Was Once a Hero (46 page)

Hours later Shasti had traded the use of her body to an offworld spacer
and escaped Olympia. She killed that spacer at their next port of call and fled
into Kandara’s spaceport underworld, promising herself to remain free or die.
More killing secured her a position with a local enforcer. Shasti was
merciless, having never learned mercy, but she did not enjoy killing as an end
in itself. Gradually, she came to prefer bodyguard duties and acquired a
reputation. Offworld contracts followed. Every chance she got, she worked her
way farther away from her homeworld.

Now she was back and there would be hell to pay.

Chapter Three

Rigg roused the others shortly before dawn. After securing the heavy
weapons and equipment, they dressed in street clothes and grabbed a hasty
breakfast.

“I have two vehicles outside,” Jenner said. “That will make our party
appear smaller and we can travel separately. Rainhell, I want you to ride in
the coupe, posing as an insurance consultant for the Trakia Mutual Combine.
I’ll be your secretary. Rigg, you’re our bodyguard. Olympia is a semi-lawless
world. An Aristo like Rainhell would have a bodyguard, even several.”

“You others will ride in the light truck. Your cover is that you are
agricultural workers on a trip to the capital.”

“Good,” Kim said, slapping his hands together. “Rubes heading for the
big city. It may explain any lapses we make.”

“Just so,” Jenner replied as she packed her suitcase. “Rainhell and I
can cover Rigg. As bodyguard he won’t do much talking anyway.”

“Strong and silent, that’s me,” Rigg said.

Shasti looked at him with an arched eyebrow.

“Okay,” he growled, “it’s you.”

Jenner looked a little perplexed at their by-play.

“Let’s go,” Rigg said, grabbing Jenner’s case off the bed. They loaded
the red sport coupe and the larger green truck-van, quickly leaving the
farmhouse behind.

The team drove out of the mountains and high desert districts, making
good time heading for the capital and the seacoast. When they stopped in towns
and restaurants, sometimes they pretended to know each other, sometimes to meet
for the first time. Other times, they didn’t communicate at all. Olympia,
difficult to land on for offworlders, was not difficult to travel in. Society
was factioned between the selectively bred and the genetically engineered, then
between different groups of the Engineered.

In the late afternoon of the sixth day, their vehicles crested a highway
and pulled into a scenic overlook. Shasti stepped out of the car and stretched,
glad to be free of its confines. The others piled out too, also glad of the
break from the long drive. Shasti walked over to cliff edge and looked out. The
air was humid and smelled faintly of the sea; they had outrun fall for the time
being.

“Marathon,” Jenner said from behind her.

The capital city gleamed in whites, blues and silver, stretching for
miles.

“I can see the coastline beyond,” Minaravitch shaded her eyes from the
strong sun.

“Not bad,” Rigg added. “It’s got a fair skyline. You folks like to build
up. Good. I had enough of underground cities on Enshar.”

“It’s grown,” Shasti said with the faint surprise of the returned
traveler.

“Population 2.1 million,” Jenner smiled. A hint of colonial pride
sounded in her voice.

“You can see how it was all planned,” Rigg said. “All very orderly.”

“Olympians hate random chance,” Shasti said. “We like it all mapped and
pre-planned whether it’s a city or a strand of DNA.”

“Has kind of a Mediterranean look to it,” Minaravitch said. “Like
somebody grabbed a tour book of Greece and decided to update the ruins.”

“Enough sightseeing,” Jenner said. “Let’s get going. We want to make it
before evening.”

On reaching Marathon, they moved into one of two safe houses Jenner’s
cell set up. Shasti chose the larger, so they could be housed together. They
took several apartments in the structure, connected by interior doors. The
neighborhood was transitional, frequented by business travelers and Aristos
either at the beginning of the way up in life or on the skids down. People
minded their business. Shasti switched their cover. Now they posed as a team of
disaster consultants looking for work.

Jenner contacted the other members of her cell, seeking information on
Pard’s movements and the purchases of armaments. “It’s safer for both teams if
we don’t meet face to face,” she answered when Rigg asked about the cell
members. Rigg didn’t like it but he couldn’t argue with the logic.

Shasti began checking the places Pard had frequented during their brief
marriage. She found all the changes in Marathon a bit bewildering. The
population had doubled. Many of Pard’s old haunts, including his city home,
were gone. Denshi’s downtown offices had not moved, though it seemed most of
their operations had been transferred to the old desert training facilities
outside Marathon. That facility had grown into a huge installation, nearly a
fortress.

They split up and began to follow leads, seeking contact with their
target. Pard remained elusive. The head of the Denshi order kept his movements
secret and had not been seen in person for some weeks. Shasti began to fear
they would have to take him at the Denshi’s public offices in Marathon. This
made the mission far more difficult. Chances of success and survival dropped to
minimal. They continued to search.

*****

Weeks passed and they were no closer to accomplishing the sanction on
Pard. Shasti, Jenner and Rigg headed back to the apartment after a day’s fruitless
search. They stopped at a market for groceries and necessities, which Jenner
and Rigg carried. It would appear strange for an Aristo like Shasti to carry
anything. The oppressive stickiness of Marathon’s tropical fall was breaking.
It would be winter soon. As they turned onto the street, the same sense of
wrongness Shasti had felt in London struck her again. Nothing showed in her
face as she turned to the others. “Tara, I want to take a look at that
electronics store.”

Jenner, addressed by her assumed name, nodded and followed. Rigg trailed
her. Shasti triggered a portable music com, hoping it would defeat any
sound-detecting equipment aimed at them. They stepped into the storefront.
Shasti pretended to be looking at a computer monitor. “Something’s wrong,” she
said to her companions over the music. “It’s rush hour and there are too few
people on the street. Those here don’t look right.”

Rigg cursed and looked up at the apartment. “The towel is out on the
window.”

Shasti looked at him, annoyed. “I’m aware of that. Don’t look again. The
team may not be aware of any problem and have hung out the all clear. Or they
are dead and someone else has hung it.”

“What do we do?” Jenner asked. Shasti looked into the older woman’s
drawn and frightened face and felt a moment’s pity for her. Jenner was not cut
from the same merciless cloth as she and Rigg. It hardly seemed fair.

Shasti used her excellent peripheral vision, looking beyond the others.
She could see several men lounging in doorways behind them, with no obvious
reason for doing so.
Denshi or police,
she thought. They must have trailed them onto the block. So the gate was shut
behind them. There were too many people who looked like police or troops on the
street. Surely more snipers and others laired out of sight.
It’s sad,
she thought,
to die, leaving Pard to pollute the
universe.
She regretted not lingering on that last kiss with Robert
Fenaday, lingering enough to taste it now.

“We need to run,” she said, with no hint of her interior deathsong.
“There are too many hostiles on the street and that’s just the ones we can
see.”

“I’m not leaving my people without trying to warn them,” Rigg snapped.

Shasti looked at him as if at a child. “They can’t get out,” she said
patiently. “They will be blocked on all four sides, above and below.”

“I’ve got to try,” he said, eyes locking on hers.

She thought a second. “We’ll go into the store and use the phone. We can
fight our way out the back and hope they overlooked it.”

“Hah,” Jenner said.

Shasti turned off the music com. “I’m going to buy the Zuidai monitor,”
she said for any listeners. They had little chance; still even a few seconds of
indecision would help. The others followed her as she pushed open the glass
doors and stepped into the store. Shasti strode up to the counter with all the
imperiousness of her class. She noted one man she suspected was police,
then
spotted the rear door. “I want the Zuidai monitor in
the window,” she told the clerk.

The store clerk nodded, not meeting her eyes. His physique would be the
source of much admiration offworld. On Olympia, his shortness and lack of
facial symmetry marked him as a recessive and lower class. Shasti’s engineered
senses detected the sheen of sweat on his forehead and the smell of chemical
fear on him.
So they’re in here too,
she thought. “My man needs to place a call on your phone.”

“Yes, madam,” he muttered.

From outside came the sharp crack of a rifle shot, then the sounds of a
fusillade. Shasti’s hand flashed out, driving the clerk to the ground. Her
other hand snapped her auto-pistol from under her arm in a liquid move. Two
Olympian police charged from the storeroom door. She shot both through their
visors. Their visor armor was no match for the illegal, hyper-velocity, AP
rounds the team’s weapons fired. People screamed
,
the
smart ones dropped to the floor. Others ran. One man fled out the front. Police
fire struck him, and he crashed into the show window.

Rigg shot the man Shasti had marked as a policeman. He didn’t see a
smaller woman Shasti would never have suspected of being Olympian police. The
policewoman shot Rigg in the shoulder with one round. He spun to the ground.
Shasti hit the policewoman in the left eye before she could fire again. Jenner
fumbled her gun out, but didn’t get a shot off.

Shasti snatched up a weapon from the floor, flicked it to full auto and
emptied the weapon across the storefront, exploding the remaining glass,
hopefully delaying reinforcements. Rigg, pale and white, climbed to his feet,
stumbling toward the back. Jenner reached to help him, pegging shots out the
front. Shasti hit the rear door and ran into two more plainclothes police. She
shot the woman officer. The male officer fired, missed. Shasti and he collided.
Shasti’s engineered body slammed adrenaline into her blood. Almost quicker than
sight, she hauled him off the ground, flinging him into the wall. He bounced
off. Shasti shot him in mid-air.

They dove out the rear door of the store and into the street. An
unmarked police aircar idled just outside the door. The two police they’d just
killed must have come out of it.

“In,” Shasti ordered. Rigg collapsed through the open front door. Jenner
jumped in the rear. Shasti raced around to the driver’s side as shots began to
come down from the rooftop snipers. A laser whiffed over her but failed to stay
on long enough to bite. It was like hot breath singeing her hair.
Anti-personnel flechettes cracked the pavement and dented the roof of the
aircar but could not penetrate it. She slid in,
firewalling
the throttle. There was the sound of a huge blast from the street of the
apartment.

“The explosives,” Rigg gasped. “They must have realized they were
trapped.”

“Yes,” Shasti, steering frantically around traffic, climbed to the
express air lane. “If pursuit is delayed, we have a chance. There’s the other
safe house.” The aircar raced away at two hundred KPH, leaving the confusion
and a towering cloud of smoke from the destroyed apartment in their wake.

“You’ll never make it with me,” Rigg said tightly. Jenner broke out the
car’s medical kit. She sprayed the wound with sealfoam, using a trauma tab to
inject painkiller into him. “As soon as we get a distance away, you two get
out. I’ll take the aircar and draw the pursuit.”

“No,” Shasti said. She checked scanners and mirrors. Nothing close. She
dropped out of the express lane, Changed streets and levels, heading back for
the ground where the car would be less conspicuous.
Rigg’s tough,
she thought.
If
he can manage a few blocks and some public transit, we’ll make it.

Rigg smiled through the pain. “Don’t get sentimental now, Rainhell. Stay
in character, willya?”

“No,” she repeated, “you were right back there. We had to try.”

“Rainhell.”

“No. Fenaday wouldn’t do it. What I’ve learned of being human, I learned
from him.”

*****

Jalgren Pard looked up from his massive desk at the knock. He was
working on contract negotiations for the sale of a former Dua-Denlenn merchant
cruiser and had left word not to be disturbed. He didn’t need to ask who it
was. His personal aide would admit no one to his presence without checking with
Pard first. The doors slid open and Grigor Salmot, his head bowed
apologetically, came in. The whipcord thin, dark-skinned man made no sound as
he walked over the marble flooring and plush, red carpet. Stealth was second
nature to Grigor.