by Steve Perry
Kay would wear armor, old-fashioned Dragonskin sheath or ultralight flexifoam-ceramic, if they made her, but since the suit’s sensors were only marginally better than her own senses, she didn’t see the point in slowing herself down with a suit, and her argument was simple: If she could dodge faster than somebody targeting her, was that not better than depending on the suit to stop the missile?
It was hard to argue with that, especially given the Vastalimi record in pretty much any kind of combatsit when compared to humans. If it ain’t broke, don’t break it.
“All right. Just like the scenario we ran, by the numbers. Let’s move out.”
Everybody nodded. They all looked ready; even Singh, who was obviously nervous. Jo glanced at Gunny, who gave her an almost imperceptible nod. Yeah, I got him.
They moved out.
~ * ~
THIRTEEN
The Rajah was polite. He made small talk while the servants brought tea and some kind of nut-cluster snack that was quite tasty. But Cutter had been in enough meetings with clients and higher-ups to know there was a point and that he would get to it sooner or later.
“These are good,” he said. He nodded at the dish of nutty things. The dish looked as if it had been carved from artificial emerald by somebody with great artistic skills.
“I shall tell my chef you enjoyed them, she will be pleased.”
There was a pause. Then: “I am given to understand that members of your group have ... gone into the field.”
Yep, probably halfway to their objective by now. He said, “I am flattered that you noticed, sir.”
Both men grinned at what was said and left unsaid:
Spying on us?
To be certain.
The Rajah shrugged. “One picks up bits and pieces of this and that.”
He was waiting for Cutter to be more forthcoming, and since he was the client, it wasn’t politic to tell him to go piss up a tree. But Cutter had also learned a long time ago not to tell anybody who didn’t have a need to know anything that might come back to bite him on the ass. It only took once to drive that lesson home.
“We are following leads.”
“One of which would be in the vicinity of our border with Pahal and Balaji, in the foothills of the Rudras?”
Cutter grinned. Of course he’d know that much; they had borrowed one of his soldiers for a guide, and the Rajah would know who, and he’d have to be slow if he couldn’t figure out why. He wasn’t slow. Cutter would bet last year’s income against a bent hard curry noodle that the Rajah’s people had seen the hopper with the team when it took off and knew how many passengers it carried. They wouldn’t be able to track it, not with the stealth gear working. Might have had eyes on it until the pilot went into her evasives, after which their trackers would have had to be magicians to stay with it.
And the scout? Cutter would also bet big that he’d been told to keep track of things and to be ready to talk about it if the Rajah asked. But that would be later.
“It’s a promising lead, sir, but I didn’t want to be precipitous. Strategic and tactical information is best kept close to the chest. It is hard to let something accidentally slip if a man has no knowledge of it.”
The Rajah sipped his tea. “I understand. But you feel that this is a promising lead.”
“There are a lot of promises in the recycle bins of history, sir. There seems to be little point in waving them around unless they deliver.”
The Rajah nodded. He put his teacup down and looked directly at Cutter. “She is my daughter, Colonel. You would not be here if I was not greatly concerned for her safety.”
“I understand, sir. And you would not have hired us if we didn’t have a reputation for doing everything possible to address your concerns properly.”
The Rajah sighed. Yes. He knew that Cutter wasn’t going to tell him the details. Perhaps the walls here had ears that belonged to somebody not as concerned with the missing girl’s safety. There was no benefit in risking that. The Rajah was canny enough to know that even if he didn’t like it.
“We will keep you informed of any significant progress, sir.”
“Thank you, Colonel.”
~ * ~
On his way back to his compound, Cutter got a call. He grinned at the caller’s ID.
“Cutter here.”
“Colonel, this is Colonel Hatachi.”
“Good evening to you, sir.”
“Not really. You have any idea how much your little stunt cost me in man- and machine-hours?”
Cutter grinned. He was good with numbers. He could probably come up with a pretty decent estimate. And he could have pretended he didn’t know what Hatachi was talking about, but that would have been insulting, and there was no need for that.
“Sorry, sir, but our job wasn’t being made any easier with your people standing so close. You stick your nose up somebody’s butt, you might not like what you smell.”
Hatachi chuckled. “Point taken, Colonel. My sergeant wants to line you all up and shoot you, but he got suckered, so he has to live with it. But be advised, we won’t be so easy to gully again.”
“Understood, sir. I appreciate your position and only ask that you try to appreciate ours.”
“As long as you don’t make too much noise or burn anything down, we’ll stand back a ways. But if you step crooked, we will come down on you like a ton of rock.”
“I wouldn’t expect anything else, Colonel.”
“Good evening.”
“And to you.”
~ * ~
“Stand by,” Jo subvocalized.
They had spread out and arrived at a small rise in the vicinity of the lodge, and to outward appearance, there was nothing to indicate any problems.
With the lights from the main building damping the spookeyes, Jo couldn’t see the others though she knew where they were supposed to be.
The lodge was constructed of logs stripped of bark, laser-planed to a consistent size, and trimmed and finished with some kind of wood preserver. Large enough to house thirty people in private rooms, the interior belied the exterior—the appliances, communications, and comforts were as modern as any to be found in the planet’s cities. There were half a dozen fireplaces, but they were for show; the heating and cooling plants were state-of-the-art. There were lights that could be made to flicker and look like candles, but they ran off solar batteries. It was fake rustic, animal heads mounted on the walls, designed to offer the illusion of a bygone time, to make visitors think they were roughing it.
The team had memorized the floor plans, seen the computer sims, knew the layout.
There were enough exterior lights to show the trimmed lawn surrounding the lodge. There were two guards patrolling the lawn, men with carbines. They weren’t in any kind of uniform but dressed for the weather, which was chilly, given the altitude. The guards ambled back and forth, one to the north, the other to the south, staying close to the building. Neither moved like a man expecting trouble.
“Let’s hear it,” Jo said.
Her suit’s com clicked.
“Ah got two guards with slung eight-millimeter Centuros crushing crickets. Nothin’ else.”
“Ditto. My suit’s heads-up says the yard is clear except for those two,” Wink said.
Singh said, “I confirm that.”
“Kay?”
There was a short pause, a couple of seconds. “Something is not right,” she said.
Jo extended her senses to the limits of her augmentation, seeking a sight or sound or smell or something on the electromagnetic spectrum that offered any danger.
Nothing.
“Got a specific, Kay?”
“No.”
“Stand by.”
Between the suit’s sensors and her implants, Jo was about as sharp as a human could get. She made it eight warm bodies inside the lodge, and the placement of those, when she called up the simview, had one of them in a small, windowless utility room, with another in the hallway outside
that room’s door. The rest were in various places fanned away from those two.
It seemed pretty obvious to Jo what the situation was: Indira was locked in the utility room, a guard posted on the door. The rest only mattered if they got in the way.
The plan was flexible, but simple: They would go in via the least congested entrance. She and Gunny and Kay would take out the opposition while Wink fetched the girl. Singh would stay outside and cover their backs. Assuming the girl was fit or could be made so, Wink would bring her out, and they’d haul ass. Once they were back in the woods, they’d call Gramps and arrange the pickup point. With luck running their way, they’d be back at the Rajah’s by dawn.
But Jo had learned that Kay was sometimes more sensitive than the suit and her augs put together, so she hesitated. Did another scan and still came up dry.
She had to make a choice.
“We’re a go,” Jo said. “But stay edgy. Gunny?”
“Lined up.”
“On my ‘now.’”
Jo glanced at her carbine, to make sure the selector was on silent. The suppressed mode was pretty quiet, but it did cut down on the velocity of the bullet. The computer sights supposedly took that into account, but it was 150 meters to her target, and she needed a cold-bore head shot, so she liked to calculate that kind of trajectory herself to be sure it matched.
She lined the virtual scope up on the guard to the north side of the lodge. The scope’s optics were good enough to let her see in darkness, which was where she wanted to take the shot, but the transition from light to shadow was tricky. The scope’s adjustment for that took a quarter second, and she needed to allow for that, plus the timing with Gunny.
Range: 148 meters. Wind velocity: two klicks per hour from the south-southwest. Suppressed velocity: 812 meters per second. Local gravity, Coriolis effect, humidity ...
The guard was about to walk past the comer of the building, and there was a post that partially blocked the outside spotlight, just there. Her aug gave her the count and she spoke it aloud: “In three ... two ... one—now.”
Jo pressed the trigger.
The scope gave her the image of the guard’s head jerking and spraying fluid as he collapsed, dead before he hit the lawn.
“Down,” she and Gunny said simultaneously.
“Crank up your bollixers. Southwest entrance, go!”
Jo came up and ran. Their suit’s bollixers put out pulses that should confuse, for a short while, all but the best military-grade motion detectors, heat-sig sensors, and pradar pulses. Not for long, but enough so somebody sitting on a scope would frown and wonder what she was seeing, which should be enough time to get inside. After that, it didn’t matter, the party would be on.
Jo came up and sprinted, carbine held ready to fire if necessary, but there weren’t any targets popping up.
Kay reached the door first, and had the old-style mechanical lock open before Gunny arrived, a hair ahead of Jo. She heard Wink coming up behind her, double-checked with a quick glance. The suit, good as it was, sometimes had trouble on the ID circuit when the bollixers lit—
Then they were inside. Jo killed her bollixers, looked at the heads-up for targets, and saw the muzzle flashes and heard the shots incoming almost instantly.
So much for surprise—
Kay said, “Wait—”
A round blew past Jo, missing by centimeters—
Her suit flashed a red warning sig: AP—!
Shit—!
She spotted a man aiming a J&S Rail Rifle at her and hit him with a triplet from her own carbine, two center of mass, one to the head. He went down—
In the heat of it, with her augs and the suit spewing info at her, Jo knew one thing:
It was a trap!
“Wink!”
“Not her,” his voice came through the com, as if he was offering an opinion on the weather, no excitement at all. “It’s a guy with a gun—hold on—ow—motherfucker!”
“Disengage!” Jo said. “Out, out, out, right fucking now!”
Kay bounded past, paused a half second to shoot somebody Jo saw peripherally, and was gone. Kay had known a hair before the first round went off—
Jo was followed by the Vastalimi—
Gunny was at the door, firing past Jo at targets behind her—
AP bullets smacked into the thick log walls next to Gunny and punched through thirty centimeters of wood and into the night. Those would hole their suits.
They knew we were coming—
“Evasive action, rendezvous point Alpha,” Jo said. “Go!”
The sound of an airborne troop transport rumbled over her. She felt the repeller charge make her hair stand up.
Jo glanced up to see rounds spangle and spark off the transport’s hull, every tenth one a tracer.
Singh, in the bushes—
“Move, Singh!”
An antipersonnel rocket lanced down from the carrier at the source of the rifle fire—
“Singh!”
“I’m clear,” he said. “Hold on—”
There was a small whump! to her left, and she saw the IR sig of a rifle grenade as Singh fired his launcher. It went off level with, but to the port side of, the transport, and was close enough to cloud the pilot’s armored window with shrapnel.
The carrier sheared off to avoid taking more fire but dropped fast.
Even as she ran, Jo saw the transport land and troops start pouring out.
“We got company, people, get gone!”
She cranked it up, moving much faster than an unaugmented human, the suit notwithstanding.
Fuck—!
~ * ~
Kay would have preferred to stop and use her claws on the human who stepped out to block her intended path; her rage was hot, but the transport had alighted and there were thirty more heavily armed troops on the ground, and she couldn’t afford the time. She shot the carbine, no sights, indexed the angle—
The bullet went through the man’s eye and exited the back of his skull.
Her way was clear. The rendezvous was a kilometer into the forest, off the approach line they had taken coming in. She didn’t wear a suit, but she could sense the others of her team. So far, they were all still alive and moving.
It had been a gull. The kidnapped female had not been in the building. She hadn’t been able to tell for sure until she was inside, and by then, the attack had begun. They were lucky none of them had been killed.
She was going to speak to a certain Rel about this—
~ * ~
Wink ran, feeling as alive as he ever had. A firelight. Unexpected, dangerous, they might still die, but so far, they had survived.
He had a small problem: One of the armor-piercing rounds had skewered his suit. It hadn’t done any real damage—it had hit just under his left arm, halfway down the lat, punched through the muscle, and exited the suit’s back. Kiting gave you good lats. The suit’s rudimentary medcomp stiffened a patch over the wound, a memory-foam pad that applied enough pressure to mostly stop the bleeding. The suit asked him if he wanted a local or a systemic painkiller, and he opted for neither—better to feel the injury and avoid doing more harm to it than to deaden it and risk fucking it up more. He’d hurt himself worse and lived with it, he could live with this.
Unless, of course, he got killed heading for Alpha point.
Getting shot was his own fault. He had expected to find the girl after he iced the “guard” and opened the door to the storage room. Instead, there had been a shooter who got a round off before Wink took him down.
He didn’t enjoy that part of it particularly, the shooting, but that was what you had to live with if you chose to carry a gun. Fucker shot him? Served him right.
He really didn’t like the getting-shot part—
~ * ~
Gunny knew a clusterfuck when she saw one, and this had been that. Yeah, she’d gone three for three inside the lodge, but when that fucking transport landed, there was no way they were gonna beat thirty-some sol
diers, and that is sure as shit what they were—combat troops, not some raggedy-ass bandits who didn’t know their asses from holes in the ground. They weren’t in any kind of uniform she recognized, but they were moving right, they were somebody’s army, and that put a new spin on this whole affair.
