Running Start Read online

  Running Start

  J.A. Sutherland

  Darkspace Press

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Also by J.A. Sutherland

  About the Author

  RUNNING START

  Dark Runs #1

  by J.A. Sutherland

  Copyright 2018, Sutherland. All rights reserved.

  Created with Vellum

  What would you do if you discovered you’d been sold?

  For Mason Guthrie, a sudden arrest, railroad trial, and quick conviction for the “vandalism” of fixing things around his tenement building come as a shock.

  For Rosa Fuentes, it’s just more confirmation that, to Earth’s rulers, they’re nothing but commodities to be bought and sold.

  Together — along with Rosa’s disturbingly capable AI — they break out and make their way off Earth to start a new, free life.

  Unfortunately, the folks they stole a billion credits from along the way would like those back.

  One

  Mason’s legs burned and his breath rasped in his throat.

  A quick glance behind him showed the flashies still in pursuit, but at least they were on foot — no aircars or hoverbikes were visible. He thought he might have even gained a little on them, but it was hard to tell in the shadows of street level. High above, most of the lights on the crosswalks that blocked out the sun were out as well — maintenance in the lows not being much of a priority.

  He also wasn’t sure why they were chasing him.

  He’d been coming down the hall from school, minding his own business — he’d heard the mids didn’t have to go to school. They just got their classes on their explants at home — or implants if they were particularly high in the mids, he supposed, but he’d never seen anyone with a real implant except the flashies. Even the teachers had explants. Why the mids could study from home but the lowlies couldn’t, he wasn’t sure — something about them not being trustworthy. Had to have the lowlies in a classroom where they could be seen and not cheat.

  He dragged his mind back from one of the tangents he so often found himself on to try and figure out his current situation.

  Mason had just stepped off the walkway between buildings, when someone yelled, “There he is!”

  Long experience taught Mason that it was best to run when you heard something like that, even if you weren’t the target. Run now and sort it out later, was a good rule for a lowly to heed.

  It wasn’t until he looked behind him the first time that he saw it was flashies chasing him, and then he really got scared. No run-in with a flashy was good, but especially not if they were specifically looking for you. At best, they might think you’d seen something and want a statement — that wasn’t so bad, in itself, but when whoever was involved in what you’d supposedly seen found out … well, whether you’d seen it or not, it was better not to take chances.

  That was another rule to live by.

  He wasn’t really very good with the rules, at least the ones about other people, but when the consequences were getting beat up, or worse, he’d learned to make an extra effort.

  Mason darted to his right into a darker, narrower street. There were a few lights from glowing signs in the windows along it, but most of it was cast in shadows. It was the sort of street Mason knew better than to be on, even with a few others, but he figured with the flashies right behind him, what could get worse?

  He found out when an arm came out of the shadows right at neck level.

  Pain shot through him, his teeth clacked together, and he suddenly couldn’t breathe, even though he really wanted to scream. His feet went out from under him as his upper body stopped in place and he went down hard. Dirt and gravel and bits of torn up street dug into his back.

  He heard a horrible, scary sound — sort of a repeated gyuck gyuck gyuck, and realized it was him trying to breathe.

  Hands rifled his pockets.

  “Anything?”

  “Nothing.”

  “He got a plant?”

  He tried to raise his hands to stop them, but someone knocked his arm down and stood on it, grinding it into the street. Fingers plucked behind his ear and he wanted to cry — his mom couldn’t afford another explant. He rolled his head to the side, but the hands grasped his hair and pulled it back.

  “Hold still, kid, or I’ll cut you.”

  He heard the buzz of a viblade and froze.

  “That’s better.” The fingers plucked the bud from behind his ear. “Now hold still and keep your eye open if you want to keep it.”

  More fingers pried his eyelid open and he could see the blur of the viblade right in front of him.

  “Hey!”

  Shouts and footsteps rounded the corner.

  “Flashies! Bounce!”

  The hands left him and Mason rolled on his side — still making the gyuck-gyuck noise, but not as bad and he felt like he was getting some air. But they’d gotten his explant bud, the screen on his right eye just showed a miserable, puke-green message. Lost signal.

  He made it to his hands and knees and that seemed to make his breathing easier until new hands grasped his arms and dragged him upright.

  “My explant,” he managed to gasp out. “They took my bud.”

  A face swam into view in front of him. It was one of the flashies, his face red and sweaty. He looked like he was having nearly as much trouble breathing as Mason was.

  Thoughts of the lost explant bud went out of his mind as the flashy’s fist connected with his gut.

  “Don’t ever make us run!”

  Doubled over, air gone from his body again, he had a bare moment to see the flashy’s stunstick coming for his head.

  “Stop resisting!”

  Two

  “Next case! Mason Oliver Guthrie!”

  The court clerk’s voice cut through the crowded room, blasted from the speakers like some kind of sonic crowd-control device. It had to be, in order to be heard over the babble of voices from the hundred or more men and women crammed into the small space. That and the crowd noise hurt Mason’s ears, but he heard it even through his cupped hands.

  He couldn’t make himself respond, though. The night in the cell — he assumed it was only a night, but it seemed like so much longer — had been more than he could take. The crowd all around him, people jostling him, touching him — it had all been too much. He’d finally worked his way to a corner and faced the wall. He couldn’t get down on the floor and curl up, there wasn’t even room for that, but he could put his forearms against the wall and hide his face in them.

  A few of the others in the cell hit him and called him names, but they’d eventually left him alone when he didn’t move or
react.

  Eyes closed, he’d kept his forearms against the wall, and tried to pretend there weren’t so many people around.

  Then the crowd had started to move and he’d been forced to leave the relative safety of the wall.

  Guards with stunsticks opened the cell and waved everyone down a corridor, whacking anyone who moved too slow. The stunsticks were on a lower setting, so didn’t knock anyone out, they just hurt and then numbed whatever got hit. Mason’s stomach rolled over and over from the stress of the crowd, but he managed to hang back until some space opened in the cell, then follow the crowd without anyone too close.

  The guards only hit him twice to get him to move faster.

  Then they’d filed into another cell, or maybe cage was a better name, because the walls were wire mesh, not bars. This one was even smaller and the crowd shoved inside was worse. Mason balked at the entry, but a stunstick jabbed into his lower back and another guard shoved him inside.

  Too many people, too close — he couldn’t handle it. He hunched his shoulders, crossed his arms, and tried to bury his face in his own chest.

  “Next case! Mason Oliver Guthrie!” the call came again. “Mason Oliver Guthrie! Last call!”

  The words penetrated the shell Mason was trying to build around himself and he struggled back. If they were calling him he had to answer, not because he cared about what was going to happen next, but because it might mean they’d take him out of the cell — anything was better than staying in this crowd.

  He worked his jaw, blinked his eyes, and called out.

  “That’s me! Here!” Mason raised his hands over his head to be seen. He had to raise both of them, as they were cuffed together at the wrist with thin plastic bands. His stomach hurt and he was still dizzy from the stunstick. He also felt like he was going to throw up, but that was either from the aftereffects of the stunstick or the stench of the bodies around him. He tried to get through the crowd of bodies to the cage door. “Hey, let me through, okay?”

  Grudgingly and slowly the mass of men between him and the smaller hearing area at one end of the room parted a bit and he managed to shove and slide his way through.

  Two heavily armored and visored flashies met him at the cell door.

  “Guthrie?” one asked.

  “Yeah, that’s me, I —”

  He broke off as they each grabbed an arm and yanked him from the crowd to stand before an old, worn lectern a few meters away.

  “Mason Oliver Guthrie?”

  Mason looked up. There were three vidscreens on the wall in front of him. The one in the center showed a heavy-set, older woman with a light sprinkling of grey in her blondish hair. The screen on the right showed a well-dressed woman with the vacant stare of someone intently accessing an implant and paying little attention to her physical surroundings. The left screen was blank. Mason figured the woman in the middle was the judge, she was wearing a robe, but he wasn’t sure about the other one — he’d never been in court before.

  He still wasn’t sure why he was here or why they’d picked him up in the first place. When he woke up from the stunstick — his head throbbing from both the stun and the lumps — he was stuffed in a cell with a hundred other guys overnight. None of the flashies would answer his questions or even acknowledge him. They’d ignored everyone until morning when they started herding the whole group out of the cell, cuffed them again — this time in front, at least — and moved the whole crowd down a narrow, stinking hallway to this room.

  “Yeah, I —”

  “ID scan!” the flashy on his left barked, giving him a hard shove and pointing to the top of the lectern.

  They’d taken his explant screen out and the bud was long gone, but there was an old-fashioned scanner on top of the lectern. Mason raised his hands and put his right index finger on the scanner. There was a flash of light and a quick sting as it read his fingerprint and took a DNA sample for confirmation. A light on the top of the lectern glowed green and the judge grunted.

  “Let’s get started then,” she said. “You have counsel?”

  “What?” Mason was more confused than ever. He just wanted to go home and make sure his mom was okay — she’d been sick more and more often lately, but wouldn’t see a doctor because it cost too much, and she’d be worried when he hadn’t come home last night.

  “Lawyer!” the judge said loudly. “Do you have a lawyer?”

  Mason shook his head. “No, I don’t even know what —”

  “Public defender appointed,” the judge said, cutting Mason off.

  The third vidscreen lit up and showed a heavy-set black man in a rumpled suit. He glanced up once, seemed to nod to Mason, then looked down again. Mason thought he looked exhausted, like he hadn’t slept in days — or maybe he had, since the suit looked like it could have been slept in repeatedly.

  “Prosecution ready?”

  “Yes, Judge Conway.”

  “Defense ready?”

  “Yes, your honor.”

  “What’s the plea?”

  “Not guilty, your honor,” the black man said.

  “Wait!”Mason yelled. “I don’t even know what I’m —”

  One of the flashies shoved him again.

  “Speak when spoken to,” the judge said, “or I’ll order you stunned and you can spend the rest of your trial on the floor in a puddle of drool and whatever else leaks out. Are we clear?”

  Already stunned speechless by what was happening, Mason merely nodded.

  “Answer me, lowly!”

  “I … yes, sir, clear … um … your honor?”

  “Good. Now let’s see what we have.” The judge’s eyes grew vacant as she accessed her implant. “Okay, so, trespassing, vandalism, destruction of public property, destruction of private property, unlicensed modification of a State-owned media device — you’ve been busy. Sylvia?”

  Mason’s head was spinning even more now. What were they talking about? He hadn’t done any of those things.

  “Yes, your honor, thank you.” The woman was speaking now. “We have multiple reports from the building superintendent at the Park 500, lower-level housing project where the defendant resides. On repeated occasions the defendant has entered areas off-limits to the tenants and caused incalculable damage.” She paused as though referencing something. “Piping leading to seven food dispensers, several environmental units, and the building’s news feed.”

  Mason almost sighed with relief. His shoulders sagged with the release of tension and his legs felt weak. If that’s what this was about, then it was nothing but a misunderstanding. He could explain those things.

  “You’ve got it all wrong,” he said, “I didn’t break anything, I fixed those things.” He held his hands up, gesturing at the woman — the prosecutor. “Look, the whole twelfth floor was having trouble with their food dispensers — they’d get nothing for a week, they had to bum food from everyone in the building just to eat, and when they did start working the nutrimash was spoiled. The pipes in the distribution room were installed wrong, see?” He tried to draw the problem in the air with his hands, but the cuffs interfered. “There was this weird bend for no reason coming off the building’s main supply line, and it got clogged up. Then when the pressure unclogged it, what had sat in the pipe for so long was making people sick. So I just rerouted it, and there hasn’t been a problem since.”

  The judge and the two lawyers were staring at him, so he went on.

  “Now, the environmental units in the building have this really weird design defect in their circuitry that throws them into a reset cycle for hours, so I came up with this fix with Mr. Mathews at school, he’s my engineering teacher, and I’ve installed that in a few units. They work great now, but I don’t have enough parts for all of them. And Mrs. Spence in 12-C, well, she couldn’t get a net connection at all — so I brought a signal tester home from school and figured out that the antennae on the twelfth floor’s repeater were mismatched. Most of the signal was going over to the next building and
not ours at all, so I fixed that and the whole floor doubled the speed of their connection so —”

  “Bradley, is your client changing his plea to guilty?” the judge asked, interrupting.

  “No, your honor, absolutely not.” The public defender glared through the screen at Mason. “Young man, you need to shut your mouth right now or I can’t help you.”

  “Help me?” Mason said. “I haven’t done anything —”

  “Exactly — not guilty, your honor. And I’d ask that the entire interruption be stricken from the record as unresponsive — there was no question pending and he wasn’t even sworn in as a witness. I’d hate to see an outburst like that taint the record.”

  “As would I,” the judge said. “It’s so ordered.” She stared at Mason. “All right, folks, let’s have no more interruptions like that. Evidence?”

  “We have the building superintendent, your honor,” the prosecutor said. “He’s positively identified the defendant and provided security footage of the defendant entering secure areas, as well as images of the damage done.”

  “There was no damage —” Mason cut off as the guard to his right placed a hand warningly on his stunstick.

  “He’s available to testify?” the judge asked.

  “Absolutely, your honor.”

  “Defense?”

  “Ah …” the public defender’s eyes glazed for a moment as he accessed his implant. “Your honor, it looks like the boy’s a good student … I mean —”