by Rick Partlow
“The hybrid got most of them,” Sandi confirmed, keeping her voice and eyes flat. “Dr. Sanchez killed some. The last couple who tried to get out died when the Pit collapsed.”
“I was damned lucky to get out of that alive myself,” Ash put in and she flashed a glance at him, wishing he’d shut up. He wasn’t nearly as good of a liar as she was.
It was a beautiful morning in Dollabella, clear and warm and still, and the sky was a deep blue that Sandi had half-thought she’d never see again. It felt incredible just to be outside again, somewhere there wasn’t snow and freezing wind at mid-day in summer, felt transcendent to have room to breath and sprawl out after spending so many hours crammed into every available space on the Acheron with nine people in a ship designed to hold two comfortably and redesigned to hold four with a little hot-swapping of beds.
It had helped that Ash and the female Marine---Sandi still couldn’t remember her name, even after spending all that time on the ship together---wound up taking turns in the auto-doc for most of the trip. Ash had been healing up from a collapsed lung, second-degree burns, sliced tendons in his hands, three cracked ribs, a burst eardrum and retinal scarring, and he hadn’t let her forget that most of that was from her firing the proton cannon only a hundred meters away from him.
Singh had stayed locked in a storage closet in the hold most of the trip, and only Ash arguing his case had convinced her not to space him. She fought against a scowl as she remembered the bounty hunter walking down the belly ramp in an empty field out in the middle of nowhere on Andalusia, days before they’d finally arrived back on Sylvanus.
“We should have killed him,” Sandi had grumbled, slapping the control to raise the ramp.
“I have to believe people can change,” had been Ash’s reply. And then he’d hugged her and damn it, how could she argue?
“I’m not sure I believe you,” Fox admitted in his casual, off-hand way that still managed to let you know he could kill you at any moment without breaking a sweat.
Sandi tensed, and next to her, she could see Fontenot’s mouth thinning into a hard line. Ash’s eyes narrowed, the muscles of his forearms flexing on the padded arms of the outdoor café’s chair. Kan-Ten was silent and immobile, but she knew him well enough now to see that he was ready to fight or run, if need be.
“Fortunately,” Fox continued with a shrug, “it doesn’t really matter. You accomplished the mission I assigned you; everything else is your business.”
Sandi hadn’t quite been holding her breath, but she hissed out a little sigh anyway. She saw Ash relax almost imperceptibly.
“The funds are in your accounts,” the Fleet Intelligence officer told them, waving a hand dismissively. “All payments have been made as agreed. I’ll get in touch when I have another job.”
“Hey Fox,” Ash said as the man pushed his way up from his chair. At the officer’s inquisitive look, he went on. “Why did we have to meet at the same café again?”
“I like the coffee here.”
And then he was gone. Sandi waited a few minutes, watching the crowd in the street around the café and nursing her espresso. They’d run out of coffee on the ship after the first hundred hours, and the caffeine withdrawal had been hellish.
“Do you think the others will be all right?” Ash wondered, toying with the remains of a croissant.
“They can’t go back to the lives they had,” Fontenot mused, “but at least they have a chance to start over. And we spread them out on different colonies, I doubt anyone’s going to find them, as long as they keep their mouths shut.”
“It’s a shame about Weaver and Kamara,” Ash said and Fontenot nodded agreement.
Sandi hadn’t met either of them, but she’d been there to witness Commander Busick’s devastated reaction to Gunny Kamara’s death. The Marine had come so close, but he’d been caught on the edge of the explosion, and no one had been near enough to help. The collapsing ground had swallowed him up as if he’d never been.
“Kate Busick seems like a very strong person,” she offered hopefully. “And we left them all as much money as we could afford.”
“The one that worries me is Mercier,” Fontenot said, her fingers clasped on the table in front of her. The synthskin made them look so real, you could easily forget that they could break a man’s neck with a single twist. “He could try to sell what he knows to the Corporate Council or the DSI.”
“Kenner could be a loose cannon too,” Ash admitted, a bit morosely. “But with the hive buried, the hybrid gone and the Metaurus destroyed, how much could anyone do with the information? None of them could prove any of it, and if Kenner or Caminero say anything, they could be charged with desertion.”
“What are we going to do now?” Kan-Ten asked. The Tahni had been fairly silent; it had been a bit awkward spending all that time on board ship with humans whose last experience with the Tahni had been a war that they hadn’t known had ended.
“Is there a beach anywhere around here?” Sandi asked, leaning back in her chair and sighing longingly, grateful just not to be cold. “I really want to go to the beach.”
***
Jagmeet Singh stood frozen in the street outside the clinic, afraid to go in. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been afraid, but the idea of stepping through the doors scared him worse than death. The foot traffic around him was polite and no one tried to shove him out of the way or cursed him for blocking the road; this was one of the posher levels of Belial, away from the fleshpots, and the bare-knuckle fighting, and the Virtual and robotic and real prostitutes. The lights were bright, the colors solid and professional and the clientele was rich. His clothes were a concession to his surroundings, his arm covered by a long jacket, metal hand gloved, and a cap pulled low over his face to hide the metal half.
The treatments performed in the medical facilities in this section weren’t cheap, but the doctors and technicians who staffed them were the best, attracted by the money and the atmosphere. Singh had the money; he hadn’t spent it on anything else in quite some time. But he didn’t fit in with the other patients, and he could feel the stares. People came to clinics like this for restruct surgery, to perfect or change or radicalize their look into something more fashionable. Few came here to have limbs regrown or injuries repaired, but this place seemed safer than any of the medical facilities available to him in the Pirate Worlds, which was worth the extra cost.
But going inside, getting this done…it felt like he was abandoning Freya’s memory. He’d carried his scars, carried these artificial parts to remind him that he’d failed her, that he hadn’t been there for her and hadn’t been able to avenge her. Removing them, moving on, leaving the scars and the bionic replacements behind, was that the same as leaving her behind?
Where would he go? What else could he do? His reputation as a bounty hunter might survive this, but he could never work for Jordi Abdullah or any of the cartel bosses again. They didn’t take well to betrayal.
“No great loss,” he mumbled to himself, still staring at the front entrance.
He heard the commotion behind him, heard someone scream and he moved by instinct, throwing his left arm around just in time to take the blade across the metal of his wrist and deflect it from its target, his neck. The man holding the knife was big, bigger than he was by four centimeters and ten kilograms, and Singh sized him up almost immediately by his face and his clothes. He had the rough, weathered look of a man who’d grown up away from Earth or the Core colonies, a man who’d never seen an anti-aging treatment or a nanite injection. His jacket was ribbed with lamellar armor, as were the backs of his gloves, and he held the monomolecular-edged combat knife as if he knew how to use it.
He stood out in the upscale crowd like a whore in church, and that, along with the clothes, told Singh that the man wasn’t a professional. He wasn’t a bounty hunter, or at least not one who’d been on the job long, and Singh had him pegged as cartel muscle.
The cyborg bounty hunter jumped back with su
rprising agility for his size, noting the clean slice through the vat-grown leather of his jacket and the matching white score across the matte black of his bionic arm. That knife was serious business, no matter how professional its owner was.
Singh ignored the crowd; some were running, some were screaming, others were frozen in place, watching with eyes wide from shock or perhaps salacious curiosity. None were threats, none were allies, and that was all that mattered at the moment. He focused on his opponent’s stance, the movement of his feet and the set of his shoulders. He knew how to use that knife…and Singh was unarmed. Well, except for his arm.
The next attack came in low, sweeping in an arc that would have disemboweled him had it landed. Instead, he caught the wrist in his metal grasp and jerked it upward sharply, snapping both of the bones in the forearm. The big man screeched, a high-pitched sound that belied his bulk, the sound continuing unabated until Singh yanked him into an elbow strike that caught him across the bridge of his nose. The knife hit the ground about the same time as the big man’s shoulders, and Singh followed the would-be assassin down, planting a knee across his chest, his bionic hand going to the man’s neck and squeezing just slightly.
His eyes bulged with fear and pain and disbelief, as if he couldn’t understand how he’d arrived in this position.
“Who sent you?” Singh asked, softly but clearly.
The big man croaked something and Singh sighed, letting loose the grip on his throat just slightly.
“Jordi Abdullah,” he hissed out. “You stole his ship, the Gitano.” The big man gasped a breath past the pressure of Singh’s fingers. “He’s got a price on you…” He grinned past a grimace of pain. “I just got here first. You can kill me, but…”
“Thanks, I will.”
The man’s neck snapped with a twist of Singh’s hand and he went still. The onlookers who hadn’t fled seemed to gasp collectively in chorus with the last breath rattling out of the assassin’s mouth. Singh stood, regarding the body, considering what it meant.
The clinic would have to wait, as would his spiritual journey, wherever it might have been leading him.
He had unfinished business.
Look for the next adventure of Sandi and Ash in Book Three of Tales of the Acheron, coming soon from Rick Partlow!
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