Borderline

by Appleton, Robert

  If I loved you, time and again I would try to say all I’d want you to know...

  Splintering pain shot inward from his ribs, then his face, his chest, ribs, ribs, ribs again, all to the distant woozying strains of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s love ballad from the musical Carousel. Always Bess’s default first pick in her audio track randomizer, for no apparent reason. So she still had some juice. What about Lori Malesseur? Was she— Hmmph! A vicious blow to the kidneys contorted him, poisoned his roots, yanked them loose. His vision and hearing and the full reception of his pain flushed into absolute clarity. He wished it hadn’t.

  Iolchian soldiers rained fists and boots down on him, belching laughs at each other as they pummeled him from every side. No weapons that he could see. It was sport to them. Retribution for his having sent them to all this trouble. But what of Lori Malesseur? What had they done to her?

  “All right, fun’s over,” one of them said, but it didn’t stop the relentless assault. “I said knock it off.” He cocked a pulse rifle, cleared them away.

  “What’s the deal, Sarge?” asked another. “I thought we were supposed to bring him back.”

  “So we are.”

  “What? Dead? We don’t have orders for that.”

  “He killed eleven of our men in the aviaries. Eleven. No way he gets to live. Not while I’m in charge.”

  “But with all due respect, you’re not, Sarge. The administrators will want to interrogate him, find out who sent him.”

  The pot-bellied, uniformed sergeant adjusted his tinted visor before kicking Finnegan in the balls. The sickening roar of laughter sounded miles away as the pain drove up in dull waves, churning him inside out.

  “You want to see this piece of shit on trial?”

  “Not really, Sarge, but—”

  “Cause that’s what’ll happen if the administration gets hold of him. Everything by the book, full ISPA rights, legal counsel, the whole goddamn show. This suck-bait’ll cut some kind of a deal to save himself. I’ve seen it before. Only I’ve lost friends of mine this time, so there’s no way I’m letting that happen. No. Way. Any dissenters?”

  Only one; Finnegan felt for a rock with his hand, took a firm grip. Swiped it side-on at the nearest kneecap. The crunch of breaking bone seemed to wake in him reserves of energy he shouldn’t by rights have had left. He crabbed forward and kicked out at the sergeant, smashing the bastard’s rifle full into his pot belly, winding him. Strong arms tried pinning him into submission, but both men had bent too close. He kneed one in the face, mashing his nose into a tomato. The other dragged Finnegan upright and yanked his arm up behind his back, threatening to dislocate his shoulder. Sonofabitch, now that hurt.

  “Break his neck,” cried the sergeant, crawling on all fours, saliva hanging as a glistening webbed string from his mouth.

  Another, bearded soldier pointed the rifle straight at Finnegan, straining himself not to pull the trigger. “Move away, Broussard. I’ve got him.”

  “Wow, take it easy with that.”

  “Blow him away, Vickers! Blow the shit-kicker away!” The delirious sergeant hobbled to his feet and leaned forward, palms planted on thighs, as if ready to start chanting in a huddle with his fellow troops. But he was the only one.

  Finnegan watched the shooter closely, and was already dipping a little to one side ready to execute his reversal maneuver on the shit holding him. Broussard. As soon as Vickers’s finger began to depress on the trigger Finnegan would drop and spin and—

  A piercing whistle stopped everyone dead.

  “So you boys think you’ve got what it takes? Seven dicks against one?” All gazes spun at once to the fringe of bracken skirting a large boulder thirty feet behind the sergeant. Lori Malesseur emerged, limping badly, blood streaming from her right leg and her left temple. Her top was open to below her breasts, revealing more than a hint of pushed-together white cleavage. She unzipped it further, down to her navel, and eased the two halves apart so that even less was left to the imagination. “A million clips says none of you has what it takes, one on one.” She tossed her dirty blonde hair, beckoning them, and planted her fists on her hips.

  Whatever she was doing, it had two things: a) unbelievable guts, and b) their attention. Dumb, yet maybe not so dumb. Three soldiers immediately started toward her.

  “Stay as you are,” ordered the sergeant, but they ignored him. No surprise there. He’d just opened the door to this when he’d thrown the rule book out the window—together with the chain of command—with his illegal revenge killing. Now they wanted their own revenge...of a different sort. “Secure her, but that’s all.”

  Yeah, right.

  Then, as if dipped in deja vu, a slick shard of an image cut into his mind’s eye again. He had no power over it. Fluid, foreign yet close, it depicted a bramble thicket from ground level, and the surrounding rocks, sand, and...

  My Shelby!

  He knew exactly when and where the image had come from—at the bottom of the steep decline to his right, at that precise moment—but he didn’t know how he knew. The gun was not visible from his current vantage. It was another peculiar out of body hint at the course he needed to take in order to save himself. But how was he doing it?

  No time to quibble. A venomous smack from Lori’s direction signalled the fight there had started. It stung him into action. If he didn’t act now, they’d probably take turns with her...

  He ducked and spun around the back of Broussard in one smooth motion, snapped his neck with both hands. No sooner had Finnegan dived at the steep drop than all his wounds leapt and flared with him, screaming as he scraped down the rough rock. Dual pulse blasts sent a torrent of debris after him. He flung himself behind the bramble thicket. The bird was there, hiding, gawping at him like he had two heads. He went straight for his cannon. Sucked in a blood-metal breath as he cocked it. Then, knowing he had no chance here whatsoever while the Iolchians held the elevated ground, he bolted the long way around the slope to Lori’s position, all the while holding his ribs. Bess crooned away as he passed her smoking chassis. Her engine was still running. Maybe she’d just overheated and wasn’t permanently damaged. Maybe.

  When he reached Malesseur, she was on her back, biting and gouging and punching the two remaining soldiers as they positioned themselves to rape her. The third lay crumpled in a heap, dead, his brains all over the sand. The bloodied rock nearby told how she’d lured him in only to bludgeon him at close quarters. One helluva woman.

  His turn now.

  He repeated her piercing whistle. As soon as the two rapists saw him they raised their arms and withdrew. One of them had already unmagnoed his fly. Sick son of a bitch.

  “You all right?” he asked her.

  She slowly zipped her top in reply, didn’t look up.

  “Stay here,” he told her. Prodding the rapists before him, he used them as human shields all the way to their colleagues’ position atop the rocky incline. “All of you, come on out and surrender the weapon. Do it, or I start blasting.” He estimated three more remaining, after the one he’d killed and the one Malesseur had killed. “You don’t get paid enough to die for no reason. But my reasons for killing you are piling up fast. So don’t fuck with me.”

  Muttering. Hissed retorts in private. This had to be the most ragtag squad of uniformed gorillas he’d ever come across. No sense of hierarchy. Apart from the sergeant, a yahoo scumbag who enjoyed killing, they might all be new at this, recently hired from civvy colonies to make up the numbers in Iolchian Core’s private army. Maybe he could use that to his advantage.

  “You should know this is Simon Malesseur you’re messing with. You just tried to rape his daughter, which isn’t historically an awesome career move. He handpicked me personally for this op. And he’s paying me ten times what you grid-licks make in a lifetime. So do the math. When the shooting starts, which of us here is fucked?” He gave them a few beats to chew on that. “Or you can surrender right now and we tie you up in the cave. Nothing more.
It’s your choice. Lori?”

  She glared at him, red and fuming—set to explode the stalemate if he didn’t get a move on. She quested for something on the ground—a rock to finish what she’d started?—and seemed to spot it as she limped away to the bottom of the slope...

  “Whoa. Don’t shoot. We’re coming.” After kicking off the sergeant who’d clung to his leg, Vickers stood tall and tossed the pulse rifle out into No Man’s land. “I didn’t sign up for no syndicate war. Right, Aegar?”

  “I reckon.” Aegar rose hands-first next to his colleague, his inner leg sopping. “Don’t hurt us, fella. We didn’t know you was with the Malesseurs. Honest.”

  “You wet scum!” To everyone’s surprise Sarge lunged from behind and careered Vickers forward, using that momentum and cover to rugby-tackle his subordinate onto the rifle.

  Finnegan ducked right away, shot from between the legs of the man with the unmagnoed fly. He pipped the unfortunate Vickers in the mouth, blowing his jaw clean off. Sarge fired back, blasted Unmagnoed Man’s leg apart at the knee. The impact of this pulse wave—the Iolchian’s weapon was the more powerful—slammed Finnegan backward onto the rocky shelf, where only a desperate shoulder roll saved him from a serious head injury.

  He spat a mouthful of dust and, despite the searing pain in his side, sprang into action. Dragged Unmagnoed Man down as a shield in front of him. Sarge did likewise with Vickers. Trading blasts, they eviscerated each others’ corpse shields a generous chunk at a time. But this couldn’t go on for long.

  Meanwhile, the other two squaddies had sneaked away and were sprinting uphill together, toward the top of the ridge. To where their artillery-mounted vehicle had to be waiting.

  Shit. Whatever they had up there, it had already lit this whole area up like the Battle of Perihelion once.

  He had to move. Now.

  While Sarge continued firing, the bare rock floor ate up most of his blasts. The crafty shit was just buying time for his friends, not really risking himself by looking where he was aiming. Any second now and the barrage from above would restart. Christ. He’d be a cave painting. But where could he go to avoid the rain that—

  A startling yeeeurk of metal scraping stone whipped him around to the left, where a bright beam bounced up almost vertically into the air.

  If I loved you...

  Finnegan punched a cheer when Bess growled into full view, headlights blazing as she leapt into action at the top of the incline. With a suicidal scream Lori Malesseur swung the bike around Sarge’s position, ducked his pulse blast, and hit the throttle, nose down. The burst of acceleration tore her straight into the panicked officer, pinning his head between fender and floor and dragging him to his death.

  Victorious, she turned Bess on a sixpence and pulled up next to Finnegan. “Oi, Twice-As-Useless. Get on.”

  He looked at her. Then at Bess. Then into the most dazzling big hazel eyes he’d ever seen looking down at him. “Who the hell are you?”

  “The dumb shit who hired you.”

  He climbed on. The condor was already nestled in the pillion bag on the back. He shook his head in disbelief. “How did you learn to ride like that?”

  “In a hurry. Best hold on, Finnegan.” She peered over her shoulder. “I’m giving you quadruple, right?”

  “I guess.”

  “Then suck this four ways.” The jolt of acceleration punched the breath from his lungs. Before he could chide her, she’d already mortgaged them on a reckless uphill shot through a rocky channel so narrow it shaved the skin off his knees. Yeeeurk! Bess’s hind quarters scraped the wall on their way out. He crossed himself. Onto the rim of the arcing ridgeline they blazed, at upwards of seventy kph.

  The loud thumps of artillery fire behind them, and the faraway impacts that followed, brought a wry smile to his stinging lips. The two surviving troopers were amateurs. Weekend warriors on a one-way trip to the stockade after this. But there’d be more to come, a lot more. Iolchis Core had a goddamn army at its disposal. So from now on, there’d be no more stoppages until absolutely, unavoidably necessary. And no sleep.

  “Oi.” She prodded his arm, then pointed away behind him. It hurt like hell to be turning at all—those sumbitches had mashed up his ribs good and proper—but he had to see.

  He wished he hadn’t.

  While there was only one Hover-APC parked on the ridgeline, a kilometre-wide wall of dust coverged upon it from a fair distance behind. A thousand glints of glass and metal spangled the ferocious cloud. Fingers began to reach out of the dust, moving quicker, veering around the edge of the ridge, on a direct intercept course with Bess.

  He grabbed a hold of Malesseur’s tense left shoulder and squeezed, mimicking her grip on the throttle as she hiked up through the gears. Well over a hundred and twenty kph now. Good job there was no headwind. They had no goggles, and pretty soon Malesseur would have had no eyes left! But this was going to be a tight race.

  Bess versus a fleet of bigger, newer, hi-tech bullies. What did the old girl have left?

  The race to the border was on.

  Chapter Three

  Staying alert after two days without sleep was like trying to remount a floating log on a timber lake: the more she struggled, the more reality spun her under. The non-stop warm breeze in her face didn’t help. So she slapped herself. Fidgeted. Rummaged through the glovebox for a distraction. There she found comms equipment, seven spare speech-only-recognition headsets Finnegan had brought for the op but hadn’t had to use. It gave her an idea.

  “Here, put this on.” She handed him one.

  “What for?”

  “So we can talk properly.” The engine’s whiny monotone, together with the fast-moving air flapping in her ears, meant she had to scream to be heard. “To keep us awake.”

  “What?”

  “See what I mean?” After two sets of double beeps, they were in sync, so she spoke normally, “Finnegan?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Tell me a story. Something. Anything. Just keep me entertained.”

  “There was an old man from Uranus—”

  “Not that. Come on. Tell me something about yourself. Where were you born?”

  “You’ve read my resume. You tell me.”

  Lindsay sighed. Even now, after what they’d been through, he was testing her, he didn’t trust her. The name Lori Malesseur was a wedge between them no amount of small talk or pretence could penetrate. But she had to be the bitch. His employer. The moment he found out otherwise, who she really was, that she’d been sent in to dupe him, either he’d kill her or she’d be dead anyway, as per Lori’s promise: “The only way you survive this is if you return with the Fleece. And if he runs, I’ll hunt you both down.” What, no hazard pay bonus? No union dispensation? For shame.

  “I’m not even sure that was on your record,” she replied. “I know you were fostered on Fourmyle Delta. Ran freight with your adopted family for a few years during the blockade war between Beta and Kappa. Home schooled, I assume. Then you trained for three semesters in the Vike Academy with your adopted sister—Megan, was it?” No reply. “Both expelled for conduct unbecoming. Details a bit hazy. After that, your record is all over the map. Wanted for various crimes on various worlds. Stints in border colony militia. Work as bodyguard, salvager, blockade runner, among other things. Oh, and what was that other one? Professional second-for-hire or something? I take it that wasn’t an acting understudy.”

  “A second is a duellist’s back-up; his job is to make sure things go...according to protocol.”

  “I figured. So how many times did you ‘unfortunately have to step in?’”

  “You don’t wanna know.”

  “Ha. You’re right. I don’t. But I want to know what happened with Megan. She never showed up on your record after the Vike. Did she move back to Fourmyle?”

  “Mind your own fucking business.”

  Lindsay wriggled in her seat, trying to bottle her irritation. “No. I think you owe me a little something afte
r I saved your dumb ass back there.” He obviously didn’t. “Well, that’s gratitude for you. Remind me to pay you in the smallest possible denomination, you cold son of a bitch.”

  “Let me ask you something first. Then I’ll tell you about Megan.”

  Oh crap. Questions about Lori? The surest way for Lindsay Polotovsky to have her neck snapped at 130 kph. But she’d encouraged this inquisitiveness. It kinda served her right. “Um, yeah, sure.”

  “Why did you do that back there?”

  “Oh. You mean my striptease thing?”

  “Why didn’t you just keep your head down and sneak off when they killed me? They must have either not seen you on the bike with me or thought you’d been blown up. You could have gotten away undetected.”

  Because I couldn’t stand by and watch you suffer like that. Because I couldn’t let them kill you. Because I don’t want anything else to happen to you, you obtuse goon. Because you’re not the asshole Lori led me to believe. Because I’ve been rooting for you ever since you decided not to leave me out there at the crossroads. Because I’m lonely and you’re kinda hot and if I could only have one more wish before Lori kills me, it would be to just keep on riding...past the border...past Lori...and never stop. Because you’re the most excitement I’ve had in a long time. Because I’m dead anyway, and it was the right thing to do.

  “Hon, how far could I have gotten on my own in this desert without transport? Seriously,” she said. “Next dumb question.”

  “That was the bravest thing I’ve ever seen.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, thanks, I guess.”

  The hoverbike’s underside struck the top of a mound, thumping them both up off their seats. A unanimous umph filled the comms channel, then a crabby croak sounded from the rear.

  “Cutis nova.” The phrase spilled out as though the jolt had dislodged it from his memory.

  “Huh?”

  “You do know what a cutis nova is?”