The Vastalimi Gambit Read online

  “Really?”

  “Just so. It takes five years of training to become a probationary Shadow, another five for full certification. They are held in the highest regard. Their field decisions are seldom overturned.” She did not mention that she had a sister and a male cousin who were Shadows.

  “If you have a question, ask it. If we can avoid trouble, that would be best.”

  He nodded.

  _ _ _ _ _ _

  The convoy was six vans, each the size of a ten-family dwelling, lumbering along on forty-four massive wheels, loaded to the brims with what looked like purple carrots. Difrui, the locals called the root vegetables. They were sweet, full of healthy vitamins and minerals and shit, and apparently tasty enough to have become one of the hottest-selling produce items TotalMart offered around the galaxy. Spendy little roots for foodies who like to go alien.

  Jo had tasted one after they found out they were coming here. It was okay, but she didn’t understand what the big deal was.

  It was hot, dry, dusty, and aside from the engine noises, fairly quiet. The smell of the roots permeated the vehicles, and it was a not-unpleasant odor somewhat like stir-fried ginger.

  “Here they come,” Gunny said. “All twenty of them, cannon-foddering right on out of the fucking woods like they got the sense of tree stumps. Ah can’t believe it.” The mock amazement was heavy in her voice.

  Jo nodded. The attack came from local east, through a stretch of thick trees that lined the road on both sides. It wasn’t really a surprise—the sensors picked up the hidden troops a klick away, and, of course, that was way too easy. A feint. The question was, where would the real attack come from?

  Jo was on the lead van, Gramps one back, and Gunny on the sixth one. They had drones in the air and a fair amount of hardware rigged on the vans, enough there even without the drones to obliterate twenty foot soldiers without raising a sweat.

  “Gramps?”

  “Got nothing in the skies. Nobody else in the woods I can see.”

  “They can’t be that stupid,” Gunny said. Her Terran SoAm accent made that come out like, “They cain’t be that stoopid.”

  They had four armed drones in the air, and any one of them was enough to take out the ground attack. What were they missing? Had to be something else . . .

  “Hey,” Gramps said, “maybe they are. And wouldn’t that make our jobs a lot—hello?”

  “What?”

  “Somebody just shot a bunch of missiles at our drones. Got, eight, ten, a dozen ground-to-air spikes heading at them.”

  Jo nodded. So much for easy.

  She had her augs lit and running, listening, looking, searching the air for scents . . .

  Gunny said, “And we got a tail and it’s rolling up on us. GE APCs, two of them, Ah reckon it thirty-troop capacity each, more or less.”

  “We are going to need one of those drones,” Jo said.

  “I’m moving ’em,” Gramps said. “Keep your shirt on.”

  Jo considered the situation. It wasn’t a bad attack, especially if the convoy was using local guards without much military experience. Cutter Force Initiative had plenty of that, however.

  The feint would occupy an inexperienced company’s attention long enough to spike their drones if they’d had enough sense to bring any, and the armored ground-effect carriers could shrug off small-arms rounds long enough to catch the slow-moving convoy. Even if the APCs weren’t mounting serious hardware, the troops would have rockets and grenades, and there was a good chance they could stop and destroy or maybe capture the agrovans. Not perfect, but probably enough for most cases, and also not cheap—your average bandit probably couldn’t afford APCs and halfway-decent troops. The attackers must have thought this was going to be a snoozer.

  Wonder who has the Masbülc military contract? Be a good idea to find out.

  “I’m going to plink the ground guys,” Jo said. “How are we doing on the drones?”

  “Two of them are killed,” Gramps said. “One more is at risk—fuck it, it’s gone. The last one is treetop and looks to be clear.”

  “Send it back to spike the APCs.”

  “Already on the way.”

  “Save me one,” Gunny said.

  “You think you can hit something that small, Chocolatte?”

  “Why not? We ain’t talkin’ about something as little as your weenie, are we?”

  “That gets bigger.”

  “So you say.”

  Jo grinned. She turned her attention back to the incoming unit of ground troops. She had a laser-guided fifty mounted atop the ten-meter-tall van, caseless hardball, every twentieth round a tracer. She could almost hear Cutter’s voice in her head as she lined the machine gun up on the nearest troops: Short bursts. That ammo is expensive!

  They were three hundred meters out, not so far that she couldn’t use her optical aug to see they weren’t wearing anything other than standard, soft-ceramic armor. Which would not even slow a fifty’s bullets down.

  Gun fodder—and—likely somebody lied to them real good. Don’t worry, you are wearing armor.

  Jo triggered the weapon, her finger’s pressure light enough to send a single round.

  The fat bullet hit the first attacker square in the chest like a big hammer. He fell, DOA.

  She targeted the second trooper. Bam. Another one down.

  The van rolled over a rough spot on the road, and the bump was enough to cause Jo to trigger a triplet on the next shot. All three of them hit the next guy, but two of them were a waste. Fortunately, Rags wasn’t here to see it. And she wasn’t going to tell him although the recording cams would rat her out if he looked, and he would . . .

  She swung the gun’s muzzle a hair to the left. Bam. One more . . .

  That did it. The remaining attackers scattered and retreated, heading for the woods.

  She probably could have spiked them all, but there was no need. If you could nail a couple, and the rest ran off? Never knew but that someday one of them might be working for you. Well, maybe not this bunch, but still. Plus, it would save on the cost of ammo . . .

  Gramps came on the opchan. “Special delivery from our drone—AP DU Lance, and . . . Adieu, Monsieur Personnel Carrier.

  “Second one missed the wreck and is still coming. Stand by.”

  “Come on, Gramps,” Gunny said. “Let it go. It’s almost within mah range!”

  With the fifty silent and her hearing-implant suppressors off, Jo heard the explosion as the second carrier ate the depleted-uranium-sheathed lance. Loud, even so.

  “Dammit!”

  “Sorry, Gunny. The DU is cheaper than the Magma, and you know how Rags is.”

  “Ah am gonna remember that, old man, next time you want something.”

  Jo grinned. Well, one attack, one win, within Rules of Engagement and legal. Could be worse. “Move along, folks. Call it in to the local cleanup crews.”

  Yep, not so bad. So far . . .

  Jo remembered the briefing before they’d left the Solar System . . .

  _ _ _ _ _ _

  Gramps had said, “Far Bundaloh? What’s on Far Bundaloh? Aside from the iridium mines, there’s jack there. It’s an agroworld. Somebody looking to steal the crops out on the back forty? Rustle some meat critters?”

  Jo looked at Gramps. “Even a blind pig finds an acorn now and then.”

  Gunny chuckled.

  Gramps frowned.

  Cutter, leaning against the wall by the door, nodded. Off his look, Jo said, “As you are all aware, TotalMart is our top customer and thus pays most of our bills. And since the current corporate philosophy is ‘If anybody sells it anywhere, TotalMart does it cheaper and is more convenient,’ then you realize that supply and demand depend on each other.

  “Masbülc—for those of you living in a cave for the last tw
enty years, is TotalMart’s biggest competitor. ‘Biggest’ is a relative term: They do seventeen percent as much business as TotalMart, so that’s hardly threatening the corporate existence; however, that’s still twice as much as Masbülc bottom-lined ten years ago. They are leaner, hungrier, and aggressive, and looking to cut a bigger slice of the pie. Decreased sales for TM means some executives will see it reflected in the size of their year-end bonuses.

  “More importantly, we might see it reflected in our business.

  “On FB, as everywhere else, Masbülc’s ops have nipped at TotalMart’s heels for years. Little stuff, mostly, misdirected delivery vans, cyberattacks on store systems, bribing employees to become sand in the machine’s gears, like that. Probably the store there—only one of those onworld—loses more to pilferage and shoplifting than from what Masbülc’s dirty-tricks harriers are doing.

  “But it’s not about the local store. FB supplies some exotic food exports that are sold galaxy-wide, and the biggest share of those flow into the TM system. And the Masbülc ops have gotten their claws hooked into that in a way that pisses off corporate uplevels.”

  Formentara said, “So we are spacing to the end of the galaxy to do what? Act as armed guards on agrovans full of roots and twigs?” Zhe raised an eyebrow.

  Jo smiled. Formentara was an androgyne, mahu, and hir sex impossible to determine from a first look. Attractive, but . . . male, female, other? Jo didn’t know; nor did it matter. Formentara was perhaps the greatest augmentation expert in the galaxy, and it was through hir grace that Jo functioned as well as she did. Jo was near the limit on augs, and without expert balancing of her physiology, that would kill her, and sooner rather than later. “Well, I wouldn’t put it quite that way.”

  Gramps said, “What, are these vans pulled by teams of animals? Horses and stagecoaches?”

  “You remember those from personal experience?” Gunny said, her voice faux-sweet.

  He played the game: “Sure, my cousin invented them,” Gramps said.

  Jo said, “Far Bundaloh is at the end of the road, but it’s not quite that distant in time. House-sized hovervans, maglev rail, and multiplex-sized wheeled bugcrushers move the crops around. It is true that some of these vans have been hijacked, and we need to stop that, but our basic role is to find the ops responsible and shut them down. That will entail convoy duty until we figure it out.”

  “I’ll get a sleetgun,” Gunny said. Her voice was as sere as a desert.

  “Shotgun,” Gramps corrected. He caught her smile and realized she had suckered him.

  “Of course you would know that. Your cousin invent those, too?”

  “Naw, Chocolatte, my brother did—right after he and I invented trees.”

  Gramps had only fifty-nine standard years, but he was older than anybody else here, beating Cutter by a few months, and the rest of them by at least a decade or two. Gunny never let him forget it.

  Of course, Gunny and Gramps were in love with each other; everybody but the two of them knew that. Either of them saying so aloud would break their faces, and as far as Jo knew, they had not acted on it save to hassle each other; they seldom spoke without personal insults or a double entendre involved.

  That made for some interesting interplay.

  Hassles and insults and leers O my. But: When Gunny had been shot on Ramal during the extraction of the Rajah’s daughter, Gramps had slept on a chair in her recovery room until she came out of the healing coma. Just so, he said, he could rag her about getting hit.

  Right . . .

  Jo looked at Cutter.

  He said, “That’s pretty much it. Wink and Kay won’t be here, we’ll get a new medic.”

  “Gonna get a new Vastalimi, too?” Formentara asked.

  “I wish. We’ll just have to muddle through.”

  Vastalimi were worth their weight in platinum to any kind of military, especially small units like Cutter Force Initiative. The colonel made it clear he would hire as many of them as wanted the job, but that pool was fairly shallow. Vastalimi tended to stay home, and those who traveled and wanted jobs as soldiers of fortune didn’t have any trouble getting work. They were faster, stronger, meaner, and deadlier than any human, and nobody with half a brain wanted to find themselves facing a Vastalimi with mayhem in mind. He was happy to have one and missing her already.

  Cutter said, “So there it is, people. Pack, say good-bye to any new friends you’ve made, and let’s get this mission in the vac . . .”

  TWO

  There had been, of course, more than a few Vastalimi on the dropship; however, it was the arrival on the planet and the debarkation into the terminal that really brought it home to Wink: Vastalimi in numbers far more than he had ever seen together before. Scores, hundreds, maybe a thousand of them, all about their business, and looking focused. Vastalimi didn’t seem to loll about, they strode, marched, moved from one place to another in a determined fashion, all looking ready to pounce as necessary.

  It was, quite literally, awesome.

  They were shorter than human average, and while their aspects were hardly uniform—there were dozens of different shades and patterns to their short fur, their heights varied, and the males tended to be larger and heavier than the females—they all looked a lot like Kay. They had those preying-mantis-shaped heads, the apelike limb set, the feline grace to their movements, the tigerlike, short fur.

  Put Kay in a clump of them and even as well as he knew her, it might take a while to figure out which one she was. Different, but still they looked so much alike.

  Wink at once felt very much the alien here.

  He saw a male with shoulders dyed a deep purple, and that one was strapped—a handgun of some kind in a hip holster, along with other items on his belt. A Shadow, but only the one. Either they were really good, or they didn’t expect trouble here. Probably both.

  As far as he could see, there weren’t any other humans in the terminal. No other alien species, either.

  He got more than a few looks cast his way. He could almost feel the gazes measuring him. Hmm. A human. What an odd mix of prey and predator it is. Should we examine it more closely? Poke it and see what it does?

  Voices were audible in the terminal, but the background murmur was in a language or languages of which he had only a few words. Not because it was difficult to learn but because it was difficult for a human to speak. The shapes of tongues and mouths and vocal apparatuses was markedly different between these people and Wink’s own. He had a translation program in his com unit. He could use it to listen or to speak, after a fashion, at least for three of the most common local dialects. The computer could translate what the locals said into something Wink could comprehend, and vice versa. Plus it could read signs and approximate them. Although that was apt to be amusing, that reader. On the dropper, he had gone to the fresher, and the reader had rendered the Vastalimi words over the door as “‘Small Orifice of Excrement’; informally known as: ‘Asshole.’”

  There weren’t any restrictions as to personal weaponry here. You could carry a knife or a gun if you could manage it on your person, and Wink had both concealed under his tunic. Not that they were particularly comforting. He was well aware of his survival chances in a dustup with a Vastalimi, and they were exceedingly slim. Not that he intended to see how that would go. Even with his risk-taking and dancing close to Dame Death, he was not suicidal.

  Hey, bug-face, you don’t seem so tough. Step off—or else—!

  Yeah, or else kill me . . .

  Kay stopped and looked around.

  “You okay?”

  “Yes. It has been years since I have seen so many of The People at once. It stirs emotions.”

  “I don’t recall you ever said why you left Vast.”

  “Because I have never said why.”

  He waited, but that was the extent of her comments. She started walking. She d
id not appear to be looking for a reception committee.

  “Is your brother coming to meet us?”

  “No. He has much work to which he must attend. I am not a cub that I cannot find him.”

  Wink nodded. Different species, different social mores.

  “Our baggage will be routed to our domus, which my brother will have provided for us.”

  “Customs?”

  “Our passports were scanned before we left the dropship; had there been any problems, we would have been approached by the authorities by now. We need only to obtain a conveyance to the bolnica—our version of a hospital. There will be a cart waiting outside the port. DrocMasc will know we have arrived and will be expecting us.”

  Wink became more aware of the stares he merited as they walked. Lot of looks.

  Halfway across the terminal, a large Vastalimi moved to intercept them. He rattled off something in that tongue-twisting language of theirs.

  The auto-engage feature on his translation program didn’t seem to be working. Wink managed to flick his translator on manually as the speaker finished, routing the output to his earbud.

  “—walk with this jebiga prey?”

  Jebiga . . . Jebiga, ah, there it was: Fucking.

  Kay responded in her language: “Companion is a Healer and human and exempt from prigovor. I am also a Healer.”

  “And exempt from prigovor also?”

  “In this instance, yes. I can honorably decline; however, I will not. Do you offer Challenge?”

  The larger Vastalimi stood silent for a moment. He must have heard something in her voice that convinced him Kay was not to be messed with.

  Wink sure as shit heard it. He fought an urge to step back.

  The male Vastalimi said, “Not at this time.”

  “Then move from my path or unsheathe your claws.”

  He moved aside.

  As they reached the exit, Wink said, “Well, that was fun. Expect that to happen a lot?”

  “It is possible. That one would not have been a problem had he persisted.”

  “Really?”