Human, page 1
part #1 of Humanity Ascendant Series
HUMAN
Published by A.G. Claymore
Edited by B.H. MacFadyen
Copyright 2018 A.G. Claymore
This is a work of fiction. Names, Characters, Places, Incidents and Brands are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademark status and trademark owners of any products referenced in this work of fiction which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with or sponsored by the trademark owners.
Click this link to get started:
http://eepurl.com/ZCP-z
Property
Surrender
W e’re gonna surrender?” Ethdu blurted. Caught off-guard by a sudden swerve, he stumbled against the side of the co-pilot’s chair.
“Full stop,” Abdu told the pilot, using the change in the shuttle’s momentum to pivot his body around a ceiling handhold. He came to rest gazing at his protégé, one eyebrow raised, orange emergency lights pulsing across his face from the Chironian security vehicle in front of them.
Ethdu’s expression smoldered with self-anger. He was tired of constantly being on the back foot with his mentor. Abdu’s ‘see if you can figure out what I’m up to’ style of instruction might have been a compliment to Ethdu’s expensive genetics but, in reality, it felt more like a never-ending series of slights. He had to learn to control his surprise. His outburst revealed a tendency to ask before thinking, a habit he’d thought was long past.
He forced a shrug, though anger and nonchalance were poor bedfellows. He had to get himself under control and the outward displays often helped to bolster the inner efforts.
“Of course we’re not actually surrendering,” he continued. “You’re just buying time.”
Abdu’s eyebrow took a break, much to Ethdu’s relief. “Our team was sent here for some serious interplanetary shenanigans,” the older man said, nodding out the window at the Chironian security vehicle, whose lights had stopped flashing orange, now that the shuttle had come to a halt. Green and white lights now pulsed as a warning to other traffic as it slid around to come alongside.
“We’re just the sort of folks who wouldn’t meekly pull over for a routine traffic stop.” He grinned at Ethdu. “Pretty cunning, don’tcha think?”
Now it was Ethdu’s turn to raise an eyebrow. “Routine traffic stop?”
Abdu inclined his head in acknowledgement. “Fair enough. The flatfoot probably scanned us, so he’ll know we’re Humans and, therefore, as unaccompanied slaves, we’re contraband.”
Ethdu treated himself to an eye-roll at this understatement. “His scan will have also told him about the combat focus in our genomes, which is probably a bigger concern for him than our being contraband.”
Both men looked aft at the sound of the security vehicle’s warbling alarm. Abdu chuckled, leading the way into the cargo compartment where the rest of the Human team waited, weapons stashed out of sight. They still looked somewhat dangerous, due to their armored EVA suits, but civilian and military variants were almost indistinguishable.
“That can easily work in our favor,” the older man continued. “That domestic security officer is going to be a bundle of nerves, going up against purpose-designed killers like us, but he’ll be damned before he calls in backup and dilutes the credit for this catch. He could get promoted over this.”
Abdu waved Ethdu aft of the wide side hatch. “So stand over there and attract no attention until you see a chance to throw him off his game.” He reached for the hatch release but stopped, frowning. “The current unrest-index in this city is below a four, right?”
“Three,” Ethdu confirmed. “He won’t even have a patrol-mate on that vehicle, let alone troops.”
The older man chuckled. “That could have been embarrassing for us!” He hit the large release button and adopted a casual pose as the hatch swung down to turn itself into a boarding ramp.
The Chironian domestic security officer slid the side of his own vehicle open and reached out to attach a heavy-duty safety line to one of the rings at his end of the Human vehicle’s boarding ramp. The line retracted, pulling the DSO’s vehicle tight to the end of the ramp and he crossed over, ignoring the two-thousand-meter drop.
Those long arms gave Chironians decent balance so railings were rare enough on their world. Their heavy forearms gave them a strong grip, making them a dominant force in the empire’s professional grappling circuit.
It tended to make them a very confrontational species and this one clearly thought he’d be able to handle a few runaway slaves. “What do we have here?” he rumbled, stepping through the hatch and rounding on Abdu. “A pack of runaway slaves without your thieving master to make excuses for you!”
It was a known fact that Mishak, the Quailu lord who owned the Kish system, was prone to economic raids on his neighbors but it was still unwise for this Chironian native to speak ill of any member of the imperial master-race. It had to be nerves talking. This DSO was twitchy, running on the ragged ends of his courage.
And it was the perfect opening.
Ethdu pitched his voice low, imagining that he was trying to gargle a throat-full of rough gravel. At the same time, he wove in a slightly higher tone. “And what gave you the impression that I wasn’t here to make excuses?” he demanded.
The security officer spun around or, rather, started spinning. His heavy forearms made him unwieldy in quick turns – not a problem in the grappling ring, if he could get his hands on his opponent, but this wasn’t the ring.
“My Lord!” he stammered. “I meant no…” He stopped in mid-apology, realizing that there was no Quailu standing there. There was another Human and the dratted creature had taken his gun away in a fluid, lightning-fast motion.
“Disarmed by a mere slave,” Ethdu mused, shaking his head in mock commiseration. “We’ll be borrowing your patrol vehicle as well.” He glanced at Olivdu who was holding her right hand behind her back. He gave her a quick wink. “I assume you still have a sizeable armory on board? Those food riots were only a few cycles ago, so I imagine you’re still carrying backup weapons for the foot patrols…”
“You filthy thieving little pricks!” the cop roared, launching himself at Ethdu.
Ethdu skipped nimbly out of the way and Olivdu jammed a stun stick into the Chironian’s side.
The hulking creature let out a strange, warbling shriek and fell, twitching, to the deck of the shuttle.
“His patrol vehicle is shielded against scanners,” Ethdu suggested, glancing up at Abdu, “and it’s designed to carry a full platoon…”
Abdu was looking at the twitching Chironian but not really seeing him. He was running the probabilities through his head. How often would the cop need to call in to central?
The Chironian, unable to control his body, let out a massive, burbling fart.
“Into the patrol vehicle,” Abdu shouted over the chorus of groans. “He can have the damn shuttle, stinking bastard!”
They piled into the police vehicle and cast off the safety line. Hendu shoved his way through the crowded passenger compartment and claimed the pilot’s seat.
“Get us to the lab, Hendy,” Abdu said, opening a weapons locker that formed the bulkhead between the flight deck and the small two-by-six-meter ‘cargo’ area.
Abdu whistled. “Would you just look at all this? They must have been shooting a hell of a lot of protesters.”
“Mostly Mushkenu population here,” Ethdu said.
The Holy Quailu Empire had three classes. The ruling Awilu, the lower-class Mushkenu and the Wardu or slave class, which included all Humans. Kish had been too backward, at the time of annexation, to support a free Mushkenu class.
“They don’t have to worry about reimbursing owners for dead slaves, do they?” Olivdu said, stating more than asking. “Mushkenu like that DSO can sneer at me all they want, but you don’t hear of Humans getting killed in a riot response.”
Not for the first time, Ethdu wondered who that argument was intended for. His people liked to brag that they were too expensive to kill out of hand. In an empire where the lower class accepted that they could be killed by almost anyone in a uniform for the slightest of reasons, that argument carried some weight.
So why did he envy the perils of the free class?
He took a pulse rifle from the rack and looked over the controls. It was a nasty weapon, designed to frighten the public. You didn’t just take a flesh-wound from a pulse weapon, you scattered yourself, and those nearby, all over the immediate area.
It fired a crystalline, metallic hydrogen round that was just barely in the solid state. A containment field, projected by a nano-emitter in the round itself, kept it from sublimating directly to a gaseous state. Once fired, the field emitter went into impact-disarm mode, with a pre-programmable delay that allowed the user to select for surface or sub-surface detonation.
Ethdu almost dropped the weapon when the deck angled, shifting hard to port. The distinctive whine of kinetic rounds came from starboard.
“I think they might be on to us,” Hendu shouted over his shoulder. “I can’t return fire unless I turn us around. These things are built for shooting citizens, not for dogfighting.”
Ethdu pulled a line from his chest-plate and snapped it to a tie rail running along the side door. Abdu slapped the opening button before securing his own line.
“Keep heading for the lab, Hendy,” Abdu shouted. He leaned out, trusting his line to save him and trusting Ethdu not to lean any farther than needed to fire from in front of him
Both men aimed aft to where another domestic security vehicle was trying to match Hendu’s wild maneuvers.
Eth resisted the urge to duck back inside to avoid a stream of tracers, knowing the craft’s flimsy airframe was no protection. He took careful aim and selected for sub-surface penetration.
The five-round burst impacted low on the craft’s nose, a meter to the right of Abdu’s rounds. The field holding the dense crystals in the solid state collapsed before the rounds had passed more than a few centimeters beyond the outer shell and then converted directly to gaseous hydrogen.
The entire front of the cockpit disintegrated and the back half slammed back into the fuselage. With a dead pilot and the entire control system destroyed, the craft corkscrewed wildly in an expanding pattern until it crashed into the side of a glazed commercial tower, its engines still thrusting the wreckage until it passed out the other side, along with at least twenty office workers.
“No wonder they only use kinetic in their vehicle cannons,” Abdu shouted over the wind. “Spectacular crashes like that cause a lot of property damage.”
“At least we bought ourselves…” Ethdu stopped mid-shout, frowning past Abdu, “… about eight seconds of freedom from pursuit. Hang on!”
He grabbed a stanchion, anticipating Hendu’s evasive reaction to the three new DS vehicles approaching them from ahead. Abdu grabbed a handhold just in time to avoid dangling out the hatch from his safety line.
“Those guys have a grav-lock on us,” Hendu yelled, throwing the small vehicle into a hard turn to port.
Ethdu looked aft to where one of the pursuing vehicles was swinging out of view behind the fuselage. Those cops must have missiles if they’re bothering with gravity signatures .
“Missiles in the air!” Hendu’s shout came as no surprise. “Do those Chironian weapons you’re using have prox settings?”
“Not unless you count proximity to the layer they just penetrated,” Abdu shouted back.
“Hammurabi’s hairy balls!” the pilot cursed. “I’ll just take care of everything, then, shall I? Oh fornication…” There was a pause and then the shuttle swung hard to starboard and put her nose down. “Yeah, actually, that should do nicely!”
Ethdu and Abdu looked forward and both let out wordless exclamations of surprise.
“Are you insane?” Abdu shouted. “That DS carrier will have point-defense systems. They’ll shred us the instant we enter their engagement envelope!”
“Not with three of their own on our tail,” Hendu shot back. “Well… probably not…”
Eth’s armored fingers were starting to bend the stanchion but he didn’t notice. He was staring fixedly as the carrier grew to fill his entire field of vision. He was about to shout a warning to the pilot but stopped, laughing, as he realized what Hendy intended.
Purely out of showmanship, the pilot threw the small DS craft into a barrel roll as they flew in the port side of the huge carrier. Docked security vehicles and their startled ground-crewmen blurred past dizzily and then they were rocketing out the other side.
The pursuing missiles, spiraling around each other in imitation of Hendu’s roll, lost track of the original gravitational signature they’d been assigned to. They decided, from the mass of the carrier all around them, that they were near enough and, rather than lose the target entirely, it would be best to detonate now and see what happened.
After all, they’d had a good run…
The carrier had plenty of wide open space on either side to vent the explosion but that didn’t mean it came out unscathed. She took heavy damage from the inside out and the docked DS vehicles were either smashed or, in the case of the Human team’s newest problem, tossed out the side like a paper model.
“Oh sh…” Ethdu was cut off as the tumbling vehicle struck their tail assembly with a glancing blow. It rushed past in a hail of debris, some of which had just been torn loose from their own craft.
“Good news is we’re near the labs,” Hendu shouted, his voice slightly higher than usual. “Bad news is that nobody’ll ever call what happens next a ‘landing’. Grab something and hope it doesn’t come loose!”
As if to prove him right, the small vehicle, having lost half of its tail, started to spin. Of all the buildings flying past the hatch, one seemed to be coming inexorably closer.
Ethdu and his mentor were trapped at the hatch. The rotational inertia was too great by now for them to make it to the seats. They both closed the helms on their suits.
Ethdu punched his arm through the outer hull so he could wrap his arm around the whole hatch frame. He did it just in time.
A hail of glazing and framework invaded the craft slightly ahead of the sound of the impact. They slid to a halt, throwing up desks and chairs in what appeared to be an office. The lights, those that still remained in operation, were at half illumination so the place was probably off shift, except for the guard who sat behind a desk near a glazed entry vestibule.
Ethdu activated the team heads-up display and breathed a sigh of relief when everybody came up green.
Abdu must have done the same because he was grinning as his helm opened. “All right, everybody, get your shit together. Security’ll be all over this site in a matter of minutes.”
“I think I peed in my armor,” Noadu said, “just a little…”
Abdu hopped down to the tiled floor and sauntered over to the security guard who still had a mug halfway to his mouth. He didn’t even appear to have noticed the large wet stain on his shirt.
It went without saying that it would be best if the guard didn’t get a chance to call this incident in to his supervisors.
“Hey, Bud,” Abdu began, giving the Chironian a casual nod.
The guard nodded back slowly.
Abdu leaned in. “Parking up here in the two-thousand block is so expensive. Do you validate?”
The guard’s eyes narrowed at this but then he twitched and fell over, stunned by the contact plates on the older Human’s armored gloves.
“Grab a weapon and let’s go!” Abdu growled.
Ethdu decided to keep his Chironian weapon. The locals weren’t fond of the domestic security officers and carrying a captured DSO weapon might earn him some points with the disaffected population if he used it on the authorities. One way or the other, it should discourage the general public from interfering.
“We’re eight levels up from the lab,” Hendu advised, checking the ammunition state on his assault weapon. “Icon is green-alpha-one.”
Ethdu brought up the overlay as they walked. The green icon was almost directly below them. It seemed deceptively easy, if you could forget about the hostile security forces.
“There’s a three-floor drop-shaft over there,” Noadu said.
“Good,” Abdu replied. “Everybody, follow Noa.”
Ethdu stepped into the quarter-grav opening in the floor, following the systems specialist down past two sets of exit railings but he cursed in annoyance. “Get out of the way, Noa!” He angled his legs back so he’d slide down behind the techie who’d failed to clear out of the drop-shaft’s base.
Basic shaft etiquette, he thought. What does he think… Fornication!
Oliv slammed into them, forcing all three of them to stumble out into an open-air café surrounding the drop exit.
It figured, of course. Higher traffic areas, like shafts that connected several levels, were ideal spots for quick-transaction businesses like cafés. Like cafés on any planet, really…
“Hello, officers!” Eth said with friendly enthusiasm, grinning like a long-lost pal.
There were eight of them, sitting at tables, standing in line or just about to leave. All of them watched the growing group of Humans, not failing to notice how heavily armed they were. They kept their hands on their drinks.
The civilians cleared out.
“The Goddess of Luck is sure stacking the bones against us today,” Abdu said quietly. “Every damn throw turns out a draw at best. Let’s just back off. There’s a ramp behind the shaft and we can probably get a good head start before they decide to escalate…”
A ninth DSO stepped out of the washroom, adjusting the seals on his light armor. He saw the Humans and his hand went to his sidearm. He froze then, realizing he was intruding on an already shaky détente.
