by Rick Partlow
I turned and sprinted away from them. Well, it was more like a shuffling, awkward jog-run, favoring my right side, but it was the best I could manage. I was fairly confident I could string them out, get them all heading past where Beckett was hiding and give her a clear shot at doubling back and finding an exit.
I was sure of that right up to the moment when one of the business-suited corporate mercenaries stepped into the middle of the central aisle only twenty meters ahead of me, a compact blaster pointed at my head. For all my acceptance of the possibility of dying, I still dove out of the way, nearly falling over my feet in a lunge to the right, trying to put gravity node generators between me and the hitman. I stumbled and went down to one knee, twisting around to look back at the mercenary. It was one of the males, tall and spindly with a face like a hatchet blade and how in the living hell he’d managed to get behind us I had no idea.
Of course, you do. The people on the street called them and told them where we were.
And yet these idiots didn’t seem to understand who he was or why he was there. The shotguns thundered again, but this time they were shooting at the hitman. I could see the lapels of his dress jacket jump where the buckshot hit, though he didn’t even flinch at the shot, just scowled and stood sideways, angling his body in the stance of an ancient duelist, exposing as little of his cross-section as possible as he raised his blaster and fired it back into the El Mercado gangsters.
When I’d been a cop, I’d had to turn down gifts offered to me more than once, but now I was a bounty hunter and this gift was just too nice to pass up. I raised my weapon one-handed and fired, again counting on quantity over quality, pressing the trigger down and keeping it down until the energy pack ran dry. Unfortunately, this guy wasn’t some stupid gang-banger with no experience in real gunfights. The minute the blaster flashed sun-bright plasma his way, the hitman was moving.
I wouldn’t say he was the fastest man I ever saw, but if not, he was a close second. He jerked backwards out of my line of fire like someone had snagged him with a hook, and most of the energy beam splashed against the closest of the gravity nodes.
I found out in that very moment why shooting gravity generator nodes with a blaster pistol was contraindicated. The casing on the side of the column ruptured quite spectacularly and suddenly there was light and heat and a concussive wave of pure gravity crushing me to the floor like an elephant had planted itself right on top of my chest.
I think I blacked out for a second, but I couldn’t be sure. The light switched off and then back on again, and whether it was from me passing out, my eyes being forced shut by instinct, or maybe the interior lighting flickering from the power surge I will never know. When the light came back, the pressure wave was gone and I sucked in an agonized breath. Knives sliced into my chest when it expanded with air and I felt fairly certain even through the haze of possible concussion that I had cracked one or two ribs.
I didn’t know if that was all I had done, and I didn’t want to move until I was sure, but I hurt all over like someone had been beating me with a baseball bat, and it was difficult to differentiate one pain from another. I tried to force my eyes to focus and thought I was in serious trouble when the world seemed to be cloudy and uncertain, until I realized it was merely the effects of the cloud of white smoke hanging over me, swirling with the air currents. More smoke curled off my jacket and my face stung as if I’d been standing out in the sun for a few hours.
My only consolation was that the hitman had gotten it worse. When I was a kid, the frogs used to swarm across the roads after a heavy rain, and at night, the automated cargo trucks would run them over by the score, leaving them flattened, barely recognizable. The hitman could have been one of those frogs. He was squashed just as flat as a human body could be compressed, his blood splashed backwards in a random splatter akin to an ancient style of painting I’d seen in art class in school.
Gravity was a wonderful servant but a terrible, unforgiving master. I’d only received a taste of the edge of the overload burst of gravitons, but the corporate mercenary had taken the full force. I pushed myself up on my left elbow, trying to get my feet beneath me, trying to steady myself despite the world spinning around me, hoping it was just residual dizziness rather than some localized gravitational effect.
The gravity field node was a shattered skeleton, its casing shredded, its base twisted and warped and I just hoped to God I didn’t have to pay to replace the thing. The nodes around it were charred black but basically intact and so was I, I decided after a brief inventory of my body. I mean, except for the broken wrist and a cracked rib, I was intact. And the possible concussion. And the second degree burns on my face.
Shit. Okay, I was on my feet and ambulatory and grateful for it. I hunted around for my gun and became very annoyed when I couldn’t find it. It had been right there in my hand when the blast wave hit. I hadn’t been tossed anywhere, so why would it be…
Oh.
Apparently, I’d dropped it when I fell and it had taken a bad bounce right into the path of the pressure wave that had wiped out the hitman. The blaster was twisted into a funky modern-art sculpture sort of thing you might find at ten times scale in front of one of those high-end museums.
Two blasters in one day. And I’d liked both those guns.
I was feeling so sorry for myself, I limped out into the central aisle and almost got shot. Only the smoke and steam still floating across the corridor, obscuring me from view, kept me from getting nailed right in the chest with the blaster bolt. It crackled through the haze of smoke, lightning bolts of static electricity arcing away from it, and I lunged back behind cover, knowing exactly who it was. I couldn’t see them clearly, but I’d seen a shadowy form short and slender enough it had to be the woman.
A wave of fiery pain radiated from my right arm and left chest, the cost of moving quickly, but I fell into a shuffling jog, another blaster shot encouraging me to keep up the pace. Where were the other two? Were they with her or were they circling around me, trying to cut me off? Or did they already have Beckett and were taking her away while they’d left little Susie Thrillkiller to take care of me?
I was moving painfully slow and felt sure she was going to find me before I made it to the outer wall and the walkway there. I glanced to the side, wondering if I could climb between the field generator nodes and skip over to the next row, but it seemed awfully narrow and offered far too many chances to snag clothes on it. There were also some pretty big stickers on the side of each of the nodes warning of the dangers of touching two of them at the same time and completing an electromagnetic circuit, though that might just have been a liability thing. Either way, I decided to hold off on the idea for the time being, since just keeping myself shuffling forward was taking all the energy I had.
The far wall called to me with visions of alternate exits, storage closets, maybe even tools I could use as weapons, but it was farther away than it looked, or else I was going slower than I thought. The soles of my boots were scraping the floor with each step and I couldn’t make myself pick up my feet to stop it. Gravity was pulling at me hard and it had nothing to do with malfunctioning field generators and everything to do with a malfunctioning Grant Masterson. I’d pushed it just about as far as I could without some sleep and some food. And water. Just the thought of water made me realize how thirsty I was and, simultaneously, how badly I had to go to the bathroom. Funny, the things you think about when you’re running for your life from a hired killer.
Sweat was pouring down my forehead, stinging my eyes, and I wiped it away with an impatient swipe of my forearm across my face. When I looked up, it seemed as if the far wall had leapt forward, close enough I could see details, like a series of motivational posters taped up at eye level, a flat-screen display built into the wall running some sort of safety lecture on a loop…
And a pissed-off-looking corporate mercenary standing in the center of the aisle, handgun raised up to shoulder level, just waiting for me to get clos
e enough for a nice, easy kill shot. I skidded to a halt, turning back the other way, but stopped again so abruptly I nearly fell over. The woman was behind me, only thirty meters away, her own pistol raised and ready to shoot.
This was it, end of the line. The guy was closer and, anachronistic as it was, I hated the idea of punching a woman, even one trying to kill me, so I decided to rush him. It was all academic because I never would have reached either one of them before they shot me down, but you have to occupy yourself somehow when you’re about to die.
I took a step toward the man…and kept going. The pressure came off my ribs and my wrist, and my stomach began doing flip-flops in a way it only did on those rare occasions when I was in free-fall. This was one of those rare occasions. The momentum from my one step hadn’t carried me very far, just a couple meters off the ground before the air currents from overhead began spinning me around. I had no anchor, nothing to grab until my hand brushed one of the gravity generation nodes and I caught hold by instinct.
I thought something dire was about to happen to me, something like the brightly-colored alarmist warnings on the safety posters, but there was a qualitative difference between the generator node now from when I’d first entered the chamber, a sound or possibly a feeling missing from it. I knew instinctively from the feel of the metal that it had been deactivated. Or perhaps it was the general lack of gravity informing my instincts. I’m not sure. I had a concussion, you know?
The mercenaries didn’t have concussions or excuses, but they both seemed just as nonplused by the zero gravity, and neither was close enough to any of the node columns to get a hold on it and pull themselves back to the floor. I was closer to the man, better able to see the consternation on his face. He was a slicked-back, too-handsome type, probably a big hit with the bar girls—or boys—in places like El Mercado. He looked unused to being out of control and his arms were flailing, the blaster in his hand seemingly forgotten as he tried, and failed, to move himself in any direction at all.
Which was why I was only half a meter off the surface while the two mercenaries were four meters up and swimming helplessly in mid-air when the gravity came back with a vengeance. I was suddenly falling onto my butt and barely had the wherewithal to slap my left hand out and spread the impact before my shoulders struck the floor, which would have done nasty things to my cracked ribs. It wasn’t exactly pleasant, anyway, and while I couldn’t have sworn to it, I thought the gravity had gone over standard by at least half again.
The mercenaries might have agreed if they hadn’t been too busy screaming. My ears had been ringing from the fall, and from the sudden yo-yo jerking back and forth of gravitational pull, but I’d still heard the smack of flesh onto the bare floor, the unmistakable crunch of breaking bones.
The woman had made the mistake of trying to put an arm out to stop her fall. Rookie move. Any decent martial arts class will teach you how to fall first, before almost anything else. And the first rule is, don’t put your hands out. You’ll wind up with broken fingers, a broken wrist or maybe even, as in this case, a compound fracture of your right arm.
Her suit jacket was made of some durable stuff and the bone hadn’t ripped through it, but there was a lump pressed against the sleeve and I’d seen it enough times before to recognize the signs. The woman had never been hurt bad before. You can tell when someone is in real, intense pain for the first time ever. They hit shock a lot quicker than people who’ve been there before and know the drill. She was out of the fight, her eyes glazing over, sweat beading on her chocolate skin and shivers running through her shoulders, and I was fairly sure she was about to pass out.
The guy, he was in worse shape physically. I winced and fought an instinct to look away when I saw his left leg bent the wrong way, tucked back under his body. He was screaming but he wasn’t about to pass out, worse luck for him. He’d dropped his blaster and I hobbled over to him, wheezing at the agony in my chest. I had to go to a knee to pick up the weapon, unable to bend over for fear I’d simply black out on the way down.
Once I had the gun in my hand, I backed away from him, toward the far wall of the chamber, only now having the luxury of wondering how in the hell that had happened.
Man, if I live through this, I just have to start watching my language again. I’m falling into old habits. Janie hadn’t liked me swearing. She’d made me promise to stop after Luke was born.
Something squeezed at my chest, but it wasn’t the pain from my ribs. I should have known better than to let myself get emotional when I was in pain and vulnerable. Too easy to lose control and get all weepy. I didn’t have time for that now.
“Grant, are you okay?”
For a hazy, senseless moment, I had the mad notion it was Janie coming up behind me, asking the question in such a solicitous, tender voice, just like before. Then I blinked the tears away and recognized Delia Beckett.
“How’d you get over here?” I asked her, frowning. “You were supposed to run, get away.”
She grabbed my shoulder and tried to support me and I had to wince and pull away.
“I couldn’t let you die for me,” she insisted. “Not after Jake.”
“The gravity,” I deduced. “That was you?”
She nodded.
“There’s a series of maintenance panels in the wall back over there.” She hooked a thumb over her shoulder. “I guess they don’t expect anyone to break in here and mess with anything, because their encryption is for shit.” She sighed heavily. “Unfortunately, they have fail-safes that kicked in after I did it and it locked down all the controls.”
She’d probably just sent the gravity surge all the way up through every level of the station, and I hoped no one else had been hurt by it. No one who didn’t deserve it.
“Thanks. Let’s get out of here before either of them works enough energy up to try something stupid and make me kill them.”
“Which way?”
Good question.
One way seemed as good as another and there were exit signs at either end of the chamber, plus the one we’d come through to get here. I didn’t want to go back through that one because the odds were, either the hit squad or the street gangers had left someone there waiting for us.
“Let’s try this way,” I nodded the way I was facing since it would hurt less than turning around.
It turned out to be the wrong decision. We hadn’t made it a half a dozen steps before someone else was shooting at us. I didn’t hear the gunshots, not at first. Something rammed into my back and I was suddenly on the ground, hot knives from the edges of broken ribs slicing through my chest, a roaring in my ears drowning out everything else. Beckett was pressing against my side, turning every breath, every second into relentless torture and I tried to scream at her to move but I didn’t have the breath for it.
It took me several seconds to realize the roaring wasn’t just the pain, it was gunfire. Buckshot ricocheted off the gravity nodes in a hand-bell choir of metallic clinks and clanks and a stray round caromed off the floor only centimeters from my head. They were getting close and I couldn’t even see them, not with Beckett pinning me to the ground. I’d dropped the blaster when she hit me and I couldn’t see it either and I knew they’d be getting closer.
It cost me screaming agony in my chest, but I pushed Beckett off of me and rolled over, ready to yell at her for not getting to cover until I felt the tacky wetness beneath my left hand. She’d been shot. Her face was a ghostly white, and blood coated the right side of her shirt. She tried to breathe and coughed instead, red flecks of frothy blood staining her chin. She’d taken a round through one of her lungs.
I could still save her, I just had to get her out of here, get her to a medic.
Another volley of gunshots, spiteful cracks not as deep as the shotgun blasts. Someone had a handgun, small caliber most likely. I threw myself over Beckett, trying to shield her body with mine, knowing my armored jacket would stop the rounds, and started hunting around to find the blaster.
Their faces were masks of avarice, not seeing us, not seeing the bleeding, helpless woman and the beat-up, useless ex-Marshal, just seeing the money they’d get for heads on a platter. They advanced in a loose wedge, not from any tactical training I was certain, but just to keep from accidentally shooting each other. The leader, the point of the arrowhead, was the one with the pistol, dull, stamped metal fabricated on some illegal machine off a black market pattern. He held it sideways, ignoring the sights. Only twenty or thirty meters away and they still weren’t hitting us yet. They couldn’t shoot for shit, but they were willing to get as close as they needed.
I had to find that blaster…
Lightning flashed out of the periphery of my vision, streaking across from right to left and punching through the chest of the man with the pistol. He’d been wearing a thick, black duster, probably armored, but not nearly enough to stop the blaster shot. A brief flare of burning cloth and sublimating ceramic plating, a puff of black smoke and a spray of blood and the gang leader was toppling over, felled like a redwood.
The others stopped in their tracks, faces frozen in shock, shotguns raised halfway up to chest level.
“Drop the fucking guns or you’re dead, assholes!”
The bellow was tinged with a familiar, slightly plaintive tone I would have recognized anywhere.
“Larry?” I murmured, trying to twist around the other direction and gritting my teeth against the pain the movement caused.