by C. G. Hatton
Duncan holstered his gun. “I don’t know how the hell you can see that far but I’ll take your word for it.”
They climbed. It was good to stretch his muscles again after so long stuck on a ship and LC moved quickly, reaching up and hauling himself over gaps in the ladders, enjoying a strength and suppleness that felt like he’d taken a shot of the wacky drugs the extraction teams used. That stuff could make you feel invincible and he was feeling close to that now. As long as the shakes didn’t kick in.
He perched on a ledge, waiting for them to catch up and reached out to Thom.
“They’re pulling reinforcements from the surface,” the kid sent. “How’s it looking out there?”
“We’re…” LC sent and bit off his next word, hearing something above, looking up and flinching as the shockwave from a massive explosion above them sent vibrations rumbling down the shaft. He tumbled from the ledge and tried desperately to catch hold of the ladder as he fell. He heard Duncan yell, twisted in midair and grabbed for a rung. His hand bounced off the first couple then he caught a hold and slammed up against the ladder, his shoulder almost wrenching out of its socket.
Sean and Duncan were both shouting to him. He hugged the metal frame for a minute then started to climb back up, trying to gauge where the nearest maintenance hatch was. He might feel invincible but he didn’t want to test the theory by falling to the bottom of a lift shaft.
Another rumble echoed from above.
“Luka!” Sean yelled.
“I’m fine,” he yelled back. “We have to get out of here.”
“No kidding.”
They emerged into a dark corridor.
“Four more levels?” Duncan whispered as they walked cautiously through an area that looked like administration offices. It was abandoned. They must have managed to evacuate to somewhere safer.
LC nodded. He was holding his gun loosely down by his thigh. It was quiet but something was niggling at the back of his mind. He almost flinched when Thom’s voice came suddenly through the Senson.
“Luka, Sean, they’re tracking you,” Thom sent calmly. “You have to get out of there.”
LC instinctively crouched, glancing around. “What?”
“They’ve got teams coordinated to clear the lower levels already. They’re just shooting to kill any of the escaped prisoners. You need to climb.”
That was quicker than they thought they’d manage. LC looked back at Sean, covering the corridor behind them and getting more and more agitated.
“We’re trying to disrupt their trackers,” Thom sent, “but they’re carrying out a complete sweep anyway. You need to move. Go left.”
They moved as fast as they could without being reckless, LC leading the way through the station. Duncan brought up the rear and it was weird to think that someone else was watching out for him.
Another tremor rumbled through the station. Thom urged them to hurry and they made it up two levels before he called out for them to stop.
“There’s a team searching this level,” the kid sent. “Elliott says this is the best chance we have of getting into the mercenaries’ comms system. Luka, he told me to ask if you’re up for it.”
LC bit back a snide comment. “Where are they?” he sent back instead.
Thom gave them directions and reeled off an array of positions and strengths. According to Elliott and Thom, there was a unit using a mobile command terminal to coordinate a search of this level. If he could get close to it, he could hack in and give Elliott access to their whole system.
“Fast in, fast out,” Duncan said and nudged him ahead to lead the way forward.
Once they were in position, LC hung back, waiting for the signal and by the time he was waved forward, there were two guys in the black uniforms of UM’s hired mercenaries out cold on the floor. He grabbed the terminal from a desk and backed into a corner with it, sliding down to sit on the floor behind a cabinet. Sean and Duncan left him to it and went to watch the corridor.
Getting in wasn’t difficult but trying not to disrupt the flow of data was tricky. He worked around it carefully and listened in to an operation that was panicked and uncoordinated. They were overreacting as if they’d been too complacent for too long.
He was vaguely aware that Sean came back in to check on him, impatient and anxious. She didn’t like to disturb and stalked back out. He got the message and started to break into the command structure, rerouting approvals and creating a way in for Elliott. He made it as elaborate as he could quickly, adding some strings they could pull to create damage if they needed to and leaving a few trip wires to hamper anyone who tried to fix it.
He was still in deep when Thom yelled a warning and gunfire erupted outside the room.
“We’ve got enough,” Thom sent. His voice was tight, every word concise. The kid had been trained well somewhere and not just in engineering it seemed. “Go, get out.”
LC got out fast, discarded the terminal and ran to the door. The buzz in his head was erratic, nothing specific and he couldn’t even distinguish individuals out there. Sean wasn’t replying but he could hear the distinctive sound of Duncan’s massive cannon of a pistol firing somewhere down the hallway.
He pulled out his gun and risked a glance into the corridor.
Sean was right outside the door. She grabbed his arm and pulled him into a run. “UM are mobilising fast,” she said, breathless. “Hal is covering us but we’re going to be pushed to get up to security if we don’t get through now.”
They ran through dark corridors, Thom trying to keep current but their information was getting more and more disjointed and eventually he sent in a whisper to them both, “I don’t know which way you can go. You’re cut off.”
LC skidded to a halt. There was no point running into trouble. “Lift shaft,” he sent to Sean and tried to get his bearings. They needed to back up. “Where’s Duncan?” He’d lost track of the noise of the massive cannon some time ago.
Sean turned. “He’ll be…” she said and her eyes flared. She shoved him hard as an explosion lit up the corridor behind them.
Chapter 10
NG took the pawn with his bishop. The Man nodded with appreciation at the move and they both drank. NG had always suspected the wine had a narcotic as well as an alcoholic effect and he could feel the boundaries of his mind open up, awareness becoming as sharp as a razor’s edge.
“Angmar Rodan is CEO of UM, I believe,” the Man said.
NG sat quietly. It wasn’t a question. The Man knew the name of every shareholder, director and CEO of all the top one thousand listed corporations on both sides of the line. United Metals were registered in Winter, aggressive, unscrupulous and highly profitable. It was a young corporation in the scheme of things but they were ambitious and they were focused, resisting the temptation to diversify that was looking to destabilise several of the other older names. And UM had been smart to pay enough respect, and extravagant donations, to certain key parties so the human rights campaigners would turn a blind eye.
The Man reached for the jug, swirling it to mix the infusion before topping up the goblets. “Men are fools,” he said. “The Between embodies every rebellious and mutinous trait of mankind, yet the fools who fight so fiercely for their independence stand by and idly allow institutionalised vultures such as UM to encroach on their hard-won no man’s land and exploit the very laxity their anarchy promotes.” He brought his knight into play.
NG didn’t say a word. The Thieves’ Guild also exploited that grey area between the two power bases of Earth and Winter, very successfully.
The Man looked up at him. “Out loud,” he said softly, reprovingly.
NG looked at the chessboard, not quite in the position he’d wanted to be. He raised his eyes. “Even before we found out that LC had got caught up with them,” he said cautiously, “we knew UM were going to be a problem. Almost as much as Zang.”
•
LC hit the wall and tumbled, debris raining down, sparks hissing. By the
time he stopped, his ears were still ringing. He’d lost the pistol and a warm trickle was running down his face. He blinked away dust and saw Sean struggling to her feet, staring at a guy in armour who was standing over her, feet planted amidst the rubble, pointing an assault rifle at her.
“Luka,” she sent tentatively.
The soldier wasn’t wearing full body armour – no helmet and no neck protection. LC reached slowly into his boot and pulled out the knife, keeping every movement minimal. He braced himself against the wall, balanced the weapon with its blade pinched carefully between his fingers, gauged the distance and the angle and threw it in a left-handed, perfectly fluid motion. The knife tumbled gracefully, cutting through the air, flying a fraction of an inch past the guy’s nose to clatter against the wall beyond.
The soldier turned his head, incredulous, towards the knife then back, piercing eyes glancing over the rubble to settle on LC.
His gun was somewhere out of reach. He felt Sean freeze, looking at him too. He looked from one to the other.
The rifle was still aimed at Sean but the soldier was beginning to twitch like he couldn’t decide whether to switch targets to the chump on the floor. The guy took a step back to widen his arc and his back suddenly arched, a loud crack breaking the silence and a spray of blood flying out of his chest, fragments of shattered armour and bone scattering. Sean flinched as the red spray hit her across the face.
The soldier dropped, LC reeling from the punch of void that hit his mind, the man dead before he hit the floor.
Duncan walked up, long strides crunching broken glass and debris beneath his boots. “Will you two quit fooling around? We have to get out of here.”
LC wiped his sleeve across his face and staggered to his feet, looking around for the pistol and the knife. He couldn’t believe he’d missed, again – it had been a perfect throw – what did a guy have to do?
He spotted the gun, leaned down to grab it and stood up, sensing that Sean was too close a fraction of a second too late to react as she slammed him against the wall, palm flat on his chest, pushing hard, face up close and furious, still spattered with blood. Her mind was a whirl of emotion. She brought up her other hand, fist clenched around the hilt of his knife, holding the blade up in front of his eyes. She was flashing on Hilyer again.
“Where did you get this?” she hissed.
LC narrowed his eyes, not sure how to respond. He could see Duncan behind her watching them both and flicking his gaze back down the corridor.
“Where,” she said again between clenched teeth, “did you get this?”
The knife was the twin of the one that Hil carried, a unique pair of extraordinary throwing knives that Mendhel had given them as a prize in a competition that had been too close to call. He had to force down the raw emotion that almost surfaced as he remembered that day, that moment. Sean was replaying a scene in her own mind; Hil twirling an identical knife between his fingers, saying to her, “LC has the other…”
LC blinked. Something warm was still dripping into his eye.
Her hand slid up to his throat. “Where?”
“I took it off a dead guy,” he said softly.
She was assuming that he’d stolen it, thinking DNA never lies, so who the hell is this guy? But he could also feel that there was a hint of uncertainty creeping in; she knew he was left-handed and she could hear Hilyer saying, “LC can’t throw a knife for shit”. He almost smiled. She tightened her grip.
Duncan put a hand on her shoulder. “We have to go. This can wait, whatever the hell it is you two have going on. Cole, take point.”
She stepped back and made a show of putting the knife in her belt.
LC didn’t know how to handle it and he wanted the knife back. Stubbornly and absolutely wanted the knife back.
Sean was upset. He could feel her dilemma. She’d been about to abandon him for a lost cause and now suddenly he turned up with a weapon that couldn’t be anything other than a link to the guy she was looking for. She was hooked back into him and she was angry because she didn’t understand why, and he was pissed that he’d screwed up badly enough to attract her attention again.
He glared at her and she glared back before turning and stalking away.
Duncan gestured for him to go and they ran through the station, dark corridors echoing with heavy footsteps and the rattle of armour.
LC moved cautiously. It had been a while since he’d been caught up in a conflict like this. Usually it was get in, get out, encounter no one. The guild picked its targets carefully and only if an acquisition was significant enough would they be sent in to a situation that was already volatile.
It was only when they heard movement up ahead that they stopped. LC glanced around. They slunk up against the wall and he reached out to Thom.
There was no reply.
They didn’t have time to wait.
LC quickly ran the schematics through his head, recalling the diagrams that Elliott had displayed, seeing the possibilities flash into his mind like tracks lighting up through a maze. The guild psych teams had never managed to figure out how he did it, no matter how many tests they put him through. He spotted a solution and moved, backing up and taking a couple of neat short-cuts to slip through into a maintenance area. Sean was right behind him, still fuming, wondering how the hell he was working out a route from memory, thinking about something else Hilyer had said to her. For Christ’s sake, why the hell had Hil even been talking to her? It was frazzling his nerves.
He ran round and led them to an access panel.
“In here,” he whispered and stepped aside to let Duncan go first, waiting stubbornly until Sean followed. He wanted her in front of him. He still hadn’t figured out how to get the knife back off her and he needed to think of some way to deflect her attention away from him again.
She caught his eye as she edged past, that curious look back in her expression.
That was all he needed.
It was tight but they crawled in and worked their way through to a narrow tube with a rickety ladder. It was dry, hot and dusty inside the tube with a rusty tang to the air. Not the worst place he’d ever crawled through.
They climbed three levels fast, Duncan pausing as he reached the top of the tube. LC knew without being able to see that tunnels branched out in four directions.
They both looked down at him.
It was unsettling to have so many people depending on him. It was easy to be reckless when it was only your own neck at stake. That was the thing Hil had never really appreciated; that LC could beat him at every turn simply because he cared less. Cared less about success, cared less about his own reputation and at the very end of it all, cared less about his own safety. Mendhel had suspected and the Chief had outright accused him of it, many times. But nothing anyone could say would change anything. He was lucky to be alive and he lived every moment, but he knew, from hard experience, how precarious life could be. He wasn’t going to sit around worrying about it. Except now he had other people to worry about. And a bounty hunter at his back who was suddenly very interested in him again.
“Go straight ahead,” he whispered and followed as they worked their way through into another maintenance area.
By the time they found a terminal, the prickling at the back of his neck was setting his nerves on edge. They were too exposed, high on a gantry that was narrow and lit only by dim red flashes that were intermittent, suggesting that power relays to the area were damaged.
LC crouched by the black box. If he’d been on his own, he wouldn’t have risked it, sitting out here like this, but he had a bad feeling that they were running out of time.
Duncan and Sean took up position on either side of him and he set to work. The box opened easily enough with a twist of the lockpick and it was encouraging to see that the system was set up for easy access, nothing too elaborate, and getting into it was fairly straight forward. He worked fast but carefully, breaking deeper into the station’s core system. It was heavily guarded an
d getting in without setting off any tripwires or traps was a bitch.
Twice he heard gunfire, distant and echoing. He didn’t move but he could feel Duncan twitch, almost physically towards him at one point and he half expected to be yanked away. It didn’t happen and he shut out the buzz. There was nothing like being under pressure. He hadn’t realised how much he missed having a specific target, having a tab to focus on with a definite end point. Running had sapped his spirit more than he knew.
He switched to the station’s security system and tried to identify the exact cell the skipper was in.
He felt Duncan’s hand rest gently on his shoulder and realised that the sounds of gunfire were closer.
“Almost,” he muttered without losing the connection. He found them but the protections around the cellblock where Gallagher was being held were isolated from the main system. He almost had it when Duncan took a grip on his arm, harder that time, and whispered, “Time’s up.”
LC slowed his breathing, slowed time and threw everything he had to Elliott, total access to the station’s core. He broke free in the same instant that Duncan pulled him away, hauling him backwards as a hail of gunfire ricocheted off the panel in front of them.
It was hard to focus coming out of a link that fast. He heard the clatter of grenades spinning along the gantry. He couldn’t see them, couldn’t get out of the way and he flashed on a view of crosshairs, seeing Duncan clearly in someone’s sights. LC reacted, no hesitation, pushing the big man out of the way.
Something hit LC in the chest and something hot punched into his leg. His knees buckled, sparks from the grenade flashing behind his eyes.
He vaguely felt someone grab hold of his arm and pull him down as his body went into overdrive to deal with the neural reset and the throbbing heat that was pulsing in his thigh. He felt himself falling backwards and tumbled, bouncing, down a staircase.
Chapter 11
“Considering the damage caused by Hilyer’s recent foray into independence…” the Man said and paused. He sipped at the wine as if tasting it for the first time, gaze resting on something in the darkness behind NG. His dark eyes blinked slowly and came to rest on NG again. “How did Anderton fare?”
