He pulled himself out of the backseat, hand instinctively searching for the briefcase. It was there. Right next to him. He holstered his blaster. Retrieved the other out of the backseat and stood over the wreck, letting his heart settle back to normal.
Waria was dead, that was for sure. The snake man’s eyes had rolled to white, and his gruesomely shot through body looked even more grotesque lying in the passenger seat covered in shattered glass. The swolly was either dead, or it looked that way. He’d been cut to shreds and was bleeding from dozens of different places.
Shoot him, some procedural part of Bowie’s mind reminded him. But Bowie didn’t and instead stumbled off up the ramp. Time was wasting, and that dropship was the only way into the party.
And he had to be at the party.
09
Hijacking. There are a lot of ways to do it. That’s for sure. It’s been going on for as long as mankind has been flying starships. It didn’t matter that this was a dropship, designed for use between larger starships and ground operations. Not just reserved for combat. They were the local freight haulers and taxi services on most planets that used dropships.
Which was exactly what this one was doing. It was departing to pick up some girls who’d be attending the party for purposes bacchanal. That was how the rich and powerful were in the Republic. They were the first ones to advocate equal treatment for all, and respect for sexuality and gender, a thing most alien cultures were still in the dark ages on compared to the rest of humanity. But behind closed doors, or closed compounds as it were, they were the first to treat the fairer sex like commercial items. They didn’t want to take the time to get what they wanted. They’d rather just pay for it.
Bowie had forced an access door three levels above eight. The access door followed a small narrow hallway out into the central lift well that led to the rooftop hangar. A maintenance bot looked up quizzically from a spot weld it was performing on some internal piping and told him he wasn’t authorized to be in that section.
“I’m leaving,” he told the insectile bot as it hunched over its work.
“You’re going the wrong way,” it noted as Bowie reached the central well. The bat-winged dropship had just maneuvered out of her berth and was adding lift to the repulsors as it climbed up the docking well. Its bulk filled the circumference and the pilot gave it a slow rotation, probably intent on picking up a course heading as soon as they were clear of the garage.
“This is my ride,” said Bowie over his shoulder and stepped out into the void to meet the climbing ship.
There was a sickening moment of falling at something that was rising to meet you, which made it seem like he was falling faster than he really was. But he landed with both feet cushioning, collapsed and rolled across the wide chroma-steel surface of the bat wing.
His grip on the briefcase was the one constant in a suddenly shifting galaxy where if he rolled too far, he was likely to go off the trailing edge of the wing and down about eleven levels to pancake at ground level.
He’d learned a long time ago to let go of fear. The worst thing that could happen, he told himself, was that he’d be dead. And then all his problems would be someone else’s. That lesson had come to him during demolition school back when he’d been a young LTJG.
He came to a stop just before the flaps along the surface of the dropship’s wing. Which was good. Connecting with the flaps would have more than alerted the pilot that something was wrong with his ship. As it was, the pilot, at best, heard a thump. A big one, and felt a tug on the portside stabilizer.
Of course, he’d tell the crew chief to pop the hatch and make sure someone hadn’t dropped some equipment from a high level on them. The danger being that even a dropped dynaspanner could jam the flaps during flight. Which could end things quickly once they tried to make a turn at altitude under thrust.
Bowie was up and striding toward the center of the ship as it climbed up through the well, engines howling and repulsors throbbing. The dorsal hatch would be right along the top of the fuselage. And sure enough someone, most likely the crew chief, was popping it for visual inspection on whatever the pilot had heard or felt. It shot open pneumatically and a man popped his head up with a flash. A second later he got the toe of Bowie’s dress shoe right in his nose. Which sprayed blood as the man dropped down into the hatch.
He was lights out when Bowie sealed the hatch and climbed down. The crewman was wearing some type of corporate logo–marked overalls that were way too small for Bowie’s frame. He could hear the pilot over the internal comm asking what was going on back there.
Bowie yanked open the cargo door and was confronted by the rising tiers of dropship berths. Some empty, others occupied by any one of a bizarre collection of different ships all serving some arcane industrial purpose.
He was about to shove the unconscious crew chief out over the roof once they cleared it, hopefully not killing the guy, when the pilot came aft and poked his head through the hatch from the flight deck. It was a large, shaven head. The head belonging to a man of above average build, height, and rage.
He took one burning look at the unconscious chief lying on the deck, and the stranger with the briefcase,
