Exile (Tales of the Acheron Book 3)

by Rick Partlow

  “As it turns out,” Sandi said with a dry grin, “you can’t actually eat glory. I know, it was a shock to me, too.” She squinted at him. “Who are you again?”

  “Lt. Benítez,” the dark-complexioned man introduced himself. “This,” he waved at the pale, stocky fellow behind him, who didn’t seem interested in the conversation, “is Lt. Jacobson. We’re with Savage/Slaughter…contractors,” he added, a bit defensively.

  “What the hell is ‘Savage/Slaughter’ anyway?” Ash wondered, gesturing at the unit patch on the arm of the man’s fatigues. It sounded like some sort of sick joke.

  “Captain Keller Savage of Fleet Intelligence,” Benitez told him, sighing as if this was a question he’d been asked too many times, “and Captain Vontez Slaughter of Fleet Marine Force Recon. They formed the company after the war, and yes,” he admitted, hands held up, “it sounds incredibly lame, but how do you tell your bosses not to name the company after themselves?”

  “You guys are pretty big now?” Sandi asked him, arms crossed as she regarded the two of them with a professional curiosity.

  “We got a whole fuckin’ planet to ourselves,” Jacobson put in, his tone a bit surly. “I don’t know why the hell we’re working for this two-bit mining co-op. They can’t be paying our usual fee.”

  “As long as we’re getting paid,” Benitez pointed out to his fellow contractor, “what do we care? Just do your job.”

  “Oh yeah,” Jacobson scoffed. “I’m the fuckin’ ground assault team leader…what the hell am I gonna’ be doing on this op? At least you’re a shuttle pilot…you might get to take a shot at something. I’ll just be stuck running ViR simulations with my platoon on the lighter.”

  “Either of you ever wonder,” Ash asked them, “who’s pulling the strings behind this? I mean, someone is obviously bankrolling the raiders; otherwise, they’d be demanding protection payments. And these people,” he jerked a head towards where Nassir had walked off, “would probably rather pay them than us.”

  “What the hell does it matter?” Jacobson wanted to know. “We have to fight them either way.”

  “Know your enemy and know yourself,” Sandi quoted at him and Ash felt the corner of his mouth quirk, “and you need not fear the results of a hundred battles.”

  “Sun Tzu.” Benitez grinned in appreciation. “The whole art of war consists of guessing at what is on the other side of the hill.”

  “Wellington,” Sandi shot back, her own lip curling.

  “War is mainly a catalog of blunders,” Ash put in.

  “Churchill,” Benitez said with a laugh. “My favorite.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Jacobson blurted, shaking his head and shuffling towards the door, “it’s like the fucking military history class in the Academy with you jokers. I’m going to go get a drink while I have the chance.”

  Benitez looked after the man, sighing heavily.

  “God deliver me from my friends,” he murmured. “I’ll take care of my enemies myself.”

  “The Iron Duke,” Ash added. “Nice meeting you, Lieutenant.” He stuck out a hand and the man shook it.

  “And you, Commander,” Benitez returned. “Commander Hollande.” He nodded to Sandi, and then turned and was gone, and the two of them were alone in the conference room.

  “I’m worried about Korri and Kan-Ten,” Ash admitted to her. “There’s just the two of them down there, and we have no idea what they’re walking into.”

  “Let’s concentrate on our part of this,” Sandi urged him, tugging at his arm and leading him towards the corridor. “Come on, let’s go make sure the ship is ready for a fight. We aren’t going to win this by throwing quotes at them.”

  Chapter Four

  Stepping through the street-level doors of the Brigantian Planetary Constabulary in Gennich was rather like crossing the siege lines into some medieval castle, Fontenot thought. A line of solid metal bollards were set in the concrete ten meters from the entrance to prevent vehicle attacks, and the doors themselves were small and narrow and easily blocked by steel shutters that could roll out of the massive concrete block overhang of the face of the building.

  The rising sun disappeared beneath the oppression of that block of reinforced concrete, and she was inside, passing through narrow lanes into security scanners under the watchful eyes of deputies dressed in dark blue armored vests, rocket carbines slung across their chests.

  They should be wearing helmets, she thought, looking them over with a critical eye. Instead, each of them wore a blue billed cap and goggles probably linked to the sights of their weapons. Maybe they can’t afford good helmets, she allowed with a mental shrug.

  The man in front of her, a short, dumpy sort with the look of a shopkeeper, passed through the scanners unhindered, barely paying attention to the deputies as the indicator lights turned green and he stepped forward. When she took a long step into the scanning bay, the lights began to flash red and she saw eyes widen behind those tactical goggles, carbine muzzles beginning to swing around.

  “Easy,” the woman monitoring the scan results cautioned from behind the bank of displays at her raised dais. “She’s carrying prosthetics, but I don’t see any weapons.”

  The three men and a woman arrayed around the scanner banks seemed to relax, their weapons going back to rest against their slings. Their fingers still seemed a bit closer to the triggers than before, though.

  “You don’t look like a Skinganger,” the highest-ranking of the deputies opined, eyes going up and down her in a professional assessment. He was a big man, most of it muscle but some of it a bit of comfortable spread that, together with the weathered look of his face told her he was probably coming up on the century mark, which she estimated put him about sixty years up on the other deputies.

  “That’s because I’m not,” she agreed. “I got the prosthetics in an accident when I was younger…I’ve lived my whole life way out in the Periphery, never had the money or the access to Core World medical tech to get it replaced with cloned tissue.”

  That wasn’t entirely honest, but it was close enough. They also didn’t need to know how overpowered her bionics were, and wouldn’t, unless one of them was an engineer.

  “What’s your business here?” the big man wanted to know.

  “I’d like to speak to the Constable, if he has a moment. It’s about a shooting I witnessed in your residential district yesterday afternoon.”

  The deputies glanced at each other significantly, a cloud going over the face of the older one. He shifted his weight and his carbine came down a few centimeters across his chest and she could see a name tape affixed to his armored vest. It read “D. Blackard.” She wondered if there was another Blackard somewhere on the force that made him have to put the “D” there to differentiate them.

  “What was your part in all that, ma’am?” Blackard asked her.

  “I’d rather discuss that with the Constable,” she said coolly. “If he’s not too busy.”

  “Just a minute.” The older deputy stepped away, and she could hear him speaking softly over his ‘link. He listened for a moment, nodded out of habit even though whoever he was talking to couldn’t have seen him. Then he turned back to her and the three deputies around her. “Let her through. I’ll escort her up.”

  “Up” was stairs rather than an elevator, narrow stairs that wound up like switchbacks and she heard the subtle, winded sigh from Blackard as they topped the last landing and headed back to an office suite. The climb hadn’t bothered her bionics a bit, but she imagined it got a bit tiresome for someone his age.

  The Constable’s door was unlabeled, just simple, unadorned grey metal, more like a military base than a police station. Blackard murmured something into his ‘link and the lock released with an audible click; he had to yank hard on the handle and the door opened with a reluctant, weighty squeal.

  The office was Spartan, telling a tale of a man who liked to keep his life and his work separate. No family videos or stills, no awards, no memen
tos, just a framed, physical certificate of the Constabulary’s charter from the planetary governor on the wall. The desk was large and metallic and massive enough to use as cover in a gunfight, and the man behind it seemed nearly as massive. He was, she thought, older than Blackard even, maybe as old as her. He’d kept himself well, and enjoyed the best modern medicine had to offer out here in the Periphery, but you could tell by the lines in his craggy, weathered face and the set of his eyes and his mouth. Things like that couldn’t be disguised by the nanite injections that kept the rest of your body young, couldn’t be changed by anything but restruct surgery, and he didn’t seem the type to go in for that.

  His hair was long and streaked with grey, tied into a pony tail that hung down to the center of his back when he stood from his chair to meet her. He was tall, just a few centimeters short of two meters, and she thought he weighed in at over a hundred kilograms, easy, maybe a hundred and twenty, most of it in his shoulders and chest. After seeing the deputies downstairs, she would have expected him to be dressed in the same, uniform blue; instead, he wore something more akin to what she would have imagined a frontier marshal would have worn in the Old West on Earth. His jacket was leather---real leather, if she was any judge, from an animal and not grown in a cloning vat---and the civilian work shirt under it was as plain and unassuming as his office. His jeans were faded and worn, with a knife clipped into the corner of his left hip pocket.

  He looked her over for just a moment, then stuck out a meaty hand.

  “I’m Chief Constable Abel Freeman,” he told her. Her hand, as big as it was, was swallowed up in his grip, but his handshake was surprisingly gentle. “What can I do for you, Ms…?”

  “Fontenot,” she supplied. “Korri Fontenot.”

  “Have a seat, Ms. Fontenot,” he invited.

  She pulled one of the cushioned office chairs up from the opposite wall and sat across the desk from him, noticing Blackard exiting and closing the door behind them. Freeman waited until she’d sat before lowering his bulk into his own seat, a well-constructed and well-padded office chair that squeaked softly beneath him.

  “So, David tells me you were there for the dust-up in the Canyon?” he asked, tone casually conversational.

  “’Fraid you have me at a disadvantage,” Fontenot replied, hands folded in her lap. “David?” She shook her head. “The Canyon?”

  “Sorry.” He grinned self-deprecatingly. “David is Deputy Constable Blackard, the fella’ that walked you in here. And ‘the Canyon’ is what we call that area of town where we had third-hand reports of a shooting.”

  “Third-hand?” She cocked an eyebrow. “Don’t you have surveillance drones or at least security cameras?”

  “You’d think,” he agreed, spreading his hands over the surface of the desk like he was fighting an impulse to make fists with them. “But every security camera we put in the Canyon or the Tahni districts seems to get vandalized before the day’s out, and every time we put drones up, they just stop reporting for some reason. So, you can understand how interested I am in hearing what you have to say about this little skirmish.” He smiled thinly. “I don’t suppose your ‘link might have recorded the incident?”

  She raised her palms apologetically.

  “I’m afraid it was inside a pocket, so there’s no video, and the audio would mostly be worthless.”

  “Of course.” The expression on his face made it obvious how much he believed that. “Anyway, go on.”

  She gave the man a highly-edited version of the story, leaving out the part where she’d shot two people and allowing him to think that it had merely been the Tahni fighting the humans. By the end, he was nodding with what seemed to her like a depressed acceptance of a familiar story.

  “Your Tahni friend is lucky he didn’t wind up dead,” Freeman commented. “Why didn’t he come in with you?”

  “Well, Constable, after what happened,” she pointed out, “he wasn’t sure what sort of reception he’d get here, and honestly. neither was I. There’s an awful lot of anti-Tahni sentiment in this city. Did the war hit you guys harder here than I’d heard?” She waved around them at the Constabulary building. “I mean, this place has got to be post-war and it looks like it was built to hold off another invasion.” She snorted. “Unless you just wanted to make it such a pain in the ass to get to see you that no one would ever bother to come report a crime.”

  Freeman chuckled with appreciation.

  “Well, there was a bit of paranoia after the military took the place back from the Tahni,” he admitted. “But in the last couple years, things had been going pretty well. I don’t think you were ever gonna’ see humans and Tahni mixing it up at the Friday-night socials, but they ran businesses together, and things were pretty peaceful.”

  “So, what happened?” she prompted.

  “Damned if I can tell you the why,” he admitted, “but the what is easy enough. A few months ago, there was a series of attacks on the Tahni districts. Firebombs mostly, which was pretty damned effective since they build out of local wood a lot. Every time, before the attack, the security cameras on that street would get sabotaged, so I couldn’t prove anything; but I heard rumors that it was off-worlders, men and women who came in at the port and left right after, which didn’t make a damn bit of sense.” The Constable shook his head. “The kicker, the thing that really tipped the situation over the edge, was when they attacked the female compound.”

  He pushed up from his seat and paced over to the framed certificate, looking at it as if it held the answers. “You know much about the Tahni, Ms. Fontenot?”

  “A little,” she allowed. “What I’ve learned from my friend.”

  “You know their males live separately from the females and pre-adolescent children?”

  “I’d heard that,” she said. “But I’ve never been around the females.”

  “From what I’ve heard, the males get out of control when they’re around females of breeding age; like being in heat except times a hundred. They only get together for prearranged mating, to produce children, and the rest of the time the males live in neighborhoods, running their shops and doing their jobs, while the females share a compound outside the town and raise the children. The males pay for part of their keep, and the females make their own crafts and sell them.”

  He put his hands on his hips. “Well, one night a couple months ago, someone set off an improvised car bomb just outside the walls of the compound and killed eight of the women, and a couple children, too. That about drove the males bugnuts, as you can imagine, and they began to strike back. Like most people in pain, Tahni or human, they struck back at those closest and least deserving first, and burned out the human-owned businesses in their neighborhood.”

  He sniffed. “We were damned lucky they didn’t kill anyone. And it’s only gotten worse since then. The men and women who owned the shops have gathered paid thugs to go after any Tahni they catch alone, and the Tahni…” He tossed a hand in frustration. “They’ve brought their own people in from off-planet as well, and one of them is organizing their own little hit squads. It’s a fucking nightmare. You can see it if you walk these streets; everyone is either angry or frightened.”

  Fontenot frowned, eyes narrowing.

  “Why are you telling me all this?” she asked. “In my experience, cops aren’t generally this forthcoming.”

  “You’re a concerned citizen like I’m a fucking school teacher,” Freeman said drily, eyeing her sidelong. “I know a hired gun when I see one, Ms. Fontenot. I just want to know which side hired you.”

  Fontenot smiled. The Constable wasn’t some dumb, backcountry hick, after all. She could appreciate that.

  I’ll be straight with him, she decided.

  “I can’t divulge that information. But I can tell you this: you’re right about the source of this being external.” She leaned back in the chair, hands propped under her chin. “Have you ever heard of La Sombra?”

  ***

  Kan-Ten chewed the so
ur-sweet root automatically, hands and head going through motions he’d learned as a child, the smoke of the incense fire filling his nostrils. He tried to remember the last time he’d partaken of the sacrament, the last time he’d shared the Life Root with his brothers, and found he couldn’t. It must have been on Andalusia, sometime before the humans had launched their bid to retake the colony, but he couldn’t picture the ceremony, couldn’t remember the day.

  The shadowy innards of the old shop floor seemed a strange place for it, its flat drabness a far cry from the recesses and raised platforms of the worship chambers of home. And yet, perhaps it was appropriate, clinging to the edges of a human world, clinging to life as a people, clinging to a dying faith, that the chamber should be so rough and shapeless.

  I should be thinking of the Emperor, he mused. I should be deep in reverent contemplation of his perfection, in gratitude for the gifts of life and the food that provides it.

  Instead, all he could think of was that he’d grown to prefer the way the Acheron’s food processors prepared the root to the traditional Tahni dishes, and how much he missed salt. Salt was an incredible seasoning and he was shocked it hadn’t spread to the homeworld. Maybe, he thought, there was a future in becoming a salt merchant to Tahn-Skyyiah…

  “You seem deep in contemplation,” Vala-Kel said, and he suddenly realized that his old friend was standing beside him and that the worship fire in the center of the chamber had been extinguished. “Surely there is much to consider, after all this time.”

  Kan-Ten dropped what was left of the Root of Life back into the hollow of the carved stone tray, then bent to lift the thing over to where other males were stacking theirs in a corner. The uneaten food would be collected by the adolescent males and taken to the compound of the females, as per tradition.