The Man Who Never Missed Read online

  The Man Who Never

  Missed

  The Matadors

  Book I

  Steve Perry

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter One

  DEATH CAME FOR him through the trees.

  It came in the form of a tactical quad, four people walking the three-and-one, the point followed by the tight concave arc; the optimum number in the safest configuration. It was often said the Confed’s military was always training to fight the last war and it was true enough, only there had been enough last wars to give them sand or cold or jungle troops as needed. These four were jungle-trained, they wore class-one shiftsuits with viral/molecular computers able to match backgrounds within a quarter second, they carried .177 Parkers, short and brutal carbines which held five hundred rounds of explosive ammo—one man could cut down a half-meter-thick tree with two waves of his weapon on automatic. The quad carried heat-sensors, com-implants, Doppler gear and personal sidearms; they were the deadliest and best-equipped soldiers the Confed could field and they were good. They moved through the cool rain forest quietly and efficiently, alert for any signs of the Shamba Scum. If something moved, they were going to spike it, hard.

  Khadaji felt the fear in himself, the familiar coldness in the pit of his belly, an old and unwelcome tenant. He had learned to live with it, it was necessary, but he was never comfortable when it came to this. He took a deeper breath and pressed his back harder against the rough bark of the sum win tree. He practiced invisibility. The tree was three meters thick, they couldn’t see him, and even without his confounder gear their directional doppler and heat sensors wouldn’t read through that much solid wood. He listened as they moved past him. The soft ferns brushed against the shiftsuits of the quad; the humus of a thousand years made yet softer sounds under their slippers as they walked, but Khadaji knew exactly where they were when he stepped away from his tree.

  He was behind them, a tall figure in plain tan orthoskins with spetsdods molded to the backs of both hands. He held his breath for steadiness and brought his arms up, as might a man lifting a small child. He hyperextended the index fingers of both hands and each of the spetsdods fired once, a polite cough. Two hits, sounding like knuckles on wood as they pierced the too-light armor.

  They were fast, the last two. The bacterially-augmented reflexes had been well-trained, but in this case, the instruction was wrong. Instead of dropping flat, the point and left rear spun, carbines cleared for killing.

  Khadaji fired both spetsdods again. The flechettes hit the soldiers halfway through their turns, on the sides instead of the backs. The point managed to trigger off a few rounds before he crumpled. The sound of the .177 was very loud in the thick forest. The smell of the electro-chemical explosive tainted the air with an acrid tang.

  The four soldiers were knotted into odd angles amid the ferns and spider plants, voluntary muscles clenched in the frozen lock which gave the ion/molecular/chemical flechette of the spetsdod its name: Spasm. They wouldn’t die, but it would take six months of treatment to bring them back to normal. Six months of extensive physical and psychotherapy for each victim of the spetsdod’s sting, expensive, time-consuming, draining. Spetsdods were good weapons for guerrillas—a dead man cost the enemy little, but a Spasmed soldier was a lot of work; with proper treatment, they never died and they did cost.

  Khadaji turned to leave. One of the quad might have triggered his com and, if so, a flier would already be on its way. As he started to move, he glanced back at the soldiers. One of them had a stain on his leg. It was hard to see because of the shiftsuit, which matched the color of the ground on which the downed man lay, but it looked like blood.

  He moved closer. Yes. Apparently the point’s desperation blast had wounded one of his own. Damn!

  Khadaji hurried to the man. No, correction, it was a woman, not that it mattered. She was hit, there was a crater the size of his fist in her thigh and she would bleed to death in a few minutes.

  For a moment, Khadaji thought about it. He hadn’t killed any of them, so far, and this one wouldn’t be on his karma, he hadn’t shot her. A flier might be coming.

  He shook his head. No. He had to take the long view.

  He found her medical kit and jerked it from her belt. He opened the plastic case and found the pressure patch. Triggering the unit, he slapped it over the pumping hole in her leg. The patch whined and sealed around the edges. Inside, the pressure went up as the rudimentary brain of the medical sealer clamped arteries and veins and shuttled the flow of blood. If a flier was coming, she’d be all right. Once he got away from the woods, he would call and report the downed quad anyway, so there was no real danger. There were no predators on Greaves and the most dangerous thing which could happen to the quad was that they might get rained on.

  Khadaji rose from his crouch and looked at the quad a final time before he loped off into the woods. He managed a grin against the drop of adrenaline which left him feeling drained and tired. The Shamba Scum had struck again—according to the official dispatches, their number was now estimated at between six and eight hundred. His smile increased. If the quad he’d just downed had been faster, the Shamba Scum would have been eliminated—all of them. For Emile Antoon Khadaji was the resistance on Greaves, all by himself.

  It was six klicks to his next station. He jogged the whole way, alert for any sounds of more troops or fliers. It was quiet. The earthy smell of the mushrooms and molds was heavy—brought out by the rain last night—and the ground was squishy underfoot.

  This part of it was hard, too. Aside from the means, the logistics were becoming more difficult all the time. In the early days, it had been easy. The Confed’s machine came to rest on Greaves as it had a dozen other peaceful worlds almost without incident. There were no armies on the world, no underground brewing among the agios and craftspeople who made up most of the planet’s population. Oh, there had been a few students handing out agitprop, but nothing of any consequence—until ten or twenty troops a day began dropping with Spasm poisoning. A single message, coded mysteriously into the Garrison Commander’s computer, claimed responsibility in the name of the Shamba Freedom Forces—quickly shortened to Shamba Scum by the troops-of-the-line.

  Khadaji grinned as he ran along the thin path through the forest. That had been a nice touch, he’d thought, naming the “Freedom Forces” after Lord Thomas Reserve Shamba, the twenty-second century war hero. It was a joke only Khadaji could appreciate, though. It came from Shamba’s answer to a surrender call by Confed forces who outnumbered him fifty-to-one at the Battle of Mwanamamke in the Bibi Arusi System:

  To the Commander, Confederation Jumptroopers:

  Sir:

  Fuck you.

  We stand until the last man falls.

  When the first man fell in the current insurgency, it would be the last man.

  Khadaji slowed to a walk when he was a kilometer from the patrol line. He checked his confounder, to make sure it was operating, bent and stretched his legs and back, and took several deep breaths. There were three men on the line in this secto
r, virgins as near as he could tell. He could have taken them on the way out, but that might have made it tough to get back into the city. The Confed military mind was rigid and not particularly bright, but neither was it completely stupid. The replacements for these three wouldn’t be fresh meat, they’d be vets, more interested in staying ambulatory than proving how well they’d absorbed their training.

  The first soldier was so easy it made Khadaji sad. He walked to within five meters without being noticed. The boy—he could have been no older than twenty-two or three—stood in the shade of a small fir tree. It was not particularly warm, but he wore class two body gear, and it didn’t take much to heat up the inside of that to sweatpoint. The boy had shifted his goggles up and his tight hood back, exposing his face and head to the cooler air. If Khadaji had been an uprank, the boy would have been in trouble.

  “Excuse me, which way is Hartman Street?”

  The boy turned, surprised. He started to swing the Parker up, but stopped. What he saw was a tall man in orthoskins, palms supinated, looking harmless.

  “Jeet, dork, don’t slip up on a man like that!” He seemed to relax a little, seeing that Khadaji was unarmed and smiling.

  The Shamba Scum shrugged, raised his left hand slightly, and stiffened his index finger. “Sorry,” he said.

  The little dart hit the boy high on the forehead and snapped his face upward; the Spasm hit him on the way down and he was in the lock before he touched the ground. The strongest muscles determined the shape of the knot; this one had strong quads and triceps—his arms and legs stuck out.

  Khadaji shook his head. There was no joy in this. The boy would be able to tell all about the man who shot him—in six months, if he were lucky. Meanwhile, he would spend an uncomfortable time thinking about his actions on this day. Spasm froze the muscles but neither the memory nor the mind which drove it. He wouldn’t be able to call out, but he would remember how stupid he had been. A harsh punishment for a boy, but it was necessary. All of it was necessary, for reasons this soldier couldn’t begin to understand, even if Khadaji had hours to explain it to him.

  Unlike the first, the second man wore his armor—and class two would stop a spetsdod’s dart—but the armor wasn’t perfect. Gloves and hoods were designed to overlap but the material had to be thin in places for a man to move; knees and elbows and shoulders had to bend or rotate. When the soldier stretched, after two minutes, Khadaji fired. The flechette entered the thin fold behind the man’s left knee, a line only a few millimeters wide. It was a difficult shot, but an expert with a spetsdod could cut a dragonfly in half in mid-air—and hit both pieces as they fell. Point-shooting had been brought to a peak higher than craft, if not art, with the invention of the spetsdod: the word itself meant “point death.” The brush came alive with the canvas-rip sound of a Parker carbine on full automatic; bushes and trees blew apart, explosive shells chopped them down from waist-level. Khadaji was on the ground and crawling before the first leaves fluttered to the forest floor. The third man had been spooked. Maybe he’d heard or sensed something, maybe one of the others managed to trigger a com. It didn’t matter. He was shooting at shades, but he would have called for backup. Khadaji crawled at right angles to the line of fire until he was clear, then stood and ran. Thorns tried to dig into the tough orthoskins, but failed. He dodged trees and larger shrubs, but ran over the small stuff. There was no time for finesse, he had to be a long way from here when help arrived.

  He cleared the forest and was among a line of warehouses in the storage district. He stopped. Behind him, half a klick back, the scared soldier was still cutting shrubbery with his weapon.

  There were few ways to disguise a spetsdod on the back of the hand. Khadaji loosened the plastic flesh which connected the two weapons to his body and pulled the flechette guns free. He found a trash bin full of scrap metal and buried the weapons deeply in it. It wouldn’t matter if they were found since he had others—the better part of a case of them from the shipment he’d stolen. Twenty spetsdods and ten thousand rounds of Spasm darts—and that number, ten thousand, was very important.

  Although he felt naked without the weapons, Khadaji stepped out onto the street as if he owned it and started toward the Jade Flower. He would have plenty of time to get there and collect another pair of spetsdods before his last station was due. So far, he’d only taken out five of the Confed’s finest, and he needed at least eight more to maintain his schedule. He wanted to average a hundred a week, but it was getting harder all the time. He’d been at it for almost six months and the first troops would be coming out of lock pretty soon. When that began to happen, it would be over. Even if the Confed military tried to lid it, word would eventually get out that only one man’s description kept coming up. They wouldn’t believe it, of course, not at first, but it would plant a seed. They would never admit that one man could mimic hundreds—military PR would smash the idea flat, that thousands of trained troops could be downed by a single assassin. But if they knew, it would be over fast. They were looking for guerrillas in packs, not the owner and operator of the Jade Rower, the biggest recreational chemical pub in the city, a man whose business depended on the military, as customers and patrons. Soldiers needed rec-chem almost as much as they needed sex and the Jade Flower supplied both in abundance. More than a few of the Sub-Befals spent time there. Khadaji made certain that upranks got the best whores, male and female, and the first drink or toke or pop was always on the house to anybody over line-grade. He was a popular man, Khadaji was.

  So, two more stations, six more hits. He sighed. Nearly six months, and he was getting tired. He didn’t waver from his purpose—that was as clear as ever—but he was tired. Not much longer. Not many more.

  He sighed again, and hurried along the street. A quad passed him, going the other way. The men all smiled and nodded at him. He smiled back. He would probably see them later.

  One way or another.

  Chapter Two

  THE JADE FLOWER was always open. Before the Confed had honored Greaves with its massive squat tactics, the rec-chem pub had been only a small-time operation, serving the locals a narrow spectrum of alcohol and soporifics, minor hallucinogens and mood elevators. Two or three part-time prostitutes took care of anybody interested in buying sex, and the operation was, at best, a break-even proposition. With the coming of the military and its civilian support population, the character of the Jade Flower was bound to change. A greedy and well-prepared man would have made a fortune, but the previous owner was old and tired and not ready to deal with the influx of soldiers, bored spouses and children the Confed sent to the sleepy planet. When Khadaji arrived and waved enough standards under his nose, the old man was glad to sell.

  Khadaji looked around the main room of the pub. It was early, not yet 1600, but already the place was crowded. Even with local zoning regs relaxed, there was usually a line of customers outside, waiting for someone to leave in order to enter. Khadaji always kept a dozen or so places open, for any highly-ranked officers who might be interested in a toke, poke or drink. Anjue, the doorman, had studied the holoproj of every uprank over the level of Lojt and if one showed up, he or she was escorted to the head of the line and inside. Rank, as always, had its privileges. The troops-of-the-line might gripe, but the powers-that-be all smiled at Khadaji when they saw him.

  The main room, which was octagonal and dimly-lighted, boasted sixty circular tables with four stools each. The first thing Khadaji had done on buying the pub was to have the stools and tables bolted securely to the floor. He’d had thirty people applying for the job of bouncer and their first test was to see if they could move the furniture. Two men managed to uproot a stool each; one woman set herself and screamed, then tore the top of a table off its mount. And then—well, she was clever. The rest failed. Khadaji had longer bolts installed and hired the two men and woman who’d proved strongest. If a fight broke out, nobody was going to be bashing anybody with his furniture; and before it got too far, Bork, Sleel or Dirisha wou
ld be there to stop it. It was difficult to argue with a man holding you a half-meter off the floor, or a woman who could break three ribs with a flat punch. There was very little trouble in the Jade Flower.

  “Ho, Emile, how’s it hanging?”

  Khadaji looked to his right, to see Lojtnant Subru, smoking a flickstick. The man’s dark face was almost hidden behind the cloud of purple-black smoke.

  “To the left, Subbie, just like always.” He grinned. “How’s the ratface job?”

  Lojtnant Subru shook his head and exhaled a fragrant blast of flickstick smoke. The smell of hot cashews surrounded Khadaji. “Busy today, Emile. Word is there were several skirmishes within fifty klicks of town.”

  Khadaji raised an eyebrow and tried to look surprised. “Really? Get any of the Scum?”

  The dark soldier nodded. “Body count of fourteen, I heard. They nicked one of ours in a blastfight, but she’s okay.”

  Khadaji didn’t have to work very hard to suppress his smile. He’d heard this kind of statistic too many times. “Good for the troops.”

  “Yeah, we should have the Scum cleaned out pretty soon. Only problem is, I hear 1C has upped their estimates of the numbers. Even with the ones we’ve been cutting down, 1C says there are close to a thousand guerrillas in the field now.”

  Khadaji shook his head. “Where are they coming from?”

  “IC would love to know. I hear the Old Man would give his left nut and a kilogram of bauxite to be able to spike the leaders.” He took another blast from the flickstick. “You ever do any ratface-time, Emile?”

  Khadaji smiled. “Sure. I did my tour sitting planet and pushing disks for a supply unit. Strictly button-thumbing stats, Subbie. Never saw action.”

  “Yeah? What unit?”

  “14-788 Quartermasters, on Tomodachi. Been a few years.” The unit was real enough, Khadaji had known men who served in it while he was training, but in fact his own unit had been the 14-433 Jumptroop Plex and he’d seen more action than most of the soldiers on this world. Too much.