Gunship (19 page)

“I’ll see what I can do.” His evil smile spoke louder than words could.

“No, you’ll do as I told you, or I’ll use your guts to hang you with.” Welch’s voice went flat as he stared back through the screen at the man. “Is the other one there?”

“I’m not sure,” Macon replied sullenly, cowed by Welch’s response. “You want kid gloves on him too?”

“No. If he gives you trouble, you can take whatever measures you need as long as he is coherent and able speak when I get him back here. I have a friend who has been dying to see him for some time now, and I’m sure he won’t mind a little damage.” Welch giggled at his own inside joke. As soon as he had those ledgers in hand, the whole lot of them would be rotting somewhere in space, leaving him free to finalize his plans.

“Then we have a deal?”

“If you stick to my terms, then yes, we have a deal. Deviate from them, and you will be dead within twenty-four hours.” Welch clicked off the conference video and smiled. He loved it when the world went his way. Then again, he made his own destiny, so why wouldn’t it?

He sat back down on his divan and picked up his favorite book of poems by Edger Allen Poe to while away the time until Macon called him back. Death and chaos always made for the best works of art. And since death and chaos were something he enjoyed creating himself, he felt a connection with Poe. Great men were always drawn together by their works, and he was going to be the greatest yet. People would flock to him either out of admiration or fear, it didn’t matter which, but he was certain that they would come. Just two more loose ends to tie up, and then he could take the next step on his own journey to greatness.

—————

At about ten minutes before midnight, Reilly scanned the room again, casually taking in all of the activity. Ty and Duv were talking to Holly and her brunette friend over by the bar, each trying to outdo the other in whatever wild tales they were spinning. The crowd was alive and people where drinking, hollering, occasionally brawling, but overall having a good night. As she slowly turned her head towards Chang, she could hear the whistle of one of his knives slicing through the air and then realized it was coming from the wrong direction.

She thought about Zain’s words before he had left. “Already? You’ve got to be shitting me!”

At the same time, a dark shape loomed on her left as she ducked, bringing up her arm to catch what she thought was a downward blow. An empty drink tray, tossed by Chang, came into view, intercepting the knife intended for her. Broken glass shattered everywhere, spraying liquid across the table and over the wall. Shots rang out as she hit the deck and rolled, coming up behind a table that had been knocked over during the initial chaos. Reilly pulled her sidearm as she crouched, trying to see where the threat was. People were running and screaming, and the band had stopped playing. She sighed. There were too many moving bodies in the way. She dodged out to the right of the table and looked for Chang. He was moving low and stealthy through the crowd, knives out.

“Reilly Campbell. Is that you hiding back there behind that table? Always knew you were a sniveling coward!”

She groaned inwardly. She knew that voice and the bastard it belonged to. She stood up slowly, looking for and finding her target.

Reise Macon. Macon had served in the ISUs a short while with Reilly. The man was unstable and prone to violence. She had turned him in after discovering he had beat a couple of civilians to death because they wouldn’t give him bribe money for patrolling their street. There was a court martial, but without an eye witness, Reise only got a discharge with some jail time and fines when he should have gotten a bullet. It had made her sick. He never should have been recruited for the unit, but when he got picked up, he went from bad to worse under the battlefield stress. After his discharge, he became much worse still. When he discovered it was Reilly who had turned him in, he promised to return the favor in his own fashion.

In her mind, she could still see it and feel it. It wasn’t three years ago, it was this moment, and she lived it daily. Reise had done what he had promised, he had more than gotten even, and yet he still didn’t realize it. Three years ago, Reilly was coming to this bar to see Jeremy Gray and Ryan Kelly. The last four to make it out, to survive that cursed hellhole on Viego 3. They made it a date, to meet on the anniversary of the day they got lifted out every year no matter what. Kelly was supposed to be late but arrived a few minutes after Jeremy did. They waited on the front porch for Reilly and Ty to get there, drinking a beer and cursing the heat, talking about future plans. Jeremy was getting married. Kelly was best man. Reilly was the bride. They had joked about Ty playing maid of honor.

Macon had gotten word about their tradition. So he got some of his goons to rig a TORR with explosives. As they stood waiting on the porch, one of the goons decided to double check his wiring to the detonator before he left the vehicle. Reilly and Ty could see the fireball from the spaceport. She never forgave herself for not being there with them. If Macon had killed her, it would have been a kindness at the time. Only Ty and Chang had been able to get her through it. Macon had disappeared after the attack. Reilly swore she would find him one day and make him pay.

She had kept tabs on him as they travelled, trying to learn where he was. Macon was now the lowest of the low, a trafficker in the human slave trade, pedaling women and children to the highest bidder and thriving off of the human misery he created. Reilly and her crew had visited more than a few of his establishments, searching but never finding Macon himself there. They made a point to always clean out the trash he had hired and help those he had enslaved to get free. If they couldn’t kill the man, they would kill his business.

It must have been making an impact for him to show up here on an ISU-friendly planet where he was known and hated. He had his blaster pointed at her as she stepped away from the table, covering down on him as well. Inside she let her anger out, seeing red, taking all the pain and channeling it into her hatred for this man who had taken everything from her.

“Reise. Wish I could say it’s good to see you, but that would only be true if you were a corpse.” She grinned as his smirk turned into a snarl. “See you brought some company along. Your taste in friends hasn’t improved. Or did you buy these on one of your business trips? I’m sure you paid too much, but then again, you always did enjoy hanging around with trash. How is business, by the way? I seem to remember a place of yours we visited just a month ago, had maybe a hundred or so people there all ready to be sold off to some processing factory on some moon. Pretty interesting visit, too, since they didn’t want to be sold. It was something else the way that big old building blew up with all that fancy equipment in it. It actually looked real pretty from where I was sitting behind the gun turret!” Reilly circled more to the left so she was now standing next to the bar with her back to the wall as she watched the other five men move cautiously forward. Only two of them seemed have a fighter’s stance, which meant the other three were probably local thugs. Good. They were also watching Chang, who stood casually fingering his knives off to Reilly’s right. Macon’s face was livid.

“Talk all you like, Campbell. You won’t be so big when I get done with you. Who knows? If I’m lucky, there might be enough left to still get a decent price at the auction house. Maybe sell your Chinaman too—but they usually need a pulse for that!” He laughed, and his men joined in. Macon sidled forward, as did his men. A large man to Reilly’s left brandished a blaster in her direction.

“Remember, boys, I need her alive and kicking…or at least alive to get us paid! But I don’t care what you do with him!” He nodded his head towards Chang, who stared back icily.

“Still running your mouth, Macon? You never did know when to shut up! Looks like I’m gonna have to shut it for you again!” Ty and Duv had gone out the side door with the crowd and crept back in behind Macon and his goons. As he spoke, Ty slammed into Macon, knocking his blaster off of Reilly so it discharged into the wall. Chang threw, taking both of the men nearest him down with knives to the throat. They fell to the floor with a faint hissing and gurgling sound, grabbing helplessly at their necks. Duv took down the man to next to Reise with an elbow to the face and a hammer-fist strike to the back of the neck. The man fell like a sack of rocks to the floor and lay motionless. Reilly, dodging the shot Reise had intended for her, was now engaged in a shooting match over the bar with the large man with the blaster. He was working hard to keep her pinned down until he could get off a stunning shot but was having a difficult time figuring out exactly where she was. She crawled quickly five feet towards the middle of the bar and looked up. The mirrors showed the man still crouched and turned the wrong way. He was oblivious to the angled mirrors along the ceiling’s edge. Reilly lay back flat on the floor. As the man popped up from the end of the bar, she shot him in the chest, leaving a large, smoking hole where his heart used to be. He toppled over with a stunned look.

Chang engaged the last man in hand-to-hand until Duv got behind him and knocked him to the ground with a bar stool. Reilly could see Ty wrestling with Macon to gain control of the blaster. , Shots ricocheted around the room as they rolled over broken glass and wood fragments, blasting furniture and causing the others to dive for cover. Reilly crouched by the bar and raised her gun but couldn’t risk the shot. They were too entangled, and she could easily kill Ty if she missed. She cursed and looked around for other options. Just then there was the sizzle of a laser rifle round as it raced through the bar. She turned back towards Ty and saw him pushing Macon back onto the floor. Reilly looked back across the room. Marek was standing in the doorway, a short-barreled tac-rifle in his hands. He lowered it as they exchanged nods. Duv helped Ty to his feet while Chang kicked the blaster away from Reise.

All of his men were dead, and Macon lay bleeding out on the floor. As Reilly walked over, he grinned while blood trickled down his face and then began to laugh.

“What the hell is so funny?” Ty growled.

“I know something you don’t know, I know something you don’t know, I know something—”

Ty grabbed Reise up by his shirt. “Well, you’d better spill it then, because it doesn’t look to me like you’ve got too much time left!”

Reise laughed and then choked on his own blood and leaned towards Ty. “Yes, but I’m gonna be dead before he gets here!” He began to laugh and choke harder as Ty shook him.

“Before who gets here? Dammit, spill your guts, you fraggin’ waste of air!”

But it was too late. Reise Macon was grinning up at them as dead as he could be.

“I think I know the ‘who’ he’s talking about.” Chang kicked over a handheld that had slid from Macon’s pocket. They all leaned over to look. The last message on it was from Razam Welch.

Reilly picked it up and snapped a photo of Macon, then hit send before throwing the handheld back on the ground. In the distance, they could hear the sound of approaching feet and a siren. The ISU garrison had been alerted and a tac-squad was on the way. They holstered their weapons and waited.

As they looked down at Macon again, Chang noticed the handheld come back on. He took a step forward and stomped the screen hard, twice. The system whined and then died as the tac-squad entered the room, armed to the teeth. Reilly and her crew raised their hands and stood silently in the center of the room as the squad stripped their weapons and had them sit along the wall.

—————

Welch fretted. Macon should have gotten back to him by now. He tugged irritably on his ear lobe, impatient, flipping aimlessly through the now-forgotten poetry book. Suddenly his handheld beeped. He leaned over and picked it up, thumbing across the screen. He grimaced and then hurled it against the wall. It showed a picture of a very dead Reise Macon.

“Idiot!” he screamed. Now Reilly knew who was looking for her and that he was alive.

He pushed over some furniture and then paused. Slowly, he turned and walked back to where the handheld lay and picked it up. He brought up the main screen and then attempted to link to Macon’s handheld again. Once the link was established, he sent a crawler over to slave the handheld to his and promptly turned on the camera. The picture was dark, but he could hear some dragging and scraping sounds. Then suddenly the picture flipped around and a hand came into view. The image scattered again and then cleared. Just for an instant he could make out four people standing together. Then the image blurred and the handheld registered a loud popping sound and went blank.

Welch smirked. He linked his handheld to the main computer and pulled up the last image on the large screen.

“Enhance photo,” he ordered.

The computer zoomed in, cropped, and then sharpened the image.

“Adjust lighting forty percent.”

There she was. Welch smiled bigger. The whole crew must be there, even…ah yes…Crazy Ray’s Wanted Man #2…but whoops! Somebody just stomped the handheld to put it out of its misery.

“Too late!” he muttered gleefully as he cued up his comms device. A voice responded, and he gave a few orders and clicked off. Turning to the large screen again, he pulled up his tracker vision and watched. Within a matter of minutes, the Seekers and Tethers were preparing to move out. It would take them another week at least to make Roen’s solar system, but then it should only take hours to find what he was looking for. They would expect bounty hunters now, but not Seekers or Tethers and definitely not in the numbers that had been sent out. Another call came in, and he routed it through the mainframe. It was Crazy Ray.

“Were you planning on telling me why you decided to pull off all of the Seekers? Or am I going to have to guess at your lunacy?” Crazy Ray was in black, Asian-looking silk pajamas, and it looked like he had been sleeping. He must have set his tracker vision to alert him to any changes.

“Raymond! I’m so very sorry to disturb your beauty sleep!” Welch smiled as Crazy Ray flinched at the use of his formal name. “Of course I was going to tell you first thing, but I had to act fast for both of our benefits. You see, one of my cronies found your wanted men.” Welch omitted the part on the failed attempt to capture them.