by Mike Brooks
“Just following orders, ma’am,” Jia said, hopping over the hedge and holding out her arms to half-pull, half-lift Han over after her. She and Kuai managed it, but the security chief wrenched herself away from them both.
“Whose orders?” she demanded, one hand clenched into a fist and the other tightly gripping the handles of her bag. “Who sent you here? Who gave you this information?”
Jia exchanged looks with her brother, wondering whether they could get away with Tasering Han now and grabbing the cash. They were supposed to wait until they had her in the car, but it looked like that might not be an option any longer.
“That’s an order!” Han snapped. “You’ll tell me right now, or—”
“Oh shit!” Jia cut her off, pointing over the security chief’s shoulder. Farther up the side street, pretty much opposite where their rental car was parked, a large metallic door in the casino’s side marked STAFF PARKING was whirring upwards. Ducking out of the entranceway, in ones and twos, were people who didn’t look like anyone the Thousand Suns would normally employ. In fact, they looked about as much like an archetypical street gang as it was possible to get outside of a low-budget action holo, and several of them had already drawn handguns.
“Run!” Jia barked, grabbing Han and almost throwing the security chief into the street. She followed her, pushing the older woman towards the questionable shelter of the line of cars on the far side. “Go!”
A gun barked once, and then it sounded to Jia’s terrified ears as though a veritable battery of weapons had opened up when the others joined in. She and Han leapt desperately through the gap between two cars and hit the pavement on the other side of the street, with Kuai barrelling in after them a second later. Jia glanced over at him to make sure he hadn’t been hit, but he was already crawling away from the gap and into cover beside her.
“Shit, shit, shit!” Jia hissed. She yelped in fright as a car window shattered above her and the bullet knocked a few chips out of the far wall.
“They’re insane!” Han hissed, rooting around in her bag desperately. “To do this now, in the middle of the street . . .” She looked up and fixed both of them with a momentary stare. “Aren’t you going to shoot back at the pig fuckers? They’ll be on us in seconds otherwise!”
Jia blinked at her in surprise for a moment, then clumsily unclipped her gun with fingers that suddenly felt too large. She scrabbled along the pavement, cutting her hand on broken glass, then reached the car’s hood. She tried to think for a moment of what Rourke would do in this situation.
Probably be somewhere else.
Not helpful. She took a breath with a whimper and swung up over the hood, desperately searching for a target. Something moved on the far side of the street, little more than a blur against blurs to her panicked eyes, and she squeezed her trigger: The gun kicked in her hand and a shooting pain took hold of her wrist, but she fired twice more and then ducked back down. Return fire came half a second later, and the wall above them puffed more chips of concrete as bullets hit home.
Suddenly Muradov’s voice was in her ear. +Jia? Kuai? I can hear gunshots; what’s happening?+
“It’s all gone tits up!” Jia hissed at him. “The fucking Triax are trying to kill us!”
There was a clang in the background, and Muradov’s breathing got louder, as though he’d started moving quickly. +What are their numbers and dispositions?+
“Six or seven of them, and pretty fucking pissed off, Chief!” Jia continued in English.
A grunt, and then Muradov was speaking in Russian. +I meant, where are they in relation to you? Can you get to the car?+
“No!” Jia looked up the street as Kuai threw himself up, shooting at their antagonists. He ducked back down a moment later, shaking his head grimly to indicate that he didn’t think he’d hit anyone. “They’re on the other side of the street, but the fuckers are level with our car. And there’s a gap in the cars on this side before that! We’d be dead meat if we tried to make it across there!”
+Do what you can. I’ll be with you as soon as possible.+
Han grabbed Jia’s arm. “Who are you talking to?”
“Someone who might be able to help,” Jia replied back in Mandarin, shaking the other woman off and firing blindly twice over the car hood. If she remembered correctly, these guns had a magazine of twenty, which meant she’d gone through a quarter of the ammunition in there already. She had two more on her belt, as was standard security force procedure according to Muradov, but even so she suddenly felt woefully underequipped, not to mention underskilled. Thankfully the Triax thugs didn’t exactly seem to be sharpshooters: They were hitting the cars, but not much else.
“Have you even called in for backup?” Han demanded. She hadn’t drawn a gun, but Jia supposed you couldn’t get away with carrying one into a casino, no matter how paranoid and corrupt you were.
“You want to do that, you knock yourself out,” Jia snapped, leaning down to see if she could see feet moving underneath the cars. No such luck: The light cast by the streetlamps wasn’t strong enough to show anything conclusive.
“You’re not even cops, are you?” Han said grimly, looking from Jia to Kuai and back again.
“Give the lady a medal,” Kuai snorted. “But if it makes you feel any better, right now we don’t want you dead, and they do!”
“This is intolerable!” Han spat, fumbling with her comm. Whoever she was calling clearly answered quickly, because a moment later she was speaking again. “Xiulan! The Triax are trying to kill me! I’m at the Thousand Suns casino, and I want reliable units here now!”
“Reliable units?” Kuai said from the other side of her. “Didn’t think you had many of those.”
“I assure you, I am very aware of which officers are on the take and which aren’t,” Han bit out at him, covering her comm for a second, then took her hand away and resumed speaking to the person on the other end. “No, of course I’m not okay, I’m being shot at! Just get people here on the double! Anyone who’s not coming here goes to the spaceport! The Triax are trying something big, I know it!”
Jia shot a glance at Kuai, her stomach churning. That could prove problematic, even if they got out of this.
“Just do it!” Han yelled into her comm. “If it proves to be nothing, then fine; I’ll take responsibility, and I’ll resign or whatever the governor wants. But I’m not letting them get away with this!” She tapped her comm to cancel the call and then glared at Jia.
“So what’s your plan, other than not hitting anything with that—gnnggghhhhhh!”
She spasmed for a moment, then fell forward with a moan. On the other side of her, Kuai was holding his Taser.
“Are you out of your fucking mind?” Jia snarled at him. “What the fuck did you just do?!”
“They want her, right?” Kuai said, his eyes wide and hard and desperate. “Her or the money, whatever. Both. So we stuff the money into our shirts, we throw her and the bag out there, and we run for it.”
“And let them kill her?” Jia asked in horror, looking down at Han. She didn’t owe the woman anything, of course, and they needed the money to save Rourke. But to throw a stunned human being out to where she’d be riddled with bullets in three seconds flat just didn’t sit well with her.
“They’re going to kill all of us in a second!” Kuai snapped at her. “This way we at least have a—shitshitshit!”
A shape lurched into view over the car’s trunk, backlit by the streetlights: a Triax thug, gun already swinging down to point at them. Jia jerked her own weapon up, but Kuai was quicker, for once, and raised his pistol to fire repeatedly upwards at point-blank range.
The bullets tore holes in the thug’s face and blew the back of his skull right out. Jia’s own shot thudded into the man’s shoulder, but did little more than knock the newly made corpse slightly sideways as it slithered grotesquely out the car and landed in a wet, suddenly boneless heap half-on and half-off the pavement.
“Fuck!” Kuai panted, desp
erately wiping his face where the man’s blood had spattered down onto him. He turned his red-smeared features towards Jia, and his eyes widened in horror. “Jia, get down!”
He leapt for her as more gunshots went off, hideously loud even over the blood thundering in her ears, and Jia found herself crushed to the pavement underneath him, even as she turned to see what he was looking at. She caught a glimpse of another Triax gang member, now on their side of the street—so they no longer had the cars as cover—and pointing his gun at them. She shrugged her brother off her and brought her gun up, braced it in two hands, and squeezed the trigger once, again, and again.
Her aim was true this time. Blood spouted from his thigh, his stomach, and then his chest, and he began a slow collapse, his gun falling from his hands.
“Yeah, that’s fucking right, you son of a whore!” she screamed, pushing herself up into a kneeling position. “You fuck with me, that’s what you get!”
Kuai was still sitting on her legs. She turned to tell him to get the fuck off her, but the words froze in her throat.
“Kuai?”
Her brother was on his back on the pavement, staring blankly up at the desert sky above them. The black of his uniform couldn’t get much darker, but there was a ragged tear in the fabric just over his heart that was already wet with blood. Another wound, where his neck met his shoulder, was turning the pavement beneath it red.
“Kuai?!”
MAN DOWN
More gunshots rang out on the night air. Alim Muradov gave the magnetic grapnel he’d attached to the building’s ventilation shaft a good tug, and it seemed to hold firm.
“Do what you can,” he said into his comm, trying to calm Jia with just the tone of his voice, “I’ll be with you as soon as possible.”
Of course, that meant abseiling straight down ten stories with Tamara Rourke’s Crusader 920 slung across his shoulders. He hadn’t had time to disassemble the gun and pack it into its carry bag, so it would just have to hang loose. Besides, it would hardly make him much more conspicuous, and he had the feeling he might need it.
For just a moment, Alim wondered what he was doing. He hadn’t abseiled off anything since his army days, and as a tunnel rat by birth, he’d never had much of a head for heights. But he’d joined this crew of his own free will, knowing full well that they were prone to straying to the far side of the law, and he’d be a poor man indeed if he backed out when they needed him. His self-esteem hadn’t fared well in the wake of the Uragan debacle: He didn’t think he could live with himself if he turned out to be as poor an outlaw as he had a lawman.
Besides, if he wanted to get off this planet, he really needed Jia Chang to stay in one piece.
He threw himself backwards without allowing himself any longer to think it through. The grapnel had a universal attachment that neatly gripped the tac belt on his uniform, which was now divested of rank markings but still unmistakably the clothing of the Red Star Confederate’s security forces. It was the only clothing he’d had to his name when he first joined the crew, and Drift had persuaded him to keep it. Presumably for just this sort of purpose.
Alim gripped the grapnel’s main body—a metal tube about the length and circumference of his forearm, with twin handles either side of it—as the alarmingly thin steel-composite wire rapidly unspooled out of it. He knew very well that his tac belt would easily be strong enough to take his weight, and this grapnel that he’d appropriated from the Jonah’s storage lockers looked standard issue and in good condition, but the last thing he wanted was an unpleasant surprise when he was twenty metres above a concrete pavement. That wouldn’t help anyone.
He kicked off the wall, deliberately not looking down. Instead he counted off the windows as he descended past them to get an idea of how much farther he needed to go. His first bound took him two stories; the next one lowered him by three. Halfway down already.
More gunshots. He had to assume that someone would call the police immediately . . . or would they? Anyone watching would see the Changs’ uniforms and probably presume that they were calling in their own backup. The casino employees almost certainly wouldn’t raise the alarm since it sounded like the Triax were behind this hit attempt. Even allowing for Jia to have misidentified their attackers, it didn’t make sense for anyone else to be trying to kill Han Xiuying.
That meant that, unless Han called them herself, it was possible that the police wouldn’t even be aware of this until long after it had played out. That might give Alim and the Changs the time they needed to get away.
His last bound touched him down onto the pavement, and he breathed a sigh of relief as he felt solid ground underneath him again. He debated over the grapnel for a second, then unclipped it from his belt and pressed the retract button to send it whizzing upwards out of sight. It would have taken too long to deactivate it and wind it back in, not to mention the potential damage of magnet and cable falling on top of him. The Jonah could get another grapnel: They couldn’t get another Jia or Kuai.
There was no one in this side street, and although traffic continued to pile past on the main boulevard, it seemed that no one had stopped to gawk at the man in black clothes bouncing down the side of a building. Well, he was probably about to draw a lot of attention anyway, but there was nothing for it. Holding the Crusader as close to his body as he could, he broke into a run.
His sniper’s vantage point had given him an excellent view of the front steps of the Thousand Suns, but the casino’s palm trees and the corner of the building itself had blocked his view of the street where the Changs had parked and where they were even now sheltering from hostile fire. He needed to get to the next intersection to draw a proper bead on their attackers.
And then what?
Alim had told Captain Drift when he’d joined that he wouldn’t kill anyone unless crew members were in danger. And yes, the Changs certainly were in danger, but did that mean Alim had to take a life, or lives? Could he perhaps disable the attackers somehow? Shots that might cripple, but not kill?
More gunshots, and then a scream rent the air: He thought he recognised Jia’s voice, albeit distorted by emotion. That didn’t bode well.
He reached the intersection and stopped his own momentum by grabbing a lamppost, then hammered the button that would stop the traffic so pedestrians could cross. On the other side of the main boulevard, through the press of vehicles, he could see three—no, four shapes—crossing the street with guns drawn. He couldn’t see the Changs, or Chief Han, but he could make out their positions from the focus of the Triax thugs.
The Changs weren’t shooting. They’d be overrun in a couple of seconds, if they were even still alive.
The lights changed, and the traffic ground to a halt, leaving a clear stretch of tarmac between Alim and his victims.
“Allah forgive me,” Alim muttered, although despite the boundless nature of Allah’s mercy, he wasn’t sure he still warranted any. Then he raised his borrowed rifle to his shoulder and focused through the scope.
They jumped into view immediately. Barely a hundred yards away, and given that they were on the same elevation as him, they were actually closer than the shot he’d made from the top of the building he’d been perched on. An untrained person might have struggled to hit them: Alim didn’t really need the scope.
The idea of winging them had gone from his head. He would need to get over there, and allowing any of them the ability to shoot back at him, however unlikely that might be, was too risky. So he lined up on the skull of the man farthest away and pulled the trigger.
The gun punched back against his shoulder, but long practice prevented it from throwing his aim off. The side of the man’s head exploded in a cloud of red, and he dropped to the ground in the middle of the road. His fellows stopped in their tracks and turned to look at him, which given the victim’s position meant that for another crucial second they weren’t looking at Alim.
Which was, after all, the idea.
The next man got hit in the ba
ck of the head while still turning to see what had happened to his friend, and slumped forwards. Alim could hear a couple of shouts and car doors opening as drivers realised that a man was aiming a rifle directly across their path and decided to flee on foot, but he ignored the distraction.
The last two were now looking back to face where their ears told them the gunfire was coming from. This time Alim targeted the closest man, the one who had—at least statistically—the best odds of hitting him with return fire. The shot took the thug in the shoulder, and he fell with a scream audible even over the traffic noise. The last man had managed to raise his handgun and shoot back: Alim didn’t bother to duck because he was already squeezing his own trigger again. The man collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut as Alim’s bullet took him between the eyes.
Alim let out his breath, then tracked across and down to where his third victim was lying on the ground. His scope showed him the man’s face: eyes screwed up, teeth gritted, one hand clamped to his wounded shoulder, and sweat beading on his brow already, visible even under the streetlights. Alim could just hear his low, ululating moans of pain.
The safest thing to do would be to pull the trigger again. The man worked for the Triax and would make his living inflicting violence or the threat of violence on others. This was a corrupt city where he might never face justice.
But he’d also dropped his gun and showed no inclination to move from his protective, foetal position. And Alim couldn’t bring himself to do it.
“Idiot,” he breathed, breaking into a run across the main boulevard. The lights were still red and holding back the traffic because only a handful of seconds had passed since they’d changed in the first place, so his dash across the intersection was uninterrupted. He got to the other side, well aware of the many sets of eyes that must have been glued to him as he sprinted past the vehicles while carrying a large rifle. He supposed that pictures or video of him might have been taken, but it didn’t matter now: Either this mad gamble would still pay out and they’d flee the planet before the security forces got themselves organised, or something would go wrong and it would fail totally. One way or another, he doubted he’d be in a situation where his face was plastered over advertising screens as part of a massive manhunt while he was still on this planet.