by Rick Partlow
Now, we were running blind through blinding rain, with what seemed like an incredibly dangerous man on our tail and four of us still stuck in the damned club. They should be able to make it out, I told myself. We’d gone in separately, and there was nothing to tie them to us. As long as they kept their heads, they’d know to meet us at the rally point and they’d be fine.
But then what? What the hell were we going to do now?
“Put me down, damn it!”
It was the girl; she’d come to, and she was squirming on Victor’s shoulder, trying to hit him in the back of the head.
“Not yet!” I yelled at her over the din of the rain pounding around us. “You might have a concussion and we have to get the hell out of here before they figure out which way we went!”
“I’m gonna’ puke!” She moaned, pounding futilely at the big man’s back.
Victor transferred her from a fireman’s carry to a cradle carry in front, which would slow us down a little but would probably keep her from getting motion sickness, and she quieted down until we finally reached the abandoned building. Even with the enhanced optics in my contact lens, I could barely see it in the downpour, but I guess Yassa’s glasses worked better in the rain because she led us right to it.
Half the building had collapsed in a heap of cement block, aluminum siding and rebar, and the half left standing had a piece of plywood fastened across the doorway. Kurt ripped it down with his bare hands and I followed the others through into the shelter of what was left of the roof, feeling a huge sense of relief as the rain stopped beating down on my head and trickling down my collar.
“Put that back in place,” I told Kurt, gesturing at the plywood.
Victor gently sat the girl down on the floor and she leaned heavily against a damp, block wall as she found her balance.
“Who are you people?” She demanded, looking around at us suspiciously, probably barely able to see us in the blackness of the unlit building.
I pulled a small light off my belt and flicked it on, shining it around so she could get a look at us.
“I’m Munroe,” I told her. “The big guys are Victor and Kurt, and this is Cap.” Yassa cocked an eyebrow at me, and I got the impression she didn’t particularly care for that nickname, but I wasn’t about to go into our personal bios for this traumatized kid. “We were in the dining room when your father was killed.”
“I’m sorry we couldn’t stop it,” Victor said, his big, square face sagging. “We didn’t know he could just…” He trailed off, raising his right hand like he was about to mime punching, but then obviously thinking better of it and letting it drop to his side.
The girl started to break down again, sobbing quietly for a few seconds before she grabbed at her head, wincing.
“What’s your name?” I asked her.
“Natalia,” she said, her voice strained, expression still twisted from the pain in her head. “Natalia Baturin.” She blinked her eyes clear and looked up at me. “Are you spacers? Smugglers?”
“Mercenaries,” Yassa corrected her. “We came here looking for work, but it seems as if we’ve just pissed off the one person most likely to hire us.”
“Constantine has plenty of hired guns,” Natalia said bitterly. “Though he always seems to be looking for more. Especially since Abuelo left the city.”
“When did that happen?” I wanted to know. “We’d heard about Abuelo; that’s why we came. We were told he wasn’t a bad guy to work for, that he treated people right.”
Natalia sank down to the dust-covered floor, resting her head on her hands.
“He did, once,” she admitted. “Things were better with him in charge than that bastard Crowley. He actually kept the buildings repaired and kept the power on, and he kept the air defense system that kept us from being raided by pirates working. He didn’t tax us more than we could afford. Then, a few months ago, he started spending more and more time away from Freeport, and Constantine started to take over running the city.”
“And taxes started going up,” Yassa assumed, “but the work stopped getting done.”
I heard a skittering on the other side of the building and flashed my hand-light over there, catching the shadow of a rat dashing for another nook of darkness.
“Fucking rats,” I muttered. “Everywhere we go, we bring those damned things with us.”
There was a pounding on the plywood panel and my gun jumped into my hand again, and I flipped off the light, moving to the side of the doorway. I saw Natalia jump to her feet and scurry farther away, taking shelter behind a fallen crossbeam.
“It’s us. Open up!” I recognized Sanders’ voice and grabbed the edge of the plywood, pulling it away from the door.
Sanders clambered through the opening before I even had it all the way aside, shaking water out of his hair and cursing. Bobbi and Carmen slipped in behind him, looking very wet and annoyed; Carmen Ibanez’s hair reminded me of a poodle my mother had once owned after her servant had given it a bath. Kane waited until the plywood was all the way open before stepping through upright, as if ducking inside was too undignified for him.
It wasn’t raining as hard anymore, I saw while I was glancing outside, but the wind had picked up and was whipping debris down the street. I pulled the cover back into place before I turned my light back on.
“Did you have any trouble getting out?” I asked the others.
“Negative,” Bobbi said. “Me n’ Eli heard the commotion from upstairs in the casino, so we headed down the back stairs right away.”
“There were people in the street though,” Sanders added. “They looked like muscle and they looked like they were hunting for someone around the Lucky Bastard.”
“We met them out there,” Ibanez said. “Kane was hooked into the bar’s security by then, so he knew right away what was going on.”
“What the hell did go on?” Sanders wanted to know. He had his gun in his hand and didn’t seem in any mood to put it away at the moment. “Is it you they’re after, Munroe?”
“Us and her,” I told him, nodding towards the girl. “This is Natalia. Natalia, meet Bobbi, Sanders, Ibanez and Kane.” I saw Natalia’s eyes go wide as she saw Kane’s cybernetics. “The guy we came to the bar to find,” I explained to the others, “is named Constantine. He’s like Abuelo’s chief enforcer or something.”
“Constantine Terranova,” Natalia supplied, with hate dripping off the words. “He’s been here since before Abuelo…he used to work for Crowley.”
“Anyway,” I went on, “this Constantine got into an argument with Natalia’s father about taxes, and it was getting pretty hot, but no one had pulled a weapon yet so I didn’t think anything of it, but then Constantine…” I shook my head. “He must have some serious bionics or some kind of augmentation, because he punched his fist right through Natalia’s father’s chest and killed him.”
“And then,” Yassa added ruefully, “the shit well and truly hit the fan, as you can imagine.”
“Fuck,” Sanders muttered, finally shoving his gun into its holster just so he could run his hands through his hair in frustration. “What the hell are we gonna’ do now?”
“Did you find anything useful, Kane?” I asked him.
“Books are cooked,” he said. “Lots of income marked outgoing but it’s fake. Someone’s skimming.”
“That would be Constantine,” Natalia said. “Everyone knows he’s stealing, but without anyone being able to reach Abuelo, we can’t do anything.”
“We,” Yassa repeated, her gaze sharpening. “Who’s ‘we,’ anyway?”
“Most of the business-owners,” the girl said, “have a kind of informal meeting.” She shook her head. “We’ve talked about trying to do something, even something drastic like fight Constantine and his crew. But most of the shop owners are older, and their kids are either gone as far from here as they can, or they’ve been working here their whole lives. Constantine’s men are like you, veterans, or some who’ve just been doing that kind of wo
rk a long time. We couldn’t beat them in a stand-up fight.”
“We should go back to the ship,” Sanders said. “We can regroup, maybe get some heavier weapons.”
“No good,” I said, shaking my head. “It won’t take them to long to trace us back to the Wanderer. They’d have people waiting for us there, and if we tried to fly out, they’d take us out with their laser weapons before we could leave atmosphere.”
“We can’t stay here much longer,” Bobbi warned. “They’ll get around to looking in this place eventually.”
“I know somewhere we could all go,” Natalia said. I looked over to her. She was a bit hesitant, as if she were debating whether or not she was doing the right thing by telling us. “There’s this friend of my father’s. He kind of runs the meeting. If you’re Constantine’s enemies, he’d definitely want to help you.”
I glanced at Yassa and she shrugged expressively.
“It can’t get much worse,” she opined.
“Oh Jesus,” Sanders moaned. “Don’t ever say that.”
“All right,” I told Natalia. “I guess we haven’t got much choice. Take us to this friend of yours.”
***
Milton Amador was the antithesis of Seth Baturin, Natalia’s father. Seth had been large and loud and hairy; Milton was small and bald and mouse-quiet. But if I’d been forced to pick which was the more dangerous of the two, I’d have definitely gone with Milton. He’d told us that he owned the town’s soy and algae farms, which made him the largest food producer on the planet.
“I know we all grieve the loss of our friend,” Milton was saying from his stool by the stone fireplace. “But this is just the cumulation of the outrages we’ve endured under Constantine.”
“Is ‘cumulation’ a word?” Yassa whispered from my elbow and I shrugged my ignorance.
I saw nods from the other civilians gathered in the Spartan, almost archaic living room. There were a half dozen of the actual members of what I’d come to term “the Meeting” with a capital “M,” plus a few adult children or senior employees. They were the ones who ran every major business in Freeport, and you could see that relative wealth in the quality of their clothes, not in comparison to ours but to what the other locals we’d seen wore. Handmade and homespun were the rule, rather than the exception, but they had fabricated pieces as well, and the material was higher tech than average for this place.
All of them were old, again relative to the local norm. On this world, with its background radiation and lack of prenatal nanite injections, people were lucky to break a century; and none the members of the Meeting were under fifty in my estimation. Still, they had listened intently to Natalia’s story, despite her youth, and then to my telling of the rest of the tale. They’d allowed me to bring Captain Yassa into the hastily-assembled quorum, but the others had been exiled to a storage building out back, out of sight of the road and hopefully far from the minds of the goons still searching the city.
“What can we do about it, though?” The woman was sharp-faced, with high cheekbones that reminded me of Sophia. Her hair was dark but streaked with grey at the temples, and age had etched its lines and creases into her face. I seemed to recall from the introductions that her name was Ichiko and that she ran the town’s only overland shipping operation. “Constantine clearly meant this atrocity as a warning to all of us, a demonstration of what he’ll do if we oppose him.”
“You and yours,” Milton leaned towards me as he spoke, “are soldiers, mercenaries Natalia told us. If you were to…” He paused, considering his wording. “…take care of this matter for us, I know we would all agree to any reasonable price.”
Shit.
“Um…” I stammered for a moment, trying to figure a way out of that without revealing why we were here. Yassa saved me.
“There are only eight of us,” she reminded Milton, “and all our heavy weapons are on our ship, which we can’t get to now since Constantine’s people will be watching for us.”
“Milton,” Ichiko objected, standing from her stool and turning on him, face going even paler, “you can’t make that kind of decision on your own! This could get us all killed!”
“Yes,” another of them agreed, a pudgy and baby-faced man with dark, curly hair; I thought they’d called him Jamie. “And where are we supposed to get the money to pay them? Constantine has drained us dry!”
“Hold up for a second,” I finally got my thoughts together. “Killing Constantine would probably be satisfying as hell, but what’s the end goal here?” I looked around at the faces of the business owners and saw helpless shrugs. Except Milton.
“To get Abuelo’s attention,” he correctly surmised, confirming my first impression of him.
“Right. But if we start killing his people, it may be the wrong kind of attention. We need a plan; and for that, we need some intelligence. You guys basically make this city run, what can you tell me about Abuelo and where he might be?”
“I think he’s dead,” Jamie declared flatly, his tone pessimistic. “Constantine killed him just like Abuelo did to Crowley, and took over.”
“You keep saying that,” Devereaux scoffed. He was a slender man with dark skin and delicate features, but his tone belied them with its harshness. “It still doesn’t make any sense. Abuelo didn’t make any secret when he killed Crowley…hell, he had a town meeting and announced it. Why would Constantine pretend the boss was still alive?”
“That’s because everyone hated Crowley,” Jamie argued. “Constantine isn’t stupid; he wants us to think that eventually, Abuelo will come back and straighten everything out because that will keep us in line.”
“If Abuelo’s dead,” I cut in, trying to take back control of the conversation, “then we’ll have no choice but to confront Constantine. But we need to find out for sure. Can any of you tell me anything useful about where he might be?”
“He has a place somewhere north of town,” Ichiko put in. “I don’t know where, exactly, but he’s rented my trucks several times and the drivers have always headed north up the mountain pass.” She shook her head. “He always uses his own drivers, never my guys.”
“That’s good,” I encouraged her. “When’s the last time he had any deliveries made out there?”
“A few months ago, just after the last time he was in town. A heavy-lift cargo shuttle landed at the port, and Abuelo rented all of my trucks. His men cleared everyone off the landing field, didn’t let anyone see what they were unloading, then they hauled it up the road as quick as they could drive.”
I shared a look with Yassa. That might have been the artifact.
“The road’ll be guarded,” she warned. “And we can’t fly out there, not with the laser defense system in place.”
I ruminated on that for a long, silent moment.
“The lasers,” I said, finally. “They’re near the town?”
“Yes,” Milton supplied. “A few kilometers past the landing field. It’s very heavily guarded at all times, though.”
I nodded. I’d figured that. But…
“The power for the lasers,” I asked him. “Where does that come from?”
“The same reactor that powers the town,” he replied. He frowned, confused. “Why do you ask?’
Chapter Ten
On most colony worlds, the fusion reactors are built well outside the cities for safety reasons. Freeport’s reactor was just across the Bijesan River, less than a kilometer from the center of the town, squatting in an ugly, utilitarian collection of buildfoam and concrete and surrounded by a cement block wall. It rested on blasted, black pavement in a plain of what had been forest before they’d cut down the trees there and fusion-formed what was left to flatten it for the reactor facility.
It wasn’t very large as these things went, certainly not as big as the one on Demeter, nor as heavily guarded. But then, on Demeter, I’d had a company of hardened, combat-tested militia, two DSI agents and two physically-augmented Fleet Intelligence super-commandoes. I looked over
at Brandy Yassa and the three former Marines and two ex-resistance fighters with her, huddled under the bridge abutment on this side of the Bijesan, none of them armed with anything more potent than a handgun, and wondered what the hell we were doing out here in broad damn daylight.
Well, broad daylight was an exaggeration; it was the middle of storm season on Thunderhead and the sky was grey and surly, darkening in the east as the sun sank lower behind the veil of clouds. But it seemed way too bright and I was sure someone was going to trip over us at any second. There wasn’t any choice, though; the delivery truck was scheduled for when it was scheduled, and adjusting that would have looked too suspicious.
I tried to wish the clouds thicker and the sun further down, but it hadn’t quite worked by the time I got the signal from Ibanez, who was on lookout at the crest of the river bank, that the truck was in sight. I waved to get her attention, then motioned across the river. She nodded and then leapt like a gymnast, catching the concrete lip on the side of the bridge, just in reach there where it met the road.
I held my breath as I watched her swing upward into the support framework on the underside of the bridge, finding purchase on an I-girder with her fingers and heels and scrambling spider-like to the first pier cap. She was almost inhumanly agile, swinging out with one arm to the cement cap and grabbing hold. She swung into it with a smack of impact I could just make out over the rushing of the wild river beneath her and I gritted my teeth.
But she was okay, and she quickly crawled over the obstacle and grabbed the I-beam on the other side of it. By the time I heard the rumble of the truck overhead, she was almost to the other side of the narrow, swift cataract and I’d stopped worrying she’d fall into the rocky, roiling river. This would have been so much easier if radios would work on this damn planet without a tight beam laser uplink to a satellite. Or if it had been possible to see the other end of the bridge from here without being spotted by the gate guards.
