She strode ahead but slowed, wary of the busy crossroads looming at the bottom of the path. Meanwhile, Vaughn lost sight of the two guards. They’d left the promenade before the next convenient junction, but there was no sign of them anywhere. What did that mean? Maybe nothing. He was a tourist here; what did he know about shortcuts, park infrastructure, evacuation protocol? Not much, but he’d been around enough crime scenes in popular places to know that security would have flagged him and Kyra long before now. Probably as soon as the chase had begun. Certainly after Sixsmith had snapped her chaperon’s neck in the auditorium. Definitely after Vaughn had hung from the walkway in the Holst lobby. Two, possibly three murders, all circumstantially or visually linked to him and Kyra, and two errant guards just ignore them after getting a real good look? No way.
He smelled an ambush.
If he’d had a couple of breathers he might have blown a hole right through the great dome itself and tried his luck in the Martian desert. But the air outside was still somewhat toxic, despite well over a century of terraforming. What else, then? Staying isolated might not be wise – they could be picked off. If those guards were working with Sixsmith, then he knew where they were too. Where would the assassin make for? An elevated shooting position: up one of the rollercoaster scaffolds? Doubtful. Genuine security would flock to him and he’d be stuck up there. Far more likely he’d switched disguises and was stalking the outskirts of the crowds, circling, waiting, ready to steal in behind Kyra and double-tap her in the back of the head.
Staff members were directing crowds that had migrated from the farthest perimeter attractions, rerouting them around Central Crater, which could be a crush hazard if it filled too quickly. Vaughn decided it would be safest to join the thoroughfare – that buffer of tightly-packed bodies was a shield you couldn’t buy – but to join it at an unexpected point. Not the crossroads or the waypoint markers manned by staff, but somewhere in between.
Better yet, they would drop down into it.
The eastern edge of Gemini Sparks, Scott “Brink” Brinkman’s old ’coaster, abutted the arterial path around Central Crater. The artificial rock formation outside its perimeter actually overhung the path at one point. The rocks were faded and even inscribed with graffiti. Youngsters had got up there. With a little nimble detour Vaughn and Kyra could do likewise, using the rocks for cover, then lower themselves down into the middle of the passing crowd without being seen by anyone else.
“Who do we trust in here?” she asked. “Security?”
“No one. We trust no one.” And he led her off the path, around a thicket of chalk-white bushes that smelled of antiseptic, where they scrambled up a steep sandy knoll to the red, stucco-and-rock wall encircling Gemini Sparks. They darted from rock to rock until the overhang loomed several meters away.
“We’re jumping?” Her nails dug into his hand as she squeezed.
“I’ll lower you down.”
“I’ll land on someone. See how that worked out last time? It got a guy killed.”
“We’ll be okay if we’re quick.”
“You promise?”
“Promise. Let’s go!”
But for those twenty seconds or so they were exposed, and he felt it. Vantage points from all over the park would have a good look at them. It didn’t matter. The crowd was neither panicked nor crushed; several punters halted when they saw what was happening and the traffic flowed around them. Vaughn lowered her down and wasted no time in jumping beside her. He neutralized a barrage of questions from spectators by pretending he only spoke Russian – pidgin Russian. Kyra outdid him by pretending she was a deaf-mute.
The procession streamed inexorably toward the main gate, a windy, circuitous route, marked now by pulsing beacons. It was a predetermined evacuation route in event of a fire or a terrorist attack or a serious dome breach. The latter had been at the back of Vaughn’s mind for a while now, for two reasons: firstly, there would, by public safety law, have to be a large cache of breathers and spare O2 canisters waiting for them somewhere along this path; secondly, snatching a pair of each and breaching the dome himself was the only getaway his Omicron brain told him was viable if he wanted to get Kyra away from here alive. If the security force had been compromised, he daren’t take her anywhere near the main gate. And if that’s where the breathers were, he’d have to stow her somewhere, fetch the gear and come back for her, then breach the dome and make their escape.
The vague alienation he’d felt at the awards ceremony surrounded him now. Weird apparel, strange perfumes, absurdly shrunken tech attached to body parts he’d never have guessed: he was in a sea of flotsam from a future shore he hadn’t quite reached. But somehow he didn’t feel out of place here, protecting her. He felt impervious, undiluted. His center of gravity under pressure was as sure as it had always been. This he was trained for. This he was good at. The gamble of joining the crowd was paying off.
“Ferrix!”
She backed into him and thrust her finger toward the snack car up ahead. Vaughn saw the grey sneakers, halted, and suddenly everything was against him. Crouched there just off the path, Sixsmith had been pretending to tie his shoes, possibly since the fake guards had given him the heads-up on his quarry’s position. Those same two guards now crept onto the scene, one on either edge of the path, sidearms drawn but held discreetly against their thighs. The three assassins closed in. A triangulation of certain death. They could not afford to let Kyra Stone leave this dome alive.
“Ferrix, what do we do?”
Despite what she hoped, he couldn’t see a few moves ahead, but he knew that he’d somehow have to force those moves, and with everything he had. “When I say go, you run like hell for the main gate. Off the path, but use the crowd for cover. Stay low.” He retrieved his backup weapon, a customized Hodiak pulse pistol, and pressed it into her tiny, trembling hand. “You can shoot?”
“When I have to.”
“It might not come to that,” he said, pulling her behind him, “but if it does, aim center mass. No headshots. Hit ’em in the guts.”
“Ferrix…I’m scared.”
“And when you’re scared, you run. I’ve seen you run. They won’t catch you.”
He could hear her rapid, gulpy breaths and feel her shaking. As the tide pressed them forward, Sixsmith reached into his bomber jacket – the jumper was history, and he now wore a Pacintic All-Stars cap. A cold, handsome face with an aquiline nose and almost no lips. A sun-starved face, with small, intense dark eyes a little too close together. He was ready to draw.
Vaughn circled behind a fat woman and drew first, over her shoulder. His snapshot zipped over the heads of the woman’s two chubby boys and clipped Sixsmith somewhere in the shoulder. The impact spun the assassin round and he tripped over the cordon chain, spilling his weapon.
The screaming began. Virulent, piercing. It didn’t stop. Vaughn lunged for the weapon, picked it up and tossed it as far as he could. A mad scramble ensued, with Sixsmith ducking into the crowd and Vaughn trying to keep tabs on him through a forest of stampeding limbs. A shot from the left winged Vaughn, but his adrenaline dulled the pain in his gun arm. He didn’t drop his Kruger. Instead, he dove on top of a man who lay flat on the ground and snapped off a high-yield blast through the gap left by the scattering crowd. It hit the fake female guard low, flinging her with such unnatural force she actually somersaulted forwards even as she was flung back. Dead before she landed.
“Kyra, go! Now!”
His niece was already a stone’s throw away, weaving her sprint through the crazy spill-out of this formerly ordered procession. The other fake guard was behind the fast food car. Sixsmith was…somewhere upstream.
“Okay, eat this!” Vaughn aimed his Kruger across the path, waited until all the punters had ducked out of the way, and unleashed another high-yield blast at the food car’s gas supply. The whole thing exploded and leapt into the air, suddenly yanked back to ground by its power cable tether. The jerk snapped the car onto its side. It c
rushed the fake guard behind it.
Sixsmith struck with extreme violence. The cordon chain he swung mashed Vaughn’s ribs on his right side. Pain scythed, bit, throbbed. He swung again, this time at Vaughn’s head. A last-gasp duck gave him only a haircut, but before Vaughn could turn his Kruger on his foe, the assassin wrapped the chain around the lawman’s gun arm. Yanked hard with a twist. He was instantly disarmed, and now off his feet as well. Not good.
Another chain swing smashed into Vaughn’s thigh. Pain scythed, bit, but did not throb. The next swing missed his crotch by the breadth of a fingernail. An ill-advised attempt to rugby-tackle Sixsmith between swings resulted in a sharp, but not quite as brutal, blow to Vaughn’s back. As he reared up in pain, Vaughn barely managed to block with his arm what would have been a killing strike – a full-bore chain to the face. The metal lash coiled around his forearm instead. Sixsmith pulled his end, but Vaughn had a grip now as well. From here on it was close-quarters combat. Badge versus bastard. Whoever won the chain lived.
The big man grabbed at him, trying to use his strength advantage. Vaughn countered it with his speed; he landed an uppercut and immediately followed it up with a devastating stomp to the knee. Sixsmith went down. He pulled his opponent down with him, using the chain neither of them dared let go of. With his free hand Sixsmith rained hurtful blows on Vaughn’s jaw and temple. A knee to the groin in reply punched the wind out of the assassin. Vaughn landed another uppercut, then a blow to the big guy’s neck. He was aiming for the instant kill spot just behind the ear, but missed.
A lapse into objective hyper-lucid awareness, something he’d always been able to access in the thick of battle, told him he had to end this quickly or he might not win. The other guy was a lot stronger. Close quarters suited him better. The more blows they traded, the more it would favor Sixsmith.
An unexpected headbutt knocked Vaughn senseless. He saw oily streamers, heard the distant sound of his own bones cracking. A livid flare of pain in his side wrenched him back in time to realize his cry had echoed. Then it was pinched to a gasp. Sixsmith wrapped himself around Vaughn from behind and squeezed like an anaconda. Any moment now his neck would break, and that would be the end of Ferrix Vaughn, of his life with Jan and Stopper, of Hesperidia, and his chance to save the life of the niece he hadn’t known existed until today.
Not yet, a voice told him. It’s not your time yet.
He swung his chain-wrapped fist behind him out of sheer instinct. It hit something that crunched. He swung again. And again. Sixsmith grunted and relented. As Vaughn slithered out of those iron clutches he knew this had to be it. The big guy’s face was a plate of tomato puree. His broken nose sprayed blood, and a terrible gash above his eye had gushed what had to be a gallon by now.
Vaughn uncoiled the chain from his arm, wrapped it around Sixsmith’s throat, and planted his knee against the base of the big guy’s neck. He leaned in, pulled with everything he had left. Wounds rose up and rebelled with damning indignation all over his body, but still he pulled. Sounds of gurgling and strained leather seemed to mingle into some lucid macabre nightmare that he must prolong past its natural wakeup snap.
Amazingly, Sixsmith’s neck did not break, so he had to choke out instead. He finally drowned in his own blood, according to the coroner’s report later, but Vaughn didn’t let go, not even when he was pulled off by a posse of uniformed – and genuine – security guards. In his febrile, red-misted mind, he still had a job to do, and this was still his time.
He only relented when he saw Kyra, unharmed, refusing a warm blanket. She still had the Hodiak tucked into her pants, and as she caught his gaze, her eyes were moist but fierce. That was the Vaughn in her.
The smell of candy floss reminded him he’d been here before once, a lifetime ago.
It had been more fun then.
Chapter Two
Jan swung her legs with anticipation as she perched on the wooden perimeter fence enclosing Miramar green. The rashers of cloud had all drifted east, leaving behind a cosmic vista of stunning clarity. It was late evening; the air was crisp but unusually still. Perfect conditions for this rare, unrehearsed event of celestial theater that had brought quite the crowd to Hesperidia’s hospitality and administration hub. Tourists, rangers and office personnel coalesced into fidgety clusters across the lawn in front of her.
She peeled the tinfoil off her hotdog, broke the lukewarm bun and sausage in two, and didn’t even have to look down as she handed Stopper his half. Her gluttonous canine companion had shadowed her ever since she’d emerged from the food tent. He’d repeatedly pawed at her leg, ignoring her attempts to chastise him. He’d even left one of his favorite pastimes – rolling on his back so the tourist kids could rub his belly – to cadge for this suppertime snack, which he promptly gobbled in one go. Then he licked his lips, eyeing her half as well.
Jan had to inhale and lift her breather for each bite, but it was by now so practiced an action that the rhythm was almost automatic. Most people unused to living on recycled oxygen for long periods found it isolating, even claustrophobic. To Jan it was simply an extension of her own respiratory system, as vital as the lungs she was born with. Twenty-odd years living in an atmosphere toxic to humans had redefined what was “natural” – technology, necessary to support life, was neither cold nor remote but integral to her every adaptation as a dweller on this wild, wondrous world.
The hotdog was a little bland. A squirt of mustard and a sprinkling of crispy onions would be just the ticket, but there wasn’t time to fetch another. She gave the last piece to Stopper, whose stunted but powerful tail scythed the grass around his haunches. The offspring of two genetically modified Boxer dogs, he’d been the first life-form of Earth origin born on Hesperidia, and breathed its methane-rich air as naturally as Jan breathed oxygen. That was the only thing they didn’t share.
“All right, boy, dinner’s over. Now it’s time for the show.”
She activated her new stargazer filter, an interactive nanocrystalline program pasted onto the inside of her visor. Simple eyecraft controlled its user interface, and she quickly figured out how to switch between the various live visual feeds. Each autonomous satellite in the planet’s protective sat net had its own in-built telescope, and these gave by far the best view of the incoming meteor shower. Jan wanted to watch the shooting match as much as, if not more than, the streaking, flaming spectacle of cosmic debris vaporized in the atmosphere. There was something thrilling about the idea of manmade orbital sentries repelling a destructive threat from outer space. Some of the asteroids heading for Hesperidia were big enough to potentially survive entry into the atmosphere and cause a lot of damage on the surface. So it filled her with a strange kind of pride to know that her species, alien though it was to this world, and not always as respectful as it should be to the biosphere, was using its most powerful weapons of destruction to defend it – a distant planet full of life with which it had practically nothing in common.
A faraway bark piqued Stopper’s growl into a chatty bowowow, halfway between a howl and a bark. He kept it up as he spun to receive a group approaching from the northeast corner of the green, parallel to the fence. Jan recognized them all before they got within hailing distance, and sighed. She’d really wanted some alone time; these past few weeks on the safari circuit had been relentless, draining, and frankly she’d had a bellyful of people and their inane problems.
Governor Nabakov, dressed in his usual hippy-dippy casual style – flip-flops, cargo shorts, cotton shirt open revealing too much of his sunburnt gut – was a compulsive talker. A nice enough guy, but he was wont to wax poetic on even the most mundane of natural events. Not much of a scientist, and way too enamored of the planet’s aesthetic beauty to be an effective practical administrator, Nabakov was a wishy-washy choice for governor: a friend to all, but he lacked that ruthless edge required for decisive intervention. If this was a fairytale rainforest, he’d be perfect. Hesperidia was anything but.
“Evening, J
ane,” he said. “Mind if we join you?”
“No, I guess. The more the merrier, right?”
“Our thoughts exactly. Let’s form our own little ragtag group, we said: the Meteor Maestros…”
“Not that you’re in any way ragtag, Jane,” Ruben cut in with customary unctuousness. He might be one of the most talented rangers and scientists in this current rotation, but there was something so studied and false about his so-called charm. Most of the women he encountered here became smitten with him, partly because of his height and build – six-four, ripped – his golden blond hair and easy-on-the-eyes Nordic features, but Jan felt nothing at all – well, nothing that a little Dramamine wouldn’t cure.
“Aw, Flavia, they’re calling you ragtag.” Jan petted Ruben’s gorgeous female GenMod husky as she reared up and planted her front paws on the fence, bushy tail swishing like crazy. The golden streak running down her back blazed in the moonlight. Stopper watched Flavia warily, as usual. She loved playing with him, teasing him, pinning him on his back, while Stopper only ever tolerated her. Jan had often wondered whether he reacted to Ruben’s dog that way through association – mirroring the way Jan felt about Ruben himself. Stopper was empathic, but he was also smarter than people knew. On the other hand, maybe he just didn’t like overweening, high-strung company either.
“Not long now,” said Ruben, sitting on the fence beside her. Tynedale, one of the delegates from the Congressional Oversight Committee on Exoplanetary Management (COVEX), here as part of a routine evaluation, sat between him and Nabakov. “You using the stargazer program?” Ruben asked Jan.
“Yeah, it’s got some killer angles – literally. Should be quite a show.”
“We’ve decided not to use it,” he replied. “There’s something distancing about seeing life through a lens. Nothing captures magic more fully than human vision. That’s where experience begins and ends, from our own God-given perception. At least for something so rare as this. You can always watch the action replays later. That’s our humble take, anyway. What do you say, Jane?”
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