Gun Runner

by Larry Correia

  The tough old bird walked him over to a bed with a boy lying on it. “This is Alario.”

  Alario was around eight and missing an arm. He smiled up at them.

  “Nice to meet you,” which was the polite thing to say, even when you were in shackles.

  “They sent him and five others at gunpoint to harvest. Sent them in with masks, but no suits. In trees that hadn’t been cleared. They disturbed a wollard nest. The same creatures that swarmed you. And what was the Warlord’s policy? To leave them. To write them off as an operating cost. If we were somewhere else, we could have regrown him a new arm. But that’s beyond us currently.”

  “I’ll work hard and save money,” Alario said. “I’ll get one.”

  “That’s the spirit,” she said, then turned to Jackson. “Alario is the only one to make it out alive. Why don’t you tell our guest what happened?”

  “My friends died,” Alario said, oh so earnestly. “Hundreds of bites each. Their skin turned black.”

  The woman gave Alario’s hand a squeeze. “It was a difficult thing, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “That’s alright. You’re made of tough stuff. And you’re going to learn how to deal with wollards, aren’t you?”

  “I sure will!”

  The woman directed Jackson to another small boy sitting on the next bed. “Hello, Leon.”

  Leon looked up. He was missing an eye.

  “When he started to go blind, they took him out on a work run and left him behind. Another operating cost.”

  “I’ll work hard too,” Leon said, clearly having heard Alario’s responses.

  “I know you will,” she said kindly. “You’re going to do well. You’ll have that eye someday. And until then, you’ll help in any way you can.”

  Leon nodded, but still looked distressed. Jackson knew that look well. He’d seen it on the children on Gloss whose parents had died, who’d lived through all sorts of stress, and seen plenty of death.

  She pointed at a group of four at one of the tables. Three boys, one girl. They had a few scrapes but looked healthy enough. “We rescued those two days ago. An op coordinated with people on the inside. They were brought to Swindle without parents or guardians.”

  “Trafficked?” Jackson asked.

  “He needs little ones to get inside the trunk hollows, that’s where the purest CX is found. He makes sure there are two or three kids in every crew, to maximize yields. In a galaxy with no shortage of war, unwanted children are a bargain. You can’t imagine how many children he buys. Of course, he calls it hiring. He calls it giving them a chance.”

  “He gave me a chance,” Leon said.

  The woman didn’t correct him, but looked at Jackson, emphasizing her point.

  “My ship has never trafficked in people. Never.”

  “I believe that. But you’ve just enabled someone who does.”

  “I swear we knew nothing about that. My captain would never condone slavery.”

  “Oh, it’s so much worse than mere slavery. On their own, children make terrible slaves. The Warlord requires strong, dedicated workers. Children are cheap right now, but they are fragile, soft, and problematic.” She went to a stainless-steel cup that was sitting on one of the tables and picked a small object out of it and held it up for him to see.

  “A computer chip.”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that dried blood?”

  “Yes.”

  He looked down at the cup and saw it was full of them. A mound of chips. He began to get a bad feeling.

  “Soft and problematic,” she repeated. “But that’s nothing a cerebral implant can’t fix.”

  “No way.” Warlord was probably a lot worse than the captain had realized, but that was crazy evil. “You’re trying to tell me he’s programming kids’ brains to make them better laborers?”

  “Hard-working and obedient.” She shook her head sadly.

  Jackson frowned. He was very familiar with the tech. Hampson devices worked by recording the neural impulses of people learning an activity, and then taking those prerecorded impulses and delivering them straight into another person’s brain. Once those pathways were cut, they made learning those specific skills far more efficient. Combine one of those with implants that stimulated the pleasure centers of your brain and rewarded you for success…Oh yeah, he was very familiar. That was how he had learned to run a mech so well, so quickly.

  “I don’t believe you. That tech is way too expensive and complicated.”

  “This isn’t the same. This is the new, cheap, bootleg, easily abused version. And he’s not teaching them astrophysics or how to run complex machines. He’s teaching them to do what their overseers tell them without question, and then fearlessly work themselves to death while the implant floods them with endorphins.”

  She shuffled him to the end of the row where they looked down at a number of kids wearing breathing masks with shaved and bandaged heads.

  “We don’t know if these will make it. The wetware he uses is aggressive. We tried the best we could to remove it, at least with our limited tech and expertise, but it is better if you catch it early. It was running riot in their brains.”

  He’d seen that before. Firsthand.

  “You know exactly what kind of slaveware I’m talking about, don’t you…Sergeant Jack?” It had been a while since he’d heard that name. “You’re practically an expert on slaveware.”

  He paused. “Yeah, from the slave’s end.”

  “I kept up on the news from home. That’s where I’d seen you. Sergeant Jack. One of Gloss’ heroes. The man who saved Pilling almost singlehandedly. And here he is in the flesh, selling arms to the biggest slavemaker in the thirty worlds. How ironic.”

  All the pilots had held the rank of warrant, but Sergeant Jack was what the propaganda guys had started calling him, so the name had stuck. The people had loved his story. A young, handsome orphan kid ends up driving the most badass machine on the planet and kicking the snot out of the evil Collective on their behalf. He’d been on recruiting posters. Kids had spray-painted his name as graffiti on Collective walls, just to piss them off.

  “Offworld ex-pats even made an anime about you and your trusty T-Bolt. The Savior of Pilling, putting metal boot to Collective ass on behalf of Mother Gloss.”

  “Yeah…I heard about it.” It was on the net, but he hadn’t ever watched it. “Sorry to disappoint you, lady, but there’s what was in the news, and then there’s what actually happened.”

  “I like to stay informed about my home world. I heard about how Sergeant Jack was compromised and sent to kill his own people. Sent to slaughter those he’d saved. We all wept when the bastards corrupted Sergeant Jack and turned him against us.”

  The image rose in his mind. His friends frozen there, immobilized by terror, as he cut them down. And then he’d gone into Pilling and Bryce and Red Valley and killed so many.

  He blew out a heavy sigh at the memory of that darkness. “We know now the Collective brought in a top-tier, offworld hacker to write the program for them. It cost them a fortune, but we were that much of a pain, and we were just too damned hard to kill the old-fashioned way. They came in through our net, our antique mech firewalls never had a chance, and then they got in our heads…So yeah, I know about slaveware, more than you can ever imagine.”

  “But you broke their hold. You escaped.”

  Jackson said nothing. He’d fought back, but it hadn’t done a damn thing. It had been like steel tendrils in his mind. He’d only escaped because of the captain, and because Jane was better at her job than the Collective’s hacker had been at his.

  “You were one of the ones who made it, Sergeant Jack. And now you’re working for a coldhearted son of a whore who employs some nasty variety of the same technology. On children.”

  Jackson looked at the kids. Part of him felt anger, but another part wondered if this was some sham. Who knew what had actually brought them here? And why was she show
ing him these kids anyway?

  “You said he gets kids cheap, but surely bots would be cheaper.”

  “He tried bots. But half-a-dozen species go nuts when inorganics are used in the trees. He ended up with a lot of broken bots and wasted CX. I’m sure he could have figured it out eventually—he’s cruel, not stupid—but then he decided tree duty was a good way to separate those who were worthy from those that weren’t. It was primal, he said. A way to select for the tough future citizens of Big Town.”

  Primal. Warlord seemed to like that idea a lot. “I see.”

  “Do you though? Did you even check our claims before you chose his side?”

  “What claims? We didn’t even know you people existed!” Jackson was starting to get really angry, at himself for getting into this, and at her for the cheap emotional manipulation. “I don’t fix the deals. And I don’t work for the Warlord.”

  “No, you just load and unload the weapons and tell yourself you’re above it all. What they do with them is none of your business, right?”

  “We have standards in the types of clients we take on,” he insisted.

  “You only serve rapists, slavers, and thieves, is that it?” she asked with disgust. “We’ve reported volumes to the ISF. All his atrocities are there in the records. Easy pickings for anyone who wants to look. And if you’d looked, you would have found the authorities had confirmed the registration of our land claims.”

  He snorted. “Who trusts the ISF? You expect me to believe the bureaucratic goon squad who sided with the Marxist death cult that murdered our home planet? Oh, I’m sorry. You weren’t there for that part. Their reports are nothing but propaganda. It’ll be a nice day on Swindle before I believe anything the ISF says.”

  But Jackson began to wonder if the captain and Shade had been hoodwinked. Or had they just turned a blind eye? Shade, maybe. The captain wouldn’t do that. Just the insinuation made him angry enough to raise his voice.

  “I don’t know the details of your screwed-up situation. I do know the ISF is corrupt and stick their dirty fingers into pies where they don’t belong. I know their so-called reports are full of malicious garbage. And you expect me to ignore that and trust them this time? Oh hell no.”

  “I’ll grant you some of the ISF is corrupt. But some of every organization is corrupt to some degree or another. The plain fact is that you either didn’t care because it didn’t matter who you were arming, or you did learn the truth, but decided not to care.”

  “Or the real one, I watched half my planet die, defenseless, because they were denied the ability to protect themselves, so I’m not a real big fan of the ISF declaring who I can and can’t sell weapons to. If you’re counting on the big benevolent space government to come save you, you’re gonna be sorely disappointed.”

  Her face turned hard. “I expected better of you, Sergeant Jack. You of all people should have known.”

  “Well, now I do. So either let me go or execute me.”

  The kids were all staring at him.

  “Gag him and take him to the surface,” she said.

  And Jackson realized he’d just lost that negotiation.

  * * *

  They put a seal strip over his mouth and shuffled him out of the room with the children. They went down a different tunnel to some stairs.

  “Up,” the bearded man gave him a shove.

  Jackson began to hike the stairs, little baby steps up because of his ankle restraints. They were going to kill him. He had nothing left to lose. When his opening came, he needed to be ready. His mind began to churn the possibilities.

  His wrists and ankles were tied. If he broke away, he figured he probably had a ninety-nine point nine percent chance of getting shot in the back. If he did somehow elude them and got outside, he figured he had an even higher chance of being killed by one of the hyperaggressive residents. Good luck streaking through the woods in his socks and underwear. That was definitely a proposition with tremendous odds for survival. And without a respirator he’d drown in his own blood within an hour anyway, so he had that going for him too.

  Jackson and his captors finished the first flight of stairs and turned for another.

  Running was out. Fighting was out. What he needed to be doing was talking, but that was a might difficult with his mouth glued shut.

  They finished the next flight of stairs. The teenager opened a bulkhead door and marched Jackson through into a section with warmer air. They closed the door behind them and shuffled him along the hall to another flight of stairs. Jackson baby-stepped his way toward certain doom. When they got to the top, there was a landing, and a final bulkhead door. Buzz Cut opened it and ordered him through. The hallway here was short. At the end were two rooms. As he approached, the lights in them turned on.

  One room held a decontamination unit. In the other hung a line of masks and suits.

  Okay…that beat the socks-and-underwear plan.

  There was an airlock past decon. Which meant that was his path out of this base and into the lovely, lung-eating atmosphere.

  Now all he had to do was figure out how to take out several armed partisans, while tied up. Worse, there were more guards posted here. Which made sense for them but sucked for him.

  There was a nearby wall display divided into twelve equal-sized squares, each displaying a feed from a different camera. The views included all sorts of angles on the woods. One of the cameras belonged to something that was moving slowly along a branch. Another belonged to something floating in the air. He figured all that was so they didn’t inadvertently exit their secret lair and run into a pack of caliban or a Big Town patrol.

  “Are we clear?” the old woman asked.

  “We’re clear,” said one of the guards.

  Beard Man went to the room with masks and grabbed one for everyone but Jackson. They began putting them on.

  They were going to escort him outside—probably just far enough if his remains were found it wouldn’t endanger their secret entrance—and then leave him to die.

  The man with the bandage, which Jackson hoped was a result of a love slash from Fifi, went over to open the airlock door and began to push in a code. As he did, the woman with the buzz cut gasped.

  “Salene!”

  All of them turned to see that she was staring at the security feeds. There was movement at the bottom corner. The camera showed a wooded hill with a run of rocks up one section of its slope. Making her way with a branch as a makeshift crutch was a blonde girl. She was dragging one leg and looked to be in her early teens. Thin, and coughing. Holding her hand directly to her mouth because she wore no mask.

  “Open the door!” Buzz Cut said. “Open it!”

  “Careful, Kelli,” the old woman warned. “It could be a trap.”

  “Salene was just captured on the raid. She must have escaped,” said the teenager. “We have to help her.”

  “Hold,” their leader ordered even though her people were obviously terrified. “She can’t be a howler. It’s too soon. We’ll get her, but we have to be safe. Recheck all the feeds and look for rangers tailing her. Wulf, run a scan and see if she’s got a tracker on her.”

  The teenage boy went to the wall and started performing a sweep.

  Jackson stood there, temporarily forgotten, as the Originals rushed into action. The girl was clearly one of their own. Buzz Cut, or Kelli probably, was clearly freaking out.

  Some creature glided down maybe five paces behind the girl. It landed and then scuttled forward a bit. It was maybe two feet tall. A hideous bat-monkey mix.

  “Open the door!” Buzz Cut cried.

  Another one of the bat monkeys glided down. And then a third.

  “Lord, no,” Buzz Cut said, her voice full of alarm.

  “No signals!” Wulf shouted.

  “Wait!” the old woman shouted, but Bandage Guy didn’t heed her. The airlock unsealed with a soft hiss. Buzz Cut pushed him aside and yanked on the door.

  “Kelli, don’t. Let us see if she’s b
een rigged.”

  But she ignored the command, her face full of worry, a mother’s fear. She ran across the airlock and started working the controls on the other side, in such a rush that she didn’t even close the door to decon behind her.

  “Stop her,” the old woman growled.

  “Kelli Kochan! Stand down!” Beard Man demanded and strode in after her. He grabbed her arm and tried to pull her away, but she elbowed him sharply in the chest and knocked him back, then she pushed on the door on the other side of the airlock.

  The exterior hatch opened.

  A small whoosh of air blew past Jackson and into the airlock, and he realized there was positive air pressure pushing out of the base to keep the caustic air from flowing in. The two men shouted at her, but she slipped out the door.

  Jackson turned toward the display.

  The girl was visible from a couple of angles now, hobbling as fast as she could. Some of what looked to be rocks were simply the cleverly disguised door, which now stood open. A hole in the slope. He could see Buzz Cut running toward the girl.

  Two of the bat monkeys hesitantly scuttled closer to the girl. The third leapt at Buzz Cut, gliding through the air. But Buzz Cut Kelli had drawn her sidearm and shot the creature, eliciting a screech. The creature veered off and flopped to the ground.

  The girl saw Buzz Cut, and her face scrunched up like she was going to cry. “Mom!”

  “Salene! Stay there. I’m coming.”

  And then there was an explosion. A huge, deafening bang. A flash of light that overpowered a number of the cameras. One moment the girl was there. The next, dust and debris and a small wave of heat blasted through the airlock doors. Bandage and Beard Man were thrown back.

  Jackson took an involuntary step backward and turned to protect his face. When the flash was gone and the camera adjusted again, it showed the slope. Buzz Cut had been flung several meters from where she had been. And where the girl had stood, the ground was scorched in a blast pattern. There were bits and pieces strewn here and there.

  The old woman made a small moan of despair. “No.” Then she rushed into the airlock and past the men. The display showed her exiting and running down the slope to where her soldier had gone down. Buzz Cut’s mask was gone. Her clothes were smoldering. The guards followed her.