Pico's Crush

by Carol Van Natta

  He was regretting his choice to get closer to the barge. He hadn’t learned much new, other than the crew had already taken anything that wasn’t nailed down, judging by the boxes of supplies and shipping crates in the front of the barge, and the barge had a cloaking canopy that used the same technology as his vest and cap. Now he was stuck in the mini-grotto, because the barge was never unattended long enough for him to slip away. If the crew had been more vigilant, they might have noticed the squirrels and birds above his position were vocalizing predator warning calls. Fortunately, the loadmaster was loud and voluble, and the crew was more attuned to urban threats.

  Since he was there, he’d really like to see what was in the shipping crates. Once again, he wished for Andra’s oculars, but he had the next best thing. Ever so slowly, centimeter by centimeter, he unsealed his gun bag, then patiently oozed his hand inside, constantly conscious of his visible movements. The contents were jumbled because he’d become lazy about snapping everything in place since leaving the military. Finally, his questing fingers found the spotter’s scope case. With exaggerated care, he pulled it closer to the opening, freezing every time someone looked his direction. He opened the case and extracted the scope, then powered it on. He’d long ago put tape over its flashy startup lights, which kind of ruined the stealth concept. At least it didn’t play a merry little tune.

  The trick to slow movements was using just enough muscle tension for control, and to keep other big muscles from tensing up in sympathy. He was a little out of practice, so it helped that the crew expected trouble from the sky or the building, not the overgrown landscape. Out of habit, he engaged the recording feature. It wouldn’t be ultra-res, but it was good enough for most loss auditors. He did an overall sweep first, then zoomed in on the crates. The closeup view was unhelpful until he found a crate that had cracked open, revealing what looked like packs of hypojets for delivering subcutaneous drugs. He’d seen enough of them in the past couple of days to recognize them by now. Lavong, the labs manager, had pointedly made the distinction between the physical chemistry done in his buildings, and the organic chemistry and pharma labs in the university’s medical department, so the jets were puzzling.

  He was just putting his scope back in its case when the loadmaster shut the barge’s gates and signaled to the pilot. The five crew left on the dock decided it was too hot to stay outside, so they trudged back up the path to the Mat Sci building’s mid-section doorway. Not wasting any time, Jerzi sealed his bag and crawled out of his den, grateful to finally be able to make progress toward his goal of the east end of the building. After he quickly rounded the exposed northeast corner, with only eight or ten meters between him and the sea, and between him and the deserted public transport stop, the undergrowth revealed a grisly tableau.

  Two dead men from the theft crew were attracting flies. One had his pants around his ankles and a phase knife in his right hand. Both died of perfectly targeted flechette wounds to the neck, back, and throat. It looked like Andra’s handiwork, and she’d have had a good reason for killing them.

  Jerzi confiscated the phase knife and two hand-beamers, amused to note that none of them had biometric locks. He’d have thought thieves would be more inclined to protect their weapons from theft. He wasn’t a forensic specialist like Luka, but logic said the bodies couldn’t have been there very long, maybe thirty minutes. It was long enough for Andra to have gone almost anywhere.

  He eyed the Math building to the south, and decided she’d reject it. The action was in the Mat Sci-Chemistry-labs complex, so that’s where she’d be.

  Another fifteen minutes of recon skulking got him to the second floor, where her office was. His long-shot gamble paid off when he saw she’d taped a note to her door. “Lightning grades posted in the big lab. Hope you crushed it!” She’d always been clever.

  He left the note where it was, in case one of the warring parties noticed its absence. Considering the number of combatants he’d seen so far, he’d been damn lucky not to run into them in the corridors earlier. Whatever they were fighting over had to be valuable, to make it worth the personnel cost. Deciding that lifts were for the suicidal, he chose the east stairs as the best of a bad lot, and vowed to make it up to his already sore legs when this was all over by booking an hour-long massage and spa-tub soak.

  He didn’t like the look of the plasma-scorched doors that led to Department Leader Vestering’s office, but he didn’t have the time to investigate. The artfully curved corridors, which he’d privately thought were pretentious, turned out to be surprisingly helpful in making him less immediately visible to anyone else in the corridor. The classroom doorways he passed were all closed and dark, and he hoped they’d stay that way. He slowed and listened intently, then peeked for a quick view of the top of the mid-building stairs and lifts. He saw a scorch mark and congealed blood on the floor, but no people. He was cheered by the fact that, outside of the dead crew in the bushes, it was the first blood he’d seen in the school. He edged closer, controlling his foot sounds on the textured floor, but the juncture appeared deserted. He walked quickly and quietly past it, using all his senses to maintain environmental awareness. It was a trick he’d learned watching Mairwen. He’d never match her phenomenal skill, but the technique had proved useful in the physical security business.

  The next problem, what to do about the closed and dark laboratory entrance, was solved by luck, when Truòng, from the rocket launch team, appeared from the other direction. He was wearing a lab coat and carrying what looked like a cleaning bot wrapped in clearpack. He palmed the biometric reader and the doorway irised open. Jerzi ran toward the entrance, startling poor Truòng into yelping and dropping his prize, which Jerzi caught by sliding in on his knees. His gun bag’s forward momentum knocked Truòng’s legs out from under him. The door irised closed behind them.

  “Nice entrance, Crush.” Some of the worry he’d been carrying melted away at the sound of Andra’s amused voice.

  He turned around in time to see her putting her Lipara flechette gun in her pocket. He handed the surprisingly cold cleaning bot back to Truòng, then stood and grinned at her. “Did I miss the fireworks display?”

  Twenty minutes later, Jerzi was sitting next to Andra on a lab bench, holding one of the cleaning bots steady while she used his confiscated phase knife as an improvised spot welder to attach a bead-like camera eye to its side. The launch team of Grien, Truòng, and Dortief, plus Grien’s older brother, were all working on devices and compounds that were mostly designed to frighten, distract, or mislead. They couldn’t take the chance on hurting innocent students or staff.

  When he could get away with it, he looked for hidden injuries Andra might have sustained. She’d given him what he suspected was an extremely sanitized account of what had happened after he’d left her in her office two hours before. He didn’t blame her for not wanting to scare the students, but he suspected the “brief interlude spent in the company of some mercs” had caused the bruise on her jaw. He’d been luckier, with only a few scrapes and bug bites.

  She’d caught the students trying to break into her office, so she’d let them in to get their rocket propellant ingredients, plus she took her own backpack and bag. She hadn’t known he was on the floater—in fact, had hoped he was somewhere safe—when she’d posted the note, which she’d intended for Pico.

  Based on their pooled intel and knowledge, their working theory was that the theft crew was stealing from the university, and the mercs were stealing from the crew. None of them could come up with an idea on what was worth stealing, except maybe a commercial project, but none of them used more than one lab. The hypojets Jerzi had seen were suggestive of illicit chems, but the organic chem labs would be a much easier place to make them. The comms were still out, and the public transport harbor was still blockaded, so unless Vestering had made good his escape and contacted the authorities, it was likely no one off the floater knew there was trouble.

  Some of the other escapees had headed to
ward the shared labs building, and Pico and Sojaire had last been seen heading for the Math building.

  “Checking on the kids, I expect,” Andra guessed. His worry must have been showing, because she’d patted his shoulder. “It’s as safe a place as any right now.”

  Their current plan depended on getting eyes on the mercs and crew, so they’d raided the project vault and cannibalized Dortief’s new and improved Doomreaper for the tiny camera eyes. Dortief had sulked until Andra had promised to help build Doomreaper’s Daughter. Their hope was that the tech suppressors wouldn’t affect the micro-power cameras, and the bots ran on long-life rechargeable batteries. They hastily reprogrammed the bots to think the third-floor lab was their home base, then set them loose.

  Andra drew Jerzi aside toward her backpack. “I don’t want the students playing with them, but I’ve got both KemX and RakX, and some home-brew TBY3 gel. I trust you not to blow the floater sky high.”

  “Wow,” he said, remembering how she’d described the contents of her backpack the day before, “sex toys sure have changed since I was a lad.”

  “Idiota,” she replied, rolling her eyes. “I was thinking about the big smuggler barge you saw, and that freight flitter Grien’s brother says is hogging the Mat Sci airpad. Be a downright shame if something happened to them.”

  “Oh, yeah,” he agreed solemnly. “A crying shame.”

  Chapter 22

  * Planet: Nila Marbela * GDAT 3241.149 *

  Mairwen sat on the only available adult-sized chair in the childcare playroom and watched Luka’s progress as he threaded a crooked path through the clutter. She knew he needed to pace, or better yet, run, not hop over children’s toys and skirt entirely too many pieces of child-sized furniture. He had never been good at waiting, and they’d been in the center for fifty-eight minutes.

  Without comms, without information, and with added responsibility of seven young children, waiting was the best option for the time being. The room was thick-walled with no windows and a controlled single point of entry. It was also better for Pico to stay in one place, so Jerzi could find her.

  Mairwen's calf was much better after Sojaire applied the wound pack and used his healing talent. She was functional, but stayed seated because it made Luka happier. After Sòng departed, Luka had insisted on carrying her in the lift from the third floor to the first-floor childcare center, and she’d let him. In her old life, no one ever carried trackers, unless it was to dispose of their corpses.

  Pico had roused the children from their quiet time five minutes ago and had them scrounging for more food. Miguel, who’d been alternating between her side and Sojaire’s, helped his sleepy sister peel a banana. They were the same children that had been there yesterday, with the addition of six-year-old Nico, an olive-skinned boy who spoke a confusing mixture of English and Portuguese.

  Luka froze in mid-step and looked at the percomp on the back of his hand. “Incoming ping.” He activated it. “It’s the data from Sòng, from an hour ago.”

  “I’ll try my dad.” Pico activated her percomp quickly, but her face fell. “Nothing.”

  Luka’s fingers danced over the interface. “I’m getting GDAT sync. At a guess, the tech suppressors are down for this building, but not the others. I’ll try an emergency priority to the police. Majeed, if I can get her.” He glanced to the children, then switched to subvocalization. Luka had shared his admittedly shaky framework of suppositions about what the crew and mercs were doing, with the key assumption being that the crew weren’t just one-shot thieves, they’d been operating in the labs since the first security upgrades had gone in eight months before.

  Pico told the children to eat fast, because she and Sojaire were going to teach them a new game called Run Like a Fox. While they’d napped, she’d presented her idea to the rest of the adults that they’d likely have to carry the children out of the building, possibly at a run. The children would be more comfortable and cooperative if they practiced ahead of time. Pico was short and small, so it made sense she’d only carry one child, while the rest of the adults carried two.

  Luka was the tallest and strongest of them, and would be carrying Miguel and his sister Celia. Lyssi insisted that Mairwen carry her, along with Nico. Sojaire insisted that Pico should carry tiny Parekh, because only she knew where the boy kept hiding the clothes he so despised. That left Davalia and Isiro to Sojaire, doubtless by his design, because they were both taller and heavier than the others. Mairwen had to consciously consider nurturing objectives; with Sojaire, they were instinctive. His talents were perfectly suited to him.

  Lyssi helped Nico figure out where to put his feet so they didn’t dig into Lyssi’s thigh or Mairwen’s ribs. Fortunately, they were each about twenty kilos, so she wouldn’t be unbalanced if she had to run. Her half-healed calf wouldn’t be happy about it, but she could do it. She walked around the room with them once, then made them practice mounting and dismounting several times. When Luka ended his call, he easily picked up Miguel and Celia and carried them to where she and her charges stood.

  “How’s the leg?”

  “Functional.” She smiled briefly, because she’d surprised him by not saying “fine.”

  Luka put the children down, then motioned Pico and Sojaire closer. “The best Majeed could do was divert an airborne AI for a flyover of the floater. It seems the police are busy with two other laboratory locations in Tremplin that were raided by mercenaries, and the labs fought back.” He sighed. “The Tremplin Police magistrate is a lazy ónytjungur who ordered her to stay out of our situation, citing lack of jurisdiction. He didn’t tell her she couldn’t share the live AI feed, so she’s going to send it to me and Division Colonel Bittman of Military Command.”

  “What’s an ónytjungur?” asked Lyssi. She reproduced the pronunciation rather well.

  “A tosser,” responded Sojaire quickly. Mairwen didn’t correct him, although it actually meant “sack of shit.” It seemed to upset people when children repeated rude words, even in Icelandic.

  Luka kept glancing at his percomp. “Makes me wish ours were like Sòng’s. His probably has its own exploration comm relay.” He crouched and held out his arms to Miguel and Celia. “Let’s practice again.” Mairwen suspected there would be new percomps coming for Foxe Investigations after this case.

  Six minutes later, the AI feed arrived. Their little floater looked like a war zone, with armed flitters on all airpads and a large collection of boats huddled around the north-side docks. The drone also caught the arrival of a military cruiser as it approached the southwest landing dock. Moments later, the dock exploded, seriously damaging the hull of the cruiser.

  Luka whistled. “Well, that ought to get their attention.”

  * * * * *

  Jerzi patted the glittery lava-red skin of his rental flitter. He’d be sorry to have to give it up at the end of his vacation. Moving it farther away from the now disabled freight flitter on the Mat Sci building’s airpad would make for a safer liftoff. An explosion somewhere to the southwest suggested things were heating up.

  When he’d arrived on the airpad with Andra’s little package of KemX, he discovered one or more lethal persons had been on the airpad before him, because the mercs who had been guarding the flitter were all dead. The freighter was half off the airpad, probably moved to allow access to the stacker, and its doors were wide open. Any cargo it had carried was gone now.

  Jerzi opted to disable the freighter by frying its steering controls using one of the mercs’ plasma rifles. No sense wasting perfectly good KemX. He stowed the rifle and the rest of the merc weapons in his flitter’s luggage hold.

  A loud static crackle in his ear startled the hell out of him. He’d forgotten he was still wearing two earwires, the one on his left jaw pilfered from a merc, and his own on the right, hidden among his earrings. His chirped an incoming ping from Luka with an invitation to a secure conference. He subvocalized the passkey of Beehive, the name of a ship only he, Luka, and Mairwen would know, and h
e was in.

  “Dad, I’m okay. Are you?” Pico’s rapid words made him smile and sigh with relief.

  “I’m good. Are comms up everywhere?”

  “For now,” said Luka. “I think the mercs found and killed the tech suppressors the crew set up. I’m with Mairwen, Pico, and Sojaire in the childcare center.”

  “I’m on the Mat Sci airpad by my flitter. May I invite Andra De Luna to our little party?”

  “Already here, Crush.” Jerzi grinned. Even subvocalizing, her distinctive Spanish accent came through. It was amazing what a little real-time communication could do for a man’s mood.

  Luka quickly brought them up to speed on what the police AI flyover revealed. Andra and Jerzi agreed that the damage to the military ship would be more than enough provocation for them to come in force.

  While Andra explained what she and Jerzi had been doing and planning, Jerzi scuttled to the north edge of the building and peeked over the ledge. The big freight barge had returned to the loading dock, but it was now accompanied by three smaller boats and a swarm of crew, hurriedly transferring stolen goods under the direction of the freighter’s loadmaster. Her booming voice was audible even from three stories up. Beyond that, he could see watersleds and a racer or two rounding the curve of the floater and heading north.

  “I grounded the mercs’ freighter,” Jerzi subvocalized, “but the crew’s freight barge is a problem. Too many people on shore. I could swim from the public transport dock, if I had the right equipment, but the temporary oxygen breather we rigged up is only good for about ten minutes before the membrane clogs.”

  “We need exit options,” said Mairwen. “I’ll go scout.”