by Nick Cole
“So who else are you?” Rechs asked. “Under that armor. Your momma didn’t name you Wraith, boy. And I’ll bet she didn’t name you whatever fake name you’re about to give me, either. That is, if you’re kind enough to oblige an old fellow former leej before I kill you.”
“Asking me to take off my helmet is against the code,” Wraith said.
Rechs gave a dry chuckle. “We both know you’re not guild.”
Wraith appeared to consider this, then removed his helmet. “The name’s Aeson Keel. Captain of the Indelible VI.”
“That probably means something, like Wraith does… but I stopped paying attention to everyone who wanted to kill me a long time ago. Sorry—never heard of ya.”
Keel gave a lopsided grin. “That’s the idea.”
“Okay then.” Rechs’s fingers moved slowly toward the hand cannon at his side. It was foolish of Keel to give him an opportunity for a kill shot. Trying to play to what was most likely a young man’s ego and hot temper hadn’t worked enough to get the kid to do something stupid. Rechs decided to just go ahead and see this thing out. The odds were in his favor. Even now.
“So what happens—“ Rechs began.
In a blur of speed, he went for his sidearm. But no sooner had his hand gripped his weapon than Keel’s blaster was already drawn and leveled squarely at Rechs’s head.
The wobanki let out an impressed purr. Even the coder gave a low whistle.
Keel grinned widely. “Ravi estimated we’d draw even.” He almost giggled. “A true fifty-fifty. I told him he was crazy. No way you’re as fast as the stories. Only I’m that fast.”
He smiled.
When was the last time someone got the drop on you, Rechs? Had it ever happened?
He knew what this was about. Galactic gunslingers always wanted to test his mettle. This young gun needed to prove to himself, and to the galaxy, that he wasn’t just the guy who laid a snare for big, bad T-Rechs; he had to prove he was better than the old man. The new bad-as-you-please sheriff.
“So that’s that, huh?” Rechs said. “Go ahead and pull the trigger. You tracked me, roped me, and the reward is all yours now.”
“Reward?” Keel asked, as if it was the first he’d heard of it.
“Don’t play stupid,” Rechs spat, feeling his temper get the better of him. “Two hundred grand.”
“Listen,” Keel said, re-holstering his blaster. “I just landed over ten times that just for finding the last surviving Maydoon.” He waved his hand at Prisma. “There’s an admiral bringing his entire fleet here, right now.”
Rechs sighed. “So that’s the real bounty, eh? Find the girl, find me. Get me alive, so I can be brought before the Senate and House of Reason. Do me a favor and pull the trigger.”
Annoyance flashed on Keel’s face. “I might,” he said. “Look, this admiral is a piece of twarg dung in a white uniform. If it weren’t for the sheer amount of money, I’d have told him to find Prisma on Kublar and then I’d’ve put a blaster bolt in his head the moment he got off his shuttle. He doesn’t want you. He wants to find her because he thinks she’ll lead him to someone named Goth Sullus.”
Prisma gasped.
“Sullus,” Rechs repeated slowly.
“You know him?” Keel said. “Great. See, that’s what I need to know. What makes finding Goth Sullus worth so many credits? Who is he, exactly?”
“And you’re not here to kill me?” Rechs said.
“You? You’re a fossil. Where’s the fun in that? I’m here for myself. There’s a lot more credits in this than what I’ve got so far. And so far, I’ve made a fortune.”
“Then… you’re for hire,” Rechs observed.
Keel seemed to think about this new tack for a brief second.
“So let me hire you,” continued Rechs. “Sullus is here. We want him too. I’ll pay you—twice what your last job was, if you work for me to kill him.”
Keel’s eyes widened. “Sullus is here?” He laughed and rubbed his hands together. “Well, I thought there’d be a little more to it than that after finding the girl and the bot. Ravi, let our… friend Lao Pak know where to find Sullus. Make sure Lao Pak gets payment before he delivers Sullus’s location to our client. And make it clear that I’m not here.”
“I made you an offer,” Rechs said.
“I know you did,” Keel said, turning back to him. “But let me help you with the math. I’m getting paid two hundred and fifty million. You’re prepared to double that?” Keel crossed his arms, as if daring Rechs to actually try to lie to him and tell him he had that many credits.
The wobanki’s ears flattened, indicating a longing for such impossible wealth.
Ravi raised a finger. “Technically you are only being paid half that sum, per your agreement with Lao Pak.”
“Semantics, Ravi,” said Keel.
“Fine,” Rechs said. “I’m good for it.”
“Oh, well then!” Keel rocked on the balls of his feet and looked to his navigator. “Hear that, Ravi? He’s good for it. Well, Mr. T-Rechs, in that case…”
Rechs carried on, unperturbed. “All I need is for you to watch the girl here while I go on ahead to kill Goth Sullus. Then you can claim the prize. I just want him dead, and then we disappear. I’m going out there, into the citadel. You get back to your ship and watch for the Siren of Titan to try to get off the landing platform.”
Keel looked at the old bounty hunter suspiciously. Trusting this guy was stupid, but it was also a lot of money. “That’s it?”
“And let the wobanki, the bot, and the girl go. They’ve got to make it back to my ship. Yes, that’s it. More or less. Consider yourself on retainer.”
Keel almost laughed. He’d apprehended his share of bounties, and he knew the sorts of desperate ploys they would come up with when backed into a corner. But no one had ever just up and offered him five hundred million credits. That was ballsy. The idea that this fossil had that kind of money was so absurd… it almost had to be true.
And if he was telling the truth, it’d be the easiest five hundred million credits anyone had ever earned. Plus, he’d still have earned the two hundred fifty million for the original job. He’d found Sullus, hadn’t he? It wasn’t his fault if Sullus was killed by this old man before the admiral could talk to him.
Besides, Keel had no intention of letting Admiral Devers talk to anyone much longer.
He looked to Ravi. The hologram shrugged.
In the end, greed won. No, not greed. Sound fiscal strategy. Keel was going to buy a luxury yacht. The kind that could sail on waves as easily as in space.
Keel returned his gaze to Rechs. “Okay. But I’m gonna hold you to all of this. And obviously I know how to find you, trap you, and kill you. But until then… partners. Agreed.”
“No,” said Rechs, and suddenly the hand cannon was pointing at Keel’s head. “Not partners. You work for me now, kid.”
24
The kid—Wraith—was good, Rechs thought. Better, maybe. If he made it out of this gunfight alive and got everyone back to the ships, then he was probably great. Or would be someday if he lived that long.
But that was yet to be seen.
But the new question was: why was some Repub admiral interested in Goth Sullus? A minor edge thug no one had heard of. And why was a minor edge thug pulling a big job on a sector defense capital? In broad daylight?
For Rechs, killing Goth Sullus was about Prisma—but he knew it was about more than just that now.
Hang out near the edge. Wait.
Maybe the waiting was over.
He pulled the heavy blaster from off his back and made his way forward under heavy fire, moving toward the citadel. He stalked and shot down legionnaires like some jungle predator. The kid with Wraith had given the leejes a dozen contradictory orders, and Rechs was moving in and among them like a shark smelling blood in the water.
He reached the grand colonnade, a series of Senate-worthy steps that led up into the center of local Republic power. Gra
nd and opulent Tyrasian marble. No expense was ever spared to keep up the facade of power the Repub needed to maintain control of a starving galaxy at constant war with itself.
As Rechs ran up the steps, he pulled a flashbang bolo from his utility belt and separated the attaching wire from each connected ball. Ignoring all the incoming blaster fire, he twirled the bolo overhead and lobbed it into the main entrance to the citadel.
A loud bang echoed off the marble caverns inside. If all went well, the flash had killed some dead and stunned the rest by optically scrambling their brains. Rechs raced into the entry hall, blasting at the survivors.
Four legionnaires poured into the entry hall at the far end, reinforcing the breach. Legion Comm had probably been restored by now, guessed Rechs, and these men were being called back from the ongoing battle with the Brotherhood on the floors above—called in to stop this new counteroffensive coming at them from below.
Rechs stitched three legionnaires with heavy blaster fire and butt-stroked the fourth as he came at him. The last guy tried to bring his N-4 up in a useless attempt to get off a gut shot, but Rechs kicked it out of his hand and smashed the leej in the bucket a second time for good measure. Incredibly, the leej’s bucket cracked. The guy went down.
“Don’t make ’em like they used to.”
Rechs slipped into the elevator, dragging one of the dead leejes with him. He pulled a micro-lock from a utility pouch and slammed it into the door controls.
“Override controls and lock doors,” he shouted at the device.
Using a multi-tool, he pried the protective plate off the leej’s update socket port, then ran some fiberwire from his helmet into the port. A moment later he was reading all transmissions to and from some idiot named Antullus to the rest of the platoon. He quickly got the gist of it: basically the point was getting everyone killed by trying to respond everywhere at once instead of using the principles of focus and mass, as every leej was taught according to the training Rechs had once mandated long ago. He felt bad for all the kids he was about to kill. They’d been led by an idiot. But that had been going on for years.
Whatever it takes to make sure you don’t feel bad about that, that other voice reminded him. About the kids you’re going to kill now. Don’t feel bad, Rechs.
Rechs hit the elevator button for the Defense Network Vault access. From the leej traffic he’d read, it looked like that was where the Brotherhood was focusing their effort.
Why was some local thug interested in anything the Defense Network had to offer?
You’re not here to find out why. You’re here to kill the man who killed Maydoon. For the girl. For Prisma. That’s all. The Republic is beyond saving. Caspo and Telos proved that.
The floors ticked by.
He heard Mara, Mother Ree now, tell him—no, remind him—that he was like some knight on an endless quest he couldn’t even remember receiving.
Almost there.
Which is it, Rechs? he asked himself.
The doors slid open.
Feel bad, or… play to win?
He was facing the backs of a leej squad engaged in a furious firefight with the Brotherhood far down the length of a corridor that led to the secure rooms of the Sector Defense Administration Building.
He shot the leejes in the back until the heavy blaster he was using got too hot.
One turned and aimed at Rechs. Rechs drew the hand cannon off his thigh quick as a hypersnake and put three slugs into the leej. The kid. Whoever he’d once been to someone.
The kid fell back in a heap, slug holes smoking in his shiny armor.
The Brotherhood killers had paused in their continuous fire to watch this old school Mark I armored bounty hunter drop the legionnaires they’d been trying to kill. Until he started coming for them.
He got his portable defense shield up just in time to reflect three blasts. Keeping it between him and the Brotherhood, he reached out around its ethereal red glow and fired back with the hand cannon. One guy went down clutching his guts and screaming bloody murder. Another’s head just disappeared in a sudden spray of red mist. More were flung back by the impacts of the hypersonic depleted-uranium slugs violently tearing through their bodies.
Blasters were one thing. Slug throwers were orders of magnitude more brutal.
The Brotherhood’s group leader was on his comm and ordering them to fall back by twos to the vault.
“We’re pulling out. Move! Move! Move!”
Rechs advanced, shooting from behind the energy disruptor shield. Thirty seconds later the barrier gave out, but it no longer mattered. Rechs was in and among them, firing point blank into their ceramic-weave armor with one hand and wielding his carbon-edged machete with the other. He shot one ugly Dantha in the face and slashed another killer across the throat when the guy came at him with a wicked vibroknife.
Two more tried to get off blaster shots, but Rechs dodged and threw his machete, sticking it in one shooter’s chest. Rechs unloaded the hand cannon on the other. Violence delivered up close and personal in a sudden staccato blare of violent death.
When both shooters were down, he retrieved his blade and advanced through the next layer of defense. He was using the hand cannon on full auto, putting as much gunfire between him and the targets ahead as possible. Ill-aimed blaster fire careened off the access paneling all around him, and smoke and haze obscured the debris-strewn hallway. The whine of blasters mixed with the brraaaap of the hand cannon.
Rex switched to IR to target better. He closed in amid the cordite haze and blaster discharge, then hacked and chopped at them as they coughed and tried to run.
One struck him in the left shoulder with a disruptor mace. Fire and pain erupted across his shoulder and down his arm—that whole side of his body felt like it had been filled by a swarm of deadly mummy-bees. The machete dropped from his fingers. His armor gave him a cardio infarction warning alarm. Several heartbeats had just gone missing from his telemetry.
Rechs smashed the guy in the face with the butt of his hand cannon, and shot him for good measure once he was down on the ground.
Then he screamed in pain. The stinging was intensifying into crawling napalm.
He stumbled forward, dragging the left side of his body with him. He fumbled for an anti-toxin injector with his numb hand and slammed it into his thigh. He had no idea whether it would do any good.
It did a little.
Just up ahead, the blast door to the network vault irised shut. Through its diminishing window he could see the gleaming white vault beyond, and within it, two large Brotherhood members and a man in a black cloak and hood. The man stood in front of Sector Defense Master System Planner, and was holding a data globe in his hand.
Rechs holstered his weapon and grabbed the door to the vault.
“Full increase!” he roared at the armor.
Hydraulic strength tripled and then redlined as Rechs tore the massive gleaming metal door apart. Suit power was now down to less than twenty percent.
As Rechs stepped through the opening, he was greeted by a volley of high-pitched blaster fire. One shot slammed into his forearm, but was deflected by the suit and struck the ceiling above. Even so, it was a real bell-ringer. He pulled his hand cannon and fired back at them.
The three members of the Brotherhood fell back, exiting toward the catacombs that led to the network nodes. It looked like the inside of some robot insect’s hive in there.
Via audio detection, Rechs heard legionnaire boots in the distance behind him. So be it. He moved forward, hand cannon out, and proceeded into the nodes. Two chambers down the length of the corridor he was greeted by crossfire from heavy blasters.
When he saw the holes seared into the walls of the ceramic honeycombed network, Rechs knew these weapons were overcharged enough to punch nice big holes in his armor. It was dangerous to fire blasters on that setting. Which meant they knew something about his armor. Knew it generally stood up to regular blaster fire. In other words, two men working for Goth
Sullus, whoever he was, knew about him. And knew he was coming for them.
“Warning!” a Network Defense System automated announcement declared. “Unauthorized system breach detected.”
Rechs circled around down another corridor tube and came upon one of the Brotherhood who’d had him pinned down in the crossfire. He shot the guy. He took another shot at the guy in position opposite this one, but that shot missed. He heard the guy falling back, cackling maniacally.
“We always knew you’d show, Rechs! Got a big surprise for you!”
Rechs dashed forward. Speed was of the essence now. That threat, a tease, a taunt, had been made to get him to check his rush. Or at least, that’s how it had seemed to Rechs. But even Rechs knew it was also some kind of invitation to follow.
They needed time to do what they were here to do.
But not forever.
Rechs crashed down the core access tube and burst into the main node power grid, ready to fire. Whirling yellow lights and hazard yellow girders warned him of the inherent danger in this room. But everyone was gone. All the terminals had been scrambled to erase whatever access had gone on here.
There was only one thing that mattered here. Rechs had been a general for the Repub long enough to figure that out—along with so much more than anyone would ever know. He knew exactly what the sector defense grids were really for. Defense information for large-scale conflicts. Automated defense plans, codes, and security access. War. Not heists, robberies or hijackings, but full-scale inter-galactic war.
That’s why Goth Sullus had wanted Maydoon’s data globe. That’s why he’d killed Prisma’s father. The man had some kind of super-secret access to all the levels, even the ones that were hidden.
But once again, why would some local thug looking to carve out a name in contraband on the galaxy’s edge be interested in the big picture stuff? Was Goth Sullus looking to cozy up to the MCR? To stand up to a real Repub response, one would need capital warships and an army the size of the Legion even if you had everything in the defense network. You’d still need to respond to the threat of total warfare. You’d need ships, war bots, fighters. You’d need another Legion just to fight the Legion.
