by Rick Partlow
And yet people were going to die fighting over this little collection of wood and stone buildings barely ten kilometers on a side, die for status and control.
At least they’re a good distraction.
“Hold on,” Ash mumbled, barely audible over the roar of the jets. “We’re going in.”
Her stomach seemed to drop away, a feeling she’d grown used to over so many years as a pilot, and the privateer Acheron plunged into a steep dive, cutting below the trajectory of the Sung Brothers attack force and heading straight into the city of Barataria Bay. The crenelated wall that surrounded the city rushed by underneath them, and then the belly jets were screaming in desperation and something was trying to drive her bodily through her chair and through the hull and into the pavement. The landing gear impacted and her safety harness bit into her shoulders even through the armor as the tread assemblies sank into their housings and recoiled slowly with a hiss of hydraulics. There was a roaring in her ears, and lights flashing in her eyes, and a haze of confusion over her thoughts from the brutal deceleration and for just a moment, she couldn’t move.
“I took out the guard shack with the Gatling.” Ash’s voice reached through the haze and pulled her back to the moment. “Street’s clear for now.”
Sandi yanked the quick-release on her restraints and pushed up out of the acceleration couch, but Fontenot was already moving ahead of her, through the narrow passage that led back from the cockpit to the utility bay. The belly ramp was rumbling open, and standing beside the control was a figure nearly two meters tall, armored but lacking a helmet, since nothing made for a human would fit him.
He was a Tahni: humanoid, close enough that he could pass for a tall man on a dark night, but in the glare of the work-lights in the utility bay, the differences were obvious. The bend of the knees and elbows and wrists was just slightly off, the fingers longer than a human’s and boasting an extra joint, and then there was the face. The ears were plastered to the side of his head, the nose nearly flat and the nostrils elongated, the mouth a thin line over jaws like a steam-shovel. The eyes were the most obvious, though: small and dark and beady and sheltered under bony ridges that ran across the forehead. He had hair, coarser and thicker than a human’s but still hair, shaved except for a strip down the center of his head that ran into a tightly-braided ponytail wrapped around his thick neck like a scarf.
Sandi had known him for two years now and was still no closer to being able to read his expressions or his body language, but she thought he considered her a friend. If anyone had told her back during the war that she’d someday trust a Tahni with her life…
“Kan-Ten,” she told the alien, “secure the landing zone. Korri,” she turned to Fontenot, “you have the map, find us a route to the compound. I’ll be right there.”
The Tahni moved down the ramp without a word, shouldering a heavy Gauss rifle, while Fontenot paused to retrieve an obsolete drum-fed assault gun from an equipment locker before she followed him. Sandi was alone in the bay with the other woman. She was strapped into one of the spare acceleration couches that folded down from the utility bay’s rear bulkhead, and Sandi was pleased to see that she’d followed instructions and stayed strapped in.
Unadorned brown hair hung limply to her shoulders, matted with sweat from the strain of the g-forces they’d all undergone on the descent, and skin that was normally deeply tanned had gone pale, but the expression on that attractive, oval face was full of determination. If you’d dressed her in armor instead of civilian clothes and put a weapon in her hand, Sandi could have imagined her roaming out into the perils of the night to find her child on her own, rather than leaving the job to the professionals.
“Ash’ll stay at this landing site as long as it’s safe,” Sandi told her. “If he has to take off, we can signal him when to swing back around and pick us up, once we find your daughter.” She hesitated, unwilling to say the next words but knowing they were necessary. “If we find her.”
“You will find her, Ms. Hollande,” Stephania Willow said, her voice strong and calm, her gaze steady. “I have no doubt.”
The words could have been a statement of hope, but the look in those dark eyes wasn’t one of hope, and Sandi felt a slight chill as she realized it had more the sound of a threat.
“I want you to remember, Ms. Hollande,” she went on, voice turning colder, “that I wasn’t just Eduardo Santonio’s wife, I was his business partner until I decided it would be better if my daughter had a chance at a more stable life. When I took Adriana to the Periphery, Eduardo did not have the power to stop me, and when he came to steal her back, he made no move against me because he knew what a grave mistake it would be. So, do not be misled by the fact that I am staying here on your ship while you go retrieve my little girl; I am not staying here because I fear what my husband or his goons would do to me, I am staying because this is your job and you’ve proven competent at it.”
There was just the slightest quiver of her lip, the first sign she’d allowed that she was, besides being a badass former cartel enforcer, also a mother.
“Don’t let me down.”
Sandi had the feeling that this woman wouldn’t care for empty promises, so she left her in the hold with the words unspoken.
Her boots thumped with hollow, rhythmic impacts on the belly ramp of the ship and the lights of the utility bay followed her, a golden halo in the drifting smoke and steam still rising from the scorch marks the landing jets had left on the pavement. Even with the enhanced optics in her helmet, it was difficult to make anything out through the billowing clouds roiled by the idling turbines, their shrill whine a constant background noise that her brain barely acknowledged. Above it, she could make out the roar of engines in the night sky, the distant thunder-cracks of beam weapons stabbing into targets on the ground, but nothing close and no warnings from Fontenot or Kan-Ten. She paused and hit the control to raise the ramp.
“We’re out,” she radioed to Ash.
“I’ll stick here as long as I can,” he replied.
The hum of servos off to her left drew her eye and she saw the Acheron’s Gatling turret extending out from the portside wing, scanning back and forth for threats. There was still a faint glow on its cooling vanes from the burst that had taken out the guard shack on the wall. She couldn’t see the wall from the ship, even though it was only fifty meters away, not with the thick haze, but her helmet’s thermal filters showed her the hotspot where the shack had been, still burning. The Acheron rested in an empty lot at an intersection in Barataria Bay’s industrial district, and around the massive, silvery delta of the cutter, she could just make out the looming sheet-metal walls of warehouses and fabrication centers.
Glowing blue haloes in her HUD led her to Fontenot and Kan-Ten where they’d taken up watch positions on either side of the intersection, down on a knee, weapons trained outward. Sandi came up behind Fontenot and put a hand on her shoulder.
“You got a direction for me?” she asked, kneeling down beside the cyborg.
Fontenot gestured to their left.
“Two kilometers, more or less,” she said.
“You’re point, Korri. Kan-Ten, you watch our backs.”
“I dislike walking backwards,” the Tahni admitted, rising with a strange, inhuman motion that seemed more like he was unfolding. “My joints are not built for it.”
Sandi snorted, patting him on the arm as she passed by.
“Then buy a helmet that fits you,” she suggested, “or let us have one made for you. Otherwise, you don’t have a map overlay and you can’t walk point.”
“I dislike helmets as well.”
Sandi followed Fontenot from ten meters back, hoping the cyborg could make out more of their surroundings than she could. Explosions and gunfire echoed through the night from the other side of the city, the population centers, but all she could see here were the flares of street lights, shining like their own, discreet stars in the haze and fog but adding nothing to the visibility. A drizzl
e of dirty rain distorted the view out of her faceplate and she began ignoring the visible light display and concentrating on the infrared and thermal filters. Through their cybernetic eyes, everything around them was an indistinct blob, but she could tell they were alone on the streets.
Everyone with two brain cells to rub together is in a shelter, or heading for one, she reflected. Guess that doesn’t say anything flattering about us.
“How sure are we about this intell?” Fontenot wondered. “Sure, this is where the dragon lady says Eduardo would send their kid, but she’s been gone, what? A year now?”
“It’s what we’ve got.” Sandi fought back a sigh; they’d had this argument on the trip from Sylvanus, and she was already tired of it. “And it’s more than we usually get, especially thanks to Captain Fox.”
The Intelligence officer had clued them in to the Sung Brothers’ pending attack on Barataria Bay, accelerating the timeline for extracting the little girl. They’d done some good work for him over the last two years, so it wasn’t exactly suspicious; but dealing with spooks always made her nervous, and in her experience, they never gave away anything free.
She wiped a gloved hand over her faceplate to clear it of excess water and realized that the fog had thinned; she could see the fine details of the buildings on either side of the street, see the cheap sheet metal of the industrial district giving way to storefronts of local wood and stone, their windows and doors covered by metal security shutters. Probably to keep out offworlders, she reasoned, since the locals wouldn’t put up with anyone inclined to steal or vandalize.
She thought about the families who owned and ran the stores and wondered if the Sung Brothers’ troops would allow them to keep the businesses, or kick them out and put their own people in place. It was always the innocents who suffered, always the children who paid the price for the greed and lust for power of people like Jordi Abdullah and the Sung Brothers. There’d been a family on Asiento, another of the smaller La Sombra outposts, who had given her shelter when she’d been caught in the middle of a fight between Jordi’s people and the Rif cartel. They’d lost a son to the violence and were so desperately afraid they’d lose their young daughter to it as well…
“This way,” Fontenot gestured down an alley to their right, holding the theoretically crew-served assault gun easily in the crook of one bionic arm.
They cut across two more parallel streets full of businesses until the dark, shuttered workplaces gave way to the bright lights of the city’s one hotel and a handful of small bars and clubs. This place had a small landing field outside the city, but the traffic was mostly La Sombra flight crews taking out cargoes of illegal weapons from the caches stored in the warehouses here, far from the probing eyes and sensors of the Patrol, and outlaw spacers didn’t have the sort of money to throw around that Corporate Council freighter crews might. Still, the hotel and the bars hadn’t had enough warning to close up and shutter the doors, and now they were paying the price.
Sandi knew that the main body of the Sung Brothers ground force would be hitting the La Sombra compound about a kilometer west, toward the landing field---she could see the smoke billowing upward into the clouds, see the flames rising already, and could still hear gunfire echoing through the streets from that direction. At first, she thought the hotel and the clubs had escaped notice, but then Fontenot threw up a hand and Sandi and Kan-Ten halted and went down to a knee just short of the exit of the alleyway, the Tahni turning back to cover their rear approach.
“There’s a squad of them coming up the street,” Fontenot said, her voice as calm and steady as if she were ordering dinner, a stark contrast to the twisting in Sandi’s stomach and the drumbeat of her heart trying to pry its way out of her chest.
Sandi fought to control her breathing, trying to follow Fontenot’s gesture with her eyes and the muzzle of her pulse carbine. She could see them now, ten of them, moving slowly and cautiously up the road from the direction of the landing field and the La Sombra compound. Their armor was mismatched, their weapons the mini-rocket-firing carbines so ubiquitous out in the Pirate Worlds, easily fabricated. They weren’t the Sung Brothers’ best troops; she figured them for hired guns, not even professional mercenaries. They’d seen the lights, she guessed, and been sent to investigate.
Unfortunately, they were heading the same place that she was, and she couldn’t let them reach it first.
“Korri, take them out, if you can,” she ordered, the words seeming to pry their way out of her mouth. She was sentencing them to death. Maybe they deserved it, but who was she to say? “If you can’t, keep their attention. Kan-Ten, come with me.”
She used the butt-stock of her carbine to lever herself to her feet and ran. She didn’t have to check the transponder display to see that Kan-Ten was following; she knew he would. The Tahni wasn’t human, but he was as dependable as the motions of the planets. Fontenot’s assault gun thudded with a report she could feel in her chest, lessening as she drew away from the cyborg’s position. She didn’t look at the Sung Brothers troops, either, counting on her friend to keep them busy; her focus was the largest of the bars, the one just behind the hotel, the one festooned with the flashing holographic image of a wolf howling at the moon just above the stone archway that overhung its front entrance.
None of these sorry fuckers have ever seen a wolf, she thought irrelevantly. Except in a video.
There were people here; people too stupid to be off the streets, probably not locals. They were running, too, running from the report of the assault gun, from the return fire of the rocket carbines. They were dressed like spacers and they were running for the hotel where they likely had rooms, as if it offered some sort of supernatural shelter against the death and violence outside. She remembered that night on Asiento and felt a sudden pang of guilt for looking down on them, but there was no time for that.
The front door to the Howling Wolf was newly closed, likely locked, but it was local wood and the latch would be of local metal, nothing exotic enough to resist a tungsten slug travelling at 2,500 meters per second.
“Open it,” she told Kan-Ten, her voice breathless from the sprint across the seventy meters to the bar entrance. She tried to stay in shape, but when you spent most of your time in a starship, long-distance running wasn’t on the regular workout list.
The Tahni barely slowed down, just levelled the Gauss rifle and fired half a dozen rounds. The armor-piercing slugs punched through each corner of the door and the latch mechanism, and Kan-Ten followed them with his shoulder, slamming his full hundred and twenty kilograms into it. The massive, wooden door toppled inward and Kan-Ten pitched forward with it, not resisting the motion but following it, letting it take him to the floor and out of the line of fire.
Inside the door, arrayed in the entranceway, were two men and a woman, all rough-looking, and all armed with compact carbines. Sandi recognized them from Stephania’s very complete files; they were Eduardo Santonio’s hired guns, his most trusted, and the ones he would have sent to take his child to safety when he’d detected the incoming Sung Brothers’ ships. Which meant Sandi was in the right place.
She spared just the space of half a second making sure the child wasn’t in the room with them, that the area behind them was clear of targets, before she touched the trigger pad of the laser carbine. It was almost too long; they were good and they’d opened fire on her immediately. But they were also distracted by Kan-Ten’s explosion through the door, and the spin-stabilized mini-rockets from their carbines went wide, detonating against the rear wall in a spray of plaster dust. Sandi’s carbine was linked to the targeting system in her helmet’s HUD, and she didn’t miss.
Laser pulses shed white flashes of ionized air like optical afterimages visible long after the actual burst of coherent light had passed. Brilliant ropes of actinic lightning connected Sandi’s weapon to center-mass on the closest of the three, a tall woman with purple hair shaped into a starburst around her head in a style that had been out of fashion
on Earth or the Core colonies for decades. The big woman wore an armored vest under her rain jacket, but it wasn’t enough to stop the laser from point-blank range; there was a flare of fire as cloth vaporized and metal sublimated and the cartel enforcer jerked backwards, her weapon slipping from nerveless hands.
Sandi shifted to the next of the three, her motions economical and smooth after much practice with Fontenot, who’d been shooting at people who were shooting at her for longer than the other three of them had been alive, combined. She ignored the mini-rockets flashing by to her right, coming closer as the man turned, and kept her finger mashed down on the trigger. She hadn’t let her eyes focus on the man before now, but as her shots tore through his throat and upper chest, she noticed that he was strikingly handsome, his features even and sharp enough to have been professionally restructed, or maybe he’d just hit the genetic lottery. That handsome face twisted with pain, and terror, and then forlorn resignation, as his life sprayed across the hardwood floor in gouts of red.
As fast as Sandi had become, as much as she’d trained, the third shooter would still have killed her; he had a clear shot and the time to aim. But Kan-Ten had rolled over onto his side, against the right-hand wall, and opened fire with his Gauss rifle. The slugs punched upward through the last man’s chin. She never got the chance to see what he looked like, if he was handsome or ugly, angry or desperate or despairing, because his head disappeared in a volcanic explosion of brain and fluid and skull fragments, and what was left of him lurched forward, hitting the floor with a sickening, wet thump.