by M. D. Cooper
“No prank.” Chase gave a languid wink. “I didn’t do a thing to your Link. And Tex here didn’t either, did you, Tex?”
“I try not to touch garbage if I can help it,” the RR-4 ground out the words like a hydraulic ram crushing refuse.
Chase lifted a hand and wiggled his fingers at Hal. “I guess we’re just magic.”
“Well, I hope you didn’t come all this way just to play tricks on me.” Hal’s voice conveyed more bravado than his expression belied. “I just run a docking bay. I don’t have money, I don’t have power.”
“You know things, Hal. You know a lot of things. Stuff that doesn’t make it onto the station networks, stuff that no one logs anywhere. Eventually, if a thing is worth knowing, it makes its way to you.”
Hal folded his arms across his chest and stared silently at Chase for a few seconds, and then his scowl turned into a smile. “OK. So what do you want to know? And how much can you pay for it?”
“Well, first off, I want everything you have on Pierce. Then I want our ship fueled, but not a soul is to step aboard it. If they do….”
“You’ll sever their Link?” Hal asked with a snort.
Tex leant forward and grabbed a torsion bar that was leaning against the bulkhead. Chase knew from experience that Hal often threatened to beat people with it and, as evidenced by the blood on the end, he’d carried out that threat once or twice.
With a casual ease, Tex bent the torsion bar into a U and then tossed it onto the desk, where it slid to a stop directly in front of the dockmaster.
“Consider that our down payment,” Tex rumbled.
Chase tried not to laugh as the color drained from Hal’s face. He knew it was base to make light of someone else’s fear, but a snicker or two escaped before he managed to fully compose himself.
“OK, Hal. Let’s have it. Everything on Pierce.”
“Chase.” All strength was gone from Hal’s voice; the man was pleading now. “If I spill, she’ll kill me…or worse.”
“Do you remember Rika?” Chase asked. “The woman that Pierce sold at auction? The woman you played a part in putting on that block?”
Hal’s eyes stayed fixed on Chase’s as he nodded slowly.
“Well, she’s coming back. Very soon. She hasn’t forgotten how you treated her.”
“R-Rika? She’s a pacifist, she hates—”
“She’s Genevia’s future,” Tex interrupted.
“Genevia?” Hal asked, his face a mask of confusion. “Genevia’s gone.”
Chase shook his head. “That’s where you’re wrong. In a month—probably less—the Parsons System will be back in Genevia’s fold. Now…enough stalling. I want Pierce.”
PAYBACK’S A BASTARD
STELLAR DATE: 02.05.8950 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Dekar Station, Merchant Docking Ring
REGION: Parsons System, Old Genevia, Nietzschean Empire
Kelly followed Chase and Tex in full stealth as they walked through the warehouse district on Dekar Station’s merchant ring. Though she tried to keep her mind calm and focused, there was no denying that the confrontation would be entertaining to watch.
From what she could see of the captain, Chase appeared calm, but Kelly knew there had to be rage seething beneath the surface of his normally placid self.
As the journey from Iberia to Parsons wore on, he’d become tenser and more irritable. The shift in his behavior hadn’t been overt, but had been most apparent in the things he didn’t say. Whenever the team discussed specifics for gathering intel in the Parsons System, Chase would only tell them he’d start the ball rolling on Dekar.
When pressed, the captain had finally explained that they’d start with a dockmaster named Hal and move up from there. It was now obvious that he’d known who was next up the ladder all along.
It wasn’t until Kelly stood in the corner of Hal’s office, invisible and silent, that she’d put it all together. So far as Chase was concerned, intel was a secondary objective. He was on Dekar for revenge.
Everyone in Rika’s Marauders had heard the story of how Rika had been sold at auction, but the details were always sketchy and changed a lot from telling to telling. Rika herself never spoke of it, though a few comments she’d made from time to time had led Kelly to wonder if said auction had occurred in the Parsons System.
Well, Kelly, now you have your answer. Parsons was just one shit-show after another for Hammerfall. I just hope Chase gets something useful from this woman before he kills her.
Normally, Chase would be the last person she’d worry about going off mission; he always put the job first. But in Hal’s office, a different man had emerged. One who was willing to sacrifice a part of himself to cut out a piece of another.
Something I know all too well.
Ahead, Chase and Tex rounded a corner and approached a door with a sign overtop that read ‘Judy’s Imports’. The captain stopped and stared at the door for almost a full minute, finally squaring his shoulders and stepping forward.
At that moment, it occurred to Kelly that Rika would not want Chase to kill in cold blood.
No one in the battalion would. Though Rika was the heart of the Marauders, it was clear to everyone that she leant on Chase in many ways. His calm surety gave Rika her strength, a strength she amplified and spread out to the rest of her people.
Well, Kelly, you’ll just have to make sure that Chase stays on the straight and narrow. If there’s brutal murder to be done, it’ll be by your hands.
Kelly sidled up behind Chase as the captain banged a fist on the door. The marker on her HUD showed that Keli was moving past the captain to take up a position next to the door. Kelly reached out and brushed a hand against her sister-in-arms’ shoulder in solidarity. Not that she expected any great challenge to lay within, it was just nice to know her family was always with her.
Despite having spent considerable time in Parsons during the war, she’d never been on Dekar—but it hadn’t taken long for her to realize that this was a station living off the corpse of a dying system. She couldn’t imagine that the locals could pose a significant threat to Chase and Tex. Throw in two stealthed SMIs as backup, and they could burn the whole place down.
A half minute after Chase’s fist had pounded on its plas surface, the door leading into Judy’s Imports opened a crack, and a man’s hooded face appeared in the darkness beyond.
“What the hell do you want?”
Chase squared his shoulders, his voice brooking no argument. “My name is Captain Pallas, and you’re going to take me to see Pierce.”
“No one named—”
The man’s words were cut off as Tex’s boot swung forward and kicked the door open, flinging the hooded man across the small office space within. He smashed into the wall and fell in a heap next to a small potted tree.
“We don’t have time for your bullshit,” Chase growled as he followed Tex in. “Take us to Pierce.”
The man’s hood had fallen back, an unbridled expression of fear visible for all to see. Despite his near-panic, he shook his head in denial. “OK, look. I do know who she is, but Pierce doesn’t operate from here. This is just a warehouse. You’ve got the wrong place.”
“Should I just kill him and we’ll look around ourselves?” Tex asked Chase.
Kelly eased into the small room and took up a position next to the man. From her vantage point, she could see the war taking place in Chase’s eyes. For a moment, she thought he’d give the order, but then the captain shook his head.
“No, Tex, as much as I’d like to wipe out everyone in this shithole, we’re not the murder squad. So far as I know, this asswipe had nothing to do with what happened to Rika. I really only care about Pierce.”
As Chase spoke, the man nodded rapidly, his words tumbling out almost unintelligibly. “I’ve only been with Pierce for a year. I don’t know anything about this Rika you’re talking about.”
Kelly knelt down and touched the back of the cowering man’s neck, sending in a passel of nano that overrode his mods and put him to sleep.
At times, she felt guilty over how easy it was for the ISF’s tech to overcome that of regular people. A person’s mind was supposed to be sacrosanct, but New Canaan technology could bypass almost any safeguard with near magical ease.
She knew, however, that the alternative was to either ply a person with copious amounts of drugs or to hit them in the head until they passed out.
Or shoot them, I suppose. I guess in the grand scheme of things, using this nano is the less smelly pile of shit.
Tex moved to a door on the right of the small reception area, while Keli dropped a stealthed equipment sack before moving to another door in the back.
* * * * *
“Hit it, Tex,” Chase said, and the RR-4 nodded once in response before kicking the door open and flinging a handful of drones out into the room beyond.
They lifted into the air and began to map out the interior of the warehouse. The space was larger than the public station layouts indicated, and Chase realized that the interior bulkheads had been removed, creating what might be the largest open area on the station.
He complied, and six of his drones lifted off, flying out into the open space.
Chase nodded and dropped a marker on the combat net, letting Tex know where he was going, and ran out into the warehouse, jumping onto a low crate then leaping through the air to land atop a five-meter-high stack of non-descript, grey cargo pods.
Potter sent more drones off the captain’s back and out into the surrounding area.
He wanted to admonish them to be careful, mildly annoyed that the two women had split up. They’re SMIs, Chase reminded himself after a moment’s reflection. Going solo is in their blood.
Chase tapped the drone’s feeds, getting a visual on the enemies. His jaw tightened as he recognized one of them from the day Rika was sold at action: Jarl. He’d been half the pair who had put her into her cryopod.
And then proceeded to kick the shit out of me. He ground his teeth at the memory.
The hull plates were stacked on the far side of an open space in the warehouse. A few drones moved along the interior ‘road’, the first signs of activity Chase had seen in the facility.
He dropped down behind one of the crate-towers and activated his armor’s stealth systems. Ostensibly, the plan was for he and Tex to not use stealth, in order to flush the enemies toward Kelly and Keli, but he wasn’t going to risk the man he remembered all too well getting away.
Chase had never told Rika what Pierce’s guards had done to him after the auction. How it had consumed no small amount of his savings to pay for the reconstructive surgery.
He’d hunted one of the guards down afterward—that was how he’d learned it was an agent of the Marauders who had bought Rika. That guard hadn’t survived the encounter. Jarl, however, had gone to ground, and Chase had run out of time before the ship he’d booked passage on departed.
At the time, he had been certain that he’d be able to put those events behind him. But every time he thought about the beating he’d received at the hands of those two guards, the feelings surged to the surface of his mind, the memories of his complete failure humiliating him all over again.
He’d survived a war and the Nietzschean camps, and then two low-rent guards on Dekar had pulverized him.
He told himself that it had been the shock of seeing Rika in that state, about to be shipped away, that had left him vulnerable. He believed it too, but it didn’t change the fact that if he’d kept his wits, he could have saved her.
No matter, he thought. Jarl’s going to get what he has coming.
Tex signaled that he was in position, and Chase shook his head, clearing away the distracting memories. He eased between two crates, moving toward the right-hand side of the hull plates and setting up behind a waist-high pod labeled as containing titanium ingots.
The RR-4 moved into the open and fired his AC9D rifle, a larger variant of the smaller AC9CRs that Chase preferred. The weapon sounded like a fusion engine coughing as it kicked ten-gram rail slugs out at the hull plates.
For a moment, Chase was worried that the enemies wouldn’t expose themselves to return fire, but then one of the three did, leaning around the far side of his cover to get Tex in his sights. However, the RR-4 had seen the man ease out and was already back in cover before the enemy even fired his weapon.
Chase was also ready. He let fire with a trio of armor piercing rounds and smiled with satisfaction as his target fell.
Chase looked at the markers the AI had dropped on the combat net and saw that a group of four enemies was moving toward Tex. Two on the deck and two up on the crates.
The RR-4 had gone from being a flanker to a flankee.
Chase said.
Gauging where Jarl would be, Chase tossed a burn stick high in the air, aiming it to come down atop the other enemy. Seconds later, a man came out from behind the hull plates, screaming as he ran. Chase casually fired his rifle and dropped the thug.
Now it’s just you and me, Jarl.
He took a step back, took a deep breath, and rushed forward, planting a foot on the crate of ingots and leaping into the air, his mechanical legs sending him up over the hull plates.
In his haste to get to his enemy, he had carelessly leapt from his last firing location. Jarl had spotted him and fired an electron beam the moment Chase was in the clear.
The stream of relativistic electrons hit him, and C
hase spun to the side, clipping a section of hull plate before crashing to the deck.
The shot had burned away part of the armor on his left side, but that didn’t slow Chase down. Something seemed to snap within himself as he rolled to his feet and spun to face Jarl, firing on the guard while barreling forward.
Jarl screamed unintelligibly, but Chase barely heard it, his vision beginning to tunnel; the locus of his greatest personal failures before him.
A small voice in Chase’s head told him to stop, told him not to let his past dictate his future, but he ignored it, determined to punish the scum before him.
A second later, he was on Jarl. He wrenched the man’s weapon away before bringing his fists down again and again on the lightly armored foe, his vision turning red.
“Chase!” Tex screamed from somewhere nearby, and suddenly Chase felt himself being yanked back, away from his target.
He spun and saw Tex’s shoulder as the RR-4 hauled him to his feet, pulling him back from Jarl.
“Sergeant, get the fuck off me!” Chase snarled.
“You gotta stop, Captain. This isn’t who you are.”
At his feet, Jarl moaned in agony. Chase clenched his jaw, wanting nothing more than to end the man’s life, to finish doling out payback for what he’d done to both Rika and himself.
“He doesn’t deserve mercy.”
“Maybe not,” Tex said quietly as he let go of Chase’s arm. “Probably not. But you gotta remember, someday this war’s going to be over, and we’re going to have to figure out how to be people again, not killing machines. You need to remember that. If you shred yourself out here on the field, there won’t be anything left for Rika when we finally get through this shit.”
“Do you really believe that?” Chase asked. “That we’ll see an end? All I see is war.”
“I do,” Tex replied with a resolute nod. “I really do.”
