by Steve Perry
“Sleel. That a last name?”
“It’s what I go by.”
Khadaji nodded. Sleel didn’t look particularly muscular under his two-piece, though he did have fairly wide shoulders. “The stools are bolted to the floor,” he said. “I want to see how strong the bolts are. See if you can move one.”
“Sure.” Sleel untabbed his tunic and slipped it off, and Khadaji revised his opinion upward. Sleel had muscle. He wasn’t all that broad, but he looked thick and dense and he carried no fat.
Sleel touched a stool, tried to wiggle it, then bent and looked at the base. He walked around the stool, then planted his feet to the sides, squatted, and kept his back straight as he gripped the cross bars under the seat. He took a deep breath and tried to straighten. Ten seconds passed. Tortuous veins stood out on Sleel’s muscles like tiny hoses under great pressure. The muscles of his neck and back and shoulders showed cross-striations; his whole upper body turned red. Suddenly, Sleel relaxed, took another grip, and repeated the lift. He did it three more times, long after most men would have quit, Khadaji thought. Khadaji started to stop him, but Sleel put a final effort into his war against the stool, and the bolts gave up the fight. The stool came out of the floor with a grinch! of metal tearing. Sleel stood there for a second, holding the stool, before he set it carefully atop one of the tables. He turned back toward Khadaji. “Anything else?”
Khadaji could feel Sleel’s arrogance, his total confidence in himself. He grinned. “We open in a week,” he said. “Can you start then? Butch will discuss your schedule and pay.”
Sleel grinned back at Khadaji. “You got it.”
The next twelve men and two women failed to budge one of the bolted stools. Then Bork came in. Saval Bork, according to the file, and he was a large man. Khadaji figured his height at near two meters and his weight at a hundred and twenty or twenty-five kilos. The man reminded him of a bear he had seen in a zoo, once. Only Bork didn’t lumber, he walked with such a deliberate step he looked absolutely unstoppable.
Khadaji said. “I want you to move a stool for me. That one.” Khadaji pointed at the one nearest Bork.
“Yes sir,” Bork said. He reached with his right hand and grabbed the stool by the cross bar.
Khadaji started to warn Bork that the stool was bolted to the floor, but he saw the big man pause as he realized something was holding the stool down. The pause was no more than a second. Then Bork straightened. Khadaji saw the muscles of Bork’s upper back work under his coverall, heard the big man grunt, and the stool came free. He’d done with one hand what more than a dozen others had failed to do with two.
“Where would you like it?” Bork asked.
“Anywhere. Can you start work in a week?”
Twenty-nine people had applied for jobs as bouncers and so far, Khadaji only had two. He needed three.
Dirisha Zuri was a tall black woman with green eyes. As Khadaji watched her walk across the floor toward him, he was more impressed with her than any of the other applicants. She wore a blue body stocking under ruffles, and she moved with perfect control. Her file said she had trained in at least four different close combat styles, and of all those he’d interviewed, Khadaji knew immediately she was the most adept in that arena. She had the job before she got to where he stood. But he wanted to see how she would handle the test.
Dirisha touched the stool lightly with her fingers, then stepped away from it. She pushed at the base with one foot. She bent and looked under the table nearest the stool. She stood, and stepped up to the table. She locked both hands onto one edge of the table’s top, took several deep breaths, then set herself. She screamed, a low guttural yell, and yanked the top of the heavy plastic table free of its base. She turned and smiled at Khadaji, then used the table top like a hammer against the nearest stool. It took five shots before the stool tore free, sheared from the bolts. She set the table top back onto its base. “You said move it,” she said. “It is moved.”
Khadaji laughed. “And you’re hired.”
The constructor was puzzled and a little upset. “What happened?”
“A little test for my bouncers,” Khadaji said. “I want you to use longer and stronger bolts when you fix them. And replace all the other bolts, too. I don’t want my customers bashing each other with my furniture, should they become agitated.” No, that wouldn’t do, to be declared off-limits by the military. He needed to have their business, it was essential to his plan. The Jade Flower was going to be popular and quiet, the kind of place a trooper could go and relax and not worry about fighting. Fighting was not going to be allowed. Sleel, Bork and Dirisha would see to that.
“It’s gonna take a couple of days.”
“Put a rush on it. I want to open in a week. How is the drugstore room coming?”
“Nearly done. I got techs setting the densecris tomorrow and a smith installing the reaper locks this afternoon. It’ll be done inna few days.”
“Good.”
Khadaji went to his office. So far, everything had gone well, at least physically. There was still the other, the mental part of it. The plan was working, but he still had his doubts as to whether it should ever have been started. He had his sense of mission, that was strong. And he had the haunting memory of Maro, that would never go away. And, too, there was his Realization, his lightning moment. It was time-faded, but he could remember the sense of rightness he’d felt after it. He had those things. Still, there was a schism between the thought and the deed. Theory and practice were separated by a gulf not easily crossed. Killing sentient beings was wrong; massive killing on a scale done by the Confed to maintain its warped existence was more wrong. The Confed was evil and dying, but its death had to be hastened, to avoid more senseless murder. What he would do here on Greaves, if he were successful, would speed up the fall. One man could make a difference and that would give millions of men hope. The Confed could be resisted. But that was only a part of it. There was more, greater in importance. Revolution and evolution, brothers of a different speed, but brothers nonetheless. The galaxy would see one thing happening here, but there would be something else unseen happening, as well. If he could pull it off. Only thing was, he would have to hurt people to do it. Not kill them, not if he could help it, but certainly he would cause them pain, stealing a part of their lives. That was not an easy thing to think about. Not at all.
Chapter Twenty
THERE WAS THE matter of obtaining weapons. The choice was, of course, spetsdods. Khadaji could have easily bought enough of the hand weapons to outfit his own army, but the form was important. It was necessary that spetsdods come from the Confed forces; further, they would have to be stolen, not bought from someone looking for a fast stad. Spetsdods were of limited use in the military, utilized mostly by prison guards, and by security personnel where deadlier weapons might be dangerous, such as in a fragile in vitro lab. Finding out low-level information such as nonlethal weapons shipments was relatively easy with the sophisticated computer gear Khadaji had. Stealing the weapons themselves was somewhat more difficult.
The warehouse was standard Confed construction; expanded hardfoam with plastic doors. Guards had been mounted near the loading bay and main entrance, with additional patrols covering the emergency exits. Eight troopers altogether. They tended to stick close to the pools of light cast by the HT lamps on each comer of the building. It was sloppy of them, but then, there had been no trouble on Greaves in the months they’d been on planet. Besides there was nothing really valuable or dangerous in the warehouse. It was mostly full of uniforms, paper supplies and miscellaneous material. And, Khadaji knew, several cases of small arms, including spetsdods.
Getting inside would be the hard part. He didn’t want trouble until he had what he wanted; therefore, he had to bypass the guards and the alarm system designed to prevent pilferage. Going through a door or a wall was out, digging under would take too long; therefore, he would go in through the roof.
He chose a rainy night, when clouds blocked all
natural skylight. The rain was cold and steady, and it kept the guards huddled under any shelter they could find near the building. Patrols were done, but reluctantly and quickly.
Khadaji lay in the wet darkness, and watched two troopers hurry past his position. Their voices were almost lost in the sound of water flowing from buildings through gutters and onto the drenched ground.
“—fucking detail ain’t worth shit—!”
“—a leak in my suit, my leg is getting wet—”
As soon as they passed, Khadaji moved. He scrambled up and ran to stand next to the building. He took a synlon ladder from his backpack and unrolled it carefully. He removed the cover from two blocks of sticktite and squeezed each clump of the soft plastic substance to activate the chemicals within, then carefully allowed the end of the ladder attached to the sticktite to hang by his side. In a few seconds, the blocks of sticktite would adhere to anything with a specific gravity greater than water, they would not let go unless a special solvent was used and then only reluctantly. Still moving carefully, Khadaji swung the synlon chord back and forth like a pendulum. With a final swing, he tossed the weighted end up. The ladder arced over the edge of the roof. The sticktite nailed itself down and became a part of the hardfoam roof, as solid as a rock.
Khadaji clambered up the ladder and cleared the edge of the roof. He pulled the ladder up behind him and pressed himself flat. The angle was slight, just enough so water would run off easily, but even so, the wet surface was slippery. It would not do to fall five meters to the ground, he thought.
He pulled a small tremor knife from his belt and cut a circle the size of his hand through the hardfoam. He slipped the spookeyes he wore on his forehead down and clicked them on. The inside of the warehouse lit up in ghostly green. He saw a collection of trash boxes a few meters away. Good. He slapped a patch over the hole he’d cut and moved along the roof. He slipped once, but caught himself before sliding far. About where he saw the trash, Khadaji cut another hand-sized hole. Ah, yes, he was right over it. He took an electronic confounder from his pack. There was a thin line attached to the device. Khadaji used the line to lower the confounder until it was hidden among the trash boxes below. He cut the line. Then he patched the second hole and pulled a remote transmitter from his pack. “Sorry to disturb your sleep, troops.” He thumbed a control on the unit. Intruder alarms began screaming.
The building vibrated under him as the doors were opened and the guards ran in. Light would be flaring inside, he knew, and the watch officer would be getting a com call from the guards. Something had set off the proximity alarms in warehouse seven, something bigger than a rat and on the floor.
The search took about thirty minutes. Since the troopers were looking for an intruder and not an electronic box hidden in the trash, they didn’t find either. He could hear them through the thin patch as they searched.
“—bad circuit is all, you think, Hal—?”
“—could get in here, the doors are all sealed—”
“—least get out of the fucking rain for a while—”
“—empty as my credit tab—”
Khadaji switched the transmitter off—it was a line-of-sight maser and so would be almost impossible for a sweeper to pick up, unless he was directly over it—and the alarms died.
He waited another fifteen minutes and then switched on the confounder. The alarms blared into noisy life again.
The search was repeated. Khadaji killed his transmitter and the confounder.
Ten minutes later, he turned them back on once more.
This time, he heard the trooper in charge of the guards yelling into his com. “Shut it down! There isn’t anybody here, we have fucking looked three fucking times! Maybe the fucking rain has shorted some fucking circuit out somefuckingwhere. I don’t care. Get a tech over here. What? That’s not my fault, you spread them out that way. How long? An hour? Fine. Nobody is gonna walk off with the fucking place. We’ll be outside like good little soldiers, protecting the fuck out of all this valuable stow. Yeah, yeah, right. Discom.” Then, a moment later, “Fucking asshole!”
When Khadaji tried the confounder the fourth time, no alarm answered. He grinned. Good thing, he was getting cold, despite the orthoskins. He pulled the tremor knife from his belt.
It took ten minutes to find the spetsdods, another three to load twenty of them and ten thousand rounds of ammunition into his pack. Less the two he strapped on, with magazines of Spasm for each. He climbed the boxes he’d stacked to the roof and left through the hole he’d cut. The rain was going to make a mess of whatever was under the hole, but that was one more blow for the Shamba Freedom Forces against the Confed.
He left the synlon ladder hanging from the roof and scuttled away into the rainy night. Maybe he should have picked off a couple of the troopers, but he figured they would have enough trouble as soon as the theft was discovered. Besides, he was still reluctant to start. He had the spetsdods and ammo, that ought to be enough for one night.
It was almost a week before he shot his first troopers, a quad he’d seen at his pub hours earlier. They were all stoned and it was no challenge. He hit them in the back; it wasn’t sporting, but then again, it wasn’t supposed to be. It was war.
And so the months on Greaves passed, with the Shamba Scum laying waste to the Confederation’s finest. They grew in number, the Scum, according to the dispatches Khadaji tapped into. There was more than a little concern in official circles.
Gradually, Khadaji came to accept what he was doing, to a degree. It still bothered him when he thought about it; only, he didn’t think about it much any more. It became his job and he tried to stay dispassionate. But he had nightmares at times, not always triggered by drug use. It had to be done, what he did, but he took no joy in it.
Eventually, as all things do, Khadaji’s plan wound its way toward a climax.
Finally, they knew who he was.
Finally, they came for him.
Chapter Twenty-One
AND SO HERE he was. Sitting on the floor of a drug vault, waiting for the Confed to come and extract its revenge. They wanted him alive, of course, but that wasn’t going to happen. It would spoil all the months of work, make it all worth so much less. Oh, sure, what he’d done would still be remarkable, but it would be less than perfect. And once they had him, they could make him say or do anything, eventually. He had no illusions about that. They could peel his brain like an onion.
Well. So much for quiet meditation. He touched upon his past in the last few moments, had brought forth the good and the bad, some of the people he had known and loved. He was, he supposed, as ready as he would ever be.
There were a couple of things left to do, before the troopers arrived. He looked at a package gathering dust in the corner and smiled. It had been there since the beginning, over six months. Khadaji took a few steps and picked up the package, a plastic box sealed with security strips. It was heavier than he remembered. Or, maybe he was just tired—
“—looking for the owner, Khadaji!”
The transceiver over the window picked up the voice of the trooper clearly. Khadaji smiled. So. At last. They were here. He stepped in front of the densecris window and touched a control, depolarizing the crystal to clarity once again. There were a dozen troopers crowding into the room, all wearing class three armor and waving carbines. One soldier carried a grenade launcher. Khadaji smiled more broadly and felt himself become calm. It was the waiting that was hard, not the doing. He waved at the troopers. “Here I am,” he said. Then he touched the control for the densecris and the window faded to black.
“Open it!” the Lojtnant said, waving his sidearm at Butch.
“I can’t. It can only be opened from the inside.”
Sleel stepped forward. “What’s the scat, Lojt?”
“I want that man.”
“Why?”
The Lojt turned on Sleel. “Who the hell are you?”
“I’m the man who is going to flatten you if you don’t com
e up with some reasons for being here.”
The Lojt laughed. He was pointing a rocket pistol at Sleels belly; more, he was dressed in class three armor, which was proof against any weapon in the room, save the grenade launcher. Even so, he shouldn’t have laughed.
Sleel stepped forward and hooked his right heel behind the Lojt’s ankle, then shoved against the man’s chest, hard. The Lojt went down, flat onto his back. He looked like a giant beetle as he waved his arms and legs, trying to right himself. There was a procedure, but he wasn’t using it.
Sleel smiled, but the smile vanished when a trooper thunked his carbine’s butt into the back of Sleel’s head. He fell. Butch dropped to his knees and cradled the fallen man’s head.
Three troopers helped the Lojtnant to his feet. Behind the faceplate of his armor, the man’s face was livid. “Get that door open!”
Two men waddled toward the door in their armor. One began kicking it while the other slammed his carbine’s stock against the handle.
From the floor, Butch said, “I wouldn’t do that. There are reaper locks installed there.”
The door’s alarm system began squalling, a singsong whoop-whoop. A recorded voice began blasting the two troopers: “WARNING, REAPER SEQUENCE ENACTED. STAND CLEAR. WARNING, REAPER SEQUENCE ENACTED—”
The two troopers looked at the Lojt, who waved the rocket pistol at the door. “Go on!”
The recorded voice warned them a final time. Then the reapers went off. Four finger-thick steel bars shot out of the door, two each near the upper left and lower right sides, angled across the door. The two troopers weren’t hit, but before they could move, the steel rods whipped out from the bars. The top set took the men at shoulder height; the bottom set just below the knees. An unarmored man would have been broken in half; as it was, the troopers were flipped sideways as if they were toys. The reapers re-cocked themselves.