Shedding the Demon (16 page)

“all right, how many ships on post near Lorah?”

“Twenty-three now since the two that had to break cover have
left.”

“Can we take him out . . . personally? Can we take
out that rock he lives on?”

Jeffrey hesitated before answering, “Well, yes we could.
However,” Renard tried to interrupt but Jeffrey rushed on, “think about the
implications. It would be obvious who did it. Could we survive that kind of
fallout on the Council?” After a moment of thought, he added, “Someone would
replace him; it wouldn’t end with him.”

Renard’s hands clenched and unclenched in rhythmic motion
for almost a minute before he sat back down and put his head in his hands.
Finally he spoke, “I’ll have to talk her into it. We can’t let him have that
kind of power. But first we need to find her
and
Dr. Tashus before Pryke
does. You know he’s going to be looking for both of them.”

When he looked up a Jeffrey, his eyes softened and his
shoulders slouched under unseen pressure. “I’m sorry Jeffrey,” he said, “I
need
your personal commentary, please forgive me.”

“Of course, there is nothing to forgive.”

Renard chuckled, “You know
that’s
not true,” and then
added, “Find her. Bring her here. We’ll protect her, reunite her with the team,
and convince her to do the right thing.”

“Consider it done,” and he made his way to the elevator.

Renard stood before the portrait of Izar Trueblood. After a
moment spent staring at the serious visage in the picture, Renard said out
loud, “Uncle, what
would
you do?”

 

**** ****

 

Finding Ken Westron took much longer
than Damon imagined. He had only a couple of days between missions and much of
that time was spent on public transportation that was slow and inefficient.
Many times he arrived back at the Abyss just in time to head out to his next
assignment.

Finally, his schedule allowed for a few extra days off, and
Damon traveled to Sangupt where Ken was last sighted.

The AI reviewed the public records of the capital city at
Damon’s request, looking for areas of trouble and patterns in the crime logs.
He believed that a person with Ken’s skills would be found near areas of
high-tech violent crime. The AI’s search told Damon where to find the right
kind of trouble.

He wandered the streets late at night waiting for a likely
target. He had his sensor suite on line and was not afraid to run active scans
to help with his search. It took an hour to find exactly what he was looking for.
About a block from where he was standing a group of four men and two women
sauntered down the street toward him, acting as if they owned the place. The
few other people still on the street were careful to give them space and tried
not to draw attention to themselves. The group’s apparent target was a small cluster
of hookers on the opposite corner.

Damon was specifically looking for street thugs like these
that had combat enhancements. He figured that if he was going to find an
infamous Biolectrician like Ken Westron, he’d start with people who were most
likely customers of his. Anyone in this city that had decent implants would
either know him or they would know people who did. Damon began a slow walk in
their direction.

One of the men spotted Damon and made a quick and quiet
whistle to get the attention of the others. They all stopped, looked at the
whistler and then at Damon. Once they saw him, they all tensed up, alert, and
spread out a few feet in each direction. As a group they moved toward him, the
men on each end moving farther out to form a loose semi-circle.

The man in the middle of the line stopped while the ends
wrapped around Damon to encircle him. Damon admired the smoothness of the
maneuver.

The center man spoke first, “Hey man, what you doin' here?” His
accent was heavy and Damon referred to the text translation in his HUD to
ensure he understood.

“I’m looking for someone,” Damon replied, noting from his
sensors that the two men behind him had drawn long knives. Damon tried to be non-threatening,
“I don’t want to cause any trouble, I just want to know where to find someone.”

“Cause trouble?” the girl to the left of the original
speaker now addressed Damon. “You don’ cause the trouble around here, we do.”

“Fair enough.” Damon conceded. “Are you willing to help me
find someone? I’ll pay you.”

They glanced around the circle, apparently unsure of what to
do with Damon and his calm demeanor, but none of them spoke.

Damon felt quite sure that diplomacy would not work with
them, but he had to try. He noticed the two assailants behind him were inching
closer. He stood his ground and made sure his armor was hardened sufficiently
for the impending attack. Predictably, the two knife-wielders moved with
enhanced speed and strength to strike the center of his back.

“Oh now that should have been a killing blow,” he said as
the blades hit and deflected off his armor. Surprised, but undeterred, both men
swung for his neck. Damon never moved and the blades rang as they were bent and
notched by the D-SAP. “Maybe you should buy better weapons,” he said and spun
to face his assailants. Moving faster than they could react, he thrust a hand
into each man’s chest, sending them flying backwards to fall unconscious to the
ground.

He turned casually to face the remaining four. One man had
drawn a sword, both women had small handguns, while the man who spoke first
took up a fighting stance from a martial arts discipline that Damon did not
recognize. He put his hands on his hips and said, “One more time, I don’t want
any trouble, just answer a couple questions.”

The martial arts man moved fast, almost as fast as Damon,
and delivered a killing blow to Damon’s throat. He barely felt it through his
armor, despite the man’s obvious strength enhancements.
That must have
broken some bones,
Damon thought as the man pulled back a mangled fist. The
man continued his attack however, using an odd jabbing kick to Damon’s abdomen,
which was ineffective against the D-SAP. Obviously in pain from his hand and
now his foot, the man kept pushing forward, executing a flurry of combinations
to various parts of Damon’s head, neck, and chest. The blows were powerful, but
they were not enough to make Damon even sway from his stance. The man fell
back, panting with the pain of broken bones, but still ready to attack again.

“Don’t be stupid,” Damon said and the girls opened fire at
point-blank range. Not as powerful as the autorifles he often faced on his
missions, they were also completely ineffective. The bullets burst into tiny
shards as they impacted on his armor. The clips were exhausted quickly, and the
smoke slowly drifted away from them in a slight breeze.

“Are you ever going to listen to me?” Damon asked them,
laughing at the confused looks on their faces. He raised both hands and fired
small caliber rounds into the lower legs of each woman, causing them to
collapse with shattered tibias. The man with the sword stepped in front of the
still standing martial arts guy, brandishing his weapon menacingly.

With a quick flick of his wrist, Damon extended a single ECB
to its full three-foot length before popping it off into his hand. “Try if you
must, but I really just want to talk.” Sword-man came in whirling his blade
with impressive speed, but Damon was able to track and parry the blows easily.
He let the man press the attack for a couple of seconds, and then he shifted his
targeting program to begin applying small cuts and strikes all over the man’s
hands, arms, shoulders, and chest. He refrained from anything lethal, but
eventually the man was cut and bleeding so badly it was hard to find a new
place to hit. After a couple minutes, the man simply could not continue and
dropped to his knees in pain and exhaustion. Damon struck him in the side of
his head with the flat of his blade, knocking him unconscious. Then he touched
the handle of his blade to the fairing on his wrist and retracted the plastic
back into its reservoir.

He faced the battered martial arts fighter and spread his
hands out toward him, palms facing outward.

“Now,” Damon said to the man, “can we talk?”

The man dropped to the ground in a defenseless sitting
position, but looked at the ground. “Where’d you get them implants man? No one around
here did 'em.”

“That’s right—better than military-grade, my friend. But I
need to see Ken Westron, do you know him?”

“Course I do, everybody knows him.”

“Where can I find him?”

“That a completely different question, man, he don' stay in
one place for long.”

Damon stepped on the man’s foot, breaking bones. He cried
out and pulled his feet back. “Where can I find him?”

After that, Damon found him to be quite helpful. He gave
names of people to ask, places to look, and night clubs where he might find
Ken.

It took Damon two more nights of skulking around dangerous
corners of the city, frequenting seedy bars and night clubs, and convincing
sometimes recalcitrant people to help, until he finally found Ken himself. Now
he sat across the room from the man, and watched him ‘holding court.’

Ken was smart enough not to be loud and flamboyant or to
draw attention to himself, but it was obvious that the other patrons all paid
him a great deal of respect. Small groups would stop at his table for few
minutes—exchanging a few words, setting up an appointment, or giving a contact
name—and then move on. Damon listened in with passive sensors, catching most of
the conversations despite the fact that Ken was running an interference
scrambler that was no match for Damon’s implants.

He observed Ken for a full two hours. The man was kind of
short, average build, and appeared to be middle aged. His light brown
collar-length hair was messy but clean, and had some gray in it. His face was
thin and angular, his expressions neutral and closely controlled. He smiled
occasionally, sometimes with genuine pleasure. His eyes scanned the room slowly
and casually, giving the impression of calm control, never nervous or shifty.

Damon hadn’t spotted a single visible bodyguard in those two
hours, and it spoke volumes about the respect that Ken garnered. Finally, Damon
decided to find out more about the man’s weapons and implants, so he brought
his active sensors online. He directed a deep scan toward Ken.

Immediately, Ken looked up and stiffened in his seat,
turning his head to face Damon directly. When he tried to read the returns from
his scan, he found that they had been blocked. According to his telemetry, Ken
was not even there.

Shielded?
Damon thought,
but how?
Realizing he
was not going to be able to keep this quiet, he stood with hands held down and
palms outward trying to be as non-threatening as possible. Damon slowly
approached Ken and detected twelve others converging as well.

“I really don’t want any trouble, I just want to ask you a
few questions. Scan my implants and enhancements; I think you’ll see that no
one here can stop me.”

Ken’s eyes took on an unfocused look as he reviewed his HUD,
and Damon watched as they slowly widened in surprise.

“Wow,” Ken said, “you’re not kidding.” He addressed the
targets surrounding Damon, “Guys, he’s right, now we have to hope he’s friendly.”

After some hesitation, all of the targets moved back, but
Damon kept tabs on them anyway. “Is it all right if I sit with you for a moment?”

“Sure, come on over,” Ken gestured to the seat across the
table.

“Thank you,” Damon approached slowly, still wary himself,
and reached for the chair opposite Ken. He sat down and the chair creaked
menacingly under his weight.

Immediately, Damon’s HUD went crazy with various warnings,
alerts, and threat assessments. He’d never seen anything like it, and he
hesitated for a few seconds, trying to decipher what was happening. Apparently,
every one of his systems was under direct electronic warfare attack. He found
that it was difficult to move since his control system was barely responsive.
He noted that there were now twenty incoming targets, but he couldn’t deploy
any weaponry. He tried to stand, but his legs were unresponsive. Luckily, his
armor was ‘going turtle’ as a fail-safe, so he was very well protected.
Confident that the approaching targets did not offer any serious threat, he
concentrated on the various warning icons. One at a time, he cleared them,
directing the control system to handle each threat in turn. In a matter of
thirty seconds, he had complete control restored. He charged up the Trip-PC and
pointed it at Ken’s head.

The Trip-PC was Damon’s favorite weapon because of its pure
firepower, but it also had a stunning visual impact. When deployed, Damon’s
hand bent downward at the wrist and a 40mm barrel emerged from the top of his
forearm. Obviously nasty and all business, the weapon glowed green and made a
distinctive hum when charged. In the low light of the bar it was an
intimidating sight. Pointed at a person’s face from two feet away was something
Damon wouldn’t want to experience.

 “You probably know what this is,” he waited and Ken nodded,
“and I’m going to guess your shielding is useless against it.” Another pause
and slowly Ken nodded again, never taking his eyes from the muzzle protruding
from Damon’s wrist.

 “Now,” Damon continued, “can we talk in a civilized manner?”

“I don’t seem to have a choice anyway,” Ken’s voice cracked,
“Now would you please put that thing away?” Damon retracted and discharged the
Trip-PC. His wrists were back to normal and there was little sign of the menace
lurking beneath the surface of his skin.