by Steve Perry
These men were obviously fit and alert for any signs of danger. Their eyes were hidden by polarized glasses, but her vision was enough to dimly see past the plastic.
One of the guards flicked a sharp glance at her, eyes only, a predator’s look, and she felt her claws start to reflexively extend. She quickly retracted them. In her culture, a hunting glance was a challenge, and had to be answered: You see me as prey? Behold my claws and reconsider.
The glancer would be the first of her targets if those guns lifted to point in their direction. Then the one to his left, who was larger and thus likely to be slower; then the one on the right, next to the youngest human. After that, they would have moved, and she would have to see how they had shifted position to choose the next target. She knew they were unaugmented, but she could smell the increased hormonal flux from here, and on the possibility they could read Vastalimi scent, she exuded contentment pheromones. Let them think she was no threat.
Always best to have an enemy underestimate you and be surprised, if need be.
She couldn’t see them, but she expected there were other guards at a remove, hundreds, maybe thousands of meters away, armed with long-range weapons.
Humans did love their guns.
Cutter Colonel, dressed in a uniform custom-made for such meetings, with ribbons and medals agleam on the chest, took the lead. As he approached the contingent, the eldest of the humans, a tall man with a thin gray beard and a blood-colored turban, stepped forward to greet him, palms pressed together in front of his torso. His silks were thin, bright, and draped to cover his more than ample girth, flowing in shifting shades of red and purple. This would be, she guessed, the Rajah for whom they’d be working
She could hear the greeting easily enough; most humans would not be able to do so at this distance.
Yes, the Rajah. And the younger man next to him?
Many among the Vastalimi didn’t bother to tell one human from another visually, and some of them offered that all humans not only looked the same, they stank the same. Kay considered it a useful skill to differentiate them by sight as well as smell, and she had devoted the time and effort necessary to learn both. It had been useful more than a few times. One did not need to ask Who goes there? in the night if one could recognize one’s own team by their odors.
Thus she was sure that the younger man was not a close relation, based on his dissimilarity of features.
She caught a name: Rama Jadak.
Ah. The husband-to-be? Or was it a common name here?
There was a transport parked not far away, a shaded awning from the canopy leading to it. This was a bus-sized vehicle, sufficient to contain them all; however, Cutter had arranged for other transports, and those smaller vehicles were parked past the largest one. Once aground on a planet that might be hostile, it was best to avoid giving a potential enemy a single and mayhaps easy target, and since they weren’t here to guard the Rajah, he was not their primary concern.
To avoid giving offense, none of the humans in her party stood armed, at least not visibly so. There would be serious weapons in their transports, vehicles manned by their own people; as soon as they got there, they would arm themselves better.
Even though her preference was for claw-to-claw, that wasn’t always the best option. She had known some on her homeworld, martial-arts masters, who’d thought themselves invincible; swaggerers who believed that no one could lay a blade or beam on them because they were so adept. And some were experts, walking murder.
Too, some of those masters had been killed by Vastalimi with less than a tenth of their skill but who brought better deathware to the fight. At ten meters, the sharpest claw or tooth was a poor tool against a gun firing a dozen flechettes a second. Only a fool thought otherwise.
Yes, one felt the need to test one’s self, to push her limits and see; however, there were times to fight claw-to-claw, and times to shoot an enemy from a distance, and it was a idiot who didn’t try to learn which was which. Pride in one’s skill was fine, as long as it did not blind one to reality.
The greeting ceremonies over—humans had many variations of this one, most of them a waste of time as far as Kay was concerned—they headed for the transports.
The world was hotter than she liked; double-coat fur was great for keeping cold out but also equally good at keeping the heat in, and while she could lower her blood pressure and trigger an autonomic cooling response in emergencies, that was not the case here. Uncomfortable was not an emergency. And she might as well get used to it since they might be on this planet for weeks.
As they neared the rented transports, Kay felt her nape fur bristle. She glanced around, didn’t see any obvious new threats—no fanatics waving long knives, no incoming vehicles heading for them, no signs of small aircraft focused in their direction. But there was something, and she had long ago learned to trust that atavistic danger signal.
Jo drifted toward her. Before she could speak, Kay said, “I feel it. Do you detect a source?”
“No. But there are twelve armed men over there by that roller, eight of whom are carrying projectile weapons.
“Yes.”
A human with a gun might be your friend, but he was still a human with a gun. If you didn’t know and trust him, you kept tabs on him. And even then, trusting most humans with or without guns was problematical. You only had to fail once badly, and you would be dead.
Vastalimi could, of course, lie, but no known race in the galaxy could begin to compete with humans in that arena. Humans would often lie unthinkingly, almost reflexively, about things large or small. And they even qualified the term with degrees: White lies. Fibs. Whoppers. Prevarications, lies of omission. It was fascinating how many ways they could dress up or dress down the notion of deliberate untruths.
The nearest guard was twenty-two meters from Kay, the farthest twenty-eight, with the Rajah, his potential son-in-law? and the other two between them.
The radiopathic button clicked in Kay’s ear as Sims sub-vocalized into the comtac unit: “Colonel, Kay confirms my impression.”
The com was set for short range and encoded, so if anybody chanced to hear it, they wouldn’t know what was being said.
“Copy,” the colonel said. “You heard the fems, people, whatever shooters you have hidden, loosen ‘em up, and not all at once. Watch the Rajah’s people. Anybody points killware in our direction, hose them. And since the Rajah is our client, best if we keep him alive until we get paid, too.”
There came a cricket chorus of acknowledgment clicks.
“Can’t see the Rajah or his mucky-mucks going into slaughter-spree,” Jo said to Kay. “Rich people seldom run amok; they hire somebody to do that for them. Likely it will be one of the guards or their driver.”
“Agreed.” Their transports were manned by CFI’s own people, and while it was not impossible that one of them could be compromised, it was less likely than the alternatives. They didn’t know the Rajah’s guards nor his driver.
Sims Captain triggered an aug. Kay felt the human’s temperature rise slightly, accompanied by a flush of her fair skin. Jo was in combat mode and would be able to move 39 percent faster with an 80 percent usable increase in her normal strength; additionally, her vision, hearing, and senses of touch would also be enhanced. She would be almost as fast and strong as Kay though her vision and hearing would still be somewhat less. And the human would burn much more energy much quicker.
“Let’s hear the arms report,” Cutter said. “Helm?”
“Port ceepee turret locked on the bus, Colonel. Say it, I’ll light it up.”
Cutter said, “So we don’t sweat the bus. I’ve got my flat-pack deuce.”
“Same here,” Jo said. “Plus the biozapper.”
The flat-pack pistol was gas-operated, small and flat enough to be slipped into a pocket, the magazine held twenty 2mm poisoned flechettes. It had an effective range of thirty meters. Sufficient for unarmored soft targets.
The augware bio-capacitor in Sims
would fire a single electrical bolt eight meters; however, it would take half an hour to recharge for another shot.
“T&T,” Kay said. Teeth and talons.
Kay listened as the others in their party rattled off their concealed weaponry:
“Pulse wand.” That from Dr. Wink.
“Willis four-point-four,” Gunny said. “Also a thermex mini and a Rilke knife.”
“Where the hell are you hiding all that?” Gramps said.
“Wouldn’t you like to know?”
A Willis 4.4mm pistol was only slightly smaller than a standard service sidearm. Its double-stack electric magazine held thirty rounds of explosive pellets and on full auto would chop a large human in half with five hits in a line. A thermex minigrenade would cook unprotected soft targets in a five-meter radius of the detonation. A sharp Rilke knife would pierce softweave and flex-ceramic armor with little effort.
Gunny Sayeed was well armed for somebody supposedly not in that mode. Of course, she always was well armed.
“All right,” Cutter said, “let’s stay on track for the vehicles—”
Kay sensed the guard’s intent to move. Before he had his carbine unslung, she sprang; by the time he had both hands on the stock, she was only eight meters away. As he lifted the weapon and began to bring it to bear on the Rajah, she was five meters, still increasing her speed.
Almost close enough to leap—
Jo had also moved; she was two meters back and two to Kay’s right, and in slow-vision-predator mode, Kay saw two more guards unshipping their weapons.
Were they intending to protect the Rajah? Simply copying their fellows? Or part of an assassination attempt?
The guards appeared focused on the Rajah and not each other, and as Kay leaped and snapped her claws out, she hoped Jo could see that the other two were part of the problem—
She hit the guard just as he triggered his weapon, knocking him and the firing carbine flying. Projectiles splashed off the plastcrete, sparking as they hit, but it did not appear any of them struck the Rajah—
Kay tore out the guard’s throat with her right hand and pushed him away with her right foot, already past him and arcing into a long forward roll—she was going too fast to stop—
She heard the second guard scream as Jo bowled into him, and became aware of the third guard’s head exploding into a spew of blood and bone and brains as she rolled up and half turned to face the rest of the Rajah’s party—
One of the guards swung his weapon in her direction—
“Tell your guards to stand down!” Cutter yelled. “It’s over!”
The Rajah yelled at the guards: “Do not shoot!”
She was already sidling to her right, putting the Rajah between herself and the guard tracking her—
The guard with the gun pointing toward her froze as he covered the Rajah. He jerked the muzzle away.
Not an assassin, then. Or one who thought it better not to try now.
The Rajah yelled again. “Do not shoot! Guns down!”
The guards lowered their weapons.
Still in a crouch and ready to move, Kay took in the scene.
Her target was down, already mostly bled out; Jo’s target lay on his back, his arm obviously broken. The third guard, missing the top half of his skull, was sprawled boneless, certainly dead.
Twenty meters away, Gunny Sayeed stood holding her pistol with two hands, muzzle pointing skyward, alert for more threats.
“Head shot,” Gramps said. “What a fucking show-off.”
Gunny grinned. “Those who can, do, old man.”
The colonel was wrong, though. It wasn’t quite over. The driver of the bus stepped out of the vehicle’s door with a short rifle and swung it up to point at the Rajah—
Jo, who was closest, pointed her right forefinger at him, and said, “Stop!”
She didn’t wait to see if the driver would obey. A crackling green bolt shot from her fingertip and struck him. He jittered, dropped his weapon, and fell, spasming and twitching as his nervous system burned out.
Sims shook her hand. “Ow. Ow! I keep forgetting how much that stings!” She stuck the tip of her finger into her mouth.
Now it was over. Except for what would no doubt be a major investigation into the Rajah’s guards, to see who was apt to cut loose at him again and who’d step in front of those guns to save him ...
~ * ~
SIX
The head of the Rajah’s Security Unit was a massive, swarthy man, two meters tall and maybe 130 kilos; he had a thick, black beard but a shaved head, and he looked as if he could chew nails and piss needles. His curved knife had a plain, well-worn grip-scales, and the sidearm he wore was a massive, gray-handled thing in a beat-up leather holster. No silks, he was in a blue flexsuit and traction boots.
Nothing ceremonial here; this was a man who used his weapons a lot and was geared to move in a hurry.
Wink wondered if his pulse wand would even slow the giant down if he decided to give him grief. Be interesting to find out...
The security man, introduced as Ganesh, stood at the head of a long, oval table made of wood with a beautiful, close-grained flame pattern in it, light against dark.
Behind him on the wall, a hologram flowered, and Ganesh nodded at the recording.
Cool air flowed over them, a welcome relief to the heat outside. Wink had never liked hard tropics. Give him a temperate world with mountains and a lot of liquid water, that was his kind of planet. Deserts and jungles? Leave those for lizards and apes.
There weren’t any other locals here except the Rajah’s prospective son-in-law, Rama, whose father, if Wink remembered his briefing, was the son of the rajah next door. Jadak? Something like that?
For their part, they numbered half a dozen: the colonel, Jo, Gramps, Gunny, Kay, and himself. All of them carried holstered sidearms now, and there were a pair of CFI troopers outside the conference-room door with assault rifles watching their backs, with two quads more at the transports.
The half-size holoproj showed a courtyard, viewed from maybe four meters above. The courtyard was full of colorful tropical plants, a small bubbling pool of water with orange-and-white hand-sized fish darting about in it, and a walk of what appeared to be dark cobblestones or a pretty good imitation of them.
After a few seconds, a woman appeared, walking from the right side of the frame toward the left. The woman wore a sari-style garment in what looked to be a pale blue silk, with matching slippers. A slight breeze molded the cloth to the front of her body. From the drape of the cloth, she was obviously female, a bit thin, but curvy. Her hair was dark, parted in the middle, and worn in a long braid that hung midway down her back, and she carried a cage of bamboo, containing a scarlet bird the size of a small parrot, but with a straw-yellow-colored, toucanlike bill.
“The Rajah’s daughter, Indira,” Ganesh said. His voice was high, girlish, and Wink had trouble reconciling that soprano with the man’s appearance. There was something spicy on his breath, a pleasant, mintlike odor.
As they watched the recording, a figure approached the woman from directly underneath the security cam. He was taller than she was by a head, wearing a gray coverall with a hood, and she turned to face him as he drew nearer. Only his back was visible.
There was no audio, but the woman said something.
“She asks, ‘Who are you?’” Ganesh said.
Indira frowned.
The man—perhaps a large woman?—pulled a small pistol from a coverall pocket. The figure wore thin gloves.
Indira tried to run, but the gunner fired before she could take even one step. She dropped the bird’s cage, clutched at her belly, and doubled over—but stayed on her feet, swaying.
The cage hit the cobblestones and broke apart.
The bird freed itself from the wreck and took to the air. Three meters high, four, level with the camera—
The shooter thrust the gun at the bird and fired again.
The bird dropped like a brick. Hit the
cobblestones, bounced once, lay still.
Gunny said, “That’s a good shot with a stubby handgun, to hit a bird in flight point shooting. He’s some kind of pro.”
The shooter pocketed the weapon, caught the wobbly woman, and hoisted her over his shoulder in a rescue worker’s carry.
A man. He moved like a man, Wink thought.
The kidnapper hurried away, in the direction the woman had been heading. He disappeared.
Ganesh waved one hand. The projection shut off.
Jo said, “Was the bird some kind of messenger? Apt to bring help?”
“No,” Rama said. “It was a warbler, trained to sing traditional songs. My gift to her.”
