by Rick Partlow
Nemeroff seemed almost surprised, like he’d expected some other outcome of shooting a man in the face, and I tried to remember if he’d actually ever done that in any of the few missions he’d been a part of. It didn’t matter; he’d never do it again. My pistol jumped into my hand almost of its own accord and I’d fired before I realized it was there. I had to assume Nemeroff was wearing body armor---since he’d known he was heading into a possible fight and I hadn’t, and I was wearing it---so I put the round between his eyes.
I didn’t bother to stick around and gawk at what was left of him, just ran. I was still half-stunned from the flash-bang and all I could think was that I had to get to the ship. I had to get out of here before I was cornered and trapped again. People got out of my way, which you might expect since I was carrying a gun and covered in someone else’s blood. As the ringing in my ears faded, I began to hear distant voices shouting at me to stop, but I ignored them except to run faster and make a turn at the next available corner to get away from them. They might have been police, or maybe Port Authority workers or maybe just Good Samaritans, but no one was going to stop me before I got to my ship. The shouts faded, but they were replaced by the whooping siren of an emergency alert, and an automated voice urging everyone to evacuate the spaceport.
People began running blindly in four different directions, and I had to concentrate on weaving through them. At least the panic was making me less likely to be spotted before I reached the ship. I had a map of the port projected onto my contact lens and saw that I was only a half a kilometer from the Nomad’s berth. I memorized the pattern of turns before I got rid of the map, not wanting the distraction. Left, the next right, second left, one last right and straight down another hundred meters…
I was about to take that last right when something jerked me off my feet and slammed me into the wall nearly hard enough to knock the wind out of me. I was in a dark alcove, in the middle of a store of inactive cleaning robots and I nearly shot Victor Simak before I realized who he was.
“Relax, Boss, it’s us.” I heard Eli Sanders’ voice behind me and I finally looked around and saw that both Simak brothers were there, along with Bobbi.
“Thank God you guys are all right,” I sighed, lowering my gun. I looked around at the shadowed nook in the wall and shook my head. “What are you doing back here? Did Calderon come after you, too?”
They shared a look and Bobbi scowled.
“Should have figured that asshole was behind this,” she muttered.
“Behind what?” I wondered.
“Have a quick look around the corner, Munroe,” Victor invited me, waving towards the berth where our ship was housed.
I frowned and edged my way out of the niche, hugging the bare, white, buildfoam wall and moving out till I could see the landing bay. The ship was a dull grey wedge of BiPhase Carbide a hundred meters long and slightly more than half that across, her utilitarian delta shape resting on five sets of heavy-duty landing treads. Gathered around her blunt nose, a little over a hundred meters away from me, was a Port Authority Police special response team in full tactical armor, their pulse carbines pointed outward like they were expecting an immediate attack.
“Shit,” I muttered, sliding back along the wall to the alcove. I looked at the others looking at me, like I had the answer to this. “Calderon figured it out.” I sketched a brief version of what had happened.
“We have the hardest time holding on to new people,” Kurt commented with a light irreverence that once might have disturbed me.
“So,” Bobbi said, pulling her gun from its holster, “we go take ‘em out?”
“They might just be innocent, honest cops who’ve been lied to,” I reminded her, frowning. “I’d rather not kill them, even if we could.” Actually, I was fairly sure we could.
“If we stick around here much longer,” Victor said, “they’re gonna’ find us and we’ll be in a shootout with the cops whether we want to or not.”
“Hey,” Sanders said, clutching at the kit bag he’d carried with him to take on the ship, “there’s a hopper rental place back around the corner, isn’t there?”
“I think so,” Bobbi answered. She frowned. “What, you want to steal one and make a run for it?”
There was an evil-genius look in his eyes that I didn’t recall ever seeing before, and all of a sudden his closed-cropped goatee began to look a bit Satanic.
“Not exactly.”
***
The alarm had gone silent, but the automated evacuation order was still recycling every two minutes or so. I looked over at Sanders as he affixed the cracking module to the security lock of the rental hopper and fervently hoped we were doing the right thing. I’d never been all that comfortable letting other people take charge, not since Demeter anyway. Having the responsibility of a whole resistance army on my shoulders had been a crushing burden, but you get used to anything after a while. By now, command felt natural and the lack of it was worse than its presence. But I’d worked and fought with these people for years, and if I couldn’t trust them at this point, then I’d never be able to.
“How’d you happen to have that cracking module in your ditty bag, anyway?” I asked Sanders, eyes darting around the lot but seeing no one there and no one approaching from the nearby office. There were security cameras, but no one to watch them, and the automated systems wouldn’t be alerted until and unless we entered one of the ducted-fan hovercraft without authorization. “Last I remember, they were all locked up on the ship.”
“I kind of borrowed one,” he admitted, voice low and terse as he programmed the highly illegal piece of equipment that Cowboy had provided for us through Calderon. “I had this idea about maybe sneaking into the VIP lounge at the Corporate Council headquarters here, just, you know, to see how the other half lives…”
“I’ve been to those kind of places,” I told him, chuckling despite the circumstances. “You aren’t missing anything. Just a bunch of pretentious, self-involved old fucks that look like twenty-year-olds.”
“Got it!” He enthused and I heard a hiss as the lock released and the pilot canopy began rising up to expose the cockpit to us. He pulled the module off the door and moved it to the key plate on the control panel next to the steering yoke. “This is going to be the tricky part,” he admitted, chewing on his lip as the board came to life and started regaling him with safety warnings and air traffic regulations. “I have to figure out how to bypass the safety interlocks…”
“Move over,” I told him, pushing him aside and climbing into the pilot’s seat. This was why I’d come along instead of sending one of the others.
I pulled my data-link out of my jacket pocket and hit the control to pair it with the cracking module; I had the codes for the things stored for use on operations. Once they were paired, I could access the hopper’s control systems through my ‘link, and I could access my ‘link through my implant receiver. And through that receiver, I could connect them both to the latest piece of implanted wetware I’d invested in. No one else knew about it; I’d used Mom’s connections to get it, because it wasn’t something that people outside the military or certain government agencies could usually afford. It had required a week-long stay in a specially-designed auto-doc where an incredibly expensive nanite bath had built the thing a cell at a time inside my head and connected it with my brain and nervous system.
I’d nearly rebelled at the idea of having a computer installed inside my head; I kept thinking of the many horrific ways that it could go wrong, that it could be used against me, that I’d wind up a vegetable… Sophia hadn’t been that happy about it, either. But if I intended to fight Andre Damiani’s organization, then I needed an edge, something to put me on their level.
The headcomp wasn’t quite as advanced as the sort of bleeding-edge military wetware people like Cowboy had, but it was the best Mom could find for me and its built in penetration programs sliced through the hopper’s security protocols like they weren’t there. It felt surr
eal and dreamlike, being able to control the thing just by thinking about it a certain way, but I could see the changes reflected in the display screen as one interlock after another was disabled.
“Put the course in,” I told Sanders, having to make a conscious effort to say the words out loud.
He stared at me for a moment, not quite understanding what he’d seen, but then he moved in and took my place as I slid out of the seat. Programming the autopilot was dead simple, just a matter of bringing up a mapping program and drawing a line with your finger from one place to the other, then punching in your desired cruising speed. Finally, he punched in a time delay, then yanked loose the module and slammed the canopy shut.
We stepped back and watched as the ducted fans began to spin, their gentle hum growing to a high-pitched whine and then a metallic yowl as the vehicle leapt into the air in a cloud of dust. The hopper climbed above the level of the dividing walls in seconds, then angled its fans forward and zipped straight out to the north. It disappeared from view behind the intervening wall on that side, and for a moment I was afraid the whole thing had gone wrong and it was just going to keep flying until it hit a mountain.
Then I saw it appear again, going as fast as its motors would drive it, heading down at a steep angle that was taking it straight for the landing bay next door to the Nomad’s, where a Corporate Council heavy-lift cargo shuttle was taking on freight from automated pallet loaders. Sanders and I were running by the time it hit, heading back the way we’d come, but the dull, solid crump of the crash echoed off the retaining walls and through the walkways. An explosion followed it, rattling the walls as pallet after pallet of organic fertilizer, headed for the hobbyist farms of the wealthy over on Eden or Aphrodite or other upscale colonies was set alight by the crash and ignited violently. Smoke began filling the walkway, billowing outward from the corridors ahead and obscuring everything in a sooty, grey cloud.
“If that doesn’t get their attention,” Sanders said between breathless pants as we sprinted back towards the ship, “nothing will!”
It had gotten their attention. The alarms were wailing again and the voice was back and more insistent now, warning that there was an official police warning to leave the area and violators would face immediate arrest and possible fines. We took our chances and ran into the smoke. I tried to hold my breath as we went through the thickest of it and was mostly successful, but I could hear Sanders coughing next to me and saw him beginning to slow down.
I grabbed him by the arm and pulled him forward. I couldn’t even see the alcove where we’d been hiding, but the roiling smoke thinned out past the corner and I could make out the Nomad ahead. The special response team was gone, run off to investigate the explosion, and I could see Bobbi, Victor and Kurt running across the open space between the turn in the corridor and the ship’s bay, nearly there now.
Back in the day, I would have had to open the hatch for them manually, but now I just told my headcomp to send the code and I could see the belly ramp beginning to descend.
“Go!” I yelled to them, waving at the ship. I pushed Sanders ahead, glancing back the way we’d come to make sure the police weren’t coming back.
For a second, I believed this might actually work.
That, of course, was when I got shot. I didn’t know what had happened at first; I was running one second and the next, I felt a hammer-blow over my right hip and I was crashing to the ground, barely getting my arms in front of my face in time to cushion it from the impact. Pain erupted in my right side and I rolled over onto my left automatically, drawing my pistol as I did.
Laser pulses were cutting through the haze and smoke that was beginning to drift in through the wide entranceway from the corridor, glowing red and crackling white as they ionized the air in their wake. My first thought was that the cops had come back and I cursed at the choice of either surrendering or shooting at them, but then I saw that the laser pulses weren’t coming from the entranceway…they were coming from behind a pair of cargo tractors that had been parked against the far wall. Advancing out from behind those, firing as they went, were Calderon, Renzor and DiStephano. We’d fooled the cops, but not them; they’d been waiting for us.
Sanders was hugging the ground, trying to get out his pistol, but the others had already headed up the ramp on my order before the shooting had started. I called out for them, but by the time they got back outside, we’d both be dead…
I didn’t expect the groundcar. I hadn’t heard it, hadn’t noticed it approaching at all because of the pain in my side and the incoming fire. It was one of the plain-white service vehicles the Port Authority used to take maintenance and repair crews from one side of the facility to the other, or to haul around management types for in-person inspections. It wasn’t capable of that much speed, but by the time it hit Renzor and DiStephano, it was going just as fast as it could. They’d been in the lead by a few meters while Calderon hung back, and the car had to have been going at sixty kilometers an hour when it plowed into them.
Both of them went down under the wheels with their antiphonal screams not quite drowning out the sickening crunch of breaking bones. The vehicle stopped in a squeal of brakes, still resting right on top of them, and past it I could see Calderon retreating as the driver burst out of the left side door and opened fire on him. Rocket-propelled warheads flared plasma and melted metal out of the sides of the cargo loaders as he took shelter behind them.
I was feeling a bit woozy from blood loss, and from the painkillers my implanted pharmacy organ was feeding into my bloodstream, and I couldn’t make my mind work fast enough to figure out who the hell this was. Then the man stepped out from behind the car and I could see his pale, doughy face and shoulder-length dark hair. Braden Vilberg ran over and grabbed me under one arm while Sanders took the other.
“Easy, easy,” Sanders cautioned the other man as they hauled me up.
I couldn’t help it, I let out a pained curse; but I started jogging with one of them supporting me on either side. We had to get the hell out of here before the cops got back. The soles of my boots scraped against the surface of the belly ramp and my vision was clouding by the time it began to lift beneath us. I saw Bobbi pressing the control to shut it as Victor came down to cover us with a Gauss rifle.
“How the hell did you get here, Vilberg?” Bobbi asked him as he helped me past her.
“I was waiting in one of the port cafes for a shuttle to the regular passenger run to Belial,” he explained, his voice a bit higher pitched than hers. “There was an off-duty cop sitting next to me and I heard him talking on his ‘link about a shooting in this sector and I didn’t know who the hell else would be shooting around here.”
He and Sanders were guiding me towards the ship’s auto-doc, but I dug in my heels, shaking my head.
“Cockpit first,” I insisted. “Got to get us out of here.”
“Boss!” Sanders protested. “You got a nasty burn-through in your side, even with the armored jacket! You need the doc!”
I did, but I also knew I would heal without it. One of the first things Cowboy had done for me when I started working for Damiani was to outfit me with a nanite repair suite that could heal minor injuries, given just a little time and the raw materials to work with.
“Cockpit,” I repeated, pulling free of him and Vilberg and staggering on through the passageway.
Kurt was in the cockpit already, prepping the ship for takeoff; I’d trained him as my copilot at the same time I’d been training to be the pilot. We’d needed a new one after Kane was killed and I didn’t trust anyone else to do it; they were good troops, but not a one of them had ever flown anything. Kurt looked around as I came in and a frown passed across his Cro-Magnonesque face as he saw me holding my side.
“You all right, Munroe?”
“Oh, you know,” I muttered, sliding down into the pilot’s acceleration couch, then motoring it around to face forward before locking it in place. “Whatever doesn’t kill me hurts like a sonof
abitch.”
I hit the alarm to alert everyone to strap in, then fed power to the belly jets. Air was sucked into the engine through fans at the front of the delta wings and run through the fusion reactor to heat it before it was expelled through variable thrust nozzles on the bottom of the ship. There was a muffled roar and a vibration I could feel through my seat as the Nomad rose from the ground. I’d ‘linked into the ship’s computer and even through my hands were on the control yoke, I was actually guiding the ship with my thoughts through my headcomp---that was another reason I’d gotten one, it made me a better pilot.
“Are they gonna’ let us take off?” Bobbi asked as she scrambled into the navigator’s couch, strapping in quickly.
“Mom gave me a code she said would override the Port Authority traffic control system,” I told her. Then shrugged. “But just the one time. This is our get-out-of-jail-free card and we only get to play it once.”
We’d cleared the retaining walls, and I’d silenced the automated systems with the code. That would only last until the cops noticed us, or Calderon sent out a manual alert. I felt the burning, throbbing pain in my side starting to recede a little as the drugs and nanites did their work; then it flared again along with our main atmospheric jets, pushing me back into the couch. The blue of the sky grew deeper as we ascended precipitously, ignoring usual traffic control patterns and heading straight up as fast as the engines would take us.