He straightened, stopped smiling, and stared directly ahead. "So which will it be, Mr. Moore: Fight and quite possibly die, or come aboard the Sunset and hear what I have to say?"
Chapter 3
I stared at Shurkan's image on the display, desperately trying to come up with a third alternative. I failed. "Audio off," I subvocalized.
"Done," Lobo said.
"Unless I'm missing something, we're docking on that ship," I said.
"I detest being trapped," Lobo said, "but I have to agree."
"Do I get a vote in this?" Suli said, her voice, like her expression, composed, almost serene, as if being kidnapped and threatened with death was a routine experience. Maybe it was. Maybe her partners were far worse than she'd led me to believe.
No matter. "No," I said. "You paid for my services, and dealing with this problem is one of them."
"Doesn't the fact that I paid give me a voice in what we do?" she said. "In fact, as the paying client shouldn't I be in charge?"
"Mr. Moore," Shurkan said, "though you are my first choice for the discussion I mentioned, I do have alternatives. I suggest you not keep me waiting."
"Again, no," I said to Suli, ignoring Shurkan. "You paid the fee and gave me our mission goals; I do the job."
"I just wanted to say that I agree we should go on the ship."
Anger surged in me at the time she'd wasted in the middle of a serious situation. I fought to control my temper, looked away from her, and said to Lobo, "Audio on."
"We'll park in the Sunset's hangar," I said.
"Excellent," Shurkan said. "Some of my guards will escort you and your passenger to me. Others will inspect your ship."
What little I owned was on board Lobo. Not all of it, including a rare gemstone from my home planet that Lobo stored in a deep interior vault, was entirely legit.
"No," I said. "You asked for a meeting. I complied. Unless you plan to charge me and arrest me, you have no right to search my vessel."
"My men can always let themselves in once you've left the area."
"Then I hope we are meeting very, very far from the hangar, perhaps somewhere on another one of your ships, because when this vessel blows while inside the Sunset's pressurized hull, it's going to take a big chunk of the Sunset with it."
"You would risk killing us?" Suli said, her calm finally shattered. "Why would you do that?"
Before I could answer, Shurkan said, "Your passenger clearly doesn't agree with your choice."
"I don't care," I said, the anger harder and harder to control. "I really don't. Now, you're the one with a choice: Do you agree to leave my ship alone, or should we both plan on meeting somewhere far from yours?"
He leaned back again, plastered on the disturbing grin, and said, "You really are every bit as unpleasant as your reputation suggests, Mr. Moore." He sighed theatrically, a move that with his juvenile appearance made him appear to be nothing more than a very spoiled child. "You bring your passenger as an extra bit of proof of good will. Then, we'll talk, and my men will leave your little ship alone. Deal?"
I pretended I hadn't heard the insult and considered the situation. If Suli came with me, she became a liability, just one more vulnerability I had to cover. If she stayed, however, and anything happened that caused Lobo to have to try to blast his way free of the Sunset, she would die for sure. She was a client, a client I now regretted taking but a client nonetheless, so I owed her the best probability of survival that I could arrange. To my surprise, she kept quiet as I considered my options; her silence gave me some hope that she could manage to do the same during the meeting with Shurkan.
"Deal," I said. "Send the route you want us to take. We're on our way."
As we followed the CC approach vector to the Sunset's visitor hangar, Lobo opened a forward-feed display focused on our destination. When he had shown me the map of the CC ships in the area, the Sunset had appeared far larger than the rest, but the holo had covered such a large area of space that I'd not really appreciated just how long the vessel was. Like all stargoing warcraft, it had to be narrow and short enough to fit through the larger apertures of most jump gates. It was big enough, however, that even with those size compromises there were some worlds whose gate apertures simply weren't wide enough to accommodate it. What the designers of the Sunset gave up in height and width, they made up in length. Easily two kilometers long, the ship almost certainly had never been on solid ground and never would be. Bristling with weapons and smaller fighters docked on all sides of it, the Sunset proclaimed loudly to anyone seeking to take advantage of the enormous target it presented that they would have to wade through considerable defenses before they ever got the chance.
I'd seen other fleet leads of similar size, but I couldn't recall a bigger one. In my years as a soldier with the Shosen Advanced Weapons Corporation, the Saw, in my opinion the finest merc company in the universe, I'd even ridden as human freight on a couple of command craft of almost the same size. Constructed in pressurized and armored sections, they could absorb quite a beating and continue to operate, as we'd learned the hard way on one occasion that cost the lives of a lot of guys I'd barely gotten to know.
I didn't like going back on board this kind of ship. I didn't like it at all.
I also knew I didn't have a choice.
"Half an hour out," Lobo said.
His voice brought me back to the moment and out of my reverie. "Come with me," I said to Suli.
"Why?" she said. "What do you want?"
"I don't have time for this." I grabbed her arm and headed rearward.
"Let go of me!"
"Then do as I tell you."
"Fine."
I released her arm and, true to her word, she followed me.
I stopped in front of the small med room and pointed at it. Lobo slid open its door. "Wait in here," I said, "until I let you out."
"Why? You said I was coming with you to the meeting, so why can't I stay with you?"
"Because I have work to do and not a lot of time to do it." I pointed to the room and stared into her eyes. "You will end up waiting in there. It's your choice how you enter. Decide." When she didn't move, I put my hand on her shoulder. "Now."
She glared at me, shook her head, anger tightening her every motion, and stepped into the little room. "Shurkan was right, you know. You really are—"
"Shut it," I said.
The door cut off the rest of her sentence.
I went to my quarters and changed my clothes, talking as I pulled off garments.
"What do you know about the inside of a ship like the Sunset?"
"An enormous amount," Lobo said. "I was, after all, built to fight as part of a fleet. Can you be a bit more specific about the data you're seeking?"
"I'm not sure," I said. "Anything that might prove useful should the meeting go wrong." I paused to think. "Examples: Will you and I be able to communicate? Could you blast your way out and survive? Is there any safe escape route for me?"
"If we're docking in the hangar dignitaries use," Lobo said, "then the default for the area will almost certainly be to allow encrypted communications. No visiting government official worth the use of that facility would attend a serious meeting without access to the data stores on the ship that brought him there."
"But Shurkan's people could easily disable comm capabilities."
"True. The Sunset certainly can jam and distort signals across all known comm bands. I suggest, however, that they would have no reason to do so. As far as they're concerned, I'm at best an ordinary PCAV, so the computational level and data store size I would offer you could not be enough to matter."
"Wouldn't they worry about me instructing you to start shooting?"
"That brings us to your second question," Lobo said. "Yes, I believe I could blow a hole in the hull that was big enough to let me fly out of there. What would happen next, however, is obvious: that section of the Sunset would seal itself, some combination of the ship's guns, the fighters parked on it,
and the other vessels in the area would attack me, and in short order I'd be just so much wreckage. Shurkan would be far enough away that you and he could watch the entire short battle—and it would be a very short fight—from the safety of a remote-feed display. Face it: Your threat all but ensured that he'll hold the meeting at least two ship sections away from the hangar."
"Don't blame that on me," I said. "He would have taken the precaution anyway. Besides, would you have preferred I let them poke around inside you?"
"Dealing with human intruders would not have been a problem, at least not for me. You, however, would not have gotten off so easily."
"How would it have been a problem for me?"
"You would have been the one who had to explain to Shurkan why he needed to send more troops to pick up the corpses."
"Which would have led us back to the same dilemma: You blasting your way out or being destroyed. Enough." I verified the comm was still working and pulled on an activefiber shirt with additional comm sensors woven into it. Should they block only the obvious ways for us to talk, I wanted a backup.
I considered releasing Suli, but something about her still bothered me. I went up front and sat in the pilot's couch. The Sunset continued to grow in the forward display, its dark body blotting out everything else, as if the section of space in front of us had fallen into an eerily large black hole.
"You monitor all aspects of all people on board, right?" I said.
"Of course," Lobo said.
"Did what you could read of Suli's vitals suggest she was as calm as she appeared? Or was she just doing a good job of hiding her fear?"
"To the best of my ability to tell given the data I could collect from the couch's sensors," Lobo said, "the only time she registered any change in emotion was when you threatened to have me blow up part of the Sunset."
"No one without serious training can stay that calm in this kind of crisis," I said, "and nothing Glazer told me about her suggests she would be that calm."
"I agree."
"Which means we can't trust her," I said.
"Yes," Lobo said, "but how is that news?"
"What do you mean?"
"Exactly how many people have we met since you purchased me," he said, "that we could both trust? Not granting trust is not a problem; it's a virtue."
"Do you realize how paranoid that sounds?" I said.
"Yes," Lobo said, "but it's in my programming." He paused, one of those short pauses that for him contained so much time for computing that I often wondered what he could possibly be doing in the gap between sentences. "As it is in yours."
I wished I could argue with him, but it would be pointless; he was right. I'd never have made it to twenty, much less over a hundred and fifty-five, without a level of active distrust that most would consider paranoia.
"Five minutes from docking," Lobo said.
The Sunset opened the hangar doors. Light burst from the ship like the bang of creation emerging from the primordial darkness. We thrust forward into the brightness, Lobo slowing as we drew closer to the ship. We decelerated gradually until we were no longer moving forward, only hovering a meter over the well-marked landing zone, and then Lobo set us down. He opened a rear-facing display, and we watched as the hangar doors sealed us inside the Sunset.
Time to find out why we were here.
Chapter 4
The Sunset pressurized the hangar faster than I'd thought was possible. A single guard, weapons still holstered, strolled through a hatch to our left and stopped three meters away from Lobo. He didn't stand at the ready, snap to attention, assume a defensive stance, or do anything else that might suggest he was working. No name badge told us who he was. Nothing about him suggested any interest whatsoever in Lobo or the people inside. He slouched, sighed, and glanced around as if bored.
"I don't even rate a serious escort?" I said. "My reputation is slipping."
"Does your ego make you stupid?" Lobo said, missing the joke. A holo of the hangar popped into the air in front of me. Two dozen red dots, each glowing brightly against the institutional burnished metal interior surfaces, occupied positions scattered around the walls, floor, and ceiling. "Those are the weapons I can spot. We can assume there are others."
I shook my head and chuckled. "I guess you demonstrate a sense of humor," I said, "only when it suits your purpose. I don't suppose you'd be willing to start using it to appreciate my jokes."
"As soon as you start telling some," Lobo said, "I'll start laughing at them."
"Very funny." I stared at the dots on the hologram; the weapons reflected exactly the sort of careful placement you'd expect from the designers of a good milspec environment. "Wait a minute," I said, realizing what was bothering me, "why are you making conversation when we're on a mission?"
"Because you clearly need it, or you wouldn't be standing there," Lobo said, "and because Shurkan's courtesy is, at least for now, giving us the luxury of postponing the job until you step outside."
"I don't—" I shut up. He was right. I'd assumed I'd taken on a simple transport gig, and when the circumstances had changed, I'd done a bad job of keeping up with them. Though I didn't blame myself for not seeing what was coming, I was frustrated at how slowly I was adapting. I had to stay alert and in the moment.
I took a deep breath, held it for a count of ten, then let it gradually out through my nose. "Release Suli," I said as I walked rearward.
She stepped out of the med room. "Are we finally ready to go?" she said. "I've put up with—"
I held up my hand, stared at her, and she stopped talking.
"The rules are simple," I said, "so it should be easy for you to obey them."
"What rules?"
"Mine, the ones you have to agree to follow if you want to come with me to this meeting."
She sighed theatrically, putting her head and her shoulders into it.
I could tell I was juiced to go, because the gesture made me want to shove her back into the med room.
"Don't talk without checking with me first for permission," I said. "Stay close to me. Follow my lead. Most importantly, do what I tell you the moment I tell you; no arguments, no delays." I stepped closer to her, so we were less than a meter apart. "Got it?"
"Yes," she said, nodding.
I waited, but she said nothing else. Satisfied, I turned away from her and said, "Open a hatch."
Light from the hangar, which was far brighter than necessary, washed across Lobo's floor and the wall opposite the hatch. I stood to the right of the opening, waiting to see if anything bad would happen, but nothing did. After half a minute, I motioned to Suli and stepped out of Lobo onto the hangar floor. She followed me. Lobo sealed himself as soon as she was clear of him.
"The air is obviously breathable," Lobo said over the comm, "though rife with human residue; they'd do well to check their air filtration system. No weapon activated when you left me. If they're going to do something to either of us, it'll happen later."
The room did carry the distinct odor of too many people sharing too small a space for too long, but I've lived with that smell many times, so it didn't bother me.
"Mr. Moore," the guard said, still slouching and not looking me in the eyes, "Councilor Shurkan asked me to escort you to him. If you'd follow me, please." He turned and left without waiting for a response or even a sign that I was behind him.
In the Saw, his sloppiness would have landed him on punishment details for a month; here, it seemed not to matter. Maybe his behavior came from riding on such a powerful ship, or perhaps it was a small sign of why any government with adequate funds employs a merc group to fight its serious conflicts.
We stayed behind him as he headed through the hatch in front of us and down a long, wide corridor. The light gray flooring gave slightly under my weight and bounced back nicely; it made walking fun. The same material covered the ceiling and the walls, though from time to time solid metal hatches and windows, each tinting opaque as we drew within view of it, broke the mo
notony.
The guard never looked back.
After five minutes, his complete neglect for our presence annoyed me enough that I said, "Aren't you a little worried that I might attack you from behind?"
"Nope," he said.
"Why not?"
He laughed. Without turning or slowing he said, in a soft, conversational voice, "For the most part, it's because I know the Sunset, and you don't."
"Which matters why?" I said, picking up my pace so I could hear him more easily.
"The weapons," Lobo said over the comm.
Before he could continue, the guard said, "Because I know that you've never been out of the sights of a laser that could cut you in half before you could touch me, nor have you ever been out of point-blank range of a trank gun that could knock you out in under a second—or poison you if we felt so inclined. We've also been under both human and machine surveillance since the moment you left your little ship."
The guard stopped suddenly and turned to face me. Nothing in the posture of his torso had changed in any immediately obviously way, but everything about him was different. His stance was wider, one foot behind the other, and his weight rested primarily on his front leg. His arms hung slightly ahead of his body and were tense, ready for action. "Also, frankly, you don't look like that much to me, and I'm good at what I do."
I told myself to ignore the insult and focus on the job at hand, but I was tired of being at the end of the whip, so before I realized I was doing it, I'd stepped so close to him that we were almost touching. I'd misjudged him before, but though I now knew what he was, I didn't care.
He looked up and to the left briefly, then smiled and backed away from me. "As much as I'd like to take you up on that offer," he said, "they just reminded me that my orders are to deliver you to Councilor Shurkan unharmed."
Overthrowing Heaven-ARC Page 3