Flashpoint (Hellgate)

by Mel Keegan

  “Up and moving,” Marin told him, a little breathless as he cleared the brush and went over the fence. “I see the man … he’s down, and he’s … missing a leg. Kravitz, make it fast.”

  Travers dove out of the trees ten meters from the fence, and picked up his pace. Ahead of him, the car was mangled, and both occupants were on the far side of it, one dead, one in bad shape. Perlman had done well to miss the vital organs. So long as med support arrived fast, the man was due a biocyber limb and residence in a cell in the Jackson facility for a very long time.

  The lander maneuvered around, right over the wreckage, and Perlman let down the ramp from several meters up. Kravitz hopped down onto the road, and the big gunmetal cases of trauma gear popped out after him, scurrying in his wake on their own repulsion. Without a word, Travers went over the fence and dropped into the ditch on the roadside. He slid the Zamphir back into its holster as he joined Marin, Fargo and Inosanto.

  They had gathered to watch as Kravitz pushed the worklights where he wanted them, sealed the wound with a few hissing pulses of pure cryogen, and slammed a sedative into the man. It was enough to settle him while the bioscan drone raced over him, and Travers watched the results come up on Kravitz’s handy.

  He had the look of an agent, bullet-headed, buzz-cut, big through the shoulders, and he was in shock, with massive blood loss. Muttering in an undertone, the full repertoire of curses and a few Travers had never heard before, Kravitz loaded the hypo. Six different shots fired into the survivor at various parts of his anatomy. At last he stood, and touched his combug.

  As he worked, Mercury 101 came around, drifted down the road a little and set down gently. The repulsion shut back, the ramp lowered, and Gillian Perlman appeared in the spill of light there. “You need a hand there, Roo?”

  “Nah, he’s good to transport,” Kavitz reported. “You want to send the handtruck?”

  Travers shared a glance with Marin and said quietly into the loop, “General Shapiro, are you still monitoring this?”

  His voice was stronger now. “I am … and we have a subject for interrogation. Clean up the scene, Travers, Marin.”

  “And you?” Travers prompted. “I’ve got your blood all over me!”

  “I’m all right,” Shapiro began.

  “Bullshit,” Jon Kim’s voice said stridently. “He had a piece of shrapnel the size of your finger in his shoulder, Major Travers.”

  “And now it’s out, and the wound is cauterized, I’m full of broad-spectrum antibiotics and the whole shoulder is numb as wood,” Shapiro said acerbically. “Perlman called the Mercury. The Infirmary is coming online, but there’s not much they can do for me that hasn’t already been done. Calm down, Jon. And Travers – just clean up and get aboard.”

  He might have hoped to quit the area, Travers guessed, before the locals called the authorities with eyewitness reports of an air crash, but it was already too late to get out. Firefly lights had begun to flicker among the stars as the survivor was loaded onto the handtruck and shoved up the ramp. Before Fargo and Inosanto had zipped the bodybag on the dead man, a squad flyer dropped in behind its flock of forward surveillance drones.

  The big yellow Marshall set down in the road, right beside Mercury 101, and Travers heard Shapiro groan in frustration. To his surprise, it was Robert Chandra Liang who said,

  “Stay where you are, Harrison. You’re in no condition to field Tactical! I, on the other hand, don’t seem to be good for much more than untangling the paperwork. You’ll have to forgive me. That’s the first time in my life I’ve been under fire, shot down, whatever you people call it. And if it never happens again, I’ll be grateful.”

  “Robert, be careful,” Shapiro warned.

  But Travers was already satisfied the Marshall was a genuine Tactical squad flyer, and Marin was saying, “It’s all right, they’re kosher. It’s a squaddy from Mount Marathon Tactical, they’re just doing their job.”

  “As am I,” Liang said in desiccated tones.

  He was coming down the ramp as he spoke. Travers watched him tug his jacket straight and show his face to the Tactical officers – and they knew him, at a glance. The two women from Mount Marathon beckoned him toward the squad vehicle, and Liang joined them there. All three spoke much too quietly for Travers to overhear a syllable, and after a moment he turned back toward Marin.

  With the bodybag loaded onto a second truck, Fargo and Inosanto had tackled the wreckage of the car. The best they could do was task two drones to shove it off the road, into the ditch, and before doing this, Fargo was wise enough to call up the road to the Tac crew.

  “Pardon me, ma’am, but have you imaged this whole scene, for the record? Get your pictures, if you need ’em, and we’ll clear the road for you.”

  The older of the two officers gave her a wave. “Proceed, Lieutenant. We got all the images we need.”

  As Fargo beckoned the drones, Travers turned his back on the tableau and saw a rueful smile on Marin’s mouth. “We,” Curtis said quietly, “are the luckiest sons of bitches just this side of hell. We should all be dead.”

  “Assassinated,” Shapiro’s voice said from the lander. “I’m not quite sure if the target was me or Robert. It might have been both. But I would call this a classic assassination attempt.”

  “Not quite classic,” Marin mused. “Whoever tasked the Jiantou wanted to make it look like a natural accident. The object was to create a midair collision. When that failed, the next best outcome was to crash the Jiantou right on top of the Magister, and again you’ve got a crash leaving too little wreckage to ever know what actually happened … and I’m afraid to say, this tells us several things.”

  Shapiro and Jon Kim had appeared on the ramp. Kim was shadowing him, as if he expected Shapiro to stagger, though Shapiro was quite steady on his feet, with the remains of his jacket hanging off his left shoulder and the right shoulder supported by a bright blue air cast. He was pale, but he was entirely lucid, and chuckled quietly as he invited,

  “Go ahead, Curtis. I’d be grateful for your professional analysis. This kind of thing lies well within your purview.”

  “I might just have been insulted,” Marin said with brittle amusement. “One: either your security or Mister Liang’s has lost at least some of its integrity, and one or both of you has become a target so prime, an agency which can only operate under the auspices of the Terran Confederacy is willing to murder two or three other people to itemize you. However, two: this agency can prove nothing. If they could prove General Harrison Shapiro is the organizational genius behind the colonial insurrection, or that Robert Chandra Liang is the head of the Velcastran republican shadow government … suffice to say, warrants would be issued for your arrest, rather than orders for your covert termination! But, three: the Confederacy is certain enough of what it knows – with or without proof that would hold up under legal scrutiny – that the termination orders were issued, although the murders were deemed so politically delicate, it was critical to disguise them as an accident. Which suggests that authorities within the Confederacy are still trying to maintain the ethics and morality of the power structure here in the colonies … trying to keep their noses clean, if you will! Lastly, you can be quite certain the failure of this attempt was reported, which means one or both of you remain in extreme jeopardy.” His brows arched at Shapiro.

  Travers puffed out his cheeks. “You did say, professional analysis. You want my recommendation, General?”

  “You’re about to advise Liang should be removed from the hot zone,” Shapiro said tersely.

  “And you, yourself,” Travers added. “We won’t know for a while which of you was the target, so you can only proceed from the assumption it’s you. Go back to Fleet Sector Borushek, and you’ll live inside a security cordon so tight, you’ll think you’re wearing corsets.”

  Shapiro gave him a faint, curious smile. “Well, then – you’re in charge, Travers. You and Marin can lay down that security cordon and monitor it. Because we�
�re not done, not yet.” He looked up past Travers at the Tactical squad, where Chandra Liang had just taken his leave of the officers and was walking back up the road. “Get aboard, all of you. If Tactical is satisfied, we need to put distance between us and this scene.”

  “Before someone higher up the assassination command chain shows up to finish the job,” Marin said quietly, almost an aside, to Travers. “Damnit, Neil, we were just lucky.”

  “Lucky you’re a fighter jockey,” Travers retorted.

  But Marin’s head was shaking slowly. “Lucky Mercury 101 was close enough to stand by us. Sure, I managed to get us on the ground, but that wasn’t going to be the end of it.”

  He was pale in the lander’s floodlights. Travers frowned at him, wondering for a moment if Marin had been hurt, though he was not wearing any visible bruise. He touched the combug to drop out of the loop. “You okay?”

  “Me?” Marin also cut out of the loop as Shapiro and Kim followed Liang up the ramp. “Yes … no.” He forced a smile. “Maybe I just felt my mortality. You know the weird shiver, as if someone walked over your grave?” He laid his right palm flat on Travers’s chest, over his heart. “You and me, Neil, and all our big plans about handfasting and getting a place of our own. We just came within a whisker of losing all of it.” He frowned at his hand, feeling the beat of Travers’s heat through his palm. “Shapiro’s war is going to kill us.”

  “No,” Travers murmured.

  “If we were cats,” Marin said with thin, forced humor, “we’d be down to one life left apiece. The Resalq used to believe a person is born with a certain stash of luck – good luck and bad. You spend your luck the way you spend your money, and when it’s gone, it’s gone.”

  “Resalq superstition?” Travers was surprised.

  Marin seemed to shake himself. “I don’t know. Mark would spin you complex theories about causality chains across several lifespans – and his people retain at least vestigial memories of one or more previous lives, so don’t be too quick to dismiss it as superstition! Me? I honestly don’t know. But it feels as if Shapiro is taking what luck we ever had and spending it.”

  He looked up at Travers in the odd, harsh lights of the lander’s floods and the Tac squad’s spinners, and Travers felt the same shiver. He touched Marin’s face with light fingertips. “Security cordon, tight as the corsets on a citybottom hustler. The same cordon that guards them guards us. Yes?”

  “Yes,” Marin whispered. He turned his head, touched his lips to Travers’s fingers just as Perlman called down the ramp,

  “You guys want a ride home? Did your comm drop out? You see something we didn’t clean up?”

  With a quiet curse Travers cut back into the loop. “Yes, no, and no.” He ushered Marin ahead of him, up the ramp. “Button it up, people, let’s get the hell back to the Mercury.”

  “StarCity,” Perlman corrected as they stepped aboard. The hatch was locking as she jerked a thumb over her shoulder in the direction of Shapiro and Liang. “We’re making a pickup before we head home … and I just called ahead and put both gunships on alert. The Mercury is leaving Joseph Valdez at this time, and we’ll rendezvous in orbit with gunship escort.” She was watching through the armorglass viewport as the Tactical squad lifted off in a blaze of red and blue spinners. When it had angled off into the southwest she lifted the lander. “No second chances.”

  “Very wise.” Marin had stepped carefully over the trauma unit which was set up amidships, and was handing his weapons to Inosanto, at the armory store. The surviving agent was sedated, with an IV and a transfuser set up, feeding him fluids, synthblood and drugs. Marin spared him a glance, and another for the bodybag which had been shoved unceremoniously between the seats. “So we’re picking up Madam Deuel,” he mused softly, “which means Chandra Liang is taking Shapiro up on the offer of being ... how did he put it?”

  “Removed from the hot zone.” Travers was frowning at Shapiro, Liang and Jon Kim, who sat in the very back of the lander, talking in undertones.

  All three looked badly shaken up. Kim was visibly jittery as he held his dogs by the collars; Shapiro was starting to get some feeling back in the shoulder, and he was clearly in pain; Liang was tight lipped as he held a comm to his ear and listened with difficulty before he interrupted in an impatient tone.

  “I know, Sonja – I hear what you’re saying, but I’m telling you to pack a bag and be in our private hangar in three minutes, with at least two security drones as your escort. I should have been dead three times over!” He paused to listen again; and then, “Yes, I’ll tell you the whole thing as soon as you’re aboard – and no, I can’t, won’t, say one syllable on the air!” Another pause as she protested, and at last he said loudly, “Sonja, we’re in the air right now. If you’re coming with me, grab your stuff and be in the hangar, drones and all. If not, fair enough, but you won’t be safe. You know the bastards will try to use you to get to me, and you also know there won’t be one damned thing I can do to help you! People could get killed, trying to pull you out of there. Pack, and call the drones, damnit!”

  He cut the line before she could protest again. Shapiro leaned back heavily against Kim and dug his fingers into his shoulder to deaden some of the feeling. “She doesn’t want to leave?”

  “She doesn’t want to ‘desert Velcastra.’” Liang turned his eyes to the gods. “Her heart’s in the right place, but I often wonder where her brain is.” He looked up at Travers and Marin and from somewhere produced a smile. “Once again I find myself in your debt. I owe both you gentlemen. Regard StarCity as your home, and if, when, I can be of service to yourselves or to Dendra Shemiji, don’t hesitate.”

  Travers was too taken aback to speak, but Marin said quietly, “We salvaged our own lives too, Mister Liang. Tell me, have you seen the surviving agent, or the body? Do you recognize them?”

  But Liang was making negative gestures. “I saw the live one, on the way into the lander. I don’t know him. I can take a look at the body.”

  The bag unzipped with a churring sound of unmeshing metal. Fargo peeled it open, and Liang peered down into a face which was oddly serene, undamaged in death.

  “No joy?” Travers guessed as Liang stepped back.

  “Alas, no.” Liang glanced forward, through the viewports, where StarCity filled the sky. “Pilot, you won’t be able to take a ship this size into my private hangar.”

  Perlman was unperturbed. “We’ll dock on with a collar, Mister Liang. Call your lady, please, make sure she’s ready to leave.”

  If she was going at all, Travers thought as Liang touched his combug and called, “Sonja? Sonja, are you with us, my dear?” A pause, no more than a few seconds, and he huffed a sigh. “Thank gods! We’re about to dock. Where are you now?”

  “Better scan the whole area,” Marin was saying to Perlman. “We don’t want any more nasty surprises.”

  “Well, shit, why didn’t I think of that?” Perlman said acidly, and gestured at the threedee, where the data was already beginning to run.

  “Sorry.” Marin clasped her shoulder. “Micro-organization. Occupational hazard.”

  With delicate hands Perlman was maneuvering the lander as Travers had watched her fly the Bravo Company gunship. He had trusted her for more years than either of them cared to remember, and as the docking collar extended he turned back to the company in the rear. Shapiro was going down fast now, as whatever Inosanto had given him simply wore off. Jon Kim sat close, and Shapiro was holding his left hand to the dogs, letting them learn his scent, get to know him.

  “Stand by the docking collar, Jude,” Perlman said into the loop. “The hangar’s quiet as a crypt. I’m not seeing anybody … Mister Liang, you sure your lady’s on her way?”

  Liang hovered at the top of the ramp, busy with his comm. From there he had a clear view of the threedee, which was cycling security data. “She’s on her way now, Pilot. Two minutes, maximum. I’m telling my house AI to lock up, shut down the power, enable the surveillance syste
m. The house will take care of itself, and I’ll brief my people when we’re safely away.” He gave Marin and Travers a wry look. “My absence, and Harrison’s, at Michael’s memorial won’t have gone unnoticed.”

  “I’ll be briefing Colonel Rusch,” Shapiro said tiredly.

  “Leave that to us.” Marin stooped to look into the older man’s eyes. “You’re about to fall flat on your face. There’s only willpower holding you up, and it won’t last much longer.” He gave Kim a faint smile. “I think you’re about to find yourself in charge. He’s needed an aide for a long time, but there hasn’t been a soul he’d trust to do the job.”

  Jon Kim looked from Shapiro to Marin and back. “Now, that’s a job I can do, Harry. I’ve dealt with every kind of government bastard you can imagine, and a lot you can’t, and I’ve negotiated with the worst Fleet had to throw at me. If he’s right and you need an aide, and if you’ll give it to me, I’ll take the job.”

  “My boy,” Shapiro said in an odd rasp, “it’s all yours.”

  They were the last words out of his lips before he slumped sideways into the seat, and his head lolled in unconsciousness. Kim’s face blanched, and without a thought he handed both protesting dogs to Travers. “Medic!”

  For years Tim Inosanto had been Bill Grant’s assistant, and he had retrained to replace Grant when the Australian transferred to the Wastrel. Travers drew back with Marin, wrestling the dogs with him and holding their fangs away from himself by simply outmuscling them. Marin took the sheepdog from him, trapped the animal between his knees and held him still while Inosanto went through the same routines as Grant would have performed. The lad was good, Travers thought – not the natural medic Grant had always been, but much better than the average field company ‘butcher.’

  “He’s lost a lot of blood,” Inosanto was saying, “but he wouldn’t let me transfuse him, or tie him down with an IV. He ought to be in the Infirmary. I can give him a shot to bring him around, if you need him, but frankly, he’s better off out of it. His pain levels are into orbit.”