by Rick Partlow
“Damn,” Bobbi muttered.
“And last, and most convincingly for me,” I finished, “he believed me way too easy. There is no way someone like Murdock would have bought into what I was saying unless he already had some confirmation that it was at least partly true.” I sniffed with a bit of disdain. “That was all an act, that business of him and M’Voba being so shocked by what I said. He knew exactly what I came there to say and he’d already decided what his answer was going to be.”
“Sometimes I forget who raised you,” Bobbi admitted, frowning into her drink. Finally, she looked up and met my eyes. “Since the beginning,” she answered my original question. “They call Murdock ‘the Bulldog,’ because once he sets his teeth into something, he never lets go. That includes his people, his ‘creations’ you called them. He would never let any of them out into the world after the war without keeping a very close eye on them.”
“He knew all along what Cowboy was doing,” I realized. I shook my head. “That son of a bitch.”
“He knew Damiani was putting together this team,” she confirmed, “and he knew you were leading it.” She shrugged. “He actually recruited me right out of the Marines. I got in trouble right after I mustered out, almost killed a guy and was heading for a Reformery. He decided that I’d be put to better use smoking out opportunists who wanted to use the end of the war to steal and smuggle weapons to the Pirate Worlds. I built up a rep as a Recon vet looking for trouble; everyone in the vet community in Hermes knew my name. It was a natural thing for Sanders to suggest me when you were looking for recruits.”
I felt a flare of anger that I didn’t try to conceal.
“He’s known about the damned…,” I stopped myself before I said “Predecessors. “…the situation for two and a half years now, right?” At her nod, I went on hotly. “Then why the hell hasn’t he done something about it?”
“He’s in a precarious position,” she pointed out reasonably. “The DSI is on the Council payroll, and Damiani has his people in the command staff of the military, not to mention the influence he has over the President. If he tried to do anything on his own, he’d be retired, or even arrested.”
She took a long drink, draining her mug. She looked troubled, self-conscious.
“Munroe,” she said with more feeling than I remembered her ever putting into a statement, “I want you to know, I’ve always had your back, and not because you were my assignment. You’re…” She stumbled over the words, and I thought maybe she’d been pretending to be something so long that she’d forgotten how to be any other way. “You’re my friend. You and Sanders and Vic and Kurt…you’re probably the only friends I’ve got.”
“I’m not angry at you, Bobbi,” I assured her. I chuckled ruefully. “Honestly, I’m kind of relieved.” At her quizzical look, I went on. “It’s good to know that at least one of us has been doing all this for the right reasons.”
“Are you Munroe?”
I let my hand slip inside my jacket towards my gun as I turned, but it was just a kid…a young teenager, dressed in a worn jacket and stained work clothes.
“That’s me,” I confirmed cautiously.
“Koji says that you and someone named Bobbi are supposed to meet his car outside and it’s going to take you to meet the Sung Brothers,” the kid recited, the words having the mnemonic quality of a rote memorization. “He says just the two of you and you have to leave now.”
I quickly sent out a message over my ‘link to the others, letting them know where we were headed and telling them to stay put until we contacted them, then Bobbi and I rose and followed the kid out of the building.
The wind lashed at us as we stepped through the Frankfurt House’s exterior door into the frigid winter night, and I fastened my jacket tighter, pulling up its hood. The electric heating coils built into it kicked in automatically and I let out a relieved breath as the bitter cold became a distant, background chill. In the neon glow of the hotels and restaurants and casinos on Shakak’s main drag, I could see that the kid was shivering a little and I pulled a couple Tradenotes out of my pants pocket and handed them to him, feeling guilty.
He pointed at a utility rover that was pulling slowly through the crowd outside the restaurant, then he hurried off. I didn’t blame him; I would have been rushing to get inside myself. I hoped he had somewhere warm to get to.
“You sure this is a good idea?” Bobbi asked me as the vehicle stopped in front of us, windshield wipers beating a slow rhythm as they swept snow back and forth. “We didn’t exactly leave the Sung Brothers on good terms. I recall killing a few of their guards and busting out their prisoner, actually. They might not be that happy to see us.”
“Hell, they might not even know we broke Marquette out,” I said with a shrug she probably couldn’t see through my thick jacket. “After all, the Cult assault shuttles started blowing the shit out of them about that same time.”
The front window on the passenger’s side popped upward and a rough-looking woman with spikey, purple-tinted hair motioned for us to get into the rear compartment. I pulled the twin doors open and clambered in, moving to the far side of the compartment to give Bobbi room. The interior of the car was bare, hard plastic and lacked any sort of seat restraints, and a clear barrier of transplas separated us from the front. The woman looked back and saw that we were inside, then tapped the shoulder of the pale, hairless young man at the wheel and the rover pulled away from the restaurant with a scrape of tires on gravel streets.
I braced myself in a corner of the compartment, trying to avoid being slung around as the driver took the rover out of the city at reckless speeds. Bobbi threw back her hood and scowled at the back of the driver’s head.
“How about taking it easy, hotshot?” She chided him. He and the spikey-haired girl ignored us and I saw Bobbi’s scowl turn into a snarl.
“Forget it,” I told her. “As long as we get where we’re going…”
She didn’t seem convinced, but she sat back against the hard, cold plastic seat and crossed her arms in ill-tempered acceptance. It only took a few minutes before we had passed out of the city limits and hit the rougher, unplowed roads that led into the mountains. The snow was building up but the powerful engine and the knobbed tires of the rover bulldozed through it, though it did force Mr. Leadfoot to slow down a little.
Bobbi finally stopped scowling at the driver long enough to look out the window, then seemed to scowl even harder.
“Wait a fucking minute,” she said. “Koji said the Sung Brothers rebuilt in the same place as before, right?”
“That’s what I got,” I said with a nod.
“So why aren’t we going that way?” She pointed back towards the last fork in the road, the one that had gone up over a hill on our left. “That was the road to the mountain pass back there.”
I leaned forward and knocked hard against the barrier. The woman with the purple hair tried to ignore me, so I knocked harder. One more second and I’d be knocking with the butt of my pistol.
“What?” The woman finally yelled at me through the thick plastic. “What the fuck do you want?”
“We’re going the wrong way,” I insisted. “We should have turned back there.”
She turned to the driver and said something I couldn’t make out. He laughed and made a rude gesture towards the back seat. The girl laughed too, and it wasn’t a pleasant sound.
“It’s a different road,” she rose her voice nearly to a shout to be heard. “It’ll be fine.”
I shared a dubious look with Bobbi. Building a new road took a long time, and they’d had to rebuild their whole city, as well.
“Where are you taking us?” I asked.
No answer. I pulled my handgun from its shoulder holster and I saw Bobbi retrieve hers as well. We didn’t know for sure that the transplas barrier was bulletproof, but now was a good time to find out.
Then the mind-scrambling shriek of a sonic stunner hit us both and everything went black.
Chapter Seven
I was unconscious, but my headcomp wasn’t. It soldiered on, unaffected by the sonic field projectors built into the back compartment of the rover, running just as its programming directed. It used the audio and visual pickups of my ‘link to determine that we were still driving and there was no immediate threat to my life, so it did what its predictive algorithms decided would fit best with my own judgments and with the goal of keeping me alive. It began using my own pharmacy organ implant to try to wake me up.
I wasn’t conscious for any of this, but a headcomp records everything; every bit of sensory input that gets to your brain, every bit of electronic data it can glean from anything it’s linked to. If you go to sleep at night and your bed partner gets up to go to the bathroom, in the morning you remember that happening even though you slept through it. When I snapped awake with a jolt of artificial adrenalin and a blinding headache, I knew exactly what had happened to me and exactly how long it had been: four minutes. We were still driving down the same dirt road in the same direction, according to my ‘link’s internal mapping software.
My first impulse was to start shooting, but I quashed it with some effort. If this car was built with a fucking sonic stunner, I was fairly certain the barrier between the driver’s compartment and the passengers’ would be sturdy enough to take a pistol shot. Even if it wasn’t, I was barely in any shape to lift the damned pistol, much less aim it accurately. The synthetic adrenalin had woken me up, but it wasn’t helping my scrambled nerves much at all.
My second impulse was to check on Bobbi, but I had to reject that course of action as well; if the purple-haired girl saw me move, they’d likely hit me with the stunner again just to be sure, and I didn’t know if my headcomp would be able to wake me up from a second shot. I didn’t even chance opening my eyes. Then I thought about my ‘link. The actual device was in a clip on my belt, and the way that I’d fallen, my coat had flipped away from it. I didn’t generally use it as anything but a transceiver for my headcomp and implant mic, but it did have a camera…
I used my headcomp to activate the visual pickup, running the signal through to the display on my contact lens. It was damned strange “seeing” with my eyes closed, but I suddenly had a monocular view of the floor in front of me. Bobbi was passed out across from me, a thin line of drool running down her chin, her eyes open but rolled back in her head. Her gun had dropped from her hand and was only centimeters from me, closer than mine, which had bounced to the other side of the car, near my feet.
Good to know.
Unfortunately, the ‘link’s angle gave me no view of the two in the driver’s compartment. I had no idea if the girl was looking at me and no concept of when it would be safe to move, so I stayed completely still, trying to control my breathing. I could feel my muscles unclenching, feel my hearing coming back to normal and my nerves ceasing their random firing. For most people, the effects of the stunner would last nearly an hour, but the army of tiny mechanics coursing through my bloodstream was doing its job quite efficiently. If I could just rest for a couple more minutes…
The car jerked to a sudden halt, rolling me over on my stomach…and sending Bobbi’s gun skittering across the floor and under her leg as it flopped around nervelessly. I mouthed a silent curse; they couldn’t see my mouth moving because I was face-down. I heard the front doors opening, then slamming shut, heard voices outside---more than just the two of them. My headcomp analyzed what I’d heard and suddenly I was aware that there were four people speaking outside the car, and of their approximate heights and distance from the vehicle.
And I was just able to make out the words that the girl was saying in the seconds before the door opened.
“This one’s too dangerous. Koji said to just put a few rounds through his head and dump the body out here. We’ll take the woman back with us to interrogate with the others.”
Well, that answered the question of who had ordered this. I’d been debating whether it had been the Sung Brothers, trying to get revenge, but apparently Koji had twigged to the fact that we weren’t working for Damiani anymore. That made things simpler, in some ways.
I took a deep breath of the chill air as the door swung open, hearing the scraping footsteps on the snow outside and knowing from that and the sounds of his breathing that it was a male, and that he was leaning into the car, reaching for me…
I waited until I felt his big hand clamp down on my right ankle so that I could get a reference for his position, then I pistoned my left leg straight into where I thought his face was. I felt a satisfying crunch of breaking bones beneath the sole of my combat boot, and the man thrashed backwards, still holding onto my ankle. My eyes were open now, my head up, and I could see the blood splashing across his white jacket from the smashed ruin of his face. He wasn’t dead, but one of his eyes was hanging out of its splintered orbital socket and I didn’t think he’d be doing much fighting; but he still clung to me like I was the one final handhold between him and falling off a cliff into unconsciousness.
And that turned out to be a good thing. The others were shouting, warning each other as they backed away and drew their guns, but the one holding onto my ankle was broad and bulky and he blocked almost the whole entrance to the passenger compartment. I twisted in his desperate grasp, pushing Bobbi out of the way and grabbing for her pistol; I’d just closed my fingers around it when the others opened fire.
Flashes of ionized air filled the interior of the car with garish, white light, and thundercracks of snow erupting into superheated steam echoed around me. The man holding onto me jerked spastically as the laser pulses tore into him, spraying me and Bobbi and the opposite window with black, boiling blood. He let go of my leg and stumbled backwards towards his killers, and I rolled behind the front portion of the double doors as it began to swing shut.
Steam billowed around the car like a smoke screen and the three outside were still firing blindly, filling my vision with brilliant stars and flashes; but I wasn’t reliant on just my eyes. My headcomp could see the input from my contact lens and it provided a knowledge of where the shooters were that felt almost preternatural, like a psychic sense that told me exactly where to aim.
I fired by an instinct that wasn’t instinct, barely able to see the rocket motors igniting on the tails of the outgoing rounds but knowing their trajectory as sure as if I were flying right beside them. I couldn’t see where they hit, couldn’t see their effects with the dying man still falling as the space of three seconds seemed to stretch out into eternity; but then time seemed to catch up and he was down in a heap on the snow, and the laser flashes were skewing wildly away as dead hands clenched triggers with a final firing of nerves.
I lunged out of the car, feeling anger and fear, but even more feeling a need to get this over with quickly and get back to my people in town. Two of the shooters were writhing on the ground, the girl shot through the neck and a short, slender man I hadn’t seen before who was clutching at the bloody mess where his left eye had been. I put a fuck-you round through each of their foreheads and followed the thermal signature of the last of them.
He was tall and skinny and silhouetted black against a snow that glowed even in the low light of a moon trapped behind the clouds. He ran away from the rover we’d come in and towards a battered, patched-together hopper they’d landed about fifty meters away on a wide stretch of road. I could hear its fans whining, not quite able to drown out the chug of the alcohol-fueled rotary engines, sending fountains of snow spraying out behind the shrouded rotors.
I sprinted after him, fountains of snow flying off my boots with each step, trying to get close enough that the dark and the steam and the snow wouldn’t matter. He had a head-start, but he was going to have to stop and open the canopy of the hopper, and when he did, I was going to kill him.
Apparently, he’d guessed my plan because he chose an alternative course of action and jumped the drainage ditch beside the road, throwing himself down behind the snow-packed roots of a gnarled oak
tree that had to be as old as the colony. I bit off a curse and took a running leap over the ditch, landing a meter past the edge and nearly running into the barren, straight trunk of a dead tree that had broken off two meters up in some past windstorm.
I’d barely gotten off the road when he sprayed a long burst of laser fire down the way I’d come, apparently not caring whether any of his allies were still alive or if he might hit them. I mean, they weren’t, but he didn’t know that…
I ignored his wild shots and pushed off from the dead tree, squeezing through tangled boughs and kicking drifts of snow away, feeling the dampness beginning to soak through my pant legs. We were wearing civilian clothes, not combat armor, and it wasn’t quite as weather-proof as I would have liked, but it was what we had on the ship.
Koji’s hired gun must have noticed me coming because his fire shifted my way, but there were about two dozen trees between us and all he accomplished was blowing the shit out of a couple of them, the water in their bark exploding outward in sprays of steam and fragments of flaming wood that mostly went his way. I heard him cry out and I wondered if the genius had managed to hurt himself with his own weapon. Lasers were cool and fairly new on the civilian market and everybody wanted one, but there was a reason I preferred something that fired a nice, solid bullet.
I used his distraction and cut straight towards him, jumping onto a fallen log that had wedged itself between four massive oaks, and running across it, feeling a flutter in my stomach as I nearly slipped off. I leapt off the end and came down into a shoulder roll in the thick snow, about even with the tall man and only three meters away. He wheeled towards me, shooting even before he had his gun all the way up, blowing harmless, steaming holes in the snow, and only years of experience made me ignore the light and heat and sound and concentrate on putting the aiming reticle across his forehead.
His hood had fallen away and I could see his narrow, hang-dog face, could see the abject fear in his eyes for just a split-second that I knew would stay with me forever because I could never forget anything ever again. It didn’t change my mind. It didn’t have the chance; by the time I consciously registered his expression, my finger had already touched the trigger pad. The fear left his face along with everything else that had made him the man he was.