by Rick Partlow
My right forearm smashed into his trachea with calculated force and he slammed backwards into another table, the laser carbine dropping slack on its sling as his hands went automatically to his throat. I ignored his gun and didn’t attempt to draw my own either, lunging down on top of Calderon and planting a knee in his solar plexus. He’d already been having trouble drawing a breath, and now he had no air left in his lungs. I saw his eyes roll back in his head and he went limp, passing out. I hit the release for his sling and grabbed the carbine off of him, then found the pulse pistol he had holstered over his hip and grabbed that as well, tossing them both aside as I picked him up and slung him over my shoulder. He was, as I expected, a heavy son of a bitch.
Outside, all hell was breaking loose. The decades-old Tahni High Guard battlesuit was on the ground now, and I could see the cracked pavement where it had landed and the steam still coming off the metal of the back of its tree-trunk legs. It was three meters tall and two wide, and as grim and featureless as a golem. CSF troopers were laying down a wild swathe of laser fire at the thing as it rumbled down the street towards them, and the blasts were sparking impotently off its centimeters-thick armor plating.
They began to withdraw, in an orderly fashion at first but then in a dead run as the thing just kept coming and the electron beamer attached to its left arm began to swing around to target them. It didn’t fire, mostly because it barely had enough fuel left in its reactor to power the motors that had it walking, and it sure as hell wasn’t flying ever again. Hell, it had taken just about every Tradenote I’d had left in the ship’s safe to rent one with enough power left to fly at all. The Tahni here might be new to this whole organized crime thing, but that didn’t mean they were stupid about it, either.
The battlesuit plodded to a halt just as the groundcar pulled up in front of the diner with Sanders behind the wheel. Vilberg threw the rear driver’s side door open and I tossed Calderon inside, then followed him through and slammed the door shut. Outside the car, I could see the Tahni battlesuit locked into a straight-legged resting position, the front half of its torso sliding downward as the operator hit the emergency egress control. Victor climbed out of the thing with eagerness that bordered on panic, and jumped to the ground, rolling as he hit.
Sanders waited until Victor was halfway into the front passenger’s seat before he gunned the engine and sent the rental car screeching away from the curb. The streets were abandoned around us, all the good citizens in the food district of Johnny City having beat feet when the lasers had started blasting, and we were going just as fast as the car’s engine would allow.
“Jesus,” Victor was saying fervently from the front seat. “Holy shit that sucked.” He was dressed in the smallest control suit the Tahni arms dealer had been able to find, cinched down as tight as they could, and it still looked like a tent on him. “God, I thought those things were scary from the outside…” I concealed a grin. Victor wasn’t fond of flying in anything smaller than a starship, but the Tahni males were large compared to humans and he was the largest of us, so the task had fallen to him.
“What if we got spotted by police surveillance cameras?” Vilberg worried, not looking up from the plastic zip-cuffs he was using to truss up Calderon, who was still out. “Or security drones? They might throw up a cordon and catch us before we can get out of town.”
“No need to worry about that,” I assured him, staring out at the business district, looking normal and sedate, as if there hadn’t been a damned battlesuit flying through the air a few kilometers down the road. “Thanks to our old buddy here,” I slapped Calderon on the leg appreciatively and he groaned, half-conscious, “not one damned EM signal could get out of the area of the diner.” I watched as Vilberg finished securing the man’s wrists and ankles. “Let’s get to Bobbi and Kurt and see what old Alberto has to say for himself.”
***
It had been a grain storage silo for the Tahni before the war; and like most of their structures built for utility rather than aesthetics, it looked eerily similar to the human equivalent. The upper ten or fifteen meters of what had been a thirty meter tall cylinder were gone now, blasted by a stray shot from an assault shuttle or a Marine battlesuit, probably. All that was left of what had once been a rounded sheet-metal roof cap were charred and jagged strips of aluminum swaying in the wind.
The covered loading dock was still intact, though, and the entrance was large enough to drive our rental vehicle right inside, the wheels thumping off of a decade’s worth of detritus and wreckage as we plunged from the glare of the descending star into the deep shadows beneath the sagging aluminum-plate ceiling above us. Another vehicle was pulled further into the loading dock, near what was left of the grain chute, and I could see light leaking through from a small, interior room in the corner just past it.
I stepped out of the car and took a long, careful look back the way we’d come. We weren’t that far from the city, which I didn’t like, but this had been the most convenient place that we could actually acquire under the table for this operation. Johnny City was less than ten kilometers back down the overgrown stretch of cracked and crumbling road. Over the jagged and spiky limbs of the transplanted Tahni vegetation that surrounded this place, I could see the patrol shuttles Calderon had mentioned glinting in the low, red-tinted rays of the setting primary as they did a slow spiral around the city. They’d find us eventually. We had to make this quick.
Vilberg and Sanders had dragged the restrained Calderon out of the back of the car and Kurt and I followed them through to the interior room. I didn’t want to call it an office or a break room or anything, because I honestly had no idea what the Tahni had used it for. Maybe it was a prayer room or a lunch room, which I understood were basically the same thing to them. Either way, it was bare and empty now, except for the accumulated dust and dirt of ten years and the equipment Bobbi and Kurt had driven here from the ship.
They had stepped out to meet us, and Bobbi regarded the trussed-up and gagged Calderon with her hands on her hips and a look of frank amusement on her face.
“I see things went well,” she commented. She caught Kurt’s eye and the nasty smile didn’t waver. “Enjoy your flight?”
Kurt wordlessly shot her a bird, then dragged the door, long ago fallen from its hinges, into place across the opening to block out the harsh light of the work lamps Bobbi and Victor had adhered to the wall. Sanders and Vilberg wrestled the now-awake and increasingly uncooperative Alberto Calderon into place on a folding, portable medical examination table we’d brought from the Nomad. Victor helped them strap him down and only then did I reach over and yank the tape off of his mouth, pulling out a veritable carpet of hairs from his moustache and short beard.
“Shit!” He spluttered in sudden pain from the pulled hair, his face practically purple from rage. “You fuckers are dead! They’re going to find you, and when they do…”
“When they do,” I interrupted him, grabbing a drug patch from the kit laid out on a folding table beside the gurney and slapping it onto the side of his neck, “it’ll be too late for you.” I looked over to Kurt and Victor, who were watching impassively, having seen this sort of thing many times before.
“You two get on sentry duty,” I told them, just in case Calderon had been right. “Launch a few insect drones to monitor the road back into town.” The two of them nodded almost in tandem and headed out to the loading dock, guns in hand.
The sedative had taken effect almost immediately and I could already see Calderon’s eyes begin to lose focus. When the muscles in his shoulders relaxed and he slumped back against the padded gurney, I retrieved a second patch from an open plastic dispenser marked with warning labels and peeled off the backing from the adhesive and placed it on the other side from the first one. Calderon twitched and his eyes flickered fitfully. He began to mumble incoherently as the drug inhibited his ability to self-censor. It wasn’t as precise and effective as a hypnoprobe and it wouldn’t work on someone who’d had any counter
conditioning, but Calderon hadn’t been a spook or an operator, just a Marine officer.
“Alberto,” I said, leaning over to get close to his ear. “Can you hear me?”
“Only mama calls me that,” he murmured, not looking at me, or at anything in the room. “Friends call me Albie.”
“He has friends?” Vilberg said quietly, sounding shocked. I gave him a dirty look and Bobbi smacked him in the back of the head. He made a zipping motion across his mouth, raising his hand in apology.
“Albie,” I tried again, feeling dirty calling him by the nickname. “Tell me where the Predecessor corpse is, the one you found on Peboan.”
“Cult has it.” The words were slurred together and so quiet I nearly didn’t hear them at all. My headcomp assured me that I hadn’t misunderstood; that was what he’d said.
“How can the Predecessor Cult have it?” I demanded. “They left it behind, and there weren’t any alive to get it by the time we got done with them. How did the Predecessor Cult get the artifact?”
“I gave it to them.”
I stepped back from him. Of all the answers I’d expected, this wasn’t one of them.
“Why the hell,” I asked slowly and clearly, “would you give the artifact to the Cult?”
This time he did seem to know I was there and that he was talking to me. He gave me a look like I’d asked a stupid question before he blurted out an answer.
“Because they paid me, you fucking moron!” Then he giggled. “They paid me the day they arrived on Peboan…that High Priest, Israfil…he didn’t promise anything, actually said he’d still kill me if I got in his way, but he transferred a shitload of scrip to one of my accounts and said that if I could find the artifact that the Skingangers had stolen and get it to them, there’d be a lot more.” More giggling, manic this time. “And boy, was there! I could retire out to a place like this right now, but I want a place on Earth.” He smiled, eyes travelling far away. “Want a place in the mountains, like one of the Corporate Council executives…”
“Where did you take it?” I interrupted, getting impatient with his dreams of avarice. “Where is it now?”
He seemed to almost try to resist telling me that one, like the effects of the drug were wearing off. His mouth became a hard line, his teeth clenched as he tried to keep them shut. Impatient, I fished another patch out of the container and swapped it out for the old one. Calderon’s back arched and his eyes squeezed shut, spit spraying from his mouth as he sputtered incoherently for a moment.
The door collapsed open with a hollow bang and I nearly pulled my gun before I saw that it was Kurt.
“There are groundcars approaching from town,” he said urgently. “Spotted them with the drones, maybe five kilometers out.”
“They’re tracking him,” Bobbi stated with grim fatalism. “He has to have a transponder of some kind on him.”
I nearly climbed on top of the table, my nose centimeters from Calderon’s face.
“Where did you take the Predecessor corpse?” I yelled at him, trying to penetrate the fog of the drugs. “Where is it?”
“F-f-far as I know,” he murmured, like his mouth was stuffed with cotton, “it’s still on Aphrodite. Kennedy City, their big temple. Still there…”
I let out the breath I’d been holding and turned to Bobbi.
“Get everyone in the bigger car, get to the spaceport.”
“What are you gonna’ do, Boss?” Sanders wanted to know.
I was yanking loose the table restraints, pulling the almost deadweight of Calderon into a fireman’s carry.
“They’re tracking him,” I answered. “I’m going to give them something to chase.”
Chapter Ten
“You’re going to die…”
Calderon was singing. I suppose it was my own fault; I’d basically overdosed him. In his uninhibited state, he’d decided that every threat sounded better if it was sung.
“They’re going to catch you and gut you like a fish, you son of a bitch…”
His voice wavered up and down an octave as the car hit another rock and bounced a few centimeters up on the right side before slamming down again. I’d cut straight into the scrubland, trying to draw the four armored vehicles off the road and free it for the others to get away. The onboard security system had precautionary interlocks to prevent leaving paved road, but it was a commercial system and my headcomp chewed through it like cardboard. I was fairly sure I wasn’t getting my deposit back, though.
Clouds of dust billowed around and behind the car and dirt and vegetation coated the windshield and I had to run the computer-enhanced optics in the Heads-Up Display to see a damned thing. The optics were cheap, commercial shit like the security system and the image wavered and blurred with each rut and hole I ran over, but I had a good idea of where I was going. The spaceport here wasn’t quite as big as the one on Hermes, but it still stretched above the tallest buildings, and those damned CSF assault shuttles hovered over it like a signal beacon, still guarding against our launch. I’d hoped they’d come after me, instead, but they’d left that to the ground troops.
There was still no sign of either the police or the military, which didn’t surprise me; Calderon had Cowboy’s contacts and clearances and I’d never known those to fail him in all the years I’d been working as his ass-kicker. I tried to access the feed from the insect drones Victor and Kurt had left flying, but the jamming was back, undoubtedly from transmitters in the CSF armored vehicles. That was okay, though: if they were jamming our drones, that meant they couldn’t use their own and I didn’t trust these guys not to use an armed autonomous flyer to launch a missile into my car, even with their boss inside.
I could tell by now that they were all following me, anyway, so that part of my plan had worked. Now I just had to figure out a way to not get killed. I was still thinking about that part, and Calderon’s singing wasn’t helping. I should have listened to Bobbi and shot him.
“I need him to draw them off!” I’d insisted at the time, yelling the answer back at her as we’d both climbed into our vehicles.
“You don’t know he needs to be alive for the transponder to work,” she’d pointed out, and maybe she’d been right, but I hadn’t had time to argue about it and we had to get the hell out of there.
I checked my position with a thought and realized I was only a couple more kilometers from the city, but this approach was blocked by a drainage ditch that I was going to plunge straight into in another hundred meters. I cut the wheel hard to the right, and dust and something that was very like sagebrush but much more fuzzy and prickly went flying off to the left as the car fishtailed. The right-hand wheels went off the ground that time, and I had to cut the wheel hard to the right to bring it back down. The car crashed down on its suspension and Calderon jerked wildly against his seat harness, smacking his head on the window and halting him in mid-verse of a newly-minted song about how he would strangle me with my own intestines.
Which was honestly a shame, because it had been a catchy tune.
I took the rental on a perpendicular route towards the main road into Johnny City, still running a good hundred meters ahead of the nearest CSF vehicle. There was a pretty sharp incline from the scrub brush up onto the pavement, and I was fairly sure I’d bottom out on it if I hit it straight, so at the last second I cut back to the left and ran parallel, edging the car onto the road with a bone-rattling thump. The tires screeched against the pavement and the car jumped forward with an almost sentient eagerness, like it was relieved to be back on a flat, man-made surface again.
“Jesus Christ, Munroe,” Calderon said, eyes clearing up for a moment as he looked up at me from where his head was down by the door, his feet somewhere in the back seat, “where’d you learn how to drive?”
It was an almost coherent statement and I knew I’d have to keep a closer eye on him; the drugs were beginning to wear off. For the moment, all I could do was push the accelerator to the floor and wish the damn car could go faster
. I’d disabled the governor on the computer system, so it was putting every bit of juice it had into the hub-mounted motors and I was still only going about a hundred and twenty kilometers an hours, even on the paved road; these rental jobs just weren’t built for speed.
The only problem with being on a straightaway again was…
I jerked the wheel to the right, then curved it back to the left to compensate as a blinding flash of ionized air tore by the driver’s side window less than two meters away. They hadn’t fired the laser directly at me or I’d already be dead; it was one-half of a warning, and the other half was the blaring siren screaming from the lead CSF assault vehicle.
“Let’s see how popular you are with these guys, Albie,” I muttered, accelerating again, finally passing by the first warehouses at the edge of town---active, human warehouses, not the rotting storage bins the Tahni had left behind. “Hope they have a higher opinion of you than I do.”
There were more buildings, mostly businesses like industrial repair and rental places, some of them already closed for the evening, but there began to be traffic as well. Another warning blast from the Gatling laser mounted on the assault vehicle struck the road a couple meters to the right of the passenger’s side and steam and shrapnel exploded away from it, bits of pavement slamming into the back of the car. I saw an automated cargo truck curve placidly around the newly-made hole in the road, ignoring the gunfire as it carried on its preprogrammed mission to deliver its contents to one of the warehouses or businesses we’d already passed.
I caught a fleeting glimpse of a group of Tahni adolescents sitting by the side of the road, huddled around a discarded industrial cable spool while one of them stood atop it and held his arms straight towards the setting primary, a gleaming blade in his outstretched hands. I blinked, not sure what I was seeing, and then they were gone.