One Jump Ahead-ARC

by Mark L. Van Name

  No one, to the best of my knowledge, knew how old I really was, and I worked hard to keep it that way.

  "What's your role when a conflict does involve one of the two?" I asked.

  His eyes widened slightly, but he didn't press me. Yet. "Except from the standard small stuff the Lankin police might handle—theft, assault on individuals in the streets, that sort of thing—we have no role unless one of the companies requests our help. All local Kelco and Xychek staff maintain dual FC/corporate citizenship, so corporate security handles anything serious, as long as it doesn't endanger civilians." He poured a glass of a light green drink and offered it to me. "Local tea? Top?"

  Gustafson waved off the offer, and I shook my head. "No, thank you," I said. "One more question, and then I'll start talking."

  "Good," Earl said. He sipped the tea he'd offered me.

  "To the degree that you can discuss or speculate about anything that involves your employer without violating your contract, how would you characterize the FC's relationship with these two corporations?"

  "That's an easy one. I don't have to provide any private information. Layla Vaccaro, the ranking FC bureaucrat here and the Lankin rep to the FC council, is on public record with her discontent over the FC's role as the weak sister of the three. Lankin joined the FC after being developed initially by prospectors from the two companies, and the FC has been playing catch-up ever since. She hates the position it's left her in." He drank a bit more tea. "And now, as you said, it's your turn."

  "Xychek's Jose Chung," I said, and paused until he nodded in recognition at the name, "has offered a bounty to anyone who captures or kills me."

  Nothing in Earl's expression changed, but I could feel the force of his increased concentration. "Why?"

  I hesitated, despite having known the conversation would reach this point. Answering him would lead to more questions. Eventually, those questions would take us to Johns and to Osterlad, and I didn't want to have to explain their deaths. Not answering would annoy him, but if I kept my focus on the matters that could affect him and the Saw, he might allow the omission. I had to try. "Nothing I did that motivated the bounty was illegal," I said, choosing my words carefully, "or deserving of that treatment, so Chung's motivation doesn't matter." Earl glanced briefly at Gustafson, so I hurried on before Gustafson could take the hint and ask the follow-up question Earl wanted him to pose. "What does matter is that Chung is buying weapons illegally from Osterlad, weapons I'm sure Xychek is not revealing in your inspections."

  Gustafson sat up straighter and leaned forward. Earl didn't move, but tension lines in his face showed the effort the control was costing him.

  "If this is true, the implications are significant," Earl said, "for all three major organizations on Lankin. I take it you can prove this?" Earl said, definitely a question, not a statement, despite the phrasing.

  "Not yet," I said, "but my source is well connected, and I have no reason to doubt it."

  "As I'm sure you'll understand," Earl said, a little frustration and anger audible in his tone, "no individual's word, not even the word of someone I've trusted in the past—" He paused to make sure I caught the tense, then continued, "—is enough justification for me to take the kind of action that proof of such a violation of a major treaty would motivate."

  "I understand," I said, "which is the second reason I need to talk to Chung. After I finish my conversation with him, I have every confidence that he'll both fix my problem and give you all the information you need to act on yours."

  "So talk to him," Earl said. "You don't need any action from us to do that."

  "You're right; I don't. What I need is your inaction, and your advice." Earl raised an eyebrow in question. "As you'd expect, Chung isn't interested in having a friendly chat with me. To arrange a talk that I can be sure to live through, I'll need to . . . retrieve him, and I want to make sure that doing so won't bring the Saw down on me."

  Earl nodded, clearly getting it. I waited while he considered; this was the moment when he'd decide.

  After almost a minute, time during which he stared up and to his right, seeing nothing but his own thoughts, he focused his attention on me and spoke. "Not acting costs us nothing, as does advice. Some information, however, unavoidably carries almost viral risk when it moves from one person to another. Are you clear that if you tell anyone about any aspect of our involvement, even this conversation, we'll not only deny it, we'll also come for you?"

  "Of course."

  He nodded. "Okay. We've been covertly monitoring Osterlad Corp. as much as we could manage for some time now, because we have other reasons to believe it's been moving arms to a corporation, though I confess we thought the buyer was Kelco. No matter; either would pose a problem for us. Osterlad's death—" He paused, giving me time to react. I didn't, so he moved on. "—has prompted his company to push all its illegal business even further underground than normal, so now we're getting even less data than before. Obtaining firsthand information from Chung could be the break we needed. You'd have to be willing to bring him and the information not only to me, but to Vaccaro; as FC head here, she's my liaison, and she'd have to get them to support any Saw action in advance. She'd also demand to talk to Chung herself."

  "Of course," I said. "Once I have the information, which I can't get until I have Chung."

  "So we have a deal?"

  "Yes."

  "Good." He leaned forward, the hard part over and the fun part, the planning, now under way. "You asked for inaction and advice," he said. "I can do better than inaction. You can't be planning to go after Chung at Xychek's HQ, because you're not that stupid; you know doing so would cause more collateral damage than we could tolerate. Taking him in transit leaves too many chances that he could duck into any of the many civilian areas along his common travel routes, which would bring you back to the problem of collateral damage. So, you have to be targeting him at his home. I choose when we spring our inspections on the corporations, and how many of their troops we summon. Were you and Top here to start chatting every now and again, I wouldn't be surprised if on the evening you paid Chung a visit you encountered only a skeleton protection force at his house, with the rest of the force off-site at a major Saw inspection of Xychek's official weapons and troops."

  Despite Earl's confidence, from what I'd seen of Chung's protection squad, they'd never cut below the number of personnel necessary to run exit groups through all three paths out of Chung's property. Still, any decrease in the force at the estate would be a great help. "Top and I get along great," I said, "don't we, Top?"

  "You bet," he said, smiling.

  "Then that's settled," Earl said. "The advice you wanted?"

  "I can't do the job alone," I said. I didn't see any win from mentioning Lobo; if Earl didn't know how intelligent Lobo was, I had a small potential future edge should I one day need it. "So I want to hire some help. I don't know any of the right type of contractors in this area. I could find some, of course, but I wouldn't know more about them than I could find on my own. I assume you have a lot more knowledge in this area and might be able to recommend someone to me."

  Earl thought for a bit, and I could almost picture the images and facts dancing across his inner vision. Gustafson appeared equally thoughtful. Finally, Earl looked at Gustafson, leaned back, and both men laughed lightly.

  "I believe Top and I are thinking of the same person," he said.

  "I'm sure of it," Gustafson said. "For what you want, and given that we can't recommend anyone in the Saw, she's far and away the best option in this entire sector of space."

  "Yeah," Earl said, still chuckling, "she possesses strong mission-planning skills, has walked point on recon teams, worked as a long-range sniper, and done more than her share of damage in close-quarters fighting, with and without weapons. She even heads her own team, in case you need multiple people."

  "So what's so funny?" I said.

  "Because I'm involved," Earl said, "she might not want the work, and
because of who she is, you might not want to give it to her." He stared intently at me. "You still don't get it?" When I didn't respond, he said, "You have been out a long time."

  I nodded. "Yeah, it's been years."

  "Alissa Lim," he said.

  Her name evoked so many memories I had trouble focusing. She was one of the best, most competent soldiers I'd ever served with, everything in the field that Earl had said and more—but she was also one of the most violent people I'd ridden with, and one of the most potentially dangerous to her team when something tripped one of her several inner triggers. Our last assignment together had been rough. . . . I pushed back the memory, needing to maintain my focus on what was in front of me. "She's here," I said, "here but no longer with the Saw?"

  "No," Earl said. "She's not here, and she left the Saw a few years ago. She's close, though, a single jump away, on an ancient piece of rock named Velna."

  Velna wasn't a place I'd planned or wanted to visit. During our time on Lankin, I'd made it a point to learn at least the basics about each planet on the other end of all of this world's jump gates. As best I could tell, Velna was notable for two characteristics: It possessed the most seismically stable landmasses of any known planet, and in all other ways it was the least appealing world humanity has ever colonized. The first trait prompted both Kelco and Xychek to build all their most vibration-sensitive fabs there, so its populated continents abounded with nano-level manufacturing tech facilities that made everything from washing machines to optical and nanotube processor systems. Those fabs provided enough jobs that Velna developed a sizable population base, most of it long-term transient, because the second trait meant that no one wanted to stay there any longer than necessary to make the money they needed to go where they really wanted to be.

  The sheer unattractiveness of the place also made it the number-one candidate for every new prison contract in the region; its prisoner population, most of which was hardcore and in deep storage, outnumbered its civilian populace. Lankin anticorporate groups protested that the corporations treated their Velna workers like slaves and dumped the waste from their fabs directly into the ecosystem, saving the huge clean-operation costs they'd incur on any other world. To hear those groups tell it, the FC didn't inspect the fabs or even lodge the feeblest of protests about them, because its prisons were the only places you could go that were worse than the corporate fabs. Nobody rocked the boat, and Velna kept absorbing the trash.

  "What's Lim doing there?" I said.

  "She left the Saw to start her own security company. Running a company is a lot different than working the field, so it was rough going for her. The Saw won't do prison work outside of active combat detention, so we did her a little behind-the-scenes favor—one you'd do well not to mention—and helped her company win the contract for the largest FC prison there. It's not great work, but it's work."

  "Lim is leading a prison team?" I said, having trouble believing it. "Amazing." Prison duty anywhere is dirty, nasty work that in my experience mangles everyone who stays with it. If Earl was as accurate as I expected, the prison work on Velna would be the worst of the worst. No one as willing to kill as Lim could afford the damage that kind of work would do to her soul. I wondered what she'd become, then recalled the way Gustafson had looked at Earl and Earl's comments about her. "What's her problem with you?"

  "For some years before she quit," he said, "we'd been involved. She wanted me to go with her. That wasn't an option. She wasn't happy with me when she left."

  Gustafson let out a breath loudly enough that it emerged as almost a snort, earning him a sharp look from Earl.

  I was amazed that any woman who could get close enough to Earl to form a lasting relationship wouldn't know that his work always came first, but I was also generally amazed by women, having been unable to sustain an intimate relationship with one for more than a few weeks at a time.

  "Any other recommendations?" I said.

  "I can come up with more," Earl said, "but no one you'll know. Everyone you served with is either still in the Saw or no longer doing this sort of work." He paused and considered me for a moment. "You're the only one I know who's stayed anywhere near the same type of action." He shook his head. "Regardless, we both know Lim is the best you're going to find if you want someone whose flaws you know."

  I nodded in agreement. He was right. Her skill set matched my needs perfectly. The bounty on my head wasn't going to vanish of its own accord, and I couldn't make it go away without help. On the other hand, when I'd last worked with Lim, she was given to almost psychotic rage and possessed an unsettling ability to kill with absolutely no remorse. Since that time, Earl had broken her heart, and she'd taken up prison work. Lovely.

  My other option was to hire an unknown. I realized I had no excuse for hesitating: I had too much at stake to risk using someone I didn't know. Lim was a killing machine, but at least she'd be a killing machine on my team.

  "Where can I find her?" I said.

  "She's in Dishwa, a pit of a city on Velna," Earl said. He stood, and we shook hands. "Top'll get you the details. I'm sure you two will be talking."

  Chapter 17

  I instructed the cab to return to Queen's Bar via a long route with four switchbacks. I planned to spend another half an hour there in countersurveillance maneuvers on the off chance Chung's men had spotted me or Earl had Saw soldiers on my trail. As the vehicle skimmed over the highway, I sat back and pondered the logistics of approaching Lim. I could probably afford her fee straight up, but I was getting tired of pouring so much of my own money into simply staying alive. Besides, the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that discovering a corporate illegal arms deal and delivering it to the planetary government ought to be worth significant money. I didn't see the opening yet, but I resolved to examine the issue further over the next few days; money was lurking somewhere in all this.

  Lim, though, presented the more pressing and immediate issue, so I returned my focus to her. Try as I might to think only about how best to recruit her, I couldn't avoid recalling the last time we saw action together. Willing down the hardcore sensory memories that cried for release in my head, I focused on the facts, hoping that by reviewing them I could leach some of the pain from the experience.

  We'd been humping on Nana's Curse, a planet that spun around a young star three jumps from anyplace I'd ever heard of. A world of startling weather, with microclimates so extreme it dragged even the best forecasting technology out of its computational depth, the planet had been a place no large organization ever wanted to colonize. Over time, however, the extreme weather attracted dozens of the various nature-worshipping cults that had started on Earth and spread outward along with the rest of humanity. Despite their varying belief systems, these cults had managed to find enough common ground to live in peace in settlements scattered across the planet's largest continent. They'd even created a planetary government and joined the Frontier Coalition in the vain hope that formal representation might keep away the major corporations.

  Then the Purifiers, the most militant and heavily armed of the many militant and well-armed one-god cults, discovered the world and its hordes of evil heathens, and all hell broke loose. I've never been a fan of dirt worshippers, but they were always either peaceful or so inept at violence as to not pose any problems for anyone other than themselves. The Purifiers, however, hated any religion other than their own. They pursued an ancient, simple approach to any place they found weak enough to attack: convert those who'll accept the truth, and kill the rest.

  The FC had contracted with the Saw to force the Purifiers off Nana's Curse, and in the process we'd spent months crawling from town to town, taking back those locations the Purifiers had overrun, burying the thousands of dead who'd possessed too much belief or too little sense to convert, and ferreting out the slash-and-burn squads that were purifying the smaller villages.