Dire Steps (2 page)

“But they do. And you should remember what happened to the man who held the job you hold now, when he got that gang angry.”

“Hard to forget, really. Considering I was there.” Olech's somber face turned from the glow of the screens, wearing a wraithlike smile. “I just realized something. The man who used to have the job
you
hold got killed that same day in that same room, shielding me from the bullets.”

Leeger returned the grin. “Why do you think I'm so concerned?”

Olech's hand came out of the shadows to rest on Leeger's shoulder. He turned back to the screens, staring at the prisoner. “All right, then. We need to find out exactly who our friend has been talking to, and what they were planning to do with this information—­if he knows that part.”

“And then?”

“Have him executed. It'll be a good message for our overly curious partners.”

“No.”

“No what?”

“I won't have him executed.” Leeger started for the door. “I'll do it myself.”

H
eavy clouds blotted the sun when Olech emerged from the building where the prisoner was being held. Unity Plaza was almost the size of a small city and still growing, but its central tower wasn't far away, so he decided to walk. All around him, stone buildings rose out of manicured lawns, structures that housed the workings of humanity's highest level of government. In spite of that lofty status, Olech had insisted on large expanses of green grass with walkways as the complex grew. Thousands of ­people lived and worked at Unity, and the Chairman of the Emergency Senate was now surrounded by men and women hustling from one place to another.

Tensions among the alliance planets had reached even this place, and Olech knew that several of the faces in the crowd were Leeger's security ­people working incognito. Olech had flatly rejected the assignment of a bodyguard detail while inside Unity, but Leeger had insisted on the hidden escorts. Drone messengers flitted across the gray sky, and the Chairman knew that some of them were surveillance robots assigned to protect him.

Despite the threatening clouds, Olech wore a sunny smile as he walked. He was greeted by many of the different staffers as they passed, and returned most of the salutations by name. Mixed with the oppressive sense of a distant, lurking danger was a different sensation, one of expectancy and even relief that manifested itself in the humanity flowing around him. Olech Mortas had always considered himself a man of the ­people, and he still prided himself on his ability to take the pulse of a crowd.

He suspected that this particular crowd was feeling relieved because his daughter Ayliss was due to depart the next day, after a six-­month residence. As an officer of the Veterans Auxiliary, Ayliss was being placed in charge of one of the newly-­formed veteran colonies in the war zone. She'd spent the previous weeks being trained in her new duties by Olech and Reena, which some had viewed as an unwelcome rapprochement between the absentee father and the resentful daughter. For years, a rumor had circulated that Chairman Mortas hired attractive young men and women in a subconscious effort to replace the two motherless children who had grown up disliking him. The presence of his daughter at Unity had damaged the psychological ecosystem for many of its personnel, and they were glad to see her go.

The sun broke through the clouds for half an inhalation, momentarily casting the smiling faces in a bleached-­out light. For that instant, in Olech's mind, they took on the pale, empty visages of dead men and women. Olech recognized some of the blank masks as ­people he'd sent to the war, all of them young, all of them killed. It was not the first time he'd hallucinated in this fashion, though the experience was relatively new.

Olech maintained his pleasant façade when he reached the security wall around the enormous stone tower that was his home. Moving through the scanners on a side gate, he wondered just how the carefree staffers would feel if they could see what he sometimes saw in them. Or if they knew that Ayliss was not the only Mortas who was about to leave them.

N
abulit looked up when Leeger reentered the interrogation room. He didn't speak, so Leeger placed an object on the table within his reach. It was a small dagger with a black handle inside a worn scabbard, and it made Nabulit look away.

“We found this hidden in your effects, along with the recordings of the Chairman's son. Jander told me about the man who owned this dagger. Cranther, the Spartacan Scout who died saving his life on Roanum. Jan was carrying this knife, and a longer one, when he got to Glory Main. Decided to help yourself to a souvenir?”

Nabulit looked down at the weapon, but made no move to touch it.

Leeger took the dagger, and drew it from its sheath. The black blade showed some wear when he placed it directly in front of the other man. “Go on. Pick it up. I'll fight you barehanded, and you can use the knife. You win, we'll let you go.”

“That's a lie.”

“It's a chance. Troops just like Jan and Cranther are taking chances all over the war zone even as we speak. Pick it up.”

“No.”

Leeger walked to the observation window. He laced his fingers behind his back, and began examining the dark, non-­reflective pane. His heart rate slowly increased as he waited for the sound of the chair, but after a few long seconds he knew nothing would happen. He returned to the table.

“This is what I hate the most about guys like you.” Leeger retrieved the weapon and seated it in its carrier. “You didn't even
try
.”

The double slap on the hatch caused it to open, and the dagger went outside. Leeger sat down.

“Now you're going to tell me everything I want to know.”

O
lech stood in another darkened room, meeting with another man who specialized in personal protection. They were far beneath Unity's central tower, looking through a sheet of bulletproof glass at a broad indoor firing range. The vista resembled a wooded countryside, a mock-­up with rolling terrain, trees, bushes, and failing light. A lone figure with blond hair and black fatigues lay prone just in front of them between two fake hillocks, sighting down the barrel of a long Scorpion rifle.

“Watch this.” Olech's companion was large, and his head was shaved almost bald. He extended a paw-­like hand to press a button on a control console just below the window.

Far downrange, where the trees and bushes blocked the view, the silhouette of a human figure hopped up and began running toward them in a crouching zigzag. In the semidarkness, it was little more than a shadow. Before the moving shape had gone three steps, another one popped up from behind a mound many yards to the left and rushed forward. The first runner dived headfirst behind a low rise in the ground, and a third figure materialized off to the right, charging ahead.

The prone shooter might as well have been a statue. The moving men repeated their brief moments of exposure in a seemingly random fashion, never more than two of them up at the same time, each exposed for only a few seconds. Olech studied the runners' movements, how they tried to reach the cover of low ground but sometimes opted for the concealment of the fake shrubbery. He noted with a combat veteran's eye that they never popped up in exactly the same spot where they'd gone to ground, and that they alternated the direction in which they crawled or rolled before rising again.

A speaker in the room broke the silence with a sharp crack, and the prone shooter seemed to flinch just a bit. The runner on the left, two strides into his rush, flipped over backward when the slug hit him. A second shot followed almost immediately, knocking down the middle runner just as he was rising from cover.

The shooter shifted minutely, swinging the long rifle to the right before firing three rapid shots. Tall fronds of faux grass jerked and twitched with the passage of the rounds, then the last runner was up too, having been flushed out by the near misses. The shooter fired twice more, drilling the projectiles into the fleeing figure's back and toppling it to the ground.

“Well done.” The voice of the bald man boomed out over the firing range, but the shooter made no effort to acknowledge the compliment. The light in the room brightened just enough to show the three robot targets, human in every regard, coming to their feet where they had been gunned down. Glowing circles showed where the rounds had struck them, and they stood there in mute machine accusation.

“Resetting. This iteration the opponents will utilize smoke obscurants.” The light went down again, and the robots hustled off.

“You've done a fine job with her, Dom.” Olech gave a brief nod to the security man, Dominic Blocker. Deep lines crossed Blocker's forehead, but he radiated physical vitality.

“If I couldn't teach her how to shoot in six months, I ought to hang it up. She's a natural, by the way.”

“Takes after her old man. I was the best shot in my platoon in Basic.”

“That's funny. The official history says there wasn't time for Basic before you and the other kids shipped out.” Blocker's voice was deep, the words unkind. Olech Mortas had joined the war against the Sims in its third year, when the conflict had been going so badly that a special waiver had dropped the volunteer age to twelve. Fifteen years old, he'd been thrown into battle with an army made up mostly of children. Badly wounded on a planet in a distant solar system, Olech had returned to Earth as one of the few survivors among the waivered recruits, a revered group still known collectively as the Unwavering.

“Sometimes the official story is different from the truth.”

“Is that what Ayliss and I are going to find out on Quad Seven?” The colony Ayliss was slated to administer was on a planet code-­named FC–7777, the two-­letter prefix standing for Force Colonized. “That what you told her here is different from what she'll find there?”

“Reena and I told her the truth, while failing to convince her to take a different colony. It's going to be rough out there.”

“You've got that right. A recently conquered planet, already being mined by Zone Quest, colonized by some worn-­out combat vets who think they're going to inherit the place. Deep in the war zone, in a part of space routinely worked by Sim raiders and human pirates. And your daughter is the Veterans Auxiliary minister who's supposed to organize that circus.”

“Don't sell those troops short. You're a combat vet, older than most of the ones you'll meet out there, and you're not worn out.”

Blocker ignored the compliment. “It's a guaranteed losing situation no matter how you cut it. The Zone Quest managers are going to ignore her, and when the vets see that happen, they're going to reject her.”

“Zone Quest will play ball with her just fine. They know they're only operating on that planet because I'm letting them.”

“That won't hold up. The troops believe you gave the planet to the Auxiliary, and when they see that Ayliss is all chummy with the outfit that's mining the place without their permission, they'll turn against her.”

“Listen to that pessimism. Not the Dom Blocker I remember.”

“The Dom Blocker you remember was seventeen years younger. He couldn't make you listen to him then, and apparently he can't do it now.”

“I didn't listen to you because you didn't want me to do the one thing that was going to keep Ayliss and Jan alive.”

“Your kids would have been just as safe if you'd let Faldonado and me track down Lydia's murderers. They poisoned your wife, robbed your kids of their mother, and what did you do? Pretended you didn't care, about your wife or your own children.”

“You keep forgetting it worked.”

“And you think that was a good thing? I don't know who else bought your charade, but Jan doesn't trust you at all, and Ayliss is worse. The woman I've been working with for the last six months is nothing like the little girl I left with you. She's fueled by blind rage, and that's your fault. You're just lucky that she found somebody else to hate.”

The prone figure glanced back at them, and an impatient voice came over the intercom. “You going to give me something new to shoot, Dom?”

Blocker activated the intercom. “What did I teach you? You shoot, you move.”

“But I got them all.”

“You never get them all. Move.”

They watched as Ayliss slowly wormed backward, away from the notch that had been her firing position. Slipping into a minor depression, she cradled the rifle in her elbows and began crawling toward another spot.

“Did you hear that? The eagerness? In all of the ranges I've been on in my life, no matter what the target looked like, I never once fantasized I was shooting a living being.” Blocker pointed. “I believe your little girl imagines she's shooting someone every time she squeezes the trigger.”

“Me, you mean? I doubt that. We've been spending a lot of time together these past few months.”

“No, I don't think she's shooting you, or even that bastard Python. She got one hell of a rush when she pushed him over that railing. I think that's why she took this job, why she picked Quad Seven, and why she's set aside her anger at you.”

Olech's voice was low. “You mean she's kill-­crazy?”

“Worse. In the fifteen years I spent in the war zone, I only saw a few guys who'd gone batshit over the blood. They were easy to spot; got all goofy whenever there was a chance of a fight. No, Ayliss is different. She knows she had to kill Python, but I think she was very surprised by how much she enjoyed it. She wants that feeling again, and she knows you can get away with a lot out in the zone.”

The crawling figure in fatigues had found a new firing point at the base of a fake tree. Slowly extending the Scorpion, Ayliss looked down the barrel to familiarize herself with the new view.

“Look at the concentration. She's actually having fun out there. Reminds me of her mother.”