Flashpoint (Hellgate)

by Mel Keegan

  But Travers’s head was shaking slowly. “Richard or Barb show their faces down there, and there’ll be blood.”

  “So … don’t,” Hubler said through a mouthful of food. “You and Marin talk the man to a deal. Or maybe he’d cut cards with van Donne.”

  “Me?” For a long moment van Donne glared at Hubler as if he wondered if Roark were joking. But Hubler was dead serious, and at length van Donne said acidly, “I only caught a ride out of Halfway. I’m not part of this roadshow, never signed any contract with Harrison fucking Shapiro!”

  “But,” Vaurien mused, “you might subcontract. You said it yourself. Name a price, Sergei. I know what Shapiro can afford to pay.”

  Again van Donne hesitated, as if trying to see the snare that was being set for him. It was Ramon – slithery as an eel, quick as a snake, trained on the street in the bowels of Marak City – who said, “Easy money, Sergei, and a job you can do sitting on your ass, drinking beer. You walk in there and say some bleeding heart colonial republican wants to buy the slaves that were lifted off the Shanghai, and Belczak’ll listen to you. For all he knows, you could be working for some Daku wanker like Robert Chandra Liang. This is exactly the kind of damn’ fool business he’d be behind. Because you know half the kids who were lifted of the old Shanghai were conscripted from Velcastra and Jagreth. A hundred moms and pops want their kids back. Makes sense, babe.”

  It seemed van Donne had come to respect Ramon’s opinion. The younger man was just as hard, as lean and hungry as van Donne would have been ten or even twenty years before. Ramon was walking the same road, and doing it with a style Sergei obviously admired, though he seldom let the admiration show through.

  “Name your price,” Vaurien invited. “Subcontract via me, take Shapiro’s money … so?”

  “My price,” van Donne mused. “I’ll take the Ulrand fee over again.”

  “Too rich for riding down there with Asako and sitting on your butt talking to another pedigree bastard,” Jazinsky said tartly. “A tenth of the Ulrand fee would still be high.”

  “Fifteen percent,” van Donne said acerbically. “Or you can go down and talk a deal yourself. I don’t need this job. And I sure as hell don’t need to put myself in Henri Belczak’s line of fire. You want me? Pay me.”

  The demand was outrageous, but Marin would have expected it. This was the man who had run guns between the Reagan de la Courte company and the government of Omaru, and cheated both parties. A mercenary who had dealt with Fleet blackmarket smugglers on one hand and Freespacer trash on the other, and was still alive against the odds.

  For a long moment Vaurien seemed to weigh the cost of the job, and though Jazinsky was still inclined to object, he lifted one long-fingered hand to forestall the argument. “All right. You have a deal, Sergei. You show Belczak a face he knows and trusts, because you’re all the same breed of double-crossing slime. You open the gate for negotiations … and then you back off and let Neil and Curtis broker the deal.”

  A smile twisted van Donne’s wide mouth, though it did not touch his eyes. “Why do I get the feeling this is the tip of the iceberg?”

  “Because it is,” Hubler snorted. “But for that kind of money, van Donne, you can do a little work.”

  He made a good point, which van Donne conceded. “All right. So it all comes down to you, lady.” He was looking at Rodman now. “You call him, you get us into the mansion, face to face with Henri Belczak himself.”

  The chair creaked under her weight as she sat back, finished eating now and cradling a glass. “You reckon you’ll come out of this owing me a favor, Richard?”

  “Yeah,” Vaurien agreed, “I will. And I’m still waiting to hear what stuff you need, aside from an AI core.”

  “The Weimann ignition sequencers were fried,” she said sourly. “No chance of getting anything like that in Ulrand. The hardware can’t be manufactured insystem. Has to be shipped in, and with the war making a mess of every supply chain … no joy.” She looked from Vaurien to Jazinsky and back again.

  “You’re in luck,” Jazinsky said with wry humor. “Several of the ships that limped out of Ulrand didn’t make it far. A couple wound up as salvage. We can get what you need. A week or two, max.”

  The drive sequencers could easily be cannibalized. Weimann systems were the same on every ship, since every nut and bolt issued from the Weimann company itself. Marin relaxed as he saw the deal starting to come together. “So it’s down to somebody making a call.” He filled a glass with a light, blond wine and sat back, one thigh lying warmly along Travers’s.

  “You want I should give the old bastard a hoy right now?” Rodman offered. “It’s all the same to me. He wants to sell me a ship, so he’s talking to me … I’m not buying, but he doesn’t know that.”

  “Call him,” Vaurien said tersely. He was looking directly into van Donne’s ice blue eyes. “Get your gear together, if you’re riding down on the Hong Lung. You too, Neil, Curtis.”

  Before van Donne could speak, Ramon was on his feet. “Not without me, Sergei,” he warned. “You still have a hard time standing up straight, and I know enough about Henri Belczak to know you’ll need eyes in the back of your head. You’re not up to that, babe, not yet.”

  Halfway to his feet in Ramon’s wake, the Mako’s copilot made similar noises. One pale hand fell on van Donne’s shoulder. “Count the both of us in.”

  The blond head rotated to look up and back at the pair of them. “Know what you’re getting yourselves into.”

  Not one syllable had slithered by Ramon unmarked. “I’ve met Belczak a couple of times – Halfway, Ulrand, whatever. He’s a cast-iron bastard. He knows my face, he knows yours. Has no reason to distrust either of us … and no reason to trust us. We’re going to walk off Rodman’s ship uninvited, with a couple of unknown quantities in tow.” He nodded at Marin and Travers. “If it rubs the old man the wrong way, there’ll be trouble.”

  On the other side of the table, Vaurien groaned and massaged his temples. “Why don’t I know this Belczak character?”

  Rodman pushed up out of the chair and drained a last glass. The bottle of Irish, still half full, slid into one long inside pocket of the battered leather jacket. “Because he’s come up fast in the months since you … legitimized. Promotion through assassination.”

  “Meaning, he murdered his way to the top,” Jazinsky observed.

  “Freespacer crews are wild,” Hubler said with a grunt of effort as he heaved himself back onto the biocyber limbs and stood swaying for just a moment, hunting for his balance. “The only reason I’m out here is, I’m through with Fleet and bloody Shapiro. The last time I expect to see Borushek is when I go to get my legs put back, and then – I’m out and gone.”

  “The both of us are, kid,” Rodman breathed.

  Something in her tone caught Marin’s attention. “You two...?”

  For a moment Hubler seemed about to deny it, and then shrugged the big shoulders defensively. “Never intended it, but what the hell? I just signed on to get a ride away from Fleet. Turns out we’re … okay together. And we both want the same deal.”

  “To get out,” Rodman said darkly, “before the war starts. And not be caught up in some half-assed Freespacer action, the way Belczak’s left a trail of bodies behind him on his way to the mansion on Celeste. And not to be snuffed in one of these weird-ass disasters that seem to be happening right across the frontier.” She did not have to feign a shudder. “Whatever’s going on, Christ alone knows, but a lot of us are wondering if Arago or Murchison needs to do a product recall on the big colony generators. They’re imploding every couple of weeks lately, and – goddamn, it’s not safe in the outlying colonies anymore.

  An electric sense of dread crackled through the room. Marin and Travers had been on their way out to pick up weapons. Both turned back and looked into the mask-like faces of Vaurien and Jazinsky. No one was moving, as if Rodman’s words had frozen them all in place. Only Tully Ingersol managed to reanimate himself,
pulling on a pale gray jacket which was messy with the patches and badges of the Wastrel, the Wings of Freedom, the Earthlight, and several other ships.

  He cleared his throat, noisy in the sudden quiet. “You, uh, had some news, Asako?”

  She could hardly have failed to notice the sudden silence. “Yeah. It came through this morning, shiptime … you didn’t know? Takashozu Field 9 is suddenly just gone. And that’s the third one in two weeks.”

  “Thirty thousand people on Takashozu,” Hubler added. “Makes something like sixty, eighty thousand people vaporized lately, and if it turns out to be a system fault in the colony generators – man, I wouldn’t want to own stock in Murchison.”

  “Murchison stock’s been tanking on markets as far back as the homeworlds,” Jazinsky said quietly.

  “Now you know why.” Rodman sounded brash, but it was a cover. “You know this makes fifteen, sixteen colonies wiped out in the last six months? And most of them lately. And all of them around Hellgate.” She glared at Vaurien. “How dumb do you think us old Freespacers are? We know something’s going on, Richard, and it ain’t our shit –”

  “Nor ours,” Vaurien muttered.

  “– so whose is it?” Rodman finished.

  Again the silence lingered until Marin wondered if Vaurien or Jazinsky was about to tell them the truth. The outlying colonies were big, dirty, noisy, swarming with heavy industry, making bright places in the heavens which were guaranteed to draw the attention of the Zunshu. And one by one they were being extinguished.

  Even though Marin knew the truth of the Resalq history, three colonies in two weeks was too much, too soon, and a chill rushed through him as he stepped out of the crew lounge. Travers was a pace behind him, and when they were out of earshot he said softly,

  “I have to call Mark. You know what I’m thinking.”

  The same thought was on Travers’s mind. “That the automata in that stasis chamber we opened did get a signal out –”

  “We know they did.” Marin heard the cold of dread in his own voice. “And you know what’s happening now.” He looked up the hand’s span of difference in their height, into Travers’s face. “Stasis chambers are waking up right across the frontier, and there isn’t one more thing the colonies can do about it than the Resalq could ever do. They were destroyed, and now it’s happening to us.”

  Zunshu.

  The word was like slivers of ice in his guts. The Zunshu were the reason for Dendra Shemiji. They were the death knell for the Resalq, first with the great world-killing weapons, later with the squads of automata, designed to look and move and sound exactly like the ancestral Resalq, get among them, penetrate the hearts of the Resalq colonies and –

  “I have to call Mark,” Marin repeated.

  “He’s got to know.” Travers moved swiftly to catch up. “He gets data feeds from a hundred better sources than anything Rodman can access.”

  He was right, and Marin forced a breath into his lungs. “I guess I need to hear it from him. Hear him say that Dendra Shemiji is mobilizing now, the way it used to. Doing something.”

  “And Mark’s going to want you back,” Travers said sharply as they stepped into their quarters and the door slid over, locked. “You’re one of the best Dendra Shemiji has left … and there’s not enough of you, now, to do the work properly. There’s too many human colonies, and it’s been too long since the last wave of Zunshu automata.”

  The Deep Sky had been quiet for so long, Dendra Shemiji had dwindled away into an elite security bureau, providing the services of the covert assassin when every other appeal to justice had failed. They were not well suited, now, to the work of hunting, tracking and destroying automata, and Travers was right. Humans had proliferated out here, so rapidly that they now vastly outnumbered the Resalq even at the height of their civilization. Dendra Shemiji was a handful of individuals like Marin, like Mark himself. It could never be enough.

  Marin sighed as he looked into the blue-green murk of the idling threedee and saw several messages waiting there. They would have come through the DeepSky data conduit in the same pulse as the news Rodman had received. One carried the ID tags of Shapiro’s office. The second was from Mark Sherratt.

  “You can only pick the colonies you know you can protect, and do your best for them,” he said regretfully as he sat on the corner of the bed and leaned over to wave a hand through the threedee, bringing it to life. “The rest? Evacuate, if you can. If you can’t …”

  The mattress dipped as Travers sat down behind him, and Neil’s big arms were about him a moment later. Marin leaned back against him, grateful for the warmth, and closed his eyes for a moment, perhaps to settle his belly, before he said to the threedee,

  “Play the messages, Etienne. Mark Sherratt’s first.”

  The screen blanked for a moment before Mark’s face appeared, and Marin recognized the backdrop. He was aboard the Carellan Djerun, dressed in the colorful garb of his own people, and behind him was his own cabin, decorated in Resalq things, the colors and forms and whims of his people. How often had Marin slept there, safe in the arms of one who was so old, and who knew so much, it seemed at times that he knew everything and could do everything. No one knew better than Curtis how mortal and fallible Mark Sherratt actually was, but even now – or especially now – he turned to the man as if he yearned for salvation.

  “Curtis.” Mark’s voice was deep, rich, level. “You’ll have had the news by now, I should think, and if you haven’t … well, there’s no easy way to break it. Three fringe colonies have been annihilated. The largest was Takashozu Field 9, with more than thirty thousand human souls. The others were further out, exploration camps, smaller, less than a thousand people on each. They’re coming thick and fast now, these ‘disasters.’ And you’ll have reasoned why.

  “We knew at once, the stasis chamber on Kjorin transmitted a strong signal before we could shut it down. We knew there would have to be repercussions, and there’s no surprise in what’s happening now.” He looked away, and then back into the vid pickup. “It’s Zunshu automata. I haven’t seen the like of this since before humans arrived in the Deep Sky. It was traumatic then, and it’s no less traumatic now.” He passed a hand before his eyes. “Harrison Shapiro keeps looking at me as if he expects me to know all the answers, and the truth is – I don’t. He’s asking me what I can do, with the resources of Dendra Shemiji, to contain these assaults.

  “The truth is, there’s little we can do, because there are too few of us and far too many human colonies. However, there’s a rumor circulating on the spacers’ rinks, on almost every world. They’re saying there’s a major design flaw in the third-generation Prometheus generators at the hearts of the new colonies – the newest being the most distant, riding the frontier, closest to Hellgate and right in the path of the Zunshu.

  “Have you heard that a lot of the exploration colonists are heading back in? There’s a mass exodus, out of the fringe worlds and back into the brightlights, and I’m grateful for it … but as the distant colonies close down, go dark, the Zunshu will strike closer and closer to the new homeworlds of the Deep Sky.

  “I fear that time,” he said very quietly, “is growing short. We’re almost at the end of what time we were ever going to have, to prepare. I’ve told Harrison this much, more than once. I’ve asked him –” Mark hesitated and took a deep breath. “I’ve asked him to take command, if he can, of the when, the where and the how of the colonial wars. He knows what I mean. The decisive battles must be set as traps, by us. The DeepSky Fleet must be lured in to take baits we’ve set, because there’s no more time for foolish, self-interested politicians and officers like Senator Charleston Aimes Rutherford to blunder around out here, making the wrong decisions, wasting days and weeks –

  “We won at Ulrand, which rocked them back. One can imagine the shockwaves impacting on Earth itself! They could easily, predictably, try to regroup. Launch their new super-carrier and come after us according to their own plan … and we do
n’t have the weeks or months left to meet them on battlefields of their choosing. The colonial wars could stutter and grumble for years.

  “But the Zunshu are already here.” He shuddered visibly, and Marin smothered a moan. It was every Resalq nightmare come true at once. The old days were returning, days of shadow and fear, and the death of everything they had tried for centuries to protect. The Resalq were so few in number, living in such depths of secrecy, they were vulnerable as humans had never been, would never be.

  “My ships, and many others, are preparing to head out,” Mark went on in an odd tone of voice. “They’re being loaded with everything, everyone, our people can pack aboard, and they’re headed into the space we charted recently … you recall the data return that was so vast, to process it I had to buy time on the most powerful machines in the Deep Sky, which was how Harrison Shapiro found me, in the end.

  “We’re going to try to save ourselves.” He looked away. “Do you blame us for the self interest? Don’t. It’s just the eleventh hour struggle of a species fighting not to pass over into extinction. There’s only a limited amount we can do to assist humans, and Harrison knows this. A few of our scientists, and I myself, will be staying behind to liaise, advise, but ...” He shook his head, an expression of inestimable sadness, and seemed to shake himself, drag back his shoulders, force his mind into gear.

  “Now, listen to me, Curtis. Harrison is going to try to order you and Neil into the front lines where the action will be at its most brutal. You’ll feel duty bound to respond, put yourself in danger’s way, and most likely get yourselves killed in the early days of a war that will need people like you in the future far more than it needs you now. Think carefully and soberly before you accept further orders from Harrison –

  “And I say this with a deep respect for the man, and a high regard for the cause he has pursued at great personal risk, for years. The freedom of the Deep Sky is the highest ideal to which a human can aspire, and you are both human. But survival must come before freedom, and I don’t think Harrison has even now grasped the terrible reality we’re all facing, your people and mine.