Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

by Anthology

  “Safe from decompression, anyway,” Halsey said. “If the Wasters have boarded us, they must have taken out our engines. When they get what they came for, they might just sail out to a safe distance and waste us.”

  “Yeah. Well, we can’t do anything about that. The only option we have is to close this hatch on the supply deck and hope they leave the storage bay alone.”

  “Then we’re on the drift until someone comes along and rescues us. As long as they decide to leave us alone.” Halsey frowned, then his face brightened suddenly. He arched his head up and peered around the curve of the doorway. “There is one other option…”

  “What?” Runstom tried to follow his partner’s gaze. The hallway was clear. The gangbangers had mostly moved on, to somewhere in the main part of the ship. Two of them stood there near the breaches, their backs to the supply deck.

  “We get aboard one of those…” he started, then stopped. Runstom guessed he was trying to imagine what kind of ships were at the other ends of those tubes.

  “Did you grab your sidearm?” Runstom asked. “I only have a stun-stick,” he said, indicating the thin rod hanging off his belt.

  “Shit, I don’t have anything,” Halsey said, padding around his uniform. He turned to look back into the storage bay. “There has to be something in here. Let’s go look around.”

  “Okay. I’m going to find Jax first and check on him.”

  “Forget Jackson, Stan! We’re going to die out here if we don’t move right now!” Halsey was trying to yell in a whisper, and it made the veins in his skinny neck bulge.

  “Listen, George,” Runstom said, pushing down with his hands and trying to take the other officer down a notch. “Let’s just pretend for a minute that Jack Jackson is innocent. We’re about to attempt to commandeer some kind of space-gang vessel. We won’t even know what it will be until we’re on board. You and I are qualified to pilot one- or two-man patrollers, but anything bigger than that and we’ll have our hands full.” Halsey frowned at this, but kept his mouth shut. “Now I’m only trying to think a few steps ahead. If we manage to get away from this situation alive, and we’re out there in the middle of nowhere in god-knows-what kind of ship, I guarantee we’ll be glad to have another hand, especially a Life Support op!”

  “Goddammit,” Halsey grumbled. He sighed. “Okay. Go find that goddamn operator. I’ll look for arms. Now let’s go, for fuck’s sake!”

  They gave another look over at the two gangbangers farther up the corridor and then carefully made their way through the storage bay, ducking behind crates and shelving units as they went. The breach-guards seemed to have no inkling that someone might be hiding out on the supply deck. Or maybe they just didn’t care; which was worse news, because that would mean they knew it was going to be a quick in-and-out for their cohorts.

  Runstom found Jax lying on top of a crate, about three meters up. With the low gravity, he must have been flung up there, and now he lay unconscious, one arm dangling off the side. Runstom crouched and then sprang his legs, thrusting himself up to Jax’s level, and then beyond. He had to stick his arms up to keep from banging into the high ceiling, and he angled himself so that he’d land on top of the crate on his float back down. He slung Jax over his shoulder and lightly dropped off the side of the box. They landed with a soft jar, and Jax made a quiet whimpering grunt as they did. “Still alive,” Runstom breathed.

  Halsey came bounding over to them, carrying a small bundle of thin, black rods. “Fuckin’ stun-sticks was all I could find. Oh, and this med kit,” he said, unhooking a white plastic case from around his shoulder. “We could keep looking.”

  “No, let’s not waste time. I have an idea.” Runstom popped open the med kit and started rummaging through it. Fortunately, it was the consumer model. Everything was clearly labeled and marked with icon-laden instructions. He grabbed a case labeled Insta-Wake. He had no idea what this stuff was, but he’d seen it used before more than once while on the job. He popped open the case and pulled out the single-shot needle-gun.

  “Hold him down,” he said, and Halsey braced Jax as best he could. Runstom put the needle-gun up to the operator’s neck (as per the icon on the inside of the Insta-Wake box) and pulled the trigger. Jax coughed and his chest heaved, and Runstom quickly covered his mouth. His eyes fluttered open, slightly at first, then suddenly they were wide and intense.

  “Shh. Jax. We’ve got a bit of a situation here, and we need you to be calm.” Jax’s eyes were still wide, but he nodded. They took their hands off him and he sat up and rubbed his head. “We don’t have time to explain everything, so just trust us on this…”

  ***

  There were so many things that Dava loved about a low-grav fight. The sheer panic that accompanied the loss of control. The recoil of firearms working against their shooters. The majestic deadliness of someone trained to use acrobatics and blades in such a situation.

  She was the first one of the Wasters to come out of the kitchen and into the yard, a massive open cube in the largest part of the barge. The tables around the room were bolted to the floor, but just about everything else wasn’t and there was debris everywhere. She scanned up the sides of the cube at the walls lined with cells, stacked up for five levels. Guards and prisoners bounded clumsily about the space, each body with its own trajectory and intention, none of them aligned. She spent a tenth of a second drinking in the pure chaos and then went to work.

  The plan to target the artificial gravity pump at the bottom of the barge and then penetrate the rear corridors had worked as well as they could have hoped. Now all that remained was to find Johnny Eyeball and Captain 2-Bit.

  A stun-stick came her way, with a bulky uniform in tow. She drew her short, curved scimitar and snapped the stick in half with a quick cutting motion. The guard stumbled backward, half-falling, half-floating. She braced one foot against a nearby table and launched herself at him, her sharp blade slicing clean through the midsection of his cheap armor.

  She moved on without bothering to finish him off, making her way toward the starboard-side wall of cells. Another guard flew over her head, arms and legs flailing, before slamming into the back wall with a crunch. She looked toward the source of his trajectory to see Eyeball wrestling with another guard, both of them trying to gain control of a low-end ModPol pistol.

  With a few long leaps she got close enough to witness Eyeball bring one of the guards’ bare hands close to his face. She caught herself between a grin and a grimace as the man howled in pain while Eyeball sank his teeth into the soft flesh just above the thumb. The gun came free and Eyeball grabbed it with one hand and with the other, shoved the guard into a sprawling tumble across the space.

  “Hey Dava,” he said with a dripping-wet crimson smile. “They fly pretty good in this gravity, eh?”

  “Johnny,” she said. “Seven minutes left, then you better be at the rear corridor just beyond the kitchen.”

  “Right,” he said, checking his newly acquired weapon.

  “Where’s 2-Bit?”

  “Third level, opposite side.”

  They’d come for both, but she knew Eyeball could take care of himself. The higher priority was getting 2-Bit out of there. Her boss had made a big stink about how important it was to bring 2-Bit back home, how much the others looked up to him, how critical his experience was to the gang. It was that last bit that made Dava wonder. She always thought 2-Bit was an idiot, but he did have experience, which may have been another way of saying he knew things, things that Space Waste didn’t want to turn over to ModPol. Locations of caches, plans for upcoming operations, informants sprinkled around the galaxy, those sorts of things. Secondary, everyone seemed to think that there was an advantage to having a couple of Wasters get arrested: recruitment. And 2-Bit was just the right man for the job. They knew that if they rescued him, he’d have a cartload of fresh meat to bring home as well.

  She headed for the opposite wall. When another guard raised his pistol at her, she kicked to her right
and balled up to avoid the shot. The kickback threw his arm up high and her scimitar swept across it, severing the hand soundlessly. The shocked victim was almost as soundless with his gasp and before he could fall to his knees, she planted one boot on his helmeted head and vaulted herself up, grabbing the railing along the edge of the second-level walkway. From there, she got to the top of the railing and leapt high enough to grab the floor of the third-level walkway, pulling herself up quickly and easily in the low gravity.

  “2-Bit,” she called out. “Captain, where are you?”

  A yellow-gray hand appeared through the bars a few cells down. “Down here!”

  She approached and saw the old man standing tall and healthy as always. She couldn’t tell if he was exceptionally cool-headed given the situation, or if he was just oblivious to the imminent danger. Of course, 2-Bit had only gotten arrested because he was trying to rescue Eyeball from the mess he’d created back on B-4. She had to admire his ability not to lose his shit over the mistakes of his kin.

  “Dava, boy is it good to see you,” he said with a genuine smile. “The force fields went off when the gravity took a hit. Safety and all that.” He tapped on the bars. “But then these came down.”

  With a laser cutter and enough time, she could get through them—they weren’t more than cheap steel, probably designed for keeping things from flying out of the cells more than actually keeping prisoners in for any length of time—but the clock was ticking.

  She switched her RadMess to voice mode. “Thompson, I need the cell doors on the third floor opened up.”

  The reply crackled over the tiny speaker a second later. “Which one on the third floor?”

  “Just open all of them.”

  “Right, you got it, Dava. I’ll get someone on it.”

  “Dava.” 2-Bit gestured to a form huddled at the back of the cell. “I got a man in here with me. He’s from B-3, but was runnin’ some racket on B-4 where he was selling cheap vacation getaways to naïve B-foureans. He would get them aboard his ship, rob them, and drop them in the next dome over.”

  “Sounds like a real charmer,” she muttered.

  “Point is, he’s a pilot,” 2-Bit said. “Claims to be a pretty good one. And you know we always need more flyboys.”

  Her bosses were right, only 2-Bit could turn a jail term into a recruiting opportunity. She half-laughed at the thought. “Alright, bring him along.”

  A buzzer sounded and 2-Bit flinched and took his hands off the bars as they slid upward. “Come on,” he said to the back of the cell.

  A soft-pink-skinned B-threer came out of the darkness. “Thank you, thank you so much,” he said, then stopped short when he saw Dava. “What’s this?”

  “What, boy?” 2-Bit said. “Come on, we need to move.”

  “She’s with you?” he said, pointing at Dava. “This shitskin?”

  The emergency lighting began to fail and the yard grew darker, which had an effect of shocking the stream of chaotic shouts and clamoring into a sudden silence. Dava went empty in her center. It had been more than a decade since she left the domes of Betelgeuse-3. She’d left at the age of fifteen, after spending nine years of her life in that whitewashed, shopping-mall civilization.

  Children had been better than anyone at reminding her that she didn’t belong. That she came from that refuse-planet Earth, that she deserved to be incinerated and broken down into molecules like any other trash. She had to bear such barbs almost every day in those domes. She was branded with it, the mark of the unwelcome, the never-clean.

  But she had not had to bear it since joining Space Waste. Ten years since she’d even had to hear slang such as that.

  2-Bit was at her side, quietly nudging her back to the present. The B-threer seemed frozen, still inside the cell, the hateful eyes burning like those of the nasty dome children. She lifted the tip of her blade slightly and he stepped back.

  “Close the cell doors on level three,” she said into her armband.

  “What? We just opened them, Dava.”

  “Close them,” she said.

  ***

  Inside some supply hold, leaning against some towering crate, Jax groaned loudly. “Help. Someone. Is anyone there? I’m hurt. I need help! Can anyone hear me?” His voice cracked with fear—most of it real.

  “Ello? Ooze over der?” came a rough voice after a minute. “Com’on outta der!”

  Jax’s mind raced. Whatever it was Runstom gave him to wake him up was giving him the shakes. “I…I can’t move. It’s my leg. I think it’s broken. Who is that? Can you help me?”

  Jax heard another voice that he couldn’t make out. Then the rough voice again, “Ee says ’is leg’s bustid. Huh? Okay, okay. I’m going.” The voice got louder as it was directed back at Jax. “Okay, you. I’m comin’ over. Don’t move. I’m uh…I’m a medic.”

  Jax rolled his eyes, which caused a spike of pain to shoot through his throbbing head. He tried to keep his hands from shaking and sit still, his back to the large crate they’d found him lying on. He heard a movement, the tok-tok-tok of boots on the metal floor off to his right, and he turned his head. A scruffy, scarred, yellow face came around the side. “Ey, boy. You got a gun? You armnnNNNHHHHH—”

  The body that came with the face flexed violently, hands dropping some kind of bladed, rifle-like weapon with a clatter and after a couple of seconds, the man spun around and crashed to the floor, his shocked face staring at the ceiling. Bubbling drool oozed out of the side of his mouth and down his cheek.

  Halsey came around the corner of the crate, three smoking stun-sticks bundled together in one hand. He stared at the unconscious man with a tight grin on his face.

  “Goddamn,” Jax whispered. “That was a little extreme, wasn’t it?”

  The officer gave him an innocent look. “Well, I had to be certain, right? He’s a big boy!” He stuck one of the stun-sticks through a loop in his belt and dropped the other two as he bent down and snatched up the loose weapon. It looked like a stubby rifle with a pair of blades extending slightly away from the barrel at two different angles, forming a vague V-shape.

  Jax was about to ask Halsey if he knew how to use that thing, but then thought better of it. Whether he did or not, Jax didn’t really want to know, and there was no point in calling the officer’s ability into question now.

  Halsey turned around quickly, rifle secured in both hands, as a shout and a grunt came from the other side of the room. Jax stood up and carefully peered around the other side of the box.

  Runstom was about twenty meters away, his right arm wrapped around the neck of another scruffy-looking man. These men were part of a gang, apparently—at least, that’s as much as Runstom and Halsey had a chance to tell Jax before they turned him into bait. The officer was at a slight disadvantage, height-wise, and he swayed horizontally from the back of the gangbanger, who was making use of the low gravity to try to shake him loose.

  Halsey slung the rifle over his shoulder and snatched up the extra stun-sticks. He ran over to the spinning officer—gangbanger combination and stopped short, trying to figure out how to get a clear shot.

  “Put those goddamn things down,” Runstom said between huffs. “The current will run through him and hit me!”

  “You’re gonna have to let go!” Halsey yelled, legs bent at the knees, trying to keep the other two directly in front of him.

  The Space Waster spun around and faced Halsey, perhaps perceiving him to be a more immediate threat than the man trying to slowly asphyxiate him. He bent his head forward and, using the weight on his back for leverage, he lumbered at an alarming speed toward the other officer.

  “Let go now!” Halsey shouted as the big, yellow man bore down on him. He thrust out his two stun-sticks, one in each hand. From his angle, Jax could see Runstom just barely manage to jump free, but he was pretty sure Halsey had his eyes closed. The sticks connected with the big man’s chest and he went down with a jaw-clenched scream through his teeth, sinking to his knees and then k
eeling over backwards.

  Jax ran up to the officers. “Where’s his gun?” Halsey jerked his head erratically from side to side.

  Runstom looked in one direction, strode a few meters, and snatched up another blade-gun type of weapon. This one appeared to be more of a single-hand weapon; a smaller but terrible and jagged blade attached to a large pistol. Most of its bulk was due to its battery pack. Runstom flipped a switch on the side of the gun and a small, red dot appeared on the crate next to him. He looked up at them. “Okay, let’s move. Jax, you wait until we say it’s clear. We’re going for the closest hole on the right.”

  Their choice of breaches was, of course, entirely arbitrary. They had no idea what to expect as far as the attached ships went. Jax watched from behind the curve of the storage-bay doorway as Runstom and Halsey quickly moved down the long corridor, guns pointed forward.

  Runstom looked back over his shoulder long enough to yell, “Clear! Come on, Jax, move!”

  Jax tried to angle his legs so that his strides pushed him forward more than up, but he was completely unprepared for athletics in low gravity. He covered the distance of fifty meters to the first breach in what seemed like several agonizing minutes, but it could have been much less.

  When he got within a few meters of the officers, he was jarred by the clapping sound of Halsey’s rifle. The officer was shooting a projectile weapon of some kind, an old-fashioned gun that actually fired bullets, and the force of the recoil in the low gravity caused him to stagger backward and lose his footing. “The door on the far right side!” he yelled, trying to get back to his feet. Runstom started firing his laser down the hall, blindly shooting down the right side.

  Gunfire echoed down the hallway and Jax was sure he heard something whiz by his head. The oval corridor was a good twenty or thirty meters across, and while Jax and Runstom were taking position near the wall on their right, Halsey was closer to the opposite side. He got to his feet and dove into a nearby breach. The officer then set himself in a position where he could brace his back against the side of the tube and lean out to fire his rifle down the hall without getting pushed backwards.