Hybrid (Tales of the Acheron Book 2) Read online

  Tales of the Acheron Book 2

  Hybrid

  by

  Rick Partlow

  Copyright 2018

  By Rick Partlow

  Chapter One

  “Repent! Repent!” the naked man screamed. “You desecrate the perfection gifted to us by the Ancients! You sacrifice your humanity to the false god of technology!”

  Ashton Carpenter watched the street preacher out of the corner of his eye, afraid to look straight at him for fear the man might try to engage him. The guy had balls to start haranguing crowds outside a Skin-ganger chop shop. The Skin-ganger cyborgs, “Evolutionists” they liked to call themselves, were already filtering out of the dingy, sheet metal building, their glowing red oculars glaring at the Predecessor Cult missionaries. The neon glow of the street signs glinted menacingly off the exposed silvery metal of their bionic limbs, and Ash walked a little faster.

  Kanesh was bad enough without wading through a religious gang war. He hated the dank, claustrophobic chill of the tunnels and the thin sheen of condensation clinging to every metal or plastic surface, and the unshakable feeling that, with every step, he was descending deeper into the bowels of Hell. Docking at the asteroid’s hub, the place had seemed a strange and almost quaintly bureaucratic cut-rate version of upscale pleasure stations like Belial in the Alpha Centauri system, except here they let you keep your weapons as long as you paid an exorbitant tax.

  But then he’d traveled spinward in the lift, towards the outer levels of the rotating cylinder of asteroid rock with centripetal gravity closer to Earth-normal, and had to search each one of them, had to experience everything that people were willing to do to each other when there were no consequences for their actions. Kanesh had been built by the Pirate World cartels, far outside the jurisdiction of the Patrol, too remote for even the military to bother with it. Like Belial and other, smaller pleasure stations inside the bounds of the Commonwealth, it was a “blown” asteroid, cored with a high-power laser, filled with water, spun and then heated with solar reflectors until it expanded like a balloon, leaving a thick sheath of nickel iron shielding the empty space within.

  Unlike Belial, though, Kanesh lacked even the semblance of law or restraint. The station had been built by criminals as neutral ground, a place to do business without the worry of another cartel crashing through the door or one side double-crossing the other. And that was the only order maintained on Kanesh: business was sacrosanct and anyone who interfered with it was dealt with swiftly and brutally, usually without even wasting a round of ammo on them. The bodies floated like debris in orbit around the station, more effective than any verbal warning.

  Cartel negotiators, smuggler crews, assassins, bounty hunters, enforcers, fugitives and exiles flocked here, and so did those who fed on their appetites. There were restaurants and bars and hotels and dance clubs, of course, almost prosaic in how little they differed from businesses just like them on dozens of worlds. They seemed out of place here, obscene in their normality next to the other things, the things you wouldn’t find on the Pirate Worlds themselves, because even a cartel boss wouldn’t want to admit they sanctioned it.

  Here, no attempt was made to hide their vices, no cosmetic veneer was thrown up as camouflage. Garish holographs advertised the attractions of each level, with little organization by types: gladiatorial combat to the death, with and without weapons, bettors welcome; chopshops where you could sell the limbs and organs stolen off of others, or have a suitable replacement grafted from the inventory, or have your own biological pieces replaced with cybernetics to chase the next step in human evolution; snuff shows where you could watch unwilling participants killed live in imaginative ways; drug dens that catered to whatever addiction might suit, from conventional chemicals such as Kick and Spindle to black market Virtual Reality that directly stimulated the pleasure centers of the brain.

  And, of course, there were the older vices, the ones that were the great equalizer. No matter how powerful or dangerous or inhuman the client, nearly everyone shared the same hardwired desires. On Kanesh, you could enjoy them safely, cheaply, simply, with cybernetic pleasure dolls and Virtual Reality, the same as in any of the seedier establishments in the Commonwealth proper. Pleasure dolls felt no pain, had no pride, carried no diseases or psychological baggage; you could do to them whatever you wished, indulge whatever sick fantasy that appealed to you without worrying about hurting anyone else.

  Which was why those other places existed. Because humans being what they were, there was always a percentage who wanted to hurt others, who wanted pain and psychological scars, who wanted to make victims. The advertisements and the glowing neon signs were blatantly honest in what they offered, and the open brutality of it struck Ash like a physical blow.

  Sandi had warned him, but he’d thought she was exaggerating. He wished someone else could have gone, but there was no one else. Sandi didn’t fit the profile of a customer who’d frequent this sort of business, and Fontenot wouldn’t have been able to control herself; she’d have wound up shooting everything in sight and getting them all killed in the process. Kan-Ten, of course, was a Tahni, and he’d never be able to convince anyone that he was sexually attracted to humans.

  He’d walked by a dozen different brothels before he found the right one; it was distinguishable only by the hand-painted mural across its front wall, matching the still capture on the screen of his ‘link. The artist had been passionate about the subject, and given that the subject involved whips and chains and abject terror, that thought made Ash’s skin crawl. There were two men leaning against the wall next to the painting, their craggy, lined features thrown into sharp relief by the garish lights illuminating the mural.

  They were laughing. There was nothing good-natured or friendly about it; the laughter was cruel and harsh, the sort of laugh that came at someone else’s expense, at the appreciation of someone else’s pain. Ash remembered laughter like that very well; when he was a kid, laughter like that was usually a prologue for a beating, or the threat of a beating. He walked past them, smelling tobacco and marijuana and alcohol and sweat, then steeled himself and pushed through the front door and into the darkness.

  There were no automated kiosks in a place like this, no holographic menus to look through. A slovenly little man with stringy, black hair and folds of fat hanging down his face to his neck sat on a metal stool behind a desk, tapping fat, dirty fingers against the cheap plastic and watching a video on a long-obsolete tablet. He glanced up at Ash’s approach, looking annoyed at the interruption.

  “What ya’ want?” he muttered around a mouthful of chewing tobacco.

  “A girl,” Ash told him, trying to make his voice gruff and self-assured.

  The old man giggled. “You’re going to have to be a bit more specific.”

  Ash bit back a curse; he was screwing this up.

  “I heard there’s a new girl in,” he said. “Young, blond. Pretty. I’d like her.”

  The old man grunted in reply, changing the screen on the tablet and scrolling through it.

  “Yeah, okay, she’s free right now.” He looked up. “That’ll be four hundred in Tradenotes for an hour.” He cocked an eyebrow. “You can rough her up, but nothing disfiguring.”

  Ash felt his gut twist as he handed the bills over, wishing he could kill the greasy bastard. He had a pistol under his jacket, all it would take was a single squeeze of the trigger. Instead, he followed the man’s gesture and was buzzed through the solid-looking door to the back rooms.

  “Room number six,” the older man supplied over his shoulder just before the portal to the next level of Hell closed.

  There was a narrow hallway between walls of
blood red, lined with doors of black metal, and everything was soundproofed; all he could hear was his own, ragged breathing and the tap of his boot soles on the tile.

  A door slammed open and a brawny, broad-bodied man stepped out, a grin splitting his shaggy, black beard as he fastened his jacket. The angle was wrong; Ash couldn’t see through the door, but he heard the crying. It was the kind of sobs that wracked a body, that shook it to its core until your chest ached with it. The door swung shut and it was gone. Ash didn’t look the bearded man in the eye as he passed, just kept walking.

  Room number six was near the end of the hallway and he could hear the magnetic lock click in release as he reached for the handle. It swung open with a squeak of old and neglected hinges and he stepped through with the slightest of hesitations, afraid what he’d see inside. The chamber was small, with barely space for the bed and a single, padded chair, both fitted with shackles for hands and feet. A cheap plastic swinging barrier at the back probably held a small bathroom.

  The girl sat on the bed, her legs drawn up beneath her, arms wrapped around herself. She was naked and he could see the faded bruises on her arms and legs, not fresh but not that old. Her blond hair was long and tangled, almost wild, and the look in her blue eyes was broken and hopeless and wishing for death. She wore nothing but a collar around her neck, simple and black and metallic; it was an obedience collar, designed to deliver painful electric shocks if she fought or tried to run. Or if someone felt like causing her pain just for kicks.

  The door swung shut behind him and she flinched at the sound of it slamming.

  Ash reached into the side pocket of his jacket and felt the small, ceramic globe there, comfortingly cold and solid. His thumb settled on the button in its side as he stepped closer to the bed.

  “Chandra,” he said softly. The girl’s gaze snapped up to meet his, suspicion strong in her expression. “Chandra, your mom sent me. I need you to get ready to run.”

  Hope flared in her eyes and she began to uncurl, letting her feet touch the floor, but still she said nothing. Ash shrugged. It was the best he could hope for; at least she hadn’t just started screaming. He pulled out the device Chandra’s mother had supplied for them, held it above his head and pushed the button. There was a moment’s delay, and then it hummed and vibrated in his hand and there was a pulse he felt rather than heard or saw, and the lights in the room went out, plunging it into the dim, green-tinted gloom of emergency chemical ghostlights long past their expiration date.

  He grabbed at the collar around Chandra’s neck and she tried to jerk away, but he caught it and yanked sharply. With its electromagnetic lock deactivated, it pulled free and he tossed it aside, sliding his handgun loose of its shoulder holster and moving toward the door. Chandra stared for a moment at the collar where it lay discarded on the other side of the bed, as if she thought this was a dream, or an hallucination.

  “Come on, damn it!” Ash snapped at her. The door was creaking open, its magnetic lock lacking the power to keep it shut thanks to the pulse generator.

  It wouldn’t have worked in a military installation, or even in most high-end commercial stations back in the Commonwealth, where everything was shielded; but this was a cut-rate brothel on a cut-rate space station in the Pirate Worlds, and they’d taken the chance.

  Chandra stood and followed him into the utter blackness of the hallway and he took a moment to slip on the enhanced optics glasses he’d retrieved from a case on his belt. They were shielded, and the hallway lit up with a computer amalgam of infrared, thermal and software interpolation. Other doors were swinging open up and down the corridor and he could see heads peeking out, men mostly.

  “What the hell?” a high-pitched voice demanded. “I want my money back!”

  “What happened to the fucking lights?”

  “Where are we going?” It took Ash a second to realize that the female voice asking it was Chandra’s.

  “We have a ship,” he told her reaching out a hand and grabbing hers. She tried to jerk away, but he held on and pulled her down the corridor behind him, moving quickly. “We need to get out of here,” he warned her. “That pulse won’t last forever…”

  “I’m not going anywhere with you!” She pulled away from him and, through the goggles, he saw her squaring up in a combative stance, all of a sudden full of fight now that the collar was off. “How do I know you’re not just like Carlito, that you’re not just going to sell me off to another place like this?”

  Ash recognized the name from the mission brief; Carlito was her former boyfriend, the one she’d met on Belial and followed here. The one who’d proceeded to abuse her and, when she’d tried to leave him, had sold her to the owner of the brothel on the condition that he not allow her mother to buy her back. Svetlana Breslov owned one of the largest night clubs on Belial station, and when her money hadn’t been enough to buy the return of her daughter, she’d used it to hire them.

  “Your mother said that you had a cat when you were like eight years old,” he said quickly, using the information Breslov had given him. “You named him ‘Carrot,’ and he was killed when he climbed into a ventilation duct and the pest control systems electrocuted him. She said you cried for three days, then you pretended it had never happened and never talked about him again.”

  Her expression shifted abruptly, stubborn suspicion washed away in a wave of hope that nearly staggered her. She nodded, choking back a sob, and he offered his hand again. She took it, squeezing gratefully, and followed him to the end of the hallway. The door there was open as well, its magnetic lock disabled, a sliver of light streaming through from the street outside; for a moment, Ash thought they were just going to be able to walk right out without any trouble.

  Then the two men he’d seen lounging outside by the mural burst through, the shoulder of the one in the lead slamming into the heavy door and banging it back against the wall with a thunderous boom that echoed back down the hallway. Their former sleazy good humor had been replaced by deadly serious expressions, along with matching sets of night vision glasses and handguns thrust ahead of them in a very professional looking stance.

  Security guards, Ash thought, and he cursed himself for not realizing it from the beginning.

  “He’s got a gun!” the one in front snapped harshly, his aim shifting.

  Ash was no sort of gunfighter; he’d been trained by the military as a pilot and that he was damned good at, but the only shooting with small arms he’d done in the service had been in the simulator or at the range. But he had been getting some tutoring lately from someone who’d been carrying a gun longer than the Commonwealth had been in existence, and she’d drilled home several key tenets of gunfighting.

  The first one was movement. He pulled Chandra against the right-hand wall, then fell to a knee and brought up his own handgun, ignoring the shot that streaked down the hallway where his head had been a moment earlier. The malignant firefly of a miniature rocket engine made a hiss-crack above his ear, followed closely by a flash and a loud bang from somewhere behind him where the warhead had struck the far wall. The aiming reticle of his own weapon had popped up on his goggles the minute his fingers had wrapped around the grip, synched via a wireless connection, and he let it hover over the chest of the lead shooter before he touched the trigger pad.

  Ash felt a shudder vibrating against his right palm as three shaped charges of chemical HyperExplosives ignited in quick succession in the reaction chamber of his pistol, pulsing the heat energy of the explosions through a semiconducting lasing rod and blasting it out the focusing lens of the emitter as a three-round burst of laser fire. The laser beams would have been invisible except as a refraction on dust or smoke in the hallway, but the pulses were powerful enough that they ionized the air around them in a flash of short-lived plasma that seemed to move in slow motion compared to the lasers themselves, drawing a sizzling, staticky line between Ash and the security guard.

  There was a small steam explosion inside the man’s chest, blo
od superheated to vapor doing more damage than the actual penetration of the pulses of coherent light, a sharp crack that seemed like an echo of the clap of the pulses wake through the atmosphere. The rocket pistol slipped from strengthless fingers and the guard pitched forward, dead before he hit the ground.

  The second man, though…he’d been shielded by his partner, and he’d seen where the shot had come from, had an extra second to aim, and he was fast. His finger was tightening, just a fraction of a second and a fraction of a gram of pressure from firing the round that would end Ash’s life, and then his head just wasn’t there anymore. The crack of a metal slug breaking the sound barrier chased the splash of blood and brains and bits of skull and beat them to the wall behind him, punching a nice, neat hole through it and ending up God knew where. The body slid to the floor, feet kicking with one final, Galvanic response.

  Ash had already been pushing up from his position on the wall and for a brief, confused moment, it seemed to him as if the man’s head had exploded by magic, but then reality penetrated and he wasn’t surprised to hear the gruff, scratchy voice that called out from the door.

  “It’s me,” she said. “You’re clear, come on out.”

  Ash glanced back at Chandra and saw less horror on her face than he’d expected, as if death in the abstract bothered her but not these two deaths in particular. Ash had to agree. He moved past the bodies, tugging Sandra along with him, skirting carefully around the growing pools of blood. The stink of burned flesh and boiled blood hit him just at the door and he clenched his teeth against the bile rising in his throat, but then he was through the exit and back in the reception area where the greasy old clerk had taken his money.

  The clerk was sprawled on the floor, his eyes wide and unseeing, head cocked at an impossible angle, neck clearly broken. Standing over him was a tall, broad-shouldered woman with the lines of age and experience on half her face that matched her short, silvery hair. The skin on the other side of her face was smoother, less natural, and there was a flatness to her left eye that gave away what she’d finally attempted to conceal after decades of wearing it openly.