I crawled out from beneath the desk and stood, cautiously. The room was an abattoir. Keene had shoved me down under the desk as the shooting started, and I hadn’t seen how badly it had gone. The room was like a small wing of a museum, with a dozen or so display cases spaced neatly around the perimeter of a space roughly the size of a tennis court. Several of the cases had been shattered by stray gunfire, but miraculously all of the displayed artifacts were still on their stands- all but one, at least. The missing artifact was sitting in Keene’s outstretched hand, which was about ten feet from the bloody mulch that had been the jovial old merc. I had known him for barely a day, but I couldn’t stomach looking at him. I just bent and scooped up the little object that we’d been sent to steal. It was strange. I knew what it was- an old artifact from the twentieth century worth more money than twice what I could earn on the streets in a year. It was sealed in a glossy black case designed to protect it from the rigors of our profession, and that protection had already proven itself essential. I wasn’t sure how much Keene’s bloodstains would have dropped the value of the relic, but I was sure I would have taken a hit in payout. I grimaced. Here I was, standing by the mutilated bodies of my short-time teammates, thinking about my payout. It seemed a little ghoulish. I guess I’ve got a little merc in me after all. Though perhaps standing in a room full of my slaughtered comrades and one guard of unknown status was a little silly. Those drones were dormant now, but if someone got wise to what was going on, they could probably use an override command to wake them back up, and then it would be me lying in a mulched heap on the ceramic tiles. It was time to go.
I made as if to leave the room, then paused and checked the guard’s pulse. He was alive. I reached out carefully for his mind, and immediately the phantom scent of melted plastic and charred flesh slithered across my mind. I wasn’t really smelling it, but it was the closest sensation my brain could decipher for what it had found in the man’s mind. I wasn’t sure exactly what I’d done, but there was a very good chance I’d turned the poor bastard into a vegetable. The endless babble of the minds of the sprawl pressed in on my temples, and I considered shutting them away. But no, this… ability of mine was the only way I was getting out of here alive. I bent and slipped the flechette carbine out of the guard’s nerveless fingers and tried to ignore the twin streams of blood I could see leaking out of his nostrils. With a quiet “sorry,” to the room at-large, I slipped out of the collection vault. It felt like someone was driving an ice-pick into the side of my head. I gritted my teeth and forced the pain away. I needed another goal. Going back down the same elevator my team had ridden up in seemed like a bad idea. For one thing, I couldn’t hack the damn thing; I didn’t have the know-how. For another, I wasn’t keen on trapping myself in a box at the mercy of hostile security forces.
Maybe Schultz’s radio isn’t working.
I heard the thought loud and clear, about half a second before I heard the elevator chime somewhere else in the building. I needed to hide. I looked around wildly. I was standing in a well-appointed space strewn with expensive couches and art. This was a very wealthy man’s living room. I remembered Keene saying that the homeowner himself was on vacation. I guessed that the brain-dead man with the drones worked for whichever security organization that the mark hired. Schultz, I guess. Sorry Schultz. But I didn’t have time for that. I needed a way out. There three ways out of the living room, so I picked the door leading me the furthest from the elevator and scurried across the room. I had just gotten the door shut when I heard the far door open.
“Schultz?” Someone called loudly. “You alright m- Oh goddammit.” The voice became tight and concerned. I needed to move. They would put together that someone else was alive in here in a moment. I turned and scrambled through the short hallway I found myself in, bursting through the door at the other end into a kitchen worthy of any upper tier restaurant. The kitchen was empty and spotless, with all of the pots, pans and utensils neatly displayed. I wondered how often this kitchen was used. Probably rarely. Rich people didn’t buy luxuries because they needed them, after all. I quickly searched the kitchen for other ways out. There was a freezer at the back of the room, but otherwise, the room was self-contained. The only way out was through the living room. I stopped and listened. I could still hear the soldier that had just come up the elevator fussing over the fallen Schultz. Could I keep him from noticing me long enough for me to sneak out? I grimaced. This would be a lot easier if this were a normal apartment, but the guy that owned this place was rich enough that this condominium took up an entire floor of the tower. There were no other apartments to hide in, no way to bluff my way out. If I got caught here, I’d be shot on sight. If I tried to leave by the elevator, I’d be caught by the security cordon in the lobby. There was no way they would fail to notice me walking out of the building during a security incident. I looked around the kitchen, despairing, looking for anything that could help me here. They would catch me. Unless… My eyes snagged on the stovetop. They wouldn’t catch me if they had something bigger to worry about.
I dashed over to the range and suppressed the urge to cheer when I realized that it was, in fact, a gas stove. I opened the gas valves all the way on all four burners. Good. Step one. But if I blew up the room while I was still inside it, I’d just burn to death instead of being shot to death, and I didn’t think that was a trade-off I was really interested in. I still needed an alternate route of escape, unless I wanted to be trapped in a burning kitchen with angry assholes with machine guns and killbots waiting outside.
I moved over to the freezer, hauling the heavy door open. My breath fogged as I stepped inside. I didn’t fancy staying in here for long. It wouldn’t do for me to freeze to death as a fire raged outside. That was far too ironic for my liking. The ventilation fan in the back of the freezer caught my eye, and I smiled. A fan meant an air duct. Maybe I could sneak out that way, like in the old movies. It would probably not be nearly as easy, but it would be better than being shot. I peeked out the door to the kitchen. I didn’t know how much gas was actually in the room, and I was going to get literally one shot at this. So I waited, tense, sure that at any moment someone was going to kick down the door to the kitchen and come howling in at me. At least I knew that if they shot me, they’d die not long after I did. When I reached the point where I couldn’t take the suspense anymore, I shouldered my rifle and took aim at the stove, ready to dart back into the freezer the moment I fired. I took a deep breath, let it out, and squeezed the trigger.
I barely got back inside the freezer before the explosion slammed the door shut hard. I heard the latch click into place. If my plan with the fan didn’t work, I would be trapped in here as the building burned around me. The minds of the surrounding thousands of Sprawl denizens living in the towers all around me lit up as they all reacted to the blast. Alarms were sounding in the building already. Most likely, the fire would be put out by automated fire suppression systems before it could get out of hand. I didn’t have much time. I stepped up in front of the freezer’s ventilation fan. It stood level with my chest, more than three feet in diameter. Behind it, through the whirling blades, I could see the metal shaft beyond. I kicked the fan as hard as I could. The protective grating warped, but otherwise, the fan was unaffected. I kicked it three more times, to similar results. I was just starting to feel stupid about the whole thing when I saw something on one of the shelves that could save my ass- an entire beef shank still attached to the bone. I set aside my rifle and lifted the frozen hunk of meat and bone with both hands. It was heavy, but that only worked to my advantage. With the aid of greater leverage, the fan came apart after only a few quick blows. I could hear movement in the kitchen. I had to move. I seized the rifle and then scrambled into the duct beyond the fan, peeling aside the air filter and temperature restriction seals separating the freezer from the ducts beyond.
The air duct was cramped, even for a half-starved rookie merc. But I suppressed the claustrophobia and forced myself to move s
lowly and deliberately. If I tried to scramble around in here, I’d make enough noise to draw every corporate stooge in twenty miles to my position. I had to be careful. I had to-
Shit, someone’s in the vents.
I cringed. Before I could think too hard about it, I reached out to the source of the thoughts. The moment I touched his mind, I could feel two or three more getting closer, approaching the area from the elevator. If this guy alerted his friends… I reached in. Dropping this guy into a coma would work, but I figured I could do better. I wasn’t totally sure what I was doing, but perhaps if I just tweaked this thought, pushed hard on that reflex…
There was a horrible scream from behind me in the freezer, and I heard feet pounding against the tile. Incoherent babbling echoed through the ductwork behind me, and I grinned. Okay, it wasn’t the violent rage I was aiming for, but panic served my purposes just fine. I moved to crawl forward, and something wet dripped onto the back of my hand. Confused, I put my fingers to my face. My nose was bleeding steadily. What the- A headache came crashing in like a sledgehammer a moment later, and it was everything I could just to keep from screaming. I had to keep moving, but the weight of all the ambient thoughts and emotions in the Sprawl were hammering at my skull. I’d overextended my meager abilities. I was pretty sure if I tried something like that again, I’d wind up unconscious. I forced myself to keep going, squinting my eyes against the pain. I made it another fifteen feet or so, and then, when I shifted my weight to crawl forward again, my hand didn’t meet metal. I barely had time to register what had happened before I tipped forward into the vertical shaft and fell.
I was too surprised to scream. I fell for a horrible five seconds, caroming off the sides of the air duct over and over, each impact echoed in the stabbing pains in my skull. Then I crashed down hard into the bottom of the shaft. I just lay there for a moment, wheezing, trying to shove the tidal wave of chattering thoughts out of my consciousness. I groaned. At least the shaft hadn’t stretched the length of the building. At least I was alive. Another spike of pain lanced through my temples and into the space behind my eyes. I ground my teeth together, swallowing the scream that tried to erupt from my throat. Alright. My extra sense wasn’t going to be doing me any more good. With a groan, I forced my inner eye closed once more, and collapsed to the cool aluminum of the air duct. I just needed to rest for a moment, and then I could keep going.
…
I woke some time later, my heart immediately lurching back into terrified thunder when I realized I’d passed out in a building that I’d set on fire. The air duct didn’t feel any hotter, though, and there was no stink of smoke. Apprehensive, I checked my watch. I sighed with relief when I realized I’d only been out for fifteen minutes. I could still do this. I just had to get out of the building. I listened hard for a moment. The fire alarm had stopped. Of course, the fire suppression system had probably quenched the burning stove within a few minutes. There still would be emergency personnel in the building, though. Maybe that was my way out. I had fallen a few stories, each bounce against the walls of the shaft slowing my momentum enough that I’d survived. Maybe I could break out into another apartment and just leave like I was an evacuating resident. That could work, right? Right.
I dragged myself forward, wincing at my new collection of bruises. Slices of reflected light drew stripes on the ceiling of the duct, signifying a vent just ahead. I slithered forward and peered beneath the slits in the metal. Beneath me was a bedroom. It had to belong to someone in the upper middle class. It was far too large to belong to the average citizen of the Columbia Sprawl, but it wasn’t ostentatious enough for a corporate executive or another bigwig. I smirked. The middle class. There was a dying breed if there ever was one. The word of the century was stratification, and economic status was no exception to the laws of the Sprawl. You were either predator or prey. Very rich, or very poor. Fierce and independent or owned by some corporate hive. I shook my head. Make anthropological observations later. Live now. I examined the room for a moment. The bed was unmade but empty. Maybe its usual occupant had evacuated with the fire alarm. The thought was somewhat quaint. In the sprawl, there was little space for evacuees to gather in. More than likely, the few people who’d actually left their homes in response to the alarm were just milling around a few stories down. No one who lived this high in a tower would deign to make the trip all the way to the bottom, not even to save their own life. Maybe they were smart not to. I’d barely made it my first time down at the bottom, even after I’d changed clothes and dirtied up to fit in. I was too pretty, too clean, and the people at the bottom of the totem pole could smell prey when they saw it. No one who lived their life this close to the sunlight would go that far down, because they wouldn’t live to talk about it. Except I had. Now I just needed to live to tell about this particular fiasco.
Gently, I pushed open the vent and scrambled down out of the air duct, letting myself drop to the floor lightly. The auto lights in the room clicked on, and I jumped. Movement out of the corner of my eye caught my attention, and I whirled, aiming my pistol at… my reflection. I winced. Where I’d once been attractively lean, I was now too thin and haggard. What curves I still had after weeks of malnutrition were offset by the ill-fitting, torn, and stained clothes that hung off of my frame. My hair, once bright as a flame, now hung dull and greasy about my face. Beneath my canted eyes were deep circles, so dark they looked like bruises. I wiped the smear of blood from beneath my nose and grinned. At least I still had all my teeth. I wondered what my parents would think of their daughter now. Had they even noticed I was gone yet? Had they noticed the money I’d taken? Surely they’d noticed something; it had been nearly a month. I wondered which they’d noticed first, their missing daughter or their missing money. I decided I didn’t want to know the answer. This was my life now, and I was going to keep it. I needed to get moving.
…
I made it out of the apartment and down the emergency stairs with little trouble. It took me a half an hour to descend to where the poor folk lived, but I made it. Here the tower became less of a distinct structure and seemed to meld with all the buildings around it. In truth, this far down the construction was constant and ramshackle, put together by gangs and mini-corps to provide real estate for them to occupy. Where the towers came close together, the space between them had been crammed with quick, simple, blocky concrete structures. These structures were divided with simple plastic walls into coffin apartments by and large, and they were all connected to each other by makeshift bridges and walkways. It was not uncommon for a walkway to give, sending fifty or sixty people screaming to the levels below. Anyone with any sense walked quickly when they crossed a bridge, and tried to think light thoughts. I rented a coffin in this mess, and I was hoping that if I spent long enough here, I would stop noticing the smell. For now, it reeked of sweat, urine, and desperation, along with a potent cocktail of chemicals that I would have bet money were cancerous. Even with my inner eye closed, I could feel the pressure on my mind like a vice screwed to either side of my head. I needed some sleep, and I needed a few tablets of the good stuff. But first I needed to finish this accursed job, or there would be no more pills, and I wouldn’t have a place to sleep by the end of the week. I didn’t know who Keene’s employer was, which was a problem. But if Keene and his people had worked the same way that I’d always heard of freelancers operating, then that meant he had a fixer. Keene would have turned the package over to the fixer, and the fixer would have paid him. With the boss and the team dead, that meant I had to find Keene’s fixer, and I couldn’t guarantee that the man would be happy to see me, not after his team had gotten slaughtered. I guess I just have to hope he doesn’t feel like shooting the messenger.
I staggered into the Greasy Wheel an hour later. I hoped the barkeep wouldn’t hold my fight from yesterday against me, but this was really the only chance I had at finding Keene’s fixer. I stumped in the front door. Only a few of the many patrons even looked up to note my pa
ssing. A few of those that had turned to look at me nodded with something resembling respect. I guessed that word of my little scrap had gotten around. It seemed that the Sprawl ran on the same rules that corporate gulags were rumored to have. I’d beaten up a guy and earned a sliver of respect. It wouldn’t put food in my belly or a beer in my hand, but maybe it would keep me from being stabbed when I wasn’t looking. Or worse.
I trudged up to the counter and tried to wave down the barkeep. He was a short, squat fellow, and his shoulders barely cleared the bar. But I’d never seen anyone give him lip and walk away. His ridiculously hairy arms and the twin tusks curling out from between his wide lips identified him as a boar hybrid, and I knew for a fact that I didn’t want that kind of trouble. I’d seen the gruff little man throw a drunk twice his size out of the window. Only the fact that safety nets were suspended beneath the bar had saved the sorry idiot from an ugly fate. So I put on my best smile, hoping my battered appearance didn’t spoil the effect, and I leaned in. “‘Scuse me, Penn?”
The boar-man looked up. “Hmm?” His eyes narrowed. “You gonna start another fight in my bar?”
“No, no,” I said quickly. “And I’m sorry about that. Had to make my point. You mind if I ask you a question?”
Penn shrugged. “‘Spose. Keene did pay your tab, plus expenses, so we’re square.”
Alien Romance Box Set: Romantic Suspense: Alien Destiny: Scifi Alien Romance Adventure Romantic Suspence Trilogy (Complete Series Box Set Books 1-3) Page 154
