Gunship (4 page)

“Uh, Captain? I think we’re in trouble.”

Reilly glanced back “Shit! Look out!”

An Enforcer had launched from the top of the canyon ridge, using the high ground to propel itself down onto the TORR. They watched as the machine opened up, revealing laser-rifle barrels and titanium claws as it fell.

Suddenly, the Enforcer disappeared in a bright blue flash. Reilly looked over to see Duv on her left providing top cover as they made their way down the canyon. He swung the gunship sideways, facing in towards the canyon wall, watching for any other movement. Ty gave a whoop and kept the gun trained behind them as they continued to jostle down the canyon edge. Reilly motioned to Duv, gave the rally sign, and pointed at the end of the canyon. “You sure?” he asked in her earpiece.

“Yeah, we gotta get off of this rock before we die here—and we’ve still got two more Enforcers about to be on us in a hot minute.”

“Alrighty. I’ll meet ya there!” Duv veered off, the ship’s engines roaring overhead.

“Hey! Where the hell is he going?” Ty hollered out. The last two Enforcers reappeared and began to gain ground again. He unloaded another stream of fire at their pursuers. When Reilly didn’t answer, Ty glanced over his shoulder. And then did a double take.

Duv had positioned the ship at the end of the canyon ridge and was opening up the cargo bay doors.

“Oh, hell no! We ain’t doing this!” Ty looked back to find an Enforcer almost on top of them. He blasted a few more rounds, which the machine dodged. “Shit, go faster, go faster!”

“I thought you said we weren’t doing this,” Reilly yelled back at Ty.

“I changed my mind!” Ty fumbled with his gear rack and pulled out a smoke grenade. It wasn’t much, but it might just buy them a few seconds while the machine switched sensors. He pulled the pin and lobbed it in the back of the TORR. White smoke whirled out, obscuring his view and hopefully the Enforcer’s, too.

Ty turned to look forward as Reilly reached the cliff’s edge and launched the TORR. He looked back again behind them just in time to see the Enforcer’s head burst through above the smoke.

“Duck!” he yelled. A laser round sizzled in the air above them and was gone. Maude hit the rear ramp, skidding a bit as Reilly floored it to prevent them from sliding backwards into the canyon. The wheels caught and gained traction, flinging the TORR into the cargo bay and promptly flipping it upside down as the bay doors closed behind them. Maude grumbled, then wheezed and became silent as the engine cut out. Reilly and Ty dangled upside down in their harnesses, gasping for breath and surrounded by the scattered cargo that had broken loose.

“Well, that was a first,” Ty noted as he painfully moved his limbs to make sure they were still all there. They could feel the gunship lurch upwards and then gain altitude. Reilly slowly unbuckled her harness and let her feet slide down to the ground while hanging onto Maude’s now-dented frame.

“That was awesome!” a voice called down from the catwalk up top.

They looked up as they climbed out of the TORR to see Duv’s son, Seth “Skeeter” Jackson, bouncing along the catwalk excitedly.

Reilly gave a crooked grin and shook her head, then continued digging her way out of the crates surrounding Maude. She examined the dent and decided it could be hammered out. It wasn’t the first time they had had to give poor old Maude some body work.

“Well, quit your blabbing and get your skinny butt down here. You can help me get this mess cleaned up, starting with moving this cargo up to the front of the hold,” Ty groused as he worked to free himself from his harness. “Damn. I think I dislocated my shoulder again!”

“You know that entire sequence had a twenty percent chance of working? I mean, the physics was totally against it, and if the right trajectory and speed hadn’t been met, you guys would be dead right now!” Skeeter happily reported as he jounced down the steps to the cargo bay floor.

“Yeah, great, thanks for that!” Ty leaned over and slapped one of the smaller crates to Skeeter while still probing his shoulder with his index finger. “What were you doing down here anyway?” Skeeter normally stuck close to Duv on the bridge when things got tight.

“Oh, yeah. Duv wanted me to look at the laser damage and see how bad it was. It fried some of the circuits to the main engine room and some of the ones to life support, too.” Skeeter pointed up to the blackened front wall of the hanger bay.

“What? Shit, would you look at that!” Reilly gazed up at the front of the loading bay. The last laser round that had missed them had gone into one of the main control boards above the first catwalk. “It wasn’t shooting at us. That thing was trying to bring down the ship.”

Most cargo-class gunships had two control boards on the loading bay deck. Disabling the lower one could cause all kinds of issues and if hit with a high enough voltage could even short out the engine in older models. Reilly had spent extra to make sure the electrical system was protected against any kind of overload or interference and had built in a backup electrical system just in case. That was the only reason the ship was still in the air now instead of at the bottom of a canyon.

“One Enforcer jumped on the back—Duv says he’d never seen them do anything like that before. He was jinking and getting ready to roll to shake it off”—Skeeter reached the bay floor and picked up the small crate—“then it just dropped back off again…pretty weird.”

At that, Ty looked over at Reilly. “You thinking what I’m thinking?”

Reilly punched the comms speaker on the deck. “Duv, run a scan for foreign objects on the hull. Tell me the minute you find something.” She clicked off. “Ty, I want you going through all of this cargo, everything, and tell me what has us getting so much attention since we started this mission.” She glanced down at her arm, which was bleeding again. “I’m going to go find Gunny and get this stitched.”

Reilly stepped up and onto the catwalk, continued climbing, and then turned down a passageway that opened into a common room where the crew took their meals. Just off of the main area was a smaller kitchen area, and past that another room and then a bunk area. She found Chang in the kitchen.

“So, you made it back in one piece, huh?” he said, turning and then raising an eyebrow as he took in Reilly’s bloody arm. “Hmmmm, or maybe in a few pieces…sit down here.” Chang pointed at a small stool in the corner by some potato peelings and then pulled an ISU medical kit out from under the counter. Reilly obediently sat as he began to unwrap the black cloth. He hissed appreciatively.

“This is pretty deep—you always did suck at knife fighting.” He pulled out some disinfectant and supplies along with a needle and stitching thread as she gingerly rolled up the sleeve on her t-shirt. “It’s going to leave a pretty scar for you to add to your collection.”

“It was an Enforcer, a class three. It was going for Ty. And I don’t remember ever losing to you in a knife fight!” Reilly grimaced as Chang jabbed her with a needle to numb the site and started to stitch up the wound.

“Overconfidence is a fickle creature that if not tempered with humility can lead to a sudden precipitous fall.” Chang smiled brightly as he continued stitching. “You just ignore the odds, and someday it will get you killed. My grandfather used to say, ‘One who drives like hell is bound to get there!’”

The shipboard comms crackled to life. “Captain.” Reilly picked up and hit the transmit button while Chang focused on his sewing.

“I found something—looks like a tracker on the starboard hull of the ship,” Duv reported. “I don’t know if it has a detonator, but it’s definitely sending out a signal. What do you want to do?”

Reilly looked down and thought for a minute. “Duv, can you jam it out? Try just enough noise to cancel it so it still transmits but at a reduced range, in case it does have an anti-jam detonator on board. We’ll have to wait to touch down to get a better look at it. And keep scanning to see if we have any company.”

“Strawberry or grape? I’m on it.” The mic clicked off as Duv hung up.

Chang watched Reilly’s face from the corner of his eye. He had been a master guns when she was a new lieutenant earning her bars in some of the ISU’s bloodiest battlefields. The captain had been fearless in defense of her soldiers, earning their respect daily by fighting with them shoulder to shoulder. She took bullets for them, charged hills, bandaged wounds, negotiated their freedom with cunning, lasers, and tantalum rounds, was there for the victories and to steady the dying and bury the dead. Chang knew if she was worried it didn’t bode well for any of them. Her intuition and instinct had saved a lot of lives in battle, including his. Besides, the signs didn’t lie. Something bad was coming. If only he knew what. Chang finished up the last stitch and tied it off, covering up the wound with a clean bandage.

“So? Now you believe me about the bad luck, huh? I can sense this stuff. Got it from my grandmother.” Chang smiled as Reilly rolled her eyes. He wadded up the bloody fabric and tossed it into the chute for the ship’s incinerator, then wandered over and used sterigel from a wall dispenser to clean off his hands. He wiped them on a small brown cloth and began chopping vegetables again.

“I believe in cause and effect. And yes, we are having some bad luck. But I also believe that at the bottom of that bad luck is a sniveling backbiter who set us up for his own benefit.” Reilly looked down to admire his handiwork. “Thanks,” she said looking over at him. “Stay frosty, Gunny. This job stinks and I don’t like it. When we get back to Arias, Welch better have some answers for me.” She stood up to leave.

Chang waved his knife at her as she went out the door. “Sometimes the only thing more dangerous than a question is an answer.” He began to whistle a cheerful marching tune as Reilly shook her head and kept walking. Once she was out of sight, Chang threw three knives into a wooden block above the door frame, rapidly one after the other, and then continued merrily dicing up the potatoes. He was always frosty, that’s why he was still alive. He shot one more covert worried glance at the captain’s retreating back before turning back to his cooking.

—————

Reilly made her way forward to the bridge. Duv was at the flight controls working a jamming solution when she stepped through the hatch. He pretty much ran everything on the bridge when she was on world or working an operation. They still had several crew slots open, but Reilly was particular about who came to work on her ship. Duv had been hinting hard at getting some more help, so she’d finally made him a deal that they’d look for new crew members once this mission paid out.
If it pays out and doesn’t cost us more than we bargained for,
Reilly thought to herself.

She punched up a holoscreen at the back of the deck. “I want all records on Welch, Errat Kelvin, and his brother Welch, Razam Rian.”

The Holographic Automated Intelligence Linked Ethernet or HAILE, pronounced Hail-lee, whirred to life. The system had been designed to speak in a soft, feminine voice that was supposed to be soothing in stressful situations. During her time in the ISUs, Reilly had seen many of these units upgraded with more authoritative masculine, computerized voices. In combat, the pilots tended to tune out the female voice, much like they would tune out a spouse or girlfriend at home or a mosquito buzzing in their ear. Either event could result in disastrous outcomes, but even more so when the information turned out to be critical to flight operations. This particular unit had been modified so that it sounded like a woman with a really deep, grating voice who had just downed multiple cups of Duv’s heavily caffeinated Iram coffee—not a good combination. Reilly frowned. She’d ask Skeeter if he could take a look at the voice modulator program once they made port.

The machine announced, “Complying. Records search underway.”

Duv laughed. “Good thing it’s not a virtual. Don’t think I could stand looking at it! That voice could only go with a woman built like a linebacker, with an Adam’s apple and facial hair to boot!”

“So she’d look just like that woman you fell in love with when we were based in Syon for eighteen months?”

“Yeah, well, they all go up about five or ten points when you’re stuck in a barren wasteland surrounded by mutant hoards who are trying to kill you—she was the Queen of Syon, no I ain’t a-lyin’, and she stole my heart and my soul.” Duv began to sing one of the unit’s old drinking songs. “
We drank lots of whiskey, an’ then we got frisky, that big woman she took me just like a she-Wookiee, and now I’m just not the same! No, after that lovin’, you just keep on puffin, ‘cause three hundred pounds tends to crush your rib cage!”
He gave a whoop and turned back to his console with a wicked grin.

Reilly leaned back and swiveled her chair so she could look out the front deck windows. The stars glimmered brightly around them, and for a moment she just breathed it in. More than anything else, this was where she belonged, where she fit in. The military had suited her well and she had loved it, learned from it, survived because of it. But it had kept her on the move and no place was home. This ship was closest thing to a home she had, and her crew was her family. It wasn’t fancy, but it was work and life on her terms, and that sure as hell beat the last twelve years of touring the backside of the universe, living on the government’s time.

“Records returned for Welch, Errat and Welch, Razam,” HAILE reported.

“Bring them up,” Reilly ordered.

The rear holo-display showed a photo of Errat Welch, their current employer. A thin, redheaded, weasel-faced man, complete with all personal specifics, education, work, residence. He held an official post with one of the lower ministerial offices on Arias only because his father was the financial minister for the planet forum and had seen fit to arrange a place for his youngest son. Unofficially, he traded moderately in black-market goods, mostly hard-to-come-by items, liquor, and some antiquities. So he was dirty, but on the lighter side of black.

Reilly touched the screen and slid Welch’s files to the side, pulling up his brother Razam’s files. The records had the same personal specifics, education and residence information, but it showed that this brother had worked for his father briefly before taking off for the central planets to pursue a series of jobs with the Interplanetary Security Command on Sargon. The records tracked him up to five years back, when it was listed that he went missing in an attack while visiting one of the Outland planets to conduct a security inquiry. Reilly assumed that now that he was out of the picture, Errat had wanted to see if her team could penetrate his brother’s site security on Vervian. If they were successful, then she was sure that he would want to “consolidate” his brother’s possessions so he could appropriately administer them in the best interest of the family, meaning himself of course. She and the crew had hoped to get enough credits from the job to keep them from having to work for a bit. That of course was long before they had been introduced to Razam’s Enforcers. Reilly wondered if Errat knew about the presence of the machines. Either way, their return visit would not be very pleasant for him, even less so if he had intentionally let them walk into a death trap.