by Rick Partlow
“You fucking murderer!” She hissed at him, her face screwed up into a mask of rage. She was crouched like a cat getting ready to spring. “Murderer!” She repeated, still loud but not screaming anymore.
“Shit,” Yassa said, letting the pressure off my arm, her own hand trailing towards her holster. She knew, as I did, that the girl was about to get herself killed.
I was about to move for my gun when I realized I’d forgotten something: we already had two people in the dining room, the two least likely to be able to avoid getting involved in something like this. Victor and Kurt sailed across the room like they’d been launched from a cannon out of the corner behind Constantine’s table. The bodyguards had been distracted by the girl, and they looked up just in time to have a combined 220 kilos of muscle slam into them with the righteous indignation of two former Resistance fighters and the skill of two cage fighters.
The guards never had a chance. There was a flurry of punches so fast and brutal that I could barely follow it, then the male bodyguard was flying over the table, clear over the top of Constantine and the girl and the dead body. He landed with a crack of wood and a louder crack of breaking bones, and stirred but didn’t even try to get up. The woman lasted a heartbeat longer, before Kurt caught her between the eyes with a forearm and she collapsed, unconscious before she hit the floor.
Things had happened so quickly that neither Yassa and I had made it more than a couple steps toward the table yet, and neither of us could get there before the girl reached Constantine. He didn’t bother to draw his gun, didn’t even bother to use his bionics on her, just swatted her away negligently with his left hand, the flesh-and-blood hand. It took her across the chin and she spun away from him, crying out in pain.
I had my gun out now, and I trained it on Constantine before his left hand could complete the arc from the backhand down to his thigh holster. A red targeting reticle hung in the air over his chest from the pressure of the web of my thumb on the back of the grip.
“Don’t,” I warned him. “We’re taking the girl and leaving and no one else has to die.”
I should kill him, though. I knew it, somewhere down deep, that making an enemy of this man but not killing him was a mistake. But he was the only lead we had to Abuelo, and I clung desperately to the thought that maybe there was still some way to salvage all of this.
“You don’t want to be pointing a gun at me, boy,” Constantine warned me quietly, his hand hovering too near the butt of his holstered pistol for my taste.
“Victor, Kurt!” I snapped. “Get the girl! Cap, you’re on point. I’ll ride drag. Double-time!”
I knew with the EM interference, he couldn’t call for help, but the bartender or one of the servers might have a hardwired line, and we needed to be gone before any more guards came, unless we wanted to wind up in a shootout. I kept my gun trained on Constantine as I moved over to the bodyguards and relieved them of their pistols; I didn’t need one of them coming to while we weren’t looking and taking a shot at our backs.
“You were military,” Constantine said appraisingly, his dark eyes unreadable, his voice still dead calm. “Marines, I’d guess.”
“Force Recon,” I confirmed. I wasn’t trying to hide it. “And you were DSI, I’d imagine.”
Victor had the girl over his shoulder and he and Kurt were already following Cap back towards the bar. I backed away from Constantine carefully, dragging my feet and keeping a hand feeling behind me. I felt the eyes of other patrons on us, but none cared enough to risk a slug in the head by interfering.
“Very perceptive,” Constantine allowed. “You wouldn’t happen to be looking for a job, would you?”
“Actually, that’s why we came here,” I said, a bit ruefully as I cleared the doorway to the bar. “But even a mercenary has to have some standards.”
“If you actually believe that,” I heard his voice carry through as I moved to where the wall was between us and he fell from sight, and I turned to run, “I’m afraid you may be in the wrong line of work.”
Chapter Nine
The rain had picked up since we’d entered the Lucky Bastard, and it slapped me in the face the second I made it out the door, forcing me to slit my eyes to see. I headed left, following the others, and I was happy that at least Victor was going the right direction towards the rally point. We’d designated it on the ride in, a burned-out shell of a building we’d seen in the industrial district, just after it switched over from the residential neighborhoods.
That was about the only thing that was going right.
Stupid, stupid, fucking stupid! I was cursing myself rhythmically in my head as I ran. That prick Constantine had been right; I was in the wrong line of work. What the hell had Cowboy been thinking sending me in here like I was some kind of damned spy? I should have acted, should have either stopped Victor and Kurt or else finished the job and killed that asshole.
Now, we were running blind through blinding rain, with what seemed like an incredibly dangerous man on our tail and four of us still stuck in the damned club. They should be able to make it out, I told myself. We’d gone in separately, and there was nothing to tie them to us. As long as they kept their heads, they’d know to meet us at the rally point and they’d be fine.
But then what? What the hell were we going to do now?
“Put me down, damn it!”
It was the girl; she’d come to, and she was squirming on Victor’s shoulder, trying to hit him in the back of the head.
“Not yet!” I yelled at her over the din of the rain pounding around us. “You might have a concussion and we have to get the hell out of here before they figure out which way we went!”
“I’m gonna’ puke!” She moaned, pounding futilely at the big man’s back.
Victor transferred her from a fireman’s carry to a cradle carry in front, which would slow us down a little but would probably keep her from getting motion sickness, and she quieted down until we finally reached the abandoned building. Even with the enhanced optics in my contact lens, I could barely see it in the downpour, but I guess Yassa’s glasses worked better in the rain because she led us right to it.
Half the building had collapsed in a heap of cement block, aluminum siding and rebar, and the half left standing had a piece of plywood fastened across the doorway. Kurt ripped it down with his bare hands and I followed the others through into the shelter of what was left of the roof, feeling a huge sense of relief as the rain stopped beating down on my head and trickling down my collar.
“Put that back in place,” I told Kurt, gesturing at the plywood.
Victor gently sat the girl down on the floor and she leaned heavily against a damp, block wall as she found her balance.
“Who are you people?” She demanded, looking around at us suspiciously, probably barely able to see us in the blackness of the unlit building.
I pulled a small light off my belt and flicked it on, shining it around so she could get a look at us.
“I’m Munroe,” I told her. “The big guys are Victor and Kurt, and this is Cap.” Yassa cocked an eyebrow at me, and I got the impression she didn’t particularly care for that nickname, but I wasn’t about to go into our personal bios for this traumatized kid. “We were in the dining room when your father was killed.”
“I’m sorry we couldn’t stop it,” Victor said, his big, square face sagging. “We didn’t know he could just…” He trailed off, raising his right hand like he was about to mime punching, but then obviously thinking better of it and letting it drop to his side.
The girl started to break down again, sobbing quietly for a few seconds before she grabbed at her head, wincing.
“What’s your name?” I asked her.
“Natalia,” she said, her voice strained, expression still twisted from the pain in her head. “Natalia Baturin.” She blinked her eyes clear and looked up at me. “Are you spacers? Smugglers?”
“Mercenaries,” Yassa corrected her. “We came here looking for work, but it seem
s as if we’ve just pissed off the one person most likely to hire us.”
“Constantine has plenty of hired guns,” Natalia said bitterly. “Though he always seems to be looking for more. Especially since Abuelo left the city.”
“When did that happen?” I wanted to know. “We’d heard about Abuelo; that’s why we came. We were told he wasn’t a bad guy to work for, that he treated people right.”
Natalia sank down to the dust-covered floor, resting her head on her hands.
“He did, once,” she admitted. “Things were better with him in charge than that bastard Crowley. He actually kept the buildings repaired and kept the power on, and he kept the air defense system that kept us from being raided by pirates working. He didn’t tax us more than we could afford. Then, a few months ago, he started spending more and more time away from Freeport, and Constantine started to take over running the city.”
“And taxes started going up,” Yassa assumed, “but the work stopped getting done.”
I heard a skittering on the other side of the building and flashed my hand-light over there, catching the shadow of a rat dashing for another nook of darkness.
“Fucking rats,” I muttered. “Everywhere we go, we bring those damned things with us.”
There was a pounding on the plywood panel and my gun jumped into my hand again, and I flipped off the light, moving to the side of the doorway. I saw Natalia jump to her feet and scurry farther away, taking shelter behind a fallen crossbeam.
“It’s us. Open up!” I recognized Sanders’ voice and grabbed the edge of the plywood, pulling it away from the door.
Sanders clambered through the opening before I even had it all the way aside, shaking water out of his hair and cursing. Bobbi and Carmen slipped in behind him, looking very wet and annoyed; Carmen Ibanez’s hair reminded me of a poodle my mother had once owned after her servant had given it a bath. Kane waited until the plywood was all the way open before stepping through upright, as if ducking inside was too undignified for him.
It wasn’t raining as hard anymore, I saw while I was glancing outside, but the wind had picked up and was whipping debris down the street. I pulled the cover back into place before I turned my light back on.
“Did you have any trouble getting out?” I asked the others.
“Negative,” Bobbi said. “Me n’ Eli heard the commotion from upstairs in the casino, so we headed down the back stairs right away.”
“There were people in the street though,” Sanders added. “They looked like muscle and they looked like they were hunting for someone around the Lucky Bastard.”
“We met them out there,” Ibanez said. “Kane was hooked into the bar’s security by then, so he knew right away what was going on.”
“What the hell did go on?” Sanders wanted to know. He had his gun in his hand and didn’t seem in any mood to put it away at the moment. “Is it you they’re after, Munroe?”
“Us and her,” I told him, nodding towards the girl. “This is Natalia. Natalia, meet Bobbi, Sanders, Ibanez and Kane.” I saw Natalia’s eyes go wide as she saw Kane’s cybernetics. “The guy we came to the bar to find,” I explained to the others, “is named Constantine. He’s like Abuelo’s chief enforcer or something.”
“Constantine Terranova,” Natalia supplied, with hate dripping off the words. “He’s been here since before Abuelo…he used to work for Crowley.”
“Anyway,” I went on, “this Constantine got into an argument with Natalia’s father about taxes, and it was getting pretty hot, but no one had pulled a weapon yet so I didn’t think anything of it, but then Constantine…” I shook my head. “He must have some serious bionics or some kind of augmentation, because he punched his fist right through Natalia’s father’s chest and killed him.”
“And then,” Yassa added ruefully, “the shit well and truly hit the fan, as you can imagine.”
“Fuck,” Sanders muttered, finally shoving his gun into its holster just so he could run his hands through his hair in frustration. “What the hell are we gonna’ do now?”
“Did you find anything useful, Kane?” I asked him.
“Books are cooked,” he said. “Lots of income marked outgoing but it’s fake. Someone’s skimming.”
“That would be Constantine,” Natalia said. “Everyone knows he’s stealing, but without anyone being able to reach Abuelo, we can’t do anything.”
“We,” Yassa repeated, her gaze sharpening. “Who’s ‘we,’ anyway?”
“Most of the business-owners,” the girl said, “have a kind of informal meeting.” She shook her head. “We’ve talked about trying to do something, even something drastic like fight Constantine and his crew. But most of the shop owners are older, and their kids are either gone as far from here as they can, or they’ve been working here their whole lives. Constantine’s men are like you, veterans, or some who’ve just been doing that kind of work a long time. We couldn’t beat them in a stand-up fight.”
“We should go back to the ship,” Sanders said. “We can regroup, maybe get some heavier weapons.”
“No good,” I said, shaking my head. “It won’t take them to long to trace us back to the Wanderer. They’d have people waiting for us there, and if we tried to fly out, they’d take us out with their laser weapons before we could leave atmosphere.”
“We can’t stay here much longer,” Bobbi warned. “They’ll get around to looking in this place eventually.”
“I know somewhere we could all go,” Natalia said. I looked over to her. She was a bit hesitant, as if she were debating whether or not she was doing the right thing by telling us. “There’s this friend of my father’s. He kind of runs the meeting. If you’re Constantine’s enemies, he’d definitely want to help you.”
I glanced at Yassa and she shrugged expressively.
“It can’t get much worse,” she opined.
“Oh Jesus,” Sanders moaned. “Don’t ever say that.”
“All right,” I told Natalia. “I guess we haven’t got much choice. Take us to this friend of yours.”
***
Milton Amador was the antithesis of Seth Baturin, Natalia’s father. Seth had been large and loud and hairy; Milton was small and bald and mouse-quiet. But if I’d been forced to pick which was the more dangerous of the two, I’d have definitely gone with Milton. He’d told us that he owned the town’s soy and algae farms, which made him the largest food producer on the planet.
“I know we all grieve the loss of our friend,” Milton was saying from his stool by the stone fireplace. “But this is just the cumulation of the outrages we’ve endured under Constantine.”
“Is ‘cumulation’ a word?” Yassa whispered from my elbow and I shrugged my ignorance.
I saw nods from the other civilians gathered in the Spartan, almost archaic living room. There were a half dozen of the actual members of what I’d come to term “the Meeting” with a capital “M,” plus a few adult children or senior employees. They were the ones who ran every major business in Freeport, and you could see that relative wealth in the quality of their clothes, not in comparison to ours but to what the other locals we’d seen wore. Handmade and homespun were the rule, rather than the exception, but they had fabricated pieces as well, and the material was higher tech than average for this place.
All of them were old, again relative to the local norm. On this world, with its background radiation and lack of prenatal nanite injections, people were lucky to break a century; and none the members of the Meeting were under fifty in my estimation. Still, they had listened intently to Natalia’s story, despite her youth, and then to my telling of the rest of the tale. They’d allowed me to bring Captain Yassa into the hastily-assembled quorum, but the others had been exiled to a storage building out back, out of sight of the road and hopefully far from the minds of the goons still searching the city.
“What can we do about it, though?” The woman was sharp-faced, with high cheekbones that reminded me of Sophia. Her hair was dark but streaked
with grey at the temples, and age had etched its lines and creases into her face. I seemed to recall from the introductions that her name was Ichiko and that she ran the town’s only overland shipping operation. “Constantine clearly meant this atrocity as a warning to all of us, a demonstration of what he’ll do if we oppose him.”
“You and yours,” Milton leaned towards me as he spoke, “are soldiers, mercenaries Natalia told us. If you were to…” He paused, considering his wording. “…take care of this matter for us, I know we would all agree to any reasonable price.”
Shit.
“Um…” I stammered for a moment, trying to figure a way out of that without revealing why we were here. Yassa saved me.
“There are only eight of us,” she reminded Milton, “and all our heavy weapons are on our ship, which we can’t get to now since Constantine’s people will be watching for us.”
“Milton,” Ichiko objected, standing from her stool and turning on him, face going even paler, “you can’t make that kind of decision on your own! This could get us all killed!”
“Yes,” another of them agreed, a pudgy and baby-faced man with dark, curly hair; I thought they’d called him Jamie. “And where are we supposed to get the money to pay them? Constantine has drained us dry!”
“Hold up for a second,” I finally got my thoughts together. “Killing Constantine would probably be satisfying as hell, but what’s the end goal here?” I looked around at the faces of the business owners and saw helpless shrugs. Except Milton.
“To get Abuelo’s attention,” he correctly surmised, confirming my first impression of him.
“Right. But if we start killing his people, it may be the wrong kind of attention. We need a plan; and for that, we need some intelligence. You guys basically make this city run, what can you tell me about Abuelo and where he might be?”
“I think he’s dead,” Jamie declared flatly, his tone pessimistic. “Constantine killed him just like Abuelo did to Crowley, and took over.”
“You keep saying that,” Devereaux scoffed. He was a slender man with dark skin and delicate features, but his tone belied them with its harshness. “It still doesn’t make any sense. Abuelo didn’t make any secret when he killed Crowley…hell, he had a town meeting and announced it. Why would Constantine pretend the boss was still alive?”