by Rick Partlow
“That’s second-hand information,” M’Voba stated behind me, skepticism evident in his deep, rumbling accusation. “How do we know Gregorian wasn’t just looking for a payout?”
“Because I’ve been to the Predecessor outpost,” I said, still looking at Murdock. “I’ve seen the starships they left behind. And I’ve seen the bodies they left frozen in stasis. I’ve kept the location a secret from everyone, including my mother and my crew, but I know it exists and I know where it is. And now Andre Damiani does, too. What do you think a man like him will do with that sort of technology, General Murdock?”
There were several seconds of silence and if any deliberation was going on behind the General’s eyes, he hid it well. Finally, he leaned forward and rested his arms on his desk, looking at me intently.
“All right, Sergeant,” he said. “I’m listening.”
***
“I can’t act without evidence,” Murdock said flatly.
I sipped my coffee, fighting not to make a face. I didn’t really like coffee or beer, which had left me shit out of luck when I was in the Fleet Marines, but I needed some caffeine after briefing General Murdock and Major M’Voba pretty much without a break for the last two hours.
Bobbi took a gulp from her own cup like it was the nectar of the gods, eyes going back and forth between Murdock and me, a spectator at a tennis match. She hadn’t said much the whole time, which wasn’t like her.
“I gave you the coordinates,” I said, shrugging. “Can’t you send a team to go get the evidence?”
“Sergeant,” Murdock replied with just a hint of exasperation, “take a look around you. Do you think I’d be forced to meet you here if I could be certain I had that great of a control over the intelligence flowing out of my command?”
“Is it that bad, sir?” Bobbi finally spoke up, frowning.
“The director of the primary civilian intelligence agency is trying to sell vital state secrets to the Corporate Council,” Murdock said by way of a response. “The President of the Commonwealth is in their back pocket, and the only reason Andre Damiani isn’t currently running the government is that the Senate retains some semblance of independence and he knows he can’t count on the inaction of most of the military.”
“Then how the hell are we going to stop him?” I wanted to know.
“I still have allies in the military,” he said, “but they’re not going to act unless they see proof this is real. This is more than an intelligence operation.” He looked between the two of us and then up at M’Voba, who was leaning against the wall of the office. “If we do this, it will be tantamount to a coup. That’s not something these people will consider lightly.”
“What sort of proof would they want?” Bobbi asked.
Murdock seemed to consider that for a moment.
“One of the Predecessor corpses you found in stasis.” He met my eyes. “You’re going to have to retrieve it and bring it back here so I can present it to them, let them have it analyzed and see that it’s real.”
“General,” I protested, straightening in my seat and setting my cup down on his desk, “there is no way I’m going to be able to get back to that outpost with just the Nomad! There’ll be Corporate Security Force ships all over that place, with assault shuttles, ground troops…I’d need a fleet and an army and you just said you don’t have one.”
“That’s not the only Predecessor corpse of which we’re aware,” he countered, his eyebrow cocking upward. “You have to return to Peboan.”
I knew immediately what he was implying. Back on Peboan, the Sung Brothers crime family had been trying to sell a Predecessor corpse from the outpost world to a high priest from the Church of the Ancients, what most people referred to as the Predecessor Cult. Negotiations hadn’t gone so well, and the Cult had wound up blowing up half the Sung mansion with assault shuttles, wiping out the local community of cyborg Skingangers who were their sworn enemies…and killing one of my troops. It was true, the preserved corpse had been on Peboan, but there was one problem with that.
“The Cultists have it,” I reminded him. We’d gone over all this in our lengthy debrief. “The last I heard, they took it from the Skingangers when they hit their buildings in Shakak.” I’d heard that directly from the leader of the Skingangers, a former Russian bratva mobster named Anatoly. “If it was on their lighter, it must have been destroyed when that ship crashed on the Predecessor outpost.”
I’d hated leaving the Cultists’ converted freighter-turned-warship in a decaying orbit over the planet, but we’d disabled their drives when we’d attacked them and we lacked the time or the equipment to repair them before she burned in.
“Mat,” the General glanced up at his staff officer, “you’re the one with the eidetic memory; at any point in Sgt. Taylor’s search of that Cultist ship did she report having seen the preserved Predecessor body?”
“I never saw it,” Bobbi answered before M’Voba could, throwing Murdock an irritated glance. “But I was looking for their human captive, that Marquette guy who discovered the outpost in the first place, not inspecting their fuc…freaking cargo.”
I glanced at her curiously, amazed she’d censored herself. She must have respected the hell out of Murdock to do that; or maybe it was just old habits from when we were in Recon, having to watch our mouths around the brass.
“But you did make a fairly thorough search of the ship,” M’Voba recalled. His headcomp had to be more advanced than mine, and I knew mine could record and replay recent sensory input, so he could review the entire debrief verbatim in his head if he wanted to. “You didn’t find Marquette because the Cultists had taken him down to the planet with them, so you looked over every square centimeter of the vessel, right?”
She grunted unwilling assent, sinking back down in her chair.
“Okay,” I admitted, “so maybe it wasn’t on their ship. But they took it from the Skingangers who’d stolen it from the Sung Brothers. If they didn’t get it up to their ship, then someone else must have grabbed it after they left. They’d have sold it to someone by now.”
“I can tell you without one iota of doubt,” M’Voba chimed in, “that your alien corpse was never put up for sale on the black market. That’s the sort of thing that we would have noticed.”
There was a bit of sarcastic humor in his tone that surprised me; he’d struck me as the dour, serious type.
“If that’s so,” I mused, my thoughts meshing like gears, “then whoever has it might be sitting on it, maybe waiting until they think it’s safe to sell it.”
“Or maybe they’re putting out feelers quietly,” Bobbi suggested, “in person, with buyers who can keep quiet.”
“Either way,” Murdock interrupted, “the place to find the answers is Peboan. And you need to get there quickly; I have a sense we don’t have much time.”
“What about Cowboy?” I asked him. I glanced back at M’Voba. “He’s one of yours, one of your…creations. What are you going to do about him?”
“For the moment, nothing. In the end,” he mused, eyes slightly unfocussed as they considered possibilities, “I believe it will be more valuable for him not to know we know.”
“Well, that’s more your game than mine,” I allowed with an uncomfortable shrug. “But I’ll tell you something, General, I’m not a man who scares easy, and Cowboy’s one of the few people I’ve ever met that scares the hell out of me.”
“Believe it or not, Sergeant,” he said with an odd, knowing smile, “I’m acquainted with people who even Roger West is scared of.”
Chapter Six
“Well,” Bobbi remarked acerbically, pulling her hood tighter against the large snowflakes blowing at our faces, “at least it’s not on fire this time.”
Peboan had changed a lot since the last time we’d visited. Oh, it was still a cold, wet, miserable shithole of a planet, but at least this time, it wasn’t a damned war zone. We’d been hailed by a traffic control agent when we’d reached high orbit, and there was a
n actual Customs building at the landing field, though that had mostly been for purposes of gouging visitors for money.
At least we’d been able to hire a car to take us into Shakak instead of having to walk through the snowstorm that was closing in over the valley. It was an ancient, alcohol-burning hulk slapped together from spare parts and it rattled so violently on the dirt road from the field to the city that I thought it might spontaneously fly apart, but it was still better than walking, and much more expensive.
The wagon had dropped us off near the industrial district, which had been extensively rebuilt in the last couple years. Warehouses and factories and repair shops that had been damaged in the gang war between the Sung Brothers and the Novya Moscva bratva, or just blown to pieces outright by the Cult assault shuttles, had been replaced from the ground up, some with buildfoam and others with local stone and wood. Most had been surrounded by security fencing back then, but now they were crammed together in unworried comradeship. A few centimeters of snow covering the ground and the aluminum roofs made them seem almost festive, like Shakak was celebrating an early Christmas.
“I don’t know,” Victor mused, eyeing the steady stream of workers heading off their shifts as the primary star sank somewhere behind the thick, grey clouds. “It was simpler, then. Just about anyone running around the street was a bad guy. Gonna’ be harder to figure out who to shoot now.”
I ignored the banter, ignored the cold wind slashing down the street and the snow it blew teasingly at the gap between my neck and my jacket collar, and tried to concentrate on overlaying the old map I’d still had on my ‘link with the new layout. Everything was slightly off and the incongruity between reality and the virtual map being displayed in my contact lens was making it a bit hard to walk straight. The red icon that was supposed to be hovering over our destination was floating uselessly in the middle of the street, equidistant from four buildings, three of them warehouses like the one we were searching for.
“Shit,” I muttered, switching the mapping program off with a thought.
I didn’t have a ‘link address because Divya hadn’t volunteered it the last time we’d been here and she wasn’t alive to do it now. I stopped in the middle of the street and regarded the three buildings carefully while the others glanced around like they thought I was seeing something they weren’t. I was about to explain the problem to them when the side door of one of the warehouses popped open and a short, sturdy-looking woman appeared in it. The last time I’d seen her, she’d been wearing body armor and carrying a flechette gun, but even in work clothes and a jacket she gave the impression of being someone who you didn’t want to mess with.
“Hello, Reyna,” I said with a nod, impressing myself by remembering her name. It had been over two years…
“Munroe,” she said curtly, her voice as rutted and gravelly as the road. “Koji says to stop wandering around the street like an idiot and come in.”
Bobbi chuckled her amusement and we all followed the woman into the warehouse…and were immediately plunged into absolute darkness. I had enhanced optics and night vision built into my contact lens, but nothing penetrated the black fog around us, not even sound; I didn’t hear the door shut behind us, though I knew it had to have. Oddly, I could see the rest of my squad, just nothing past them.
“What the hell is this?” Vilberg blurted, a hint of panic in his voice. He’d drawn his gun but I put a restraining hand on his arm.
“Calm down,” I told him. “Just theatrics.” And some pretty impressive dampening fields. I wished I knew how he pulled it off, but my headcomp didn’t have that answer.
“Theatrics, Mr. Munroe?” I could hear the pleasant tenor from somewhere ahead of me, though I couldn’t pinpoint the exact direction. “It’s business. One has to maintain an image.”
Then he was simply there, as if he’d appeared from a wormhole: a slender, hairless man who could have been anywhere from twenty to two hundred, dressed in loose, unadorned clothes but sporting an elaborate motion tattoo on his head that involved writhing snakes diving into and emerging out of his skull. He sat on a high-backed wooden chair that looked too much like a throne, his hands resting on carved representations of lions.
“It’s very impressive, Koji,” I allowed. “But we need to talk to you.”
“Then talk,” he invited with a wave of his hand. He glanced around, curiously. “Is the lovely Divya not with you this time?”
“She doesn’t work for Monsieur Damiani anymore,” I said, and it was the truth, if not the complete truth. “Our last job here was a bit much for her; she just couldn’t keep her head.”
I felt a sharp pain in my right thigh and realized that Bobbi had slammed her knee into it. Kurt buried a snorted laugh under a cough.
“We’re here to track down an artifact that went missing after our last visit,” I explained. “The Cultists didn’t have time to load it into their ship and our intelligence sources have told us someone grabbed it off one of the cargo trucks they rented.”
“An artifact?” Koji leaned back in his chair and shook his head. “What sort of artifact?”
“Don’t insult my intelligence by trying to make out you don’t know exactly what happened here with the Cult,” I said, cocking an eyebrow.
He grunted, lip curling upward in a half-smile.
“Now you sound like Divya,” he murmured. But he waved a hand in assent. “Very well, let’s say that I do. Nothing of that sort has been put on the market that I know of…and I would know. If someone stole it during the confusion of the Cult attacking, they haven’t advertised it.”
I hissed out a sigh. It was warm in here and I unfastened the front of my jacket while I tried to think of what I should be asking Koji. He was many things: arms merchant, middleman, deal broker, facilitator and self-promoter. He knew the locals, knew how they thought.
“Who do you think would have the balls to steal it but the brains to not sell it?”
That seemed to make him think. He rubbed at his rounded chin, eyes flickering back and forth like he was working through a list.
“The Sung Brothers have been insanely paranoid ever since the Cult blew up half their mansion,” he said finally. “They’ve rebuilt it into a compound with remote sensors and even automated weapons set to blast anything that gets close to the walls.” Which was illegal as shit, but that didn’t mean as much out here.
Koji tapped a finger against the head of one of the lions.
“If the Sungs’ people stole the artifact back from the Cult, they might be spooked enough by what happened last time to hide it instead of putting it out on the market again.”
I nodded slowly. That made sense. They were the only ones with people on the ground.
“You won’t be sneaking up on them this time,” he warned me, referring to our operation on our last visit here to free Marquette from where they’d been holding him prisoner in a cell in the basement of their mansion. “You won’t get within a kilometer of the place without getting blasted to ash.”
“Can you set up a meeting?” I wondered. “I can make it worth your while.”
He seemed to consider it for a moment.
“I’ll do my best,” he said. “You should go find a room. I recommend the Frankfurt House.” He smiled thinly. “It’s new since the attack and I bought a stake in it. Tell them I sent you and they’ll discount your stay. I’ll send word once I’ve contacted the Sung Brothers.”
“Thanks for your help.” I nodded to him.
“Don’t thank me yet, Mr. Munroe. Trust me, there will be a price for this, and you will pay it.”
***
The Frankfurt House did not remind me of Frankfurt at all, or any other part of Germany I’d visited with my mother as a kid. It was vaguely European in its style, but more a never-never Europe of a couple centuries ago as filtered through romantic movies. The servers wore some sort of bright green coveralls and straw hats with feathers in them and the interior decoration seemed to be predicated on the
idea that the perfect model for a German restaurant was a Viking longhouse, right down to a central hearth and rounded shields hanging on the walls. Tables were communal and patrons sat on cushions on the floor to eat, though the bar was fairly standard and the attached casino, ViR game room and brothel seemed oddly modern by contrast.
“Koji invested in this?” Sanders wondered, eyeing the décor with an expression of distaste. “The guy may be a wheeler-dealer when it comes to selling weapons, but he needs to hire a damned business consultant for restaurants.”
“I don’t know,” Victor commented with a philosophical shrug. “The place seems crowded enough.”
It did; most of the low-slung tables were full and the people eating from shared plates of roast beef and pork seemed happy enough about it. I hadn’t been on board ship quite long enough for my mouth to literally water at the thought of real food, but it was close.
“I’m going to try the dinner,” I decided. “Bobbi, you hungry?”
She looked at me oddly, but then shrugged. “Sure, why not?”
“I’m just gonna’ go have a couple drinks,” Sanders said, waving at us as he headed for the bar. “Call me if anything happens.”
Victor glanced over at his brother and Kurt nodded.
“We’re heading for the casino,” the older of the two announced, to no one’s surprise. Both of them had what a therapist might have called an addiction to gambling, if either had been inclined to see a therapist. I thought maybe they’d started back on Belial station just after the war, when they’d fallen into fighting in underground bare-knuckle matches for money.
That left Vilberg. He sighed, staring longingly for a moment at the dinner table and then the bar before settling finally on the oval doorway back beyond the ViR game room, unmarked but outlined in deep red in a tradition as old as the Pirate Worlds. Male and female prostitutes lounged against the wall near it, dressed as scantily as they could in the depths of a frigid winter and looking passable for a world where body-sculpting was pretty much unobtainable.
