by Rick Partlow
“That’s because everyone hated Crowley,” Jamie argued. “Constantine isn’t stupid; he wants us to think that eventually, Abuelo will come back and straighten everything out because that will keep us in line.”
“If Abuelo’s dead,” I cut in, trying to take back control of the conversation, “then we’ll have no choice but to confront Constantine. But we need to find out for sure. Can any of you tell me anything useful about where he might be?”
“He has a place somewhere north of town,” Ichiko put in. “I don’t know where, exactly, but he’s rented my trucks several times and the drivers have always headed north up the mountain pass.” She shook her head. “He always uses his own drivers, never my guys.”
“That’s good,” I encouraged her. “When’s the last time he had any deliveries made out there?”
“A few months ago, just after the last time he was in town. A heavy-lift cargo shuttle landed at the port, and Abuelo rented all of my trucks. His men cleared everyone off the landing field, didn’t let anyone see what they were unloading, then they hauled it up the road as quick as they could drive.”
I shared a look with Yassa. That might have been the artifact.
“The road’ll be guarded,” she warned. “And we can’t fly out there, not with the laser defense system in place.”
I ruminated on that for a long, silent moment.
“The lasers,” I said, finally. “They’re near the town?”
“Yes,” Milton supplied. “A few kilometers past the landing field. It’s very heavily guarded at all times, though.”
I nodded. I’d figured that. But…
“The power for the lasers,” I asked him. “Where does that come from?”
“The same reactor that powers the town,” he replied. He frowned, confused. “Why do you ask?’
Chapter Ten
On most colony worlds, the fusion reactors are built well outside the cities for safety reasons. Freeport’s reactor was just across the Bijesan River, less than a kilometer from the center of the town, squatting in an ugly, utilitarian collection of buildfoam and concrete and surrounded by a cement block wall. It rested on blasted, black pavement in a plain of what had been forest before they’d cut down the trees there and fusion-formed what was left to flatten it for the reactor facility.
It wasn’t very large as these things went, certainly not as big as the one on Demeter, nor as heavily guarded. But then, on Demeter, I’d had a company of hardened, combat-tested militia, two DSI agents and two physically-augmented Fleet Intelligence super-commandoes. I looked over at Brandy Yassa and the three former Marines and two ex-resistance fighters with her, huddled under the bridge abutment on this side of the Bijesan, none of them armed with anything more potent than a handgun, and wondered what the hell we were doing out here in broad damn daylight.
Well, broad daylight was an exaggeration; it was the middle of storm season on Thunderhead and the sky was grey and surly, darkening in the east as the sun sank lower behind the veil of clouds. But it seemed way too bright and I was sure someone was going to trip over us at any second. There wasn’t any choice, though; the delivery truck was scheduled for when it was scheduled, and adjusting that would have looked too suspicious.
I tried to wish the clouds thicker and the sun further down, but it hadn’t quite worked by the time I got the signal from Ibanez, who was on lookout at the crest of the river bank, that the truck was in sight. I waved to get her attention, then motioned across the river. She nodded and then leapt like a gymnast, catching the concrete lip on the side of the bridge, just in reach there where it met the road.
I held my breath as I watched her swing upward into the support framework on the underside of the bridge, finding purchase on an I-girder with her fingers and heels and scrambling spider-like to the first pier cap. She was almost inhumanly agile, swinging out with one arm to the cement cap and grabbing hold. She swung into it with a smack of impact I could just make out over the rushing of the wild river beneath her and I gritted my teeth.
But she was okay, and she quickly crawled over the obstacle and grabbed the I-beam on the other side of it. By the time I heard the rumble of the truck overhead, she was almost to the other side of the narrow, swift cataract and I’d stopped worrying she’d fall into the rocky, roiling river. This would have been so much easier if radios would work on this damn planet without a tight beam laser uplink to a satellite. Or if it had been possible to see the other end of the bridge from here without being spotted by the gate guards.
She was on the opposite bank, crawling up on her belly to the crest of the rise, watching the truck as it passed across the bridge, heading for the lone gate in the block wall around the reactor complex. I couldn’t see it from where I was, but I’d gotten a good look at it when we’d been moving into position through the high grass at the edge of the river, over a three hour period from late morning to early afternoon. That wasn’t as long as it sounded on a planet with an eighteen-hour rotation, but I was glad we’d brought some ration bars and water along, and that it wasn’t raining that hard.
I sat there watching her watching them, envisioning the security blockhouse built into the wall, imagining the truck halted at the imposing metal barrier across the road while the guards checked their work order on computers hardwired to the systems across the river in town. I’d thought about just cutting the superconductive wires where they crossed the bridge in their polymer sheath, but that would have probably brought someone to investigate. This was riskier, but worth it.
“What is taking so fucking long?” I muttered.
“Patience, Commander,” Yassa said from right next to me. I glanced over in surprise; I hadn’t noticed her move, but she was crouched beside me on one knee. “Things happen when they happen.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, grinning despite the tension I felt. I was glad I’d brought her along.
Then I saw Ibanez motion for us to move.
“Go!” I hissed at the others, scrambling out from under the abutment and up the bank to the road.
The truck had already moved through into the bare, black lot beside the reactor facility’s loading dock, but the gate was still up. I sprinted across, feeling the others on my heels; once I reached the other side, Ibanez popped up and joined us. The bridge was only about fifty meters from end to end, but it felt like we were out in the open forever and my eyes were locked on the closed, tinted polymer window of the security blockhouse. I slammed into the door of the guard shack with my shoulder and it popped open readily, sending me half-stumbling inside.
Kane was there, leaning over the computer console, a lead from it plugged into one of his ‘face jacks, while Bobbi Taylor kept watch, pistol held down at low ready in both hands. The two men who’d been crewing the guard shack were on the bare, cement floor, unconscious, gagged with strips of cloth and secured with industrial plastic ties that were the closest we’d been able to come to flex cuffs.
“Any problems?” I asked, looking between the two of them. Yassa came in behind me, while the others crouched in the cover of the closing gate.
“Other than being stuck in the back of that truck for two hours under a load of crates?” Bobbi shot back, grinning. “No. These two didn’t see a thing until Kane smacked them down, then he basically sat on them while I choked them out.”
“Security vids are looped,” Kane told me, unplugging from the board. “We’re clear.”
That was practically a soliloquy for him.
“All right,” I waved for them to follow me outside. “Bobbi, you’re on point.” We needed to move before Ichiko’s drivers finished unloading the truck. “Go, quick.”
She trotted off toward the loading dock, and the rest of us followed at a regular, ten-meter interval. I stayed towards the middle of the pack and Yassa brought up the rear, taking her role as the “platoon sergeant” of our understrength squad seriously. We all had our guns out, though we would prefer not to use them; if we started killing Abuelo’s people
, this was going to get out of hand very quickly.
We moved up the ramp, past the drivers, who were dutifully loading crates of raw soy and spirulina onto a pallet jack. They looked at us with worried glances but didn’t stop working; they knew who paid their salaries and Ichiko didn’t strike me as an easygoing boss. I waved at everyone to spread out once we were inside the building, motioning for Victor and Kurt to stay and guard the loading dock entrance, then signaling Bobbi to head up the block staircase that led out of the storage bay and into the main reactor facility.
We’d gone over the layout for this place with the woman who ran the city’s largest construction firm. She hadn’t actually built the reactor; it had been shipped in pieces in several heavy-lift cargo shuttle loads decades ago by Freeport’s founder, a woman named Aliya, who had been Crowley’s predecessor. But Val, the construction boss, had been a supervisor when the cement block walls had been built around the reactor and the cooling chambers and the turbines, and she had a pretty good idea of what the layout must be still.
It was a mostly automated setup, as far as I could tell from the files we’d been able to pull up on the local ‘nets, which weren’t much. It wouldn’t require more than a half dozen technicians on duty at any one time, maximum; Val thought two shifts might be there at once, to allow hot-swapping for breaks. That meant maybe as many as a dozen workers, and an unknown number of security guards. I was betting not too many; there wasn’t any incentive for anyone in Freeport to sabotage the plant. It was their lifeline as much as Abuelo’s.
In fact, we’d had that very argument when I’d explained my plan…
I moved past Ibanez and Sanders and put myself third behind Bobbi and Kane as we went up the stairs, pausing at the closed door there. I motioned for Kane to hang back, then nodded at Bobbi. She yanked the metal handle and jerked inward and I ducked through, my pistol held at low port. The hallway on the other side of the door curved off to the left, and I heard the sound of voices in a room a dozen meters down, off to the right.
“Break room,” I mouthed to Bobbi as she came through behind me, motioning for her to hold up the others.
I listened for a moment, trying to get a sense of how many of them there were. I made out two voices immediately, a man and a woman talking loudly, laughing about something. I concentrated, trying to make out the words.
“…the fucking coolant stack and I said, Gordo, you can’t flush the reactor just because…”
Then mumbling and cross-talk and more laughing. The man, and the woman, and one other, quieter, chuckling perhaps politely, as if he or she wasn’t as amused. I turned back to Bobbi and flashed three fingers. She nodded, then turned and waved the rest of the squad up. Kane, Sanders and Ibanez moved in and I directed them to deploy up and down the hallway from the loading dock door to just short of what I figured from the markings on the wall was a break room. I’d rather have bypassed it entirely, but there was no way around without being spotted.
Yassa came in last, and I relayed the information to her silently, then motioned for her and Bobbi to come with me. I sidled up to the breakroom entrance, looked to Yassa, then took a deep breath and swung around the corner. The two talkative ones didn’t even notice us at first, still gabbing away, sitting hunched over a folding table, hands clasped on the warmth of steaming coffee cups. One of them was a well-fed, squinty-eyed, pinch-faced, probably fortyish man dressed in clothes expensive enough that I knew he was a valued employee but sloppy enough that I also knew he wasn’t a manager. The other was a woman, maybe a bit younger, soft-featured and doe-eyed, with a mouth that seemed a bit too large for her face and clothes similar to the other talker.
The last one at the table saw us, though, the one who’d laughed politely. He wasn’t a technician or a manager. He wasn’t soft, and he wasn’t dressed like a worker. His head was shaved and he wore dark utility fatigues and an armored vest and had a large handgun strapped in a holster across his chest. His eyes opened wide, hands shifting off the table, away from the steaming ceramic mug and towards that gun.
“Don’t fucking move,” I said, aiming my pistol between his eyes.
The heads of the other two snapped around and I saw the man’s mouth start to open in a shout. I stepped across the room in the space of a second and put a hand over his mouth. He flinched away at the touch, but he didn’t cry out. The gunman glanced between me and Bobbi and Yassa and his hand didn’t move off the table.
“Everyone stay quiet and stay calm,” I cautioned, reaching over to yank the security officer’s pistol from his holster, “and no one will get hurt. Nod if you understand.”
All three nodded, the two workers jerkily, obviously close to panic.
I looked around the room. Besides the cheap, green-topped table, there was a counter with a drink dispenser and a food processing unit, partially-empty plastic crates of soy and spirulina stacked next to it. Shelves above the counter held cups and plates and a bulletin board on the wall displayed a streaming series of dates and announcements. There was one other door in the room; a bathroom maybe.
“Check there,” I told Bobbi as Yassa and I patted the three of them down.
The security guy had some kind of short-range ‘link in a pouch on his vest, tied to an earpiece. I figured it must be tied to an internal communications system and I pocketed it, shoving the earpiece into my place so I could monitor if there were any announcements. The others had nothing but a few Tradenotes and some sort of pass on lanyards around their necks. I took those, too.
“You don’t know who you’re fucking with here,” the gunman said in a low, soft voice. His eyes were focused on me when he spoke, and he didn’t seem nearly as scared as he should have been.
“I think I do,” I countered, trying to keep my voice cool and emotionless.
Across the room, there was a startled cry and then a commotion and I looked over to the interior door Bobbi where I’d sent Bobbi. She lunged inside and I heard a smack of something hard hitting flesh and a grunt of pain. That was when the bald guy made his move, and I should have seen it coming. The table flipped over as he moved, sending hot coffee spraying everywhere and I swung my left hand at him instinctively, slamming his own pistol into the side of his head even as his fingers closed on the collar of my jacket.
He went down with a croak, clutching at his head, and the woman worker screeched in fright and surprise, dodging away, while the pudgy male made a break for the door. He made it to the doorway before a dull silver arm clotheslined him across the throat and he went down with a thump of a hundred kilos hitting a tile floor, choking and gagging. Kane stepped across in front of the entrance, staring at the prone worker impassively. Yassa grabbed the woman around the neck and covered her mouth with a hand as she put her into a choke hold, cutting off the blood at her carotid artery, only letting go once the woman had gone limp.
I sprinted over to the bathroom and pulled the door open. Inside, I saw another guard, a blond man dressed in the same black clothes except with his pants down around his ankles, lying unconscious on the floor next to a toilet, a bleeding cut across his cheek and a silver handgun on the floor next to his outstretched hand. Bobbi covering him with her pistol, an amused look on her face.
“Well,” I sighed, kicking the pistol away, “that could have gone better.”
“Could have been worse, too,” Yassa reminded me as she pulled out a handful of plastic ties. I tossed the handgun I’d taken off the guard onto the counter, then grabbed a few from her.
“Get them all tied and gagged and stuff them in the bathroom,” I said, walking over to the bald guard and twisting his hands behind his back, then zip-tying them in place. He moaned softly, blinking his eyes rapidly and trying to struggle against me without much strength. I secured his ankles, then pulled a strip of cloth out of my jacket and gagged him.
When I straightened, I could see that Yassa had done the same to the woman and Sanders and Ibanez had come inside and were tying up the male technician.
&nbs
p; “Not him.” I pointed at the man in the expensive clothes. “Bring him over to the chair and sit him down.”
While the others hauled the bound and gagged woman and the two guards into the bathroom, Sanders and Ibanez yanked the one Kane had clotheslined up by his arms and dumped him in one of the chairs next to the overturned table, his dress shoes dragging through puddles of cooling coffee. He was still coughing, trying to get his breath back, his face turned purple by the shock and exertion and his eyes fogged over with fright. I crouched down in front of him, my pistol still in my right hand.
“You,” I smacked him lightly in the cheek with my left palm and he focused on me with a look of abject terror, “pay attention. What’s your name?”
He didn’t respond other than wheezing hoarsely, so I slapped him a bit harder and he yelped.
“I said,” I repeated, emphasizing each word, “what is your name?”
“Sanford,” he gasped, still trying to get his breath, his voice scratchy and pained. He smelled of stale coffee, sweat and urine. “Maynard Sanford. Chief Engineer…”
“Maynard, I need to know how many more people are at the plant tonight. How many engineers, how many more security guards?”
He hesitated and I let the muzzle of my pistol drift forward towards him.
“No one has to get killed tonight, Maynard,” I assured him. “I’d rather no one did. That’s why those guards,” I nodded at the two security officers being dragged into the bathroom, “are still alive. If I go on into the plant and there turn out to be more people than you tell me, I might be forced to shoot someone. If you tell me the truth,” I raised my left, empty hand in counterpoint to the one with the gun, “then I can arrange things so that we do what we have to do and no one gets badly hurt.”
