by Rick Partlow
"They'll have the port sealed off," I warned him, slinging the bag over my shoulder by its strap.
"We'll take my ship," he told me, pulling his Gauss machine pistol. "It's not at the main port---but we'll need some transportation..."
Before he could finish the thought, a chorus of screams and shouts erupted from the floors below, interspersed by loud crashes and the crack-whine of discharging pulse weapons. All of our heads whipped around, and my sidearm jumped into my hand.
Kane pulled a Gauss pistol, yanked open the door and thrust himself out of it weapon-first.
"Clear for now," he reported, twisting back toward us. "Let's go."
He was starting to turn back when a barrage of laserfire came up the stairs, slicing through the big man and spraying his burning blood and tissue out across the room, splattering all three of us. Slumping forward without a sound, he fell down the stairs, and I threw myself into the doorway on my belly, pistol extended.
At the foot of the stairs were a pair of corporate mercs, dressed in the same soft armor and visored helmets as the thugs that had attacked my house, and toting heavy pulse carbines. I pumped both of them with a pair of tungsten slugs apiece, slamming them against the wall.
I was getting my feet underneath me to head down the stairs when another merc came around the corner, hosing the stairwell with laserfire. Crimson threads struck the walls all around me, spraying me with burning plastic, and I jerked back into the room, landing on my back and kicking the door closed with my foot. I scrambled away from the door as pulses of coherent light chopped through it, impacting on the far wall.
"The window!" Kara yelled, pulling me to my feet.
I nodded, brought up my Gauss pistol and pumped a couple rounds into the tough transplas to weaken it. Deke joined me with his electromag machine pistol, spraying the pane with tantalum needles. The transplas shattered under the combined impact, and Kara threw herself out of the opening, pistol in her hand. Deke followed her, and I paused for a moment to pop a fresh clip into my slugshooter, wincing as the laserfire continued to slice through the door. My weapon reloaded, I sprinted across the room and jumped through the shattered pane into the night.
A cold rain whipped at my face as I sailed downward head-first from the third story, flipped end-for-end in midair and landed with my feet about ten centimeters deep in the mud in the alley behind the Lucky Bastard. And found myself right in the middle of another damned firefight.
Parked across the front of the alley was a Ground-Effects-Vehicle armored personnel carrier, mounting a heavy Gatling laser in its turret, waiting for anyone to try to escape through the alley. The rotary-barrel pulse weapon opened up just seconds after I hit the ground, barely giving the three of us time to press back against the walls before the swath of incandescent threads tore through the alley.
Steaming mud showered us as the support laser blew apart the dirt street, hunting for us in our positions in nooks in the wall. The laser pulses tracked upward, chipping off pieces of buildfoam wall, sending burning debris flying off into the dirt and adding to the cascade of steam that was rising up to obscure their view.
Gritting my teeth, I brought my pistol up to chest level, calling up a mental picture of a turret-mounted Gatling laser and searching it for weaknesses. My databank reminded me that it was possible to disable the gun with a well-placed shot to the feed mechanism where it entered the chamber, and I constructed a computer overlay that floated across my vision. When the overlay passed across the actual weapon, there would be a bright red glow over the point I should target.
Taking a deep breath, I pushed off from the wall, firing as I fell backwards to the muddy ground. I had only a fraction of a second to target the red glow, but I managed to fire a two-round burst in that bare moment and saw the tungsten slugs impact the side of the Gatling laser. The rounds pierced through the feed mechanism, setting off the explosive lasing cartridges within it, causing the rest of the ammo in the feed train to cook off. The turret sent up a shower of sparks and black smoke, sitting there streaming flames for a few seconds like a giant roman candle before the whole gun blew off its mount on a column of fire.
The flaming Gatling laser went up nearly ten meters into the air before it finally arced downwards and impacted in the mud only a few meters in front of me, a hail of red-hot metal and plastic spattering around it. The APC's side door flew open and three armored mercs piled out, nearly trampling each other in their effort to evacuate the vehicle.
Deke and Kara took them out with carefully-targeted bursts of laserfire and tantalum needles, throwing one of them back into the vehicle, the other two slumping in front of the APC's open hatch. I got to my feet and checked in both directions to see if there was any more immediate threats.
"Where to now?" I turned to Deke once I saw things were clear. He stared at me as if I was speaking a foreign language, his face ashen. He'd been acting on pure instinct and programming so far, but Kane's death was just hitting him. "Deke!" I grabbed his arm, shaking him. "Which way do we go?"
His eyes hardened, and I saw an anger behind them that I'd never seen in six years of war. He pulled away from my grasp, looking around, trying to get his bearings.
"Follow me," he mumbled, heading off down the alley away from the burning APC.
Kara and I jogged after him, the echoes of screams and gunfire fading as we drew farther away from the Lucky Bastard. Deke led us through a twisted maze of alleyways and backstreets, always just one step and one street away from the patrolling mercenaries. Now and then we heard the distant sounds of shouting or scattered shots, but most of the town was dead quiet, its wary residents gone to ground at the familiar scent of the hunter.
We ran almost a kilometer, clear out of the entertainment district to the residential area on the other side of the strip---a dank, Spartan landscape of wind-battered rowhouses. I was about to ask Deke just where we were actually going when he pulled up to an abrupt halt at the end of an alley directly across from a small, one story garage.
"What're we looking at?" I asked him quietly.
"Private garage," he told me, eyes carefully scanning the streets. "We're gonna' need a ride to get to my ship."
"Looks clear," Kara opined, checking both ways, then starting to move out of the alley.
"Looks are usually deceiving." Deke grabbed her arm. "There's a groundcar behind the building---just pulled up. Check thermal."
I switched my vision to thermal imaging and saw the heat trail in the dirt leading from the street to the alley behind the garage. I heard Kara swear softly as we both went back to normal optics.
"So what's the plan?" I asked Deke.
"Well," he began, pulling out a small control device from a pouch on his belt, "the atmosphere may screw up microwave commo, but," he continued, aiming the unit at the front of the garage and pushing a button inset on the face, "you can still do wonders with laser line-of-sight."
The largest of the three doors that took up most of the front of the garage began to rise slowly open, but before it could make it all the way up, a large Ground-Effects-Vehicle shot out with a cloud of dust, its plenum inflating even as its fans kicked it forward. Barely clearing the rising door, the flat-black, lozenge-shaped vehicle spun into a tight turn out of the building, skidded sidelong with a whine of turbines, and wound up parked crossways across our alley, its side hatch falling open directly in front of us.
Scrambling up the steps that lined the inside of the hatch, Kara and I fell into the roomy passenger compartment, while Deke jumped into the driver's seat, thumbing the control to close the door.
"Man the gun," Deke snapped from the driver compartment, then hit the accelerator, giving the car a shot of power and sending us screaming down the street on a cushion of air.
Looking around the cab, I saw in an instant the ass-end of a medium Gatling laser latched down in the rear of the vehicle. Fighting against the bucking of the car, I lunged back to the gun mount, scanning its controls until I found the touc
h pad that opened up the cowling and uncovered the weapon's business end.
The hinged cowl unfolded like an insect's wings, revealing the multibarrelled pulsegun and automatically activating the sights. Through the targeting screen, I could see one of the mercenary APC's pulling out from behind the garage, the corporate thugs alerted by the sound of the groundcar. I powered up the ammo feed, sighted on the juncture of the vehicle's weapon turret, and squeezed the twin triggers.
The weapon belched out a burst of thirty rounds, an almost-solid crimson thread connecting our two vehicles for a fraction of a second. I'd been trying for their ammo supply, but the bouncing of the car threw off my aim and the burst only spalled armor off the face of the turret with a light show of sparks. The merc gunner answered with a long, hosing volley that swept from wide right of our car to wide left, ripping a jagged line of impact craters across the sloping back and making me instinctively flinch from the dazzling shower of vaporized metal.
I could see the surrounding buildings blurring by us in my peripheral vision, but I concentrated on my aimpoint, trying to ride the wave of curves and jounces until I could keep a good sight picture. The center of the pursuing APC's mass passed briefly through my sights, and I hosed off a long burst, trying to move the gun with the motion of the car and ride my target. This time I was luckier, and I could see a few rounds tear through the cowling over the APC's port air intake, send up an incandescent jet of hot gasses from the turbine.
"Nice shot!" Kara complimented me, watching the screen over my shoulder.
I only grunted by way of reply. Losing a turbine would slow them down, but it wouldn't help too much in these narrow streets. Unless we got to some wide-open spaces, we wouldn't be able to outrun them.
I was hunting for another shot when their gun opened up again, chopping through the armor around our own weapon's mount. I threw myself to the floor, landing on top of Kara as the passenger cabin was suddenly filled with the acrid stench of hot gas and the whine of ricocheting bits of spalled metal.
"Goddamn!" Deke swore from up in the driver compartment. "Hold on back there!"
I don't know exactly what he did then, as I was busy trying to get myself untangled from Captain McIntire, but all of a sudden the car was spinning wildly to the right, pushing both of us against the left wall with enough centrifugal force to do an orbital station proud. I had almost managed to pull my face out of Kara's armpit when the car whipped back to the left, fishtailing wildly and sending us tumbling around the cab anew.
"Jesus, Kara," I wheezed as her shoulder blade jabbed me in the ribs. "Next time put your fucking seatbelt on."
"Well pardon the hell out of me," she grunted, arms flailing.
Finally, the car straightened out, jumping forward with a whine of overtaxed turbines, and I was able to pull myself back up to the gun mount. A cold wind was whistling through the holes blown in the cab by the enemy's last blast, sending a chill running through me as I took my position. We had left the city behind us, I saw as I looked at the targeting screen, and were cruising at a very high rate of speed over the surface of the river that ran past Freeport.
Seeing the jagged, irregular rocks that jutted at intervals above the surface of the rough-running river, I whispered a silent prayer for Deke's driving ability and gripped the side of the weapons mount. At least it looked like we had lost the APC.
"Incoming at two o'clock!" Deke announced. "Attack pods!"
"Oh, great," I moaned. I twisted around to look through the front viewscreen, saw two of the bulbous aircraft coming in at about a klick.
"They're just space-dropped hoppers, right?" Kara took up her kibbutz behind my right shoulder. "They can't be carrying much armor---your Gatling can knock them down."
"Yeah," I conceded sourly, "if I can hit them."
I tracked upward with the gun, my aim not helped by the constant swerving Deke was putting the car through to avoid the rocks. One of the pods swooped down in a steep dive and I could see the grenade launcher mounted in its chin spit out a short burst. Deke juked the car sharply to the right only moments before the water exploded only meters to our left in a triple-thunderclap that shook our vehicle.
I sent a volley into the night sky, but came nowhere near the attack pod as it feathered its portside maneuvering fan and dropped off to its right. I tried to track it downwards, but then the other pod came in along the same attack pattern and targeted us with a burst of grenades. This guy wasn't as accurate as his wingman, and all three detonations impacted harmlessly on the rocks a good twenty meters behind us.
He juked away, but I ignored him, searching instead for the first pod and finding it in its return arc for another pass on us. I cut across his path with a long burst of laserfire, starting to keep a close watch on my ammo count---I still had more than two thousand rounds left, but that could go pretty fast. I saw a flash of sparks off the edge of his fan skirt, and he immediately started an evasion pattern, not seriously damaged.
"Shit," I muttered.
"How's it going back there, bud?" I heard Deke call from the driver's seat.
"Not good, Slick," I admitted. "I'm running low on ammo and these guys are too maneuverable. How much longer we gonna' hang our asses out in the open like this?"
"Not too much farther," he assured me. "Just keep them off our backs for another three minutes."
"Easy for you to say," I replied through gritted teeth, firing off another burst.
This was not my field of expertise. I was a commando by training, and human targets didn't move quite this fast. It would have been nice to have an A.I. targeting system to track and nail these fuckers automatically, but you didn't often find that kind of hardware in a groundcar. So I was stuck with my own biological and cybernetic software and reactions, which, though superior to some fighter control systems, weren't designed for this kind of work.
Still, I smiled grimly to myself, I was state-of-the-art. I picked up the second pod as it set up for another attack run, not yet trying to evade, got him right in the center of the crosshairs and squeezed the triggers. The Gatling laser consumed over eight hundred hyperexplosive chemical cartridges in just under five seconds, and the solid crimson line intersected the pod nose-on. The bulbous aircraft's MHD turbine erupted in an incandescent cloud, scattering glowing debris from the pod like a man-made meteor shower, and sending the main body tumbling into the river with a billow of steam.
"State-of-the-art, motherfuckers," I hissed.
"Fancy shooting, farmboy!" Deke whooped.
"How are you on ammo?" Kara asked me.
"Little over a K," I told her, shaking my head. "Not enough to track the other one---he's good."
"Don't worry about it, bud," Deke told me. "Look up front."
I twisted around, looked through the front viewscreen and saw the river---and us---heading into the side of a mountain. I wondered why that was good news, until I took a closer look and saw that the river actually went into a wide cavern cut through the center of the mountain. I grinned, realizing what he'd meant. The cave was wide enough for the hopper to follow us, but if it did, it'd be a sitting duck.
The pod pilot must have realized it, too, because he cut loose with a barrage of grenades, putting a wall of fire between us and the cavern entrance. The blasts rocked the car and I could hear fragments of shrapnel ricocheting off our sides as the multiple thunderclaps echoed back and forth between the river banks. Deke went into a series of sharp, choppy maneuvers that threw me back and forth, from one wall to another, trying to keep from getting nailed before we could reach the entrance.
I snapped a brief volley at the pod to keep him honest, but had to leave it at that, since I'd need almost every round to take my shot if he followed us. The pod juked away from the pulses, but came right back on our tail, latching like a bulldog. I cursed softly, risked another look up at the cavern. I'd barely turned around when the rock mouth swallowed us up, cutting off the light from the huge moon and plunging us into darkness.
; The car's headlights illuminated the rocky outcroppings ahead, but the only light in the rear of the vehicle came from the targeting screen. It was set to IR imaging, lighting up the passenger compartment with a pale, green glow, and showing me that the remaining attack pod had given up the pursuit.
"He broke off," I called up to Deke. "He'll probably be waiting for us at the other end of this tunnel."
"With friends," Kara chimed in.
"Don't worry about the other end." The light, trickster tone had returned to Deke's voice. "We're taking a detour."
I didn't have time to ask what he meant, because he chose that moment to throttle back the car, bring us to a hover near the left-hand rock wall. The left-side hatch swung open with a whine of servos, coming down to touch the wall---just below the entrance to a narrow tunnel carved in the rock.
"Everybody out!" Deke scrambled out of the driver's compartment, hefting one of his tote bags. "Last stop."
"Where does it lead?" Kara asked, unstrapping from her seat and grabbing the other bag.
"To an abandoned landing field left over from the Pirate Wars," he told her, jumping over from the hatch to the tunnel. "It's about three klicks on foot."
While I listened to them, I was working on freeing the Gatling laser from its moorings. I hit the quick-releases and pulled the gun from its mount, leaving the tracking servos, targeting mechanism and trigger yokes behind. A stream of linked rounds spilled out of the feed link, then settled back into the ammo box with the bulk of the remaining cartridges. I yanked the box out of its niche, hung it from the side of the Gatling by the appropriate attachments, then hefted the gun by its rear auxiliary trigger frame and front pintle. A bit unwieldy, but I could handle it.
"Yo, Supersoldier," Deke called to me from the tunnel. "You coming?"
"On my way," I assured him, ducking through the hatch and springing over to the mouth of the tunnel. Deke and Kara both looked me up and down, the corner of Slick's mouth turning up in amusement at the sight of the support weapon I held.
