The Tejano Conflict Read online

  Meet Cutter Force Initiative

  COLONEL R. A. “RAGS” CUTTER: A career military man, Cutter left the GU Army when he ran afoul of Army politics. At large, Cutter realized that there was a need for his kind of expertise and created a fighting force for specialized, smaller-scale actions.

  JO SIMS: A former PsyOps lieutenant in the GU Navy, Sims is drop-dead gorgeous and as adept with small arms as she is with her mind.

  TOMAS “DOC” WINK: An ER doctor before he joined the Cutters, Wink is an adrenaline junkie who doesn’t feel alive unless he is on the razor’s edge defying death.

  ROY “GRAMPS” DEMONDE: Previously the PR director for a major corporation, Gramps lost his family in the revolution and is always looking for a way to stick it to the GU.

  FORMENTARA: A mahu and cybernetics whiz, Formentara is adept at installing and maintaining all kinds of bioengineered implants.

  MEGAN “GUNNY” SAYEED: Gunny is a master weaponsmith and expert shooter. If it throws any kind of missile or a particle beam, Gunny can use it, upside down and over her shoulder.

  KLUTHFEM “KAY”: Kay is a Vastalimi who can kill using only her bare hands, feet, or fangs.

  Praise for

  THE RAMAL EXTRACTION

  “A cutting-edge, militaristic sci-fi novel . . . There’s also plenty of action and adventure and blood and guts.”

  —Fresh Fiction

  Praise for the novels of Steve Perry

  “A crackling good story. I enjoyed it immensely!”

  —Chris Claremont

  “Heroic . . . Perry builds his protagonist into a mythical figure without losing his human dimension. It’s refreshing.”

  —Newsday

  “Perry provides plenty of action [and] expertise about weapons and combat.”

  —Booklist

  “Noteworthy.”

  —Fantasy and Science Fiction

  “Another sci-fi winner . . . Cleanly written . . . The story accelerates smoothly at an adventurous clip, bristling with martial arts feats and as many pop-out weapons as a Swiss Army knife.”

  —The Oregonian

  “Plenty of blood, guts, and wild fight scenes.”

  —VOYA

  “Excellent reading.”

  —Science Fiction Review

  “Action and adventure flow cleanly from Perry’s pen.”

  —Pulp and Celluloid

  Books by Steve Perry

  The Cutter’s Wars Series

  THE RAMAL EXTRACTION

  THE VASTALIMI GAMBIT

  THE TEJANO CONFLICT

  The Matador Series

  THE MAN WHO NEVER MISSED

  MATADORA

  THE MACHIAVELLI INTERFACE

  THE 97TH STEP

  THE ALBINO KNIFE

  BLACK STEEL

  BROTHER DEATH

  THE MUSASHI FLEX

  SPINDOC

  THE FOREVER DRUG

  THE TRINITY VECTOR

  THE DIGITAL EFFECT

  THE OMEGA CAGE

  (with Michael Reaves)

  MEN IN BLACK

  STAR WARS: SHADOWS OF THE EMPIRE

  STAR WARS: MEDSTAR I: BATTLE SURGEONS

  (with Michael Reaves)

  STAR WARS: MEDSTAR II: JEDI HEALER

  (with Michael Reaves)

  With Tom Clancy and Steve Pieczenik

  NET FORCE

  NET FORCE: HIDDEN AGENDAS

  NET FORCE: NIGHT MOVES

  NET FORCE: BREAKING POINT

  NET FORCE: POINT OF IMPACT

  NET FORCE: CYBERNATION

  With Tom Clancy, Steve Pieczenik, and Larry Segriff

  NET FORCE: STATE OF WAR

  NET FORCE: CHANGING OF THE GUARD

  NET FORCE: SPRINGBOARD

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  USA • Canada • UK • Ireland • Australia • New Zealand • India • South Africa • China

  penguin.com

  A Penguin Random House Company

  THE TEJANO CONFLICT

  An Ace Book / published by arrangement with the author

  Copyright © 2014 by Steve Perry.

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Ace Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group.

  ACE and the “A” design are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) LLC.

  For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) LLC,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-698-15071-3

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Ace mass-market edition / January 2015

  Cover art by Kris Keller.

  Cover design by Lesley Worrell.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  This one is for Dianne, as ever; and for Ginjer Buchanan, the patient, long-suffering, and excellent editor who has taken care of me for a lot more years than either of us wants to think about . . .

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks this round go to: Dal, whose help was most valuable; Doug Atkins, for the snake-and-stick line; Dan Moran, in general; Alan Carruth and Woodley White, luthiers par excellence, for inspirations in wood and string.

  CONTENTS

  Meet Cutter Force Initiative

  Praise for the Novels of Steve Perry

  Books by Steve Perry

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  PROLOGUE

  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 TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  PROLOGUE

  Hotel Orleans—New York Metroplex

/>   Cutter arrived at the door, which swung open as he got to it.

  He stepped inside. It was a first-class meeting room, part of a suite, expensive and plush. Good signs. Meant the clients who hired Zoree Wood’s military unit, The Line, had money and didn’t mind spending it. Be interesting to see how much of it would come CFI’s way . . .

  Other than the woman who met him at the door and himself, it seemed they were alone.

  “Hey. How has the galaxy been treating you, Rags?”

  “Can’t complain,” he said. “Yourself?”

  Wood smiled. “Come on in, have a seat. I cashiered out a colonel, and now I’m a general. Pay is way better, and I get to call more shots than I did in the GU Army, no uplevels second-guessing over my shoulder. What’s not to like?

  “Have a glass of this?”

  She held up a bottle of very good bourbon.

  He grinned at that. “Know my weakness, do you?”

  “Word gets around.”

  He sat on the couch, as comfortable as it looked, and it looked comfortable. He returned her smile. She was still fit, still handsome. Not in uniform, though she might as well have been, everything about her clothes and bearing said “soldier.”

  She poured him a drink.

  Wood’s preferences ran to women, there had never been anything other than work between them, but the respect had been mutual. He’d been a captain and she a lieutenant when they’d done the Jusian Campaign. Clean and mean, that one; it had given him a boost toward colonel, and put her further along the path to her captain’s bars. A good memory. Long ago and far away.

  He said, “How are the wife and kids, you still married?”

  “Kids are grown, off making grandchildren, and I am still with Gemma. She’s her same ornery self. She wants me to retire, for us to buy a star-fruit orchard, raise puppies, and watch grandchildren. Couple more years, we’ll be able to afford it.”

  He smiled.

  She said, “Looks like you’ve done all right for yourself, considering. Sorry it went down the way that it did.”

  “Scroom,” he said. “Onward and upward.”

  “So, are you in?”

  “I am. Gramps is exchanging photons and dickering with your contract people as we speak.”

  “Demonde? He’s still around?”

  “Yep.”

  “Only the good die young.”

  “Explains why we are still here.”

  They smiled.

  “Okay,” she said, “down to the nitty-gritty?”

  “When you are ready—I’ve irised the NDA.”

  She nodded. “What we have here is your basic license-limit industrial. The Line represents Tejas Enterprises, a conglom whose reach spans everything from photonic computing to earthmoving gear to agro and fish farms.

  “Our opposition is called United Mexican Corp, they have fingers in most of the same pies. The Resource Allocation Act parses a lot of stuff neatly, but there aren’t as many resources as there used to be on the homeworld, and that makes the cost of doing business spendy. Negotiations between TE and UMex for sharing the water rights have broken down.

  “The H2O in question is predinosauric and down deep, and theoretically owned by a convoluted mix of corporations and governments, a rat’s nest of rights and subrights. Local and planetary govs have waved eminent domain and condemnations all over the place, but the inks lease their lawyers by the shipload, and it is a tangle that might take decades to sort out.”

  He nodded. “Our goal?”

  “Forty thousand acres of land, with wells going halfway to the core, apparently, producing all of the groundwater in the region that isn’t completely tied up legally.”

  “How is this even possible in these times? And wouldn’t it be easy just to channel desalted from the nearby gulf?”

  “Good questions. Apparently during the various changes of government and corporate mineral and water rights being tossed around over the last century, there came a loophole regarding this particular lot. Some arcane and highly technical hairsplitting and what resulted was a big chunk of property that belongs to either everybody or nobody, depending on which authority you ask. And what it appears is, there is a ticking clock. On such and such a date, whoever is in possession of some substantial portion of the aquifer located at such and such a longitude and latitude, vis-à-vis the operational flow—and I’d have to ask the lawyers to get into the details—has some kind of a priori claim. At least long enough to run things until it all eventually gets sorted out.

  “If nobody is there, it goes back to the government.

  “It’s apparently cheaper to pump the water that’s there up than build a new plant and pipeline. The current ones are running at capacity and the water allocated. There are all kinds of environmental-impact studies that have to be done to run a new conduit across private properties. Condemnations, rare birds, endangered field mice, all that takes a lot of expert study and legal wrangling. Plus what it would cost to put up a desalination plant and rig dins or hire people to run it. Last time somebody built a new osmosis plant and channeled the freshwater more than a hundred kilometers inland anywhere locally, it took ten years to get it done.”

  “All about the money,” he said.

  “Always is, isn’t it? Anyway, a lot of stuff can happen before the legal mud finally settles.”

  “That sounds downright goofy.”

  She smiled again. “Does, doesn’t it? Ours is not to reason why . . .”

  He nodded. “Got it. Strategy and tactical situations?”

  “The area is being held by a small security force run by a bunch of locals. TE and UMex have convinced the powers that be that a dukes-no-nukes dustup is the quickest way to settle things, citing the Zeller Accord. Commencement officially starts in fourteen days. So the locals bail. We can field recon now though no hot engagements are allowed for two weeks. After that? We have seven days to shoot and win it, so three weeks total. Somebody needs to range, sneak-and-peak, and this is your kind of thing. Do this right, we hit the ground running and clean it up PDQ.”

  “Numbers and hardware?”

  “Licensed for two thousand troops each side, personal augmentation, no limits; small arms, light APCs, up to 30mm on the cannon end. AP grenades, G2A, G2G, A2G, A2A, nothing bigger than Class-V rockets, little stuff. It’ll be stoppered-velocity everything; they don’t want strays leaving the range and killing civilians in their homes halfway across the region. No railguns, no lasers, no big boomers. No deep, ugly craters in the local landscape.

  “No orbital boomware or zappers, spysat feeds only. Troops are however we want to divide ’em—infantry, armor, air. Pretty tight limits.”

  “Still a lot bigger than anything on Earth in a long time.”

  “Yes. And a nice feather in our caps when we win it.”

  “Okay. When do you want us operational?”

  “Yesterday. I’ll have my XO squirt the maps and intel your way as soon as the contracts click. They are almost a day ahead of us on this; so they’ll have their own rangers on the ground before you get down there if they have anything on the ball.”

  “Got it.”

  “Welcome aboard, Rags. Always good to see a competent face at my door.”

  “Happy to have somebody think so.”

  ONE

  It was hot here in this particular region of Earth. And humid. Kay’s fur was damp with perspiration. Still, she’d been in warmer places; she could stand the heat. The things about which you could do nothing? You simply endured them.

  The smells were odd, but she was sorting those out. She had never been to Earth before. There was a lot of civilization here, but also pockets of nature. An interesting mix, but it didn’t feel anything like Vast. No other world felt anything like Vast.

  She watched the two combatants circle.

  Mis
hfem stepped to her left, wary, and rightly so.

  Jo Captain maintained her distance, also edging to her left.

  Em was slightly faster, but Jo knew more about fighting Vastalimi than Em did fighting humans, and Jo was more than passing adept at positioning. To overcome this, Em would have to move closer; however, to move closer was to court Jo’s attack. Even though Em was faster, the difference was not so great when reaction time was factored in. In theory, a nearly even match.

  A few years back, Kay would not have believed it possible that a human could spar with one of The People and have any chance of winning at all, even one as augmented as Jo Captain. Now? Jo could manage a win against Kay half the time, and against Em, still three of four. Many on Vast would react with scorn to hear such a thing spoken. A human? Are you mad? A natural mistake, but one that could be fatal, should the situation arise.

  Em wanted to leap and claw, that was her nature—just as it was Kay’s nature—but they both had learned that flight time from where they were to where Jo was could only be hastened so much. Seldom enough to compensate for Jo’s superior position. To fly was to find yourself unable to change your trajectory against an opponent who knew how to exploit that.

  Millions of years of evolution taking prey by leap-and-claw, however, were not that easy to overcome.

  Humans didn’t mind defending and countering, so the first attack needed to be telling or they—well, at least in Jo Captain’s case—could block or parry and land a critical response. Bare-handed and sheathed in a bloodless cub match like this, it didn’t mean anything save wounded pride, but had she a blade? Jo could inflict a fatal wound even against a Vastalimi’s superior claws. There would likely be mutual slaying, and while such was not technically a loss, it would be a high price to pay for a technical point . . .

  Kay and Jo had learned much from each other; Em had more than a little left to learn. None of the humans against whom she had fought had Jo’s skill and physical abilities combined. Kay wasn’t sure there were any humans that good.

  Em feinted, a quick false step.

  Jo did not react, save to smile. “Am I a cub?”

  “Never know until you try.”

  “Your sire is a rhinoceros,” Jo said