“Tell him Hammer says to keep his prying to himself, or he’ll be next, no commission required.”
I froze, the blood draining from my face as Stepyan’s words hit home. It took a second for me to realize my mouth was hanging open, and then I closed it, darting a nervous glance at Varian.
“What is it you don’t want me to know?”
So, it was going to be like that, was it? Well, in that case...
“Hammer says to keep your prying to yourself or you’ll be next, no commission required,” and then I clapped both hands over my mouth, but Stepyan wasn’t finished.
“Tell him this interrogation is over if he wants to live—and nothing had better happen to the feed from your implant, or I’ll come down there and go looking for him myself.”
“I can’t,” I whispered, squeezing my eyes tight shut, and hunching over my knees.
“Tell him!” roared through my skull, and my mouth complied.
When I was done, I raised my head, and studied Varian’s face. The others in the room were staring at me, and Varian was glowering. I guess he didn’t like being threatened by a renowned assassin. I raised an eyebrow, and pushed to my feet.
My intention had been to walk my way out of there, just as casual as you please, but you know about intentions, right? Mine ended when my ankle gave way and I ended up landing, face first, on the floor.
“Oh, for pity’s sake!”
I knew that voice. I rolled, just in time for the woman with the auto-injector to plant her foot firmly in the middle of my chest. She caught my panicked glance, and held up empty hands.
“I need to strap your ankle,” she said, catching my eye. “Okay?”
“Okay?” she repeated, when I continued to stare, bouncing her foot.
“Okay. Okay.”
“Good.” She took her foot off my chest. “Now, stay right there.”
I propped myself up on my elbows and watched her walk back around the table to the cabinet built into the wall, and then I caught sight of someone standing above me. I looked up, and met Varian’s eyes.
“You heard the lady,” he said, and I rolled my eyes.
“And for Pete’s sake, Varian. Put the stars-be-damned blaster away.”
I held out my hand, and he shook his head.
“Not an ice cube’s chance in...”
He stopped, abruptly.
“Hell,” he finished, after a brief pause, but I got the distinct impression that hadn’t been the first word he’d wanted to say.
“Why not?” I challenged, pushing the tiny piece of strangeness aside, and hoping it wouldn’t come back to haunt me, later. “It’s not like I need to shoot you. You’ve made a bargain with an assassin, and he’s said to leave me alone, so you’re not exactly a threat, are you?”
He glared at me, as three voices made their annoyance known.
“I guess the pentosdial works really well on you,” he said, and I closed my eyes, listening to my know-it-all mouth drop me in the shit, again.
“Sure it does, and so do most of the others.” I closed my eyes. “I hate you. I hate this shit and I ha—”
The sentence ended in a yelp, as the woman returned and wrapped firm hands around my ankle and boot.
“Looks like I might need to cut these off,” she began, which only brought me protesting upright.
“Don’t,” I stopped. “Let me try to take my foot out of it first.”
“How about we just leave it on and strap over the top of it?” Varian suggested. “There’s a few miles to walk to base, and we don’t have time for nanites.”
These guys had nanites?
My eyes widened, and I searched the woman for any sign of another injector, my leg going tense in her grip. She glared at Varian, and slapped me on the thigh.
“You,” she said, stabbing a finger in his direction, “need to call ahead and let them know we’re coming, and you,” she added, pointing her finger at me, “need to calm right down. Pentosdial. I’m not injecting you with anything, just strapping your leg. See?”
And she held up a roll of bandages. I nodded. I did see. I just didn’t believe her. She looked like she knew her way around doctoring, just as good as Doc—and Doc was full of tricks, when it came to sticking me with the shots we both knew I needed. The man was a trypanophobic’s nightmare—and I figured this woman wasn’t far behind him.
“What’s your name?” I asked, as she smoothed the leg of my combat fatigues down flat, and started wrapping.
“Judith,” she said.
“You been a medic long?”
She smiled, a small, tight smile acknowledging what I was doing.
“I think I’ve been doctoring since the time you were in diapers.”
I frowned.
“How old...” I let my voice trail off, as she shook her head.
“Don’t make me hurt you.”
Well, fine, then.
She caught the look on my face and laughed.
“I stopped counting when I hit fifty-six.”
“Why...” but her smile faded, and she shook her head, and I caught the looks of concern that flitted across the faces of the people standing around us. “Nev—Ow!”
“How are you intending on getting the bracelet off Celia’s wrist?” Judith asked, easing the bandage she’d just pulled tight.
“Tens?” I asked, calling him through the comms.
“I’ve found a way to reverse the locking mechanism in the absence of Barangail’s thumb-print.”
I relayed that to Judith, the rebels listening with interest.
“I’d like to speak with your Tens, one day,” Varian said, and I dodged an outright no.
“That’ll be up to him,” I said, wincing as Tens snapped his refusal.
“Oh, Hell to the Hells, no!”
It was something I didn’t relay.
15—Ant Honey
I was guessing the pentosdial had worn off by the time Varian signaled we were approaching the outpost where Celia was sheltering. The painkillers were also wearing off, and my leg felt like it was on fire, so I was looking forward to finally getting inside and sitting down. I was even thinking of sleep, but that was a long way off. I wanted to be back on the Shady Marie with the mission well behind me before I did that—even if it was beginning to look a bit like a fool’s dream.
“Hang in there, kiddo.”
At least Tens was back to normal. Irritating, but normal.
A shout of alarm brought me swiftly back to the present, and I looked for the threat. Around me, Varian and his group were scattering. The woman nearest me grabbed my arm and pulled me behind her as something dropped from the ceiling and landed, hissing, on the floor beside us.
The hiss ended in a sickening crunch, as the woman brought the broad blade she carried down on the center of the creature. I pulled my blaster and scanned the ceiling further out. Sure enough, there were a half dozen more coming towards us. I took aim at the nearest, and pulled the trigger. It took me two shots. The next one took three.
Damn. I hoped that wasn’t a trend.
Nope. I took out the one, after, with a single shot, and the one after that—and then I realized I’d found the sweet spot. It was just under the bottom row of eyes, where the chelicerae, or fangs, hooked in. Those last two shots had landed as the multi-legged monsters raised their forelegs and spread their fangs.
Fuck, I hoped they weren’t spiders.
I didn’t bother stopping to count either legs or body segments as more of the critters came towards us. These ones were accompanied by a larger beast that looked exactly like the rest of them, save that its abdomen was rounder, and it was about four times their size. The thing had fangs on it like a front-end loader.
Momentarily torn between shooting it, and taking out the dozen or so smaller critters accompanying it, I hesitated. Varian and the rest had no such qualms. A storm of blaster bolts tore into the larger creature, making its attendants scatter to attack whatever threat they could reach. That made
my decision easy.
I took on the little ones.
It wasn’t long before my partner followed my lead. Together we stopped most of them before they reached the front line of shooters. One got past, and leaping up to sink its fangs into a rebel’s chest. He was lucky. If it had chosen his face, he’d have been in a world of hurt... or not in the world at all. It was hard to tell if these things were venomous, and I didn’t want to find out the hard way.
As it was, if its target hadn’t had friends close enough to shoot it off his chest, he’d have been a dead man—or a sorely injured one. As the biggest of the attacking creepy crawlies fell, I noticed something gleaming among the fallen carapaces and spindly legs.
“What’s that?” I asked, pointing it out to Varian, as I worked my way closer.
This took a bit of time as there was no way I was going to wade through the bodies. There was no telling if one of them was still alive enough to take a bite out of me as I passed. I carefully dragged each one to one side—and I blasted it if it so much as twitched. I might have felt stupid about doing that, except everyone else was doing the same.
By the time Varian and I reached the device, I had a terrible feeling the mission had slipped a little further south than it had already gone. If I hadn’t known any better, I would have thought the bit of equipment attached to the creature’s head was some kind of a cross between a camera and some sort of... sort of...
“What is that?” I asked, as Varian brought the grip of his blaster down on the camera, and turned towards me.
He grabbed me by both shoulders, and unzipped the front of my combat suit.
“Hey!” I shouted, but he ignored my protest and tried to peel the suit off my shoulder.
I jabbed my blaster into his stomach. That stopped him.
“Back! Off!” I ordered, punctuating each word with a poke of the blaster’s muzzle. “Back the fuck off.”
He backed up, raising his hands as he did so.
“No offence,” he said.
“Like Hell there isn’t!”
“I just had to see—”
I poked him again...several times.
“I. Am. Not. A. Peepshow.”
He backed up another two steps, and then wrapped his hand around the muzzle of the blaster and turned it aside as he twisted it out of my grip.
“Look!” he snapped, waving my gun in the general direction of the smashed-up electronics on the bug’s head. “That’s a recording camera. Barangail’s like that. He records everything. He tracks everything. We fucking forgot to debug you.”
I looked around at the critter corpses surrounding us.”
“You think they were sent?”
He holstered his blaster, and passed mine back to me.
“I do.” He waved in the direction of my gaping armor. “Barangail likes tagging the ribs.”
Well, fuck. I’d forgotten, as well.
My face must have said it all, as I pulled back the suit, and lifted the tank top to show the still red patches marking my sides. Varian looked down at my ribs, and then back up into my face. I’ll give him this, his eyes didn’t linger anywhere else. Good man.
“You know we’re gonna have to do somethin’ about that.”
He even managed to look apologetic.
I looked around the cavern, and then made a point of nudging a pile of spider guts near my boot.
“You got somewhere cleaner we could go?”
There was movement as two of the bigger guys moved in. I looked from left to right, snagging their eyes, and they stopped, which was when I made a point of putting my blaster back in its holster. Let’s just say that what came next wasn’t fun, and that nan-gel has helpful anesthetic properties when it comes to minor field surgery, but does nothing for the pain you get from being hit one too many times upside the head.
“Sorry.”
I got shakily to my feet, feeling the pull of dressings over where the trackers used to be. Varian held out his fist, fingers down, and I put out my hand for whatever it was he was offering.
“If it makes you feel any better, we got them.”
He dropped the crushed remains of the trackers into my outstretched palm, and I dropped them onto the floor and ground what was left into powder.
“Just as long as you got them all.”
“It’s not something we can afford to miss,” he said. “As it is, we’ve stayed too long already.”
As if his words were a signal, the others shifted, melting back into shadows, and taking side tunnels. Varian’s gaze flitted around the cavern, and mine followed it. I caught movement at the top edge of a corner his men had avoided, just as he turned and bolted.
“This way!”
I didn’t ask why. I just ran after him. The movement had looked bulky enough to be something man-shaped zip-lining down through a narrow crack in the cavern ceiling—and who knew that had been there? I guess the spiders had to have come from somewhere.
Varian ran back the way we’d come, and I ran after him, bitching at Tens and Case as I went.
“You didn’t think to warn a girl?”
“You’ve only just come back on-line. We were getting ready to pull you out. Now, move your ass!”
Well, someone had gotten up on the wrong side of the bed today!
“What’s a bed?”
Oh. Well. That explained it.
It didn’t take us long to realize we’d picked the wrong tunnel.
His lordship had been tracking me, which meant he’d known which trail we’d come in by, which meant that of course he had men hitting one of the junctions we’d passed and coming up along our back trail. I wondered briefly what that might mean for Judith and the hidden alcove, and hoped the rebels had had time to clear out. Right now, though, that wasn’t my concern.
I dove for the shelter of the wall, and hoped there was nothing nasty living behind the stalagmite I’d chosen. Varian had tried for the other side and vanished into the shadow cast by a convenient ripple. Ahead of us, the three men we’d caught up with had also taken cover, and Barangail’s guards advanced.
I checked the charge on my blaster and took a deep breath, wondering why Barangail’s men hadn’t opened fire. I closed my eyes, and took another breath, listening to the noise in the tunnel, and calming my mind. I ran through where I’d seen them last, and figured it wouldn’t take long for them to reach the front three rebels.
The sound of their footsteps reached me, as I focused, but they weren’t alone. I also heard the sound of movement behind us—and remembered the man-shaped forms dropping out of the ceiling in the cavern we’d just left. I only hoped Varian could hear it, too. Furtive movement sounded from the other wall, and I heard a muffled curse.
Yup. He remembered...or he’d caught the sound of combat boots pounding over stone, the same way I had. Suddenly, our cover didn’t mean shit. I flattened myself to the floor, hoping the shadows and the angle of the tunnel would be some protection, but it gave me an awkward angle for firing, and I came up onto a knee.
“Yours?” I asked as the first man came around the corner, and it was as if the word was a signal for all Hell to break loose.
I heard firing from behind me, and realized my cover served some purpose, after all, since it protected me from the squad advancing from the other direction. The shadows provided some protection, but the first few solids blew stone from the walls above my head. I fired back, not happy with the flare of blue that shimmered under the impact of my slugs. The energy bolts had the same effect.
Well, fuck. Barangail was cheating.
Across from me, Varian swore and then sent a short burst into the same target. The blue sparkled and flared, and Varian fired a single round more. This time, there was a ripple of faded blue, and the man stumbled back. Varian’s next shot exploded the guy’s head.
Four shots. Right.
I followed his example, pumping four quick shots into one of the guys coming down the opposite side of the tunnel. He dropped to his knees, a
nd my fifth shot went clean over his head, blasting stone chips from out of the wall. He was rolling when I fired my sixth, and behind cover on the seventh.
“Motherfucking son-of-a-bitch!” but I wasn’t alone. On the other side of the corridor, Varian’s targets were doing the same. It reminded me they were combat veterans, and hadn’t survived this long without learning a few tricks. Well, it was time they stopped.
I picked the next guy along, fired five rapid shots, and saw him drop to the floor.
“Sonuvabitch!”
Well, that last shot clearly hadn’t killed him. I tried for a hit on his prone form, but one of his comrades had stepped over his body, and I hit a leg, instead. Opposite me, Varian was having the same problem—and Barangail’s men were advancing. We’d be in close quarters soon.
As I thought it, a large multi-legged shape dropped down from the ceiling to land in the middle of the guards. If it had been alone, it might have been in trouble, but the men who turned towards it couldn’t bring their blasters to bear before being hit by another form, and then a third, and the ants knew exactly what to go for first.
I watched as large mandibles closed over torsos and men, and foreclaws wrapped around weapons and tore them out the soldiers’ hands, and I was on my feet and backing up as Varian came clear of the shadows on the other side of the tunnel. Our sides touched, and he laid a hand over my arms, pushing them down.
“Don’t fire,” he said, but I’d already started, and the trigger clicked over as the Blazer’s muzzle dropped.
The shot went into the cave floor.
“Don’t fire!” he shouted, as another ant dropped off the ceiling and landed in front of us.
I froze, staring at it, while Varian reached over and plucked the blaster out of my hands.
“What...” I asked, as he stuffed the weapon into his belt.
“They’re friends,” he explained, “or they were...”
That was not a comforting thought as the ant grabbed me in its long, curving jaws and lifted me from the ground.
“Don’t struggle,” Varian said, as a second of the big creatures lifted him from his feet.
That was a hard order to obey, but it became a whole lot easier, when the ant’s mandibles tightened, and I felt the sharp serrations along the inside of them make indentations through the armor. One punched down over where one of Barangail’s trackers had been lodged and I whimpered.
Mack 'n' Me: The Wolves of Alpha 9 Page 13