IGMS Issue 29 (5 page)

"Absolutely." Olivia's normally laconic voice was tight with adrenalin. Before her word finished, the night vanished.

Two bars of light pulsed through the jungle. They paused for nanoseconds to burn through the thin obstacles of corrugated steel and wooden beam, steel drum and gasoline. Then the camp's fuel supply and generator whirled themselves apart in shrapnel and flame.

Time, and Alec dropped. Steel claws flicked out, catching branches and bark in a controlled fall that slammed him into the mud in the middle of the panicked mob of men who were stumbling blind from their bunks. They weren't his job though, so he left them for the guns of his squad while he knuckle-ran toward the cinderblock building that squatted before him.

Gathering momentum, he charged its door just as it swung open, spilling figures into the night. Convenient, he thought, and spit.

The darts leapt from his mouth and bit into their targets, spilling fast-acting tranquilizer. One fighter howled as he tumbled to the ground and Alec spit at him again, not wanting any chance of interference. Leaping the bodies, he lunged for the closing door.

Vaulting up, his claws sank into the wall and he swung his short legs forward, smashing the door back open. Then he let go, crashing down to land on the man who had been trying to lock him out. His victim howled and Alec spat down once, then raised his optics to search the interior.

On a rusted bed frame, a man lay tied, a cloth wrapped tight around his eyes. Another blood-spotted rag on his forearm covered where the kidnappers had torn out the trace-chip.

"Gordon Ashway?" Alec's bot voice growled, probably terrifying, but the man was sharp enough to guess what was happening.

"Yes. Company send you?"

"Yep." Alec sliced the ropes and stepped back, calling over the signal to the team. "Client found. Transport to me."

"Roger," Taylor said. "Lucy, forward to load. Alec, warn the client, I'd like Olivia to give us some cover."

"Hold on a sec, Mr. Ashway." Alec reached up with his claws and pressed the blindfold back over the prisoner's eyes even as the man tried to strip it away.

"What?" The room lit up, light avalanching through the barred window and marking every tiny gap in the wall and roof. Outside, screams greeted the brightness. "What's going on?" The man was doing well, considering, but hysteria edged his voice.

Alec pulled back his claws and let the client remove the blindfold. The man's eyes widened, seeing the dark ape-thing crouched before him, a monster wrought of steel, carbon and silicon.

"Your rescue. Follow me please, and we'll tuck you safe inside a transport bot." Alec drew himself up and sketched a bow, wishing again that the company wasn't so uptight about appearances. A little bow tie and a bowler perched just right on his bot's head might make a world of difference to their clients.

Not likely though, he thought, leading the ashen faced man out toward the pregnant-centaur shape of Lucy's transport bot. Syracuse Securities was, unfortunately, run by the traditional assortment of humorless corporate prigs.

"Eyes on me, people. I'm talking money." Hastings stumped into the Hole's plush briefing room like a bald bulldog in khakis, and waited for them to settle while he chewed the end of an unlit cigar. The mission conductor managed to be the perfect image of a hard-bitten old soldier, even though he'd spent his entire life ensconced in the military-industrial complex's civilian side, a middle-manager in Syracuse all the way back to the good old oil days.

"Whose money?" asked Olivia as she put down the pick she'd been running through her damp hair.

"Your money. You've got a mission."

"We just finished a mission," Bodi said, a chunky Apollo resplendent in a crimson silk robe.

"Exactly. And since you geeks did it so well, the customer wants another." Hastings fingers tapped across the touch-screen inset in the table and an image bloomed into life on the wall behind him. A map of the same verdant failed-state they had just visited over the signal.

"That camp was right where the informant told us it would be, so his reliability rating just upgraded. So the customer paid his price for the location of this ransom racket's leaders." A red dot appeared on the map, in the middle of what had once been a walled resort community. "Customer's decided these pricks should go away. So we're going to ask them to leave. Firmly."

"What's our turn around?" asked Taylor. It was the first thing the squad leader had said since they'd all pulled out of their rigs and headed for the showers.

"Twelve hours. Theatre techs have to juice and maintain the bots, and we need to hang a stealth eye over the target."

"That soon?" Alec said, the now familiar nervous excitement gripping his belly at the thought of combat.

"We have to act before the target realizes it's been compromised," said Taylor.

"Whoa, wait. Twelve hours?" Bodi shook his head. "I have plans tonight. A hot piece of tail named Emilio has an appointment with my -"

"Sorry, Bodi," Hastings interrupted. "Your boy Emilio wants to saddle up tonight, he'll have to find himself another cowboy. Syracuse doesn't want to take any chances on this, so you're all staying here and getting some quiet, non-intoxicating R&R. I'm sure you remember the pertinent clauses in your contract, right?"

Bodi swore, but before he could protest again Olivia spoke. "Bonus?"

"Double bonus," said Hastings.

Olivia gave the company man a smile. "What's for dinner?"

"I can throw something together." Areva, the med tech, leaned against the back wall with Sam and Kamil, the signal techs. "There's plenty in the kitchen." Her bright brown eyes rested on Alec's. She'd asked him out once, not long after he started with Syracuse. He'd begged off, uncertain about the company's opinion on interoffice romances, but he'd been reconsidering. He smiled back, but the tech looked away when groans echoed around the table.

"Yes, it'll be vegetarian," Areva snapped. "You think you can do better, the freezer's full."

"I'd recommend trying whatever it is she makes and pretending you like it," Hastings cautioned. "Remember who straps your junk into those rigs."

The mission conductor chewed his cigar and eyed them all. "Tactics team in the home office is pulling in the data. Preliminary plan should be ready by six hundred. So I want to see you all stuff your faces and hit your bunks. It's going to be an early day."

Bodi grumbled, but everyone else seemed cheerful, the prospect of a night trapped at work and an early morning no problem with the promise of double bonus. Alec stood and began to turn toward the kitchen when Taylor spoke.

"Good work out there today."

"Thanks." Alec felt a surge of pride at the compliment. An old school soldier, unlike Hastings, Taylor was quiet. He'd been special forces though, back when that meant putting your flesh-and-blood on the line. Meeting Taylor had done more to attract Alec to Syracuse then their benefits package, and he valued the old soldier's approval.

Taylor added, "Dropping through their perimeter like that saved time, and maybe the hostage's life. Not many people could have done it. Your ability to ride a brachiator's impressive."

Lucy moved over to them, smoothing her damp hair. "Impressive? It's insane. Our old guy, Jackson, he thought he was a monkey-man, but you make him look like a sick sloth. I have trouble with the transport sometimes and it's just a quadruped."

"Damn, Lucy," Bodi said. "You need all those extra legs just to walk straight."

Lucy spun to face Bodi's smirk. "I swear I'm going to -"

"Going to what, you scrawny -"

"Stop." Taylor's cold voice snapped through the squabble. "This is done. Understand?" They nodded, Lucy sullenly, Bodi amused. "Go."

Alec watched them leave, wondering. Six months on the squad, over a dozen missions, and Alec still didn't understand how these people fit together. He looked back to Taylor, about to ask the old man, but the look of disgust in the soldier's eyes checked his tongue.

He headed for the kitchen instead, and left Taylor alone with his tablet and the images of the battle they had fought just forty-five minutes ago, a world away.

Alec lay in his bed, considering the volume of earth above him. The Hole was fifty feet underground, hidden beneath an office building in the Albuquerque suburbs. A secure data site for a bank that had fallen in the Big Crunch thirty years before, Syracuse Securities had snapped it up on the sly. A hidden bunker from which to run its missions was a valuable asset. Syracuse didn't have many friends besides its shareholders, and remote control mercenaries weren't popular either. The Hole kept them secret and protected the source of the signal that connected them to their bots.

Alec hated the place. It was, in fact, exactly the opposite of his dreams.

With a sigh, Alec reached for the tablet he'd left on the nightstand. Tiny pictures danced across it until he found the one he wanted. Their official group photo. One hundred and ten of NASA's best and brightest, all dressed up in their uniforms. Alec still had his at home, wrapped in plastic. He looked at it sometimes, mostly when he was drunk.

With an angry snap, Alec flicked off the computer. The Little Crunch had hit right before Aries Five should have left orbit and taken them all farther than any human had gone before. One year, that close to the payoff of a lifetime spent in school, in gymnastics, in wu shu classes, training his mind and body to run exploration bots across the rust-red Martian dust. Then the Western economies had hiccupped again and sent the politicians into a panic. Too much money, too many resources, and the mission got shelved before it began. Someday, NASA told them as they mothballed the ship. Then they were reassigned. Or, like Alec, cut loose to find some new use for their hard won skills.

So he had.

An RC merc. The metal muscle of the old economies. Riding the signal into whatever hot-zone failed state that had decided to be difficult. A job he'd never wanted, and in the almost year since he'd signed on with Syracuse he hadn't told anyone, friends or family, what he did. He didn't want to talk about it.

Especially once he realized how much he liked it.

Sleep wasn't coming, and lying here wouldn't do him any good. Maybe Areva was still up, and they could share some cocoa in the kitchen. Alec pulled on jeans and t-shirt, opened the door and stepped blinking into the hall's unwavering brilliance just as the screaming began.

The blood stench filled the conference room, strong enough that Alec could taste its coppery flavor.

"Damn," he whispered, staring at the body sprawled across the table.

In the hall, the pounding of feet buried Lucy's panicked curses and he flicked a quick look over his shoulder to see Taylor outside the door.

"Status, Chu?" Taylor asked, voice steady. The question eased the terrified tension in Alec's throat.

"Hastings is dead. Something carved him up."

"Some
thing
?" Taylor stepped into the room, eyes searching the corners, the space beneath the table, coming to rest on a missing ceiling panel.

"Lucy thought she saw a bot," Alec said, nodding toward the hole. "Going in there."