Lethal Cargo

by Felix R. Savage

  Dolph and I weren’t able to stay in touch throughout the whole operation. It’s kind of difficult to talk on the phone when you’re shooting and running. But as near as I can figure it, this is what happened.

  Dolph had trouble finding a parking space. It was, of course, Founding Day, meaning that the mall level was packed out with visitors to the festival. Dolph finally found a space in a distant corner.

  He opened the back of the truck, and five wolves in human form got out. These were Alec from the range and four of his friends, who called themselves the “jungle wolves.” They lived out there. They were hardcore.

  Martin was still out at the spaceport. He’d been pissed at not getting to join in, but I had begged him to stay put to cover Parsec’s most likely escape route.

  Irene? None of us exactly knew where she was, except Rex, and he wasn’t telling. She had come home to eat and sleep last night, then gone back out at dawn. She said she had picked up the trail of the contaminated fairy dust. If she could just track down this one guy, she’d be able to find out where it had come from.

  I didn’t really see the point of tracing the damn stuff, but Irene seemed to think it mattered. And much as I would miss her sharpshooting skills, I accepted that my part of the operation wasn’t a job for a sniper.

  Neither was Dolph’s.

  The jungle wolves lifted two large suitcases out of the back of the truck. One of these held their spare guns and ammo. The other held the shaped charge we had prepared in my kitchen last night, after MF grudgingly deemed the apartment fit for human occupation.

  He had enlisted Nanny B to help him sterilize the entire apartment down to the sheetrock. I’m hardly even exaggerating. When MF allowed us back in, I had scarcely recognized the place. All the carpets and soft furnishings had vanished, along with the bedclothes, everything edible out of the kitchen, and the top layer of paint off the walls. Lucy’s room had been stripped of all her belongings. Even her cherished Gemworld Families dolls had joined the carpets and curtains in the plastic bags piled in the living-room, which MF instructed us to treat as hazardous waste. That hurt.

  And yet, after the initial shock, I had been oddly relieved that Lucy’s things were gone from the apartment. I did not need reminders everywhere of the kinder, gentler world I had tried to build for her.

  Anyway, if I got her back, I’d buy her all the new toys she wanted.

  If? No. When.

  MF had offered to assist Dolph’s end of the operation. He swung down from the back of the truck after all the men were out. Dolph had dressed him in a Shoreside Elementary t-shirt to make him look less high-spec. It swallowed his suitcase-like housing, while his head stuck out of the neck hole, googly eyes blinking innocently.

  On their way up in the elevator, people smiled and chatted to MF, taking him for some kind of interactive advertising bot. MF played along by relating factoids about the Founders.

  The Founding Day festivities also gave Dolph and his crew an excuse to wear red and green face paint. Most people would just paint tricolor stripes on their cheeks. Dolph and the jungle wolves had painted swoops and blobs on their foreheads, jaws, and one eye. The key principles are to obscure the ocular region and the bridge of the nose, and break up the symmetry of the face. The Travellers used living tattoos. This way worked just as well. The facial recognition algorithms would have a very hard time identifying the six men who remained in the elevator when everyone else got out at the mall level.

  In silence, the team travelled up to the 121st floor. Dolph reached around and loosened his Koiler in its holster.

  The elevator doors opened.

  Dolph walked out into that eerie hall with its mirrored ceiling and light-up tiles. He confirmed with a glance that there was no one else in the hall. We had found out by studying the building plan that Mujin Inc was the only occupant of this floor. The company’s doors were still sealed.

  Dolph took a laser pointer out of his pocket and aimed it directly into the camera facing the elevator.

  At the same time, Alec was taking out the camera at one end of the hall, and Ryder, a young veteran of Quvira, was dealing with the one at the far end.

  “Hopefully it’ll be a while before they get around to checking out the malfunctions,” Dolph said. The team had seen the Founding Day festivities in full swing on the mall level as they rose up in the glass-walled elevator. It looked like a human sea of red, white, and green. With any luck, building security would have their hands full.

  The team proceeded to their objective and prepared to force an entry …

  See how much easier it is to talk about it like this? These are the words Dolph used when he talked about it to me, but I’d probably have resorted to the same kind of language, the language the army taught us. The plain fact was that Dolph and his team were preparing to set off a bomb in a Mag-Ingat office building, a level of crazy that could only be glancingly justified by reference to the threat on the other side.

  The doors were two slabs of steel sealed as tightly as an airlock. MF tried to force them by inserting his laser saw attachment into the crack, but nothing happened except that the steel heated up and unpleasant wisps of smoke escaped. Anyway, Dolph had already decided to go with the shaped charge. I think on some subconscious level he had forgotten that he was on Ponce de Leon. Mentally, he was operating off-world. The explosive we had got from the construction company was a high-brisance nitramine, which crumbled when we unpacked the bricks, and smelled like marzipan, with an odor so strong we’d had to open the kitchen windows. We had packed the charge into an economy size can that formerly held fruit salad. We had made a copper liner for it, and made stand-off legs by cutting up the wire rack out of my oven. Getting the stand-off distance right was crucial. MF had estimated the thickness of the door and broken out his math skills.

  The team taped the charge to the bottom of one door and retreated to the other end of the hall. Dolph carried the detonator, unreeling the wire behind him.

  He said that when he looked back down that long hall, the doors looked tiny, but he still had a sudden fear that the hall wasn’t long enough.

  “Five,” he said. “Four. Three. Two. One.” He pressed the firing button.

  46

  At the same time, Robbie was parking around the corner from Buzz Parsec’s house.

  It was a lovely house. Mellow brick walls with just the right amount of ivy—real terrestrial ivy—rambling over them, and dormer windows in a tiled mansard roof. You could hardly believe Shiftertown’s worst crook lived here. But of course, all the other houses on his cul-de-sac were equally lovely. They were all variations on the Ville Verde template. And the other houses had real, lived-in front gardens—here a jungle gym, there a tree swing, there a pergola covered with roses—whereas Parsec’s front garden was a square of lawn enclosed by shrubbery, clearly tended by a bot. Neither he nor Cecilia had any interest in gardening.

  I got out of the pickup, still in my bear form, and walked up the cul-de-sac, sniffing the ground and looking all around. Thank God, there was no one out on the street. They’d all be at their own Founding Day hootenanny. In fact, I could hear the faint sound of a steel band drifting over the rooftops from the community’s public park.

  The garage abutting Parsec’s house had just one car in it, a two-seater that I guessed was Cecilia’s. It was not the one on the security camera footage. I hadn’t expected them to be that dumb, but all the same, my heart sank.

  What if Parsec wasn’t here, either?

  Well, there was only one way to find out.

  I turned onto his garden walk. It was laid with black pebbles, graveyard style. Heated up by the sun, the pebbles scorched my pads. I took one more look around to make sure I was alone on the street. I saw no one but Marco the wolf, loitering on the corner, waiting for his cue.

  Unlike Dolph, I planned to do this as quietly as possible. The streets of Ville Verde were unusually wide, to accommodate flying cars setting down and taking off. All the same, w
e couldn’t treat this like urban clearance on some alien planet, where we had little to no regard for collateral damage. I wanted to get inside the house, away from potential casualties and spying eyes, not only human but electronic, as quickly as possible.

  I climbed Parsec’s front steps and rang the doorbell with my nose.

  Why does anyone choose a bear as their animal form? Every moment I was remembering how much I hated it. My thick fur threatened to overheat me, while my relatively short limbs gave me less speed and agility than the big cats or the wolf I preferred.

  I heard the doorbell ringing through the house, with an empty echo. My misgivings intensified. I rang again.

  After another minute, Larry (or maybe it was Gary) Kodiak answered the door. He was in human form. You have to be, to carry an assault rifle.

  “What the fuck do you want?” he growled, holding the rifle down by his side, where it wouldn’t be noticed by any watching neighbors.

  He was wearing shorts and a string vest.

  To my bear’s nose, he smelled like meat.

  I shambled forward into the hall, forcing him to take a quick step back.

  “Steve?” he said, suspiciously.

  I wasn’t Steve, but I now recalled that Steve’s chosen form did have one advantage. Bears can rise on their hind legs very quickly. Before the Kodiak twin could raise his rifle, I hugged him in my muscular forelegs, pinning his arms to his sides. I set my teeth into the side of his neck.

  His rifle went off, hitting the floor and the steel lip of the front door. I heard a ricochet break glass.

  I hugged him tighter. He was struggling madly, trying to kick me in the crotch. He knew that that hurts even in bear form. I bit down enough to break the skin. Now he changed his tactics and played dead.

  Running footsteps crunched on the pebbled walk. Rex and the wolves cut off the sunlight from my furry back as they piled into the hall. I heard the door slam, and Rex saying my name, but I didn’t really hear him because I was tasting the Kodiak twin’s blood, and fighting the instinct to bite down with all the crushing strength of my bear jaws, severing his spinal cord and his carotid artery in one fearsome bite.

  That’s why Parsec’s gang favored bears, of course.

  No other animal that I have been has quite as much of a yen for killing humans.

  Then again, was it the bear, or was it me? I had been going mad for 36 hours, ever since Lucy was taken. It had to start coming out at some point.

  “Mike! Mike!”

  I reminded myself fiercely that Larry or Gary K was not my enemy, and dropped him. He fell like a side of meat.

  “Shit,” I said, breathing through my nose.

  Feet thundered on the stairs to the basement. The wolves were executing our plan to start searching the house at the bottom. Rex stood over me, covering the end of the hall with one of the rifles we had borrowed from the range. They were .308s fitted with suppressors. As I pawed at the Kodiak twin’s unmoving body, Rex suddenly swung around and fired into an open doorway on our right. The suppressor reduced the typical roar of a rifle to a sound more like a high-pressure air hose being disconnected. Over it, we heard something shatter.

  “Only a goddamn holovee,” Rex said.

  I took a deep breath and Shifted back. When I had hands once more, I quickly palpated the Kodiak twin’s chest. I’d broken a couple of his ribs. He was groaning helplessly, his eyes rolling in agony.

  “Where’s my daughter?” I slapped his face. A blood bubble appeared at his lips. “Where is she?”

  He groaned incoherently, too out of it to even hear what I was saying. I swore in frustration.

  “Let him be,” Rex said. He dropped his backpack and kicked it towards me. I pulled out a pair of jeans and put them on, then a flak vest. I grabbed the Kodiak twin’s assault rifle. I had a .45 in the backpack, also borrowed from the range, but this had a larger capacity.

  We left the Kodiak twin where he was and cleared the ground floor. I took lead, sidling up to each doorway in turn while Rex covered me. I burst through each door in turn and quickly swung my rifle to cover the whole room. Parsec had more rooms on the ground floor of his house than I had in my whole apartment. They were crammed with expensive furniture and gadgets. And they were empty. The only living things we found were some fish swimming around in a restaurant-scale saltwater tank in the kitchen. Bears like their seafood fresh.

  I had eschewed Dolph’s idea to use grenades, as the one thing I feared most was accidentally hurting Lucy. But as we stood in the kitchen, breathing heavily and scanning the large, empty backyard and swimming pool, I heard a muffled explosion beneath my feet. Crockery clinked on the shelves. “Those damn wolves,” I snarled.

  We reached the stairs at the same time as Sep and Marco stumbled back up them. Sep had lost all the hair on the right side of his head. His face on that side was red and starting to blister. Both young men held onto the banister, fumbling as if they couldn’t see where they were going. Yet Marco was stubbornly carrying a commercial-grade holo projector.

  “Flash-bang,” Sep mumbled.

  “Irene warned you about the booby-traps,” Rex growled. “Anyone down there?”

  “No one,” Marco said. “It went off when I took this.”

  Parsec’s booby-traps were set up to deter burglars.

  I knocked the holo projector out of Marco’s hands. It fell beside the Kodiak twin, who had stopped groaning because he’d passed out. “Can you see?”

  “Kinda.”

  “Stay here. Rex, you better stay here as well.”

  “You going up there?” Rex rumbled, glancing at the stairs. One flight led down to the rec room. Another led up to the second floor.

  “Yes.” I grabbed Sep’s rifle and slung it over my shoulder as a backup weapon, and then started up the stairs.

  When I stopped to listen at the top of the first flight, all I heard was my friends whispering to each other at the bottom.

  With my back pressed to the wall, I sidled a few steps along a hall sumptuously carpeted in pink and white.

  Silence.

  I flung open the first door I came to and aimed my rifle inside.

  It was the master bedroom. One of those levitating beds stood on a raised dais, heaped with his ‘n’ hers pillows. I went through and cleared the en suite bathroom, uncomfortably aware that my ass was hanging out—I needed someone else up here to cover my back. I shouldn’t have left Rex downstairs. But I needed someone effective on the door, in case more bears arrived. I had to assume that if there was anyone else in the house, they would have called in the cavalry by now. For that matter, if any of the neighbors were home, they might have noticed the boom from that damn flash-bang. Ville Verde security might be on their way.

  Galvanized by urgency, I went back through the master bedroom. When I told Dolph about this later, he said, “Please tell me you took a dump on his bed.” It didn’t even cross my mind. There was no room for anything in my mind except Lucy.

  Muscle memory and experience carried me through the rest of the second floor, but I was in so much of a hurry that I was getting sloppy. The next flight of stairs had a 45-degree bend in it. I put my rifle around the bend first, like you’re supposed to do, but then I followed through without waiting long enough, and a bullet almost took my head off. Another one clipped my flak vest and sent me stumbling back down a couple of stairs.

  “That you, Starrunner?”

  I recognized Canuck’s voice over the ringing in my ears.

  “You’re fucked this time!” he screamed. “Boss’s on his way!”

  I yelled back, “Is my daughter up there?”

  “Give it up. Drop your weapon,” Canuck shouted. His voice was high and raw. I believe that bear was actually a bit deranged. He couldn’t possibly have been scared, right? He had the advantage over me. No way I could get up those stairs while he was …

  Wait.

  I crouched on the stairs, listening. I heard him rustling around up there. After a moment h
e got impatient and sent another burst down the stairwell. It shattered a framed print. Broken glass fell to the stairs. Before he would be able to physically squeeze the trigger again, I popped around the bend and fired up the stairs. I didn’t have time to aim, but I saw him, prone on the landing.

  I retreated into cover as he fired another burst, thinking desperately.

  Something touched my bare foot.

  I whipped my head and weapon around and saw Rex. He crawled up the first few stairs to where I was. “Sep’s on the front door,” he breathed into my ear. “Marco’s in the kitchen. Think they learned their lesson about picking up sparkly things.”

  “Canuck,” I whispered, motioning up the stairs.

  “Where are you, Starrunner?” Canuck screamed. “I can hear you! I can smell you! Here, doggy, doggy!”

  “Keep him talking,” I whispered to Rex, sliding down the stairs so he could take my place.

  “Any more of them up there?”

  “Hope not.”

  I told him what I was going to try, and left him the Kodiak twin’s assault rifle, which still had most of a full magazine. Then I tiptoed back along the second-floor hall. There was a window at the far end. As much as I tried to be quiet, it squeaked when I opened it, but another burst of fire from Canuck conveniently covered the noise. Rex gave me a thumbs-up. I put my head out.

  The ivy climbed past the window, up to the roof.

  I tested the thickest stem by tugging on it. It did not come away even a millimeter from the brick. Real terrestrial ivy is a tenacious plant. Unlike the strangler vines more common on Ponce de Leon, it is a stayer, not an opportunist. These plants were old and well rooted, and the stem I held was so thick and woody, it was practically a tree trunk.

  Bears are good at climbing.

  But under some circumstances, humans are better.

  I put my rifle down. It would just get in the way. I had my Machina in one of the pockets of my flak vest. That’d have to do.