by Rick Partlow
He didn’t have the chance to finish the sentence. He jerked and spasmed, the gun falling from his hand as he grimaced in pain. He let loose of Bobbi and tried to reach behind him with his bionic arm, like it was the only strength left to him, but his mouth opened slack, spilling a gush of blood, and his eyes rolled back in his head. Then he fell forward, crashing to the deck with a metallic clang, a huge hole ripped into his back just below his left shoulder blade.
Behind him, Kane shook blood from his fist. The flesh half of his face was charred and cracked, the human eye swollen shut, and his fatigues were shredded and covered in burns and blood. Standing a step down from him on the ramp was Trina Wellesley, her face more shocked and horrified than I’d thought her capable of feeling.
I felt my lips pulling back from my teeth in the closest I was going to come to a smile at the moment.
“Found her out there,” Kane said, his voice slurred and mechanical. “Said she could help.”
“Get the board unlocked,” I said to Wellesley, “and we’ll take you out of here.” I looked at Kane again and shook my head. “Can you fly?”
By way of response, he stomped past me towards the cockpit, the Corporate Security Force agent jogging beside him. Bobbi was on her knees, rubbing at her throat and staring daggers at Constantine’s corpse while Victor and Kurt had gone to help Sanders.
“Get rid of the bodies,” I told them, “and close the ramp. Then everyone get belted in, and get Sanders strapped down, too. We may have a rough ride.”
I could hear the turbines spinning up as I made it to the cockpit. Kane was already strapped into the pilot’s seat, but he wasn’t bothering with the holographic display; he was plugged directly into the control console, his cybernetic eye gleaming. I fell into the co-pilot’s seat, motioning a hesitant Wellesley into the navigation position as I buckled the restraints.
The forward viewscreens were active now, and I could see what the cameras and sensors were picking up. The aliens were still over by the barn, firing energy blasts in three directions, all of them away from us. Yassa and Gramps had to still be alive out there, still keeping them busy. But that wouldn’t last long. I pulled my ‘link out of my pocket and called up the file I’d been given by Cowboy.
I found the communications controls and activated the shuttle’s primary tight-beam antenna, realigning it towards the coordinates I read off the ‘link. I sent the signal code and held my breath. If Cowboy had been lying, or the CSF had detected the strike package and destroyed it…
No. There was the return signal, beeping cheerfully and flashing green in the communications display. It was a fairly simple interface, and it only took me seconds to figure out. I fed the coordinates of the canyon to the satellite, then told it to launch immediately, which gave us…
“Three minutes, thirty seconds until we’re toast,” I informed Kane.
“What does that mean?” Wellesley demanded, looking sharply at me.
I didn’t answer her, just stared at the main display and watched the bugs. They were all firing at the same place now, the far corner of the barn, their converging energy beams nearly whiting out the view screen. When the glare faded, they all began to turn away from the wreckage…and turn towards us.
“Kane,” I bit off, but almost before I said the word, the shuttle leapt into the air, jetting forward the second it lifted off.
I was pushed back into the acceleration couch, the breath going out of me as Kane opened the throttles and rocketed us across the canyon floor only a few meters off the hard deck. Everything seemed to be narrowing to a black-rimmed tunnel in front of me, and I knew I was close to passing out. I tried to clench my stomach muscles, but pain flared again in my side and I gasped with air I didn’t have to spare and the blackness swallowed everything.
Chapter Twenty
I spasmed against my seat restraints, eyes flying open, and I instinctively knew I’d blacked out from the g-forces. I looked around and saw that Wellesley had done the same and was still out. Kane was stock-still, effectively part of the shuttle’s computer system. The rear view and threat readout in the main display screen showed that we were nearly ten kilometers from the ranch house, well out of the firing arc of the aliens.
My eyes danced around the display, hunting desperately for the countdown from the strike package, until I saw a much more dramatic and definitive answer to that question. Streaks of white-hot plasma descended out of the cloud cover like a swarm of meteors, each of the two dozen spears of light actually a three-meter long tungsten rod that weighed hundreds of kilograms.
They struck simultaneously and a dome of fire kilometers high expanded out to engulf the entire canyon in a blast as powerful as a fusion warhead. The glowing hemisphere faded and a mushroom cloud climbed high above the canyon, carrying with it the vaporized remains of Carmen Ibanez, Brandy Yassa and Cesar Torres. They were gone, as if they’d never been.
I leaned forward into my hands, and to my surprise, found myself whispering a prayer for them. Mom had raised me an atheist, but Gramps had been an old-fashioned Catholic, and I’d gone to mass with him many times over the years. I wasn’t sure I believed, but I was sure he did, and I was sure he’d want it. As for Yassa and Ibanez, I didn’t honestly know, but it wouldn’t hurt.
I frowned as I felt the shuttle nosing upward, the thrust increasing as the boat gained altitude.
“Take us back to Freeport,” I instructed Kane, my voice rasping and husky.
“No can do,” he said. I glanced over and saw him still staring forward, expressionless. “Remote override taking control. Can’t fight it.”
Trina Wellesley was awake now, and she was smiling thinly.
“That would be the Medellin,” she told me, her voice in control now, her demeanor calmer. “That’s my lighter, in high orbit,” she amended. “When I unlocked the controls, I activated an emergency alert. They took control once we were out of the canyon and they’re bringing us into a docking orbit with them.”
I’d tucked the pulse pistol into a storage pouch in the side of my chair. I pulled it out and levelled it at her face.
“Unless you get back on the comms and tell them not to,” I corrected her.
“If you shoot me, Mr. Callas, they’ll still bring you on board, and when they access the on-board security monitors, they’ll see that I’m dead and they’ll gas this ship, then hit it with sonics just for good measure. If you’re lucky, you’ll wake up in confinement. If you’re not, you’ll never wake up at all.”
“You’d still be dead,” I reminded her, trying to be as calm as she was, but feeling my lip curl into a snarl. “And we have all the way to orbit to think of a way to stop the shuttle.”
“How about I offer you something you want, then?” She nodded back towards the hatch to the utility bay. “Your man back there is badly wounded. If you put down the gun and don’t attempt to resist, I guarantee that he’ll receive treatment.” I opened my mouth to object, but she halted it with an upraised palm. “I’ll also guarantee that the rest of your team will be released once we reach Hermes.” She cocked an eyebrow at me. “With Mr. Torres apparently no longer a concern, my job is to bring you back…just you.”
I pressed my lips together to keep from cursing reflexively. That bitch knew just what notes to hit, all right. She knew I’d have no problem killing her and taking my chances, but if it meant the chance to keep the rest of the team safe…
I spun the pulse pistol upward on its trigger guard and flicked on the safety.
“I’m not certain how much you know about me, Ms. Wellesley,” I said with quiet resignation. “But I can guarantee you something: if you fail to deliver on your part of this deal, don’t count on anyone else to keep me from getting to you.”
“Once Ms. Damiani gets you back,” she countered, “you won’t know much about you, Mr. Callas.” She sniffed. “But your mother would probably frown on me going back on my word to her son, just on principle.”
“My mother,” I said to h
er, staring out the view screen as the clouds gave way to the stars, “doesn’t have principles.”
***
The hull shuddered as the shuttle docked, and I shuddered with it.
“We should have fought ‘em,” Bobbi Taylor grumbled, anchored by one hand to a strap on the bulkhead by the airlock. The fingers of her free hand flexed unconsciously, as if it longed for a weapon. The Gauss rifles and the pulse pistol were stowed in the locker just aft of the cockpit, at Wellesley’s insistence.
“Sanders and I are both shot,” I pointed out, my voice sounding distant in my own ears, my head floating as much as the rest of me, and not just because of the microgravity. “Kane crashed a starship and all three of you are pretty beat up. We have a few rifles, no pressure suits, one avenue of egress, and no control over this boat and they have gas and sonics and all the time in the world.”
As if on cue, Sanders moaned softly, his eyes blinking fitfully. I grabbed him by his fatigue pants’ belt and kept him from floating off towards the overhead. Kane was standing behind us, his metal feet magnetized to the deck, and said nothing. He hadn’t spoken a word since the CSF had taken over control of the shuttle and I wondered if he had a concussion from the crash.
“You didn’t have to do this for us, Boss,” Victor said quietly. He and Kurt looked smaller, somehow, bobbing there with no purchase.
“Of course he did,” Wellesley commented drily from the front of us. She glanced back at me, with what might have been disdain and might have been…what? Envy? “It’s who he is…for the moment.”
We were in the belly of the beast now, inside the lighter’s docking bay. It was a bulky, bulbous, ugly ship seen from the outside and I felt even worse inside it. The docking collar hummed mechanically as it sealed around the airlock of the shuttle, like a noose around our necks.
There was no pressure equalization to worry about, so the inner and outer airlock doors opened together with a smooth hum of servos. There were a pair of armored CSF troops waiting for us outside the lock, their boots magnetically locked to the deck, pulse rifles cradled in their arms like they didn’t think they’d need them. I was suddenly conscious of the blood stains on the deck beneath my feet, and I wondered if anyone in the crew of the Medellin had been friends with the people I’d killed, and whether they held a grudge. And then I looked past them and forgot all about it.
Standing behind them, anchored to the deck by the magnetic soles of his ship boots, was Cowboy.
“Howdy Munroe,” he drawled. Then he nodded to Wellesley, who looked even more shocked than I was. “How you been, Trina?”
“West,” she hissed the word like it was a curse. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“Just safeguarding my employer’s investment, Trina,” he said with a grin. He turned to the two CSF guards. “Get that man,” he gestured towards Sanders, “to the medical bay and see they get him treated right away.”
“Yes, sir,” a woman’s voice answered him from the exterior helmet speakers of one of them, and they moved forward and took the barely-conscious Sanders from my charge. I let him go reluctantly, not so much because I didn’t think they’d take care of him but more because I was reeling and at least he was something to hold onto.
“Kane,” I said, finally shaking off my stupor, “go with them. Get looked at by the docs.”
He didn’t argue with me, and I knew that meant he was hurt worse than he was letting on.
“West,” Wellesley snapped, pushing herself out into the passageway as the guards retreated with Sanders’ limp form, Kane clomping along behind, “you can’t just come on board my ship and order my people around!”
“Oh, of course I can, Trina,” he sighed in mild exasperation. “I just fucking did it, didn’t I?”
Behind him, in the security monitors that displayed the lighter’s docking bay, I could see West’s cutter taking up the other half of the bay, opposite the shuttle, squeezed into a space that had held two of the now-destroyed assault boats.
“What the hell am I going to tell Patrice?” Wellesley demanded, less outraged now and sounding a bit desperate.
“Tell her this is what Andre wants,” Cowboy responded with an easy shrug.
I could see her biting back her instinctive response, but I felt a cold tingling in my scalp. Andre? Uncle Andre? Was that who Cowboy worked for?
Wellesley was rubbing a hand over her eyes, looking gut-punched by the realization that the only thing she thought she could salvage from this clusterfuck was being taken away from her.
“Take these people to the mess, Trina,” Cowboy ordered her, waving at Victor, Kurt and Bobbi. “Get them something to eat, then take them somewhere they can get cleaned up. It’s a long flight back to Hermes and they all smell like blood and ashes.”
Wellesley didn’t even bother to argue with him, just pushed off down the passageway towards the hub of the ship, not waiting to see if anyone followed her. Victor and Kurt headed after her immediately, glancing uncomfortably at Cowboy as they did, probably remembering him as a vaguely threatening presence from wartime Demeter.
“So you’re Cowboy, huh?” Bobbi asked, looking him up and down as she pulled herself out of the airlock. “You’re cute…but that damn money better be in my account when I get back.”
“It’s there already, ma’am,” he assured her, grinning in amusement as she brushed past him, closer than she had to. Then he looked over at me, his expression growing more serious. “Come along with me, Munroe.”
He grabbed me by the shoulder and propelled me beside him as his magnetic boot soles kept him on the deck. I let myself be pulled along without a word, numb and drifting, literally and figuratively. I should be furious with him, I knew. I should be raging; he’d known that Gramps was Abuelo, he’d recruited Yassa to…
I blinked. Recruited her to what? Cowboy was a lot of things, but stupid wasn’t one of them. He’d have known that Yassa wouldn’t betray me, even with the drugs. He’d brought her in to…
“You brought her in so you could tell her the things you couldn’t tell me,” I said, my voice muted and unemotional. “So that it would come from someone I trusted.”
“Even strung out and half-delirious,” he said, shaking his head, “you’re smarter than ninety percent of the Corporate Council Executive Board.” He eyed me sidelong, an appraising look. “Ruthless, too. Not squeamish at all about doing what has to be done. I completely understand why your mother wants you back so badly…and why Andre Damiani would rather you stay gone, for now.”
I vaguely realized we were heading for the other side of the hangar bay, to where his ship was docked.
“If Uncle Andre wants me out of the way,” I asked him, “why doesn’t he just have you kill me?”
We were paused outside the lock to Cowboy’s cutter, its curved, delta shape visible in the display screen, and he peeled off a glove and touched the ID plate.
“Because Monsieur Damiani didn’t get to be the Director of the Council’s Executive Board by wasting resources.” The lock slid aside and West pushed me into the ship’s utility bay. “He just doesn’t want you being a resource for his pain in the ass sister.”
I caught myself against the padded bulkhead next to a storage locker and stared at him, curiosity warring against resentment, and both fighting a losing battle with fatigue.
“What’s the real reason you didn’t do this yourself?” I wanted to know.
“I wasn’t lying to you,” Cowboy insisted, closing the lock behind us. “There’s a man down there who knows me. You met him too, once, back on Demeter at the end. He’s one of the Glory Boys, so if he decided to pick a fight with me, it’s not certain who’d win.”
“You told me one lie,” I asserted. “You said it was a Predecessor artifact. That damned thing didn’t come from the Predecessors.”
“No, it didn’t,” he admitted with a shrug. “But that was information I couldn’t admit, or I’d have had to tell you about your Great-grandfather…and then, you
might not have done it.”
“Just one last thing, Cowboy.” I felt like I was slurring my words a little and I concentrated harder, trying to make sure I stayed sharp, because this was an important question. “Did you really want that pod intact?”
“Oh, sure, if you could have pulled it off,” he told me readily. “We’d have studied it in a contained lab with a lot of safeguards, just like we have the others.”
I nodded, forgetting I was in microgravity, feeling the motion send me drifting. So, the Corporate Council had a bunch of those things stored in labs somewhere, each a little time bomb that could probably take down our whole civilization if we didn’t contain them in time. Just one more thing to keep me up at night.
“Why am I here?” I wondered, looking around the ship.
“Come here,” he said, waving me towards the other end of the bay.
Tucked in by the bulkhead there was what looked like an auto-doc: a transparent polymer cylinder lined with medical scanners and connected to spherical tanks of nanite-infused biotic fluid that could repair almost anything short of an amputation or major brain damage, given enough time. I pushed off from the storage locker and floated over to it, catching myself against the smooth, curved surface of the thing.
“Why couldn’t I use the one in the lighter’s medical bay?” I asked, starting to strip off my fatigue top.
“Because this isn’t a normal auto-doc,” Cowboy told me. I paused with my shirt halfway off, looking back at the thing again, more cautiously.
“This,” he continued, walking around the cylinder in the stiffly awkward manner that ship boots forced on you, “is a…” He shrugged. “…an investment by Monsieur Damiani. You’re already a nearly perfect physical specimen thanks to your mother’s genetic intervention. This is something to make sure you stay that way.”
“Can you be less specific?” I murmured, pulling off my shirt and tossing it away. It was soaked with sweat and stiff with blood and it rotated slowly away before slapping against the far bulkhead.
