I couldn’t help the smile that crept to my lips. "Let's go."
It should go without saying that unloading twelve hundred people, four hundred twenty chickens, three hundred cows, two hundred nineteen pigs and the accompanying crap tonnes of feed – both pre and post processing – into the frigid cold required significant effort and was accompanied by quite a lot of complaining.
From my perspective, however, the move was executed flawlessly. What was now the new town of York had roughly been home to around sixty thousand. Its new residents were doing a pretty good job of figuring out how to make the best use of what the area had to offer.
"Might have been nice if we'd picked a warmer season," Curtis Long said, holding up a cup of synth coffee, nodding at me. It was as close to a compliment as the man was capable of and I raised my own cup in his direction.
"Sounds like you've had good luck hunting?" I answered, looking down at the bowl of steaming chili in front of me. Eating real meat was taking some getting used to, but that was one of the virtues of the highly-seasoned stew Patty cooked. Really, it almost always tasted the same, whether with real meat or otherwise.
Hog's wife, Patty, had wasted no time in taking over one of York's existing restaurants. While much of the equipment required repair, she insisted the level of tech wasn’t considerably different from that of Zuri, only now she had a captive audience. It hadn't taken us a lot to get the restaurant operational as it had been one of the municipal priorities, behind energy and water.
"Wildlife is starting to smarten up," Curtis Long piped in from across the restaurant. "Won't always be this easy."
I smiled, looking back at those gathered at my table.
"Man would complain about ice water in the desert," Hog chortled.
"I understand coffee plants don't like cold weather," Patty said. "What are you doing about those plants you brought along?"
"I'm paying the Begorian boys to bring soil up to the third floor of the Bold building," I said.
On the opposite corner from Patty's restaurant, House of the Bold had claimed a five-story office building that sported a curved glass façade overlooking the slushy Clear Lake a hundred meters farther east. I'd personally claimed a conference room, several adjoining offices and an area to lay out planting beds and artificial lights for my coffee. As far as I knew, there was only one other coffee plant in the entire galaxy aside from the plants left behind to grow wild on Zuri. I just knew I was sitting on a gold-mine. Of course, I'd have to up my production from twelve plants, but I was willing to be patient. "I told those boys I'd cut 'em in on sales going forward if they helped with production."
"Good luck with that," Bish scoffed. "Those boys been a pain in my side for as long as I can remember."
"Mez, any more trouble?" I asked, ignoring Bish.
Mez Rigdon was York's sheriff on Zuri and had volunteered to stay in the job. There'd been some initial friction concerning people’s housing choices. Some of the units had turned out to be less than desirable and there had been bad feelings. Fortunately, Mez intervened, keeping peace long enough for York's council to step in and find a long-term solution.
"We're going to need to move the Springfields," she said. "If I'd seen they were moving in next to Grubs, I'd have stopped it. They just don't get along that well."
"Are they okay moving?" Hog asked.
"No. They think Grubs should move. It's simple math, though. If Grubs move, it's five households. Springfields only have two," Mez said. "Neither family wants to give in."
"Give 'em ten percent extra allotment," Hog said. "That should ease tensions. You okay with that, Silver?"
"Will ten percent do it?" she asked.
"If they get to rub it in Grub's face, it will," Mez answered.
I felt a presence over my shoulder and looked up to find Curtis Long looming.
"Need something, Curtis?" I asked, uncomfortably.
"What are you doing with those grounded freighters?" he asked. "Anyone make a claim on em?"
"They belong to the Musi," Marny answered.
With all the activity, I'd almost forgotten about the four Musi crews running loose. Before we arrived, Sandoval and Lathrop had discovered four different crews looting the cities, filling miserable little freighters with anything that wasn't tied down, including substantial piles of fuel.
"They're criminals," Long said. "We should hunt 'em down."
"And do what? Kill 'em?" Marny asked. "They're just trying to survive. Did you know the Musi have no homeworld? Strix and Musi came from the same place and the Musi are only allowed on that world if they're in an ownership contract with the Strix."
I sighed. I'd heard the story before. Some Musi voluntarily enslaved themselves to the Strix for a place to live. I couldn’t imagine how low you'd have to feel to voluntarily live with Strix.
"Look, I wanted to stop the looting until we could figure out what was going on. Now that we’re here, we have enough fuel. Was it wrong for the Musi to try and take material the Abasi worked so hard for? Yes. The fact that we have permission doesn't exactly mean we worked any harder for those materials," I said.
"What are you saying, Cap?" Marny asked.
"Make contact with the Musi," I said. "We'll repair their ships and give them enough food and fuel to get them home. If they want to live on Faraji, we can work out a treaty."
"You're giving them the only other inhabitable planetary object in the system?" Bish asked incredulously.
"I've been there," I said. "I guarantee you don't want to go. Once they get going, we can collect taxes or something."
"I'll take care of it," Marny said, standing.
"You don't want to see Munay?" I asked.
We'd received word that Sandoval had recovered Fleet Afoot and was expected in York in less than thirty minutes.
"Is he conscious yet?" Marny asked.
Munay had been discovered alone and unconscious on Fleet Afoot, which had taken a significant beating. Whoever he’d found, they had very nearly done him in. I looked to Nick.
"Medical AI says it'll take a night in the tank," he said.
"Do we know what happened to the navigation data?" I asked. "How is it possible to lose it all? I didn't think it was even possible with smart fabrics and all the systems we had in there."
"Fleet Afoot isn't human manufacture," Nick said. "I'm hoping we can find some piece of equipment where the information got uploaded. Sandoval's team didn't find anything yet."
"Jester Ripples couldn't find it?"
"No," Nick said, crushing what I considered our biggest hope. "Shimmering Leaves is down. Sandoval is moving Munay over to Hornblower now."
"Let's go," I said, standing.
"What about our meeting?" Bish asked, annoyed by the sudden change.
"Keep having it," I said. "In our absence, Mom has authority to make decisions for House of the Bold."
"And you're going to run off and take our only protection with you?" he pushed back.
"I've been down this road before, Bish," I said. "Hornblower doesn't belong to York. We'll do our best by you, but we have our own priorities."
"That's crap," he argued.
"That's reality," I said and leaned in to give Mom a quick hug. "Come over when you're done. I'm sure Greg would like to see you."
"I will," she said.
Nick and I exited into bright sunshine which reflected off the quickly melting snow. Where Zuri had been hot and muggy, its cool season barely reaching five degrees at night, Kito had an entire half a dozen ten-day periods where the average low temperature was below zero. I thought I'd find the cold annoying, but our suits did a fine job of keeping us warm, so the iciness just added variation.
"You going to try to wake him?" Nick asked as we flew through the pressure barrier and onto the flight deck.
"If Flaer says its safe," I answered, sailing through the hallways at speed to the medical bay. Flaer, of course, was our resident doctor and the significant other of our primary gunne
r, Sendrei.
"If Flaer says what's safe?" Flaer asked, uncannily picking up the conversation I'd thought was too far away for her to hear.
"I want to talk to Munay," I said. "Can you wake him?"
"I'd rather give him a night in the tank first, but I don't think it'll cause too much trouble," she said. "I was just prepping him. You can help."
I wasn't about to argue with her, so I helped peel back Munay's charred vac-suit. His AI had done a good job of keeping him alive, but it was clear he'd run into something bad. Sections of his leg were badly burned and the control circuits of his suit broke as we pulled it off. I'd held out some hope that his suit held the information we so desperately needed, but it looked to be a complete loss.
For several minutes we worked in quiet as Nick and I helped Flaer apply patches and swabbed at things best left undescribed.
"Man, he's really been through the wringer," I said.
"He's responding nicely, though," Flaer said. "This one has the heart of a fighter."
I chuckled. I'd found Munay rather annoying on multiple occasions. There was no doubt in my mind that he had a fighter's heart.
"Can he hear us?" I asked.
"Hoffen?" His voice was so quiet that if he hadn't been elevated on a table in front of me, I wouldn’t have heard him. The sensors Flaer had placed on him showed increased stress and I could sense he was trying to sit up.
I placed my hands on his shoulder and gently pushed him back. "I'm here, Greg. You're safe. I can hear you."
"I got 'em," he whispered and reached around with his burned arm, trying to get to his mouth.
"Easy Greg," I said, my heart starting to race as I gently resisted his attempt to move. "Got who?"
"Frakking bugs," he said, coughing violently and jerking his hand away with more strength than I'd have expected. "I found their home."
"I'm sedating him," Flaer said. "He's hurting himself."
"No!" he coughed again and spat blood onto his bare chest, then relaxed as the medicine calmed him.
I swabbed at the goop he'd coughed up and tossed it into a nearby reclaimer port when I heard a clank against the metallic wall inside the small cavity.
"Stop reclaimer!" I ordered, hoping my AI was fast enough.
"What is it?" Nick asked.
"He had something in his mouth," I said, reaching into the goo and trying not to think about what I was doing. My hand closed around a small object and I extracted it, using a fresh swab to wipe it off. It was shaped like a tooth, but I could tell it was much more.
Chapter 15
Good Cop, Demon Cop
Mendari System, Intrepid
“Clingman never stood a chance,” Sendrei groaned, slowly getting to his feet after having been thrown against the bulkhead. “And what kind of bull-shite civilization attacks with no provocation?”
“They call themselves Mendari,” Jonathan answered. “At least that is a reasonable translation.”
“They’re spider people and I thought I’d seen everything,” Tabby said, making her way forward, not bothering to remove the pistol at her waist before entering Intrepid’s bridge.
“That would be a poor classification,” Jonathan said. “The sentries which attacked were a fusion of biological and mechanical. The biological entities are rather mundane by our current standards.”
“They looked like spiders,” Tabby answered hotly.
“What happened to Clingman?” Ada asked.
“We were attacked by three of those man-spider hybrids,” Sendrei answered. “After we dispatched the first, they were upon us. Clingman’s armored vac-suit was pierced by a mechanical limb.”
“How many were there? It looked like we woke the entire station,” Tabby said, tuning Intrepid’s forward screen to replay the data-stream of their hasty exit from the rusted building.
With rapt attention, she watched as Brockette hustled Ada toward the ship, followed a few moments later by Sendrei and Tabby rocketing out, unstable in their dual grav-suit and arc-jet-fueled flight. At first, only a pair of man-spider creatures emerged, giving chase, but as video continued, the entire entrance to the rusted ruin boiled, disgorging one after another. Tabby froze the scene and rolled it back, freezing on the forward pair as they leapt toward Intrepid.
“Sendrei, are you seeing this?” Tabby asked. “This thing’s not over.”
“Scan ship’s skin,” Sendrei ordered, bolting back up from his station. “They’re trying to get around to the cargo-hold. It’s still open.”
At about the same moment the external vid sensor discovered two hybrid warriors clinging to Intrepid, Warning klaxons sounded on the bridge, alerting the crew of a potential breach.
“Seriously with the alarm timing?” Tabby said sarcastically as she followed Sendrei from the bridge.
“All hands, emergency combat burn,” Ada announced and spun Intrepid over hard.
With virtually no warning, those on the ship who weren’t strapped in, were flung into the nearest bulkhead. As if to add insult to injury, Ada spun Intrepid once again in the opposite direction, tossing the same crew in the opposite direction.
“What the frak, Chen!” Tabby complained, peeling herself from the bulkhead.
Tabby’s complaint was overridden by Ada’s whoop of exultation over tactical comms. “I got one!” Her celebration was cut short a moment later when she recognized a new problem. “Frak. There’s one in the hold. It’s got Brockette!”
Using her grav-suit, Tabby squirted around Sendrei, who was still finding it difficult to identify up and down. Before she cleared the hallway, Tabby heard heavy gunfire followed by a short-lived scream. The scene she came upon in the hold was grisly. The body of Brockette, having been torn in two by the invader, lay on the floor.
“Tabitha, if you could keep the invader alive, it would be of benefit,” Jonathan said over comms.
Tabby grunted in response, “Find another one.”
The man-spider whirled, sensing Tabby’s presence as she entered the bay. Standing three and a half meters high, the sentry was roughly man-shaped on top. It had no hair on its gray, bumpy skull, pock-marked and unhealthy-looking skin sagged down the torso where it met machine, and heavily-muscled arms ended in four-fingered hands, which grasped thin, metallic arms leading into the spidery body. Where skin met machine, the humanoid body was inflamed, its skin attempting to reject the joining.
Tabby lunged forward, taking advantage of her ability to float above the deck. At the last moment, the man-spider jumped nimbly up to meet her. Subconsciously, Tabby picked up on something she wouldn’t have been able to easily put into words. Having left the ground, her attacker had no further mobility and was clearly looking for a grapple.
“Demon!” it shouted as they met in midair.
In the back of her mind, Tabby questioned the translation Jonathan had put together. Pushing the unproductive thought away, she slapped at the nearest leg as it bent and twisted unnaturally toward her.
Instead of dodging the next attacking leg, Tabby grabbed the metal, encircling the shaft with both hands. Pushing with her grav-suit, she surged into the torso, sending the two hurtling toward the deck. Just before impact, the metal legs snapped outward, swiveled and caught them both, cushioning their landing. Tabby smiled, having expected the move. With her hands grasping the leg, she swung a foot up to brace against its base and pulled with her considerable strength. For a moment, nothing happened, although the torso of the man-spider turned, its face looking down at her with rage-filled eyes.
The feel of metal giving way fueled Tabby’s efforts and she brought her other leg up beneath her. A great scream filled the room as she and the leg came free. Trails of green fluid and long wires followed behind the severed metal.
“Port side!” Sendrei yelled.
Without hesitation, Tabby dropped the leg and turned, just as a second spider leg caught her mid-abdomen, piercing her side and sticking her to the floor. She screamed in pain but had the presence of mind to roll
into the leg as yet another sought to finish her off.
The sound of Sendrei’s gunfire drew the man-spider’s attention and Tabby felt the metal slide out of her flesh. For ordinary humans, the trauma would have been enough to keep them down, with continued life expectancy low. Since most of Tabby’s abdomen had been manufactured on Mars in a military hospital, her pain was very real, but she was far from disabled.
Taking advantage of Sendrei’s distraction, she pushed up from the deck and grabbed the very leg that had pinned her. Unaware of the trouble she was about to cause, the man-spider charged at Sendrei, flattening two of its metallic legs as a shield in front of the human torso.
“Not sure how many of these you need,” Tabby grunted, vital fluids leaking from her stomach as her grav-suit sought to staunch the bleeding.
Tabby knew she couldn’t continue long but didn’t dare allow the advantage to pass. Having a feel for the pressure required, she planted both feet and ripped out the leg, even as the beast sprinted toward Sendrei. With only two legs left on its left side, the spider was forced to drop its shield to maintain balance, just as additional crew joined Sendrei at the door.
Faced with multiple blasters, the man-spider sprang to jump, but instead spun out of control, unable to adjust to the asymmetric pressure caused by an uneven number of legs. With dripping leg in hand, Tabby hurled herself at the flailing creature and drove the metal through its chest, pinning it into the forward bulkhead. Tabby allowed herself to sink to the floor, carefully watching the thrashing beast in its death throes.
“Oh, frak, does that hurt,” Tabby said, throwing an arm over Sendrei’s shoulder as he lifted and carried her from the hold.
“How are you even talking?” he asked, half-running down the ramp that led to the smaller Deck Two which held the brig and medical bay, just behind crew country sleeping quarters at the ship’s bow.
“Decided not to go with factory originals,” she answered, lightly tapping her stomach. She winced in pain.
Judgment of the Bold Page 17
