by Rick Partlow
Divya led us to a door that looked much like all the others, and stared up at a section of wall that seemed like just another stretch of locally-manufactured steel. She smiled and waved.
“Open up, Koji,” she said in her artificially sweet tone that was meant to let you know she was in charge and you’d best deal with it. “I’m a friend of Roger West’s.”
There was no reaction for maybe ten seconds, but then the door opened with a hiss of hydraulics that gave some hint as to how solid their security really was. Just inside was a short, solidly-built woman dressed in an armored vest and a fur-trimmed jacket, standing behind the gaping maw of a flechette gun. I didn’t know which looked more dangerous, the scattergun or her stark, fearless glare.
“I need your weapons,” she said, her voice as unyielding as her expression.
“No, you don’t,” Divya corrected her, seemingly unfazed by her gun and her attitude. “You need to remind your boss who he works for, and then you need to let us in before I terminate that arrangement effective immediately.”
The resolve on that solid face seemed to waver, and I saw her eyes flicker back to her left, though she didn’t turn away from us.
“Let our guests in out of the cold, Reyna,” a smooth tenor instructed from somewhere in the darkness behind her.
The woman reluctantly waved us inside, checking the street behind us to make sure no one else had followed, then hitting a control to slide the door shut. It slammed with a solid, metallic clunk and we found ourselves inside a thick, almost palpable darkness that my night vision lens couldn’t penetrate. That was some trick; I didn’t know how he did it, but it was probably expensive. A circle of light appeared in the darkness and in it was a slender, Asian man dressed in loose, comfortable clothes that were either silk or an artificial analog of it. He looked young, but that was probably the result of money and technology, and he had not a single hair anywhere on his head or face. What he did have was an active, holographic tattoo of a nest of serpents that writhed in and out of his skull. It was a disturbing image that distracted me from his generic features, which was probably the idea.
“Divya Reddy,” the man who I assumed was Koji said, extending a hand. “How very nice to see you again.”
“You never were a good liar.” Divya took the hand in something less than a handshake, then used that same hand to gesture at me. “Koji Tsukahara, allow me to introduce Randall Munroe, the stick to my carrot.”
I shook his hand. It was soft, and cold, and mushy, and I didn’t care for it.
“You keep it like this all the time?” I asked him, waving a finger around at the theatrical darkness. “Or is this just for our benefit?”
“Please do dispense with this nonsense, Koji,” Divya sighed in exasperation. “If you want to impress me, do it with your knowledge.”
Koji made a sour expression, but he reached inside his sleeve and touched a control and the lights came up. The place wasn’t that impressive in the light and I began to understand why he kept it dark. It was what it looked like, a warehouse, stacked high with pallets of plastic and metal cases and cartons that lined the cement block walls and moved towards the center in layers that left passageways wide enough for an industrial lifter to navigate.
“That’s better,” Divya said, smiling. “Now, let’s have a seat; we need to talk.”
Koji led us to a small back room, surprisingly well-appointed for a warehouse in the Pirate Worlds, with hand-crafted furniture and hand-painted art decorating the walls. Victor was gawking like a tourist, his carbine tucked casually under his arm, while Vilberg was still in shock. The guy I’d killed had been his friend, apparently, or so I’d discerned from his dejected mumbling. He still couldn’t believe his friend had been about to shoot a child, and then him.
I felt for him; I’d been there, done that when it came to people I trusted stabbing me in the back. At least Gramps and I had a chance to reconcile a little before he died.
There were only three seats at the small table in the center of the room and Divya and I took two of them with Koji in the last. Vilberg fell into a padded chair in a corner, eyes staring into the haze of his thoughts, while Victor leaned against a wall, keeping watch.
“Can I get you something to drink?” Koji offered, waving at a dispenser on the far counter with a selection of coffees and liqueurs.
I shook my head. Honestly, I could have used a nice, stiff drink. It wasn’t the getting shot at, or the shooting other people; I had, unfortunately, done enough of that in my life that it barely registered anymore. But the business with the kid had rattled me, and I couldn’t shake it. Every time I imagined his face, all I could see was my son, Cesar. But I didn’t drink on duty.
“We need an assessment of the local situation, Koji,” Divya got down to business. I appreciated that about her.
“It’s a total shit show,” the man said bluntly. “It’s been damned bad for business.”
“Koji is a go-between,” Divya explained to me, pausing the other man with an upraised palm. “He brokers deals---arms deals, specifically---between the Sung Brothers, the bratva and whoever else comes along.”
“I also keep a little inventory of my own on hand,” Koji said, motioning out at the warehouse through the open door to the room. “Not that anyone trusts anyone else enough to do a straight deal lately.”
“What the hell are those Skingangers doing here?” I wanted to know. “I’ve never heard of them working as mercenaries for anyone.”
“They aren’t mercenaries,” Koji corrected me. He snorted out a breath, then pushed up from the table and walked over to the dispenser, pouring an amber-colored drink into a clear glass. “They’re part of the bratva.”
“Since when does the bratva roll out the welcome mat for Evolutionists?” Divya asked skeptically.
Koji took a long swig from his drink and sat down again. “Since the brother of the current boss became one.”
“Whoa,” I murmured.
“Exactly,” Koji agreed, nodding. “This kid, Anatoly, he went off on his own to try to make his way without Alexi’s help, and he came back with a shitload of bionics and a bunch of like-minded friends. The Skingangers got an enclave, a safe haven in the Pirate Worlds, where the Patrol and planetary law enforcement can’t touch them; and the bratva got a pretty bad-ass group of head-knockers. And Alexi decided to take advantage of that to try to take back the arms business from the Sung Brothers.”
“That’s why the Sung Brothers hired these mercenaries?” I presumed.
“No,” he corrected me, “they didn’t do that until someone started ripping off their off-world caches. Losing one or two small arms dumps here on-planet isn’t a game-breaker, but losing cargo ships full of military grade proton cannons is something that could put them out of business.”
“How the hell does the bratva know where the Sung Brothers are storing their weapons?” I leaned forward, elbows on the table. “It’s not like knocking over a warehouse here in Shakak…space is big, after all. There can’t be that many of the raiders like the ones we hit on that moon, so how are they finding them?”
“I’m not so sure the bratva are the ones behind it.” Koji drained the last of his drink before looking between Divya and I with a conspiratorial expression. “I still have connections with them, even after everything that’s happened.” He snorted. “Not that they trust me; they think I’m too close to the Sung Brothers. But although they freely admit to sending the Skingangers to stealing or destroying arms here on Peboan, they all insist they have nothing to do with the raiders.”
“They’re criminals,” Divya pointed out drily, steepling her fingers. “Have you ever considered that they might have an incentive to lie?”
“Of course. But if they are stealing the off-world shipments, what the hell are they doing with it? Because they sure aren’t selling it to anyone.” He threw up his hands in consternation. “It’s not as if these sorts of transactions don’t get noticed. If they’re on the market,
it’s not anywhere in the Pirate Worlds, and it would be damned risky to try to sell them in the Commonwealth.”
“So why would someone be stealing all these weapons if not to sell them?” I had a nasty feeling I knew the answer.
“That’s easy,” he told me, smiling with a grim certainty. “They plan on using the weapons themselves.”
“That makes a depressing amount of sense,” Divya declared.
“We should talk to the Sung Brothers,” I said. “They might have intelligence on who’s behind this.”
“Good luck with that,” Koji scoffed. “They’re totally paranoid right now, with the Skingangers gunning for them all over Shakak. They have a fortress built out away from the city with air-tight security and they haven’t left it in weeks. They won’t even accept messages from me.”
“That only leaves one other possibility then,” I decided, looking over at Vilberg. “We need to talk to Captain Calderon. Can you get us in to see him?”
He seemed to consider that for a long moment before he answered me.
“Before what happened tonight,” he replied quietly, “I’d have said yes. But now…I don’t know. They might just shoot me before they give me a chance to talk to them.”
“The Savage/Slaughter crew is hold up in a temporary camp outside of town,” Koji mused, rubbing his hands together thoughtfully. “Security’s pretty tight, but I might be able to grease the right palms to get you through.” He shot me a hard look. “I can’t promise you’ll come back out, though. Calderon’s a maniac. He’ll kill you as soon as look at you.”
***
The Savage/Slaughter encampment might have been temporary, but that didn’t mean it lacked for solidity or security. As the car that Koji had loaned us slowed near the end of the hard-pack dirt track, I could see the quick-setup buildfoam walls rising above the grassy plain, their grey surfaces lit white by the glare of the security spotlights. Guard towers rose at the corners of the wall, reinforced with local metal, each of them crowned with a Gatling laser turret that could be used for air defense at need…and probably had been, when they’d tried to shoot down the Nomad.
Out beyond the walls, I saw something that made me cringe instinctively: automated sentry pods, armed with grenade cannons, set out at intervals around the perimeter. It was all kinds of illegal in the Commonwealth to use any sort of automated weapon; even the military were restricted from letting anything other than a human decision maker pull a trigger, even during the war with the Tahni.
Gramps had told me the laws had been passed because of what had happened along the European borders with Russia after their nuclear exchange with China. Refugees were flooding into western Europe, many of them carrying diseases, and there was already a critical shortage of food, fuel and medical resources because of the economic disruption the war had caused. More than one nation had deployed automated sentry drones to patrol the border and programmed them to shoot anyone crossing without authorization. Tens of thousands of innocent civilians had died in a few days.
If the Patrol or the military found out Savage/Slaughter was using proscribed weapons, they could have their charter revoked. Calderon was taking a hell of a chance.
The car stopped at a security checkpoint maybe ten meters from the main gate, and three troopers in black armor approached it, two setting up flanking positions watching it and the third came up to the driver’s open window. Our driver was a slender, Asian woman assigned to us by Koji and she hadn’t said two words to any of us the whole way out here. She looked bored.
“What’s your business here?” The gate guard asked her, his laser carbine held across his chest, the muzzle pointed in our general direction.
The driver’s response was as laconic and disinterested as her general manner.
“Koji called. These guys want to talk to your boss.”
She indicated who “these guys” were with a jerk of her thumb towards the two rows of passenger seats in the back of the groundcar. Divya was next to me, while Victor had claimed the back row to himself, sprawled across it unselfconsciously. Vilberg hadn’t wanted to come, hadn’t wanted to face his CO right now, and I’d become convinced he wouldn’t be of much use anyway. I’d sent him back to the ship to fill in Bobbi about our situation. I figured if he double-crossed us and rabbited, we’d be no worse off than we were already.
The gate guard was still for a moment and I figured he was radioing someone inside the privacy of his helmet. Then he lowered his carbine and waved us through. The thick, metal gate parted before us with a loud warning buzz and the driver gunned the engine of the car and spun the tires in the thin layer of mud from the recently melted snow. We lurched through and pulled into a courtyard in the center of a semi-circle of buildfoam domes. They formed the hub of the camp, with a few storage buildings thrown up from local scrap surrounding them.
I could see unarmored troopers walking between the buildings in their black uniform fatigues, some of them staring at our car as the driver screeched to a halt between a pair of armored, tracked vehicles. The driver tapped her fingertips on the steering wheel as we climbed out, barely waiting for the doors to close before she gunned the engine again and backed out of the spot.
“Call when you want to get picked up,” she said in the middle of closing her window, and then she was back out the gate and gone.
I eyed Divya balefully and she shrugged in return, slipping on her jacket’s hood against the biting wind.
“Good help is hard to find,” she said.
“Are you the people Koji sent over?”
I glanced around and saw that the question belonged to a tall, athletic woman with close-cropped dark hair who’d emerged from the central dome, walking up the recently-laid concrete pathway. She was dressed in the Savage/Slaughter utilities and her right hand rested cautiously on the butt of a pulse pistol in a holster at her hip.
“I’m Divya Reddy.” She stepped up, back straight and tone as self-important as usual. “We need to speak to Captain Calderon.”
“Are you armed?” Her eyes flickered to the three of us, lingering for a moment on Victor, her eyebrow raising slightly as if his muscular bulk intrigued her.
“No,” I assured her. We’d left our weapons with Koji. I didn’t like it, but I figured we wouldn’t be allowed in while carrying and I didn’t want to trust my personal firearm to these assholes.
“You’ll be searched,” she warned us, shrugging as if it didn’t concern her. “Follow me.”
I let out an involuntary sigh as we stepped out of the chill wind and into the heated anteroom of the prefab, buildfoam dome. There was a cheap, plastic desk there, with a folding chair and a communications station, but no one sat at it and the display was dark.
Must be the jamming, I thought. No one could receive signals from drones or communicate with their troops because something was locking down all broadcasts. You could still use hard-lines or laser line-of-sight, but those were vulnerable to sabotage, so the mercs and everyone else were operating blind down here.
The woman led us past the desk and through a short hallway of bare, undecorated grey buildfoam to what seemed like a cross between an office and an operations room. A cheap plastic table was in the center of the small room, with a folding OLED projector sheet spread over it, displaying a layout of the city, with red spots winking here and there, though I didn’t know what specifically they indicated. No one was paying attention to it, anyway.
The center of attention at the moment was a chunky, amber-skinned, youngish man who was slumped in a folding chair, head in his hands, a picture of dejection. Standing over him was a tall, strikingly handsome man with cheekbones sharp enough you could shave with them, piercing dark eyes and a cleft chin. He’d either won the genetic lottery, had his face surgically resculpted, or he’d been engineered that way by rich parents. His hair was a layer of dark brown fuzz barely two centimeters off his scalp and his Savage/Slaughter utilities were spotless and unwrinkled.
Behind him, almos
t blending into the background by comparison with the man, was an older woman…not old looking, not the way you saw in some of the poorer colonies or here in the Pirate Worlds, but someone who exuded an air of maturity, of having been around and seen it all. She wasn’t wearing the Savage/Slaughter uniform, but her grey tunic and trousers and the plain brown jacket she wore over them were uniform-like in their anonymity. Her features were equally bland and generic, not ugly or unpleasant but not striking in any way. Her brown hair was pulled into a bun, and her most prepossessing features were blue eyes as frosty and cold as anything on this snowy planet.
“How the hell did you let things go to shit like that?” The tall, good-looking man was saying. His voice wasn’t quite as polished as his looks; it held a rough and ragged edge to it, like he’d been yelling too much recently. His expression matched his tone, twisted into a grimace that seemed out of place there on that movie-star’s visage.
“It was a fucking ambush, Lee. Our ambush, not theirs! You should have slaughtered them.” He kicked in frustration at one of the table supports and the image in the projection shuddered. “Instead, I have two dead who I can’t fucking replace out here on the ass end of nowhere.”
“You’ve seen the helmet cam footage, sir,” Lee said sullenly, rubbing his eyes. The man was tired and I couldn’t imagine how long he’d been in there, answering questions. “Laser weapons aren’t as effective against the Skingangers as they are against Norms. We need Gauss rifles.”
“Well, we don’t fucking have Gauss rifles, do we, Lee?”
“Sir,” the woman who’d led us in interrupted a bit hesitantly, and the handsome man looked over. So did the plain woman, her eyes hooded and wary. They were both evaluating us, but I had the impression that their judgements were very different. It seemed to me that he was looking at us to decide which one of us was the biggest physical threat, but she was looking for the quickest thinker. “It’s the people you were waiting for.”
