Soldier

by David Ryker

  I swallowed and remembered when she’d popped the hatch of her mech on Draven and taken off like a racehorse. How she’d ripped the gun out of my hand so fast I hadn’t even seen her do it. How she’d charmed me into not killing her — twice. I wedged the thoughts down and cleared my throat. “So what happened to them? Why haven’t they overthrown the Federation?”

  Volchec looked up, expression grave. “Because after Fox fucked us, we sent half the armada after her. We never recovered the plant, but we found out what the Free were doing, where they had their little breeding colony, got the information we needed to scan for them, and then we wiped them out.”

  I swallowed. “Wiped them out?”

  “The whole fucking planet and every Tenshi on it.”

  “As well as every traitorous double-agent we had in our ranks,” Volchec growled. “Showed them that no one fucks with the Federation like that and gets away with it. Public executions. All of them, and their conspirators.”

  There was silence in the room until Everett broke it. “But of course, we didn’t get all of them, so some survive, and they cause a lot of fucking problems — guess they took the genocide personally.” She shrugged, trying to play down what she was saying, but it was still hard to hear. Especially when you thought you were the good guys in the war. “This one especially,” she said, tapping on the photo of Fox. “The Federation was hunting her for ninety years, and they thought they’d killed her. Leveled an entire city to do so, but just like a fucking cockroach, here she is. Again.” She shook her head in disbelief. “I remember that op — marched five hundred mech into that city to take it apart looking for her. Mac was there, right?”

  Mac nodded. “Yeah, the Falmouth was the ship on deployment. We had her picture on our screens for a week as we marched through the city, clearing it building by building, hundreds of Tilt-wings and dropships circling in case she bolted. We cornered her in a high-rise, demolished the whole fucking thing, until all that was left was rubble. Killed everyone,” he said, grappling with the words. “Killed her.” He nodded at the photo.

  Volchec slammed down her fist on the table and the hologram jumped. “Well, obviously fucking not.” She sighed and lifted her hand, closing the file so Fox disappeared. “And now here she is again, fucking with my shit, again.”

  Everett took a breath and looked at me. “Volchec was running one of the insurgency parties,” she said, turning to her. “If I’m remembering correctly?”

  Volchec looked at her but said nothing.

  “You were a major then, too — right?” Everett added.

  Volchec nodded. “Yeah, but I’m not going to make the same mistake twice.”

  I narrowed my eyes, trying to read her expression.

  “You calling this in?” Everett asked.

  “I have to,” Volchec said through gritted teeth. “And I know what they’re going to say — what they’re going to do. They’re going to put Telmareen on planet-wide lockdown, and then they’re going to land every fucking warship we have here, and then shit is going to hit the fan. If Fox is here, and she’s got the Guard working for her — or with her — then it means that Telmareen, in part, or in its entirety has been turned. Their allegiance has shifted, and that means that some bad shit is about to go down. You realize,” she said, looking at the faces around the table, “that one transmission — this transmission,” she muttered, tapping on the file, “is going to start a goddamn war the likes of which Telmareen has never seen. If the Free think they’ve got their hooks in here — into the biggest Iskcara operation for a thousand lightyears, then you can be damn well sure that they’ve got troops all over, lying low, waiting for it to blow up. And when it does, things are going to go south really fucking quickly. That guy at the spaceport — no doubt there to scoop up whatever came out of that locker — one last attempt to stop us from putting Fox in the middle of all this—”

  “But how did they know to be there?” I interjected.

  Volchec shrugged. “Who knows — I doubt they missed that combination carved under the desk. They probably just didn’t know exactly what it was for. They likely had people stationed all over, hedging their bets.”

  Everett folded her arms. “You think Barva told them what it was?”

  “I think Barva held out as long as he could,” she sighed, “and then died before they got what they needed out of him. Or maybe he told them to go fuck themselves when they were pulling his fingernails, bit through his own tongue and choked himself on the blood.” Volchec’s features were iron, her voice remorseless. “And after that, they probably went back through the garage, found the number and realized it was all they had to go on — a number. Could have been coordinates, or a combination, a password — anything. They’d not have had the pull to access the records they needed to narrow the search like we did. Not without raising some flags, at least. It was imperative for their operation to go on like it was without the Federation knowing what was up. If they knew that the Guard weren’t under their control, then everything would have fallen apart. So, whether the Free had control of the Guard or not — in part, or wholly — Telmareen is still a Federation planet, and everyone living here, working here, running businesses — they don’t want war. So shit had to stay quiet.” She curled her knuckles and rested on them on the table. “If they’d have marched Barva into the spaceport — if they knew what the numbers were — and he’d screamed or made a break for it, a shootout or death there like that would attract attention. News reports, videos, pictures, all uploaded to the network. All that shit gets filtered through millions of AI cores, scanning for stuff like wanted suspects, operatives, anything that could be bad for the Federation and the status quo — hell, if you yell the words ‘Kat Fox’ in a public place on a Federation planet you’ll have fifty Federation officers on you in minutes. They couldn’t risk any of that. So we have to assume, by process of elimination, that he died before he gave up the info, and that the dumb shit that tried to get the drop on you was just there, staking out one of the possibilities, and that he saw you come in, start checking lockers, and figured he had a lead. Hell, maybe he even wanted to impress the Free with his initiative. What Fox didn’t bank on was that the guy they put on it was a fuck-wit, and that you three weren’t. Guess not everyone at the Guard is turned — limited options probably. But still, if you’d have been on your own, by the sounds of things, you’d have a few holes in you,” she said, staring at me, “and we’d be one duffle bag full of evidence lighter.” Volchec drew breath and stared at the hologram in front of her. “They knew Barva was getting ready to run, and they knew what he had. They scooped him up while he was on the way out is my guess, but didn’t bank on his failsafe, and couldn’t risk stepping out of the shadows to make a fuss of retrieving it. We can only count ourselves lucky it came off like it did.”

  I looked at Fish and nodded at him, smiling. He’d saved my ass. He returned it, his gills fluttering. Mac stayed silent, probably kicking himself that he’d not been there. He put on a tough show, but when it’d come down to it, what happened with the transport had hit him hard. We were all soldiers, sure, but we were all human, too — figuratively, of course, considering Fish was, well, a fish.

  It was all conjecture, what Volchec was saying, but it sounded right on the money. I stared at her through the hazy image in front of me and had to smile. She was sharp — as a razor. But I guess that was what the Federation looked for when they promoted people and let them run things. She must have been barely into her mid-forties, and she’d already risen to the rank of commander on a Federation carrier. She must have been good to get there, and I guess I’d just never thought about it until now. She had no proof of any of this, just a few pieces of a puzzle still unfinished, and yet she’d drawn the rest in herself, and no one had any thoughts that it was anything other than dead right. Or at least if they did they didn’t make it known.

  “So what’s next?” I asked her.

  “I’ll make the call.”

 
“And what about Alice? We can’t just leave her.”

  “I know.” Volchec sighed. “Best case scenario?”

  I nodded.

  “I make the call, the Federation scramble the armada and put them en route ready to mount a full-scale insurgency with the aim to install martial law as quickly as they can.”

  “That’s best case?” I croaked, not seeing much light in the tunnel.

  “Yeah — best case is that it takes them a day to do it.”

  “And how is that any better?”

  “Because it means we’ve got a day to rescue her.”

  20

  “You don’t honestly think these guys are going to be stupid enough to go back to the same bar, do you?” Mac asked incredulously, staring up at me as I climbed down out of Greg.

  My boots hit the frozen dirt and I wiped a droplet out of my running nose with the back of my hand. “Actually, I do, because I think they think we’d not be stupid enough to.”

  “So what’s the plan — just bust in there and confront them, say we know you’re not working with the Free! And then pull our guns?” He put his hands on his hips and measured me.

  I shrugged. “Pretty much — though we don’t pull our guns unless they do.”

  “I like to already have mine out when someone reaches for theirs,” he grunted, shaking his head. “What makes you so sure these guys aren’t attached, and that we’re not in someone’s crosshairs right now?” he asked, looking around emphatically.

  “Because, one, if we were — we’d already be dead. And two, if they were involved with the Free, then why the hell would they hire three mercs to steal Iskcara that they already had access to?” I shook my head. “No, these guys tapped into the same info that I did, went to the same bar, thinking what we were thinking, looking for someone to hit up for a way into the operation. They’re mercs — they go where the credits are, and when Iskcara’s on the table, so are credits. They just got bored of waiting, saw an opportunity to grab some for themselves, using us to do it, playing it up like they had the inside track. No, these guys aren’t working with the Free. They just know someone who is — that’s their inside line. How they knew about the shipment route. How they got here before us — knew about the Iskcara being skimmed. They’re connected, just not as well as they made out.” I smirked, staring up at the bar with the huge door for the second time. “And that’s why we’re here. If they do know someone on the inside, then we need that lead, and what they know. We need every scrap of intel we can get if we’re going to get into a Free slash Telmareen Guard headquarters and bust out a goddamn prisoner.”

  Mac pressed his tongue into his lip and narrowed his eyes. “That’s a lot of guesswork, and a lot of ifs.”

  I drew a breath. “You got a better idea?”

  “And what about the warehouse, huh? The one with the radiation proofing. How do you explain that?”

  I shrugged. “Hell, they probably are using it to store the Iskcara, but going back there is only going to expose us before we strike.”

  “And the arrest-deadzone between here and there?”

  I ground my teeth. That one was my fuck-up. I hadn’t done my due diligence. “That strip of industrial zone is sanctioned for development. It is all either demolished, derelict, or under construction — but it’s all blocked off either way. Concrete blockades around the entire stretch. There weren’t any arrests because there wasn’t anyone going down there. And I’d bet those damn mercs made that same fuck-up,” I said, pointing at him, “which is why they chose this bar to hunt for whoever was moving the Iskcara, when in fact it had nothing to do with anything. We just made the same mistakes they did.”

  He scoffed. “We?”

  “Okay, I made the same mistakes they did.” I tapped on my chest and the lumpy stem-gel caked on it, over my still throbbing wound. “But I already paid for that, alright? You try getting shot in the fucking chest,” I grunted. “It’s no fucking picnic.”

  Mac smirked at me. “Alright then, Red,” he said, narrowing his eyes and proffering the door. “Your lead.”

  I straightened my jacket. “You’re damn right it is.”

  I pushed through out of the cold forever-dusk air and into the musty, stale interior of the bar. The heavy door swung closed behind us and the wind died on our cheeks. Mine stung in the warmth, throbbing gently as the blood rushed back into them.

  I narrowed my eyes and swept the room from right to left, visualizing where I’d dive to and draw if things went sour, which I was very much expecting them to.

  The mercs were just where they’d been before, in their booth. The three of them were sitting across the table from another human. He was in his fifties, grizzled, with a scar across his forehead, shining red against his white hair. He was a merc if I’d ever seen one and was wearing that hard-cut expression that Alice and I had sported when we’d headed over there the first time. It seemed that Telmareen was becoming a hotspot for them — the promise of credits in the air just too good to pass up. The trio — Kera and her cronies— were just trying to carve off a slice of the pie, whether they were involved or not. Maybe they thought that jacking some Iskcara would impress someone, or get them noticed, or maybe they just thought that if someone was skimming, then everyone should get a cut — or maybe they just thought the Federation had gone a little soft on Telmareen. What I did know, though, was that they didn’t have the stones to pull off a job themselves, so they were roping other naïve mercs in under the pretense of getting in good with whoever was running the show — that fabled promise of steady work, a golden ticket — and sending them to their deaths. We’d not seen anything really, on the airwaves, about the attack on the transport, which meant that the Guard and the Federation were suppressing it, probably to keep everything looking normal from the outside, which likely meant that we weren’t the first to try to hit the shipments, and we wouldn’t be the last. It also explained why there was so much protection — why there was an electrified hull, an automated cannon, and why and how the Telmareen Guard scrambled all those Fixed-wings so quickly. It wasn’t their first go-round. I just wondered what the hell they were doing to Alice right now, and if I could put that blame on myself. Looking back, it’d all been so easy. Too easy. Way too easy to get into that conversation and land that job. We should have known something was up. I should have known.

  I shook that thought off and headed for the table, set to interrupt their little interview. The droid caught me first and tapped on Kera’s shoulder. She stopped mid-spiel and looked up. The Polgarian turned and looked over his shoulder, then rotated in the chair, trying to stop his eyes going wide. I was, after all, a ghost — someone they’d watched die. Or at least thought they had. I guess none of us were as smart as we thought we were.

  I reached the table, watching to make sure their hands weren’t twitching. Mac’s was already around his pistol grip, ready to draw in case. There was no mistaking his try it and see, assholes expression.

  “Move,” I growled, hooking my thumb over my shoulder at the merc in front of me. He wrinkled his brow and glared up at the kid telling him to get out of the booth. If he was standing, he probably would have taken a swing at me, but he wasn’t, and I was wearing an even more pissed-off look than Mac. I never considered myself intimidating, but I suppose when you’ve got a mission to complete and a score to settle, sometimes it just sort of oozes out of you. He looked from me to Mac to the mercs and back, before sighing and sliding to his feet. He was waiting for them to come to his aid, but they were staring at Mac and me, a little dumbfounded.

  The guy with the scar pulled himself to a stance, stood facing me for a second, measuring up whether he was going to try some shit, and then decided against it. He sidled off, muttering to himself, and pulled up a stool at the bar, glowering at us over his shoulder every few seconds.

  I ignored him and turned my attention to Kera. “Don’t get up.”

  “I wa’nt tinking to,” she said darkly. “Never seen a dead man come
back t’life,” she said with only the slightest shade of surprise coloring her voice.

  “There’s a lot you haven’t seen,” I growled, sliding in behind the table. Mac stayed standing, hovering at the edge of the booth. He casually pulled his pistol off his belt, and, hanging his wrist over the back of the booth, hid it from the room with his body. From their perspective, though, it was clear as day. He could lift his hand and put a bullet in any one of them before they could even move for their weapons. “Hands on the table,” I ordered.

  Mac jiggled the gun and they obliged, looking at him, and wondering which one of them he’d plug first if they didn’t comply.

  “Now,” I said, taking a breath and sitting back, resting my hand on my lap in case I needed to go for my Arcram. “We’re going to ask once, and you’re going to tell me who you’ve got inside the Guard, or the Federation, or whoever the fuck it is that’s giving you the intel on the Iskcara shipments.”

  They all looked at each other. I curled my free fist and slammed it on the table. “We know you’re not working with the Free — we know they’re running this skim — and we know you don’t have anything to do with them. You’re just a couple of mercs trying to muscle in on someone else’s racket, and you fucked us once, but now we’re here for the real intel, which you’re going to hand over, or my friend here is going to start getting real jittery.”

  Kera started to smirk, and then even dared to laugh. “Oh, child, you theenk you got it all figured out?”

  “I’ve got a pretty good idea,” I growled. “You know someone on the inside, they’re giving you the shipping intel, you’re scooping up mercs who’re going off the same clues that we did, sending them to do your dirty work because you don’t have the stones to do it yourself.”