Impact Event (Dargo Pearce Chronicles #1)

by David N. Frank

  Pearce nodded soberly. It was smart thinking on Meson’s part. First principles. Can’t take anything for granted.

  “What would you need in order to be able to test your theories out, Doc?”

  Meson rolled his eyes and guzzled down half a pint of juice.

  “I’d need the damned ship.”

  THIRTEEN

  Vegas, Orchard System

  United Sol Confederation Protectorate

  Twelve hours later Pearce stepped off of the open-air gangway elevator that the starport VI had rolled into place against the Nightingale upon landing and took in his surroundings. The docking bay was the modest and sparingly appointed affair common on most young colonies in the Confederation. The modular open-air buildings were usually dropped into place fully assembled, needing only to be connected to local utilities, and the cheap resins and polymers used in their construction were clear to everyone who laid eyes on them. The severe lack of maintenance and regular cleaning visible only added to the decrepit appearance of the horseshoe shaped building.

  The docking bay was minimally lit, and combined with the naturally blood red light of the local star slung low on the horizon it provided an overall ambience of shadowy malevolence. Pearce had been to a dozen worlds with red dwarf suns like this one, and the feeling of uneasiness that they produced was still as strong as the first time. They all felt utterly alien. Pearce recalled from his history classes that early Earthen space explorers had believed M-dwarfs to be too inhospitable to have the “goldilocks zone” necessary for life. As by far the most common type of star in the galaxy, however, having inhabitable planets was all but guaranteed.

  The thing was that Pearce still didn’t consider these worlds to be very habitable. Any of the ones that technically qualified were large, heavy gravity worlds, tidally locked to their suns as if the very ground itself knelt in worship. This meant that one side of the planet was incredibly hot and the other was deathly cold, leaving colonies to be built in narrow bands straddling the light and dark sides of the surface.

  The result were settlements and cities that cast constant shadows and endured a never-ending daytime, with skies that were more rouge than blue and the spectral glow of the star casting all ordinary colors in an abnormal and eerie tint. It made the colors of people’s eyes, hair, and skin look especially surreal. It was known to literally drive people mad, and if that wasn’t bad enough the constant threat of solar flares meant that most business and pleasure took place indoors or underground. Really, Pearce didn’t see the point of such colonies. Humans were simply meant for different operating conditions.

  Already he could feel the tug of the planet’s stronger gravity, and remembered his first training mission on a similar planet where he had learned a lesson the hard way when he broke his femur in a fall that would have barely bruised him on an Earth normal world. Years of experience and a decade of genetic and biomedical enhancements ensured he wouldn’t make that same mistake again.

  This particular cesspool of a colony was not high on the list of places that Pearce would have chosen to go after they escaped the Shenzen system, but it was the closet planet with an Omega safehouse by at least another two days, and it also didn’t have a PAN system. That meant they could flash-in close to the planet instead of AU’s away in an arrival zone, and get to the surface within a few hours. The lack of an organized customs process also made it ideal.

  Unfortunately, the planet had undergone a series of significant setbacks in the twenty years or so since the safehouse had been established, and while it was still listed as secure and operational, the colony itself was not doing quite as well. Initially there had been an ore rush when large concentrations of exotic heavy metals had been surveyed, but after just a few short years of mining it became clear that the majority of accessible ore had severe defects in quality which made the entire business plan untenable. The handful of corporations that had rushed to build out cities and mines went bankrupt overnight, and the big money abandoned the system shortly after.

  That left behind a quarter-million or so relatively poor miners and the workers that supported the infrastructure around them to fend for themselves, and so like nearly every example in human history the very worst dregs of society rose to rule the roost. Some entrepreneurial drug lords setup shop and took over the local government, legalizing their professions along with essentially everything else evil under the (red) sun. They provided most of the illicit activities and substances for the surrounding sector of space, some twenty worlds in all.

  And as they paid their tithes to the local Governors and had previously been a rising star in the Confederation colonial expansion, the USC left them mostly alone. An Independent World in all but name, the planet’s original colonial designation had been replaced by “unanimous vote” to Vegas, in homage to the original City of Sin of old Earth.

  The result was a sprawling and dichotomous city that was somehow managing to achieve modest growth. The majority of the colony was comprised of former mining tenements and repurposed warehouses, low and flat structures spreading out for kilometers bookended by the spaceport on one end and the abandoned mines on the other.

  In contrast to that, nicer and taller hotels and former corporate office buildings carved out a square kilo of space not too far from the docking bays. They had once housed investors and executives, but now where were you found the casinos, brothels, discotheques, and drug dens that provided the only excuse to consider risking your life for a visit.

  Pearce wasn’t even remotely concerned for his own well-being, but the other passengers of the Nightingale were a different story entirely, and so he had ordered them all to remain on the ship. On the journey here he’d been forced to pull rank to stop the Marines from trying to send the FLASH traffic message he’d created over the planetary network. After what they’d seen before leaving the system he just couldn’t risk sending the message through the unsecured hypernet. Once he had exposed one of his higher Omega-provided authority levels the Marine’s had grumbled but backed down. He couldn’t really blame them; their entire ship full of brethren had been completed wiped out.

  The civilians had taken coaxing of a different kind, and in the end he was forced to invoke a bevy of galactic security regulations to declare them all as material witnesses under the protection of the United Sol Confederation. They were forbidden from talking to anybody about what they had seen under threat of imprisonment or even death. As an added precaution he locked everyone out of the comm systems, even the irate Captain. The stakes were simply too high.

  Pearce glanced back at the Nightingale as he thought about the brave people that he had left inside. The ship was sleek for a starcraft, owning to the fact that it had to be built with lifting surfaces to accommodate atmospheric entry and escape. Rather than the skeletal lattice structure of nearly all ships designed solely for deep space travel, it sported a uniformly covered body that gently sloped to provide control fins and a fuselage. Barely visible at the top of the craft were the folded up radiator panels and the slightly bulbous hab module, stretching over a hundred meters high in total.

  The bottom of the craft was dominated by enormous engine nacelles that looked like they belonged on a ship three times her size, and provided the high Delta-V capacity of the VIP vessel. Wedged in between the three engines were the enormous propellant and fuel tanks.

  Pearce sent a thought to his VIA and the gray and cobalt civilian jacket he was wearing sealed itself up more tightly, as it was even cooler than he expected due to the constant winds the tidal climate caused. It would make the bulge of his shoulder-holstered PB blaster more noticeable, but that was hardly a bad thing in a place like this.

  He quickly strode for the docking bay exit as his VIA brought up a map overlay which showed the route through the city to the building the safehouse was located in. It was about a ten minute walk, as he had no intention of getting scammed by a local taxi.

  He ran into trouble before he even made it to the door. As
he approached it, the battered grey door swung open on shrieking hinges and three hulking individuals squeezed through the threshold. As they took up standard security interdiction positions on either side of the doorway, a fourth individual stepped through who was decidedly more normal-sized. The brains to the brawn, but probably even more vicious as the ringleader of this shakedown gang.

  “Welcome to beautiful planet Vegas!” the brain said with a flourish. His bulbous lips formed Sino words, which created a dissonance Pearce forced himself to ignore as his VIA translated them seamlessly in his mind to Confed basic. “Here, you can truly find anything you are looking for. No rules, no restrictions!”

  He was really beaming now, approaching Pearce with the open arms of a consummate salesman. He was even wearing a five piece suit to complete the appearance. Pearce already knew exactly how the pitch would go, having seen this con dozens of times before. No need to wait for the punchline.

  “I already have security” Pearce said softly without moving. The leader halted his approach, cocking his head and displaying a deep frown on his angular face. The eyes told the truth, however, as their calculating gaze didn’t change in the slightest.

  “Come now my friend, we haven’t even been formerly introduced. You may have paid for the standard docking security package, but as I said, here on Vegas there are no rules, and so additional insurance is required to ensure that your trip is a pleasant one!” The smile was back on his face again, practiced and easy, and still not reaching his eyes. “My name is…”

  “I said that I already have security,” Pearce interrupted with more tenor in his voice this time.

  He watched the reaction of the hustler closely for an indication of which way this was going to go. His body was relaxed but ready for action. He had activated his VIA’s combat mode the instant the first goon had stepped through the door. It already displayed threat indicators on his OHUD for each one as well as the ringleader, highlighting their detected weapons and augmentations, which were considerable. It calculated the distance between the four men, optimal engagement patterns, and estimated reaction times.

  The massive musclebound thugs were all over 110 kilos, sporting a number of scars and sharing the same buzz cuts. They seemed alert and ready, even eager, for trouble. They were wearing no-nonsense sporty jumpsuits that allowed them a high freedom of movement and all carrying nasty-looking pistols openly in holsters slung on their right legs. One of them had split to Pearce’s right side of the door, and the other two to the left, providing overlapping fields of fire and room to maneuver. They’d clearly done this sort of thing dozens of times in the recent past and considered themselves professionals.

  They were complacent, over-confident, and under-prepared.

  The boss wasn’t putting on a frown this time. He was simply staring at Pearce, evaluating, deciding. He would make the same mistakes his thugs had already made, and assume that Pearce didn’t present enough of a threat to be wary of. He would decide to show Pearce just how badly he needed “additional security”, and maybe teach a lesson to the mouthy prick at the same time. His fine-tuned innate ability to detect micro-expressions spelled it all out before his VIA popped up an “Imminent Threat Detected” warning. Time seemed to slow down for Pearce, a combination of his natural combat instincts and the enhanced amounts of synthetic biochemicals flooding his bloodstream.

  The ringleader began to open his mouth to issue a command, and Pearce simply moved.

  One instant he was standing three meters in front of the group, and the next he was launching through the air and striking a knee directly into the gut of the right-most thug. The air exploded from the enforcer’s lungs with a gasp even as Pearce’s momentum smashed him backwards into the wall, bouncing his head off of the surface and rolling his eyes up.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Pearce saw the other two goons reaching for their weapons, but by design his assault had taken out the opponent on the right first, ensuring that those weapons were as far as possible from being able to target himself quickly. The fools all wore their holsters on their right legs, which meant they now had to draw and then pivot and aim directly across their bodies, a gratuitous waste of time which made this even easier than it already was for Pearce.

  As Pearce pushed off of the collapsing first thug, he spun to slip past the leader and take care of goon number two. The boss was spinning while trying to pull a pistol out of the small of his back, another unfortunate place to stow a weapon in a short range fracas.

  Pearce snapped out a fist that connected sharply with the side of his head, almost an afterthought before quickly closing in and ramming an elbow into the right side of the second henchman’s face. Skull met genetically-enhanced and graphene-armored elbow with a sickening crunch and the force of his attack actually knocked the brute clear off his feet to land in a crumpled heap a meter away.

  While that body was still in flight Pearce was already upon the last thug, who had pulled free his pistol, a wicked looking slug thrower, and was attempting to line up a shot from his hip at the freak of nature that was bearing down on him. Pearce chopped hard at the gun hand and felt bone snap as the pistol went flying without firing a shot, then chopped his other hand directly into the man’s throat with the precise force to incapacitate and not kill.

  As the final thugs hands instinctively went to claw at his throat in an effort to reopen his trachea, Pearce followed up with a one-two combo. One to the solar plexus, which doubled the henchman over, and two to the back of the head, knocking the man unconscious. He flopped to the ground with a crunch, his nose smashed in spite the shortness of the fall, thanks to the stronger gravity.

  Targets neutralized. Elapsed time, 4.27 seconds.

  Pearce slowly surveyed the scene. The three enforcers would all be waking up in an hour or so. The leader was stumbling to his feet in a daze, his weapon on the ground meters away, and posing no threat.

  Murrig’s voice came over his VIA. “Mister Buxton, that was the finest hand-to-hand action I’ve ever seen. I think we need to have a chat when you return about just who the heck you actually are.”

  Pearce replied back with a thought, not wanting to verbalize a response in front of the groggy but still awake lead goon. Make sure they leave. Pearce then walked over and grabbed the hapless man by the front of his fancy business suit, lifting him clean off of the ground.

  “I have security. If you or anyone else steps foot inside this docking bay again after your friends come to collect these knuckle draggers you are all dead. Spread the word.”

  With that, Pearce dropped the stunned man on his ass and walked through the exit door.

  ***

  Pearce exited the docking bay onto a poorly lit thoroughfare that was almost entirely empty of life. A handful of small shops of questionable repute had lights on nearby, but other than that there was little action to note. There were no taxis, automated or otherwise, awaiting a mark from the recently landed ship. In fact there was scant traffic of any kind. The carmine skies were devoid of skyspeeders, and harsh shadows gave a general sense of foreboding and hollowness that permeated absolutely everything in sight.

  A kilometer or so to his right there was a noticeably brighter glow above the skyline. Like every vice-based economy ever in human existence, Vegas had a dense zone where the majority of the commercial activities took place. If he did happen to seek transport into the city he would surely be taken directly through the area, without regard to his desired destination. The safe house was located just outside of zone’s limits, and Pearce had selected a path that would steer him entirely clear of it.

  He headed across the main avenue and took a narrow side street as directed by his OHUD. He quickly realized that Vegas was truly a gangster’s paradise, and that none of the latest intelligence on the seedy colony was even close to being up-to-date. His briefing package had suggested a corrupt but organized government, but he saw little evidence of any kind of organized civil leadership. Junk and garbage was piled every
where, and the entire city was in a severely run down state. It was in the middle of the “night” locally here, but even so it felt more deserted than it should. The only people he saw were either homeless or thugs that sized him up with deadly stares.

  As he travelled down abandoned streets dimly lit by the constant red glow of the sun, he took in his surroundings with care. The city didn’t have a large footprint, and as such space was actually at a premium. The roads were narrow and flanked on both sides by five to ten story buildings connected like old fashioned row houses. The neighborhood seemed to be low-end residential. Not many windows had lights shining from within, and those that did gave no appearance of being occupied. Small alleys broke up the connected buildings every few hundred meters or so, and a few beat-up ground-cars were parked here and there. It was eerily quiet, and sound seemed to travel for blocks.

  He eventually emerged onto a slightly larger road, where he ran into his second obstacle since landing. The safehouse had originally been a typical Omega affair; a permanently leased room inside a mid-tier hotel with a hidden secure comm center. And as of a few weeks ago the facility was still listed as online and active, with no disturbances to either the main outer room or the hidden inner room.

  The building Pearce now stood across the street from, however, was no longer an active hotel. The façade listing the former name of the building was in tatters, and the once grand main entranceway was now fortified with the appearance of a bunker. A driveway that lead up a gently sloping hill to the entrance was closed off with barricades and an armored vehicle.

  A dozen or so heavily armed criminals hung out on the drive and around the entranceway. Apparently, when the tourist business dried up an enterprising criminal organization had taken over the building and was using it as a headquarters, drug lab, brothel, or all of the above.