by Rick Partlow
The numbers had been painted over on most of the buildings, but my ‘link still led me to the correct one. It looked like all the rest, down to the junkies on the steps, semi-conscious. I saw three feral-looking children, none older than eight, staring at us from where they gathered around a mangy cat. They’d been taunting it, poking it with sticks and blocking it from running away. I shivered a bit at the deadness of their gaze, the hopelessness and worse, the acceptance, like they’d never known anything different and never would.
Sanders was right behind me, so close he almost bumped into me as we walked up the steps, past a man who could have been eighty but was probably forty, the lines in his face etched by malnutrition and inactivity and despair. I pushed open the cheap, plastic door and it squeaked on its hinges, throwing light into the unlit hallway. There were stains on the walls and floor that could have been blood, gouges that might have been made by knives or clubs, one that might even have been from a bullet. There was a short, skinny teenager squatting against the wall at the end of the corridor, watching us as we stopped at the door.
Like the building, it lacked a number, but it was where the map in my ‘link had led us. There was no ID plate or call button, so just I pocketed my ‘link, looked around carefully and knocked. I waited, listening for a moment, but heard nothing. I looked at Sanders. He shrugged, reached past me and knocked louder and longer than I had. We waited another ten seconds and heard nothing.
“Maybe there’s nobody here,” Sanders suggested, the look on his face telling me he wished I’d accept that so we could go.
I pounded on the door with the flat of my hand.
“Captain Yassa!” I yelled. “Are you here?”
There was more silence…and then a barely-audible groan. At first, I wasn’t sure I’d actually heard it, but then Sanders locked eyes with me. He’d heard it, too.
“Captain Yassa, can you hear me?”
Another low moan. I cursed under my breath, then hauled back and slammed the heel of my boot into the latch. The door looked flimsy, and it was; it exploded inward at my kick and the light from the front door of the building leaked into the darkness of the room.
I waited a moment for my eyes to adjust, and slowly the dark blobs inside became visible in the filtered, grimy light. This apartment wasn’t as unfurnished as Kane’s had been; that would have been an improvement. There was a kitchen so small it could barely hold the cheap, government-handout food processing unit crammed onto the counter, a bathroom without a door and with stains of mysterious provenance all over its ancient tile, and a single, small, ragged futon.
The woman lying on that bed wasn’t quite skeleton-thin, but she was getting there. Her face, once rounded and pleasant, now seemed slightly sunken and gaunt, and her light brown hair was ratty and knotted and much longer than I’d ever seen it. Her clothes were cheap and basic, not the gaudy and colorful styles most of the chawners wore, but they were worn and ragged and stained, like they hadn’t been changed in a long time. Her lips were dry and cracked, her eyes wide open and bloodshot, lost in a haze of unreality. Her skin, which I remembered as perpetually light pink with sunburn and dusted with freckles, was pale and taut, and pinched slightly at her neck where the drug patches were affixed. Three of them. That was enough for an overdose.
Former Marine Captain Brandy Yassa had been a woman full of life, in command of it. Whoever this was barely showed a sign of life at all. I bit off a curse and felt for a pulse; it was slow, but it was there.
“We have to get her to the ship,” I decided. “There’s an auto-doc in the utility bay.”
Sanders didn’t say anything. I looked back over at him and saw his face slack with disbelief, distraught that someone who was as much of a rock in our lives as Captain Yassa was in this condition. I sympathized, but I’d been prepared for it; I’d read Cowboy’s files on her. I hadn’t believed it at first, but I’d read it.
“Sanders,” I said sharply and his eyes snapped towards me. “We have to get her back to the car. Can you carry her?”
“What?” He blinked, then seemed to come back to himself. “I mean, yeah, sure.”
I helped him get her up. There was still some tone to the muscles of her arms, which meant she hadn’t been this bad for long. Sanders grunted as he put her over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, but seemed to settle into it. He was a bit bulkier and more broad-bodied than I was, even if he’d been sitting at a desk too much lately. Once I saw that he had her, I took a quick look around the apartment, making sure there was nothing she’d want to take with her.
Something caught my eye: a small, hand-carved wooden box maybe seven or eight centimeters long and three or four thick. If it was real wood, it was pretty valuable, which meant it had to be something significant to her or she would have sold it already. I grabbed it, then led Sanders out of the front door and into the hallway.
The kid was gone from the corner. That should have been my first clue that something was wrong, but I didn’t catch it right away. Then a long shadow fell over us as a tall, long-armed man stepped into the front entrance to the apartments. He wasn’t common street trash, you could tell that by his clothes. They were expensive, either cloned leather or a good enough faux that you couldn’t immediately tell the difference, and tailored to his form by a laser scanner. He wore a waist-length jacket and matching pants, with holograms of dragons weaving over the arms and legs in a hypnotic pattern.
His face told me that he was dangerous. There was no drug haze to it, no longing or envy. He had what he wanted and he was smart enough to know not to taste the merchandise. It was a long, horsey face, not pre-planned from the genes up, and not particularly good looking, with a slightly crooked nose where it had been broken once too often. There were deep lines around the eyes and mouth, but I didn’t peg him as being that old. Those lines came from pain, from privation. The lined mouth was turned down in a scowl.
“You don’t belong here,” he said. His tone was deep and pleasant, like one of those computer-generated voices they use for directions in your ‘link, a voice of confidence and authority.
“No, we don’t,” I agreed, keeping my voice calm, despite an incipient trickle of sweat down my back. “That’s why we’re leaving.”
“You can leave when you put her back where you found her.” He barely moved his head, but I could sense as much as see the motion.
“She’s my friend,” I told him. “What’s she to you?”
“She’s a steady customer,” he said. “And an occasional contractor, when the need arises. And it arises enough,” his voice became just slightly more strident, “that I will have to insist that you put her back where you found her.”
My eyes were adjusting to the brighter light outside, and I could see the shadows on the steps out front. There were two more people out there. I didn’t figure someone like this would come alone.
“I can pay,” I told him. “I have $3,000 in Tradenotes on me, and I can get twice that much in an hour.”
“Or,” he suggested, “I could take what you have now and be satisfied with that and my customer.”
He took a step closer, through the door, and the two men behind him moved into view. They weren’t as well dressed as he was, but they shared the same confidence in him. This wasn’t going to end easy.
“You could try to do that,” I told him, feeling the words come out naturally, without thought. I felt myself relax as I said them and I wondered where they were coming from. “But first, let me tell you a story. There’s an animal called a wolf. It hunts in packs, and it sometimes takes on prey twice or three times its size. But it takes a big risk when it does that, because prey that big can hurt the wolves, maybe kill them, and they have to be sure the meal they’re trying to get is worth that risk. That’s what we call the risk-benefit ratio. Ever hear of it?”
“You don’t seem like that big of a risk,” he commented, smiling with white, even teeth.
“If you don’t let us out of here,” I said to
him, trying not to send threatening, just matter-of-fact, “someone is going to wind up dead. If it’s one or more of you…” I shrugged. “I have a ship to catch; I’ll be gone before they find the bodies. If it’s any of us… Do you really want the heat that would bring from the Constabulary?” I gestured down the street. “We rented the car; it’s keeping track of our location so they’ll know where we went missing.”
He laughed at that, far too comfortable for my liking, and I felt the hackles rise on my neck. He took another step forward, less than a meter away from me now. I could smell the strange, herbal scent off of him, either some incense he’d been burning or maybe something he’d been smoking recently.
“The Constabulary doesn’t come here,” he said. “This is my town…”
I didn’t let him finish. One of the first things Gramps had taught me about fighting was to hit someone while they’re in the middle of trying to sound like a badass. I leaned my upper body back away from him, and he lunged forward instinctively, hand snaking out to try to grab me and keep me from getting away as all of his weight went to his forward foot. But only my upper body had rocked back; I snaked out with a left round kick that took him in his forward knee cap.
There was a crack that almost made me wince in sympathy and the big man grunted as his kneecap dislocated and suddenly there was no strength in his plant leg and he began to pitch forward. He was a tough son of a bitch, I’ll give him that; he tried to grab me on the way down, to take me down with him, but I yanked his arm towards me to give him some more momentum, and he pitched forward down the hallway, head over heels.
The muscle he’d brought with him lurched into motion, hands reaching under their shirts for weapons, but I was expecting it. My old roommate in the Marines, Johnny Pacheco, had been from the barrios in San Jose, and heused to tell me stories about the gangs there. I’d laid hands on their boss, and he’d want them to kill me for that; that was how this sort of operation went. They’d at least have blades, maybe even guns; they were illegal in the city, but you could fabricate one from a black-market pattern in an hour or two, and ammo was even simpler.
My gun had been fabricated in the Zwischenwelt Waffen Herstellung factory in Earth orbit, bought by the Commonwealth Military Procurement system, then probably stolen or smuggled out or just sold outright by some twisting of regulations to the Corporate Security Force, then acquired by Roger West, given to me and holstered under my jacket. It was very familiar to me; it was the same one I carried at my job, the same one I’d been issued during the war. It was capable of synching up with a battle helmet or commercial enhanced vision glasses or even the contact lens I wore in my right eye that displayed a Heads-Up Display for my ‘link.
I saw the targeting reticle hanging in front of my vision the second my finger touched the trigger, and everything seemed to slip into slow motion the second it appeared. I had an uncanny feeling like I was back on Demeter again during the war, and a harsh, deadly cold seemed to settle in across my nerves. I shot the bigger of the two men first, the one closer to me. He was almost ten centimeters taller than me, and probably ten kilos heavier, but it was the monowire whip he’d pulled out of his pocket that worried me more than his size. It dropped from nerveless fingers as pieces of his skull exploded backwards into the face of the shorter one.
The second man rammed into the back of the first, unable to check his rush towards me, and went off balance, reflexively firing a round from his fab’ed handgun into the floor of the hallway. The sound was loud and percussive, a contrast to the hiss-bang of the rocket-propelled round I’d fired, and it echoed painfully through the entryway and my head. I followed him as he fell and put a point-blank shot through his head. Two men. I’d killed two men. I felt nothing.
One left. The one in charge, the dealer, the boss. He was trying to get up, trying to draw his pistol. He didn’t look scared, but I didn’t think he would, not him. Instead, his lined face was determined, intent on survival and victory. He would have been hell on the Tahni during the war, but now he was the one who’d kept a woman I’d liked and respected hooked on Kick and Spindle and God knew what else, and taken her services in trade. I looked at him and didn’t feel cold anymore, suddenly didn’t feel nothing. I felt rage.
He had his gun in his hand when I shot him in the forearm. The stamped metal, black market gun flew away with a spray of blood. I kicked him in the face. More blood, and teeth. He went down, the breath gushing out of him in a wheeze. He tried to get up and I broke his good leg with a vicious stomp, feeling the tibia crack, sending him back to the ground. I went down to a knee beside him and put the barrel of my pistol against his forehead.
“Don’t get up,” I said. He went still, his dark, intelligent eyes narrowed and staring at me. “Do you know why I don’t kill you?”
He shook his head, not speaking. I might have broken his jaw with the kick.
“Because I want to,” I said. I jerked my head at the other two. “Those two, I had to kill. I don’t have to kill you, but I want to, for what you did to her.” I motioned to Yassa, still unconscious on Sanders’ shoulder. Sanders was stock still, like a deer in a spotlight, a look of horror and disbelief on his face.
“After I do what I have to do,” I told him, “I’ll come back here. When I come, I don’t want to see you. If I see you, if anyone in the neighborhood has even heard of you, I’ll finish what I started and beat you to death. Nod if you believe me.”
He nodded. He wasn’t scared, but he was a survivor, a predator, and he knew when he’d come across another.
I walked over and picked up his gun, sticking it in my belt, then grabbed the other from the dead man before I headed for the door again, my own weapon in my right hand, the metal stampings of the street pistol pressed up against the box I’d taken from Yassa’s apartment in my left. I’d get rid of their guns in a storm drain I’d seen back near where we’d parked the car.
“Let’s go,” I said to Sanders. This time, he didn’t need me to say it twice.
There were no watching eyes or playing children on the walk back to the car; the streets and doorways and windows were empty. I could see from fifty meters away that the car was unmolested. People here, I thought as I dropped the guns into the open storm drain by the side of the road, knew when to duck and cover.
“You killed those guys,” Sanders said. It wasn’t an accusation, nor a gasp, nor a complaint. It was more of a…realization, maybe. As if he’d just realized what he was getting into.
“If you want to go back to your uncle’s company,” I said, unlocking the doors and helping him lay Yassa across the back seat, “now’s the time.”
He didn’t say anything at first, pushing the woman’s legs inside and shutting the door. She didn’t move, barely breathed.
“No,” he decided, getting into the passenger’s side. “I’m in. I just…” He shook his head. “It’s been a while.”
“Yes, it has,” I agreed, pulling out of the grass lot and heading down towards the spaceport. “But the rules are the same.”
Chapter Six
Brandy Yassa slowly blinked awake, a hand going to her face and rubbing it vigorously, as if she expected it to be coated with mucus or vomit. Instead, there was nothing and she stared at her hand in confusion. Then she looked down at the grey utility coveralls she was wearing, and then down further to the cot on which she was lying, and her confusion deepened.
Then she looked up at me.
“Munroe?” She forced the words from a dry throat in a hoarse murmur.
I handed her a cup of water and she downed it without thinking.
“Hey, Cap,” I said quietly, not moving from the chair beside her cot. The cabins on the Wanderer were all basically closet-sized, but I’d given her the largest. “How do you feel?”
“I feel like shit,” she said frankly, her voice sounding more normal now. She pushed up to a sitting position on the cot. “Where in the hell am I? And what are you doing here?”
“You’re on m
y ship,” I told her, “in Transition Space.” Which was the reason we had artificial gravity; the Teller-Fox warp unit could create it, but only in T-space, for some reason.
“What the hell did you do to me?” Her hands went to her head, digging into her long hair, cleaner now than it had been.
“You OD’ed on Spindle. Maybe Kick too, I don’t know, didn’t have time to stick around and find out. I popped you in the auto-doc.” I shrugged. “We have a couple females on the team, I had one of them wash you and dress you. I tossed your old clothes into the airlock and spaced them.”
“Shit!” She slammed a fist into the cot and glared at me. “Get me back to Hermes, now!”
“You want to go back to Overtown?” I asked her. “You’re going to need another dealer then.”
“Goddamn it, Munroe, what did you do to Barry?” She was standing now, unsteady, balancing herself with a hand on the bulkhead. I stood to keep on her level: she was a tall woman and we were almost eye-to-eye.
“If Barry is the guy who showed up to try to keep me and Sanders from taking you out of your apartment and getting you treatment, then he’s going to have to spend a little time in an auto-doc himself. And the two goons with him who pulled weapons on me…” I shrugged. “Well, let’s just say an auto-doc won’t do them any good.”
She screamed in pure rage and swung at me wildly, but spun to the deck and hit hard on her shoulder. I stayed standing, not trying to help her up.
