The Darkness of God: Book Three of the Shadow Warrior Trilogy (17 page)

“I don’t know. Sometimes I wish I did.”

• • •

The little man who acted like a chipmunk woke Wolfe early the next morning and gave him a slip of paper with a message. It was a simple code Wolfe remembered from the war.

I
N-SYSTEM
. ETA
YOURS THREE
E-
DAYS
. B
E
R
EADY.

There was no name on the slip.

• • •

“You could stay on,” Stoutenburg said. “Kristin hasn’t told me anything about either of you, but I have the idea neither of you has any kind of a home.”

“That’s true enough, Tony,” Wolfe said. “But there’s something I’ve got to take care of. It’s maybe a little bit bigger, maybe a little more important than Graveyard.”

Stoutenburg inclined his head. “If you say so. You know, at one time, I dreamed of having a big parish. Maybe being a bishop, even. But things happened to me, like I think they’ve happened to you two. And now I think what I see around me is more than enough.”

“Very nice,” Wolfe said, without irony. “I wish I had your clarity of sight.”

• • •

“Joshua,” Kristin said, as they were loading the moke, “I’ve got something to tell you.”

Wolfe turned, leaned back against the moke’s body. “You’re not going with me.”

“How did you know?”

He shrugged. “I knew.”

“They need law around here,” Kristin said. “You won’t — can’t do it. I told Tony I would.”

Wolfe nodded. “He’s a good man,” he said obliquely. “And you’ll make a good cop.”

“You know,” she said, “when Tony took the gun away from Canfield … That proved something to me. You don’t have to use violence. There’s always another way.”

Wolfe glanced at her, thought of saying something, changed his mind. “Nice if you’re right,” he said, voice neutral.

“And didn’t you once tell me that there isn’t any after?”

“I did.”

“Did you mean for us when you said it?”

“Yes,” Wolfe said honestly. “For everything.”

“I still don’t understand.”

“Again … I can’t tell you.”

“You see?” Kristin’s eyes were pleading, hopeless.

Wolfe stared down into them and took a deep breath. He took Kristin in his arms, kissed her, chastely. “Thanks, angel,” he said. “Like I said, Tony’s a very good man.”

• • •

A ship lay in the center of the empty port. It was sleek, angled, dull black. Two gunports were open, chaingun barrels in battery.

One tracked Joshua’s ‘sled as it floated across the field. He drove the moke to the shed and put it inside. He came out, carrying the two packs Kristin had bought for him.

The port slid open, and a bearded, big man came out. He held a gun pointed down at the ground, carefully not aiming at Joshua. “You’re Wolfe,” he said. “I recognize you from the holos back during the war. I’m Merrett Chesney.”

“I’ve heard of you.”

“You’re a little late.”

“Some unexpected business came up.”

“We better bust ass. The client’s in a hurry.”

“So am I,” Wolfe said. He started for the port, stopped, and stared off at the gray mountains in the distance for a long time.

Then he boarded the ship, and the lock slid closed behind him.

“You travel light,” Chesney said. “A virtue in these times.”

“It didn’t start out that way,” Joshua said, then forced his mind away from Ak-Mechat VII.

“When does it ever?” Chesney laughed harshly. He checked the control panel, nodded satisfaction, and swiveled in his chair. “I think the closest I ever came to actually meeting you was off some beastly Al’ar planet. A1122-3 it was. Horrid tropical world. I was beating up the oppos to give one of your teams cover on an insert.”

Wolfe thought back.

“You were trying a prisoner recovery,” Chesney said.

Wolfe remembered.

“It got a little ugly,” Chesney went on. “I had seven old
Albemarle-
class spitkits, and we were zooming and shooting and dancing all over the heavens and then two Al’ar frigates came out of nowhere. We lost three, and were very damned grateful that was the worst it got.”

“It wasn’t any prettier on the ground,” Wolfe said.

“I never heard what happened, actually,” Chesney went on. “Never had the proper clearance. No one around to be rescued, then?”

“No,” Wolfe said slowly. “No, there were almost seventy civilians down there.” He remembered the stumbling, nearly brain-dead men and women who’d been through Al’ar interrogation.

Chesney waited for more details, eyes gleaming a little. After a while, he realized that was all Wolfe proposed to say. “Ah well, ah well,” he said. “A long time ago, wasn’t it? But back then we were most alive, at our finest. Pity those days aren’t still around, isn’t it?”

“I don’t think so,” Wolfe said. “We’re still paying, and I don’t think the debt’ll be settled by the time I die.”

Chesney shrugged. “War debts, deficits — those are for governments to worry about, not warriors like you and me.”

“I wasn’t talking about the money,” Joshua said shortly.

Chesney looked at him cautiously. “Well, that’s as may be.” He paused, then changed the subject: “I s’pose one thing we should settle is the pecking order, then. It’s my ship, so I’m in command normally. However, I’m hardly a fool. When we insert and extract your areas of expertise, I’m demoted to first mate. Agreed?”

“That sounds reasonable.”

“Good,” Chesney said. “Very good indeed. I happen to have a small bottle of a good, perhaps excellent if my shipper is telling the truth, Earth-Bordeaux. Shall we seal our partnership?”

• • •

Chesney was as experienced as Joshua in long, dull N-space passages, and so the two stayed out of each other’s way as much as possible. The ship was small, a converted eight-crew long-range scout of the
Chambers-
class, which Chesney had named the
Resolute.
The engine spaces had been roboticized, as Wolfe had done with his own ship, the
Grayle.
The crew spaces were still anodized in the soft pastels the Federation thought lessened tension, and Wolfe supposed Chesney preferred them that way; they must remind him of his service days.

Something nagged at Wolfe, something about Chesney. But it didn’t surface, and so he let his back brain worry at it. He spent the long hours working with the Lumina in his carefully locked compartment, reading from the ship’s extensive library, or sleeping. He took over the cooking, since Chesney’s idea of a good meal was to reconstitute a steak, fry it gray, and cover it with freeze-dried mushrooms and whatever soup came to hand.

Chesney had hidden a bug inside the wardrobe catch, which Wolfe found and deactivated within an hour after jumping from Ak-Mechat VII. Neither man brought it up.

Wolfe discovered Chesney had more than one good, perhaps excellent, bottle of wine aboard. He nipped constantly, on the sly, an experienced secret toper. Joshua wondered if he was as sly about his alcoholism when alone. Since they were far from action, and a
Chambers
-class ship in transit could be piloted by a drug-hazed gibbon, Wolfe said nothing.

Four ship-days out, Chesney told Wolfe the destination and the clients. They were to pick up the bomb materials on Bulnes IV, then make a short jump to deliver it to the rebels on Osirio, barely twelve light-years distant. “Seems straightforward enough,” he said. “Don’t suppose, Joshua, you’d be willing to dig through the library, see what the piddling match is all about, though? Not that it matters, but it might be interesting. Even valuable, if the slok comes down.”

Wolfe obeyed, also curious, and reported some success.

“I suppose it’s some government-take-all planet with a colony, dissidents dissidenting from the official policy, helping rebels and that, then?” Chesney said. He’d been quick to inform Wolfe that not only did he despise politics, but he utterly hated any government that did more than maintain a military and police force.

“Not exactly. The whole situation’s interestingly backward. Better listen closely,” Joshua said, “because I don’t think I’ll get it right more than once. Osirio, where we’re to deliver the package, was the mother planet. Evidently their best and brightest went out to Bulnes, where we’re supposed to make the pickup, and colonized the system. Osirio was brain-drained and is currently in a state of what the ‘pedia called decadent autocracy. Aristocratic thugs who run things badly, much like Earth’s czars, so there’s an active little rebellion bubbling. Assassinations, no-go districts, the stray conventional bombing here and there. The rebels, as far as I could tell, don’t have any particular program other than blasting the rascals out. The real dynamism is on Bulnes IV, but the government of Bulnes owes its legitimacy to the mother planet.”

“Good Lord,” Chesney said.

“Yeah. They’re afraid if Osirio falls, they’ll tumble right after it.”

“Who’s right?”

Wolfe shrugged. “The people out of power aren’t killing as many people as those in power. Yet. Maybe they’d do better, or maybe they’d start their own pogroms if they won.”

“Thank heaven it’s not for us to say,” Chesney said. “But with a mess like that, it’s certainly tempting to make the easy profit.”

“I don’t follow,” Wolfe said.

“The way that wonderful voice we contract our services through set the deal, we get 250K when we pick up the plutonium, or whatever it is, 750 on delivery.”

“I know.”

“We could do a little personal renegotiation, arrange to get the 750 from the rebels first, then write off the 250 and go about our merry way, then, couldn’t we?” Chesney saw the expression on Wolfe’s face. “No, I s’pose not. Probably be too messy to arrange, not to mention dangerous while we loop around their silly world, bickering. We’ll play the cards as they lay, I suppose.”

• • •

Chesney was fond of talking about the war, particularly about the atrocities of the Al’ar. Wolfe listened and made little comment. Chesney seemed less interested in conversation than in his own monologue.

One time, after third-meal, Chesney asked Joshua, “What made the bastards so cruel? Why’d they kill so many women, children, and civilians who weren’t even Federation officials?”

“That wasn’t cruel to them,” Wolfe said. “Women breed warriors, children — what they called hatchlings,” he said in Al’ar, “ — grow up to be warriors. As somebody back on Earth once said, ‘kill ‘em all. Nits grow up to be lice, don’t they?’ The Al’ar think — thought anyone who does things the hard way is a complete fool.”

Chesney looked away for an instant, as if some very private thought had surfaced, then back at Joshua. “You were their prisoner, when you were a child, or so the fiches had it, which was why the Federation made you into a supercommando,” he said. “So you dealt with them face-to-face.”

“Sometimes.”

Chesney shuddered. “That would’ve been horrifying. Like walking into a spider’s web. But at least you got to see them when you killed them. That must’ve been a pleasure.”

Joshua said nothing.

“Thank heavens,” Chesney said, “they’re dead, or at any rate gone from this spacetime. We don’t need any more nightmares like them, right?”

Wolfe thought of the “virus” that had driven the Al’ar from their own universe and was now invading Man’s. Again he kept silent.

• • •

They came out of N-space on the fringes of the Bulnes system and wormed their way toward the fourth planet. There were three planetary fortresses orbiting the planet and patrol ships crisscrossing the world.

“Piffle,” Chesney said. “Their security chatters like a band of langurs, never keeping silent to see what’s going on around it. This should be as easy as stealing coins from a dead man’s eyes. Their search patterns are lattices like your grandmother’s pie.”

“I don’t think my grandmother made pies,” Wolfe said. “I remember her being quite busy representing her district.”

“All right, then your first popsy’s see-everything blouse.”

“I wasn’t that lucky,” Wolfe said amiably. “My first love was the daughter of the Federation’s secretary of state. She wore tunics that fastened at the neck, hung loosely, and never gave me anything to dream about, plus the baggy knee-trousers that were the style then.”

“Ah, but once you got the tunic off,” Chesney said, deliberately lascivious, “then you beheld a garden of delights?”

“Nope,” Joshua answered. “I never even kissed her, and I’m not sure she knew I did more than exist. In any event, it was more pouting than passion on my part.”

“Ah,” Chesney said. “Unlucky you. As for me, my first was the tutor my father brought in to teach my brothers some language or other. A definite tart. But when my father caught us doing the naughty, that was the last we saw of her. I’ve often wondered …” Chesney shook his head.

“What happened to your great first love?” he went on, changing the subject, making conversation while his fingers touched sensors and the
Resolute
closed on Bulnes IV.