by Steve Perry
Before the picket could bring his weapon to bear, Kay sprinted in, incredibly fast, and lashed out with one claw—
The false image her aug gave the blood that spewed from his neck made it a maroon color in the spookeye field. He dropped his weapon and reached for his ruined throat, no more than a fading gurgle accompanying his fall as he dropped onto his side.
Kay dropped next to the dying man and hastened his end with another claw.
She did like that throat strike, and with good reason: Land it, it always worked. And so far as Jo could tell, Kay always landed it. If you planned on hand-to-hand with a Vastalimi? You wanted to wear a nice, thick titanium collar...
Moving on now, people ...
~ * ~
There were supposed to be two sentries outside Rama’s temporary shelter, but it turned out there was a third. Kay and Jo were set to deal with the expected ones.
“I got him,” Wink said.
The third man was behind the building, a dome-shaped thing with surface e-camo lit to hide it from an overfly.
Wink worked his way into position.
He gripped his knife, the fat cylindrical handle familiar and comfortable in his hand, and edged his way forward, moving as smoothly as he could. When the sentry moved, Wink stopped. Motion, especially jerky motion, caught a human’s attention in a hurry. You might hear a funny noise in the night and puzzle over it, but if you saw somebody creeping up on you with a knife, you wouldn’t wonder over it very long. The trick to overcoming that was to be close enough to use the natural reaction a man had to deadly danger to finish the attack.
People would freeze, run, or fight, and usually in that order.
Wink had been on death’s doorstep often enough so that the hormonal rush didn’t kick in the same way for him that it did for most. The chemical cascade that flooded a man’s mind and body, driven by the reptile brain that wanted to survive at all costs, came to him, but seldom as the tsunami. These days, it was more like a small wave that lapped at his thighs, rocking him, but not threatening an uncontrolled tumble.
He missed that.
Here he was, stalking a man armed with a carbine who wouldn’t hesitate to shoot him if he spotted him. His transponder was off, he wasn’t in uniform, he was a wild card, and fair game to either army. And yet he was only mildly edgy.
Once they were inside and hidden, noise was less of a factor, those guards would be easier, but here and now, with this unexpected extra one on patrol, quiet was the main factor. They were in the middle of a military encampment; there were a lot of nervous, heavily armed soldiers geared up for battle. Such situations were volatile. Throw a rock through a window in this kind of situation, and when the smoke cleared from the startled gunfire, there might be dozens of corpses from friendly fire, the shooters convinced they had seen the enemy.
Wink took another step. Two. Three. Stopped.
Perception was a strange thing. One of his uncles had been a hunter, had liked tramping around in the woods with a small-caliber rifle, shooting tiny tree-dwelling animals called squirrels. It was all highly regulated; one had to take safety classes, obtain a license, wear special clothing, and use an approved and registered weapon. The season for such hunts was short, and the managed parks in which they took place were crawling with forest rangers sent to enforce the game limits and safety rules.
After a hunt, his uncle Val used to have an ale or four, snort, and offer that there were more wardens in the woods than hunters. That back when he’d been young, things had been much more relaxed and fun. It was all so fucking civilized now.
Val was a large man, pushing two meters and a hundred kilos. His hunting costume was a brilliant, phosphorescent pink: a vest, cap, and gloves that the quarry’s vision supposedly couldn’t differentiate from any other solid color. That wouldn’t spook the prey, but it would allow hunters to easily see and identify each other.
That was part of the safety-first attitude for which Val had little use. Sissy stuff. What kind of hunter couldn’t tell the difference between a squirrel and a man?
The sentry turned a little, giving Wink a profile, and for a moment, he felt a tiny thrill course through him. Then the sentry turned his back again.
The thrill ebbed.
Maybe he could make a deliberate noise? Spike the fear factor?
No. It wasn’t about him, it was about the mission.
Wink took another step. Two ...
The last time Uncle Val went hunting was on a clear, cold morning, the sun shining brightly. The season had just begun, there were a lot of hunters and wardens out.
Thirty minutes after he stepped into the groomed forest, somebody shot Val in the back of the head. The bullet passed through his bright orange cap and hit him in the hindbrain, shutting down his autonomic system. By the time medical help arrived, it had been too late for a long time. Val was effectively dead before he hit the ground.
So much for safety first.
How was it possible for somebody to mistake a two-meter-tall, hundred-kilo human in a bright, glowing pink costume for a tree-dwelling creature the size of his hand? To shoot him through the glowing hat?
But: On every planet where hunters went forth to take game using projectile weapons, be they guns, bows, or atalatl-hurled spears, they sometimes took out each other instead of the prey.
If you had a knife, you’d have to be blind to accidentally stab a human instead of a squirrel, but distance and excitation and a way to reach out from afar?
Some small number of such instances were deliberate. Somebody who wanted to see what it felt like to kill a fellow human, and a hunting “accident” was punished much less severely than intentional homicide, sometimes not at all, under the “assumed-risk” principle. But most were true accidents, people whose adrenaline fogged their vision and caused them to see what they wanted to see instead of what was there.
A rat-sized creature with a bushy tail? Or a man’s glow-in-the-daylight hat?
Hell. Shoot it—and find out.
Almost. Almost. Five meters. Three ...
Now!
Wink sprinted, raised his knife, and drove it into the man’s spine at the base of his skull, slipping it between C2 and C3, the spear point severing the cord entirely.
The sentry never knew he was coming, nor what hit him.
It was a paralyzing stab. The man collapsed, unable to move, speak, even breathe. With help, he could recover, the cord could be repaired, a few months and he’d be as good as new.
“Sorry,” Wink said quietly. He squatted and nicked the right carotid artery. The sentry would bleed out quickly, no pain, he’d go to sleep and not wake up. Wink didn’t enjoy this part particularly, but it was necessary. The man was a soldier. He had to know there was risk involved here—
“Wink?”
He activated his com. “I’m done. You aren’t waiting on me.”
“Stet that.”
Wink wiped his knife on the dying man’s sleeve and resheathed it.
~ * ~
THIRTY-THREE
The dome was spacious, a prefab iglu, filled with luxurious furniture, like silk couches and ornate, hand-carved tables, chairs, and a desk. The interior was broken up into rooms by shimmering curtains of brightly colored silk hung from the high ceiling. It smelled of spicy cooking.
When Cutter stepped into the main room, Rama was on a cushy couch, wearing silver silk nightclothes, and not the least bit pleased to see him.
“Cutter! What are you doing here? How did you bypass my guards?”
“We have reason to believe that we can find Indira in your camp.”
“Here? Are you mad?”
“Maybe just a little bit pissed off, but not entirely mad, no.”
“What are you saying? You think I had something to do with my fiancée’s disappearance?”
Cutter nodded. “It certainly looks that way. We have run down a bunch of leads, and they all point in your direction.”
“Leads? Any such things are false
! Planted by Luzor to throw you off his track!”
Cutter shook his head. “See, that’s one of the things. There’s no way that the Thakore benefits from kidnapping Indira. What he gets for that is you kicking in his door and slaughtering his people wholesale, blowing things up, plus a big bill for it all afterward. Why would he do that?”
“Because he is insane, a fool, a man so devious they will have to guard his corpse after he dies, or he will steal it himself!”
“On the other hand, what do you get out of it?”
“Excuse me?”
“If you recover Indira, you are an international hero. You are acclaimed across two countries, and you cement your connection with the Ramal family forever. The Thakore has to cough up a shitload of money, trade agreements, whatever, because he’ll likely lose the war.”
“Not likely.’ He will!”
Cutter continued: “If you find that Indira has been slain, then you punish her slayer, and either way, you come out of it smelling like a rose.”
“You must be as insane as he is.”
“There are days when I wonder. But: We do have all those reasons.”
“You cannot have any that are legitimate!”
Cutter rattled off a set of names. “You do know these people?”
“Of course I know them! They are wealthy men, in Pahal and Mumbai. One cannot help but know men of great means on our world.”
“You know a woman named ‘Udiva’?”
“The cloth merchant in northern Mumbai, yes, yes, I know her! What of it?”
“You admit to having dealings with them.”
“Did you not hear me? Yes, certainly, I deal with them and others like them all the time! They are pillars of society, businessfolk, they are the upper castes. How would I not deal with them?”
“Listen, I’m not a judge to decide who knows what about what. What say we just collect Indira and lay it all before the Rajah? He can sort it all out.”
“There is no one to collect and nothing to sort out! I am in the middle of a campaign! I have no time for your crazed stories, Colonel! I have battles to fight, ground to capture. Once that is done, then we can discuss your silly notions, and the Rajah can laugh at them with me.”
“If Indira is not here, you can go on about your business. I’m assuming if you had anything to do with this, you weren’t foolish enough to let her know because that will mean you’d have to kill her.”
“Enough! I command an army! I will hear no more of this. Guards!”
“They, uh, won’t be coming.”
“What? What have you done?”
“Nothing fatal to the ones inside. Just made sure they wouldn’t interrupt us until we finished our conversation.”
“It is finished! I will speak no more! Leave, or—”
“Or what? It seems we have the advantage here.”
“You are wrong in this, too!”
He swept his hand under a silk cushion and came out with a small pistol.
Cutter was faster. He cleared his holster and indexed Rama, fired one dart from his own weapon. It hit Rama square on the chest, and that should have been that, only—
Rama grinned and thrust his pistol in Cutter’s direction—
Fuck! Cutter dived out of the chair and to his right. He hit the floor, rolled on the thick carpet, and came up, jinking left as he did, in case Rama tracked his trajectory—
Which Rama did—he fired at where Cutter would have been had he kept going forward—
Too far away to jump at him, and he was either immune to the darts, or that thin fucking nightshirt was some kind of special armor—
Cutter pointed his pistol at Rama’s head and triggered off four quick shots—
Rama screamed and clapped his hands to his face—
Maybe he wore beddybye armor or was antichemmed, but a dart in the eye? Always a good attention getter—
Rama screamed loudly, rage and anger mixed, and pointed his pistol, but before he could line up on Cutter with his good eye, the nearest curtain flapped open and there came the quiet fhump! of a suppressed weapon.
Rama’s head blew apart as the explosive round hit it.
“Shit!” Cutter said. He came all the way to his feet.
Behind him, Jo stood there, carbine extended for another shot if necessary.
Certainly wasn’t going to be necessary for Rama to get to whatever afterlife might be waiting for him. No medic in the galaxy could fix that.
It made things more complex.
Wink came in behind Jo and bent to look at the corpse.
“I’m just guessing without a full autopsy, but I’d say that Rama here is considerably dead, and the cause probably an explosive carbine round to the head.”
Jo held up Rama’s pistol: “His magazine’s loaded with full-on toxics. He’d have killed you if he’d hit you, Rags. No help for it.”
“Well. We’ll just have to explain it to the Rajah as best we can. Better that we find his daughter and bring her back— that’ll go a ways to keeping us on his good side.”
“I’d guess we just got on the Thakore’s good side, too.”
“There’s that. Okay, we go to Plan B: We need to arrange for Rama to take that secret trip.”
“I have the recording.”
“Let’s get moving.”
Jo stood there for a moment.
“Something?”
She nodded in the dead man’s direction. “Yeah.”
“Go ahead.”
Jo told him.
He shook his head. “Motherfucker! You sure?”
“Pretty much.”
Cutter chewed on it for a moment. “Well, it doesn’t matter to the immediate situation. Let’s go.”
It didn’t take long to load Rama’s body, along with the unconscious guards and the three dead sentries from outside, into Rama’s private transport, conveniently docked at the south side of the dome. The ship could be entered from inside the place, didn’t even have to get wet, it was pouring rain.
Once that was done, Cutter said, “I’ll ditch the hopper somewhere and meet you at the rendezvous.”
“Could be a long way.”
“I saw a scooter in the back. Sig is going to show it as Rama’s, so his guys won’t be shooting at me if they see me.”
“Copy,” Jo said.
Once he was clear of the dome, Cutter lifted and triggered the recording.
“This is Rama,” came the dead man’s voice. “I am flying west for a meeting with Rajah Ramal’s envoy. Do nothing until I return.”
The incoming com lit with several queries, but Cutter ignored them. He expected that’s what Rama would have done had he been alive and actually going somewhere.
Not likely anybody here was stupid enough to shoot down their commander’s private yacht; though from the way he had been, it might have been tempting. One less asshole on a planet, who’d miss him?
~ * ~
THIRTY-FOUR
“Right there?” Wink said.
Jo nodded. “Actually, it’s pretty clever. It’s what the late Rama and his command staff all use. What’s one more iglu among scores just like it? The ranking officers will have guards posted, so that’s not a tell. I doubt there’s a functionary whose job it is to count temporary structures every day, and if there is, he could easily be in on it.”
“Hiding in plain sight,” Gramps said. “Got to give him credit for that one.”
“Rama didn’t strike me as that serpentine a thinker,” Gunny said.
“Nor me,” Wink said. “Smarter than he acted.”
“Maybe” Jo said.
They looked at her.
“We can talk about that later,” she said. “First, we fetch our quarry.”
“If she’s actually there,” Gramps said.
“Either she is in there, or she left a noticeable amount of her scent there,” Kay said. “The smell matches that of the clothing we obtained.”
Jo’s own olfactories were enhanced, but even
so, she couldn’t keep up with Kay when it came to scent. Only so much you could do with a human nose, and the Vastalimi were still superior to the best human augmentation in that realm.
