Star Risk, LTD.: Book One of the Star Risk Series

by Chris Bunch

  A third, a dopplering device used in model aircraft competition to spoof tracking missiles, now power-jumped, ‘cast artificial “window” in their flight path.

  “Two minutes, maybe,” Jasmine said.

  Over the static-wave, they dimly heard Tormal Citadel broadcast something.

  But they never knew what it was, as the lim came down fast, dead center over the roof, and banged in for a landing.

  Riss, Grok, and Baldur piled out, ran toward the gun turrets. As they’d hoped, the guns — a multiple-barreled auto cannon in each turret — had cutoffs installed, so no eager robot could shoot his fellow turret apart.

  Baldur and Grok had small necklace charges around their necks. They flattened against the turrets, and draped a charge around the gun barrel, pulled a fuse. Grok thundered back to the lim as Baldur planted a second necklace charge, then followed him.

  Riss had a larger coil of explosives, and wound it around the base of the fourth turret. She, too, set her fuse and doubled back to the lifter.

  “Off and keep it very, very close,” she said, as she jumped back in the lim, and the door slid down.

  Jasmine nodded, intent on the controls. She lifted the lim clear, slid it to the edge of the roof, and over the edge.

  A blast of gunfire went overhead as two turrets tried vainly to depress their guns enough to reach her.

  M’chel’s eyes were on her watch’s sweep second.

  “And eight … six … four … three … two … bang.”

  There were actually four bangs, three moderate, the fourth quite impressive.

  King, needing no orders, took the lim back to the roof.

  The damage was impressive.

  Three of the turrets had their gun barrels blown off. The fourth had been torn out of the steel-and-concrete roof, and had vanished somewhere overside.

  There were bits of the cannon’s breech still intact, and, clearly, stairs leading down into the fortress.

  “Just call me ebenemael,” Riss said. “Do I know how to open a can, or what?”

  No one bothered to answer. King got out of the lim, and crouched behind a ventilator, blaster ready.

  The other three pulled on gas masks, slid headsets and throat mikes into place, and ran hard for the hole where a gun turret had been, and down its stairs.

  All of them had small charges looped around their necks, guns in hand.

  “About here,” Riss said, and slapped a charge against a door.

  The three went down half a flight, and the charge went off, spinning the door into a hallway.

  They ran back up, and into the corridor, ignoring the ENTRANCE FORBIDDEN Sign.

  They came to a pair of doors. One said: CONDEMNED PRISONER SECTION, ABSOLUTELY NO ADMITTANCE.

  Riss blew the door open, and they ran down another corridor.

  At the end of the corridor was a steel capsule, and in it, a man. He was speaking into a microphone.

  Riss and Baldur knelt, launchers aimed, and fired at the capsule’s window. Grenades arced out, crashed through the not very bulletproof glass, and went off. The guard grabbed his throat, convulsed, went down.

  The raiders went down the hall, and Baldur dragged the guard’s body out of the control capsule.

  “About like other installations I have … hem, read about,” he said, fingers flying over sensors.

  He pressed his mask close against the microphone the guard had been using, twisted a selector to a position marked CELLBLOCK.

  “Inmates, get away from your doors,” he said. “Goodnight, get moving!”

  He jumped back out of the capsule, as a central door opened.

  There were rows of cells, their doors sliding open.

  Bewildered men and women, some half-dressed, stumbled out.

  One of them was the man Riss recognized as Chas Goodnight.

  “Let’s haul!” she ordered.

  “Right. But what about — ”

  A door came open, and a guard stepped out, gun in hand.

  “Shit,” Riss muttered, kneeling, blaster up, in two hands.

  She shot him in the chest, saw him fall, and she and Goodnight were running back to where Grok and Baldur waited.

  “What about them?” Goodnight managed, jerking a thumb at the other prisoners.

  “Good confusion factor,” Riss said.

  They went back down the corridor past the control capsule, reached the door just as a stair door opened and four guards came out.

  Very suddenly Chas Goodnight became a blur. Riss’s gun was lifted, the guards’ blasters were leveled. The blur smashed into one guard; spun, another was down; knocking a third sideways, and a fourth’s neck snapped, the crack very loud to Riss’s ears.

  The blur came back beside them, then resolved into Chas Goodnight.

  Riss one-handed a gas grenade off her harness, held one sensor down, pushed the other, and tossed the grenade into the midst of the sprawled men.

  They went up the stairs into the shattered turret, were on the roof, pelting toward the waiting lim.

  King was up, behind the controls as they rolled in, the lim already lifting clear of the roof.

  She sent the lim diving off the roof, down into the valley below, then, at full, burn-out-the-drive-who-gives-a-rat’s nostril speed, toward the small city where a well-paid merchant skipper was holding his ship on a ten-minute tick, supposedly awaiting last-minute orders from the ship’s owner.

  Riss was breathing as if oxygen was a new, delightful experience.

  She unclipped her harness, sagged back on the seat, considered their prize.

  Chas Goodnight was equally slumped against the jumpseat.

  Even bearded and not that clean, Riss had to admit he was one of the more handsome men she’d seen.

  He noted her attention, and smiled gently.

  “Now, what I could do to a steak or three,” he said, and Riss’s slightly romantic thoughts died.

  Baldur must have been reading her expression, for he chortled.

  “Thanks,” Goodnight said. “I owe you.”

  “That is correct,” Grok said.

  “So what do I do to pay you back?”

  “Nothing much,” Riss said. “Just give us a good job recommendation.”

  TEN

  “This,” Friedrich von Baldur said, “is a hell of a place.”

  “Little joke?” Grok said. “I think I have read someplace that Sheol equals hell?”

  “Little joke,” M’chel agreed. “Very little.”

  Chas Goodnight was staring out at what the Foleyites, or however they labeled themselves, called the outskirts of a city.

  Sheol. Population 5,000, days. Who knew how many, or was sober/straight enough to count nights?

  If Sheol ever had a city planning board, they were never among those who were straight. Sheol grew as it grew, and no one cared, since the minute the lodes went dry, the miners would move on. Sheol’s population would drop to five senile prostitutes, four bartenders with delirium tremens, three arteriosclerotic retired miners, two historians and one city manager.

  Here were shacks, with large signs: LET US ASSAY, SELL YOUR SAMPLES; ADVANCE ON GOOD SAMPLES; GRUBSTAKE YOU AGAINST YOUR NEXT BIG STRIKE; and, as always in any mining town: PAWNSHOP, WE’LL TAKE CARE OF YOUR VALUABLES WHILE YOU’RE PROSPECTING.

  There were lots with battered ships, some of which might actually be practical for mining, supply houses with used gear from those who’d guessed wrong, and new supplies for those who hadn’t guessed at all yet.

  Here and there were houses of the few citizens in service industries not battening off the asteroids.

  As their rented lifter got closer to what passed for city center, there were streets entirely devoted to various forms of sin.

  In the middle of one such blinking, flashing row of iniquities, some of which were yet to be invented, sat, like a prim maiden with her legs crossed in a whorehouse: MINER’S AID SOCIETY.

  There appeared to be no one inside.

  “
Now this,” Baldur announced heartily, “is my kind of place.” A delicate pink tongue came out, touched his lips. “It smells of credits. Loose credits, just waiting to leap into our pockets.”

  • • •

  Reg Goodnight stared in incredulity.

  “But I thought you were — ”

  “Rumors of my execution,” Chas said dryly, “were thankfully exaggerated.” He looked across the desk, only approximately big enough to land a starship on, then around the paneled suite. “Well, aren’t you gonna leap into your brother’s arms, or go kill a prodigal sheep or whatever it was?”

  Reg came around the desk, and embraced his brother.

  M’chel thought it took a bit of study to tell the two men were related. They had the same lank bone structure, the same lean build. But where Chas’s face was weatherbeaten, with easy smile lines, Reg clearly didn’t get out in the open much, and he’d started to go a bit to fat. He was also balding a bit, and his fingernails were well dined on.

  Where Chas wore a shirt and trousers an engineer or outdoorsman might choose, Reg was most carefully tailored and trimmed.

  He looked exactly like what he was — a very sharp executive, who was also very harried.

  He turned away from his brother, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand.

  “You said,” he said to Baldur, “that you had a surprise, and that it was personal. But I never dreamed — ”

  “That’s the best kind of surprise, isn’t it?” Riss said.

  “Well, yes. Yes, of course,” Reg said, almost stammering. He turned back to Chas. “How did you get out?”

  “These people were kind enough to rescue me.”

  “Well, thank you,” Reg managed. “Thank you from the bottom of my heart. I assume you didn’t do it for charity, and I’ll be happy to meet any fee you want, to the limits of my resources.”

  “We do not want any credits from you,” Baldur said. “Only from Transkootenay.”

  Goodnight turned suddenly cold, and now M’chel could definitely see the resemblance between the two brothers.

  “Go on,” he said, voice flat, neutral.

  • • •

  “Should we have been more subtle?” Grok asked.

  “Why?” Baldur said. “There were no witnesses, and I was carrying an anti-bug.”

  “That is not what I meant,” Grok said.

  “I think what our furred friend means,” M’chel said, “is should we have put it less blatantly than ‘in return for your brother’s ass, we’d like to be at the top of the list for your security contract’?”

  “Why?” Baldur asked again. “We do not tart around; we do not expect him to do so either.”

  M’chel looked at Grok, shrugged.

  “Hell if I know if Freddie blew the pitch,” she said. “I’ve never done this kind of business before, either.”

  “Perhaps we should have let his brother negotiate?” Grok tried.

  “That’s a terrible idea,” M’chel said. “We don’t know if Chas has a silver tongue, and, as far as we know, as soon as we give him leave, he’ll be off on his galaxy-wide thieving and could give a rat’s elbow if we starve.”

  “Bit of a pity,” Baldur said. “We could use someone of his talents.”

  “Speaking of which,” M’chel said, “where is our bouncing young bester tonight?”

  “Out,” Baldur said. “He asked Jasmine if she wanted to help him find a place where you might not be ptomained to death.”

  “Just a lonely guy,” M’chel said. “Wanting to keep a lonely gal from being lonely.”

  She snickered. Chas Goodnight, on the flight from Tormal, had made it clear he was interested in Riss, and wouldn’t mind waking up next to her at all.

  Riss, being a polite sort, hadn’t said that she’d had her days of pretty boys, and generally looked for a bit more these days, and had fobbed him off with the excuse she never fooled around on a job.

  She also hadn’t given her real reason, which was that on the flight she’d talked enough to Goodnight for her initial interest to fade, and to start thinking Chas had the moral makeup of a spider.

  “With Jasmine?” Grok said. “Now that might answer a question I’ve had.”

  “Which is?”

  “Whether or not she is a robot. I may have erred when I told Goodnight, when he asked where she’d come from, that Cerberus was her former employer, which service she left because they think her to be a robot.”

  “What would sex have to do with it?” M’chel asked. “Couldn’t a robot — which I don’t think Jasmine is — be programmed to screw like a mink?”

  • • •

  They were sitting very close together in a booth of a rather plush restaurant. The meal had been horrendously expensive, if not much more than adequate, and the wines had been worse.

  Chas Goodnight leaned over, and gently nibbled on Jasmine King’s earlobe.

  “That feels nice, Chas,” she said, in her perfect voice. “But it won’t get you anywhere.”

  “Why not?” Chas said seductively. “Don’t you want to be the first to help this poor boy recover from his near-death experience? Lovemaking is one of the best ways to reaffirm humanity.”

  “That’s true,” she said.

  “Not to mention that’d be a great way for me to express my thanks to you for saving me.”

  “That’s true, as well,” Jasmine said. “But no.”

  “Why not?” Chas flushed, realizing he was sounding like a pouty adolescent.

  “Because is enough of a reason, isn’t it?”

  “Well … I guess so.” Goodnight drank wine, tried again. “You know, I studied robots some time ago.”

  “That must have been interesting,” King said blandly.

  “It was. Especially the Prime Directives.”

  “In what way?”

  “Remembering the First Directive,” Chas said. “How is it? ‘A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.’ ”

  “So?”

  “Well, a psyche deprived is a damaged psyche, and therefore its owner would be harmed.”

  “So?” King said again.

  “Well, if a robot, say, were an incredibly lovely woman, and she didn’t want to make love to a good-looking man, thereby harming him, wouldn’t that be a violation of the First Directive?”

  “Yikh,” Jasmine said, drinking her wine and refilling it from the bottle in the bucket. “Who would want to go to bed with a robot, anyway?”

  “You didn’t answer my question,” Chas purred.

  “But what if that robot didn’t have the First Directive?” Jasmine asked. “Or the other two either?”

  “That … that’d be impossible! All societies require robots to have the Three Laws programmed into them.”

  “All societies?” Jasmine asked.

  “Everyone that I’ve heard of does,” Goodnight said.

  “And you’ve heard of every culture that happens to synthesize artificial beings? Every culture?”

  Goodnight looked deeply into her eyes. They were clear, deceit free. But he felt a shiver touch his spine.

  Jasmine smiled again.

  “Besides, if I have to be honest with you, and I truly don’t mean to hurt your feelings,” she said, patting his hand, “I never go to bed with a man who’s not as smart as I am.”

  Goodnight looked amazed. “But I’ve got a near-genius intelligence level.”

  “Which you don’t use.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “One instance,” Jasmine said. “You got caught stealing, and were thrown out of the army. You got caught again, and were about to be strangled.

  “Yet you propose to keep on the same track, even though your record hardly suggests you’ve made a successful career choice.”

  Goodnight, his romantic mood shattered, glowered at her.

  “You see?” Jasmine said. “Not only won’t you listen to logic, but you insist on letting your ego get all b
ruised and battered in the process.”

  “What do you want me to do?” Goodnight said. “Join you people or something?”

  She patted his cheek.

  “You could do much, much worse.”

  • • •

  “I’ve decided,” Reg Goodnight said, “to reconsider my original options for Transkootenay’s security provider.

  “I’ll be honest, since there’s only the five of you present, and admit a bit of my decision had to do with my brother deciding to join Star Risk, limited.

  “Not to mention that Cer — one of the other security services I invited to bid on this project has been most dilatory in providing me with a prospectus.

  “And your offer was most reasonable.

  “I propose that I, meaning Transkootenay Mining, offer Star Risk, limited, a tentative contract for six months service. You can have your lawyers go over the contract as soon as it’s drawn up, assuming you accept the general terms, but, in brief, I propose to offer you a traditional ‘no cure, no pay’ contract.

  “However, I do realize this is an expensive contract. The raiders are costing us a minimum of five million credits per day, which is intolerable, even for a company the size of Transkootenay.

  “You’ll be given half a million credits per diem, plus full expenses to the tune of two million credits per diem, said expenses to be vetted by Transkootenay’s business office, for a period of six E-months, during which time you are to attempt to discover these criminals who are attacking Transkootenay Mining, its employees and representatives, destroying Transkootenay’s equipment, and stealing valuable resources that are the legal property of Transkootenay Mining, as attested by a legally binding contract between Transkootenay Mining, and the Foley System Government.

  “At the end of that time, this contract may be renewed, in six E-month intervals.

  “Satisfactory completion of this contract will be rewarded with a minimum of ten million credits, plus bonuses for exceptional or early completion of the task.

  “These sums will be paid by the Foley System Government, routed through Transkootenay Mining.

  “Welcome aboard,” Reg Goodnight said sincerely.

  “And may you do Transkootenay as much good as you have my brother.”