Then she sees the grenade.
That’s right, you remember, don’t you girl?
Her tongue darts out, flicks open the switch cover and turns the grenade on.
It’s set to a three second timer by default. After one second, the bots loading cargo freeze halfway up the ramp.
“Danger,” one of them says. “Electromagnetic pulse detected.”
“Cade! What are you—”
That’s as far as Aurora gets with her objection before the grenade unleashes its invisible fury. The bots on the ramp collapse with clattering thunder, and Aurora goes down with a meaty slap.
I set Bry down and palm one of the wafer-sized bot jackers from the same crate as the EMP. Then I pretend to run to Aurora’s aid.
As soon as I reach her, I open the access panel on the back of her neck and slot in the jacker.
Connecting to it with my holoband, I command the device to disrupt Aurora’s automatic reboot sequence and make a copy of her neural data.
Then I pretend to show concern for Aurora while I wait, shaking her, and saying: “Hey! Wake up? Shit! How do I reboot you...? Damn it, Bry!”
Chirr?
She comes waddling over to us and peers down at Aurora with big, blinking blue eyes.
“What did you do?”
Chirr?
“Bad girl!”
She tucks into a protective ball and starts shivering.
Poor thing. But I need to have a scapegoat ready when Aurora wakes up and reviews the security feeds from her cargo bay.
The transfer finishes and I eject the jacker into my palm. A few seconds later, Aurora wakes up none the wiser.
She sees me kneeling beside her and shoves me away with an angry scowl. “What the fuck!?”
“It wasn’t my fault! Bry activated the grenade. She must have thought she smelled food or something.”
“You expect me to believe this was an accident?”
“It was. I swear. Check your security feed if you don’t believe me.”
I see images go flickering across Aurora’s eyes.
While I’m waiting for her to check the footage, I push off the deck and turn around to check the bots on the boarding ramp. With my back turned, I slide the jacker into a pouch on my gunbelt under the guise of hooking my thumbs into the belt. The cargo bots come jerking back to life a few seconds later. They’re a lot slower to recover than Aurora, which probably speaks to the sub-par quality of their EM countermeasures.
“Hmmm...” Aurora mutters.
I turn back to her with a bland look. “See? Why would I want to knock you out, anyway?” I jerk a thumb to the cargo bots, just now picking up a crate full of weapons. “I could have blown us up!”
That adds to my alibi, but I was careful to check the markings on the crate the bots were loading before letting Bry activate the EMP. Making them drop volatile explosives really would be a scrigg move.
Aurora seems satisfied with my excuses, and she turns her ire on Bry instead. She’s still tucked into a shivering ball of fur.
Aurora’s glowing orange eyes skip back up to me as she pushes off the deck.
“What the hell were you doing with that grenade in the first place?”
“I wanted to check to make sure I got a high enough yield.”
“Speaking from painful experience, I’d say you got the right ones,” Aurora says. “You finish up here. I’ll be up in the cockpit.”
“Sure.”
As she’s leaving, Aurora calls back, “And make sure that little pezzo di merda doesn’t set off any more grenades on my ship!”
“Don’t worry, I think she learned her lesson!” I call back. Walking over to Bry, I bend down and stroke her patchy white fur. “It’s okay, girl. You had a tough day, huh? We’ll get you fixed up and get rid of those little monsters before they finish you off.”
Bry doesn’t reply. Maybe she’s mad at me for blaming her, but that’s probably ascribing too much awareness to an animal intelligence.
As soon as Core’s cargo bots are done, I contact Aurora in the cockpit to address the matter of our food supply and the infestation on board.
“Figure it out!” she snaps at me. “I don’t need food, and I already warned you that you’d be paying for any damages those xenos cause.”
“I’ll take care of it,” I assure her.
Aurora ends the comms there. She’s obviously still in a foul mood after the EMP incident, but so far it doesn’t look like she’s figured out what really happened.
I scoop Bry off the deck and follow the cargo bots onto the streets, looking for a dealer who might be willing to take a few dozen exotic xenos off our hands.
While I’m at it, hopefully I can find a cracker to decrypt the data I pulled from Aurora’s neural net.
Chapter 41
“Are you sure?” I ask.
The cracker bot’s glowing red eyes brighten then dim as if it just experienced a power surge.
“Yes. She knew of Cade Korbin because they work in the same field, but there is no sign that she deliberately sought him out. And after their initial meeting, her intentions remain honest. She’s after the target, not you.”
My eyes narrow at the bot. “My name is Erin Thul, not Cade Korbin.”
“Of course, it is,” the cracker bot deadpans. It’s a nondescript basic, bare metal-skinned model without any synthskin or even any moving parts to imitate human facial expressions. Since this bot lacks any of the niceties that make interaction with humans easier, I suspect that it’s just a cheap, remote-piloted avatar to help the real cracker stay anonymous. On a world like Hades, he or she is probably hiding from their powerful corporate clients and victims rather than law enforcement, which doesn’t exist.
I wonder if the cracker might try to claim the price on my head now that he knows who I really am.
But he’s not set up for that kind of work. He’d have to hire someone else to do it for him, and then they’d claim the fee instead.
“What about after the job is over? Is she thinking about killing me then?”
Once more the bot’s eyes flicker.
“No. She doesn’t believe it to be worth the risk of losing her membership with the Syndicate for only half a million credits.”
“All right, thanks for your help.”
“Of course.” The cracker hands me the bot jacker chip with the decrypted data on it. “Do you require anything else?”
“That’s it.”
I paid in advance for the cracker’s services—twenty thousand credits—so now I simply head back out into the hot, dry air of Hades’ streets.
Bry squirms in my arms. I shift her to a one-handed grip so I can slip the bot jacker into a compartment on my belt.
At least now I have some peace of mind. Aurora isn’t secretly gunning for me. I can stop watching my back and focus on the mission.
“What do you say we go get some food, Bry?”
She uncurls from a ball to peer up at me with one blue eye. Chirr?
“Food first. We’ll find someone to buy your kids after we eat.”
Maybe that will solve my liquidity crisis.
Chirr-up!
Was that enthusiasm?
I hope so. If not, I’ll need to buy a whole lot more food than I was planning. Probably more than I can afford, too.
* * *
Fourteen Hours Later...
“Here you go,” I say, breaking off a piece of Bry’s favorite snack and tossing it to her. She snaps the chunk of protein bar out of the air with her tongue.
I open my helmet’s visor to take a bite for myself, careful not to drop crumbs inside my state-of-the-art ADX exosuit.
We’re each sitting on stools bolted with folding arms to the scuffed and green-milk-stained table in the mess hall. Finally, it’s no longer teeming with Bry’s psychotic offspring.
Their endless chirping and chirr-upping has been replaced with blessed silence—nothing but the steady hum of the FTL drive and the rhythmic whooshing
of the Seraph’s climate control system.
As it happens, Bry wasn’t at all sad to see the little monsters go. She didn’t even want to say goodbye. After they attacked her, the next time she saw her kids, she took off, hopping away as fast as those stubby legs could carry her. I found her tucked into a ball and shivering under one of the bunks in our room.
I couldn’t even coax her out to say goodbye.
Maybe it was long-past time for them to go waddling out on their own. Or maybe them eating their parents when they get that big is something they all do, and she wasn’t keen to have them take a few parting bites.
Whatever the case, I made a tidy sum selling them to the xeno dealer on Hades once he realized they’d happily eat their master alive if he neglected to feed them. I didn’t think to ask who he was going to adopt them out to. None of my business.
He gave me thirty-six hundred credits for the whole brood. One hundred a piece. Turns out there weren’t actually fifty of them, but I could have sworn there were more than thirty-six. Maybe they turned on each other before they tried to eat their mother. Whatever the case, Aurora promptly took half of the credits for the anticipated cost of repairing the damage they did to her ship.
Still a decent profit for me, but I’m sure Bry will nibble away at it with all the money I’m spending to feed her. Protein bars aren’t cheap.
I toss another chunk in her direction. She almost scratches the paint on my armor in her hurry to snatch the morsel out of the air.
“Careful.”
Chirr...
With the little monsters gone, we had a quiet night and a pleasantly dull day. Now it’s 16:52 IST, and according to the ship’s computer, we’re just twenty minutes from dropping out of FTL.
I’m already dressed, suited up in my ADX armor, and packing three different kinds of weapons. Seeker drones for tagging targets are clipped to my belt. A fire and forget ADS-4 stun pistol is holstered on my right hip. It carries four tracking, shield-piercing stun darts with an effective range of five hundred meters. I also have a bolt-action ADX-19 rifle on my back. It’s scoped with thermal and night-vision optics, and it has adaptive stabilizers and aim-assist. That one can fire either tracking rounds or stun darts and can hit a target from over a klick away. The third type of weapon I’m packing is a belt full of grenades: two high-yield EMP’s, two plasma, and two stun grenades.
Besides that, the compartments in my suit are loaded with all kinds of jacker tech that will hopefully make finding Rama easy.
It’s a lot of gear to carry, and smuggling it down to Aquaria is a chore in itself. The Alliance isn’t as strict about system security as the Coalition, but they’re still not dumb enough to kill tourism on a resort world like this one by letting people walk around with high-powered hardware.
In order to get our gear past Customs, Aurora and I hired a smuggler on Hades to meet up with us just outside Aquaria’s FTL inhibition zone. He’ll ferry me and our gear down to the surface in a cargo drop pod while Aurora flies on to the system checkpoint in her ship.
That’s another forty-five thousand credits I won’t be seeing again. Between that and the four hundred grand I spent on gear, this job is getting expensive. Lucky me Dreana turned out to be loaded.
A sharp jolt comes through the Seraph as it drops out of FTL. My helmet chirps at me with an incoming comms from Aurora.
“You’d better get to the airlock. I have the Dreidel in my sights. Won’t be long before we’re docked up.”
“Copy that. On my way.” I end the comms and ease off my bar stool. I’m about to pop the last of the protein bar into my helmet when I notice that Bry is watching me with a pitiful expression. Her mouth pops open in a disappointed O, and her eyes grow even bigger and rounder than usual.
I give in with a sigh. “Here,” I say, and toss the last bite her way.
She snaps it up instantly, and I shut my visor.
“See you later, Furball.”
Chirr-up!
Chapter 42
Aquaria,
Alliance Space
The drop pod rattles and shakes around me as it enters the atmosphere of Aquaria. The light radiating from my helmet displays vaguely illuminates the pod’s interior. According to my suit’s sensors, things are heating up fast. The interior temperature is up to sixty-five C already. That’s warm enough that I’m starting to feel it even through my suit. Of course, my thermal shield is offline. Can’t risk having emissions leaking from the pod and giving me away. All of the gear that we packed for the mission is sitting in front of me in a pre-cooled, vacuum-insulated crate on the opposite side of the pod. We loaded nearly everything with stun darts. After all, this contract is for live capture.
If Rama is as good as her rating suggests, capturing her is going to be interesting.
The pod has no viewports. No way for me to see what’s going on outside, or how close I’m getting to the shallow turquoise oceans below. The pod is disguised to look like a meteor. I just hope it doesn’t break apart or burn up like one.
The rattling and shaking reaches a crescendo. I’m pressed flat against the front end, pinned there by my own momentum as atmosphere drags on the misshapen pod, slowing it down.
No sign of braking thrusters or grav brakes kicking in yet. They’d better, or I’ll hit the ocean at terminal velocity, making this a very short and stupid start to a job.
The roaring of atmosphere outside quietens and my sensors show temp dropping tick by tick. Soon enough, I can feel the heat begin to dissipate. Then the G-forces pressing me against the front end of the pod swiftly multiply. I’m relieved, even though it feels like I’m being crushed. It’s just the grav brakes kicking in.
So far so good.
The suffocating weight of my own inertia eventually eases, and I’m actually able to take in a deep breath. Air whistles outside the pod—
Is it my imagination or am I still coming in too f—
The impact is like hitting a brick wall. Water comes spraying in through a dozen different ruptures in the pod, flooding the interior in seconds.
I can’t breathe, and I’m seeing spots. For a moment, I wonder if my suit flooded, too, and I’m busy drowning. A familiar burn spreads beneath my ribs, but then my lungs inflate with a deep, desperate gasp.
Peeling myself off the inside of the pod, I try to get my bearings. The hatch that I crawled in through aboard the smuggler’s ship is right above my head, but the doors look deformed.
I try the control panel. The hatch doors open an inch before getting stuck. An error flashes red on the screen just before it dies with a series of crackles and pops as water gets to the circuitry. Wisps of smoke trail out from the dead panel.
Cheap smuggler crap.
But I’m already prepared for this.
Reaching up, I feed my armored hands into the gap between the doors in the hatch and tear them open with the augmented strength of my suit.
A shimmering blanket of sunlight appears above me. That’s the rippled, sunlit underside of the ocean surface. It’s only about fifteen feet up, and the water is magnificently clear. The pod is already resting on the sandy bottom. Despite the hollow interior, it is designed to sink like a real rock and stay down—just in case someone was watching as it hit the surface.
Cracking open the storage crate, I pull out a big waterproof bag with guns and gear in it and sling it over my shoulder before climbing out. Out in open water, I drop down the side of what genuinely looks like a rock. Unless you count the hollow interior.
My feet touch down on the sandy bottom of the ocean with a muffle skrish that gets transmitted through the external audio pickups in my helmet.
I don’t go bobbing up. This suit is too heavy for that—even on Aquaria with its lower than standard gravity. Buoyancy is directly proportional to gravity. It’s all about densities, and right now I’m much denser than the water.
I find my bearings with the suit’s scanners by checking the slope of the ocean floor. Heading for shallower water
, I slowly trudge toward the shore of the small, uninhabited island Aurora and I picked for a rendezvous.
Walking along the sandy ocean floor is slow, exhausting work with the water tugging on my every step. But my exosuit is aiding and abetting every step, making me faster and lightening the load on my muscles.
I’m about halfway to the shore when I hear the telltale roar of a ship approaching. I don’t think it’s Aurora, because we said she’d come get me by boat.
It must be a system patroller come to investigate the meteor. So I freeze on the spot and set my adaptive armor to stealth mode. Using my neuralink, I do the same for the bag of gear on my back.
Now I’m an invisible wraith, blending perfectly with the clear water and sandy ocean floor. Waving a hand in front of my face to test the effect, all I see is a vague stirring of the water.
But I can’t keep walking to shore. The water is too clear and each footstep will stir the sand around my feet. In fact, I hope that ship can’t see the trail of footprints along the ocean floor leading back to that meteor.
Checking my rear cameras, I see the vague outline of the pod behind me, turned a dark, blurry blue from the sheer volume of water between us. It’s supposed to have disintegrated so that all anyone will see at the impact site are scattered fragments of rock.
But as I’m watching, I see that blurry outline vanish. The smuggler did one better. He used a pod with adaptive camouflage, and it’s become invisible just like me.
The ship roars by overhead, and comes to an abrupt stop a hundred feet away, hovering directly over the spot where the pod set down.
Come on, I think. It’s not worth your trouble.
The patroller is in an air car. Probably local PD. He hesitates for a few seconds, maybe talking it over with the dispatcher.
And then the patroller jets away. On to the next call.
I let out a breath I didn’t realize I was holding.
Maybe patrols here are as lax as the laid-back atmosphere promoted by the hot sand, surf, and fruity drinks. Or maybe that smuggler bribed someone to look the other way.
The Bounty Hunter (Cade Korbin Chronicles Book 1) Page 20
