Profiteer

She banked the bike toward the east side of the clearing. She streaked by only five meters above the ground. The velocity indicator shifted digits too fast to read.

 

Halfway to the surrounding buildings, and cover—

 

Something hit her. Something big.

 

It was an energy weapon, because the field soaked up most of it. But the rear of the bike blew out as the power cells for the field overloaded explosively. The Leggett listed to port and banked away from the edge of the clearing. Tetsami tried to get the bike under control, but the explosion had damaged the grav unit.

 

She thanked God that personal transports only used catalytic injection grav units. They might power up slower than a quantum extraction unit, but they didn’t turn into clouds of radioactive plasma when they malfunctioned.

 

The ground began sliding upward, and she wondered what would hit her first, the ground or another shot from that weapon.

 

It was the ground.

 

The left front of the Leggett clipped the corner of an old building foundation and flipped up and around in a slow spin that was only possible with a contragrav. Tetsami had a moment to see the ground spinning to meet her. She released herself from the bike and hoped her body armor would save her.

 

She hit the side of a sloping mound of dirt. Her helmet hit something hard and she could hear a crack. She was rolling too fast to see anything. It took her a second to realize that she was still alive.

 

Something above her exploded and showered dirt over her. She didn’t know if it was her bike or a missile.

 

She came to a stop in a trickling river of slime at the base of the hill. She was nauseated, dizzy, and aching in every muscle of her body, but she seemed to have gotten off with little damage.

 

Tetsami raised her head—

 

She ripped off her helmet and threw up into it.

 

Elsewhere, the sounds of battle continued. If she was lucky, they counted her among the dead now. She raised herself upright, and this time the vertigo was easier to deal with.

 

She had rolled to the bottom of a large blast crater. The river in the bottom was the effluent from a broken sewer line. “Well, girl,” she said to herself as she walked away from the battle. “You’ve been at this for eight years standard. You’ve finally hit the wall. What are you going to do now?” She didn’t have an answer.

 

She still had to worry about getting out of this alive.

 

She climbed, haltingly, toward the lip of the crater. It was hard going, but her condition improved as she went. It got better when, halfway up, the sounds of fighting ceased.

 

She got to the edge believing she’d managed to survive the incident—

 

When she cleared the lip, she came face-to-face with a man in a battlesuit of chrome, gold, and polished white enamel. He wielded the nastiest energy weapon she had ever seen.

 

<>

 

* * * *

 

CHAPTER FIVE

 

The Underground Economy

 

 

“A criminal is a revolutionary without the pretense.”

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

 

“After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands.”

—Friedrich Nietzsche

(1844-1900)

 

 

There might have been a worse place to ditch the Hegira than the east side of Godwin, but if so it wasn’t on any of the eighty-three inhabited planets in the Confederacy.

 

Dom opened his eyes with the hope that what he was feeling was due to a screwed up balance circuit. It wasn’t. He was hanging upside down from the crash harness.

 

There was a bright side. The drive hadn’t blown.

 

The Hegira had plowed through the tenth floor of a fifteen-story warehouse and had flipped over. Perhaps it had rolled. Dom didn’t remember anything after the small aircraft’s impact with the building. It’d smashed through the other side, planting its nose in the roof of a neighboring building. The drive section balanced precariously on the bottom half of the window the Hegira had broken through.

 

Dom was suspended, headfirst, about thirty meters above a very hard-looking alley.

 

He waved a hand experimentally at the space where the windscreen had been. His hand brushed empty air.

 

As Dom scrambled to untangle parts of his body from the crash harness, he got subliminal glimpses of a group of spectators below him. The eidetic computer net wired into his brain dutifully recorded impressions of leather, metal, kevlar, and monocast with little rhyme or reason.

 

The most vivid detail that registered as Dom unwedged his artificial left leg from the Hegira footwell was the Proudhon Spaceport Security logo one of them wore.

 

That was before someone started to take potshots at him.

 

Suddenly, the group below him had Dom’s full attention.

 

The shooter was shaved bald and wore an exec’s monocast vest. Baldy was firing some hideous homemade weapon. The others were laughing as he paused to reload it. Even though Baldy was the one shooting, what scared Dom was the pulse carbine slung cross the back of the one with the spaceport shoulder patch.