Terranova planetary nearspace
Michael drifted in and out of consciousness. He floated on a sea of drug-induced calm, untroubled by the fact that he had been in a box the size of a coffin inside a container of mining machinery for hours now. What did bother him was an itch somewhere down by his left ankle, an itch he could not reach no matter how hard he wriggled and squirmed. The plasfiber box was simply too small. He did his best to ignore it, but cut off from the outside world except for transient shifts in the ship’s artificial gravity field that told him only that he had been moved onboard a shuttle, he had little else to focus on.
He wondered when to start panicking. He should have been released hours ago. Six hours, he had been promised; six hours to clear Fed border security for transfer to the freighter to take him to Lagerfeld.
Right from the start, he’d resigned himself to a long wait. The entire consignment had been lashed with a nearly lethal dose of x-rays during security scanning, sending his neuronics into a near panic, alarms urging him to get the hell out of there. Even now the nanobots loaded into his system worked furiously to repair the damage to his system the x-rays had inflicted.
In the end, border security must have been satisfied by the scan. Otherwise, they’d have torn the container apart and he’d be in custody. That would have been interesting in light of the fact that he was supposed to be dead. He sighed. So what if things were not running to schedule? As long as his supply of sedatives held out, he didn’t care. He tried not to think about how he’d feel if they did run out. Michael suffered, and badly, from claustrophobia, and he had never been in such a tight space.
So he did the only thing he could do: He upped his sedatives and within minutes was asleep.
“Hey, spacer! Wake up!”
Michael opened his eyes. Where the hell … Then he remembered. He focused with an effort-he might have overdone the sedatives a bit, he realized-and looked up into Sergeant Shinoda’s anxious face.
“Oh, hi,” he mumbled.
“You had us worried. Now let’s get you out of there.”
With an effort, Shinoda and a second marine-one of the four making up the security detail Jaruzelska had insisted on sending along-levered him out of the coffinlike box and stood him on his feet.
Shinoda’s nose wrinkled. “I think we left you in there a bit long.”
“Now that you mention it,” Michael said, flushing with embarrassment, “I think you did. There’s only so much those diapers can take, so show me to the shower.”
“This way,” Shinoda said, standing well clear and pointing to the access door leading from the freighter’s cargo bay.
Michael cradled a welcome cup of coffee as Shinoda popped the silver cube of a near-field jammer onto the table. “So what happened?” Michael asked.
“Those assholes at border security smelled a rat. At first we thought they’d been tipped off, but it turned out they just wanted to know why we were taking mining machinery to Lagerfeld.”
“Fair question. The mines there stopped production a century ago. But you showed them our end-user certificates?”
“We did, but of course they had to check. I mean, would you accept an end-user certificate from the Live-in-Hope Mining Company?”
Michael laughed. “I guess not.”
“So they checked, and that took a while-” Shinoda turned to glare at the gangly marine sitting alongside her. “-which it need not have done if Marine Clothcock Mitchell here-” She reached out and smacked the back of Mitchell’s head. “-hadn’t given the border security guys some lip.”
“Hey, sarge,” the man protested.
“Don’t fucking ‘hey, sarge’ me, Marine Mitchell. I’ve told you before: Keep your damn mouth shut. If I need you to speak, I’ll tell you. Understood?”
Mitchell nodded.
“Anyway,” Shinoda continued, “the Live-in-Hope Mining Company duly came back to say that all was aboveboard. Turns out the border security guys thought we might have been planning to sell the consignment to the Rogue Worlds.”
“Well, Lagerfeld does trade with them.”
“It does.”
Michael looked around the battered bulkheads of the tiny compartment that passed for the ship’s passenger saloon. “Not the best ship I’ve ever been in,” he said.
“The Golden Gladiator?” Shinoda chuckled. “She’ll do. The captain’s a strange man, the mate’s even weirder, but the engineer is solid as rock. We’ve had a look around. She’s an old ship, but they look after her.”
“So we’ll get to Lagerfeld okay?”
“We will … Let me see; yes, another day and half should see us there.”
“Any changes to the plan?”
“None. We transfer to the President Cruz as soon as we dock; it breaks orbit four hours later. We should be dirtside on Scobie’s on schedule.”
“Good,” Michael said. The moment of truth was fast approaching; he shivered at the thought of what it would take to get past DocSec security and safely dirtside on Commitment. For all the assurances he had been given by Jaruzelska, by Fellsworth, by the spooks from 66, by the tech guys from intelligence support, the fact was that the Hammers, always obsessed with their border security, were now beyond paranoid.
“You okay?” Shinoda asked.
“Oh, sorry,” Michael said. “I was just thinking about DocSec. Can’t say I’m looking forward to meeting them again.”
“We’ll be fine.”
“Yeah, we will,” Michael said. He tried to ignore the fact that they had a reasonable chance of not making it. “They got anything like a gym onboard this scow?”
“Hey! Don’t let the crew hear you calling their beloved Golden Gladiator a scow. They’ll tear you a new one.”
“Oops,” Michael said, chuckling. “So no gym?”
“Afraid not. But we have found some mats. We’ll be doing unarmed combat drills. Care to join us?”
Michael did not like the way a wolfish grin had appeared on Shinoda’s face. He sighed. “I hate marines. All you ever want to do is kick ass.”
“Never kicked the ass of a dead man before.”
Michael sighed again. “Well, now’s your chance. Come on, then. Let’s do it.”
• • •
With frightening speed and power, Shinoda scythed Michael’s legs from under him and smashed him into the mat with a sickening thud that drove the air from his lungs. An instant later, Shinoda had somehow gotten her arms around his throat and head, twisting and squeezing until Michael had to slap the mat in surrender.
Gasping, he dragged the air back into tortured lungs sip by agonizing sip. “You fucking bastard,” he wheezed.
“Had enough, spacer boy?” Shinoda said. She let him go and rolled away. “Honestly,” she said, standing up to pull Michael to his feet, “you Fleet guys are a bunch of pussies. You couldn’t fight off a three-legged dog.”
“Yeah, right,” Michael muttered. He tried to ease the aches out of his back and shoulders. “Anyway, better a pussy than a fucking psycho.”
“Not where we’re going. Now, you had enough?”
“One more, but show me how you did that throw.”
“Sucker! Right, stand like this … yes, okay. Now …”
Michael lay in his bunk in the half darkness. The only sound was the gentle hiss of the air-conditioning. The images of Shinoda and her four marines had stayed with him, stuck in his mind. It had been almost frightening to watch the carefully controlled mix of skill, finesse, speed, and brutality at work. Their drills looked like the real thing. More than once Michael had been sure, absolutely sure, that one of the team members would end up badly injured, even dead.
I might be the man to captain a dreadnought, he thought, but I want Shinoda and her marines alongside me when the fighting gets up close and personal.
But all the Shinodas in the world would count for nothing when they came up against DocSec.
DocSec did not need skill, finesse, or speed. They had the only thing they needed: brutality, and plenty of it.