by Mel Odom
“Not for use on humans, no, but I do want one with rifle rigging.” I pointed out a 15mm hand cannon that had caught my attention. The slug-thrower came with a longer barrel than the short one currently outfitted on the weapon.
At my side, Shelly stiffened. I had never carried a slug-thrower while working as her partner, but I remembered how Simon Blake had, and how well he had used the weapon. I believed I could do as well, though I would not be able to have the same casual attentiveness to targets.
“I will not be using it on humans, but there are hoppers and other vehicles that I may wish to elude.” I voiced that to reassure her—myself, I supposed—rather than the shopkeeper.
Property damage by the NAPD had been frowned upon too, which was another reason a bioroid operating under their auspices could not carry a weapon like that.
“You do realize that I’m not supposed to sell this to a bioroid who isn’t licensed for it.”
“Perhaps you would enjoy watching it collect more dust in there.’”
Jitish held his gaze steady, but I knew that I had him when I had purchased the Gibson PAD at the price we had agreed upon. It had been a while since he’d sold much and he was hungry.
He named a price that was exorbitant, but I didn’t mind letting him see some substantial profit on the slug-thrower. He was generous enough to throw in a holster that fit on the inside waistband of my pants.
The rifle rigging came in a small leather valise. I opened it, found the rifle stock and small folding bipod tucked in fitted compartments inside, and checked the fit on the 15mm Gortaub. The rifle stock fit on the slug-thrower easily, and the bipod slipped onto the .5 meter barrel extension like a glove. Even though I was prepared to handle the gun, the initial resistance to it in my programming thrummed through me. I finally pushed it aside.
Gordon had one of his massive hands on the slug-thrower at his hip and remained ready to pull his weapon at the slightest indication that I meant his employer any harm.
Working smoothly, with as much of Simon Blake’s experience with the weapon as with my own understanding of it, I removed the stock and the extended barrel from the slug-thrower. Instead of returning them to their case, I tucked them into hidden pockets in my duster, which was cut to smooth the lines and reveal nothing of what lay underneath.
“How much?”
We haggled over that price a little more enthusiastically, but Jitish knew I wasn’t leaving the shop without those things. I also made him throw in two hundred-count boxes of ammunition for the slug-thrower, one with short rounds dedicated to subsonic and low speed that wouldn’t penetrate most walls—or bodies—and higher-velocity rounds for shooting at a distance. Then I purchased a set of tools, including a cutting laser and welder and a stunstick.
My cred level was nearly flattened, but I had everything I needed except for a place to stay.
When we were finished, I left the shop and began scouting for a hotel. I needed to upgrade the PAD and get hold of Floyd. There were questions I needed answered.
Chapter Eleven
I managed the repairs while looking into the mirror at a motel at the back end of the box canyon. Logic dictated that by placing myself back there I was trapping myself, but I knew I could climb into the half-mile high mountain range if I needed to.
Due to the craggy exterior, I could avoid any hoppers willing to chance the wind shear that could exceed 100 kph. Coupled with the thin atmosphere, hopper pilots would have a difficult time tracking me. Human pursuers wouldn’t be able to keep pace with me while in envirosuits, and clones and bioroids could be dealt with.
I felt confident in my chosen bunker.
The PAD replacement took eighteen hours and nine minutes. I only had to backtrack on the operation six times, which I thought was well within tolerance given the less-than-adequate circumstances I was forced to do them in.
When I was finished, I ran a diagnostic and immediately felt the difference in the capability I’d been performing at when it came to Net access.
While I was soldering up my chassis, I pinged the secret account Floyd 2X3A7C and I had set up for our communications. When I finished with the soldering, I went down to the motel’s main lobby, checked my tools into a safebox, then checked out of the higher-priced room I’d stayed in, and signed up for one of the body drawers most of the people who stayed there slept in.
“Too bad we don’t have crypts outside.” The wizened old woman that manned the desk was different from the one I had checked in with. The tattooing on her face marked her as Martian; the ink looked as faded as her hair and as listless as the perfunctory smile she offered me. “It would be a lot cheaper. But we don’t get many of you in here. I think most of the bioroids sleep standing up in whatever warehouse or business they work at.”
I thought that was probably true as well, but didn’t say anything. I accepted the key code she gave me, committing it to memory at once. I crossed the small lobby and headed into a narrow hallway, stepping aside to allow men and women to file past.
Locally, it was just after 1300. According to the help wanted postings I had seen on the vicinity classifieds in the newsrags, the nearby businesses ran on three shifts: from six to two, two to ten, and the skeletal maintenance shift from ten to six. These people were going to work and none of them looked excited to do so.
I continued past communal showers where men and women stood waiting to go in with towels wrapped around themselves. I filed scars and tattoos as a matter of course because those were identifying features a person of interest could not get rid of without considerable effort. I discovered three criminals guilty of misdemeanors and two felons as I walked by the steam-filled room. Since none of them were currently wanted for crimes involving murder or personal injury, I was able to pass them by without apprehending them myself.
Using my new PAD, I hijacked the motel’s frequency and sent in the location of all five people to the NAPD and Martian police. I would be gone before the law enforcement teams arrived, and I made certain my communications transmission could not be tracked.
“You’re taking a risk,” Shelly said as she walked beside me.
“I cannot let them go without telling someone.” It was, in fact, everything I could do to walk away without apprehending them myself. Only the fact that I had no current law enforcement standing prevented me from doing so.
Shelly cursed but didn’t protest any further.
The vault room was filled with small meter by .8 meter doors on the walls. A few of the drawers were open and motel guests were gradually awakening to the sound of alarms only they could hear, or were sitting on the drawers waiting to become more fully alert before trying to walk.
They looked at me, and most looked away immediately, but a few studied me with low-level curiosity. I ignored them and found the door to my drawer, then punched in the key code.
Smoothly, the drawer rolled out to reveal the small bed with sanitary wrap covering it to prove that no one had been sleeping in there since it had been sterilized. I levered myself into it, listening to the rollers groan slightly under my weight even on Mars.
Shelly stood and watched. “I’ll be out here, Drake. I can’t stand those things. They remind me too much of the morgue.”
“I understand.” Even as I responded, I wondered where her response had come from. Shelly wasn’t squeamish. She and I had visited morgues several times. I thought perhaps having her say that was because I didn’t want to see her lying beside me in that drawer. It would have reminded me too much of how I had last seen her after she’d been killed.
After I settled onto the bed, I pressed the keypad to roll myself into the storage space. Once the door was sealed, the unit’s near-AI spun up into life, reading my preference from the check-in log I’d filled out.
“Hello, guest.” The voice was a female baritone. “Welcome to Elysian Fields Motel. We try to match each of our guests with the most comfortable arrangements so that you will enjoy your stay with us.”
&nb
sp; A small screen opened almost in my face and revealed a deluge of sensie images ranging from dramatic to pornographic as well as a selection of sports.
“As you can see, we can provide you with an assortment of viewable products. You can choose a two-dimensional experience or a more interactive, virtual one. We can also bring you live sporting events from around Mars, Earth, and the Moon. Note: please allow for the lag time between Earth and the Moon for live presentation.”
I opted out of that, switched out the lights, turned down the offer of music as well as background noise that included whale songs and swamp sounds, and logged onto the message service I was using with Floyd. He had responded. I asked him to rendezvous with me at our meetbox.
He asked me to give him an hour and I did, lying there quietly in the near-coffin while planning out my next move. Instead of meeting with Floyd, though, I took a side trip back to the past.
* * *
“Simon! Where are you?”
I was running for my life, taking long, risky strides over the Martian landscape in my envirosuit. Rebel mortar fire blew craters into the side of the mountain we were fighting on. My aud dampers filtered out most of the screaming missiles and the raucous blasts, but they didn’t do anything about the concussive waves and scattershot shrapnel that filled the thin air around me.
“Here.” I sent out a suit ping so Rath could find me easier.
“I see you. You’re a quarter-klick out of position.”
“That’s because the rebels have got tanks we didn’t know about.” The intel on the op was faulty and Chimera Team was taking the brunt of that mistake.
Rath chuckled drily. “I’ll have a word with Chesboro when we get back to Mariner colony.”
“You do that.” I threw myself down onto debris-strewn ground as another group of howlers whistled by overhead. “In case I don’t get to attend that meeting, maybe you could tell him a few things for me.”
“You’ll be there. I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”
On my knees and making the most of the cover I’d found, I peered down into the valley Chimera had agreed to take for Whampoa Reclamation. Whampoa was a Chinese mining outfit that had recently purchased the mineral rights to the mountain range we’d signed on to make safe.
After meeting stiff resistance originally, Whampoa had put some of their sec people into the area to shore up their efforts to move mining equipment into the mountains. Several million dollars’ worth of earthmovers lay scattered across the mountainside. The rebels had used them as target practice.
There were also several dead sec people. Whampoa hadn’t been allowed to claim the bodies. Since there weren’t any carnivorous beetles and blowflies on Mars to help get rid of dead things, those corpses had just lain there, slowly decomposing in their envirosuits, which kept them at human temp instead of the cold of Mars. I knew from experience that by the time those bodies were recovered, the dead would be poured from those suits like stew or a really thick soup.
Chimera was getting a bonus for every dead body they brought in that could still be recognized. That was easy cred as long as the suit remained intact. If a suit’s integrity was breached, things got really messy and hard to label.
“Meaning no disrespect, Colonel, but you may not have a choice in the matter.” I triggered the magnification built into my helmet and tracked the hostile forces.
Most of the rebel mortar emplacements lay hidden in ravines and gullies, dug in tight in hard to get to places. Some of them had even dug in behind the metallic corpses of the earthmovers. Chimera was getting paid for salvage rights to the equipment too, but I didn’t think the rebels knew that their choice of hiding spots was making our jobs even harder than they already were. The colonel wanted those salvaged earthmovers as intact as they could possibly be.
“I always have a choice, Captain.” Rath sounded supremely confident. I couldn’t help thinking that maybe wherever he was, he probably wasn’t looking at as much resistance as I was. “You need to remember that.”
I lifted my laser rifle and sighted on a two-man mortar group that had broken cover and was sprinting across open ground 437 meters away. Since I was using the laser and not a slug-thrower, I didn’t have to allow for any lead time or drop. I put the sights over the first man and burned a hole through his head you could have put your thumb through.
When the dead man went down, the man behind him was following too close to keep from sprawling on top of him. The man tried to get to his feet, shoving against the dead man. I sighted, waited a beat for him to calm and focus, then burned him through the head as well. He dropped like a stone.
“Good shots,” Rath said over the channel. “Now why don’t you get your team organized again and take those people out.”
“Yes, sir.”
I ripped off the cover to my PAD and orally gridded the battlefield, knocking out terrorists as my team accounted for six more kills. The main problem was the four tanks. They stood six meters tall, eight meters wide, and twelve meters long. Not a lot of thought had gone into the overall appearance. They were tracked ziggurats three layers high, and the two top tiers bristled with 20mm cannons.
I couldn’t help wondering where the rebels had gotten them from. The people we’d identified couldn’t reach that deeply for war machines and weapons, but they somehow had.
I keyed my comm. “I don’t suppose you have air support ready, do you?”
“As a matter of fact, I do. Paint the targets and we’ll release the birds.”
I adjusted the laser rifle, turning down the destructive capability and bringing up the special targeting frequency. I aimed it at the first tank as it trundled down the Martian landscape as another wave of mortars blasted the landscape in front of me into bits. Sand and grit blew over me, tinking against the envirosuit.
“Target One is painted, Colonel.”
“Outstanding. Bird is in the air, locking onto your signal.”
I waited, holding the rifle steady as the tank fired on the run, blasting a 150mm cannon round into the hill in front of a small contingent of the forces I commanded.
The turret suddenly lifted slightly and came around in my direction, and I knew the team inside the tank had figured out what I was doing.
“Colonel, the target has a snooper array tracking back my paint signature.” I tried not to imagine the little that would be left of me if that round hit my position.
“Of course they do. We have 6.8 seconds between rounds those people can fire. That bird will be there in 5.9 seconds.”
“Cutting it close, sir.” There wasn’t time to say anything else. I knew the tank was about to fire. I stared down the large muzzle and awaited that round.
Before the tank fired, though, a silver drone flashed across the sky and unleashed the small nuclear bomb it carried. Knowing the warhead was en route, I pushed myself up and scrambled for cover, managing three long strides before the V-shaped drone screamed down out of the sky and delivered a bomb that struck home.
The explosion enveloped the tank, bursting one of the treads into a cloud of flying shrapnel and separating the three layers that made up the vehicle’s stages. A heartbeat later, the pieces clanged back down into a pile, then jumped and juddered as the ammo cooked off, turning it into a swarm of deadly debris that mowed down nearby enemy combatants.
The concussive force caught me and slung me to one side. Pain flared through me and my breath exploded from my lungs when I struck the ground. Dirt and debris rained down over me, pelting my armor and helmet.
“Simon.” The colonel sounded firm and totally in command. “Give me a sitrep.”
I pushed myself up, checking quickly to make sure I hadn’t been wounded. The suit’s air pressure looked normal, so I assumed it hadn’t been holed. I gazed back at the flaming pyre that remained of the first tank.
“Target One is down, sir.”
“Good. Light up the second target.”
I threw myself forward and pulled the laser rifl
e into position. “Roger that. Painting the second target.” I squeezed the trigger. “Target Two is painted.”
Alerted by the first tank and that unit’s sudden demise, the second tank had already locked onto my position. As I watched through Simon’s point of view, I tried to get him to move, to abandon his location on the hillside, but he remained irresolute. His trust in John Rath’s ability was much stronger than mine. Even knowing that he had survived the encounter didn’t quell my desire to protect him.
I barely noted a second V-shaped drone that flitted into sight an instant before another explosion struck the second tank at the bottom of the right tread. Although the tank wasn’t immediately left in ruins, the bomb destroyed the tread and the hillside, causing the vehicle to slowly overturn.
“Bogart,” I called over the comm. “Put a rocket into that tank.”
“On it, Captain.” Forty meters away, Bogart popped up on a ridge, his purple hair showing under his helmet. The rocket launcher on his shoulder belched fire and smoke, and a large warhead whistled across two hundred meters to slam into the tank.
The tank erupted and rocked as it lay upside down. Flames from the incendiary warhead wreathed the vehicle. No one made it out of the tank alive.
A woman lifted the hatch on the third tank and attempted to track the next drone with the anti-aircraft guns. I centered the reticule over her head and burned a hole in her skull, frying her brain. She slumped forward just before the drone delivered its deadly payload. The bomb dropped down into the tank and exploded it from within, scattering parts and corpses over the battlefield.
The remaining tank attempted to retreat, but rocket launcher fire turned the countryside around it into a blistering inferno. Another drone lit it up and destroyed it as well.
Simon grinned and I felt his expression of relief spread across our face. “Thanks, John.”
“I’m here to serve, buddy. I told you that.”
“I know. But I appreciate the service.”
