Alien Bounty (19 page)

"We've got security troops up here," Ceex said grimly. "Get ready to take some heat."

McCade climbed over a low pipe and saw a strange sight waiting up ahead. Four members of Sappo's household troops had exited through his private lock and come face-to-face with the Il Ronnian cyborgs. But Sappo's troops didn't
know
that the men who faced them were cyborgs. And not knowing they stood frozen in place wondering how humans could enter a vacuum and stay alive.

None of them lived long enough to find out. One after another they fell as the strange apparitions shot them down. Two died without firing, the third got off a single shot, and the fourth killed Keeg a fraction of a second before Leeb drilled an energy beam through his visor. The cyborg blew up just as the man's visor shattered and the vacuum sucked him out through the hole in his helmet.

It wasn't a pretty sight, but McCade didn't have the time to look. He was too busy helping Leeb place explosives around Sappo's private lock. A few seconds later and the cyborg was pushing McCade toward cover.

They were just barely behind a boxy piece of duct work when the charges went off. McCade peeked around the corner just in time to see the outer hatch fly off its hinges and spin into space.

Neem and Reba were right behind him as he and Leeb dashed for the lock.

"We've got more troops out here," Ceex warned. "Geev and I will hold them off while you secure the lock."

"Roger," McCade replied.

The tunnel had decompressed as they blew the hatch, but there was another lock just fifty feet in. It had been placed there in case the first lock failed.

"Just a sec and I'll blow it," Leeb said, reaching for his demolitions bag.

"Whoa," McCade ordered. "If we aren't careful, we could decompress Sappo's entire area. He won't be much good to us if he's dead."

McCade palmed the door and it slid open. It seemed all the security measures had been lavished on the outer door, leaving this one unprotected.

McCade chinned his radio. "The lock is secured, Ceex. Time to join us."

The cyborg arrived a few seconds later. His energy rifle had disappeared along with his right arm. White hydraulic fluid spurted from the stump and half his face was burned away. "Sorry I'm late. Geev won't be coming."

McCade remembered Geev's dark plastiflesh, his flashing brown eyes, and his ready smile. He hoped that whatever Sappo had to say would be worth the price, and wondered if that was possible.

The outer door closed, air hissed into the lock, and the inner door cycled open a few minutes later. They were all on the dock with weapons ready, but nothing could have prepared them for the hail of lead and coherent energy that reached out to greet them.

It was Reba who saved the day when she stood up and lobbed a grenade down the corridor. She was still standing there waiting for the grenade to go off when Neem reached up and jerked her down.

The grenade turned the other end of the corridor into a slaughter house and Neem threw another just to make sure. Like the first one it went off with a deafening roar. They waited for a few moments, but there were no signs of life, so one by one they all got up.

All that is but Leeb. A piece of shrapnel had lanced down through his chest ripping his life-support system apart and destroying his motor control subprocessor.

McCade bent to help him, but Ceex pulled him away. "He's gone, Sam, and if you stay here, he'll take you with him."

They were forty feet down the corridor when Leeb blew up. The explosion made a dull thumping sound and no one chose to look back.

Their entrance into Sappo's quarters was almost anticlimactic. As the door hissed open they were ready for anything, but rather than armor-clad troops a domestic robot rolled forward to greet them. Its synthesized voice was stern and unyielding.

"Please leave. Your presence is not wanted here. I will summon help if necessary. Please leave . . ."

The robot never got to repeat its warning because Reba put her hand blaster up against its metal forehead and pulled the trigger. The beam of blue energy went right through the thin metal and out the other side.

On the far side of the room a tank filled with Nuerillium air fish shattered into a thousand pieces, freeing its multicolored captives to flutter about the room.

And what a room it was. If anything the rumors had understated its elegance. Overhead the vast sweep of the starscape made the room seem huge. The holos added to that impression, wrapping the room in color and pulsating to the beat of the exotic music that floated through the air. And water eddied and swirled beneath their boots looking like marble brought to life. The overall effect was beautiful but cold like a piece of sculpture that is seen and not touched.

"All right," McCade said grimly. "Sappo's in here somewhere. Spread out and find him."

No one had taken more than a couple of steps before a section of holo rippled and a man stepped out. He was small, carefully dressed, and as far as McCade could tell completely unarmed. He wore an amused, almost arrogant expression, and frowned when he saw the air fish fluttering around the room.

"I don't know who you people are but you're certainly destructive. If this is an attempt to rob me, I'm afraid you'll be sadly disappointed. I keep my cash and other valuables somewhere else."

"No," Neem answered as he walked across the room toward Sappo. "This is not an attempt to steal your stupid possessions. What we want is knowledge. Knowledge stored in your brain. And we'll do whatever's necessary to get it."

Sappo became visibly nervous as Neem drew closer. "My brain? Knowledge? What do you want?"

The black plastic of Neem's visor was only inches away when he spoke. "We want the location of a man. A friend of yours by the name of Mustapha Pong. Give us what we want and you'll live."

Sappo was scared now. He took a step backward. "You don't understand . . . I can't . . . Pong would kill me."

Neem reached up to remove his helmet. As it came away he said, "No,
you
don't understand. If you
don't
tell, I'll kill you. I'll strip your skin off one inch at a time until you pray for death with every breath you take."

Sappo took one look at Neem's distorted features and began to scream.

A week had passed since their assault on Sappo's quarters. Now
Pegasus
was closing in on asteroid FA 6789-X. It was better known as the Dump, and from what McCade could see via his long-range optics, the name fit. FA 6789-X had once served as an Imperial supply dump, a staging area for some long-forgotten mission, an airless lump of rock to be used and then abandoned.

A long list of temporary residents had come and gone since then, including a succession of miners, an eccentric loner or two, and most recently Mustapha Pong. Or so Morris Sappo claimed.

And McCade was inclined to believe him. For one thing Sappo was scared, and for another he was sitting in the ship's lounge where Neem could reach out and touch him, something the human would do anything to avoid.

Sappo had some rather deep-seated religious beliefs stemming from his childhood on Regor II. There his parents had attempted to beat an understanding of good and evil into his scrawny little body, and even though they'd failed, they had managed to warp his mind. So even though Sappo knew that Neem wasn't the devil, the Il Ronnian's demonic appearance still turned him into a babbling idiot. And babbling idiots can be extremely cooperative.

Thanks to a cooperative Sappo, they'd been able to lift from Tin Town without interference, and without payment for the considerable damage they'd caused. So when Sappo said that Pong made regular use of the Dump, McCade believed him.

The only problem was that McCade couldn't tell if the pirate was in residence or not. McCade spoke without taking his eyes off the screen. "Reba, cycle through the sensors one more time."

"Okay," she replied. "But it won't do much good. There's so much junk on the ground that you could hide the Imperial fleet down there."

Reba was right, of course. The original supply dump had centered around a cluster of domes. When the navy pulled out, all sorts of junk was left behind. Broken-down crawlers, gantries, and other less identifiable chunks of equipment lay all over the place. As the years passed, other tenants had added their debris to the pile so that a jungle of wrecked ships, scrap metal, and other junk filled a good-sized crater.

As a result there was enough metal on Dump to put all of McCade's metal detectors onto eternal alert. On top of that were radiation leaks from junked drives, a lot of vague static, and residual heat emanating from God knows what. It could mean nothing or everything. There was no way to tell.

Reba looked up from her sensors. "Sorry, Sam. There's too much input. If Pong's there, I can't pick his ship out of the background clutter."

McCade nodded and stuck an unlit cigar between his teeth. He could land and risk falling into a trap or stay a safe distance away and wait for something to happen. A day? A week? A month? It made little difference because he couldn't afford to use any time at all. Unless he found the Vial of Tears, and found it damn soon, entire planets would begin to burn.

"Strap in, everybody. We're going down."

It was a simple approach. FA 6789-X had a nice predictable orbit with just the right amount of spin to generate light gravity.

The problem was where to land. The crater was so full of junk that there wasn't much open space left. That seemed to suggest a landing outside the crater's perimeter, but if he did that,
Pegasus
would stick out like a Zord at a Finthian tree dance. And if Pong returned, he'd see the little ship and destroy it. That left the crater, junk or no junk. It might be a tight fit, but once down
Pegasus
would fade into the background. In fact, they could lay an ambush for Pong if that seemed advisable.

As the asteroid grew larger in his viewscreens, McCade swung
Pegasus
to the right and used his repellors to skim across the crater. "Keep a sharp lookout, Reba. Let me know if you see anything funny."

But Reba was silent as they passed over the forest of junk. Light dusted the tops of things and sparkled off the billions of dust motes that were stirred up by the ship's repellors. But outside of the ship itself nothing moved or gave McCade reason to run.

McCade put
Pegasus
down in the shadow of a huge ore processor. It was a tight fit between that and a pile of metal scaffolding, but he made it. He used the ship's sensors to take one last look around. Nothing. If Pong were present, surely he'd have reacted by now.

McCade released his harness, stuck the cigar in a pocket, and followed Reba out of the control room.

Neem, Sappo, and Ceex were already in the lounge when they arrived, so the tiny space was full to overflowing. Now that they were down McCade was anxious to look around.

"All right. With the exception of Ceex, I want everyone suited up. Yes, Sappo, that means you. If anything unpleasant happens to us while we're out there, it's gonna happen to you too."

"Ceex, I want you to stay aboard
Pegasus
and man the weapons systems. If anything moves, blast it."

"Maybe he should "Il Ronnian" the weapons systems instead," Neem suggested with a smile.

"Give me a break, Neem. That okay with you, Ceex?"

The cyborg nodded. Half his face was a mass of melted plastic that dripped downward like wax from a candle. The other half wore a twisted smile.

They'd done the best they could for him, but the truth was that his injuries required the attentions of a fully equipped cyberlab, and an Il Ronnian cyberlab at that. But Ceex had insisted that he be allowed to come along, and this way he'd be useful without slowing them down.

"All right then," McCade said. "Let's suit up and take a look around. I want everyone to carry an extra oxygen supply and a blast rifle. There's no telling what we might run into out there and we may want to stay awhile."

Forty-five minutes later McCade scrambled down to the ground and took a look around. Huge pieces of equipment formed a metal maze on every side. There were thousands of hiding places and everyone of them could harbor an ambush. But why bother? McCade thought to himself. If Pong's here, we would have seen him by now.

They had chosen the original domes as their destination. According to Sappo, that's where Pong stored some of his loot between raids, and if they decided to lay an ambush for him, that would be the place to do it.

McCade and Reba took the point with Sappo following along behind and Neem bringing up the rear. Constrained as he was by McCade's leg shackles, Sappo couldn't move very fast but that was fine. The rest of them were loaded down with extra oxygen and weapons so they weren't moving very fast either. But the light gravity helped as did a certain amount of fear.

It was spooky in and among the junk. Their movements carried them from heavy shadow to bright sunlight and back again. It took very little imagination to turn twisted pieces of metal into homicidal aliens.

Once, McCade thought that he saw a weapons turret on a junked shuttle turn to track them, but when he stopped to look again, he saw that it was just the way the light had moved across its surface.

And twice he thought he saw movement, first between two hydroponics tanks, and then through the canopy of an old crane.

On both occasions he used his radio to ask Ceex for confirmation, but the cyborg hadn't seen anything and swore that all of his sensors were clear.

Over the years a number of natural paths had evolved in and between the larger pieces of junk. These were well marked by crawler tracks, but it was impossible to tell how recently they'd been used. Without the effects of weather to wash them away, many were probably twenty or thirty years old.

Finally the domes loomed up ahead. One had been crushed by a badly piloted ore barge years before, one had been stripped for use somewhere else, and three appeared to be in reasonably good shape.

McCade and Reba approached the first of these while Neem and Sappo hung back. Its surface was checkered with solar cells, beat exchangers, and other less-obvious equipment. Crude patches were visible here and there where someone had modified the dome for a particular use and someone else had come along to restore it.