by M. D. Cooper
Barne took them around the city via a circuitous route, passing onto gravel roads again after a while, and then onto another paved highway that entered the city from the east.
“Where are we going, once we’re at the city?” Amy asked after not speaking for a few hours. “I’m really hungry.”
“I’ve managed to set up a meeting with a short-range freight hauler that moves grain off-planet to stations insystem. He can get us up to one of the moons…Baqara, from the looks of it,” Barne replied. “That’s tomorrow morning. I’ve set up a safe house in the city, so that’s where we’ll hunker down ‘til then.”
“But what about food?” Amy asked.
“We have food,” Chase promised, looking down at Amy, who sat beside him. “Well, it’s stuff that does the same thing as food once it’s inside your body.”
“Do you mean it tastes like crap?” Amy asked, wrinking her nose and showing some spunk for the first time.
Chase gave a low chuckle. “Yeah, but I was trying to be more delicate than that.”
“I’m ten, I’m not a child,” Amy informed him. “Besides, my dad says worse stuff all the time.”
That was the one thing Rika really didn’t like about this mission: the ambiguity over who Amy really was. Captain Ayer hadn’t known, and apparently neither did the Old Man. The Marauders had been approached by an intermediary, who claimed that, should knowledge of the girl’s identity leak, it would make even bigger problems for her father. Maintaining the fiction that she was safe at home was paramount.
Rika had been instructed not to ask Amy about her father, and she’d been ready to comply—but that was before they’d been attacked by multiple enemies and lost their off-world transport.
As far as she was concerned, any intel was good intel. It wasn’t as though the team was going to spill the beans to anyone out on Faseema.
“Who is your father?” Rika asked.
Still wearing her helmet, Rika could see a frown settle on Amy’s forehead without having to turn.
“You don’t know?” the girl asked, then glanced at Leslie. “You said you worked for him?”
Rika shook her head. “No, he hired us, but we never met him. It was all done through an intermediary.
“I don’t understand…” Amy said. “I assumed you were all out of uniform because this isn’t one of his worlds, and you were hiding.”
Barne chuckled. “Well, that second part is true, at least.”
Amy’s words narrowed down Rika’s list of suspects. There weren’t a lot of men on this side of the cluster who were said to possess worlds; though there were a few, one stood out.
“Your father is Stavros,” Rika stated after a moment’s consideration.
A look of consternation passed over Amy’s face. Rika suspected that she had been instructed not to share that information in the event of capture—and by the look in the girl’s eyes, she was now wondering if she had been captured anew.
“Well, that makes things interesting,” Barne said before cursing quietly under his breath.
Rika connected to Faseema’s general information network through a relay Barne had set up, and looked up what public information there was on Stavros and his family: his wife had died several years prior, and he had only one daughter—Amy.
“Good thing you told us, Amy,” Leslie said. “You may not be immediately recognized, but if the locals do identify you, we may have an interesting scenario on our hands.”
“What do you mean?” Amy asked.
“The folks around here aren’t big fans of your father,” Rika replied, wondering why K-Strike had brought Amy to Faseema.
Her intel said that Amy had been captured four light years from here, in the Sydon System. Holding her there would have been a far better option than taking her through Politica-controlled Oran to Faseema.
<’Bout sums it up,> Barne replied.
“Are you guys talking?” Amy asked. “You all went quiet at once. I can tell when people are using the Link, you know, even if I don’t have it.”
“Sorry,” Leslie apologized. “We just didn’t want to worry you with our speculation over who might have taken you, and who else might be out there.”
“Like the people that shot down your ship?”
Rika nodded. “Just like them.”
No one spoke for several minutes after that, and Rika turned to look out the window, to the north where the air and spaceport lay.
A ship rose into the sky on an invisible pillar of gravitons, passing up through the clouds and into space in just a few minutes.
If Patty and her shuttle were still intact, none of this would have been necessary; they’d be well on their way to the Romany by now. No need to hop a ride on some civilian freighter out of a local port.
Rika glanced back to where Patty lay on the rear seat. Chase had placed her in an induced coma while a dose of mednano worked on her internal injuries.
With any luck, she’d be back on her feet before they had to get to the spaceport. The idea of getting Patty through planetary exit customs—
Barne laughed.
Dammit…
Rika couldn’t believe she had forgotten about her ‘normal’ right arm. If it was still on the shuttle, and the enemy checked that over, the other mech would know exactly what she was up against.
she said stubbornly.
While they spoke, they had passed through the outskirts of Kandahar City, and into the typical spread of warehouses and service companies that surrounded a air and spaceport.
Rika was surprised when Barne drove through that district to an area with smaller retail stores lining a broad boulevard. A row of tall trees ran down the center of the road, and streamers hung from their branches. A banner stretching above them read: ‘Reclamation Day, 3050!’
Rika hadn’t sorted out why the locals had such a strange calendar year, but was more interested in when the celebration was. She looked it up, and saw that the celebration would be in three days; it was in honor of the day the new government centered on Faseema was established, after the war with The Politica.
Not much of a reclamation, she thought. More like an exile…or something.
The street was not heavily trafficked, though a number of groundcars were on the road, with some craft also in the skies above. More importantly, there was almost no foot traffic on the sidewalks, and half the businesses appe
ared shuttered.
After driving for a few blocks, Barne slowed the truck and turned into a narrow alley between two buildings.
“We gonna fit?” Chase asked.
Barne lowered his window and folded his mirror in, gesturing for Rika to follow suit. “We’ll fit.”
The truck squeezed between the buildings, rolling over a few boxes that had been leaning against them. Rika had a momentary fear that there might be someone living in the boxes, but breathed a sigh of relief when the wheels didn’t bounce over anything big enough to be a person.
Once past the two buildings, the space opened up enough for Barne to turn the truck around and nose it into the alley to block it off.
“And here we are,” he announced.
“Another day, another abandoned building,” Chase joked.
Leslie laughed. “You don’t appreciate the aesthetic, Chase? Barne always takes us to the nicest places—he can find.”
“You want the Plaza Park Hotel?” Barne asked. “It’s down the road. Complete with enough security to make sure the likes of us never get in.”
Rika pushed her door open and stepped into the small courtyard between four buildings. All of them appeared to be unused—some were boarded up, others had broken windows. All were covered with graffiti.
“Which one shall be our lovely accommodation?” Rika inquired.
“There.” Barne pointed to one of the boarded up buildings. “Lock combo is our usual.”
Rika nodded and approached the back of the store. A sign on the door read, ‘Fran’s Fabulous Fabrics.’ She reached above the jamb and found the locking device. Keying in the code by feel, Rika pivoted, getting ready to fire with her GNR if anything awaited them inside.
“Monitoring net reads clear,” Barne reported from her side.
“Yeah, I’m just paranoid,” Rika replied as the lock disengaged, and she put a hand on the knob. “Blame me?”
Barne shook his head. “Not really. Paranoia’s a good survival trait in our line of work.”
‘Line of work’. Something about the statement struck Rika as incongruous. She supposed that, for Barne, it was a line of work. It was a career he had chosen and engaged in with great passion.
For Rika, it was her life. She was always a mech, always armored, always primed for a fight. It was life back on the Romany, or shore leave that felt like the job.
Being in the shit, in some dump, on some crappy planet or station? Now that was her normal life.
She pushed the door open, sweeping her GNR across the small room at the back of the store. True to the sign, dozens of bolts of cloth rested in racks; though as many were pulled out and strewn across the floor, their bright colors and patterns muted by dust and grime.
Rika moved into the room while Barne covered her from the entrance. Neither expected to find anyone, and they both hoped they wouldn’t. The sort of people hiding in here would probably be homeless or neighborhood kids. If either of those saw the team, the safe house wouldn’t be so safe anymore.
Killing any occupants would take care of the problem, but that wasn’t how the Marauders—team Basilisk in particular—operated.
Rika’s scan turned up no heat sources in the back room, and nothing showed on IR or UV. She signaled to Barne that the space was clear and moved to the door that led to the front sales area.
Barne followed behind, covering her right side as she pushed the door open.
It was dark—the store’s front windows boarded up—and roughly twenty by thirty meters. Racks of cloth, some large cutting tables, and two auto-weavers filled the space.
Rika moved out, checking the corner behind the door before starting her sweep on the left side, looking down each aisle and scanning with her sensor suite, while Barne covered her from the doorway.
When she had passed all the aisles, Rika walked down the far one and performed the same sweep from the front of the store.
Nothing turned up—other than a few mice, who were happily nesting in a pile of wool—and she called out softly, “We’re clear.”
Half a minute later, the rest of the team filed into the room. They dumped guns, ammo, and other equipment onto the counters in the back.
With the truck clear, Chase and Barne went out to fetch Patty. A minute later, they brought her in and laid her down on one of the cutting tables.
“How’s she look?” Rika asked as she approached.
“Better,” Chase replied. “Her internal bleeding is all cleaned up, and her vessels and arteries are stitched back together. Her liver and right kidney are just about all set, too. I expect her right lung to be healed up in an hour, tops. If she checks out after that, we’ll bring her out of the coma.
“Glad to hear it,” Rika said, and not just because she didn’t want to haul Patty to the spaceport in a coma. She had gotten to know the pilot on the trip in, and her generally positive attitude toward life combined with an often-sarcastic wit made Patty an enjoyable person to be around.
Chase’s nod was resolute. “Patty’s made of some damn tough stuff. Gonna take more than a downed bird to take her out. Plus, the Old Lady would have our hides if we effed her up too much, so she’d better be OK.”
“Captain Ayer did tell us to take care of her,” Rika remembered, giving Patty one last look before turning to Leslie and Amy, who were settling down behind the back counter.
“You want to do a little recon, or should I?” Rika asked.
Leslie glanced at Amy, who, while looking better than she had when they brought her out of the bunker, still looked scared and uncertain.
Rika supposed that the drive in the truck had probably been reassuring. They had been out in the world, moving through traffic like other vehicles. But now they were hiding in an abandoned store—not exactly a confidence builder.
“I’ll stay here,” Leslie decided. “You go take a peek.”
Rika nodded, clasped Chase on the shoulder as she walked by, and strode through the back room and outside into the enclosed area between the stores.
The back door of the truck was still open, so Rika closed it quietly before turning to look at the rooftops. She gauged the strength of the balustrade and leapt up, grasping it with her left arm, and swung herself up onto the roof.
It was late in the afternoon, and Oran still shone overhead; though the shadows were beginning to lengthen. Rika looked up and saw a smattering of cars flying in the air, but most of the traffic was on the ground.
Rika doubted that any of the vehicles overhead would have spotted her;if they did, Faseema was not so civilized that an armored figure on a rooftop would be cause for alarm. Still, Rika engaged her stealth systems, blending into the rooftop’s gravel surface.
She crept to the front of the building across a series of boards that were laid along the roof, releasing a passel of drones as she went—restocked from Barne’s supplies—instructing them to take up positions on surrounding buildings.
Many of the local businesses had cameras and sensors on their roofs; Rika’s drones located those systems and tagged them on her HUD.
This was her last batch of drones—she had lost the majority back at the granaries. The rest of the team was low, too, and she made a mental note to recover these before they left.
Rika settled into her position as Kandahar City eased into evening, the traffic increasing for a time before the number of cars began to diminish.
There was a comforting aspect to the hum of the city: the sounds of cars and people mixed with the rustling of leaves in the large trees that ran down the middle of the boulevard.
Every now and then, a group of kids—some as young as ten, others older and more raucous—would pass by below. Their brief bouts of noise and color were a refreshing break from the quiet and stoic adults that made up the majority of the sparse foot traffic.
No one stopped at the windows of the fabric store; few even gave the place a second glance, which was good to see. It meant that the store was long since forgotten, completely blended in
to the urban landscape.
“I love how you can still see the stars here—even in the cities,” Chase said as he settled down beside her, leaning against the raised edge of the wall. He was wearing civilian garb, but she could see the neckline of his ballistic-sublayer poking above his shirt.
Rika gave him a warm smile. He had approached quietly, but there was no way to make it across the gravel rooftop without giving off more than a little sound.
“How are things below?”
Rika could have monitored everything on the Link, but she was keeping her EM signature quiet, enjoying feeling the pulse of the city.
“Patty came to right on schedule,” Chase informed her. “She’s pissed that she lost the shuttle—she said there was absolutely nothing on her scan when she came in. Blames herself for us being stuck here.”
“She knows that’s nonsense,” Rika dismissed the notion. “She was coming in fast for evac with no overhead scan. You just can’t see everything in that situation. We certainly didn’t expect there to be a whole other player on the field; though had we known who Amy’s father was, we certainly would have.”
“I wonder who they were,” Chase mused.
“Could have been anyone. Maybe they work for whoever hired K-Strike. Might have been on their way to pick her up from the farm. Could be some other third party that saw an opportunity… Stars, it could have been Stavros’s own people, looking to nab the girl once we’d found her and save paying our rate.”
“Great to have a list that includes pretty much everyone,” Chase replied, his voice rife with irony. “What do we do with her now, anyway? Do we take her to the designated rendezvous, or do we just hand her over to the authorities when we get to the Politica-controlled stations here in Oran?”
“We don’t know how K-Strike got their hands on Amy,” Rika pointed out. “Could be a traitor in Stavros’s government; if she doesn’t make it back to him, the Marauders won’t get paid. Amy stays with us, and we take her to the rendezvous.”
Chase inclined his head and nodded. “Sound reasoning. So right now, we just keep our heads down and hope Barne can get his guy to move us off-planet.”
