The Vastalimi Gambit (8 page)

Fluffy almost drooled at that.
Only
a few million?

“Let me call up a deposit contract—”

“Well, here’s the thing. I must confess I have spoken to representatives of the Bundaloh Miners Association, and they have offered a generous interest rate if we use their credit union.”

“BMA is a fine organization, to be sure, but they don’t have our resources, M. Demonde. You would be better served by BG across the board.”

Gramps allowed himself to look indecisive. “BMA is smaller, but they are eager for our business. They’ve offered some sweeteners.”

“Which BG will match and exceed. They can’t beat our interest rate on short-term-yield CoDs.”

“There is one thing they seemed somewhat reluctant to do.”

“Name it.”

“There is another SMC operating on-planet. As it happens, they are the opposition to CFI on our current assignment. I would very much like all available information on them. Nothing illegal, of course, no confidences broken, nothing untoward. A man in your position would surely have access to such information.”

“I confess I have not heard about this competing military corporation,” Fluffy said. “Certainly, they are not depositors here.”

“But you could find out where they are keeping their money? And perhaps some, ah . . . background information?”

“For a client who is willing to put a few million New Dollars into my bank? I am certain I can.”

“I was hoping that you would say that. Why don’t we transfer, say, a million or so into a new account to get things rolling, and the rest when you have something for me?”

“I’ll punch up the deposit agreement, M. Demonde.”

“Call me ‘Gramps.’”

Fluffy smiled.

Gramps returned the smile. “Always a pleasure to do business with a man of the galaxy,” he said. He almost added “Fluffy,” but fortunately managed to hold off on that.

Wink sat in a chair outside Droc’s office, waiting for Kay and Droc, playing with his knife. He spun and twirled the stubby-bladed weapon this way and that, rolling it from hand to hand.

The knife was a spearpoint design, dropped just a hair, with a short, thick blade. It was single-edged, Damascus, four kinds of tool steel blended and hammered until there were 416 layers. The metal had been acid-etched to showcase the folded pattern; the steel was darkened to shades of gray and black and thus would not reflect light to draw attention in the night.

That helped it function, and it also made it pretty.

Hammer-forging made for a strong, pliable steel, and the temper gave it a hardness that held a razored edge. The handle was also fat, a cylinder longer than the blade, stabilized maple burl, pressure-stained a deep red. The guard was a sculpted oval, the same steel as the blade. It was a functional, useful knife, and Wink was most comfortable using it. He was, after all, a surgeon, at ease with sharps, be they steel, vibratos, or obsidian. When your main tool is a knife, best you learn how to use it well.

This was something he tended to do when there wasn’t anything else to occupy him, and he’d had this particular knife long enough so that it had become a well-practiced and smooth activity.

In a fight where he had to use it, he’d never risk dropping the weapon by dicking around with such moves. Wink knew guys like that. Somebody threatened them, a knife would appear magically, they’d give it a few showy spins to let whoever it was see they were good, and not to be fucked with, and apparently such would draw the “Oh, shit!” reaction often enough to short-circuit trouble.

There was something to be said for this. A big cat flashing its teeth might scare off lesser predators.

For his money, if he had to pull a knife, it was going to be because he had to use it pretty soon, and that meant whoever was in his face or coming up on his back was probably already past the point of being shooed off. When the adrenaline flowed, those small movements you could do in your sleep almost reflexively tended to go away—it was the nature of the system. Big muscles, the ones that worked for running and jumping and getting the fuck away from a predator, those took over, and fine motor control went into the toilet. Wink had seen guys who could plug the bull’s-eye on a target all day long at fifty meters miss an incoming trooper at spitting distance with an entire magazine’s worth of ammo.

Primal fear could be a killer.

Shoving a knife was a big motion, not like squeezing a trigger.

Twirling it was not a big motion. And if your weapon was a knife, you most certainly didn’t want to
drop
it when you needed it most.

As an adrenaline junkie, Wink tended to slide past that—he lived for the rush and had learned how to function when it took him for the ride. Chances were, he was going to hit his target, or stick it, just fine.

Of course, handling the knife like this made it into an extension of his hand. He did that with his handguns, too. If you were completely familiar with a weapon’s balance, the heft, the way it would move if you did this instead of that? That was a plus, come the real need . . .

The door slid open, and Kay came in, followed closely by Droc.

Wink slipped the knife back into the sheath behind his right hip. It was old-style, cloned-leather rather than pressure-formed plastic. A bit bulkier, but more organic. Plus, he liked the feel and the smell of leather.

“Anything?”

Kay shook her head. “Completely nonreactive for zoodozoa.”

“Damn.”

It had seemed like a promising lead. Zoodozoa were a pseudolife-form discovered eighty years ago in a methane sea on some godforsaken moon somewhere. Not exactly flora or fauna, they had viral-like qualities, were as small as medium-sized varieties of viruses, and they had been implicated in some esoteric illnesses among humans. The zoodozoa tended to hide inside cell nuclei, where they were hard to spot even if you knew to look for them, and while they caused problems, they didn’t replicate with any kind of predictable regularity, nor in numbers enough to jump out at somebody trying to find anomalies. Sneaky little bastards.

“Some of my colleagues are beginning to invoke notions of religion or magic,” Droc said. “We are cursed by the gods for our hubris and the like.”

“Yeah, well, if that’s the case, we are shit-out-of-luck,” Wink said. “But excuse me if I don’t buy that one.”

“Not religious?”

“Actually, I don’t have a problem with the idea of something beyond the physical. Lot of strange stuff out there in the galaxy. But I don’t believe in a deity who manifests as a giant white-haired old man in the sky setting up roadblocks, hurling lightning bolts, or striking us down with assorted plagues. That seems awful petty for any kind of being capable of building or destroying universes with the wave of its appendage. Why bother?”

“Who can know the mind of a god?” Droc said. “And it would be a white-furred old Vastalimi and not a human around here. Our deities are territorial.”

Wink looked at him. Funny guy, Kay’s brother.

“However, I agree with your assessment of God,” Droc continued. “I see Him as a twirler. He sets the galaxies in spin, then moves off to other serious business. Whether He or She will be on the Other Side when our spirits arrive there, if indeed they do? Who can say? I also doubt that an omnipotent being needs to poke a finger into the doings of Vastalimi or humans or any other species on an individual level.”

“On the other hand,” Kay said, “if that were the case, we could importune God to lift this particular affliction and perhaps Zhe would see fit to do so, if we asked properly.”

“You believe that?”

Kay smiled. “Not for a human second.”

“Which leaves us where we were before.”

“Well, it eliminates another possible cause,” Droc said.

There was a pause. Then: “Epidemiological inquiries have come up empty, other than the illness has occurred in families or in close associates. I am positing some kind of intentional introduction of an unnatural causative agent by unknown parties,” Kay said.

“Based on?”

“Based on the theory that somebody wanted to kill Vastalimi deliberately using a method that wouldn’t likely be traced back to them. Either a particular target, without regard to sequelae regarding others; or with mass murder in mind, for whatever reasons.”

Wink nodded. That made as much sense as a natural, completely undetectable disease, more so, actually. More diabolical creations had come from labs proportionately than from nature. Why somebody would go to this much effort, were that the case, might be beyond easy measure, but that it was possible? People had been coming up with ways to kill each other since people became such, and they had gotten better and better at it . . .

“We have studied the patients with this affliction from various standpoints,” Kay said. “Primarily medical, then geographical, genetically, environmentally, looking for links that would isolate a natural cause. If the illness is artificial, then we won’t find those particular links. So we need to examine other factors, based on that notion.”

Wink nodded. “What might they have in common regarding their sociology rather than biology. Who are their friends and enemies? Who might they have pissed off?”

“Exactly,” Kay said. “If there is something that links them together worth murdering them for, and we can find it, we can backtrack that and figure out who is responsible.”

“It is a thin theory,” Droc said.

“If you have a thicker one, Brother, I’m ready to hear it.”

Droc shook his head. “A small chance is better than none.”

Wink said, “So, how do we start?”

“The Shadows can parse much of it. They have the ability—if it can be found, they can find it—if they have sufficient reason to look. They might need more than a theory, though my sister will at least listen. We can continue our own investigation. We know the names of those afflicted, and in which order they became such. The dead will have family, friends, coworkers, and they are potential sources of information.

“If we ask the right person the right question, it might open a door.”

“Works for me,” Wink said. “Let’s go places and talk to people.”

_ _ _ _ _ _

Gunny was dozing off in her chair when Cutter said, “Okay, what do we have?”

They were in the conference room, the walls still smelling faintly of ferrofoam-setting solution, a not-particularly-pleasant chemical stink.

Gramps said, “I have the bank they use, and where they buy their local supplies, courtesy of our new banker, Fluffy.”

The others looked at him. “A nickname, based on his hairstyle. I didn’t get a location. Probably they have a bivouac somewhere away from their main camp, too, but we can poke into the deliveries.”

Cutter nodded. “Formentara?”

“Like so many of the stone-age planets you drag us to, this one is lacking much in the way of technology.” Zhe kept hir face deadpan. “They do have augmentation parlors here—mostly muscle and endurance augs for the miners, a few that offer more than basics. I was able to determine that there have been a few soldiers newly arrived, in for tune-ups, and a backwalk of their payments for such services link to the corporate account Gramps found.”

“Which is a shell,” Gramps added. “‘John S. Mosby & Associates.’” He smiled.

Cutter grinned, too.

“What’s funny?” Jo asked.

“Our competition has a sense of history,” Cutter said. “John Mosby was the leader of a military unit on prespaceflight Earth during a large and nasty early-industrial regional war. Led a group of rangers, guerrilla forces, hit-and-run against much larger armies. Quite successful, albeit they were on the losing side.

“Mosby was, I believe, a colonel by the end. He was known as the Gray Ghost, based on uniform color and his ability to vanish when pursued. You should brush up on your history, Jo.”

“Friend of yours?” Gunny said, smiling at Gramps.

“Johnny? Sure, knew him well. One of J. E. B. Stuart’s boys. Great soldier. Became a diplomat after the war. He was a lawyer, but I never held that against him. I thought you were from that region—why don’t you know this?”

Gunny shook her head. Point to Gramps, for the research.

“Gunny?” Cutter said.

“Scuttlebutt from the pubs, but my source seems fairly reliable. Seems there’s a group of ‘religious tourists’ who have rented a parcel of land a couple hundred klicks southeast of Adit. Some kind of retreat, so the story goes. They’ve built a camp and seem to be importing a lot of supplies in heavy-duty vans and hoppers. Maybe they are erecting big idols or something.”

Cutter said, “So that gives us something to look into, doesn’t it? Can we get a spysat overfly?”

“Not unless we launch it ourselves,” Jo said. “The locals are touchy about such things. Might could hack into one long enough to get a view, but if they are running camo, we won’t see anything.”

“Do we have a bird in stock?”

“Not as such. I could buy us one.”

Cutter shook his head. “Seems like a lot of expense, given as how we have all you highly trained and well-paid soldiers who can figure out cheaper ways to put eyes on the site.”

“Might could sneak a couple of firefly drones over, drop a few birdshit cams in,” Jo allowed. “Though if they are any good, they’ll find and disable those pretty quick. Even the on-demand-only transmitters would trigger halfway-decent scanners, and they’d zap the cams.”

“Which would tell us something, wouldn’t it?”

“Yeah, either they are undercover mercs or really paranoid religious nuts. Unfortunately, it would tell them something, too.

“Too bad Kay isn’t here. She could sneak in and out, nobody the wiser.”

“Well, I leave it to you, Jo. It’s why you get paid the big money.”

“Thanks. I’ve been meaning to talk to you about a raise.”

“Next assignment.”

“That’s what you always say, Rags.”

“And don’t you want a consistent commander? Besides, what would you do with more money? I have to force you to take leave now as it is. You probably have more noodle in the bank than the rest of us put together.”

“No,” Gramps said, “that would be Formentara. Zhe’s richer than some planets. And zhe doesn’t spend it, either. I had that much, I’d retire.”

Jo shook her head at Cutter. “Amazing how good you are at changing the subject.”

“Mark of a good commander. You gonna stand around all day or get us some useful intel?”