by M. D. Cooper
“OK, Amy,” Leslie said as she rose. “Time for us to go. I have to put my helmet back on so that I can keep my eyes peeled while we’re out there.”
“Do you have to?” Amy pleaded. “I don’t like how your helmets make you look.”
Leslie knelt in front of the young girl, smoothing her hair back. “I know. They’re meant to look dangerous, to make people fear us. It’s part of what we do.”
Amy nodded. “I know, my father says similar things. It’s just…they’re still scary.”
Rika backed out of the opening in the gunship’s side and stood guard as Chase ducked in to retrieve Patty. He lifted her carefully, and Rika touched his shoulder as he moved past.
Chase’s mental avatar gave her a knowing smile.
Chase turned his head, looking back, and gave a nod. She couldn’t see his face, but she knew there was a wink being given.
Behind her, Leslie finally got Amy out of the gunship, and began guiding her down to the floor of the ravine, explaining why they couldn’t fly a stolen gunship with a hole in the side to the city’s air and spaceport.
Rika leaned her head into the vessel and made one last sweep to ensure nothing identifying them had been left behind. Amy had left a few fingerprints on the hull, so Rika wiped those off before walking to where Jemmy was slumped over.
Should have gotten Leslie to help with this, Rika realized as she lifted Jemmy’s right arm with her left, pulling him up straight. Then she ducked down and slung him over her shoulder. Or not; guy doesn’t weigh that much.
A hundred meters from the gunship, Rika stopped and turned to face it, looking at the cliff rising above; there was a large outcropping of rock, twenty meters up. She took aim and fired her electron beam at it.
The ravine wall exploded, and rock showered down onto the gunship, nearly covering it. Rika changed her angle and fired a sabot round at the cliff face, shattering it further and dropping more stone onto the craft below.
One more shot and the final chunk of the overhang fell, likely crushing what remained of the K-Strike vessel.
Should do the trick. The hikers would probably see the dust and come investigate—or maybe they’d think the ravine wall was unstable and turn back. Either way, Basilisk would be long gone by then.
Rika carefully moved down the ravine, reaching where Barne waited in the ground transport a minute later. It was an off-road truck of sorts that had a small bed and three rows of seats inside.
Chase was settling Patty in the back row as Rika approached, and Rika spotted a shady spot where a bottle of water and some protein bars waited.
She laid Jemmy on his side and, once satisfied that he wouldn’t get baked when the sun reached its zenith, walked to the truck, getting in the front passenger seat.
“Good to go, LT?” Barne asked from the driver’s seat.
“Yup. Dropped the cliff on the gunship; no one’s getting to that thing for some time.”
“The whole cliff?” Amy asked. “The echo was kinda scary.”
“Not the whole thing,” Rika said with a soft laugh. “But enough.”
The drive out of the ravine was slow-going over the rough terrain—a combination of gravel and paved roads—but an hour later, they were in the rolling-hill-country to Kandahar City’s south.
Barne took them around the city via a circuitous route, passing onto gravel roads again after a while, and then onto another paved highway that entered the city from the east.
“Where are we going, once we’re at the city?” Amy asked after not speaking for a few hours. “I’m really hungry.”
“I’ve managed to set up a meeting with a short-range freight hauler that moves grain off-planet to stations insystem. He can get us up to one of the moons…Baqara, from the looks of it,” Barne replied. “That’s tomorrow morning. I’ve set up a safe house in the city, so that’s where we’ll hunker down ‘til then.”
“But what about food?” Amy asked.
“We have food,” Chase promised, looking down at Amy, who sat beside him. “Well, it’s stuff that does the same thing as food once it’s inside your body.”
“Do you mean it tastes like crap?” Amy asked, wrinking her nose and showing some spunk for the first time.
Chase gave a low chuckle. “Yeah, but I was trying to be more delicate than that.”
“I’m ten, I’m not a child,” Amy informed him. “Besides, my dad says worse stuff all the time.”
That was the one thing Rika really didn’t like about this mission: the ambiguity over who Amy really was. Captain Ayer hadn’t known, and apparently neither did the Old Man. The Marauders had been approached by an intermediary, who claimed that, should knowledge of the girl’s identity leak, it would make even bigger problems for her father. Maintaining the fiction that she was safe at home was paramount.
Rika had been instructed not to ask Amy about her father, and she’d been ready to comply—but that was before they’d been attacked by multiple enemies and lost their off-world transport.
As far as she was concerned, any intel was good intel. It wasn’t as though the team was going to spill the beans to anyone out on Faseema.
“Who is your father?” Rika asked.
Still wearing her helmet, Rika could see a frown settle on Amy’s forehead without having to turn.
“You don’t know?” the girl asked, then glanced at Leslie. “You said you worked for him?”
Rika shook her head. “No, he hired us, but we never met him. It was all done through an intermediary.
“I don’t understand…” Amy said. “I assumed you were all out of uniform because this isn’t one of his worlds, and you were hiding.”
Barne chuckled. “Well, that second part is true, at least.”
Amy’s words narrowed down Rika’s list of suspects. There weren’t a lot of men on this side of the cluster who were said to possess worlds; though there were a few, one stood out.
“Your father is Stavros,” Rika stated after a moment’s consideration.
A look of consternation passed over Amy’s face. Rika suspected that she had been instructed not to share that information in the event of capture—and by the look in the girl’s eyes, she was now wondering if she had been captured anew.
“Well, that makes things interesting,” Barne said before cursing quietly under his breath.
Rika connected to Faseema’s general information network through a relay Barne had set up, and looked up what public information there was on Stavros and his family: his wife had died several years prior, and he had only one daughter—Amy.
“Good thing you told us, Amy,” Leslie said. “You may not be immediately recognized, but if the locals do identify you, we may have an interesting scenario on our hands.”
“What do you mean?” Amy asked.
“The folks around here aren’t big fans of your father,” Rika replied, wondering why K-Strike had brought Amy to Faseema.
Her intel said that Amy had been captured four light years from here, in the Sydon System. Holding her there would have been a far better option than taking her through Politica-controlled Oran to Faseema.
<’Bout sums it up,> Barne replied.
e adamant, and a little defensive.
“Are you guys talking?” Amy asked. “You all went quiet at once. I can tell when people are using the Link, you know, even if I don’t have it.”
“Sorry,” Leslie apologized. “We just didn’t want to worry you with our speculation over who might have taken you, and who else might be out there.”
“Like the people that shot down your ship?”
Rika nodded. “Just like them.”
No one spoke for several minutes after that, and Rika turned to look out the window, to the north where the air and spaceport lay.
A ship rose into the sky on an invisible pillar of gravitons, passing up through the clouds and into space in just a few minutes.
If Patty and her shuttle were still intact, none of this would have been necessary; they’d be well on their way to the Romany by now. No need to hop a ride on some civilian freighter out of a local port.
Rika glanced back to where Patty lay on the rear seat. Chase had placed her in an induced coma while a dose of mednano worked on her internal injuries.
With any luck, she’d be back on her feet before they had to get to the spaceport. The idea of getting Patty through planetary exit customs—
Barne laughed.
Dammit…
Rika couldn’t believe she had forgotten about her ‘normal’ right arm. If it was still on the shuttle, and the enemy checked that over, the other mech would know exactly what she was up against.
she said stubbornly.
While they spoke, they had passed through the outskirts of Kandahar City, and into the typical spread of warehouses and service companies that surrounded a air and spaceport.
Rika was surprised when Barne drove through that district to an area with smaller retail stores lining a broad boulevard. A row of tall trees ran down the center of the road, and streamers hung from their branches. A banner stretching above them read: ‘Reclamation Day, 3050!’
Rika hadn’t sorted out why the locals had such a strange calendar year, but was more interested in when the celebration was. She looked it up, and saw that the celebration would be in three days; it was in honor of the day the new government centered on Faseema was established, after the war with The Politica.
Not much of a reclamation, she thought. More like an exile…or something.
The street was not heavily trafficked, though a number of groundcars were on the road, with some craft also in the skies above. More importantly, there was almost no foot traffic on the sidewalks, and half the businesses appeared shuttered.
After driving for a few blocks, Barne slowed the truck and turned into a narrow alley between two buildings.
“We gonna fit?” Chase asked.
Barne lowered his window and folded his mirror in, gesturing for Rika to follow suit. “We’ll fit.”
The truck squeezed between the buildings, rolling over a few boxes that had been leaning against them. Rika had a momentary fear that there might be someone living in the boxes, but breathed a sigh of relief when the wheels didn’t bounce over anything big enough to be a person.
Once past the two buildings, the space opened up enough for Barne to turn the truck around and nose it into the alley to block it off.
“And here we are,” he announced.
“Another day, another abandoned building,” Chase joked.
Leslie laughed. “You don’t appreciate the aesthetic, Chase? Barne always takes us to the nicest places—he can find.”
“You want the Plaza Park Hotel?” Barne asked. “It’s down the road. Complete with enough security to make sure the likes of us never get in.”
Rika pushed her door open and stepped into the small courtyard between four buildings. All of them appeared to be unused—some were boarded up, others had broken windows. All were covered with graffiti.
“Which one shall be our lovely accommodation?” Rika inquired.
“There.” Barne pointed to one of the boarded up buildings. “Lock combo is our usual.”
Rika nodded and approached the back of the store. A sign on the door read, ‘Fran’s Fabulous Fabrics.’ She reached above the jamb and found the locking device. Keying in the code by feel, Rika pivoted, getting ready to fire with her GNR if anything awaited them inside.
“Monitoring net reads clear,” Barne reported from her side.
“Yeah, I’m just paranoid,” Rika replied as the lock disengaged, and she put a hand on the knob. “Blame me?”
Barne shook his head. “Not really. Paranoia’s a good survival trait in our line of work.”
‘Line of work’. Something about the statement struck Rika as incongruous. She supposed that, for Barne, it was a line of work. It was a career he had chosen and engaged in with great passion.
For Rika, it was her life. She was always a mech, always armored, always primed for a fight. It was life back on the Romany, or shore leave that felt like the job.
Being in the shit, in some dump, on some crappy planet or station? Now that was her normal life.
She pushed the door open, sweeping her GNR across the small room at the back of the store. True to the sign, dozens of bolts of cloth rested in racks; though as many were pulled out and strewn across the floor, their bright colors and patterns muted by dust and grime.
Rika moved into the room while Barne covered her from the entrance. Neither expected to find anyone, and they both hoped they wouldn’t. The sort of people hiding in here would probably be homeless or neighborhood kids. If either of those saw the team, the safe house wouldn’t be so safe anymore.
Killing any occupants would take care of the problem, but that wasn’t how the Marauders—team Basilisk in particular—operated.
Rika’s scan turned up no heat sources in the back room, and nothing showed on IR or UV. She signaled to Barne that the space was clear and moved to the door that led to the front sales area.
Barne followed behind, covering her right side as she pushed the door open.
It was dark—the store’s front windows boarded up—and roughly twenty by thirty meters. Racks of cloth, some large cutting tables, and two auto-weavers filled the space.
Rika moved out, checking the corner behind the door before starting her sweep on the left side, looking down each aisle and scanning with her sensor suite, while Barne covered her from the doorway.
When she had passed all the aisles, Rika walked down the far one and performed the same sweep from the front of the store.
Nothing turned up—other than a few mice, who were happily nesting in a pile of wool—and she called out softly, “We’re clear.”
Half a minute later, the rest of the team filed into the room. They dumped guns, ammo, and other equipment onto the counters in the back.
With the truck clear, Chase and Barn
e went out to fetch Patty. A minute later, they brought her in and laid her down on one of the cutting tables.
“How’s she look?” Rika asked as she approached.
“Better,” Chase replied. “Her internal bleeding is all cleaned up, and her vessels and arteries are stitched back together. Her liver and right kidney are just about all set, too. I expect her right lung to be healed up in an hour, tops. If she checks out after that, we’ll bring her out of the coma.
“Glad to hear it,” Rika said, and not just because she didn’t want to haul Patty to the spaceport in a coma. She had gotten to know the pilot on the trip in, and her generally positive attitude toward life combined with an often-sarcastic wit made Patty an enjoyable person to be around.
Chase’s nod was resolute. “Patty’s made of some damn tough stuff. Gonna take more than a downed bird to take her out. Plus, the Old Lady would have our hides if we effed her up too much, so she’d better be OK.”
“Captain Ayer did tell us to take care of her,” Rika remembered, giving Patty one last look before turning to Leslie and Amy, who were settling down behind the back counter.
“You want to do a little recon, or should I?” Rika asked.
Leslie glanced at Amy, who, while looking better than she had when they brought her out of the bunker, still looked scared and uncertain.
Rika supposed that the drive in the truck had probably been reassuring. They had been out in the world, moving through traffic like other vehicles. But now they were hiding in an abandoned store—not exactly a confidence builder.
“I’ll stay here,” Leslie decided. “You go take a peek.”
Rika nodded, clasped Chase on the shoulder as she walked by, and strode through the back room and outside into the enclosed area between the stores.
The back door of the truck was still open, so Rika closed it quietly before turning to look at the rooftops. She gauged the strength of the balustrade and leapt up, grasping it with her left arm, and swung herself up onto the roof.
It was late in the afternoon, and Oran still shone overhead; though the shadows were beginning to lengthen. Rika looked up and saw a smattering of cars flying in the air, but most of the traffic was on the ground.