Iron Legion Battlebox

by David Ryker

I could hear Everett shifting and standing, my comment enough to get her on edge immediately. Fish gurgled again.

  “You see when he came in? Before us? After?”

  He let out a low bubbling sound. “... After…”

  “What is it, Red?” Everett asked quietly.

  “Dunno, like I said, probably nothing, but something just feels off. I mean, he could be waiting for someone, or just waiting for a flight — probably is — but I dunno. Something doesn’t feel right,” I mumbled. I could sense his eyes on me as I went back to scanning.

  “Play it cool, keep going with the scanning. We need to find that locker. Fish, do a walkthrough.” Everett’s voice was like ice. Cool. Collected.

  Fish burbled and pushed off the wall, heading for the other side of the hall, taking a route that would send him right by the guy in the dark jacket.

  Another four duds of lockers and Fish was closing in. He clicked into the mic and I looked over my shoulder. The guy in the jacket was pushing himself to a stance. He left the pad on the bench and headed for me. Fish was on his tail, correcting his course.

  “Stay cool,” Everett said slowly. “Nothing’s amiss. Fish has it and I don’t think this guy’s clocked him. Keep going. We can’t start some shit if there’s nothing to start.” It was the right thing to say, but I still felt shitty with my back to the guy in the dark jacket.

  The next locker came up with another name and I tightened my grip around the scanner to stop my hand shaking, thinking about my reach for the Arcram. I’d drop the scanner, twist low and draw, if necessary. I was on edge. Fuck, why wouldn’t I have been after what had happened? I’d had next to no sleep, my nerves were jangled, Alice was probably dead, and we had every Telmareen guard in the city looking for the mech pilots who’d just tried to knock over an Iskcara shipment.

  My jaw tensed and my eyes drifted upward to the level that I thought they’d need to be when I turned and drew. I barely noticed what had come up on the screen of my scanner, and drew it up to the next locker, almost missing the name before it changed.

  Rase Barva.

  My brain stuttered and I stopped, taking a second to register. I moved the scanner back down to the bottom locker, number 1172, and froze as the name popped up again. I cleared my throat, searching for my voice. “I’ve found it,” I muttered.

  “Good.” Everett’s voice was jilted and between breaths. She was moving, and quickly. “Open it.”

  I held the scanner to the pad and thumbed it over to the right setting before hitting the trigger. The word ‘EMULATING’ appeared on screen and I reached over and pushed my sleeve up with my other hand. There were eight digits written on my wrist. When the green bar filled the screen, the little screen on the biometric pad lit up and asked me to key in a combination. I punched it in and the locker popped open a few centimeters. I backed up and dug my fingers into the gap, catching a shadow looming over me at the last instant.

  I dove sideways, hoping to avoid a gun to the back of the head, and hoping to hell that Fish was there in time. He didn’t disappoint.

  I turned in the air, landing on my side and sliding away just in time to see a pistol flash. The guy’s jacket swirled, and Fish was next to him. Arms flailed, the gun bounced off the floor, and then the guy in the jacket sagged forward onto Fish’s shoulder, arms draped over his elbows. He looked at me for a second and then turned the guy around so his back was against the lockers, and laid him against them. He’d never even seen it coming, and even if he had, I still doubted he would have had a chance to do anything about it. Fish was fast — I knew that much from experience.

  The guy crumpled to the ground, eyes wide, hands meekly groping at his torso and the quickly growing red patch there, right where his sternum was. Fish knelt in front of him and in one smooth movement pushed the curved knife in his hand back into the sheath on his ribs, and with the other produced a little canister of something. He held it up to the guy’s chest and sprayed it right into the center of the bloody circle. It was a milky color and bubbled and expanded as it landed on the guy’s shirt and skin, hardening in a second or two.

  The patch stopped spreading. Fish stowed it and looked at me, nodding minutely. I nodded back and watched as he deftly buttoned the guy’s jacket over the blood, then folded his arms across his lap so it looked like he was sleeping. His head was already hung over and he was still. Fish had stabbed him right through the aorta and then sealed the wound. Blood was spilling out of his heart and pooling inside him. The pressure drop was so severe it’d sent him into cardiac arrest and then he’d lost consciousness all in the course of about ten seconds. If he wasn’t dead already, he would have been by the time I stood up.

  The security next to the door hadn’t even seen what had happened. There were people slumped over all around the place, sleeping, waiting for service to resume. He was just one more, and by the time anyone figured out anything was amiss we’d be long gone.

  Everett pulled up, walking briskly, and dipped her head toward me, eyebrow raised. She was asking if I was okay. I nodded back and took her proffered hand, getting to my feet. She smiled for an instant in acknowledgement and then turned to Fish. He handed her the pistol the guy had dropped, and she held it in her hands, staring at it.

  I went for the locker and opened the door, feeling it knock against the dead guy’s elbow. I ignored it as best I could and reached for the black duffle bag inside, pulling it onto the floor. I could see Everett out of the corner of my eye, still looking at the gun. Fish was going through the corpse’s jacket.

  I unzipped the bag and paused. There was a set of clothes and shoes, a stack of Credit notes bound by a rubber band, a jacket, Federation ID card with his picture, but a name that wasn’t Barva’s on it, and a pistol laid on top of a paper file. I reached for the pistol and lifted it out, feeling the weight of a full magazine. It was loaded and there was a round chambered. This was a go-bag. He was planning to leave, and in a hurry. And whoever he was planning to get away from he thought he might have to shoot. I pushed the gun into the jacket and went for the file instead, pulling it out and standing up. Everett was still looking at the gun and Fish was still in the dead guy’s pockets.

  I flicked the front page open and froze. There, staring up at me, was a photo of the last person I expected to see. It was a printed photograph of a woman — she was young, blond, with half her hair tied back, some of it spilling over her face, obscuring one of her bright blue eyes and the smattering of shrapnel scarring that ran from her neck over her jaw and up her cheek. My blood ran cold as I stared at her.

  She was wearing Federation fatigues, standing among three other people who were blocked from view by black rectangles. She was holding a rifle up, leaning it against her shoulder, a smirk of victory painted on her lips. She was standing in what looked like a warzone. Buildings were smoking behind her.

  The photograph was a file photo from the Federation, that much I could see. Something clandestine — the identities of the others had been redacted by the look of it, but there was no mistaking her. This was taken after some battle, or some mission, somewhere very far away. She didn’t look like a fresh recruit, like she’d told me she had been for the Federation, back on Draven. She looked seasoned, older somehow, but just as youthful, reveling in a hard-earned victory with her unit.

  My throat was dry. I’d let her go on Draven because I thought she was a nobody, but here she was again. The file was weighty in my hands, filled with whatever else Barva had found out, but I couldn’t stare at anything but her face. She was involved in this — in Iskcara skimming, but how? What the hell was going on?

  I knew the Free had a hand in this — they were the chief suspects in it — but her? A lowly Free grunt? Except she wasn’t just that — couldn’t be. But hell, she was just a few years older than me — and yet the date displayed on the photograph was almost a hundred years ago. My mind was spinning. It couldn’t be her — it had to be a doppelganger, or… Or something.

  I tore my gaze
from it and looked at Everett, her face grave.

  “Everett,” I croaked, barely able to muster a sound.

  She slowly looked at me. “Yeah?”

  “This is… It’s, uh…” I shook my head, gathering my thoughts. “The Free are…”

  “It’s worse than that,” she muttered. “This is a Federation standard issue Goze and Hanson — this is the pistol that the Federation supplies all Civic Guards with, right across the galaxy.”

  Fish stood up, something in his hands, and confirming Everett’s observation held up a badge that had the words “Telmareen Civic Guard” inscribed underneath the Federation’s logo.

  “This guy was a fucking Telmareen Guard,” Everett said, drawing a long breath, “which means that the Guard weren’t just getting bribed to look the other way. They’re in on whatever the hell’s going on here.”

  I nodded, piecing together what I could. “And the Free are definitely pulling the strings.”

  Everett swore. “Come on, we need to get back.”

  Fish pocketed the badge and I dropped the file back into the duffle bag and zipped it up. We all took off at pace toward the door with Everett in front, leading the way.

  Halfway there, she stopped, held her finger to her ear, and screwed her face up. “What?”

  Someone was talking to her. Must have been Volchec.

  “Jesus Christ,” Everett mumbled, taking her hand away and turning to us, eyes wide.

  “What is it?” I asked, my voice tremoring against my beating heart.

  She swallowed. “They’ve found Alice.”

  19

  When we got back to the hideout, everyone was abuzz. I say everyone — it was just Mac and Volchec — but they were moving around fast enough to make the room seem small.

  Everett pushed through first, Fish after and me behind. She opened the door and slipped in out of the drizzle and into the musty interior of the warehouse. I’d wanted to catch her and pull her aside to tell her about the blonde, but she’d been motoring, and I’d not had the right words. I was still reeling from it. I swallowed and ducked into the room, still wondering how I was going to explain it all. I had to. It would come out of the woodwork if not, and if it did, then it’d look bad. I just had to find the right time.

  The table that Volchec had been leaning on was now cleaned off, and on it was a laptop. In the middle of the table was one of the projectors that had shown us the hologram of Telmareen back on the ship. She was typing into it, and the projector was buzzing as she did, the image above it just a cluster of light, morphing and changing as she input the info. She sucked in a breath and hammered down on a key. The image spun and then transformed into a building. One that was unmistakable. It was the Telmareen Guard Tower. I swallowed and paused, looking at it.

  Everett circled the table and pulled out the pistol and the badge we’d lifted off the dead guy and put them on the table for Volchec to look at.

  I kept my fist closed around the duffle. Mac approached, seemingly having shaken off his catatonic slump, and reached out for it. I pulled it away instinctively and he stopped, looked at me like I had two heads and then grabbed it. I let it go, realizing that it wasn’t incriminating — it had a picture of someone in it that no one else had ever seen. I swallowed and forced myself to remember that. I could let this ride and just come out with the information — which was probably negligible — when the time was right.

  Mac dumped the bag on the table and unzipped it. Everett had radioed ahead as we’d headed over, filled Volchec in on what had gone down, and had in turn been brought up to speed on the Alice situation.

  She’d been processed and checked in at the Telmareen Guard Tower in our zone. And that meant that she was alive, and in holding. Though we didn’t know what state she was in. It’d taken a lot longer than we’d have thought, but there was conjecture as to why that was. The consensus was that they’d questioned her off the record as to what her intentions were, who she was working for, and why the hell she’d tried to steal an Iskcara shipment, but that they couldn’t not have her processed, or it would raise some flags.

  She was, after all, now a criminal in the Federation’s eyes. What we couldn’t work out, though, was how the Free fitted into it all. The Guard were a subsidiary of, and controlled by the Federation, so for them to be working with the Free made no sense. It meant the operation ran a hell of a lot deeper than we first thought, and that the corruption could run who knows how high in the Federation order.

  Parts of the puzzle were still missing, though. It wasn’t fitting all together yet. The Free were behind the skimming — that much was now certain. Some of the Guard were in on it too — that much we could pretty much guarantee. We guessed that they weren’t all in on it, though, as they were still keeping up appearances. They had processed Alice, after all. If they hadn’t — dead or alive — it could have meant the Free were in total control of the Telmareen Guard. There’d been a time delay between her arrest and processing, but what had happened during that time, we couldn’t say for sure.

  And the second question — the one on everyone’s minds — was that if the Free were controlling the Guard, and they were, and were therefore behind the skimming of the Iskcara, then why the hell had we been hired to steal a shipment of the stuff they already had control over?

  The file slapping on the top of the table jolted me back to reality and I stepped forward, next to Mac, across from Volchec and Everett, their features swimming beyond the hologram.

  “Son of a bitch,” Mac mumbled, opening the file and staring at the photograph. He scoffed and then pushed the file toward Volchec.

  “Jesus Christ,” Volchec said, rubbing her forehead. She spun the folder around and slid it over to Everett. She smirked at it and shook her head.

  I was missing something. “What is it?”

  Volchec dragged it back in front of her and lifted the photograph out, unclipping it from the top of the page. “This fucking bitch.” She laughed, shaking the image. “We thought she was dead. She’s been listed deceased for almost ten years.”

  “Deceased?” I croaked, trying not to give anything away. “Who is she?” I asked, hoping that they’d say ‘just some Free rebel,’ but knowing they wouldn’t.

  Volchec bit her lip for a second, collecting her thoughts, or maybe deciding whether or not she should tell me. “Her name is Kat Fox.”

  “Cat-fox?” I raised an eyebrow. I didn’t know if it was a moniker, or just a joke.

  “No, not cat, like one of those four-legged furry things — Kat, as in Katherine. Second Lieutenant Katherine Fox. Or at least that’s what she was before she deserted, killed an entire battalion, and then made off with just about a quadrillion credits worth of steel and munitions.” Volchec spat the words, shaking her head. “She’s been a thorn in the Federation’s side for the last century, and ten years ago, we killed her.”

  “I’m sorry, did you say century?” My brain stuttered. She looked barely older than me.

  Volchec nodded. “Yeah.” She drew a long breath. “This fucking bitch,” she said, grimacing. She exhaled, leaned forward so her head was nearly in the hologram, and slapped the photograph down on the table, pinning it under her palm. “Katherine Fox enlisted in the Ground Corps a hundred years ago, sailed through basic, and showed such aptitude and skill that she was fast tracked into our special forces division. She was doing extremely well — one of the best we’d ever had — and even after being promoted, she stayed in the field. We wanted to get her into the training side of things. She had a way about her, a natural instinct. Speed, strength, cunning. She was one of the most ruthless Federation Special Corps Operatives we ever had. A true asset that racked up hundreds, if not thousands of kills while on active duty. Most of the missions were clandestine, redacted, never sanctioned — almost like this one,” she grunted, shaking her head. “This bitch was a cold-blooded killer, and she saved hundreds of thousands of Federation lives with the preventative work that she did, right up until sh
e took them all back.”

  I tried to stop myself from asking about the century thing, as I was guessing she’d come back to it — or at least I hoped she was going to. “Okay. And then what happened?”

  “She was on a mission, about eight years into her service — a Federation transport convoy, top secret. An automated, propelled construction plant, a lot like the one we stopped off at — except that was the first one put into production. Before that, they were all manned. It was set to change the face of the war, which at that point, was raging. The Free were hacking us to pieces on every offensive and we couldn’t produce enough steel and ship it to them in time. But what if there was a plant that could produce thousands of units and ship itself to where it was needed most? It would have turned the tide of war.”

  I could see where this was going, but Volchec was in story mode, so I didn’t interrupt. Mac, Fish, and Everett just waited patiently for me to catch up. They obviously knew this tale.

  “So,” Volchec said, “as that whole section of the station was being moved — towed through space, with a Federation escort, that’s when she struck. She killed the entire crew of the fighter ship she was on, assumed control, got aboard the Class Two destroyer that was escorting the space station, killed more than thirty trained crew members as she made her way to the reactor, outfitted it with explosives, then got up to the bridge using her clearance, killed the command there, overrode the security protocols, targeted every ship in the convoy, blew them all out of the sky with a single synchronized shot, and then disabled the controls before hijacking the tow vessel. When the crew tried to regain the bridge, the reactors blew and set off a chain reaction that destroyed the entire ship, along with everyone on board. More than four thousand men and women lost their lives that day. And by the time we managed to scramble any sort of support, she was long gone, along with our production plant. She’d planned it all — long before she even enlisted. It’d always been her plan, right from the very start. Eight fucking years as a plant.”