Sly Mongoose (7 page)

It felt like he stood on the bottom of a wide curve, which meant that the ship spun to provide some light gravity for its passengers. If this ship resembled most Ragamuffin higgler ships, from the outside it looked like a giant pen with its end jammed into a larger cylinder of the thrust unit.

“Thank you.” Pepper brushed shell fragments off his forearms. He winced as he walked: a three-day-old bullet wound to the calf. Thanks to his over-mechanized and designed body it was healing up nicely but it still stung.

The woman touched her ear and listened to something. “Cargo all safely retrieved,” she said, responding to a prompt whispered into her ear
by someone elsewhere in the ship. She grabbed Pepper’s hand and shook it. “Grenada LeFevre, we all please to meet you. Captain Canden say welcome up in she ship, but not to ever talk or go near her.”

Pepper looked up toward the narrow top of the room and the rows of catwalks with cargo lashed in on the sides. Four men with rifles, well spaced out, all sighted in on him with an unwavering patience that Pepper appreciated.

“Thanks for the hospitality.” Pepper stepped forward, but Grenada moved in front of him.

She held up a hand. “Listen, in order for you leave the hold, we need to get something straight.”

“I’m listening.”

“You name’s Juan Smith.” A slight smirk from her meant she’d probably selected the name from the list of his assumed identies that the Dreads gave her.

“Really?”

“However you want play that, up to you.” She shrugged. “Second, you have to hand over all them weapon underneath that coat.”

Pepper nodded. Fair enough. He slowly reached in. An automatic pistol under the left armpit. The half-size mini-grenade launcher on his right thigh, the shotgun on his left. Explosives strapped to the small of his back. Extra ammunition clips on his chest and ribs.

Two combat daggers, one on a quick-release gel strap on his right wrist, another on his left ankle. Each piece hit the metal grid work under their feet with a
clang
that echoed through the hold.

“There you are,” he said.

“That last dagger, strap up on you back,” Grenada said.

Pepper reached back. Somewhere between a short sword and a knife with compensation issues, he’d become slightly attached to the piece. “It’s a gift. Not a weapon.”

He kept it for special assignments. Only the most important of the Ragamuffin’s enemies saw the sword just before dying.

“Don’t look like nothing I got hang up on
my
wall.” Grenada reached out a hand. “I see all that blood near the hilt, right?”

Good eyesight. Almost as good as his. No one else would notice the faint discoloration: Pepper had cleaned it up on the way downstream to the DMZ.

Pepper handed it over. “If anything happens to it I would be quite disturbed.”

Grenada took it and laid it on the pile between their feet. “I take it for you, look after it real good.”

“Thanks.”

“Third, we telling peeps you been hole up in you cabin because you in bad health.” She looked him over. “I see you already done and gone get that memo.”

Pepper’s body had cannibalized fat and muscle during the escape and ensuing journey, burning through immense amounts of energy in a short amount of time. He remained not much more than a tent pole that the overlarge trenchcoat draped over. His clothing covered the scarring and wounding.

The price of doing business sometimes.

“I’ll be eating extra meals for the next few days. High-quality proteins appreciated.”

“I feed you extra, if you tell me how it was all up in a vacuumball getting catapult out from wormhole to wormhole until you got to the DMZ.”

Pepper snorted. “Maybe. I was supposed to get picked up later. Why the change?”

“Well, that there’s a whole mess.” Grenada shook her head.

“Thing is”—Grenada bounced in the lighter gravity of her cubbyhole of a room, closer toward the hub of the ship—“you wasn’t the only one out past the DMZ. The Dread Council got a message. From some League high-ups.”

The council kept a relay system going for open communications between the two. Mostly diplomatic static, but occasionally something useful snuck through. “So they bit?”

“Yeah,” Grenada said. “And they send me and the captain in. Captain
say she could turn a nice profit on a run past the DMZ, pick up some rich refugees on the low who want out the League. Add that to big bonuses up on taking diplomats over, at a time when antimatter fuel running higher and higher . . . hard to turn down.”

She opened up a small cupboard, tossed a few packets over her shoulder at Pepper, who caught them out of the air. Emergency meals, high in protein. Just what he needed. “Thanks.”

“Yeah, ship-wide dinner coming up in two or three, but that should hold you up.”

Pepper tore the packaging open and listened to the meal sizzle as it warmed up. A full-course meal’s worth of savory smells filled the room. Orange chicken and rice balls. He pulled the pair of telescoping chop-sticks out of the package sides. “What did the League want?”

Any information to add to his suspicions was helpful. He knew that, based on his suspicions, heavily armed Ragamuffin ships waited around the wormhole leading to New Anegada. They also lurked in orbit around New Anegada. All on high alert.

“Another try to get New Anegada to join the League.” Grenada pulled off her jacket. Pepper noticed the handgun, combat knife, and explosives that lined it.

“They don’t stop,” Pepper said through a mouthful of orange chicken.

Grenada wore an armless T-shirt. Her left arm sported a grinning cartoon mongoose, black ink on her brown skin. She straddled a chair. “Yeah, but this time they was a bit more convincing.”

Pepper nodded at her arm. “You’re a mongoose-man.”

“Well, yeah, mongoose, but don’t be calling me ‘man.’ ”

“Where you been?”

“Got tatted up after the Tangent Run.” Grenada leaned forward. “Nothing like the trouble you been around for, though.”

No, but it meant she’d served ten years as part of the elite that protected New Anegada. If she volunteered for the near-suicide raid at Tangent Run, deep into League territory, then Pepper could give credit where it was due. The Dread Council trusted her with this ship’s protection. She’d do.

Pepper crushed the remains of the foil wrapper in his hand. Scarfing the meal that quickly: not exactly high manners. But they were soldiers swapping info, not diplomats at a fancy table.

Grenada leaned forward over the chair’s back. “You went out to watch the League kill the last Satrap, didn’t you? That’s the word around the mongoose, that’s what they saying.”

There’d been a lot more than that, but that had been one of Pepper’s little missions. “Yeah. Wasn’t much we could do to stop it.” From rulers of the Forty-Eight worlds to extinct. A long way to fall for the alien Satraps. The revolutionary League of Human Affairs sent out video footage of the execution that took place on Midhaven, the League’s heart, everywhere. For them, proof that humanity had thrown the last traces of Satrap rule off its back, seventy-five years after first taking up arms in the revolution against them.

“Not even you. But why go if you couldn’t do nothing?”

“Because the universe is a fucking hostile place, and I need more usable data,” Pepper said. “For example, you know the Satraps were religious?”

“They believe in gods?”

“Not as such. Those big worms, they lay in their webs of power, they may have ruled us all and the other races in the Forty Eight, but they claimed they were created by another race far away from here. They were created to act as a biological throttle on any developing intelligent creatures that evolved in this area.”

“You believe that shit?” Grenada folded her arms.

Pepper shrugged. “According to the creature that I watched die, who really had no reason to lie, the last several hundred years of struggle, our bondage to the Satraps, that was just a distant race’s form of preventative pest control.”

“A ghost story, just trying to spook the little human.”

“Maybe.” Pepper leaned against the stacked bunks, already getting hungry again. “Think about this, though: on Earth we were just one of a handful of species that developed intelligence as a survival mechanism. Not a lot of competition, back there. But on the galactic level, we’re on the edges of an ecosystem with a multitude of competing intelligences
no doubt honed out of a stew of survival of the smartest and most dangerous. What gets culled out of that?”

Grenada slapped her tattoo. “Nothing the mongoose can’t handle yet.”

She was too young to remember when Ragamuffin ships hid in the depths of space, skulking around the edges of the Satrapy. Too young to remember New Anegada as a preindustrial world on the edge of destruction.

“We’re ants,” Pepper said. “Living on the edge of a park near a city and congratulating ourselves for figuring out how to cross a road. We don’t even know how the wormholes we use to skip around the Forty-Eight worlds were made, or why they’re here.” And with the League constantly trying to consolidate humanity under one banner, everyone paid more attention to small fights in the DMZ than trying to invest in pure research.

“We go get there. We tough.”

“True, living in the cracks nothing has noticed us yet. But at some point, something nastier than the Satraps will notice we’re here, and it’ll have to make a decision about us. I bet it might not be a decision we like.”

“We have to be like them fire ants,” Grenada said. “Swarm them.”

“We’re going to have to get our shit together,” Pepper said. “Right now we’re squabbling with the League. Humans arguing over competing ideas. These are just distractions. We need to start getting ready for the next wave. Or we’ll get burned bad.”

That penetrated. Grenada sat up. “Burned. Yeah. Just like the League diplomat: you spinning the same story.”

Pepper looked at her. “What do you mean?”

“The League, their little attempt to get us into the fold. They made the same argument you just did. Only, a little more dramatic.”

“Tell me.”

“Ain’t pass me report back to the Dread Council, but you privy to all that.” Grenada stood up. “After dinner I show you some pretty pictures. Gotta go prep now, provide security.”

“For dinner?”

“Lot of refugees from all the League areas we pass through, in the mix with a few politicians from New Anegada, and some freak with a silver eye from Chilo, and some sightseeing idiots. Don’t need to find out that some refugee we taking to Chilo really an assassin. You coming?”

It sounded exhausting. “No. Bring me back some food, I think I’ll rest up.”

“You bunks you rest, I be back.” Grenada slipped her vest back on and checked its contents.

Pepper pulled himself up into the bunk and clipped the webbing over it that would hold him in place if the ship had to suddenly adjust course. “What’d you see out there, Grenada?”

“The League think they seen what them boogeyman you worried about done.” She smiled and backed up to the door panel, which slid aside as it sensed her approach.

“Which was?” A transit warning sounded. The
Sheikh
was about to pass through one of the many wormholes on the way to Chilo.

“Someone burn a whole planet up, man,” she muttered, and stepped out of the room.

P
epper’s feet hit the cold metal floor as the door screeched from being forced open.

“You up?” Grenada’s voice sounded strained.

He grabbed his coat and looked around while pulling it on, getting oriented. A full eighteen hours had ticked away. In the two days since being picked up he’d mainly spent his time hiding out in her cabin, not in the mood to talk to other passengers. She brought him back hot meals, and he’d been trying to undo the damage done recently to his body, letting the tiny machines and souped-up biological systems in him layer muscle and bone density back on.

“I’m up.” He felt heavy and tired. Each dreadlock seemed to pull at the roots of his scalp, not something he ever noticed usually.

The room pitched at a completely different angle. He stood with his feet on what had previously been one of the walls.

Grenada forced the door the rest of the way open and tumbled in. “Emergency power only.” She turned around and pulled a green duffel bag into the room, which she tossed at Pepper. Outside, shadows grew and flickered as tiny red lights flashed on and off.

“What’s going on?” The zipper stuck, and the fabric tore as Pepper continued to pull it open. The duffel contained all his confiscated gear.

“We going end over end.”

The heavy feeling: increased gravity, the force of them being jammed down against the floor at twice a regular gee.

“Wobbling, too,” Pepper said after a second of studying the varying feelings of force as he massaged his holsters into place.

Grenada cocked her head and put a hand over her ear. “Canden. She say we been infiltrate.”

“League agents, a hijacking?” Pepper finished arming himself. “I’m not going to be optimal, I’m still recovering.” Low bone density, a leaner body, deep scarring in the left bicep and both thighs.

“We do what do with what we got,” Grenada said.

“The League got someone aboard while you were on your little daytrip?” Pepper shook his trench coat out and let it settle.

“I don’t think so.” Grenada flipped her mattress up to reveal an arsenal of her own strapped to the bedsprings. “Not with me breathing down every lock, everyone on or off the ship.”

Pepper looked out of their room. The once vertical bulkhead near the room had turned into a floor down “under” the door. “Maybe,” he said to himself.

“We near the tip, most the passengers back near hull central. Even like this we got just enough gravity to keep them from being sick, and not enough for them to hurt themself.”

He looked up. Rungs and rails ran along the corridor. They looked strange when the ship spun for gravity, but if the ship wasn’t spinning and instead was being pushed, their orientation made sense. Yet using rails and runs at twice a gee, that would be exhausting in a hurry. “We joining the passengers?”