Rebel Hell (Hell's Jesters, #3), page 26
Ben stepped into the feeble light of pre-dawn, breath puffing from his nostrils in the cold like plumes from a charging boar’s snout. “The old days,” he growled. “In the old days this lout would’ve made off with your wallet. Or didn’t you remember?”
“Better than making off with someone else’s wife,” Tim fired back.
The blaze of Ben’s stare was as obvious as embers blown in a fire. Uh-oh...too soon. The man turned that glare on the others. “All of you leave.” He glanced at the men at his back that’d followed him here. “All of you.” He waited until the party had dissolved into shadows in the dark before returning his attention to Tim.
Benjamin Jarvis stood nearly as tall as Tim with the broad, hard build of a lifetime of honest work. His wide-jawed face clenched into a scowl Tim knew wasn’t natural on a face accustomed to smiles and softer words. But catastrophe had changed them all. He clenched the blastrifle from Kelly’s Hellhound and, for a moment, Tim wondered if he’d pushed him to breaking already. But he set it on the ground as he took up a seat on a knob of tree root and studied him with tired, mournful eyes.
“I knew you’d come back.”
“I didn’t.”
“Then that must make me the smarter, for once.” He shook his head. “It was in your nature. You could never leave well enough alone. You always had to poke-poke-poke.”
“How’s Kelly?”
“She’s fine. We just had a nice talk, about you and her and the Hell’s Jesters.”
“I don’t know what she—”
“Tim, stop.” Ben held up a hand to restrain him. “Just...don’t bother with another of your lies or tall tales or charm. She told me.”
Tim pressed his lips into a line and shrugged.
“You’ve been to town, I understand?”
Tim kept his lips clamped.
“You have. And that means you’ve seen.”
“I saw her, if that’s what you’re asking.” He glowered at the man that had taken his wife. “I suppose you’re going to bring us in?”
Ben’s face took on the lugubrious aspect of a house collapsed in the dark. “You’ve seen then,” he said quietly, “but you haven’t understood.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Did you see Pastor Esau?”
“The lunatic? Yeah, I got a look at him. Heard him, too. He sounds like one of the poor devils on the street corners in Mosby, after the city ran out of funds and had to close the Asylum.” Tim spat to one side. “I always knew Johnsville folk were simpletons, but I didn’t know they were suckers.”
“You only got a glimpse,” Ben replied. “You don’t understand the...power he has over people.”
“The power to make people give up their brains? That’s no kind of power I want to be around.”
“You and I, both.”
Tim started to snarl, but held up. “What...are you talking about?”
He considered Tim for a long time before saying, “Now I’m the one with a story for you. You think you can keep that big mouth of yours shut long enough for me to tell it?”
“Maybe.”
Ben paused, considered again. “No one’s totally sure where he came from,” he began. “He showed up in town right before Loudon declared for the Union. Things already weren’t going well, then. The government in Mosby had nationalized industry and agriculture for the emergency and prices just collapsed. People were losing their farms. People were getting desperate.” He looked at the ground. “Heck, I was getting desperate.” He met Tim’s gaze again. “He sounded crazy at first. But crazy started to sound good. People started following him around. Soon mobs attended him and people were putting him up in their homes, just to have him preach off their front porches. Even the mayor granted him a stipend.”
“Sounds like you were the crazy ones.”
“We were!” he exclaimed, seemed surprised at it. “But you wouldn’t know. You weren’t here, of course.” His stare grew venomous. “You never were.”
“From the sound of it, I’m glad.”
Ben ground his teeth before continuing his story. “He had this message that made sense, after you heard it over and over again. But people did start getting suspicious. Sheriff Tolliver started looking into him, asking of neighboring districts. Things didn’t add up. I few of us were starting to raise a fuss. But then Tolliver disappeared. Things started to get real weird. And then...”
He gestured up at the sky, colored now by the earliest rays of dawn, a hideous blood-red, the whorls of ash-cloud bunching like clotted gore.
Tim shivered, remembering Esau’s apocalyptic message.
“After the skies burned, his message didn’t just make sense; it was reality. When people scrambled about, losing their minds, looking for truth, there he was. At first the Major went along. But Esau wasn’t satisfied, said he was standing in the way. He formed a Citizens’ Committee and they voted to dissolve his position. When he wouldn’t stand for it, Esau’s committee lynched him.”
“Mayor Pfalz?” Tim gasped. Pfalz had been magistrate of Johnsville for two generations because no one else cared about the largely powerless position. He’d been a jolly, vaguely greasy, corpulent man who loved to talk. He’d been mostly harmless, too, having a natural disdain for work.
“That’s right,” Ben said tonelessly, haunted stare betraying that he’d obviously seen the act. “They beat him half to death in his own front yard and then hung him from a tree to finish the job.”
“Shit.”
Ben nodded. “Indeed. After that, a number of us had had enough. We tried reaching out to whatever central government remained. McClintock and her idiots didn’t care, were too busy sucking up to Syntar. And Syntar sure as heck didn’t care. So we tried taking matters into our own hands. But Esau had the numbers and the guns. There was a fight—” he winced “—a short one. We ran. We’ve been hiding out up here, since, looking for another chance.”
“Another chance...” Tim started to say. But an icy jolt snapped through his nerves. He blinked once, looked squarely at the other man. “Ben, Nikki was there with him.”
He grimaced and gave a single, jerky nod.
“Yes. Tim. She is with him.”
Tim felt his face contort with the twist of his gut. He couldn’t describe the sensation to himself, could only liken it to discovering something horrific and unexpected, like the time he and some of the other boys found Old Man Eaton dead in the woods—likely dropped by natural causes, but half eaten by dires.
“Ben, I...don’t know what to say.”
He chortled humorlessly. “Now I’ve seen it all; Tim Watkins without a smart comment to offer the world.”
And that was true. Tim opened his mouth, but couldn’t find words to fill it.
“So you can appreciate how your timely arrival makes things awful darned complicated for me.”
“I didn’t come back for her,” Tim blurted, surprising himself because it really was true.
“You expect me to believe that?”
“I don’t give a damned what you believe. But it’s true.”
“So you came back to save all the poor, oppressed people of Loudon?” Ben drawled with sarcasm. “Tim Watkins, who’s always been such a crusader...?”
“I...” Words tangled together in his mind, like a mob trampling itself at an exit that has been unexpectedly barred. He fought to sort them, realized finally there was no sorting; only a truth he hadn’t confronted. “I don’t really know why I came back.”
“Sounds like a cop-out.”
“Call it whatever you want.”
They glared at each other in the silence of the day’s first light. Tim had stared down too many plasma blasters and particle cannon to look away first, so it was Ben who relented finally. But he did so with a dangerous smile.
“I already asked your friend this, but I’ll try it again on you. Are the Jesters coming back?”
“If they can.”
“Whose side will they be on?”
Tim groaned. “You actually expect the Hell’s Jesters to help out in a small town feud?”
When he looked at Tim again, he was pointing his blastpistol. “If they want you back, they will.” His fingers tightened around the weapon. “One way or another, I’m taking Johnsville back, Tim. I’m taking her back.”
“You think you can?”
“With the Jesters backing us, I’m pretty sure.”
“I meant Nikki.”
“I know what you meant.”
Tim leaned back against the tree, eyed the blaster, its muzzle shivering with its holder’s tension. There wasn’t murder there, in Ben’s eyes, but anger and hurt didn’t point to a lot of self-control. “How did it happen?” he asked softly. “Did she pull away all at once, or real slow like.”
Ben swallowed. “Slow...then all at once.” He pointed the pistol. “I blame you.” Probably seeing Tim’s eyes widen, he grinned and lowered it. “She wasn’t quite the same, after you came to visit her, back before the war. I think she blamed herself as much as she hated you. It was poison. She was hurting in ways I couldn’t help her with. It made me hate you even more than I think she did. You ruined us.”
Tim looked away now, couldn’t look that truth in the eye. “What do you want me to say? I’m sorry?”
“It’d be a heck of a start.”
“Then I’m fucking sorry, all right?” He forced himself to stare the other down, meet Ben’s hate and hurt, face his own guilt. “I’m sorry about all of it! It’s all fucked up and I know that and I know what I did. But there’s a point where you can either keep carrying all the shit around, or you can drop the load and move the hell on without it!”
“Is that what you did?”
“It’s what I do, every damned day.”
“How freeing that must be for you,” Ben snarled as the pistol shook in his fist. He lurched to his feet and strode towards Tim, came to stand over him with the pistol aimed at his forehead. “Of course you were always good at leaving things behind.” A crazy smile twitched the corners of his lips. “You pointed one of these things at me once. How does it feel to be on the other side?”
“Feels great.” Tim glared up at him, scared but in no way was he going to let him know it now. “Why don’t you go ahead and pull that trigger?”
Mania flared in his eyes for a moment. “No.” A blink of self-realization doused it and Ben stepped back, the blaster muzzle dipping. “That’d just make it easy for you, wouldn’t it?”
“Easier than listening to you lose it.”
“There’s that smart mouth!” Ben cackled, sounded unhinged. “Yes, you might not care what happens to us or to yourself, but I bet you care about your lady friend.” He fingered the blastpistol. “I could go find out.”
Tim forced the insolent smirk on his face to remain in place, to give no slip, no sense of the ice water running anew in his veins. It was his voice that betrayed, a slightly quaver as he replied, “Be my guest.”
“Yes.” Ben’s grin spread like the dawn. “You and your Jesters are going to help us. You’ll make sure of that, won’t you?”
“It doesn’t matter what I do. We don’t have any hyper-capable communications or ether-tennae. I can’t call them.”
The other man’s smile twisted wickedly. “That’s where you’re wrong.”
DOCK FOURTEEN GREW in the forward viewport of the shuttle Tina had acquired for the job. Close up, it still resembled a half-eaten apple core, but one swarming with the ants of dozens of space-suited crews and hover drones at work.
The console communicator pinged. “That’ll be Dock Control,” Tina said, seated beside Jerry at the helm. She touched another control. “Time to see if my forger is as good as he says. Transmitting now.”
Jerry took one hand off the shuttle controls to wipe it on his pant leg. Fear didn’t clench his guts, but it still made itself known. He hated the way sweat stung at the corners of his eyes, the way he knew it’d be beading across his brow.
“You all right?” Tina asked him with a knowing smile.
“It’s fine.” He glanced at her. “Shut up.”
Her smile remained. “Relax. My contacts are the best. This will work. Besides, I’ve been to these Yards before.”
“You’ve robbed this place before?” Cory asked from the second row of seats in the compartment.
Tina glanced over her shoulder. “Not a robbery; more of a kidnapping of sorts.” She snickered to herself. “I suppose you could call it an involuntary defection. But there was this engineer specializing in stealth tech a friend of mine wanted to speak to really badly.”
“It’s a lovely career you’ve cultivated, kid,” Jerry said to his daughter.
She looked at him, her smile gone frosty. “You want to have another argument in front of Little Sister, here?”
“I’m not your—”
The console pinged again and a globular popped up, flashing green with directions to one of the Dock’s mid-level berths.
“All right,” Tina purred. “Codes are recognized. My boy was as good as his word.”
“Lucky for us,” Jerry rumbled. “What now?”
Tina pivoted in her seat. “You ready to play your part, Princess?”
From his seat behind Jerry, Jones made a face. He wore a suit of absurd expense, Foundation World finery that would stand out like a sore thumb amongst the roughnecks of Cerelon, but seemed precisely right for a corporate popinjay on an inspection tour. He adjusted stylishly-antiquated glasses on the bridge of his nose and smoothed some unknowable imperfection from his slicked-back hair. “I’m ready.”
“They’ll want to see a face for this next part. You’re going to need to stand for the holocamera.” Tina waited while he did so. “Remember, you’re here to look over ships with the intent of a possible bid on Navy surplus.”
“What about facial recognition?” Cory asked. “He’ll be scanned.”
Tina smirked at the corporate man. “Your real name isn’t Jones. Can I assume this isn’t your original face, as well?”
He sighed. “I have had some augmentation, yes.”
Tina winked at Cory.
The console blatted and Jerry checked it. “Incoming message from Dock Control, just like you said.”
“All right, you’re on, Princess.” Tina turned back to the controls, assumed the appearance of a bored shuttle pilot.
A globular materialized to show a tense-looking woman with close-cut hair and the olive drab overalls of a Rynamax employee. “Codes and manifest packet check out, Shuttle Alpha-Oh-Nine. Please state your name and purpose.”
Jones leaned forward over Jerry’s shoulder. “This is Calvin Hennesey,” he regurgitated the false identity from the forged packet, “Director of Acquisitions from Spinward Technologies, come to review product for possible purchase.”
“Looks like you were a last-minute addition to our calendar, Mr. Hennesey,” the Rynamax operator said with a frown. “I don’t have an escort available quite yet. Do you mind waiting at your berth for a few minutes.”
“That will be fine,” Jones replied in the clipped voice of a displeased executive.
“I will make arrangements,” the operator said. “You’ll be viewing the transports at the overflow dock, Upper Level, Ninety Two.” She shrugged at the camera. “It’s a little bit of a walk. Sorry.”
“Like I said; it will do.”
“Spinward Tech?” another voice off camera asked.
The perspective shifted to focus on a second person in the control booth and the chill sweat dampening the insides of Jerry’s overalls doubled. A younger man with cold eyes, a clean shave, and the crimson and black uniform of the Navy glowered into the camera. The pips of a Commander glinted on his high collar.
“You’re an awfully long way from home, Alpha-Oh-Nine,” the officer said.
Shit-shit-shit...
“There are...shortages everywhere,” Jones recovered his composure almost instantly. “It does us no good to produce product if we don’t have the transports to move it. My superiors have contacts out all over the place, scouring for more lift capacity. We heard Rynamax had bargains and I’m here to see them.”
The officer stared through the hologram with an arrogant half-smile, seemed to study Jones. “Well, you might be disappointed. The Fleet’s interest in this overstock has grown again. You may face a bidding war.”
Jones pretended to match the younger man’s arrogance with what was no doubt a well-practiced sneer. “I come well-heeled for that, sir.”
The officer drummed his fingers on the back of the Rynamax operator’s chair and she visible squirmed. “Perhaps,” he said, “you’d come see me first, Mr. Hennesey, before you make any decisions. We may be able to come to an arrangement.”
Jones smiled. “I will be certain to do so.”
“Excellent!” The Commander glanced at the operator. “I’m satisfied.”
“Alpha-Oh-Nine,” the operator said without acknowledging the officer, “you’re clear for berth seven-slash-seven.” The globular blinked out.
Jones blew out a breath and loosened his tie. “Well, that was something.”
“You did great, Princess.”
Jones ignored Tina and shook his head. “Amazing. Everywhere I go, graft. That officer intends to shake us down for a kickback—won’t he be surprised?”
“But what is he doing here?” Jerry asked. “I thought the idea was the Navy is pulling out and that’s why Rynamax is selling off all this stock.”
“It’s probably just like he said,” Tina insisted, “probably some quartermaster’s squabble.” She glared. “It’ll be fine, Dad.”
He looked away, blood boiling at the cut of her voice. She’d always had that talent, even as a precocious seven year-old, for domineering.
The control console pinged and flashed. Jerry scanned the readout. “Dock Control computer is requesting the helm.” He touched a switch, felt a thud go through the vessel as their course slowed and altered, no longer under his guidance. “And now they have it.” He didn’t quite look at Tina. “So, we’re committed now.”
