‘Stay with the officer!’ Nathan yelled behind him to Betty, the older officer having fallen further behind. ‘I’ll track down the shooter!’
‘Keep line of sight!’ Betty shouted breathlessly.
Nathan barely heard her as he dashed across the street in pursuit of the felon who had vanished into a building in the block opposite, pedestrians scattering away from the pistol he was brandishing. Nathan hit the side street at a sprint and rushed up to the door which was still swinging from side to side where the perp’ had crashed through it. Faded paintwork above the door for a convenience store stained the otherwise unadorned walls.
Nathan skittered to a halt and then peeked around the corner of the jam into the gloom within. Moving beams of sunlight pierced the darkness like drifting strobes as the station rotated slowly in space, streaming through the only gaps of glass not smeared with grime. Nathan eased inside and listened intently as he crouched down and hugged the wall, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness.
The sounds of the street outside were muted by the interior of the building, which was cooler than the city streets. Nathan could hear a rhythmic dripping of water, condensation and damp a problem in buildings where the airflow generated by gigantic low–level fans had long ago ceased. Debris littered the floor as Nathan crouched down and listened, forcing himself not to switch on his night–vision lens to aid his search: the devices were excellent but easily foiled by a wily opponent with a flash light.
Nathan heard a flutter of light footsteps from across the building, ascending fast, and he broke cover and sprinted across the interior of the ground floor. Once filled with ranks of shelves, their markings on the tiled floor clearly visible even in the low light, the ground floor was now one large open space entombed in dust and grit. Nathan spotted the footprints in the dust even as he ran and changed course to follow them to a flight of metal steps.
He slowed and eased up the steps, watching the door at the top in case the perp’ decided to take a shot back at him when he was trapped on the…
A figure lunged into view and Nathan saw a pistol aimed directly at him as he hurled himself to one side and vaulted over the side of the staircase. A plasma shot boomed and he felt the heat of it whip past his face, a bright ball of electric blue energy that smashed instead into the tiles far below and exploded with a bright flare of fearsome light.
Nathan plummeted downward and slammed into the floor, rolled hard to his right to absorb some of the impact and then sprawled onto his back as he saw a shadowy figure leap from the top of the stairwell and plunge toward him.
Nathan rolled to his left and fired as he went, but his wild shot went wide of the target as the figure landed cat–like nearby and sprinted away from him. Nathan took aim, but the figure crashed through another doorway and vanished from sight.
Nathan hauled himself to his feet and dashed after the perp’, his legs and hips aching from the long fall as he plunged through the doorway and into a corridor, then ducked as a plasma shot crackled toward him in a vibrant halo of searing heat and light.
The plasma charge splattered the wall behind him, sprayed white–hot plasma across his back. Nathan wriggled out of his jacket as he smelled it burning and sprinted in pursuit of the shooter as he rushed up a darkened staircase at the far end of the corridor. Nathan aimed as he ran and fired three shots, not really trying to hit the perp’ but more interested in denying him the chance to fire again as Nathan sprinted up the stairs two at a time, his chest and lungs heaving.
The stairwell backed up on itself, climbing higher inside the building and Nathan could hear the shooter’s footfalls as he ascended with super–human speed. Nathan labored up the stairwells as his thighs began to surge with pain and his breath was sucked in with strained gasps. Sweat beaded on his forehead and drenched the shirt on his back as he climbed upward until he reached the top floor and heard a door crash somewhere ahead of him.
Nathan staggered onto the corridor and saw the door at the far end opening out onto the roof, could smell the slightly less pungent air gusting inward from outside as he ran on legs rubbery with fatigue until he reached the door and he crouched down. He knew with certainty that the shooter would be waiting for him to appear, probably even now was aiming his pistol at the open doorway. Even as he considered that he heard the sound of more sirens bearing down on Phoenix Heights and knew that if the shooter hung around much longer he’d be boxed in and unable to escape.
Nathan took a breath and then aimed outside and fired two shots randomly at where he assumed the gunman would be waiting before he hurled himself out and rolled along the roof, coming up on one knee and searching for the shooter.
The roof was empty.
Nathan blinked and then he heard the hum of a plasma pistol right behind him.
He looked over his shoulder and saw a hooded youth standing atop the roof door house, having vaulted there on his bionic legs right after crashing through the doorway. From beneath the shadows of his hood, two inhuman looking red eyes glowed. Nathan, his voice ragged with exhaustion, shrugged.
‘Can we call it a draw?’
The youth aimed his pistol more carefully and Nathan saw the bulky weapon was not a pistol at all but a military blaster, something that should never have reached the streets of the city. He had heard rumors of such weapons occasionally being found in the possession of major criminals but never before in the hands of a street youth.
‘You’ve already shot one police officer,’ Nathan cautioned, ‘you shoot another and you’ll be in Tethys Gaol by tomorrow.’
‘I didn’t shoot him,’ came the warbling reply, translated by a digital device attached to the inside of the youth’s throat. ‘But there ain’t no sense in lettin’ you go now.’
His eyes peered at Nathan from within the darkened veil of his hood, points of red light that betrayed further bio–enhancements to the optical nerves allowing for infra–red and perhaps even ultraviolet vision.
‘No sense in killing me either,’ Nathan pointed out. ‘You can’t win. The cavalry’s here.’
The sirens were louder now, screeching in through the thin veils of cloud drifting in the city’s atmosphere and obscuring the starlight.
The youth seemed to shrug and then he aimed the pistol between Nathan’s eyes.
‘Good chase, cop.’
Nathan flinched and then suddenly a blast of air hammered the roof of the building as a police cruiser shot over their heads with scant inches to spare. Nathan saw the cruiser’s exhaust hurl the shooter clear off the door house and over Nathan’s head, even his bionic limbs incapable of saving him as he crashed down onto the unforgiving surface of the roof. The weapon flew from his grasp, the youth stunned and incapacitated as Nathan leaped across to him and drove one knee between his shoulder blades as he reached around and drew his wrists together.
The police cruiser landed nearby on the roof and Betty climbed out, her pistol in her hand as she shouted at him.
‘What the hell happened to line of sight?!’
Nathan locked the manacles into place and stood up, his legs still weak with fatigue.
‘I did what you said,’ he replied with a smile, ‘I kept line of sight, with this guy. You wanna question him or do I get to do it?’
***
IV
Tethys Gaol
Xavier Reed awoke with a start as a claxon ripped through the field of his slumber like a plasma ray through black velvet. He sat bolt upright on his bunk as the stench of closely packed humanity hit him, of unwashed bodies and stale breath that permeated the thick, hot air like a blanket.
The bunk in his cell was made of tubular titanium, too tough for even the most determined inmate to break up and use as a weapon. The walls were poured concrete with an internal mesh of steel, the mirror above the steel sink and latrine also polished steel. Nothing could be broken, nothing salvaged for escape or violence. Battles in this gaol were fought with bare hands, feet and heads, brutal and primal.
The barred cell door clattered open, along with a hundred others on D Block as the “
sticks
” called the inmates out, so called because of the electrically charged batons they wielded with almost feverish delight on any inmate who was found to be out of line. Xavier stumbled bleary–eyed out of his cell and moved to stand on the gantry overlooking the chow hall two tiers down.
Arranged in two blocks facing each other, with the tables and chairs of the chow hall bolted and welded to the deck between them, the blocks were two tiers high and designed to hold around a hundred inmates. Xavier had counted two hundred twenty at least, most of them sharing cells in twos and threes. As a new face he was allowed a single cell for a short amount of time, a measure designed to protect newcomers from extortion and violence at the mercy of the old hands that ruled the block. In truth, Xavier had found that all the solitary living did was draw attention to the newcomer and give the other inmates time to plan and conspire.
The gantry was filled with cons, all in their orange prison scrip’ overalls and light sneakers. The prison’s environment was 1G, standard gravitational force, created by newly–installed Higgs Boson generators deep within the station. Xavier had heard that in previous years, massive riots had been conducted in zero–G conditions as inmates discarded their gravi–boots in favor of the perceived freedom of flight. The job of clearing up body parts floating around the blocks had not, he had been assured, been for the faint hearted.
D Block was only controlled in name by the sticks. In truth it was the domain of Zak “The Shock” Volt, a lifer with a string of gang kills to his name. Surrounded by an aura of psychosis, Volt was short and stocky, shaven headed and devoid of the biogenic implants favored by many of the block’s inmates. Those implants were always removed before incarceration on Tethys Gaol, meaning that the unenhanced suddenly found themselves at a distinct advantage to their limbless fellow convicts.
The sticks bellowed the numbers of each convict out from their armored watch station on one side of the block, the calls echoing across the hall from speakers embedded in the walls.
‘Two–one–five–Bravo!’
‘Sir, yessir, cell ten!’
‘Two–one–five–Charlie!’
‘Sir, yessir, cell eleven!’
The two watch stations were sunk into the walls at each end of the block, each above a single sally port and with ten meters of polished steel wall below them, removing any hope of prisoners climbing the walls and entering the hard–light protected towers. Metal spikes protruded from the walls below the stations, each with a thousand volts running permanently through them. In the quiet hours, of which there were few on the block, Xavier had heard them humming in the darkness, along with the rattling from narrow air conditioning vents located just above the watch station windows.
Xavier answered when his name was called and caught dark looks from cons across the block. Some men glared at him, others sniggered and exchanged knowing glances, others still pretended that he didn’t even exist in order to avoid the bloodshed and violence they knew must surely soon come. Xavier knew that the word was out because he had heard the whispers floating across the block during the night, purposefully kept low to avoid alerting the guards and all the more sinister for it.
‘Newbie’s a cop.’
‘No way man?!’
‘Prison stick!’
‘Wouldn’t wanna be him!’
‘They’ll have stuck him with steel by the mornin’.’
‘That’s if he’s lucky, man! Zak’s crew will take him apart bit by bit, a chunk at a time! Man, his time’s over ‘fore it’s started.’
Xavier had remained silent and still and forced himself not to think of his wife and child so far away now back on Earth. Three days into a life stretch and already he felt as though the palpable tension in the air and the constant threat of violence was corroding his arteries, crushing his heart in a vice–like grip.
‘Chow hall, now!’
Xavier turned as the prisoners filed off the gantries and descended toward the hall below. Already, he dreaded mealtimes. When locked in his cell Xavier was on his own and reasonably safe. At meal times he was exposed and under scrutiny in a packed hall, surrounded and yet utterly alone. As a former
stick
he knew that if he didn’t do something real fast his life would be over, and not before considerable pain at the hands of Volt’s crew.
The prisoners filed into the hall, the cells overlooking them and armed guards watching from the opposing towers as Xavier headed for his seat, on a table reserved for the newest cons. Currently only five of the eight seats were taken, due to what the sticks had termed “medical issues”. Xavier could only guess what afflictions the newcomers had suffered, and whether they had been afflicted by other inmates.
Xavier sat down, four other men joining him in silence. He already knew that two of them were hardened criminals who just happened to have arrived at Tethys, while the other two were newcomers to the system like him. Keen to distance themselves from Xavier they willingly sat alongside the lifers, leaving him perched on his own on one corner of the table.
The two lifers, muscular dudes with bioluminescent tattoos covering massive biceps, thick beards and grim expressions, thumped down onto their seats opposite and glared at him in silence as from inside the center of the table a hatch opened and meals appeared on trays. Each man reached in turn for the meal with his number stamped upon a thin plastic box. Xavier saw his meal appear and he reached out for it.
A thick hand grabbed the box and snatched it away from him.
Xavier looked up into the eyes of the nearest bearded lifer, who smirked as he slid the box out of sight between himself and his companion. Xavier watched as the other inmate opened the box and slid something from a plastic bag into the meal before sealing it once more. The smirking inmate returned the box to Xavier, the other two cons watching the exchange in nervous silence.