Absolution

by Rick Partlow

  The door was locked because you locked anything you wanted to keep from getting stolen or vandalized down here, and I didn’t have Dog along to hack the system so I had to do it the old-fashioned way.

  “Get behind me,” I warned Beckett, shielding my face with my right hand and trying to aim my blaster at the magnetic lock plate at an angle where the plasma wouldn’t splash back at me.

  I slitted my eyes and pulled the trigger. Heat washed over me, sunburn-hot on my neck and hand, and I smelled burnt hair and knew it was mine, but when I looked out from behind my hand, the lock was melted away, a twisted, black mass of metal and plastic, and the door was slowly swinging open. I pushed it open with the barrel of my blaster and held it with my foot, motioning to Beckett.

  “Go.”

  “They’re down there!” The words were distant, but I heard them clearly from somewhere past the other end of the alley. “I saw them go this way!”

  Beckett’s head snapped around at the far-off yell, lips skinned back from her teeth in what might have been fear or anger or both. I pushed gently at her shoulder and she moved through, feeling her way along in the pitch blackness on the other side of the door. I could feel them coming behind us and I wanted to scream at her to hurry so I could get in and get the door closed, but I knew there were stairs inside somewhere and I didn’t want to chance pushing her down them, so I waited with patience I do not, generally, have.

  When I thought there was enough room, I slipped in beside her and yanked the door shut behind me. It banged far too loudly and I held it in place, knowing it wouldn’t lock but hoping to keep it from rebounding and swinging back open. They’d find it eventually, but it would make me feel better if it stayed closed.

  I waited for just a moment, hoping my eyes would adjust to the darkness, but the blackness was too deep and there was only so much human rods and cones could do with it. I remembered my night vision glasses hanging in the utility locker and gave myself a mental kick in the butt for neglecting to bring them. They would have been so much less obtrusive than the flashlight, but at least I’d remembered to bring that with me.

  I grabbed it out of the pouch on my gunbelt, slipped my blaster out of its holster and affixed the light to the rail in front of the weapon’s trigger before switching it on. Beckett flinched at the sudden flare of white, shielding her eyes and moving back around behind me. A sloped metal ceiling nearly stared me in the face, heading down a staircase only a meter away, its landing bare metal grating beneath our feet. I realized Beckett must have been centimeters from the edge of the first step and I was suddenly glad I hadn’t rushed her into the door.

  “There’s a flashlight on your gunbelt,” I told Beckett, moving down the first couple steps to give her room. The ceiling was low, barely two meters of clearance from step to bare, grey metal, and I was glad I wasn’t an overly tall man. I started to turn back to the stairs then realized I hadn’t been clear. “Don’t turn it on yet. Just keep it in your hand in case you need it.”

  I couldn’t see a thing below us except for the flight of stairs we were on and the next landing. The walls were narrow, the ceiling low and the light couldn’t penetrate through the gridwork metal more than a few meters.

  Good. Get all that between us and whoever’s coming behind. Maybe they won’t know we came down here.

  And I knew that was wishful thinking even before the idea had the chance to bounce from one side of my head to the other, but I kept descending. The metal steps banged and rattled beneath us in a drumline rhythm, far too loud but it couldn’t be helped. I leaned against the right-hand railing with my shoulder, the pistol stretched out ahead of me, the light on the steps.

  It seemed as if we descended forever, one flight after another, and I’d given up on counting the landings we’d hit or the levels we’d traversed. Exits beckoned at every second landing, and I wondered where they went and if we’d be better off trying one of them. I thought about it, thought about how we’d be stuck down at the lowest levels with no way out. I could use my ‘link to find a way back up, and hope we could avoid detection until we reached the Communications Center…

  What was it my trainer in the Academy had said?

  “Hope in one hand and shit in the other and see which one fills up first.”

  That reward for our heads was going to be a wildfire devouring the good sense of every gangbanger and wannabe badass all over El Mercado. If we jumped out of one of those doors into the middle of a neighborhood full of innocent bystanders, we’d take the chance of catching them in a crossfire and getting someone killed.

  I kept heading downward instead.

  “Do you hear that?” Beckett asked, grabbing my shoulder and pulling me up short between one stair and the next.

  Annoyance fought for supremacy over exhaustion. I’d fallen into a nice, mind-numbing rhythm that had let me forget how incredibly tired I was, and now I was huffing and puffing and wishing I was anywhere else in the whole galaxy. And I could hear the steps behind us, above us. Still far off, but thumping with the regularity of a heartbeat.

  They were coming. I wasn’t sure if it was the street muscle or the mercenaries, but someone had found us.

  I sucked in a breath, tried to dig up energy from some untapped seam buried inside me but couldn’t find any, so I let gravity do the work. At least we were heading down. Relatively speaking of course.

  It wasn’t too much farther. You couldn’t miss the entrance. It was festooned with warnings in every language spoken in the Union and a few that had died off since the station had been constructed, as well as skull and crossbones symbols, radiation warning symbols, heavy machinery warning symbols…well, you get the idea. It was the Lascaux Caves in metal and plastic, and it was locked, of course.

  I blasted the door, then had to do it again because I’d flinched the first time and missed the lock plate. I blinked away afterimages and patted bits of white-hot metal off my jacket before they could burn through the lining. Beckett was coughing from the fumes and the only reason I wasn’t was that I was still holding my breath. I kicked the door open, the solid impact of my boot sole on four centimeters of solid alloy travelling up my leg and all the way into my back and on into my cracked wrist. I grunted, and then coughed because grunting had made me inhale, and ducked inside with Beckett stumbling close behind.

  I turned off my flashlight. I didn’t need it in here. Not that it was like sun-bright, but there was a constant background glimmer of pale blue Cherenkov radiation, a sort of nightlight glow that seemed to come from everywhere at once. It traced halos along the curves of endless rows of field generators, dumbbell-shaped columns running from the floor twenty meters up to the ceiling like a redwood forest if the redwood were made of exotic alloys and boron honeycomb composites and carbon nanotubes.

  Somewhere in here were control stations, shielded offices with protective suits and battalions of maintenance ‘bots, but those weren’t kept crewed round the clock. The gravity generators were simple for all that they were nearly a miracle of exotic materials and energy fields no one had even dreamed about until a couple hundred years ago. Not much could go wrong, and the normal parts that wore down and had to be replaced could be handled by the ‘bots. We didn’t have to worry about the workers finding us or any innocent people getting caught in the crossfire.

  “Which way?” Beckett asked, her eyes glazing over a little at the sight of the endless rows of fairy columns.

  Good question. One direction looked much like another, so I gestured to the right. I wasn’t sure how far we jogged because everything looked the same. There were alphanumeric designators on each of the field generator columns, but not in any sort of order I could discern and nothing to indicate how far we’d gone. I briefly considered trying to make my way to the central power conduit, visible through the forest as a broad, rust-red cylinder at the center of the chamber, nearly a kilometer away, but rejected it. The idea wasn’t to give them a landmark where they could find us, it was to blend in.
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  I went off to our left, about halfway down one of the rows of field generators, equidistant from the central walkway and the outer wall, and dropped to a knee, fighting the urge to lean against one of the glowing columns. I couldn’t feel any heat coming off them, couldn’t discern any difference from the radiation except for a tingling down my spine that might have been psychological, but I still didn’t want to touch them.

  Beckett collapsed beside me, sweat pouring off of her, the combined effects of our experiences on Hanuman and here on El Mercado beginning to show in the strain on her face. It probably showed on mine, too, but I didn’t have a mirror handy.

  “We can just stay here, right?” she said, her breathing rapid enough I began to worry she might hyperventilate. “They wouldn’t find us here, would they? We could just wait long enough and they’d leave, right?”

  I blew out a sigh, the tail end of catching my breath as well as disappointment in having to tell her the truth.

  “Unfortunately, we can’t. There’s the radiation, and the lack of food and water, and the fact we have to sleep sometime and my arm is only going to get worse…” I shrugged. “You get the idea. I’ve given them every chance to give up, to leave us alone. And I brought the fight down here where no civilians can get hurt.” I felt as if I were trying to talk myself into it more than explaining it to her. “I’m afraid anyone who comes down here, we’re just gonna have to kill them.”

  Beckett didn’t react, apparently having no problem with the idea, at least in the abstract.

  “Unless they kill us first,” I amended. “In which case, our problems will be over.”

  I grinned. I’d been trying to lighten the mood, but she didn’t seem to be taking the joke well. She was staring into space, arms draped across her knees.

  “Grant,” she said, tentative and quiet, “I need to tell you something.”

  I waited, letting her get to it in her own time.

  “I told you before I didn’t have any evidence you could use, but there is something. Something you could take them all down with. If I get killed here…” She trailed off, hissing out a breath, shuddering, but pressed on. “If I get killed, you need to take my body with you.”

  I scowled.

  “Well, that’s sort of a macabre request,” I said. “This a religious thing, you need to be buried somewhere special or something?”

  “Shut up,” she snapped. I blinked. She hadn’t been that assertive the whole time since I’d met her. “That hopper crash that killed my parents, you read about that, right?”

  I nodded. She sucked in a breath before she went on, as if she were having to force this out.

  “I was in that hopper with them. I was hurt really bad.” Her left hand went to the eye on that side, fingers trailing across her eyelid. “I lost this eye, had some brain damage even.”

  “Did they grow you a new eye?” I asked her. That would have been standard procedure on Earth or any of the inner colonies, but somewhere like Morrigan, it might have been prohibitively expensive.

  “The crash wasn’t an accident,” she went on as if I hadn’t spoken, still not looking at me. “That is, it wasn’t just the storm that caused the accident, the automatic guidance system in the hopper was faulty. It was a factory defect, one the company who’d made the system hadn’t bothered to correct because it would have cut into their profits more than simply paying for the damages it caused if it ever went wrong.”

  “Holy…,” I trailed off. “That’s…someone should have gone to jail for that.”

  “They might have. Which is why they came to me in the hospital and made me an offer. I didn’t have the money for an off-world university, but they said they’d send me to one, then make sure I had a good job afterward.” She licked her lips, a nervous sort of motion as if her mouth were dry. “They said they’d take care of me for life, if I let them do one thing. When they replaced my eye, they gave me a new, cutting-edge biomechanical version. Not just cloned tissue, but not bionic either, a combination that would pass most sensor scans.” I felt a prickling down my spine, realizing what she was confessing to. I didn’t say anything yet, sensing she needed to finish this. “They put a data recorder in the eye. Undetectable. They implanted a computer control for it linked to my optic nerves, with a wireless download capability.” She finally met his stare. “They turned me into a ready-made industrial spy and then arranged for me to get the job with Hadur so I could help them take over the company.”

  Now it was clear why she hadn’t told me before. Possession of enhanced bionics by unauthorized civilians was punishable by life in prison or even death. Using the data on the recorder as evidence to clear her of murder and treason would have only got her thrown in jail for the rest of her life for something just as serious. But there was one other question nagging at me, one I had to ask her.

  “So, Jake,” I said hesitantly. “He didn’t know, did he?” She squeezed her eyes shut and tears beaded on her cheeks.

  The biomechanical eye can still cry.

  “I should have told him. I knew what they were going to do with the company, but I thought…” Shudders went through her. “I thought he’d hate me if he found out. I helped him because I thought maybe I could stop what was happening without them finding out it was me. And I got him killed. It was my fault.”

  I wanted to comfort her, but I sensed it wouldn’t be welcomed right now. Maybe she was too accustomed to self-loathing after all this time. Or if I’m being honest, maybe it was me. Maybe I blamed her for her boyfriend’s death the same as she did. She’d known what was happening and she’d let him get himself killed.

  “You keep saying ‘they’ and ‘them.’ Who?” I shook my head. “Who was behind this? Who gave you the wetware and set all this up? Is it this Nautilus thing? The shell corporation?”

  “That’s the latest of a dozen names they’ve gone through just since I was recruited. I don’t know what to call them. I only dealt with third parties, lawyers and technicians. But there was one name that came up, not while I was being recruited but when we started looking into Nautilus. I didn’t think about it, but you mentioned it before, back in the brothel.”

  A chill went up my spine and a sense of unreality settled around me that had nothing to do with the gravity field.

  “It was Tomas Caty.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  I had so many questions to ask, and suddenly, no time for any of them.

  “I think they went this way!”

  The shout was heedless, reckless, unprofessional. It was definitely one of the locals we’d seen, not the hit team. A good news-bad news joke. The good news was they weren’t the trained squad of corporate mercenaries bent on killing us. The bad news was there were a lot more of them and they could cover more ground than the four remaining assassins could have.

  The tap-tap-tap of hard boot soles on the main aisle heading toward us banished my exhaustion and pain with a sudden burst of urgency, and I scrambled to my feet. Shooting at them was a risk, and not just a legal one. I could, conceivably, claim self-defense and not be in much more trouble than I already was. No, the risk was I might miss, probably would miss shooting left-handed. I met Beckett’s eyes and thought about what lay behind the artificial one. She had proof. She could make things right, which was all I’d ever wanted. Me living through it wasn’t necessary.

  “Stay here,” I told her. “I’m going to draw them off, get them coming after me. Once I do, I want you to get to the Communications Center and call the Marshals. Give them my name, tell them what’s going on. Maybe…” I was searching for something to give her hope, trying not to just think of my own goals. “If you’re straight with them, if you offer to give up your evidence and testify, I think they’ll cut you a deal. Even with the eye. It’s better than you’ll get from Nautilus.”

  “Grant,” she said, her voice hardly a whisper, her eyes wide with fear. For one of us, though which I wasn’t sure. “If you go out there, you’re going to get killed.”
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  I shrugged.

  “I’ve pretty much been going to get killed since my wife and son left,” I admitted, figuring now was as good a time as any to be completely honest with her and myself. “This seems like as good a way as any.”

  I took off, sprinting towards the end of the row, toward the voices, not giving her a chance to try to talk me out of it. I wanted to be talked out of it, and I was afraid if I gave her too much time, she’d come up with a reason not to do it that I could live with.

  Cheer up. Death can’t hurt that much.

  There were five or six of them coming up the central aisle, spread out on both sides between twenty and a hundred meters away, carefully checking each row of gravity generator nodes, sawed-off shotguns held low and casual like they’d used them before and weren’t too worried about any opposition.

  Morons. There wouldn’t be that big of a price on my head if I weren’t dangerous.

  My hand was shaking, though not from fear. Pain, exhaustion, adrenaline jitters, yes, all those, but not fear. I couldn’t take the time to stop in the middle of the aisle and steady myself, so I settled on spraying and praying, holding down the gun’s trigger and hosing the bursts of plasma energy in the general direction of the bad guys. I hit one, miraculously, a thick-chested man with a sculpted brown beard. He squawked and dropped his gun, the stamped metal of the shotgun receiver clattering against the metal grating floor as it hit just a half-second before he did. He continued writhing and screaming once he reached the deck, not dead but not in any shape to get up and join the fun.

  If the idea had been to get their attention, well…mission accomplished. Three shotguns roared at once, the reports blending into a rolling thunderclap echoing wildly through the forest of gravity nodes and something smacked into my right shoulder hard enough to make it go numb. I grunted and half-spun with the impact, my left hand and the blaster it held going to the ragged hole in my jacket. The buckshot hadn’t penetrated the armor plating beneath the vat-grown leather. I didn’t think it had, anyway. But they’d seen me and I was fairly confident they’d follow when I ran.