by Rick Partlow
Both the captives were bound hand and foot and seemed to be unconscious, which wasn’t as conspicuous in microgravity as it might have been otherwise, but wasn’t going to completely escape notice either. Acosta muttered a curse. This was all last-minute, on-the-fly planning, but couldn’t they have at least tried to be a bit subtler?
There were murmurs now, just a few newcomers. Acosta wondered if the people who’d visited before were so used to seeing shit like this that they didn’t even think twice about it. But some heads turned as the two Spartan mech-jocks passed. Acosta watched the eyes and read the thoughts, the progression from “Gosh, there’s something weird about those guys,” to “I wonder how drunk they have to be…” to “are those two guys tied up and unconscious?” and finally, inevitably, “should we tell someone about this?”
The process was nearly universal and it usually took a predictable amount of time, maybe ten seconds from start to finish. Fingers raised, pointing, the shouted words “Hey!” and “Wait!” rising above the general hubbub of the docking cylinder but almost lost in the twisted acoustics of a cylindrical compartment three hundred meters across and nearly as deep. But the reaction spread like dominoes falling, following the Spartans and their captives in a chain of hands braking on the guiderails and fingers pointing and raised cries. It was only a matter of seconds before the guards became aware of the racket and connected it to Logan and Kurtz.
Acosta touched a control on his ‘link, then covered his ears, closed his eyes and brought his knees up to his chest.
For such a small lump of explosives, it made quite a bang.
Even fifty meters away, the heat was the warm glow of a fire in the hearth on a cold winter’s night, the concussion a palm slapping him in the chest like a friend’s greeting, then the thump of the wall fetching up against his shoulder. It wasn’t a painful impact—there wasn’t enough of a charge for that—but he knew it would be worse for the security troops closer to the wall. He’d taken the chance their armor would keep them from getting seriously hurt, and maybe it had, but they’d still lost their magnetic anchor to the floor and were floating free, arms windmilling wildly.
“Move your asses!” he yelled into the audio pickup of his earpiece, pushing away from the wall.
A woman was crouched beside him, curled into a ball, still holding her hands over her ears, eyes squeezed shut and mouth open in a silent scream, as if she expected another explosion on the heels of the first. Something about the terror in her expression bothered him, sticking with him as she faded from view behind.
Other screams hadn’t been so silent, and they were easy to hear now, cutting through the background noise and the wailing alarms, through the haze of smoke and the confused shouting. They were screams of alarm rather than pain, he judged, though he couldn’t be sure. The blast had been close enough to the customs kiosk to cause injuries in the staff working the table, but he’d done the best he could and he wasn’t going to agonize about it.
Instead, he grabbed the nearest guiderail and propelled himself back toward the shuttle, building up reckless speed in the midst of the herd of panicked human sheep. He knew how to maneuver in zero-gee, had aced at least that much of the tactical course mandated for field agents by General Constantine, and he used every bit of that training now. You had to know the physics, of course, but you had to know it on an instinctive level, not thinking about which motions would send you spinning one way or another, just doing it.
He twisted and spun and clutched at the bar to brake himself when he needed to, leaving a bit of skin behind, and ducked into a ball when impacts were inevitable. A tall, gangly Belter dressed in tight, dark elastic grunted and spun away in a tangle of long limbs as Acosta ricocheted downward and barely pushed himself back up in time to avoid plowing into the floor.
Stopping was the hard part. The shuttle’s docking collar was only ten meters away and if he just grabbed tight on the railing, it would probably dislocate his wrist. Instead, he twisted around and scraped the sides of his boots against the rubber padding, tightening gradually until he’d bled off enough momentum to kick off sideways and glide into the umbilical.
Katy clapped in appreciation.
“You may be a shitty copilot,” she said, “but you sure as hell know how to run away.”
“Go get this thing ready to blast out of here,” he told her, making it an order even though he wasn’t a hundred percent sure he outranked her anymore. “And get the Shakak moving!”
Katy, surprisingly, didn’t argue with him, just nodded and headed back through the shuttle’s lock, pushing off toward the cockpit.
“What should I do?” Mira wondered. Her hand was wrapped around a safety strap, gripping it white-knuckled like she’d be sucked into space if she let go. She was young, he thought, not for the first time. Too young to be caught up in a place like this.
“Go belt yourself in,” Acosta instructed. And stop distracting me, he added silently.
The Intelligence officer leaned back out of the docking collar, wondering exactly how long they had before someone added two and two together and came up with “let’s go shoot the mercenaries,” and whether Logan and Kurtz would make it to the shuttle before or after the realization. They were close now, though they couldn’t hope to move as fast as Acosta had, lacking both the training and the freedom of motion since they were dragging along the bounty hunters. Less than fifty meters, which still seemed way too far, but at least the path was clear and there didn’t seem to be anyone…
“Stop right there!”
The call was amplified, perhaps by the external speakers on the security guard’s helmet or perhaps via a connection with the public address system, or maybe both, but the reverberation made it harder for him to pinpoint the source.
There. Twenty-five meters or so behind Logan and Kurtz, two armored station security troopers were jetting toward them using some sort of hand-held, compressed-gas propulsion guns. Damn. He hadn’t noticed those. They complicated things. They were going to catch up, and when they did, they weren’t going to bother trying to stun the two of them or trap them. The full-auto, drum-fed flechette guns they both carried would rip the two mech-jocks apart and if the bounty hunters got hit in the process…well, collateral damage was always a danger.
Kurtz glanced back over his shoulder at the pursuing troops, but Logan was fixed on his goal, pumping his arm along the guiderail in dogged determination.
Which leaves it up to me.
He pulled his sidearm from the cross-draw holster on his left hip. Colonel Randell always made fun of the cross carry, saying he was trying to look like a gunfighter, but it just felt right to him. He stretched his arm out, bracing it against the rim of the docking collar and wedging his feet on the inner ring to absorb the recoil. The handgun was standard military issue for Sparta and Modi and available commercially everywhere else, as common as dirt, each of them with a pop-up electronic sight. His trainers at the field agent course had criticized it, saying it wasn’t practical for shooting on the run, but propped against a rest, it was almost ideal. He could have aimed for the troopers’ faceplates from a rest this still, taken them out even at fifty meters, but there was that whole damned thing about not killing them…
He shifted his point of aim to the left hand of the lead trooper, where he was holding the compressed gas gun and fired off three shots as quickly as he could. The gun bucked, the roar of the 10mm slugs screaming out of the barrel subdued by the built-in suppressor but still enough to pop his ears. Sparks and a jet of flame shot out the side of the propulsion unit and the lead trooper rocketed off at an angle to his original course until he let loose of the gas gun and wound up tumbling backwards helplessly.
By then, Acosta was shifting his aim but the second guard in line had realized they were being shot at and was trying to adjust his course laterally and bring up his flechette gun at the same time. There was no choice, no time for a carefully-guided shot at the gas gun. Acosta fired off the rest of the maga
zine at center of mass, counting on the man’s armor to do its job.
A 10mm slug travelling over 600 meters per second wouldn’t penetrate the thick chest armor the man wore, but it would still hurt like a son of a bitch, and probably scare the shit out of him. At least that’s what Acosta was hoping. The station security guard jerked wildly at the impact of the volley, and more significant than whatever momentum the slugs imparted to him was his haphazard waving around of the gas gun. The hand-held compressed-gas propulsion unit twisted him in an out-of-control spiral that abruptly ended in a collision with the opposite wall between two docking collars.
Acosta reloaded automatically, dumping the spent magazine and switching out to a fresh one. The empty mag spun slowly away, ricocheting off the opposite side of the docking umbilical in a distracting spiral arc, but before he could think to try to retrieve it, Logan barreled through the opening, nearly taking Acosta with him.
“You’re welcome!” Acosta called after him, squeezing against the side to let Kurtz in along with the broad-bodied great ape he was carrying with him.
Once they were inside, Acosta shut the outer lock then retreated back to the inner one and slammed it closed before he bothered to holster his gun.
“We’re in, Margolis,” he called up to the cockpit. “Cut us loose before someone with two brain cells to rub together figures who’s behind this!”
“Wait!” Logan exclaimed, head snapping around from where he was strapping the lanky, long-faced goon into one of the acceleration couches. Now that the bounty hunter was still, Acosta finally noticed they’d gagged him with a strip of cloth, the same color as the shirt beneath the tall man’s leather jacket. “Lyta could still be trying to reach us! We can’t leave dock until she gets here!”
“You’re in command, sir,” Acosta assured him, putting a bit of the cynicism he was feeling into the “sir.” “But if we stay here, they’re going to block us in with one of their tugs or just start ventilating us with one of their antimissile Vulcan cannons. We have to get out of the bay and under the cover of the Shakak’s guns.”
“He’s right,” Katy put in before Logan could protest again. She was twisted around in the pilot’s seat, her face taut with anguish, but she was smart enough to understand the situation and Acosta appreciated the support. “We’ll come back for Lyta…but we can’t do that if were dead.”
Logan’s face twisted into a snarl, and, for a moment, Acosta was sure he was going to do something stupid like grab a gun and go blasting back out into the docking bay. But whatever he thought of Logan Conner’s lack of leadership experience, the man was Jaimie Brannigan’s son, and was no one’s fool.
“Right,” Logan grunted, tightening the strap across the bounty hunter’s chest tight enough to squeeze the breath out of the man, making his eyes go wide. “Get us out of here, Katy.”
Acosta stifled the sigh of relief building in his chest, not wanting to antagonize his commanding officer any more than he probably already had. Besides, it would have been disrespectful. He valued Colonel Randell’s level-headed leadership probably more than anyone else. She served as a counter-weight to the younger, more impetuous bent of the too-quickly-promoted Colonel Conner and Commander Margolis. If she’d been here, if the situation was reversed and he or Logan or Katy were the one trapped inside, Acosta was sure she’d be making the same decision.
At least telling himself that made it easier to live with the sweet feeling of impending safety washing over him when the shuttle broke away from the docking collar and began maneuvering out of the bay. The bang-bang vibration of the steering jets startled him more than it should have, all too reminiscent of projectiles hitting the fuselage.
Someone was screaming over the radio from up in the cockpit until Katy reached out and shut off the speakers.
“Well, Traffic Control isn’t happy with us,” she announced. “They say they have an emergency in the docking bay and want everything locked down, but I told them to piss off, that we paid our fees like everyone else and don’t want to sit around and get shot at while they try to figure out how to do their job.”
“They won’t fire at you yet,” Mira said out of nowhere. Acosta shot her a curious glance as he passed by on the way to the cockpit.
“How the hell would you know?” he asked her, buckling on the restraints in the copilot’s position. He’d barely tightened the strap across his chest when Katy hit the steering jets again and sent them boosting forward out of the docking cylinder, the glaring yellow of the work lights of the inner ring fading to the gentler glow of the stars against the infinite black.
“It’s what I do for Ms. Kane.” Mira flinched at the ringing thump of the maneuvering thrusters. “I get to know people, tell her what I find. Customs and Traffic Control are very blustery, but they can’t afford to bully too much or the customers would go elsewhere.” She sniffed a reserved laugh. “People do not come to Trinity because of the luxury.”
“Well, thank Mithra for small favors,” Acosta mumbled. He pulled up the sensor display for his station and began hunting through a forest of lidar, radar and thermal signatures, the footprints of all the various starships gathered around Trinity. “Where’s the Shakak?”
“She’s coming in using the stardrive,” Katy told him, her voice a bit distracted as she plotted a burn on her station’s navigation system. “Trying to keep her signature quiet until she has us in the hangar.”
“If anyone sees her boosting in without any visible fusion drive,” Acosta warned, “we’re blown. The whole operation is blown.”
“Starkad found Terminus,” Logan reminded him, voice so grim Acosta felt the need to turn in his seat and look back at him. “They have the stardrive ship Terrin brought out here. The operation is already blown, Agent Bray.” He bared his teeth. “If Starkad knows, who the hell are we hiding it from?”
“Brace yourselves,” Katy Margolis said, and for a moment, Acosta wasn’t sure if she was warning them for the upcoming boost or the future of the Dominions until she clarified. “Two-gee acceleration in five.”
She would have been right either way.
13
“Play it for them, Nance,” Kammy ordered, a sigh hissing off the end of the Communications Officer’s name.
If there’d been gravity, Logan expected the big man would have been stooped over, shoulders dragged down by the sorrow and weariness he was obviously feeling. Instead, he was hanging from the safety rail at the edge of the bridge, every muscle relaxed except for the hand anchoring him. Kammy had seemed more animated when he’d asked them to come straight from the ship’s hangar bay to the bridge on arrival, but maybe whatever it was had more time to sink in by now.
Nance was one of the few members of the original Shakak’s crew who’d survived the battle with the Starkad heavy cruiser Valkyrian back at Terminus, and though she’d received a promotion and a few medals for her actions, she still occupied the same position as Comm officer. She hadn’t wanted to give up her assignment to the new Shakak II to take a position commensurate with her new rank on some other, lesser ship.
The same was true of everyone from the Spartan Navy and Rangers who’d served on the first Wholesale Slaughter mission: not one had elected to leave their position even though every single one had been offered more authority in another assignment. As for Captain Donner Osceola’s original crew, well…he wanted to think, cynically, that the pay was better working for Sparta than going freelance, but he shook the idea away as unworthy. They’d been faithful to Osceola and they’d transferred that loyalty to Kammy when he’d taken over as Captain.
Nance seemed as fretful and depressed as Kammy, almost reluctant to touch the control to play back the message. When she did, the image came up on the two-D auxiliary screens rather than the main holographic display, the screens they’d installed during the refit. The face on the screen was unremarkable, unthreatening, an accountant’s face, the suit beneath it an accountant’s clothing. The expression on his face didn’t match his
appearance. His anger radiated off him like the heat waves from an optical illusion on a desert road.
“We know it was you, Slaughter. We’ve seen the security videos from the club, we know you were there personally. We want Grieves and Jackson back and we want them now.”
“Grieves and Jackson?” Katy repeated.
“Monk and Ham,” Mira supplied. “Those are their real names. That man is Milo Breckenridge, Momma Salvaggio’s operations manager. He handles things when she’s away from the station.”
“In case you think you can just scoot out of here in your ship, bear in mind this station has the weaponry to disable any civilian ship.”
“Not this ship, Mister,” Katy muttered.
“If that isn’t enough reason for you,” Breckenridge went on, “perhaps this will be.”
The camera view shifted, jerky and halting, evidence that the video pickup was held in someone’s unsupported hand. Logan caught a brief glimpse of what looked like the detention cell in the security offices where they’d been held earlier before the image settled on Lyta Randell and his breath caught in his throat.
She was seated in one of the same metal chairs they’d occupied before, except her hands were cuffed behind her, her head slumped against her shoulder. The left side of her face was bruised, her left eye swollen shut, and blood trickled down her cheek from a cut above her brow. Logan thought for a terrifying second she was dead, but then she moaned and her swollen and split lips parted, gasping in a breath.
“She looks pretty bad,” Breckenridge judged, his voice half a lament and half a taunt. “The injuries occurred while she was being apprehended, I assure you.” He ducked back into the image, almost playful. “So far. But I can’t promise how long I can keep it that way, because the head of security, Officer Lopes, is having her broken arm treated right now in the clinic, and I understand she’s quite upset and has promised to, and I quote, ‘break every bone in that fucking bitch’s body.’ Now I am not a violent man.” Breckenridge motioned down at himself as if his suit proved it. “I don’t believe I could stop a determined woman such as Officer Lopes, even if I wanted to.”
