by Chris Bunch
One stood, holding up a hand.
Riss and Goodnight stopped.
The man tapped his chest, where there was a plas badge clipped on, held out his hand for ID.
Riss smiled, shot him.
His partner’s mouth dropped, and he reached for his holstered blaster. M’chel cut him down before Goodnight had his gun up.
Chas smiled, bowed her toward the lock.
Riss smiled back, and entered, Goodnight behind her.
The lock door closed, air hissed, and Goodnight turned on his outside mike.
“How do you want to hit them?”
Riss frowned, as if she couldn’t hear, opened the faceplate of her suit.
Chas Goodnight opened his as well. “What’s the matter with — ”
Riss hit him, quite hard on the forehead, with the heel of her palm. Goodnight’s head banged against the inside of his helmet, and he collapsed.
“Poor bastard,” Riss said. “But nobody should have to live with what you’re thinking about doing.”
She dragged him to a corner of the lock.
“Now, you just lie there, like a good little casualty for a few seconds. I’ll be right back, as soon as I finish my own shift at being a prime fool.”
She closed her faceplate, opened the lock’s inner door, taking a pair of grenades from her backpack.
The reception area belonged on another world, one with a sun and air. There were a pair of men, and a woman, waiting to be summoned, trying to look casual on very modern office furniture.
A receptionist looked up, smiled.
“You wish?” came through Riss’s outside com system.
Riss didn’t answer, but thumbed the first grenade, rolled it into the reception area, then the second.
The second, a blast grenade, detonated, and men and women screamed. Then the first, a gas grenade, exploded.
Smoke spread through the room, and M’chel saw people holding their throats, staggering, dropping.
Riss forgot about them, ran down the hall toward the inner suite.
A man came out of an office, looking bewildered, saw M’chel and her gun, reached for a tiny gun in a shoulder harness.
Riss shot him, rolled another grenade into his office, went on into a central meeting area.
There was a large double door, real wood. Riss shot it down.
Inside was a conference room with a long table, and three or four men and women, intent on papers, screens glowing around them. They turned at the blasts, and one came to his feet.
Riss recognized none of them.
Except Reg Goodnight.
For an instant M’chel wished real life was a romance, and she could have a second to tell Goodnight he was finally paying some past-due debts.
But it wasn’t, and she blew his head off, then threw two grenades her thoroughly conditioned fingers told her were fragmentation into the room, and was headed back toward the lock, spraying bolts as she went.
She was chanting as she ran — “What an idiot, what an idiot, what an idiot.” Alarms dinned.
M’chel reached the lock, hit the cycle button. Chas had stumbled to his feet, and was retching.
“Close it up, soldier,” she ordered. “And don’t puke in your suit.”
He nodded, numbly.
Riss snapped her faceplate shut.
The lock hissed the last of the air out, and the noise of the alarms went away.
Riss saw suited men, carrying blast rifles, coming up the steps toward them, and shot the first three, ducked as a bolt ricocheted off the steel beside her.
Somehow Chas, staggering, semiconscious, had his blaster up, was shooting, not accurately, but close enough to drive the guards to cover.
Other blaster bolts were spitting down, from above her, and she saw the enormous Grok, kneeling and firing systematically into the compartments in the wall across the canyon.
He suddenly stopped and, moving faster than anyone as big as he was should be able, ran along the top walkway, sliding out of his pack as he did.
Riss couldn’t figure what he was doing, didn’t have time to wonder as she pushed Goodnight up steps, toward the same level Grok was on.
Grok was about one hundred meters away from her, fumbling with his pack.
Riss suddenly realized what he was doing.
A hundred meters below him was the huge cruiser. There was a ramp, and an open lock into the control cabin just below Grok.
Grok now had the pack whirling like an ancient sling. He let it go.
It sailed far out, hit one of the cruiser’s nose stabilizers, bounced onto the ramp, and then the grenade Grok had activated went off, setting off the other explosives in the pack.
Flame balled, rolled into the lock, and Riss saw fire spurt out.
Grok was running back toward her, and had Goodnight by one arm.
None of the raiders were paying any attention to the three as they scrambled up the last ramp, intent on their own catastrophe.
Smoke was boiling up from the great ship below as the three pushed through the hatch onto the moon’s surface.
M’chel wanted to collapse, but there was no time.
Smoke was leaking through the plas covers.
It took us two tries, but I think we finally got the bastard, she thought.
They staggered about two hundred meters, and Riss saw a nice, safe, deep crater. They piled into it, crouched against the rock, feeling vibrations shake them as explosions went off in the base.
Then the ground shook, as if an earthquake had struck, and a sheet of flame gouted up, ripping away the plas, a man-made volcano as the cruiser exploded, hell rolling through the raiders’ base.
The three found their feet, looked at each other.
Nobody reached for a com plug.
There weren’t any words just then.
They turned away, back toward the mountain, where Spada waited.
FIFTY-FIVE
Grok, shaking his head, came out of one of the Boop’s recreation rooms.
“There is such a thing as irony.”
“Oh?” Goodnight said, where he sat nursing a very large brandy and a purple-bruised forehead.
“The news ‘cast from Glace,” Grok said. “It was announced by the government today that the asteroid mining contract let to Transkootenay Mining has been canceled, due to inadequate performance.”
Then it hit him.
“That means we do not get paid, either!”
“Now, that’s irony,” Riss said. “Although I’m not laughing at the moment.”
“True irony,” Grok agreed. “Not to mention that we’ll never know who Murgatroyd was, or if we got all of them.”
“Probably not,” Riss said. “I doubt if that Mar Trac was on Moon Five. Nor whoever introduced this legislation.
“All we got were the operational sorts.”
“Like my brother,” Goodnight said, with a strange expression. “And most of the throat-cutters. But even some of them, those that were offworld, got a running start.
“If Reg had hung in place, stonewalling everybody with some kind of logical story for a couple of weeks, instead of cutting and running, he’d be in the catbird’s seat right now.”
“It doesn’t look like this is a nice, neat ending,” Riss agreed.
“All that time, wasted, lost,” Goodnight mourned. “Shit, shit, shit. Where’s King and Freddie? I want off this world, out of this system, so I can go feel sorry for myself.”
Riss, not wanting to bring up Reg, glanced out the port.
“Here they come. Let’s give them the bad news and scarper.”
But von Baldur seemed undisturbed, and King’s glowing smile didn’t diminish when they got the word.
“All right,” Riss said. “Either of you two bird-eating cats can explain why you aren’t sprinkling ashes on your heads.”
“First, this,” von Baldur said, holding up a large parcel. He took a huge bottle of champagne out of it.
“I didn’t know they had
methuselahs this far in the outback,” Chas said. “Let alone full of nice earth Taitinger champagne.”
“Open, pour, and I shall explain our unconcern about what the Foley System Government chooses to do,” von Baldur said.
“I got a little curious a few weeks ago,” King said, before the cork came out of the bottle.
“I went looking for diamonds. Diamonds, precious metals, and such, wondering what Transkootenay did with them.”
She nodded to Riss.
“Obviously your Kinnison rock sparked my interest.
“Imagine my surprise when we had a chat with a couple of staff mineralogists, and found Transkootenay was holding these precious metals right here on Mfir. I don’t know under what pretext, and if they’d always been doing that, or if this was something Mr. Goodnight started recently. But Glace didn’t have them, nor had they been shipped on to Transkootenay’s headquarters.
“Possibly Goodnight was keeping them as a departure bonus, or for emergency expenses. Not that it matters.
“Anyway, Friedrich and I went looking for these preciouses, and found them in a large vault in a downtown bank.
“I ‘just happened’ to have paperwork with me suggesting that we were the authorized representatives of Transkootenay Mining, and were here to expedite transshipment of said precious minerals to its proper owner.”
She pointed out a porthole.
“Those two armored lifters dripping with security guards coming in at the gate are taking care of the scutwork transferring all that lovely, lovely wealth into the Boop-Boop-A-Doop’s holds right now.”
“I shall be dipped,” Chas Goodnight said. “So we’re not broke.”
“We’re not broke,” King agreed.
“But what if somebody comes looking?” M’chel Riss asked.
“Those damnable raiders, stealing everything around!” von Baldur said.
“The thing I don’t know,” Riss said, “is what the hell’s Cerberus’s position was … is … in all of this.”
“An excellent question,” Baldur said. “It is apparent they weren’t in league with Murgatroyd. Fairly apparent, anyway, since we didn’t find any other tracks other than that chat Nowotny had. I shall discount the bomb, which might have been intended just to frighten us a bit. I guess they were just sniffing around the fringes, looking for a profit.”
“I’d just as soon figure they were trying to kill us with that bomb,” King said. “And if you hadn’t been the sneaky sort, we would have been all over the walls.
“It’ll give me motivation the next time we run into the shitheels.”
“Fine with me,” Riss said. “There’s nothing wrong with having a good enemy to dream about.”
Goodnight, still a bit concussed, moving carefully, flipped the cork off with his thumbs, let champagne boil up for an instant, then started filling the glasses.
“So there are happy endings, after all,” M’chel said dreamily.
“Of course there are,” Baldur said comfortingly.
“I never doubted it for a minute,” Jasmine King said.
Chas Goodnight raised his glass. “To crime!”
The four members of Star Risk, ltd., drank deeply.
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Text Copyright © 2002 by Chris Bunch
All rights reserved.
Published in association with Athans & Associates Creative Consulting
Cover image(s) © 123rf.com
Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.
eISBN 10: 1-4405-5374-2
eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-5374-5
