by Rick Partlow
“What the hell does he think we can do about it?” Sanders wondered, throwing up his hands. “There’s only the seven of us…eight if you count Divya.”
“Nine,” Vilberg said softly, hands clasped together in front of him, frowning with decision. “If you’ll have me.” He shook his head. “I don’t think I can work for Calderon anymore.”
“Even so,” Sanders pressed on, “seven, eight, nine, a dozen…what does he think we can do?”
And then I knew. It was obvious.
“He wants us to do the one thing he can’t do,” I answered the question for him as it was answered for me by my intuition. Every eye went to me, and I noticed that Divya’s had a knowing twinkle.
“He wants us to go talk to the Sung Brothers.”
***
“This is the craziest fucking thing we’ve ever done,” Bobbi said, swinging a leg over the back of the grounded mule then strapping herself into the saddle. “And that’s a long and colorful history to choose from, Boss.”
“It’s not that crazy,” I objected half-heartedly, mounting my own ride, then touching the control to bring the vehicle to its feet.
She didn’t say a word, just looked pointedly around at the clearing that connected the dirt road to the trailhead. It was all obscenely brightly lit in the afternoon glare from the system’s primary, the snow nearly melted off the persistent, hardy grass beneath it. Koji’s driver still stood next to the cargo truck he’d used to deliver the mules, looking at us with a mixture of amusement and pity on his scarred, weathered face. Divya watched from the cab, thoughts spinning behind her calculating eyes as usual, while Kane waited for her back at the ship.
Divya had her own part to play: Kane was going to take her out to the nearest system with a jumpgate and use the Instell ComSat there to report Calderon’s activities to the military, and to Cowboy. I figured he would get things done quicker on that front, and maybe we could get the Savage/Slaughter contractors out of our hair without having to kill any more of them.
I wasn’t happy about getting rid of our air cover and losing our only connection to the Skingangers for however many hours in Transition Space it would take them to get there and back, and I also wasn’t entirely comfortable having to ask for help. Generally, we got things done ourselves. But Divya had made a good argument that she was operating on partial, discretionary instructions and needed to get more detailed guidance. She’d seemed almost human about it, which had me worried.
Then there were the seven of us. We were mounted on the half-dozen cybernetic pack-mules that Koji had stuck away somewhere in his warehouse. God knows where he’d got them or what he’d been planning to do with them, but the four-legged all-terrain cargo carriers were the perfect transportation to get us up the mountain to the Sung Brothers’ fortified mansion without being intercepted along the way.
And then they were going to hide out and let me go in alone to try to talk to the Sung Brothers and convince them that their customers, the Predecessor Cultists, were ripping them off and were about to start a full-scale war right here on their planet, in their city. And they were going to listen to me after I’d been seen killing the mercenaries they’d hired and palling around with the Skingangers who they were fighting tooth and nail for control of the city.
“Yeah, you’re right,” I conceded. “This is a pretty sketchy plan.”
Sanders had climbed on behind Bobbi on her mule and she hit the control to raise the machine up into its walking position. The motion sent both of them swaying backwards against their restraints straps, like old-fashioned rodeo bull-riders.
“We’ve been in worse situations,” Sanders commented. He shrugged. “Not on purpose, though.”
“You sure you want to join up with this outfit, Vilberg?” Waugh turned in her seat to ask him. He was back in his Savage/Slaughter armor, but we’d used the portable repair shop on the Nomad to change the color from black to our team camo pattern to avoid shooting him by accident. He was also armed now, which still made me nervous; but if I was going to trust him to come along, it didn’t make any sense not to use him. At least he’d used a Gauss rifle before, even if it hadn’t been his issue weapon either with Fleet Search and Rescue or the contractors.
“Are you kidding?” The former mercenary asked, grabbing his helmet from where it was slung on the cargo netting hanging off the saddle. “I’ve been with Savage/Slaughter for months now and we never do anything this cool.” He settled the helmet on its yoke and sealed it.
“I take it all back,” Bobbi commented dryly, wrestling her own headgear into place. “He’ll fit in fine.”
I took a deep breath of the mountain air; it smelled sweet, like the Rockies back on Earth. Then I sealed my helmet and snapped the latches tight.
“Comms check,” I said into my audio pickup. One of the advantages of being this far outside the city was that we were away from the EM jamming fields and could actually talk to each other like it was the 23rd Century and not the 17th. “Sound off.”
Everyone responded with their name and I nodded inside my helmet, satisfied. I switched to Kane’s ‘link address.
“Get back quick,” I told him. “If we need the ship, we’re going to need it bad.”
“Thirty-five hours’ turnaround.” It wasn’t actually his voice I was hearing; he had an implant ‘link, like me. His subvocalizations sounded more natural than his physical speech somehow, less strained. “Plus whatever time to negotiate with the ComSat.”
I knew that should be right on time, if we stuck to our schedule and everything went according to plan. Luckily, I had my helmet sealed so no one else could hear my insane laugh at the idea of everything going according to plan.
“Let’s move out. Victor and Kurt, you take the rear. Twenty-meter interval.”
I’d never actually ridden one of these things before and I was having a hard time getting comfortable with it, particularly uphill on the narrow game trail squeezed between rows of evergreens. It was a strange combination of riding a horse and operating a motorcycle and it shifted from side to side with every step, swinging the sides of my legs precariously close to the trunks of the trees lining the path.
The shadowed wood swallowed us up, throwing everything into a twilight gloom, and the dusting of swiftly-melting snow became thicker and deeper the higher we travelled. The slope of the trail wasn’t impossibly steep, but walking it on foot would have at least required snow shoes and taken days. The mules just ate up meter after meter with their long, swaying strides, their wide, spiked footpads sinking through the snow and digging into the ground beneath.
My helmet sensors quickly learned the sounds of the mule footsteps and began to filter them out, concentrating on possible threats. As my mount climbed upward into a small clearing about a kilometer up the trail, I heard a crashing in the brush off to my right and spun around just in time to see the ass-end of a black bear retreating deeper into the trees.
“Why the hell did they introduce bears here?” Bobbi wondered.
“The planet,” I reminded her, “was originally settled by Russians.”
“So?”
I shook my head at her ignorance of history. She wasn’t born on Earth, though, and lacked any extant relatives who’d been alive when Russia had actually been a thing.
“We have saber-tooth tigers on our planet,” Victor commented with his usual “what-kind-of-a-wimp-are-you” tone.
“We have dangerous animals on Hermes, too,” Bobbi returned in a biting tone, “but the damned things evolved there, we didn’t clone them in a tube and set them loose on purpose.”
“Let’s cut down on the chatter,” I said, trying to keep the grin out of my tone. “We’re only five or six kilometers out and I don’t know how sensitive their security systems are.”
The next hour passed in silence except for the chuff of the mules’ footpads into the snow and the soft crunch as they pulled out, and sometimes the skitter of a marten or a squirrel or the flutter of wings. The trees g
rew thicker and the trail grew steeper and narrower, switching back around hills and descending into gullies, but the mules stayed as steady as their namesakes, disregarding the precarious path just as they disregarded the chill wind that whipped at us and the occasional flurry of snow.
I was letting the mule’s obstacle navigation programming do most of the driving while I watched the dead reckoning map projected in my helmet HUD, with the location of the Sungs’ compound a green square provided for us by Koji, along with his best guess of where their security perimeter began. It was a hard, red line on the map, but my trust of its accuracy was a bit fuzzier and less well defined and I was mentally adding a few hundred meters to it. It didn’t seem like it was that far away, but the route we were taking wasn’t at all straightforward; not so much “as the crow flies” but more “as the mule walks through deep snow.” The primary was beginning to sink low in the sky by the time we reached the fork in the path and I raised a fist to call our column to a halt.
The game trail had levelled out a kilometer or so back, as we travelled onto a plateau, and widened out slightly where it split into two tracks, one going straight and the other heading off to the left. The snow was thinner up here as well, barely four or five centimeters deep and melted off the trees. Otherwise, this stretch of ground didn’t look at all different from the last few kilometers. There was nothing visible but the unending forest that blocked out the sky with a standing wave of shadowed green.
Bobbi brought her and Sanders’ mount up next to mine and I leaned over to touch helmets with her, avoiding using any EM signals this close to the compound.
“Give me an hour to get there,” I said. “And another hour to get in to talk to them. After that, use your best judgement.”
“Be careful, Boss,” she said. This close, I could just see her eyes through the visor, and they looked worried. “Don’t make me have to explain to Sophia why I let you get killed.”
I didn’t respond to that, just unsnapped my Gauss rifle from its sling and handed it to her, then stripped off my tactical vest with its spare magazines and passed it to Sanders. I kept my pistol; they’d be suspicious if I came all this way unarmed. Then I sat there and watched as Bobbi led the others down the side trail, waving back to Victor and Kurt bringing up the rear.
I stayed in place until they’d disappeared into the gloom of the forest and I couldn’t make out the crash of their mules’ footpads. Then I dragged the throttle bar on the mule’s control display upward and it surged forward again at a jarring trot. I passed right through the area where I estimated that the Sung Brothers would have their security sensors, kept going at a steady, lumbering pace even when the trail intersected the main road. The road had been cleared by locally-fabricated tractors and graded not that long ago; it was broad and fairly smooth, and bordered by a cleared area of land a few meters deep on either side.
I could see the glow of the compound’s lights in the darkening twilight, and I still pressed on, startling a doe feeding at the edge of the forest and sending it bounding away. It wasn’t until the massive, stone walls of the building itself loomed above the surrounding trees that I heard the vehicle approaching. It roared up the road toward me on thick, knobbed tires, its alcohol-fueled engine rumbling and coughing. It had started out life as a heavy cargo hauler, but armor had been fitted around it like a carapace, and gun turrets peaked out from behind thick, metal shielding at the front and back.
I killed the power to the mule and climbed down, unfastening my helmet and tucking it in the cargo netting that hung alongside the saddle. Then I put up my hands and waited until the armored truck had ground to a halt only meters away, its headlights flaring painfully into my eyes. I squeezed them to slits and tried not to look away, glancing side to side so I could catch the movement when a half a dozen troopers piled out of the back and formed a semicircle around me.
They weren’t soldiers, not even contractors; they were the hired guns of a crime syndicate and you could see it in their mismatched gear and their lack of discipline. They were careful not to get in the way of each other’s field of fire, though, I’ll give them that.
“Get on your knees!” One of them was yelling at me, a younger man with a sharply pointed beard colored various shades of purple. He jerked the muzzle of his rocket carbine downward with every word, as if to illustrate where I should go. “Get on your knees right now!”
“Don’t fucking move!” The tall woman in the armored vest standing next to Purple Beard ordered. “If you move, I’ll blow your fucking head off!”
“You two need to make up your minds,” I said casually. “Do you want me to get on my knees or do you not want me to move?”
“Both of you shut the hell up,” an older, commanding voice cut through their blathering.
The man who stepped forward out of the cab of the vehicle wasn’t much to look at, short and wiry with close-cropped, curly hair. But he had an air of competence to him that the others didn’t, and he was obviously their leader. He stopped about two meters in front of me and looked me over carefully, holding a pulse carbine across his chest at low port. He didn’t point his weapon my way, but he didn’t take his hand off of it, either.
“Who are you and what do you want?” He asked in his no-bullshit tone, seeming more curious than afraid or angry.
“My name’s Randall Munroe. I work as a trouble-shooter for Andre Damiani, Director of the Executive Board of the Corporate Council.” I saw the recognition in his eye, saw the curiosity intensifying. “I’ve been sent to Peboan because Monsieur Damiani is deeply interested in buying something your employers are trying to sell.” I shrugged expressively. “They’ve proven difficult to reach, lately, so I thought a more direct approach might work.”
He regarded me for a moment, wheels turning behind his eyes as he considered whether or not he could believe me. Then he nodded slightly, almost to himself.
“Lyria,” he said to the high-strung female who’d commanded me not to move. “Take his gun, and that combat knife.”
I felt her hands stripping the weapons away from me, but I kept my eyes on the leader and my hands in the air.
“All right, Mr. Munroe,” he said once I was disarmed, “you can put your hands down now. My name’s Caesar. If you would board the vehicle,” he waved at the open passenger’s side door, “I’ll take you up to the house and ask the Sung Brothers if they’d like to speak with you.”
I felt a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding slowly hiss out of me. At least they hadn’t just shot me outright, which had seemed like a distinct possibility.
Don’t get too confident, I reminded myself, climbing up the metal steps into the cab. The seat was cushioned with what looked like real leather, though the rest of the interior was utilitarian plastic and metal. The driver stared at me with suspicion, and I could see the gleam of the instrument panel reflecting off his bald head.
The day’s not over yet.
Chapter Ten
The Sung Brothers’ mansion was a combination of superior architectural taste and incipient paranoia. The house itself reminded me of one of Mother’s old country homes that she rarely visited, constructed from stone and local wood, undoubtedly at great expense. The stone was slate-grey under a roof of darker shingles and the building itself must have covered a quarter of a hectare, sprawling in single-story wings before it rose to the summit of the main building, towering over the surrounding trees.
The paranoia came from the wall. It wasn’t just a fence, it was a full-scale palisade three meters tall, built from stone reinforced by steel and capped at each corner by guard towers with heavy Gatling lasers. It probably took as long to build as the house itself and I wondered which had cost more. You’d think they expected a rampaging horde to come storming out of the forest…or maybe a flight of assault shuttles to come in on a strafing run.
Darkness was creeping across the sky from horizon to horizon and the lights on the wall were winking on in response even as the armored truck
passed through the gate. The guards in the gate house waved at the driver and he nodded in return. I didn’t get the sense that any of them were ex-military, at least not recently; they all had the ragged-edge look of outlaws, men and women who weren’t afraid to use a gun and weren’t particular who they used it for.
Who am I to talk, though?
I’d told myself for the last three years that I was only going along with being Andre Damiani’s trigger-man until I could find a way to fight back, get out from under all this. But it didn’t feel as if I were any closer to that now than I had been that first day Cowboy had shown up on Demeter to collect my end of the bargain that had kept me out of my mother’s suffocating grasp.
I shook those thoughts away, forcing myself to concentrate on the here-and-now. The armored truck pulled up in front of a paved walkway leading up to the huge, wooden double doors at the front of the mansion and Caesar pushed out of the passenger’s side, waving for me to follow. There was a guard at the front, a tall, slender woman who probably came from a lower-gravity world. She pulled one of the doors open with an old-fashioned brass knob and held it while Caesar and I passed through, followed by two more of his people.
The entrance hall was decorated with tasteful, locally-made artwork, original stuff not just copies of the classic Earth paintings and sculptures. It was a bit too busy for my tastes and I knew Mother would have turned up her nose at it in disgust, but it was evidence for a real effort at showing an interest in art rather than just showing other people you could afford art.
Caesar waved me over to a padded chair in the sitting room just through the entrance hall, and gestured for me to wait.
“Watch him,” he told Purple Beard and the high-strung woman, then strode off purposefully, jogging up the polished wooden staircase that curved around the outer wall of the sitting room.
And watch me they did, like I was some eldritch creature who would disappear between eyeblinks, but I did my best to ignore them. These people, I decided with a hint of disdain that reminded me of Gramps, were amateurs. I still had three weapons left on me, concealed in my armor, and they hadn’t yet found one of them. They had all these weapons, all these goons, but not a single MRI scanner? We had better security at the Amity Police Station back on Demeter.