The Ramal Extraction

by Steve Perry

None of them spoke to that.

  There was another thing she might have said, but Kay withheld it. Humans indeed had a different life-view than Vastalimi, and she knew from her experiences with them that hearing that Tawny—her sister—had died the next day when they took down the two vepar they’d been hunting would bother them. As if killing Blue Eyes was somehow made less valid because Tawny died so soon afterward. They wouldn’t understand that such a thing did not matter. Death came, and when it left, it seldom did so with clean claws. That was the way of it.

  Humans simply did not view this as did Vastalimi.

  As she considered this, Jo looked at her. “I’m curious; how many of you made it to the end of your trek out there in the grasslands?”

  Kay nodded. “Eleven of us.”

  “Tawny?”

  “She was not among the survivors.”

  Nancy said, “Better strap in, folks, we are approaching the ground. These slave programs don’t always get it exactly right—I’ve been let go a meter up, and I don’t want anybody biting their tongue off if that happens.”

  ~ * ~

  TWENTY-SIX

  There were cameras on the transport, as well as bird cams and bug cams overhead, and probably many more such devices hidden in vehicles and other objects on the ground. The tram picked them up at the end of a line of parked hoppers, probably two klicks away from the store’s nearest entrance. They could have walked, but that would have marked them immediately. None of them were in clothes that screamed “military!” and all weapons they had were concealed.

  Formentara and Kay caught a different tram to the mag-lev station for their visit to see the offworld programmer in Dep. Things going well, Jo and the rest of them would pick up Formentara and Kay after they were done here.

  Things going well...

  Knowing you were being watched and recorded was part of living in civilization. You learned not to do things that would come back to haunt you if they were shown in a criminal court as evidence against you. Even though the standard contract the Rajah had signed gave them immunity equal to that of an offworld ambassador, and they would not be charged for what they were about to do, CFI did do a fair amount of work for TotalMart, and even if they suspected, better that the store’s security couldn’t prove they had anything to do with it. It was a fine line to walk.

  Thus they all wore skinmasks—high-end, but simple. And they watched every move they would make.

  The device was rigged with a timer and a hellfire tab. Fifteen minutes after it was triggered by an encoded radio-pulse, it would be no more than hot smoke in the sunny day.

  When the tram arrived at the store and people began alighting, Jo “accidentally” dropped a handbag she carried. When she squatted to retrieve it, she stuck Formentara’s toy under the tram, her actions hidden from view by the strategic stances of her team.

  She stood less than two seconds later.

  The kwik-stik adhesive made a permanent bond with the underside of the tram. Well, it would be permanent under normal circumstances. Once the encoded radiopulse stroked it, the adhesive would release. The device, about half the size of her palm, would fall onto the roadway. A repeller would pop it into the sky, albeit only a few hundred meters up. On the way down, the gadget would be consumed by the hellfire tab, leaving a smoke trail and little else.

  Security would tag it, of course, but determining the source, and what it had been? Certainly not beyond a reasonable doubt.

  It was possible that store security might eventually puzzle it out, but backwalking it to Jo and the CFI team would be difficult. Should be enough to keep them off TotalMart’s corporate shit list.

  It would have been much easier if she could have just carried the sucker in her pocket into the store and dumped it into a recycle bin once she’d used it, but TotalMart was big on radio controls inside its stores. Any coms in use inside went through their own repeaters, incoming and outgoing, and signals they didn’t recognize were automatically jammed. Even Formentara couldn’t figure out a way past a five-hundred-thousand-watt damper with something you could hide in your hand, so the complicated gadget was necessary.

  The days when you could start a fire or set off an explosion here while you hustled over there to do something and have it go without a warble were gone.

  Civilization didn’t like surprises ...

  ~ * ~

  They ducked into the last loo in the line. Nobody else there. They changed the simple skinmasks they’d been wearing for a second set, just enough to screw up a facial-recog program. Local law didn’t allow cams in the loo, but Gramps had a bollixer running just in case there were voyeurs in security. Wouldn’t be the first time somebody got off watching people pee.

  Gunny leaned against the door to make sure nobody else came in as they masked up.

  Gramps said, “Sid’s schedule puts him in his office from 0800 to 1130 hours, then he heads for lunch. He travels with two security guards and sometimes takes other executives to lunch. They favor the restaurant Makri, which features a large, edible spider as its premier dish. The place is within easy walking distance of Sid’s office, but he always rides in an electric cart that picks him up on the ground level outside his office.”

  “Ah think Ah had one of those spiders once,” Gunny said. “Pretty tasty. ‘Cept if you cook it wrong, it’s poison.”

  They had gone over all this several times, but Jo ran through it again:

  “Once more: Gunny takes the driver’s place. We’ll be at the hallway leading to the public loo, three stores down. She makes the turn, we take down the guards—we are all checked as loading trank darts, right? We don’t want anybody works for TM dying.”

  They all nodded.

  “We go out through the exit past the loo. Doc, you have your gadget ready?”

  Wink opened his right hand and held it so they could see the injector stuck to his palm. “IV punch,” he said. “Gas-jet into the vein, no hypodermic necessary, nine seconds to take effect. He’ll be awake but so stoned he will do whatever we tell him and smile as he does it.”

  “Okay, let’s get into position. I won’t trigger the switch until he is in the hallway. Once it is lit, we will have fifteen minutes before the sat’s foot steps off the mall. Nancy will have the hopper ready to lift when we get there. Let’s do it, people.”

  ~ * ~

  Gunny waited until the cart passed into a cam-shadow under a conduit-covering drop ceiling, then slid into the front seat next to the startled driver. “Hey! Who the fuck are—!”

  Gunny shot him in the forehead. They said it didn’t matter where you put the trank dart, long as you got a solid hit piercing the skin, but she figured the closer to the brain, the better. Besides, she had a reputation to maintain. Head-shot Gunny...

  He toppled, and she eased him off the cart and dragged him to the storage compartment in the front. She pulled his ID tag free, shoved him inside, and closed the lid. He’d be out for forty-five minutes. She stuck the tag onto her shirt pocket so the edge showed, the holograph and stats hidden. If she passed by a scanner, it would indicate that Doy Bergive, the driver, was at the wheel. As long as there wasn’t a cam that showed her face and found that it didn’t match the driver’s, she’d be good. It didn’t have to hold up for more than another five minutes.

  She drove in the cart lane, hit the warning horn to beep at pedestrians who had strayed into the cart’s path. “Hey, stay on the walkway!” Like she’d been doing this job for years.

  Gunny pulled up in front of the office exit a minute before the door opened.

  One of the bodyguards, a tall and wide man in a faux-sharkskin suit cut to hide his shoulder holder, stepped out. Frowned at her.

  “Where is the other guy?”

  “If the usual guy is Doy? Fuck if I know. Dispatch told me to take his cart and get over here. I drive where I’m told.”

  The guard hesitated a moment.

  It went to Plan B, he came out with hardware, she’d shoot him and haul ass. If he
went for his piece, she’d be faster coming from her right hip carry, he’d never make it...

  He looked up and down the hall. “Clear,” he said.

  The door opened again, and Sid came out, the second guard behind him. The second guard was a short, thin, woman.

  ~ * ~

  When Jo saw the target, she triggered her radiopathic pulse.

  In the parking lot somewhere, the hidden transmitter sent its radio sig to a satellite in low orbit. The sat was a surplus Navy Warbird that now belonged to the Rajah, and the radio wave that spoke to it switched on a preprogrammed sequence.

  The Warbird generated a beam. It zipped across the twenty thousand kilometers in a hard, focused, electromagnetic pulse that splashed onto the TotalMart building and scrambled com frequencies seven ways from Saturn. Anything within a certain bandwidth, which included communicators, wireless cameras, and repeaters, went wonky. And they’d stay that way for most of fifteen minutes.

  Probably going to be a lot of silent alarms going off because they had lost their carrier links.

  Security was going to be hopping. And electronically blind and deaf. If they had any sense, they wouldn’t go into lockdown because it might cause a panic if people who wanted to get out couldn’t, and there was no indication of a physical attack from without.

  Jo grinned.

  ~ * ~

  The lights flickered as the store’s mainframe adjusted power flows, trying to sort itself out.

  “Where is Doy?” Sid asked Gunny.

  “I don’t know, sir, Dispatch sent me.”

  Tall-and-Wide said, “My earbud just went dead.”

  “Mine, too,” Short-and-Thin said.

  Sid looked at the guards. “Great. Another fucking computer/communications glitch. Nothing I can do about it from here. They’ll send a runner if it’s any kind of real problem.” He looked at Gunny. “Let’s go. I have people meeting me in four minutes.”

  “Yessir.”

  The three of them climbed into the back of the open cart and sat.

  Gunny engaged the motor, and the vehicle hummed away.

  When they neared the loo corridor, Gunny said, “Sorry, sir, but I have to stop at the toilet!”

  “What?”

  “I have a touch of intestinal flu.”

  By then, Gunny had made the turn.

  “Crap on your own time!” Sid said. “Turn around!”

  Gunny heard the small whumps! of darters going off.

  Both bodyguards spasmed and collapsed.

  “What the fuck is going on—!”

  Gunny stopped the cart and turned to grin at Sid, just as Wink arrived.

  “Happy daze!” Wink said. He slapped Sid on the neck, under his left ear.

  “What a nice afternoon for a walk in the park,” Wink said. “What say we go outside and enjoy the hot sunshine.”

  Sid grinned at him. “Sure!”

  ~ * ~

  The building was plain, some kind of prefab panel, no markings on the door to identify it. It was a one-story light-industrial unit in a row of others just like it, save for small signs and a couple of personal touches, different-color doors, like that.

  A few people came and went.

  Formentara looked at Kay. “This is the place. Shall we?”

  “Stay behind me,” Kay said.

  “Glad to.”

  Kay stepped into the motion detector’s range. The door slid open. Kay hurried through. Her dart pistol appeared in her hand as if by magic.

  Formentara strolled in much slower, hir own weapon still tucked under hir tunic. Kay was eminently more capable of dealing with resistance, was there any, and if it was formidable enough to defeat an armed Vastalimi, chances that Formentara would offer much of an additional challenge were slim and snowball.

  The anteroom was empty. The door leading to the next room was open and Kay was already through it. “Hold,” Kay said.

  Formentara arrived and saw a tall, redheaded human male in a zentai skinsuit, covered neck to toes—face open— in a thin, green material. Guy had muscles on his muscles, and the smoke-thin material revealed that he was hung like a pornoproj star, too.

  He seemed full of nervous energy, bordering twitchy.

  He was next to a console, stopped now, but obviously working on the lit board. No patient, so he was doing b.g.

  There were no signs of weapons, and no place he could hide an external one under that outfit.

  “My God, it is you. Formentara! I’m honored.” He gave her a military bow.

  “Do I know you?”

  “I wouldn’t think so. We’ve never met, and my work is still in the budding stage. But of course any augmentor worth his own piss knows who you are.” He waved at the console. “I’m Gee.”

  He pronounced it with the soft-gee sound, like the karate suit.

  “Well, M. Gee, I would like to discuss your work in the realm of alien augmentation, if you have a few moments.”

  “You saw my Rel?”

  “And the traps you left in him.”

  Gee smiled. “I didn’t believe them when they said you were here, but just in case, I added the second. Any local augmentor on this dirt ball would have been flummoxed by the first, but if you were looking at the Rel? I knew you’d blow past that like it was nothing.”

  “And you also knew I wouldn’t expect anybody here to be good enough to hide the second.”

  He gave hir another slow nod of acknowledgment. “Indeed. Did it work?”

  Zhe was tempted to tell him it hadn’t, but one rewarded skill with honesty. “It did.”

  He grinned widely. “Ah. My greatest accomplishment. Thank you.”

  “His augmentation was not detectable by a Vastalimi at close range. I would consider that a greater accomplishment.”

  “I am honored.”

  Formentara shook hir head. “You have promise. I have some questions about the Rel. I need to know how one came to such a place that he would seek out an augmentation. And how you just happened to be here when he needed it.”

  “Coincidence?” he said.

  Zhe smiled. “Oh, no, I don’t think an augmentor of your caliber, the only one on the planet capable of rigging an undetectable-scent cross-species meld, just happened to be here. Somebody hired you. I need to know who and why and what else you have been up to. And why the Rel needed to die.”

  It hardly seemed possible, but his smile increased yet again. “I would like nothing better than to sit and talk about it with you, believe me. But I am bound by ND confidentiality agreements.”

  Kay said, “He reeks of hormones, some real, some artificial.”

  Formentara nodded. She couldn’t smell them, but she knew the signs, it was in his every gesture.

  “He’s wired, big-time. Surely has a biozapper,” zhe said. “Stay back.”

  Gee laughed. “Of course, you would see me for what I am.”

  “How many?”

  “Twenty-four.”

  Zhe nodded. Gee was an aug-hog, an addict, running too many systems, barely in balance, and burning himself up. Addicts thought they could manage that, especially programmers, and of course, they couldn’t. Gee could put himself under and run his own robotics, but it was a fool’s game. Robots could be finely tuned, but even the best AIs didn’t have intuition. They could be masters of the craft but not artists. Without that, it was not a matter of “if,” but “when” the crash would happen. Might be months, years even, but he’d never live to see fifty.

  “I can tune you,” zhe said.

  Zhe saw him consider it. He knew what his eventual fate would be. And if he was half as knowledgeable as he pretended, he knew what that offer meant. Even a onetime tune could self-replicate enough so it would probably add six or eight years to his longevity, as long as he didn’t add more systems.

  “You would do that?”

  “We can help each other.”

  Ten seconds passed. “Once I’m under, you could change your mind.”

  “You’d
have my word going in.”

  He nodded, almost to himself. “And to be under the probes of the great Formentara? Another signal honor. But— no. I can’t.”

  “Listen—” zhe began.

  He charged Kay, moving much faster than a normal man could possibly move—

  ~ * ~

  Kay saw the human in green coming at her, raising one hand to point his finger at her, and she knew he was too fast for her to step out of his way—