by David Ryker
I opened my hands and looked through them, never gladder to see Mac’s HAM. It stood there, on the ramp, locked and loaded, and shrouded itself in smoke as a dozen mini-sidewinders leapt off his shoulders and corkscrewed towards the door, exploding on the threshold in a squall of rubble and concrete.
I leaped up and made for the ramp just as it touched down on the deck, scrambling up the sloping steel past Mac and into the safety of the hold. Fish and Greg made it up after me and as soon as I heard their heels hit steel, we were lifting off again, the lumbering beast sidling into the sky, jets crackling in the frozen air.
The wind rush swirled in the cargo bay as Mac did his best to keep the Fixed-wings off us, but I was more focused on Alice. Greg crouched and popped the hatch, going onto all fours to let me in there. I touched my finger to my ear. “Everett, I need you,” I called. Her boots were already on the steps before I finished, and by the time I had Alice unfastened, one open eye lolling, barely conscious, she was next to me, helping lever her out of Greg’s body. Her head fell against my chest and we carried her, Everett holding her legs, toward the sleeping area.
Greg sealed himself up and immediately went to the door to join Mac. We’d attracted some attention, and Volchec was doing what she could to shake them off.
We staggered through the door as Volchec pulled us into a tight bank and climbed into the clouds. Everett stumbled into the doorway and cracked her shoulder, swearing, but it wasn’t like Volchec could just fly straight.
We managed to get Alice onto one of the beds, and she groaned as we put her down, bullets ringing on the hull like someone hammering a gong. I could hear Greg and Mac giving them hell, but we just had to trust that they had it.
Everett circled me, holding on to the edge of the bed to steady herself, and cupped Alice’s face. She winced and came around a little, trying to bat Everett off.
“Broken?” I croaked, looking at her jaw.
Everett met my eyes, her expression grave. “Get the kit,” she said, feeling gently along Alice’s jaw line. My head was in one of the lockers under the bed when Alice’s cry split the air.
“I know, I know,” Everett muttered. “It’s okay, shh.”
She held her head straight and reached into the bag I was holding open. She fished blindly and pulled out a roll of gauze, using her teeth to tear the top open. She spat it onto the floor and offered me the end. I took it and followed her eyes, holding it next to Alice’s chin as she looped the roll over her head and round a couple of times. She took a breath. “Red, hold her shoulders.”
I didn’t ask, I just did. My hands closed around the top of her arms and held fast, and then Everett pulled the wrapping tight. Alice yowled through gritted teeth forced together.
“It’s fractured… I think,” she said, tying it off. “We need to get her to a med-bay — a real one, for X-rays, a brain scan,” she muttered, elbowing me out of the way and feeling down Alice’s collarbone, then down her flank. She moaned again as Everett did. “Some broken ribs, too. Shit, they gave her a serious working over.”
She turned to me, her face solemn. “There could be internal damage, too — there’s no way to tell.”
I ground my teeth, fists curling. “Okay,” I growled. “I’ll be quick.”
Everett sighed and then nodded. “Don’t die.”
“I’ll try,” I said, heading for the door. My finger found the pad behind my ear and pressed it. “Volchec — take us up. Eight five.”
“You’re fucking joking!” Her voice rang out in my ear as I made for Greg. “We’re already thirty clicks out!”
“Then take us back,” I snapped. “We’ve got a job to do, and if we don’t hold up our end of the deal, Kera’s going to roll on us — you know she will. And then we’re all screwed.”
“I can handle it,” she said, her breath heavy from fighting the controls. “I’ll handle it.” She repeated it, though I didn’t think it was for my benefit. We were hauling ass away from Telmareen, still tailed by the Fixed-wings, but if we pulled into orbit, they wouldn’t be able to follow. Though, if we got that far, we definitely wouldn’t go back.
I sucked in a hard breath. “You really think General Greenway’s going to let us walk after all this?” I said, holding on to the side not to fall as Volchec swung us into a dive and then pulled us back up. Everett eyed me, nodding for me to keep going. Volchec was looking after her team — that was her mandate — she was trying to get us out of what was proving to be a very hairy situation. But we couldn’t leave Kera’s man there. If we did, then we’d all be facing the block anyway.
“He’s right, Volchec,” Everett yelled, trying to keep Alice’s head steady in the tumult.
“You know this is our only shot,” I called, staggering back into the hold. “We get this guy out, and he’s ours for the questioning before we hand him off. That’s what Kera said — he was the one in contact with Fox — relaying her orders to them from the inside. We need that information. It’s the best bargaining chip we’ve got. We deliver a fresh lead on Fox to Greenway and we get out of this… Maybe. If we don’t, even if we get off Telmareen, you think we’re just going to walk after everything that’s happened? Any of us?”
I let the words hang in the air, and then I heard Volchec swear. “Goddamnit! If you get us shot down, Red, I’m going to kill you.” A loud whine rang out as she pulled the controls back and opened the thrusters, pulling us into a steep climb. My guts somersaulted as she twisted us back around and then got the hammer down, straight-lining it back toward Telmareen with everything our Tilt-wing had.
“First pass!” she yelled as we came upon the eighty-fifth floor, banking in close so they could get a clear shot..
Greg leaned out of the back and speckled the building with sticky bombs. They thudded dully on the windows and exploded in a shower of glass as Volchec swung around for a second approach.
“You got your ass strapped on, ‘cause this is going to be rough,” she yelled, swinging in low and taking us up in a vertical climb. I was crouched on Greg’s arm, and out of my peripheral I could see Fish loaded on Mac’s. Both Greg and Mac had one leg on the doorframe, holding on to the cargo netting on the wall to keep them in the ship as it hauled itself upward, engines screaming.
“We’re only getting one shot at this — you ready?” she asked, the G-Force distorting her voice.
I wasn’t sure if I was, but there was no backing out now. The ship tilted back, and the engines cut. We inverted, and the building sailed into view, slowing as we arced to the top of our climb and stopped. The eighty-fifth floor, windows blown out, loomed, and then I was flying. My stomach lurched as Greg propelled me into space, throwing me across the gap, a thousand meters above the street below.
Fish and I hung, side by side, flying through the blisteringly cold air, and then we landed, hard. The momentum carried me over and I sprawled forward, rolling sideways and scrambling to a stance in the concrete corridor of the eighty-fifth floor, clawing air into my lungs. Fish never left his feet, landing and springing forward with ease.
“We’ll keep them busy, just hurry the fuck up!” Volchec yelled, voice crackling with static as she dipped out of range and pulled away into the streets below, still tailed by three Fixed-wings. She was right, we had to move fast. I took one look at Fish, drew my pistol, and then started moving.
Kera told us that her missing merc was a humanoid, though he wasn’t in a cell. The eighty-fifth was one of the accommodation floors for humanoid Guard, and housed a series of apartment-like dwellings. A lot of the Guard lived in the tower full-time, and their man was being held in apartment 85-C. All we needed to do was get him out.
Fox had been holding him there to keep Kera’s crew on the straight and narrow. Insurance, Kera’d called it. I believed it. She said that Fox had been operating on Telmareen for the last year, setting up the operation and worming her way into the Guard. Kera’s part in it all was simple — she was to help Fox double down.
Kera’s job wa
s to put the word out about the skimming — leak the news so other mercs started showing up. Get them to try to knock over a transport with the promise of credits and more work for whoever was pulling the strings to come after. The Guard would scramble to protect it, put down the would-be thieves and then keep the heist quiet.
All the while, shit is blowing up and bullets are flying — lockdowns are in effect and martial law is imposed and lifted continually while they’re looking for the idiots who hit the transports. For all those living on Telmareen, the Federation, who were supposed to bring peace and order — for a cut of their taxes, of course — weren’t delivering on what they promised.
And with the Guard being forced to worked harder, pushed to do more by the Federation, to stop the attacks and crush those trying to upset the balance, it was becoming easier and easier to turn them.
When Fox had enough support, she intended to lead an uprising, and brief though it might have been, it would have lasted long enough to make off with a freighter-full of Iskcara, which was always the goal. It was the long game, and it was her specialty. I believed that, rolling Kera’s words over in my mind as we hit each corner in turn, covering the other as we worked our way toward 85-C.
Supposedly though, a week back, Fox had received word that there was some big upset at a Free stronghold halfway across the galaxy, and she was needed to oversee things there. She slipped off planet, and then turned up a couple days later limping, which made sense considering I’d shot her — or so Kera said her guy had relayed.
She was using the Telmareen Guard Tower as her base of operations — I mean who the hell would look there for a Federation war criminal — let alone a dead one. Kera spat all this information out, and neither me nor Mac, at the bar, had said a word. It all fit though. If it was a week back, that would have been Draven — the Falmouth coming down.
If she was called in to oversee things there, it must have been to clean up the mess caused by whoever the hell decided to attack a Federation carrier as it passed by. It was probably her plan all along to lure the Federation to attack the base, and it’d almost come off. I was kicking myself I’d let her go… twice. She hadn’t been detained on Draven, like she’d said.
She was commanding the counter attack, saw it going south, maybe thought that a full battalion of mech were incoming — and she knew she was more valuable alive and that the battle was lost. She was getting the hell out of there before she was caught — or worse, identified. And she’d played me like a god damn violin, and I’d fallen for it.
How the hell she’d managed to get there and back in a day was beyond reasoning, and was the only thing that didn’t fit — but everything else made so much sense. It’d taken us nearly four days in hyperdrive to get from the Oberon Mansoon to Telmareen, and it was only the biggest ships that had the sort of power it took to warp space and create a wormhole — she’d have needed her own destroyer — and whether she was well connected or not, there was no hiding one of those, so it remained a mystery to me.
Of course I couldn’t exactly say to Volchec or the others that it didn’t make sense — because I still hadn’t come clean about seeing her, so I stayed quiet instead and hoped that someone would put a bullet between her eyes before any of it came out. Though knowing my luck, I didn’t think that was likely to happen.
Still, I had bigger things to worry about. If we didn’t get Kera’s man out, she was going to spill everything to the Federation — about how we’d hit the transport and basically fucked everything up. It was more than enough to get us all ejected, and none of us wanted that. Our only out was to rescue her man from the tower — where Kera said he was under the protection of the corrupted Guard, so we didn’t exactly know what we were walking into. Still, if it was on this floor, built for humanoids, it meant that they’d be our size, which was something at least.
My satchel jostled as we made for 85-C, the floor empty. Seemed like everyone else had scrambled to the lower floors and Mac’s scrambler was still making it difficult for them to coordinate, though there was no way they hadn’t seen our Tilt-wing hit the eighty-fifth floor, so it wouldn’t leave us long before they came back up.
We circled around until it loomed in front of us, a solid metal slab in a concrete wall, the letters 85-C stenciled on it in black. I slowed to a halt, breathing hard, and swung the satchel around, opening it. I pulled a shape charge out and slammed it against the metal just under the handle.
Fish reached out, twisted the dial and armed it, and then we both made for the corner. The timer hit zero and the bang echoed through the halls. With my ears ringing, we swam through the smoke toward the maimed frame, and then dipped in, pistols raised, ready to take on whatever lay ahead.
24
When we burst through the door of apartment 85-C, I went low and Fish went high, but as we swung our pistols around the room, ready and willing to put bullets in whatever was waiting there for us, there was nothing to shoot at.
The room was completely empty.
We stared at the modest couch strewn with dirty clothes, the kitchenette with a sink full of dishes, the ajar bedroom door that Fish went to check, leading to an unmade bed and moldy shower. There was no sign of whoever had been there — Kera’s man was gone, as were the guards watching him. It all looked fresh though, and the scent of stale sweat and gun grease hung in the air. We couldn’t have missed them by much, but we had missed them. Whoever had been there was now gone.
Fish came back out and stared at me. “What…. now?” His voice was strained and his eyes were bulging, gills flickering as he took short, sharp breaths. I think it was the first time I’d ever seen him rattled.
I narrowed my eyes and looked around, mind reeling, knuckles white around my pistol. “I don’t even know.”
We followed through with the plan and headed upward. It was all we could do. It wasn’t far to the roof, and we were prepared to fight our way up if we needed to — it’s what we’d planned on, but just like the eighty-fifth, it was completely empty.
If the upper floors had been commandeered by the Free, they were gone now, and there was no sign of anyone. The only noise as we climbed was our heavy breaths and boots echoing on the steps of the central stairwell. There were no guards. No Free rebels. Not another soul. It was like everyone had just vanished. But where too, we didn’t know.
By the time we got to the roof for evac, Mac and Greg had taken out two more of the Fixed-wings on their ass, and the third had backed off to a distance where it couldn’t be shot down.
We waved them in and Volchec slid the ass across the landing pad like a pro, just long enough for us to hop in, and then we were out of there. The ramp closed up behind us and the pressure sucked on my ears, and then Volchec took us upward through the clouds and out of range of the Fixed-wing on our six, and into orbit. She swung us around to the dark side of the planet, out of range of anyone pursuing us, and came out of the cockpit, face twisted with surprise — confusion even. She stopped at the rail and stared down at me, breathing hard. I was on one of the benches in the hold, head in my hands.
“What happened?” she called down from the catwalk.
I didn’t look up, and though I wanted to offer something encouraging, or even constructive, only one thing came to mind, and to my lips. “We fucked up — that’s what happened. Somewhere, somehow — we missed something… I don’t know. But there was no one there. No sign of any Free rebels, or Kera’s man, or anyone.”
I heard her fist hit the steel rail, and then the cockpit door closed behind her. I stared up at Greg, chipped, dinged, and dented from the fight, and then thought of Alice, jaw broken as well as God knows what else, and wondered what it was all for.
And now, with nothing but a name to go on — Kat Fox — and a couple of mercs hovering the axe over our necks, we were pretty much screwed. I closed my eyes and tried to calm myself.
“James?” came Greg’s voice in the gloom.
“Yeah, Greg?” I muttered, not opening my eyes
.
“I detect that you are stressed. Would you like me to play some music for you?”
I gritted my teeth and tried not to tell him to go fuck himself. I settled instead for saying, “No.”
But he didn’t listen, and as we drifted through space on the dark side of Telmareen, all the sad notes of a usually happy song seemed to ring in the hull.
I just pushed my head back and let the exhaustion catch up with me. At some point, it reached out and took me, dragging me down into the murky depths of my own mind.
I dreamt that I was choking — and when I woke up, I realized that things weren’t much better. It was a new day, but unfortunately, it appeared just to be the same old shit.
Nothing had changed, and though I wanted it to be more than anything else, it hadn’t been a bad dream. We were hanging by a thread, our team, and it seemed like any way we went, we’d be heading toward our own deaths. I opened my hands and stared at them.
No, there had to be something we could do. Some way out of all this. I set my teeth and thought hard. I thought like I hadn’t done before. I thought like the sort of pilot that I’d eventually grow to become.
And as a thought began to grip me, mutating slowly into an idea, my hands started to curl into fists. I realized that this was a problem that had an answer. There was a way out. It wasn’t pretty but it was there. I swallowed and stood up, staring at Greg. “Hey big guy,” I said, a hint of malice in my voice. “You ready to go again?”
Epilogue
My teeth ached in the cold wind and I could feel my eyelashes crusting with ice. “I don’t like this,” I muttered into my collar. Greg was crouched over me, running the thrusters at low boost to try and create a curtain of warm air, but it wasn’t working very well.
We were more than twenty clicks into the night-side of Telmareen, a planet I’d hoped we’d be leaving behind for good.