The temperature here was cooler than in the dropship. Jackson’s air quality meter dipped a bit but was still green.
Katze observed how the bodyguards fanned out and formed a perimeter. “You still have security issues down here?”
“We’re in the CX business. We have security issues everywhere. Everybody wants some.”
It was taking Jackson a moment to find his feet. The gravity here was lighter than Earth standard, but the air pressure was much higher. Maybe that was the reason megafauna flourished on this planet? He didn’t know. There hadn’t been a real strong science curriculum at Tent City High School for Orphans and Refugees.
They walked down a little corridor deeper into the mountain. Warlord patted one of the walls as he walked. “The stone gives great protection against the extreme weather and all of the hyperterritorial things that live here.”
“And protection from prying eyes in space,” Tui said over Jane’s net.
“We have a few stations like this. At any given time, there are only a couple thousand of us on the surface. Mostly rangers, who stage from here to scout for groves, and the techs who support them. They rotate in and out, a week at a time. We tried building lower down, in the arboreal areas where the CX is harvested, but the kaiju would simply swarm them. We lost a lot of people those first years. Up here, we are mostly safe from the big ones, but down in the valleys below is where the money’s made.”
They reached an elevator that two of Warlord’s men were holding open. It was a gigantic thing. Large enough for fifty people. The doors closed and they descended for a very long time.
“The rangers use exos for speed and concealment. They find groves and mark the targets when they are ready. Unfortunately harvesting is noisy and draws the planet’s ire. So we drop the harvesters in, along with a mech to protect them, gather as much CX as we can before the predators swarm, and then get it back to Big Town.”
Jackson’s air meter was still showing safe. “Everything’s filtered in here. Why did we need to mask up?”
“Because you are my guests, and I would not lose you to an accident. When a seal corrodes, and they inevitably do, the results can be rather sudden. Sometimes burrowers will dig their way in. Swindle destroys everything eventually. This planet is manifest entropy. You may see some of the workers inside the mountain without their masks on, but believe me, they still keep them close at hand.”
Then the elevator stopped, and the doors opened onto a large, well-lit commons. There were people in various uniforms there, all of them a little frayed or stained, talking to each other or walking to some other destination. The place had that rough, decaying feel of a frontier outpost. The furniture and fixtures were industrial prefabs or 3D prints. Jackson got the feeling these people worked hard for a living.
When they saw Warlord emerge from the elevator, they all stopped and came to attention. He gave a casual nod of greeting as he walked through them. From the body language Jackson guessed the workers’ reactions ranged from awe to nervous fear. Either way, it was obvious Warlord wasn’t the sort of boss who went out for a beer after work with his employees.
The group entered a guarded hallway and left the commons behind. They came to a room with a full bank of windows that looked out over the landscape. It gave them a fine view of the forested hills and valleys far below.
Tui whistled. “Majestic.”
There were mists that prevented Jackson from seeing more than a few kilometers out, but he was able to see a flock of white bird-looking things flying in the distance. They had very long tails.
“From here you can see the area we have cleared. It’s not much. Plus the plants grow so quickly that we have to flamethrow the perimeter daily. I’ve been hesitant to try genetically targeted defoliant because it may endanger the CX production. There is much we do not understand about the biology of Swindle.” He pointed at a bunker near the summit. “Those are protective gun batteries up on the side of the mountain, although the mists sometimes limit their range.”
“I thought you didn’t want to attract attention,” Katze said.
“That’s for the rangers out in the unsecured zones. If something starts climbing up here, we kill it.”
“Even one of those big ones you were talking about?” Jackson asked.
“Short of using nuclear weapons, those are exceedingly difficult to kill. Luckily for us, they do not seem to like the altitude.” Then Warlord pointed toward the mist-shrouded valleys. “Those are the manaloa groves. That’s where we harvest our CX, and where we will be doing our hunting.”
“I like the sound of that,” Katze said.
“Yeah,” Bushey sent over the net, “it’s perfect if he wants us to have a hunting accident.”
“If he wanted us dead he would’ve just poisoned these respirators,” Tui sent back. “That would be a lot less work.”
“I don’t know, Chief. He seems like the kind of psycho who likes the personal touch. If he goes all Most Dangerous Game on us I’m gonna say I told you so.”
“Come, my friends. Let’s get you all suited up.”
* * *
Sam Fain received a call from his boss down on the surface.
“What did you find?”
“None of the cameras caught what went on behind those bushes. It’s a blind spot. I find that curious.” They’d had enough time to exchange a message with James Overturf though, and even though the bracelets hadn’t caught anything, it was still nagging at Fain. It was obvious that this crew had some method of silent comms going on that his hackers couldn’t crack, so it still could have been a coordinated meet.
“You did your research?”
“Lots of fake IDs and dead ends. Just as we found before.”
“Which is expected for people in their line of business.”
Fain wasn’t so sure about that. He’d spent enough years first working for the Russians and then freelancing that he’d seen a lot of clandestine ops. This felt like a government cover. Nicholas Holloway’s jacket was too good. The Americans should have promoted him to admiral, not run him off because of a scandal. Julie Thomas’ family was too rich and connected for her to end up slumming it across the outer edge of space with a bunch of smugglers. His gut was telling him this was some kind of setup.
“I pulled the military records for the big islander and the woman from Amon. Nothing too unexpected there, provided they’re not totally fabricated, but the kid’s from Gloss. That was one nasty civil war. The place is a real mess now. Hard to get any concrete data out of it at all.”
“He is what he says he is.”
Fain figured the boss would know. “You want me to just poke around what’s left of Gloss’ net and ask about their mech pilots?”
“There were not many. He will be known.”
“I still don’t trust these people.”
“Tell me when you actually find something.” Warlord ended the call.
Fain leaned back in the seat and began to go over his reports again. These Tar Heel morons were going to slip up. Everyone did. And when they did, the puzzle pieces would fall into place.
* * *
Jackson walked out of the hugely reinforced door at the base of the mountain wearing an exo. The entire hunting party was suited up in exos that had been borrowed from the Big Town rangers. Jackson’s suit smelled like its regular user smoked cigarettes, an archaic habit that was still popular among some cultures that saw it as a tough-guy habit. To spacers used to living in recycled oxygen environments it was seen as a foolish affectation. Jackson’s peers drank or chewed their bad habits.
He stepped out onto a rough road, the gravel crunching beneath the big metal soles of his feet.
Exos worked on the same basic premise as a mech, but like most pilots, Jackson recognized they were inferior in every way…well, except for cost. There was no armor, not even a shell or a cab even, just a mechanized frame that moved with you, providing far more strength than was possible for even an augmented human. These
were older units, refurbed dockworker rigs, but they were quiet, and they had pretty good battery life.
He was carrying a Wakal pneumatic bolt rifle, which was powered by an air compressor and fed by a large magazine mounted on his back. The bolts themselves were huge, 25 centimeters long, and were launched out of a nearly meter-long barrel. Jackson was impressed. Wakals were not cheap guns. Tui and Bushey were outfitted the same way. Katze had picked out a 20mm rifle that even she wouldn’t have been able to lift without the exo.
Warlord carried a huge crossbow that must have had a three- or four-hundred-pound pull, a quiver of javelins, and two sidearms. He was the only one whose exo wasn’t borrowed, but rather he had a personal one staged for his use here. It was newer, nicer, smoother, and had been painted in some sort of white dot tribal warpaint style Jackson wasn’t familiar with. Apparently, he went on these hunting trips rather often, sometimes even going out solo.
But today he was accompanied by two members of his security detail, also in exos, and carrying jet-suppressed rifles. And just in case of emergency, they were being tailed by a mech. It was an older model Mirage, just a little three-meter-tall unit, but even then, it still packed more firepower and a far better sensor suite than the rest of their party put together.
“Alright everyone, check your HUDs. Make sure this location is tagged on your map should we become separated.”
Jackson looked at the Heads-Up Display. It was a balmy twenty-five degrees…That would be seventy-seven on the Tar Heel, since the captain still thought of temperature in American. High humidity. The air meter was red. Very red.
“We will follow this road down to the hunting grounds. That should give each of you a chance to get used to moving in these exos in this gravity.”
They took an accelerated stroll toward the manaloa groves. Warlord suggested they jog, and so they did. The combination of the light gravity and the exos meant they could take monstrous strides.
Despite their battered appearance, the exos were well maintained. The hunting party didn’t make much more noise than they would have just on foot. The key was to let the frame do all the work to conserve your energy. The former soldiers, Tui and Bushey, seemed comfortable in their rigs. Katze not as much, because most of her military experience had been ship-to-ship boarding parties and fighting in tight corridors where exos were often too big to be of use.
For Jackson, he felt like a racing driver playing with bumper cars. He had to admit he was a little jealous of the guard driving the Mirage, and often found himself glancing back over his shoulder to see how that guy was doing…He was a clumsy amateur, and obviously driving by stick, not plugged in directly. The difference between the two was night and day. Jackson hadn’t asked, but he was starting to suspect Warlord was the only man in his operation with the necessary implants to fly-by-mind.
As they got closer to the mist, Jackson saw that the trees were exceedingly tall, a hundred meters at least. They had tall narrow trunks with short branches that feathered out. Along those boughs, instead of leaves, they grew needles, but they weren’t pine needles. Instead, they were segmented and soft.
“These are the same trees those children were climbing in that video that started the riot,” Tui sent silently.
“We still don’t know if that was real or propaganda,” Katze answered. “Either way, it’s not our fight.”
Up until now all the brush had been cleared away, leaving nothing but gray stone and yellow dirt. There were small bots moving along the perimeter, occasionally blasting out streams of burning napalm to burn back the plant life. Like everything on Swindle, even the foliage was aggressive. They crossed the ashen DMZ into the thick undergrowth.
“Tread carefully, my friends. Many of these bushes have a sting to them. If it doesn’t have thorns, it probably has a nest of swarming insect living in it,” Warlord warned. “I will take point. Follow my path. Remain alert.”
There was a breeze, and, here and there, thin clumps of mist the size of houses ghosted by. The group scared up a flock of blue butterfly-looking creatures, each as big as Jackson’s hand. One landed on Jackson’s gun barrel and then sprang away again, and he saw it had a tiny snout and tusks. Farther on, they passed a scattering of what looked like birds, except they were covered in long thin hairs instead of feathers. These too had snouts.
A few minutes after that, the hunting party came to the overgrown ruins of what had once been a ten-meter-tall fence, with crumbling guard towers that now served as nests for the snout birds.
“This is from before my time, when they tried to build a fortress so the harvesters could work in safety. They were fools. Swindle cannot be tamed, only temporarily bested.”
They continued the easy jog. At one point, Warlord drew a javelin from his quiver, then ran forward, stopped, and stabbed down. A huge snakelike thing thrashed in the grass, then lay still. When it was good and dead, he called them over. It had two eyes on each side of its head. He used the top of the javelin to hold its head, then forced open its mouth with the tip of his exo’s boot.
“See those teeth? Not only are they razor sharp, they are coated in venom.”
There were no fangs, just multiple rows of very sharp teeth.
Jackson hadn’t even seen the snake-analog lying in wait. “That was pretty well camouflaged.”
“Indeed.” Warlord nodded upward. “Sometimes they like to camp in the branches, so they can dive onto their prey.”
“This planet sucks,” Bushey sent.
“What happens if we see one of those big kaiju types?” Tui asked.
“As soon as one of those is spotted, an alert is sent out. Harvesters return to their dropships and take off. Rangers, or in our case, hunters, go to ground, hide, and wait them out. Do not worry. We know where all the caves and burrows are to shelter in.”
“There were women at that pool,” Bushey sent again. “I could have been swimming.”
They continued on, but now Jackson kept a close eye on the trees and the ground. They had to slow their exos a bit because of the terrain. The silky leaves were so thick that visibility was minimal. The ground was broken and uneven, and they often had to bound over massive root bundles. This was why Warlord needed mechs. Tanks were far cheaper, better armored, and could have just as much firepower, but no tank could traverse this sort of terrain.
Meanwhile, the Mirage was effortlessly keeping up, even with its clown of a pilot. Jackson could have leapt and sprinted through this tangle, even by stick. Mind, would be no problem at all…
He sighed. Even though a connect was no longer an option for him, sometimes, like right now, he kind of missed it.
Tui startled some animal that screeched and went crashing away through the brush. From the noise and the thermal signature, it had to have weighed a hundred kilos. And they’d never even seen it. Warlord just chuckled at how they’d all flinched and continued marching.
Jackson had set foot on many different worlds since he’d signed onto the Tar Heel crew, but there was something about Swindle that was truly alien. His home world was cold and bleak and life struggled to find purchase there. Truthfully, this place didn’t look that different than the images he’d seen of Earth, just stretched out more…but there was a strange feeling to it. Something primordial. Like a vague sense of dread, as if the entire planet was subtly warning them mankind didn’t belong here.
They continued on through the thick, alien wood. A few klicks later, the Warlord said, “We’re almost there.”
“I’m getting excited,” Katze said.
“Oh, you just wait. Our hunting grounds are in the next valley.”
“What’s in there?”
“Surprises,” Warlord answered. “This way.”
“I hate surprises,” Tui said over the net, but they followed Warlord anyway.
They traveled another klick up a hill, then followed what appeared to be a game trail into a different sort of forest. Some of these had the odd, piney needles, but some were flatter. The
re were vines and undergrowth and red saw grass. And a lot more of that strange, low-hanging mist. It was a heck of a walk, and Jackson sure would have hated to do it without the exo. Another twenty minutes of hiking and they came to the edge of a wide clearing covered with gravel and stones.
“Check out the guards,” Bushey said.
Jackson glanced over and saw that their escorts were falling back a bit, and since the ground had flattened out, it wasn’t because they couldn’t keep up…The locals were getting nervous.
Warlord, on the other hand, was either fearless or possibly insane, because he didn’t seem worried in the least. Suddenly he held one fist up, signaling for them to stop. “We’re here.”
“It’s a rockpile,” Tui said.
“It’s a kinsella nest.”
“A what?” Katze asked.
“They’re named after the scientist who cataloged the species. Michael Kinsella. He was a biologist among the first settlers and attempted to study them. He lasted three hours before they ate him. Fascinating creatures. We have to thin out their population, because when a nest gets too populated, they split off and make new burrows. Often right under my harvesters’ feet.”
Katze unslung her gigantic rifle. “I don’t see any nest.”
“There’s a fat hole right in the center of this field.”
Jackson spotted it. A dark burrow.
“There are a few other holes around. Over on that edge. And there’s one down there. Let me show you.” Warlord picked up a big stone with the exo’s hydraulic grabber that extended past his real hand. Then he hurled it out into the center of the field. A moment later something earth-colored rose just a little out of one of the holes.
Tui flipped on his bolt gun. Jackson followed suit.
“They know we’re here now.” Warlord was obviously having a fine time. “Let’s see if we can’t stir them up a bit.”
He landed another rock in the middle. A moment later, a nightmare scuttled up out of the central hole.
Gun Runner Page 20