by Rick Partlow
Deke had never met him, but a file had been supplied by the middleman in this deal, and he took the moment to review the pertinent facts. His name was Kane Xiang, or so the file would have had Deke believe, and he ran an iridium mine on Sipapu, a squatter colony on the fringes of the Pirate Worlds---those lawless, nearly worthless systems on the inner edge of the Cluster that rejected Commonwealth rule.
Officially, colonization was forbidden in the systems directly bordering Pirate Space. But with the Cluster’s more accessible colonies being quickly gobbled up in the Expansion that had followed the Second Interstellar War, many dissatisfied adventurers and restless entrepreneurs were venturing to the proscribed systems to try their hand at mining or agriculture.
Only one problem with that: since the colonies weren't recognized by the Commonwealth government, they received no protection from the Patrol or the Rangers---and the pirate cabals knew it. This left the squatters with the choice of either hiring mercenaries for their defense or doing the job themselves.
Xiang's people had chosen the latter alternative, and that was where Deke came in. The hold of his ship was packed with a pair of military-grade proton cannons suitable for mounting on any spacecraft, along with the sensor package and Artificial Intelligence programs to run it. All of which was stolen, all of which was illegal for civilians to possess, and all of which was illegal to sell to an unenfranchised colony.
All of which didn't mean shit to Deke.
"You're Conner," the man accused, striding down the ramp and approaching Deke. A quick scan showed Deke he wasn't armed and wasn't packing any obvious physical augmentation.
"And you're Xiang," Deke returned, shoving his sidearm into its holster. "Hope you've got loading equipment in there," he went on, nodding at the hopper, "'cause you folks aren't paying me enough to haul this shit out on my back."
"No problem." Xiang fished in his pants pocket and came up with a crystal dataspike, tossing it to Deke. "Go ahead and check that out while I go grab the powerlift."
Deke frowned at him as he disappeared back into the hold of the aircraft. He'd been dealing with the squatter colonies for a while now, and he hadn't yet met one of the raggedy-assed paranoids that didn't want to go over the cargo with an electron microscope before they forked over the money. Yet a quick scan of the spike with his neurolink showed that it indeed held the two hundred K in Corporate scrip that was the agreed-upon price for the weapons.
He tucked the spike into a pouch on his gun-belt, shaking his head. There was no sign of any trouble, and he couldn't start shooting his customers just because he had a bad feeling---business might start to decline. So he just waited and watched as the hopper's cargo door fell open with a metallic groan.
Xiang clomped out of the aircraft's cargo hold wearing the faded yellow bulk of an old industrial exoskeleton, its aging servos whining in protest as he brought it over the uneven ground between the two vehicles. Deke chuckled softly as the man approached him.
"That thing looks like it's older than I am," he commented.
"We don't get much in the way of equipment out here." Xiang smiled apologetically through the exoskeleton's safety cage, struggling with the machine's controls. "This old girl's held together with spit and good wishes."
"Aren't we all?" Deke mused. "Follow me."
The ramp to the cargo bay yawned open from the ship's belly, revealing the insulated hold and the half-dozen durasteel containers which contained the components of the proton accelerators.
"You want to inspect the goods?" Captain Conner asked the colonist, leading him up into the bay. "You choose the box and I'll pop it open for you."
"I'll check it out back in the hopper," Xiang told him. "I've got a diagnostic scanner in the hold."
Deke frowned. There it was again, that faint odor of something rotten. It wasn't so much that Xiang wasn't inspecting the cargo on his ship---God knows, there were all types out here, and maybe he wasn't the shrewdest businessman. No, it was the fact that a group of half-assed squatters who couldn't even afford a first-class powerloader had a full diagnostic scanner in the hold of his hopper---a device which cost nearly as much as one of the bootleg proton cannons.
It still wasn't enough to make him push the panic button, but it was damned strange. He shook the feeling off. If anything happened, he'd deal with it. He hadn't survived in the business this long without living through a handful of attempted double-crosses: he was confident that there was nothing this Xiang could throw at him that he couldn't handle. One hole card he'd enjoyed for a long time was that while he usually knew who he was dealing with, the opposition never knew who they were dealing with.
Deke stepped out of the way as Xiang hauled the first of the containers forward, the oversized footpads of the exoskeleton scraping against the surface of the ramp with a sound that set the pilot's teeth on edge. He had barely made it out of the hold when something crackled and popped in the machine's hip and the exoskeleton froze up with a grinding squeal.
"Shit!" Xiang spat, slamming a fist against the padded armrest. "This Goddamned thing's primary motivator’s shorted out again."
"Let me take a look at it," Deke offered with a sigh, holstering his sidearm. He stepped around to the rear of the machine, popped the access hatch into the guts of the electric motor, and was rewarded immediately by a cloud of white smoke and the unmistakable stench of burning insulation. "Goddamn, this thing is an antique," he muttered, using the thermal optics implanted behind his corneas to trace the short. "Here's your trouble," he announced, feeling on his gun-belt for the all-purpose tool he kept in a pouch there. "Just be a second..."
The words were barely out of his mouth when the motor blew up in his face and the world was suddenly several different shades of black...
* * *
Deke swam through a sea of darkness, clawing his way back to consciousness with but one thought: this was impossible, Impossible, IMPOSSIBLE, GODDAMN IMPOSSIBLE!!!
The Glory Boys, the elite team of augmented commandos he'd fought with during the war, were not physically capable of losing consciousness except by death or voluntary sleep. Sonic stunners and microwave disruptors could cause them pain and confusion, various chemicals or electric shock devices could short-circuit their organic nervous system, but nothing short of actual physical force could disrupt the heavily-shielded superconductive fibers that connected their implant computers to their byomer muscle augments. Their auxiliary organs could supply them with a few minutes of extra oxygen, and their computer-to-brain neurolink could prevent them from blacking out due to shock unless they permitted it to stop the pain of an injury. And the only way to disconnect the neurolink was to rip it out of his skull.
So why, for the first time in two decades, was his headcomp silent?
He opened his eyes.
"You're shitting me!" he blurted.
"Hi, Deke," Kara McIntire said, smiling broadly.
Deke tried closing his eyes and opening them again, but the lean, attractive face, the piercing green eyes and the spiky, short-cut hair just wouldn't go away. He looked around and saw that he was lying in a military-style bunk in a small, sterile, white-walled room with no windows and a single door. He wasn't restrained and he was still dressed in his own clothes, though a quick pat-down revealed to him that all the hidden weapons had been cleaned out, right down to the monowire garrote wrapped in a special lining of his jacket sleeve. He tried to extend the talons mounted on the bones of his forearms, but received not a whisper of response from his headcomp.
God damn it.
"Where am I?" he asked her, sitting up. "And no offense, but what the hell are you doing here?"
"You're on the Patrol cutter Kraken," she confirmed his worst fears. "And I'm here to give you a way out."
"Since when do you work for the Patrol?" he wanted to know. Of course, what he really wanted to know was what the hell was happening with his augmentation, but something in him prevented him from coming out and asking.
"Oh,
I don't," she assured him. "I work for General Murdock now."
"Oh, shit," he mumbled.
General Antonin Murdock had been the CO of Deke's commando team during the war. His most recent run-in with the man had involved an apocalyptic confrontation with the monopolistic might of the Corporate Council, the result of which was the collapse of the Council and the sweeping under the rug of a shitload of advanced alien technology. The man had more power than ever now, and the last thing Deke had wanted was to become involved with him again.
"Cheer up, Deke," she urged. "Cooperate and you get everything back---including a guarantee that you'll never have to worry about the Patrol again."
"And if I don't?" he wondered. "Off to a reformery?"
"Not my call," she admitted, frowning in discomfort. "But unlikely, considering how much you know."
"So I'll be 'disappeared,' huh?" He grinned lopsidedly. "Murdock never was much of a sentimentalist. Well, at least I know where I stand." He regarded her carefully. "What if I said I'd downloaded my memory of what happened on Petra onto several dataspikes being held by friends in the Worlds? And that if I fail to contact them for a certain period of time, those recordings will be hacked into a Commonwealth Instel Newsnet broadcast for all to see?"
"Well then," she replied with brutal honesty, "I'm fairly certain your memories would be ripped out by a psycheprobe and those friends would be hunted down and killed within a week."
"Just curious." Deke said, spreading his hands innocently. He sighed heavily, settling back on the cot with his head on his hands. "All right, what does that old bastard want from me?"
Chapter One
Mitchell:
I was on my last lap around the property line when it hit me like a fusion blast and I found myself lying on my belly in a ditch at the side of the path, plunged into a nightmare vision of green sky and hellish red trees.
It took me a moment to realize what had happened, and when I did I couldn't quite believe it. I had gone into combat mode. My implant computer had jacked my system with double-doses of adrenaline, powered up my auxiliary sensors and muscle augments and activated my thermal vision lens implants without so much as a by-your-leave, and sent me involuntarily into a dive behind the nearest cover.
Nothing like that had happened to me for over four years, since the business with the Corporate Council, and I’d been close to certain that it would never happen again---yet here I was, lying in a ditch. And I could immediately see why: cutting across the field on a direct bead toward me was the biggest fucking thing I’d ever seen moving on two legs.
It was human, genetically at least, but that was where the resemblances between us ended. Canaan was a high-g world---1.68 gravities---and it tended to produce compact, heavily-muscled types like myself, but this fellow made me look like an anemic Martian. Only a couple centimeters taller than me, he was very nearly as wide as he was tall, with scaly, armored skin and eyes set deep in boney orbital ridges. My headcomp told me what he was before I asked: a Titan, genetically engineered over a century ago to live and work on Morrigan, a 2.5g world with a high level of heavy metals and radioactives and a decidedly lethal ecosystem.
Back when useful worlds were hard to come by and the only way to reach them was through the jumpgates we’d inherited from the Predecessors, it made sense to engineer colonists for a less-than-ideal planet. Now, with the Transition Drive opening up hundreds more systems and dozens of habitable worlds, the Titans had outlived their usefulness as heavy-g miners and workers---but they still made great assassins.
A quick scan of the thing told me it wasn’t carrying any weapons, but then it didn’t need to---it was a weapon. Whoever sent it must have decided it was easier to use brute force rather than try to smuggle weapons through the quarantine at the spaceport.
The Titan looked like something out of a nightmare on thermal/IR, and I wondered why my headcomp had bothered---until I cut off the filters and the thing disappeared completely. I went back to the enhanced view and he was back, and this time I noticed the glowing star of an isotope power pack at his waist, connected to fiber-optic threads that ran all over his body: a camo field. Tools of the trade. My trade, once upon a time.
Well, there was no use hiding in a ditch---if I could see him, he sure as hell could see me.
I stood and stepped back onto the path, resisting the temptation to dust myself off. Titans spoke an odd dialect rooted in some old Earth language called Russian, and I searched my headcomp for the proper pronunciation.
“You looking for me, asshole?” I asked him in his own language.
I saw him pause in his broad stride, a look of consternation passing across his inhuman face. Then he smiled and the camo field disappeared. I deactivated my optical filters and he was transformed from a red-and-orange thermal collage into the ruddy-skinned Goliath I knew him to be.
“It is good,” he said slowly, in a guttural English, “to encounter so worthy an opponent. Killing you will be an honor.”
“Pleasure’s all mine.”
Then, without another word, I was in motion. Nearly twenty meters separated us, but I covered the ground in three bounding steps thanks to the byomer strands that augmented my natural muscles, and with the last step I was airborne, my left heel sailing toward his head.
He wasn’t there, of course. He obviously had jacked reflexes, probably some kind of skeletal reinforcement and a body that was used to half-again the gravity here on Canaan. He easily sidestepped my kick and tried to come at me from behind, but I spun on the ball of my left foot and spun into a jump back kick that caught him high in the chest.
The Titan stumbled backwards, surprise in his eyes at the force of my blow, but regained his footing and managed to duck my follow up kick. He tried to move in and grapple with me, but I jumped out of his grasp and braced myself to meet his charge. He had plenty of bulk to throw at me, but with that bulk came shitloads of momentum...momentum I could use against him. I spun away from his charge, spun into a heel kick that caught him behind the knee. I could hear the ligaments pop in the joint and I knew instantly that he lacked the byomer webbing that reinforced my own joints.
I tried to press my advantage, jumping at him as he stumbled away, but he came inside my guard with speed that belied his bulk and caught me with a backhand across the face. There was no pain, really---my headcomp had shut off my pain receptors---just an odd tingling as I felt myself flying three meters back and plowing shoulder-first into the dirt.
Had I been a normal, unaugmented human, the fight would have ended right there with my neck nicely broken. As it was, my brain felt like it had been run over by an autoharvester, and I was blinded by a stunning revelation: I had popped the ligaments in his knee. He could still fight, but could he run?
I knew I could.
I took off at a dead sprint, taking full advantage of my augments, churning up dirt as I hit a speed close to fifty klicks an hour. The Titan limped after me with a ridiculous hopping gait that would nevertheless have put a championship sprinter of a century ago to shame, but I was easily outdistancing him...
Then I saw the groundcar approaching. It was over a klick away, but I knew it was Rachel from the heat signature. I skidded to a halt, turning back to face the Titan. If I kept running, Rachel would be on top of us in seconds, and I didn’t want to think about what that thing would do to her if he caught her unawares.
I ran at him and faked a flying kick, then flipped up and bounced off his shoulder as he swung at me, landing behind him as he tried to turn. He would have nailed me if he could have turned at his normal speed, but the knee ligament damage slowed him down enough for me to slam an elbow strike into his kidneys, putting my entire weight into the blow. The Titan staggered forward with the strike, still half-turned and off-balance, and I used the opportunity to jump into a heel kick that took him in the back of the neck.
The kick was centimeters too low to break his neck, but I felt his clavicle snap under my heel before I touched down, spinning
to face him. He was reeling from the two hits and I was concentrating so heavily on him that neither of us noticed Rachel’s groundcar until it plowed into the Titan doing better than eighty kilometers an hour. The Titan flew a good twenty meters before he hit the ground rolling and flopping like a landed fish, while Rachel’s car spun out in a spray of dirt, the gyros whining as they fought to keep the vehicle from rolling.
I desperately wanted to check on Rachel, but I knew that if the Titan wasn’t out of commission he was still a deadly threat, so I ran over to him, scanning him carefully as I approached. He was, amazingly enough, still alive, despite have a compound fracture of the hip and right leg and several shattered ribs. He tried to rise on his one good arm but I kicked it out from under him and he collapsed onto his back, wheezing with effort.
“Give it up,” I told him. “We’ll get you to a medical center...”
“And psych-probe me?” He shook his head, gasping for breath. “I think not.”
He must have overdosed himself with adrenaline, because in one instant he had flipped upright, balanced precariously on his good leg as he swung his one functioning arm at me. I ducked it easily, hopping back out of his reach. I risked a glance back at the groundcar and saw Rachel struggling to free herself from her safety harness. I had no more time to waste playing with this asshole.
With a thought the paired, twenty-centimeter plastalloy talons anchored to the bones of each of my forearms extended through the synthskin flaps on my wrists. The Titan came at me with a burst of chemically-induced energy, but I batted aside his attack and swung through his guard. A spray of bright, arterial blood painted the soil red and the Titan’s body teetered for a moment, headless, before crashing to the ground.