by Watson Davis
"What?" Orchid Flower exclaimed. "Stand down, EC28201. Go back to your designated location, and power down your damned weapons."
# # #
Jarod Gorovitz knelt in his private chapel, hands clasped before him, eyes shut. He prayed for God to cleanse his soul of the taint of talking to Dr. Nieve and dealing with devils, stilling the anger and disgust he always felt after such meetings, searching for the inner peace only God can provide.
A sandalwood candle burned on the altar before him. His knees rested on a plush velvet pad. Peace eluded him.
The door to his chapel creaked open, the sound echoing in the empty space, bouncing off the unadorned stone walls.
Jarod's head rose but his eyes remained shut. He hoped one of the younger children had sneaked in, but feared something more serious.
"First Father?" a middle son's voice whispered, a quiver in his tone—young Luke, by the sound of it.
So. Something more serious. Jarod opened his eyes and rose to his feet, turning to peer back at the door. Light streamed in and hurt his eyes. He winced, raising his hand to protect his eyes. "Yes, Luke?"
"The LightDream courier has left the station, sir." Luke bowed.
"That, at least, is a blessing," Jarod said, the hard knot of revulsion not diminished. "But why are you here?"
"They have armored up and are powering up their weapons," Luke answered. "Second Father requests your presence on the bridge."
Jarod's hand flew to his temple, opening up a channel to the Family ship's bridge. "Shoot!" he screamed. "Shoot those godless sons of bitches and whores!"
# # #
"Sending you meet-up co-ords," Kevin said in a calm, almost distracted, almost uncaring voice.
"Vanessa? Did you read that?" I touched my temple, relieved my on-board had come back to life with the removal of the collar, and stepped into a hallway, shoving Mercedez before me. I blinked my eyes, seeing a faint light beckoning me, giving me a direction—right into a wall. "Received."
"This way?" Vanessa stood on her tiptoes, talking to me over the heads of the sobbing girls and boys surrounding us, flexing her recently-dislocated fingers. "The maps don't fucking synch."
"No." My low-light vision enhancements spared me the faded colors of the peeling wallpaper, the stains and splotches of Nemesis-knows-what still evident from when the Family held me hostage here, the stink of sweat and sex and vomit and blood hanging in the misty air.
"That way." I pointed down the corridor opposite of the way we'd entered, trying to remember the layout of this place—a layout I'd tried to remove from my memories, a place I'd tried not to think about with such determination I’d thought I'd forgotten it, but now it seemed so familiar. I yelled, "Emergency evac. Everybody out!"
"Everyone hold hands and follow me." Vanessa backed down the hall, tugging on one of the boys, a boy with short stubble sprouting on his head, his hair shaved off. He wobbled, eyes wide, blind in the darkness, taking the hand of a girl next to him. With her other hand, Vanessa banged on the walls, on the doors, screaming, "Emergency! Everyone out!"
Shapes moved down the passage behind me: people running the wrong way, into the clutches of Santina and her minions, being thrown against the walls, falling, being dragged down.
Santina. I stopped, watching, guilt gnawing at my guts. Mercedez sprinted away from me, and I watched her run, considered going after her, leaving everyone else behind, or just beating her senseless and leaving her to die.
"Dorothea?" Vanessa pushed and pulled, trying to keep the kids together, trying to get them moving. "Come along now."
"I can't see!" one girl screamed, curling up on the ground, shielding her head with her hands.
I picked the girl up, a teenager carrying a few extra pounds. She hasn’t been here long. I stared into her face, into her eyes. “What’s your name? Look at me. What’s your name?”
She blinked. In a quivering voice, she said, “I’m Stacie. Stacie Grudt.”
“Stacie, there are some people here in worse shape than you,” I said. “I need you to help them get the hell out of here.”
Her lip quivered. She took a deep breath, and said, “Okay. Okay, yeah.”
I pointed her toward the exit.
“Dorothea?” Vanessa, rising up on her tiptoes to look over the people between us, glared at me. “Get your ass in gear, soldier."
A couple emerged from the door to my left—a man with a creased face, a face exposed to too much UV light through its faceplate, now sporting blemishes maturing into cancers, and with the man, a little moon-faced teenaged girl, frightened, her lip quivering with her breaths. She clung to him, and I pushed the two of them down the passageway.
A strident alarm blasted twice, slowing down the third time, the pitch getting lower and softer until it died out completely.
Several doors down the hall opened, people pouring out of them, pulling clothes on, pulling ragged suits on, looking around, hopping down the passage. "What's wrong?"
"Are we losing pressure?"
"Go, that way." I shoved at people, old and young, male and female, herding them forward, peeking back over my shoulder at Santina and her all-too-rapidly-expanding gang. "Run for your fucking lives."
"What the hell are you all doing?" A man stomped down the corridor, goggles on his head, yelling at the people passing him. "Calm yourselves. The power will be back on any second now. If you go, don't expect a refund."
He stopped, staring at Vanessa, looking at the mob following her, bending over for a better look. He straightened and shook his head, hands before him. "No, no, no."
"We can't just go." One girl reached out to the girls and boys around her. "What are they going to do to us? They'll kill us."
“Something worse will happen if you don’t!” I grabbed the girl's arm, yanking her up, pitching her down the hall. She fell to her knees in the middle of the floor, but a boy helped her up, reaching out and lurching forward.
"Everybody's got to clear out." Vanessa waved her arms.
The man with the goggles stopped holding out his hands. "You can't do that. Paying customers can leave, but the toys are going to stay."
"Do you need a hand?" I shouted.
“Seriously, Hero?” Vanessa turned her head and glared at me. She whirled on the ball of her foot, whipping her leg up and out in textbook form of what not to do in a real fight, driving the side of her foot into the man's throat. He went down fast and hard, collapsing in a coughing heap. She winced and hopped up and down on her toes, looking a little pale.
Another man came out of a door next to me, throwing the door open, squinting and sightless, his suit clinging onto one of his ankles. "What the hell happened to the fucking lights?"
"It's an emergency." I seized him by the shoulders and tossed him toward the exit. "Time to go."
He stumbled forward, arms flailing.
"Got stairs to the exit!" Vanessa bellowed.
I ducked inside the room, scanning it, grabbing the boy on the bed—naked, face bruised. He pulled away from me.
"Come on, kid,” I said. “We've got to get you to safety."
He shut his eyes, coiling up, clutching himself. "Let me die."
"No." I gathered him up, and I carried him out.
The man who had been with him lurched around, his hands stretching out unseeing in the darkness. I kicked him in the testicles, knocking him on his ass.
An eerie moaning came from down the darkened hallway. I pivoted, the hair on the back of my neck rising, keeping my movements slow, careful not to trigger a reaction; I strained my eyes, testing the limits of the low-light enhancements, the boy whimpering in my arms.
“Go.” Santina stood a few steps behind me, not looking at me but looking down at an angle, like she was studying the corner where the wall met the floor. A crowd milled about behind her, shifting from one foot to another: the guards we'd left, the girls from the kitchens below, their bodies twisting, eyes looking like shadowy holes, mouths gaping open.
"S
antina?" I inched away from the man crawling on the ground. I stared back at Santina, expecting her and all those behind her to come charging toward me, not knowing if I'd keep carrying the boy, or if I'd drop him to save myself.
My stomach flipped in shame at the thought.
The corridor behind me had cleared except for the man with the goggles holding his throat. Santina crept forward, the groaning hunger of those behind her growing louder, threatening, their faces turning toward me.
I spun and ran, hugging the boy with both arms, my shoulder hurting, face throbbing, side aching. I jumped over the guard, stumbling as I landed with the boy hugging my neck, clutching at me with his thin, frail arms. I staggered forward, focused on the stairway, and didn't glance back until I reached the end. Vanessa waited for me at the bottom, looking up for me, waving her hands at me.
I stared back down that dark hall.
Santina stood almost the same distance as she had been standing from me when I had first seen her, like she was just maintaining the distance between us, holding herself back, holding the others back. She stared directly at me while the others like her knelt around the two men, covering them. Santina pointed away, pointed toward the stairs. "Keep going," she whispered.
I was doing it again, abandoning someone I cared for to save myself.
I ran down the stairs and out the door anyway.
I am no fucking hero.
# # #
"I'm not stopping my evasive maneuvers until they stop targeting me," Lu said to Orchid Flower control, rolling the ship to port, evading a barge, swerving to get back on course to the ejection point.
The yacht fired a barrage from her energy weapons. Lu ducked the Old Girl behind a row of docked vessels, the plasma bolts ripping those vessels apart, shredding their hulls. Two shots slipped through a space between the ships and collided with the Old Girl's screens, the impact knocking her off course, skewing her to the side, the lights inside her fluttering.
Lu's hands danced over her controls, struggling to right the ship. She flipped her comm to her passengers, saying, "Hold tight. Gonna get bumpy. I might launch you without warning."
"Roger that," Edmund said. "We are locked and ready for insertion."
"I'll drop you as close as I can," Lu responded, her hands flicking back and forth. She switched her comm to Stemple. "Go linear gravity compensators only; feed the difference into the shields. We are out of our league here."
"Check," Stemple said. "They're rotating more barrels our way."
Downward gravity ended and the vessel's acceleration slammed Lu back into her chair, her flight suit redistributing pressure to keep blood pumping to her brain.
A bombardment of plasma and missiles whizzed by the Old Girl, confusing the sensors. Lu ducked out of atavistic instinct. "What the hell was that?"
The majority of the bolts and missiles flew wide, missing the LightDream yacht, but the ship's shields wavered beneath the forces unleashed upon them.
"I don't know." Stemple changed his primary display, moving from his firing solution over to sensor history. "I wasn't watching."
"Those shots originated from the Gorovitz main structure," Kevin said from his berth where he awaited insertion. "They decided to join the party."
"Shoot the LightDream craft now." Lu yanked back on the control stick with both hands, her feet pushing against the deck, adding more boost to raise the ship away from the protective cover of the mining crafts, the compensators groaning. Lu gritted her teeth, growling, the pressure crushing her breath out of her lungs.
Stemple flipped back to his firing solution screen. "Gimme a sec, gimme a sec."
"Don't got one."
The LightDream yacht let loose another blast, even more of its armament discharging a vicious fusillade of power.
"Insertion." Lu hit the button to release the Motayen team. She cringed, closing her eyes, preparing herself for a salvo the Old Girl was never designed to handle, a blow more powerful than her aging shield tech and armor could withstand; Lu fully expected her part in the fight to be over, but she was glad Edmund would have his shot.
# # #
Outside The Jealous Rose's front entrance, on a dusty thoroughfare with broken-down carts littering the sides of the streets, I set the boy down with the other kids. I touched my temple. "Edmund? ETA?"
“We’re having some problems up here,” Edmund answered.
Down the street, Mercedez stood, hands on her knees, panting, some of her Family guards touching her arms, patting her back, conversing with her. She waved her arms toward us.
"What do you think you're doing?" A Family guard marched toward us from a bar across the street, his voice amplified. He jerked a tase club from his belt, pointing at us. "Get your asses back inside."
The kids stopped, some cringing away from the Family goon, some frozen in place by fear, their eyes wide, and others falling to the ground, curling up into balls, covering their ears with their hands and squeezing their eyes shut.
Behind us, the lights of The Jealous Rose flickered out, the shrill screams from inside gurgling to a stop, the shrieks for help dying. One of the miners hitched up his suit, tightened the clasps around his stomach as he stared back at the Rose, and stumbled backwards, saying, "What the hell is going on in there? What the hell is that?"
The light over the door to the restaurant to the right of The Jealous Rose sputtered out, a woman running out the door wailing for help, only shadows behind the door. Smoke billowed up from somewhere behind the buildings, creeping up to the ceiling of this sector, branching out over our heads.
"Come on." I guided the boy forward, reaching out to corral some of the other teenagers. "We've got to go."
The girl from inside, Stacie, jogged forward. “I’ve got them. Come on, guys.”
"Hold on now, chikka." The Family man shook his head. "Everyone back inside."
Vanessa darted forward, slamming the point of her elbow into his throat, the impact picking him up off his feet and throwing him through the air. Shaking her hand, wincing, she said, "This way, guys. Follow Aunt Vanessa."
We herded them along the path shown by our on-boards in the direction Edmund had marked for our rendezvous, down the deserted, littered street.
A few Family goons stood at the end of the main corridor, stepping out from between the stores and shops, the mounds of waste and refuse, with tanglers and blasters held loose in their hands. "Where are you guys going?"
Two police officers strode in, looking around, accompanying a couple of techs from the Power division.
"The power anomaly is coming from the junction behind those shops." One of the power guys pointed toward The Jealous Rose. "Looks like a fire or something back in the alley."
"Help us out here." I pushed the kids forward. "We've got to evacuate and lock down this sector."
The policemen stared at me, blinking. "What the hell is this? Get your damned clothes on."
"Hold on." A Family thug strode toward the police, holding his hands up, a blaster in his right hand. "This is our sector; you ain't got no business around here."
The policemen dropped into a crouch, their hands going to the butts of their weapons in their holsters. One of them shouted, "Put those blasters up!"
"We've got this under control," the thug growled back, raising his weapon. "This is Family business."
"Everybody stay close"—I reached out and grabbed the kids, yanking them toward me, forcing them behind me, between Vanessa and myself—"and prepare to run."
"Help!" A woman ran out of the Prior’s Divine Wings tattoo parlor a couple of doors down from The Jealous Rose, screaming with her hands over her head, her suit lowered to her waist, her tits flat against her chest, flopping, half of her chest tattooed with a picture of a mining flitter. The sign above the shop sputtered, lights flashing on and off. "They got Prior!"
One of the Family goons jerked around, flailing his blaster toward her, compressing the trigger and launching a stream of pulses of crackling energ
y, blue and bright, that annihilated the front wall of the tattoo parlor, with one unlucky pulse ripping the fleeing woman’s torso apart, sending blood spraying into the air.
The cops yanked their weapons from their holsters and fired.
The members of the Family raised their weapons, aiming toward the policemen. All of them, Family and police, darted back into the spaces between the buildings, ducking behind trash cans and behind carts parked before the shops, scattering like roaches when the lights are turned on.
"Everybody duck and cover!" I screamed, turning and forcing the kids down to the ground, down to the garbage-covered pavement, Vanessa doing the same. Cries and screams echoed as they froze and fell.
The lights in the tattoo parlor winked out. A man crawled to the doorway, trying to run out, but gray, metallic-looking hands pulled him back, his shrieks drowned out by a horrible moaning and slurping.
The Family opened up, everyone blasting away, no one aiming but whooping and howling obscenities. Bullets flew. The cops ran back away from the intersection, discharging their weapons without taking aim, sending bullets ricocheting, pinging off the walls, breaking windows.
"Take care of the kids. I'll clear a path." I scrambled over the pavement on my hands and knees and threw myself across the corridor, tackling one of the Family men, ripping the blaster from his hands, reversing it and driving the butt into his jaw, knocking him out.
A Family guard in an alley across from me stared at me, realizing what I had done; he called out, aiming his weapon my way. I blasted him, splattering him all over the far wall, and I rolled away from the spot where I'd been, plunging through a door.
I ducked down, scrabbling along a dirty floor, past grimy wooden chairs stacked up on each other, a row of tables with locals hunched down beneath them covering their heads with their arms. Bullets shattered the windows and blaster shots hummed by, the energy striking the walls, burning holes in them and exploding into sparks.
Finding a sturdy wall, I threw myself against it, breathing heavy. I tapped my temple, sending a message to Vanessa. "Give me a second feed. Let me open up a way to one of these alleys."
