Blowback (3 page)

Tom stretched out his legs and watched the crowd in the bar.
More than once he’d managed to shoot someone a mere second before they shot
him, and Tom had developed an instinct for keeping an eye on everything around
him. Living with his stepfather had given him a good eye for trouble coming his
way, and now that he was big enough to end any problem that started, Tom
enjoyed sitting in places like the
Golden Absolute
where trouble was
sure to start.

A woman at the bar caught his eye. She was older, no girl to
giggle at him during sex, and the gun on her hip suggested that she could take
care of herself. Tom liked that in a woman. He never did understand why men
flocked to the young doxies who stood around the newsfeed screens and watched
the vid stars with their fancy-pants fashions. Tom sure as hell didn’t want
that in his bed.

No, this new woman was more his speed. Her hair was streaked
with blue, but her skin was honey colored and all human. She had wide hips and
a strong body that her tight pants showed off very nicely.

Tom could feel himself start to harden, but just as he got
up to see if she was interested, a man slid into the chair next to Tom.

“What the…?” Tom jerked back, his hand going to his gun.

“I don’t want trouble.” The man dropped an envelope on the
table and held his hands up in surrender. The guy looked like a toothpick
compared to Tom. Of course, physical strength wasn’t everything. One of the
meanest soldiers Tom had ever met was this tiny, wiry little man who’d had a
real thing for knives, but this guy moved like an office worker.

“What the fuck do you want?” Tom leaned forward, crowding
into the man’s personal space and smiling when the guy started sweating. He was
acting like an escaped slave, searching the shadows for boogey men all rabbit-like.
Lots of people thought rabbits weren’t determined. However, Tom had spent
plenty of time watching them on the farm. They’d get where they were going
every time even if they were nervous as hell and twitchier yet while doing it.
That was this guy.

“I wanted to show you something.”

Tom narrowed his eyes. “If you’re some perv who’s about to
pull his pecker out, I really don’t have a problem cutting it off,” Tom warned.
From the way the man turned bright red and started spluttering, that hadn’t
been his plan. Tom crossed his arms and leaned back, waiting for some sort of
explanation. The twit’s hands shook as he reached for the envelope.

“No, I wouldn’t—you—” He stopped and took a deep breath.
“There are things you need to know.” His hands were shaking as he pulled out a
display unit. It was one of those disposable units that stored a certain number
of pictures, and when you were done, you wiped and tossed the whole thing.
Smugglers loved to use them because the cops couldn’t retrieve images of the
illegal goods once the memory was wiped.

“You got something to say, you should say it to Captain
Ramsay,” Tom said as the little man turned the unit on and pushed it toward
Tom.

“Maybe he’s not the best man for the job. After all, he has
to follow orders.”

“So do I,” Tom said, but the image on the screen was
distracting him. It was Da’shay. Her long black hair was braided in back and
she had a big honking knife in one hand and a gun in the other. After years in
the Corps, Tom knew what a man or woman looked like when enjoying the kill and
Da’shay had that look. Blood was smeared across her simple, tight uniform. Tom
hadn’t ever seen her touch a weapon or wear anything other than those silly
dresses of hers, but there was something in the way she held her body that told
him this wasn’t some photo patch job. This was Da’shay.

“This from her file?” Tom flipped the unit over and used a
thumbnail to pop off the cover to the power source. If someone wanted to tamper
with a disposable unit, he had to disconnect the unit power and jack in an
alternative power source while he edited the pictures. Tom sure didn’t have
those sorts of skills, but he could spot tampering like that easy enough. This
unit, however, hadn’t been rigged up. Tom clicked the cover back in placed and turned
the unit over again.

He poked the controls for the next image. This one showed
more of the background. Wire pens were crammed in under a bulkhead. This wasn’t
one of the legal slave pens on the colonies—in those places they put collars on
people and paraded them around. This was a smuggler taking slaves to some
illegal work camp in free space where the boss would deny he had slaves while
slowly starving them to death because they weren’t valuable enough to feed.
Each pen had a body in it, some curled up and others splayed out in a grotesque
sprawl. Tom had seen ships like this.

“Da’shay ain’t the one who killed those.” Tom pointed to the
cages. Those people had been poisoned. He’d seen other slaves with that white
foam at the corners of their mouths, their limbs twisted in inhuman shapes as
they struggled for air. It wasn’t something he ever wanted to see, but he
couldn’t blame Da’shay for it. More than likely, a Corps ship had hailed them
and the slavers had killed the cargo to avoid having the extra life signs on
board.

“No, but she killed others.”

“Ain’t like
genta
are saints. They’re just as likely
to kill as a human, maybe not for the same reasons, I suppose.” Tom shrugged
and studied the pictures. If someone had used the unit to take a picture of something
that’d been cobbled together, he’d see a stray shadow, a missing shadow, an odd
angle that didn’t make no sense. The scene was shocking, but every instinct Tom
had said it was real.

“This…this woman is a devil.” The little man reached over
and turned to the next image for Tom.

Holy hell. Tom wasn’t even sure how many smugglers he was
looking at because the way the bodies had been cut into pieces and scattered
around made calculating a little more difficult. “You’re saying that she did
this?” Tom turned to the next image, and Da’shay was clutching her gun the way
a child might hold a bear, but with the other hand she was swinging her knife
toward some guy who wore a panicked expression. That was one less smuggler Tom
had to worry about arresting. From this angle, Tom could see the tears in her
plain, gray uniform. Some of the blood covering her was her own. That made
sense because in a small space with the hull ricocheting the bullets around,
she’d have to be a ghost to avoid getting shot at least a few times.

“She took care of the smugglers,” Tom said. He felt
something heavy in his stomach, something like disgust. He was all for shooting
people when they were on the wrong side of the law, but this…she was taking joy
in killing these people. However, she was crew and that was reason enough not
to tell this pencil-necked twerp just how uncomfortable this made Tom.

“You want someone to see this, then you show Ramsay.” Tom
pushed the display away.

“They were calling the Corps captain, begging to surrender.
By the time crew got there, there wasn’t a smuggler left alive.”

Tom shrugged. “Not my business, but seeing what those
smugglers do affects some people. She wouldn’t be the first to blow up a ship
full of assholes.” Tom leaned back and studied the man. “Ain’t sure what you
want me to do about this.” He thumbed the unit to the next picture and Da’shay
was standing there with such a blank look on her face that he felt chills up
his spine.

“From what I hear, she almost blew you up and you didn’t do
anything to stop her.”

Tom fisted his hands and had a flash of anger that left him
wanting to pound the shit out of this guy. “She didn’t set the bomb.”

“No, but if your engineer had left the intake vents open,
that explosion would have swept through the
Kratos
. And certain
government officials and your captain aren’t doing anything to hold her
accountable.”

“There’s a real old saying. It goes, ‘That’s above my pay
grade.’” Tom smirked at the man and leaned back in his chair. This conversation
was making him more than a little uncomfortable, especially given that Ramsay
had shut him down when he’d tried talking about Da’shay. Ramsay was better than
most captains, but there were times that he simply didn’t talk to Tom because
Tom wasn’t an officer.

“Maybe,” the man said. “But I’m willing to bet that you’re
not the sort to let friends get killed because of orders. Your captain has
orders. But this is what you need to ask yourself.” He leaned in, scooting his
chair closer. “What would have happened to that engineer if she’d had the vents
open?” Tom didn’t answer as he thought about hot, poisonous steam filling the
ventilation, all pouring down onto Becca who wouldn’t have been able to get
free. “What would have happened if your captain or the sergeant hadn’t taken
shelter in the smuggler’s ship? I read the reports, and from what I can see,
you four barely survived Da’shay’s latest spell.”

Tom couldn’t really argue with that. He’d survived his
step-father, basic training and sixteen years of policing parts of the universe
most soldiers tried to avoid, and one bomb had just about blown him up. Didn’t
feel right. And looking at the expression on Da’shay’s face—looking at the
utter joy as she cut into human beings, it did seem to make it more likely that
she’d had something to do with the bomb. At the very least, she knew it was
there and she hadn’t cared enough about their lives to do anything about it.

The man lowered his voice to a barely audible whisper. “The
people I work for think that Da’shay is out of control.”

“Then tell her to fuck off,” Tom suggested. Exiling
genta
worked. No one knew where they went…maybe to the colonies and maybe back home
to where the species had first come from. Maybe they killed themselves; Tom
didn’t care. He just knew that if a
genta
was told to go away, it did.
If someone up the chain of Command told her to get lost, she would. Hell, she
wasn’t even regular crew. Da’shay pretty much only piloted when she felt like
it and she’d quit half-way through a blessed shift. The
Kratos
would be
fine without her.

“Certain people want to keep her around. You understand our
problem?”

Sucking air through his front teeth, Tom looked around at
the room. Yeah, he understood. Some Commander didn’t mind having Da’shay
around, even if she was helping someone blow up Tom and the crew of the
Kratos
.

“Just because the decision comes from someone with rank,
that doesn’t make it right. We have reason to believe that you’re an
intelligent enough man to find a solution.”

Tom gave the man a shit look. He wasn’t dumb enough to fall
for that kind of flattery. Compliment him on his shooting and he’d believe it.
Compliments about his intelligence when it came to these kinds of complicated
problems, that was flat out insulting.

The little man leaned closer. “On Ishum, your captain’s
hover was hit with a grenade blast. It knocked him out while the crew went into
a fight with a mercenary named Pada.”

Tom scratched his chest. “I remember.”

“Yes, and it seems rather convenient that the captain was
incapacitated.”

With a shrug, Tom stared at the man, daring him to make
whatever connections he wanted. Tom had filed his report and he was sticking by
it.

“You suggested that one of Pada’s men got a lucky hit with a
grenade launcher.”

“Happens,” Tom said. “Yesterday, I shot two men dead from five
thousand meters out.”

“Yes, but that seems unlikely since Pada was paying the
captain to pull his men back at the last second. That was the third time your
crew had Pada cornered, and yet it was the first time you managed to capture
even one of the mercenaries. Captain Severn’s accident was very well-timed.
Your cover story, however, could use some help.”

If Command knew he’d turned on his own captain, they’d
arrest him for treason and throw him under the jail. He’d lived with that fear
for years, especially after Command had transferred him days later. But in the
last six years, he thought he’d put that bit of treason to rest. Instead, Tom
could feel the familiar panic. They knew. They knew and not even killing this
little flea of a man would change the fact that someone had written down in a
report that he’d turned on his commanding officer. Tom leaned forward. “You
have something to say, you say it. Otherwise, you go away, because you’re
bugging me, little man, and you would not like to find out how I deal with
annoyances.” The fear in the man’s eyes was enough to make Tom feel a little
better about this whole fucked up situation.

“You’re a survivor, Tom Frieden. We happen to think that
you’re smart enough to see that getting rid of Da’shay is the only way for you
and the crew to survive.” The man’s gaze darted around the room as if he
expected cops to jump out at him. “We also think your captain can’t do
anything…not without ending up in the same trouble you’re in. We’re trying to
protect you and Captain Ramsay.”

“Yeah, because you care so much for us.” Tom crossed his
arms and dared the little man to try to say that.

“No, we don’t. We do, however, want to stop more disasters
before the Command and the government end up with a big black eye. This
genta
massacred a crew begging for help and then stood by while terrorists nearly
blew up a Corps crew. If the press got that, we would care very much about
that.”

“Are you trying to set me up? You recording this? What, do
you want me to say I’ll turn on the Corps? Is that what you’re looking to get
on tape?” Tom leaned closer so that any microphone would pick up his next
words. “I ain’t turning traitor. So run along, little man.” Giving the man a
feral smile, Tom leaned back in his chair and watched to see what he’d do now.
Ramsay didn’t let him do undercover much since Tom didn’t always have a good
hold on where the entrapment line was, but he knew for a fact that a statement
of outright refusal meant that a cop was on mighty shaky grounds with recorded
evidence.