by Jake Elwood
Rufalo shrugged. "I'm not too busy. If I get really bored I'll go home. But I'll probably be right here."
"All right." She hesitated, then embraced him briefly. "Thanks, Lo. It's really good to see you."
He surprised her by turning red and giving her a bashful smile. "You too, Sand," he said. "I'll see you in a little while."
Formalities at the gate were more extensive than she expected. There were a couple of silver boxes mounted high on either side of the gate, each with a pair of gun barrels poking out. Blast turrets, each with its own AI. Clearly, tensions between settlers and nomads had gone up.
Twelve years earlier, the city cops had worn a knife-proof version of the same baggy shirt and pants that most city dwellers favored. Now the men at the gate wore body armor and helmets, and they were alert and unsmiling as they examined her ID. They let her keep her pistol, but they scanned it and her, and gave her a stern warning against causing trouble.
"Sila Sneckham," she murmured to herself as she entered the city at last. It was the name on the ID she was using that day. She hated getting her own name wrong. It was embarrassing. "Sila Sneckham of Mirianus 4."
Souvenir vendors flocked around her, with a few pickpockets mixed in, she was sure. She pushed through the crowd, not speaking, and quickly left them behind. The sights and smells of the city were triggering waves of memory, and it was annoying her. She was in danger every moment she was in Sandport. It was no time to be mooning over the past.
A moneychanger took a swipe from her credit crystal and gave her a pendant on a retractable cord, the local standard for currency. The pendant wouldn't work without her thumb pressed to the clip on the spindle, which made it pointless to steal. She recorded her thumbprint, clipped the spindle to her belt, and headed back into the street.
There was a small chance that she'd already been spotted, that a team was poised to trace her movements remotely by her use of the pendant. A more likely scenario was that bounty hunters were staking out choke points like big hotels, the spaceport, and the city gates. The best way to beat the first scenario was to stay on foot. The second scenario called for covering ground quickly, removing herself from the choke point. And it had the advantage of putting her in an air-conditioned vehicle.
Cassie flagged down a taxi, waved her pendant over the credit panel, and got in.
Everything in Sandport was the color of the dirt outside the city walls. She'd taken it for granted when she'd lived here as a street kid, but now it struck her as an absurd choice. This part of Bruma could be charitably described as 'bleak.' Everything about desert life was austere and drab. Why in heaven's name wouldn't people paint their houses in bright colors? The city could have been a dazzling gem, a swirl of blues and greens and yellows and all the other colors you never got to see, except when the desert plants bloomed every couple of years.
Instead, every single structure was some shade of muddy brown.
The people wore the same drab colors. Cassie knew them to be as lively and passionate as anyone else in the galaxy, but from the window of the taxi they looked like a cheerless and downtrodden lot.
At length the taxi left the heart of Sandport and moved into a posh neighborhood. The buildings were nicer, the yards bigger, and there were splashes of color. The buildings were still brown, but there were lawns, trees, planters. The greenery seemed ostentatious after so many blocks of dirt and sprawling cactus.
There were fewer pedestrians in this part of the city, and they dressed better, more like the well-to-do on most planets. It was as if the taxi had left Bruma and rolled somehow into a suburb of Camulod. It was strangely depressing, and Cassie found herself perversely missing the dreary streets that comprised most of Sandport.
Gavriel had a sprawling house set in a yard that took up half a block. Only one story high, the house took up hundreds of square meters. Most of the walls were glass, the ultimate extravagance in a climate zone like this. The house had to cost a fortune to keep cool.
And cool it was, Cassie knew. She'd been there half a dozen times, back in the old days. Gavriel didn't let street rats like Cassie past the front foyer, but the foyer was very nice.
The taxi rolled up the driveway and coasted to a stop by the front door. "Wait here," Cassie said, then waved her pendant over the credit panel again. The door opened and she got out, looking around, alert for danger.
There wasn't a sign of life in the entire street.
Move quickly, Cass. That's the key to survival in this particular game. By the time they know you've come to see Gavriel, you need to be long gone. She nodded to herself and walked briskly to the front door.
The door slid open at her approach, which seemed odd. Gavriel wouldn't have coded it to let in every street rat he'd ever dealt with. Quite the opposite, in fact. She grinned to herself. Trust Gavriel to know that a former contractor was in trouble and likely to come to him for help. He must have predicted that she would turn up, scrounged up an old scan of her from a visit twelve years before, and told the door to let her in.
It was gratifying to see that he still didn't miss a trick.
The foyer was much as she remembered it, a cool room with chairs along one wall and a tray of glasses for guests beside a water dispenser. She waited for a minute or so, and when no one appeared, she moved to the inner door, the one that led to the rest of his house.
The door slid open.
"Well," she said aloud, "he must want me to keep going." Only half believing it, but goaded by a mix of curiosity and urgency, she stepped through the doorway.
The house was built on an open plan. She could see the outside walls in three directions, and the lawns and trees of Gavriel's property and that of his neighbors. Everything was glass and pale wood and tiles of light tan. There were sofas to her left, and entertainment consoles. A kitchen was visible to the right. The old man was nowhere in sight, so she headed for another doorway near the center of the house.
She quickened her pace, suddenly eager to see the man who had been her mentor and friend at a time when she'd been alone and desperate and vulnerable. Who could say where she would have ended up if Gavriel hadn't noticed her, seen some potential, and decided to take her under his wing?
The door slid open, she glimpsed a cozy office with paneled walls and a broad desk, and then he was there before her. He was as slim as she remembered, and as elegant, his suit tailored and up to the very latest fashions. She remembered his hair as a blend of black and white. It was white now, with bits of black still showing on the crown. His eyes were as piercing as ever, though they sat among a larger field of wrinkles than when she'd seen him last.
Cassie could feel herself smiling, her shoulders rising as some of the stress she'd been carrying slid away. Here, at last, was a friend, someone so much smarter and wiser than she, someone she knew she could trust implicitly. She opened her mouth to greet him.
And froze.
There was no answering smile on his face. Instead she saw regret, and grief, and shame. His eyes met hers for the barest instant and slid away, and a cold fist clenched in Cassie's stomach.
Gavriel had betrayed her.
CHAPTER 9
She broke into a run. She headed for the back wall of the house, Gavriel slipping from her peripheral vision and disappearing behind her, and she knew she would never see him again. She drew her pistol, fumbling with the controls by touch, her eyes on the house around her, the glass wall in front, and the yard beyond.
Men appeared, in doorways and from behind furniture, more than a glass-walled house should have been able to hide. They wore matching armor, and that scared her. This was no motley bunch of bounty hunters. These men were organized. Two men came running from a doorway on the right, and she snapped a shot that took the second man in the upper arm. Her pistol was still set on stun, and his armor absorbed it.
Her brain and senses were working together on a level beyond the conscious. Some part of her took in the sounds that running men make, caught the reflection
of movement behind her in the glass wall just ahead. She dove, not knowing exactly why, and someone behind her fired.
Both of Cassie's hands hit the floor, her left palm and the knuckles of her right hand, which was still gripping the pistol. She did a forward roll and came up on her feet, her thumb switching the pistol to rail gun fire. There was a brown mess on the window, a gelatinous mesh that stuck to the glass, and she recognized it as the product of a web gun. A person wearing stun-resistant armor would still go down if you nailed them with a web.
She swept her pistol up and blasted away at the glass panel just to the right of the web. Half a dozen rounds hit the glass, starring it without breaking through, and she swung the barrel to the right, snapping a couple of shots at the two men. They flinched, and one man clapped a hand to his cheek where a steel round carved a bloody furrow.
Then she hurled herself shoulder-first at the starred window, hoping desperately that it would shatter.
She bounced back, landing heavily on her side. A mass of web flew over her, and a couple of stun blasts hit the glass.
Cassie fired from the floor, aiming at the legs of the two men who were intercepting her. One man fell with a cry, the other took a dive behind a divan, and Cassie came to her feet. The window had actually broken, she saw. A big chunk of glass had fallen outside as she had tumbled back, and the second gob of netting had sailed through the hole. She flung herself forward, flying head-first through the opening, feeling the edges of the glass scrape across her legs.
She landed hard on the grass, rolled to the side, leaped up, and ran. Stun bolts were hitting the glass from inside, and she angled to one side, keeping away from the hole. Something moved in the corner of her eye and she turned her head to see a man lifting a long-barreled stunner to his shoulder. Cassie threw herself flat and blasted away with the pistol until he fell. Then she sprang up, hurled herself at the low fence that marked the edge of Gavriel's yard, and swarmed over.
"Roger," she panted, "come get me. I'm in trouble." She was in an alley, blank fences on either side. She turned toward the nearest street and ran. "Roger! Are you there?"
Silence.
"Crap!" She reached the street, and saw a stun blast splatter on the wall of a house ahead of her. She swore and turned to the left, getting away from the mouth of the alley. There was only one vehicle in the street, a wagon pulled by one of the biggest packers she'd ever seen. The wagon's open box was full of yard waste, grass clippings and hedge trimmings. The packer was ambling along, and Cassie was about to overtake the animal when inspiration struck.
Muttering an apology under her breath, she lifted her pistol and shot the big animal in the tip of its tail.
The packer let out a bellow of pain and exploded into motion. The driver, half-asleep on the front bench, rocked back in his seat as the wagon shot forward. Cassie just had time to grab the side of the wagon as it shot past. She took two running steps, leaped, and swung herself into the back.
She'd dropped her pistol as she landed, and she spent a long moment rummaging among the twigs. The driver was cursing and shouting as she grabbed the gun, switched the dial to laser, and lifted her head over the back of the box. There were three men close behind her, sprinting flat out, and she ignited in the air, sweeping the beam left to right at knee level. All three men fell sprawling.
Stun shots scorched the air, and she pressed herself flat. A wet impact shook the tailgate, and the brown tendrils of a net curled over the top of the gate. Cassie rolled to the far side of the wagon and poked her head up.
She caught a quick glimpse of a ground car coming up fast, one mercenary driving, two more leaning out the windows and shooting. Then the wagon careened through an intersection, horns blared, someone screamed, and a cargo truck rolled past, missing the back of the wagon by scant centimeters.
In the brief moment that the cargo truck hid the mercenaries, Cassie flung herself out of the wagon. She landed boots-first, tumbled, and dove through the doorway of a corner store.
A display rack of ham chips collapsed as she crashed into it. She got to her feet, shook her head to clear it, and stepped into the doorway. A flitter swooped down from above, plunging her into shadow for an instant, and she heard a low rumble as a blast turret on the underside opened fire. Cassie stood frozen, trying to figure out which way to dodge, but the flitter was aiming its barrage at something farther down the street.
She stared, confused, then heard an agonized bellow from the packer pulling the wagon. They had shot the creature to stop it, and she felt a rush of unreasoning fury. Without thinking, she switched the pistol to shock mode, stepped into the street, took careful aim, and fired a jagged bolt of energy into the flitter's port-side repulsor.
She didn't stop to watch the crash. She just ran.
The posh residences were behind her now. She ran past high-end shops and tiny restaurants, shoving fashionably-dressed shoppers out of her way. From time to time a stun bolt would drop a pedestrian beside her. A bolt grazed her left arm and it went numb, but she was still able to pump her arm as she ran.
The mouth of a pedestrian underpass yawned beside her, and she dashed into it. With luck she might make them abandon the ground car. She ran pell-mell, knowing she had to reach the far end of the tunnel before they blocked it and trapped her.
She burst out of the tunnel, moving too fast to feel the tingle of the light force field that kept cooled air trapped in the tunnel. She was in an open plaza, a place where she'd lifted more than a few handbags in her time. A statue of some bureaucrat stood in the center, and she ran to it, using the base as cover. The first mercenary came out of the tunnel, a burly man in a suit of silver mesh that would make him impervious to laser fire.
Cassie switched the pistol to rail gun mode and shot him in the center of the chest. He clapped his hands to his chest and grunted. He didn't fall, which meant he had armor under the mesh, so she shot him again in the same place. The second round went through both of his hands, and he screamed.
Cassie ran laterally, heading for another tunnel. The cool air felt good against her skin, but in moments she was out of the tunnel and back on another street. She ran, guided by the rumble of heavy machinery coming from further down the street. She holstered her pistol, knowing she was going to need both hands in a moment.
Mining was the economic heart of Sandport, and the city processed ore on a massive scale. Cargo haulers would drop the ore just outside the city to the east. The processing plant was a couple of kilometers to Cassie's west. In between, an elevated track carried an endless stream of ore cars back and forth.
She remembered a low, easily-scaled iron fence keeping the timid away from the ore line. When she reached the top of a hill and saw the ore line before her, though, she swore with what little breath remained. The fence was gone, replaced by a polymer wall a good ten meters high. The ore cars and their rails were completely hidden.
Since slowing down was no option, she ran toward the wall, eyes scanning, looking for a building with a balcony or a roof that might let her jump to the top of the wall. It was only when she looked down to check her footing that she saw a service door set into the wall. She ran at the door, drawing her pistol and switching to laser, and paused for a moment, panting, as she cut through the latch.
Some instinct made her duck, and a flurry of stun shots hit the door and wall. Cassie threw a shoulder against the door, felt it give way, and tumbled through.
It was shadowy in the space beyond, a narrow gap enclosed by matching polymer walls with huge steel posts at regular intervals and a couple of long rails overhead, one about four meters up, the other twice as high. As she looked, an ore car shot past on the high rail, moving so fast that she felt the wind of its passage.
The carts on the lower rail were much slower. Each cart hung below the rail on a metal arm. There was no direct contact between the arm and the rail. Magnetic fields kept the two surfaces apart, and a separate magnetic system pulled the carts along. Cassie ran west, toward t
he ore processing plant, glancing back every few steps to watch for a car on the lower track. The cars were nearly silent, and she barely saw the next car before it was on her.
A man was peering through the service door, alert for an ambush, as the ore car reached her. She took a running jump and hooked her fingers over the metal lip that went around the bottom edge of the car. For a bad moment she hung there, helpless and exposed, and the man lifted his pistol, taking careful aim. Then the next ore car whipped past him, close enough to make him flinch. By the time he recovered, Cassie was out of stun range.
Squirming up the side of the car using only her arms was harder than she'd expected. She'd forgotten the graze to her left arm, but it seemed to have recovered. She grunted and strained, wondering how she'd gotten so badly out of shape, and finally caught the metal lip on the bottom with her toe. From there it took only a moment to scramble up and onto the piled ore.
She lay flat on her back, lumps of rock digging into her back, and watched a car on the higher rail flash past above her. The lower rail was dangerous enough to ride, but the higher rail was suicide. The cars shot back and forth in unpredictable patterns, sometimes rising on short branch rails to dump their load of ore into a different car. Even getting into one of the higher cars was close to impossible.
And aside from the upper rail, there was no way to catch up. Cassie took a deep breath and let it out. She was safe at last.
She was starting to smile when an ore car raced past overhead and a man leaped out, landing on top of her.
The shock was overwhelming, but Cassie had instincts honed by long, rough years in dangerous places. She had his forearm trapped against his chest with her right hand and a lump of ore in her left hand, swinging for the side of his head, before she was fully aware that she was under attack.
His face was a handspan from hers. He had shaggy blond hair and blunt features, with blue eyes and a small cleft in his chin. She'd never seen him before, but he wasn't dressed like the other mercenaries. He had some grappling experience, she realized, as he rolled his head to minimize the blow from her lump of ore, then clipped her across the jaw with an elbow and got his trapped arm free.
