Few of the residents were more than a century old. The Midgaard, which the Humans of 3428 were now effectively indistinguishable from, lived to be thousands of years old. Most of them had learned to see the Universe for themselves.
The steady flow of information had led the local Humans to skim. They’d see short vids, read headlines and, in some rare cases, glance at article summaries, and then they’d react. The network was a seething tide of angry commentary.
And now those comments had been turned against Viggo’s family.
He could hardly fault the poor saps who barred his way and he certainly couldn’t kill them for it.
But how would he get past? He couldn’t shake the feeling that danger lay in all directions but this one. He glanced up at the sheer rock walls on either side of the pass.
Climbing those would be a mistake. There were fimbrols up there in the thousands. The large avians were more or less mammalian, feeding their young from glands under their wings. They shifted to meat as the chicks started growing their flight-scales and Viggo didn’t want to end up as a snack in one of those cliff-side rookeries.
He’d been gazing absently at the trio as he thought about his options but he suddenly realized something odd was happening. The three men were backing away from the small ledge that overlooked the opening to the pass.
All three had bows up and arrows nocked. It had been the bows that first clued him in to the fact that these were his people and not off-world traders. Only the locals knew the knack of drawing a bow back to the ear and hitting the target by feel rather than sighting along the arrow.
Few off-worlders used bows, considering them beneath their notice, but their energy-based weapons were a magnet for dangerous wildlife on this world. With a short flight-time for the arrows, most locals could aim using their precognitive skills.
The three men under Viggo’s gaze weren’t aiming at anything, though. There must not have been any concrete danger visible to them but they were clearly agitated.
One of them, the one farthest from the pass, suddenly shouted in alarm. He turned and fled into the darkness beneath the trees. One of the two remaining guards turned to see him leave. He grabbed his comrade by the shoulder and shoved him after their fleeing friend before backing away after them, eyes glued to the foliage on the far side of the pass.
Whatever they’d sensed, Viggo hadn’t noticed it and he was beginning to suspect a trap. As soon as I head for that pass, someone’s gonna jump out and nail me,”he thought. Maybe I need to… He stopped mid-thought, keeping still but turning his attention to the forest behind him.
Something’s back there, he realized. Perhaps the withdrawal was just a diversion to keep his attention focused. It would be hard to sneak up on someone with an eighteen-second ability, unless he was sufficiently distracted.
Whatever it was, he had little choice now, which meant he was wasting time. He checked to be sure his arrow was still nocked, exerting enough tension on the string to keep it from slipping, and then he moved forward.
He could see no danger in the near future from either the right or left flank so he pressed ahead, jogging quietly across the jungle floor toward the pass. He’d been in there before but only once. It was widely regarded as one of the more terrifying places on a world known for its dangers.
The last place you’d expect a fugitive to head for.
His sense of danger was fading from behind and, oddly, he was seeing no immediate threat from ahead. Most journeys on 3428 involved a few halts or course changes to prevent coming to the attention of something deadly.
The salve worked to prevent your scent from drawing chimera but it didn’t stop them from hearing your approach or spotting you moving through the brush.
He followed a natural game trail, staying low and moving along at a fairly fast pace on the hard-packed dirt, easily avoiding the few errant twigs that he might have stepped on had he not enjoyed advance sight.
He approached a fork in the trail and planned to follow the right-hand branch, knowing from his previous visit that it lead up into the highlands. Before he reached it, he began to feel a return of the same trepidation that had driven him forward.
Whatever had gotten behind him had somehow managed to move up on his right flank and it was out there, waiting for him…
He veered onto the left-hand trail and kept his pace steady. Surely the creature, whatever it was, couldn’t outpace him through dense jungle when he was able to move so freely on this game trail.
He picked up his pace, heart starting to race in a way he’d never experienced before. This was getting dangerous, even by local standards.
He skidded to a stop. It’s ahead of me now? How the hells? Whatever it was, he now sensed a danger ahead, the same danger. He squinted into the brush, fingering the nocked arrow on his string with his right hand.
Why was he not seeing what the danger was? The fear seemed real enough but his people usually saw the reason for fear before feeling the actual fear itself. He wondered if it was due to some kind of infection. Had it affected those three men at the pass in the same way?
And then he felt the dart bury itself in his neck. His right hand let go of the string and reached up for the dart but it seemed to change its mind and race his body to the ground. And I didn’t see that coming, did I? he thought before passing out.
Give and Take
Qualterax System, Republic territory
“No activity in the area, Spartanburg,” Odin’s voice crackled over the scout-ship’s speakers. “You’re clear to launch at your own discretion.”
“Roger that, Skidbladner,” June replied. “Standing by for final jump path.”
“Isn’t this a relatively straightforward jump?” Mol Dineb asked her.
“Depends on what you mean by straightforward,” she said, not taking her eyes from the tactical holo. “If you want to do an atmospheric dropout, which is still almost entirely unheard of, then you need to consider what’s between us and the destination.”
“But,” Mol Dineb frowned slightly, “the bow wave of the distortion effect will trap anything that’s in the way, protecting the ship. Even a low-grade pillow merchant like me knows this.”
“Yes,” she confirmed patiently, “but all that matter doesn’t just disappear. When we drop out, it’s released again, mostly as plasma. Doing that out here in the black is deadly enough. Doing it at ground-level on an inhabited planet would be decidedly unwise.”
“But we’re just about to…”
She held up a hand. “I know, but that’s why we’re doing this carefully, selecting the cleanest path we can find. If we pull it off, the result should be more like a sonic boom than an atmosphere-incinerating catastrophe.
“We don’t have an abundance of choice here. You said the circuits they make on Qualterax are designated as tertiary strategic assets, right? The minute they see unscheduled dropouts in orbit, they’ll torch the whole mess and then we have no plausible reason for being there. That means no plausible reason for your ‘escape’ as well.
“I’d refuse this job, except for the fact that it lets us field-test a central element in our planning. It’s a butt-load of cloak and dagger over a bunch of sex-pillows, if you ask me,” she added, finally turning to look at Mol Dineb.
He stared at her, surprised. “When did you figure that out?”
“When I walked in and saw the three of you trying to design a sex pillow,” she said as though it should have been obvious. She turned back to the tactical display.
“And yet, you pretended not to know…”
“I thought it would be funnier.” She shrugged, smiling at the memory. “My man’s been around for thousands of years and he sometimes makes the mistake of assuming that wisdom is a simple process of cumulative osmosis. If I didn’t occasionally tweak him, he’d be insufferable.”
She laughed. “Did you see the look on his face when I was ‘innocently’ talking about length?”
Mol Dineb snorted. “Or wh
en you offered to do a promotional video?”
“Hell,” she exclaimed. “I’d forgotten about that! I think I’ll set up a camera in our quarters when we get our hands on your first batch; see how far I can troll him.”
“Why was he so embarrassed? I thought the Midgaard were pretty open about sexual matters.”
“You have to remember that he’s spent more than two thousand years on Earth, so he’s picked up a few of our habits.”
“Our habits?”
She nodded. “It’s my homeworld. I’m from a place called South Carolina. My parents were old-school religious and they used to scare the hell out of Odin.”
“And you’re not… old-school?”
She laughed. “Bringing an actual pagan ‘deity’ home to meet them? Are you kidding me? It’s for the best that they never found out who he really is.”
“Window coming up,” the pilot said. “Looks like a good one.”
“Take it when you have it, Hal,” she told him.
She opened a connection with the Skidbladner, copying her team in the back of the scout-ship. “Oscar Mike,” she said, warning them that they were on the move.
In the back of the Spartanburg, her eighteen-warrior team tightened harnesses and rechecked their weapons and equipment. It was an obsession with detail that regular Midgaard warriors scorned but she’d formed a very different team from the usual death-or-glory style of war-band.
The thirteen men and five women of her team were as close as they could get to the kind of professionals with whom she’d served alongside back on Earth. She was no qualified instructor, having been one of the earliest women to gain entry into her nation’s military elite, but she understood the methods.
Those methods had forged a handful of teams like this one. Teams that could succeed where a standard raid would not.
A shudder went through her as the view through the cockpit windows blurred into streams of bent starlight. Almost before her brain processed the fact that they’d initiated the jump, it was over.
They punched their way back into flat space, the bow-wave kicking up dirt in front of them. The pilot slid the craft sideways to avoid the small crater they’d just blasted in the ground and settled the ship onto its three skids.
“Trace matches scans. Get moving!” June said, forcing herself not to shout. Her team would already be amped up and screaming at them might put them in a frame of mind to miss an important detail.
She got out of her seat and grabbed Mol Dineb by the arm. “Get in the pod,” she told him, “and stay there till the locals come for you, got it? Remember the story?”
“I managed to steal an escape pod,” he recited, pausing on the lip of the hatch, “but it got caught up in your distortion field and I ended up here.”
“You’d better sound more natural than that when you’re talking to the locals.” She gave him a shove and hit the eject button. The pod dropped to the ground with an audible thud, even from inside the scout-ship.
June opened the side hatch and jumped out. She hit with a roll and came to her knees, aiming her weapon out at the surrounding industrial buildings. The rest of her team dropped behind her and fanned out to cover a full circle.
She fell back and motioned to the last of her men to come out of the Spartanburg. “Give me a hand with this pod. If we get it moving, it should roll down that alley for a few hundred meters. No sense bringing him all the way here just to drag him back out into the outer system when we jump back.”
They heaved on the round pod, grinning at the cursing and muffled thumps coming from inside. “Skathi, Ullr, what’s your status?”
“Oskar Mike,” Skathi replied. “Three minutes, boss.”
With a final heave, they sent the pod rolling and bouncing down the slight incline of the dark alley. She managed not to laugh at Mol Dineb’s predicament but it wasn’t easy.
She retreated back to the circle and checked her tactical HUD. Her sniper team was almost at the top of the tower they’d selected from Republic planning records which, for a change, were still up to date.
That, in itself, was already a minor miracle and it made her nervous. “Luck is a finite resource,” one of her instructors had been fond of saying. “When everything’s going your way… that’s when you really need to be on your guard ‘cause that’s when the Universe is fixin’ to shove a jalapeno up your tailpipe.”
“Alright guys, we’ll advance to the target but stay sharp. This may be a sleepy little frontier dirt-ball but you never know what you’re going to run into. Keep an eye on your heatsinks. Vidar, take your fireteam up the left side of the street; Mojl, take the right.”
They set off down the half-illuminated street, one four-person team on each side of the street using what cover there was and scanning everywhere. Their HUDs were overlaid with the data from Skathi and Ullr.
The low illumination was a good sign. If there was a night shift in this district, the streets would have been better lit. It also made detection less likely.
They had to hold up at a deserted intersection while a surface-cleaner trundled through. It probably didn’t have a live operator in it but it had an array of sensors to assess its progress and to avoid collisions. June’s heart nearly jumped out of her chest when a small creature landed in front of her.
She let out a breath, taking her hand away from the grip of her sidearm when she saw it wasn’t a sentient and, from the tag on its studded collar, it was probably a pet of some kind.
The thing chittered inquisitively at them. Vidar made a shooing motion and it jumped back onto the factory roof to June’s right. The leap seemed effortless, though the roof was a little more than ten feet.
Production facilities on old outposts like this one tended to have more space and less surplus energy. They tended toward designs where materials flowed horizontally rather than ones that wasted resources fighting gravity.
The cleaner turned a corner and they could resume their advance. Aside from one robotic cleaner and one… cat-thing… there were no hitches.
June called a halt before they rounded the final corner. There was something going on out front of the target.
“Looks like a heavy cargo-mover,” Skathi said. “About eight thousand heat signatures inside. Gotta be the life-support for the circuits. Four guards with sidearms that l can make out; the other three are unarmed, probably just warehouse staff.”
June resisted the urge to curse. “That complicates things,” she said. “Mover’s gotta have a demolitions charge on it to stop bad guys like us from just helping themselves. There’ll be a heartbeat-link keyed to the guards.”
“True,” Skathi said but she sounded doubtful.
“What’s on your mind, Skathi?”
“Vehicle fits the profile for an old model of mover. I think it might actually date back to the Imperial regime.”
“Shit,” June exclaimed. “They built to last!” It was less impressive to the Midgaard but, still, that vehicle had been driving around on this world when Rome was still just a temporary camp for traders. “So the demo charge might not even be operational.”
“That’s my thinking,” Skathi confirmed. “This is the puckered back end of the galaxy. How much are they spending to maintain something that could still malfunction and blow them all to vapor?”
“Cameras?” June asked.
“Covering the street at ground level,” Skathi replied. “Two out of seven are moving on the front street. One at the far end, so no problem, but the other is over the main doors, facing the mover.”
“Bare minimum maintenance,” June mused.
“Puckered back end,” Skathi reiterated.
“So we’re out of sight if we’re on the far side of the mover but we’ll get spotted on the way.” June looked up. No heat signatures. Need to use the roof.” She turned to the warrior behind her.
“Egil, give me a boost up.” She got her right foot into Egil’s cupped hands and pulled herself up onto the low roof of the building to her r
ight. She could have easily jumped, relying on the enhanced abilities of her suit but three hundred kilos of flesh and metal composites still made a hell of a noise landing, regardless of how easily it was launched.
There were no guards up here, of course. She waved the rest up and then moved out of the way as they clambered up as quietly as possible. Two of the team members reached down and hauled up Vidar, who’d just boosted the second last member up.
They worked their way across the corner of the roof, angling toward the mover in the street below. The roof gravel was making a racket under their feet and she could barely believe it wasn’t bringing the whole damned planet down around their ears.
Ten meters from the edge, she waved the team down and pointed to Egil. “Egil, come lower me so I can take a look.” She led him over to the parapet, where they crouched to have a look at movement patterns. The thermal sensors in their suits, coupled with the more powerful unit on Skathi’s weapon combined to provide a pretty accurate picture.
Two guards were inside with the laborers. One was in the control cab of the mover and the other was on her side of the vehicle, lighting a smoke. She sighed. This really was the puckered back end of the galaxy. The ceramic tube was ubiquitous among lagweed smokers. Only out here could a guard get away with being stoned on duty!
She watched until his heat signature moved back to the warehouse side of the vehicle. “Tell me lagweed doesn’t accumulate in your brain and make you dopey,” she whispered, even though the suit was attenuating her voice. “That dumbass hid to light up but then came walking back in front of the camera with the tube in his damned mouth!”
“You see me complaining?” Skathi asked. “It’s making our job easier, isn’t it?”
“True enough.” June put a hand on the parapet and swung her legs over. She reached up and took Egil’s hand and he lowered her almost all the way to the ground.
He held her there. “Wait,” he said quietly. A rumbling sound, like a large door being moved, was coming from the warehouse and he dropped her so she’d hit just as the door hit the stops at the end of its rusty frame.
Asymmetry Page 8
