Black Steel

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Black Steel Page 10

by Steve Perry


  Wu shook her head, amazed.

  “All right, here’s what I’ll do. I’ll find out where he goes and then follow him when he comes back. I’ll give you a call when he’s where you can reach him, that okay?”

  “Great. “

  “Okay. Discom.”

  Wu tucked her com unit back into a little square and crowed it to her belt. Well. Whatever Cierto was up to in The Brambles, she could catch him when he returned. Wonderful stuff, technology.

  Meanwhile, maybe she could get in a little practice with her sword. One could never be too good.

  Especially now.

  Sleel felt a chill, despite the day’s warmth, as he moved about the camp. He was like a tracking beast searching for some sign of intrusion. He scanned the skies and road, seeing nothing amiss, but feeling that prickly coolness on his skin that went with danger. His inquiries had come up mostly dry. He knew that the passengers of the private ship were groundside, checked into a hotel in Bandari, but they weren’t in their rooms. A list of applications to enter The Brambles did not include Cierto’s name, but Sleel also did not assume the man was entirely stupid. Even though local records showed that no visitors had been approved for entry past the guarded borders for today, the tickle in Sleel’s belly would not stay still.

  Danger was coming; Sleel knew it in that part of his mind that lived past reason and logic. The old reptile brain Dirisha used to prattle on about, that part was alert, nose in the air, sniffing for death and smelling its dank stench. How and when it didn’t know, but soon. It knew that.

  Sleel checked the explosive loads in his left spetsdod again, a thing he had done five times already today. The right hand weapon still contained the stepped-up version of shocktox, the animal trank. Even though Sleel was less concerned with sparing life than Emile or some of the other matadors, there was no point in using more force than was needed to stop the threat. Sleel figured that if somebody tried to kill you, all bets were off, insofar as their right to keep using the community air went; still, explaining a pile of bodies could sometimes get difficult. Best to save the killing stroke until there was a real need for it.

  He was outside the main building, perched upon a small grassy hillock that rose a few meters higher than the rest of the hill. The sunlight splashed everywhere, the bugs buzzed back and forth, the air was thick with humidity. It was quiet enough.

  Sleel looked at his tracker. Reason’s transmitter sent to the tiny four-centimeter screen a small green dot that pulsed in time to his heartbeat. The man seemed calm enough. That was good. Sleel didn’t doubt his own ability, especially given what these geeps had thrown at him so far. It was almost a shame to have to bring it to a close. Almost, but not quite.

  Inside the hovervan, Miguel said, “Thirty seconds, Patron.” His voice was muffled by the protective helmet and face shield of the shiftsuit he now wore.

  Cierto nodded absently. “I am ready.” The trip thus far had been almost uneventful. The guards at the border had performed a cursory inspection, and neither Cierto nor the glider parts had been in any jeopardy. Such fools would not last long in his employ. Immediately after clearing the border, Miguel had put the vehicle on automatic and begun to assemble the gliders. There was a bad moment when one of the spunfiber struts jammed, due to some grains of the chlorinating compound which had adhered to it from where it had been hidden. Fortunately it was a problem easily resolved. Now, both gliders were rigged, the small and quiet motors purring in readiness.

  Miguel touched a control and the rear door of the van retracted. They were cruising at perhaps two hundred kilometers per hour and the warmer air from outside swirled around them. Miguel glanced at his timer. “Five seconds, Patron.”

  Cierto moved to the edge of the doorway. The filmy delta-shaped wing of his glider was fan-folded closed to allow movement inside the van; once he leaped out, a tug would pop the wing open. Although they were perhaps a thousand meters above the tops of the trees, Cierto had only a touch of fear about the jump. He had tested this particular glider on a dozen such drops and it had performed flawlessly

  “Go, Patron!”

  Cierto leaped into the empty air, to his left as they had practiced. Miguel was immediately behind him, angling right.

  There was a moment of gut-twisting free-fall before the wing snapped out and locked into place; then Cierto was flying in the hot daylight, still dropping rapidly, but now in a controlled glide. In a moment, he and Miguel would be between two rows of the ubiquitous trees and safe from detection. Any radar tracking the van would show only a quick strobe of them before they were gone, and unless the simadam operating it happened to be looking right at the scope at that precise instant, they would never be noticed at all.

  Wu was in a flat patch of grass on the edge of a public park, dancing with her sword. She had gathered a small and curious crowd, but she did not allow this to bother her as she moved. The single chime of her com on her belt did interrupt her kata, though.

  “Yes?”

  “Scanner here. The two men inside the chem van just bailed out.”

  “Huh?”

  “Yep, my crossover sat just happened to be coming online when they did it. They hopped out the back and opened some kind of ultralight aircraft, then went into the trees.”

  Wu considered this. “What about the van?”

  “It’s all by itself and continuing on course. Be interesting to see how far it gets past there before the AAA guns pot it.”

  “Can you follow the two men?”

  “Sorry, no. They are under the canopy.”

  “Damn, “

  “I have an idea where they are going, though.”

  “Where?”

  “There’s a religious retreat, a camp, a dozen klicks away from where our boys left the van. Nothing else for more than a hundred kilometers ‘cept trees. I doubt those gliders have much of a range. Plus, I’ve been sorta keeping an eye on some of the other chem plant delivery vans. A couple of them are heading in that same general direction. “

  “Any ideas as to what it might mean?”

  “Well, no. The camp is empty, except for two men who filed an internal flight plan for it a few days ago.

  They are one Jersey Reason and somebody who calls himself Sleel.”

  “Sleel!”

  “You know him? He records as a local boy.”

  “Not personally, but if he’s who I think he is, I know of him. He’s a matador, one of Khadaji’s original crew.”

  “Well, that would explain things, wouldn’t it? A bodyguard and his client, holed up in what ought to be a pretty safe place. Looks like your man Cierto has biz with them.”

  Wu felt her belly grow tight. This was bad. Somebody was going to die. The real question was: who?

  Chapter TWELVE

  SLEEL LOOKED AT the infocrawl on the computer’s holoproj and whistled. “Man,” he said.

  Behind him, Reason came to look at the picture formed in the air above the comp. “A fire?”

  “Yeah. Couple hundred klicks from here.”

  The miniature version of the distant fire blazed high into the scaled-down sky.

  “I thought the trees were flame-resistant.”

  “They are, but almost anything will burn if you crank the heat up enough.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “Mean’s company is on the way here,” Sleel said, automatically checking his spetsdods.

  “Because there’s a fire two hundred kilometers away from us?”

  “These trees are worth their weight in platinum right now,” Sleel said, “and likely will be worth a lot more than that when they come to term. Everybody who can lift a shovel or man a hose will be heading there to put the fire out. Security will stay onstation, but they’ll be watching on the ‘proj. Something that might get attention on a dull day could slide when people get busy. I would say we got ourselves a nice, fat diversion here. ” He nodded at the tiny flames of the projection.

  “We’d better get ready.�
��

  Cierto glided to a soft landing next to where Juanita and Luis awaited. Miguel brought his craft down directly behind Cierto. The pair of them quickly shed the harnesses connecting them to the lightweight gliders, folded the wings, and put the devices next to the trunks of the line of trees to their left.

  “Is the diversion established?”

  “Si, Patron,” Luis said, grinning. “Half a kilometer of the trees are en fuego. “

  “How far to the target?”

  Juanita said, “Less than a kilometer. That way.”

  Cierto nodded. “All right. Light your suits. No radio contact, line-of-sight-laser coms only. This matador will have security. We can defeat much of it, but if anybody sneezes and reveals us, that person dies by my hand, comprende?”

  There was a soft chorus of acknowledgments from the students.

  “Bueno. Let us go and bag our quarry.”

  “Scanner?”

  “Here, Fem Wu. I’ve got the camp in view, it’s easier ‘cause it isn’t moving, but it looks quiet. It sits in a fairly cleared area, lot of rocks, and the perimeter is clean

  “Damn. My eye is gone. The next one is three minutes away. I’ll keep you apprised.”

  Wu nodded at the empty air. Cierto was about to do something, and she guessed it was to try and assassinate this Jersey Reason. The matadors were the best bodyguards in the galaxy, Wu knew this, but the odds were bad. Cierto was a dangerous foe, he was likely well ached and he had the support of others and a mountain of money upon which to stand. She would not wish to be in the matador Sleel’s position.

  Well. If it came to violence, the chances were that either Cierto or Sleel or both would be killed. If Cierto died, then her own mission was finished. But if he survived, what would he do then?

  Wu sat on the short grass in the warm sunshine and considered the problem. If Cierto killed the two men and lived through the adventure, then it was not likely that he would spend any time picnicking in the trees afterward. No, he had broken more than a few laws, not even counting the murder, so he would probably wish to depart this fair world with all due speed. Which would probably mean that Cierto would proceed directly to where his boxcar was berthed for a quick lift to his ship’s orbit.

  Wu could hardly spend a great deal of time skulking around the port without being noticed, but if Cierto’s departure was apt to be no more than a few hours away, she could certainly manage to watch the boxcar for that long.

  She stood. Yes. It made sense, even though it went against Master Ven’s law of no-expectations, that Cierto would be leaving shortly. If she hoped to catch him, there would be the best place.

  She went looking for a flitter to taxi her to the port.

  “Anything?” Reason asked. He had the needle gun .tucked into his belt and he nervously touched the gun’s butt as he spoke.

  Sleel watched the security screens that lit the air over the com. The radar said the skies were empty; the sensors at the base of the hill were silent; the cameras trained on the road showed no traffic. Even so, Sleel felt an impending sense of threat. “No, we’re clear. But tell you what, you sit and watch the screens. You hear or see anything, gimme a yell. I’m going to go out and take a look around with my own eyes.”

  Reason nodded and slid into the control seat as Sleel stood. “This is the perimeter alert-” he began.

  “Teach your grandfather how to suck eggs,” Reason said.

  “Huh?”

  “Old proverb. Means I know as much about how to operate this gear as you do.”

  “Right. Sorry.”

  “I just remembered something,” Reason said. “I was on Rift for a job about fifty, fifty-five years ago.”

  Sleel looked interested. “Yeah?”

  “I was still pretty young. I was working for another thief, part of his crew. There were four or five of us, as I recall.”

  “What did you steal?”

  Reason shook his head. “I don’t know. Never did. I was the escape driver. I drove the groundcar, an old crate with polyglas wheels, thing ran on broadcast power but we had it rigged with a battery in case we got shut down. Whatever it was was pretty small; the guy I worked for managed to keep it in a shirt pocket. Least that’s what he patted when I asked did it go all right. “

  “Not much help there. You remember the place where it happened?”

  “Not really. Rich man’s estate out in the middle of nowhere.”

  Sleel thought about it. “Can’t be this guy, he’s only forty-something T.S. He wouldn’t have been a hormone storm in his father’s loins yet.”

  “Just thought I’d mention it.”

  Sleel nodded, then went outside.

  It was past noon, into the hottest part of the day. Heat spiraled up from the ground, heavier from the exposed rocks, in shimmering waves. Sleel walked and looked for any sign of trouble. A chokebird chawk-chawked as it flew past, and the insects sang their songs, but there was nothing amiss that Sleel could see.

  Something was wrong, he could feel it, but the ground below the hill was empty and quiet.

  Damn.

  Luis whispered from two meters away. “There, Patron, the guard. I can shoot him from here-”

  “No,” Cierto commanded. The man in orthoskins atop the hill peering into the distance was easily a hundred and fifty meters away. Too far for a handgun like those they carried, even with an expert marksman like Luis behind the weapon. “Wait until we get closer.”

  “As you wish, Patron.”

  Cierto heard the impatience in Luis’s voice and he smiled at it. It did not matter what the young man thought, only what he did, and as long as he obeyed, that was the only important fact. Luis could not see his smile, Cierto knew; it was as invisible as Luis was to his own eyes, a shimmer that was nearly a perfect match to the background from virtually all angles. The matador atop the hill could be looking right at the four of them and not see them.

  As for the sensors they had already passed, well, they were excellent devices but hardly a match for the confounders Cierto and his trio of students carried. At a cost of a hundred thousand standards each, the confounders had better work.

  Abruptly the matador turned away and moved from sight.

  “Climb with great care,” Cierto said. “Do not disturb the rocks.”

  “Sleel?”

  Sleel was wearing short-range dentiphones and need do nothing more than grit his teeth once to be able to reply. “Yeah. “

  “I got a funny signal on the sensors.”

  “On my way.”

  Sleel hurried toward the main building.

  Inside, the older man pointed at the ground sensor projection. “Look at this.”

  “Looks clear to me.”

  “Yes, but it’s too clear. This group of twelve here is reading perfectly blank.”

  “So are all the others.”

  “Not quite. There’s a ground effect from the hot rocks, here and here, see.”

  “So?”

  “So, there are a lot of hot rocks around this group, too. Why aren’t they picking up clutter the same way?”

  “Who knows? Were they before?”

  “According to the recording yeah.”

  Sleel felt a cold finger touch his heart, then slide its way down into his bowels and begin stirring hard.

  Uh-oh. “Confounder,” he said. It was not a question.

  “A real good one,” Reason said.

  He’d underestimated them, based on the previous attacks. Bad mistake. He knew better.

  “Go get in the flitter,” Sleel said. “You get a signal from me saying `Go,’ you punch it right through the door and fan like hell away from here with your distress beacon screaming. I think we got company and they didn’t bother to touch the doorchime before they came in.”

  “Sleel-”

  “It is not a suggestion. Do it.”

  Reason sighed and gave him a short nod.

  Sleel went to the building’s rear entrance, away from the too-clean sens
ors, and went through the door at a run, diving and rolling on the hard ground, coming up into a combat crouch, both spetsdods questing for targets.

  Nothing.

  He started to rise, then sensed something to his right. The air was … blurry about fifteen meters away.

  Shiftsuit blurry.

  Sleel didn’t think; he snapped his arm out and fired. If he were wrong, he’d have wasted a demistad’s worth of ammo, he could live with that

  Spetsdod darts moved relatively slow compared to some projectiles. A man with sharp eyes could see one, were the air clear and the sun bright. Sleel saw the dart fly. Then he saw it stop in midair.

  Armor-!

  He dived just as a dark object seemed to materialize next to the spetsdod’s frozen dart. That would be an unshielded gun of some kind. Sleel didn’t stop to note the make and caliber. He looped into a second roll, straightened and opened out prone on the ground, jamming a sharp rock into his left thigh hard enough to tear the orthoskins and bruise him pretty good. He swung his left hand around and fired twice, a double-tap, one on each side of the gun coming to bear on him.

  The explosive round to the right of the invisible target’s weapon found its mark. The whump! was loud.

  Part of the shiftsuit’s grid shorted out and, like a broken-up holoproj signal, the outlines of a short, heavyset man flickered in and out. The suit’s backup computer tried to compensate but could only manage the bottom half of the outfit. What appeared to be the top half of a man toppled and fell onto its side. Sleel fired another explosive round and it hit the downed attacker about where his nose ought to be under the mask. The mask shattered and the half-body flopped onto its back.

  Sleel leaped up, but the sudden pain in his leg where he’d hit the rock caused him to lurch to one side. It was lucky, because the gunner behind him, who was yelling, “Miguel!” missed with her first shot.

  Sleel spun, but the second shot took his already injured leg out, knocking him sprawling. He twisted as he fell and fanned off four shots. Two of them hit the woman-it sounded like a woman-and she screamed and went down. Her suit was better, it maintained its integrity, but the blood pumping from within her quickly stained the outside of the figure as it ran down to pool in the dirt.

 

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