by Mel Odom
Once more Lai tried the stomp technique, coming in close. This time Sage only slid out of the way, knowing he had to put the corporal down quickly before he had to hurt him. Sage slid toward Lai’s planted left leg, wrapped his left arm around the corporal’s ankle, and then rolled back on the captured leg before his opponent could turn around. He spun and drove his right elbow into the back of Lai’s knee with everything he could muster.
The knee buckled and came down. Lifting his legs, Sage caught Lai’s head between his ankles and pulled, yanking his opponent backward. Lai hit the mat on his shoulders, laying his arms out to slap his hands against the surface to lessen the shock. Sage rolled on top of the man, pinning his shoulders against the mat, then powered a straight punch to Lai’s forehead that drove his head against the mat and knocked him unconscious.
Head still pounding, his sense of balance still spinning, Sage regained his feet. The cheering had died down and the majority of the soldiers looked disappointed and unbelieving.
The match had lasted all of twenty-three seconds, the fastest Sage had ever disposed of an opponent.
Sweat streaming down his body, his vision still blurred, Sage looked at them. He spat his mouthpiece into one gloved hand. “Anybody else want a shot at the title today?”
There were no takers, and since Lai was on his back unconscious, the crowd drifted away.
Looking impressed, Kiwanuka tossed Sage a towel. “I haven’t seen that move before.”
“There are a lot of moves you haven’t seen.”
“I thought he had you with that sucker punch.”
Sage toweled off, feeling the wind blow coolly against his sweat-covered body for a change. “He should have. I was careless and didn’t think he would try something like that. I let my guard down. And that wasn’t all. He’s so quick I couldn’t stop him.”
“The moves were really good.”
“Thanks.” Sage draped the towel over his shoulder and stepped through the ropes. He gazed around the training grounds and saw that the soldiers had returned to their PT. “Corporal Finnegan.”
“Yeah, Top.” The soldier was young and redheaded. As medical support for the hand-to-hand combat training, he was tending to Lai.
“Get a detail together and get that soldier to the infirmary. He’s probably got a concussion. If he does, keep him out of the roster till he’s healed. If he doesn’t have a concussion, send him to me when he’s conscious.”
“Roger that.” Finnegan called out three names and the soldiers set to picking Lai up from the mat to lie on a back board.
Sage continued his rounds, walking among the men. He was certain a couple of teeth had been loosened too, and he thought he might have a cracked rib or two, but he wasn’t going to let any of the pain show. He wiped at his face again and the towel came away with smears of blood.
“You should probably report to medical too,” Kiwanuka said.
“Does anything need sealed?”
“No. You’ve got a couple tears. Nothing that won’t knit up on its own. Maybe you’re not as tough as you think.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
“Hey, I just know how hard that punch was. I felt it over where I was standing.”
“Trust me, you have no clue. I don’t know if I’ve ever been hit that hard by anyone who was human standard.”
Kiwanuka squinted at him as they walked through the training grounds. “The eye looks bad. It’ll probably swell shut.”
“It’ll be okay. I’m going to tend to PT, then get it checked out.”
“Don’t be stubborn.”
“They can’t see that I’m hurt.”
“They don’t think you’re invincible, Top.”
“It would be better if they did.” Sage glanced over to the row of buildings closest to the perimeter fences. “The kid is back over there.”
“I know. I saw him. His name is Jahup. And he’s not a kid. He’s a leader of his hunting band.”
He was also the guy who had helped save Sage and Kiwanuka when they had been attacked. Jahup’s actions with his rifle had been picked up by the ParaSights. Sage hadn’t noticed the boy until prepping his after-action report on the assassination attempt.
“What’s he doing here?” Sage asked.
“Watching. That’s what he always does.” Kiwanuka didn’t glance at the young Makaum man’s position. “I think he’s watching you.”
“Why?”
“Probably to see one of these younger soldiers kick your butt.”
Sage grinned at her and the effort sent a stab of pain through the side of his face. “Not going to happen.”
“We’ll see.”
Sage ignored that and watched the young Makaum, thinking about how good it would be to have people in the jungle who knew their way around.
TWENTY-NINE
Personal Quarters: Sage
Enlisted Barracks
Charlie Company
Fort York
1722 Zulu Time
Someone rapped on Sage’s door and when he looked up, he saw Colonel Halladay standing there. Sage quickly stood to attention and saluted, wondering what was going on. The colonel was usually good about giving him a heads-up.
Halladay returned the salute. “At ease, Top. This is more of an informal visit.”
“Yes sir.” Sage dropped into parade rest.
Looking mildly amused, Halladay said, “Permission to come inside, Top?”
“Granted, sir.”
Holding his cover in one hand, Halladay entered the small office. “Do you have coffee?”
“I do.”
“Could I have a cup?”
“Yes sir.” Sage retreated to the stripped-down coffee service and poured a coffee. He served the cup to the colonel and warmed up his own. If the colonel was going to have a coffee, they were going to be there for a while.
“Sit, Sergeant.” Halladay waved to the chair behind the desk. “This is your office, not mine.” The colonel looked around. “Mine . . . isn’t as neatly kept. Yours is positively Spartan.”
“I travel light, sir.” Taking his seat behind the desk, Sage looked at Halladay and waited.
“That eye looks bad.” Halladay touched his eye, mirroring the swollen eye Sage sported.
“It’ll heal.”
“You should have expected Corporal Lai to try something. With the way you’ve been knocking guys down in practice, you should have known they would stop fighting fair.”
Sage was surprised but didn’t say anything.
“I saw the fight,” Halladay said.
“I didn’t notice you there.”
“I wasn’t there. Some of the soldiers upped vid of the fight onto the sprawl net.”
That irritated Sage. The training they were doing was supposed to stay within the ranks, not be privy to outsiders. “Do you know who posted the vid? If not, Murad could probably find out.”
“I know who did it. Murad did find out. I asked him to look into the matter and I’ve already dealt with it.”
Sage sat back in his chair as understanding came over him. “Major Finkley.” There would be no other answer except one of the lieutenants, and Halladay would have delegated the punishment to the major if it had been one of them. And if it had been an enlisted, Sage would have been detailed to take care of it.
“It was Finkley. Evidently he’s been running a sport book on some of the fights in the arena. Streaming live vid into bars in the sprawl. It’s run on the QT, but a following has developed. Finkley has a cryptographer setting the odds and he’s been making a pile. They were pretty good about keeping everything under the radar. I caught your showdown with Lai today because I had a meeting with some of our local civilian labor directors who are fight fans.”
“Access to our training doesn’t fly, sir. What we’re doing here, how we’re doing it, the Phrenorians don’t need to see that.”
“You’re not doing anything secret, Top,” Halladay said. “You’re training your men.
Every Phrenorian warrior worth his salt is doing the same thing right now, and probably a lot of that training is the same.”
“That’s beside the point, sir. What goes on in our house should stay in our house.”
“I agree. Finkley has been reprimanded. I alerted the general, and the general is actively displeased with the situation as well.” Halladay grimaced. “If I had my way, if Finkley’s father wasn’t Alliance Senator Aldous Finkley, I’d bounce Finkley to some backwater post where he couldn’t do anything.”
“Maybe that’s what they were thinking when he got bounced here.”
“No. When Finkley’s father, the senator, requested that his son be sent here, it was as a liaison for the corps. Senator Finkley wanted to make certain his constituents got a fair shake out here in the Green Hell. First pick of concessions, etc. Profit margins have got to meet corps’ margin expectations.”
“So Finkley’s been reporting on how you do your job.”
Halladay nodded. “As a result, I walk a thin line, Top.” He paused. “I’m also getting some pressure on your activities out in the jungles. Command thinks that Charlie Company is spreading itself thin beating the brush for drug labs. I think you and your team are getting too successful at putting corps labs out of business. Command has voiced the opinion that we should stay closer to home before we ignite a hostile situation between warring lab operations that spills over onto the fort.”
“Are they forgetting that our soldiers are being affected by the drugs moving across the planet as well? That our position here is getting undermined and threatened by the black market?”
“They’re choosing to ignore that for the moment. Later, of course, they’ll claim that we should have been on top of it. I’m documenting the exchanges. When the pressure goes away, and it will, I’ll be able to show a trail concerning our activities and our orders.”
“So we’re going to shut the op down?” The possibility caused the back of Sage’s neck to burn in anger.
“No,” Halladay said. “We’re going to be more choosy about our targets. We’ve put pressure on the corps at street level. We’ve killed or incarcerated drug manufacturers and smugglers. We’ve destroyed materials and raw product. The street price of the drugs has gone up dramatically and profit margins have decreased. Just because the black market ups the price on product doesn’t mean that the people they sell it to are going to be able to purchase it.”
“I hadn’t realized we were having that effect.”
“You are. And it’s not because the suppliers want the price to go up. They’re squeezing out buyers, losing creds at the bottom line. They’ve had to raise the price just to stay in business. We’re hurting them. Rather, I should say you and your team have hurt them.”
“This is a team play, Colonel.”
Halladay nodded. “I’ve been running interference on the political end of things, and dodging the brass. However, they’ve gotten onto General Washburn and pressure there carries more weight. The general wants to finish out a calm billet. So I’m at a catch twenty-two. The drug cartels the corps have established can’t deal with the profit loss, and I can’t deal with the heat from Command. Something has to give.”
Sage thought about that. “You just said you’re not shutting down the op.”
“I’m not. Not yet. But we’re going to have to change the game, Top. We can’t keep going after the nickel-and-dime guys. We need a win. A big one. One that I can use to leverage Command into freeing us up.”
“They’re not going to back off, sir.”
“They won’t have a choice. The labor director wasn’t the only person I saw today. I also saw members of the Quass that are sympathetic to Terran military presence. I let them know I need them to back me. If you can get me proof that ties those drug networks into the corps, those Quass members are willing to go to bat for us in a much bigger way. They’ll push to break charters with the corps and send them packing.”
Sage considered that. “You want something that will roll back onto the corps supporting Senator Finkley.”
“I do, Top. But I don’t want it. I need it. We need it.”
“I understand, sir.”
“I don’t want to add any pressure to the situation, but have you or Lieutenant Murad developed any leads on where we can get information about a clearinghouse regarding these drug labs? They may be independent cells, but I haven’t met a criminal yet who completely trusts his grunts. Somebody somewhere is keeping an eye on the creds.”
“Roger that. Lieutenant Murad has been talking about the same thing. Every lab we’ve taken down has been tied into a cyber connection. They’ve always been so heavily encrypted that the lieutenant hasn’t been able to crack them.”
“I’ve been reading Murad’s reports. He says that those sites have been cybered up pretty tight.”
“The lieutenant hasn’t given up though, sir. He appears to be as skilled with code as Sergeant Kiwanuka is with a sniper weapon. The problem we’ve faced so far is that all the operations we’ve hit have been small. The lieutenant thinks if we can find a larger operation, one that has a lot more raw materials, more shipping channels, then the latest version of his crack coding might suss out the network backing the drug labs. Put a bow on a large chunk of it.”
“That’s what he said when I talked to him about this.”
Sage sipped his coffee. “You should have told me you’d already talked to the lieutenant, sir. I’ve wasted your time.”
“No you haven’t.” Halladay held a hand up over his head. “Murad explained what he was doing somewhere about here to me. My emphasis was on handling soldiers and materials, training the right people for the right job. Murad told me he’d discussed this with you and Sergeant Kiwanuka.”
Sage nodded. “He brought it up last night.”
“You followed what he was talking about?” Halladay lifted a skeptical eyebrow.
“Lost me at the get-go, sir. But I believe the lieutenant can do what he says he can do. I just need to find the right target where we can implement the cyber attack.”
Halladay smiled. “I may be able to help you with that, Top.”
“You know a location?”
“If I did, I would have already told you. No, my talk with the Quass was about more than just pushing back at the corps given the right ammunition. I also went to them asking for help.”
That bothered Sage and he tried not to let it show, but he knew he failed.
“I’m not big on trusting someone outside of the fort either,” Halladay said. “Not with the situation being what it is. As you know from my views on Finkley, I’m not in favor of trusting everyone here. But some of those Quass have the same agendas we do. One of the elder Quass, a woman named Leghef, knows how to play her cards pretty close to the vest. She doesn’t know where a major lab is, but she thinks she knows one of the local merchants who will.”
“You’re going to ask for cooperation?”
Halladay flashed a cold grin. “I was told this merchant wouldn’t be interested in cooperating with anything that was going to impact his bottom line. And we’re not hoping to do anything less than destroy that bottom line.” He paused. “Asking him isn’t going to fly. At least, asking nicely won’t.”
Sage nodded. “So we’re not going to ask nicely.”
“No.” Halladay sighed. “And I can’t sanction this op, Frank. If you, and your team, decide to pursue this, you’ll be doing it on your own without any deniability.”
“I can’t speak for the team, Colonel, but if I can find the soldiers than can help me pull this off, that will be fine with me. We just won’t get caught. Now give me that name.”
THIRTY
Residence of Sneys the Merchant
Outside Makaum City
0041 Zulu Time
Clad in a lightweight no-see glidesuit that gave up nearly all armor (it wouldn’t stop a direct hit from a solid projectile and would only partially block beam weapons) and dumbed the onboard AI functiona
lity down to directional assistance and nightvision only, Sage dropped from the jumpcopter a thousand meters out from the target house. He popped his arms out and unfurled the wings that ran from his wrists to his ankles. The nano-augmented memoryweave stiffened into webbed wings as it caught the wind.
Rolling his body, Sage controlled his rapid descent toward his target. Before he knew it, he was plunging through a cloud of asnd, which were bloodsucking mites as big across as his hand. The bulbous insect bodies smashed against him, spreading over him in splotches of bug guts.
Behind him, Kiwanuka hit the insect cloud and cursed vociferously. Her voice carried to him over the limited-range, line-of-sight inner-ear comms they were using for the op.
“It’s not anything that won’t wash off,” Sage said. “Be glad your faceshield holds up against them.”
“They’ve covered my faceshield. I’m flying blind.”
Kiwanuka sounded calm, but Sage knew that wasn’t the case. He didn’t like the glidesuit, and he didn’t trust the no-see fabric to “bend” light and other detection systems well enough to keep them hidden while they were without support and in enemy territory. The man they were after, Sneys, had on-site bodyguards around the clock.
Sage had racked up nearly four times as much practice time in the glidesuits as Kiwanuka, and he still didn’t care for the rapid descent or the knowledge that his fate depended on skills he wasn’t happy with. Glidesuits weren’t primary equipment at training, but there had been enough training to make a difference. Sage had never before used them till training.
“Turn your head from side to side,” Sage told her. “Let the wind resistance do the cleaning.”
With the memoryweave locked out into glide position, Kiwanuka couldn’t move her hand in to clean her faceshield. That was another item on the long list of things Sage didn’t like about the suits. He couldn’t even look over his shoulder to see if Kiwanuka was following his suggestion. He missed the 360-degree view provided in the battle helmets.
The distance to the ground and to the target counted down rapidly inside his faceshield, fogged up occasionally by the heat of his breath against the humid night air.