Lone Wolf

by Nigel Findley

  Up ahead I can see the Otter. We’re closing the gap, maybe only a hundred meters back now. But just as I realize that, I see the stem of the boat sink lower as the driver pours on more power. I think we’re still reeling them in, but the rate of closure’s dropped drastically. Frag it!

  Yet maybe it’s not going to matter much. To my right, I can see a Yellowjacket breaking away from the dogfight and now skimming toward us low over the river. I turn my head slightly and yell back to Argent, “Is that our air support?”

  I feel him shrug, then hear him mumble into his throat mike. If he can raise the small rotorcraft, we’ve got this whole thing chipped. The Otter’s got a machine gun, but that style of pintle mount doesn’t let you elevate the weapon enough for antiair actions. The Yellowjacket can fire a burst of chain-gun fire across the boat’s bows and order it to stop. We’ll catch up with the rotorcraft playing overwatch, and it’s game over.

  If, that is, the Yellowjacket’s one of ours ...

  The thought hits me with shocking suddenness, and my gut knots. Argent’s still muttering into his mike, but it doesn’t sound like he’s getting the response he wants. The small rotorcraft’s hurtling in closer, and it’s lined up with us, not with the Otter. I throw my weight to the right and drive the leading edge of the hull deep, honking the Watersport around in the tightest possible turn. Only sheer luck keeps us from catching a wave and going over. Equally sheer luck keeps Argent from ripping my arms off as he grabs my shoulders again.

  Just in time. The Yellowjacket’s chin-mounted chain gun sparkles, and the fire-stream chums the water where we were a second ago. The pilot tries to correct, slewing the micro-turret, but he’s coming in too fast on his strafing run to compensate. Then he’s over and past, already swinging up in an arcing bank.

  I carve us around in another tight turn as the Yellowjacket sets up for another pass. The pilot seems to have learned his lesson. This time he’s cut his speed way back and is cruising in slowly instead of going for a high-speed pass. The rotorcraft looks dead level, a perfect solid weapons platform. I carve again, and his first long burst misses by ten meters.

  Behind me I can hear and feel Argent wrestling with his assault cannon, trying to bring it to bear. Tough job; there’s just not enough space back there to move around much without going swimming, and my hard maneuvers aren’t helping. Another burst of chain-gun fire, this one only a couple of meters astern of us.

  “Hold us fragging still!” Argent barks.

  “Like frag I will!” I shout back. The Yellowjacket’s hovering now, the pilot tracking us entirely with the microturret. Another longer burst almost right on the money, and it’s sheer luck we’re not dead.

  “We’re dead if you don’t,” the runner snarls at the back of my head.

  “We’re dead if I do.”

  But he’s right, of course, the Yellowjacket’s going to score eventually. So I grit my teeth and crack the throttle as wide as it’ll go, tearing off perpendicular to the chopper’s line of fire to give the pilot as tough a tracking problem as possible without any more wild maneuvers. The chain gun fires again, the bullets slashing into the water meters behind us. The pilot checks his fire, I see the micro-turret slew, and I know what’s coming next.

  Sure enough, the water chums wildly ahead of us, as he tracks the stream of fire toward the racing Watersport. In a second or two we’re going to intersect, and that’s all she wrote. “Do it, Argent!”

  The Panther cannon roars, the recoil almost enough to put us out of control. Perfect shot—the high-explosive round impacts dead center of the Yellowjacket’s canopy. It staggers in the air, then a secondary explosion blasts it into fragments and the greasy fire of burning fuel.

  The relief’s enough to make me want to yarf, but I’ve got to stay frosty a little longer. While we’ve been playing games with the Yellowjacket, the S-C Otter’s been opening up the gap, boring forward at full speed. We’ve got to play catch-up, but I’m starting to think we’re not going to make it.

  “Will this thing go faster with just you aboard?” Argent asks.

  I nod.

  “Then this is where I get off,” he says. “Catch ya later, Wolf.”

  And then he’s gone, just dumping himself overboard. I wince at the thought of the impact he took. At the speed we’re going, water’s about as compressible as concrete. Good luck to you, priyatel, I tell him silently. Hope you don’t break any bones.

  And I hope you can swim.

  Free of the extra weight, the Watersport picks up like the engine’s turbocharged. The speedo bar creeps up to just below eighty klicks, and the impact as the little craft skips over small waves is almost enough to knock my teeth loose. The exhilaration’s back, but it’s coupled with real fear. A Watersport’s like a bike in some ways, but water isn’t like a nice smooth highway. Waves and boat-wakes are real dangers, and if you hit them just the right—or wrong—way, they can send you cartwheeling across the surface.

  Those fears are starting to increase as I close with the Otter. The open boat’s kicking up a good wake, making waves high enough to throw the Watersport into the air at the speed I’m going. I’ve got to be real careful how I shift my weight as I come back down.

  Now that I’ve cut the gap to less than fifty meters, it’s time to check out what my firmpoint-mount machine guns can do .. . and, more important, how using them will affect my handling. I squeeze both triggers, carving a slight turn to rake the stream of fire across the Otter’s stem. I can feel the Watersport shift and shimmy with the: recoil—disturbing, but not critical. Firing only one of the guns would probably be more risky, but as long as I balance the recoil I think I’ll be okay.

  And that’s all fine and good, but I’m not the only one who’s got weapons. I see the muzzle flashes as the Otter’s medium machine gun opens up. This isn’t a chain gun with a grotesque rate of fire, so I can’t see the stream of fire, which makes the whole thing all the more frightening. If the Otter’s gunner gets a dead bead on me, the first indication I’ll have of it is when I start taking hits. I cut left, catching a good second and a half of air as I cross the wake, shifting my weight desperately to stop the Watersport’s tendency to corkscrew. Almost immediately I cut back right again, jumping the wake a second time. Then back to the left.

  I'm like a water-skier cutting back and forth behind the boat, getting closer with each crossing. This is starting to feel suicidal, but it’s the only thing I can think of. The gunner aboard the Otter can traverse his weapon to track me— with limited success so far, thank Ghu. Not so with me. My firmpoint-mounted weapons are fixed, so if I want to hit something, first I’ve got to point the nose of the Watersport at whatever it is. Meaning, in turn, that I can put my imaginary sights on my target at only two points of my zigzagging, and those make for maximum-deflection shots anyway.

  Meaning, still further, that my odds of scoring serious hits are next to squat, while the chances of the Otter’s gunner being able to blow me into scrap get better and better the closer I come. For about the millionth time in the last minute, I seriously consider simply giving up the whole mess as a bad fragging job. But then I remember what Eye One, the drone spotter, said: three corp execs. Would execs bail out without taking as much incriminating drek with them as they could? Not fragging likely, priyatel. Even if the combat deckers crack the lab’s system, there might not be anything left to find because all the dirt might be downloaded onto chips now aboard the Otter.

  Before I have time for second thoughts, I lean into a hard turn to the right, and just keep on going until I’m eighty or ninety meters off to the right of the Otter. Then I straighten up my course until I’m paralleling the boat. Cutting back left, I point the bow of the Watersport at the center of the Otter, crack the throttle, and clamp down on the twin triggers. I can see where my fire’s falling, chewing up the water a dozen or so meters short of the Otter, so I shift my weight back until my arms are fully extended. Up comes the bow— not much, but enough—and it’s like
I’m walking my fire onto the Otter. Meanwhile, spray from the other gunner’s fire is kicking up all around me. But at the speed I’m going, and the way the Watersport’s skipping around on the waves, I’m a frag of a tough target. The way the bike’s moving is just splattering the stream of MG fire every which way, saturating the volume of space occupied by the Otter. At least that’s what I’m hoping for. The boat is looming bigger and bigger—thirty meters away, twenty. Something goes spang off my hull, and another round punches clear through the right fairing. I’ve got to break off .. .

  But then I see the gunner blown backward, the pintle-mount gun spraying fire into the sky before it falls silent at last. Without the MG to worry about, I chop the throttle, jump the wake again, and I’m right in the “slot,” directly behind the Otter and about fifteen meters back. I squeeze the triggers again, and watch the twin MGs chew the living drek out of the boat’s stern. There’s a flash of fire, a plume of oily black smoke as I drive a dozen rounds into the inboard engine, and then the Otter’s down off the step and slowing so fast I almost plow into its stem. I chop my own throttle right back, and squeeze off two more short bursts right into the open cockpit.

  It’s a matter of maybe ten seconds to come alongside. I’m driving the Watersport with my right hand, holding the assault rifle in my left. That’s my off hand, but with an autofire weapon it’s not going to matter worth squat at this kind of range. I swing my butt onto the Otter’s gunwale, pivot my legs over and I’m aboard.

  And suddenly in the middle of a charnel-house. Of the four people aboard, three are messily dead, chewed into dogfood by machine gun fire. The fourth is still alive but only just, and not for long. His right arm’s damn near off, and he’s pulsing bright arterial blood all over the boat’s bottom. He’s conscious, his eyes glazed and dulled with agony and shock. His face is streaked with blood, but I have no trouble recognizing him.

  “Hello, Mr. Nemo,” I say quietly. “Or do I call you Gerard Schrage?”

  The Lone Star suit looks up at me blankly. He recognized me the last time we met, but I suppose he’s got other things on his mind right now.

  There’s a war going on inside me. Schrage is a motherfragger—the one who put me beyond sanction, the one who pushed Drummond and the others to set up the ambush that killed Cat Ashburton. The one who cut the deal with Timothy Telestrian to acquire the magically triggered bug as a tool for use in his Military Liaison projects. The one who killed Paco and the other Cutters as part of a fragging field test. But no matter how much I hate him, it still slots me to see him lying there bleeding to death.

  Frag, how many times over the last few days have I imagined putting a bullet through his lousy head? But each time I pictured it, it was a matter of pow, over. Cap him and that’s it. Clean, with no lingering aftereffects.

  It’s different with me suddenly faced with the consequences of my vengeance. I may not have known he was aboard, but it was my bullets that maimed him. His blood’s spreading over the decking, and I’m standing in it. This is reality. I should be feeling satisfied, feeling some sense of completion and closure at Schrage’s death. But all I feel is sick.

  I turn away. There’s nothing I can do to save him, even if I could bring myself to do it, but that doesn’t mean I can watch him die. I suppose I should search the boat for any datachips or other material Schrage and his chummers have taken from the facility, but I’m just not down for it. Frag it all anyway, if Schrage’s death doesn’t put an end to the whole nasty pile of drek, I don’t want to know about it.

  The fire in the Otter’s engine is out, but the engine is totally dead. While I’m standing there staring at it, I finally spot a secondary drive, a small, low-power electric motor. I stand there in the blood a moment longer, then feel a grim smile spread across my face. Yeah, that’s the fragging ticket.

  I cross to the gunwale where my Watersport’s floating, and take a couple of moments to secure the small craft with a line. Then I go forward and fire up the Otter’s silent electric drive. I put it in forward gear at dead-slow, less than walking speed. When I’m confident it’s going to keep running—that I didn’t frag it with my gunfire—I swing overboard and straddle the Watersport. I cut the line loose and fire up the Suzuki’s water-jet. Using my own craft, I nudge the Otter onto the course I want. Roughly south, toward the Tir Taimgire shore of the Columbia. Frag knows what the Tir border forces will make of the trashed boat and the bodies, including a senior suit from the Star. But if James Telestrian’s links with the Tir military are as strong as his ties with its business community, the evidence aboard the boat should become a big enough club for James to beat son Timothy into fragging oblivion.

  Once I’m confident the Otter’s rudder is amidships and the boat’s not going to veer off, I crack open the throttle and turn north toward where the flames and black smoke are rising into the sky from the Nova Vita compound.

  Epilogue

  I’m a few minutes early for my late-aftemoon appointment, and the weather’s about as good as it ever gets in the sprawl, so I decide to walk the last few blocks. I hit the Override key on the autocab’s control pad, and the dog-brain autopilot pulls over to the side of the road, fragging near greasing a young woman pushing a baby stroller.

  As I climb out and pull my credstick from the charge slot, I look at the street sign on the corner. First and Union. The Charles Royer Building—otherwise known as Metroplex Hall—is at Fourth and Seneca, which is a five-or six-block hike, including the stiff slog up the Seneca hill. Well, like I said, it’s a good day for a walk. I swing into my stride.

  It’s freaky how everything feels back to normal—on the surface, at least. I don’t know exactly how she did it, what strings she had to pull, or what bodies she might have threatened to unearth, but Lynne Telestrian followed through on her promise to lift the Star’s out-of-sanction order against me. I can walk the streets again with at least some assurance that I won’t get geeked at any moment. The Cutters might still want my blood, but from what I’ve been able to dredge up on the street, the gang’s now history, at least as an organized force to be reckoned with. Maybe that’ll change, but the deaths and the panic and hysteria created by the killer virus seemed to rip the vital social structure of the gang apart. An organization like a major gang depends on a very precarious balance among various social dynamics, and the bug episode seems to have knocked that balance to hell and gone.

  I don’t know what effect the destruction of the NVC facility had on the Timothy versus Lynne internecine battle— whether it’s still going on or whether it gave James the leverage he needed to oust Timothy totally. The Telestrian empire’s still in existence, but they’re definitely not airing any dirty laundry in public, and I honestly can’t make myself care enough to try and dig it up. If they want to frag each other blind, let them go to it with a will, say I. Just keep me out of it.

  I also don’t know what effect, if any, the arrival of Schrage and the other deaders on the Tir shores might have had. Again, I could probably find out if I cared enough, but at the moment I simply don’t.

  Apparently, some people are concerned about Lone Star’s involvement in this whole mess, people in high places. When Peg put out some electronic feelers to discover my status with the respectable world a few days after the raid, she found that Governor Marilyn Schultz was very interested in meeting with me—at my convenience, of course—to “enlist my aid in evaluating the ongoing contract between the metroplex and Lone Star Security Services” or some such drek. The way both Argent and I scan it, some serious shakeup is in the works, and Marilyn wants to hear my fix on things.

  So that’s why I’m slogging up Seneca on this warm afternoon. I hit Third and check my watch—still ten minutes early—so I decide to go around the block and enjoy what serves for sun in Seattle. I hang a left on Third, and find the street blocked off by Lone Star barriers about halfway down the block. The barriers are lined with spectators. Curious, I drift on over.

  It’s the fragging Lon
e Star motorcycle drill team, practicing and demonstrating their precision riding for an appreciative crowd. Yeah, that makes some sense, the fair and show season’s coming up, and the drill team puts in appearances all over the sprawl and even elsewhere in the Salish-Shidhe nation. So they’re out here today on Third between Seneca and University, all shiny and proud in their blue and gold dress uniforms, riding Harley Electraglides so polished they look almost mirror-finished, demonstrating their precise maneuvers, laying those big bikes so far over that the chromed pipes are scraping the pavement.

  The Star had a team like this in Milwaukee—has one in every major city—and when I was at the Academy and afterward it was chill to ridicule the people in it. They’re all volunteers, so you’ve got to be a prima donna to sign up, but then you’ve got to be accepted by all the other prima donnas already on the team. Anything to get out of doing real police work, I guess. Or so went the joke.

  No matter how much I ridiculed them publicly, though, deep down I guess I always felt some sense of pride when I saw them show their stuff. Sappy and sentimental, maybe, but it’s true. Pride stemming from the sense that there was a kind of grand tradition behind the whole Lone Star operation. That was then. Now I know what this kind of show really is—a marketing display for a megacorporation selling its wares. Feeling empty inside, I turn my back on the spectacle, and continue to walk on up Seneca.

  The Metroplex Hall’s a striking building—thirty floors sheathed in dark green glass—but at the moment I’m in no mood to appreciate it. I climb the stairs, pass the statue of Chief Seattle, and walk into the lobby. At the reception desk, the functionaries confirm I’m authorized to be here and give me a pass keyed to my destination—including a circuit that will beep wamingly if I stray off course. A minute later I’m on the way up to the twenty-ninth floor. Other people are in the elevator with me, but for some reason they seem to stay as far away from me as they can, leaving an invisible wall of empty space around me. Fragged if I know why, but it fits with the way I’m feeling—detached, empty, not part of any of this, just going through the motions. The elevator disgorges me on the right floor, and I stroll into a plush waiting room.