Profiteer

“Maybe I will, when I’ve got a chance to think.” Sweat was rolling down her face, despite the cooling system, and she desperately wanted to wipe off her forehead. She blinked her eyes and wished for a sweatband.

 

“I just appreciated your concern for Mosasa.”

 

Shane nodded inside her helmet and kept watching the door. She thought she saw something and began to run her visor through its enhancement modes.

 

Random kept talking. “He’s the closest thing I have to a son.”

 

Please God, Shane thought, don’t tell me the AI’s losing it.

 

“Look, Random, I chose my team, okay? That’s you, Mosasa, everyone. Do you have any surveillance on the corridor out there?”

 

“No, they’ve locked me in. The only pictures I have are the ones they pipe in.”

 

Shane kept staring at the door. Her visor’s setting had locked into the IR, and the door was beginning to glow around the edges. Heat trails were piping in from the sides.

 

“Random, they’re cutting in from the other side now.”

 

“They’re early,” Random said matter-of-factly. “Some of the onboard marines must’ve been in position when we boarded.”

 

“It’ll take them two to five minutes to cut open the door.”

 

“How long for Mosasa—?”

 

“Seven to ten.”

 

“Been nice knowing you, Random.”

 

“You can hold them off. There can only be five at most.”

 

“Only one of me.”

 

Her chrono flipped over to 07:49.

 

Parts of the door were now glowing in the visible spectrum. The marines out there must have a cutting torch.

 

She dialed her MacMillan-Schmitt for maximum discharge. Not a setting recommended for firing inside enclosed spaces, especially with a fully charged wide-aperture plasma rifle. But a second shot probably wasn’t going to happen.

 

“What’re you doing?” asked Random.

 

“Setting this on full.”

 

“Isn’t that dangerous?”

 

Shane laughed. More like suicidal. There was a good chance of her filling this room with plasma backwash. That’d fry her just as bad as the troops outside the door. “The jet might vent out.”

 

“There’s only ten meters down that corridor before there’s another emergency door.”

 

“They might have cut through it.” There was a long silence after she said that. And after a while she said, “Then again, they might not have. You don’t have any idea, do you?”

 

“No, but if I were laying an ambush, I’d put them in one of the empty lockers down that hall.”

 

Shane nodded. “So I’m taking a chance.” After a moment, she added, “Maybe you should lock yourself up in that case of yours.”

 

As she heard the sounds of cables withdrawing and Random’s case closing, she considered the fact that she probably knew the marines on the other side of the door. She could surrender and escape with her life. For some reason the thought shamed her.

 

Ichose my team.

 

“I made my bed,” Shane whispered. “Now it’s time to die in it.”

 

Smoke was wisping from the bottom of the door. The edges were glowing red and occasionally the light from the cutting torch flashed along the edge. Parts of the door were warping inward.

 

It was 07:50.

 

“Think the others made it, Random?”

 

“Yes,” came the voice from the case’s speaker, behind her. “All the force is surrounding the ship.”

 

“Good. I’m glad.”

 

“No regrets?”

 

“Only one.”

 

“What?”

 

“I think I chose the wrong line of work.”

 

At 07:50:30, the door to the secondary computer core of the Barracuda-class troop-carrier Blood-Tide fell open and ex-Captain Kathy Shane fired her weapon.

 

<>

 

* * * *

 

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

 

Extreme Prejudice

 

 

“Nothing is so fierce as a coward who is backed into a corner.”

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

 

“A desperate disease requires a dangerous remedy.”

—Guy Fawkes

(1570-1606)

 

 

07:48:00 Godwin Local

 

 The elevator rose.

 

Johann Levy stared at the rifle on the floor in front of him and thought of Paschal.

 

Twelve years ago he had been a young lawyer rising in the Paschal hierarchy. There might have been a chance of rising in the secular arm of the Paschal government, if it weren’t for the revolution. If he hadn’t panicked. If he had stayed.

 

It was the colonel’s fault. Klaus Dacham had been a captain then, and he’d ordered the TEC reinforcements to roll over all the demonstrations. Five hundred dead, ten times that injured, ten times that imprisoned. Even the Paschal Elders who had called for help were shocked.

 

Levy had been one of the liberal voices in the establishment, but when he had seen most of his friends from the university disappear at the hands of the TEC, he had run. Left Paschal, left the Confederacy, left everything he had known, to come to this nihilistic little dirtball called Bakunin.

 

Levy had never forgiven himself for that.

 

Worse, he had left himself. He hadn’t even dared to apply for his own exit visa. He had stolen a friend’s and had left the planet wearing that identity. The real Johann Levy was most likely in some unmarked student’s grave on Paschal.