by Steve Perry
She shrugged. “You get used to it. How old are you?”
“Twenty summers.”
“When Ah joined the Army, you would have been two.”
“Are you that old?”
She laughed. “Gramps would bust a gut laughin’ at that one. Yeah, Ah’m that old. And trust me, Ah was way more rattled than you were first time we saw lethal action.”
“I find this hard to believe.”
“Oh, it’s true. You like Doc’s story? Let me tell you mine...
~ * ~
“My first tour was with the Unified Terran Army, the Kiwi Police Action. Six of us on patrol came across a liquor still in the woods above the Lower Nihotupu Reservoir, Waitakere Ranges, maybe twenty-five klicks southwest of Auckland. We were hunting Maori insurgents, and we figured some of them were brewing it—the embargo was dogged down pretty tight by then.
“Ah was a doe-private grunt, just turned seventeen, my first field op. Our sergeant was a tight-ass from Beijing, the guy on point was from Fiji.
“Our com gear was for shit, off-line more than it worked, and we were using LOS jive-signs, maybe half of which I knew. First two of those you learn? ‘Duck!’ and ‘Haul ass!’
“The Fijian was a third-tour guy who loved the forest, busted back to corporal from sergeant for punching out civilians in an off-base watering hole. The man could disappear behind a blade of grass. He found the still and doubled back to tell us. Him, we trusted.
“Sergeant Wang was a class-one asshole, chickenshit to the core, he would have called in a nuke-drone to take out an empty plastic barrel if our com had been working, but since he couldn’t raise anybody, we went in for a look.
“Nobody home we could see. Our motion detectors didn’t catch anything, our wide-look IR cams gave us nothing but the sig from the heat-pump induction heater under the barrel of mash they were cooking. No insurgent glows.
“Wang decided they musta heard us coming and trucked. He decided we’d toss a willy-peter into the camp and burn it down.
“The Fijian volunteered to do the grenade, and since Ah was the newbie, Ah got sent along to cover his ass. Walk in the park, blowin’ shit up with nobody around.
“We got there, the others stayed back eighty meters in the woods. There was a two-hundred-liter aboveground camo tank half-full of hooch they’d already distilled. The Fijian emptied his water canteen and filled it from a spigot on the tank, tasted the stuff.
“ ‘Whoa! This shit has got some kick!’
“He offered me a sip, but Ah wasn’t interested.
“He set a white phosphorus grenade next to the tank.
“ ‘Twenty seconds!’ he hollered, and we were fixin’ to truck, since it was gonna make a big, bright fireball when all that alcohol went up.
“Ah was already turned round, my back to the site, when the Maori came out the ground. Had a spiderhole dug next to the barrel, the heat from the inducer enough to hide his sig from our WLIR. Smart, and probably he’da stayed there ‘cept he heard the Fijian yell out the grenade’s timer and he figured he was gonna get barbecued in his hole, which he surely would have.
“That Maori had a drum-fed gunpowder shotgun, an antique, probably alternating buckshot and solid slugs, and he blew out the Fijian’s face with his first shot.
“I dropped and spun as he fired, and his second and third shots just cleared my head.
“My weapon was an old BTY subgun, six-millimeter caseless-pistol plasma-capacitor. Piece of low-bid shit, as likely to jam or short-circuit after three or four rounds as not, even if you spent an hour every day cleaning and tuning the sucker, which Ah had done for all the fucking good it did me.
“I got off four and sure enough, that fuckin’ Betty shorted—but three of those for sure hit the Maori solid.
“Big man, two meters, 130 kilos, easy, those tribal tattoos they like all over his face, body, and arms. No shirt, so I saw the puckers in tachypsychia-time when the pellets hit, the first two three centimeters apart dead-center sternum, the third one higher and to his left, all of them heart punches. I like to think the fourth went into one of the other three holes.
“Man was dead, but didn’t know enough to fall down.
“Somebody in the squad started hollerin’ and shootin’. My weapon was fucked. Ah ate dirt and the Maori laid onto the trigger and hosed the air over me on full auto, sounded like the rage of Yahweh. Ah figured Ah was history as soon as he realized all he needed to do was drop the muzzle a hair, but ‘fore he could, the grenade lit and he got char-broiled into crispy terrorist. His ammo cooked off, that willy-peter burned the shit out of everything for twenty meters, but he was a fire shadow ‘tween me and it, and Ah walked away without a blister.
“Eighteen years ago. Give me a stylus, I can draw you the pattern of tats on the man’s face.”
Gunny looked at the boy. “Nobody is a born killer. And nobody ever forgets the first time they get laid, nor the first time they spike somebody. Right now, it’s fresh and warm, but it will cool, and you will get past it.”
He looked doubtful, and he might be right. Some people never did get past it. They didn’t continue on in the Army, unless they stayed REMFs. And what was the point in that?
Singh was rattled, but he didn’t have the feel of somebody who would curl up and let it take him.
~ * ~
SEVENTEEN
Kay went to see the Rel. If she could track down the source of information that led them into a trap, she might be able to find a connection that led deeper. It was a logical line of inquiry.
She returned to the public house where she had questioned the Rel. It was as dim and moist as it had been before, and there were Rel there; however, the one she wanted was not among them.
Again, the herbivores froze at her approach. She picked the one that looked the most terrified.
“I need to speak with Zeth of the Hallows,” she told him. “Where is he to be found?”
“I-I-I d-don’t kn-kn—”
“Then best you point me to somebody who does know, or you will regret it for the remainder of your short and miserable life.” She was in no mood to be denied and wanted to be sure that came across.
Apparently, it did.
“B-B-Boot-Booterik is Zeth’s sib.”
“Which one is he?”
“H-He is n-n-not here.” Off her look, he hurriedly added, “I have an address where he lives!”
“Provide it.”
He rattled off a street and number.
She stood. “Do not attempt to contact either of these individuals, Rel. If you do, I will find out about it.”
“I w-w-won’t.”
She turned and left.
Outside the pub, she activated her com, to call Sims Captain. She didn’t think she would need help, but it was the unit’s protocol.
“What’s up, Kay?”
“I have a lead. The location is Footpad Alley, number sixteen. A Rel’s domicile. I am on my way there and—” She stopped. What—?
Coming around the comer was a man with a sidearm pointed in her direction.
“Kay?”
She dodged to her left, jinked right and left again, and charged at the gunman.
He fired, but missed, a gas-propelled missile of some kind—
She sensed the second man behind her. She stutter-stepped and cut right, but—
—too late. She heard the second gun cough, felt the dart sting her high on the left side of her back—
She managed to reach the first gunman as he fired and missed again. She laid her right claws across his throat and ripped away flesh and cartilage down to the spine.
She spun ...
Things went dark—
~ * ~
At the comshack, Jo said, “Kay?”
Behind her, Rags arrived. “What?”
“Kay’s got a problem,” she said. “Sounds like a dustup. Her com is on, but she’s not responding.”
“Got a location?”
“Yes.”
<
br /> “Let’s go.”
~ * ~
Formentara said, “The signal is not moving, it’s right where we first located it.”
As the hopper dropped low over the city, Nancy said, “Ninety seconds.”
“You get that, Colonel?”
In the second hopper, coming in from the opposite direction, Cutter said, “Got it. We’re fifteen seconds ahead of you.” Gunny was with him, as was Wink. Along with Formentara, she had Gramps with her, and each hopper had six more troops. It was policy on a hostile world to split up command staff when it was reasonable to do so and to take enough firepower to get the job done.
By the time Nancy put them down and they boiled out, guns ready, Cutter was already on the ground and shaking his head. “Here’s her com. She’s not here.”
“Probably still alive,” Gramps said. “Otherwise, why take her?”
“Why take her at all?” Jo asked.
“Maybe Ganesh,” Gunny said. “She made him look pretty bad”
“We’ll have a word with him,” Cutter said. “Formentara?”
“Let me trigger it,” zhe said.
Jo looked at hir. “Trigger what?”
“Her implant.”
“What? Vastalimi don’t do implants, everybody knows that.”
“Let’s hope whoever has her thinks so, too,” Cutter said.
Jo looked back at Formentara.
Formentara grinned, and waved a small flatscreen no bigger than hir palm. “She doesn’t know about it, and no way she would. It’s inert until somebody sends the coded trigger pulse. About a quarter the size of my little fingernail, a bit thicker.”
“How in the hell did y’all get something like that into her?”
“Put it in her food. They don’t grind all that much, got no real molars. Inside a piece of gristle. Acid-activated timer pops out burrs—tricky with Vastalimi, they got those short, meat-eater bowels—it digs in, usually in the small intestine, stays there, doesn’t cause any problems. Hypo-allergenic, hooks of gold, coated in silicone, running viral moleculars, heat-diff biobatt. Good for ten years, easy. I check it every six months. Working fine a few weeks ago.”
Jo shook her head. She, like the rest of them, had either an implant or a rider on an aug that sent out a locator signal, that was expected; you got killed, somebody would know where to come collect the corpse. But she’d never heard of a Vastalimi with one.
“She’s gonna be pissed when she finds out,” Gramps said.
“I can live with that,” Cutter said. “Long as she’s alive to get pissed.”
~ * ~
When Kay awoke, it was with a chemical hangover and a killing rage, the combination of which made her head hurt. She was on her side, in a vehicle, one rolling on a road, to judge by the vibrations, and a quick, surreptitious look showed her she was in a storage compartment, lying on a rubbery pad. A van of some kind, moving slowly, turning this way and that. It did not feel as if she had been unconscious long, her internal sense of time told her. Still in the city, then, and on their way ... where? Who were they, and what did they want with her?
Perhaps the kidnappers? That would be good. Escaping confinement might be difficult, but if these were the people for whom she was looking? So much the better.
She pretended to still be unconscious. If they had a camera watching her, they might have noticed her eyes open for a half second when she had looked around, but she hadn’t offered any other signals that she was awake.
She would wait. An opportunity would arise.
~ * ~
In his hopper, Cutter said. “Once she gets to where they are taking her, we’ll scout the location, determine the best way to go and fetch her.”
It went without saying that they’d have to be careful. They’d only go in if they had a pretty good idea of what the situation was. The point was to get Kay back alive. But if it was the same people who’d kidnapped the Rajah’s daughter? That would be a bonus.
His com chortled. “Cutter.”
It was the Rajah. “I am afraid I have some disturbing news,” he said.
“Go ahead.”
“My prospective son-in-law has plans to field a large force of troops to invade Balaji. He seems convinced that the Thakore is responsible for my daughter’s disappearance, and he does not wish to wait for you to find her.”
Great. Just what we need, a hothead with an army.
“ ‘Has plans to field’?”
“He is ready to go now, but I have convinced him to bide awhile before he launches any attack.”
“How long?”
“Hard to say precisely. A few days. A week, perhaps.”
“Thank you, sir. We’re in the middle of an operation. Soon as we tend to it, we’ll see if we might be able to talk some sense into Rama.”
“I hope so, Colonel. If my daughter suffers as a result of his actions, I will be most unhappy with Rama.”
Cutter disconnected. The Rajah had enough steel in him and enough money so that having him unhappy with you might present a real hazard to your continued existence.
Well. That was Rama’s lookout. He had his own situation—
“Looks like they’ve stopped,” Formentara said. Zhe waggled the flatscreen. “I’m not getting a signal, so they must be shielded, but I have a location where the sig cut out.”
“Would it do that if she was dead?” That from Gunny.
“No.”
Cutter said, “Gramps, get a snoop in the air on the PPS coordinates and get us some images. Careful, so they don’t spot it.”
Gramps mumbled something Cutter didn’t catch.
“What’s that?”
“I said, ‘Teach your grandfather how to screw.’ It’s already on the way.”
Cutter smiled. He did tend to get a little hands-on sometimes. “Sorry.”
The snoop, a Dybercine M-3 Busybody, was a palm-sized drone with a low-rez forty-megapixel cam. It had whisper jets and a field-effect repeller, a cruising range of a hundred kilometers and an operating time of sixteen hours, as long as enough of that was sufficient daylight to recharge the cells. Not the absolute top-of-the-line gear, but good enough for their needs.
There were three ways to effectively use a snoop without the subject’s spotting it. Either sheathe it in stealth gear; make it look like something natural, a bird, or, on some worlds, an insect; or fly it far enough away it couldn’t be seen or detected. A palm-sized sky-colored drone three klicks up? Nobody using human eyes would see it; putting a scope on it would be almost impossible unless you knew exactly where to look; and sensors with gain set high enough to spot it would pick up all kinds of artifacts. The cam could collect a sharp streaming image in a single pass. Crisscross a few times, you could build a decent threedee hologram accurate to centimeters, more or less. The unit didn’t have passwall viewtech, that cost a small fortune, but they could get that information later.
The snoop in the air, it would take a few minutes to arrive, and Cutter thought it best to tell the crew about the Rajah’s intel.
He did.
“Isn’t Rama’s father the rajah of whatchamacallit?” Wink asked. “Why is he letting his son do this?”
Cutter shrugged. “Who knows what the agendas are out here.”
“If it turns out we have to go into Balaji to collect Indira, its being a full-out war zone might cause problems,” Gramps said.
“Or it could work to our advantage,” Jo said. “If they are busy shooting at each other, maybe they won’t notice us.”
“And maybe if we do it right, we can find and collect her and be long gone before her boyfriend cranks up a shooting war.” That from Formentara.
“That would be good,” Cutter said. “We didn’t come dressed for a war.”
~ * ~
EIGHTEEN
“Here we go,” Gramps said. “She went in there and didn’t come out.”
The holographic projector over his board lit and the image of what looked like a row of warehouses appe
ared, three-dimensional and sharp. There was a pulsing purple dot above one of the buildings.
Jo looked at the structures. She had already tapped the coordinates into a flatscreen, found the address and a street map, and was running the search engine ...