by Rick Partlow
The neon yellow of the station lights faded to a shadowy grey in the looming tunnel, the only illumination coming from chemical strip lights in circles along the tubular walls and alongside the tracks. I pushed away from the floor lining and came to my feet, grabbing Beckett and yanking her up with me.
“What…,” she began, but the words ended in a muted shriek when a plasma blast splashed against the far wall of the tunnel.
There were no more questions nor the time to answer them. I pushed her ahead of me along the maintenance walkway, a narrow strip of metal grating beside the tracks, and wished she could run faster. I could have run faster, and I was fairly sure the bad guys chasing us had not skimped on the cardio either. I pulled my blaster and held it out behind me, glancing back over my shoulder every few steps.
One of those glances revealed a shape backlit by the yellow glow of the terminal and I fired at it without stopping to aim, more interested in keeping their heads down than stopping and getting into a standing gunfight. I fired off a burst of four shots, hoping to God I hit something, and then my charge went dry. I should have expected it, should have already switched out power packs, but I’d made a rookie mistake and lost track.
I briefly considered trying to reload on the run or, alternatively, having Beckett pass me her gun, but two things changed my mind. The first was a stinging, burning swarm of sparks from a blaster shot impacting the wall beside us, and the second was the light and wailing horn of an oncoming train.
“Shit!” Beckett said, and I couldn’t have put it better myself.
This time she saved the day, because my eyes were full of afterimages from the blaster shot and I couldn’t see a thing. I felt her pulling me to the side, to the wall and past it, and I realized we were in some sort of darkened alcove. I didn’t know what it was for, and I wasn’t about to try to speculate at the moment, but I used the time to reload. My eyes hadn’t adjusted and there wasn’t even a hint of light in the niche in the wall, so I ejected the spent power pack by feel and inserted a new one.
The old one went into the pouch where the fresh one had come from. The things aren’t cheap, and I wasn’t back in the Marshals where we could toss them anywhere and let the government buy me a new one. The process reminded me of my tactical training in the Academy, where they shut off the lights and played distracting noises to force you to work under pressure.
Pressure was being provided in this case by a big, honking passenger train passing less than a meter in front of my face, the clacking of its wheels on the track a metallic heartbeat, the wind of its passage a hot breath in my face. I wanted to ask Beckett if she was all right, but I couldn’t even hear myself think and I resolved to wait until the train had gone by before pressing on, sure there was no way the hit team could get to me with the sides of the cars only ten centimeters or so from the walls on each side.
I should have learned not to be that sure of anything. The only light I had was the flash of dim interior lamps through the windows of the train, just enough to reveal the blackness of a dark-clad silhouette and the glint of reflected light from the matte finish of a blaster. There wasn’t time for coherent thought, just reaction, and my first reaction was my left hand striking out and seizing his right, trying to control the weapon before he could level it at us.
The man was strong and the pressure against my shoulder almost made me forget my own blaster. It was only a single moment’s delay, but it was enough for him to secure my right wrist in the grip of his free hand and we were wrestling for control of the weapons and of each other in a space the size of a coffin with someone else jammed behind us and certain death less than a meter in front of us.
I should have yelled at Beckett to shoot him, but I was using all my breath and concentration against his not inconsiderable muscles, and that was on top of the fact I was severely worried she’d shoot me by accident. I didn’t say a word. My chin was pressed into my chest and our foreheads were pressed against each other like a couple slow-dancing, each of us trying to protect from a headbutt by the other.
I was worried about Beckett, worried about the guns, too worried to take a risk. The corporate mercenary was less risk-averse. He stepped into a knee strike at my thigh and even though I turned and caught most of it on my hip, it was enough to knock me off balance and give him just the opening he needed.
I was turning, spinning, afraid to fire my gun for fear of hitting Beckett, being pushed back towards the train. The noise of the passing cars was deafening, each gap between them a gaping maw ready to swallow me up. It wasn’t slowing and I had the sense it wasn’t stopping at this terminal, was intent on proceeding straight through to the next, so there was no hope of respite.
The emitter of my blaster struck the side of the train and, as I tried to hold onto it anyway, my right wrist snapped. I would like to say that I bellowed with rage like a wounded bear, but the truth is, I screamed. There was anger in it, and pain, lots of pain, and fear, and desperation, and I used all of it, used the ten-kilo weight advantage I had on the guy and twisted him around with my hand on his wrist and my shoulder pressed into his.
I lunged into a front kick to his chest, my foot snapping like a piston. He flew backwards and, in this case, backwards was right into one of the gaps between the train cars. He was gone in the blink of an eye, a metallic crunch the only hint of his fate.
“Shit!” I yelled, clutching at my wrist, suddenly giving up on giving up swearing. “Goddammit, that hurts!”
And that was just as long as I could afford to indulge in the pain. The second the train was gone, the others would be coming for us, and I sucked at shooting with my left hand.
“Stay flat against the wall,” I yelled in Beckett’s ear, edging out into the tunnel, the train cars so close I could feel a loose strap from the collar of my jacket snapping against the metal.
I couldn’t look back at the woman, couldn’t turn my head at all, couldn’t even hold her hand because my wrist was throbbing like it had just got hit by a damned train, and I could only hope she’d developed enough instincts for self-preservation over the last couple years to blow out her breath and hug that wall. I don’t know how many cars the train had but they seemed to go on forever, the rhythmic click-clack pounding in my head, the heartbeat of this decrepit cesspool of a space colony.
And then it was gone and I nearly collapsed forward, sucking in a long breath to try to steady myself. I grabbed at Beckett’s arm with my left hand and pulled her ahead of me, pausing for just a moment to grab the gun from her holster.
“There,” I said, pointing with the gun at a strip of red lighting along the wall, indicating an emergency exit. “Hurry.”
I ran, and tried to think about anything other than the pain and swelling in my wrist and the interesting shade of purple it was already turning, and the way it felt as if someone was closing it in a vice with another turn for each step. I wasn’t succeeding too well. The door was locked but it wasn’t a fancy sort of lock with magnetic seals or biometrics. Nothing in this place was fancy or high-end. Everything was thrown together from leavings, kludged out of spare parts. I levelled the blaster, turned my head away, and fired a round through the bolt.
On the other side was a ladder and I cursed again, deciding to get as much mileage as I could from this lapse in my manners. I didn’t want to take the time to pull my holster around to the opposite hip, so I just shoved the blaster into my jacket pocket and started climbing one-handed. I didn’t know how much time we’d bought with the train, or how long the hit team would take confirming their friend’s death.
Did they like him? Was he a fun guy to go out drinking with between murder missions? Would they stop to say something over the body of their friend? Or was it just business and they’d raise an eyebrow at his battered corpse and move on. I was hoping he was very popular and mourning would give us more time to get away, but that might have been shock setting in.
The ladder only stretched up ten meters but it could have been a millio
n kilometers according to the itch between my shoulder blades. Getting shot in the ass would have been an undignified way to go, and the fact they’d have to go through Beckett to get to me didn’t make me feel any better about it.
I guess the hit team must have liked pinched-face at least a little bit, because I hit the hatch without getting shot, though I almost did fall back down the ladder when I tried to open it one-handed. I wedged a foot against the opposite wall of the tunnel and grabbed at the latch, leaning into it to push it away from me. The door opened downward and almost knocked me off the ladder again, but I managed to grab onto one of the ladder rungs and pull myself up with one last surge of energy.
I was in an alley between two buildings stretching up all the way to the distant ceiling, fifty meters up, with barely a gap between their roofs and the light panels. I pulled Beckett up with my left hand, my right arm cradled against my chest, then I kicked the hatch shut and slammed my boot heel down on the latch handle, hoping I could jam it.
“Oh, thank God,” she hissed, looking back down through the hatch as if she couldn’t believe we were alive. “We made it.”
I was looking elsewhere. The lights were still low, but people were out, crowds of them. Not families, not children. Just adults, mostly men, hanging off of balconies, standing in the street, drinking or openly smoking or injecting drugs.
They were watching.
“Don’t be thanking anyone just yet,” I told her. “We just went out of the frying pan and right back into the fire.”
Chapter Fifteen
“We have to get out of sight,” I told Beckett.
We’d only been walking for a few minutes since escaping the underground and things seemed to get worse with every step. My hands were a bit twitchy, I’ll admit, and I was shaking from the constant, throbbing pain in my wrist. But Beckett was in full-blown post-adrenaline-rush jitters mode, her teeth clenched, eyes darting about like a ferret on amphetamines.
That wasn’t the worst of it though. The worst part was, her paranoia was completely justified. The hit team was somewhere back behind us, and they’d be following soon if they weren’t already. Everyone we saw on the street was staring at us, pulling out their ‘links and making calls, and I was sure we’d picked up at least three different tails. I figured the only reason no one had taken another run at us was they didn’t want to be the first to get shot, and now they knew I’d shoot them. At some point, I’d have to convince them I’d kill them, but I was hoping to put that off. I kept my left hand in my pocket, wrapped around the blaster’s grip.
“Where could we go,” Beckett asked me, her voice wavering, a muscle in her cheek twitching, “on this tin can? There are people everywhere.”
I hadn’t thought about that, but it made sense. She’d grown up on an isolated, sparsely-populated colony world. She wasn’t just afraid of getting killed, she was getting phobic about the crowds.
What do they call that again? Not agoraphobia, that’s fear of open spaces. If Dog were here, he’d know.
“I can only think of one place,” I said. “The gravity generation array. It’s three levels down, near the outer hull antipolar to the system primary. Everyone avoids it because of the radiation.”
I didn’t think it was possible, but her eyes got wider.
“Radiation? What radiation?”
“It’s not fatal…I mean, I guess it would be if you lived right next to it for a few years, but you can go down there for short periods and not get anything worse than a headache.”
“What about calling for help?” she reminded me. “I thought we had to call for help.”
Before I could answer, I looked around to our right out of some sixth sense, some subconscious realization from the direction of the people around us, the echoes of the sound in the approaching intersection in the corridor. The streets were wide in this section, built like a planetside city to make tourists feel more at home, and the tourists I could pick out of the crowd were slowing, looking at something, while the locals were turning, making for the left-hand side of the road and shelter in the family bakery at the corner there.
I didn’t want to look, didn’t want to know. I just wanted to run. I looked anyway.
These were no kids, no teenage gangbangers. This was the real deal, the sort of muscle the people who ran El Mercado could call up on short notice. They were older, bigger, more professional, with none of the colorful, flashy clothing the kids had worn. Dark colors blended in with the shadows, and heavy jackets testified of the armor plating sewn into them. Haircuts were short and practical for men and women both, and there was no segregation by sex as in the youth gangs.
And there were a lot more guns. They didn’t hold them out in the open, but I knew where to look and I could see the places they were being carried, the bulges beneath the clothes, the reassuring pats against the chest or side of heavy jackets. These guys wouldn’t be intimidated and I wouldn’t be able to shoot everyone holding a gun before they got me. Probably. I wasn’t ready to try it, not unless our backs were against the wall.
I tried not to stare as I counted, but I couldn’t help it. There were an even dozen of them, about two hundred meters away, and I could see them scanning the streets, looking for us.
I grabbed Beckett’s hand and ran like Satan himself was on our heels.
She nearly stumbled at first, unprepared for the sudden acceleration, but I slowed down just enough for her to get her footing. I heard a distant yell behind us and didn’t look back to see who it was, just headed the opposite direction from the street muscle. Pavement slapped against the soles of my boots and Beckett’s heels scraped behind me, her palm sweating against mine and tugging me backwards with every step.
I wanted to look back and make sure she was okay, that she wasn’t about to trip and yank us both down, but I was trying to piece together a street map of El Mercado in my head with one side of my brain, and with the other half, keep a watch out for any amateur bounty hunters ready to take us down and try to keep the reward for themselves.
The terrain here didn’t help my navigation at all. Someone, long ago, had decided it would be a wonderful idea to build everything in this district in the style of a South American favela. Some historically-ignorant romanticist, I figured, because they’d gotten their idea of what a favela was from old movies instead of history books. They weren’t, contrary to the popular culture of the last few decades, romantic and quaint neighborhoods with cozy little families sharing their dinner with local children and breaking into dance numbers in response to any personal drama.
They weren’t tall and cramped and jammed together out of some stylistic aesthetic, they were symbols of neglect and corruption, abandoned by their governments and left to rot. They were poverty, and crime, and bodies being dumped every night and collapsing infrastructure, and they’d been that way right up till the time the Union was formed. Some were still that way.
I wasn’t sure if it was history repeating itself or simply the same recipe being cooked with the same ingredients in two different ovens, but El Mercado’s favelas were just as corrupt and abandoned and crime-ridden…and just as jumbled and confusing. Every one of them was slightly different, but not different enough to make an impression on me when I’d looked at a map.
All I knew was the service stairway down to the maintenance levels was in the alleyway between building A120 and A121, and if there were ever any numbers anywhere on these row houses, they certainly weren’t there now. I suppose they could have been buried beneath the graffiti, or covered by hanging laundry, and I could have found them by letting my ‘link scan the area and guide me with its mapping subroutines, but stopping to do that seemed like a great way to collect a bullet or energy blast in the back of the head.
Children crowded the railings of the last two or three levels of the row-houses, pointing at us and laughing, chattering in three or four different languages, only two of which I understood. The gist filtered downward through layers of noise and sweat and
hard breathing and preoccupation: they were taking bets on how long before the two of us died.
I’ll take some of that action. Give me five credits on 0300 local time.
I don’t know how I saw the alley. It looked like any of a dozen others I’d passed in the last two minutes, and my attention to find detail was suffering with fatigue, but something caught my eye, just a shape somewhere down at the end of it, a light at the end of shadowed darkness.
It was the maintenance stairwell. I don’t know how I knew, but I did, and I yanked Beckett after me, nearly pulling her off her feet. She stumbled and I skidded across something wet and tried not to think about what it might be, catching her shoulder before she fell into the unidentified puddle. The alley was dark but the service door was marked with a chemical strip light and I thought the subdued glow was probably what had drawn my eye to it.
Beckett looked a question at me, too out of breath to speak. I caught the meaning. Was this really a good idea?
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “It’s the best idea I have.”
I guess that was enough for her, or maybe she just didn’t have the energy to think of something smarter, because she followed me down the thirty meters of narrow alleyway as if the strip of light over the metal door was the entryway to paradise.
Something jumped between a pair of plastic trash bins off to our left and my blaster fairly leapt out of my pocket, my trigger finger already beginning to press down before I saw it was a cat. Real, live dogs, they didn’t have many of on space stations, but there were cats galore, because wherever we went, however careful we were about it, humans always seemed to bring rats with us.
Cockroaches, too, but we didn’t have anything to hunt them down except little robot exterminators, and they never quite got the job done.
