Unexpected Rain

by Jason LaPier

  After a minute of confusion, the alarms quieted enough for an announcement to be heard. An unnatural and unperturbed female voice calmly stated, “Alert. The ship is under attack. This is not a drill. The ship is under attack. Gunners, report to battle-stations. Guards and prisoner escorts, report to the prisoner bay. This is not a drill. Repeat. This is not a drill.”

  “Well, fuck me,” Halsey said in a normal voice, just before the alarms started blaring again. “Come on, Stan,” he shouted. “Let’s go!”

  They ran down the maze of corridors that led them from the guest rooms to the prisoner bay. Various uniforms ran with them, others ran the opposite direction. Once they hit the prisoner bay, they ran into real chaos. Most of the prisoners were still in the yard and barge guards were desperately trying to corral them into their proper cells. This did not go over well with most of the prisoners, who – quite correctly – assessed that the cells were the least safe place to be during a fire-fight between the barge and other spacecraft.

  Things went from bad to worse when something got past the barge’s defenses and the walls shook violently and the floor lurched out from beneath them all. Artificial gravity started to falter, causing everyone to bounce around like they were on pogo-sticks. The guards suddenly became less concerned with getting the prisoners back into their cells and more concerned with finding something to hold on to.

  “Stan!” Halsey yelled. “Stanford Runstom! Over here! I found Jackson!”

  Runstom got himself turned around and saw Halsey holding Jax from behind, his arms hooked under the operator’s armpits. Jax’s head lolled around, his eyes barely open. Runstom made his way over to them, trying not to run, lest he send himself flying out of control in the weak gravity.

  “Jax, wake up!” Runstom yelled once he got to them and got a hold of Jax’s chin.

  “I think he hit his head,” Halsey shouted. “We need to get the hell outta here!”

  Runstom looked around desperately as he racked his brain trying to remember the layout of the barge. He’d been briefed on it at some point in his ModPol officer training, but that was long, long ago. “This way,” he shouted, pointing. “To the kitchen. I think if we go through there, we can get to the storage room. We might be able to find shelter in there. Inside packing crates – or something.”

  Halsey nodded and moved around Jax so they could get on either side of him, each with one of his arms hooked over their shoulders. The extra weight actually made it easier for them to move in the low gravity and they got to the kitchen without injury, dodging bouncing guards and prisoners as they went. They tried to yell to people they passed to tell them to get to the storage bay, but it wasn’t apparent whether or not anyone was listening.

  The kitchen was a total mess and they had to pick their way carefully through the chaos of cookware and upended food. Once they made it through, they found the short hallway that hooked up with a large corridor.

  “This is the main supply corridor,” Runstom said. The alarms rang furiously in the distance, but not in this section of the ship. “I think the supply deck might detach. There will be some minimal controls in there. If the barge takes too much damage, we can try to pull off and float away.”

  “Yeah, and hopefully not draw any attention.” Halsey looked back through the kitchen, the way they came. “You think anyone else got the idea?”

  “I hope for their sake, someone does,” Runstom said. “Come on, let’s go.”

  They moved down the long, wide corridor toward the primary supply deck. Once they reached the end, they punched the door release and the storage bay opened widely before them. Everything inside was strapped down tight and mostly unaffected by the drop in gravity.

  The floor lurched violently, one way, then the other, back and forth a few times. The three of them ended up in different parts of the room. Runstom found himself near the doorway and on his back, staring at the supports high above along the ceiling. Suddenly, a high-pitched, eardrum-piercing, nails-on-a-chalkboard sound screeched from the main supply corridor.

  Runstom lifted himself off the deck and hooked his arm over the rounded edge of the door frame, getting a good look into the large hallway. Bright, white light sprayed in showers of sparks on either side of the corridor. Runstom froze, unable to comprehend what was happening, unable to react. After a minute or so, the white light was just a red ghost in his eyes. A few metallic clangs, and suddenly a round section of the wall popped out and hit the floor with a clatter. Almost instantly, three more circles of wall were projected out, one on the same side as the first, the other two on the opposite side.

  There was a moment of eerie silence, save the distant klaxons, which from here were beginning to sound like an alarm clock, pestering him to wake up already. The silence didn’t last. Shouts and cheers emanated from the new holes in the corridor, and were soon followed by human forms. Human forms armed to the teeth with all manner of projectile, chemical, and even bladed weaponry.

  “Fuck me!” Halsey breathed, suddenly at Runstom’s side. “Fucking gangbangers!”

  “Shit,” Runstom said in a hush, trying not to draw any attention. “Why are they attacking us? There’s nothing of value on this prisoner ba—”

  Runstom stopped himself as the gangbangers met in the middle of the corridor. There must have been twenty or so of them. He caught sight of the symbol on the back of one of their jackets. Three arrows in a circle, arranged as if one flowed into the next, but with the arrowheads bending outward.

  Halsey must have seen it too. “Space Waste!” he whispered.

  No further explanation was needed. The two officers didn’t have a need to know much about space gangs in their relatively low-key planetary assignments, but Space Waste was legendary in ModPol circles. One of the largest gangs in the known galaxy, and certainly the most well-organized, Space Waste had a knack for showing up without warning, taking what they wanted and then disappearing. More often than not, they left no living witnesses; only hundreds of InstaStick decals featuring their twisted-arrows logo.

  “If Space Waste is hitting a prisoner barge,” Runstom started quietly, turning away from the doorway and slouching against the wall so he could face Halsey, “they must be here to break someone out.”

  “How did they get aboard?” Halsey came around the other side of him to get coverage behind the wall.

  “They must have used those tubes.” Runstom gestured vaguely. “Reinforced, pressurized boarding tubes that can extend from one ship and form a seal with the hull of another ship.” He’d been asking himself the same thing for the last several minutes and finally worked it out. “They’re flexible, to account for drift. They were originally designed for rescue operations.”

  “How do you know this?” said Halsey, cocking an eyebrow.

  Runstom shrugged. “I saw it on holo-vision once. It was one of those rescue documentaries.”

  “But if they cut through the hull, what happens when they disengage the boarding tubes?”

  “Well, in a rescue operation, it’s a last resort. They only do it when they know LifSup is failing on the endangered ship, and they want to get as many survivors off as quickly as possible.”

  “So lemme guess,” Halsey said grimly. “The Space Wasters won’t be so humanitarian.”

  “No, I would think not,” Runstom replied calmly. He wasn’t actually calm – far from it – but the situation was beginning to feel like it wasn’t real. Like it was just a holo-vid show. “They’ll probably get whoever they’re after, and then re-board their ships and disengage the tubes without bothering to attempt to re-seal the hull breach.”

  “Shit,” Halsey muttered. “This is too much explosive decompression for one week.” Runstom shot Halsey a sour look and the other man put his hands up innocently. “What? It’s not like Jackson will get framed for it this time.”

  Runstom suddenly stood up halfway, his eyes darting as he scanned the storage bay. “Where is Jackson?”

  “Sit down!” Halsey said,
pulling on Runstom’s arm. “We’ll get him in a minute. We need to figure out what to do! We don’t have much time!”

  “Okay, okay.” Runstom crouched back down and spoke in a low voice. “They’ve breached this main supply corridor. So the rest of the ship might be okay, once they detach the boarding tube. But only if someone can hit the emergency air locks, then they can cut the rest of the ship off from this hallway and be safe.”

  “Safe from decompression, anyway,” Halsey said. “If the Wasters have boarded us, they must have taken out our engines. When they get what they came for, they might just sail out to a safe distance and waste us.”

  “Yeah. Well, we can’t do anything about that. The only option we have is to close this hatch on the supply deck and hope they leave the storage bay alone.”

  “Then we’re on the drift until someone comes along and rescues us. As long as they decide to leave us alone.” Halsey frowned, then his face brightened suddenly. He arched his head up and peered around the curve of the doorway. “There is one other option …”

  “What?” Runstom tried to follow his partner’s gaze. The hallway was clear. The gangbangers had mostly moved on, to somewhere in the main part of the ship. Two of them stood there near the breaches, their backs to the supply deck.

  “We get aboard one of those …” he started, then stopped. Runstom guessed he was trying to imagine what kind of ships were at the other ends of those tubes.

  “Did you grab your sidearm?” Runstom asked. “I only have a stun-stick,” he said, indicating the thin rod hanging off his belt.

  “Shit, I don’t have anything,” Halsey said, padding around his uniform. He turned to look back into the storage bay. “There has to be something in here. Let’s go look around.”

  “Okay. I’m going to find Jax first and check on him.”

  “Forget Jackson, Stan! We’re going to die out here if we don’t move right now!” Halsey was trying to yell in a whisper, and it made the veins in his skinny neck bulge.

  “Listen, George,” Runstom said, pushing down with his hands and trying to take the other officer down a notch. “Let’s just pretend for a minute that Jack Jackson is innocent. We’re about to attempt to commandeer some kind of space-gang vessel. We won’t even know what it will be until we’re on board. You and I are qualified to pilot one- or two-man patrollers, but anything bigger than that and we’ll have our hands full.” Halsey frowned at this, but kept his mouth shut. “Now I’m only trying to think a few steps ahead. If we manage to get away from this situation alive, and we’re out there in the middle of nowhere in god-knows-what kind of ship, I guarantee we’ll be glad to have another hand, especially a Life Support op!”

  “Goddammit,” Halsey grumbled. He sighed. “Okay. Go find that goddamn operator. I’ll look for arms. Now let’s go, for fuck’s sake!”

  They gave another look over at the two gangbangers farther up the corridor and then carefully made their way through the storage bay, ducking behind crates and shelving units as they went. The breach-guards seemed to have no inkling that someone might be hiding out on the supply deck. Or maybe they just didn’t care; which was worse news, because that would mean they knew it was going to be a quick in-and-out for their cohorts.

  Runstom found Jax lying on top of a crate, about three meters up. With the low gravity, he must have been flung up there, and now he lay unconscious, one arm dangling off the side. Runstom crouched and then sprang his legs, thrusting himself up to Jax’s level, and then beyond. He had to stick his arms up to keep from banging into the high ceiling, and he angled himself so that he’d land on top of the crate on his float back down. He slung Jax over his shoulder and lightly dropped off the side of the box. They landed with a soft jar, and Jax made a quiet whimpering grunt as they did. “Still alive,” Runstom breathed.

  Halsey came bounding over to them, carrying a small bundle of thin, black rods. “Fuckin’ stun-sticks was all I could find. Oh, and this med kit,” he said, unhooking a white plastic case from around his shoulder. “We could keep looking.”

  “No, let’s not waste time. I have an idea.” Runstom popped open the med kit and started rummaging through it. Fortunately, it was the consumer model. Everything was clearly labeled and marked with icon-laden instructions. He grabbed a case labeled Insta-Wake. He had no idea what this stuff was, but he’d seen it used before more than once while on the job. He popped open the case and pulled out the single-shot needle-gun.

  “Hold him down,” he said, and Halsey braced Jax as best he could. Runstom put the needle-gun up to the operator’s neck (as per the icon on the inside of the Insta-Wake box) and pulled the trigger. Jax coughed and his chest heaved, and Runstom quickly covered his mouth. His eyes fluttered open, slightly at first, then suddenly they were wide and intense.

  “Shh. Jax. We’ve got a bit of a situation here, and we need you to be calm.” Jax’s eyes were still wide, but he nodded. They took their hands off him and he sat up and rubbed his head. “We don’t have time to explain everything, so just trust us on this …”

  There were so many things that Dava loved about a low-grav fight. The sheer panic that accompanied the loss of control. The recoil of firearms working against their shooters. The majestic deadliness of someone trained to use acrobatics and blades in such a situation.

  She was the first one of the Wasters to come out of the kitchen and into the yard, a massive open cube in the largest part of the barge. The tables around the room were bolted to the floor, but just about everything else wasn’t and there was debris everywhere. She scanned up the sides of the cube at the walls lined with cells, stacked up for five levels. Guards and prisoners bounded clumsily about the space, each body with its own trajectory and intention, none of them aligned. She spent a tenth of a second drinking in the pure chaos and then went to work.

  The plan to target the artificial gravity pump at the bottom of the barge and then penetrate the rear corridors had worked as well as they could have hoped. Now all that remained was to find Johnny Eyeball and Captain 2-Bit.

  A stun-stick came her way, with a bulky uniform in tow. She drew her short, curved scimitar and snapped the stick in half with a quick cutting motion. The guard stumbled backward, half-falling, half-floating. She braced one foot against a nearby table and launched herself at him, her sharp blade slicing clean through the midsection of his cheap armor.

  She moved on without bothering to finish him off, making her way toward the starboard-side wall of cells. Another guard flew over her head, arms and legs flailing, before slamming into the back wall with a crunch. She looked toward the source of his trajectory to see Eyeball wrestling with another guard, both of them trying to gain control of a low-end ModPol pistol.

  With a few long leaps she got close enough to witness Eyeball bring one of the guards’ bare hands close to his face. She caught herself between a grin and a grimace as the man howled in pain while Eyeball sank his teeth into the soft flesh just above the thumb. The gun came free and Eyeball grabbed it with one hand and with the other, shoved the guard into a sprawling tumble across the space.

  “Hey Dava,” he said with a dripping-wet crimson smile. “They fly pretty good in this gravity, eh?”

  “Johnny,” she said. “Seven minutes left, then you better be at the rear corridor just beyond the kitchen.”

  “Right,” he said, checking his newly acquired weapon.

  “Where’s 2-Bit?”

  “Third level, opposite side.”

  They’d come for both, but she knew Eyeball could take care of himself. The higher priority was getting 2-Bit out of there. Her boss had made a big stink about how important it was to bring 2-Bit back home, how much the others looked up to him, how critical his experience was to the gang. It was that last bit that made Dava wonder. She always thought 2-Bit was an idiot, but he did have experience, which may have been another way of saying he knew things, things that Space Waste didn’t want to turn over to ModPol. Locations of caches, plans for upcoming operations, i
nformants sprinkled around the galaxy, those sorts of things. Secondary, everyone seemed to think that there was an advantage to having a couple of Wasters get arrested: recruitment. And 2-Bit was just the right man for the job. They knew that if they rescued him, he’d have a cartload of fresh meat to bring home as well.

  She headed for the opposite wall. When another guard raised his pistol at her, she kicked to her right and balled up to avoid the shot. The kickback threw his arm up high and her scimitar swept across it, severing the hand soundlessly. The shocked victim was almost as soundless with his gasp and before he could fall to his knees, she planted one boot on his helmeted head and vaulted herself up, grabbing the railing along the edge of the second-level walkway. From there, she got to the top of the railing and leapt high enough to grab the floor of the third-level walkway, pulling herself up quickly and easily in the low gravity.

  “2-Bit,” she called out. “Captain, where are you?”

  A yellow-gray hand appeared through the bars a few cells down. “Down here!”

  She approached and saw the old man standing tall and healthy as always. She couldn’t tell if he was exceptionally cool-headed given the situation, or if he was just oblivious to the imminent danger. Of course, 2-Bit had only gotten arrested because he was trying to rescue Eyeball from the mess he’d created back on B-4. She had to admire his ability not to lose his shit over the mistakes of his kin.

  “Dava, boy is it good to see you,” he said with a genuine smile. “The force fields went off when the gravity took a hit. Safety and all that.” He tapped on the bars. “But then these came down.”

  With a laser cutter and enough time, she could get through them – they weren’t more than cheap steel, probably designed for keeping things from flying out of the cells more than actually keeping prisoners in for any length of time – but the clock was ticking.

  She switched her RadMess to voice mode. “Thompson, I need the cell doors on the third floor opened up.”