Knight Errant

by Paul Barrett

  “You’ll invent the dummy dive, ‘cause that’s what you are,” Yoseph said, grabbing some more crackers.

  Patishi stuck out her tongue. “Takes one to know one.”

  “That’s enough,” Dona said. The tongue was a sure sign things were approaching the out-of-control point. “Finish up and I’ll bring out the cookies.”

  “Okay,” they said simultaneously, and then giggled. They began eating in silence, and Dona started for the kitchen to get the plate of cookies.

  “Hello, Mister Maratai,” she heard Tasha say from the living room. “You’re home early.”

  “We have to leave,” Yonath said, his voice tense.

  So, it’s finally happened, Dona thought as she walked toward the living room.

  No sooner had Yonath entered his house than four of the five men, clad in workman’s overalls, stepped out of the van and crossed the street. Two walked to the front door, and two strolled toward the backyard. In the back, they found a large, open sliding glass door. The men could hear the children’s voices as they discussed their day’s exploits. The leader signaled to his partner, who quickly took a small silver colored cylinder out of his pocket.

  “What’s going on?” Dona asked when she saw Yonath.

  “We need to leave. I saw Moran at work, and he may have recognized me.”

  “Moran? I thought he was dead.”

  “So did I. Tasha, get some clothes packed for all of us and get my go-bag.”

  “Yes, Sir.” Tasha bounded up the stairs.

  “Dona, get the kids ready. I have to make a call.”

  Dona headed for the kitchen as Yonath went to the house phone. His mobile had been unable to call out, which told him all he needed to know. He could only hope they hadn’t compromised his house line.

  “Come on, kids.” Dona stopped when a small metal object arced into the kitchen and landed at her feet with a hollow metallic thud. She bent to pick it up when it split open with a sharp pop. The gas hit her, and she collapsed to the floor. The children got out a startled cry before they were overcome and slumped in their chairs.

  At the same time, the front door burst open and two men moved in. Before Yonath could react, one of them fired a needle pistol. The dart hit Yonath in the neck. The bioengineered neurotoxin rendered him unconscious. He fell, the phone dropping from his hand. The attackers grabbed his inert body and dragged it into the kitchen.

  Dona lay on the floor next to the expended gas grenade. The children sat back in their chairs; Yoseph’s half-eaten sandwich lay on the floor where he had dropped it.

  “Gather them up. You, go find the maid and take her out.”

  They moved to their tasks. The man sent to neutralize Tasha got no further than the doorway when she appeared in front of him with a furious snarl.

  He hardly had time to register what was happening. With a feral yowl and a quick thrust, her three-inch claws sank into the man’s torso. She raked through his stomach. Entrails spilled to the carpet. She withdrew her hand and slashed across his throat and jaw. Blood sprayed. He released a wet gurgling sound as he fell to the floor.

  “Holy shit!” The second man yelled as he backed up, slamming into the glass door. Tasha raised the pistol in her left hand and fired. The beam pierced his right eye through the iris and punctured its way through the back of his skull, stopping as it melted a dimple in the glass.

  One of the men had been picking up Yoseph when Tasha burst into the room. He quickly stood up, holding the limp boy like a shield. Tasha leaped next to the man. Before he could react, she pressed the pistol between his eyes and fired. The man dropped, Yoseph on top of him.

  The leader pulled his needle pistol and flipped the selector switch, arming the barrel with lethal barbs. As Tasha turned on him, he fired. The needle plunged through her fur and sank into her neck. The force pushed her back against the doorframe, throwing off her shot; the laser burned wood six inches above the leader’s head.

  Tasha leaped, releasing a yowl of fury. Startled, the man fired twice. Both hit home, striking her below the chest. She landed squarely on top of the kidnapper. With a savage hiss, she raked three deep furrows across his chest before collapsing from the needles’ poison.

  A primal scream of fury and agony escaped from the man as he pushed her limp form off his pain-racked body. Blood coursed from the foot-long gashes, and fire burned in the cuts. He pulled himself upright, every movement torture, forcing himself to remain conscious. The fifth man, who had been sitting in the carpet van when he heard the commotion, appeared at the glass door.

  “What the hell?” he said after a quick survey of the scene.

  “Shut up,” the leader snapped, gasping at the pain. “Grab those kids.”

  The driver sidestepped the corpse at his feet, picked up the kids, and slung one over each shoulder. The leader grabbed a towel from the counter and stuck it underneath his gore-drenched coveralls. The pain was lessening. He was thankful for that, even though it could be a bad sign. Grabbing Dona by the neck, he pulled with all his strength and moved for the doorway. He had to stop as the effort made his head spin.

  “Put the kids in the van and then come back and get Maratai,” he said weakly.

  “What about her?” the driver asked, indicating Tasha.

  “Leave that bitch to rot,” he said through clenched teeth. “Let’s get out of here and get me to our medic.”

  They crept to the front and loaded the bodies into the van. They no longer looked like simple carpet cleaners. If someone had seen them, they would doubtless have called the authorities. But it was 1:25 p.m. local time in the middle of the week. Everybody was at work earning their keep, or enjoying their own lives indoors. The two men pulled onto a quiet, deserted street and drove away; their mission accomplished despite the efforts of one young nanny.

  5

  Call To Arms

  “Checkmate.” Trey stood up and walked over to the cooling unit.

  “What?” Hawk said as he studied the pieces, carved of jet and ivory. They could have easily played with holographic representations, but Hawk enjoyed the tactile sensation of actual stone. He felt it improved his game. Obviously not enough, because Trey had beaten him. Again. “Well, I’ll be damned. What does that make it now?”

  Trey pulled a Planetbuster Fizz drink from the cooler and wiped the top with his shirt sleeve. “Six to two, my favor.”

  Gerard, who sat at a nearby table working on a disassembled cleaning robot, chuckled.

  “You got something to say?” Hawk mock snarled at him. “Why don’t you play him?”

  “Yeah, please play me, Gerard. I need a challenge.”

  “Ship, dock this boy’s pay,” Hawk said.

  “We don’t pay him, Captain,” her contralto voice informed him.

  “Well, make it proactive. That way, when we do start paying him, he’ll owe it all back to us for a few years.”

  Trey ignored Hawk’s threats and walked over to Gerard. “How about it?”

  Gerard considered the robot, which lay in pieces scattered about the table. He turned to Trey. “Why not?”

  “Filamentous,” Trey said. He popped open his drink, walked over to the board, and started to set up the pieces.

  “Don’t bother,” Gerard said, standing. “We’re not going to play chess. We’re going to play something a little different.”

  “Different?”

  “Yes.” Gerard walked over to the wardroom closet and opened it. Bypassing the shelves of games and physical books, he reached to the top shelf and pulled down a dark wooden box carved with intricate designs of serpents and birds.

  “Uh-oh, you’re in for it now,” Hawk said.

  Gerard returned to the table. “It’s obvious your tactics are sound since Hawk is no slouch as a chess player. Let’s see how you do on a larger dimension.” He pushed the chessboard aside and sat the box in the center of the table. Lifting the lid, he pulled out a table-sized mat and two bags of stones.

  Trey stared at the
new board a few seconds. “What is it?”

  “It’s called Go, which is Ancient Earth Japanese for five.” Handing one of the stone-filled bags to Trey, he opened his own and laid several small white disks on the board. “This is the setup.”

  As Gerard explained the rules, Hawk walked over to the counter that separated the wardroom from the kitchen. He grabbed a loaf of bread, some sliced balin, and a jar of soynaisse. “Sandwich?” he asked the other two.

  They both declined, so Hawk prepared one for himself.

  Since leaving Pa’tris Prime two days ago, they had been adrift, waiting to see if their errant contact would try to re-establish a meeting. Hawk itched to do something. Ship’s search had so far turned up several people named “Anne Siliar,” none of which matched his attacker. The only Anne on Pa’tris Prime worked at the local office of Positron Medical, which Ship had learned earlier. A quick call revealed she had no problems with her boss and knew of no one matching the false Anne’s description.

  Hawk knew Ship’s search, akin to seeking a grain of sand on a beach, would most likely end without a match. Physical features were too easy to change if you had the right connections. This meant losing the only lead on the identity of the mysterious One-Eye. The Knights had built a substantial list of enemies in their career, and Hawk didn’t relish the idea of tracking each of them down separately until he found the culprit.

  On the other hand, if he waited long enough, another attempt would be made, thus giving them a chance to catch a lead.

  He had been lucky in the alleyway and didn’t care to make himself a target again.

  The sandwich finished, he grabbed a Talosian Dark, his favorite beer, out of the cooler and a bag of rye chips from the counter. He returned to the wardroom to find Trey and Gerard had already started their game. He sat down to watch.

  Twenty minutes later, with Trey losing and Gerard explaining why, Ship said, “Captain, I have a message coming in from Force 13. It’s coded Firefall.”

  “I’m on my way.” Hawk spilled his drink in his haste to stand. “Dammit. Clean that up, Trey.”

  “Please,” Ship reprimanded Hawk.

  “No time for please,” Hawk said, leaving the room.

  “There’s no contact video, Captain, only a recorded message.”

  Hawk stopped. “What? That’s not S.O.P.”

  “Be that as it may, it came in as a recording, no video.”

  Warning flags went off in Hawk’s head. He walked back over to his chair while Trey grabbed a cloth. “Play it.”

  After a second, a voice Hawk didn’t recognize piped through the bridge’s speakers. “To Hawk, Commander Force 13 C5 unit Knights of The Flaming Star, from Hostada Sivali, Planetary Council Agent. A friend of yours has gone missing. Meet us at the Seldon Excelsior in Ivaros as soon as possible. Message ends.”

  “That’s it?” Hawk asked.

  “What was your first clue?” Ship said with asperity. “The ‘message ends’ announcement or that I didn’t play anything else?”

  “Get the cr-” He stopped as the other three crew members walked into the wardroom.

  “Already done,” Ship said.

  “I can see that,” Hawk said. “Play the message.”

  As the message repeated, Wolf sat down, Laura walked up behind Trey, and Ashron roamed over to the sandwich counter.

  When it finished, Hawk said, “What do you think? Trap?”

  “Hard to say,” Gerard said. “Could be, since they didn’t use standard protocol. On the other hand, few people know the Firefall code, so there may have been a valid reason not to risk video contact.”

  “You’re a lot of help. Anybody else?”

  “I’m just the guy who blows things up,” Ashron said, slathering mustard on a piece of bread. “I think the only way we’re going to know is to go and find out.”

  “I’d agree with that,” Laura said. “Besides, I seem to remember somewhere in our charter it says we’re obligated to respond to an emergency call.”

  “We are,” Ship said. “Paragraph 7, subsection B.”

  “Obligated, yes,” Hawk said. “It’s a matter of how cautious we are when we walk in the door.” He pointed at Gerard’s cybernetic arm. “Can’t you use that thing to predict the future?”

  “Sorry,” Gerard said. “Prognostication with anything beyond the most minute chance of accuracy is mathematically impossible. Too many variables.”

  “Damn. Ship, did you backtrace that message?”

  “Yes, Captain. It had standard Force 13 encoding tagged to it, and it came from Seldon.”

  “Is the Seldon Excelsior one of Force 13’s safe houses?”

  “Yes, the Council owns the building.”

  “And Hostada Sivali is an actual Council Agent?”

  “If I had eyes I would roll them,” Ship said. “Yes, he is a certified field agent.”

  Hawk thought for a moment. Things weighed in favor of a legitimate call, but the recent assassination attempt made him more cautious than usual. He had to go. Even if the Knights charter didn’t require it, it would drive him crazy not to find out if the message was real.

  “Okay, Ship. Plot a preliminary course.”

  “Already done. We’re in luck because we’re close. ETA is twenty-six hours, thirteen minutes, plus or minus three minutes. Course is set, simply awaiting Gerard’s presence and confirmation.”

  “Very well. Gerard, get to the bridge and do your thing. Everybody else, into the bunks to get your good time shots. We’re going to Seldon.”

  6

  Mission Accepted

  As cities went, Ivaros, Seldon’s capital city, looked much like any other Corp city. The corporations had moved in and obliterated any traces of native culture, replacing it with uniform skyscrapers of glass and steel. Not that the buildings matched. Each was as individual as the Corporation it housed, and you could tell from the design which company owned which building, from the black-glassed monolith of Universal Armaments to the asymmetrical gold spire-topped skyscraper of Lithwyn Genetics.

  All different, all the same, Hawk thought. He mused that Corporate culture had become the culture on many planets. He hated it, just as he hated the traffic jams, the crowds, and the pollution. He was happiest in a place with less than a hundred people. Even that was pushing it.

  To Hawk’s frustration, what Ivaros didn’t have was an unoccupied pit that could accommodate Ship. They had larger berths, but Port Control wouldn’t lease time to the smaller craft. Hawk had been forced to dock at one of the three gigantic orbital stations and take a multi-passenger shuttle down to the port. The cramped shuttle, reeking of exotic perfumes and alien odors, had made Hawk queasy and put him in a bad mood.

  Station docking also made resupplying a logistical challenge, especially since they were in a hurry. Laura had done an excellent job of convincing the loadmaster to move them up in line. She could, with the help of well-placed credits, be very persuasive. The loadmaster had assured Laura that Ship would be ready no later than 0500 tomorrow morning. Though Hawk bemoaned the wasted time, their hasty departure from Pa’tris Prime afforded them little choice.

  Hawk spotted a line of bright yellow groundcabs in the port driveway, patiently waiting for fares to hail their services. Proudly stenciled on the sides of the vehicles were a series of glyphs that Hawk’s translator chip decoded as Seldon Cabs. Your transportation choice for 50 years. Most of the cabs, even the hovercraft versions, looked like they had been with the company since day one.

  Hawk slipped into the front cab and viewed the driver through the glass partition. “Seldon Excelsior,” he muttered. His voice filtered through the translation speaker in the glass.

  “Sure thing,” the Mocklin driver’s voice filtered back, his crimson jowls and dreadlocked hair flapping as he pulled into traffic.

  “How long?”

  “Twenty minutes if traffic is good,” the driver answered.

  Great, Hawk thought, leaning against the syn-leather seat, its s
urface covered with patches in various shades of brown. Well, at least I’m not surrounded by aliens with bad breath.

  As he sat there, eyes staring beyond the towering buildings and speeding vehicles, he thought back to the days when the Knights as a mercenary unit went from a dream to reality. Working for Force 13 had its advantages; the amount of downtime was not one of them. The Planetary Council called in a group like Hawk’s, known as a C5, or five-person commando unit, as a last resort. The universe, at least that part of it ruled by the Planetary Council, was a relatively peaceful place, and things didn’t get that desperate that often. This left his crew with too much time on their hands and nothing to do but twiddle their thumbs and train.

  Never one to twiddle, Hawk decided, after two years with Force 13, to take his crew’s cover story as a mercenary unit and make it legitimate. In the last eight years, he had managed to build up both a lucrative side business and gain a lot of good will in the corporate sector. To a corporation seeking a reliable, efficient group of mercenaries, willing to tackle any job that didn’t stray too far over the line, the Knights were the elite. Force 13 gave its tacit approval to the whole situation. Hawk returned the favor by using his Corporate contacts, if necessary, to aid in the success of Force 13 assignments.

  “Here you are, my friend,” the driver said, staring at Hawk with large, golden-red eyes.

  Hawk came out of his reverie at the sound of the cabbie’s nasally voice. “How much?”

  “Seven point three Stus.”

  Hawk held his wrist up to the chip reader on the back of the seat. When it beeped, he said “Ten.”

  “Thanks,” the cab driver said as the credits appeared on his display. “Have a day.”

  Hawk stepped out of the cab. It drove off as he walked into the Seldon Excelsior. Its easily recognized gold raven emblem seemed ready to swoop down from its place on the gray walls above the double doors, which a blue-suited human doorman opened for Hawk.