by G J Ogden
Cad kicked himself for falling into Doyle’s trap, because now he also had to endure the man’s sanctimonious smirk.
“Well then, Mr. Rikkard, I trust that I will see a marked improvement in your performance,” Doyle said, again causing Cad to force his jaw shut to stop himself telling Doyle where to get off. Doyle climbed into his golf buggy, glancing back at Cad a final time. “I would hate to have to ruin your good name.”
The image of Doyle and his golf course dissolved around him, and Cad found himself again standing in the compact ready room on his fighter. Cad closed his eyes and drew in long breaths through his nose, releasing each one slowly through his mouth, but the meditation technique failed to have any calming effect on his unstable emotional state. Instead, he opened his eyes again and hammered his fist into the storage locker to his side, adding new dents alongside the numerous others he’d left there during previous fits of rage.
Eventually, he stopped, knuckles sore and breath heavy, and stepped off his ship. The cold air of the mountain settlement on Minerva’s rocky fourth continent was more soothing than his crazed assault of the storage locker had been, and he chastised himself for giving in to anger. I’m better than that… he told himself, flexing his fingers to help with the pain. And I’m better than that prick, Damien Doyle...
Cad had already vowed to himself that one day the repugnant man would get his due. One day, his army of security measures and his personal protection bot wouldn’t be there to safeguard him. One day, Cad would sink his Black Prince sword deep into Damien Doyle’s flesh, and smile as he watched the life leave his narrow, shifty eyes. However, he also knew that day would have to wait; first, he had to prove Doyle wrong. He had to humiliate him before he killed him. And, unlike every other life that Cad Rikkard had taken in his long and storied career, he would gladly fulfill his personal contract on Damien Doyle for free.
8
Cad walked toward the bar where Falken had arranged his meeting with “the woman,” otherwise known as notorious fixer, Sara Daggett. It had been built inside a natural cave structure, and would have been a great place for a quiet drink, were it not for the dozen or so thugs and lowlifes that regularly frequented it.
Minerva was a raw, untamed world comprised of dozens of small settlements and “frontier towns,” not unlike America’s Wild West, except without the horses. Each settlement district had an elected legislature and governor, but there was little law and even less order. Damien Doyle owned many of the speculative enterprises, though all were skeleton outfits on which he’d made minimal investments. It was a case of throwing mud at the wall and seeing what stuck. The settlements that prospered, typically by discovering valuable resources, were developed and would eventually become the planet’s major cities. The rest were left to rot and fester and fend for themselves.
Cad entered the bar and was immediately assaulted by the raucous laughter of Alexis Black. She was standing in front of a tall cabinet and playing some sort of vintage arcade game. Whatever it was, she was clearly enjoying herself.
Draga was also inside, but playing a game of an entirely different kind. It was a variation of darts, except instead of darts, it used throwing knifes, and instead of a dartboard, there was the head of a huge cow-like creature that was native to the planet. It gave a very literal new meaning to the concept of scoring a bullseye.
“Any sign of Daggett?” Cad asked Draga as her opponent threw the second of three knives at the severed animal head. It bounced off the substantial skull and dug into the bar, an inch away from another patron’s hand. The thrower cursed savagely, but the man who had almost been skewered remained unaware of his close call and continued joking with his companions.
“I’ve asked the barkeep to let me know if she comes in,” said Draga, waiting patiently for her next turn. “Nothing yet. Apparently, he says we’ll know when she arrives.”
Cad sighed again. He was still on edge and wound up tighter than a spring, and being made to wait again was doing nothing to temper his foul mood.
Alexis let out a blood-curdling victory cry as she defeated some unfeasibly grotesque end-of-level boss monster in her game. Her yell coincided with Draga’s opponent making his third and final throw, causing the dagger to fly wide and sink into the back of the man who’d narrowly avoided being hit with the previous throw.
The man let out a cry of pain and pulled the blade from his back before springing up and searching furiously for the culprit. However, Draga’s opponent appeared far more concerned with having missed the target and losing the round than with stabbing a fellow drinker.
“Who the hell threw this?” the man growled, holding up the blood-stained dagger.
However, the offender had already stormed up to Alexis and was standing next to the arcade cabinet, glaring at her.
Cad and Draga met each other’s eyes. Both had been in enough bars like this one to know what was coming next. They stepped apart from each other to give them space to move more freely for when the inevitable brawl began. Cad rested his left hand on the sheath of his sword, tipping it back in order to give himself a better angle to draw it.
“Hey, freak, you just cost me that game!” yelled the dagger thrower, showering Alexis with spittle as he barked at her.
Alexis closed her eye and wiped it with the back of her hand, meeting the man’s wild eyes. “Buzz off, I’m busy,” she snapped, returning to the game.
“Who threw this damned knife!” yelled the other man, staring around the bar. His eyes then fell on Draga, who was the only one who’d dared to look back at him. “You think this is funny, crazy face?” the man said while slowly advancing on Draga with the dagger now held in anger. “How about I shove this knife into your pretty little eye instead?”
The arcade cabinet suddenly shut down, and Cad glanced over to see that the dagger-thrower had yanked out the power cable and was now dangling it in front of Alexis like a lure. In the absence of the repetitive, synthesized music it had been playing, the bar was suddenly deathly quiet.
Neither meditation nor punching his storage cabinet had succeeded in quieting Cad’s aggravated nerves. Maybe a good old-fashioned bar fight would instead, he reasoned.
Draga moved first, claiming the knife from the hand of the stocky, foul-smelling lowlife and sinking it into his eye socket. The man yelled and staggered back, clutching his hands to his bleeding face.
At the other side of the bar, Alexis grabbed the power cord that had been dangled in front of her and wrapped it around the knife-thrower’s neck, slipping behind him and pulling back hard. The man flailed around, desperately trying to free himself, but Alexis merely wrapped her powerful thighs around his body, holding him like a wrestler going for a submission maneuver.
Cad watched and waited for his opportunity to strike, right hand now wrapped around the handle of the Black Prince sword. He saw a woman reach for a weapon and drew the blade, deflecting the pistol in the same motion, before cutting down across her neck, slicing clean through to the hip. The woman fell, and Cad stepped deeper into the room, ready to face anyone else who would be foolish enough to cross him.
Chairs screeched and boots shuffled across the stone floor, which was now splattered with blood from Cad’s earlier brutal strike. One man roared, eyes fixed on the dead body of the woman, before lifting a bar-stool and advancing. Cad stepped forward and slashed toward the man’s neck, but the attack was blocked by the stool. Continuing forward, Cad then drove the pommel of the sword into the man’s face, crushing his nose, before drawing the blade back across his neck, opening it to the bone.
This time, no one else moved, besides the writhing figure of the man who still had the dagger lodged into his eye. There was a loud crash, and Cad glanced back to see a body bent over the arcade machine, head buried through the screen. The knife-thrower – the man who’d actually started the fight thanks to his misplaced throw – lay on the floor, blue-faced, with the power cord still tightly wrapped around his neck.
“This is a
ll a bit grim, even for this place.”
Cad looked toward the entrance and saw a middle-aged woman standing just inside, flanked by two men who looked more like mercenaries than the usual inhabitants of Minerva.
“Let me guess,” the woman said, looking at Cad. “You guys are the Blackfire Squadron?”
Cad checked the room, noting that the remaining patrons all appeared to be suitably shocked and subdued by his display of medieval swordsmanship, and sheathed his blade.
“Then I guess you must be Daggett?” said Cad, addressing the woman.
“I am,” Daggett said, walking further into the cave bar and stepping delicately over the body of the woman. “So you’re the guy who is trying to get hold of nukes?”
9
Cad Rikkard peered out through his binoculars at the enormous circular tower, built on the summit of a rocky hilltop. It was a lone fortress, constructed three hundred miles in any direction from the nearest settlement. To Cad’s eyes, its design had clearly been inspired by sixteenth century European tower houses, except that it was around ten times their size. Ordinarily, he would have enjoyed seeing such a noble-looking fortification, but the knowledge that he needed to attack the structure had dulled his ability to appreciate it fully.
“You’re sure that there are nuclear warheads stored inside that tower?” Cad asked the fixer, Sara Daggett. She was sat next to him in the driver’s seat of the buggy she had driven to the tower’s location. This had been in order to avoid Cad and Alexis landing their fighters too close to the target and raising suspicion. “Because it would be a shame to trash such a beautiful piece of architecture.”
Daggett recoiled slightly. “Beautiful?” she said, taking another look at the tower. Then she shrugged. “Whatever floats your boat, I guess. But, yes, there are nukes inside.”
“So go and get them for me,” Cad replied, wondering why the fixer had dragged him all the way out into the middle of the rocky desert. “That’s what I’m paying you for, right?”
Daggett scrunched up her nose as if she was thinking how best to phrase an awkward question. “Here’s the thing, you see – I need you to get them.”
Cad laughed, drawing curious glances from Draga Vex and Alexis Black, who were in the rear of a second buggy, driven by one of Daggett’s two bodyguards.
“If I’m getting it myself, then what the hell do I need you for?” Cad asked.
Sara Daggett reached into the rear of the buggy and pointed to one of a trio of metal containers that she’d brought with her.
“Because if you want to move those warheads, you’ll need these,” Daggett said, patting one of the containers with the flat of her hand. “Besides, without me, you wouldn’t even know that this thing was here.”
Cad replied with a thoughtful huff, then peered out at the tower again. “What the hell is it anyway?”
Daggett smiled. “It’s a treasury of priceless artefacts, both ancient and mysterious,” she said with an overly theatrical air before becoming more serious again. “It’s owned by a guy called Frazer Melton Strickland; just some obnoxious trillionaire collector,” she added with a bored waft of her hand. “Half of the stuff in there he acquired illegally, I suppose by paying guys like you to acquire them for him.”
Cad snorted. “Hardly. I’m no petty thief.”
Daggett conceded his point and apologized before continuing. “Anyway, inside the tower is everything from famous works of art, to ancient Egyptian relics, to the only surviving species of extinct animals stored in cryo-freeze. You name it, this guy has it.”
Cad cursed, and then blew out an annoyed sigh. Frazer Strickland was a business acquaintance of Damien Doyle. In addition to being another member of the galactic ultra-rich, he was probably the closest thing the contemptable man had to a friend. Robbing Strickland’s vault using tech and weapons paid for by Doyle was hardly the sort of quiet operation that his employer wanted. However, Cad badly wanted the nuclear warheads too.
Cad had always been aware of rumors that some warheads had escaped decommissioning, but he’d never had cause to need any, until now. Nuclear disarmament had been one of the few major collaborative successes that Earth’s governments had actually achieved. In the golden age of interstellar expansion, territory was cheap, and it was far easier and more efficient to wage wars via electronic rather than violent means. This time, however, Cad favored the brute force approach, and he knew that only something on the scale of a nuclear assault would get Dr. Rand’s attention.
Cad’s plan was simple. On the assumption that the genius hacker, Falken, would find a way to defeat the defense systems on the renegade hideouts, Cad wanted his next and subsequent attacks to make a statement. He knew he couldn’t keep attacking the bases on foot, one-by-one. Sooner or later, a renegade would score a lucky shot and end his mercenary career far sooner than he’d planned. Cad and his Blackfire Squadron members had nearly died twice already, and they were no closer to flushing out Dr. Rand. However, he was betting that by nuking one of her precious hideouts, Cad would get her attention and draw her out into the open. Cad would then open a dialogue on the pretense of ceasing hostilities, while Falken’s tracer tech pinpointed the famous scientist’s location.
“Okay, I’ll get the damn nukes myself,” said Cad, aiming a finger at Daggett. “But if I’m risking my neck here, then I’m not paying you a dollar.”
Sara Daggett’s eyes narrowed, and for the first time since they’d met, she actually looked like the woman whose cut-throat reputation Cad had heard so much about. However, before the situation escalated, Cad explained his reasoning.
“Your payday comes from taking whatever else you find in that tower,” said Cad, nodding in the direction of the looming fortification. “I get you and your goons inside, take out whatever defenses Strickland is using to guard his trinkets, and keep the nukes. Anything else is yours.”
Sara Daggett reclined in the seat of the buggy and regarded Cad for a moment before replying, “Okay, but only because it’s you,” she said in a genuinely complimentary tone. “The reputation of the Blackfire Squadron is well deserved.”
Cad smiled, pleased that his repute amongst the top echelons of villainous society was still in a high standing.
“I don’t suppose you know whereabouts in that fort the nukes are located?” asked Cad, looking for anything that could give him an advantage.
Daggett nodded. “They’re on the top level, maximum security. It’s guarded by sentry turrets and a Theseus-class warbot.” Cad let out a low whistle. The Theseus models were tough, and one of the least screwy too. However, like all combat bots, with the exception – at least, so far – of Doyle’s personal unit, the Theseus had its weaknesses too. “And you have some plans outlining the tower’s exterior defenses?” Cad added, seeing what else he could extract from Daggett for free.
“I do,” said Daggett before adding, as if to reinforce her material value to the success of the heist, “which didn’t come cheap, by the way…”
Cad stared back at the fort and began to rub the base of his chin with his thumb.
“So, are we on?” asked Daggett after Cad had been silent for a full minute.
Cad nodded, but continued to stare out at the tower, stroking his chin broodingly.
“How long do you need to plan the raid?” Daggett added, her interested tone betraying her obvious enthusiasm and excitement for the operation.
Cad smiled again; his mind had already run through a dozen different scenarios whilst they’d been talking. If the fixer’s intelligence was accurate, raiding the fort would be a cakewalk compared to assaulting the renegade bases.
Cad Rikkard turned to Daggett and said, “Give me an hour.”
10
Cad hovered his fighter above the dusty, rocky landscape of the Minervan desert and watched as Draga Vex circled around the fortress of treasures owned by trillionaire Frazer Melton Strickland. Anti-aircraft batteries tracked and fired at Draga’s fighter as she soared past the tower, whittli
ng down the defenses with each attack run, until all were reduced to smoldering stumps.
Cad’s recon scans had confirmed that the plans of the tower’s defenses, supplied by the fixer, Sara Daggett, were valid. This gave him confidence that her account of the interior defenses was accurate also. However, since there was an electronic sensor barrier shielding the inside of the fort, he had no way to know for sure. He’d find out soon enough, Cad thought, as he prepared to execute the next phase of his plan.
Draga peeled away from the tower and began to patrol the area, in case Strickland had invested in additional manned or unmanned fighter defenses too. On account of Draga’s more serious injuries, Cad had made sure that she sat out of the actual tower assault. He’d achieved this by convincing Draga that, as the best fighter pilot, her skills were needed in the air. Cad’s assertion that she’d be bored assaulting the tower anyway, since there was no-one to kill, had sealed the deal.
Ordinarily, Cad would have wanted Draga by his side, especially as it was still not certain what they’d be faced with once inside. However, the chance of opening up her injuries, coupled with the fact that both he and Alexis were also ferrying one of Daggett’s hired guns into the attack, gave him confidence enough to sideline her on this occasion.
Cad signaled Alexis and then accelerated the fighter toward the tower, locking on to a section of the roof structure with his targeting computer. He waited for the precise moment then squeezed the trigger, launching a volley of small, dagger-sized missiles at the building. The weapon – another of Damien Doyle’s toys from the magnate’s own treasure trove – was purpose-designed for this sort of task.
Cad watched on his monitor as the missiles dug into the thick stone roof of the massive square fort in a perfectly circular pattern. They then drilled themselves deeper into the stone, each leaving a line of volatile residue, like an explosive snail trail, in their wake. The missiles detonated in sequence, causing a synchronized cascade of focused explosions that left a round hole in its wake.
