by Rick Partlow
“This guy stinks like a whorehouse at high noon,” Kurtz complained, keeping the gun trained on the unconscious man while he patted him down.
Lyta, finally able to catch a full breath, had to agree: what Monk lacked in oratory skills, he made up for in the sheer amount of cologne he’d managed to dump over himself. She managed to stand, trying to keep one eye on Kurtz and his hunt for the elusive handcuffs as she kept a watch around them and tried to see if she could spot Logan.
Lopes was still on the floor, moaning softly now, holding her bruised jaw with her unbroken hand, but she wouldn’t be a threat injured, drunk and unarmed. Other customers were staring at them, but none who wanted to get involved, if she was any judge. But anyone, a bartender, a customer, a janitor could have already called security and they needed to get out of here while there was still a chance.
She spotted Logan almost immediately. The dancers and waitstaff had cleared a large spot on the floor around him and the bounty hunter they called Ham, as if the two of them were going to compete in a freestyle dance-off. To her, it looked more like a secondary school wrestling competition set to a bad music track. Logan had trapped Ham’s right hand against his body under his left arm, trying to keep the man from drawing his weapon, and was holding the left fist away from his face as they circled, each trying to hook the other’s leg. It could have been amusing if things weren’t so close to going to utter shit.
She was about to vault over the wall herself and help him, but he made his move while her hand was grabbing the edge. It was subtle, a shifting of his stance, pushing inward and forward instead of out and back, at just the right time, something you couldn’t learn drills and training, something you had to spar and spar and spar to get a feel for. A blink at the wrong time and she would have missed it—one second, they were in the middle of their high-stepping dance and the next, Ham was sprawled out on the floor with Logan’s knee in his chest.
Then the boy broke the cardinal rule she’d taught him in a thousand different sessions in the dojo: he punched Ham square in the face.
Don’t hit someone in the face with your bare knuckles, damn it, she chided him mentally.
She understood the action even as she mentally condemned it. Her lessons had always stressed hitting soft targets with hard, and when you were sitting on someone’s chest, the only soft target readily available was the throat, which could have killed one of the men they were trying to take alive. Two punches, three, two in the nose to blind the man with pain, a sharp jab to the point of the jaw to stun him, then he was stripping the gun out from beneath the man’s jacket.
Lyta tore her eyes away from the scene on the dance floor and checked on Kurtz, who had found two pairs of flex-cuffs in Monk’s pockets and was using them to secure the big man’s wrists and ankles. Monk was shaking his head, about to come to, but Kurtz aimed the dart launcher and fired into the bound man’s neck. It was a shock capacitor, she could tell by the way the muscular bounty hunter spasmed and thrashed as the stun charge coursed through his body.
It’s going to work, she dared to let herself think. We’re going to make it out of here.
Then she saw the first station security troops tromp through the front entrance, three of them in full armor, helmets on but faceplates up, hands filled with what looked like sonic stunners. The woman in the lead was panting and sweating under the brow of her helmet, having sprinted to the scene as fast as she could bearing the load. She glanced back and forth, unsure of where the emergency was with the lights still dimmed and half-naked bodies glowing on the video screens.
“Well, damn,” Lyta said mildly.
Logan already had Ham thrown over his shoulder, and she could see Kurtz struggling to get Monk up off the ground. She rushed over and helped him, getting the bulk of the heavy bounty-hunter up onto a fireman’s carry, then pushing the man toward the exit. The music had stopped. Her ears had grown so accustomed to the onslaught, it took her a moment to notice.
“Go!” she said in a harsh bellow, loud enough to make Logan turn in his tracks. “Go!” she repeated, motioning at the rear exit. “I’ll hold them off!”
She could see the battle raging inside him played out across his face, but he knew the situation as well as she did. This was the mission, and he’d chosen it. He lumbered toward the door, the lanky man hanging over him like a cape, Kurtz struggling to follow.
Lyta smiled as she hefted the half of a pool cue, spinning it around artfully in her right hand like the escrima sticks she’d learned to use as a teenager. She grabbed the edge of the dividing wall and bounded over it, taking the landing in a crouch. The video screens had gone dark and the lights came up as her feet touched the floor, bathing her and the security troops in a harsh, white glare.
One of the braver, or perhaps more intoxicated club patrons, a man tall enough to have been raised on a lighter-gravity world, lunged at Lyta with arms wide. Maybe he was trying to impress his date, or maybe he thought she was just your normal, brawling miscreant. Either way, she didn’t want to hurt him too badly, so she didn’t use the stick. Her elbow impacted his solar plexus and he pitched forward, suddenly unable to breathe.
As if his fall was a cue, the bouncers, two men with more testosterone flowing through their bloodstream than their tiny brains could handle, decided they’d be the heroes of the day and hand the crazy woman over to the security troops. Lyta sneered, deciding they didn’t deserve the restraint she’d shown with the first attacker; they’d had ample warning. Her stick flashed out, breaking an arm just below the elbow, then lashed backwards and dislocated a knee. For big men, they screamed like babies, one writhing on the floor while the other stumbled away holding his arm. The people who’d been crowding the dance floor watched her with wide eyes, frozen in position, as if they were more afraid of what she’d do if they tried to run away than they were of what she’d do to them if they stayed.
There was no missing her now. The armored woman was looking straight at her. The security troops aimed her way and advanced through the foyer, ignoring the alarms from the weapons detectors as they passed. The bouncers weren’t there to berate them, anyway. Lyta edged a step closer to the nearest cluster of dancers, and indecision narrowed the eyes of the woman in the lead, the muzzle of her sonic stunner wavering as she glanced back and forth at the civilians surrounding Lyta. She was thinking of pissed off customers, Lyta figured, and how much trouble she’d be in if she wound up knocking out a dozen of them to get one trouble-maker.
Lyta didn’t intend to give her the time to sort it out.
With a rising, ululating yell, she charged into the security troops, her stick raised…
12
“Not that way!” Logan yelled to Valentine Kurtz, waving him away from the control panel for the lift station.
Kurtz frowned in confusion until he saw his commander lugging the semi-conscious, bound Ham toward the emergency stairwell.
“You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me, Boss!” he exclaimed, already puffing from the effort of lugging Monk around. “There’s no way…”
But Logan had already pulled open the door and there was no option but to follow him. Kurtz took a sideways step, wondering if anyone was watching them. There were plenty of people milling about the lift station, heading up or down, back to the docking hubs or out to the various night spots on this level, but no one gave the two of them more than an idle glance. Apparently, this wasn’t the sort of place where it paid to be too curious.
“There’s no way I can carry this heavy-assed lunkhead all the way down to the docking bay!” Kurtz reiterated, letting the stairwell door slam shut behind him.
The stairs were narrow, spiral, and little-used, added early in the construction of the place because they’d a way to get out of the cave if the power failed. Chemical light-strips lined the upper edge of the walls, giving just enough illumination to navigate the steps without falling and breaking his neck but not nearly enough to feel comfortable. He’d seen them in the mission brief and
almost immediately dismissed them, thinking they’d be too slow and too confining to be of any use.
“Spin gravity gets lower the closer we get to the hub,” Logan reminded him, his voice echoing off the walls, tinny and hollow. “He’ll get lighter. Plus, Mira is taking the elevators down to the docking bay, and I don’t want her caught up in this.”
Kurtz glanced around instinctively, realizing he’d forgotten all about the girl in the confusion.
“Aren’t we going to wait for Colonel Randell?” he asked. The words cost him breath he couldn’t spare and he was fairly certain he’d strained something already, but he had to know.
“No.” Logan’s voice was harder to make out this time, lacking the projection and enthusiasm of his previous answer. “She knows what she’s doing. She’ll do better on her own without us slowing her down.”
There was a lot more Kurtz wanted to say, but he clenched his teeth and concentrated on keeping his balance, on anything other than the pain in his neck and shoulder, and core muscles, and the increasingly intolerable stench of the man. There was a reason he drove a mech instead of hauling a gun and a ruck across Hell’s creation like the Rangers, and this whole thing was giving him a nice, painful reminder of it. The stairway twisted downwards, the DNA strands of the station stretched out in a never-ending spiral through every level from the rim to the hub. He didn’t even want to think about how close they’d been to the rim. Not all the way out, of course, but far enough.
Logan was right though. As each landing passed, carrying the bounty hunter seemed to get easier. He would have chalked it up to his own rugged, hard-bitten nature if he hadn’t known it was the pull of the centripetal force decreasing, and he resented science for the disillusionment even as he appreciated the relief. As grateful he was for the decreased pull of spin-gravity, he was even more grateful for the lack of company. The stairwell might not have been deserted—it was impossible to see more than a dozen meters or so in either direction due to the curvature—but no one had happened to be in the same isolated section they were or happened to be wandering out onto one of the landings as they tromped through. Which was a damned good thing, because Ham had come to after a few minutes, and wasn’t happy at all.
“You won’t get away with this!” the tall man bellowed, the echo of the shouting off the laser-cut stone walls almost more annoying than the inanity of the declaration. “You don’t know who we are, asshole! You don’t know who we work for!”
Logan didn’t pause in his pace down the stairs, just pivoted his upper body and whacked Ham’s head against the nearest wall. The bounty hunter squawked and groaned, his head lolling and a bruise already starting to form under the small pressure cut.
“I know exactly who you are,” Logan told him, strain in his voice. Kurtz wondered if it was the physical stress of the quick descent or maybe the emotional toll of leaving Lyta behind. “You’re the piece of shit who kidnapped my brother a week ago, and you’re the same piece of shit who’s going to tell me exactly where you took him if you ever wanted to walk on your own two feet again. Until then, you can shut the hell up.”
Kurtz snorted under his breath. The Boss had a way with words. Ham did as he was told, either from fear of getting smacked again or maybe an incipient concussion, and it was only two more landings before the gravity was light enough they were taking the steps three and four at a time. Then their luck ran out.
They were only three levels up from the hub and the apparent gravity was somewhere around a tenth of a gee in Kurtz’s estimation, based solely on what he remembered from brief training visits to smaller moons during his military career. Not low enough to float like a feather on the wind just yet, but Kurtz felt as if he weighed about as much as a good-sized salmon from the Chilkat River back home.
Logan was just a few steps down from the landing for level four when the stairwell door popped open right between them, nearly slamming Kurtz in the face before he could bring himself to a stop.
“What the hell?” the man who stepped through exclaimed, staring down at the receding back of Logan Conner and the bruised and bleeding face of Ham the bounty hunter. “What do you think you’re doing?”
Kurtz could only see part of the back of his head, and all he could tell was the guy’s head was shaved and he was wearing some sort of a uniform, though he had no idea if it was Security or janitorial. But he already had his ‘link in his hand, getting ready to make a call, and Kurtz was willing to bet it wasn’t to his girlfriend to tell her about the odd thing he had seen today at work.
He shrugged Monk off his shoulder as easily as tossing away a jacket, able to handle him so easily both because of the light gravity and because he didn’t care if the big man fell flat on his face. He’d stuck the dart gun in his belt back at the club, hesitant to leave the weapon laying around for someone else to pick up and use on him, and he clawed at it now, struggling to free the front sight from the material of his fatigue pants before the intruder noticed him.
“I said stop!” the bald man called again at Logan’s back. “I’m calling Security!”
Another second to find the safety and Kurtz fired from nearly point-blank, putting the dart in the man’s right shoulder and leaving him spasming in the throes of an electric stun charge. The gun had barely made a sound when it fired, not much louder than a balloon popping as the magnetic launcher shot the capacitor out at over a hundred meters a second. Kurtz didn’t bother to put the gun away this time, just flicked the safety back on. Baldy was stuck half-in and half-out of the stairwell entrance and he took the time to pull the man out and kick the door shut before he went back for Monk.
By the time he caught up with Logan at the next landing, the stairs were more useful for their railings that let him guide himself with the edge of his hand, and the spin gravity was barely enough to remind him which way used to be down.
“We’re getting close,” Kurtz called. “Maybe we should be thinking how we’re going to get these assholes past the security checkpoint.”
Logan nodded, dragging a foot across the wall to slow himself down, then pulling his ‘link out of his pocket and raising it to his mouth.
“Acosta,” he said tersely. “Whatever you’re going to do, do it now.”
Patrick Bray had been masquerading as Francis Acosta for so long, he was beginning to forget which was the real him. It was disturbing, and his lack of any family ties on Sparta only made things worse. He really needed to take a trip home to Nike soon, visit his parents and his sisters, get a feel for who Patrick Bray really was.
First though, he had to blow something up. Nothing big, he didn’t have enough explosives for a big bang, and it would have been counterproductive anyway. He wanted to distract the security guards at the customs station, not force them to lock down the whole docking bay.
He’d known what was expected when they’d gone over the plan, and he’d had hours to think about it, had even bounced it off Commander Margolis. She’d thought it was too wimpy, which meant it was probably just this side of reckless, given her predilections. He wasn’t entirely satisfied with it, but he had a bad habit of paralysis by analysis. His superiors had said so on his last personnel evaluation, and he’d signed it, so it must be true.
Acosta drifted down from the shuttle’s docking collar, leaving the girl Mira with a disgruntled Katy Margolis back in the umbilical tunnel. Katy wanted to be involved, but she was a pilot, not a field agent or a soldier, and he wished Colonel Slaughter or Colonel Conner or whatever the hell he was calling himself this trip would have the balls to remind her of it. Just because someone was brave enough to face down the enemy with a gun didn’t mean they were the best qualified for the job. At least he’d assigned her to the shuttle for this mission, though he’d had to stress they were going to need a quick getaway to get her to agree with it. He wanted to blame it on their relationship, but he was sure she’d be just as much of a wildcard if they hadn’t been together. Acosta had managed to convince her he needed her to keep an
eye on Mira and make sure she didn’t warn the guards or steal their shuttle while he created the distraction.
The explosive was compact and easily disguised, so he’d slipped it into the hollow shell of a cased datalink. It looked incredibly normal to be meandering along in the broad, multitracked docking cylinder carrying a datalink, nothing that would attract any attention. It even gave him an excuse not to make eye contact with the customs agent. The weaselly little man gave him the creeps and it had taken nearly an hour to convince him they’d straightened things out with station security after Lopes had cut them loose. Acosta flashed the pass the little man had given him after much hemming and hawing and protest and was waved through.
The station security guards anchored behind the customs booth regarded him dully, probably only noticing at him at all simply because of the earlier ruckus. Acosta waited until he was sure they’d turned back to check the next newcomer in the customs line before he peeled the backing off the adhesive strip on the back of the dummy ‘link and affixed it to the raised frame of a staff-only restroom behind the customs office, then pushed quickly away.
If they had camera monitors, he might have been seen, but it would look like nothing more than an attempt to maneuver in free-fall, to get a boost toward the lift station. Now that it was set, the nerves began to eat at him, sweat beginning to gather at the small of his back despite the inherent chill of the docking bay environmental systems. He had his gun. While it was a comfort, it was also a temptation he couldn’t give into. They’d agreed they didn’t want to kill anyone and, more importantly to him in particular, these guys were wearing armor and he wasn’t. The odds were, if any shooting started, he’d be one of the first to die.
He touched his earpiece, connected to the real ‘link on his belt.
“Go,” he transmitted.
The door to the emergency stairwell wasn’t locked because it would have defeated its purpose. Even a bunch of money-hungry outlaws wanted to make sure people could get out if something went wrong. Mass death was bad for business. And since it was such a pain in the ass to actually get anywhere via the narrow, twisting stairs, almost no one used them; which meant no one was paying attention to the door when it opened and Logan and Kurtz came out, dragging the two bounty hunters with them.