Grendel Unit 1: Bad Day at Khor-wa Read online

  "Stand by. How's that?"

  The heartbeats vanished in his ears, giving Vic a clearer sound of the earrings and chains jingling around the Cryndian's neck as he walked. "Better," Vic said. S'bal was nearly upon him and Vic turned away and looked down, pretending not to know him.

  "Hey, buddy. You got a smoke?" S'bal called out to him.

  "No," Vic hissed. "Keep moving."

  S'bal walked over to him, "I'll pay for it."

  Vic stared daggers at him, "Get the hell away from me, you moron."

  "You know I can't hear you guys right?"

  "I swear to God, I'm going to shoot you if you don't move," Vic said. "Go find the target and don't talk to us again."

  "Fine," S'bal said, stepping back with his webbed hands in the air. "Didn't mean to offend you, Captain. Jeez, humans are so touchy."

  Vic pressed his back against the building's wall and took a deep breath, trying to relax. "Did that seem strange to anybody else?" he said. "Why do I have the feeling he just called out my ID?"

  "I gave you that knife for a reason, Captain," Monster said. "He can grow back whatever you cut off."

  "Don't tempt me, Big Man," Vic said. He looked over to see Frank coming up to his position, the folds of his long black coat covering the Rangefinder slung under his one arm and the medical bag slung under the other. "Do me a favor, Frank. If you ever find another asset that you think will do a good job, slap yourself in the face as hard as humanly possible."

  Frank shrugged, "You're the one who always says we can't use decent people as assets, because decent people wouldn't be involved in this crap."

  "Don't quote me to make an argument against me. It's not fair."

  "Why?"

  "The fish is moving into the bar to your left," Buehl said.

  "We're on it," Vic said. He looked back at Frank as they emerged from the alleyway, "Because you never say anything intelligent enough for me to do the same thing."

  "You'd better hope this op goes well. I'd hate to see you shot up, laying in a ditch, with just stupid old me as your backup."

  The street was crowded and damp from the massive buildings that reached hundreds of feet into the sky, all of them with leaking evaporators and air exchangers. There were aliens of all kinds mixed in with the humans, from dog-sized rodents to bright green, fauna-humanoid hybrids whose veins sparkled with luminescent chlorophyll. Food vendors hawked sugary drinks and cheap trinkets with desperate vigor.

  Vic squinted as he considered that. "Good point. I take it back. Buddy. By the way, did I tell you how smart and skilled you are lately?"

  "Can I get a beer? Whatever's on special," S'bal said through the transmitter. "Hey, is Rick working?" The bartender's response was inaudible, but S'bal said, "Can you tell him his friend came back to see him?"

  A moment later, a gruff human voice said, "What the hell happened to you?"

  "I got busted."

  Frank turned to look at Vic with his eyebrows raised, "What is he, nuts?"

  "Not necessarily. Word probably got out already and he just wants to get in front of it. It's kind of smart, really." They posted up by the entrance to the bar with their backs to the wall, watching the people walk past.

  They heard Rick say, "Our friend is not gonna be happy you lost his dope."

  "Who says I lost it?"

  "Okay, conversation's over. Get out of my bar."

  "Wait," S'bal said. "It's not like that."

  "I swear to God, fish, if you came in here for the cops to try and set me up, I'll kill everyone you know."

  "The cops on this planet couldn't find their backsides with a geo-tron in one hand and a flashlight in the other. They never knew I was holding."

  Rick fell quiet at that. Vic leaned back against the wall on one foot and said, "Who could argue with that? This guy must have met Sergeant Pern before."

  "I swallowed the pills. My kind has two stomachs. It's a survival mechanism for storing food. I can keep all sorts of stuff in there."

  "Do you got the stuff?"

  "You want to see it?"

  "Are you gonna barf all over my bar?"

  "I was thinking we could go in the bathroom."

  "Let's go."

  S'bal hesitated, "Where's the Yultorot? I need to see the money if I'm going to show you the product."

  "I'll pay you. You can give the pills to me."

  "Damn," Vic muttered. "The target's spooked because of the arrest. I swear to God, I'm going to find that pain-in-the-ass cop and strangle him if he screwed this up."

  S'bal said, "Listen, no offense, but I was told to give these to Yultorot. You can give me the money, but I'm not handing these pills over to anybody else. You think I want that guy pissed off at me? I'd rather just hop on the next flight out of here and sell them to somebody else."

  Another pause, and then Rick said, "You really have them, right?"

  "I really do."

  "Because if I bring him here and you don't, I don't need to tell you how excruciating things are gonna get for you, right?"

  "Right."

  "I'll give him a call."

  "You hear that?" Frank said with a wide smile. "I told you he'd be a good asset. I told you. Admit it."

  "Fine, fine, shut up," Vic said. "Control, did you copy that?"

  "Affirmative, Captain," Buehl said in their ears. "We're trying to trap and trace any outgoing calls in your sector right now."

  "How big's the sector?" Vic said.

  "A half-square mile. Best I can do. All right, twenty-four calls just went out. Monster's sifting through them now."

  They heard S'bal sipping his beer, his jewelry dangling as he drank. Rick came back and said, "Okay, he's on his way."

  "Let's go, boys," Vic said. "Let me know where he's coming from."

  "Standby, Captain," Monster said. "Twelve of the calls went off-planet. Five to various restaurants in the area. Several are still on the line. Wait. One of the calls was received inside the bar. Wait a second. Something's wrong with our equipment. Okay, we're back. We lost signal for a minute."

  "That's gotta be him in the bar," Frank said. "Watching to see if it was cool or not."

  "Can you trace the number to an owner? See if you can give us some sort of visual," Vic said.

  "Working on that now," Monster said. "Stand by to receive a message on your phone."

  Vic felt the device buzz inside his coat and unhooked it to look at the screen, seeing an eighty-year-old woman with thick, horn-rimmed glasses. He showed the picture to Frank and said, "He certainly doesn't look so tough, does he?"

  "You never know. Old ladies can be cranky sometimes."

  Vic slid the phone back in his pocket and said, "I'm going to guess the answer's no, but at least check that old woman to see if she has any criminal relatives. In the meantime, Frank and I are going in."

  "Received, Captain. Good luck."

  "I had a teacher named Mrs. Benson who looked like that," Frank said as he followed Vic through the front door. "If we have to go up against Mrs. Benson, I'm pretty sure we're screwed. She was the scariest… " Frank stopped talking. Vic was looking at the bar and then at the crowd around it. S'bal was not there.

  "Where is he, Control?" Vic said.

  "It shows he's right there," Buehl said.

  Vic walked up to where an empty glass of beer was sitting on the bar and sat down next to it, trying to remain discreet even as the gears turned violently in his head, nearly making him break into a sweat. He glanced down at the empty glass and cursed. The transmitter necklace was sitting in the bottom, bathing in the white foamy suds of S'bal's half-finished beer.

  Chapter 5: Tango Down

  Buehl watched the small lights on his screen blink rapidly, then vanish, leaving nothing but a dark black screen. He pressed the reset button and the secondary power supply. Nothing. When he looked up at the various display screens on his console, all were dark. "What the hell's going on?" he said.

  Monster pounded his own screen, trying to int
imidate it back into functioning. "Captain, we have a problem."

  "No kidding," Vic said through the speaker. "The asset ran off, the target is in the wind, and I'm about to kill Frank."

  Buehl frantically typed command after command into his console, trying to unlock the ship's controls. "It's worse than that, sir. All of our systems are jammed."

  "It's probably just a sun flare or something in the atmosphere."

  "We didn't pick anything up in our last scan for that, Captain," Monster grumbled.

  "It happens," Vic said. "Get back online and− " the captain's voice turned into nothing but digital static.

  Buehl smashed his fist against the console, "Well that's freaking convenient! Why should the systems stay online when the asset goes missing?"

  Monster turned and looked at him, "That is exactly what I was thinking. Do you believe in coincidences?"

  "No," Buehl said.

  "Neither do I. What systems do we have control of?"

  Vic slammed the bar's back door open and cursed at the sight of the brick alleyway stretching another city block, filled with nothing but trash and empty containers. He ripped the sidearm from his hip and snarled, "First, I'm going to kill him. Then I'm going to kill you."

  Frank moved ahead and checked inside a trashcan. "What about Yultorot?"

  "Right," Vic said. "First I'm going to kill Yultorot, then the fish, then you."

  "I think I should get to kill the fish."

  Both of the men braced themselves against the walls. "This alleyway's a fatal funnel. Stay up. We're going to get down it as quick as we can," Vic said. They trained their weapons on the far end of the alleyway and ducked low, moving double-time. "If I trust you to kill the fish, will you screw that up too?"

  Frank kept his eye against the Rangefinder's stock, scanning the walls and cutouts ahead of them for signs of movement. "Probably," Frank said. "We're sitting ducks in this alley."

  "Fine," Vic said. "You got your glasses?" He fished in the pouch on his belt for a moment and pulled out a small grey ball, then tossed it as far into the alleyway as he could. The ball shattered against the ground and thick billowing smoke emerged in the air, filling the entire alleyway with a dense, dark cloud. Vic pulled out his glasses and fit them over his face, touching the sideframe and saying, "Activate smoke filter. Let's go nice and slow."

  The glass lenses shimmered momentarily and then revealed the alleyway once more, but as a ghost-image filled with shadows and shapes. Vic's hands and the gun in front of him were like gray pencil drawings. They moved through the smoke-filled cloud and Vic ahead at a large dumpster and saw the silhouette of a man holding a heavy assault shotgun aimed directly at him.

  He was bent forward just a little, revealing the slightest bit of his face so that he could peer down the alleyway and blast whatever came his way. Vic grabbed Frank by the shoulder to stop him and pointed ahead. Frank spun to get his weapon aimed at the shooter, but Vic stopped him and held up his fist, telling him not to move.

  Vic crept directly in front of the shotgun's barrel and looked down at the assassin. He was dressed in dark fatigues and everything about his position and build suggested that he was former Unification military. A mercenary, then, Vic thought. The man wore a pair of useless smoke-filtered goggles as he searched the alleyway for thermal images of his two targets. Guess Buehl's fancy smoke bombs did the job, Vic thought. I'll have to put him in for a commendation. Not that he'd ever get it. General Milner was infamous for never recognizing service because, as he put it, you got paid, didn't you?

  Vic lowered his pistol and aimed it at the shooter's forehead, centering it between the man's eyes. The decision weighed on him for a moment. Leave him, and he could come up from behind them with that thing and blast them both to hell. Try to knock him out and he might alert whoever else was waiting for them.

  Not very heroic, Vic thought.

  It's better to be a living professional operative than a dead hero, he thought in reply. Sorry, buddy. Lights out.

  Vic squeezed his pistol's trigger with one hand and reached out to grab the shotgun before it could fall from his lifeless hands and clatter against the dumpster. The shooter collapsed on the ground, twitching momentarily as the deep black hole in the center of his forehead started to leak. Vic's pistol had been completely silent. His eyes widened as he looked over at Frank and mouthed, "Did you see that?"

  Frank looked like he was going to be sick. He turned away from the shooter's dead body and kept moving. He checked the walls, and angles, and cutouts, and trashcans feverishly, convinced there were hitmen crouched behind every one, that the smoke pellet was dissipating and they'd be flamed by some unseen scumbag for sure.

  The sound of metal clanging rang out as Buehl smacked his wrench against the console's side and shouted in frustration. Monster was bent forward, staring through the small portside window at the planet below. Everything looked the same. Light cloud cover. A bluish-green atmosphere. Continents littered with grids of cities so dense that they looked like patchwork across the craggy surface. Their screens were blank and their computer circuits were dead. All they could do was hover.

  "It's not a mechanical issue on our end," Buehl said. "We're being jammed from an outside source."

  "Who could possibly have the capabilities of jamming us?" Monster said. "Unification technology is far superior to anything in this region."

  "Unless the people jamming us have Unification tech."

  "Stolen?" Monster said.

  Buehl looked back at him with concern and said, "Whatever it is, it isn't good."

  "Land the ship," Monster said. "We need to extract the team right now."

  "I was thinking the same thing." Buehl slid into the pilot's seat and flicked the controls to begin their descent. "Give me a minute, we'll be back at stratospheric level soon. See if that gives us any better readings." At that moment, all of the ship's displays and computers came back to whirring, beeping life. Buehl laughed aloud and said, "Holy crap, that worked!"

  Monster flew back into his seat and immediately began to pull up the captain's coordinates, searching for signs of activity below. What he saw made him rear up in his chair and shout, "Look!"

  Buehl leaned over to see the two blinking dots that represented Captain Victor Cojo and Lieutenant Francis Kelly. They were moving through an alleyway that led to an open area where almost a hundred armed soldiers waited in the surrounding buildings or were hidden under cover, securing the area from every direction.

  At the far end of the landing sat a large ship, its outline showing that it was much larger than the Samsara. Monster zeroed in on the ship and stopped moving. "It's a Unification ship," he whispered. "All of the soldiers are ours too."

  "What the hell's going on down there?" Buehl said.

  Suddenly, the radio transmitted, "Unification vessel Samsara, this is the sovereign government of Khor-wa. You are forbidden to enter our atmosphere, repeat, you are forbidden to enter our atmosphere. We have notified your command personnel and advised them that any attempts to do so will be seen as an act of aggression and result in the destruction of your vessel."

  Monster snatched the microphone and shouted, "We have people down there, you sons of bitches!"

  The radio, display screens, and computer terminals all went dead.

  Monster looked at Buehl and said, "How far up are we?"

  "Too far up," he said.

  Monster shot out of his chair, "Too far up for humans, maybe."

  The last remnants of their smoke dissipated in the wind, leaving nothing but the end of the alleyway directly ahead of them. The sky was not murky gray with no sign of the sun in sight. Soon, night would fall, and their chances of finding their asset and the target would all but vanish. They took off their glasses and Vic held Frank up a few feet from the exit. "When we get out there, stick to the walls. We've just got to ride this out long enough for ops to get back up and running. Hopefully, we'll be going in the right direction."

  Fran
k took a deep breath and hesitated before saying, "What if we get the hell out of here instead? We're off book. We just killed a guy. We have no ops."

  "Forget it."

  "Can we at least consider cutting our losses here? The asset is gone, Vic. Yultorot knows we're coming. It's a bad play and you know it."

  Vic grabbed Frank by the collar of his shirt and hissed, "No!" The two men glared at one another, close enough for their spit to spray one another in the face, but Vic didn't care. He twisted Frank's shirt tighter and said, "I will not abandon this mission just because it's difficult or complicated. Not after what that son of a bitch did."

  "It won't bring them back, Vic."

  "I know that!"

  "It won't bring them back. Nothing we do, nobody we kill, will bring them back. What we can do is live to fight another day."

  "Fine," Vic said, releasing him. "Go on then. Go back to the bar. Live to fight another day."

  "You're making a mistake."

  "Just get the hell out of here," Vic said. "I'm serious. I shouldn't have brought you in the first place."

  "What's that supposed to mean?"

  Vic waved his hands frantically at the alleyway's entrance, "Will you get the hell out of here so I can concentrate on what I'm doing? I'll see you on the ship."

  "Fine," Frank said. He started to walk back down the alley, then stopped to look back at where Vic was crouching. He opened his mouth to call out to him to just give it up and come on, but it was too late. Vic spun around the corner and vanished. Frank sighed and kept walking, shaking his head. Vic would return to the Samsara in a few hours, irritated and exhausted at having spent the so much wasted time searching for people who knew better than to stick around when they were being hunted.

  The dead man was lying behind the dumpster just ahead, fully revealed now that they were no longer shrouded in smoke. It was difficult to look at now. Even if he'd been there to kill them, he was somebody's loved one, somewhere. All the life he'd possessed was gone, leaving just an empty husk behind. All the startling details of death were on full display, his hair, his wide-open eyes, the lettering writing across the back of his uniform shirt.