Fire Fight

by Chris Ward

  Caladan nodded in all the right places. He had learned long ago that the best way to find out what was going on anywhere was to shut up and listen. Missing an arm automatically put him down among the rats, making him someone to confide in. Lia paid him as much for what he could find out in any given spaceport as she did for flying the heap of space rubble she called a ship.

  On a wallscreen in the corner, some local drama was playing. Caladan, unable to read the subtitles that were in local script, switched his gaze between the actors on the screen and the drunk sitting on his right.

  ‘Have another drink,’ Caladan said, waving for the bartender, an off-worlder whose race he didn’t recognise. A single eye watched him out of a shaggy fuzz of hair, but the grunt to the affirmative came in the common tongue.

  ‘Don’t mind if I do,’ the drunk said, holding out the glass for the bartender to refill. Caladan took another refill of his own, but he had been topping up the drunk’s glass on the sly since the man’s tongue started to wag.

  ‘You’ve lived all your days in Louis Town, I take it,’ he said.

  ‘You’ve got me,’ the drunk slurred. ‘Born and bred. Father was a lumberjack.’

  Caladan lifted an eyebrow. ‘Of trees? What do you need wood for?’

  ‘Nah, of steel girders. Off the crashed spaceships out west. Back in the Barelaon War. Parts rained down for a day and a night, so the story’s told.’

  ‘I don’t know it.’

  ‘I can elaborate if you have the time. I’m something of a historian.’

  ‘Is that so?’

  The drunk grinned. The bartender rolled his single eye as though this was a story he had heard often before.

  For the next twenty minutes, Caladan listened patiently to an often contradicted or repeated story about a space war that might or might not have happened as the drunk claimed. The Barelaon War was true enough—it had left three star systems uninhabitable—but it was the first he had heard of it happening in the Areola System. Whether the drunk had attributed the right battle or not, that there was a vast desert of space junk out to the west was undisputable; Caladan had flown over it.

  Of more interest was that the drunk claimed a warlord was hiding out there, using it for a base.

  The drunk had just begun another elongated monologue about the failing politics in the Areola System and the resultant rise of feudal warlords on several of its habitable planets, when the wallscreen in the corner abruptly turned to static.

  Several customers jumped up in frustration and rounded on the bartender, who shrugged his furry shoulders.

  ‘Transmission’s down,’ he said. ‘Drink some more until it comes back on. One drink each on the house.’

  ‘That’s the spirit,’ chortled the drunk, but Caladan’s enthusiasm was gone. He excused himself and headed out into a shared passage with other bars on the pretence of a restroom visit.

  His intercom blinked with a red light, indicating the weakest signal available. ‘Robot? You there?’

  ‘Here. Something’s blocking transmissions within the city. I’m using the ship’s booster to get through.’

  ‘Where’s Lia?’

  ‘I’m still trying to make contact. The captain’s intercom is diverting to messages.’

  Caladan groaned. That meant she was screwing the client. It didn’t matter what systems they visited, or what work they did. Some things never changed.

  ‘Keep trying until you get hold of her. I’m heading back to the ship now. Get me a tracking on her location, and I’ll find her if I can. If not, prepare the Matilda for leaving. We might need to hover in orbit for a while until she shows up. Something’s going on down here, and I’m not feeling too good about it.’

  He switched off before the robot could reply. Where had Lia got to?

  Outside, the street shone with gaudy neon, amplified voices, and the shouts of bar touts. Caladan pushed his way through the crowds of revelers, heading for the access to the spaceport built into the dome’s roof.

  He was halfway there when the dome above him exploded.

  The air was torn from his lungs. It took him a few desperate seconds to reach the respirator fixed on the wrong side of his belt for his hand, during which his vision blurred and his stomach started to spasm. He took in a desperate breath one moment before he vomited up his last few drinks, then stuffed a respirator now stinking of bile back into his mouth and grimaced as each breath he sucked in came with the smell.

  Racing through the towers and walkways overhead came a group of Dirt Devils, ships even the Matilda’s rusty cannons could chew right up, but here in the city’s confines they posed a serious threat.

  ‘Where are you, you dumb cow?’ he muttered, crouching into an alleyway as hordes of screaming people rushed in all directions. A blast of proton cannon fire destroyed a building at the far end of the street, bringing more hysterics.

  Caladan pulled out his intercom and searched the small screen for information. The robot had found her already, and a red dot blinked back at him. She was less than five hundred metres away, but judging by the circling Dirt Devils in that direction, she was under fire.

  ‘Damn you, fool,’ he muttered, stepping out into the street, causing a hover-taxi to jerk to a stop, its automatic collision-prevention system throwing it sideways to avoid him. The hatch opened and the driver, an elderly, six-armed Karpali, climbed out, shaking two of three clenched fists as it shouted obscenities in a language he didn’t understand.

  With a wave of his blaster, Caladan hijacked the taxi, climbed inside and disabled the voice activation system with a single shot. As the door slid shut, he pulled a small device from his pocket and attached the damaged wires protruding from the destroyed voice activation system to it, using a clip to hold them firm.

  Then, switching on the homemade device that gave him control of the taxi, he pointed at two circling Dirt Devils a few streets away.

  ‘Right underneath,’ he said. ‘That’s where we’re going.’

  The little hover-taxi darted through alleys, under bridges, and past tall buildings as the Dust Devils circled. From somewhere behind him came the blare of an alarm, signaling the local authorities had taken to flight and would soon engage the terrorists in combat. That the Dust Devils showed no signs of leaving worried Caladan. A larger attack might be imminent, perhaps by a ground infantry force.

  ‘Here,’ he shouted at the voice command, and the taxi ground to a stop, its doors swinging open. He stumbled out as rubble rained down from high above, blocking the street ahead. With nowhere else to go, he slipped into an alleyway between two buildings. With its automatic command systems disabled, the hover-taxi sat by the curb, then with an earsplitting crunch disappeared under a heap of falling masonry.

  ‘Come on, robot,’ Caladan muttered as he ran, flicking on his intercom, praying for a signal. ‘Where’s that stupid woman got to?’

  Up ahead, three Dust Devils were encircling a squat concrete building that looked like a bunker or depository. Photon cannon fire had decimated its upper levels, but its foundations still stood, its lower levels perhaps installed with reinforced steel for such an event.

  As he reached the end of the alley across the street, a Dust Devil dropped to the ground, its landing gear lowering as it came to a stop.

  Much bigger close up than they looked in the sky—where they resembled grey buttons—Caladan was surprised to see nine men climb out, all wearing headgear and body armor, and carrying heavy duty proton blasters. As he watched, they spread out to encircle the building, their weapons trained on the dark under-space where conventional wheeled vehicles were parked.

  His intercom bleeped. He groaned as it confirmed his worst fears. Lia was underneath the building.

  ‘All right, here we go,’ he muttered, checking the attachment of his respirator and then unholstering his blaster. Not for the first time, he regretted the exchange that had taken an arm from him. In such situations, a second was more than useful.

  Above him,
the three other Dust Devils had been engaged by five local police Peacekeeper craft. Tough-hulled but cumbersome, Caladan was a little surprised that Louis Town hadn’t upgraded to the newer Enforcers he had seen on many of their recent landings. Perhaps the drunk was right about the rot setting in on Iris. He watched an exchange of fire, in which two Peacekeepers were shot down for one Dust Devil, then the two remaining Dust Devils turned and fled into the narrower streets of the southern part of the city, leading the Peacekeepers away.

  ‘Up to me,’ he muttered.

  The Dust Devil had been left sitting in the street, its doors down. Caladan adopted the pose he so often used to put sentries off their guard, the stooping lurch of a drunk. With one arm of his cloak hanging loose and the other clutched across his belly, his blaster hidden by folds of the thick material, he stumbled across the street until the ship was blocking his view of the building.

  They had to have left a man inside. No militia would ever leave a ship unattended, its doors open.

  Caladan reached the shadows around the landing gear and peered up the gangway into the ship. Lights still blazed, computers and machinery still hummed.

  There.

  Standing on the landing gear’s other side, a proton blaster across his chest, his back to Caladan, was the sentry.

  Caladan stopped. He put away his blaster, and opened a small box on his belt. He withdrew a long syringe and lifted it up to the air to check the end of the needle was still sharp. Satisfied, he held it gently in his hand, careful not to touch the tip.

  He crept couple more feet closer to the sentry, then made his move. He kicked the metal landing gear to the side of him, aware how the sound would carry as the metal frame reverberated. As expected, the man jumped, lifting his gun, facing to the left.

  Caladan stumbled out of the shadows, jabbing the needle through the thick material of the man’s uniform, embedding it into his forearm.

  With a grin, he gave the plunger a quick squeeze.

  The effect was immediate. The man howled and fell to the ground, his limbs jerking and kicking like a fish thrown on to land. Caladan gave him only a cursory glance. It wasn’t a pleasant way to die, but the poison would finish its work in a couple of minutes.

  Picking up the fallen guard’s photon blaster, he fired a couple of shots at a building across the street, giving the other militia men the impression they were under attack from that direction, then ran up the gangway into the craft.

  The sentry had been alone. Caladan frowned at the folly of these inexperienced men, then slipped into the pilot’s seat, pulled up the viewing screens and turned the Dust Devil’s cannons on to the men it had recently disembarked. Five died before they knew what was happening. The others took cover, dropping behind whatever was nearby: fallen masonry, a burning hover-car, a line of portable vending machines.

  Cackling, Caladan opened fire on them all as he prepared the Dust Devil for take-off, warming the engines and setting a course for the spaceport. A few returned fire, one man standing to blast a hole in the Dust Devil’s left wing. Caladan turned the cannons around, but someone else got there first. The man doubled over as blaster fire hit him from behind, then a figure was sprinting out of the dark beneath the depository building. Caladan smiled as he watched Lia on the screen. She fired over her shoulder, taking out two entrenched militia men, then dropped and rolled as others opened fire on her.

  Caladan swung the cannons around to give her cover. Lia jumped to her feet and ran the last few steps to the gangway.

  ‘Well, fancy finding you in here,’ she gasped, breathless.

  ‘Hurry up,’ Caladan shouted. ‘We haven’t got all day.’

  Lia stepped into the cockpit. ‘Nice to see you again,’ she said, grinning. A trickle of blood ran down the side of her face. ‘Did you enjoy your shore leave?’

  ‘Wasn’t as sedate as I was expecting,’ he said, engaging the lower thrusters to send the Dust Devil spiraling up into the air.

  As they headed back to the spaceport, they caught the attention of a Peacekeeper craft, a small two-man ship shaped like a mathematical set-square, with a square head and its thrusters blasting out of its lower, sloping underside. Its warning beacon flashed and a message appeared on their screen, but Caladan switched it off, then dropped into the city’s narrow streets, cutting through tight alleys and into a long, low tunnel until they had shaken it from their tail. Lia hung on to the back of the pilot’s chair as the ship bucked and twisted, a smile on her face, seemingly enjoying the ride.

  A few minutes later, Caladan took them back up into the air, from where they found the spaceport in front of them.

  ‘Man, they smashed it bad,’ he said.

  The dome had been blasted through right below the main docking station for off-world ships. Tangles of glass and metal swung in the breeze of a growing storm, held to the dome by steel wires that passed through the surface. Already, though, tiny computer systems built into the dome were beginning to move them back together.

  ‘It means we can fly straight through,’ Lia said, but Caladan shook his head.

  ‘Not so fast. It’s regenerative. It’s already begun to restore itself. This system used to be prone to large meteor showers.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Look.’

  Caladan pointed to a corner of the view screen. ‘There. It’s knitting back together. But that’s not all. First it puts up a frame which it builds around.’

  ‘Can’t you blast it?’

  ‘The holes are too big. It’s like a net. The cannon fire will go straight through.’ He grinned. ‘I have a plan, though.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Call up the robot. Tell him to get the ship ready.’

  Lia pressed the intercom to her mouth and started speaking into it as Caladan turned the Dust Devil around, readying the rear thrusters for one final blast.

  Lightly built machines, they were designed for speed and agility, not durability in a firefight. Nor did their regular arsenal have the firepower to break through the dome surface—a mixture of metal and glass—so one must have been deployed with a special payload.

  ‘They weren’t planning to get back by air,’ Caladan muttered to himself. ‘They were after something.’

  ‘Are you going to tell me your plan?’ Lia said, switching off the intercom. ‘The Matilda is airborne, the rear dock ready to receive us.’

  Caladan grimaced. ‘We won’t be docking,’ he said. ‘Hold on.’

  Lia glanced up at the screen. The sky in front of them appeared laced with lines of silver. ‘Caladan … you’re not serious.’

  ‘It’s the only way.’ He grinned, hiding the terror he felt. ‘Get ready to jump.’

  The armor plating on the Dust Devil’s outer surface shrieked as they crashed into the wire netting. The small ship broke through, but not before sustaining terrible damage. As it looped up into the air, both engines cut out, and the wind howled through dozens of rents in the hull.

  ‘I always knew you were crazy,’ Lia gasped, heading for the cockpit’s rear, holding on to overhead pipes and shelving units as the ship rocked in its death throes.

  ‘Yet I continue to surprise you, is that it?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Caladan grinned. ‘Goddamn pray that robot sees us coming.’

  He jabbed a button on the dashboard and the cockpit’s roof ejected. Freezing wind filled the small cabin. Lia climbed out on to the spacecraft’s top, then twisted and reached down for Caladan.

  ‘Never the easiest of maneuvers,’ he said, letting go of the ship’s controls to take her hand.

  As Lia pulled Caladan up beside her, the ship began to list, the last of its upward motion exhausted. It hung in midair for a few seconds, then plummeted out of the sky.

  Lia pressed the intercom to her lips. ‘Harlan….’

  Something huge loomed beneath them, then the Dirt Devil was spinning across the floor of the Matilda’s landing bay as the rogue hunter swallowed the smaller craft like
a giant space whale. Lia wrapped her arms around Caladan and they jumped clear. Caladan grunted as the fall knocked the wind out of him, but there was no time to quietly suffer. The Matilda lurched, righting herself, and the Dust Devil slid right back out again. As soon as it was through the opening and spinning through the air, the cargo bay door closed with the hiss and groan of hydraulics.

  ‘Close one,’ Lia said, sitting up, one hand picking a piece of wire mesh out of her hair.

  Beside her, Caladan nodded, still too shaken to answer.

  LIA

  ‘My programming says I should be proud of that maneuver,’ Harlan5 said, standing by the airlock leading out of the cargo bay, his wide, magnetic feet holding him still while Lia and Caladan struggled against the motion of the ship as it rose toward the outer edges of Iris’s atmosphere.

  ‘If you dig a hole, you’ve got to fill it in,’ Caladan growled, pulling himself up. ‘Get us out of here.’

  Lia patted the robot on the shoulder as she reached him. ‘Ignore him,’ she said. ‘Listen to your programming.’

  ‘My programming tells me—’

  ‘We need to get to the bridge,’ Lia said, engaging the airlock. ‘Come on.’

  ‘We’ve got security cruisers waiting for us,’ Caladan said from the pilot’s chair. ‘What the hell did you do down there? Those Dust Devils were after you. Don’t try to hide it. What did you do?’

  Lia grinned, remembering the Tolgier’s hands on her body. ‘Aside from get drunk and get laid?’

  ‘Of course. Some things are a given.’

  ‘Jealousy doesn’t fly ships.’

  ‘A good job. If it did, we’d have crashed by now.’