Beginnings-eARC

by David Weber

  Unfortunately, Brandão was almost certainly right, he reflected gloomily. The power receptor was an ancient unit, and the one moving part most likely to fail was the tracking unit that moved it from powersat to powersat as the satellites moved across the heavens.

  “How's the auxiliary?” he asked, and Brandão shrugged.

  “Kicked in automatically,” he admitted. “It's carrying the entire load with a thirty percent reserve.”

  Manischewitz nodded. Brandão's current post was in the kitchen, monitoring the camera system they'd installed to watch the grounds. He'd tried a motion-sensor net first, but that had been a diaster, given the amount (and size) of the local wildlife, so they'd fallen back on visual imagery, instead. He wasn't happy about the change, but as Ardmore had pointed out, their real security depended on not having anyone come looking in the first place. It wasn't like they were going to have the personnel or the firepower to fight off a full bore commando raid, after all.

  They'd put the primary monitoring post in the kitchen because it had been simpler to piggyback it onto the lodge's existing environmental and services monitor, and that had been located in the kitchen by some previous owner. There were drawbacks to the arrangement, since the kitchen had only one set of windows and the greenhouses on that side of the lodge blocked anything someone might have seen out of them. Still, it worked, and it meant Brandão had been in the right place to check the other systems when the receptor went down.

  And at least the auxiliary power system, unlike the power receptor, was practically brand new. It was also rated to keep the entire lodge up and running for a minimum of one planetary week, so there was no immediate problem. Even assuming they couldn't repair whatever was wrong with the receptor out of their own resources—which was unlikely, given the skill set of his team—they had several days before they had to worry about getting a repair crew out here.

  “Hopefully it's just a reset,” he said now. “If it's more than that, send Sawney in to tell me how bad it is when he gets back.”

  “Gotcha.”

  Brandão nodded and closed the door behind him, and Manischewitz turned back to his paperwork.

  * * *

  Sawney Sugimoto grumbled under his breath as he trudged across to the power receptor.

  He didn't often agree with Brandão, but this time the asshole had been right; the damn thing should've been replaced before they bought the place. Not that it was surprising it hadn't been. Power receptors were like roofs; people didn't worry them . . . until they broke or started leaking. And to be fair, receptors were pretty damned rugged, built to designs that were mostly at least two or three hundred years old and about as reliable as hardware got. He just hoped it was something fairly simple, because if the tracking unit was shot they'd have to pull the entire thing, and he had a pretty fair notion who was likely to get stuck with the grunt work on that one. Just like he had a pretty good idea how he'd just happened to be chosen to go check out the problem in the first place. Just like Brandão to pick him for the job! Could he have chosen Mönch, or Grazioli, or Zepeda? No, he'd had to pick Sugimoto, even if he'd been—no, because he'd been—the outside man farthest away from the receptor. Of course, Mönch was an old buddy of his, wasn't he? Couldn't have Mönch getting his arse up out of his comfortable chaise lounge and actually doing some work, could he? Especially not if he could send Sugimoto to do it, instead. It was the kind of petty, pain-in-the-arse, I'll-get-even trick Brandão specialized in, and one of these days. . . .

  He reached the receptor shed and leaned his pulse rifle against the wall beside the door as he punched in the lock combination. None of the previous owners had ever bothered to change the combination from the default 1-2-3-4 setting, and frankly, Sugimoto couldn't imagine any reason why they would have. Or why they'd bothered to put a lock on the door in the first place, for that matter! Power receptors weren't exactly cheap, but stolen units weren't likely to bring in big credits, and they were big, heavy, and hard to move. Why anybody would—

  The door opened, and Sawney Sugimoto's eyes widened in astonishment. There was a hole in the shed's back wall—a big hole, one that went almost all the way from ceiling to floor. It was almost two meters wide, as if someone had carved the wall's tough composite with a vibro bl—

  A hand reached out from one side and caught the front of his tunic. It yanked him into the shed, spun him around as if he'd weighed less than nothing, and an arm like a bar of iron went across his throat from behind. He reacted automatically, driving his right heel back, reaching for the forearm across his throat with his right hand while his left shot back behind him, fingers clawing for the eyes of whoever that forearm belonged to.

  A wrecking ball hammered his right calf as his assailant drove a booted foot into it, smashing down from above, just below the knee. Something popped in the joint with a white-hot explosion of pain, and what would have been a scream turned into a high-pitched, nasal whine as the forearm cut off his breath. His scrabbling left hand found nothing, and then he froze as a hand the size of a small shovel fastened on the back of his head. He recognized that hold, and his assailant's obvious strength was terrifying. A couple of kilos of pressure, and his cervical vertebrae would snap like a dry stick.

  “That's better,” a deep, quiet, terrifyingly calm voice said behind him. “Now lose the gunbelt with your left hand. And keep the right hand right where I can see it. I'd hate to have to break your neck before we have a chance to get to know each other.”

  * * *

  “Tracking unit's back online,” Riley Brandão said, poking his head back into Manischewitz' office. “Everything green on the diagnostic board.”

  Brandão sounded moderately disappointed, Manischewitz noted, but he nobly forbore to comment on it. Instead, he simply nodded.

  “Talk to Sawney at shift change. Find out what he had to do to get it back up and see if we really do need to go ahead and replace it. I don't want anybody out here in the next couple of weeks if we can help it, though.”

  “Gotcha,” Brandão said again and withdrew once more.

  * * *

  Alfred Harrington listened to the hum of the tracking unit, moving the receptor back into alignment after he'd removed the old-fashioned screwdriver he'd used to jam it, while he regarded his unconscious captive through bleak, hard eyes. He still knew entirely too little about what the hell was going on, yet he knew a lot more than the he'd known ten minutes ago. He wished there was time to gather still more information, but there wasn't. His prisoner hadn't wanted to cooperate, and Alfred wasn't about to put any childlike faith in the accuracy of what he'd said, but the other man had changed his mind about keeping his mouth shut when Alfred levered his left arm up behind his back until his shoulder joint separated. The Deneb Accords would have had a little something to say to Gunny Harrington about methods of interrogation if his prisoner had been a member of any recognized military organization. Not that that thought bothered him at the moment . . . and not that he was dealing with any recognized military organization.

  The pulse rifle his prisoner had been carrying was a powerful, high-capacity magazine military weapon, however. That alone would have been enough to convince Alfred that the current owners of the lodge weren't the innocent and law-abiding civilians they obviously wanted people to think they were. The pulser holstered at the man's belt would have been another indication in the same direction. And although he hadn't admitted it in so many words, even when Alfred twisted that dislocated shoulder, what he had admitted made it fairly clear who Alfred was dealing with.

  Manpower. His nostrils flared, and he felt the monster stir, testing its chains as he remembered Clematis. Manpower, again. What could Manpower want with Allison Chou? What could possibly make her important enough for Manpower to risk an operation here? The entire galaxy knew about the searing mutual hatred between Beowulf and Mesa, and Manpower's operatives could have very few illusions about what would happen to them at the hands of the Beowulfan court system . . . assum
ing they got as far as the court system.

  Unfortunately, he didn't have time to get more complete information out of his prisoner. They were bound to miss the man sooner or later, and probably sooner. The Manpower thug knew that as well as Alfred did, and he'd obviously been trying to play for time. He'd admitted that they'd grabbed Allison as part of some sort of extortion plot, although he'd also claimed he didn't know who the object of the extortion was. That was entirely possible—Alfred would have kept the operational details as closely held as he could if he'd been planning something like this—but it was also entirely possible the man had been lying. Trying to give up just enough information to satisfy Alfred's questions while he stalled until someone else came looking for him. That was why Alfred had given himself only ten minutes to ask questions. What he had at the end of that time was all he was going to get, and that was one reason he'd been as . . . insistent as he had.

  His virtual tour of the lodge's layout had allowed him to catch his prisoner in two lies, and the pain he'd applied when he did had probably convinced the other man to be at least reasonably truthful. It had been hard to stop with mere pain. The monster was rousing again, and the repeated bursts of agony—and the sense of fading awareness—coming to him through whatever linked him to Allison had made it even harder. But now he had to decide what to do before he moved on, and he touched the hilt of the vibro blade. It had sliced through the synthetic composite of the shed wall like a knife through butter; a human throat would be far easier to cut.

  Alfred's nostrils flared and his fingers tightened around the hilt. The need to remove the unconscious thug from the face of the galaxy quivered in those fingers, and the hot, sweet taste was back in his mouth, made hotter and sweeter still by his own sense of desperation as those thunderbolts of someone else's hopeless pain and terror ripped through him. It would be the easiest thing in the world to do, and anyone who gave his services to Manpower—anyone prepared to help kidnap and torture Allison Chou—had already paid for his own ticket to hell.

  But Alfred Harrington wasn't a Manpower thug. He was—he had to be—better than that, because if he wasn't . . .

  He snarled in frustration and reached for the roll of tape in the toolbox on the receptor shed's supply shelf.

  * * *

  Giuseppe Ardmore made himself step back and switch off the neural whip. It was hard, and he licked his lips, savoring the rich, addictive delight of handing out pain. Of inflicting pain, especially on someone like this bitch. Benton-Ramirez y Chou's sister. Oh, that made it especially sweet as he remembered New Denver! But he had to be careful. Manischewitz would be pissed if he killed her too quickly. Ardmore could have lived with that—Manischewitz would get over it, in time—but he didn't want to kill her too quickly, either. He wanted to keep her alive for as long as he could, and he looked forward to using more traditional methods to help motivate her brother.

  He clipped the neural whip to his belt and stepped over to the recording unit trained on the nearly naked young woman in the middle of the room. Watching the imagery and listening to the audio would be almost as good as doing it all over again, he thought, and it would be a very good idea to be sure he'd stayed out of the camera's field of view himself. Manischewitz was right about what could be teased out of even fragmentary images, although no one was likely to get much from a gloved hand wielding a neural whip. Best to be positive about that, though.

  He gave his semiconscious victim another glance before he hit the replay button. He'd been very careful with the setting on the neural whip, making certain it was set just low enough to avoid any permanent damage to her nervous system, but her skin was mottled with dark, angry marks and her muscles continued to jerk and quiver uncontrollably wherever the whip had kissed. He'd made sure to record a full minute of that after he switched the whip off. Might as well give her brother proof of how high it had been set, after all.

  * * *

  Alfred was grateful that the ravine had gotten him as far as the power receptor unseen, but there was no convenient fold in the ground between the receptor's shed and the main lodge building. He eased the door back open a crack, looking through it, and his jaw tightened. His prisoner hadn't lied about at least one thing, he thought, considering the man reclining on the chase lounge. The lounge was a good sixty meters from his present position, at an angle from the shortest line between the shed and the lodge, parked beside an outside table with a sun umbrella. The man in it didn't look to be the most alert sentry in the history of mankind—there was what looked suspiciously like a beer bottle on the table at his elbow, and Alfred knew what he would have had to say if one of his perimeter guards had decided to park his arse in the shade instead of staying alert and on the move—but he could scarcely miss seeing a two-meter tall stranger sauntering across the lawn.

  On the other hand, he was sitting down, wasn't he? Presumably the rest of his team knew him well enough to expect him to be doing just that. And the cushioned back of the chase lounge was higher than his head and the chase lounge itself faced away from the lodge. Not only that, but the clouds were closer, the temperature had dropped slightly, and the wind had picked up even farther, churning the trees around the lodge with a soft, multi-voiced roar and murmur like ocean surf. All of which suggested . . .

  The Descorso was a comfortable, familiar weight in his hand. He gripped the shed's doorframe in his left hand, pressing his elbow lightly against the half-open door as he turned his forearm into a rock-steady rest. He laid the pulser's long barrel across that forearm, brought the sight's red dot down until it rested directly between the seated guard's eyes.

  His own eyes were very calm very, still, and the monster purred within him. He inhaled, let half the air trickle back out of his lungs, and squeezed.

  * * *

  Riley Brandão finished building his ham and cheese sandwich, snagged the open bottle of beer from the counter at his elbow, and settled back down in front of the surveillance system. Technically, he was supposed to stay glued to the display, watching it with steely-eyed attention as if the fate of the universe depended upon it. Actually, nobody could get anywhere near the lodge without passing through one of the outside men's field of view and it was past lunchtime, so it was fortunate the universe had been able to get along without him for two or three minutes.

  He chuckled at the thought and double checked the household diagnostics panel, just to make sure the damned receptor hadn't stopped working all over again. It hadn't, although he questioned how much longer that would be true. Overaged piece of crap, that was what it was, and Manischewitz should have listened to him about it in the first place. He felt a mild glow of satisfaction at having his estimate of its decrepit condition confirmed, but he wondered idly why Sugimoto hadn't already reported back on what had caused the problem.

  Probably still bitching about getting sent out to check it in the first place, he thought and snorted in amusement. He and Sugimoto didn't much like each other, and he was pretty sure the other man had figured out why Brandão had chosen him for the job. Serves him right. Brandão grinned. Bastard thinks he's such a killer ladies' man? Right—sure he is! If he hadn't come sailing in with that stack of credits . . .

  He chewed a mouthful of ham and Swiss cheese and reminded himself that it was small-minded to dwell on past grievances. But that was all right with him. He was as small-minded as it got when it came to women, and Sugimoto had known that when he horned in. Good old Sawney still had plenty to make up for in Brandão's book, and he was sure ample opportunities to make Sugimoto's life miserable would present themselves. He swallowed and reached for his beer, reflecting on the grievance in question. That prick Ardmore had probably put Sugimoto up to it, for that matter. Of course, it was safer to get even with Sugimoto than with Ardmore, but someday he'd get around to—

  As it happened, Riley Brandão was wrong about that.

  He was just bringing the beer bottle to his lips when the kitchen door opened behind him. The lodge had been built with de
liberately rustic and archaic internal features, and its doors were old-fashioned, manually operated things with actual knobs and hinges. Brandão's beer hovered in mid-air, just short of his mouth, and his eyebrows started to rise. He didn't know what he'd heard—or sensed—from behind him. Perhaps it was the latch turning, perhaps it was the squeak of the hinge or simply air moving as the door opened. Brandão didn't know, and he never found out.

  Alfred Harrington pushed the door open with his toe, and the pulse rifle Sawney Sugimoto no longer required came down like a pile driver. Its butt smashed into to the back of Brandão's skull and crushed his occiput like an egg shell.

  * * *

  Alfred stood half-crouched, head and ears cocked. His eyes never even flickered as the man he'd just killed slid bonelessly out of the chair to the floor. The corpse's head hit the floor with a thud and blood pooled, spreading out across the tile, sending tendrils oozing like thick, crimson tentacles. There was no expression at all on Alfred's face as they spread, but his nostrils flared, and he made himself wait, listening for any sound, any movement.

  There was none, and after a moment, he straightened. His virtual tour of the lodge had told him where the kitchen was, and Sugimoto had “volunteered” the information that the external sensor net—such as it was, and what there was of it—had been wired into the household systems monitoring station. He'd been far from certain about trusting any of Sugimoto's information, but a quick look around showed him it had been accurate . . . this far, at least. But there were at least eight more men in and around the lodge, and there was only one of him.