by Rick Partlow
I rose from my seat and watched as it touched down on the tarmac, its landing jets whining and sending out the hot breath of a dragon that was a relief from the cold, until its treads hit and it settled into their suspension. The whining roar died away along with the hot wind, and a ramp opened up from the ship’s belly, just behind her cockpit. The man who walked down it was tall and rangy and wearing utility fatigues instead of the camouflaged combat suit I was used to seeing.
Cowboy met me halfway between his stealth ship and my improvised chair and offered a hand. I shook it warily; I respected the hell out of what this guy could do, but I didn’t know if I would have considered him an acquaintance, much less a friend.
“Hey, Cowboy,” I said. “Where’s Kel?”
“He had things to do at the gas mine,” the Fleet Intelligence agent told me, waving in the general direction of the gas giant, invisible behind the grey cloud cover. “But I saw on the Fleet manifests that you were over here on Loki and thought I’d stop by.”
I raised an eyebrow. That was a not-insignificant waste of time and fuel. “Well thanks for thinking of me, but that seems like a long way to go to just say hello.”
He crossed his arms and regarded me silently for a moment with a flat, neutral stare that made me feel like an exhibit on display.
“It would have been a long way to go just to say hello to Staff Sgt Randall Munroe,” he admitted. “But it’s not that far at all to apprehend Tyler Callas.”
I felt my breath quicken unconsciously and I tried to keep it under control. A mad desperation made me think about going for my pistol, but I knew that was a waste of time. Cowboy could disarm and incapacitate me before my hand twitched. This was it. There was nowhere left to run and no way to fight. Mother would win the way she always did.
“I didn’t know you were working for the Corporate Council,” I said bitterly, trying to keep my hands away from my weapons.
He laughed at that, a long, slow chuckle that sounded genuinely amused.
“Mr. Callas, we all work for the Corporate Council one way or another,” he told me. “But I’m not here to arrest you.”
“Then why are you here?” I asked him.
“You gotta’ know by now,” he said in a Texas twang, “that you can’t run like this forever. They will catch up to you, probably sooner than later. Unless you have someone running interference for you…someone with a few more connections than your Company Commander.”
“Why would you do that for me?” I felt a slight lightening of the blackness closing in around me. I didn’t want to give into that feeling because I still wasn’t sure if this was a trick.
“Two reasons, Mr. Callas,” he said, and I noticed his stance relaxing, as if he’d decided he wasn’t worried about me pulling a gun on him anymore. “For one thing, despite what your mother thinks, you aren’t ready to step up and take a Council position. It’s not who you are now, but I think you might be in a place where you’ll want to do it one of these days, after you get the chance to live your own life for a while. And maybe I want a Corporate Council Executive who owes me one.”
I wanted to laugh at that notion, but I kept my face as stony as I could, nodding to encourage him to keep going.
“Second,” he went on, “you’re too valuable an asset to stick away somewhere locked up while they scramble your brains.”
“An asset?” I repeated, cocking my eyebrow. “For who?”
“Right now, for the Marines,” he said, gesturing around at the military aircraft. “I know the Corporate Council leadership doesn’t consider the Tahni to be a major threat to their interests, but I respectfully disagree. Maybe that’s because I’m closer to the problem.” He smiled, a genuine smile. “Anyway, we can use every level head and straight shot we can get right now. But I was thinking more after the war.” He shrugged. “I expect to have a position of responsibility by then, a position that might require, let’s say, independent contractors to do work for me from time to time.”
“What kind of work?” I wanted to know.
“Just the occasional favor,” he said, his tone minimizing words that seemed pretty ominous to me. “Nothing that’ll interfere with whatever life you choose to lead. And I swear…” He pronounced it “aah sware.” “…your mother will not find out where you are. You don’t have to deal with her until and unless you decide you’re ready to.”
I faced away from him, staring out into the grey gloom, feeling the snow flurries that were all that was left of last night’s storm teasing coldly at my neck.
“This feels a lot like making a deal with the Devil.”
“It may be,” he admitted readily enough. “But as devils go, am I better or worse of one than Patrice Damiani?”
I realized that there was no point in debating this. I had the choice between immediate punishment or some odious duty in a hazy, distant future. At twenty-one, the future seemed pretty far away. I turned back and nodded in fatalistic acceptance.
“All right, Cowboy. You’ve got a deal.” I snorted humorlessly. “Do we sign it in our blood?”
He laughed at that, and despite the fact that it sounded genuine and homey, it was a chilling sound.
“Deals like these,” he said, “always get signed in other people’s blood.”
Now:
Cowboy was the only name I’d known him by. He was…he had been a commando in a top-secret unit working for Fleet Intelligence during the war. He had also been a sleeper agent for the Corporate Council. He had landed on Demeter along with his partner, Kel, and we’d worked together to prepare the planet for the Fleet offensive that retook it. That was when he’d met Sophia. She hadn’t been around for the deal we’d made on Loki, months later, but I’d told her about it since, and she didn’t look any happier to see him than I was.
“So,” I said, feeling a sense of fatalistic acceptance settling deep in my chest, “is Roger West your real name?”
“Close enough,” he replied with a shrug.
“It sounds fake,” Sophia said sharply. “And if you’re a bounty hunter, I’m a fucking hairdresser.”
He chuckled, as seemingly unconcerned with her angry disapproval as he was with the gun I carried.
“Being a hunter’s a good cover for sticking my nose in some odd places.” He cocked his head, eyeing me with an amused self-satisfaction. “I told you I expected to have a position after the war, and I do. I take care of problems for someone…very significant in the Corporate Council. Someone even more significant than your mother.”
“That’s a short list,” I said, a bit impressed. “What problem are you taking care of currently?”
“What do you know about the Predecessors, Mr. Callas?” He asked me. I frowned, feeling my fingers flex of their own accord, as if they wanted to go for the pistol.
“My name’s Munroe,” I reminded him, trying not to grind the words out.
“Of course it is,” he said drily. “So, Deputy Constable Munroe, what do you know about the Predecessors?”
“What everyone knows, I suppose,” I said with a shrug, trying to relax. I moved over to the table and pulled out a chair, falling into it easily, as if his presence here didn’t concern me. I felt more than saw Sophia moving behind me, her hands on the back of the chair. “They were around sometime tens of thousands of years ago, and they left us the map in the Edge Mountains on Hermes of the wormhole jumpgate network.” I paused and went on. “Some people think they actually created the network, and I guess they might have. I don’t know enough about physics to say for sure. And some people think that most of the habitable planets we’ve found were engineered to be that way tens or even hundreds of thousands of years ago by the Predecessors.”
“But nobody knows,” Cowboy agreed. He pushed himself off the table and pulled out a chair opposite mine, sitting down with a lithe agility that belied his height. “But we want to know. The Corporate Council Executive Board has had its eye out for any possible remnant of Predecessor technology pretty much sin
ce they formed back during the First War with the Tahni. They examine every archaeological report, they chase down every rumor and they don’t fuck around. Anyone who got their hands on Predecessor technology could destabilize the economy and maybe even challenge the Commonwealth military.”
“So, you’re chasing a rumor?” Sophia asked from somewhere above me. “What do you need Munroe for?”
“This particular rumor,” Cowboy said, his hands flat on the table, “is out of the Pirate Worlds, on a planet called Thunderhead.”
I didn’t have to ask where he meant. The Pirate Worlds, inhospitable and barely habitable planets out at the edge of Commonwealth space, had been settled by criminals and anti-government types right after the Teller-Fox Transition Drive had gone on the market and opened up dozens of new systems that weren’t connected via the Jumpgate Network. It was technically illegal, but by the time anyone thought to try to stop them, we were at war with the Tahni again. Now, the Pirate Worlds were the headquarters of a half dozen criminal syndicates and the fodder for every action movie and ViRdrama that had come out for years now.
“How would someone out in the Pirate Worlds get their hands on a Predecessor artifact?” I asked him.
“And what do you need Munroe for?” Sophia repeated. “Why can’t you check on this rumor yourself?”
“If I knew how, I wouldn’t need to investigate it,” Cowboy said with obviously strained patience, eyes flashing between the two of us. “I just know that Abuelo has been hiring any scientist with ties to Predecessor research who’ll take his money.”
“Abuelo?” I repeated, squinting in confusion.
“That’s the man who runs Freeport, the largest city on Thunderhead,” Cowboy supplied. “No one knows much about him before he arrived on the planet sometime during the war. They say he killed the old boss, a miserable bastard named Crowley, and took over his syndicate…and the fairly extensive anti-spacecraft defense system that allows him complete control over planetary orbital traffic.” He looked up at Sophia, who was still standing just behind me. “And I need Munroe because there are people on Thunderhead who know who I am. If they saw me nosing around, they’d warn Abuelo and he’d dig himself a hole and pull it in after him.”
I laughed and shook my head. “What the hell do you think I’m going to be able to do that you can’t? I don’t know shit about the Pirate Worlds, and I’ll stick out like a whore in church trying to ask questions about Predecessor artifacts on Thunderhead.”
“What I expect you to do, Munroe,” Cowboy said, pointing a single, gloved finger at me, “is recruit yourself a squad, people who can handle themselves in a fight, people who served in the war with the Marines, preferably, and take it to Freeport. Abuelo is always looking to hire veterans with combat experience. You’re going to go to work for him, and then you’re going to find out where he has this Predecessor artifact.” He smiled broadly, in a look that would have seemed friendly on a real person.
“Then you’re going to steal it for me.”
***
“I’m going,” Sophia declared flatly, in a tone that would brook no argument.
And yet I had to argue, and I had to do it well.
I rested my hands on the hood of the rover, letting my head hang for a moment as I tried to collect my thoughts. Cowboy had headed back to the spaceport, giving me instructions to meet him at his ship in three hours, and I’d gone to Nunez and let him know I was going to need an emergency leave of absence for a few weeks. I’d told him it was to deal with family problems, which I guess was true, in a way.
Sophia had barely been able to contain herself while I talked to Nunez, and she’d confronted me the moment we were outside in the parking garage. I looked around carefully, checking to make sure there was no one else around to overhear us.
“No. For three reasons,” I went on before she could break in with an objection. “First, there’s no one else who can do your job, not yet. If you leave here for weeks, what do you think’s going to happen to the research? What are the glorified janitors you hired out of Amity going to do if the sonic fences break down and a fucking mastodon needs to be herded back into the reserve? Or a saber-tooth? Is Nunez going to bother to hunt down a stunner from your locker at the facility, or is he just going to shoot it?”
I could see the cracks in her resolve, but she wasn’t even close to giving up.
“You’re more important to me than the Revenants,” she said, slamming a fist into the side of the car. It felt good to hear, because the Revenant Forest Preserve was her whole life.
“Reason number two,” I went on, grateful that I’d actually managed to think up a reason number two, because neither one nor three would have done it alone. “What about your family? If anything happens to me, the only person I care about knowing it is you, and I think I can count on Cowboy to come and tell you. But if we both wind up getting killed, your parents will never know where you went or why you never came back. Do you really want to do that to them?”
“Munroe,” she insisted, grabbing me by the front of my jacket and pulling me around towards her, “you are my family.”
That felt good, too, but I could see more chunks falling away.
“That’s the last thing,” I told her, putting my hands on her arms and pulling her against my chest. “I’m a selfish prick,” I admitted. “Because I know how much it’s going to hurt you if anything happens to me, but all I can think about is how I would feel if you got killed because of me, because of a debt I owe.”
Her head sagged against my shoulder, the breath going out of her in a sigh. I could feel a shuddering go through her, and I realized with a start that she was sobbing. She hadn’t cried in front of me since the war. I kissed her forehead, stroking her hair.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I’m sorry, Sophie.”
Then she hauled back and hit me hard in the shoulder, rage and ferocity etched into her face beneath the tears.
“If you fucking get yourself killed, I’ll dig up your corpse and kill you again,” she growled. “Do you fucking understand me? You are not leaving me alone here.”
“I love you, too,” I said, rubbing the spot she’d punched.
She was still crying, and still angry, when she kissed me. I wanted to promise her I’d come back, but I’d never lied to her, and I didn’t want to start now.
Chapter Three
The inside-out world of Belial stretched out before me like a twisted wonderland of human debauchery and I remembered all in one rush why I’d left my old life behind. I stepped out of the lift I’d ridden here from the docking bay, moving aside to let others by behind me, staring like a tourist up the hub of the “blown” asteroid that was now the largest man-made construction in all of human space.
Some independent investors---back before the Corporate Council, when there had been such a thing---had taken a basically spherical, nickel-iron asteroid, drilled a narrow hole down its center, filled it with water and then exposed the thing to sunlight amplified by large mirrors. The resultant steam pressure produced a hollow tube of compressed ore, in this case nearly thirty meters thick. Spin was imparted to produce near one gravity at the lowest levels. The "open" ends were sealed by transplas, with reflectors mounted to provide natural sunlight, and a pair of huge docking rings were connected through the core with a non-spinning transport tube.
They’d left gaps between the hub and the innermost ring, so you could see basically all the way from one end of the station to the other in a mind-bending and balance-challenging view. The gravity this close to the hub was fairly light, and I saw thin, impossibly tall Belters and low-gravity natives striding quickly with their long, skinny legs as they searched out places to eat or do business or get their lightweight rocks off. I idly wondered if the sex dolls and prostitutes on this level were just as tall and skinny as their clients.
I shook that thought and the uncomfortable mental images that accompanied it out of my head and walked carefully to the next lift station, th
e one that went outward towards the lower levels. I’d been here once before, just after the war’s end, when I’d been searching out discreet and untraceable transportation back to Demeter. This time, I already had the transportation; Cowboy had left a ship docked for me here. What I was looking for now were passengers.
“You have room for maybe eight or nine on the boat,” Roger West had told me hanging on to the railing beside me as I’d taken a look at the small, delta-winged starship just a few minutes ago.
It had been one of the first generation of missile cutters from the Fleet Attack Command, produced just after the Battle for Mars had shown the weakness of our capital ships to assaults from Transition Drive warships. Superseded by more advanced models later in the war, it had been stripped of its armament and sold for surplus a year later, and there were hundreds more like it all over the Commonwealth. It was barely bigger than a cargo shuttle at a hundred meters long and half that wide, and it had the name “Wanderer” stenciled on its rounded, armored nose.
“If you want, you can fill her up with that many,” Cowboy had continued, “but I want you on Thunderhead in five hundred hours, whether it’s you and eight other people or just you. I transferred the files you asked for to your ‘link.”
“I saw that a couple of the people are right here on Belial,” I’d said, eyeing him suspiciously. “Did you know who I’d ask for, or was storing the boat here just a happy coincidence?”
He’d just grinned at that, in that not-quite-pleasant way of his. “The clearance codes for the Wanderer are on your ‘link too.” He’d glanced around to make sure no one else in the docking bay was close to us. “There’s another set of codes in there too. I’m leaving a little insurance policy in orbit around Thunderhead for you, geosynchronous over Freeport. It’s a kinetic strike package, totally stealthed so their anti-spacecraft sensors won’t pick it up. The atmospheric conditions make communications problematic though, so you’ll need a tight-beam laser uplink to use it, and you’ll only be able to do it once. Once it fires, the anti-spacecraft system will blow it out of orbit.”