Anything seemed possible at this point, she thought to herself, fighting back an overwhelming feeling of despair. She had not even had a moment to mourn for Tanner, she realized as the skiff rounded a turn and accelerated through the end of a residential district and into the Mall Memorial Commercial Park. Residential towers vanished and there was a surprising amount of darkness as the only illumination in the park came from the street lamps hundreds of feet below them. The cab of the skiff fell into shadow and Michelle at last began to cry.
3
Terry Palmer felt awkward as hell knowing that there was a cute girl crying in the back of his shuttle, but that she was also a murder and terrorism suspect. Was she feeling regret or was the sense of loss starting to hit her? You never knew with these types of cases. He wanted to pity her, place his hand on her shoulder and tell her that it was going to be all right, but if she was what she was accused of…
In the end, he tried to stay down the middle. “We tried to call your parents, but they were unavailable,” he said. “Your father’s assistant’s secretary has a call into their lawyer’s office, and an attorney will be meeting you at the station. If you need to talk-”
“Thanks, I know my rights,” Michelle spat back harsher than she intended. “Sorry,” she added after a moment. “It’s been a rough day.”
“You know we want to believe you,” Palmer began, which caused James to throw a glance his way. “But things just don’t add up.”
“We went over this at my house,” she said, clearly exasperated. “I don’t what else I can tell you that’s going to make you believe me.”
Putting the skiff in automatic, Palmer turned around to face her. “Look, I’ll tell you what,” he offered. “We’re going to follow the evidence. That means we’re not handing you over to the Gael until we are utterly convinced that you deserve to be locked up.”
A sad sigh escaped from the back. “You don’t think they can manufacture whatever evidence they want?” she countered.
James looked back at her and said, “That sounds sort of conspiratorial.”
He felt more than saw her eyes lock onto his in the dark. Michelle growled, “A man broke into my home in a secure high-rise, bypassed all of our high-tech security, and managed to murder my friend without showing up on any security cameras, and you think I sound like a conspiracy theorist?” She paused. “You don’t have to believe me, but I know that Tanner was murdered by someone else in that room and I know that I’ve never committed an act of terrorism in my life, unless attending anti-Gael Occupation Force rallies is an act of terrorism. I know that- Look out!”
The skiff had entered the Suitland Industrial District and was met with the harsh halogen glare of industrial lighting on the skyway. The skyway swung left and ran between two enormous four hundred story factory buildings that were hulking masses of steel and stone that spread the equivalent of twenty city blocks lengthwise. In the middle of the street about one hundred yards in front of them, an inferno raged. There was a stalled hovercar in the skyway, spewing fire high into the air as well as toward the ground below: a pure, unbreaking column of greenish-yellow plasma fire.
There was no way to get through the column heading down to the surface and they did not have enough time to climb up and above the firestorm. Palmer quickly switched the control back over to manual and fired his retro-rockets full burn. There was a sickening lurch as the shuttle screamed to a stop and all three occupants slammed forward.
“What the hell?” Palmer groaned as he pulled his face out of the control stick.
The skiff was hovering only about twenty feet from the blazing vehicle. It was now on their right as Palmer had wrenched the ship to the left in his attempt to get it to stop in time. Michelle had hit her head on the seat in front of her, but fortunately not too hard. The pain was much worse in her wrists though. The binders that were wrapped around her and chained to the floor had caught her hands as she was flung forward. She was pretty sure she was bleeding.
“You okay?” James asked, looking back to her. In the soft light, he looked like a zombie with his broken nose and cut lips.
“I don’t know,” Michelle replied as the pain in her hands intensified. “My wrists feel ripped to shreds.”
James slid back the partition between them and leaned through it. “Let me see,” he said gently.
Examining her hands gingerly, he produced a laser-cut key, inserted it into the lock on her binders and turned it. He took a look at the cuts- they weren’t deep, but they would still need to be looked at. Dropping the binders in the front seat, he said, “I don’t think you’ll need those for a little while.” Turning back to Palmer, he said, “We better call this in.”
“Yeah, right,” he said, punching in a code into the secure comm in the dashboard. He swung his head to the left, to the right and back to the left, trying to stretch out his sore neck. “Oh shit!” he swore vehemently as he suddenly punched the throttle up and pushed the shuttle into a dive.
“Palmer, what the hell are you doing?” James shouted.
The explosion rocked the shuttle, flinging Michelle against the window. Things moved in slow-motion for her. The fast-blinking alarm lights warning of their impending doom, the ground rushing up to meet them and the streak of smoke as another torpedo speeding their way seemed to take an eternity to process. Just before the second impact, she swore she saw the shuttle behind them with an open cockpit and a man with a rocket launcher pointed at them. For just a moment, she knew that was the man who had killed Tanner. Then, there was a sickening crunch and everything went black.
4
The first shot had taken out the shuttle’s rear thrusters, but it had not been a kill shot thanks to some excellent piloting on the driver’s part. The ship was careening so badly that Pascal Jacobin’s second shot impacted on the exposed belly of the shuttle, one of the more reinforced areas on it. Most of the repulsors cut out and the ship fell another fifty feet to the ground, the twisted and mangled aft end still burning. A third shot would have taken them completely out, but he passed up on it for two reasons. One, he had to absolutely make sure that the girl was dead and that meant watching the life drain out of her eyes, and second, that was the part of the job he enjoyed the most.
As swiftly as he could, Jacobin set down his shuttle next to the flaming wreckage and opened the cockpit. He swung his legs up and over the side of the ship and allowed himself to drop to the ground as he drew his plasma pistol from its holster. There had been no movement that he had seen inside the wreckage, but he took no chances. Carefully, Jacobin stalked up to the police shuttle at an oblique angle, making sure they would not have the opportunity to shoot off a few potshots at him if there were survivors.
The shuttle had landed on its belly, but it seemed as if one of the landing gears had at least partially descended as the ship was resting at a strange angle, tilted toward the ground on the side he approached. The pilot’s head was resting against the window in the front hatch. The hatch refused to open as the bottom portion of it was pinned by the ground, so Jacobin put his pistol to the glass and fired straight through, splattering blood and gray matter across the cockpit’s cracked windshield. Sirens were beginning to blare in the distance so he hurried around to the front of the ship and grabbed the handle at the bottom of the hatch.
Opening it, Jacobin saw the older black detective’s body lying sprawled across the control console. Casually, he fire two rounds into the cop’s chest. The body spasmed, but did not move. His eyes tracked through the back seat, but it was empty. He flipped on his glasses and switched them to night vision mode so that he could stare into the blackened recess behind the seats that was the shuttle’s storage area. The girl was huddled in the back, pressed in between a large storage bin and the rear hatch. He allowed himself a small smile as he climbed into the back seat and took aim at Michelle’s face. Her eyes looked brilliantly beautiful in the emerald green night vision, Jacobin thought to himself as his finger began to squeeze the t
rigger.
“Hey,” a voice gargled from behind him.
Whirling around, Jacobin found himself face to muzzle with the well-dressed black detective’s service pistol pointed through the partition. “Fuck you,” the voice rasped as James pulled the trigger, blasting a round of superheated plasma through the assassin’s high-tech glasses and into his eye.
Jacobin’s corpse fell to the floor of the shuttle in between the rows of seats and James’s gun hand fell down to his side. He then fell over, letting his head land on the lap of his partner. Immediately, Michelle rushed forward, stepping on Jacobin’s body accidentally, and leaned over through the partition.
“Are you okay?” she asked James.
“Peachy,” he replied, his face looking ashen. “That was the guy, wasn’t it?” His voice was barely a whisper now.
“Yes,” she whispered back, leaving out the “I think so” that sprang to mind. The sirens were getting louder.
He nodded. “Get the hell out of here,” he forced out. “Don’t stop running.”
Michelle felt a few more tears welling in her eyes, but she forced them back and crawled out of the shuttle. The sirens sounded as if they were coming from behind her, but she could not go forward as the blazing inferno (which she was now certain had been set by the assassin who lay dead in the police shuttle) blocked her escape forward. Sprinting as fast as she could, she raced away from the industrial area, making a few turns to hopefully get out of the path of any incoming police shuttles, and made her way to the park, vanishing into the night.
Chapter 6
1
Matthew Jennings dropped the tablet onto the table, having just finished reading Pahhal’s report for the second time. A bitter sensation crept over him, starting with his gut and worming its way up his throat like bile. They were going after an idealistic college student, one who was supposed to be a terrorist. Personally, he did not buy anything that Pahhal was saying.
“As you can see, she went into hiding after the detectives who were bringing her in were murdered,” the Gael had said. “We don’t know if the unidentified man who was found dead on the scene with the two officers was there to rescue her or not. It seems the likeliest scenario.”
“My arse,” Fix had grunted, which drew an amused look of curiosity from Pahhal.
“You don’t launch torpedoes into a shuttle carrying someone you’re trying to rescue,” Jennings had clarified.
“Perhaps,” the Gael had said. “But you know it wasn’t us, if that’s your concern. We very much want her alive.”
“And why is dat?” Lafayette had asked.
“We will make an example of these terrorists,” Pahhal had said. “Humans appreciate spectacle, and so we will create one in an effort to discourage those who would perpetuate acts of terror against their fellow citizens.”
Something did not add up about what Pahhal had been saying, but Jennings could not put his finger on it, and he did not let that stop him from accepting the job. What was more important to him was that they had some cash, had supplies and some work that promised more of the same. They would get the girl and let the Gael worry about her trial.
Pahhal was long gone and Jennings was still sitting at the table in the Caf, lost in his own thoughts when Lafayette came up the gangplank pushing an anti-grav cart stocked high with supplies.
“Mon capitaine, a hand s’il vous plait,” he called.
Ignoring him, Jennings kept staring down at the tablet. “If the Gael want her alive, who the hell is trying to kill her?” he wondered aloud.
Sighing as he began to singlehandedly stock the galley, Lafayette said, “I suppose it’s too much to hope dat it was random. Some sort of psychopath.”
“We both know it’s not that,” he countered. “You don’t attack the police with rockets if you’re just a psycho looking for a thrill.” He took a deep breath and then stood up and began helping Lafayette. “It’s not a bounty hunter either. One, it’s too high-tech and well organized to be anyone but the largest players. This guy was too fast, too good to be just a bounty hunter. He had connections; he knew he was going to kill the girl before the warrant crossed the Nucleus.” He eyed a package contemptuously and said to Lafayette, “Canned beats? Really?”
“Don’t like it; don’t eat it,” he shot back.
“Anyway, second, this assassin they found dead with the two cops,” Jennings continued. “No ID, fingerprints had been stripped off, he had new retinas and DNA was entirely inconclusive. The guy’s a ghost.”
Lafayette stopped and locked eyes with him. “I know what you’re getting at,” he said. “If this girl is getting hunted by the Resistance…”
“They would kill us all and a million more around us just to get to her,” Jennings finished. “I know, but we took the job. What other choices do we have?”
“Take the money and run,” he countered quickly. “We could get more work…”
“You think we’re going to be able to get anything after we get a rep for welching on a deal,” he demanded. “We won’t be able to get a sniff, honest or not, and then we’re dead in space.”
“Merde,” Lafayette muttered under his breath. “Can’t get out from under the lion’s paw, can we?”
“We always fight our way clear,” Jennings said calmly. “Sooner or later.”
Lafayette nodded and went back to placing some more items into the galley storage cupboards. “What’s next then?” he said between grunting. “Where do we start looking for her?”
“Upper class girl on the run with no underworld contacts to get her off-world? She could be hiding with a friend, but the Gael would have found her if that was the case. So, she managed to get smuggled off-world somehow,” Jennings mused. “The number of people she knows that could pull that off for her must be slim.” Jennings looked up to the ceiling as he always did when he talked to the near-artificial intelligent computer system onboard the Melody Tryst. “Minerva, my dear?” he called.
“Captain Jennings,” the pleasing female voice intoned. “What can I do for you?”
“I need a full profile on a Michelle Rachel Williams of Seaboard, North American continent, daughter of the TARC councilors,” he said. “Focus on friends or relationships that might produce a tie to off-world shipping or smuggling.”
“Processing,” Minerva replied. “It will be approximately 2.3 hours before search is complete.”
2
Things were proceeding quite nicely, Jennings thought and that was always a grave cause for concern. Lafayette had finished stocking the kitchen, and he was already making plans for actual cooked meals that involved real food, non-canned vegetables and meat that came from real animals. Squawk was running around like a hamster, tweaking items, fixing things that had not worked in months (like Lafayette’s bathroom) as well as prepping the ship for takeoff, stocking the parts shed in the cargo bay, and refueling the ship’s tanks and massive reserves. Meanwhile, Fix was busy changing out the Melody Tryst’s spent plasma chargers- the space cannons had been mostly decorative for the last few months, fixing the anti-personnel weapons systems and loading the space-to-space and air-to-surface missiles they had purchased. The database search was almost complete, and Pahhal had sent a message that their warrants would be quashed as soon as they took off.
Captain Jennings was on the bridge, going over the pre-flight checklist from his position in the pilot’s chair. The bridge was pretty small, just the six stations- pilot, navigator, tactical, communications, science and engineering- situated in a semi-circle in front of the viewscreen. Computer screens flashed with activity all around him as Minerva continued her search, security cameras jumped from signal to signal, the Magellan computer calculated navigational co-ordinates, and the flight HUD indicated one by one each aspect of pre-flight being completed.
Punching the intercom, Jennings sounded throughout the ship, “All hands report.”
“This is Fix. External defenses online. Internal defenses not yet ready,” came the
terse reply.
“Squawk, your status?” Jennings asked.
“Go, go, all systems are go. Go!” came the excited reply.
“Once we’re spaceborne give Fix a hand with the internals,” he ordered.
“Roger!” the Pasquatil shrieked in manic glee.
Jennings could not help but smile. “Lafayette?” he asked.
“I don’t think we can leave yet, mon capitaine,” he replied.
“Why not? What’s wrong?” came the concerned reply.
“I can’t find my favorite bouillabaisse pot,” Lafayette said after a moment.
Jennings rolled his eyes and called back, “Activating thrusters. Perhaps you could set aside your aspirations to haute cuisine for a moment and haul ass to the bridge.” He paused. “Unless you want me to take a turn at using Magellan.”
“Non!” Lafayette shouted. “En route!”
A wry smile crossed Jennings’ face as he remembered the first time he had attempted to use the navigation computer. The Melody Tryst’s course had skirted a little too close to a black hole for everyone’s comfort, although Jennings still maintained they would have been fine. Ever since then, Lafayette had not allowed him near Magellan.
“Interstellar travel is far too complex and variable to allow for your kind of cowboy push the button and go mentality,” Lafayette said as he stepped on the bridge and sat on Jennings’ right at the navigator’s seat, where he began gingerly touching Magellan’s touch-screen interface. “Don’t worry, ma cherie. I will not let him touch you again,” he whispered.
Jennings smiled as he activated an external comm line and said, “Mariador Control, this is Starlight Minstrel requesting permission to exit gravity.”
“Starlight Minstrel. This is Mariador Control. Stand-by,” came an automatic space traffic control reply.
“Let’s hope the fake ID holds,” Lafayette muttered.
“It’ll work,” Jennings said, expressing a confidence he did not exactly feel.
111 Souls (Infinite Universe) Page 6
