Cauldron of Ghosts

by David Weber

  The second male robber screeched also; and, also, fell to the street surface. But unlike the first one she’d shot, this robber held on to his pistol. Thandi took care of that problem with a shot that disarmed him. It might be better to say, dis-handed him. The habit of double-tapping when she fired was too deeply ingrained to control in combat conditions. And what two pulser darts fired from a military-grade handgun will do to a human hand, with its nineteen bones and multitude of tendons, nerves and blood vessels, doesn’t bear thinking about.

  The female robber just stared at her, mouth agape. She remained standing, too. Thandi thought she didn’t realize what had happened to her, since it had all happened so quickly.

  For a moment, she was tempted to put an end to the woman’s confusion, either by shooting out her other knee or putting an end to her existence altogether. But that seemed excessive, since the woman wasn’t holding any weapon except the packet of explosives—which she’d obviously not armed yet. Besides, Victor wanted prisoners.

  So she just rolled out from under the lorry and sprang upright. Pointing to the woman’s shattered knee with her pistol, she said: “Fall down, you dimwit.”

  The woman, her mouth still gaping, looked down at her knee. Her lower leg was completely blood-soaked by now.

  “You fucking bitch!” she screeched.

  Then she finally collapsed. The explosive packet fell on the street surface a meter away from her.

  Thandi strode over and kicked it out of reach. To be on the safe side, she kicked it far enough for it to fall into a stairwell leading down to what looked like the entrance to a warehouse. If it exploded at this point, unless the robbers had used an insanely powerful charge, the blast would have no effect except on the outer surface of the building.

  Now, where was Victor? From the sounds coming from above, Thandi knew he’d been busy. But doing what, exactly?

  She looked up and didn’t know whether to laugh or snarl. Cachat, you—you—

  * * *

  Victor’s task had been trickier than Thandi’s. Overcoming four people on the ground, for someone like her, was fairly straightforward. But overcoming one or more people behind the controls of an operating commercial lorry positioned in a lane that was ten meters in the air was a different proposition altogether.

  Victor was a firm adherent to the KISS principle. So he initiated the encounter by ramming his own vehicle into the lorry. His vehicle was a personal air car and the target vehicle was a lorry massing at least seven times as much. But he wasn’t trying to destroy the lorry—and on the flip side, he didn’t care how much damage he did to his own vehicle. He had more than enough funds to buy another one—or another twenty, for that matter. All he needed was the element of surprise.

  The impact was jarring, for him much more than for the occupant or occupants of the lorry. But he was expecting it and he, she or they weren’t. The protective equipment in modern vehicles was more than adequate to keep everyone involved in the collision from being seriously injured. What such equipment wasn’t designed for was to keep them from being confused and startled.

  Then, when the lorry was driven a bit forward and into the side of the adjacent building, very startled. Then, when a maniac emerged from the air car—literally, emerged: the crazy idiot was already on the vehicle’s hood and—

  Pointing a weapon at the lorry.

  A magazine-fed grenade launcher, to be precise.

  Profoundly startled.

  There were two robbers in that lorry, one male and one female. The female was the driver and the male was in overall charge of the high-jacking.

  High-jacking attempt, rather.

  “Hey!” the driver yelled. “That son of a bitch has a—”

  It really wasn’t fair. The thirty-five-millimeter, pulser-driven grenade was designed to deal with much tougher targets than a commercial air lorry. It punched straight through the driver-side door and detonated in almost the exact center of the cab . . . whose windows (and a substantial portion of the supporting structure) blew abruptly outward. The detonation of thirty-two grams of highly advanced chemical explosive gutted the cab and shredded its occupants.

  At that point, the lorry’s automatic traffic program gave up the ghost. It analyzed the situation as one of complete vehicular disorder and gave a signal that caused all the lorry’s machinery to shut down. Which it did instantly, except for the built-in delay procedures that allowed the counter-grav to bring the lorry down in a reasonably gentle manner and select a spot on the surface below that was reasonably unimpeded.

  “Reasonably unimpeded,” given the current condition of that street surface, was a very relative term. So, the descending lorry landed right on top of one of the robbers and crushed him to a pulp.

  Fortunately, that was the robber who was already dead.

  Meanwhile, Victor’s own vehicle’s traffic program had come to the same conclusion. With all systems shut off, the air car’s counter-grav brought it down in reasonably controlled manner. On an empty patch of street, this time around.

  Victor hopped off the air car. “Good work,” he said.

  “And where the hell are your survivors?” was Thandi’s response.

  He grinned at her. “I knew I could count on you. How many do we have?”

  “Three. None of them are exactly in tip-top condition, you understand.”

  “As long as they can talk.”

  “Talk about what? And why did we need any survivors at all? The way I see it—”

  She glanced around. Sure enough, there were at least a dozen onlookers that she could see. The subterranean commercial thoroughfares had slidewalks also, although they weren’t as heavily trafficked as the ones in residential areas—and judging from the evidence, didn’t work as well either. At least one of the slidewalks was completely out of order. She could see a couple of people walking on their own power.

  Quite a bit of power, now. They weren’t quite running, but they weren’t wasting any time, either. Clearly, they didn’t want to stay in this vicinity any longer than they needed to.

  “Dead assholes tell no tales,” she concluded.

  “Tell tales to who? We’re in Lower Radomsko, Thandi. Nobody gives a damn what happens here. Well, that’s not quite right. A lot of people give a damn, but the only ones in position to do anything about it are whatever local gang is in charge. And those assholes, as you put it—”

  He indicated the dead and wounded bodies lying about. “Are mostly right here. At least, I’m pretty sure they are. That’s why I wanted prisoners. To find out.”

  “To find out . . . why?”

  “So we could decide if my provisional change of plans makes sense, what else?”

  And with that, Victor went over to the nearest wounded robber. This was the second one Thandi had shot, as it happened.

  “Who’s your boss?” he asked. “And where can we find him?”

  The man, who’d been doing his best to staunch the blood flow from his knee with a mangled hand, looked up at Victor and snarled. “Fuck you!”

  “The name of your boss,” Victor repeated. He pulled out a small pistol. “And his or her present location.”

  His tone of voice was neutral in all respects. Calm, level, even—seemingly devoid of any emotion.

  Thandi knew him very well by now. At times like this, Cachat was utterly lethal.

  “Tell him,” she said to the man on the street, moved by a vague humanitarian impulse. Very vague—in all likelihood, the robbers had been planning to kill her after they high-jacked the lorry. “Tell him right now.”

  “Fuck you too!”

  Victor shot the man in the head. Then, moved over to the woman.

  “Your turn. The name of your boss. His or her location. You have”—he glanced at his timepiece—“five seconds.”

  “Oh, for the love of God,” said Thandi, moved by another humanitarian impulse. “Give the poor woman at least ten seconds. Look at her. She’s in shock.”

  There was no
expression on Victor’s face, “If you insist.” To the woman: “You have ten seconds. Starting . . .” He glanced again at the timepiece. “Now.”

  Thandi sighed. “Tell him. If you don’t, he’ll kill you and move on to the last guy and do the same. If he doesn’t get the answer from him, he’s dead too.”

  That had taken about seven seconds. Victor started counting off. “Three seconds left. Two. One.”

  “Stop!” the woman yelped. “For Chrissake, stop!” She held up a bloody hand and used it to wave Victor away. Tried to, rather. “You already killed the fucking boss! He’s in that lorry you—you—what the hell did you do to it, anyway?”

  Victor ignored the question. “How many are left in your gang, then? And where’s your headquarters?”

  “Left?” She choked down a hysterical laugh. “Left? There isn’t anybody left, you—you— Whatever your name is. You already killed everybody. Except me and”—she glanced over at the other gang survivor. He’d finished jury-rigging a tourniquet with his belt and was staring at them.

  “And Teddy, over there.”

  Victor nodded at the man. “Pleased to meet you, Teddy.” Then, looked back at the woman. “And what’s your name?”

  She hesitated for a moment. Then, shrugged slightly. She could only use one shoulder to do so, because her right hand was still occupied keeping pressure on the wound in her knee. “I’m Calantha Patwary. People call me Callie.”

  “Pleased to meet you also, Callie. I’m Achmed Buenaventura and my partner here”—he pointed to Thandi with a thumb—“is Evelyn del Vecchio. Now that we’ve all become acquainted, how would the two of you like to come to work for me?”

  He looked around the area. “Seeing as how the neighborhood obviously needs someone new in charge.”

  Callie and Teddy stared up at him. Callie’s mouth was gaping again.

  Thandi knew how she felt. She was almost gaping herself.

  Victor Cachat and his damn improvisations. Otherwise known as the maniac’s wild ride. And . . . here we go.

  Chapter 31

  “Does he ever stick to a plan?” groused Yana, after she read the message on the screen that Anton had just decrypted.

  “Not that I can recall,” said Anton. His tone of voice was mild. “Do keep in mind that the universe never seems to stick to a plan either. Relax, Yana. Victor is in a league of his own when it comes to improvising. He’s something of a genius at it.”

  Yana looked dubious. “I thought the idea was to steer clear of Lower Radomsko altogether.”

  “Yes, it was. That’s because if you muck around in that area, some gang is bound to jump you. But that’s sort of a moot point now, isn’t it? Just crossing one little itty-bitty corner of the place brought a gang down on us. Or I should say, down on Thandi Palane and Victor Cachat.”

  Yana chuckled. “Talk about shooting for the Darwin Award.”

  Anton nodded. “As acts of suicidal folly goes, that one’s a real contender for the title. We didn’t plan for it, but what’s done is done. And now we’ve cleared a corner for ourselves in Lower Radomsko. So why not set up shop? There are some real advantages to working out of that area, you know, in addition to the drawbacks.”

  “Such as?”

  “For starters, the Mesan authorities ignore Lower Radomsko almost entirely. Saburo told us they occasionally send in a few agents, but that’s only for specific purposes. Tracking down runaway slaves, usually.”

  “Okay. What else?”

  “None of the automatic surveillance equipment works in Lower Radomsko. I mean, none. The local gangs make it a point to trash anything that gets set up. According to Saburo, the Mesan security agencies don’t even try any more except when some newly appointed big shot does the usual new-broom-sweeps-clean routine. Then they piddle around for a while installing surveillance devices, all of which get wrecked almost as soon as they’re set up. After a few weeks, the new big shot has become a worn down and wiser big shot. That happens pretty fast in agencies working in the seccy districts. Either that, or the big shot just gets fired—sorry, transferred laterally—and a more sensible person comes in as their replacement.”

  “And . . . what else?”

  “You have to fend off other Lower Radomsko gangs, but the bigger and stronger crime organizations in other districts leave you alone. It’s just not worth it for them to deal with the headaches involved.”

  Having finally found what seemed like a flaw in the new plan, Yana pounced. “Yeah—exactly! We’ll be wasting most of our time and energy defending ourselves against petty gangsters.”

  Anton leaned back in his chair and looked up at the tall woman. The expression on his face was simultaneously pitying and derisive.

  “Which part of ‘Thandi Palane and Victor Cachat’ did you miss, Yana? The one thing we are not going to be doing is defending ourselves against petty gangsters.”

  Yana stared at him, then at the screen. Then, scratched her jaw. “I take it phrases like ‘preemptive strike’ and ‘do unto others before they do unto you’ are applicable here.”

  Anton smiled and looked back at the message. He indicated the last two sentences with a finger. “This is the real problem on our hands at the moment. Forget the gangsters. Wannabe gangsters, I should say.”

  Yana studied the sentences. Lorry serviceable and cargo fine. But will need new personal transport.

  “What’s the problem?” she asked. “That dealer he bought the air car from had plenty of others on his lot.”

  Anton clucked his tongue. “How does it happen that a former Scrag is such a neophyte—I’m tempted to say, a hopeless naif—when it comes to the basic principles of crime and wrongdoing?”

  She grinned. “We’re super soldiers, remember? Did Achilles and Hector know how to pick locks?”

  Anton was a little surprised that Yana knew the Homeric legends. But only a little. You had to be careful with terms like “Scrags.” Leaving aside the fact that it might be offensive to people like Yana—although it usually wasn’t; ex-Scrags were anything but thin-skinned—the bigger problem was that it could lead you to underestimate them.

  Yes, the descendants of the “super soldiers” of the Final War tended to be arrogant, narcissistic, often ignorant and way too full of themselves. But there was a reason for the term “super.” That hadn’t been mere propaganda on the part of the Ukrainian tyrants who created Yana’s ancestors and set them loose on the world. Even as heavily outnumbered as they’d been, the super soldiers had come awfully close to winning the Final War in its opening phases. Of course, once the initial surprise attacks had been blunted and everyone had started opening up their own private arsenals of horrors, things had gone downhill for all concerned.

  Quickly.

  “You still haven’t explained why Victor can’t just go back to the same dealer,” she said.

  “Think it through, Yana. All the way through. What’s Victor’s new cover story going to be? He just blew off completely any chance that anyone with half a brain is going to believe he’s really an investigative reporter. Didn’t he?”

  She rubbed her jaw again. “Um. Yeah. Unless he figures out a way to shift it all onto Thandi.”

  Anton shook his head. “That’d be stupid. Thandi looks like a big dumb laborer now. Victor will want to keep that disguise going. He’ll let it slip that she helped him some, probably, but he’ll take most of the credit for destroying that gang.”

  “I still don’t see why he can’t just buy himself another air car.”

  “How did he lose the one he had? The last thing he wants people in Lower Radomsko to think now is the truth—which is that Thandi got ambushed and he wrecked the car coming to her aid. No, no, no. That won’t do at all for—”

  His voice, already deep, dropped another octave. “Achmed the Atrocious, new crime lord of Lower Radomsko. Soon to be over-lord of the dump. So it’ll seem, anyway.”

  Comprehension dawned. “Okay, I get it. He planned to wreck the air car. From the m
oment he bought the damn thing.”

  “From the moment he landed on Mesa,” Anton corrected her. “Hell, who knows? Maybe the fiend planned it before he even left the Core.”

  There was nothing wrong with Yana’s brain. She had already thought through the logic. “Right. And would a criminal mastermind buy himself a new air car after deliberately wrecking the one he had? Not hardly. Not when he can sell the wreckage for parts and scrounge up another one by taking it from the next gang who gets the Victor treatment.”

  She shook her head. “He is a bad, bad man, Anton.”

  “They don’t call him Achmed the Atrocious for nothing.”

  * * *

  “Are you sure, Victor?” Thandi asked. She gave the two wounded criminals slumped in the back of the lorry’s cab a look that was free of anything resembling the gentler virtues. Mercy, compassion, empathy—not a trace. “That equipment is expensive to run, you know.”

  Victor’s lips quirked. “We have plenty of money. And what better way to make sure it’s working properly?”

  For their part, neither Callie nor Teddy—a name Thandi thought was ridiculous for a thug—was paying them attention any longer. Once the effects of the adrenaline started fading, the pain of their injuries had surged up in full force. Just to keep them quiet, if nothing else, Victor had given them a powerful sedative. They were still conscious—sort of—but they were now half-reclined and pretty much oblivious to everything around them.

  “Aren’t you worried—”

  “That if you go straight from here to Steph’s boutique that’ll draw attention to them?” Victor shook his head. “Who cares where we go? If the Mesan police even noticed this fracas at all, they’ll have written it off as just another criminal incident in Lower Radomsko. The population density in the seccy quarters makes it impractical for the cops to maintain close surveillance. They just assume the crime bosses will keep a lid on things, and if they don’t the authorities will start breathing fire on them, not the small fry.”

  He waved his hand at their surroundings. There were still some onlookers, but they were being very careful to keep a distance and a low profile. “The only gang controlling this area is the one we just took down. And I doubt they would have had the resources to follow you anyway. They certainly wouldn’t have had good enough tracking equipment, which means they’d have to follow you in person. And how likely is that?”