It almost made me want to laugh.
That was a feeling that was very short lived.
We pushed it, running the decks of the cruiser as a team, as pairs, as part of a multi-group hunt, and then we retired to the gym for more sparring. Scarpil had been right. No one underestimated me. On the upside, no one cheated, either—until I knifed the first one in the thigh.
You can’t say I wasn’t a fast learner.
Delight and Pritchard waded into the fourth fight. At first, I thought they were going to try and pull us apart, but then Delight smacked my opponent, and Pritchard smacked me, and it was on. My original opponent and I teamed up to put Delight on her ass, but Pritchard was quick to take advantage and tossed me into a wall. Delight regained her feet and took my sparring partner out, and then the pair of them headed my way as I picked myself up.
I started to laugh, and went for Delight, who was the closest—or so they thought, until I blindsided Pritchard with a sudden change of direction and clipped him upside the head. It went downhill from there, but I was trying to more than bruise one or both of them, and I made them work for the victory. I musta made my mark, because the next time I took Pritchard off his feet, Delight shot me.
“Son of a bitch!”
I was still cursing when I came round.
“You shit-eating, dung-crawling, larvae-munching, bug-fucking, goat-sucking, spit-sacking whore!”
I was half-way onto my feet, when Delight reached out and pulled me upright.
“You spent too much time with the vespis.”
I hauled back a fist, only to have someone grab my arm and twist it behind my back at the same time as they wrapped an arm across my other shoulder and pull me tight into them.
“Let me go, Scarpil. You have no idea what you’re playing with.”
He tweaked my arm a bit higher and I gasped.
“Who says I’m playing?”
“Stand down, Cutter.” Pritchard’s voice slid over me, his command repeated in my head, as Cascade bounced his presence into my implant and leant his body against my legs.
I closed my eyes, took a breath, counted to ten in Galbas, ran it backwards in Galfran, tried to work out what the numbers were in vespis and lupar. Took another breath. Pritchard watched me start to calm.
“Scarpil.”
I felt the tension on my arm ease, but the big guy didn’t let me go. When I opened my eyes, again, Delight was still standing there. She glanced over at Pritchard.
“That went a lot better than we hoped.”
I followed her look, caught Pritchard’s slow nod.
“Still needs a little work, though.”
“Well, at least she’s not completely off the planet, this time.”
And I realized what they’d done. No wonder the medics had looked upset. I looked at the way Delight’s combat team had gathered around her.
“Did they know?” I asked.
She shook her head.
“No fun in it. Besides, they needed to learn not to underestimate the unenhanced.”
“Except today, I was…”
I let the words hang there, and Delight grinned.
“They figured it out fast enough—and you weren’t enhanced, yesterday.”
When I’d taken Scarpil down, she meant.
“But I was,” Scarpil added.
I twisted my head to look up at him, but one of the other team members spoke.
“We all are.”
Are?
“As in permanently?” I asked, my voice coming out pitched higher than I’d intended, and the team members I could see all nodded.
Well, no wonder they’d been handing my ass to me all week.
I glared at Delight.
“Doc is gonna have your hide.”
Her face took on a hard edge.
“Not if it gets him back his captain, he won’t. And not if it keeps you alive. You might want to think about that. Where we go, we do a lot of good. We can’t do that without the boosts we take. It’s a price we’re willing to pay.”
She paused, looked around at her team. The hardness I’d seen in them, before, was back, and they nodded in unison. Whatever missions these guys took, they believed in what they were doing. I stared at them, wondering just how crazy they had to be to let themselves stay permanently juiced. The three times I remembered seemed a little crazy to me… Well, okay, the first two times. This last one…
I looked over the team, feeling like I’d had the snot kicked out of me—and they looked back. I had to give them credit, though; they all looked as knackered as I felt, and there were at least four missing. Medical was definitely not going to be impressed.
In the end, none of us were.
Delight took us straight from the sparring mats to wolf-based scenarios—and from the feel of those, she’d ripped them straight out of some poor soul’s head. Several poor souls, if the team’s reactions were anything to go by… and then we came to the one where we were staring down a newly docked wolf drop-ship in a spaceship’s hangar bay, and I was sure of it.
She didn’t give me time to do more than glare, and the scenario started rolling—and she’d tweaked it. Of course, she had.
“You spit-sucking, psychotic, mouth-breeding—”
The first wolf construct came at me with a roar, and I slid under its swing, slamming a boot into its shin so I could stop and fire two shots from the Blazer up into its midriff at very close range. Things got more interesting after that.
24—Finding Mack
Delight ran us hard and ran us late, and then gave us two days’ rest.
“I want you all on-deck in forty-eight,” she said, taking a good look at us, merciless and hard as they come, “and I want you up to speed on wolves, Aktrovaran, and the system in general. Don’t disappoint me.”
“Never!” the team roared back, and, for a moment, it was like none of them were injured, which was a sheer impossibility, given the workout we’d just had.
Delight smiled at them.
“Excellent. Now go lie down before you fall down. No one’s getting tucked in, tonight.”
The team went, and I turned to follow them.
“Where do you think you’re going, shit-for-brains?”
And I stopped, because she could only mean one person, since her voice was inside my head, as well as outside it.
“San, caf, and bed,” I told her, and resumed walking towards the door.
“Not yet, you’re not.”
This time, I didn’t stop walking. I even flipped her off as I reached the door.
“You and whose army?”
And that was as far as I got, because Scarpil came back through, picked me up by the front of my ship’s suit, and carried me back to where Delight was waiting…and smirking. Like she was anywhere near funny.
“What do you want, Delight?”
Pritchard stepped out from behind a false wall, and handed me a leash.
“Dog’s all yours he said.”
And I stared at him, then took a minute to stare at Delight.
“That’s it?” I looked up at Scarpil, and then back at Delight. “You had the big goon ambush me just so you could hand me back the dog?”
“Hey!” The big goon didn’t seem impressed with the designation.
“What?”
And he backed up a step, clearing the way for the door.
“San, caf and bed. Right?”
“Yeah….”
“I’ll go with you.”
“Like Hell you will.”
He looked momentarily horrified.
“No, no, no. Not like that. I’ll just walk you to your cabin.”
“I can find the way.”
“Yeah, but…”
I stepped around him.
“I’m going. On my own.” I held up the leash. “With Cascade.”
They let me go, and I was at the door before I registered the counting.
What the?
“One.”
And my world slid.
I slammed a hand out and into the wall, registered Cascade pressing up against me, pushing the rest of me into the wall before I could fall over. I laid a hand on his head.
“All good, boy. It’s just…” I searched my mind for why I’d be feeling like I’d been run down by a battle cruiser.
I mean, the work-out hadn’t been that bad. Weird how I couldn’t push myself clear of the wall, again. I slid down until I was sitting on the floor, Cascade in my lap.
“Good boy,” Pritchard said, and crouched down in front of me.
“Stim pack wore off,” he said. “We were going to warn you, but you went all independent on us.”
There was a response to that, but I couldn’t quite grasp it. Slippery little sucker.
Pritchard started talking, again, but I couldn’t catch the words…or keep my eyes open. I figured he and Delight had caused the problem, so they could fix it. I didn’t even need to be awake.
That was probably a good thing.
I think I lost a good eighteen hours of the forty-eight we’d been assigned, although ‘lost’ might not be the right word for it. It seems your mind can still learn, while most of you is asleep. I woke up feeling like I’d been touring the ass-end of the galaxy, while running a code war with the wolves. It took me several minutes to realize I was tangling arach, wolf and Galbas coding like there wasn’t a skerrick of difference between them.
“Wonder when I learned to do that?” I murmured, sitting up and swinging my legs over the edge of the bed.
Something scampered out from under my feet, with a yip of reproach, and Cascade appeared.
“Sorry, boy,” I said. “I didn’t see you there.”
He turned around and licked my hand, bouncing into my head, even as he stopped me taking another step forward.
Boy?
Since that was accompanied by the mental image of Rohan, it wasn’t hard to work out exactly what the dog wanted me to go and do. The only problem was that we couldn’t do it yet.
“We’re on our way, Cas. Stay with me, and you can come, too.”
In hind sight maybe I should have explained that better, but the meaning was clear to me. By the time I’d realized my mistake, Cascade wasn’t letting me out of his sight—not in the san unit, not in the caf, not in the library, and not when I slept. The dog stuck to me like glue, right up to when Delight called us into the briefing room as the Wanderer slipped into the docking bay it had been assigned.
We all took note of the orbital as it slid past, counted ships in dock, ran names, and then ran the faces of whoever happened to be dumb enough to be watching us pass. It was… entertaining.
“They’re never going to let an Odyssey cruiser stay,” I said, after identifying the third suspected pirate ship—and Delight smiled.
“I love this place.” The smile disappeared. “Pity we’re not here to clean it up.”
It was a pity, but I wanted Mack back, and Tens and Rohan, and I didn’t want anything to jeopardize our chances of making that happen. As if she’d heard me, Delight gave a single, sharp nod.
“Point taken.”
“Cutter, Cascade, Abby. You’re with me. The rest of you go limber up. Don’t break anything, and don’t hurt anyone. I want you mission ready, not exhausted.”
I felt Abby slide into my head as the room cleared. Cascade’s entry was nowhere near as unobtrusive. In fact, his entry reminded me of the way the wolves had bounded into my head—all exuberance and play…and no manners whatsoever.
“Get over it, Cutter.” Delight, of course, was her usual self, as she settled into my implant. Her virtual presence looked around, and her gaze settled on Cascade.
The dog had stopped his prancing around, and was standing still, tension running through him, like an arrow at full draw. Delight reached out her hand, and slid it under his muzzle, scratching his chin. With her other hand, she stretched up and opened a link into the orbital’s database, and I realized her Hack Team had been busy already.
Pictures of Rohan and Mack and Tens flashed in front of the big dog.
“Find them,” Delight said. Her hand tightened on the dog’s jaw, before he could take his head out of her grasp. “Quietly! Shadow dog. Shadow.”
Images flowed between them: of Cas sneaking past detection programs, monitors, and technicians wet-wired into the system.
“Shadow!” Delight repeated, and Cascade gave a whining growl.
He could do quiet.
“Good boy!” Delight said, and let him go.
He leapt for the entry into the station’s systems, his virtual construct shrinking from giant hound, to something sleek and small, with gleaming fangs and prehensile claws.
What the Hell was that?
“Skaraflam,” Delight said. “You never want to meet one in the wild.”
Made me wonder when Cascade had ever come across one, but Delight didn’t know.
“You’ll have to ask Rohan,” she said, “…or the wolves.”
The wolves?
Actually, that seemed more than likely. After all, what would one of the greatest hunting races of the system keep as pets, except for deadly little hunters, and I wondered if Cascade had actually met one, or if he’d only seen a memory in some wolf’s head.
“No time, Cutter,” Pritchard said, arriving late in my skull, but diving straight back out after the dog. “We have to try and keep up.”
The man had a point.
I bounced through the entry point after him, not caring that Delight might have wanted to go next. Cas was my responsibility—and I wanted to see Mack again.
“That’s sweet enough to make me wanta puke.” Delight’s words echoed briefly through my mind, but I ignored it.
I had more important things to do.
Whatever Delight had given Cascade to use for virtual scent worked like a charm. The dog took us off the orbital, and through a catering company’s data base, before surfacing in an auction house, and just as quickly bugging out. That last? I caught sight of the firewall and encryption running on that thing, and was wondering how to follow the big guy in, when he reappeared and rolled into the caterer’s systems, again.
It took me a little longer to realize the significance of the company, and then I worked it out.
“Those sneaky sonsa…”
“Yeah.”
Delight didn’t sound too impressed, either.
Dog didn’t give us much more time than that to dwell on what we’d come to realize. He wormed his way into the systems belonging to the caterer’s headquarters, and then into its business agreements, and then into its inventory.
“Nice!”
Couldn’t say I agreed with her, there, but I was pretty happy to find the boys—alive and each in one piece—even if I couldn’t reach their implants.
“Isolation cells,” Delight muttered, helping Pritchard grab Cascade before the dog tried to break the barrier between him and his boy.
“Time to be going back, boy,” Pritchard told him, and Cas growled. “We’ll get your boy, and we’ll let you come, but not now.”
Cascade growled again, and I thought he was going to unleash those teeth on Pritchard’s arm, when Pritchard tried one more tack.
“Treat?”
“Treat?” That was definitely one of Cascade’s favorite words.
The dog turned himself around, barely giving Pritchard enough time for a quickly thrown, “Hold on,” before he was bounding back the way we’d come.
I made a grab for Delight, just as she reached out and tried to snag Pritchard as he zipped by. We both missed. Abby tut-tutted as she reappeared from a short reconnaissance of the isolation cells.
“Can’t get into them without waking up the whole system,” she said, holding out virtual hands, “and we really don’t want to do that.”
I figure
d I’d ask her for details, later. Right now, I wanted to get the hell out of the caterer’s system and back to the Wanderer. Abby heaved a mock sigh, and offered her hands, again.
“I’ll take you back,” she said. “It’ll be quicker, and I can make sure you’re not followed.”
To my surprise, Delight didn’t argue. She just reached out and took Abby’s hand, and then grabbed me and hauled me over to where I could do the same. I glanced back at the surveillance feed showing Mack pacing restlessly in his cell. Man was shirtless, and wearing a pair of shorts barely adequate for modesty. He looked like a caged lion.
I felt Abby take a good virtual grip on me, and then we moved. I can’t say it was exactly like being teleported—the absence of light was a dead giveaway—but it was darn close. Abs swam the systems like she was born to it, even though I knew she’d been human once.
“Not so much with the once,” she replied. “Transfer does not mean you lose your humanity; it only means you lose your first shell.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, but she wasn’t quite done.
“It’s better than losing your life.”
Good to know, I thought, and hoped I’d never be in a position to have to make that choice. Abby gave the equivalent of a virtual snort.
“Hon, the line of work you’re in, you’re not likely to have the choice.”
Yeah. Thanks, Abs.
She and Delight left the implant as soon as they reached it, and I was grateful, taking a little longer to get my bearings and then surface. What I really wanted to do, now, was to take a closer look at that catering company, because it fell into the same category as the Odyssey cruise-line front, and let the wolves go a whole lot of places, no questions asked, that they might not otherwise be able to access.
“You done in there?”
Delight’s voice was not a welcome intrusion, but I decided I’d better come out of my head and check on Cascade. There was no telling what mischief the big beast had gotten up to in pursuit of the promised treat.
I opened my eyes to see him sitting next to Pritchard, his head on the man’s lap, crumbs scattered around his muzzle.
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