“Her name is Wembla,” Kiris said, as she explained her findings to Bers and Herdis. “And I am as certain as I can be that she isn’t directly tied up in the underworld, but she certainly is adjacent to it, what with her job and location. According to her, the bodies recovered from that fire belonged to a baseline woman and a Kapadian man. So as far as we know, the one we are looking for is still alive.”
The knowledge was a bit of a relief to Gaylen, which competed with a guilty disappointment that he could no longer consider just walking away in good conscience. It was a complicated feeling.
“Our new friends just entered a small clinic,” Ayna said into their comm channel.
“Thanks, Ayna,” Gaylen replied.
“That business, if we want to call it that,” Kiris went on, “Was recent, and barely seemed to do any actual business. There was a bit of a rumour mill around it, in the days before the fire. Everyone knows that the shipping businesses and freelancers have shady offworld ties. It’s one of those things that people just accept.”
“Hardly unique to this place,” Gaylen said.
“No. But the general impression Wembla got,” Kiris went on, “and I stress that she stressed that this was an impression, is that things are changing in the local underworld. Coming together somehow. Less internal chaos and random crime, and more organised.”
“As would happen, if distant power brokers want to set up a network,” Gaylen said.
Bers let out a pained grunt. Gaylen turned around to find a stranger pulling a large needle out of the Fringer’s neck. There was another one, with another needle, and this one came at Gaylen. His reflexes went off, and the needle didn’t get through his fighting glove as he batted the little tool aside.
Bers swung at his assailant, but the stranger dodged the worst of it, and the Fringer didn’t follow up. His face was a stiff sneer and his body seized up, as something nasty hit his system fast and hard. Gaylen heard a near-silent engine, a whoosh of wind and a hum of tires as a small transport vehicle with tinted windows came to a quick stop in their path, cutting them off and blocking the scene from general view.
Kiris swung her fighting-cane at the one who had jabbed Bers, but the man reacted like a trained warrior, blocked the weapon, caught it, then caught her arm. Bers fell down.
A door opened at their back, but Gaylen had to react to the stunner his opponent had drawn with his other hand. He was able to catch the man’s wrist and keep the prongs aimed away from himself, but he still had that needle, at the end of a small handle. He heard two more enemies step out, and Herdis engaged them.
Herdis found herself forced around, one arm wrapped around her in a tight grip, as the other one went for a jab with the needle.
Gaylen caught a needle sting with his glove again, and risked a punch into the man’s jaw. Some sound, some instinct, warned him, and he sent a kick backwards, even as he held onto the man’s gun-arm. He hit an incoming foe in the thigh, and Gaylen heard Herdis struggle and gasp in a hard fight.
These men didn’t wear the green jackets of those petty thugs. They all dressed differently, but practically, in plain colours. And they moved and fought like professionals.
The man Gaylen had kicked answered with a kick of his own. It went high, and landed on the shoulder blade. Gaylen’s vest cushioned the impact to a slight degree, and he sent another blow into the man he was grappling with, then forced the stunner into a new direction.
The other parts of this fight passed in front of his eyes for an instant, as he turned towards the kicker. Kiris was down, sharing Bers’s symptoms, and Herdis had her baton out, in a losing battle against a man with a stick of his own.
Gaylen forced the man’s finger to squeeze the trigger, and the stunner sent a blast of electricity at the kicker. The man wasn’t quicker than lightning, but he proved quicker than a trigger-pull. The blast went past him, and into the wide-open sliding door on the side of the car.
There was a gasp on the ground. Somehow, possibly just through sheer obstinacy, Bers managed to move his hand. He caught the ankle of the one who had attacked Kiris, in a rubbery grip that nonetheless tripped the man.
The kicker sent out another high kick, the sort only used by morons or people who really knew what they were doing. A boot clipped Gaylen on the head, and threw him to the ground.
The ground was where people had fun with you in the Deep Streets; stomping you into a mess, or just killing you, depending on their mood. So landing the right way had been a priority skill to learn.
Gaylen got his hand around Kiris’s dropped cane, and was able to lift it before the kicker closed the distance. The man darted back away from the first swing, and the second one went into Kiris’s assailant as he started rising. The man he’d been grappling with was getting his bearings, so Gaylen put a stop to that with a blow. The man fell, and his head smacked into the ground.
The kicker got to Gaylen before he recovered for another swing, and just like that he was in another grapple. The man kept him from using the cane, so Gaylen risked taking one hand off it and going for his knife. It came out, the blade sprang free, and the man caught it with his own fighting glove.
They both released the cane, and now fought for control of a much deadlier weapon. They both knew the moves and the counters, and the counters to the counters. There were only so many ways the human body could be twisted and thrown around. After a few moments it became a simple contest of raw strength, where they stalemated each other.
The man tried to snag his ankle, and succeeded just enough to be able to swing Gaylen around. His back smacked into the side of the car, and still neither of them had control of the knife.
Gaylen strained with everything he had, and pushed the bastard back. He rained several quick blows down on the man’s right arm, and eventually the shock of it all opened his hand, and the knife hit the ground.
The man’s hair was too short to grab, so Gaylen went for his shirt collar instead. He got a grip and pulled down as he brought his knee up. The man defended himself. Gaylen wasn’t sure how much damage the impact actually did, but did it again, and again, and then the man caught his leg.
The man tried to trip him up, but Gaylen instead caught his head, and flung both of them to the side. He controlled the fall, and the man landed on his back with Gaylen on top. It only lasted a moment; a leg came up between them and pushed.
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Gaylen was thrown back, but his grasping at the man came with a prize: A belt or strap of some kind came loose from around the torso. It was sturdy, and heavy with equipment of some kind.
Herdis was now on the ground, trying to swing her baton at the man above her, while he was seeking an opening. Gaylen swung the belt with both hands, into the back of his head. It wasn’t a perfect weapon, but a second swing, straight into his face, sent him backwards into the car.
He wasn’t finished. None of them were; the kicker was already up, and the other two were recovering. Herdis reached into the little medical bag at her hip, and Gaylen swung the belt wildly, every which way, buying what seconds he could.
Herdis jabbed an injector into Bers’s neck, then got up with Gaylen’s knife in her hand.
One man went for the dropped stunner, while his buddy covered for him by advancing on Gaylen. Gaylen went on the attack, while Herdis menaced the other two. He swung and swung, but the belt had its flaws as a weapon, and the man blocked the hits with his arms and tried for low kicks. At Gaylen’s back, Bers rumbled, a low and angry sound of effort, as the drugs in his system duelled with a brutal cocktail of stimulants.
That one man now had the stunner, and went around his comrade for a clear shot. Gaylen moved to stay of the firing line, then wagered it all on a frontal attack. He slammed into the man he was duelling, and smashed him into the other one. Both fell, and Gaylen stomped on the stunner-hand. The other man sent his leg out in a kick, and impacted on Gaylen’s shin with a smack.
The leg lost strength from the shock, and he staggered back.
Bers rose. Face hard and sneering, he rammed into the men overpowering Herdis. It worked, but to a far lesser extent than the man was normally capable of. He swayed on his feet and nearly fell, then as he reached for one of the men the target stabbed back with a knife.
A fifth man, as unremarkable as the others, was coming around the front side of the car. The driver was coming to aid his comrades.
“Let’s go!” Gaylen shouted.
He threw a couple of more belt-swings, then knelt down and grabbed Kiris. With the strength of do-or-die necessity, he threw the woman over his shoulder.
“Let’s go!” he shouted again.
Herdis and Bers had bought themselves a moment of breathing space with swings and stabs, but that was all it was. The woman pulled on the big Fringer’s arm, and to Gaylen’s relief he saw sense.
They ran. Kiris’s dead weight was slippery, pinned between his arm and his shoulder, and threw his balance off, a situation not helped by his dizziness. But they ran. He didn’t look back, but he heard Herdis and Bers close on his heels, and the group of men close on theirs.
There was still almost no one around, least of all in the direction he’d chosen as the most immediate route away from the fight. But there was a door; an entrance into another low-grade set of apartments. He didn’t know how long their pursuers would risk dragging out a public fight, but there was a good chance he’d run out of strength before that. So he gambled once again, and went for the door.
It wasn’t automatic, and so Kiris’s butt swung it open. There was no real lobby; just a corridor with a handful of doors with apartment numbers, and a couple of side-corridors. Herdis and Bers entered after him, just as he selected the corridor on the left. It led to another fork, and he cut to the right, towards a door on the other side of the building.
Kiris’s butt didn’t suffice to open this one, and so he took one arm off the woman he loved and tried the handle. Nothing happened, save that a small image of a key blinked red on the door.
“Shit.”
Herdis and Bers caught up, and the Fringer gave the door a kick. But his great strength was a fraction of what it should be, and his balance visibly wavered. He slumped up against a wall, seemingly fighting just to stay upright.
Herdis went into her bag again, and brought out another injector. Or perhaps it was the same one. Either way, she hissed at Gaylen to hold still for a moment, and gave Kiris a shot.
“Her breaker…” Herdis gasped, as Kiris started mumbling in a decidedly pained fashion. “We could try to…”
But their enemies were coming; Gaylen heard the door on the other side slam open, and echoing footsteps filled the hallways. They were going to have another fight on their hands. Herdis had one eye swollen shut, and was bleeding from her head. Bers was bleeding from his hand and could barely stand, and Kiris was a while off from even being able to make the attempt. And Gaylen…
He realised that he still had the belt clutched in his left hand. He took a closer look at the little holders on it, and rested some of Kiris’s weight against the wall for a moment as he dipped two fingers into one.
“Oh, I know these,” he said. “Take her.”
He slid Kiris to Herdis, who took the Chanei around the torso. Gaylen attached one of the little plastic objects against the door’s lock, then found a button on the belt.
“Turn around!” he told the others as he followed his own advice. Then he pressed the button.
The lock-charge went off, and destroyed a fist-sized chunk of the door and the frame. The door opened. He took Kiris again, and they went back on the run.
The street on the other side looked a fair bit better than the previous one. For one, it had an open shopping centre on the ground floor. Shopping meant people, and people meant witnesses, and so Gaylen led his group straight there.
They went through an automatic door, and a lobby that thankfully didn’t have any kind of security, with their inconvenient questions. Beyond it was a main thoroughfare, lined with small outlets on either side, and few additional ones down the middle. They got some looks from everyday people, but Gaylen had always found that staring right back into people’s eyes was a good way to get rid of folks with peaceful lives.
Gaylen stopped at the first relatively empty spot he saw; an area behind what seemed to be some sort of nightclub, closed at this hour. There was a public bench, where he deposited Kiris. Next he wrapped the belt up and put it in one of his coat’s bigger pockets.
They were safe, he told himself. Those bastards might have been willing to attempt a quick grab out on a near-deserted street, within arm’s length of a vehicle, but here there were just too many people. And cameras.
They were safe.
“Well, we survived,” he said.
He put a hand on Kiris’s shoulder. She didn’t speak, but looked up at him with awareness and appreciation.
Bers growled. That was literally what the sound was. He examined his bleeding hand, and Gaylen realised a knife blade had gone right through it. The Fringer squeezed it into a trembling fist.
“Rats.”
Herdis applied a quick coagulant to her battered eye and forehead, swallowed a pill, then took in her patients.
“I didn’t have time to adjust for body weight and system. Bers, I have to give you a boost, and Kiris, I need to give you a counter-boost.”
“Mhm!” the Chanei vocalised, eyes wide and body trembling as it was ravaged by an excessive amount of stimulants. She looked like a strung-out junkie.
Gaylen peeked around their makeshift hiding place. A few people who had seen them enter noticed him, but quickly averted their eyes. He saw no sign of the five men.
“We shouldn’t stay here too long,” he said as he retreated. “We’ll go out one of the other entrances, maybe order a taxi.”
“We should go to a bathroom first,” Herdis said, as she measured out another shot for Kiris. “Make ourselves at least slightly presentable.”
“Yeah.”
Gaylen checked himself for wounds he might easily have missed in the heat of fighting, but didn’t find any blood. Just bruises and pain.
“That was a close one,” Herdis added, as she gave the shot.
“Yeah.”
“They just left the clinic,” Ayna said into the earpiece. “Hello? Guys?”
“Thanks, Ayna,” Gaylen said, and was happy to plop down next to Kiris and put his arm around her. She, in turn, was happy to lean into him. “Listen, we have an update too.”