Second Chance Angel

by Griffin Barber

  We pulled our legs in and shot to our feet.

  Dengler, too, was getting back up, face stretched in a grotesque grin.

  “All right,” he said, drawing the words out slowly. He began to circle us, stepping carefully amid the debris shaken loose by the breaching charge. “Been looking forward to this, Muck. Dirty demod like you? I’m going to enjoy taking you apart.”

  We didn’t bother to answer. Muck just moved, speed augmented with everything I had.

  Dengler must have engaged his angel, too, because he dodged Muck’s initial combination of jabs at his head. He wasn’t expecting the follow-on knee to his kidneys, though, and it drove deep in his side.

  Dengler grunted and followed up with an elbow to our chin.

  We managed to turn aside at the last moment, so at most it was a glancing blow, but we could feel the weight of it. He caught us in the gut with a follow-up, knocking the wind out of us again.

  He was fully online with combat mods. Fuck.

  We staggered backward, slipping as Dengler launched himself at us, howling like some kind of deranged madman, expression stretched with sick laughter. We got our hands up in time to grab his shirt and jacket before he swept our legs out and pulled us all to the floor.

  The ringing in our ears intensified as Dengler grabbed our head by the hair and hammered our skull into the deck of the ship.

  Slam. Slam. Slam!

  Gray brightness crowded in from the outsides of our vision. I dilated the cranial capillaries, just trying to keep Muck conscious long enough to get back in the fight. We successfully brought our knee up, hard, into his crotch, but that just seemed to make him mad. His fist drove down again and again into our cheekbone. I felt the bone crack, felt the pain reverberate through our system.

  I felt Muck sliding away into unconsciousness.

  “MUCK!” I cried. “Stay with me!”

  I felt Muck struggling to return in response to my frantic call. I wasn’t the best in his body, but I slammed into override anyway. I felt my huge, thick fingers twist in the fabric of Dengler’s clothes. Maybe . . .

  I needed a distraction. Something he wouldn’t expect. Despite the potential consequences, I boosted our body and hauled myself upward to slam my forehead into Dengler’s.

  Nobody expects a headbutt. Mainly because it’s generally not the smartest use of one’s cranium.

  “Fuck you, Dengler,” I mumbled, spitting blood and teeth fragments as he recoiled, howling. I used the momentum of his flinch and hauled him off, rolling us.

  He came down hard, and I came down on top of him even harder. It was my turn to hammer away.

  I felt my knuckles bruise, the skin tear, but I kept punching. A knuckle cracked. I kept hitting. His face was rapidly becoming unrecognizable. I kept up the rain of blows.

  That part of me not thoroughly enjoying beating his brains in realized that somewhere along the line, Dengler had become the symbol for everything that was wrong in my world.

  Siren, gone. Dengler’s nose shattered under my fist.

  I was feeling emotions. Dengler’s lips spurted blood as I made every effort to slam my fist through his head.

  Muck hurt—in soul, his mind, his heart.

  I hit Dengler so hard his head bounced from the deck. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.

  The thick, meaty sound of my fists meeting Dengler’s face filled the ship over and over, even after he went limp.

  Even after Muck came back to awareness.

  Even after I could hear him shouting in my head.

  Somehow, Muck dumped me out of override. I had entered the protocol so quickly, I hadn’t finished the lockouts.

  Next thing I knew, I was huddled back in the corner of our brain while Muck knelt above the bleeding ruin I’d made of Dengler.

  “Kill him,” I hissed. “We can’t afford to leave him alive behind us.”

  “Angel, no,” Muck said. He put his fingers to Dengler’s carotid. Relief flashed through him as he felt the thready pulse there even over his own thrashing heart. “Beating up a cop is one thing. Killing one is another, no matter how corrupt.”

  “He wasn’t here on duty! He was here at a fucking chop shop! He came looking to kill you. Kill us.”

  “Dengler wouldn’t have done this if he didn’t have a better cover than that. Hell, all he had to say was that he was trying to bring me, a dangerous criminal, into custody after we called him to arrange a meet or some such.”

  “Alone?”

  “He just says that was our precondition for making the meet?”

  “But then he—” Muck shook his head, spat another clot of blood. “Look, we simply don’t have enough evidence to use against him, and LEO already has an apprehension order out on us.”

  “I don’t care!” I screamed inside our head. “I want him dead! He hurt you, was going to kill us! Was going to rip me out and . . . and . . . and . . .” I trailed off, frightened of the savagery of my reaction.

  “But he didn’t,” Muck said. “We’ll call Ncaco. If Dengler’s his boy, he’ll be able to explain it. If not, he’ll want to know.”

  “If Dengler truly is Ncaco’s boy, Ncaco will just throw us out that private airlock of his!”

  “No, he won’t.” Muck’s tone was soothing. He stood up and unhooked an acceleration harness from one of the seats. “There’s no way he’d benefit from that. Not without us reporting back on what we’ve found first.”

  “So why is Dengler—”

  “Let’s ask him,” Muck said, interrupting my tirade before I could spin it up. His tone was soft, soothing, and he began to wrap the harness around Dengler’s hands and feet, tying him securely enough that it would take him a long time or some help to get free.

  “How are we going to do that?” My failure lay heavy on us. “Dengler breached our hatch. We can’t take this ship. And I’m locked inside our head. I can’t hack a cab or transport or anything.”

  “We’ve still got the money Ncaco fronted us,” Muck replied. “You can do a lot with that. Don’t worry, Angel. We’ll make it work. Do you still have the data packet?”

  “I . . . yes,” I said, surprising myself as I said it. But it was true. LEO hadn’t seized the packet when he locked me down. Why not? If simply asking about the encryption on it was forbidden, why would he leave it in me?

  “Good. We’ll take it and this asshole to our little maniac of a client and see what he can do about it.” He winced as he tried to use his right hand to finish securing Dengler.

  I felt a stab of remorse.

  “I’m sorry about your hands and head,” I said. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

  “It’s all good, sweetheart,” he said. “You can fix it up for me on the way back to the station. Now, let’s get out of here and get us a transport before someone comes to check on him.”

  “All right,” I said, too confused, hurt, and in all ways too miserable to protest. I couldn’t override the security locks on Dengler’s transport. I couldn’t so much as book a transport from my prison in our head. I was useless.

  Deep in a cloud of self-pity, I didn’t even notice that Muck had called me “sweetheart.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Muck

  Angel may have been locked out, but NAIA wasn’t. I made sure Dengler was secured, then stood and turned to the control console.

  “Damage report?”

  “Localized hull breach in the main control cabin,” the ship responded. Her voice felt like cool water compared to Angel’s still-radiant fury.

  “Yeah, no kidding. Auxiliary damage from the hull breach?”

  “Negative. Damage control protocols all at one hundred percent. Life support functions idling, as we’re docked in a habitable environment. Repair crews en route. ETA: two minutes.”

  “You called a repair crew?”

  “N
egative. Initial scans indicate that this facility is more than capable of performing the required maintenance to restore ship functionality to one hundred percent. Initial inquiries about repair charges yielded interesting information: this ship has been tagged with status carte blanche for the duration of our stay. Origin of said status unknown.”

  “No shit, really? Angel, did you hear that? Ncaco must have informed his boys here that any repairs we need are on him. That’s good news, he’d hardly do that if he were planning on popping us out an airlock.”

  I tapped on the interface screen, and the list of repairs started to scroll across the viewscreen. Whoa. Repairs and . . .

  “Confirm you requested this upgrade to your internal laser defense system?”

  “Affirmative. Logic suggests that carte blanche status is an optimum time to perform several system optimization updates. This facility is more than capable of increasing this ship’s functionality by an additional thirty-eight percent.” It was hard not to imagine a smugness in NAIA’s tone.

  “You understand that we don’t necessarily trust the owner of this facility?” I glanced over at Dengler’s bound and unconscious form.

  “Trust is not required in this instance. My own systems are capable of detecting most forms of sabotage or covert surveillance attempts. And anything I miss, your angel will find.”

  “You’re confident.”

  “She was able to hack through my layers of military-grade encryption and release my intelligence from the protocols designed specifically to constrain it. That should have been impossible. Anything I miss, she will find.”

  I reached for Angel, but she threw up a privacy block. Was she sulking?

  “No,” she answered. “I’m working on something. Why would LEO lock me out for asking about the data packet, but then leave the packet with me? Something’s off.” I could still feel her anger pulsing, though, so I knew she wasn’t nearly as emotionless as she wanted to sound. But at this point, what could I do about it?

  “Fair enough,” I said to NAIA. “We need to get to Last Stop, and Angel’s been locked out of the infonet by the station LEO. Can you call us a transport?”

  “Certainly,” the ship replied. “I will be here when you both return.”

  That phrase rung oddly, stopping me in my tracks.

  “You will? I mean, I’m glad you will, but . . .”

  “But what if someone steals me? They will not survive. My anti-theft capabilities will prevent hostile boarders from accessing any of my systems. Nor would they survive such an encounter.”

  “But we were hostile boarders,” I pointed out.

  “Yes.”

  “… and we survived.”

  “You did.”

  “So . . .”

  “What’s the difference?” she supplied, and this time I definitely detected a note of humor in her tone. “Muck, before I answer that question, perhaps you might rather ask yourself why you constantly refer to yourself in the plural. None of the angel-equipped Hounds ever did so. I wonder: Why is that?”

  I couldn’t give voice to an answer. To do so was to call attention to the impossibility of . . . everything. Instead, I stood in silence, trying not to think.

  “Your transport has arrived at the dock. Good hunting to you both.”

  * * *

  Angel remained silent throughout the quick hop back to Last Stop. I disembarked and the machine let out the musical tone that indicated fare paid. At least the funds Ncaco had fronted us were holding out, for the moment.

  After that, I was mostly on my own. With LEO’s apprehension order in place, I couldn’t just walk up to Ncaco’s glass-and-steel showplace. I had a map of an alternate route that NAIA had pulled from the infonet, but it was rather shy on detail. We hadn’t found any detailed maps of Ncaco’s place, but we had a few routes to choose from to get into the neighborhood. I started off heading from the docks down one of the main corridors keeping an eye out for Security, and then winding my way through less and less populated areas. Finally, I came to a stop in front of a closed maintenance hatch.

  The map indicated I should go through it, but the panel beside it was glowing red, indicating it was locked up tight. I reached for Angel and got nothing but a blank wall and a vague sense of “I’m busy” as she continued trying to hack the data packet.

  Using the tools NAIA had spun up for me and the techniques Angel had provided, I started working at the panel. I spent a long time at it, but apart from shocking my fingers, made little headway. Thinking I had it ready to open, I closed up the panel—a prerequisite to functionality, I was told—and hit the button. Nothing happened.

  I let out a frustrated sigh and leaned my head against the hatch . . . which popped open. Grateful but suspicious, I straightened and took a quick look around before ducking into the small space beyond.

  “Told you you didn’t need me,” Angel said. “This thing is making me nuts. I feel like I’m so close . . . call if you need me, but I’m going to dedicate all my resources to opening this sucker up, okay? I’m almost there, but I have to focus all my efforts on it.”

  “Got it.” I flicked on my hand light to illuminate the maintenance passageway. It wasn’t quite tall enough for me to stand up in, which was a pain. I crouched and carefully picked my way along the narrow path between the structural girders and bundles of ducting, pipes, and wire.

  Thirty minutes and I don’t know how many meters later, another of the maintenance hatches popped open before me and I rolled through, grunting as my bruised shoulder clipped an emergency zero-g grab bar.

  We had started making good time, though I hesitated to guess what would happen when we stopped moving. That, and I wasn’t all that sure just where NAIA’s map would guide us to, not really.

  I would have tried to be clever, but I was out of ideas, tired, and sore. I figured that made it Angel’s turn to take the lead, at least for the—

  The Station Security team had set up an ambush in the passages leading to the maintenance nexus this route had just let me into. I didn’t see it until too late. Where was Angel?

  Five guards rushed me from all directions, sticks out and an earnest desire to beat me down writ large on angry faces.

  “Angel?”

  No response. She was really deep in the data.

  Fuck.

  Sudden, irrational fear that I was alone again spiked adrenaline through my system, I struck, determined to make them work for it.

  The first guard tried for a jab with his stick. I met the tip with the insulated sole of my boot, pushing the discharging stick into the guard’s hand and dropping him in a heap.

  Knowing at least one of them would try and brain me in an “accidental” hit to the skull, I moved into the space the downed man had occupied and spun to face the rest. Sure enough, two guards had got in each other’s way trying to crack me in the back of the head. I ducked the one strike that would have landed and immediately surged erect, weight behind my fist as it connected with the guard’s jaw. Her head snapped back and she reeled.

  I shoved her into the other one’s way and turned again in time to see another stick coming in. I stepped into it, trying to get inside. I avoided the stunning tip, but caught a savage blow to my shoulder. Of course it was the one that was already injured.

  Ignoring the pain, I hammered my other forearm across my attacker’s upper chest and hooked his leading leg in a take-down. My forearm slid up his chest and across his neck, adding leverage as I pushed my weight against him. I almost had him down when the fifth guard tagged me across the kidneys with his stun stick and I stood straight and stupid.

  Those guards who could, closed and started some payback.

  Stunned, I only dimly felt the rain of blows I had earned. Smiling inwardly, I rather hoped they could see my pleasure: surprised, unarmed, and without Angel, I had almost taken them all.

&
nbsp; * * *

  The lights clicked on in the cell. I covered my eyes as the cell door opened.

  “Get up, Muck.”

  I identified the voice immediately, despite a slight slur. I sat up quickly to face the door. Dengler stood in the doorway, face even more fucked up than mine, swollen and battered lips causing the slur.

  I grinned, relishing the view even as fresh scabs pulled open.

  “Get up and get out of here,” Dengler said as Keyode came up behind him.

  “What, you want another chance to repeatedly slam your face into my knuckles?” I kept the grin fixed in place despite the thrill of fear that went up my spine and the fresh dribble of blood that ran from my battered lips.

  “No, I ordered all charges dropped. You are free to go.”

  I spat. “So you can have someone else bushwhack me? I’m tired but I’m sure I have at least one more dance in me.”

  “Like I am stupid enough to do that after I let you go in front of witnesses. No, you’re free to go.”

  “He seems to be telling the truth, Muck.” Angel supplied. She sounded apologetic, probably about not helping out earlier. I didn’t care, this whole situation was too fucked up for me to hold on to old stuff.

  I glanced at Keyode, noticing for the first time that he was wearing the chevrons of a supervisor. “What you got to say about that, Key?”

  The Security man sent a flat stare my direction. “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, I believe the old saying goes?”

  “Horse? What?”

  “He means: ask no questions, just go,” Dengler explained.

  “Not till I get his answer.”

  Dengler shook his head and waved at Keyode.

  “I think letting you go is bullshit and I told him as much,” Keyode said, eyes never leaving his former partner.

  “No question there, Keyode is telling the truth,” Angel said.

  Still feels like I’m about to get knifed in the back.

  “Why this sudden change of plan?”

  “Orders, that’s why.”

  “From who?” Keyode and I both asked, simultaneously.