by Rick Partlow
They were all out in the open, with the nearest backup a hundred klicks away, and no more of an advance recon than a couple low fly-bys. McKay had requested an earlier visit, with his team going first in a separate vehicle and checking the whole area out, but O’Keefe had found the idea insulting.
“These people are personal friends of mine, Lieutenant,” she had told him coldly. “I will find any such treatment of them a personal insult.” And that had been that. Jason had been in too good of a mood at the time to push the argument any further, not that it would have done any good.
He glanced at Shannon, saw her returning the look behind her round-lensed sunglasses, and had to smile. He’d worried, just before they’d drifted off to sleep early this morning, that things would be awkward for them now, and that he’d just sacrificed any chance at a good working relationship for a couple hours of—admittedly intense—pleasure. But in the morning, she’d managed to handle it just right, playing it loosely, but not lightly. He’d left his bedroom with the feeling that, although what had happened was not serious enough to affect their military association, nor was it something he could dismiss as a meaningless one-night stand. In fact, rather than worried, he actually felt damn good about the whole thing.
He forced himself to concentrate on the business at hand as from the largest of the three structures emerged a Latino couple whom McKay recognized from Val’s speech as Jorge and Carmella Mendoza. They looked much the same as they had in the holo from two years before, perhaps even a bit healthier and surely better dressed. But something about them struck Jason as not right, before they ever spoke a word. They seemed nervous and fitful as they stepped away from the door, like cornered animals. And he had an odd feeling that the thing responsible was the man that walked out that door just behind them.
He was a short, broad-shouldered man, dressed in work clothes and a broad-brimmed hat that shadowed a hard, craggy face and deep-set dark eyes. His beard and salt-and-pepper hair were cut short and neat, and his whole bearing suggested discipline and control. With a start, McKay realized that the man reminded him of the Snake. Now that was a scary thought.
“Jorge, Carmella!” Val ran toward them, sweeping them both into a warm embrace. “You both look wonderful! It’s so good to see you!”
“Gracias, senorita Valerie,” Jorge said. “It is good to see you as well.” His eyes flashed at McKay and the others.
“Where are the children?” Val asked, looking around for them. “Are they well?”
“Si, Valerie,” Carmella answered. “They are visiting neighbors. We hoped to get them back in time to see you, but…”
“It’s all right,” Val assured her, smiling through her disappointment. “Jorge, Carmella,” she introduced, “this is Glen Mulrooney, my fiancé.”
“Senor Mulrooney.” Jorge Mendoza shook the man’s hand. He glanced back at the stranger hesitantly, and Jason could have sworn that the man nodded at Jorge, as if giving him permission to tell the others his name. “This is Senor Carlos Gomez,” he said. “A leader in our community. He wished to meet you.”
“It is a pleasure, Ms. O’Keefe,” Gomez said in unaccented English. “I have much appreciated the work you have done for our people.”
“Thank you, Mr. Gomez,” she acknowledged. “I try to do what little I can.”
“Please, senorita,” Jorge said, “would you come inside and sit down with us?”
“Ms. O’Keefe,” McKay interrupted, “if you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to have my people at least sweep the house with the scanners first.”
“Lieutenant McKay,” she snapped, spinning on him with a glare, “how many times do I have to tell you that the Mendozas are my friends?”
“Senorita,” Jorge spoke up. “It’s all right. We will not mind.”
“Well…” She didn’t like it, but if it would keep McKay quiet… “All right,” she acquiesced. “But make it quick.”
“Vinnie, Jock,” Jason ordered, “go inside and run a quick scan—sonic and metal detection.”
The two sergeants slung their shoulder weapons, pulled compact hand scanners out of the cargo pockets of their fatigue pants and headed into the farmhouse. The hand-held devices weren’t perfect, but they could pick up a human heartbeat and detect metallic weapons; it didn’t seem too likely that anyone out here would be able to get their hands on the polymer weapons used by military forces and police; but, at any rate, the chemscan that would have detected them would have required a much longer process with heavier equipment, which was more than O’Keefe was willing to allow.
While the two NCO’s scanned the buildings, Crossman started a slow patrol of the perimeter—without having to be told, McKay was glad to see—and the others waited uncomfortably in the intense heat. Of the O’Keefe party, only Valerie was dressed for the weather: she wore khaki shorts and a tan, long-sleeved shirt, plus a brimmed hat, similar garb to Shannon’s, although filled out in different places. Glen was in a short sleeved pullover shirt and slacks, which was going to leave him with a good sunburn on his pale arms, McKay thought; and the RHN cameraman was dressed likewise, while the governor’s representative, a short, slimy little man named Eberhard, wore a completely inappropriate business suit. That alone spoke volumes about how often the governor’s people got out into the Wastes, McKay mused. Tanaka, not surprisingly, was still in his standard black slacks and long-sleeved shirt, but the glare of Tau Ceti seemed to affect him as much as McKay’s temper had the night before; the only concession he made to it was a pair of mirrored sunglasses.
“How can anyone grow a damned thing in this God-awful heat?” Glen wondered, tugging at his collar.
“Genetically-engineered seed,” Valerie explained to him, surprising Jason with her knowledge. “It can grow with very little water, and its cycle’s adjusted to match the planet’s seasons. They provided each colonist an allotment of it, but it’s very expensive.”
“It is hard to afford to buy extra seed,” Jorge agreed. “We have enough to eat, now, but it was hard for a long time.”
“Sir.” Vinnie emerged from one of the outbuildings with Jock on his heels. “It’s clean, as far as these toys can tell.”
“Are you satisfied now?” Valerie asked McKay, not without a bit of disdain.
“Satisfied’s such a big word,” McKay muttered, stepping past her through the open door of the farmhouse. Tugging his sunglasses off and hanging them from his T-shirt, Jason looked around him.
The place was fairly roomy, which made its lack of furnishings even more glaring. The dining room table was built into the wall, but the rest of the furniture was either cheap, throwaway plastic or hand-built from local scrapwood. Cloth curtains partitioned the inside of the geodesic dome into the dining/living room area, a kitchen, and three small bedrooms; the only built-in internal doors were the ones to the storage closets. It was neatly kept, Jason admitted, though the ventilation wasn’t much to speak of and the unmistakable stench of human body odor filled the place.
Turning back to the door, Jason saw the Mendozas, Guzman, O’Keefe, Tanaka and the RHN reporter file in behind him. Shannon, as they had planned, would stay outside and keep a link open through the flitter’s radio to Kennedy, just in case. Why the governor’s rep had chosen to stay outside, McKay didn’t know—maybe the man didn’t consider smalltalk with the peasants to be part of his duties. Or maybe it was the smell that kept him out.
“Please, sit down,” Carmella invited them, waving at the dining room table: actually, a buildfoam booth that extended out from the wall, just beneath the window.
Jason waited for the Mendozas, Val and Glen to take a seat before he situated himself across from Guzman—he wanted to keep an eye on the man. Tanaka and the RHN cameraman both remained standing, the reporter setting up at a good angle for filming and the bodyguard taking a vantage point against the wall to the side of the table.
“So, Jorge, Carmella,” Val asked them, “have you managed to dig a well yet?”
Jorge shook
his head. “Not as yet. The ground is too hard and the water too deep. We need to rent digging equipment, but we cannot afford enough seed to grow enough crops to make the money to rent it.”
“The multicorps have plenty of equipment for their mines and farms,” Gomez spoke up with a note of anger in his voice—yet McKay somehow got the impression that the words were rehearsed. “But we exiles are kept down, digging in the dirt with our hands while they lounge in their plantation houses, with their slaves catering to them, like medieval barons. How ironic that the Republic government, with its roots in the United States, has turned its back on the revolutionary ideals which founded that nation.” He glared at McKay. “Do you know that with the funds spent on shipping emigrants to the star colonies, a city the size of one of your Western megalopolises could have been built to house more than twice the number of indigents who have been sent to the colonies? But that would mean admitting that the problem is poverty and not ideology—and it wouldn’t give the multicorporations a ready and helpless work force.”
“You seem like a very well educated man, Mr. Gomez,” McKay observed. “How the hell did you end up here?” That earned him a nasty look from Valerie, but he was becoming inured to those by now.
“Nineteenth in my graduating class at UCLA, Mr. McKay” he replied, with something in the way of self-satisfaction in his voice smoothly replacing the righteous indignation as if it had never been. “Or is it Captain McKay?”
“Lieutenant,” Jason informed him, trying not to show the trepidation that was beginning to gnaw at his guts.
“I had everything,” Gomez went on, “that modern society could provide: a professorship at the University of the Americas, a real house away from the conditioned boxes of the cities, a family. But I was willing to risk it all to become politically active in my homeland of Panama, to try to bring justice to those less fortunate than I.”
“This particular brand of ‘political’ activity,” Jason surmised, surreptitiously slipping his right hand inside his open overshirt and letting it drift toward the butt of his shoulder-holstered pistol, “wouldn’t happen to be the Panamanian Liberation Front, would it, Mr. Gomez?”
“For the sake of argument, Lieutenant,” Gomez said with a wave of his hand, his smile much too confident for Jason’s comfort, “what would you say if I told you you were right? And what would you say if I told you”—his dark eyes glinted with a madness McKay had seen for one brief moment in the face of a terrorist on Inferno before the man had gone down to a hail of bullets—“that there was five kilos of plastic explosives taped to my chest, and that this”—he produced, with the flourish of a stage magician, a small plastic box about the size of a comlink—“was the trigger?”
McKay’s hand froze centimeters from his handgun, his eyes focussing so tightly on that plastic device in Gomez’s hand that they could have been hooked to the RHN reporter’s camera zoom control. With his free hand, Gomez pulled up the hem of his shirt, revealing a large, grey lump of putty taped across the lower part of his torso. Beside him, Jason could hear Valerie’s sharp intake of breath and feel the vibrations as Glen began to shake uncontrollably. The RHN reporter lowered his camera and began slowly backing toward the door.
“It is an interesting feeling controlling one’s own destiny, Lieutenant McKay,” Gomez told him calmly.
Around them, as if on cue, three men emerged from hiding places in the bedrooms and kitchen, their hands filled with compact submachineguns. McKay didn’t turn his head but he knew the answer to his own questions before they were even fully formed. The gunmen had been able to conceal themselves from Vinnie and Jock’s sensors because they had somehow been able to acquire, probably through judicious bribes to cargo ship crews, heartbeat-masking stealthsuits and all-polymer weapons that no doubt fired caseless cartridges with non-metallic bullets. In other words, this had to have been planned very well in advance.
The gunmen began to advance on them, one approaching the cameraman while the other two headed for the table. Jason didn’t try to think, not on a conscious level. He’d been too well trained in Colonel Mellanby’s crash course for that. He knew everything he needed to know on a gut level. He had to act now, before the opposition got organized, or there would be no satisfactory end to this. And he had to watch for the opportunity that always presented itself, if only you knew where to look.
When things began to happen, they happened fast. The spark that lit the match was the eruption of a barrage of gunfire outside. Gomez and his people had to be expecting it, but even as Val and the others twisted around in surprise, so did the gunmen allow their attention to be drawn away for just a split-second.
And that was more than Nathan Tanaka needed. One second the Japanese bodyguard was leaning harmlessly against the wall, a still-life of utter motionlessness, as the nearest of the gunmen approached him; the next eyeblink, Tanaka was a blur that defied definition, and the unfortunate Salvadoran who’d been luckless enough to be less than a meter from him was lying on the ground with his neck at an impossible angle.
Gomez jerked around at the crack of the gunman’s neck breaking, but all of Jason McKay’s attention—all of his being—was focussed on the man in front of him. Faster than he thought he could ever possibly move, and yet so slowly it made his brain scream at him, Jason ripped his service auto from its horizontally-canted shoulder holster and blew off the top half of Carlos Gomez’s forehead.
Later, he wouldn’t recall seeing the pistol’s pop-up electronic sight extend, or noticing the targeting dot through its clear LCD image. He wouldn’t even remember actually pulling the trigger. To him, it seemed as if the gun had jumped into his hand of its own free will. But the ear-shattering explosion of the high-power 10mm being fired in the closed building jolted him back into synch with the passage of time.
Not rising from his seat, unable to hear Valerie O’Keefe’s scream as the blood and bits of brain splashed over her and Glen, Jason twisted around and fired a double-tap into the chest of the second gunman. The fellow was tall, with long hair that whipped wildly around as he jerked from the impact of the ceramic slugs, then fell like a puppet with his strings cut. McKay glanced around frantically for the remaining one of the three Central Americans, but saw that Tanaka had already taken care of Gomez’s other compatriot, who was writhing on the floor trying hard to breathe, but having a hard go of it with his trachea ripped out.
The roar of his own handgun still ringing in his ears, Jason couldn’t be sure if the gunfire outside had stopped or not, but he wasn’t about to leave his command to fight that battle alone… or leave Shannon alone. The fierceness of the latter conviction surprised him. He turned back to the ruin that had once been Carlos Guzman and pried the bomb trigger loose from the corpse’s hand, stuffing it into his pocket before he rose from his seat. Pushing past the RHN reporter, leaving him to stare in abject horror at the corpses around him, Jason scooped up one of the terrorist’s submachineguns—they’d never had the chance to fire them—and paused at the doorway to fix a look at Tanaka.
“Keep them in here,” he told the bodyguard, seeing him nod before he turned back to the door.
Crouching beside the entrance, he shoved his pistol in his belt, grasped the handle in his left hand while his right held the appropriated weapon. He yanked the door open and threw himself out of it. Landing on his shoulder, he rolled back into a crouch, brought the subgun to the ready…
And found he’d arrived at the party too late. A half-dozen bodies littered the ground between the farmhouse and the flitter, but none of them belonged to his team: five were obviously in league with Gomez, by the look of their weapons and the black Stealth suits they wore; while the other was the security guard who’d accompanied them from the mansion. Vinnie, his flechette gun tucked in the crook of his arm, still stood over the man’s body, checking his carotid pulse. Jason rose from his crouch, letting the submachinegun hang at his side.
“Is everyone okay out here?” Jason asked, eyes on Shannon, who st
ill held her compact handgun at arm’s length.
“All aces and eights out here,” Vinnie reported, standing. “The merc bought it, though. Took a bullet for the suit.” He jerked a thumb toward Eberhard, the governor’s representative, who was on his knees beside the flitter, puking into the sand. It was obvious from the tone in Vinnie’s voice that he thought it had been a bad trade.
“Call in a support team,” Jason told Shannon, tossing the machine pistol in the dirt and reholstering his own weapon. “And get the flitter warmed up—I want to get O’Keefe and her people out of here before anything else happens.”
Behind him, the door to the farmhouse opened and the RHN reporter looked cautiously around before stepping out, his camera still hanging forgotten at his side. He walked numbly yet deliberately up the ramp into the flitter and sat down, his gaze staring a thousand meters through the bulkhead. From the shell-shocked look on the man’s face, Jason figured he probably wouldn’t come out until the vehicle landed at the governor’s mansion. The others trickled out after: first Valerie and Glen, both still splattered with blood, the horror evident in their eyes as they partially supported each other; after them, Tanaka followed close behind, his face as impassive as if he’d just eaten lunch and was ready for a short nap.
Jason regarded him for a long moment, trying to figure out what went on behind that unreadable gaze.
“Why’d you trust me to take him before he could blow us up?” McKay asked him with open curiosity.
“Why did you trust me,” the bodyguard replied with a shrug, “to create a diversion?” Jason just nodded and let the man escort Val and Glen toward the flitter.