I made a mental map of the shuttle as I ran, and tried to get a step ahead of whoever was coming after us. Anyone who docked had to dock with the shuttle’s spine, since it wasn’t spinning. Then they’d go E.V.A. and enter the maintenance trunk of the big wheel. Once inside, they’d head down (away from the spine) into the wheel and out in different directions, trying to cover as much ground as possible before anyone knew what was going on.
The shuttle’s command crew had to know this was going on; the collision-avoidance sensors would have been going off like crazy. So either the command crew was dead, or they’d gone along with the docking maneuver. But if the command crew were dead, the docking maneuver would be unnecessary: without control, everyone on the shuttle was already dead but just didn’t know it yet. So the command crew was alive, and had gone along with the docking maneuver without alerting the passengers.
That meant that the docking was either official or it was pretending to be official. Maybe right now the command crew was on tight beam to Akaampta Orbital trying to check their bona fides, but the time lag would be—what?—an hour or more. That was plenty of time for the bad guys—if they were bad guys—to get in and get out.
And if they weren’t bad guys, why jam the comms? Better to just monitor the comms and take your time.
I got to the door of the club deck, and half a dozen diners looked up in a mixture of surprise and annoyance at the drawn Hawker. I did a quick scan, but there was no sign of either Marr or Barraki. The purser saw me and headed toward me, anger clouding his face.
“Put that away!” he ordered, pointing at the Hawker. “You know the rules in the dining compartment.”
I lowered the pistol but didn’t holster it.
“Has Dr. Marfoglia or Barraki been here?”
“Put that away, I said!”
“Tell me why we just docked with another ship, and I will.”
That stopped him, and he looked uncomfortable.
“I . . . don’t know. There must be a good reason.”
“They didn’t tell you? The purser? Tell me where Marfoglia and Barraki are, right now.”
He looked around nervously and licked his lips, starting to put the pieces together. When it came to smarts, this guy was no Walter Wu.
“I . . . I think they were going down to Observation.”
I headed for the elevator, but it opened just before I got to it, and the two guys inside, still suited up but without their pressure helmets, took one look at me and started shooting.
* * *
In the confined space of the club deck, the pistols had roared like thunder and had left my ears ringing. I dropped the empty magazine from the Hawker’s pistol grip and loaded magazine number two. I have a vague memory of people screaming and china breaking behind me. Both of the dead guys in the elevator were packing identical Rampart Auto-10s with the serial numbers burned off. On the elevator ride down, I stuffed one of the Ramparts in my waistband, and half a dozen magazines into my pockets, and I felt a little less naked. I checked the rounds in one of their magazines—simple hollow points, not poisoned pills. That was really good news, since I was bleeding from a glancing shot to the left side of my rib cage and a shallow through-and-through to my right thigh. The ribs hurt worse right now, but the thigh was probably going to slow me down more. But the bullet missed the bone and the artery, so I was still in business.
I have no memory of actually shooting the two guys.
I looked at them, really looked at them for the first time, and got a funny chill down my back. I knew one of these guys—I didn’t know his name, but he’d run Lotto cash for Kolya, back on Peezgtaan. What was a Piss-Can Lotto runner doing fifteen light-years away from home?
Okay. Think, Sasha, think! What does this mean?
Everybody thinks that trained assassins grow on trees or something, and that any time anybody with a pocket full of money wants somebody gotten rid of, it’s easy—just call the Assassin’s Hotline or whatever and there will be all these unbelievably deadly killers just waiting for a job. But it doesn’t work like that.
Not that there aren’t incredibly deadly professional killers; the opposition had hired two of them, brought them in from off-world, but Bony Jones—praise his memory—had dropped them. That meant that whoever was behind this had to improvise. Kolya was all there was available, and once they hired him, he had to move fast. No time to bring in additional help from off-planet. When it turned into a chase, it was still better to chase with the people you knew—no way to keep a lid on things if you start broadcasting what’s going on and what you need done. Hence, this Lotto runner—and who knows what his buddy did for a living—filling in as killers, all with their matching untraceable Ramparts, probably from the same production lot.
Not that I was some unstoppable killer myself, understand. I was just a guy ran a lotto and loan operation to fund a soup kitchen and a clinic. But at least now I knew I wasn’t up against a dozen Co-Gozhak silencers, with some government agency behind them and death in their black lizard hearts. So I had maybe a little chance.
The elevator stopped on the observation level—the outer deck of the big wheel—and opened. I came out with the Hawker leveled and braced with both hands, checked right and then left, and didn’t see any movement at all. No sign of a struggle, either. I listened, and didn’t hear anything, but I wasn’t really sure how good my hearing was after all the shooting on the club deck.
I started aft—because I had a hunch I’d get a look at the ship that had docked from the aft windows—and started checking the private rooms off the main lounge. One turn, twenty yards, and I was at a window looking aft, and sure enough, there was a ship docked on the spine, just going out of view as the wheel turned, but I saw enough to recognize it as a Blackbird. It’s long and tapered for a purpose—very low radar signature from the front, which is the aspect it presents when overtaking or approaching. It also had big liquid nitrogen-cooled damper hoods to kill most of its thermal signature—again, from the front. From the side or rear it would show just as hot, but this was a ship to get you in secretly and then out fast.
The good news was there weren’t any extra quarters modules attached. It only had internal room and life support for maybe eight or ten guys. Also, no spin habitat. If they’d been out here waiting long, they might be out of shape.
And if that sounds like I was grasping at straws, what’s your point?
There were two ways to work this.
I could try to run out the clock—delay and annoy them until they had to get out of Dodge before getting intercepted by the real Co-Gozhak—but the longer I let them wander around, the more chance there was they’d stumble across Marr and the kids.
Or I could hit them hard. They were spread out searching, they didn’t know the shuttle’s interior as well as I did—looking at floor plans is no substitute for walking the ship—and they weren’t trained killers. At least some of them weren’t. Kolya had a couple of pretty dangerous guys on the payroll, and he’d have them along for sure. And Kolya would be here, too. You could count on that.
But no choice, really. Hunt ’em and hit ’em.
My hearing must have been bad, because I came around a corner and there were two of them, not five meters from me. I almost pissed myself, but the Hawker was pointed in the right direction. I fired three times, and one of them fell down, two slugs having gone in the back of his head and exited the front. The other guy ducked through an open door into one of the side rooms, and I recognized him as Charlie Nguyen, one of Kolya’s real killers. He’d had a Rampart in each hand, and I dropped down to one knee, the Hawker trained on the doorway.
Charlie had a signature move that always worked, because he was crazier than most people he came up against. He’d stick both guns out and start shooting as fast as he could, aiming about where he knew the target was but with the pistols spread side to side, spraying bullets, and then he’d come out, following the guns, and adjusting his aim onto the target. When the shooting
started, sane people ducked, and that gave Charlie his chance to get out in the open alive. Once he saw you, and he was shooting while you weren’t, he had you. That’s why I knelt down. He stuck out his pistols and started shooting, but the rounds all went over my head. I waited, and when he came around the door, I shot him in the forehead and he fell down.
My ears were really messed up now. They actually hurt from the noise, and I tried saying something just to see if I could hear it. I could, but my voice sounded tinny and distant. I looked down at Charlie and the other dead guy, and I felt nothing. I’d felt sick when I’d killed Ricky, but that was different. Ricky was just trying to kill me, and he had his reasons. These bastards were trying to kill two little kids, and Marr, none of whom had ever done a single thing to hurt these guys, or anyone else for that matter. If there really were a hell someplace, then these two monsters were already there. Pretty soon they’d have some company.
* * *
Since the observation deck was on the outside of the wheel, it was the biggest deck, and we’d figured out a number of places where the kids could hide. But Marr was with Barraki, and lots of those places she couldn’t fit, so I started with the big ones. I found them the second place I looked, in the equipment spaces for the hydraulic pistons that closed the solid shutters on the aft observation ports. They were down behind and underneath the pistons, and you couldn’t see them unless you knew just where to look.
“Hey, are you okay?” I called down.
“Sasha! Oh, thank God it’s you!” Marr cried out.
“Come on, let’s get you out of there.”
Easier said than done, it turned out. They were down below deck level and had to climb out over the pistons, and we hadn’t figured on all the lubricants. After they slipped and fell back a couple times, I ended up hauling them up by sheer muscle power, which also was easier said than done, since both of them were pretty greasy by then.
“Oh my God, you’re hurt!” Marr said as soon as she saw the blood on my shirt and pants.
“Little bit,” I answered. No point in trying to bullshit her at this point. “Nothing serious, though. Have you seen any of them?”
She nodded her head.
“We saw the ship dock but didn’t know what it meant. I tried to call you, but something’s wrong.”
“They’re jamming the comm links.”
She nodded.
“We heard the security alarm and the announcement that there had been shots fired on board. We didn’t know what to do, so we hid.”
“You did exactly right. You okay, sport?” I asked Barraki. He looked up and nodded. He’d been staring at the wound in my leg, and he was trembling.
“Sasha, are you going to die? Like Mr. Jones did after they shot him?”
“Look at me. No, I’m not. It’s not that kind of bullet, Barraki. It’s just a plain old slug, and it made a plain old hole. Here, I took the guy’s gun. Look.”
I pulled out the Rampart, dropped the magazine, and let him see the top bullet—not that he’d necessarily know a poison pill if he saw one, but he could see there was nothing special about these. I put the magazine back in and laid it on the carpet. I pulled the Hawker and its spare magazine out and held them out to Marr. I preferred the Hawker, but I had more rounds for the Rampart.
“Remember how to use this guy?”
She nodded. “I had a good teacher.”
“Yeah? What did he teach you?”
She looked me in the eye and took the Hawker.
“He taught me to just shoot.”
“Okay. I’ve dropped four of them so far. I’m not sure how many there are, but there can’t have been more than a dozen, outside, to start with.”
“There were nine,” Marr said. I looked at her in surprise. “They had to go outside their ship, in pressure suits, to get in the shuttle,” she explained. “We could see them. Barraki and I counted them.”
I grinned.
“Good work! Good thinking. Okay, that helps. Four down and five to go. But they’ll be more alert now that they’ve lost guys, so it’ll get harder. Tweezaa’s in hiding place number two. You remember which one that is?”
Marr and Barraki both nodded.
“First thing, Marr, power down your comm link. Not sleep mode, dead cold. Second, we go get Tweezaa. Then we figure out if we bunker up or keep moving, depending on what we see between here and there. If . . . if we get separated, get to Tweezaa. Clear?”
They both nodded.
We started down the circumference corridor, me in the lead, Barraki behind me, and Marr bringing up the rear. I told her to stay ten or twenty paces back so she wouldn’t be in the line of fire if there were trouble. That wasn’t me being protective. Tactics 101: don’t get both of your guns pinned down by the same shooter. What difference would ten or twenty paces make? In a regular building maybe not a lot, but we were walking the inside circumference of a wheel. The deck rose ahead of and behind us, and you could see people’s feet coming before anything else. With a little luck, trouble ahead wouldn’t know Marr was there at all.
Oh, yeah. Tactics 102: keep your best gun back. I suppose taking the lead was me being protective—so sue me.
The observation deck is almost mazelike in the variety of paths you can take from here to there, although it is very simple in basic design. Think of the deck as a long, endless corridor. In the center is a spine of rooms—meeting rooms, and a lot of dead machinery spaces with no access from this level. The three elevator foyers were spaced around the wheel in this center strip as well. There were parallel corridors to either side of the central spine, and then observation lounges outboard of those. Some of the lounges were linked, and most of the meeting rooms had access to both corridors, so there were lots of ways to get from point A to point B, if you knew what you were doing.
That also meant there were lots of places for bad guys to hide. Speed and caution are always a trade-off, and this was no exception. If I wanted to be cautious; I’d have checked each room as we came even with it. I’d checked them all coming this way, but someone could have come up behind me and slipped in, or come by way of the other corridor. I didn’t bother, because it was a big ship, there weren’t many of the bad guys left, and we’d never get to Tweezaa if we checked every door we came to. At a certain point, speed is a better defense than caution, and I figured that’s where we were right then.
I wasn’t entirely wrong—I was actually about half right, as it turned out. My decision to move fast was a calculated risk, and in any calculated risk, there’s a chance things will come out wrong.
We were about thirty yards down the corridor when I heard a door open behind me, and I heard a familiar voice say, “Hey, Sasha. Long time.” Then there was the explosion of a gunshot behind me, and a slug buried itself in the wall beside me. I went down and rolled to the side, the Rampart coming up, and I saw Bear Bernardini stagger forward and fall face-first to the deck. Marr was half a dozen meters behind him, the Hawker up in both hands. It was her slug that had hit the wall, after it had gone through Bear.
So the gamble on speed hadn’t paid off, but trusting Marr with my back had.
Barraki crawled out of another open doorway, where he’d gone for cover.
“Are you safe?” he asked.
“Yeah, I’m fine, thanks to Marr.”
She lowered the automatic and tried to smile, but she was shaking from reaction.
“He’s moving!” she said, and started to bring the Hawker up again, but I waved it down.
“I’ve got him. Let’s get into that room.”
I got up and limped over to Bear. He was conscious and moving, but obviously hurting. I kicked his Rampart away from his hand, then scooped it up and tucked it in my waistband, grabbed his collar with my left hand, and dragged him into the conference room, although it took some doing. My right leg throbbed with pain, and the knee was starting to get wobbly and watery feeling—and Bear wasn’t called Bear for nothing.
“Marr, watch the c
orridor at this door. Barraki, watch the other. Heads down low, at floor level, so you’ll see feet coming and they won’t see you.”
I pulled Bear against a wall, propped him up, and had a look. The bullet had entered his lower back and come out the front.
“Who shot me?” he asked, confused and in pain. I nodded toward Marr, and Bear made a face.
“Son of a bitch! Well, I’m out of this hunt. I never had much stomach for it anyway.”
“It’s worse than that,” I said. I ran my finger through the blood oozing out of his abdomen and held it up for him to see. The blood was nearly black. “You took one through the liver, Bear. You’re not going to make it.”
“Aw, Jesus!” he said, his face wrinkling up like we was going to cry. “Aw, Jesus.”
“Bear, you’re dying, and you owe me. You tried to kill me back in the Crack, and you tried again here.”
“Kolya made me,” he protested, but I shook my head.
“Kolya didn’t make you—you chose your side. And now here you are, blood leaking out and poison filling up your body. And you owe me.”
He licked his lips, and I could see panic starting to take hold, but he fought it down and nodded.
“Yeah. Yeah, Sasha, I guess I do owe you. What do you want?”
“How many total?” I asked. Marr and Barraki had counted, but he didn’t know that, and I wanted to see if he would lie to me.
“Nine, counting me and Kolya.”
So Kolya was along. I felt a chill, a shudder of dread. I’d been sure he would be here, but being sure and having it confirmed are two different things.
“Any other good shooters?”
How Dark the World Becomes Page 32
