Rocket’s Red Glare

by David Hardy

  Blaise threw the incapacitated – screaming – peacekeeper down from the flyer. Mrs. Jordan looked horrified, but Blaise wasn’t sure for what, so he screamed, “Close the door, Molly.”

  “We’re stealing a peacekeeper’s flyer?” she asked, disbelieving. “We’re really doing this?”

  “Not for long,” he said.

  He flew them in an arc to the beach, with the other flyers starting up. “Can you ride a broom?” he asked, as he broke into the cabinet that contained them. Not his fault if they required gencode to open. What kind of idiots had life saving equipment under gencode?

  “Sure.”

  “Then get ready,” he said, handing her a broom “We’re going to jump out of a perfectly good flyer. Mrs. Jordan, can you ride a broom?”

  To his surprise, the grandmotherly, white-haired woman said, “Of course, my dear. It’s part of the training in the Sons of Liberty. I’m so glad you joined us.”

  Blaise didn’t try to disabuse her. He hadn’t joined anything; he just couldn’t let sweet little old ladies be arrested, tortured, and killed without a fight.

  They waited till they were going over a dark section of beach, where an overhanging cliff made the space below the flyer utterly invisible, and then they escaped via a hole in the floor, which Blaise, with his knowledge of the structure of flyers, could create in minutes. Thank heavens for having had to keep his stupid craft going all this time.

  They landed on the dark beach while the peacekeeping flyers went by overhead. He’d programmed a circuitous route for the one they’d just escaped, so it would keep them safe a while.

  It took Blaise a few minutes to get his breath back on the beach, with the sound of waves roaring so loudly he could barely hear the two women talking next to him.

  ○●○

  “I’m sorry,” Molly was saying. “I think you were among those I was supposed to warn, but when I got to Roger’s Deli, they tried to grab me, and I got a bad feeling. And then when I ran, there were peacekeepers.”

  “Yes, they took Roger’s Deli yesterday. It is not your fault, my dear. Quick thinking on escaping. And yes, I probably would have been warned, but maybe it was information they got from the people at Roger’s Deli. Who are you?”

  “Molly McCauly Smith, from Syracuse Seacity. I was sent with a coded message in my pendant, one that will save hundreds of people, and now I don’t know to whom I should give it.”

  Mrs. Jordan sighed, in the dark, “Well, my dear, I’m as good a person as any. I will get it in the right hands. Now that you’ve saved me. Better that we part now. Mr. Morel can get you back safe, and I’ll make sure that it gets where it should be.”

  Molly must have looked paranoid, because Mrs. Jordan opened her coat, and showed them the piece of flag in an interior pocket. “I’m Deborah Samson Jordan,” she said.

  And then with great kindness, turning to Blaise, “Get this young woman home. Today you’ve both done good work for the cause, against great odds.”

  Molly expected Blaise to say something about how it wasn’t his cause, but he didn’t. In fact, he didn’t talk at all until, through a network of alleys and stairs, they’d made it back to his flyer. He didn’t start speaking properly until they’d taken off and were flying over the darkened ocean.

  “How come your flyer doesn’t scream all the warnings?” Molly said, convinced that now there would be a watch out for two fugitives, or maybe four.

  “Oh, it does,” he said. “I just disabled the speakers. I find all the screeching distracted.”

  “I suppose that’s why you picked me up.”

  He shook his head. “I picked you up because I’m a sucker for a girl in trouble. You see, I have two sisters. Used to have three.”

  “You said that Usaians caused your sister’s death.”

  “It’s complicated. Suzy was a rebel, always. But then her boyfriend became a Usaian and she joined.” He shrugged. “She was caught and killed.”

  “But that wasn’t the fault of the Usaians,” Molly protested. “It was the authorities. They killed her for her beliefs. It wasn’t something she did, was it?”

  “Well, I used to think she knew the penalty.”

  “But?” Molly asked, sensing a but.

  “But I got to know Deborah Jordan, Mrs. Jordan, really well when we were trying to figure out if Suzy really had been killed or not, and she is kind, really kind. Like someone’s sweet grandmother. They can’t possibly have anything real against her. She probably never even shot peacekeepers in the leg.”

  “I had to, or otherwise—”

  “Mrs. Jordan and possibly we would be killed, I know.” He was quiet a long time. “I still don’t believe you know. I don’t see any point of going around worshipping the idea of a dead and gone country.”

  Molly tried to draw on all her dignity. “It’s more complicated than that,” she said. “And there’s more than that too. But most importantly, the USA isn’t dead.”

  “No? Where is it then?”

  “The USA was never a territory,” Molly said. “Oh, it was that too. But it was also a set of beliefs, based on the idea that all men should have the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. From that all laws came, but even now, as we fight to restore the laws, as long as people believe in the ideal, the USA lives on.”

  He gave her a really odd look.

  The rest of the trip they barely talked, before he delivered her to her mother, at the crack of dawn.

  Two things surprised Molly: He didn’t tell her mother never to let Molly go out on these things on his own; and he said he’d come by and check on her next week. And then he did.

  ○●○

  Had his parents known what Blaise had decided to do, they would have thought he’d lost his mind. Or else that he was more like Suzy – the rebellious child – than they’d ever suspected.

  But they didn’t know.

  He hadn’t converted over night. And unlike what his parents would doubtlessly say, he didn’t do it for Molly. Oh, Molly was part of it all right, but mostly because of their discussions on politics, on history, on religion.

  He’d come to believe as she did, that the idea of the USA should not be allowed to perish from the world. It was a vast philosophical lantern, illuminating minds, and beckoning to a future in which it would be, hopefully, once more, a real country of land and laws.

  But for now all Blaise Morel, who took the name Blaise Robert Paine Morel, could do was to pledge his heart and his mind to the cause, and swear to live and if needed to die for it.

  They handed him a piece of a flag that had once flown over the land of the United States of America. It was a dingy, ragged-edge square, showing a tiny bit of red, and an expanse of blue with a single white star.

  He held it over his heart.

  About the Author – Sarah A. Hoyt

  Sarah A. Hoyt was born (and raised) in Portugal and now lives in Colorado with her husband, two sons, and a variable number of cats, depending on how many show up to beg on the door step. She is the author of more than 34 published novels: science fiction, fantasy, mystery, historical mystery, historical fantasy and historical biography. Her short stories have been published in Analog, Asimov's, Weird Tales, and a number of anthologies from DAW and Baen. Her space-opera novel Darkship Thieves was the 2011 Prometheus Award Winner. Her most recent novel is Darkship Revenge, the fifth book in the acclaimed Darkship series.

  A Man They Didn’t Know

  David Hardy

  Vann’s Station turned silently on the fringe of the Asteroid Belt. A freighter bearing crudely milled titanium was outbound for Earth, and a few ships were drifting in with raw ore from the diggings.

  But in the Whiskey Quadrant the Titanium Lounge was jumping. The music was blaring and the crowd overflowed into the street. The rest of Whiskey Quadrant was equally busy. The Quad was usually lively on a Saturday, when the asteroid miners flooded in, looking for a good time. Kent Hill’s keen gray eyes held an amused detachment
. He was not looking for a good time as such, he was looking for a wanted man. He was a United States Deputy Marshal, and finding fugitives was his job, one that he liked quite well. Hill’s good time would end in the arrest and incarceration of a very dangerous criminal.

  Ted Kovacs came around the side of the bar, glancing either way along the curving avenue that ran the length of the space station. Kovacs was the Chief of Security for Vann’s Station. Keeping order among the men, women, and robots that populated a support station on the asteroid belt was no easy task. Kovacs had only a miniscule staff, too few to police the station well. Advances in surveillance-thwarting technology constantly negated advances in surveillance technology. The station’s owners cared more about damage to the station than to its occupants, and all the criminals were well-armed. But Hill and Kovacs had been buddies back in the Cyborg War and that meant going a little extra when a friend needed help.

  Kovacs nodded at Hill. “Yep, my snitch got a line on this Jake Cole joker. Saw him three quarters of a rotation back. The little rat is already counting his share of the reward.”

  “Anybody with Cole?” Hill asked. “He runs with a robot. Supposedly the robot helped him pull a bank job on Mars.”

  Kovacs shook his head sadly. “No, but you know how it is. It’s harder to keep track of robots than people. I seized three robots being smuggled in as parts. Damn things were designed to dispense Neometh and play slot poker. Caught hell for it too, the smugglers were kicking back to the station’s owners.”

  “Nothing like a wide open station. It’s one big ‘ol wheel of fun in space.” Hill put his badge, which served as a tactical combat communication and sensor array, on the outside of his jacket and shifted his μ366 blaster, loaded with six expendable capacitors, where it was ready for a quick draw. “Let’s take him.”

  Kovacs strode alongside Hill. “I’m glad you came to me with this. I’m going to cash in the reward and head back stateside. I’m tired of playing doorman for a bunch of crooks and ingrates.”

  “I’m glad you’re backing me up.” Hill meant it. Cole had shot his way out of a Federal courthouse orbiting Jupiter and headed for the asteroids where international law meant that no Earth-bound entity, not China, Russia, Brazil, nor even the U.S.A. had jurisdiction. Outside of the Federal Orbital Court system, Hill wasn’t much more than a bounty hunter with a fancy badge.

  Kovacs went around back, producing a key-circuit to open the service door. The lawmen strode quickly through the liquor storage room, past the protesting owner, past a couple of people who faded into side rooms at the sight of the law. They pushed aside a robot bartender and entered the main room.

  The lights were low, the music deafening, and the room was packed. Hill surveyed the crowd, a quarter were flying on Neometh, a quarter were on Synthmorph, and the rest were drunk on cheap whiskey. Kovacs nudged Hill. “My snitch.”

  The snitch was a man wearing a cheap suit and a blank expression. He made eye contact with Kovacs for a second. Then he looked away down the bar. At first all Hill saw was a miner, dressed in grubby coveralls, a stupid expression, a loose lipped face, a beer clenched in either fist. Then he saw Cole at the bar, talking to a woman. The outlaw was animated, punctuating his words with his glass of bourbon. Yet there was something repetitious about Cole’s movements, almost mechanical.

  Hill turned his badge’s targeting system toward Cole. It picked up the suspect’s voice. “Yeah, family is what matters. Everything else is crooked, it’s all sixty-two twenty-five, you know what I mean?” She evidently didn’t, but Cole kept talking. “I can’t go home, but there’s a place where I see my kin. Laws don’t nose around too much on those ranges.”

  The badge scanned the man at the bar, taking measurements, cross-checking thousands of records of wanted men, eyes, bones, ears, voice, the spacing of visible pores, instantly producing a confirmation on the heads-up display, visible only to Hill. This was Jack Cole, wanted for bond jumping, armed robbery, and attempted murder. Hill signaled Kovacs to move in.

  Hill pulled his μ366. “Federal marshal! Cole, you’re under arrest!” The badge screamed a warning. Hill was still raising his blaster when a fist holding a beer bottle smashed into him, sending him crashing across the bar.

  Hill rolled with the blow, an instinctive reaction that saved his life. The miner had to drop his other beer to reach for a blaster a microsecond before Hill rolled behind the bar. He felt the scalding heat of the blast that barely missed him. The badge broadcast counter-measures to scramble any weapon targeting him, and then went to help Kovacs as blaster shots came fast and furious. Panic had gripped the Titanium as blasters began firing.

  “Do you read? Do you read?” Hill signaled to Kovacs. “Civilian in the way!” Kovacs shouted. Hill popped up from behind the bar just in time to see Cole, using the woman as a shield, cut Kovacs down. The miner was standing over the smoking corpse of the snitch, blaster in one hand and a beer in the other. The miner’s face rearranged into something less human, more like a robot. Instantly the robot-gunman took aim at Hill. The badge’s scrambler averted the blast by a fraction. Instead of killing Hill, the plasma slug brought down part of the bar wall and left Hill stunned and injured. When he rose, Cole and the robot had fled.

  ○●○

  Hill offered his badge and blaster to the Chief United States Marshal for the Asteroid Belt. The chief stared hard at Hill. “You’re a goddamn idiot. Not only did you screw up the Cole arrest, but you think I’ve got deputies to spare.”

  “It was my screw up,” Hill said. “I need to know if you still trust me to clean up the mess.”

  “What were you going to do if I accepted?”

  “Go after Cole and the robot as a free-lance bounty hunter.”

  “And get in the way of the next guy. No thanks.” The chief pushed the badge and blaster back towards Hill. “It’ll be a lot easier to take down Cole with these.”

  Hill went back to the files, looking for clues to where to find Cole or the strange robot. He’d tracked a lot of wanted men, but none who had killed a friend. There was grim determination in his heart as he looked for Cole’s trail.

  The robot had very little in its file, besides a few scattered sightings at the scene of Cole’s violent crimes. There was no manufacturer information, so the robot could have been a one-off from any of the myriads of bot foundries, or even cobbled together from parts in a temporary bottery. The morphing ability it displayed was unheard of, except in experimental models. The robot was the key to this Cole business, but Hill had no time to find what it unlocked.

  Cole’s file was much longer. He was born in Texas on Earth. Family contacts were limited. His mother in a cryogenic retirement home in Florida, father deceased, a brother on Mars, a sister married to a cybernetic tech living in the Moon Cities. Surveillance on the mother had produced nothing and the sister had converted to the Church of ProgSocJus and had cut off all contacts with relatives as hopelessly unrepentant oppressors.

  Cole had a record from his youth, petty theft and drug possession. He straightened up and worked for his brother Tom’s cattle outfit on Mars’s terraformed ranges running bos, as they called genetically-modified Martian cattle, before joining the army. He’d served two tours on Planetoid 806 during the Cyborg War. He was in an outpost that was nuked and overrun by Cyborgs. Cole was listed as MIA, but was released at the end of the war as a POW to a neutral Swiss mission. He’d been torn up pretty bad, but the Cyborgs had put him back together, with none of the cybernetic oddities they had a penchant for.

  Then Cole’s life got strange. He alternated between spending his days performing acts of charity, and violent outbursts. There were six months helping build habitats for retirees on Venus, then a knife fight over a spilled beer. Cole worked nine months on a thermal bore-hole crew on Titan, giving his wages to buy robot limbs for wounded vets, then he robbed a payroll and blew through the money in a month, spending it on booze, drugs, and loose women. And so it went, a dramatic act of charity, a
period of law-abiding quiet and service to others matched by an armed robbery, an act of pointless violence, or cold-blooded assassination. The Cassini Ring Drug Cartel was suspected of hiring Cole to silence informers.

  There weren’t a whole lot of clues left in the ruined bar. The woman Cole had used as a human shield said he had just finished paying for her to return to Saturn to reunite with her estranged daughter. “Cole’s about changing people’s lives,” Hill muttered to himself. “He’s clearly a believer in family.”

  Hill thought a moment. “Family. I think it’s time to head to Mars.”

  ○●○

  Down in Argyre Planitia the grass grew thick enough in the atmosphere maintained by the terraforming satellites. But only a few daring cattlemen lived there because of the attacks by semi-humanoid mutated suidae. The porcine brigands had been dumped in the Charitum Montes by a failed genetic-engineering consortium backed by Russian oligarchs and Wall Street speculators. Between the Sooeys and the types of settlers that inhabited the crater bottoms, lawmen were not welcome.

  Hill rode into the bottoms, appearing to be just another bos handler looking for a job, and leaving behind a past that he did not wish to talk about. He kept his ears open and said little, moving towards Tom Cole’s Red Dust outfit. The closer he got to the Red Dust the more he learned of the owner.

  Tom Cole was no wild outlaw. Boss Tom adhered to the best practices of the Martian Stock Association, paid his men on time, covered their insurance, and preached the Gospel on the Sabbath. Boss Tom was very much the exception among the sort of men that clustered in the crater bottoms. When Hill showed up at the Red Dust, he introduced himself as “Smith.”

  “You’re regular crater-county bos-boy, aren’t you?” Tom said.

  Hill nodded.

  “You’ve done your share of blotting gene-codes. Rearrange the DNA on a bos so it doesn’t show who owns it.”

  “Yes, sir, I’ve done some in my day.”