“Negative, met a friend down here willing to loan me air time. SITREP, over.”
Kel sounded concerned, even over the net. “We're at the theater out in the parking lot. Seems the show was sold out so we're waiting to see if we can scalp some tickets.”
“Won't be worth seeing live, 1-1,” Lasher countered. “We have it on good authority the crowd won't make it until the credits. Make for safe space, how copy?”
“1-4 this is 1-1. We heard from some people at concessions. Apparently they got in a load of chocolate covered mini-bot-drops and are selling them as regular mini-bot-drops, how copy, over?”
“Roger, 1-1. 1-4 out.”
“What is a mini-bot-drop?” Romeo asked.
“Type of candy they sell in the Core Worlds,” Lasher answered. “In this case, probably his way of telling me that the nanites used in a recent series of attacks are being used here without the workers knowing.”
“Oh, that's not good. That also means that the crowd we have coming down the north passage is primarily workers augmented by the Steel Devils, then?”
“Could be. I don't want to hurt them, but we might not have a choice.” Lasher put his hand onto the stone. Closing his eyes, he made contact with the Crucible, funneling power into his mind to fuel the Way. His senses raced through the hundreds of tunnels in an instant, finding the group advancing toward them. They had split in two. One was coming straight at them. The other group had taken the runner-tunnel, a shaft that went straight through the entirety of the mine level, and was circling back from the other direction.
He pushed his will through the Way. A stone crack filled with the force of the Crucible, becoming a fissure. The fissure widened to become a chasm. Rock collapsed, breaking the support struts to tumble into the tunnel. Silver and several workers were crushed by the cave-in. Lasher could see the mercenary pulling apart the impromptu grave, salvaging Silver before it could claim him. The devil was alive, but his leg and arm were badly fractured.
The double Lashers remained still as the second group moved past, oblivious of them a scant few meters away.
Twin Thunder held up the group. “Seems Lasher has set some traps for us. Strange that I can't sense him at all. Spread out. If you find him, signal to the rest of us before you engage.”
They split in several directions. Twin Thunder remained in place like a dog with a scent he couldn't reconcile. Eventually, he moved off in the direction of the cave-in.
“Can you lead them to the lowest part of this level?” Lasher asked once Twin Thunder had gone. “You'll know you're in the right place when you see a crossed pylon symbol.”
“I'll signal when I have them there.”
“Here's what I have planned.” Lasher took a moment to detail his plan for the remainder of the hunting party.
“Understood.” The word had barely left his mouth when Romeo-Lasher left the poncho to sprint down the passage.
“This ought to be interesting,” Lasher thought. He bounded up, the poncho slapping at his legs. Using a side passage, he moved around the cave-in he'd caused. He could feel the fear and death through the Crucible with every step. Approaching a corner leading him back to the main cargo lift, a sensation in the Crucible screamed at him to dive for the floor.
Kilmartin fired twice, missing both times. Lasher used the Way to hoist a rock, catapulting it at the merc who leaned his shoulder armor into it, easily blocking the projectile. “Do people actually fall for that?”
The merc lowered his gait, firing shots while walking backwards. Rock after rock sailed into the air, becoming a shield against the storm of gunfire. The bolts shattered all of them, filling the passage with dust. He changed his direction of aim, blowing out part of a support strut. Lasher rolled away from the rod-encrusted girders that came crashing down.
The Crucible scooped up the debris of rock and resicarbon, forming a wall in front of him. He pushed it forward, rapid closing the distance against his opponent. There was a lull in the onslaught as Kilmartin had to load a fresh magazine into the rifle. The rocks spread apart allowing Lasher to crash through. He took hold of Kilmartin’s rifle. Holding it flat, he rammed his knee into it, cracking the hand guards and bending the frame, then used the ruined weapon to toss the merc into the wall. Rapid fire knee strikes battered the tops of his opponent’s thighs where they weren't covered by the skel-frame's struts. Reaching to the back of the merc's head, Lasher thrust Beth's knife into the bottom of his jaw, following it with a savage slash to the throat.
He dropped the merc to the floor to answer his earpiece. “Romeo?”
“Please execute your space magic trick,” the impostor said hurriedly. “We have them right where we want them.”
Lasher placed his hands against the stone, reading the life force of the planet. Romeo had ducked into the fissure, wedging himself deep into the chasm beyond. The Swarm-tech infused workers were breaking the stone with their fists, trying to widen the gap to pull him free from his hiding place. Lasher flooded the stone with the Crucible's force, savagely cracking it above his body-double. In return, the facade, broke open, spilling a torrent of water that rushed into the space with the force of a cannon.
The Swamers were hit next, the water gushing through the widening crack, sending powerful blasts of liquid and stone into the passage. They were savaged by the maelstrom. Unable to find their footing, they were swept through adjoining passages.
“Neat trick,” Romeo chuckled his approval into the com.
Lasher pulled free from the Crucible into the waiting mask of Twin Thunder Mountain. Its red accents made him seem more machine or mannequin than a man. He was holding a heavy blaster pistol in both hands. He returned them to their holsters, bringing out two rods from a magnalock on the back of his armor. Twin Thunder’s robe swirled as he adopted a wide footed stance. The rods, held out to the side, ejected shims that formed them into maces. Static discharge fields, powered along the surface, making them appear ghostly, wrapped inside a soft hum. “You can come willingly or I can throw you down the mountain!”
“Everyone always wants me to come along willingly, following it up with a threat,” Lasher laughed. “I think the threat is just you puffing your chest out. You thugs are all the same, a hard shell around a fearful core. You want to seem tough but you don't want to put in the work to actually be so. Let's see what you got, One Echo Foothill.”
The scream from Twin Thunder was primal, a throwback to a time when men fought with close quarters weapons because it was all they had. A lunge, a sweep, and a smash sent splashes of stone skittering across the floor. Each swipe missed, the last connecting with a wall. Lasher was a blur, evading every strike as if Thunder had told him the movement ahead of actually doing it. The last thing Kilmartin saw before the light fully faded from his eyes was a choreography of death taking place between the most skillful opponents he would ever witness.
One of the electro-maces floated close to Lasher's head, prompting him to put up his hand to prevent its connecting. A surge of red electricity arced into it, forcing him to back up. He growled at the bite, shaking the numbness from his hand as Twin Thunder stalked him.
“Injury?” Asked the Steel Devil.
“Old one.” Lasher said, flexing his fingers back and forth.
“But you're not that old.”
“It's old to me.”
“I remember seeing you as a boy on Koban Sul,” Twin Thunder hissed. “I remember thinking, would my skill in the Eternal Work ever be good enough to rival the fire of that boy. Now I see you must have had a good publicist.”
“I have good memories too.,” Lasher countered. “I remember seeing an Iron Bamboo monk beating down someone similar to yourself in the Frontier. I asked him later why it seemed so effortless. He replied, 'Because the Eternal Work is based on love, not hate, greed, or anger. This man lost because the love of violence is merely the hatred of self. He never chased the Eternal Work, only suffered the Eternal Struggle.’”
“How dare
you!” the Mountain roared. He threw one of the maces, colliding with the stone above the mongrel's head. It hovered for a moment in the air, sailing back to his hand. He crossed the space between them in a single bound, landing in fury hard enough to crack the floor. The buzzing of the maces whirred through the air, mostly dodged but occasionally deflected by the petrified knife.
Lasher changed the momentum on the fighter, working the Way to reorient gravity in their shared space. The Mountain lost his footing, propping himself up against the wall. He came up easily, adopting a stance as sturdy as his name suggested.
“The one great thing about someone who thrives on hate instead of skill is that they can never tell when someone just needs them distracted or to blabber for a minute longer.” Lasher threw out his hands in an 'X' pattern, dropping to one knee. A wave of water blasted Twin Thunder from his feet into the rapidly filling tide. The water rushed around Lasher, who wrapped himself in the power of the Crucible. He watched the big man swept away by the flood. Then he dropped the force shield he'd created, riding the rush alongside his enemy. He rammed the stone knife again and again, in every vulnerable spot in the armor. Despite the lethal stings, Twin Thunder fought against him. Lasher shoved the knife under the belly plate, twisting it to cause enough pain to force the Mountain’s head forward. Lasher latched onto the voluminous neck, tearing out Twin Thunder’s throat with wicked canines. When the Mountain's strength waned, the mongrel snatched one of the heavy blaster pistols from his hip. He placed the ornate weapon under the man's chin, separating the top half of his head from the rest of him.
“Fluff! Now!”
“Power build up detected in enemy RIM-IV,” Ennix said. The Kangal turned on his heels. The plasma caster on its shoulder spun up, the tip glowing in an azure golden light illuminating the space. There was a flash from the molten energy projectile firing from the launcher to slam into the poncho over the downed Doom Cat.
The fabric exploded into tiny cinders as the projectile dug a path several meters deep into the floor. Screams echoed off the stone walls from the crowd of indentured servants rising by elevator to the top of the Sink. The flaming wisps cast odd shadows as they floated along the air currents coming down the shaft.
“You would think one of the mighty Kangal class would have noticed a lowly Doom Cat slipping from under its nose,” cooed the sandpaper hiss of the missing mech.
Ennix raised the gain on its audio sensors to their maximum level, trying to locate the source of the downed RIM-IV. The echo from the passage combined with the air currents coming down the shaft and the sound of rushing water all worked to confound the sensor suite.
“Poor little bully bot, all alone now. Your master is dead. Are you going to collect the bounty yourself?” Fluff asked.
“I have no master. Kilmartin is my partner.”
“Was. He was your partner.”
The coils shot from a nook in the ceiling, wrapping around the bot’s head. Vibro-generators spun to life, screeching against the prosteel struts they had locked onto. Fluff fell from the shadowy nook, dropping to the stone behind the Kangal mech. He jumped to the side, attaching to the wall for a power lunge, yanking his opponent from his stance. The mech tried to level its plasma caster at the Doom Cat but couldn't get the spiral condenser to spin fast enough against the bumps rattling its impromptu sleigh ride.
Fluff bounded up, changing form as he did so to his man-panther mode. He tore a cable free from the elevator array, threading it into the mech. “Your partner dropped this.”
Fluff produced an ion grenade, stuffing it into the struts underneath the back plate of the mech. He picked up the much larger machine, first righting it back to standing, followed by ramming its head into the wall at a dead run back to the lift. Ennix tried to counterattack, firing up an arc-bracer to slam into the annoying smaller bot. He met with empty air as the fiery fist streaked like a comet into one of the wall supports next to the elevator.
Fluff called the lift, which activated the counter cables to hoist Ennix into the air. A second or two into this flight, the plasma caster spun up, only to be engulfed in a pressure wave ending in sparks. The mech resembled a puppet whose strings had been cut being hoisted up out of the show.
The panther-mech whirled to see two Lashers standing up from the sluice that had deposited them close by. “Oh no! My brain has been fried by the after effects of Kel eating that Tyth chili!”
“Fluff, I'll explain later,” one Lasher told him. “Did you catch my chatter with Kel?”
“In-between wrecking a Kangal mech and being great at it you mean? I caught bits and pieces.”
“I see what you did there. Kel and Kat are going to fly the shuttle of slaves with the cargo back to the freighter to keep up appearances. Beth is waiting for us outside with that merc’s ship. We're going back to the Palladium. Once we're top side, we link up with Tolin and Yu to flank the freighter.”
“We always have the best times,” Fluff chuckled.
Eleven
“Both Silver Scorpion and Twin Thunder Mountain are dead? How can you report this as a win?” Ms. Chen asked in an icy tone.
“Ma'am, we got the rest of the shipment of colabrium en route to the Tianshan Forest. Most of the servants were recovered as well. Some of the locals were pressed to make up for the losses of the cave-in.”
“It wasn't a cave-in!” Chen glowered at the holographic image of the Work-Captain aboard the ship.
The man bowed out of the camera's field of view. He was replaced by a slightly older man, with military cropped hair showing vague signs of graying. “Ms. Chen, I am sorry that the undertaking has come to such a negative result. Our two families have done much for each other over the years. The failure of my men is a slight to you and I am most deeply sorry for the current position we have put you in.”
Chen's demeanor changed, softening to show respect. “My deepest sympathies for your loss, sir. It was not my intention to...”
The man in the broadcast cut her off. “No apologies necessary, Ms. Chen. We are responsible for our own success, not you. This is ever the way of the Eternal Work. We are receiving the final shuttle soon. We will offload the supplies and personnel, taking the time to indoctrinate the locals into our undertaking. Once secure, we will go down to the planet to apprehend the asset from the team sent by your partner. We are taking steps in the event we make Flight-15 before doing so. This Orin Lashra is very adept at slipping the noose. Do you have any advice that might benefit our pursuit?”
“Expect the unexpected, sir.”
The Work Captain nudged his way back into the broadcast. “Ms. Chen. I don't believe we should proceed with the current plan according to the black book, especially in light of the events at the Sink. Lasher and his crew have proven too dangerous. Although I am sure Venger Phoenix and his men are capable, we would do well to take on a complement of mercenaries or like-minded individuals before continuing our plans.”
Venger Phoenix looked away for a moment. There was a swipe, a blur of motion producing a blazing sword on the other side of the Work Captain's neck. It appeared to have been just taken from the forge, sounds of sizzling embers hissing their displeasure at the cool air in a series of snapping pops. The man's head fell away, his body soon following. There was no blood from the cauterizing effect of the blade.
“The Black Cypher mercenaries operate in this sector of space. I'm sure they would welcome a contract from someone of your reputation, Ms. Chen. May I make introductions on your behalf?”
“Please do, honored Phoenix. And by all means, find me a Work Captain I can trust. It seems we have a vacancy.”
Chen closed the connection. When Kenner had first come to her, the promise of his plan had been grand. She would become a crime lord the likes of which even the Xang triads had never seen. The mission had taken a turn for the worse after Lasher had survived the little outing on Tythian. Her organization was fracturing, subordinates were questioning her, and she had been forced to seek help fr
om the triads.
“Willow?”
The comm pinged in her ear. Cybernetic vision displayed an image of a woman sitting at a desk. “Yes, ma'am.”
“Ready my ship.”
Chen walked down the hall, bypassing Mr. Quick with a curt nod. The Zheegan returned the gesture, smiling to display duradium alloy teeth that made him the envy of all his friends. He gestured to the door opening with a WHOOSH.
Kenner was in his office, standing in front of the statue, a hologram playing in the background. A woman with tightly braided hair and a disapproving scowl was watching him, clearly not happy that he was showing her his back. “Revered Sister Naema, may I introduce my Vice President, Ms. Chen.”
“I didn't take this meeting to entertain your entire cartel, Mr. Kenner. Serious inquiries are being made as to the involvement of the Faith Revere in the undertaking.”
“If I remember correctly, the major force behind these jabs is an inspector within your own sphere of control. Might I suggest you reassign him?”
The scowl on Naema's face was almost palpable through the hologram. “He is a chief inspector of San Verone. The monastery has rules about interfering with investigations of their top inquisitors. Castillo is a war hero and a respected lawman. Even if I am discrete, his reassignment would cause more problems than they solve. My sources also say that someone with extreme clout is pushing this.”
“The Force Commander?” Kenner asked.
“No. He checks in, but his attention is elsewhere.”
“An unknown then?” Kenner tapped his chin with his finger. “Interesting. What has the Grand Master of the monastery said about this?”
“He has left me to deal with it. From near as we can tell, the push to link someone at San Verone with the events of Striker Main is coming from outside the Crucible Faith.”
“Also interesting. If you like I can try to put something together for Chief Inspector Esteban Castillo. Ships fail all the time. Natural disasters take lives without reason or care. Despite the miracle advances of the Core Worlds Alliance, accidents still happen.”
The Revenant: A Military Sci-Fi Series (Hunter's Moon Book 2) Page 14
