by Mel Odom
“Yes.” My voice was weak, ragged and hoarse. I felt like I had glass in my throat. I blinked and his features became sharper. I knew from my surroundings that I was in a hospital bed. “What happened?”
He cocked his head to one side. “You don’t remember?”
“No.” I tried to clear my throat and couldn’t.
The man reached for a cup on a small table beside my bed and put a straw into my mouth. “Take a small drink. Just enough to wet your lips.”
I did, and the water tasted cool but had an off-flavor that told me it was laced with electrolytes and vitamins. I tried my voice again and it was a little better. “What happened?”
“What do you remember?”
I struggled to think, but it was like someone had wrapped my thoughts in cotton. “I was in combat. Somewhere.” I thought some more, and finally managed to snag a wayward memory. “Around Demeter colony.” That was one of the first ag-bubbles on Mars.
“That’s right. I was in the same action.”
“You’re a merc?”
He nodded. “My name is John Rath.”
The name meant something to me. “I’ve heard of you. Commander of the Chimera Mercenaries.”
“That’s right.”
“What are you doing here?”
“My team and I pulled you out of that firefight.”
I tried to remember and couldn’t. “When?”
“Four days ago. You’ve been in a coma.”
“What about my team?” Their faces appeared in my mind. I knew them all. They’d been men and women I’d fought with for…I wasn’t sure how long.
Rath shook his head. “Nobody else made it. You guys took a direct hit from a walker.”
I struggled in the bed to lift my upper body and check myself. My head spun and I thought I was going to be sick. My arms and legs appeared intact. If everyone else was dead, how could I be whole?
“Am I injured?”
“Some internal damage,” Rath said. “Nothing that couldn’t be easily patched up. The main thing was the head injury.”
I reached up and felt my head, but there were no bandages.
Rath shook his head. “Nothing you’d notice on the outside. The doctors said you’d suffered a concussion. That you’d probably have some memory loss. It might or might not come back.”
I considered remembering how my team had died around me, then thought maybe that memory would be better off lost. I had memories of them before, but there were a lot of other memories that were jumbled, jagged pieces that didn’t really fit together. I remembered several pieces of battles on Earth and on Mars, several faces, but no one really distinct.
My sharpest memory was of the night my parents and sister were killed.
“Just take it easy,” Rath advised. He put a hand on my shoulder and eased me back to bed. “You’re going to be fine. You’re in good hands. Nothing’s going to happen to you here.”
I lay back, but adrenaline flooded my system and caused my body to quake. The part of me that was still Drake 3GI2RC knew that I was suffering from a panic attack. I had seen victims and NAPD personnel undergoing similar effects. I knew it would pass.
“Just keep breathing,” Rath instructed in a calm voice. “Concentrate on getting a rhythm. Let the chemicals run their course and everything will be fine.”
A nurse in green scrubs came through the door and checked the equipment attached to me.
Rath fixed her with his gaze. “It’s all right, nurse. Lieutenant Blake and I have got this.”
The woman looked like she was going to protest.
“I said, we’ve got this.” The edge in Rath’s voice was unmistakable. “If we need you, I’ll call you.”
The nurse took an involuntary step back, then gave a grudging nod, turned, and left the room.
I focused on my breathing and the panic filling me began to subside.
“Good job,” Rath said.
“My memory,” I croaked.
“What about it?”
“I’m having trouble…remembering everything. It’s all mixed up.”
“You remember the battle at Demeter colony,” Rath said. “You remember your name.”
I struggled to do that, and couldn’t really do it, but I remembered that Rath had called me Simon and Lieutenant Blake. The same name showed on the patient monitor on the opposite wall. “Simon Blake.” I said the name with more confidence than I felt.
“See? You’re going to be all right, soldier.”
“I lost my team.”
Rath nodded and his face hardened. “They got buried right, Lieutenant. Their families got paid full death benefits. You did everything for them that you could. I saw that. In time, you’ll remember.”
I nodded. He gave me another sip of water and I took it.
“When can I leave the hospital?” I asked.
“Another couple days, I’m told.”
I glanced over at him. “What are you doing here?”
“I’ve got men and women in this hospital. I came to check on them. Thought I’d look in on you.”
“Thank you.”
“I also wanted to talk to you about a business proposition.”
I waited.
“I want to buy up your contract from RuschDev and offer you a leadership position with the Chimeras. With me.”
I struggled to remember RuschDev and thought I recalled that it was a genemod corp that specialized in creating vegetable hybrids that would grow on Mars.
“Why would you do that?”
“Because you’re too good to be working for a small corp like that, and because RuschDev, as of four days ago, became a crater in Demeter colony.” Rath paused and lifted a PAD, punching up a display that was a vidcast clip of the street where RuschDev had once stood.
The neighborhood of small corps looked familiar, but I couldn’t remember being there or anyone who had worked there.
RUSCHDEV VICTIM OF ANTI-EARTH ATTACK, the crawler at the bottom of the holo announced. NO SURVIVORS FOUND. THE BODIES OF SEVERAL KNOWN TERRORISTS ON-SITE.
“Your pink slip with RuschDev came while you were in the coma. I’m forcing them to pick up your medical. Then—if you want—you’re a Chimera. Unless there’s somewhere else you’d rather go.”
I was silent for a moment, thinking about it. I sifted through those jumbled memories. As best as I could recall, I had no family left alive. I’d spent time on Earth and Mars fighting other people’s battles, defending other people’s property and personnel, and the only friends I could best remember had died four days ago.
I shook my head and it hurt. “No. I don’t have anywhere else to be.”
“Good. The team will be glad to have you. I’ll be glad to have you.” Rath offered his hand and I took it, feeling it strong and firm in mine.
* * *
I returned to the attack site in a rush and took stock of my situation. I was in no immediate danger of being crushed under the fallen rock. The gravity was in my favor and my chassis was too well constructed for it to buckle.
I tried to shift and only managed to move a few millimeters at first. Then, gradually, some of the rocks on top of me began to slip and give way. I kept moving as much as I could, thinking of the people aboard the train who were in danger. I would not fail.
Finally, light broke through the darkness that surrounded me. I thrust a hand through a section where I could see sky, then drew my arm back and thrust again, creating more space and a sudden rush of rock that spilled from the top of the heap. A quick check of my internal diagnostics showed me I’d been trapped and immobile under the fallen rock for eighteen minutes forty-three seconds.
The rescue group from Podkayne shouldn’t have been more than three minutes thirty-seven seconds out.
I shoved through the pile of rock and rolled down to the bottom of the hill where the original outcropping had been. Only a stub, like a broken fang, remained to mark the area where it had stood. The Gortaub was still slung over my shoulde
r and I pulled it around, then freed the Synap from my thigh pocket again.
The jackers were in full route, though. Several of the container cars lay sliced open from laser torches. Cargo spilled out across the sand. I sprinted over to the crawler I’d disabled. I didn’t think any of the crew would still be aboard, but one of my subroutines involved thoroughness, which was considered an asset at the NAPD.
One of the railroad secmen fired at me and small-caliber rounds ricocheted from my chassis before another of them ordered the first to stand down. I picked up his order over the comm frequency I’d tapped into. “That bioroid is working with us. Don’t shoot.”
I leaped up to the crawler’s command module and grabbed hold of the door. Before I opened it, I checked the bullet-scored transplas window and spotted the booby trap that had been left behind.
The anti-personnel mine was only eight centimeters cubed with a matte black finish. The thing that immediately caught my attention was that the explosive had been manufactured according to a design by Skorpios Defense Systems, and that link took me back to the investigation I’d opened on the Moon that had marked me for destruction.
Skorpios Defense Systems CEO Gordon Holder had been executed and I had followed the trail left by his killers to an illegal munitions manufacturing site where weapons had been being made and shipped off the Moon to Mars. Although the facts had never been confirmed, everyone at the NAPD believed that the weapons were being sold on the Martian black market. The terrorist factions were better armed these days than they had been in years.
I left the command module door in place and used the laser cutting tool I’d bought when I’d picked up my weapons. I sliced a hole in the wall, then reached in and disabled the claymore mine. After I set the device aside, I opened the door and checked the interior.
I didn’t climb into the area. It was a crime scene waiting to be analyzed, one that would hopefully help law enforcement agencies find the jackers responsible for the attack.
“Hey.” One of the railroad secmen hurtled through the air in a long leap, letting me know he wasn’t a native Martian, and landed a few meters away. “Don’t climb into that vehicle.”
“I’m not,” I replied. “I disabled a claymore mine inside the vehicle.” I dropped down to the ground.
“Who are you?”
“Norris 1JA5NU.”
“How did you go on the defensive like that? A Norris isn’t usually capable of something like that.”
“I represent Lono Ag currently, but I have been repurposed. Before that I pitched a defensive line for KentDefender Corp. I was programmed in how to use weapons and under what conditions.” Fabrication was one of my skill sets as a detective to get confessions. I used that now to cover myself.
“You do good work, Norris.”
“Thank you.” I strode back toward the train, disassembling the Gortaub as I went and storing it once more.
Above me, the strike wing from Podkayne Transit Authority shot past and streamed contrails behind them.
Chapter Twenty-One
I was carrying the sixth fatality from one of the passenger cars when Hayim found me.
“So you’re still functional, eh?” Hayim cradled a sheet-covered woman’s body in his arms. Dried blood streaked one of his cheeks under the envirosuit’s face shield, but he looked otherwise unharmed.
“I am.” Tenderly, I handed the dead man to the cargo bioroids working from the back of a cargo hopper. “How are you?”
Hayim handed up the body that he’d carried. “I survived. Seems like I always do.” He slapped a hand against his metallic thigh. “At least, most of me does. The crypt safety measure kicked in and protected me. Took me a while to get out of it.”
“I’m glad you are all right.”
“Me, too.”
I started walking back toward the train. A group of bioroids and robots laid new mag-lev track to replace all that had been ruined. The railroad construction crew had arrived less than forty minutes after the transit authority teams, but the nosies had beaten them, trailing on the heels of the transit authority strike force.
One of the media people stood in front of an overturned cargo container with the crippled crawler lying in the background. He wore an envirosuit and stood in front of a vid operator wearing a shoulder-mounted satellite relay.
The transit authority had locked out all comm units not part of their group and there wasn’t enough bleed out from those communiques for me to pick up on my PAD. I had no problem tuning in the nosie, though.
On the broadcast, the nosie wasn’t in his envirosuit. They had placed a holo overlay over him that mimicked his movements and showed him in a suit and tie. He was young-looking, but he hadn’t had any surgery done on his vocal cords yet and I could hear the age in his voice. His blond hair was neatly trimmed and his cerulean blue eyes sparkled.
“—Authority isn’t saying much, but my sources inside the department are telling me that they believe the destruction of Manta Bill 3047 was caused by terrorists who were after the cargo the train was hauling.” The nosie turned and pointed at the wreckage of the crawler and the cargo container behind him. “As you can see from this downed crawler, the terrorists came in force, with enough weaponry to stage a small war. Taking out a train armed only with a skeletal security team was child’s play.”
I silently disagreed with him. I didn’t necessarily believe that terrorists had been behind the attack. It could just as easily have been a rival black market dealer after the illegal cargo the train was carrying. And the security team aboard the train hadn’t been skeletal. The numbers from what I had seen had been double what would normally have been assigned to such a run.
The fact that several of the railroad secmen had been transported for sustained “injuries” along with passengers that had gotten evacuated was suspect to me. None of the transit authority officers investigated their release. That indicated that someone had paid for “reduced attention” during the investigation.
“You know that means that a corp was behind the weapons shipment, right?” Shelly asked.
“Yes,” I answered.
“Our original thinking that Gordon Holder and Skorpios Defense Systems were selling to the black market was incorrect.”
“That was just one theory you and I had come up with.”
“Holder would have spread the arms around the black market. Anyone could have purchased them. That would have made a lot more business sense than hitting this train and alerting the colonies that illegal weapons were shipping to Mars.”
I considered that as I carried another body to the flatbed. “What if the revelation was part of the plan all along?”
“These jackers wanted people to know that the weapons were here? Why?”
“To ratchet up the feelings of distrust between those factions predisposed toward Earth’s continued involvement here, those who want Martian independence, and the terrorists.”
“Wouldn’t the terrorists be the most likely suspects? Just to drive a deeper and wider wedge on the political front?”
“Think about it, Shelly. The terrorist groups have been responding to perceived threats as well. Earth-owned corps have been beefing up their security presence in the colonies.”
“That was in response to increased terrorist attacks.”
“It’s a closed environment cycle. One that can be manipulated from outside by simply raising concern in one area. The other areas raise automatically.”
“You think one group is behind this?”
I passed another body up to the other bioroids working on the flatbed. “I don’t know. I was merely thinking outside that cycle.”
“Norris,” Hayim said to me.
“Yes.”
He lifted an arm toward his face in an automatic gesture, then grimaced when his hand banged into his face shield. “My nose itches. I hate when I’m inside one of these suits and my nose itches.”
“I understand.”
He put his arm down. “You
do realize that my e-ID isn’t going to stand up against any close scrutiny on the part of Podkayne Transit Authority.”
“I do.” I wasn’t sure if mine would either.
“You might be able to slip off on your own because you don’t need air to breathe, but I can’t. I’ll never make it.”
“I know. I have a plan.”
Hayim looked at me expectantly.
“You will not like it,” I told him. But it was all that I could think of.
* * *
“Are you comfortable?” I asked an hour later.
Hayim lay next to the pile of corpses on the car where the dead had been moved. He was safe enough from harm and from discovery by Podkayne Transit Authority.
“No, I’m not comfortable,” he growled in response.
“But you are alive and you are free.”
He cursed, but it was at the situation and not at me.
Fred A24U13 seated next to me was so low that he was almost featureless. Only a hint of a nose and cheekbones showed below his silver eyes that never flickered with animation. His voice was flat and monotone. Fred D21E30 and Fred M28A89 sat on the other side of the container car as it sped toward Podkayne colony.
“This one is not dead,” Fred A24U13 said.
“Not yet,” I said. “But he will be soon enough. He is human. All humans die.”
“Hey!” Hayim objected.
“He is not dead,” Fred A24U13 repeated. “Therefore he should be on one of the passenger cars with the living. His presence here is a mistake.”
“He has lost his legs.” I pointed out the tear that ran up one side of Hayim’s envirosuit during the wreck. The suit’s automated system had already tied a tourniquet to the leg, sealing off potential air loss, but the bionic limb showed through.
“Then he should be aboard a medical evac,” Fred A24U13 said.
“He is in no immediate danger. His vital signs are strong.” I trusted that the conundrum would hold Fred A24U13’s logic circuits in thrall, and it did.
“You are certain this man is where he should be?”
“I am.”
“Then I defer to your decision.” Fred A24U13 sat back and went inert inside the cargo webbing that held him stationary.
