Gun Runner

by B. V. Larson

  “What if they don’t want Gorman? Eh? What if they choose another?”

  I shrugged, not being overly concerned.

  “Bah!” Jort exclaimed, standing and walking off the bridge in a huff.

  I smiled after him. Neither of the girls were overly interested in him. I could understand why that would be frustrating especially on a long voyage, but once we gathered a load of rifles and delivered them to Trask, things would be different. We could land on a friendly world and relax for a time until our money ran out.

  Then, it would be time to make another deal and risk our lives again.

  My next visitor was Rose. She was in an odd mood. Drifting in space affected people in various ways—but it was rarely a positive experience.

  “William?” she asked. “Are we going to land soon?”

  “Tomorrow. I think that will be safe.”

  “Safe? Another dark hint? Jort and Sosa seem to fear this place. Even you do. Why? What’s so important about timing our landing?”

  I looked her over for a moment. Everything about this place was a closely held secret. After all, knowing how to get these weapons safely aboard my tiny ship was the only reliable source of product I had at the moment. The word in the cluster was that I’d killed Kersen, and now no other gun supplier trusted me.

  In the case of Rose, I’d come to trust her over time, but it wasn’t a blind sort of trust. It was the kind of thing that didn’t include my most valuable secrets.

  “There you are, shutting me out again,” she said, watching my face. “And you wonder why we don’t get together anymore… How can two people be intimate if there’s no trust between them?”

  I could have told her any number of ways such an arrangement could be achieved, but I was smart enough not to.

  “Look, Rose. There are things you don’t know yet about this trade. This whole process—what we’re engaged in now—that’s one of them.”

  She released an angry puff of air and got up to flounce off the bridge. But I glanced at the chronometer. It was only six hours until the local star would rotate out of view, freezing over the surface around my cache of weapons.

  Sighing, I called her back. “All right. Here’s what’s going on.”

  I explained to her, in some detail, that this planet was haunted still by creatures half-living, half-dead. They slept when the ice covered them, and the face of the planetoid was away from the sun. But when that face spun around again, they awoke and were dangerous.

  “Something lives down there?” Rose asked incredulously. “What could live on a ball of frozen methane?”

  “We were last here three months ago when the sun rose over the armory—that’s the Sardez storage facility full of guns that we’re mining for rifles. At that point, the things that live down here attacked us.”

  Rose was wide-eyed. “They’re dangerous, I take it?”

  “Yes. Extremely.”

  “How will we get the rifles, then? Won’t Baron Trask be suspicious by now? Won’t he think you ran out on him and plan to never return?”

  “Possibly,” I admitted. “But I have a foolproof plan to smooth over any ruffled feathers he might have. I’ll give him the fifteen hundred rifles he asked for, more than the agreed upon amount. He’ll be happy, you watch.”

  She thought that over. “I think that will work, knowing Trask. It might also leave him greedy for future deals, so he’ll want to let us go.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve thought of everything, haven’t you? Except one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You’ve frightened me. I’ll never sleep now. Just knowing we were going down to a deserted weapons storage facility kind of freaked me out before. Now, I’ve got new reasons to be terrified.”

  I smiled. “I was hoping that sharing my secrets with you would put your mind at ease, but maybe you need more of a distraction. What can I do to help you get over this fear of yours?”

  She didn’t meet my eyes. Instead, she reached out a small hand and ran it over my arm and the back of my hand.

  That’s all the encouragement I needed. I reached for her, and we began to kiss.

  The night passed very pleasantly after that.

  Chapter Fifty

  The next morning I was in a great mood as I landed my ship in a swirl of methane snow. The sun was down over this region of the planetoid, the faint light from it reduced to a glint in the black sky. It did little more than light up the peaks of the tallest mountains.

  The key was that the dangerous light no longer reached down to the surface. I felt confident that anything surviving down here had been frozen again for three long months.

  We waited until the flurries of snow kicked up by our jets settled around the ship. Gazing out through our viewports, we set every external light the ship had to blaze brightly. Then we watched, and we waited.

  “You guys can’t be serious,” Rose said. “There can’t be anything alive out there. It’s a hundred degrees below freezing.”

  The rest of us didn’t answer. We stared outside intently, ignoring her.

  The nameless planet’s thin, poisonous atmosphere wasn’t entirely still. There were occasional storms here, especially at the line where the world slowly transformed from day to night, or night to day. Every puff of frost that touched the portholes made us wince away.

  “Maybe we should wait another few days,” Sosa suggested.

  They all looked at me. Rose had her arms crossed. She appeared dismissive, but she was slightly worried. She was the least experienced of all of us, and she knew it.

  “No,” I said. “We’ll do it now. We’ve already been gone much longer than we promised.”

  “Screw Trask!” Jort suggested. “He is scum. He murdered his own man—Magnus. I liked that one. He was good man. Also, a smart man.”

  I knew Jort was right. But as a gun runner, you didn’t always get to pick your business partners. Often, they weren’t the most savory of men.

  “Suit up,” I said, and they knew it was an order.

  With muttered curses, they prepared to exit the ship. We hadn’t been outside for weeks, and we had to check our gear carefully. A leaky seal or a dead battery could be fatal.

  “Jort and I will go out. Sosa, you command the ship in my absence. Rose, watch the sensors and report anything you see.”

  “Anything I see? On a dead, frozen rock like this? It doesn’t even have a name.”

  “Report,” I repeated quietly, “anything you see.”

  Rose looked down at the deck, then walked away and took her station at the ship’s sensor boards. She would perform her task, I knew, even if she thought it was absurd. She was no child. Not anymore.

  “Jort, check my gear.”

  In the tradition of spacers everywhere, we both went through a careful inspection of the other man’s suit. Flaws were patched and rechecked. When we were both satisfied, we moved to the airlock and listened to it hiss loudly while it pumped the air out of the tiny chamber.

  At last, when the pressure in the airlock had equalized with the pressure outside, the door automatically slid open.

  A cold swirl of frost snaked in around our boots. The ship was in a heavy drift already. It was half a meter deep in places. Stepping outside, we found we didn’t crunch all the way to the bottom of the snow layer with every step. The planetoid’s gravity was so low that we could walk on the top layer. It was as if our boots were snowshoes.

  Working to keep up a steady pace, we first circled the ship.

  “Everything looks fine,” Jort pronounced.

  “Yes. Let’s go to the armory.”

  Pulling out two power-sleds from the hold, we set off. Jort followed me, and we made good time over a ridge and out onto the broad snowy plain that contained the armory. The land here was cratered and shattered with deep crevasses. That’s why we couldn’t land the ship any closer to the deserted facility we planned to plunder.

  Dragging and bumping along behind each
of us was a power-sled. The situation was familiar, and I was reminded of the last time I’d come here months ago to gather the weapons I’d sold to the colonials on Baden.

  The planetoid was a dreary place under the best of circumstances. Out here, so far from the central sun, the universe was perpetually dark. When the long, long night set in here, it became positively oppressive.

  Jort and I didn’t talk as we labored to get the sleds to the armory. Most of this universe of ours was dark and somewhat depressing. Sunny, cheerful places were rare. But even so, this rock stood out as an isolated spot. It affected the mind. Perhaps that was because all humans were born on more welcoming worlds. When you contrasted this place to any other you knew, the comparison was bleak.

  Worse than the darkness itself, there was a deep sense of dread to the place. We quietly trudged along through the drifting, crusty snows. We could hear one another breathing hard and grunting with effort—but there were few words spoken. Each of us was thinking of the horrors we’d seen the last time we’d visited this lonely place.

  We each carried a Sardez rifle which we used for a walking stick. They were among the last such weapons we had. We’d taken them along on this hike without speaking of it, almost without conscious thought. We both knew there were strange things buried in the drifting snow. Our rifles may or may not be enough to stop an attack, should it come, but they were better than nothing.

  I chided myself concerning these thoughts as we struggled over a rise and dragged the sleds down into the crater, taking care to give the splits in the ground a wide birth. Never, in all the times I’d come here, had I been attacked in the dark. The things that dwelled here, whatever they were, couldn’t function in the long cold nights.

  “There it is!” Jort said suddenly.

  I stopped walking and looked up. My rifle rose automatically to my shoulder. After a moment, I lowered the muzzle again.

  He was pointing excitedly at the entrance. The opening was nearly buried in snow. It was a black wound that penetrated the rock nearby.

  We’d reached the foundations of the fortress that had been destroyed long ago. A few paces more, and we’d be able to enter the tunnels and head down to the armory. I should have been cheered by this, but somehow, I wasn’t.

  We dragged our sleds to the tunnel mouth and then down into the ground. We were swallowed by darkness now. We had only our suit lights, glaring bluish-white, to guide us.

  “Not much farther,” I told Jort. “We’re nearly there.”

  Then we walked out onto an open space, and we halted. My mouth fell open. My suit lights played over the walls, the ceiling, the empty floor.

  “Where are the guns, Captain?” Jort asked.

  “They’re gone,” I said, somehow preventing the despair in my heart from coming out in my voice. “Everything’s gone.”

  Chapter Fifty-One

  “Is this the only vault?” Jort asked me. He stumped near and looked around. “Could we be in the wrong place?”

  I laughed. It was a bitter, haunted sound.

  “No. We’re not in the wrong place. We’re just too late.”

  “But who? How?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. I sat on my floating power-sled and let my feet dangle above the icy floor. My suit-lights played over the ceiling, but my eyes were unfocussed. I saw nothing around me.

  All was lost. My one secret, my singular advantage—gone. Now, all I was could be summed up in a single phrase: a gun runner with nothing to sell.

  This stash of weapons had been the magical key to my business. Out on the rim of the Conclave there were always plenty of buyers—selling was the easy part. Getting the weapons in the first place, that was the real trick.

  Everyone out here needed weapons to defend themselves or to abuse others. Every planet had colonial troops that were weakly armed. Every raider the colonies defended against likewise needed better gear to perform their depredations.

  Oh sure, there were local arms factories. They could produce the basic stuff, shredders, RPGs and the like. But no one wanted that. They wanted the best. They wanted Sardez rifles. Sleek guns that were military grade, better than Conclave manufacturers could produce even to this day.

  Long ago, in my first life, I’d found this place while fleeing and hiding from patrolmen. It had been my secret. I’d thought about emptying the place out—but then what? Where would I store my stock? Where better than here, a secret facility at the very edge of nothingness?

  There were even alien creatures here. Things that slept half the time. Most thieves, I’d long ago reasoned, would probably want to come here in the daylight. It was natural—and a deadly mistake.

  “What are we going to do?” Jort asked me.

  “We’re fucked. Someone found the stash and stole everything.”

  “Let’s look around.”

  Groaning to my feet, I shuffled after Jort as he studied the icy floors. He examined the chamber carefully, like a bloodhound sniffing for clues.

  “There are a lot of footprints,” he said. “All layered over one another.”

  “Of course. I’ve been down here before, you know. So have you.”

  He didn’t even look up. He continued to study the floor. When I came to stand next to him, he put out a thick arm to bar me from walking ahead of him.

  “The model-Ds… we brought them out here with us last time, didn’t we?”

  “Yes. What of it?”

  “Look here. This region of the vault—it was full of crates, wasn’t it? I see many prints. All over the place, around these pallets. They look inhuman.”

  I stared. The floor was crusty with ice, but there were clear scratches and scuffs. Examining the print I made myself, I saw a waffled boot-shape in the frost.

  Jort was right. The region where the missing rifles should be—ten thousand or more of them boxed and ready to deliver—was full of a different kind of print. Each mark was narrow, rectangular. There was no round shape to a model-Ds footprint. Just a hard metal and plastic foot that was rigid and unforgiving.

  “Someone used androids to steal my stash? Makes sense, I guess.”

  Jort nodded, and he continued to examine the scene. I let him, even though I thought it was pointless.

  “Look here! Where does this side-tunnel go?”

  I followed him, frowning. I stared at a U-shaped arch in the wall.

  “I… I don’t know. I don’t recall that being here before.”

  Jort grinned and rapped steel-covered knuckles on my breastplate. “See? Jort is smart! Jort has found the answer!”

  With a small flower of hope in my heart, I followed him into the side passage. Examining the doorway, I saw that it was seamless. It must have been here all along, but with the stacked guns, the frost and the darkness, I’d never even seen it.

  We walked cautiously into the tunnel. After a hundred steps we came to another door. It looked like a blank wall—but my eye wasn’t fooled now. It had the same shape, and there was a metal wheel in the middle.

  Without being told to act, Jort grabbed the wheel and tried to turn it. His massive shoulders bunched and flexed. At last, with a shrieking sound of unoiled metal, it turned and the door swung wide.

  Another chamber lay beyond. We walked inside, shining our lights high and low. The room was far from empty. It was, in fact, nearly full of crates. They were stacked five meters high in places.

  “Another chamber…” I said, stunned.

  Stepping forward quickly, I checked the labels on the boxes. They were printed in the Sardez script, of course, but I knew enough of that dead language to piece together what I was reading. Their words were based on old Standard, just like every dialect in the Conclave.

  “Power packs,” I said, walking to another stack.

  “Rifles… Mortars!”

  Jort was grinning now. He followed me, swollen with pride. “What did Jort just do? Who is the smart-man here today?”

  “You are, Jort,” I said with feeling. “You’
re a goddamned genius!”

  We laughed, and we clapped each other on the shoulders. Jort’s powerful blows hurt and bruised, but I didn’t care. I was no longer ruined. In fact—I was rich.

  A creaking sound began just then, and it took us a second to recognize it.

  “The door!” Jort shouted. “We’ll be sealed in!”

  Together, we raced back to the entrance. The door was a mere crack. No wheel was on this side of the vault entrance. Just like the other vault, the door was seamless and almost invisible.

  Shouting, I shoved the barrel of my rifle into the crack that was left. I applied leverage, but still the door was being dragged shut. The strength that I was up against—it was impressive.

  Jort took his own gun and jammed it into the crack. He fired it, blindly, but there was no effect. If anything, the powerful wrenching force that opposed us increased.

  “Get something else!” Jort shouted. “The rifle barrels are bending. They might snap.”

  I left him howling and struggling to lever the door back open. His shoulders bunched and strained. His body trembled with the effort. Still, the door was slowly closing.

  Grabbing the first thing I found, I took a long tool from the wall. It was solid, built by the Sardez. Like all their works, it was rugged and heavy.

  Ramming it into the crack, I found it was something like a cross between a pick and shovel. It had a long handle, and it was all tough metal. Thicker than our rifle barrels and diamond-shaped for strength, the pole formed a good lever. We moved to the far end of the lever, and we strained to force the door open.

  Slowly, the crack grew wider. With a sudden capitulation, it flew wide and slammed against the wall of the vault. A resounding clang boomed around the chamber. Without our helmets on, the sound would have been deafening.

  There, in the opening, stood a figure I’d never dreamt of, not in my most fevered nights of sickness.

  The main chassis of a model-D was there. The limbs, the central barrel-shaped body—it was all there.

  But wrapped around it—inserted into the plastic torso—was a snake-like being.