by C. G. Hatton
Sean was pushing through the abandoned barriers. Something in the air was setting his nerves on edge. “Wait up,” he hissed. Faint voices echoed up to them from the stairs ahead. Angry voices. She stopped and looked back at him, pulling the pistol from her leg holster.
Someone was in trouble down there. The underground tunnels were the only way across the river without getting shot at or targeted by mortars, and as much as every sense he had was screaming at him to back up quietly and head for the surface, and leave whoever it was to their fate, he knew they wouldn’t make it to the next station before curfew.
There was a shout and sounds of a scuffle.
“We have to go back,” he whispered and pulled out a knife, holding it loosely in his left hand.
Sean backed up to stand beside him and they turned.
Shadows moved. Hil took a step back and an arm grabbed him from behind, tight around the throat, as a hand grasped his wrist and twisted.
Sean cursed and struggled against the figure that had caught hold of her, and as their eyes met in silent agreement to break free, another figure emerged from the shadows in front of them, gun up and a shit-eating smirk on his face.
“What do we have here?” the newcomer said. He was wearing body armour but it was a mishmash of pieces strung together over dirty fatigues. He waved the gun casually. “Lose the weapons.”
Hil relaxed, shoulders dropping, and he let the knife fall to the floor. His captor frisked him, pulling his coat aside to take the gun from his waist and the other knife from his belt, the hand clamping firmly around his neck again.
“We have business here,” Sean said calmly, relinquishing her pistol without argument.
The man smirked. “I know exactly what kind of business people who run around in the snow at curfew are after. Ditch the vest as well.”
Sean shrugged out of her coat and let her armoured vest drop to the floor with a clatter. The guy holding her was wearing a massive rain cape, hood up, that still dripped with melting snow. He produced a wand that he waved up and down over her body, careful not to stand in his boss’s line of fire. The wand beeped once. He grinned and reached into her trouser pocket to take a small knife that he threw down onto the floor. Once satisfied, he shoved her aside and moved to Hil.
Hil smiled softly and balanced his weight. “I heard the mutants had taken over the sewers this side of the river,” he said.
The guy in the cape growled and the hand from behind tightened around his neck.
“Shush now,” the guy with the gun muttered, taking a step forward to look into Hil’s face.
He thought for a second that he’d got their attention away from Sean but the guy stepped back abruptly, increasing his angle to cover them both. So they weren’t all stupid.
The wand beeped only at Hil’s wrists as he was checked again. Cape guy pulled up Hil’s sleeves, satisfied that the brace on the right and the band on the left were no threat and stepped back with a guttural grunt.
A scream echoed up from the station below them.
The main man smiled and waved his gun again, gesturing towards the barriers. “Shall we go and join the party?”
Hil braced himself as the guy behind took hold of his arm and tried to turn him. As the pressure on his throat eased up, he pushed sideways and dropped his weight, throwing the guy off balance and sending them both tumbling.
He heard Sean yell, gunshots echoing loud in the confined space, then he was rolling free. He managed to get to his knees, pulled the knife out of his boot and threw it in one fluid motion, the projectile leaving his fingers an instant before the guy tackled him and threw him down.
For a moment his vision swam as his head hit the floor and the guy pummelled a fist into his face. Hil tried to curl up and tensed but the weight vanished, Sean leaning in close to hold a hand gently against his cheek.
“Nice throw,” she said and pulled him to his feet.
He groaned and looked around. The two bodies of the heavies were still twitching but the bossman was dead, Hil’s knife embedded in his throat.
“Come on,” Sean said, “we should go.”
Hil walked unsteadily to the guy he’d killed. He looked down. It wasn’t often that he’d ever need to go to those extremes and it made him queasy.
He knelt and pulled the knife out, wiping it on the guy’s sleeve. He stood and twirled the knife slowly between his fingers, staring at the body. “Shit.”
Sean put a hand gently on his shoulder. “Come on. We’re going to have to risk the surface. You up for a race?”
Chapter 8
“Speaking of Legal,” the Man said, pausing with his goblet half way to his lips, “did you know they were battling on two fronts?”
NG slowly traced a finger around the rim of his glass, feeling the warmth rising from the wine. “The section chief in Legal hasn’t been in post long,” he said carefully. “She has ambition and drive. And, as much as her appointment was risky, her background was too intriguing for me to let her pass. We make full use of her connections with the Assassins and she is completely loyal to us. That I do know. Whether she’s loyal to me is another matter and that changes on a whim. But yes, I was aware of the internal quarrelling. Rather than a distraction, it served to spur on certain parties within Legal to increase their efforts. That our people still feel the need to prove their abilities will never be detrimental to the guild. It’s the model we rely on.”
A candle to their left flickered and died, a trail of smoke winding upwards into the embrace of the darkness. It was warm in the room and the loss of that small circle of light seemed to darken the mood.
“We sit,” the Man said, “between Earth and Winter with a multitude of other potential allegiances at every turn. The Assassins, the Merchants, the Federation – each vying for power across the line. You say Hilyer took O’Brien to Redgate. That very colony itself illustrates the fierce fighting nature of man that we aim to harness. Look at the voracity with which they protect their own. Imagine the possibilities if they were to be delivered a real enemy to fight.”
•
They ran through the snow, keeping close to the walls and ducking into side streets whenever the roar of a vehicle threatened to close in on them. Lights pierced the whiteout and they heard the whine of sirens behind them. At one point, vehicles screeched to a halt up ahead, skidding through the deepening layer of snow covering the road. Doors slammed and there were yells. Hil grabbed Sean’s arm and pulled her into a doorway, fumbling with his lock pick to open the door. They fell through into a dark and musty hallway. Numbered apartment doorways loomed on both sides of a long corridor, half of them open, hanging off hinges. They ran through to the back and broke out into an alley, a whistling wind hitting them hard and whipping at their coats. An aircraft screamed overhead and distant blasts echoed eerily as one side or the other began their nightly bombardment of the city.
They ran on and made their way back to the main street, watching as carefully as they could in the blizzard before breaking out onto the wide boulevard. Hil still wasn’t back up to a hundred percent after the crash and breathing got hard fast, an agonising stitch in his side sending sparks of pain through his recently battered ribs every time he slipped on a patch of ice. They stumbled into the tube station, soaked through, bitterly cold and breathing heavily.
Hil doubled over, wheezing.
“Hey, you’re not as fit as your file claims, superstar,” Sean said, slapping him on the back.
“I told you before, you shouldn’t believe everything you read,” he muttered.
She laughed and gave him room to recover, stamping her feet and blowing on her hands. He watched her scout around with a flashlight, making sure they were alone. She was a lot like Martha, he thought, but she was more lively, cheerful in a way that Martha could never quite manage around him. He shivered and stood up.
“C’mon,” he said. “We need to get across the river.”
This station wasn’t as badly damaged but it was
a mess with shattered glass and rubbish strewn across the tiled floor. He led the way down three flights of stairs that stretched down to the tube tunnels below. The air was stale and damp. The last time he was here, the trains were still running albeit infrequently, dilapidated carriages with haunted faces at each grimy window, keeping the southern part of the city mobile. The blighted area had spread and it looked like the no man’s land of the North Shore had stretched its fingers out to embrace the southern banks of the river, both sides fighting over land that wasn’t worth the effort. Based on the state of the stations here now, they were going to be lucky if they managed to find an intact tunnel to get across.
They moved quickly and quietly. Twice more he saw cameras, black and twisted boxes that twitched almost imperceptibly as they passed.
“Someone’s watching,” he said under his breath. “It was always difficult to get to the North Shore, but it looks like someone wants it cut off completely.”
Sean had her pistol out, holding it loosely by her thigh. “This might seem obvious to you, but why didn’t we just land on the north side of the river and come south into the city?”
He laughed. “You’ve not been here before, have you?”
“No,” she said matter of factly. “Anyone that wants to lose themselves in this shithole are welcome to disappear.”
“The Merchants’ Guild operates the airfields,” he said. “They have some kind of neutral status. Trying to fly in anywhere else on this hemisphere will get you shot down by one side or the other. Entering the city legitimately through the Merchants then disappearing is the only way to get in.”
They came out onto a level with tiled archways that were pitted with bullet holes and turned a corner.
“I hope Badger is worth this,” Sean said, staring at the collapsed tunnel and mangled train in front of them.
Hil jumped down onto the tracks and shone his flashlight at the seemingly impenetrable mass of the train.
“I can get through there,” he said. “You want to stay here?”
“You’re kidding me?” she said from the platform. “I’ve heard all kinds of crap about you guild guys but this I have to see.”
It wasn’t the hardest thing he’d ever done, not by a long way, but crawling through the twisted metal and trying to make sure Sean had a way through too wasn’t easy, especially with one arm throbbing and refusing to take his full weight. He was also cold and wet and hoping like hell that it was worth it. He was starting to get flashes of memory, glimpses of LC that were making him think that they’d been in trouble before he’d ended up crash landing alone on that planet.
The carriages were abandoned and in parts the train had been crushed by the collapse of the tunnel. If the train hadn’t been there, there would have been no way for them to get through. As it was, the strength of the frame of the compartments had braced the roof fall in places. He wriggled through a gap, pushing metal bars and seat debris out of the way, and hung upside down in an open space that looked like it was the front control carriage. The window had shattered. Hil manoeuvred himself carefully and braced his feet so that he could take his full weight on his legs, dangling backwards, leaving his left arm free to squeeze out of the gap and bring the flashlight up. Through the train’s warped frame, he could see that the tunnel ahead was clear, the faint light of the torch fading into the distance. He swept the beam around, saw the reflection bounce off flood water and caught sight of the smooth motion of the auto-sentry a fraction of a second before it swivelled round and opened fire.
He yelped and curled back up into the gap, scrambling backwards as rounds impacted on the front of the train.
He almost yelled as Sean grabbed his ankle from behind. “Who the hell is that?” she whispered loudly.
“It’s a freaking auto-sentry. Someone really doesn’t want anyone using these tunnels.” He squirmed backwards to find more space and twisted around to check his hand where he’d felt the sting of an impact. It was bleeding but was just a scrape, shrapnel. He hated auto-sentries almost as much as he hated electrobes.
“Here,” she said, nudging his leg again.
He reached down and took a small metal cylinder from her. “What’s this? We could bring the roof down if we throw a grenade.”
“It’s a concussion grenade,” she said. “Neural flash-bang, no collateral damage.”
“A concussion grenade won’t take out an auto-sentry, they’re designed to withstand hi-explosives.”
“No, it won’t take it out, but there’s a chance that if you drop it close enough it might disrupt its sensors long enough for someone to get to it and disarm it.”
“And the someone would be?”
“Well, you’re up front, superstar,” she said, smiling at him in the torchlight.
“How much of a chance?”
“A small one, but I figure it’s our best shot unless the gun’s really sophisticated, which it isn’t – otherwise it would have hit you with its first two shots. And unless you’re packing an EMP generator to fry its circuits, we really don’t have much choice.”
He looked at the grenade dubiously and began to shimmy back into the gap.
She tugged his ankle. “Make sure you throw it as far as you can – it has a decent radius.”
He stretched forward, trying not to lean on his right arm that was aching in the effort to hold the torch loosely in numb fingers. The minigun began spitting rounds at him as soon as he cleared the gap. He flinched, dropped the flashlight and threw the grenade from his left as best he could. There was a splash and a flash and a sharp agony speared through his eyes to the back of his head.
He was vaguely aware of someone climbing over him. He managed to squeeze open one eye and through the pain and rapidly diminishing vision he watched a pair of exceedingly fine hips sway their way casually towards an auto-sentry desperately trying to reboot itself. He tried to move and his world went black.
Someone was holding him and stroking his head. Hil groaned and moved slightly, even that small motion sending sparks flaring behind his eyes.
“Hey there, superstar,” someone said from somewhere above him. Sean, he remembered vaguely. He opened one eye to darkness, a faint beam of light illuminating a mangled mass of metal.
“Come on, Hil,” she said, ruffling his hair. “Time to move. I’ve frozen my ass off here waiting for you to stir yourself. How about it?”
He lifted his head and squinted into the darkness. It was quiet.
“It worked,” he mumbled.
“Yes, it worked. It doesn’t always. Fortunately for us it was junk, scraped together from salvaged parts by the looks of it. What did I say to you about the range?”
She was way too much like Martha.
He lay there and pinched the top of his nose, trying to relieve some of the pressure.
“But hey,” she said, “you gave me enough time to push past you and get to it.”
Hil stood up unsteadily. Any glass that had been in the window frame had gone. He picked up the torch and picked out the sentry. The barrel of the gun had flopped down listlessly.
“It’s disarmed?” he asked and felt a trickle run from his nose. Sean stood up and shone her light in his face. He shied away, closing his eyes instinctively from the glare. She reached a hand up and pressed a cloth against his face.
“Your nose is bleeding,” she said. “Don’t worry, it’ll wear off. The headache will take a while though. And yes, it’s disarmed.”
She turned the beam onto the window and cleared away the remaining shards of glass from the edge. “After you.”
They splashed through the tunnel, moving quickly to warm up. The river was seeping in, flowing down the walls in sheets and, in places, torrents, and it wouldn’t be long before the tunnel would be completely flooded and impassable. The cold sapped their stamina and they were both tired before they reached the first North Shore station.
“How far once we get to the surface?” Sean asked as they climbed out onto the platform.
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“Another mile or so east. If he hasn’t moved.”
The station was burnt out but the stairs this side were clear and they jogged up, feeling the air get colder as they approached street level.
“No crazy shit from here on in,” Hil said. “Badger micro-monitors a one mile radius around himself. If he spooks, we’ll never find him.”
“Will he know we’re here?”
“Probably been watching us since the train.”
“If he’s watching, won’t he see it’s you?” she said. “I thought you knew this guy.”
“Yeah, and he’ll see I’m with you. Did I forget to mention that Badger doesn’t like strangers? I’m hoping he’ll be curious enough to give us a chance to explain.”
Out in the street, it was quiet, soft white snowflakes drifting down like ash from a fire. They walked swiftly through the dark streets, keeping to the buildings, both with weapons out but they didn’t encounter anyone. Not a soul. This side of the river was deserted. It set the back of his neck tingling again.
“It’s not always this quiet,” he warned as Sean started to drift out into the open. She came back to his side, in the shadows. He’d seen militia raids on this shore before, fast and violent attacks on the pockets of resistance that kept a hold here. It wasn’t something he’d want to get caught up in.
They triggered three alarms that he was aware of before they reached Badger’s building. He hit the buzzer with numb fingers and the door clicked open.
“Don’t be startled by anything that happens,” he said and crossed the threshold.
Immediately, a score of bright blue beams scanned him from head to foot. He stood patiently, only stepping forward once they had receded. He beckoned Sean to enter. She holstered her pistol and stepped in. The beams lingered on her longer and he could see that she was starting to get irritated when they shut off abruptly and the door at the far end of the hallway opened.