Ragnarok (The Echo Case Files) by C.S. Stinton
* *
‘Get him!’ Tycho yelled as she pushed her way back along the gantry.
‘Great idea!’ Harrigan said. ‘Leadership skills like that, you had to be an Academy graduate!’
She ignored him as she ran and Harrigan looked down. Jovak had knocked a couple of girls over as he’d landed and though the thumping music and flashing lights hadn’t stopped, the the people on the dance floor below were aware something was happening, trying to clear space.
He swung over the railing after their target and knocked more people over as he landed, his boots ringing out on the metal floor. There was a shout of anger, a scream of surprise, but Harrigan ignored these and looked to the door.
Jovak was easy to spot. He was ramming his way through the crowd towards the door, staggering patrons in his wake. Harrigan surged into them like he was shoulder-barging a wave, bigger than the smuggler but faster, better trained. What he couldn’t dodge, he could push.
Jovak’s jacket was flapping behind him; Harrigan got a fistful of it, only for the smuggler to shove back. Harrigan had been off-balance enough from the lunge that he staggered and then Jovak was past the main throng of patrons, in the open space before the door.
Harrigan threw himself forwards in a flail of a tackle. He almost didn’t get a touch in, then he had Jovak’s ankle and they both went down. The smuggler hit the metal floor hard but Harrigan was still moving, yanking himself up to slam the other man down again to stun him, and there he was, he had him -
A heavy hand landed on his shoulder and Harrigan looked up to see the meaty, unimpressed face of one of the bouncers. He was hauled to his feet as another grabbed Jovak and hefted him up.
‘You two can take it outside,’ the first bouncer grunted, and before Harrigan could to explain, he was yanked along, feet dragging on the floor. He was no slouch in size or strength but the bouncer was a slab of meat of a man and he knew fighting back would have the whole team round on him. Fighting Jovak outside would be much the same as doing it inside.
They were both hurled through the door and into the busy street outside Freightyard 26. Jovak stumbled and sprawled, but Harrigan stayed on his feet.
‘Why’d you run, Darren?’ A menacing smile tugged at his lips.
Jovak was scrambling to his feet and reeled away from the kick aimed at his chest. The bouncers who had tossed them out for disrupting their club now stood in the doorway to watch. Credit chits exchanged hands. ‘Saw the news, Harrigan. Shouldn’t be surprised you‘ve gone narc. Once Fleet, always Fleet, huh?’
Harrigan scowled as he saw him pat at his pockets, tensing at the prospect of a gun. ‘Yeah,’ he growled. ‘Semper fucking fi.’ Then he rushed him.
He was bigger than Jovak, better trained than Jovak, but fear could spur a man to great things and the smuggler hadn’t stayed free for as long as he had without learning a few tricks. Harrigan’s first blow hit him in the gut and he staggered, but jerked away from the follow-up that would have clipped his jaw and knocked him senseless. Jovak ducked under the next heavy swing and Harrigan gave a yelp of surprise and pain as the smuggler stepped past and jabbed him in the side.
The bouncers laughed. More credit chits exchanged hands. Most of the passers-by were giving them a wide berth, a street brawl hardly worth stopping for this far down, but a handful were pausing to watch. There were no aghast faces. This was entertainment on a Saturday night.
Harrigan cursed the weeks spent in a cell, the months spent on a ship and in the bars. A year ago he’d have dropped Jovak in one swing. A year ago he’d have caught him before they even got to the bouncers.
He whirled around and this time Jovak wasn’t fast enough, Harrigan’s fist landing on his cheekbone. The smuggler was knocked flying, crashing into the back of a broken bench and sending a pack of girls who’d been cat-calling the two of them scattering. Harrigan was on his sprawled body in a heartbeat, dropping one fist into his gut, another into his jaw, and then -
Then his vision exploded in front of his eyes with a wave of pain, and Harrigan staggered back. Jovak had kept his wits about him enough to snatch up shattered remnants of the broken bench and had cracked him about the skull with a length of solid wood. But adrenaline fizzed through his brain and guts. Jovak was still slumped and Harrigan had fought through worse than this. He gathered himself, even though Jovak was just a blur, and stepped in again.
His left arm was ready to block another swing of the makeshift club - but Jovak dropped it and Harrigan’s instincts screamed at him to react as the other hand came up. Jovak was holding something he’d pulled from his pocket, but it wasn’t a gun. It was a taser.
Jovak’s arm darted forwards but Harrigan snatched the wrist just in time, twisting it up. For a moment they were locked and in shock Jovak thumbed the switch. Electricity sparked in the air between them but found no target, lighting the faces of the two combatants in this gloomy underbelly of the city. Jovak’s expression was tense fear, knowing he needed the weapon to have a chance of victory, knowing he couldn’t win this contest of strength.
He kicked Harrigan hard in the shin; the bigger man twisted his leg to deflect the worst of it but still grunted in pain and pushed down, trying to turn the incapacitating sparks on his opponent. But Jovak held firm with sheer desperation, his back to the shattered remains of the bench. The girls who’d been sent skittering away were jeering again, the crowd had grown, and the bouncers -
Two of the bouncers had crossed from the doorway towards them, though Harrigan didn’t realise this until strong arms wrapped themselves around his chest and hauled him back. For a moment he thought it was some ally of Jovak’s, that he was going to be pinned, and he swore and writhed until he saw the other bouncer grab the smuggler, too. The taser fell harmlessly to the ground, sparked once more, then was dim.
‘Enough of you two!’ shouted the bouncer who had Harrigan, the same one who’d thrown him out before. ‘Break it up, we don’t need this outside our door.’
Harrigan swore again. ‘Oh, no, you stupid -’
‘Don’t be talking like that,’ said the bouncer amiably, and dragged him around to the door to Freightyard 26 to see the waiting and rather smug form of Maggie Tycho stood there, wiggling a credit chit between her fingers.
‘How very kind of you, gentlemen!’ she told the bouncers. ‘You can let the big angry one go, but if you’d restrain the little ugly one I think we can consider our business done for the night!’
Harrigan was let go, and he straightened his jacket with soaring indignation. His ribs hurt, his head spun, and the apologetic clap on the back from the bouncer did little to soothe his anger. ‘Where the hell were you?’
Tycho smiled sweetly as Jovak, who was wriggling and cursing to no avail and had his hands bound behind his back by a bouncer. ‘Getting reinforcements. Of course. Oh, and enjoying the show - you really can throw a punch, you know?’
‘Enjoying the - you could have helped!’
‘I did. And these guys will be able to enjoy a splendid night off, courtesy of the Confederate Marshals! Thank you, Jimmy,’ Tycho said with all courtesy as the second bouncer finished his work on Jovak and stood with a meaty hand clamped on the smuggler’s shoulder. She reached into her jacket. ‘Right, make yourself useful, Harrigan!’ Harrigan’s eyes blazed, but Jovak took advantage of the silence to scowl and mutter to himself.
‘This is ridiculous,’ Jovak murmured.
‘Shut up, or I’ll finish giving you your damn hiding.’
Tycho had her pad out and pulled her earpiece off, tossing that to him. ‘I‘m going to have to sweet-talk Navarro into coming down here to pick us up; it’s got to be a cell or nothing for this degenerate,’ she said, jerking her head at Jovak. ‘Can you call the Chief?’
Harrigan nodded, mollified by the reminder that they were making progress, and put on Tycho’s earpiece. ‘Call Ramirez,’ he muttered as an instruction, and there was the rattling sound of data for a second before he was patched through. ‘Commander
8
Ramirez stopped as her earpiece crackled, so the news saved her life.
The bullet whistled through where she’d have stood if she’d kept walking, and thudded into the wall with a thunk of metal on metal. She stared at it for half a heartbeat -
Then was moving, throwing herself across the suspended walkway and behind a metal garbage skip that stank of irregular collection. She wasn’t far from the apartment block, but Locke’s car had dropped her off two levels too high and so she had taken this quiet, isolated walkway down towards the main plaza.
So isolated that this couldn’t be some stray accident. Not here and now. Not at her.
Her back to the container, Ramirez frowned at the bullet hole. Too large to be from a handgun. That meant a rifle. That meant distance, so she’d been shot at from somewhere in a row of buildings maybe twenty yards opposite her. Drawing her Hauer, she reached into her uniform jacket and pulled out her pad. Thank God she hadn’t listened to Tycho’s fashion advice, she thought. If she’d bought a dress she’d have neither sidearm nor pad.
‘Er, Ramirez?’ That was Harrigan’s voice, crackling from her earpiece. ‘Did you hear me?’
‘Please hold, Mister Harrigan,’ she said as levelly as she could. ‘Someone’s trying to kill me. I’ll be with you as soon as I can.’
‘Someone’s what?’
She ignored him, thumbing her pad. Here she was again, pinned down and being shot at. It was starting to get tiresome. There was no guarantee the sniper would stick around for another go, but she wasn’t risking her neck finding out for sure. And if she stayed where she was, if the sniper had allies they’d be descending on her soon enough from another angle and she’d be like a rat in a barrel.
But unlike on the Fortune’s Favour, this time she had control. She brought up the program on her pad she needed, snapped a quick picture of the bullet-hole, and the software went to work. It had been designed for crime scene investigation and now she was using it to prevent the crime of her own murder, but it was sophisticated and it was quick. Without getting closer she couldn’t expect miracles, but the pad’s in-built camera was powerful enough from across the walkway to take a decent picture of the hole - and the trajectory calculation started.
It used more than the picture - the pad knew her location and ultranet knew every inch of Hardveur. Without needing to move or press a button, the pad was already calculating that she’d been shot at from across this specific street and was bringing up pictures of the opposite building. Three seconds in and it had narrowed the gunman’s location to six possible windows.
Five windows. Four windows. Three windows. The picture of the buildings opposite zoomed closer and closer, selecting at last a specific floor, and, after a mere ten seconds‘ work, stopped on two adjacent windows.
Ramirez cursed. If she was stood right next to the bullet-hole she could maybe take a good enough picture for a precise calculation, but she was still in cover, low down. She extended the pad out from behind the garbage skip, exposing no more than fingertips, and snapped a picture of the windows in question.
They looked much the same as each other. The one on the right had a small shadow in the bottom-left corner which could have been a gunman. Or it could have been anything, really. And the gunman knew exactly where she was, and could have moved. Ramirez scowled and, without much enthusiasm, reached up to the lid of the garbage skip and rummaged inside.
A bag the size of her head, pungent and soft, was lifted out. Ramirez held her breath as she hefted it - then tossed it from behind cover, out into the open of the walkway. As a diversion, it wouldn’t work against an expert.
But an expert wouldn’t have missed her in the first place, and as she threw the bag she took her Hauer in both hands and rose from cover a heartbeat later.
Two buildings across. Three floors up. Five doors left of the lit stairwell. The shadow in the picture was clear in her mind as Ramirez swung her Hauer up to where she knew - or thought - the shooter was. There was another thunk of metal on metal as they opened fire first, but her gambit had worked, they’d jumped at the diversion, she saw the muzzle flash -
And fired. Their rifle would allow them a second shot as quickly as they could react to the sight of her, so she didn’t fire once but three times. One bullet shattered a window so it had to have gone wild, but there was no sound from the other two and that he hadn’t returned fire meant either she’d hit or he’d taken cover.
Adrenaline pumping, Ramirez lowered her sidearm an inch and squinted across the gap. There was, indeed, the motionless slumped shadow she’d been shooting at. Now she could stop and look properly she could see she’d hit her target with one of the last two bullets. Or both.
‘Ramirez? You dead yet?’
She pressed her hand to her earpiece. ‘Sorry to disappoint, Harrigan. Put Tycho on.’ Her voice was calmer than her thudding heartbeat called for.
There was the sound of muttering, then her partner’s voice. ‘Chief? Are you all right?’
‘Alive and kicking, but someone did just try to kill me. He might not be alone.’ Already Ramirez had moved down the walkway towards the main plaza; she had no desire to be shot at again in this narrow space. ‘If you‘re calling in the HCPD for help, send them to my location. The shooter’s down and I want him picked up and ID’d.’
‘You got it.’ A pause. ‘They’ll be with you in five, Chief. Hold tight and we’ll see you at Central Precinct.’