by Mel Odom
“Good job with the drone,” Kiwanuka said, meaning it.
“Thanks, Staff Sergeant.”
“But if you’d gotten discovered by the reporter piloting that drone while you were people-watching, you’d still be working latrine detail with the sewage treatment corps.”
“Understood, Staff Sergeant, but in my defense, I would like to point out that I needed hands-on experience with the drone appropriation.”
Despite her tension over the coming sequence of events, Kiwanuka had to repress a smile.
“Lima Two and Three, collision is in . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . now!”
On the screen, the second crawler bolted through the intersection and T-boned the prisoner transport crawler. Instantly, the concealed gel-based explosive packs under the transport vehicle exploded along the right side. The shaped charges had been positioned to knock the crawler over.
Panels blew loose along both crawlers, torn free by fingernail-sized charges designed to make the damage look much worse. In reality, the crawler tipped over onto its side, rolled onto its top, and was driven four meters forward because Lima Three hadn’t been at speed during the moment of impact.
Smoke and sparks spewed from the crawler’s undercarriage.
As prearranged, several of Mr. Huang’s noodle carts blew up as well. The old spymaster had volunteered his services, and never mentioned how he knew what Kiwanuka planned to do.
Kiwanuka looked at Culpepper. “Was the crawler supposed to end up upside down?”
The explosives ordnance operator was grinning happily. He leaned forward in his seat and stared at the computer screen. “Yes, Staff Sergeant. We found out the transport’s rear door didn’t always open when it was on its side. Getting it upside down was tricky, but there you go.”
Kiwanuka eyed the thickening gray-white clouds around the tangled vehicles. “It looks like it’s on fire.”
Culpepper grinned bigger. “All blue smoke and mirrors, Staff Sergeant. Cosmetic effect only. It’ll last a few minutes, then disperse on its own. And those fire extinguishers people are carrying out now? They’re only going to make it worse.”
A crowd of people gathered at the crash site. Most of those assembled outside the shops unconsciously formed a perimeter. Media drones swooped in to record the event. Only a handful of brave onlookers charged toward the overturned crawler. They unleashed streams of fire retardant foam and most of them actually hit the target.
Instead of suppressing the sparks, the foam made the pyrotechnics worse. An instant later, two geysers of flames shot up two meters. The onlookers darted back inside the shops.
A third geyser shot up, this one hitting at least four meters in height.
One of the crawler drivers swore. “Did you guys screw this up? If not for the armor, we’d be baking in here.”
“Negative, Lima Three,” Pingasa said. “Everything is going according to plan. Sit tight and let things develop.”
“You’re not sitting here, Pingasa.”
“Stop the chatter,” Kiwanuka ordered. “Maintain comm silence.” She shot a glance at Culpepper, who had returned to his carton of ysecki.
Culpepper shrugged. “Artistic license. I felt it would help sell the wreck. Nothing’s gonna burn down.” He pointed the chopsticks at the screen. “And that smoke? It’s laced with pepper spray, so anybody who thinks about playing hero will take one whiff and decide it’s not worth it. That perimeter will be maintained.”
Kiwanuka looked back at the screen. “I’m going to hold you to that, Corporal.”
The transport crawler’s rear doors shoved outward and more smoke roiled. For a moment it looked like flames filled the cargo compartment.
“Dry ice,” Culpepper said. “Heated by a plasma charge to vaporize immediately. Also seeded with pepper spray. Your prisoner will come out of there struggling to breathe and not seeing well. She’ll buy the accident, and the threat of an imminent explosion will hurry her on her way.”
“You enjoyed this way too much, Corporal.”
Culpepper’s image was reflected in the computer vid and he was smiling wider than ever. “Did I ever tell you I was a concert stage manager in my teens before I signed up in the Terran military?”
“No, and we’ll save those particular stories for over a beer later,” Kiwanuka said. “Provided we get what we want.”
Pingasa tapped the keyboard and the view flipped to a camera facing the back of the transport crawler as Darrantia stumbled into view. Coughing and rubbing her eyes with her cuffed hands, the Voreuskan peered out uncertainly.
“C’mon,” Pingasa muttered, “you know you want to run. Buy this, buy this. You got lucky. It happens. And you know you don’t want to go to a prison colony. Run!”
Darrantia threw herself from the overturned crawler and sprinted for the nearest alley.
Triggered by the computer chip within the alien, the camera angles on the monitors changed quickly to pick up her escape.
Kiwanuka knew their fugitive would elude their vid net in seconds.
Pingasa played the keyboard in quick syncopation. “I’m plotting projected flight lines now and looping in the hacks I’ve set up on local sec cams, but we’re gonna run out of those quick because there aren’t a lot of people down here who believe in passive defense systems.”
That meant there were a lot of trade merchants and shoppers who carried weapons. Kiwanuka tensed. That facet of the op was beyond their control.
Somewhat.
Pingasa had installed a neural inhibitor in the tracking chip as well. If they needed to, they could shut Darrantia down with a signal. Before they had to do that, though, she wanted the Voreuskan to make contact with her team.
She intended to give Halladay the assassins of Wosesa Staumar. If they could prove the political leader wasn’t killed by Terran military, it might help tip the balance of power in the sprawl.
“Is that tracker online?” Kiwanuka asked.
A grid overlay of the neighborhood flared to life on one of the screens. Darrantia’s tracking chip showed up as a blue dot racing through an alley.
“Confirmed, Staff Sergeant,” Pingasa said. “Reading tracking signal five by five.”
Kiwanuka relaxed a little, but she still hated being a spectator. C’mon, she thought. Reach out to your team. You’re still handcuffed. You need help.
For a moment, Darrantia disappeared from the vid streamers and became only a dot on the mapping grid.
“Does that store have vid?” Kiwanuka asked. “Do you have—”
Pingasa hunched over the keyboard. “I got this, Staff Sergeant.”
Almost immediately, a vid view from inside the store came online.
Darrantia dodged into the electronics shop from the alley and barreled over a man walking through the exit. The tracking chip picked up the curses that followed Darrantia’s arrival. The shopper, a Terran standard humanoid who spoke with a Mytntrod accent, reached for a concealed weapon on his hip.
Without hesitation, the Voreuskan slammed into the shopper with enough force to knock them both to the ground. The weapon slid free of the man’s hands and skidded across the plascrete flooring tiles.
“What kind of weapon is that?” Kiwanuka demanded.
Pingasa locked on to the weapon and opened a magnified view of it on another screen. It was short and stubby, with an abbreviated stump of a barrel.
Don’t let it be lethal, Kiwanuka thought.
“That’s a Shednal neuropulse pistol,” Culpepper said. “Short-range, non-lethal. Designed to incapacitate a target, not kill.”
“You’re sure?” Kiwanuka asked.
“I am.”
Kiwanuka nodded. The assessment agreed with her own weapon recognition. “Leave her operational.”
“Roger that,” Pingasa said.
On-screen, Darrantia elbowed the man in the face as he struggled to get up. Then she head-butted him and grabbed his hair to slam his face against the floor.
Kiwanuka cursed
. The Voreuskan could kill with her bare hands.
Darrantia threw herself after the stun gun as the shopkeeper broke out of his daze and reached behind the counter. Wrapping her hands around the pulse pistol, Darrantia rolled onto her side and pointed the weapon at the counter. The shopkeeper rose up behind the counter with a Kerch shrapnel burster in both hands.
The shopkeeper fired prematurely and Kiwanuka steeled herself, expecting her bait to be reduced to bloody rags on the shop floor. Instead, the shrapnel cluster vaporized a display containing Net-driven media earwigs into a spray of colorful plastic confetti less than a meter from the Voreuskan. The weapon’s basso boom temporarily deafened the tracker as the aud compensator kicked in.
As the shopkeeper racked the Kerch’s action, Darrantia fired. Although the beam didn’t show up on vid, the Voreuskan’s accuracy showed when the shopkeeper fell back limply.
Scrambling to her feet, Darrantia ran to the other side of the counter. Pingasa changed vid angles and pulled back behind the counter. Darrantia dropped to one knee and robbed the unconscious shopkeeper, taking a few loose cred notes, a credstick, and a handcomm.
When the Voreuskan juiced the handcomm, the screen flared to life.
“That’s not password protected,” Pingasa observed. “That’s stupid.”
“But it works for us,” Kiwanuka said. “Can you access that comm unit through the store’s Net array?”
Pingasa tapped the keyboard. “Actually, I’m booting off the tracking chip. Gimme a minute.”
Darrantia clipped the comm to the front of the jumpsuit and turned her attention to the store’s cred reader.
“Is she robbing that guy while she’s using his comm to call for help?” Culpepper sounded impressed.
“That she is,” Pingasa replied.
“I bet there are some unhappy old boyfriends in her past.”
“Your kind of girl?” Pingasa asked.
“I don’t know if I could work around the feathers.”
Kiwanuka ignored the duo. If they weren’t running their mouths, they weren’t at their best.
The comm connected at the same time the cred reader spilled its profits onto Darrantia’s borrowed credstick.
“She is good,” Culpepper said.
“This is Darrantia,” the Voreuskan said as she picked up the Kerch for a moment, then put it down and grabbed the pulse pistol again. She headed for the door.
“Trace that comm,” Kiwanuka said, but she knew she was speaking too late. Pingasa was already hitting keys.
“I’ve been compromised,” Darrantia said, “but I’m loose. I need an exfil if you can manage it. Comm me back.”
Once she stepped outside of the shop, the vid ceased and Darrantia was once more a blue dot on a grid map.
Silently, hoping they got lucky, Kiwanuka pulled on her helmet, slid her Roley into a ready position, and ran for the door. Pingasa, Culpepper, and the five other soldiers followed at her heels.
TWENTY
Xurase Club
North Makaum Sprawl
1731 Hours Zulu Time
Sage swept the bar with his gaze as he led his group into the soft darkness that filled the large space. Xurase occupied the whole lower floor of the building. The second floor surrounded an open area that looked down on the first floor. Plasteel rails decorated with weapons framed the opening. Doors led to private rooms on the second floor.
In his estimation, only a few actual mercenaries occupied tables in the bar. There were a lot of posers. Some of them were Makaum youths who stood out with their humanoid features and slightly green skin tint. Male and female, they dressed in cheap armor and wore cheap weapons that would have been against martial law in the sectors patrolled by Charlie Company.
A lot of the hangers-on were offworlders, so the wannabe syndrome wasn’t confined to just the locals. The collection of clientele came from at least a dozen different planets that Sage could pick out. They wore the same style of armor and weapons, and some of them had stylized Xurase logos featuring a flaming reticule. Nothing was low-key about the bar.
Alcohol and drugs were in use at the tables. Multicolored smoke drifted in layers against the high ceiling and along the partial ceiling that ran under the second floor. The dim lighting softened the appearance of the bar as well as the hard, blank features of the pleasure girls trolling the guests. It was early and the long night was coming, so there was no hard-sell push going on yet.
Along the wall to the right, four fighting rings held combatants who used different weapons and fought while referees managed the action and scored points. The one-on-one matches drew a lot of attention from the crowd and were also displayed on holos around the bar. Cheering burst out at irregular but short intervals. From the way credits changed hands at the table, gambling was encouraged.
Throzath and his friends sat at a back table near a pole where twin Caszom femmes used their tentacles to seductively hide their modesty while working through martial arts katas.
Like most of the clientele in the bar, Throzath wore offworld mercenary armor and carried a large plasma burster on his hip and a Nemkcha two-handed sword sheathed over his shoulder. A white medcover wrapped his left thigh.
Sage knew the young man intended the medcover to be a badge of honor. The story about the shooting that morning was still being broadcast on various media channels Sage had seen. He doubted the wound was still there. Throzath’s father, Tholak, had been one of the big lottery winners among the Makaum when the worlds came to trade. Top-of-the-line med treatment would have been available to Throzath.
“Love the sword,” Fachang said quietly. “Nemkcha steel, if I’m right.”
“You are,” Sage said. “And you rarely see those blades in anybody’s hands who aren’t Nemkchand.”
“Do you think Throzath knows how to use it?”
“No.”
Fachang chuckled. “Neither do I. It’s a showpiece. He’ll never get it out of that rig in time to do anything with it. He’s fortunate there isn’t a Nemkchand warrior in the bar to take it from him. They usually take the head of the offending party as well.”
Sage silently agreed. His anti-ballistic wraparound combat specs had quickly changed to allow enhanced vision that swept away the shadows trapped in the bar. Curved and reinforced, the lenses would take a direct hit from a low-powered projectile weapon and turn it away.
Even so, getting shot in the eyes would incur a lot of hydrostatic shock. Sage intended to prevent anyone from shooting him in the face, but the lenses worked to keep fingers and knives at bay as well. Once he’d activated the glasses, they’d adhered to his face through static electricity generated through batteries in his armor.
“Good evening,” a Shaqis femme said as she met them at the door. “Welcome to Xurase.”
The hostess was petite with flawless light-blue skin and pink hair that swept her bare shoulders. Her antennae stood out from her forehead and wiggled slightly as she imprinted Sage’s scent. If they had met before, she would know and remember where and when. And she would not easily forget him. The chances were good that she’d know him if they met again.
“Will you be sitting at the bar?” she asked. “Or would you like a table?”
“A table,” Sage said.
A number of people sat at the bar, and it was twenty meters from Throzath and his group. All the variables between the bar and Throzath’s table would be problematic when they had to move because Sage wanted to act quickly along the path of least resistance.
“Of course. You are in luck. This evening we have several tables available.”
Sage nodded to a table. “That one.”
Smiling, the hostess guided them to a table only three down from Throzath.
The young Makaum man was drinking and playing a game of Ytasi. On the holo projection floating only a few centimeters above the table surface, an army of men armed with spears and shields battled a flock of birds that were capable of launching feathers and dung at their opponents. Sn
ow capped the mountainous landscape in places and offered treacherous footing.
A server in semitransparent orange synthwrap approached them and took their drink orders.
Throzath cheered loudly at the end of the turn as the game computer tallied both sides’ losses. Most of the seventeen hangers-on cheered Throzath’s step toward victory, but the congratulations might as well have been a canned response because the excitement was feigned. Even the losing player congratulated Throzath.
“He’s a pampered one, isn’t he?” Fachang asked.
“Yeah,” Sage said, “but he also almost got some of Charlie Company killed this morning, and he’s got a connection to weapons that are contraband under martial law. If they’re in our sector, I want to know about it. And I want to send a message to anyone else who thinks attacking Terran Army personnel is a smart thing to do.”
“Uncle is happy to help with that, Master Sergeant.”
While the server went for the drinks, Sage took stock of Throzath’s company. The three Terrans, two men and one woman, looked like corp muscle. All of them moved smoothly, like they were wired. Two others were Zukimther warriors and they towered over the rest of the group.
A sixth was also female, but she was Ishona, all corded muscle and fangs. The tips of her elongated ears poked through her black tresses. Her pelt was golden and glowed in the light-enhancing glasses. Her protective armor sheathed her full body like a second skin. She wore a Kimer beam weapon at her hip, but Sage knew she’d have several edged weapons concealed on her body. Ishona loved their claws and anything that was sharp and personal.
“I make six of them as bodyguards,” Sage told Fachang.
Fachang nodded. “Agreed. I would assume they were added after the incident involving the soldiers this morning. How do you want to do this?”
“With as little blowback in the bar as possible,” Sage replied. “I want Throzath’s arrest to send a statement, but I want everyone alive. The head is close to the entrance.” He pointed at the bathroom area. “The way it looks like Throzath’s been drinking, he’ll have to go soon enough.”
