by Steve Perry
Gunny laughed. “Who are you talkin’ to, Rags? Not any of us. We laugh at Death.”
Cutter grinned. “I had to ask.”
“With all due respect, the fuck, you did.”
Em said, “You would do this for a comrade?”
Cutter said, “In this case, yes. Two weeks ago, we couldn’t have left, but we are done here.”
“I have found the right humans. Count me in.”
“All right. Pack it up. We’ll take the shortcut and see what happens.”
_ _ _ _ _ _
“So, where are we?” Wink said.
“Southeast part of the city. A neighborhood of people who are well-off.”
“I can see that. Nice dwellings.”
“We won’t be able to stay here for long,” she said. “Rich people are more concerned with losing their possessions. Someone will notice us parked here and wonder why.”
Wink nodded. The van had dropped the one they thought was the leader here, and he had gone into a house. They had decided to let the others go and to check this one out.
“So, recon?”
“Yes. But you stay here. Humans won’t be common, you’ll be noticed. I will be, too, but if I don’t stay long, it won’t matter.”
“Think this is the guy doing it?”
“If not, he is a thread that will lead us further on. And no, I don’t want to call my sister.”
“What about your brother? He might be worried about us, too. It’s been more than two days. He will have missed us.”
“Leeth will be monitoring his communications. Droc will survive not knowing.
“I’ll be back in a few minutes. Try not to be noticed.”
She stepped out of the cart.
_ _ _ _ _ _
“We are spacing in that? That ship looks older than dirt,” Gunny said.
Gramps said, “Nah, I believe we created dirt first, then this. But not long after.”
Gunny shook her head.
Jo could understand the reaction: The ship did look as if it had been sideswiped by an asteroid and only partially repaired. The hull was dinged and pitted, and there were rainbow patterns that made it look as if the stressed stack had been annealed and retempered. It hung there in the vacuum like a relic from another century, an eighty-meter-long lozenge with rounded and melted edges. She couldn’t make out the name at this distance unaided, but a tag floater under the image identified the vessel as the Elfu Mwaka Valco.
What did that mean? Jo wondered. “Abandon all hope . . .”?
Formentara said, “I guess the owners figure if it disappears in the Chomolungma, it won’t be that much of a loss.”
“How much did you pay for our passage again, Rags?” Jo asked.
Cutter shook his head. “Enough so we could probably buy that ship, tear it down, and rebuild it.”
“And for that much, what do we get?”
“The pilot has taken that ship into the Void and come out more than a score of times.”
“Great. So he’s overdue to not come out?”
He held up one hand in Jo’s direction. “He’s what’s available. You are a volunteer, remember.”
It was just the seven of them: Rags, Formentara, Gunny, Gramps, Singh, Em, and herself—they’d left the unit back on Far Bundaloh with Lieutenant Atkins in charge. Atkins was an old hand and should have no trouble making sure the harvest was finished before he packed it up and went home.
Cutter said, “I believe I’ll go visit the fresher. I don’t want to die with a full bladder.”
He wandered off.
As they stared at the vessel via the orbit port’s viewscreen, Singh leaned over to Jo. “Pardon, sah, but I have heard the colonel referred to by the name ‘Rags’ several times. Does this have some special meaning I should know?”
Jo grinned. “Gramps tells the story better. All those decades of practice.”
Singh looked at Gramps. “Sah?”
The older man smiled. “Ah, yes, the warnom. I wasn’t there, you understand, but I have it from somebody who was.
“It was during the Nchi Uprising, on Earth. The colonel was a buck sergeant leading a DGF squad.
“Nchi was one of those short-lived countries on the African continent, used to be Kenya, Uganda, one of those near Lake Victoria. You were a mapmaker in that part of the world back then, you could always be assured of a steady income, the names and borders changed so frequently.
“Um. Anyway, the local warlord started slaughtering the residents, and it slopped over into the country next door. Cutter’s DGF—Detached Guerrilla Forces—unit was relatively close, stationed on Comoros, an island in the channel between Mozambique and Madagascar, and somebody decided it was a good idea for the GU to stick its nose into the situation.
“They figured a couple of platoons of the galaxy’s finest waving their hardware would scare the warlord enough so he’d stop shooting.
“Surprise, surprise, they were wrong. Guy was apparently crazy, and he threw everything he had at them. The end was never in question—the Galactic Union Army is never outgunned, certainly not by some pissant thug in the backwoods; however, there was a communications snafu, and Cutter’s squad was cut off from the rest of his platoon and surrounded by a goodly chunk of the warlord’s army. Dozen rifle toters against maybe a hundred Nchians, armed with everything from assault rifles to vehicle-mounted machine guns and mortars.
“Cutter called Support for a salvo of smart missiles, but somebody dropped the ball on that, and they were getting the crap shot out of them.
“They were in a town that recycled and refabbed a lot of clothes for export, cotton, hemp, natural fibers, like that. Cutter led his squad past one of the garment-recycling factories toward what looked like a thin spot in the enemy’s lines.
“They were almost there when somebody in Missile Support finally woke up and sent a spray of rockets in their general direction. The rockets did clear out a nice gap in the line, but one of them strayed and hit the recycling plant, blew it to kingdom come.
“There were apparently tons of old clothes waiting for the refabber slung in all directions, and a big smoldering clump of them fell right on top of Cutter and buried him.
“When the action cleared enough to see, Cutter had vanished.
“The enemy troops on the ground were closing in, and the GU squad was still looking, but they couldn’t find their sergeant.
“Now, what you need to know is, these Nchians were a superstitious bunch. They had a legend regarding mythical ancient creatures of the forest they called the Matambaa. According to the stories, these creatures were immortal, manlike, shaggy, covered with moss and whatnot, and if one of them caught you, you’d get dragged straight to their version of Hell to be tortured for all eternity.
“So Cutter, buried under a two-meter pile of shredded, still-burning fabrics, dug his way out, more pissed off than scared, cursing up a storm.
“Just as he cleared the pile, all wrapped up in smoking shirts and sheets and the like, beating at them with his hands to try and put out the remaining bits still on fire, the half dozen Nchians running point arrived.
“They saw him. One of them yelled, ‘Matambaa! Matambaa!’ and the six hit the brakes, spun around, and hauled ass.
“Cutter’s squad was near enough to catch the action, they saw the fleeing soldiers screaming in terror as Cutter appeared.
“As it turned out, in the Nchian language, ‘matambaa’ means ‘rags.’”
Singh grinned. “Ah. That’s a good one.”
“Might not be true,” Gunny said. “But you never let truth stand in the way of a great story . . .”
They looked at the ship hanging there in space.
“Ten to one in our favor,” Formentara said.
“We’ve gone places where the odds were worse,�
� Jo said.
“Gravity always wins in the end,” Em said.
_ _ _ _ _ _
The pilot who met them at the transfer lock was a raffish-looking man of maybe thirty. He was average height, had longish hair, and was well built under a thin, white, long-sleeved shirt. Over that he wore a sleeveless vest, with dark silk pants tucked into ship-soft jump boots, and he had a pistol slung low on his right hip. The holster looked like leather, or a pretty good imitation of it, a warm and dark brown, and there was a strap near the muzzle that looped around his leg just above the knee.
He glanced at Em, and if seeing a Vastalimi board his ship bothered him, Gunny couldn’t tell it.
Gunny looked at the holster. Come on. Guy must think he’s some kind of fast-draw expert, strapped down that way.
The weapon puzzled her. The butt looked to be some kind of dark wood, inset into a bright blue frame. Was that metal? The piece had a kind of stretched-open S-shaped shiny rod jutting out a couple of centimeters from a rounded section above the butt. External hammer. The trigger guard, trigger, and that back piece all appeared to be the same kind of bright blue material. The rest of it was covered by the holster.
“Interesting weapon,” she said.
“You must be ‘Gunny,’” he said. “I am Mão Unico, at your service. Here, have a look.”
The gun appeared in his hand almost as if by magic, and Gunny resisted the sudden urge to draw her own weapon. Too late . . .
She revised her opinion. He was fast.
He twirled the sidearm around in his grip and extended it to her butt first.
She didn’t know what it was, but she could see it was either a real antique or a good copy of a cowperson weapon, right out of a prespace historical drama.
“A revolver,” she said. It was heavy, probably twice the weight of her own pistol.
He grinned, showing nice teeth. “Good. Almost nobody gets that much.”
“It’s steel. How did they achieve that color? Anodizing?”
Unico said, “Not anodizing, it predates that. It depends on the polish beforehand. The polish, and different metals, give you various shades. The metal is put into an oven and heated, with the color coming from a fuel mix of charcoal—that’s partially burned wood—and types of animal bone. It’s not just decorative, but also helps protect the metal from further oxidation. This particular weapon also predates stainless steel, so it needed a coating to slow rust.”
“Really? Predates stainless?”
“Yes. It is a Colt Pocket Model percussion revolver, .31 caliber—that’s just under 8mm. The octagonal barrel is four inches—about ten centimeters—long. Made in NorAm circa 1849.
“Not the original finish, of course, I redo it myself every couple of years. I could plate it with a modern protectant, but that would be cheating.”
“In 1849? That’s old-style dating from what, three hundred years before spaceflight?”
“Close enough.”
“What kind of ammunition does it use?”
“Originally, it was a deflagrating chemical propellant called black powder. Predates smokeless gunpowder. I could make the original, but it’s messy and creates a lot of smoke on ignition, so I use a substitute called Pyrodex.”
“Look at her, she’s like a child in a candy kiosk,” Gramps said.
“Hush, old man. Go on.”
Unico said, “Each of the chambers in the cylinder—there are five of them—is like a miniature cannon. While the weapon is assembled, you measure the proper amount of propellant into each chamber, muzzle pointed skyward. Then you push a lead ball down on top of that—I don’t use lead, of course, but a malleable stacked ceramic that approximates the density and weight. There’s a little rod under the barrel there, see, a lever that lines up with the chamber. That forces the ball tightly against the propellant. Once that is done, you put a dab of grease on top, to prevent accidental chain-firing and to oil the rifling. The final steps are percussion caps, which can be put on via this slot.”
He pointed.
“Here let me show you how it breaks down for cleaning.”
She handed the weapon back to him. He did something with a control on the side, and the barrel came away. He removed the cylinder and showed it to her. “See, each of the chambers has a small copper nipple on the back, just there, and the nipples each have a tiny hole bored through it. A cap—that’s the little copper thing, there—fits over the nipple.
“To fire the weapon, the hammer is cocked, which rotates a loaded chamber underneath it. When the hammer strikes the cap, it ignites, sending a spark through the nipple into the chamber, where the Pyrodex ignites and blows the ball down the barrel.”
“Hard enough to do damage?”
“Kill you as dead as the best dart gun made. Velocity somewhere approaching three hundred meters a second. Sights are rudimentary, but it is as accurate as many combat sidearms out to fifty meters.”
Gunny shook her head. She’d seen and handled smokeless-powder weapons, there were still plenty of those around, but never anything this old. “God, that’s—that’s archaic! How long does it take to reload that cylinder?”
“A few minutes. The second-fastest way is to carry a spare already loaded. It can be replaced in a few seconds.”
Gunny was still amazed. “Ah can’t believe anybody carries something like this! Five shots? Ten, if you are lucky? What if you run into more enemies than that?”
“Well, there’s this . . .”
He came up with his other hand holding a 6mm dart pistol he must have hidden under his vest. “Faster than a reload is a second gun.”
Em whickered. “Two guns? Devious lot, you humans.”
“That is the absolute truth,” Jo said.
“Maybe later you can shoot it,” Unico said to Gunny. “I have a range in the cargo bay.”
“I’d like that,” she said. “Assuming we live that long.”
TWENTY
When she returned to the cart, Wink Doctor was slumped, keeping, literally, a low profile.
“These are the most uncomfortable seats I can dredge up from recent memory.”
“Not built for humans,” she said. “The designer probably never expected one would use it. If it makes you feel better, I don’t find it comfortable, either.”
“So, what’s what?”
“I was not able to see much directly. I connected to our borrowed com’s search function and determined that the dwelling at this address is listed as belonging to someone named Frowmasc. A background search on him says that he is an importer of offworld electronic components used in trash-compacting control systems.”
He nodded. They had not found their own coms, nor their earbuds, but the dead Vastalimi had a couple of coms they weren’t using.
“My. That sounds . . . exciting.”
“On the face of it, it is rather dull; however, there are reports, unverified, that Frowmasc’s company might be importing things other than common electronic parts, including certain recreational chemicals that are illegal here.”
“Ah. The man who came to check on a kidnapping and who caused a warehouse to be blown up is a criminal? Imagine that.”
“We should move this vehicle to another location.”
She waved her hand over the control panel. The cart’s engine came online. “We need to park somewhere we can see the dwelling’s entrance but far enough away from here so we won’t be noticed by the same set of neighbors.”
“Another surveillance.”
“Yes. Either Frow will go somewhere, or somebody will come to visit him, and we will have another trail to follow.”
“Works for me. Was there any reason this guy might be responsible for the illness?”
“Nothing apparent. Save that he was involved in our capture and covering up the deaths connected to it, and we are inv
estigating the cause of the illness. That appears to be more than coincidence.”
“Yeah, I’d have to say it seems as if somebody doesn’t want us to go down that path.”
The day had been sunny but a bit cooler, so they didn’t have to find any shade to park in, but there were heavy gray clouds in the distance and moving in their direction. Rain coming, Kay knew, and with some lightning. This was good for them—The People did not mind rain all that much, but it would cut down on those who’d be out and about, so it might be safe to stay in one spot longer.
If a neighbor approached and asked why they were parked there, Kay would offer that the cart had malfunctioned, and that they were waiting for a repairperson to arrive.
Wink would be a brow-raiser, of course. Locals might be used to seeing a cart in need of repair now and then, but one with a human in it? Not so much.
Still, there was a trail here, and short of backing off and calling in her sister, Kay could not see another way to stay on it.
They would just have to see how it went. With luck, it wouldn’t take too long for something useful to happen.
They were still in motion, looking for a spot to stop the cart, when Wink said, “Hello?”
“What?”
“We got company.”
Kay glanced at the rearview camera’s feed. Indeed, a vehicle, larger than theirs, had arrived at the Frow dwelling.
“Never a dull moment,” Wink said. “He must have called somebody.”
The new arrival was pointed in their direction. Kay pulled to the side of the street and stopped a couple of blocks away.
A pair of males they had not seen before alighted from the vehicle, a gray, six-passenger fan-wheeler. Such carts rolled where there were roads, and if water travel was necessary, could retract the wheels in favor of repeller fans. Kay hoped that wouldn’t happen since their cart did not have that capability.
The two males went to the dwelling, out of sight.
A minute later, they returned, with, presumably, the one she had identified as the dwelling’s owner, Frowmasc.
