by Rick Partlow
“Is she going to be all right?” Logan asked, hanging off a hand-hold just inside the med bay’s hatch.
He’d tried to keep his voice low enough for only Dr. Coldwell to hear him, but across the small clinic, Lyta Randell turned in the webbing of her bed to focus her good eye on him. She looked a lot better now than when she’d been brought aboard an hour ago, but one eye was still just a slit and would be until the swelling went down.
“This is nothing.” She snorted a laugh and he thought she was probably already medicated. “You shoulda’ seen me after the bar fight I got into as a buck sergeant on Nike!”
“She may have a slight concussion,” Coldwell said, clucking like a mother hen. The paunchy, slack-jowled older man, looked like some country doctor pulled off a backwoods colony rather than a twenty-year Ranger medic who’d gone in for formal medical training in his forties. “Definitely a cracked orbital socket, cracked ribs and a sprained wrist. But she’ll make a full recovery.”
Logan nodded his gratitude to the older man and moved into the ward, squeezing past or sometimes over the treatment equipment attached to rails in the deck till he could secure himself at the edge of Lyta’s bed.
“Forget about the bumps and bruises,” the Ranger officer urged him, smacking him in the arm hard enough to nearly send him floating away. “Did we get what we needed?”
“We did.” He shrugged. “Or should I say Acosta did.” He blew out a breath. He hadn’t been comfortable using the interrogation drugs on the bounty hunters. They could have dangerous and unpredictable side-effects, but there hadn’t been time for anything else. “Starkad doesn’t have Terrin yet. This Momma Salvaggio made a deal with the Starkad commander, Colonel Grieg, to recover the data Terrin downloaded and left with Lana Kane, but she’s playing fast and loose with him. She knows Terrin is Sparta, and she’s keeping him and the tech who came with him secret from Grieg as a hole card.”
“Colonel Saul Grieg?” Lyta’s eye narrowed. “I’ve heard of that asshole. Used to be a Marine company commander…he was the one who slaughtered those Mbeki POWs on Connaught. Got a commendation for it, the son of a bitch. Now he’s in charge of Starkad Intelligence.”
“Then we need to get Terrin away from Salvaggio before Grieg gets his hands on him.”
“You know where he is, then?” she asked him.
“He’s the same place Starkad is heading. The same place this Lana Kane is taking the data files. Revelation.”
14
The mech was so old that Terrin couldn’t recognize the model other than it was vaguely humanoid and, at only ten meters tall and probably twenty tons, most likely a scout. It shuffled down the dirt road behind the jail like an old man doggedly moving from one task to another, raising a cloud of dust as it walked. A woman and her son walked by along the main road right at the corner of Terrin’s view, and he saw her shoot a glare at the machine.
Not happy about the current administration, I guess.
He stepped down from the cot and looked around the cell.
Neither am I.
Franny was sitting on the floor, back against the wall, face buried in her hands. She’d been that way since coming back from the post-breakfast bathroom break. They were allowed three a day, the only time they left the cell, and he’d tried to be keenly observant, hoping he could spot some weakness, some way out. But it was just a short, block hallway with two doors, one leading to the windowless bathroom, the other thick metal and obviously leading to life outside this stinking jail.
They’d even been given time to wash up and after the second day, offered a change of clothes. Though Terrin didn’t think much of the dull, brown work coveralls, he accepted them just the same. Their Wholesale Slaughter duty fatigues had been ripe enough to stand up by themselves. Neither the change of clothes nor the bathroom breaks seemed to have done anything to improve Franny’s mood. He considered trying to cheer her up, but decided he wasn’t qualified for it and settled on drawing her out instead.
“What do you think they’re going to do with us?”
She finally looked up, her eyes red but no trace of tears surviving the scrubbing of her palms against her face.
“They must know who we are,” she declared, voice wavering even if her expression was firm. “If they’re smart, they’re trying to sell us to Starkad.” She shrugged. “I mean, sell you.” Bitterness creeped into her words, growing more pronounced with each one. “They’re probably just keeping me around to use as leverage, someone to kill in front of you to show they mean business.”
“Don’t say that!” Terrin exclaimed, crouching down beside her. He hesitantly put a hand on hers, squeezing in what he hoped was a comforting gesture. “We’re both going to be okay.” He winced, realizing he sounded pretty unconvincing even to himself. He tried a new tack, determined to get her mind off their situation. “Hey, you know all about me and who my family is, but you haven’t told me anything about yours. Where are you from?”
“Sparta,” she said, shrugging as if it wasn’t important. “I’m from Elysium,” she added, “across the mountains from Argos. I don’t get to the city very much.”
“What about your mom and dad?” he prompted, trying to keep her talking.
“They work in civil engineering, city planning,” she told him. She shrugged, as if she was surrendering to his efforts despite her mood. “They met there thirty years ago when they were entry level techs, and now they run the district office. My sister works for them, but I decided I want to travel.” She snorted humorlessly and the sound morphed into a sob she wasn’t quite able to stifle. “Great life choice, huh? Now, I’ll probably never see them again.”
Her shoulders shook and Terrin patted her hand, feeling utterly helpless. He awkwardly slipped an arm around her, letting her lean against his shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” she told him, wiping her face off against his sleeve. The intimacy of the gesture felt good, even on the darkness of their circumstances. “I’m being selfish. You have to be scared, too, and I’m sitting here whining about myself.”
“I’m worried,” he admitted, “but I don’t know that I’m scared, if I’m being honest. After everything that happened on the mission to Terminus…”
He closed his eyes, trying to squeeze out the images of the Jeuta Wihtgar , who Donner Osceola had sheltered and given a home on the Shakak despite the enmity between humans and the genetically-engineered race the Empire had used as slaves. Wihtgar had betrayed them and tried to kill them all, would have strangled him if Kammy hadn’t shown up to take the traitor down. The moment had haunted his dreams for weeks, but now he felt nothing.
“It scares me that I’m not scared,” he said. “If that makes any sense.”
“Do you have anyone back home, waiting for you?” she wondered.
He stared at her, uncomprehending for a moment, ready to answer with something inane about his father worrying about him, when he realized what she meant.
“No. I haven’t really had time for a relationship for a while.”
“I decided I didn’t want to leave anything hanging at home as long as I was going to be in the service,” she said. “There really hasn’t been anyone since then. I’ve just been too caught up in the job.”
She was leaning closer to him as she spoke, and despite the lingering smell of sweat the sponge baths couldn’t quite banish, despite the frizzy, out of control mess of her hair and the knowledge he was just as big of a mess, he wanted very badly to kiss her. The idea scared him worse than the thought of Starkad getting their hands on him, but he leaned into her and closed his eyes.
The door to their cell slammed open and he jerked away from Franny, forgetting about the kiss and hopping up to his feet. The woman who stepped into the cell was shorter than Franny, much shorter than him, and probably weighing less than fifty kilograms. The brown uniform jacket she wore seemed like a tent on her, as if she were a child playing soldier, and the unit patch on the shoulder did nothing to change the impression.<
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“Salvaggio’s Savages,” it read in stylized text, over the image of a kilted warrior with skin painted blue and a two-handed sword held over his head. It was the crest of a mercenary unit, over the top and cheesy as most were. He remembered thinking how ridiculous “Wholesale Slaughter” was as a name until he’d seen some of the names of actual mercenary companies.
Yet for all her girlish stature and the extravagance of her uniform, there was something in the woman’s startlingly blue eyes, in the wild mane of red hair, in the hard line of her mouth that was a clear warning not to underestimate her. Or maybe it was the heavy, stamped-metal handgun hanging in a skeleton holster at her right hip that did it. It was tied down to her thigh and the way her hips swayed with its weight spoke of a deadly familiarity with the weapon.
“Your girlfriend’s right, boy,” she said, her voice a clear, pleasant contralto. “I’m going to sell you to Starkad, and Mithra knows what they’ll do to you.” She laughed, mouth twisting into a cruel smile. “I’m sure it won’t be anything pleasant.”
Franny grabbed Terrin’s hand and he helped her to her feet. She shrank against him for a moment, but then pushed away and stood facing the woman, arms crossed over her chest, a study in forced determination. An odd surge of pride went through Terrin’s chest, though he wasn’t sure how he had the right to be proud of her.
“There’s another option, though,” the red-headed woman told them.
She took a step further into the cell and two armed guards moved up behind her, tall and massive and carrying drum-fed flechette guns. They didn’t come inside, just reinforced her authority with their presence.
“I’m Captain Josephine Salvaggio.” She grinned at Terrin’s look of disbelief. She couldn’t have been older than thirty. “Yes, I’m the ‘Momma Salvaggio’ you’ve heard so much about. My people run things here and at Trinity. We don’t have much time, so I’m going to lay this out for you simple. Starkad wants something you have. Their head honcho, Colonel Grieg, told me to be on the lookout for some data crystals, but I know you didn’t have them on you when you were taken on Trinity, so I have to assume you passed them off to that broker you went to see, Lana Kane.”
Panic roiled in Terrin’s gut at how quickly his plans had unraveled and his eyes darted around, searching for any route of escape. There was none except through the two hulking guards and the yawning muzzles of their shotguns. Salvaggio regarded him with cool amusement, as if she could smell his fear.
“Unfortunately, Ms. Kane absconded with the goods before we could locate her, which complicated everything, including my agreement with Colonel Grieg. But I think our dear Lana has taken herself and your data crystals to the only place outside of Trinity where she’d be able to find sanctuary.” A demonstrative wave of her hand. “Right here on Revelation. You see, most of the workers on Trinity are from Revelation. I took care of a problem they had some time back and unfortunately for them, they were unable to pay the price we’d agreed upon, so I’m taking it out in trade for a portion of their wages.”
“How enlightened of you,” Terrin murmured.
It was an old story, one he’d heard of many times during his time on the Shakak. Mercenaries were notorious for upping their price in the middle of a job—they were hardly better than the bandits they’d been hired to fight, most of the time.
“You’ve got once chance to get out of this with your skin intact, boy,” she said, her affected good mood vanishing in a flash of irritation. “You work with me to find Ms. Kane, get her to give you the data crystals back, then you give them to me.” She inclined her head toward him. “The minute I have them, you and Little Miss Pixie here get a free ride to the nearest non-aligned settlement and we never have to see each other again.”
Terrin’s jaws ached from keeping his mouth shut. He’d wanted very badly to blurt out his insistence they weren’t going to be handing over the data crystals to Starkad no matter what she or this Colonel Grieg did to them. He almost felt the smack on the back of his head Lyta Randell would have given him for saying something so stupid.
“Grand gestures and noble words are for politicians, boy,” was how she’d put it if she were here.
“How do I know you won’t just kill us after we get the data crystals for you?” he asked instead. “How do I know you won’t just lean on Starkad for more money, then turn over us and the data?”
Franny’s mouth dropped open, her eyes wide with disbelief as she stared back at him over her shoulder. He tried not to meet her stinging glare of betrayal, instead focusing on Salvaggio’s reply.
“Well, you can’t, sugar,” the mercenary commander admitted with a low chuckle. “But you can know it’s much safer for me to just turn you over. And you can also know your girlfriend was right about her role in all this.”
Salvaggio struck out with rattlesnake speed, grabbing Franny’s wrist and pulling her back against her chest, one arm wrapping around her neck and the other drawing her pistol. Terrin took an instinctive step forward, but the mercenary warned him off with a tap of her pistol barrel against Franny’s right temple.
“You see,” Salvaggio went on, her thumb playfully flicking the safety of the handgun off and then back on again, “Starkad doesn’t give a shit about her, so I could put a bullet through her brain, toss her body in a ditch and never even have to tell them. Or, you could cooperate and everybody wins. Which is it going to be, sugar?”
“Don’t tell her anything,” Franny ground out through clenched teeth, eyes squeezed shut. “I’m not afraid to die.”
“You’re lying, girl,” Salvaggio said into her ear, running the barrel of the weapon playfully through her hair. “I can feel you trembling.”
Terrin’s mind was working furiously, trying to find the right thing to say, the right move to make. He couldn’t let Franny die because he was too slow, too clumsy to do the right thing. Logan always did the right thing, always managed to accomplish the mission.
Logan’s best friend died accomplishing the mission, his memory taunted him.
“All right, I’ll do it,” he said, hands raised, palms out in surrender. “I’ll help you find her, but you got to get me out of this cell. I can’t take it in here any longer.” He shook his head, trying to sound desperate, which wasn’t difficult. “I was trapped underground on Terminus for months, and I’ve been in here for days and I can’t take it anymore! Take me wherever you need to, just get me out of here.”
“Now there, you see?” Salvaggio smiled broadly, relaxing her hold on Franny. “I knew we could all be reasonable and come out of this as friends.” She turned back toward the two guards outside the cell door. “Johnny, Drake, go pull a car around back. We’re all going for a ride to spread the word to Ms. Kane’s friends in Riverton Farms that her friends from Trinity are looking for their property.”
One of the two turned immediately and went to pull open the door to the outside, but the other seemed reluctant.
“You sure you don’t want me to stay with you, Cap?” he asked. His accent spoke of an origin somewhere deep in Clan Modi territory, drawling and drawn out.
“I think I can handle these two trained killers,” the woman replied, imitating his accent in mockery of both him and the two of them. She jerked her head toward the door. “Go make sure Johnny doesn’t run into anything. You know the poor boy can’t drive worth a damn.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Drake grumbled, shaking his head and slinging his weapon.
“Good help is so hard to find in this business,” Salvaggio lamented. “I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that. Wholesale Slaughter has a pretty good rep, you must get mobs of recruits everywhere you go.”
“I had someone try to join when I was on your station,” Terrin said, putting more rancor into the words than he meant to. “He seemed pretty eager to get anywhere else as quick as possible.”
“You can’t keep everyone happy,” Salvaggio mused. “Business is business…”
She was gesturing carelessly with he
r gun, holding it loosely in her hand, and she’d kept the other resting on Franny’s arm, keeping her simultaneously too close and not well secured. Terrin saw it and wished he could say something, wished he could tell Franny now was the time, but he didn’t have to. Franny struck in an overhand blow, forearm to wrist and the handgun went flying. Terrin dove for the weapon, feeling awkward and clumsy and far too slow.
He caught it before it hit the floor, twisting to land on his back, hands wrapped around the dull grey slide of the heavy, metal handgun. It was an old design, blocky and primitive and unfamiliar in his hands, but he managed to get it pointed in the right direction just as Salvaggio braced to make a lunge at Franny.
“Don’t move!” he barked, trying to keep the gun pointed at her as he scrambled to his feet. “Stay right where you are!”
He remembered the manual safety and flicked it off with his right thumb. At least he hoped he’d switched it off; she’d been playing with it so much, he couldn’t be sure.
“Take it easy, boy,” Salvaggio urged him, hands raising in front of her. “That’s my favorite gun, and I’d hate to get killed with it.”
She didn’t seem worried enough for his comfort, but then she was a professional mercenary and had likely been on the business end of a lot of guns. He had not been on either end of very many guns and was a good deal less comfortable with it.
“Move out of the cell slowly,” he said, gesturing with his left hand, keeping the gun still in his right. One of the many things his father and Lyta Randell had taught him when he was younger, and they had still hoped he might be a soldier, was that guns were for shooting, not to use as pointers, back-scratchers or clubs. “Toward the door. Franny, get behind us.”
The grips of the handgun were a red-brown wood inset with some sort of circular, metallic emblem. He hadn’t bothered to read it, but he could feel it pressing into his hand; he was gripping the gun so tightly, the pattern would probably be etched into the skin of his palm.