Sounded like this Morg, Tatreen, had himself quite the following. That’s dangerous. What you don’t need among slaves is a leader.
The spec for the priv was simple – snatch, extract and transport – to a Confed station on some anonymous trojan in the L4. I was a little surprised it wasn’t just a simple kill. Why bother moving the target? Why not just drop him and leave?
Five Technicians against one Morg. Even if he had a loyal following, this seemed a little heavy handed, cruel even. And with the state of this squad, I knew blood would be shed, just because it would be fun for them. No one would question, or care about, the deaths of a few dozen Morgs. Compensation would be paid. Replacements acquired.
The most valued workers on the docks were the loadwalkers the ones who piloted powered exoskeletons to move cargo. They were the elites of the Lower Wards. After all, they had jobs – and skilled ones at that. Morgs were used for the small stuff, things the loadwalkers couldn’t reach. The loadwalkers clomped about, lugging decaton cargo boxes, a sea of gray metal and black on yellow warning stickers. And scurrying among the behemoths, another sea, of Morgs. Moving, loading, tending. Trying not to get pulped.
We entered from above, from the shadows a hundred meters over a lightly traveled storage area. Sceet took point, navving from an intel feed that showed us Tatreen’s most likely locations. Most of the Morgs lived in burn-holes, bunkers that had been punched directly in the walls of the dock. It was more efficient, cheaper to keep them close to their work sites. We dropped silently to the pinnacle of a mountain of crates and hunkered down. We’d timed our entry for shift change. As soon as this last wave of boats cleared out and the Morgs retired back into the bunkers, we would infiltrate and collect.
Huddled on our pile of boxes, we waited. I noticed a couple of gouges in the concrete below – small blast craters, probably from bell mines. In the last few years, there had been a steady trickle of unsuccessful uprisings among the Morgs. No doubt that was why we were here. The leaders of the last uprising, a mob that had managed to board a low-orbit cargo scow, had all been publicly executed. Their perfectly preserved heads were mounted neatly at the entrance locks of the dock. But apparently the anticipated deterrent effect hadn’t materialized – which put us atop this huge-ass pile of crated whatever the hell it was. Waiting.
As soon as the last ship of the shift unlocked and pulled away, the last of the scattered loadwalkers jumped out of their rigs and headed for the lock. The next shift would arrive in a couple of minutes. The Morgs, big and slightly stooped, made their way towards the narrow openings along the steel gray walls, which would lead them into the warrens they called home.
Sceet called up a marker on our augments, in the direction of the doorways – our signal to proceed.
We went out in our normal traversal formation – Sceet on point with Hart close behind him. Jordy, me and Ripeye 10 meters back in a loose follow. The dock was all but deserted and it took us less than a minute to cover the entire length, to the entrance of the bunkers.
We filed in singly, Ripeye stood ‘blocker’ and braced his back against the inner door of the lock, waiting and guarding, as the four of us went further in.
Glimmers of lighted cans glowed farther in. The Morgs dried their own shit and then burned it for cooking and light. Some spaces were dimly lit, others pitch black.
We paused in front of one room, more like a shallow dent in the passage wall. A single can glowed and stank in the corner. These hovels were worse than any brig on a Confed ship – prisoner containments for the worst offenders. Fused floors, fused walls, no heat or ventilation. Thin mats were placed directly on floors, sacks cut open and used as blankets. The air was dense with sweat, urine and of course feces.
One Morg lay on a mat in the first room we approached. He strained his neck muscles and pulled his head off the floor, blinking and struggling to see in the black. I shined a light directly at him. The dark slate of his face seemed to absorb the light – his eyes, a darker brown than my own, dilated when they should have constricted against the beam. Morgs were usually a grayish color, most of them bald, and weren’t prone to contact. But he reached his murky hand out, as if to touch us, and his stringy hair hung in clumps down his shoulders.
"Chek Ha Na," he said in a guttural rumble.
"What the fuck does that mean?" Jordy whispered. He shifted his weight from foot to foot, hopping and buzzing with lethal intent.
Hart hit him in the chest with the flat of his palm. "Stand down, man."
Jordy settled for a moment, but his breath came hard. "This place is skank-nasty. Let’s get this guy and get the fuck out."
Jordy was right. It smelled, but not just of feces now. It smelled of decay and rot and death. It smelled of Nanette’s blood, and I shook my head to keep the image of her pale, blood soaked lips out of my mind’s eye.
The Morg continued in an urgent chant.
This place was wrecking my calm. It was stupid really. Five highly trained Technicians should have been able to come in here, grab the Morg by the gonads and yank him out into the waiting lifter which hovered two clicks away – an unmarked, unregistered transport assigned to us for the duration of the priv. In and out in ninety seconds.
Except the chanting kept going, and the stink of the place crept into my brain, conjuring images that shouldn’t have been there.
Jordy hopped again. "Let’s get this the fuck over with."
Hart hit the flat of his palm into his own chest this time and growled. Then he straightened out his arm, aimed his puncher at the muttering Morg and blew his head into mist. Silence enfolded us and the Morg’s brains sprayed the wall, a welcome to demons hidden in passageways yet unseen.
Jordy chuckled.
Sceet motioned to us all, "Move out. We’re wasting time on this shit."
"How do you know that wasn’t the target?" I asked.
Sceet waved his wrist comm in front of us. "Intel has Tatreen’s biometric signature. It’s still active. Let’s go."
We left the pulverized Morg oozing in the dark.
Soft, fluttering activity awakened in the rooms around us – a sound like thousands of tiny appendages tapping in the walls. Morgs looked at us blankly from their hovels, then huddled back into the dark corners as we passed.
I don’t know why, but somehow I hadn’t expected females. They grabbed at their children, barely clothed, and hushed them into the far recesses of their rooms, shielding them with their bodies.
I wanted to stop and tell them that we weren’t there for them. They had no reason to fear us. We only wanted one man. The rebel. Tatreen.
But a buzzing of voices awakened in my head. I couldn’t think beyond the confusion of images of Nanette pressing me to her breasts, Shenu’s drool falling onto my chest, and finally Deidra’s face but with horns and fangs growing out of her orange painted mouth.
We followed Sceet further into dark passageways until we came to a room with a faint blue glow emanating from inside. Sceet motioned with his right hand for us to enter.
Jordy and I took up positions at each side of the doorway. Hart and Ripeye went shoulder to shoulder with Sceet directly behind them. As soon as Hart and Ripeye cleared the door they shouted, "On your knees!"
Gunfire followed. Jordy and I raced into pops and flashes and chaos. The room, dark, except for the strobing flashes of automatic weapons, seemed far too small for the bodies crammed into it. A Morg, bigger than I’d ever seen, easily 2.5 meters tall, stood in front of Hart and Ripeye, throwing punches with gigantic arms that bulged unnaturally with muscles and veins.
In the flashes of light I saw his face, scarred along the cheeks and brow, and his bottom lip sliced open so it appeared to have two halves. His hair coiled along his back like serpents and he wore only heavy cargo pants, made for the loading docks.
He blocked the entire entrance and backhanded Hart – catapulting him to the other side of the room, into the wall. As Hart flew he discharged his weapon, putting a 3 round burst directly into Rip
eye’s face. Ripeye went down unceremoniously, onto his knees, then forward, falling onto the incendiary grenade he’d been priming.
2.5 seconds later, the grenade discharged, pulverizing his body, scattering incandescent chunks of flesh everywhere. Hart caught fire and slid into a silently curling crouch, his limbs folding inward while he blackened.
Jordy roared and bumrushed the humongous Morg, whose bullet riddled torso and arms were burning in spots from the grenade and filling the small space with a burnt-meat smell. Jordy was big too, a solid two meters tall and all muscle, but the Morg hoisted him overhead and threw him without the slightest hint of effort, smashing him as if he’d been dropped a hundred meters. He ragdolled to the floor with a wet, crunchy sound..
Sceet cued an augment and screamed at me, "Grab the target!" The marker pointed to the far corner and the only thing I felt was relief that this monster who was thoroughly kicking our asses, was not Tatreen. I charged into the dark corner.
And stopped.
Huddled in the darkest recess of the room, where a small blue flame flickered from what seemed to be within the wall, sat a boy – maybe nine years of age. His gray skin was lighter than the other Morg’s, but that only made the huge moles on his cheeks more visible, like polka dots on his face.
Huge brown eyes stared up at me, his mouth slightly agape.
I turned to Sceet. "It’s just a kid."
I knew if we took this child, if the Confed wanted him that badly, he would never live to see next week, much less adulthood.
Sceet, obviously not burdened with the same concerns, hollered, "Take him!"
I reasoned with myself. I had done worse. I wasn’t entirely clear where murder rated on the savage bastard scale in comparison to kidnapping, but this felt pretty wrong. At the very least, I needed to be sure.
"What’s your name, kid?"
The boy tugged at his sleeve with skinny fingers and mumbled, "Tatreen."
So we had the right guy.
"What’d you do?"
Sceet screamed behind me.
The little boy reached out his left arm, and lightly wrapped his palm around my wrist, then he placed his right hand on the cement wall, near the blue light.
Suddenly, instead of the dank bunker, I was in Nanette’s room, watching her apply perfume behind her ears and down her throat. Nanette always liked to smell good, even on her off days.
I watched her for a few seconds and smiled.
Then an armored Confed trooper burst into the room. I screamed at her to run and lunged for the soldier. I fell through him like smoke.
Nanette yelled at him to get out. He grabbed her neck with his black gloved hand, and twisted her head around and into him so her back pressed up against the front of him.
He whispered something in her ear. Her blue eyes went wide and tears glistened. Then he rammed a combat knife into the back of her neck.
He spread her out, face down, on her fluffy bedspread, arranging her limbs with great care while she gurgled and bled. Only then did he rape her.
More images flooded into me. I saw too many things. Things I didn’t know. Shouldn’t know. I pounded the heels of my hands into my eyes, to block out the visions, but of course that was useless. They were inside my skull..
The Confed. Terror. Death. Worse.
Then, just as suddenly, I was back in the bunker, on my hands and knees, with the taste of vomit in my mouth, next to the little boy Tatreen. Screaming.
"What did you do to me?"
"The Voudoun want you to see the truth." He rubbed his finger along the wall and the blue light danced with this hand.
Sceet still roared at me. I pivoted slightly, crouched on my heels and saw him flailing at the giant Morg. The beast had him in an effortless grip. It's arms were bloody and burned, his chest dotted with dozens of bullet wounds, but it showed no sign of impairment. No awareness of pain.
"He will not fall," Tatreen said.
I wondered what he meant, but then noticed the Morg’s eyes – the sockets looked hollow, empty. Was he even alive?
Sceet screamed for me to shoot the motherfucker, as he pounded his armored fists pointlessly into the Morg’s arm.
I picked up my weapon and staggered forward as the Morg twisted Sceet’s head with one hand, like he was opening a bottle. A muffled pop and Sceet went limp. Then the huge Morg collapsed to the ground like a sack of meat and bones.
Tatreen still hunched in the corner. He stared at me with those huge brown eyes.
"You’ll be needed for what’s coming," he said. Then he closed his eyes as if to sleep. Or pray.
I heard the sounds of bodies in motion. There were other Morgs coming. A lot of them.
So I fled.
I expected to have to fight my way through them. But they let me pass. The Morgs I encountered stepped silently aside. Outside the bunkers, I settled into a steady combat run, covering the distance to our extraction ship in minutes.
And then I committed treason.
Worse, I betrayed the Corps. Disabling comms and tracking was something any Technician could do in seconds. I plugged into the ship through my wrist ports, my ‘jacks’, and did the deed. Of course I was only buying myself time. They’d see that the lifter and I were gone. Even the Confed could figure out what that meant.
Sooner or later, they would follow.
CHAPTER SIX
I knew they would expect me to run, to head for the Outer System, into Irezi space where the Confed couldn’t reach me as easily. So I did precisely the opposite. I ran a track into high orbit, boosted into a trajectory that would look a whole lot like a lifter bound for Mars, and then went I stealthy. A couple of careful nudges and I came zinging back around the planet, masking my re-entry trail with Singapore Lift’s shield cloud.
Two hours later, I dropped the lifter at one of the low rent surface locks at the bottom of Marajo Lift. Easy enough to slip inside, back into the Depot I had so recently vacated. After all these years, I was, once again, just another grit.
I kept to myself, and stayed in one place only long enough to stock supplies, or find a part or two. One piece at a time, I was making my stolen lifter into an anonymous civilian transport. I knew eventually I’d have to recruit a crew – a few grubs, nobody who could give me trouble. Low profile from here on out.
That is, until I met her.
I’d been working my exit plan. I went into a shitty little store looking for dried protein cubes and someone who could sell me water. Guess they could tell easily enough I wasn’t from their quad – which made me a legitimate target. When they saw my cads, one of them pulled out a crowbar and tried to whack me over the head.
In a civilian fight, I usually stick to simple hand-to-hand. I don’t want to take unfair advantage. But this dipshit asked for it – the crowbar guy that is. When I grabbed him by the scruff of his greasy neck folds and hauled him close, I almost passed out from the smell of his breath. I let his momentum carry him forward and shifted so he rolled over my hip. He sailed into the wall, leading with his face, and thumped himself unconscious. Then his friends jumped me.
It was an entertaining side excursion that set me back a few hours. By the time I cleaned the blood from my knuckles, changed into fresh clothes, and hauled my new cache of supplies back to my ship, I had already lost most of the day. And I was a little tired. Almost didn’t notice the black-clad figure sprinting toward me across the cargo pad.
She was a good two hundred meters away, but there was no mistaking that pale skin. Or the way she moved.
Wraith.
Marines train for a lot of contingencies, Wraiths among them. Even at a full, run the gracefulness of her body was obvious and I could see the unmistakable blips of pocket jumps. I knew it was dangerous to underestimate a Wraith. They look good, but they’re calculating, ruthless and completely lethal. I also knew their weaknesses. Confined spaces – they don’t like 'em. Which I could empathize with. Keep your enemies close, but with Wraiths you have to almost be on to
p of them.
She ran into me at full speed. I caught her easily in a loose embrace. A quick pat up her back revealed no weapons. She had something else stashed there.
Up close she looked different. Not like the Wraith’s I’d been trained for. Something about her eyes. Wraith’s had a chill in their gaze. They were always assessing, gauging, looking for the advantage – or an escape route. But this one, there was a ferocity in that blue-gray stare. Something I’d never seen before. Something I liked. Of course she was still Wraith, which meant she couldn’t be trusted.
I quickly circled my hands around her slender frame. "Whoa, kid. Take it easy."
My condescending tone got the exact response I’d hoped for – irritation. She cursed in Cheyanow, such ugly words from such a pretty mouth. I couldn’t help but laugh.
"I need help." She spat.
I knew that already. I heard the Jovians chasing after her – heard em shouting to each other before I could see them. Thugs. Amateurs. But the fact that this sweet treat in clingy black with a scooped out neckline, and what were clearly world-class tits, needed help didn’t mean a damned thing. I didn’t trust her. Not at all.
I snatched up the last four cases of protein cubes and shoved them quickly into the cargo hatch. She wasn’t getting out of my sight – or off with any of my stuff. I stayed at the open lock of my boat – making it harder for her to pocket jump in and loot anything.
Something told me she was maybe in more trouble than she could deal with, and she knew it. We’d been taught that Wraiths never felt fear, but this girl was scared.
"Who’s after you?"
"Squats. Eight. Maybe more. Thirty seconds away."
"Bah!" I muttered under my breath. "I’ve had my own ‘issues’ with those smelly little bastards. Not thrilled about a repeat."
I stepped partway into the entry hatch. We were at the edge of a cutoff. Nothing in front of us but a two hundred meter drop to the endless desert of the Atlantic Basin. I knew I wouldn’t feel right about leaving her to her fate – even if she was a stone-cold killing machine. Hell. Not that different from me I guess.
The Jack's Story (BRIGAND Book 2) Page 3