The Ramal Extraction (17 page)

At the comshack, Jo said, “Kay?”

Behind her, Rags arrived. “What?”

“Kay’s got a problem,” she said. “Sounds like a dustup. Her com is on, but she’s not responding.”

“Got a location?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s go.”

Formentara said, “The signal is not moving, it’s right where we first located it.”

As the hopper dropped low over the city, Nancy said, “Ninety seconds.”

“You get that, Colonel?”

In the second hopper, coming in from the opposite direction, Cutter said, “Got it. We’re fifteen seconds ahead of you.” Gunny was with him, as was Wink. Along with Formentara, she had Gramps with her, and each hopper had six more troops. It was policy on a hostile world to split up command staff when it was reasonable to do so and to take enough firepower to get the job done.

By the time Nancy put them down and they boiled out, guns ready, Cutter was already on the ground and shaking his head. “Here’s her com. She’s not here.”

“Probably still alive,” Gramps said. “Otherwise, why take her?”

“Why take her at all?” Jo asked.

“Maybe Ganesh,” Gunny said. “She made him look pretty bad”

“We’ll have a word with him,” Cutter said. “Formentara?”

“Let me trigger it,” zhe said.

Jo looked at hir. “Trigger what?”

“Her implant.”

“What? Vastalimi don’t do implants, everybody knows that.”

“Let’s hope whoever has her thinks so, too,” Cutter said.

Jo looked back at Formentara.

Formentara grinned, and waved a small flatscreen no bigger than hir palm. “She doesn’t know about it, and no way she would. It’s inert until somebody sends the coded trigger pulse. About a quarter the size of my little fingernail, a bit thicker.”

“How in the hell did y’all get something like that into her?”

“Put it in her food. They don’t grind all that much, got no real molars. Inside a piece of gristle. Acid-activated timer pops out burrs—tricky with Vastalimi, they got those short, meat-eater bowels—it digs in, usually in the small intestine, stays there, doesn’t cause any problems. Hypoallergenic, hooks of gold, coated in silicone, running viral moleculars, heat-diff biobatt. Good for ten years, easy. I check it every six months. Working fine a few weeks ago.”

Jo shook her head. She, like the rest of them, had either an implant or a rider on an aug that sent out a locator signal, that was expected; you got killed, somebody would know where to come collect the corpse. But she’d never heard of a Vastalimi with one.

“She’s gonna be pissed when she finds out,” Gramps said.

“I can live with that,” Cutter said. “Long as she’s alive to get pissed.”

When Kay awoke, it was with a chemical hangover and a killing rage, the combination of which made her head hurt. She was on her side, in a vehicle, one rolling on a road, to judge by the vibrations, and a quick, surreptitious look showed her she was in a storage compartment, lying on a rubbery pad. A van of some kind, moving slowly, turning this way and that. It did not feel as if she had been unconscious long, her internal sense of time told her. Still in the city, then, and on their way…where? Who were they, and what did they want with her?

Perhaps the kidnappers? That would be good. Escaping
confinement might be difficult, but if these were the people for whom she was looking? So much the better.

She pretended to still be unconscious. If they had a camera watching her, they might have noticed her eyes open for a half second when she had looked around, but she hadn’t offered any other signals that she was awake.

She would wait. An opportunity would arise.

In his hopper, Cutter said. “Once she gets to where they are taking her, we’ll scout the location, determine the best way to go and fetch her.”

It went without saying that they’d have to be careful. They’d only go in if they had a pretty good idea of what the situation was. The point was to get Kay back alive. But if it was the same people who’d kidnapped the Rajah’s daughter? That would be a bonus.

His com chortled. “Cutter.”

It was the Rajah. “I am afraid I have some disturbing news,” he said.

“Go ahead.”

“My prospective son-in-law has plans to field a large force of troops to invade Balaji. He seems convinced that the Thakore is responsible for my daughter’s disappearance, and he does not wish to wait for you to find her.”

Great. Just what we need, a hothead with an army.

“‘Has
plans
to field’?”

“He is ready to go now, but I have convinced him to bide awhile before he launches any attack.”

“How long?”

“Hard to say precisely. A few days. A week, perhaps.”

“Thank you, sir. We’re in the middle of an operation. Soon as we tend to it, we’ll see if we might be able to talk some sense into Rama.”

“I hope so, Colonel. If my daughter suffers as a result of his actions, I will be most unhappy with Rama.”

Cutter disconnected. The Rajah had enough steel in him and enough money so that having him unhappy with you might present a real hazard to your continued existence.

Well. That was Rama’s lookout. He had his own situation—

“Looks like they’ve stopped,” Formentara said. Zhe waggled the flatscreen. “I’m not getting a signal, so they must be shielded, but I have a location where the sig cut out.”

“Would it do that if she was dead?” That from Gunny.

“No.”

Cutter said, “Gramps, get a snoop in the air on the PPS coordinates and get us some images. Careful, so they don’t spot it.”

Gramps mumbled something Cutter didn’t catch.

“What’s that?”

“I said, ‘Teach your grandfather how to screw.’ It’s already on the way.”

Cutter smiled. He did tend to get a little hands-on sometimes. “Sorry.”

The snoop, a Dybercine M-3 Busybody, was a palm-sized drone with a low-rez forty-megapixel cam. It had whisper jets and a field-effect repeller, a cruising range of a hundred kilometers and an operating time of sixteen hours, as long as enough of that was sufficient daylight to recharge the cells. Not the absolute top-of-the-line gear, but good enough for their needs.

There were three ways to effectively use a snoop without the subject’s spotting it. Either sheathe it in stealth gear; make it look like something natural, a bird, or, on some worlds, an insect; or fly it far enough away it couldn’t be seen or detected. A palm-sized sky-colored drone three klicks up? Nobody using human eyes would see it; putting a scope on it would be almost impossible unless you knew exactly where to look; and sensors with gain set high enough to spot it would pick up all kinds of artifacts. The cam could collect a sharp streaming image in a single pass. Crisscross a few times, you could build a decent threedee hologram
accurate to centimeters, more or less. The unit didn’t have passwall viewtech, that cost a small fortune, but they could get that information later.

The snoop in the air, it would take a few minutes to arrive, and Cutter thought it best to tell the crew about the Rajah’s intel.

He did.

“Isn’t Rama’s father the rajah of whatchamacallit?” Wink asked. “Why is he letting his son do this?”

Cutter shrugged. “Who knows what the agendas are out here.”

“If it turns out we have to go into Balaji to collect Indira, its being a full-out war zone might cause problems,” Gramps said.

“Or it could work to our advantage,” Jo said. “If they are busy shooting at each other, maybe they won’t notice us.”

“And maybe if we do it right, we can find and collect her and be long gone before her boyfriend cranks up a shooting war.” That from Formentara.

“That would be good,” Cutter said. “We didn’t come dressed for a war.”

“Here we go,” Gramps said. “She went in there and didn’t come out.”

The holographic projector over his board lit and the image of what looked like a row of warehouses appeared, three-dimensional and sharp. There was a pulsing purple dot above one of the buildings.

Jo looked at the structures. She had already tapped the coordinates into a flatscreen, found the address and a street map, and was running the search engine…

“Okay, this building is owned by something called the Hari Corporation. Hold on a second…”

Jo waggled her fingers at the sight-reader. More intel appeared.

“Looks like a shell. Officers listed are Krishna, Vishnu, and Durga. Might take a while to backwalk it.”

“We can get that later,” Cutter said. “Take us in closer.”

Gramps waved his hand. The camera’s VP did a slow zoom, so the one building filled the holograph. At ground
level, the VP circled the structure, showing the windows and doors.

“All right, let’s get the materials specs and start the tacticals,” Cutter said.

The door to the van’s cargo compartment rolled up, and Kay caught the odors of three humans—one who had recently eaten meat, one who needed a bath, and one who stank of fear. She inhaled a bit deeper and caught the scent of a fourth, ten meters away. One or all of them could be armed, but surely the farthest one would be.

Only four—five, counting the one she had killed. She was insulted.

Of course, she was also captured, so the insult was overridden by shame.

How had she allowed it to happen? It was pathetic.

Best she prepare for what was coming.

Vastalimi learned as cubs how to enter an auto-trance state called
spokoj
, similar to hypnosis. This was usually done to enhance focus for detail work, or for rote memorization of a lot of data, but it could also alleviate pain. It wasn’t enough to calm a serious physioemotional state, something like a
zrelost
seizure, but it was useful.

She whispered the trigger phrase under her breath and tripped into
spokoj
.

Good thing, too. Almost immediately, she heard:

“Is it still asleep?” one of the men said.

“Of course. The dart carried enough tranquilizer to put a giant out. It will be unconscious for another two hours, minimum,” said a second man.

“Are you sure?”

“Watch.”

She held her breath, sank deeper into
spokoj
, waiting…

There it came. A jab, into her side with something sharp.
It broke the skin, but was stopped by the rib. A short knife, probably. No real damage.