by Jamie Davis
“You’ve got a lot of room to talk. You just got here yourself, didn’t you? Besides, how many times have I had to go traipsing off searching for you when you didn’t show up at the extraction point after I delivered a package?”
She shrugged. “What can I say. I’m easily distracted. It’s hard enough to find new and inventive distractions at home, especially with Daddy around. These little jaunts are my only chance to get out and live a little. Don’t deny me a little fun, K.C.”
Marci used Kurt’s initials in her usual nickname for him. She pulled out a credit chip and slid it into the slot on the side of the register. The cook tapped on the screen a few times, then he pointed at Kurt.
Marci nodded. “Yeah, I’ll get his eggs, too.”
A quiet chime sounded, signaling the removal of the cryptocurrency credits from her account. She pulled her credit chip from the slot after a nod from the cook, shoving it back into the inside pocket of her leather jacket. “Come on it’s time to go.”
“Hold on, I’m almost finished breakfast.”
“Now, K.C. The gate back to Earth has a resonating cycle and unless you want to stay here for another seventy-two hours, you’ll get your ass in gear. I’m bored and want to go home.”
Kurt slid off the stool and shoved a final bite of the runny egg into his mouth then followed Marci down the street. They still had a good ten-minute walk ahead of them. The gate’s location was in the center of the city, part of a transportation center situated like the hub in the middle of a giant wheel.
Like most of these intersections between worlds, a sort of portal city had sprung up around the gate in the ten years since the Incident spawned the numerous transit points to and from Earth Prime to begin with.
Most people lamented the opening of the gates when the failed space travel experiment in near-Earth orbit had catastrophic results. All over the planet and in the near reaches of the solar system beyond, portals opened, some large enough for a spaceship, others so small, only a single person could pass at a time.
Kurt had seen the opportunity the gates provided almost immediately. Once the inevitable trade started up between the various friendly realms, and thank God most of the worlds through the portals were friendly, it was only a matter of time before a delivery specialist would be needed.
Kurt watched and waited while masses of aliens, protohumans, and regular ordinary folk, surged through to earth in the largest mass migration in earth’s history. All those people, more than a billion in the initial years after the portals opened, brought with them tech, products, and resources ready for trade.
Biding his time until his enlistment in the Special Operations Group was finished, Kurt honed his arcane skills even as he practiced to keep up with his physical training. Once he got out, Kurt worked to supplement his martial arts and cyber hacking knowledge over and above what he’d gained in the service.
In the end, once he’d established a name and reputation for himself in certain circles, being a delivery specialist was good money. He didn’t always get roughed up the way he did on this run, at least not every time.
Delivery recipients, who often traded in illegal or black market goods, sometimes assumed he was expendable. They thought he should be silenced to maintain the security of their packages, no matter how many times he told them he never looked inside the items he delivered.
This sometimes caused friction after the fact, but he was careful never to kill anyone during his escapes. That kept the worst of the retaliation to a minimum until Trent, his job broker, could smooth things over from back home.
Now, here he was struggling to return home following yet another job with sketchy intel.
Marci set a rapid pace back to the gate. With his injured knee, Kurt had a hard time catching up once she pulled ahead of him. That ended up working to their advantage. The Hell’s Gaters hiding near the portal landing zone weren’t looking for a woman and ignored Marci as she approached the gateway’s location.
Kurt picked them out in their hiding places right away. One of them had leaned out to check out Marci’s ass as she went by.
Expecting a reception of some sort, Kurt was prepared to deal with anyone waiting for them at the gateway. They had to know he’d return to this crossing since it was the only one with any sort of reliability, if a portal that opened on a random three to five-day schedule could be called reliable.
Since the portal wasn’t due to open under normal circumstances for at least three days, only two gangbangers waited at this moment, more lookouts than enforcers. Kurt had stayed in the shadows on the approach and he turned down an alley as soon as he spotted them. Hopefully, it was before he was spotted in return.
If he could come in from behind them, he might be able to silence them before they sounded any alarm and more help arrived.
Using the alley to circle to the other side of the building, Kurt slipped along a narrow passage between two tall office structures until he reached the street again. Peering around the corner, Kurt spotted the green-haired mohawk of one lookout crouched in a sub-basement stairway where he could watch the approach to the gate’s concrete landing pad.
The other lookout was across the street. Kurt would need to slip in behind the closer of the two and deal with him quickly and quietly. The other one would surely notice any major commotion opposite his position.
Marci helped by distracting both of them. They hadn’t been paying her any attention at all until she walked up the ramp up onto the concrete pad marking the portal and stopped in the middle of the ten-meter-diameter circular dais. Then the theatrics began as she raised one arm, fingers splayed wide, and started chanting.
Now was his chance. Kurt ignored his complaining knee and darted around the corner, hopping over the metal railing surrounding the recessed stairway and dropping down on top of the unsuspecting watcher.
Kurt drew his stun baton while in mid-air and landed on his target, bringing the weapon down on the back of the kid’s exposed neck. He spasmed with flailing arms and legs as the stun charge hit him and then he was still.
Rising from his crouch to peer over the top of the sidewalk across the street, his eyes met those of the other watcher. They were wide and he saw the whites of her eyes as her lips moved.
Kurt was willing to bet she wasn’t talking to herself. She was using her personal data comm implant to tell someone on the other side that Kurt was here.
He stood up and ran up the steps to the street. There was no use hiding now. The young woman across the street must have thought he was coming for her because she yelped and darted from her position in a building’s entry alcove and ran down the sidewalk in a dead sprint away from the gate platform.
“Marci, time to hurry things up,” Kurt called out to his companion. “I think we’re gonna have company soon.”
“This isn’t a hurry-up thing, K.C. I have to shift the entire space-time continuum to make this gate think it’s next Tuesday at 3:48 AM. That’s when it’s going to open again. If I miss, I could force it open on a blank spot, a place that isn’t any place at all. That could destroy this whole universe. So, do you think I should hurry up or take my time and get it right?”
“Just get it done. I get the feeling these guys aren’t going to play nice when they show up.”
“What did you do to piss them off?”
“I didn’t oblige them and die when they wanted me to.”
“They should get in line with the others who have a similar complaint,” Marci laughed as she painted a glowing, golden sigil in the air with her forefinger.
“Nice. You know your father would be angry with you if I died because you didn’t open a gate in time.”
“He’d get over it.”
A shot rang out a few minutes later announcing the arrival of more Hell’s Gaters. Kurt didn’t see them first, so it caught him by surprise and in the open. He’d split his attention between watching the road and watching Marci work.
The first warning he had was when a
bullet buzzed like a hornet past his head. Kurt ducked and crouched down behind the low concrete wall bordering the landing dais. Marci stood where she was and kept scrying the magical calculus sigils needed to open the gateway.
“Marci, damn it. Get down.”
“I can’t,” she muttered through gritted teeth. “This is the hard part. Besides, they aren’t after me. It’s you they want to kill.”
She used two hands now, writing different sigils and runes in the air at the same time with both hands. The glowing letters appeared in a flowing, graceful script. They were beautiful, though Kurt could only suss out the meaning of about half of them.
He knew a good deal about the arcane arts, but Marci took it to a whole other level. It had something to do with her dual PhDs in mechanical engineering and theoretical astrophysics coupled with her grandmother’s heritage as a tribal shaman from the Amazon.
More bullets ripped past and pinged off the top of the concrete wall, ricocheting in random directions. One of them was going to hit Marci, knowing his luck today.
Kurt pushed back his sleeve and tapped a sequence in the holographic keypad that appeared above the six-centimeter wide plain stainless steel wrist comp he wore. Keying in the final part of the code, he stood and rushed over to stand between the steadily advancing gang members and Marci.
He grunted and leaned forward as the bullets expended their force against the personal shield he’d engaged. It was a new addition to his kit, adapted by his elven tech wizard from a piece of off-world tech Kurt had picked up on a recent delivery. This was the first time he’d deployed it. He was glad it worked as advertised and would have to thank Jonesey for her excellent work.
Each time a projectile struck the shield, the force was transferred into the neural network of his reactive carbon fiber body armor. It felt as if he was getting stung by a dozen bees at once all over his body as the hardened fabric absorbed the force of bullets and dissipated the projectiles’ energy against his skin.
Kurt watched the display on his wrist control. The energy level supporting the shield dropped with each strike. It was already down to half strength after being struck by nearly a dozen projectiles. The four shooters had grown bolder when they realized he hadn’t returned fire. Now, they clustered together in the middle of the street while advancing on the dais.
Two carried shotguns and two fired semiautomatic handguns of some sort. It didn’t really matter how they were armed. The kind of gun firing the bullet that killed you didn’t matter. You were still dead regardless of the source.
“How much longer?” Kurt asked, flinching at the unpleasant stinging sensation he experienced across his body at the moment.
“It’s hard to say. I’ve done the hard part and made the connection. Now I have to convince it to open.”
“You sound like you’re having a conversation.”
“I sort of am, now shut up and let me talk.”
She was back to writing one-handed sigils right now but it looked more like whole sentences than single runes connecting spells and equations together.
A shotgun blast hit the shield at close range and the barrier went down, the force hitting Kurt like a punch in the gut as the charge ran out. Some of the shot’s pellets got through the shield.
Marci growled deep in her throat as one creased a bloody line across her neck. “That hurt, asshole.”
Her free hand dropped to her side and dug into her oversized purse. She pulled out a military-grade flechette pistol and turned her head to aim at the approaching gangbangers.
Marci’s left hand never stopped etching glowing sigils in the air.
“No!” Kurt shouted too late. She wasn’t supposed to be armed.
Marci squeezed the trigger and held it down, spinning up the gaussian magnetic coil inside. She sprayed the pistol back and forth, filling the air with the ripping snarl of what sounded like a buzz saw. The gun sprayed the entire street with a hypersonic hail of razor-sharp metal darts, each barely a few millimeters wide.
The magazine emptied in less than five seconds, but that was long enough to do its intended job. The electromagnetic coil inside the gun, responsible for flinging the darts out at such high speeds, whined as it powered down. Marci shoved the gun back in her bag and turned back to her spell.
Kurt stood up from where he crouched to stay out of the line of fire and looked down the street. All four of the assailants were down, their bodies shredded like hamburger.
He spun back around to his companion.
“What the hell, Marci? I searched you for weapons when we came here just because of what happened the last time. Now you pull this? I’ve told you. You can’t go around killing people like that.”
“They were trying to kill us.”
“No, they were trying to kill me. I can deal with that. Once I escaped, things would have eventually gone back to normal. There’s a reason I say ‘no killing.’ Now there’s gonna be a blood debt owed and they’re not gonna accept money. They’ll want a body in repayment.”
“I’m a big girl. I can take care of myself.”
“No, you only think you can. That is why your father requires you to travel only with me. He trusts me to keep you out of trouble like this. Where’d you get that hand cannon anyway? They are limited to military issue back on Earth and I can’t think there are too many of them outside of our own reality.”
Marci shrugged. “I won it in a card game while I was waiting for you. You were late, remember?”
“A card game?” Kurt stared at her for a few seconds. He’d finally run out of words. He eventually settled on saying nothing and just shook his head.
The girl’s ability to get into trouble when left alone for the tiniest amounts of time was truly astounding and it would be funny if it didn’t cause so many issues for him every time she did something like this.
He was about to scold her some more but she interrupted him.
“Time to go home, K.C.”
Marci turned to him with a smile and snapped her fingers.
Behind her, a glowing blue portal opened. It was wide enough to drive a semi-truck through, which was why there was a ramp down from the landing pad instead of just stairs as in some of the smaller pedestrian gates.
Kurt spared a final glance behind him at the carnage in the street. He’d have to sort this out somehow. Shaking his head, he gave Marci a gentle shove through the gate before stepping across after her.
Chapter 3
Kurt rolled over in bed and waved his hand over the nightstand. A holographic display of a pleasant beach scene appeared. A scrolling ticker at the bottom showing the time, indoor and outdoor temperature, and the day’s weather outlook.
Nine-fifteen AM?
Kurt groaned. He’d overslept again. Every time he came back from these jaunts it took longer and longer for him to recover.
It was three days after the last job and he still felt like crap.
Stumbling into the bathroom, wincing at the persistent stiffness in his knee, he splashed water over his face. The fading bruises and scabbed-over cuts looked a little better. He’d hoped he wouldn’t have to travel uptown and make use of the clinic’s services but maybe he’d make an exception this time.
They had the latest in stem cell regenerative injections and he’d made sure they had a supply of the proto-cells from his bone marrow in case he needed emergency treatment. It was crazy expensive and wasn’t covered under the universal health care system he belonged to.
Thinking about that, Kurt laughed. He was on a low-risk plan to save costs, despite his line of work. If his insurance agent ever found out what he really did, he’d jack the rate up immediately.
Another glance in the mirror, he assessed his injuries again. Kurt shook his head. He could wait for things to heal up the natural way.
A buzzer sounded and Kurt tapped the wall display beside the sink. A hologram showed his outside entrance and a gray-haired man in a tan windbreaker standing there. The old guy looked up at the cam
era and flashed his middle finger.
Kurt laughed, tapping the virtual button in the hologram to activate the intercom along with deactivating the front door’s lock.
“Come on up, Trent.”
Grabbing a towel as the display shutdown, Kurt wiped at the residual moisture on his face and headed downstairs. His top-floor, two-story loft apartment gave him plenty of privacy since few people knew anyone lived above the dry-cleaning and laundry business downstairs. He liked staying under the radar as much as possible. It had saved his life on more than one occasion.
Trent had already reached the kitchen and poured himself a glass of orange juice before Kurt came downstairs. The job broker pulled out a mini-bottle of vodka from his jacket pocket and added it to the drink. He stirred it with his finger before popping the dripping digit in his mouth to clean it off.
“Make yourself at home,” Kurt said with a grin.
“Always. Don’t you remember what you said after that dustup in the Ukraine? ‘Mi casa es su casa’ I think it was. You haven’t rescinded the invitation, have you?”
“Of course not,” Kurt said as he pulled a bottle of seltzer water from the fridge. He grabbed a lime from a basket on the counter and turned back to the kitchen island. He pulled a fifteen-centimeter chef’s knife from the butcher’s block and sliced the lime into wedges before wiping the blade down with a damp dishrag, drying it, and returning it to its slot.
Kurt carefully inserted the lime in the bottle of seltzer water and pushed it down into the opening with his fingertip before he took a sip.
“I don’t know how you drink that crap without any alcohol. It’s unnatural.”
“It helps me keep a clear head. It’s hard enough to stay fit and healthy these days. Did you get final payment for the contract?”
“I did.” Trent pulled a small datapad from his pocket and held it out for Kurt. “Just need your DNA scan to transfer to your secure account.”
Kurt pressed his thumb against the screen and waited for it to sample his skin cells and read his genetic signature.