by Rick Partlow
“Well, there’s where we run into some trouble, my dear lady. Because, you see, there’s someone else who has a much more pressing interest in discussing these matters with the bratva than you.”
The lights finally rose up and Deke blinked as the rest of the warehouse came into focus. The walls were bare buildfoam nearly covered by ceiling-high stacks of sturdy packing crates, row upon row of them leaving only narrow aisles that led to a small office. The stacks of crates formed a semicircular barrier around Koji…and around the arc of that semicircle were ten men and women, all of them looking roughly dangerous in mismatched body armor and a hodgepodge of various weapons.
One of them---a compact, wiry little man with short, curly hair and a dangerous glint to his dark eyes---stepped forward, his pulse carbine aimed at a point between Deke and Kara.
“The Sung Brothers request the honor of your company,” the little man said, his voice surprisingly deep.
Deke could feel his heart rate and respiration start to surge as adrenaline coursed through his system.
“You sold me out, Koji,” he accused mildly, trying to buy himself a moment to game-plan.
“You’re a transporter,” Koji explained with a helpless shrug, the look on his face not the least bit apologetic. “The Sung Cartel is a customer…and the customer is always right.”
He glanced at Kara, ready to move at her signal despite the odds: the shooters might be hard-cases but none were boosted and he was confident the two of them could handle the lot.
But Kara, to his surprise, seemed unfazed by the development. She coolly regarded the man who had spoken, her hand not moving towards her sidearm.
“All right,” she said, her tone calm and even. “Let’s not keep them waiting.”
“Nice place,” Deke commented, only half sarcastic, as he and Kara exited the luxury groundcar, followed by the four armed guards who had accompanied them on the half hour ride. They’d travelled more than twenty kilometers from Shakak over barely maintained fusion-formed roads and, despite heated leather seats and a mini-bar, the trip hadn’t been a pleasant one. Deke had the thought that the distance and difficulty was intentional, a way of isolating the Sung Brothers from the riff-raff of the port town.
Illuminated by the harsh glare of security spotlights, the Sung House was a stark contrast to everything Deke had seen in the bare-bones squatter-colony city. Not a gram of buildfoam had gone into its construction, nor a centimeter of plastic. It was four stories of solid wood and stone, harvested at great expense from the wilderness outside Shakak and assembled by hand rather than by automated fabricators.
The mansion reminded Deke of the historic districts in Montreal, with its sloped, shingled roof and block construction. Of course, the old manor houses in Canada usually weren’t surrounded by four meter high stone walls with guard towers every hundred meters fitted with medium Gatling lasers.
“This way,” the wiry little man---Deke had heard one of the others call him Caesar—directed them, motioning with his carbine toward the tall, narrow double-doors at the front of the main building.
Deke’s left hand brushed his empty holster and his eyes automatically went to where his handgun was tucked into Caesar’s belt. He and Kara could have taken the guards out at any time on the ride over, but she’d shown no inclination to do it. He tried one more time contacting her via his neurolink transceiver, but she either wasn’t receiving his call or had decided to ignore him.
It’s her show, Deke told himself again, following Kara into the house.
The front doors swung open silently and the group stepped into am entrance hallway tastefully decorated in the same antique style as the outside of the mansion. Side tables of real, hand-polished wood held hand-fired and glazed pottery. Paintings lined the walls, again all works made by a human artist using brushes and paints rather than an artificial intelligence controlling a fabricator. Deke noted more of the same in the elegant sitting room into which the entrance hall led: velvet-covered furniture and tables of locally-mined marble along with several classically styled sculptures.
For a family that made its fortune buying and selling high tech weapons and illegal ViR streetware, Deke reflected, the Sungs sure seemed enamored of old school craftwork. Or maybe it was just the conspicuous consumption they liked.
“Hold up,” Caesar raised a hand to halt them there in the entrance hallway, his head cocked as he appeared to be listening to a transmission on a mastoid comlink or maybe a neurolink transmitter. He suddenly turned on Kara and Deke, hostile suspicion in his eyes. “These two are carrying implant weapons.”
The other three guards raised their pulse carbines and Deke held up his hands, realizing there must be some high-tech scanners behind all the low tech appearance of the entrance hall.
“Whoa!” he said, trying to calm them. “We didn’t ask to come here, you came for us! And you weren’t exactly taking no for an answer.”
Kara stepped up to Caesar, arms down at her sides, expression impassive. “If we’d wanted to,” she said softly, her eyes and voice flat and emotionless, “we could have killed every single one of you back at Koji’s warehouse.”
“Well, I…” Caesar tried to interrupt, but she pressed on, raising her voice slightly to speak over him.
“If we’d wanted to,” she continued, “we could have killed you in the car.”
Deke could see Caesar’s eyes going wide as the man decided that he believed every word she was saying. Caesar, Deke thought, was a very perceptive man for a Pirate World gunslinger.
“And if we wanted to,” Kara concluded, “we could still kill you and take out the Sung Brothers, despite the various safeguards they’ve had built into this house.” She smiled, a smile like a mouse might see just before the cat took its head off and swallowed the rest whole. “But we don’t want that. We came here with you peacefully because we want to talk. Your bosses want to talk.” She spread her hands. “So, let’s talk.”
“Just who the hell are you?” a harsh, choppy voice demanded from the other side of the sitting room.
Deke looked up and saw two men descending the spiral staircase from the second floor, identical down to their feather-cut, shoulder-length hair and the deep maroon of their casual jackets. Their skin was as pale as the polished marble of the sculptures in the sitting room and given the epicanthic folds to their dark eyes, Deke was sure that was a cosmetic choice---either theirs or their parents’. Their faces had the gravity of age if not the lines of it, and Deke knew they’d been running Shakak---and most of Peboan---for the last three decades.
“Mister Sung…” Caesar began and Deke had the time to think “Which one?” before the brother on the left cut off Caesar’s words with a slashing motion.
“When we heard you were in town, Conner,” the Sung on the left said, spearing Deke with a glance, “we thought perhaps you were scouting us out for the bratva. But she does not work for the bratva,” he pointed a long-nailed finger at Kara. “So madam, I repeat: who the hell are you?”
The Sung brother on the right said nothing. That’s how they always played it, Deke knew. One of them did all the talking while the other said nothing. Some people said that it was Il-nam who did all the talking and Ji-u who was always silent, but Deke thought they took turns.
Deke looked to Kara, wondering what cover she was going to use. She glanced back to him for just a heartbeat, then turned to the Sungs.
“My name is Major Kara McIntire,” she declared. “I’m with the DSI.”
Chapter Three
Conner:
Deke almost missed Sung’s reply as he was still staring open-mouthed at Kara. Then it penetrated: the man had asked why he shouldn’t just have her killed.
Good fucking question, Deke agreed.
“Given that you could actually pull it off,” Kara granted for the sake of argument---sounding awfully blasé about it, he thought, “you shouldn’t kill us because we’re hunting for the same people that attacked you.”
T
he Sung brother who was doing the talking smiled knowingly. “You’re after the Predecessor tech they used, you mean.”
“It’s not in the best interest of the Commonwealth to have that sort of weaponry available,” she admitted readily. She cocked an eyebrow at him. “And if you’re thinking you could get your hands on it and corner the market, let me remind you that the military would likely come down on anyone who tried to do that with their full weight. And to quote Joseph Stalin, ‘quantity has a quality all its own.’”
“I don’t know who the hell Joseph Stalin is,” Sung said drily, “but you do have a point.” He leaned against the bannister at the end of the staircase on his side as his twin leaned against the one on the opposite side in a nearly perfect mirror movement. “I’d love to send you and your toy soldiers after the Romanovs, but the truth is, they don’t have the tech. They just hired the people who do.”
“We could still have a talk with the Romanovs,” Kara suggested, smiling a bit playfully, as if she could ingratiate herself to Sung by offering to wreak havoc upon his rivals. “They might be persuaded to tell us who they hired.”
“We ‘persuaded’ several of Romanov’s lieutenants to death,” Sung said with a snort. “The force who attacked us hired themselves out via a dead-drop.” He sneered. “We were a…proof of concept, if you will. Free advertising for their service. Their future prices for such direct action are so exorbitant, we can’t even afford them. However, they are offering other services at a lower rate: covert operations, wet-work, intelligence gathering.” He grinned cynically. “You might say they’re a private version of your agency.”
“Does this group have a name?” Kara asked him, her face darkening now with concern.
“They call themselves the Naga for some reason.” Sung chuckled. “I had to look that up…some weird snake creature from some weird religion. Fucking theatrics.”
Deke looked from him to his silent brother, still perfectly mimicking his stance, and fought back a derisive snort.
Yeah, theatrics.
* * *
Deke slapped the control on the inside of the Dutchman’s lock and stalked towards the cockpit as the ramp rose behind him, bringing Kara up with it.
“Set a course for Inferno,” she was saying as she came up behind him, seemingly oblivious to his mood. “I need to speak to General Murdock about this, and I need to do it in person. I don’t trust our communications with this sort of technology out there.”
“Yeah,” Deke muttered, falling into the pilot’s seat. “Trust is a big problem.”
“Something bothering you?” Kara asked, sitting down beside him in the copilot’s position. Her tone, Deke thought, showed a decided lack of concern.
“What could be bothering me?” he bit off through clenched teeth. “I don’t know, Major McIntire, maybe it’s the fact that you just made it impossible for me to ever pull a cargo again in the Pirate Worlds.” He turned in his seat and fixed her with a glare. “These people aren’t the forgiving sort. I’m officially a stooge for the DSI, thanks to your big fucking mouth, and any of the families in the Worlds is just as likely to blow a hole in me the next time they see me.”
“You want me to tell you I’m sorry I made it impossible for you to smuggle illegal goods for a living?” Kara asked him in a challenging tone. “Somehow I don’t think that sentiment fits in with my job description.” She snorted derision. “Get a legit run. Tariffs and fees aren’t so bad now that the Corporate Council doesn’t hold a monopoly on transportation anymore.”
Deke’s scowl deepened. “Yeah, that’s so fucking appealing: go straight, sign contracts, pay taxes…”
“You’ve been playing the outlaw for what? Nearly fifteen years now?” She gave him a look that reminded him of his mother on those rare occasions she was sober. “Maybe it’s time to grow up, eh?”
He blew a breath out through his cheeks, trying to keep himself from starting a pointless shouting match. He passed his hands over a control and the ship’s belly jets roared to life with a whine of turbines. A thought struck him and he turned back to her.
“Back at the Sung’s mansion, you looked as if you’d heard that name before: the Naga.”
Kara nodded almost reluctantly. “There was a rumor a few months back about someone trying to recruit former DSI agents and contractors…the kind that did the Corporate Council’s dirty work. They were purged from the agency when General Murdock took it over.” She snorted. “Hell, half of them have arrest warrants out on them, along with that asshole Gregorian, if we ever get our hands on him.”
“You still haven’t caught him?” Deke asked, genuinely surprised. “The guy was the director of the DSI, that’s a pretty high profile position to just disappear.”
“He was the head spy of the Commonwealth for ten years,” she reminded him, a bit defensive. “He knows where to go to disappear. Anyway, among the ‘purged’ we slipped a couple sleeper agents who were still loyal to us just in case the ones we wanted in a reformery ever tried to get ahold of them. One of them told us about the rumor…and the name of the group trying to recruit them.”
“The Naga?” Deke assumed. She nodded in response. “I guess that makes sense,” he said, cocking an eyebrow. “I mean, if they want to set up a private dirty works business, ex-DSI spies are probably top hires. The inside man tell you anything else about them?”
Her eyes narrowed and her expression went cold. “Not after we found his body stuffed in a storm drain on Thunderhead.”
Deke winced, but kept his attention on the controls as he fed power to the belly jets. Air sucked in through the turbines ran past the ship’s reactor, was superheated and then expelled from the jets in pillars of fire that lifted them off the fusion-hardened surface of the port’s landing pad. Clouds of steam billowed around them, blocking the view from the exterior cameras and forcing the ship’s computer to simulate their surroundings using the other sensors.
Once they were fifty meters up, Deke began shifting power from the belly jets to the rear thrusters and the Dutchman started its slow climb through the thick winter clouds of Peboan. They were both silent for a long time as Deke considered whether or not he wanted to ask the next question in his mind.
“The agent that got killed,” Deke finally said, eyes still on the control board as he guided the repurposed missile cutter out of the atmosphere. “Did you know him?”
He saw her nod out of his peripheral vision. She didn’t say anything for a moment and he thought she wasn’t going to.
“I was the one who asked him to go under for us,” she confessed so quietly he almost didn’t hear her over the roar of the engines.
Deke saw the slate grey of the clouds giving way to the black of space on the feed from the external cameras.
“Not a business to get into if you want to live a long, boring life,” he allowed. “But then, who am I to talk?”
“Is that why you’re still trying to play the outlaw, even when you don’t have to anymore?” Kara asked. “You could have gone home, you know.”
Deke didn’t respond immediately. The reason he’d headed to the Pirate Worlds after the war was an attempted murder charge he’d narrowly avoided thanks to General Murdock’s intervention. He’d probably been released from the service a bit too soon, he realized now, without enough time to decompress from the war. When some drunk in a bar had taken a swing at him, he’d nearly killed the guy and then badly injured some of the police who responded to the fight. He’d been given the choice of an extended stay in a psychiatric facility or leaving Earth for good. He’d picked up the Dutchman as war surplus and never looked back.
But after he’d helped Caleb and, indirectly, General Murdock stave off Andre Damiani’s power-grab four years ago, Murdock had repaid his help by getting his record expunged. And actually…
“I did go back,” he told her. “You know that.”
He tried not to let the frustration show on his face. His father still hadn’t forgiven him the shame he’d c
aused his family, not even after fifteen years: Jacob Conner had refused to meet with him. His mother was married to someone else and had three more children and treated him like an acquaintance. His older sister was off-planet and they’d never been close anyway.
“It wasn’t home anymore,” he admitted, finally looking away from the readouts and the viewscreen. He saw understanding in Kara’s eyes. “I’m really not sure it ever was.”
As the Dutchman left Peboan’s atmosphere, the turbines ceased drawing in air to use for reaction mass and instead drew from the ship’s onboard supply of metallic hydrogen, still boosting away from the cold refuge for those who couldn’t or wouldn’t live under the law of the Human Commonwealth.
“I’ve never been big on the whole home and family thing,” Kara admitted. “My father was the captain of a cruiser in the Tahni neutral zone before the war. I saw him maybe twice a year. He died the second day of the war and I signed up the same day I heard.” Her voice was neutral, her face emotionless, like she was discussing a story from the NewsNet. “Mother never really forgave me for that, I think. I don’t know…we don’t talk much. I was incommunicado for a long time during the war, and after…well, we just kind of went our separate ways.”
Deke tried not to show his surprise. This was the first time he could recall Kara telling him anything about herself, much less something personal.
“So, I guess the DSI is your family, huh?” Deke asked. “I mean, you went back to them after all that happened.”
She surprised him again by laughing at that: a slow, soft chuckle.
“That’s exactly what the last psych counselor said to me,” she explained. “The truth is a bit less sentimental. The Department gives me an excuse to avoid all that shit. Hell, they pay me to avoid it.”
“And I’m the one that needs to grow up?” he shot back, watching the navigation display as the ship boosted quickly out of planetary orbit.
Finally, the Dutchman was free of Peboan’s gravity well and Deke shut down the fusion drives. The acceleration ceased and he came up against his restraint harness with no force to hold him down. He nudged the ship’s computer with a mental whisper from his neurolink and the Teller-Fox drive units activated, far enough away from the planet now that the gravitational pull wouldn’t interfere with the warp field. The ship surged forward as the warp effect squeezed the fabric of spacetime like a boat propeller.