Nolan upended the case and dumped its contents into his hand. The small flash drive was ancient technology long ago phased out by the Imperial government. However, the fact that it could only be accessed by physically plugging it into a terminal meant that it couldn’t be hacked remotely. Taia’s highly advanced algorithms could slice through just about any digital lock—on everything from vehicles to high-security buildings—but the encryption key used to secure the drive was impenetrable to even her.
Slipping the flash drive into his pocket, Nolan sealed the metal case and slid it back into place behind the dumpster. “Send Agent Styver the usual ‘package received’ message,” he told Taia.
“Done,” the AI responded before he’d even finished speaking. The long-range wireless transmitter she’d incorporated into his wheelchair gave her remote access to her full computing power no matter where on New Avalon he went.
Pulling his wheelchair in reverse, Nolan backed out from the tight space between the two dumpsters. He’d just spun his chair to return to the main street when his ears picked up the sound of someone moving. He tensed, his mind instantly on full alert.
A shadow fell across the alley a moment later. “Hey, man, want a hit of Blitz?” A man in a ratty-looking trench coat slipped toward him. Shifty-eyed, rat-faced, and with a smattering of poorly drawn tattoos covering his face and neck, he was exactly the sort of man Nolan had hated dealing with during his days of using.
“No, thanks.” Nolan tried to move past; men like this tended to get high on their own supply and could be violently unpredictable.
“Gunk, then?” The pusher shifted to block Nolan’s path again. “Jazz? Kissy Face? Black Coke?”
Acid churned in Nolan’s stomach. He’d tried them all before, each cheaper, more potent, and more toxic than the last.
“I said no, thanks.” Nolan rolled forward. If he couldn’t go around the man, he’d go through him.
“Come on, man!” the pusher protested, moving to keep himself in Nolan’s way. “Just a little hit. Guy like you, you look like you could use it!”
“No.” Nolan locked eyes with the man. “Now get the hell out of my way before—“
“Before what?” In an instant, the pusher’s demeanor changed. His wheedling tone disappeared, replaced by a vicious snarl. His hand dipped into his trench coat and produced a wicked looking blaster. “What you going to do, gimp?”
Nolan’s eyes locked on the twitchy finger hovering over the trigger. One wrong move and the pusher would put a bolt through him.
“That’s right.” A sneer tugged at the man’s lip. “I saw what you dropped in that beggar’s cup. Means you’ve got credits to spare.” He tightened his grip on the blaster, setting its firing mechanism humming. “So unless you’d like a new asshole in your throat, you’ll empty your pockets and give me everything you’ve got!”
Chapter Nine
Nolan went still, cold. A deadly calm descended over him, the way it always did when facing danger.
“Easy,” he said in a quiet voice. He lifted his hands off his chair’s wheels, spreading them wide. “There’s no need for violence. You can have everything I’ve got, no problem.”
“Damn right!” The drug pusher eyes brightened with an opioid-maddened gleam. “Now give it over!”
“I’m reaching into my pocket for my credits.” Slowly, he lowered his right hand toward his belt, careful not to move his left hand. “It’s not much, I warn you, but you can have it.”
“Nolan,” Taia’s warning voice echoed in his ear. “I’ve found him in IDF facial recognition database.” She had two cameras hard-wired into his optic nerves, allowing her to see through his eyes. “Ledren Eberhart, flagged under ‘Wanted for Murder’.”
Nolan didn’t stop moving, though every muscle in his body tensed as his hand lowered toward his belt.
“He’s connected with a string of muggings turned violent,” Taia continued. “The IDFs have a warrant out for his arrest.”
“Hurry up!” Ledren snapped, waving the blaster in Nolan’s face. “Don’t make me—“
Nolan’s left hand slapped the gun to the side and his right-handed punch caught Ledren under the jaw. The pusher’s head snapped back, his eyes crossing, and he sagged. Nolan closed his fingers around the man’s wrist and yanked him hard, slamming the drug pusher’s face into the alley street. The unconscious Ledren didn’t so much as cry out as Nolan yanked his arm around behind his back and twisted it at a terrible angle. Only when his shoulder gave a loud pop did Ledren wake, letting out a terrible shriek of pain.
Nolan’s fist crashed into the back of Ledren’s head twice in quick succession. The blows struck just beneath the base of the drug pusher’s skull, knocking him out once more. This time, when Nolan dislocated his other shoulder, the senseless man didn’t so much as stir.
Drawing his Echosteel blade, Nolan slashed the man’s filthy trench coat into ribbons. “Taia,” he said as he worked, “give the Doofs a call and let them know we’ve got—“
“Hey!” A shout from the end of the alley cut him off. Nolan’s head snapped up in time to see three thugs in trenchcoats similar to Ledren’s racing toward him. Their eyes were fixed on Ledren lying at the foot of his wheelchair, and their hands reached into their coats. Doubtless for blasters, as evidenced by the bulging outlines underneath their armpits.
Shit! Nolan had a split second to decide what to do. The minute those goons brought their guns to bear, he was in trouble. He couldn’t outrun them in his wheelchair, and there was no other way out of this alley. He’d be too slow to wheel himself behind the dumpsters. Even then, that would only delay the inevitable.
He had one choice. Snatching up Ledren’s fallen blaster, he brought the gun to bear on the men rushing toward him. He squeezed the trigger three times in quick succession. Bolts of brilliant blue energy sizzled from the barrel and slammed into the goons. They shrieked in pain and their pistol blasters spun away into the alley. All three of them clutched singed and blackened hands.
“The IDF’s on the way,” Nolan shouted at them. “Leave now, and you won’t wind up dead or in Imperial prison.”
The three thugs exchanged glances, but when they looked at Ledren on the floor, their expressions hardened. “He ain’t gonna kill us,” one growled to his comrades. “Gimpy here don’t want bodies on his record any more than us.”
Nolan’s jaw clenched. The thug had read the situation correctly. Nolan wanted to avoid IDF attention as much as the drug pushers, which was why he’d shot to disarm rather than disable or kill.
“Besides,” the same man snarled, turning his eyes back to Nolan, “it’ll take ten minutes for the Doofs to get here. Plenty of time for us to deal with you.”
“You forget I’ve got the gun, right?” Nolan waved the blaster at them.
“You do.” The goon’s face creased into a vicious smile. “But you can’t shoot all of—“
Nolan cut him off with a blaster bolt to the kneecap, and the big man went down with a high-pitched shrill of pain. But in the instant he fired, the other two thugs charged. They moved quick, crossing the distance to where he sat in the space of a second. Before Nolan could bring his blaster back around to disable another of the thugs, the man brought an extendable nightstick swinging around toward his gun hand.
Instantly, Nolan dropped the gun—as the thug intended—and lowered his hand. Just enough for the nightstick to whistle past dangerously close to his fingers. But Nolan wasn’t as defenseless as his wheelchair suggested. Leaning forward, he gripped the man’s left wrist in an iron lock and gave a vicious wrench. The twist sent the goon staggering with the momentum to avoid injury, and right into the path of his fractionally slower comrade. A descending nightstick crunched into the goon’s head with skull-crushing force, and he dropped to the alley floor.
The last goon stared down in horror at his comrade, for a moment too stunned to follow up. Nolan ripped the Echosteel blade from its sheath, tapping it on the arm of his wheelchair a
s he brought it swinging up and around. Razor-sharp steel hacked through the nightstick and the palm and fingers gripping it. Blood gushed from the mangled remains of the thug’s right hand, and still he stared down stupidly, silent, his eyes going wide.
Then he screamed: a loud, wailing cry that rattled off the alley walls. Agony echoed in that sound and he fell to his knees, eyes locked on the bleeding stump where his hand had been. Nolan brought the pommel of his Echosteel dagger swinging around. It slammed into the shrieking goon’s temple, silencing his cry and knocking him unconscious.
Something hissed toward Nolan, and agony exploded in his left shoulder. Fire coursed through the bone and joint, and he grunted at the pain. He barely had time to throw his upper body to the left as the goon he’d kneecapped loosed another shot at him. The bolt sizzled through the spot where his head had been an instant earlier. Somehow, the thug had managed to recover his lost blaster—or one of his comrades’—and decided he didn’t mind leaving a corpse behind him.
Nolan’s right arm whipped up, back, and forward before the goon could recover. The throw was terrible, the angle all wrong, but it didn’t matter. The Echosteel blade flew toward the thug and knocked the pistol from his hand. Blade and gun clattered off down the alley. The goon wasted a moment looking for his weapon.
That moment was all Nolan needed. He scooped up his dropped blaster, brought it to bear, and squeezed the trigger. A bolt of bright blue light drilled a hole into the thug’s forehead, right between the eyes. The man’s head snapped back and he crumpled to the ground.
“Warning,” Taia chirped. “Doofs seven minutes out.”
Nolan cursed. The IDF wouldn’t go easy on anyone found in the vicinity of such violence, especially with a corpse thrown into the mix. He had only a few minutes to get out of here before the Doofs swarmed the place and started asking questions.
A difficult choice faced him. One body was bad enough, but four would be worse. At the same time, if Ledren or the others identified him as their assailant—either to the IDF, which Nolan doubted, or more likely to their fellow gangbangers—he’d have to deal with that complication.
He cursed, then lifted the blaster and put three quick rounds into the unconscious Ledren and his two thugs. The IDF would ask questions and start an official investigation, but they were far less likely to find him than whoever Ledren worked for if the man survived this.
Insides swirling, he wheeled down the alley toward the main street. The wound in his shoulder made every movement of his left arm agony, but he’d dealt with far worse pain before. He paused only long enough to retrieve his Echosteel blade and tuck Ledren’s pistol into the cushions of his wheelchair before pushing his chair away from the bodies. He had to get clear and leave no trace of his presence for the IDF to follow. The Doofs weren’t exactly genius detectives, but they had enough semi-competent investigators on the force to give him trouble if they found anything to link the deaths here to him.
To his relief, no one on the street beyond seemed to notice. The heavy dumpsters hid the bodies, and the loud hum of passing vehicles would have drowned out the blaster fire. None of those he passed paid him any attention, even with the hole in his shoulder. Grove District, Shimmertown, the Bolt Hole, and the other low-end neighborhoods of New Avalon could be hazardous to those who got curious at the wrong time and place. And, with men like Ledren or Wolfe around, it was better to turn a blind eye to anything and everything.
Still, Nolan didn’t breathe easy until he was safely across the street and back into the brilliantly lit Shimmertown. The descending darkness and the glaring neon lights of the peeler bars and watering holes offered him the same cloak of anonymity that shielded all those around him. The men and women on the streets saw nothing outside their immediate space—selective blindness out of a desire to avoid similar scrutiny.
Turning into the alley, he wheeled toward the ramp that led into the Spacer’s Paradise back door. Just in time. In the distance, the wailing of IDF sirens told him law enforcement had arrived to deal with the corpses.
Nolan welcomed the darkness of the hall—it concealed the blaster wound from Clive. The bouncer gave him a nod and said something friendly, which Nolan responded to automatically without really hearing the words. He raced toward the service elevator and wheeled his chair into the car.
“He’s new, isn’t he?” he asked Taia. “Ledren. I’ve never seen him before.”
“According to IDF reports, in the last few weeks the White Sharks have been making moves on Los Espadones territory. Ledren Eberhart is low-level, but enough of a player in the White Sharks that he runs his own crew.”
“The handsome gentlemen I just met in the alley, I take it?”
“That’s them. The one you gave a third eye was Burn Mashrose. All the IDF has on the other two are first names: Golliam and Harris.”
Nolan’s jaw muscles worked and he barked a silent curse. Gangs and cartels weren’t exactly the forgiving type. They’d be looking for answers, but hopefully the IDF was just incompetent enough to ignore any information the White Sharks could bribe from them.
“Taia, get a message to Agent Styver and let him know we need this squashed,” Nolan said. The Protection Bureau might have a ridiculous moniker and no official records in the Imperial government database, but the clandestine organization wielded an impressive amount of power. They could disappear whatever file the Doofs opened on the four bodies in the alley.
“Message sent.”
The elevator clank-thumped to a stop at Nolan’s apartment and the doors gave a little ding before sliding open. That ding was a sound he’d intentionally asked Taia to play—a signal that she’d deactivated her defense grid and powered down the various anti-intruder weapons integrated into the elevator car’s ceiling. A simple fingerprint scanner integrated into the button for his floor was nowhere near protection enough.
Nolan winced at the pain in his shoulder, but he couldn’t deal with it yet. First, he had to check on his house guest. “How’s she doing?”
“Stable,” Taia replied, “and still riding her second step-down dose of Blitz.”
Nolan felt sick. The very idea of injecting her with more of the drug repulsed him, but it was the best way to help her get clean.
“Her liver and kidneys are responding to the meds, but I’m worried about her cardiovascular system.” Taia turned on the wall screen and brought up a 3D simulation of what Nolan assumed was the woman’s heart. “See this enlargement and thickening of the muscle around the left ventricle? That’s a sign of cardiac hypertrophy.”
“Damn.” Nolan studied the image of the woman’s heart. Though he had no idea what he was looking at, he knew Taia wouldn’t bother showing him unless it was serious. “So what does this mean for her?”
“It means Hell Week will have to be dragged out a bit.” Taia actually sounded concerned. “Slower detox protocol, with higher doses of the medications and more time for IV fluids and nutrients to strengthen her body. Even then, there’s a risk that it’ll be too much for her to handle.”
Nolan’s brow furrowed. “And what if we slowly wean her off the Blitz?”
“I calculate the probability of arrhythmia at 87.5% and sudden cardiac arrest at 66.36% if she continues taking the Blitz. Even now, with the small doses required to keep her stable while she recovers, the chances of complications are approaching 50%. Her only hope of survival is to get off Blitz as soon as safely possible, but there is a serious chance that getting clean will kill her one way or another.”
Worry burrowed into his gut. He’d done what he thought was right: getting the woman away from Wolfe and his goons, taking care of her, helping her start the road to detox. But this new complication changed things. Helping the woman detox was one thing; risking her life in the process was another.
“Wake her up, Taia,” Nolan instructed the AI. “This is a decision she’ll need to make for herself.”
Chapter Ten
“I strongly advise against waking h
er up, Nolan.” Again, Taia’s voice rang with a very human note of concern. “Even on a low dose of Blitz, her body is far too dependent on the drug to safely bring her to full consciousness.”
“Can’t you do anything for her?” Nolan demanded. “Just wake her up enough to think clearly? There’s got to be something you can give her that’ll make her lucid enough to have a choice. If her life is going to be on the line here, she damned well deserves a chance to decide whether she’s going to risk it or not.”
A long moment of silence passed before Taia spoke. “I can give her a neurostimulant that will temporarily neutralize the effects of the Blitz on her brain. But I cannot stress enough the importance of getting her answer as quickly as possible. There is a risk of seizures, brain aneurysms, and—“
“Can you wake her up for just one minute?” Nolan stared down at the woman’s pale skin and gaunt face. “Sixty seconds. That has to be enough.”
Again, a long pause, then Taia answered. “Sixty seconds, Nolan. No more. And at the first sign of danger, I will give her the dose she needs.”
“You’re a marvel, Taia.” Nolan wheeled closer to the woman. Sweat soaked her pale skin, and though Taia had been pumping fluids and nutrients into her system for the better part of twelve hours, she showed no visible sign of improvement. But weak as she was, she needed a chance to make her own choices.
Nolan drew in a breath. “Do it.”
“Administering neurostimulant, now.”
The effects on the woman were immediate. Her eyes began to flutter and she stirred, moaning weakly. “No more,” she muttered, her words slurred.
Then her eyes popped open, her pupils dilating and her gaze locking on Nolan. Her expression contorted, twisted, transformed from slack and dazed to panicked in a heartbeat. She let out a half-shout, half-scream and tried to push herself up on weak arms.
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