Black Steel (12 page)

"Hot enough to light the trees?"

"Si, Patron. More than hot enough."

"Trees that are potentially worth millions, perhaps even billions each, will ignite. I expect that will draw considerable attention. "

"As you say, Patron."

Now dressed in the shiftsuit, Cierto smiled at the memory. A simple plan, but one which would have an excellent chance of success. Local authorities would be busy worrying about their crop. While they concentrated on extinguishing the fire, Cierto and three of his students would kill the old thief and his guard, and rendezvous with Dona where she waited with the escape vehicle. If they had trouble with guards while leaving, those guards would be dealt with, and before anyone could figure out what had happened, they would be on his private ship and into Bender space.

Honor would be satisfied, at last.

The camp was reached by road only from the east. The three buildings that comprised the main part were upon a hill deemed too rocky to level and use for planting, so the single road wound around and over mostly bare rock and dirt, with some small scrub growth and grasses being the only vegetation.

From the hill, a man had good views of the canopy of bramble extending off in all directions below.

While intentionally rustic, the camp was not without some modern facilities. Sleel had the computer up and had installed in it a security program. The matadors had contacts all over the galaxy, and it was not difficult to spend a goodly chunk of Reason's money upon defensive materials.

Sleel explained it to Reason.

"I've got half a dozen AA lances around the perimeter of the hill," he said. "Although there isn't supposed to be any air traffic without official clearance, that's just in case anybody comes calling from the air. They do, they get spiked.

"There are button sensors scattered around the base of the hill, with a cluster along the road, so anybody comes that way, we see 'em."

Sleel held up a small rectangle of black plastic. "This is a black-market spetsdod load. Explosive rounds.

Punches a neat little cone-shaped crater in anything softer than carbonex or steel when it hits it. In case our bad guys have developed an immunity to my other dart chem."

"I didn't think spetsdods were supposed to be lethal."

"Learn something new even at your age, hey?"

Sleel produced a small pocket pistol. "This is a 6mm needier, fires capacitor rounds, about thirty thousand volts each. Builds up the charge when it spins through the muoplastic barrel. Kind of like a real mild version of the military Spasm load, it'll lock a guy into tetany long enough to knock him down and keep him twitching for ten minutes. Like a taser, but without wires." He handed the gun to Reason.

"I don't much like guns," the older man said.

"I'm not asking you to make love to it, just keep it around. Try not to shoot me or yourself with it. You got fourteen shots in a magazine; here is a spare. There are more than twenty-eight of them, we're in trouble."

Sleel grinned.

"You think they are coming here."

"Oh, yeah. I haven't figured out how or when, but they're coming. So far they have shown us they are determined, but not too adept, so I figure we either end it here or catch us one who can tell us where to go to finish it. If we can grab one before he passes out."

"So that's it?"

"The good ones are simple. Unless you have a better idea."

''...No."

Sleel looked through the plastic window in the main room of the largest building in the camp. The hot sky was cloudy on one edge, promising a thunderstorm before the day wore out. He was ready. More than ready, he was anxious for an attack. It was time to do what he knew how to do, to prove to himself that he was good at something.

Come on, elbowsuckers. Come and try me.

Whatever Cierto was up to, Wu didn't think it was in any way good. The man was arrogant, rich, amoral, and deadly, not a pleasant combination. She had watched him enter the hovervan and leave, heading toward The Brambles, and it occurred to her that something nasty was about to transpire.

What, she wondered, could she do about it?

She used her personal com to put in a call to Scanner.

"No," the old man said, "I don't think I can get you into The Brambles, least not so fast as to be able to tail somebody."

In the shade of a broad-leaved tree with orange bark, Wu nodded to herself. "Thanks anyway."

"What I can do, I can tap into the mapsats and footprint him for you."

"Come again?"

"Mapping satellites that overfly The Brambles. These things have optical resolution that can read the time on a guy's wristwatch from twenty thousand klicks. There are sixty or seventy of them orbiting up there officially, not even counting the sub rosa spysats I can access. Give me your location and the direction the van took."

Wu did so.

"Hold on a second; I have to translate that into binary grid numbers. Okay . . . got it. It's a little tricky, switching from unit to unit here . . . there he is. Fortunately there isn't a lot of air traffic over The Brambles. Yep, there's the flight plan, that's our boy. He's on course and heading for a scheduled delivery at Madini, that's about six hundred klicks from where you are. Oops, now he's moving out of range. I need to see what's coming up crossways . . . it'll be a couple of minutes before I can patch into something to see him again."

Wu shook her head, amazed.

"All right, here's what I'll do. I'll find out where he goes and then follow him when he comes back. I'll give you a call when he's where you can reach him, that okay?"

"Great. "

"Okay. Discom."

Wu tucked her com unit back into a little square and crowed it to her belt. Well. Whatever Cierto was up to in The Brambles, she could catch him when he returned. Wonderful stuff, technology.

Meanwhile, maybe she could get in a little practice with her sword. One could never be too good.

Especially now.

Sleel felt a chill, despite the day's warmth, as he moved about the camp. He was like a tracking beast searching for some sign of intrusion. He scanned the skies and road, seeing nothing amiss, but feeling that prickly coolness on his skin that went with danger. His inquiries had come up mostly dry. He knew that the passengers of the private ship were groundside, checked into a hotel in Bandari, but they weren't in their rooms. A list of applications to enter The Brambles did not include Cierto's name, but Sleel also did not assume the man was entirely stupid. Even though local records showed that no visitors had been approved for entry past the guarded borders for today, the tickle in Sleel's belly would not stay still.

Danger was coming; Sleel knew it in that part of his mind that lived past reason and logic. The old reptile brain Dirisha used to prattle on about, that part was alert, nose in the air, sniffing for death and smelling its dank stench. How and when it didn't know, but soon. It knew that.

Sleel checked the explosive loads in his left spetsdod again, a thing he had done five times already today. The right hand weapon still contained the stepped-up version of shocktox, the animal trank. Even though Sleel was less concerned with sparing life than Emile or some of the other matadors, there was no point in using more force than was needed to stop the threat. Sleel figured that if somebody tried to kill you, all bets were off, insofar as their right to keep using the community air went; still, explaining a pile of bodies could sometimes get difficult. Best to save the killing stroke until there was a real need for it.

He was outside the main building, perched upon a small grassy hillock that rose a few meters higher than the rest of the hill. The sunlight splashed everywhere, the bugs buzzed back and forth, the air was thick with humidity. It was quiet enough.

Sleel looked at his tracker. Reason's transmitter sent to the tiny four-centimeter screen a small green dot that pulsed in time to his heartbeat. The man seemed calm enough. That was good. Sleel didn't doubt his own ability, especially given what these geeps had thrown at him so far. It was almost a shame to have to bring it to a close. Almost, but not quite.

Inside the hovervan, Miguel said, "Thirty seconds, Patron." His voice was muffled by the protective helmet and face shield of the shiftsuit he now wore.

Cierto nodded absently. "I am ready." The trip thus far had been almost uneventful. The guards at the border had performed a cursory inspection, and neither Cierto nor the glider parts had been in any jeopardy. Such fools would not last long in his employ. Immediately after clearing the border, Miguel had put the vehicle on automatic and begun to assemble the gliders. There was a bad moment when one of the spunfiber struts jammed, due to some grains of the chlorinating compound which had adhered to it from where it had been hidden. Fortunately it was a problem easily resolved. Now, both gliders were rigged, the small and quiet motors purring in readiness.

Miguel touched a control and the rear door of the van retracted. They were cruising at perhaps two hundred kilometers per hour and the warmer air from outside swirled around them. Miguel glanced at his timer. "Five seconds, Patron."

Cierto moved to the edge of the doorway. The filmy delta-shaped wing of his glider was fan-folded closed to allow movement inside the van; once he leaped out, a tug would pop the wing open. Although they were perhaps a thousand meters above the tops of the trees, Cierto had only a touch of fear about the jump. He had tested this particular glider on a dozen such drops and it had performed flawlessly

"Go, Patron!"

Cierto leaped into the empty air, to his left as they had practiced. Miguel was immediately behind him, angling right.

There was a moment of gut-twisting free-fall before the wing snapped out and locked into place; then Cierto was flying in the hot daylight, still dropping rapidly, but now in a controlled glide. In a moment, he and Miguel would be between two rows of the ubiquitous trees and safe from detection. Any radar tracking the van would show only a quick strobe of them before they were gone, and unless the simadam operating it happened to be looking right at the scope at that precise instant, they would never be noticed at all.

Wu was in a flat patch of grass on the edge of a public park, dancing with her sword. She had gathered a small and curious crowd, but she did not allow this to bother her as she moved. The single chime of her com on her belt did interrupt her kata, though.

"Yes?"

"Scanner here. The two men inside the chem van just bailed out."

"Huh?"

"Yep, my crossover sat just happened to be coming online when they did it. They hopped out the back and opened some kind of ultralight aircraft, then went into the trees."

Wu considered this. "What about the van?"

"It's all by itself and continuing on course. Be interesting to see how far it gets past there before the AAA guns pot it."

"Can you follow the two men?"

"Sorry, no. They are under the canopy."

"Damn, "

"I have an idea where they are going, though."

"Where?"

"There's a religious retreat, a camp, a dozen klicks away from where our boys left the van. Nothing else for more than a hundred kilometers 'cept trees. I doubt those gliders have much of a range. Plus, I've been sorta keeping an eye on some of the other chem plant delivery vans. A couple of them are heading in that same general direction. "

"Any ideas as to what it might mean?"

"Well, no. The camp is empty, except for two men who filed an internal flight plan for it a few days ago.

They are one Jersey Reason and somebody who calls himself Sleel."

"Sleel!"

"You know him? He records as a local boy."

"Not personally, but if he's who I think he is, I know of him. He's a matador, one of Khadaji's original crew."

"Well, that would explain things, wouldn't it? A bodyguard and his client, holed up in what ought to be a pretty safe place. Looks like your man Cierto has biz with them."

Wu felt her belly grow tight. This was bad. Somebody was going to die. The real question was: who?

Chapter TWELVE

SLEEL LOOKED AT the infocrawl on the computer's holoproj and whistled. "Man," he said.

Behind him, Reason came to look at the picture formed in the air above the comp. "A fire?"

"Yeah. Couple hundred klicks from here."

The miniature version of the distant fire blazed high into the scaled-down sky.

"I thought the trees were flame-resistant."

"They are, but almost anything will burn if you crank the heat up enough."

"What does it mean?"

"Mean's company is on the way here," Sleel said, automatically checking his spetsdods.

"Because there's a fire two hundred kilometers away from us?"

"These trees are worth their weight in platinum right now," Sleel said, "and likely will be worth a lot more than that when they come to term. Everybody who can lift a shovel or man a hose will be heading there to put the fire out. Security will stay on-station, but they'll be watching on the 'proj. Something that might get attention on a dull day could slide when people get busy. I would say we got ourselves a nice, fat diversion here. " He nodded at the tiny flames of the projection.

"We'd better get ready."

Cierto glided to a soft landing next to where Juanita and Luis awaited. Miguel brought his craft down directly behind Cierto. The pair of them quickly shed the harnesses connecting them to the lightweight gliders, folded the wings, and put the devices next to the trunks of the line of trees to their left.

"Is the diversion established?"

"Si, Patron," Luis said, grinning. "Half a kilometer of the trees are en fuego. "

"How far to the target?"

Juanita said, "Less than a kilometer. That way."

Cierto nodded. "All right. Light your suits. No radio contact, line-of-sight-laser coms only. This matador will have security. We can defeat much of it, but if anybody sneezes and reveals us, that person dies by my hand, comprende?"

There was a soft chorus of acknowledgments from the students.