Gates of Hell

by Susan Sizemore

  “He found out I’m in town. I think he’s on Bonadem trying out a new brand of Rust, but I don’t know. I’m trying to make him think I’m looking for a piece of his action—as if I’d ever deal in anything like Rust. Well, he’s a border runner and shouldn’t be too up on my reputation. I’ve been buying Rust from him through one of his girlfriends. I don’t know who Persey’s Rust connection is, though I suspect Denvry or Halfor. But who’s supplying it to the suppliers… ?” He shrugged. “All I have are rumors. Some say Plaent. Or Pyr.” He shook his head. “He’s a scary renegade bastard, but…” He shrugged again.

  Martin listened carefully, recognizing all but the last name Glover reeled off. He was considered the United Systems’ specialist in the workings of the Bucon’s pirate guild and the shadow empire of the Pirate League. He figured much of what he knew was what the guild and League allowed to be known. “Pyr?” he inquired, on the off-chance he might gain some new, uncensored information while the ambassador was drugged to the gills and off-guard.

  Glover looked pained. “Not exactly an honest, tax-paying guild member. Showed up on the border over by the Rose Nebula five, six years ago. They love him out that way, which keeps the guild from coming down hard on him. He’s a slaver and pirate and works the techno market more than he is a dealer, but with a nasty rep, and mysterious friends on several sides of the border. You want to contact the folks on the other side of the Rose, you have to go through Pyr. One rumor is that the Rust is coming from the other side.” Glover shrugged beneath his blanket. “Just another rumor.”

  Pyr sounded interesting. Ugly, but interesting. Martin made a mental note of the information.

  “We need to talk to Sting. Roxy. The koltiri.”

  Physician Merkrates, who I helped raise, Martin added with an inward wince. He wished he hadn’t agreed to this. Until last night, he’d thought the kid was immortal, if not completely invulnerable. He wasn’t so sure anymore, but that wasn’t going to stop him from going through with this. He got up and helped Glover to his feet.

  As they started toward the door, it was flung open. A petite, dark-haired woman stumbled inside and threw herself into Glover’s arms. He hugged her close and let her sob for a few seconds, then held her out at arms’ length. Martin noticed bruises around her big brown eyes and a swollen lip. She looked nervously at Glover.

  “Pamla, dear,” he said gently. “You told Persey about us, didn’t you?”

  “No,” she retorted quickly. “He wouldn’t beat the shit out of me over you. It’s worse.”

  Martin stepped forward. “How worse?”

  “Hello, Viper,” she greeted him with a smile that lit up her bruised face. Martin recognized her from the Bucon enclave in the Terran asteroid belt where nobody went by their real name.

  “Marquise, isn’t?” She nodded. “What happened?”

  She gasped and went pale. “Viper, you’re Service, too!” She turned a fierce glare on Glover and demanded, “What are you up to?”

  Glover’s knuckles went white from his tight grip on her upper arms. She tried to wriggle away, and he shook her. He said something threatening in a Bucon dialect that Martin’s translator probably wasn’t supposed to recognize. The concepts that were translated to Martin from Glover’s words were, “Family-thieving, sex-for-nothing idiot. Everybody’s action is at stake. What is going on?”

  She replied with a few unpleasant words in Bucon, then blurted out in Standard, “I told Persey about Groupie! All I said was that it was odd seeing her in civvies as the last time I’d seen her she’d been in a Service uniform. He beat me up for dealing to her. Then he…” She gulped, then bit her bruised lower lip. Bucons didn’t talk easily to each other.

  “What?” Glover prodded with another hard shake.

  “Then he told all his dealers to spread the word that Rust is being hoarded at the hospital. He said to tell the junkies that if they want it they have to get it from the hospital. And when they find out that there isn’t any—it’s going to be ugly, Glover. If it isn’t already.” She looked pleadingly at Martin. “I don’t want to see anything happen to the doctors. They were helping the ones too young to use the Rust.”

  Martin’s mouth went dry. “The hospital.”

  “Riot.” Glover pushed the woman aside. He looked at Martin. “We have to get to the—Sting.”

  “Not her,” Martin declared. “Persey doesn’t care about Roxanne. It’s Dee he’s after.” Dee, the very bright Service chemist who now had a supply of Rust to work with. Dee, his friend. Dee, who had just saved his life. Martin suddenly realized the people he’d noticed down in the street had all been moving, drifting as if windblown, in one direction. A strong wind. Desperate people driven by need. The walking dead. Tools for whatever Persey had in mind.

  “The bastard is dead,” Martin decided. “Glover, where’s your air-car? We have to get to the hospital right now.”

  ———

  “We’ll walk from here.”

  Somebody in Dallis had finally shut down the last power plant, Martin realized as Glover stopped the aircar a cautious half-kilometer away from the dark hospital grounds. The rain still poured down in wind-driven torrents. Martin wiped water out of his eyes and squinted to get a better view of the lifeless gray mass of stone and glass at the end of the wide street. Beyond the dark hospital, the port was a deserted cluster of tower, hangars, and permacrete fields. They walked up a street full of puddles and awash with streaming water. Except for the low moan of the wind, his ears were assaulted by dense, unnerving silence. He was used to the empty streets and unlit shops. He didn’t know what it was that seemed so ominous about the abandoned street. Maybe because a riot should be a noisy affair. He made out a large crowd of people milling around ahead of them, moving in and out of the hospital’s gates. No shouts. No angry screams—but the feeling of danger increased with every step nearer the silent mass of bodies. No one noticed two more people approaching the crowd.

  Martin shook his head as he pulled out a hand weapon from a concealed pocket of his jacket. “I hate heroics,” he complained. Then he gave a hard look at the equally well-armed Bucon.

  Glover had his collar pulled up against the rain, but his gaze came up to meet Martin’s. “Me, too.” He looked almost bored.

  Martin nodded. Of the two of them, Glover was probably the calmer. He was a Rust junkie, but he had everything at stake. He’d do. “Let’s go.”

  ———

  “Bet this was a nice garden a few minutes ago,” Martin commented as he stepped over the body lying across the stone-flagged path.

  The body had formed a sort of dam, and rain water mixed with blood pooled where the dead man lay. There were people everywhere in the courtyard, some of them on their feet, their faces full of anger and desperate pain. Many more were on the ground, beds of summer flowers crushed beneath them. Many were dead, many more were injured, the violence totally random. The rain poured down on them all, soaking multiple shades of blood into the ruined garden, diluting and mingling it into black streams.

  Martin stunned a few of the crowd when they turned their attention toward him and Glover. They fell with the same weird silence that permeated the place, thicker than the blood. What the hell did Rust do to people? Martin didn’t let himself think about it. He took a deep breath and ran as fast as he could for the main entrance.

  There was no blood on the white and purple tiles in the lobby, just trailed-in mud and small puddles of rainwater. They followed the mud trail into the carpeted corridors. Here people were shouting.

  Some were screaming in pain, most were shouting for Rust. The first-floor corridor was lit only by skylights, the dark color of the walls absorbing much of the light. Martin found a wall map, but without the voice-activated guide it took him long seconds to make out that the labs he wanted were located on the twentieth floor.

  “Damn.”

  He grabbed Glover by the arm. It took them a few more seconds of pushing through the crowd to find the emerge
ncy stairs and follow the hysterical cries and shouts of the pack of Rust hunters upwards. The stairwell was dark; not totally black, but dark enough to add to the danger and Martin’s sense of foreboding. He almost missed the unconscious woman wedged into the doorway of the tenth floor.

  It was the glint of gold that caught his eye. Gold that had a twenty-four-carat quality to it, but also seemed to have a life of its own. It was the kind of living color that could only be associated with one rare variety of humanoid in the Systems. He was used to waking up with hair like that in his face on most mornings.

  “Roxy,” he said, kneeling beside the huddled form of his sister-in-law. He had heard that there were several koltiri working at the hospital, but he figured the others would have been sensible enough to blink out at the first sign of trouble. Roxy was a MilService officer—which said a great deal for her common sense right there.

  Her skull was smashed in, her lovely face a ruin, the gold hair sticky and matted with clots of blood. The damn fools had decided to kill the one thing that could save them, Martin thought furiously. He battled the fury and felt for a pulse at her throat. He wasn’t surprised to find one, just overwhelmingly happy.

  He and Glover exchanged a relieved glance, then dragged Roxy out of the stairwell. There were windows along one wall of the corridor. It was empty of rioters at present. There was plenty of light here to see that Roxy was covered in more blood than even a head wound could account for. Martin spotted a long jagged cut in the bare skin over her heart, but it was already healing. Luckily, her attacker hadn’t known that you couldn’t kill a koltiri by stabbing her in the heart. If you cut off the head of a koltiri healer or blew her up, then you might have a chance of killing her—but a knife in the heart? No. That would hurt a koltiri really badly—and make her angry. He knew from personal experience that the last thing you ever wanted to do was to get a gentle, compassionate demi-goddess really pissed off.

  “She’ll be okay,” he assured Glover. I hope, he prayed silently.

  “My head hurts,” she answered for herself. Roxy’s big purple eyes blinked open. “I’m going to throw up.”

  “You do that, honey.” Martin helped her to sit up as she began to retch. She did vomit, and it was mostly blood. “Oh, God,” Martin whispered as he watched helplessly. The girl was going to need a lot of time and protein to put herself back together from this one, and he didn’t have either to give her.

  She got slowly to her feet and leaned against a window, her forehead pressed to the cool glass. Martin watched carefully, a part of him clinically, as the last traces of injury disappeared from the empath and the ruined face became familiar again. Familiar, but changed. Her large eyes were sunken in hollow sockets, the skin drawn tight over thin bones. She was a big woman, taller than him by several inches, but right now she looked more like a stick-figure drawing of herself than a living person.

  “A one-eyed man tried to kill me,” she said, her voice as thin as the rest of her. “I remember one brown eye and a big knife. Some other people had bats. Does Bonadem have a baseball team?”

  She was just as loopy as when Dee’d taken her back here a few hours ago. “Where is Dee?” he asked, slowly and patiently. “In the chem labs upstairs?”

  She blinked owlishly at him. There was no expression in her eyes. “I think so.”

  He heard people clattering up the stairs and looked around quickly. This place was not safe, not even for a koltiri. A few more stabs in the heart or any other serious injury and Roxy would probably die from exhaustion. But he didn’t want to take her with them up to the twentieth floor, either. It sure as hell wasn’t safe to leave her in the hallway, abandoned for now or not.

  “Roxanne, is there somewhere safe nearby where you can hide?”

  She plucked at the damp sleeve of his jacket. “Go get Dee,” she said insistently. “She’s with Callen and Rutherford. Get them, too. Rutherford has nice eyes, even if he doesn’t like me.”

  He stroked her cheek. “You first, darlin’. Where can I stash you?”

  She blinked a few more times, then told him, “There’s an isolation ward on this floor. Safest place on the planet. Got its own power source and everything.”

  “Good.”

  The stairwell door opened and Glover shot down three intruders. The door closed. Martin had the feeling the Bucon’s weapon was not set on stun.

  Roxy ignored the bodies piled in front of the door and looked out the window. “Viper, I think it’s stopped raining.”

  Martin didn’t let himself be exasperated. “That’s nice,” he said gently. He took her arm and asked, “Which way to this isolation ward?” She pointed.

  Glover protected their backs as they hurried along. Glover’s vigilance made Martin glad to be needed.

  The faint blue glow across the doorway at the end of the corridor showed Martin that there was still a small amount of power protecting some people from the plague and violence. Anxious faces peered out of a half dozen beds in the ward beyond the force field when they reached it. Meddroids moved from one diagnostic station to next, the only care left for the seriously ill people in the shielded ward. Martin glanced at the control panel set in the wall by the entrance. Every other sterile field in the hospital was down. He thought about the Hippocratic Oath. He thought about the Bucon Empire.

  “More coming this way,” Glover spoke behind him.

  “I hear them.” He had no trouble remembering the codes used in every hospital in the United Systems for this kind of force field. He punched the code sequence as Glover swept his weapon across another group of intruders. They fell in a tangled heap across the corridor. The glow faded. Martin pushed Roxy through and Martin brought up the field again. “Let’s go,” he said to the watchful Glover.

  They found another stairway around the next bend in the corridor. They saw no one else on this dark staircase as they hurried up the ten flights to the labs. Martin wasn’t prepared for the bright sunlight from the hall windows as he came panting through the doorway on the research level. There were plenty of people in this part of the building. A whole riot’s worth. Noisy, angry, frightened, dying people.

  Martin took a step forward and pressed quickly back against a wall when a man aimed a cudgel at his head. His weapon took the man out, then he swept it in an arc, stunning at least a dozen of the rioters. “That was a baseball bat,” he muttered as he stepped over the bodies.

  He looked over his shoulder to check that Glover was still with him, just in time to see the Bucon’s cool expression change to snarling anger. “Persey!” Glover changed his aim slightly and fired, flinging a red bolt of energy past Martin’s shoulder.

  Martin ducked and whirled in time to see a long-haired man dodge the weapon’s ray, pushing a shrieking woman into the deadly light as he fled through a stairway door. Glover would have gone after Persey, but Martin pulled the Bucon forward as the woman’s death-scream rang in his ears. They stayed close to the wall and moved cautiously toward the labs. Martin searched the crowd but didn’t see any living members of the hospital staff, nor was there a single glow of an environmental belt. He cursed silently at this new way of dying from the plague as he and Glover went from one wrecked laboratory to the next, until they found what they were looking for.

  There were three bodies left scattered carelessly amid overturned equipment and tables. Any evidence of research was destroyed or taken. The two men had been clubbed to death, researchers destroyed along with the evidence of Rust’s existence. One of the men had nice eyes that opened on nothing; the other had been small and pudgy. Martin made only a cursory inspection to make sure the men were really dead. It was the woman he knelt beside and took in his arms. There was a thin strand of wire wrapped tightly around her neck, a few drops of blood on her pale skin. Her sapphire-blue eyes were empty, the habitual mock-cynicism wiped from her face, replaced by a grimace of pain.

  “Oh, Dee.”

  Not an easy death. Somebody had wanted to hurt her. Somebody was a vengef
ul bastard.

  Martin’s fingers plucked at the wire, carefully unwinding it to reveal the deep cut that circled Dee’s throat like a necklace. He swallowed hard, brushing his hand across her cheek.

  Glover touched his shoulder. “Looks like Persey got what he wanted here.”

  “Yeah.” Martin stood. “We’ll have a hell of a party, Groupie,” he promised her solemnly. “Let’s go get Roxy.”

  He took a moment to change his weapon’s setting to something stronger than stun.

  Chapter Twelve

  “He looked at me. What was I supposed to do?”

  “Damn it, girl, this is no time to be committing miracles.” Martin took Roxy by the shoulders and turned her away from the ward bed, and the healthy occupant that was looking up at her worshipfully. “Save your strength. We have got to get out of here.”

  “They do have baseball on Bonadem,” she told him, smiling happily and pushing blood-crusted hair out of her face. She jerked a thumb at the bed. “He wants me to teach him basketball, though. There’s a ball in my room. I have to go get it now.”

  Martin tightened his grip on her thin arm when she tried to go to the door. “We need to get off the planet, Roxy. We slipped past the blockade in an oversized darter. There is no way three people can make it out in a darter. Are you following this, sweetheart?” Roxy was watching his lips with intense concentration as he spoke. She raised her gaze to meet his eyes and smiled. He couldn’t tell if it was a smile of understanding, but he went on. “You came from the Tigris in a long-distance cutter, right? Please tell me you have a cutter at the port.”

  She seemed to absorb his words by osmosis, then parroted them back to him. “You have a cutter at the port.”

  “No. But do you?”