by Rick Partlow
There was a woman lying on her right side on the deck between the pilot and co-pilot’s acceleration couches. She had short, red hair and hazel eyes and she was trying to suck in her last breath with a fist-sized hole burned through her chest. Her left arm ended at the bicep, the bone charred and splintered and the rest of it blocking the cockpit hatch. She had a gun, but it was in the holster at her left hip. I thought she’d been the pilot.
Maybe it was the pain from the wound in my side, or maybe it was the lack of sleep and lack of food, but I couldn’t hold back the bile rising in my throat this time. I pulled back out of the cockpit and vomited what little was in my stomach onto the deck beside the hatchway, leaning against the bulkhead heavily.
“Boss, are you okay?”
It was Victor, concern in his eyes as he ran up through the aisle between the rows of seats, Kurt just behind him.
“Yeah,” I said, spitting on the deck to clear my mouth. “Get her out of there,” I nodded towards the cockpit, “so we can try to get this thing in the air.”
Victor grimaced when he saw the woman, but he did what he was told, grabbing the pilot by the legs and dragging her out of the cockpit. She’d stopped trying to breathe, and her eyes were open and unblinking. Kurt picked up her severed arm, his face intentionally expressionless, and followed the trail of blood on the deck out to the ramp.
Before they could get to the end, Bobbi came up, pushing Sanders in front of her as he cursed and fought her.
“Let me go!” He was yelling at her, trying to break free of her grip without much success. “Carmen could still be alive! We could still save her!”
“She’s flatlined,” Bobbi said, firmly but gently, grabbing him by the jaw and forcing him to look her in the eye. “She was shot right through her neck, Eli. If we had an auto-doc or a fully-equipped medical bay and we got her into it immediately, yes, we might save her. We don’t have either of those, and she’s dead. She’s gone.”
“Jesus,” I moaned, squeezing my eyes shut. Ibanez. They were talking about Ibanez, and she was dead.
I pushed off the bulkhead and stumbled into the cockpit, not wanting to look at them, just wanting to get this thing off the ground and blow this whole damn place up. There was blood all over the control console, enough that it was interfering with the displays. I swore under my breath, pulling off my jacket and wiping it away enough for the holo-projectors to work. There was blood on my fatigue shirt, too, and seeing the charred hole in my side almost made me throw up again.
I fell into the pilot’s seat and hunted for the control to start the turbines. This shit was state-of-the-art, not like the century-old crap they had on Thunderhead; haptic holograms with a pretty advanced AI that would fly the ship for me if I could figure out how to tell it what to do. I scrolled through one screen after another until I finally saw the icon for the engines and pulled it up to access the menu.
And it blinked at me in large, red letters: “Access denied. Identity scan unknown.”
“Fuck!” I screamed, slamming my fist into the hard polymer of the console.
I heard the shouts then, and a shot. I bolted out of the cockpit, pulse pistol jumping into my hand from where I’d set it next the control panel, and found Sanders writhing on the deck, a ragged hole burned through his shoulder, while Victor and Kurt aimed their rifles towards the top of the ramp.
Constantine Terranova stood there, his pulse pistol extended in his left hand, the cybernetic fingers of his right wrapped around the throat of Bobbi Taylor, holding her in front of him as a shield. Her rifle was on the floor and she was clawing in futility at the hand slowly choking her.
“Everyone throw down your guns,” Constantine said, his voice deadly flat despite what looked like a painful and serious burn on the left side of his face. “If everyone stays calm, we can all get out of here alive.”
“No one’s fucking getting out of here alive, you piece of shit,” I snapped at him, feeling almost more annoyed than enraged. “The pilot’s dead and we’re locked out of the controls. So why don’t you let her go and I’ll go easy on you and put a round through your forehead before the aliens get the chance to rip you to pieces with their fucking claws.”
Victor glanced over at me for just a moment at the statement, like it was an involuntary shocked reaction.
“Well, I’m not fucking giving up, Munroe,” Constantine growled, finally, it seemed, losing his composure. “So drop your damned…”
He didn’t have the chance to finish the sentence. He jerked and spasmed, the gun falling from his hand as he grimaced in pain. He let loose of Bobbi and tried to reach behind him with his bionic arm, like it was the only strength left to him, but his mouth opened slack, spilling a gush of blood, and his eyes rolled back in his head. Then he fell forward, crashing to the deck with a metallic clang, a huge hole ripped into his back just below his left shoulder blade.
Behind him, Kane shook blood from his fist. The flesh half of his face was charred and cracked, the human eye swollen shut, and his fatigues were shredded and covered in burns and blood. Standing a step down from him on the ramp was Trina Wellesley, her face more shocked and horrified than I’d thought her capable of feeling.
I felt my lips pulling back from my teeth in the closest I was going to come to a smile at the moment.
“Found her out there,” Kane said, his voice slurred and mechanical. “Said she could help.”
“Get the board unlocked,” I said to Wellesley, “and we’ll take you out of here.” I looked at Kane again and shook my head. “Can you fly?”
By way of response, he stomped past me towards the cockpit, the Corporate Security Force agent jogging beside him. Bobbi was on her knees, rubbing at her throat and staring daggers at Constantine’s corpse while Victor and Kurt had gone to help Sanders.
“Get rid of the bodies,” I told them, “and close the ramp. Then everyone get belted in, and get Sanders strapped down, too. We may have a rough ride.”
I could hear the turbines spinning up as I made it to the cockpit. Kane was already strapped into the pilot’s seat, but he wasn’t bothering with the holographic display; he was plugged directly into the control console, his cybernetic eye gleaming. I fell into the co-pilot’s seat, motioning a hesitant Wellesley into the navigation position as I buckled the restraints.
The forward viewscreens were active now, and I could see what the cameras and sensors were picking up. The aliens were still over by the barn, firing energy blasts in three directions, all of them away from us. Yassa and Gramps had to still be alive out there, still keeping them busy. But that wouldn’t last long. I pulled my ‘link out of my pocket and called up the file I’d been given by Cowboy.
I found the communications controls and activated the shuttle’s primary tight-beam antenna, realigning it towards the coordinates I read off the ‘link. I sent the signal code and held my breath. If Cowboy had been lying, or the CSF had detected the strike package and destroyed it…
No. There was the return signal, beeping cheerfully and flashing green in the communications display. It was a fairly simple interface, and it only took me seconds to figure out. I fed the coordinates of the canyon to the satellite, then told it to launch immediately, which gave us…
“Three minutes, thirty seconds until we’re toast,” I informed Kane.
“What does that mean?” Wellesley demanded, looking sharply at me.
I didn’t answer her, just stared at the main display and watched the bugs. They were all firing at the same place now, the far corner of the barn, their converging energy beams nearly whiting out the view screen. When the glare faded, they all began to turn away from the wreckage…and turn towards us.
“Kane,” I bit off, but almost before I said the word, the shuttle leapt into the air, jetting forward the second it lifted off.
I was pushed back into the acceleration couch, the breath going out of me as Kane opened the throttles and rocketed us across the canyon floor only a few meters off the hard deck
. Everything seemed to be narrowing to a black-rimmed tunnel in front of me, and I knew I was close to passing out. I tried to clench my stomach muscles, but pain flared again in my side and I gasped with air I didn’t have to spare and the blackness swallowed everything.
Chapter Twenty
I spasmed against my seat restraints, eyes flying open, and I instinctively knew I’d blacked out from the g-forces. I looked around and saw that Wellesley had done the same and was still out. Kane was stock-still, effectively part of the shuttle’s computer system. The rear view and threat readout in the main display screen showed that we were nearly ten kilometers from the ranch house, well out of the firing arc of the aliens.
My eyes danced around the display, hunting desperately for the countdown from the strike package, until I saw a much more dramatic and definitive answer to that question. Streaks of white-hot plasma descended out of the cloud cover like a swarm of meteors, each of the two dozen spears of light actually a three-meter long tungsten rod that weighed hundreds of kilograms.
They struck simultaneously and a dome of fire kilometers high expanded out to engulf the entire canyon in a blast as powerful as a fusion warhead. The glowing hemisphere faded and a mushroom cloud climbed high above the canyon, carrying with it the vaporized remains of Carmen Ibanez, Brandy Yassa and Cesar Torres. They were gone, as if they’d never been.
I leaned forward into my hands, and to my surprise, found myself whispering a prayer for them. Mom had raised me an atheist, but Gramps had been an old-fashioned Catholic, and I’d gone to mass with him many times over the years. I wasn’t sure I believed, but I was sure he did, and I was sure he’d want it. As for Yassa and Ibanez, I didn’t honestly know, but it wouldn’t hurt.
I frowned as I felt the shuttle nosing upward, the thrust increasing as the boat gained altitude.
“Take us back to Freeport,” I instructed Kane, my voice rasping and husky.
“No can do,” he said. I glanced over and saw him still staring forward, expressionless. “Remote override taking control. Can’t fight it.”
Trina Wellesley was awake now, and she was smiling thinly.
“That would be the Medellin,” she told me, her voice in control now, her demeanor calmer. “That’s my lighter, in high orbit,” she amended. “When I unlocked the controls, I activated an emergency alert. They took control once we were out of the canyon and they’re bringing us into a docking orbit with them.”
I’d tucked the pulse pistol into a storage pouch in the side of my chair. I pulled it out and levelled it at her face.
“Unless you get back on the comms and tell them not to,” I corrected her.
“If you shoot me, Mr. Callas, they’ll still bring you on board, and when they access the on-board security monitors, they’ll see that I’m dead and they’ll gas this ship, then hit it with sonics just for good measure. If you’re lucky, you’ll wake up in confinement. If you’re not, you’ll never wake up at all.”
“You’d still be dead,” I reminded her, trying to be as calm as she was, but feeling my lip curl into a snarl. “And we have all the way to orbit to think of a way to stop the shuttle.”
“How about I offer you something you want, then?” She nodded back towards the hatch to the utility bay. “Your man back there is badly wounded. If you put down the gun and don’t attempt to resist, I guarantee that he’ll receive treatment.” I opened my mouth to object, but she halted it with an upraised palm. “I’ll also guarantee that the rest of your team will be released once we reach Hermes.” She cocked an eyebrow at me. “With Mr. Torres apparently no longer a concern, my job is to bring you back…just you.”
I pressed my lips together to keep from cursing reflexively. That bitch knew just what notes to hit, all right. She knew I’d have no problem killing her and taking my chances, but if it meant the chance to keep the rest of the team safe…
I spun the pulse pistol upward on its trigger guard and flicked on the safety.
“I’m not certain how much you know about me, Ms. Wellesley,” I said with quiet resignation. “But I can guarantee you something: if you fail to deliver on your part of this deal, don’t count on anyone else to keep me from getting to you.”
“Once Ms. Damiani gets you back,” she countered, “you won’t know much about you, Mr. Callas.” She sniffed. “But your mother would probably frown on me going back on my word to her son, just on principle.”
“My mother,” I said to her, staring out the view screen as the clouds gave way to the stars, “doesn’t have principles.”
***
The hull shuddered as the shuttle docked, and I shuddered with it.
“We should have fought ‘em,” Bobbi Taylor grumbled, anchored by one hand to a strap on the bulkhead by the airlock. The fingers of her free hand flexed unconsciously, as if it longed for a weapon. The Gauss rifles and the pulse pistol were stowed in the locker just aft of the cockpit, at Wellesley’s insistence.
“Sanders and I are both shot,” I pointed out, my voice sounding distant in my own ears, my head floating as much as the rest of me, and not just because of the microgravity. “Kane crashed a starship and all three of you are pretty beat up. We have a few rifles, no pressure suits, one avenue of egress, and no control over this boat and they have gas and sonics and all the time in the world.”
As if on cue, Sanders moaned softly, his eyes blinking fitfully. I grabbed him by his fatigue pants’ belt and kept him from floating off towards the overhead. Kane was standing behind us, his metal feet magnetized to the deck, and said nothing. He hadn’t spoken a word since the CSF had taken over control of the shuttle and I wondered if he had a concussion from the crash.
“You didn’t have to do this for us, Boss,” Victor said quietly. He and Kurt looked smaller, somehow, bobbing there with no purchase.
“Of course he did,” Wellesley commented drily from the front of us. She glanced back at me, with what might have been disdain and might have been…what? Envy? “It’s who he is…for the moment.”
We were in the belly of the beast now, inside the lighter’s docking bay. It was a bulky, bulbous, ugly ship seen from the outside and I felt even worse inside it. The docking collar hummed mechanically as it sealed around the airlock of the shuttle, like a noose around our necks.
There was no pressure equalization to worry about, so the inner and outer airlock doors opened together with a smooth hum of servos. There were a pair of armored CSF troops waiting for us outside the lock, their boots magnetically locked to the deck, pulse rifles cradled in their arms like they didn’t think they’d need them. I was suddenly conscious of the blood stains on the deck beneath my feet, and I wondered if anyone in the crew of the Medellin had been friends with the people I’d killed, and whether they held a grudge. And then I looked past them and forgot all about it.
Standing behind them, anchored to the deck by the magnetic soles of his ship boots, was Cowboy.
“Howdy Munroe,” he drawled. Then he nodded to Wellesley, who looked even more shocked than I was. “How you been, Trina?”
“West,” she hissed the word like it was a curse. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“Just safeguarding my employer’s investment, Trina,” he said with a grin. He turned to the two CSF guards. “Get that man,” he gestured towards Sanders, “to the medical bay and see they get him treated right away.”
“Yes, sir,” a woman’s voice answered him from the exterior helmet speakers of one of them, and they moved forward and took the barely-conscious Sanders from my charge. I let him go reluctantly, not so much because I didn’t think they’d take care of him but more because I was reeling and at least he was something to hold onto.
“Kane,” I said, finally shaking off my stupor, “go with them. Get looked at by the docs.”
He didn’t argue with me, and I knew that meant he was hurt worse than he was letting on.
“West,” Wellesley snapped, pushing herself out into the passageway as the guards retreated with Sa
nders’ limp form, Kane clomping along behind, “you can’t just come on board my ship and order my people around!”
“Oh, of course I can, Trina,” he sighed in mild exasperation. “I just fucking did it, didn’t I?”
Behind him, in the security monitors that displayed the lighter’s docking bay, I could see West’s cutter taking up the other half of the bay, opposite the shuttle, squeezed into a space that had held two of the now-destroyed assault boats.
“What the hell am I going to tell Patrice?” Wellesley demanded, less outraged now and sounding a bit desperate.
“Tell her this is what Andre wants,” Cowboy responded with an easy shrug.
I could see her biting back her instinctive response, but I felt a cold tingling in my scalp. Andre? Uncle Andre? Was that who Cowboy worked for?
Wellesley was rubbing a hand over her eyes, looking gut-punched by the realization that the only thing she thought she could salvage from this clusterfuck was being taken away from her.
“Take these people to the mess, Trina,” Cowboy ordered her, waving at Victor, Kurt and Bobbi. “Get them something to eat, then take them somewhere they can get cleaned up. It’s a long flight back to Hermes and they all smell like blood and ashes.”
Wellesley didn’t even bother to argue with him, just pushed off down the passageway towards the hub of the ship, not waiting to see if anyone followed her. Victor and Kurt headed after her immediately, glancing uncomfortably at Cowboy as they did, probably remembering him as a vaguely threatening presence from wartime Demeter.
“So you’re Cowboy, huh?” Bobbi asked, looking him up and down as she pulled herself out of the airlock. “You’re cute…but that damn money better be in my account when I get back.”
“It’s there already, ma’am,” he assured her, grinning in amusement as she brushed past him, closer than she had to. Then he looked over at me, his expression growing more serious. “Come along with me, Munroe.”
