The man only clutched the tool closer to his body and took a step backward.
Keel pointed down. “Bring it over,” he commanded. “You wanna get paid or not?”
“Honored Captain,” persisted Gorjut, “you mustn’t do this! We have ways and traditions that must be followed, lest you unleash a curse on us all!”
“Aw…” Keel said, frustrated. He pulled out his blaster pistol to shoot the crate, but first turned to face the workers, intending to tell them what to do after he discharged the weapon.
The native workers must have thought the blaster was for them. Their eyes wide with panic, they threw down their shovels and pickaxes and jumped out of the pit, clawing their way up the dirt ramp and sprinting away. Gorjut joined them in their retreat, leaving Ravi and Keel alone.
“That is one way to get out of paying five thousand credits,” Ravi deadpanned.
“Yeah,” Keel agreed.
He leveled his blaster at the corner of the crate and sent a bolt directly into it. Fragments of scorched wood flew everywhere, and a thin tendril of smoke rose from the hole Keel had made. “At least there’s no smell.”
“The conditions of the desert—”
“Ravi,” Keel interrupted. “I don’t care. Can you help me pry away the rest now that I’ve made the opening?”
“I cannot.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
“Won’t,” Ravi said. “I am sorry.”
“Everybody’s got a conscience all of a sudden,” Keel said.
He bent down to grip the boards. He heaved upward, heard a groan, and then felt the boards snap and come away in his hands. He broke away more boards until the opening was large enough for him to comfortably fit his arm inside, which he did, sending it in up to the elbow.
He felt his way around. “Yeah,” he said. “This is the top. Feels dry.”
If Ravi had another comment about the effects of the desert, he kept it to himself.
Keel’s arm went in deeper, almost to the shoulder. “Okay, I think I’ve got something that will work. Gonna try to pull it out.”
There was a gruesome snapping and splintering sound. A dry sort of gasp was accompanied by a sharp crunch.
Ravi looked upward. “Heaven preserve us.”
Keel withdrew his arm, revealing an additional hand—mummified.
“This gonna be enough?” he asked.
“Yes, Captain Keel,” Ravi said, exasperation plain in his voice. “A sample of his hair would have been enough. You did not need to desecrate the body.”
Keel tossed the severed and desiccated hand of Kael Maydoon out of the pit. “Well, better too much than too little, if his bio-signature is what will get us on board those ships. Who knows whether decay would make it so it doesn’t work.”
“I know,” sighed Ravi. “Every first-year biology student knows as well, and I assume several primary school students as well.”
Keel looked up at his navigator for a beat. “I liked it more when you were dead.”
“You are a mean person, Captain Keel.”
Ignoring the dirt ramp out of the pit, Keel jumped and then hauled himself up as if he were leaving a swimming pool. He dusted off his hands, then picked up Maydoon’s. “No time to rebury the rest. Let Gorjut and his boys do it if they care so much. Let’s get back to the ship.”
As the pair started back toward the Indelible VI, Ravi stopped abruptly. “Captain, the Six is detecting—”
“Stop right there!” came a voice-modulated command, spoken through a bucket.
Keel had picked up on something not being right without the last-second warning from the Six’s passive scanners. Sensed it was the better word. But it was too late now. Whoever was behind them already had the upper hand. Completely.
“Turn around,” boomed the voice. “And show me your hands!”
The voice was enhanced like a legionnaire’s, but it didn’t sound quite Legion. Keel had a feeling that even without the vocal enhancement program that was being run and transmitted through external speakers, this speaker had a deep voice of his own.
Together with Ravi, he turned slowly to face the newfound problem, holding up both his hands—and one of Kael Maydoon’s.
Six shock troopers stood before him, with their weapons split evenly between him and Ravi. They had arrived on impossibly quiet repulsor bikes. Keel hadn’t even heard a trace of them. The hazy glow of a newborn morning reflected off of their polished black armor.
“Ravi?” Keel mumbled.
“What did you say?” shouted the shock trooper with the deep voice.
“Less than two percent,” Ravi answered.
Keel cleared his throat. “Uh, I said, ‘You got me.’”
The shock troopers advanced slowly, cautiously. Keel hoped Ravi was priming the Six’s weapons, something to even the odds.
“What are you holding?” boomed the lead shock trooper.
Keel looked casually to the hand, as if he himself wasn’t sure. “Oh. A hand.”
“Where did you get it?”
“Uh… found it.”
“Here’s the grave,” said one of the other shock troopers, looking down into the open pit.
The other troopers turned to look—an incredible lapse of judgment—but the deep-voiced one kept his attention fixed on Keel.
“Thirty-five,” Ravi said quickly.
“Probably the best we’ll get,” Keel mumbled to himself. To the shock trooper he said, “Here, you can have it if you want it.”
He tossed the hand in the air, giving it a rainbow arc. In the split second that the shock trooper looked at the hand, Keel drew his blaster and leveled it at the soldier. The deep-voiced combatant was caught flat-footed. A myriad of blasters from the other shock troopers clicked and primed. Keel couldn’t kill them all. But he could probably get most of them.
A negotiation was still his best bet.
“This goes down like you want it,” Keel said evenly, “half of you die. Maybe all of you. Starting with your squad leader here.”
“Shoot him,” rumbled the deep-voiced shock trooper. “Complete the mission.”
Great. A hero.
The shock troopers raised their blaster rifles. Keel began to squeeze his trigger, mentally deciding which way to drop and whom to shoot next on the way down.
“Wait!”
One of the shock troopers ran over to stand beside the one Keel had his sights on. This trooper’s posture was non-threatening. His blaster rifle was on safe and pointed at the ground.
“Captain Ford?” asked the trooper.
Keel was taken aback by this. He squinted at the soldier, as though by doing so he might see through the man’s bucket to look upon his face. The sun had not yet fully risen, and much of what Keel could see was still in the shade of dying night.
The shock trooper held out a steadying hand to his deep-voiced companion and lay his rifle on the ground. He pressed a button on the side of his bucket, and its front flipped up and retracted inside, revealing the man’s face. That was an improvement over the Legion’s models.
A two-tone chime sounded from Keel’s comm. An alert sent by Ravi letting him know that the Six’s guns were online, ready to join in the fight.
“Ninety-two percent,” Ravi whispered.
“Hold on,” said Keel. He strained to make out the features on the shock trooper’s face. The soldier had jet-black hair, dark eyes, and a smooth scar that ran from the bridge of his nose down onto his cheek. Keel’s stomach jumped again, this time not from the meal.
“Exo?”
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Prisoners of Darkness Page 25