They almost drove past the path leading to the witch’s hut. The winding private road was barely wide enough to fit their civvie car and it had been barely graded; it made the pothole-ridden country highway they’d taken on the way there look great by comparison. You’d think that someone providing a vital service would make it easier for prospective customers to find her.
“Doesn’t look like she gets much traffic,” Gonzo said, echoing his thoughts.
“They just don’t want to make it too easy to step out on their wives is all.”
“We could just turn around, Russet. There’s always the waitresses at the Boar’s Head and Smiley’s. Or the new enlisted joint they just opened.”
“Yeah, sure. Half those girls just won’t put out, and the other half have a dozen Marines apiece chasing them. Good luck getting anywhere.”
Gonzo glanced at the woods. “Not liking this, Russet.”
It wasn’t like Gonzaga to get nervous, but they were way off the grid out here, and if that bartender had been doing more than bullshitting Russell, this was just the kind of spot where a couple of idiot grunts could get bushwhacked. The alien trees grew thickly alongside the road, their canopy obscuring the stars above and darkening the area to the point they might as well be driving down a tunnel. The car’s headlights cast a small patch of illumination ahead of them, and Russell had his imp run a low-light app, which helped a little. It still felt like they were going into hostile territory.
“Almost there, brah.”
A house loomed at the top of the hill, its slopes too steep for the trees to continue crowding the road; only few brushes and wind-bent saplings grew on the final stretch. Russell noticed that someone inside the house would have a clear shot of the approaching vehicle most of the way up. The impression that the place had been set up with an eye for defense got stronger as they reached the house proper, a three-story old-school wooden structure with peaked tiled roofs and narrow windows, its dark colors fading into black in the faint starlight. There was a footpath leading up to the porch, too narrow and steep for a wheeled vehicle, and not coincidentally in full view of several of those narrow windows. Russell wouldn’t want to storm that place with less than a squad in full battle-rattle, even if there was only one person inside. A less-well equipped force – a mob of angry townies, say – could expect to take some losses before even getting to the front door.
They parked in a cleared area some twenty feet below the summit, and walked the rest of the way. Out in the open, the forest below seemed too quiet for comfort. Russell didn’t like this one bit. That bartender was trying to screw him. It’d be just the thing to do to some outsider trying to get laid: send him somewhere where asking for sex might get him shot or arrested for attempted rape.
“Let’s play it smart, Gonzo,” he said as they paused in front of the door. “Be very polite-like. Maybe we got played, so don’t be asking for her rates just yet, okay?”
“I feel you,” Gonzo replied. “If this is a whorehouse, it’s the worst one I’ve seen. Makes you feel as welcome as a Snake at a Puppy festival. Tell you what, even if she is hot to trot, she’s all yours, man. I’ll just catch up on my reading or whatever.”
“Roger that.”
Russell was looking for a doorbell or intercom while his imp searched for the contact info associated with the property. He drew a blank on both fronts, but the door swung open on its own just anyway.
“Spooky.”
“Just an automated door,” Russel growled. “Like they got everywhere.”
“Here, it’s just fucking spooky.”
They went in.
The door opened to a narrow hallway leading in, with a small table built into a wall and an antique-looking mirror above it. Russell noticed yellow wallpaper in a twisting pattern that caught his eye and wooden slat flooring with a homey welcome mat by the entrance. He carefully used it to scrape any dirt from the soles of his boots. Like he’d told Gonzo, he planned to play to be very polite. Worst case, he’d get the cheapest fortune reading available, and then head home and figure out some payback for the dickhead who’d steered him here.
“Good evening,” someone spoke from deeper inside the house. A female voice.
She was waiting for them in an old-fashioned parlor. All the furniture appeared to be hand-made and locally-produced. He’d noticed the same styles around Davistown; hardly any fabber stuff around. The woman appeared to be in her thirties, not that looks meant anything nowadays. He noticed her jet-black hair, long but tightly wound in a bun over her head, its lustrous sheen making Russell wonder what it would look like loose and whipping around while she swayed back and forth in time with his rhythmic pounding…
Shit, he thought, noticing his mouth was hanging open, making him look like some yokel on his first trip to the big city.
“Good evening,” the woman repeated. Her face was a pleasant oval shape, her skin pale, in sharp contrast with the dark hair. The lips were a bit thinner than Russell liked, and the grin had an edge to it that made him wary; something about her told him she could take care of herself.
“Evening, ma’am,” he said while he tried to access her public profile with his imp. PRIVATE PROFILE was all he got. Weird. It was hard to avoid providing at least a name and birth date, and people who went to the trouble of hiding those were automatically met with suspicion.
“I assume you are here for a reading, Lance Corporal Edison, Private First Class Gonzaga.”
Nothing supernatural about that. Their public profiles were pretty much open to inspection by anybody with an imp. Russell’s Facettergram page was short on personal details and long on adult content clips and pics.
“Yes, ma’am. We were told you did that sort of thing.”
“Is that all they told you?”
Ordinarily, Russell would have used that question to start testing the waters about any ‘special services,’ but he simply shrugged. “Pretty much, ma’am. Psychic reading, fortune telling.”
“I see.” Her smile shifted a bit as she spoke, her dark-blue eyes glimmering with a mixture of humor and something else. Russell had never been the kind to look away from someone’s gaze, and he didn’t do that here, but it took some work. She was unsettling. A witch. He could tell without looking away from her eyes that Gonzo was getting tense, and when Gonzo got tense things could get ugly fast.
At ease, he sent through his imp, and his buddy relaxed minutely.
“Very well. Let us get started,” she said, getting up. She was wearing a plush bathrobe, and the movement revealed something satin and sleek underneath, bright blue against pale her skin, and the little flash stirred Russell up more than a full frontal squat at a strip joint.
“Ah, well, about your rates. Uh, for a reading,” he stammered, feeling about as sure of himself as he’d been his first time at a cathouse, back when he’d still been an Obie.
“You will pay me what you think the experience was worth. Does that sound fair?”
He glanced at Gonzaga.
“All yours, bro,” Gonzo said with a shrug.
“Follow me,” she said.
He did.
Most of the interior of the house was unlit. A lone lamp had illuminated the parlor. The hallways leading deeper into the house had no overhead lighting, and the only break in the darkness was an open door at its end, where another lamp cast a small square of light. They went through that door, into a smaller room filled with a table and four chairs.
“At ease, Marine,” she said. “Have a seat.”
Russell did so automatically, following the orders as if they’d come from an officer. Which clearly was who he was dealing with. Miss Private Profile had commanded troops at some point. He suspected bubblehead rather than Marine, but an officer was an officer.
He’d always wanted to fuck an officer. But in this case he wasn’t sure if it was a good idea.
“So what did they tell you about me?” she asked as she sat down on the other side of the table. “Did they cal
l me a fortune teller? A witch?” She tilted her head, and her smile vanished. “A whore?”
“All of those,” he said. Lying came as naturally to him as breathing, especially lying to an officer, but it didn’t even occur to him to say anything but the truth to her.
“They would say that. Witch. That’s almost flattering, if by that word they meant a follower of one of the Old Religions. As far as belief systems go, most of theirs aren’t bad at all. But no, I’m not a Wiccan. I was raised Catholic. I even attend Sunday services.”
How about the whore part? The thought came up as automatically as a fish darting for a lure.
“No, I do not sell my body for money, either,” she answered the unspoken question, and laughed at the way his expression changed. “And no, I didn’t read your mind. You have a decent poker face, Lance Corporal, but not good enough, that’s all.”
“Understood, ma’am.” Well, this had been a waste of time and money. But he wasn’t sorry he’d come here. The woman was…
“Hold out your hands,” she said in the same voice of command.
Orders were orders. She reached out towards him. Her skin felt cool to the touch, almost cold. Cold hands, warm heart. His mother had used to say that, in between the periods of incoherent, blissful stupor when she got her hands on a dose of her medicine, and the bouts of brutal, also incoherent cursing when she was going through withdrawal.
She closed her eyes, still holding his hands in hers.
“Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t,” she said. “It’s easier if you’re warp-rated, of course.”
“Wha...?”
At first, he dismissed the slight tingling feeling as just nerves, at least until he started seeing things.
It was like being in warp space. Scratch that. It was exactly like being in warp space, except he wasn’t going anywhere. But he was watching bits and pieces of his life. His first kill. Getting blown to hell on Parthenon-Four. Sex. Death. The highlights of existence. It seemed to last forever, but took no time at all.
She let of go of his hands and he slumped on the chair, blinking back tears, feeling worse than that time he’d tried some alien drugs that he’d been told were ‘better than peyote’ and had almost killed him.
“Interesting,” she said.
“What the fuck are you?” he said, but in a tone of voice far softer than the words themselves. His normal reaction to something like that would have been to bury the emotions and memories she’d woken up under a tsunami of violence. Not now, though. Now he wanted to know what she thought of him, after seeing what kind of man he was. For some reason, he wanted to know that very badly.
“My old naval designator was 6611,” she said. “Warp Navigator.”
“Holy fuck.” That explained a lot. Warp-Navs were all a bit nuts. It came with the job of having to hold things together while they made sure their ship came out of the other end of warp transit. They usually worked in teams of no less than three in military vessels, two in civilian ones, because they tended to burn out, sometimes without warning. In theory anybody with a brain could help the nav systems lead a ship through FTL, but it took someone special to make it work a hundred percent of the time. Warp-Navs were special, but a lot of them ended up with…
“… a medical discharge,” she completed the thought. “You see, what our normal senses perceive as reality is just the tip of the iceberg. Accessing warp lets you see deeper into the reality spectrum, as it were.”
“And now you can do magic,” he said. He should be worried, the way you’d feel when you realized the person you’d been chatting with was totally insane, but he wasn’t bothered by this conversation.
“I can see things a little differently, that’s all. There’s quite a few people like me. The dumb ones end up in glorified insane asylums. The rest of us, we learn to smile and say the right things, and they let us go in peace. Out here in the colonies, you can be weird and most people leave you alone. At first, I hid from everyone, but I helped someone out, and that led to someone else asking for my advice, and so on. Most of my neighbors have come to appreciate my services, although they prefer not dealing with me except when they need something.” She shrugged. “That’s fine with me. I prefer to be alone.”
“Yeah,” he said. He would have agreed with her if she told him the local star was made of nacho cheese.
“But I do get lonely sometimes,” she added. The smile was back, along with the glimmer in her eyes. “And you are a not a good man, but you aren’t rotten in the middle. A hard man. Good to those you think deserve it. Those happy few. The rest of the world doesn’t really count. Not a great way to live, but it’s what you are. It doesn’t bother me. And I do get lonely sometimes.”
No, he wasn’t bothered at all.
“You only have two hours or so, so better make them count, Marine.”
He didn’t know what she meant about the two hours, since his liberty didn’t expire for another forty-eight, but right now he didn’t care.
They lunged at each other, knocking the table to one side.
* * *
Afterwards, he didn’t fall asleep or grab his shit and head out, the way he always did, especially the latter, because falling asleep next to some stranger was a great way to end up broke or dead. He lay next to her instead. There was something he wanted to say, and he wasn’t sure how to say it.
The actual words were easy enough. He’d whispered them to plenty of chicks along the way, whenever paying for it was beyond his means or too much trouble. Not that the ‘good girls’ didn’t get paid. The coin was different: dinner and presents, yeah, but above all, lies. Let’s do this again. I really felt a connection, baby. Didn’t you? I think this could really be something. You’re different from anyone else I’ve been with. He’d said all of those, and more. It was the coin of the realm when you dealt with amateurs.
And now he couldn’t make himself say them.
“You’re sweet,” she said. “But you’re going to be too busy to worry about that. Your two hours are just about up.” She grinned and threw his pants at him. “They were two very nice hours, though. But you better get dressed.”
Before he could open his mouth to ask what the fuck she was talking about, a FLASH message came through his imp.
ENEMY WARP EMERGENCE DETECTED. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. ENEMY WARP EMERGENCE DETECTED. ELEMENTS OF NASSTAH FLEET HAVE ENTERED PARTHENON SYSTEM. ALL LEAVES ARE CANCELLED. ALL PERSONNEL REPORT TO DUTY SOONEST.
His personal orders came through. He and Gonzo were going to have to drive their rented piece of junk as fast as it could and get back to the FOB soonest.
“You are a fucking witch,” he said as he scrambled back into his field grays.
“Depends on your definition, I suppose.”
“Will I see you again?”
“Maybe. If you want to. If we both make it through what’s coming.”
Russell almost asked her if she knew what was coming. If they’d both make it. He rushed out instead. Gonzo had already left and had the car running.
He wasn’t sure he wanted those questions answered.
They’d been driving for almost an hour before he realized he’d never gotten her name.
Sixth Fleet, Parthenon System, 165 AFC
“Eight dreadnoughts, all with multi-missile boxes. Fifteen battleships, five of them also missile platforms. Eighteen battlecruisers and forty cruisers; twelve of the latter are volley ships, the rest are fast-attack models, light on armament and shields but capable of exceeding .001 c by some five to ten percent. Seventy-five fast-attack frigates, outfitted likewise; fifty standard frigates, and fifty destroyers. Plus thirty planetary assault ships and the usual support elements.”
“Hey, we outnumber them in destroyers,” Admiral Givens said, eliciting a chuckle from everyone in the Tactical Flag Command Center. “They’re serious this time,” she went on, her calm tone belying her true feelings.
The disparity in tonnage was even more hideous than the ship number
s indicated. Their destroyers alone were thirty to fifty percent more massive than the American equivalents. The US Navy had faced worse odds and come out victorious, but the Vipers were using weapons and tactics designed to counter their normal advantages. They’d all but crushed Fifth Fleet, and now it was her turn to find out just how effective the ETs’ new toys were.
“Execute Attack Plan Epsilon.” There were grimaces among the crew at the orders, but everyone did as they were told.
The two forces played the elaborate dance the preceded a space battle, selecting a place to fight and meeting each other there. The Vipers armada’s final emergence point was one light-minute away from Parthenon-Three. Sixth Fleet met them there.
Standard operating procedure was to appear in normal space at half a light second away from the op force, taking it under fire before the ETs had fully recovered from transit. Most alien species needed a minimum of thirty to sixty seconds to fully overcome even a short jump. That was a long time to rely only on automated systems that couldn’t be very sophisticated or they, too, would be affected by FTL travel’s unavoidable side effects. The ability to strike after emergence with near-impunity had been the key to multiple American victories.
The enemy had emerged from warp in a vertical formation, this time, forming a wall of ships that launched thousands of missiles as soon as Sixth Fleet came out of W-space. The volley, travelling at around 1/100 of c, would have taken less than a minute to reach its targets, had the Americans appeared at the usual range. They hadn’t.
Sixth Fleet emerged two light seconds from the enemy formation, sacrificing its normal advantage to quadruple the time the missile storm would take to reach her formation. Givens knew they were going to need every bit of those extra two or three minutes to avoid sharing the fate of Admiral Kerensky’s ships. There were a lot of missiles. Even after being whittled away for their entire two light-second trip, some were bound to get through. At least the Viper fleet would be too far away to pile on with beam weapons after they recovered from transit.
Admiral Givens realized she was grinding her teeth together hard enough to hurt. She forced herself to unclench her jaw.
No Price Too High (Warp Marine Corps Book 2) Page 16
