“Oh, so you met Nimer? Little fucking weasel,” Red Bart said. “I hope you kicked his ass at least as good as you just did mine.”
“Well, we didn’t part friends,” Fergus said. “You and I did, or so I thought.”
“Nimer worked for me for less than a month, then called the MCA and claimed I was a Free Marsie. They kept me in lockup for three weeks, probably hoping I’d lead them to my ‘connections.’ Couldn’t get a fucking job because between the MCA and Nimer, everyone was convinced I was too hot to touch. I was born in fucking Cleveland, Angus. I need to eat and breathe. What was I supposed to do?”
“So you hired on with criminals? What do you want, a sympathy card?”
Red Bart looked miserable. “I didn’t have any other choice! Shit. This was supposed to be a one-day gig moving stuff.”
“Where’s the camp, Bart? Where are they keeping the woman? How many are there?”
“Ah! You’re the Mars assassin they got word of right before Poppa Graf stopped answering their calls,” Red Bart said.
“Graf’s dead,” Fergus said.
“I always wondered what kind of work you did. Figured it was something sly, but didn’t take you for the killer type. The way they talked about Graf, I’d’ve thought him invincible. You killed him?”
“Wasn’t me. How many Luceatans are there, Bart?”
“Four, all vicious bastards with barely two brain cells between them,” Red Bart said. “You wanna know their names, ages, heights, favorite stupid filthy joke? Just ask.”
“I’m in a hurry, Bart.”
Red Bart banged his head gently against the floor. “Camp is in the old mess hall. The girl got away when a bunch of scavengers from the upper floors came down and tried to unplug and cart off our oxygen generator. There were six Luceatans until that fight. They’re working their way up through the Warrens from the bottom looking for her. Sent me here to load up the truck again, get it ready to go. I was going to leave without them when you came along.”
“Sorry, Bart.”
“Yeah, well. I shouldn’t have tried to shoot you, but I panicked. I can help you.”
“I can’t trust you.”
“You don’t have to. Take my comm—” He tried to lift his wrist, saw it was now bare. “Ah, you already did. Smart. You gotta know, though, they’re going to kill the girl when they find her. Probably me too. No loose ends. They just want off Mars. I don’t want to die here, Angus.”
“Me neither,” Fergus said, “but I can’t promise you anything.” He patted down the pockets of his suit, found what he was looking for in the same one where the binders had been: perp tranqs. He pulled one out, no bigger than a crayon, and jabbed Bart with it. The man grunted, then fell slack.
Fergus flipped his comm back on. “Mari, you still okay?”
“So far,” she said. “No luck yet.”
“Listen, there are four Luceatans working their way up from ground level. Be careful. I’m going to climb up to the top floor and start searching down. Shout if you need help or if you find her first.”
“Okay,” Mari said. “Thanks, Fergus.”
“No problem.”
He glanced down at Red Bart. Not a lot of choices, are there? he reminded himself. Careful to shut the door behind him, he started searching for a way up.
* * *
—
Stairs, Fergus thought, should be outlawed on all civilized worlds. Or at least they should not be the sole means of vertical travel in any structure over five stories tall.
He finally reached a landing with no more flights up but a small, wide airlock instead. A half flight down was the regular door into the maze of cubes that was the zenith of the Warrens. He was at the roof. There were scuff marks in the dirt, recently made, around the airlock door. It couldn’t have been Arelyn, he thought. Or could it?
He tried to peer through the airlock’s tiny glass porthole, but it was thickly fogged with dark grime on the other side. He pressed the button, and there was the long grinding noise of the outer door closing and sealing. After an interminable wait, the inner door creaked, shuddered, and drew open. The floor of the airlock was covered with blackened, burnt garbage and the remains of an air canister that had had the valve pried off. By the marks on the walls, the airlock must have been nearly full to the top with burning trash.
But why? he wondered.
Then, “Ah!” he said. “Clever!”
Cycled out, the burning garbage would have been pulled out of the airlock by the pressure difference, creating a brief, bright flare atop the building. Someone had tried to send a signal, probably not knowing that the whole of Ares Five could watch the Warrens burn to the ground and not shed a tear.
Fergus picked up the air canister. His gloves registered it as still warm. Dropping it, he practically leapt down the stairs to the landing below in his excitement. How far could she have gotten if the canister hadn’t even gone fully cold?
The first two rooms were empty. The third held a body that looked desiccated enough to predate Mars colonization itself. The fourth was shut, and the door radiated a small amount of heat in infrared. He put a hand against the door, pressing very lightly, and it gave. Taking a deep breath, he tried not to smile—he’d found her! Pushing the door open, he half ran into the small room.
Six men, barely less wasted than the corpse one room over, turned from where they were huddled over a small stovebox to stare at him. The heads-up display in his face shield processed the odors in the room and ran a list in green letters down his peripheral vision, but he already knew from the box, the men, and their expressions: they were making skunk.
“MCA!” one of them shouted, his face an almost comical mask of surprise. “Wain, protect the stuff!”
The skunkers staggered to their feet.
Oh, shit, Fergus thought. He backed up, slammed the door shut, and ran. At the stairwell, he jumped down to the landing below, grateful for the low gravity. At that floor, he opened the hall door, closed it behind him, and threw the emergency bar. It wouldn’t stop six normal men, much less popped-up skunkheads, but he hoped it would slow them down enough for him to find a place to hide.
He went two-thirds of the way down the hall before picking a room. The door was bent in at an angle and covered in scorch marks; in places it had melted into the door frame. He grabbed it and tried to pull, but it wouldn’t move. Perfect.
Fergus got down on his belly and pulled himself through the gap at the bottom of the bent door. The room was dark, filled with broken and burnt furniture and an overturned portable air-blast shower at the back that was ideal cover.
Down the hall he could hear the crashing of metal on metal. He hoped the emergency bar would hold a little longer.
A table was propped upright against the shower. As soon as he put his hands on it, the table flew at him, flattening him to the floor beneath it. Someone came out of the shower, jumping onto the table and knocking the breath out of him. She was the spitting image of Harcourt except younger and much angrier, and she had a portable oxygen tank in one hand and a large length of pipe in the other.
“Arelyn?” he tried to say, but he still hadn’t caught his wind yet and couldn’t manage more than a pathetic gasp.
“Asshole,” Arelyn said, and hit him.
* * *
—
Pain woke him up, as it so often did. His head, of course, but also his chest and ribs. Woozily, he managed to open his eyes, then wished he hadn’t. He was in the hall now, four of the skunkheads hunkered together nearby fighting over the things they’d raided from his pockets. Whatever they’d done to him, it hadn’t been bad enough to break anything. Yet.
Skunk made people dangerous but also distracted and paranoid. Fergus inched his hand across the floor until he found a small chunk of debris. Closing his fist around it, he waited until the argument seemed to be reach
ing a crescendo, then tossed it down to the far end of the hall and feigned unconsciousness.
The skunkers panicked at the clatter. “He’s got a partner!” one shouted.
“Of course he does, you idiot,” another answered. “They always do. We took down one, we can take the other.”
One by one they stepped over him, banded together in some semblance of bravery. As soon as they were far enough down the hall, Fergus scrambled to his feet and ran the other way for all he was worth.
He threw himself through the stairwell door, slammed it shut, and dropped the emergency bar back into place. Dizziness nearly overwhelmed him, and he teetered for a few moments against the stair rail. “Mari?” he called on the comm, but there was only silence, not even the echo of empty signal. Putting a hand to the side of his head, he found the comm relay there was smashed. Smart kid, he thought. Good aim too.
It made things more complicated, though.
If he could get down to the ground level, maybe he could steal a relay out of something in the supply truck or from Bart’s suit. Then he could let Mari know where he’d seen Arelyn and, more importantly, warn her about the gang of skunkheads coming down from the top floor.
Of course, on his way down he’d be heading right toward the rising Luceatan search party. He’d worry about that when he had to; he had enough other things to deal with right now. Such as: he hadn’t heard the emergency door up above. Either the skunkheads had given up without even trying, or—
Or there’s another way down, he thought as a shape leapt at him out of the shadows on the next landing. He managed to dodge but crashed shoulder-first into the railing and stumbled, trying to catch himself as he staggered, off-balance, down the next set of stairs.
He landed heavily, threw one hand out, and grabbed the railing as three skunkers gathered above, ready to jump. Twisting, he threw himself down the next flight. Thank you, Mars gravity, he thought, for not killing me quite as much as some other planets might have.
One of the skunkers leapt out, arms spread, through the gap between flights. The man didn’t even scream as he missed Fergus and fell the remaining stories, arms and legs bouncing off railings and walls on the way down.
Fergus looked away before the body reached the murky bottom. The wet thump echoed up the stairwell.
It didn’t seem to discourage the other two. Fergus ran down the next flight, trying to stay at least a staircase ahead of his pursuers. At the next turn, something crashed into the wall where his head had been a moment before, and he glanced back long enough to discover that one of his pursuers had thrown his oxygen bottle at him. Two more flights down, that man fell to his knees, hands scrabbling at the metal landing. Fergus didn’t wait, didn’t need to see anyone else die, even people who were trying to kill him.
Dead air pocket. Maybe I’ll make it after all, he thought.
Four more skunkers appeared on the landing below him. He leapt, tucking his knees up, and hit the clustered skunkers like a cannonball. He fell onto a pile of people and tried not to care who or what he stepped on as he pulled himself away from their grabbing hands.
Three more floors to go. He hoisted himself up onto the rail and slid down the next flight before the first of the skunkers had disentangled himself from the pile. Surprise had given him a good lead, but the reinforcements weren’t exhausted or beaten, and they had a lot of drugs in their systems convincing them they were superhuman.
Second floor. Fergus dodged a thrown rock and a pipe. At the landing he spun as a skunker jumped at him, trying the same maneuver he’d just successfully used on them. The man missed, hit the floor hard, crumpled.
First floor. He went wide around the roughly man-shaped mess on the floor, trying to see as little of it as possible. Throwing open the door, he slammed it behind him, dropped the emergency bar, and ran down the long corridor back toward the bay with the supply truck and Red Bart.
No Luceatans anywhere. He hoped they’d run into a skunker horde themselves; if ever there were two groups of people who deserved each other . . .
He just wanted to find Mari again.
Coming into the bay, his suit’s pressure alarms began to go off; someone had opened the door to the outside and not closed it again. The supply truck was gone. Red Bart lay where Fergus had left him. He’d managed to close his suit up but was gasping for breath, eyes wild. Leaning close, Fergus saw his oxygen was down to less than five percent, and his spare suit tank was gone.
Shit. How long did he have before the skunkers got through the last door? Did he have so little time that he’d willingly leave a man to die?
There goes my new reputation as a fearsome assassin, Fergus thought. Reaching down, he undid the handbinders, and Bart groaned as he was finally able to unbend himself from the unkind position Fergus had left him in. “Any spare tanks we can reach quickly?”
Red Bart pointed.
Fergus ran across the room to a small charging niche he’d missed before. A single tank was hooked in. It was only at forty percent, but that was better than nothing. He brought it back to Bart, who jacked it into his suit and took several deep, gulping breaths.
“Thank you,” Bart gasped out.
“Don’t thank me yet. I’ve got about a half dozen very angry skunkheads coming down behind me. Where did the truck go?”
“Luceatans,” Bart said. “Left me . . . die. Not long.”
“Yeah, well,” Fergus said. “Did they have two women with them? Or one? One mean-looking one with a pipe?”
Bart shook his head no, tried to say something, and instead fell into a lengthy coughing fit.
Did the Luceatans give up and leave, or were there two new bodies he just hadn’t found yet? He went to the door, staring out into the night sands of Mars. One lens of his goggles didn’t want to focus anymore, but with the other he could make out two figures stumbling across the surface about halfway to the window-washing buggy. One still carried a pipe.
The spare suit had come in useful after all.
Fergus’s heart soared. For the first time in longer than he could remember, he didn’t feel haunted.
“They got away,” he said, turning to Bart. “You think you can walk out of here?”
“Give . . . minute,” Bart said, between coughs.
He could hear pounding now on the corridor door. “How about twenty seconds?” he asked.
“I. Take it.”
“Good.”
Fergus checked his seals again, then peered out to see how Arelyn and Mari were doing. They were running now. Behind them, the supply truck was racing toward them at full speed. They’re going to run them down, he realized with horror. Mari and Arelyn were out on bare sand with no cover, nowhere to hide.
The two women split up. Mari headed off at an angle, probably hoping to draw the truck away. It remained resolutely after the taller Arelyn.
“Not gonna make it,” Bart said, stumbling over to where Fergus stood.
“No, they’re not,” Fergus agreed, and his eyes met Bart’s for just a moment before he ran as hard as he could out onto the surface of Mars.
His lungs pounded in his chest, his ribs ached, his body was full of angry bees. The bees spread through his chest and down his arms, his fingers burning and crackling with their fury as if they were consuming him from the inside out.
At last he fell to his knees, stretched out both his hands toward the speeding supply truck as if pleading for it to stop, and poured himself out through his fingertips. White light arced across the intervening space, a single sharp curling bolt of lightning.
It enveloped the truck for just a fraction of an instant. Then the truck seemed to twist and turn, rolling over on one side. From the interior he could see the bright blossom of flame.
Oh hey, Fergus thought. I hit something important.
His suit tried desperately to reboot.
He
fell onto his hands, then laid his face down against the sand, wishing he could feel the cold, wishing there were an oasis here he could drink from until the awful fire in his gut was quenched.
He could see, in a blur, Mari and Arelyn converging on the window washing buggy. Minutes later it started up and drove away at top speed. Go! he thought. Go Mari! Yeah!
Maybe, just maybe, he could finally forgive himself a little bit for Dru.
Turning his head, he spotted Bart edging his way along the side wall of the Warrens, away from the maintenance bay and toward the cover of another corner. In the wide doorway, the gang of skunkers had gathered. At last, one began walking across the sand toward him. A second, then a third joined in behind him.
No big black triangles here, come to save him from certain death a second time.
It doesn’t matter, Fergus decided. I still win. I just need to stop winning quite so badly.
Chapter 22
Bits of things were clearer than others. He remembered them grabbing his boot and dragging him back into the Warrens. When he struggled, they’d hit him, so after a few feeble attempts to fight them off, he gave up; he didn’t have the strength to get away. Tell yourself that, Fergus, he thought. Pretend it’s not because there’s just nowhere to get away to and you’re more okay with this being the end than you should be.
One of the skunkers closed the bay door, and the five men gathered around him, all talking at once. He didn’t think any of them realized others were speaking or that no one was listening. He met the eyes of one—surprisingly young, for all that the man’s face sported the wrinkles and heavy staining of a long-term skunk addict—and found an emptiness in those eyes that hurt to see. He felt, for an instant, as much pity for them as for himself.
During that brief connection, the man blinked, his grimace showing eroded and blackened teeth, and kicked him. It wasn’t a hard blow, but the action caught the attention of the others, and they all began kicking at him, head and stomach and back, wherever they could get a boot in. They shouted, some of it about the MCA, frustrations with the injustices of the world, ex-lovers, disloyal friends, being sold bad skunk. Most of it was unintelligible.
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