Privateer Tales 3: Parley (11 page)

“Let him go." I marked the target as friendly on the tactical display. “Marny, you and I are going to stick to the walls on opposite sides and go down the hallway. If we have contact we both drop prone. Roger?”

“Aye, aye.”

“GO.” My timer was complete and my gun was active again. We didn’t make it five meters before three figures popped around the corner at the end of the hallway.

“Contact!” Three red dots appeared in my tactical display. I tossed myself forward onto the ground. It was impossible to fire, but at least I didn’t get hit by the initial salvo. Tabby and Nick returned fire and Marny dialed in a target on the way to her stomach. All three figures dropped.

“Marny, we’ll crawl to the end of the hallway,” I said.

“Aye, aye Cap.”

We made it to the end of the hallway without incident. My tactical display agreed with my assessment that the T was a balcony.

“Nick, Tabby, advance on our position. Stay clear of the balcony railing, might be baddies below.”

“Roger.”

“Check.”

I peeked around the corner to the left. I was able to see all but the far right corner of the balcony from my position. I was still on the ground, not wanting to give my position away to anyone below. The balcony ended in an open stairwell. I thought I could stay hidden if I crawled over there, but if I did that I wouldn’t be able to deal with the stairwell. We had three baddies left.

I pushed myself backward - back the way we’d come. I didn’t have to tell Marny to do the same, she followed suit and we stood up.

“Two left. I believe this level is clear. There’s a stairwell on the left. I’ll take point with Tabby on my right shoulder and Marny stacked up behind her until we get to the stairwell. We need to stay away from the balcony. Nick, you stack up on Marny. I’ll hug right as much as possible in the stairwell to give everyone a clear firing lane. GO.”

We moved to the stairwell without being detected. I wasn’t sure if that was good or bad. We started down the stairs and a figure appeared. I fired and Nick fired. The figure disappeared but I had a sinking sense it might have been a friendly. Whatever it was, two more peeked in and popped back.

“Fire short bursts at the stairwell door and follow me. GO.”

We started firing and didn’t see any more baddies. We had to get through this bottom door. “Tabby and I are left, Marny and Nick right. They know we’re here, so short bursts to keep ‘em suppressed. GO.”

We moved through the doorway and caught one of the baddies in the open. Tabby and I moved around left and I was sure Marny and Nick had moved to the right. The tactical display showed two more baddies pop up on the right and they dropped just as quickly.

“That’s twelve. Clear the room,” I said.

Tabby and I moved around the room and met up with Marny and Nick on the other side. There was a door at the end with a sign that read ‘End.’

I pushed the door open and walked through. I was exhausted. It had taken us a total of …

Two men spun around from behind a wall and opened fire on us.

“Contact!” I said. My gun wasn’t operational. Tabby’s obviously wasn’t either, as she’d followed directly behind me. Marny and Nick returned fire and tagged the two remaining baddies.

“What the frak?”

“Clear,” Marny announced.

“That’s fourteen by my count,” I looked at Marny suspiciously.

“Oh, did I say twelve?” She tossed an innocent look back at me.

“What about that sign? It said ‘End,’” Tabby
declared. “Let me guess, that was an object lesson.”

“Guilty,” Marny said sheepishly.

I was annoyed at the result, but the message was well-delivered.

“Okay. Nick, you’re next,” Marny announced.

“Can we have a couple of minutes?” I asked.

“Paying by the hour, Cap.”

I sighed. We exited the room and saw the sign, TAC-10B on an adjacent door. The second run went much the same as the first, except we didn’t get surprised at the end. It was quite a bit easier for me since I wasn’t the one having to think my way through the entire exercise. Finally, it was Tabby’s turn. I’d like to say she did a lot better, that her weeks at the academy had instilled in her some inherent squad leadership capabilities neither Nick nor I had. However, in the end, we didn’t do so well. It wasn’t her fault. The fact was, we were tired and just started getting sloppy.

The trip back to the hotel was quiet. Nick, Tabby and I were frazzled. Marny, as expected, looked as fresh as she had first thing in the morning. Thankfully, she wasn’t gloating.

“How’d we do?” I didn't hold out much hope for a glowing report.

“Perfect. It’s not the sort of thing you can be good at right out of the box. Overall, I’d say you did better than most on their first time out. Mostly I wanted to introduce you to the struggles of running a squad, especially if that squad hasn’t trained together. The three of you work well together. I can tell you did team sports. Wish you were part of the crew, Tabby.”

“Wish I wasn’t missing the part where you teach us how to do it right,” Tabby shot back.

“You’ll be running your own squad soon enough.”

Tabby nodded, lost in thought.

“Anyone else up for hot springs?” I asked. The night before, Tabby and I had discovered the resort’s giant hot springs.

“Oh heck, yah!” Tabby said.

The afternoon passed quickly and before I was ready, it was time to take Tabby back to the Academy. The two of us sat in the cab, just outside the visitor center.

“I didn’t know if we’d ever see each other again after the attack on Colony 40,” Tabby was looking at me intently. I felt like she had something she needed to say.

“I’m glad you could break free for the weekend.”

“So, are you okay with this?” Tabby asked.

“This? As in us?” I asked, gesturing between us with my hand.

“Yeah. Not knowing when we’ll see each other again?”

“Are you? It seems kind of unfair to you,” I hated saying it, but I had to give her a way out if she wanted it.

“Is that how you feel?”

“You know better than that.”

“Do I?” she asked.

“Tabby, I’ve always believed you’re too good for me, that I’ve no right to expect you’d want to be with me. I felt lucky just being your friend. I guess I still kind of feel that way.”

She just looked at me for a couple of moments. “So what? You just want to be friends? Frak, Hoffen. Sack up and just come out with it.”

I didn’t know how she always got me so twisted up and how we could go from awesome to completely off the rails. Worse, I never seemed to say what I intended and now we were headed down the worst possible path.

“That’s not what I meant at all,” I finally said.

“So what did you mean?”

“I meant …” I put my hands on the sides of her head and pulled her toward me. She resisted, but I didn’t relent and met her half way. I kissed her the way I’d been wanting to since I’d picked her up the day before.

Tabby finally relented, wrapping her arms around my back and pulling me on top of her. After a few moments we came up for air.

“
That's
what I meant,” I said. “And for the record, Tabby, I hate this. I want you with me every day. But if the options are what we have now and nothing at all, I’ll take this. I chased you to Mars, I’ll follow you wherever you go until you tell me to go away.”

“Only one way I’ll do this,” she said. “Completely honest and monogamous.”

“Hah. I can’t have a girl in every port?” Which was not the right thing to say.

Tabby drew back and slugged me hard.
That one was gonna bruise. “Not even one, Hoffen. I’ll know and I’ll hunt you down and end you. Then we’ll be done.”

“Won’t I be gone, since you ended me?” Again with the wrong thing. It earned me another slug, but that was fine by me.

“I have five minutes. Don’t break my heart, Liam.” Tabby opened the door and started to climb out. I leaned into her and stole a final kiss. She ran toward the gate and looked back over her shoulder before she passed through and gave me a sweet smile. It was a memory I would treasure.

The ride back to the resort seemed to take forever. I knew I would see her the next weekend, but I couldn’t escape feeling melancholy.

Marny was stretched out on one of the couches with her head resting in Nick’s lap when I walked back into the living room at the Concord.

“Guinness in the fridge, Cap.”

I grabbed a bottle and flopped into the couch across from them. “What’s on deck for tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow we deconstruct what we did today. You guys did better than I’d expected. It wasn’t hard to tell you’d worked together before. I wish we could keep Tabby.” Marny stopped and looked at me guiltily, “Frak. Sorry, Cap.”

“Nah, I get it. We’re better with her,” I said.

“Not necessarily better, just she fits the team. It’s hard to find that kind of synergy. So tomorrow we’re going to work on theory. It’ll work fine with three. We’ll also work on common four-man formations.”

“Just for the record, I don’t want to be doing much of this,” I said.

“Practice?” Marny asked.

“No, practice is fine. Chasing people who have guns, I’d like to avoid.”

“We practice so we’re not making it up as we go.”

“I’m in… I’m also exhausted. See you guys in the morning.”

“Yeah, we’re headed to bed shortly,” Nick said, not even smirking at me.

I checked my queued comms. There was a never ending stream of small details that Nick and I dealt with as budding entrepreneurs. I felt fortunate that Nick handled most of them. The one item that was solely in my wheelhouse was to line up loads and destinations.

Loading
Sterra's Gift
was going to be easy, but the
Adela Chen
was still proving to be problematic. I’d made initial contact with several corporations hauling in and out of Jeratorn. However, the responses so far had only been of a generic ‘thanks for your inquiry’ type.

Of primary interest, however, was a comm from Ada.

Liam, I know this is short notice and I completely understand if you can’t make it, but we are having a memorial service for Mom on Monday afternoon. It will be informal, but Dad would love to meet you guys and … well ... no pressure. Talk Later – Ada

It struck me again just how stoic Ada had been this past week. I still felt awful that we hadn’t been able to save her mom. The only comfort I could take from the whole mess was that Ada was now safely home with her family. I appreciated that she’d attached the address of the memorial to her vid-comm message so we could be there.

The next comm was from Qiu Loo. I was a little surprised, since I wasn’t expecting to hear much from her. The note was flagged as urgent.

Captain Hoffen, we may need to cut leave short. There are things I can’t discuss on comm that could change our priority. I have contacted the shipyard to see about further expediting the repairs and modifications. Please tentatively plan to leave next Sunday, 1400
.

I tried to tamp down my annoyance. She was busting to get going, but I didn’t think she was the type to pull a stunt. Qiu Loo was much more of an in-your-face, don’t-care-what-you-think type of person. I walked back out into the living room. Nick and Marny were still on the couch.

“Did you get the messages from Ada or Qiu?” I asked.

“Haven’t checked since we got back to the suite. What’s up?”

I explained the messages.

“What do you think Qiu’s on about?” Nick asked.

“Any ideas, Marny?”

“I agree with you, Cap. Qiu’s not yanking our chain. A lieutenant isn’t going to get the shipyard to do bupkis without having some real juice. The fact she’s been at them twice means somebody high up is pushing.”

“That’s my read too. You guys going to Adela’s memorial?” I asked.

“Wouldn’t miss it,” Marny said. Nick nodded agreement. “Doesn’t get you out of practice though, so set your alarm for 0700. We don’t want to be late to the memorial.”

I sighed and turned back into my room.

At 0600 the next morning I jumped right out of bed without an alarm. I thought I’d be sore from all the bending, crouching and crawling from the day before, but I felt pretty good after a long hot shower. I decided it was time to stop feeling sorry for myself about the situation with Tabby. I had the love of the woman I most cared about in the universe and we’d make everything else work out.

“Cap. Bacon and eggs? I make a mean omelet.” Marny greeted me cheerfully.

“You cook?”

“Nope. Room service.” She lifted the silver lid off a plate containing a large breakfast. I was starving. I wondered if the smell was why I’d woken up so easily.

I sat down, plate in hand. “How’re we going to do training today?”

“Two parts. First, we’ll walk through each of the scenarios. The studios are set up to replay the encounters. I’ll point out what we could have done differently as we walk through. After that, I’ll reprogram the scenarios to run, using the changes we talk about and you can see how things would go differently.”

“What, with holographics and stuff?” I asked.

“Yup, the studio is all holographic with programmable physical props like walls, trees, ponds, you name it.”

“That’s pretty intense.”

“Tuesday – another indoor. Wednesday – low gravity station. Thursday – outdoor. And Friday, we’ll volunteer to be baddies.”

“Why would we do that?”

“What? Be baddies? It’ll give us a chance to see pros in action.”

“We get to be the bad guys?” Nick asked as he joined us. “Frakking about time!”

Working through the scenarios was humbling. Watching from behind our holographic figures, it became imminently clear how messed up our formations and approaches were.

“Listen to your instructions here, Cap. See how much information you’re having to communicate? That’s because we don’t have a common frame of reference
, like we do on the ship. You can’t make any assumptions, so you have to think about every bit of minutiae. You’re overloading on details and that means you can’t think clearly. You recovered, but try to remember how you felt right then. That’s why we’re doing this, so we can create a common set of phrases and hand signals to describe complex actions. It allows you to focus on things that are different, not on everything all at once. Let’s move to the next room.”

Marny was complimentary at our approach to the first room. “You hit that pretty much textbook. If I didn’t know better, I’d have thought you trained on that approach. Nice job, Cap. Let’s move down the hallway.”

Our holographic images moved out of the first room and we watched Nick walking on my right side with his gun against the wall. If something bad happened he wouldn’t be able to move his gun anywhere and it would be going off right next to my ear.

“As uncomfortable as it sounds, you’ll have to switch shoulders in that situation. We’ll work on it so you are comfortable. You had the correct side but once you got to the corner, if something happened, Nick would have had no way to support you,” Marny said patiently.

“Since you were already out of position when you reached the corner, you couldn’t possibly execute a correctly pie’d corner.” Marny grabbed my holographic figure and slid it around and directed the AI to make my blaster rifle point down the hallway.

“If you ran into problems, Nick couldn’t have done anything to help you without stepping into your line of fire. It worked out in this case, but we need to fix it.”

She walked us through all three scenarios like this, patiently explaining where we had messed up and where we had done a good job of improvising. We were such rookies, I was surprised she was even trying to train us.

At the end, Marny made all of the adjustments she wanted and then re-ran the encounters. We flowed smoothly through the building and easily cleared the rooms. The concepts ranged from complex to fairly obvious. When standing next to a
life-size version of yourself during the explanation, the concepts became clear very quickly.

“Why do I feel like we’re just scratching the surface?” I asked while flying back to the resort. We all wanted to take a shower before the memorial.