Thankfully over the course of his life Jackson had gotten a lot of practice at looking nonchalant even while breaking the law. The cop waited just long enough for the defender’s facial scan to say he was someone other than Mufasa Gray before he clomped past. Luckily he didn’t bother to look at the record it pulled up long enough to wonder why a priest was hanging out on a loading dock, but like the captain said, too much automation made people sloppy in their critical thinking…a weakness he loved to exploit.
A security bot appeared in the sky above the buildings at one end of this alley. It paused a moment, lights flashing on its underbelly. Jackson knew he had to get moving. It was only a matter of time before one of them saw through his disguise.
But there was no way he was going to make it to the accelerator with his leg. “Jane, you’ve got to get me a ride.”
“I’m working on it.”
Another security bot flew over the roofs. Jackson knew the next one was going to fly down the street and come get a good look at him. And that would not do. Once their quick search failed to find Mufasa Gray, they’d go old-school police, check the images and do a BOLO for every Caucasian male, early twenties. The AI would know he was approximately 172 centimeters tall and weighed in at 70 kilograms.
On Gloss where he’d grown up, a little gunfire in the streets wasn’t even noteworthy. You pretty much needed an orbital bombardment for anyone to care enough to call the cops…not that they had cops anymore. But Nivaas was an orderly place—in the cities at least—where all the crime was done politely between politicians and megacorps who could afford war mechs. They didn’t have any patience for thuggish shenanigans here. On the bright side, hopefully that meant they’d already arrested Jeet Prunkard.
There was a whine as a smaller drone zipped down the alley. This flier was small, dark, and didn’t look at all like the local government ones he’d seen so far. The privately owned drone paused, hovering a few feet above him.
“Buzz off,” he muttered.
But instead it suddenly dropped to about waist level, so it could get a picture of his face. Jackson looked away, but then it flew off.
“Jane, you said Prunkard’s crew had a specter too?”
“Yeah. And he’s surprisingly good. Not as good as me, obviously. But he’s got skills.”
So like Jane, Prunkard would probably have a lot of extra eyes flying around, and would know all the usual bag of tricks of how runners avoided them. “I just got sniffed by someone.” Jackson looked around and spotted a faded sign on a wall with the icon for a public restroom and an arrow pointing that way. “I’m going to a place that’s a little quieter.”
He found that shorter strides made it easier to schlep his leg, so he quick-schlepped it in that direction. Once they found the hornet Fifi had killed, they’d see that it had stung someone, and he couldn’t let any of the drones see him limping suspiciously. Luckily his destination was just around the corner.
Nivaas had the sort of orderly society that allowed for things like shared public restrooms. There were three sinks and five stalls and it was remarkably clean. Probably because of the same little city worker spiders like the one he’d broken earlier. Nobody else was inside. He selected the stall at the very end, then locked himself in. Thankfully they were western-style toilets, so he’d at least have a place to sit while the tox pack did its job. If the cops or Prunkard’s men came in here, he’d be cornered like an idiot rabbit. He gave an exasperated sigh as he pulled his legs up so they couldn’t be seen beneath the stall if anybody wandered in.
“I’ve got to warn you,” Jane said in his ear. “Grandma is really mad at you right now. She was just yelling about how your ‘antics’ are going to cost us this job. You might be safer down there with Prunkard.”
“Ride?” Jackson prompted.
“Ooh, yes. I think that will do nicely.” But it sounded like Jane was talking to someone else.
“What have you got?” He figured it would be something innocuous. Maybe a little cart for invalids. A scooter maybe. But sometimes Jane surprised. It could be a car.
“Expect—going dark.”
And then she was gone.
“Jane?”
But Jane was offline. Probably someone was getting close to tracking their signal. So Jackson waited. A minute went by. Then two. The burning began to fade, but his leg was still mostly numb. The tox pack was working, but depending on the strength of the concoction, it could take time to counteract the agent.
Another few seconds ticked by, and then the bathroom door opened and someone walked in. The footsteps were loud. Large. A man, Jackson thought.
Jackson slowly pulled the tiny illegal throwaway pistol from his belt. If it was the cops, he’d have to hope the gun and the stolen medallion were small enough to flush. Then he’d surrender, plead his innocence, and hope the penalty for resisting arrest, fake identities, and punching spider bots wasn’t too insane. If it was Prunkard’s crew, he’d gladly shoot those guys dead. Except there was no way he was going to be able to hide a body or bodies on one leg in the middle of a city. What was the Nivaasian sentence for murder? Probably something like a hundred years hard labor in their mines. He’d rather not find out.
The individual walked slowly down the line of stalls, but rather than picking one, he hesitated, listening.
Bang. Jackson flinched as the first door was kicked open.
Cops would have announced themselves before searching the place…Probably.
There was a moment’s hesitation. Then the stranger kicked in the second door. Bang.
It was definitely a man. Jackson could see boots underneath the door now. They were big and sturdy with thick, mag-lockable soles. Spacer’s boots.
Third door. Bang. Fourth. Bang.
Jackson said nothing, just trained his gun for where he figured the pirate’s center of mass would be and got ready to shoot. But the door kicker paused. Someone else was talking. Apparently, he had a partner who had been left to block the entrance.
“Sorry,” the man at the entrance said. “You can’t come in here. We’re doing a little maintenance.”
Except the potential witness to Prunkard’s maintenance work wasn’t turned away that easy. Jackson couldn’t really hear them, but Prunkard’s goon replied, “Well too bad, pal, the restroom’s closed. So beat—ooof.”
Jackson couldn’t see, but from the noise it sounded like somebody had just gotten kicked in the chest and launched across the restroom hard enough to bounce off a sink.
The boots in front of Jackson’s stall turned to face the new threat, and he didn’t have to wait long, because a heartbeat later the newcomer closed on him. Now two pairs of big spacers’ boots were crashing back and forth. The room shook as Prunkard’s man was slammed into the wall, followed by the distinctive cry of someone who’d just gotten an arm put into a joint lock. Then Jackson’s door flew open.
There stood a giant Samoan, holding a pirate whose face had just been used as a battering ram. The pirate didn’t look so good. The giant, on the other hand, looked like he’d just been served up a big dish of ice cream.
“Hey, Jackson,” he said as he twisted the bad guy into a pretzel. “Hope I didn’t interrupt any business.”
“About time, Tui.”
Tuitama Abinadi Fuamatu was one big Samoan, and chief of Tar Heel security team—which was usually more of a raiding party. His hair was braided in small, tight cornrows. He had a pe’a—warrior’s tattoo—from his waist to knees. When exposed, it looked like a pair of permanent crazy pants. One half of his torso was tattooed as well, from pec to powerful shoulder to wrist. A full sleeve plus some. The tats were supposedly loaded with symbolic meanings, protections, and blessings.
He effortlessly flipped Prunkard’s goon over one hip to smash him against the tile wall. The move knocked the wind and the sense right out of the poor fool.
“Bro,” Tui said with a grin. “You’re all squashed up like a rat. Come out of there.”
“A h
ornet stung my leg.”
“Can you walk?”
“Sorta.”
Tui held out a hand to help him up. Jackson took the hand and tried to resist Tui’s crushing grip. He was no wimp, but Tui had cybernetic augments and military gene mods, so that was basically impossible. Tui liked to joke that the army doctors had unlocked the old dormant chimp genes, but whatever upgrades Earth Block had really given him, he was freakishly strong.
From the two handguns Tui had just stuffed in his waistband, he’d managed to disarm both goons in the three seconds the fight had taken. It was a good thing Tui was so damned friendly, because otherwise he’d be terrifying.
The pirate who had manned the door was lying on the floor, struggling to breathe. Neither one of them was Prunkard, which meant that piece of nasty work was still out there somewhere.
“Nice,” Jackson said as he stashed his gun away. “But I could have taken them.”
“Sure you would have, Junior,” Tui said as he helped Jackson toward the door. “Now let’s see about getting out of here without getting arrested…Jane, I’ve recovered Jackson.”
“Great. Do you still have the medallion?”
“I do,” Jackson said, patting his pocket to make sure. “Maybe Tui should hold onto it in case I get rolled up. Worst-case scenario I can try to talk my way out of some lesser charges while Tui gets it back to the ship. The cops are looking for someone half his size and half his age—”
“Hey now. I’m not that old.”
“Well, that’s gonna be a problem.” The voice in his ear was no longer the dulcet tone of Jane, but rather Captain Holloway’s drawl. “Change of plans, boys. We just got word. This security alert made Splendid Ventures nervous. Since it was so close, they probably thought it was the evicted settlers taking a shot at their pilot, because they just sent a priority request to the taco bar to bump them up. They want their Citadel back on their company ship, ASAP.”
That was not good. The plan had been to wait for the shipping container carrying the Citadel to be accelerated along the thousand-kilometer launch track and shot toward heaven. Once in orbit, Jane would create a blind spot, and the good folks of the Tar Heel would make a quiet swap away from the many eyes in space. By the time SVC realized they’d been robbed, the Tar Heel would be through the gate. But for all that to work, the security medallion needed to be there, three feet away from the Citadel, to override its security. Otherwise, that fine piece of engineering would set off all sorts of alarms when it deviated from its course.
“How much did they move the schedule up by?”
“They’re going to launch within the hour. Turns out there’s some perks to being a giant megacorporation.”
Tui and Jackson shared a glance. There was absolutely no way they could get to the port, catch a shuttle, and get the medallion into orbit in time to make any kind of swap. And once the Citadel was aboard the SVC ship, they could kiss that prize goodbye forever.
“So have Jane stall them.”
“She’s trying, but it’s not looking good.”
“That’s a whole lot of money to just let float away.”
“Well, that’s exactly what I was thinking, son. But all is not lost. There’s one surefire way to make sure that medallion is in the right place at the right time.”
Jackson thought it over for a second…He checked the map in his eye display. The Citadel’s container was only a short drive away…parked at the launch track’s hub. They were close enough to get there before the container was accelerated to escape velocity and hurled into space.
“You can’t be serious.”
“That depends on how badly you still want to get paid, Mr. Rook.”
Chapter 4
“Bro,” Tui said as he drove them out of town. “Stowing away is a bad idea.”
“It’s only bad if we get caught. Or I fall off and die. Or the launch kills me. Or a piece of cargo shifts and crushes me. Or there’s another layer of security on the Citadel we don’t know about, I can’t unlock it, so I run out of air and Splendid Ventures finds my frozen corpse when they finally get around to doing inventory…I think I’m gonna stop now. Making this list really isn’t helping.”
“I think it’s clarifying,” Tui said.
Jackson was lying on the floor of the backseat, out of sight. Tui was up front driving this rental manually because the vehicle’s self-driving system would never allow something this illegal and dangerous. Jane had easily cracked the system and overridden all the security protocols and recording devices, so the car wasn’t putting up any fuss. Furthermore, they could speak freely without the cops having a record to listen to later.
“Hey, Jane, I just thought of something,” Jackson said.
“Yeah?”
“My blood is on that hornet. They’ll get my DNA and be able to match it to my military records from Gloss.”
“Don’t worry. I had Fifi punch its battery. It was on fire by the time you limped out the back.”
“You’re so thoughtful.”
“It was nothing.”
“I just really want you to know how much I appreciate everything you do for this team.”
“Oh, thank you. That’s sweet.”
“Focus, Jackson,” Tui warned. “We can do the employee of the month thing later. We’ll be on the access road in a few minutes. You know how the accelerator companies always say no cargo liquid, fragile, perishable, or living things allowed for? They say that for a reason! You got your Raj?”
Jackson patted his backpack. “I don’t leave home without it.”
“We’re past all the cops if you want to suit up then.”
So Jackson dug into the main compartment of his backpack and removed Raj, his space suit. In addition to providing pressure, oxygen, and a way to control temperature, a suit needed to protect its wearer from solar radiation and micrometeorites, tiny bits of who knows what flying through the ether at enormous speeds. A speck of ice hitting you at thirty thousand klicks per hour could really ruin your day. The fact that his suit could accomplish that, while being this light and compact, was a miracle of modern technology…And probably one of the only things worth a damn that had ever been invented on Gloss.
The Mirage 360LR was made of composite layers of thin materials that allowed a wide and flexible range of movement while providing a good amount of protection from the surprises Mother Space liked to hurl at you. There were some suits that were even thinner now, but this had been the same suit he’d been wearing when he had escaped his home planet. Raj had carried him through many a dicey spot. Sure, there were more advanced suits available now, but Raj had a funky smell that Jackson welcomed. That funky smell meant luck.
He stripped out of his regular clothes and got into the suit. It was briefly warm, the heat of his body radiating back at him, and then the cooling system kicked in and Jackson settled into his old friend, the material feeling like cool, worn cotton. He checked his mask but didn’t put it on yet. The rebreather canister didn’t last that long, and if he couldn’t get into the Citadel and its supplies, he’d need every bit of air inside it to survive until the Tar Heel could pick him up.
All his regular clothing went into the pack, which still had a bunch of useful tools in it, and he put that on his back. He felt something crawling across his neck, and he almost reflexively swatted at what he thought was a bug, but then he realized that was just Fifi, tagging along to help.
Jane contacted them again. “I think SVC and their cronies are really trying to ruin our day.”
“What do you mean?” Jackson asked.
“They just advanced the container’s launch time. It’s on the move. It’s on the accelerator.”
“They don’t really take off until they get away from population centers,” Tui said as he jammed the pedal to the floor. “We can still catch it.”
“That’s the hub up there,” Jackson pointed out the front window. “Looks like it’s got a lot of security.”
“Good thing we’
re not going in that way,” Tui said as he turned onto the access road. “You about ready?”
“Almost.” Normally he’d be doing this in weightlessness, not bouncing along in the back of a rental vehicle. But with practiced efficiency, Jackson kitted up. He attached the grapple to his wrist mount and checked that it was charged. He tapped his thumb against his palm to activate the adhesive, confirmed it was working, then killed it. Then did the same for his feet. They’d only provide a fraction of the grip here that they would in space, but every bit helped. He checked, and then double-checked that he still had the medallion. Good to go. “This will be just like grabbing it out of orbit.”
“Pretty much. Only if you miss this time you’ll probably fall under the train. Or I’ll drive over you. Try not to fall this way. I’d feel bad if I killed you. That would really stress me out.”
“Yeah, I’d sure hate to do that.”
Out the side window, Jackson could see a big, rectangular, container starting down the maglev track. It was going relatively slowly. That wouldn’t last. They would be parallel for only a short window.
There was a security gate ahead of them, with a big sign saying that this area was off-limits except for accelerator maintenance crews. “Jane, the gate’s still closed,” Tui said, but they didn’t slow down. It was a pretty sturdy-looking gate, and their rental was a lightweight polymer electric commuter vehicle. Hitting it this fast would probably kill them. “Jane? Please?”
The gate started sliding open, but it was moving at ultra-slow speed.
“I don’t think we’re going to make it,” Jackson said.
“We’ll make it,” Tui replied.
Gun Runner Page 5
