by Rick Partlow
The three of them followed me out to where Bobbi and Sanders were keeping watch. I shut the door behind us and slid the bolt home, locking it. My eyes darted back to the house; I winced at the glare from the lights there. It was the dead of night, but I was sure someone was going to wander out of it any second.
“Kane is on the way to Freeport to get the ship,” I told them quickly, very cognizant of how exposed we were out here. “We have to shut down the laser defense systems before he takes off, or else he’s heading off-planet and leaving us behind.”
“What?” Sanders blurted, wide-eyed.
“Shut up,” I snapped impatiently. “We have just a few hours before he gets there…” I shrugged. “If he gets there. We have to get it done and then stay alive till then.”
“What if he doesn’t come at all?” Ibanez wanted to know.
“Then we kill everyone and take the trucks,” Bobbi said savagely, angry for the same reasons that Ibanez and Sanders were scared.
“Our first priority is finding Captain Yassa,” I told them. “We’re going inside and we shoot anyone we see. I’ve got point. Bobbi, you bring up the rear.” I glanced at Ibanez, who was empty-handed. “First one we shoot that has a gun, someone get it to Ibanez.”
I was being reckless by taking point, especially since I was technically the officer in this mission, but I had a sense of how to handle this and there wasn’t time to explain it to them. This whole thing was a shit sandwich, but the hell if I knew any other way I could have done it.
I headed towards the house, up into the central courtyard, again striding carelessly like I owned the place. If they knew we were here already, they’d be shooting at us, so I figured it was smartest to assume they didn’t know. The courtyard was lit up almost daylight bright by the floodlights, but there was no one there. I walked straight up to the front door of the ranch house and yanked it open, shoving the barrel of my rifle ahead of me.
The entrance hall was vacant and dark and nothing moved. I felt a twinge of hope fluttering inside my stomach at the idea that maybe this would be easy; maybe everyone was asleep except the guards who’d been on duty. Maybe we could just waltz right in, find wherever the control center was for the defense lasers, find Yassa and then hold up somewhere defensible until Kane arrived.
Yeah, and maybe the Predecessors would fly in on their winged unicorns and spread love and happiness and give everyone their own pony. Nothing was ever that simple or easy.
“What are you guys doing in here?”
The voice came from the hallway junction on the other side of the living room, way too loud and way too authoritative for my taste. He was dressed in the same dark colored fatigues and tactical vest as the other security personnel but he had a holstered handgun instead of a rifle and had an air of authority about him that matched his middle-aged features.
“I said I wanted patrols all night…” He stopped, frowning. “Ben, is that you?”
Ben must have had one of those faces.
“Yeah,” I said, walking closer, still casual. I kept my voice hoarse and quiet. It was dark in here and he didn’t have night vision glasses; maybe the guy wouldn’t realize what was going on. “We got called in by the Boss.”
“What the hell’s wrong with your voice?” Then he stopped walking forward and noticed Victor and Kurt; they were hard to miss, as big as they were, and there wasn’t much you could do to hide that. I saw the realization in his face, followed quickly by panic, and his shoulders shifted, his right hand making a desperate grab for the handgun holstered at his hip.
I was right about at that magic seven meters again, and I felt a confidence surge through me that I could reach him before he could draw that pistol. I’d taken two steps toward him, leaning forward and ready to lunge, but I stopped abruptly because his head exploded. The report of the rifle going off was a double thunderclap behind me, the flare of the rocket-assisted rounds a red streak through the darkness of the living room that had come way too close to me.
I spun around and saw Sanders’ rifle at his shoulder, a thin haze of white smoke dissipating from the barrel vents, a tremor in his cheek. The man he’d shot slumped to a floor now stained red and littered with pieces of skull and brain, and Sanders looked very much like he wanted to puke. That was probably, I realized, the first human being he’d ever killed. At least he hadn’t frozen up.
“Shit,” I muttered. So much for sneaking around. “Bobbi! Take Victor and Kurt and go left; find Yassa and find the control center for the lasers. Ibanez, Sanders, follow me!”
I heard voices coming down the hallway in front of me, sleepy and questioning, and I trotted past the dead body and put my shoulder against the wall. I felt things crunching and mushing under my boots and I tried not to think about what they were. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Sanders take up a position to my right, crouching low against the wall on his side, while Ibanez knelt over the dead body and stripped the gunbelt from it, strapping it around herself and cinching it tight before she pulled out the handgun and checked its load.
“Go,” she urged me, coming up behind me, the pistol held at low ready.
I shuffled down the hallway, keeping my left shoulder against the wall. This way led to the den, the bar where Yassa and I had been sharing a drink when she’d told me about Cowboy. I didn’t know what else was down here, except for the dining room at the very end, so I had no idea which door opened or whom it belonged to, but I did see the light flash on inside the room, a flare in my borrowed goggles, and I threw up a fist to stop Sanders and Ibanez.
“What was that noise?” It was a woman, dressed in loose fitting pants and shirt that might have been what she slept in, and I could see that she was unarmed. “Is someone out here?”
I thought I remembered seeing her at dinner, but I hadn’t been introduced. I’d had a sense she was involved with running the ranch, but she definitely wasn’t one of the hired muscle.
“It’s okay, ma’am,” I told her, waving confidently. “We have it under control. Just stay in your room for now.”
She squinted down the hall at me, her night vision ruined by turning on her own lights.
“Who is that?” She asked.
“It’s Ben,” I attempted, waving again and pulling the hat down a little over my face.
“Oh, all right,” she said, nodding and retreating back into her room, closing the door.
Sanders stared at me and I shrugged and kept moving. Ben was so popular, I kind of wished I hadn’t had to kill him.
The next door past the woman’s bedroom, I knew, was the den, and at the end of the hall I could see the short staircase that led down to the darkened hollow of the dining room. The only door left to check was set in the wall opposite the dining room, and I remembered from passing it earlier that it had been fitted with a biometric lockplate.
Approaching it now, I could see that it was yawning open and inviting and setting off all my internal alarms. I stepped across the hall, motioning for Sanders to watch back the way we’d come while Ibanez covered the dining room. Inside the door was a set of stairs heading downward, and I remembered Julio mentioning the basement, and that it was usually locked. A faint light filtered up from whatever was below, but no sound betrayed what waited down there.
“I’m going down,” I told them, speaking quietly. “Sanders, keep a lookout up here. Ibanez, you’re with me.”
Sanders looked like he wanted to argue about it, but I didn’t give him the chance; I just stepped onto the cement staircase, grateful it wasn’t wood like most everything else in the house. My steps on it were light taps rather than the creaks they could have been, but they still seemed thunderous in the absolute silence from below. The staircase curved with the wall, following some natural bend in the foundation of the house, and as it did the light grew brighter and more focused.
It came, I saw as I descended, from a 2-D flat-screen monitor affixed to the far wall, long obsolete like most everything else in the Pirate Worlds. An error me
ssage flashed across it, obvious even to someone as barely technically literate as me.
“Connection not available,” it repeated over and over. “System not responding.”
Sitting on a chair bolted to the floor in front of a control panel was Gramps, his face ashen, his hands flat on the console in front of him. I stepped across the room, my rifle trained on him.
“Keep your hands in front of you,” I warned him.
His eyes snapped around and he nearly lunged up out of the seat before he saw the muzzle of the rifle yawning in front of him. There was a desperation in his look that I’d never seen before, and maybe relief and definitely rage. I didn’t see any obvious weapons on him, but I didn’t lower the gun; he was old and devious enough to have one or two concealed on him.
“What the hell did you do, Tyler?” He demanded. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done to us?”
“What did I do?” I balked at him. “What the hell are you talking about? You betrayed me, Gramps. You were ready to lock me up; you’re no better than my mother!” I realized I was yelling and reined myself in, trying to bring my temper and my breathing under control. I took a step closer to him. “I saved your life once. Tell me where you have Captain Yassa before I change my mind about that.”
“It’s not about me, you selfish prick!” He exploded, coming to his feet. “When the other cabals realize our defenses are down, they’ll come in and steal everything they can and destroy what they can’t!”
I felt my face screw up in confusion and I felt the muscles in my arms shuddering as I fought to keep myself from butt stroking him with the rifle.
“What the hell are you talking about?” I repeated. “I’ve been hiding in a cave for two days, when the hell would I have had a chance to shut down the defense system?”
That took him back a step and the look on his face matched the one I felt on my own. Then it hardened into utter rage.
“Constantine,” he growled. He stepped forward again and I brought the rifle back to my shoulder. “You wanted to find your Captain Yassa,” he said impatiently, waving up at the stairs. “I’ll take you to her.”
I was debating whether or not I should hit him in the face and tie him up when I heard the gunshots echoing faintly down the stairs. I backed away from Gramps and looked up towards the entrance.
“Munroe!” Sanders ran down to where the wall curved, stopping when he could see me. “There’s a fight going on at the other end of the house! It’s gotta’ be Bobbi!”
Gramps looked at me questioningly and I swore under my breath and motioned to Ibanez. “Let him go up. You two, follow us.”
Ibanez looked at me doubtfully, but she moved out of the way and let the two of us by. I had to jog up the steps to keep up with Gramps, but once we hit the door, I shoved past him and ran towards the sounds of gunfire. I saw the tiny flares of rocket-assisted rounds smashing into the walls of the living room as I crossed it, then in the darkness of the connecting hallway I could see a dozen fireflies as answering fire headed into the enemy, coming from doorways on either side of the hall.
“Friendly coming up behind!” I shouted hoarsely. “Don’t fucking shoot me!”
I could see more details as I got closer. There were at least five or six of Constantine’s men barricaded in a doorway at the end of the hall, blocking it with an overturned metal storage cabinet to provide cover. It had a couple dozen holes punched in it and they were still alive, so I assumed it was filled with something thick enough to stop the incoming rounds.
I opened up with my own rifle as I ran, targeting with the reticle projected onto my stolen night vision goggles. One of the figures in the door spun away, holding an arm and cursing, and the others ducked down, giving me the opening to slide into the doorway on the right along with Bobbi Taylor, Ibanez pushing Gramps in behind me. It was his office, the one I’d been in with Yassa a couple days ago. Across the hallway, I could see Sanders huddled behind the Simak brothers in someone’s bedroom, swapping out magazines from the spares we’d doled out.
“They popped out of that room down there a couple minutes ago,” Bobbi told me, flinching unconsciously as more return fire smacked into the doorframe beside her. “We’ve been holding them off, but we don’t have enough ammo to assault.”
“What’s down there?” I asked Gramps as I checked the round counter on the side of my rifle and saw that I had 30 shots left in this magazine.
“The armory,” he told me and I sighed. They weren’t about to run out of ammo, then.
“Of course it is,” Ibanez muttered, looking with disdain at the handgun that was her only weapon.
Gramps pushed past me, getting closer to the door.
“Constantine!” He shouted. “Constantine, can you hear me? It’s Torres!”
The firing died down a moment and I heard mutterings and rumblings from inside the room. Finally, after a long moment, the enforcer’s smooth and deep voice answered.
“What do you want, Grandpa?” There was disrespect in the tone, not at all the subordination that would have made me feel so much better.
“I think you know damn well what I want, Constantine!” Gramps was bellowing now, spittle flying from his mouth, as close to completely out of control as I’d ever seen him. Scared Gramps was so much more terrifying than even just-betrayed-me Gramps. “The fucking defense system is down!”
“Oh, that,” Constantine replied casually. “I apologize, did I forget to mention that I had a better offer?”
“The Corporate Council paid you off, too?” Gramps’s voice was incredulous, his eyes wide.
Constantine laughed at that, a derisive snort. “You see the damn Corporates under every rock, Grandpa. You were almost too easy to manipulate; it was disappointing. No, it was someone much closer to home: the Novoye Moscva bratva.”
“The what?” Ibanez muttered. I’d heard of them, though.
“They’re a Pirate World cabal,” I told her quietly. “Emigrants from old Russia, what was left of it after the Sino-Russian War. They’re mostly over on Peboan, a few light years from here.”
“They’ve been trying to take over Crowley’s operations since I killed him,” Gramps said in a low growl. “Damn it. I knew Constantine was a bastard, but I didn’t realize he was such a stupid bastard.” Then louder, shouting again. “What are they offering you, Constantine? I’ll double it.”
“They’re giving me your job, old man.” That laugh again, mocking. “Mr. Munroe, do me a favor and take a look down the hall. I guarantee your safety.”
I sneered at that, instead stretching my rifle out around the door jam and using the connection between its sights and the glasses I’d been using. Constantine was standing just behind the storage cabinet, flanked by two of his men. His right hand was wrapped around Brandy Yassa’s throat. She’d been worked over; her face was bruised and blood trickled from her nose and a cut above her eye, but her expression was still defiant. Her hands were flex-cuffed in front of her, but given that Victor and Kurt hadn’t been able to take Constantine, I don’t know that it made any difference.
“Drop your guns,” Constantine said, “or I’ll snap her neck.”
Chapter Sixteen
I wanted to yell for him not to do it, wanted to step out and surrender, but I knew just how much good that would do.
“You know who I am, Constantine,” I told him, pulling the rifle back, not wanting to see any more. “You know where I’ve been. She’s my friend, but I’ve seen friends die before.”
“I apologize for sounding so melodramatic,” he said, actually sounding contrite. “Here’s the thing, though, I need something from you and your old grandpa, and I need you alive to get it. So, I’ll make you a deal. Your people can go. I have the ID cards for the vehicles in here. I’ll give them the key to the rover and they can take off, head back to town. But you stay here.”
“Don’t do it, Munroe,” Bobbi hissed at me. “You can’t trust him.”
I could see Victor shaking his head f
rom across the hall, while Kurt and Sanders just watched, wide-eyed.
I closed my eyes, mind working feverishly.
“Toss the key card down the hall,” I said to him. “Let the others get out. Once they’re gone, I toss out my weapon. Then you let Yassa go after them. Once she’s had time to get out, I’ll step out of this room.”
“He’ll kill you,” Bobbi said fiercely, pushing against my shoulder in frustration.
“Not before he gets what he wants,” Gramps said grimly, eyes hooded.
“You’re pretty intelligent for a Marine,” Constantine said. “All right. Everyone, hold your fire, let them go.” There was a pause and then I saw a small, round code card spinning across the floor outside the hall. “There’s the key to the rover.”
“Kane should be here soon,” I said quickly to Bobbi. “Get out of that canyon as quick as you can and see if you can get a signal to him. If you can do it without getting killed, come back and get us. You’re in charge, Bobbi,” I added.
She nodded, not speaking, not even looking at me, her expression full of rage and frustration. Ibanez put a hand on my shoulder.
“We’ll come back for you,” she promised.
“Go,” I told them, nodding out at the hallway. “Hurry, before he changes his mind.”
“Move it!” Bobbi snapped at Sanders and the brothers, waving them ahead of her. “Get going, now!”
Ibanez followed her out, and I could see Bobbi backing up, covering them with her rifle as they retreated from the hallway. I watched them as best I could, waiting a full thirty seconds before I heard Constantine calling to me.
“Your gun,” he said.
“Cut her hands free,” I told him. I gave it another ten seconds, then looked at Gramps and tossed the rifle out the door. It clattered to the wooden floor with a solid, metallic sound and I pulled the goggles off, dropping them to the carpet in Gramps’ office.
There was no sound for a moment, but then I saw Yassa coming slowly past the door, rubbing at her wrists. She looked at me, the pain in her eyes having little to do with the bruises on her face.
