Absolution

by Rick Partlow

  The gang-bangers dropped their shotguns slowly, the weapons clattering one at a time against the metal grating of the floor, hands going up. Two squads of blue-armored Union Marshals rushed in at the signal of surrender, blaster carbines levelled and ready to take out anyone who moved.

  My mouth hung open and for just a moment, I forgot about the pain in my chest and the wounded civilian beside me and stared. I was still staring when Larry Daniels stepped in front of me, his weapon tucked under his arm, an “I told you so” expression on his chiseled face beneath his tactical helmet.

  “You’re gonna get yourself killed, Grant,” he said, kneeling down so I didn’t have to crane my neck up to look at him. “You know that, right?”

  “She needs help,” I said, unable to come up with anything more intelligent, waving toward Beckett. She was unconscious now, but still struggling to breathe. “She’s been shot.”

  “Medic!” Larry yelled behind him. “Get up here, it’s secure!”

  Two more Marshals in blue, a red cross marking their bulky armor plating, slid in beside Beckett, quickly and expertly stripping off bloody clothing and applying smart bandages. I let out a sigh, knowing she would make it now. They’d take care of her. Relieved of the burden of her survival, my mind went back to my own injuries and I very nearly passed out.

  “See to him when you’re done with that one,” Larry told the medics, and I thought I heard real concern in his tone.

  “I’m damned glad you’re here, Larry,” I said, my voice coming out a pained wheeze. “But how the hell did you find us? We never did get to send out a distress call.”

  Larry didn’t answer, just nodded off to the right. Coming up behind the medics, limping on three legs, the hair on his rear flanks charred and blackened, grinning in a way that was very canine and yet so very human as well, was Dog.

  I tried to say something coherent and again, failed.

  “You were…,” I started, tripping over the words. “How did…”

  “I told you I had to do some self-repair,” he said, tilting his head in a shrug. “Once I got the power feed issue taken care of, it wasn’t that hard to slip out of the docking bay. No one looks at a robot, even a damaged one.”

  “Grant,” Larry told me, his eyes set in grim accusation, “you’ve got complaints filed against you from Morrigan to Hanuman to here, from Traffic Control, local law enforcement, corporate security…. And then there’s this,” he said, gesturing at Dog. “Buddy, you’ve got some serious explaining to do.”

  “Yeah,” I acknowledged, feeling everything start to spin around me, the cumulative effect of exhaustion, dehydration and maybe a little internal bleeding finally beginning to take their toll. “But not right now.”

  I passed out.

  Chapter Seventeen

  “You look a lot better now than the last time I saw you.”

  Delia Beckett paused in packing the small shoulder bag and turned as I entered the room. It wasn’t quite a hospital room, wasn’t exactly a jell cell, but reminded me of both. The uniformed Marshal standing in the hallway just outside the open door made it seem more the latter.

  “Same to you, cowboy,” she said, smirking at the Stetson. I’d retrieved it from the Charietto after the Marshals had hauled it here to Government Central, not wanting to leave it in case the feds wound up confiscating the ship. Of course, they might still throw me in jail, but one thing at a time.

  “Aw, I just had a couple broken ribs.” I waved it away with a wrist that had been swollen to twice its size only a couple days ago. “Nothing a little time in the bone growth stimulator couldn’t make short work of. You saved my life. Twice.”

  No point in mentioning I could have survived the shot she’d taken for me. It was the thought that counted.

  “And all I did was bring trouble your way,” I reflected, speaking the words that had been gnawing at me for a while now. “You were doing fine living there in Absolution and I screwed everything up for you.”

  She zipped the bag shut and slung it over her shoulder, laughing softly.

  “I was dying inside a little bit every day back on Morrigan. Someone would have found me eventually. I wasn’t trying too hard to stay hidden. This way…” She motioned around her. “This way at least I can start trying to make it right.”

  “They must really want what you had in those implant data crystals,” I mused, shaking my head. “Total immunity and witness protection…the Marshals don’t throw that sort of deal around much.”

  “They deactivated the implant,” she said with an indifferent shrug. “It’s been grown over with nerve tissue and there’s no safe way to replace it, so I’m going to be blind in one eye, but it seems a small price to pay for what I’ve done.”

  “It’s a fresh start,” I said. “Most people don’t get that chance.” I shrugged. “Trust me, I know.”

  “I get to go be a rehab therapist on some outer colony.” She stepped closer. She seemed cleaner now, less haggard, younger even. I decided I didn’t feel so guilty anymore. “But what do you get?”

  “I’m about to find out.” I pointed a thumb back at the hallway. “I go meet with the Chief Inspector in like five minutes. I just wanted to make sure to say goodbye first. I’ve never been very good at saying goodbye. When my dad died, I didn’t even want to go to the funeral. It felt like it wouldn’t be real if I didn’t say goodbye.”

  “This doesn’t have to be quite that final, I hope. But if it is, maybe you should try to do what you helped me to do.”

  She wrapped me in a hug and I returned it a bit awkwardly. I’ve never been much of a hugger.

  “Forgive yourself,” she told me.

  I’ve never been big on that, either.

  “I’ll try,” I promised.

  And then she followed the guard out of the room and down the corridor, and she was gone. It was my turn to face my fate. At least they hadn’t kept me under guard since I was released from the medical ward. Heck, they hadn’t even stuck me in the inmate section, which I’d very much appreciated. Of course, they hadn’t let me see Dog, either, and I suppose they’d known I wouldn’t try to run without him.

  The walk was long and there were stares this time, but not the resentful kind, and I wondered just how much everyone knew about what had happened. It was also possible they were staring at my hat. You didn’t see many Stetsons in a Union Marshals’ headquarters, except on Halloween.

  Larry was waiting for me in front of Tanaka’s office, arms folded and an expression of disbelief on his face.

  “How did you do it, Masterson?” he asked, no resentment in his tone just a sort of awe-filled skepticism. “How did you turn this fuck-up into one of the biggest busts in the history of this base? Do you know how many judges we had to roust from their beds to write up the warrants before the word got out? How many strike teams we had to send out to raid the corporate headquarters of Hadur, BramCo and a half a dozen others? My God, we’ve made more arrests in the last three days than we have in the last year!”

  “It’s a gift, Larry,” I said, spreading my hands. “Consider it my way of saying thanks for pulling my fat out of the fire.”

  “Felt like old times.” He offered a hand and I shook it. It did feel like old times. “Good luck in there,” he said, reaching over to knock on Tanaka’s door for me.

  “Come.” Her voice was curt in a familiar way I hadn’t realized I’d missed.

  I gave Larry a final nod, pulled off my hat and walked into the office. It was sparsely, almost Spartanly decorated, the only thing unrelated to Tanaka’s career a small holo-cube cycling photos and videos of her husband and children on a loop. The Chief Inspector was behind her desk, leaning back in her chair and watching me with the keen expression of a hawk circling a field mouse. The door slammed shut behind me and I glanced back at it sharply, only then noticing Dog sitting on the floor beside Tanaka’s desk.

  He was, I saw, completely repaired, right down to the fur on his haunches.

  “T
hey wouldn’t let me see you,” Dog said plaintively, then fell silent at Tanaka’s glare.

  Holy hell, she can even shut Dog up.

  “Please sit down, Mr. Masterson,” she said, motioning at the chair across from her.

  There was only one chair, sturdy and comfortable with padded faux leather that creaked beneath my weight as I settled into it. I’d been in her office before with others and there was always just the right number of chairs for however many people were in her office at the time. It was uncanny.

  “We are faced with an interesting situation here, Mr. Masterson,” she said, hands folded in front of her, elbows resting on the desktop. “Between what Ms. Beckett provided for us from her implant and the records your…” She paused, her mouth hardening in disapproval. “…your dog here uploaded from the lab on Hanuman, we have been able to identify a senior Union Representative, Tomas Caty, as being involved in a smuggling ring dealing in black-market military-grade Bartoli crystals and illegal human experimentation.”

  She pushed up from the desk and paced restlessly behind it, hands clasped at the small of her back, a lion trapped in a cage.

  “Right now, we have enough to arrest him and make a fair case in court.” She stopped in mid-stride to shrug. “Not insurmountable, but enough to ruin his career, certainly. But he’d be the end of it, unless we were willing to cut him a deal to get to the next rung up on the ladder.”

  “What makes you so certain he’s not the top rung, ma’am?” I asked her.

  She scowled at me as if I should know better.

  “Caty is not intelligent enough to pull something this far-ranging off on his own. He’s a politician’s politician, an expert at charm and glad-handing and talking out of both sides of his mouth. I’d be willing to bet my pension he’s someone’s sock-puppet.” She turned a hand over demonstratively. “Which means he might take us up on that deal, but Goddammit, Grant, I don’t want to give him one. He doesn’t deserve to come out of this Scot-free, not after what he did to you.”

  I could sense all this leading to something, and since I’d never known Maggie Tanaka to beat around the bush before, I could tell it was something she didn’t like.

  “Come on, ma’am,” I urged. “Out with it.”

  “The thing is, Grant, with what we have now, if we do cut a deal with Caty, we could get him to confess that the evidence he presented of you bugging his offices was doctored. You could be reinstated, get it all back within weeks.”

  Okay. Now I understood.

  I sank back into the chair and let my head tilt back, eyes on the ceiling, imagining being back on the job. I noticed Dog hadn’t said anything, and I wondered if he was that impressed by Tanaka or if he was being reticent because he wanted me to think about what was important to me instead of him.

  Which would be giving him credit for a lot more grace and selflessness than he’d ever demonstrated before.

  If I had my job back, if I was cleared of all charges, I could even get visitation rights with Luke. It wouldn’t be often unless I could get reassigned to the Solar System, but not-often was still better than never.

  “What’s the alternative, Chief?”

  “The alternative is, you leave her with your ship fixed and your bounty paid and your companion.” She glared again at Dog. “And you continue acting as a bounty hunter with no official support from the Marshals or anyone in the government…but unofficially, you’ll be acting on information I give you and helping us follow leads into whoever is behind Nautilus.”

  “What do you know about them?” I asked, trying to buy time so I wouldn’t have to give my answer yet.

  “Not enough. We think it has its fingers in dozens of criminal enterprises and is heavily involved in the Evolutionist Cult.”

  My ears pricked up at that. The Evolutionists thought cybernetics were the next step in human development and financed their criminal use of enhanced bionics through smuggling and murder for hire.

  “We’ve been investigating them for the better part of a year, but every time we’ve tried to send a Marshal in undercover, they’ve been burned.” Her expression hardened. “A couple have wound up dead, no suspects, no explanation.” She emerged from behind the desk and put a hand on my arm. I stared at it for a moment, wondering if it was a prelude to violence. “Grant, I can’t ask you to do this. Not officially. But if I know you, I don’t have to, do I?”

  “So,” Dog said, settling into the copilot’s seat, resting a paw on the console, “where to next?”

  I enjoyed the feel of my seat on the Charietto in silence for just a moment. Would I have really given her up, given Dog up, for the chance to go back to my old life?

  “Tanaka gave me a lead about a fugitive out in the Paragon at Barnard’s Star. Muscle for a big-time smuggler who was linked through Nautilus to Caty in the data you scooped up.”

  I turned to him and grinned.

  “We’re going hunting.”

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