“It was amusing to discover you had gone crawling to Scutter O’Banon. One might say, ‘Out of the frying pan into the fire.’ I offer release; he offers slavery.”
Jim ignored him. Tychus was silent as well, which told Jim he was utterly focused on finding Daun and taking him out. Jim was completely fine with that. He continued slapping out the fire, reaching to turn off the burner. As his fingers closed on the knob, he jostled it slightly, and something in the beaker atop the burner splashed out and landed on his jacket sleeve, burning a neat little hole in it, but it didn’t seem to eat its way through to his arm.
He stared, and then his fear started to abate. The fire that had been consuming Forrest’s pants leg now extinguished, Jim dropped to the floor and crawled underneath the table again. Calm now, he gave the wrist of the late Forrest one final chop, tugged the hand off, and slipped the small lockbox off the doctor’s arm and into his pocket. Then he got a firm grip on the torso.
Suddenly, Jim began to sob loudly. “I can’t take this anymore!” he cried. “I can’t take living in fear!”
“Jimmy, what the hell you saying, you idiot?”
“I can’t take it no more, Tychus! He’s right: Scutter can’t protect us. Nobody can. We’re dead men, just as dead as Forrest!” He hoped that Tychus would pick up on what he was planning; he couldn’t be any more obvious than he already was. Daun was as intelligent as he was terrifying.
“Why, Mr. Raynor, I’m surprised to hear you fibbing. Though it was quite a good performance. You might have missed your calling.”
Shit. Daun was an empath. No actor in the world could have tricked him.
“Defiant to the end,” Daun continued. “All the more fun for me, after the merry chase you’ve led me on.”
Swearing, Raynor half-stood, swiftly raising Forrest’s torso above him with one hand. Gunfire came from a corner of the room near the window, and despite what Daun had said about toying with Jim, bullets spattered Forrest’s body. At the same moment, Jim reached out for the beaker on the burner, hissing as his hand closed on the hot glass, then threw it in the direction of the gunfire.
Daun screamed in agony. He stumbled forward, Jim and Tychus forgotten, clawing at his eyes. Jim realized with a jolt of cruel pleasure that the acid had struck the bastard full in the face. Jim heard gunfire behind him as Tychus took a few shots at their enemy, but Raynor was already heading for the window. The room wasn’t that high up, if he recalled correctly, and it was safer than being in the lab with Daun and a whole mess of chemicals that might—
He and Tychus crashed through the window a scant three seconds before the laboratory in the research and development branch of Besske-Vrain & Stalz Pharmaceutical Corporation exploded in balls of black and orange hellfire. The heat was at their backs, and Jim and Tychus instinctively waved their arms and legs as if trying to swim away from it.
The fall seemed to take forever, but as they crashed into springy green bushes that some landscape designer had blessedly decided to plant along a walkway, they realized that (1) the fall was only about three stories and (2) they were alive.
Hurting, but alive. Jim was pretty sure something was broken in his already burned hand, and he felt as if he’d been shaken like a rat in the jaws of a lyote, but they were alive.
“Don’t nap, Jimmy! Get your ass outta that bush!” Tychus growled. He pressed a hand to his ribs but seemed to be moving briskly enough. His face was scratched, and Jim tasted blood from his own split lip.
Jim clambered out of the lifesaving topiary. Sirens were already wailing, mixing with the sounds of people screaming. Tychus pointed at the crowd of people fleeing the building. Guards tried to instill some sense of calm, but it was useless: the terrified doctors, technicians, and office drones were not having any of it. “That’s our cover,” he said. “Let’s go!”
Before Jim could object, Tychus was hightailing it toward the stream of terrified people, waving his hands in the air and screaming like a little girl. Jim shrugged mentally and joined the flow, shrieking and flailing, too, and the two let the crowd carry them out. The chaos was indeed perfect cover, and less than three minutes later Jim and Tychus had followed the stream of Besske-Vrain & Stalz employees all the way to the parking lot.
Many of the groundcars were beautiful, befitting their task of ferrying obscenely wealthy business executives. Others were a bit simpler. In the confusion, Tychus approached one of the executives just as he was about to get in his vehicle, knocked him unconscious with a well-landed punch, and hopped inside while Jim tumbled in the passenger side.
Jim’s face split into a grin, despite the terrible pain of the gesture and the agony in his hand, as the long, sleek silver groundcar roared to life, and a few minutes later the panicky throngs, wailing ambulances, and plumes of smoke were fading in the rearview mirror.
“Tychus?” Jim said after they had made certain that they had indeed escaped undetected. “I … don’t know if I can keep doing this.”
“Doing what?” Tychus asked. He pressed a hand to his side briefly, then reached in the breast pocket of his suit coat and removed a smashed cigar. He sighed sadly at the waste.
“This. That bastard is a damned shadow. We can’t shake him. The only reason we’ve been able to dodge him twice now is because we’ve been lucky. That’s it. Not because we’re smarter, or better, or sharper shooters—but because of blind, stupid, fickle luck. We got out last time using some poor bastard’s body as a shield, and this time only because of a damned Bunsen burner and the beaker on top of it.”
Tychus grunted. “Well, I won’t argue that we’ve been lucky. But I don’t think Daun could have survived that.” His lips curved around the cigar in a smile. “Was awful nice to hear him screaming. Nice touch, Jimmy.”
Jim shook his head and cradled his injured hand. “I don’t think he was killed. I don’t know that he can be killed.”
“Now, that’s just scared speaking.”
“He might have survived. I don’t know how, but he might have. And if he has, he is going to come back after us with a vengeance. How the hell did he know to show up there, anyway? So much for O’Banon protecting us,” Jim said in disgust.
“I said, I think Daun’s crunchy on the outside.”
“Tychus, we almost got killed! By all rights we should have been! Scutter was supposed to protect us!”
“Look. If somehow Daun did survive this, O’Banon will make a deal for us, Jimmy, and then that psycho will go away.”
“A deal that will make us slaves to him. Tychus, there’s nothing about this that doesn’t stink to high heaven. Not a damned thing.”
“You stink pretty bad,” was Tychus’s only comment.
“Gentlemen,” said the image of Scutter O’Banon from a computer screen, “I have to say, you are failing, quite drastically, to live up to your reputations. You have been given exactly one mission, and it was a complete disaster.” The voice was clipped, cool with barely concealed anger. O’Banon himself was off on business and not physically present, which was probably a good thing. A stone-faced Cadaver had collected the lockbox when Jim and Tychus had arrived at the mansion, and had left them alone in the receiving room with the computer.
Tychus blew out a breath. “Now, sir, I will remind you that we came under attack by a very zealous bounty hunter. We adjusted our percentage with you in order to be protected from this same asshole. And despite this, we survived and came home with the formula for and a sample of Utopia. Frankly, sir, Dr. Forrest was a dick, and I say we brought you the better end of the deal.”
“Your job was to bring back both the lockbox and all it contained and Dr. Forrest. It seems the late doctor failed to include a very important part of the formula. It’s going to take weeks to determine the missing element.”
Tychus feigned shock. “Really? Why, that treacherous bastard! But that ain’t our fault that he did that. You know, upon reflecting on the entire incident, I’d say that it was hardly a complete disaster. Looks like ne
ither of us held up our ends of the bargain.”
“I don’t care if you were under fire from the entire Confederacy. You have failed.”
Jim gritted his teeth, almost literally biting back words.
“I bet you we’d be a hell of a lot more efficient if we didn’t have to worry about Daun nipping at our heels all the time. That was our deal, Scutter: we come work for you, you keep us safe while we’re doing it.”
“I don’t know that you’re worth trying to keep safe if you can’t even manage a heist a toddler could handle.”
Jim had had enough. “I’m outta here,” he said, turning for the door.
Tychus muted the mic. “Jim, wait a—”
“Hell with waiting. I need a drink.” He stalked off as Tychus resumed trying to placate the shark.
Tychus found Jim about an hour later. He was in a darkened corner of the bar in one of the comparatively quieter establishments. He’d ordered an entire bottle of Scotty Bolger’s Old No. 8 and was well into it by the time Tychus’s large shape loomed up in front of him.
“This place is utterly dead. What the hell you wanna come here and party for?” Tychus reached out a dinner plate–sized hand, grasped the bottle, and took a swig.
“I ain’t come here to party,” Jim said.
“I don’t know what’s going on with you, Jimmy, but you ain’t been a lot of fun recently. And as nothing else has been a lot of fun, either, that kinda pisses me off.”
Jim poured himself another shot and downed it. “You wanted to know what business I had on Shiloh?”
“Yep.”
“My mother died.”
There was silence. “Well, Jimmy, I am right sorry to hear that,” Tychus said quietly, and Jim knew he was being sincere.
Slightly mollified, Jim nodded and asked, “What happened to your parents?”
“Don’t know, don’t care. Ran away from home at age twelve and ain’t never looked back.”
“You’d care if you heard they was dead.”
“I don’t know about that,” Tychus said, again with total honesty. “But it’s obvious you do. And like I said … I’m sorry.”
Jim smiled a little. “Thanks. I just want to sit here for a bit and drink and think.”
“Usually the former don’t help with the latter, but sometimes it does. You do whatever you gotta, Jimmy. Me, I gotta get trashed and make little Tychus happy.”
Jim laughed aloud at that. “You go take care of that.”
“I’ll come find you tomorrow.”
“Bet I’ll still be right here … except facedown and with a few more bottles around me.”
“You should get that hand looked at,” Tychus said.
“Yeah … I don’t feel like asking Scutter for anything right now.”
“There are places around here that’ll fix you up, no questions asked, for enough credits.”
Jim shrugged. “Scotty Bolger seems to be a pretty good doctor too. Ain’t feeling much pain right this moment.”
Tychus grinned, clapped his old friend on the back, and left.
Jim poured himself another shot but did not drink it immediately. Instead, he lifted the small, clear glass and idly looked at the amber liquid within. He remembered the first time that he had been introduced to the stuff. Tall, gangly Hank Harnack, a former enemy who had become a cherished if unpredictable brother in arms and fellow Heaven’s Devil, had ordered Scotty Bolger’s Old No. 8 for himself, Raynor, and Kydd, calling it “the good stuff.” It had, of course, tasted like crap, but Harnack had assured Jim he’d get used to it. A fistfight had broken out, of course, and the three of them had escaped on a “borrowed” vulture hovercycle. Jim smiled at the recollection of the happy chaos of that evening.
So much had gone away in the last few years. Jim’s unfamiliarity with drinking. The camaraderie of the unit. His parents, both of them. Ryk Kydd and Vanderspool both—the good and the bad. Hell, Jim thought with a self-deprecating smile, he could count his own naïveté among the casualties.
It had been unsettling, revisiting Shiloh. Even if his mother had been well, the trip would have been uncomfortable. Everything had changed, and nothing had changed. There was new building in progress, new hardships, but the land and the sunsets and the struggle were the same as what he had faced as a child growing up there. Except then he had had a family, a place. He had turned from that path, and he wasn’t sure where he was anymore.
Jim had first turned from it when he had opted to go off world, dazzled by a recruiter offering a “generous” enlistment bonus, to become a Confederate marine and fight in the Guild Wars. That path had led him to witness acts both heroic and despicable, to trust and to have trust betrayed.
His eyes narrowed and he gulped the liquid, relishing the fire as it burned its way down to his gut.
Vanderspool.
Jim wasn’t a man who hated easily; that kind of emotion had to be earned. But by God, Colonel Javier Vanderspool had earned it in spades.
He’d earned it because he was utterly corrupted—rotten to the core. Because he had been prepared to sacrifice the lives of—well, everyone under his command for money. Because he had installed kill switches in suits that were designed to save the lives of soldiers in battle. And because, in the end, he had given Jim Raynor a choice that was no real choice at all. Raynor had gone AWOL rather than face resocialization. That decision had forced him to turn his back on his parents, and both of them were now dead.
Fortunately, Vanderspool had met a fitting end. Jim Raynor himself had fired the gauss rifle spike into the man’s chest.
When you broke it all down and analyzed it, he supposed it all made sense, each step of the journey. But when you just looked at now versus then …
Raynor poured himself another shot.
He was glad, fiercely glad, that he had had a few moments with his mother before her death. He wished he had had the same with his father. In a way he had, through the holovid. His mind went back to what his dad had said.
I love you, Jim. You’re my son, and I always will love you. I used to think I could also say, “I’ll always be proud of you.” But I can’t honestly say that anymore.
Jim grimaced and knocked back the shot.
We love you, but we can’t take your money. That’s blood money, Son, and that’s not how you were raised…. Do you remember what I used to tell you, Son? A man is what he chooses to be…. You can always choose to be something new. Never forget that.
Words. Nice-sounding ones. “Some things are easier to say than to do, Dad,” Jim said softly.
Where he was right now was good. He knew it. Sure, there was Daun, but there was also Scutter, who would kick Daun’s ass at some point; Tychus seemed certain of it. The money was good. They could buy the best booze, women, and parties with it. He hopped from high to high.
But in return for Scutter’s help in defeating Daun—and whoever the hell had sent the bastard after them—O’Banon would own them. Their legacy would be not portraits hung in museums or colonial courtrooms, or names carved on memorials for the honored dead, but having their pictures on wanted posters. The money would run out; the women would betray them; the booze would make them sick. From high to high.
Jim didn’t want to think anymore. He’d heard that answers were sometimes found at the bottom of a glass. He intended to find out.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
DEADMAN’S PORT, DEADMAN’S ROCK
Tychus blinked awake to find Raynor staring down at him. “I’m getting mighty tired of people wakin’ me up,” he grumbled. The girls on either side of him muttered.
“I know. Me too. Come on. Let’s get some food.”
Ten minutes later, they were in a seedy diner chowing down on flapjacks, crispy fried skalet strips, eggs, toast, jam, and black coffee strong enough to stand a spoon up in. Jim was surprised to see so many people up at such an early hour; the place was bustling. He supposed that in a port like this, there was no “better” or “worse” time for activity, c
riminal or otherwise.
“Got your hand fixed, I see.”
“Yeah. Booze wore off and it hurt like hell, so around three I found someone to do the job.”
“Surprised you didn’t end up with another tattoo.” They grinned at the memory. Ages ago, it seemed now, the entirety of Heaven’s Devils had trundled, absolutely blotto, into a tattoo parlor and gotten their emblem placed on various parts of their bodies. Jim remembered very, very little of it, so “memory” was perhaps not the most accurate term. Still, it made him smile.
“So, Jimmy, I know you. Spill. You didn’t get me out of a sandwich just to go eat flapjacks.”
Jim chewed the surprisingly delicious flapjacks under discussion, washed the bite down with a swig of thick coffee, and nodded.
“You’re right. And because you know me, you may not like what I’m gonna say, but I bet you’ll understand it.”
Tychus scowled. “I better get more coffee in me if you’re gonna start talking like that. Maybe with a shot of something.”
Jim put down his fork. “Tychus … I been doing a lot of thinking. And I’ve made a choice.”
Tychus looked at him expectantly, chewing.
“I want out.”
“Aw, hell, Jimmy,” Tychus groaned. But as Jim suspected, Tychus didn’t look surprised. He forked another mouthful of eggs into his mouth and looked around with studied casualness. More quietly he said, “That ain’t something you should be advertising in Deadman’s Port. Be careful about that kinda talk, you hear me?”
“I hear you,” Jim said. “That’s why we’re here. We’re not as well known here as we are at the bars and gambling dens and whorehouses. Places I find I’m getting right sick of being in.”
Tychus stared at his half-eaten breakfast, then pushed his plate away. “You don’t just ‘get out.’”
“I do. And you can too. Tychus, you’re a bull, and it makes me sick to see anyone riding you.”
StarCraft II: Devil's Due Page 16
