by Steve Perry
“Yes, sir.”
The Rajah waved away a server come to refresh his tea. “What you are really asking here about who benefits from this potential war is whether my son-in-law-to-be would benefit from it, isn’t it?”
It was, but his protestations about his daughter aside, Cutter was leery of saying so out loud. He’d never been that much of a diplomat, but he had learned enough along the way to know if you didn’t watch your ass, there were ways of losing it other than having it shot off.
He let that one lie.
The Rajah did, too. Finally, he said, “What would you have me do, Colonel?”
“Tell Rama that before you can commit your troops to an invasion, you need proof that your daughter is being held by the Balaji.”
The Rajah nodded. “I had already considered such a condition. Yes. I will do that. And if the proof is provided?”
“It will give us more information we can use. Maybe in time to prevent a war.”
~ * ~
TWENTY-TWO
At the afternoon intel meeting, the group presented their new information.
The weather had turned stormy. The lightning arresters were getting a workout, and the rain came down amidst loud thunderclaps and hard winds. They were snug enough inside, but if you had to leave shelter, you’d be soaked before you got ten meters.
Tropical worlds tended to provide some fierce downpours.
Not much had changed, insofar as the substance of their knowledge.
Gunny allowed that Rama was not known for his patience, nor his kind nature, but outside of rumors, there was little to indicate he was particularly despotic. No dungeons full of political or personal enemies, though there were some of both who had apparently disappeared mysteriously.
Wink allowed that local doctors did not seem to have any indications that other Rel were being augmented.
Formentara’s search along those lines had thus far been fruitless.
Gramps had found that money was being shifted in the city. The rumors of impending war had caused military-armament stocks to rise, along with emergency supplies. Fuel costs had also begun centimetering up. Local gun stores were having runs on ammunition.
Kay was out in the rain somewhere, seeking something.
Cutter told them about the Rajah, they batted that around for a couple minutes, then he officially closed the meeting. Nobody was in a hurry to leave. There was little they could do outside that they couldn’t do under a roof, and they all had slogged through enough mud and bad weather so they didn’t need more practice.
Gramps had the thousand-meter stare, and Gunny roused him from it: “Hey, fossil-man, your brain short out?”
He looked at her. “Not yet, Chocolatte. Just thinking about another rainy day, long ago and far away, when I was young.”
“They had rain when you were young?”
Deadpan, he said, “My uncle invented it. I was also remembering that story you told the kid after we got back, about your first kill.”
She looked at him. “How could know about that? You weren’t around when Singh and me were talkin’.”
“The walls have eyes and ears, remember?”
She shook her head. “That’s right, Ah forgot, you ain’t got nothing better to do with what little time you have left than run the surveillance gear to spy on folks.”
“Rust never sleeps.”
“Your uncle invent rust, too?”
“Nah, my aunt did that.”
The sound of the rain sheeting against the roof was loud.
“So what about Gunny’s story?” Wink asked. “Why were you remembering it?”
Gramps shrugged. “Reminded me that I have that story, too.”
Gunny said, “Rainin’ pretty good out there. I don’t have anyplace I need to be for a while. Ah don’t mind listenin’ to an old man ramble.”
Gramps nodded.
~ * ~
“Before the Army figured out I was a better desk-commando-photon-pusher than a field soldier, I did my first tour as a cricket-crusher. I was stationed at Fort Kharanji, whose crappy climate was a lot like New Mumbai’s—hot, except when it was wet.
“One evening, there came a torrential rainstorm, fifteen centimeters in a couple hours, and the transmitter-generator that fed the fence juice somehow overloaded a circuit and shorted the wire out, so I was on fence patrol. Cheaper to send a pair of boots out into the storm than to install sufficient backup.
“It was still raining, getting dark, and the ops helmet I wore was old and crappy, the motion sensors, spook-eyes, and Doppler were all going in and out every time the lightning crackled, the com mostly static, so it was slog through the puddles and shine a flashlight, looking for trouble.
“Not that we expected trouble. The base was in the middle of a forest in the middle of nowhere, and we’d never had any problems from the locals, so I wasn’t looking to catch anything but more rain.
“Half an hour before my relief was due, I was in the northwest comer of the base. The trees had been trimmed back a few meters short of the wire, but the post-mounted lights were out, and it was dark, the downpour keeping the camp glow pretty dim.
“My com crackled, and I thought I heard somebody, but I couldn’t make out the words, and when I toggled a repeat-request, I got nothing—it didn’t seem to be working from my end at all.
“Then I saw a darker blob in the darkness right at the fence, and it was moving.
“I did just like I’d been taught in basic: brought my weapon from sling-ready to off-hand, and hollered out, ‘Who goes there? Identify yourself!’
“For which trouble I got three sidearm rounds fired in my direction.
“My weapon was an RK-32 carbine, and I indexed the pistol flashes and unloaded a magazine at the shooter.”
Gunny said, “RK-32? What, is that a flintlock?”
“Yeah. A thirty-round magazine flintlock,” Gramps said. He smiled. “And I used every one of those cartridges, full auto.”
Gunny shook her head. “Wasting the Army’s ammo.”
“SOP—never use one when thirty will do. Hey, I was eighteen. Shooting and all the while yelling into my dead com for help.
“When nobody shot back anymore, I changed magazines and lit a lantern.
“Once I got more light, I saw there were two men on the ground, one inside the fence, the other just outside, and both hit multiple times.
“The outside guy died before the medics got there, the other survived, and lived to be court-martialed.
“The dead guy was a local, he was the one who shot at me. The one who survived was an assistant quartermaster, an old lifer sergeant about to retire. They decided that a big rainstorm with the fence’s power down would be the perfect time to do a little redistribution of the Army’s wealth.
“The sergeant loaded up some stuff—mostly electronics, viral-molecular chips, visual-purple control switches, some timers, and like that, probably eighty, ninety grand worth on the local black market. He met the guy at the fence, they cut a hole, and were making the switch when I happened upon them.
“I wasn’t supposed to be there. The sarge had arranged for the broadcast power to the fence to be interrupted, and he’d somehow managed to get a fake report-to-quarters call out to the sentries, only my com wasn’t working, and I didn’t hear it.”
“Their bad luck,” Gunny said.
“Yep. And my cherry.”
“War is hell,” Wink said. He looked around. “What about you, Jo? You got a story?”
“Not one that is particularly interesting,” she said.
“Aw, c’mon,” Gunny said, “it’s not like you have an appointment you need to keep, is it?”
Jo shrugged. “Okay ...”
~ * ~
“My first military action was at the Zamadani Riot that led to the Second Holy War.
“What happened, it was a summer day, a hot and arid wind off the desert, a crowd milling around a local shrine, chanting prayers. Maybe five hundred of the
Zamadani faithful. Rain was a once-every-other-year event, and when it happened, you couldn’t walk for the mud that caked your boots, or so they told me. Didn’t rain while I was there.
“Our platoon had been dispatched as backup for the local police, but nobody was expecting any real trouble. They were pilgrims come to see the shrine, make offerings, whatever.
“Nobody ever figured out exactly what set it off. One second, nothing; the next, the loons went loose on us, and we had to dodge and cook.
“They didn’t have guns, though every adult in the faith carried a short, heavy, convex-curved-inside-edged sword. It had a shape something like a Gurkha kukri, and the length of the blade was supposed to be from the tip of the owner’s middle finger to the crook of the elbow.
“Rikotilo de Dió, they call them—God’s Sickle. Two kilos of razor-edged nastiness.
“In the first few seconds, one of our guys was beheaded, and a couple others lost hands, or were badly butchered. They knew how to use the things. Three of my squad didn’t make it.
“Once we commenced firing, we chopped them up by the scores.
“I probably shot a dozen fanatics waving those fucking swords in the five minutes before somebody cranked a Hot Screamer Pulse through the crowd and shut it down.
“Afterward, there were a hundred bodies and way more who were seriously wounded, and some of them were surely mine, but I couldn’t tell you which one was the first.
“They all wore those white robes with cowls and scarves across their faces, so telling one from another once we started blasting? No way to be sure.”
The others nodded.
Gramps said, “I was in an MCC during that one, once it got cranked up good. Saw a lot of those sea-of-white attacks on the feeds. They did all look alike.”
“There you go,” Jo said. “My story. And I do have some training I need to go do. See you all later.”
She headed out of the conference room, padded down the hall. Actually, she wanted to try out the new aug in the rain, see how it worked with things being slippery and slidey. She’d strip down to tights and slippers and run through the mud a little, do a systems check. Never hurt to work on different surfaces, in bad environmental conditions. It wouldn’t always be a bright, sunny day on clean plastcrete when the line went hot, and practice might not save your ass in every situation, but it would give you as much advantage as you could give yourself, and that was worth something.
Everything she’d just said to the others about her first military action was true—but it wasn’t the whole truth ...
At sixteen, she had been on a field trip with her science class. They’d gone to Adelaide, to the new Extee Museum. Afterward, a few of them went to a local bar that apparently looked the other way when underage customers came in.
Jo had been sitting with a couple of her friends when a guy came over and offered to buy them a drink. He was tall, good-looking, a few years older, maybe twenty, twenty-two, and he had a slick line.
They were impressed, and while she was careful not to drink more than two of anything alcoholic, it wouldn’t have mattered if she’d been drinking water.
Because he doped her drink.
Things got hazy, and the next thing she knew, she was naked in a cheap room somewhere on a bed on her back with the guy on top of her pumping away. She was aware of it, but she was unable to move.
He turned her this way and that, used her until he was too spent to continue, then got dressed. He walked away laughing.
“Welcome to the big city. Outback. Hope you enjoyed the ride. Come back anytime.”
Hours later, when the drug wore off, she put her clothes on and found her way to the place where the class was staying. She didn’t tell anybody. They assumed she’d gone off on her own and had a good time, and she didn’t say any different, only smiled.
She hated it. Hated how she felt. How helpless she had been.
She vowed that nothing like it was ever going to happen to her again.
She saved some of his DNA. If you had money, there were semilegal ways to ID the person it came from.
Once she was sure she wasn’t pregnant and hadn’t been infected with some disease, Jo took some of the money she’d saved from working in the opal mines the last couple of summers and found an augmentation medic in Port Augusta, a couple of hours’ drive away from her home in Woomera. She wasn’t old enough to have the implant, but she did the research and found out the medic was a drinker and willing to do work to keep himself in booze.
She took the pubtrans bus to town, got herself a room, and went to see the medic.
He was a drunk, but skilled, and the outpatient implant a basic one, what was called CAS, which stood, she learned, for Citius, Aldus, Fortius—the old Olympic motto: Faster, Higher, Stronger...
She was already pretty fit from digging in the mines, but the implant, which included hormones, genes with spliced viruses, and connective-tissue strengtheners, worked just like advertised. A few weeks later, she was half again as strong as she had been, measured by how much weight she could lift; her speed was only 20 percent more on hand stuff, a little less on things like running; and she could only jump about a quarter meter higher than before, but those were enough to bring her up to par with a lot of male unaugies.
She was careful not to let anybody know what she had done. Her parents didn’t suspect; neither did her sister.
A follow-up visit to the medic in Port Augusta showed that everything was working fine and as good as it was likely to get without a lot more training.
The medic was even willing to check the database for a few dollars more and ID the DNA sample she gave him. He had given her a funny look, and at the time, she thought he might have had some idea of what she was up to, but if he did, he didn’t care enough to say anything.
Roxby Norse was the name of the man who had raped her. Twenty-three years old, a resident of Adelaide, SoAus, occupation salesclerk, at the Outdoor Produce Market on Currie Street, near New Light Square. Married, no children, no criminal record. A predator, and not one you’d likely spot looking at his stats.
She spent the next month working on her plan.
She had learned from research that the less complicated something like this was, the better. There were few links that anybody knew about between her and M. Norse, and it was unlikely anybody who knew her would remember him.
She lived in a town five hundred kilometers away from where Norse lived.
She did the research. Ran the maps. Found his place of work, where he lived. She was careful to do it from a computer that didn’t leave ways to backlink it to her, just in case somebody thought to look.
She memorized the maps, sat images, transportation lines, and schedules. It was like studying for an important test, and she’d always been good at that.
She found a place in Port Augusta where she could buy a full-head skinmask retail, no ID necessary. She bought one.
She waited for fall break, when there would be a lot of students out and about.
She mailed a package to herself at a mail drop in Adelaide.
She took a flight to Victor Harbor, well south of Adelaide, and caught a feeder maglev to the big city, buying her ticket with cash and flashing a fake ID she had made herself. It wouldn’t pass a careful check, the ID, but nobody was apt to do that. •
In the crush of travelers, nobody gave her ID a second look.
She got to Adelaide, rented a covered trike at the train station.
She rode to the mail drop and picked up her package, using a different phony ID. She stuck the package into a cheap backpack.
She rode and parked the trike two klicks away from where Norse lived. She had determined that the best time and place was when Norse left his cube for work. He was on a night shift, and it would be dark.
In the night, at a ratty public fresher whose camera watching the door had been smashed and not yet replaced, she went into a stall and opened the package. She removed from it the skinmask and put it o
n. Once it was smoothed into place, she put on an outback cap, an old shirt and sweater, and baggy pants. She donned thinskin gloves and pulled the last item from the package, an old ball-peen hammer that had belonged to her late grandfather. It had been in a box of tools in the attic of her parents’ house for years. Nobody would miss it, even if they had known it was there.
She tucked the hammer under her sweater, loaded her street clothes into the backpack.
She walked the two klicks to the plex where Norse lived, timing it to arrive half an hour before he was due at work. It was only a ten-minute trip by bus from his place to the market.
