by Rick Partlow
He shook his head, not speaking. I might have broken his jaw with the kick.
“Because I want to,” I said. I jerked my head at the other two. “Those two, I had to kill. I don’t have to kill you, but I want to, for what you did to her.” I motioned to Yassa, still unconscious on Sanders’ shoulder. Sanders was stock still, like a deer in a spotlight, a look of horror and disbelief on his face.
“After I do what I have to do,” I told him, “I’ll come back here. When I come, I don’t want to see you. If I see you, if anyone in the neighborhood has even heard of you, I’ll finish what I started and beat you to death. Nod if you believe me.”
He nodded. He wasn’t scared, but he was a survivor, a predator, and he knew when he’d come across another.
I walked over and picked up his gun, sticking it in my belt, then grabbed the other from the dead man before I headed for the door again, my own weapon in my right hand, the metal stampings of the street pistol pressed up against the box I’d taken from Yassa’s apartment in my left. I’d get rid of their guns in a storm drain I’d seen back near where we’d parked the car.
“Let’s go,” I said to Sanders. This time, he didn’t need me to say it twice.
There were no watching eyes or playing children on the walk back to the car; the streets and doorways and windows were empty. I could see from fifty meters away that the car was unmolested. People here, I thought as I dropped the guns into the open storm drain by the side of the road, knew when to duck and cover.
“You killed those guys,” Sanders said. It wasn’t an accusation, nor a gasp, nor a complaint. It was more of a…realization, maybe. As if he’d just realized what he was getting into.
“If you want to go back to your uncle’s company,” I said, unlocking the doors and helping him lay Yassa across the back seat, “now’s the time.”
He didn’t say anything at first, pushing the woman’s legs inside and shutting the door. She didn’t move, barely breathed.
“No,” he decided, getting into the passenger’s side. “I’m in. I just…” He shook his head. “It’s been a while.”
“Yes, it has,” I agreed, pulling out of the grass lot and heading down towards the spaceport. “But the rules are the same.”
Chapter Six
Brandy Yassa slowly blinked awake, a hand going to her face and rubbing it vigorously, as if she expected it to be coated with mucus or vomit. Instead, there was nothing and she stared at her hand in confusion. Then she looked down at the grey utility coveralls she was wearing, and then down further to the cot on which she was lying, and her confusion deepened.
Then she looked up at me.
“Munroe?” She forced the words from a dry throat in a hoarse murmur.
I handed her a cup of water and she downed it without thinking.
“Hey, Cap,” I said quietly, not moving from the chair beside her cot. The cabins on the Wanderer were all basically closet-sized, but I’d given her the largest. “How do you feel?”
“I feel like shit,” she said frankly, her voice sounding more normal now. She pushed up to a sitting position on the cot. “Where in the hell am I? And what are you doing here?”
“You’re on my ship,” I told her, “in Transition Space.” Which was the reason we had artificial gravity; the Teller-Fox warp unit could create it, but only in T-space, for some reason.
“What the hell did you do to me?” Her hands went to her head, digging into her long hair, cleaner now than it had been.
“You OD’ed on Spindle. Maybe Kick too, I don’t know, didn’t have time to stick around and find out. I popped you in the auto-doc.” I shrugged. “We have a couple females on the team, I had one of them wash you and dress you. I tossed your old clothes into the airlock and spaced them.”
“Shit!” She slammed a fist into the cot and glared at me. “Get me back to Hermes, now!”
“You want to go back to Overtown?” I asked her. “You’re going to need another dealer then.”
“Goddamn it, Munroe, what did you do to Barry?” She was standing now, unsteady, balancing herself with a hand on the bulkhead. I stood to keep on her level: she was a tall woman and we were almost eye-to-eye.
“If Barry is the guy who showed up to try to keep me and Sanders from taking you out of your apartment and getting you treatment, then he’s going to have to spend a little time in an auto-doc himself. And the two goons with him who pulled weapons on me…” I shrugged. “Well, let’s just say an auto-doc won’t do them any good.”
She screamed in pure rage and swung at me wildly, but spun to the deck and hit hard on her shoulder. I stayed standing, not trying to help her up.
“You need to take it easy,” I cautioned her. “You were in the auto-doc for over twenty hours. You need to eat something.”
“Why the fuck did you stick your nose into my life?” She was on her hands and knees, her face down, and her voice sounded like a sob.
“Because I have a job offer,” I said to her. “After you get something to eat and get your shit together, I’ll tell you about it.” She didn’t look up, didn’t try to stand up. “If you aren’t interested, I can drop you off at Loki or even one of the Pirate Worlds. If you want to kill yourself with Spindle and Kick there, you could probably do it without the Constabulary throwing you into rehab every six months.”
I took a step towards the door, but she stopped me with a hand on my ankle. She looked up at me, tears streaking down her cheeks. I paused, but it took her a few minutes to work up to what she had to say.
“I wish I could pretend it was the guilt.” Her voice was calmer now. “I wish I’d done it because I couldn’t live with all the Marines I’d lost, but that’s not the truth. I tried to stay in, after the war, but I was stuck on Tahn-Skyyiah in garrison duty, and it was boring as hell. I got out, and went to Hermes to try to get a job in security consulting, but I sucked at it and they let me go after three months. I couldn’t hold down a job, and I couldn’t sleep, and I couldn’t handle civilian life…and I thought I was too much of a hard-ass to get psych counselling from the Military Separation Center.”
She took a deep breath and pushed herself up to a seated position, legs crossed. “Then I went to a club in Sanctuary, trying to have a little fun, to lighten up. Someone offered me some Spindle. It made me feel…less stressed. For a while. Then I took the Kick to get myself going again, then the Spindle to come back down. Then I ran out of money, Overtown was cheap, but not cheap enough to keep up a habit, so…”
“You don’t have to say anything else.” I didn’t want to hear it. She’d been a respected superior officer, and a friend, and I didn’t care to think about her that way. “The auto-doc ran you through a detox, but that’s just physical. We’ll be at the node to drop into Loki in twelve hours. If you still want, I can drop you off there. If not, there’s this thing I’m doing, and you can be my second in command.”
She looked up at that, eyes going wide, but I was already opening the door
“Twelve hours,” I reminded her. “Oh, and I brought your box, the one from your apartment.” I nodded across the compartment. “It’s in the drawer next to the cot.”
I let the hatch shut behind me. The passageway was very narrow through the waist of the ship, but Sanders was waiting there, his arms crossed, an uncomfortable expression on his bland face. I wondered how long he’d been waiting there, afraid to come in.
“How is she?”
He seemed genuinely concerned. He was the only other person on the ship who’d served under the Captain; I was the only one who’d been in her platoon when she was a Lieutenant.
“She’ll be okay,” I told him, hoping I was right. I nodded towards the cabin he and I shared. “Go get some sleep while you have the chance.”
I left him there, not waiting to see if he took my advice, and moved up to the cockpit. I expected to find Kane there; he hadn’t left except to eat and use the head since he’d boarded the ship. He’d told me he could sleep sitting down, or eve
n standing up if he needed to, which was handy since it freed up a cot. I didn’t expect to find Bobbi Taylor, but there she was, sprawled out in the acceleration couch at the navigator’s station, reading something on one of the ship’s tablets.
She was broad-shouldered and hard-edged, her blond hair cropped short and her muscular arms bare past the sleeveless sweatshirt she wore with her utility fatigue bottoms and a pair of soft-soled ship shoes. She didn’t look much different than I remembered her from Recon Qualification training; maybe a bit rougher around the edges, but living through an interstellar war will do that to you. She regarded me coolly with water-blue eyes.
“So, you wound up stuck on Demeter,” she said out of nowhere. “That’s a stone bitch.”
I nodded towards the tablet in her hand. “What, you’ve been looking up my life story?”
I sat down in the copilot’s seat, hitting the release latch to free it and swiveling it around to face her.
“It’s not like there’s much else to do on this trip so far,” she replied, shrugging. “Why didn’t you get the damned Medal of Honor, Munroe?”
I laughed. “What, the Silver Star isn’t enough for being lucky enough to not get killed?”
“You organized a bunch of half-assed civilians into a real resistance,” she said, not taking my bait. “You tied up the Tahni garrison for a year and pretty much made it possible for us to retake the planet without pounding the shit out of it from orbit first.” She snorted. “If that doesn’t deserve a Medal of Honor, I don’t know what the hell does.”
“There were…complications,” I said, knowing I was being cryptic but not willing to say more.
I didn’t want to get into explaining how my mother, Patrice Damiani, had found me on the Fleet base on Inferno after I’d returned from Demeter, and I’d had to jump out of a flying hopper to get away from the Corporate Security team she’d assigned to escort me back to Earth. Cowboy had managed to keep me hidden from her after that, but the media coverage a Medal of Honor would have brought would have made that impossible.
“Anyway,” I went on, “it’s not like I did it myself. There were a couple DSI agents they sent down after a few months, and then we had some Fleet Intelligence operators who weren’t officially there.” I waved a hand dismissively. “I made some bad calls. Did some things that wound up getting people killed. I’m not saying I didn’t do some good…” It had taken me a while to admit that, to really accept that I hadn’t totally fucked things up. Sophia had to basically pound it into my head. “…but a lot of Marines could have done what I did.”
“A lot of Marines would have crawled into a fucking hole and cried,” she shot back. “You were a leader, you did what you had to do.” She slotted the tablet into a sleeve attached to the cockpit bulkhead. “And I knew you were a squared-away Marine by the time we finished Force Recon training. That’s why I’m not going to come out and tell you that you’re a fucking idiot to bring that strung-out junkie onto the boat.” She rolled her eyes. “But I want to.”
“She was the best combat officer I ever served with,” I said, maybe a bit defensively. “And if she commits to this job, I know she’ll pull her weight. If she doesn’t, we’ll cut her loose.”
“You’re the boss, Boss,” she said. “You got anything to drink on this tub that isn’t processed soy?”
“Check the cooler,” I told her, nodding towards the mini-refrigerator built into the bulkhead over on her side of the cockpit.
She spun her seat around and pulled it open. Inside were a few bottles of a locally bottled beer I’d found on Hermes. I’d bought them for the others, not for myself. She smiled as she pulled one out and twisted the top off.
“Excellent,” she said, taking a swig. “It’s even my brand.”
I glanced over at Kane, who was so silent that he could have been a piece of furniture; I’d almost forgotten he was in the compartment with us.
“Would you like a beer, Kane?” I asked him.
“No.”
I didn’t wait for him to elaborate. I’d learned during the short trip from Belial to Hermes that the man didn’t say any more syllables than were absolutely necessary.
“Give me one.”
I looked around. It was Captain Yassa, looking straight-backed and composed, more like the woman I’d known three years ago than the one I’d left a few minutes ago.
“Someone told me I needed some calories,” she added, the corner of her mouth turning up slightly.
I chuckled and looked over to Bobbi. She grabbed another bottle from the cooler and tossed it underhand to Yassa. The older woman caught it one-handed, then twisted off the cap and took a long, gulping drink. She sighed as she brought the bottle down away from her mouth and looked me in the eye.
“Tell me about this job.”
***
I looked around at the faces squeezed into the utility bay, the largest room on the boat. On my left were Victor and Kurt, blond and bulky and happy to be there. Next to them was Kane, standing stock-still with an indifferent expression, only interested in the money that would let him achieve his goal of not being human anymore.
Then there was Carmen Ibanez, petite and skinny, smiling and bubbly with wild, curly hair, but tough as banded steel; she’d been in another company in my battalion on Inferno, and I think I’d met her once before Demeter but I wasn’t sure. She’d had drinks a few times with Sanders and Bobbi at the local Veterans’ watering hole in Sanctuary and they’d swapped stories. I wasn’t sure if that was all she and Sanders had swapped, but if they were involved before, they weren’t now.
Sanders was still next to her, seeking out someone familiar I suppose. He hadn’t looked comfortable since our little foray into Overtown, and I hoped I hadn’t made a mistake bringing him along. Bobbi was on the other side of him, fists planted on her hips, looking like she believed she could take anyone in the room. Maybe she could.
Finally, my eyes travelled to Brandy Yassa, Captain, Commonwealth Fleet Marine Corps, First Force Reconnaissance Battalion, Delta Company, Retired. She looked better now than when she’d woke up a few hours ago; I’d insisted she get a full meal down and rehydrate before we had the mission brief. Her eyes looked brighter, more intent, and her stance was steadier and well balanced. But I thought I saw a quiver of doubt in her expression; maybe it was just me seeing in her what I felt in myself.
“Any of you ladies and gentlemen heard of Thunderhead?” I asked them.
“Yes,” Kane said. All of them looked at him, expecting him to elaborate; they didn’t know him as well as I did.
“It’s in the Pirate Worlds,” Bobbi Taylor said. “I audited a news report on the Pirate Worlds once, for a report I did in NCO school.”
“They’re just like nearly worthless, barely habitable, right?” Sanders asked her. “Right on the fringes of Commonwealth space and not worth the effort for the government to try to crack down on?”
“Some think,” Kane spoke up, surprising me, “the feds do nothing because the cabals pay them off.”
I looked at him, but he volunteered nothing else, and his green eye was as cold and unrevealing as the red one.
“Or maybe,” Yassa interjected, “the feds don’t do anything because the pirate cabals have a deal with the Corporate Council.”
“Either way,” Bobbi Taylor cut in, looking a bit irritated at the interruption, “Thunderhead is way out on the periphery, far at the end of one of the last Transition Lines in the Cluster.”
“What’s ‘the Cluster,’ anyway?” Victor asked, face screwed up in confusion.
Bobbi’s ears started to turn red from being interrupted again, so I answered quickly. “The Transition Lines,” I told him and Kurt, “the ones that run between star systems, that we use the Teller-Fox warp unit to travel along, they’re like fault lines in the structure of spacetime caused by the gravitational interactions of stars. But they only connect a few hundred systems in our immediate area. That’s called the Cluster. It’s all the stars we
can reach with the Transition Drive. As far as anyone knows, there are no Transition Lines that lead out of the Cluster, and we’ve been looking for them for decades now.”
Victor nodded his understanding. Kurt still looked confused, but I figured Victor could explain it to him later, so I waved at Bobbi to go on.
“Thunderhead’s got a big moon,” she went on, “and a fast rotation---I think the days are only like eighteen hours long there. And it’s got a hell of an electromagnetic field and a lot of background radiation, which makes communications hard and isn’t that great for humans to live in, either. Last I heard, the whole planet was run from the only real city, Freeport, by a cabal under some toad named Crowley.”
“It was till a couple years ago,” I agreed. “Then he was replaced by someone they call ‘Abuelo.’ He supposedly killed Crowley and took over his operations. Our job is to go to Freeport and pretend to be a bunch of vets who’re dissatisfied with civilian life and want to try being mercenaries.”
“Not much of a stretch there,” Carmen Ibanez drawled, chuckling.
“No,” I said, smiling back. “The best lies have a lot of the truth in them. We need to get hired on by Abuelo and brought into his operation.”
“Why?” Yassa asked me, and for a moment, I could see my old Company Commander in that face. “What’s the objective?”
“Abuelo has found something,” I told her, and all of them. “Or at least there are strong rumors he’s found something; an artifact that might be Predecessor technology.”
Bobbi Taylor’s mouth shaped a soundless whistle.
“Something like that,” she said with awe in her tone, “would be basically priceless.”
“It could also be damned dangerous,” I pointed out. “Our job is to steal it from him, if possible, and deliver it to the people we’re working for.”
“And who might that be?” Yassa again. She was probably the only one among them who cared.
“That’s where things get complicated,” I admitted. I hesitated, knowing the reaction I was going to get. “We’re working for someone high up in the Corporate Council Executive Board. I don’t know who, exactly; the go-between who hired me wouldn’t tell me.”
