“Are you okay, Sergeant Major?” Sommerkorn asked again.
“Mmmhmm,” Price said. “Just got my bell rung.” He rolled over to his stomach. “Half of my systems have warning lights on now, too.” He got to his hands and knees.
“You want to call it off?” Sommerkorn asked.
“Fuck no,” Price said. “I’m going to kill you for that!” Without standing up, Price sprinted for Sommerkorn, head down, augmenting his steps with taps on his jumpjets for extra speed.
Sommerkorn had a heart beat to realize this was the bull rush he’d been warned about, and he triggered his jumpjets to go over the CASPer hurtling at him. He almost made it, but Price saw him rising and stood up. The top of Price’s CASPer hit Sommerkorn’s boots like a runaway train, and he spun out of control, head over heels. He killed his jets, but had more momentum than he could control, and his world spun violently; Sommerkorn completely at least three summersaults—it may have been four—and crashed down onto his stomach.
“In the event of a crash, please wait until all motion ceases…” The words of the sub-orbital flight stewardess flashed through his mind as he lay on the ground, stunned. Everything hurt. He had heard a crack and was pretty sure the restraining straps had broken at least one of his ribs on impact. He hadn’t thought his head could reach the front of the CASPer, but apparently it could; warm blood trickled down from his forehead into his left eye, making everything fuzzy. He blinked several times, and his vision slowly cleared to reveal a series of malfunctioning stoplights. No, not stoplights, it was the warning and caution system. He’d never seen that many yellow lights in a CASPer, and the red lights were his first two, ever. The front camera system was out—it showed as ‘destroyed’—and the jumpjet in his right boot was also down. As hard as Price had hit him, losing the jumpjet wasn’t much of a surprise. The surprise was that he didn’t have more things broken. He hurt everywhere.
He heard voices and finally realized they were talking to him. “You okay in there?”
Sommerkorn nodded. When they repeated the question, it took a second for Sommerkorn to realize they couldn’t see into his suit. “Yeah,” he finally said. “I’m just gathering my thoughts.” He took another 20 seconds to make sure he was functioning again before he began moving. He didn’t want Price to hit him again before he was ready. Ready? Hell, he didn’t want Price to hit him like that again, ever. He remembered the sky going past, over and over, and then the earth-shattering stop. He wanted to avoid doing that again, more than anything else in the world.
Except losing. He didn’t want to lose…and all he needed was to knock Price down one more time. Preferably without getting run over again.
When someone started asking if he was okay again, he got his arms under him and raised himself up. First order of business, acquire the target. He found Price in the overhead monitor as he rose to his hands and knees. The sergeant major was right in front of him, about 35 feet away, and he had one foot braced and was leaning forward like a sprinter; Price obviously intended another bull rush as soon as Sommerkorn got up.
Sommerkorn started to rise, hoping he could get off the tracks before the train got there, but a third red light illuminated as the servo in his right knee failed, and he crumpled to the ground again.
He fell off to the right and ended up with Price on his left side. As his thoughts cleared, Sommerkorn realized it was a much better position. He could still pull this off. If he could get Price to charge, he could drop to his hands and knees, and rise to trip him up again. It was a good thing the servo had failed—if he’d stood up, he wouldn’t have been able to see Price coming with the forward cameras out, and he wouldn’t have known when to move.
He locked his right knee joint, brought his left leg up underneath him, and struggled to his feet. Sure enough, Price immediately rushed toward him, piling up the momentum.
Sommerkorn dropped to his hands and toes in a bridge position; he couldn’t do hands and knees with his leg locked.
Price hadn’t survived as many battles as he had over his career by being stupid, though. Although it had looked like he was out of control, he wasn’t, and he slammed on the brakes. Sommerkorn realized that, as close to the ground as he was, all Price had to do was slap him down onto a knee, and the sergeant major would win. Desperate for anything that would give him a chance, Sommerkorn pulled his left leg up on top of his right leg in a figure four position, with his boot facing away from Price. As the sergeant major braked to a halt alongside Sommerkorn, he dug his fingers into the ground and triggered his operational jumpjet. His body pivoted around on his hands, with his legs snapping around to cut Price’s legs out from under him. The sergeant major hit the ground on his back again.
It was over; Sommerkorn had won.
He struggled to his feet, finding new pains in his back and neck. Whiplash. Great. He hobbled over to where Price lay, dragging his right leg. “You guys leave in two days for the Trigar system,” Sommerkorn said. “You’ll have to hurry so you can get the suits upgraded in time.”
Computer Operations, Golden Horde HQ, Uzbekistan, Earth
“I’ve got something!” Corporal Bolormaa Enkh exclaimed. “A ship just transited into the solar system, and it made a call with some old codes. We’re going to be able to break this one.”
“Do we know who it was sent to?” Major Good asked.
“Yes, sir! The Veetanho ship answered it, but it used the new code, so we don’t know what they said.”
“Did the new ship reply?”
“It did, but it switched to the new codes.”
Good swore. “Is the new ship a Veetanho ship, too?”
“No, sir. They checked in as a Bakulu trader.”
“So, all we got is just their call checking in?”
“Yes, sir,” the corporal replied, with a broad smile on her face. “It’s much better than that, though.”
“What do you mean?”
“When they checked in, the Bakulu said they had the latest intercepts of our messages for them from the Information Guild.”
“Our messages?” Major Good asked.
“They said they had the latest Four Horsemen intercepts.”
“Good catch, Corporal. Colonel Enkh is going to want to know this, right away.”
“I will brief her on the transit to the Trigar system—we leave in 30 minutes.”
“Good luck,” Major Good said. “I have a feeling you’re going to need it.”
Downtown Tashkent, Uzbekistan, Earth
The pillow buzzed, waking Major Good later that night. He reached under his pillow and removed a small box that vibrated a second time before flashing a code. 03A. Someone or something had deactivated his security system. He slid from his bed and scooped up a nerve gun and a hypervelocity pistol from the bedside table.
Major Good hoped it was a common criminal. If so, the thief was welcome to anything he had downstairs; everything of real value was in his room. Several cameras attached to pressure plates would take the thief’s photo for Good to give to the police tomorrow. If the intruder wasn’t a thief, though, or if the thief came upstairs, he was ready.
A converted attic, his room only had one entrance. While it would be a liability in the event of a fire or if he needed to escape suddenly, it simplified the room’s defenses immensely. Good padded to the other side of the bed where the side table had been pulled three feet away from the wall and knelt behind it. The small table doubled as a shooter’s rest, and he leveled both pistols at the door, nerve gun in his left hand and hypervelocity pistol in the right.
Good didn’t have long to wait. A small red light over the door strobed once; someone was on the landing just outside the door. His heart pounding, he tried to keep his breathing slow and focused, and he did his best to ignore the sweat trickling down the small of his back. His eyes were locked on the door as he went over his options. He would stun the intruder if he could safely do so; he would kill him if he couldn’t.
The door handle t
urned deliberately, completely silent, and the door rotated inward slowly. Good waited for the ambient light from downstairs to outline the target, but there was no one there. What? That couldn’t be; someone had disconnected the surveillance system downstairs, and the door hadn’t opened itself. There was an intruder in the room, but Good was unable to see him! What could make someone invisible, to the point where they didn’t block light? Nothing he knew of. His adrenaline spiked as he realized he was spectacularly outclassed; despite his electronic systems and warning measures, he wasn’t getting out of this alive.
The smallest whisper of cloth-on-cloth came from the foot of the bed, and his eyes jumped at the sound. Good saw movement and recognized his mistake; he had unconsciously assumed the intruder to be a Human and had looked at the upper half of the doorway; the creature stalking him was much shorter. The alien was cat-like in appearance, but even walking on two legs was no more than 22 inches or so in height. Nestled behind the side table, Good hadn’t been able to look low enough to see the alien as it entered the room.
A Depik. There was a Depik in the room with him. The tiny aliens were the ultimate assassins—small, incredibly fast, and entirely without morals where it came to killing anyone that wasn’t a Depik. Their skin also had a chameleon-like capability that allowed them to blend in with any background. A nocturnal species, its eyes were optimized for night vision; they could see far better than Good in the dark. The Depiks also didn’t have nerves like Humans, so the nerve gun was worthless. Good would get one shot, at most, and then one of them would be dead. If he didn’t kill the Depik with his first shot, he doubted the assassin would give him time for a second.
Good knew the Depik was probably about to spring onto the bed as a prelude to killing his sleeping self. The only good thing about the Depik’s size was it couldn’t see onto the bed; it didn’t know Good wasn’t still in it. If it jumped onto the bed, though, it would know, and Good would only have a fraction of a second to kill it before it bolted. If he missed, which was entirely possible with the target’s small size and ultra-quick reflexes, he wouldn’t last three more seconds. Good looked longingly at the door, every fiber in his body screamed for him to run for it, but he knew there wasn’t any way he could beat the Depik down the stairs and out the door.
But he didn’t have to.
He set the pistol on the bed, swapped out the nerve gun, and threw it out the door. Before he could even pick up the pistol and get it aimed at the doorway, a tiny shape materialized in the doorway. He didn’t see the alien run up; suddenly, it was just there.
Good’s left hand met his right in a two-handed grip on the pistol, steadying his aim, and Good put the sights on the alien. The Depik, recognizing its error, spun and bounced, faster than Good would have believed possible. He was already pulling the trigger, though, and the gun fired. The round caught the assassin in mid-spring. Although it missed the Depik’s head where Good had been aiming, it struck the creature in the stomach as it leaped, and the supersonic round blew the alien out the door. Good heard it bounce on the stairs at least twice, the sounds barely audible over his pounding heart.
Good was torn—should he stay in cover and wait to see if the Depik came back to finish what it started, or should he go check on the alien? His bowels threatened to betray him at the thought of leaving the safety of the side table, but not checking on the alien was worse; if it was still alive, there was no telling what it might do. Keeping the pistol pointed low in the doorway, Good advanced toward the door. As he reached the doorway, he heard scratching noises from downstairs. He crept to the stairs and peeked over the top; the Depik was trying to drag itself to where its jacket lay in front of the door. The alien’s back legs didn’t appear to be working, and the tile made it hard for its claws to get purchase.
“Don’t move!” Major Good yelled. Depiks were incredibly expensive to hire, not only because of their physical skills, but also because of their unwavering focus on mission accomplishment. They would complete the mission—whatever the cost—even if it killed them. If the mission was to kill Good, it was entirely possible the creature had a bomb or maybe the triggering mechanism for an explosive device in its jacket.
Good fired, the round blowing a hole in the floor to the right of the Depik. It also cracked the tile, which the Depik hooked a claw into and used to drag itself closer to the coat. His hands shaking, Good fired again, this time blowing a hole in the floor to the left of the alien. The creature’s movements were slowing, but it still had the strength to pull the coat over and one of its paws reached inside it.
“No!” Good yelled, pounding down the stairs toward the assassin. He knew he’d be too late, so he stopped and aimed again. Before he could fire, the alien pulled out something small and stuck it in its mouth.
Good fired; a third hole was torn through his floor. He aimed again, but the creature stilled.
Weapon still pointed at the alien, Good crept down the stairs. Something wet squished under his bare foot. Judging by the feel, it was a piece of organ; Good really didn’t want to know. He made it to the creature, avoiding the blood smear the rest of the way.
The intel officer checked the alien; it was dead. Although there was no doubt in Good’s mind the pistol round would have been fatal, apparently the assassin hadn’t wanted to take any chances.
No Depik had ever been captured while on a mission, another reason for their exorbitant fees, and the one sent to kill Good wasn’t going to be the first. In fact, Good couldn’t remember anyone ever killing one and bringing in the body. He felt pretty good about himself for about 10 seconds, then he noticed the assassin’s body was collapsing in on itself and losing all its form and structure. Within 30 seconds, all that remained was an amorphous blob of goo surrounded by the Depik’s clothes. Shit.
Sighing, Good went back up the stairs to get dressed prior to calling the base. He turned on the light as he entered the room and stopped in shock. Embedded in the wall, at a level even with his eyes, was a long throwing knife. From where it protruded from the wall, it couldn’t have missed his head by more than an inch or two.
There was a green substance on the blade. As he watched, a drop fell to the carpet, where it hissed as it melted the fibers.
Major Good stood, open-mouthed, as another drop fell to the carpet. He’d never even seen the assassin throw it.
The Lyons Den, Houston, Texas, Earth
“Thanks for meeting with me today,” Major Good said. “You need to be aware of this.” He slid a large manila envelope across the table. “It is our latest intelligence assessment.”
“Thanks,” Steve Rath said. “I’m not sure what you want me to do with it, though. I’m just the acting manager of Asbaran Solutions. Colonel Shirazi is currently off-planet, and I’m not sure when he’ll be back. Hell, I’m not even sure if he’ll be back, for that matter.”
“It’s important you take a look at this,” Good replied. “At a minimum, you’ll want to raise the security level for your senior officers, including yourself. There are forces at work that seek to bring down our companies.”
“I’m passingly aware of that,” Rath said with a wry smile. “They already tried to financially ruin us, but we caught it in time and have reversed the damage they did.”
“I know,” Good replied, “just like I know you still have a Cochkala working for you doing your financial management. You need to protect him, too. He is very valuable, and they will certainly kill him if they become aware he is still alive. Also, having failed financially, we suspect they will now resort to measures a little more…extreme.”
“What do you mean by extreme?”
“An assassin tried to kill me last week.”
“What? Last week? What planet were you on?”
“Open the package,” Good urged; “there are pictures.” Steve opened the envelope and leafed through the contents before pulling out three full-color, Tri-V pictures. “What do you think?” Good asked.
“I’m not sure what to thi
nk,” Rath said. “It looks like a dead cat—maybe a Persian?—with most of its guts removed, a knife in the wall, and some melted carpet. What does this mean?”
“First of all, the cat is actually a Depik, which is a race that is often hired to perform assassinations. They are by far the best assassins in the galaxy. The knife in the wall just missed my head; the melted carpet is from the toxin that was on the knife. One drop would have killed me within seconds. It was formulated to kill Humans. Oh, and to answer your earlier question, I was here, on Earth. The pictures were taken at my home in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. If I didn’t have a galaxy-class security system, I would be dead right now.”
“A galaxy-class security system? Why do you need one of those? What do you do for the Horde, anyway?”
“I provide…intelligence support…for the company. I suspect someone saw me trying to bug some of the alien ships in the Tashkent starport. Apparently, they don’t want me to know what they’re doing.”
“What are they doing?”
“I can’t confirm, but it looks like they’re trying to bring down all of the Horsemen.”
“Bring down the Horsemen?” Rath’s jaw dropped and remained open.
“Well, it actually looks like all of the Earth-based mercs are taking hits, but it seems the Horsemen have received special attention. I suspect that is because we are the leaders of the Earth-based mercenary companies. Take us down, and the rest will fall.”
“But why? Why would someone do that?”
It could be a number of reasons. Over the last hundred years since we joined the Union, we’ve cut into the mercenary business. Deeply. It’s possible some of the other races haven’t appreciated losing work to us and are trying to push Humanity out of the business. That’s the assumption I’m going on, although there are a number of other possibilities.”
“Like what?”
“It’s possible one of the other races is xenophobic and just wants to kill us off. Who knows?” Good shrugged. “It’s also possible these are all just random events, but there are too many of them stacking up for me to believe that.”
The Golden Horde (The Revelations Cycle Book 4) Page 15
