by Rick Partlow
CONTENTS
WHAT’S NEXT IN THE SERIES?
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Epilogue
WHAT’S NEXT IN THE SERIES?
Also by Rick Partlow
FROM THE PUBLISHER
About Rick Partlow
CONTACT FRONT
©2020 RICK PARTLOW
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WHAT’S NEXT IN THE SERIES?
CONTACT FRONT
KINETIC STRIKE
DANGER CLOSE
DIRECT STRIKE
1
The billboard spewed government lies far above us, and I pretended to listen while I watched the crowd in the Zocalo.
“Final casualty estimates from what has already become known colloquially as The Battle for Mars have yet to come in, but Commonwealth Fleet Admiral Sato has announced that the cruiser Midway, which was set to launch from the shipyards there, has been destroyed, along with several other ships in the docks for repairs and refitting. The Tahni attack was beaten back at great cost and Fleet sources say it may be some time before the cruisers lost in the strike can be rebuilt.”
The talking head was narrow-faced, short-haired, and androgynous, a computer simulation meant to come across as pleasant and non-threatening while it told the masses the official story about an alien attack on the Solar System that had taken out a good portion of the Commonwealth’s military arsenal. Did the government think we were stupid? Did they think if they sugar-coated the news enough that we wouldn’t get scared?
Watching the cattle shuffling along obediently through the shops of the Trans-Angeles Underground, heads down over their scansheets, reading the latest celebrity gossip, I decided the government was probably right. A billion people were crammed into the Trans-Angeles Metro Center, most of them chawners on the dole in the Underground, living on free soy paste and spirulina powder and free virtual reality entertainment, in boxes ten meters on a side. Sometimes it seemed not one of them cared about anything past the end of their nose.
“Hostilities with the Tahni erupted again decades after the Truce ended the First Interstellar War,” the announcer continued, “when the Tahni attacked squatter colonies in the Neutral Zone with a ruthless nuclear bombardment.”
The inoffensive face was replaced by images of a planet from orbit, pinprick flares of light rising over one of the continents. Who took the video? I wondered. Or was it another simulation, like the announcer, like most everything about life down here in the Underground?
“Commonwealth President Gregory Jameson responded by launching targeted conventional strikes against Tahni observation posts on their side of the Neutral Zone, and it was assumed things would return to the status quo before the Tahni launched a vicious sneak attack on our military shipyards in Martian orbit.”
There he was. I tuned out the billboard stream and the hawkers at their kiosks trying their best to drown it out with advertisements of their wares, and locked my focus on the man in the green and yellow jacket. It was cheap and flashy, made on the public fabricators from free patterns on recycled material, typical for the chawners in the Housing Blocks, but in this case, it was camouflage. This guy wasn’t a chawner on the public dole, and he didn’t live in a ten-by-ten box. The edge of a holographic tattoo crawled up the side of his neck, an expensive extravagance most people down here couldn’t afford.
The backpack was what I was interested in. He tried to wear it casually, as if it was a change of clothes or his virtual reality gaming headset, but the fingers of his right hand were curled around one of the shoulder straps, gripping it like his life depended on it. I knew his face, knew his route, knew where he liked to stop for lunch. I’d been watching him for two weeks, from the minute he got off the train at Whitlow Station until he reached the far end of the Zocalo and emerged from a particular shop without his backpack.
And the very next day, if you knew the right way to ask, that shop suddenly had plenty of Kick to sell you. Synthetic endorphins were popular, incredibly addictive and illegal as hell, which meant they were big business for the people who really ran the Underground: the gangs. The Kibera 1087s, in this case. Nasty fuckers who liked to hurt people just to make a point. They manufactured the Kick in labs deep inside their territory, where the cops were afraid to go, but there was no money in the Housing Blocks and the working class who would come to the Zocalo to buy drugs wouldn’t risk going down into the Kibera. So, they used couriers. Like Mr. Ugly Jacket here.
He passed by my position without giving me a glance and I fell in behind him, blending into the crowd. It was a diverse group, like all the Zocalos in the mega-city, mixing the typical Underground dwellers with the more upwardly-mobile working poor from slightly higher in the food chain. There were even a few of the ground-level surface-dwellers who worked hard enough to see the towers where the Corporate Council bigwigs lived, even if they’d never set foot in them. That sort of envy might even make me want to slap a drug patch on my neck and feel like a king for a couple hours.
But I’d settle for the money I’d get from stealing their drugs and selling them myself. It was still addictive, but I can quit anytime I want. I touched a control on my datalink and it posted a pre-arranged ad on a public personals site, where anyone could see it. No direct connection between me and anyone else. Ten meters away, a slender, leggie girl with bobbed pink hair and calf-high boots shifted her course just a step or two, her eyes down like everyone else’s, a public scan
sheet in her hand playing a video only she could hear on her ear bud.
I slipped a hand into my jacket pocket and felt the cold ceramic and plastic of the stun wand, and flicked off the safety with my thumb. The pink-haired girl gasped an apology as she bumped into the courier and he cursed at her in a patois of Spanish, English and Tagalog. He’d pay for it two seconds later. I jammed the business end of the stun wand into his side and held down the trigger.
Ugly Jacket Man stiffened, every muscle in his body tensing up as the shock coursed through him. This close, I could smell the cheap cologne he used way too much of, the sickeningly sweet stench filling the air between us and making me want to gag. I grabbed the right shoulder strap of the jacket just as I let off the trigger, stripping it off him with practiced smoothness as he collapsed to the tile floor, slipping it onto my own back and stepping past him as if nothing had happened.
Pris didn’t slow down, didn’t look back, her pink bob merging into the crowd as she headed off away from the Zocalo toward the train station. I arced around the edge of the kiosks, not wanting to look as if I were following her, but needing to get to the same place as quick as possible. I tried to stick to the spots where the crowd was the thickest, but the group I’d fallen in with was heading for an entrance to the Zocalo, and when I split off from them, I was suddenly alone and very, very obvious.
I’d known there would be security. An outfit like the 1087s wouldn’t send a shipment of Kick worth thousands of Trade-notes to the Zocalo without having someone around to watch the courier’s back. I’d been counting on speed and confusion to shield us from them, but I locked eyes with a tall, dark-eyed, raven-haired man thirty meters away and I had a suspicion I was screwed. When he pulled a gun, I was certain of it.
The hair rose on the back of my neck. Guns were incredibly easy to fabricate and cheap to buy, but hard to get past the security on the trains, which meant this guy had either bribed the right person or managed to get the patterns for an undetectable pistol. Either possibility meant he was someone good enough with a gun for the 1087s to go to this much trouble.
I ducked right, then cut left just as he fired his first shot. It wasn’t loud, the sound of someone clapping their hands, and I wasn’t sure if anyone except me noticed it. If it hit anything, the noise of the crowd covered the sound of the ricochet and before he could fire again, I was running.
Pris turned from her casual stride across the square and her eyes went wide.
“Cam?” she blurted, and I was too scared to be mad at her for using my name.
“Go!” I urged her.
It was probably the wrong decision. If she’d stayed put and pretended she didn’t know me, the shooter might have ignored her. But I didn’t have time to sit around and debate, and the image of her standing there like a statue while some gangbanger shitbag put a bullet through her head seemed more pressing than second-guessing myself. She ran, and I pushed her ahead of me, heading for the train station.
There were detectors there, and even if the gun could beat those, there were live cops. The shooter wouldn’t want to chance a run-in with the Transit Authority Police. Not even the 1087s fucked with the TAPs.
Another hand-clap somewhere behind me and someone screamed. I knew screams, knew their subtleties and varieties very well, and this one was pain, not fear. I grabbed Pris by the hand and ran faster, knowing how hard it would be for her to keep up in those damned boots. I’d told her not to wear the boots, but she never listened.
“Have you got the bag?” I asked her, yelling breathlessly. She nodded, not speaking, either because she was already tired or too scared to talk. “We’re going to duck into the bathroom and make the transfer. Get ready.”
She fumbled at her waist, unbuckling an expandable pack and pulling it open. Getting the pack had been the hardest part of the whole job. Not that it was impossible to find a signal jamming container, but most of the sources for them were the gangs, and the whole purpose of this was to pull it off without letting the gangs know who did it. That way, they’d all want to blame each other for it.
We dodged behind a cluster of people who were finally looking up at the world, just noticing the screaming and the commotion around whoever had caught the bullets meant for us, and used the concealment to duck into the restroom. The first half a dozen stalls were occupied and panic surged in my gut at the idea the gunman would walk in on us as we circled the curve of the restroom corridor searching for an open toilet and kill us here in the bathrooms.
A young woman with a little boy in tow was camped outside one of the doors, waiting for it to open and I groaned at the thought they must all be in use, but then a door popped open and a doughy-faced older man dressed in clothes two sizes too large for him stumbled out, waving a hand across his face.
“Might not want to go in there right away,” he cautioned me, but I ignored him and pulled Pris inside, pushing the door shut.
“Oh, Jesus!” Pris exclaimed, covering her mouth with her hand at the smell. “Hurry up, Cam!”
I held my breath as I pulled the backpack off and ripped it open. The drug patches were sealed in individual plastic cases, and the whole thing was sealed a second time in a large bag. The tracker would be planted somewhere in all that shit, and there was no time to dig it out right now. I stuffed the plastic bag into the waist pack and shoved it at Pris, then slipped the backpack onto my shoulders.
“Wait thirty seconds,” I told her, “then get on the train and head back to the Favela. If I don’t show up in two hours, your best bet is to dump it and run.”
She nodded, but I knew she wouldn’t do it. If I didn’t show up, she’d take it to the broker herself and try to sell it. Pris was nothing if not self-sufficient, which was why I was with her. I didn’t like needy girls. She braved the smell in the toilet to kiss me, and then I was out the door again.
The bathroom corridor curved in a half-circle and I followed it out the other entrance, walking fast rather than running, not wanting to rush into the path of a bullet. I saw him almost immediately, towering over most of the crowd only twenty meters away, his right hand and the gun I presumed he still held concealed under his jacket. He hadn’t seen me, but I needed him to, so I ran.
The walkway between the Zocalo and the train station was packed with pedestrians, but I didn’t try to weave through them, pushing them out of the way instead. Yells, curses, and obscene gestures followed me, a signpost for the 1087 gunman. He’d be coming after me, which was just what I wanted, but I needed to get inside the train station. I didn’t think he’d follow me in there, not with the TAPs ready to swarm all over him. That was what I kept telling myself.
The entrance to the station was a broad archway, made from cheap buildfoam like everything else down here but with a façade of fake brick, as if it were a leftover from the old world. What bullshit. I knew the old world and I didn’t want to be reminded of it, but I was happy as hell to make it through that arch, because it was where the weapons detectors were housed.
Come on, just stay out there. It’s not worth the risk for you to come in here.
I slowed my pace and risked a look behind me.
“Shit,” I muttered.
The tall man hadn’t even hesitated, just followed me right through the detectors. Maybe he’d ditched the gun, but I couldn’t take that chance. I didn’t have time to wait for a train and if he followed me onto one, I’d be just as dead. I took off for the north terminal at a jog. There were four tracks running parallel from south to north, each reachable by a series of escalators arcing over the intervening trains.
These weren’t evacuated bullet trains running on magnetic suspension like I’d heard they had between the cities, thank God, just regular monorails. If the tracks had been sealed, there would have been no way I could get away with this.
I ran up the escalator three steps at a time, wriggling around other travelers where I could, pushing them out of the way when I had to, and not sticking around to hear them curse me out. I s
lid down the handrail on the other side, earning a few dirty looks and nearly falling off the edge and busting my ass, then I was up the next one to do it all over again.
I didn’t see the TAPs and damn it, for once I wanted to. If the TAPs were running a patrol, they’d stop me or the gangbanger, and either one would work. I wasn’t carrying any contraband and I wasn’t wanted for anything at the moment. Sliding down the escalator might get me a ticket, or a three-day ban from the station, but I could live with that.
There’s never a cop around when you need one.
I stopped at the bottom of the last escalator, panting in exhaustion, my adrenalin running low, sweat soaking the small of my back and dripping down into my face. I wiped it away, deciding I needed a haircut, and checked behind me.
Son of a bitch. The black-haired man was coming over the top of the last arch and didn’t even seem out of breath…and his gun was in his hand.
I bolted for the tracks. Some places, they had polycarbonate shields in place to keep people from doing just what I was about to do, but if there’d ever been any here, they’d taken them out years ago and left us peons to Darwin’s mercy. The yellow lights were flashing that a train was coming, but I wasn’t going to wait for it. I vaulted the railing, bending my knees to absorb the impact of the two-meter drop and still twisting my ankle a little.
The lights were flashing red now, and an alarm was sounding, but the train was going too fast to stop this close. I ignored the flare of agony in my ankle and hopped over the rail assembly in the center of the tunnel, trying to get up a running start before I hit the opposite wall. I could see the maintenance door, just fifteen meters or so down the tunnel along the walkway. It was locked, but I’d paid a worker in Kick to get the universal code key a couple months ago.
I jumped and snagged the edge of the walkway with my fingertips, the worn buildfoam way too smooth and slick from decades of use. The toes of my work boots scraped against the surface of the wall as I pulled up straight, trying to use the big muscles of my back. My forearms burned and I kicked my legs like I was running in mid-air, putting every last bit of desperate energy I had into getting my center of gravity over that wall.
