by S. N. Lewitt
What were the Petit Harriers doing involved in this kind of thing?
"Kid, you veer off to the left, go about a hundred meters and put your canister down, heading at two-two-zero, you copy?"
"Yeah, I hear you."
"Good. You get done, use your doppler to find me. You got a fix on my shadow?"
"I got it."
"Go."
As he siphoned away, Gain heard Jaskeen ordering Chan to take the second leg of the triangle. Well, this much at least he didn't have to think about. Killing these kabid would make that much less of the poison available on the market.
No, he didn't like this mission worth a damn, but this part he could manage. How much of the rest of it he could stomach remained to be seen. He hadn't had much chance to think about that, they'd been moving so fast, but sooner or later, he was going to have to come to terms with it. He hadn't joined the Petits to become a drug dealer.
15
The doppler image on Gain's heads up was easy enough to follow. There wasn't anything else to see, and after he dropped his canister, he swung a wide turn and siphoned toward Jaskeen. The man was only a hundred meters ahead, according to the read, but he'd have been invisible at five meters in this murk.
Suddenly the darkness turned into bright light.
Somebody had popped off a string of flares! Seventy, maybe eighty meters ahead, magnesium-white light shone through the seawater—the flares were releasing hot bubbling gases whose ghostly, contorted shadows danced in the brightness. There was Jaskeen, caught like a bug under a scope, four suited figures jetting toward him, trailing more bubbles, no more than thirty meters away. One of the figures began firing meter-long darts from a repeating speargun he carried. The darts fell short, but not by much.
Gain pushed his suit's siphons to full. The four didn't seem to see him—at least none of them were coming his way. He aimed himself at the four, and the suit began picking up speed.
"Luck?" It was Chan.
"I see them," Gain said. "I'm fifty meters away and slightly above, coming in on their starboard side. Where are you?"
"Port, and level. These suits aren't armed. I can't get at my weapon, it's inside with me."
"Ram the sons-of-bitches," Gain said. "The helmets should take it."
Yeah, if you didn't hit face first and crack your viewplate and drown under high pressure.
Jaskeen had turned away from the four attackers and kicked his own siphons to full push, but the guards were faster since their gear didn't have to be quiet or mimic some foodfish. He'd be within speargun range in a few seconds.
The angle was perfect. Gain flew the waters like some undersea raptor, and his speed and that of the guards was such that he speared down into the leader like a javelin. At the last second, he remembered to duck his head and use the top of the helmet. He hit the man square on the right side, banging his own head hard enough on the inside of the helmet to see a flare of red and then gray sparks. The blow knocked the guard sideways, mashing one of his main siphon tubes shut. The port siphon blew that much faster, and he went spiraling off out of control into the fading glow of the flares.
Chan hit the second of the guards just then, coming up from under him to thunk against the man's more or less unprotected belly. The man dropped his speargun and bent as close to double as the suit would allow.
That still left two armed guards.
"Turn off your com and exterior suit pickups!" Jaskeen yelled at them. "Turn 'em off now!"
Dazed, Gain obeyed. Not that there was anything to hear but suit motors and siphons anyhow. What good was that going to do?
Jaskeen had circled back and was coming toward them. Just in time to watch us get darted to death, Gain thought. Stupid idea to ram those two. The other two guards bore in and raised their spearguns. Gain cranked his siphons up, but he knew he'd never outrun the guards. They were going to die. And on his first mission, too!
Something beat at Gain's suit. Like a pressure wave. It hurt his ears. He reached up to cover them, banged the gauntlets against the helmet before he realized he couldn't get to his ears that way.
The two guards dropped their weapons and began to spin madly. Holy Hershaw! What had happened to them?
Jaskeen came close enough so that Gain could see him in the rapidly dwindling light of the flares. He touched his com aerial. Gain clicked his com back on.
Jaskeen's sub came out of the murk to within a few meters of the trio. He must have called it.
They weren't going to die after all. How about that?
16
Inside the sub, Gain realized what had happened. That esoteric sound thing. Jaskeen must have turned his external speakers on and blasted the two guards. If he'd keyed into a radio freq they used, they would have gotten the sound through the water and inside through their coms. Ouch.
Which also meant that Jaskeen hadn't needed his help, and that now Gain owed him his life. "Any trouble?" Jaskeen asked Tin. "I had to shoot a couple guys got in the way. Nothing serious."
"You want to keep driving? There's a bunk in back. I think I'll grab a little nap."
"No problem. Where to?"
"Put it on a heading of three-oh-four. About an hour at cruising speed. Wake me up when we get there."
Gain stared at Jaskeen. Could he really just go to sleep after this? Wasn't he tense? Gain was tense.
Rook moved toward the old man. "You, uh, want any company back there?"
Jaskeen smiled. "I never heard a better offer, Doreen."
Gain was aware that his mouth was gaping as he watched the pair of them move toward the rear of the sub. Come on. He was an old man! What did she see in him? Besides, Rook was some kind of nympho. She'd probably kill him.
Forty minutes later, Jaskeen returned. He looked ten years younger and refreshed, as if he'd had a full night's sleep. What is wrong with this picture?
"Where is Rook?" Gain asked.
"Asleep. Let her rest, would you, bub? She's real tired. A lovely woman, Doreen. Lovely."
Unbelievable!
The second urchin bed was much easier; Jaskeen went out alone and placed the timed canisters. No guards. That bothered Gain.
"The other one was the main bed," Jaskeen said, after he'd gotten back. "And even there, they had to be careful about how many bodies they had swimming around. The trick is not to be noticed. This bed is close to the Soflu Fissure; there's a cold water power intake less than ten klicks away, got a lot of maintenance workers and like that around. Nobody is likely to notice a flat patch of urchins on the dark sea bottom here, but they would see a habitat. A diver disguised as a fish can come by now and then and harvest what he needs by hand."
They were halfway back to Oondervatten before Rook emerged from the back, grinning widely but looking exhausted. She in turn looked at Jaskeen as if he could not only move beneath the water, but could, if he wanted, walk on top of it.
Chan just shook his head and chuckled. Gain realized all over again how much he had yet to learn about things.
"Now what?" Gain asked.
"Back to the Hot and Moist," Jaskeen said.
17
Jaskeen had an office and he and Chan and Gain were in it, the old man behind a desk that looked as if it had been carved from a giant pearl. Rook was in one of the rooms behind the fresher with Trish, formerly of the green shocked hair. Shoulders was lifting weights in the gym with a couple of guys who looked as if they could be his brothers for size and shape, and a woman who had more muscles than Gain. Tin was in Madam Howzu's, playing poker.
"Here's what you came for, bub." Jaskeen held up a crystal vial about the size of a hen's egg. "Enough in here for more than a thousand doses."
Gain stared at the vial.
"Marshal Twill'll be tickled, and you'll probably get a commendation for your rank rec file."
The thought didn't raise Gain's spirits. He hated this. But what was he going to do about it?
A voice came from the com inset into the pearly desk. "Boss, we
got trouble out here. Behind the bar."
Jaskeen glanced at the holoproj, waving until the camera picked up the view he wanted. "Oops."
"What?" Gain said.
"There's a guy behind the bar holding what looks like an implosion device."
Chan said, "Kreest, Limo, you're letting all kinds of trash in here these days. I might have to find myself another place to do my drinking."
"You might at that," Jaskeen said.
Gain moved to stare at the front of the holoproj. There was a short but well-knit man dressed in gray skintights, his hands clutched around a roundish object with a plunger on top. His thumb was on the pushed-in plunger. "You know who he is?"
"Selachii assassin, I expect. Well. Let's go talk to him."
18
People had moved away from the bar, but that wasn't going to do them any good. If the guy was holding what Gain thought he was, nobody in the place was safe, nor anybody for a fifty meter circled around the pub. Looked like a military surplus suckbomb, probably in the hundred-to three-hundred-megavac class, and the red blinking diode said it was armed. The plunger was a deadman's switch.
Jaskeen moved toward the man, Chan and Gain right behind him.
"Close enough," the assassin said.
"What's the deal, bub?"
"Don't try your yell, I'm plugged, and I'm circulating nodistract against your hypnosis. Shoot me, the bomb goes off. Zap the whole place, the bomb goes off. Look at me crooked, the bomb goes off."
"Yeah, you're in the pilot's chair. The deal?"
"You or the whole place. Your choice."
Jaskeen didn't hesitate. "Me," he said. "Everybody else walks?"
"That's the deal. Put your hardware on the floor."
Jaskeen pulled two needle guns from their hiding places and put them carefully onto the floor.
"You, too," the assassin said, nodding at Chan and Gain.
Gain said, "You implode us, you go with us."
"Yeah. Don't matter to me either way."
He had to be on something, Gain figured, or else he was a fanatic jobbed out to the mob by one or another group of homicidal zanies. Gain pulled his tangler from his holster and dropped it onto the floor. Chan put his weapon down next to Gain's.
Gain was trying to remember something. Something about these old implosion devices. About the timers. What was it?
The assassin moved toward the exit from behind the bar, keeping one hand on the bomb as he lifted the section of bar that blocked the exit out of his way.
Four seconds, that was the standard delay on such devices. After that thumb came off the deadman's switch, there'd be four seconds before it sucked everything around it into a supercompact ball, but there was something else. What the hell was it?
Nobody in the pub was making any kind of noise. It was as quiet as a tomb.
The assassin moved toward the three of them. "Back up," he ordered.
Once activated, the timer gave you four seconds, no way to stop it, pushing the plunger back in didn't do any good. It gave you two chances before you armed it, but once it was armed, that was it. Except—
The assassin reached the spot where the weapons had been dropped and bent to pick up Chan's hand cannon. Not the tangler or the shocktox needlers—he was going for a kill.
The assassin came up, grinning, the gun pointed at Jaskeen.
—except that the plastic plunger for the deadman switch was mechanical, not electronic, and it had a spring inside the plunger, the plunger was hollow and the spring was inside it, a coil spring inside a hollow chamber, and if that spring didn't push down on the firing mechanism then the thing wouldn't go off, and that's why the military had junked the things and gone to the all-electronic models, and Gain still had the boot knife right there in its sheath.
Jaskeen was a drug dealer and probably not a very nice man in a lot of other ways, but whatever else he was, he was on the Petits' side. He'd saved Gain's life. Gain couldn't just stand there and watch him get burned down. This was back-to-the-wall stuff.
"Hah!" Gain yelled.
The assassin swung the heavy handgun to cover him, but Gain was diving and rolling, pulling the knife as he came up, slamming into the assassin as the man fired, feeling the heat of the beam sear through the fabric and skin of his left side, stopping the bleeding as it cauterized the shallow wound. The assassin rolled away, but that didn't matter, only the bomb mattered, and that was falling in slow motion and Gain grabbed it in the air like a teshball and slammed it against the floor, watching the red warning light that had stopped blinking and gone full on, the second timer on the side of the bomb flashing from four . . . to three . . . to two—
God, let it be sharp enough!
Gain laid the edge of the knife against the tip of the bomb's plunger and pushed for all he was worth. The tough plastic resisted—
Then sliced through. The coil spring inside shot out and hit the knife blade and Gain jerked the knife away and the spring popped free of the plunger and flew ten meters across the room.
And the timer said "0" but the firing pin wasn't going anywhere. And Chan and Jaskeen had the assassin face down.
"Oh, man," Gain said. "Oh, man!"
19
Sitting at a table and drinking large gulps of the best beer anybody had ever tasted, Gain kept shaking his head. "I can't believe I did that," he said, for the third time.
"You're gonna be all right, kid," Jaskeen said. "Don't you think so, Chan?"
The Sub grinned. "Oh, yeah. Gonna be a great officer, Luck."
"I can't believe I did that. Risked my tail and everybody else's for a drug dealer."
Jaskeen looked at Chan. Chan shrugged. "Up to you, Limos."
Gain took another long swallow of his beer. This really was good beer, the best he'd ever had. But he also caught the exchange between the two men. "What?"
"Look, bub, you're an officer, you understand the term 'need to know,' right?"
"What are you talking about?"
"Things aren't always what they seem, kid. No, not kid—Stelo. You see, this vial"—he held up the crystal he'd shown Gain in his office earlier—"this isn't what you think it is. It's not yadjak, it's an antidote to yadjak."
Gain put his beer down and stared at Jaskeen. "Antidote?"
"Might as well fire the other barrel." Chan sipped at his own drink. "Really good beer," he said.
"What are you trying to say?" Gain said.
"Well, for instance, I sort of misled you when I said there were three kabid urchin beds. There were only two."
"You—you destroyed them both?"
"Yep. When the galaxy runs out of the drug on hand, it's all gone. Oh, the second bed was mine, sort of. I had to get into the business all the way for a couple of reasons. To convince the local underworld types to let me into their confidence. And the Petit scientists needed a good supply of the urchins to produce the antidote."
Gain shook his head. Jaskeen couldn't be saying what he thought he was saying.
"I've been deep cover here for more than five years. Marshal Twill sent you and your crew along when I told him we were ready to burn this operation down. Sorry I couldn't tell you sooner."
Gain felt like the stupidest man in the galaxy.
"We were a diversion," Gain said, seeing the light at last.
"Well, yeah. Sorry."
"That's how you knew what was going on. That's how you were always a step ahead of us."
"You were helpful," Jaskeen said. "Really."
"Oh, man."
"Come on, Stelo. You didn't join the Petits to be a drug dealer, did you? You don't think we're like the Grands, that we'd really stoop to something like that?"
"We? You . . . you—you're . . . ?"
Chan finished his beer. "Yeah, afraid so. Jaskeen here is still in harness, Luck. A Full Commander bucking for the Line, ah, detached to envoy duty at the moment."
Gain wanted to scream. "And you?"
"Well, I'm probably an officer again, I expect."<
br />
Gain shook his head. This was all a dream. He was back in the academy, having a dream. It couldn't be real, could it? "Who else is in on this? Everybody but me?"
"Nah," Chan said. "Just me 'n' Limos 'n' Twill."
"Oh, man."
Jaskeen said, "Of course, I'll be pulling out of here now that the job's done. I expect I'll be given a command somewhere nasty as a reward for my service. No good deed goes unpunished. I expect they'll give me Chan. Want to go along, Luck? I can always use another good officer."
Gain couldn't believe the words when they came from his mouth. He said, "Sure. Why not? It couldn't be any worse than this."
Chan and Jaskeen grinned at each other.
Tin came bustling in at that moment. "I won!" he said. "Cleaned her out on the last hand. Both of us had heart flushes, would you believe that? Ten out of twelve of them in our hands, only I had the ace! What are the odds against that?"
"Damned if I know, " Gain said. "I believe I'll have another beer. It's been a real long day."
Somebody laughed, but it wasn't Gain.
"Hey, Luck?" Chan said. "By the way—welcome to the Petit Harriers."
This time Gain did laugh.
Tonight We Improvise
S. N. Lewitt
Executive Officer Yuen was in charge of the briefing. "We have been tasked by the Twelve, or at least by the Fleet Commodore at their orders, to verify the rumors about certain factions on Zamalah running an illicit slave trade."
"Again," said Navigator Rasidov.