Counterweight (10 page)

He risked a break in observation to open a weapons chest,
pulling out a scatter-stun launcher. He stepped back to the open door, letting
the reticule guide him back to the target. He let out a relieved breath as he
confirmed the target.

The target had failed to make contact with G’Mal because the
Foxlight II
was overdue. Their scheduled docking port had just been
released to another vessel but Orbital Control had no updates on the ship’s new
arrival time.

As far as Graadt was concerned, it was the best possible
scenario. He didn’t care if he met the smuggler; he wanted the Human agent and
this Krorian cat’s-paw might just lead them straight to him.

If he didn’t, well, Nid was still at the tether station
working to identify the next watcher.

It also solved the problem Graadt had been mulling over:
should he follow the enemy agent or just grab him and start an aggressive
interrogation? Now, with two targets, he could afford to do both. He’d follow
this one in the hopes that he might be on his way to report in.

If that didn’t put meat in the pot, they’d grab the watcher
in the station and start peeling the skin from his back.

The target ignored the cabs at the pick-up zone, continuing
down the pedway to where the rail shops began. The only reason rail shops
didn’t crowd out the cabs was the absence of protective railings to hold the
rickety structures.

The Krorian moved into the steady pedestrian flow, ignoring
the calls of the shop owners.

“Fornication!” Graadt grabbed the overhead handle and leaned
out the door, angling his body to seek a gap between the unlicensed structures.
“Kaans, I lost the signature. I can’t see past these gods damned shanties.”

The carrier lifted but he shook his head. “He must be too
close to the shops. I still can’t see him. I need to get in there.”

“Hang on,” Kaans yelled.

The carrier swiveled around, bringing the nose into the back
of the shops, tearing three of them from their dubious moorings. The shops, along
with their owners, fell onto their counterparts on the next level, smashing
them loose as well.

As the carrier swiveled back to bring the door near the
railing, Kaans let out a whoop of delight. “We ought to get a cut of the setup
tax when we pull a stunt like that!”

At least twenty shops had been destroyed before the
avalanche petered out, deflected by a cleverly constructed, angled shop roof
eight levels down. The Company would be sending out a tax adjuster within
hours. His mission would be to map the empty slots so it would be easier to
know whom to squeeze for a setup tax as new shops sprang up.

Graadt couldn’t care less about getting a cut of the tax. He
was too focused on timing his jump to hear his pilot. He backed away from the
opening, slinging the scatter-stun launcher over his shoulder. Aiming for a
slight gap in the crowd of gawkers who were gazing down at the chaos, he hit
the doorway at a dead run, launching himself backward like a high jumper.

His head found the gap and his shoulders widened the
opening, spinning the onlookers out of his way as his body rotated. He
compacted into a ball, slamming to a stop against the legs of a heavy-set
Dactari in an expensive tunic.

Graadt stood, looking down at the pureblood example of his
own species. Designed as a military race, the Dactari had no genetic tendency
toward weight gain, so it took indulgence on a nearly heroic scale for one of
them to get to this state.

The Dactari began an angry tirade but stopped short as
Graadt slapped him hard and shoved him back into the crowd. The vast majority
of those now watching him were anything but Dactari and he heard an
undercurrent of approval in the crowd.

He scanned the faces, looking for the scar, but he doubted
his target would hang around. That was the thought that kept the chase alive.
He shouldn’t be looking for a
face
; he should be looking for the backs
of heads.

After a shop crash like Kaans had just caused, all eyes were
turned to the tragedy. It was like watching a ship fail orbit – you just couldn’t
turn your eyes away.

Unless you were using the confusion to slip away.

After breaking contact, the heat signature was lost. He had
to acquire his target the old-fashioned way. He pushed his way through the
crowd, scanning for movement, and he spotted a head of black hair above a green
collar, moving toward a zone of medium-wealth housing. All around the head were
the faces of people moving in Graadt’s direction.

He pushed clear of the press and unslung his launcher. Like
most Stoners, Graadt had high testosterone levels and he was prone to
escalation when stressed. Losing his prey and the risk of death from his leap
had filled him with adrenaline and now he forgot about trying to follow his
enemy.

Now he wanted to give aggressive interrogation a shot.

Faces began to show alarm as he leveled the weapon, aiming
at the departing figure in the green overalls. He pulled the trigger. A sharp,
brutal hum emitted from the weapon as the mini rails launched a disintegrating
canister of shock balls. He knew it would hit several innocent pedestrians as
well but the effects were rarely permanent.

They spread out as the canister reacted with the air and
evaporated. Just before they made contact, a man in a business tunic turned to
look back at the dark-haired-man, no doubt wondering why such a
shabbily-dressed individual was entering a neighborhood that was well above his
pay level.

His curiosity saved the target.

The businessman took the three balls that would have struck
the agent and he went down like a sack of water. The target turned at the fresh
screams. He saw the twitching bodies behind him and looked up to see his
pursuer.

Until now, it was uncertain whether the Krorian was aware of
Graadt and his team or pretending ignorance in an attempt to keep his pursuers
on a passive footing. There was no doubt now as he turned and raced for the
entrance to the glazed neighborhood, knocking the security guard aside with a
push to his throat.

Graadt tossed the empty weapon away and raced after his
quarry. Passing the choking guard, he spotted the Krorian angling around a
stand of decorative trees and ducking down a side alley.

This was definitely a bad choice of neighborhoods to go to
ground in. This zone was home to the mid-level cargo brokers who needed to
spend their lives in close proximity to the planet-side tether station.

When an unexpected ship came in, whatever the cargo, the
first ones at the station usually made the best deals and this zone was
directly next to the station. Appearance was everything here. Showing wealth
was a way of displaying success and the houses were all constructed of glazing
– the better to show others what that wealth was being spent on.

It didn’t make for very good cover.

Graadt set off after his target, not wanting to fall too far
behind. The walls might all be glass but the slight greenish hue tended to add
up and, with a few layers in the way, he might lose sight of him altogether. As
it was, the target was moving in and out of sight as he ran past structural
elements or interior partition walls.

Graadt angled to the right, intending to intercept the
Krorian from the side as their paths intersected, but he lost sight of him
again as he disappeared behind what appeared to be a storage room. He put on a
burst of speed, rounding a corner that was mostly obscured by a large, carved
spice-wood screen strategically placed in the corner of the room to maximize
its visibility.

His arm came up almost of its own accord, his body
conditioned by years of brutal childhood and adolescence. His own son, a
stranger to him these last five years, had already made three kills on the
training grounds before his tenth year. The Krorian’s knife attack was
unexpected and reasonably well-executed, but Graadt was better.

Much better.

He’d blocked with his left forearm and he got his right hand
onto his enemy’s wrist in a heartbeat. Sliding his left hand down to the man’s
elbow, he rotated the Krorian’s arm back before thinking had anything to do
with it and shoved it into the angle where neck meets shoulder cutting the
carotid artery.

His enemy’s eyes began to glaze and the body began to sag,
giving up a lifetime of fighting against gravity.

Graadt cursed, slamming a bloody palm against the glass wall,
the print barely visible against the dark wood in the room.

He’d allowed adrenaline to make the decisions. The thrill of
taking another life had eclipsed his need for information. In that split second
after recognizing the threat, he’d allowed reflexes to take over when he could
have just as easily disarmed his opponent after the initial block.

It would have meant a higher risk but combat always came
with risk and Graadt knew he’d failed himself. Worse still, he’d failed his
son. In killing the Krorian, Graadt had deprived himself of a valuable
resource, one who, with the appropriate ‘encouragement’, might have led them to
their real target.

Capturing or killing the Human agent would be a reminder to
the Dactari that the Stoners were able to get things done. Things
they
couldn’t do. More importantly, his people on Oudtstone would have to publicly
acknowledge him after such a feat.

The
Foxlight II,
En
Route to Chaco Benthic

R
ick
woke with a start. Something had just moved. Distant impacts and vibrations
transmitted through the fabric of the ship, becoming muted sounds in the small
atmosphere of his suit.

He desperately tried to pull his wits back together. His
last attempt at sleep had been interrupted by the couple who had discovered him.

That was it… He was still aboard the smuggler’s ship but the
crew were dead and, from the sounds, the raiders were separating their boarding
clamps. He felt a wave of nausea and, though he’d never experienced it
first-hand before, he understood from his training that he was feeling the
effects of pitch exposure.

The raiding vessel was using their pitch drive to push away
from the distortion envelope they currently shared with the
Foxlight II.
An alarm began its warbling tone inside the helmet and Rick sub-vocalized a
command to bring up the diagnostics menu.

Before he had the chance to find the issue, his mind told
him he had bigger problems to contend with. He set his suit’s mag plates to
full strength just as the raider vessel angled away, leaving the
Foxlight II
on its own.

A new alarm sounded, indicating an emergency reactor scram.
With the fusion reactor going off-line, the distortion generator failed as well
and the ship tumbled back into normal space. The bodies on the bridge bounced
off bulkheads and ceiling panels and the captain’s corpse hit a stanchion with
such force that he was almost torn in two at the waist.

Cushioned inside his suit, Rick was unscathed, though he was
suddenly glad he’d been caught while sleeping in the shuttle. He’d been brought
before the captain on an empty stomach. If it hadn’t been empty then, it
certainly would have been now. The wild motion, combined with the sickening
effects of an emergency drop-out, wreaked havoc on his body. Rick fought to
control the heaving of his guts, deprived of the slim comfort of being able to
double over.

At least he had a clean helmet. As his body recovered, he
turned his attention to the damage-control telemetry. What he saw was hardly
reassuring. Every compartment in the ship had been vented, often from the
inside. No doubt the boarding party had fired through the hull as they cleared
the ship, ensuring that unsuited victims wouldn’t be able to pose any problems
for them.

More disturbing was the data coming from the Engineering
compartments. Several magnetic field emitters had been damaged by interference
from the raiders’ pitch drive, causing the emergency scram. Without those
emitters, the magnetic torus used to contain the fusion reaction would be
incomplete, allowing plasma to spill out at more than seven million degrees
Celsius. He was reasonably sure, without needing to consult his training as an
engineering officer, that such a leak would be a bad thing.

The ship was still rotating and drifting, dead in space, but
he had to forget about that for the moment and hope it didn’t find an asteroid
or planet before he could fix the engine. Though the ship was spinning, his
inner ear was using the vessel’s gravity as a frame of reference and he knew he
would be able to walk easily enough.

Rick released the mag plates, knees bending slightly as he
found his footing. He took a deep breath, let it out and headed for the same
hatch he’d last walked through as a stowaway. He now passed through it as the
ship’s master, though whether he would actually be able to control the smuggler
ship was a question to which he still had no answer.

He approached the main hatch to Engineering but it failed to
open at his approach. Even though there was no atmosphere on either side of the
door, the safeties were still set to prevent proximity opening. Rick nodded in
approval. The
Canal
was programmed the same way – there was always the
chance that loose debris might find its way into the engine room and play havoc
with sensitive gear.

Falling back on his pod training sessions, he scanned around
himself to ensure no foreign objects were waiting to roll through the door.
Satisfied, he stepped over to the door actuator panel and hit the red button.
The door slid open, revealing a dead Tauhentan in a pool of blood, his weapon
on the floor near his left hand.

Rick considered closing the dead engineer’s eyes but
realized the futility. The man was frozen stiff. Still, he couldn’t leave loose
debris lying around the engine room. Muttering a silent apology, he knelt by
the man’s feet and pulled gently until the frozen blood gave up its grip on the
deck plating. He dragged the corpse with its halo of blood out into the
companionway before coming back in and sealing the door.