by Rick Partlow
He sent the recording to their server, then turned his attention back to the oncoming assault shuttles. The ship’s capacitor banks were charged, and they were still at a safe distance.
“Hold on,” he warned Sandi.
He hit the Teller-Fox warp unit with an overloading jolt of power; space ripped again, a curtain parting, and they were gone.
Chapter Five
Ash felt his head spinning and he wanted more than anything to close his eyes and try to shut out the noise and the smells and the tsunami of advertising, but to stop in the midst of this galloping herd of humanity would have meant being trampled. He’d thought he’d known what Belial would be like. He’d seen the documentaries, watched the streams, played the ViRdramas set there, like everyone else had. Belial was the Casablanca of the Commonwealth and everyone knew about it.
He’d watched his first documentary stream about it when he’d been twelve years old, and he remembered the story like it was yesterday. Belial had been the brainchild of a man named Kevin Ling, an investor out of old Hong Kong who’d jumped into the business opportunities the wormhole jumpgates afforded the minute the Commonwealth had allowed civilian traffic through them. He’d been smart enough to know that habitable planets would be tightly controlled by the government for the foreseeable future, and he wanted something independent, something the Commonwealth wouldn’t have their fingers in. He’d organized a cabal of investors, back before the Corporate Council, when there’d been such a thing as an independent investor. They’d called themselves “the Wan Chai group,” and they’d begun construction on what they called a “pleasure station” in the middle of Alpha Centauri’s inner asteroid belt.
It had been brutally simple, if also brutally expensive. They’d basically just laid claim to the largest asteroid in the belt, then dug a hole all the way through it using what amounted to jury-rigged nuclear weapons, filled the hole with water and focused concentrated sunlight onto the thing with reflectors kilometers wide. The water had turned to steam and expanded, blowing up the asteroid like a balloon, and when they’d imparted spin to it with another series of nuclear explosions, it had lengthened into a cylinder---a hollow cylinder dozens of kilometers long with a crust thirty meters thick.
The Wan Chai group had sealed it airtight, built airlocks and then got started on the interior. There’d been plenty of other rocks around to provide mineral resources and plenty of free solar energy from the reflectors and the biggest expenditure had already been sunk. It had taken years for the investment to pay off, but when it had, the Wan Chai group had been in a prime position to buy their way into the Corporate Council. He thought he’d read that a couple of them were still alive. With current biotechnology, they’d probably stay that way.
In the beginning, there’d been maybe a half-dozen businesses that had leased space in what eventually became known as Belial. Over a century later, there were thousands, packed into every level, taking up nearly every square centimeter that wasn’t used for housing employees or generating power, growing food or handling waste. Most were legal, a good percentage were quasi-legal, and some were downright illegal, but Belial prided itself on not being under the legal domain of the Commonwealth government and enough money greased enough palms that no one had ever seen fit to press the issue.
Ash hadn’t even made it to the illegal stuff; he was stuck in the main drag, the mass of humanity making its way from the docking bays, down the lifts to the dining and entertainment district. The gauntlet you had to run to get to the promised land of vat-grown steak, professionally-trained master chefs, genetically-engineered wine, live music and the largest dance-floors in the Commonwealth led you through a barrage of invasive advertising. It assaulted your senses, stretching across the ceiling, scrolling across the floor, following you along the walls. It called to you with a siren-song you couldn’t ignore through the ear-bud of your ‘link and probably used banned subsonic modulation to get you into the mood to spend money.
If Ash had been here with Sandi to have a nice meal and an expensive bottle of wine and a little dancing, the sales pitch probably wouldn’t have bothered him as much; he’d certainly seen the likes of it in his youth in Trans-Angeles. But he was here because his life was falling apart and this was his last chance to salvage it. And Sandi had refused to come along.
“The Patrol is a joke,” she’d insisted, sitting strapped into her chair, arms crossed stubbornly. “And when they’re not ineffectual and impotent, they’re corrupt. This won’t accomplish a damned thing, if they even show up at all.”
He’d argued with her for almost an hour, and it had been as pointless now as it had been during the war. He’d left her there, still strapped in, with the ship’s board locked down so she couldn’t steal it and leave him stranded there “for his own good.”
She hadn’t liked that much, he reflected with a chuckle.
What the hell does she expect? He wondered. It wasn’t as if she’d given him any reason to trust her.
Finally, after a solid hour of ambling along with the other cattle in the herd, Ash could see the lights of Canis Major. More than a club, much more than a bar, more even than the five-star restaurant that it certainly was, it was a cultural phenomenon. Men and women who tossed around millions of dollars in a day’s work and spoke without irony of the effect of political events on the interstellar market marked a trip to the Canis Major on their bucket list.
Getting reservation to dine there would have taken either a great deal of time or a great deal of money, and Ash had neither. But there were a half a dozen bars that orbited the dining room’s periphery, mostly to reinforce the impression that the place was crowded and popular, and all it took was a few Tradenotes slipped into the hand of the bouncer manning the barricade.
Unfortunately, a few Tradenotes was about all he had left.
Glad I stocked the galley with soy paste and spirulina, he thought ruefully. Looks like that’s all I’ll be eating for a while.
He weaved through the crowd that lined the fifty-meter long curve of what the signs advertised as “the Canis Minor Bar,” heading for the last seat at the end of the bar closest to the restaurant entrance. There was a tall, slender woman seated at the stool there, sipping a drink and conversing in low tones with a much shorter man, raised in gravity at least twice that of wherever she’d been gestated. He wore the cheaply-fabricated, bright-colored flash that spacer crews typically changed into for visits planetside, while she was dressed in a tailored business suit, darkly conservative to match her short, slicked-back hair.
He squeezed in next to them at the bar and waited, hoping whoever they sent to meet him would know what he looked like. He tried not to listen to their conversation, but eventually picked up enough to realize that one of them was trying to buy drugs from the other, though he wasn’t certain who was selling and who was using.
“What would you like?” The bartender finally got around to asking him, interrupting his eavesdropping.
Ash blinked, unused to a human server. It was an affectation here, catering to the wealthy who were used to it, and to the middle class briefly treating themselves to the fantasy that they were wealthy. The bartender was an attractively exotic young woman with eyes too green to be natural.
Ash calculated in his head how much cash he had left and what it would buy.
“A glass of whatever dark ale you have on tap,” he told her.
After she clarified that the bar had six different dark ales on tap, Ash ordered a popular brand and passed her the physical notes, then leaned up against the faux wood surface of the bar and settled in, hoping he’d get his drink before the Patrol agent showed up. He’d needn’t have worried; he nursed the ale for nearly forty minutes before he noticed the man staring at him.
He was broad-shouldered and powerfully built and dressed in plain, grey fatigues and a flight jacket that might have been armored, and he looked to Ash like someone who was used to having a gun at his hip. There wasn’t one there at the moment
, because Belial didn’t allow guns, but Ash thought he saw the sway in the man’s gait from the weight he was used to carrying at his right hip. His face was bland and expressionless, with dark hair cut almost to the scalp and skin the color of old teak, and his eyes were dark and unreadable, flickering back and forth like a lizard’s as he seemed to watch every corner at once.
He seemed to spot Ash almost immediately, heading straight over to the bar to stand next to him, leaning over the counter as if he were waiting to give his drink order.
“Are you Carpenter?” His voice was well modulated and pleasant, like a professional singer or one of the computer-generated personalities that gave you directions on your ‘link.
“Yeah,” Ash confirmed. His mouth suddenly felt very dry and he took a last sip of his dark ale to work up some moisture. “Are you…?”
“My name’s Jagmeet Singh,” the other man interrupted. He glanced around, cocking a curious eyebrow. “Where’s Hollande?”
Ash had rehearsed a response for that, something less insulting than “she thinks the Patrol is all a bunch of corrupt incompetents.”
“She wanted me to handle contacting you,” he said instead. “I have the evidence she discovered.” “Discovered” sounded so much better than “stole.” “Once you review it, and you’re ready to offer a deal that gives her immunity from prosecution and straightens things out with the Fleet, she’s more than willing to testify…”
“Not here,” Singh cautioned, glancing around at the other patrons.
The skinny woman and the stocky man were kissing now, Ash noted idly.
“Let’s go someplace more private,” Singh suggested. “I know a bar near here, a smaller place where we can talk.”
“Okay,” Ash said with a shrug, following the big man out through the throng.
He was worried he’d lose him in the crowd, but Singh seemed to know just how far ahead he could get without letting Ash fall away. It took them nearly ten minutes just to make it through the lines waiting for Canis Major, but then they were out the other side, past the advertising barrage and back on the main avenue that ran a winding path through the district. Ash followed the man as he turned off the main drag, away from the crowds, down through a series of alleyways that seemed to take them farther and farther from the collection of expensive and flashy restaurants and clubs and into a more dimly-lit, private section of the level.
Throngs of tourists had turned into the odd group of spacers and construction workers and miners, passing by in threes and fours, eyes darting carefully back and forth.
“Is Hollande back on your ship?” Singh asked him, slowing enough that they were walking side by side.
“She’s…,” Ash started to reply, then hesitated. “She’s somewhere secure, waiting to hear from me,” he changed his answer to something that seemed more discreet.
“We don’t have time for bullshit, Carpenter,” Singh snapped, a shadow of impatient anger clouding his face. “You’re both wanted by the Fleet and the Commonwealth for murder and treason, and I need to talk to Hollande.”
Ash stopped in the middle of the street, eyes wide, face slack and goggled at Singh.
“What?” He blurted. “Murder? Treason? Murder of who?”
“Whom,” Singh corrected with a twist of his lip. He faced Ash, right hand resting on his hip like it usually rode a gun butt there. “Didn’t Hollande tell you that part when she asked you to shelter her? She was here before, only a few weeks ago, trying to catch a ride to Anansi, when one of our agents spotted her. We can’t carry weapons in here, but he tried to apprehend her anyway.” He watched Ash as he spoke, in deliberate assessment. “She had a knife. She gutted him like a fucking fish.”
Ash’s thoughts were spinning like turbines, trying to process the idea, trying to decide whether or not he believed Sandi was capable of doing it. The Patrol agent would have had to have been undercover; they weren’t allowed an open presence on Belial. Maybe she hadn’t believed he was actually in the Patrol? Or maybe she had, but she’d thought he was on the cartel’s payroll? She’d been so insistent that the Patrol was corrupt…
“You’re a Fleet officer with a clean record, Carpenter,” Singh was still speaking. “I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and say you were deceived into helping Hollande. But the time has come to wash your hands of her, to turn her over to the proper authorities. Where is she?”
“Let me go talk to her,” Ash insisted, holding up his hands in a delaying motion, stomach fluttering worse than the first time he’d experienced microgravity. “I’ll find out what happened, get all this straightened out, and convince her to come and sit down with you…”
There was a glint in Singh’s eye, something dark, something decidedly un-Patrol-like, Ash thought.
“Wrong answer, flyboy.”
The blow came unexpectedly, but Ash realized that even if he’d known it was coming, it was way too fast for him to block or avoid. Singh’s fist slammed into Ash’s solar plexus and the wind left him with an explosive whoosh. Stars filled his vision and suddenly he was lying on his side on the cold polymer of the street and found he couldn’t see, or breathe, or even move.
“Now,” Singh told him, moving around behind him and assembling a sleeper hold around his neck, “we’re going to take you someplace really private and let Hollande listen to me cutting off parts of you until she decides to give herself up…”
Ash hadn’t been back to Trans-Angeles since the day he’d left for the Commonwealth Military Academy, hadn’t set foot in the streets of the Kibera since he was a teenager. But no one lived the life he’d lived there, with the family he’d had, and come through it basically intact, without learning a few things about how to survive in a fight, including what to do when someone got you into a rear naked choke.
And he knew if he let Singh sink the choke hold, that would be it. Ash raised his shoulders high against the sides of his neck and jammed his chin down into his chest, not letting the other man get his arm around his neck. Singh tried to use his leverage to lean over further and gain more purchase, and that was what Ash had been hoping he would do. He reached behind him and grabbed at the other man’s shoulder and neck and heaved forward, throwing all of his weight into the move.
Singh flew over his head and slammed onto his shoulder against the polymer flooring. He’d twisted in mid-air to avoid landing flat on his back, and Ash noticed it; the man knew how to fight.
And he’s probably a lot better at it than I am, Ash realized.
He rolled onto his hands and knees and scrambled desperately to his feet, sprinting away like a runner out of the blocks.
People, he thought, his brain trying to work against the waves of adrenalin coursing through him, against the pounding pulse-beat in his temples and the wheeze of labored breath in his ears. Got to get to people.
The soles of his boots slapped loudly against the surface of the street like a conductor keeping time. He tried to make the taps come faster, concentrated on running and nothing else, forcing himself not to look back. Dive bars and hole-in-the-wall restaurants blurred by him on either side, but he didn’t even consider trying to enter one of them; if anyone in this district gave a shit enough to call security over one man chasing another, Singh wouldn’t have brought him here. He just kept running, trying to remember how far it was back to the main street, hoping like hell he could recall the twists and turns that had led him here.
If he could just take the time to grab his ‘link out of his pocket, at least he could warn Sandi…
He didn’t see the woman who stepped out of the shadows beside the public bathroom until her shin was rocketing towards his face. His hands were already up, flashing back and forth as he ran, and it was blind luck that he got them in front of him to partially block the roundhouse kick. He still went down, feet sliding out from underneath him as the sledgehammer punched his own forearms into his face with the dull explosion of pain that you only felt when something broke your nose.
Ash landed hard on his shoulders, vision full of colorful flashes, and he rolled frantically, trying not to stay in one place too long for fear of the next hit that was sure to come. Then his back was up against a wall and, as his vision cleared, he could see Singh on one side of him and the woman on the other, blocking his escape.
She was short and stocky, though that might have just been the impression her armored jacket gave him. Her hair was blond, tied in an intricate braid, and her face was pale and flushed red with the excitement that shone from her blue eyes. Her smile was feral and she looked even more prone to violence than Singh.
“You’re slipping, Jagmeet,” she commented, her English lightly accented. “You didn’t use to give targets the chance to run.”
“He’s bait, Freya,” Singh responded tightly. “You don’t kill bait, you dangle it.” He grinned at Ash. “Never get married to a colleague, son; everything becomes a competition.”
Ash’s attention had been so completely focused on Singh and his…wife?...that he hadn’t noticed the shadow-clad figure approaching behind the man. There was a furtive movement, something cylindrical, something with a large, gaping muzzle, and then a shriek of sound that pierced through Ash’s head like a white-hot knife and sent his hands to his ears, even though blocking them off did nothing. He squeezed his eyes shut instinctively, but when the sound stopped abruptly, he forced them back open.
Singh and Freya were writhing on the ground, convulsing at the edge of consciousness, froth at the corners of their mouths. Standing over them, the ugly, bell-mouthed shape of a sonic stunner cradled in her hands, was Sandi.
“Hurry,” she urged him, holding out a hand. “They won’t be out for long; this thing,” she nodded down at the sonic weapon, “is older than the fucking station.”
He shook off his surprise, took her hand and let her help him up. She started jogging off in a direction he hoped was out of the neighborhood, and he followed her, limping slightly from the pain in his back where he’d landed after the kick.
