His heart flipped too, but it was nothing to do with gravity. The admiral hadn’t said a word. Hadn’t moved.
“Oh, no!” groaned Fitz. “Not you too, Obinquin.”
He raced over to the window and confirmed his fears. A line was slashed across the admiral’s throat from which he had bled out. Fitz realized that he was standing in the man’s blood. With the place illuminated in such crazy colors, he hadn’t noticed the crimson pool.
Fitz closed Nuysp’s eyes.
“Whatever you did and whatever you failed to do sixteen years ago, I forgive you, Obinquin.”
He stared at the dead man who might have become an essential ally. “Now what?”
Kanha Wei had bribed him to come here, to collect up his passengers once they’d been debriefed, and fly off into exciting galactic adventures at the head of Chimera Company.
Well, she could go stuff herself with her precious jump coordinates. If his enemies could kill Nuysp, they were all in danger. He was going to collect Izza and his cosplaying chief mechanic and get the hell off this station.
Fitz grabbed the slate and ran.
He was halfway across the room and about to leap for the hatch when the windows blew in, spraying him with fragments of colored glass and throwing him into one of the sofas.
No matter how much he shook his head, he couldn’t clear it of buzzing motes of light.
An armored gauntlet grabbed him by the arm and pulled him off the sofa and onto his knees. Someone else pulled Fitz’s arms up. He kept his hands open and high for all to see.
The Cordovan Room was full of armored legionaries shouting at him, but their voices seemed to come from far away and he couldn’t understand.
But the PA-71 rifles aimed his way spoke eloquently.
The buzzing in his head cleared a little, and he heard one say, “DNA confirmed. The deceased is Admiral Nuysp.”
A jack ripped off Fitz’s shades.
“Well, will you look at that? It’s a damned mutant. Devil eyes like him are born guilty.”
The legionary removed his helmet. The man inside could be the twin brother of Osu Sybutu. But then he spat on Fitz. Sybutu might be an arrogant jack, but he would never do that.
“Your kind disgusts me. But… maybe not for much longer. Eh, lads?”
That comment won a knowing chuckle, which choked off when one of the jacks interrupted. “Sir, I’m getting reports of a disturbance in the lower floors of this building.”
“Well, well.” The jack who’d taken Fitz’s glasses crouched down in front of him. “Looks like your friends have come to rescue you, mutie. You stay there and watch them die. Martinelli, if he opens his mouth, shoot him dead. Everyone else, cover the entrance.”
The officer replaced his helmet.
The hatch slid open.
“It’s a trap,” Fitz whispered without moving his lips, hoping desperately that Izza’s sharp ears would hear.
Four rifles covered the hatch. She didn’t stand a chance.
He shut his eyes, unable to witness the soldiers slaughter his wife.
No one fired.
Fitz opened one eye and immediately dropped his jaw because the figure in the hatchway looked nothing like his lady.
“What the hell?” said Martinelli.
Fitz looked straight at Martinelli. “Didn’t anyone warn you?” he said, ignoring the instruction not to speak, because in the circumstances surely even this Martinelli jerk couldn’t begrudge Fitz his moment. “Always expect the unexpected if you mess with the affairs of Captain Tavistock Fitzwilliam.”
“Huh?” Martinelli clubbed him to the floor with the butt of his PA-71.
Fitz stayed down, grinning, and watched the show.
Caught in mid-air, with his Jotun tail tied to a step, Catkins appeared to be dangling from the ceiling while juggling oversized gaming dice. He’d judged it just right to use his cosplay claws to spin the dice around in the null-gee zone.
It was a cute trick. And a great distraction for Izza to come bursting through the hatch, weapons blazing.
Fitz readied to spring into action, but the jacks sliced off the Jotun costume’s tail and dragged Catkins down to the ceiling.
Izza hadn’t come.
His chance to escape had gone.
“We’ll take the buffoon in the fancy dress back with us,” said the officer. “Not you, mutie.” He drew his handgun.
“Let me guess,” said Fitz, “I’m about to be shot dead while resisting arrest.”
“A most regrettable outcome,” replied the officer insincerely. “But you brought it upon yourself, Fitzwilliam. You know too much to live.”
Fitz stared resolutely at the pistol as it was raised to his head.
“Time’s up,” the officer told him. “Say your prayers, freak. You’re going home… to hell.”
At the last moment, Fitz’s courage failed him, and he looked away.
His head filled with a gunshot’s roar.
NEXT ISSUE: Battle stations!
ISSUE 3
IZZA ZAN FEY
Three Minutes Earlier
The vehicle flew in silently, the neon glare of sim-night in District Metz absorbed by its no-reflec surfaces. It looked like a playgirl’s hover-limo, except its silence didn’t fit with that notion.
Izza immediately assumed the worst.
It usually turned out to be the truth.
This was an assault vehicle, and it had come to kill her husband.
She paused on the threshold to Howell’s, long enough to be sure where her enemy was headed. Her heart fluttered when she saw it would enter at the very top of the building, the assault team readying to swing out and then come crashing in through the angled windows.
She wouldn’t have time to get to Fitz first.
That’s okay, she told herself. He’s a master of stalling.
But she was nervous as hell as she ran inside… and smacked her face against the wall of metal that had appeared from nowhere.
“Freeze, intruder!” boomed a robotic voice.
Bylzak! Door security.
“Or not,” said a second robo-guard. “You’re armed, which means my weapons have just unlocked. Go on, make my day, humanoid. Let me splatter your fluids over the sidewalk.”
Slowly – very slowly – Izza turned her head to see what she was facing. She guessed they’d started out as C/Lark-7 combat droids, but the hulking seven-foot-high machines had been heavily modified. Sensor cupolas had been replaced with humanoid-looking heads. Small tusks were set among realistic yellowing teeth in pivoting lower jaws. Outer casings had been painted to suggest muscles and bone structure beneath green skin.
Their black market PPR3 blasters looked very real, though.
Cautiously, she raised her arms and opened her palms, praying the nano dust she’d just thrown at the security droids was invisible even to their enhanced senses.
“We’ll lay our blasters down first,” urged the droid on the right who had pointed ears on its head. “Then you draw your weapon. Perhaps you’ll get lucky, punk.”
“Luck is not a strategy,” Izza replied.
The nano dust completed its assembly into EMP patches and fired a pulse into the robots. The less talkative one sparked and smoldered. The one with the ears gave a pixelated scream. It fell through the window, sending shattered glass spraying out on the sidewalk.
Izza shrugged. “Not my strategy, anyway,” she quipped as she drew her plasma pistol and scanned the Howell’s crowd. “I leave the risk taking to my partner.”
The people in Howell’s were caught between stunned silence and panicked screams. None of them drew weapons, and that was enough to release her to race up the stairs, bounding over three steps at a time in the low gravity.
This is one freaky layout, she thought to herself, as she pushed through a force curtain and into a vertical spineway from which horizontal walkways led to self-contained compartments. In fact, it looked like a docking pier – perhaps it had been at one point –
and that was a good thing because it meant she was sprinting up to the roof with her route clear.
When she was almost halfway up, the door opened on an enormous compartment labelled the Ibson Arena. A human woman stepped out, emerging onto the next walkway up from Izza.
There was a tint of blood and madness in the yelling and cheers that flew out of the arena. She didn’t have a good view from this angle, but she could see tridents and metal helmets been thrown in the air. Whatever was exciting the crowd, they seemed oblivious to what was going on in the stairwell.
The door shut and Izza put the crowd from her mind. The woman, however, had chosen to become a problem.
“Hey,” she called to Izza, planting herself in the stairwell. “What’s with the urgency?”
The woman was clad – barely – in a chainmail crop top, a skirt of weighted leather strips, and strappy sandals. Her sword sheath was empty but looked practical. Her exposed skin had been painted to resemble a Zhoogene.
“Go back inside,” Izza ordered the offensive human.
The human placed her hands on her hips and widened her stance to block the stairwell. Izza noticed small nicks and bruises to her arms. “Oh, yeah? You don’t tell me what to do.”
“Yes, I do,” Izza growled as she slowed to confront this human. She fired a plasma round, sending a bulb of high-energy matter spinning past the woman’s head, close enough to singe her unruly hair and scorch her cheeks.
The woman apparently agreed, because she yelped with fear and scampered back along the walkway to whatever deviant pleasures they enjoyed in this Ibson place.
The route was clear to Fitz.
Despite the extensive noise cancelling in Howell’s bar, she heard the sound of crashing glass come from the roof and picked up the pace, praying she wouldn’t be too late this time.
——
Stealthy as a choking vlymichka vine, Izza crept up the steps to the Cordovan Room. She announced her arrival with a plasma round to the face of the human handling Catkins.
Her enemy was wearing battle armor. The plasma ball wouldn’t penetrate such high-grade defenses, but that didn’t matter. Humans were notoriously squeamish about being hit in the face.
Sure enough, the human let go of Catkins – who was wearing a ridiculous costume for some reason – and tried to claw away the burning fire from their eyes.
Humans. So predictable.
Izza grabbed the human as she leaped high, swinging them around to use as a portable living shield.
She shot another by the window who was trying to track the sudden change in the battlezone.
As the pseudo-gravity flipped, and the overhead and deck switched places, Izza tossed Fitz his hand cannon and swung her human shield once more, aiming its boots at the head of the man nearest her partner.
Her target dodged out the way, but it was all Fitz needed to get in on the action.
“Grenade!” she screamed to keep the room’s attention on her.
She landed on her back beneath her struggling human shield, clinging onto them with all her hydraulic might.
She’d played her part. Now it was Fitz’s turn.
TAVISTOCK FITZWILLIAM
No man can ask for more in his partner, Fitz acknowledged, his heart swelling at the sight of his wife delivering his weapon of choice in a perfect throw.
In one fluid motion, he caught his F-Cannon, shoved Martinelli away, and put a round through him.
Focus point: four meters.
Round selector: ‘Jack slicer’ (APA – Anti Personnel Armor)
Fitz liked his hand cannon configured to defaults that suited the more common kind of shenanigans the galaxy sprung upon him. So far, this latest brouhaha was proving no exception.
The round cut a hole through Martinelli and traveled on to punch through the wall behind. In fact, anything in a direct line from the barrel to a point four meters away was obliterated. At the focus point, the jack slicer round finished its sneaky assist from higher dimensions and fully returned to conventional spacetime. It re-emerged with zero momentum, leaving it to fall or float away.
As Fitz blew out the brain of the thug manhandling Izza, he felt his stomach do a somersault.
Suddenly, ‘down’ had shifted through 90 degrees and was now pulling gently toward the shattered window. His first shot must have blown the room’s A-grav, leaving them with the centrifugal force generated by the station’s spin.
Volleys of gunfire raked the air inches from his torso – the accuracy of the return fire thrown off by the sudden change in gravity.
“Low grav is fun,” he said, tapping the round selector onto firestreak, and sending shots into the three killers trying not to slo-mo fall out the window.
The heatseeker rounds lacked the penetrating power of the jack slicers, but Legion-spec battle armor was not what it had once been. The Orion Era was a very long time ago.
“Why aim when the cannon does it better?” Fitz asked the room as he scanned for hostiles. “After all, the blessed thing cost enough.”
One left. Holding onto Catkins.
Fitz ducked under the table, which had tilted upside down on its slow fall out the window.
Bolts slammed into it sending up a cloud of splinters into the air and the smell of scorched wood into his nose.
“Are you insane?” Fitz shouted at the jack who’d fired on him. “This table is genuine wood!”
He clambered on top of the ruined table and jumped back into the room while Izza fired at their opponent’s foot.
The man howled with pain, loosening his grip sufficiently for Catkins to push him away. He tumbled down toward the window, trying to twist around so he could face his enemy.
But Fitz wasn’t in the mood to give him a fighting chance. He tapped back to jack slicer rounds and blew the man’s back out his front.
“Fitz,” warned Izza. “Their transport…”
“On it.”
Fitz grabbed the corpses, who were leisurely falling out the window, and removed their helmets so he could commit their faces to his auxiliary memory store. In his experience, it paid to know who was trying to kill you. Sometimes the answers could be quite the revelation.
Then he gave their departure greater urgency with a few kicks.
Grabbing onto a holo-projector spike near the window, he angled his head to peer past the table, which had floated out the building in lazy pursuit of the corpses.
“We need to get out of here,” urged Catkins.
“The captain is not finished yet,” said Izza, and he relished the pride in her voice.
If his heart had swelled before, now it was fit to burst.
Until he considered whether he justified the trust she placed in him. He felt a grin he hadn’t even known was there leave his face.
He’d spent the last decade convincing everyone – most of all himself – that he knew what he was doing. That he only looked as if he was making it up as he went along.
After this assassination of the admiral, he couldn’t convince himself anymore. He no longer understood the game.
I’m still good for a little mayhem, he told himself as a hover vehicle in absorbent coatings drifted down in silence to see what the hell was going on.
Fitz put two swingfire anti-vehicle rounds into its engine section, using direct fire mode because – hey – he was in plain sight so why bother using the swingfires’ sneaky mode?
The vehicle exploded.
“Spectacular!” he exclaimed and contemplated his wonderful F-Cannon.
It was an oversized handgun with a large and bulbous magazine that slotted beneath a snubby barrel. It looked unbalanced, misshapen even, but it handled like a dream. Lacking the ejection port and slide of a slug thrower, and the electric buzz of a blaster, it looked too smooth and crude to be more than a toy, but the hand cannon was no fake.
Nor cheap.
And when he replaced it in the bespoke thigh holster, its familiar weight made him feel whole again.
“Captai
n!” cried Catkins who had divested himself of his Jotun suit. “Now can we go?”
“Of course, Catkins.” Fitz beamed. “It’s time to go home.”
“Didn’t you tell me we were supposed to pick up our passengers?” whispered Izza as they descended the stairs on their way to street level. “The Viking and the relatively normal ones?”
“The Legion is compromised,” Fitz replied. “When an admiral’s life is fair game for politicking, people like us are dead meat. I thought I had a plan to fix everything.” He grimaced. “It’s in tatters. We need to flee, my lady. And then flee again. And then…” He sighed. “Then I’ll think of something.”
TAVISTOCK FITZWILLIAM
The creaks and groans thrown out from the carriage’s mag-rail coupling were beginning to worry Fitz.
So were the sparks.
He grinned at Izza and Catkins to let them know everything was all right.
On balance, he decided, that was a fair appraisal. The state of disrepair of the space station’s light rail system was indeed a good thing.
True, the carriage swinging its way toward the center of the station’s spine sounded as if it would never reach the Phantom waiting for them at Pier 17. Long before then, it would decouple and fling them to a messy death.
One of the neighboring carriages wasn’t even there, its absence one of several that made the mag-rail trains resemble shattered mouths with teeth punched out. Fitz didn’t care to speculate whether the carriage had been removed as a precautionary safety measure or fallen off in transit.
But on the positive side, this was evidence of maintenance funds being siphoned off toward higher spending priorities by those who controlled the purse strings – priorities such as pleasure yachts and… well, pleasure in general. Hopefully, it meant that whatever surveillance systems had been built into the carriage hadn’t been maintained either.
Which was just as well, because walking around with an exotic alien hand cannon strapped to your waist in a no-carry station was the kind of thing that made surveillance AIs shake their circuits with excitement.
Chimera Company Season 2 - Deep Cover Page 10