Farthest Reach Read online

  Which I might have been. He was good-looking and he owned a starship and I can be as shallow as the next girl.

  The passage ended in the cockpit, which seemed even more cramped than the utility bay with the front screens turned off, the blank curve of the bulkhead pressing in on the acceleration couches and the control consoles. Deke fell into the pilot’s seat and the holographic displays activated, showing us a panoramic view of the spaceport, the grandly-named fusion-form landing field outside town. The cockpit seemed less compressed with the illusion of the outer darkness fed into the space ahead of the control panels, and I finally felt comfortable enough to climb into the copilot’s seat.

  The ship’s turbines rumbled to life, beginning their spin up, but I hadn’t seen him touch a control. I frowned.

  “How the hell are you doing that?” I demanded, squinting at him as if I could spot the trick.

  He didn’t bother trying to pretend he didn’t know what I meant. He tapped a finger against his right temple.

  “Your tax dollars at work,” he said, then seemed to reconsider. “Well, someone’s tax dollars. All wireless, all built in. Among other things.”

  “Damn,” I murmured, finally impressed. “Yeah, okay, you might actually be able to kill them and make it out alive.”

  “I know I am.” He nodded to my seat. “Strap in.” I slipped my arms through the restraints just as I felt the ship begin to shift, the belly jets throwing out sheets of steam in the display. “But since you seem to think killing them is such a bad idea, what do you suggest as an alternative?”

  “How long will it take to fly us out there?” I asked him, fingers digging into the armrests. It felt unnatural for something this large to be lifting straight off the ground.

  “Maybe ten minutes.” He gestured toward the communications console. “Maybe you should get on the horn and call these Sung Brothers to let them know we’re coming.”

  I thought about that for a long moment and a smile slowly spread across my face.

  “No, I don’t think I will.” I eyed him up and down. “Time to find out if you’re as big of a badass as you think you are.”

  ***

  The Sung Brothers’ compound was impressive, even from a thousand meters up. It reminded me of pictures I’d seen in history vids from Earth of the old castles they used to have thousands of years ago.

  Was it thousands? Hundreds? I couldn’t remember. I never paid that much attention to my history classes.

  The main house was huge, a mansion by Thunderhead’s standards, built of local stone and wood in a style I’d heard called Early Modern, though I had no idea early modern what. It was all peaked roofs and picture windows, slate gray with white trim. The barracks for their small army of hired thugs was similar in style but smaller, lower to the ground with no big windows or arching doorways.

  It was the wall that made it look like a castle. It was a meter thick, constructed of local stone reinforced by the same sort of alloy they make starship hulls from, BiPhase Carbide, and it could take a hit from a missile launcher without crumbling. At each corner of the octagonal structure was an armored guard shack mounting a Gatling laser turret, enough firepower to take down an assault shuttle.

  But not quite enough to take down a starship, even if they’d been expecting one.

  “This thing is armed, right?” I asked him, fingers clenching the ends of my seat’s armrests. He chuckled, not looking away from the main screen, and the ground rushing up to meet us.

  “Bit late in the day to be asking that now. Who did you want me to shoot?”

  “Not who. What.” I pointed at a stretch of wall facing the incoming road from town. “Will whatever you have penetrate that wall?”

  “Let’s find out.”

  My stomach stayed at somewhere around five hundred meters up, but the rest of me went nap-of-the-earth. The trees were so close they nearly tickled the Dutchman’s belly and when the tree line passed, the ship dipped even lower. Steam billowed around us, clouding the optical view on the main screen, but computer simulation pierced through it using infrared and radar. I had no trouble at all seeing the three-meter wall rushing up directly at the nose of the ship.

  Reality ripped asunder, split by a line of energy so bright the screens whited out for a moment, so powerful its heat created a wave of turbulence and the Dutchman shook in fearful awe of the force it had unleashed. And for just a split-second, so did I. A five or six meter stretch of the wall was just gone. There wasn’t so much as a loose bit of stone or a section of rebar left, just a glowing halo of burning gas and jagged, white-hot edges on either side.

  “Is that…,” I stumbled over the words. “Is that a proton cannon?”

  He nodded, but the question had been rhetorical. Nothing else small enough to fit on the cutter would have had the impact to take down the wall. The weapons were military-grade, highly illegal, and expensive as all hell if you could manage to get your hands on one at all. I wanted to ask him how he’d gotten it, but now wasn’t the time. I could see the Sung Brothers’ guards running around their compound like cockroaches scattering from the light, and we had to get to work before they got organized.

  “Land next to the house,” I told him, trying to sound as if this were all old hat to me.

  “The ship can do that all by itself,” he assured me, unstrapping and clambering out of his seat. “I’ll see you down there.”

  “Wait, what…”

  He was already gone, and I was trying to figure out if I should be grabbing the steering yoke, but the autopilot was still taking us smoothly in toward the open courtyard in front of the mansion. Somewhere behind the cockpit, I heard the whine of the belly ramp opening over the roar of the landing jets, and I knew Deke had jumped out from ten or twelve meters up. Far enough up to bust up a normal human being, maybe even kill him, but he hadn’t hesitated, which meant he was either just as dangerous as he thought he was or he was just a huge dumbass. At this point, it could have gone either way.

  The ship, though, she was the real deal, and her AI landed on that narrow stretch of ground as sweet as you please, with barely a shudder. I unstrapped my safety harness, forcing myself not to rush. I had to be calm, had to be in control if this was going to work. I could not let them see me as some ditzy, blonde teenager.

  Deke had left the belly ramp down and the utility bay was misted over with a bathhouse cloud of steam from the landing jets, hot and humid enough to steal my breath. I stepped through it slowly, my hands at my sides, not making any sudden movements, and when the yawning muzzles of a dozen weapons coalesced on the other side of the curtain of steam, I wasn’t a bit surprised.

  They were yelling, shouting, panicked and yet trying to sound commanding to hide it. Three different men gave me three different orders, all of them contradictory, but I ignored them all until their leader ran up, shoving the others aside. He wasn’t particularly tall or imposing, but he had the air of authority about him, the look of a man used to being obeyed. His right hand rested on the butt of a holstered pistol.

  “Who are you?” he demanded. “And what in the hell do you think you’re doing here?”

  I thought about telling him my name, but realized it wouldn’t mean anything to him or any of them. I might just as well call myself Kiska for all the weight it would carry with these people.

  “I own the Lucky Bastard,” I said instead. “And the Sung Brothers are going to want to talk to me…unless they think another war would be good for business.”

  ***

  For a family that made its fortune buying and selling high-tech weapons and illegal ViR streetware, the Sungs sure seemed enamored of old-school craftwork. Or maybe it was just the conspicuous consumption they liked.

  The entrance hallway was tastefully decorated in the same antique style as the outside of the mansion. Side tables of real, hand-polished wood held hand-fired and glazed pottery. Paintings lined the walls, again all works made by a human artist using brushes and paints rather than an
artificial intelligence controlling a fabricator. More of the same in the elegant sitting room: velvet-covered furniture and tables of locally mined marble along with several classically styled sculptures.

  “Just who the hell are you?” a harsh, choppy voice demanded from the other side of the sitting room.

  Two men descended the spiral staircase from the second floor, identical down to their feather-cut, shoulder-length hair and the deep maroon of their casual jackets. Their skin was as pale as the polished marble of the sculptures in the sitting room and given the epicanthic folds to their dark eyes, I was sure that was a cosmetic choice—either theirs or their parents’. Their faces had the gravity of age if not the lines of it, and they’d been running their section of Freeport for the last three decades.

  “Mister Sung…” the man who’d brought me here from the Dutchman began and I had the time to think “Which one?” before the brother on the left cut off his words with a slashing motion.

  “When we saw the ship coming in,” the Sung on the left said, spearing me with a glance, “we thought perhaps the Commonwealth military had finally caught up with us. But you are not military.” He looked me up and down with obvious disdain. “In fact, you look like a homeless street waif. So, madam, I repeat: who the hell are you?”

  The Sung brother on the right said nothing. That’s how they always played it, or so I’d heard. One of them did all the talking while the other said nothing. Some people said that it was Il-nam who did all the talking and Ji-u who was always silent, but others thought they took turns.

  “I own the Lucky Bastard. I came here to warn you that the bratva are trying to have you killed to eliminate the competition, and to offer you a deal.”

  The two brothers shared a glance, a grin, a sharp laugh.

  “You think we do not know Antonov wants us out of the way? Who did he send this time? That worthless piece of shit Eddie?”

  “He sent me. Mr. Antonov wants to take over the Lucky Bastard, run it as a meeting place for the bratva and their associates, and freeze me out. I objected and he told me I could keep my place if I convinced you to meet with me, then had you killed.”

  Both of the brothers, the talker and the non-talker, appeared on the edge of breaking into uncontrollable laughter before the one on the right whispered something in the ear of the one on the left, and he looked sharply at the man who’d brought me in.

  “Caesar,” he snapped at my guard, “she was alone on that ship, wasn’t she?”

  “There was no one else aboard,” Caesar insisted. “We searched it after she landed.” He waved back at the three other armed security guards with him to indicate who he meant by “we.” It had seemed excessive for just one unarmed girl, but I suppose I’d made an impression. “Besides, no one could get in here past the security systems.”

  “You keep telling yourself that, bub.”

  Caesar went for his gun. He was fast, perhaps the fastest draw I’d ever seen, but the slab-sided Gyroc pistol was still just barely clear of its holster before a shadowy blur swooped down from the top of the stairs and slammed into him, shoulder to chest. Caesar flew across the room, pitching over the top of a decorative table and not stopping until he tumbled across an ottoman and collapsed to the floor, groaning softly but not moving.

  The other three were cannon fodder, the typical hired thugs you could find on a world like this, two men and a woman who couldn’t find a better job than carrying a gun and trying to look tough. Any training they received was on the job and against other street trash just like them, and they were totally unprepared for anything like Deke Conner. He actually slowed down enough for me to see him move this time, maybe because he didn’t need to go any faster to take care of these losers.

  It was a study in brutal efficiency, a forearm across the carotid artery, a kick to the side of the thigh, a knife hand into a solar plexus, and all three were on the ground, two of them unconscious and the third screaming in agony from the kick to his leg. I sympathized; I’d been kicked in the common peroneal nerve before, by a nasty drunk, and hadn’t been able to walk right for a day.

  Deke disarmed all three, not even breathing hard, and handed me a Gyroc pistol. I held it at my side, not bothering to point it at the Sung Brothers. They weren’t moving an inch, not with Deke’s handgun covering them, not with four of their guards taken down in about as many seconds.

  “Are we all agreed we could kill you?” I asked them. My heart was about to pound itself out of my chest, but I kept my demeanor calm with the skill I’d learned dealing with countless mean drunks over the years. “If we wanted to?”

  Their eyes were wide, matching expressions of shock on their identical faces, and then matching nods.

  “What do you want?” the talker asked. Even now, they were sticking to the schtick. Impressive.

  “What we don’t want,” I told him, “is yet another turf war. That’s why we didn’t just take Antonov’s deal and kill you both.” That, and the fact I would have been shot trying to get out afterward.

  “How do we know Antonov put you up to this at all?” Sung frowned, so used to being in charge, he still thought he was in a position to argue. “You could just be running your own scam.”

  “There’s a holo-projector in that table,” Deke announced, nodding toward an artistically-sculpted brass table at the center of the sectional sofa. He winked at me, then stared at the table intently for a moment, and the holographic projector flickered to life.

  “How the hell are you doing that?” Sung blurted, seeming almost outraged.

  “Same way I cracked your security system,” Deke explained without really explaining. “Same way I recorded this even though Antonov confiscated my ’link.”

  Antonov’s face appeared in midair above the table in incredibly high definition, every ugly pore supersized.

  “It seems to me our mutual problem is the Sung Brothers Cartel,” he was saying, a song I’d heard before, yet somehow the tune seemed different listening to it on a recording. “And if Mr. Conner here is as dangerous as he claims to be, then perhaps he can make that problem just…blow away.”

  I’d missed the noise of the puff of air coming from his mouth when he’d demonstrated what “blow away” meant. Deke hadn’t, though.

  My own voice, then, strange and alien as your own voice always sounds when you heard it coming from outside your head.

  “Are you saying that you want him to assassinate the Sung Brothers?”

  “This is an ugly word, ‘assassinate.’ This is a rough place, a rough city. Things happen here and people simply have…accidents.”

  The recording ended, frozen in midair.

  “It could be a fake,” the Sung brother who’d been talking remarked, not sounding convinced of his own argument, as if he felt compelled to make it for the sake of form.

  “It’s not a fake.” The other one spoke and now I was shocked. From what I’d been told, that never happened. “You know that sleazy old fuck. That’s exactly the sort of shit he’d say.” He speared Deke with a glare. “How much would it cost me to get you to kill him? Fifty thousand? I can pay in Corporate Scrip or Trade Notes.”

  “If I wanted Mr. Conner to kill Antonov,” I interjected, reminding them who was in charge, “he’d be dead already. If I wanted him to kill you, you’d be dead. All killing either of you would do is start another war just like the one that killed my father.”

  “I hate to repeat myself,” the Sung who’d done most of the talking put in, “but what do you want?”

  “The Lucky Bastard is mine,” I told them. “That’s nonnegotiable. But I think it also serves your interest and Antonov’s if there’s someplace neutral, someplace your people can meet without it turning into a bloodbath. Somewhere you can negotiate who runs what without everyone killing everyone else.”

  Now the Sungs smiled, and I like to think it was because they appreciated both the daring and the simplicity of my plan.

  “So you get afforded official, neutral stat
us, protected by us and Antonov,” he summarized. “That’s going to be a lot of people who really hate each other passing through your place all at the same time. Who’s going to keep a lid on them, make sure nothing bad happens?”

  I smiled back, finally feeling some genuine confidence this might work.

  “Why, Mr. Conner here will be responsible for that.” I nodded toward Deke and his eyebrow went up.

  “I will, eh?” he said. “And what do I get out of this setup?”

  “What do you want from it, Deke?” It wasn’t a come-on. I swear. It just sounded like one.

  “I’ll take what Antonov offered you,” he replied, the glint in his eye telling me he’d heard the double-entendre, but his words saying he was all business. “Thirty percent.”

  “Deal.”

  While we were speaking, the Sungs’ guards began to stir, one of them puking noisily on the floor, the others holding their head. Caesar began clawing for a holdout piece holstered at the small of his back, but the Sung brothers both waved him down with matching impatient glares, as if they blamed him for not being able to stop Deke.

  “And who’s going to tell Antonov about this whole business?” Sung wondered.

  “Oh, that’ll be my pleasure,” I offered. “In fact, it was going to be our next stop.” I motioned at the door, out to where the ship had landed.

  I offered a hand, putting it somewhere between the two brothers and letting them decide who would shake it. The talkative one did. His hand was dry and soft, not the hand of a man who worked for a living.

  “Then we have a deal. As long as someone is willing to pay to repair our goddamned wall.”