by Rick Partlow
She held a heavy Gauss pistol at low ready in her right hand, the gunbelt partially concealed under the flaps of her dark-colored duster. The pistol was damned expensive, and damned hard to get out here, and he’d worried it might draw too much attention, but Fontenot had insisted on bringing it.
“Is she all right?” Korri Fontenot asked, tossing a handful of clothes to him that he passed awkwardly back to Chandra.
“She can talk, you know,” Chandra bit off, grabbing the fatigue pants and t-shirt and slipping into them quickly. “Get me out of here and I’ll be fine.”
The look on the biological half of Fontenot’s face told Ash she wasn’t convinced of that, but she let it go.
“How many more you think are in there?” Fontenot asked, her tone casually curious, but the glint in her eye saying something completely different.
Ash hissed out a breath, knowing what she was thinking.
“We can’t save them all,” he reminded her. “We’d just get them killed if we tried.”
She grunted noncommittally, but waved at him and Chandra to go in front of her. There were people out in the street, most of them too drunk or high to notice what was going on, but there were one or two who stared at them in open curiosity. No one challenged them, and by the time they reached Kan-Ten’s position, Fontenot had signaled to Ash to holster his pulse pistol.
The Tahni was a gargoyle squatting in the shadows of a shut-down bar, his features hidden under a hood, his pulse pistol concealed under the folds of his cape. He unfolded as they approached, rising to his full height of nearly two meters, the odd configuration of his joints invisible inside his loose clothing.
“We are clear on this side,” he announced in his sing-song accent, some of the consonants distorted out of a voice box that hadn’t evolved to speak any human language.
He turned towards them and Ash could hear Chandra gasp. His face was humanoid but inhuman, the dark, beady eyes protected under ridges of bone, the nose nothing more than elongated nostrils flat against his skull, and his jaws as large and brutal as the shovels of a power digger.
“What,” he asked her with a sense of humor learned from years among humans, “you’ve never seen a Tahni before?”
She probably had, Ash reflected. It had been nearly six years since the war with the Tahni had ended, and more and more of the aliens were integrating with the human Commonwealth, settling in human colonies or simply staying put on former Tahni colonies that the Commonwealth had taken during the hostilities. Belial was the Casablanca of the Commonwealth and Ash was sure there were at least some Tahni on the station, but maybe none had worked at her mother’s club.
Kan-Ten didn’t wait around for an answer, just fell into step with the others. Once they were around the curve of the cylinder and the brothel was out of sight, Ash let himself take a breath.
“It can’t be this easy,” he murmured as they waited at the lift station, eyes scanning 180 degrees around them.
“We’re not fighting La Sombra bounty hunters,” Fontenot reminded him, sounding a bit amused. “Just small-time scumbag slavers.” She shrugged, more a motion of her head since both of her shoulders were cybernetic. “The three we killed were probably half their employees. They probably have a protection arrangement with one or another of the cartels, but by the time they figure out who did it, we’ll be long gone.”
The words were comforting, but Ash still sweated the entire ride up the lift to the docking hub, hand hovering over the grip of his pistol and tightening each time the doors parted at a new level. But the weight fell off of his shoulders the closer they came to the ship---literally, since the centripetal force that simulated gravity grew weaker as the lift approached the hub. When the doors slid open for the last time, they were in free fall and only the sticky plates on his ship boots kept him attached to what had been the floor. He felt Chandra grabbing at his arm to try to keep from floating upward as their lift car’s motion abruptly halted.
The hub level was a buzz of activity as people surged this way and that like water bugs, some pushing themselves along the broad causeways in zero gravity with the ease of frequent flyers, some using hand-held propulsion units and more still walking stiffly with the aid of magnetic boots or sticky plates. They were a motley lot of smugglers, petty criminals in cheap, colorful flash, serious cartel heavy hitters in more practical and usually armored gear, and average workers dressed in stained and worn coveralls, mixed with those who considered themselves businesspeople and dressed the part. Each group moved with a natural flow, falling as if by design into lanes of purposeful speed, casual indifference or reluctant drag, some towards the lift banks, some back towards the docking bay and others to workstations right there in the hub itself.
Ash and the others fell in with the casual floaters, moving slow enough to avoid attracting attention but faster than the ones trudging along the deck with the speed of a garden slug. Moving in zero gravity was natural for Ash after years in Space Fleet, Chandra had been raised on a space station and Fontenot was old enough to be experienced at everything. Kan-Ten, however, flailed about like a drowning fish and wound up having to grab onto Fontenot to keep from drifting into oncoming traffic. Ash still couldn’t read Tahni expressions well enough to know if Kan-Ten was embarrassed by the whole thing.
“We’re two minutes out,” Ash said in a conversational tone, speaking into the pickup of his ‘link. “No one following that we can see.”
The security zone was just this side of the docking bay, but it was for incoming traffic only; no one cared what you took out of the station.
Hell, they didn’t care that much what you brought into it either, Ash mused. They just want to make sure they charge you for it.
The guards on either side of the security lock were big and armored and intimidating, fastened to the deck with magnetic boots and lugging around assault guns that would have been impossibly heavy if there’d been anything more than microgravity. Ash tried not to stare at them, and he could see that Chandra wasn’t even trying; she watched them with eyes wide and face pale, as if she expected them to see who and what she was and try to take her back to a life of slavery. That, he decided, was not going to happen. He’d bring the whole station down around their ears before he’d let her go back to that.
Then the guards were behind them and they emerged out of the darkness of the man-made cave and into the multi-tiered docking bay that stuck out of the polar hub of the station, a shiny, ornate decoration on the dull grey of the station’s cylinder, matched by the silvery cooling vanes emerging from the opposite pole. Light from the nearby primary star streamed in through meter-thick transplas windows, reflected by the same mirror-bright polished shielding that protected them from micrometeorite strikes; and in between the windows, evenly spaced around the circumference of the cylinder, were the docking collars. Each was mated with the airlock of a shuttle or other small vessel; larger cargo ships orbited the station at a safe distance and sent shuttles in to transfer crew, passengers or cargo.
Their ship, the Acheron, wasn’t a shuttle; she was a converted Fleet missile cutter, bought surplus by him and still mostly owned by the bank. He’d bought her while he was still a Fleet officer, using his pension as collateral, back before he’d had to go on the run with Sandi. He was still technically AWOL, though in a peacetime drawdown, that wasn’t nearly as worrying as the trumped-up murder charge still hanging over them or the price that the La Sombra cartel still had on his and Sandi’s heads.
Luckily, no one cared about that sort of thing out here, unless a bounty hunter happened to track them down…
“Shit!” That was Sandi’s voice coming over his ear bud, and she didn’t sound happy. “Ash, get everyone into the ship now! We have company.”
He could tell by Fontenot and Kan-Ten’s reactions that she’d included them in on the transmission, and Chandra was glancing between the three of them, noticing the alarm on the humans’ faces.
“What is it?” she wondered, fear l
eeching back into her eyes.
“Hold on,” he warned her, grabbing her arm with one hand and the safety rail that ran along the right-hand bulkhead with another and yanking them both forward.
The crowd parted around them as they flew through the sedate movers, jostling a few and earning muttered or shouted curses in return. The corridor seemed to blur on either side of Ash and he was starting to seriously worry whether he’d be able to stop, and then he saw the berth number for their ship lit up on the wall ahead only thirty meters or so away. He twisted his body around, dragging the side of his boot against the roughened surface of the rail, slowing both of them down enough that he was able to grab the railing without breaking his fingers.
He still left a layer of skin on the surface of the railing, but they jerked to a halt just a meter or so past the Acheron’s docking station. He glanced back and saw Fontenot braking abruptly, her bionic hand squeezing down hard against the railing with no worry for pain or injury. Kan-Ten had been riding her like a magic carpet and he barely hung on, his feet flying wildly out in front of them; Ash would have laughed had his gut not been too tight for it.
The inner and outer lock doors were already open and Ash pulled Chandra into the utility bay, letting her get a hand hold next to one of the passenger acceleration couches mounted in a corner by the utility lockers.
“Strap yourself in,” he instructed tersely, then pushed off through the central passageway into the cockpit, trusting Fontenot to make sure she followed his instructions.
Behind him, he could hear the airlock hissing shut, and halfway up the passage, he felt a jolt and the accompanying bang of maneuvering thrusters pushing them away from the docking collar. Passing by the cabin hatches and the small galley, he could see Sandi already strapped into the pilot’s seat, her short, red hair pulled back and interface jacks from the control panel plugged into the implant sockets at her temples. Her face was taut with concentration, her hands clenched on the armrests of the acceleration couch and, rather than distract her, Ash pulled himself into the copilot’s seat and scanned the sensor display as he strapped himself in.
The system was laid out for him in the holographic projection of the main viewscreen, a white dwarf with no surviving terrestrial planets, only an ice giant so far out that you could barely tell it orbited the star at all. There were a dozen cargo ships in long orbits around the station itself, but none of them seemed particularly threatening at the moment. There was one ship boosting, probably just out of Transition Space, a fairly common looking freighter, but Ash couldn’t see that it was any different than the others.
“What am I missing?” he finally asked her, feeling the ship swinging around away from the station.
“That’s the fucking Gitano,” she bit off, sounding more scared than annoyed.
“Shit,” he swore, not having to ask anything else. The Gitano was a La Sombra cartel ship, and the last time they’d seen it… “It’s Singh.”
The communications console lit up with an incoming signal and the head and shoulders of a man were projected in a corner of the main screen. He had once been harshly handsome, with a hard-edged rakishness to his face, but now half that face was metal, matte black and obscenely bare, with the right eye grey and cybernetic while the other was dark and full of a rage for revenge.
“Carpenter, Hollande,” he addressed them, “I’m going to give you one opportunity to surrender because I promised Jordi Abdullah I would.”
“So he can have the chance to torture us to death instead?” Ash snapped back. “Did you really think that would work, Singh?”
“Honestly, no,” the bounty hunter admitted. “But a promise is a promise.”
The hologram snapped off as the transmission ended, and Ash barely caught a glimpse on the sensor display of a flight of anti-spacecraft missiles launching from the Gitano’s weapons bay before the Acheron’s fusion drive ignited and slammed him back into his padded acceleration couch with the force of nearly six times his normal weight. His vision began to narrow into a tunnel as the pressure on his chest increased and breath became impossible; he tried to tighten his core muscles against the acceleration, but as it approached nine g’s, he knew he was going to pass out…and he knew it wasn’t going to be enough. The missiles could accelerate for twenty g’s for a brief burst, and humans couldn’t take that.
Spacetime ripped open around the nose of the cutter and the living nothingness of Transition Space swallowed them up. Ash sucked down a sweet lungful of air and relief as the weight of an elephant shifted abruptly to his normal ninety kilograms, pulling downward towards the deck. The artificial gravity worked in conjunction with the ship’s warp field, and then only in Transition Space, for reasons he’d never been quite able to understand without an advanced degree in trans-dimensional physics.
He looked over to Sandi. She didn’t look nearly as relieved as he felt. Her face was angular, with high cheekbones and a slightly imperfect tilt that lit up her blue eyes when she smiled, but she wasn’t smiling now.
“That was too damned close,” she ground out, yanking at the quick-release for her seat restraints. “If Kanesh massed another million kilograms, I wouldn’t have been able to get out of its gravito-inertial shadow in time to make the jump and this ship and everyone in it would be a fond fucking memory.”
He nodded, unsure of how else to respond.
“Thanks for keeping a look out,” he said, attempting a smile.
She snorted, then gave in and returned it, leaning over to kiss him fondly.
“Next time,” she warned, “I get to go risk my neck while you stay on the ship and play getaway driver.”
“Deal,” he promised, standing and unbuckling his gunbelt. “I’m not cut out for this gunfighter shit anyway.”
“Did you have to use it?” She nodded towards the laser.
“Yeah.” His face went grim and hard. “And this time, I don’t feel a bit bad about it.”
She closed her eyes and hissed out a sigh, obviously understanding what he was saying.
“How is she?”
“Better than I would be,” was the only answer he could give without sounding trite. “I thought I was going to have to drag Fontenot out of the place, though.” He restrained an urge to spit. “It’s hell in there.”
“A guy named Jean-Paul Sartre once said, ‘hell is other people.’ I don’t know who the hell he was,” she admitted with a shrug, “but he had a point.”
“At least we got the girl out. We’ll get her back to her mom and try to figure out how Singh found us…again.” He worked at a kink in his neck. “We should be safe on Belial.”
“With Singh after us?” Sandi shook her head. “We’re not safe anywhere.”
Chapter Two
Sandrine Hollande watched Chandra sobbing quietly in her mother’s arms and felt a sharp spear of pain in her chest. She hadn’t had the chance for a tearful reunion with her own mother, and she wasn’t sure she was as happy for the girl as she was resentful. Svetlana Breslov, however, was unequivocally happy; the woman was a slightly more weathered version of her daughter and looked nearly as young with the glow on her face at the girl’s return. And the idea that she’d been a part of that made her feel worthwhile.
She’d felt the same when they’d managed to rescue Adam Krieger from the stronghold of a cartel boss who’d been trying to use him as leverage against his father, a corrupt Fleet Admiral. When Breslov had contacted them, she’d seemed to know everything about the whole business with Adam; it was why she’d sought them out to retrieve her daughter. She’d heard about it all, ironically enough, from Lena Brunner, the daughter of the cartel boss from whom they’d rescued Adam.
“Maybe we’ve found our new business model,” Ash murmured softly by her ear, slipping an arm around her as they waited near the rear of the main dining room of the Worlds Away, Breslov’s massive casino hotel deep inside the mountain of asteroidal nickel-iron that was Belial Pleasure Station.
Sandi eyed him sid
elong, wondering if he’d read her expression. Ash had always been good at that, all the way back to their freshman year in the Commonwealth Service Academy. He’d been her best friend for a long time before they’d become lovers, and the former was still more important than the latter. Still, looking into those soulful dark eyes and that square-jawed, boy-scout-earnest face, the latter wasn’t a bad deal, either.
“Acheron LLC, finder of lost children?” She whispered back playfully. “You think there’s money in it?”
“There certainly was this time.” That was Korri Fontenot, standing sentinel-like behind them, her arms crossed, her face with an obvious look of satisfaction. “Don’t know that we can count on every desperate parent to be quite as wealthy as Ms. Breslov.”
“Do we require the money that badly?” Kan-Ten asked. He was propped on a stool at the high-top table the rest of them were standing beside. His alien face was cloaked in the hood of his cape for the same reason that Fontenot had taken to covering her bionics with synthskin: they were wanted, both by the law and, almost more significantly, by the La Sombra cartel, and anything that would throw off potential informants was worth trying.
At Sandi’s frown, the Tahni clarified: “Does not the other funding we are receiving cover most of our expenses?”
Sandi scowled at the thought of their other source of funding. It was a sore spot for her, and even more for Ash.
“I’m not sure we should count on that money too heavily,” Ash warned, his expression darkening.
Before they could discuss the topic further, Svetlana Breslov gave her daughter a kiss on the forehead and sent her off with one of her employees, presumably to clean up and change. Then she walked over to the four of them, unselfconsciously wiping away a tear that streaked down her right cheek.
“I cannot begin to thank you enough,” she said in an accent that still spoke of a home in the Russian refugee camps of Fairbanks over a century ago. “The money, it is not enough.”