The Last Horizon

by Anthony Hartig

  “Not counting this trip, nine.”

  “Anything else I need to know?”

  “Not really. It’s just...”

  “What?”

  “It’s just that every time I get back from a journey there’s always something a little different about things. I haven’t been able to put my finger on it, but things seem a tad off. People mostly.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Ah, nothing. May be I’m imagining it.”

  “No seriously, Nikki,” Scott demanded, “what do you mean that people seemed off every time you come back from one of these journeys?”

  “I didn’t notice it right way. It took months before I began to perceive any changes in the people that I’ve known; there’s something about the way they act or the things they do that’s out of character for them.”

  “Maybe it’s not them but you that’s changed.”

  “Well anyway, I’ll tell you one thing that changed me.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I believe in the impossible now.”

  Chapter 4

  Kurlie

  I’ve got less than two weeks to get a make on this guy and figure out where to go from there. Max told me Scott brought two bags with him for the trip.

  “So Tommy, what did you find on this Fenmore Scott character?”

  “Not much, boss. We staked him out and all we’ve got is that he’s at the La Plume de Ma Tante Hotel. Early riser. Eats like a horse in the morning. It took a lot of digging, but we finally found out that he came from somewhere up in the northeast. Some sparrow-fart town called North River. All the data bases divulge is that he owns a couple of houses in a rural area. He seems to be a recluse.

  A passenger list from the airlines show that Scott flew into New Detroit two nights ago on a red-eye and checked right into the Plume. No family, no one close to him that we can use. Records show some higher education. Spotty employment history in the trades, maybe inherited some money, but that’s it.”

  “What else?”

  “Birth records show November 3, 2360. Oregon, Earth.”

  “Where in Oregon?”

  “I’m still looking. The trail goes cold in Oregon.”

  “Keep digging. This guy’s got a story and I wanna know what it is. I wanna know who he works for.”

  “You want him taken care of when he gets to Nexus?”

  “No, I want to keep an eye on him. I wanna know what kind of business he’s got there. I’m gonna send Tony and Mick up north to poke around. What’s that place?”

  “North River.”

  “Get them the address to Scott’s house and have them go today. Let’s see what we can find out.”

  A couple of days passed and my boys didn’t find anything up in North River except Scott’s empty house being kept up by the neighbors. Nothing about this Scott’s life stands out as unusual, and everything about him indicates an ordinary guy; a little too commonplace if you ask me, like he doesn’t want to draw attention to himself.

  His immediate neighbors don’t know anything personal about him except that he’s a nice landlord that brought them some firewood a couple of times. With the exception of a few small business owners that had a brief encounter with Scott, the town folk were no help either; they rarely saw him around—“Quiet fella, he seems like a nice guy...always waved and said hello when he drove by...” was the way they described him. Their opinions would be different if they had seen what he did to my men.

  Then last night, Tommy came to my bar and he was scared out of his wits. He looked visibly shaken, kept looking around, and his eyes were bloodshot.

  “Boss, you’ve gotta help me.”

  “You look like hell, Tommy. When’s the last time you slept?”

  “I haven’t. I think I’m being followed.”

  “Calm down. Do you think anyone followed you here?”

  “Maybe. I dunno.”

  “So what’s got you so edgy?”

  “This Scott guy that you’ve got me tracing...”

  “What about him? What’d you find out?”

  “I searched the C-net for anything on a Fenmore Scott; past schools, parents, siblings, military service, criminal history, you name it, and I found his personal profile. Nothing special about him, zero dirt. On the surface he seems like a citizen; pays his bills, taxes, no big deal.

  He has a SCNet account like everyone else in the system, so I loaded a trackware to run a history on his SCP number so I could hack his account to see the sites he’s visited along with any business transactions.

  My screen went black and I couldn’t get commands to work on my pad the moment I started the scan. Next thing I know, the lights in my apartment dimmed and a series of numbers started typing by themselves on the VDT.

  I hit the scram switch, but my processors wouldn’t turn off so I unplugged from the wall. The second I did this, my power totally blinked-out. I went out to the patio to see if may be there was a black-out in the city, but it was just my place.

  I drove over to Vince’s and we tried to run the scan on Scott’s profile there. The same thing happened; the power went out for a few seconds and those numbers typed out on the screen again.”

  “So what are you getting at, Tommy?”

  “Someone’s watching him. I don’t know who Scott is, and who ever is watching him is now watching us. Scagged our systems and did a fandango on the cores. Neither of our systems are operable.”

  “Can you find out who it is?”

  “Vince is helping me with that right now, he’s using Larron’s system, but we keep hitting a firewall of some sort. We haven’t been able to script it. Boss, we’re up against something big here. This is some serious Network d-star system assaults.”

  “I thought you, Vince, and Larron were the best in the business, Tommy.”

  “We’re good, Boss,” Tommy frowned, “but I’ve never seen anything like this.”

  Tommy’s sat-phone rang and he almost jumped out of his seat as he fumbled it out of his pocket. He looked at the i.d. on the screen and exhaled with a relieved expression as he looked back at me.

  “It’s Vince.” He smiled weakly as he pressed the answer button and brought the phone up to his ear. “Vince...”

  A bright flash of white light flared from the phone in Tommy’s hand with a loud pop that made his head jerk violently to the side and sent him sprawling to the floor. I was sprayed instantly with his blood.

  “Tommy!” I shouted as I sprang from my chair to see if he was okay. I kneeled next to his crumpled body; his face was covered with blood and the side of his head had been blown away when his phone detonated.

  My bodyguards ran over, grabbed me, and pulled me away from Tommy. By then, customers began screaming as they realized that someone was killed, and pandemonium cut through the music as people jumped up and started running out of the tavern.

  “Let’s get’cha outta here, Kurlie!” One of them bellowed as he grabbed my arm and hustled me through the backdoors of the bar where my driver screeched my sedan to a halt in the alley.

  “Tommy.”

  “He’s dead, Kurlie!” The guard puffed as he shoved me into the backseat, slid in next to me, and nodded at my driver. “Go!”

  The driver laid rubber and smoked out of the alleyway and merged into traffic into the main street.

  “The safe-house on 59th and Grand.” I ordered. “And wheel it!”

  I exhaled and noticed my hands were trembling.

  “Kurlie, you okay?” My bodyguard asked reluctantly.

  “Yeah. Send some guys over to Larron’s flat and get him and Vince to the safe-house. Grab all their hardware and bring it over. I want to know what they found.

  Get the tavern cleaned up before the police get there. Get Tommy out of my place and get me some clean clothes.”

  “Sure Kurlie.”

  “And get Max on the line right now. I need him to contact Nikki and warn him about this guy.”

  I watched the traff
ic go by in a blur as we weaved thorough the lanes. The city went by in a strobe of distorted neon as we blazed through the sheik uptown boulevards.

  My driver swerved left after passing the sonic monorail station and gunned the car through one of the busiest intersections in the city.

  “Max isn’t answering his telecom, Kurlie.”

  “Keep trying, damn it.”

  “We’re almost there Kurlie.” The driver announced with a relieved sigh as he made a right into a side street that lead to an industrial district composed of manufacturing plants and warehouses. “This place is like a ghost town after hours.”

  The street lights seemed dull and gave the area an ominous air as we slowly pulled up a ramp that ran along side of some loading docks of a two story building that belonged to me. We came to a stop in front of a steel roll-up door, the driver punched in a security code on a number pad, and we watched it crank up with a mechanical groan as we pulled inside a dark garage and parked.

  “No Max yet?”

  “No. The rest of the guys should be here soon.”

  “Okay, let’s get set up inside and have the entire crew meet here in the next hour.” I frowned as we stepped out of the car. “Somebody get the lights. I want all our safe-houses up and running within the next two hours.”

  “You’ve got it Kurlie.”

  “One more thing,” I glared as I pulled out a cigar and lit it, “get word to all our people on the street that I want to know if there have been any big buys on weapons or drugs. I want to know if anything unusual’s been going on in our territory. Nothing moves in the city without us knowing.”

  Chapter 5

  The first four days went by without incident. I upheld my personal policy of absolutely zero transmissions and steered clear of the main shipping lanes and military supply routes. Where Scotty was concerned, we kept the small talk on neutral ground by avoiding personal questions.

  In an odd way, he reminded me of my father. Wherever he originated from I could tell that he was well traveled. I still had no idea what he did for a living or what his business entailed at Nexus. Whatever it was, it couldn’t be good if he was involved with Kurlie and I refused to believe that he was employed by him. No, this guy had a story. It was none of my business, but my curiosity was killing me.

  The Zephyr was a light hauler but extremely maneuverable in zero grav and atmospheric environments. She had a fixed inverted gull-wing delta configuration with an eighty foot span; the vessel’s double-vertical rudder’s dihedral symmetry and the two smaller twenty-degree anhedral ventral fins made the craft really stable and gave me an extremely tight turning radius. The hull was a hundred and twenty feet long, thirty feet wide, and twenty-four feet tall; it was plated with poly-alloy armor composed of radar absorbing, infra-red signature reducing materials.

  It cost me a fortune to get my ship customized, especially the retractable retro-jet modifications, but it was worth every credit. I took a lot of pride in black market kit bashing the instrumentation and controls to suit my needs.

  The Zephyr was fast. Illegal, sensor-scrambling fast with what’s called a Bokka bomb defense system that would make any smuggler drool.

  The Bokka was one of a kind, it used to be the small emergency shuttle that came with the Zephyr; a Phoenix-Alpha2 parasite ship attached to the belly of the ship, but I converted it into a Bokka drone when I retro-fitted the e-pod and slide rail ejector system. It took me almost a year to get the Bokka tailored with the custom software that wasn’t readily available on the black market. I had eight different techies making wafers without them knowing about each other to avoid raising suspicion, and I integrated the components myself to create the drone. The Bokka still looked like a harmless factory shuttle and could pass the scrutiny of any life-safety inspector, but it was an unlawful weapons platform armed with ion virus charges that a friend acquired for me.

  The one drawback with the Zephyr was that she only had one escape pod if things went terminal. One. It was really all I needed since I traveled alone. The e-pod was sufficient to keep me alive for a while if I had to eject, but it was only designed for one person for a short duration. I’ve never been concerned about my escape system since I never carried passengers…until now. Let’s face it, in this game every voyage had the potential of being a one way trip. It’s something that I’ve accepted as the nature of the beast.

  I looked over at Scotty and decided that he didn’t have to know any more than I had already told him. He seemed more withdrawn after I disclosed our flight plan and we drew closer to the Pipe each passing day. He spent most of his time studying his SCaT Pad and basically kept to himself.

  One night, as he stared blankly at the Zephyr’s instrument panel (as if it could reassure him that everything would be all right), he broke his own spell with a sigh and slowly turned his head toward me and asked “So where did you learn to fly, Nikki?”

  “I thought you said no personal questions.” I chided playfully hoping to lighten his mood.

  “Is asking how you got your pilot rating personal?”

  “It is for me.” I felt bad for him, he looked so dejected as he turned his attention back to the console.

  “Sorry.” He said weakly.

  “I grew up on a farm back in the Midwest and my daddy taught me how to fly dusters when I was a teen.” I smiled as I cast an eye over the plotter.

  “Flying dusters and navigating a deep space freighter are two different things.”

  “By that you mean working on a farm knocking bugs off crops and smuggling weapons outside our solar system for a living are on opposite ends of the scale.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well to make a long story short, I was twelve the first time I made a solo flight in a duster. It was a sixty-year-old JD Fischer turbo that my father and I spent months secretly rebuilding in our barn. He’d taken me up a bunch of times in the duster that he flew, so I already knew my way around the controls. I was hooked the moment my father handed me a helmet and I strapped into the cab with him.

  Anyway, it was an early spring morning, wickedly cold but the sun was out and the sky was a bright crystal blue--a perfect morning. Everyone was still sleeping when my father and I went out to the barn and hauled out the duster to a staging area at the end of the air strip. Once we got it fired-up, I hovered around next to the fields to get a feel for the controls. I’ll never forget my dad’s expression as he ran after me when I took off.

  My spirit flew higher than the duster that morning. My mother heard the racket we were making and came out to see what the commotion was all about. She was really pissed when she saw me strafe the livestock yard and take out a section of fence before crash landing on the side of the main road. She didn’t talk to my dad for a week, but I couldn’t wipe the smile off of my face for a month, especially at the dinner table when my dad would wink at me when mom and my brothers weren’t looking.

  Years later when my father died, I felt like I had nowhere else to go. My mother and brothers inherited the farm, and we all got a percentage of the property rights. Then there was an insurance pay-out from daddy’s death. My father stipulated in his policy that eighty percent was to be given to me when I turned seventeen. I couldn’t see myself living there the rest of my life, so I turned my property share over to Mom, then took my cut from the policy, moved to New Detroit, and forged my own business after working for the Aerodyne/Genesis Corporation for a year.

  You know, growing up, my father used to tell me there where worlds out there I needed to see…he told me to “dream beyond the fields and fences.” When he was home, we used to sit in the backyard with the telescan and look at the star systems on clear nights and chart them.

  “What did you mean when you said “when he was home”? Was your father gone a lot?”

  “Yes, he was gone for long periods of time. My mother and brothers were the ones that really kept the farm running.”

  “You and your father sounded close.”

  “Yeah, we we
re tight. I was his only daughter and the youngest in the family, so that kind of made me..”

  “A daddy’s girl.” Scott grinned. “I’ve been meaning to tell you that I thought the way you handled that lizard at Montrell’s bar the other night was impressive.”

  “You saw that, did you?” I grinned as I shook my head.

  “Where did you learn to fight like that?”

  “When you grow up with three older brothers you sort of have to be able to stand up for yourself.”

  “You really expect me to believe that you’re self-taught with those kind of moves?”

  “You really expect me to believe that you’re going to Nexus on business involving cosmetics?” I squinted as I took a closer look at the scanner. “And what’s up with your personal weight, Scotty? When you boarded my ship you tipped in at a hefty two hundred seventy-three pounds, someone with your build should be at one eighty. There something you need to tell me?”

  “Wouldn’t know where to start, Nikki.”

  “How ‘bout with something simple, like an explanation about your weight. Tell me that and I’ll ignore the fact that you’ve got a 9-mill strapped to your left ankle.”

  “Okay,” Scotty nodded his head with a resigned grin, “I’ve got artificials.”

  “How much of you?”

  “Legs and my left arm are integrated bio-mech.”

  “May I?” I reached over and pulled up Scotty’s left sleeve and ran my hand over his left forearm. “Your peripherals look and feel real,” I gasped, “your arm feels natural…a warmth, I’ve never seen anything like it. They did a nice job on you. Can you feel me touching your arm?”

  “Yes, I can feel your touch. Cutting edge technology.”

  “What happened to your real limbs?”

  “Car accident.”

  “You’re lying. This kind of technology isn’t available to the general public yet, even the best AI’s don’t have this kind of finish. You’re artificials are flawless. So what happened to your real ones?”

  “I’ll keep it simple, young lady. I lost my legs and arm during the Terekian war. I don’t remember much. All I have are fragments that I’m still trying to piece together.”