“Slow down,” Daffyd urged. “It’s too crowded on this street but he’s coming up on the same alley he started from. We’ll incapacitate him once he’s out of the public eye.”
The protection money collector veered to the right, ducking into the same alleyway that Daffyd had been counting on.
“Civvies have no gods-damned sense,” Eddie mused, waving his hand across the vehicle’s control board, taking them into the alley. “Using the same route for ingress and egress?” He shoved his hand forward across the board and the vehicle surged, thumping with a muffled sound before halting.
“Monty’s hairy nuts!” Daffyd exclaimed. “What the hells are you playing at?”
“What?” Eddie looked back to Daffyd, gesturing out the windscreen. “You said incapacitate him.”
Daffyd held up a stun launcher that Orlowski had secured for them. “I was going to incapacitate him.”
“Uh uh,” the squadron commander contradicted. “You said we’ll incapacitate him.” He jabbed a finger at his chest. “Any attempt involving us as an aggregate would tend to indicate the use of our conveyance. It seemed the most efficient way for us both to incapacitate our target.”
“Tell me again why you’re here and not running your squadron?”
Eddie waved a hand. “Wanted to see the place,” he said. “and I’ve got good subordinates to mind the shop while I’m here…” He suddenly spun his head back around to the front.
“Looks like you’ll get the chance to use your launcher after all.” He nodded out the window. Their target was pulling himself down the alleyway by holding onto one of the conduits that ran along one the walls, hopping along on one foot.
“Tamade!” Daffyd pushed a slide switch forward and cracked his weapon open. He pulled out one of the tiny balls and waved a hand to open the side door. With a quick look up and down the alley, he stepped out and walked briskly up to the man. “Why the hurry?” he asked as he jabbed the ball against the small of the man’s back.
Tiny darts deployed as the pressure simulated a normal impact. They were enough to penetrate his clothes and embed in skin. Four thousand volts sent the man into spasms.
When the device was drained, Daffyd slipped it back into his pocket. Paul had been adamant that they leave no evidence behind. If Kinsey’s people found the ball at the abduction site, they’d realize they weren’t dealing with a rival syndicate. Imperial weapons indicated someone with a little more clout.
Eddie pulled up and helped secure the man before loading him in the back. “That was pretty easy,” he said, “but there are so many ways it could have gone horribly wrong…”
Daffyd climbed into the back seat and sat with his feet on their prisoner’s head. “Let’s just get back to HQ before a cop comes along. This crime-lord thing is risky as all hells.”
“Pfft,” Eddie responded, climbing behind the controls of their small mag vehicle. “Paul’s the crime-lord. You and me, we’re just his lowly foot-soldiers, putting in the time, hoping for a chance to move up the chain.”
“Whatever.” Daffyd leaned back and closed his eyes. “Let’s just get back to the ship.”
The Next Objective
Paul was on the bridge wing, looking out across the river at a stretch of the shoreline where several derelict buildings had been torn down. A crew was bringing in construction equipment to put up something new.
Daffyd leaned on the worn, but otherwise solid, wooden cap of the railing. Without weather, the station’s fixtures tended to last a lot longer and this freighter, though rusty along her waterline, was in very good shape otherwise.
It had been Daffyd who’d found her in a nearby derelict yard and got her propulsion back online. For the most part, freighters on Cerberus just had to load up and let the river take them where they needed to go. The engines were just there to maneuver in and out of docks, but they were good at keeping station offshore.
“You look like gavno,” Daffyd observed.
No answer.
Daffyd sighed. “You give a fella a compliment and all you get is the cold shoulder.”
Paul snorted. “I just wish we could see an end to all the fighting is all…”
“That happens for everybody,” Daffyd said quietly, “eventually. If you want peace, you need a bullet in your head cause strife is the gods-damned Human condition.”
He turned to lean on his left arm, looking over at Paul. “This is about you and the General, isn’t it? You’d like to settle down but you figure it’s too risky.”
Paul nodded, still looking out over the water.
“Well you better not get any silly ideas like running off to some remote world together,” Daffyd insisted. “If you do, you’ll still end up fighting the same battles, just on a different scale.” He chuckled. “Somebody like a local crime lord…”
“Speaking of which,” Paul mused, “we need to move this along so we can get back to the fleet.”
“We’ve got a prisoner,” he told Paul.
“Figured you would,” Paul said, still watching the shore. “You and Eddie are the only ones to bring anyone in so far.”
“At least it’ll let us move up the food chain.”
Paul nodded. “Still like to get a few more. Come at em from more than one direction. A couple of gunners from Dmitriy’s squadron are working an angle on a drug pusher up by the university. I think their chances are pretty good.”
“Are we pushing too hard too fast?” Daffyd voiced the concern that had been nagging at him since his arrival. “Won’t we spook Kinsey?”
Paul shook his head. “A group trying to muscle in wouldn’t just tickle him, they’d be going for maximum impact. They’d want to disrupt Kinsey’s cash flow and undermine his subordinates’ confidence in him.
“Have you ever seen something like that?” Paul nodded toward the riverbank.
“Like what?”
“Those guys are getting ready to fabricate buildings. Individual buildings.”
“We have stations like this back in the Imperium.”
“Sure, but less than a fraction of a percent of all Humans have ever seen them.” He looked at the engineer. “Have you?”
“No.”
“Making a standalone building with its own little purpose,” Paul mused. “Seems crazy, but it feels so much more natural.”
“It’s delightfully inefficient,” Daffyd said. “These colonies seem to exalt the individual, rather than making us all into cogs in some drab machine.”
“That’s exactly what I’ve been trying to put into words,” Paul turned from the view to grin at him. “The engineer philosopher!”
“Feihua!” Daffyd stepped away from the railing. “If you’re done torturing me, let’s get below and you can start in on our guest.” He headed for the stairs.
Their guest was conscious now. Trussed up from an overhead pipe, his head was hanging back, staring up at the cable runs and pipes above. His head jerked forward at the sound of approaching footsteps.
“Welcome aboard the Jolly Badger,” Paul said mildly with a nod toward Daffyd. “Don’t get me started. It was his idea.”
“I got her running so I get to pick the name.”
“And what the hells is a badger?”
“Beats me, just some old origin-world fairy tale creature.” Daffyd pulled a chair over to the wall where he could lean back. “Y’know, like the Toe Fairy.”
Paul looked over to the prisoner as he slipped a knife from his sleeve holster. “Can you imagine having to work with this guy? The nonsense he comes up with.” He waved the knife carelessly, the prisoner’s eyes focussing on it. “Just yesterday, he was telling us about a date with this woman…”
He darted a glance at Daffyd. “This time you’re sure it was a woman, right?”
“Oh, for the love of the gods!” Daffyd raised his voice, jumping into the improvisation with ease. “That was just the once. How the hells was I to know what that district was all about? I’d never been to that world before.”
Paul turned a longsuffering gaze back to the prisoner. “You really can’t tell this guy anything,” he complained, bringing the knife back up in front of the man’s face, waving it to emphasize his points. “Rim worlds are safe enough, if you go to the local MP outpost and get a briefing. They really don’t mind if it saves them the trouble of pulling some dumbass out of a hermaphroditic brothel.”
“I believe you said don’t mention it, at the time,” Daffyd groused, “and here I am, listening to you mention it.”
For a completely made up event, the story was in serious danger of taking on a life of its own.
“I never said I wouldn’t mention it.” Paul grinned at the prisoner. “But we’re being rude to our guest.” He slid the tip of the knife into the man’s right nostril. “I have simple questions,” he said softly, “and they have simple answers. I should warn you, before you consider playing this the hard way, that I can stand a considerable amount of pain.”
“You mean when you’re inflicting it, right?” Daffyd asked.
Paul shrugged. “Well, yeah. I figured that went without saying.” He pressed the tip of the blade against the inner side of the nostril. “So how’s it going to be? Do you feel like answering a few simple questions?”
There was very little apparent danger in agreeing with such a simple question. There was no actual information being given up yet, so the man made the most likely response.
“OK.”
Once you start talking, a good interrogator can milk you dry. If you start talking with an affirmative like yes or ok, it just speeds things up even more.
“What’s your name?”
“Frank.”
“Did you grow up on the station?”
“Yes.”
“Who do you work for?”
“What?” The man’s eyes grew wide. “Are you kidding me? We never see him; he probably doesn’t even exist. You’re wasting… Aghhh!” He jerked his head away turning the cut Paul had made to the inside of the nose into a clean slice all the way through.
“Ah,” Paul remonstrated, “now that’s mostly on you. I was just putting a little cut on the inside to warn you. No external damage to scare off the ladies, but you had to jerk your head…”
“You said if I answered your questions, it would go easier for me.” The prisoner was breathing rapidly.
“Not if you’re going to piss in my pocket.” Paul leaned in, his face now six inches away from his prisoner’s. “I asked you a simple question and you tried to muddy the waters with talk about the leader of your syndicate.”
He slid the knife into the other nostril. “Who gives you your marching orders? After you’re done robbing your victims of their credits, where do you take the chip?”
Frank’s eyes darted to the side.
Paul was reasonably sure another attempt at misdirection was in the offing. “You want us to turn that pretty nose into a pig snout?”
“What the hells is a pig?” Daffyd asked from his perch behind Paul.
“It’s the animal that pork comes from,” Paul said over his shoulder.
“Really?” The front chair legs hit the deck. “There’s an actual animal? I always thought it was just engineered from Human tissue.”
“That’s disgusting!” Paul removed the knife and turned to face Daffyd. “You thought you were eating Human tissue?”
“No,” Daffyd corrected, “I never ate the stuff because I thought it would make me a cannibal.”
“Oh sure,” Paul nodded. “Hard to make friends if you’re always trying to take a bite out of them.”
“Would have been useful right now, though. Hey?” Daffyd chuckled. “I could’ve started at the feet and worked my way up till he talked.”
“You guys are messed up,” Frank complained, “and you’re in way over your head. We’ve got Marines calling the shots. Some real grade-A hard cases and you wanna muscle in on them? I’ll tell you whatever you want, but I’d forget the whole thing, if I were you.”
Paul hid his relief. The station was a big place. With more than six-hundred square kilometers of useable space, there was room for more than one crime syndicate. They were pretty sure they’d set up in the middle of Kinsey’s territory, but confirmation never hurt.
“Marines!” Paul acted impressed. “Saying, for a moment, that we believe you,” he added sarcastically, “there should be no danger to your bosses in telling me where to find them, right? It’s not like we’re going to get the upper hand against real Marines!” He looked over and shared a laugh with Daffyd.
“How much you wanna bet the Toe Fairy works for them too?” Daffyd asked.
“Don’t say I didn’t tell you,” Frank warned.
“Y’know, I’m starting to like this guy,” Paul said. He turned to the prisoner. “C’mon, Frank. Answer time. Help me fight my deep-seated urge to use blades on folks.”
“Alright,” Frank blurted, eyes back on the blade. “The daily collections for this sector go to Seamus – I swear I don’t know his last name – at his pub on the corner of Liberty and Coleson.”
“Its name?”
“Place is called Your Name Here.”
“Inventive,” Paul remarked. “What kind of muscle at the bar?”
“Usually three Marines,” he said. “One out front, acting like your average barfly, two in the back, where the credit chips are held.”
“All in plainclothes?”
A nod.
“And when do they take it to the next guy in the chain?”
A pause. “First day of the week.”
“You realize that if you steer us wrong, here, and we don’t come back, somebody’s gonna make slippers out of your ass cheeks?” Daffyd added.
A nod.
He didn’t look particularly alarmed at the prospect, so Paul figured he’d been telling the truth. “Nothing you’d like to recant or adjust at all?” He spread his hands out. “No penalties at this point, if you’ve been bullshitting me and decide to come clean.”
“No need to lie,” Frank said simply. “Just make sure you carry a holo eye, or something, so your people know I didn’t lie. Those Marines are gonna hammer your bones flat.”
“We’ve faced Marines before,” Paul said mildly. “Isn’t that so?”
“Technically,” Daffyd corrected, “Frank, here, is facing one right now.”
“What do you mea… Hey!” Frank twisted his head in a vain attempt to avoid Paul’s right hand. Strong fingers grasped his jaw.
“Hold still,” he ordered, tossing the knife on the floor and reaching out to Daffyd for a small dispensing nozzle.
“What is that?”
“Prison yard sutures. Don’t worry,” Paul soothed. “This glue is industrial strength.”
Frank seemed on the edge of screaming as Paul ran a thin bead of the adhesive along the outer edge of the cut in his nose. “Yeah, it stings,” Paul admitted, “but warning you really wouldn’t have helped. You’d just be more likely to twitch.”
He guided the edges of the cut together, holding them so the glue could bond. “You ever see this done when you were locked up on Mictlan?” he asked Daffyd.
A headshake.
Frank seemed to forget all about the pain in his nose. “You did time in Mictlan?” His voice had taken on a nasal quality that he hoped wasn’t permanent, but his sense of alarm quickly overrode his concern. He’d been assuming he was being held by a bunch of misguided fools. The kind of people who’d never last two micros in a fight with Marines. If one of them was a Marine himself and the other had managed to survive in the Imperium’s most notorious super-max prison… well… that changed a few equations.
“What’s the story with his leg?” Paul asked.
“Bad sprain, but it’ll mend,” Daffyd told him. He sighed at the look on Paul’s face. “Eddie hit him with the car before I could use the stunner.”
“Hmmm…”
“What?”
“Not a bad call, really. If you’d fired the stunner, there’d be tiny
scorch marks on the walls and pavement from the balls that missed.”
“Bozhemoi! Not you too?”
“That should have occurred to me earlier,” Paul admitted. “Stunners should be last resort and, even then, single ball if possible. Too much evidence, otherwise.”
“That’s what I did,” Daffyd told him, “eventually. He started hauling himself down the alley, so I gave him a jolt.”
“You’re a tough bastard, aren’t you?” Paul grinned at the prisoner. “C’mon. Let’s get him onto a cot. He’ll have to stay here till we’re done. Then you need to hit the stores. I’ve got a schematic for you to work on.”
Let’s Be Hasty
“There they are,” the sensor tech said with quiet urgency. Though there was no need to speak loudly in the cramped confines of their Hasty Ferret he did so out of reflex. The enemy was only a few thousand kilometers away from their lone scout ship. “Two cruisers, five frigates.”
“So they’re finally adapting their tactics to compensate for General Urbica’s ambushes,” the pilot/commander mused. “Trying to make themselves a harder target.”
The sensor tech cursed softly. “Ain’t right, ‘Vampire’, leaving those poor bastards to the Grays…” A holo display in the center of their windowless craft showed a horde of Gray shuttles moving between their ships and a Human freighter.
Vampire chuckled. “Send what we’ve got, ‘Fungus’, and don’t you worry about leaving anyone,” he insisted. “The old man might look at the numbers and call it all off, but the General knows what we can do. Hells, our three heavy gunboats alone could run ‘em off. They might only have two thirds the displacement of a Gray cruiser but they’ve got twice the mass. Gunboat armor can shrug off the biggest nukes the Grays deploy.”
Though both Windemere and Urbica were of the same rank, everybody in the fleet knew who the General was.
“There’s also our antimatter rounds. One good AM hit on a Gray cruiser can rip her open, once you get past the shields.”
The sensor tech sent the signal back to the open wormhole, well beyond a Gray cruiser’s maximum detection range.
He looked down at a pulsing icon in the holo display. “Looks like we’re lit up,” he reported calmly. “No sign of any change in activity yet, though.”
The Gray Matter (Rebels and Patriots Book 3) Page 19