by Ian Cannon
“Yeah,” Ben said observing the tiny spire. “There’s got to be an airlock.”
“We suit up, go in that way,” she suggested.
“Okay, we’ll take the drop pod. REX, warm it up.”
“Affirmative,” REX complied.
“Atmo gear. Let’s suit up,” Ben said.
Tawny was already on her way toward the cargo bay saying, “My favorite.”
Before Ben could follow her, REX said, “Uh, Cap?”
He stopped, turned.
“If those demo bots have orders to blow the place, it’s a good bet the charges have already been set.”
Ben took a big breath and said, “Then we don’t have much time.”
“Hey—no atomizing today, alright?” REX said, his words rimmed with nervousness.
No atomizing. Not today.
“Right …” Ben murmured.
The drop pod lowered from REX in its slow space dance until it thumped against the top of that open shaft. Ben stabilized with the sub thrusters until they were connected. “Opening rear hatch,” he said, and the pod’s back door whirred open. They’d already evacuated any air to avoid a burst of atmo, and Tawny could see the airlock reveal itself below her.
“In position,” she said as she started lowering from the pod.
“I’m right behind you.” Ben hovered away from the flight control dashboard and joined her in the back looking down as she climbed aboard the Guilder’s Mix exterior seal. She placed a wench device on the hatch, entered a code, and the lock mechanism thudded open. The huge iron plate cranked open showing a dim, vertical passage beyond.
“We’re in,” she said and began climbing aboard. Ben followed her, both unsure of what to expect.
He checked his thermal readouts across the top of his atmo-suit’s arm. There was no weather. The place was a frozen block of ice.
“Closing,” Tawny said, and the exterior airlock slipped shut over their heads. They were in. Next was the interior hatch with a spin wheel lock mechanism. Together, they strained to break the seal and the thing slid away revealing perfect darkness. Their suit lights speared ahead illuminating tiny pieces of the massive whole which was the Guilder’s Mix’s upper balcony.
Tawny lowered inside first, bobbing in the weightless atmosphere. Fanning her palm light back and forth she said, “It’s too dark.”
Ben came down next hauling his bag of gear. He unzipped it and pulled out a plasma ball. “Here,” he said tossing it gently out into open space. The thing fluttered on like a micro-sun shedding an even blanket of light across the interior surfaces of the place. They both flinched at once. This was the upper balcony of Guilder’s Mix, for sure. They could tell by the bodies clouding the space and hovering motionless in the air. They were all dressed in the finest garb—echelon capes, rare silk sashes, and costumes cut from high-dollar interplanetary boutiques from across the solar twins.
“Oh, boy,” Ben said spinning one around in inspection and recognizing the face. An Orbinii woman. “O’reala,” he muttered. She had hailed from a Victorian common house and had financial ties with the Guild.
“That looks like Fawn-lussto over there,” Tawny said pointing out another body, a man who’d owned a series of Guilder safe houses across the outer planets. He was Paxian, his fair skin and chiseled features left very well preserved in the frozen atmosphere. “Who did this, Benji?” she said, her voice thin with anxiety yet sharp with fury.
“Let’s find out,” he said pushing himself toward the balcony’s edge. He hovered over and grabbed ahold of the railing, opening up a deep, wide view of the cantina below him. Four levels of open gaming area led all the way down to the main pub floor a hundred feet below. Bodies tumbled throughout the space. Dozens of them. Casualties of the attack.
“You think Sympto’s here?” Tawny said through her head set.
Ben looked back at her as he hovered over an ocean of negative space. “He’d be back in the echelon wing.”
Tawny turned to look behind her. The upper balcony ended in a broad stairway that led up to the private quarters. The echelon wing. She fanned her light back at him and said, “Let’s split up. I’m going to check back here, see if one of the liaisons might be alive.”
He nodded and said, “Okay, I’m going to go below. Hey…”
They shared a look.
He said, “Let’s make it quick. I don’t want to become a part of their demolition enterprise.”
“Agreed,” she said.
He watched her move off toward the echelon wing with her bio-suit jets scooting her along. He sighed and looked down forlornly. This was terrible. He initiated his own atmo-suit vents and began descending down through the structure pushing debris out of his way. It spun off at tangent angles. Lowering down and down, he came to the bottom with his boots landing on the floor. He was in the bar area scoping back and forth with his light. Everything was silent down here. The gaming tables were dark. The media screens were blank. There was no life here. Everything was dead. Bodies pirouetted in spread-eagle fashion, each face a blank stare. What had happened here? Who had done this?
He shook it off. Had to compartmentalize. He needed answers, not more questions.
There had to be a security stream that had recorded the attack. Even if it was powerless, there’d still be a memory cell. He looked over toward the entrance to the hub. The security entry podium. There was a computer console there. Maybe …
He boosted toward it and came to a stop stabilizing himself against it. With gloved hands he tapped the interface. Nothing. He crooked his lips rubbing his hands across its lower parts. A seam. Access hatch. He pried it open, muscling the panel away. He reached in feeling, concentrating. There! The memory cell. He wiggled at it feeling it loosen, then pop out of its port. He took it, looked into it. Perfect. He’d have to get it back to REX.
Above, Tawny made it to the upper echelon floor where a long corridor stretched out before her. There was scoring all over the place. She scooted to the wall looking hard, intrigued, and rasped her hand gently across the bulkhead. She could feel where the scorching had plasma burst across it in the direction of fire. She turned back, squinting. Someone had been back at the balcony firing a blaster in this direction while … she turned back and looked down the hall … someone else had fired back from that direction. There had definitely been a fight. This place was starting to look more like a warzone.
And right there, just a few paces from her position, was the echelon room. She crooked her lips. Had to go investigate. But there was a body in the way. It caught her attention. There was no leisure clothing, no Guilder’s Mix night-on-the-town apparel. This body was strangely out of place. It didn’t belong.
She scooted toward it rotating it in her hands and absorbing its features. Light armor. A blaster strapped to a thigh. An atmo-suit. It was black on black. Anger flushed across her. This was a member of the raid party. A picture of the incident was starting to paint itself. Whoever they were had attached to the outside of the Guild hub, entered from … she squinted down the corridor … there, and stormed through Guilder’s Mix in force. But why?
She looked into the adjoining Echelon room. A bar to the left. An observation window overlooking Guilder’s Mix at the forward. More bodies hovered around. She recognized one as the Paxian belly dancer that Sympto had obsessed over. If she was here, then …
She moved inside the echelon bar scanning hungrily with her probe light. People. Bodies. Faces. The Paxian dancer whirled in slow loops over her dancing platform. And right in front of her was Sympto’s couch. His favorite perch. But no Sympto. She lowered the light, confused. Sympto had been here. But he wasn’t now. The Paxian was here. So where was he?
A thought struck her hard.
She scurried back out into the corridor and shot a look way down at the end. She pointed to the left. Security was firing from there. These invaders were firing from … now to the right … from there. She scooted off until she came to the end of the corridor. She ca
me to an airlock. More scoring.
Tawny settled back grinning bitterly. These invaders had made a hasty retreat. They’d gotten what they wanted and left in a big hurry.
Prisoners.
Or worse.
Hostages.
And Sympto was one of them.
Ben had made his way back to the center of the saloon area still glancing around, hunting for clues or signs. There had been a heck of a fight. That much was obvious. Destruction was everywhere. But no signs as to who had done this. He clenched the memory drive in his gloved hand hoping his answers were there. Looking directly up, he quickly mapped out his path back to the upper balcony through a world of vacuum-born debris and bodies and initiated a one-tenth ignition on his jump booster scooting him skyward.
Ascending through the space he had to bump and shove his way through, tumbling more rubble out of his way. Something caught his eye to the right, half in shadow. He reversed thrust and came to a buoyant stop in midair, looking hard. It was a body. He didn’t recognize it. But more than that, he didn’t recognize its regalia. He squinted at it. An atmo-suit. Black on black.
Guilder’s Mix had no shortage of eclectic personalities and wild-weird characters on any given night, especially down here in the bottom saloon areas. Noossians wearing big bio-mech apparatuses clutched onto their backs and shoulders, Tremusians in their knightly security armor, loners and cutthroats wearing pieces of battle-scarred armor and tech gadgetry, even the occasional Ionian in their steaming, swirling full-atmo tanks. None of it was unusual for this place. But a full visored bio suit with helmet? He blanched. Something wasn’t right about that guy.
He scooted over to inspect, moving a heavy piece of lounge furniture out of his way—a big rotating gaming table of sorts—and sending it off into a tumble. Yep—he was right. This person didn’t belong. He turned the body over and flinched at what he saw. There was a blaster shot that had scored its chest, a big crown of charred flesh. This shot wasn’t arrant. It was made by design. This was one of the invaders. Someone had scored a kill.
“Benji,” Tawny said through his headset.
He looked up. She had perched herself over the balcony railing looking down at him. “I found something. Might be interesting.”
“Good,” he said. “Me too. Get back to the drop pod. I’m right behind you.”
“I’m on my way out,” she said and disappeared back across the threshold.
Ben looked back at the body before him. There had to be signs of its affiliation on its uniform somewhere. A patch. A pin. Some sort of stitching—anything to designate its group. He turned it over, flipped it around looking at the chest, the shoulder pauldrons, the back, running his hands across its utility belt, over its helmet. There was nothing. Whoever they were, they’d come to Guilder’s Mix on a mission to destroy and had chosen to remain perfectly anonymous. If Ben had had any safe harbor in the solar twin system at all, this place was it. If he and Tawny belonged anywhere, it was here, no matter how tenuous their relations were with the Guild … this was their home.
And this buckethead had come to destroy it.
Anger seethed up in him and he wrenched the body out and away with a growl, dislodging his own position in the weightless chamber. He crashed back against the far bulkhead that formed the level two gaming floor. He grabbed the railing, collecting himself and watching that invader’s body hurl further and further away through the space. It bumped harmlessly into the far wall and slowed in its tumble. Ben wished he’d been here for the attack. He wished he’d been next to Tub’Num fighting like an Ae’ahm profit during the raid. But no. Instead, he’d been rotting in a Sarcon prison wasting time.
His eyes slowly went down. He couldn’t get bitter. He wouldn’t let himself.
He growled shaking it off and braced himself to spring up toward the exit far above, but something caught him, turned him cold inside his atmo-suit. He shot a glance over. There was a corner where the architecture of the gaming floor sloped into an alcove joining with a vertical bulkhead. It was a tiny space suffused in shadow, but there was a tiny light. This place had no power. It was completely dead. How was there a light in the dark corner over there?
It made Ben flinch back, especially once the light blinked. He scooted toward it headfirst with his tiny jets hissing on the atmo-suit. He came closer, held his arms out and braced himself against the big steel ribbing that created the tiny alcove. Flashing a palm light inside, he saw what it was.
A bomb. It was on a countdown.
He reeled back on impulse, looking harder. The countdown numerals were in some hieroglyphic code. Looking up, he traced a thick wire that ran up the club’s wall several feet, then branched off into a dozen other wires. He couldn’t follow them all. He didn’t have to. There were demolition explosives set all over the place.
He set his arm panel to universal numeral calibration and flashed his arm at the bomb’s ticking countdown. Its vid feature read it, dumped the image into his suit’s filter process and spit out the number 2.
As in minutes.
This whole place was about to blow.
“Uh …” he said, backing away. “Tawny, what’s your position?”
“I’m at the airlock. Should I wait?”
“No, baby. Man the pod. I’ll be right there.”
“Benji, what’s wrong?”
“Oh, nothing. We’re just, uh… yeah, this place is going to blow up.”
“Blow up?” she said sounding alarmed.
“Yeah. Looks like the demolition team’s already been here. We gotta go, now.”
“I’m at the drop pod.”
“Okay. Be there in thirty.”
“Make it fast, babe,” she said.
“Yep.” He backed away to face the second-floor railing and came faceplate-to-faceplate with another body floating in the air. He paused with a start, blinking and reeling back. There was no time to hesitate. They barely had enough time to make it to a safe distance away before this place turned into a tiny sun, but as he went to engage his atmo-vents he hesitated again.
That body wasn’t there just seconds before, and there was no way it had simply drifted across Guilder’s Mix and sidled up directly behind him.
It was almost as if …
Ben gasped.
… as if it had just appeared there...
He pushed away from it.
… perhaps matter transported from somewhere else in the blink of an eye …
His mind spun.
… he recognized it.
That Krutt bounty hunter!
“What the—”
He reached for his blaster.
The Krutt went from playing dead right into action, quick—a glowing spear wheeled down across Ben’s arm knocking his blaster askew and sending the plasma shot straight into the ground. The explosion erupted big enough to throw him and the Krutt violently across the second-floor railing and back out over open space. Ben tumbled head-over-heels out of control until he smacked into that bulky piece of furniture still wheeling weightless through the air. It was that big heavy gaming table, perhaps for the game of Nipps or Jamooba. The Krutt did the same, grasping ahold of the monolithic object from the opposite end. They each stabilized at either end of it, both looking across at each other over its surface.
“No!” Ben heard himself roar. The Krutt’s name—No.
“Come with me now, Benjar Dash, or die you will.” Its voice rang out in the digitally-baked flat tones of its atmosphere containment suit.
“This place is rigged to blow. We’ll both die,” he said.
The Krutt indicated a fist-sized round apparatus on its chest. It had two lights. One red. One green. A matter transporter. “No. You only will die,” the Krutt said. It was Ben’s quickest way off the station: Transport back to the Krutt’s vessel. Be his prisoner. No thanks.
Ben roared out and jammed the tabletop into the Krutt’s chest as hard as he could. He flew off one way. The Krutt flew off in the opposite direction. The
table went flipping off at a random angle. Ben wheeled toward the second-floor landing, gaging distance frantically and—Ooof! He crashed into the landing rail, hard. Clinging to it, he looked up. His only way off the station was way up there with Tawny.
Call for help? Don’t call for help?
Forget it. There was no time. He could handle this. One atmo-suit jump straight up and he’d meet her at the drop pod. From there, they could—Gah!
Something leapt into his periphery, made him spin around. The Krutt ignited his suit booster coming at him like a shot and leading his approach with that glowing spear. Ben pulled himself to the right. The blade glanced off railing splitting cross bars in half. Steel screamed out in shrieks. The Krutt pulled back, spun around under the power of his suit vents, came in for another shot. Ben wrenched himself the opposite way as the humming blade severed more railing bars into blossoms of spark and jots of light. He thrashed at the Krutt with a boot. The Krutt jolted back over open space. Ben twisted around and hit his flight nozzle control. The boost choked, sputtered. He went nowhere.
“What the …”
He spun back around. The Krutt hovered before him with that sizzling lance in both hands. He’d struck Ben’s atmo-suit, shattered its flight control center. He was at the mercy of the weightless environment now, no control. That would slow him down. Through the Krutt’s opaque visor, Ben could imagine the thing grinning at him viciously.
Ben turned around and yanked against the railing hard, shooting vertical, arms out, snagging the third-level mezzanine overhead. The Krutt mirrored him, came in for another shot. Ben deflected the spear with a forearm, but it cost him his outer layer of atmo-suit. It peeled off taking a layer of skin with it as sparks arced blindingly in the air. Ben sneered in pain and kicked again. The Krutt jetted away, spun around in mid-flight and whirling its weapon overhead in a dazzling foray.
“Then it is dead that you come with me, Benjar Dash!” he barked coming in for a kill shot. A shadow loomed at him. Ben glanced over. That big, flipping game table drew near in its weightless gambol through Guilder’s Mix. He released the mezzanine and grabbed it, wheeled it over as the lance stabbed at him. The blade speared through the surface, its pointed end jerking to a stop an inch before sinking into his sternum. The motion jarred Ben up against the mezzanine, his arms straining at full extension against the table, the Krutt pressing against the other side, the blade arcing and hissing between the two of them, inching toward Ben’s chest. Ben’s jaw clenched, teeth bore out in a defiant snarl. He was pinned down. Couldn’t move. Couldn’t adjust. Running out of strength.
