by Rick Partlow
“All right, I’m putting it down.”
She slowly lowered her pistol toward the floor, keeping the muzzle pointed away. She bent down on one knee, and the metal of the gun’s receiver was just kissing the concrete floor when she saw something slice through the other woman’s chest, something fast that wasn’t even slowed down by the ballistic weave cloth of the utility blouse. Blood sprayed out into the shadows behind her and the crack of something breaking the sound barrier had barely echoed across the room before the woman collapsed forward, her eyes rolling up in her head.
Sandi wasn’t trained for this, and lacked the instincts that experience afforded, but she’d learned one thing in the last couple of years that had stuck with her: when someone is shooting at you, move!
She was already in a crouch, and all it took was pushing off with her forward leg, grabbing Adam and pulling him with her as she dived forward and to her right, behind the shelter of the heavy metal casing for the servos that operated the inner lock door. A hail of projectiles smacked into the other side of the assembly and she cringed, trying to squeeze herself and Adam into the smallest target possible and praying to whatever hypothetical God might exist that the machinery was sturdy enough to stop the shots.
“Is that you, Hollande?”
She frowned, wondering who the hell would know her…
Oh, shit. That voice. It was Singh, the bounty hunter. He was here on the ground, coming after her. What the hell was he doing here? How did Jordi even know they were here?
“If it’s you, speak up,” the singer-smooth voice urged her. “I get more money for you alive, so I’d rather not kill you by accident.”
Yeah, I’d hate to get killed by accident, too, she thought, snorting a humorless laugh.
She was looking around, wondering if she could run fast enough to get through the next set of doors. The chamber on this side of the inner lock was dark and shadowed and mostly empty past the door machinery on either side of the entrance, but through the next arched hatchway, she could see the gentle glow of chemical ghostlights along the ceiling, and a row of solid, metal doors along one side of the corridor.
Maybe…but she’d have to buy them some time.
“Yeah, it’s me, Singh,” she called back, pitching her voice to carry over the racket outside. “I have Adam Krieger with me. Did they tell you about him?”
Adam stared at her doubtfully, the whites of his eyes showing clearly in the darkness.
“Yeah, I know who he is,” Singh admitted. “I’d really hate to shoot him, too. Why don’t you throw your gun out and come up with your hands in view, and we can talk this over?”
“The second I move,” Sandi whispered in Adam’s ear, “run that way and find Fontenot.”
He glanced back the way she was pointing and nodded jerkily, obviously terrified but also not panicking, which was a definite plus. She leaned back against the cold, grooved metal of the casing and took a deep breath.
“How can I be sure you won’t just kill me?” She asked, gripping her pistol securely in both hands.
She waited for him to start the first word of his reply before she moved. She lunged sideways into the open, landing hard on her right shoulder but keeping hold of the gun. She was too close to use the sights, too close to think; Singh was only three or four meters away, tall and looming and intimidating in black body armor, a bulbous pistol with a fat, shrouded barrel in his right hand. She recognized it as a Gauss machine pistol, an electromagnetic slug-shooter that fired high-velocity tantalum needles; it was based on Tahni tech, and was damned expensive for civilians, not to mention hard to get out here in the Periphery and damn near impossible to find in the Pirate Worlds.
Hers was simpler, cheaper and pointing the right way. She fired without thinking, without intent, her finger touching the trigger pad and not letting up. Spin-stabilized mini-rockets hissed out of the barrel in quick succession, only far apart enough that the exhaust of the first wouldn’t affect the flight of the second. It wasn’t like firing the proton cannon on a starship in a vacuum; her hands were shaking, her target was moving, she was breathing hard and most of the rounds missed.
Three of them didn’t. She could see the flare of the rocket motors intersecting with the bounty hunter’s chest and left arm, could see the puffs of smoke where the warheads hit, could see him jerk backwards from the impacts, stumbling and falling over, blood spraying from his left bicep but none from his chest. She knew instinctively what had happened; the pistol rounds hadn’t penetrated the heavier armor over his torso. She needed to go for the head, but she knew she wasn’t a good enough shot to do it.
She ran. She scrambled up to her feet, balancing on her left hand and headed after Adam; she could see him a few meters ahead of her, jacket flapping as he sprinted awkwardly. She caught up to him, feeling an itching between her shoulder blades, certain that Singh was going to recover and put a burst of needles into her back. She pushed Adam through the chamber into the hallway, not stopping, just running even harder. The doorways were there, but they were traps; she’d waste time trying to open them, and even if she could find one that wasn’t locked, she’d be trapped inside, a sitting duck for Singh and any of his troops he brought with him.
Instead, she and Adam pushed through the corridor, deserted and empty and echoing with an alarm klaxon she hadn’t even noticed till now, and ran headlong into a set of tall, plastic dust doors. Adam tried to pull up, but Sandi just slammed her lead shoulder into the right-hand barrier and it swung open. Adam stumbled through behind her, colliding with her and nearly knocking her over. The doors opened out into a chamber that took up nearly half the dome, filled with massive cargo cranes and a pair of loading gantries constructed over cargo lifts that ran deep down into the bowels of the sub-levels dug down into the bedrock under the buildfoam structure.
The mules were poised under one of the cargo cranes, waiting with stolid indifference as each was loaded down with the massive bulk of a Planet-Killer missile. The missiles themselves were huge, twenty meters long, and they hung off the end of the cargo mules, their sheer weight forcing the massive legs of the machines deep into their suspensions. Brunner’s tech was making adjustments to the magnetic restraints that held the cargo in place, and Fontenot was stepping out from behind the controls for one of the cranes.
The cyborg’s natural eye flickered toward Sandi and the pilot waved frantically, pointing a wordless warning back at the doors as she dragged Adam away from them.
“They’re coming!” Sandi yelled, running toward the squad of Rif soldiers.
The doors exploded inward a second later, spinning off their mounts in a haze of smoke, a wave of concussion throwing Sandi across the concrete floor and driving the breath out of her. Adam smacked against a support beam and fell, limp and unconscious, but Sandi fought to keep her eyes open and her brain working despite the haze over her thoughts and the stars floating in her vision and the whistling, hollow whine in her ears. She rolled onto her side and fumbled with her pistol, trying to reload it; a small part of her mind that was still thinking clearly was shocked she’d been able to hold onto it.
She’d managed to eject the empty magazine and was patting at her vest pouches for a full one when the La Sombra troops rushed through the doorway into the swirling cloud of smoke and dust their concussion grenade had generated. Rocket rounds flashed across the room each way like swarms of fireflies, flaring off of metal equipment in what seemed like an endless series of pop-crack-bangs that echoed through the hollow chamber. Sandi blinked at the polychromatic flashes, not blinded because of the automatic polarization of her goggles, and finally found a magazine, sliding it into the grip of her pistol and slamming it home.
Fontenot was taking shelter behind the support for the crane, while the others were seeking cover behind the meter-wide legs of the mules, but the tech hadn’t made it; he was lying at the front foot-pads of one of the cargo-hauler robots, shaking in deep shock, bleeding out from multiple torso hits. Sandi rolle
d onto her stomach, her pistol stretched out in front of her, and began pumping rounds into the La Sombra troops.
They were faceless behind visored helmets and uniform in their tan and grey armor and rocket-firing carbines, and there were over a dozen of them trying to force their way through into the inventory handling chamber. Three were down already, but they weren’t stopping for casualties, driven on from behind by a tall figure in black armor.
Damn it. She’d hoped Singh had at least been wounded badly enough to take him out of the fight, but he’d just been waiting for the cartel soldiers to catch up to him. Sandi snarled and tried to target the bounty hunter, but the rounds impacted a cartel mercenary in front of him, sending the man staggering backwards. She couldn’t tell at first if his armor had stopped the rounds, but he fell to one knee, a hand clenching at his chest, and Singh saw it and retreated back to the other side of the doors, willing to let the cartel gunman do the dying in his place.
The other La Sombra troops, discerning in seconds that they wouldn’t be able to overrun the Rif position without taking too many casualties and now, suddenly without Singh in their midst to urge them on, spread out and took cover behind a row of pallet jacks. Jordi, she had to admit, had trained them well; they continued to pour suppressive fire towards Fontenot’s squad, keeping them pinned down. Their ammo load-out wouldn’t last long, but it didn’t have to; they had more troops out there, two landers full of them Ash had said. If they’d taken out Brunner and her squad already…
And Ash---what had happened to Ash? That had to be Singh’s wife piloting the white cutter, the woman he’d called Freya. If she was the one who’d been flying it back on Anansi, she was damned good; a sinking feeling tugged at Sandi’s stomach at an image of Ash disappearing in a fireball on the other side of the planet. If he was dead, they all were…and maybe it was better that way. She’d been alone long enough, and going back to it, living her life with no friends and no family, seemed worse than dying here on this snowball world.
She reloaded her pistol again, tossing the expended magazine behind her, unable to hear it impact on the concrete from the ringing in her ears. She didn’t, she decided, want to die lying on the ground and hiding like a rabbit. She risked a look back at Adam and saw him stirring, curled up on the floor, head cradled in his hands, probably concussed. If he was out of it and tried to stand up in the middle of the crossfire…
“Fontenot!” She yelled into her ‘link’s pickup. “Cover me, I’m going to get the kid!”
The cyborg’s reply was lost in the gunfire and lost on her battered ears; Sandi would just have to figure she’d said “yes.” She eeled across the floor on her belly, moving as quickly as she could and hoping that the increased volume of fire she could hear above her was outgoing rather than incoming. Adam saw her coming and seemed to come back to his senses a little, trying to squeeze smaller behind the support beam. She could see a cut oozing blood on his forehead where he’d smacked into the column, but his eyes looked like they were focusing on her.
“Come on!” She yelled in his ear over the crescendo of gunfire, taking his arm and leading him in a hunched-over sprint away from the narrow support column and toward the base of the nearest cargo crane, where Fontenot and two of the others from her squad were already taking cover.
It was only twenty-five meters, but it felt to Sandi like it was on the other side of the planet. Rocket-propelled projectiles whipped back and forth so close she felt the heat of their passage, so close that one of them tugged at her insulated fatigue pants and she tried to run faster, but Adam stumbled.
They were four meters from safety when something hot as the sun and hard as a sledgehammer slammed between her shoulder blades and she pitched forward, pushing Adam ahead of her and into Fontenot’s waiting grasp with the last bit of strength and control she had. Pain exploded in her upper back and she tumbled out of control, her pistol flying away from her. She threw her arms in front of her face just in time to land on them, the pain from the impact almost as bad as the pain from being shot.
Gasping for a breath that wouldn’t come, unable to move, and certain she was dead, she stared helplessly ahead of where she’d fallen, her vision blurry. There was a mass of black and khaki moving towards her, and the faint line of rational thought she was squeezing past the agony in her back knew it had to be the La Sombra mercenaries rushing forward…and then they were falling. Blood and smoke and sparks and the flash of rocket warheads igniting metal to plasma combined in a collage of carnage, and the mercenaries jerked and spun and collapsed one after another. She squeezed her eyes shut, convinced she was hallucinating from blood loss, but when she opened them again, she saw Lena Brunner striding through the door like she owned the place, a smoke-shrouded carbine nestled in her grip.
“Get the missiles out to the shuttle,” she snapped, looking past Sandi, over at Fontenot. “The boy too, get him on board and watch him.”
Someone was kneeling over her; she couldn’t see their face from where she’d fallen, but she felt their touch, felt it when they rolled her onto her stomach. Pain blossomed again as they unfastened her armored vest and pulled it away from her back.
“Is she going to make it?” Brunner wanted to know.
She’s talking about me, Sandi realized dimly, feeling as if she was floating somewhere above herself.
“Armor stopped most of it,” a man’s voice said with clinical detachment from behind her. “The warhead detonated against the thickest part of the plate…it’s mostly concussion, a nasty burn, but…” A pause that might have been a shrug and then she felt something warm and soft and sticky against her back and almost immediately the pain began to fade. “I got a smart bandage on her. That and some rest, she’ll be fine in twenty or thirty hours.”
She scowled at that. She sure hadn’t felt fine. Shit. If I’m not dying, then I can talk.
“Ash,” she forced out, her voice strained and ragged as she tried to raise her head. “Is he okay?” Brunner moved around to where Sandi could see her, and she was grinning harshly.
“Your boyfriend saved our asses, Hollande. Took out that cutter and got one of the landers before the other one bugged out.” The big woman snorted a laugh, shaking her head. “I guess you two are going to work out after all.”
She felt a wash of relief, and she wasn’t sure if it was that or the drugs, but a fluffy whiteness absorbed her and everything faded from view.
Chapter Seventeen
Ash laid awake in the dark, holding Sandi while she slept. The cabin was tiny, but it was better than what the rest of the crew and passengers on board the lighter had, with three or even four people squeezed into a compartment the same size. Brunner had surprised him when she’d suggested mating the Acheron to the lighter for the Transition, so that he could be with Sandi while she convalesced; it had seemed far too human for the ruthless enforcer. Sandi had decided that Brunner was just so happy about having the missiles that she’d forgotten to pretend to be a badass for a moment.
Ash hadn’t argued the point; he knew Sandi wanted to stay on the cargo vessel so she would have an opportunity to sabotage the missiles, and there was no way in hell he was going to leave her on the lighter by herself while he sat on the Acheron effectively a whole universe away.
She stirred against him and he stroked her hair gently until she settled back into whatever dream was disturbing her subconscious. His hand trailed down her shoulder and he felt the edge of the smart bandage she still wore over the wound there; the nanites it sustained with its biotic infusion were still rebuilding the tissue of her skin, nerves and muscles and the topical anesthetic coating it was keeping her free of pain while they did it. The ship’s medic had told them it could come off in another twenty hours, before they returned to Tangier.
He’d come so damn close to losing her, and the thought bothered him even more than how close he’d come to dying himself. He’d blacked out from the sudden, violent deceleration over Peboan’s equatorial sea, and had only reg
ained consciousness once the Acheron had climbed into near orbit, trailing clouds of radioactive vapor that surely hadn’t endeared him to the planet’s civilian authorities.
By the time he’d made it back to the weapons depot, Brunner and her people had been pinned down by the La Sombra mercenaries and were taking casualties. He’d destroyed one of the landers on the ground, then strafed the opposition troops to take the heat off Brunner. Singh had gotten away, from what Sandi had told him, which was not good, especially since that meant that Ash must have killed the bounty hunter’s wife on their cutter. Singh had already been bad enough when the two of them were just another bounty; Ash didn’t want to think how dangerous the man would be now that it was personal.
“Transition in twenty minutes.” That was the Captain’s voice coming over the boat’s intercom. Ash hadn’t had the chance to talk to the man, but he’d been briefly introduced. The lighter’s master was a weathered, rough-hewn man with the unlikely name of James Red Arrow and the look of an old pirate to him.
Ash sighed and rested his head back tiredly against the pillow. There was no use putting it off; he nudged Sandi and he could feel her wake instantly with a slight, sharp intake of breath.
“What?” Her voice was clear and cogent without the grogginess of sleep.
“We’re almost there,” he told her. “She wanted us on the bridge for this.”
He felt her nod, then she rolled over and touched a spot on the bulkhead and a small panel lit up in the overhead. Their clothes were piled on the deck at the foot of the cot and she sorted quickly through the stack, tossing his to him while she pulled on her own, just ship-wear shorts and a T-shirt, with a utility vest thrown on over it just to have pockets, and finally spacer’s boots. She’d had it fabricated on the cheap back on Tangier, since she hadn’t brought anything with her.
“This is a mistake,” she opined, following him out of the cabin to the auxiliary airlock. “Jordi doesn’t get intimidated.”