by Isaac Hooke
Mei lowered her hand. The baby coughed and resumed breathing. The child seemed fine. Thankfully.
Utterly relieved, Lana went to the bed in the dim light, and sat down. She wanted to scold Mei, but what did she know about babies? Maybe there was no chance the child would have died.
Lana saw a shadow standing in the corner of the room, near the curtain. The shadow’s eyes glowed yellow.
Lana started.
Shui had seen the shadow too. “Lana, we have to get out of here!” Her friend ran toward the door.
The robot made no aggressive movements.
“Shui, wait!” Lana said. “Wait. It’s just Dong. It seems to be operating normally.” She turned toward the robot: “You scared me, Dong.” “Dong” was a common name people gave to the loaner robots found in hotel rooms.
The baby started crying.
“Calm your baby!” Shui said.
Mei tried to silence the child, to no effect.
Was the baby’s sixth sense trying to tell them something?
Lana stared at the dark form of the robot.
She realized something.
The room had an outdoor balcony, hidden behind the curtain.
“Dong?” Lana said. “Have you stayed in the room all this time? Or have you gone out on the balcony?”
Dong emerged from the shadows.
Glowing blue droplets surrounded its chest piece.
CHAPTER ONE
Rade
You could tell how a man died by the smell.
A man who died of a gut wound smelled the worst, followed a close second by a man who’d suffered a grenade wound. Burn deaths smelled like roast pig. Cranial wounds smelled strangely of fish (someone told me that it was the eyes). Sometimes lung wounds smelled of tobacco. Heart wounds smelled like blood: metallic, coppery.
The man on the ground below me had died of a head wound, and the fishy smell of him filled my nostrils.
I was dressed like the dead man, wearing a privateer’s black, strength-enhancing jumpsuit, with an open faceplate. Holographic lighting units were arrayed along the bottom rim of my helmet and projected an image over my face so I looked like an SK (Sino-Korean) thug.
I was on Pontus, a colony world in Gliese 581. The system itself was officially owned by the Franco-Italians, but the SKs had purchased and developed Pontus primarily because of its proximity to Tiàoyuè De Kǒng Gate, whose Slipstream led to Tau Ceti and the heart of SK space. (Slipstreams were the only way starships could “jump” the vast gaps between systems, and required the use of Gates to enter safely. These Gates led to and from fixed locations, so you couldn’t simply jump anywhere you wanted.) Tau Ceti was where the UC (United Countries) had built the secret Gate to Geronimo, eight thousand lightyears away. A Gate that was now dismantled.
Pontus. A small pocket of SK space in a system that was otherwise neutral. The planet was basically enemy territory, and off limits to the UC. If I were captured here, let’s just say the United Countries would be in a world of trouble. Actually no, that’s not true. They’d merely disavow my actions and call me a rogue asset. So I’d be the one in a world of trouble, at least until my platoon brothers came to the rescue.
And they would.
That was what most of my missions were like. Direct action: getting up close and dirty with the enemy. Ah, the wonderful life of a MOTH (MObile Tactical Human).
The SK terraformers had done a bang-up job here on Pontus. The air contained twenty percent oxygen, pressing down at a comfortable 1.07 standard atmospheres, while temperatures planetwide averaged a balmy 30 to 35 degrees Celsius (86 to 95 Fahrenheit). The surface of the planet was roughly ninety percent water, and sandy atolls populated with palm trees made up the remaining ten percent, giving the entire world a tropical island air.
It was almost paradise.
Tell that to the dead man in the flora below me.
I lay chest down on the edge of an elaborate wall of thick stone that surrounded a sprawling palatial compound. The wall’s copestone proved wide enough to comfortably hold a prostrate sniper such as myself. A slight berm along the inner rim of the wall formed a sort of parapet, offering a convenient hide.
My platoon brother Lui was our inside man in the palace. He posed as an SK manservant, placed two weeks before. He’d had some minor cheek and nose reconstruction done to fool any facial scans (moles in Big Navy had leaked sensitive data to the SKs, and our classified files had ended up in the hands of privateers on more than one occasion).
Lui was the reason we had full blueprints of the palace. This morning he’d also deactivated the perimeter sensors, which were cleverly embedded into the many statues of the Paramount Leader that ornamented the wall I lay on at this moment. Trace, Ghost, and I had circled the perimeter and sniped all the cameras and other sensors anyway, just to be safe. Since Lui had replaced the camera outputs with vid feeds, the security algorithm shouldn’t notice the difference anyway.
We’d also taken down all the outer sentry robots, leaving them in shot-up piles at various points outside the wall. Snakeoil’s Node-jammer had prevented the robots from sharing telemetry data, so we didn’t even have to eliminate them in unison.
The dead privateer below me, just inside the wall? One of the few human sentries inside the compound. He’d decided to take a piss at the wrong time and Trace had been forced to shoot him.
There were five more sentries—three robot, two human—patrolling the compound grounds within, but they weren’t my concern just now. I wouldn’t be able to harm them anyway, not with this weapon—I’d switched out my sniper rifle for a tranquilizer gun hours ago.
I was gazing through the scope of the tranq even now, aiming at the palace. Specifically, through a certain window, at a certain door. Lui had left the window open at our request. It wouldn’t do for bulletproof glass to get in the way of a tranquilizer dart.
Because of the dictates of the mission, I couldn’t look away from that door, not for a moment. I did keep my other eye open for situational awareness purposes, but other than that, all I’d known for the past three hours was the feel of the tranq gun in my arms, the sight of the closed door in my scope, and the fishy scent of the dead man below. The palace itself was just an unfocused blur in the background, this brown lump of a pagoda with dragon statues guarding the entrance (though they looked more like giant worms than dragons to me).
The palace, and the island it was built on, was owned by the privateer financier Lóng Xiōng, or Serpent Heart. He was responsible for financing some of the most infamous privateer crews out there, including the crew of Mao Sing Ming, the murderous “Malefactor of the East,” who my leading petty officer, Facehopper, had personally taken down. Lóng Xiōng procured the ships and weapons, and the privateers gave him half their profits.
From the looks of it, he’d become a very rich man. Blood money. It’ll buy you the world. But what it won’t buy you is a modicum of decency. Nor protection from those who would see your kind forcibly removed from the world.
Today, our financier was having some sort of pool party. Scantily clad women and female Artificials lounged on the pool deck. The Artificials were obviously Skin Musicians—gorgeous, sensual robots too perfect to be actual women. They looked like they were straight out of a porn vid: long hair, flawless skin, curves to die for, shaved in all the right places. Their every movement oozed sensuality and coquettishness, and I knew they were well versed in man-pleasing.
The financier himself wasn’t present at the party. Not yet, anyway. He was inside the palace, behind the door in my sights, meeting with a privateer captain whose shuttle had arrived this morning. With Lui’s help, we’d positively ID’d the second man as Hóng Húxū, or Redbeard. He was almost as notorious as Mao Sing Ming had been. With his arrival, the operation had been greenlighted.
And here we were.
“I’m getting a ch
eeseburger when we get back,” Ghost transmitted subvocally, via his Implant. The albino was staring into the scope of a tranquilizer gun beside me. His job was to take out the privateer captain, while I was to handle the financier. Once we got them, we’d switch back to our Mark 12 sniper rifles.
Earlier, Snakeoil had carefully measured out the tranquilizing dosage required for the two targets. The financier was heavier, so my dart had more of the tranquilizing agent meted out. Even so, if the dosage was even slightly off, the stuff could cause death in minutes via heart-lung stoppage. Which was why we all carried the antidote.
I resisted the urge to look at Ghost. I had to keep my eye on the closed door. “How can you think about food with that smell?” I sent back. “I’ve almost retched three times.”
“What smell?” Ghost returned.
“The smell coming from the dead guy.”
“Ah,” the albino sent. “Hardly even noticed it. All I smell is barbecued meat.”
“Bro, there’s no barbecue down there.”
“When you’ve been staring into your scope for three hours straight and your stomach starts to growl with enough force to give away your position, all you can think about, and all you can smell, is grilled cheeseburger. It’s my greatest dream right now.”
“Ghost, if your greatest dream is to eat barbecued cheeseburger, you’ve got some self-improvement to do.”
Eight months ago I would have never dreamed of talking to Ghost that way. As a friend, I mean. I was the new guy. The guy who had to prove himself.
But my platoon brothers respected me now. I’d proven myself in battle. I’d covered their asses, taken bullets for them, patched them up while hell rained down on us. When the fecal matter hit the fan, I was the one who kept my wits and found a way out of the situation. More often than not, that involved strategies and tactics no one else had thought of, such as turning off said fan and letting the fecal matter drip right back at whoever had thrown it.
Still, I’ve had my doubts about my abilities. I lost two very important people in the past, and a part of me still thought it was my fault. If any more of my brothers died because of something I did, I’d never forgive myself.
“I can has cheezburger?” Trace said subvocally, mocking Ghost from his own position on the wall ten meters to my left. He was equipped with a sniper rifle, not a tranquilizer gun. Trace was East Indian, Bengali to be exact. He’d shot me in the arm during training as part of my Combat Resiliency Qualification. I didn’t hold it against him—he was just doing his job.
“Har har,” Ghost sent back.
“You know, it’s too bad we can’t just terminate both targets,” Trace said. “Why the UC wants to capture scumbags like these alive is beyond me.”
I kept my eye on the door. I didn’t have to look at Trace to know he was aiming his rifle into the compound at this very moment, ready to snipe with lethal accuracy. I knew I could trust him with my life.
I heard Tahoe shift behind me. He was watching our backs, heavy gun in hand. “You know the political situation,” Tahoe said via his Implant. “There’s been way too much backlash lately. We take them alive or we don’t take them at all.”
Tahoe Eaglehide was Navajo, with a wife and two children back on Earth. A good friend. The best. I’d known him from the beginning. He, Alejandro, and I had enlisted together. Officially, I was supposed to call him by his callsign, “Cyclone,” but it never really stuck. Not for me.
“Hey, I’m just saying, things would go a lot more smoothly if we could just drop the two of them,” Trace said. “Send in a drone, and we’re done. Or have Lui do the deed from the inside, and make it look like an accident. But noo, we have to take them alive.”
The last three drone assassinations didn’t go over too well with the media. The political fallout was intense, with the SKs threatening to declare all-out war if another “innocent” SK citizen was executed by a drone launched by “UC cowards.”
“Moe just passed checkpoint Wheat Lager,” Trace said, this time over the platoon-level comm. “Should be coming up on your two o’clock, Facehopper.”
Moe was one of the three remaining privateer robots patrolling the inner grounds. All three were military-grade humanoids, armed with assaults. Basically equivalent to the UC’s Centurion-style combat robots. Trace had nicknamed them after characters from his favorite Net comics, while the two human privateers on sentry duty got the names of the Golden Age pirates Blackbeard and Kidd.
“Confirmed,” Facehopper said over the comm. His four-man fire team was positioned on the opposite side of the courtyard. “Moe in sight, checkpoint Pale Malt. Blackbeard is up next.”
The seconds ticked by.
Facehopper’s voice came over the comm again. “Rage, Ghost: How are you blokes holding up?”
“Mighty fine, sir,” Ghost said, chuckling slightly. He was just as tense as I was.
“Hang in there.”
“Yes, sir,” Ghost said. “You know how much we love hanging.”
“I do indeed. Balls in and tits up.”
Twenty minutes later, the door I had been watching so carefully through my scope finally opened.
When you acted as a sniper, waiting for your target, the moment of action always arrived unexpectedly. And if you blinked, or you sneezed, you missed it. Which is why you always had your finger on the trigger, and your eyes on the target. But you had to be careful, because sometimes—actually most of the time—things didn’t quite go according to plan.
I almost pulled the trigger of the tranq gun.
Thankfully, I didn’t.
Because it wasn’t the target: a woman had walked out, and she didn’t match any of the profiles.
“Uh, who’s that?” Ghost sent over the comm.
“The financier’s girlfriend,” Facehopper sent, obviously viewing our vid feed. “Look sharp, people.”
No one else emerged from the room. The woman sauntered down the hall, toward the window Lui had left open for us, and once she was there she rested her elbows on the windowsill. She leaned out dreamily, looked at the pool, and waved at one of the girls, who waved back. After a moment the woman retreated from the window.
But then she turned around, and cocked her head as if considering something.
Then she closed the window.
“Are you guys seeing this?” Ghost sent. The disbelief was obvious in his subvocalization.
Bulletproof glass now resided between me and the doorway.
Tranquilizer darts couldn’t penetrate bulletproof glass.
The woman took the stairs and vanished from view.
“Trace, we’re going to need you to poke some holes in the window when the targets emerge,” I said. Which could be any second now, given that the door in my sights remained wide open. “Transmitting visual data.” I sent him a snapshot of my current point of view, so he’d know where to make the hole. Ghost sent him a snapshot, too.
Modern bulletproof glass didn’t shatter when armor-piercing rounds hit. All you could do was poke holes in it, if you had the right rounds. Some armor piercers wouldn’t penetrate on the first try, and merely caused a messy crater until you fired two or three times. MOTH sniper rounds always penetrated on impact of course, passing through and continuing on the same trajectory, striking any objects beyond with roughly two-thirds the original energy, which was more than enough to kill. So he’d have to make sure the target wasn’t in the line of sight when he fired.
Still, since the glass didn’t shatter, subsequent shots at different targets were made harder by the artifacts left behind on the surface. Which was why it was important that Trace made his holes in just the right place.
“Received data,” Trace responded. “Two new assholes coming right up.”
“Try not to kill the targets in the process,” I said.
“Mmm,” Trace sent. “I’m going to h
ave to reposition. Widen my angle.”
“Do it. We don’t know when—” I broke off as the financier emerged from the room and ambled into my sights. He was all smiles, as was the privateer captain at his side. “Targets in sight. Repeat, targets in sight. Trace, we need those holes!”
“On it.”
The financier and the privateer captain were walking toward the staircase that led down from the hall. I was going to lose my target in seconds . . .
“Trace . . .” I said.
The Bengali fired his silent rounds, and three fresh holes appeared in the glass, the bullets striking the wall just inside.
I aimed through one of the bullet holes—
The financier was starting to react to the perforated glass—
I took the shot.
Direct hit.
Beside me, I heard the muffled sound of Ghost’s tranquilizer gun going off.
Both targets toppled to the floor.
The tranquilizer darts were equipped with medical sensors. I glanced at the heartbeat monitors assigned to the targets on my HUD (Heads-Up Display). Their hearts were beating, albeit slowly.
So far, so good.
“Targets tranquilized and stable!” I said over the comm, though everyone else would see the vitals on their HUDs by now.
I rested the tranquilizer gun on the copestone beside me and brought the strap of my sniper rifle down from my shoulder.
“Moe and Blackbeard are in my sights,” Trace sent. “Taking them down.”
It was only necessary to capture the two main targets alive. Anyone or anything else with a weapon was considered an enemy combatant and engageable by the ROE (Rules of Engagement).
Trace let off two quick shots with his sniper rifle. Like our weapons, his muzzle was silenced, and no one poolside yet noticed.
“Targets down,” Trace sent.
While the sound of a silenced rifle might be unnoticeable, two sentries toppling to the ground and bleeding out, on the other hand, was very noticeable.
Sure enough, I heard the high-pitched scream of a woman, and all hell broke loose.