Mack 'n' Me: The Wolves of Alpha 9

by C. M. Simpson

  Mack shook his head, again, and rested it in his hand, and I still couldn’t work out why. It wasn’t like what I’d done was a secret. After all, the man had given the order out loud. Even the spiders in my head knew I’d hacked Barangail’s system three ways to the Stars and back.

  And they should, because I’d used their psi connection to my head to access their arach implants to get into their host’s systems and servers. It’s not like that was a secret.

  “No, but the fact that we’re that deep in his system, is.”

  And I froze. While I hadn’t forgotten I had two uninvited psionic guests riding shotgun in my mind, I hadn’t realized they were close enough to maintain the connection. I wondered exactly how they were doing that.

  “Surely your Delight told you about long-range psi?”

  I wanted to answer that, but I couldn’t remember if she had, or not. Not that it mattered. Long range psi, huh? How long range?

  “Some of us can speak between starships.”

  I wondered how much distance was between the starships, and if that needed special focus, but the spiders weren’t forthcoming. Before I could chase that down via their implants, a trolley bearing a large soup tureen was pushed through the kitchen doors, and wheeled over to stop beside Barangail. I watched as they served his lordship first, and then watched as they served Mack next.

  I was served last, but I didn’t mind; it gave me a chance to check the contents of the tureen before anyone ate—Mack specifically. I stood up as it drew to a halt beside me, and swiped my finger horizontally through the contents of the bowl, checking for an invisible barrier. When I found none, I swiped it the other way, pleasantly surprised to find nothing.

  I couldn’t smell any glorrin in the steam rising from the tureen, either.

  “The chef made enough for his lordship’s household; we were told to offer it as an alternative,” the steward told me, and I couldn’t work out if he was offended, or disgusted.

  Across the table, Mack bowed his head and covered his eyes with one hand. I ignored him, and sat, wiping my soupy finger on my trouser leg, and watching as the steward picked up my bowl and filled it. Lord Barangail watched the whole show, not a shred of emotion on his face, and I wondered if he knew what I’d been doing, or if he was taking notes for next time.

  “We’ll discuss business, after we eat,” he said, and gestured towards our bowls. “In the meantime, enjoy your meal.”

  We ate, and I was surprised to find the stim settling in my blood, instead of sending tremors of energy through my limbs. The first time Delight had hit me with a fast-healing chemical cocktail, I’d had so much energy I’d needed to run, and I’d run for miles, covering the length of several city blocks and the circumference of a small airfield in record time. After that, there’d come the battle, and then oblivion in a regen tank while I mended. I really hoped it wouldn’t come to that, this time.

  Mack looked across the table at me. The soup was long past, as was the starter and the main. The dishes had just been cleared, and we were waiting for dessert. Not that I wanted to wait; I just wanted to get down to discussing the contract, finalizing the details, and starting whatever mission it was that Barangail had in mind.

  “If I agree to it,” Mack said, keeping his words confined to our comms.

  Oh, yeah. There was that. I contemplated the kitchen doors, Barangail, his nervously shifting bodyguards, the hovering waiters, the visual pick-ups camouflaged against the ceiling, the arach sitting quietly in my head and not saying a single word. What did they want with this world, anyway?

  The arrival of the sorbet brought my attention back to the table, and I realized I’d missed the stewards returning. Was the stim pack wearing off? I checked for pain, and found none, and wondered exactly what Mack and Doc had cooked up, because I was pretty sure I should still be feeling the other effects.

  “The nanites are controlling the release,” Mack said, as I worried at the problem. “Eat your dessert. The rest will be there when you need it.”

  It would? I wondered what would trigger the effect, and how long it would be between trigger and consequence.

  “Not long,” Mack said. “Please eat your dessert.”

  Please, huh? Again. I eyed the sorbet, and realized it hadn’t been served from a communal dish, that each portion had been individually delivered, and that Mack was already eating. I shot a glance towards our host, and noticed that he was eating, also. He caught my eye, and gestured towards the sweets sitting before me.

  Really? I lifted the bowl in one hand, and raised it to my nose, before remembering hypomelantin wouldn’t leave an odor, or taste. Mack caught the movement, and shook his head, and I wished I had a probe I could test the sorbet with. Honestly, it wasn’t a surprise when Mack dropped his spoon, while I was still dithering over the first bite.

  I looked at Barangail, as Mack set his elbows on the table and rested his chin in his hands.

  “We can do this easy or hard,” his Lordship said, and his eyes flicked to the men I knew were standing alongside the wall behind me.

  I set my spoon on the table, wondering if falling asleep in my sorbet would have been worth the enjoyment of eating it—and then I started to push my chair away from the table.

  I stopped almost immediately, too, since, even on nans, I wasn’t going to be able to avoid the shot from a blaster pressed up against my skull—or get to the guys on the opposite side of the room before they’d gotten off half a dozen shots. Yeah, that would hurt, it being real close range, and all.

  Taking a deep breath, I slowly raised my hands, and cautiously turned my head to look at Barangail.

  “I guess you got me,” I said, and the bastard was grinning as he pulled his stunner and shot me.

  Last thing I saw for a while was him picking up his spoon and going back to his sorbet.

  10—The Missing Bracelet Mission

  First thing I saw, when I woke up was Mack. He was standing about a meter and a half off the edge of the bed looking down at me. Made me wonder what he was doing standing so far off, when, usually, he was right alongside. I sat up, mouth feeling desert dry, and like half a planet had curled up and died inside it. My head wasn’t very happy with me, either, but I got the impression it should be feeling a lot worse than it did—I guess the stim pack hadn’t worn off, yet... or Mack and Doc had added some fast-healing nanites to the mix.

  I might ask him about that.

  Mack was watching me, but he wasn’t saying a word. Not even in my head. Hmmm...

  I checked the implant, looking for the usual quartet of trouble, and was not entirely surprised when I didn’t find it. Their links were still there, but they weren’t. In other circumstances, I might have felt relieved. Not this time.

  I checked to see if I still had my unwanted passengers. Have to admit, it was a pleasant surprise to find they were completely absent, as well. I looked over at Mack, and wondered why he was keeping his distance. Walking up to him, and trying to poke him in the chest made that obvious.

  The cell we were in was divided down the middle by a solid barrier. It wasn’t glass, and it was completely invisible, but it was there. I poked it, once more, and heard a hum vibrate through it. Mack backed up a step, so I did the same. The hum came, again.

  Mack backed up, again. This time he took two steps, and I was just as quick to copy him. It was a good thing, too. Light arced through what looked like a foot of invisible wall, and white streamers of power fizzed and crackled over its surface. Uh huh. Cute.

  I stared at it, until the lightnings died down, and then looked back up at Mack.

  “Force field?” I asked, and watched him frown.

  Well, at least I knew he couldn’t hear me, either.

  I looked around the cell. Our halves were identical, right down to the fact my side no longer had a bed. Staring at the space it had been in, I wondered where the damn thing had gone, and then I looked more closely at the walls.

  There was no door.

&n
bsp; I turned slowly, surveying every inch of wall I could see.

  There was no door on Mack’s side, either.

  Huh. Not cool.

  I backed up to the wall opposite Mack, and folded my arms across my chest. I figured it wouldn’t take long before someone arrived. It would be just like Barangail to have the cells monitored, until we woke up and he could negotiate from a position of power.

  His voice, when it came through the speakers, still came as a surprise—I’d been expecting him to actually appear.

  “There was an assassination attempt, last night,” he said, and I rolled my eyes.

  Sure, there was.

  Barangail didn’t immediately add any more, letting the silence stretch for the minute it took me to remember Case talking about the job she and Steppy had been hired to do. When I did, I frowned. I’d been pretty sure they were still in the planning stages.

  That thought made me relax, and I stayed, propped up against the wall, waiting for Barangail to get sick of the quiet. It took longer than I’d expected, and I wondered why he’d thought that news would make either of us react.

  “Don’t you want to know who the target was?”

  Mack sighed, and I focused on his face. It held an all-too-familiar look of impatience.

  “Not our business to get into the local politics,” he said. “Speaking of which...”

  He let the words trail off, inviting Barangail to follow the lead.

  “Yes, business,” he said, and smoothly changed the topic. “I need you to fetch me a bracelet.”

  I leant my head back against the wall.

  “Would help if we knew what the bracelet looked like,” I said, making it sound like he was ten kinds of stupid for not having shown it already.

  I didn’t need to look at Mack to know he was either rolling his eyes or glaring at me... Wait! I’d been able to hear Mack! Did that mean he could actually hear me, now? I straightened up and pushed off the wall.

  “Mack?”

  “What is it Cutter?”

  He sounded tired, and I didn’t have an answer for him; I was just glad to be able to hear his voice. Before I could think of a reply, the wall flashed white between us, leaving me blinking to clear the dazzle from my eyes.

  “When you’re quite finished.”

  Well, Barangail didn’t sound impressed. I wondered what had gotten into his britches, and tried to wipe the tears from my eyes so I could see him clearly... and then I remembered he hadn’t shown himself.

  “Is it normal for you to conduct business from the other side of a closed door?” I asked.

  “The bracelet,” he said, completely ignoring my question, as the image of a thick, gold bracelet, outlined in silver and studded with a single row of alternating red and blue gems floated in the invisible wall. “I want it back.”

  “Sure,” I said, irritated by his theatrics and his absence.

  I caught Mack’s eye, and raised an eyebrow to see if I should continue. He shrugged and nodded. It was a typical ‘Sure, why not’ kind of look, and I have to admit it surprised me. The man usually did his own set of negotiations.

  Was he sure? I sent him a questioning look, and he nodded. He was sure. Well, alrighty, then.

  “When did you have it last?”

  I know, as a question calculated to piss off some masochistic lord with a he-man complex, that wasn’t bad. What can I say? I couldn’t resist. I could resist looking at Mack, though. I didn’t need to see his face to know he probably wanted to wring my neck. Barangail ignored the bait.

  “It belonged to one of my concubines,” he said, and the full-length picture of a beautiful red-head, with aquiline features appeared beside the slowly spinning image of the bracelet.

  Before either of us could respond to the image, Barangail continued.

  “It was stolen from her chambers by one of the maids, and the woman fled before we realized it had gone.”

  “Do you know where she went?”

  “Somewhere in the caverns. One of the mine guards recognized her.”

  “A lady’s maid in the mines? Didn’t that raise questions?”

  “She told them she’d been assigned kitchen duties for displeasing her mistress,” Barangail said. “It’s a common punishment, and the task of taking meals to the mines isn’t popular.”

  I wondered why, but Barangail answered the question before I could ask it.

  “Sometimes we have incursions, and the guards aren’t enough.”

  Incursions, huh? But Mack had had enough of staying quiet—and incursions were a job for muscle, which I, typically, was not.

  “What kind of incursions?”

  There was a moment’s pause, as though Barangail had to think of how much he was going to tell us. I looked over at Mack, and he looked back. Neither of us was very happy. Part of me tried to work out why we were even bothering to negotiate the contract, when our patron was so untrustworthy. Another part said it was because Mack was curious.

  The arach were on this world for a reason, and we needed an excuse to be down here, too. The fact we didn’t have much of a choice about accepting Barangail’s contract paled to insignificance compared to that. Barangail’s answer brought me back to the cell.

  “There’s a species of giant ant that infests the caverns,” he said. “Sometimes we can mine for months without running into their hunters, and sometimes a new nest starts up close enough to the mine for the ants to consider it prime hunting territory. They migrate underground, so we don’t usually get a warning.”

  I frowned. That couldn’t be the only reason. Mack clearly agreed.

  “Anything else?”

  “Just the usual underground beasties. We have large arthropods, and insects pretty much all over the caverns. Of the usual carnivores and scavengers, we have the odd killena, wargrul and baskalie. We clear those out whenever we come across them.”

  Neither Mack nor I wanted to admit we had no idea what the three predators were that he’d mentioned, and I found myself missing Case’s quick research capability, and trying to work out how I’d been so thoroughly patched out of the system. It wasn’t anything that I could see in the implant.

  Mack, however, had realized we’d missed something in our distraction with incursions.

  “What was she doing in the mines?”

  Of course, Barangail missed the point.

  “I told you. The guard thought she was serving meals.”

  “No,” Mack said. “I mean: why did she go to the mines after she’d stolen the bracelet? Why not the city? You said the guard only thought she’d been sent there to serve meals. Presumably she hadn’t?”

  And Barangail got it.

  “No, of course she hadn’t. Up until the point where we’d found the bracelet missing, we hadn’t known she’d done anything worthy of punishment.”

  Incursions or no, I still couldn’t see how a slightly dangerous journey to a serving kitchen in a mine could be considered a punishment for a maid. There was something else going on there. I made a note to chase it down, later, and forced myself to pay attention to what Barangail was saying.

  “Our best guess is that she used the kitchen duty as an excuse to leave the mansion, and slipped away through the mines to join the other runaways.”

  “Runaways?” Again, Mack let the question dangle.

  “Runaways,” Barangail agreed. “Any planet with indentured servitude has them. As does any world with criminals who wish to avoid punishment. They try to hide underground, here, but we eventually smoke them out.”

  Smoke them out, I thought. What an odd choice of words... but neither Mack nor I asked for clarification. There were more important things we needed to know.

  “Are these runaways likely to be dangerous?”

  Again, there was a pause, and I knew we weren’t going to get the truth.

  “Some might have weapons,” was evasive, and “but most are unarmed and poorly equipped to survive, let alone anything else,” was almost certainly a lie.


  I thought about the people who’d attacked us on the way to dinner.

  “What about the ambush?” I asked, and didn’t need to add that our attackers had been well-armed, and pretty well-equipped.

  This time the reply was too quick to be believed.

  “Terrorists. Every world has them.”

  The images in the separating wall alternated as they flashed.

  “So,” Barangail asked. “Will you take the job?”

  “Yes,” came as a chorus from both Mack and me, and the wall at one end of our cell dropped to waist height to reveal Barangail standing on a balcony positioned above a small open section of floor in front of the cell.

  “Good. Bring the bracelet to me, and I’ll give your crew the run of the city for shore-leave, and you access to a secluded part of the Gorge for training.” he said, and I watched as his body guard moved onto the balcony around him, while two large squads of soldiers moved through doors set in the walls below, to occupy the space in front of the cells.

  My heart sank. This did not look good.

  11—A Guarantee for Good Behavior

  Mack and I backed up, as far away from the front of the cell as we could get without plastering ourselves against the rear wall. Both of us made sure we had enough space to move. I glanced at the dividing wall, annoyed that the images partially obscured Mack’s cell. He followed my look, frowned, shrugged, and faced towards the soldiers in front of him.

  I followed his gaze, and saw that both squads had formed up, four across, close to the wall. Mack was eyeing the men, and probably thinking the same thing I was, except...

  I glared at the images hanging between us, and remembered the flickering lightnings that had played over the wall the last time I’d poked it. With a hurried glance towards the guards at the front, I took a shuffle closer to the wall and poked it again. After that, I gave the guards my full and undivided attention.

  I wondered how they were going to get in, given I still couldn’t see a door in front of the cell, but I didn’t have to wonder for long. That question was answered as the wall in front of Mack’s cell dropped into the floor. As soon as it did, the squad in front of him moved into the cell. I waited for the same thing to happen with mine.