McCade's Bounty (3 page)

Seconds later they were free of the asteroid's light gravity and headed out toward the area where the
Void Runner
and some of the other large ships drifted miles apart.

The
Void Runner
had originally been a Destroyer Escort and, as such, was twice the size of McCade's previous ship
Pegasus.

Although still small enough to negotiate planetary atmospheres, and therefore streamlined in appearance, the
Void Runner
was
more ship than one person could comfortably run by himself.

The ship had carried a crew of eight back in her military days, but McCade had modified her to operate with a crew of four, and could fly her single-handed in an emergency.

So, Rico and Phil had come along to keep McCade company and crew the ship. They chatted with each other as McCade sent
Void Runner
a recognition code, countersigned the return password, and slid the shuttle toward the lighted berth on DE's port side.

There was another similar berth on the starboard side presently occupied by a four-place speedster. More toy than tool, McCade justified it as a lifeboat and ignored Sara's disparaging remarks.

Easing the little ship into its bay, McCade fired the shuttle's repellors and lowered it onto the durasteel deck. The outer hatch slid closed shortly after that, air rushed in to pressurize the bay, and a pair of snakelike robo tubes slithered out to connect themselves to the shuttle. The tubes pulsed rhythmically as fuel flowed into the shuttle's tanks.

McCade, Rico, and Phil left the shuttle the moment the bay was properly pressurized. The argrav was adjusted to Alice normal and felt good after Rister's Rock.

Bright lights threw hard black shadows down against the durasteel deck. All around the three inner bulkheads, tools, torches, and hand testers were racked and waiting for use.

McCade tapped a code into the lock and waited for it to iris open. The lock was necessary so that a loss of pressure inside the shuttle bay wouldn't affect the rest of the ship.

McCade still felt a sense of pride when he stepped out of the lock into his ship.
Pegasus
had been comfortable and fast, but nothing like
this.
The
Void Runner
was larger, roomier, more heavily armed, and even faster than
Pegasus
had been. She was three years old, but she still smelled new, and McCade took pleasure in walking her corridors.

As McCade made his way toward the ship's bridge he passed the hundreds and hundreds of items that mean little by themselves but taken together make a warship.

There were com screens, remote status displays, zero-G handholds, navy gray bulkheads, damage-control stations, equipment panels, warning labels, first-aid kits, access doors, radiation detectors, patch paks, ventilation ducts, weapons lockers, maintenance ways, crash kits, miles of conduit, and, yes, brass that did little more than look good.

McCade scrambled up a short flight of metal stairs and entered the bridge. The overhead lighting was subdued. Hundreds of indicator lights glowed red, green, and amber.

There was a command chair located toward the center of the room, fronted by three control positions, one for the pilot, the copilot, and the weapons officer.

McCade dropped into the captain's chair and touched a button. "Maggie? You there?"

A screen came to life. It showed a middle-aged woman. She was all torso and no legs. Both had been horribly mangled during a drive-room explosion and scissored off by her self-sealing space armor.

For reasons only Magda Anne Hornby could understand, she'd refused stim growth replacements
and
prosthetics, settling for a custom-designed argrav box instead.

But legs or no legs, Maggie was still the best damned engineer for a hundred lights in any direction, and knew it.

Maggie blew a stray strand of red hair out of her eyes. "Of course I'm here. Where the hell did you think I'd be?"

McCade grinned. He knew from experience that Maggie was impossible to please. In fact it was Maggie's personality rather than her handicap that kept her from more lucrative employment on a freighter or a big liner. "My mistake. I'll need the drives about five from now."

Maggie nodded curtly and the screen went black. Though welcome on the bridge, she preferred to ride where she worked, in the drive room.

Rico ran a manual preflight check, while McCade tapped instructions into the ship's navcomp, and Phil sharpened a durasteel claw. Although the variant was a lousy pilot, his keen brain and amplified reaction times made him a crackerjack weapons officer.

With all systems green, and a gruff "go ahead" from Maggie, McCade fired the
Void Runners
standard drives. The DE would reach the nav beacon in a few minutes, enter hyperspace, and exit about three standard days after that. A short run later and they'd see Alice.

McCade allowed the seat to make him comfortable and delegated control to the navcomp. He couldn't wait to get home.

The ship's screens blurred momentarily as the
Void Runner
slipped out of hyperspace. McCade felt the usual moment of nausea and scanned his readouts for signs of trouble. Nothing. All systems were green.

Phil tapped a series of keys. Sensors reached out to probe the surrounding vacuum for indications of heat, metal, or radiation. Passive receptors listened, scanners watched for signs of pulsed light, and vid cams searched for movement against the stars.

Phil growled in the back of his throat as the skin along the top of his muzzle formed a series of ridges and his fangs appeared.

Something was wrong. Although Alice couldn't afford remote weapons platforms, she did have deep-space robo sensors, and based on their warnings the
Void Runner
should've been challenged by now.

Phil opened a com link, tapped in a frequency, and spoke into his mic. "This is the
Void Runner
,
Delta Beta, six-niner-two, requesting a planetary approach vector. What the hell's wrong with you people? Wake up and smell the coffee."

Silence.

Phil's chair whirred as he turned toward McCade. "I'm worried, Sam. No challenge so far, and no response."

McCade frowned. Maybe there was some sort of equipment failure.

"Try 'em again, Phil, and run a diagnostic routine on our gear. There's always the chance that some equipment went belly up."

Phil tried again and got the same result. He ran an auto check on the ship's com gear. Nothing. The variant turned toward McCade and gave a shrug.

McCade lifted a protective cover and pushed a red button. A klaxon went off and called a nonexistent naval crew to battle stations. The ship's defensive screen went to full military power, weapons systems came on-line, and a three-dimensional tac tank appeared in front of McCade's chair.

The tac tank was empty of movement—outside of symbols representing Alice, her sister planets, and the sun itself. There were no warships waiting to pounce, no fighters vectoring in, no torpedoes flashing through space. Nothing.

The intercom bonged. Maggie appeared on-screen. She scowled. "You're starting to piss me off, McCade. What's all this battle stations crap? You hit the wrong button or something?"

McCade fought to keep his temper. "We can't raise Alice and we're not sure why. They should be all over us by now. Strap in and stand by."

Maggie nodded and the screen flashed to black.

McCade took another longer look in the tac tank. Still nothing. A hard lump formed in his throat. Where were the robo sensors? The usual tramp freighters? The planet's five-ship navy?

McCade swallowed hard. "Rico, full power. Phil, keep your eyes peeled. I've got a bad feeling about this."

It took twelve long, frustrating, tension-filled hours to close with Alice. Hours during which there was plenty of time to worry, to think about Sara and Molly, to imagine all sorts of terrible calamities. But nothing, not even McCade's worst imaginings, could compare with what they actually found.

Alice half filled the view screens when Phil spotted the first wreck. "Sam, Rico, take a look at this."

Phil's claws made a clicking sound as they hit the keys. A magnified image appeared on the main view screen. It was a ship, the remains of one anyway, tumbling end over end. Light and dark, light and dark, over and over again. Torpedoes had taken a terrible toll, ripping huge holes in the vessel's durasteel hull, gutting the interior.

Rico's fist made a loud bang as it hit the control panel. "Damn! That's the
Free Star
!"

"It
was
the
Free Star
,"
Phil corrected grimly. "Wait . . . there's more . . ."

McCade bit his lip. The
Free Star
had been a reconditioned destroyer, the flagship of the planet's small navy, crushed like a child's plaything. Who had done this? Pirates? The Il Ronn? It was impossible to tell.

By the time the DE swung into orbit around Alice the crew had seen more smashed ships, a ruptured habitat, and four or five burned-out satellites. Taken altogether the destruction meant hundreds of lives lost.

McCade thought about Sara and Molly. A muscle in his left cheek began to twitch. He had to get dirtside, had to find them, had to make sure they were okay. But what if they weren't? What if . . . Phil interrupted McCade's thoughts.

"Hold it! I've got something on VHF!"

Alice shimmered and disappeared as a new image formed on the main view screen. The shot showed a man, a nice-looking man, with a fleshy something on his shoulder. Was it blue? Purple? The thing shimmered like iridescent cloth. The man smiled.

"Hello. This message is intended for Sam McCade. Everyone else can open the nearest lock and suck vacuum.

"As for you, McCade, I sincerely hope you're dead. But if you survived . . . here's something to think about: 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.'

"Or, how about, 'What goes around comes around'?

"Or, the ever-popular, 'Screw with me and I will rip your goddamned lungs out'?

"Take your pick. Just remember. You stuck your nose where it didn't belong, and I chopped it off."

The screen snapped to black.

Rico's chair whirred as he turned toward McCade. "Okay, sport . . . who the hell was that?"

McCade's mind raced. Who the hell was that, indeed? Like most bounty hunters he was good at remembering faces. Yet McCade was sure that he'd never seen the man before. But that didn't make sense. The man had a personal grudge, a grudge so big he'd attack Alice, so surely they'd met. Wait a minute . . . the voice . . . there was something about the voice.

"Play the last part again."

Phil tapped some keys and the man reappeared. " . . . And I will rip your goddamned lungs out.

"Take your pick. Just remember. You stuck your nose where it didn't belong, and I chopped it off."

McCade slammed his fist down onto the arm of his chair. "Mustapha Pong!"

Now it made sense. Pong was the renegade pirate who'd unknowingly stolen the Il Ronnian Vial of Tears a few years earlier. In an attempt to avoid an interstellar war and pocket a sizable bounty, McCade had tracked the Vial to Pong's secret base. Shortly thereafter a combined human-Il Ronnian fleet had destroyed the base and almost all of Pong's ships. That explained the grudge.

And although McCade and Pong had spoken with each other by radio on one occasion, they'd never met face-to-face.

Rico nodded his understanding. "So what's the weird-lookin' thing on Pong's shoulder."

"I can answer that," Phil said grimly. "The 'weird-lookin' thing' as you call it is a Melcetian mind slug."

McCade frowned. "A Melcetian what?"

"Mind slug," Phil replied evenly. "I read a paper on them once. They're nonsentient symbiotic creatures who rarely leave their native planet but have the capacity to amplify human brain activity."

"Amplify brain activity?" McCade asked. "As in think better?"

Phil nodded. "Better, faster, and more creatively."

Rico raised an eyebrow. "Oh, yeah? Then how come I never saw one before?"

Phil smiled, and given his durasteel dentition, it was a terrifying sight. "Because everything has a price. In this case the price involves allowing the slug to tap into your spinal cord, filter your blood for nutrients, and feed you addictive chemicals."

McCade shuddered as he hit his harness release. "Sounds horrible. It makes a certain kind of sense though. No wonder Pong's so good at what he does."

A few seconds later all three of them were headed for the shuttle. Although McCade was the only one who was married, both Rico and Phil had significant others, plus a raft of friends. And as a member of the planetary council, Rico felt a special responsibility to the entire population.

They all hoped for the best but feared the worst.

McCade paused outside the shuttle bay access lock and touched a button. Maggie appeared on-screen. He knew without asking that the engineer had kept abreast of developments via the drive-room intercom and view screens. Maggie didn't talk much but she always knew what was going on. "We're heading dirtside."

Maggie nodded. "It didn't take a genius to figure that out."

"Are you coming?"

Maggie gave him a twisted smile. "No, I don't think so. I haven't got any people down there, and besides, who'd watch the ship?"

McCade had expected something of the kind and was secretly grateful. He hated to leave
Void Runner
unattended. "Thanks, Maggie. I'll call you from dirtside."

McCade was just starting to turn away when Maggie cleared her throat. "McCade?"

"Yeah?"

"I'm sorry."

McCade looked in Maggie's eyes and knew she thought Sara and Molly were dead. It was a logical conclusion but one he refused to accept. A lump formed in McCade's throat and he forced it down.

"Thanks, Maggie. Keep a sharp lookout. There's always the chance that they'll come back."

Maggie nodded silently and the screen faded to black.

The trip dirtside was a dark and somber affair. Heavy winds buffeted the shuttle as it entered the atmosphere and snow fell at lower altitudes.