Chronicles of a Space Mercenary 0: Tanya, page 11
Chapter 37
“She’s there!” Jason snapped. “Her ship is still docked!”
“We’ve searched the entire city.” The Simian said with some exasperation, some part of him at conflict with wanting to get angry with Handler, but that made very little sense to him in his limited fashion. He was very happy with his employment and his life, and he would not wish to anger Handler.
“Search it again.” Jason snapped and hung up.
“Not going well, dear?” Felone asked, not bothering to look up from her computer screen. They were sleeping together out of boredom, as they had upon occasion, and Felone had gotten started calling him dear, though not as an endearment.
“You’ll try my patience one too many times.” Jason snapped before he could hold it in, really angry this time, but all this did was bring Felone’s head up and a laugh to her lips.
“You wish you had the balls.” Felone said scathingly, for a moment showing her true nature, that of the emotionless cold-blooded killer.
Jason didn’t comment, his anger instantly melting away in the face of the possibility that he might really push Felone too far one day. Normally, Jason didn’t give two shits what he said to Felone, but it wasn’t just a matter of fearing her or not. He feared her, but she needed him as much as he needed her. The Organization was far too complex for one person to run alone, and so no matter how badly they had gotten along over the years they both recognized the need to work as a team.
But as Jason looked at Felone’s angry face he decided that this might be one of those times when it was best not to push her any further than he already had. He was well aware that this entire mess was his fault, even if he wouldn’t admit it openly. And things were not going as planned.
Jason could never forget how he and Felone built the Organization in the first place. It was their success as a hit team, and that success largely Felone’s doing, that necessitated the recruiting of their own Operatives to handle all the new work that was coming in as a result of their growing reputation. They were now known far and wide in the kinds of circles where such services were required, but there could be no forgetting how they began, nor how very dangerous Felone really was.
Felone had also later received the same enhancement as Tanya, the success with her enhancement paving the way for more testing and research until finally they had both undergone the actual procedure. There was no rejection with Felone like with Tanya, and the transition had been the smoothest Jason had seen of any type of enhancement even with the much more volatile and unpredictable Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal augmentation.
Jason almost died during his conversion. He wanted to and was sure he was going to, his screams every bit as loud as Tanya’s as his body fought ferociously to reject it. But something had finally given way within him and he eventually accepted the enhancement. His recovery took a long time though, much longer than either Tanya or Felone, and so even though he was as fully enhanced as they he didn’t want to have to put those abilities to the test against either of them. Both Tanya and Felone were naturals.
“It may just be the two of us in the end.” Felone said, having calmed down and apparently also having read his mind. “Tanya will get them all, there’s no doubt of that, and we’ll have to finish it ourselves. Just like the old days, right Jason?” It wasn’t really a question. She was telling him how things were going to be. She went back to her computer screen and left Jason to his own troubled thoughts.
Chapter 38
Tanya was waiting immobile in the total darkness of the warrens for more than forty-eight hours. Not moving, barely breathing, waiting. The patient hunter is always rewarded. Tanya was almost rewarded too well this time. There were three of them and they weren't taking chances.
Tanya caught sight of their thermal glow long before she heard a sound. They were far too good for that, but they weren't good enough to have forced themselves to keep wearing their thermal retardant suits. They carried no lights, counting on the assumption that Tanya would have given up her thermal retardant suit as well. They were mistaken. Lying prone inside a rotted crumbling place in the wall, and reducing her heart beat through rhythmic slow breathing, she wasn't even uncomfortable. A little warm at most, and impatient, but she didn’t let that impatience transfer to her body. It was in her mind alone.
The Simians began slowly to draw nearer. They were moving with the utmost caution. A limited intellect did not mean a limited cunning. Their simian enhancements reduced intellect but raised their reliance on their instincts. They were as wary as any animal, but they weren’t in their own forest and that was all that Tanya needed to even the odds. There were still three of them and only the one her, and who knew how many more were near enough to intercede if Tanya couldn’t silence them before they could react?
They were spread out. The first in line was meters ahead of the second, and the second meters ahead of the last. Tanya didn’t like the weapon the first in the group was carrying. It was an old style scatter-gun, although its manufacture would have been recent, and it was probably loaded with something much nastier than lead pellets. Tanya didn’t want to find out the hard way what it was packing. In all likelihood, some form of micro-flechette load. She should have thought of it herself, as it was ideally suited to the tight enclosed tunnels of the warrens; just swing it in your opponent’s general direction and pull the trigger. The Simian with the scatter-gun would have to be taken out first, negating her desire to let the last in the line pass before making her attack.
It seemed an eternity before the first of the three was alongside her crack in the wall, and for a moment, as it paused to sniff the air, Tanya thought for sure it had or would detect her, but the overpowering stench of the warrens confused whatever it thought it smelled and it slowly continued to move on past, its every sense on alert as some inner warning tried to make itself known, moving gracefully now as it stalked. Tanya shot it through the back, through the corrupted heart, closing her eyes as she depressed the actuator, to avoid the flash that would also momentarily blind the second two. Or so she hoped.
Tanya rolled free of the crevice and yanked the scatter-gun from the Simian’s now nerveless fingers before it could even begin to fall to the ground. She spun and discharged the weapon down the tunnel and into the two others, who were struggling through the haze of their momentary blindness to pick her out of the gloom, and since their vision was blurred from the flash of the laser and Tanya was emitting no thermal signature, the flash of the scatter-gun was the last thing either of them saw.
Chapter 39
The scatter-gun had blown them apart, Tanya noted with detachment as she quickly removed the first Simian’s bandoleer of scatter-gun shells. There was no time to waste. The thundering reverberation of the scatter-gun would have been heard for a great distance, and there could be no question as to the cause. They would be coming from every direction. They would be coming now, and Tanya had no idea how close they might already be. Throwing the bandoleers around her own shoulders and releasing the face mask of her thermal retardant suit, she began to run.
The location had not been a random one. There was only one place near here where a person, or Simian, could quickly gain the city above, a small crack in the ceiling just down from where she had laid in wait, and once she had climbed up through it, she pushed the huge bulk of an old wooden bureau over the opening and then continued to move upward through the building.
When she made it to the fourth floor she quickly took her place at a rotted windowsill and began to wait. There was beginning to wait, there was waiting, and then there was waiting for the waiting to end. That was her new existence, and it was a comfortable one.
Tanya hadn’t wanted to make so much noise when she made her attack, but she’d had little choice. The scatter-gun meant one shot, while her laser-pistol would have required two, and it would have provided the opportunity for one of them to retaliate if they fired at the laser’s flash as she blazed away. Both Simians had their weapons in their hands, and they were faster than most could imagine. But now she also had the scatter-gun. The thought was a pleasure, and at this point in her isolation some type of amusement was at least well deserved, if not necessary.
She leaned the scatter-gun against the wall as she pulled her face-shield down again now that her exertions were over, and now that she needed to be invisible again. Then she pulled her holstered weapons, the blaster in her right hand, the laser in her left as she waited. She didn’t have to wait too long this time. They were coming from every direction, and all converging on this spot.
A group of six of them slowly began working their way up the street within minutes, spread out in military fashion, using every piece of cover the street offered, and moving forward very slowly. Tanya idly wondered how many there were. A whole lot of them was her guess, though she didn’t actually know the true count of the Organization’s Operatives. She thought about how she had gotten herself into this. It was still worth it, though maybe it would be preferable to run for a while. She played a dialogue of the arguments in her head. She had to talk to someone, even if only herself and even if only in her own head.
By the way they were spread out Tanya seriously doubted she would be able to get more than two and that only by firing both her weapons simultaneously. The moment she opened up the rest would vanish like wisps of smoke on a strong breeze. Then they would encircle her. Or they would try to. Taking in a long breath and then easing it out slowly, Tanya stood up in the window, both weapons pointing down at the street below.
Chapter 40
Tanya chose as her targets two of the Simians who were working their way along the opposite side of the street, the two closest to her. Just a brief flicker of her eyes farther up the street to her right, and the blaster in her right hand following that flicker even as she looked back to her left to take careful aim with the laser. As her eyes locked on the left hand target both her weapons fired.
The laser shot took the closest Simian through his left eye as he looked up belatedly to find Tanya standing above him framed in the window and looking down at him over the flashing muzzle of her laser pistol.
The blaster shot was off by more than a meter, tearing a huge hole in the building next to the Simian but the concussion literally ripping him into pieces that went flying all across the street. Close was good enough with the blaster. She holstered her hand weapons and snatched up the scatter-gun as she took off at a run.
Tanya ran out of that apartment and down a long hall towards the rear wall of the old tenement building, the side farthest from the street, through another apartment and without pause she made a running stutter-step to adjust her timing. She went leaping right out the back window. The backs of the buildings, here at least, weren't as closely set together as were the sides of one building to another. It was a jump of about five meters, but Tanya's strength and coordination could not be measured in human terms. Satisfying herself with a quick glance below that there were no witnesses as she sailed across the span. She saw nothing and then she was landing on the sill of the window. There weren’t any guarantees that no one had seen her.
The cracked plas-crete brick sill shattered under her weight as she landed on it, simply disappearing from under her foot the moment her foot touched it, her forward momentum crashing her bodily into the remainder of the sill itself, her right knee slapping the ruined edge and somersaulting her head first into the room.
She tucked and rolled but she still hit the interior floor hard, rolling and sliding along the floor, the scatter-gun held protectively close, and when the room’s far wall abruptly halted her slide she rose and quickly surveyed herself. She had only lost some skin from the backs of her hands where they had cushioned the scatter-gun from slamming into the floor itself, but her knee was finished. That was obvious immediately.
She was seriously injured. She walked back and forth across the room a couple times, forcing herself to walk on it to test its severity. She could barely put any weight on it at all and it was already beginning to swell.
Not good. Not good with the entire Simian army bearing down on her. She wasn’t sure how long it was going to take them to figure out how she had escaped them, but she would never be able to escape them that way again. Not until she could get into a ‘doc, and there would be no hospitals here. At least, none where surgeries to help people where performed.
She was sure they would be storming her recently vacated building momentarily, and if it had to be a fight to the finish then she would start finishing it now. She could not escape. It was as simple and obvious as that. Tanya had come to the end of the line. She would run no farther.
Chapter 41
The monopod went on the broken sill, sitting unevenly where the sill was crumbled, but that was all right. Tanya was sitting a little unevenly herself, favoring her knee, her left leg tucked in Indian-style, her worthless right leg thrown out in front of her, but slightly bent and causing her to lean a bit as she settled the butt-plate of the blast-rifle to her shoulder and looked down its sights at the building just vacated.
Just then explosions shook that building as the Simians stormed it from several points. Tanya held her finger just above the actuator of her leveled blast-rifle, biding her time now, just moments away from making her assault and revealing her location.
There was nothing to lose; when they did not find her there, they would expand their search to the surrounding buildings and it would be over. She would go out now at the time of her own choosing. She had lived her entire life regulated by someone else’s terms, so it had never truly been her own from the beginning. At least now, at the end of that life which had never been hers, she could choose the terms of her death. Her finger settled towards the actuator.
“Stop Tanya.” The voice said. Tanya flopped onto her back bringing the blast-rifle over and centering it on the old man standing in the doorway, holding up empty hands to show her that he was unarmed. She did not know him, nor had she heard his approach. It was a thing to keep in mind; whoever he was, he could move without making a sound. If he had, she would have heard it.
“How do you know my name?” Tanya demanded.
“You speak now.” Was all he said. Tanya was nearly thunderstruck as she looked at the old man. He looked to be about ninety, but that probably meant he was somewhere in his sixties or seventies. If he was in his late sixties or seventies, then…
“Malcomb?” Tanya asked. He bore a slight resemblance to that long ago personage only recently remembered, but those memories brilliantly clear in her mind. Tanya could hardly believe it was him. The years had not been kind to him, whereas with her numerous Rejuvenations she looked barely older than she had then, which was obviously how Malcomb had recognized her.
“You had better let me help you.” He said as he walked up. “They’ll be coming soon.”
He was far stronger than he looked and he helped her up, his gaunt frame hiding a wiry strength that had been beaten into it by the brutal daily struggle for life here. He poured an eloquent look into her eyes after he’d noted her swollen fatigues, but when he spoke, it wasn’t to her. Nor was it words. It was the squeak of a rat.
Instantly more than a dozen well-armed youth rushed noiselessly into the room from the hallway and took up defensive positions around the windows. All looked to be professionals, if you discounted their relative youth, but Tanya had neither heard nor even known they had been there and that meant they were professionals. Professionals trained in the same school Tanya had attended.
All were armed in one fashion or another. A few had really old projectile rifles, but mostly old lasers of one variety or other, and Tanya pointed to the scatter-gun she had left leaning against the wall as three youths detached themselves from the group and began helping her out of the room. Malcomb glanced at the weapon and turned back to nod once. She and Malcomb, and the other children of that long gone era, had lived this role before and knew what the other would do in any given situation better than a twin knows what his own sibling will do; it was not necessary to speak vocally to communicate because they had developed their own type of signing, when Tanya couldn’t speak, to bridge the communication barrier with one another and now Malcomb had transmuted that form of silent communication into a battle/defensive language with this new group.
It employed the same signs Tanya and Malcomb used to communicate with one another all those years ago. As the three boys helped her out of the room all Tanya could think was the fact that not only had Malcomb survived, but had continued to provide for the children of the ghetto since Tanya had disappeared!
Tanya had truly come home. Home to the only family she ever knew.
Chapter 42
The scope of what she was witnessing was almost beyond imagining. The dozen or so kids who set up the defensive perimeter around the room where they’d found her were only part of a much larger group. They hustled her down through the old tenement building towards the warrens below, moving Tanya as quickly as they could, the entire group, or whichever part of it was here at this moment, slowly pulling in behind them as they descended.
Tanya was reassured by their precision; she had not thought to tell Malcomb just how dangerous the Simians were, but by the well trained orderly actions of the group, the absolute quiet in which they functioned, left little doubt in Tanya’s mind that Malcomb and this group knew their business. He would not have survived to his age here if he hadn’t.
They had just reached the warrens when the sound of fighting erupted from above, the Simians running nearly blindly into the tail end of the unexpectedly large resistance. The distinct detonation of a number of projectile weapons was followed instantly by blasters. The children’s lasers were relatively quiet unless they struck something explosive, but the effectiveness of this group’s lasers could be defined by how quickly the blasters were silenced.
