by Rick Partlow
“That can’t be good.” She sighed. “It sounds like we’re flying into a war zone.”
“Oh, it won’t be that bad,” Divya assured her. She was occupying the auxiliary couch that pulled down out of the bulkhead just inside the cockpit hatch, and I was fairly sure the only reason she’d waited till now to comment was the g-forces from the main engine burn weighing on her chest. “I mean, the two concerns are competing, of course, but they’re both businesses when you strip away the criminal veneer. Surely they can’t afford to make things too dangerous or they’ll be cutting off their own income streams.”
She’d changed clothes while we were prepping for takeoff from the gas giant’s moon; she was wearing something that wouldn’t stick out quite so blatantly in a place like Shakak, a utilitarian outfit that probably still cost more than I made in a year. She’d added a personal touch to it, though, a multicolored head scarf inlaid with metallic gold in designs that might have come from somewhere in Asia back on Earth.
“The Corporate Council is a business, too,” Bobbi snapped back at her impatiently. “But here we are, shooting people for a living.”
“Discreetly,” Kane put in and I laughed almost involuntarily.
“Is there still a spaceport?” Divya asked, arching an eyebrow.
I pulled up the sensor readout and zoomed in on the river valley, penetrating the cover of the decades-old trees that towered above the city, and running a thermal scan of the surrounding area. The primary star was beginning to set, so any heat sources should have shown up fairly clear. I shook my head slowly.
“There’s a field down there,” I answered, “with what might be ships on it, but none of them are powered up, not even on standby.”
“Head there,” Divya said, in an annoyingly commanding tone.
“I was under the impression,” I said, tightly controlling my anger, “that I was in charge of tactical operations. Where and when to land this ship seems pretty tactical to me.”
“We’re not under fire,” she pointed out, her tone dismissive, “and we’re not in combat or on a combat operation. This is a strategic decision and I’m making it. Land the ship.”
“You heard the woman, Kane,” I waved to the cyborg. “Land the fucking ship.”
His flesh and blood eye gave me a look and I shrugged. We both had a feeling for what was going to happen, but sometimes the best way to learn is to get your nose rubbed in the shit. Kane didn’t touch a control; he didn’t have to, with the interface jacks in his temples plugged directly into the ship’s systems. His biological eye went unfocussed and the Nomad began a gradual, shallow circle down through the partial cloud cover and down towards the broad river valley.
The setting primary star cast a red-gold tint over the trees and grass outside the city, and the lengthened shadows threw Shakak into harsh relief, making it seem sinister somehow in its sprawling, industrial ugliness. I didn’t see any vehicles, didn’t see any people.
I also didn’t see the anti-aerospacecraft Gatling laser turret open up until after Kane threw the Nomad into a barrel roll and a sudden dive that left my stomach about two thousand meters up. Even then, it was the merest flash of light across the threat display and a warning klaxon that filled the cockpit with its squealing clamor.
G-forces tossed me hard against my seat restraints and I clenched my teeth and my stomach muscles tight and counted on my implants to keep me from puking. I could hear Divya squawking in distress somewhere behind me, and even Bobbi was grunting with the effort of keeping her lunch in her stomach. I tried to keep my eyes open, but my vision was blurring and there was a roaring in my ears and I knew I’d just have to trust Kane to get us out of this alive because it was everything I could do just to stay conscious.
I felt something wet hit the back of my neck and I cursed, knowing it was probably someone’s vomit. Then we were back level for just the barest of moments and I drew in a breath before the belly jets roared to life and I was thrown forward against my restraint straps, feeling a twinge in my neck from the whiplash. I could hear a crash from the utility bay as something broke loose of its moorings and slammed to the deck and I just knew I was going to puke now from the negative g’s, but then we landed with a bone-jarring jolt and were finally still once again.
There was a barely-perceptible bouncing sensation as the landing gear settled in on their hydraulics and lifted slowly back up, and the turbines began to throttle down from a screaming roar to a faint, background whine. I opened my eyes and my vision stopped spinning long enough to make out our surroundings on the viewscreen display. Smoke was billowing around us from a brushfire started by the belly jets, and the tall grass we’d landed in was quickly burning away beneath us.
We’d touched down in a small clearing, barely large enough to accommodate the Nomad’s wingspan, and tall, imposing pines stretched over us, black and featureless as they were backlit by the sunset, swaying in the chill wind blowing off the mountains. The primary star still shone on those snow-covered peaks, bathing them in a rose-pink glow that was far too---what had Kane said? Oh yeah---“pretty” for a place as harsh as this.
“Jesus H. Tapdancing Christ,” Bobbi moaned from behind me and to my left. I hit the quick-release on my restraints, then turned the acceleration couch on its gimbals to face her and Divya.
Bobbi’s face was as close to green as a human could come, and she had a couple small puke stains on her armored vest, but at least she’d stayed conscious. Divya’s head was lolling and she was leaning slack against her restraints. There was a huge swath of vomit across the front of her tan jacket, but it was fading even as I watched, swept away by the self-cleaning material.
“Do we have any bogies coming after us?” I asked Kane, trying to get up enough equilibrium to stand.
“Nothing in the air,” he told me. “Not even drones.” The cyborg seemed as unaffected by the gut-wrenching maneuvering as he was by everything else. I wondered how much was a put-on, a game he played with himself. Then again, if you pretended to be something long enough, you really did become that.
I pulled up the sensor data from the last two minutes and whistled softly.
“We took fire from three separate laser turrets,” I told Bobbi, “and a guided missile battery, all from different quadrants of the city and surrounding areas.”
“How far away are we from Shakak?” She wondered, leaning forward to stare at the display.
“Fifteen kilometers,” Kane answered. “Northwest.”
“What the fuck happened?” Divya moaned, eyes still squeezed shut but her hands searching blindly for her restraint release. I limped a step across the cockpit, still feeling a bit of the bruising from the explosion earlier, and pulled it for her; she slid slightly down in the seat with a sigh.
“What happened,” I said and she cracked open one eye to look at what I hoped was one of my best I-told-you-so glares, “is that, guess what, we were under fire and we are in a combat operation after all. Maybe you should stick to relaying the orders from higher and stop trying to be an operational commander.”
She looked as if she was about to say something back, but I didn’t give her the chance, turning instead to Bobbi. “Go check on the others and make sure everyone came through okay, then get them ready for a soft recon. I’m going to go see how our guest is doing.”
I could hear the moaning and complaining emanating from the cabins as I navigated the narrow passageway back to the utility bay, but I left those to Bobbi. I knew they’d been strapped into their fold down seats so no one would be hurt that badly. Corporal Vilberg had been strapped into the cot still, which had been locked into moorings in the deck, and it was the only thing I could think of that would have made that big bang earlier.
Sure enough, the cot had collapsed, the brackets at the ends of the legs snapped off near the connections at the bottom. Vilberg was on his side, hanging out of the straps and cursing hoarsely, jammed into a corner of the compartment between two storage lockers.
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p; “Are you okay?” I asked him, kneeling down and unlatching the straps, sending him tumbling a few centimeters to the deck.
“What the fuck?” He spluttered, trying to push himself to his feet but slipping down again with a moan, holding his head.
“We took some ground fire,” I explained, then cocked an eyebrow at him. “You could have mentioned that might happen, especially since your ass was on the line right alongside ours.”
“Shit,” he murmured, squinting at me. There was a nasty bruise forming on his right cheek, but I didn’t see any blood and he didn’t seem to have any broken bones. “They’re shooting at incoming ships now? It wasn’t that bad when we left, and that was just a few days ago.”
“We’re going to be hiking into town,” I said, offering him a hand and pulling him to his feet. He was solidly built, and the gravity here was close to Earth-normal, and I had to brace a foot in a solid stance to help him up. “We need to try to figure out the situation, and I’d like to bring you along to explain things to your CO, if you’re willing.” I shrugged. “I won’t force you to come, not least because I don’t want to have to babysit you or make sure you don’t try to screw us over. But if you agree to not cause any trouble, I’ll take you back to your people and we can try to straighten things out between us.”
“Sure,” he agreed immediately. “I don’t want to be sitting in this damn ship tied up for days.”
“I want your word,” I warned him. “And if you break it, I’ll put a bullet in your head and not lose a wink of sleep over it.”
“In that case,” he said enthusiastically, raising his hands in acquiescence, “you have my word. Definitely. All day long.”
***
By the time we started walking, the primary was well below the horizon and the wind was picking up, a freezing-cold blast of air that moaned through the swaying trees and pushed away the clouds. A veil of stars hung over us, shockingly bright and so different from the constellations I’d seen in my youth in the desert southwest of North America or what I’d grown used to over the last few years on Demeter. I had to force my eyes away from them so I could concentrate on the rough, uneven game trail that was leading us out of the forest.
And there was game here, engineered and imported decades ago by the original settlers along with the grass and trees and insects and everything else, spreading with unnatural swiftness due both to the accelerated breeding and growth patterns engineered into the first few generations and to the total lack of competition. The algal growth that the Predecessors had left behind to engineer living worlds was insanely hardy and persistent, but one of its side-effects was the production of soil perfect for Earth-based plants to take hold; and when they did, it died and disappeared.
It was almost like they’d known we were coming and left the table set, on dozens of worlds throughout the Cluster. Sophie believed that was just what had happened, that they’d been able to predict humans…and maybe the Tahni as well…would become star-faring civilizations, and they’d wanted to leave us a legacy. She wasn’t the only one, either. There were people who worshipped the faceless mystery of the Predecessors as gods, and thought they still watched us and guided us without our knowledge.
Me, I knew now that the Predecessors been chased out of the Cluster by whatever enemy had created the biological robots we’d seen “hatch” out of the seed pod thing on Thunderhead almost three years ago, and I’d found myself wondering if they’d wanted us to advance so we could come help them fight someday.
I guess we’d have to stop fighting ourselves before we could do that.
“It’s fucking freezing out here,” Vilberg complained, his voice quavering.
I looked over and saw him tightening the hood of the jacket we’d loaned him, hands going quickly back into the pockets.
“You’ve been here longer than us,” I reminded him. “Aren’t you used to the weather yet?”
“We never go out without our armor,” he said, a bit defensively. “It’s got heating coils.”
“Wimps,” Victor muttered from somewhere a dozen meters or so back.
I was walking point in our little formation, with Divya behind me, then Vilberg and Victor bringing up the rear. Bobbi had wanted to come, but I’d had to remind her that she was my XO and I needed her in reserve with the ship in case things went pear-shaped for us. Divya had to come to establish contact with the Council’s intelligence source, and I wanted Vilberg as a peace offering for the mercenary company; but for this operation, I was of the opinion the smaller, the better. Divya hadn’t argued, hadn’t said much at all, and I think she was a bit embarrassed by the whole business with us almost getting shot down.
She didn’t seem cold, though, and I thought that had to be a function of her fashionable field wear. Victor and I were wearing the same kind of heated jacket that we’d loaned Vilberg, but we were also wearing our armored tactical vests underneath it, which added a layer of insulation. A Gauss rifle would have made me feel all warm and fuzzy, too, but it probably would have attracted too much attention once we got into the city.
“Are we nearly there?” Divya finally spoke up. I’d been impressed she’d been able to keep up this pace in the dark, even with the enhanced optics in the glasses we’d given her, but it had been a damned long walk.
I reached my hand into my pocket and touched a control on my ‘link and the mapping software hooked to my contact lens displayed the distance and an overhead view of the terrain ahead. I pointed through the trees slightly to the left of the trail.
“You see that glow on the other side of the hill over there?” I asked her.
She seemed to squint at it before nodding.
“That’s the city. It’s about another kilometer.”
Vilberg let out a relieved breath, though he didn’t say anything, probably not wanting to get mocked again by Victor. I wasn’t sharing his feeling of relief; I had my pistol in my hand and was getting a tingling feeling on the back of my neck that only grew stronger the closer we got to the town. Victor had insisted on something bigger than a handgun, so I’d let him take a rocket carbine, which wouldn’t be as obtrusive as a Gauss rifle out here in the Pirate Worlds. He held it across his chest like a totem, and I noticed him walking backwards for two or three steps every few dozen meters just to check the trail behind us.
“Are there any sentries or checkpoints we need to be aware of?” I asked Vilberg. I’d gone over it with him before, but this close to the town, I wanted to make sure there was nothing I’d forgotten.
“Not that we’ve set up,” he insisted. “Like I told you, that’s the kind of thing the Sung Brothers might do on their own, but they didn’t give us an op plan or anything.” He looked around uncomfortably. “Man, I feel weird out here at night without a gun.”
“If the shit goes down,” Victor rumbled, “just get behind Divya. She’ll protect you.”
I snorted at that and even Divya cracked a smile.
“What did you do in the military, Vilberg?” I asked him. He didn’t have ‘face jacks, so I knew he hadn’t been a battlesuit Marine, and he didn’t strike me as the Recon type, though I’d been surprised before.
“I was in Fleet Security,” he told me, confirming what I’d thought. Then he surprised me. “Search and Rescue.”
The S&R Detachments worked in conjunction with the Marines, pulling out wounded troops and disabled battle armor in active combat. They were pretty hardcore, for Fleet types. I nodded in appreciation and mentally adjusted my judgement of the man’s fiber.
It was only a few minutes before the faint glow turned into a glare, drowning out the stars, and the buildings of the town began to throw shadows out into the forest hundreds of meters away. I’d audited Divya’s intelligence report on the place, generic as it had been, so I had a good idea of the layout. Originally, the city had been built according to a plan, with the bars, restaurants, hotels and casinos in the center, housing in the next layer out and industrial areas at the edge of town.
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nbsp; It was a sensible arrangement and, of course, it had only lasted until the next wave of settlers came and built their houses out of the cheapest available material wherever there was land no one else wanted, which was usually past the industrial district. Then those same people opened up their own shops or storefronts or warehouses and those were sometimes past the new layer of housing or sometimes wherever there was a gap between buildings that was in a handy spot.
So now, decades later, Shakak was a jumbled mess of everything mixed with everything else, cheap buildfoam mixed with cheaper local material, businesses next to homes next to storage buildings, and the only remaining constant was that the hotels and bars and casinos were still downtown. That was where the glare was coming from; everything else was dark, even apartment blocks and houses; I only knew what they were from the layout I’d loaded into my ‘link that was being projected over the view in my contact lens.
Most of the city was on what had been a grassy plain about a half a kilometer from the area’s largest river, a broad and deep and winding artery that cut through half the continent. We emerged from the forest on the side of a hill overlooking the edge of the city, the dark structures raising like the crenellations on a castle wall. I crouched down, more from instinct than anything else, my training rebelling at the thought of silhouetting myself.
“Which way?” I asked Divya.
She pulled out her ‘link and held it up so she could see the screen, then panned it back and forth until she saw an indicator light up red on the display.
“There,” she told me, pointing into the industrial district. She touched the screen of her ‘link and ‘cast the directions to mine and I saw a red halo glowing over one of the low-slung warehouses in the middle of a score of others just like it. “You can lead the way, Munroe.”
Her tone seemed subdued, and I noted that she had her compact pistol in her hand. She rarely carried a weapon. She was as nervous as I was. I tried to find that amusing or comforting, but it wasn’t. The city seemed…well, not dead, nor sleeping. It seemed huddled, hiding, afraid.
