Two hours before the projected launch time, I met the Strange Kitty team, my salesman and the wrangler, at the coordinates I'd given them. They arrived in a heavily shielded company transport truck that contained my birds and a dozen other animals of various types, all sedated. The men sported Strange Kitty uniforms in ad-woven active fabric, images of augmented creatures of all types slithering over the clothing. Had anyone stopped them, they explained, they would have been able to produce a full schedule of deliveries. I nodded appreciatively at their caution. My salesman appeared exactly as amped as he had at the store. The wrangler, an even shorter man who was enough of a bird fan to have back feathers that peeked above the collar of his coverall, moved almost as if asleep—a by-product, he explained, of the chemically enhanced calming mosey pheromones he'd washed with before loading the birds.
"I'd like to verify the recording capability," I said. The air was hot, thermals playing almost visibly in the slow-moving atmosphere. This far inland we received all the heat of a tourist coastal city but none of the cooling ocean breeze.
"Of course," my salesman replied.
They opened the back of the truck and led me inside. Its rear half was a large cage full of moseys squawking and flapping and jumping about. As the wrangler walked over to the cage, however, the pheromone assault calmed the birds, and they settled on some of the many dark wooden perches that extended from the bars, walls, and ceilings of the caged area.
He took out one of the moseys and absently stroked its head, the bird lying as still and happy in his arms as a spent lover. A little under a third of a meter long and with a wingspan of over a meter, the mosey was bigger than I'd expected. At first glance as we entered the truck, I'd thought the moseys to be plain, basically gray animals with only the blue beaks to break up the color monotony. Now, with the time to look closely, I saw that their feathers eased through a gentle color transition from dark gray at the tips to a blend of lighter grays and finally to a blue so close to gray it was as if the merest few drops of blue pigment had fallen in a can of gray paint. Here and there on the bird's underside were flecks of white and black frequent enough that they invited the thought of a pattern, but not any pattern I could discern. Not showy animals, but ones that repaid close inspection, beautiful in their own way. I realized then, as I have at many such moments in the past, that the same has proven true of every living thing I've ever taken the time to study closely, a testimony to the wonder of creation. I know many people crave explanations for the glories of the universe, but I don't; what I crave is the will and the ability to learn to appreciate it all.
The wrangler interrupted my reverie. "It couldn't be simpler," he said. He parted the feathers on the left side of the bird's neck to reveal a small stud, pressed the stud, and pointed the animal's head at me. After a few seconds, he pressed the stud again, then hooked a small viewing port to it, the bird still happily pheromone-drunk in his arms. The screen snapped alive with multiwindowed images of me in visible, IR, and composite frequencies.
"They're trained for the end coordinates?" I said.
"Of course," said the wrangler, his pride obviously offended. As he put the mosey back in its cage, he continued. "We've made three other deliveries in that area earlier today. Each time, we fed them and established the destination for them. They're superb homing beasts, so that might have been enough. To make sure, though, we installed some of our proprietary tech—" he must have seen my eyes widen, for he quickly added "—nonmetal, of course—in every bird in the flock. They'll work, or you owe us nothing."
"And you'd refund my previous payments?" I said, addressing the question to the salesman.
"Of course."
"Excellent," I said. I counted the birds; nineteen were in the cage. I had expected more. "Why only nineteen?"
The wrangler's look ratcheted from offended to annoyed. "Because it felt right," he said, "for moseys, these woods, this time of year, this time of day. It felt right. It's what I do."
"My apologies," I said, meaning it. I'd asked out of reflex, not thought, and if I was going to question their expertise, I should have done the research in advance to be able to do so intelligently.
I took out my wallet, thumbed what I owed them, and showed it to the salesman.
After finishing the transfer, he said, "When do we launch?"
"When I call you," I said, "which will be in less than two hours. I want to be at the endpoint before you release them; no point in taking the risk of transportation issues messing up the schedule. Who from your end will be with me?"
"I will," the wrangler said. "Launching requires only opening the exterior cage access panel in the side of the truck, so he'll handle it. The moseys will take it from there. I assume you can take me and my equipment bags; yes?"
"Yes." I didn't see him as a threat, and having a hostage could prove useful should something go wrong. "Let's go." To the salesman I added, "I'll call when we're in position and the time is right."
The trip to the endpoint went smoothly, no traffic and, to my delight, no probing chatter from the wrangler. I invested some of the available transit time in counter-ground-surveillance side trips and detours, and neither I nor Lobo, who was tracking me from one of his low-orbit posts, could spot anyone following. Lobo couldn't get detailed enough data for me to be completely comfortable, but that was fine; too much comfort in a mission is a dangerous thing.
As the sun was fading and the day's light deepening in tone and multiplexing in color, playing a visual symphony transitioning from unnoticed backdrop to in-your-face beauty, I made the call. The wrangler anticipated less than half an hour before the birds would reach us and began setting out food, harnesses, four pop-up cages, and another test viewer. I scanned the treetops on the other side of the parking area for signs of the moseys as Lobo kept me posted on what little he could discern. What appeared to be the flock was moving from the launch site toward me, its speed was consistent with the plan, and so on.
A little over fifteen minutes later, Lobo relayed the most important news: The flock had crossed Chung's grounds, and all nineteen birds were still airborne and heading toward us. I relaxed a little.
The vibrant colors of the sunset had begun to morph into somber, inky tones that would soon give way to night. The day was cooling quickly as the sun set. The moseys flew into view. The wrangler misted the air with a spray bottle I assumed contained more pheromones and put bits of additional food in the now open cages. The moseys circled us for a few minutes, enjoying the freedom of the sky and reluctant to surrender it. The chemical net of the pheromones and the installed Strange Kitty tech drew them down and into the cages. The last few hovered for a little bit just out of reach, moving in slow spirals on wings working so slowly and perfectly you could almost believe they never really moved, but even those reluctant few finally settled into captivity.
The wrangler closed three of the cages and pulled one of the birds from the open fourth; it was as submissive as the one in the truck. A bit back from and below the control stud was a small flap of skin that covered a thumbnail-size recording module. He popped the module out of its socket and pointed to the module's connector. "Nonmetal conductor plug compatible with most milspec tech," he said. "They wear out faster than metal, so plug them in once, get what you need, and move the data to more stable media. Okay?" He handed me the module.
"Got it," I said, as I took the recording. I tested it in the viewer and watched the images at high speed, skipping forward quickly but seeing enough to confirm that it contained coverage of Chung's place. "Good enough," I said.
The wrangler nodded and went to work on the other birds. I counted nineteen birds, and he delivered nineteen modules.
The salesman arrived ten minutes later. Lobo said he couldn't spot any pursuers. I paid the balance I owed and left as the wrangler was gently carrying the birds one by one into the truck's holding pen. The salesman stood calmly by, smart enough to realize there was no point in trying to rush this man with his charges.
We'd spent a lot of time in orbits near Chung's, so while we were analyzing the recon data I had Lobo park us in a fairly high orbit about as far away from Chung as possible, in a nice spot over the largely unsettled mountainous region on the continent on the other side of Lankin from Bekin's Deal.
I had to admire the quality of Lobo's analysis systems. He perfectly and quickly assembled all the recordings from the nineteen birds into a composite video and a set of stills showing images in various combinations of wavelengths. Predictably, no one bird had captured all the views I wanted, and most of the time the birds weren't looking directly at the estate, but their flight pattern was wide enough and slow enough, as the Strange Kitty crew had said it would be, that the composite images completely covered the estate. Almost two dozen of the most important still images filled Lobo's wall in front of me as I walked back and forth in his main open area.
No matter how long I looked at them, they told me the same basic story: Chung's estate was a fortress, more heavily armed than I'd guessed. Air-defense weapons, both missile launchers and energy pulse, squatted in plain sight about twenty meters from each side of the house. Image-match searches of Lobo's weaponry database pegged them as serious medium- and high-altitude killers, useless for targets below two hundred meters but deadly for anything above that height. At least two dozen guards were visible across the estate, some obviously carrying the smart missiles that conventional wisdom had long held were the best choice for combating low-flying attack craft. Lobo might be able to weather a hit from one of those missiles, but he also might not; I didn't want to find out.
IR views showed hot sensors scattered across the estate, with a ring of what I had to assume were overlapping area monitors covering the perimeter of the cleared area.
As I'd observed before, three gates, all staffed with guards, led into and out of the property.
The size of the estate, the multiple entrances, and the many guards and sensors combined to doom any possibility of a stealth attack with my nanomachines. I've never tried controlling more than half a dozen nano-swarms, and the clouds unavoidably move fairly slowly, certainly at nothing like battlefield weapon speeds, so I had no chance of individually taking down the whole place. Even if I did, explaining that much disassembled matter in a large city like Bekin's Deal would be impossible. I couldn't afford the attention.
I saw no way to do this job entirely on my own without enduring way too much risk.
Involving Lobo didn't improve my chances a lot. Even assuming he came in hot, my options were severely limited and incredibly unattractive.
The only one I was sure would work was a total-destruction missile and pulse attack from an altitude of about a hundred meters on the edge of the forest outside the house. Lobo could fly in quickly enough that only the gate guards would have time to attack, and from the images we had of their weapons his armor could handle the minimal attack those guards could muster before he killed them. Firing everything he had in one long screaming attack, he could take out the whole area, scorch the turf and everything on it, but that did me no good; I needed Chung alive.
Worse, that much destruction and death would tornado into enough news locally that the FC would have to come after me. They might be able to write off Chung's loss as a standard corporate casualty, part of the risk of operating on still-developing worlds, but some of his guards were bound to be talent recruited locally, with local ties, and their deaths would provoke an outcry the FC couldn't ignore. The FC would then use the Saw to get me, of course, and I doubted I'd live to walk away from that fight.
No, total destruction wasn't a reasonable option.
Any more finely targeted approach would, of course, leave Lobo open to the handheld missiles. Losing Lobo was also not an acceptable choice.
We could perhaps boost the odds of success by first blanketing the area with milspec sensor disruptors and hoping Chung's sensor web was old tech—not likely, but possible—but the guards would then take Chung and leave. Clusters of armored vehicles stood ready to roll at the intersection of each of the three roads with the house. I had to assume that these guys would use standard protection protocols, so at the first sign of attack all three sets of vehicles would roar out of there at high speed, and I'd have to guess which one held Chung.
The more I stared at the images, the more I was convinced that I had to change the game's rules if I wanted to play at all.
"Lobo," I said, "I can't come up with a plan that doesn't involve massive casualties and that also guarantees we emerge alive and with Chung. Can you?"
"No," he said. "Quite the opposite. Logic dictates we can't guarantee success within the axioms you've set. Your rules don't allow us to destroy the entire place, so we're left with two of us to cover three well-spaced exit routes. This is obviously not possible."
"Yeah," I said, "it isn't. We can't do it."
I stretched out on a pilot's couch, the images on the wall blanking as I moved away from them. I had to stop avoiding the reality in front of me and accept the only real solution to the problem, or start running and hope Chung, Osterlad's team, and everyone else Chung contracted would eventually tire of searching for me. The latter was unacceptable. As little as I wanted to follow the only path I could discover that would get Chung, I had even less desire to spend all my days in heightened paranoia, even if the paranoia was justified.
"The answer," I said, "is just as obvious, but I hate it."
"What?" Lobo said.
"I have to get some help."
Chapter 15
The Saw recruiting center perched in the shadow of a skyscraper on the southern edge of Queen's Bar like a bird of prey waiting for rodents to crawl into the light. A plain rectangular building with clean, sharp lines displayed the Shosen Advanced Weapons Corporation name, icon—a gleaming serrated blade most of the way through cutting a rifle barrel in half—and motto, "The Price of Peace." The door stayed open around the clock. Inside, the honestly inquisitive visitor could always count on free drinks, food, and basic stimulants. The repeat moocher could equally reliably expect to hit the street face-first after fewer than three strides into the greeting room.
I counted half a dozen Saw troops on duty in the large open public area, their eyes constantly monitoring both their conversational targets and the room's access points. About that many more were stopping by on a leave day to grab a bite to eat or enough stimulants to keep them going as they fought to muster the stamina to spend the accumulated pay that was screaming for release from their wallets.
Standing to the side of the main information counter was an older man, a sergeant, whom the inattentive or the intoxicated could easily mistake for a friend's kindly uncle. A smile constantly played on his face, pleasant crinkles surrounded his eyes, and his hands moved with the unhurried ease of someone with not a care in the world. Bring even slightly trained vision to bear on him, however, and you'd note the master gunnery sergeant's stripes on his working blues, stripes that marked him as being as high a noncom as you'd find in the Saw; the complete lack of visible fat on a body half again as wide and as thick as the bodies of most men his height; and the fine scar lines on his neck and hands, lines he kept despite the ease with which Saw doctors could have removed them, lines he used every campaign to remind him how easily and how quickly the drain could come out on any mission. An active-fabric patch on his chest alternated his name, "Gustafson," and the Saw logo. He made me while I was still figuring out that he was the one I needed. By the time I reached him, he'd shifted one foot forward and spread and lowered his stance, all in subtle movements you could easily miss. In my peripheral vision I caught three of the duty troops moving nearer the exits; should I get by him, they'd make sure I never left the building.
All around us the recruiting chatter continued. The locals, who were there to find out if the merc life might be for them, or if it really would pay enough to get them out of whatever trouble they were in, remained happily oblivious of the storm gathering wind acro
ss the room from them.
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