Gun Runner

by B. V. Larson

  By anyone’s accounting, I’m a paranoid man, but Sosa was putting me to shame. I knew these people considered us to be heroes—and rightly so. They weren’t about to steal anything from us.

  Ten minutes later, however, a messenger came for me. It was a colonial militia man—a kid, really—still wearing his dirty green coveralls.

  “Captain Gorman, sir? Colonel Fletcher wants to talk to you.”

  “What about?” I demanded, slurring my words.

  “It’s confidential, sir. No one told me anything.”

  Alarm bells went off in my head. Could Sosa be right? Could these colonists be so greedy and grubby they were already regretting paying their runner?

  Standing up, I signaled to Jort. He stood up as well, and the girl that had been riding his knee and kissing his neck tumbled to the floor. As everyone was a bit drunk, no one was hurt. A gust of laughter was the only result.

  Jort, like an alert dog, watched me as closely as his state of mind allowed. He swayed on his feet, but only a little.

  Turning, I walked toward the exit. Jort and Sosa trailed me. I tried to pay my tab, but the barman wouldn’t hear of it.

  “Any runner who comes all the way out here with good merchandise, then risks his own cock fighting aliens, well, he gets free drinks in my house!”

  Smiling, I left them all with a cheer and a wave. Out in the cold, dark streets, I followed the messenger kid.

  Some of the bar’s patrons followed in our wake. They were under the mistaken impression we were on our way to yet another drinking establishment. Once they realized that we were heading toward the boring part of town, they melted away in search of better entertainment.

  We wound up at the Colony First Hospital. On the third floor, we met up with Colonel Fletcher. He was inside a plastic bubble of film, with a couple of model-K nurses fussing over him. He looked up at me from the bed with squinting eyes.

  “There you are, Gorman—not too drunk to stand, I trust?” Fletcher asked.

  I smiled with half my mouth. “I’m fit to serve, Colonel.”

  He coughed as he laughed. “Of course you are. Listen, I know you want to be on your way, and I don’t blame you. Not at all. Our problems aren’t your problems, after all.”

  Here it was. The pitch. He wanted something, and he wanted it pretty badly if he was willing to take so much time to butter me up. Worse, it had to be something I didn’t want to give. I steeled myself and smiled in a frozen fashion.

  “Let’s hear it, Colonel.”

  “You’re not like a normal runner. You deliver, and you’re a friend in need. I’d like you to bring me another load of rifles… and something bigger.”

  “Bigger? Like what?”

  Fletcher’s mouth worked for a moment. Tubes ran out of his nose and his ass. They pumped unidentified fluids in and out of him at random intervals. He looked like a model-Q that was still under construction.

  “We need something that can stop these Tulk from coming here again. We think they must have sent a small ship at some point. After landing here, they infested our ducks. Sure, now our native population is docile again, but they could go rebel on us again at any time. In short, we need some kind of planetary defense system. Satellite-based, maybe—”

  “Whoa, whoa!” I said, putting up my hands. “I’m a simple gun runner, Colonel. Not a miracle-worker.”

  Colonel Fletcher raised his own hand in response. The tubes crisscrossing his torn-up belly shivered at the movement. “Don’t panic! I don’t expect you to steal an orbital station from the Conclave and haul it out here. Nothing like that. I’m looking for certain key components—things we can’t get out here on the fringe.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like a combat-controller with trained AI. Like a set of projector tubes to connect to said controller. Look, we can build our own platform. We can push it up into orbit, and we can provide all the power it needs to operate. All we need is the stuff we can’t manufacture on our own.”

  My mouth was hanging open a bit. I don’t know what I’d expected him to ask for, but it wasn’t this.

  Quickly, almost automatically, I gave him a reassuring smile. “That might be possible, Colonel. I’ll check with my people and get back to you.”

  Colonel Fletcher smiled in return. “Excellent! I knew I could count on you, Gorman. You’re the best.”

  We walked out of there, and I glanced at Sosa and Jort. They both seemed upset.

  “Captain, you can’t go promising these yokels that kind of tech!” Sosa hissed at me.

  “Sosa is right, Captain. You smart-man—but that was dumb...”

  “Shut up, both of you.”

  We returned to our ship, pulled up our ramp, and blasted off into space. It was done without a warning call to their tower. Without so much as a flowery goodbye to the populace. Even I’d gotten spooked by this latest request.

  “Why’d you say yes to them?” Sosa asked. “If you meant to run out?”

  I shook my head. “You’re smart. You figure it out.”

  She thought about it, and she nodded. “You always do that, don’t you? When someone asks for more than you can deliver, you smile, say yes, and disappear.”

  I pointed a finger at her and nodded. “Now you’ve got it.”

  “You so smart,” Jort said. “How come you die the first time? What happened to the other guy?”

  “He must have made a mistake.”

  “Yeah… one big mistake. You are clone—but can clone be smarter than this man you copy?”

  My face faltered. I couldn’t keep a smile on my lips, not even false one, with such questions in the air.

  Sosa listened, but she didn’t interrupt. She wanted to hear the truth.

  “I don’t know…” I said, and I meant it.

  Chapter Thirty

  Bright and early the next morning, I awoke with a headache. I was sleeping and drooling in the pilot’s chair, and we were still drifting in orbit over Baden.

  Confused, I looked at the instruments. Flashing red lights tipped me off, and I checked our local sensors.

  “Sosa, Jort! To your posts! We’ve got company!”

  There was a ship—a small one—coming up toward us from the planet surface. I hadn’t even known they had a viable ship, but it stood to reason. Most colonies had a few tugs or automated rock-miners lying around.

  My hand reached for the thrusters, but I didn’t touch them. All I had to do was pull back on those levers, and Royal Fortune would leap ahead. We’d lose them in a gush of exhaust.

  But I didn’t activate the engines. I was curious, so I let the ship approach.

  “Jort, open the aft gun turret. Sight on the approaching ship. If she tries something, burn out her engines.”

  “I’m on it, sir. Target locked. Target in range. Ready to fire!”

  “Hold your fire, Jort.”

  “Yes, sir,” he said, sounding disappointed.

  Sosa came up onto the flight deck then. She looked around at the instruments. She appeared to be agitated. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

  “We outgun that rowboat. He can’t do much.”

  “What if they launch missiles?”

  I shrugged. “Then we outrun them.”

  She gritted her teeth and sat in the copilot’s chair. She looked like she wanted to run more than I did.

  My own state of mind was more curious than concerned. “Open a channel to the approaching ship.”

  Sosa hesitated—but she did it.

  “Baden Colony ship,” I said. “Identify yourself and your purpose.”

  A laugh came back to me. “It’s Major Hendricks. This is our space, Gorman. I don’t have to tell you what I’m doing in orbit over my own colony.”

  “Fair enough. What do you want, Hendricks?”

  He hesitated. “I need to talk to you. I meant to do it before you left—but you took off in a hurry.”

  I considered. The fact he wasn’t talking right now indicated that he didn’t
think it was safe to do so. He could have simply radioed from the ground—but maybe someone was listening that he didn’t want overhearing us.

  Heaving a sigh, I spoke at last. “Come on up alongside us. We’ll dock up and have a little meet-and-greet.”

  Sosa made a sound of exasperation. She glowered at me in disbelief, her arms crossed tightly. I ignored her. If she had something to say, she could say it.

  A few minutes late, Major Hendricks climbed out of his tubby boat and glided toward us, weightless inside a docking tube that connected his ship to mine.

  “We could disconnect right now,” Sosa said in my ear. “No one would be the wiser. It’d be an accident forever.”

  I turned to stare at her in disbelief. “I don’t think so. I didn’t save all these people just to shank one of their leaders now.”

  Hendricks finally came aboard. He eyed Sosa without any affection, and the feeling seemed mutual.

  My hand came up, and we shook. Hendricks flashed me a nervous smile.

  “What’s this all about, Major?” I asked.

  Jort came floating up the shaft from the lower decks. I signaled for him to get back to his post, which made him curl his lips at me. He quickly obeyed and dove down the nearest shaft. We couldn’t leave our guns unattended just in case Hendricks planned mind to mess with us.

  “Um…” Hendricks said. “Could we meet privately?”

  I glanced at Sosa. “Go oil the model-Ds.”

  She exited the flight deck with poor grace.

  “What is it, Major? I’ve got to get this payment back to Kersen. We’re overdue as it is.”

  “I wanted to talk to you—to tell you a few things. I… I think you’ve earned it.”

  “Shoot.”

  Hendricks looked troubled. “It’s about you—and this ship. We’ve seen the ship before, you know.”

  “You said that.”

  “But we didn’t tell you all of it. The colonel didn’t want to get involved, see? He just wants the guns to keep flowing. I think the way you joined us and fought up on that mountain—I think that deserves better.”

  I was frowning now, and I crossed my arms. “I’m sure I’ll appreciate this when you get to the point.”

  “Right. It’s just this: we’ve met you before. But it wasn’t you, exactly. It was the original you.”

  Blinking, I felt stunned. “My clone?”

  “Um… you’re the clone, I think, technically.”

  “Right, right. It hardly matters. I understand… that’s why you reacted with hostility that first day, right? When we landed?”

  “That’s right. You—Gorman the original, I mean—showed up but didn’t deliver a payload at all. After a while we realized you didn’t remember any of that. We’d heard you died out in the Pava system, and—”

  “What’s that?” I asked sharply. “The Pava system? That’s pretty far out.”

  “It is. Anyway, we heard you’d died after you failed to deliver some goods out there about a year ago. Then you showed up all of a sudden, not recognizing anyone, working for Kersen again… We played along, and eventually we decided you weren’t faking it.”

  It was my turn to be full of frowns and deep thoughts. “I haven’t met anyone else yet who might know what happened to the first me. Have you got a clue?”

  Major Hendricks shrugged. “All I know is the rumor about the Pava system—and one other thing: this ship. It’s cursed or something. As you know, Captain Jensen was flying it a while back, and he’s apparently vanished too.”

  “He didn’t vanish.” I proceeded to tell him about the radiation accident and the bodies that had been aboard when I’d first taken command.

  “Too much power, huh? Fried by your own faulty engine shielding? That’s a nasty way to go.”

  “I can think of worse. Anyway, what do you think happened to me? The first me, I mean.”

  He thought it over. “I don’t know. I do know that woman you’re traveling with, though. I remember her. She was with Jensen, too.”

  Chewing that over, I nodded. “All right. Thanks for the info and the warning.”

  “Just watch yourself, Gorman. Kersen has sent us three different runners to Baden—and two of them were you. I think that’s odd.”

  I nodded, unable to argue his point.

  Major Hendricks returned to his ship and jetted back down toward Baden.

  Almost immediately, Sosa appeared on deck. “What’d he want?”

  “Nothing. Just to wish us well.”

  “Okay, if you want it that way. It’s your ship.”

  She slunk off, and I strapped in. We fired up the engines and left orbit. For the first time, I was leery of pouring on the power and letting the ship fly the way she really wanted to.

  What if my predecessors had made that exact mistake before?

  Chapter Thirty-One

  We avoided the local slip-gate. That was too hot for us now. Patrol ships might be laying in ambush, waiting for us to go back there. Instead, I struck out to cross interstellar space alone. We crawled over the lightyears, and the trip took weeks.

  During this time, Sosa became increasingly defiant. She asked endless, pointless questions, usually about the engines.

  “Do we need to fire them up when we reach our destination?”

  “Yes, there will be quite a bit of braking required to slow us down.”

  “Do we have enough fuel for that?”

  “Yes,” I said, patiently. “We’ve got plenty of fuel and supplies. We could fly another month if we have to. After that, I suppose we could cook and eat Jort.”

  Jort had been gliding up the shaft from the lower deck. He approached with great interest, having heard part of our conversation.

  “Cook and eat? Is this a Conclave idiom? Are you planning sex on me? What a surprise, it’s not even my counting day.”

  “As if,” Sosa said, rolling her eyes and stalking off.

  “She’s a cold one, that girl,” I said.

  “No, no! I disagree. She’s a volcano ready to explode any moment. You should set her off. We’d all be happier.”

  I blinked, but I thought I got his meaning.

  With nothing to lose except my pride, I made an attempt that evening. I’m not a wizard of romance, but I’ve been successful from time to time.

  I started off with a bottle of wine opened at our group dinner. Setting it on the table, I poured each of us a glass without any comment.

  Jort drank his with noisy greed. Sosa sniffed at hers, then finally took a sip. By the end of the meal, she’d had two glasses.

  Jort was an ass and thick in the head, but he seemed to grasp what was what. He talked about checking on gear and left the upper deck.

  Sosa then stood up, planning to retreat to her private quarters. She did that practically every night, holing up and doing God-knew-what in there until she was summoned back to duty by the ship’s computer.

  “Wait,” I said. “I wanted to talk to you.”

  Hesitantly, she sat back down. “What is it?”

  “You’ve been to Baden before, haven’t you?”

  She looked furtive. “Yes. A few times. I was with Captain Jensen—remember?”

  “Were you on board this ship when I flew her—the first time?”

  There it was, the stunner question. I’d been holding onto that gem for days.

  “I… I didn’t fly with you. The first you, I mean.”

  “All right... but you have met me before?”

  She was staring at her empty wine glass, spinning it between two nervous hands. She nodded slowly.

  I opened a second bottle and filled her glass. She didn’t object—she barely seemed to notice. I filled mine as well.

  “Okay,” I said. “So, you flew with Jensen, but not me. Which one of Kersen’s agents flew with me?”

  She looked up at me, startled. I’d taken a guess, and apparently I’d hit home. She licked her lips.

  “Jensen did. He was your first mate—the other you,
I’m talking about.”

  I was beginning to get interested. I’d not heard much of what had happened to the original version of Gorman. He’d stored me, his clone, years ago and gone off roaming the universe. Since my awakening, I’d thought about him now and then, but mostly in terms of curiosity about my missing past.

  “You must know why I’m interested in the topic,” I told her. “For me, it’s kind of like having amnesia.”

  “Yes… I can understand. But I can’t help you much. I wasn’t there when—whatever happened, happened.”

  “Right, but you know more than you’re letting on. That’s obvious.”

  She didn’t meet my eye. She drained her glass and stood up. “I’m going to bed. Thanks for the wine.”

  Shrugging, I let her go. Taking the bottle to my own cabin, I sighed and stretched out on my bunk. Soon, I fell asleep.

  * * *

  Stealthy sounds awakened me hours later. The ship was quiet, hissing and gurgling to herself. But the sounds were there, and as I’m a man who’s lived a dangerous life, they were enough to awaken me.

  Sitting up, I almost dropped the wine bottle. I grabbed it with clumsy fingers, preventing a splintering crash.

  Someone was in my cabin. The door was open a crack, and dim yellow light flowed in forming a line across my bed.

  “I can’t do it,” Sosa said quietly.

  Sitting up and rubbing my eyes, I watched her warily. I offered her the bottle of wine.

  She took it, chugged a long drink from the bottle directly, then handed it back to me. I sipped some as well.

  “Talk to me,” I said. “Tell me what’s been bothering you for the last month or so—besides that annoying Tulk that was in your belly.”

  “That’s it,” she said. “The Tulk. You got rid of it for me. You risked your life to save me, a worthless wretch, and you removed that vile rider.”

  “Who said anything about being a wretch?” I asked, watching her. I’d always found I could get more information by listening than by talking. I chose to listen closely tonight.

  Sighing, Sosa sat beside me on the bunk. I got the feeling she was drunk. Had she found and consumed more wine while I slept? That was my impression.