by Terry Mixon
“I am a Command Constable of the Oberon Security Enterprise and represent the First Oberon Council of Speakers,” Daskalov snapped. “I have the authority here, whatever games you want to play. It is my responsibility to see that all docking charges and oxygen fees are collected and that no…accidents happen.”
“So, you run the local protection racket,” Brad said calmly. “We aren’t playing, Constable. All charges and fees were negotiated directly between the convoy’s owners and the Council of Speakers. Anything additional would be a violation of that agreement, an agreement I am charged to enforce.”
An alert siren echoed across the landing dome as the first freighter began its descent.
“Now, I have no basis on which to trust your people, and I do trust mine,” he continued. “My people have vac-gear on them and will be fine when the dome opens. Will yours?”
“We’re not stupid; this is our job,” Daskalov told him. “This is our responsibility. Your mercs are unnecessary and unwelcome; their presence increases the potential risks to the convoy.”
“Oh, I was hoping you’d say something like that,” Brad purred—and then moved, the silver cylinder from his gun-belt in his hand and extended in an instant, electromagnets flaring to life to send the meter-long monofilament blade flashing toward Daskalov.
“You can threaten me and my people and bluster, and the Guild says I have to take it,” he told the local. “You threaten my client, however, and my contract says I am authorized to use ‘all necessary force’ to protect them.”
The impossibly thin blade glowed azure in its magnetic field, humming slightly from the power source in the cylinder in Brad’s hand. Daskalov had a similar weapon at his own waist, but he didn’t go for it, staring at the tip mere centimeters from his face.
“I suggest you go talk to your bosses, Command Constable,” Brad said softly. “They went to a lot of effort to get my client here. Don’t fuck it up for them.”
Chapter Seven
Once the OSE panhandlers had been ushered on their way, Brad’s people quickly got the landing site under control. The dome was large enough for all six of the freighters to touch down and had been completely empty.
“Kind of surprising they even had a landing site big enough for all of this, given how little traffic Oberon must get,” he noted to Saburo on the command channel, watching the third freighter transition through the immense airlock toward the ground.
“They’ve got two more that I spotted on the way in,” the older Asian man replied. “Three big landing sites, each as big as the spaceport at Ceres.” He shook his head. “There’s more going on out here than I thought there was, or there’s no point in having those ports.”
“Six million people in the Outer System,” Brad said quietly. “They may not have the tech or the automation or the rest of what we take for granted inside the Belt or at Jupiter, but…that’s still six million people in artificial environments and flitting around on spaceships.
“There almost has to be more out here than we give it credit for.”
His ground forces commander was a Jovian native, and he snorted.
“It seems like every layer of the system thinks the layers out from them are barbarians in pigpens pretending to be starships,” Saburo noted. “The Belt thinks Jupiter is a dystopic Everdarkened-hole, Mars thinks the Belt is a dystopic Dark-hole, Earth thinks everywhere is lacking in basic amenities.…”
“No human is ever going to realize that their prejudices against everyone else are just as ill-founded as the prejudices against them,” Brad said with a chuckle. “How’s our actual job going, Colonel?”
“Doary is working on some actual official channels with Oberon Security Enterprise,” Saburo told him. “Those seem to involve much less fishing for bribes and staring at her chest.”
“No offense to your subordinate, but even Trista doesn’t have much to stare at when she’s wearing combat armor,” the Commodore said dryly. “I get the feeling someone was as much testing us as anything else.”
“This is that kind of place,” Saburo agreed. “If you let people push you around, you get pushed. You made the right call, I think.”
“Our job is to make sure our clients are safe. If I can do that by threatening someone instead of killing them, I will,” Brad concluded. “Of course, if I can do it without threatening someone, that’s even better.”
Saburo laughed at him.
“You, Commodore, would be disappointed if you hadn’t been able to threaten someone. I don’t get the impression that you like Oberon.”
Brad shook his head.
“I don’t,” he admitted. “This whole contract seems to be a reunion tour of places where shitty things happened—though at least on this moon, I was what happened.”
And if anyone wanted to raise trouble over that, well, he wished them luck. They’d need it.
Most of the Doctors’ Guild personnel were being intelligent and staying inside the ships as the remainder of the convoy made their landing approaches. Brad and his people were well away from the landing pad and, in theory at least, didn’t need to worry about the dome losing air pressure. That was what the massive airlock was for.
Of course, the mercenaries weren’t going to trust the airlock, which was why they all had vac-gear built into their combat armor. It took Brad a moment to realize that the three people walking across the dome toward him were not only not his, they also weren’t wearing any kind of vacuum safety gear.
“Can I assist you?” he asked the broad-shouldered tall woman leading the trio.
“I hope so, Commodore,” she told him with a smile down at him. He wasn’t a small man, but she towered over him. “I am Dr. Leonhardt, the head administrator for the new hospital. I need to go check out the build site while we bring our people and supplies down, and I was hoping I could impose on you for an escort.”
Brad scoped out her companions. Both had the universal look of bureaucrats, even if Leonhardt herself looked like a rogue Amazon from a recruiting poster. None of them were wearing proper safety gear for the landing dome, and he sighed.
“I’ll take you myself,” he told her. “That will get you and your colleagues somewhere where you’re not at risk of getting trapped in vacuum.”
She blinked in surprise, then looked up at the massive airlock door above them and sighed.
“Specialties, Commodore,” she told him lightly. “I now understand why Captain Garibaldi was looking so pained when she spoke to me as I was leaving.”
“You can wander around a landing dome during descent operations,” Brad replied. “But you want an emergency automatic helmet.” He tapped the collar he wore. “Let’s get you into the main colony.”
He turned to Saburo.
“Saburo, can I borrow a squad?” he asked. “Let’s get our client safely to her new building and check it ourselves.”
They’d need to go over the building with a fine-toothed comb before they let the doctors set up. The sooner they found it, the better off everyone was.
“Take Vaughn and his people,” Saburo told him. “They can do the security sweep for you while you’re there.”
“Security sweep?” Leonhardt asked.
“Bombs, bugs, squatters,” Brad reeled off instantly. “We want to make sure you have no unexpected surprises.”
She wrinkled her nose.
“Is that likely?”
“This is Oberon, Dr. Leonhardt,” he told her. “I am not being paid to assume your safety. Quite the opposite.”
First Oberon didn’t have much in terms of streets or transportation, with the entire city being made up of interlinked domes and underground tunnels. Similar cities farther in toward Earth would use small corridor runabouts, but First Oberon was a foot-traffic-and-subway city.
There were probably vehicles somewhere in the colony, for the Council of Speakers if no one else, but as Brad led his client through the tunnels, all he was seeing were pedestrians and the occasional subway entrance.
The address Leonhardt gave them was close enough that they didn’t need to risk the subway, and the exercise was good for them. Oberon kept the colony gravity mostly around the half-standard-gravity most human settlements used, though at least one spot they passed through had no artificial gravity at all.
The moon was large enough to have gravity of its own, but it was almost nonexistent—just enough to make sure that nobody fell off the surface.
“I’m guessing your people brought ambulances?” Brad asked Leonhardt as they carefully made the transition from one of the low-g zones back to the artificial gravity of the colony “streets.”
“We have a few specialized corridor cars, yes,” she confirmed. “I think they’re even designed to handle gravity transitions like this.”
“The address you gave us is just down here,” Brad told her as he gestured down the tunnel. “What should I be looking for?”
“It’s a trio of old warehouses we bought up over the last year or two,” Leonhardt told him. “Workers should have been blasting out walls and linking them all into one building for us. We’ll want to see what kind of job they’ve done and what the new floorplan looks like.”
That made sense at least. The Guild had brought a lot of gear and people.
“What about residences for your folks?” he asked.
Leonhardt sighed.
“While I regarded it as an excess of paranoia, the decision was made to have everyone live inside the hospital and its security perimeter for at least the first year or so,” she told him. “From what you’ve been telling me, I guess that wasn’t so paranoid after all.”
“It might be,” Brad admitted. “I don’t believe Oberon is quite as barbarous as my Belt-born self wants to think, but you’re still probably wise to keep everyone safe.”
It was hard to tell the difference between a warehouse, a hotel, or an office from the tunnel “street.” Some had signs, but many just had numbers to look at. Brad found the ones he was looking for and scoped out the entrances carefully from across the street.
To his surprise, Leonhardt proved quite cooperative with his paranoia, quietly stopping with his squad as he surveyed the space.
“There’s a cargo entrance as well, I’m guessing?” he murmured to her. From this side, all he could see were sets of double doors with discreet numbers. “And a plan for signage.”
“Yes, and yes,” Leonhardt confirmed. “This is the main public entrance; the cargo access actually requires authorization codes to get to. What we bring in and in which order will depend on the layout.”
“Vaughn?” Brad asked. “Anything pinging your scanner?”
The NCO had a concealed array of sensors layered through his armor and linking back to his wrist-comp and helmet.
“Nothing flashing red warning lights,” Vaughn told him. “A couple of odd things. I’ll definitely want to sweep the building before we let any of the civilians inside.”
“Really?” Leonhardt asked incredulously. “What are you expecting? Killer robots? Assassins? Bombs?”
The squad leader coughed delicately.
“Bombs, ma’am,” he admitted. “A few pings of radio transmissions that could be bugs or detonators, some chemical signatures that might be left over from the workers blasting the space open.”
He shook his head.
“Like I said, no flashing red warning lights, but a few things that don’t look right. I don’t think we can let the clients in just yet.”
“Agreed,” Brad said instantly. Leonhardt might be looking rebellious, but even if Brad didn’t agree with Vaughn’s assessment from what he had been told, no good commander ever overrode their troops in front of the client.
“Doctor, if you and your people can wait here? Corporal Achmed, keep your fire team with them,” he ordered. “Sergeant Vaughn, let’s go take a look!”
For a few seconds, Leonhardt looked like she was going to object, but she finally sighed and nodded.
“This is your area, Commodore,” she admitted. “We’ve already seen a million times more trouble than I actually expected for this trip.”
“I know,” Brad told her. “But that, after all, is why your Guild hired us.”
Brad Madrid was in command of the Vikings. There was no question that the Commodore was in charge: he signed the paychecks, signed the contracts, gave the orders.
But when Sergeant Vaughn gestured for him to wait outside as the first fire team went into the building, Brad followed orders. A sergeant who knows what’s going on outranks everybody.
Three armored troops, led by Vaughn himself, went in first. Brad went in with the second fire team, keeping well back and letting his specialists do their jobs.
The hospital-to-be definitely showed its warehouse heritage. They came in through a closed-off set of offices that would act as a reception for the new operation, and then entered into a vast open space.
The walls on either side still showed the signs of fresh demolition, with scaffolding and rough floor layouts installed. It was…well short of what Brad had been expecting from Leonhardt’s description, almost as if the work had stopped at some point along the way.
There was enough space in the three warehouses for a hospital, easily, but while the space was five stories high, there’d been only the beginnings of an effort to turn it into separate floors.
“Sergeant, does this smell off to you?” Brad asked.
“I’m still picking up radio signatures and chemical explosives, so I’m going with yes,” the non-com replied. “What are you thinking, sir?”
“This was supposed to have a full five-story floor plan the doctors could slot their equipment and beds into,” Brad told his subordinate. “This does not look remotely close to being complete…and I don’t see workers.”
The space was silent, in fact. It looked like the worksite had just…stopped. Everyone had put down their tools and walked away, well before the work was done.
“Vaughn, have your people get Leonhardt and the rest well away from here,” Brad ordered, looking around and letting the reality sink in. “Everdark, contact OSE and the Marines—they need to evac the area. I’m guessing gas and bombs, someone has rigged this whole thing to go up in fire and death.”
“Yeah,” the Sergeant confirmed after a moment. “Son of a bitch.”
“Sergeant?”
“Motion-activated infrared tripwire across the exit. That was not there before.”
A chill ran down Brad’s spine.
“Linked to what?” he asked.
There was a long pause.
“I’m going to guess to the new traces of VX-65 that the scanners are picking up,” Vaughn told him very, very slowly. “It’s a binary neurotoxin, wouldn’t have started mixing until the activation code was sent.”
“Someone set this up to trap the first responders and gas them,” Brad concluded grimly. “There is definitely a bomb around here, too.”
“We’ll find it,” Vaughn promised. “Achmed is dragging Leonhardt back to the landing site, but he doesn’t have the manpower to evacuate the area.”
“You find the bomb and see if you can disarm the gas,” Brad ordered. “I’ll see if I can coordinate with the OSE. Even if we can find a way out of here, this entire sector is at risk!”
Their vacuum gear wouldn’t protect from VX-65. It could dissolve gas masks and clothing and was lethal on contact. Whoever had rigged this trap wanted to make damn sure the first people to visit died.
Along with everyone else in the sector. VX-65 wasn’t exactly containable once mixed.
“This is Commodore Madrid,” he barked as he broke into the Oberon Security Enterprise’s emergency channels. “We are in the target site for the new hospital, and someone has rigged this space with explosives and VX-65 canisters.
“We need a full evacuation of Sector LD-73 before it’s too late. I’m not certain that we are going to be able to disarm the bomb or the gas.”
There had been conversation on the chan
nel when he linked in. Now there was only the silence of shocked cops.
Then a familiar voice cut in.
“This is Command Constable Daskalov,” the man who’d tried to extort Brad for money at the landing pad stated. “My section is in LD-76; we can be there in under five minutes to commence the evacuation if no one is closer.
“How much time can you buy us, Commodore?”
“I don’t know,” Brad admitted. “It seems to be set up to trigger when we leave, so I think we can try and stay in here until you’ve evacuated the area.”
“Fuck.” The curse hung in the official channels for several long seconds.
“We will clear the area, Commodore, if you can find a way to disarm the active bombs. We…” Daskalov swallowed loudly enough to be heard. “I don’t believe we have the counteragents for VX-65. We don’t generally see WMD-grade chemical weapons out here!”
“You don’t generally see them anywhere,” Brad said. “Get the area clear, people. The Vikings will deal with the damn bombs.”
Brad dropped the channel and brought up his helmet. Scanning the space, his combat optics could pick up the infrared beams blocking the exit. It was a full mesh; there was no way they were getting through it without shutting it down.
“So, we have a problem,” Vaughn said in a calmly conversational tone.
“I knew that,” Brad told him.
“No, you knew we had bombs and nerve gas,” the NCO told him, his voice still perfectly calm. “I think we should have guessed the level of the bombs once we knew they’d put VX-65 in here.”
“Sergeant…” Brad swallowed. “Are we talking nukes here?”
“No. Just hyper-compressed thermobarics.” Vaughn paused. “If this bomb goes up, this entire sector is going to get blasted into orbit.”
“Can we stop that from happening, Sergeant?”
“I’m not sure yet.”
Chapter Eight
“We have the immediate vicinity of your location evacuated, but the sector is home to thirty-five hundred people,” Daskalov told Brad grimly. “I’ve pulled barely twenty OSE people into the region and there’s more on the way, but I’m not sure we can evacuate all of LD-73 in time, Commodore.”
