by Ryan Krauter
"Nah, I'll find my own way," Web returned the grin.
"You sound confident."
"Oh, I know people." Web smiled larger than he should have as he thought of Halley. He knew deep down that she would rescue him. He couldn't explain it, but the feeling was there. And when she did, he was going to take her and run to the other side of the galaxy with her so he could confess how he felt. Now that was a scary prospect. Maybe a sadistic Priman interrogator would be less stressful than trying to process those feelings?
"Anyone I'd know?" prodded Mithus.
Web was curious, that was for sure. For all he knew, Halley and this guy might have sat across from each other in one of their advanced how-to-kill-things classes. But he couldn't tell him that. He could, however, think of a great story that only he and Halley knew. "You know if I personally had any good stories to even tell, I wouldn't. But I will say that one friend in particular once blew up a dormant volcano and made it erupt just to cause a distraction. Formed a new island chain and got what she was after in the process."
Mithus seemed to process this. "Is she for hire?"
"You couldn't afford her."
Kira Malix sat at the outdoor cafe sipping a stim-caf in the dusk light. Despite her troubled mind, she had still noticed the various pleasant distractions Callidor had to offer; vibrant red/gold sunsets, friendly locals, unique cuisine, amazing architecture around the older, more preserved parts of the planet. It hadn't lasted, though. Soon enough, it all washed away; it was just background noise, a low level buzzing in the background that was discarded as irrelevant to her immediate needs. It was a shame, but she sure as hell would never feel the same about the planet after the Priman occupation. Too much had changed; she would leave as soon as she could and find reasons to never return. But first, she had business.
Kira Malix, of course, was simply one of the many IDs of Halley Pascal. It was actually a Confed-issued one, which caused problems with her now being burned thanks to Enric Shae of Senator Dennix's staff.
Add to that another problem: there were other SAR detached operatives like herself here on Callidor, and they'd been ordered to bring her in as a rogue. She didn't know how many there were or whose side they were on. The nanites in her body served as a form of cloud storage, and every time she checked in with her handlers they took a sample which the senior SAR commanders reviewed; there were no secrets for a SAR operative, at least not during their service. So, they would have seen the confession of Tana Starr regarding the Priman plot to assassinate Representative Velk, the accusation against Senator Dennix of not only being a complicit pawn of the Primans but learning the ring data she'd helped acquire would prove it beyond a doubt. That is, of course, if the senior leadership had felt it was something the outbound operatives needed to know. And if the senior leadership wasn't corrupted. And so on and so forth.
The short version is that she trusted exactly two people on this planet: herself and Web. And with Web locked up in the prison on the other side of town, she needed resources. That led her to this cafe.
She'd been tracking the young man for two weeks and finally anticipated his routine. He was an electronics supplier; he sold the sort of gizmos one couldn't buy legally in any store. Automated defenses, remote controls, limited AI robotics, self-healing computers. She needed the mother of all remote control packages.
The dealer and his entourage of two bodyguards and a third party buyer got up from the table in the building's gloomy interior. She knew that after a meeting, the dealer, who went by the simple nickname Mouse, would exit through the back and into the short alley where his hovercar was parked among the others in the building's ground level lot.
She left a few credit chips for a tip and quickly walked out of the gated area and into the alleyway. It was getting darker but Callidor was a safe city, its capital city Harkor definitely so. Nevertheless, she didn't get more than a half dozen steps into the alley before she realized she wasn't alone. She sensed one person behind her. Normally, her nanites would have enhanced her hearing well enough to make a guess as to body type and gender, but they'd been mostly used up trying to stabilize her after she'd been shot at the secret Priman prison. While they could replicate themselves to a degree using minerals and nutrients she took in, the core numbers were made of exotic materials and came in programmed. The short version was the she was essentially a normal person again, albeit very well trained and overwhelmingly motivated. She was going to continue.
"Hey there," a woman called from in front of her as she stepped out of the shadows. "Can you spare a few credits?"
"Yeah, same here," added another young male as he joined the woman. Halley stopped and looked at the third person closing in from behind, cutting off her escape.
"Seriously?" she asked in disbelief. "You want to shake me down right now? Don't you have something better to do? I'm sort of busy."
"Then how about you just leave us something and be on your way," the man behind her suggested. "Cause we don't have anywhere better to be." His mood darkened as he finished, and Halley knew from long experience he'd use violence without remorse.
Halley didn't have the time for this. She kept walking. As she drew even with the first man, he put his hand on her left shoulder. Without missing a beat, she smacked his elbow down from on top, allowing her to fold his arm towards his chest. She took a step behind his right foot with her own right, then shoulder blocked him in the right shoulder. He flew backwards to the ground, arms flailing as he lost his balance. He fell flat on his back, head making contact with the pavement.
Halley immediately chambered her left leg and lashed out at the woman with a vicious side kick to the chin. The woman was unconscious before the teeth finished flying from her mouth.
She turned to find the third man had run up and tried to grab her shirt front. She grabbed his wrist and rotated him into an arm-bar with an assist from her other arm. As he became bent over at the waist, she used her closed fist to smash him in the nose. Holding him from completely collapsing with the arm bar, she grabbed the handgun that had been poking out of his back waistband. She let him fall in a heap to the ground.
Halley looked at the door where the dealer was supposed to exit and saw that he was already there, bodyguards standing protectively in front of him with hands inside their light jackets, no doubt around the grips of some sort of weaponry.
She simply smiled and expertly disassembled the gun, tossing the parts as she looked at the entourage. Initiator battery went left, capacitor went right, top of the slide and main discharge coil ended up on the ground in front of her as she dropped the stripped frame.
Halley approached the group, hands held out to her sides. She took slow, small steps towards them, trying to suppress the pain in her side where she'd been shot not long ago. Her failing nanites couldn't heal her completely and she needed to save them up for help tracking Web, so whenever she got tired or too active the tightness and pain made her want to limp. "Mouse, my name is Kira Malix. Please excuse the mess, but I had hoped to introduce myself with a little less mayhem. I need some parts; the kind only you can get."
Halley had done all she could. Everything had been planned, organized, backed up and prepared for; all she could do was get on with it.
She hefted her backpack full of explosives and checked the charge on her blaster, then stuffed it in her back waistband.
Time to go.
Halley got near the building by impersonating an employee of the office next door on the second tier of buildings. The woman looked close enough to her, and after accepting a bribe to take the week off on vacation, Halley had wasted no time in working that routine into her plan.
The woman always got to work early, often sitting outside on the ground level before heading up to her second tier office building. That relaxation time on the ground level worked to Halley's benefit.
She approached the small green space that these buildings shared early several mornings after her meet with Mouse, company ID badge stuck
to the outside left breast of her tunic. Formal business style was incredibly stuffy here on Callidor, with three and four piece suits, elaborate headwear for men and women alike and so much more. The good news was all the layers helped conceal her features somewhat. She strolled around to the back of the building and approached her target: a service door where foodstuffs were delivered and trash sent out for processing.
Halley checked the street to make sure nobody was looking, then slewed right up to the door and bumped it with her left shoulder while holding a cracking scanner to the lockset with her right hand. In a mere two seconds, the locks disengaged and the door slid into its pocket. She was in.
Halley's business was simple; level the building. It was entirely devoted to the Primans and their business, and though it was originally a Callidorian structure she couldn't let it stand any longer. Especially with what was on the roof.
That didn't mean everyone inside had to die, though, especially since many were locals coerced into working there and not actual Primans. Two or three minutes of advance notice and the whole place would clear out quite nicely.
She snuck into the sub-levels undetected, placing charges on all four corners of the building which could be remote detonated. They were also on a ten minute timer that was already running.
Halley returned to the first floor and walked out of the service stairs into a side lobby and a squad of four Priman soldiers, weapons all aimed at her.
"Halt!" the one in front commanded. "That is a restricted area."
"I work next door, sorry!" she tried, putting on her most convincing embarrassed look. "I just ducked inside so I could-"
"I'm scanning your ID," the leader said again, and motioned another soldier forward to do so. The Priman held a scanner up to Halley's borrowed ID, then waved it over her so it could obtain a DNA sample. Almost immediately the scanner started beeping and honking as if possessed.
"You are not the woman on the badge." It was a statement. The soldiers all brought the stocks of their weapons to their shoulders.
"Oh wow," Halley exclaimed, looking around in wonder. "This is definitely not the cafeteria. You all seem so angry! I just wanted a salad."
The leader shook his head and rolled his eyes, then let go of the rifle with his left hand to touch the comm stud on his collar. "I have a suspect to take in-"
He didn't finish the sentence because Halley charged him, left arm swinging inside-out to sweep the gun barrel out of the way so she could give him a palm strike to the solar plexus. After that, she whirled, never staying anywhere, feet always moving, using her momentum to put extra force behind her attacks. The Primans were at a disadvantage at first; they weren't prepared for hand to hand combat, and with their leader in the midst nobody dared to just start shooting.
Halley had barely finished hitting the leader when she spun two hundred seventy degrees and put a back kick into the chest of another soldier. She ducked a punch and a rifle stock jabbed at her face, returned the punch and grabbed his hand with her free one as he staggered. She twisted around and with a flick of her wrist sent him tumbling backwards to the ground.
The last soldier tried an overhand swing with his combat knife. She blocked, spun outside his reach, collapsed his arm and continued his swing, bringing the knife right into his own chest.
She grabbed a fallen rifle and headed for the lobby where she saw a squad of six more come bursting through the doors from the walkway outside. Well, at least their response times were respectable, she thought.
She let loose a burst of full auto laser fire, shattering floor-to-ceiling windows and stitching holes in the lobby walls, then ducked back through the doors and ran off towards the back entrance. She triggered the fire/hazard/evacuate handle next to one of the exterior doors and kept a running count of the explosives' timers: seven minutes.
"This is the saboteur who destroyed the building and so many of our soldiers?" asked the lead interrogator of his comrade. He was safely in the underground prison, many stories below the chaos on the surface above. The woman in question had brought a fifteen story building down, though oddly enough sometime after triggering alerts that caused the occupants to evacuate. Still, she'd had a running battle with several squads of the occupation garrison, finally becoming cornered outside just as the building fell. She had still almost escaped, and her dust-covered body had to be dragged out from under the clever hide she'd made between two overturned hovercars.
"She is the one, yes," replied the garrison commander. His job was on the line; it was his soldiers who'd failed to stop the lone insurgent, and he knew he was at the mercy of the interrogator, who in addition to being in charge of the secret prison also outranked him straight away.
"What were her goals?"
"We're just sifting through the rubble now, sir. We're trying to piece together what may be missing, where the blasts originated, if there was sensitive material near the explosives sites. From the level of her demonstrated ability, I felt she was not a random local. She has been well trained, perhaps a Confed soldier or spy, private mercenary, something along those lines. Since this facility is the closest capable of handling prisoners such as her, I thought she would be best placed here so you may handle her in whatever way becomes appropriate."
"Hmm," the garrison commander grumbled. This was supposed to be a prison for the political prisoners only; there were other facilities for more dangerous occupants. Confed and Talaran soldiers as well as a few others had accumulated over the last six months or so, and as his subordinate had pointed out, there weren't many other places to put POWs right now. He moved the soldiers out as fast as he could, but there were always a few around. He wondered what the Confeds did with his own people when captured.
"You were right to bring her here, at least," he allowed. "She will be a pleasure to break."
"She can hear you," Halley muttered as she carefully tested out muscles and joints. Between the explosion and enthusiastic efforts of her captors, she'd received her fair share of retribution from the troops.
"That's good," the interrogator said as he approached her, though careful to stay well outside the arc of where she could lean or lash out. Despite being restrained by the hands and feet to the confinement chair, something about her gave him pause and he decided to assume she was going to be trouble. There was also the small consideration that she had understood them speaking in their own language, not the regional standard she spoke in reply. She had just become more interesting. "You know, you killed ten of my soldiers today. That is unfortunate for you."
"I only killed six; there were four more out there in varying degrees of pain and suffering. Unless you didn't rescue your own people from the building."
She was good, the interrogator admitted. Throwing his arguments back at him, trying to put him on the defensive; she knew what she was doing.
"Give her the chemicals," he said to his assistant on the side, "no sense wasting any time before questioning." He turned to Halley. "Sooner or later, you'll tell me what I want to know, like who you work for and what your business was in that building. You'll tell me with a smile on your face, and it will burn you up inside because you'll be powerless to stop it."
Web had heard the commotion the previous day after the thunderous explosion at the corner of the courtyard. He'd seen the building collapse slowly, then saw nothing more as the guards mercilessly shoved all the prisoners in the yard back inside and down to their cells.
They were interrogating the new guy, Web assumed. He'd just barely seen the Primans making someone take the walk of shame past all the cells down towards the interrogation rooms. He hadn't heard any noise, though. Often, especially with the Confed troops who had basic conditioning to resist psychological interrogation, there were screams, yelling, cursing. He figured it meant this new one was either a politician, because they often admitted to just coughing up whatever the Primans asked, or he was one tough old bastard.
Web hoped it was the latter.
Loren sat in
the booth at the rear of the restaurant, back to the wall as he surveyed the occupants. From their previous business there, he remembered and had verified the sight lines and exits. He'd also ordered a simple food item that was almost impossible to screw up, with a glass of water that had come from the station's own purifiers.
He shifted in his seat, feeling the reassuring heft of his SSK in his waistband holster and covered up by his civilian jacket.
Garrett walked in exactly ten minutes early, something Loren had seen him do on a regular basis. He also assumed the fixer had cased the place thoroughly well beforehand. Loren gave the man a casual two-fingered wave as they made eye contact.
"This seat taken?" Garrett asked in good humor as he slid into the booth opposite Loren.
"I ordered up a few hundred credits' worth of food and told the waitstaff the person who joined me would pay," the Confed man replied with a grin. "You want to have a seat, it's all yours."
"I know better than that. You ordered a prepackaged sandwich and water. Your food will be here in less than a minute."
"You just know everything, don't you?"
"That's why I'm so good at my work." Garrett got serious. "So, my friend and I are parked in one of the docks. Naturally, he's still aboard. When did you arrive?"
"Last night, commercial flight. You know how horrible it is to sit in back and let somebody else do the flying? I almost couldn't take it."
The waiter arrived with Loren's sandwich. Garrett declined food but ordered a low-grade alcoholic drink.
"Ok, I need to fill you in before I take a bite of this sandwich, just in case it all goes wrong again and I need a stomach transplant. We're ready to take your guest off your hands. Everything's set."
Garrett surprised himself as he realized he felt a bit protective of Velk. Loren was no doubt going to go put themselves in harm's way. It was what the demented Confed officer seemed to be good at, and to his credit he always seemed to get the job done.
