by Jake Elwood
The burly man loomed beside her, his back toward her, and the seat moved beneath Lark. She could make out the front wall of the Hall of Heroes beyond him. The wall was sinking. Either the Hall was collapsing or she was in an open-top flitter and it was taking off.
Terror filled her. It was too late! Once the flitter was too high for her to jump out she'd be trapped. Lark took a deep breath, opened her eyes wide, and sat up.
She was in the back seat of a large flitter. A woman sat to her left, head back against the seat cushions, a blood-soaked cloth pressed to her face. The woman was moaning and swearing. There was so much blood staining her blouse that Lark couldn't tell what color it had originally been.
To Lark's right was the big man who had carried her. He leaned over the top of the car, a crater gun in his arms, all his attention focussed on the street in front of the Hall of Heroes. He fired, then leaned out even farther, taking careful aim.
There was something familiar in the shape of his body. It was Soresh, she decided. Her every instinct told her to shrink back and hope he didn't notice her, but she imagined him taking aim at Alexandra. She had to do something!
His thighs pressed against the inside of the flitter door, his feet braced against the floor. Lark was about to goose him, hoping to spoil his aim, when a better idea occurred to her.
She reached past him and popped the latch on the door.
He was gone in an instant, wailing as he fell, and Lark stepped into the space where he'd been, peering down. Vertigo twisted her stomach as she took in the dizzying drop to the ground, a good fifteen meters down. Still, any drop that she might survive had to be better than staying where she was. She closed her eyes and hurled herself toward the void.
She didn't see the hand that caught her coat, just felt the fabric snap back against her. She landed on the floor of the car, a hard-faced older man glaring down at her. The glare vanished for an instant, replaced by blank-faced shock, and Lark managed to grin. "Expecting someone else, were you?"
He didn't answer, just pulled a compact red pistol from under his coat and shot her in the face.
You don't dream when you've been knocked out by a stun shot. Not exactly. Lark floated in an unpleasant stupor, awash in a faint miasma of fear and pain and vertigo. She woke to the sensation of someone slapping her face. She opened her eyes.
She was sitting more or less upright, and she straightened herself as she blinked, trying to figure out where she was. Cold air flowed past her, helping to revive her, and she gradually made sense of the blur of color and shape around her.
Either she hadn't been out for long or it was quite a long trip she was taking, because she was still in the open-topped flitter. They were up high enough that all she could see was cloud. The hard-faced man who'd shot her sat across from her, the same red stun pistol in his hand. The blood-soaked young woman was unconscious or dead, curled up on the seat beside Lark. Even with the wind whipping past her face Lark could smell blood thick in the air, and she swallowed as her gorge tried to rise. Beyond the gunman Lark could see a man in the driver's seat. There was no one else in the flitter.
Lark stared at the man with the red pistol and scowled. "Who are you?"
His eyes narrowed. "Who am I? Who are YOU?"
"Kaia Highstar, of course." Lark patted the rich blue coat. "Can't you tell?"
Her head rocked back, she saw a flash of sky, and things went momentarily dark. When her vision cleared she was looking down at her lap, watching drops of blood spatter and splash across the fabric. He hit me! The son of a bitch hit me! She lifted her head and looked at him, blood from her nose washing warm and salty across her lips.
There was no expression on his face. No fury, no regret. He was hitting her because it was the most efficient way to get what he wanted, and as that horrible fact sunk in Lark felt her stomach tighten. She was no stranger to violence, though she'd had a year of peace since her father died. He'd hit much harder than this guy did, but only after working himself into a rage.
And I never saw it coming, she realized. He's fast. Fast and dangerous.
"My name is Milly Vanderstars," she said. The lie was probably pointless, but information was power, and she wouldn't give away any more than she could help. "My class is on a field trip. The Skyland security people asked me to dress up as Kaia. They didn't say why."
That drew the first real emotion she'd seen from this man. His lip curled. "That's because you're a groundsider," he said. "To them you're about as important as a worm. They'll use you and get you killed and never give it a moment's thought."
"Well, thank goodness I'm with you now, so I can finally be treated right," Lark said. Drops of blood flew out with every word, and she blew a puff of air at him. Blood spattered the legs of his jumpsuit, and Lark felt an icy wave wash through her body. I've gone too far. What am I doing? Her survival instincts had been better, a year before. She'd gotten used to better treatment, though. Stop it, Lark. This is no time to stick up for yourself. You'll get yourself killed.
She wasn't going to stop, though. Some time in the last twelve months she'd crossed a line without realizing it. She'd made a transition, deep down inside, from the terrified victim who cowered and cried and tried to placate her tyrant father to something else. Something more. She wasn't going back across that line. Not for fear of a beating. Not for fear of death. The price was too high.
The hard-faced man stared at her for a long moment, his lips tight. Then he inclined his head in a tiny nod. "Do you know where they took Highstar?"
"Oh, of course." Lark rolled her eyes, knowing she was overdoing it and too angry to stop herself. "They told me everything. Would you like her personal banking codes too?"
"You don't want to push me too far," he said. He took a digiband from his pocket, a device like sunglasses with a lens over only one eye. He put it on, touched a control on the side, and the lens over his left eye went opaque. His right eye continued to stare at her, and the pistol in his hand didn't waver.
Lark thought about making faces at him and decided not to push her luck. The shock of the blow to her face was wearing off, the pain setting in. Half her face ached. Her nose burned, and several teeth felt loose in their sockets. Blood still poured down her face. Since she couldn't staunch it without touching her nose she ignored it, turning her head to look out at the passing clouds.
By leaning a bit to one side she was able to see a bit of the ground. Only for an instant, though. The ground fell away sharply as the flitter passed the edge of the plateau. Lark stared down into a pale haze covering an ocean of toxic gas and shivered. Wherever they were taking her, she wouldn't escape by walking away.
Chapter 17
Kingstown didn't have much of a criminal underworld, from what Cassie could see. Aside from subversives like the Plateau Society, there was pretty much no organized crime at all. Still, she was doing her best.
The gambling club wasn't much, a dingy room under a factory, a shadowy space with low ceilings and a robot staff. A seedy brown-haired man tended a none-too-clean bar along one wall. Cassie, after playing half an hour of Fan-Tan to establish her bona fides, switched to nursing a drink and chatting up the bartender.
The other gamblers were drones, dissipated and dull-eyed. Useless to her. It wasn't looking as if the bartender was going to be much use either, but she clung to hope.
"Bit quiet, isn't it?" She swirled ice in her glass and gave the bartender her best sympathetic look.
He looked from the three men at the Fan-Tan table to the two women and a man staring into vid screens along the walls and hoisted his eyebrows. "You kidding? This is the busiest it's been all week."
It was no good pretending she was local. She didn't have the accent. She said, "I've been on Zemoth for a year now." The best lies were close to the truth. It made the details so much easier to track. "It took me most of that time to find this place." She gestured around the little room. "Nice as it is, I can't help hoping for a little more."
"More
than this?" He said it deadpan, as if he meant every word. It had to be ironic – she was almost certain – but she gave him a neutral smile, just in case.
"What else does this town have? I'm not getting rich playing Fan-Tan." She sipped her drink. "A girl's gotta make a living. Jobs aren't exactly easy to get when you've got a record."
He gave her a long, searching look. "The big oxygen plant is always hiring," he said at last. "The pay's crap, though. That's why they're always looking."
Clueless and inscrutable were almost indistinguishable. Cassie stared at him for a long moment, then said, "I'll keep it in mind."
The club had a privacy field, a low-level scrambler field that prevented recording, broadcasting, or the use of data access through implants. It kept Jerry from listening in, a fact for which she was now grateful. He'd get a good laugh from this shining example of her human engineering skills.
She couldn’t very will bring him in with her. He was too imposing, with his height and his broad shoulders. He couldn't stand out more in this crowd if he set himself on fire. Most of all, though, it was his unmistakable air of integrity that made him a liability. He was as trustworthy as a Space Scout. It was stamped all over his cheerful, charming face. No one could mistake Jerry for an underworld scumbag.
It fell to Cassie, with her decade and a half of experience as a street rat, a petty thief, and finally a master thief, to troll through the underbelly of Kingstown.
Not that she was learning anything. Tossing back the last of her drink, she nodded to the bartender and headed for the door. Concern for Lark gnawed at her like a living thing. She had to force it to the back of her mind to be able to function at all. The urge to grab the bartender and shake him until he told her something useful was almost overpowering. She suppressed it, refocussing, making herself concentrate on recalling every rumor, every scrap of innuendo she'd ever heard about crime on Zemoth. If she could find the right contact in the underworld she should be able to learn--
Her hand was centimeters from the touch pad for the door when the entire wall in front of her buckled inward. She got an arm up in front of her face an instant before the explosion came. The force of the concussion slammed her backward, chunks of door and wall slapping her arms and chest. The pain of a crushed lip was a hot white point of fire, and a sharper agony in her lower gums told her a tooth had broken off.
The floor cracked against the back of her head, then her shoulders, back, and hips. Half the door landed on her stomach, driving the last of the breath from her lungs, and she lay there, eyes squeezed tightly shut, waiting for the roaring in her ears to stop.
When a slow count of three brought no reduction in the noise she opened her eyes. Dust filled the air above her, and she coughed, wincing at the pain in her ribs. She couldn't hear the cough, just a roaring that seemed to come from every direction at once.
A swirl in the dust resolved itself into a man in desert-camo body armor, a thick pistol dangling in one hand, the other arm covering the lower half of his face. His body shook with coughs as he stumbled forward, his feet unsteady on the debris. He planted a foot on the chunk of door that covered her stomach and stepped over her without any sign that he'd seen her.
She seemed to have all the time in the world to work a hand under the chunk of door, under her jacket, and work her pistol out of its holster. The man took another step, and she pressed the muzzle of the pistol against his ankle and pulled the trigger.
A flash of light dissipated across the surface of his boot, a stun shot wasted on a stun-resistant surface. He would have felt the tingle. She didn't bother looking up at him, just flipped the weapon to rail mode and fired a steel slug into his foot.
If he screamed she couldn't hear it. His body crashed down beside her and she shoved the gun against his side, then shifted the muzzle down until it was against his hip where the armor ended. She fired two more rounds, then put a hand on the broken door, ready to shove it aside.
Blast rounds smacked into the door, nearly scorching her fingertips, and she felt a vibration of impact and a tingle of pain in her stomach. Instinct took over and she fired three times before she was consciously aware of the target.
A woman stood amid the rubble of the front wall, a pistol in her hand. The gun was broken, and her right hand was shattered. She dropped the ruined weapon and grabbed her hand, cradling it against her stomach. Cassie took aim and fired once more, punching a round through the back of the woman's left hand. The round tore through both hands before hitting the armor over the woman's stomach. The bloody steel sphere landed on the floor between the woman's feet as Cassie shoved the remains of the door aside and rolled to her feet.
A couple of scorch marks marred the fabric of Cassie's blouse over her stomach, but the blast rounds hadn't injured her. The rip-proof fabric was still intact, but Cassie could feel the sting of half a dozen cuts under the shirt. A dribble of blood along her rib cage tickled her, and she pressed her hand absently against the fabric.
Her limbs were intact, her eyes were fine, and she could breathe. Her mouth hurt dreadfully, but that could be addressed later. Aside from being deaf she was fully functional.
And the people she'd been looking for were here.
Cassie levelled her pistol and walked into the billowing cloud of dust.
The problem with laser beams was that, in smoky or dusty air, they acted as a tracer, drawing a bright red line that showed exactly where the beam was coming from. A crimson line appeared in the air a scant few centimeters from Cassie's side. In the second that it took for the beam to swing toward her and touch her abdomen just above the hip, she fired three rounds into the dust a handspan above the source of the laser. Her nostrils filled with an acrid smell like burned plastic, a hot finger touched the skin just below her ribs, and she stepped sideways, deeper into the billowing dust.
No more laser beams showed.
An exploring finger found a long hole burned through the fabric of her blouse. The wound was superficial. She ignored it, advancing on the point where the crimson line had originated, circling as she went to come in from an unexpected angle.
She found a corpse, a thin young man with a hole in his neck just above the low collar of his chest armor.
Cassie stepped over his body and headed up a rubble-strewn staircase and into the street.
The dust cloud broke apart quickly in the late-afternoon breeze. She caught a quick glimpse of tail lights disappearing in the distance. A getaway driver, no doubt, beating a prudent retreat.
She turned back to the staircase, descended several steps, and dropped into a squat. That put most of her body below street level, only her head exposed. She scanned left and right, then glanced back over her shoulder.
Dust poured out of the basement in a steady stream, but the air was clearing rapidly. She could see the murky outline of tables inside. The bartender loomed in the thickest part of the dust cloud, then stumbled over the bottom step. He clambered up the stairs on hands and feet, crawled over her legs, reached the street, and staggered off until he ran blind into the wall across the way.
Cassie holstered her pistol. If she was quick, she and Jerry could haul away one or two of the shooters for some hard questioning. She'd need his muscles, though. If the privacy field was still working she had to be beyond its reach. She stood, heading for their rented hovercar. "Jerry. I'm coming in. We have some party guests who need a ride. I seem to have lost my hearing, so I don’t know if you can hear me. Get your tail in gear, though. We need to hurry."
The car still stood where she'd left it. Jerry sat at the controls, head lolling on the cushion. He had apparently drifted off waiting for her to come back. Well, they'd both been missing a lot of sleep. She couldn't begrudge him getting some rest. She stepped toward the car, lifting a hand to rap on the window.
Too late she realized the explosion must have been loud enough to wake up half the city. Light flashed in the corner of her eye, she started to turn, her hand dropped to the butt of her pistol
, and a stun shot took her square in the chest.
She didn’t feel it when she hit the ground.
Chapter 18
Jerry woke up on the floor of a flitter. There were booted feet all around him, and he reached out, grabbing the nearest foot by heel and toe. Before he could start to twist, another stun shot hit him and the world vanished in a sharp white burst.
When he woke again he tried to hold himself still and keep his breathing deep and even. But a woman's voice, shrill and petulant, said, "He's awake!" So Jerry sighed and opened his eyes.
He was in a pantry, lying on his back with the top of his head touching the wall. His knees were bent, his feet touching the shelves that lined the opposite wall. The shelves held packaged food of every description, enough to stock a small grocery store. At the far end of the room, maybe four meters away, a fat and sulky woman sat on a little stool with a stunner on her knee, watching him with dark, suspicious eyes.
There was an open doorway beside her. A man's voice came from the next room. "Keep an eye on him. If he tries to get up, shoot him again. If he gets nerve damage, that's his problem."
It took quite a few stun shots to cause real injury, but Jerry supposed his count for the day was getting up there. When Cassie had been in the gambling club for twenty minutes or so he'd decided to stretch his legs. He still didn't know where the shot had come from. When the door of the car swung open the world had disappeared in a flash of white.
For ten long minutes very little happened. Jerry tensed and relaxed his muscles one at a time, starting at his feet and working his way up. When he straightened his left leg the fat woman lifted the stunner. He ignored her, rotating his ankle, bending and straightening his knee, then lowering his foot back to the floor. He did the other leg next. Only when both feet were back on the floor did she relax again.