The Terminal War: A Space Opera Novel (A Carson Mach Adventure) (3 page)

“You guessed right. A small raiding Axis force is hitting their outer planets. I’ll clear it with the admiral if you’re interested?”

“Kicking Axis ass? You bet I am. Send over the data. I’ll start making plans.”

Morgan smiled at the expected response. “I thought this might be your kind of thing. Do you want a quick drink tonight for old times’ sake?”

“Sure. I’ll swing by at eight?”

Throughout the conversation, Steros glared at Morgan. The young captain always showed outward animosity toward him. His father was the former president, and Morgan had been instrumental in his overthrow, for the good of the Salus Sphere. It was understandable to a certain extent, but Steros junior’s pass had expired and open signs of insubordination could no longer be tolerated.
 

“Do you have a problem, Captain?” Morgan asked.
 

“No, President,” Steros replied, placing emphasis on the title.

“Listen, son, I’m sorry about your father, but we all need to move on. It’s a dangerous galaxy out there, and we all need to be working together.”

Steros narrowed his eyes. “I’m not your son, President.”

Tralis gave Morgan a knowing nod and grabbed Steros by the arm. “This way, Captain. We need to have words.”

Both members of the Western Fleet returned to the transport pod. Morgan headed for his office, feeling confident the threat around the vestan planets was under control.

Tralis would keep Captain Steros in line. He was only a minor distraction compared to the next piece of business on the agenda: recruiting Mach for the mission to Terminus.

He would have to lie to his old friend, of course, but Mach would understand—if he survived. Morgan had no other choice. Mach would see that.
 

The lactern wrestler wrapped his muscular black arm around the horan’s head and ripped it off with a single, brutal yank.
 

Mach grinned at Beringer’s expression. The archeologist sat opposite him and focussed on at the fighting cage with a mix of horror and disbelief. The pounding beat of the fight music thrummed throughout the dingy downtown club situated in a little-known alley. If Fides Prime security got wind of it, and of all those that dwelled here, Mach had no doubt they’d just nuke the whole place with everyone inside.
 

“How can you drink that stuff?” Beringer said.
 

Mach slammed another shot of the toxic concoction known as Death’s Whisper on account of its quiet approach. One minute you’d be enjoying the sweet, warming taste as though it were a cough mixture, then bang, you’re tripping balls, not knowing how to work your limbs and having the time of your life for it.
 

After so many hard missions, Mach needed to cut loose.
 

“Drink up,” Mach said to Beringer. The latter hadn’t touched his Whisper. He sat there, back straight, his hands in his lap, like a kid at church.
 

“I’d rather we just conclude my proposition,” Beringer said. He glanced a nervous eye across the bar: exactly what Mach had told him not to do. He was so out of place that if he accidentally made eye contact with the wrong person, he’d not be able to walk out of the place of his own volition.

“Dude,” Mach said, slamming his glass down on the table and waving a hand in the air to summon one of the many semi-naked bartenders who slithered between the tables like greased snakes. “Drink your damned drink and stop staring around the place. You’re gonna get us both messed up. Besides, relax! We’ve got good booze, great entertainment, and Adira’s fighting in the main event. What a privilege you’re getting.”

The gray-haired archeologist slumped forward to the table, resting his elbows on the edge. It was better, but he still looked so out of place, which was part of Mach’s plan—to an extent. Risky, but it would pay off if Beringer didn’t get stabbed in the kidneys before he had a chance to put the bet on.
 

“Okay,” Mach said, leaning forward. “Tell me more about your job.”

A leather-clad human barwoman approached and placed two more glasses of Whisper in front of the two men. She smiled. Her metal-tipped fangs reflected the neon light of the dingy bar.
 

Damn, Mach thought, they looked great—expensive too.
 

It was a good sign. Despite the dark, underworld atmosphere, there was an epic weight of loot swimming about.
 

The woman ran a hand over Mach’s head, the sharp, poisoned-tipped nails gently scratching his scalp—a little reminder to tip well.
 

“No fear, my sweetheart,” Mach said to the woman. “By the end of the night, you’ll get the biggest tip you’ve ever seen.”

“Why thank you kindly, Bleach,” she drawled with a southern Fides Prime accent. “That would be a wise decision on your part.”

She spun on her stiletto heel and slithered between more tables, catching the glances of everyone as she went, including the kingpin of the establishment and one of the biggest criminal enterprises in the whole of the Sphere: Gracious Sinju.
 

It would be generous to call him a man: the beast had two extra prosthetic arms under his original pair, powered by a vestan exoskeleton. Both of his eyes had been swapped out for IR units, and he had a murder rap sheet that would put the military of a small empire to shame. His head was completely bald and capped with a plate made from Summanun jet: one of the hardest substances known in the Sphere and more expensive than most precious metals.
 

Gracious, however, he was not. The grizzled old bastard seemed to enjoy the irony of being anything but. He caught Mach’s gaze and inclined his head a few millimeters. One would be mistaken to think this was a greeting or recognition of respect. It was no such gesture; it was Gracious saying: “I see you, motherfucker.”

Mach just grinned and saluted him with two fingers before turning back to his table.
 

Beringer’s hand shook as he picked up his glass of Whisper. He sipped at it, like a nervous bird.
 

“That’s him, isn’t it?” Beringer said, keeping his eyes down.
 

“Yup.”

“I can’t believe we’re going to do this.”

“We? You’re the one who wants the money for your little expedition.”

“Only because you’re demanding so damned much.”

Behind them, another two fighters were going hell for leather inside the cage. They were fighting a bare-knuckle fight to the death, and the two human men took that quite seriously. The crowd bayed and roared with each direct hit and spurt of blood.
 

Mach leaned closer into Beringer and grabbed his wrist. “Tell me,” Mach said. “How badly do you want to go to this shitty little planet to get this artifact of yours?”

The archeologist tried to pull away.
 

Mach held firm.
 

Beringer slammed his other hand down on the table. “As badly as I’ve ever wanted anything, damn it! You don’t understand the significance of this find. I have to have it; it could change our perception of the Sphere and those that inhabited it before us. Don’t you understand how important that is?”

Mach let go and smiled. “That’s all I wanted to know. My crew and ship don’t come cheap.”

“I’m here, aren’t I? I don’t understand why it has to be so expensive. It’s just a routine task.”

Mach leaned back in his chair and sunk the rest of the Whisper. “It’s not just the danger of going to some unknown rim world beyond the noncombat zone; it’s the opportunity cost. If I take your job, we’ll be gone for two weeks. I could earn more money than you have in a few days. I’m sorry, Beringer, but I ain’t in this game for anything other than cold hard cash. So if you want us to ferry you out there, you need to pay up, and that means…”

“I know,” he said, staring down at his half-empty shot glass. “I just think it’s unnecessarily dangerous.”

The crowd roared as one of the human combatants stood over a bloody pulp of an opponent, his hands raised in victory. Two bodyguards entered the steel cage and escorted the man out. He could barely walk.
 

A group of cleaning droids dragged away the body of the loser and then dashed back inside to clean the blood and assorted fluids from the fighting arena.
 

Mach could see Beringer trying not to look at Gracious.
 

“Just drink,” Mach said. “Keep your eyes on the cage. Did you bring the stake money?”

Beringer tapped his wrist-mounted smart-screen. “Twenty thousand eros. It’s everything I have. If anything goes wrong, this will ruin me. You understand that, right?”

“Sure, but the thing is, it’s not just my fee you’re covering, you’re also getting one helluva favor from Adira, and she will insist on collecting the favor at some point.”

“I know this too,” Beringer said, resignation drawing his words out with a sigh. “I have no other option. I can’t go through official channels; they’d just lock the artifact away, hiding the truth. And no other freelancer has the skill or a ship like yours.”

Mach checked the time on the large display above the cage. They still had another ten Standard Salus minutes to go before Adira’s headlining fight. Her opponent hadn’t yet been announced.
 

That, however, shouldn’t be a problem. Adira was out in the back room preparing with her usual deathly still meditation. Mach had offered to sit with her, but she gave him the eyes. And one does not simply defy the eyes.
 

“Tell me more about this discovery,” Mach said, to waste some time and hopefully ease Beringer’s nerves. “Why’s it so important to you? I mean, I get that it’s rare and can blah blah something about our perceptions, but why you? Why do you have to be the one?”

Beringer finally swallowed the rest of his drink and leaned forward so that the small electronic candle in the middle of their table lit him from beneath like some shady effect from humanity’s old twentieth-century films.

“I was just eight years old,” Beringer said, “forty years ago when my parents took me off Earth and to Fides Prime during the exodus. It was all so exciting for me then; I didn’t truly understand what was going on with the Century War. Earth was changing on a daily basis, Dad got killed, and then the next minute I know, I’m on a new type of starship, making my very first L-jump to the Fides system.”

“Probably better for you that you were young,” Mach said. “What about your mother? What happened to her?”

“Cancer,” he said, the single word dropping like a bum note in a minor key.

“I’m sorry,” Mach said. And he was. He had known so many of the Earth people to succumb to it before the medical revolution in the Sphere eliminated such diseases. “So this artifact that you’ve discovered… it’s related?”

Beringer’s eyes widened, pupils dilating due to the Whisper and the gloominess of the room, but there was a fierce hunger there, twitching at the corner of his eyelids.
 

“It’s from Earth,” Beringer said, hushing his words so that Mach could barely hear him. He continued, “Before our species evolved to who we are now on Earth, there are some schools of thought that we were the results of not just evolution, but of a helping hand, some grand conductor easing things into place.”

Mach snorted. Evolution had been proven time and time and again. “I don’t believe in all that mumbo jumbo,” Mach said. “And frankly, I’m surprised you do.”

Without moving even a scintilla, Beringer said, “I know it to be true. I found a similar item on an expedition back to Earth when I was twenty-three years old and studying for my Ph.D. It was a small object, round. Perfectly round. Unnaturally so. Under high magnification, it displayed no flaw in its surface. Do you realize how impossible that is? A material that even under the most powerful microscopes we have today shows perfect spherical form in every possible essence?”

“And you think you’ve found another?”

Beringer sat back for a moment and smiled up at the barwoman, who had brought another couple of drinks over. No Whisper this time, but something a little more potent: Gasmulch.
 

“Courtesy of the gracious one,” the fang-toothed woman said, running a fingertip across Mach’s hand, making him shiver with delight—and no little fear. “He asked me to pass on his best wishes to Adira against her opponent tonight.”

“And that is?” Mach prompted.
 

“You’ll see, darling, in good time.”

She swung away, laughing. Mach didn’t like that one bit. The back of his head burned. He could tell Gracious was staring at him. But fuck him, Mach thought; he wasn’t going to give the manipulative old swine the satisfaction.
 

Instead, he grabbed both glasses and shot them one after the other, slamming them down on the table so hard most of the patrons in the bar looked over at him.
 

“Do we have to do this?” Beringer asked. Mach noticed the poor man’s hands were shaking worse. But this was good. He needed to be scared. That was the only way this plan would work.
 

The last fight played out in the cage over the course of a bitter ten minutes. The two combatants—vestans armed with wooden staffs—beat the living crap out of each other. The larger of the two took a shot to the balls. Vestan balls were even more sensitive and painful than humans’ if played with wrongly.
 

A chorus of, “Oooh,” rang around the bar.
 

The vestan slumped to his knees and gave the three-finger gesture—fingers close together, palm up. He had quit—and would likely never sire children in his lifetime.

The bar erupted in cheers as the winner was announced, and the onlookers who had backed the right fighter buzzed around the bookmaker’s desk to collect their winnings. It was no surprise to see that the number of losers far outweighed the winners.
 

“Adira’s up,” Mach said. “But before they start, tell me: you found another of these spheres on some distant planet?”

Beringer simply nodded. “And it predates the one I found on Earth by at least two millennia.”