Hybrid (Tales of the Acheron Book 2)

by Rick Partlow

  “What happened to the other truck?” Kan-Ten asked, scanning the street as he half-supported Prya. The woman’s face looked positively grey, her eyes wide as she glanced furtively around.

  “It’s gone,” Fontenot reported, her voice cutting through the whine of the Acheron’s turbojets. “That fucker’s too smart to stick around when the odds are against him.”

  Sandi was having nightmare visions of Singh jumping out of every shadowed corner along the ruined, deserted stretch of industrial buildings, and the hundred-meter walk to the idling ship seemed to take hours. Ash was at the foot of the ramp, waiting for them with a pulse carbine cradled in his arms, shifting his weight nervously from one foot to another.

  “Hurry,” he said. “They have a lighter in orbit; I took down two of their shuttles, but they have to have at least one other around in reserve.”

  “Thanks for bailing us out.” Sandi kissed him quickly, resting her head on his shoulder for just a moment before she had to move and make way for Kan-Ten to escort Prya up the ramp.

  “Next time though,” Fontenot interjected dryly, clomping up behind them, “don’t blow shit up right next to us.”

  Ash chuckled apologetically as he hit the control to close the belly ramp, then rushed back up to the cockpit. Sandi sagged, leaning against the bulkhead for just a second, thinking that this wasn’t even the hardest part. Now, somehow, they had to convince the netdiver to share privileged information with them before they got her back to the bratva.

  “Thank God,” Prya Shaw sighed, letting Kan-Ten settle her into an acceleration couch. “I can’t believe they came after me…they must have figured out I was a spy.” She met Sandi’s eyes with a look of utter gratitude and hero-worship. “Thank you, thank you all for getting me out of there. If there’s anything I can do to repay you…”

  “You know,” Sandi mused, grinning as the belly jets began to power up for takeoff, “there might be something after all.”

  Chapter Four

  Jagmeet Singh reached instinctively with his left fist to knock on the hatch of the captain’s cabin, used to the discipline of keeping his right hand free to draw his weapon. He hesitated before the black matte metal of the bionic hand touched the plastic; he still hadn’t mastered the art of controlled, subtle motion with the prosthetic and he was just as likely to crack the door if he tried knocking with that fist. He lowered the bionic limb and rapped on the door with the measured force of his right hand.

  “Come.” Captain Deruda’s tone was harshly abrupt, the same as it had been when he’d radioed to their shuttle on the way up from Peboan that he wanted Singh to report to his cabin immediately after Transition. Singh pushed the handle down with his artificial hand and shoved the hatch open with his shoulder.

  The Captain’s cabin was more than twice as large as any of the crew quarters on the lighter, nearly the size of the ones he’d seen on Fleet cruisers back in the day, which seemed like an absurd waste of space on a ship like the Gitano. It wasn’t a cutter or a courier, but living space was still at a premium, as it was on any starship. Deruda was seated in a divan that could double as an acceleration couch at need, drinking something that smelled vaguely alcoholic from a squeezebulb. He was a round-faced, pudgy bear of a man with wiry salt-and-pepper hair that descended down the half-domes of his cheeks in absurd mutton chops.

  “Close the door behind you, Singh,” he ordered in his annoying, nasal voice.

  Singh swiped backward with his prosthetic and the hatch crashed shut hard enough to make the shipmaster flinch.

  “Jesus Christ,” Deruda whined, “can you try not to break the fucking ship?”

  There was another seat available, but the man didn’t offer it and Singh wouldn’t have taken it in any case.

  “What do you want, Deruda?” He heard the slight slur of his words and felt a flare of anger. It didn’t matter that he’d made the decision to keep the bionics for now instead of replacing them with cloned flesh, the weakness of it gnawed at him. That was what he’d wanted, a constant reminder of what Hollande and Carpenter had taken away from him: his arm, his face, his Freya…

  “It’s ‘Captain Deruda’ on board this ship,” the man reminded him, trying to sound threatening but ruining it with his plaintive tone.

  “What. Do. You. Want.”

  “This has been a fucking disaster,” Deruda said, slamming the bulb down on the table bolted to the deck beside the chair, the effect slightly spoiled by the fact that both the drink container and the surface were cheap, yielding plastic. “We lost two fucking assault shuttles and ten people down there. Jordi’s going to fucking kill me.”

  “Assault shuttles,” Singh repeated, laughing at the absurdity of it. He didn’t like to laugh; it hurt. “Strapping weapons pods to a cargo bird or a lander doesn’t make it an assault shuttle. And you have plenty of troops on board.”

  “Are you fucking serious?” He gaped at Singh, eyes wide. “This mission is over. We’re burning down the fastest Transition map to La Hondonada, and I’m filing a full report to Jordi. I just need to make sure that you take the responsibility for losing those two boats.”

  “We’re not going back,” Singh declared flatly. “We know exactly where they’ll take that girl, and we’re going to track them down. We’re changing course for the bratva settlement on Thunderhead.”

  Deruda pushed his bulk out of the seat and squared off with Singh, one hand going to the pistol in his shoulder holster, anger flaring behind his piggish eyes.

  “You listen to me, bounty hunter,” he bellowed. “You may think you’re hot shit on a stick because Jordi sicced you on those two shitbag drifters, but I’m the Captain of this ship, and I set our fucking course! If you think you can swing your dick around my ship and order my crew around, you’re as fucking crazy as you look! My crew is loyal to me and…”

  The backhand was casual, almost as if his arm had moved on its own, but the motion was a blur faster than a human eye could follow. The edge of the black, metal hand sank into Deruda’s left temple with a crunch of splintering skull and a spray of blood that spattered against the dull white of the bulkhead. Deruda went slack, collapsing sideways half-on and half-off his bunk, a wet gurgling the last sound he made before he went silent forever.

  Singh bent and pulled the pistol from the man’s shoulder holster, dropping it into the deep pocket of his duster, then he threw the door open and stepped out into the passageway. The bridge was up a set of metal steps to the left and he took them two at a time, walking past the galley and the small medical bay. He stepped through the open hatchway and a half a dozen pairs of eyes turned his way, Deruda’s bridge crew.

  They were a motley lot, dressed in a mix of old military gear, colorful flash and spacer’s leathers, two of them with the towering, slender build that spoke of a childhood spent in low gravity and one stocky and muscular enough that he might have hailed from a high-g world. The oldest was the First Mate, who looked as if he could have been well over a hundred and lacked the benefit of modern anti-aging treatments, while the girl at the sensor station might have been in her twenties. They stared at Singh with looks that ranged from suspicion to horror, and the bounty hunter realized that his bionic hand and the entire left sleeve of his jacket were covered in blood. It dripped fitfully onto the deck, a tip-tap sound that cut through the stunned silence.

  “Captain Deruda and I had a disagreement about our course of action,” he told them, his voice calm and unhurried. “I’m afraid he won’t be joining us for the remainder of the voyage. Navigator,” he turned one brown eye and one dull grey metallic one on the older woman with the purple bobbed hair and a leather jacket covered in holographic unicorns, “I’m going to need you to take us to Thunderhead.”

  He paused, looking at each of them in turn, watching for the first twinge of a move for a weapon, the first step one might make to run.

  “Will that be a problem?”

  The First Mate took a slow, hesitant step forward, then he gave what
might have passed for a salute a century ago.

  “No, sir,” he said firmly.

  “What’s your name?”

  “First Officer Kittner,” the old man told him. If he was scared, he was doing a good job of concealing it. Singh wondered if Kittner wasn’t happy to be rid of Deruda.

  “Well, Captain Kittner,” Singh said, half his mouth twisting into a smile, “the ship is yours.” The smile faded. “And if we aren’t in Thunderhead in eighty hours, then I’ll be having this conversation with the next officer in line. Clear?”

  “Clear, Mr. Singh.”

  Singh nodded to the older man and turned on his heel, heading back for the cabin he’d been assigned; he’d leave Deruda’s and its cleanup to the First Officer. He liked Kittner; the man struck him as a pragmatist. It was always pleasant dealing with people who accepted the inevitable.

  ***

  Prya Shaw hunched under the upturned hood of her borrowed rain slicker and tried to divide her attention between oncoming pedestrians on the Freeport sidewalks and what seemed to be a constant watch for the ankle-deep puddles and mud bogs that no amount of maintenance could prevent.

  I’ve been here a day, she fumed silently, and I already hate this damned place.

  Thunderhead was the sort of place that you lived when you’d been kicked out of anywhere nicer. That was how the Novya Moscva bratva had wound up here, from what her uncle had told her. No other cartel wanted the planet; Freeport was its only real settlement and even that had been basically leaderless when they’d come in and taken over a year ago, after the Sung Brothers’ mercenaries had beaten their mercenaries and kicked them off of Peboan.

  She could see why. Peboan might have been bitterly cold in the winter, but at least there the sun shined sometimes. She glanced upward, blinking at the raindrops that splashed on her, searching for any hint of a break in the gloom. It was technically daytime, but the clouds were so thick that she couldn’t honestly tell, and it had been raining nonstop since she’d stepped off the Acheron.

  I should be grateful, she chided herself. At least here, she wouldn’t be constantly paranoid, looking over her shoulder, deathly afraid that she’d be found out. No, here I just have to worry about mudslides, floods, lightning strikes and the background radiation giving me cancer.

  She looked up instead of down at the wrong time and her foot plunged up to the calf in a puddle, the water flooding over the top of her water-proof boots and soaking her right leg.

  “Goddammit!” she yelled, yanking her foot out of the washed-out hole in the sidewalk and trying to shake off the excess water.

  A couple passers-by glanced at her outburst, one of them chuckling at her discomfort. She scowled at the man, a spacer by the look of his clothes, and far too handsome and healthy-looking to be from this miserable planet. Easy for him to laugh; he could fly out of here in a day or two and never have to come back.

  Oh well, at least half this city isn’t burned down.

  The buildings here were nicer than back on Peboan, she had to admit. There was a style to them, something more aesthetic than the starkly practical designs in Shakak. Her aunt and uncle had a very nice two-story townhouse not far from Alexi’s business offices, and they’d secured her an apartment only a kilometer away in “gratitude for her service.” She hadn’t thought of asking for a car, but maybe tomorrow. Might as well take advantage of the gratitude while it was fresh.

  Freeport’s main street ended in a T-intersection and she followed it to the left, out past the edges of the entertainment district, well past the luxurious townhouses of business owners and cartel executives and into the rowhouses where the tech workers and managers lived. The neighborhood was still nice, but the accommodations were smaller and more basic. She tapped an alphanumeric code into the access pad on the outside security door for her building, feeling a surge of irritation that she couldn’t use a wireless ID key like she had back on Peboan; the background radiation on Thunderhead made any sort of wireless communication problematic.

  The interior stairwell was empty, most of the tenants still at work and the lights still dim since it was technically daytime. She threw back her hood and reveled in the dryness of the air, shaking water off on the floor and not caring. She was only one story up and as she stepped slowly and carefully up the stairs, she began to muse whether she might have the place redecorated once she’d settled in; after all, she’d be living here for a long time, perhaps years.

  She was so lost in thought, she almost didn’t notice the broad-shouldered, rough-looking older man coming into the entrance hall at the foot of the stairs. She frowned as she looked over her shoulder at him; he didn’t look like the sort that would live in this building. He wore a shaggy beard and spacer’s clothes and she could see a pistol holstered at his waist, not strange for drifters and smugglers but not typical for residents. But how would he get in if he didn’t live here?

  She quickened her pace up the stairs, hearing the impact of his boots on the bottom steps even as she reached her floor and walked quickly to her apartment. Her heart was thumping against her chest by the time she got the code keyed into the lockplate and saw the indicator light up green. She yanked the door open and rushed inside, pushing it shut behind her and throwing the security bolt. She stared at the blank, white surface of the inside of the door and tried to slow her breathing.

  She was probably being paranoid, a holdover from the last year she’d spent on Peboan.

  “Good afternoon, Ms. Shaw.”

  She screamed reflexively, spinning around. Stepping out of the shadows of her apartment’s small kitchen was a tall, menacing figure dressed in black, the left side of his face swathed in darkness. As he came closer, she could see that the darkness wasn’t shadow but matte black metal.

  She felt panic surging through her and she jerked back the bolt, pulling the door open desperately, thinking maybe she could get back down the stairs before him, could get back to the crowds of people and safety. The bearded man stood just outside, his broad chest blocking her way, an impassive, neutral look on his lined, craggy face and his pistol hanging by his side, held casually in his left hand.

  “You don’t wanna’ be doin’ that, ma’am,” he drawled, nodding back into the apartment.

  She backed up carefully, looking between the two men, the fires of panic burning cold in her gut. The half-faced man pushed back his leather duster and hooked his right thumb on his gunbelt, the impersonal regard of his natural eye as lifeless as that of the metal one.

  “What do you want from me?” she stuttered, barely able to form the words past hyperventilating breath.

  “The people who brought you here,” the cyborg said. “The pilots, Carpenter and Hollande. I want to know where they went, what they told you, what you heard.”

  “They…they didn’t tell me anything.” She shook her head, a sharp, jerking motion. She tried to back away from both of them, away from the front door and the kitchen, back towards her living room. “They didn’t say anything about where they were going, I swear.”

  “That would be most unfortunate.”

  He stepped closer and now Prya could see that his left hand was metal as well, bare and undisguised under the sleeve of his jacket. She backed away another step and felt the back of her legs hit the edge of the couch. The man’s natural hand reached out and shoved her in the center of her chest and she cried out as she fell backwards, toppling into a seat on the ratty cushions of the sofa that had come with the apartment.

  She stared up at the cyborg, the metal half of his face thrown into sharp relief in the dim light filtering through the shades over the front window. She was shaking and she couldn’t stop it, couldn’t get her breathing or her heart rate or her fear under control. He was death, and he’d followed her here all the way from Peboan, and there was no escaping him.

  His biological hand struck out as quick as a snake and grabbed her left wrist, twisting it above her painfully and she gasped and tried to kick at him. She could feel
that his legs were flesh and not metal, but she might as well have been kicking at the bionics for all the reaction he gave her. He twisted her wrist further and she screamed and stopped trying to kick him.

  “I don’t know!” she screamed over and over. “I don’t know!”

  His metal hand unfolded above hers, the mechanical thumb and forefinger grasping her left pinkie and straightening it. She clenched her teeth, shaking her head, murmuring “no, please,” and knowing it wouldn’t do any good.

  She screeched when the finger broke and neither of them seemed inclined to silence her. They’d scouted the place out, some part of her realized dimly, through a haze of pain. They knew no one was home in the apartments around hers. They could do whatever they wanted, she could scream as loud as she wanted, and no one would hear. The scream choked away into sobs and she clenched her eyes shut and looked away from her finger, bent backwards at an unnatural angle.

  “You have nine more,” the man declared in a cold, businesslike voice. “And after that, I’ll be forced to get serious.”

  “There…” She trailed off, hating herself, but knowing she’d reveal it eventually. She wasn’t a hero, wasn’t like Sandi or Ash or Korri or even the Tahni. She was a technician, a computer netdiver, not a soldier. “There was one thing…,” she panted, barely able to see through the tears welled up in her eyes. “There was a system in the Sung Brothers’ files, out near the edge of the Cluster…one of their mineral scouts had surveyed it a few months ago.”

  “They wanted to know about it,” he surmised. “What was there?”

  “The files…the scout said he found a ship there, a Fleet cruiser, he thought.”

  “In a system that far out?” He frowned, seeming less than self-assured and in control for the first time since she’d entered the apartment. “Why?”

  “He didn’t know,” she insisted quickly. “Once he saw it, he got the hell out; he didn’t want to tangle with a military ship.” She shook her head. “That’s it, that’s all they wanted to know about, I swear to God.”