by Rick Partlow
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, almost 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.”
The man nodded curtly. “Lt. Lee, go get started on your After-Action Report. I’ll send it to Colonel Savage with the next supply run. And don’t forget the next-of-kin messages for Corwin and Donnelly.”
“Yes, sir,” Lee stood and headed out of the room, looking grateful to be leaving.
“Close the door after you, Sgt. Lewicky,” the tall man said to our guide.
She retreated without a word, pulling the cheap, plastic door shut as she left.
“I’m Alberto Calderon,” the man said. He didn’t offer a hand and he didn’t seem to be in a very welcoming mood. “Who are you and what do you want?”
Divya stepped forward, hands grasped loosely behind her back.
“Divya Reddy, Captain,” she said, almost snapped. “I represent the interests of Andre Damiani, the Director of the Executive Board of the Corporate Council.”
“And what the hell does Andre Damiani want out here in the Pirate Worlds, Ms. Reddy?” Calderon demanded irreverently.
“The Sung Brothers are part of certain deals that he is int
erested in seeing fulfilled,” Divya answered with her typical cryptic vagueness. “He has concerns that your efforts here have been insufficient to make that happen.”
“Well maybe he should send us some fucking help then!” Calderon snapped, leaning forward like he was ready to hit her. I tensed up, ready to intervene, but he swayed back. “Or loan the Sungs enough to get more than a company out here!”
“What you need, Captain Calderon,” she fired back, “isn’t so much more troops as,” she glanced meaningfully at the woman in the background, “better intelligence. We have reason to believe that the Sung Brothers are not facing just one enemy, the bratva and their Skinganger allies, but two. The raiders who are stealing the Sung Brothers’ off-world weapons caches aren’t working for the bratva.”
“Then who do you believe they’re working for, Ms. Reddy?” The woman asked, speaking for the first time since we’d entered the room. Her voice was a counterpoint to her appearance, distinctive and clear and well-modulated.
“I don’t know, yet, Ms…?”
“Van Stry,” the woman volunteered. “Cameron Von Stry.” She didn’t move from her spot against the wall, just eyed Divya carefully.
“I don’t know yet, Ms. Von Stry,” Divya told her, the tone snide and a bit condescending. “That’s why we’re here.”
Victor shot me a look and I knew what he was thinking because I was thinking it, too. Divya wasn’t doing us any favors and these people didn’t seem scared or impressed by her at all. I could see the anger growing behind Calderon’s eyes and I decided to say something to try to defuse the situation, against my better judgement.
“We’re here to help. It would be in your best interest, too, if we can find out who’s behind the attacks.”
“You’re here to help, are you?” Calderon said, not sounding at all placated. “If you’re here to help, Mr. Munroe, then why do we have helmet footage of you killing one of my fucking men?”
Oh, shit. I wasn’t panicking so much that he knew I’d killed his soldier as that, somehow, he knew my name and I hadn’t told it to him.
“Maybe,” I replied, trying to keep the edge of fear out of my voice by squeezing it out with anger, “if you gave enough of a shit to keep your men from taking shots at fucking children, then Corwin would still be alive.”
His eyes widened ever so slightly, and I knew I’d caught him off-guard by demonstrating I knew the name of the man I’d killed.
“I’ve done a lot of shit over the years that I’m not proud of, Captain,” I said, my hands clenching involuntarily into fists, “but I never took a shot at an unarmed kid just because I was scared of my own fucking shadow. Is that the kind of professionalism they teach you on Highland? What kind of an outfit is this, anyway?”
I hadn’t seen either of them push a button, or touch a ‘link, or make a gesture; but the door opened behind us and a half-dozen armored soldiers filed through it, laser carbines shouldered and aimed at the three of us.
“This is the kind of outfit that doesn’t let Corporate Council toadies lecture us about fucking ethics,” Calderon snarled.
I’d turned instinctively towards the door opening, and as I tried to turn back towards him, his fist caught me across the left cheekbone and I went flying backwards, stars erupting in my vision. The floor rushed up and smacked me between the shoulder blades and I felt the wind rush out of me.
Gloved hands yanked me upright and I tried to blink my vision clear.
“Get these people into a holding cell,” Calderon was telling the soldier in charge of the team. “Tell the medics to prep for an interrogation.”
“You’re making a mistake.” The voice was Divya’s even if I couldn’t see her yet. It was calm and even, as if she’d been expecting this. And maybe she had.
“I think you’ve made the mistake here, Ms. Reddy,” Von Stry said as we were dragged out of the room. “You’re working for the wrong Damiani.”
Chapter Seven
We’d been sitting on the bare, concrete floor of the holding cell for an hour before any of us said a word. It was Divya, of course.
“She’s DSI,” she mused, staring straight ahead into the shadows thrown by the single chemical strip-light, almost as if she were talking to herself, “but she works for Patrice. Interesting.” She was talking about Van Stry, I got that much. I’d caught the meaning of “the wrong Damiani” loud and clear despite an incipient concussion.
“It’s fucking fascinating,” I agreed, finally starting to feel like I could think again. Calderon packed a hard punch, and it took a while for the nanites to repair that kind of damage. “Mostly because she knows exactly who I am and is probably going to turn me over to Mom.”
“It’s fascinating,” Divya corrected me, eyes and tone sharpening, “because it means that Patrice is manipulating this situation with the Sung Brothers and these mercenaries. She has Von Stry here for the same reason Monsieur Damiani sent us.”
“And what might that be?” Victor muttered. He was sitting propped against the wall, hands cushioning his head, legs stretched out.
Divya spared him a scathing glance.
“If I intended to tell you at all,” she pointed out impatiently, “I certainly wouldn’t do it here.”
Almost on cue, the heavy, metal door unlocked with the slam of a heavy bolt yanking aside and ground open with a nerve-jarring scrape. It was the same fire team as last time, but this time they were carrying sonic stunners instead of pulse carbines.
“Lay face down and put your hands behind your head,” their leader snapped over his helmet’s exterior speakers. “Do it immediately or you’ll all be stunned and the exact same thing’ll happen as would have if you hadn’t resisted. The only difference’ll be you wake up with a killer headache.”
I took a quick but careful assessment of the fire team and noted they seemed ready, interested, almost keyed up and eager to fire. I nodded to Victor.
“Do what they say,” I told him, then rolled onto my belly and interlaced my fingers behind my neck.
They took Divya first. I could see them pulling her up out of the corner of my eye. She didn’t say a word as they hauled her out the door, then slammed it shut. It locked with a solid thump and I rolled over and sat back down, unhurried. There was nothing I could do, no way out of the room.
Victor looked like he wanted to say something, but I waved him to silence, pointing to the walls, indicating we were being monitored. He nodded, then sat back with a look of resignation.
“Don’t try to hold out,” I said to him, after a moment’s deliberation. “You don’t know anything they won’t know already, and there’s no use getting yourself beat up for nothing.”
He grunted by way of response, and I sighed. I knew Victor, and he’d be tempted to make them work for it; but if we were going to get out of here, I needed him ready to go at a moment’s notice, and I didn’t want him getting stunned unconscious or beaten to a pulp.
I felt exhaustion dragging at me and it felt like I hadn’t slept in days.
That’s because I haven’t slept in days, I realized.
I closed my eyes; when I opened them, I realized that I’d dozed off and that the door was opening again. I didn’t have my ‘link anymore, so I had no idea how long it had been, but from how worn and disheveled Divya looked, it had been a while. The soldier in the lead pushed her inside, forcing her to catch her balance against the far wall.
“You know the drill.” It was the same voice as last time, I thought. Probably the same guy.
I was half tempted to see what my medical nanite suite would do against a sonic stunner, just as an experiment, but I rolled onto my face instead. Better to get them to let their guard down, get them complacent before we tried anything. I expected them to take me next, and I tried to stay loose and not give them any reason to restrain me, but they went to Victor instead.
“Yeah, yeah,” I heard the big man mumble, heard his boot soles scraping on the floor as he got up. “You sure need a lot of
guys for just the two of us and a skinny little desk jockey.”
“Shut up.” There was a muffled thump and I figured one of them had smacked him in the shoulder with a buttstock because all the combat boots shuffled towards the door.
“You know what I was doing in the war, tough guy?” Victor’s voice was in the hall now, just outside the door. “While you were shifting soy pallets from one shuttle to another, I was on Demeter, slicing Tahni throats. You cut-rate action movie commandos don’t fucking impress me.”
“Let me stun him, Sarge,” a female voice begged.
“Shut up.”
Then the door was closed again. I shook my head and moved over to where Divya was slumped against the wall. She hadn’t been beat up, not that I could tell; there was no bruising on her face, anyway, and no blood. But she was pale and drawn and her hands were shaking. Her pupils were dilated and I guessed that they’d used chemical interrogation on her.
“Did you give them anything?” I asked her. I didn’t show any sympathy for her, both because I had none and because she wouldn’t have appreciated it.
She shook her head in a jerky, unnatural motion, like she was about to have a convulsion.
“Monsieur Damiani doesn’t send people like me into the field without precautions,” she said, her voice quavering and soft.
She’d had counterconditioning, that’s what she meant. Psyche probes, hypnotherapy, maybe even an implant to keep drugs from working on her. They hadn’t gotten shit from her, and probably wouldn’t have even if they’d used physical interrogation. That left the bigger question, the one I wanted to ask but didn’t: had she gotten anything from them in the process?
