by Rick Partlow
Sandi rushed past the bodies, pausing to kick the guns away from their hands and trying not to focus on the tacky, sticky sensation as the soles of her boots made tread-marks in the swiftly-spreading pools of crimson. Again, guilt tried to well up inside her; these people had been assigned to protect a child, and she’d killed them for it. Kan-Ten was up and following her through the entrance hall and into the main dining room; it was deserted, chairs kicked over and food still on the tables…and a man’s body, sprawled on the floor between the dining area and the bar, a handgun near his outstretched fingers. Eduardo’s people had kicked everyone out when they’d brought his daughter here, and someone hadn’t wanted to leave. Suddenly, she didn’t feel as guilty anymore.
Sandi kept her carbine trained on the bar and the doors set in the wall behind it, careful of anyone hiding there, ready to ambush them. Steam drifted off the cooling vanes of her carbine, the shimmering waves of heat carrying away the beads of water that had accumulated in the light rain outside. She came around the edge of the bar and ducked under the gate, ready to hose down anyone she found there, but there was nothing. She held the gate up for Kan-Ten and they both picked their way through pressurized kegs of beer and crates of locally-bottled liquor to a rubberized matt on the floor near the center of the bar. Sandi kicked it aside, revealing a metal trapdoor with a hinged handle at the front edge.
She pulled her carbine into her shoulder and crouched above the trapdoor, then signaled to Kan-Ten. The Tahni reached down and yanked the handle upward, revealing a wooden stepladder descending into an unlit basement. Sandi hesitated for just a moment, afraid there might be another guard stationed in the cellar, but no gunshots were forthcoming.
“Adriana,” she called. She realized that her helmet’s external speakers made her sound distant and mechanical; with a muttered curse, she jerked at the quick-release and twisted the helmet off. The air inside this place was warm and dry, and the space behind the bar smelled of stale beer, and breathing it made everything feel so uncomfortably real.
“Adriana!” she repeated. “Your mother sent us to bring you back to her!”
Another long pause, and for a moment, she thought the girl wasn’t down there, that they’d found a different hiding place for her.
“Who are you?” The voice was a little girl’s, halting and tremulous and scared.
“My name is Sandi. Your mom, Stephania Willow, sent me. She was worried about you and wants me and my friends to take you home.” She made a face, realizing she sounded awkward. Probably comes from having a fucking admiral for a mom. “Your mom is with us, back on our ship, just a few minutes from here.”
She thought she’d reached the girl, but then there was another stretch of silence. She checked the time on her wrist display and cursed.
“Why didn’t Mom come herself and get me?” Adriana demanded, a bit of petulance sneaking into her voice.
“Because it’s dangerous outside.” Sandi forced calm into her tone, trying not to sound impatient. “There are bad men coming to try to hurt everyone here and your dad is fighting them. That’s why your mom wants you to come home. That’s why she sent us.”
Sandi shot Kan-Ten a look of exasperation, mouthing “Jesus Christ,” and knowing both were probably wasted on him.
“All right, I’m coming.”
Sandi hissed out a sigh and shifted the muzzle of her carbine upward, relaxing her crouch into more of a squat. She could see movement in the darkness below them, and then a mop of dirty blond hair ascending the ladder. Adriana’s face was cherubic, but then most well-fed eight-year-old girls seemed fairly cherubic until you got to know them. Her clothes were expensive, and tailored, and fit in poorly in a place like Barataria Bay, but perfectly with her mother’s tastes. Adriana paused at the top of the ladder and looked Sandi up and down appraisingly.
“You’re too pretty to be a soldier,” she declared, her green eyes narrowing.
Sandi laughed; she couldn’t help it.
“That’s because I’m really a pilot,” she admitted. “I’m only a soldier when I have to be.”
“I want to be a pilot!” Adriana announced, smiling as if they weren’t on a world settled by gunrunners and in the middle of an invasion. “Mom says I can learn how to fly when I get older!” The little girl glanced over at Kan-Ten and gasped. “Are you a Tahni?” she asked, pushing herself up out of the trapdoor to stand next to him. “I’ve never met a Tahni before!”
“I am Kan-Ten,” the alien told her with what would have sounded like earnest sincerity in a human. “We must leave this place now. You need to stay close to Sandi.”
Sandi pulled her helmet back on, pushing shut the seals, then touched the control to transmit over her ‘link.
“Korri,” she called. “We’ve got the girl and we’re heading out. Are you okay?”
She could see the older woman’s transponder on her HUD, and it showed her about fifty meters from the bar and moving in an arc back toward it.
“Roger that.” Still that relaxed voice, like this was nothing to her. “I got what was left of the squad running in circles, chasing where they think I am. I’ll meet you at the entrance in one minute.”
“I’m going to have to carry you for now, Adriana,” Sandi told her, slinging her carbine and picking the girl up, then pulling her sidearm.
“I can walk,” the girl protested, though she didn’t struggle.
“I know you can, but we’re going to have to move fast, and I’m wearing enough armor to protect the both of us.”
Kan-Ten led them out the front door, and she tried to shield the girl’s eyes from the dead bodies in the entrance hall; she wasn’t sure how successful she’d been, but the child didn’t react either way. Outside, Kan-Ten turned to the right, looking for Fontenot, and Sandi stepped off to the left, near the corner of the bar…and stopped short. She was staring into the yawning muzzle of a rocket revolver, a massive, obsolete weapon held in an equally massive hand.
The face behind the hand was good-looking in a rough and rugged way, tanned and lined, strands of grey streaking his close-cropped beard, and his eyes were the same shade of green as his daughter’s.
“Dad!” Adriana blurted, like he’d caught her snacking between meals.
“Put her down,” Eduardo Santonio ordered tightly, his words a barely-controlled hiss.
Sandi sensed more than saw Kan-Ten turning, bringing up his rifle.
“Hold your fire,” she said quickly. “Fontenot, if you can hear me, do not fire.”
“Are you sure you know what you’re doing, girl?” Fontenot sounded dubious, but Sandi ignored the question.
Sandi slowly and carefully holstered her pistol, then reached up and pulled off her helmet, looking the cartel enforcer in the eye.
“Mr. Santonio,” she said, trying to keep the intense fear out of her voice despite looking straight into the explosive warhead of a mini-rocket, “I work for your wife. She sent us to take Adriana home. She knew this attack was coming.” She waved a hand back toward the landing field and the La Sombra compound, and the gunfire still clearly audible and getting closer. “She knew Adriana wouldn’t be safe here. You have to know it, too.”
The look on the man’s face changed from barely-chained fury to a halting confusion and hesitation, and the barrel of the revolver wavered. He knew she was telling the truth. Then his expression hardened again and the weapon straightened.
“She’s my daughter,” he insisted, “and she’s staying with me. Put her the fuck down now before I blow your head off.”
Sandi felt her mouth set in a grim line and she turned her body, angling the little girl away from him.
“No,” she said. “Not here. If you want to keep your daughter safe, if you want to be with her, you’ll come with us, get her safe on our starship and fly out of here.” She nodded toward Kan-Ten, then out to where Fontenot was approaching, assault gun levelled at the man. “You can shoot me, and maybe hit your daughter, and then she can watch them kill you
. Or you can be her father and protect her.”
Santonio’s lip quivered somewhere between frustration and desperation and he slowly lowered the gun.
“All right,” he sighed. “Goddamnit, you’re exactly the kind of person Stephania would hire. Let’s go.”
Sandi nodded, then put her helmet back in place and sealed it.
“Korri, lead off. Kan-Ten, watch my back.” She paused and made sure her exterior speakers were turned off before she continued. “And if this asshole looks at me sideways, shoot him.”
Something exploded less than a hundred meters away in a globe of white fire, and the ground shook hard enough that it nearly threw Sandi off her feet. Fontenot didn’t need any more encouragement; she loped off back the way they’d come, and Sandi surged into a sprint to keep up with her.
“We’re heading back, Ash. You still good?”
“So far, but I don’t know how much longer we’ve got,” he answered her. “The fighting’s getting closer.”
“You don’t have to tell me. Hang tight.”
Then she was breathing too hard to speak. For a little girl, Adriana was damned heavy, and the only reason she didn’t have Kan-Ten or Fontenot carry her was because they were both better gunfighters than her. She could have let Santonio carry his daughter, but she was afraid he’d seize the opportunity to take off and leave them there. She thought she’d gotten through to him, but she wasn’t willing to bet Adriana’s life on it.
The walls of the alleyways seemed closer together somehow than they had on the way in, as if the echoes of the gunfire chattering from a couple streets over was physically constricting her, closing around her and Adriana. She gritted her teeth and tried to keep her finger away from her sidearm’s trigger pad as she ran, despite the instinct to clench her fist. They were one street away from the Acheron when Fontenot skidded to a halt just at the alley entrance and opened fire to her right, scuttling backwards to cover.
Return fire pounded into the left-hand wall of the alley, a block-and-mortar fabricator and small equipment repair shop, the warheads of the mini-rockets flashing with flares of vaporized metal that ate pockmarks out of the corner of the building. Sandi put her shoulder against the right-hand wall, shielding Adriana with her body, while Santonio and Kan-Ten swept past her to take up positions next to Fontenot. The cartel enforcer moved with a careful recklessness, like he knew the knife edge of the situation intimately and came just as close as he could to it. He went to the center of the alleyway, edging around Fontenot, out just far enough that he could see the shooters. The heavy revolver was an extension of his arm, pointed as naturally as Sandi might point her finger in a casual gesture.
Flame erupted from the barrel as rockets the size of a man’s little finger launched one on the heels of another, just enough gap to make sure the exhaust of the first didn’t alter the course of the next. He emptied the cylinder in one, long burst before taking a single, casual step backwards just ahead of a dozen rounds of incoming fire. They couldn’t have missed him by more than centimeters, Sandi judged. The man had balls, but that was no surprise; Jordi Abdullah didn’t hire cowards to run his businesses.
“We got two squads out there,” Fontenot informed them, “less two or three individuals now. They’ve learned their lesson and are behind available cover. Can we bring the ship in for fire support?”
“The angle’s wrong,” Sandi estimated reluctantly. Calling in air support was always her first instinct. “He couldn’t bring the Acheron in low enough to target them, and the streets are narrow enough that a straight-down shot wouldn’t reach them.”
She paused, grunting with effort as she shifted Adriana’s weight. The little girl was pale, eyes wide, arms clinging around her neck tightly, as if everything was finally getting to her, just now sinking in. Poor kid.
“I’ll circle around,” Santonio declared, sliding a fresh load of ammunition into the cylinder of his weapon. “Keep them looking this way.”
“I will accompany you,” Kan-Ten said.
The cartel enforcer sized the Tahni warrior up and nodded curtly.
“Take care of my daughter,” he warned Sandi. “Or I’ll kill you.”
Then they were both gone, down the other end of the alley, and Fontenot was leaning out and firing again. Everything felt distant inside the helmet, as if it was happening to someone else, and perhaps the distance let her keep her cool, because everything inside her was screaming with a desire to panic and run. She set Adriana down but kept one of her small hands clasped in her own left glove, held onto it like a talisman and kept her secure against the wall while she leaned out over where Fontenot crouched down.
Down the street, the Sung Brothers’ mercenaries were less than fifty meters away, darting from cover to cover, from alleyway to sheltered doorway to the lee of an ancient cargo truck, on fire now with its thin metal engine cover shredded and splintered. The incoming fire was sporadic, unorganized, but daunting for all that due to their sheer numbers and Sandi jerked back as a burst of mini-rockets impacted the wall just around the corner from their position, throwing up a cloud of fiery fragments of rock and plaster.
Sandi leaned out again, quickly like a snake striking, and fired off most of a magazine from her pulse pistol. The weapon was high-signature, the passage of the laser pulses clearly marked by flashes of superheated air, and its impacts were equally as dramatic. Stone and brick and plaster and buildfoam and metal vaporized or sublimated in showers of angry red sparks, and a man dressed in black armor with impractically stylish red decoration fell backwards clutching the stump where his right hand had been a moment earlier.
Then Sandi was huddled around the corner with Adriana, crouching protectively over the girl to guard her from the burning fragments coming off the opposite wall as mini-rockets tore at it in raging futility. Fontenot braved the hail of fire with resolute calm, the report of her assault gun just as slow and steady, like a drum beating somewhere in the distance. The consequences of her shots were somewhat more drastic than Sandi’s; the rocket-assisted rounds were like giant versions of the incoming fire, with warheads that sprayed targeted spears of plasma in four directions.
Sandi risked another look and saw another of the enemy down, probably dead, being dragged behind cover by his fellows, while the rest of them were staying further back than before. It still wouldn’t be enough to get them across that street, though---it was fifteen meters of open space with no cover, and she had to carry the girl. It would be at least two to three seconds, and she and Adriana would both be good and dead before they’d hit the halfway point.
Then she heard the shouts. Two, maybe three voices yelling a warning, and someone screaming in pain. The reports of the weapons changed in pitch as the impacts on the wall lessened and then ceased; the shots were being aimed the opposite direction, toward where Santonio and Kan-Ten were attacking from the rear.
“Go!” she yelled at Fontenot, scooping up Adriana and breaking into a run without hesitation.
Two and a half, maybe three seconds, yet it stretched on forever, and Sandi was sure someone was going to look back, start shooting and she and the child would both die bleeding on the cracked pavement. They didn’t; the next alley over swallowed them up and Fontenot behind them, and they were across.
“Go, Kan-Ten!” Sandi tried to shout it, but it came out as a dry rasp. “We’ll cover you from this side.”
“Get the child to the ship,” the Tahni replied. The ‘link pickup cleaned up his words in software before transmitting them, so she could understand what he was saying, but she could still hear in the background the sound of weapons discharging and rounds impacting all around him. “We will meet you there.”
She wanted to argue with him; it felt right to say no, to insist on covering the two of them. But the girl was the mission, and more than that, she was their responsibility. She made a motion at Fontenot to move out and the older woman didn’t argue.
The Sung Brothers troops hadn’t made it as far as the in
terior wall of the city, and the Acheron was exactly where they’d left it. She looked, Sandi thought, incredibly beautiful and otherworldly sitting there in her silvery, streamlined glory among so much squalor and destruction. The fog had cleared, and she realized that the system’s primary had risen somewhere behind the jealous grey of the clouds, giving just the slightest glint to the cutter’s reflective finish…and making her feel suddenly very exposed.
“Open the ramp,” she called to Ash when they turned onto the last street, past the warehouses, nothing between them and the wall but the ship.
An expanding pie-slice of welcoming light flooded out to greet them as the ramp lowered, and stretched out in backlit shadow at the top of it was Stephania Willow. She stood like an ancient stone sentinel, waiting and watching; but when she saw her daughter she flew down the ramp with her feet barely touching its metal surface.
Sandi didn’t remember handing the girl over, but suddenly Adriana was out of her grasp and in her mother’s arms and she didn’t know how she’d ever considered the woman cold and unfeeling.
“What are you crying about, Mommy?” The words were muffled, spoken against Stephania’s shoulder as it shook with sobs. “I’m okay, I promise.”
“I’m going back for Kan-Ten,” Fontenot said, shifting her assault gun to her left hip as she pulled a spare drum for it from a pouch slung over her shoulder.
“There is no need.” The Tahni’s voice was in her headphones, not her external audio pickups, and his transponder signal showed him coming in from the next street over from the one they’d traversed.
Sandi turned and saw him running in that curious, shuffling gait that no human could have quite duplicated; it looked awkward as hell, but he covered ground as fast as any unaugmented human she’d ever seen. The armored pauldron over his left shoulder was charred and cracked, and she saw blood running down his left arm beneath it, though it didn’t seem to slow his pace.
He was alone. There was no sign of the enemy or of Eduardo Santonio. She felt a hiss of breath go out of her. Whatever else the man might have been, whatever sins he might have committed, he was a father to his daughter. Fontenot scanned the approaches, covering the Tahni as he stomped up the ramp, then hitting the control to close it.
