Gun Runner

by Larry Correia

  Jackson looked over at the kid, Wulf, who was watching him, hand on the pistol in his belt. “Move, and you die.”

  Jackson lifted up his bound hands to show he wasn’t going anywhere.

  The kid was distracted though. He was obviously distraught and his eyes kept flicking back toward the display. Jackson saw the others on camera, some trying to stabilize Buzz Cut enough to move her to safety, while the others formed a defensive perimeter. He could probably rush the kid, knock him down, then close the airlock to buy him some time…but to go where? There was the little hospital. Maybe he could make it back there, get something out of one of the drawers and pick the lock at his belt. Or a scalpel might be enough to cut these carbon cords.

  And then what? Take Alario or Leon or one of the other kids hostage?

  That was no kind of plan, so he waited and watched the displays.

  His mind replayed the scene. A thin blonde girl, schlepping her way home. Coughing up dark wetness from burning lungs. If she’d been captured on the raid, she’d been a gift from Warlord. Had to be. Sent back and blown up. Had she even suspected that she’d been wired?

  A little flame of anger ignited inside Jackson’s guts. What if everything the old woman had been telling him was true? He thought about the riot up in Big Town, the video of the kids in the trees, the injured people he’d seen, the hunt.

  Primal, Warlord had said.

  And he suddenly knew she was telling the truth.

  The hospital and the kids in it weren’t any kind of sham. These people weren’t terrorists or claim strippers. They were mothers and daughters. Orphans. Fathers. Sons. Husbands and wives. Just trying to settle and use their land.

  Something shifted inside him. Something deep. Something solid. His little flame of anger got hot. Anger at Warlord. But mostly anger at himself.

  I should have known.

  He looked at the camera feed and watched as the Originals carried their fallen soldier back. His opportunity to escape was dwindling, but Jackson knew he wasn’t going to run.

  They carried Buzz Cut through the door. Her clothes were shredded, her skin was black, bubbled, and burnt. Some spots had been fried right off, exposing the painful, red flesh underneath. They hustled her past him, yelling for their doctor, heading for the hospital, but Jackson had seen this before. Her burns were beyond third-degree. He suspected she was dead, or soon would be.

  “Seal the airlock, Wulf, and watch the prisoner,” Beard Man ordered as they rushed past.

  “I will, Father.”

  Jackson watched them go. The hallway fell silent. Some animal hooted in the distance outside. Jackson turned. The airlock was open. He could see a slash of shade and a sunlit stretch of ground beyond. He looked at the room off to the side for decontamination. Looked at the one with suits and masks hanging in tidy rows.

  The kid, Wulf, moved over, pulling his pistol from his pants. “Don’t you even think about it! Stay right there.” He had a German, or maybe Dutch accent, and he made the terrible decision to use the gun’s muzzle to push Jackson back. “I’ll kill you where you sta—”

  Except Jackson wasn’t in the mood, so he head-butted Wulf right in the nose.

  He wasn’t an augmented hand-to-hand combat master like Tui, but nobody who came up in a Gloss refugee camp was a slouch when it came to giving or taking a hit. Wulf went down hard, the pistol bouncing from his hand.

  By the time Wulf realized what was going on, Jackson had already bent down, retrieved the gun, and was standing over him.

  The kid wiped his bloody nose, realized he was screwed, but glared at Jackson, defiant. “Do it then! Shoot me, coward!”

  The kid had some spunk, he’d give him that. Jackson turned back to the airlock, shuffled over to the door controls, and punched the close button.

  The doors sealed with a quiet hiss.

  Jackson spent a few seconds working the tape off his mouth. When it finally came free with some skin from his lips, he tossed it to the ground. “I’m not going to kill you.” He dropped the pistol’s magazine, then racked the slide to eject the round in the chamber, before tossing it back to the surprised teenager. He stepped back to the spot where the boy had told him to stay and waited. “But for the record, I’m no coward. You tell your leader that. You tell her we need to talk.”

  Because the whole picture had changed. He had no idea what was coming but running sure as hell wasn’t part of it.

  Chapter 22

  Sheepishly, Wulf retrieved his gun, reloaded it, and then tried to stop his nosebleed. The door guards came back, heard Wulf’s report—which to his credit, was an honest one—and then watched him warily. Jackson leaned against the wall and silently waited for the return of the decisionmakers.

  Sometime later the old woman and the man with the beard came back, looking stern. “You’re supplying him. You’re killing us, Sergeant Jack. You’re killing us.”

  “He disarmed Wulf and could have escaped, ma’am, but he stuck around,” the guard informed her.

  “That was his mistake, then.” She walked over and pushed the code to open the door.

  “He struck you, boy?” Beard Man asked angrily.

  Wulf nodded. “Sorry. He got the drop on me and took my weapon. He could have killed me.”

  Jackson said, “I could have killed him, suited up, and walked right out that door. But like I’ve been saying this whole time, I never wanted to hurt you people.”

  The woman pulled her pistol from its holster and motioned with it for Jackson to move into the airlock.

  “I’ll go without a fuss. If you want, I’ll even stand still when I’m fifteen meters out so you have an easy shot. But before I do, you need to hear what I have to say.”

  “Didn’t we put tape on his mouth?” Beard Man asked.

  “I have information you need,” Jackson said. “Because soon, if you aren’t prepared, Warlord is going to roll you up like cheap carpet.”

  “Move.” Beard Man pointed his rifle at him.

  “It’s your heads,” Jackson said.

  That got him speared in the guts with the rifle’s muzzle. It was a painful blow, and Jackson doubled over. Before Beard Man could strike Jackson again, the leader held up her hand to stop him. That hadn’t been because of sympathy or mercy. She simply wasn’t in the mood to play.

  “You’re going to be invaded.”

  “Warlord has tried before.”

  “What are there, a few thousand of you? But you’re broken up into little cells like this one, hiding in places like this, spread across the whole planet?”

  She didn’t move, didn’t blink, gave no indication whether he was close or out in the weeds.

  “They’re going to come through the mists. They’re going to come at night. You won’t have a chance.”

  Beard Man scoffed. “Really? We’re going to listen to this?”

  The old gal said, “He’s tried to invade many times. But there’s nothing to invade.”

  “Standard asymmetric tactics,” Jackson said. “I get it. But I saw the exos and mechs Warlord has. Good for security. Good for holding off monsters for a few days and then going home. Not so much for prolonged offensives. Not in terrain as tough as this. They’re too hard to supply, too hard to maintain. When he tries to root you out, I bet all you have to do is run, hide, and bide your time.”

  “Thus far, that is correct. What’s he going to do? He can’t bomb us without endangering the groves. The air eats his gunships.”

  “It won’t be from the sky. It’ll be up close. He’ll come at you with something that has the strength of a Glossian brigade.”

  “He can’t support that many troops from Big Town,” Wulf’s father snapped. “They already have food shortages.”

  “Not the number, but the equivalent combat power. He’s got something new. You can’t run from this thing. You can’t hide. He’ll pick off your cells one by one. And be able to operate down here with impunity, for as long as he feels like, and I doubt very much you’ve g
ot anything with the firepower to stop him.”

  The old woman’s mood shifted from anger to listening. “What the hell did you sell him?”

  “One of the most advanced mechs in history.”

  The Originals shared a nervous glance. You didn’t need to be a pilot, keeping up on the latest designs, to have a grasp about just how dangerous those were. A top-tier mech could sway battles between real armies. A half-ass militia was nothing to them.

  “Yeah, whatever you’re thinking it’s capable of? It’s worse. They’ll just be shadows until it is too late. They’re going to comb these woods, find you, and kill you. They’ve got armor that will eat anything you’ve got, and sensors you can’t avoid. This won’t be an army you can outfight or outwit. Think of a tank crossed with a ninja, that sees all and knows all, that can deploy for months on end. They’ll slip into these woods, to wait and watch. Once they’ve mapped every one of your hidey holes, your people will start to vanish.”

  “We’ve taken on mechs before,” she said.

  “Not like these. These are your meteors hurtling at the planet. They are your extinction-level event.”

  “He’s lying,” Beard Man said, but Jackson could hear the doubt in his voice.

  “No, I’m not. I’m the one that procured and delivered the system. I know what I’m talking about.” He looked at the woman. “I’m Sergeant Jack, remember?”

  She knew his history. Knew his expertise. Knew what he’d been able to do.

  She asked, “Fifth gen?”

  He nodded. “Like nothing you’ve ever seen before. Light-years beyond the one I used against the Collective.”

  “Before, you kept saying they, as in multiples…”

  “He’s got two. A Citadel we delivered him, and a Spider supplied by I don’t know who else. Either one would be enough to totally gut your resistance.”

  She considered that for a long time. “So now what? You’ve absolved yourself, so I can walk you out, shoot you in the back, you can die guilt-free?”

  “You could…Or you could let me help you.”

  “No way. He’s a plant.” Wulf’s father stared cold intent down the barrel of his rifle, just one trigger pull away from blowing Jackson’s head off.

  The old woman stood there, thoughtful. This was clearly a leader who wasn’t easily swayed. If she’d stayed on Gloss instead of trying to colonize Swindle, she probably would have wound up as one of their officers.

  After a minute of consideration, she pushed the button to shut down the airlock. The mechanism engaged, and the door swung shut with a quiet sigh…that probably matched the sigh of relief Jackson tried to hide.

  “I wasn’t lying when I said my captain has a code, or at least I do. I swear I didn’t know what all was going on here. What I just saw…” He nodded toward the displays. “Booby-trapping a kid? That’s evil. I regret that we supplied him, but now that I know, I can’t let him use what I helped get him do more stuff like that. Give me a chance to undo what I’ve done.”

  “Let me kill him,” Beard Man said.

  “Hold on, Ragnar.” She folded her arms. “Okay, I’m listening.”

  “I took that mech from someone else. I can take it from him.”

  The woman looked at Beard Man, who was apparently named Ragnar. He curled his upper lip in disgust at the situation, then looked back at Jackson. “It’s a double-cross. We should terminate him and his entire crew.”

  “I need to think about this. We’re going to verify your mech story. If it pans out, you just might live one more day.”

  “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,” Jackson said, which was one of the captain’s favorite quotes.

  “Take him back,” the woman said.

  And Ragnar obliged.

  * * *

  They returned his pants, shirt, and shoes. They fed him. Not real food, but green military bars. They gave him water, put him in a cell, and shackled him up again. They did not reunite him with Fifi.

  The hours passed. Guards came and went in shifts. The current shift ended, and a new guard showed up, the boy he’d head-butted and disarmed.

  “Your name’s Wulf, right?”

  “It is.”

  “German?” Jackson asked.

  “Not from Earth,” the boy said, meaning he was indeed German, but from some colony.

  Jackson nodded. “Sorry about your nose.”

  “I should have shot you.”

  “I can understand that sentiment,” Jackson said. “I see you’ve been trained, but even a good soldier can get suckered. The man with the beard, that’s your dad, right? You two kind of look alike.”

  But Wulf didn’t respond. Jackson tried to make idle conversation, but the boy wouldn’t go for it, and so Jackson sat back and thought about his situation. It was not a pretty one. Assuming he got out of here alive, maybe there was a way he could get the captain to undo the sale of the Citadel, so the chances of him owning his own trading ship had dramatically shrunk. However, because there was nothing he could do about it, Jackson took a nap, dreamed of nothing, and woke sometime later.

  A female guard had replaced Wulf at the door. She was about as talkative as Wulf. So he sat there, thinking about what he’d need to do to make this right.

  Ragnar and the old lady arrived sometime later. By this point he was pretty sure she was either the main boss of all the Originals—not just this cell—or was relatively high up in whatever passed for their organization, and Wulf’s father was her right hand.

  She was wearing the same combat pants and black undershirt. The same butt-ugly Brady handgun at her hip. Only now she looked weary, worn down, and a little sad.

  He said, “The woman with the buzz cut. Kelli. She didn’t make it, did she.”

  “Salene had been a slave, working in the groves. We freed her. Kelli freed her. And took her in, raised her as her own. Because her own daughter had already been gunned down.”

  The woman let out a sigh of weariness. Of too many Kellis. Too many Salenes.

  “I’m sorry,” Jackson said.

  A beat passed, and then she changed the subject and said, “Our source says Big Town does have a Citadel, and Warlord is currently testing it out. Once he’s confident everything works right, he’ll bring it down to the surface.”

  Jackson nodded. Warlord wasn’t wasting any time. “And then you’ll all die. I can stop him. I’ve got a plan.”

  “Plans have already been made. And you have a task. You will perform that task. If you fail to perform it, you will forfeit your life. And the lives of your crew. If you succeed, then we can negotiate what happens from there.”

  He was willing to help them because it was the right thing to do, but he didn’t like the threats. “You won’t get that unit without me. That’s just the facts. You might know Big Town, but I know the Citadel. And so we’re going to have to agree on a plan together.”

  She gave him a sad little laugh. “When you’ve proven you can be trusted, we’ll take the next step.”

  “And how am I going to do that?”

  “First, deliver us the plans for that mech.”

  Now it was Jackson’s turn to laugh. “You can’t be that naïve. A fifth-gen mech isn’t something you can just fab yourself with 3D printers. They’re incredibly complex systems. Building one would be impossible here. That’s why places like Big Town have to hire people like us.”

  “Maybe,” she said. “But if we’re going to destroy his capability, then we need to be able to recognize the information on his networks when we see it.”

  “Fine. I can get you the plans. We scanned all the hardware when it was on the ship, and our Specter made copies of all the software. But you won’t need any of that if you help me sabotage that mech.”

  “You don’t tell us what to do,” Ragnar snapped.

  “How many mechs have you stolen? How many heists have you pulled off?”

  Ragnar said nothing.

  “That’s what I thought,” Jackson said. “I’m t
he one going in. Let me go. Let me get back to Big Town. I’ll use my expertise to get close, and when I’ve considered all the options, I’ll tell you the resources I need, and you’re going to give them to me. This isn’t going to work any other way.”

  “Sergeant Jack,” the old woman said. “This is the bed you made, so you’re just going to have to sleep in it. I’m not going to risk my resources. You won’t see any of them. We can work through dead drops.”

  He didn’t like running blind, but this was a step forward. They’d moved past talking about killing him, and that fact lifted Jackson’s spirits a bit. Now they just had to hammer out details. “We don’t have the time for dead drops. I’m going to need to coordinate with someone up there live.”

  “You deliver the data as a show of good faith, and then we can move to that step.”

  “Fine. But you delay more than a day or two, and your window is going to shut. The first fifth gen he’s got is supercomplicated to run, which is probably why he hasn’t used it yet. The one I brought him is so natural it practically drives itself. It won’t take him long to get comfortable with it. He doesn’t strike me as lacking confidence.”

  The woman nodded. “Very well. We can have you found by the rangers today.”

  Jackson said, “I’d like the little bot you took from me.”

  “The killer?”

  “We should keep that,” Ragnar said. “We haven’t yet cracked it.”

  The woman said, “He’s right. We should keep it. Make it yield up its secrets.”

  “Fifi isn’t going to yield up her secrets, I guarantee that.” He was willing to bet they didn’t have anyone here who could hold a candle to Jane. “More importantly, I’ll need her.”

  The old woman looked at Ragnar. He shrugged in acquiescence.

  “Fifi,” the old woman said. “That’s an odd name. What does it stand for?”

  “No idea.”

  “Very well. We shall give the bot back to you.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Don’t thank me yet. I want to believe you’ve truly seen the error of your ways. Perhaps it’s because we’re from the same place, and you were once a hero to my people, and so I find myself hoping you really are a decent man who was simply deceived. Except hope is not a strategy, Sergeant Jack. So now I’ll explain what will happen to you if you fail to perform your task or betray us.”