Kill Team (Galaxy's Edge Book 3)

by Jason Anspach

  There really is no going back.

  Except… you hope there is. Surely at any moment some legionnaire kill team will come sweeping in and clean everything up before it goes too far.

  ***

  The last-rate hotel you’re leaving opens out onto a small alley. And the night. You step over the gutter and decide to stick to the center of the alley until you reach the street up the way.

  An old zhee watches you from beneath her hooded shawl. Her donkey face is cracked and leathery, and her dead eyes betray her past. The zhee used to eat anyone they found. Everyone knows that.

  It took the early Repub thirteen dead worlds to figure out that the “space locusts” they’d been hearing about… were actually migrating zhee.

  They’ll eat anything.

  That’s why it’s dangerous out at night.

  The Legion wanted to destroy the zhee then and there.

  But the House and Senate don’t much like the Legion.

  You make the main street, and it’s alive with zhee cafes and zhee corner markets. You can buy cheap blasters in the corner markets alongside the local fermented drink and the sugary snacks the galaxy sells to them.

  It is not uncommon to see zhee children carrying blasters.

  There is nothing so fundamentally wrong as a child with a blaster and the worldview that you are not even an intelligent life form. The zhee believe that the Gran Pasha will one day return to lead them to resume their conquest of the stars.

  Then they’ll eat everyone.

  Until then they’ll just breed like rats.

  A thousand different musicians on a thousand different sound devices compete to achieve the absolute opposite of harmony and orchestration. This too is the zhee, and anyone who comments on anyone else’s music will most likely find themselves at knives.

  The zhee love knives.

  They call their special version the kankari.

  It’s still early, and you make the Grand Republic Hotel, get past the state-of-the-art security bots, and enter the opulent lobby. This place is the opposite of everything else on this stinking, boiling, broiling world. Here everything is charm and elegance and the murmur of polite conversation from discreet corners. The Grand Ankalor Bar—where the journalists and diplomats and the occasional naval attaché come to exchange trade—is where you’re headed. It’s already busy.

  You enter the bar and nod to the usual crowd who know you and will not swear under oath that you’re a good man and it’s just terrible about your luck. You wonder which of them is your minder tonight, because the Carnivale has all its players playing. This is quite a big op, and you are the tip of the spear. So someone is always supposed to be minding you.

  Because whoever they are, they’ll need to be there if it all goes south.

  Do they watch you in the streets where it’s most dangerous? That’s what you wonder as a reporter named Darringa from Republica Press and Information buys you a “G and T, old chappy!” though you are much younger than him.

  Or maybe not.

  He drinks a lot, so…

  You wonder if they watch you as you thread the stinking little alleys filled with murderous zhee who’ve been told by their clerics that they must resist even if they use only knives and hammers and sleds to mow down any and all unbelievers.

  And do they, the minders, watch you while you sleep?

  Did they watch the girl you hired and didn’t have sex with? Did they watch you through the night as you lay next to her and listened to her sleep so that you could be reminded of someone else breathing in the night? Someone somewhere else in the galaxy?

  Did they?

  Do they?

  You gulp at the gin and tonic with a splash of rosewater, which is how Chuntly, the barman at the Grand Republic, mixes them. You gulp, and you tell yourself it’s all part of the act. You gulp your drinks because you’re a drinker and you’re desperate.

  “There’s got to be that hint of desperation, my boy,” X has told you. “So drink like you’re dying of thirst.”

  All part of the game of espionage.

  All part of the game of finding explosives to blow up capital ships. Republic capital ships.

  ***

  You find out from Steadron, who works for Spiral News Network—if you call drinking all day and trying to dig up dirt on who’s selling weapons to whom as you crawl from one bar to the next, work—that a Repub Navy officer has been seen over in the Night Market selling some pretty good stuff. He’s on leave and doing business with contraband and stolen merchandise.

  “Rumor is he’s got two, my friend,” says the red-eyed Steadron as the hustle of the Bar Utopion grows hot and close in the late of the Ankalorian night. Players in the weapons bazaar, and courtesans who want nothing more than mere credits beyond their ability to spend, wage their wars and make their deals all around you.

  Suffering and lust are good friends tonight. Hopefully everyone can walk away a winner.

  Except the dead who will get killed on the back end of all these deals.

  Except for them.

  Someone has to lose. Why else would we need all these weapons?

  “Two of what?” you ask Steadron.

  “Massive antimatter reaction ordnance. But I hear he’s leaving tomorrow, so better make your deal quick before he’s gone.”

  It’s dangerous to cross the zhee-infested slums. Night or day, it’s dangerous. But two MAROs will do the trick to make sure that Frogg and Scarpia know you can acquire. And hopefully acquisition leads to trust, and trust… well, that should lead straight to betrayal.

  And termination. But that’ll be some legionnaire’s job.

  “We just acquire the intel, my dear boy,” said X when this all began. “You won’t be pulling any triggers.”

  Then a medal, and back to that life you once had. No more Tom. You’ll be that other guy… what’s his name? She knows. Don’t worry… she remembers who you are. If you forget, when you get back, you can ask her.

  You down the last of the gin and tonic and can’t help yourself from checking with a quick pat that your blaster is still under your arm, hidden beneath your light coat.

  Then you’re out the front of the hotel and the doorman, dressed like the grandest of Republican admirals, tries to get you a cab.

  The man is earnestly trying to save your life, you think. Except you know cabs won’t be headed where you’re going tonight. Even they know it’s too dangerous.

  So you cross the busy street and start walking. It’s instantly darker here on the other side. But it has to be, because it’s the opposite of the glitter and glamour of a grand hotel. This is Ankalor, and it’s overrun by the zhee.

  They watch you pass the cheap stores, and you can hear them muttering in their guttural tongue. You’re sure they’re noting, remarking, informing on you.

  So switch it up, just like you were taught.

  Just like the pack predators they are, they work together at killing. There are no moderate zhee. That’s a lie the Repub tries to sell every time the zhee blow themselves up in a crowded café. Never mind the rest of them dancing and braying in the streets, firing off their blasters for their bizarre gods, celebrating the deaths of other as some kind of moral victory.

  Never mind that, Tom.

  And also never mind the irony that you’re the one out to find explosives on a night like this to do what they do in the name of freedom. You’re doing it for freedom too… right, Tom?

  Or a medal.

  Or her.

  Or the action.

  Never mind you’re going to provide some explosives for just the same reasons the zhee are going to blow up a transportation terminal on some core world. This is different.

  Why?

  You make an unexpected turn down an alley. Junk shops and noodle bars line the way. Their weird moaning music blares at you from every stall.

  Why is it different?

  You pass zhee porn and jade lotus dealers and cheap blasters and all kinds of things
that’ll ruin lives.

  How is it different?

  You’re walking fast. Switching it up. But roughly making your way to where you want to go—the Night Market and the last chance to catch the dirty naval officer who’s rumored to have some really big fireworks.

  Your ticket in with Scarpia. The target. Mister Scarpia.

  How is it different? You answer yourself. Because you’ll just be procuring the ordnance. Delivering. And most likely Nether Ops will arrange for Dark Ops to send in a legionnaire kill team to clean everything—everyone—up. All long before those two big firecrackers actually get lit.

  You tell yourself that and keep moving.

  You’re pretty sure two of them are following you. Two zhee.

  Where are your minders?

  Except… if the girl in charge of the op, Operation Ghost Hunter, knows that Frogg and his people are watching you, and suddenly you get rescued from two hired zhee killers by men in black who’ve been tailing you all the way from the Grand Republic… well, then they’ll know you’re a…

  They’ll know you’re not Tom.

  You’re someone else.

  They’ll probably kill you. Just to send a message.

  You can’t shake the two zhee, and now you’re deep and away from the main streets and the illusion of security the Repub tries to create with their never-stopping, always-moving armored sled convoys. That’s all it is. An illusion. And the minders won’t be saving you this time. You’re pretty sure of that.

  You’re on your own.

  You hear their hoofsteps closing in on you. Their snuffling voices that sound like monsters. Because they are monsters. Vicious, violent monsters that look like humanoid donkeys.

  You take a quick glance back and see them reaching under their shrouds.

  Cloaks.

  But the cloaks remind you of shrouds.

  Coal-dark eyes watch you in the night. Yeah, they’re coming for you. It’s going down right now in a dark alley on a dangerous planet. Your heart is in your throat. So you make for a smaller, even darker alley, and you start to run.

  Fast.

  You can hear them behind you. Their hoofs clobber the stone of an alley filled with silvery moonlight and deep dark blue shadows. They’ve stopped speaking. They’re not laughing or shouting, because this is the part they love: running prey to ground. It makes them frenzy.

  Except you’re leading them to a nice quiet place where you can have it out with them. Because the thing with the zhee is that they’re constantly fighting each other, and when they’re not fighting one another they’re fighting the rest of the galaxy. And should any one zhee ever fight any other member of all the races and species of the galaxy, then all the other zhee will come and help it.

  You can win money on a sure thing like that.

  So the thing that must be done next… it must be done as quietly, and as privately, as possible.

  You’ve got your blaster out and you’re screwing on the silencer. Slowing. Letting them catch up to you.

  You were trained for six months by the handlers at some cottage in the Vindar highlands. Trained to fight in the dark, screw silencers on blasters at a dead run, and all kinds of other nasty tricks. And the whole time you kept telling yourself that you’d never really need to know these terrible things that no decent person should know… except you learned them well, because you were pretty sure you were going to need to know those things.

  You knew even then.

  You knew you would have to go far in the how far will you go department.

  At the next intersection of high docking bay wall and zhee slum, you jag right and throw yourself against a dirty wall.

  They’re coming at you full tilt now. They’ll go wide on the turn.

  Their hoods have fallen away from their donkey heads. Massive teeth open wide as they suck at the hot night to reach you.

  They have gone too wide on the turn.

  You fire and hit the first guy.

  The bright blue flash of the blaster cannot be dimmed. It illuminates the intersecting alley, turning it a sudden ghostly bone-white. In that horribly clarified moment, it makes their mad donkey faces somehow even more demonic.

  You hit that guy in the chest and the zhee behind him pushes the body forward into you, making you shoot the first guy again.

  They both have gleaming curved knives.

  Kankari, they call them.

  Small. Silver. Curved like a crescent moon. Wicked sharp.

  You push the dead zhee off you a moment after his smelly body almost crushes you against the grungy alley wall. You grab at his fur and heave him off.

  Except…

  Except…

  Your blaster’s in the wrong position.

  The remaining zhee dances forward, his hooves clip-clop-clopping on the stone as he delivers a sharp little cut at your wrist. He’s trying to open a vein.

  The zhee are excellent cutters.

  That’s what Mageeio, who taught you knife fighting courtesy of the Carnivale, assured you.

  “Dey knows how to bleed a man out,” he said. “Dey’s savages, but dey’s smart savages.”

  You drop the blaster. You hear it hit the stones of the alley in the night.

  The zhee gives a short, snorty laugh and shifts his balance back to gather himself for his next attack.

  You react just like you were taught.

  Taught by Mageeio.

  Taught to fight knives in close-quarters combat when you can’t run away, which is just about the smartest thing you can do in a knife fight: run away.

  But you can’t, so you must do this instead.

  You do exactly what you were taught.

  You rush the remaining zhee and get in close where he can’t cut and dance. You grapple and try to get hold of the knife.

  “Control the knife, lad!” Mageeio is screaming in your ear, just like he screamed at you back in the highlands on Vindar.

  You pin that massive arm with most of your body, and now you’re ramming your knee like a jackhammer into the monster’s groin over and over. It brays once, and on the next strike you flex upward, raise your knee, and slam it into the zhee’s swollen belly, causing it to lose all its available air.

  It lets go of the kankari.

  And you have it and now you’re just slamming it over and over into the thing, anywhere you can. Over and over into its donkey-leather body.

  Just like Mageeio told you.

  “This ain’t the pretty part like in the entertainments, lad. This is for survival. So keep stabbing until dey don’t move no more.”

  You do.

  And he doesn’t.

  Move, that is. Not anymore. Because the zhee’s dead.

  You get up, shaking.

  You do the opposite of everything you’re supposed to do next. Everything Mageeio taught you about this situation.

  You lean against the wall of the alley and take out a cigarette. You light it. You can hear the streets just a few blocks away. The light, life, and music of the galaxy.

  Here in the night, with the two dead zhee at your feet…

  It is the opposite of everything known up until now.

  06

  You make it to the Night Market, and it’s not hard to find the Repub Navy officer fencing ordnance for personal gain. The things he’s selling are located in a large main hall. The mercs he’s hired are watching the crates and the clamshell cases with specialized weapon systems. He, on the other hand, is enjoying the company of two stunning Endurians.

  Yeah, they’d probably tell you they were princesses. But here they have another job title.

  You’re sitting at a dirty table filled with bad scotch and picked-over rice bowls. The Endurians cast long lashes at you when the Repub Navy officer isn’t looking.

  You try to ignore their obvious charms.

  “RepubNet says you’re defrocked. Dishonorable discharge.” He’s wearing a flower-printed shirt and he hasn’t shaved in days. There’s a small pile of powder
y blue H8 in front of him on a silver mirror. “How do I know you’re not Dark Ops sent here to find out exactly what I’m doing? Bust me, and my men will shoot you dead.”

  He holds the H8 out in front of you. You take a pinch and inhale.

  It punches you in the brain… which is what H8 does. It’ll do other stuff later. But right now you’re still cruising on killing two zhee. You’re wound tight, and now you’re stoned to the gills on H8. Not a great combo.

  Which makes you sassy enough to swipe the cheap gutter scotch he’s been pouring and take a swig just to get the vile H8 drip out of the back of your mouth. You swallow and it burns, and you fight feeling mean. You fight looking at the Endurians. Both of them. The lines between hate and lust blur when you’re rushing on your run.

  Or at least that’s what the H8 junkies scream in all their shoegazing songs.

  “I don’t care what you think,” you mutter. “I’m here for those MAROs you’ve got. Deal… or don’t waste my time.”

  The officer who goes by the phony name Abo leans back in his chair and smiles. The name might be fake, but everyone knows he’s been selling real live legit legionnaire ordnance. So they know he’s a Repub officer on leave.

  “Those are very expensive. House of Reason keeps trying to get the military not to use ’em anymore. Pretty soon they’ll be a banned weapon galaxy-wide. But until then they are absolutely perfect for taking out a tunnel complex, or any bunker built to capital ship standards. Problem is the delivery system. I don’t have those.”

  You wait and say nothing. Then…

  “I’ll take two.”

  “Two’s all I got. And like I said, they’re expensive.”

  “How much?”

  “Three million apiece. Hard credits. Meaning I actually want to see the credits. And since no one carries that big of wallet around… until I see it, we’re just talking, Defrocked.”

  You smile and taste the bad scotch again. The H8 makes it tastes just right.

  “Obviously. Six million in hard currency would get you killed on Ankalor.”