Revelation Run

by Rick Partlow

  “If nowhere has an ass end,” the jailer growled, “then you’re in it.”

  A pause and Terrin thought that might be as good an answer as he was going to get, but the man apparently wasn’t as bad as his eyes and voice made him seem.

  “Revelation,” he said. “You’re on Revelation. And Mithra help you both.”

  11

  The Palladium was a grand name for a seedy nightclub patronized by the scum of the Dominions. Lyta Randell was sure she’d seen worse in a career spent slicing through the dark underbelly of society with a bayonet, but she couldn’t think where. The driving beat of music ten years out of date, the bass vibration she felt in her sinuses, the raucous undertone of people yelling at the top of their lungs just to be heard, the disorganized thrashing that passed for dancing, all that would have been bad enough. The borderline pornographic videos running on a loop on multiple flat screens at the perimeter of the dance floor were the capper, though, the straw that broke the camel’s back of bad taste.

  “Places like this,” Kurtz confided in her at the top of his lungs, “are why I don’t like the city.”

  “We’re inside an outlaw space station as remote as your Coonskin Holler,” she yelled back into his ear. “This is not ‘the city,’ at least by any definition of the word I ever heard.”

  He shrugged, apparently confident he’d made his point anyway, and kept scanning the crowd with eyes a bit too wide to be inconspicuous. She almost kept at it—giving the country boy shit was more fun than she’d imagined it would be—but she was too busy trying to track Logan and Mira on the other side of the dance floor. The girl wasn’t happy to be here at all. When Logan had sent Katy and Acosta back to the shuttle to keep it ready for a quick getaway, Mira had begged to go with them; but Logan had insisted she personally identify the bounty hunters.

  She understood the girl’s fear, but Logan had made the right call in bringing her along. In a situation like this, you didn’t want to be guessing whether you had the right targets. Of course, Lyta wasn’t happy to be here either, but for different reasons. She and Acosta had taken the unpopular position that they should have headed to Revelation immediately to secure the data crystals. Not that she didn’t love Terrin like a little brother, but the mission always came first. She’d almost been relieved when Logan had overruled her, not because she thought she was wrong, but simply because she wanted to rescue Terrin first and following orders was as good an excuse as any to take what she knew was the less responsible course of action.

  She also wasn’t happy they couldn’t bring their guns into the club. She’d tried to convince Mira to wait for the men outside one of the exits so they could do this while they were armed, but the young woman was insanely paranoid about being conspicuous. She was convinced Salvaggio’s people could get to her family back on Revelation if they knew what she’d done, and she might have been right.

  Mira was staring intently at someone Lyta couldn’t see, at a group of tables behind a section of the club walled off from the dance floor. She tried to raise her hand to point, but Logan intercepted it by her side and shook his head. Lyta grinned in spite of the situation. The boy wasn’t bad at this, for all that he made a living driving a mech. If he lived through all this and eventually wound up as Guardian after his father, at least the head of the Spartan government would be someone who could keep his head under pressure.

  Logan had pulled out his datalink and punched something into it before tucking it back on his belt, so she wasn’t surprised when her own ‘link vibrated for her attention. The message was brief and to the point: TARGETS ACQUIRED.

  “Come on, Country Boy,” she nudged Kurtz. “Showtime.”

  Making their way across the dance floor was worse than trying to traverse a mine field, because at least the mines stayed in one place. More than anything, the gyrating, out of control swarm of intoxicated bodies reminded Lyta of martial arts training; halfway across, she began treating it like a session in the dojo, blocking and ducking and weaving. Poor Kurtz wasn’t as experienced and she saw the man take an elbow to the neck and nearly go down. The “dancer” barely noticed, despite Kurtz’s snarled warning, and Lyta had to yank on Country Boy’s arm to keep him from taking a swing at the one who’d hit him.

  “They’re over there,” Logan told her when they made it across to his position. He nodded surreptitiously over to the tables and she tried to glance in that direction out of the corner of her eye. “And guess who’s with them?”

  She didn’t have to guess. She remembered the Security officer, Chica Lopes very well from their short acquaintance, most of it from over the barrel of a gun. Lopes wasn’t in uniform at the moment; instead, she wore a surprisingly feminine outfit of soft colors and trailing ribbons totally unsuited to her personal demeanor.

  Well, sometimes a gal just wants to let her hair down, I suppose.

  The two men with her weren’t potential suitors or dance partners, though. They were dressed for business, if your business was busting heads. Their matching black leather jackets weren’t a uniform, but she could tell they were reinforced with armor, probably bullet-resistant and definitely protection against blades and stunners. The jackets and the general air of thuggish badassery were the only things the two men had in common; otherwise, they could have been opposite ends of the genetic spectrum. The one on the right was tall and thin, with a face like the head of an axe, so narrow his eyes seemed in danger of meeting in the middle. Everyone called him Ham, according to Mira, though she had no idea why.

  His partner was at least a head shorter and twice as wide, with arms as big around as the taller man’s legs and so long that his knuckles almost dragged on the ground when he walked. Mira had told them he was known as Monk, and Lyta could at least see the reference for that one, having encountered monkeys on the various worlds where the climate had been appropriate to introduce them after terraforming. Though she thought this guy was more akin to a mountain gorilla than a monkey.

  According to Mira, they were Momma Salvaggio’s bully boys, both a side hustle and a means of keeping the riff-raff in line. Nearly everyone who did business on Trinity was wanted by one Dominion or another, and those who stayed long-term, or used the station as a place to do business were urged to pay protection to Salvaggio’s security force. The ones who chose not to take advantage of the service were scooped up by the bounty hunters and turned in for the reward.

  The woman had an eye for making a profit, Lyta had to give her that.

  “Lyta,” Logan said right next to her ear, “circle around the other side.” He motioned at the short set of stairs on the other side of the dance floor, leading up to the next level where the tables were located near the restrooms and the rear exits. “Kurtz and I will talk to them at the table. Mira,” he told the younger woman, “you wait by the exit, okay? If anything goes wrong, just head straight for our shuttle and Katy will take you back to the ship.”

  The girl took off immediately, apparently happy to be as far away from them as possible, and Lyta snorted in amusement. Life was so much simpler when you stopped expecting to live through it.

  Moving back across the dance floor was simpler without trying to drag Kurtz along. She danced herself, whirling and eeling through the crowd, hugging the edges, her right shoulder scraping along the stone and plastic there. She was grateful the sleeve of her utility fatigues was thick because the wall was damp with something, probably a lot of different somethings. She held her breath, determined not to figure out what they were, and finally she reached the steps, squeezing by a tall, statuesque young woman wobbling precariously on ten-centimeter heels, each hand holding a colorful cocktail.

  She’d been worried Lopes would notice her approach and recognize her, but the security officer seemed absorbed in whatever conversation she was having with Monk and Ham, gesticulating broadly like she was telling them a war story.

  Probably bragging about how badly she intimidated us.

  In fact, the woman barely noticed w
hen Logan and Kurtz stepped right up to the table beside her. Monk and Ham spotted them immediately, their hands leaving the sweating glass of their drinks and reaching automatically under their jackets. Her nerves buzzed an alert up and down her spine, a suspicion they’d bribed guns past the club security—or maybe simply bullied their way through on the strength of their position with Salvaggio’s organization. She glanced around quickly, searching for makeshift weapons, found a quartet of pool tables squashed too close together in an alcove just beside the bathroom. People were playing on them—badly, drunken—despite the close quarters, but none noticed when she slipped a cue from the rack on the wall.

  “Slaughter,” Lopes said, surprise heavy in her voice as she finally looked up and saw the two men. “What are you doing here?”

  “That’s ‘Colonel Slaughter,’ Officer Lopes,” he admonished her with a stern brashness she knew was affected. He was most likely mimicking his father, she thought. “And I’m here because I wanted to speak to your friends here.”

  “Do we know you?” Ham demanded, obviously the more talkative of the pair. His hand hadn’t quite made it beneath his jacket, but it was close enough to get there quickly if need be.

  “You don’t. But we were here to meet a potential client, a potentially lucrative client, and I’ve been told you were the last ones to see him.”

  Monk snorted but said nothing. Ham grinned broadly.

  “We’ve been the last thing a lot of people have seen, you know what I mean?” He turned his neck to the side, cracking the vertebrae loud enough to be heard over the bass beat. “You’ll have to be more specific.”

  His accent was Starkad, she thought, somewhere urban, maybe Stavanger itself; and from his bearing and attitude, she was sure he was former military. An asshole, but a dangerous asshole.

  “His name is Terry Conner,” Logan told him, acting as if he really expected an answer. “He was here just over a week ago.”

  They tried, she’d give them that. They did their best to pretend the name meant nothing to them, but Ham had a tell, a muscle twitching next to his right eye.

  “Never heard of him,” Ham grunted, then shut himself up by taking a swallow of his drink. Monk said nothing, and Lyta was beginning to wonder if he was actually capable of human speech.

  Finally, Chica Lopes spoke up, and Lyta got the feeling it was because the bounty hunters had stopped talking and the security officer’s instinct was to fill the gap.

  “The gentlemen have said they don’t know your friend, Colonel Slaughter,” she told Logan, clearly trying to assert some authority, though her voice sounded distinctly buzzed and not conducive to the effort. “So, why don’t you just move along?”

  “I think I know the kind of people you’re used to dealing with,” Logan said, ignoring Lopes, directing his words at the bounty hunters.

  His tone had drifted away from the emulation of his father’s imperiousness and towards a different voice, one uniquely his own. She’d initially thought of it as his “Jonathan Slaughter” voice, but she’d changed her mind. This was Logan Conner now.

  “Outlaws, men and women with a price on their heads, no backup, no support. People you can make disappear and no one will notice.” Logan moved a step closer, hands flat on the table, leaning over Ham with an expression as deadly as the one the bounty hunter had affected. “I am not one of those people. I don’t kill people retail, one at a time for spare change. Like it says right here…” He nodded toward the unit patch on his shoulder. “…we deal in wholesale slaughter. It’s not just my name, it’s a job description. Believe me when I say, if the two of you get between me and a deal that could make me money, keep my mecha repaired and my people fed, I will leave your bodies bleeding in these tunnels and no one will ever remember they used to be scared of you.”

  Lyta was impressed. Putting together a credible threat was an art form, and his was as good as any she’d used in a long and colorful career. She was even more impressed by the lack of fear behind it. Not that Logan wasn’t afraid; he wasn’t a psychopath, and facing down stone killers in a nest of outlaws was enough to give anyone pause. But he hadn’t shown a micron of it, and she saw the worry in Ham’s eyes, maybe even a bit in Monk’s stolid expression. Neither of their hands continued the slow traverse under their jackets.

  It might have ended peacefully with the two bounty hunters giving them the information they needed, except for the one thing guaranteed to screw up the smoothest of transactions: a self-important drunk who believes they’ve been disrespected.

  “You listen to me, fucking Colonel gun-for-hire,” Chica Lopes spat the words, pushing herself up to her feet and getting into Logan’s face. “You may be used to pushing people around, but not on my fucking station!”

  Lyta saw it before Logan or Kurtz, saw the woman’s hand reaching back under her frilled, mauve jacket, grasping the handle of the concealed pistol, and she was in motion, swinging the pool cue in an arc she’d learned with a katana as a young teenager. The end of the cue smacked into the security officer’s wrist with a double-crack of faux-wood snapping at the hinge point and the wrist breaking a microsecond later. The gun went flying and Lyta made the rookie mistake of trying to follow its flight, desperate for a real weapon in the face of the guns she assumed the bounty hunters had.

  She’d taken her eyes off of them for the briefest of moments, but it was long enough for them to make their move, prodded into action by the sudden violence, the breaking bone, the piercing scream as the agony burned through Lopes’ alcohol haze. She rushed in to take them out before they had the chance to try to run, but it was too late. Lopes stumbled into her way, swinging at her one-handed with admirable spunk and a natural brawling ability, and she had to waste the second it took to plant what was left of the cue across the woman’s jaw and the side of her neck.

  Lopes went down like a felled tree, collapsing backwards and getting in her way just long enough. Ham had bolted, running straight into Logan and trying to bowl him over, but the kid had a low center of gravity and enough training from her to take the rush and redistribute it into a hip toss. The tall bounty hunter flopped through the air and tumbled right over the dividing wall onto the dance floor, flailing legs and arms catching everything around him and took three of the club’s patrons down with him in a tangle of limbs. Shouts, screams, breaking glass all sent ripples of disruption through the crowd like a rock thrown into a pond, sent people stumbling out of the way, bumping into other dancers, spreading the chaos.

  Logan followed him over the wall, leaving her and Kurtz to deal with Monk, who didn’t seem in the mood to run. The big man roared like a wounded elephant, tossing the table on its side in a fountain of cheap liquor and broken glass, and charging directly into the unlucky Valentine Kurtz. To his credit, Kurtz didn’t turn and beat feet in the opposite direction, despite the fact the big man had a good ten or fifteen kilograms on him. Lyta was still a good three steps away and there weren’t too many good strategies for dealing with someone that much stronger and heavier, but Kurtz, at least, didn’t choose the worst of them.

  He went low, diving for Monk’s knees, risking taking one of them right to the face in an effort to get beneath the big man’s center of gravity. Lyta didn’t wait to see if the strategy worked; she threw herself over the upturned table and slammed the jagged end of the broken pool cue into Monk’s right shoulder blade with as much force as two solid decades of training could impart to it. She had no illusions the improvised weapon could penetrate the armored jacket, but it didn’t have to—it just had to keep the muscle-head from drawing his gun. The scapula was too large and too deep for her to hear it break, but his right arm went limp and the breath went out of him in an agonized whoosh. She resisted the urge to put the next blow behind his right ear, since they needed him alive. Instead, she jumped onto his back and wedged the half of a pool cue under his chin, yanking him backwards.

  “Get his gun!” she yelled at Kurtz just before Monk collapsed back onto her.


  Lyta tucked her head in close beside his and tried to turn him, tried to force his body to the side to let his weight land on his shoulder instead of her back, but she was only partially successful. A dull, concussive pain exploded in her back and up through her ribs as her shoulders slammed into the floor, then rebounded with the weight of the bounty hunter on her chest. Monk thrashed to the left, trying to work himself free with his good arm, trying to throw her off, and he nearly succeeded.

  She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, couldn’t see through the flashes of stars in her vision. Her ribs felt cracked, but she held on, ignoring the agony in her side and pulling back on the pool cue with everything she had. More weight piled on to the already-substantial bulk of the bounty hunter and she thought it had to be Kurtz, but she couldn’t see anything past the wild tangle of Monk’s blond hair.

  Her vision cleared in time to see Kurtz yanking the gun from Monk’s shoulder holster. It wasn’t a conventional pistol, though, it was a dart launcher, maybe loaded with drugged hypodermics, maybe with stun capacitors. Just the sort of thing a bounty hunter would find useful for capturing wanted men and women. He tried to aim it at Monk and Lyta clenched her teeth reflexively, about to scream at him not to do it—a stun capacitor would conduct right through him and into her—when he visibly changed his mind and crashed the butt of the gun down into the bounty hunter’s jaw.

  It didn’t knock the man out, but it took the fight out of him and she was able to sink the choke hold in, pressing the pool cue home into his carotid until he went slack. She held it a few seconds after that, knowing he wouldn’t be under long, and when she let go she had to wave at Kurtz to come help her move the big man off her.

  “He’ll have restraints,” she said, her voice still a croak as breath rushed back into her lungs. She squirmed out from beneath Monk while Kurtz held him up, heard the mech-jock grunting with the effort. “Get them on him.”