Absolution

by Rick Partlow

  They were shooting at us. It seemed like an overreaction, but I wasn’t going to stick around and try to argue them out of it. Dog had pulled me down, his senses and reaction time better than any human’s, and now he yanked me up, grabbing my left sleeve and tugging me forward, his claws scratching against the floor for purchase. Beckett was staring in disbelief, the proverbial deer in the headlights, until I crashed into her, my chest ramming against her shoulder and carrying her along back the way we’d come.

  People were screaming and scattering, already panicked by the alarm and now pushed over the brink by the gunfire, and their chaos kept us alive a few seconds longer than we had any right to expect. Not even Neanderthal and his goons were willing to fire into their own workers to get to us, which was more ethics than I’d given them credit for, but the respite was going to be brief.

  “Where are we going?” Beckett asked, her voice high-pitched and tinged with panic.

  I made a split-second decision, my subconscious processing data I didn’t even remember knowing.

  “Back to the Nautilus lab!” I said. “Stay close to the right-hand wall!”

  The workers running away from the gunfire were mostly keeping to the right side of the corridor, a natural herd reaction to danger and one I was going to do my best to take advantage of. We weaved through the clusters of workers and a face here and there struck me: a middle-aged man with a grey-streaked beard and cheeks ruddy with exertion; a woman so young I might have justifiably called her a girl, with her blond hair tied into a ponytail and her eyes wide with abject fear.

  A flare of blaster fire spalled burning concrete off the wall just above our heads and someone screamed. Guilt stung hard in my chest, because I was the cause of the fear, the reason they were in danger, and I would have given myself up if it had been an option, but summary execution didn’t appeal to me. I felt a mixture of relief and fear when the civilians began to turn off from the main corridor ahead of us, heading somewhere I guess they considered safe and leaving us with no cover.

  “Faster!” I urged Beckett. I wanted to grab her and pull her along, but it was an irrational impulse and would have just thrown us both off balance and slowed us down. But we were running as fast as she could and I could feel the sights settling onto my back and the finger tightening on the trigger.

  Dog surprised me. He does that now and again, acts like maybe he cares whether I live or die. The move was so fast I barely followed it, as graceful as the pounce of a leopard onto a gazelle. One moment he was galloping a few meters ahead of me and the next he was using his momentum to climb up the side of the right-hand wall, then bounding off of it to the left, ricocheting off the opposite side and back into the pack of guards behind us.

  He didn’t do as much damage as he could have. He could have killed every single one of them, ripped their throats out or sliced through their femoral arteries. Instead, he just slammed into Neanderthal with a cross between a body block and a hip check, sending the big man tumbling forward, tripping up the two guards following close behind him in a chain-reaction like bowling pins going down. My head whipped around as I tried to follow the brown blur of Dog’s trajectory, and I nearly tripped over my own feet when he bounded away from Neanderthal and dashed back ahead in a flurry of scraping claws.

  The delay was just enough, and no gunfire followed us when we turned the corner into the side hallway to the Nautilus lab.

  “What the hell?” Beckett demanded, pushing the door shut. This time I made sure to lock it behind us and she collapsed against it as I did, holding her head in her hands, hyperventilating. “Why did they start shooting at us?”

  “Yeah, I might have some idea about that,” Dog said. “I was going through the records I skimmed from the memory download. You know that company that hired the guards, BramCo Mineral Acquisitions Security Police? Three guesses who their parent corporation is, and the first two don’t count.”

  “Nautilus,” I hissed. “They’re not just rent-a-cops, they’re hired guns.”

  “And we just handed ourselves over to them,” Beckett moaned.

  “This was your idea,” I reminded Dog.

  “And coming back here and shutting ourselves in was yours,” he shot back. “Did you have a plan beyond run and hide?”

  “Run and hide is a good plan,” I insisted. “But yes. We’re going back to the Charietto and getting off this damned rock.”

  “How are we gonna do that with all those guards ready to shoot us the minute we set foot out in the hallway?” Beckett asked, staring at me with disbelief in her eyes.

  I nodded toward the locker I’d left hanging open with the spacesuits still hanging from their racks.

  “We’re going to take an alternate route.”

  “I think we’re about even in the dumb-ass idea category now,” Dog said, his voice small and tinny over the helmet radio of the battered, old spacesuit.

  I wasn’t sure if I could disagree. Going outside through the Nautilus airlock had sure seemed like a great plan, and the fact that the suit tanks had been charged with air and their systems were both still working had been a real stroke of luck. Until we’d gone out the lock and realized the landing platform for the dome was still nearly a hundred meters above the surface of the planet.

  I’d felt very much like a bug on a plate standing out there on the circular platform, three hundred meters across and perfectly flat, an island of grey metal on a dull, yellow plain of sulfurous hell. Above us, Agni stared down balefully, its yellow and orange and red clouds seething with rage at the intrusion into this, the realm of ancient gods. Around us, rising high above the angry, volcanic surface, were the domes. They’d seemed tiny and claustrophobic from the air, but down among them, they were huge, man-made mountains.

  “Should we try to climb along the outside?” Beckett had asked. Her tone was a bit shrill and I wondered if she’d ever been outside on a hostile world in nothing but a suit. It was a humbling experience. “There’re probably maintenance catwalks on the exterior of the domes.”

  “Monitored, certainly,” Dog had nixed the idea with a shake of his head. It was incongruous seeing him out there in the thin, poisonous air, as if he were some phantom haunting the installation, a ghost dog from another time. “The only way to get through to the landing platform where they have our ship is on the ground, at the base of the domes. Too much area down there for anyone to watch it all.”

  Another idea which had made sense, until we’d found out the only way down from the outside of the landing platform was a narrow, rickety ladder attached to the skin of the support column. Which ladder we would have to descend in spacesuits where you couldn’t see your feet to know if you were about to miss a rung. Oh, and did I mention Dog wasn’t built to go down ladders? Up, sure, no problem. Down, not so much.

  So, there I was, 250 meters over jagged, unforgiving lava rock, trying to climb down a ladder one-handed, unable to see my feet or feel a thing through the thick, protective boots, while carrying a 120-kilo robot dog under one arm. The weight wasn’t that bad, given the gravity on the moon was a third standard, but even at a third of his normal weight, Dog was an armful, and 300 meters was a long climb.

  I felt hampered by my resolve not to curse, because I surely wanted to. Fatigue was straining both forearms and my shoulders were on fire, tense from the load and equally as tense because I was just plain scared. I hadn’t let on to Beckett because she was nervous enough for all three of us, but I didn’t much care for spacesuits. The hard, outer surface, armored against impacts and radiation, constricted my chest and made it hard to draw a full breath. The faceplate only exacerbated the feeling, reflecting just a bit of carbon dioxide back into me with each exhalation, until my hindbrain became convinced that I was about to asphyxiate despite the fact I was getting plenty of air. The intellectual part of my mind knew that, anyway.

  Dog could probably read my heartrate and blood pressure even through the suit, so he wouldn’t be fooled by my brave act, but I kept it u
p, just the same. No use giving him more ammunition.

  “What happens if they spot us on the ladder?” Beckett asked. “Do we have a backup plan?”

  “That would be Plan C,” Dog told her, deadpan. “We’re already on Plan B. You don’t really want to know what Plan C is.”

  “If anything happens,” I cut in, trying to keep her calm, “just follow me and try to keep behind cover. Everything will be all right.”

  The bottom edge of the domes passed by and we were climbing down the side of one of the ten-meter-wide shock absorbers they rested on, keeping them stable through the tectonic travails of the moon. I tried to concentrate on the intricate details of the supports, losing myself in the ragged network of abrasions cut into the metal surface from years of exposure to caustic chemicals. When my foot touched ground, it surprised me enough I nearly cried out and made myself look like an idiot. I was so relieved to set Dog down, I wouldn’t have cared.

  “Thank God,” he said, hopping out of my arms before I had the chance to lower him to the sandy, rock-strewn surface. “If I never have to be carried by a human again, I will die a happy robot.”

  I took a moment to catch my breath and work out the cramps in my arms and quadriceps, leaning forward and trying to get a sense of our surroundings now that I could see again. Everything seemed so much bigger down here, closer. The colors were brighter, the rocks sharper and more jagged, the clouds of sulphur dioxide a white haze drifting across the face of the gas giant. Shadows stretched out around us, the looming menace of the domes casting a pall over the harsh, unforgiving environment.

  It seemed like an excellent place to get ourselves killed.

  “Dog, take point,” I said. “Delia, you’re in the middle and I’ll bring up the rear.”

  How much good I’d do unarmed and in a space suit, I wasn’t sure, but it was the tactically sound decision. And I had to let Dog walk point because I sure didn’t know which way we should be going. Beckett didn’t complain and, for once, neither did Dog. He did start bounding off without us at way too fast a pace, taking for granted we could adapt to the low-gravity hop as easily as he could. And honestly, I could have, but Beckett wasn’t nearly as experienced in different gravity fields and looked as if she were trying to ice-skate in dirt.

  “Slow it down a bit, partner,” I cautioned. “Not everyone’s got computer-controlled gyros.”

  “I can go just as slow as you meatsacks want. It’s your lives, after all.”

  I was sure that would make Beckett feel all sorts of better. I knew it cheered me right the heck up.

  “I can go a little faster,” Beckett insisted. She experimented with a bunny-hop, both legs at once, but it was awkward and slow.

  “Just a giant step,” I advised her. One small step for a man, a voice from a long-ago history class whispered in my ear, one giant leap for mankind. Right then, I would have been satisfied with a few medium-sized steps for these particular humans.

  She tried it, a tentative bound at first, then fell into a sustainable rhythm and I followed behind. It was about ten times as difficult trying to keep up the pace while checking our six o’clock every second step, all in a space suit. I couldn’t turn my head, so I had to turn my whole body, 360 degrees in mid-air and it was making me dizzy after about the first hundred meters. I could tell right away that wasn’t going to be sustainable and cut it back to one rearward glance every sixth or seventh step.

  That’s probably how they were able to sneak up behind us. One step, one turn to check behind us and we were clear, nothing but the fearsome vistas of Hanuman and the Brobdingnagian expanse of the domes and the equipment supporting them. The next, just twenty or thirty seconds later, and they were just there. I might not have seen them at all if it hadn’t been for the flare of an outgassing reflecting off a spacesuit visor, but the glint revealed them as surely as a spotlight. There were four of them, scuttling cockroaches beneath the floorboards, a hundred meters behind us and moving up fast, much faster than I thought we could manage with Delia slowing us down.

  My reaction was instinctive, less a plan than an adrenalin spike. Flight was out, so fight it was.

  “Behind us!”

  I didn’t remember making the decision to shout, heard the words as if they came from someone else, maybe the same person who was turning and bounding into a single, powerful leap just as high as muscles born on Earth and trained on planets with even higher gravity could take me. I was soaring upward, five meters off the ground, ten meters forward, the moon and the dome and everything on either side a blurred streak, while the glittering faceplates of suit helmets and the wicked, angular curve of blaster carbines came into preternaturally sharp focus.

  I’d been trying to get their attention on me, away from the others, and it had worked a bit too well. Sizzling, crackling blaster fire passed only centimeters from my head, one bolt of scintillating energy actually burning through the space between my left arm and my side, leaving charred, blackened streaks on my suit. It seemed like I hung up in the air forever, a floating, reactive target to test the marksmanship of the station’s hired guns. They needed practice.

  I came down right in the middle of them and my shoulder slammed into a chest. I hadn’t planned it that way and it really didn’t work out how I would have hoped, because the chest plate of a spacesuit is pretty hard and unyielding. Pain wrenched through my arm and upper back, sharp and hot, and stars swam over my vision. I forced down the pain, blinked back the stars and made myself keep moving, hoping I hadn’t done anything truly, monumentally stupid like getting my faceplate cracked.

  I was staring almost nose-to-nose at the man who I’d heard called Pruitt, my helmet only centimeters away from his, my hand resting against his shoulder where I’d grabbed it to steady myself. His face was pale, beaded with sweat, his eyes wide with shock and indecision. The security guards couldn’t fire with me right in the middle of them, but they wouldn’t want to put their guns down and wrestle hand-to-hand, either, if they could help it, which gave me a few seconds of confusion in which to act, and I tried to take advantage of it.

  I grabbed at the emitter housing of his blaster carbine and yanked toward me, knowing he’d clamp down and hold onto the thing for dear life. When the gun came towards me, so did he…and so did the external controls for his suit. My fist was armored with a spacesuit glove designed to work outside among sharp, jagged lava rock and I smashed it into his faceplate with all the force and leverage I could build up. The faceplate cracked. It didn’t shatter, which would have probably killed him, not from the lack of air but from the poisonous clouds of sulphur dioxide, but the cracks were a spider-web spreading across the visor.

  The man panicked. I’d seen in his eyes he would. He could have kept fighting, trusting in the construction of the suit to hold together until he got back inside, but instead, he let the blaster carbine go and ran, heading back to whatever access airlock they’d all come through in the first place.

  I’d had seconds of advantage and it ran out about the same time Pruitt did. The other three security thugs had finally figured out what was going on and they’d all reached their own conclusions about how to solve the problem. One of them was backpedaling with quick, urgent steps, giving himself room to aim his gun at me, while the other two grabbed at my arms and shoulders, trying to wrestle me to the ground. I had the blaster carbine, but I was holding it by the barrel and there was no way I was going to have time to flip it around or even use it as a club with the two guards weighing me down.

  I was just about done. I was still struggling, still trying to break free and simultaneously keep the two security guards between me and the one with the gun pointed, but I knew winning one battle would lose me the other. Lucky for me, I wasn’t alone. A brown blur slammed into one of the guards holding my arm, a torpedo of fake fur and real attitude. The man’s grip jerked loose from my right arm and he tumbled backwards, head over heels, not stopping until he bounced off the side of one of the dome support columns.
>
  The one who’d been holding onto my left arm had kept his helmet tucked against my shoulder, trying to keep me from getting to his faceplate, but when Dog attacked, his head snapped up and I saw the whites of his eyes, saw his lips skin back off his teeth in shock and sudden fear. I was cocking my arm back to take a swing at his helmet when he did exactly the right thing…or exactly the wrong thing, if you were looking at it from our perspective. He pushed away from me, blindly, desperately, just wanting to get distance between himself and Dog.

  Dog knew what was going to happen and so did I. I fumbled with the blaster carbine, lunging forward to one knee just to keep in motion but knowing my only chance was to be faster on the trigger than the other guy. Dog took another tack, rushing straight at the gunman, betting shock and surprise and his sheer speed would be enough to take the guy down before he could fire.

  He was wrong. Star-white energy lanced outward and Dog twisted in mid-leap, trying with every bit of preternatural machine agility he had to avoid the burst of blaster fire. He couldn’t quite do it. Sparks flashed and Dog slumped to the ground in a halo of smoke.

  Chapter Eleven

  “Goddammit!”

  I wasn’t sure which surprised me the most, the curse that wrung its way free of my lips against my will, or the reflexive squeeze of my finger on the carbine’s trigger pad. A blinding fusillade of actinic energy gushed from my carbine’s emitter, a firehose of plasma that had to have drained the power pack. What was left of the gunman bore very little resemblance to a human being and was barely held together by what was left of the spacesuit.

  Something nagged at the back of my mind, the conviction I was forgetting something, and I knew as quickly as the thought passed from one side of my brain to the other exactly what it was. The last guy had a gun, and just because he was panicked didn’t mean he wasn’t about to use it. My carbine was empty and I was in an awkward position, down on one knee. It would take a second for me to get into motion, and I had the sense it was a second I couldn’t spare.