by Rick Partlow
I shrugged. It wasn’t going to get any better by watching it. I motioned for the others to follow and headed down the other side of the hill.
Chapter Five
There wasn’t too much of a transition between the packed dirt of the trail down the hillside to the slightly harder packed dirt of the perimeter streets. At least there wasn’t much mud, which was a nice change from many of the Pirate Worlds we’d visited, but I figured that was because most of the free water was frozen. Icicles hung off of the eaves of houses and clung to the metal gutters off warehouse roofs, and where the wind touched my face it was still bitterly cold.
Wire fences surrounded some of the warehouses, three meters high and probably linked to security systems, the coating of ice on the chain links reflecting winks of light from deeper in the town. Nothing seemed to stir inside them, and I wondered if they were even in use. Passing through the outer layer of buildings, I began to see the effects of what was happening here. More warehouses or factories or whatever were in the next row, but half of them were in ruins, collapsed or burned or exploded, their wreckage scattered halfway into the road, the fences ripped or cut. No smoke or dust rose above the remains, and from the look of the ice coating the chunks of stone and buildfoam and the splinters of wood, I thought the damage had to have been done at least several days ago.
Some of it had spilled over to the smaller row-houses squeezed in-between the industrial buildings and a few were totally burned out, blackened husks picked clean of anything useful. Others had just been damaged, a corner of a roof caved in or a window or door boarded up around sloppily-patched holes from bullets or rockets or fragments.
I caught a flicker of movement in a house that was half collapsed in on itself and I held up a fist and stepped farther into the shadows as I took a knee. The enhanced optics in my contact lens turned the interior of the ruined building from a blob of darkness to a blob of hazy green, which wasn’t very helpful. There simply wasn’t any detail to see, just a jumble of fallen rock and wood and buildfoam scraps. I watched it for a moment, hoping for clarification, but I saw nothing.
Maybe it had just been a trick of the shadows.
No. There.
It was just the briefest flash, the white of a light-skinned face barely visible under a dark, hooded jacket, but I saw it clearly. Maybe it was nothing; but then again, maybe it was the scout for an ambush. I motioned to get Victor’s attention, then signaled that I was going to take a look inside the building and I wanted him to wait there. He flashed the “okay” and waved at Divya and Vilberg to get back farther out of the street.
I held my pistol at low ready as I crept closer to the wreckage of the narrow, shabby, little house, trying to keep my eyes on it while also not losing sight of my surroundings. Rotten, half-burned wood creaked under the soles of my boots, and bits of concrete clattered away as I dragged my feet over the uneven surface, sacrificing stealth for stability. They knew I was here, whoever they were; they’d been watching me.
Things became clearer and more distinct inside the house as I ducked under an overhanging roof fragment and stepped over the threshold. What looked like it had been a hand-tooled wooden bedframe was broken and charred on the other side of a collapsed interior wall, whatever had made up the mattress burned to nothing. What might have been a table was resting on the stubs of two legs against an exterior wall, but no other furniture had survived whatever vultures had descended on this place…so there wasn’t really any place for the kid to hide.
He crouched in a corner, partially shielded by a fallen section of concrete block wall, hugging his knees to his chest. A blanket lay next to him, stretched out on the floor as a pallet, and beside it was a plastic bottle half full of water. I couldn’t see much under his heavy, dark-grey jacket except a sliver of his face through the hood. It was lean and grey-eyed and sharp-angled and maybe twelve years old at the oldest. A shock of red hair fell across his forehead and a look of utter, desperate hopelessness was fixed on that face.
I sighed out a breath and shoved my pistol back into its holster.
“Are you alone here?” I asked him.
He nodded jerkily, barely looking at me.
“Was your family in here when…” I trailed off, gesturing at what was left of the house.
Another nod. I felt a wrenching inside my gut, thinking of my own son back home, much younger than this boy, and what it would do to him if I didn’t come back. I reached into an interior pocket of my jacket and pulled out the protein bars I’d stuffed in there before we’d left. I didn’t know if he’d be afraid to take them from me, so I dropped them next to him. He looked at them, back at me, then back at the bars for an instant before he snatched them up, shoving two in his pocket before ripping open the third and devouring it in seconds. He only paused to take a sip from the bottle of water before finishing it off, then licking the inside of the wrapper.
“If you want to come with us,” I said hesitantly, “I’ll try to find someone who can take care of you.”
I didn’t know who the hell that would be, but I couldn’t just leave him here, not if I wanted to be able to look at myself in the damn mirror.
His eyes darted toward the street just a microsecond before I heard the engines. They were old, obsolete, probably alcohol-fueled and undoubtedly fabricated locally out of whatever scraps people could get their hands on. They were revving hard, not just cruising down the street to get from one place to another; the sound was angry, dangerous. I pulled my pistol and held my other palm up to the kid as I turned toward the exit.
“Stay here,” I told him. “Stay down.”
I hopped gingerly across the rubble, reaching the street just as the cargo trucks roared by me, their headlights dark, figures huddled in the open beds with what looked like rifles cradled in their arms. We were less than a hundred meters from our destination and I was hoping, nearly praying that they’d keep on going, but the trucks skidded to a halt nearly right in front of me with a squeal of poorly-maintained brakes. The rear loading gates slammed downward and the troops inside piled out with a heavy thud of boots on the packed dirt and a gleam of light reflected off the metal of bare, cybernetic arms and legs.
They were all cyborgs, and I knew what else they had to be: Skingangers. Evolutionists, they called themselves philosophically, but these guys were carrying too many guns to be philosophers. Evolutionists thought the future of humanity was in cybernetic enhancement and replacement; they rejected flesh in favor of the permanence of metal and circuitry. Skingangers financed that rejection via organized crime: dealing in drugs, illegal Virtual Reality, assassination and Ripjacking---kidnaping transients and selling off their organs for cheap transplants.
What the hell they were doing here in Shakak, I had no clue.
Once all of them had vacated the vehicles, the trucks roared to life again and aimed straight for the fence barricading one of the smaller warehouses. There wasn’t room enough to work up much speed, but they were heavy and powerful and they pounded into the chain link abreast and took it down with a screeching rip of metal. The Skingangers pressed in behind the trucks, squeezing through the gaps on either side where the fence had been torn away from the support poles, heading for the front loading dock, scrambling up the ramp to the cargo doors.
Those doors swung aside seconds before the Skingangers reached them, and a blinding, persistent flash erupted in a solid line of ionized air, chopping through the front line of cyborgs and blowing them backwards.
Gatling laser, I thought clinically. This is a trap.
They flowed backwards like a wave away from the incoming laser fire, some of them shooting back with their heavy rocket rifles as they retreated. The Gatling laser sliced through the cabs and engines of the cargo trucks, flares of burning fuel and vaporizing lubricants spraying from the fist-sized holes punched in the metal of the engine covers. The Skingangers ran behind the trucks for cover and when they did, the Gatling laser fell silent and the soldiers inside the warehouse pou
red out of the loading dock doors.
They were dressed in identical black armor and visored helmets, the front rank laying down suppressive fire with pulse carbines. I’d seen them before, on the moon of the gas giant; they were Savage/Slaughter mercenaries, Vilberg’s unit. More of the Skingangers fell to multiple hits from laser-fire, and others shrugged off blasts that caught them on their bionics, but a couple laid down covering fire from behind the trucks while the others fell back…right into us. A few ran down the edge of the street, while others were ducking between buildings, looking for better cover.
“Fall back!” I yelled at the others, seeing Victor staring at the scene wide-eyed like he didn’t know whether to shit or go blind.
The kid. I couldn’t leave the kid there. I dashed back inside the house just in time to see him disappearing through a door at the back of the building and I cursed under my breath. I clambered through the debris with desperate speed, nearly slamming my head into a sagging support beam, squeezing through the partially blocked doorway into the back room where I’d seen the boy disappear. The room was small and filled with ash and broken concrete, but one corner had collapsed and there was a narrow gap in the block wall there that led out into the darkness.
The boy thought he could get out the back safely, but there had been Skingangers heading that way, and if the mercenaries followed them… I really didn’t want to stick my head out through that hole with people shooting at anything that moved, but I also didn’t want to see that kid’s dead body lying on the ground.
“Shit,” I hissed.
I put my left arm through first, figuring that if it got blown off, I could still shoot back, and braced my hand against the rough, broken concrete of the exterior wall. I scraped the hell out of my shoulder, but I was able to use the leverage to pull my head and right arm through at the same time, pushing my gun out in front of me and kicking free to land on my side on the ground in back of the house.
Shattered fragments of concrete dug into my side and back, but I ignored the pain and rolled into a crouch just in time to almost have a Skinganger run straight into me. It happened fast and I think the only reason I didn’t get shot was that he was too close and I was able to grab the barrel of his carbine before he could shove it in my face. He was a tall man with a pair of glowing red, artificial eyes and a mouthful of sharpened, metal teeth and he was drawing back his hand to take a swipe at me when I shoved the barrel of my pistol under his chin and pulled the trigger.
His head didn’t jerk back, probably because of the cybernetic reinforcement to his spine, but the top of his skull exploded in a fountain of blood and brain matter and he stumbled backward a step before he toppled backwards and crashed like a felled redwood. I didn’t try to pry the carbine out of his hands; it would have taken too long and the cybernetic fingers wouldn’t loosen at all in death. I just took off down the alleyway to the left, figuring that was the way the boy would have run since it was away from the fighting.
Another row of narrow houses was crammed in behind the one I’d just exited, all of them burned out and deserted; I thought for a moment that I should search them, but I figured the kid would want to get farther away, if he was smart. Past the wreckage of the row-housing was another fenced-in industrial building, this one larger and more fortified than the last, and across the alleyway was the back of what looked like some sort of storefront, boarded up and dark and seemingly unoccupied. The store had a second floor with a fenced in porch hanging over a storage area that held nothing but a few empty, plastic crates. Support beams of local wood propped up the porch and chain link fencing enclosed the storage area.
The boy was climbing up the outside of that fence when I reached it, trying to reach the second-story porch, trying to find somewhere out of sight where he could hide. I thought for a second that he was going to make it, until a blast of laser-pulses hit the wooden post a meter away from him, sending a blast of steam and splinters exploding away from it. The kid screamed and fell the two meters to the ground, hitting hard, flat on his back.
I slid into a kneeling position beside him, sheltering him with my body, then twisted around and opened fire almost before I had a target. The handgun rounds weren’t going to penetrate their armor at its thickest points over the chest or major arteries, so I aimed someplace where I knew it would be thinner out of the need for flexibility. The one who’d fired at the boy was ten meters away, give or take, hopping around a fallen section of block wall, when I shot him through the left knee. The armor held his leg together, but I was fairly sure that was the only thing; the warhead of the round I’d fired expelled a jet of plasma when it impacted, superheating all the tissue around it like a grenade going off.
The Savage/Slaughter contractor screamed loud enough that I could hear it through his helmet, then went tumbling forward head over heels, the laser carbine slipping from his hands as he slammed to the ground. I ran over to him and ejected the magazine from his carbine, firing off the last chambered round back the way he’d come before I tossed the weapon down and let it retract on its sling. Then I ran back to the kid and grabbed him under the arm, dragging him back towards the alley between the shop and the burned-out house next door.
He was groaning, which at least meant he was alive; I thought maybe he’d just had the wind knocked out of him, but I couldn’t afford to check him out yet, not with the Skingangers and the mercenaries still shooting at each other. I could see the flashes from the lasers on the next street over, and heard the faint whooshing crack of rocket-propelled projectiles answering back. I kept my handgun trained the way I’d come, expecting one of the mercs to find the guy I’d shot any second and head after me.
Unfortunately, I was so focused on the way I’d come that I made a rookie mistake and didn’t pay enough attention to the approach behind me. I heard the footsteps and started to turn when I heard a slightly wavering male voice over a helmet speaker.
“Don’t move. Throw down the gun.”
Shit.
I thought for just a second about making a play, but the kid was starting to stir and I didn’t want to try something that could get him killed. I opened my gloved hand and let the pistol fall out of it; it hit the packed dirt with a solid thump of metal and polymer. Then I raised my hands over my head and slowly turned around.
There was just one of them, dressed in black armor, aiming the crystalline emitter of a pulse carbine at my chest.
“I’m just trying to get this kid out of harm’s way,” I told the merc, actually being honest with him. “You guys were about to shoot him.”
“Shut up!” The man snapped. “Interlace your fingers behind your head and get on your knees.”
I hissed out a sigh and did as I was told. He was going to take me prisoner, which sucked, but at least then I could get a chance to talk to his commander. The guy probably wouldn’t get sent out on his own if he was a total shit-for-brains. Maybe I could reason with him.
My knees were just hitting the dirt when the boy came to, saw what was happening and shot to his feet, panicked alarm written on his lean, hungry face. I was jumping to my feet with him, knowing what the merc would do even before he swung around his carbine, and knowing I wouldn’t be able to move fast enough to stop him before he shot the kid. Then something flew through the air in a blur of dark clothing and slammed a body block into the mercenary, taking them both to the ground.
It was Braden Vilberg, wrestling with the armored contractor for control of the carbine and yelling at him, simultaneously.
“God damn it, it’s just a kid, Corwin!” Vilberg bellowed, his face flushed red with outrage. “What’s wrong with you?”
If the words penetrated Corwin’s adrenalin buzz, he didn’t show it; he threw Vilberg off of him, then came up to a knee and aimed the carbine at his comrade’s face. Fortunately, by that time I’d had the opportunity to roll back the other way and grab my pistol. With Corwin about to pull the trigger, there wasn’t time for a shot to the knee or somewhere nonfatal, wh
ich left his faceplate as the only practical target; but he was facing away from me. I shot for the head anyway and saw the round flare against the thick BiPhase Carbide of his helmet, the plasma splashing out and scoring the faceplate even though it didn’t penetrate.
Corwin spun towards me instinctively and I fired again. This one went right through the helmet’s visor, through his left eye and directly into his brain. At that range, it was nearly impossible to miss. The contractor slipped from his knee down to his shoulder, shuddering and kicking for a few moments as he died.
Vilberg’s face went from a flushed red to a ghostly pale in seconds as he watched his former comrade’s life slip away, looking from the body to me and back. Behind him, I could see Victor and Divya running up, guns ready.
“Sorry, Boss,” Victor said. “He slipped away when the Skingangers started taking shots at us.”
“Where’s the boy?” I asked, ignoring the big man’s explanations, looking up and down the alley.
There was no sign of him, and the fighting was moving farther away, leaving its dead behind.
“Damn,” I muttered.
I couldn’t go chasing off after the kid again. I’d have to hope he could make it somewhere safe. Maybe he’d head back to his old house again and I could find him there later.
“Come on,” I urged, pulling Vilberg to his feet. “Let’s go find this contact before anyone else tries to kill us.”
Chapter Six
The warehouse didn’t look much different from any of the others we’d passed by in the last twenty minutes. It was faceless, featureless sheet metal, scored and rusted and coated with a thin layer of ice near the roof. Yet I could tell something was different about it, though it defied description.
Maybe it was the solid thickness of the walls, or the lack of graffiti and vandalism, or maybe it was just the subconscious knowledge that this place was occupied and in use. Or maybe it was the lights leaking through the covered windows high up on the walls, hinting at a vigilance that the other places lacked.
