Matador: The Man Who Never Missed Read online

  Khadaji circled before Jason managed to get his carbine out to cover his assigned field of fire and raised both spetsdods. He fired twice, caught Jason and the quad leader with the first two rounds, then fired both his handguns again. He got Janie, but missed Toomie, who was still covering his quadrant with short bursts of the Parker, his back to Khadaji. Before the man could realize his team wasn’t shooting, Khadaji snapped off a final round into Toomie’s neck. He went down, the Parker silenced.

  No time. Khadaji sprinted for the door, tugging the spookeyes from his face as he ran. He didn’t slow, only twisted so that he hit the pressed plastic with his left shoulder. The cheap material tore away from its sliding frame in a shower of gray shards and Khadaji dived for the floor as he went through.

  The double boom of a smoothbore pistol filled the air and the charge of brass shot sleeted against the wall and through the open doorway. Khadaji rolled up and fired toward the woman standing behind her desk. The dart hit her square on the chest, but she managed to trigger another twin shot of the smoothbore as she went backwards. The gun was pointed at the ceiling and blew a binocular-shaped pattern in the white hardfoam.

  The Sub-Befalhavare went into poison contractions; the strength distribution of her muscles causing her to sit back in her chair, her fists drawn up to her shoulders and her face clenched into a snarl. She held onto the smoothbore pistol at an almost classic port-arms position, pointed by her right ear.

  It should not have been funny, but it struck Khadaji that way. He laughed, thought about it for a few seconds, and decided to add a touch more. There was a flower arrangement on the woman’s desk and he pulled a long-stemmed green rose from the vase and stuck it into the barrel of the smoothbore. One had to keep one’s sense of humor, after all. And it could be a clue for a wise man. A green rose—a jade flower… He doubted the Sub-Befalhavare would think it funny, but humor always depended upon one’s viewpoint, whether you were the one who stepped on the banana peel or an observer.

  Time to leave. Khadaji sprinted from the office and into the street. Other troops would be coming and he wanted to be back at the Jade Flower by the time somebody started a net working in the city.

  He jumped the downed figure of a quad member near the door and started down the street. Another easy station, he thought, as he ran. He shook his head a little. He had to watch that, the feeling of invincibility, the sense of rightness which made him feel as if he could not fail. That was dangerous, that kind of thinking. Just because he knew who he was and what he was doing, there was no guarantee he’d succeed. Overconfidence had ruined more than one man, especially men with grand plans who let the big vision cloud the details of the smaller workings. The tendency was to feel as if there was some kind of benevolent spirit backing him, the hand of Fate guiding and protecting him because he was its instrument, and that was dangerous. He was fourteen years past his Realization and he still had to fight the sense of superiority it had given him.

  He heard voices approaching from a side street and slid to a halt in the shadow of a trash-recycle hopper. A pair of quads ran by, heading back toward the T-plex. Close.

  Yes. It could happen at any time. A stray bullet triggered by a falling trooper could do it, a slip while running from pursuers, any one of a hundred things. For nearly six months he’d been careful and lucky.

  He ran back toward the Jade Flower. He recognized that his worry meant the time for the end was getting nearer. It gave him a fluttery stomach to think about it, a tingle in the muscles of his buttocks even as he ran.

  “Have a nice nap, Chief?”

  “I feel much better, Butch. How’s business?”

  “Goin’ pretty good, now. I heard Anjue on the com a few minutes ago, he said when Sister Clamp came in, fifteen troopers joined the line.”

  Khadaji nodded and strolled into the octagon. The place was at capacity, save for the spaces saved for upranks. He smiled a little to himself. At least one Sub-Befal wouldn’t be dropping by tonight.

  There was a man drinking splash alone at one of the spare tables. Khadaji walked to the table and nodded down at the man. He was a quad leader, a Sub-Lojt, and he looked familiar, though Khadaji couldn’t place him. “Evening,” Khadaji said.

  The man looked up and nodded, but didn’t speak.

  “Drinking alone can be depressing. Mind if I join you?”

  The Sub-Lojt shrugged. “Sure. Why not? I was just turning over a few bad memories.”

  A server brought Khadaji a flare full of Moet & Chandon, from his private stock of vintage champagne. He sipped at the pale amber liquid slowly. “Another splash for the Sub-Lojt,” Khadaji said.

  “Thanks,” the man said. He finished his current mug and leaned back. “You know, I was going to flake out when my impress was up, but I went for another tour. Probably the biggest mistake I ever made.”

  Khadaji nodded slightly, but said nothing.

  “I just left the knot ward—one of my quad is in his second month.”

  “Hit by the Scum,” Khadaji said. That’s where he’d seen the man’s face, obviously. Only, he couldn’t remember the particular attack. There had been so many.

  “Yeah. It was dark, we didn’t see ‘em until it was all over. We were lucky, they only got Rudy. I check on him every once in a while.”

  “You must really hate them,” Khadaji said.

  The Sub-Lojt shook his head. “You know what the funny thing is? I don’t, really. But seeing Rudy reminds me of what it is I do for a living.” The man paused to stare at his splash for a moment. “I was remembering a time on Wu,” the trooper said. “That’s in the Haradali System.”

  Khadaji nodded again. “I’ve heard of it.”

  “Yeah, well, we had to go in and flatten a local insurrect—bunch of malcons somehow managed to get control of a city and were making a lot of noise. A simple operation, by-the-tape, more gunship diplo than anything else. We waved the flag from a battlecruiser and a couple of support ships and sent a few centplexes down to show Confed muscle, you probably know the drill.”

  “Yes. I know it.”

  “Well, I went down with my quad and got stuck doing guard duty on a secured perimeter, no perspiration. Then, some fuzzbrain in the malcons got the idea to try a raid. They sent maybe a hundred against us, armed with sticks and thero-knives and a few chemical-only slug guns.”

  The Sub-Lojt paused and took a drink of the new mug of splash. “Stupid,” he said. “Practically unarmed against a quad, none of us virgins. We cut them down like it was target practice. It was stupid of them, stupid?”

  Khadaji sipped his champagne.

  “It was not our fault, they’d have wiped us, they could have, we were only doing our jobs. But after it, I went with the medics to check for survivors. We were using .177s with the harrad load, so there weren’t many. But there was this… girl.” He paused and took another swallow of his drink, closing his eyes as he did. “This girl was maybe thirteen and she was lying there with her legs shot off from from the middle of the thighs down. And she looked up at me while the medics were clamping vessels and pumping dorph into her to kill the pain and I swear I never saw such clear green eyes before or since. And she smiled and said, ‘It’s all right. My father is a soldier.’ And then she died. Massive hemo-shock, the medics said.”

  The Sub-Lojt finished his splash and set the mug down gently. “That was the bad part. As if it was okay for me to shoot her, because I was a soldier like her father.” He shook his head. “A system that makes people kill children, it’s just not right. If something like that ever comes up again, I don’t know if I could shoot. I haven’t seen any of the Shamba Scum, but if I saw a bunch of kids coming at me waving sticks, I just don’t know what I’d do this time. Can you understand how I might feel like that?”

  Khadaji nodded, and stared unseeing at the far wall of the octagon. “Yes,” he said, finally. “I can understand.”

  Chapter Four

  AT ONE-THIRTY, Khadaji went to his rooms. The Refle
x was mostly gone, but there was enough of the drug in his system to keep him awake for a couple of hours, if he’d let it. Instead, he took three hundred milligrams of paramethaqualone—Paco, it was called in the pub—and stretched out on the bed. There were more potent sleeping medications, but a Paco would sometimes stop the nightmares that usually went with Reflex. Sometimes.

  —twenty-five years old and Sub-Lojt, with a good shot at promotion to full Lojtnant, if he would sign for another tour this far in advance. A man could do worse than the military, and six years in the Jumptroops with two Distinguished Service lines on Nazo and a third for the Kontrau’lega Break would set him up for a fast track to his own centplex. That’s what they told him and he had no reason to believe any different. As soon as the little scrap on Maro was done, he could come and see the Old Man’s sub and talk fine points and was he interested?

  Emile Khadaji nodded and grinned. He was young and understood life in the ranks. It wasn’t dull, there were plenty of people who shared the places with him, he had good times with women and even a few men, he had stads to buy what he wanted. Was he interested? Yeah, he was interested—

  “—see the way the fish swim through that funnel, Emile? It’s plenty big enough to pass through, but once they’re on the other side, they never can seem to find the narrow exit to get back out.”

  The boy nodded at his father and watched the fifty kilo grouper swim around inside the trap. There were five or six of the big blue-gray fish flippering back and forth. “They’re stupid,” he said. “The hole in the middle is the same size on both sides.”

  Hamay Khadaji looked down at his ten-year-old son, then back through the glass walls of the observation tank. “No, son, they aren’t stupid, no more than any other fish. It’s the way they look at things. It has to do with the space around them, with the way their eyes and minds work. Just because somebody or something doesn’t look at the world the way you do doesn’t mean it’s stupid. It’s just different—”

  “—oh, yes, Emile, put it in, I’m ready!”

  He looked down the length of Jeda’s naked body, slick with sweat, at her widespread legs and damp pubic hair. He was ready too, but he wasn’t sure of just what to do. Should he just plunge in all at once? Or should he move slowly? She said she liked it all at once, but the instruction tapes said it was better to be easy, gentle and—she decided for him, as he poised himself over her, by grabbing his ass with both hands and pulling him into her, hard. Oh, yes! This was wonderful, he couldn’t believe how good it felt, only it wasn’t going to last long, he felt himself about to explode—

  —exploded into a shower of blood and torn flesh as the slugs from his carbine smacked into her flesh. The look of surprise on her face, of puzzlement, touched him. She had not known she could be hurt, that she could die. It was there on her face as she fell, the amazement. Among the hundreds of them charging across the harvested wheat field, he saw her face clearly. But the look was on other faces in the background. Wrong, the look said. This isn’t right, this isn’t the way it’s supposed to be, those dying expressions said—

  “Khadaji, get your quad to the left, three hundred degrees! There’s another wave coming!”

  “Jasper, Wilks, Reno, the Lojt says cover three hundred, stat!”

  “Why are they still coming, Emile?” Reno was almost sobbing. “We’re blowing them to fuck and they ain’t even armed! They’re fucking crazy!”

  “Goddamn fanatics,” Jasper cut in. “They don’t think they can die, their leader’s told them they’re invincible. Well, we’ll show the stupid ratholes—” He triggered another blast of his carbine, waving it back and forth at hip level like a water hose. Three hundred meters out, four or five of the attackers went down, human wheat in the field used to grow a different crop.

  “Stupid fuckers, stupid fuckers, stupid, stupid—!” Jasper screamed as he fanned his weapon back and forth. All around them, other quads burned the air with blasts from their carbines, firing a locust-cloud of explosive bullets at the oncoming enemy. Thousands of the attackers dropped, so many they were stacked two or three meters high in places, with others climbing the hills of human debris to keep coming. Those were cut down as well, until the mounds of dead grew higher still.

  “Why don’t they stop?” Reno was crying, pointing his empty carbine at the sea of people, clicking the firing stud over and over. “Why don’t they stop? Why?”

  Khadaji felt gray, he felt as if a barrel of sand had been poured over him, ground into his eyes and nose and mouth and muscles. His arms ached from the weight of the carbine, the stink of electrochem propellant filled his nostrils, the roar of the explosions seemed continuous, even through the mute-plugs in his ears. But he kept firing. And firing. And firing…

  He opened his eyes suddenly, but otherwise didn’t move. The sheets were damp from his sweat and he felt chilled. Only a dream, he told himself. Just a bad dream. He couldn’t even remember it, only that it was bad. He took a couple of deep breaths and went through a relaxation drill, but he was still tense. And awake.

  After a few minutes, he sat up, then stepped out of the bed. He padded across the floor, the air cool on his naked skin. He bent and touched his toes, straightened and leaned back, stretching his belly muscles. He was in good shape, but using Reflex drained him. He always resolved to avoid the stuff after he went through one of these nights, but sometimes it was necessary. Only a little while more and he could stop.

  He went to his desk, slid it aside, and opened the secret store box under the flooring. In one corner was a small case, a flash-rigged packet coded to open by the print of his left ring finger. He sat cross-legged and naked on the floor by the desk and printed the lock open. Anybody who tried to violate the packet without the proper print would be rewarded by a face full of phosphoreme at 800 degrees C.

  Inside the case was a writing nib and a small pad of paper. A single number was written on the top sheet: 2376. He stared at the number for a minute, then tore the sheet from the pad. Add four in the woods. Plus two on the picket line, that’s six. Four more in front of the T-plex made ten and the Sub-Befal made it eleven. Twenty-three-eighty-seven. He wrote the number on the blank top sheet. He put the pad back into its case and tucked it back into the locked case. There was no need to count the flechettes, but he pulled the magazines from the two spetsdods he’d used and double-checked them. He’d canned two of the weapons after the station in the woods, but he’d kept the ammunition. He counted the remainder of those plus the ones he’d used later. Each magazine held twelve darts, so he should have, let’s see, minus two each from the first station, then two more, one from the left, one from the right…

  He finished the count. One short. Had he miscounted?

  He closed his eyes and replayed the stations slowly. The first one was okay, the second was right, it must be the third…

  He fired twice, caught Jason and the quad leader with the first two rounds, then fired both his handguns again. He got Janie, but missed Toomie…

  Ah. Yes. He’d missed the last quadman with his first shot, it had taken a second dart for him. Khadaji grinned wryly. He was getting careless. He reached up and pulled open one of the drawers in his desk. There was a second flash-rigged packet nestled in the corner, under a banded packet of standards. A thief who opened the drawer would see the money and likely not worry about the plastic packet under it. If he or she did try to open the case, there would be a hot surprise waiting; the thief would be lucky to escape with hands and face intact.

  He removed the second case from the drawer and printed it open. Inside were loose spetsdod darts; there had been a hundred of them. Ninety-three now, Khadaji knew. He had removed seven of them in five-odd months, once for each wasted dart he’d fired. There was a pair of tweezers inside the lid of the box and he used them to pick up a single dart, which he carefully loaded into the magazine of his right-hand spetsdod. There.

  He closed the flash-rigged packet and put it back into the drawer. His carelessness ha
dn’t been in missing Toomie, though that was bad enough; no, the problem was in forgetting that he’d missed. True, it had been in the middle of a heated exchange, but it was inexcusable.

  He put the weapons away and closed the store box. There was no rigged lock on the store box itself, even though a determined search of the cubicle would likely turn it up. That was all right, it was unlikely anybody would be in here while Khadaji was alive and if he were dead, well…

  He suddenly felt very tired. The Reflex had finally worn off and the Paco was still pulling at him. He stood and walked back to his bed. So very tired.

  He slept again, and if he dreamed, those dreams didn’t disturb him.

  “Good morning, Boss.”

  Khadaji nodded at Bork, the largest of his bouncers, one of the largest men on Greaves. Bork was of Homomue stock, from a world where the gravity was higher than normal and increased muscle mass was an asset. Here on Greaves, where the gravity was close to standard, Bork resorted to weight-lifting to keep in tone. He could have simply used electrostim but Bork preferred the barbells. More organic, he said.

  “Bork. Things peaceful last night after I turned in?” “Yessir. I had to warn a trooper to quiet down, but he didn’t cause any trouble after that.”

  Khadaji smiled. Bork was soft-spoken most of the time, but when he “warned” somebody, it could involve lifting them by the shirtfront with one hand until they were eye-level. He had seen Bork load a flexsteel bar with 275 kilos and then proceed to bench press it ten times; Bork himself weighed a good hundred and twenty-five kilos and stood close to two meters high. Most troopers smiled nervously when Bork passed.

  “You’re off at eight?”

  “Supposed to be,” Bork said, “but Sleel had to see the medic so I said I’d cover for him.”