by Rick Partlow
“I’m going, kid, I’m going,” Salvaggio said. “But I don’t think you’ve considered what you’re going to do when Johnny and Drake see you coming out behind me with a gun in your hand. Those boys aren’t that bright, and without guidance from higher authority, they’re apt to do something fatal for all of us.”
She was edging out of the cell and toward the door, still a meter away from it. He’d told her to move slowly, but he felt as if she was stalling, waiting for help.
“You better make sure they don’t do anything stupid then,” Franny told her, nearly yelling the words. Terrin wanted to shush her, but she looked manic and keyed up and he was afraid she’d just start yelling at him, instead. “Because you’ll be the first one to get shot!”
“All right, calm down.” Salvaggio pushed the door open and was about to take a step out when Terrin put a hand on her shoulder, making sure he had control so she couldn’t just bolt.
“Small steps,” he reminded her. “Don’t run or I’ll shoot, because we’ll be dead anyway.”
He felt an instant’s doubt, wondering if he could do it, if he could shoot her down in cold blood. He’d killed before. He’d cycled the airlock and executed Wihtgar when Captain Osceola had given him the choice. He’d shot Starkad Marines in the battle for Terminus Cut. This felt different, though he couldn’t have explained why. He hoped he wouldn’t have to find out.
It was late morning and he squinted at the glare of the primary star, trying not to give in to the natural instinct to hold his hand up over his eyes. Instead, he maneuvered Salvaggio ahead of him and ducked into her shadow, maintaining a clear view up and down the back of the building. It was sandstone block, just as plain and primitive on the outside as the inside, with a wood overhang sheltering the concrete walkway leading a few meters out from the back door.
The mech he’d spotted earlier was sauntering through the main street of the town, visible over the slate rooftops off to his left, while on the right the dirt road headed away from the low-slung block and wood buildings and out into rolling, red hills. There was no one else in sight and he was giving serious consideration to tying Salvaggio up and making a run for it, but before he could put the notion into words, he heard the rumble of the car pulling around the back of the building.
It was a generic all-terrain rover, dented, faded, and blasted by years of dirt, sand, and sun, its knobbed tires cracked and caked with dust. The cab of the rover was covered by a take-down canvas roof, but the back was an open bed, and the guard called Johnny was standing in it, flechette gun resting against his shoulder while one hand anchored him to the roll bar. He seemed to be happy to be basking in the sun and totally oblivious to Salvaggio and her “prisoners.” The one she’d called Drake was driving the vehicle, shading his eyes from the glare with a hand across the windshield, not even looking over at them until the vehicle came to a stop right in front of the rear door.
Terrin swallowed the lump in his throat and pulled Salvaggio closer to him, jamming the muzzle of her pistol into the small of her back.
“Hey, ma’am,” Johnny frowned, one hand reaching around for his shotgun. “Why are you…”
He trailed off, eyes widening as he finally noticed what was happening. Inside the cab, Drake swore, the sound of the words lost to the rumble of the old, internal-combustion engine, and threw open the driver’s door, trying to jump out and grab his gun at the same time.
“Tell them to drop their guns and get out of the truck,” he said, his voice a dry rasp. “Tell them if they don’t do it now, I’ll shoot.”
“Boys, just settle down,” Salvaggio said, voice raised in a commanding tone that could have come from Lyta Randell or Captain Cordova. “I want you both to do exactly as I say, do you understand? Do exactly what I say and not a damn thing else. I want you both to tell me you understand me.”
“I understand, ma’am,” Johnny replied immediately, freezing in mid-step, one foot halfway off the back of the truck.
“Yes, Captain,” Drake added, standing in the open driver’s door, glaring at Terrin and Franny with murder in his beady, piggish eyes.
“Set your guns down, boys. Do it now.”
“In the truck,” Terrin amended. “Put your guns in the front seat of the truck.”
“Do it,” Salvaggio urged them. “Then move away from the vehicle.” She turned her head back toward Terrin, scowling. “You gonna shoot me with that gun or drill into my spine with it, boy?”
He pulled the barrel back a bit, realizing he’d been digging it into her back a bit too hard. He nearly mumbled an apology but stopped himself. It would show weakness.
“You shoot it with it pushed that hard into me,” the mercenary pointed out, “you’ll jam it up and it won’t feed the next round, you know that, right?”
He didn’t answer her, but his ears burned with embarrassment. Salvaggio’s men had stepped back from the rover, up against the back wall of the jail; he was about to tell Franny to check the vehicle, but she was already jogging around the front end, as far from the reach of the mercenaries as she could get. She slid into the driver’s seat, shoving over the flechette gun Drake had left behind and checking the controls to make sure the vehicle had been left drivable. It took her only about ten seconds, but it seemed to drag out into an eternity before she leaned over and threw the passenger door open.
“Get in!” she urged him, her elfin features distorted into something desperate and furious. “Hurry, before someone else comes!”
He backed toward the open door, fighting to keep his balance and maintain a hold on Salvaggio and keep an eye on Johnny and Drake. He hunted blindly with his left foot for the floorboard of the rover’s cab
“You go through with this, boy,” Salvaggio warned him, her tone almost matronly in its concern, “you’d best be prepared to go all the way. I don’t have anything in particular against you, but I’ll be obliged to hunt you down. You know that, right?”
For some reason, the threat steadied him and he settled back into the seat, letting loose his hold on the woman but keeping the gun pointed her way. Salvaggio regarded him with eyes of blue crystal.
“I’ve been hunted by worse, ma’am,” he told her. Then, aside to Franny, “Go!”
His door swung shut as the truck pulled away down the dirt road, leaving a cloud of red dust behind them.
15
To say Revelation City was the prime real estate on the planet was to pay it too high of a compliment, Ruth Laurent decided. The entire southern hemisphere was a wasteland, desert and bare, arid rock surrounded by oceans choked with matts of algae, and the north was attractive only by comparison. Low desert gave way to high, and a few mountain-cradled valleys where the annual rainfall was enough to support the transplanted, genetically-engineered trees, brush, and wildlife.
They’d flown over the coastal algae farms during their approach in the drop-ship and she’d wondered what sort of life the workers there must have. Much of it was automated, but not nearly enough. Out here, when something broke down, the parts to repair it had to be something you could fabricate locally or you might as well throw it in the recycler. Sometimes, it came down to men and women and even children in wooden boats scooping algae matts off the surface of the water.
The train tracks ran right up the coast, where tankers waited to be loaded then picked up by fusion-powered engines and hauled inland to the processing plants. Along the way, they’d pass the soy farms and pick up barrels of protein paste and between the two staples, the colony could survive…if you could call a diet of processed spirulina powder and soy paste living. Larger colonies with more arable land and a better climate might manage to grow enough fodder to support herds of aurochs or bison, might husband citrus groves or greenhouses, but not Revelation. If anyone down there raised anything larger than goats, she’d be shocked.
It was a world with nothing worth having except its people, and people who only stayed because they were too poor to migrate someplace better, marooned by the de
cay of the Empire which had once made planets such as these desirable places to live. Upper-class Imperial citizens had traveled here simply to climb the sandstone cliffs or drive all-terrain vehicles up their sandy tracks, and the tourist trade had made the world a place for the ambitious to build a life. Until it had all fallen apart.
There probably hadn’t been any Jeuta raids or wars for succession out here, no bloodshed or destruction. The ships had just stopped coming, stopped bringing the tourists and their money, the spare parts, and the new technology. What was left was stripped away and taken toward the core, and the people had been abandoned to fend for themselves with what little remained.
Their history had played out on one world after another all across what the Dominions now referred to as the Periphery, the playgrounds of the rich turning into wasteland, detritus, prey for the vultures picking over the corpse of a galaxy spanning civilization.
And what are we, if not simply the fattest vultures?
She said nothing during the descent, having learned better than to try to make small talk with Colonel Grieg. He sat in the acceleration couch beside her and endured the braking boost in obdurate silence, dark eyes hiding an even darker heart. It would have been easier if the man were stupid, a simple brute; but he was intelligent, or at least clever. Anyone who underestimated him did so at their peril, and if she’d learned anything from the failure of her former commander, it was not to underestimate your opponent.
The touchdown was rough. The Revelation City “spaceport” was a rock-strewn plain cleared half-heartedly by a tractor whenever they got around to it. Two other landing craft squatted with heads bowed against the afternoon sun, one a passenger shuttle and the other a cargo hauler modified for use as a drop-ship, the standard craft for mercenaries and bandits alike.
Not that there’s much of a difference between them.
She stood off to the side with Grieg and his command staff and waited while Captain Egeland walked his Mobile Armor company down the massive belly ramp. The machines fanned out and spread into a perimeter, guarding the drop-ship while the rovers disembarked in their wake, knobbed tires shifting up and down on the off-road suspensions as they passed over the ruts and ridges of dirt and sand left by the mecha footpads.
“Officially, we’re working with this Salvaggio woman,” Grieg told Captain Gerhardt, pacing back and forth between the tire tracks. The Marine commander listened attentively, unmoving, her rifle at low ready as if she were one of the sentinel statues on Stavanger. “But that means nothing. She’s mercenary trash and the people here have no loyalty to her and less to us. When we go in, we go in to occupy a hostile city. Take no chances, assume no allies. None of the damned mercenaries touches a weapon or pilots a mech while we’re in the city. Am I clear?”
“Clear, sir!” Gerhardt barked, and Laurent heard an echo from Egeland on the general net on her ‘link. Grieg had been speaking not just to the two of them but to all the Marines and mech-jocks…and possibly to her, as well.
She had a gun this time. She hadn’t asked for it, but Grieg had insisted.
“If you’re a Supremacy officer,” he’d said, “then you’re one of my troops, and my troops always go armed.”
The compact pistol seemed to drag at her shoulders, a tumor growing beside her breast. She’d have to use it this time. She felt it. This would be the mission where she’d get her first kill, lose whatever innocence she had left.
The thought wouldn’t leave her, wouldn’t be scoured away by the high desert wind, the sand blasting against the armor plating of their rovers, wouldn’t be shaken off by the rhythmic thumping of the tires on the sandstone as they drove into the town. The ride was blissfully short, mostly because there wasn’t that much to the place. The town was built around the train depot, the processing facilities, and the storehouses surrounding it, simple, aluminum sheeting buildings three or four stories tall. The fusion reactor powering all of it lay outside of town, built on the banks of a nearby river, diverting some of its flow to cooling stacks. From the air it had seemed ancient, and had probably been left behind when the Empire pulled out because it was too large to loot. She wondered how they managed to keep it running.
Further out from the food processing and storage units were smaller factories. She hadn’t seen a planning schematic for the place, but she imagined it held whatever industrial fabricators they’d been able to scrounge up, along with the raw materials to feed them. Those were harder to come by and she didn’t recall anything in the mission reports about surface mining facilities or anything at all in the asteroid fields or on the moon. That meant they were totally dependent on interstellar shipments for fusion fuel pellets, iron ore, plastics, superconductor fiber, precious metals…pretty much everything except food.
And this Salvaggio controls all traffic in and out of the system, I’d wager.
Past the industrial areas, there were a few restaurants, no doubt catering to the workers at the factories. Well, diners more than restaurants. Two different bars, and she’d have been willing to bet one served as the watering hole for Salvaggio and her people while the other was for the locals, whether it had started out that way or not. All the structures had a crumbling, degenerate air to them, their facades faded and peeling under the dry, warm wind. It made them seem neglected, almost abandoned, for all she could see locals moving past on the sidewalks.
The children stared at their vehicles in open curiosity, but the adults averted their eyes and quickened their step, as if afraid being caught staring would attract unwanted attention. They reminded Laurent of the buildings, beat up and neglected, falling apart with each passing day.
“This is it,” the driver announced, pulling their rover up to the curb of a one-story block building caked in crumbling stucco.
A sign mounted above the front entrance, once bronze but long since green with corrosion, advertised “Revelation City Hall.”
“How optimistic,” Grieg murmured.
She and the Colonel had been sitting wedged between two armored Marines and when the vehicle bounced to a halt, the two troopers piled out, weapons going to their shoulders as they watched for threats. Across the street, a man in faded blue coveralls broke into a trot to get out of the line of fire, one hand holding a floppy, brimmed hat tight to his head. She wanted to chuckle at the sight, but the laugh died in her chest, killed by the thought of how that man viewed them, as invaders brought in by other invaders, just one more nail in the coffin of the life he’d grown up with.
“You must be Colonel Grieg.”
The woman was petite, unimposing…cute, even, with a heart-shaped face framed with curly red hair and adorned with the bluest eyes Laurent had ever seen. They were currently aimed like a sighting laser at Saul Grieg, who returned the stare unabashedly. Behind her, three men lined up like an honor guard, two of them large and probably considered intimidating, dressed in armored vests over their brown fatigues but with no weapons evident. The third was a mech-jock, she guessed from the one-piece coverall and the set of his stance. Mech-jocks seemed to instinctively hunch their shoulders inward all the time, as if they were squeezed into a cockpit.
“How did you know it wasn’t me?” Laurent asked the woman, the corner of her mouth quirking up at someone who clearly must have been underestimated over and over in her career judging her so quickly.
Salvaggio regarded her with what might have been amusement or perhaps disdain.
“The message I received from Breckenridge sounded scared. You don’t look like you’ve ever scared anyone in your whole life.”
“If you believe me to be so frightening, Captain,” Grieg said, climbing the rough, stone steps up to the front porch of the city hall, towering over the woman, “why do you not seem intimidated?”
“I said Breckenridge was scared,” she corrected him, head tilted back to look him in the eye. “I didn’t say I was.”
“Yet you should be.”
Grieg slammed a fist into the wall beside her head, the armor
ed knuckles of his gloves cracking the plaster and sending fragments flying. Salvaggio tried not to flinch and did a fair job of faking it, but the tightening of the muscles in her cheek told the story of her surprise and the brief flash of fear. The men behind her weren’t as practiced at hiding their reaction and the two big foot-soldiers started to push away from the wall, halfway into a step toward the Intelligence chief before they stopped at the levelled muzzles of the Marine auto-rifles.
“I reviewed your message on our way down from the ship,” Grieg went on, his voice even, mouth a hard line. “You had the fugitives here, in this very building…” He sneered at the huge crack in the stucco his fist had left. “…in this very old and shitty building, and you let them escape!”
The volume had gone up on the last three words until he was yelling almost into Salvaggio’s face, but she was prepared this time and didn’t lean back from it.
“I allowed them to escape, Colonel,” she corrected him, arms at her side, stance strengthening as if preparing to meet a charge. “And you should be thanking me.”
Grieg ceased to loom over her, more a shifting of his stance than any discernable motion, but a concession nonetheless. He waved a hand in invitation, though his sneer made it a mocking one.
“Enlighten me.”
“If we’d left those kids on Trinity for you to stumble on, what would you have done with them?”
“Our interrogation procedures are very thorough,” Grieg assured her, a bit smugly Laurent thought. Her stomach twisted. She was very aware of how thorough they were. And how final.
“And they’d have told you what?” she prompted, her tone dangerously condescending. Salvaggio might have not noticed the sudden, threatening shift in Grieg’s expression, but Laurent certainly did. “That they’d turned over the data crystals to Lana Kane, the broker, correct?” She shrugged. “Which you already knew. And then you’d come here and be no closer to finding what you were really looking for. This Kane woman is a local, from one of the small farm communities outside the city. She’s got no living relatives we know of, but she knows everyone and has used her connections to help most of them at one time or another.”