Racers of the Night: Science Fiction Stories by Brad R. Torgersen

by Brad R Torgersen

  • • •

  Kalliope Reardon came in on the Goshawk like a micro-sized freight train. Ignoring the small arms fire that spattered across the Archangel suit, she went directly up the ramp and back into the cargo hold, flinging people bodily away from her and smashing shoulders, arms, legs, rib cages, and spines with a series of savage punches and kicks. Those not smart enough to flee, were soundly pulverized under the Archangel’s super-extra-large boot heels. To the point that Kal was covered in gore from top to bottom.

  But where was Commander Berd? Or Berd’s second-hand thug who’d delighted in brutalizing Tim?

  A sudden rumbling in the ship alerted Kal to the fact that someone had triggered the old freighter’s launch sequence. Doubtless, from the bridge.

  Kal wasn’t sure how to get there from the cargo hold, but she knew a faster way. Collecting two of the submachine guns which had been abandoned on the deck, Kal darted back out of the cargo hold—the surviving privateers scattering out of her path—and hit the suit’s limited flight boosters.

  It wasn’t anything to write home about. Kal’s path up to the top of the ship was a bobbling, weaving, legs-flailing embarrassment. But it got her where she needed to go. Perched on the mottled, ugly skin of the Goshawk, Kal marched to where the wraparound windows of the bridge were built into the top of the hull.

  Inside, she saw two faces. Just the men she wanted.

  Kal pointed both submachine guns at one of the windows, and pulled the triggers back.

  Rounds blared from the barrels. But the bridge windows had been designed to be meteorite-resistant. The bullets embedded in the reinforced transparent fiberflex, without shattering it. When the submachine guns were empty, Kal tossed them away and began stomping on the damaged window with both boots. After six or seven hard kicks, the window finally blew inward: ripped from its metal frame.

  Kal dove down, and found herself facing an unsettling sight.

  Berd was still in his uniform, unarmed. But the other man … the other man had been smart, and collected the pieces of his own Archangel armor. Though the armor did not appear to be fully booted up just yet. Without weapons, Kal had only her Archangel to work with. She kicked hard at her opponent’s sternum. He managed to get out of the way just in time.

  The wireless signal that was connected to Kal’s helmet speakers came alive once again.

  “We’re leaving this planet,” the voice of Kal’s opponent said. “And I’m not the only one who thought quickly enough to suit up while you whisked your friend away to safety.”

  “You’ll have a hell of time flying this tub into orbit with the bridge being open to vacuum,” Kal said.

  “A minor problem. There are always the secondary and tertiary control centers. You, on the other hand, are soon going to be outmatched ten to one. I don’t think even you will be foolish enough to take those odds. So you can either flee the ship before we take off, or we can keep right on fighting. Until a dozen of us in suits tear you limb from limb!”

  Kal’s opponent advanced on her, his movements getting more fluid as the suit’s neural interface caught up with him. For an instant, Kal considered. Could she take them all on? Assuming the numbers the man was stating were accurate? Then she thought of Tim, laying half beaten to death back on the forest floor. He might not make it without Kal around to help and protect him.

  The horizon outside the bridge windows began to shift and sink. The Goshawk was ascending on her thrusters. Kal might have had the suit to protect her, but the freighter was the only thing capable of getting her into orbit, which was where the Goshawk’s cradle ship would be waiting to take them out of the system.

  In the end, it proved to be one of the harder calls in Kal’s life. But it was the right call. She climbed back up out of the bridge, skipped across the skin of the ship to the tail, and hit her flight thrusters. She floated easily down to the forest below as the ugly, abused Goshawk climbed slowly and steadily into the sky, roaring like a dragon.

  Chapter 20: uncharted territory

  Five days later, Kal and Tim were holed up in the remains of the Broadbill.

  With the Ambit League gone and no apparent sign of any other human life on the uncharted planet, what else was there to do but settle in and make themselves cozy?

  It beat the hell out of trying to build a lean-to in the forest. And it allowed them to stick close to the few remaining Archangel suits which had not yet been salvaged by the privateers; though finding those crates in the huge mess of other debris would be a time-consuming affair.

  On their fifth night alone, Kal and Tim sat around the small space heater Kal had recovered from the wreck. With electric power still provided by the undamaged cells in the Broadbill’s carcass, Kal figured they had enough electricity to last them several years.

  Which wouldn’t be nearly long enough, Kal reckoned.

  “Nobody will find us,” Kal said, a blanket wrapped around her shoulders while she sipped at a cup of hot soup.

  Tim had his own cup of the same soup, only carefully clutched in his good hand. The bad one was bandaged tight in a foam-seal emergency cast. Something Kal had found in an aid locker, and applied. After holding Tim down and setting the bones back in place. Doubtless the hand would need major surgery, if ever they got back to civilization. But at least the hand would heal, for however long they were marooned.

  “Sure they’ll find us,” Tim said. “We already know somebody knew about this planet, because the Ambit League had to pick out the coordinates ahead of time, and give them to the hijackers who took the Broadbill from Viking Station. The problem is, the people finding us will be Ambit League, not CAF. Berd and his buddy Pitman will be back. For the rest of the Broadbill’s cargo, if nothing else.”

  “Maybe,” Kal said, before taking a long, throat-warming sip.

  “You think otherwise?”

  “I’m not entirely convinced that wreck survived getting to orbit, frankly. It was halfway to falling apart as things were.”

  “And if it didn’t, someone else will still come.”

  Kal thought about it. “Because of the Archangels.”

  “Because of the Archangels,” Tim agreed.

  Kal looked over at her young partner’s wounded hand.

  “Think you’ll be able to put on a gauntlet when that smashed paw of yours gets better?”

  “Maybe,” Tim said. “Why?”

  “Because it’ll take more than just me to fight whoever shows up next time. We’re still in the same pickle as when we first got here: how the hell to get off this planet and back to friendly space.”

  “By the graces of the Ambit League,” Tim said, and chuckled.

  “With my boot on their throats,” Kal said, narrowing her eyes.

  “Maybe,” Tim said.

  “Definitely. I’m pissed off now. I’m not in the habit of letting perps walk away. This Berd guy, and his crew … I want them. Dead or alive.”

  “Frontier justice?” Tim said.

  “It’s the only kind we’ve got now, Tim.”

  He stared off into the distance—away from the wreck, and into the tall trees.

  “Yeah, I suppose you’re right. It’s all we’ve got.”

  A few readers who saw this story when it originally appeared in the pages of Five by Five #2 complained that it wasn’t a finished tale, just the opening to what felt like a novel. And I confess: they’re right. The universe of Reardon’s Law is a big universe, and there is a lot more to this story than can be contained in a single novella. I hope readers who liked this story, and who want more, will be patient with me. My plan is to release additional “episodes” in subsequent volumes of the Five by Five series, and reprint them in my own subsequent collections. So if you’re thinking there’s more to come, you’re absolutely right. Meanwhile, I hope I can be forgiven for indulging in some good old fashioned rock-em-sock-em space opera. With a bit of political intrigue, heist action, and thriller material thrown in for good measure.

  The chara
cter of Kal Reardon goes back over twenty years, to a lady I conjured up for that old sci-fi radio serial I used to do. At the time she was a civilian cop plunged into a civil war, and I retained pieces of the basic premise, while reversing Kal’s role: now she’s a military cop navigating a post-war world where trouble may boil over at any moment. Because in the minds of the defeated, the war hasn’t really stopped. There is no peace. Just a festering hatred against the Conflux, which has split the Ambit League into chunks, and keeps them all isolated from each other; or so the Conflux thinks.

  If you’re wondering why I didn’t deliberately set either the Ambit League or the Conflux up as “good” and “bad” I wanted to make it clear that in this future history, the opposed political forces driving the war clearly see themselves serving the best interests of humanity, while in actuality they do what almost all governments have done: serve the personal interests of whichever brokers happen to have their hands on the levers at that particular time and in that particular place. It remains for the reader to decide which forces—if any—are worth supporting. Sometimes, you can root for a soldier, without necessarily rooting for the government she fights for?

  Kal herself is someone my wife and I worked on for what we hoped—many years ago—might be her own audio serial. The project languished, but I always wanted to revive Kal for something in the future; as one of those characters I knew I simply had to include in some kind of big-scope bang-up thing. I also solicited the input of a former Army soldier who did time in Somalia, 1993-1994, and who had some fascinating opinions on what it’s like to be a woman carrying a rifle in an irregular war zone. So hat tip to Krista Krcmarik Kemper, and many thanks for sharing your thoughts.

  ***

  Blood and Mirrors

  Camarro Jones dipped the control bars on her bike and floated quietly under the scrolling orange text of the police caution holo. EvSeaBelTac in February was its typical gloomy self. Dense clouds generated a perpetual spray of tiny rain droplets that coated structures and people alike, until everything and everyone had a clammy, damp sheen. Camarro deployed her bike’s ground wheels, coasted to a stop, took off her helmet, then slid out of the saddle and punched the shutdown—her riding leathers sweating visibly in the gray mist.

  A duty patrolman in a blue poncho stepped away from his squad car to intercept Camarro, until he saw her badge clipped to the lapel of her belted jacket. At which point he waved an okay and stepped aside, allowing her to stride past and sprint down the stairs into the sex bar.

  Dark red fluid was splashed obscenely across the bar’s central stage. Not all of it human in origin.

  “Got another one for yah,” said a plainclothes officer from the ESBT Metro Bureau. He indicated the two bodies piled naked and awkward at the base of the central stage’s single brass pole. The house lights had been turned up and the air still stank of burnt cannabis and spilled liquor. Camarro knelt and ran her eyes slowly over the bodies, dumping gigabytes of super-hi-res video into her solid-state server. She moved around the victims, methodically taking it all in—careful not to disturb the evidence—then stepped away and crossed her arms over her considerable breasts.

  “Just because I used to work the Scene,” Camarro said, “doesn’t mean I enjoy these cases, Detective. After the Awakening, I got out of this racket for a reason.”

  “I know, Cam. But you should go see the bathroom.”

  “What for?”

  “Come on …”

  Camarro followed the policeman to the unisex lavatory, which was decorated with more fluid and two additional naked bodies: one natural, one not.

  “God, Al,” Camarro said.

  COME BACK TO ME, MISS JONES was written in gore across the wall over the urinals.

  Camarro took a step back, her eyes wide as she studied the crude writing. It appeared to have been done by hand.

  “Any fingerprints?” she said.

  “No. And no hair or DNA either. Perp was wearing a damn clean suit for all we can tell. Cam, what the hell does this mean?”

  Special Detective Camarro Jones didn’t speak, nor blink, as she continued to stare at the writing.

  “Cam?”

  “Alberto …how long since the first patrolman got here?”

  “Thirty eight minutes, give or take.”

  “Was anyone still in the bar when officers arrived?”

  “No, though there was a mighty big crowd out front, scared out of their minds.”

  “Let me guess, nobody admits they saw anything.”

  “Per usual.”

  “Cowards. Please tell me someone thought to get an image of the crowd.”

  “I can ask the guys. Maybe get some footage from a trafficam. Why?”

  “I need to check the faces against my memory of old clients.”

  • • •

  Once she’d cleared surface street traffic control, Camarro let her bike merge with the regional net: just one flying vehicle in a huge cloud of flying vehicles, each orchestrated by the NTSB’s hypercomputers at Old Being Field. She hunched over the control bars and snuggled her thighs around the edges of the saddle, aero-helmet blending her profile with the bike’s overall streamlining. Water spattered across the visor and was gone in an instant as the net slowly moved her into a primary lane, throttling up. At two-hundred K per hour she could be home in minutes.

  Alas, home was the one place she didn’t want to be right now.

  “Get me the U-Dub operator,” Camarro ordered the bike.

  Shortly, an automated menu was asking Camarro how it could assist.

  “Advanced Intelligence Lab, please. Grad student Nathan Kahaulelio. Police priority.”

  There was a small pause as the menu verified the security code packets on her voice-over-IP signal, then another small pause as the menu routed the call.

  “Kaho here,” said a pleasantly masculine voice.

  “Nate, It’s Cam.”

  “Hi sweets. You hardly ever call this early from work. What’s up?”

  “Have you been at the house this afternoon?”

  “No. Professor Sanjalee had some extra papers for me to grade. I’ve been in my office since three.”

  “Good. Stay there. I’m coming to get you.”

  “Has something happened?”

  “Yes. Whatever you do, don’t go out of your office. I am alerting campus security.”

  “Cam, what’s this about?”

  “Tell you when I get there.”

  The line dropped back to the menu, and then to campus police, who agreed to Camarro’s request after only a few moments of explanation. Then it dropped.

  Camarro allowed herself to go internal while her bike shot over the labyrinth of interconnected supercity that dominated the old Interstate 5 corridor. From Marysville in the north to Centralia in the south, and across the lakes as far as Issaquah, the Everett-Seattle-Bellevue-Tacoma megalopolis held almost seventy million people. Somewhere in that mass, was a person who killed. In fact, was killing. Human and simuman alike. This person knew Camarro’s name. Out of them all, this person knew who she was. In fact, had known. From the old days before she Woke Up.

  It made Camarro ill just thinking about it. The big list of clients. There had been thousands of men and hundreds of women. Camarro closed her eyes and pulled up the blurry trafficam shots that Al Guadron had gotten for her. Isolating the individual profiles—those that were even visible in the crowd through the rain—took several minutes. Then she set up a recognition routine and told it to begin rifling through her deep memory, comparing each face from the trafficam with every person she’d ever serviced. She buried this process down where it wouldn’t hit the cognizant-emotional layer—she always had to do that when going back to the time before she Woke Up—and settled in while the bike homed on the university.

  • • •

  “This is unbelievable,” Nate said as he examined the image Camarro had dumped to his e-mail via the wireless. It was a still of the bloody writing over the urinals from
the club. She was in serious violation showing evidence to a civilian not officially associated with an open investigation, but Camarro felt it worth the risk because her husband needed to understand the gravity of the situation.

  “It’s a former client,” she said, not smiling, “I’m sure of it. He remembers me, Nate. He’s hitting the places where I used to work. One at a time. And he’s leaving bodies in his wake.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Pretty sure.”

  “Did you recognize anyone from the trafficam shots Al got you?”

  “No, but that doesn’t mean anything.”

  The burly Polynesian slowly leaned back in his office chair, cupping the lower half of his face in his left hand. Outside his office door—which they’d closed—two campus police stood watch, their eyes following the occasional student or faculty who happened to pass at this odd hour.

  “If this former client wants you back so badly, why kill over it?”

  “I don’t understand that part yet, which is why you can’t go back to the house, Nate. It’s too risky. If this person remembers who I am and where I’ve worked, they might be able to track down where I’m living now, or who I’m married to.”

  “I can take care of myself,” Nate said, a tattooed forearm flexing for emphasis.

  “I know you can, hon. Do this for me, okay? If this perp got to you—”

  “They’d better hope I don’t get to them,” Nate growled protectively. He stood up suddenly from his office chair, sending it backward on its coasters, then he turned and faced out his window into the lowering light of evening. Spots and droplets of moisture coated the outside of the glass.

  Camarro walked up behind him and experimentally wrapped her hands around the hard mounds of his biceps and triceps. For a programming wunderkind, Nate was built more like a football player than a code hacker. It was one of many reasons why she liked him—the fascinating dichotomy between his outward appearance and his inner self. It had captivated her in the months following her Awakening, and she’d been in love with the man ever since.

  “Please,” Camarro said, massaging gently.