by S. C. Jensen
The skids milling about the hockmarket would have sold me out in a heartbeat. I was nothing to them.
But every single one of them would have people who weren’t nothing. Friends and family they’d step in front of a slug for, take a bullet for, give up their last scrap of food for. And if they weren’t worth anything, neither were Tom or Rae or Dickie. If I went after Price to satisfy my own need for revenge, I’d be no better than he was. I clenched my jaw and felt the wire cut into my flesh. Something warm and wet trickled down my throat.
But I didn’t move.
Price narrowed his eyes at me like he was inspecting a black mould growing on his favourite laboratory experiment, equal parts fascination and disappointment all wrapped up with a little bow of scorn. “You were right, Lorena. She is predictable in her own unusual way. Is the drone ready?”
“It’s waiting on the roof,” she said, like the teacher’s favourite student whose already completed the bonus assignment. “I took the liberty of chilling a bottle of—”
“Ready the extraction kit,” he said. “I’m bringing this one with me.”
“Her?” The blonde woman’s jaw dropped, and she spun to face Price. “What could you possibly want with this—”
“I didn’t ask for your opinion, Lorena.” His voice dropped about twenty degrees and left ice crystals hanging in the air between them.
I lifted my fingers to my throat and felt around the wire. My pistol lay on the ground, just out of reach. Price had his back to me, so I stretched out the toe of my boot as far as I could without adding pressure to the wire around my throat. Dickie rolled over with a grunt and shook his head. Price and Valentia ignored us both.
Valentia glowered with the intensity of a storm scudding in over the harbour and stepped down the stairs toward him as if she wasn’t finished yet. As she opened her mouth to protest further, Price put up a bloodied hand and turned his dead shark eyes on her. “Now.”
My toe clipped the butt of the pistol and it spun out of my reach. Dickie groped around his torso as if wondering whose body his head was attached to and rolled onto his hands and knees. I had no idea what an extraction involved, but I had a feeling I didn’t want to find out. I willed Dickie to look my way. Maybe he could kick the pistol toward me. Maybe he could—
Valentia closed her thin-lipped mouth and stomped down the stairs past the tables covered in chunks of meat, and Dickie lunged for her with the zapper clutched in his hand. The prongs connected with Valentia’s bare calf and sent an arc of electricity exploding over her body. The blue jolt of juice crackled over her body the same way the green flickers had wrapped around Libra’s towers before they went down. That didn’t seem right. Valentia screeched and jerked away from Dickie’s weapon, but her body twitched and seized beyond her control. Smoke poured out of her ears and her perfect-blue eyeballs burst out of her head in a shower of sparks. Her skin melted down her face in a waterfall of flesh-coloured liquid, exposing chunks of metal beneath the skin. Dickie screamed and scrambled away on his hands and knees like a crab, his face twisted in terror. He dropped the zapper on the ground.
Lorena Valentia had been Price’s other success. Lorena and Patti were like twins separated at birth. I didn’t have time to think about it.
“Get her,” Price demanded, and the two guards dropped their cases on the stairs.
The faceless silver helmets turned to me, and they stepped forward in unison, marching toward me like police droids with orders to contain a prisoner. I backed up, toward the computer my wire was attached to, not wanting to risk accidentally setting off the pulse bomb.
Then everything happened at once.
Dickie flung himself forward, launching himself at the fallen electroshock weapon as though he no longer cared what was happening as long as he was armed. Price lunged forward and stomped on Dickie’s hand with his shiny, white dress shoes and kicked the zapper away from him. The guards grabbed me and wrenched me forward. The wire bit into my skin and closed off the last whistling passage of air I had left. I clawed at my throat and fell to my knees. And the hockmarket exploded in a ball of green flame and huge arcing forks of electricity.
“No!” I tried to scream but the words and my air strangled in my throat, and I fell forward, writhing on the floor, with a black fog obliterating my vision.
A sound like glass breaking crackled above me. Icy rain and debris showered my face. Voices shouted all around me, but I couldn’t make sense of anything. Chills wracked my body, and my limbs shook. I flailed my stump and couldn’t figure out why my upgrade wasn’t working. The room seemed to expand and contract with my heartbeat. Soldiers in black swarmed the laboratory, firing bolts of plasma from long, deadly looking weapons. I watched it all through a dreamlike haze.
The last thing I saw before my head went under the cold, black sea of unconsciousness was a woman with purple hair throwing balls of fire with her hands.
I managed to suck a thin mouthful of air into my lungs, and I forced it back out, trying to say, “Dickie—”
But I didn’t know if the word ever made it out.
Or if he could have heard me if it had.
When I regained consciousness, Tom’s swollen, bloodied face floated in front of mine. That image would haunt me until I died. The nightmare of my failure embodied in the face of the man I loved, broken because I’d failed to protect him. “I’m sorry, Tom,” I whispered. “I love you. Always did.”
“I know.” His gravelly voice rumbled from his chest, so close to me that I could feel it in my own. “I love you too.”
Calloused fingers twined with my flesh hand, and a thumb rubbed the inside of my wrist. Warm and slightly clammy. So real that my eyes stung with tears. I’d never be able to handle dreams like this. It would have been better to be dead than to carry the weight of this loss for the rest of my life.
“This isn’t fair,” I said. “It should have been me.”
“I’m glad it wasn’t,” he said, and the calloused fingers wiped away my tears. He held something to my lips, one grey iris watching me from beneath an eyelid like a rotting piece of fruit, bruised and oozing.
I sipped. Water. My throat burned as I swallowed, but the water felt cool and fresh. Not the substanceless ether of dreams. I swallowed again. He said, “There you go.”
I tried to push myself up on the cot, but I only had one hand, and that hand was being crushed against his meaty palm. I said, “Am I hallucinating?”
“No,” he said. “But I’d probably say that even if you were, wouldn’t I?”
He wrapped an arm around me and helped me to sit up in the bed. He smelled like blood and antiseptic.
I said, “You’re alive?”
“What’s left of me, I guess.” He chuckled and then winced. “A few broken ribs, a punctured lung, and I’m down an ear and a couple of toenails. But Sal’s gal, Oki, assures me they’ll grow back. The toenails, not the ear.”
I shifted my weight and my head spun. I balanced on one hip and reached up to touch his face. His skin twitched beneath my fingertips, and he breathed in sharply, but he didn’t move away. I said, “Oki is okay? The kids? What happened?”
“I guess your cyber-witch friend gets off on high-stakes gambling.” He licked his lips and grinned at me. He was missing a couple of teeth, too. “She made a trade with Nathanial Price—Patti for a handful of her compatriots from the Barrens.”
“She was from the Barrens,” I said. “I knew she’d been acting weird when Gore . . . Wait a minute. Where is Gore?”
“Here. He’s fine,” he said. “Johanna and her friends are members of a guerrilla anti-corp group that’s been messing with inter-Terran tech companies for the last decade. Gore and I did some work for the HoloCity Trade Zone, monitoring the threat posed by groups like hers. Turns out, there aren’t any like the cyber-witches of the Barrens.”
“The flame throwing,” I
said. I’ve never seen anything like that.”
“Neither had Libra,” Tom said. “A couple of years ago, they were captured in a raid and sold off to the highest bidder. Libra bought them. Johanna managed to escape but got picked up in one of LunAstro’s refugee sweeps. She bided her time until an opportunity came up to free her friends. Price became that opportunity when he tried to leverage her to get his hands on Patti Whyte.”
“So why didn’t she take off once she had her friends?” I said.
“Johanna never planned to leave Patti with Price,” Gore said. “She was going to play him. But when she found out what you and Gore had been planning, she saw another opportunity.”
“Yeah,” I said. “An opportunity to light Gore on fire and cut us out of her deal. That’s what it looked like from my end.”
“I guess you didn’t see the whole picture.” Tom stood up from the edge of my bed with a groan and shuffled across the room. I swung my legs over the edge of the bed, swaying slightly, and planted my feet for better balance. I didn’t recognize the room we were in, but it was cozy and private. Low yellow light cast a candlelit glow on the pale walls. The familiar slope of his shoulders as he walked away from me sent a thrill up my spine.
“Wouldn’t be the first time.” I ducked my face to hide the flush creeping into my cheeks.
Tom wasn’t dead. Tom was in my room. And he’d heard the words I’d meant to say for all those years. Wished I’d said. And he’d said them back.
My heart pounded in my chest like I’d just ran up ten flights of stairs. What were we going to do now? My vision started to fade, and I suddenly thought I was going to pass out again.
Tom picked up the little silver sphere that held Hammett and tossed it to me. I leaned forward to catch it and as my fingers wrapped around the SmartPet my body kept falling forward.
“Hey!” Suddenly Tom was at my side again. and I was on my back on the floor, staring at the unfamiliar ceiling. He said, “Sorry. Are you okay?”
“I didn’t see any of this coming.”
He hoisted me into a sitting position and propped me against the mattress. The heat from his body next to mine felt like the rush I used to chase night after night in neon-lit Grit strip bars, filtered and condensed to the point that I really saw the glow-up for the cheap imitation high it was.
He said, “Maybe you were distracted.”
“Yeah,” I said. I ran my thumb over the scanner on Hammett’s sphere, but nothing happened. “Why don’t you fill me in.”
“It’s a good thing Dickie’s not here.” Tom elbowed me gently in the ribs. “You’d never hear the end of that one.”
I blushed again. What was the matter with me? Then the rush of blood seeped out of me and left my skin chilled. “Dickie . . . Is he . . . ?”
“He’s fine,” Tom said. “Telling everyone how lucky you are that he was there to protect you.”
I laughed, relief spinning in my head. I said, “Okay. I can live with that.”
“Here’s the quick and dirty,” Tom said. “Because if the rest of the crew finds out you’re up and I’ve been hogging you to myself, they’re going to break my other ribs and send me on a space walk—”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Are we in orbit?”
Tom nodded. “Cosmo came through with the bangtail you requested. And he has supplied quite the team to fly it.”
He ran a huge hand tenderly over the top of his skull, as if looking for new bumps.
I shook my head again, afraid I was going to wake up and this time find myself hanging in cold storage in the Creep Stacks’ organ bank.
“Johanna tagged both you and Gore with a tracker,” Tom said. “Yours was on Hammett and Gore’s was on the flash drive in Gore’s bag.”
“But Oki checked that stuff,” I said. “She got rid of the tracker.”
“That wasn’t hers,” he said. “I guess an organ grinder gang got the jump on Gore and tried to use him to send a message to their rivals. You guys were in the wrong place at the wrong time.” He shook his head. “The old boy must be getting lazy. Johanna tagged you on the bangtail. A lot of Barrens’ tech is undetectable by our scanners.”
“So she knew where we were?”
“By the time Sal had dropped off Oki and the kids at the pick-up location,” Tom said, “Johanna already had her friends back. She had plans to break out more of Libra’s prisoners and wanted to catch up with Gore before he went in. She didn’t realize Gore wasn’t there until he and her team intercepted one of Price’s creatures hauling away Sal and girl.”
“What are those things?” I said. “Is that what happens to people when Price’s program takes over their brain?”
“You’ll have to ask Johanna and Patti about that,” he said.
“Patti?”
“Is still with us,” Tom said. “And she has news about Rae. Good news for once.”
Holy Origin, I’d forgotten about Rae. Guilt welled up inside me and the tears that had been threatening to spill out poured down my cheeks in hot trails. I struggled to stand. “Mr. Fen,” I said, “and Rae. Necklaces. Lorena Valentia was controlling them with nanoids. Everyone at the LunAstro base is in danger. I have to go. I have to—”
“You have to sit and rest.” He held me back with a heavy hand on my shoulder. “And let someone else handle things for a little while. Patti had the same epiphany and explained everything. We’re on our way to get Rae. Nothing you can do right now will make it go any faster.”
I pressed Hammett’s sphere again, but the battery was still dead. I said, “Rae’s okay. You’re okay. Dickie’s okay. All despite the fact that I managed to screw up every step of the way.”
“Is that what you think?”
I shrugged and leaned my head against his shoulder and closed my eyes. I saw Libra’s towers come down in a ball of green flame. The explosion in the hockmarket. I said, “I fell. All those people died because I . . .”
“Because you couldn’t breathe with a wire wrapped around your neck?” Tom said. “Be careful. We might start thinking you’re human. Which, incidentally, is what screwed up Price’s plans.”
“What do you mean?”
“That bomb in the Grit was set to blow no matter what you did,” he said. “He was playing with you. But something you did surprised him. He didn’t leave when he should have. Why?”
I rubbed my eyes with my flesh fingers and leaned against Tom to stay upright. But I couldn’t remember. I said, “What happened to Price?”
Tom’s body tensed. He said, “Johanna’s plan was nearly perfect. She and her team could give SecurIntel a run for their money. But she was too late. Price got away. One of her people managed to get the case with Patti’s brain and CBI but—”
“My arm.” I suddenly felt like I’d been crushed under a back of bricks.
“I’m sorry.”
“I don’t think I can process this right now,” I said. “Is there anything I need to know right now? Or can I go back to sleep?”
“No rush.” Tom grunted and got to his feet and helped me back onto the bed. He pulled the sheets up over me and set Hammett on the bedside table. He frowned like he had something he needed to say but he didn’t want to upset me anymore. He said, “Just one thing.”
My mind rushed with possibilities. The urge to sleep evaporated in a spray of panic that surged through my chest and kicked my heart into high gear.
Then Tom’s lips were pressed against mine and I was swimming through another feeling, something soft and warm and comforting. Something I had been needing for so long I’d forgotten all about the hole it had left in my chest. I leaned into the kiss and felt this thing wrap around my heart and quiet the panic inside me. This felt right. This was what I’d been missing.
When he pulled away, I said, “You taste like antiseptic.”
He said, “Get used to it.�
��
I fell back into the pillow with a smile on my lips.
The last thing I heard was the gentle click of the door closing behind him and the thrumming of the engine as we hurtled through the black void of space. And toward my best friend.
For the moment, at least, things were going to be okay.
To Be Continued in …
Bubbles in Space: Book Four
Spit ’Em Out
Coming October 4, 2021
Pre-Order Today!
The following are some of the slang words I’ve used in Bubbles in Space. Where applicable, I have indicated the original meanings of these words from classic pulp novels. Did I miss any? Please let me know if you’d like a term added to the list! Send me a message at [email protected]
Bangtail – space shuttles, originally “racehorse”
Boiler – both personal and rental maglev vehicles, originally “car”
Button man—hit man, hired killer, original meaning
Cush – money (a cushion, something to fall back on), original meaning
Dizzy – crazy or foolish, originally “to be ga-ga for”
Drift – get lost, original meaning
Fade – to kill, originally “go away” or “get lost”
Feedcasters – live video jockeys on social media
Feedreels – live video footage covering news, social events, gossip, and entertainment topics
Glow-up – originally “a glow” was to be drunk, here used as a drug-induced high
’Gram – hologram image or video
Grid – a network, can refer to the electromagnetic transportation grid the boilers run on, or a communication network
Hack – a taxi, original meaning