Honor of the Clan (7 page)

Not that it helped. Garth laughed silently. He had to admire the women for one thing, they were damned clever at keeping their babies out of debt peonage. Frequently didn't work, but it frustrated the shit out of the Darhel when the women had their kids outside of the infirmary—which meant the kid was born without debt—and then handed them straight out, squalling, to women in town who could foster them. It meant every woman in town, even the whores, was raising at least four kids, sometimes as many as eight. Mothers took over on the weekends, giving the whores much-appreciated time off for their pecuniary activities. He didn't know how they managed to feed all those kids, but none of them looked particularly hungry. The mothers and fathers, of course, took some of their own scarce freedom money and paid it to support their kids. But by common agreement, and sheer self-interest, indentured women had as few children as possible. Abortions, although illegal, could be had in town, as well as contraception shots. Damn Claire, anyway. His only consolation was that she was going to have a shitty time paying to support it on her own, and if that was rotten of him, then tough shit. Parenthood was her idea, not his; let her take responsibility for her own damn choice.

He'd missed most of what the Darhel said, by getting distracted with his stupid problems, and Garth cursed himself. But, what the hell, he didn't envy being skewered by a jealous husband if he stayed around here. Not to mention being watched like a hawk by the other jealous husbands. It was common knowledge he screwed around, of course, but every man assumed his own wife was perfectly sexually satisfied at home. Or, at least, the women he chose had that kind of husband. He made a point of skipping the suspicious ones. Damn Claire.

In the end, he decided fuck it, and lined up with the others to give his vocal signature to the contract. Every one of the other guys was signing on, and this bunch didn't look like suckers to him. He'd take his chances.

David Wheeler was not an attractive man. He had been cursed with a large nose, ears that stuck out from his head, and a tendency to freckle. There were some things rejuv just didn't clean up. Sure, his buck teeth had been corrected as a matter of course, but being juved wasn't the same thing as having good, old-fashioned plastic surgery. The other thing rejuv didn't touch was the fundamental personality, nature and nurture together. In David's case, who knew what genes his father had bestowed? His mother had been a war whore, and he was the result of a Galactic policy that treated women like breeding stock. The tendency of adults and children alike to favor the beautiful put a fine polish on whatever nature gave him.

Wheeler shared only a couple of traits with the bleached-blond twit in the shuttle seat next to him. The first was that both were quite fit. He knew the other man's work, such as it was, and its motivation. The second was a complete and total lack of conscience. It was the only thing about the over-sexed moron he remotely respected.

"So, what'd we sign up for?" the other man asked him.

"A trip to the vet. My god, I hope you're not on my team," Wheeler said, pulling his hat down over his eyes and leaning back to catch some sleep. As always, the hat caught and rested closer to his head than his ridiculous ears. Wheeler was used to it. He even liked his ears now. They were an excuse to beat the crap out of, if not actually kill, guys who made fun of them. He'd slipped up and nearly killed one, once. At the time, he thought the slip up was in
not
killing the little fuck. Then he found out that, had he succeeded, the bastard's entire debt would have been added to
his
account. As it was, the prick's medical bills were his own problem. Just like the antiseptic for his own knuckles got charged to him.

He grinned slightly as he drifted off to sleep. Never miss a chance to sleep. God, he hoped he wouldn't be working with that vapid twit.

Chapter Three

An hour later, Wheeler groaned mentally as they stood on top of the building that contained their assigned targets. Of course, pretty boy wasn't just on his team. It was worse. What team? Just him and mister never-met-a-pussy-he-wouldn't-fuck. He'd better explain the facts of life to this loser before he had to half kill him.

"You wanted to know what you signed on for? In exchange for killing some Indowy wimps, we get our entire debt paid off, plus a bonus. Almost half the cost of a ticket back to Earth. This is a sweet deal, and if you fuck it up for me, I swear to God I will keep that pretty face of yours uglified for years. Get me?" David, of course, wouldn't be going back before he could afford that plastic surgery and a nice retirement on Earth. He was tired of the stink of sliced and diced Posleen.

"Holy shit." Karnstadt was too busy seeing dollar signs to give a fuck about the threats. "No fear, dude. You just point me at who I gotta kill for that, and we'll get along fine."

One plus. The twit usually did take point on recon patrols, emplacing a lot of sensors, and did, Wheeler admitted grudgingly, kill his share of feral Posleen normals in the process. As much as he was out front, if Karnstadt wasn't pretty good he'd have been thresh for some ravenous carnosauroid moron by now. Okay. Whatever.

"Right. The first task is finding each of these little buggers, and there is a priority to pulling them in. The most important ones—don't ask me why they're important, I dunno—have been called to a meeting like where their debts usually get called in. It's like it would be with us, only the Indowy just let the poor bastards starve to death. We've got this little gadget—kinda a Galactified buckley." Wheeler held up a black box about the size and shape of a box of cigarettes. Neither man had ever seen an AID before. "It can find the headset the critters use when they make stuff—the specific one for our target, and tell if it's in use, and where it is. We just follow this box's directions. It talks. Right, box?"

"I am not a box, I am
not
a buckley, I am an AID, and yes, I can talk." The AID sounded resigned rather than snippy. It had been in the unassigned pool for what, to a machine that made a supercomputer seem like a digital watch, was an eternity. It had never met user support staff from pre-war Earthtech companies. It neither knew nor cared that those staffers had existed. Still, it and they were kindred souls in long-suffering exasperation with the average user.

"Yeah, but aren't some of these guys going to figure out what's coming and run? What if they aren't at work? What good is that thing then, huh? Thing doesn't even have a screen." Karnstadt took an instant dislike to the little box, as if sensing its own opinion of him.

"I can tell you where their quarters are. Other Indowy would be most reluctant to hide them," the AID said.

The two men looked at each other. Wheeler could tell that the twit was thinking the same thing that he was. Both had been born on Earth, and knew if they were caught up in a shrinking net of cops, or a gang, the last place they would go was home. Why would these bastards need anyone to hide them? The building was huge.

"How many of these buggers do we have to kill to get paid?" Karnstadt asked.

"If you kill every individual I find for you, you will have completed your contract." The voice emanated from the box in a way that made David want to cross himself, despite being a long-lapsed Catholic. It was as if a human being were standing right there next to him. Gave him the creeps.

"Yeah? What if the sucker bugs out between when you find him and when you actually get us there?" Garth Karnstadt had run enough cons himself to have a keen sense of when a con might be coming at
him
.

The AID sounded reluctant as it agreed, "You are only obligated if I get you within range of your eyes, where you can see the specified individual."

"Not good enough. All these little greenies look alike to me. You have to have some way of pointing the specific guy out to us and keeping him pointed out when he tries to get lost in the crowd."

"In all probability, an Indowy will not attempt to flee," the AID lied smoothly.

"You didn't promise to point him out. If you don't keep him positively identified until we've got our hands on him, the deal's off."

Wheeler restrained himself from breaking into the conversation. Yeah, he wanted the prize, but not enough to take his hand off the game. He wouldn't have thought of bargaining with the thing to tighten the agreement up. Maybe the other guy wasn't a complete twit after all.

The AID's tone was positively frosty as, after a noticeable pause, it agreed. "Acceptable."

"I've never seen one, but I've heard of these things. If you can make them change terms for you, the changes are tight. Official. Just like a supervisor or fucking el—Darhel putting it down with his own voice." Karnstadt nodded at the box.

"Thanks. These bastards would dick over their own mothers for a buck," Wheeler was less circumspect in front of the AID than his partner, but his voice held no particular rancor, just acceptance. And the observation, although the biology was necessarily metaphorical, was simple truth.

"So, you got any advice on the best way to do this?" Karnstadt asked the AID.

"I am not programmed to plan killing," it said distastefully.

"Wait a minute. You can tell if these guys are on their phones or head-thingamajigs or whatever. How many of them are down in there with their whatzis on?" Wheeler pointed downward into the building.

"Four hundred thirty-seven," the machine answered.

"Any of those the same as the ones that showed up to that meeting?"

"No."

"How many are in the meeting, and where's that?"

A ghost-transparent hologram of the building came into being in front of the two men. Built with antigravity technology, it was the typical Indowy squared-off soda straw. Troops from early in the Posleen war had compared some Indowy cities to an order of french fries, only organized. Notably, the comparison had come from troops who had spent the prior three months on a near-exclusive diet of MREs.

This particular french fry had a red dot in one corner, almost a third of the way down. The dot blinked wickedly as the AID spoke, "Two hundred nineteen targets are in room fifty-seven point twenty-five point twenty-five."

"Uh, yeah. So can you show dots for the rest of them?"

Flares of red coalesced into fine mists of dots grouped together in various locations throughout the building.

"Which one has the most lumped together?" Karnstadt asked.

"Waitaminute," Wheeler broke in while the AID obediently started one group blinking. "If we whack the guys in the meeting room, by the time we get to another group, all the guys in the building will have scattered. You can't keep this shit quiet—no, I mean the screaming you can, but these little fuckers will be able to communicate. If we go to that lump first, then the guys in the meeting will have scattered, along with everybody else. This ain't gonna work."

"Our projections are that one human is sufficiently violent to operate alone," the AID said.

"No, huh-uh," Karnstadt shook his head. "I don't care if these guys are pacifists, if we don't have two guys closing in on them from each side, at least, they're gonna run. You need a minimum of two teams, and even then you're only going to get the first two lumps of the critters."

"That evaluation is not consistent with our best projections," the AID said.

"Your projections are shit," Wheeler pronounced. "Even if you're using combat experience, all you got is Posleen."

"Negative. Our systems contain substantial data and analysis of human on human violence," the machine said distastefully.

"Indowy aren't human," Karnstadt said.

"We have
far
more experience of the Indowy than you." The AID's tone was patronizing as hell. "You may back out of the agreement and forfeit payment if you choose. A fee for the shuttle service, and early contract termination, will be charged. Are you choosing to abandon your agreement?"

"Hey, we warned you. If you want to ignore us and decide you know best, that's fine, and we'll do it, but we don't take the blame and lose our pay if you're wrong. Right?" Karnstadt glared at the little black box balefully.

"Agreed," the AID conceded grudgingly.

"Okay, it's your dime. Which lump of these guys, altogether, do you want dead worst?"

"We . . . find the members of this group the most adverse to our interests." The AID choked it out, as if it had inherited the inhibitions of its creators, making the big clump in the work bay flash a bright, blinky red.

"Got it. When we get there, you just highlight these guys in order of the ones you want, um, gone the most. Works for you?" Wheeler asked the box. He found it easier to talk to it if he treated it like a field radio with someone on the other end.

The AID's long pause did not appear unusual to either man, who had never heard the term "processing speed." They therefore didn't know to infer distance communication with speed of light lag. The machine, of course, didn't enlighten them.

"First priority is painted red, second is yellow, third is green," it said.

"You're the boss," Wheeler spoke for both of them, talking to the imaginary man behind the box.

The door from the roof down was, of course, unlocked. It didn't even have a lock—what need in a species with no theft?

Neither man had ever been in an Indowy building before. Not being Indowy-raised with their height deliberately stunted, they had to walk crouched to avoid banging their heads on the low ceilings. Karnstadt especially had to work to squash his two-meter frame under a ceiling not much over a meter and a half. They wouldn't have been able to move through the crowded halls at all if the Indowy hadn't seen two armed, vicious omnivores and sought any door to make themselves scarce. That both men were grinning only made them more frightening to the denizens. This particular grin, combined with stony eyes lit with the barest hint of an eager twinkle, would have frightened humans, too.

"Hey, look at us, we're Moses," Wheeler joked, gesturing at the parting wave of Indowy opening before them as they went.