I reach the driver’s side, mentally trigger the door to slide open, and drop into a pristine, quilted black arak leather seat behind the controls. Omar slides into the matching passenger’s seat beside me. A festering stench comes in with him that lifts my upper lip and makes my nose twitch. Sweat, blood, and piss. The smell of fear. I know it well. The Paladins aren’t exactly the nicest branch of the Coalition’s Spec Ops. And my job in particular was filthy as hell. Probably why the bastards burned me and pinned me with all the shit they ordered me to do. Can’t have the Coalition’s holier-than-thou reputation sullied by the nastiness of consequentialism.
I turn the car on with a thought, and bend down to rummage around under the pilot’s seat for the signal jammer I attached there in case I ever needed this car for a getaway. After executing Rajesh, for example.
So much for that. Now I’m going to need a whole new plan to get close to him. Four months of prep work down the scrigging drain. I glance at Omar as I flick the physical switch to turn the jammer on. No sense leaving a digital trace to connect me to the illegal device. I can scrub the bio memories of this Deus-forsaken mess later.
Speaking of digital traces. I need his in case we get separated. I send a silent request to exchange comm numbers and location data with his holoband. He accepts without asking me why. Smart man. At this point trusting me is all he’s got.
“Where are we going?” Omar asks as I take the M-shaped control yoke in both hands and slide it straight up to lift off from the ice field. The car goes whirring into the air, buoyed up by its grav lifts.
I feel my spine compress with the sudden upward acceleration. That reminds me to dial up the inertial dampeners so I can keep the G-forces within tolerable limits. “To your house, where else?” I ask as I push the throttle all the way up to the max.
Omar looks uneasy with that statement. “You know where I live? Why are we going there?”
I send him a bland look, but don’t reply.
Within seconds we’re whistling along at over 500 klicks per hour, heading straight for the gleaming, crystal spires of Liberty City. The appearance of it is like a decorative glass sculpture with the city lights glowing in green, blue, and purple, and reflecting in colorful swirls off the surrounding ridges of glacial ice.
An alert flashes on the main holo display, the airspeed is flashing to get my attention—502 KPH. The limit is 350, but as long as I’m flying in one of Mohinari’s cars, the police wouldn’t dare to pull me over.
“If we’re going to my house, I have a right to know why,” Omar insists. His voice sounding stern, like he thinks maybe he can intimidate me. Maybe he thinks I’m soft, because I saved his ass. If he only knew who I am, he wouldn’t think that. He’s just lucky he’s not a dirty cop—notwithstanding the smell of an arak’s ass that’s radiating from him in noxious waves.
“We’re going to pick up your family. If you don’t get them out of Liberty City before Mohinari realizes what just happened, he’s going to feed them to his pet Wraiths.”
Omar grows suddenly still and serious. Nods once. “What about you? You’re the one who killed that guy, not me.”
“Yeah, that was me. But it wasn’t me, because I’m someone else. My name isn’t Roman, and I don’t have wavy black hair or dimples in my cheeks, and I sure as hell don’t have this damned baby face,” I add, sparing a hand from the controls to indicate my hideously-hologenic mug with a thumb.
“Then who are you?”
I spare a second of my attention from the grid lines of air traffic that I’m illegally skirting by flying below the designated altitude of one thousand meters.
“I’m the guy people call when calling guys like you doesn’t work.”
* * *
The air car comes to a gliding stop in front of the docking port that extends from the balcony of Omar’s apartment. He’s up on the fiftieth floor of a modestly appointed-building that glows blue and green in a checkered pattern as the light from within is filtered through its tinted windows. The apartment has no view except of the towers across the street and the criss-crossing snarl of pedestrian tunnels on the commercial floors above and below this one.
“I’ll be right back,” Omar says as the privacy frosting of the glass doors behind the thermal-shielded balcony clears to reveal a pretty young woman with dark hair, and a miniature version of her. The daughter has her face and hands pressed to the glass.
“Make it fast.”
“Can I shower?”
“Fuck no.”
“Okay.”
Omar’s door slides open, and I fold my hands calmly in my lap while I wait. My eyes are everywhere, scanning the skies, and the displays in the dash showing feeds from the external cameras.
Air cars flit around, whirring softly as they go. Dipping down, docking briefly, then jetting off. It reminds me of this documentary I saw once. Weaver birds on Earth. They use grass to build these huge communal nests that hang from the branches of trees in southern Africa. Like apartment buildings for birds. The male weavers can be seen flitting about, hovering briefly outside to leave food for their kids and mates, and then they go flitting off again. Just like these cars.
Of course, we’ve got our women doing it, too. Birds need to catch up. Such a sexist species. A grin parts my lips. Then collapses in a scowl.
Where the hell is Omar?
The glass doors and windows along the balcony are back to frosted. Nothing but a fussy glow leaking out to tell me that they’re still home. Deus, I hope they’re not making a run for it. Not trusting me right now would be the last mistake they’ll ever make.
My eyes dip to check the car’s sensor display for the requisite number of life signs inside.
Three green dots. On the move. Headed toward my location.
Smart man.
The glass door slides open, three people come bustling out, their arms draped with luggage.
That was fast.
Too fast. Must have already had those bags packed. Again, I’m subtly impressed with Omar.
His family hurries across the short docking bridge to the side of the Cavalier. Both doors on the passenger side slide open as Omar triggers them with his implant, and they come sliding in. Another noxious cloud fills my nostrils. This one cloying and sweet.
“You trying to choke me to death with flowers?”
Omar snorts a grim laugh as the doors slide shut. “Let’s go.”
I feed the car with a new destination: The Rikard Spaceport, and it undocks from the apartment with a clunk. A moment later, the car goes drifting up, slotting into the snailing lanes of traffic between two commercial levels. We’re barely doing sixty KPH. Too damn slow. A frown graces my lips. All cars have to be on autopilot inside the city limits, no way around that without bringing every police cruiser on the planet crashing down on us. Maybe even a few FSA Interceptors to boot. Gotta protect those bird nests.
“Where are we going?” a small voice asks.
A glance at the holofeed from the ceiling cam reveals a cherubic face, innocent blue eyes, cheeks pink from the cold.
“Shhh,” her mother says.
I look away. The less the kid knows the better. I can’t guarantee that they’re going to make it. I’ll get them off world, but after that, they’re on their own. I glance at Omar. He’s wearing a fresh set of civilian clothes, not another uniform. Good. That choking flowers smell is coming from him. No time to shower, so he emptied a bottle of his wife’s perfume to mask his filth. His gunbelt is gone, replaced by a civilian belt with a thermal shield built in.
There is a hint of a bulge in the inside right pocket of his creased, brown arak leather jacket.
A gun? Looks big enough to be a compact laser pistol. Omar probably has a permit for concealed carry. Good. He’s going to need it.
Chapter 4
Liberty City’s spaceport swells large and bright beneath us: a giant circular landing deck in the center for container haulers and warships. Concentric rings of smaller pads conne
cted by access tunnels to the central hub. Those are for independent traders, freelancers like me, and wealthy system-jumpers on stim-vacations. The spaceport is on the outskirts of the city, up on one of the glacial shelves that overlooks the rift and the spires of downtown where we were a few minutes ago.
Omar and his family are quiet. Scared. He’s turned his seat back to face his family. I can hear him and his wife trading the occasional word or two. Sometimes they’ll glance at me, then look away just as promptly. They’re scared of me, not just the possibility of reprisals from Mohinari.
They can sense it. The black cloud of death that follows me around. I’ve made my peace with it, but I have my own personal entourage of ghosts, and not all of them are friendly.
Our car folds into a holding pattern of traffic above the spaceport, chugging along at the speed of sloth. I’d bet a thousand credits that no one on Terra Novus even knows what a sloth is. Like most Earth animals, they’re long extinct—except for the cybernetic replicas in Coalition museums. I used to like visiting those museums. Back when I wasn’t an ex-con who flashes an alert on people’s comms and mixed reality displays whenever I’m within a hundred meters. You have to see it to believe it. They say people are mostly water—well, I can part a whole Red Sea of people just by strolling down the street.
Ex-cons are the stuff of legend on Earth: rare, twisted creatures with mythical powers that parents whisper to their children about to keep them in line.
Nobody gives a shit about me out here. Partly, because I have illegal mods to my neuralink that broadcast an innocuous ID code to match whatever biomask I’ve decided to wear today. Out here, in the heart of the Free Systems Alliance, I’m in the land where nobody knows my name.
And nobody ever will.
I hit the brakes just before my car can smack into the one in front of us.
I was drifting slowly forward, lost in thought, thinking the line would inch forward soon, but these cars are not moving at all. What the hell is the hold up?
Brake lights burn bright red in a long, snaking line to the parking garage below.
A shit ton of tourists going home today. I glance at the feeds from the car’s external cameras to check for queue jumpers who might actually be gunning for us.
Nothing.
Yet.
I take a breath.
The Free Systems Alliance is the other side of the coin, the place where all the ex-cons and practicing criminals go. If I tell someone on Terra Novus that I have a criminal record, they’ll ask, you want to see mine?
A smirk lights my features. This is where all us rare creatures go. We’re not welcome in the Coalition. No jobs for us (not that there are many to begin with), but there are no UBI benefits, either. And no women or men who’ll want to date us—well, that’s not true. Lots of good little daddy’s girls will slum it with a bad boy for the night. They’ll ask about my scars and clear out in the morning. Suits me fine, because I’m no good at relationships, but sometimes it does leave a bad taste in my mouth—knowing that a one-night stand is all that anyone could ever want from me.
If a guy like me wants to move on and scrub that record clean, maybe become a family man and carve out a bubble of domestic bliss on some picture-perfect Coalition world, then they have to go for a dunk in Genesis. That’s what they call their simulated, correctional version of life. It’s the one where you get reborn as a baby and rewire your brain from the ground up in a nice, simulated AI family that’s scripted to play the part and produce a perfectly-adjusted human being.
That’s a fine corollary for the Coalition. Fixing people’s defects fixed their society. Husband cheated on you? Bad on you for not checking his monogamy scores before you got married, but don’t worry! One short visit to a behavioral clinic will fix him for good. He’ll never even look at another woman—or man. Not like that, anyway. He won’t be able to.
Yeah, the Coalition is a helluva place, but I’m worlds-fonder of the Alliance. Unexpected things still happen here. Chaos breeds uncertainty, and uncertainty breeds excitement. Not to mention jobs for me. Next time you watch a holovid, imagine what would happen to the story if there were no bad guys and no conflict at all. Just happy, smiling people without any problems. There are a hundred trillion of those shitty stories playing on repeat in the Coalition—not in their holoplexes, mind you—in real life.
It’s ironic, because I’ve built a career around hunting and often killing the human shit bags that make the Alliance interesting to me. Maybe it’s my inner utopian at work, the one who was born on Earth and infused with its ideals.
That was before the Paladins turned me into a twisted killing machine in the name of safe-guarding those ideals from external threats.
Threats like Mohinari.
Remembering the man we’re running from has me checking my surroundings again. But I still can’t see any cars jumping the line behind us, nor any screaming in from above or below.
So far we’re blending in nicely. I just hope that luck holds.
The military sounded great when I signed up. Get out there and kill the bad guys. Be a hero. But I didn’t know about all of the innocent people that I wouldn’t be authorized to save, or worse yet, the ones who would become collateral damage, standing between me and a target.
Those are the ghosts that follow me. The dark cloud. The ones who scream for justice and never let me sleep. They’re the ones who indirectly saved Omar’s life.
I’m my own boss now, so I get to decide which detours are worth the trouble. A glance at the car’s internal holo feed shows Omar on the back seat now, his daughter tucked against his side, sucking her thumb. She can’t be more than four years old. Omar’s wife has her hand laced through his, her knuckles white with fear.
A grim smile tugs, and one corner of my mouth twitches. I really hope they make it to Earth. It might be boring, but boring is safe.
Our car finally reaches the end of the chugging line of traffic and zips down, into an empty parking space on the top floor of the massive garage. I take one more look at the car’s sensors and external holofeeds. Still no signs of trouble.
“Everybody out,” I say.
Chapter 5
My hand drops casually to my DX-22 as my door slides open and I step out of the car. I stand there, eyes on my peripheral camera feeds, ready for a quick draw.
But everyone I can see walking around in the garage has hover carts full of luggage floating along behind them. No sign of anyone like me, traveling light because they’re not planning to travel.
Omar joins me on my side of the car with his wife and daughter. His family’s names pop up on my display, floating above their heads: Sienna and Damaris Trevos.
“Anything?” Omar whispers.
“Not yet. Try to keep up,” I say.
And then I take the lead, striding fast down a moving pedway between the front ends of the parked air cars. I hear Omar grunt and see on the picture-in-picture (PIP) rear-view at the top of my display that he’s just picked up his daughter. Her chubby little legs won’t keep up with mine.
People are joining the pedway ahead of us with their hovering stacks of luggage, blocking my way.
“Make a hole! Coming through!” I call out periodically to get them to step aside. It’s a risk. Mohinari will be looking for someone with my appearance and listening for someone with my voice. I had to have a vocal modulator installed for this job. Expensive, painful surgery, but at least it will help for other covert ops down the road.
We get to the end of the pedway and reach a maglev tram just now pulling into the station. It goes to and from the main concourse. I’m the first one stepping through the doors when they slide open. I accidentally push a striking young woman aside. She stumbles and glares at me with glowing orange eyes.
“Hey! Watch where you’re going, scrigg!”
My gaze lingers on hers as Omar and his family pile in beside me. A name appears above the woman’s head: Aurora Velez. She’s beyond striking, with fiery red h
air to match her eyes, and just a couple of freckles on her cheeks. Perfection incarnate. Orange isn’t a natural pigment for eyes and she’s unusually pretty, so there are only a few possibilities for what she is:
Bot.
Engineered human.
Or a cyborg.
Her eyes are glowing. Using my holoband, I zoom in to see the colored specks of familiar icons around the edges of her pupils. Her mixed reality displays are projected directly over her eyes, which makes me suspect they aren’t real. Augmented Reality Contacts don’t let biological eyes breathe, and they’re a lot less comfortable and useful than holobands (no speakers or mic for comms and audio). Still, she could be an engineered human wearing ARCs. Can’t rule it out.
But I do. She turns away, and I find myself studying her clothes and shoes. Her v-cut white blouse and matching shimmersilk skirt are both clinging and too skimpy for this part of the planet. No heated linings. No thermal shield attached to a belt. And no hint of a panty line under that skirt. The heels on her boots are also far too high and uncomfortable for travel. It all adds up to the same thing:
She’s doesn’t feel discomfort of any kind if she doesn’t want to. That means she’s either a bot or a cyborg, not a human.
And that puts me on edge.
Some of the deadliest people I’ve ever met fall into those two categories, but she does have a hovercart full of luggage, all of it expensive designer brands that I recognize from Earth. Same with her clothes. That could be a trick, part of a disguise, but she doesn’t seem to be wearing any weapons. No place to put them. Of course, she’s probably a living weapon, so who needs guns or plasma blades?
But no, I don’t think that’s it. She turned her back on me, and she’s not wearing a holoband or any other tech to keep eyes on me with her head turned away. If she were a trained assassin, she’d recognize that I’m one, too, and she wouldn’t let me out of her sight. That means this is just a wealthy Coalition tourist on her way home.
The Bounty Hunter (Cade Korbin Chronicles Book 1) Page 3