by Rick Partlow
She yanked the door open, its hinges squeaking gently, and I lunged forward and stuck my weapon through the hatch, its sights synched with my HUD. There was a ladder running from the edge of the hatchway down into a small, dark room cluttered with plastic totes and bundles of roofing materials, probably left over from the construction and used for repairs. The door to the room was shut and nothing stirred. I signaled to Bobbi that I was heading down, and I felt her move up behind me, ready to cover my descent.
I let my rifle retract against my chest and pulled my pistol out of its holster, keeping it in one hand while the other grasped the ladder. It was metal and seemed fairly solid, more solid than most of the slapdash construction I’d seen in this city so far; it didn’t waver a centimeter as I clambered down it, then stepped carefully and silently off the final rung and onto the bare buildfoam of the floor. The room was small enough that I stayed with my sidearm, sliding next to the door and waiting there for Bobbi to pull the hatch shut behind her.
I felt myself breathing hard, felt my heart pounding so hard that it almost hurt, and I realized I was experiencing a residual spike of adrenalin left over from the parachute jump that was just now hitting me. I worked on controlling my respiration, letting everything slow back down in the few seconds it took Bobbi to get down the ladder and get into position. None of it seemed to be affecting her at all, but nothing ever did.
I thought for a second about what she’d said back in the bar on Hermes, about how she didn’t have any use for normal people anymore, and wondered if that was the price she’d had to pay for being as good at this kind of thing as she was. I wondered if I’d have to pay it, too, eventually.
Bobbi gave me a slap on the shoulder to indicate she was ready and I shook off my reverie and slid the door open slowly and quietly, just a slight scraping of plastic on buildfoam. Light trickled through from the widening opening and I saw a stairway heading downward, wood and metal secured into buildfoam with primitive metal bolts. I guess getting a working molecular bonder out here wouldn’t have been as profitable as smuggling heavy weapons.
The steps creaked under my weight and I cursed in the privacy of my helmet, hoping no one was close enough to hear the tell-tale sounds. The light that had travelled up the staircase came from the next floor down, and as I crept towards it, I began to make out more details. The stairs ended after a single flight; they weren’t the main stairwell for the building, just a passage to the storage attic. The next floor was mostly workspaces, some individual offices isolated behind soundproof walls, others clustered around holotanks or quantum computer banks, with neural interface halos sitting unused in charging cradles, waiting for the new day. The lights were turned low but not out, probably for cleaning crews, but the floor was currently empty.
This was where Koji ran the actual business part of his business, and I reflected with a wry grin that the Patrol would have loved to have gotten their hands on those computers. I didn’t honestly give a shit, myself. If he didn’t sell stolen weapons, someone else would. It was his connections to my uncle that were causing me heartburn.
I could see the primary stairwell at the other end of the rows of workspaces, lit up with an even brighter glow of lights from the next floor down. I remembered the layout that Mark had shown us, and the next floor was only a partial platform hanging above the main storage area of the warehouse, with a break room/kitchen and a large apartment where Koji stayed when he was too busy with work to go to the house he kept outside of town. Once we hit those stairs, we’d likely encounter our first resistance and everything would speed up precipitously.
As we moved out into the more open space between workstations, I holstered my pistol and started transitioning back my rifle. And of course, that was when the door to the bathroom in the corner opened and a broad-shouldered woman stepped out, re-fastening her body armor after having used the facilities, her pulse carbine slung causally over her shoulder. Her eyes flickered towards us, glinting in the light coming up from the staircase, and there was just the space of an instant, the gap between breaths, when she wasn’t sure what she was seeing and I thought either Bobbi or I might bring our rifles to bear and get a shot off before she sounded an alert.
I had just started moving the muzzle around when she shouted though, something barely coherent and probably incomprehensible but loud enough to carry. Bobbi and I fired at the same time and the twin slugs sliced through her chest as if the body armor wasn’t even there. We’d loaded for anti-personnel work, with projectiles of polycarbonate wrapped in tungsten wire, and the frangible rounds fragmented inside her torso and didn’t exit, trapped by the ballistic plates on the back of her armored vest.
She collapsed with a wet, gagging cough, blood gushing from her mouth as her insides were turned into a mush, but I was barely paying attention to her. Instead, I was sprinting for the stairs with Bobbi close behind. They’d be coming now, maybe not knowing what they were facing or who was up here, but someone would come up and we couldn’t afford to get bottlenecked on that staircase.
“Dakota!” I heard the voice echoing up from below before I’d made it to the head of the stairs. “Are you all right up there?”
Maybe I thought I was indestructible after surviving the parachute jump, I don’t know, but I took a running leap over the railing and dropped into the stairwell from the side. There was this feeling you don’t understand until you’ve experienced it, a realization that you’re falling too far and that the landing is going to hurt, and then my boots hit the buildfoam floor three meters down and I rolled to take the impact on my hip and my side and yes, it hurt. I compartmentalized the pain and concentrated on the three armored security guards who’d been lounging in the break room.
The three of them were a freeze-frame image arrayed around me: the one who’d yelled for Dakota, standing there at the foot of the landing, one foot on a step upwards, the barest sketch of a meaty, thick-featured face and long, straight hair making it through my senses. Then there was the one sprawled on a ratty couch beside a cooler, sipping something out of a squeeze-bulb designed for ship-board use, a dull, disinterested look on her blocky features; the only remarkable thing that caught my eye about her was her shock of snow-white hair running from the bangs that hung in front of her eyes all the way back to her neck. The third one, standing straight-backed next to a kitchen counter, was a Tahni, which would have shocked me at one point, but not so much anymore. They’d begun integrating into the human worlds since the war, and the Pirate Worlds had been more accepting than most, since they hadn’t had to fight against them.
I shot the Tahni first, just because my rifle happened to be pointed his way. He’d been eating some sort of wrap, probably stuffed with the protein-rich plant his people favored and brought with them wherever they went, and the bits of it flew away as he pitched backwards. There was yelling from somewhere behind and below me, but I couldn’t afford to pay attention to it yet.
The one on the couch had been resting with his carbine cradled across his chest and he managed to squeeze the trigger before I rolled over onto a knee and brought my rifle to bear on him. The burst came nowhere near me, and my own shot went straight through his head, but the crackling, scintillating flash of ionized air was like a signal flare that no one below us would be able to miss.
The man at the stairs was clawing at his waist for a holstered handgun, mouth screwed up in the middle of a warning yell, when Bobbi shot him in the back. His hands went limp and he fell to his knees, his face going white just before he collapsed to the floor, gasping one last time. She bounded down the stairs a moment later, her Gauss rifle sweeping back and forth as she sought out any other threats.
I ran to the railing that overlooked the main floor of the warehouse, resting the fore-stock of my rifle on it and training it downward, looking for targets. What I saw, at the center of rows of hard-plastic ordnance crates, was Victor, Kurt, Sanders and Vilberg, all four of them stripped down to their undershirts and shorts and strapped int
o heavy, padded chairs at the wrists, ankles, waist and forehead. Their shirts were soaked with sweat and their eyes were unfocused. Vilberg’s mouth was hanging open, his chin wet with spittle, and Sanders seemed to be muttering something so softly as to be unintelligible.
All four had been drugged. And all four had guns pointed at their heads, some with the muzzles touching their temple, by a half dozen scared and desperate armored security guards. Koji stood at the rear of them, half-concealed behind a stack of crates, a pulse pistol held awkwardly in his left hand, like he wasn’t used to having to hold one.
“You two need to leave, now,” the arms dealer said, in a voice that was trying to be firm and commanding but failing miserably. Apparently, he hadn’t had time to set up his tricks and theatrics. He probably felt horribly exposed. “If you don’t get out of here, I’ll have them killed.”
I didn’t move more than a few centimeters, but I shifted the muzzle of my rifle just slightly to train it on him.
“You know me, Koji,” I said, using my helmet speakers to amplify the words. “You know we’re not leaving without our people.” Before he could protest, I went on. “It doesn’t have to go down this way. All we want, all we ever wanted, was to know who has the artifact. Tell us that and we’ll go and you’ll never see us again.”
“I know you don’t work for Monsieur Damiani anymore!” He insisted with the whining, outraged tone of a child threatening to tattle to the teacher. “We received a message on the relay ship two days ago! I’m supposed to kill you when I see you!”
“Then why’d you take my men in for interrogation?” I asked him, sensing the real purpose behind his actions. “You’re looking for an edge, because you know what’s coming. My Uncle Andre has his own problems. The sharks are circling back in the core systems, Koji, and however things shake out, you’re going to be on your own here for quite some time. Andre can’t do anything to help you…but I can.”
“What?” He demanded, but with a hint of avarice behind his indignation. “What can you do for me?”
“Thanks to my mother,” I told him, “I have the passcodes for several anonymous accounts she set up for emergencies and black ops. You give me the information I need, and I’ll open them for you.” Some of them, anyway. “You’ll have enough capital to do whatever you want here, no matter what happens with Andre Damiani.”
He hesitated long enough that I thought for a second we were still going to have to shoot our way out of this, but finally he gave into the desire to get out of the situation alive.
“I don’t know anything for sure,” he said. “But when the Cult pulled out of the city, they left the truck with their artifact sitting at the cargo dock at the Skingangers’ compound. Some of my informants saw it and came to report it to me, but by the time I sent people to retrieve it, it was gone. And no one here has it, I’m dead certain sure of it.”
Shit. We were back to square one. I felt like shooting him on general principles, but he wasn’t done.
“There was only one ship left intact after you and the Cultists left, though,” he went on. “They arrived in orbit just hours afterward and they were landing shuttles at the spaceport. I know they commandeered some vehicles to load up their gear and take it back with them.”
All the pieces came together in my head before he even finished. I almost didn’t hear him.
“It was those mercenaries that were working for the Sung Brothers. If anyone has the artifact, it’s their commanding officer, Alberto Calderon.”
Chapter Nine
I sat alone in the Johnny City Bistro, eating pommes frites and nursing a glass of sparkling water and watching a half dozen Tahni watch me back. They sat in their own section of the place, whether by their choice or that of the restaurant’s human owners, I didn’t know, and ate their own food and resented the hell out of us. This had been their world, their colony back before the war. They’d called it Jahn-Skyyiah, which the Commonwealth military troops occupying it these last ten years had shortened to “Johnny,” and their capital had become “Johnny City.”
Most of Johnny City had to be rebuilt anyway, after the pounding it had taken during the invasion. I hadn’t been along for that ride, but Bobbi had and she’d told me it had been a tough slog. I guess the locals hadn’t forgotten it, either. From what the Marines guarding the spaceport had told us, they had to step in and put down rioting about twice a year, and there were still parts of the Tahni neighborhoods where the planetary constabulary wouldn’t venture without military escort.
It felt strange for me, seeing so many of them in one place. They were all males, of course; Tahni males and females didn’t socialize together except when they were contracted to mate. Their clothing seemed to be made of strips of differently colored cloth wound together in ways that defied gravity; some of them wore it like a long skirt, while others had each leg individually wound in breeches ending in thick-soled sandals. The adult males generally shaved their heads except for a Mohawk-style strip along the center that grew down into a queue hanging down to the middle of their back. Warriors and those who had been warriors grew it even longer than that and wrapped it around their necks, but I didn’t see any of those in the bistro today.
I squinted at the primary star riding low in the afternoon sky and glaring harshly at me through the best fight the diner’s tinted front windows could throw at it. It was getting late and I was getting full: this was my second order of fries. I was beginning to think he wouldn’t show up, but then the door opened with a chime that let the servers know a new customer was entering.
He was a silhouette, tall and broad-shouldered and featureless, stained as dark as his soul. I felt the weight of my gun under my jacket and kept my hand carefully away from it. He wouldn’t come here alone. A quick test of my ‘link confirmed that he’d laid down a full-spectrum jamming field over us so I couldn’t call for help. He always was thorough like that. His footsteps fell heavily on the tile floor, then scraped to a parade-ground halt next to my table. He waited there for a second as if he expected me to do something; when I didn’t, he pulled the chair out opposite mine and sat down across from me.
“Did you really think West would get your message?” Calderon asked me, lip twisted in a sneer. “Did you think he’d meet you here and give you a hug and make everything all right?”
He was dressed in civilian clothes, dark and stylish and perfectly tailored, but I was fairly certain that the leather duster he wore was armored and it probably concealed a pulse carbine or something equally lethal in a chest harness. He wouldn’t come in here to confront me unarmed.
“Actually, Alberto,” I said, trying to sound casual, “I was kind of hoping you’d come.” I drained the last of my sparkling water and hid a grin at the way he scowled when I used his first name; he could never forget that he’d been an officer and I’d been an NCO.
“You’ve always been such a cocky little shit,” he growled. “I hope you’re not counting on getting out of here on your ship. The port’s locked down, asshole. There are two CSF assault shuttles patrolling over it, and I brought a whole platoon with me.”
I could see them through the restaurant windows, moving into position under the cover of alleyways and parked cargo trucks. Their armor was matte black, the visors of their helmets dark and mirrored. I’d seen them before, on Thunderhead and a few times since. Marine or Fleet Security vets, most of them, who couldn’t find a better way to make a living after the war. Men and women not so different from me and mine, but they’d had a choice and I hadn’t.
“Does Cowboy know?” I asked him, playing for time.
“Does he know what?” Calderon snapped. “He knows you’ve turned traitor, he doesn’t want to know anything else. He doesn’t monitor your dead-drop accounts anymore, I do. He doesn’t have time to deal with scum like you right now, and neither does Monsieur Damiani.”
“Does Cowboy know,” I persisted, “that you stole the Predecessor corpse off Peboan?” I could tell I’d scored on that
one by the flash of alarm in his eyes. His mouth worked but it took him a moment to get the words out.
“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” he insisted, trying to cover his guilt with anger and bravado. With a sweeping motion, he brushed aside his duster and pulled out the pulse carbine slung beneath it, levelling it across the table at me. There were several gasps from the human customers, and I saw more than one of the Tahni begin heading for the door. As they left, the CSF mercenaries began moving in, converging on the entrance from where they’d been covering it.
“Where are your people at?” Calderon demanded, coming to his feet. “We’ll find them eventually, but if you cooperate now, things will be less painful for everyone.”
“They’re around,” I allowed, not moving, keeping my hands on the table. “I sent them to go look at a heavy machinery rental.” Now I couldn’t help it; I smiled. “You see, Alberto, this place was a Tahni military outpost for a hell of a long time, and there were just so many hidden weapons stockpiles here. The Marines and the Fleet cleaned up as much of that shit as they could, but there’s no way they could find all of them…”
His eyes went wide and I began to see comprehension in them. His left hand went instinctively to the ear bud from his ‘link.
“Lt. Brandt!” He snapped. “Lt. Brandt, do you hear me?”
“Wide-spectrum jamming works both ways,” I reminded him cruelly. I wasn’t worried he’d shoot me out of hand; that’s why I’d mentioned the artifact. He wouldn’t want to take the chance I’d tell Cowboy.
The windows of the diner shook and the tables rattled, and the few people who hadn’t fled already poured out the front door as something large and vaguely humanoid roared out of the sky on jets of superheated steam. Calderon couldn’t help himself; he looked away from me, eyes drawn to the matte-grey armored bulk of the incoming battlesuit. I didn’t.