The Hammer Falls Page 17

  “These megacorps write the FBI’s budget.”

  Horace rubbed his eyes and felt that despair tugging at him again.

  The connection went dead.

  His gaze fell upon Bunny just in time for her bemused smile to flash-evaporate into a look of confusion. She touched one implant behind her ear, shaking her head as if dazed. The lights on the train went out, casting the outside festivities into darkness.

  Bunny’s gaze darted toward the sky, searching.

  A sudden wind whished over them, and then the sound of a turbine as a sleek dark bulk hove into view above the train, drifting ten meters overhead. An aircraft, a drone, the size of a small car.

  Twin blue eyes on an underbelly turret swiveled toward them.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  In the swirl of dust, Trask and the fighters gazed upward.

  A silent strobing burst of blinding sapphire flashes turned the dust clouds in the parking lot into a nightclub dance floor.

  Except for the cries of confusion. Then pain. Jocie screamed.

  Dozens of tiny flames burst into incandescence on the ground, and on the flesh of the transfixed fighters. Trask dove for cover under one of the aluminum tables. The light splashed rainbow splotches into Horace’s vision.

  The fighters began to topple.

  The aircraft maneuvered. The turret swiveled. Another strobing burst, as brilliant as the facets of a sapphire in the sun, flashing like a sewing machine needle. Or a silent machine gun.

  Gobbets of parking lot concrete glowed molten.

  Bunny screamed, “Get down! Run!”

  Inside the train car, Horace threw himself out of sight of the thing, crawling toward Bunny.

  Sounds of pain outside, coughing, gagging. The stench of seared flesh and burning blood blasted inside the train on the jet wash of the hovering machine.

  Bunny called to him. “A corp security drone! It’s got a pulse laser!”

  Horace peeked through a window. The robotic blue eyes swept around the scene, surveying the men squirming on the ground with smoking, sizzling pockmarks across their bodies. Some weren’t moving at all.

  “Where’s Trask?” he said.

  “I don’t know!”

  The bulk of the drone was just visible around the angle of the open door.

  “I’ve already called the police!” she said. “You know what they said? That thing is exercising its rights! It’s legal!”

  “Can you get us out of here? Get this thing moving?”

  “All the signage and tables are deployed. Some of them aren’t automated.”

  “Undeploy them and fuck the rest. Get us out of here!”

  “What about everybody outside?”

  “Leave that to me!”

  He lunged outside. The turret swiveled. He threw himself under an aluminum table. Another cascade of strobing brilliance left streaks in his vision and a burning sensation in his forearm. The stench of molten aluminum and burnt flesh was acrid in his nose. In his forearm was a blackened pinhole leaking blood. Having passed through the metal table, the laser beam fizzled in the flesh of his arm.

  He heaved to his feet, lifting the table into a shield. With it standing upright between him and the drone, light shone through the multitude of blackened perforations across its surface. Nevertheless, it might save his life.

  Clutching a support contour on the table’s underside with one hand, he ran toward the nearest man on the ground, Skullcrusher James, and hooked a twitching arm, dragging the fighter behind the table, half-upright, and toward the door of the train. James staggered and coughed burnt blood. The stench of seared flesh clung to him. Horace practically threw him up into the train.

  His heart pummeled against his breastbone.

  He went for another.

  The drone maneuvered for another shot.

  Horace grabbed “Mad Killer” Michael’s arm, rolled him over. The young fighter failed to respond, and two blank, cybernetic eyes stared from a face with two seared punctures.

  Lex staggered to his feet, Jocie thrown over his shoulder like a limp rag, and hooked another fighter’s arm, dragging him upright and stumbling for cover.

  Another flashing burst punched a spread of fresh holes in Horace’s shield and drew a painful furrow across his cheek. A fighter, propped up on an elbow nearby, screamed and spasmed and collapsed.

  A thunderous report and a cloud of smoke erupted from Trask’s miniature Civil War cannon.

  Standing behind the cannon, Trask howled with pain.

  The drone jerked and spun.

  Horace’s tattoos came to life.

  He charged toward Trask, who lay on the ground beside the smoking cannon. The cannon lay on its side.

  Sparks dribbled from a ragged wound squarely in the center of the drone’s fuselage.

  Trask rolled around, clutching his arm. Horace reached him, snatched him by the collar, and dragged him behind the upright table.

  Trask’s left wrist bent in a way far too rubbery to be intact. “Couldn’t get the elevation. Had to hold it like a gun. The recoil...”

  The power plant of the road train hummed with life. The flashing lights and signage began to retract. The horn blasted.

  “Hit it again!” Trask rasped, gesturing to a nearby box filled with paper packets full of powder.

  Horace snatched the cannon, then the box of ammunition, and dragged them close.

  The drone’s whining turbines began to labor. Then the sound of gunfire erupted from the train. A pistol barrel poked through one of the rear windows and hailed slugs at the drone. Most security drones were armored against small-arms fire, but the unseen shooter was accurate. Ricochets popped and whined. Glass shards tinkled to the pavement. A bullet took out one of the turret’s sapphire eyes.

  “Ten packets, then ball, and pack it good!” Trask said.

  Horace grabbed a handful of powder packets, stuffed them into the barrel, reached in the box and felt around until his fingers brushed one of several lead balls about the size of a large apricot, then jammed it in too.

  With a quivering hand, Trask handed him the solid brass ramrod. “Pack it all down!”

  Horace took and jammed the ball as deep as it would go, then spun the muzzle toward the drone.

  The drone spun its nose toward the train and slid backward, putting distance between itself and the train.

  Dread sluiced ice water through Horace’s veins. Under the drone’s wings hung missile pods. In a flash of fire and ribbon of smoke, a missile streaked toward the train. The detonation shattered the last train car like a watermelon hit by a sledgehammer. Splinters and shrapnel spun in all directions. The shockwave blew the table over into Horace, smacking him across the skull before it flew past and away. A shard of bulkhead like a spinning guillotine whooshed overhead.

  Trask was talking, but there was no sound but the ringing in Horace’s ears.

  He spun the cannon muzzle toward the drone, sighted down the barrel with one blurry eye, yanked the lanyard hanging from the breech. Nothing happened.

  Trask slapped his leg, yelling something.

  “Cap!” Trask screamed. He reached out with copper cap similar to those used by Horace’s childhood pop gun, but the size of a child’s fingertip. Trask stumbled forward, opened the firing mechanism, and jammed the cap onto a nipple.

  At half the frequency of before, laser pulses raked the bodies on the ground again.

  Trask set the cannon’s hammer. “Line it up!”

  Horace grabbed the tongue between the wheels and realigned the muzzle.

  “Left! No! Fuck! You take the lanyard!” Trask thrust the lanyard into Horace’s hand. “Fire on my ready!”

  The drone hovered and ducked as sporadic fluctuations in its power unsteadied its own aim.

  Trask adjusted.

  Horace waited. With their shield gone, they were sitting ducks.

  The turret swiveled toward them.

  “Fire!”

  Horace yanked.

  T
he cannon roared and bucked, and a cloud of blue-gray smoke obscured their view of the target.

  But they could hear the whine and the raking squeal of failing turbines.

  The drone fell nose-down into the earth and struck with a crunch. The tail smashed down a second later. Sparks and smoke scattered from the fallen drone.

  Not far away, the road train burned.

  Horace staggered upright, his breath ragged. Trask clutched his shattered wrist to his chest.

  “Nice shooting, Tex,” Horace said.

  “It’s a hobby.”

  Horace hurried toward the bodies strewn before the road train, bleeding onto the pavement.

  Ten hunks of meat pierced by needles of blue light. All dead, among them Jax “To The Max” Gavillion and “Mad Killer” Kevin Michael. And there were no Regenecorp techs anywhere nearby. No hospitals nearby. There would be no coming back for them. And there would be no police coming to help them. The drone had come from some corporation claiming to be protecting its “rights.” Having had several decades to write their own rules, they could do whatever they wished.

  Optics on the drone’s nose cone spun toward Horace, tracking him.

  “Holy shit, that thing’s not dead!” Horace shouted. He dove for the door of the train again.

  The laser turret on the underside struggled to rotate, but it was bound in place by the drone’s weight. Horace grabbed up one of the vibro-axes that had been used for the demonstrations and charged the machine.

  The axe’s hum whispered up his arm, and he fell upon the drone with savage ferocity, careful to stay out of the arc of the laser turret. Even the armored hide of the drone could not withstand a full-on assault by a vibro-axe wielded with the power and fury of Hammer Harkness.

  Sparks exploded around him as he smashed all the optics and sensors he could recognize, severed the control harnesses of the missile pods, chopped deeper and deeper into the fuselage until he found its quantum computer AI brain, and destroyed it with a howl of rage.

  Only after all that, with his tattoos gleaming like neon lights, did the drone die.

  He didn’t want to look at the human arm, severed at the biceps, lying on the ground nearby, bone-spiked knuckles clenched into a loose fist.

  He didn’t want to think about a rainbow-haired smear of bloody paste that might be waiting for him in the wreckage.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Flames licked the darkness and spat blacker smoke into the night sky. The wreckage had been blasted dozens of meters in every direction.

  Horace ran for the wreckage of the last car. Where had Tina been? In the last car. She had helped him with his armor. Had it been her, Lex, or somebody else shooting from the window, creating the distraction without which he and Trask would have been cut to pieces by the pulse lasers?

  “No, no, no...” kept coming from his lips as he climbed into the tangled mass of twisted metal and licking flames.

  A scrap of scarlet dress fluttered in the breeze, hanging from a jagged finger of frame.

  “Is anybody here?” he called. “Anybody!” He flung aside sheets of hot metal. The only thought he could muster was More innocent blood on my hands.

  Voices called to him from the forward cars, but his ears weren’t working. He squinted through the smoke.

  Tina and Bunny were leaning on each other as they stepped down from the front car. Both of them bore wide-eyed expressions of pale shock and horror at the carnage laid out around the pavement, and the smell of seared flesh and blood emanating from the bodies. Tina pulled away from Bunny, jumped to the ground, and vomited. Bunny clutched her mouth and laid a gentle hand on the girl’s back.

  Relief so profound burst through Horace that he choked back a lump in his throat and wiped at the wetness in his eyes. Their voices sounded muffled through the ringing in his ears.

  Trask stumbled toward Bunny and Tina. “You two all right?”

  “Ambulance is on its way,” Bunny said.

  Tina straightened and wiped her mouth. “I’ll get the med kit.” She ran into the infirmary car.

  From where he stood rooted among the wreckage, Horace could hear her through the broken windows rooting around in the infirmary. Every window in the train had been shattered by the explosion’s pressure wave.

  He shook himself and moved to the next forward car, peeling back sheet metal and debris for signs of dead and injured.

  Trask’s voice came to him. “That had to be Lex shooting. He and Jeremiah were the only guys with handguns, and Jeremiah was already cut to pieces. Poor bastard saved our bacon.”

  A couple of fighters had emerged from their cover under the train, clutching at their blackened pinhole wounds. Tina had the first-aid kit out.

  Then Bunny’s voice cut through the smoke and night. “We have to go! We have to go right now! There’s another one coming! ETA, two minutes.”

  Trask sat against a massive tire, cradling his arm. “How do you know?”

  “I got a solid lock on that thing’s transceiver signature. It was an autonomous AI, but it was also in direct contact with someone, taking orders. Right before the attack, it started jamming the area. My wireless connections all went dead. Now, I’m picking up some net chatter that looks like another one. Look, we have to go.”

  Trask yelled, “Everyone, on board! Bunny, can you slice it somehow? Buy us some time?”

  “I can’t! What about the bodies?” Bunny pointed at the sprawled corpses.

  “We can’t resurrect them. They’re headed for the morgue. If that second one gets here, we’re all done for. Help me up. Let’s go.”

  Horace grabbed up the cannon tongue and wheeled it toward an open storage compartment under Trask’s cabin.

  A heavy clank shuddered through the train as the linkages detached between the destroyed rear cars.

  “Everybody up front! Right now!” Trask said. “Bunny, we’re only taking the engine!”

  The engine car came free of the second car with a clank and a pneumatic hiss. Horace slammed the storage compartment shut.

  The remaining fighters dragged themselves as best they were able into the engine car. The doors shut, and the wheels rolled them away from the rest of the cars; in effect the engine became a somewhat beefy bus. The vehicle circled and reeled out of the parking lot onto the street, lurching them painfully around inside.

  The door between Trask’s compartment and Bunny’s was open. Bunny sat in the driver’s seat. Strange that this was the first time Horace had seen her sit there.

  “Go, Bunny, go!” Trask called to her from his office chair. “Get us out of here. And run dark!”

  Every light in the vehicle suddenly went dark, leaving them in blackness.

  “You have a stealth-mode road train?” Horace said.

  “I got more than that, but nothing that can shoot down a drone,” Bunny replied. “We’re not the fucking military!”

  “You guys did pretty well with that cannon,” one of the fighters said, a man named “Cherry” Jubal Lee. Jubal sat on the floor, his breathing ragged, clutching his right breast, blood leaking between his fingers.

  “We can’t exactly mount it on a turret,” Trask said.

  “We need to get to a hospital!” Tina shrilled. “Hospitals are neutral zones!”

  “Do it!” Trask called to Bunny.

  “Doing it!” she called back.

  “Is it following us?” somebody said.

  “Can’t say. No radar! But I’m listening to its comm traffic. I don’t think it’s made us. The nearest hospital is five klicks from here.”

  “We can make five klicks!” another fighter said.

  “Not if there’s traffic!”

  “What the fuck is a klick?”

  “They wouldn’t attack us in traffic!”

  “Don’t bet your life on it!”

  “What did it want? Why did it come after us?”

  “It’s me,” Horace said. “They’re after me.”

  Silence settled over them like a st
ifling blanket.

  “I’m sorry,” Horace said. “It’s my fault. They’re not going to stop. They’ll never stop.”

  Wind whipped through the shattered windows as the bus picked up speed, sucking curtains and blinds outside. Horace cranked up one of the blinds, swept the curtains open, and stood before the window overlooking the increasing flow of traffic around them, scanning the night sky for any sign of hostile pursuit. Cars and trucks honked their horns at the massive vehicle traveling with no lights.

  The drive to the hospital was among the longest twenty-minute spans of Horace’s entire life. Bunny had called ahead so that, when they pulled up the drive to the Emergency Room, a line of white-sheeted gurneys spilled out to meet them. All praise to full medical.

  As Trask and the wounded fighters were wheeled inside, Horace sat down beside Tina on the couch. He put his arm around her shoulders; they were shaking. “You all right, kid? You’re not hurt?”

  She sniffled, and he practically saw her lip stiffen. “I’m fine.”

  “I thought that was you shooting.”

  She wiped her nose. “I thought it was you. It came from your window.”

  “I guess we’re both okay then.”

  “I guess so.”

  “I gotta get this armor off. Can’t breathe.” He gathered himself to stand, but in a flash found two wiry arms wrapped around his neck and a warm cheek against his, the cool kiss of a tear squeezed between them. He encircled her with his massive arms, and in them, the shudders in her body began to subside.

  Then she jerked herself away and hurried down the steps into the hospital.

  Horace let his breastplate hang loose. As the minutes ticked by, his tattoos dimmed. There were only two doses of Go Juice left in his injector, and his entire supply had been in his equipment box in his compartment, along with his weapons and the rest of his gear. Since it was custom-formulated for his biology, Go Juice was not something he could buy off the shelf. Only a few gray-market pharma-techs associated with the pit fighting scene dealt in such concoctions; the earliest he could get more, even if he had the money, would be probably a week.

  The guilt gathered upon him, drove him deeper and deeper into the couch cushions, like a wrecking ball settling onto his lap. Dying in the pit was one thing—pit fighters made a choice to be there, to seek the limelight, to strive in the ultimate contest between two warriors—but bystanders being slaughtered as collateral damage in someone else’s vendetta demanded justice, retribution, vengeance.