by Rick Partlow
Following the map in my head, I took the first right on the road and, almost like those Tahni boys had been performing a ritual calling down traffic, I was suddenly weaving through a dozen cars heading the same direction I was but at a much slower speed. I was out of the commercial sector now and into the business district, and people---humans and Tahni---were shuffling in and out of storefronts, most staying on the sidewalks but some going to automated cabs or personal vehicles.
I jammed down on the brakes as a car pulled out right in front of me, then I cursed as the safety harness bit into my chest to keep me from being thrown into the dashboard. I accessed the feed from the rear camera and saw in a corner of my contact lens the image of the assault vehicles rounding the corner only forty or fifty meters behind me, catching up way too quickly.
I gritted my teeth, yanked the wheel to the right and hit the accelerator and the horn at the same time, riding up on the sidewalk and scattering a group of pedestrians in plain-looking work clothes. I cut back in front of a cluster of three auto-cabs and roared around the next curve onto Johnny City’s main drag. The line of storefronts gave way to row upon row of outdoor sales kiosks. It was a large, open-air Zocalo with that reminded me of the much larger one back in Trans-Angeles where I used to shop as a kid. Crowds of humans and Tahni milled around them, through them and all the way across the street to shops on the other side.
I laid on the horn again, swerving around clusters of heedless shoppers carrying fresh vegetables or farm-raised meat or hand-made clothes or leather goods in plastic tote bags and getting more than one obscene gesture in return. I wanted to beat my fist against the steering wheel as I crawled through the crowd, and when I heard Calderon giggling uncontrollably again, I wanted to beat my fist on his face instead.
Then I heard the sirens blaring behind me and I knew that the CSF assault vehicles had caught up with me; and I also knew I was not going to outdrive them in the evening traffic. To my right, a stretch of Earth-imported grass lined the paved road, leading up to more Tahni-imported tree-things, and then a row of Earth palm trees transplanted there in a stark contrast. And between those rows of trees led a wide pedestrian walkway that led all the way through the Zocalo and out the other side into the next street over. It was blocked by series of anti-vehicle barrier posts that I knew were concrete filled with metal reinforcements that went down into the foundation a good two meters, but there was a gap between the last post and the closest Tahni bush-tree that was just wide enough…
“Fuck it,” I said to no one in particular.
I hit the horn again and drove through that gap and then straight up the walkway, sending shoppers diving into the grass and ducking between trees to get out of the way. I took the car straight up the hill and onto the concrete pad of the Zocalo, steering around plastic recycling bins and then barely missing a shopkeeper who tried to step out and wave me down. Sirens screeched shrilly behind me, growing most distant as I put more of the market between us, and I could hear loudspeakers ordering people out of the way and the solid thud of a crash as one of the assault vehicles rammed into one of the bush-trees. I took a quick glimpse backward with the rear-view cameras and saw one of the CSF cars stuck between the trees and the vehicle barrier and the others trying to move farther down to look for an alternate way up.
Then they apparently lost all semblance of patience and someone opened up with a Gatling laser. I was up the hill and slightly over the rise from where the assault vehicle was stuck, but the powerful energy blasts tore into the concrete of the sidewalk behind my car, sending gouts of steam and smoke into the air before chewing into a line of kiosks off to my left and vaporizing them in blasts of liberated water vapor. Most of the shoppers had already begun running when I’d driven on the sidewalk and I didn’t see any casualties, but all I could do was hope that meant that there weren’t any because I didn’t have time to stop and look.
I maneuvered around a utility building at the center of the Zocalo, ignoring a security guard standing in the doorway of an office and yelling something at me like this was some sort of minor traffic violation and like he hadn’t noticed the crew-served weapon firing. The other half of the complex was a collection of outdoor eateries bounded by rings of round tables with built-in bench seating and there was absolutely no way to drive through it. But that was okay.
I gave the car’s auto-drive systems a simple set of commands, then I punched Calderon across the face to make sure he was too stunned to interfere before I slowed the car to a crawl and jumped out the door. I landed on my feet, breaking into a run without bothering to look back, but my headcomp told me the story as if I’d known it all along and was just remembering it.
The car pulled a quick K-turn and headed straight back down the way it had come, heading right for the stuck assault vehicle. As I ran, I felt my mouth twist into a grin that was more of a snarl, hoping one of Calderon’s own CSF flunkies would get the chance to blow him in half. People eating at the outdoor cafes stared at me as I dodged through the tables, some of them wandering towards the utility building to see what the commotion was on the other side. I thought I heard a crash as I reached the next street over, but I didn’t hear any more laser fire, which was disappointing.
I kept running when I hit the street, cutting in front of an auto-cab and hearing its brakes lock as it screeched to a stop to avoid hitting me. The other vehicles would get over to this street as soon as they found a place to cross and I needed to be as far away as possible by then. I cut up another alley and found myself away from the malls and shops and in a residential neighborhood…a Tahni residential neighborhood. You could tell by the architecture: they favored high walls and no windows and everything looked run down and hand-made and half-assed. Most of it had been damaged or destroyed in the invasion and when the civilians had been released from the holding camps, they’d mostly had to rebuild with whatever they could scrape together.
I nearly stopped in my tracks when I saw the first group of adult males gathered at a corner, passing around a clay bowl and inhaling the pale smoke that drifted off of it. This was a male neighborhood, of course. The females and all the children lived in an enclosed compound on the other side of town, as was their custom, one that not even a war could change. Some people argued that it was their biology that had made them so insanely aggressive as to start an interstellar war in the first place, while others thought it was their religion and still others thought the first was responsible for the second.
Sophia was convinced that the Predecessors had screwed with Tahni evolution and they’d become tool-users too soon. I didn’t have a clue, but I felt pretty fucking naked running through the middle of their streets alone as the darkness gathered on the horizon. It was warm here this time of year, and I was going at a pretty good clip, but I wasn’t sure either the heat or the exertion was responsible for the sweat gathering at the small of my back.
A lone male shouted something at me in sounds a human couldn’t duplicate, gesturing in a way I didn’t recognize. Except I did; my headcomp informed me it was a classic Tahni insult involving an accusation of cowardice, with the added implication that I was running the way all humans did when faced with Tahni warriors. He looked the right age, and had his queue wrapped around his throat, so he might have actually have fought against us. I felt an irrational urge to go show him what would happen if I stopped running.
The exterior walls of the spaceport loomed over the Tahni ghetto in silent but obvious intimidation, built there as an object lesson to the conquered that they had no power to object to the undesirable zoning. I jogged at an easy pace between two slate-grey, windowless apartment buildings, the last layer before the three-meter-tall chain-link fence between the port and the neighborhood.
I was thinking of chancing a call to the others now that I was away from the jamming, but that thought was abruptly interrupted by the four Tahni males that moved out into the alley to block my way. I slowed to a walk, then stopped, regarding them. They were former
military; they had the look, the wrapped queue and the clothes worn just so, like a uniform. Dark and alert eyes watched me from under ridged brows, their faces flat and unreadable even with the translation software in my headcomp.
“What do you want here, human?” The one who asked was the oldest of the three, with grey in his dark hair and lines etched beside his eyes. His accent was sing-song, his voice surprisingly high-pitched.
“I just want to pass,” I told him, motioning at the fence. There was a meter-high hole ripped in the links just behind the alley; I’d seen it a half a kilometer away.
“This is ours,” one of the others said in broken English. “Find your own way.”
I didn’t have a lot of time to waste on these guys and my first instinct was to shoot them. Something held me back, though; maybe it was the thought that their position was a lot like mine, trapped in a box someone else had made. I tried something different.
“Our ways are drawn at the will of the Path,” I said, as close to the Tahni intonation as a human throat could manage. It was a common saying in their religion, and generic enough that I was fairly sure I wouldn’t offend them. And then I bared my teeth. “The Path willed me to kill shitloads of your buddies on Demeter, so get the fuck out of my way.”
Something about their demeanor changed. I couldn’t have said for sure what it was, or what it meant, but I could see the change and it was probably because of the mention of Demeter. Everyone who’d fought for either side in the war had heard of the planet and knew what had happened there. None of them said anything, but they moved, the oldest first, backing away into the gravel-lined yard behind the apartment house on the left.
I walked past them, not staring but keeping my eyes on them sidelong until I’d passed through the gap in the fence and began to run again.
No one in the spaceport paid me any notice, even at the light jog I continued onto its paved walkways. I half expected the CSF ground troops to be stationed there, but I suppose they hadn’t felt the need with the shuttles overhead. I still hadn’t quite worked out how we were going to get past those shuttles when I reached the Nomad. The belly ramp was down and Victor and Kurt were waiting at the bottom, pacing back and forth.
“Thought you might not make it, Munroe,” Victor said, face lighting up when he saw me coming in through the bay’s interior doorway. “How’d you shake ‘em?”
“I threw Calderon at them,” I told him, clapping both men on the arm as I climbed up the ramp. “Close this thing and let’s get the hell out of here.”
“What about the fucking shuttles?” Kurt protested, following me up towards the cockpit while his brother raised the ramp.
“Boss, you’re here!” Sanders said, rising from the navigation console as I entered the cockpit. “I thought we were going to have to go look for you!”
“I told you he’d be here,” Bobbi declared smugly from the copilot’s station, smirking slightly, just a hint of a softening around her eyes the only sign she was relieved I’d made it.
“Everyone strap in,” I announced, tying into the computer as I fell into the pilot’s seat. Bobbi had warmed up the reactor and I had the ship’s computer begin electronic negotiation with the planetary traffic control system to clear us for takeoff. Sanders went back to the Nav console while Kurt unfolded the spare acceleration couch from the bulkhead beside the cockpit hatch and they both fastened their harnesses.
I fed power to the turbines, starting the flow of air through the reactor ducts, filling the ship with a high-pitched whine. Then I looked over at Bobbi.
“I may need you to burn a bridge or two,” I said to her.
She sighed, her eyes closing for a moment, but when they reopened, she nodded agreement.
“Space Fleet Orbital Command,” she spoke clearly and concisely into the audio pick-up at her station, “please confirm Ident Code Alpha Alpha four three niner Gamma Foxtrot.”
There was a long silence and on the bridge, I saw Sanders frowning in confusion, staring between Bobbi and me, uncomprehending.
“AA439GF,” the voice was a human, not an automated response, “this is Space Fleet Orbital Command, Lt. Lee here. We have confirmed your Ident Code and acknowledge your priority orders. What do you need from us?”
“I’m on board the registered free-trader Nomad,” she told the officer in the orbital monitoring station. “There are two CSF assault shuttles in a patrol pattern over the spaceport. I need you to instruct them to stand down and leave the area. I need it made clear to them that if they take any aggressive action against this ship that they’ll be shot down immediately.”
There was a longer pause this time, only the whining of the idling turbines making a sound.
“Umm, I, ah...,” the man at the other end of the line dithered. “But they have, umm…authorization from…”
“Lt. Lee,” Bobbi interrupted with a finality to her tone, “is there some problem with your comprehension of the scope of my standing priority orders?”
“Ah, no ma’am,” Lee responded, “but…”
“Is there some problem,” she ground out, “with your confirmation of my transponder signal or Ident Code?”
“Umm, negative, ma’am.” You could hear Lee swallowing hard even over the commo line from orbit. “Sending the transmission now, ma’am. You’re cleared for takeoff at your discretion.”
Bobbi settled back into her acceleration couch with a resigned hiss of breath, ignoring Kurt and Sanders, who were still staring at her wide-eyed.
“Link this ship into your tactical feed, Lt. Lee,” she amended, “and your commo line to the shuttles.”
“Aye, ma’am.”
“What the fuck is going on?” Sanders blurted, but I held up a hand to silence him.
The tactical display on the viewscreen switched to a view from the defense satellites and I could see the assault shuttles highlighted with red haloes as they orbited the spaceport about ten kilometers out.
“…repeat,” the transmission from the Fleet Command Center began blasting out of the cockpit speakers en media res, “Corporate Security Force shuttlecraft CSF10199 and CSF10198, you are ordered to leave the area and cease all offensive operations. Failure to comply will result in your aerospacecraft being disabled or destroyed. Do you copy?”
I began feeding more power to the turbines and the whine grew lower in pitch until it was a rumbling roar that vibrated the bulkhead and the Nomad began to lift out of its bay on columns of fire.
“Fleet Command,” a woman’s voice responded, annoyance bordering on outrage in her tone, “we are authorized by order of DSI Deputy Director Alvarez to operate on this planet…”
“Your authorization has been superseded, CSF10199,” Lee cut her off. “Don’t bother arguing with me, just follow the instructions I’ve given or I will use all necessary force to ensure that you do.”
As we rose above the walls of the bay, I could see a couple other ships lifting at the same time we did; this was a fairly busy port for this far out on the frontier. I took advantage of our expedited military clearance and blasted straight out over Johnny City, gradually angling the belly jets backwards until it was safe to transfer power to the main thrust nozzles. We shot out at an upward angle, a good six g’s of acceleration pushing us into our seats, clearing the city limits in seconds. On the tactical display, I could see both assault shuttles breaking from their patrol pattern to pursue us.
This was where it could get tricky, especially if Lee lost his nerve.
“CSF shuttlecraft,” the Fleet officer transmitted again, his voice taking a hard edge, “I must warn you, you need to break off pursuit and leave the area immediately. We will use force.”
“I have my orders, Fleet Command,” the female pilot snapped at him. “I don’t recognize your authority to supersede them. If you so much as paint us with a targeting laser, you’ll be brought up on charges.”
“Shit,” Bobbi muttered, and I had the same thought. Lee was between a rock and a hard place.
>
And the DSI’s a pretty big fucking rock.
Starships with atmospheric capabilities, especially smaller ones like our converted missile cutter, were hybrid beasts. They had to have turbines for operation in an atmosphere, plasma drives for outside of it and the Teller-Fox warp unit to jump to T-Space. That made them terribly versatile, but not terribly good at any one thing. Which meant that those damn shuttles, which were not that much smaller than our ship and were built to operate in atmospheres and in orbit, were a hell of a lot faster in the soup than we were. Add to that the fact that their pilots and crew were probably wearing g-suits and could push nine gravities of acceleration without losing consciousness, and they were catching up to us way too quickly.
“Lt. Lee,” Bobbi cut in, her voice strained by the elephants sitting on our chests, “take them out. That’s a direct order.”
The shuttles were closing in, just a few kilometers away now, and we were still a good two minutes from leaving the atmosphere, much less getting far enough away to Transition. I was fairly certain they had proton cannons, and even though the Nomad had military-grade EM shield projectors, they wouldn’t last more than maybe one shot from a proton accelerator.
“Now, God damn it!” Bobbi exploded.
Then lightning struck from above in an actinic white flash of super-ionized atmosphere and the lead shuttle simply ceased to exist. Where it had been, there was nothing but a cloud of vapor, still traveling in the same direction and only gradually losing velocity. The second shuttle immediately banked away from its pursuit course and began a slow arc back the way it had come, towards the Johnny City spaceport.
“Thanks, Lieutenant,” Bobbi said, her voice more subdued.
“Good luck,” Lee responded, perhaps with some bitterness in his tone. “Whoever you are.”
“Yeah,” Sanders muttered, still staring at her with suspicion in his eyes. “Whoever you are.”