Fire Base (Drop Trooper Book 6), page 5
“No.”
Vicky and Wade glared at me, short and sharp before they looked away, as if just realizing they were giving themselves away. I ignored them, though I knew I’d hear about it later.
“There were forced laborers there,” I went on. “La Sombra had them held prisoner there in the compound, kept in a single room, to do the labor of scraping off the Firefox from the rock, harvesting it for them to sell. I put them in a vehicle and sent them down the mountain.”
“What the fuck?” Luz exclaimed, rounding on me, his fingers twitching near the pistol holstered at his belt. “You didn’t tell me that!” Fear flashed in his eyes as he looked at Bindy. “I swear to god, Mama, they didn’t tell me that!”
“Oh, relax, Luz,” she said, waving in a dismissive gesture. “You think I didn’t know already? You think I wasn’t already having the compound watched? Those people dispersed to their settlements almost immediately. They’re farm laborers. They probably wanted to go back and tell their families they’re still alive.”
I very carefully did not blow out a sigh of relief, though I wanted to. I’d spent my life following my gut, but I wasn’t convinced it was a good way to test the limits of modern medical technology with respect to life extension.
“Well, Mr. Alvarez, Ms. Sandoval, Mr. Cunningham,” Bindy Kamara said, spreading her arms as if she were embracing us, “I can’t say that I accept you into our family, not yet. My trust takes longer to earn than that. But I will give you the chance to do it. Luz, you created this mess, you’re in charge of them. Get them two rooms in the guest house and show them where they can get some breakfast.” She raised an eyebrow. “I assume you haven’t eaten yet?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Get them some food and see if there’s any restocking or maintenance they need for those metal suits of theirs, or their shuttle.” She chuckled aside to me. “I’m afraid we can’t provide anything too advanced or expensive, but if there’s anything that can be fabricated with local materials, Luz can take you to the right people to talk to about it.”
“We’re fine for now,” I assured her. “We have our own resupply and maintenance equipment.”
“Then out.” She made a shooing motion toward the door. “I have work to do and you’ve already taken up the best part of my morning.”
Luz nodded to us, a bit curtly I thought, and I considered that maybe he seriously pissed at us for letting the civilians go. Which was a shame, but if I had been forced to choose whether to piss off Luz or Mama Bindy, I’d have chosen Luz every day and twice on Sunday. We began to follow him out, but Isabella interrupted us unexpectedly.
“I hope you’re all as good as you say you are,” she said. She met my eyes with a gaze so clear and piercing, it raised the hackles on my neck. “I hope you can actually provide protection from La Sombra. Because after what you’ve done, we’re going to need it.”
5
Breakfast in Bathala City was more like an early dinner for us, but I didn’t complain about the food, not after eating shipboard soy and spirulina for the last two and a half weeks.
“This is damn good,” I said around a mouthful of fried rice, egg, and some kind of pork. It was vaguely spicy but nothing I couldn’t handle. “What do you call this?”
Luz was across the table from me, eating with desultory efficiency, staring at us with ferocious resentment when he bothered to pay attention to us at all. At my question, he looked up, his jaw working as if he was deciding whether to answer.
“Tosilog,” he said. I waited for him to expound on it, but that was as much as I was going to get out of him.
“I’ve had it before,” Vicky told me and my eyebrows rose in surprise. She shrugged. “There was a Filipino family in our housing bloc, and I was good friends with the daughter for a while. I ate a few meals there.”
“For a while?” I asked, catching the downturn of her voice.
“Disagreement over a boy.” She made a face. “In retrospect, he wasn’t worth it.”
“Wow, I can’t believe I didn’t know that,” I said.
“What? That I had other boyfriends before you?” Her lip curled in amusement. “I don’t know how to break this to you, Cam, but I’m afraid I wasn’t a virgin when we got married.”
The snort of laughter was uncontrollable and I was barely able to keep from spitting out a spoonful of fried rice and then nearly choked on what went down the wrong pipe, and Vicky pounded on my back sympathetically.
“No,” I corrected her once I could talk again. “I meant I can’t believe I didn’t know you’d had Filipino food.”
“I apologize. I didn’t realize we’d reached the stage of our relationship where I shared the various types of cooking I’d sampled.”
Wade was just as taciturn as Luz, though not, I thought, for the same reason. He didn’t look angry or resentful, just guarded and closed-mouthed, as if he didn’t want to say anything in front of the cartel lieutenant for fear of giving too much away, but it seemed unnatural and suspicious and I tried to get him to talk.
“You ever have Filipino food, Cunningham?” I asked him.
“What?” He blinked as if he hadn’t been paying attention to the conversation, then looked down at his food as if he hadn’t noticed that, either. “No, man. We never ate nothin’ that wasn’t programmed into the food processors. Mostly pasta and hamburgers ‘cause my moms didn’t know how to program it right, and wouldn’t let anyone else mess with it.”
I sighed and gave up on him, glancing around the dining room. It wasn’t anything fancy, just a wood-frame shack with a stone-built kitchen in the back, but the food was good and plentiful, and the workers and guards seated along the rows of benches at the communal tables weren’t complaining about it. More than a few of them were staring at us between bites, a few with the natural resentment of the outsider, but most with honest curiosity. I wondered if the story of what we’d done had spread among them.
I stifled a yawn, suddenly feeling more tired than hungry and deciding it would be a good excuse to get out of from beneath the watchful eye of Luz and the others in his retinue seated at the tables on either side of us.
“Hey, I’m still running on ship’s time,” I told him, “and I haven’t slept in thirty-two hours. Can we see those rooms Mama Bindy was talking about?”
“She’s ‘Ms. Kamara’ to you,” Luz snapped. “You don’t call her Mama until she says you can.”
“Sorry.” I wasn’t, but we weren’t here for a dick-measuring contest. “Anyway, can you show us where our rooms are?”
“You go ahead,” Vicky suggested. “I could stand to eat some more of this. Just message me on my ‘link where the room is and I’ll be up in an hour or so.”
“Yeah, I think I’m gonna take a walk around,” Wade said. “I been cramped up on a ship too long. Wanna get some real air.”
I grinned at Luz.
“Guess it’s just you and me.”
“Come on,” he grunted, tossing his empty plate into a plastic tub already half-filled with dirty dishes. “Follow me.”
The primary star was all the way up now, beating down on the subtropical jungle and on us humans stupid enough to live in it. Sweat was collecting at the small of my back and armpits beneath my utility fatigues before we’d made it halfway across the compound. The ground was hard-packed dirt, rich and black, and truck gardens sprang up here and there, not growing the sustenance crops of the farms outside the walls, but luxuries like tomatoes and peppers, the ingredients for the breakfast we’d eaten. It would have seemed almost idyllic if it hadn’t been for the smudges of black smoke on the horizon, an ever-present reminder of why no one else wanted this planet.
The guest house was what Bindy had called the building, but it was more along the lines of a hotel, or a small apartment building. Three stories tall, it dwarfed the other buildings and I got the impression that it was a barracks for the more important members of Bindy’s crew, maybe including Luz. It made sense. Trying to construct single-family houses would have made the compound impossible to defend, and defense against attack was a necessity out here, not a symptom of paranoia.
Luz took me up an exterior staircase onto the porch that lined the third floor of the building, to a screen door set in the external wall. It was unlocked and there was no inner door, but the room inside was spacious compared to the compartment Vicky and I shared aboard the Yantar, about the size of our room in the farmhouse back on Hausos. There was a bed, a chair, and a small dresser with a mirror, as well as a closet-sized bathroom that didn’t include a shower.
“The showers are down the hall,” Luz said as if reading my thoughts. He leered in a decidedly unwelcoming way. “Communal for the floor so I hope you brought bathrobes.”
I nodded toward the screen door.
“You guys are pretty trusting, huh?”
“You think like an Earther.” His lip twisted in distaste. “We don’t rob each other. We’re family here.”
I said nothing, figuring he was ticked off enough without me adding to it.
“Enjoy yourself.” He turned to leave.
“When are we going out again?” I asked. He paused in the open door, frowning back at me. “You didn’t bring us in just to take out one La Sombra operation. When do we go out again?”
“That’s up to Mama Bindy. If it were up to me, you’d be going out tomorrow and we’d clean out all of those bastards. But she has other ideas about the smart thing to do.” The tone of his voice told me what he thought of that.
“La Sombra are the only ones giving you trouble?” At his look of confusion, I expounded. “There’s a lot of cartels out here. And a lot of elements moving into the Pirate Worlds from the Commonwealth since the war. You not having problems with anyone else?”
He wanted to say something. I could tell by the way the veins bulged in his neck and his fingers clenched just slightly, wanting to tighten into fists.
“No,” he lied. “No one else.”
And then he was gone, the screen door bouncing against the frame as the springs pulled it shut. I sat down on the bed and kicked off my boots, then lay down. It was comfortable enough, but that might have been the exhaustion talking. I hadn’t been lying to Luz, I was wiped out. The food had helped, but I was already getting the post-adrenaline shakes and needed to sleep. I just couldn’t decide whether I should try to nod off before Vicky came back, because I was sure I’d wake up when she returned from breakfast.
I would have felt more comfortable with my sidearm, despite Luz’s assurances about honor among thieves, but he hadn’t returned it. I would, I had been assured, get it back when I left the compound. I still had a carbon-fiber knife strapped to my right leg, just in case, but it didn’t bring me the sort of peace of mind that a weighty Gyroc pistol might have. Or a pulse pistol, if I was dreaming. But while the CSF had the weapons, normal mercenaries like we were supposed to be wouldn’t have been able to afford them even if we’d found someone willing to sell them to us. Carrying them around would have been as good as wearing signs around our necks advertising we were plants.
I drifted off despite my misgivings and woke with a start at the sound of the screen door opening.
“Vicky?” I murmured, blinking hard, eyes blurry.
“No.”
I sat up, swinging my legs off the bed, about to jump to my feet, but soft, slender fingers stopped me with a hand against my chest. It was Isabella. In the soft light filtering through the gauzy white curtains in the windows, her features looked less harsh and accusatory, more feminine. She’d changed clothes since the last time I’d seen her, from practical work wear into something white and diaphanous and off the shoulder. When she sat down on the bed beside me, I caught a hint of a breast beneath the fabric.
“Umm…,” I stuttered. “Is something wrong? Is Vicky okay?”
“She’s fine,” the woman told me. “She went to find your friend, Wade. I’m told she was afraid he’d get himself into trouble.”
“Yeah, that sounds like Wade,” I agreed. My mouth was suddenly dry and I tried to stand, but she arrested the motion by leaning into my shoulder. I scooted away and tried to find my voice again. “Why are you here, then, Miss…?” I shrugged. “Should I call you Ms. Kamara or do you go by another last name?”
“Call me Isabella.” She shrugged. “And I’m here because I don’t believe you.”
“Don’t believe me about what?” I wondered, going quickly from uncomfortable and unwelcome arousal to alarm in about half a second.
“You didn’t come here looking for a family.” She smiled thinly. “You’re a man who’s used to being alone. I can tell that about you.”
“But I’m not alone,” I reminded her.
“Yes.” A sniff that might have been a laugh. “Your friend, and the woman, your…wife, you said?”
Which was an odd way of saying it, I thought.
“Yeah, she’s my wife.” I was, perhaps, a bit more insistent about the statement than I’d intended. “We met right after I joined the Marines. I’ve known Vicky for almost eight years now.”
“It’s a long time.” She tilted her head at me. “You can learn a lot about a person in eight years. Perhaps too much?”
“No such thing.” The words came easy, with absolute conviction. “We’re not perfect, but we promised even before we got married that we’d be honest with each other, no matter what.”
“Is being honest so important to you, then?” It was a challenge, and I knew instantly that I was being played. “Then be honest with me. Why are you really here? Why did you choose us?”
“I’m being as honest with you as I can be, Isabella.” My discomfort had faded, now I knew the truth. She wasn’t actually here to seduce me; it was a tactic to try to take me off guard. I was used to people trying to play me. Women trying to seduce me, not so much. “We’re here to help you. I give you my word that I have no intention of doing anything to hurt your mother or your family.”
“I’d like to believe you.” Shadows played over her face, couching half of it in darkness, the other in the soft light. “I have a way of reading people. It’s why my mother has chosen me to be her successor, why she keeps me in her office for every meeting with strangers. And my sense of you is that you’re a good man. They’re rare in this place and that’s sad. We are what you Earthers made us. We could have been part of your Commonwealth, could have worked together, but the government sided with the Corporate Council over our ancestors and we had no choice but to go to war with you.”
“Stop saying ‘you Earthers’ as if I’m some kind of power broker from Capital City,” I told her, annoyance burning in my chest with a heat I hadn’t anticipated. “I was born in a city that doesn’t even exist anymore. My parents raised goats and chickens and they were both murdered before I was eight years old. I joined the military because the alternative was prison. Living here would have been a step up for me.”
I thought she was going to get angry, but instead, she inclined her head toward me in apology.
“I’m sorry. It’s easy for me to forget that you’re not all alike. To us, you all seem rich and arrogant. As I said, I think you are a good man. But I also think you’re a man used to lying and being lied to. You’re comfortable with it, despite what you say is your preference for honesty. Maybe you wouldn’t lie to your wife, but you would lie to me, and to my mother, if you thought it was for a good reason.”
I swallowed hard. She was very convincing, and mostly she’d convinced me that I was caught between Scylla and Charybdis. If I lied to her, I felt confident she’d know, but if I even came close to telling her the truth, the consequences might be even worse. I had to say something, and the words spilled out of me with no intent or premeditation.
“My mother was holding my hand when she died,” I said, and Isabella’s eyes narrowed in a frown at the sudden change of subject. “Two of the gangsters who ran Tijuana were arguing over a debt, I think. That’s what my father told me later. One pulled a gun and started shooting and a stray bullet hit her in the chest. I was six years old and I watched her die in front of me. That was enough for my father. He was a broken man without her, and eventually, he sold everything we had, bought an old car and me, him, and my older brother set out across the desert, trying to reach Trans Angeles. We were ambushed by bandits and my brother and father were killed. I only survived by hiding under a blanket in the floor on the back seat. Then I walked for days and was dying of dehydration and heat exhaustion when someone found me and took me to the city.”
Her expression softened and I thought for a moment she might cry, but that wasn’t what I was aiming for.
“So, Isabella, when I swear to you on the graves of my family that I mean no harm, no bad intent to you or your mother or your family, if you really have the ability to read people, then you know what I’m saying is true.”
Her smile was sad, though I didn’t know if the sorrow was for my story, or for my weak attempt to convince her. I was holding my breath and I forced myself to stop. One call by her and all three of us were dead.
“I believe you, Cameron Alvarez. I believe what you’ve told me is the truth. It is not all the truth, but it is as much as I am likely to receive right now. And enough that I will tell my mother she does not need to have you taken into the woods and shot.” She rose from the bed and so did I, as if I was back in the Corps and she was my superior officer. “You and your wife and your friend are to come to the main house at Compline for dinner.”
“Compline?” I repeated, shaking my head.
“You said you were Catholic.” Her grin was only slightly malicious. “Do you not know the Canonical hours? The times of prayer?”
“I was a boy,” I protested, hands raised in surrender. “I pray, but there weren’t many churches in the Underground.”
