HIGH NOON ON PROXIMA CENTAURI B
CLIFF WINNIG
The shadows shortened toward nothing the closer Jocelyn Stark rode to High Noon.
Her eight-legged sand lizard, swift and sinuous, ran along the access road that paralleled the train tracks. Jocelyn leaned forward in the saddle and patted Zamir’s neck. Even through UV-resistant gloves, she could feel his iridescent scales sliding beneath her fingers.
“Just a little farther, old friend. A little faster.” Her mount’s weaving gait grew more pronounced as he picked up speed. Sand lizards couldn’t be spurred, nor did they seem to understand human speech. But they had an empathic connection to their riders and followed their wishes with eerie exactitude.
If she pushed him too hard, Jocelyn knew, his heart would burst. Zamir knew his limits, but he’d also pick up on how much she needed to beat that train into town.
She leaned further forward, so close she could smell the desert on him. All she could do now was reduce their drag and hope for the best.
As their speed increased, the hot wind fell heavily upon them. The Dragon’s Breath, folks called it, endlessly exhaled across the hardscrabble land. Jocelyn’s hat blocked the worst of it, but still it burned.
Proxima Centauri b—PCb, or PeaceBe to the locals, the peace of the grave always in mind—did not rotate as it swung around its sun in a tight orbit. Tidally locked but protected by a strong magnetic field, it held onto its atmosphere with a desperate grip. Its winds blew constantly from noon to midnight and back, past the ring of twilight around its middle where most of the native life thrived.
Jocelyn felt the blast-furnace heat through a haze of exhaustion. She’d ridden for over a week (the habit of thinking in weeks died hard), from a mining town partway to East Twilight, where she’d met her contact. She’d hated the whole trip and all the cloak-and-dagger precautions that had come with it. Hell, she hated leaving High Noon at the best of times. But staggering amounts of money were involved, amounts that could seemingly bend the laws of physics, the type of fortune that had moved human colonists 4.2 light-years to an alien solar system. This time, the money was funding the hostile takeover of one mining giant by another. And hostile here meant killers. Killers who even now were on a train heading to High Noon. Her contact had details on them and their target, but the deal had been that Jocelyn had to come in person, alone. She couldn’t just send her deputy.
So she had, quietly and unofficially—not by train, not by windflyer. Sand lizards didn’t send telemetry, and they were common enough not to attract attention. They were even fast.
But trains were faster, and the killers had boarded one sooner than her contact had expected. She’d raced that train home, her lead dwindling all the while.
Jocelyn looked back along the tracks. She couldn’t yet see the dust blown up by the train, but she felt its approach as an ache in her chest, a pounding at her temples. She couldn’t let it overtake her.
She turned back to the road and peered past the brim of her hat. The distant needle of High Noon’s central tower sliced up from the horizon. It rose like a mirage above the windswept plain and shimmered in the heat haze.
For all that it hugged its sun closely, PeaceBe was a dark world. Proxima Centauri glowed mainly in the infrared. Even the planet’s dayside looked twilit to humans without night-vision augs, but those were standard, as was a wardrobe full of UV-protective gear. Jocelyn could see every rock between here and the tower, every short, sharp shadow, all in shades of rust.
Soon the surrounding circle of solar panels came into view, a black line near the tower’s base that stretched across half the horizon. The tower itself rose from a huge power station. It broadcast that power along microwave beams that led to each of the four main Twilight cities. High Noon had grown up around the tower and beneath the solar panels. The panels’ shade couldn’t fully protect the streets from the heat, though they did make the town livable. Technically.
Perhaps longing for that shade, Zamir picked up even more speed, his legs now a blur. He was, after all, a creature of the twilight ring. He could survive planetary noon, yes, but he normally wouldn’t go within a thousand kilometers of it.
Some instinct made her look back again, and there it was: the train. A plume of dust rose in its wake, but even the train itself was visible now.
Damn. Jocelyn leaned low and held on as Zamir ran on.
She could hear the train by the time they reached the edge of the solar panels. Just under their lip sat the sticklike figure of Barney Ng atop a sand lizard of his own. He was already turning his mount back toward town, its outskirts still kilometers away—or his lizard, knowing he wanted it, had turned herself.
Jocelyn whooshed past him, not slowing down, as the solar panels abruptly cut off the huge red sun directly above. Running lights along the road caused her augmented eyes to switch to normal sight, and color returned. She rode through shafts of crimson light as they ran across periodic gaps in the solar panels above. The wind died down, and what remained was merely uncomfortably warm.
Barney caught up and rode beside her, his lizard pacing Zamir.
“Marshal,” he said across the gap.
“Barney.” She nodded to him. “Thanks for covering for me.”
“No problem. I don’t think anyone found out you were gone. Suspected, maybe, but unable to prove it.” Barney offered his lopsided grin, skin tight on his left cheek where a scar ran. “I assume they’re on the train.”
Jocelyn just nodded. The train was almost upon them now. She could tell by the way its headlights shone on the pillars holding up the solar panels.
“How many?”
“Three, according to my source.”
Barney went silent a moment. Then he gave her a sidelong look. “I’m glad they didn’t send just one or two. I wouldn’t want them to think we’d gone soft.”
High Noon was built on the first landing site on PCb, but no one stayed there who didn’t have to. Those with warrants for their arrest in the Twilights or who just had no better prospects made it their home, unless they preferred the chill of Midnight. They called it HN for short, though many said it stood for Hell No.
The impression that nickname gave was wholly accurate. High Noon had been assembled from whatever had been handy: shipping containers, discarded spaceship parts, even flare-baked mud bricks. A good chunk of it lay underground, off tunnels that ran under the streets, all the better to escape the heat and the frequent solar flares. Most locals lived a level or two beneath the surface. Those who passed through High Noon did so as quickly as possible.
The train station threw these distinctions into sharp relief. While High Noon’s starport was used mostly for freight, sometimes travelers disembarked there rather than the newer starport in Midnight. Well-dressed immigrants from the asteroid belt or the system’s diminutive Oort Cloud waited on the landing platform, resting in power chairs while they acclimated to the nearly 1.2 g gravity well. For them, High Noon was a brief stop on their way to a Twilight city.
Dust-covered locals filled the rest of the space, some in mining uniforms, others in threadbare outfits, often with minimal UV protection. Beggars panhandled for what they could. Thieves slipped in between the immigrants, hoping to slip out again with something for their trouble. Both groups melted into the crowd at the sight of the marshal and her deputy, who raced into the square astride sand lizards that slalomed around people and other obstacles. The lizards were used to that, though it spooked the out-of-towners considerably. The pair had slowed down when they’d hit the outskirts of town, but not by much.
When the train doors opened, Jocelyn and Barney sat there atop their lizards, smartguns already drawn. Jocelyn pulled two chips from an inside pocket of her duster. They were a gift from her informant. She handed one to Barney and slotted the other into her gun’s targeting system. “It’s got all three of them.”
Barney nodded and slotted his in as well. Now both guns could scent the blood of their adversaries.
The new arrivals were staring up at them now, some trying to hide it but most not. More looked at Barney than at Jocelyn, no doubt wondering how a man with his slight build could stand the gravity like he’d been born to it, which he obviously hadn’t. But Barney had acclimated long ago. He always moved efficiently and with purpose.
Jocelyn’s smartgun beeped. One of the killers was close. He appeared a car down a moment later and looked right at her: a cyborg, one of the paired operatives who went by Zero and One. He smiled under Proxima-colored artificial eyes and stepped aside for his counterpart. Both wore tailored suits with the Triple Sun Mining logo tastefully sewn onto the lapel. The left arm of the first ended in a hub bristling with multiple weapons where his hand should be. The second cyborg’s right arm mirrored it. So Zero and One respectively, Jocelyn recalled.
Neither made a hostile move as Jocelyn and Barney brought their sand lizards around and approached.
At length, the third member of the trio stepped out from between the cyborgs: Yana Morozova. She wore a slit-skirt suit and showed no obvious augs. She had a head full of subtle ones, though, according to Jocelyn’s source.
“Marshal,” she said, her voice as smooth as the ice plains by Midnight. “Deputy.”
“Welcome to High Noon,” Jocelyn said. “But I’m afraid you won’t be able to see the sights. This train turns around in twenty minutes.” Already, the new immigrants were nervously rolling past the group and boarding with evident relief. “You’re gonna be on it.”
Morozova smiled, showing perfect teeth. “I do not think so.”
Now Jocelyn did raise her gun. It chirped as it acquired the target. “I’m afraid I must insist.”
Morozova shook her head. A complex pattern of braids framed her face. “We have committed no crime, Marshal. There is no warrant for our arrest.”
“No, but I’m authorized to detain anyone who threatens the peace.”
Morozova’s smile vanished. She took a step forward. “My dear marshal, the peace is not what we threaten. I promise you, we shall not disturb it. Now if you will excuse me, my colleagues and I have business. It will be quiet business and, as I said, peaceful.” She began walking toward them, although the cyborgs didn’t move.
Yeah, like the peace of PeaceBe. “You have ten seconds to board that train, Ms. Morozova.”
The assassin raised a delicate eyebrow at the sound of her name, but otherwise didn’t react. Part of Jocelyn admired how calmly she stared down the barrel of a smartgun that had her number. The rest of her wondered what Morozova knew that she didn’t.
“I’m serious, Morozova.”
The woman paused and raised a manicured hand, showing a clearly expensive watch. “Shall I count for you? Ten. Nine. Eight…”
Jocelyn fired at two. To be fair, she picked a nonlethal target, but she squeezed the trigger just the same.
Only nothing happened.
She looked down at her smartgun in time to watch it power off. Judging by Barney’s sudden curse, his had done the same. She looked up again as Zero and One vaulted over them with cyber-assisted leaps. Morozova darted between the sand lizards at the same time, and all three dashed down the stairs that led to the nearest tunnel.
“Dammit!” Jocelyn hopped off Zamir and sprinted after them, but by the time she reached the tunnel, the trio had vanished.
“Would you really have shot her?” Barney sat at his desk, scrolling through a projection in the air above. Analyses of security footage competed for space with rumors and informant reports.
Jocelyn paced the length of the small marshal’s office, furious with herself. “Didn’t have a lot of choice, did I? But no, not fatally. Just…enough to stop their mission.” She paused and glared at nothing in particular, at everything in the room. “Damn that woman and her micro-EMP! How often you figure she can do that?”
“All day and still have power left to hack into HN’s city servers.” A map popped up amid the data displays. Blue lines snaked across it. “Okay, I’ve got probable routes and destinations. Normally, I’d transfer them to your watch…”
Jocelyn nodded, studying the holographic map while she could. “We can’t use any electronics, but we know the town. We’re going to have to split up. You track the killers. I’ll locate their targets. We’ll meet up every two hours, usual spot.”
She turned to the hologram floating above her own desk and studied for one last time the features of the middle-aged blonde woman and her twelve-year-old son: Alice and Rory Strauss-Agarwal, the widow and son of mining magnate Kumar Agarwal. He’d been the victim of a hostile takeover by Triple Sun. Alice and Rory had escaped with their lives and a little untraceable cash as stowaways on a cargo ship, according to Jocelyn’s source.
Rory had grown up in luxury on a corporate station, the son and heir of a trillionaire, but Alice had spent her formative years as upper middle class. Even more, she’d had a stint in her teens as a homeless runaway. Maybe she could hide them from the killers long enough for Jocelyn to find them and get them both out of town.
Maybe. But only if Jocelyn hurried. She went to her desk, opened a drawer, and pulled out a small oak box. Like its contents, it had come with her from Earth, had lain beside her in her sleeper coffin during the twenty-year trip. She withdrew the silver chain from under her shirt and used the small key to open the physical lock. She heard Barney come up behind her. He’d only seen the inside of the box once himself.
Jocelyn popped the lid and pulled out her Colt .45 revolver, a family heirloom. She inspected the gun. She kept it cleaned and ready, occasionally even took it out in the desert for target practice, but she always did that alone. The bullets that still sat boxed in the drawer had been assembled from locally-printed parts, but with a high degree of accuracy. She chambered six rounds, took all the extras she had, and holstered the gun. The smart holster molded itself to the unfamiliar weapon.
She looked at Barney. “Ready?”
Barney turned to the wall behind his own desk and took down the sheathed sword. A modern weapon, it had a monomolecular edge. “Ready.”
Jocelyn nodded. “Be careful out there.”
Since it was always high noon in High Noon, people were always about. They scuttled like sand crabs under hats and dusters, some on foot and some on sand lizard. They dodged each other and the robotic delivery sleds in a kind of chaotic ballet, never once looking up between solar panels toward the vast red disc of the sun, never mind the invisible stars beyond.
Jocelyn rode toward the center of town, to the unfashionable eastern side opposite the market. The Four Winds Bar and Grill squatted there at the base of the power station, like a weed growing next to a towering oak. It got its name from the air currents above the city: the rising column at high noon, which became the jet streams that fanned out across the world.
Everything switched to monochrome as she entered the bar and her night-vision augs kicked in. Jim liked to keep the place dim, like the twilit sands beyond the town lights.
“Marshal.” Jim’s deep bass cut across the conversation’s buzz, beneath his patrons’ vocal ranges. “The usual?”
Jocelyn shook her head, thinking wistfully of a double shot of single-malt. “I wish. Seen Simon today?”
Jim snorted. “See him every day. The usual table.”
Jocelyn touched the brim of her hat and gave him a nod by way of thanks. She crossed the room and took the stairs down to the lower bar. Underground, the decor switched from modern patchwork to Old West, with actual hand-painted murals of cowboys and buffalo along three of the walls. A second bar, tended by Jim’s daughter Anna Mae, ran the length of the fourth wall. The underground bar had a two-drink minimum, and strictly top shelf, but the marshal was given a pass—when she was there on business, that is.
Seeing her approach, the goons at Simon Le Blanc’s table stood and stepped aside. Jocelyn took one of the vacated seats.
Simon gazed at her impassively. His poker face was unparalleled. “You’re here about the woman and her son.”
Jocelyn nodded.
“Officially, no one’s seen them. Unofficially, no one’s seen them.” He raised a hand to cut off Jocelyn’s response. “You know I’d like to help. I always like to help…when it doesn’t affect business. This is more than a business concern, however. My life isn’t worth spit if I interfere, nor is anyone else’s in my organization. Triple Sun can do that. It can reach out of the sky and squash us all. And why not? It wouldn’t hurt their bottom line. They might even install their own people in our place. High Noon may be independent, but we’re independent by their leave.”
“So you’ve got nothing.”
“Nothing. And if you’ll take the advice of a violent man with a violent past, walk away from this. I’ve been a pro for decades now, and these people make me look like a Johnny-come-lately.”
Jocelyn knew better than to bang her head against a wall that would never give. She stood.
Simon looked up at her. “I’m serious, Marshal. Really. It’s good of you to want to save the kid and his mom, but I don’t want you to wind up like the last marshal.” He grinned, one of the few times she’d seen him do that in more than a decade of High Noon law enforcement. “I’d miss crossing swords with you.”
Jocelyn checked the wall clock on her way out. She had time to sweep the aboveground buildings in Squatters’ Alley before her first scheduled rendezvous with Barney.
Barney didn’t make the rendezvous. Jocelyn waited ten minutes, then swore up a storm. Quietly, so as not to attract too much attention. She flagged down a message drone. When it landed in her hand, she spoke to it in an undertone. “Find Deputy Marshal Barney Ng. When you spot him, come find me.” Drones could legally search the town’s surveillance cameras as they flew physically through the streets and tunnels. Normally, she’d just tell her watch to find him, but that wasn’t an option with Morozova’s EMP attack. She watched the drone buzz away, then walked to where she’d tied Zamir.
She had just climbed up into the saddle when the rising sequence of tones sounded a Flare Warning. It came from every street corner.
Zamir knew the drill. He raced a block and a half to the nearest sand-lizard-friendly ramp that led belowground. As Jocelyn rode, the High Noon Astronomer’s amplified voice detailed the size and probable duration of the flare.
She continued her search on the first level below the surface. Not the ideal place to be during a flare, but not too dangerous, if it wasn’t a big one. Crucially, it was the less-expensive area, which made it a better place for someone to go to ground.
Jocelyn spent the next few hours in growing frustration. No one had seen the pair. No one had seen the killers. Unlikely, of course, in a town the size of High Noon, but Simon must have had word spread around. She didn’t think he was actively aiding the killers, but he was blocking her search at every turn. Jocelyn resolved to bust him for something as soon as all this was over.
The drone found her hours later. She was standing beside Zamir, returning her canteen to his saddlebags while he drank from a public trough. It wasn’t the drone she’d sent. This one was a courier for the drone company itself. It hovered by her head and informed her that the marshal’s office would be billed for the destruction of the first drone.
“Details,” she demanded, and it gave her an intersection on the second level down. There the drone had apparently been blown apart.
Zamir started moving even as she settled back into the saddle.
Benny the Fish, one of Simon’s senior henchmen, waited for her at the intersection. He looked at her with the sad round eyes that had earned him his nickname. “For what it’s worth, Marshal, we’re sorry.”
A crowd had gathered outside the Hôtel du Monde. Jocelyn pushed her way through it and past the owner, who was rapidly explaining the situation in an ever-rising pitch.
When she reached the kitchen, the first thing she noticed was the blood. The walls and even the ceiling had been splattered with it. The second thing she noticed was the pair of cybernetic weapons hubs lying on the floor, sliced cleanly off their hosts’ arms. At the back of the kitchen, near the open door to the alley tunnel beyond, she found out the full extent of the battle.
To his credit, Barney had sliced Zero and One to pieces, but they in turn had blasted several large holes in his chest. He lay staring up at the knives attached to a magnetic rack above the counter. The light reflected off the blades shone in his eyes. His own blade remained in his grip, even in death.
With reverence, Jocelyn stepped around him to the back alley and found what was left of Alice Strauss-Agarwal. The former trillionaire wore the hotel’s kitchen staff uniform. A ragged hole lay in the center of her chest, right where her heart had been. Blood pooled around her. It had already started to congeal about her limbs and her splayed-out blonde hair.
Of the kid there was no sign. Nor of Yana Morozova.
Benny the Fish had followed her as far as the kitchen threshold. There he stood, head bowed in respect, though for some or all of the dead she couldn’t tell.
Jocelyn made her way back to him. He stepped aside to let her pass, but she shoved him against the wall. He looked up, met her eyes with his fishlike orbs, which widened even more with what he saw there.
“Where’s the boy?” she growled through gritted teeth. “What about the Russian?”
Benny gulped. “The boy wasn’t here. Neither was Morozova.” It didn’t surprise Jocelyn that Simon’s man knew the assassin’s name. “She got a job here under an assumed name, but where they were staying…” He shrugged. “Simon doesn’t know.”
“If I find out you’re holding out on me, Triple Sun will be the least of your concerns.”
Benny gulped again. He looked like a guppy. “Understood, Marshal.”
“Anything else?” Her whisper filled the silence in that empty room. Somewhere behind her, a pot boiled over, causing the burner to sizzle.
“We think they were up on the surface, but not in any of the usual places. They broke in somewhere. The kid…he’s good with technology.”
All at once, the rage left Jocelyn. She felt empty, like a drained shot glass.
She let Benny go. He slid out from between her and the wall and stepped back into the restaurant section, which was crowded with rubberneckers kept at bay by haggard-looking hotel staff.
Jocelyn grabbed a pair of linen towels and covered Barney and Alice, making sure to close Barney’s eyes as she did so. She left the cyborgs where they lay.
That done, she glanced back through the kitchen door. Benny was nowhere to be seen. The manager was building up the courage to come talk to her.
“Place a call to the coroner,” she told him. Then she slipped out the back to the alley beyond.
A town the size of High Noon held a fair number of law enforcement officers, but nearly all of them were private: corporate security officers for the various mining giants in the system. The starport and the power station both had a few of their own as well.
Still, someone needed to handle the cases that fell outside the sundry corporate jurisdictions. It didn’t take a large staff, really. Jocelyn and Barney had been able to handle it all. But now Jocelyn had no one she could call for backup, no one who’d support her next move. At least Triple Sun’s security wouldn’t help Morozova. They needed plausible deniability. Moreover, their rivals wouldn’t dare interfere with a hit of this magnitude. Jocelyn was on her own.
She used the tunnel route to reach the marshal’s office, which had an entrance off a main thoroughfare on the first level underground. There she checked the astronomer’s report. The flare was dying down but still dangerous. Jocelyn also scanned the system for any reports of break-ins.
She found one immediately. It had already hit the local news: the power station’s ground-floor and underground doors had been methodically sealed, all of them, within the last hour. A molecular seal. It was going to take at least another hour to cut through any of them, according to PCb Power’s press liaison. Jocelyn’s incoming message queue was blinking red with all the reports. If she’d had her watch, she’d have known about it fifty-three minutes earlier.
Rory Strauss-Agarwal probably couldn’t have done that trick. He and his mother had fled too quickly to bring along such specialized mining equipment. But Morozova…if she’d discovered Rory’s location and wanted to seal him in, that’s exactly what she’d use.
However, she also might use it to throw the town marshal off the track, but a quick search didn’t show any other reports. So either she’d kept secret her real location, or she was even now somewhere inside the power station. With Rory.
Jocelyn grabbed her mesh UV mask and the light, UV-resistant barding that would provide extra coverage for Zamir, just in case she had to go up on the surface. Then she rode out to the first-level entrance to the power station, where a crew was trying to cut through the sealed door.
Pablo Hernandez, head of power station security, stood frowning at the technician who directed the robotic cutter along the edge of the door. There wasn’t even a seam, just a shiny area of melted metal where the doorframe had been.
“How long?” she asked Pablo without preamble. She hadn’t bothered to dismount.
“At least half an hour, she tells me.” He indicated the technician with a nod of his head. “I can’t reach anyone in the building. Flare interference, maybe.” But even he didn’t sound convinced. Point-to-point underground comms should still work, with only a wall between him and the recipient—if the recipient were still capable of answering.
“Is there any other way into the building?”
Pablo frowned at her now. “No. The bastard—whoever they are—sealed every damn door. Emergency exits too.”
Jocelyn wracked her brain for what she knew about the power plant. She hadn’t been in there in years. “What about the observation deck?”
Pablo shook his head. “Just windows. There’s a small emergency exit, but not even a fire escape leading up to it. Just an extendable ladder. It’s sealed from the outside. The ladder retracts. No one could scale that slope, even if there weren’t a flare.”
“Thanks,” Jocelyn said. “I don’t have my watch, so I’ll be out of contact. The suspect can generate a micro-EMP field.” Pablo swore at this new information. “Send me a drone when you manage to get in.”
Pablo nodded grimly and returned his attention to the technician, who’d cut through about three more centimeters while they’d been talking.
Zamir already knew where Jocelyn wanted to go. He slipped through the crowd until they reached the nearest ramp up.
A ladder ran up each solar panel’s support column for maintenance purposes, but for her plan to work, Jocelyn needed to reach one of the periodic gaps large enough for a sand lizard to scramble through. That meant riding on the trackside road for several hundred meters, then turning left onto a narrow access road.
The running lights faded behind them as they shot along the access road, but Jocelyn’s night vision didn’t kick in. Because of the flare, sunlight poured through the gaps, much brighter than usual. A crimson glow lay upon everything in sight—bright, but so very different from her memories of Earth.
At last she saw the gap ahead. Zamir sped up automatically and vaulted them into the air, his eight legs more than a match for PeaceBe’s gravity. They landed on top of a solar panel with a thud so hard Jocelyn’s jaw clenched with the impact. Zamir sprinted for the tower.
Even hundreds of meters away it loomed over them, a cone that gradually tapered till it reached a level ringed by parabolic dishes. Those sent the powerful and instantly deadly microwaves toward each Twilight city. A dozen meters above them, a row of windows marked the observation deck. Zamir crunched some of the tiny cleaning bots as he S-curved forward across the solar panels.
Jocelyn kept her gaze up, toward the row of windows. A shadow moved across several of them. Whether hunter, prey, or simply one of the workers trapped in the building, she had no idea.
How had the kid and his mother stayed hidden there so long? Jocelyn wondered. The plant had excellent surveillance security. It had to. Yet the pair had lived there, hidden somewhere, maybe since they’d made planetfall, while Alice had snuck out to work one of the few jobs that still paid in cash and allowed her to take home food.
Morozova had broken through the security as well, tracking the son. Both had the skills and equipment needed to pull that off. Dammit, she thought. I hate big money.
The tower grew until it just became a wall, curving out of sight in either direction. Soon they reached the last of the solar panels. Jocelyn leaned all the way forward in the saddle and held onto Zamir’s neck, her gloves gripping the UV-resistant barding. Zamir leapt across the meter-wide gap and onto the side of the tower. Jocelyn stayed in her saddle with the impact and the start of the climb. In the wild, sand lizards could climb near-vertical cliffs, but the metal-and-ceramic walls of the tower offered little purchase. The climb was slow and involved this or that pair of legs losing a grip, claws scraping against the surface until they found a fresh toehold.
He didn’t fall, though, and they made progress. As they drew closer to the ring of power dishes and steered between two of them, Jocelyn got a sense of how huge they were. Each one fired a beam hundreds of kilometers to a relay station on the way to its ultimate destination in a city.
Jocelyn focused on the effort of staying in the saddle until a rifle report broke her reverie. She looked up in time to see bits of glass fly away from one of the windows as a second and a third shot rang out. Then came a crash and a rain of glass shards falling seemingly in slow motion. Jocelyn ducked her head, and they fell on the top of her hat and shoulders. She leaned to the side, not trusting empathy alone to tell Zamir he had to get off that approach, had to hide below one of the dishes.
They’d only gone a meter or two before the first bullet struck Zamir. Somewhere above, having shot and kicked out the window, Morozova leaned out and fired a rifle straight down at them.
The lizard took the blow silently, stoically, and kept climbing. They were in the shadow of a dish now, its mast giving them partial cover, but it wasn’t enough. Another bullet struck Zamir, this time in his neck. A spray of blood—red even in a world of red—splashed across Jocelyn, drenching her hat and one of her duster’s sleeves.
She willed him to turn back, to climb back down. They’d find another way in. Somehow.
Zamir seemed to reach a decision on his own, however. He sprinted up the tower again, past the mast and up, up toward the broken window.
“No!” Jocelyn shouted, but Zamir ignored her. In fact, he drowned her out.
Sand lizards rarely vocalized. In mating season, the females would bellow across the wastelands. The males would shout at one another, trying to frighten rivals answering the same call. A mother would coo to her silent children to get them to go to sleep.
They only vocalized on one other occasion, and this was it. Zamir began to sing. There was no other way to think of it—rising and falling in pitch, mournful in affect, haunting in its alien beauty.
A death dirge.
Far below, answering calls came from other sand lizards. Those few on the aboveground streets and those within earshot in the tunnels below: a chorus, an answer, a communal acknowledgment of loss.
“No…” Jocelyn choked out the sound, even as more blood poured over her, even as Zamir’s pace began to slacken. He was almost there now, almost level with the broken window. Now Jocelyn could see Morozova, an expression of cool assessment as she took aim at the shifting shape below her, directly at Jocelyn now.
Jocelyn fired first.
She hadn’t even realized she’d drawn her Colt, narrowed her gaze, taken aim. Her arm flew back with the recoil, but her left hand held a fistful of Zamir’s barding. She stayed in the saddle.
Morozova cursed and vanished from the window. Zamir’s song began to falter as he drew alongside the shattered window and held on.
Zamir’s golden eyes were closing. Still holding the Colt, Jocelyn hugged him around his neck, heedless of the blood continuing to drench her, her cheek against blood-slick barding. Through the armor, she could feel the warmth still in him. He smelled of deserts and journeys and long twilit wanderings watched by a sun three times as big in the sky as Earth’s.
He shivered, then shook. She couldn’t stay, she knew. She had to go, had to save the child. One last squeeze and she let go and reached to the side. He angled his body to make it easier for her. She grabbed the bottom sill, her gloves protecting her from the knives of glass still attached, and swung herself into the room.
The observation deck filled the whole of the floor. A trail of blood led from the window past the central elevator shaft to an emergency stairwell near the far wall. There was no one else there.
She caught a movement in the corner of her eye and turned to see Zamir leaning away from the wall, his front legs already losing their purchase. His eyes snapped open and locked onto hers.
Do good. He could have spoken it out loud, so clearly did she understand it.
Then he was gone: falling, falling to the panels far below.
Jocelyn sprinted across the floor. The crash came from outside just as she wrenched open the stairwell door.
She ducked and rolled onto the landing, but no shots came. A maintenance ladder led up, while a metal stairwell led down. The stairs ended six meters down at a firewall and a door to the lower levels. That, she saw, had been sealed the same way as the outside doors.
So Jocelyn climbed the ladder, up through a maintenance hatch to a level full of machinery. It hummed and buzzed all around her. On instinct, she rolled again as soon as she reached the level.
A shot rang out and pinged against the wall behind her. Crouching, still holding her Colt, Jocelyn ran along a narrow catwalk. Another shot rang out. This time, she could tell it came somewhere from her right, and she dove behind cover. All around her came the noise of the machines and their metallic smell.
Morozova’s smooth voice cut through the buzz. “Marshal Stark, let’s be reasonable about this. I don’t want to have to kill you. It creates paperwork.”
Jocelyn gritted her teeth but stayed silent as she looked everywhere for the source of that sound. With the machines confusing her senses, it was impossible to tell.
“Yes, we killed your deputy and your animal companion,” Morozova said, “but your side killed my cyborgs. They’re hard to replace. They require special parts, special training. So, you see, we are equally inconvenienced, equally bereft. It can stop here.”
Jocelyn hated making a sound, hated giving away her position, but if there were a chance…“You killed the mother.” Did she hear a breath from somewhere above? She searched the machines above her, revolver ready, but saw nothing. “The kid’s no threat to you. Withdraw. Leave. Go back to your station.”
“No. That is nonnegotiable.” The voice came from behind, and Jocelyn spun around. Morozova stood there, pointing a long, sinister pistol at her. “Goodbye, Marshal.”
A shadow fell upon the assassin. Morozova fired, but the shot went wide. It ricocheted off a wall into some equipment.
Jocelyn was on her feet, running toward Morozova. The boy! Rory had leapt onto his mother’s killer and hung on, one arm around her neck, punching wildly with the other. Not weak blows, either, for all that he was still twelve. Rory screamed wordlessly, eyes squeezed shut.
With a smooth motion like water flowing over rocks, Morozova threw him off her and onto the catwalk. She aimed and fired three rounds.
These too went wide as Jocelyn collided with her and they tumbled back onto the deck. They both reached for the other’s gun, but Morozova managed to roll them over and wind up on top. She smashed Jocelyn’s right hand onto the catwalk, hard, and the Colt flew out of her grip. Jocelyn watched it slide along the catwalk and tumble off the side, heard it clatter its way down.
But Jocelyn had found Morozova’s right hand too. She grabbed the wrist and twisted hard.
Morozova yelped, yet she held onto her gun. With her free hand she grabbed at Jocelyn’s left, only to slide off because of Zamir’s blood. She head-butted Jocelyn, and Jocelyn’s skull slammed onto the catwalk, hard enough for her to see stars.
A wave of nausea hit. Jocelyn lost her grip on Morozova’s right hand. Morozova sat up and punched her in the nose once, twice. A loud crack and spike of pain accompanied the first blow. Jocelyn was sure her nose was broken.
On the catwalk behind them, she heard Rory running away, scrambling down the ladder into the stairwell. Good, she thought. He’s showing some sense.
Morozova punched Jocelyn once more as she struggled up, then kicked her in the ribs and ran after the boy. She’d reached the ladder and started down it by the time Jocelyn managed to stand.
With a casual motion, Morozova raised her gun, aimed at Jocelyn, and fired.
The impact knocked Jocelyn onto her butt. Her left shoulder exploded in pain. A wave of vertigo struck her. With Zamir’s blood all over her, she couldn’t tell how bad she was bleeding.
As she sat there, the pain in her nose and shoulder moved from sharp to throbbing. Annoyingly, the waves of pain weren’t in sync.
She felt Zamir’s gaze upon her again. Do good.
Jocelyn staggered to her feet. She walked back to the ladder, blood still flowing out of her nose and shoulder. She didn’t know if she would pass out, or when, but she grabbed the side of the ladder and began her descent one-handed. She was feeling pins and needles now all along her left arm.
She stepped onto the landing without any memory of the climb and burst through the door to the observation deck. She staggered between the benches and seats that filled the middle of the room. She didn’t see Rory or Morozova anywhere.
Another wave of nausea hit, and she leaned against a chair. That’s when she saw Rory’s shadow. He’d hidden under a row of chairs. She didn’t let her gaze dwell on him, worried she’d give him away.
“Come on, boy!” Morozova called out from somewhere off to her right. “You can’t hide forever. You think the marshal will help you? She’s useless. She lost her gun. Hell, she’s bleeding out. She just doesn’t know she’s already dead.”
Whether or not that was just an attempt to demoralize him, Jocelyn resented it. She frowned and let go of the chair she’d been leaning on, determined to stand as long as she could.
Morozova came into view at the perimeter of the room. She had a clean shot at Jocelyn, but she didn’t take it, whether from disdain or simple lack of concern, Jocelyn couldn’t tell. The assassin was scanning the chairs and benches, looking for a telltale shape, a shadow. It wouldn’t be long before she spotted the boy.
Maybe I am already dead, but I can still do good.
Jocelyn didn’t know where she got the energy, but she ran, boots pounding as she pelted across the tastefully corporate carpet.
Morozova got one more round off before Jocelyn slammed into her. She had no idea if she’d been hit. The pair went tumbling right where Jocelyn had wanted, to the window that Morozova had shot and kicked out.
For a moment, they both hung suspended. Morozova’s cool gaze was replaced by wide-eyed surprise. As she lost the fight with momentum and gravity, she reached out, grabbed Jocelyn’s arm, and began to pull her over the edge.
Jocelyn didn’t have the strength to resist. Blackness appeared at the edges of her vision. Her panoramic view of PeaceBe’s noon plains and the distant hills beyond narrowed.
She hardly noticed as another body slammed into her from the side, barely felt Morozova lose her grip on Jocelyn’s blood-soaked duster.
When Jocelyn struck the floor, she didn’t feel it at all.
Rory was standing over her when she woke. Beside him stood a suit and a woman in a maroon jumpsuit. The latter sported a caduceus logo stitched above the stylized “A” of Agarwal Mining and Transport.
The woman fussed over some tubes snaking into Jocelyn, then nodded to the man in the suit.
Rory beamed at Jocelyn. “I’m glad you made it,” he said. “I told them to do everything they could for you.” He glanced up at the woman. She nodded at him, and they both left the room.
The suit pulled up a chair and sat down. “Don’t worry, Ms. Stark. You’re going to be fine. The doctor tells me you’ll make a complete recovery.”
Jocelyn nodded. She wanted to ask where she was. The gravity felt Earth normal, not like PeaceBe’s, but something he’d said bothered her more. “Marshal Stark, if you don’t mind.”
The man pursed his lips. “Well, no. Not currently. We finally skirted the Triple Sun blockade and made the rendezvous with Master Strauss-Agarwal. If we hadn’t been delayed, you’d never have had to be involved. I’m sorry about your deputy and about having to move you off-world. The facilities in High Noon…well, let’s just say you probably wouldn’t have made it.”
“Okay, we’re in space, in spin gravity—or is it one-gee acceleration?”
The man nodded. “The latter.”
Jocelyn swallowed. “I’m still marshal, though. I know it might take a while for me to get back, but you can let me off at a station and—”
“I’m afraid it’s not that simple, Ms. Stark. You see, we’re in a lot of danger in the Proxima system. Our rival’s takeover attempt was extremely successful, for now. We need to regroup.”
Jocelyn shifted, instantly regretted it as pain shot through her shoulder. She settled again. “Okay, but can’t you, you know, drop me off? Hell, once I’m up and about, I could even take an escape pod, if I can borrow one.”
The man shook his head. “We’re out of range.”
“But surely a new ship like this has all the latest—”
“Oh, we have the best escape pods money can buy, but we’re still out of range. You see, to regroup, we’re going to need to go where the rest of the company holdings are.”
“But I thought you said the takeover was pretty complete.”
“In the Proxima Centauri system, yes.”
Jocelyn felt as if she’d been struck in the chest. “You mean…Earth?”
The man paused, exhaled. “Well, the Sol system, anyway—at least as far as the Oort Cloud, though probably all the way to Pluto. We’re still working out the details.”
Jocelyn tried to sit up, more carefully this time, but she was simply too weak. She fell back again, defeated.
“I’m sorry,” the suit said. “We can offer you a job in corporate security. It’s the least we can do for saving the boy’s life.” He offered her an inoffensive corporate smile, then stood. “Think about it. It’ll be a couple of days before you’re well enough to enter a hibernation pod.”
With that, he walked out of her range of vision. A door slid open and shut.
Jocelyn lay there and stared at the clean white ceiling. She thought of all the reasons she’d left Earth, all the reasons she’d never gone corporate. She didn’t think she’d take that job, might even take the next flight back to PeaceBe.
She closed her eyes and saw Barney’s eyes staring at nothing, Zamir’s eyes meeting her own.
A determination grew inside her until it became a certainty. First thing I’ll do when I get back to High Noon is find my Colt. The badge might take longer to get again, she knew, but she wanted that back too.
And she would have it.