by Rick Partlow
“Shit, the battlesuits,” she said, gesturing. She saw comprehension in Singh’s eyes as he stared at the place the powered armor had been standing.
Fontenot broke into a run, leaping through the gap in the metal roll-up door, large enough that one of the suits had to have made it. She sprinted up the loading dock ramp…and then stopped abruptly, hearing Singh skidding to a halt behind her. Two more bodies, these obviously Jordi’s people, one with…his? her?...head crushed to a pulp, the other flattened as if he’d been hit by a cargo truck.
She frowned in confusion for just a moment, wondering why Vala-Kel, who was ostensibly Jordi’s ally, would kill his men. A light went on behind her eyes and suddenly she understood that Kan-Ten had one of the suits. Nothing else made any sense.
“Kan-Ten?” she called over her ‘link. There was no answer.
She gritted her teeth and picked up the KE-guns the dead soldiers had dropped, ignoring the blood and bone fragments splattered on them, and handed one to Singh. His lip curled in distaste, but he took the proffered weapon and tucked it under his arm, wrapping his fingers around the unfamiliar and alien firing grip. Fontenot looked up and down the perimeter wall, but saw no sign of friend or foe, though the pockmarks on the side of the fortress behind the wall told a story of Gauss rifle rounds burying themselves in ten centimeters of reinforced concrete.
“Where the hell is everybody?” Singh wondered.
“They retreated from the wall,” Fontenot guessed. “The fighting probably went inside, or else the mercs followed them around the other side of the building.” She cocked her head, listening for the sounds of battle with her cybernetically-enhanced left ear, but heard nothing. “I think it’s over.”
She jumped the two meters up to the fighting platform in one bound, grabbing at the edge of the wall for purchase, and Singh followed just as easily.
“What the fuck?” Fontenot blurted, seeing the crashed troop lander immediately, clearly visible in the security lights still burning along the roofline of the Constabulary. She felt a cold pit in her stomach as she realized that Sandi or Ash would be inside that thing…likely Sandi, if she knew the woman at all. “We’ve got to get down there…”
She moved without thinking, lunging forward, ready to throw herself down off the wall; Singh grabbed her by the collar and jerked her back a half-second ahead of a burst of tantalum needles that would have decapitated her. They spent themselves against the inner edge of the parapet instead, and she threw an arm up to protect her face from the spray of concrete fragments that exploded outward from it. She spat out concrete dust, yanking away from Singh’s hand with an angry glare, but quickly reining herself in as she realized he’d saved her life.
“There are seven of them down there.” He gestured at the wall, keeping his back against it as streams of metal slivers chewed away at the parapet, their impacts a staccato jackhammer that vibrated through the thick, metal-reinforced wall. “Moving west.” He indicated the direction straight away from the garage door, toward the landing field. “One of them is Jordi Abdullah.”
“You got that all in two seconds?” she asked, cocking an eyebrow at him as she checked the unfamiliar controls on the KE-gun to make sure her fingers were still positioned correctly.
“I’m very observant.”
The firing died off, the rainstorm of projectiles slowing to a patter, then going silent.
Fontenot exchanged a look with Singh, then surged upward over the parapet and swung the muzzle of her borrowed weapon downward. She could see them jogging quickly across the open plain in a ragged line, heading straight for the wrecked lander, Jordi Abdullah at the front. He was nearly a hundred meters away, but she couldn’t mistake him for anyone else; his face was burned into her brain. She tried for just a fraction of a second to put the rifle’s targeting optics over his retreating figure, but gave up on it almost immediately; they were too different, built for eyes that didn’t focus quite the same as a human’s.
Have to use Kentucky Windage.
She leveled the weapon toward Jordi as best she could with no sights and had the sudden, prescient thought, There’s only five of them down there. Singh said seven.
She ducked her head instinctively, jamming the KE-gun muzzle off to her right one-handed in her left arm and holding down the firing stud. The gun shook and bucked wildly in her grasp as it fired off a brief burst, then she felt a powerful, wrenching jolt in her left shoulder, saw a shower of yellow sparks. Suddenly, she was off-balance, falling backwards helpless to stop herself. Singh lurched forward, trying to catch her, and she wanted to extend her left hand to grab his…but her left hand wasn’t there.
Two meters’ worth of gravity drove her into the ground below, hitting on the metal of her right shoulder, but with enough force to crack her head against the pavement. Stars sparked in her vision and she cursed reflexively, knowing that Jordi had dropped two of his troops back to guard the rear, and she’d fallen for it, quite literally. She tried to bring her left arm up to assess the damage, but it had been severed below the bicep, taking the isotope power pack on that side with it. Jagged metal and ceramic trailed threads of superconductive wiring at the very end of the bicep, but she couldn’t see anything past that, couldn’t see her shoulder, and it seemed like she had to twist her head around way too far just to get that much of a view…there was a blind spot that took up her whole left side.
She abruptly realized that her left eye had gone dark, the power to it cut when she’d lost the battery in her arm. She rolled to her right, pushing herself to her feet. At least her leg was on a separate power source, or else she wouldn’t have been able to move at all.
Singh had dropped down beside her, looking as if he wanted to offer her help but had thought better of it.
Smart man.
“We have to get out there,” she said, her words coming out slurred; she couldn’t open her mouth all the way with the left side of her jaw unpowered. Her voice sounded muffled, like her ears were stuffed up and needed to be popped, and she knew that was from her cybernetic audio pickup not working.
“Get up.” She glanced up with her right eye since she couldn’t nod. “Give me cover, I’ll jump the wall.”
“Forget it,” Singh declared flatly. “You’re half the woman you used to be…about ten seconds ago.”
She felt her temper flaring up, but he forestalled it by shoving his KE-gun at her. Her own had toppled over the wall along with half her arm. She took it by reflex, turning it awkwardly, one-handed, bracing it against her hip until she found the grip.
“You get up there,” he suggested, “stick this over the side and open up.” He waved demonstratively. “I’ll go after Jordi.”
“You don’t have a gun,” she reminded him, the Tahni weapon wobbling in place as she tried to steady it with her right hand, her center of balance off from what she’d grown used to over decades.
“I’ll figure something out,” Sing assured her, grinning crookedly. “I’ll call you when I’m ready.”
Before she could argue any more, he took off running down to the next fighting position, fifty meters farther down the wall. She cursed silently, since it was too much effort to talk, and looked up at the fighting platform. There was no way in hell she was going to be able to climb up to it without using her hand. She crouched, then leapt, trying to lean forward since she couldn’t count on her arms for balance. Her right shoulder crunched against the interior of the recessed platform, smearing the wet, red stain where one of its former inhabitants had been messily killed, and she scrambled to find purchase with her feet before she fell back down again.
She found her balance and gasped in a breath, feeling the muscles on the biological half of her face tick spasmodically from the strain of moving the metal hinges of the left side of her jaw manually.
I’m half-blind, half-deaf, and mostly useless, she grumbled, crouching just below the edge of the parapet, waiting for the signal from the bounty hunter.
“Now.” The
word sounded tinny and artificial over the external speaker of her ‘link, but the receiver in her cybernetic ear was useless, and the communications device knew it.
More cautious this time, she peeked the muzzle of the KE-gun over the edge of the wall, exposing as little of her arm as possible, and began spraying random gunfire in the general direction of the two sentinels Jordi had left behind. The answer was immediate, and two KE-guns could put out an impressive volume of fire; she jerked her weapon back over the ledge after feeling at least two tantalum needles strike its cooling jacket. Another three quick bursts dug into the wall in sprays of dust and fragments, then both fell silent.
“Let’s go.”
Singh’s voice over the ‘link startled her, but she didn’t hesitate; she jumped up and stepped off the top of the wall, the night streaking past her as she fell the four meters, holding the Tahni weapon out to the side for a counterweight. The impact was jarring, even with the shock-absorption built into her bionic legs, and she had to roll forward into a crouch to keep from simply falling on her face. She scanned the horizon carefully, expecting Jordi and his group to stop and take a shot at her, but there was a slight rise in the ground just outside the wall, and she was sheltered from their line of sight.
Singh was twenty yards away, even with her on this side of the rise, kneeling over the corpse of one of Jordi’s soldiers, stripping it of its weapons. It took her a moment to realize that the dead man’s head was turned around 180 degrees from his chest. The second sentry was less grotesque, if no less dead. She had a combat knife buried in the base of her skull all the way to the hilt, and her eyes were still open, a dull expression of surprise on her tattooed face. Her KE-gun lay just past her outstretched and strengthless fingers, but the drum had been ejected and Fontenot could see it was empty.
Singh stood, a newly-procured Tahni KE-gun in his right hand, braced on his hip, a Pirate World-fabricated rocket pistol extended toward her. She tried to shake her head, then stopped.
“Got a gun,” she mumbled, gesturing with the KE-gun.
“It’s fried,” he told her, nodding at the muzzle end.
She turned it toward her good eye and saw that one of the rounds that had struck it had peeled away part of the cooling jacket. She could see the electromagnetic coil beneath, and what was visible of it was blackened and charred.
Damn.
She tossed the heavy weapon down in disgust and took the pistol from Singh.
Easier to shoot one-handed anyway.
As Singh shifted his rifle, Fontenot noticed a slice through his armored jacket on the right side, over his ribs. She frowned and stuck her pistol in her belt to free up her hand. He tried to pull away when she reached for it, but she drew it back and saw blood welling from a tear in the shirt beneath. He’d been shot. She looked at him and he shrugged.
“It hurts,” he admitted, “but it’s not going to kill me unless something helps it.”
She snorted and let the jacket go.
Singh took the lead, without her having to tell him why: she was half-blind and had no IR or thermal without her bionic eye, not to mention he had the more effective weapon. She hoped to hell someone in Gennich did repairs for prosthetics, or it was going to suck riding all the way back to Sylvanus like this.
Or just being dead. That would suck, too.
They topped the rise and she could see immediately that Jordi was almost to the wreckage. Singh didn’t wait to be spotted; he took off at a dead sprint and she followed as best she could, her legs just as fast as they ever were, but the change in her weight distribution altering her stride. Ten meters, twenty, thirty, dirt and sand spraying up around the soles of Singh’s boots as he drew away slightly.
She couldn’t see in the gathering gloom further away from the lights on the wall, couldn’t see it when Jordi’s troops turned, but she could see Singh dive to the ground, and that was enough of a warning for her to throw herself down. Tantalum hail snapped over her head, a series of high-pitched cracks marking the supersonic passage. Fontenot pushed the pistol out in front of her and fired off three quick rounds, unsure in the dark whether she was actually aiming at anything but not wanting to die with rounds still in her magazine.
Singh must have been shooting too, and more effectively, because suddenly the cartel troops were firing less and running more. She came up on one knee, levelling the pistol and snapping off a shot at one of the fleeing backs, but they were already taking cover behind the broken-off wing of the lander. It had been tossed a good fifteen meters away from the lander when the craft had hit, and it was closer to the cartel soldiers than the rest of the wreckage.
One of them didn’t make it; she saw a dark figure go down as the snap-crack of the KE-guns firing filled the air. That still left three of the hired guns…and Jordi. Her vision was adjusting to the lower light out here, and she could just make out the cartel boss’s dark jacket flapping in the chill night breeze as he ran toward the cockpit.
Fontenot tried to get up, tried to go after him, but there was a staccato crackle and something slammed into her right leg low, near the calf. She went down, cursing, rolling onto her side and firing back.
“Singh!” she bellowed, the call a distorted wail of desperation. “Get him!”
The bounty hunter was already moving, despite the incoming fire. His KE-gun was out of ammo and he tossed it aside and ran, faster than any normal human could. She could already tell he wouldn’t be in time.
Chapter Twenty-One
Sandi heard the gunfire and tried again to move; she couldn’t, and she screamed in frustration and agony. The sound came out as a rasp, dry and mewling and she hated the weakness of it nearly as much as she hated the fact that she couldn’t move and couldn’t see. The lack of movement was a physical problem; she was fairly certain that she’d fractured her spine. The lack of vision was more physics: it was dark inside the cockpit, the only illumination the intermittent flashing red of an emergency indicator somewhere back at the control panel.
She was still strapped into her acceleration couch, but it had broken free of its struts in the crash and left her propped up against the portside bulkhead…or maybe it was the starboard, since the lander was inverted. She didn’t remember the crash, didn’t remember anything until a few minutes ago. How long had it been? She didn’t have any way of knowing; the interface cables had yanked out of her implant sockets under impact, and there wasn’t much chance the computer was operable anyway. There was blood coating the side of her face; she could feel it there, still wet, but not dripping anymore.
At least she could feel her face. She couldn’t feel much of anything else, couldn’t feel her legs or her arms or anything below her chest, and certainly couldn’t move it.
Spinal cord damage, she thought with a fatalistic certainty. Nothing irreparable, if someone got her to an auto-doc, got her stabilized before her systems started to shut down.
Should have let Ash fly this bird… But then, No, I’d rather it was me.
She felt a wave of agony wash over her, unfocused and generalized, followed by a rush of nausea. She clenched her teeth. If she vomited, it would wind up all over the front of her flight suit, and that wasn’t the image she wanted to present to whoever found her, whether it was Jacobson, or Korri, or Ash, or…
She didn’t want to think who else it might be.
There was a burst of gunfire, the unmistakable hum-snap-crack of electromagnetic slug-shooters of some kind, closer this time, and then impacts somewhere on the hull of the lander. Groans and creaks as someone’s weight was put on some strained section of the lander’s fuselage, a bang as some piece of wreckage was thrown out of the way.
Goddammit, if I could just get to my gun…
The dark and shadowy figure that lurched through a gap in the fuselage could have been anyone, but she knew by a gut she couldn’t feel anymore that it was no one she wanted to see. A small flashlight snapped on, pointing downward, giving enough light that they could both see each other wi
thout blinding either of them.
“Oh, this is perfect.”
The voice was as smooth and oily and artificial as the receiver of the pistol in his hand. His depilated head gleamed slightly in the reflected glare of his flashlight, and the shadows made his face seem even more sinister than usual.
“Hello, Sandrine,” Jordi Abdullah said with a wolf’s smile. “It’s so good to see you again.”
***
Yellow warning icons had turned to red, the turbines were screaming at him with anguished, overtaxed wails and the hull of the ship was groaning in protest, but Ash ignored them all, ignored the dull ache and the constant pressure that made even breathing difficult. It wouldn’t make a damned bit of difference if he arrived two minutes late in a perfectly-functioning ship and fresh as a daisy.
He could see his destination just a few kilometers ahead, and a few more below, a glowing red halo on the satellite map that stretched out before him in his mind’s eye. There was nothing in the air, no orbital activity and no communications in or out of the city, nothing he could detect on any of the sensors, as if the whole place was dead, a ghost town. No…there was one signal. It was an emergency beacon, flashing a distress call over and over, automated and low-power…like something you’d find on a troop lander. It pulsed an ugly yellow in the open field between the spaceport and the Constabulary, just where Sandi had been heading to drop off the Savage/Slaughter mercenaries.
He throttled back the jets, almost against his will, as if the speed had been a barrier to dealing with what he might have to see, then banked into a spiral that would take him down over Gennich. The turn was tight, pushing him sideways into the corner of his acceleration couch, but it was the quickest way to bleed velocity, and he needed to be down there.
And there it was. He could see the belly camera feed, the infrared and thermal and everything else blended into a single, seamless picture for him by computer systems working like a mute, inglorious Renoir in the background. The lander was belly-up, one wing ripped off and separate from the rest of the fuselage, but it hadn’t exploded…it was basically intact. Someone could have lived through that; that was what he tried to tell himself, anyway.