by Rick Partlow
“We’ve arranged to rent a hopper,” Sandi explained. “We’ll fly you out to Moreau Island and our ship can land there and pick us up.” Moreau was out in the middle of the inland sea northwest of Shakak; it would be an hour-long flight in a ducted-fan hovercraft, but it wouldn’t attract too much attention.
Prya frowned. “Won’t orbital traffic control get suspicious about a ship landing out there?”
“Not after the bribe we dropped.” Sandi grinned. “Don’t worry, we’re professionals.” Sort of. “Do you have anything you want to bring with you?”
“Shit, no.” She shook her head sharply. “Just get me the hell out of here.”
“Kan-Ten,” she said, keying her ‘link. “Bring the car around. We’re leaving.”
***
“What the hell is taking so long?” Ash wondered, asking the question out loud and getting no answer except the rhythmic vibration in the deck from the turbines idling.
He’d had the ship’s reactor powered up and the turbines running for ten minutes, and was only waiting for the word from Sandi to call Orbital Traffic Control for the clearance to take off. Looking out the viewscreen at the open, fusion-form landing field they called a spaceport here, lit up almost to daylight in the harsh glare of the security floodlights, it seemed a bit odd to be following prosaic regulations like they were back on Eden or Hermes or one of the other Core colonies, but the Sung Brothers liked things orderly and businesslike. If you tried to take off without clearance, they had batteries of anti-spacecraft missiles they were more than happy to share with you, and not even the new avionics and ECM hardware Fox had provided would be able to avoid all of them.
His finger hovered over the communications panel as he debated whether to call Sandi again. She’d probably be irritated; she hated him jiggling her elbow.
“Fuck it,” he mumbled, touching the control. “Sandi, did she show up yet?” He waited for a reply, but got nothing. He frowned. The least she could do was tell him to go to hell. He switched over to Fontenot’s ‘link address. “Korri, what’s the status? Did the subject show up? Are you guys in the air yet?”
Nothing.
“What the hell?” He tried pinging their ‘links to get a position, but received no return signal. A bad feeling began to crawl out of his gut and he muttered a string of curses in English, Spanish and Tagalog as he switched over to the Traffic Control frequency.
“Peboan Control,” he called, trying to keep from yelling it, “this is the independent freighter Acheron calling for clearance to take off from Shakak spaceport.”
More nothing, not even an automated acknowledgement. They were being jammed, broad-spectrum, high-energy. And any jammer close enough to do that…
“Shit!” He yanked the manual control stick and slid his fingers up the touch-screen for the throttle, then felt the hand of God pushing him back into the acceleration couch as the belly jets screamed to life.
Everything seemed to be happening at once and he was left with not enough hands to strap himself into the seat restraint and plug the interface cables into his implant sockets and still maintain control of the ship and try to evade the flight of two air-to-air missiles that he could see on the screen accelerating towards him at twelve gravities. He’d been berthed fifty meters from a patched-together cargo lifter, and the missiles sliced through the space the Acheron had occupied only half a second before and struck the shuttle.
A fireball climbed forty meters into the night sky and a blast of superheated air nearly set the cutter into a spin; Ash clenched his teeth and yanked back on the stick, boosting out of the turbulence, then cursing and taking the half-second to secure the flight harness. He could see the two assault shuttles burning in over the horizon about six kilometers out and the time it took him to fasten his restraints seemed to be enough for them to halve the distance.
He switched to forward thrust and the view on the front screens blurred as the cutter shot out over the city, putting more distance between him and his pursuers. Desperately, he clawed one-handed at the spools of interface cable, yanking the leads out and plugging them into his jacks. The virtual world of the interface began to swallow him in streams of data, but one piece of knowledge shone through the others: there was no activity from the Shakak air defenses. If this was La Sombra tracking them down again, they’d made a deal with the Sung Brothers, and they were killing two birds with one stone.
“Sandi!” he yelled into the communications pickup, knowing it was futile. “It’s a trap!”
***
“Remind me again,” Fontenot grumbled from the backseat of the groundcar, “why we didn’t get the hopper to start with and just park it in front of the Winter’s Heart?”
“Because landing a hopper in front of the restaurant would have attracted attention,” Sandi explained with exaggerated patience, not taking her eyes off the snow-covered gravel road. “And we’re trying to avoid attracting attention.”
It was starting to snow again, and the large flakes flared white and distracting in the car’s headlights and Sandi’s knuckles were white where she clutched the steering wheel. There was no auto-drive or Heads-Up Display or even a night-vision filter in the windshield, not in a cheap piece of junk slapped together from fabricated parts here on Peboan, but that didn’t stop idiotic pedestrians from stepping out into the street blindly, not even checking for oncoming traffic. She felt as if she was stuck in a period piece about life on antebellum Earth, and she didn’t even like those kinds of movies.
“People would have noticed me climbing into a hopper with a bunch of strangers,” Prya Shaw declared, sitting next to Fontenot in the back seat, her hood up to cover her face as much as possible. “The Sung Brothers have been paranoid about retaliation from the bratva ever since they finally kicked them off Peboan last year.”
“The two cartels shared this place?” Kan-Ten asked, twisting around in the front passenger seat to meet the netdiver’s gaze. “How did that work?”
“About as well as you might expect. Both sides hired mercenaries and the city was nearly destroyed.” The woman sounded disgusted. “They’re still rebuilding. Look.” She pointed out the front windshield at a row of burned-out buildings, charred and blackened beams of local wood all that remained of what had once been urban townhouses. “We had refugees living in hand-built lean-to’s right in the city up till a few months ago.”
“You sound like you find this wasteful,” Kan-Ten commented, showing a remarkable comprehension of human intonations, Sandi thought. “If that is so, why do you work as a spy to continue the conflict?”
Sandi couldn’t spare the attention to turn around and look at Prya’s face, but the silence that answered the question didn’t seem entirely comfortable.
“I have relatives who work for Alexi Putschin, the head of the bratva,” she finally said, sounding as if she had to yank the truth out of herself. “My uncle asked that I do this for the sake of the family.”
“Well, I guess we all know what a pain in the ass family can be,” Sandi told her. She leaned forward, trying to get a better look at the next intersection, which was taking them towards the more industrial section of the city. “I think we turn right up here, then the hopper was parked maybe a half a kilometer down the road in an open lot. Korri, call Ash and tell him to go ahead and get clearance for take-off.”
She’d barely finished the sentence when she saw the cargo truck pulling out of the side street only ten meters ahead of them, directly in their path, its covered bed blocking out the streetlights. Cursing reflexively, she jammed on the brakes and felt her safety harness biting into her shoulder as the car skidded to a halt less than three meters from the driver’s side of the truck, hearing the pinging clatter of gravel thrown up by their tires ricocheting off the larger vehicle’s wheel well.
“Reverse!” Fontenot was yelling, but she was already shifting the car, slamming her foot on the accelerator as it went into gear.
The groundcar jerked backwards with a rush o
f power from the decades-obsolete alcohol-burning engine and Sandi grunted, twisting around to look behind them. There was another cross street only twenty meters back, on the opposite side, and their car had barely begun to reverse when another truck, this one a flatbed, roared out of the alley to block their retreat. Sandi let off the accelerator and looked back forward to see a familiar face staring at her from inside the cab of the cargo truck there. It was Jagmeet Singh, smiling coldly with half his mouth.
The canvas flap was thrown off the back of the truck and armed and armored men and women began jumping off the back, dressed in the characteristic khaki and brown of the La Sombra cartel.
“Korri!” Sandi yelled, ripping her pulse pistol out of its holster, but Fontenot was already yanking her safety harness loose and throwing open the door.
Behind them, she saw with a quick glimpse in the mirror, more troops were piling off the back of the flatbed, and she hit the accelerator again, feeling a hollow thump and hearing the impact of the rear bumper on at least two of them as they were crushed between her car and the truck’s loading gate. Then Fontenot was hanging out her open door, cradling the oversized bulk of an old assault gun, a weapon that had been obsolete for a few decades in an age of mobile battlesuits but still held a lot of value when dealing with lightly-armored opponents.
The dual-drum-fed support weapon belched out a sustained fusillade of proximity-fused 25mm warheads that burst like fireworks in the midst of the oncoming cartel soldiers, the powdered metal payloads transformed to spears of plasma by the heat of the shaped-charge HyperExplosives. Four of the attackers collapsed into nerveless heaps, their helmets smoking where the plasma had burned through, and the rest scattered, firing back blindly. Sandi flinched as mini-rockets glanced off the roof with thunderous bangs, then she cursed aloud when one cracked through the front windshield. She looked back for just an instant and saw that it had passed over Prya’s head. The woman was crouched on the floor, hands clenched on top of her head and terror written on her face, while Kan-Ten fired off a steady barrage of laser fire from his pulse carbine over the top of the back seat through what was left of the rear windscreen.
“Hang on!” Sandi yelled, leaning out her window and shooting left-handed at the cab of the truck in front of them.
Singh and the driver ducked as laser pulses punched through the heavy plastic of the windshield or spalled melted or vaporized metal off the body of the cab, and Sandi used their distraction to shift back to drive and stomp down on the gas pedal once again. The groundcar lurched forward and she jerked the wheel to the left, steering around the front end of the cargo truck.
They barely made it past: the driver tried to slam into them broadside and managed to clip the rear bumper, tearing off the rear quarter-panel on the passenger’s side of the car, but then they were around it and she was gunning for the next intersection. She tried not to hyperventilate, tried to keep herself steady, pretending it was a space battle during the war and she was plugged into the interface. But this was so much less controlled and yet so much more overwhelming even than the full immersion of the interface, and she could feel her fingers cramping as she yanked the wheel over in a sharp right turn. The rear of the car fishtailed and she felt the solid bump as it grazed the edge of the sidewalk before she could straighten it out.
The tires dug into the dirt beneath the snow and gravel and they were heading down the dark, narrow street at seventy kilometers an hour, their headlights sweeping over the empty, burned out buildings on both sides of what had once been a thoroughfare. She wanted to look behind them, but the rear-view camera had busted when she’d backed into the truck behind them and the physical mirror had been shot off along with the top right quarter of the windshield. Wind was whistling through the car and snow was pelting her face and it was all she could do to stay between the sidewalks.
“They’re behind us,” Fontenot yelled, seemingly sensing her thoughts. “Thirty meters back, both trucks.”
“You’ve got that fucking cannon,” Sandi said tightly. “Can you discourage them?”
“Not with this door in the way.”
Sandi didn’t look back, but she heard the rending squeal of metal and plastic tearing and the uneven roar of air rushing in from only one opening, and then a shifting of weight on the suspension as Fontenot hung out the side of the car by one unyielding metal hand, the other filled with the grip of the assault gun. There was a deep-throated thumping that was partially carried away by the wind, and then the squeal of tires behind them as the truck swerved away from the gunfire.
For a second, Sandi thought Fontenot was going to take the pursuing trucks out all by herself, but then the deep thumping of the assault gun was answered by a string of crackling bangs across the roof of the car and a terrified scream from Prya Shaw. An incandescent stream of molten metal speared through the dashboard only centimeters from the steering column, making Sandi flinch and jerk away and nearly run off the road. She heard an intake of breath from Kan-Ten and saw that another shot had burned a nasty groove across his right shoulder; she didn’t think it had penetrated the armor they all wore under their jackets, but it had to have hurt just the same.
“Shit!” Fontenot cursed, ducking back inside. “They hit the damned ammo drum! The gun’s jammed!”
Another burst from behind them sliced across the passenger’s side of the car and Kan-Ten ducked down in his seat a half-second before a round blew his headrest apart in a flash of vaporizing plastic. Sandi saw an alleyway off to the right and turned into it with a desperate twist of the wheel, sending the groundcar up on its left-side wheels and nearly flipping it over. She felt her teeth clack together as the vehicle slammed back down onto all four tires and gunned the engine to take the car into the alley…and then cursed and hit the brakes.
Half of a burned-out warehouse had collapsed across the alleyway about ten meters into it, clogging the street with tons of brick, cement block and fire-charred wooden support beams, all partially covered with the recent snow. Sandi shifted the groundcar into reverse, the transmission clunking into gear roughly, then twisted around in her seat, trying desperately to get back out on the road before their pursuers overtook them. She’d barely touched her foot to the accelerator before the flatbed cut them off, pulling so close to the end of the alley that the edge of the truck bed scraped across the still-standing front faces of the buildings.
Sandi’s brain locked up for just a heartbeat, bereft of ideas and hurting for options.
“Everybody out!” Fontenot yelled, jarring her out of her fugue.
She unfastened her seat harness and slammed a shoulder into her door, tumbling out onto the dirt and gravel of the alley, barely remembering to reach back inside to retrieve her pistol off the seat where she’d dropped it. Snowflakes slipped down the neck of her jacket but she barely felt it, adrenalin coursing through her right alongside the conviction that they were about to die.
She’d thought the roaring in her ears was her own pulse until the flatbed truck exploded.
The concussion laid her out flat on the street, the breath gone from her in a blast of blistering-hot air and her vision full of flaring after-images. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to clear her vision and her head, and when she opened them, she saw Fontenot standing over her, offering her a hand up. She took it and was pulled easily to her feet, up from the chill of the snow-covered ground to the wave of heat still coming off the burning flat bed.
“What the hell?” she muttered, barely able to hear her own words over the ringing in her ears and the roar of the crackling fire that was enveloping not just the truck but the buildings on either side as well.
Kan-Ten was limping over to her, one hand gripping the arm of Prya Shaw, who seemed unharmed but in shock. The Tahni gestured upward and Sandi finally looked above her, seeing the massive silver bulk of the Acheron descending on columns of fire a hundred meters or so down the road from them in an open lot.
“Ash.” It was one word, one name, but it see
med to contain paragraphs of relief.
“This way,” Fontenot put a hand on Sandi’s shoulder and guided her through a small gap in the wreckage that blocked the alleyway. “Hurry.”
Didn’t I have a gun? Sandi wondered dully, still stunned. Then she looked down into her right hand and saw the pulse pistol still gripped there instinctively; she moved her finger farther off the trigger pad and pushed the weapon out in front of her.
The gap in the wreckage led them through the empty hulk of the devastated warehouse, pitch black until the flashlight attached to Kan-Ten’s carbine lit up the wrecked hollow, glinting off the ice that frosted every flat surface. Sandi could hear Fontenot’s heavy footsteps crunching through the drifts of ice-covered snow that had blown in through the gaps in the collapsed roof and solidified, and she made sure to watch where she placed her own feet.
Behind her, she heard Prya Shaw gasp and looked back to see the woman clutching at Kan-Ten’s arm, barely able to keep her balance. She felt a momentary scorn until she reflected that the woman was probably scared out of her mind. Hell, Sandi had seen combat, been in several gunfights, and she was still scared out of her mind.
Finally, they reached one of the doorways that led out to the main road, gaping open, with the door itself collapsed inward, the metal burned black but still solid. Fontenot squeezed past Sandi, motioning for her to wait and then ducking out the door with surprising grace and speed for a woman carrying around nearly a hundred kilograms of metal. Sandi edged closer to the doorway, feeling an itching impatience to be out of the building, but it was only seconds before Fontenot reappeared, waving for the others to follow.
“Quick,” she urged, motioning the others ahead, facing back behind them, carbine at the ready. “Get to the ship.”
