by Blaze Ward
Can’t Shoot Straight Gang Returns
A Handsome Rob Gig
Blaze Ward
Knotted Road Press
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
About the Author
Also by Blaze Ward
About Knotted Road Press
1
He should have known it was trouble when someone knocked at the door way too early this morning. The sun was barely up. Only cops and reporters got out of bed at dawn.
Handsome Rob opened the door to his apartment by bracing his foot and his shoulder where nobody could knock him back easily. He had a pulse pistol in his hand, down by his side where it wasn’t obvious.
Because whoever was out there was still banging loudly, the safety was off.
This was supposed to be his day off. Technically, his whole month off, have just completed another amazing, do-or-die mission for The Service, Lincolnshire’s Guardia Civil Interior. Roberto Segura, Field Agent Extraordinaire.
And grumpy dude, mildly hung over as someone didn’t have the decency to call on the comm he had silenced last night while drinking so he could sleep in.
Bastards.
He checked the screen showing the hallway. Cursed. Looked again. Cursed again.
The man outside wore a naval uniform. Never a good sign. At least he wasn’t Shore Patrol, but an officer.
Robb undid the series of deadbolts, chains, and doorstops so that he could open the door. The knocking ceased when the first lock clunked. Five later, Robb opened the door enough to scowl at the man in the hallway.
“Senior Segura?” the officer asked hopefully.
Unlike Rob, the man was pressed, ironed, and starched to trim perfection. Rob had shaved sometime in the last three days, if he was counting correctly.
Naval Commander, too. In full dress uniform at that. Jacket with ribbons and stuff across the front. Senior enough fellow. Way too important to be a flunky or messenger, unless there was an admiral involved.
“Yeah, that’s me,” Rob finally answered.
That’s what his identity papers said these days, anyway.
Roberto Segora. Six-Foot-One. One-Ninety-Five. Brown eyes. Black Hair. Hispanic genotype.
At least the last five were accurate enough for government work. Which is what he did.
Government work.
“I have a message and papers for you, sir,” the commander smiled brightly. “May I come in?”
Rob sighed. A year ago he had been a Courier for the Service. A messenger boy like this commander on his doorstep imitating a damned rooster.
Now he was a Field Agent. Decorated, even, although Jorge and friends had done most of the work. Still, it got him noticed as a man who got things done.
And apparently summoned shits like this guy to come over before lunch.
Rob stepped back quickly enough that the commander couldn’t have reacted if he was going to charge. He did keep the pistol handy. And the safety off.
The commander followed him into the room at a polite march, closing the door before Rob could and coming to attention.
Rob felt tired just watching the guy. He looked like the type that had already run ten kilometers this morning, had breakfast, done a pile of paperwork, and then taken a delivery assignment to wake up a secret agent who had been asleep for about three hours at this point.
The man noticed the pulse pistol, but didn’t comment, which was good. Carefully, the commander reached into a pocket and pulled out a small packet that he held out carefully.
Rob took it like it might be infected or something.
“Sit,” Rob half-ordered, dropping into a chair and gesturing the man to the couch that probably still smelled like the perfume of that gorgeous redhead who had followed him home a few nights ago and had her way with him.
Oh, the sacrifices we make in the Service.
Rob cracked open the packet and pulled out the first page.
Seriously?
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Rob asked the man. “They’ve activated my reserve status and commissioned me as an officer in the Lincolnshire Navy? You people do realize who I work for, right?”
At least the commander had to courtesy to look pained at the accusation.
“It is my understanding, sir, that your previous…uhm…experience has been under a civilian rubric,” he said carefully. “This operation is apparently falling under the Ministry of Naval Operations and you are being seconded by the Service to them for the time being. You will accrue retirement points and pay, sir, as the commission is being backdated to your original separation date.”
Rob fixed the man with an ugly scowl. He liked being an agent of the Service.
Lincolnshire had a puddle-jumper navy, mostly composed of second-hand vessels purchased used from the Republic of Aquitaine Navy. Nothing larger than a frigate, since they didn’t have the local facilities to build or maintain them, but the galaxy had changed over the last few years.
But apparently stealing an experimental warship from Salonnia had brought him to the attention of the right people. And capturing one of Salonnia’s senior captains, who had chosen to defect when the alternative was that Jorge would have just shot him out of hand.
Rob wondered if the old commodore had purchased a nicer retirement here by telling more secrets after they dropped the man off.
Rather than answer the commander, Rob looked at the rest of the packet. It had a set of orders with his name at the top.
Investigate a supposedly-new, supposedly-secret naval base one of Salonnia’s Crime Syndicates had set up near the juncture of Lincolnshire’s space with Salonnia and Corynthe, the pirate kingdom currently under the sovereignty of an Aquitaine admiral named Jessica Keller.
Surveil the facility’s capabilities for disrupting trade in the event of active hostilities between nations.
Eliminate said base by whatever means were necessary, while maintaining plausible deniability for Lincolnshire.
At least they weren’t dreaming too small on this one. One man against an entire naval base, probably with half a dozen little warships set to blow his silly ass up when they caught him.
“Do you have oral orders to supplement these?” Rob asked wearily, standing.
A civilian agent would have been within their rights to refuse a suicide mission, which was why the first thing those bastards had done was to put him into uniform. Probably figured that would make him a good little Office of Naval Intelligence operative if he wasn’t careful.
Of course, if those people hadn’t failed in the first place, nobody would have been banging on Rob’s door at such an ungodly hour.
“I do not, sir,” the man said, also rising. “Instead, I was instructed to give you an hour to get presentable and then drive you to headquarters.”
“Do they have an idea of how I’m supposed to do this?” Rob asked, waving the documents. He finally put the safety on, so that he didn’t shoot anyone this morning.
“No, sir,” the commander grimaced. “I believe the admiral said we were in the Hail Mary stage of things. If this didn’t work, we might have to beg Aquitaine for another Jessica Keller, or something.”
Rob matched the man’s grimace. A decade ago, she had blown up a pirate base on the surface of a planet not all that far from there by hitting it with an asteroid. En route to conquering all of Corynthe with a couple of tiny warships and a lot of audacity.
Audacity.
Rob smiled so suddenly that the commander took a defensive step back unconsciously.
“Sir?” he asked.
“Audacity,” Rob grinned. “That’s what this is going to take.”
“And?” the commander asked carefully.
“I might know a guy.”
2
For a day that had started out too early, and then spent too much time inside a dreary office building, the evening wasn’t looking too bad. Rob had placed a call when he managed to escape the various captains and admirals looking to him to save the day, and then got a repulsor-taxi that hadpicked him up at the front gate of the naval base and hauled him into town.
Puerto Peñasco hadn’t changed in the last year. Or maybe the last fifty. The city looked like all cities outside of major naval bases, in every star nation he had ever visited. Blue collar for the most part. Worn down and a little seedy. Just this side of a crime-ridden slum, if you turned the wrong way at the wrong intersection.
The place where the taxi dropped Rob took him back nearly a year, to where it had all started. His first mission as a Field Agent. At the top of a staircase to a below-street dive, two blocks from El Ayuntamiento. In the wrong direction.
The inside of the bar was just as old and decrepit as it had been then, somehow hanging on at the very edge of not quite run down enough to be demolished for something better. A battered wooden bar on one side, where thirty people could sit, instead of the dozen or so there now.
Booths on the left, slightly elevated on a walkway to give a view over the tables on the floor, at the stage where live music frequently played. It was Tuesday, so Rob hoped fervently that it wasn’t open mic night. Or Ladies Night.
Or anything that involved dealing anymore with random, needy strangers.
His contact was seated in that same, central booth as before, with conspicuously-empty ones on either side.
Jorge Royo. Famous video star who had once been a serious thespian, before he moved into campy, over-the-top action comedies, frequently ones that he wrote, produced, and directed, just so he could work with his friends. And keep most of the money himself.
Even the Service wasn’t entirely sure what Jorge was worth these days.
Late fifties, at first glance, but Rob knew now that the man was at least a decade older. Hair starting to gray on the sides, after decades of dye to keep it dead black as a leading man. A little work around the face to keep things tight. The galaxy’s most famous sun tan revealed by a peach silk shirt half unbuttoned.
In his hand, Jorge held a martini glass. It was almost his signature move these days.
Jorge smiled as Rob got close. The noise inside was quiet enough that they could talk.
“Vishnu, kid, you look like hell,” Jorge greeted him, waving an arm to get the attention of a buxom, bottle-blond, bar maid with a fantastic ass. Tallia.
Rob remembered her from a year ago as well, surprised that she still worked in a dump like this. The money must be better than one expected from the clientele.
Rob sat. Well, more collapsed into the booth beside Jorge and let the weight of the day flow off to infect some of the other people in the room.
Tallia came close, her shirt buttoned just enough to make her prominent chest utterly distracting as she smiled at him.
“Whiskey, neat?” she asked. “Top shelf?”
Rob tried not to goggle too badly. She hadn’t seen him in a year and remembered what he drank? In a bar he had been in exactly twice before this?
“And another for me,” Jorge swirled his martini glass a touch and them emptied it.
Rob would have thought that Jorge was a drunk, but he had seen the man consume enough alcohol to kill a moose without achieving hardly more than a good buzz. And he was a happy drunk, at that.
Maybe the man was immune to alcohol, like some doctor had added an extra filter to his stomach that just routed most of it into his bladder instead of his bloodstream.
“So talk to me, kid,” Jorge instructed him. “Your call sounded messy. Usually the Service handles these things, but you were coming here directly from ONI? What gives?”
Habit and training made Rob scan the immediate area for eavesdroppers before he spoke. This was technically a public place, but the locals knew to stay away from Jorge without invitation.
“Some Salonnian Syndicate has a new base out where they shouldn’t be,” Rob replied in a quiet voice, pitched so that only Jorge would hear. “The usual things have failed, so the fleet panicked and asked the Service for Extraordinary Measures.”
“How bad?” Jorge leaned a little closer.
“I am now on active duty with the Lincolnshire Navy, as a Lt. Commander.” Rob mostly kept the snarl out of his voice. “With orders to do something about it. And I’ve just spent the entire, damned day dealing with a bunch of admirals, captains, and headless chickens, so I needed a drink. Thought I’d see if you had any ideas, since we were both in town at the same time.”
“How wide is your writ for action?” Jorge’s face turned serious.
Dangerously serious. The man had been a famous vid star for a decade, and then a successful B- and C-level actor for another three, but he was also one of the Service’s secret weapons, an agent whose antics were so gonzo that nobody realized the man was a spy.
Like the time a year ago when Rob helped Jorge and his friends steal a warship right out of a Salonnian naval base, in the middle of a rock concert. Under the guise of scouting to make a pirate movie.
“Probably as wide as I want to push it,” Rob replied after a moment. “If I want to get stupid.”
Tallia returned with drinks, interrupting the conversation before she retired. Unlike the first time Rob had been in here, there was no banter or innuendo between her and Jorge tonight, so maybe she was much smarter than she looked and could read the audience’s need for quiet.
“Did you ever end up making that movie?” Rob continued, holding the glass and just smelling the whiskey. “Can’t Shoot Straight Gang?”
“No,” Jorge smiled. “Got sidetracked at first, and then the damned Service wouldn’t come down on their price for rights to film it. Apparently, they realized that it might make money. Still want to work on it if we do?”
“Absolutely,” Rob felt some of the weight fall of his shoulders for the first time in what felt like hours. “If they’ll let me. The Service, that is. Or the Navy.”
“Thinking about getting the band back together?” Jorge’s smile apparently was infectious.
“Maybe,” Rob took a sip of the amazingly excellent whiskey and let the liquid, caramelized smoke coat his insides with a layer of warm. It reminded him that he hadn’t eaten anything but a breakfast burrito today, as well. “Need food. But need some help trying to come up with something. I cannot imagine a con that gets me or us onto a secret naval base. At least, not a second time. They’re probably still a little pissed about the first.”
“Oh, they are,” Jorge laughed. “Not the government, exactly, but the Syndicate that funded that ship. They were out everything, and Lincolnshire’s been trying to reverse engineer it instead. That vessel is now one of the heaviest ships in Lincolnshire’s whole fleet, at least until the new designs come on line.”
“New designs?” Rob felt his mind perk back up. He wasn’t a naval spy, but data became information after you churned it around long enough.
“War Catamarans,” Jorge leaned back and sipped his martini. “Take two old frigates and build a bridging element across the center, like
a capital H. Put some heavy weapons on that mount so you don’t have to rebuild the bows of the older vessels, and you have something up in the medium to heavy cruiser range. At least the old range. Not sure how they rank against Aquitaine’s new Expeditionary Cruisers.”
Rob thought about it for a moment, but then shook his head.
“No, don’t tell me how you know these things,” Rob said. “Better off not knowing.”
Jorge smiled like a sphinx.
“So you want me to make some calls and see who’s in town?” Jorge asked.
“Dinner’s on the Ministry’s creditstik,” Rob smiled cruelly. “At the fanciest place you can swindle a reservation.”
“Kid, you shouldn’t challenge me like that, you know,” Jorge laughed. “I might be a third-rate actor, but I’m still a first-rate conman.”
“That’s why I called, Jorge.”
“And your thoughts on a con job?” Jorge grinned. “How it will never work?”
“Yeah?”
“That’s because you’re conning the wrong people.”
3
Because he was pissed at the whole situation and most of the galaxy, Handsome Rob had decided to live up to the nickname Jorge had given him, and treated himself to a day at a luxury spa after getting himself measured for a brand new tuxedo.
Not his creditstik. Not his budget.
He emerged looking like a million dinars, and dressed like it as well. Even his pulse pistol was nearly invisible in the jacket’s perfect cut.
A ground vehicle was waiting when he walked out the front door of the spa, where he had been expecting his repulsor-taxi in the front quad. He hadn’t ordered a limousine tonight, but the back door opened and Aphrodite emerged from the sea as he watched.
