Hell to Pay: A Mercenary Warfare Adventure

by Zen DiPietro

  “I’d like to assure you that I know exactly what I’m doing,” Cabot answered. “But the truth is, I’m making this up as I go along.”

  Omar nodded. “All right, then. Let’s have some fun.”

  AFTER A FEW HASTY calls on the voicecom, Cabot settled on a plan that involved his old friend Doony Kirk. Doony would transfer a load of emergency supplies to Chesring, while implying the cargo was something terribly illegal.

  Even if Chesring took a look at the goods, he wouldn’t know that they weren’t stolen or anything other than what they seemed.

  Chesring would deliver the goods to Doony’s delivery point, then check in with Cabot. Assuming Chesring did as directed, Doony would benefit by not having to deliver the goods himself, giving him time to go on another run instead. And if it went wrong, Cabot had guaranteed Doony’s losses.

  Either way, Doony made out fine.

  Cabot, on the other hand, might end up regretting everything.

  If only Riki Chesring had turned out to be dumb and gullible.

  WHEN NAGALI RETURNED, she assured Cabot that she’d made friends with Chesring and that she thought he could deliver as promised.

  “Fine,” Cabot said. “You can be his contact person, since he likes you so much.”

  He gave her the details of the meet with Doony and the drop, and stayed away from the rest. Chesring would understand having orders come from someone working for the boss of an operation. And if Nagali really did have a rapport with the guy, then all the better.

  As soon as the arrangement was made, they departed. Again, that was for the sake of appearances, since Chesring would be watching.

  Cabot felt a little weird about it all, but identified nothing he could have done differently. It was just one of those situations he had to roll with.

  The return to Dragonfire was uneventful. Cabot only wished he had a better idea of whether his trip had been successful or not. When he reported in to Fallon, he wondered if she’d be displeased with his lack of quantifiable results, but she’d only told him to keep her informed.

  He didn’t want to fail her. Thus far, he hadn’t, and he didn’t want to start doing so with the likes of Riki Chesring.

  Days passed and Cabot fell right back into the normal routine of life on Dragonfire as if he hadn’t been gone for a month.

  His life was taking on a strange duality that was made even stranger by the fact that it didn’t feel uncomfortable or unpleasant.

  Was it a sign that he was maturing, accepting life as it was and enjoying it while he could? Or did it mean that he was becoming more like Fallon?

  And should that idea bother him more than it did?

  All he knew was that he felt oddly okay with all the strange changes converging around him.

  To top it all off, he kept half-expecting Ditnya to deliver an epic “Gotcha!” at any moment.

  He lived in exciting times.

  A week after returning to Dragonfire, Doony contacted him to tell him the transfer to Chesring had occurred without issue.

  Eight days after that, Doony said that the cargo had arrived intact and on time.

  Cabot felt like he’d gotten one step closer to his goal. He’d directed Chesring to contact him when the deal was done, but didn’t hear from him until two days afterward.

  He hadn’t specified that the contact had to be immediately after, though, so maybe that was his own fault.

  A contract was a contract, and only as viable as its clauses.

  “My contact is pleased,” Cabot told Chesring from the comfort of his quarters. “Are you ready to move on to something bigger?”

  “Always,” Chesring said. “But I have to handle something else first. I’ll contact you in a month.”

  “A month? That’s not what I had in mind.” Cabot scowled at him.

  “I go where the work takes me. Right now, I have another contract. I’ll check in afterward.” Chesring’s image blinked out, making Cabot’s voicecom go dark.

  He sat, thinking. He’d intended to pull Chesring further in to get him to reveal the identity of his other employer.

  Instead, he had the man’s current coordinates and the fact that he was embarking on a new job right at that moment.

  And Cabot happened to know someone who could do a lot with that kind of information.

  He reactivated his voicecom, this time opening a channel to Fallon.

  BACK TO THE routine for Cabot Layne, regular guy/trader/sometimes spy trader. He felt increasingly ambivalent toward the oddness of his new existence.

  He was pretty sure that Dr. Barlow, the station’s mental health specialist, would call that, “acceptance.”

  Cabot was good with that, too.

  He was also good with the fact that he’d heard nothing else from Fallon about slaving, Ditnya Caine, or disappearing outposts.

  No news was good news. In the time between the last news bulletin and the next, Cabot was making the most of each day.

  Every few evenings, he visited the pub with Omar. Sometimes Nagali came along and sometimes she didn’t. The practice became a regular thing, and Omar’s big personality made it balloon into a public thing.

  Regulars on the station came to know that twice a week, on specified days, it would be meet night at the pub.

  The group varied night to night and continued to grow, but all of his friends joined in, including Fallon and her team. Nagali and Omar somehow managed to fit in among them, and even more surprising was the evening Captain Nevitt stopped by, had a drink, and shared some stories of her days at the academy.

  The captain could tell a good story—who would have thought?

  After one of these get-togethers, Cabot walked back to his quarters, tired but happy. Funny that in the midst of so much uncertainty, the members of the community seemed to be growing closer and fonder of one another.

  Or maybe all that was actually caused by the uncertainty.

  He was getting ready for bed when he heard the chime for his door.

  Nagali stood there, smiling at him.

  “Making an early night of it?” While Cabot was one of the earliest to leave the pub gatherings, Nagali tended to be one of the last.

  “Sort of. You know how sometimes the timing for something is right, and you know that if you don’t act you’ll regret it?”

  “Sure.” He usually got that feeling when he saw an item on the LTS market he knew he could turn a profit on.

  “Well, I feel like tonight’s my night, so I’m asking you out on a date.”

  He squinted at her. “I was kind of expecting a business proposal.”

  “No business,” she insisted. “Not tonight. I’m talking about something personal. A date.”

  “What kind of date?” he hedged.

  She threw her arms up. “How many kinds of dates are there? A date date. Two people who are interested in each other go out. Food is often featured. Some kind of entertainment is common. You know. A date.”

  “Hm.” He rubbed his thumb over his lips. “This is all so sudden.”

  She heaved out a dramatic sigh.

  “Technically speaking, is it possible to date someone you were once married to? Or is there some other word? I feel like the Sarkavians must have a special word for that.”

  She rolled her eyes. “If you aren’t going to take this seriously, then never mind. I must have been wrong about this being the night. Or maybe I’m just stupid for thinking you’d take me seriously.”

  She turned to leave, but he grabbed the loose cape or scarf or whatever that was hanging off the back of her outfit. He pulled her back, then turned her to face him.

  “A date,” he said, now entirely serious. “You, me, no shenanigans. I accept.”

  Her eyes widened with shock. She looked so surprised that he leaned forward and gave her a peck of a kiss, right on her ruby red lips.

  “Dinner, tomorrow night, an hour after I close up shop. I’ll pick you up at your quarters. Don’t be late.”

  A speech
less Nagali was truly a wonder to behold, and he stood there, taking it in for a full thirty seconds. Then he stepped back into his quarters.

  “See you then.”

  The doors closed.

  CABOT HAD BEGUN to understand the slow slide of equilibrium punctuated by a sudden abnormal spike.

  When Fallon and Raptor showed up at his shop as he closed up the next evening, he wasn’t surprised.

  “Can we talk?” she asked.

  He looked at them, then stepped back with a bow. “Of course. Come in.”

  He locked up, then joined him at the table near the center of the store. “Can I get you anything to drink? I could go grab a pot of tea from the Tea Leaf.”

  “No, thank you.” Of the members of Fallon’s team, Raptor had the most easygoing and cheerful personality. He looked serious, though, which concerned Cabot.

  “We’ve hit a snag in the joint venture with Ditnya,” he said.

  Cabot wished he’d gotten some tea for himself. Bad news always seemed a little easier to take with a warm cup between his hands. “What happened?”

  Fallon, sitting next to Raptor, said, “Things were going well. Both sides were cooperating and we were making progress. Your Chesring guy led us to a small syndicate that confirmed that a couple people within One Universe were serving a central role in the slave trade. Once we knew where to look, getting all the proof was easy.”

  Cabot had doubts about how “easy” it would be to break through a major organization’s security and ransack a database that no doubt had been carefully protected. Easy for Avian unit, maybe. Not for someone like him. “That’s major progress. What went wrong?”

  Fallon and Raptor exchanged a look. “It is major progress,” she agreed. “Except that while we were working in tandem with Ditnya to decide how to excise the bad people while leaving the good people unscathed, she sent in her own team, which blasted the shit out of the entire organization. Instead of taking out a handful of bad people, she murdered two hundred, most of whom were mostly, if not entirely, innocent.”

  That did not bode well.

  “Ditnya doesn’t do partial guilt. Either a person’s guilty or not, in her eyes,” he said slowly.

  “That’s exactly what she said,” Raptor said. “She told us that if we let anyone who had any amount of guilt go, we could expect the slave trade to grow right back. That, instead, she’d ripped out the infection and cauterized the wound. She considers the matter closed.”

  “We can’t accept the killing of innocent people, even if they aren’t PAC citizens.” Fallon flattened her hand against the table. “It’s not just the injustice of it. Those of us who work under Krazinski know that a short-term sacrifice can have much further-reaching gains. Our problem is compounded by our complicity with Caine. Our actions, combined with our association with her, will turn planets who have long been trade allies or are otherwise on good terms with the PAC away from us. We can’t afford that with all that’s going on with Barony.”

  “It’s a public relations problem, then,” Cabot surmised.

  “You could say that,” Raptor agreed. “But the scope of it is huge. The PAC can’t afford to lose non-member allies. If our association with Caine becomes known in the wake of what she’s publicly acknowledged doing to One Universe, we absolutely will lose a number of allies.”

  Cabot thought it through, and they were right. There was no ducking that. “That means the question becomes—who knows of your partnership with her, and how do you keep them quiet?”

  Fallon nodded, looking grim. “That’s it, exactly. The good thing is that the only person who can prove it is Ditnya herself.”

  “Which means that Ditnya now holds something huge over the PAC.” Cabot’s mind raced, trying to understand all the ramifications. “Do you think she put the PAC in this position on purpose?”

  “She’s Ditnya Caine. Of course that’s what we’re thinking,” Raptor said. “We do believe she had genuine interest in shutting down the slave trade, and outside of dismantling some sites, that’s pretty much a given. But there’s no reason she wouldn’t have worked with us, used our resources, and also parlayed that position into putting her boot in our face. For her, that would be a win-win.”

  “Unless she has no reason to want Barony to prevail,” Cabot said.

  “Why would she care?” Fallon didn’t sound skeptical, but curious.

  “Anarchy’s bad for business. I’ve heard her say it herself.” Cabot thought it through, trying to consider all the angles.

  “You’ve gone quiet,” Raptor prompted.

  Only then did Cabot realize he’d spent several minutes sitting, saying nothing. “Sorry. I’m just thinking it through. I don’t think she wants to see the PAC fall. There’s more advantage to her if it doesn’t. But if it did, she’d survive it. She’ll play this situation in accordance with whatever will best suit her.”

  “If she doesn’t want to see Barony rule the PAC zone,” Fallon said slowly, thinking aloud, “we should be able to work out a deal with her.”

  “If you give her something she wants, she won’t have any reason to reveal her brief partnership with the PAC.”

  “Yes, but more than that,” Raptor said. “If she doesn’t want to see Barony rule, maybe she’d join us in the fight. If it’s to her advantage.”

  Cabot felt some unspoken words crowding in around the ones that Raptor and Fallon were voicing aloud.

  He felt them in the air as the two waited for him to speak.

  “I get the feeling this conversation isn’t just about filling me in. This is need-to-know information. So why do you think I need to know? This stuff is your territory, not mine.”

  Fallon said, “If we were to bring Caine into our fight against Barony, we’d need someone to have eyes on her. Someone she can’t buy off.”

  As much as he’d embraced going with the flow and accepting things as they were, that was just too far for Cabot. “I’m a trader, not a war general.”

  “None of us are war generals,” Fallon countered. “We’re just stepping into the roles that have no one else to fill them.”

  He shook his head. “You’ve got the wrong guy this time. I’m sorry.”

  Fallon looked to Raptor, and something passed between them.

  “Okay,” Fallon agreed, surprising Cabot. “Thank you for all the help you’ve given us.”

  She stood.

  “That’s it?” Cabot looked up at her in amazement. “I expected more of a hard sell.”

  She shook her head. “We’re not doing business. Something like this has to be taken on without doubt. Everyone has a line, and we’ve crossed yours.”

  He didn’t know what else to say except for, “I’m sorry. I’m just not qualified.”

  “No one’s qualified to wage interstellar war,” Raptor said as he followed Fallon out. “We’re all just bracing to do our best.”

  Fallon paused at the door. “It would have been nice to have you with us, but I understand. Truly.”

  He sat at the table long after they’d left. He wasn’t the person to do something like that. He didn’t have the training or the stomach for war. How did they expect him to police Ditnya Caine? They were grasping at whatever they could, and he didn’t blame them for it, but he knew what he could do and what he couldn’t do, and this was a hard no.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t want to help. He couldn’t.

  But why did Fallon’s understanding make him feel terrible?

  A KNOCK on the door of the shop roused him from his unhappy reverie. With a jolt, he realized how late it must be, and that he’d stood Nagali up.

  Scrap. When things started going wrong, they really piled on.

  When the doors parted, Nagali stood there, wearing a red dress that showed a lot of collarbone, impractical but pretty shoes, and a worried expression.

  “What’s happened?” she asked.

  He pushed away his turmoil. She didn’t need to know about it and he’d promised her a nice evening.
“I’m so sorry. I came across a discrepancy in one of my business accounts, and was trying to track it down.”

  “Did you find it?”

  “A charge was erroneously reversed. I need to do more research on the goods that changed hands so I can file a report.”

  “How vexing,” she frowned. “At least you found the problem.”

  “Yes.” He put on a smile. “Are you ready for dinner?”

  “Absolutely. I’m starving. I made a reservation at the steak place. I hope that’s okay.”

  “Since you invited me, you must be paying, so it sounds great to me.”

  She chuckled. “Yes, I’ll treat you to anything you like. That’s something I’d never say to Omar. He’d bankrupt me.”

  Cabot smiled, genuinely this time, and the weight of his refusal to help Fallon eased.

  Things would work out for the best. He wasn’t the person they needed.

  8

  Cabot gave the date his best effort, but his spirit was a little bruised. He tried to be pleasant, witty, and engage in conversation, but he could tell that Nagali knew something was wrong.

  For some reason, she didn’t pry. She continued on as if nothing was amiss.

  That, more than anything else, made him start to think maybe she really had changed. Nagali always pried. She always pointed out anything out of character. But oddly, in this case, she was giving him space.

  It made him want to talk to her about it, but he didn’t have the right to. All that Barony war and Ditnya alliance stuff belonged to PAC intelligence, not him.

  He’d patrol his own zone, as the saying went.

  As they left the restaurant, she put her hand on his arm. “Why don’t we call it a night? I can tell you have some things on your mind.”

  “I’m sorry about that,” he said. “I’m just distracted. I’ll make it up to you another night. How about I walk you to your quarters?”

  She smiled. “I like the part about your making it up. I’ll make some fun plans for that. But we all have off days, don’t we?”