Wholesale Slaughter

by Rick Partlow

  The clock ran out and he shut out the counsel of his doubt, concentrating on doing his job. The doors slid aside and everything seemed to happen at once. Osceola shot past him as if rocket-propelled, nearly plowing through the crowd of people waiting for the car to arrive. He heard alarmed shouts, a single scream, and then Lyta was moving and so was he. She followed the spacer’s trail, staying low, close to what had been the elevator’s floor, still aligned as the “bottom” of the docking bay. Logan pulled himself through at the ceiling, slipping by over the heads of the crowd gathered at the doors, keeping his gun close to his chest and out of view.

  Clouds of floating blood followed them out the door, drawn by the difference in air pressure, and more shouts echoed off the walls of the bay, some of them arcing upward in tone to panic. An alarm sounded, the call of the emergency alert the Belter woman had somehow found the fortitude to push, and then the clamor was behind him and all his attention was focused on what was in front… and below.

  The docking bay assaulted his senses with a kaleidoscope of visual data, hundreds of people heading toward the lift banks and away to one or another of the dozens of occupied airlocks, each with their own trajectory and speed, each a potential threat to be watched. Light panels glowed at intervals along the walls, just bright enough to distract. Clear sections of transparent aluminum afforded views of the ships docked at each port, shielded from the cosmic radiation and micro-meteors of open space by a shroud of asteroid material stretching over the stationary hub, spinning in counterpoint, its rotation obvious from the gleam of the solar reflectors imbedded along its inner surface.

  He tried to shut out the extraneous, pulling himself by feel along the padded length of one of the railings affixed to the “ceiling” of the octagonal tube of the docking bay and keeping his eyes scanning a ten-meter half-circle ahead of Donner Osceola, trusting Lyta to have the man’s back. He didn’t spot anything at first, and about thirty meters down from the lift car, he was beginning to wonder if Osceola was being paranoid in his conviction that the bounty hunters would be staking out the docking bay.

  So intent was Logan on watching the action down below, he almost didn’t notice the airlock hatch opening two meters ahead of him, one of the ports dedicated to cargo transports. He caught a vague blur of motion in his peripheral vision and tried to curve around the woman emerging from the airlock, nearly colliding with her and coming close enough to read the corporate logo on her leather flight jacket.

  It said “Logotech.” Logan felt a cold lump in the pit of his stomach and he grabbed at the railing. The momentum jerked painfully at his fingers, peeling skin off his palm and turning him away from the rugged-looking, short-haired woman as he tried to bring up his gun. Somewhere below, gunshots rang out and he knew he was too late.

  Lyta Randell didn’t second-guess herself, as a rule, but it wouldn’t have been close to the first rule she’d broken for Donner Osceola.

  This was a mistake. She heard the voice inside her head as if someone were whispering it into her ear, a conscience she hadn’t heard from in a while. I did this for the wrong reasons and it’s going to get us all killed.

  What was it about this beat-up, ragged-out spacer that kept dragging her in when she should have run away?

  She wanted to stare at him until she figured it out, but forced herself to look away and scan the crowd instead. If this had been any sort of civilized place under the constraints of a single government, if it had been the Gateway of Imperial days, all three of them would have already been in custody and her biggest worry would have been who to call to get them out of the local jail; on a place like Gateway, she knew if she’d seen the local Enforcers, it would only have been because they’d they were working for the bounty hunters.

  There was still panic behind her, raised voices calling for medics, calling for police who likely wouldn’t come, but no one had tried to stop her or Osceola. She felt the stickiness of the blood still coating her hands, felt the dampness of her collar where it had splattered across her jacket, and she knew the people passing by her could see it. She felt their eyes settle on her and then quickly glance away, not wanting to get involved in someone else’s trouble, or step into the path of someone else’s bullet. She knew they weren’t a threat by the studied lack of attention they were paying.

  She knew the man with the close-cropped mustache, slicked-back hair, and corporate logo on his jumpsuit was a threat because he didn’t look away. He stared, a rookie mistake, or maybe just a side-effect of dealing with amateurs for too long. He saw her looking at him, though, and made a play for his gun. Hers was already in her hand.

  She fired by instinct, and her instinct betrayed her; most of her years of combat had been deep in gravity wells, and the weapons she’d used for her limited free fall combat training had been mission-suited, recoilless. The bounty hunter’s slug-shooter wasn’t. The first two rounds of caseless 10mm erased the mustached man’s face, but the kick of the weapon also erased her forward momentum and left her drifting in mid-air, unable to reach the guide-rails.

  The file of spacer crews and diplomats and spies and criminals all around her scattered like cockroaches from a light switch, leaving behind the echoes of shouted warnings and panicked cries and the floating body of the bounty hunter. And her, and Donner Osceola.

  He’d brought himself to a stop against the guide-rail, yanking the gun she’d given him from the pocket of his jacket, trying to pull himself back toward her.

  “Get out of here, you idiot!” she yelled. He was making himself a target and if he had any brains, he’d get to the shuttle, but she knew he couldn’t hear her above the din of confusion and chaos and wouldn’t have listened if he had.

  She had to throw something away, get herself moving again and she began fishing in a pocket for a spare magazine while she kept an eye out for threats to Osceola. The volley of gunshots above her head interrupted the search and she snapped her handgun upward, caught a brief glimpse of another of the bounty hunters drifting away from him amidst a sea of amorphous red blobs… and then she realized the sudden motion of the pistol had sent her spinning backward.

  “God damnit, I hate free fall!” she bellowed, trying to use the lessons she’d learned and twist herself around in a way to stop her spin.

  Finally, she simply aimed the pistol over her head at a bare metal stretch of unoccupied bulkhead and fired off the entire magazine. She knew she was taking a huge risk the bounty hunters had been smart enough to load frangible ammo for use inside the station; if they hadn’t, the ricochets could have killed or wounded innocents, including her.

  Shit, how innocent can they be? They’re here, right?

  The recoil from the shots sent her downward to the lower guide-rails and she tossed the empty gun away, heading straight for Osceola, trying to grab her own weapon from the holster beneath her jacket. She was going to be too late, she could already see it. There were two of them, both dressed in the same freighter-crew disguise, and they were already firing.

  Her ears were filled with the shrill whine of the gunshots she’d aimed at the overhead and she couldn’t even hear the report from the guns, but she saw the results. Two civilians who hadn’t been quick enough to get out of the way, both of them dressed in casual business wear, probably here to make an under-the-table deal, were between Osceola and the bounty hunters. He had his gun out but wouldn’t take the shot with civilians in the way; the bounty hunters had no such scruples. Bullets ripped through the two bystanders on their way to Osceola and she saw him grunt as something struck him in the side, but she had no shot.

  Gunfire rained down on the bounty hunters from above and she glanced up and spotted Logan secured to the upper guide-rail with one hand, firing with the other. She couldn’t tell if he was hitting anything, but she also couldn’t sit around waiting to find out. She pushed off, her own issue pistol at the ready, and passed right by Donner Osceola, tamping down a nearly irresistible impulse to check if he’d been wounded. Instead, she
aimed herself like a missile at the enemy, firing the very second she made it past the wounded civilians.

  At least one of the hunters was still kicking, reeling from a grazing wound to his neck but trying to bring his weapon up to target Logan. Her first round took him in the chest, and he tumbled backward but caught himself on the guide-rail; from the lack of blood, she intuited he was wearing body armor. Her second shot went to the head from only five meters away.

  She transitioned to the other man, finally beginning to notice details. He was short, thick-necked, his hair dark and curled and curving down into long sideburns. He gasped for breath, the wind driven from him from two hits to his chest which hadn’t penetrated the body armor beneath his jacket but probably hadn’t been any fun at all. Blood welled from a wound in his arm, making him fumble with the spare magazine he’d retrieved, trying desperately to reload.

  If the man had a moment to consider his situation, he would have been trying to run; like her and the others though, he was operating on training and instincts and the fight-or-flight part of his brain was already stuck on “fight.” She’d seen it before and knew there’d be only one way out of this for the man. She aimed carefully and did the deed with a single round, only then pushing herself back toward Osceola.

  The older man was doubled over, floating freely, hands clenching his stomach, but she couldn’t see any blood. His mouth was twisted in a pained snarl and his gun was spinning in place next to him, forgotten. She secured it, tucking it into a pocket as she stopped herself beside him.

  “Are you okay, Don?” She wondered if she’d actually asked the question, because she still couldn’t hear her own voice, just a shrill whistle.

  He nodded, unable to speak yet, which was just as well. He tugged at his jacket where the slug had hit and she saw the round hadn’t penetrated. He wasn’t wearing an armored vest, but his jacket was woven from bullet-resistant material, which had kept him alive if not comfortable; she was fairly sure he’d cracked a rib or three.

  “Let’s get you to the shuttle,” she said, sure she was yelling the words out of tone. She was trying to scan visually, trying to make up for the lack of her ears and nearly put a round into Logan Conner’s chest when he sailed down from the overhead and grabbed Osceola by the arm.

  “We need to go!” Logan yelled so loud she heard it even with her abused hearing. “There’s more of them coming from the lift banks!”

  The younger officer pulled them both along by the guide-rail and Lyta followed, facing back toward the elevator station to try to catch a look at the threat Logan had noticed. It was hard through the flock of panicked tourists and crewmembers and assorted others heading away from them, but through those fleeing the echoes of gunfire, she saw the few rushing toward it. They might have been more bounty hunters or they might have been Enforcers finally deciding the gunfight was adversely affecting business, but she didn’t want to wait around and find out which guess was correct.

  “How far down is your shuttle?” she asked Osceola, trying to estimate how much of the four hundred meters of the docking bay they’d already traversed.

  Before he could answer, she spotted the last of them just thirty meters down the docking hub, half-hidden behind the edge of an airlock attached to a shuttle. She knew it was one of the bounty hunters by the corporate spacer gear the man was wearing and the stamped-metal handgun he held uncertainly at his side as if he didn’t know who to point it at. He’d seen his friends—or his comrades, at least, she amended—die in front of him and he’d had the time to think about it, and she saw the doubt in his eyes.

  He probably would have run, but they were between him and his only way out. She hoped they wouldn’t have to shoot him, but she was dolorously certain they would. Then a hand reached out from the airlock, as big as the bounty hunter’s head, closing on the man’s gun hand and breaking it with a relentless, crushing grip. The man who emerged from the airlock was proportionate to the hand, twice as broad across the chest as the bounty hunter, with arms as big as the smaller man’s legs, and thighs the size of tree trunks.

  His face seemed oddly peaceful, even amicable as he ripped the pistol from the bounty hunter’s grasp and then picked him up by the neck and negligently tossed the smaller man further down the docking bay. The bounty hunter spun out of control, unable to grab onto a hand-hold to check himself before he slammed into the opposite wall with a meaty thud that easily carried the fifty meters. My ears are clearing up, she thought.

  She wondered how the big man had done it, as even someone his size was still restricted by the lack of gravity and the difficulty in gaining leverage in free-fall, but then she saw the thickened, metallic soles on his massive boots and realized the soles were magnetic.

  “Get us out of here, Kammy!” she yelled, nearly slamming into his chest as she let go of the guide-rail, aimed at the air lock. The big man caught her with surprising gentleness for someone of his strength, giving her a brief hug before he pushed her ahead of him through the lock into the shuttle.

  “And a pleasure seeing you again, too, ho’onani,” he said in a cheerful baritone. It meant “beautiful” in some obscure, ancient dialect he’d learned from his grandmother, who’d learned it from her grandmother all the way back to when Earth had been a living world.

  The big man shook his head as he followed Logan and Osceola through the lock, slapping the control to close it. Lyta helped Logan strap the older man into an acceleration couch before she dropped into one herself, still fastening her restraints when Kammy hit the controls to cut loose from the docking umbilical.

  “Can I assume we’re in trouble?” Kammy wondered, still seemingly untroubled.

  “It’s the fucking New Saints again,” Osceola grunted through a haze of pain.

  “Running for our lives from bounty hunters,” Kammy mused, nudging the shuttle’s steering yoke, “with Lyta dragging your ass out of the fire just in time.”

  Maneuvering rockets banged against the hull and the shuttle began to drift outward, into open space. Kammy looked back at Lyta and grinned so broadly it nearly split his chubby, cheerful face in two.

  “Seems like old times.”

  8

  “How the hell,” Kathren Margolis murmured aloud, “did I get stuck waiting here?”

  Well, you asked for it, didn’t you? she reminded herself, silently this time. The shuttle was empty except for her, but talking to herself was likely to be another sign for the trauma psychology board that she wasn’t yet ready to report back for duty. And as much as she appreciated the time she’d been able to spend with Logan back in Argos, she just couldn’t spend one more minute sitting around on her ass while he got to do actual work.

  She’d run every single meter of the city and several kilometers outside of it in the nature parks and told herself she was training for a marathon even if she had no idea when the next marathon was going to be held. She’d spent hours in the gym, some of it with Lyta Randell getting in-depth training in hand-to-hand combat, and more hours with the Ranger captain on the tactical range, determined to never, ever be captured alive again. And then Dr. Saito had the nerve to declare all her preparation as “symptoms of post-traumatic stress” instead of the sensible reaction she was sure it was.

  “She can kiss my ass,” Katy muttered. Then she punched the armrest of her acceleration couch. “Shit, I’m talking to myself again.”

  She pulled off the seat restraints and kicked out of the cockpit, determined to something beside sitting in the pilot’s seat waiting for a status report and feeling sorry for herself. She knew she should be grateful for the chance to fly again, even if it was a milk run like this. Logan had gone out on a limb to get her on this mission and one of the concessions he’d had to make to the intractable Dr. Saito was that Katy wouldn’t leave the shuttle.

  But it’s Gateway, she thought, a pout passing across her face as she rummaged through the shuttle’s supply cabinet for something to eat. Every kid has read about Gateway, seen movies about
it, played games set in it, with all the spies and underworld wheeler-dealers, and here I am and all I get to do is eat freeze-dried noodles and check the weapons’ calibration.

  She shrugged. The noodles weren’t that bad. She’d grown used to them on her shake-down cruise after flight training. Logan hated them, even after three years in the service; he was a bit of a food snob, which she could understand given his upbringing.

  And I’m, what… in a relationship? In love? With the son of the Guardian, who’s about to go incognito as a mercenary on a suicide mission? When did my life get so damned complicated? Maybe my parents were right…

  The ship’s communications board lit up yellow, flashing an incoming signal, and she touched a control at the ‘link on her belt and transferred the call to her earpiece.

  “Margolis here,” she said automatically, the way she’d been trained to answer a ‘link call when she was in the Academy. She threw what was left of the noodles in a recycler and pushed back up into the cockpit.

  “It’s me.” Logan’s voice, strained, as if he were exerting himself or maybe… under acceleration? “We’re in Osceola’s shuttle, on the way out of the dock. There’s been trouble, he has a whole crew of bounty hunters on his tail and they might have a ship out there. We need aerospace cover to get back to his ship.”

  “On my way,” she told him, pushing down from the overhead fuselage and sliding into the pilot’s seat.

  Her hands fastened the boost restraints with rote motions and she didn’t feel excitement, not the way she thought she might on her first actual combat mission. Instead she simply felt… right. Complete. This was what she’d been trained for, and all the shooting and running and martial arts were distractions from the goals she’d set for herself, reactions to the derailment of her life.