The Ramal Extraction (24 page)

Jo had learned this and devised ways to counter it.

Jo switched her leads again, stealing another half step. It was simple but effective against one who had not seen it: Lean forward, then as you lean back, slide your foot ahead. Your body appeared to stay in the same space, but you were closer.

Kay had seen the trick and was not fooled. She waited.

At four meters, the woman was well within Kay’s standing-jump range, and just a hair outside her own. But a leap, once committed to, took a relatively long time to arrive. Velocity was limited to ground speed at launch. An alert opponent had plenty of time to get out of the way or set up a counter. The first time Jo had stepped in and thrown a long sidekick when Kay had flown at her from a distance had been a surprise. Vastalimi were agile, but unlike creatures with long and heavy tails, they could not change direction in midair. She had managed to tuck and twist, so that the kick caught a raised thigh instead of her belly, but it had been enough to off-balance her landing and allow Jo to follow up effectively.

She hadn’t made that mistake again.

No, the way to victory now lay in gaining position and being able to get an attack off faster than it could be defended, or to set up a second or third move to follow it equally fast. This was why pure defense was the path to a loss. You could block ninety-nine of a hundred attacks but if you failed on the hundredth, you lost—

Jo cross-stepped to her left, offering what seemed to be a weak position.

Kay whickered. “Really? Have I gone blind?”

Jo grinned.

Kay switched leads, allowing her hands to drift back into defensive position a little slower, leaving her highline open.

“Yeah, I’m not buying that one,” Jo said.

Lightning sizzled, and the instant blast of thunder made it
right there
—

Jo attacked, churned through the mud, her augmented speed turning her into a wet blur as she used the light and sound for a distraction. She fired a right punch high—

—Kay dodged to her left, shot her right hand out in a stop-block punch—

—Jo snapped her right knee up wide, aiming for Kay’s thigh. She slid over the muddy ground on her left foot as if she were skiing, no loss of balance—

—Kay barely avoided the knee strike by a spin away, and she slipped while doing it, took a heartbeat to regain her own balance—

—Jo dropped her raised knee and pivoted on both feet, but her momentum kept her skidding past a hair—

—Kay crouched low, the squat almost touching her buttocks to the ground, and leaped, hands leading for a low tackle—

—Jo sprang up and forward, tucked into a ball, and threw a forward somersault
over
Kay—

—Kay turned her dive into a shoulder roll. Splashed mud and water, bounced up in a 180, sank to her ankles in a boggier patch—

—Jo landed the flip, right leg leading, and stepped out of it, pivoted on the balls of her feet, turned to face Kay, five meters between them—

“Halt!” somebody yelled. “Identify yourself!”

Kay came out of her crouch, saw Jo do the same.

An unsuited sentry.

“Captain Sims and
Kluth
fem,” Jo called. “At ease.”

“I need a password, Captain.”

The sentry, a hard-faced human with his weapon pointing between the two of them, was ten meters away, backlit by the lights of the main structure in the compound. Likely that Jo or Kay could get to him and take him down before he could do anything useful, and if he knew who they were, he knew that, but he was one of theirs, and this was his job.

“The password is ‘Boogie-woogie.’”

The sentry lowered his weapon. “Sorry, ma’am,” he said.

“Not at all,” Jo said. “We forgot where we were, our fault. Good job.”

The sentry nodded.

Jo looked at Kay. “A draw?”

“Draw. Tell Formentara the new augmentation is most impressive. I thought you would fall when you threw that knee.”

“Me, too,” Jo said. “Amazed me I stayed up.”

“It will be interesting to see how it works on firmer footing.”

“I’m looking forward to that. What say we get dry, and I buy you a drink?”

“I am open to that.”

Gramps said, “We’ve intercepted another com, Rags.”

Cutter looked up at the man in the doorway.

“Should be up on your screen. Oral, no visual, but you need to listen to it.”

Cutter saw the pulsing com-dot on his computer’s holoproj. He said, “Play on-screen com recording.”

“—can’t talk long, they are coming back, but I am alive, Father, and—”

The voice stopped.

“That’s it,” Gramps said.

“How did we come by it?”

“Rama sent it to the Rajah about five minutes ago, according to the Rajah’s security, along with a barely polite frothing-at-the-mouth demand for the Rajah to get his ass in gear and get his armies on the march.”

Cutter leaned back in his form-chair. “Is it her?”

“Formentara says it is, but with reservations. Zhe’s on hir way over.”

“Reservations?”

“Voxmatch uses twenty-six points for a perfect mesh. Realistically speaking, anything above nineteen points is good enough for a positive ID and you almost never get a perfect mesh. The message is a twenty-three.”

“So we believe it is her.”

“Yes, but—”

Formentara arrived at that moment and moved past Gramps into Cutter’s office. Zhe said, “It is her
voice
, but she didn’t send that message.”

“Explain.”

“We have access to more than a hundred hours of recordings featuring Indira. So a baseline is easy to establish. The kidnappers would know that. This snippet of monologue is her saying those words, no question, but they weren’t spoken in that order.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“It’s a mash,” Formentara said.

Cutter looked at hir expectantly.

“A construct. Listen to this.” Zhe tapped a command into the small handheld.

Cutter’s computer’s speakers cut in:

“—can’t talk long, they are coming back, but I am alive, Father, and—”

“Sounds about the same to me,” Cutter said.

“Not
about
the same, it is
exactly
the same,” zhe said. “Voxmatch puts it as a twenty-six when compared to the first message. That never happens.

“The second one is a mash I put together using a computer-cull to give me the set of words that matched my query. I linked them together in order, ran it through a smoother to fix the cadences so they’d be more like they would be in that sentence’s order. A word at the end of a normal sentence usually gets a different emphasis than it would at the beginning or middle, and if you move it, it sounds wrong.”

Cutter nodded. “Okay.”

“My mash is a perfect match. Couldn’t happen that way coincidentally. Somebody did the same thing I did.”

“So it is a faked message.”

“Absolutely.”

Cutter considered it. “The question then is, who? Somebody trying to fool Rama? Or Rama trying to fool the Rajah?”

“There’s something else,” Formentara said. “There’s a carrier sig under the message, part of which is a com unit’s hardware hash. I ran the number, and it’s IDed as one of the units Indira had, which is reportedly missing.”

Cutter thought about that for a moment. “So whoever is responsible for the message has the com unit Indira probably had with her when she was taken.”

“Or access to the hash number and enough sense to append it, to convince us she sent the message,” Gramps put in.

“Gets even more interesting,” zhe said. “The backwalk on the sig shows its origin in the southern reach of the Asana Forest.”

“That seems sloppy,” Gramps said. “The other messages
were bounced all to hell and gone, no way to trace them. Why wouldn’t this one be?”

Cutter said, “Refresh my memory: The Asana Forest is where…?”

“Southern Balaji.”

Of fucking course it is.

“Looks like Rama is going to get his war,” Gramps said.

“Why fake the message if they have her?” Cutter wondered aloud. “Why not just have her parrot whatever they tell her to say?”

“Maybe she isn’t in any condition to talk,” Formentara said.

Cutter sighed. Always a possibility—that the victim was dead before they ever arrived. It had happened before, not much you could do with that, save maybe recover the body. A small and cold victory.

Cutter’s com announced an incoming call.

“The Rajah?” Gramps said.

“Yes. I’ll go talk to him. And then maybe we need to have another word with Rama. Call the team in. We are probably going to have to hurry.”

Kay got the call as she finished grooming her fur, combing out undercoat shed and tangles. She wasn’t particularly vain about her appearance, but there were basic minimum standards a Vastalimi would adhere to when it was possible to do so. You might not have time to groom in combat for days, but there was no excuse for not doing it sitting idle, waiting for something—for anything—to happen…

She opened the com, said: “I am here.”

“Is this the Vastalimi?” came the voice.

A female Rel, she didn’t doubt. “It is. Speak.”

“I am told you wish to talk to me.”

“And you are?”

“My name does not matter.”

“Then you should have no problem giving it to me. And better that we should talk face-to-face.”

“I won’t give you my name, nor will we meet can I help it. Two of my kind to whom you recently spoke face-to-face are dead. I have no desire to join them.”

“I killed neither of them.”

“All the same, they are dead, and certainly due to that contact. Death rides on Vastalimi shoulders.”

So, Booterik’s thinly veiled reference to his sibling Zeth’s being dead could be so if this Rel was telling the truth.

“So Zeth
is
dead. How did he die?”

There was a long pause. “I understand it was suicide.”

Kay nodded to herself. Yes. That made sense. Under stress, Rel were quicker to do that than many species. Or it could have been murder, to keep him quiet.

“It was you who told Zeth the location of the kidnapped human fem.”

“No. I told someone else, who told someone, who probably told Zeth. I did not know Zeth.”

Yes, she could see such a possibility. What one Rel knew was apt to be shared with others, which was likely how Zeth learned of it. They were herd creatures; among themselves, they were quick to talk about anything and everything. Which was why she went looking there in the first place.

“How did you come to learn this information?”

“By way of a human native.”

“The human’s name?”

“I—I need assurances.”

“What assurances?”

“That if I help you, you will not hunt me.”

Kay considered the comment. Augmented Rel. Those who didn’t roll over and show their bellies immediately? How very strange. “You bargain with me? Have you forgotten who I am?”

“I know what you are. And I know, too, what the word of a Vastalimi means. Give it, or I discom and run.”

“And you believe I won’t find you?”

“Eventually. It might take years.”

“Or days.”

“Yes. But that is my offer.”

The Rel did not matter, only what she knew. “All right, done. If you give me information—and if it turns out to be true and useful—I won’t hunt you.”

“The human’s name is Brahmaputra Siddhartha. He is the manager of the TotalMart in Dep-by-the-Sea.”

“How did he come to reveal this information?”

“By accident.”

“Explain.”

“I worked for TotalMart as a contract accountant, and Bram Sid was my employer there. While balancing ledgers, I came across a file that was out of place. When I read it, I found the information about the Rajah’s daughter. It was thinly disguised—‘R.’s daughter, being held at the lodge, under guard.’ Like that. I mentioned it to my lover.”

And her lover could not keep it to himself, Rel being what they were. It spread from there.

“Is that all you know of it?”

“It is.”

“Then we are done,” Kay said. “Graze free.”

The Rel broke the connection.

They could find out her name, of course. If she worked for TotalMart, there would be records, and Cutter Colonel had deep connections with TotalMart. But why would she bother? The CFI team could verify it if they wished. The Rel was but a tool, history of no import. And Kay had given her word, which
was
important.

This was most clever, the planting of false information. It was done by somebody who knew that Rel were quick to mouth, who knew that it would be too good not to share. And by someone who knew that it was likely a Vastalimi hunting for information would eventually speak to one of the Rel who had it. Most clever.

Perhaps they had made this information available elsewhere, as well.

It seemed an elaborate and complicated effort to set up
a trap. Of course, it had worked, if not as well as they doubtless wished.

Certainly it was not done by some half-witted kidnapper looking to make money; no, this opponent was smart and, so far, had been ahead of them. That was good. One wanted a decent match. There was no real joy in a fight against a markedly inferior opponent.