“But such an action amounts to nothing more than petty revenge,” sputtered the Captain. He smoothed his nonexistent hair with a sweaty palm. “There would be no profit in it for anyone.”
Mai Lee shrugged. “My reputation is based on such actions. I find that my reputation is worth much in business dealings and I am therefore quite willing to take something of a loss here to enhance the aura of cooperation my name engenders. You have forfeited your life to a good cause at least, Captain. Let that be of some small comfort to you during your last seconds. Now, if you would excuse me,” she said, reaching for the cut-off button.
“Wait,” cried the Captain, his voice rising up and cracking. “I will comply!”
Mai Lee let him stew a moment, looking down as if she hadn’t heard, pretending to fondle the cut-off button. Finally, she looked up in disgust. “You agree to halt the exodus of the cargo?”
“Yes, immediately,” gushed the Captain. He wrung his reddened hands and attempted a sickly smile. “Your Excellency,” he added.
Mai Lee let play a long moment of indecision. “Very well. Your assassination is stayed,” she said and moved again to cut-off the connection.
“But wait, we haven’t yet discussed our new terms.”
Mai Lee made a gesture of exasperation. Her lips curled back in a grotesque snarl. “There are no terms, worm. You will stop them or die.”
She pounded her fist on the cut-off button and the screen went dark.
Inside the aft hold of the Gladius a twelve-foot tall shipping polygon of gray foam suddenly ruptured. A massive bio-mechanical hand, called a gripper, extruded from the breach. The gripper swiftly tore away the top of the foam, like a spoon topping a boiled egg. The mech lieutenant stepped out of the cocoon, swiveling his optics. As the hold was pitch-dark, he switched to infrared mode and quickly moved to activate his platoon.
This was the moment that the security forces had been waiting for tensely. The Captain had been emphatic about waiting for the leader of the mechs to reveal himself before taking him out. The others would then never be activated and that meant they could be salvaged. The salvage value of the combat-ready mechs would be much greater if they were still intact.
Unfortunately for the security team, however, they had failed to consider the fantastic sensory apparatus of a mech manufactured for combat. The mech lieutenant heard the ambushers breathing and sensed the heat of the sighting lasers playing on his head encasement. Instantly, he bounded away behind an immense carton containing a power-dozer.
Shouting to one another in alarm, the security team broke cover and tumbled forward in pursuit, snapping off shots at every flickering shadow. A sergeant roared in alarm and fired wildly into another of the gray cocoons, which had also extruded a bio-mechanical arm. The mech’s second gripper shot out to grasp the Sergeant’s shoulder, which was instantly crushed to jelly.
“Turn on the floods!” screamed a green-suited security woman. She ripped off her night-goggles and opened up on the cocoons as well, as many of them were now popping open.
A hailstorm of exploding bullets and lancing laser beams turned the gray foam coverings into a disintegrating cloud of particles. One mech’s arm was blown off. Unconcernedly, he reached out with his remaining gripper and squeezed the head off the nearest rifleman.
The floods went on, removing the mechs’ advantage of superior night-vision. The lights also revealed the dark towering form of the mech lieutenant who now stood in the midst of the humans.
Moving with berserk speed, the mech lieutenant yanked a rifle away from a man, his claw-like steel gripper taking a good portion of the man’s arm with it. Wielding the rifle first as a club, he swept it around at head-level, dropping three more security personnel. With fantastic dexterity he flipped the weapon into his cradling arms, found the trigger and fired into the fleeing pack of humans.
After that it was a rout. Leaving most of their people behind, the security forces escaped through the huge pressure doors into the ship. They hit the emergency pressure-loss toggles, shutting the doors with explosive force in the faces of the pursuing mechs.
A hurried meeting was held in the Captain’s briefing room.
“The aft hold is over six miles long and is an absolute maze of cargo,” began the Security Chief. He had been involved personally in the attack on the mechs and his right hand was damaged, crusty with dried blood and coated thickly with nu-skin. “I suggest we open the primary bay doors and space the entire hold. We can then recover most of the cargo with the tug fleet. Even mechs can’t operate in vacuum for long.”
“I won’t hear of it,” rumbled the Captain. “Your team’s incompetence has already cost me dearly. I certainly will not dump a billion credits worth of trade goods into orbit to rid the ship of a handful of crazy robots. This trip has too slim of a profit margin to suit me already.”
“Sir, these aren’t crazed robots,” explained the Chief with a hint of exasperation in his voice. “They’re highly intelligent and ruthless beings built for warfare. All we’ve managed to do is get them to classify the crew of this ship as hostiles.”
“What are our other options then?”
“Well, we should remember that the mech lieutenant doesn’t really care about us. I mean, he has a mission to do, to get down to the planet surface, I assume. We disabled their jump-flitters before they woke up, so he can’t get down without improvising.”
“What exactly are you suggesting?”
“Why don’t we just let them go? Give them the flitters they need, and let them out one of the airlocks.”
The Captain rubbed his chins and glared at the Chief. He puffed out his cheeks and threw his arms up in a gesture of exasperation. “I positively fail to understand your cowardice in this. We have a full combat-ready company of marines and several hundred security people on this ship. There are only sixteen of these pests in the hold and some of them are damaged. What you’re going to do is go in there and hunt them down and blow them apart.”
Fifteen
After hunting the rogue for three days, the inquisitors were exhausted, and even their riders grew tired of the chase. Fryx had given them no further telepathic hints and Garth was leaving behind him precious little in the way of spoor. They had tracked him back to the highway where he had apparently caught a ride to the next village, then proceeded on foot. In the muddy jungles of the river basins they lost him again.
The man whose turn it was to watch fell asleep in the bole of a stink-vine tree. In the night, with Gopus only a dim sliver of light barely discernible through the jungle canopy, an odd figure entered the camp. Wearing a black hat with a wide low brim and a black cape, the figure moved with infinite care lest he awaken the men or in some way alert their wary riders. After a few minutes of slinking in their midst, the dark figure discovered the man in the stink-vine tree. With a delighted fluttering of the fingertips, the figure stalked the sleeping man, coming up behind him.
Gathering up a handful of pebbles, the figure flicked them, one by one, onto the sleeper’s back. After the third such attack, the man snorted and half rose up. Suddenly, he lurched upright, his rider goading him to wakefulness. The figure behind him pranced forward, cape swirling. A length of steel glittered and the inquisitor slumped back down.
The commotion awakened another of the men, however, who climbed from his bedroll. Not aware that anything was amiss, the tall, slender man wearily opened the tent flaps and rummaged in the cooler for a squeeze-bag of refreshment.
There was movement in the back of the tent. The man startled, then peered more closely. “Jed?” he mumbled, still half-asleep. His rider, withdrawn into unknowable private thoughts of its own, did nothing to warn him.