Black Steel (13 page)

"Bueno. Let us go and bag our quarry."

"Scanner?"

"Here, Fem Wu. I've got the camp in view, it's easier 'cause it isn't moving, but it looks quiet. It sits in a fairly cleared area, lot of rocks, and the perimeter is clean

"Damn. My eye is gone. The next one is three minutes away. I'll keep you apprised."

Wu nodded at the empty air. Cierto was about to do something, and she guessed it was to try and assassinate this Jersey Reason. The matadors were the best bodyguards in the galaxy, Wu knew this, but the odds were bad. Cierto was a dangerous foe, he was likely well ached and he had the support of others and a mountain of money upon which to stand. She would not wish to be in the matador Sleel's position.

Well. If it came to violence, the chances were that either Cierto or Sleel or both would be killed. If Cierto died, then her own mission was finished. But if he survived, what would he do then?

Wu sat on the short grass in the warm sunshine and considered the problem. If Cierto killed the two men and lived through the adventure, then it was not likely that he would spend any time picnicking in the trees afterward. No, he had broken more than a few laws, not even counting the murder, so he would probably wish to depart this fair world with all due speed. Which would probably mean that Cierto would proceed directly to where his boxcar was berthed for a quick lift to his ship's orbit.

Wu could hardly spend a great deal of time skulking around the port without being noticed, but if Cierto's departure was apt to be no more than a few hours away, she could certainly manage to watch the boxcar for that long.

She stood. Yes. It made sense, even though it went against Master Ven's law of no-expectations, that Cierto would be leaving shortly. If she hoped to catch him, there would be the best place.

She went looking for a flitter to taxi her to the port.

"Anything?" Reason asked. He had the needle gun .tucked into his belt and he nervously touched the gun's butt as he spoke.

Sleel watched the security screens that lit the air over the com. The radar said the skies were empty; the sensors at the base of the hill were silent; the cameras trained on the road showed no traffic. Even so, Sleel felt an impending sense of threat. "No, we're clear. But tell you what, you sit and watch the screens. You hear or see anything, gimme a yell. I'm going to go out and take a look around with my own eyes."

Reason nodded and slid into the control seat as Sleel stood. "This is the perimeter alert-" he began.

"Teach your grandfather how to suck eggs," Reason said.

"Huh?"

"Old proverb. Means I know as much about how to operate this gear as you do."

"Right. Sorry."

"I just remembered something," Reason said. "I was on Rift for a job about fifty, fifty-five years ago."

Sleel looked interested. "Yeah?"

"I was still pretty young. I was working for another thief, part of his crew. There were four or five of us, as I recall."

"What did you steal?"

Reason shook his head. "I don't know. Never did. I was the escape driver. I drove the groundcar, an old crate with polyglas wheels, thing ran on broadcast power but we had it rigged with a battery in case we got shut down. Whatever it was was pretty small; the guy I worked for managed to keep it in a shirt pocket. Least that's what he patted when I asked did it go all right. "

"Not much help there. You remember the place where it happened?"

"Not really. Rich man's estate out in the middle of nowhere."

Sleel thought about it. "Can't be this guy, he's only forty-something T.S. He wouldn't have been a hormone storm in his father's loins yet."

"Just thought I'd mention it."

Sleel nodded, then went outside.

It was past noon, into the hottest part of the day. Heat spiraled up from the ground, heavier from the exposed rocks, in shimmering waves. Sleel walked and looked for any sign of trouble. A chokebird chawk-chawked as it flew past, and the insects sang their songs, but there was nothing amiss that Sleel could see.

Something was wrong, he could feel it, but the ground below the hill was empty and quiet.

Damn.

Luis whispered from two meters away. "There, Patron, the guard. I can shoot him from here-"

"No," Cierto commanded. The man in orthoskins atop the hill peering into the distance was easily a hundred and fifty meters away. Too far for a handgun like those they carried, even with an expert marksman like Luis behind the weapon. "Wait until we get closer."

"As you wish, Patron."

Cierto heard the impatience in Luis's voice and he smiled at it. It did not matter what the young man thought, only what he did, and as long as he obeyed, that was the only important fact. Luis could not see his smile, Cierto knew; it was as invisible as Luis was to his own eyes, a shimmer that was nearly a perfect match to the background from virtually all angles. The matador atop the hill could be looking right at the four of them and not see them.

As for the sensors they had already passed, well, they were excellent devices but hardly a match for the confounders Cierto and his trio of students carried. At a cost of a hundred thousand standards each, the confounders had better work.

Abruptly the matador turned away and moved from sight.

"Climb with great care," Cierto said. "Do not disturb the rocks."

"Sleel?"

Sleel was wearing short-range dentiphones and need do nothing more than grit his teeth once to be able to reply. "Yeah. "

"I got a funny signal on the sensors."

"On my way."

Sleel hurried toward the main building.

Inside, the older man pointed at the ground sensor projection. "Look at this."

"Looks clear to me."

"Yes, but it's too clear. This group of twelve here is reading perfectly blank."

"So are all the others."

"Not quite. There's a ground effect from the hot rocks, here and here, see."

"So?"

"So, there are a lot of hot rocks around this group, too. Why aren't they picking up clutter the same way?"

"Who knows? Were they before?"

"According to the recording yeah."

Sleel felt a cold finger touch his heart, then slide its way down into his bowels and begin stirring hard.

Uh-oh. "Confounder," he said. It was not a question.

"A real good one," Reason said.

He'd underestimated them, based on the previous attacks. Bad mistake. He knew better.

"Go get in the flitter," Sleel said. "You get a signal from me saying `Go,' you punch it right through the door and fan like hell away from here with your distress beacon screaming. I think we got company and they didn't bother to touch the doorchime before they came in."

"Sleel-"

"It is not a suggestion. Do it."

Reason sighed and gave him a short nod.

Sleel went to the building's rear entrance, away from the too-clean sensors, and went through the door at a run, diving and rolling on the hard ground, coming up into a combat crouch, both spetsdods questing for targets.

Nothing.

He started to rise, then sensed something to his right. The air was . . . blurry about fifteen meters away.

Shiftsuit blurry.

Sleel didn't think; he snapped his arm out and fired. If he were wrong, he'd have wasted a demistad's worth of ammo, he could live with that

Spetsdod darts moved relatively slow compared to some projectiles. A man with sharp eyes could see one, were the air clear and the sun bright. Sleel saw the dart fly. Then he saw it stop in midair.

Armor-!

He dived just as a dark object seemed to materialize next to the spetsdod's frozen dart. That would be an unshielded gun of some kind. Sleel didn't stop to note the make and caliber. He looped into a second roll, straightened and opened out prone on the ground, jamming a sharp rock into his left thigh hard enough to tear the orthoskins and bruise him pretty good. He swung his left hand around and fired twice, a double-tap, one on each side of the gun coming to bear on him.

The explosive round to the right of the invisible target's weapon found its mark. The whump! was loud.

Part of the shiftsuit's grid shorted out and, like a broken-up holoproj signal, the outlines of a short, heavyset man flickered in and out. The suit's backup computer tried to compensate but could only manage the bottom half of the outfit. What appeared to be the top half of a man toppled and fell onto its side. Sleel fired another explosive round and it hit the downed attacker about where his nose ought to be under the mask. The mask shattered and the half-body flopped onto its back.

Sleel leaped up, but the sudden pain in his leg where he'd hit the rock caused him to lurch to one side. It was lucky, because the gunner behind him, who was yelling, "Miguel!" missed with her first shot.

Sleel spun, but the second shot took his already injured leg out, knocking him sprawling. He twisted as he fell and fanned off four shots. Two of them hit the woman-it sounded like a woman-and she screamed and went down. Her suit was better, it maintained its integrity, but the blood pumping from within her quickly stained the outside of the figure as it ran down to pool in the dirt.

He spared his knee a glance.

Half of the joint was gone, the remaining part wasn't ever going to be useful again, and he wasn't going anywhere unless he hopped or crawled. Too soon to hurt, too.

Sleel bit down on his dentcom control. "Go, Jersey. Now!"

He heard the flitter's fans rev and he rolled onto his back and pulled a bungee strap from his belt and slapped it around his shattered knee. The strap tightened and slowed the flow of blood from the gaping wound.

The door to the garage rolled up and the flitter drifted out. It was no more than thirty meters away. Sleel propped himself on his right elbow and waved at Reason. "Go on! Get the fuck out of here!"

But Reason fanned the flitter toward Sleel.

"No, you stupid dickhead! Lift! Lift!" He waved Reason off.

Reason put the flitter down two meters away and cycled the door open.

"Goddammit, no, go, get the hell away from here!"

The older man hopped out of the flitter and moved to grab Sleel.

"Far enough, thief!" a deep male voice called.

Sleel turned to try and locate the source of the sound. There, only five meters or so away, a shimmer Sleel raised the left spetsdod, but before he could acquire the target, another blur to his left shimmered and became fully visible. It pointed a handgun at him.

Sleel jammed his forefinger toward the second target and the spetsdod went off at the same instant the other's weapon fired. His shot took the attacker at throat level, but the other's projectile hit Sleel's outstretched wrist, and his hand and spetsdod shattered into bloody fragments of bone and sinew and plastic and metal. The blast splashed into Sleel's face, blinding him. He fell onto his back and wiped at his face. Slivers of sharp bone stabbed into his palm as he wiped them from where they stuck into his face. His left eye was dark, and when he touched the socket, it was full of nothing but hot ooze and more fragments of bone. Not a good day for his left side, he thought, and almost laughed at the insanity of the inappropriate thought.

Now it hurt. All over.

He felt Reason grab his clothing by his shoulder and tug. Sleel raised his left arm and saw that there was, oddly enough, almost no blood flowing from the destroyed wrist. That was nice.

"Leave him," the male voice came.

Sleel twisted and saw another figure shimmering into view. A tall man who pulled from a sheath on his side a long, nearly straight-bladed sword.

Sleel was going into shock, but he tried. He pulled his right arm across his body-it seemed to weigh tons-and triggered his remaining spetsdod. The darts spattered against the suited figure harmlessly until the weapon ran dry. The man laughed.

He could reload the weapon with explosive rounds-if he had another hand to do it with.

The man in the shiftsuit reached up and pulled his face shield off. Sleel didn't recognize the face.

Neither, apparently, did Reason.

"Do you not know me, thief? You stole from my family. From my grandfather." He had some kind of lilting accent.

Reason shook his head, but he did not lose control. He still had the needler tucked into his belt. He pulled it.

The man put his face shield back down and raised the sword. He started toward Reason.

The old man triggered the weapon. Sleel saw that his aim was good, all of the needles hit right over the heart, but the armor under the suit stopped them. Reason dropped the useless gun.

Sleel shoved at the ground with his hand, trying to rise enough to block the attacker and allow Reason time to escape. The world went gray from the effort. He put everything he had into it, managed to get to his good knee and elbow.

The oncoming attacker didn't bother to dirty his sword, he just reached out and shoved Sleel over with one boot. Sleel struggled to come up again; but it was beyond him. He was forced to lie there as the swordsman came within range of Reason.

The old man might have made it back into the flitter if he'd tried, but he just stood facing the swordsman.

"For honor," the man said, and swung the black sword.

Reason's head fell and bounced once, then rolled over to rest against's Sleel's smashed leg. The half-blind matador screamed, a wordless cry of utter rage and anger, but it was choked off as the gray claimed him for itself.

Chapter THIRTEEN

CIERTO WALKED EASILY toward where the gliders were. Dona would be on her way toward the pick-up point, having made her legitimate deliveries in the chemical company's van. Cierto would fly the few klicks to meet her for the rendezvous and they would leave this world as soon as possible.

Cierto had the hood and face cover of the suit pushed back, and the day's heat did not bother him now.

He felt strong and able and pleased with himself. The electrical storm that had been gathering itself was approaching, but he would be away before it arrived. Distant thunder rumbled long after the lightning flashes.

Cierto skidded on a patch of loose soil. He grinned. Careful. It would not do that he fall and break an ankle on the way back from such a victory. The thief was dead, the matador guarding him was doubtless drawing his final breaths as his life seeped from his grievous wounds. He had been skilled, that one, able to detect and slay Juanita, Miguel and Luis despite the suits, but in the end, he had lost the fight. They were overrated, these matadors, Cierto decided. But this was not important.