Pusher was firing a lot of CST rounds in support of Silk and Frog. Danny saw Cobra peek out of the doorway of the building they all thought was the command center. A volley of bullets and one smaller laser hit where his head would have been had he not immediately ducked back in the door.
Danny spotted the two with slug throwers. They were well concealed behind a small sandbagged bunker. Danny thought that the bunker might contain ammo or explosives and considered blowing the bunker. He rejected that idea because he had no idea how big a boom it might make and what kind of shrapnel might find his teamies.
One BAWs head popped up to look at the door closely. Danny mentally prodded the other to do the same and got ready for two quick shots. Finally, the second slug shooter’s head popped up to join the first. Danny shot the second before he comprehended that his companion was dead. That left the laser shooter as the hardest person to find. Danny noticed the lizard slowly crawling on top of the rock he was behind and got an idea. He grabbed his soft hat out of his cargo pocked and put it on the lizard. Then he quickly rose and placed one shot near the bunker. He immediately dived to the side of his hide and saw the laser barrel move as a one-inch hole went through the lizard and his hat.
Danny was admiring the BAW’s responsive shot even as his much larger laser put two rounds on target. The first two took out the BAW’s barrel and the second hit the laser power pack. When the BAW cried out in pain and rolled into sight, Danny’s third round ended his agony.
The team ran out of targets and B-Ball called for another sweep of the buildings. The sweep turned up nothing but gave the teams the opportunity to plant enough explosives to level the buildings. Danny could not help but think that this was too easy when three coffin sized cases dropped from on high, popped at about 500 feet, and discharged five anti-gravity stingers each. The stinger looks like a metal basketball with a laser protruding three inches out of the surface and a two camera system, one in front under the laser and one in back. While it only flies at about sixty miles per hour, it could stop or turn on a dime. It could also drop or rise quickly.
The stinger made a hum that most could not hear until it was within five feet of its target. To a Shadow's enhanced hearing, it was a noisy critter even at ninety feet. Danny clicked his headset three times, waited one second, and then three times more, waited one second and twice more. The first two indicated imminent dangers and the last double click indicated the threat was above them. He was glad that both teams were in a building.
While signaling, he jumped behind a fat tree, sighted from the right and took out two stingers. Flipping to the left side of the tree, he took out two more and noticed that they were splitting into two groups. Three were heading at him and the remaining eight were heading to the encampment. Two of them exploded as Pusher weighed in.
Danny thought, to hell with radio silence at this point. "Pusher, pop one of the stingers headed at me."
Before he finished the sentence, the lead stinger exploded. The other two stopped to do a quick scan for Pusher.
"Bad move boys," said Danny as he fired twice from the bottom right of the tree he used for cover. One blew in pieces but the other only bobbled and started spitting laser shots at Danny. A stinger had a maximum of about eighty shots before needing a recharge. This one’s controller seemed willing to use most of those to cut down the tree to get a clear shot at Danny. After about the twelfth shot, it blew up.
"Thanks Pusher, let’s try to get some more before they start shooting at our teamies."
"I am with you Topa. Attention teams, three stingers have entered buildings two, four, and five. We are engaging the remaining three still outside."
Both Danny and Pusher shot at the same time and two stingers that were hovering over doorways went down. The remaining stinger shot into the open doorway of building three.
"Team, the last stinger is now in building three," said Danny.
All the buildings blew up at once. Debris pelted the area. Much of it reached the tree Danny still perched behind. Explosion driven sheet metal whooshed by on both sides of Danny’s head. The tree already suffered many stinger shots. One Frisbee sized piece of metal sliced through the tree like a steak knife through soft butter. Six inches above Dannys head, the severed tree leaned and fell. Danny jumped in time but had to pull his trapped WAL out from under the felled tree by the strap.
"All teamies, this is B-Ball. This concludes our exercise for today. I just called our employers for pickup. Their satellites show that the pirates’ last ship left after deploying their last three gifts. Hot Damn has one dead and no wounded. Crunch Bunch has one wounded and two to check in. Team leaders, carry on, out."
"Topa, this is Cobra. One of the stingers got Silk in both shoulders before I could take it down. I dragged him out but I need you and Pusher to make a litter out of some saplings and hustle it down here."
"I’m on topa’ it Cobra. I’ll make the litter and bring it down with Pusher on it. It looks like he caught some shrapnel from those exploding buildings. It looks bad but does not seem to be life threatening. Med packs had stopped the bleeding. He is conscious, out."
Danny stretched and shook his head at the memories. It was just one mission out of so many, but it was still a vivid memory.
Danny smiled at the snatches he remembered so clearly. Tomorrow he would check to see if any of the team retired and were available. B-Ball is a General now; Silk died on Chesney, and Frog was shot to hell on Dirge but might have made it. Cobra and Pusher could have retired.
Chapter 9 – Employee Number Two
Ramos was impressed. He had always met Kip in Taylorville’s inner city. Kip usually drove a worn carryall and wore work utility clothes like everybody else. Ramos felt
awkward in a posh office like this wearing clean but lower class clothing. He dismissed the awkward feelings to his prior Navy career and the related spit and polish. Still, the receptionist treated him like royalty and even asked him what he wanted to drink while she walked him over to the private elevator and holo-keyed it to open. There was only one destination floor.
Ninety-second floor, very impressive.
The door opened and a pleasant and obviously fit man who looked to be in his late thirties handed him his drink as he got off the elevator. The man introduced himself as Danny O’Malley. Danny led Ramos down a beautiful hallway and announced him at the corner office.
"Mr. Short is here, sir."
"Hap-nen ‘Mos?" The call came from inside the massive office. Ramos saw his friend Kip looking out one of the see-out-only window walls to the sunlit city below.
"Floatin’ free, Breeze. Say Kip, is all this yours? I mean is somebody going to come in here and get all hostile because we are in their office?"
"No fears my friend. A loan for the building and the investment of startup capital for the company was sort of a present from the Emperor for saving his life. The whole building is the headquarters of GalTech although others currently least most of it. GalTech is a new company with a new CEO named Kipling David. What are you drinking?"
"Bourbon, and it’s pretty good bourbon at that. A visitor has to be impressed at your service. Somehow, I doubt that the guy who handed me this drink is any kind of butler. In fact he comes about as close to being a butler as a tiger is to being a titmouse."
Kip touched his wrist-holo and smiled, "Danny, what kind of bourbon did you give my friend? Oh. Yeah, that’s pretty good stuff. But look in the liquor closet. I laid in some McKendric and some Buffalo Trace just for you and Ramos. They are both from Terra. I’ve tried the Buffalo Trace before, and I hear McKendric is great. Let’s give him four fat fingers of Buffalo and a Neo-Cuba Havana Cigar. I need to butter him up good before I put the hard sell on him. And Danny, if you haven’t tried the Buffalo Trace or the McKendric, you are in for a treat. Buffalo and a good cigar is what sensual gratification is all about this side of sex."
Kip turned smiling and was surprised to find that Ramos was staring at him in a sad and serio
us way.
"Mister Kipling David, you never need to sell me on anything –ever. You don’t even ask me. You just tell me what I can do for you and I will do it or get hurt trying. That also goes for a whole lot of the street beaters you have touched. You have to know that. What we owe you goes beyond money. You gave many of my people back their dignity, the respect of their families, and their freedom from a lot of bad things or people. Better than that, you showed me how to help them without it being just charity. Now that I see all that you have, I feel even stronger about all that. You did not have to come down to East Grand Avenue all those weekends and help us fix up those houses. Hell, you could have just sent a flunky with a check. I love you, breeze. What can I do for you?"
"Thanks, Ramos. Let’s sit down in one of these chairs. First thing you can do, is promise to never call me Mister again. You are my friend. I just recently came into all of this money. If you had been watching the holo projector instead of working your ass off, you would have caught my exploits with the Emperor. Don’t ask now. Just tell your holo to look me up on the GSHN (Galactic Shared Holo Net.) Associate my name with the Emperor and you will get a dozen recent scandal sheet versions of the story. The GSHN is lousy with them. Mos’, I did not have much money when we were cleaning up those houses. The situation may have changed, but I have not. I am also not trying to cash in any kind of marker, but you know that."
Danny O’Malley had been listening discreetly. He entered the room, walked up to the seating area. He handed Ramos and Kip a fresh drink and offered cigars. Kip smiled and gently shook his head.
"Danny, why don’t you pour yourself some of this, sit down, light up, and join us? You need to hear this too, Topa. And for the love of mayhem, would you please quit calling me Sir?"
Danny sat down to join Ramos Short and Kip. Kip was at his best talking to an audience that was relaxed and enjoying a drink with him. Any drink, even water, would do. Now that man understood and could avoid cancer, Kenicky-grown cigars were not a health risk. They were back in vogue. They made Kip even more animated for some unfathomable reason. Before they started, Kip told the room computer to set the security dampers to maximum and hold all communications except the Emperor, Ben or Eva.
"Gentlemen, we are on a mission. It is a secret mission in a secret army. I am, unfortunately, the General of this secret army and that knowledge is the most classified secret in the Teaman Empire. Both of you will have to get a mind-wipe implant as soon as we get done talking. It is painless, Mos’. Danny, yours just needs to be updated. Just before the implant, we store your personally keyed and scrambled mind map and entangled photon imprint pattern. I suggest you make a new one each time you visit here Mos. It takes ten minutes the first time and about thirty seconds from then on. That part is also totally painless. If someone does try to do a deep scan on you or break you mentally, a break-point stress frequency algorithm in the implant triggers the mind-wipe. The stored data can restore 98 to 99 percent of your pre-wipe memories along with all of your learned-muscle responses. The more you record, the less you lose, Mos."
Ramos stood up, hoisted his Bourbon in a silent salute, and smiled as the other two stood up and joined him in the toast and the smile. They sat again.
"Danny is an ex-Shadow like me. We have become close over the years. His team name is Topa. Mine is Duke."
Kip looked at Danny. "Danny, for different reasons and in a whole different struggle, Ramos and I have developed the same sort of bond. Ramos is a former Senior Chief Petty Officer in the Teaman Royal Marines. He led several successful boarding engagements against pirate ships before getting a knee wiped out from a laser cannon ricochet. They never did quite get the knee back to normal. He has spent the last five years helping his community. When you want to shed a tear of admiration sometime, I will tell you what I mean by "helping his community." I trust you both with my life. More importantly I trust you with the Emperor and the Empire. I trust your honesty, your integrity, your intelligence, and your ability. And I need all those things from both of you now."
Kip pulled heavily on his cigar and appreciated the unique Neo-Cuba tobacco’s aroma. His symbiont would not let him inhale the impurities directly into his lungs, even with all the genetic enhancements to make the tobacco safer. But his Syrt enjoyed the fragrant aroma with him.
"Our Empire is a dingy sailing in the midst of a fleet of war ships on a stormy sea. We could easily be swamped by accident or crushed on purpose. Presently, we are extremely vulnerable. With only ten habitable worlds in our Empire and less total population than the capital planets of some other Empires, we have to be smarter than our sister empires to survive and prosper."
"The solution for our small empire may be to serve as an effective damper for wars among all Empires. Unfortunately, what I am going to ask us all to do will probably put all of our families, our friends, and us at risk. From the moment you walked in the door, life as you knew it changed. Mos, I am going to try to apply what I developed in the Shadows related to small team tactics to create a really large corporation that spans all empires and serves the Teaman Empire in some unsuspected ways."
"We are going to treat various parts of the corporation like cells in a spy network. Some of the subsidiaries will be exactly as they appear. They will be real, profit making, competitive corporations. A few will be more than they appear. All will operate outside the Teaman Empire. Oh, these special subsidiaries will definitely be profitable companies. Operating units will be a maximum of one hundred fifty people. When they overgrow that mark, they do their amoeba thing and break into two or more smaller units. I will explain all that later but the short version is we want close working relationships and nobody can feel close to a group that becomes too large.
“Again, each operation has to make a profit. However, they will have a couple of ulterior purposes.
“The first will be to get as big and profitable as possible and use hundreds of local suppliers in the Empire in which the Subsidiary operates. It will also use some vendors in other non-Teaman Empires. We want to be a company that ties together diverse Empires and their Alliances. We want other governments to feel like they cannot economically afford to fight with the Teaman Empire. If we can establish a solid and legal flow of money and jobs they enjoy, no one will want to let their government risk interrupting it."
"The second is to be an admired and loved member of the community and model corporate citizens. We want to win the respect, friendship and maybe even the hearts of our employees wherever we operate. We want to make it a major public relations problem for any government to take a shot at our company."
"The third purpose will be to gather information needed to insure the safety of the empire. It is this third purpose that could bring down the whole house of cards. It is that purpose and the needed covert operations that the two of you will spend most of your time setting up. You will have to help me figure out how to put a cow in the middle of a heard of buffalo and not have it noticed. Then to make it more interesting, we have to figure out how to milk it without that activity being noticed."
"We want the governments of the empires where we operate, not just the communities, to realize that hurting the Teaman Empire will economically harm their economy as well. We want to know what they are up to at all times. We are going to grow like no organization has ever grown before. Because of that, we do not want that growth to become obvious or newsworthy. I want to have overt and straight forward operations on every planet in the Sleet Alliance and on the capital and industrial planets in the other Alliances within the next fifteen years."
"You two now have a Zeta Clearance. You are two of only twelve of us in the empire that have a full Zeta Clearance. You are about to be impressed when I tell you who are our partners are in this adventure."
"Let me guess," said Danny pointing a cigar that had quit burning, "all this happened at the meeting at GalTrust Bank, right?"
"Right, and before I tell you the rest of the story, I have to give our team he
re a major assignment. We need one more fully Zeta Cleared person. We need a recruiter. The best damned recruiter we can find. Our lives and this plan depend on it. And it is up to us to find and qualify this recruiter."
"We are going to have to put this new recruiter and Mos through a quick Shadow training program. The good news Mos’ is that your knee will never be a problem again and you will be in top physical shape until you are well past one hundred and twenty years old. The bad news is that Danny and I get to work out with you. Prepare to be bruised. Oh yeah, I forgot. As of now, you two are both vice presidents of GalTech and you are both about to be wealthy. It is necessary, not just a perk. Believe me you will earn it. I just hope you live long enough to enjoy it."
This time Danny stood up and hoisted his glass. The other two joined him in a toast. They stood and smoked and drank in silence and camaraderie for several minutes before getting back to serious conversations.
Kip was happy. The vision he formulated since the GalTrust meeting was coming together. Moreover, that vision could bind good men such as these to a cause greater even than the Teaman Empire. Look out Galaxy, GalTech is coming.
Kip said to CLYX, "If this all works, Will Jasper will become the greatest single humanitarian in the Galaxy and few will ever know it."
To Kip’s surprise, CLYX responded, "He sees it as his legacy and is very happy about it. He is sure that you, Eva, the Prime Minister, and Ben will make it work even if he is killed."
After the mind mapping, Danny shared his recent conversations with neighborhood merchants with Ramos along with an incredible pot of coffee and fruit wedges.
"You know Danny, I can’t relate to being financially well off. I don’t even spend all the money from my pension. I give most of it to those who really need it. But I could really get used to the coffee around here."
GalTech and the Shadow Warriors: Growth of a Star Empire Page 11