Unexpected Rain

by Jason LaPier

  The reply crackled over the tiny speaker a second later. “Which one on the third floor?”

  “Just open all of them.”

  “Right, you got it, Dava. I’ll get someone on it.”

  “Dava.” 2-Bit gestured to a form huddled at the back of the cell. “I got a man in here with me. He’s from B-3, but was runnin’ some racket on B-4 where he was selling cheap vacation getaways to naïve B-foureans. He would get them aboard his ship, rob them, and drop them in the next dome over.”

  “Sounds like a real charmer,” she muttered.

  “Point is, he’s a pilot,” 2-Bit said. “Claims to be a pretty good one. And you know we always need more flyboys.”

  Her bosses were right, only 2-Bit could turn a jail term into a recruiting opportunity. She half-laughed at the thought. “Alright, bring him along.”

  A buzzer sounded and 2-Bit flinched and took his hands off the bars as they slid upward. “Come on,” he said to the back of the cell.

  A soft-pink-skinned B-threer came out of the darkness. “Thank you, thank you so much,” he said, then stopped short when he saw Dava. “What’s this?”

  “What, boy?” 2-Bit said. “Come on, we need to move.”

  “She’s with you?” he said, pointing at Dava. “This shitskin?”

  The emergency lighting began to fail and the yard grew darker, which had an effect of shocking the stream of chaotic shouts and clamoring into a sudden silence. Dava went empty in her center. It had been more than a decade since she left the domes of Betelgeuse-3. She’d left at the age of fifteen, after spending nine years of her life in that whitewashed, shopping-mall civilization.

  Children had been better than anyone at reminding her that she didn’t belong. That she came from that refuse-planet Earth, that she deserved to be incinerated and broken down into molecules like any other trash. She had to bear such barbs almost every day in those domes. She was branded with it, the mark of the unwelcome, the never-clean.

  But she had not had to bear it since joining Space Waste. Ten years since she’d even had to hear slang such as that.

  2-Bit was at her side, quietly nudging her back to the present. The B-threer seemed frozen, still inside the cell, the hateful eyes burning like those of the nasty dome children. She lifted the tip of her blade slightly and he stepped back.

  “Close the cell doors on level three,” she said into her armband.

  “What? We just opened them, Dava.”

  “Close them,” she said.

  Inside some supply hold, leaning against some towering crate, Jax groaned loudly. “Help. Someone. Is anyone there? I’m hurt. I need help! Can anyone hear me?” His voice cracked with fear – most of it real.

  “Ello? Ooze over der?” came a rough voice after a minute. “Com’on outta der!”

  Jax’s mind raced. Whatever it was Runstom gave him to wake him up was giving him the shakes. “I … I can’t move. It’s my leg. I think it’s broken. Who is that? Can you help me?”

  Jax heard another voice that he couldn’t make out. Then the rough voice again, “Ee says ’is leg’s bustid. Huh? Okay, okay. I’m going.” The voice got louder as it was directed back at Jax. “Okay, you. I’m comin’ over. Don’t move. I’m uh … I’m a medic.”

  Jax rolled his eyes, which caused a spike of pain to shoot through his throbbing head. He tried to keep his hands from shaking and sit still, his back to the large crate they’d found him lying on. He heard a movement, the tok-tok-tok of boots on the metal floor off to his right, and he turned his head. A scruffy, scarred, yellow face came around the side. “Ey, boy. You got a gun? You armnnNNNHHHHH—”

  The body that came with the face flexed violently, hands dropping some kind of bladed, rifle-like weapon with a clatter and after a couple of seconds, the man spun around and crashed to the floor, his shocked face staring at the ceiling. Bubbling drool oozed out of the side of his mouth and down his cheek.

  Halsey came around the corner of the crate, three smoking stun-sticks bundled together in one hand. He stared at the unconscious man with a tight grin on his face.

  “Goddamn,” Jax whispered. “That was a little extreme, wasn’t it?”

  The officer gave him an innocent look. “Well, I had to be certain, right? He’s a big boy!” He stuck one of the stun-sticks through a loop in his belt and dropped the other two as he bent down and snatched up the loose weapon. It looked like a stubby rifle with a pair of blades extending slightly away from the barrel at two different angles, forming a vague V-shape.

  Jax was about to ask Halsey if he knew how to use that thing, but then thought better of it. Whether he did or not, Jax didn’t really want to know, and there was no point in calling the officer’s ability into question now.

  Halsey turned around quickly, rifle secured in both hands, as a shout and a grunt came from the other side of the room. Jax stood up and carefully peered around the other side of the box.

  Runstom was about twenty meters away, his right arm wrapped around the neck of another scruffy-looking man. These men were part of a gang, apparently – at least, that’s as much as Runstom and Halsey had a chance to tell Jax before they turned him into bait. The officer was at a slight disadvantage, height-wise, and he swayed horizontally from the back of the gangbanger, who was making use of the low gravity to try to shake him loose.

  Halsey slung the rifle over his shoulder and snatched up the extra stun-sticks. He ran over to the spinning officer–gangbanger combination and stopped short, trying to figure out how to get a clear shot.

  “Put those goddamn things down,” Runstom said between huffs. “The current will run through him and hit me!”

  “You’re gonna have to let go!” Halsey yelled, legs bent at the knees, trying to keep the other two directly in front of him.

  The Space Waster spun around and faced Halsey, perhaps perceiving him to be a more immediate threat than the man trying to slowly asphyxiate him. He bent his head forward and, using the weight on his back for leverage, he lumbered at an alarming speed toward the other officer.

  “Let go now!” Halsey shouted as the big, yellow man bore down on him. He thrust out his two stun-sticks, one in each hand. From his angle, Jax could see Runstom just barely manage to jump free, but he was pretty sure Halsey had his eyes closed. The sticks connected with the big man’s chest and he went down with a jaw-clenched scream through his teeth, sinking to his knees and then keeling over backwards.

  Jax ran up to the officers. “Where’s his gun?” Halsey jerked his head erratically from side to side.

  Runstom looked in one direction, strode a few meters, and snatched up another blade-gun type of weapon. This one appeared to be more of a single-hand weapon; a smaller but terrible and jagged blade attached to a large pistol. Most of its bulk was due to its battery pack. Runstom flipped a switch on the side of the gun and a small, red dot appeared on the crate next to him. He looked up at them. “Okay, let’s move. Jax, you wait until we say it’s clear. We’re going for the closest hole on the right.”

  Their choice of breaches was, of course, entirely arbitrary. They had no idea what to expect as far as the attached ships went. Jax watched from behind the curve of the storage-bay doorway as Runstom and Halsey quickly moved down the long corridor, guns pointed forward.

  Runstom looked back over his shoulder long enough to yell, “Clear! Come on, Jax, move!”

  Jax tried to angle his legs so that his strides pushed him forward more than up, but he was completely unprepared for athletics in low gravity. He covered the distance of fifty meters to the first breach in what seemed like several agonizing minutes, but it could have been much less.

  When he got within a few meters of the officers, he was jarred by the clapping sound of Halsey’s rifle. The officer was shooting a projectile weapon of some kind, an old-fashioned gun that actually fired bullets, and the force of the recoil in the low gravity caused him to stagger backward and lose his footing. “The door on the far right side!” he yelled, trying to g
et back to his feet. Runstom started firing his laser down the hall, blindly shooting down the right side.

  Gunfire echoed down the hallway and Jax was sure he heard something whiz by his head. The oval corridor was a good twenty or thirty meters across, and while Jax and Runstom were taking position near the wall on their right, Halsey was closer to the opposite side. He got to his feet and dove into a nearby breach. The officer then set himself in a position where he could brace his back against the side of the tube and lean out to fire his rifle down the hall without getting pushed backwards.

  Jax watched the scene with bemusement, until Runstom turned and shoved him into the boarding tube. He came in after the operator and leaned out the side of the tube, sending laser fire down the corridor. After a few blasts, he turned to Jax and shouted, “Get down the tube to the ship. Make sure we can fly the thing outta here!” Jax started to turn, but Runstom yelled “Wait!” He unhooked the stun-stick from his belt and handed it to the operator.

  “What am I supposed to do with this?” he said, fear creeping into his voice.

  “There might be a pilot standing by. Just press the button on the handle and poke him with the round ball at the end.” Jax stared at the stick in bewilderment. “Go, now, goddammit!” Runstom shouted, and the look of intensity and violence in the officer’s eyes made Jax want to go down the tube and face someone less terrorizing. Like maybe a bloodthirsty gangbanger.

  Runstom stuck his gun back out the breach-end of the tube and with a battle cry, continued blasting. Jax could hear Halsey join in, and for that brief moment he imagined the ModPol officers were a two-man army, fighting off a wave of invaders. He spun around and headed down the tube.

  The tube itself was barely large enough in diameter for a grown person to stand. Being B-fourean, Jax was taller than many other humans and had to crouch as he picked his way through the flexing tube. There were handles dotting the length of it, and he quickly discovered their intended use. Once he was off the barge, the failing artificial gravity was no longer a factor, because there was no gravity at all. The tube was some kind of segmented metal. It was not transparent, and for this, he was thankful. It didn’t seem like a good time to be confronted with the vast emptiness of space.

  After a minute or two and some distance Jax couldn’t judge, he reached the end. He could still hear Runstom shouting and blasting, and he was pretty sure he could make out the clapping of Halsey’s rifle even at this distance. The hatchway at this end was open. That seemed like a terribly dangerous thing to do, and Jax had to imagine it violated all kinds of safety regulations. So, yeah, he thought as he slowly pulled himself through the hatchway. Add that to their list of atrocities.

  The ratio of ducking to returning fire for Runstom and Halsey was steadily growing in favor of ducking. There was a palpable increase in pressure coming from the center of the barge as the gangbangers reassembled their forces and returned to their only escape route. It seemed like a good plan, but now Runstom was having his doubts about getting between a legion of Space Wasters and their ships.

  “George,” he said in between blasts of his laser pistol. “George!”

  Halsey stopped shooting and leaned back into the tube he occupied on the opposite side of the corridor. He struggled with an extra ammo clip that was affixed to the side of the heavily modified rifle. “My last clip,” he yelled. “We need to get out of here.”

  The gangbangers didn’t waste time taking advantage of the short pause. Runstom and Halsey were both forced to lean back into their tubes as the hallway crackled with machinegun fire. Runstom panted as his heart threatened to climb out of his throat. He and his fellow officers had combat training, but it didn’t come close to preparing him for something like this mess. He looked down at the cellpack in the laser pistol. It was down to about a ten-percent charge. He had no idea how many shots that translated into.

  The continuous rain of bullets smoothed into a series of rhythmic bursts, and for a brief moment he thought that maybe it meant the gangbangers were running low on ammo as well and were attempting to conserve it. This thought gave him a flicker of hope until he remembered all the blades attached to the guns. Maybe he was better off getting shot before it came to that.

  A new sound caught his attention, a strange metal-bouncing-on-metal sound. He and Halsey both looked into the corridor from their opposite-sided shelters. A cylindrical object bounded along and continued all the way to the supply hold they’d come from only minutes before.

  “Shit.” Runstom wanted to yell to Halsey that it was a grenade, but the explosion beat him to it. The heat of it blew up the hall and into his tube, but there was nothing more than that. He ventured a peek back down toward the hold and saw the burned scarring just inside the open doors.

  He realized in that second that whoever had thrown the grenade hadn’t accounted for the low gravity. The next one came with an adjusted aim, rolling to a spot directly between them where it stopped and spun idly like a bottle in a party game.

  Halsey took two steps into the corridor that was still being peppered by cover fire and swung his rifle like a club, smacking the cylinder with one of the blades at the end of the barrel. The grenade flew back down the hall and Halsey cried out as a spray of red burst from his forearm. The rifle clattered to the floor and he dropped back on his ass and kicked at the floor with his feet, pushing himself back into the tube.

  “George!” Runstom reflexively stepped toward his partner, but the spray of bullets drove him back.

  The returned grenade blew and the cover fire was momentarily interrupted. Runstom didn’t have time to wonder if it actually took anyone out, he just used the space of a breath to dive across the hall and into the other tube. He grabbed Halsey by his good arm and hoisted him to his feet, but the other officer cried out as he stood.

  He pulled away the bloody arm to reveal thicker, darker blood coming from his abdomen. “Stan,” he gasped, reflexively holding his wound once again. “You gotta go.”

  “No.” Runstom tugged roughly at Halsey’s arm. “Come on, George. We’re both going.”

  Halsey groaned but didn’t protest further. Runstom tried to think but he had no time. They were outnumbered, outgunned, and it was clear the rest of the barge had fared even worse. Space Waste had won. He looked down the nearby tube. No doubt there was a ship at the other end, but he’d already sent Jax down the tube opposite. More than ever, Runstom thought their only chance at escape was to stick together.

  In the several seconds that had passed, the gunfire had not returned. “Come on, George,” he said with a tug. “Now or never.”

  They limped across the width of the spacious hallway. A burst of gunfire sent them diving for the tube. Runstom felt the bite of one shot in his thigh and the ripping sting of another across his midsection before he hit the inside of the tube. He spun around to see Halsey twisting in the corridor, spitting curses and clutching his leg.

  “George!”

  Another cylinder bounced along the floor, thumping Halsey in the chest. He grabbed at it, bobbling it until he spun it around and found the safety clip. He clutched at it and looked at Runstom. “Go, Stan!”

  “George, what are you doing? Throw it back!”

  “Go!” He started belly crawling toward the tube. Sporadic bursts lit up the air. “Go before I blow us both up!”

  Then it clicked. He was going to blow the tube loose so that no one could follow.

  “Damn you,” Runstom said and turned away from his only ally.

  He flung himself as deep into the tube as he could, then scrambled to yank himself along by the handholds when the gravity disappeared altogether.

  Still coping with the weightlessness, Jax pulled himself through the small ship slowly and carefully. He was in what appeared to be a passenger-seating and load-out room. There were twelve or so “seats” on the walls which were angled in a way that, if there were any gravity, one could walk up to them and strap in securely without actually sitting. They were similar to
the mount that was in his cell, only made for voluntary use. On the other side of the room was a series of racks that contained a few spare guns and what looked like suits of armor.

  On the opposite wall from the hatchway was another door. This one was closed, and apparently locked, according to the lit sign on the front of it. There were a few flimsy-looking spacesuits hanging haphazardly on either side of it. Jax realized that this was probably the cockpit door. It was a small ship indeed; a personnel carrier, probably hijacked from a military outfit at one time. Just enough to get a boarding party from one big ship to another. They’d be lucky if it could even do Warp.

  Jax knew the cockpit door wouldn’t open unless the outer hatchway was closed. He’d have to cut off the ModPol officers long enough to secure the ship. He put a foot against the wall, hit the door trigger on the hatchway, and sprang his body across the chamber to the opposite side, grabbing onto the latches on the wall and hiding himself behind the spacesuit closest to the cockpit.

  He waited. The seconds passed. He tasted bitterness in his own saliva and he forced his breathing to slow, trying desperately not to vomit. Finally he heard the internal mechanisms of the door sliding around, eventually clinking into place. The door slowly opened.

  “Hey, fellas,” a voice said. “Back already? Hello?”

  Suddenly, unexpected to both Jax and the pilot, there was a series of clanging sounds coming from the outer hatchway.

  “What the hell?” said the pilot to himself. He was still out of view from Jax. The banging of something solid on the metal hatch came again. “Okay, I’m comin’, I’m comin’,” he shouted, then said in a quiet aside, “How did those idiots manage get the inner door to open without coming through the outer door?”

  Jax could hear the snapping sound of belts being unclipped. He tensed and poked the little ball at the end of his stun-stick between the sleeve and the midsection of the spacesuit, pushing the sleeve aside just enough for him to watch his aim. A body began to float by and he hit the button, jabbing the stick forward.