“Thanks, Chief,” said Katze.
“But since I didn’t have anyone sharp or diplomatic available, I chose these two. Shade, this is Katze Yeager,” he nodded toward the female goon. “And Mike Bushey,” the male. “Trust me, despite appearances, they’ll do.”
Jackson had enjoyed working with both of them. Katze Yeager was younger and relatively new to the crew, Mike Bushey was older and been with them for a few years, but they were both vets, and like Tui, they’d both been gene-modded and cybernetically augmented by the militaries they’d served with. Katze had been an Amonite marine, and Bushey, a sergeant in the Earth Force Infantry. Though the crew of the Tar Heel mostly tried to avoid outright conflict, the captain liked having a few dedicated trigger pullers on the payroll. Tui had twelve people on his security team, most of whom never had anything to do with Grandma if they could help it.
“Thank you, Chief Fuamatu,” said the captain. “Now get on with it, Shade.”
“Very well. Our buyer is this man.” Shade activated the holo projector on her wrist. The image was obviously a propaganda shot, showing a very handsome black man, lean, bearded, with way too many medals on his uniform. “This is Warlord.”
Katze spoke up. “Warlord? No the? No title? Just Warlord?”
“That’s all anyone calls him,” Shade said.
“He actually doesn’t have a name?” Katze asked.
“That is his name. Nobody knows what he was called before. All we know is the story he painted of himself when he seized control of Swindle. He was drafted to be a child soldier on Earth but worked his way up the ranks and survived the Ghana Wars. Afterwards he emigrated here in search of a better life. Came with his sister. Because of the implants he’d gotten from the Africa Pact, he got a job protecting harvesters down on the surface. When the corrupt territorial government fell to pieces, and his sister was killed during the food riots, he rose up and defeated the lawless gangs who had turned everything to chaos.”
As Shade spoke, the pictures flipped through a slide show, but every image of Warlord was either a stylized piece of artwork, a propaganda shot, or an election poster. It was apparent that he maintained a very well-cultivated image.
“Warlord brought peace, order, and prosperity to Big Town, saving hundreds of thousands from death in the process. He’s the hero of the orbital, and he’s run this place with an iron fist ever since.”
“Huh,” Katze said, not satisfied.
“Yeah, one of those types.” Bushey had seen plenty of dictators. “I’m sure he bleeds like the rest of us.”
“Maybe,” Tui said. “You never know what kinds of mods he’s got.”
“This is a friendly visit,” the captain said. “You’ll need to smile, Bushey.”
Bushey smiled. It was a slightly hideous thing.
“Tremendous,” the captain said. “We’ll make sure to put you out front when the shooting starts.”
The others chuckled. Except for Shade, who just kind of scowled, and then continued her briefing.
“That’s the official version of events. In reality, I can confirm almost nothing about him. The faction he fought for collapsed, and their record keeping was spotty even before that. His personal infosec is top tier. Not even Jane could crack it. Compared to the gangs who fought over Big Town after the territorial government collapsed, he’s probably an improvement. From all available intel his rule is strict, but the people are decently cared for. He keeps getting reelected…by an inevitable landslide, with a hundred and ten percent voter turnout.”
“He sounds like a real peach,” said Katze.
“Actually, he’s rather charming in person. However, this is where it gets interesting.” The image changed to an extremely complicated looking chemical compound. “This is CX. I won’t confuse Jackson by trying to pronounce its actual name. What you need to know is that it’s very costly to synthesize, but is required in large quantities for gate operation, which makes it an exceedingly valuable commodity. The precursor agents are only found in a handful of places in known space. Swindle is one of them.”
“But it’s not like the others.” said the captain. “Swindle’s has the highest quality.”
Shade changed the holo to a map of the sector. There were a lot of different color border lines clashing here. “After the territorial government was deposed, the ISF, the Syndicate, and the Pact all made claims on this system.”
Their broker waited for that to sink in, because those were the three most powerful alliances in human history. As mankind had spread across the stars, most new worlds had remained independent, but a few had united to form powerful defensive coalitions. When superpowers butted heads, things could get very ugly.
“It’s currently listed as a disputed territory on the registry of planets and Big Town isn’t recognized as a legitimate government by anyone respectable. Hence the arms embargo. However, should one of the major powers attempt to take Swindle by force, the others would have no choice but to send fleets in response. If the flow of Swindlen CX is interrupted, it could have dire economic ramifications, so they each only keep a token presence here.”
“Let me guess,” said Bushey. “As long as the Warlord keeps CX production up, selling to all of them, the superpowers are happy to keep it to a cold war, and they leave him alone to run his little kingdom.”
“Very good,” said Shade. “And if Warlord were to openly side with any of them, the other two competitors would be forced to act. So he plays all three…You’re smarter than I originally assumed, Mr. Bushey.”
“Eh, you do enough merc contracts for dictators, you learn their games.”
Tui said, “No offense, Captain, but I gotta ask. Why’d you decide to start doing business with this guy? I thought the policy was to support each individual’s right to protect themselves and their property, governments be damned. Ruthless dictators aren’t our normal customers.”
That was the code. And the captain did more than give lip service to that ideal—he’d risked life and limb to make sure others had the tools they needed to defend themselves.
“Show them the thing, Shade.”
She flipped the holo. From the way the viewpoint was bobbing along, and the labored breathing, this clip was obviously from a helmet cam, and whoever was wearing it was running for their life. The view flashed across rough terrain, craggy rocks, and roots so gigantic they had to be climbed over. When the camera panned up, it showed a thick canopy of supermassive branches, densely covered in colorful leaves.
“This is from the surface of Swindle. You can find raw CX on other worlds, but it is exceedingly rare, and always lower quality. But on Swindle, it’s comparatively common and pure, the result of a complicated biological process by an organism that lives on the bark of those trees. A process that nobody has been able to replicate anywhere else. Thus, teams of harvesters drop down to the surface to collect the CX, and then get out of there as fast as they can, because of—”
Then there was an earsplitting screech from the holo, so primal and angry it made Jackson instinctively flinch.
“Those,” Shade finished.
The camera jerked up as something incomprehensibly large leapt between the trees. Despite being so vast, it was lightning quick. Jackson had seen elephants and mammoths grown from the original Earth DNA in person. This thing appeared to be far bigger than that but ran and jumped like a monkey. There was a flash of what had to be meter-long mandibles, as the camera was scooped up, the harvester thrashing through the air, and dropped, screaming, into what looked like a circular pit of quivering knives. Shade paused it there.
“That’s a mouth,” Katze said incredulously. “Those are teeth.”
“Yes. And you can be thankful I stopped before the mastication process started. It’s rather…grisly.”
“Dear lord,” said Tui.
“I doubt your god dwells on the surface of Swindle, Mr. Fuamatu,” said Shade. “It’s a rather unpleasant place.”
The captain laughed. “
That right there should accentuate why I decided to start running weapons to these folks. Believe it or not, I’m told that one’s medium-sized. They also come in large, extra-large, and jumbo. Workers were going down to pick flowers in hell no matter what. Their casualty rate was insane, but since the pay’s good there are always more hungry immigrants from Earth showing up to replace them. The only thing the ISF had allowed these people for protection down there were some old, worn out, T7 Jackals.”
Jackson just shook his head. Those were light scout mechs from the Africa Pact. They were relatively fast, but their armament was negligible, and they were fragile enough that whatever that thing was in the video, it would pop them like a grape. Something as tough as the Citadel on the other hand…As fast as that creature appeared to be, you’d want to jack in—fly-by-mind—to be able to chase that thing, bounding from tree to tree, total commitment, fire and fury. It would be a challenge, a real hunt to remember…But then he dismissed that tempting thought, because those days were behind him. He was never going to risk plugging in again.
“Shade introduced us a few years back. Warlord made his case. Screw the ISF and their silly rules. So I started selling them stuff, though nothing nearly as advanced as what we’ve scored this trip. With proper kit, fewer workers get eaten, and we get paid. It’s been a good arrangement. And now Warlord’s got himself quite the shopping list, most of which we can check off with this shipment.”
They accelerated toward Swindle until they were doing close to a hundred and thirty-two thousand kilometers per hour. The planet was easy to pick out from this distance. It was a much larger dot than all the surrounding dots. It also had a slight green tinge. Sensing their curiosity, the captain enlarged the view of the planet on the main display. It was covered with swirls of white and green clouds with red-and-brown-flecked land peeking up from below. The oceans were so blue they were nearly purple.
“So it is as nasty as they say,” Katze muttered.
“A literal nightmare world,” Shade answered, “with a caustic, poisonous atmosphere, extreme temperature swings, violent storms, and best of all, incredibly deadly wildlife.”
“That doesn’t sound too bad.”
“Sounds like a party,” the captain said. “Time for lunch.”
They broke out the bags. Tui added some of his favorite snacks, little squares of chocolate with a sweet ant paste inside that was supposed to be a delicacy in the Xindalu system. They tossed the bag around in the weightless environment, enjoying the ant creams. Everyone except Shade partook. She was too busy reviewing the inventory they’d procured. She kept running her hands through her short pale hair, probably trying to decide how much she could get away with overcharging Warlord.
While he ate, Jackson got curious, pulled up the guidebook entry on Swindle, and started reading.
The planet’s official name was Lush, or at least that was the name the exploration company who had discovered it had registered it as. They’d sent back glowing reports. Pictures of waterfalls three hundred meters high. Stunning woodlands, plains, lakes, and rivers. Sunsets on magnificent beaches. Huge parts of the planet, the official report claimed, were a veritable Eden.
The citizens of the poor, overpopulated, and crowded countries of Earth had rejoiced, as they did every time a habitable planet was found.
Exploration companies got paid in shares of whatever they discovered. They sold the tracts they’d been granted and made a huge profit. The rest of the planet was ceded to various countries by the rules of the International Space Federation. The countries then distributed their claims or sold them off according to their individual laws. Soon millions of people had been buying, selling, and trading tracts of land on a planet that only about a dozen explorers had actually seen with their own eyes.
Eventually three settlement companies formed to fund the construction of colony ships to Lush. One was big enough to hold a hundred thousand people. Many spent their life savings to buy a claim, supplies, and pay for the journey. The broke and desperate bonded themselves out. They made their epic journey through the five gates, eager to claim their slice of paradise.
Except when they arrived, they found that the reports were a fraud.
Oh, it was as beautiful as the photos made it out to be. The exploration company had merely omitted some inconvenient facts, like how the atmosphere was breathable in only the most tortured sense of the word, and how everything that lived there wanted to kill you.
“Wow, these people got screwed.” Jackson closed the page, then asked Shade, “Did they ever find the executives of the exploration company?”
“No,” Shade answered, annoyed at having her paperwork interrupted. “They rolled up a number of the peons, but the ones behind it all took their money and disappeared.”
Katze had been reading too. “Imagine coming all this way, with no way to get home. A hundred thousand people stuck in a ship above this crapsack world because of a con, those poor suckers.”
“Maybe the first ones that died off, before they found CX.” Bushey snorted. “As for the rest, I’m crying big old tears for them and the gold mine they got down there. I don’t care if it does come with a few kaiju.”
“I think that’s Warlord’s take on it too,” the captain said. “Maybe you and he will get along after all.”
* * *
A couple hours later they began their approach toward the port of entry into Swindle’s sovereign space. The port was simply a spinning habitat ring with an array of cannons that moved in an orbit that kept it in a fixed position relative to Big Town.
The port control radioed the captain, who identified himself. They sent out a gremlin to verify they were just a little striker. They got a cursory scan, and that was it. It was nothing like the layers of complex security around Nivaas. Big Town simply didn’t have those kind of resources.
Not much later, the captain turned the ship a hundred and eighty degrees and began to decelerate. The force shoved Jackson into the back of his seat. Big Town’s “navy” consisted of a few civilian ships they’d welded railguns onto, but they’d still smoke anything that came toward the orbital too fast.
Katze pointed at a conglomeration of objects orbiting Swindle. “Is that it?”
“That’s Big Town and its outlying facilities,” the captain answered. “In all of its hideous, crowded awfulness. Since I’ve been here, I guess I can play tour guide.”
The central part of Warlord’s domain was the shape of a closed-off tube, almost a kilometer in diameter and over eleven kilometers long, rotating to provide the close to two hundred thousand inhabitants something akin to gravity. That part had been the original colony ship, but Jackson only knew that from reading the guidebook. It was impossible to recognize as having once been a ship now.
“When the colonists couldn’t go down, and most of them couldn’t afford to return to Earth, or didn’t have anything to go back to, they turned their bus into a space station. They started adding modules onto it and have never really stopped.”
“It sure doesn’t look planned,” said Tui.
“Only if the architect was a crazy cat lady with hoarding issues. I don’t think the builders were big on zoning regulations.”
Big Town was ugly from the outside. There were huge solar arrays, and radiators, and various other appendages sticking out of it. Some were straight, some crooked, some short, some long. It looked like a crazy tentacle monster. On this end of the orbital, a long, stationary port arm stuck out, extending for about a half a klick. With all its branches, it looked like it could accommodate several transports at a time. On the far end the inhabitants had attached a huge asteroid that was in the shape of a human ear, the lobe sticking out into space.
“The mountain there is full of ice. They recycle their water supply, of course, but they always need more to send down with the harvesters who brave the surface, and they lose even more during the CX processing. When this one’s mined out, they’ll tow over a new one from their belt. You see that
big lump there?” The captain highlighted a section on their display. “That’s the CX processing plant they built for their gold rush. Lots of security there.”
And indeed, that lump bristled with bots. Warlord’s sad little fleet was mostly positioned to protect it, because that was their moneymaker.
“And the large asteroid trailing Big Town?” Katze’s military service had been spent performing boarding actions, so of course she was the one to notice such things. “Gun platform, I assume?”
“Cheap, but effective. He’s got a number of them covering the place. The other two long orbitals in visual range are their farms. Warlord took me to one once. Think big greenhouses with high levels of carbon dioxide to help the plants grow. They’re actually kind of amazing. There’s one other big station in orbit, built out of one of the smaller colony ships, but it’s always on the opposite side of the planet. It’s run by some guy named Riku Kalteri, and they claim to be their own country.”
“They rivals?” asked Tui.
“Oh yeah. He hates Warlord, and Warlord hates him. They would have blasted each other out of the sky a long time ago, but that would force the ISF to step in, and neither of these little tinpot dictators want that to happen. I don’t supply him, and I don’t rightly know who does, but I’m sure he’s got a similar arrangement going. Kalteri has his piece of Swindle. And there are a half-a-dozen corporations jockeying to get pieces as well.”
“A lot of complications,” Katze said mused.
“It’s a powder keg,” the captain said.
“It’s money,” Shade said. “Lots and lots of money.”
Big Town control sent the captain his docking destination. They flew past three cleaning ships, collecting garbage. They flew past gremlins. They flew past a dropship on its way to the surface, probably carrying a crew of harvesters. And then they were approaching their designated bay. They moved in gently. Their approach was textbook. Once they were close, mechanical arms reached out, attached, and dragged them the rest of the way. A moment later there was a thump as they locked on.
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