by Steve Perry
“Yeah.”
“Where?”
“On the myostim adjunct.”
Wink nodded. That’s why he hadn’t spotted it. Kid had been hiding it from the Army docs, some of whom might have noticed but most of whom wouldn’t have if they’d even bothered to look. He’d have found it eventually. That wasn’t the first place he’d have looked.
“Lie down.”
The kid did, and Wink went to adjust the D&T. The aug had been damaged from the impact with the tree. It was easy enough to fix once you knew what the problem was, and if he was in a good mood, Wink could repair it so it was better than before, just a matter of inserting the right virus and nanosires into the right gene and spinning it. If he was in a bad mood, he could shut it down, or even reverse it. Fix it so Fletcher couldn’t get it up with a crane and a roomful of pornoproj stars paid only if they got him off...
That would be cruel, and he wouldn’t do that. The troops needed to blow off steam, sex was as good a way as any, and better than a lot of other options. As he well knew personally.
Wink grinned. Formentara would still get a kick out of this story. It was hir kind of thing. Zhe knew way more about cybernetic biologicals than he did. Maybe more than anybody did. If Wink wanted wetware of any kind, Formentara was who he’d want installing and tweaking it.
The D&T hummed away, and Wink stood there watching. He was bored. He was usually bored. He needed to do something active. Preferably with some risk to life or limb. Sex was way safer, mostly. Unless you decided you wanted to do it with the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time, just to juice it up. Once, he had picked up a miner’s woman in a downlow pub near the big iridium mine on Far Bundaloh. Taken her into a stall in the public toilet and had noisy intercourse there. The miners were hard-asses and they would have casually killed him for all kinds of reasons just because they felt like it, but that one, screwing one of their fems? That would have put him high up the to-do list.
It had given the activity a certain spice ...
~ * ~
THREE
In the comshack, Jo Sims did a quick, personal radiopathic scan—one of her most useful augs, what with the subcell neuron implants, she had all kinds of available frequencies— and admitted the ophthalmic flit from Formentara: Time for a tune-up, scrolled across her field of vision. And if that’s what Formentara said, Jo was good with that.
Formentara was a mahu, a human androgyne whose gender wasn’t readily apparent at first glance. Nor on second, third, nor however many glances. Nobody in the unit claimed to know whether Formentara was a “he,” a “she,” or “other,” but Jo didn’t care. Zhe was the best hands-on cybernetist around, the kind of diagnostician who could run hir fingers over your body and intuit what was wrong with your onboard systems, then fix them while zhe ate a sandwich and read a novel. Hir expertise was beyond science and well into art.
Why zhe wasn’t under contract to some giant university or corporate cybernetics unit was a mystery—zhe could make five times what CFI paid anywhere in the civilized galaxy, no questions asked.
Jo had more implants than anybody she knew who wasn’t dead. They gave her power and ability beyond most humans’, but, she had been told going in, at a cost: They would kill her eventually, and sooner rather than later.
She had made her choices, for her own reasons, and she was willing to live—and die—with those. She had never expected to see seventy or eighty standard years—until she met Formentara.
“Camel cark!” Formentara had said. “If systems are balanced and maintained right? If you repair wear-and-tear biodamage and gross injuries properly? No reason you can’t live out a normal span, you don’t burn the lamps overtime.”
“How many technomedics can do that?” Jo had asked. “Keep systems that perfectly balanced?”
Formentara grinned. “Counting myself? Two. Maybe three.”
Jo laughed. “I expect they have a long waiting list.”
Zhe shrugged. “If they spouted off and told people they can do it, sure.”
“You just told me.”
“And that’s the deal: I’ll keep you running, but you keep it to yourself.”
Jo didn’t take long to answer: “I’m good with that.”
Zhe grinned. “I figured.”
Jo shook the fugue and got back to the project at hand. A kidnapping, and an op she’d be running. Rags liked field-work, but his time was better spent running big strategy, not little tacticals. He was the colonel and she the captain, but he knew he was too valuable to risk in too many dustups, so his forays into the field were limited. Now and then, he had to get out and shoot something, but she was careful to keep those to scrapes where the risk was minimal. He didn’t like it, but he did it. He’d sit back at the mobile HQ and drum his fingers, unless the shit really hit the fan.
Or he got really bored.
At least, she’d get a chance to get out of this fucking form-chair and back into action where she belonged. A chance to stretch.
Better get the b.g. stuff collected so she could do the briefing. In extraction work, time was the biggest enemy. If the kidnapped victim wasn’t killed immediately, there was usually a period when they might be recovered alive. But after a few weeks, the longer the elapsed time, the fewer chances of a live recovery.
~ * ~
FOUR
On the GS Frag, a Class III Leapship that could haul eighty people and all their gear in relative comfort eighty light-years at a Leap, and twice that many people in a pinch, Jo Sims stood at the head of the conference room table. Seated around the table were Gunny, Gramps, Doc, Formentara, and Kluthfem. Colonel Cutter leaned against the carbon-fiber inner wall near the room’s primary hatch.
“All right, folks, listen up. We are on our way to Ananda, half of a binary system with Om, planets circling a class G2V star, FHND 31-Epsilon—that’s Flamsteed-Halley New Designation for those of you not planning a second career as an astronomer.
“Informally, the system is called Lance. Mid-rim, Orion Arm, turn left at the Dagger Nebula and straight on ‘til morning.
“Ananda is an E-type world in the ninety-eighth percentile for atmosphere and gravity, a little more oxy, a little less nitrogen. Your circulating antibacterials and antivirals have been updated to deal with the local bugs.
“Twenty-two-hour days, 369-day years, climate range Within Terran Standard Limits, but shading more into tropical, save toward the poles.
“Activate your sunblocks and drink a lot of replenishment fluid.
“There are no indigenous intelligent species. Eight-tenths of the place consists of saline seas, landmasses clustered mostly around the equator, with small-continent-sized islands farther north or south.
“The usual—trees, mountains, lakes, plains, like that. Lots of trees where we are going, so expect to see a lot of wood construction.
“Population nine hundred million, originally settled by wealthy immigrants from TerraIndia, the local businesses are chiefly agro- and aquacultural, mining, and assorted light industry. Largely self-sufficient, their unique exports are medical-grade Rhodopsin, a visual-purple substance extracted from a local fish, used in military vessel viral-molecular computer-memory systems, and Heavenspice.”
“Ooh,” Gunny said, “Heavenspice. Doubles the cost of a good meal for one sprinkle of that. Worth it, though.”
“Good meal?” Gramps said. “When’s the last time you ate anything other than field rats or vat-grown mysteryburger burned to a crisp? Dusting those with Heavenspice would be a crime against nature.”
“You’d know all about crimes against nature, wouldn’t you, old man?” Gunny said. She smiled.
Jo ignored them. “The reason we got this job is because TotalMart has a couple of big stores on the world, plus being an exporter. They work long-term contracts with both the Rhodopsin fish processors and the Heavenspice Growers Union, and they want to keep the Rajah happy, so they recommended us. We need to move somewhat cautiously, so as not to�
�”
She stopped. “Am I boring you, Doctor?”
Wink looked at Jo. He faked a big yawn.
“Truth, fem? I confess, I am pretty much somnambulant.”
She lit her Stress Analyzer aug, just because she could. Always useful for PsyOps to know when somebody was lying. She scanned the heads-up display—another direct send to her optic nerves.
Heartbeat. Respiration. Blood pressure. Myotonus. Perspiration. Conductivity. Eye movement...
Given his stats, the yawn wasn’t fake. He was pretty much relaxed enough to be on the edge of nodding off.
The fucker—
“And that’s different than usual how, Doc?” Gramps said. “You the only man I ever knew could go to sleep sucking a bulb of hot soup while falling down a flight of stairs.”
There was a soft whicker from Kay. They didn’t laugh loud, the Vastalimi, but they did laugh a lot, and they seemed to understand human humor just fine, even if they didn’t always agree with it. A typical Vastalimi joke would feature a punch line in which half a dozen people might be dismembered in a particularly hideous fashion, with the resulting gore put to some use that would make humans go pale and excuse themselves from the room while the Vastalimi whickered themselves silly laughing.
And he slipped in the blood and smashed his nose against the wall, then fell and cracked his skull, and his sister said, “That will teach you!”
Whicker, whicker, whicker...
Different species, different ideas of what was funny.
Next to Kay, Formentara. Jo thought hir expression was slightly amused, but with hir, it was, like most everything else about Formentara, hard to tell.
Cutter did like disparate characters on his teams as long as they were competent.
She shook her head. Yes, there probably wasn’t any real need to learn about stellar classes and where the planet stood in relation to the galaxy, but you never knew what might be useful, so she was thorough in her coverage of new operations. Better to have it and not need it than the other way around.
Nobody ever bitched about having too much ammo in a shoot-out.
“If I might continue?”
Wink offered a theatrical shrug and a shit-eating grin. Don’t mind me.
“Our client is named Ramal, he’s the Rajah of New Mumbai. His daughter, Indira, has apparently been kidnapped by a person or persons undetermined. Our mission is get her back, preferably alive. Which means we’ll have to figure out who took her first.”
“Ransom demand?” That from Gunny.
“Not thus far. The political situation is mostly fine, but at a continental level is apparently less than copacetic. There are several... rajahnates? rajahdoms? that run most of what goes on on-planet. They don’t all get along. Plus the usual malcontent insurgents, who would seem to be the obvious suspects.
“Indira is engaged to be wed in the next month, they are big on single-partner, different-sex coupling locally, a major celebration attached, and this has put a crimp in those plans.”
“We sure she didn’t just run off?” Gunny asked. “No ransom demand, how do we know she was kidnapped? Some of these old-style societies still go in for arranged marriages and such. Maybe she didn’t want to connect with her mate-to-be?”
“That has to be considered,” Jo said. “We haven’t seen all their data yet.”
Kluthfem made a sharp tongue-click sound.
“Kay? Something?”
The Vastalimi said, “If the female’s departure was voluntary, are we obligated to return her if we locate her?”
“No. She is an adult by local and GU standards. If she left on her own and we find her, we report that to our client. Up to them to work that out.”
Kay chirred. There came a pleasant, faint musky odor, a pheromone that Vastalimi females sometimes emitted when they were pleased.
They had had some interesting moral codes, the Vastalimi. Apparently on Kay’s homeworld, females had been held more or less in thrall until the last hundred years or so. The females finally got tired of it. There had been a short and fairly bloodless revolution. Females refused en masse to have sex with the males. Any male who attempted rape was hunted down by cadres of females and castrated.
At some point, the males saw the light. Which probably made them a little smarter than human males, she figured, who still tended to think of themselves as God’s gift to women...
The female Vastalimi were still touchy about such things. If Indira had left on her own, and somebody wanted to make her come back, Kay wouldn’t have any part of that. Or maybe she’d get in somebody’s way, a not-inconsiderable obstacle. It was good to have a Vastalimi as your friend, bad to have one as an enemy.
Jo glanced at Cutter. “Colonel?”
Rags said, “Jo has pretty much covered it, but my contact inside TotalMart has let me know that local biz folk tend to be insular and suspicious of outsiders. Oh—and the GU Army’s Ex-Tee-J-Corps has a base in New Mumbai, just outside the capital city.”
There came a chorus of groans at that. XTJC fielded some good officers and troops, but in Jo’s experience, they also always had more than their share of total assholes. Most GU military didn’t have any use for mercenary cadres, but Jaycore really didn’t like them. She’d never met anybody in any of those units who called the Cutters anything other than “cutthroats.”
A couple of times, she had come close to pulling a blade, and offering, “You mean like this?”
“You know the drill, people. Live with it,” Rags said. “With any good luck, we’ll be in and out of there in a hurry, and spending our bonuses during a nice thirty-day liberty.”
Jo nodded at this, but the truth was, she wasn’t much on liberty. Too much trouble she could get into in the civilian world without even trying.
She picked it up: “Rest of it is in your downlinks, read over it, we’ll hit n-vac at 0800 ST and arrive in the vicinity in seventy-two hours. Back to full gee once we finish the Leap, so better hit the myostim. If you are wheezing and dragging two minutes after we exit the ship, you can stay here and collect base pay while the rest of us divvy up your bonus.”
Gunny laughed. “You hear that, Gramps? I’m gonna be spending your bonus NDs on my spa vacation in Bali.”
“Sheeit, Chocolatte, I’ll give you a two-minute head start in a four-minute race and still run your skinny brown butt into the ground.”
“What, you went and got jet augs installed in your ass?
“Come by my cabin, I’ll show you what I got augmented.”
“You wish.”
“Nah, it’s your loss.”
Jo shook her head. Gramps was the oldest guy in the room, but he was only fifty-one SYs, beating Rags by six months. Still, that made him fifteen or so years older than Gunny, and eighteen older than Jo. They liked to razz him about being an old fart, but truth was, he was in pretty good shape for a man his age. And given the back-and-forth with Gunny, Jo wouldn’t be at all surprised to see them wind up in the sleepsack together. Military foreplay was often combative. Gunny could shoot the nuts off a minifly at five meters, and Gramps could have them weighed, measured, and sold for a profit before the fly’s nads hit the ground. She’d seen stranger pairings.
“That’s it, we’re done. Try to stay out of trouble.”
~ * ~
FIVE
Kluthfem sniffed the alien air at the spaceport as she stepped into the hard sunshine from the ship’s dinghy, seeking the scents of predators and prey. Mostly what she got were the stinks of lube and fuel and hot plastcrete, and the body odors of the humans waiting there. With humans, you sometimes got prey, sometimes predator, and sometimes both from the same individual mixed together. Ever fascinating, that identity shift. Even dying Vastalimi never smelled like prey.
They were on the outskirts of the largest city in the country, also named “Ramal,” a seaport on the west coast. There was a slight tang of ocean in the atmosphere. There was also a faint hint of Rel, the amphibious aliens sometimes seen from
Out the Arm, but she couldn’t spot Rel among the humans standing in the heat of the day, nor any on the crews bustling about the port’s parked vessels. Interesting. She made a mental note to follow that up: Prey could be useful at times.
There were a dozen humans waiting, all males, under the shade of a portable canopy. She cataloged the twelve: four dignitaries, armed with what appeared to be gem-encrusted, forearm-length, slightly curved, ceremonial knives in gilded sheathes.
Eight guards, each bearing slung carbines and sidearms. They also had sheathed knives, but in plain scabbards, sans decorative stones on the handles. Working blades.
