by Rick Partlow
“Not a chance, honey,” I told her matter-of-factly. “You’re with me.”
I saw her smile slightly at that.
It was only a few more minutes before we reached the lift banks that would take us to the docking ports on the opposite side of the station---it would have been more convenient to dock our ships on the same pole as Murdock’s berth, but it would also have attracted more attention…and it was kind of funny watching Rachel experience the same culture shock I had gone through years before.
We boarded the lift car with a gaggle of crew from a long-haul indie freighter and I tried to shut out their unlikely stories of sexual prowess while I attempted to contact Deke and Kara. They didn’t reply, but I tried not to panic over it. They were supposed to be conferring with the people who ran the station’s security, and I wasn’t sure whether that area might be shielded to prevent unapproved communications.
I felt Rachel slip her hand into mine and I squeezed it reassuringly. She had her long, auburn hair tied into a ponytail that, together with the oversized flight jacket, made her look younger. Or maybe it was her eyes that did it…for years, they’d carried a sense of age with them, carried the burden of losing her daughter and her family to the Tahni. Since coming back from Petra, her eyes had that old light to them again, the light I’d seen in them when we were teenagers. Even the insanity of the past few days hadn’t extinguished it. I was very much afraid of that light going out again, more afraid than I was of dying.
The lift took us inward to the station’s core and the faux gravity of centrifugal force faded away until everyone in the car was floating, securing ourselves with the straps provided at intervals along the walls. From there, it took us forward, the acceleration gradually turning what had been the back wall into an impromptu floor. We reached our stop first---the freighter crew would be further out along the docking spindle, where there was room for a ship as large as theirs. The doors slid aside with a rasp and Rachel and I pushed off from our handholds and floated out into a broad, busy corridor lined on either side with airlocks leading into docking umbilicals.
You couldn’t see the ships from the inside of the docking spindle, but the slip numbers were projected as holograms that floated in the air beside each airlock, glowing brightly in the comparatively dim light of the corridor. I grabbed Rachel’s hand---she had very little experience in zero gravity and besides that, she looked like she was feeling nauseous---and secured us both to one of the guiderails running down the center of the corridor. Most of the people zipping back and forth in the busy docking spindle ignored the handrails with the haughty air of seasoned spacers, and the two of us got more than one disdainful sneer from them.
Not that it mattered to me. Despite the travelling I’d done during the war, I was still a ground-pounder and I had very little in common with most spacers, as my compact build attested.
“That’s the one,” I said, nodding towards Slip 3504A, about fifty meters down the corridor, on the left. “Wait here.”
She looked like she was going to object, but I didn’t give her time. I pushed off hard from the railing, dodging passing workers who were jetting by using hand-held thrusters, and came up against the hull next to the airlock. I checked the status display in the screen embedded next to the lock and was informed that this slip was occupied by the private courier Persephone. That was Murdock’s ship…well, it was what Murdock’s ship said it was to commercial spaceports. So he had been here---might still be here. If he wasn’t, he hadn’t left on his own ship…and probably not of his own free will, either.
I turned back to Rachel and transmitted to the comlink she wore in her ear. The ship’s still here. I’m going inside…give me thirty seconds and then, if you don’t hear from me, get the hell out of here and contact Trint and Pete, have them meet you back at the lift station.
“I’m not leaving you…” she began, but I cut her off.
Rache, I said firmly, if there’s something in there that I can’t handle, they’re sure as hell going to be too much for you to handle alone. I haven’t been able to contact Kara and Deke, so go get Trint if there’s a problem.
I could see her intense frown from fifty meters away across the broad corridor, but finally she nodded. I turned back to the airlock and pressed my palm to the ID plate. As I expected, it told me I was not registered for access to the ship and asked me for a passcode. Kara had loaded the codes into my headcomp and I broadcast them to the security system. There was a moment’s delay, then the ring of light around the ID pad lit up green and the airlock’s outer door slid aside.
The inner hatch was already open since the interior of the spaceship and the connective docking umbilical were pressurized, so once the outer door opened, I could see straight through the narrow tunnel into the interior of the courier. The lights were on---they’d probably come on automatically when the door opened---and the small equipment bay seemed empty.
I decided speed would be a better tactic than caution and pushed off hard, propelling myself through the umbilical like a slug from a Gauss gun. I swung my arms, spinning in mid-air and coming up against the far hull of the courier with the soles of my boots. There was only a space of a second between the time I passed through the ship’s open airlock until my boots slammed into the hull, but my augment sensors had already determined that the ship’s equipment bay and cockpit were unoccupied. I bounced back against the other hull next to the airlock and grabbed hold of a handle to keep myself from ricocheting off again and pinballing around the cockpit.
The interior of the Bulldog’s ship looked much like any other star courier, with an equipment locker and a small bench just behind the cramped cockpit. On the other side of the equipment bay were two other hatches, one leading to the head and the other to the closet that passed for a cabin on a vessel this small. I pushed off the handle towards the head, sliding the door into its recess and checking quickly to see that the bathroom wasn’t occupied, then moved to the cabin. Again, nothing, although I noted that the room was spotlessly clean. General Murdock was as fastidious on a personal level as he was on a professional one.
It’s clear, I transmitted to Rachel. Come on in.
It was only seconds before she floated through the airlock umbilical, catching herself on the handle just inside the hatch.
“Close it,” I told her, moving into the cockpit.
I pulled myself into the pilot’s seat and logged into the ship’s computer system using the codes Kara had given me.
Hello Captain Mitchell, the ship’s AI said, startling me as its “voice” spoke into my thoughts via my neurolink. I should have guessed General Murdock would have a pretty sophisticated AI on his ship, but for some reason I hadn’t considered it. How may I help you today?
Hello Persephone, I responded, a bit uncomfortable and awkward talking to an Artificial Intelligence again after all these years. We believe General Murdock is in trouble and we’re trying to locate him.
Understood. My last communication with General Murdock was seventy four hours, twelve minutes and thirteen seconds ago. He transmitted an intelligence update to his personal log from a location in the entertainment district. He hasn’t been back to the ship or communicated with me or with anyone else using my systems since then.
Let me see the intelligence update, I instructed the computer. Put it on the main display.
A two-dimensional image of Murdock’s face appeared on the cockpit’s main display, looking curiously flat and inanimate in the holographic projection. Antonin Murdock had the face of a school teacher or an accountant, soft-edged and watery-eyed with an aura of harmlessness about him. It was all a lie, a camouflage that hid a brilliant mind and a frighteningly ruthless soul.
“Update at 1234 hours, July 23rd, 2,220 Commonwealth Standard Time,” Murdock droned, his voice soft and unassuming. “My contact failed to show in our usual meeting place, but I did find a message at the dead-drop account.” He frowned. “I find this suspicious, as I can find no record that my con
tact has been on the station in months.”
I felt my lips pressing together tightly. If the Bulldog found something suspicious, that was enough to ping my sensor net.
“The message was vapor,” he went on. I knew what he meant: vapor meant the message would erase itself after one reading and featured safeguards that made it almost impossible to record or duplicate. “It said that the Naga were sending a hit team after an undetermined target in a black market tech lab in the Favela district of San Sebastian, on El Dorado.” He shook his head. “It’s not much to go on, but I’ll follow it up after I leave. There’s one more possible source here that I can tap, but I’m having difficulty locating or contacting her. I left a message for her to meet me tomorrow at the Fountain, but I don’t know if she received it. Update ends.”
The playback froze on the image of his face and I stared at it for a long moment, thinking. This didn’t make sense to me. When we’d asked to meet with General Murdock four years ago, he hadn’t come alone; he’d sent Mat M’Voba, God rest his soul. That’s why he kept people like Kara around, people he could trust.
Why would he risk coming here alone? Just to meet a contact? I didn’t buy it. Still, if there was a chance he’d been to the Fountain…
Pete, I transmitted, you there?
Nothing. Dammit. I touched a control on the Persephone’s communications console, calling up Pete and Trint’s comlink signatures.
“Pete, Trint,” I said out loud into the audio pickup. “Do you read me?”
Captain Mitchell, the ship’s AI said into my head, I am detecting low-level local jamming.
Shit. I turned to Rachel. “We’re being jammed.”
I saw a flare of alarm in her eyes and she looked around reflexively. “What should we do?”
“Persephone,” I said, addressing the ship verbally so Rachel could follow the conversation, “can we get clearance to undock from here and switch to a dock at the opposite pole?”
There was a pause before the computer responded---I assumed she was checking with the station’s systems.
“There’s a large freighter docking farther down the spindle from us,” the computer informed me. “The station’s security system won’t allow us to leave until it’s finished. I could override them and take off anyway,” the AI offered genially, “but that would preclude us being able to re-dock at the antipolar spindle.”
I considered for a moment taking off anyway, but I knew Belial had anti-spacecraft defenses and even if this courier was armed---and I assumed it was---I wasn’t going to be able to shoot my way through them.
I pushed off from the pilot’s seat and went back to the equipment locker, pulling it open. As I expected, it contained a small armory, including a byomer suit. I quickly stripped off my clothes and pulled the suit on, feeling it adjust itself to my stocky frame. I got dressed again, then reached into the locker and pulled out a small zero-g maneuvering unit. It looked like a fat pistol, but all it fired was a jet of air that allowed you to move around more easily in microgravity. I tossed it to Rachel.
“There’s about a hundred meters between this slip and the security checkpoint,” I told her. “If they plan to attack us with ranged weapons, they’ll have to do it before we get to the checkpoint. If they just plan to jump us, they’ll wait until we pass through it and get out of sight. When we exit the lock, I’m going to go first and I want you to head straight for the security station as fast as that thruster will take you.”
“What are you going to do?” she asked me.
I grabbed a holstered pulse pistol out of the cabinet and belted it on. “If they’re waiting for us past security, I’m going to give away General Murdock’s personal sidearm to some lucky rent-a-cop,” I said, pulling the gun out of its holster and checking the load. The magazine held a full complement of fifteen hyperexplosive shaped charge rounds that would direct their energy through the lasing rod and emerge focused into pulses that could cut through most light body armor. Murdock’s initials were inscribed into the side of the receiver.
“If they jump us here…” I shrugged. “Get clear and get to security, report the jamming and contact Trint and Pete. They need to know someone might be waiting for them at the Fountain.”
“Every plan you come up with seems to involve me running for help,” Rachel commented unhappily. I eyed her balefully and she raised a hand. “I know, I know…I’ll do it.”
I cycled a round from the pistol’s magazine into its chamber, then pushed off and moved to the airlock. My hand hovered over the control plate.
“Count to ten, then follow me,” I told her. She nodded and I hit the control.
I pushed off and sailed down the docking umbilical, the pulse pistol held close to my body across my chest and under the open flap of my jacket. Kicking away from the end of the umbilical and into the thoroughfare, I opened all my natural and implanted senses totally to the environment around me, searching for anything that seemed out of place. The wide corridor was full of people and activity and it almost overwhelmed my ability to process it, but I let my headcomp run pattern recognition with my implant sensors while I stuck with the ones God gave me.
I separated the people into groups---here a cluster of repair workers, there a flight crew for a transport, there a trio of Belters on holiday---then watched for aberrant behavior. As I came up against the guiderail in the center of the corridor, I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary at first, just the normal flow of traffic heading towards or coming from the Security checkpoint by the boarding station for the lifts.
Then Rachel jetted out of the airlock, wrestling the maneuvering unit into submission with a look of stubborn determination on her face. She accelerated down the thoroughfare much faster than I would have considered safe, moving at about 50 kph and yelling hoarsely for people to stay out of her way.
That caused a reaction from almost everyone, from casual curiosity to alarmed concern…to a group of three men dressed like Corporate spacers. They were Earth-normal build, stockier than the low-grav types but much skinnier than me, sporting the standard drab uniforms and conservative haircuts that Corporate employees wore, with no distinctive tattooing or jewelry to make them stand out. On thermal, I could see the shining stars of isotope power packs implanted in their bodies, so they were carrying bionics---most likely replacement joints and reinforced bones. I couldn’t tell from this distance, but I assumed their loose uniforms hid body armor as well.
I could see their eyes narrow and their hands go into shoulder bags, bringing out compact pulse carbines. I could feel my lips skin back from my teeth as I braced a foot on the guiderail and kicked away from it, aiming for the center of the three men. I could see it in their eyes when they saw me coming: a look of surprise, as if they hadn’t known what to expect.
Now who would have sent these guys after me and not told them what to expect?
Pulse carbines swung around and one of the men actually went floating away, cursing loudly as his own motion sent him spinning away from me. I opened fire about twenty meters away from them, putting a burst of two shots through the forehead of the closest, the one on my right.
Everything seemed preternaturally clear to me, every detail standing out with incredible clarity. I saw the laser pulses cut through the space between us---the actual beams were invisible, of course, but their passage superionized a narrow corridor of air, leaving a shimmering crackle of plasma---and heard the crack of the thunder the miniature lightning bolts left in their wake.
I tried not to focus on the bloody mess the double-tap of pressure-pulsed laserfire made of the gunman’s head when it instantly brought his cerebral fluid to the boiling point and exploded his skull out the back, tried not to think about what the liquid drops that were splattering against my jacket were made of. Instead, I spun in mid-air along my axis of travel and shot the one on the left. He got off a burst before I fired, and I could feel the heat from the high-power carbine as the wild shots passed only centimeters from my right should
er.
My shots didn’t go wide. The man I had targeted was utterly average looking and the only thing that stood out to me about him was the blank stare of disbelief on his face when the laser pulses cut through the armor he was wearing beneath his jacket and blew apart his heart and lungs. I didn’t take the chance that he was augmented enough to survive that: I put two more rounds into his head and he pin-wheeled away under the impetus of the steam explosion that took apart his skull.
I could hear the screaming now as onlookers began to notice what was happening, but I was focused on the last of the three…and on making sure I didn’t succumb to tunnel vision in case there were more of them. The last of this group was the one who’d accidentally sent himself into a spin when he first saw me. He was still spinning; and now so was I, with nothing to brake myself against. The docking bay kaleidoscoped around me in a rainbow blur of shapes and colors, but I knew where he was, thanks to my headcomp and implant sensors---I had a mental image of us provided by my implant computer that showed him about ten meters away from me and still moving outward, spinning the opposite direction as me.
He was shooting now, not caring what else or who else he hit as long as he had a chance at getting me, and I could see the actinic flashes as laserfire chopped into the side of a docking umbilical, then tracked to the right and passed only a meter over my head. Then my spin and his matched for just a single heartbeat and I fired.
The shot was rushed, but it was guided by twenty years of experience and the millions that had gone into my physical augmentation. I spun away before I saw where it hit, but his fire ceased immediately. As I rotated around again to face him, I could see him gasping fitfully, blood pouring from his nose and mouth as he tried to breath without lungs.
I felt a twist in my gut but pushed it down. This wasn’t some soldier fighting for a cause he believed in, or being forced to fight rather than face prison or execution; this was a hired assassin who’d been trying to kill me and my wife. And this might not be all of them.