Shadow Warrior- Omnibus

by Chris Bunch

  ‘At any rate, those columns, about your height, are where our problems have been occurring, and the reason our project’s stalled for the moment.’ The small man’s mouth twisted, and, surprisingly, emotion came into his voice. ‘Damn me but I’m sorry someone had to die! Especially that much against the odds! With all that desert to incinerate . . .’

  ‘There were four previous backblasts,’ Wolfe said. ‘And the fifth killed Lorn Ware.’

  Frazier nodded jerkily.

  ‘What was she doing out there?’

  ‘That’s what makes it worse,’ Frazier said. ‘What she was doing wasn’t really necessary. She wanted to get some holos of the test. Lorn said they’d make a spectacular exhibit at the University . . . Univee as they all call it now, and I suppose I’d better adjust to it. She thought it might help when our budget was up for renewal, since it appears we’re sort of stalled in place, and the government wants to see results for its investment.’ He shrugged small shoulders. ‘Who was I to argue? I’m not exactly a specialist in raising money.

  ‘Maybe if I were . . .’ his voice trailed off.

  Wolfe waited politely, but the man didn’t continue. After awhile, Joshua said, ‘So she just happened to pick a place where the flashpoint happened.’

  ‘Scholar Northover wondered if maybe that monument out there . . . there’s some kind of Al’ar stonework, which we call a monument . . . might’ve drawn the blast,’ Frazier said. ‘Like lightning is drawn to a high point. He’s the electromagnetic specialist with the team, so perhaps there’s merit to his theory, and the monument was badly shattered.’

  ‘Was there anything of a similar nature to draw the other four blasts?’ Wolfe asked.

  ‘No. Or, at any rate, nothing that we can determine.’

  ‘I’d like to take a look at the accident site,’ Wolfe said. ‘If there’s a gravsled I could borrow? I don’t think I can get lost.’

  ‘I’ll com the garage, and have one waiting. If you plan on eating with us, the next meal is at 1800 hours.’

  ‘Thanks. Speaking of which . . .’ Wolf took an elaborate timepiece off his wrist, opened its back. ‘I’m still on Zulu shiptime.’

  ‘1430. The planet-day is 29.5 hours,’ Frazier said. ‘It’ll seem like forever. But why don’t you borrow one of these? They make life a little simpler.’

  He opened a desk drawer and took out a slender black device with a synthetic hook/eye strap, gave it to Joshua. ‘Let’s see . . . that’s unit 56,’ he said, and turned to a small domed case. He touched sensors on it. ‘And it’s . . . 1143 now . . .’

  ‘That’s a time-send,’ Frazier explained. ‘Everyone on the team carries one. It’s nothing but a receiver, linked to a common sender. Set the sender when you land on any world for any length day, and all the units show exactly the same time, so there’s never any trouble about synching watches, let alone making sure everyone has a timepiece that’s capable of that wide an adjustment.’

  ‘Convenient.’

  ‘Especially when you have such a small team,’ Frazier went on, ‘and you’re trying to keep some sort of order. It’s handy when anything potentially hazardous is being investigated. ’

  ‘How many people are on the expedition?’

  ‘Twenty-three,’ Frazier said. ‘Sorry. Twenty-two, now.’

  ‘And you’re on first-name terms with them? Like you evidently were with Ware?’

  ‘I . . . we like to think of ourselves as friends,’ Frazier said. ‘Mostly, then, yes. Although there are some who prefer formality.’

  ‘Of course,’ Wolfe said. He eyed a rather ornate ring on the middle finger of Frazier’s hand, was about to ask something when the door slid open, and a woman came in. She was a bit older than Wolfe’s 35 years, athletically built, large-breasted, mildly pretty. Her hair was long, pulled back and then wrapped around her neck for convenience, and she wore an untailored set of ship coveralls.

  ‘Scholar,’ the woman said, ‘we’ve got some preliminary pickups from the mole on the 14th level, if you’re interested. ’

  ‘I am,’ Frazier said. ‘Maybe we’ve found something worth sending someone down to investigate.’ He rose. ‘Oh. Pardon me. Joshua Wolfe, this is Scholar Mikela Tregeagle. She’s the expedition comptroller, adjutant, wheel-greaser, executive officer . . . the one who never makes a mistake.’

  ‘Hardly,’ Tregeagle said, and her polite smile made her suddenly lovely. ‘I’ve merely been with Scholar Frazier for eight years now, so I should know by now what’s supposed to come next.

  ‘I’m pleased to meet you, Mister Wolfe, although the circumstances aren’t the best.’ Tregeagle grimaced. ‘Lorn Ware was one of our best. I don’t think anyone was a harder worker.’

  ‘Except maybe you, Mikela,’ Frazier said.

  The smile she gave him for payment was very warm. Frazier seemed not to notice.

  ‘If you’ll excuse us, Mister Wolfe,’ he said. ‘The garage is near the bubble’s main entrance.’

  ‘I saw it when I landed,’ Joshua said. ‘I’ll try to not be any trouble while I’m here. I’m sure the questions the Univee . . . pardon, the university, has can be cleared up in a day or two and I’ll be on my way.’

  Wolfe left the expedition base, walked the quarter kilometer to his ship. The air was thin, slightly acrid.

  As he approached, the airlock opened, and a gangway slid down. He entered the ship.

  ‘Greetings,’ he said.

  - Greetings, - the Grayle answered.

  ‘This situation may become interesting,’ Wolfe said. He issued careful instructions. ‘Now to worry about me,’ Wolfe said. ‘Starting with the fact I’m chatting with a goddamned box.’ He went to a bulkhead near the airlock, touched a stud. The wall slid open, revealing racked pistols, rifles, grenades, machine weapons, even a semi-portable blaster. He considered carefully, took a tiny dart-like knife of black obsidian sheathed on a worked silver chain from a rack, put it on so the knife hung down the back of his neck; stuck a narrow tube-blaster in his halfboot, went back to the port.

  ‘Wish me luck,’ he said, and went back into the dry desert wind.

  A burly man waited beside a small lifter. He wore stained, worn coveralls and the lines on his hands had ground-in grease in them.

  ‘You’re the snooper,’ he greeted Wolfe.

  ‘More a paper-shuffler than anything else,’ Joshua said, holding out his hand. ‘Joshua Wolfe. You’re Dov Cherney.’

  The man ignored Wolfe’s hand.

  ‘I am. Why’s the university so interested in Lorn?’

  ‘I’ll put it brutally,’ Wolfe said. ‘Insurance companies don’t like to pay out near as much as they like to take it in.’

  ‘A lot of people die,’ Cherney said.

  ‘They do,’ Wolfe agreed. ‘So what’s your especial interest in Ware?’

  ‘I don’t think that’s any of your business.’

  ‘I think it became my business after what you just said.’ He stared hard at Cherney, and the man’s eyes dropped.

  ‘Lorn was a friend of mine.’

  ‘Scholar Frazier said everybody on the team is friends.’

  Cherney snorted.

  ‘I didn’t believe it either,’ Wolfe said. ‘Unless there were twenty-three angels here.’

  ‘Not hardly.’

  ‘How special a friend was Ware to you?’ Wolfe said, keeping his voice neutral.

  ‘She was . . .’ Cherney suddenly hiccuped, and turned away, blinking.

  Wolfe waited until the big man turned back.

  ‘Sorry,’ Cherney said. ‘I’m not used to things like this.’

  ‘Stay that way,’ Wolfe advised. ‘It’s harder in the short run, but better.’ He didn’t explain. ‘Go on.’

  ‘I thought a lot of her,’ Cherney said. ‘She was easy to talk to.’

  ‘Just talk?’

  Cherney flushed. ‘Yes, dammit!’

  ‘Her choice or yours?’

  ‘Hers,’ the man grudged. ‘I wanted . . . wante
d what I never got.’

  ‘How much did that bother you?’

  Cherney started to get angry again, caught himself. ‘Quite a lot,’ he said. ‘I’m being honest. I lost my wife and son in a stupid accident two years ago. Saw the Univee was hiring for offworld, so I thought that’d get me out of things. Didn’t think I’d get the job, but I guess scholars always need somebody who knows which end of a wrench fits your hand.

  ‘Lorn used to come down here and talk. Suppose she wanted somebody to talk to who wouldn’t rank on her. Which I didn’t. But I guess I thought more of what was going on than she did.’

  ‘Rank on her?’

  ‘Lorn and Tranh Van are . . . were . . . still working on their degrees, so they were the dot and carry types for the expedition,’ Cherney went on. ‘I guess Lorn didn’t realize what a pain in the ass scientists can be, not wanting to do anything outside their specialty, especially if it involves physical work.

  ‘Lorn never had time for her own specialty.’

  ‘Photography?’

  ‘Hell no. That was something Frazier decided she’d be good at. She’s taking her degree in alien psychology, but Toni Acosta . . . that’s Scholar Acosta to anybody lower-ranking than God or Frazier . . . keeps anything in that area, Al’ar or people, welded solid.

  ‘So it was go here, do this, clean that, and Lorn was getting sick of it.’

  ‘Did it show?’

  ‘Damned right it did. She was worried Tregeagle was going to ship her back on the next resupply. The exec’d had more than a couple of what she called guidance sessions with Lorn.’

  ‘What was Lorn Ware like?’

  Cherney considered. ‘I thought she was the prettiest, nicest thing I’d ever met,’ he said softly, and again had to find control. ‘But I’ll be honest, Wolfe.

  ‘There were those who don’t . . . didn’t agree. They thought she was a little too one-way. She was very determined to make it big, and didn’t have much use for anyone who wouldn’t . . . or couldn’t . . . help her.’

  ‘Like you?’ Wolfe’s tone was equally soft.

  Cherney jerked as if struck, growled, and a fist balled.

  Joshua’s right leg moved back half a foot, and his hands curled slightly. He was suddenly in a barely noticeable crouch.

  But Cherney’s hands opened, and his shoulders slumped instead. ‘Yeah,’ he said tonelessly. ‘I guess like me. I just wish she hadn’t tried so hard. Maybe . . .’

  He was silent for a moment, then looked up at Joshua.

  ‘But maybe not. There’s your lift, Mister. Sign the trip-ticket and logbook before you take it out.’

  Wolfe sat on the plinth of the shattered Al’ar monument, staring up at the transmission tower the backblast had reportedly come from.

  He looked at a small holo in his hand. A young woman sat in a sidewalk café in some city. It was summertime wherever the holo had been taken, because the woman wore stylishly baggy shorts and a twin vee-top over small breasts. Lorn Ware.

  Yes, pretty, Wolfe thought. Perhaps 25 E-years. Hair cut efficiently short, like most of the other scientists. Expression half-smiling, as if she’d been complimented before the shutter opened. Wolfe couldn’t read anything else from her face.

  He rested his head on one hand, closed his eyes, let his Al’ar-trained senses reach out.

  The wind tasted bitter, like the past, too well remembered. Very faintly, it brought a mind-scent of a time long ago, when he had been a student of Al’ar ways, when he’d earned the Al’ar name, One Who Fights From Shadows.

  Then war had come, and he’d been first their prisoner, then one of their most deadly foes, striking from nowhere, deep inside their systems.

  At the war’s height, the Al’ar had vanished, leaving their home planets in perfect order, and Man’s galaxy a shatter of planets and ships, a galaxy that only now, eight years later, the Federation was beginning to put back together.

  Outside the Federation were the lawless Outlaw Worlds, and beyond them the empty Al’ar systems.

  A-6343-5 was between the Al’ar and the Outlaw worlds.

  Joshua felt back into the past, felt for the Al’ar, almost saw their corpse-white forms as they built the towers. His most terrible enemies and his best . . .

  His eyes blurred for an instant, and he wiped a sleeve across them, ignored the knife-force of the past.

  Emptiness came, then he felt, very faintly, Man’s arrival. The presence grew stronger, and he sensed Ware’s presence. For an instant there was something else, then a flash of agony and the long swirl down into death.

  He forced his mind back, feeling for that something else.

  Wolfe stood, looked again at the transmission tower, then walked slowly to the broken monument.

  He ran a hand across the blast-shattered stone, then looked out at the empty desert.

  ‘Cute,’ he murmured. ‘Very damned cute indeed.’

  He smiled, but his smile was not pleasant.

  Wolfe had been inside one of the Al’ar hidden bases twice, once when the Al’ar still held it. Even now, eight years later, his skin still crept, his arms wanted to be cradling a heavy blaster, and his senses reached for some warning before an Al’ar came from nowhere to kill him.

  He felt sweat on his temples, unobtrusively wiped it away.

  No one noticed - they were watching the woman 75 feet above move from handhold to alloy handhold toward the control deck about ten feet distant from her. The climber was Scholar Tregeagle, and Wolfe began to believe what Frazier had said about her vast competencies.

  The chamber was enormous, more than a kilometer long, and as high, filled with glittering machinery, silent now, but looking like they needed no more than a signal to growl into life.

  They were nearly two miles underground, and had descended on an antigrav generator crudely welded into an Al’ar descent tube that no one had been able to activate.

  There were half a dozen scientists in the chamber beside the zebra-painted ‘mole’ that floated two feet above the deck. The robot bobbed slightly in a stray air current, and Wolfe thought it was eager to be released to hunt deeper into the cavern after more Al’ar secrets.

  ‘What do you think that is up there, Raoul?’ Scholar Frazier asked, and Wolfe wondered why he didn’t use the man’s title.

  “I’m not sure,’ a bearded man said. ‘I hope it’s adjustment controls for the grid. Maybe I can figure out from there what’s causing these frigging backblasts.’

  Scholar Frazier moved closer to Joshua. ‘That’s Scholar Northover, our electronics man.’

  Wolfe nodded, wondered why Northover wasn’t up there with Tregeagle instead of trying to figure out the Al’ar machinery from a distance.

  Tregeagle reached for a stanchion, pulled herself onto the deck. There was a spattering of applause, and the woman bowed elaborately.

  Joshua ate without talking, feeling eyes touch him, flinch away when he raised his head. He’d been introduced around by Scholar Frazier’s deputy, Tregeagle, before the meal. A few scientists had tried cautious, nervous questions about what was new or interesting in the Federation, quickly dropped when they learned Joshua was based in the Outlaw Worlds, sectors they evidently thought were made up of murderers, barbarians and the déclassé.

  Not far wrong, Wolfe thought. Which is why I like them.

  He finished his meal, took the plate to the cleaning station at the end of the messhall. There were no scraps left from the processed protein slab the hand-scribbled menu had called ‘Meaty Surprise,’ nor from the vegblok that’d accompanied it.

  Wolfe scrubbed the plate with waterless detergent, held it under the rinser for a second, then placed it in the nearby rack.

  He leaned back against the wall and waited patiently until most of the scientists were looking at him.

  ‘I just wanted to offer my apologies,’ he said, not sounding apologetic at all, ‘but it’ll be necessary for me to interview each of you singly about the unfortunate accident.’ He put a delibera
tely artificial smile on his face, wiped it away.

  ‘Saying that I feel like some sort of policeman,’ he said, and his eyes swept the narrow messhall. He didn’t see the response he’d hoped for. It had been a cheap shot in the dark at best.

  ‘Perhaps, Scholar Tregeagle, I could use your office.’ Again, it wasn’t a request. The woman nodded.

  ‘The quicker begun, the quicker ended,’ he said. ‘Scholar Acosta, if you’d be willing to go first?’

  The small woman pursed her lips, then got up.

  ‘Very well,’ and bustled out of the room, leaving Joshua to trail in her wake.

  If Frazier reminded Wolfe of a woodpecker, Toni Acosta was a shrike, a butcher-bird. Within a few moments, she’d shredded Scholar Frazier (‘nice enough, but years beyond being able to head an expedition’); her compatriots (‘largely idiots who bussed every posterior in sight for their postings, ’ and the dig itself (‘poorly organized from the outset, oriented toward gadgeteering and gimmickry instead of analyzing and understanding the Al’ar psychology, which should be the real beginning and purpose of any investigation. ’); and left the blood-dripping remains impaled on branches for later savories.

  Joshua noted his mind was running to Earth-bird analogies, and wondered if he was homesick. He shuddered involuntarily, which answered his question, and turned back to business.

  ‘Your opinions are interesting, Scholar Acosta,’ he said. ‘What about your colleague?’

  ‘You mean student Ware? Hardly my colleague.’

  ‘What was your opinion of her?’

  ‘Utterly incompetent, like almost everyone studying psychology these days.’

  ‘Strong condemnation.’

  ‘Piddle,’ Acosta snapped. ‘Hardly nasty enough for these numbwits with addled psyches, trotting around trying to bring everyone down to their level, hoping that’ll enable them to understand their own sewer-pipe thinking.’

  ‘You’re generalizing.’

  Acosta looked at Wolfe sharply. ‘Perhaps,’ she said slowly, ‘I should be more careful with my words. But what an interesting choice of words. Clerk-interviewers don’t generally think in those terms nor use words like generalizing. Are you what you seem?’