The Good, the Bad, and the Merc: Even More Stories from the Four Horsemen Universe (The Revelations Cycle Book 8)

by Chris Kennedy

  Mulbah sighed.

  “There are times when a leader must lead,” the founder and owner of the Kakata Korps began as he relaxed into the pillow. He stared at the dull grey ceiling of his room and gathered his thoughts before he continued. “And there are times when he must accept the blame for his own mistakes. I screwed up. I should have been the one translating the mission, not you. I should have double-checked everything. If I blame you, then nothing gets fixed. I blame me. It was my fault. In the end, it doesn’t matter. The contract was fulfilled, and the payment is going to be more than enough to hire more Liberian mercs. We’re doing it, Samson. We’re succeeding.”

  “Boss,” Samson said and looked down at the floor for a moment. “Why do this? Why…why are you so concerned about Liberian mercs? You can hire anyone!”

  “This may sound strange to you, but I see Liberia as it is right now, and it is a joke,” Mulbah said in a low, angry voice. “Corruption, poverty, disease…we had every opportunity to succeed, and we screwed it up. We let corrupt politicians run our country, and we get mad when they pass laws to benefit themselves. We let foreigners tell us how to do business and then act surprised when they cheat us. We tell our children to follow their dreams and then yank the dream away by not giving them a chance to succeed. We complain about our lack of goals, and yet we offer none to work toward!

  “Long ago, when my father took me to America the first time, I saw a land of opportunity. I saw people who were poor rise up and become great. I saw the great extend their hand to those who needed it and bring them up. They competed against one another until a victor emerged, and then the victor would graciously assist the loser so they wouldn’t be destitute. It made me cry, Samson. I cried like a little girl. It showed how many people could work together and be a nation.

  “We are many different people in Liberia, but I think we can be a nation. We just need leaders who are not looking out for themselves but for the future of Liberia and its people. Our people, Samson. The first step in doing this is to create something the next generation can work toward. I’ve told you before that I dream of making Liberia a destination not just for Africans but for humanity as a whole. We can rebuild it and make it bigger, brighter. A future. Kakata Korps was started with that goal in mind. It would create families once more, families who don’t have to worry about civil war or being the spoils of battle. Children should be able to look at soldiers and feel awe and pride, not fear and loathing. Parents should not have to worry about warlords grabbing their child and thrusting a weapon into his tiny hands to be a soldier.

  “I want to fix this. I want to end the despair and offer hope. I want…menh, I want to save our people from ourselves.”

  Samson stared at his boss for a long time, silent. Mulbah waited for his subordinate to speak. Finally, the mechanic sighed and sat down on a chair.

  “You want to overthrow the government,” Samson stated.

  “No,” Mulbah corrected, his voice gentle in spite of his earlier passion. “I want to hold valid elections so Liberians can choose their leaders for once. Their true leaders. I want to ensure that the votes count, that all votes matter. We have a constitution; I think it’s time we follow it.”

  “And the Korps?” Samson asked.

  “The Korps is the first step,” Mulbah stated. “We need to give them jobs, but if they are going to fight hard, they need someone to keep the home fires burning for their return. They must have a home to return to. This is what I’m suggesting, Samson. This is what I want to do.”

  Samson nodded, ever so slowly. Mulbah met his eyes and felt the intensity of the mechanic’s stare. Samson offered him a small smile.

  “Sounds good, Boss. When do we begin?”

  “We already have.”

  # # # # #

  VVREMYA by Mark Wandrey

  1

  The party had gone on for more than a month without ending. When Yegor Pestov’s brother first came to him to say he’d taken all the money from their family mining company, Sokolov Pogranichnyy Konstern, or SPK, and invested it in, of all things, a mercenary company, Yegor had completely lost it.

  “Are you insane?” he’d raged. “How much?”

  “Why, all of it!” Grigori had proudly proclaimed. It had been their father’s brilliant idea to make Yegor and Grigori equal partners, and both had the authority to spend and invest SPK’s funds however they wanted. He’d hoped the two brothers would be forced to work together. Instead, Grigori had dumped half a billion rubles of their carefully hoarded funds into the craziest venture Yegor had ever heard of. He’d been drunk when the mercenary company they’d sponsored to the huge tune of 2%, the Winged Hussars, had flown away from Earth in their little ship, and took his future with it.

  Afterward, he’d tried to stay interested in the daily operation of SPK; however, with their exploration operation ruined by a lack of capital, he was reduced to only trying to squeeze profit out of the company’s dozens of nearly played-out rare Earth mines within the Urals and in Mongolia. He’d contracted six exploration companies for the coming year and he’d had to cancel all of them, only leaving SPK’s own inhouse team. Without the funds, he didn’t have the ability to save the company.

  “You spent our inheritance,” he’d accused Grigori in a meeting six months after the boondoggle. He was inches from leaving for good, abandoning the family company, and going to live in the tiny dacha his father left him on the Black Sea. Only 3 of the 100 mercenary companies returned from space, and none were the one they’d backed. When the Winged Hussars finally returned, and became the fourth horseman, Grigori was vindicated, and Yegor was stunned. A week later, a courier delivered a check to them in the amount of 376,838,800,000 rubles, their 2% share of the investment, after costs. It was a 753-fold return on their investment. The party started and didn’t end for a month.

  It ended on the day Grigori was stabbed to death by a hooker who didn’t like how much she was being paid, and Yegor found Grigori had been playing hot and loose with their money, investing a lot of it back in the Four Horsemen and a few other merc companies. These companies were new, of course, but they had learned a lot from the trail the Horsemen helped blaze. Just as before, the gambles paid off. Grigori hadn’t picked at random. He’d carefully chosen companies related to the Horsemen in one way or another.

  With Grigori gone, Yegor was forced to decide. Go back to business as usual, retire on the billions they’d made, or let it ride. He liked the odds, and drinking a toast to Grigori, he let it ride…and ride it did, for another year. The money came in so fast he couldn’t send it back out. The Russian Republic central bank stopped paying him interest, because his deposits were larger than the government. At the end of the second year, he was one of the top 100 wealthiest people in the world, and SPK was in the Fortune 500. All this, and they hadn’t started a new mine since the Alpha Contracts!

  Yegor was the first Human to buy a robotic flying limousine, which made quite a splash at the president’s birthday party! He was the first to have a Union designed and built mansion, cut from living rock in the Urals and only reachable by helicopter or flyer. He was also the first to have a private space yacht. Sure, it was only a converted tramp freighter, but no one on Earth, with the possible exception of the mercs, knew the difference. It was too good to last, and it didn’t. Time ran out.

  One at a time, the various merc companies bought him out. What had been steady and massive rivers of revenue shrunk to streams, and then trickles. Plans he’d had were suddenly brought to a screaming halt. He had the design for an orbital hotel and casino ready to go, with an initial buy in of 2 trillion rubles. He could bring in investors, but he wanted it all for himself. Damn the timing.

  Yegor spent weeks going over the possibilities. Plenty of merc companies wanted his money. Plenty of new, untested, and risky merc companies. He even bought into two, and they never came home. Damn it, why did Grigori have to get himself gutted like that? It was during a study session using his own node on the
GalNet, the Union’s version of the internet, that he found something.

  Several Earth concerns were dealing in F11. An isotope of Fluorine, it was what made fusion power possible. Amazing stuff, of which there was none on Earth, and probably not even any in the Solar System. It only occurred in two known places. In the remnants of gas giants, like Saturn or Jupiter, where a supernova had blown the world’s cloud cover away, and around black holes. There were only a few dozen gas giant mines in the galaxy, and every ruble to his name wouldn’t buy him a minority share in any of them. Black hole mining, though, was a possibility.

  “Well how hard can that be?” he wondered. Then he checked. There were no black hole F11 mining operations in business. Curious, he paid for the survey data from the Cartographers Guild, which listed all the places where F11 had been located. Sure enough, there were three black holes listed with verified deposits of F11. All were claimed; none were being worked. That was interesting. He bought the more in-depth survey data for a sum that would have allowed him to retire in comfort before everything changed. As he’d thought, 11 more black holes were classified as probable sources of F11. He sorted their location, and one was not only in their arm of the galaxy, it was in their region.

  “This can’t be right,” he said to Igor Ivanovich, one of the legal researchers in the company’s legal department. “This F11 is so valuable, yet there is no evidence of this site ever having a claim?”

  “The Union laws are strange,” the lawyer said. “They are more like anarchy. The guilds have ultimate authority in most cases. Maybe there really is no F11 around those…black holes?”

  “Yes,” Yegor said impatiently, “black holes. I thought that too, so I researched the history of such claims with the Trade Guild. They have 42 previous such claims that have been filed. There is no central authority recording transactions, but I did find a mention of one lucrative haul being sold from a black hole in the Cimaron region of the Peco arm.” The lawyer stared at him. “It’s a long way away.” In the end, the lawyer shrugged and said maybe it was just too expensive.

  Yegor spent a month researching mining and extracting F11. It wasn’t cheap, that was for sure. It was often found with other gases, and if it was too polluted, it quickly became impractical to extract because purification costs exceeded profits. Still, it wasn’t any worse than some of the deep core mining SPK had experience with. He checked his company payroll and was stunned to see just one exploration and core team still employed! Worse, their contract was up in weeks. He instantly renewed it and began laying the groundwork for the plan that would set him up as a better investor than his brother had ever been.

  He found purchase contracts on the GalNet for mining equipment, bought the equipment, and ordered it delivered to a storage facility near his target. Then he contacted the representative of the Trade Guild on Earth, a frightening werewolf-looking creature called a Besquith, and filed his claim on the system. He couldn’t really read the being’s facial expressions, which seemed to go from indifferent to angry and back again; however, Yegor couldn’t help but think the Besquith was amused by his claim. The only problem there was the guild insisted on a 299-year claim.

  “Why?” Yegor demanded. The Besquith looked at him with its red eyes and smiled. Yegor almost shit himself.

  “Claims in black holes have a minimum 299-year contract.”

  “But why?” he persisted.

  “Guild rules.” Yegor swore and paid the fee, which even for 299 years was much less than he’d been expecting. The contract on his claim had to be 500 pages, though. He dropped it in the lawyer’s inbox and went back to work.

  The next step was transportation. Leasing a ship for an extended operation wasn’t cheap—it cost more than he had—and to make matters worse, not many aliens were keen on extending Humans credit, especially after a number of combat dropships never came back from the Alpha Contracts. Things were getting better, but slowly.

  He looked into purchasing. The problem wasn’t the price; it was transfer fees. No one was selling ships on Earth, which meant he had to go to space to get them. Companies charged extortive rates to move a ship to a backwater like Earth. So much so, it nearly doubled the cost! He was beginning to think he’d reached a stopper when he got a visit from the least likely person anyone would expect.

  “Boss,” his secretary called one morning, “you have a visitor.”

  “No one was scheduled,” he said, glancing at his appointment reminder.

  “No,” she agreed, “but you probably want to see him.”

  “Okay, buzz him in.” The outer door opened, and in strode a man wearing a uniform. If the plain blue uniform and logo on his shoulder weren’t enough, there was almost no one on the planet who wouldn’t have recognized the chiseled features of Jim Cartwright, founder of Cartwright’s Cavaliers. One of the Four Horsemen had just walked into his office.

  “Hi Mr. Pestov,” Jim said, crossing over to the desk and offering him his hand.

  “Mr. Cartwright,” Yegor said, jumping uncomfortably to his feet and taking the hand. It was warm and firm. “Do we know each other?”

  “Only indirectly,” Jim said. Yegor gestured him to a chair, and they both sat. “Your company invested in mine back before the Alpha Contracts.”

  “Oh,” Yegor said, snapping his fingers, “right. That was my brother.”

  “Either way, it was good timing for us both.” Yegor nodded and opened the cigar box on the desk and offered it to Jim. “Don’t mind if I do,” he said and took one. “Cuban, nice.” After he cut the cigar and lit it, the older man took a deep appreciative puff, launching a cloud of smoke toward the ceiling. “Excellent.”

  “So, what can I do for you today?” Yegor asked.

  “I understand you’ve been looking for a ship.”

  “Sure am,” Yegor said, “but no luck.”

  “Your luck is about to change. We’d like to trade up, and don’t need our current ship.” Yegor sat up in surprise.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I said I want to sell you my ship.” Jim took out a slate and sat it on Yegor’s desk, then touched the corner. To Yegor’s surprise, the slate had a built in Tri-V projector and a miniature space ship appeared to spin in place.

  “Neat slate,” Yegor said, “we only have a few. Too expensive.”

  “Worth the credits,” Jim said, then laughed and gestured at the ship. “You’re more interested in an alien slate than my ship?”

  “Oh, no,” Yegor said and shook his head, focusing on the ship. “What is it?”

  “I understand it is a Poolt-class frontier transport. Its original name was unpronounceable, so I christened it EMS Dante. We bought it after the Alpha Contracts and used it for a few missions. We got it cheap, and now we’ve outgrown it.” He touched the control again and data appeared under the ship. The vessel was 129 meters long, 60 meters wide, with massive cargo holds, and is capable of making both an unassisted takeoff from a planet’s surface, as well as a laser-boosted ascent. That’s important—we almost got stranded on a planet with very little water.” Jim gave his patented, photogenic chuckle and shook his head. “That’s why we switched to space-based vessels with dropships. It’s old, but serviceable.” The data said the ship possessed a sizeable cargo hold and could land fully loaded. “We bought it for 3 million credits. It’s seen some hard times, so I’ll sell it for 2 million.”

  Yegor swallowed. That was a lot of money for SPK—almost half their reserve.

  Jim watched his expression and nodded shrewdly. “I see that might be painful,” he said. “Okay, I’ll tell you what, 1 million and a 25% interest in whatever you’re doing.”

  Yegor didn’t know if he liked that option any better, truth be told. Yet it might also be his only option. If a little ship like that, worn out and partly converted to life as a merc ship, cost over 3 million, his entire cash reserve wouldn’t buy anything better on the open market. Plus, this ship was here…and he trusted Jim Cartwright.

  “H
ow about five hundred thousand and 10%?”

  Jim proved to be just as shrewd in contract negotiation as he was purported to be in combat. He wouldn’t come down on the million, but he settled for 20% of the venture. Yegor took the deal. An hour later, the lawyer delivered the contract, they both signed, and Yegor broke out the vodka while Jim read the contract details.

  “F11 mining, eh?” he said with a nod. “I’ve heard about it being around black holes and wondered, but mining isn’t something that interests me.” He folded the contract and put it into his attaché case along with the fancy slate. “I’ve heard good things about you and your company, though, and hopefully you’ll make us both some money.” He raised his glass, condensation glistening on its sides. “To success.”

  “To success,” Yegor said, and they both threw down the shots.

  2

  Yegor took possession of EMS Dante a week later. It was just as big and ugly as it had looked on the Tri-V. Still, it was Yegor’s ship, and he caught himself admiring its bulbous lines. No longer an Earth Mercenary Ship, or EMS, it was now designated ECS Dante, for Earth Commercial Ship. As Jim Cartwright promised, the ship was indeed serviceable. It was also an ancient, worn out piece of shit, making it obvious why the merc commander wanted to move on. The alien engineers Yegor hired gave it a thorough checkout after it landed at the Sevastopol Starport. They reported the F11 was good for another thousand hours, but the lifter motors would probably need to be completely rebuilt within 20 hours of operation, and there was some rust in the main structural members.

  “Will it fly?” he asked the leader of the engineers, Shoop, an alien elSha who looked like a meter-tall lizard.

  “Of course,” Shoop said, patting the grimy wall of the engine room. “This ship has been flying 700 years. I’ll keep it flying as long as you keep pouring credits into it.”