the opposite direction. The entrance was an archway over a tunnel seven meters wide and three high, the active display advertising proudly that this was Station 540A and it served the southwest section of El Mercado.

  “We’re getting on the train?” Beckett asked breathlessly, sticking close by my left shoulder, having to run to match my jog down the steps to the station.

  “No,” I said, but didn’t elaborate. “Just stay with me and keep low.”

  The clamor and motion of the street faded behind us as the entrance to the underground station swallowed us up.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The terminal was a cave, not wreathed in shadows but in neon light, casting everything in an artificial aura of cartoonish color. The station had two platforms, twin tracks, and there weren’t more than a dozen people queued up for either of them, but neither train was in the station at the moment. Which was perfect. I didn’t know this particular station, but I was very familiar with ones like it throughout the Union, on backwoods colonies and cut-rate space stations just like this one, places where high tech and high maintenance were too expensive.

  No evacuated tunnels, no magnetic suspension, just rails and wheels…and space for us to run and hide. I blew past a cluster of older, beat-down looking locals, their clothes drab and simple, their expressions disinterested even when they saw us both jumping down off the platforms onto the track. I hit hard plastic lining on the balls of my feet and fell into a crouch, then nearly toppled over when Beckett plowed into me from the side.