Fire Base (Drop Trooper Book 6), page 6
“Seven PM,” she informed me. “1900 hours, I believe the military would say. Your ‘link should be synchronized with our local time, so I expect you to be on time.”
She was out the door like a whisp of wind from a coming storm and I watched her, wary and keyed up, feeling like a mouse who’d been toyed with by a cat. I was still standing there when Vicky walked through the door a minute later. She frowned at my stance, then pointed back behind her.
“Was that the girl, Isabella?” she asked me. “Mama Bindy’s daughter?”
I nodded, not even considering lying to her.
“She came up here while I was asleep.”
“For what?” Her eyebrow shot up and I snorted.
“Not for sex, that’s for sure. She was trying to make me uncomfortable, trying to press me for information.” I collapsed down on the bed, the strength gone out of me, the quivering anxiety of the post-adrenaline shakes returning with a vengeance. “And Goddamn if it didn’t almost work. She’s dangerous as shit.”
“I could have told you that already.” She sat down beside me and nudged me in the ribs. “It’s a good thing I know how hopeless you are with women or I might be jealous.”
I laughed and it almost transformed into a strained cough. “Oh, and we’re invited to dinner with them at seven.”
“Ooh, more Filipino food.” Vicky rubbed her hands together, looking eager and full of life and not at all like we’d gone on a mission just a few hours ago. I wished I knew how she did it. “What’s on the menu?”
I slipped an arm around her, touching my forehead to hers as if I could draw strength from the contact.
“I think maybe us.”
6
Dinner, as it turned out, was a whole pig roasted on a spit.
“It’s called lechon,” Isabella told us, anticipating my question. Vicky eyed her suspiciously but said nothing, concentrating on chewing the salt pork. “It’s a frequent guest at our dinner parties.”
The party wasn’t at the communal dining hall where we’d had breakfast, nor was it open to all the workers as the meals there had been. The three of us were seated across from Bindy, Isabella, Luz and a younger man who had been introduced to us as Rodrigo, one of Bindy’s younger sons. They hadn’t mentioned how many children she had, but I got the impression I hadn’t met them all.
The dining room was bare stone, floor to ceiling, broken by screened windows with no glass, only storm shutters that could be lowered and locked on the outside. The roasting pit was at the center, half-surrounded by a broad, stone chimney stretching up through the roof, and the radiant heat was enough to bring beads of sweat onto my forehead. Somehow, though, it wasn’t uncomfortable. Instead, the place seemed homey, welcoming, and I could almost forget we were here for intelligence gathering.
“I visited a lot of colony worlds during the war,” I said to Bindy, “but I have to admit, I’ve never seen a setup quite like this. It’s impressive.”
“It’s how real people should live,” she told me. Her plate was full, but she picked carefully at her food, never letting her mouth get too full to talk, punctuating every few bites from a sip of a metal cup she kept topped off with something alcoholic from a wooden decanter beside her. “I don’t know how you survive on the shit you people eat.”
“I’d think you, of all people, would understand how much someone can survive.”
Bindy raised her cup to me, then paused with it near her lips.
“Would you care for some rum?” she asked. “Any of you? I have forgotten my manners, since none of these heathens can stand the taste of good rum.”
“Good rum, my ass,” Rodrigo muttered, making a face. “That shit is nasty, Mama.”
“Boy, you haven’t tasted enough of life to tell me what is nasty.”
Isabella laughed softly at the exchange, but Luz still seemed to be in a bad mood, and I wondered if the scowl on his face was a permanent feature.
“I’d be honored, ma’am,” I told her.
“Then come and get it!” She pushed a spare cup across the table at me and I slid my chair back, pouring to the rim with the brown liquid. I looked at Wade and Vicky, but they both made motions of negation.
“Naw, man,” Wade said, shaking his head. “I ain’t been able to handle rum since this one weekend on leave back on Eden. There was this other dude, a Force Recon puke, who challenged me to triple shots of 151, and I kind of lost count of how much I had and exactly what I did the rest of that night, but all I know is, I woke up the next morning still drunk and I haven’t touched the stuff since.”
“We have milk, as well,” Bindy offered, her smile sharp with derision.
“Naw, I’m good.” Wade was either oblivious to her mocking him or just powering through, I wasn’t sure which. “Hey, you know, I noticed something about Bathala since we been here. Wherever else we’ve been out here in the Worlds and even before that, in the Periphery, we’ve been seeing quite a few Tahni.”
Bindy and Isabella were both masters of their emotions, their faces not betraying the slightest of reactions to the statement, but Luz was less so, and Rodrigo absolutely sucked at poker. Luz just had the barest of twitches, but Rodrigo flinched as if he’d touched a live electrical lead.
“But I ain’t seen none here,” Wade finished up, not looking at either of them, keeping his eyes on Bindy. “I was just curious if they avoided this place for some reason.”
I wanted to moan at the ham-handedness of his questioning, and I covered the face I made with a sip of the rum. Rodrigo, I quickly discovered, had been sadly correct. I had nothing against rum, but this shit, as he had said, was nasty. But I’d had worse, so I drank it and smiled. But a silence had fallen across the table and I had to jump in and save Wade because no one else would.
“I don’t understand how Tahni would be able to live and work around humans,” I said. “Or vice versa, of course. I mean, they sure hated the hell out of us during the war.” I shuddered and it wasn’t entirely acting. “I was part of the landing force that mopped up the Tahni occupation forces on a world called Demeter, and that was some cold-blooded shit they did there. Putting whole families in outdoor cages exposed to the weather all day and night and starving them right out in the open to try to make the resistance fighters give up. You can’t just turn hate like that off by flipping a switch and saying the war’s over, right? That’s hate that goes right down to the core.”
“Their money spends just as good as anyone else’s,” Luz growled, squared-off and tensed up like he might jump up at any moment and lunge across the table at me. “And however many humans they killed in the war, the Commonwealth military killed as many of our people during the Pirate Wars. Those wars were started by people like you, Earthers who couldn’t leave well enough alone.”
Had it been Bindy Kamara who was pissed off at what I’d said, I would likely have backed off and played it safe. But she was merely observing, guarding her expression behind her cup, and while I didn’t know her that well, I would have been willing to swear in court that her eyes were lit up with interest, as if she was as interested to hear Luz’s defense as I was.
“Really?” I asked the cartel enforcer. “Because I was under the impression that this last war started because of people like you, like us, people who’d gotten a raw deal out of the Commonwealth and just wanted to go their own way. They colonized worlds in the neutral zone, worlds the Tahni called their territory, and the Tahni bombed them to vapors for their trouble.”
If Luz had been combative before, he was positively apoplectic now, exploding out of his chair with enough force to send his plate rattling across the table. He wasn’t wearing a gun and I had the impression that Mama Bindy wouldn’t allow anyone to go armed in her house, even her own people, but that was the only thing that kept me from being shot out of hand.
“You don’t have the fucking right to question my decisions, you Earther piece of shit!” he bellowed. “Who this family does business with is none of your fucking business! If we want to….”
“Luz,” Isabella said, her normally soft and controlled tone as hard and final as a fist slamming into the table. “You are at my mother’s table and these are our guests. I will thank you to keep a civil tongue in your head, or you can find somewhere else to take your meals.”
Luz blinked as if he was waking up from a dream, his forehead glistening with sweat. It dripped down his face to his upper lip and he licked it away, a nervous little lizard in the sun, watching a bird circling.
“My apologies, Ms. Isabella, Mama.” The words could have been broken glass for how hard it seemed for Luz to chew them up and spit them out. “I misspoke. It will not happen again.”
His words were humble and peacemaking, but when he fell back into his chair, it rocked back with the violence of his motion and the legs scratched against the stone floor.
“I’m sorry,” I said, putting a hand to my chest. “I didn’t realize it was a sensitive subject. Just making conversation, and I didn’t think the sort of small-talk Marines are used to would go over at the family dinner table. That doesn’t leave much except the war, I guess.”
“It was the formative experience of our youth,” Vicky added, eyeing me sidelong as if it had been me that fucked up and not Wade. “Don’t believe that shit you see in movies where veterans are all close-mouthed and don’t want to talk about what they saw in combat. I figure the main reason most of us joined up was so we could have cool stories to tell when we got old.”
Bindy Kamara’s laugh was hoarse and rough, the laugh of a woman who’d spent her youth smoking, drinking and various other things that could have killed her early.
“And did you think you would grow old, girl? Did you think you would survive the war?”
“You know, ma’am,” Vicky admitted, “I did. Maybe I was just young and stupid, but I did. It was pretty damned close more than once. And the last time….” She shuddered against me and closed her eyes. I slipped an arm around her and she leaned into me.
“Tell me,” Bindy said. “Tell me about the last time.”
“I was there,” I said. “We were together in the last battle, the one to take the Tahni homeworld. Some Force Recon pukes were infiltrating the palace and we got to cover them, make sure the Tahni didn’t roll up their backs while they hunted down the Emperor. They threw everything they had at us, and we didn’t have air support at first, so we just had to hold them off. It was down to the absolute last second when the assault shuttles finally freed up and I had to call an air strike right on top of our position.”
“Right on top of my position,” Vicky corrected, smacking me on the shoulder. The blow didn’t hurt, and neither did her words, but the memory of her and Delp lying just meters apart, her badly wounded and Delp beyond help, stung like a scourge across my soul and I closed my eyes. She must have sensed it because her hand fell across mine. “But there was nothing else to do,” she added. “I almost died, but if he hadn’t done it, we all would have and the Tahni would have come in right on top of the other Marines.”
“And were you two…involved at the time?” It seemed an oddly oblique way for someone like Bindy Kamara to ask the question, but then, I suppose she didn’t want to make any assumptions.
“We were,” Vicky told her. “We had been for years.”
“And yet you were still able to risk her life?” Bindy wondered, eyes boring into me. It wasn’t an accusation, asked more in a sense of wonder.
“We were Marines,” I said, as if that explained everything. “Marines accomplish the mission.”
“Which is a good reason to keep us around,” Wade added.
“It is,” Bindy acknowledged, her dark eyes twinkling with a hint of hidden knowledge. “As long as your mission and ours are the same.” She smiled and swept a hand toward the spitted pig. “Would anyone care for some more pork?”
“Jesus tapdancing Christ,” Vicky sighed, head in her hands as she sat on the edge of the bed. “That was fucking exhausting. Can I just go back to fighting Tahni in a battlesuit?”
“I think she likes you,” I said, leaning back against the wall by the door. There was more I wanted to say, but we had to assume these rooms were bugged. Maybe they weren’t, maybe I was thinking too much like an Earther, like Mama Bindy had said. But I didn’t want to sell her short. “She’s a dangerous woman, but a fair one, I think. If she’d joined the Marines instead of the cartel, she’d have been a match for Top.”
Vicky barked a laugh. “Good thing Top isn’t around to hear you say that.”
“I wonder what she’d think of us now.” I hadn’t meant it to come out quite as bitter as it sounded. Though I suppose if the room was bugged, it would fit well with the conversation we were pretending to have.
“She’d probably say we should have stayed in the Corps.”
“Is that what you think?” I wondered.
“I think I need a drink. Or some sleep. Or both.”
The knock on the outside door brought both of us to our feet, and I pulled my hold-out knife from its sheath and moved to one side of the entrance.
“It’s me,” Wade Cunningham’s voice came clearly through the screen, though we couldn’t see more than a shadow.
He didn’t wait for an invitation, just pushed through. I’d expected him to be in a bad mood, either embarrassed at his own clumsy attempts to gather intelligence, or pissed off at me for interrupting them. Instead, he seemed wired, quivering with anticipation.
“What’s up, Cunningham?” Vicky asked, hands on hips, staring at him with what a sensible man would have recognized as dangerous impatience.
“Since we’ve officially got a job,” Wade said, winking at us so we’d know he was speaking in code, “why don’t we go spend some of our hard-earned money on a few drinks in town?”
I wasn’t going to make it easy on him.
“What’s wrong with the drinks here?”
He motioned dramatically at the door, then waved around us at the room, pantomiming that someone could be listening, and I nearly burst out laughing, hiding it behind a coughing fit.
“Because the drinks are better in town,” he insisted, still motioning like this was Boot Camp and we were going through Basic Infantry Training again. “And so is the company.”
Vicky was giggling now, too, one hand covering her mouth.
“I don’t want to walk all the way to town in the dark, Cunningham,” she insisted, joining in the bait-the-Wade game I’d started. “It’s late and I’m tired.”
“I got us a car,” he said, fists clenching, face reddening like he was a toddler about to throw a fit in public. “And I slipped a few Tradenotes to one of the guards so they’d let us go out the main gate. Trust me, we’re golden.”
He made one final face at Vicky and she finally relented.
“All right. But just for a couple drinks. If I stay out all night, I’m never going to get my damn Circadian rhythms in synch with the night-day cycle here.”
“Sure, just a few drinks,” he agreed, waving his arm for us to follow like he wanted to take a hill. “But we need to go now. The car’s waiting.”
I shoved my boot knife back in its sheath and slapped him on the shoulder,
“Wade, old buddy,” I said, following him out the screen door, “you might want to consider another line of work.”
7
“God, you guys are dense,” Wade Cunningham said, his face twisted up like he’d bitten into a pickled lemon. “We came out here to meet my contact. I thought I was gonna have to draw you a fucking picture!”
“Shh,” Vicky said dramatically, putting a finger to her lips and scanning around the dark streets of Bathala City. “You never can tell if we’re being bugged out here.”
I didn’t laugh, not because the joke had lost its humor since we’d egressed the truck that had given us the ride into town, but mostly because Bathala’s narrow, dark streets were riding the ragged edge of my nerves. I had my knife palmed, blade running along my forearm, but my palm itched for a gun and Wade hadn’t been able to bribe the guards enough to retrieve our weapons and return them to us before we left.
Not that the people here seemed particularly diabolical compared to other worlds I’d visited. Most of the pedestrians passing us along the sidewalk were local workers, probably going from job to home or vice versa, shoulders sagging, heads down, faces cloaked in shadow from the flickering, malfunctioning streetlights. Here and there, a mother would shepherd her children along, eyes darting back and forth in the unmistakable look of prey wary of ever-present predators.
And the predators were there, even if I wasn’t counting us in their number. I couldn’t say if they were Kurotong, but they were outlaws, all the same, advertising the fact unashamedly. I didn’t envy them their stifling leathers in this humid jungle climate, but I was green for their openly-flaunted firearms, and acutely aware of our disadvantage.
“What the hell are we doing here again?” I asked Wade. I’d gotten a general idea from his game of charades back in the guest house, but hadn’t asked for any details during the truck ride.
“I told you the Corporate Council has resources,” he reminded me, sounding very self-satisfied. “I got in contact with one and arranged a meeting.”
That was enough to draw my attention off the street and all the potential threats it held and I stared hard at Wade.
“And just how did you do that without exposing us to Bindy and her people?”
“Take it easy,” he said, patting the air in a quelling motion. “I’m not stupid.” Vicky’s raised eyebrow spoke volumes as to what she thought about that, but I said nothing and let him answer. “Even on a shithole like this, there are bulletin boards on the nets. I left a message on an employment site, advertising for an assistant crewmember on a cargo shuttle. That’s the standard message protocol I got from Inspector Dukanovic, and every paid CSF informant is supposed to recognize it.” He grinned. “And this guy did. We’re supposed to meet him in a place called Pink Chiffon in about half an hour.”
