The Ramal Extraction (4 page)

Jo nodded at this, but the truth was, she wasn’t much on liberty. Too much trouble she could get into in the civilian world without even trying.

She picked it up: “Rest of it is in your downlinks, read over it, we’ll hit n-vac at 0800 ST and arrive in the vicinity in seventy-two hours. Back to full gee once we finish the Leap, so better hit the myostim. If you are wheezing and dragging two minutes after we exit the ship, you can stay here and collect base pay while the rest of us divvy up your bonus.”

Gunny laughed. “You hear that, Gramps? I’m gonna be spending your bonus NDs on my spa vacation in Bali.”

“Sheeit, Chocolatte, I’ll give you a two-minute head start in a four-minute race and still run your skinny brown butt into the ground.”

“What, you went and got jet augs installed in your ass?

“Come by my cabin, I’ll show you what I got augmented.”

“You
wish
.”

“Nah, it’s
your
loss.”

Jo shook her head. Gramps was the oldest guy in the room, but he was only fifty-one SYs, beating Rags by six months. Still, that made him fifteen or so years older than Gunny, and eighteen older than Jo. They liked to razz him about being an old fart, but truth was, he was in pretty good shape for a man his age. And given the back-and-forth with Gunny, Jo wouldn’t be at all surprised to see them wind up in the sleepsack together. Military foreplay was often combative. Gunny could shoot the nuts off a minifly at five meters, and Gramps could have them weighed, measured, and sold for a profit before the fly’s nads hit the ground. She’d seen stranger pairings.

“That’s it, we’re done. Try to stay out of trouble.”

Kluth
fem sniffed the alien air at the spaceport as she stepped into the hard sunshine from the ship’s dinghy, seeking the scents of predators and prey. Mostly what she got were the stinks of lube and fuel and hot plastcrete, and the body odors of the humans waiting there. With humans, you sometimes got prey, sometimes predator, and sometimes both from the same individual mixed together. Ever fascinating, that identity shift. Even dying Vastalimi never smelled like prey.

They were on the outskirts of the largest city in the country, also named “Ramal,” a seaport on the west coast. There was a slight tang of ocean in the atmosphere. There was also a faint hint of Rel, the amphibious aliens sometimes seen from Out the Arm, but she couldn’t spot Rel among the humans standing in the heat of the day, nor any on the crews bustling about the port’s parked vessels. Interesting. She made a mental note to follow that up: Prey could be useful at times.

There were a dozen humans waiting, all males, under the shade of a portable canopy. She cataloged the twelve: four
dignitaries, armed with what appeared to be gem-encrusted, forearm-length, slightly curved, ceremonial knives in gilded sheathes.

Eight guards, each bearing slung carbines and sidearms. They also had sheathed knives, but in plain scabbards, sans decorative stones on the handles. Working blades.

These men were obviously fit and alert for any signs of danger. Their eyes were hidden by polarized glasses, but her vision was enough to dimly see past the plastic.

One of the guards flicked a sharp glance at her, eyes only, a predator’s look, and she felt her claws start to reflexively extend. She quickly retracted them. In her culture, a hunting glance was a challenge, and had to be answered:
You see me as prey? Behold my claws and reconsider.

The glancer would be the first of her targets if those guns lifted to point in their direction. Then the one to his left, who was larger and thus likely to be slower; then the one on the right, next to the youngest human. After that, they would have moved, and she would have to see how they had shifted position to choose the next target. She knew they were unaugmented, but she could smell the increased hormonal flux from here, and on the possibility they could read Vastalimi scent, she exuded contentment pheromones. Let them think she was no threat.

Always best to have an enemy underestimate you and be surprised, if need be.

She couldn’t see them, but she expected there were other guards at a remove, hundreds, maybe thousands of meters away, armed with long-range weapons.

Humans did love their guns.

Cutter Colonel, dressed in a uniform custom-made for such meetings, with ribbons and medals agleam on the chest, took the lead. As he approached the contingent, the eldest of the humans, a tall man with a thin gray beard and a blood-colored turban, stepped forward to greet him, palms pressed together in front of his torso. His silks were thin, bright, and
draped to cover his more than ample girth, flowing in shifting shades of red and purple. This would be, she guessed, the Rajah for whom they’d be working

She could hear the greeting easily enough; most humans would not be able to do so at this distance.

Yes, the Rajah. And the younger man next to him?

Many among the Vastalimi didn’t bother to tell one human from another visually, and some of them offered that all humans not only looked the same, they stank the same. Kay considered it a useful skill to differentiate them by sight as well as smell, and she had devoted the time and effort necessary to learn both. It had been useful more than a few times. One did not need to ask
Who goes there?
in the night if one could recognize one’s own team by their odors.

Thus she was sure that the younger man was not a close relation, based on his dissimilarity of features.

She caught a name:
Rama Jadak
.

Ah. The husband-to-be? Or was it a common name here?

There was a transport parked not far away, a shaded awning from the canopy leading to it. This was a bus-sized vehicle, sufficient to contain them all; however, Cutter had arranged for other transports, and those smaller vehicles were parked past the largest one. Once aground on a planet that might be hostile, it was best to avoid giving a potential enemy a single and mayhaps easy target, and since they weren’t here to guard the Rajah, he was not their primary concern.

To avoid giving offense, none of the humans in her party stood armed, at least not visibly so. There would be serious weapons in their transports, vehicles manned by their own people; as soon as they got there, they would arm themselves better.

Even though her preference was for claw-to-claw, that wasn’t always the best option. She had known some on her homeworld, martial-arts masters, who’d thought themselves invincible; swaggerers who believed that no one could lay
a blade or beam on them because they were so adept. And some were experts, walking murder.

Too, some of those masters had been killed by Vastalimi with less than a tenth of their skill but who brought better deathware to the fight. At ten meters, the sharpest claw or tooth was a poor tool against a gun firing a dozen fléchettes a second. Only a fool thought otherwise.

Yes, one felt the need to test one’s self, to push her limits and see; however, there were times to fight claw-to-claw, and times to shoot an enemy from a distance, and it was a idiot who didn’t try to learn which was which. Pride in one’s skill was fine, as long as it did not blind one to reality.

The greeting ceremonies over—humans had many variations of this one, most of them a waste of time as far as Kay was concerned—they headed for the transports.

The world was hotter than she liked; double-coat fur was great for keeping cold out but also equally good at keeping the heat in, and while she could lower her blood pressure and trigger an autonomic cooling response in emergencies, that was not the case here. Uncomfortable was not an emergency. And she might as well get used to it since they might be on this planet for weeks.

As they neared the rented transports, Kay felt her nape fur bristle. She glanced around, didn’t see any obvious new threats—no fanatics waving long knives, no incoming vehicles heading for them, no signs of small aircraft focused in their direction. But there was something, and she had long ago learned to trust that atavistic danger signal.

Jo drifted toward her. Before she could speak, Kay said, “I feel it. Do you detect a source?”

“No. But there are twelve armed men over there by that roller, eight of whom are carrying projectile weapons.

“Yes.”

A human with a gun might be your friend, but he was still a human with a gun. If you didn’t know and trust him, you kept tabs on him. And even then, trusting most humans
with or without guns was problematical. You only had to fail once badly, and you would be dead.

Vastalimi could, of course, lie, but no known race in the galaxy could begin to compete with humans in that arena. Humans would often lie unthinkingly, almost reflexively, about things large or small. And they even qualified the term with degrees: White lies. Fibs. Whoppers. Prevarications, lies of omission. It was fascinating how many ways they could dress up or dress down the notion of deliberate untruths.

The nearest guard was twenty-two meters from Kay, the farthest twenty-eight, with the Rajah, his potential son-in-law? and the other two between them.

The radiopathic button clicked in Kay’s ear as Sims subvocalized into the comtac unit: “Colonel, Kay confirms my impression.”

The com was set for short range and encoded, so if anybody chanced to hear it, they wouldn’t know what was being said.

“Copy,” the colonel said. “You heard the fems, people, whatever shooters you have hidden, loosen ’em up, and not all at once. Watch the Rajah’s people. Anybody points killware in our direction, hose them. And since the Rajah is our client, best if we keep him alive until we get paid, too.”

There came a cricket chorus of acknowledgment clicks.

“Can’t see the Rajah or his mucky-mucks going into slaughter-spree,” Jo said to Kay. “Rich people seldom run amok; they hire somebody to do that for them. Likely it will be one of the guards or their driver.”

“Agreed.” Their transports were manned by CFI’s own people, and while it was not impossible that one of them could be compromised, it was less likely than the alternatives. They didn’t know the Rajah’s guards nor his driver.

Sims Captain triggered an aug. Kay felt the human’s temperature rise slightly, accompanied by a flush of her fair skin. Jo was in combat mode and would be able to move 39 percent faster with an 80 percent usable increase in her
normal strength; additionally, her vision, hearing, and senses of touch would also be enhanced. She would be almost as fast and strong as Kay though her vision and hearing would still be somewhat less. And the human would burn much more energy much quicker.

“Let’s hear the arms report,” Cutter said. “Helm?”

“Port ceepee turret locked on the bus, Colonel. Say it, I’ll light it up.”

Cutter said, “So we don’t sweat the bus. I’ve got my flat-pack deuce.”

“Same here,” Jo said. “Plus the biozapper.”

The flat-pack pistol was gas-operated, small and flat enough to be slipped into a pocket, the magazine held twenty 2mm poisoned fléchettes. It had an effective range of thirty meters. Sufficient for unarmored soft targets.

The augware bio-capacitor in Sims would fire a single electrical bolt eight meters; however, it would take half an hour to recharge for another shot.

“T&T,” Kay said.
Teeth and talons.

Kay listened as the others in their party rattled off their concealed weaponry:

“Pulse wand.” That from Dr. Wink.

“Willis four-point-four,” Gunny said. “Also a thermex mini and a Rilke knife.”

“Where the hell are you hiding all that?” Gramps said.

“Wouldn’t you like to know?”

A Willis 4.4mm pistol was only slightly smaller than a standard service sidearm. Its double-stack electric magazine held thirty rounds of explosive pellets and on full auto would chop a large human in half with five hits in a line. A thermex minigrenade would cook unprotected soft targets in a five-meter radius of the detonation. A sharp Rilke knife would pierce softweave and flex-ceramic armor with little effort.

Gunny Sayeed was well armed for somebody supposedly not in that mode. Of course, she always was well armed.

“All right,” Cutter said, “let’s stay on track for the vehicles—”

Kay sensed the guard’s intent to move. Before he had his carbine unslung, she sprang; by the time he had both hands on the stock, she was only eight meters away. As he lifted the weapon and began to bring it to bear on the Rajah, she was five meters, still increasing her speed.

Almost close enough to leap—

Jo had also moved; she was two meters back and two to Kay’s right, and in slow-vision-predator mode, Kay saw two more guards unshipping their weapons.

Were they intending to protect the Rajah? Simply copying their fellows? Or part of an assassination attempt?

The guards appeared focused on the Rajah and not each other, and as Kay leaped and snapped her claws out, she hoped Jo could see that the other two were part of the problem—

She hit the guard just as he triggered his weapon, knocking him and the firing carbine flying. Projectiles splashed off the plastcrete, sparking as they hit, but it did not appear any of them struck the Rajah—

Kay tore out the guard’s throat with her right hand and pushed him away with her right foot, already past him and arcing into a long forward roll—she was going too fast to stop—

She heard the second guard scream as Jo bowled into him, and became aware of the third guard’s head exploding into a spew of blood and bone and brains as she rolled up and half turned to face the rest of the Rajah’s party—

One of the guards swung his weapon in her direction—

“Tell your guards to stand down!” Cutter yelled. “It’s over!”

The Rajah yelled at the guards: “Do not shoot!”

She was already sidling to her right, putting the Rajah between herself and the guard tracking her—

The guard with the gun pointing toward her froze as he covered the Rajah. He jerked the muzzle away.

Not an assassin, then. Or one who thought it better not to try now.

The Rajah yelled again. “Do
not
shoot! Guns down!”

The guards lowered their weapons.