“Mr. Alvarez.” The Tahni gave an odd, otherworldly lilt to my last name. He was watching me back by the hopper he’d emerged from, arms folded in front of him.
“Lieutenant Alvarez,” I corrected him, though I don’t know why. It wasn’t as if I had ever asked anyone to call me by my rank since I’d mustered out. Must have been sheer bloody-mindedness.
“Lieutenant Alvarez,” Zan-Thint said, inclining his head toward me. “It has been instructional meeting you. I’m sure I’ll see you again.”
“Not,” I assured him, slipping into the driver’s seat of our vehicle, “if I see you first.”
6
“No, Goddammit, I don’t care!” Clines raged, throwing up his hand and stalking across our living room, heading for the door. Again. “I’m going back to my house, gonna grab my rifle and I’m gonna go up in the hills behind Hellnick’s house and pick off those fuckers one by one, I swear to God!”
“Dave, sit your ass down,” Brad Torrey insisted, this time not even bothering to get up from our dining room table, nor deigning to look up from the glass of vodka I’d poured for him. “It’s too damn late in the day for your hysterical bullshit.”
“Hysterical bullshit?” Clines rounded on him; face flushed. “Those are fucking Pirate-World cartel heavy hitters, Brad! They had a proton cannon in that shuttle! I’ll bet you anything they’re paying Hellnick to let them store weapons out on his property!”
I rubbed at my temples.
“Jesus, Dave, stop yelling. Just have a seat. Brad is here, we’re here, let’s sit down and talk about what to do.”
“Easy for you to say to stop yelling,” Clines grumbled, falling into one of the carved wooden chairs we’d bought for an absurdly low price here on-planet. Back on Earth, harvesting wood was illegal as shit and buying pre-ban wood furniture cost more than most people made in a year. “You didn’t have those assholes sticking guns in your face and threatening to take your property.”
“And if you’d listened to me and kept quiet,” I reminded him, “no one would have been threatening anything.”
“What are we gonna do about this?” Vicky asked, coming back from the kitchen with a glass of milk. She was, I noted, as cool as the first snowfall. Her hand didn’t shake and the surface of the milk stayed level and unbroken as she sat down beside me. “Seriously,” she added, glaring at Clines. “No more talk about sniping people. For one thing, they have hoppers and they’d just hose your position down from overhead and kill you. For another, you were Fleet Security and you’ve never sniped a Goddamned thing in your whole life. You can barely hit a rock dragon at a hundred meters.”
“Hey, now…,” he began to protest, but I interrupted him.
“Dave’s right, though, Hellnick is in on this. They’re either threatening him or paying him. We need to contact the Corporate Council, get the CSF down here.”
Clines snorted a laugh, slapping a palm on the tabletop and making Vicky’s milk splash a few droplets onto its polished surface. She shot him a glare but he wasn’t paying attention.
“The Corporate Security Force is a joke. They’re only interested in making sure the Council’s interests are looked after. They couldn’t care less about us shit-kickers.”
“If we try to handle this ourselves and don’t call them,” I pointed out, “and everything goes to shit, Hellnick is going to be the one reporting us. And we aren’t going to have much of a defense, legally.”
“Legally?” Clines repeated, staring at me wide-eyed. “What makes you think any of this will ever see the inside of a court?”
“We can’t call the CSF yet,” Torrey said. “Not until we talk to Hellnick. We need to know what he knows.”
“You really think that stuck-up asshole is going to tell us anything?”
“I think we’re going to give him the chance before we call the CSF or grab our guns and charge in shooting.” Torrey pulled out his ‘link and began typing a message on the screen. “I’m calling an emergency meeting of the Hausos Settlers’ Board for tomorrow afternoon, and I’m sending Hellnick an invitation he damned well better not refuse.” He looked up from the ‘link, his smile thin and rueful. “And the only reason I didn’t make it for tomorrow morning is because it already is tomorrow morning.”
“You’re welcome to sleep here, Brad,” I offered. “Or I can give you a ride back to your place.” We hadn’t discussed how he was going to get back home when the ESP hopper had dropped him off at our house. He lived a good hour’s drive from here, so I was hoping he’d agree to sleep over.
“Tell you what,” he said, “why don’t I sack out at Dave’s place? Then I can make sure he gets to that meeting tomorrow instead of doing something stupid like going after a bunch of weapons smugglers with a damned hunting rifle?” He tilted his head toward Clines. “Is that okay with you, Dave?”
Clines looked as if he was going to debate the point, but then he checked our faces and when it became clear that neither Vicky nor I were going to support him on this, his shoulders sagged in defeat.
“Hell,” he sighed, “you might as well drive. I’m so worked up, I’d probably steer us into a damned tree.”
“You two be there on time tomorrow,” Torrey told us, emphasizing the point with a knife-hand directed at each of us in turn. “And just like the Corps, on time means fifteen minutes early. Remember, you were both officers. Don’t let this civilian farmer shit turn you into slovenly former NCO’s like Dave here.”
“Fuck you, Brad,” Clines said, shooting him a bird as he headed out the door. “I don’t know why the hell we put an officer in charge of the Settlers’ Board. All you ever want to do is order people around.”
“Which is why they put me in charge.”
And then they were out the door. I should, if I’d been worried about being a good host, have walked them out to the porch and watched them go, but I felt drained, exhausted, as if I’d just fought a battle. I wasn’t sure if it was the hour or the comedown from the adrenaline high, but I could barely move and I didn’t want to think. Thinking would make me actually consider what had happened.
“You don’t agree,” Vicky said. It wasn’t a question, but I answered it anyway.
“No, I don’t.”
“What do you want to do about it?”
“What I want to do,” I told her, honest with her because I always was, “is pack everything up and buy tickets on the first ship out of here.”
She smiled, her dark eyes piercing through me.
“And what are you going to do?”
“We should get to sleep,” I told her. “We’re going to need to get an early start.”
The comms building wasn’t hard to find. It was wooden shack sitting at the foot of a transmission antennae a hundred meters tall. It had seemed like a waste of resources to me the first time I’d seen it. After all, on Earth and the core colonies, there were strings of satellites to handle off-world transmissions, but this wasn’t Earth, and it wasn’t even one of the Periphery colonies, much less the core. Hausos was in the ass-end of nowhere and we didn’t rate comm satellite strings. Instead, we got this one transmission tower in the center of our one poor excuse for a town, and if it was facing the wrong direction, well then, you waited until it was facing the right direction before you transmitted.