“And who’s backing you up?”
“I’m a lot better equipped to handle trouble,” I said and patted the blaster on my hip. “And Marilyn, here, will back me up.”
She shook her head, but she followed Corca out of the bay. I followed at a little bit of a distance, pushing the grav sled.
I would be going right as they headed left when we reached the end of the tunnel ahead. The population had gone underground as soon as we had landed on the Moon. There were old tunnels from the corporation that had initially settled Moon 456. They’d gone bankrupt and pulled out. Without those tunnels, we would have perished the first year. They probably wished they had executed all of us, but chasing us down would have been a costly endeavor after a costly war. Now, after fifteen years, Traitor’s Moon was thriving. Of course, the freedom we had fought for should have been had after we reached the Moon.
Not quite what we had sought. The first elections were pretty fair, but the latest was a little different. Kellogg had it rigged and managed to secure a life term as President. We traded a corrupt government for another, and I had left. Now, I ran the fastest ship in the system and hauled cargo. If Kellogg had half an inkling of where I got that ship, he would have burst a blood vessel.
* * *
Chapter 3
“You have the supplies?”
“Of course I do, Peleri. Have you ever known me not to get your shipments through?”
The restaurant was empty, and the light was dim. Peleri kept night hours, which suited his favored clientele. The deep core miners worked different shifts than the surface crews. The tables were round, and each had six seats. The grav sled fit through the front door with inches to spare, and the heavy box was unloaded by several of his men.
“Your credit will be transferred as soon as the spices are weighed and tested.”
“Seems like you might trust someone after three years.”
“I trusted my previous supplier, and he skimmed from the top of each spice to sell at another establishment.”
“I don’t need to steal from you, Peleri,” I said. “Bought some of my own while I was on Fredonia. I don’t use it all that often, but I do love a good pie when I can get one. And that’s rarely.”
One of his men returned and nodded.
Peleri nodded in reply and pressed several buttons on the device in his hand. I watched my implant as the credit was added to my account.
“Always a pleasure, Peleri,” I said and turned away from the heavyset manager of Taste of Earth. I knew the reference to the Sol System was what he was after, but most of the miners on Moon 456 wouldn’t know what it meant. They’d come here after the war, and there weren’t as many who could reference what we were fighting for.
There was a place on Earth that had been based on the rights of each and every person as an individual. It was a great country, in its time, and could have been a great model for our new government. If we’d won the war, we had planned to do just that. But we lost. We lost so many of our greatest leaders in that final, mad frenzy to get away. Now we had Kellogg. That’s why I didn’t stay on the Moon any longer than I had to.
“Mister Warrick?”
I turned back to him.
“I know a patron who is interested in hiring a fast ship. I have heard you mention that yours is the fastest in the system. Would you be interested?”
“Always interested in a job, Peleri,” I said.
“Then I will give you his contact information. I will send it to your message board.”
He punched a few numbers into his handheld unit.
“Thanks, Peleri.”
“I do trust you, Mister Warrick, despite my checking the supplies.”
“I know you do,” I said. “I’d check the order too. Just giving you a hard time about it. I’ll send a message to the guy.”
“It seemed very important to him, Mister Warrick.”
“It always is,” I said and sent a message to the contact that had just appeared on my message board.
I immediately got a reply.
“Pretty damned important,” I muttered as I left the restaurant.
The message asked me to meet him at an address not too far from where I was, so I sent an acknowledgement and turned the grav sled to the left instead of the right. If you take one of the sleds from the shuttle bay, you better bring it back. If not, the genetic reader turns in your genetics to the Port Authority, and you are charged for it. Not just a fee, but for the grav sled, itself. No one wants to buy the whole damn sled.
The lights dimmed a little as I pushed the sled down the street. I don’t know why they bothered dimming the lights when it was “nighttime,” instead of leaving them alone. Maybe it was a way of remembering the world we had come from, but what was the point? It just made it easier for the unsavory sort to hide in shadow.
Perhaps, that was the point. Kellogg had his fingers in a lot of pies, including crime. I shook my head and turned my sensory package up a few notches. The dim light became much clearer, and I could hear everything going on around me. Sometimes the Audible Enhancement was a pain, but it had saved my ass numerous times.
Much like it was about to do again. I heard the steps closing from behind me, and my hand flashed down to draw the blaster from my hip. I turned to face the incoming thugs who stopped as they stared down the barrel of my blaster.
The first of the three thugs was about six feet tall, bald, and tattooed.
“I don’t want to kill you, and you don’t want to be dead,” I said. “If your guy behind me takes another step, I’ll start a bunch of killin’ that none of us will be happy about.”
The leader raised his hands and made a motion with his left one. The steps behind me ceased.
“Smart move,” I said. “If he keeps reaching for that gun, it’s going to get ugly.”
Baldy shook his head, and the thug behind me stopped moving.
“Not the guy I was expecting,” he said.
I had expected the thug to use some of the gang dialect used by most of the bangers in Landing. His voice was clear and educated. It piqued my curiosity. Not your normal Landing thug.
Looking closer at the tattoos, I spied a familiar one amongst the sleeve on his left arm.
“Freedom.” I nodded toward the arm. “Got one of those, myself.”
His mouth crooked up on one side just a little, and he moved his pointer finger in the familiar squad command to abort mission.
“Marine?” I guessed.
“Yep, you?”
“Navy.”
“Officer?” he asked.
“I worked for a living. Still made captain, though, close to the end of the war. Weren’t many officers left.”
“That’s a fact,” he said. “Careful walking the streets. There’s a lot of activity out here tonight.”
I didn’t bother bringing up the fact that he was part of that activity. I wasn’t surprised that a former Freedom Fighter was a common thug on the streets of Landing. Many of us had fallen pretty far when we lost the war. I was a smuggler. I never would have pictured myself doing the things I’d done and doubted this Marine ever thought he would be rolling guys in the street.
“Ever thought this is where we’d be fifteen years later?” he asked as his men entered the side tunnels.
“I was just thinking the same thing.”
“I could try to make an excuse,” he said. “Limited skill set, not able to afford to keep the augments running—there are a few reasons for what I do.”
“You don’t have to make excuses to me, Marine.” I holstered the blaster. “I smuggle goods from one system to another. I commanded a warship. Now, I sneak in and out of systems to get things no one else can get. I understand how this place works.”
He nodded and turned around to walk away.
As my implant scanned through the record of Erik Jacobi, I said, “There might be a better way.”
He turned back toward me with an eyebrow raised.
“A fellow
who was awarded the Star of Freedom should have some options.”
Both eyebrows rose in surprise.
* * *
Chapter 4
“You’re Warrick?” The man studying me was a short, dark-haired fellow with features a lot of people wouldn’t necessarily remember the source of. I had studied the old histories when I was younger. It’s where I learned about the country on Earth that had been the United States of America. Most people had lost the majority of those old features as humanity had spread across the galaxy. Doctor Horas had distinct features of the old country of Japan.
Several countries in the old diaspora had colonized planets and systems solely under their flags. That had ended with the unification of Earth, but there had been some systems that kept those ancient bloodlines. My home world had been settled much the same way by German and Norwegian settlers. I had distinct features just as rare as the doctor’s: six feet tall, blue eyes, and blonde hair.
“That would be me,” I said. “I’m going to make a wild guess that you’re Doctor Horas.”
“I am,” he said. “I was told you have the fastest ship on Traitor’s Moon.”
I winced. “I hate that name.”
“What would you wish me to call it?”
“Call it what you want,” I said. “I just hate the name.”
“As you say.” He nodded.
“So what can the fastest ship in the system do for you, Doc?”
“There is a system out on the rim named Leeander. They are suffering from a plague that could wipe out over a third of their population. I have been working to produce a cure, and I need it delivered to the Leeander System.”
“Don’t know if I want to land on a plague-ridden world, Doc.”
“There is no need to land. There are people expecting the package, and it can be dropped in a pod.”
“That sounds doable,” I said. “I’m guessing we need to leave as soon as possible.”
“People are dying, Mister Warrick.”
“Get your cure, then, and let’s get some prices established. Simple delivery is four thousand credit.”
“I have everything in this case, and the price is fair,” he said holding a briefcase to his chest. The tiny red dot that reflected from the case sent my augments into overdrive.
The world seemed to slow as I moved forward and grabbed the Doc. Shoving him sideways, I felt the air from the bullet that would have ended both the Doc and his cure. We were halfway across the street before the second bullet whipped past my ear. I launched the tiny drones from the collar of my long coat with my implant and sent them on a tracking pattern. One of the tiny drones found the shooter and slipped into his clothes.
I grinned and triggered another small launch from the gauntlet on my right hand. This one hit the shooter directly where my drone had placed itself. The tiny rocket carried a small explosive. It wasn’t enough to blow up a door or penetrate a wall, but it was more than enough to send the shooter tumbling from the roof where he had been perched. When he hit the asphalt, twelve stories down, I doubted anyone would notice the extra hole where the explosive had erupted.
“Doc,” I said. “I’m thinking the price may be going up.”
“They have found me,” he muttered.
“Who is after you?”
Another of my drones sent an alarm.
“I guess we’ll talk about that, after I get you out of here alive. We’ve got incoming.”
I was going through escape avenues with my implant, and it kept a running tab of percentages for success. There was only one that was higher than sixty percent.
“This way, Doc.” I pulled him toward a round manhole cover. “This is gonna suck.”
Grabbing the edge where the slot was, I strained and pulled upward. “Really wish I had gotten the strength package.”
The covers were made to be heavy, so people couldn’t do what I was about to do. I might not have had the strength augments, but I’m a big guy, and the lid came up.
“Down the hole,” I said.
I had to give the doc credit; he didn’t hesitate. This might not have been the first sewer he had crawled through. Most people are horrified at the thought, but he just went straight down the ladder. I followed. What the hell had I gotten myself into?
As I pulled the lid back down, I placed a small device on the bottom surface. It would use the lid as an antenna to keep me in touch with the micro drones. I had four left up there, and I launched my last two inside the tunnel we found ourselves walking through.
I was quite happy we had taken the time to build good sewer systems in Landing. The walkways on each side of the channel in the middle kept us out of the vile smelling mess in the center of the tunnel. The only time the walkways were under water was during a flushing stage, where they forced water, thawed from the frozen surface ice, down the tunnels to keep them as clean as they could manage. The map in my head said we needed to go east, and this tunnel ran north to south. The closest cross tunnel was north.
“This way,” I said. I stopped and glanced back up at the cover. “Friggin’ thousand credit for that damn grav sled.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know they were here.”
“Don’t you worry, I’m keeping a tab. Those damn drones aren’t cheap either. Let’s move before someone figures out where we went.”
* * *
Chapter 5
Someone had figured out where we went. The image from the tunnel ahead showed a group of four coming in our direction.
“Get behind me, Doc,” I said and drew the blaster. “You drop to the floor when the shooting starts.”
“Shooting?”
“Four guys ahead,” I said and stopped with my head cocked to the side.
A single shadow moved behind the men on the left side of the tunnel. The two thugs dropped, and blaster fire took out the other two.
Erik Jacobi stepped into the dim lights so my drones could see him. He holstered the blaster and stood there with his arms crossed.
“Okay,” I muttered and stepped around the corner, holstering my blaster.
“We keep meeting in the strangest places,” I said.
“Decided I would take you up on that offer,” he said. “Admittedly, it was before you started protecting this guy. You do know he has a forty thousand credit bounty on his head?”
“Really?” I asked as I looked at the doctor.
“Oh, God,” he moaned.
“Seriously, Doc?” I held my hands out with the palms up. “What the hell are you into?”
“They don’t want this cure to reach Leeander.” He looked like he was near tears. “They’re going to kill me.”
The last part was said with complete despair. It wasn’t faked; he really didn’t think they would kill him until this moment.
I sighed. “I’ll try to keep that from happening, Doc.”
Looking at Erik I asked, “You still want to be a part of this? I’m taking this guy and his cure to stop a plague in a system on the outer rim.”
He chuckled. “I reckon this has already been more fun than I’ve had in ten years. You’re the best chance to get my augments back. I’m in.”
“Then we’re headed to the port to get the hell off this rock.”
“You got it, Boss.” He turned and pointed to a branch tunnel. “This is the quickest route, but we’ll be topside for the last mile or so. Won’t take them long to figure out where you disappeared to. These guys aren’t checking back in.”
“Lead the way, Marine.”
I swear his shoulders straightened just a bit as he turned to head down the tunnel. I motioned for Doc to go ahead of me and sent a message to the drones above ground to move toward the Port. When I came out from the sewer, I wanted to know what was waiting.
The rest of the trip through the sewer was uneventful. It smelled awful, but we reached the exit, and I placed a hand on Erik’s shoulder.
“Hold position for a minute.”
I climbed the l
adder and placed another device on the bottom of the lid. We had left the range of my other device some time back. My drones should already be in the area.
“That’s not good,” I said.
“What is it?”
“Drones are dead,” I answered.
“You’ve got an implant?”
“Yep. I left four drones moving in this direction.”
“All of them down?”
“Down or jammed. I still have two down here with us. I’ll switch frequencies every second to stop anyone finding them. Couldn’t do that with the ones up top once I got out of range.”
“Alright, let me out first.”
“I’ll go first. My augments are still working.”
“I’m still a Marine.”
“I know, but we need the fastest one of us out there first to do recon.”
He frowned.
“Don’t worry, you’ll get plenty of action soon enough. If they took out my drones, they’re pretty damned good.”
I pushed the heavy lid open a fraction, and a micro drone shot through the crack. It did a circle of the immediate area and saw no one.
“Okay, here goes.”
I pushed the lid all the way open and poked my head up to scan the area. “Looks clear. Come on up.”
My drone found someone on the roof two buildings over. “Hold!”
My hand blurred, and the blaster was pointed at the rooftop. Then the drone got close enough to see who was holding the rifle.
I sighed and dropped my gun back down into the holster just as he jerked back in recognition. I’ll be damned if I was shooting the sniper. He thumbed a throat mic.
A voice came from the cross tunnel ahead.
“Maximus Augustus Warrick!” The voice was one I thought I would never hear again in my lifetime. “What the hell have you gotten yourself into?”
“Regina?”
“Yes, dipshit, it’s Regina. I repeat, what did you get yourself into? I came for an easy bounty, and here you are. I’ll be damned if I’ll kill the Captain of the Screaming Eagle. Not for a thousand bounties.” She paused. “Did you contract the guy?’’
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