by Rick Partlow
Wait. There, in the cover of the broken-off wing, there were three thermal signatures, human, and another one twenty meters away, this one with the unmistakable glow of isotope power packs dotting bionic prosthetics. That was Korri, and she was shooting at the others. They had to be Jordi’s men, and if they were fighting over the lander, then Sandi had to still be inside it.
It was a logical leap, he knew, but it was a straw and he’d be damned if he didn’t grasp at it right now.
“Korri,” he transmitted. “If you can hear this...”
***
Korri Fontenot hugged the ground, counting on an almost-imperceptible swell of sandy earth between her and the cartel soldiers sheltered behind the wing to protect her from the insistent bursts of metal shards tearing up the ground only a meter in front of her. Her pistol was empty, Singh was occupied with heading Jordi off before he reached Sandi, and she couldn’t see a damned thing with her head buried in the sand. She could only hear half of it, a truncated, mono version of reality, with half the whining snaps of the KE-gun rounds, half the chopping impact into the sandstone just beneath the surface, half the…
She rolled onto her side, eye opening wide.
Half the distant roar of turbojets overhead.
“Korri.” The voice was as distant as the jets, coming from her ‘link at her belt. “If you can hear this, get away from that wing, ‘cause it’s not going to be there in ten seconds.”
“Oh, shit,” she hissed.
She couldn’t just get up and run away, not without catching a round or ten in the back. She dropped the useless handgun and began high-crawling backwards, toward the lander, counting on its bulk to shelter her from what was coming.
Ten seconds. It wasn’t long enough, it was no time at all…and yet it seemed to stretch forever, and it was only four seconds in when she finally thought, Fuck it, and started running.
Five.
The roaring wasn’t so distant anymore, it was a rolling thunder just overhead, maybe a few hundred meters up,
Four.
She could see puffs of sand only centimeters from her feet, knew they had to be from enemy fire, but it was too late to stop now.
Three.
High-pitched pings sounded off the fuselage of the lander as she got closer to the tail section; they were shifting fire. Thank God the Tahni guns didn’t have usable optics…
Two.
She threw herself forward, hitting on her right shoulder and rolling onto her belly just past the edge of the lander’s tail, around the cover of the broken and folded-in vertical stabilizer and then…
One.
She had her eye closed, her arm thrown across her head, but she still saw the flash as clear as if it had gone off inside her head. The ground shook, and the wreckage of the lander rattled in the hurricane-force wind as the shock from the blast travelled outward, and a tornado of sand scoured across her, debris pattering against the fuselage. She shielded her eye and looked back at where the severed section of wing had been; it was gone, swallowed up in roiling steam and a bubbling pool of molten sand. She could feel the heat radiating off of it from behind the body of the lander; of the cartel soldiers, nothing was left but vapors.
“Shit, Ash,” she said softly. “It was just three guys.”
***
It was just her imagination---the light was too dim, and shining the wrong direction---but Sandi was sure she could see right down the barrel of Jordi’s pistol to the miniature warhead affixed to the rocket in the chamber.
“My only regret,” the cartel boss said, finger caressing the trigger pad, “is that I don’t have time to do a proper job of this. A gun is so much quicker and less painful than you deserve.”
“Just get it over with, you fucking drama queen,” she sighed, letting her head slump back against the seat. “Or are you gonna’ talk me to death?”
Whatever his response might have been to that, it was lost in a flash that flared through the gaps in the fuselage and an explosion that shook the cockpit like a bone in the teeth of a dog, sending Jordi stumbling against the bulkhead. Sandi’s acceleration couch slid down to the side, leaving her hanging from the straps of the seat, and she gasped as agony shot through her, the only sensation left that she could feel. She gritted her teeth, trying to clear her vision of the stars that floated across it, and thought she was hallucinating from the pain when she saw the tall, dark figure coming through the crack where the fuselage had split on impact.
But it had to be real; Jordi saw it, too, and fired at it instinctively. The rocket round flared against the black, armored jacket but didn’t penetrate, and in the light of its ignition, she saw the absolute last person she’d ever expected to: Jagmeet Singh. The bounty hunter moved fast, faster than he had any right to. Before Jordi could squeeze off another shot, Singh had snatched the gun away, yanking it hard enough that Sandi was sure she heard a couple of the cartel leader’s fingers break as it came out of his hand.
Jordi cursed hotly, pulling back his twisted fingers, his eyes wide with shock, and he reached for the knife at his belt with his left hand. He gripped it with the practiced stance of someone who’d fought with it before, the black, leather-wrapped handle between thumb and forefinger. His flashlight had fallen from his grasp when the explosion had shaken the cockpit, and it finally completed its slow, clattering roll across the slanted surface of what had been the overhead and was now the deck, coming to rest in a corner and giving Jordi a clear view of the other man’s face.
“Singh,” he said in a gasp of disbelief, the knife wavering.
He took a hesitant step back, and Singh took the same step forward, the pistol extended in his right hand.
“The last regret you’re ever going to have,” the bounty hunter declared, his voice as flat and deadly as his expression, “is sending your hired guns to try to kill me.”
Jordi blinked, cocking his head in confusion that made Singh pause in his advance.
“What the fuck are you talking about?” He raised his hands in a peacemaking gesture, though he didn’t drop the knife. “I sent you after Hollande and Carpenter, and the next thing I knew, you disappeared for weeks…I thought you were dead! And when you got back, you were killing my people on every outpost you could get to!” Jordi shook his head. “You were my best, for God’s sake, why the hell would I try to kill you?”
Singh blinked, thoughts bouncing off of each other behind his dark eyes, and Sandi saw him glance her way, a shadow of suspicion on his face.
“It’s true.”
Sandi barely recognized Fontenot’s voice. It sounded slurred and ancient, and when the woman emerged from the gap in the fuselage and stepped into the glow of the fallen flashlight, she looked even worse than she sounded. The synthskin was gone from her right arm and peeling off of the other side of her face like she’d been stricken with some sort of skin disease; the metal beneath it was gleaming obscenely in the reflection of the flashlight beam. Her left arm was gone below the shoulder, the ends of it jagged and twisted. She didn’t look as if she could take on Jordi right now, much less Singh.
“It was us,” the woman admitted, steadying herself against the side of the bulkhead as she stepped up into the cockpit. “Well, we didn’t do it, personally. We work with Fleet Intelligence; we told you. Before that mission, the one to find the Metaurus, we had asked our handler for help with you; you’d ambushed us in the Pirate Worlds, almost killed us. We wanted you off our backs, and he said he’d take care of it.”
Sandi stared at her, horrified. Why the hell was she telling Singh this? He was the only thing keeping Jordi from killing her, the only one of them with a gun.
“You knew?” His voice seemed hurt, vulnerable, and Sandi’s stare flitted over to him, her mouth falling open.
What the hell?
“I suspected,” Fontenot replied. “It wasn’t as if I could call and warn you; it was a done deal by then. When I saw you here…well, I wasn’t sure if I could trust you at first, and I sure as
hell didn’t know how you’d react if I told you the truth about the price on your head.” There was a look that passed over Fontenot’s face, one Sandi hadn’t seen there before…regret.
“If I’d known then what I know now, I might have done things differently.”
“Singh, come on, man,” Jordi urged, interrupting the exchange. His knife seemed more like a pointer now than a weapon and he used it to single out Fontenot. “These fucks lied to you, betrayed you. You have just as much reason to hate them as I do!”
There was desperation in his tone, but cunning in his eyes.
“You kill them both now, and help me get out of here, and I’ll transfer you everything I have left in my dummy accounts in the Periphery. That’s gotta’ be half a million in Corporate Scrip…it’s all yours.” He grinned with that old Jordi Abdullah cockiness. “Just do one last job for me, let me pay you to do what you want to do anyway. Kill these bitches, and you’ll be a rich man.”
There was a silence that lasted far too long for Sandi’s taste, and shadows played over Singh’s face as he looked aside at Fontenot. Finally, he met Jordi’s eyes again, his mouth set in a hard line.
“Sorry, Jordi. The man you want to hire is dead.”
The gunshot took Sandi by surprise, its target even more so. Jordi Abdullah stumbled backwards into the bulkhead, a third eye punched through his skull between the first two, something dark and wet splattering on the deck behind him. The man who’d once controlled more star systems than any other single individual in the history of the Commonwealth slid down the bulkhead on a trail of blood, and settled to the floor just across from Sandi. She saw a look of startled annoyance on his face, as if he’d suddenly remembered an important engagement and realized he was late for it.
Sandi hissed out a sigh, letting her head rest against the side of the acceleration couch.
“She looks pretty bad,” Singh was telling Fontenot. “I think her back’s broken.” His voice was distant in Sandi’s ears, like a conversation on the shore heard from a boat slowly drifting away. “Give me a hand, we need to carry her out of here.”
When Fontenot answered, it was a whisper in a sea of blackness that was closing around Sandi, threatening to pull her beneath it.
“I’ll be happy to lend you a hand…since that’s all I got left.”
There was a jostling, and a shifting, and daggers of agony in her back, and she was sure she passed out more than once. But consciousness was persistent, and finally she saw a face…familiar, she thought. Jacobson. It was Jacobson. He frowned, and pressed something against her neck, something cold and sticky that she barely felt. Her head swam with sudden dizziness and dribs and drabs of sights and sounds blurred and swirled around her in a feverish kaleidoscope.
“…pressure on her spinal cord,” she heard a voice that might have been Jacobson’s. “Paralysis is temporary for now, but if we…”
“Get her on board.” That was Ash, firm and trying to be commanding, but too shaken and concerned to pull it off. “Get her into the auto-doc.”
The flurry of light and sound seemed to fade into a featureless background, and warm blankets of sleep buried her in endless comfort, with one, last hazy thought penetrating before all thought was gone: Ash is going to give me shit for crashing the plane…
Chapter Twenty-Two
Ash held onto her like he was never going to let go. Sandi had the thought that she should push him away, scold him for being so clingy in a public place. After all, it had been over a week since she came out of the auto-doc en route to Sylvanus, and he was still constantly holding her hand, touching her like he believed she’d fade away if he let go for too long.
But she didn’t scold him, and she didn’t push him away, because she understood how he felt, understood the fear she’d put him through, and she wanted him to hold her, even here on a park bench in the Dolabella Memorial Gardens. It was a clear night, warm for this time of year, and hundreds of couples and families and solitary dreamers wandered gravel footpaths lined with flowering trees and looked up at the wonderland of stars. Tonight, she just wanted them to be two of those people, enjoying the night and each other.
Then Captain Fox came along and ruined it all.
“Good evening,” he said with a nod and a genial smile, strolling casually down the sidewalk from the park’s street entrance. He was dressed in one of his loud, colorful shirts, his hands tucked in the pockets of his baggy, grey shorts like he’d come to Sylvanus for a beach vacation five years ago and never left.
“Why the park?” Sandi asked him, feeling curious.
“The café has a new owner,” he confessed, his expression turning morose, as if it were a tragedy. “She changed the menu. Plus,” he added, face brightening again, “things are changing for us, as well, and I thought a new venue would be symbolic, somehow.”
He glanced around them, his hooded eyes flickering to each shadowy bower of the park. “Where are Fontenot and the Tahni?”
Sandi shared a glance with Ash, letting out a slow breath that was close to a sigh. He shrugged, shorthand for him volunteering to be the one to tell the story.
“Kan-Ten decided to stay on Brigantia,” he explained. “He missed being with his own people, I guess. He felt like they needed him there.”
“Commendable,” Fox allowed, dropping down into a sprawling seat next to them on the bench, taking up about half of it, his arm stretched along the backrest.
Sandi scowled and scooted closer to Ash, the rough wood of the seat scraping against the back of her bare thighs. Fox didn’t seem to notice her discomfort, or perhaps that had been his goal.
“But what about our friendly neighborhood cyborg?” he went on. “Don’t tell me, let me guess: she stayed too, decided to run for Planetary Constable?”
Sandi started to say something smart-assed, but then reined herself in. Fox did nothing without a reason, at least not when it came to his job. He also didn’t ask questions he didn’t already know the answer to. He wasn’t really asking where Fontenot was, he was gauging their attitude about it.
“Korri needed some custom repairs done to her prosthetics,” Sandi answered him calmly and factually, not giving him the emotional response he wanted because fuck him, he should have just come out and asked what he wanted to know. “She couldn’t get it here.”
He seemed to be waiting for more, and she noted dissatisfaction in the set of his jaw when he didn’t get it.
“That’s a shame,” he said, spreading his hands. “I wanted to congratulate all of you for taking out Jordi…and to share some news.” He smiled broadly but somehow without showing his teeth. “You’ve all kind of worked your way out of a job.”
“What do you mean?” Ash asked, and Sandi saw his eyes narrowing cautiously, looking around with obvious suspicion at the people passing by on the walking path.
She understood his paranoia; she was half-expecting a squad of Patrol officers to rush out and arrest them both at any second. It was just the sort of thing she’d expect Fleet Intelligence to do to someone who wasn’t of use anymore.
“Calm down, children.” Fox chuckled, clearly amused by their reaction. “What I’m saying is, there’s been some changes, a reorganization, you might say. That power struggle I mentioned before you left? Well, we came out on the right side of it, and suddenly I’ve got a lot more pull than I did a few weeks ago. And since we don’t currently have a need for undercover operatives in the Pirate Worlds…”
“Oh come on, Fox,” Sandi exploded, getting tired of the theatrics. “Just tell us, for God’s sake!”
A couple of passers-by glanced over at her eruption, but she ignored them, and for a change, so did Captain Fox.
“All right, I won’t draw it out any longer,” Fox said, raising his palms in surrender. “All charges against both of you by the Patrol and Space Fleet have been dropped. Carpenter, your official Fleet personnel jacket will reflect that you’ve been on detached duty with Fleet Intelligence this whole time. You can report t
o Inferno for a new duty station if you like.” He shrugged. “Or you can be honorably discharged as of now.”
Sandi felt Ash sag against her, his jaw dropping in disbelief.
“My God.” His voice was subdued, almost awe-struck.
She knew how he felt. It had been so long, so long looking over their shoulder, unable to plan for anything but the next assignment, because staying in one place too long would get them arrested by the Patrol or targeted by Jordi’s bounty hunters. They could visit the Core worlds, even go back to Earth if they felt like it…
She looked sharply at Ash. Unless he wanted to go back into the military. It wasn’t as if leaving it had been his idea, after all. She’d crashed in on his world like the meteor that killed the dinosaurs, and thrown his life into utter chaos.
“I’ll take the discharge.” He was speaking to Fox, but his eyes were on her. As always, he knew what she was thinking. “After all,” he expounded, “I built the Acheron because I wanted to see the galaxy.” He grabbed her hand and squeezed it. “Let’s go see it together.”
***
Korri Fontenot couldn’t think of too many places she hated more than Belial. The hollowed out asteroid was home to just about every inane and pointless weakness of the human species, put on showcase and sold for a premium. Immersive ViR, drugs, alcohol, pleasure dolls, prostitution and dozens of other pursuits, all designed to help people avoid having to actually live their lives.
And obscenely overpriced food, she added to the list.
She was here for none of those, but that didn’t make her feel any better about the visit. She stared at the holographic banner that advertised the wares of the clinic and wondered if she could go through with this.
Cloned organ and limb replacement, it read. Augmentation available. Price on request.