In Earth's Service (Mapped Space Book 2) (20 page)

“Don’t know.”

His brain was obviously so stim-soaked, he
couldn’t think straight. “Nazari, how do you access your ship’s log?”

He smiled sourly. “Not me … Con … sort’m …”

“You work for the Consortium, but the log is your responsibility.”

“I haven’t … been Captain ... since … they took
over.”

“If you’re not in charge, who is?”

His head turned slowly, looking around. When his
eyes settled on his nephew, he nodded weakly. “Him.”

I glanced at Mouad, confused. “Your nephew’s in
charge?”

“Ne-phew?” Nazari’s face twisted in revulsion.
“He’s not … my–”

A silver shard flashed past my shoulder, slicing
through Nazari’s throat. Blood spurted from the wound as I instinctively rolled
sideways and another metal shard cut the air where I’d been only a moment
before. I came up on one knee, P-50 drawn, as Jase went down from an elbow to
the head and his fragger went skidding across the deck. Mouad – or whoever he
was – dived after it, scooped it up and fired at Izin, but the little tamph was
too fast. He darted sideways in a blur of speed, then brought his shredder up
with an instinctive intention to eliminate Mouad as a threat.

“Don’t kill him, Izin!” I yelled desperately. “I
need him alive!”

Izin shifted his aim, sparing Mouad’s life, then fired.
The shattershot broke into a torrent of tiny, rapidly spinning slivers the
moment they left the barrel, severing Mouad’s arm between wrist and elbow. His
severed hand still holding Jase’s gun fell onto the deck, then Mouad clamped
his good hand over the bleeding stump to stop the flow and ran for the open
cargo door.

“My shot!” I declared, knowing if Izin fired
again, Mouad would bleed out before I could question him.

Izin kept the fleeing watch officer in his sights,
but didn’t fire, while I put two gelslugs into Mouad’s spine. He fell forward
under the twin hammer blows, rolling down the ramp as Izin and I ran after him.
When we reached the open cargo hatch, Mouad was lying on his back at the foot
of the ramp, wheezing from the air knocked out of his lungs. Sweat was beading heavily
on his face and the whites of his eyes were turning a sickly yellow. I aimed my
P-50 at him as my threading interpreted the signs and flashed an alert into my
mind.

WARNING : KANOZON-7 METABOLIC ACCELERATOR
DETECTED!

K-7 was a banned drug, giving a tremendous burst
to physical strength and endurance while suppressing all moral constraints. The
PFA military had invented it, but abandoned it when they discovered it turned disciplined
troops into paranoid psychopaths. High on K-7, he was likely to kick me so hard
he’d break both our legs without blinking.

“Who are you?” I demanded

“Mouad,” he said, giggling in a crazy breathless
way.

“Why is the Consortium shipping guns to the
Brotherhood?”

“You’re about to find out!” he said, jabbing his
blood soaked thumb into his jaw.

I grabbed Izin with my free hand, lifting him off
the deck, and dived sideways behind the ship’s bulkhead as Mouad’s body exploded.
Shrapnel, bloodied flesh and bone fragments showered the cargo hold as we landed
together.

After a moment, Izin glanced at my arm pinning his
chest to the deck. “Thank you, Captain. You can release me now.”

I rolled off him, then stepped back to the open
cargo door. The explosion had torn Mouad’s body apart, but barely dented the
heavy cargo door.

“How did you know?” Izin asked.

“His eyes. He was juiced on K-7. That stuff will
make anyone crazy – crazy enough to trigger a detonator implanted in their jaw.
”

“It would appear the Consortium like their hitmen
to be young and psychopathic,” Izin said. “A formidable combination.”

Jase sat up slowly, blinking, holding the side of
his head. “Whew! Never saw that coming.”

Izin and I returned to where Nazari lay dead in a pool
of his own blood.

“You are fortunate he wanted Nazari dead more than
you, Captain” Izin observed.

He was right. If Mouad had gone for me first, I’d
be dead on the floor instead of the Cali smuggler. The metallic blade intended
for me had struck the bulkhead behind Nazari’s corpse and fallen to the deck. It
was three centimeters long, razor sharp with a flared tail that expanded after
firing, giving stability through the air and extra cutting power. There’d been
one hidden beneath the skin of each of Mouad’s forearms.

I retrieved the blade from the bulkhead, turning
it over in my fingers.

“What is it?” Jase asked.

“A subcutaneous flechette.” An assassin’s weapon. It
was lightly smeared with Mouad’s own blood as it had cut its way out of his arm.

Jase winced. “What kind of sick freak uses a
weapon like that?”

Izin peered at it curiously. “Ingenious.”

“So Nazari wasn’t the boss? Beady eyes was!” Jase
said, picking his shredder up by the barrel and shaking Mouad’s severed hand
from it.

“Nazari flew the ship,” I said, “Mouad gave the
orders.”

“I guess that’s it then,” Jase said. “No Mouad, no
log.”

“We still have the navlog – and we have Izin!” I
said glancing at the little tamph. “You’ll have to break the encryption before
the Cyclops gets here.”

“It’s unlikely I can do that in the time
available, Captain,” Izin said warily.

“Then you better get started. We’ll clean up the
mess down here.”

“We will?” Jase asked, glancing at the blood
splattered cargo deck with revulsion.

“You know I like a taut ship,” I said, enjoying
the worried look on his face, then added, “Those bots must have a scrubber
function.”

Relief washed over his face. “Yeah, scrubber bots!
That’ll work!”

For an Orie trained gunslinger, he was surprisingly
squeamish at the sight of the splattered remains of a psychopathic Consortium
hitman.

* * * *

Hadley arrived in his ATV as the cargobots
finished cleaning the last of Mouad’s remains from the deck and the ground
outside surrounding the cargo ramp. The Prairie Runner had come across from the
vehicle hoist with its lights off so spotters on Citadel didn’t see it. When Hadley
strode up the ramp with two of his men, he couldn’t help but be impressed with
the quantity of armaments stowed in the
Merak Star’s
cargo hold.

“So this is where the Drakes get their weapons from,”
he said, recalling the sporadic raids the colony had endured before the first
URA batteries had been set up.

“Not for much longer,” I promised.

He looked pleased, then motioned for his men to load
Nazari’s body, cocooned in cargo wrap, and the other prisoners into the Prairie
Runner. “Considering what they’ve been doing,” he said bitterly, “I’m inclined
to dump them on the flatlands.”

“Then you’d be no better than Metzler.”

“Now why’d you have to go spoil my fun!” Hadley
replied as Izin entered the cargo hold and hurried to us.

“I need the Silver Lining’s processing core to access
the Merak Star’s navlog, Captain. I’ve made a copy,” he said, holding up a data
chip.

“How long?”

“A few days, maybe a week.”

“All we need is the last drop off location.” I was
certain the alien-tech delivery point was the key to whatever the Drakes and
the Consortium were up to.

“The log is protected by a multiplex-encryptor,”
Izin said. “It’s broken into randomized, individually coded blocks. I have to
break each block separately until I find the one we’re looking for.”

It wasn’t military grade encryption, but it was more
sophisticated than any mere smuggler needed.

Izin turned to Hadley. “I need to get back to the
Silver
Lining
as soon as possible.”

Hadley nodded. “I’ll drop you at the Hiport hoist
before dawn.”

“We’ll meet you at the Retreat in the morning,” I
said to Hadley.

“You’re not coming with us?” he asked.

“We have one more to job do here, then we’ll catch
the Link back.”

“What job, Captain?” Izin asked.

“Put the Consortium out of the arms business, at
least for a while.”

“How are you going to do that?” Hadley asked.

“I’m going to blow up the Merak Star,” I said
simply. It would take the Consortium at least a year to get a replacement ship
sent out from Core System space. That would give Lena Voss and Earth Navy time
to figure out how to put a permanent end to the Consortium’s gun running racket.
It was the best disruption I could manage at short notice.

“This is a big ship,” Hadley said. “How are you
going to destroy it?”

“An energy core collapse ought to do it.”

Hadley’s eyes widened. “How big an explosion will
that cause?”

“Izin?” I said.

He thought for a moment. “Based on the size of the
energy plant, a collapse would generate a two kilometer hypocenter surrounded
by a ten to twelve kilometer blast wave.”

“That puts Hadley’s Retreat outside the danger
zone,” I assured him.

Hadley look shocked. “But you’ll destroy the cable
station and the spaceport!”

“Loport mesa itself will cease to exist,” Izin said.

“More than that,” I declared. “If we time it right,
we’ll vaporize the Cyclops as well!”

* * * *

The
Merak Star
was
equipped with safeguards designed to protect densely populated Core System
worlds from the kind of attack human religious fanatics had launched against
the Matarons fifteen hundred years ago. Disabling them proved to be a slow
process, made more difficult by Izin’s absence. We were far from finished when the
ship’s sensors detected a large contact plunging through the atmosphere toward
us. Soon thermal and optical images of the
Cyclops’s
dark cylindrical
mass filled the bridge’s four screens, while heat blooms on her bow and
amidships revealed she was coming down weapons hot. With her transponder off, the
colony’s surface batteries should have been hammering away at her, but they
simply watched and did nothing.

“She’s got targeting beams on us and all eight gun
emplacements,” Jase said.

“Not exactly trusting are they,” I replied.

The
Cyclops
set down close to the
Merak
Star
leaving her weapons charged and her maneuvering engines on standby in
case she needed to jump back to space at short notice.

“Now what?” Jase asked.

“We bluff,” I said, loading detonators into my gun.
If it came to a fight with the Drakes, area effect exploding ammo would even
the odds.

We hurried down to number one hold and waited
above the door-ramp as the ground cooled beneath the
Cyclops
.

“Give them a good look,” I said, certain they had
us on screen and were wondering where Nazari was.

“You think they can see my knees shaking?” Jase
asked lightly.

“Act like an Orie merc. Make them believe you
belong.”

Jase assumed a swaggering bearing, leaned against
the bulkhead and crossed his arms. “I belong everywhere!”

A mechanical whir sounded from the
Cyclops
as its massive armored door lowered to the ground, then Anya appeared, followed
by Domar Trask and his two O-Force bookends. They eyed us suspiciously as they
approached, stopping at the foot of the cargo ramp. I opened my mouth, about to
introduce myself, when Jase cut me off.

“JAG-40s?” He said contemptuously, nodding at the
weapons the three Orie mercs carried. He straightened, placing his hands on his
hips. “I guess kissing Drake butt don’t pay well.”

 Trask’s eyes narrowed while his two cannon humpers
bristled. I realized Jase had initiated some kind of Oresund ego-flexing ritual
designed to determine who was the alpha of alphas. Either he’d get us killed or
earn us some grudging respect.

“I’d take one of these over those popguns you’re
wearing,” Trask growled, taking the bait.

Quick as a flash, Jase had both fraggers out and
aimed at Trask’s head. “Are you sure about that now, squaddie?”

Trask blinked, surprised at Jase’s speed and ready
aggression. “I’m ready to put it to the test right now, if you are.” As he
spoke, Julkka Olen and Stina Kron moved out to the flanks, placing distance
between themselves and turning their guns on us.

Jase gave him a cocky grin. “Anywhere, anytime,
grandpa.”

“Before you boys start blasting each other,” Anya
said, “do you want to tell me where Captain Nazari is?”

“He’s dead,” I said. “Binge snorted four
stimhalers in one night. Never came out of it.”

Anya’s eyes arched, but she didn’t look surprised.
“I warned him about that stuff.”

“A lot of people did,” I said.

“What about Mouad?” Trask demanded.

“He’s dead too,” Jase said with cold menace. “I
retired him for letting Nazari die.”

Understanding appeared on Trask’s face as he guessed
Jase was the new Consortium hitman, sent to replace his failed predecessor,
then he turned to me, “And you are?”

“Sirius Kade, Nazari’s replacement. The Consortium
gave me the job because I don’t use ‘halers and they don’t want any more
mistakes.”

“I’ve never heard of you,” Trask said bluntly.

“That’s because I’m discreet.”

Anya gave Trask a slight nod of approval, then the
three Orie renegades lowered their guns. Jase made a show of twirling his fraggers
and sliding them back into their holsters.

“She just saved your life,” Jase said.

Trask scowled. “There’s three of us and only one
of you.”

“Yeah, but I have two guns, which means I’d have
shot you twice before they got me once.” He grinned, making a show of enjoying
himself. He was so overbearingly confident, even I was almost convinced he lacked
any fear. Not for the first time, I wondered how Oresund had developed such a
strangely militaristic culture. Clearly, any sign of weakness was punished, while
a reckless disregard for death earned respect.