She hit the side of a sloping mound of dirt. Her helmet hit something hard and she could hear a crack. She was rolling too fast to see anything. It took her a second to realize that she was still alive.
Something above her exploded and showered dirt over her. She didn’t know if it was her bike or a missile.
She came to a stop in a trickling river of slime at the base of the hill. She was nauseated, dizzy, and aching in every muscle of her body, but she seemed to have gotten off with little damage.
Tetsami raised her head—
She ripped off her helmet and threw up into it.
Elsewhere, the sounds of battle continued. If she was lucky, they counted her among the dead now. She raised herself upright, and this time the vertigo was easier to deal with.
She had rolled to the bottom of a large blast crater. The river in the bottom was the effluent from a broken sewer line. “Well, girl,” she said to herself as she walked away from the battle. “You’ve been at this for eight years standard. You’ve finally hit the wall. What are you going to do now?” She didn’t have an answer.
She still had to worry about getting out of this alive.
She climbed, haltingly, toward the lip of the crater. It was hard going, but her condition improved as she went. It got better when, halfway up, the sounds of fighting ceased.
She got to the edge believing she’d managed to survive the incident—
When she cleared the lip, she came face-to-face with a man in a battlesuit of chrome, gold, and polished white enamel. He wielded the nastiest energy weapon she had ever seen.
* * * *
CHAPTER FIVE
The Underground Economy
“A criminal is a revolutionary without the pretense.”
—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
“After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche
(1844-1900)
There might have been a worse place to ditch the Hegira than the east side of Godwin, but if so it wasn’t on any of the eighty-three inhabited planets in the Confederacy.
Dom opened his eyes with the hope that what he was feeling was due to a screwed up balance circuit. It wasn’t. He was hanging upside down from the crash harness.
There was a bright side. The drive hadn’t blown.
The Hegira had plowed through the tenth floor of a fifteen-story warehouse and had flipped over. Perhaps it had rolled. Dom didn’t remember anything after the small aircraft’s impact with the building. It’d smashed through the other side, planting its nose in the roof of a neighboring building. The drive section balanced precariously on the bottom half of the window the Hegira had broken through.
Dom was suspended, headfirst, about thirty meters above a very hard-looking alley.
He waved a hand experimentally at the space where the windscreen had been. His hand brushed empty air.
As Dom scrambled to untangle parts of his body from the crash harness, he got subliminal glimpses of a group of spectators below him. The eidetic computer net wired into his brain dutifully recorded impressions of leather, metal, kevlar, and monocast with little rhyme or reason.
The most vivid detail that registered as Dom unwedged his artificial left leg from the Hegira footwell was the Proudhon Spaceport Security logo one of them wore.
That was before someone started to take potshots at him.
Suddenly, the group below him had Dom’s full attention.
The shooter was shaved bald and wore an exec’s monocast vest. Baldy was firing some hideous homemade weapon. The others were laughing as he paused to reload it. Even though Baldy was the one shooting, what scared Dom was the pulse carbine slung cross the back of the one with the spaceport shoulder patch.
Make short work of me and the Hegira—though it’d be difficult getting it recharged in this part of town.
Must be their idea of fun.
Dom pulled his body as far as he could into the shelter of the cockpit just as another shot hit the side of the Hegira.
He couldn’t risk return fire. With his reflexes he might get two of them with his pulse laser, but that would inspire the survivor to use a real weapon.
He put his left hand, the fully cybernetic one, on the side of the canopy and clamped it there. Then he wrenched the crash harness off, swinging out the missing windscreen.
Dom dangled under the Hegira, his left hand clamped around a strut in the canopy.
The punks below applauded him.
Dom looked down. The gang was closely grouped under the Hegira.
Dom looked back along the drive section, at the window on the floor below. The window had been cracked by the Hegira’s impact, but it was still there. It was a risk....
He looked at his audience, who seemed to be enjoying the show.
If you liked that, he thought, you’ll love this.
Dom reached up and pulled the emergency eject lever. His left hand was holding on to the canopy. When he pulled the emergency lever, two tons of gas pressure blew the canopy back on its track, shooting toward the drives. The ninth-story windows of the warehouse raced toward him. He let go, and slammed into the window.
For a split second he worried if the weakened window wouldn’t give—
He smashed through.
As he crashed into the ninth story, rockets blew the driver’s seat down, straight at the punks. The rocket had enough thrust to blow the chair up for fifty meters. It tried to level itself, but trapped by the alley it only managed to slam itself into the walls. The rocket would still be going when it hit the ground.
Dom rolled over broken glass to the receding thrum of the seat’s thrusters. As he skidded to a stop, ruining his suit, he caught a brief glimpse of orange as the chute deployed all wrong, billowing itself up to the Hegira.
The few real parts of his body hurt.
He got on his hands and knees. The entire floor was one room. It was empty, stripped. Anything of value had long ago been ripped off—light fixtures, electronics, plumbing, carpeting, walls, furniture.
He had rolled to the far wall. Next to him was a deep shaft. Someone had made off with the elevator.
He turned away from the shaft. The floor was about five-hundred meters square. The only light came from anemic moonlight filtering through dust-hazed windows. No one could sneak up on him here. Just empty gray space. At first Dom was surprised at the lack of people or graffiti, but as he heightened the gain on his photoreceptors, he realized that there weren’t any stairs.
The missing elevator had been the only access to the upper floors.
“Damnation and taxes.” His voice echoed back at him, enforcing the sense of emptiness.
He shook with delayed reaction. He forced himself to stop.
A sickening screech shattered the silence, followed by a snapping sound. A grinding noise—accelerating in pitch—came from the window Dom had broken through.
He looked back as the majestic shadow of the Hegira slowly moved. The nose slid toward the ground. The grinding reached its apex and the entire craft jerked downward.
It slid by the window with comparative soundlessness.
A half-second later he heard the sound of tearing metal and shattering plastic. The concrete floor shuddered with the impact.