“That ship was part of Jeet Prunkard’s fleet.”
“Uh-oh.” Their captain had a very specific moral code. Part of that code was that they tried to only steal from scumbags who really deserved it. Prunkard had really deserved it.
“What’s he doing here?”
“Why wouldn’t he be here?”
“Space is really big, Jackson!”
Prunkard had made his fortune as a claim stripper—the type of pirates who loved going to planets that were still relatively untamed and stealing everything that wasn’t nailed down. Colonies were a great source of heavy machinery and specialized equipment, which was easy to resell, no questions asked. On Nivaas there wasn’t much law away from the main settlements, and very few people around to protect their valuables. Claim strippers were a notoriously brutal lot. Fighting each other and killing anybody who got in their way. Even among that vile bunch, Prunkard had a rep. He murdered anybody who crossed him. Stealing his livestock hauler was one hell of a cross!
Jeet Prunkard knew Jackson well enough that this weak disguise wouldn’t fool him. It was designed to defeat facial recognition algorithms, not someone you’d once looked in the eye as you lied and cheated them.
Jackson saw an alley and made a beeline for it. Just before he turned the corner, he glanced back.
Unfortunately, Jeet was also really good at noticing other criminals. The pirate was pointing right at him.
“Shanks,” Jackson cursed, slipped his other arm through his backpack strap and ran. If Prunkard’s crew caught him, he was dead.
Back out on the street, the fat pit bull woofed.
Chapter 2
Jackson sprinted down the alley. Then turned into another, and another, trying to shake his pursuers. On the bright side, in this gravity he could run all day and feel like an Olympian. On the downside, when he looked back, it appeared so could the goons who were chasing him.
“Bad news,” Jane told him. “Prunkard’s guys are right behind you. Their chasing you looked suspicious enough it triggered the security algorithms. Cops have been asked to check it out.”
That was the problem with these law-and-order towns.
Above him on one wall, a group of maintenance spider bots clung to the side of a building, cleaning and repairing a patch where some weird Nivaasian fungus had grown. The bots were pale and about a foot across. He ran underneath them, hoping they weren’t connected to Sharmala’s security system.
None jumped, and he sighed a bit in relief, having dodged at least that bullet. And then one flung itself off the wall, sailed smoothly over his head, and landed a number of paces in front of him. It reared up on its hind legs and spoke.
“Mufasa Gray, halt and wait for the authorities.” Its voice was surprisingly tinny. “I have been authorized to interdict you.”
He looked back just as Prunkard’s goons entered the alley. They saw him.
Next to Jackson was a little four-wheeled bot snugged up against the side of the alley. It held the supplies the maintenance bots used to do their work. It probably weighed twenty kilos. Jackson picked it up and hurled it at the spider bot, which easily leapt out of the way and up onto the wall of the building. The supply bot crashed to the pavement and splashed water and cleaning agents all over.
“Mufasa Gray,” the spider bot said. “Destruction of property will not be tolerated.”
“Jane,” Jackson said. “They’ve pegged my ID. I need to go dark.” If he didn’t, everything tied to the city’s security grid would be looking for him.
“Working on it, Jackson.”
“Mufasa Gray!” the spider said.
Jackson kicked it out of the way.
The other spiders didn’t like that, because they all increased their volume and began blinking lights. “Mufasa Gray! Halt!”
Jackson did not halt.
A spider bot leapt at him.
There’s nothing quite like having a large metal spider fly right at your face. Jackson was wearing gloves. Nice gloves that could pack an extra punch. He activated the iron fist feature, hardening the outside, and struck the bot in midflight.
He was rewarded with a satisfying crunch, but the spider wrapped its legs around his fist and gripped his forearm, refusing to let go. He could hear the footfalls of Prunkard’s goons, but Jackson stopped long enough to punch the spider into the wall of the building. It crunched. He punched it again. The bot sprayed out a stream of green fluid that splashed Jackson up the side of his face. Jackson punched it a third time. This time the spider bot cracked right down the middle and fell to the ground.
“Mufasa Gray!” the broken thing said. “Halt.”
“You’re dead, thief!” shouted the bigger goon. They had nearly caught up. Jackson took off. When the remaining cleaning spiders told Prunkard’s men to stop and wait for the authorities, there were gunshots. He didn’t dare look back as the pirates blasted the maintenance bots.
Every sensor in the city would pick up the gunfire. Now the cops would be really interested.
“Jane,” he said urgently as he ran down the alley, dodging trash piles and scaring stray cats.
“You are about to become Father Patrick Mullane. An Irish-Catholic priest who is known for his love of butterflies. The picture I have has him surrounded by a cloud of blue ones.”
Where did she come up with these stolen IDs? But it didn’t matter—priest, pope, or mullah, as long as he wasn’t Mufasa Gray. “Just tell me when you’re switching.” He reached the end of the alley and glanced behind to see the goons freeing themselves from the meddling bots.
“Hold still one sec.”
But the short goon was pointing a handgun at him. There was a crack. The projectile made a loud slap as it hit the bricks next to him. Bullet or tranq, he couldn’t tell, but either was bad. Jackson dashed out into the street to avoid getting shot. It was nearly as crowded as the market, and it must have had cameras too, because as soon as he was in the open an alarm sounded.
“Anytime now,” he said to Jane.
“You need to get to a blind spot. If I switch your ID in the open it won’t fool the AI.”
“Where do I go?”
“Turn right. Hurry.”
He ran past a tall man smoking some kind of pipe, past four women with bright headscarves sitting at a table, past a rack of three public scooters. He briefly thought about taking one, but then discarded the idea because with the alarms, they’d be shut down. All along the street people were obediently moving to the sides of the streets to make way for the police.
“Uh-oh. Bad news, Jackson. Prunkard’s got his own specter. Nivaas security just received a flag that Mufasa Gray is an alias for a wanted criminal. I should have thought of that.”
“Can you do anything?”
“Working on it.”
A cop appeared at the far end of the street riding on a defender, a small mech that was capable of detaining people, other bots, and vehicles. It had a little platform that hung down from its backside, just big enough for two humans to stand abreast like a modern-day chariot. A defender usually housed more bots that could be used for everything from forensics to tracking by smell. So much for that direction.
At least the goons hadn’t followed him out of the alley. They must have heard the sirens. Even Prunkard’s crew weren’t cocky enough to get into a shoot-out with the police.
He looked up to see another hornet’s nest, its activation light blinking.
Hornets had a few modes. Sometimes they followed a target silently, acting as quiet little surveillance eyes in the sky. Other times they shot after their prey with a shrieking buzz, loaded for bear. The sound was on purpose, designed to inspire fear, designed to convince you to stop and raise your hands before the screaming hordes of hell descended upon you with their vicious stingers.
The coverings popped open, and dozens of robotic hornets—each as big as his pinky—spilled out.
“Shanks.”
The first hornet shot out of the nest. It circled
up high above the street. Another one followed.
“Mufasa Gray,” numerous speakers broadcast up and down the street. “Halt and lie facedown on the ground.”
Jackson stopped. This was a lot of firepower for one destruction of cleaning bot charge. What had Prunkard told them? That he kidnapped and ate children? Whatever it was, Jackson didn’t have much time. A few more seconds and he would be boxed in.
The people of Sharmala were getting out of the way, happy that they weren’t the ones being screamed at. Law enforcement had a reputation for being heavy handed in this settlement and they didn’t want to get caught in the cross fire.
“Jane!”
“You’ll have to make your own blind spot. Are you ready?”
“I was ready yesterday.” He spotted the front door to a restaurant and decided that would be it. But he didn’t run for the door. Instead, he ran for the service bot standing like a statue on the sidewalk, holding a pitcher of ice-cold lemonade. He reached into the pocket of his cargo pants and pulled out a canister of Shine. “Say when.”
“Prepare to be sedated,” the speakers declared. Then the first hornet began to shriek and then a swarm exploded out of the nest. The noise was deafening, aggressive, and downright terrifying. The psyops of this security system really was top-notch. It was enough to scare the soup out of anyone.
Many of the people on the street shouted in alarm and ducked for cover. The worker bot with the pitcher of lemonade in its hand held perfectly still in the middle of the road. At least it didn’t try to tackle him.
Above Jackson, the hell swarm dived.
“Now!”
Jackson pressed the button on the canister, tossed it high into the air, and darkened his eye film to max as he looked away.
The canister detonated in a searing cloud of light. The spreading cloud of tiny particles reflected and amplified the sun, emitting thousands of lumens. The fog of light temporarily blinded every eye on the street, but it also emitted a pulse of jamming radio waves on all but Jane’s selected frequency. The effect should have been enough to mask his signature from all but the most powerful top-of-the-line sensors.
“You are void,” Jane said as she cut the transmission of his personal ID chip. For the security systems, one moment they’d have Mufasa Gray in their sights, then a burst of static, and then Mufasa Gray had vanished.
Shrouded in blinding, celestial light, Jackson pivoted away from the lemonade bot and sprinted for the restaurant door. Because the hornets were built to use GPS coordinates, calculate speed and direction, and adjust their flight accordingly, they streaked through the blinding cloud to clang off the plastic body of innocent Mr. Lemonade.
Jackson reached the restaurant door. Even with his eyes shaded enough to safely use a welder, the brilliance of the Shine off the glass made it nearly impossible to see. They’d gotten this batch of Shine from a Triad mafia group who had promised high quality, and it appeared they’d delivered. These were not your ordinary unicorn sparkles.
As he grabbed the door handle, Jackson heard the wicked, unmistakable buzzing shriek of a lone hornet. It came out of the light, a black bullet, streaking fast and low to strike him in the leg. It seared him with a hot, thin stab, as its stinger injected a burning cocktail of drugs.
Chapter 3
Jackson grunted in pain and struck at the hornet, but the device had sent the hooked tips of its six legs through his pants and latched onto his skin.
Hornets were made smooth as silk to resist removal. Jackson clutched at the thing, but it slipped between his fingers. All the while it was burrowing its legs into his flesh and injecting whatever chemicals this security system used. A circle around the spot where it had struck was burning and rapidly moving outward. It really hurt. And then ground zero of the hornet sting went totally numb.
That was bad.
As long as the hornet was attached, it would continue to poison him, and they’d be able to track it, but he couldn’t grab its exoskeleton, which was as slick as wet, soapy glass. He engaged the magnetics on his gloves, but the hornet’s shell must have been made out of some kind of composite.
Luckily Jane was on it. Fifi dropped out of Jackson’s pocket and landed on the hornet. There was a buzz and shake. And suddenly the hornet released its hold on his skin, fell to the ground, and lay there like a dead animal.
Fifi sprang back up to Jackson’s shirt and climbed onto his shoulder.
“Keep moving,” Jane said.
“I think I have a crush on Fifi,” Jackson said as he yanked the door open. Inside, the diners were shielding their eyes against the light and trying to figure out what was happening on the street. He shuffled toward the back, the burning and numbness in his leg spreading at an alarming rate. It was now halfway up his thigh.
There was an emergency anti-tox pad in his pocket, about half the size of a deck of cards with a mounding lump in the middle where all the chems and counteragents were stored. Jackson pulled it out, removed the covering on the adhesive side, then reached down his pants and slapped the pad onto his leg just above the burn. It immediately latched onto his skin, sampled his blood, and started analyzing how to respond.
The diners continued to shield their eyes and peer out at the street. He took another step, and his calf suddenly stopped working. He fell over a table, spilling a few plates and disturbing someone’s lunch. The street behind him was still sparkling and blinding. Inside the patrons were murmuring and making small cries of dismay. But the Shine wouldn’t last forever. He limped for the back of the room and what he assumed was the kitchen. There was a farmer’s hat woven from grass on a table. He stole it, hobbled a few paces farther, and stole a tall drink in a bright pink, disposable cup.
The expanding burning circle in his leg and the numbness that followed it continued to spread. And suddenly his leg stopped working entirely, and he stumbled against the wall.
“My leg is nonresponsive.”
“Keep going,” Jane urged. “There’s an alley behind the restaurant.”
Easy for her to say. He grabbed an empty chair and schlepped along using it as a crutch. He pushed open the swinging half doors at the back of the dining area and found the kitchen. The light from the street cast weird shadows here, but the staff hadn’t been blinded. He saw cooking machines, an operator, and a waiter, along with plates, utensils, and food preparation knives. It smelled very strongly of curry.
“What’s that racket?” the operator was dressed in a white chef’s shirt.
“The street’s a madhouse,” Jackson said.
“You can’t come back here!”
“I twisted my ankle trying to get away from whatever that is!” He tried to sound afraid, which wasn’t a stretch at all. “I’m going out that emergency exit or I’m gonna sue!”
It wasn’t much of a story, but the cook was more concerned about what was going on out front than weird customers blundering through his kitchen. The Shine cloud was beginning to disperse, and Jackson needed to make himself scarce before it did.
He hopped to the back door, traded his hat for the freshly stolen one, and stepped into a service alley that ran behind all the shops on this street. This was where deliveries were accepted and garbage picked up. Before the door closed behind him, he snagged one of the server’s aprons from a peg on the wall.
On his head, Jackson wore the grass hat. In his hand he still held the tall, pink cup. People frequently saw what they wanted to see. And no kind of fugitive Jackson knew paraded around with an apron and a pink cup. But just in case it wasn’t enough, he changed his shirt color to white, removed his nose augment, and pulled another bigger type of moustache out of his pocket and slapped it on his face. A moustache might be simple, but the truth was that moustaches worked. At least when dealing with those who didn’t know you.
The burning in his leg had stopped climbing, but it was still moving down. Right now, his foot was on fire, and he knew very soon it would be numb.
“ID?” he asked Jane.
“That sounds interesting. You can tell me all about it when I get back.” He was now Father Patrick Mullane, who liked butterflies. Other facts about the father scrolled up his display. He pushed aside the bio and pulled up a map of the town. Jane had marked each security asset searching for him with an x. There were a bunch of them.
“Okay. Captain’s here too. He wants to know if you can make it to the taco bar?” That was their code word for the accelerator where the Citadel was waiting to be launched into space.
“This leg is not going to get me to the bar.”
“Did you apply your tox patch?”
“Yes. It’s not doing much yet. Can I get a ride out of here?”
“Maybe you should pray for one, Father.”
“You can be sure I’ll be offering sacrifices to Fifi if I get out of this. Please tell me you’ve got somebody nearby who can pick me up. Where’s Tui and his skull crackers?”
“I haven’t been able to reach him yet. They might be on a shuttle back up here so they could be ready to snag the package in transit.”
Jackson swore under his breath. Of course. Their mission had been to gain access to the accelerator and rig his ride while he’d been tailing Dwight.
“You’re on your own, Jackson, sorry.”
“Okay,” Jackson said. And then he hobbled down the back alley toward a cross street. Above the buildings, hornets and sirens sounded. Here and there wisps of shining brightness rose into the sky.
“Warning. Bogey approaching.” And there was indeed an x heading this way on the map. Jackson looked around. There wasn’t any place to hide. Not one he could get to with his leg in its current state, anyway. So he hopped to the side and took a seat on a loading dock, looking in the direction of the commotion. Like he worked here, was taking his break, and trying to figure out what was going on.
A moment later the big defender appeared at the end of the alley, with a cop riding the chariot platform. Jackson pretended not to know they were there. He just sat with the big grass hat on his head and the big pink cup in his hand and stretched out a leg. He took a sip on the straw, found out that he’d stolen a salty vegetable drink of some type, then glanced casually down the alley like he’d just noticed the cop. He scooted back as a good citizen should, making room, trying his best to hide that fact that his leg was lame and his toes felt as if they were on fire.
Gun Runner Page 4
