by Rick Partlow
There was a flash of movement in the tunnel mouth, and I desperately raised the beamer with one hand and fired half-blind at the blur, partially concealed by the burning debris of the worker 'bot. The lightning flash of the electron beam only further taxed my overworked corneal implant filters, but I thought I hit something, and the dark shape recoiled away from the hatchway.
Clenching my teeth and shaking my head, I finally got my feet beneath me and threw myself headfirst through the hatchway, barely feeling the heat from the flames I passed through. I hosed the room with the beamer as I hit the floor on my shoulder and rolled to my feet, vision clearing. The iridescent flashes of ion fire tore into the walls and scored deep burns into the lockers, but Cowboy was gone. I crouched in the middle of the room, panting for breath, and checked the charge of the beamer. It was about three shots from exhaustion...and I was pretty close to exhaustion myself.
Noticing one of the heavily-armored lockers partially ajar, I staggered across the room and nudged it the rest of the way open. Inside was a partially-stocked rack of the kind of pump-action plasma guns that I'd used extensively during the war, and, below them, stacks of spare magazines. I'd chased Cowboy into an armory. Fucking brilliant of me, huh?
I dropped the nearly-spent beamer, its thermoplastic and alloy frame clattering loudly on the metal-grill floor, and pulled a plasma gun out of the rack, hefting its familiar weight. I slapped a full mag home and pumped a round into the chamber, then grabbed a spare and stuck it into my equipment belt at the small of my back. I wanted to linger and search for a pistol and maybe some grenades, but I couldn't let Cowboy get too good a lead on me.
Holding my new weapon at high port, I followed Cowboy's heat trail out the armory's door and down the narrow corridor. From the inadequate lighting and the unfurnished air of the area I was running through, I surmised I was at the edge of the dome, possibly underneath the occupied levels but still above the lake. Perhaps this was a secret section open only to Cowboy and the Elite Bodyguard, judging by the heavy artillery in that arms room.
All of which meant that we were probably pretty close to wherever he had that ship. I at least hoped he was running for a ship. If he was going through all this just to try to take a shot at me, things were going to get pretty nasty.
There were no twists and turns in this trail---the tunnel led straight from the armory along the curve of the dome's outer wall, and Cowboy's thermal signature followed it exactly, glowing brightly now with the heat of the discharged plasma gun. He was going along at a pretty good clip, too, leading me to believe he'd given up on ambushing me for a fast run to his escape route. Either he was getting desperate, or maybe I had nailed him with the shot from the tunnel and he was hurting...or both.
I put on some speed myself, not yet feeling the effects of the blast in the tunnel, but knowing I would later. I ignored the little twinges of pain from my face and back, concentrating on the clanging of my spiked boot soles off the grillwork floor, letting the drumbeat hypnotize me. In the rhythm of my steps I could almost hear my father, reading from the Book of Life. Vengeance is mine, I shall repay, sayeth the Lord...An eye for an eye and a tooth...Thou shalt not kill...A time to kill, and a time to heal.
God, how I laid awake at night, running those words through my head, trying to make them run together into something that would help me solve the moral dilemma of going to war. All it ever gave me was a headache and a firm conviction that I'd have to trust my instincts---just like now.
The corridor widened gradually as it went along, until the end came into sight and I pulled up to an abrupt halt. Less than a hundred meters from where I stood, a wedge-shaped star courier sat nestled in a boxy grillwork structure that I knew to be a gantry elevator up to the landing pad. Its belly ramp was down, and at its foot was Roger West.
We saw each other at the same time, but my weapon was in firing position while his was held muzzle-up as he attempted to board. I jerked the trigger and the big gun bucked in my hands, the glaring fireball it belched out sending a searing backblast of heat over my exposed face. I willed the shot toward him, envisioning the ionized hydrogen vaporizing that Goddamned ridiculous handlebar mustache and his face along with it, but Cowboy had a split-second to act, and, for one of the 'Boys, that was time enough. He threw himself headfirst away from the ship's ramp just as I fired, allowing the plasmoid to travel through the space he had occupied and slam into the courier's left rear landing strut.
Metal and plastic melted off of the thin support arms in bubbling sheets, sending clouds of black smoke streaming off of it, but for a moment I could actually see it warping under the starship's weight before it finally collapsed. The left side of the courier's delta wing slammed into the gridwork floor with a scream of shearing superstructure and a shower of ceramic and polymer shrapnel, my view of Cowboy now blocked by both the bulk of the ship and the billowing clouds of steam.
I knew I would be a wonderful target if Cowboy was in a position to take a shot at me from behind the ship, but I stood my ground, slowly advancing toward the ship, one deliberate step at a time.
"I don't want to kill you, Cal," I heard his voice call from somewhere far away---years farther away than the few dozen meters that separated us. "Just let me go...it doesn't have to be like this."
You made it like this, Cowboy, I thought at him, not caring if he could hear it. You made your choice a long time ago.
If he picked up my transmission, the only indication of it was the squeal of underused servos as the gantry elevator slowly began rising from its berth towards the surface. He was running...but not fast enough. I sprinted a zigzag course toward the platform, ducking and weaving, shifting my plasma gun to my left hand and using my right to pull the face hood from one of the cargo pouches on my utility belt---I'd need it on the surface.
I only had it halfway on when a starbright flare of hydrogen speared out from the haze behind the courier and passed only centimeters from my left leg, the heat searing my side even through the Reflex Armor. The plasmoid punched into the floor less than a meter behind me and the steam explosion from the vaporized metal sent shrapnel slamming into my back. I rolled forward on my shoulder, biting back a curse at the burning stings up and down my right side---at least the armor had kept the makeshift hypersonic bullets from penetrating.
Catching a glimpse of motion behind the wafting steam rolling off the underside of the courier, I sprang to my feet and took a snap-shot one-handed with the heavy assault gun. The recoil nearly tore the weapon from my grasp, but I saw the plasma flash impact the belly of the ship, some of it seeming to splash over the shadowy figure.
Pulling my face hood over my head, I had just enough time to transfer my grasp to the gun's pump and cycle its action one-handed before I reached the gantry elevator. It was already about a meter and a half above the floor, but I took the gap in one stride, the grillwork rattling beneath me as I landed near the nose gear of the courier.
Even as I landed, Cowboy was on me, hands empty and claws extended. His assault gun lay on the platform behind him, its receiver melted from the splash of plasma I had seen. His utility belt---with holstered rocket pistol---had been burned away, along with a not-insignificant chunk of his right hip, by the blast from my electron beamer back in the armory. More significantly, he hadn't had the chance to put on his protective hood before losing the belt.
I didn't bother trying to bring around the assault gun for a shot---there wasn't time or room for that---I just thrust it receiver-forward into his face. He stumbled back, blood spraying from his nose and lips, and I took the opportunity to let the plasma gun fall and extend my own talons before he could spring back at me.
I could almost feel the fear radiating off of him as he realized the position he was in. There would be no more sniping from ambush now; we were in my arena. West was the pilot, the sniper, the Cowboy who counted on his fast gun and wired aim. I had always been the sledgehammer of our little outfit, with all the finesse of a punch in the mouth, an
d we were playing my game.
There was no room for a ballet of martial arts as the elevator platform rose through the ceiling with the hiss of an airtight seal, and no time for it, either. Cowboy knew he had to make it through me into the ship to survive, and, without a sealed Reflex suit and face mask, he could only last a minute or two in the chlorine atmosphere.
It wasn't the lack of air, or even the cold that was the problem---if there'd been a vacuum out there, we both could have endured it for close to fifteen minutes. But the one part of our body that the Commonwealth surgeons hadn't been able to harden or protect with their little scientific gadgets had been our mucous membranes, and a chlorine atmosphere would eat through them in a few seconds. One of us might survive that for a while without protection, but it wouldn't be pleasant.
Our talons clashed with a skitter of polymer and our elbows, knees and forearms smacked together with a lightning-quick series of strikes and blocks---all there was room for in the small section of floor. I concentrated on his right leg, knowing that the nasty wound from the beamer would eventually slow him down there, and drove him back against the nose gear of the courier.
We were both moving faster than I'd ever experienced before, even against the Tahni 'borgs, and I was beginning to wonder if we weren't too evenly matched for either of us to land a clean blow. Then his right guard slipped just a fraction, and I managed to slam his injured hip with my knee. He grimaced, slipped and hit the ground rolling away from the nose of the courier. I chased him, trying for a stamp that could put the leg out of commission, but he was slicker than I thought---he caught me with one leg off the ground and nailed my plant foot with a heel. I fell forward, trying to twist away from him, but he caught my falling torso with his other foot an tossed me over his head.
I found myself suddenly flying through the air, knowing, to my chagrin, that this flight would end all too abruptly. Something---I thought it was the edge of the courier's tilted delta wing---hit me across the lower back, and I felt all the wind leave my body in a rush as an explosion of pain swept from my lumbar all the way up and down my body. I was bent backwards, then bounced off the ship like a handball, and I barely retained the composure to take the landing on my shoulder and roll to my feet.
I remember what happened next only because my headcomp recorded it; my conscious mind was in total shutdown from the pain and shock, and I was acting solely on instincts and programming. Somehow, I had managed to come down right in front of my plasma gun, and something, whether my gut or my headcomp, told my senseless body to reach down and scoop it up, then look for Cowboy.
But when I looked up...he was nowhere to be found. I automatically swept the area with my augment sensors to be sure he wasn't trying to sneak up on me, but there was nothing there---except this incredible sense of cold. Then two things finally penetrated my dazed mind: one, that Cowboy must have used the seconds I had been out of it to run on board the ship; and, two, that I was now standing on the surface of the landing pad and it was bleak, airless, and incredibly, bone-chillingly cold.
Thank God my headcomp had prevented me from breathing and caused the byomer in my face hood to form a gas seal, or I probably would have sucked in a lungful of chlorine already, and been well on my way to bleeding to death from the lesions in my lung tissue. The cutter we had arrived on had been joined by a pair of Stealthships, nearly identical to the one I'd flown in the war, though there were no troops in sight. But as intimidating as the barren landscape around me was, with its frost-capped mountains and deadly acid lake, the supernova that was exploding in my consciousness was that Roger West was on board that ship, and would probably be lifting off in seconds unless I stopped him.
That was when I noticed that the boarding ramp was closing...I ran for it, but it was already only centimeters from sealing, and I knew that even I couldn't force it open by hand. But I still had that plasma gun. The angle was wrong on the left side of the courier because of the damage I'd done to the landing gear under the port wing, so I ducked under the listing delta and took up a position about ten meters from the ship. I braced the weapon against my thigh, not wanting to subject my bruised lower back to the torture of a shoulder shot, and whispered to the gun's computer to do its thing.
The intense heat that washed back from the plasma pulse was a welcome, if momentary respite from the biting wind that lashed at me from off of the lake, and it warmed things up even more on the belly of the courier. Ceramic and alloy armor melted away with an audible crack of supersonic black steam, and there was suddenly a jagged hole the size of a dinner plate at the forward juncture of the ramp and the ship's hull.
Not enough. I racked the slide back, sending the spent casing hissing out of the chamber in a mist of liquid nitrogen, then braced it again and fired. This time, the plasmoid blew a more-satisfying meter-wide gap in the belly of the courier and went through to scorch the inner hull above the ramp. A backwash of ship's atmosphere, steam and flame-retardant foam from the courier's fire-fighting system puffed out of the opening, obscuring it for a heartbeat as I ran toward it. I couldn't see through it on thermal because of the foam, and auditory amplification was near useless in the thinner atmosphere, but I didn't have the time for caution---I only had a few more minutes before the oxygen supply from my support organs ran out, and less than that before the intense cold would freeze my arteries.
So I jumped straight into that cloud of mist, and straight into the crimson flash of laserfire. The same cloud of smoke and gas that allowed me to jump into that trap, however, was the one thing that saved me from an instant death...Cowboy couldn't see me any more than I could see him, so he was forced to fire at the movement, and the burst, rather than blowing a hole through my forehead, caught me on the heavier armor over my right chest.
A fierce, burning agony sliced through my pectoral muscle and I threw myself flat, triggering off another blast from the plasma gun, the novaflash blinding me in the close quarters of the courier's hold. This time, because of the pain in my chest and my weakened condition, the kick from the weapon tore it out of my grasp and sent it rolling back out of the gap in the hull, and I found myself sliding back toward the hole myself, because of the tilt of the ship.
I extended my left-hand talons and dug them into the thermoplastic deck to halt my slide, and, as I came to a halt, I found that both the mist and my vision had cleared. Across the equipment bay, propped up on his left knee in the cockeyed entrance to the passageway up to the cockpit, was Roger West, and he looked almost as bad as I felt.
I hadn't scored a direct hit with the plasma shot---that would have been too much to ask---but the right side of his head was a charred, bloody mess from the near-miss, and there was a wicked-looking burn-through on his right shoulder. He was breathing in deep gasps, and I could already see blisters on his face from where the chlorine had brushed him. The pulse carbine he'd shot me with lay resting against the bulkhead, but he wasn't making any attempt to retrieve it as yet.
"Guess..." he rasped, "we're gonna' wind up with one of us dead, huh?"
"Looks like it," I replied evenly, the muscles in my shoulder bunching up as I used my talons to pull myself up to a crouch.
"Didn't want it to happen this way..." He shook his head. "Andre wanted y'all dead, but I thought I could bring ya' around..."
"A lot of the people that died at that hospital were my friends," I told him, finding myself unusually calm---or maybe I was just drained. "All of them trusted me to protect them. Someone's got to pay for that, Cowboy."
"I understand." And I really thought he did---he didn't seem so desperate anymore; just thoughtful and resigned.
"Tell me something," I asked him, curiosity getting the better of me. "How much of what you told us about the Predecessors was true?"
He grinned, a horrible sight with the damage to his face, and laughed hoarsely until coughing stopped it.
"All of it, Cal ol' buddy. All of it and more."
Then, without a second's warning, a rumbling came
up through the courier, shaking me down to the bone, and the deck began to shift beneath me. It took me less than a heartbeat to realize what had happened.
"Bastard!" I hissed, struggling to hold my balance.
While we'd been talking, he had linked with the ship's computer and warmed the engines up, and now he was taking off with me on board. I saw him reaching for the pulse carbine, trying to catch me off balance, and I launched myself across the hold at him, my pain and exhaustion swallowed up in rage. We locked talons and were immediately bounced off of a bulkhead as the ship lurched back to level.
We rolled across the deck, pounding viciously at each other with our knees and elbows, and simultaneously struggling on a cybernetic battlefield for control of the ship's computer. There, he had the advantage of already seizing the high ground---he'd penetrated the system and gained control, and I was going to have to find a back door in.
The beating we were administering to each other seemed to fade into the background as our headcomps and penetration programs dueled through their chess game of moves and counters.
I felt the solid jolt run up my leg as my knee smashed into his left hip...
I tried to cut power, but that was too obvious and he had the route blocked, so I tried to penetrate navigation and set an automatic landing. No go...he'd anticipated me there as well.
His forehead came up to catch me a glancing blow across the bridge of my nose, and my vision was lost in a sea of stars. Suddenly he was on top...
Fire control...that was it. I told the ship's failsafe system that there was an engine routing leak and plasma was eating through the control lines, and simultaneously convinced it that the ship was in a stable orbit. Instant engine cutoff. But I had lied...we weren't in orbit, and we weren't safe. We were nearly thirty meters over the landing pad, too damn close to the edge, and dropping like a stone...