by Dayton Ward
“I can’t leave you here.”
“Every second you’re yapping, the Klingon’s running! I know this shooter—he’s here for me. You get the Klingon. I’ll handle this.”
“You’re sure?”
“On three! Ready?”
She holstered her phaser and checked her tricorder. The Klingon’s bio-readings were continuing to move away at a brisk pace. “Ready.”
“One. Two. Three!”
Quinn popped up from cover, firing wildly at the Nausicaan while letting out a whooping battle cry. Bridy sprinted from the doorway, down the street, and around a corner in pursuit of the Klingon. She struggled to hold her communicator steady while she ran. “I’m clear! Meet me at the ship!”
“Roger!” The next sound over the comm channel was a shrill whine of weapons fire, followed by a string of Quinn’s most colorful curses. Then the channel clicked off. Bridy closed her communicator, tucked it away, and drew her phaser as she pressed on, desperate to make up lost ground.
The street behind her echoed with weapons fire and the whine of approaching sirens, and for a moment she suffered a fleeting pang of guilt at leaving Quinn to fend for himself. Then she shook off her doubts. He’ll be fine, she assured herself as she broke into a full run. I’m sure Quinn knows what he’s doing.
7
Quinn yelped in pain as a bolt of supercharged plasma grazed his left shoulder and burned a streak through his jacket, shirt, and flesh. He zigzagged and ducked without slowing down, while wondering, What the hell am I doing?
Fiery streaks of orange blazed above his head as he turned a corner. He stumbled and slid half a meter on the gritty pavement. He tried to break his fall by extending his left arm and was rewarded with searing pain in his wounded shoulder. Muttering curses, Quinn pushed through his pain and kept moving.
His footfalls crunched on bits of gravel and echoed off bare walls of sun-baked stone. Overlapping them were those of Quinn’s pursuer, a Nausicaan bounty hunter he had seen haunting the dom-jot tables aboard the Omari-Ekon more than a year earlier. The lanky humanoid was much faster than Quinn had expected, and he seemed to be closing the distance between them at an alarming rate.
Desperate to get a few steps ahead of the bounty hunter and lose him in the maze of intersecting alleyways—some of which were nothing more than short passages that dipped under buildings and connected to other alleys—Quinn caromed off walls and crashed through loose mounds of garbage while trying to make turns at a full-on sprint.
Bounding up a short flight of stairs, he saw a door ajar directly ahead. He charged through it into a sweltering kitchen and slammed the door shut behind him. Clouds of scalding vapor billowed around him as he twisted and dodged past the cooking staff, most of whom looked like Saurians or Kaferians, an antlike species that had always given Quinn the creeps. One of the Saurians stepped into Quinn’s path holding a saucepan from which blue-and-orange flames danced. A frantic chorus of chittering and hissing filled the air, but Quinn blocked it out and kept on moving lest the Nausicaan follow him through the back door.
He hurried down a narrow corridor toward the dining room, hopeful that he had found a place to hide. All I have to do is pay off the maître d’ and get a table in the back, he told himself. Once the Nausicaan moves on, I can go back to the ship.
Quinn’s hopes of hunkering down in a safe haven vanished as he stepped into the dining room. Every patron in the restaurant was a Gorn. Two dozen archosaurs looked up at him and, in unison, hissed their disapproval. Two massive Gorn standing on either side of Quinn lunged at him.
Just my luck, he realized. I pick the one joint in the alien quarter that’s reserved for Gorn only.
The Gorn bouncers seized him with scaly hands and lifted him several centimeters off the floor. Quinn flailed his hands to get their attention. “Hey, guys, c’mon. I can see the door, right? I can let myself out, really. There’s no need to—”
They hurled him through a green-tinted window.
He struck the glass-strewn pavement first with his elbows, then with his chin. Pedestrians recoiled and gave him a wide berth. Jagged shards of shattered glass cut his palms as he forced himself up. He glared at the widening circle of spooked aliens that were staring at him. Thanks for making yourselves into a target with me as the goddamned bull’s-eye, he fumed. He lurched back into motion as a plasma bolt ripped into the street behind his foot, turning asphalt into slag.
Shouldering and shoving, he made his own path through the crowd. People raced in all directions at once, all whipped into a panic by the screeching of the Nausicaan’s rifle and the wild ricochets of hot plasma deflected off metal surfaces.
A fiery flash kissed Quinn’s face with heat as it ripped past and slammed into the back of an alien woman half a stride ahead of him. She collapsed face-first, dead before her limp body struck the sidewalk.
Quinn ducked and detoured right, down a wide alley. As soon as he did so, he realized it was a mistake. Less than fifteen meters away, the alley came to an abrupt end more than twenty meters above the next street, which had been built at a lower elevation on the hill. There were no doors in the alley and no sign of a ladder or staircase ahead. Screams resounded from the street behind him: turning back was not an option. There was nothing to do but run faster and try to leap over the street ahead to a window of the building on the other side.
His breaths were ragged and short and his heart slammed inside his chest as he ran for his life. At the last moment he fixed his sights on a closed window just below the roof of the building, kicked hard off the last edge of ground beneath his feet, and launched himself over the gap.
For a fraction of a second stretched by his fear, he felt himself rise . . . and then gravity took over. Free fall made his guts feel as if they were about to erupt from his mouth. Arms windmilling, he screamed with primal fear as his body traced an ever steeper arc across the void.
Bolts of energy raged past him, each one closer than the last.
The building’s façade raced forward to meet him.
He shielded his face with his crossed forearms as he struck the window. It shattered into millions of granular bits as he made impact. Then he struck the heavy, burgundy-colored curtain on the other side and pulled it with him as he fell to the floor. He tucked and rolled, only to become half-cocooned in the drapery. Shouts of anger and alarm went up from the next room while Quinn thrashed and kicked and pulled himself free of the smothering fabric.
Another barrage of plasma fire surged through the bashed-open window. Quinn ducked for cover, then blind-fired a return salvo. He kept firing out the window as he backed out of the room and pushed past a furious Selay, whose cobra-like hood was fully spread in an impressive threat display.
“Sorry,” Quinn said to the irked reptilian as he made a break for the door.
The portal slid open ahead of him, and he retreated into the corridor. He looked around for a lift, only to see it crisscrossed with a strip of green tape printed with alien symbols that he was fairly certain meant “out of service.”
There was one central stairwell. Its design was open and airy, which to Quinn meant vulnerable as hell. He pondered his options: try to descend seven floors before being intercepted, or climb one floor to the roof.
From the apartment he’d vacated came the crash of another window breaking and the heavy thud of a body landing on the floor.
Quinn bounded up the stairs to the first switchback, drew his stun pistol, and shot the lock off the door to the roof. The door swung open ahead of him.
And away we go.
Kajek rolled onto his back, ignored the hissed threats of the Selay standing over him, and roared as he plucked a thick shard of broken glass from his left forearm. He had remembered Cervantes Quinn from their fleeting acquaintance on the Omari-Ekon as a paunchy, middle-aged human given to sloth and alcoholism—not as someone with the stamina or guramba to make a leap such as this.
He tossed aside the jagged hunk of glass and stood.
Either Quinn has changed or I’m chasing the wrong person.
As Kajek moved toward the door, the Selay stepped into his path, intent upon voicing his outrage despite the fact that Kajek couldn’t understand a word the reptilian said. Kajek backhanded the scaly pest, launching him up and back against a wall. The Selay collapsed to the floor, stunned but clinging to consciousness.
Footfalls echoed from the corridor outside, followed by weapons fire. Kajek drew his plasma rifle from its sheath on his back and followed the sound of his fleeing bounty. He pivoted into the hallway, his rifle level and steady. The reek of human sweat and fear pheromones lingered in the muggy air. Following the scent, he arrived at the building’s central staircase and glanced down. The open layout of the building’s interior made it all but impossible for Quinn to have escaped by descending. Then Kajek looked up and saw it was only one flight to the door ajar at the top of the staircase. He’s on the roof.
Kajek charged his weapon to full power and ran up the stairs. He paused at the roof-access doorway and listened, but heard nothing, and then he opened it. Bright sunlight half-blinded him for a moment, and he tensed in anticipation of an ambush. None came. Wind buffeted his ears, and sirens wailed in the distance.
The roof was peppered with squat blocks, housings for climate-control turbines, but none were large enough to provide cover for Quinn. Kajek turned in a slow circle, looking for any clue as to the human’s path, but the roof’s surface was pristine white concrete. The building was flanked on two sides by much taller buildings, and its front offered nothing but a sheer drop to the street thirty meters below—leaving only the rear of the building as a possible escape path.
Drawing near its edge, he spied a pair of handholds for a ladder. It’s a long way down, human, he gloated. Can you climb faster than I can shoot? He poked the muzzle of his rifle over the roof’s edge and fired a few blind shots, just in case Quinn was lurking on the ladder, hoping to snipe Kajek when he showed his face. The sharp whine of plasma fire echoed and faded away, met only by silence. Curious and concerned, Kajek slowly leaned forward and looked down.
There was no one on the ladder, on any of the escape platforms, or in the alley far below. Each platform had a single, featureless portal marked “no reentry” in Gorn Standard, meaning Quinn could not have used one to sneak back inside the building. The bounty hunter furrowed his brow, baffled.
He froze as he felt the icy kiss of metal on the nape of his neck.
Quinn’s voice was low and steady. “Don’t move or you’re dead.”
• • •
Quinn strained to stop his bloodied hand from trembling as he kept the muzzle of his pistol against the Nausicaan’s neck. His arms, back, and chest were aching and cramped after hanging upside down for nearly two minutes from a narrow beam on the underside of a mid-flight landing in the building’s main staircase. He had dangled like a bat twenty meters above the atrium floor while waiting for the bounty hunter to pass him on his way up the stairs.
“Back up slowly,” Quinn said. He backpedaled two steps and let the bounty hunter retreat from the edge. “Throw your weapon off the roof.”
The Nausicaan turned his head ever so slightly to peek back at Quinn. He sounded amused. “That’s a stun pistol, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, at point-blank range.” He steadied his aim. “That means you’ll live—but with mud for brains. Now toss the rifle, crab-face.”
The command elicited a growl from the bounty hunter, but then he hurled his rifle away, into the alley behind the building. Seconds later, Quinn heard the clatter of the weapon striking pavement far below. “Nicely done,” he said.
He lowered his aim and shot the Nausicaan twice, once in the back of each knee. The hulking alien howled and collapsed in a heap. Quinn planted one booted foot on his foe’s neck and relieved him of a disruptor pistol, two combat knives, and a bandolier of miniature grenades.
Quinn nodded to himself. “That’s better.” He shackled the bounty hunter’s wrists with his own magnetic manacles. “I set these to release automatically in four hours. By then you might get the feeling back in your legs, if you’re lucky.” He rolled the ugly bastard onto his back. “What’s your name?”
“Kajek.”
“Ganz sent you?”
“Yes.”
He crouched above Kajek and pointed his pistol at the bounty hunter’s face. “So, what’s this about? Zett? Or something else?”
“Zett.”
“Sonofabitch.” Quinn frowned and shook his head. “I knew dusting that little prick would come back to haunt me.”
“Killing me will not save you,” Kajek said. “Ganz will send others.”
“I’m not gonna kill you.” He poked Kajek’s chest. “You’re gonna take a message to Ganz. Tell him Zett went out of his way to come after me. The little thug made it personal, and he got what he deserved.”
“Is that your story?”
“It’s the truth.” Quinn stood. “Zett had it coming.”
“We all have it coming, human.”
“Some of us sooner than others.” He backed away from Kajek and made a threatening gesture with his pistol. “Do not come after me again. Because I promise: next time, I will kill you.”
The Nausicaan spread his fangs and grinned. “You will try.”
8
Bridy had no trouble following the Klingon spy’s path through the crowded streets of Tzoryp. All she had to do was look for pedestrians who had been knocked down or shoved aside, or for vehicles that had slammed into walls, barricades, or each other while trying to avoid hitting the lunatic sprinting through traffic.
She had shoulder-checked and trampled more than a few people herself in the past few minutes, and the angry choir of sirens and horns swelling in her wake made it clear she also had inconvenienced a fair number of drivers.
Rounding a corner, she spotted a commotion on a footbridge above a busy road. In the middle of the kerfuffle was the spy, still running flat out and firing his disruptor wildly, generating panic and casualties to cover his escape. Bridy sprinted after him, and her body protested with every running step. Her legs ached, and she felt as if her heart were pumping acid. The city’s thick, polluted air stabbed her with knifing pains between her ribs after every labored breath.
The footbridge was littered with fallen bystanders. Bridy vaulted over some and sidestepped others, and she only narrowly avoided a wild, random blast from the fleeing Klingon. She leaped over the stairs at the end of the bridge and was less than thirty meters behind her quarry.
The Klingon headed for a starship construction yard, fired his disruptor to vaporize a force-field generator along its perimeter, and raced headlong through the massive eruption of white-hot sparks. Deep warning klaxons clamored across the sprawling industrial park and resounded off the metal scaffolds that surrounded a small starship’s skeletal frame, most of which lay below ground level in a yawning pit full of robotic welding arms.
Workers in powered full-body load-lifter exoskeletons lumbered awkwardly out of the Klingon’s path as he dashed through the work site and over a ramp into the starship frame, unleashing a flurry of disruptor fire every step of the way. As the last worker plodded clear of Bridy’s path, she raised her phaser and opened fire on the Klingon. Her weapon’s electric-blue beam sliced through a chunk of the starship frame but missed the enemy agent.
She followed him across the bridge and inside the guts of the half-built ship just in time to see his feet leave the top step of a ladder at the end of a narrow passageway. Determined not to let him increase his lead or lose her inside the maze of the spaceframe, she pushed herself to keep up a breakneck pace. Three steps short of the top of the ladder she caught sight of the spy and fired. The Klingon dodged around a corner, and Bridy’s phaser beam missed him and struck a small hydrogen pod at the far end of the passageway.
Bridy saw the flash and felt the explosion’s impact but heard nothing. The next thing she knew, she was on her back, lying on the deck
at the bottom of the ladder, her vision purpled and swimming with crimson spots, her ears ringing, and her body feeling as if it had just been crushed in a vise.
That could’ve gone better, she chastised herself. Overcoming her body’s desire to succumb to inertia, she forced herself to stand, only to find her balance less than reliable. Her head swam, and a sick feeling churned in her stomach. She struggled up the ladder. Can’t quit now. Have to keep going.
She staggered down the corridor, which was peppered with fire, and turned right to follow the path the Klingon had taken. It was a dead-end corridor ending at a ladder, which led to an open hatchway on the ship’s dorsal hull. Bridy lurched awkwardly toward the ladder, holstered her phaser, and climbed. As she neared the top, she ducked a disruptor pulse that ricocheted off the hull near her head. She drew her phaser and fired a few blind shots in the Klingon’s general direction, then pulled herself up and over the edge.
He was twenty meters away, scrambling between gaps in the ship’s patchwork of a dorsal hull, heading for its bow.
Got him, Bridy gloated as she aimed at his back.
An explosion rocked the starship frame, which groaned like a wounded giant and listed sharply to port. A huge reddish plume of fire rose from its bow.
Bridy and the Klingon spy slid across the hull as it rolled toward the wall of the pit. Flailing for purchase, Bridy made a split-second decision to let her phaser fall so she wouldn’t. Clinging to the edge of a hull plate, she watched her weapon bounce off the ship and vanish into the dust cloud rising from the pit below. Her only solace was seeing the Klingon’s disruptor follow it into oblivion.
The spaceframe began to warp and buckle. Large swaths of hull plating crumpled, broke off, and tumbled away as the ship collided with the pit wall.
Something exploded in the bottom of the pit, and a large section of the skeletal ship’s midsection buckled inward. Within seconds, Bridy found herself dangling by one sweaty hand from a crack in a hull plate as her communicator tumbled from her belt and vanished into a roiling dust cloud that was rising to engulf her. Then the ship began a moaning nose-dive into its construction quarry.