by David Ryker
She laughed a little louder and pulled her hands to the edge of the table. Mac stiffened and I straightened instinctively. She stopped and pulled her mouth into an ‘o’ shape. “You two is jumpy, eh?”
She was testing us, and I wasn’t sure if we’d passed or failed.
“Sorry to disappoint you, child, but you’re not as clever as you theenk.” She relaxed a little and sat back in the booth, keeping her eyes locked on mine.
“Then why don’t you tell me what I’m missing,” I said with as much menace as I could muster.
“Oh, I don’t know if we got dat kinda time. See, I theenk if you back in here, acting all tough and demanded shit of me, den you don’t know much about anyting — but you got some kinda pressure on you, time-wise, eh? How dat for a guess?” She narrowed one eye at me.
My jaw flexed. If they didn’t cough up their intel then we only had one option, and that was to attack the Guard head-on without any idea of what we were going into.
She laughed a little more and shook her head. “Look, we been doing dis a laang time, ‘kay? We know who is who, and when two childs come walking in a place like this, sporting fresh steel big-boys, we know who they be — really. Got the Federation steenk all over yah,” she said, waving her wrist limply at me. “You here, doing Federation business, tryna feegure out what de hell’s going on — aye?” She put her hands flat on the table and leaned forward. “See, but you not de first one, are ya?”
I sucked in a breath through my nose but said nothing.
“Another one came t’rough ‘ere, looking for information. He one of yours?” She raised her eyebrows and looked at each of us in turn. Barva. She meant Barva. I wasn’t having a good run of this. If she wasn’t bullshitting, then I’d missed the beat twice now.
I had to know. I nodded almost minutely, and she casually curled her knuckles under her hand on the table and knocked on it. “T’ought so. And you here to try an’ find ‘im?”
I nodded again.
“But he not here no more, huh?” She lifted her chin as she asked, keeping her eyes on mine. I could feel Mac’s too. No doubt he wasn’t too happy about me giving the game away.
I shook my head.
“Yah, he be rustling too many bushes, banging on too many trash cans. Dat sorta activity in such a precarious time make people a little nervous, ya know? Now he been snapped up,” she said, snapping her fingers. “An’ gone who knows where. If he a friend o’ yours you best make peace wit’ de fact you probably ain’t never seeing him again.”
I swallowed. “Why are you telling us all this?” It was the question on my mind, and Mac’s. This was building to something. It had to be, otherwise they would have tried to kill us the moment we walked in, knowing what they did.
“Because we know t’ings getting to a special time now.”
“Special time?” My head was spinning. “What’s your role in all this?” I softened all of a sudden. I didn’t have the energy to keep it up, especially considering I was swinging in the dark and missing. “Are you working with them? Why are you trying to steal Iskcara shipments? What are they doing with it all?” The questions were spilling out. Mac cleared his throat and touched the grip of the pistol against my shoulder to let me know that I should shut the fuck up.
She laughed a little. “Look, we both got t’ings we tryna do, eh? Both got shit to look after. So we make a deal—”
“The last deal we made with you didn’t come off too well,” I said, my voice barbed.
“D’as ‘cause dat weren’t no deal,” she replied, just as harshly. Her hand rose and she pointed at me. “Dat just be you and de girl theenking you know how de world works, and getting turned over. You theenk you be playing us, but you just puppets in all dis.”
I gritted my teeth and spoke through them, my patience strained. “So what’s the deal?”
“You tell us what we want to know, and den we tell you what you want to know. Fair?”
I swallowed. “If your word is worth anything.”
She held her hand to her chest like she’d been stabbed in the heart. “Dat wound, child. Not my fault you theenk you clever when you actually gettin’ tricked.”
I exhaled and blinked hard, trying to force down the headache poking me in the back of the eyes. “Just get on with it.”
She didn’t waste any time. “You are Federation, right — some investigatory group, aye? Just to confirm dat we are who we all are.”
I looked at her for a while, and then nodded. Mac cleared his throat again but said nothing. I paid it no mind.
“And sheet about to get real tough for everyone on Telmareen, right?”
I nodded again and heard Mac swear under his breath. I don’t know what it was, but I could sense humanity in her all of a sudden, like she wasn’t playing an angle anymore.
“And when that do, everyone who associated with dis shit going to be found and killed, right?”
“Yeah,” I sighed. “Probably.”
“Den it about time we got out of de fire, yeah? Get off Telmareen before dat shit ‘appens.”
“We would if we could.”
“But dat girl shot you not wit’ch you no more, is she?”
I shook. “No, she’s not.”
“She in de Guard towah, yeah? Arrested after your little stunt. We keep tabs on dat sort of thing. Need to know our work paying off.”
“Yeah. That’s right.”
“And de way you lookin’ at ‘er last time, me think you not too pleased to be leavin’ her to de same fate as your other man?”
I was sick of being read. I had no idea what the hell was going on, only that I didn’t know anything I thought I did. “Where’s this going?” I asked, my patience all but expended.
“Well, if you going in dere to get her, den maybe you do us a little favor, and you get our man out at de same time.” Kera cocked her head a little.
“What, he get arrested trying to pull the same stupid shit?” I scoffed.
“Nah,” she smiled sadly. “Not quite. He what dey call insurance. Make sure we keep doing what we s’pose to be doing. We can’t leave ‘til we got our man back. And if all dis sheet start kicking off before dat happen, den we get pulled into it. Free vers’ de Federation, right here on de streets of Telmareen. And you know how dat end. We don’t want to be here when dat happens, ya see?”
“So why not break him out yourself?” I raised my shoulders. “Smart as you are, of course.”
“They see us coming, they know who we are, they put a gun to our man head and den they know that we not loyal — we not wit’ dem. So what good any of us when dat happen? Maybe dey not see you coming. Maybe you get in, rescue de girl, and get our man same time, and bring him back.”
I sucked on my cheek. “And what assurances would you have that we’d even follow through with that?”
She shrugged herself. “Well, we could always make an anonymous call to de Federation and tell dem how you try to rob one of their shipments, shot down one of deir planes in de middle of deir city, eh? Got it all on film, afta all — you and dat girl agreeing to do it and all that.”
I took a breath. We’d have to include that in our report anyway, but at least we’d be able to spin it our way. If it got out before then, we’d be court martialed and ejected before we could even plead our case. And Volchec would be shitcanned for allowing the whole thing. Hell, they’d probably just eject all six of us and be done with it. The last thing we wanted was for that to get out before we could make an attempt to rescue Alice. They’d never allow it otherwise, and if we went outside them, we’d be disobeying direct orders — also an ejectable offense. I didn’t know what she was going to say, but Kera’s words felt like a pretty cold fucking barrel against my temple. I nodded after an age. “Okay.”
Mac finally broke the silence. “Red, what the fuck are you doing?” he hissed.
“We don’t have a choice,” I mumbled.
“Well, we could just fucking shoot them, be done with it. Dead p
eople don’t tell stories, I know that much.”
“And Alice?” I turned away from Kera and looked at him. We were all human around the table just then — the Polgarian, the Droid, Mac, me, and whatever the hell Kera was. They might have been cold mercs working an angle before, but they had someone they cared about being held at gunpoint, same as we did. They needed us, and whether Mac could see it or not, we needed them.
“We’ll figure it out,” he said, trying to sound confident. But he didn’t, and I didn’t care. I’d already made my mind up.
“No, we won’t. They know something we don’t, and they need our help. We’re going in there to get Alice, and we’re going to have a much better chance of succeeding if we have their help. If we kill them now, hell, maybe word gets back before we can make an attempt, and then they kill Alice before we get there. And then what?”
Mac opened his mouth, but no words came out.
“We’ve fucked this mission,” I said. “I’ve fucked this mission. I’ve fucked up every call I’ve made and it’s been a total shitting of the bed from the moment we touched down on this fucking planet. We can’t count this a successful mission — so the least we can do is go home with everyone we came with. And if that means letting a couple of Free-helping mercs go free — well,” I said, sighing, “Alice is worth that much.”
Mac stared at me, knuckles white around his pistol grip. “Fine. But if they rat us out and tell the Free we’re coming, and they pop Alice before we get there…”
“Then trust me when I say, we’ll hunt them to the ends of the fucking universe if need be.” My voice found its rhythm all of a sudden and sounded hard again. “This is the only play we’ve got right now, and I don’t like it any more than you do, alright?”
He bared his teeth and drew a slow breath. “Okay.”
I turned back to Kera. “You’ve got a deal. Now spill your fucking guts. Who are you and what the fuck is happening on this stupid fucking planet?”
21
“Coming up on Service Entrance 3 now,” I said, pacing steadily down the asphalt ramp toward the huge steel roller door that led into the bowels of the Telmareen Guard Tower.
The Guard themselves were a mixture of races. Being a Federation Sanctioned Force, they were mostly comprised of humans and humanoids, but that wasn’t to say that the entirety of the Guard was. As such, the sight that awaited us was a strange one.
“Alright.” Volchec’s voice echoed in my head. “Stay cool, don’t let them know anything’s up until you hit them.”
I nodded to myself, looking at the two figures ahead. Snow had started falling and it was resting gently on the pair — the one on the left a humanoid inside a modified F-Series painted in green and white striping with a siren on its head to denote its place in the Telmareen Guard. And on the right, a Wint, the same hairy species that had served us in the bar, though this one looked about twice as mean. It was standing practically as tall as the F-Series, nearly six meters, wearing a long green winter coat that would drown any human, adorned with reflective panels. It was holding a rifle in its grasp — what I first assumed to be a Samson, the same as what was slung over my back — but as I drew closer I saw it to be something else. A shotgun. A big one, that looked like it would punch a massive fucking hole in whatever it was aimed at.
The F-Series on the left wasn’t too different from my own, except it was armed with a ‘Deterrent Foam Cannon,’ which Volchec had relayed to us on the way down. Canisters on its back fed expandable foam into the gun which then sprayed it at high velocity onto whatever was giving it grief. It expanded and hardened into a gummy semi-liquid, and made it impossible to retaliate. I had to deal with it before it got that far.
There was something in blind trust. It was an oddly unnerving and exhilarating experience. I sidled down the asphalt ramp in my F-Series, breathing deeply. “Greg, target the camera dome on the F-Series ahead.”
“Targeting,” he said softly, putting a reticle over it.
“What are the odds we can blow a hole in it before he moves?”
“It’s likely.”
“Put a figure on it.”
“Ninety-two percent.”
I let out a low whistle. “That is likely.”
The F-Series clocked me finally as I stepped into the glow of the floodlight over the door, looming out of the gloom, imposing with icicles hanging off my body like fangs.
“Halt,” came a deep voice. The heavy hand of the F-Series lifted and ordered me to stop. I did.
I pulled up, turned a quarter on, took a breath, and then drew fast. The barrel of my plasma pistol swung round, the holes in the muzzle whistling in the cold air and let loose with a single blob of white-hot ionized gas. It zipped through the air, buzzing like a wasp, and hit the F-Series square in the camera dome before it could do anything about it. The orb of electrics and lenses exploded and melted at the same time, erupting in a fountain of sparks. The round burnt its way straight through the top section of the mech and burst on the concrete wall behind it, leaving a charred black star as a reminder.
By the time the first plume of smoke rose into the frigid air, I was already down the ramp. Greg propelled us forward with a burst of thrust and I landed, skidding on the cold ground, spraying the body of the F-Series with a shower of ice shards.
The Wint tried to draw, but before it could even lift the shotgun halfway, the strap parted, and the weapon was pulled from its hands. Its eyes went wide for a second and then it staggered backward into the roller door, cheeks bloated like a toad’s neck. Fish materialized next to me before leaping up and finishing the Wint with a heavy right cross. Its head lolled backward and it slumped to the ground, unconscious.
Before it did, the hatch on the F-Series ahead decompressed and opened. The pilot was totally blind inside without the cam dome, though when he regained his sight, we probably weren’t what he was hoping to see. A measly-looking human, pudgy-faced with thinning orange hair stood up in the cockpit as though he was about to jump out, but froze when he realized that I wasn’t fifteen meters away anymore.
I reached out and watched Greg’s hand close around his midriff. Greg plucked him out of the body of the mech and held him aloft, tight enough so that he couldn’t scream.
I pulled my hand out of the glove and touched the seal above me, opening my own hatch. I drew as I stood, bracing against the cold wind, and leveled my Arcram at the Telmareen guard. There was no way to tell if he was corrupt or not, but letting him go wasn’t an option just then. I put my boot on the lip of the hatch and leaned out, reaching with my free hand for the chest of the guard, and the keycard hanging off his breast pocket.
He made a strangulated attempt to beg for his life, but I didn’t want to hear it. There was no time, and I didn’t want to kill him anyway. If someone was shooting at me then it was fair enough, but I wasn’t quite there when it came to executions. I sighed, thumbed down the Arcram to non-lethal, and put an electrified blob between his eyes. The sparks arced over his head and his eyes rolled before Greg dropped him back into the cockpit and lowered his arm. The guard lay there, unconscious, legs akimbo and half out of the F-Series, which was making no attempt to do anything — it was either a much milder form of AI that was shitting itself currently, or there wasn’t one installed at all. The militarized arm of the Federation were emphatic about their AIs and the level of autonomy and control they had — in the heat of battle, it was imperative so they could keep their pilots alive. I’d only ever been in one and I could attest to that. But for civilian application? Maybe it just took one look at us, realized that it was outgunned, and decided playing possum was its best chance of survival. The plasma round would have blown out the entire camera dome and all broadcasting capabilities it had, anyway. A well-placed shot would do that — straight through the core components built into the top of the body. So if it did try anything, it would be fighting blind.
Though it wasn’t like the design was that bad. Plasma weapons were highly illegal for ci
vilians to possess, after all, and pretty rare, so protecting against them was likely a design cost they couldn’t afford to incur on a grand scale for an unlikely occurrence like that. Even just carrying them was a corporal offense on Federation planets. And it wasn’t like a regular pistol would do the same — plasma weaponry did serious damage — far more than the Federation was willing to prepare the F-Series for. The Alpha Series, the officers’ mechs — well, they were a different story. They actually wanted to keep the guys flying those alive.
I stayed hanging out of Greg’s mouth as he approached the card-reader next to the roller door and touched my finger to the skin behind my ear. “We’re at the door now. Did Kera’s contact come through on those schematics?”
“Amazingly, yeah,” Volchec said, hope in her voice. “Everett’s uploading them to you now.”
“Humph — well, if there were no schematics, there was no deal,” I grunted, touching the card to a reader suspended five meters off the floor.
“We’re not out of the woods yet, though,” Everett’s voice added. “Kera’s contact in the Guard may have given us the location of Alice’s holding cell, but getting there’s still not going to be an easy task.”
I sighed. “Yeah, I know, but still, at least they didn’t tip them off — we could have come down this ramp facing an army of Telmareen Guard looking to shred a couple of Federation idiots before they managed to get a shot off.” I waited but no one said anything. “But we didn’t — so that’s a good start, right?”
Volchec cleared her throat. “Stay on point, Maddox. There’s a long way to go.”
The light on the pad turned green and the door started rumbling upward. Footsteps echoed behind me and I leaned around the hatch, watching Mac running down the ramp. He had a rifle in his hands, but it looked like a pea shooter compared to the shotgun lying across the stomach of the Wint.
Fish pulled it off the hairy body, held it up and kept it pointing forward as the door ahead revealed an underground parking garage.