Kantovan Vault (The Spiral Wars Book 3)

by Shepherd,Joel

  “That complicates things,” said Forrest, as Dale followed Tooganam and Milek into the cavernous space.

  “Not really,” said Jokono. “They’re armed, but I should be able to hack them. Just don’t be seen until I do.”

  Dale was not surprised. The first thing Jokono had done was interrogate Tooganam about the activities of this particular gang. Gamesh gangs were territorial — one thing about a free-city, the government owned very little land. Private entities owned nearly everything, and so there was limited neutral space on which to safely carry out criminal transactions. The gangs preferred their own, friendly territory. Going from what Tooganam told him, he’d quickly used data maps of Gamesh that he’d acquired before arrival to pinpoint the most likely sites for this transaction… and arrived at their current location, in advance, for reconnoiter. Dale had been skeptical, but sure enough, when the call from Tooganam’s contacts had come through, he’d asked to meet in exactly the location Jokono had said, and already prepared for.

  No sooner had they entered the warehouse than the big doors behind began to rumble shut, and the overhead lights flicked on, illuminating a vast space of stacked crates and loaders. Dale glanced within his hood, and saw one of the pointy-faced, crouched and reptilian kratik was closing the door. The other, and one of the peletai, remained unseen. And then all six of the gang were pulling weapons, and pointing them at Tooganam, Dale and Milek.

  “That is far enough,” the earpiece translated the lead shoab’s nasal whine. “Human. Remove your cloak.”

  “Geenu,” said Tooganam, rounding on him with measured indignation. “What are you doing? You know whom I speak for, and you don’t cross them if you want to live. Not even on Gamesh.”

  “Be quiet old fish,” the shoab snorted, as the six aliens encircled Dale’s three. Dale kept his glasses on him, tracking each movement, transmitting all vision and sound to his little network. This development wasn’t particularly surprising, but it was certainly focusing. “Your fleet aren’t the only tavalai on the lookout for rogue humans.” He gestured his gun at Dale. “You, you’re too broad for a parren. Off with the hood. Slowly.”

  Dale reached, and slowly pulled back the hood. “This is a very bad move for you,” he told the shoab named Geenu. “I will give you one chance to reconsider.”

  The shoab might have chuckled, a dry rasping sound. “You mean your friends outside? We have more drones, and the entire location is under our surveillance. Tell them to give up. They’re watching on those glasses, aren’t they? Give up, all of you. Give up now, and you won’t be harmed. Or else, you shall all die — it makes no difference to my superiors.”

  “Mine say the same about you,” Dale growled.

  One of the shoab slapped at his neck in alarm, jumping as though stung. He stared about, looking for the offending insect… then collapsed, legs folding with a crash. Geenu glanced in alarm, his pistol not wavering from Dale’s chest. Shouted something at his fallen comrade.

  “Wasn’t me,” said Dale. The kratik yelped, stamping a foot as some pain stabbed his ankle, then also collapsed. The big kuhsi snarled and backed up, weapon panning back and forth in panic. An explosion tore through nearby crates, and the lights went out.

  Dale ducked low and went straight for the peletai, figuring that sard nightvision was pretty awful and the same might be true for most insectoids. He collected a shell-hardened arm, broke its grip easily and smacked it in the head with an elbow. It dropped, and he did, and rolled as the kuhsi opened fire in panic, muzzle-flash lighting the dark as it blazed about.

  Dale came up by the door, augmented eyes adjusting fast and searching for scattered targets… but Geenu was already on the ground and shrieking, while his shoab companion fell even now with a stagger and thud to reveal Milek, indigo eyes ablaze and bloodied blade in his hand. The kuhsi shot at him, and Milek faded and ducked like a shadow, as Dale shifted aim…

  …and with a thud the kuhsi fell before Dale could fire, sprawled face-down on the floor. Behind him in the silent dark was Tooganam, hefting his big, heavy-ended cane, and only now did Dale see the weight of it, wielded in the tavalai’s big hands like a toy. Sometimes he forgot just how much stronger tavalai were than humans, and though old as he was, Tooganam surely retained his karasai augmentations.

  “Old fish,” Tooganam snorted, and hit the button to open the doors once more. The air was filled with drifting smoke from the explosion.

  “First Section, status please,” Dale requested, moving on the fallen aliens with the borrowed pistol ready. The peletai he’d struck was unmoving, its bulbous, multi-faceted eyes glazed. Hard-shelled sard hadn’t taken punches well either. Milek now moved on the wailing Geenu, and laid his blade at the shoab’s long throat. “Wait,” Dale told him.

  “Two down out here,” came Forrest’s voice. “One kratik, one bug. Both dead.”

  Dale knelt at Geenu’s head — above, to be clear of those powerful arms. “Who told you to get us?” he demanded. “State Department?”

  “Tavalai!” Geenu gasped. “Tavalai, I don’t ask who! There’s a bounty, any humans in Gamesh! They don’t say who!”

  “He knows,” Milek observed, ready to deliver that final thrust. The blade had been borrowed from Tooganam’s kitchen, and Dale had rarely seen one so well wielded. The indigo eyes were intense but calm. “He will tell others. We will be compromised.”

  Dale went to check on the two who had fallen to the invisible foe. He wasn’t sure exactly where to check on a kratik’s body for a pulse, but where ever it was, he was pretty sure this one’s reptilian heart wasn’t beating. Neither was the shoab who’d been bitten. Jokono had told him those little buzzing things weren’t set for lethal doses. Either he’d lied, or the little buzzing things were getting ideas of their own. Neither possibility was comforting.

  Tooganam was staring at him, and the two bitten victims. “Those two are dead? How?”

  “Ask me no questions,” Dale told him, “and I’ll tell you no lies.” And for the first time since Dale had met him, the old tavalai looked alarmed. And gazed around at the empty air, searching for invisible death.

  Milek was gazing at Dale, with wonder in his eyes. The Captain and Major had speculated that Aristan might have some general idea of what and who Phoenix had aboard. It would explain why he’d given Lisbeth that data chip on Stoya, and been unsurprised at how fast it had been translated. Did Milek know too? Or was he merely impressed at how efficiently the humans killed, by whatever method?

  “Jokono,” said Dale to the air, “the shoab said we’re all being watched, are we about to have company?”

  “No,” Jokono replied, “I let them think they were safe. We’re being watched, but the watchers are being fed a false feed, they won’t know something’s wrong until we’re long gone.” Jokono had been good with network wizardry before. Now, upgraded with some of Styx’s technology, he could perform true magic on alien systems.

  “The bug’s dead too,” said Reddy from the pelletai’s fallen body, and Dale blinked. He hadn’t seen Reddy emerge — he’d been hiding in the warehouse from the beginning, and had set off that explosion at the convenient time, a little thing that Petty Officer Kadi had made from common chemicals in Tooganam’s apartment. “I think you broke its neck.” Dale snorted, and advanced on the fallen kuhsi. “We killing that one too?”

  “No,” said Dale. He didn’t know Tif that well, but like all marines he’d gotten to know Skah, and the idea of killing defenceless kuhsi did not sit well with him. That made him uncomfortable, because he’d never cared much for the safety of any aliens who threatened humans before. Soft civvies with desk jobs and arts degrees might worry about that kind of thing, but Dale had long prided himself on not being that sort of useless man. Maybe he was getting soft.

  “Damn fool’s just a kid,” he explained, as much to himself as the others. “Panicked in the fight, and he’s a long way from home.” He knelt at the kuhsi’s side, and pulled a knife from the unconscious male�
�s belt. “Kuhsi out this far are all hired help, Tif told me how all the young males are raised with dreams of adventure, they leave home looking for trouble. Joker, get me a link to a Gharkhan symbol translator, will you?”

  Jokono did that, and a series of human and kuhsi letters flashed upon his glasses. “That’s a risk,” said Reddy. “He could give us away.”

  “I’ll take it.” Dale put the knife to the kuhsi’s jacket, and began carving ‘go home kid’ into the leather, in what he hoped was legible Gharkhan. “I think he’ll look at this when he wakes up, and reconsider his adventure.”

  He looked up as Forrest and Tong entered, each dragging a new body. “Just like the fucking brochure, isn’t it?” Tong panted. “Join the Fleet, travel the galaxy, meet interesting new people and kill them.”

  When Dale got up, Tooganam was rummaging through the big canvas bags the kuhsi and kratik had been carrying. They were indeed full of weapons. Tooganam handled several with accustomed ease, cracking breaches and checking magazines. He handed a short-muzzled assault rifle to Dale as he came to look.

  “Tavalai model,” he said. “Close defence, army issue, not karasai. Good weapon.” Milek also came to look. Geenu was no longer shrieking, nor making any sound at all. Dale didn’t ask how that had happened, and did not particularly want to know.

  Dale nodded, checking the rifle over. “Good,” he admitted. “This will do nicely.” He put the weapon to his shoulder, and found the balance acceptable, considering it was not made with humans in mind. The trigger was very wide and flat, to accommodate thick tavalai fingers.

  “Free of charge, too,” Reddy volunteered, taking one of his own. “That bomb worked great, Petty Officer blows shit up real good.”

  “Could have done it myself,” Kadi insisted, emerging now with his gearbag and utility belt, glasses up to peer at the alien bodies on the cold floor. “Shit. Joker, are local cops going to come looking for these guys?”

  “No doubt they’ll find them eventually,” Jokono reasoned. “But I’m not seeing any response right now. In my experience there are a lot of strange sounds coming from industrial yards at all times of night, and we’re a long way from anywhere residential.”

  “Gamesh police don’t bother with criminals,” Tooganam snorted, leaning on his heavy staff and eyeing the humans with their new weapons. “Criminals are a distraction for Gamesh police. Interfere with the important work of digging in ears for wax.”

  Several of the marines looked amused. “What about their armed wing?” Forrest asked, checking an unfamiliar pistol. “The robot units? Ready Response?”

  “Robots,” Tooganam said distastefully. Dale noticed he was watching Milek with particular caution. Milek was not handling any of the new weapons himself, seeming quite content with his blade. “How tough can they be?”

  Tooganam saw Dale looking at him, and indicated Milek’s way, surrepticiously, with his staff. Dale glanced, and nodded. So Tooganam found Milek’s skillset alarming also. Parren feudal society had a special place for assassins, operating quietly from the shadows. ‘Watch this guy’, the tavalai’s look said. Dale could only agree… and found himself reluctantly comforted by Tooganam’s dry good sense. He’d hated karasai, and killed quite a few of them in his time, but never once had that hatred precluded respect. Seeing Tooganam now, many of the things he’d seen karasai do in the war began to make a new kind of sense. Karasai were rarely dynamic or daring, but they were never stupid, and always knew the odds. That was exactly what he saw in Tooganam now. Predictable, yes… but also reliable. If a combat marine learned to value anything, it was the guy at his back who was always exactly where he needed to be, always ready, never flaking out. And seeing those praiseworthy qualities in his former enemy made him… uncomfortable.

  “So which gun’s mine?” Kadi asked the marines. The marines looked at each other, skeptically. “Oh come on! I have to get a gun, right?”

  Trace accompanied the nervous tavalai crewwoman around the H-Bulkhead main-rim corridor of Satamala to the small accommodation quarter, where a few surplus rooms could be converted into passenger quarters. The crewwoman indicated the correct door and left, as though anxious to be elsewhere. Trace hit the call button, and waited.

  While the humans had ridden from Ponnai dividing their time between accommodations on Satamala and their equipment in the zero-G lander, their parren ‘companion’ had ridden the entire journey here in seclusion. The tavalai crew said he had not once emerged from his quarters, and took food and drink delivered to the door. They did not know anything about him, save that he was Aristan’s chosen man, and was said to fulfill all mission requirements. Trace found it impressive that any being in search of inner-peace could ride out an entire journey from Ponnai, more than a hundred hours and counting, in a single, small room. Impressive, but misguidedly impractical. Inner peace was only useful when applied to real-world goals. Sitting in a small room half your life seemed hardly to qualify.

  The call button was not answered, and she opened the door on override — on any ship, and most particularly a warship, there was no facility to lock a door from the inside. Inside the room, on the bare steel floor, sat a black-cloaked parren, legs folded, hands on knees. Trace stepped inside and closed the door.

  “We’re forty hours from descent,” she told him. Or she assumed it was a him. With Aristan’s people, it usually was. “We need to start coordinating. I understand you’d rather meditate, given what you’ll be required to do, but you will have other functions too. It’s time to come and learn them.”

  “Yes Major,” said his translator speaker, seeming to capture some of his alien vocal calm. “I am ready.” Translator speakers sounded mostly alike, but his actual voice was very familiar.

  Trace frowned. And her eyes widened slightly, realising who it sounded like. Surely he hadn’t… “Who are you?” she demanded. He rose effortlessly to his feet, unfolding from the ground with a fall of robes, and pulled his hood back to rest the rim upon his brow. Trace was not so familiar with parren that she could confidently tell them apart just from the upper-half of the face, but this parren had made an impression. “Aristan?”

  Aristan made a small bow, hands folded within the sleeves of his robe. “I have a hostage of one of yours. Now, you have me.”

  Trace stared. It would not do to show shock or extreme surprise before a man who valued serenity above all, in character at least. But it was ridiculous. Aristan was the leader of twenty billion parren. He commanded a paramilitary army of devoted acolytes, any one of whom would give his life in an instant if commanded. And yet he came himself. “This is irregular,” she observed.

  “But necessary. This mission must succeed. You risk yourself for its success, and now I join you. Rank is of no consequence, and I would rather die than see it fail.”

  “Are you capable?”

  The big eyes narrowed slightly. Perhaps offended, Trace thought. Good. “The ways of the Tahrae, and thus of the Domesh, have been carved in stone for thirty thousand parren years. I was chosen by the previous leader, through the trials of ascension, and the confidence of my peers. This is no bureaucratic posting, Major, and no feudal succession. That you would ask the question reveals your ignorance of my people.”

  “I’ve been briefed on your background,” Trace replied. “I didn’t get this far by believing everything the briefings tell me. And I’ll decide for myself if you’re capable.”

  “Acceptable,” said Aristan, perhaps mollified. “As I will form my judgements of you. In protecting your commander’s sister, your capabilities so far demonstrate something less than advertised.”

  Trace had to resist the impulse to rage. She felt it, as all humans felt it. Denial was pointless. Instead, she recognised the challenge for what it was, and took a long breath to calm herself. In truth, she’d always enjoyed these challenges. To resist the wails and cries of the unthinking hind-brain, to stare them down until they slinked back into the shadows, had always been the most immense satisfa
ction. To not flinch, and not fear, when bullets were flying and people were dying, was perhaps the greatest test. To remain cordial and proper with a man she’d truly like to kill was nearly as great.

  “Your approval or appreciation is not something I value,” she told him. “Only your performance. Come with me, I have things to show you.”

  She informed her team by uplink on the way back to Midships, then pulled her way down to the lander holds with Aristan close behind. In the main hold where Command Squad had been calibrating their suits, a different training procedure was now underway. Trace diverted off the upper-hold walkway, and grabbed onto a ceiling cargo claw to steady herself. Aristan did the same, and stared down at the open space with astonishment.

  The hold’s steel secure-cables had been stretched across the space, where typically cargo nets would be deployed in zero-G between racks of haulage containers. With the holds empty, the cables made a maze that Privates Arime and Kumar were using to play a game with the kid. It was a version of tag, and all three were zooming about the space with bursts from compressed-gas thrusters, catching the cables to change direction rapidly mid-flight, and bouncing off the walls. The kid’s coordination was extraordinary, considering his struggles with children's toys just two days earlier. The thrusters he used were human hand-helds, a pair of which he was somehow manipulating with two arms and little claw-like hands while using others to swing about cables like an ape in the trees, and bound off the walls with great force.

  Aristan gasped some things that Trace’s translator did not catch. Then he turned a wide eyed stare at Trace. “The destined ones! They live!”

  “Drysines,” Trace confirmed. “Yes.”

  “But it… you… it would…” Aristan took a deep breath to recompose himself. Trace had never seen him so close to the edge of his control. She doubted anyone had. “A drone would never follow organic command. It must have higher instruction.”