by Rick Partlow
“There are at least two people pulling security around this next curve, maybe fifty meters,” I informed her, looking at the readout from my helmet’s audio and thermal sensors. “So, can we talk about this later?”
She shut up for a moment and I raised a fist in the air, signaling the others to stop and take a knee.
“Me and who else?” She asked. The corner of my mouth quirked upward.
“Not this time,” I decided. “Sanders, take Waugh and Prouty. Make it silent and quick and don’t let them call for help.”
“Roger that, Boss,” Eli Sanders said, rising up and waving the other two forward.
I could feel Bobbi’s eyes on me even if I couldn’t see them.
“What?” I asked her on our private channel.
“Sanders is a good man in a fight,” she allowed grudgingly, and I knew it had taken her most of the last two and a half years to come to that conclusion, “but I don’t trust the new guys yet.”
“The ‘new guys’ have been working with us for nearly a year,” I reminded her. We’d gone through quite a few candidates to replace Carmen Ibanez and Captain Yassa, and none had stuck until these three. “Anyway, we have to be able to count on them or we have to know we can’t.”
“You’re the boss, Boss,” she grumbled.
I ignored her and concentrated on following Eli Sanders, Marjorie Waugh and Channing Prouty as they crept closer to the bend in the canyon, going from a jog to a cautious, crouching walk to a high crawl as they rounded it. Then they were out of sight, and off my sensors as well. Normally, I could have accessed their helmet cams on my HUD, but the raiders we were hunting had full-spectrum jamming laid down in this canyon, low enough beneath the deck that no one would notice it from orbit but effective in preventing AI driven or remotely piloted drones from being able to stumble on them. That limited our comms and our magnetic sensors to line-of-sight.
I knew how Bobbi felt; I wanted to be up there myself, not because I enjoyed sentry removal but because I knew I could do it better than any of them, including her. But I wasn’t just a Joe, I was the commander of this little band of misfits and I had to learn to trust them. So, I crouched in the dark and I waited, feeling the tension and impatience of the others behind me as palpably as I felt my own.
It was nearly five minutes before Sanders appeared around the corner and waved us forward. I jumped to my feet, stomping the pins and needles out of my legs, and jogged around the bend in the ancient river. The thick sand sucked the soles of my armored boots into it and it took a concerted effort to keep my balance as it tried to throw me off.
Beyond the bend, the canyon widened out even more, nearly a hundred meters across at its widest, and tucked into that bulge about half a kilometer down was a starship. It wasn’t much of a starship, a battered and patched surplus missile cutter, one of the earliest designs, probably pirated or slapped together from stolen parts. It squatted in utilitarian ugliness under the cover of a camouflage net pitoned into the rock walls to either side and nearly blocking the width of the canyon.
A couple hundred meters this side of the ship were two men in dark-colored utility fatigues and armored tactical vests. One was flat on his back in the dark sand, his eyes wide and white, his face death-pale. His throat had been ripped out, his head all but severed by a combat knife, and his chest was soaked in his own blood. He was thin, almost gaunt, his face lined from a life lived hard. The other man was face-down and I couldn’t see the wound that had killed him. Their weapons were tossed to the side, long-obsolete rocket rifles that could be fabricated locally; they were a favorite out here in the Pirate Worlds, away from the centralized manufacturing in the Commonwealth.
Prouty and Waugh were crouched next to them, faceless statues in the sand, their Gauss rifles held at the ready. There was blood spattered across the sleeves of Waugh’s armor and the backs of her gloves, but I didn’t see any shake in her hands or any unsteadiness in her stance.
“Any movement at the ship?” I asked them.
“Nothing so far,” Prouty told me, just the slightest hint of a break in his voice. “It’s cold and dark, nothing on thermal.”
“Move the bodies off to the side and cover them up,” I told him. “Disable the weapons.”
“Yes, sir,” he acknowledged, coming to his feet and grabbing one of the raider corpses by an ankle to drag it off.
“Victor,” I said, seeing the big man coming around the corner, his Gauss rifle held like a toy in his massive hands. “Break out the charges. Bobbi, you and Sanders place them. Kurt, take the others and set up security on the other side of the ship. I’d rather the first time these assholes knew we were here was when this boat blows up, but if you see anyone coming down the canyon, kill them.”
I didn’t stand around and watch them; I ducked under the drooping edge of the camouflage netting and headed up the open ramp under the nose of the cutter. It was dark inside the ship’s utility bay, without even the chemical strip-lights you would usually find in any military or commercial vessel; that probably meant they---or someone---had cobbled the thing together out of surplus parts auctioned off after the war.
As I entered the bay, I let my rifle hang across my chest on its retractable sling and transitioned to my pistol in the closer quarters of the ship. The bay wasn’t occupied, but it wasn’t empty, either; a dozen heavy, polymer lockers were strapped to D-rings set in the deck and bulkhead. They had the nearly universal look of weapons storage cases, though they lacked any government or commercial identification markings or any RFID chips that my helmet sensors could detect. According to Divya’s briefings, the guns had been stolen from off-world caches belonging to the Sung Brothers; their home turf was Peboan, this system’s largest habitable.
Why she or the people for whom she worked cared about the Sung Brothers or their weapons was something she’d declined to share. Maybe she didn’t even know. I was just glad I didn’t have to carry the shit off the boat and haul it out of here; my instructions were just to make sure it was on board…and check the ship’s logs to see if I could find out who was paying them to steal it.
I cat-footed through the passageway up from the utility bay towards the cockpit, pausing as I passed by the cheap, plastic hatches of the small cabins. Three of them were ajar, the tiny compartments empty, their cots folded into the wall among faded mold stains. The last was shut, and I sighed out a breath, stopping with my shoulder against the bulkhead next to it.
Why couldn’t they have just slept in their encampment? Someone always wanted to sleep in the ship, despite how humid and stuffy it got inside without the power on. Probably their boss, or captain or commander, or whatever the hell he called himself.
I shifted my rifle around to the back, raised my pistol to the high ready, then positioned myself across the passageway from the hatch and lunged forward, kicking it in. It wasn’t military quality, wasn’t even commercial quality; it was the cheapest fabricator-made piece of plastic shit they could find and it busted inward beneath the sole of my boot like it wasn’t there. Inside the darkened room, sprawled out on the fold-down cot, was a fat man in loose-fitting sleep-wear, a russet mustache drooping over his florid face. He bolted upward at the noise of the hatch bursting inward, and I saw his hand snatching for a pistol he’d left on the shelf beside the cot.
I shot him through the forehead at near point-blank range. The rocket motor of the handgun round barely had time to ignite before the bullet struck him, but this close, the coldgas launching charge was enough. His skull popped like a fresh egg and the warhead sent a narrow jet of plasma through his brain; he collapsed backwards without making a sound. The cabin wasn’t even as big as my bathroom back home and the blood spray coated every surface.
“Shit,” I muttered, wiping blood spatter off my right arm.
I stepped inside and grabbed his handgun, then headed up to the cockpit. The main power was shut down, but the computer system was running off the battery backups. It was decades obsolete, with physica
l input rather than haptic holograms, and it lacked even the most rudimentary data security. Which was all very convenient for me. I pulled up the ship’s navigation systems and transferred the data to my helmet computer via a blissfully unsecured wireless link.
I didn’t waste time reading it, just de-assed the boat as quick as I could. Something itched between my shoulder blades, maybe a feeling I’d been in there too long…or maybe just drying sweat. Bobbi was heading up the ramp as I was heading down.
“Charges are in place,” she said. “Timers are set; we have five minutes.”
“Get everyone moving. We need to be assaulting through the objective by the time this thing blows.”
She turned and began yelling on the team net, but I blocked it out, holstering my pistol before stripping the ammunition out of the one I’d picked up on the ship then tossing it away. By the time I’d transitioned back to my Gauss rifle, I’d reached the other side of the cutter and could see Bobbi leading the team forward in a wedge formation. I jogged to take my place behind her at the center of the wedge, then fell into a quick-step, half tactical and half “let’s get the hell out of here before the charges blow.”
The gas giant filled the sky above the canyon, a constant reminder of how small we were and how little all this meant, yet somehow, we couldn’t stop killing each other over this petty shit. The thought was there, but it washed over my back like water and was gone. Philosophy was fine, but this was the here and now and this was the job. If I wanted to get home to Sophie and Cesar, I needed to concentrate on the job.
It was less than a kilometer before I could see it, could see the light leaking out from doors cracked open and the thermal signature of the power cells and the EM jammers they ran. They were poly-canvas huts, quick to set up and compact when collapsed; an electric current turned them from malleable to board-solid in seconds. They were perfect for a temporary camp you could strike in minutes, and the raiders had set them up between the gaps in a rock-fall to give themselves cover and a measure of concealment. They didn’t intend to stay here for longer than it would take to get the location of their next raid against the Sung Brothers, that was clear.
How the hell had Divya known where they’d be and when to attack?
Later, damn it.
I couldn’t see the people inside the tents on thermal; the tent material was insulated against that, military grade. But if our intell was right, there were about a dozen of them, and we’d already killed three. They were probably all asleep, but probably was a slippery word that could wriggle right out of your fingers.
“Get to cover and get yourself a good field of fire,” I told them when we were about thirty meters from the closest of the tents.
The fallen rock provided plenty of cover for a small force like ours, and we scattered to it like roaches fleeing a sudden light. I was on the other side of a jagged splinter of granite from Bobbi, at the center of the formation, and I put the aiming reticle in my helmet HUD on the central tent, the largest of them.
“Thirty seconds,” Bobbi told me, her voice calm and almost tranquil. She was an absolute bitch when we were waiting for shit to happen, but once it did…
Nothing moved. My helmet sensors picked up the sound of someone snoring. I closed my eyes for just a second and pictured Sophie and Cesar at the spaceport, waving goodbye as I boarded the ship. Cesar was deep into the Terrible Two’s, but he’d kept it together long enough to smile for me when I left. I left too often. I could see it in Sophie’s face even when she tried to stay cheerful for Cesar’s sake, even though she’d never say it because she knew there wasn’t much I could do about it, yet.
Behind us, the night lit up and a roaring shockwave of sound and wind swept down through the canyon, focused by its rock passageway. The sound seemed distant, filtered through my helmet buffers, and I could barely feel the vibration in the rock I was leaning against, but I knew several kilos of chemical hyperexplosives had just turned a few hundred thousand dollars’ worth of starship into the same collection of disconnected spare parts it had started life as. A billowing cloud of red dust and flying debris rolled over us, swallowing everything in its path and obscuring all but thermal sensors.
When they came out of their tents, I could only see them as yellow, green and red outlines, inhuman and faceless. I could hear unintelligible shouts and loud, panicked curses that cut off abruptly when I pulled the trigger. The Gauss rifle kicked hard against my shoulder and there was a spray of warmth from the featureless blob of one of their heads. The human outline was falling backwards in what seemed like slow motion, bouncing off the ground and then lying motionless forever.
I scanned for another target and there was nothing but bodies, gradually going from red and white to green and blue.
“O’Neill, Waugh,” Bobbi ordered curtly. “Check the bodies. Sanders, Victor, Kurt, check the tents then turn off those damn jammers. Prouty, you stay here with me and cover them.”
The dust was beginning to settle, fading into the background as the wind swept down the canyon, and I could see the bodies clearly now. If they’d looked human before, they certainly didn’t now. They were broken things, bags of blood and meat and I had a hard time believing they’d ever been alive. O’Neill and Waugh were stripping weapons off them, then gingerly turning them over to search for more.
“Tents are clear,” I heard Sanders announce after half a minute. “Jammers are off.”
“Kane,” I called over my helmet radio. “You hear me?”
“Yes.” The voice was monotone and nearly mechanical. Not as mechanical as he wanted it to be.
“Come in and pick us up at their camp,” I told him. “It’s a cold LZ.”
“Two minutes.” Not a word wasted. Sometimes I felt lucky to get him to talk at all.
It was less than a minute before I heard the scream of the jets circling overhead. The canyon wasn’t quite as wide here as it was where the raider ship had been berthed, but Kane could land the Nomad in a bathroom. She was the same, basic delta of a converted missile cutter, like the raider ship, but that was where the resemblance ended. The Nomad had been reconfigured in a Corporate Council dry-dock and refitted with custom sensor, communications and electronic warfare suites as well as a military-grade proton cannon. She was worth a fortune, which was why she also had some pretty sophisticated security systems in her ship’s AI to keep Kane or any other member of the crew from running off and selling her.
The Nomad roared into the canyon on columns of fire, her belly jets throwing up a sandstorm that scoured my visor. I didn’t look away, just watched her touch down on five heavy-duty landing treads, their carriage sinking into their housings as the weight of the ship settled onto them. Kane had left about a meter of clearance between the tips of the delta wings and the canyon walls. The turbines spun down to a steady, background hum but didn’t completely fade as the boarding ramp extended on hydraulic cylinders and a slender, wispy figure descended, her shadow stretching far past her meter-six height.
She was attired inappropriately for the conditions in a well-tailored business suit with dress shoes shining in the light from the utility bay, and her short, conservatively dark hair was fashionably coifed in an intricate bun. I suppose she was attractive in a sort of cold, elfin way, but she definitely wasn’t my type.
“Very efficiently done, Mr. Munroe,” Divya Reddy told me, miming applause. Her voice was smooth and oily, her eyes dark and unrevealing. She probably weighed less than fifty kilos and I trusted her significantly less far than I could throw her. “I’ll have to recommend Mr. West give you a bonus this quarter.”
I waited where I was and let her approach, feeling tired in general and not a little tired of her after spending the last two weeks cooped up together inside a fairly small starship.
“What the hell does Andre Damiani care about this piddly shit anyway, Divya?” I asked her, knowing I was wasting my time but feeling obliged to go through the motions.
“I’m sure that the Executive
Director of the whole Corporate Council doesn’t share his inner thoughts with me,” she answered with a dry humor that was unusually introspective for her. “Perhaps you can schedule a personal interview with him the next time you head back to Earth.”
I snorted at that, not quite a laugh but almost. I hadn’t been “back to Earth” since I’d changed my identity, altered my face and ran off to join the Fleet Marine Corps almost nine years ago. That was the major part of the deal I’d made with my Uncle Andre through his agent, Roger West, who I’d come to know during the war as “Cowboy.” I worked as his hired gun out in the Pirate Worlds in exchange for him keeping my whereabouts and existence secret from my mother, Patrice Damiani. If she’d known where I was, she would have been hauling me back to her little fortress in the Trans-Angeles megalopolis back on Earth for “re-education.”
“I have the navigation files you wanted,” I told her, tapping the side of my helmet. “So, unless there’s anything else you need, can we get off this rock and go home?”
I was coming down from the adrenalin high of a firefight and the hour-long operation that had led up to it; that’s the only excuse I have for not remembering very clearly what happened next, or the order of what occurred. I know two things happened at once, so close together I couldn’t tell which was first: the Nomad blasted off from the canyon floor with enough force that the blast of the belly jets blew Divya a meter through the air to slam her shoulder into my chest and knock me backwards off my feet, and Kane broadcast a panicked exclamation in a voice surprised enough to almost sound human.
“Incoming!”
Chapter Two
The sand and lower-than-standard gravity cushioned my fall, so I wasn’t too stunned to notice the dark, bat-like shape of an assault shuttle roaring overhead, flashes of ionized air tracing a line from the Gatling laser in its chin turret as it chased after Nomad. It was there, then it was gone, passing over the canyon and disappearing from sight in the space of an eye-blink, and I was already pushing Divya off of me and scrambling to my feet.
