One Jump Ahead-ARC

by Mark L. Van Name

  We braked hard and watched the action from a hundred meters away, monitoring the crew and all broadcast frequencies simultaneously. Osterlad's company was almost certainly buying orbital surveillance, of course, but Lankin was nowhere near built up enough for even the rich to garner continuous coverage from sats they didn't launch themselves. As best Lobo could tell from the low-orbit machine chatter, we were currently running undetected, the nearest satellites not likely to sweep this area for another hour or so. Plenty of time.

  The gas dissipated. No one moved on the surface of the boat. Its control pods tried to send distress signals, but Lobo overrode them with canceling frequencies until we were able to fry them with focused microwave hits along the hull's rim and up the masts. A few transmitters buried deep in the boat were hopping bands every few seconds, looking for responses, but Lobo would be able to handle them for as long as we needed.

  Lobo hovered a couple meters above the boat and opened a floor hatch. I dropped to the deck. He immediately headed up to our agreed-upon monitoring position, high enough that he'd be hard to spot, especially with the cloud-tinged camo now rippling across him, but low enough to be of help if I needed it. I toured the guards, crew, and girls, shooting each with enough gang-dosed DullsIt—another purchase from the fine merchants of the Queen's Bar street market—that they should all approximate vegetables for at least four hours. I bound their hands and feet with quick-ties in case Johns wasn't the only one in Osterlad's company to receive broad-spectrum inoculations. I dragged Osterlad well away from the controls, then shot armor-piercing rounds into them until Lobo told me the only active electronics on the ship were the increasingly frustrated buried emergency beacons.

  With the situation in hand, I granted myself a few moments to appreciate Osterlad's boat. As good as the sadwood had appeared from a distance, up close it was better, smooth and warm as a lover's thighs, a blue richer than the ocean or sky yet echoing both. As I gazed along the line of the deck up to the horizon, the wood blended the water and the atmosphere, a child of the two riding above the one and below the other. The air smelled and tasted of the ocean around it, a light breeze mitigating the heat of the afternoon. I understood why Osterlad would take the risks he did to be here.

  I shook off the view and focused on the task at hand. I injected Osterlad with a standard battlefield stimulant, then backed four or five meters away from him and leaned against the nearest mast. The post was bigger and smoother than it had appeared from the air, and I passed the seconds until Osterlad recovered by enjoying the texture of the wood against my back.

  He came around quickly and sprang to full alert, clearly riding more chemicals than the single shot I'd given him. He registered me, stepped forward, and I shot a round at a shallow angle in the deck less than a meter from his foot.

  "Sit, Mr. Osterlad," I said.

  The round had the effect I wanted; he sat. "Mr. Moore," he said. For the first time since awakening, he took a few moments to survey the ship and his crew. His control was good; he pushed his expression through shocked, angry, and attacking into corporate-negotiation neutral so quickly I would have missed the transition had I looked away at all. "An appointment would have been easier"—he made a point of staring further at his crew and the damage the missiles had caused—"and quite a bit cheaper for us both."

  "I doubt you would have met with me," I said. I didn't quarrel with his second comment; I was going to have to restock the weapons Lobo had fired, and they didn't come cheap. "In our first encounter, you understood how little I like wasting time. I haven't changed."

  He pointed behind him, to the wall under the ship's wheel. "Do you mind if I move enough to be able to lean? Sitting hunched over is needlessly unpleasant." I nodded assent and gestured upward with the gun. He kept his hands in view as he moved back, then leaned and put his hands in his lap, as apparently relaxed as he was during our meeting in his office. "Thank you," he said. "Now, I take it there's some problem with your arrangements with Mr. Johns."

  "No problem at all," I said. "He tried to kill me and steal the PCAV." I had to force myself not to call Lobo by name; when you confront an enemy, never give more information than is necessary. "Instead, I killed him and took the control complex."

  "I must apologize for my associate's actions," he said, his tone that of any executive dismissing a subordinate's minor transgressions, "but it seems to me that you've taken care of punishing him and so our only remaining business is the balance you owe on the control complex."

  I chuckled; I had to admire his bravado. "We're wasting time again. I understand your attempt to steal the PCAV, though I find it unfortunate; I would have paid what I owed you prior to the attempt. The problem is the bounty on me."

  "I assure you I have placed no bounty on you," he said.

  The best liars always lie as little as possible, and Osterlad was clearly good, attempting to redirect me with a useless truth. I was the one wasting time now, allowing myself to fall into conversation with him, to follow societal norms that weren't appropriate to the situation. Every minute I spent here increased the odds that a security team from his office would intervene. "Enough," I said. "Johns told me you wanted not only to steal the PCAV but also to collect the bounty on me. I want to know who put the bounty on me."

  "I'm sure I don't—"

  I cut him off. "If anything you found about my background suggested to you that I'm at all squeamish," I said, "you should slap the people that furnished you such inaccurate crap. I dislike torture, but it works, and I need that information. Answer the question."

  "As I said before—"

  I stepped closer to him, pulled the small energy pistol from my belt, and shot the top of his left foot. The beam sheared off the upper several centimeters of his dark leather boat shoe and the tips of the toes within it, cauterizing the flesh instantly. The smell of sizzling flesh punched me in the head and stomach. I could take it and had smelled it many, many times, but I never got used to it. I never wanted to get used to it.

  Osterlad was good: He let out one moan, then clamped his mouth shut. I assumed he was getting help from a top-drawer executive chemical boost, but he still had to work to keep his face under control, and he had trouble looking away from his foot. His voice wavered a bit on his first words. "That was completely unnecessary," he said. "We are not a stupid company, nor are we inexperienced. Our standard contracts include capture clauses, so all our special consulting clients understand the risks to their identities." He finally looked up at me. "Jose Chung, the Xychek head here on Lankin, offered a rather substantial fee for your capture, as well as a somewhat lower fee for your . . ." He paused as he searched for an executive-approved phrase. ". . . return in any condition."

  "Why?" I asked.

  "As I'm sure you will appreciate, our clients' motivations are not our business."

  "Speculate."

  "I should think it's obvious," he said. "By rescuing the girl on Macken, you helped Slake. Slake is Xychek's counterpart in this region. Xychek and Kelco were going to share the rights to Macken and its new aperture, but Kelco won the exclusive. Had the kidnapping persuaded Slake to get Kelco to withdraw, Xychek would have been back in the running, perhaps even for an exclusive of its own."

  "So was Chung behind the kidnapping?"

  "I don't know for sure," Osterlad said, "though it's certainly within the realm of possibility. Someone gave the little agrarian troublemakers enough information that they knew about the girl and where to find her. I have trouble believing Slake would station anyone on Macken he couldn't trust; the Kelco advance group there is still rather small. The FC has no reason to hurt Kelco. That leaves Xychek."

  "Chung is based here?"

  "Yes."

  I nodded my head, thinking, trying to pin down what was still bothering me. A few seconds later, I figured out what it was. "I don't understand why you and your company are in the bounty-hunting game, nor why Chung would even approach you. Explain it to me."

  A condesc
ending smile played across Osterlad's face, an expression I suspect his subordinates witnessed frequently. It vanished quickly as he regained full control. "Chung is a valuable customer of ours. The . . . problem arose in the course of a conversation on other topics, so we naturally offered to help." He spread his hands, as if to include me, as if I were someone he was selling to—which in a way, of course, I was. "As we would offer to help any valued customer, or friend."

  I ignored the pitch. "What was that conversation about?" I said.

  Osterlad shrugged, his attempt at diversion having failed. "Xychek doesn't intend to let Kelco have the rights on Macken. Chung is buying weapons from us and assembling a private militia to do whatever is necessary there—and before the Frontier Coalition takes the issue seriously enough to extend the Saw's contract in this sector to cover Macken. Until then, of course, the government would be very unlikely to get involved in a little corporate squabble, even one that left a few casualties."

  "How do your friends at Kelco feel about you supplying Xychek?"

  He shrugged again. "Confidentiality is, as you must understand, paramount in our business. We do not discuss the arrangements of any client with another."

  "Thank you," I said, stalling. "You must manage security well, to be able to play both sides and have nothing leak."

  He bowed slightly, a mocking smile on his face, but said nothing.

  With what he'd told me, the picture was clear, so I didn't need anything else from him. I could find a corporate headquarters myself. Chung was now my problem.

  Osterlad, however, remained an issue.

  "I don't suppose you'll leave me alone if I let you go," I said.

  His smile crept marginally closer to being real. "Of course not. Even if I wanted to, the offer for you is substantial enough that some of my more entrepreneurial subordinates would pursue the matter independently, and they'd find it a sign of weakness that I didn't put the company in the game in the face of a direct client request." He shook his head. "No, I couldn't."

  I nodded again. "I didn't think so." I stared at him until he looked into my eyes. "If I get Chung to withdraw the offer, would our business be complete?"

  I don't know why I bothered to ask. I knew what his real answer would be. He'd lie, of course, because any small chance at keeping life going is, in those moments when you know death is reaching for you, better than no chance.

  "Perhaps," he said, "provided you paid the remaining balance on the control complex and the cost of restoring my boat."

  I had to give him respect once again; it was the most convincing version of the lie he could tell. A less skilled liar would have grabbed for the hope I'd dangled.

  I faced two options: kill him, or keep him as a hostage and hope his company valued him enough to leave me alone for at least a while. Keeping him, however, only delayed the inevitable, because eventually I'd have to let him go, and then he'd come for me. Still, like him I preferred to cling to the small chances when I could, and I truly wanted to avoid more killing.

  He interrupted my reverie. "In the drawer under the wheel," he said, "are a variety of painkillers. May I stand and get some?"

  I nodded. As he pulled himself up, I reached a decision. I turned slightly to my right and murmured, "Lobo, come get us. We're going to have a guest for a while." I hated the idea of maintaining a prisoner, but maybe I could work this out given more time. If I could get Chung and Xychek off my back, then maybe money, perhaps coupled with a little groveling on my part that Osterlad could use to illustrate his strength to his staff, would be enough to placate the man and his company. Maybe it could work.

  Lobo came into view above us, his low-altitude engines warming the air, quiet enough in stealth mode that their sound added to but didn't drown out the backdrop of ocean noise. I looked up to see where he was targeting landing.

  When I looked back at Osterlad, he was pointing a small weapon at me.

  I shook my head at my own stupidity.

  "You're worth more alive than dead," he said, "but not enough more that I won't shoot. Put down your weapons, then bring in your ship."

  "I'm sorry," I said, meaning it. I'd wanted to avoid a repeat of the episode with Johns, but if I could stall Osterlad then I could decide whether to use the same techniques on him.

  Lobo saved me the decision.

  The air popped with an arc of energy. For a split second, the light around Osterlad's face flared like a sun throwing off extra energy. His severed head fell. His body toppled, the flash-cauterized flesh of his neck still sizzling. The smell of his burning flesh followed the visual a second later. I turned away from the corpse, hoping to avoid having the image and the stench etched into my memory, but it was too late; both would come back to haunt me, probably in the middle of one of those sweat-soaked nights when the dead and the injured chase me through the dark passages of my mind.

  I shook my head to clear away the self-pity. He'd chosen to fight, and he'd lost. He was dead, and I was alive. "Thank you," I said to Lobo, "for saving my life." And for not making me personally kill him, I thought but did not say.

  "You're welcome," he said. "As I warned you earlier, surgical removal is frequently the only reasonable option."

  "Yes," I said, "yes you did. I was hoping to avoid more killing, but it was a stupid hope all along."

  "You didn't kill," Lobo said, "I did. Does that help?"

  I considered the question as Lobo set down and I boarded. He shut the doors behind me, and we took off quickly.

  "No," I said. I'd long ago promised myself that I'd never ignore the consequences of my own actions. I didn't have to like what I did, but I wouldn't ever try to fool myself into believing I hadn't taken an action. "You fired the pulse, but the moment I decided to come back for Osterlad, I killed either him or me. I just didn't realize it at the time."

  "Should I sink the boat?" Lobo asked.

  "Do you believe we've left any traces they can link back to us?"

  "None beyond the quality of the countermeasures and weapons," Lobo said. "Those factors do limit the possibilities to attackers with access to at least fairly current technologies."

  Osterlad moved in a world where enough of his clients and competitors had such tech that I'd at worst be one option among many. The proximity of his death and Johns' wasn't in our favor, but working for us was the power vacuum that his death would cause in his company and the corporate turmoil that would ensue as his potential successors scrambled to take over and lock down their empires.

  I granted myself one bit of peace: As surely as I'd made decisions that had led to his death, Osterlad had, too. I had to assume he'd dealt honorably with Slake, or Slake wouldn't have recommended him. If Osterlad had extended me the same respect and working relationship he'd offered Kelco, he'd be alive now.

  The crew on the ship had no chance to make any of those choices, so killing them would be going too far. Of course, I supposed that even working for Osterlad was in a way making the choice to risk being a pawn in this type of situation.

  I could spiral down this philosophical hole as long as I could stand it, and I could eventually make it take me anywhere I wanted to go, but the simple truth was that I wasn't willing to kill the boat's crew as they slept off the effects of the DullsIt injections.

  "Leave the boat alone," I said.

  "Okay," Lobo said. "Where should I take us now?"

  Chung had offered the bounty, so Chung was my best bet to lift it.

  "Back to the shuttle storage," I said, "so I can gather some more information. We need to find a way to meet with Xychek's Mr. Chung."