The Gates of Hell

by Chris Kennedy

  I felt off the next morning, and even a Tim Horton’s butter tart didn’t help much. Fortunately I’d gotten two, and by the time I landed my aircar in the Owen Sound lot, I felt sharp and ready to tackle anything. Except, of course, for talking to Captain Gregg.

  Who wants to talk to someone you know has been blackmailed into betraying all he holds dear, including his family’s legacy?

  But there was no help for it.

  We met in the training facility. Elite’s simulators gleamed, and their displays showed a section currently running an exercise.

  He held out his hand. “Your software’s been very useful, Mr. Blaine.”

  I shook it. “Thank you, Captain Gregg.”

  “We especially appreciate your specialized packages. The ones designed to simulate specific worlds and aliens.”

  “We do our best. We’re constantly scouring updates to Jane’s and other sources to ensure those aliens are armed with everything they have in their arsenals.”

  I plugged into the units and ran through their maintenance logs. Gregg waited patiently. We chatted over this and that while the systems passed bits hither and yon.

  “Anything else here, Mr. Blaine?”

  “Not unless you have something to show me.”

  “No, sir. Shall we return to my office and I can run through our upcoming goals and requests?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Excellent. We can talk privately. Maybe Russell’s lapse in info control will be useful, and Gregg will use the opportunity to ask for help.

  Gregg settled behind his clean and organized desk. The only personal touch, other than his “I Love Me” wall, was a photo display frame changing images every fifteen seconds. Pictures of his family and dog, mostly.

  “Hold on while I transfer the request file,” he said.

  “Thank you. I hope you’ll take the time to run over those with me so we’re sure to address any issues.”

  “Of course. Major Dozier said not to waste the opportunity, especially since we have so many holes to fill after the battle.”

  “Thank you. I had heard you suffered some casualties.”

  He snorted. “More than a few.” His eyes held something…

  Does he want to talk now? Maybe if…

  I grimaced. “And you had actions on Peninnah and Cimarron 283133-6A as well as Maquon, right?”

  “Yes.”

  Odd. No reaction to Peninnah. Maybe if I prime the pump again.

  “If I recall correctly, you were in command at Peninnah. It’s our hope none of your officers will have to deal with anything like that ever again.”

  His face turned into a granite mask hiding his thoughts. “Indeed.”

  Well, not the first time I’ve seen someone hide their feelings behind a wall, though it does make it hard to help.

  I took a breath and glanced at the picture frame. It showed Gregg’s dog perched on the top of an aircar. I chuckled.

  He glanced at the frame and smiled. “He’s a good dog, even if he doesn’t always act like it.”

  “What kind is he?”

  “English Bull Terrier. His name’s Georgie.”

  I blinked at the name. “That’s a real breed, right? Not a mutt?”

  He chuckled. “No, these are pure-bred. I probably shouldn’t spend that much getting them, but they’re great with my kids and keep their training well.”

  “So you’ve had more than one?”

  “Oh, yes. This is the fourth I’ve had.”

  “His name is Georgie IV?” I blinked again.

  “Yes.” He glanced up at me. “Why do you ask?”

  “No reason. I just like to get to know my clients. I find that if I learn a little bit about their family and pets, it makes my job more enjoyable.”

  “Makes sense.” His smile didn’t reach his eyes.

  “I’ve noticed some other Greggs in the Foresters’ history.”

  “My family has been a part of it since it began.”

  “I didn’t realize serving in the Foresters was a family tradition.”

  “Oh, yes.” He eyes bored into mine. “We’ve served in the Foresters ever since day one. The Edmonds have always given us the chance to serve their family ever since the RCA decided to sell them a unit’s history and battle honors. A generous gift indeed,” he added almost in a snarl.

  I frantically pulled the notes from my sweeper to my pinplant display. The account with GeorgieIII in the password had been part of the blockchain that had paid into Maria Sasaki’s account. And this time, I actually noticed the account’s details.

  Oh, hell! The tax designation shows it was originally opened by a non-profit in the time just after the Alpha Contracts. Gregg had paid to control Vincent. It had all been a lie. Gregg faked the threat to his mom to give himself cover.

  I glanced up and looked into his eyes. I had taken too much time. I realized he knew I knew.

  He calmly began opening the bottom drawer of his desk.

  I leapt for the door and dove out into the reception room. A 10mm round went over my back and impacted the hardened concrete on the far wall.

  Gregg’s orderly looked up in shock.

  I rolled off to the side behind a heavy desk, my GP-90 at the ready. The corporal looked into Gregg’s office door and received a round to the face for his trouble.

  Gregg charged out, GP-90 blazing. His shots crashed into the desk, sending metal slivers along my ribs.

  I was too stunned to return fire immediately.

  More rounds impacted the desk, jamming it up against me.

  I sent a couple of rounds back to make Gregg think.

  The captain snarled, “The Greggs pay all their debts!” He fired a few more times, and then the outside door snicked shut.

  I peered around the desk and saw no one except the faceless orderly, brains leaking on the linoleum.

  I sent a message to Russell, dumping my notes and a description of what had just happened. I told him to shut everything down. I could have done it myself, but right then, I wanted to live. If Gregg hadn’t stayed to pay his debt to me, that meant he expected me to die right here. Now I had to figure out how, and do it right quick.

  I sat in the orderly’s chair and started my sweeper, looking for all net activity in the area. A sharp pop and a burst of heat came out of his office. I glanced in to see a pile of slag where Gregg’s computer had been.

  My sweeper showed a bunch of programs activating on the Foresters’ servers. The easiest to deal with were the relatively standard viruses. I sent my malware programs chasing after them.

  We’d always anticipated this possibility with our simulators, and their anti-malware routines kicked in as well, meaning I could ignore the programs attacking them.

  I started to help salvage what we could from the Foresters’ servers when I saw the code directed at the armory.

  “A bomb in the armory would most definitely not be a good thing,” I stated to the corporal on the floor.

  The orderly didn’t disagree.

  The timer showed less than fifteen minutes. It also looked too big to be just a timer. It had to include separate subroutines, and that meant traps.

  Gregg hadn’t been in this position to sacrifice himself. He wanted revenge, not a heroic death. That meant he had to include some sort of emergency way into the program, just in case.

  My sweeper finished its initial examination and provided me with that backdoor.

  I kept talking to the orderly. “At least I have a way in. Now to stop it in less than—” I looked at the timer “—twelve minutes without setting off those traps.”

  The orderly urged me to hurry. In his quiet fashion, of course.

  A dropship broke the silence when it screamed over the building. I released a breath when I realized it hadn’t dropped any ordnance.

  Thank goodness it hadn’t been armed.

  I sent up a message to Captain Barkley to track the dropship and glanced at the timer. Ten minutes.

  “Now,
Corporal, if you know the code, you can tell me.”

  He refused to answer.

  “How about a hint? It can’t be a random thing. Had to be something Gregg could remember like the password on the bank account, right?”

  Still no answer.

  “Fine, keep your captain’s secrets.”

  Nine minutes.

  “Well, since you’re not helping, I’m going to have to do something stupid. You might not realize, Corporal, but fifteen minutes, even at modern processing speeds, is not long enough for most brute force attacks to succeed. If he had to enter a passcode, he had to enter it correctly under stress. Might be safer to allow himself some mistakes, don’t you think?”

  The orderly had no answer.

  “Well, anyway, I don’t see much choice.”

  I set my sweeper searching for any relevance to the password on the bank account. It came up almost instantly. George Patton, born on 11 November, 1885.

  Dammit! I should have recognized it. Gregg’s senior thesis had been on Patton’s armored doctrine technical papers, and Casablanca wasn’t just Bullitt’s favorite movie.

  I set my sweeper to attack using combinations related to Patton. “Might be a good time for a prayer, Corporal.” I closed my eyes and executed the program. I opened them after a moment to find well over a million attempts already without success.

  I blew my breath out. “No luck yet, son, but at least we’ve got a chance.”

  Seven minutes.

  I started adding all I could think of that I knew about Captain Gregg to my sweeper’s attack algorithm, beginning with Georgie and all the info I could find on English Bull Terriers. I tagged Marcus and all the ancestors I knew about. Added the non-profit’s name and the unit Marcus had hoped to purchase.

  The sweeper now showed over a billion attempts and counting.

  Three minutes.

  I thought of Gregg’s senior thesis and pulled it up. “Now, if it’s in here, it’s something memorable, don’t you think? Something important to him. How about the dedication?”

  I sent it over. Nothing.

  “Thesis statement?”

  No.

  Two minutes.

  “You’re not giving me much help, son. Let’s check the foreword.” Nothing there.

  One minute.

  “Yes, you’re right. It could be in the conclusion.” My eyes widened at the Patton quote on the last page.

  Thirty seconds.

  “Well, shall we?”

  The orderly didn’t argue when I overrode the sweeper’s brute force attack and copied over the quote. I double-checked to make sure I hadn’t screwed it up. I’d get one chance.

  I took a deep breath. “Well, Corporal, it’s been nice chatting with you.”

  I sent, “Nobody ever defended anything successfully; there is only attack and attack and attack some more.”

  The timer stopped with four seconds remaining.

  I started to relax, but I heard footsteps running up to the door.

  There’ll be time to explain later, if I have a later.

  I slid my GP-90 away. I dropped to the floor, laced my hands behind my head, and stared into the dead orderly’s ravaged skull.

  Four Foresters burst into the office. They had their AK-218s trained on me, just hoping I’d move.

  I didn’t.

  Thank goodness Edmonds trained his people well. Gregg’s not the only one with debts to pay.

  * * * * *

  Rob Howell Bio

  Rob Howell is the creator of the Shijuren fantasy setting (www.shijuren.org), an author in the Four Horsemen Universe (www.mercenaryguild.org), and an editor of When Valor Must Hold, an anthology of heroic fantasy. He writes primarily epic fantasy, space opera, military science fiction, and alternate history.

  He is a reformed medieval academic, a former IT professional, and a retired soda jerk.

  His parents quickly discovered books were the only way to keep Rob quiet. He latched onto the Hardy Boys series first and then anything he could reach. Without books, it’s unlikely all three would have survived.

  His latest release in Shijuren is Where Now the Rider, the third in the Edward series of swords and sorcery mysteries. The next release in that world is None Call Me Mother, the conclusion to the epic fantasy trilogy The Kreisens.

  You can find him online at: www.robhowell.org, on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B00X95LBB0, and his blog at www.robhowell.org/blog.

  * * * * *

  Long Live the Huma by Chris Kennedy

  Peepo’s Pit, Karma Station, Karma Orbit

  Colonel Kuru Shirazi stumbled as he walked out of Peepo’s Pit. Although not normally one to consume alcohol, he had allowed one of the members of the Golden Horde to give him a shot glass of something the mercenary had called “Mother’s Milk.” The former gang-banger hadn’t been very forthcoming over whose mother had spawned the devil drink, but a second one had Shirazi’s vision starting to go fuzzy around the edges, and he knew he needed to beat a hasty retreat before someone gave him a third.

  “What was in that stuff?” Sergeant Major Kazemi asked, moving quickly to steady his commanding officer.

  “I don’t know, but don’t ever let me have another of them. Ever.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  They walked in companionable silence across Karma Station. Although it was late according to the space station’s daily clock, a wide variety of aliens were out and about, many of which the Humans hadn’t seen before. New to the Galactic Union stage, it wasn’t much more than a year since the first aliens had shown up on Earth and welcomed them into the galaxy-wide polity. The aliens at the time had said that Earth didn’t have anything the galaxy needed…until they saw Humans fight. After a terrorist bomb had killed the galactic ambassador, the mercenaries protecting the delegation had gone in to destroy the terrorists and found that Humans had quite the propensity to fight.

  Although vastly unprepared for war at the galactic level, the people of Chabahar, Iran, and the military units stationed there had rallied and—while they’d lost a whole lot more than they’d killed—they’d been able to inflict casualties on the MinSha, the giant praying mantis-like aliens that had come to plunder the town. In the wake of their admittedly minimal success, the Galactics had invited the Humans to become mercenaries. They hadn’t done much…but they’d done enough. Out of the thousands of races in the galaxy, only 36 would fight for money. The Humans would be the 37th.

  Colonel Kuru Shirazi, Iranian Army, had put together a mercenary group called Asbaran Solutions, made up of former soldiers under his command, and had taken one of the first hundred contracts offered to humanity. Unfortunately—just like their initial meeting with the MinSha in the streets of Chabahar—humanity was unprepared for fighting the alien mercenaries, and only four of the companies had made it back. In addition to his own Asbaran Solutions, only Cartwright’s Cavaliers, the Winged Hussars, and the Golden Horde were still viable organizations.

  Through some cosmic joke, all four had a horse in their logo—the Asbarani were ancient Persian elite cavalry—and the leader of the Cavaliers, Jim Cartwright, had convinced the other leaders to call themselves the “Four Horsemen” after some religious story of his, and he had gotten their agreement to do everything they could to help Earth take its place among the other mercenary organizations in the stars, toasting the new group with, “The Four Horsemen for Earth!”

  It made sense, though. Humanity’s start had been inauspicious at best. A 4% success rate was nothing to brag about, especially since at least one of the “winners” appeared to have done so through the wildest chances of luck. As Cartwright had said, they needed to hang together, or they would all hang—or get shot—separately. They needed better equipment, and not just the gear the aliens had. Sure, more lasers and magnetic accelerator cannons—MACs—would help, but it wouldn’t level the playing field considerably. The aliens were bigger, faster, stronger, and generally meaner than anything humanity could throw at them.
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  In addition to the MinSha, he’d seen the Besquith, giant aliens that looked like werewolves that had mouthfuls of shark-like teeth. They were said to be ferocious warriors and merchants; he knew Humans weren’t ready to face the Besquith. The ones who had faced them hadn’t come back. Other aliens were just as scary. Humanity needed to carefully pick their next set of contracts, while amassing new galactic weapons and working on a number of projects to help make them equal to the aliens. Cartwright had an idea about a new set of powered armor. While Shirazi was interested in it, nothing the Iranian Army had ever fielded along those lines had ever worked for more than a few minutes. He remained skeptical that such a project would work, too, but Cartwright thought, with an injection of galactic tech, something might be possible.

  Lost in his thoughts, he almost tripped over the two creatures who stopped in front of him. The aliens appeared mammalian in nature and looked like the anteaters he’d seen in a zoo once, with long snouts and droopy ears. The aliens also had long, sharp claws, although whether they were for digging or tearing the flesh from someone’s bones, Shirazi had no clue.

  One of the creatures said something, which his translation pendant turned into, “Greetings!”

  “Greetings,” Shirazi said, starting to go around the aliens.

  “You are a Human, right?” the alien asked.

  “Yeah, why?”

  “We need help and want to hire you.”

  Shirazi made eye contact with Kazemi, who raised an eyebrow. “You do, huh?” Shirazi asked. “And why is that?”

  “We heard there was a new mercenary race, and we want to hire it,” the alien repeated.

  Shirazi chuckled. “Because of our military prowess?”

  “Well, no, not exactly,” the alien said. Both of them shifted around a little, looking uncomfortable.

  “Well, why then?”

  “We heard you were new, so we thought you might be a little more…affordable…than some of the other races.”

  “Yes,” the second alien said. “Can you believe the prices some of them charge? It’s almost usury!”