Flashpoint (Hellgate)

by Mel Keegan

  “A fool, I am not,” she snorted. “Hey, is Ramon with you?”

  Travers shared an amused glance with Marin. “He’s up in the clubs, humping, missing all the excitement.”

  And then Marin caught his breath in surprise, a whisper over the combug in Travers’s right ear as Ramon’s voice called from somewhere close to hand and upward,

  “No, he’s not.” He chuckled humorlessly. “Sergei called … bless his avaricious little heart. I see you, Zac, sittin’ there with a big chunk of steel sticking out of your leg. It’s a medic you want, not a needle dart and a one-way ride to the airlock in a bodybag. Throw the damned gun away – eres un imbacil, eh, Rosaline?”

  “Some people’s children,” Rosaline growled. “Hey, Ramon, you got a clear shot at him?”

  “I got a shot,” Ramon said doubtfully. “You want I should put one in him? Doesn’t seem right to shoot a moron with twenty centimeters of steel sticking out of his leg.”

  Her voice rose to a roar. “You hear the man, Zac? You want a bullet in you before you’ll throw the stupid gun away?”

  A groan of pain answered her, and then the hollow-sounding skitter of plastic. “Get me a medic. Ramon, for chrissakes, get me a medic.”

  “Get one for yourself,” Ramon said nastily. “I’m comin’ down now, Rosaline, and I’m trustin’ you. Do the smart thing, lady. I see your face, I’m likely to shoot it, just in case, sabe.”

  “Babe,” she told him, “I’m not even here. Take your friends and get the hell out.” She coughed a laugh. “Mind you, the next time we answer to Boden Zwerner, we’re dead meat.”

  “Forget about Zwerner,” Marin advised as Ramon began to make his way down the steps against the side of the building. “If he’s not already dead, he soon will be.” He looked up at Ramon. “He took two cracks at Sergei, and he missed both times … now it’s Sergei’s turn.”

  “And Sergei won’t be missing,” Ramon finished. He touched the combug in his left ear. “I’m not getting much from the Mako or the Wastrel, just a few words here and there. They’re jamming shit out of the airwaves. Are we leaving, or what?”

  He was at ground level as he finished speaking, with a gun in either hand – and not palmguns, Travers noted, but something by Chiyoda, small and powerful. Vaurien and Jazinsky stepped out into the alley to join them, and it was Vaurien who lifted his voice and called,

  “Rosaline, how many more of Zwerner’s victims are between us and the hangar?”

  “By now?” she said with harsh, cynical humor, “they’ll probably be on the other side of Halfway. Which is where I should be.”

  “Then, we’re leaving.” He gestured in the direction of the docks, the hangar, the Capricorn. “After you.”

  “Me?” Ramon cracked a broad grin.

  “You know this place, these people, this work,” Marin reasoned. “Take point, kid. We’ll cover the rear, and we’re out.”

  The combugs spat a storm of static, and Travers struggled to distinguish a syllable here and there. It was a shooting party out there. The Wastrel and the Mako were maneuvering freely, but Zwerner had launched the two small ships against the tug while he apparently tried to make a break from his private hangar. Sergei van Donne had other ideas. His voice punched through the jamming now and then, a few furious words which imparted a fraction of the story, just enough to tell Travers space was a dangerous chaos.

  But the access passage back to the hangar was clear, and the hangar itself had become an anthill. Several vessels were leaving at once, and Vaurien swore softly as they hurried back to the Capricorn.

  “Paranoia’s catching,” Jazinsky muttered.

  “It’s Zwerner’s buddies, bugging out before they can be dragged into the fight,” Ramon said scathingly.

  “He just found out what his friends are.” Travers aimed the remote at the Capricorn, and as Etienne recognized the ID code, the lift engines began to whine. A hot storm of repulsion assaulted the eyes and sinuses as they jogged the last twenty yards, and Travers was pleased to lock the hatch behind them.

  In the cockpit, Vaurien had already jacked in and was negotiating with hangar control. Marin’s face was a stony mask as he listened in, and Travers was not surprised to hear Vaurien saying,

  “You either open that ’lock and let us go, or your drones will be welding for a week, you understand me?”

  It seemed the Freespacers did. “They’re under orders,” Marin guessed. “Zwerner’s people, playing delaying tactics – keep us pinned down here as long as possible, if we even made it back here.”

  And Zwerner, Travers thought darkly as he lowered himself into a seat at the weapons console and ran up the harness, was currently discovering how few friends he possessed here. Spinners flashed red, sirens blared across the hangar as it began to blow down, and Vaurien gave the repulsion a nudge to lift the Capricorn.

  Before the hangar’s wide armordoor was even half open they were out, and within five thousand meters of distance between the tailpipes and the ramshackle chaos of Halfway, the comm jamming cleared enough for Etienne to punch through it.

  The Wastrel was the biggest marker in the navdeck display but five other ships were in space, and all were swarming like so many hornets. Travers saw the Mako at once. Two were the ships which had assaulted the Wastrel at dock, and one of them was badly damaged. Ten kilometer streamers of coolant, fuel and atmosphere marked the path along which it was drifting, and as Travers jacked into the loop and began to listen he heard distress calls. Someone was bitterly haranguing van Donne, and as Travers listened he heard Fernando Wang’s unmistakable voice – the Krait was in space. Wang was not going to be denied, if Zwerner was running.

  “You get what you deserve, Corbin,” he was telling the whining pilot whose ship was streaming every liquid and gas stored aboard. “You fly for that bastard, you’re no friend of ours. I see your face again, here or anywhere else, you better put a bullet in me before I get my hands on you.”

  The whining voice began to jeer, but Travers heard the sound of fear behind every word. “You going to feed me to that snake of yours? Well, screw you, Fernie. You’re sick, you know that?”

  And then van Donne himself: “Let it be, for chrissakes, Fernie – you don’t see Zwerner trying to jump out? I’m reading Weimann ignition signatures! He’s going to jump so early, his drive engines will fry Halfway. You got a shot at him?”

  On the very fringe of the Capricorn’s sensors, Zwerner’s ship was heading away fast. He was at full throttle, stern cannons pulsing sporadically to keep the Mako off his tail, and van Donne was right. The unmistakable energy signatures of a Weimann ignition were framed in Vaurien’s threedee.

  “Wastrel, you hear me?” Richard did not raise his voice. “Tully?”

  “Right here, boss,” Ingersol responded. “We didn’t take any damage. I just ran the quickie diagnostic set, we’re good to go.”

  “Then go,” Vaurien told him. “Put some solid armor between Zwerner and us, and get that son of a bitch. Don’t let him get out.”

  Let him jump to e-space, and the next time they saw him, he would be basking beneath Earth’s own sun, and enjoying the protection of Tactical, while the fallout of a too-close Weimann ignition left a roasted colony behind him. Marin was intent on the sensors, and his voice was sharp. “Sixty seconds, Richard, and he’ll jump. I’m looking at his drive signature right now. Can the Wastrel reach him?”

  “I don’t know,” Vaurien said cautiously, “but Zwerner should certainly be in range of our guns. Tully?”

  “I heard that,” the tug’s chief engineer assured him. “Curt’s right, we can’t overtake him, but I can sure as hell make a mess of him before he can jump out. I’ll put one in his engine deck, scram his reactors. You there, van Donne?”

  “Yo,” van Donne sang. “I want the killshot, Vaurien. He’s mine, you hear?”

  “You can have him,” Richard said dryly. “Tully, we’re not going to catch you. This bucket doesn’t have the speed. Don’t w
ait for us.”

  “I wasn’t going to,” Ingersol told him in glib tones. “He’s thirty seconds from a jump, and we’ll be in range in less than twenty. Hold on.”

  The Wastrel was driving ahead, far faster than either the Mako or the Krait. The only reason Zwerner was ahead was that he had run first and fast, while the tug was still breaking free of the docking pylons. Ingersol had cleared the big ship’s cannons; his targets were already acquired, and as Travers watched the instruments he saw Zwerner’s own guns open up.

  He was wasting his time, and he might have known it. The tug was armored like an asteroid miner. Her forward hull was so thick, she could have driven bows-first into a minor planet and swept it before her. Ingersol let Zwerner’s gunner fire as he liked, and picked his own targets with precision.

  Two demolition shells smashed into the engine deck, high above the keel of Zwerner’s ship. A vast gout of blazing gas wreathed the hull, and Jazinsky said with dark satisfaction, “both reactors are scramming … five minutes to restart, minimum, even if there’s no actual damage – and I think there is. Good shooting, Tully.”

  “Thanks,” Ingersol said through the crackle of signal distortion. “All yours, van Donne. Take him if you want him.”

  “I want him,” Sergei growled.

  “We want him,” Wang added. “Hold up, Sergei.”

  “Catch me if you can,” van Donne challenged.

  They were converging fast on Zwerner’s coordinates, and all Zwerner’s crew could do was throw every erg of power into their guns. The Mako was an ugly brute of a ship, faster than the Krait, and Travers was unsurprised when van Donne was the first to come under Zwerner’s guns. Ingersol could have covered him, but he did not. He had no more affection for van Donne than had Jazinsky, and she was watching the threedee as if she would have enjoyed seeing the Mako blown out of space.

  “She’s hit,” Ramon rasped. “She’s losing speed and flying crooked … Sergei! Sergei, you hear me?”

  It was the copilot on the air – Rafe Byrne, who had flown with van Donne for years now, and bedded with him for even longer. “Engines are farting around. We’re hurt. Sergei’s looking at the numbers … we can’t make a Weimann jump, but I’ve still got two out of four cannons.”

  As he spoke, Byrne was laying down a pattern of fire across the upper hull of Zwerner’s ship. The big, powerful Kotaro-Fuente yacht was elegant, stylish, but it did not have the hull armor to withstand a battle, and Byrne knew exactly where to hit it to do the heaviest damage.

  “Wait for me, goddamn it,” Wang roared.

  And then van Donne’s voice, taut as rawhide: “The ship’s dead, Fernie, it’s not going anywhere. You mean you want salvage rights?”

  The Krait was on his tail now, catching him up fast as the Mako began to wallow on fractional power. Wang’s cannons were almost a match for the Mako, and he was firing as he overtook van Donne. Zwerner’s yacht was crippled, drifting, buffeted by every impact, and Travers saw the early signs of breakup.

  Before he could speak Marin said quietly, “Escape pods. I’m seeing three. Tully, you want to catch them in tractors?”

  “No,” Ingersol said promptly. “We should be rescuing Boden freakin’ Zwerner’s crew?”

  “We should be finishing the job we came here to do,” Marin said levelly. “The contract is for Zwerner – and he could still be in one of those pods.”

  “Blow ’em to hell?” Ramon suggested. “If you’re too squeamish to do it, get out of the way and let me.”

  For a moment Vaurien seriously considered the offer, and then touched the combug in his right ear and said, “Reel ’em in, Tully. If they’re alive, let Harrison Shapiro’s interrogators get what they can out of them. It’s a good bet they’ll have been close to Zwerner. They might know Zwerner’s contact, back in Earth.”

  “The bastard who instigated the CL-389 incident, paid Zwerner to set it up,” Marin murmured. “Tully?”

  “Uh … yeah,” Ingersol agreed. “I’ve got ’em, boss. Pulling ’em in now. I’ll put ’em in Decontamination 3. It’s the best lockup we have. Damnit, Fernie, get the hell out of there!”

  The Krait was interfering, getting in the way, and Wang shouted over the chaos of jamming and comm distortion, “Let me get close enough to scan the pods. I want Zwerner.”

  “You couldn’t tell Zwerner from any other human life sign,” Jazinsky said loudly, “unless he actually opens his mouth and says who he is! Fernie, get out of there. Even if Zwerner’s alive, the best he can hope for is a solitary confinement, and interrogation that’ll fry his brains, before he’s quietly executed.”

  Wang skipped a beat. “Interrogation? You can promise me the real deal? He’s going to get shit beaten out of him, electrodes on his nuts while the lights go down all over Fleet Borushek?”

  “If that’s what it takes,” Vaurien said stonily. “You think Shapiro’s going to be the perfect host? Leave it, Wang. You got the result you wanted. I’ll give you one chance in five Zwerner’s even in one of those pods, and if he is – God help him.”

  Another pause, and then the Krait peeled off and Wang growled, “All right. Good enough. I’m out of here … Sergei?”

  “Yo,” van Donne called.

  “You need an assist, bro?” Wang offered in doubtful tones.

  But van Donne made negative noises. “We’re going to need major help, Fernie, way more than you can give, but thanks. We’re shut down here, Vaurien – I just scrammed the lot, before we start leaking everything toxic we got. I can yell for a tow from Halfway, but the place is probably lousy with Zwerner’s bounty hunters. Take us aboard … you owe us one.”

  In fact, he was right, and Vaurien did not fret over the decision. “You heard the man, Tully. Put him in Hangar 6, and have the drones standby.”

  “Here we go a-bloody-gain,” Ingersol breathed, just within the pickup range of the comm. “Give me strength.”

  “If I can’t render an assist,” Wang was saying, “I’m out of here. Catch up with you in Marak City, Sergei.”

  “Yeah, later,” van Donne said, clearly preoccupied with the condition of his ship. “Watch your tail, Fernie.”

  Off the Capricorn’s starboard bow, the Wastrel was in clear view now. Travers took his eyes from the threedee, released the harness and stood up to use his own eyes. The ship was newly scorched in several places, but she was too big, too powerful to even notice the damage, other than to assign it a place in the routine maintenance schedule.

  Red and blue beacons winked, marking the positions of the three escape pods. Travers caught a glimpse of them as Vaurien took the Capricorn in under the tug’s belly. The Krait had gone, heading out fast to the Weimann exclusion limit, when a hangar door slid open, spilling a halo of white light. Vaurien cut speed and took the Capricorn up into it.

  In the back of the cockpit, Travers slung an arm across Marin’s shoulders and listened to the acid banter between Ramon and van Donne. Unless Travers missed his guess, they were not yet bunkmates. There was a broad element of flirting which would dissipate after the fact. Ramon was playing it to the utmost, and enjoying it.

  “The pods are aboard,” Ingersol reported as the Capricorn rode back to its usual berth, and the repulsion shut down. “Decon 3 is locked up tighter than the corsets on a citybottom hustler.”

  “Keep it that way,” Vaurien said tersely. He turned the ship over to Etienne and gave Travers and Marin a dark look. “I’m going to take a tip from Harrison, and place security matters in your capable hands.”

  “Thanks a bunch.” Marin turned up the collar of his jacket before heading out into the sharp chill of the hangar. Travers was a step behind him. “Swing by the armory, Neil,” he added. “I don’t think I’d trust Zwerner’s personal chef to play nice, much less his bodyguards!”

  Travers was thinking the same thing. There was no way to know who or what was in the pods. The yacht would run comfortably with a crew of five and up to eight passengers, but those numbers could be
quadrupled in an emergency, though the lifepods would accommodate a maximum of sixteen. The more people were crammed aboard, the greater the risk, and when chaos broke loose it would be every man for himself. Zwerner could have been shot dead by one of his own, in a mad scramble for the last pod.

  From the armory, they took a pair of Chiyoda machine pistols and four Zamphir sidearms, all fully charged. Vaurien watched without comment, but touched his combug. “Bill Grant? You there, Billy? We might need you down in Decon. Some bugout pods just came aboard.”

  The medic had obviously been waiting for Vaurien’s summons. “Be with you in one minute, soon as I pick up my gear,” he promised. The Australian accent reminded Travers powerfully of the last hours aboard the Intrepid. Bill Grant had done some of his best work there, and he was well through his studies here, under Vaurien’s wing. He would be qualified soon – Doctor Grant, with a diploma issued by a Deep Sky college, and more field experience than any five inner city physicians combined.

  Decontamination 3 was aft, right above the last hold before the engine deck. It was a part of the Wastrel humans rarely visited – cold, dim, dirty. Drones worked here on the rare occasion when salvage had to be cleaned up before it could safely be handled. Machines were oblivious to corrosion, peeled paintwork, dead fluoros and the trash of the fabrication shops which had been dumped out of the way here six months ago and forgotten.

  The service elevator deposited them at a tiny equipment store where Ingersol was waiting with an AR-90 in one hand and a mug of coffee in the other. He gave an animated shudder as they strode into the dimness and the reek of spilled chemicals and old machinery.

  “Jeez, I gotta get down here and get this fumigated,” he muttered. “I haven’t been here in a year … the garbage hasn’t moved.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever been here,” Jazinsky admitted, “and I might never be back. This is disgusting.”

  “So are the inmates.” Vaurien waffed a hand before his nose. “They stink as much as – what in the hell is that smell?”

  “I don’t actually know.” Ingersol sounded mildly anxious. “I think two spills got mixed … and I think it’s a little bit toxic. I’m getting light headed. Don’t worry, boss, I’ll get the drones in here.”