“Peder…” He was numb with shock.
“You did what you had to do. What Peder would have wanted.”
Peder the Magnificent. His brother. And there was his blood, thinning in the rain. And his ravaged neck.
While Father hurried and got his emergency breathing apparatus on, thoughts tumbled through Wulf’s head. Maybe if he had hit Peder in the head with the butt stock, maybe he could have knocked him out instead of killing him. Maybe he and Father could have wrestled Peder together and somehow subdued him. They could have carried him back and held him until the doctors had figured out how to save him.
But he’d shot him instead.
“I should have—”
“No!” Father said. “He was beyond repair. You gave him the best thing a brother could. You gave him a quick death.”
Grief boiled up in Wulf. He’d just had to kill his own brother. This was Warlord’s doing. He’d taken their land, taken their lives. How many had he sent back this way? And how many more corrupted would come? Wulf’s sadness turned to rage.
“I’m gonna kill him,” Wulf growled. “That greasy whoreson. I’m gonna kill the Warlord.”
“Someday, son…” And then Father held up a transmitter from Peder’s suit. “Verdammich! Help me find them.”
The suit was sending data back to the monsters who’d enslaved him.
“Destroy them! Quickly.”
* * *
The man everyone on Swindle knew only as Warlord stood in front of the displays and smiled to himself as he watched the last signal go to static. The fight between son and father and son had been rather satisfying. It would remind those wretched Originals who they were dealing with.
“That howler didn’t accomplish much,” Fain said in disgust. Big Town’s security chief held a container with three kava in it. They were long, multilegged creatures from the planet’s surface with mandibles that could slice a finger off, but despite that they were rather delicious. Fain skewered one with a long fork right behind the head. The kava wriggled and writhed. Fain brought the kava up, held it out to his employer, but Warlord was full, so he waved it off.
“He got a good reading of their perimeter.”
“But only one kill. We’ll never exterminate all the surface rats at this rate.” Fain took hold of the body of the kava, twisted and yanked, separating the head, and then he brought the decapitated body up and sucked out a chunk of meat.
“It’s not about the numbers,” Warlord told his subordinate. Fain was extremely dangerous, but in a direct sort of way. He hadn’t hired the man for big-picture thinking. “We send in a few more uncles and mothers and fathers down there, a few of them explode for good effect. That’s incredibly demoralizing.”
“Implanting slaveware isn’t cheap.”
“I’m aware.”
“Not to mention it’s a war crime.”
They both chuckled at that. Out this far the law was whatever Warlord said it was. “Oh no, not more sanctions from the ISF. Whatever will I do?” Warlord snorted. “Regardless, this amuses me. And Howlers keep the surface rats distracted while we prepare the final solution, Fain. The next arms shipment should be here soon. If the runners deliver half of what they’ve assured me they can get, I’ll finally have the resources to root out the Originals once and for all.”
“I’ll believe that when I see it.”
He knew the mercenary meant no disrespect. Fain had fought in the crag mountains of Gloss and the glass-steel cave cities of Motonari, both terrible places indeed, but as far as the planets human beings had actually managed to settle and eke out existence, there wasn’t anywhere less forgiving than the caustic, monster-infested, nightmare hellscape they were currently orbiting. The air slowly corroded their flyers. Satellites couldn’t see through the thick canopy. The ground was too rugged for most vehicles. The plants so aggressive that if they burned a road, within days it was re-covered, and that was if the work crew didn’t get torn apart by the wildlife in the process. Sending more men down only made it more likely they’d attract a kaiju. Those circumstances combined made it frustratingly easy for the guerillas to sabotage his operations and then vanish.
Warlord would have loved to drag a giant asteroid over and drop it into this wretched planet’s gravity well, but he needed Swindle’s vicious, yet extremely valuable, ecosystem alive. It was of no value to anyone dead. The original settlers who had stubbornly refused to fall into line, on the other hand…
“There’s a weapons shipment coming. And once it arrives, we’ll wipe them out—every man, woman, and child. We’ll exterminate the rats. All the rats in all their filthy little ratholes.”
Chapter 9
Gates were funny things. Sometimes you really couldn’t get there from here. Though humanity had built hundreds of gates now, there were only five that had the proper angles to transit into the Swindle system. To avoid interference between those, each of the five arrival areas had a separate entry zone, which was a sphere as many thousands of kilometers in diameter as needed to accommodate the exit variance. All the zones were well outside the planetary plane.
Of course, all of them were watched.
There was no way to hide the sudden heat signature that appeared at the end of a transit. In the cold of space, a radiating ship was practically a glowing beacon. The only real way to hide a ship was in plain sight, which was the Tar Heel’s forte.
There were five paths into the Swindle system, but only one gate out. The place just hadn’t been worth the investment until recently. The exit zone from the Nivaas system followed Swindle closely in its orbit. At normal speeds, it would take Tar Heel about five days to catch up to the planet. They were going to make it in three, because the captain was really eager to get this transaction over with. The crew was happy to push it, because every one of them was set to make a killing on their portion of the sale. After this, Jackson would have enough saved up to buy himself a modest little barge if he wanted to. Not that he’d decided to make the jump to owner-operator just yet, because he still wasn’t convinced the captain was actually going to go through with his retirement plans.
Jackson was into kilometer two of his daily run around the eternal corridor with Tui and a few of the crew when the intercom told him to report to Shade’s office.
With his shirt stained with sweat he wasn’t exactly presentable, but she’d just have to deal with it. The captain and Shade were already there waiting for him. Though she didn’t really have an official place in the ship’s hierarchy, Shade had the second biggest cabin on the Tar Heel. It was part business office, and also her living quarters, along with her two bearded dragons. They were huge things, two and a half feet long at least. One was white, the other a deep red. They were sitting on a desk that folded out of the wall, tails draping off the side.
“You sent for me, Captain?”
“I did.” He gestured at the chair next to him. “Have a seat.”
Shade pulled a live cricket out of a little tub and held it out by its leg. The red lizard reached up and nipped it out of her hand, crunched it, and swallowed. That one’s name was Ares. There was a little storage room dedicated to Shade’s bugs. One time her hornworms had gotten out and disappeared who knows where. A few months later, moths had begun to fly about the habitat ring. It was amazing how much nonsense the captain would put up with, provided you made him enough money.
“We were just discussing how we’re going to go about meeting with the buyer. I’m going to send the Tar Heel to the League port at Raste.”
The little station above the dead planet Raste belonged to the League of Merchants. The league was supposedly independent, but ultimately answered to the ISF, the International Space Federation, the eight-hundred-pound gorilla that managed the exploration of stars and allotment of land claims for this section of the galaxy.
The ISF made laws and had its own courts, law enforcement, and military, all of which their client brazenly defied.
“Are you sure that’s wise?
” Jackson asked.
“We’re sure,” Shade said. “Our client might take it as an insult docking at Raste instead of Big Town, but it’s insurance.”
“You think he might try to rip us off?”
The captain shrugged. “I think the only reason he’s not done that before is because we were more valuable to him still alive and making deliveries.”
“The Warlord is a very intelligent man,” Shade said. “He does nothing without a cost/benefit analysis.”
“I was gonna say he knows not to kill the goose who lays the golden egg.”
Shade’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “I’m not familiar with that saying, Captain. You tend to lose me with your bits of folksy Earth wisdom, but I can gather the context. Yes, in the past it benefited the Warlord for us to continue doing business. However, this is the most valuable shipment we’ve ever brought him. He may conclude it’s easier to just seize it rather than pay for it.”
Jackson nodded. “Makes sense. So you arrange your deal, get paid, and then we transfer the goods. You want me to fly the Tar Heel to Raste?”
“Naw, that’s why I called you in here. Castillo will be in charge of the ship. I want you to come with us to meet the client.”
“To meet the Warlord?” Jackson laughed. “Aw, come on, Cap. You know I’m not good with people.”
“Yep,” Captain Holloway said. “Believe me, I know.”
Shade held out another cricket to her dragons. This time the white dragon took it and gave it a munch, the cricket’s legs kicking a bit before it disappeared. That one’s name was Zeus. “Previously, we simply dropped the containers with their requested items into orbit, and they wired us the funds. It has been an acceptable arrangement with minimum exposure for both parties. This shipment, however, will require a face-to-face negotiation. You know more about ground combat hardware than anyone else aboard. The Warlord likes his toys. You two can talk shop.”
“I can talk mechs,” Jackson grudgingly agreed with her. He’d spent a lot of time over the last few days inspecting their new prize, and it had confirmed his initial impression, that the Citadel was the finest mech he’d ever seen. If they’d had a few of those on Gloss, it would be a free planet today instead of a third-class suck pit.
“We want you to solidify the relationship,” she said. “Talk up the finer points of the Citadel. Compare it to the other models we’ve delivered him.”
Jackson had never been to the surface of Swindle, but he’d heard legends about how bad it was. The workers down there needed mechs to protect them from the giant wildlife, only the ISF—in their infinite bureaucratic wisdom—had declared military tech off-limits to these people. Luckily for the workers of Swindle, the captain didn’t much care for those sorts of rules.
Since the beginning of their business relationship the Warlord had become something of a collector. He’d accumulated five mechs from them, but the Citadel was something new. Something far more responsive and flexible than anything he’d probably seen before.
“You want me to butter him up.”
“We want you to make him drool,” the captain said.
Jackson nodded. “If he knows anything about mechs, this thing sells itself.”
“He does,” Shade said. “He’s a mech pilot too.”
“Really? Manual control?”
“Linked.”
Jackson whistled. “Impressive.” That was a pretty elite fraternity. It took a special kind of brain to seamlessly perceive a walking tank as your own body, and only a small percentage of those could accept the implants.
“See? You’re practically a brother from another mother. Talk shop, and help seal the deal,” the captain said. “So you’ll go with us in the striker to Big Town while the Tar Heel continues on to Raste. The striker holds six, so we’ll take Tui and two of his men. More than enough for a friendly meeting with a longtime customer. If he’s in a good mood, we should be able to move everything we’ve got. And I mean everything.”
They had procured a whole lot of controlled items and illegal goodies on this run. The Citadel was just the really expensive cherry on top.
“That’s a big payday,” Jackson said.
“Huge.”
“I like huge,” said Shade.
“On the other hand,” the captain continued, “if he thinks we’re working for one of the factions who want to muscle in on his operation, we’ll be taking a short trip out of an airlock.”
“Airlocks are too dull for the Warlord,” Shade said. “His justice usually involves a trip to the surface with cameras and betting to see just how long the idiot who got caught survives.”
“What’s the record?” Jackson asked.
Shade shrugged. She didn’t have time for blood sports. There was business to conduct.
“We shouldn’t have any problems,” the captain said. “He knows what we traffic in, so he’ll assume the Tar Heel is better armed than it looks. If he gets to feeling treacherous, it’s not like he’s in some hardened facility a thousand feet below ground. He’s in an orbital. A big fat whale, floating on a predictable course. So it’s in everyone’s interest to play nice.”
“There’s no way in hell you’d ever give the order to open fire on an orbital with hundreds of thousands of innocent people living on it.”
“Of course not,” the captain said. “But the client doesn’t know that.”
Shade waved off the conversation about obliterating the orbital. “There are many ways to use nukes. That’s not what I’m worried about. I’m worried about flyboy here.” She looked directly at Jackson and narrowed her eyes. “Don’t screw this up like you did on Nivaas.”
Irritation rose in Jackson, but there was nothing to be gained by fighting with her now, so Jackson held his tongue.
“I don’t trust the guy. Hell, his people literally only call him Warlord for goodness’ sake, so he ain’t exactly cuddly. However, he’s kept his people alive in a godforsaken place, and he’s done it all while thumbing his nose at the ISF, which I can respect. We get in, we close this deal. It’s my last hurrah. With a nice fat parting bonus for the whole crew if everything goes right.”
Jackson didn’t know exactly what all was in inventory, but he’d helped steal enough of it to have a pretty good idea. The share payout on all of it was going to be big, add a bonus on top of that, and it put the dream of being an independent operator within reach, and not just of some crappy rock hopper, but an actual decent ship. Two months from now he could be Captain Jackson.
* * *
Jane was hacking into the security system of the league station above Raste when a red flower icon appeared on her visual.
She selected the flower and watched a video of a beach with an older couple on it. The sun was setting, the tide going out, the waves crashing on the rocks. There were trails of footprints walking along the edge of the surf line. The whole place was strewn with the detritus from a storm. In the distance, garbage bots were cleaning and grooming the sand.
The image was from her homeworld. A land of order and unmatched technological knowledge, which kept itself purposefully separated from the lesser branches of humanity.
Jane never talked about where she was from to the other members of the crew. It was safer for them that way. Only this was no mere postcard to remind her of her childhood. It was another coded message from her sister. Jane deciphered its hidden meaning within seconds.
The new threat hunting them wasn’t from the Iyer, or the Boroughs. This was something new, yet familiar. And her sister had nearly been hacked. Nobody ever got close to hacking the girls of Mary 231.78, especially not their 22nd sister, who was smart and careful and always covered her tracks. She was the one who had initially devised their secret language. Hacking her would be like trying to hack the wind.
It had been several years since any of Savat’s hounds had gotten this close to catching one of them. Since there were only a handful of people in the universe who could do what she did, as well as she could, she woul
d have to be extra careful not to leave any trace. If the hunters got closer, she would have to disappear again and start over with a new identity somewhere else. She didn’t want to do that. This ship was her home now. For the first time in her life Jane had made real human friends. Normally she had to build them.
* * *
The next day they boarded the striker—one of the two smaller ships the Tar Heel carried—and strapped themselves in. When everything was a go, they engaged the electric pushers that nudged them away from the hull. When there was enough separation, the captain turned the striker so the wash wouldn’t blast the other ship, then engaged the thrusters. Though half of them aboard were certified to fly a striker, the captain had claimed the stick, probably for the fun of it.
While the little striker accelerated toward Big Town, the Tar Heel continued on without them. She was kind of pretty, in a big, awkward, lumbering sort of way.
“That’s one majestic lady,” the captain said wistfully as his ship grew tiny in the distance. Jackson exchanged a look with Tui, but neither of them said anything. Only a handful of the crew knew about their captain’s planned retirement, but all of those had already started a betting pool on how long his self-exile back to Earth would last.
“Alright ladies and gentlemen, Big Town, ETA three hours.” Once the Tar Heel was just one of a million dots in the sky, the captain turned his chair around to face the compartment where the rest of them were strapped in. “You all know the basics, but Shade, would you make sure everyone knows enough about the political niceties of this deal so they can avoid screwing it up?”
She looked over at Tui and his handpicked goons, Katze and Bushey, and then finally at Jackson. “I don’t know if I have the time or the crayons sufficient to do so.”
“She means you,” Tui fake whispered loud enough so everyone would hear anyway. “I’m educated.”
“Yeah, but you got a degree in philosophy,” Jackson muttered back.
“Gotta love correspondence courses.” Then Tui turned back to their broker. “Don’t worry. The captain asked me to pick only the sharpest and most diplomatic members of my security force for this mission.”
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