Flashpoint (Hellgate)

by Mel Keegan

  On the cot was the body of a man, half clad in battered jeans with the knees ripped out and the cuffs frayed to string. And he might have been dead at first glance. The VR hookup was more than likely filthy – users this far out did not seem worried about contracting the Hamilton-Scalzo virus, though it would have been the first concern on Marin’s own mind. This idiot was still flying, still jacked into some synthetic fantasy, mind so far from his physical body that he was utterly oblivious to the club, the noise, the intrusion.

  “You want to take him out of here?” Ramon said loudly, over the persistent din. “You can’t hear yourself think in here.”

  “Grab him,” Vaurien said against Travers’s ear. “Get him back to the Capricorn. I’ve had about all I care to see of this pit – or hear, or smell.”

  Marin and Travers stooped over the man, took his weight between them, and as Travers got an arm under him, Marin unhooked the VR rig. A groan told them Kolya Talantov actually was alive, but he was too far out of his head to know as they carried him out of the cubicle. In the narrows of the passage outside, Travers swung him up over his shoulder and handed the worklight to Marin.

  “You remember the way out of here?”

  “I think so.” Marin angled the light. “Stay close.”

  They were turning back into the foyer when a shape loomed up on Marin’s right – big, powerful, sober and motivated. He knew at once it was ‘management’ protecting its clients, but Ramon was there, cutting off the goon before he could block their path. Marin could not catch what he was saying, but the goon seemed satisfied. He knew Ramon by sight, and if the kid said Talantov was okay, that was good enough. More than likely, he had said the crew of the Krait had come to bring the idiot home, sober him up, because he had a job to do.

  The worklight’s powerpack was uncharged. It was dying even before Marin turned it off, and he dumped it with the rest of the maintenance tools as Vaurien led the way out of the red strobes and into the cold, dark reek of Halfway’s lowest level. The way back to the Capricorn was not far, but far enough for the din from the club to fade, allowing a man to marshal his thoughts.

  Heavy vibration through the deck told them the Mako was powering up, and moments later they heard the bell-like chime as she disconnected from the docking adapter. She would loop up around the old hull and slide into a brighter, warmer, much safer berth.

  The remote in Vaurien’s left hand issued a squawk as he unlocked the Capricorn, and Travers went ahead. He dumped Talantov in the first available seat, and as Marin joined him he was working his shoulder to and fro after the chore of carrying the idiot. Kolya Talantov had not even twitched an eyelid. He had no idea he had been taken out of Gemini.

  “He does this often?” Marin wondered.

  “Every off-shift,” Ramon sighed. “Addicted. He has it bad. His game is one of the crap ones, total brain-rot. You’d have to be out of your gourd to even load it up, but this loon –? He lives for it.”

  As he spoke he was opening the case, taking out the blockers Wang had supplied. He loaded a capsule into the hypo as Marin watched, and jabbed the full shot into Talantov’s neck.

  “He’ll come around in a few,” Ramon said, and he sounded as disgusted as amused. “You know, if Fernie didn’t owe this bastard, he’d kick his ass the hell of the Krait. But Kolya saved his life one time. Go figure. Took a bullet for him – yeah, true! The good old cliché. Now, for all I know, Kolya could’ve been plugged by accident, but he actually did get between the shooter and Fernie, and he fed Fernie the story about how he tried to save him. Sounds like bullshit to me, but Fernie’s … an oddball. He has this one weird-ass code he lives by. The scales have to balance, he says, and if they don’t balance up, they have to be made to.”

  “Which means he’ll beat and screw the value of a hireling’s crimes out of him – or her!” Vaurien mused, “and when he thinks he might come up owing a debt, he pays it.”

  “You got it.” Ramon leaned down over Talantov, peering into the man’s face, looking for signs of life. “He’s coming around. He’s gonna live this time. I keep tellin’ him, he’s runnin’ out of luck. One night, he drags himself back to the Krait and comes whining at my door. ‘Help me, you gotta help me, somebody’s been fucking me.’ And he’s been reamed bloody, and he has no idea who was on him. One bastard or half a dozen, he’s never going to know. They could have killed him, and he wouldn’t have known one damn’ thing about it. Now, how smart is that?”

  In the cabin lights, the man looked bad, Marin thought. He was still young, but he had the skin tone of unrisen bread dough and the complexion of putty. Kolya Talantov was probably not yet thirty, but he was raddled, less thin than wasted. He was not going to live much longer, and the worst of it was, he did not seem to care. If he did not succumb to a virus like Hamilton-Scalzo, he would die with a seizure, or with the dope that always accompanied the VR trips.

  “Coffee?” Travers offered, on his way to the ’chef. In the warmth of the Capricorn, he dropped his jacket on a seat, and glanced at Marin with the offer of coffee, which Curtis accepted with a mute nod.

  “I’ll take one, Neil.” Vaurien was still frowning over Talantov. He had slipped a combug into his ear and was listening to the Wastrel’s loop through a crackle of heavy encryption. “Greenstein reports the Mako safely tucked away … and Barb wants to know when we’re coming back.” He touched the ‘bug to cut into the loop. “A few minutes, Barb. We’re just waiting on some information, and then we’re out of here.”

  A combug slipped into Marin’s ear and he heard her respond,

  “Make it soon, Richard. I do not like having Sergei aboard.”

  “Nor do I,” Vaurien agreed, “but he’s been useful this time.”

  “Barb,” Marin said quietly into the crackle of encryption static, “can you give me an hour, when we get back?”

  “Sure. What do you need?”

  “Two things,” he told her, “and I’m not about to describe either one on the air! It won’t take long. A few minutes.”

  “You know where I’ll be,” she told him.

  As they fell silent, Kolya Talantov began to groan awake. He changed color as he swam back up toward semi-consciousness, and Marin would not have been surprised if he had begun to heave. The blockers could have that effect, when they were administered in heavy doses and the comedown was fast, abrupt.

  His eyes cracked open, showing rims of red and vastly dilated pupils. Ramon got in front of him. The first face he saw was familiar, and at least he did not panic. “Where am – whaa –?”

  “You’re safe, you moron,” Ramon said slowly, distinctly. “We dragged your ass out of Gemini before you could get done over – again. You owe us you understand? You’re on a lighter belonging to Richard Vaurien, and don’t you dare say ‘who?’ Because you know Vaurien as well as we all do. He wants some info out of you, shithead. Fernie Wang told Richard he can have the info, so you answer the man’s questions, and then I’ll drag your sorry ass home.”

  The words seemed to have made their way into the corner of Talantov’s brain which was still functional. Ramon moved aside, and Vaurien took his place, directly before the man. Talantov had both hands on the arms of the seat and shoved as hard as he could to push himself up a hand’s span against the backrest. He was sucking his tongue and teeth, tasting acid, looking wretched.

  Like Ramon, Vaurien pitched his voice levelly, spoke slowly and intonated every word clearly. “You know me?”

  “Course I bloody know yer.” The accent was thick. It sounded like Haven, reminiscent of Sergeant Roy Neville. “I seen yer on the rink, twenty different ports.”

  “All right. Fernie Wang’s orders … you tell me what I need to know. Deal?”

  “If Fernie says so.” Talantov peered up at Ramon. “Mind, if yer shittin’ me, and I tell yer some crap yer ain’t supposed to know, and Fernie takes it outta my hide, I’ll be after yer with a big gun.”

  “It’s kosher, Kolya,” Ramon assured him.


  “Kosher,” Talantov echoed. “Jesus, I could murder a beer.”

  “When I get you home,” Ramon promised. “Richard?”

  “One question,” Vaurien said tersely. “I want a name. The name of the guy you know from Gemini, who was talking about his business, and he either deals in labor, or knows who does … and he just traded through the labor lifted right out of the Shanghai escape pods at Ulrand.”

  For a moment Talantov blinked stupidly at him, as if Vaurien had just delivered a speech in native Resalq, and then the red eyes cleared and he said, “Ron Reanie. Is that all yer want?”

  “Ron Reanie,” Vaurien echoed. “Is he here?”

  “What, yer mean on Halfway? Yeah, got an office in Xanadu, where the lights shine so bloody bright, they burn yer eyeballs right out.” Talantov blinked up at Richard, and breathed a tide of acid breath into his face. “He was slumming last night, I seen him getting up close and unfriendly with some of the house nasties. Gemini.”

  “Barb, you heard that?” Vaurien said softly.

  “Every drunken syllable,” Jazinsky’s voice whispered over the comm. “Give me one minute, let me verify the ID and make sure the bastard’s still here.”

  They waited then, while Talantov fidgeted and squirmed in the seat, looking green to the ears and more likely to start retching with every moment. Vaurien was restless. He wanted the man off the Capricorn before he lost the contents of his belly, and with little time to spare Jazinsky said,

  “It checks out, Richard. I’m seeing comm lines, a private dock, fuel and lading manifests. Ronald Joaquin Reanie, at a berth in the rock at the bow-end of the old Explorer.”

  “Good enough.” Vaurien stepped aside. “Get him out of here, Ramon, before he’s puking on the decks.”

  “Will do.” Ramon caught Talantov by both thin wrists and pulled him more or less upright. “Shit, man, you’re a mess. Go home, take a shower, you stink. Richard, give me three minutes to get back here!”

  “I want a beer,” Talantov whined.

  He was still whining when his voice disappeared through the docking adaptor, and Travers gave Marin a look of appalled amusement. Halfway had the reputation for being the place where the refuse of mankind washed up. Vaurien was in the cockpit, and the engines came online as they waited for Ramon. Marin leaned on the bulkhead beside the hatch, tipped his head back and gave Travers a sidelong grin.

  “They used to say there’s one born every minute.”

  “I’d guess it’s closer to ten.” Travers’s long fingers traced the line of Marin’s jaw. “Xanadu. You want to dress up, do this in style? We’ll be shouldering through the elite bodyguards. They probably won’t even let you in to breathe the same air as the likes of Zwerner if you don’t dress for the occasion.”

  “Interesting.” Marin turned his face to Travers’s palm, enjoying the warm, the strength of it. “What does one wear to hunt for slave dealers?”

  “A gun,” Travers suggested glibly.

  “Several,” Marin amended, and his palm hovered over the hatch release. He had heard approaching footfalls. Ramon was returning at a jog, and as he appeared the hatch closed up behind him. “Any time you’re ready,” Marin said into the loop.

  The Capricorn’s engines had been on standby for the last minute, and as Marin and Travers moved forward from the hatch, they heard the docking adapter separate.

  Chapter Three

  The lab’s mainframes were independent of Etienne, and Jazinsky had configured them for one task. They were processing the flood of data returned by the Orpheus. Neil Travers understood none of the fine details of the work, but the broad concept made a terrible sense, clear as the air on the Fox Glacier on a midwinter’s morning.

  The flight for which Mick Vidal gave his life had returned more data in less time than any other project Jazinsky had ever coordinated. Only the Resalq wrangled more data, and not often. Mark Sherratt’s machines, both at the house in Riga on Borushek, and his home on Saraine, were working on the same project, with AI aboard the science vessel Carellan Djerun acting as a conduit between the two.

  They needed more computers, more space, more time. The machines might be available, but there was no more time. Travers was keenly aware of the pressure under which Jazinsky and the Resalq were working – and just as aware of the anger Vaurien harbored for Tonio Teniko.

  A message was waiting on Richard’s private system access, but he continued to ignore it, though he had not deleted it. Travers watched him move about Jazinsky’s lab, pacing like a caged animal, unable to be still though he must be tired. Jazinsky was intent on the AI she was fine-tuning for a delicate task, and at length it was she who said, over her shoulder without looking up from the threedee,

  “Richard, pull up a seat and go over the specs on that drone. Give yourself something to do. You should eat, or sleep, or both.”

  The drone was the little maintenance machine Marin had asked for. It would enter the crawl spaces in the hull of the old Explorer, and she had loaded it with the schematics. It could find its way from the maintenance hatch where it was inserted to the service ways in the physical infrastructure where Boden Zwerner’s household was installed. It would wait there until the AI reported a radiation spill, and then it would open a hazmat container and flood its compartment with enough hard radiation to convince Zwerner’s AI that the alarm was very real.

  Every human in Xanadu would scramble for the docks. Every ship would punch out fast, when Jazinsky’s AI began to report critical inconsistencies in the Prometheus generator which provided the habitat’s power. The hollow planetoid would empty out in a matter of minutes, and the hardest part of the plan, Travers knew, was always going to be pinpointing Boden Zwerner himself, in the chaos.

  As much as Vaurien and Jazinsky might dislike and distrust van Donne, the man had his uses. His data had identified Zwerner’s decks within Xanadu, his private docking facility, and his ship. He was flying a Kotaro-Fuente spaceplane, a luxury few could afford. It was fast, Weimann enabled, powerful, maneuverable – and armed. It was registered on Jagreth for the purposes of Deep Space Merchant Astra law; it ran a crew of four, but Zwerner’s private staff numbered more than twenty, and the household would evacuate en masse.

  Five Companions, three secretaries, chefs, stewards, and an army of bodyguards, lived and worked in a structure van Donne described as a mansion carved out of the solid rock of the asteroid. The whole entourage could only pick up and run, when the warnings were broadcast that the generator was dangerously unstable. It would be shut down to prevent a major disaster, but the spill would make Xanadu terminally unhealthy, and Boden Zwerner would be the first one out. He had ambitions to live the good life in the homeworlds. The specters of disease, therapy, biocyber prosthesis, cloned organ implants, would rush him out of Xanadu so fast, the challenge would be to keep up with him.

  “Done.” Jazinsky straightened from the threedee and pushed both hands into the small of her spine. “The AI’s in and working. The local mainframes are old, busted up, jacking around, but my AI has enough smarts to work around the deficiencies. You trigger it, Neil, and it’ll do its thing, like the drone. Speaking of which, Richard –?”

  “It checks out fine.” Vaurien looked up at her through the blue-green mist of the threedee. “Tully’s going to insert it at a service point about a hundred meters from here, and then it’s all up to Curtis. And Sergei, damnit. If they’re going to take that spaceplane, they’ll have to be pretty damn’ fast off the mark.”

  A surveillance drone had already been launched to monitor Zwerner’s private dock, and Travers had no qualms about the Mako’s ability to be in the right place at the right time. He might have had more misgivings about the fact that more than twenty people would be on the Kotaro-Fuente along with Zwerner, but van Donne had no such feelings.

  He despised Zwerner’s corps of bodyguards as the kind of ex-Fleet muscle who got mercenaries a bad name, while Zwerner’s bevy of concubines were ‘brightlights w
hores’ who would service the devil himself, if the price were right, and the secretaries were Zwerner’s protégés. They would have been instrumental in setting up the Cygnus-Logistics Ore Hauler 389 incident. They were many rungs further down the same ladder Zwerner had scaled, and if they survived him, they would murder each other to fill the vacuum left by his death.

  Sparing tears or remorse for the company was a mistake, and Travers knew it. Marin was stoic on the subject. Any individual on Zwerner’s private staff would have killed him on sight, if they knew who he was, or the nature of his mission. The time when Dendra Shemiji could afford to be selective – set a trap, bait it, wait for Zwerner himself to walk into it and take him alone – was long past.

  Time was the one thing none of them had left, and Travers set aside the misgivings as he watched Vaurien sign off on the prep work for the drone. The machine was waiting; Ingersol would insert it, and the plan was clockwork. Boden Zwerner could not possibly know it, but his life measured in hours.

  “Xanadu,” Jazinsky was saying as she came around the work bench, dropped both big hands on Vaurien’s shoulders and began to knead them. “How long since you put on your gladrags and drank champagne? Ease up on yourself, Richard, before you break something.”

  He leaned back into the kneading hands. “I’m not going to Xanadu to get pissed and dance! It’s just a job, Barb. Some bastard by the name of Ronald J. Reanie, dealer in exotic goods of every disreputable kind, including slave labor.”

  “So, where is it written that you can’t live a little, on the side?” She slapped his back, done with the massage, and hopped up to sit on the bench beside him. “Better?”

  He stretched and twisted his spine this way and that. “Better. And I guess we can afford to swan around for an hour. We can’t leave Halfway till we nail Zwerner, which gives us twelve hours.”