The Tejano Conflict (11 page)

That she got past
their
sentries unnoticed pissed her off.

“Don't we have anybody on fucking guard duty?”

Kay said, “I did not think it necessary to disturb them.”

“Yeah. Don't worry, I'll disturb them later.”

The hunters on Vast were considerably more adept than humans. Ghosts in the night.

“Well, it's still good to see you.”

“And I you, Jo Captain.”

Dawn was still a couple of hours away. “You came from the other end of the area?”

Kay shrugged. “No more than a dozen kilometers. Not much of a run.”

Jo imaged making that trip at a jog in a fur coat. She shook her head.

“I have news,” Kay said.

Jo caught the quick flash of a smile.

“Yes?”

“It concerns the male Vastalimi. We met, he and I, in the forest.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“And . . . ?”

“And . . . what?”

“Come on, fem. He's probably the only male of your species for a dozen parsecs. What did he look like? How did he carry himself? How was his musk?”

“He looked like a male. He walked on two legs as we all do. His musk . . . well, it was sufficiently masculine.”

Jo shook her head. “I know you aren't that dense!”

Kay grinned. “His name is
Grey
masc. We spoke for only a short time. He was . . . not unattractive. He laughed at my joke. He allowed that he would feel bad if he had to kill me. He moved well.”

“All that?” Jo paused. “When is the wedding?”

Kay regarded Jo as if her skin had shifted to flaming purple. “Wedding?”

“‘Not unattractive,' you said. With a sense of humor? And he moves well? Sex, at the very least? Tell me the thought never crossed your mind.”

Kay grinned again. “I cannot tell you it did not. And it was . . . not an unattractive notion.”

Jo laughed. “Life is short, fem. You need to make hay while the sun shines.”

“I don't understand the metaphor.”

“Claw while the prey is in reach.”

“Ah.” Kay laughed. “Perhaps if he survives. It would not do for us to . . . do anything while we are on opposite sides of a conflict.”

“Okay. I won't kill him if you won't.”

They smiled.

It was late, just past midnight. Cutter was crossing the quad when he felt the pressure—somebody was watching him.

It was a public space, lots of troops went back and forth between the camp's buildings at all hours, so somebody noticing him wasn't a big deal, but this was different.

Somebody was
watching
him. With
intent
.

There were plenty of people who didn't believe you could do that, sense somebody watching you, but he had learned to trust that feeling over the years. It wasn't always right, but it was right more often than not.

He kept walking. He raised his left arm and pretended to look at his ring chronometer, but instead did a quick and surreptitious scan ahead and to his left. He stopped, as if he had suddenly remembered something. Shook his head, as if in irritation at himself, turned around, to the right, and took in what he could see that way.

Nothing amiss. He headed back toward the HQ module. Nobody else in sight, and he had done a 270-degree scan. Either they were hidden, too far away to see, or in that last quadrant, now to his right front.

He flicked a glance that way . . .

There. Was that a hint of movement, in the shadow of the cantina?

The pub closed at 2330, and the building was dark; no light spilled from the windows.

The camp lamps on eight-meter-tall poles bathed the compound in a functional, if not all that bright, yellowish glow, save for a brown corona around the LEDs themselves. A few moths or other night insects who didn't realize they weren't supposed to see and be attracted to the glow flitted around them, casting fuzzy, pale shadows of themselves here and there.

It was more that he felt a presence than saw it.

In another five meters, he would be as close to where he thought somebody was as he was going to get; after that, his back would be toward the spot, and of a moment, he knew if that happened, somebody was going to try for him.

Knew
it, absolutely sure.

Who was it? An enemy infiltrator? Somebody come to take the head off the opposition's leader?

Should he wait and see? Was his ability to track and shoot enough to beat somebody firing first from less than ten meters away, if that was what they intended?

Was anybody even there? Was he seeing ghosts in the night?

Something changed, something in the air, what he couldn't have said. He didn't see anything, he didn't hear anything, but he didn't wait—he snatched his pistol from its hip holster, thrust it toward the darkness under the cantina's overhang, and fired three rounds—
pop-pop-pop!
moving his wrist a hair between the shots, left to right, drawing a line. At this range, it would be a spread just under half a meter where the missiles would impact.

“Fuck!” somebody screamed.

Muzzle blasts sparked in the darkness, but even as he dived and rolled to his right, he knew those shots went high and to his left—

—Cutter landed prone, the Willis 4.4 lined up on the place where the shooter's muzzle had been. He fired five more times, tracking from chest height at a slight angle to the left and downward, in case the shooter had ducked—

Somebody started yelling “Who goes there!” and “Show yourself!” behind him.

Their guards.

Cutter lay quietly, waiting.

Somebody punched in the crisis lighting, and the compound lit up like it was daytime.

There was a body on the ground under the cantina's overhang.

Cutter voxaxed his command com onto the night's opchan. “This is Colonel Cutter. I'm prone on the ground eight meters from the cantina's front window, don't spike me. There's a shooter down next to the building. He's probably out of it, but approach with caution. Shooter might not be alone.”

He waited, and pretty quickly, a quad moved toward the cantina, carbines leveled.

They bracketed the downed shooter. One of the guards moved in carefully, bent to examine the shooter.

“DOA,” the guard's voice came, both over the com and through the warm night air.

Cutter stood, pistol still in hand.

He felt somebody come up behind him.

“An assassin?” Gramps.

“So it would seem.”

“Guards are doing a perimeter check.”

“I hope they do a better job than last time. Find anybody, try to bring them in alive.”

Cutter moved over to look at the dead man.

Nobody he recognized. The man lay on his right side, blood from multiple wounds on his torso and neck pooling on the ground, a silenced pistol near his outstretched hand.

Wink arrived, half-dressed, carrying a medical bag. “Somebody need a doctor?”

“Not unless you have a miracle in your sack of tricks,” Cutter said.

Wink bent and looked at the corpse. He did something with a small reader. “Three . . . four . . . five, maybe a keyhole . . . I count six hits. How many times did you shoot?”

“Eight.”

“Getting old, Rags.”

“Bracketing, you miss some. Better safe than sorry.”

“Do we know who this is?”

“Never saw him before, I know of.”

Gramps said, “I-team says the perimeter is clear. Who's the dead guy?”

“Don't know.”

“He aiming at you in particular?”

“I think so. I think he meant to backshoot me. I spotted him before he could.”

“Got any enemies?” Wink said. He smiled.

Cutter smiled back.

Gramps came round. “You get a DNA?”

“Already logged into the system,” Wink replied. “No immediate comeback, so he's not one of the opposition's registered.”

“And yet, who would want to see our commander dead more than they?”

“The list is probably fairly long,” Cutter said.

“Piss off anybody lately?” Wink asked.

Cutter and Gramps exchanged looks. Gramps picked it up: “Junior.”

Wink looked up. “Junior?”

Cutter said, “I'll fill you in later.”

The I-team leader joined conversation oncom: “We got a shielded fuel-cell trike outside the fence. Probably what our visitor rode here on. I will check local records.”

“Stet that,” Cutter said.

Well. Never a dull moment.

– – – – – –

The sweep came up empty. If there had been anybody else, he or she was gone, and there was no sign of another trike, so it would seem to be just the one shooter.

Wink told them there was no record on Earth of the shooter's DNA, at least not one they could access, and he wasn't carrying anything that would ID him. Interesting, and moderately impossible. You couldn't move around on Earth without leaving a trail, and if you were from offworld, there should be an entry tag somewhere.

No match to the dead guy existed. Which meant he was protected by somebody.

Gramps said, “Could be some kind of sub-rosa op, shielded identity.”

Cutter nodded.

“I wouldn't think Junior would have any trouble importing a killer without leaving a trail.”

“Probably not.”

“You'd think he'd offer you a little more respect by hiring a better one,” Gramps said.

“Given how things went back on Morandan, maybe not. He caught me flat-footed.”

“We don't know it's Junior. Could be the opposition. Or an old enemy.”

“Could be.”

“You don't sound too worried.”

“He missed, I didn't.”

“They might send somebody better next time.”

Cutter shrugged. “Or not. See if it happens.”

– – – – – –

“Captain?”

Jo came awake at once. Her internal clock told her it was 0320. The sodden night smelled of mold and moths, which, until she'd had olfactory augmentation, she'd never known, that moths had a kind of . . . powdery-rot odor.

It was Singh. “Yeah?”

“Pradar op says we have aircraft incoming.”

Jo stood, stretched, moved to the craft's computer board. She called the pradar op even as she toggled the image onto her control screen.

“Hey, Prop, what do we have?”

He said, “Two craft, masked sig and stealthed, but from the size and speed, I'm guessing troop copters, probably Howard 120s.”

Jo nodded to herself. H-120s would carry eighteen troopers with chutes or twelve with flysuits. If they could drop two dozen on top of them, that would make things interesting.

“They have to know we know they are there,” Jo said. “Reach out, Prop, see if there's anybody else flying our way.”

“That's a negative out to one hundred klicks, Cap.”

“Stay alert. Let me know if anything shows up.”

Jo opened the command opchan. “Heads up, people. If you haven't already noticed, we have enemy aircraft approaching. The G2A spikes are ready to go, and we'll hold off until they are close enough so they can't duck 'em; but meanwhile, everybody scans everything else, this might be a decoy.”

H-120s were slow; unless the enemy had some way of stopping tight-beam-guided ground-to-air missiles, they would be easy targets once they were within range, and they almost were there. They couldn't get close enough to drop parachutists that could reach 'em unless they were a lot higher, and the missiles could stretch to an H-120's ceiling.

If, however, they were carrying troops in flysuits, they'd drop them before they got within missile reach. The suits—essentially stubby wings with small turbojet engines—were slow, had a short range, and were harder targets. The fliers could drop into the ground clutter and be hard to spot on pradar or Doppler. This was risky, since the controls weren't all that precise on issue flysuits, and if you leaned crooked at two meters up, you'd auger into the ground at speed or bounce along the dirt like a stone skips on water; still, trained troops might get to a target without being shot down. It was something to worry about.

“Cap, they are holding just outside maximum range, and I'm getting e-chaff.”

Jo noticed on her own scope. “So they are using flysuits.”

“That's my guess.”

Be a waste of missiles trying to spike those, Jo knew. They might snag a few, but their standard G2A systems weren't rigged for cold, human-sized targets.

“All stations, expect troops in flysuits incoming.”

“Oh, boy, wingshooting!” That was Gunny.

Jo shook her head. Time to go outside and have a look.

“Inbound,” somebody said. “The leader is eleven hundred meters out, speed . . . 180.”

The machine guns had enough onboard brain to calculate the lead. An ape could hit them if he pushed the right button.

“Targets of opportunity,” Jo said. She scanned the skies. Her optics were first-class, but she didn't see anybody yet.

“Soon as you can hit them.”

“I got four more, I think,” another voice said. “Oops. One of them disappeared. Bad flying.”

“That just means the more dangerous ones are still coming,” Jo said.

The first machine gun opened up.

Jo saw the tracers zipping up from the emplacement into the night.

“Leader is down,” the gunner said. “The next three have separated—”

“—and the one farthest north is mine,” Gunny said. “Come on . . . come to Mama . . . Gotcha!”

The second machine gun chattered; more red streaks arced through the darkness.

That shooter must have put a round into one of the flysuit's engine intakes; there was a small flash of orange light as the engine blew, followed a few seconds later by a screech of metal tearing.

Time that sound got to Jo, that flier would already be dining on dirt.

More carbines fired. Even if the suits had been pradar-shielded, which they weren't, troops on the ground wearing spookeyes could see them well enough.

And if Jo were one of the fliers, right about now, she'd be tossing some kind of photonic to make shooters on the ground blink—

The thought was the deed: Photon flares on glide foils erupted, lighting up the sky. That made the nightscope shutters automatically shield, but it also gave plenty of illumination for naked eyes to see the fliers, a couple of which were no more than five hundred meters out.

Jo raised her carbine. She didn't use the sights, but let her training tell her where to point. Human brains were exceedingly accurate when it came to tracking motion. When it felt right, the position of her weapon's muzzle and that of the target, she pulled the trigger and let go a full-auto blast, fifteen rounds, continuing to track the target without conscious thought.

Years back, she'd taken a seminar given by a professional trick shooter. Don't think, the woman had said, just feel. There will be a connection between you and the target, and once you feel it, fire. Have that, you won't miss.

That woman could borrow a ring from somebody in the audience, put a paper sticker over the opening, toss it into the air, and thread it with a pistol round without scratching the ring. As far as Jo could tell, the trick shooter didn't have a single aug running, which made it even more amazing.

Her target didn't slow, but it changed direction and flew into the ground.

“Where
you
goin', birdboy?” Gunny's voice came over the com. “Nobody excused you! Eat this!”

Somebody said, “Cap, I think we got a couple made it to the ground, south side, on the hill.”

Kay seemed to materialize from nowhere. “I will check,” she said.

Jo nodded. “Go.” If there were a couple of enemy soldiers there, they'd be shedding their suits and looking for cover or a way up. Kay was on it, and Jo wasn't worried about a threat from there . . .

“Captain, the H-120s are making a run.”

“What? That's idiotic!” Jo said, half to herself.

Might be remotely controlled and full of explosives.
That would be spendy, but it could make a big enough bang to draw attention away from the incoming flysuiters.