Artificial Evolution

by Joseph R. Lallo

  He watched with mounting anger as the interlopers spiraled toward a likely escape. His brain traced out the routes to the various docks, then the time it would take for his men to reach their destinations. He didn’t like the timing.

  “You!” he said, pointing at a scrawny man unlucky enough to be standing beside him. “Jump.”

  “What!?” he yelped.

  “If they can make it, you can make it.”

  “Look, man. I just signed up to smuggle green devil. No one said anything about—”

  The leader grabbed him by the collar. “I’m saying it now!”

  He shoved the smaller man, knocking him off balance, and used the momentum to send him stumbling toward the edge. A final kick pitched the man off the catwalk. Predictably, the unwilling volunteer didn’t make for a very successful projectile. He plowed through a cloud of small-caliber weapons and rebounded off the far wall at the same time that Squee and Lex finally dropped down to the surface of a distant walkway. They climbed to their feet and dashed toward the docking bays at the far end of the station.

  The leader growled. Alpha male of a barely cohesive group of violent cronies wasn’t a very secure position. It was a hard-fought and highly contested role. One did not remain at the top of the heap by allowing outsiders to disrespect the home turf and get away with it. The business with that Brit and his woman had nearly ruined him. The blood was already in the water. If he didn’t take decisive action, the power-seekers nipping at his heels would tear him apart. He scanned the other catwalks. A few of his people were on the way to the docks, but from their performance so far, he didn’t trust them to wipe themselves properly, let alone stop these two. It was time to take matters into his own hands.

  He stomped into the bar. The combination of the lingering funk spray and his own homicidal body language made sure the crowd parted around him. Just beside the entry arch was a utility closet. He grabbed a stool and bashed it open with two quick strikes. Inside was a cluster of mechanical switches and a tool kit. He tore open the kit and found a pair of clamplike accessories, then looked to the panel. A subpanel of switches was labeled Gravity Control, but most were marked with meaningless letter and number codes. The only one he could make sense of was the largest: Emergency Shutdown.

  #

  “Bays 20 through 16? Almost there,” Lex said breathlessly. He glanced over his shoulder to see that no one had even gotten close. “We’re getting pretty good at zero-g, Squee!”

  With his escape looking considerably more likely than it had a few moments ago, he turned his mind to the SOB. Normally he would have to wait for it to warm up, but he had a feeling that wouldn’t be necessary this time. They were going to have the exterior door locked down, but all he would need to do was get the tractor beam into weapon mode and turn the ship around to deal with that. As long as he got there safely, he was in the clear.

  A sequence of sounds heralded Murphy’s Law coming into effect. The first was a distant electrical thump, like a massive circuit shutting down. Almost at the same moment was a roar of startled and angry cries. Next came a sequence of smaller thumps, each progressively closer.

  “I don’t know what that is, Squee, but I guarantee it isn’t good…”

  They redoubled their efforts, sprinting onward. The corridor for docking bays 10 through 6 whisked by. Their turn was just a few steps ahead, but the thumping was getting closer and faster. Lex planted his foot to make the turn, but before he could push off, the panel beneath him shut down and “down” suddenly went away. The hapless pair simply continued in a straight line, tumbling weightlessly toward the dead end of the long central shaft.

  Lex struck the solitary guardrail on the whole of the catwalk, the one indicating the dead end. It did little more than send him tumbling end over end. His head and neck clanged off the etched metal station directory beside it, and he continued on toward the painted mural on the wall a few meters beyond. He was able to pull Squee against his chest, and he took the brunt of the impact with his back.

  “This is,” he coughed, “going really well, don’t you think?”

  The collision was enough to cause each of them to rebound back toward the rest of the station, but the angle would have left them stranded in the middle of the weightless shaft, so Lex grabbed the loose edge of a wall panel and brought them to a stop. He surveyed their surroundings. The lights in this section of the station pulsed weakly. Maintenance was clearly not a focus for the station’s clientele. A few meters to their left was a set of utility rungs leading to a bundle of wires and cables that probably fed the gravity plates. He worked through the sequence in his head. He would push off the wall, grab the edge of the walkway, and climb along. Or maybe he would shoot straight for the bay corridor and grab the edge. The signpost looked like a good grip. His head was still spinning from the impact and the prolonged spiral that had brought him to the catwalk, so he didn’t quite trust his aim. Better to take it slowly.

  As he swept the area, looking for second- and third-chance handgrips just in case he missed along the way, he noticed a line of porthole-style windows illuminated from the other side. They ran below the catwalk, and thus had been out of sight until now. Two of Leon’s men were guiding themselves through the passage the windows revealed.

  “Crap! Must be a maintenance corridor. They might be headed for the bay. It’s okay. It’s okay. We can still take our time. Just, you know, faster,” he told Squee.

  He tensed for the jump. A distant clap and a nearby plink startled them both. They were still trying to work out what it was when another pair of claps coincided with two neat divots blasting out of the mural beside them.

  “Right, so that maniac is stupid enough to shoot in a space station.”

  He spotted Leon in the distance. The madman was clopping along the walkway, slow, purposeful steps locking down to the surface despite the lack of gravity. In his hand was a small, rather unintimidating pistol, likely the first one he’d been able to snag. A few more were tucked into his pants. His stable footing could only be due to induction boots, the sort of things external crews usually wore to lock them down to the hull. Regardless, it officially meant Lex couldn’t take his time.

  “You’re really going to be earning your keep this time, Squee,” he said. She was drifting at the end of her leash, her face mellow and unconcerned. He grabbed her, then started to reel out slack on the leash. “Ready for more grappling hook?”

  The little creature’s ears perked up and she yipped once. Two more claps and another pair of much closer divots motivated Lex to hurry. He angled Squee toward the signpost ahead, stuck his head beside hers, and pointed.

  “We’re going to aim for the post now. See it?” he said. Squee locked her eyes on the target. He put his hand under her back paws, and she waggled and coiled, becoming completely still once she was loaded and ready to fire. “Go get it.”

  Squee sprang from his hand with her usual precise aim, dragging her loose leash behind her. Like a seasoned pro, she snagged the bays 1 through 5 post and wrapped herself around it. Without hesitation he pressed the retract button and held tight. It reeled in the slack, went taut, and began to draw him toward the hallway.

  Ahead, Leon was getting ever closer. He held his pistol high and directed at Squee.

  “Oh no you don’t!” Lex bellowed, holding the retract button on the leash and accelerating forward.

  The gunman quickly adjusted his aim and fired, but a human body flying headfirst doesn’t present much of a target, and a man anchored only by magnetic clamps on his feet doesn’t make for much of a sharpshooter. Three shots missed their mark as Lex reached the post Squee clung to, shoved off it to change direction, and struck the man full force. They both went tumbling through the air. Lex released the leash for fear of pulling Squee into the fray. As soon as his feet left the catwalk, the gunman was as much at the mercy of the lack of gravity as Lex, and that gave Lex a tiny edge. As became quickly apparent during the resulting grapple, size, combat experience
, and homicidal rage pitched things rather sharply in the other direction.

  “I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you!” Leon growled, firing the pistol wildly.

  It was all Lex could do to keep the pistol pointed away from him. Each blast sent them pitching in a new direction, twisting this way and that, bashing into walls.

  “You’ll kill everyone if one of these bullets causes an exterior wall to fail,” Lex said.

  “It’ll be worth it!” Leon barked.

  By sheer luck, one of his feet brushed the bottom of a catwalk and the inductive grip engaged, grinding along the surface and bringing them to a stop. He dropped his other foot down, braced himself, and wrapped a hand around Lex’s throat. He put the pistol to Lex’s temple. “Now hold still… I want to leave enough of your face so people will still recognize you.”

  Lex, perhaps because he was still in a zero-g state of mind, executed a maneuver that no one standing on his own two feet is prepared to counter. He planted one foot on the thug’s thigh and shoved hard, causing his whole body to pivot sharply around the stranglehold. The momentum managed to torque him out of the grip. The man, panicking at the thought of letting the pilot slip away again, released the gun and tried to grab him, but Lex’s rotation had continued. He was nearly upside down over the thug, passing over his head. Reaching out, he caught the thug’s hand and yanked himself down behind him. The man turned in time to see Lex reach the catwalk in a handstand, coil, and donkey-kick him in the gut.

  The force of the kick was more than the induction boots could handle, and he was sent launching up into the mounting structure of the catwalk. Lex managed to snag one of the nearby struts and haul himself around to the topside of the catwalk, where he dragged himself toward Squee. The hefty clank of the induction boots locking in, and the intimidating snap of a clip slipping into a new gun, encouraged him to hurry.

  Lex grabbed the leash and the funk and leaped down the branching corridor. Bays 1 through 5 were the largest in the station, leaving vast stretches of narrow, almost completely smooth hallway between each door. The designers must have had a lot of confidence in the brand-new gravity plates, because there were no backup means to traverse the gaps. No rungs, no chains, nothing. Lex had developed a fair amount of skill jumping from wall to wall to move through a weightless station, mostly due to the frequent need to chase a feisty funk, but fatigue, adrenaline, and more than a little caffeine had left him lacking his usual grace. He grabbed on to the doorway for bay 3 to give himself a stationary position to gather his wits and take a breath.

  “Just two more doors…”

  Two gunshots rang out, drawing his attention to the entryway. Leon hadn’t reached it yet, but his trigger finger had decided to get a head start on the shooting. Next came a much louder clunk from the far end of the hallway. A hatch dropped open and two men tumbled out. They were unarmed and clearly just as confused by the lack of rungs, but they had half the distance to cover to reach the bay with the SOB inside. With few options, he started reeling in the leash.

  “Okay, Squee,” he said, clicking the handle of her leash to her harness. “Times are getting desperate, I think it’s time to split up. See bay 5? That’s where we’re headed. Don’t get caught. I’ll be right behind you… ready? Go!”

  Squee flicked her tail, pivoting in the air, and pushed off Lex’s shoulder. She bounced from wall to wall like a furry pinball, driving herself forward with skill and purpose. Lex launched himself next. The pair went back and forth, presenting two dizzying targets. The thugs were at bay 5 at this point, still coming to terms with the poor corridor design. They barked orders at one another, and both set out after the pair, for the moment forgetting that they were supposed to be getting to the bay instead.

  The funk reached them first and treated them the same way she would treat any other obstacle. Like a black-and-white blur she bounded off walls, off backs, and off faces, moving flawlessly toward her target. She was past them in an instant, leaving the men disoriented from the sudden nudges and gagging from the lingering spray. They hadn’t recovered yet when Lex came barreling at them, but his larger size and lower acrobatic skill meant that getting tangled with them was unavoidable.

  He struck the two men hard. Thanks to the pesky law of conservation of momentum, the collision sent the three of them backward the way Lex had come. Once the thugs realized they had their hands on him, no amount of disorientation was enough to keep the pair from taking out their pent up rage on the pilot. A two-on-one pummeling began in earnest. Punches to the ribs and back landed with meaty thumps. It was a small mercy that neither of his enemies had received any formal zero-g training, so each blow sent them reeling away and scrambling to keep their grip, but if things didn’t tip his way soon, the two-man beating was going to leave Lex in no condition to fly his ship, or even continue breathing.

  Squee had reached the door and immediately become fixated on its control panel. There were few things she liked better than touch pads, and this one had all sorts of buttons. The one time Lex had attempted to leave her home alone while he went to work, he had found her roaming the hallway when he got home. She was no stranger to door controls. Actually interacting with one in the absence of gravity was proving to be difficult, but she wasn’t one to give up easily. She’d resorted to bouncing back and forth between the control panel and the far wall, trying to nose at the various buttons on each return trip.

  The cluster of struggling men drifted quickly past bay 4 and continued toward the entrance of the hallway. Just as they passed bay 3, what for Lex qualified as a lucky break finally came; Leon reached the doorway. Without so much as taking a moment to aim, the enraged gang leader began firing indiscriminately. The fact that two-thirds of the people in the scuffle worked for him didn’t seem to matter in the slightest. Self-preservation overruled duty, and Lex’s two foes scrambled for cover. They shoved off Lex and propelled themselves roughly into the doorway of bay 3. A bruised and dazed Lex struck the far wall a moment later.

  Bullets pinged off the wall beside him, kicking up shards of metal and sparking wires as Leon honed his aim. Just when it seemed the next one would hit its target, his weapon clicked empty, and for a brief and precious moment all he was slinging was profanity. Lex shook his head and looked to see the bearded lunatic pulling free his next weapon, which had the compact, boxy appearance of what could only be a fully automatic pistol.

  Something had to be done, and quickly. With the sheer amount of ordnance that was about to fill the air, there was little doubt at least one would find its mark. Lex looked around, then spotted a small hatch on the wall labeled In Case of Fire. He tore it open and pulled out the canister within, angling it away from bay 5. He braced himself, pulled the safety pin, and squeezed the trigger.

  Rather than a CO2 powered makeshift rocket, the extinguisher sprayed a disappointing blat of expanding white gel-foam that barely nudged him forward.

  “Scientists had to go and ruin the best part of weightlessness!” he growled.

  Rather than waste time lamenting this missed opportunity, Lex put the canister to work. First, he sprayed a liberal dose of the stuff toward the entrance of the corridor to obscure the view and slick up the walls. Then he flipped around and blasted two quick blobs into the faces of the attackers sheltered in the doorway. Just for a little extra distraction, Lex jammed the trigger of the extinguisher down and left it slowly rotating in the air, filling the corridor with foam as he did his best to nudge himself toward bay 5 again.

  Bullets blasted through the wall of foam for a second or two in a continuous buzz of weapon fire. Bullet holes traced a line along the floor below Lex, followed by an angry shout as the unseen leader learned the cumulative recoil was enough to once again overcome the meager grip of his boots.

  Lex reached Squee to find she’d successfully worked out which bit of touch pad would open the door, and now she was just bouncing back and forth between the far wall and the control pad to pop the door open and closed again. Lex caught her
on a return trip and beeped the door open, ready to hop into the SOB and make his escape. When he saw what the bay held, his face dropped.

  “Yeah, I guess I should have realized that…”

  When the gravity had been shut down, the SOB was left to the whims of the station’s erratic rotation and sickly vibrations. It had left the ship flipped on end and with its cockpit against the exterior door. While it had cooled down a great deal, at least to the point it was no longer incandescent, the ship had raised the temperature in the hangar to an uncomfortably high level and was still hot enough to encourage Lex and Squee to keep their distance. As they watched, it ground along the door. Lex cringed at the sound and reached for his slidepad.

  “That paintjob is taking a beating,” he said with a grimace.

  He pulled back and clipped Squee’s leash on to his waistband, then tapped at his device to activate the remote control. The SOB’s engines rumbled quickly to life, and Lex began to guide it away from the walls and back toward the landing pad. Fingers made slick by extinguisher foam made remotely handling the ship via the small screen difficult enough. Trying to do it while drifting weightlessly required a rub-your-head-and-pat-your-belly level of concentration. As a result, it was Squee who noticed when the door slid open and a foam-encrusted lunatic raised his weapon.

  The little creature yipped in alarm and snarled, leaping off Lex to attack Leon. Lex panicked and pulled her back, then pushed hard off the floor, narrowly dodging the burst of bullets but losing the slidepad in the process. It spun in place, leaving the SOB to continue on the last trajectory he’d set. It quickly intersected with the wall. The air filled with an earsplitting grind as the ship carved its way along the floor toward the group. The leader shifted his weapon for another shot, but before he could pull the trigger, Squee dove at him for another attack. This time Lex couldn’t stop her quickly enough, and she rocketed all the way to the leader, clamping on to his wrist.