Trinity: Atom & Go Page 3

  “Obliged,” Atom murmured as he knuckled his forehead. With a meek bow he turned and shuffled his way through the maze of chairs to the front door.

  The men followed.

  On the street outside, the cool of the eve hid Atom with a refreshing wave of energy. He stepped aside to let the men exit the bar.

  They looked about in confusion.

  “Where’s your skiff, gramps?”

  Atom turned halfway back, addressing them without the dignity of looking on them. “What can you tell me about Genny?”

  An unbidden smirk broke the tall man’s face a moment before Atom’s rail-pistol smashed into his cheekbone. Before the other man could react, Atom snapped the pistol sideways and punched a round through his chest.

  “Bleedin’ hell,” the freighter’s words whistled through his crushed face as he stumbled back toward the bar. “What’s wrong with your bleedin’ brainpan?”

  Atom stood in silence, tracking the drunken merch each step of the way.

  “Brovers,” the broken man whimpered through the door as he steadied himself against the frame. “That there boke just…” He turned to point at Atom just as a round slipped through his good eye.

  A moment of silence followed before the crowd of unruly freighters poured from the bar, weapons raised and ready.

  Atom stood in placid contemplation of his rail-pistol.

  “What’s your malfunction,” the leader roared as he trained an auto-shotgun at Atom’s chest. The other dozen men held a ragged arsenal of cobbled, merchant-ship weapons.

  Atom stared them down.

  As the freighters stood, shaking with drunken adrenaline, their eyes took in the blood of their companions pooling at their feet. They failed to register the pram drifting towards them.

  “The name Genny mean anything to you?” Atom growled.

  “Don’t mean nothing to me,” the leader muttered. “Anything to the rest of you?”

  A scattered shaking of heads and grumbled negatives answered the query. Their weapons wavered as Atom glared through the men.

  “Any of you remember a waitress that you followed out? Short, slight, light hair, she wore a white dress with gold flowers,” Atom paused as recognition lit on several of the men’s faces.

  The leader, however, grew dark as Atom spoke. “What’s a servy to us?” he demanded.

  “Obviously, nothing.” Atom spat in the dust of the empty street.

  “You mean you killed two of my men over a bar-slut?” Rage bubbled to the surface as the spacer advanced. His shotgun drifted from Atom’s chest to his face. “There are a billion willing wendys all over the Black and you decide to drop over this one?

  “I’ll kill you personal-like,” the man said with a shower of spittle.

  “It wasn’t the doing, so much as how it was done. You didn’t give her much choice.”

  “We didn’t even do nothin’ to this one. She was all flirty and smiles on the job, but when we tried for more she gets prim. So’s I busted her gob, but she limps and that ain’t no sport. We just chucked her in the alley so’s she ain’t out in the open,” he growled, his shotgun wavering with passion. “Why’s this one so big to you?”

  “She reminded me of my oldest daughter, Aamu,” Atom said with quiet malice.

  The freighters took a moment to register how close the pram had drifted during the conversation. A look of universal surprise mirrored on every face as the pram began to spin like a top. Margo gripped the sides and held on for dear life. Before any of the spacers could react, energy blades hissed out from the suspensors and began carving through the lower extremities of the panicking men.

  They dropped as the humming blades sheared shins and severed legs refused to support bodies.

  Not a shot sounded from the merchantmen as they writhed on the ground, but Atom stalked among them, a grim-faced death affording the coup de grace even as the pram slowed in the midst of the bloody carnage.

  As the pram resumed its previous hover, Margo looked up at Atom with a dizzy expression. Her hands clutched the pram’s sides with white knuckled tension, but grim determination hardened her face.

  Atom stood above the shift leader last. The man, in mild shock from the loss of his left leg, held up a feeble hand to shield himself from Atom’s wrath.

  “For innocence lost,” Atom whispered as the single shot echoed along the empty street.

  Atom stood over the dead man and holstered his pistol. Then, without a backward glance, he took hold of the pram and set out down the street. He laid a gentle hand atop Margo’s head and she looked up to him with a sad, knowing smile.

  “For Genny,” he whispered to her as she reached up and patted his hand.

  Just before rounding a distant corner, he looked back to catch Gims creeping from the tavern so survey the damage.

  ***

  He awoke a short time later to Margo poking his shoulder. When he regained enough sense to sit up, he looked down at the object tucked in his hand.

  His eyes widened in wonder.

  Heaped against the abbey wall, Atom coughed. Novas exploded behind his eyes. He tried to gather his wits as they skated around his pan, twinkling fireflies on a hot summer’s eve. Willing breath back into his body, he tried to shift, but darkness threatened to overwhelm him again.

  His last image before slipping back beneath the surface superimposed a half-dozen grey frocked sisters clustering around him in concern.

  ***

  “Dear captain, where are we floating?” Hither perched cross-legged in the navigator’s seat, chin propped in her palm as her absent stare absorbed the lengthy fingers of the God’s Hand Galaxy wisping across her consoles.

  “Following a hunch.” Atom frowned at the pilot’s HUD.

  “Lot of Black out there. How do you know we’re headed true?”

  Atom spun away from the full spectrum canopy. For a moment he studied his long-time friend, taking in the soft curve of her neck as she cupped her chin. Twirling her long auburn hair around a finger, she gazed through her console out into the Black. Her eyes caught the light of distant stars and twinkled, twin emeralds in an ivory sea.

  Atom cracked his neck with a grimace. “Just a hunch,” he said, expecting Hither to engage.

  She only shrugged.

  “Don’t you want to hear the hunch?”

  “I guess.” She slipped her bare feet to the floor and blinked from her stupor. “I’ve always assumed if you had a hunch, it’s a good follow.

  “It’s not like you’ve ever steered us into trouble,” she said sarcastically as she rose and stretched her back with feline grace. “What is this master plan?”

  “I didn’t say it was a plan.” Atom ignored the tone and turned back to the Black.

  “So, this ‘not plan,’ what are we doing?”

  “Heading to Gomori Alpha.”

  “The space station?” Hither yawned and stretched, studying Atom through slitted eyes as she covered her mouth with the back of her hand.

  “It’s the closest refueling point.”

  “You’re gambling that Lilly didn’t bother to top off before she got the drop on you?”

  “Would you, if you were rushing to see me on my deathbed and didn’t know how much time you had.”

  “I’d probably take the time to go for a full rejuve treatment.” She locked Atom with a half-smile. “You know, I’d want to make sure I looked my best for your funeral. And who knows, maybe you’d drop dead when you saw me burst through your door all lovelified.”

  Atom spun and thrust himself up from the pilot’s chair, ignoring Hither’s banter. “And in my defense, it never crossed my mind that she might have a golem under her control. The last time I saw one of those was during the Bastet Insurrection when the emperor sent a death squad into battle to make a point.”

  He stepped closer to Hither and dropped his voice. “They terrified me, and they were on my side.”

  “What about this one?”

  “I’m surprised I didn’
t void.” Atom chirped a mirthless laugh. “I’ll have to figure out how to take her without that thing tearing our arms off.”

  “Public setting?”

  “That might be the best scenario. You don’t think she would turn a golem loose on bystanders?”

  “Doubtful.” Hither padded up beside Atom with her arms crossed protectively and leaned her head on his shoulder as he stood looking out into the Black beyond the pilot’s canopy. “I’ve been over everything we have on the girl and assembled the best profile I can. Spec says she avoids the eye at all costs. That golem is her last line of defense. She wouldn’t show that card unless she had no other choice.”

  “Then she expected trouble at the abbey?”

  “She expected something. Whether that something was us or maybe Gehkohan retainers, you’d have to ask the girl.”

  Atom slipped an arm around Hither’s shoulder and snuggled her close.

  For a time they stood in silence, admiring the depths of the Black, losing themselves in the eternal silence. Atom calculated. He ran contingencies in his mind and trusted that his gamble would pay in full. He hoped that love trumped common sense. If love proved true, the odds shifted to his side of the table.

  “Kozue,” he said, closing his eyes and leaning a cheek on Hither’s soft hair. “Call a meet in the commons.”

  “Will do, Cap,” she replied in a chipper tone.

  Atom waited.

  After another minute he let go of Hither and turned away from the Black. “Come on, girl. Let’s go figure out our next step.”

  Hitching up his gunbelt, he strode from the bridge with Hither padding along behind.

  “Looks like this job just took a turn for the interesting,” he said as he crossed into the galley and took a seat at the table with a dapper smile.

  The rest of the crew sat around in various poses of disinterest. Shi slurped at a bowl of noodles. Daisy skimmed a book on his pad. And at the far end of the table, amid a spread of random parts, Byron tinkered with a handheld explosion of wires and soldered bits.

  “That a bomb?” Atom asked as Hither slipped into the booth.

  “Combo alarm-disarm plasma cutter, jib,” Byron said around the smoking soldering iron clenched between his teeth.

  “As long as it won’t blow a hole in the side of my ship.”

  “We meetin’ ‘bout blowin’ holes in ships or how’s about we chatter ‘bout how you gotcher hind whooped by a lil’ girl.” Shi grinned and cocked her head with bird-like jerkiness as she slurped another mouthful of noodles from her bowl.

  Atom frowned and rubbed at his temples.

  Daisy’s shoulders shook like an almost imperceptible earthquake. Byron looked up with a startled expression, the smoking iron wreathing his face.

  “It’s true,” Atom’s words crawled out as he rehashed the events from the previous day. “From what we know about Lilly Prizrakov Genko, or Genny as she was known on Soba 4, or Marian on Dathan, is that we can’t pin down what we actually know about her.”

  “Any chance that Ghost Tribes rumor has weight?” Daisy asked without looking up from his book.

  “Or, is that what we have to expect?” Hither looked around the table. “If she’s a ghost, then we know she’s capable of almost anything, with resources we can’t underestimate. I’ve never had any direct dealings with the Tribes, but I’ve come across some of their handiwork in my old job. The Tribes are masters of all things shadow – assassination, subterfuge, espionage, theft, to name a few.”

  “Don’t forget their dedication.” The hulking pilot swiped a new page with a thick finger. “Once they accept a job, only death can stop them.”

  “Soundin’ like somekin we know.” Shi finished her noodles and pushed the bowl away from her. “If’n I din know better, I’d say our mighty Cap, hisself, was from the Tribes. I see ‘im bend every rule to comp a job.”

  “And what of it?” Atom grinned behind his fist.

  “As long as I ain’t yer contract, I’m square with it.”

  “He en’t never changed ‘ow he looks.” Byron squinted at his project and waved away the smoke.

  “Maybe that’s my disguise,” said Atom.

  Byron raised his eyes to stare at Atom.

  “So, a little girl beat me soundly,” Atom said with a laugh, holding up his hands in resignation.

  “Do we know for sure that she’s from the Tribes?” Daisy set his pad on the table and turned his full attention to the conversation. “Was this knowledge given to us when we took the job? If not, I don’t know that we need to continue down this path.”

  “I took their money.”

  “Can you return it?”

  “On what grounds?”

  “They violated our contract through non-disclosure.” Daisy leaned back and frowned as he folded his arms across his belly. “We have the right to know what you’re facing when you choose to take a contract from any client.”

  Atom pursed his lips in thought. “They mentioned suspicions of training, but no hard evidence. We could probably walk away, but at this point, my interest has been touched.”

  “Interest?”

  “A girl whooped me.”

  “She’s from the Tribes,” Hither interjected.

  “We don’t know that for sure.” Atom glanced at her.

  “It’s looking that way, Atom. You build me a scenario where a girl, somewhere between sixteen and twenty-five, infiltrates a large, mid-level han. Bypasses all the security checks. Disappears into the Black with damaging information. And then resurfaces to gently put you down with a golem she has imprinted on….”

  “What’s a golem?” Byron’s eyes danced from person to person.

  All heads at the table swiveled to Byron in amazement. For a moment they sat in shocked silence. Then, like a pendulum, the heads swung back to Atom.

  “You’ve never heard of a golem?” the captain asked.

  “Oi, I’ve ‘eard jibbers and floaters from the Black of golems, but that don’t rightly know what they are, or ‘it’ is.” His voice rose as he spoke. “Last I knew, golems swept from the Black to snatch unruly kits.”

  Atom nodded and slipped into lecturer mode. “The golem is an unholy melding of man and machine. They considered it a deep fringe project, but that went out the hatch when the emp unveiled them at the Battle of Tokai.

  “Essentially, they are soldiers who have died in battle and then been fused into their battle armor. If their brains survive the process, their neural signature and consciousness is tied to the armor. They are no longer limited by the human body. Instead, a golem is as close to synthetic life as we have come to producing.”

  Byron pinched his lips together, contorting them into elastic shapes as he digested the information.

  The others waited in silence.

  “They’re basic bots wiff brains.” He furrowed his brow. “Fourteen circs an’ I’m still bein’ learned new tids.

  “I ain’t seein’ what makes these metal bokes somefin’ tougher ‘an imp marines or deaf drones.” He picked up his soldering iron and turned his attention back to his project. “Shouldn’t an EMP handle ‘em tight?”

  Atom turned to Hither for help.

  “They run on bio-energy and have been modified so that all their internal parts are biosynthetic,” she said. “They function like an organism, not a machine.”

  “That’d be a rough toss.” Byron remained focused on the tiny board inside his project. “All the strength of armor wiff none‘a the weakness.

  “An’ this wendy got ‘er ‘ands on one?” He paused, glancing up from his soldering.

  Atom shrugged. “The bigger question is how she imprinted with the thing.”

  “If you say so,” Shi chirped. “I say it all boils to how we’re takin’ her on without that beast catchin’ us unawares.”

  “Truth,” Atom sighed.

  “What’s our next jump?” Daisy asked.

  “Headed out to Gomori Alpha.” Leaning back in his chair, Atom laced hi
s fingers behind his head. As he spoke Margo wandered into the galley. Atom waved her over and pulled her up into his lap. “I’m banking on Lilly making for the nearest refueling station.

  “There’s no record of her ship at either of the two ports near the abbey, which means she either topped off before dropping in, or she burned through to make the best time and dropped near the abbey, but off the grid. With no record, there’s no fueling taking place, which points us towards Gomori Alpha as the nearest fueling depot.”

  “Don’t ya’ll think she’d anticipate us trackin’ her there?” Shi drawled. “Seems only logical-like that she’d be better at coverin’ her tracks when she knows good an’ well that she tussled with you back at the abbey.

  “She knows you’re on ‘er scent.”

  “Probably.” Atom stared off into the thoughtful beyond as he strapped up one of Margo’s little boots. “But do you have a better path to follow?”

  Shi thought on it for a moment. “Naw, I reckin the straight shot is the most likely course. Even if she’s pullin’ a skipper an’ toppin’ just enough to jump to the next system, we’ve a headin’ to follow.”

  “Against the Ghost Tribes, I’d imagine it’s easy to overthink and overanalyze actions,” Hither added.

  “Agreed.” Daisy grinned. “This is like a cosmic game of pawns. When there are too many strategies in play to predict the opponent’s true intentions, it's best to resort to the simplest steps. We take the simplest, most conservative approach until we can determine our enemy and their true thoughts.”

  “So, Gomori?” Shi stared into her empty bowl, willing it to refill.

  “We split when we arrive.” Atom tapped his chin in thought. “She’s seen me and Go, but she hasn’t seen the rest of you. Pair off and we sweep the station.

  “If you find her.” Atom paused to look around the table. “Nearest group goes to assist, the other locks down her ship. The last thing I want is for her to panic and call in the golem on a space station.”

  “That would be a death sentence for the entire station,” Hither agreed. “She most likely imprinted that golem like a hound. It’ll stop at nothing to protect her.”

  “We have a day and a touch to Gomori. Shi, you’re with Daisy. Hither, you’ll float with Byron. You can concoct whatever cover story you want, but make sure it is solid between the two of you and there’s enough to back it. We’ll go light arms, nothing that would draw attention from the authorities or hans.”