The Harriers Book One: Of War and Honor

by S. N. Lewitt

  "That'd be my guess," Chan said.

  Shoulders said, "There's a guy who's lifted some heavy weights loosening up carefully down one level. Getting ready to move."

  "Me, I'd give six-to-one that the fat woman coming out of the fresher finds us more than usually fascinating," Tin said.

  Jaskeen said, "That's five. Okay. I've got the woman and lightfoot, any leftovers were missed. Chan, you and Shoulders take the one with muscles. Rook, the one in blue and yellow. Kid, you get the one in greens. At speed. On my count of three. One. Two. Three—"

  Gain didn't have time to think about it. He rolled off his chair and took three quick steps toward the black-haired man in greens. The guy was startled, but not so much so that he froze. He untangled himself from the chair and came up, sliding into a defensive stance. That confirmed something or the other.

  A needle gun twanged and Gain caught a peripheral flash of the fat woman coming out of the fresher as she began to fall.

  Somebody yelled something obscene in tradespeak.

  Gain was moving fast enough that the guy in greens couldn't dodge, and the LUC kept going, shoulder first. The guy tried to block and move at the same time, but managed neither, and Gain slammed into him hard enough to knock him down and sprawl on top of him. Before the guy could do more than curse and try a punch, Gain smashed down with a hammer fist. The guy was trying to come up, so his head was a few centimeters clear of the floor. The strike connected with his forehead and drove the crown of his head back down. The guy was knocked cold. A lucky shot.

  Remembering what Rook had said, Gain whacked the guy again, this time on the temple. He didn't react, save to bounce to one side. He was out, all right.

  Gain came up, in time to see Rook twirl into her man with some fancy aiki move and cut him down like a laser-sawed tree. The guy never had a chance.

  Shoulders and Chan, meanwhile, were busy tossing a big man over the rail. He didn't want to go, but he was losing.

  Jaskeen stood facing the one he'd called a lightfoot, five meters of space between the two men. Jaskeen's hands were empty. How could that be? Hadn't he shot the fat woman? Gain remembered the sound of the needler, and she was lying on the floor, sure enough. Wait. There it was, tucked into his waistband. Why'd he do that—?

  Lightfoot dug for something under his black tunic. His hand came out with a stubby-barreled plastic gun and he started to swing it up—

  Jaskeen, grinning, snatched the needler out of his belt and whipped it toward Lightfoot with a speed Gain couldn't believe. He shoved it out and caught it with his other hand, like punching a fist into his palm. The needle gun twanged three times. Gain twisted and saw the trio of needles stick up in Lightfoot's forehead, making a neat line right between the eyes, but up a centimeter. Lightfoot went over down and backwards like a destringed puppet.

  The big man who'd been dumped over the railing hit on his back on a table below him, making a fairly loud crash as the tabletop shattered.

  Then things got very quiet in the Hot and Moist.

  11

  "Who were they?'' Chan asked, as Jaskeen came back to where the Petits sat once again.

  "Grands. On detached envoy duty. Got full diplomatic credentials."

  "Ah."

  Gain thought, So I'm stupid: "What does that mean?"

  "Means they are a mission from somebody way up the chute, bub. I'd guess maybe as high as the Grand MiC Hisself. And it also means I am reconsidering your request."

  "Why? I mean, probably they came after us, but it still isn't your business."

  Jaskeen didn't smile. "Doesn't matter why they came. People don't bring weapons and hassle in here. They need to understand that I can't let that happen."

  Jaskeen's tone made Gain feel cold suddenly.

  "What did you do with them?"

  "Sent 'em up to the main level. Trish went along to make sure they behave until she turns em loose."

  "You're going to let them go?"

  Jaskeen looked at Chan, then shook his head at Gain. "What did you want me to do kid, kill 'em? They're documented Grand Harriers, you can't just shove em out a lock. Plenty more where they came from. Better the devils we know. There are certain rules to this game."

  "That include assassins shooting at me up on the landing deck?"

  "Yep, that's so. You Petits and Grands can fling hardware at each other until the local sun goes nova, but us cits have to be a bit more careful how we walk."

  "But you're still willing to help us?"

  "They broke the rules. People come here to get stoned or swacked or laid, that's okay. Anarchy ain't allowed."

  They followed Jaskeen to a door that was concealed against the back wall of the fresher, into a long hallway lined with other doors. From the sounds coming through those thin panels, Gain realized that this was the other part of Jaskeen's infamous operation. Lust about to be fulfilled had a certain . . . urgent tone to it.

  He led them down through a series of turns and downward angles until they reached a pressure door. The thick portal swung open after Jaskeen tapped a command into the key console next to it.

  They faced a second pressure door across the length of a small lock chamber. Past this one was a huge room, full of submersible craft. There were maybe two dozen vessels, each on rolleracks, lined up with hatches in the metal walls. Looked like so many ship coffins waiting to be deep spaced. Several techs moved around, attending to the various craft. Jaskeen went ahead to speak to one of the techs.

  "I don't suppose you want to tell me what's going on?" Gain said.

  "I don't know for sure," Chan said. "Limos is unhappy that the Grands and the Selachii smuggled guns into his place. Real unhappy."

  "Selachii?"

  "Yeah, name for the local crime syndic. Means 'shark' or 'ray,' something like that. Among other things, they control the hallucinogen trade on this world."

  "I thought the four in the pub were Grands."

  "They were, but they couldn't have gotten that far without Selachii help. Limos has—or had—a deal with the Selachii: they didn't bother him, he wouldn't bother them. Well, now they bothered him."

  Gain had the sudden feeling that bothering Jaskeen was much like saying something uncomplimentary about Shoulders' mother.

  Rook moved closer to Gain and Chan. "That true what he said about being able to kiai the whole room?" she asked.

  "Yeah," Chan said. He looked at Gain. "Limos knows this esoteric martial art, kiaitsu. Sound control. Takes years to perfect, gives the same effect as a sonic stunner. An expert can knock you down with a shout. You saw a little bit of it when he made the two freight handlers sit."

  "What," Tin put in, "does he do if somebody is deaf? Or wearing plugs?"

  "Kuji-kiri. Magic finger weave. A kind of hypnosis, it thralls you long enough for him to sucker-kick you."

  "Yeah? What if they are blind and deaf?" Tin said.

  Chan laughed. "Hey, Tin, even you could probably keep up with a blind and deaf opponent. Likely he'd just shoot 'em. He can outdraw most with those needlers he carries, and he doesn't miss many within range. You saw the lightfoot."

  Jaskeen came back from his meeting with the tech. "Sub's ready," he said. "Let's go."

  12

  The hatch slid open ahead of the sub, and the view through the front ports was of a long, lighted metal tunnel ending in another hatch. The sub rolled into the lock and the hatch slid shut behind them.

  Gain was impressed by the submersible. It was built shaped like a cigar inside a toilet paper tube on the outside; inside, the sub looked almost like a ground car or a multi-passenger hopper. Eight seats in four pairs for company, a pilot and co-pilot seat at the controls. Each pair of seats had a thick double densecris plate, cut round, through which the outside was visible.

  Gain had seen aerocraft with more complicated boards, but not many. A lot of hydraulic switches and mechanicals up there. Jaskeen ran through his checks with an offhand expertise, both hands working independently as he powered
up the sub and put systems on-line.

  "There's a box just ahead of your seat," Jaskeen said to Gain. "You might want to check it out."

  Gain was in the front pair of seats behind Jaskeen, next to Chan. Tin and Rook sat behind them, and Shoulders had a pair of seats across the aisle to himself.

  Chan opened the box, which looked like a padded footrest. Inside were their weapons.

  How'd he do that? Get them here ahead of them so fast?

  Chan passed out the hardware. Even though it was only a tangler, Gain felt a lot better once he had it again. The knife was somehow even more comforting.

  "There are only three known kabid urchin beds on the planet," Jaskeen began.

  There came a loud whoosh of compressed air. Water foamed and bubbled up next to the sub. A piece of some kelplike plant floated past the window as Gain watched the water level in the lock rise to completely engulf the ship.

  The sub moved forward on its rollerack.

  "Two of the urchin beds are owned outright by the Selachii," Jaskeen continued, "and they buy all the output of the third, so the Selachii have a pretty good monopoly.

  "Now kabid are scarce and very finicky. Nobody's ever been able to raise 'em artificially. They are native to a hundred-klick oval in this one sea. They live at a thousand-meter depth, plus or minus five, need a special kind of rickrock bottom, a current no stronger than a klick or two, and an absence of industrial pollution. Take away any one of these, or maybe ten other things, they don't reproduce."

  The sub slid out into the ocean. It was dark and murky, but Jaskeen switched on exterior sunlamps that brightened things considerably. Colorful fish darted past in small schools, and more vegetation drifted into view. Gain couldn't see the bottom of the sea.

  "The yadjak drug is part of the poison the urchins use to protect themselves from bottom feeders. Only one species of fish is immune, and there ain't many of them, both because they breed slowly and because the Selachii pay a real big bounty for any brought in. Don't want the little suckers eating up their profits."

  The sub made a slow turn, the humming of its electric motors sending a pleasant vibration through the seats. The air was dry and crisp, and Gain felt his sinuses ache a little.

  "How is it you know so much about these things?" Gain asked. He swallowed, and his ears popped.

  "I own the third kabid bed."

  Ah. Well. How about that? Our ace in the hole is a dealer in the very drug we've come to find. How convenient. It made Gain want to spit. The MiC had sent him out to procure drugs so that they could manipulate one of the Twelve. Yeah, yeah, the Grands were already doing it and it was self-defense, to maybe save the Petits from ruin, but where was the moral stance here?

  "So we're going to harvest some of your private stock?"

  "No, we're going to destroy the Selachii urchin beds."

  13

  The voyage was two hours old when Jaskeen put the ship on autopilot and went to use the head. While he was gone, Gain turned to his SUO.

  "You have any problems with all this?"

  Chan shrugged. "I do what I'm ordered to do most of the time. I sometimes volunteer when they can't legally make me go. It's a big galaxy, Luck. Lot of wicked things running around. You can let 'em run over you, you can hide from em, or you can try to get a grip on em."

  Gain leaned back in his seat. He sighed. "Situational ethics."

  "Sure. What else? It always depends on where you are and what's going on to figure out what you need to do. Unbendable rules tend to be real brittle; they break when you try to pry with em. A guy living in a metroplex thinktank on Dataline can give you a hell of a theoretical law to live by, but he won't put his own toe in the cold water down here. There are only a few things I'd be willing to put my back to the wall and stand or go down for. You need to think real hard about what you'd do it for."

  Chan looked at Gain's face and shook his head. "The Bugs—the Wammgalloz—have a saying: 'Let the one who would choose my food taste forever with my tongue.' "

  Along with everything else, Gain was getting philosophy lessons from aliens, via his Sub. Wonderful mission so far.

  Another hour passed. Jaskeen did something to the motors and they got very quiet, but also began to pulse in a strange rhythm. He killed the exterior lights, then one-wayed the densecris all around. They were getting close to their destination.

  "We're pretending to be a joewhale," Jaskeen said. "Even so, we'll stop well outside the patrols' range."

  "Then what?" Gain asked.

  "Then we suit up and take a swim."

  "A thousand meters down?"

  "In a deepsuit, it's a walk in the park," Jaskeen said. He grinned.

  Well, if this old man can do it, so can I. But—then what?

  He asked. Despite his promise, Gain was sure being a lot of mouth with all his questions.

  "We get to the bed, set some poison charges, and the crop dies, quick and painlessly."

  "That's it?"

  "Like I said, bub, a walk in the park."

  "What if they find out who did it?"

  "Oh, they'll know who did it. I plan to tell 'em myself."

  The sub idled to a stop. Jaskeen adjusted the ballast so that the craft hung in neutral buoyancy. It was very quiet down here all of a moment.

  "The deepsuits are aft, in the big locker next to the head. Three of us should go. Anybody know how to run this tub?"

  Tin said, "I've driven a few."

  "Good. You keep things loose here. I holler, you come and get us. Weapons system controls are in the lockbox, left console. Here's the key." Jaskeen flipped a small plastic tag at Tin. "If you have to come in, shoot anything that doesn't look like us."

  "Who gets to go?" Rook asked.

  "Me, cause I know what we're doing. Chan, because I trust him. And the kid, because he's the officer."

  Rook, Tin, and Shoulders looked at Chan. He glanced at Gain, then nodded. "Limos was an officer before most of you were potty-trained. It's his show, right, Luck?"

  Gain felt a small moment of doubt, but suppressed it. It was a little late to start acting like he was in charge, now wasn't it? He nodded. "Yeah."

  14

  The deepsuits were simple. They were augflex with air bottles and gills, bubbleless siphon drives and standard deepwater tool kits. More like mini-subs, they each looked like nothing so much as a big hydraulic walking loader, except that the frame was enclosed in the augflex. Not much different in operation than a standard vacuum spacesuit, and Gain had tested out okay in those.

  Once he'd climbed into the suit and latched the watertights, he found that walking in the sucker was a lot harder than in any vac suit, though. Fortunately, he only had to manage a few meters to get into the lock. Once outside he'd use the siphons for most of his locomotion. Dangling from his belt was a pressure canister of something that would supposedly kill the urchins.

  It occurred to Gain as the sea poured into the outer lock of the sub, swirling up around him under pressure, that for Jaskeen to have on hand a poison that would kill the kabids, all ready to go and all, was passing strange.

  "Com check," Jaskeen said. His voice sounded tinny and hollow in the deepsuit's speaker.

  "I read, L-A-C," Gain said. Just like a meteor drill.

  "These coms are line-of-sight magwavers," Jaskeen said. "We don't want to be bleeding radio where anybody can hear us, so the range is real short and real narrow. Don't get lost."

  "Copy," Gain said. "Uh, can I ask something?"

  "I think maybe I'd be disappointed if you didn't, bub."

  "Don't you think the Selachii are going to be mad if you kill a third of all the urchins on the planet?"

  "I'm going to kill more than a third," Jaskeen said. "We'll do their other bed, it's only a few klicks away, right after we finish here. And, yeah, they'll be real upset. They should have thought of that before they sent those Grands to my place."

  Juddah, Gain thought.

  The outer hatch slid wide. "We'll hav
e to do this in the dark," Jaskeen said. "Keep your doppler tuned to me, I'll lead us in. Oh, and don't worry about me, kid. Selachii'll be steamed to the eyeballs, but I've got the only other urchin bed on the planet. They'll come to terms if they want to stay in the yadjak business. Nobody knows where it is but me, and I've got a burnblock against telling the location. They touch me and it goes away. And they know it—I bought the block from them."

  At a thousand meters from the surface, it was like the inside of a cave. Occasionally Gain saw bright sparkles in the gloom, some phosphorescent fish luring prey, maybe, but those and the diodes in his and the other two men's suits were all the lights there were.

  After what seemed like hours but was only a few minutes according to his suit clock, another light source appeared in the distance in front of them. It was very dim, but definitely there.

  "Coming up on the beds," Jaskeen said. "The light is from the guards' habitat. Nine-person permanent station. We'll circle around it. What we want is about five hundred meters past it."

  The silent but powerful siphon pumps drove the deepsuits through the dark waters.

  "They don't have sonar or UWR?" Chan asked.

  "Both, but these suits give off the same shadow as portfin lubafish. They breed in these waters. And they are siphoners."

  No doubt about it, Gain figured. This wasn't some spur-of-the-moment deal on Jaskeen's part. The man had been prepared to run this program before Gain and his misfits ever showed up. Poison all ready, stealth-camouflaged deepsuits—Jaskeen definitely planned ahead. Maybe he had figured on cornering the drug market for a long time, making his own urchin bed worth a whole lot more.

  Did it matter? He was helping them do what Gain had been sent to do. Wasn't that the important thing? Was this, as Chan had said, a back-to-the-wall issue with Gain? Wasn't his duty as a Petit officer more important than his personal moral and ethical feelings?

  Now there was a question.

  It was all fine and good to be like the on-the-spot rangers, dispensing justice as needed when there was nobody else around to do it, but yadjak was an addictive-after-one-time drug that made you think you were a god. People had tried to fly off tall buildings while skyed on yadjak, had walked in front of mag-lev trains, and there was no cure for it. Once a yadjak addict, always a yadjak addict; you could take it away but you couldn't take away the desire. People would do anything to get more of it. Anything at all.