by John Bowers
So far he was still alive. His strategy now was to take the car to the edge of town and hide out until dawn. But first he needed the machine gun—if he ran into trouble after leaving here, the gun would do him no good if it was still in the trunk. He pulled out his key pod and pressed the trunk button. The lid popped quietly, just enough to free the latch. Nick put the pod in his pocket and stood up again, pulled the trunk open, and picked up the rolled blanket holding the MG. He closed the trunk as quietly as he could and unrolled the blanket…
Click!
Nick recognized the sound instantly, the faint metallic sound of a bolt snapping shut. In the daytime, with ambient noise all around, he might not have heard it at all, but in the empty silence of night the sound carried. He wasn’t sure where it came from, but it seemed to be to his left.
He dove headfirst to his right, hitting the oily, hard-packed dirt on his stomach.
FF-T-T-T-T-T-T-T-T-T-T-T!
The gun was surprisingly quiet, but the rate of fire was terrific. The car windows disintegrated and forty holes appeared in the vehicle at the same time. The car was between Nick and the gunman, so he wasn’t hit. He lay perfectly still, debating his next move. How many were there? Just one?
FF-T-T-T-T-T-T-T-T-T-T-T!
Bullets ripped the car again.
Nick slowly pulled his .44 from his left-hand holster and transferred it to his right hand. Breathing as slowly as he could manage, he tried to keep his cool while the gunman decided his next move. Nick quietly cocked the .44 so it was ready to fire and pulled out Nathan’s .45 for his left hand; thus prepared for battle, he remained still another few seconds.
Peering under the car, he could see, dimly, the side street. So far he heard nothing to indicate that anyone else was approaching, so possibly his assailant was conducting a search on his own, or just watching the au’tel to make sure Nick didn’t slip through the net. Maybe he didn’t have a communicator, or just didn’t want to relay false information until he was sure what he was dealing with.
Whatever the case, he was moving across the street in Nick’s direction.
Nick could see his legs, stepping quickly in a half crouch, nervous and uncertain of himself. A rookie. Blinking against his nerves, Nick watched from under the car until the other man reached the parking lot; he was walking slower now, at a snail’s pace.
“Don’t shoot,” Nick said. Quietly, as if he were in pain. “Don’t shoot. I give up.”
The footsteps picked up speed. Now the man was trotting toward him, his guard lowered, probably euphoric over getting his man. When he was ten feet away Nick came to his feet, both pistols leveled.
“Freeze! U.F. Marsh—”
FF-T-T-T-T-T!
BOOM!
BOOM!
He was a Rukranian, by his tattoos, and young, not more than eighteen. His eyes sprang wide when Nick confronted him and his shots went high. Nick’s shots did not.
The kid hit the ground like a fallen tree and didn’t move, his machine gun still gripped in his left hand. Nick hurried around the car and knelt over him, aware that lights were coming on inside the au’tel and people were peering out the windows. If the Ruke kid’s machine gun hadn’t raised an alarm, the shots from the .44 certainly had.
Nick took the kid’s MG and two spare magazines, picked up the gun he’d taken from Vanov, and popped the clamshell on his car. He was out of options and out of time—he had to go. He tossed both guns into the front seat, then popped the trunk and hoisted the kid’s body into it. He got back in the car and fired the turbine…
But it wouldn’t start.
He tried again, and a third time, but got nothing except a spark and a whine. Scared and frustrated, he leaped out and opened the engine compartment; even in the dim light from the au’tel corridor he could see the oil that bathed everything; loose wires sprouted like a bad haircut and the compartment was riddled with holes.
The kid had shot out his engine.
Fantastic.
Desperate to get going, Nick grabbed one of the MGs and both magazines. Without a word to the people now sticking their heads out of the au’tel, he took off running again and disappeared down the street.
Chapter 25
Harold Reed paced from one end of the room to the other, rage burning in his eyes. He had gathered his troops together—his BCs—and given them orders. Walker had killed three of his men and badly injured a third, but he still had twenty who were healthy and motivated. He didn’t particularly like any of them—the BCs were little more than subhuman in his eyes—but they were vicious and cruel, two character traits that were perfect for his needs.
He also didn’t trust them—eventually Sirius would have to deal with Beta Centauri if their attitudes didn’t improve—but as long as they were well paid they would do whatever was required of them. What was required right now was to find Nick Walker and kill him…his dream of a Texiana show trial had ended the minute Walker smashed Cybele’s face into the kitchen table.
He sent them out in teams; four men had taken the gunsled, which would enable them to respond quickly when Walker was located, and the other sixteen were sent in different directions to track Walker down. The idea was to set up a perimeter around Binary Flats so that, if Walker tried to leave the area, he could be spotted.
Two of the idiots had decided to split up. One had staked out the au’tel where Walker left his car, and that proved to be his last mistake. His partner had heard the gunfire, but by the time he arrived all he found was Walker’s car shot all to hell, his partner’s body, and nothing else. Walker had vanished.
Now all Reed could do was pace the room and wait for reports. Dawn would be here in another hour and the streets would fill with people going about their day; once that happened, finding Walker would be exponentially more difficult.
“Will you stop that? You’re driving me nuts.”
Cybele Gannon sat at the table holding an ice pack to her face. Blood smeared her forehead and the front of her blouse. Goldie had given her first aid and a doctor had been called, but hadn’t arrived yet. Her nose was broken and Cybele was furious—broken noses never healed straight, no matter how expert the treatment, and her beautiful features would be forever marred by Walker’s attack.
Reed stopped pacing and turned to stare at her.
“Well, excuse me, Princess! I’m trying to catch the man who smashed your face, in case you didn’t know. Pardon me for giving a shit.”
“You aren’t going to catch him by wearing out the carpet. Maybe you should be out looking for him.”
“And maybe you shouldn’t have let him escape! Did you ever think of that?”
“Oh, fuck you, Harold! It wasn’t my fault.”
“No? Then whose fault was it? ‘Go to bed, Harold, I can handle this guy, Harold. We have men guarding the door, Harold, he isn’t going anywhere’.” He turned and stalked across the room again. “Fuck!”
Still tender from the pain, Cybele felt tears of rage swelling in her eyes. They spilled down her cheeks, the salt stinging her broken skin.
“It wasn’t my fault. It’s not like I let him go.”
“I know you didn’t do it on purpose, but you were supposed to be watching him. How in hell did he get the E-cuffs off?”
“I don’t know! When he came out of the toilet he was still wearing them. Then suddenly they just flew apart and he was all over me. You should be talking to Igor; he was the one who fucked up. He was supposed to be watching the door, so how did Walker get past him?”
“I’ll deal with Igor soon enough. Right now he’s out with the others.”
“What are you going to do with Walker when you catch him?”
“That depends on whether he’s killed or captured. One thing I promise you…he isn’t leaving this planet alive.”
***
Nathan Green drank two bottles of cold water and poured another over his head. His head still pounded but his vision was clearing a little. The old man behind the counter pulled a ch
air out of a back room and placed him in it.
“Just rest easy there, buddy. Take as much time as you need. We can call a doctor for you next time somebody comes in with a phone.”
Nathan tilted his head back and sighed, but shook his head.
“No doctor. Not yet anyway.”
“You need somebody to look at that.”
“I know, but if whoever did this to me finds out I’m still alive, they may come back.”
“Then we’ll call the G-men.” The old man frowned. “Or maybe not. Come to think of it, those fellers were G-men.”
“Who are the G-men?”
“Never mind. Just close your eyes and take it easy. We’ll figure something out.”
Nathan tried to relax. His body needed the rest but his mind refused to cooperate. According to the old clerk, Cybele Gannon had orchestrated the attack that left him in this condition. He remembered his conversation with Nick on Saturday about Cybele, about whether she had been involved in the wanted poster ruse. Nick had discounted it as unlikely, though neither of them could figure how the Rukes could have known she would call Nick without her being involved. But if she had been in on it from the beginning, then why had she shot Vanov?
It didn’t make any sense.
Only maybe it did. Nathan still didn’t know why she killed Vanov, but clearly she wasn’t innocent or she wouldn’t have led him, Nathan, into this trap.
And come to think of it—he felt stupid for not thinking of it sooner—how did she know Nick was in trouble? She had insisted that Nathan leave town, said Nick had been captured, but didn’t explain how she knew…and Nathan hadn’t asked her.
Dumb-ass!
He turned his head slightly and groaned as pain shot through his forehead. The pain left him weak and gasping. He took a deep breath and blew it out, still trying to think it through.
Well, there was a reason he didn’t have his official badge yet, apparently. He wasn’t ready for it. Stress or no stress, with his training and experience, limited though it was, he should have thought of the right questions to ask. And he hadn’t. He had accepted without question Cybele’s story about following him and Nick to Binary Flats. He should have grilled her more closely, demanded a fuller explanation. How did she know Nick had been captured unless she had seen it…or been involved with it?
Somehow, she was the key to this whole case.
He just didn’t know yet where she fit in.
***
One of the first things Nick had noticed about Binary Flats was the lack of design. In a normal town things were more organized; residents lived in one area, businesses in another, and any civic buildings, such as a police station and courthouse, were generally grouped together. Binary Flats seemed to have sprung out of the ground in no particular order. Au’tels were sprinkled in unlikely places, between homes and businesses, and here and there were empty lots where buildings had burned or been taken down; he had seen a school next to a repair shop, an equipment yard next to an herbal remedy store…no order, no beautification, no parks. Everything was haphazard.
But now that disorder came to his aid. After leaving the au’tel with the machine gun, Nick had run two blocks and turned left another block, keeping in darkness as much as possible until he came to what must have been a power station. It didn’t look much like any power station he’d ever seen, but he saw heavy power lines leading into it and heard the hum of transformers. It was located on a narrow lot between a boarding house and a fuel depot. Whoever had placed it there apparently hadn’t considered the potentially explosive implications of having a fuel station only a few yards away, but there it was.
Fortunately, the fuel depot was closed, which meant there would be no traffic for at least another hour, but even more fortuitous was the fact that the power transformers gave off heat. If Nick could hide between a couple of those, they should mask his signature to infra-red scanners.
Checking in all directions to make sure no one was watching, he walked across the dirt lot and squeezed between the transformers, feeling his body hair tingle from the static electricity and hoping he didn’t generate an arc. The transformers were some twenty feet apart; he settled down between them and tried to lie still. He wished he could sleep but knew better than to try…even if he could doze off, it was better to stay awake. Once dawn came, his cover would be blown, and he would need to move before they found him.
Approaching Binary Flats – Alpha Centauri 2
Virgil Bullard glanced at his watch. He’d been in the air three and a half hours and saw a glimmer of dawn over the Syracuse Sea to his left. Binary Flats should be coming up soon, but he wasn’t sure how much farther it was. His fuel gauge was starting to worry him—his private hovercar wasn’t the most economical model on the market and, even though he filled up before leaving Centauri Springs, he was stretching his range.
He throttled back a little to conserve fuel, but not too much. If Walker was in trouble, time was of the essence. He needed to get there as quickly as possible. He just hoped he would find an open fuel depot when he did.
Binary Flats – Alpha Centauri 2
Nick saw the first faint streaks of light in the sky to the east. He’d been hiding in the power station—or substation, if that’s what it was—for over an hour. The gunsled had passed over twice, cruising slowly as it scanned the streets below for heat signatures; and once he’d seen two men on foot walking down the street, searching. No one had spotted him yet. It was probably hard for those on the sled to sort out the heat sigs, he thought—people were sleeping in many of the buildings around him, and there were other power sources as well, all of which would show up on IR scanners; the best they could do was sweep the streets and empty lots, and they were clearly doing that.
But they hadn’t found him.
Now dawn was starting to break, and soon people would begin to venture out. He already heard a surface car engine in the distance, probably someone heading off to work. It was Monday morning and activity would be brisk. Harold Reed and his people were running out of time…
But Nick knew they wouldn’t give up.
As tired as he was, his mind was still working. He was scared, certainly, but not paralyzed. While waiting for daylight he had gone over everything again in his mind, twice. Nathan was still out there somewhere, but without his collar comm or his pocket phone Nick couldn’t communicate with him. He just hoped Nathan was safe and wouldn’t do anything stupid. No doubt he had called Camarrell for backup and help should be on the way.
More immediately, Nick was thinking about Reed and Cybele Gannon. His first priority was to stay alive, and to that end he was prepared to kill every Rukranian he met, but he wanted Reed and Gannon. By their own admission, they were the perpetrators behind this whole nightmare and he wasn’t about to let them get away with it. He wasn’t sure he believed that Cybele’s dad didn’t know anything about the plot, but that determination could wait. He wanted to take her and her lover back to Camarrell in chains…or at least E-cuffs.
(And somewhere, when all this was finished, he needed to advise his superiors that E-cuffs could be compromised by simply getting them wet. Maybe he would invent an E-cuff that was impervious to water and market it himself, but that might have to wait until his retirement…if he managed to reach retirement age.)
He tried to figure how it might all play out. If Reed’s men got him, they would probably kill him. He doubted that Reed would risk trying to hold him prisoner again, even for the glory of a Texiana trial; but if he did, Cybele had said they—she, Reed, and Nick—were all going to Sirius. Obviously that meant a spaceport, or at least an airport. Those shuttles from Centauri B (Beta Centauri? Now he was confused) had to land somewhere.
The gunsled had come from the south, but that didn’t mean anything—it could have been kept anywhere. He needed to find out where off-world transportation came down and get to it before Reed and Gannon could leave. If they failed to catch him, escape would be their final option.
&nbs
p; Trimmer Springs – Alpha Centauri 2
“Have you talked to Nick today?”
Kristina poured coffee for her mother and herself, then set the pot back on the burner. They had just finished breakfast and were having their second cup; Suzanne had to be at the boutique within the hour.
“No, I haven’t. I called him yesterday but he didn’t answer.”
Kristina’s brow furrowed. “That isn’t like him, is it?”
“No, not usually. But I don’t know exactly where he is. There may not be a satellite signal there.”
“I couldn’t get Nathan last night either. I hope everything is okay.”
“Have you tried him this morning?”
“Not yet. I thought I would ask you first.”
“Give him a ring and see if he answers. They’re probably having breakfast somewhere right now.”
Kristina went into the bedroom to retrieve her phone. She came back a moment later and punched in Nathan’s number. She sipped her coffee while she waited for a connection, but after several moments all she got was a rapid beep followed by a warble and a canned message about “subscriber out of range”.
She disconnected.
Now Suzanne was frowning. She stared at the phone with a green gaze, then reached for it.
“Let me try Nick. One of them should be answering.”
“Unless they’re busy…”
“Or in trouble.” Suzanne entered Nick’s number, but after a maddening wait got a different message. This one said “device out of service”.
Suzanne stared at the phone for a moment, then stared at Kristina. Kristina was trying to be nonchalant, but Suzanne saw the worry in her eyes. Without a word, she retrieved her own phone and located a stored number for the U.F. Marshal’s office in Lucaston. She called it and asked for the number for the Camarrell office, but a helpful operator connected her directly.
“United Federation Marshal, Camarrell office.”
“Hello, my name is Suzanne Norgaard and I’m trying to track down Marshal Nick Walker. I understand he is operating in your territory.”