Jubal Van Zandt & the Revenge of the Bloodslinger Page 7

  While I waited, Carina checked the magazine in her rifle, then stuck it back in, racked the bolt, and leaned over my shoulder.

  “Can you open it?” she asked.

  “I’m not even going to dignify that with a response.”

  “Well, can you do it any faster?”

  “And I’m the impatient one. Right.”

  “I assume,” Carina ground out, “that someone either heard those shots or saw them on a security feed, and that someone will be coming to investigate, probably with plenty of ammo. Additionally—” She twisted the word as if it was supposed to be some kind of barb at me. “—I want to get out of here before I bleed to death.”

  “What, no hyperclotting upgrade?” Somewhere on the peripheral of my mind, I was aware that my voice had taken on that flat affect it did in times of intense stress, but the majority of my brain was recalling the tones I’d memorized earlier. I played back the code Smiley Wy had entered, assigned the tones to the buttons I’d just pushed and listened to, then I punched in the code.

  The lock beeped three times in agreement, then the bolts disengaged with a snick.

  I flung the door open. It rebounded off someone on the other side. That person cursed, then stumbled out of the way.

  The hallway was full of SecOps.

  “Oh, good.” I pointed at Carina. “This psycho just shot a bunch of guys and took me hostage. I don’t know what your foreign victim’s rights laws are, but if possible, I’d like to press charges.”

  Then everyone was shooting again. I dropped and hugged the floor like a long-lost love.

  “Stay down,” Carina yelled at me.

  “Ha!” I yelled back.

  I assumed she was rolling her eyes at me, but I didn’t lift my head to look. I am a huge fan of my life and not a fan at all of sticking my head into the path of things that have the potential to end my life.

  The floor and I had plenty of time to consummate our reunion, realize how much we’d grown apart over the years, agree that this had been fun but it would never work between us, and say a bittersweet farewell before the shooting finally tapered off.

  Carina grabbed me by my hoodie’s collar and dragged me backward into the hallway. A second later, the door slammed shut and I heard the lock reengage.

  “All right, I admit that going back through the main terminal was a bad idea,” Carina said. Oddly enough, her voice was eerily flat, too. “But I really wanted that knuckgun back. My mom got it for me. Damn it. Okay.” She looked at me. “What are the odds that you can get us out of here?”

  I smiled. “Sister, getting out of places without being killed or captured is my job. And for only a slight pay increase, I will get you your knuckgun back.”

  ***

  People tend to think about security in only a couple of dimensions. They think if they lock a door, only people who can pick locks will get through. To combat this, they create a lock that’s set to a numbered code. Then the only people they have to worry about are those unsavory characters with stolen or homemade electronic overrides or an e-skeleton key app.

  As it happened, my override for first-gen—I checked the brand—Rufus-Ponobo locks was in my Taern loft, and at my and its fastest, it would’ve taken us a minimum of forty-nine seconds to get into the panel, plug in, let it run its algo, access the code, and open the door. By then, we would already have been gunned down. The success factor of the e-skeleton key was equally preparation-based. You can have the app, but if you don’t have the time to download the lock brand you’re looking for—in our case, Rufus-Ponobo—then it’s worthless.

  And so the security systems designers for the Soam International Airport were pretty sure they had anyone with ignoble intentions by the balls.

  “Shoot the panels,” I told Carina, pointing down the hall at the doorways. “All of them.”

  “The lock panels?”

  “Tampering with the panel or the mechanism freezes first-gen locks in the engaged position. Should buy us some time—at least until they bring an override in from security to reset them.” I jogged down the hallway to the bodies Carina had left strewn all about.

  “If I damage all of the panels, it’ll cut off all our potential exits,” Carina called after me.

  I snorted. “Yeah, all of our lateral ones.”

  Satisfied that I might actually know what I was doing, Carina took a step back from the door and splintered the electronic panel with the butt of her rifle. Then she moved on to the next door and the next, leaving a trail of cracked plastic and dented metal behind her.

  Back at the body pile, I found what I was looking for—the other rifle. I held it by the stock and stepped on the chest of the guard I’d taken it from. Trapped gasses moaned out of his dead throat. His flesh tried to wobble and slip out from under my sneakers, but I didn’t fall. I reached up and poked the muzzle of the rifle at the corner of a pocked ceiling tile. It lifted a good foot and a half, then whumped back into place.

  You’d think people would get smart enough to stop adding dropped ceilings to every building they renovated. Sure, it saved you a boatload in heating and cooling and air filtration costs, but was that really worth invalidating your security systems?

  Carina was more than halfway down the hall now. I didn’t want to wait around, so I started smashing code panels, too. We covered the rest of the hall, then met back up at the end closest to the terminal, where the SecOps were probably already bringing in some techie with an override.

  “What now?” Carina asked.

  I poked the rifle up at the ceiling again, shoving the tile above the door up and to the side, leaving a gaping hole. Dust and tile crumblies filtered down.

  “Here.” I handed Carina the rifle. “All yours. Now give me a boost.”

  “Just a sec.” She ejected the magazine, pulled the bolt and took that bullet out, stuck them both in her pockets, then leaned the extraneous rifle against the wall. “Okay.”

  She set her feet a little wider than shoulder-width apart, leaned her back against the door, and settled into a half-standing, half-sitting position. Then she made a wheeling hand motion at me like Let’s go.

  I grabbed her shoulder and stepped onto her undamaged thigh. I put a little bit of weight on it. When she didn’t flinch, I bounced once on the ball of my floor-foot, then shoved off, putting all of my weight on her leg. She grabbed my calf with both hands to stabilize me.

  “Here’s a knight who didn’t skip leg day,” I said.

  “Wall-sits are the most important part of a knight’s training regimen,” she said. “Got to be prepared in case you show up late to chapel and all the pews are full.”

  I pulled myself up onto the creaky ceiling supports, careful not to damage any of the tiles. It took me a second to situate myself up there, get to where I could turn around and look back down.

  Carina was standing on her good leg, adjusting the rifle strap. After a second, she stretched both hands up toward me, ready to be hauled up.

  I hesitated.

  Carina had read my file. She knew my record. In the Entering Soam line, she had asked me outright whether or not I ever got repeat business, and my feigned affront hadn’t stopped her from almost getting to the question that she really wanted to ask—the one about whether I would betray her, too. She had to have known that I wasn’t joking when I told the SecOps guys I wanted to press charges against her, that if things had gone the other way and she hadn’t been able to get us away from them, I would’ve thrown her under the barge in a heartbeat. You don’t get to be the best thief in the Revived Earth by spending all your time dying or rotting in jail.

  But the look she was giving me right then behind those outstretched hands was so guileless that I could almost believe she trusted me.

  Either that or she was manipulating me.

  Well, she had been fast enough to get us out of the immediate path of doom and smart enough to set a dead man’s switch on her payment, so she knew I was at least half as invested in her survival as I w
as in mine. Plus we had agreed on that expensive little add-on for her knuckgun’s safe return. That was probably the reason she wasn’t worried about me taking off across the dropped ceiling supports toward the closest roof access or air shaft without her. It was naïve reasoning on her part, but not implausible. Honor is one of those things so ingrained in Guild knights that they usually can’t see past it to reality.

  I prostrated myself across the evenly spaced supports, hooked my feet under a set for extra stability, then reached down and grabbed one of Carina’s upstretched arms with both hands.

  “You’re a lot heavier than you look,” I grunted. I couldn’t even get my arms to bend.

  “You’re a lot weaker than you look,” she said.

  She then proceeded to use me as a rope ladder, pulling herself hand-over-fist up my arms until she could reach both my shoulders and the supports. She opted for digging her fingernails into one of each.

  “FYI, medical expenses incurred on the job get billed to the client,” I said. “Hey, be careful! We don’t want to break any of the tiles.”

  She got her boot off of the tile I’d set aside and moved to a better position. “Sorry, this is my first ceiling-climb.”

  “Well, get your act together.” I nudged her out of the way, then took the tile and laid it back in its grooves. Darkness closed in around us. “If we scuff up the tiles, they’ll realize we’re up here and start shooting.”

  “Can you see?” Carina asked.

  I couldn’t, but I had seared the layout of the terminal and hall into my brain out of habit, and I could feel my way through the beams and wires easily enough, so it was basically the same thing.

  “Yeah, why?” I lied. “Can you not? Doesn’t the Guild do a night vision upgrade?”

  “Not anymore. Tapetum lucidum cuts down on overall visual acuity. It’s not worth the tradeoff.”

  “Huh. Learn something new every day.” I started moving at an angle across the ceiling supports. “Can you follow me by sound?”

  “Yeah.” She listened for a second, then I heard her start moving, too.

  I lowered my voice so that no one below would hear me. “Make sure you stay on the supports. Don’t touch the tiles, you’ll fall right through. Even if you don’t, you might bump it or make a noise. We want to get out of this hallway undetected, buy ourselves some space.”

  We crawled until we reached a roughly rounded wall made from some kind of crete—probably con, based on the beady texture. There the space between the actual ceiling and the dropped ceiling tapered off. I consulted the terminal layout in my head. The jetway we had exited our flight and stepped into the Entering Soam line from had been to the left of the hallway Smiley Wy had taken us down. We were now facing the opposite direction, which meant we needed to go—

  “Left,” I said.

  The bathrooms I’d been forced to use out of boredom—less than six times, though; I’m pretty sure Carina was exaggerating about that—lay in that direction between a closed variety store and an airport bar. And lying the length of a cargo carrier past those was the terminal baggage claim.

  “How much time do you think it’s been since you killed that eelfucker and his guards?” I asked over my shoulder.

  Carina didn’t answer me right away. A pale blue light winked on, then off again behind me. Her wristpiece.

  “We disembarked the plane twenty-nine minutes ago,” she said. “Wy approached us eight minutes ago. First engagement with the Soam SecOps about three minutes later, in the hallway. Second engagement probably forty-five seconds to a minute and a half after that.”

  So about five minutes since the first shots were fired and three minutes since the last shots. Odds were good that Smiley Wy or an equivalently important eelfucker hadn’t had time to send a peon to confiscate our bags from the carousel yet.

  The awful smell drifting up from below strongly indicated that we were crossing above the bathrooms now.

  “Hey, Carina, did you ever notice how the period before marriage when somebody’s got your pledge not to screw anyone else and the period of time you’re shooting at an enemy are both called engagement? Weird, right?”

  “I guess so.”

  “What if engagement was a period of time when you shot at your future spouse and if he or she didn’t die, you would marry them?”

  “Then that’s how it would be, I guess.”

  “You and Nickie should consider it. Start a new trend.”

  “Do you talk excessively when you’re nervous that you’ve missed our turn?”

  “Nope. It’s a service I provide free of charge and reason. Right here is where we’re going.”

  We were above the airport bar. I felt around for a few seconds until I found the air purification ductwork. In the complete darkness, my eyes imagined they could see a dull shine bouncing off of the metal.

  “Don’t have any more of those knives on you, do you?” I asked Carina.

  Instead of answering, she found my hand and set a flat glass handle in my palm. It was warm to the touch. Obviously wherever she was hiding these, they were close to or in direct contact with her skin. I wondered whether the knife smelled like her skin, and what her skin smelled like. Probably good. Women usually smelled good.

  I used the warm knife blade to pry up the corner of a ceiling tile that had been cut short to accommodate the ductwork’s vent. Bright white light lanced into the space, too bright and too white to be the muted tones I’d seen in the bar. This was the little kitchen that served patrons who wanted an appetizer with their booze. We were directly above a counter that looked like it thought “sterile food preparation surface” was a hilarious joke. No one was messing around in there, so obviously the only people at the bar at that hour were dedicated drinkers.

  “Jubal, you gorgeous genius, you’ve done it again,” I said.

  I pried up a full tile, set it aside, then handed Carina her knife back.

  “Here, put this on,” I told her, shucking my hoodie and turning it inside out. The outside had been black. The inside was bright white with black stitching. I tossed the reversed hoodie to Carina, then adjusted the collar of the bright purple- and green-leafed tourist shirt I’d been wearing underneath. “You’re going to have to ditch the rifle up here, too.”

  “Why?”

  “How far do you think we’re going to get packing an operator-issue rifle in the middle of a Soam airport?”

  Reluctantly, she laid the rifle across the supports. The good side of her mouth frowned as she pulled on my hoodie.

  “I’m getting you your knuckgun back,” I reminded her. “Plus you have however many knives you’ve got stashed around your person. It’s not like you’ll be unarmed.”

  “I know. It’s just counterintuitive.”

  “That’s what you keep telling me,” I said, lowering myself onto the counter.

  I got out of the way while Carina climbed down, too. Before I followed her to the floor, I took a second to fit the tile back into place.

  Feet on the floor, I looked Carina over. The white of the hoodie was so bright that it stood out in shocking contrast to her dark skin. People weren’t going to be looking at her face unless there was something equally shocking up there to lock onto.

  “Put the hood up and see if you can’t hide that dead giveaway on your cheek,” I said.

  She did. “Better?”

  I nodded, then looked out over the double-hung raywing doors into the bar proper.

  The place was doing a bustling trade, about six or eight customers, most drinking alone, but a few in a small group by the wall that opened into the terminal. The bartender was delivering a pair of fruity-looking mixed drinks to the group.

  I held one raywing open for Carina, then eased it shut behind me. It would’ve been great to spot somebody with a hat I could scoop up, but headwear didn’t appear to be the fashion in this particular watering hole, so I just kept my pace even all the way out.

  We turned onto the open floor of the terminal.r />
  “The trick is to keep moving at a steady pace,” I told Carina, gesturing my hands subtly as if we were having a conversation I cared just enough about to illustrate it. “Even if we just go back and forth. It’s easier for the eye to focus on someone if they’re holding still than if they’re wandering.”

  “Doesn’t look like we’ll have to go back and forth,” Carina said. “That’s the baggage claim for our flight up there. Looks like people are still picking up.”

  I nodded. “See your bag yet?”

  “Mmhm.”

  “Good.” I spotted mine circling the carousel not far from hers. “Don’t go straight to it.” I veered off toward the opposite end of the claim and watched the offloading chute as if I was still waiting for mine to pop out.

  “This is your big secret? This is what you get paid to do? Just walk into places and take something?” Carina’s voice was low enough that only I could hear, but there was an unmistakable insinuation of humor to it. A bit of laughter that suggested the joke was on everybody but me.

  “When the opportunity presents itself, yes.” I gestured to my bag as if I hadn’t been keeping track of it for the entire last revolution of the carousel. “Oh, there it is.”

  I grabbed my bag off the track and hooked it over my shoulder.

  Carina’s duffel bag rotated into view, and she picked it up. “And that’s it?”

  “Hey, sister, you were ready to give your knuckgun up for lost.” I tapped my sternum. “I got it back. Contractual add-on fulfilled.”

  “Just by walking me back into the piranha’s nest.”

  “I hate to dispel the magic and mystery for you because, believe me, I like being seen as a god on earth, but more than half of my job is just doing things no one else has the balls or the galls to do, and keeping a cool head while I do it.”

  Carina huffed a little laugh, and I allowed myself a self-satisfied smirk. As we approached the terminal’s exit, which had been peppered with SecOps guards, I morphed my smile into something meant to convey how glad I was to finally be off that airplane. Something those guards were probably used to seeing from tourists.