Birthright: Battle for the Confederation- Pursuit Page 20

  On the ground floor of the nightclub next door, three patrons stood still among the dim around them. They held drinks that were untouched. They barely noticed the pulsing music that virtually compelled a being to at least tap a foot or snap a finger in time to the beat.

  "Commander Stone is upstairs, I believe," said the first one. He was a handsome human male, tall and athletic and waved through to the front along with his companions. The other two were a Drisk male, also the object of much attention from others, both female and male alike. The third was a human female, also tall and athletic, with sharp features and dazzling hazel eyes.

  "Why do you say that?" asked the woman.

  "Regular patrons are not being admitted to the upper levels," the first one answered. "The first floor contains only locals carrying on in whatever this ritual is called. The people upstairs, at least the ones I can see on the balcony from here, are more observant. They're watching, talking carefully. Upstairs is where we'll find the Commander."

  "Then we need to get upstairs," concluded the Drisk.

  The human male, first name of Hata, was eager to carry out their orders. They were part of the special security forces aboard Captain Vol's ship and were in disguise under orders from Representative Ravine herself. The orders were simple; find and capture Commander Loren Stone and any other Avenger crew on the surface. If they couldn't capture them, execution was an acceptable alternative.

  They'd arrived as part of Representative Ravine's diplomatic detail, promptly donned their disguises and started looking for their Confed enemies. They'd searched for Loren Stone's name and found him at a mid-level lodging near the government quarter, but by the time their team arrived all but the commander had left. They'd followed in the hopes of catching the rest of his crew but based on this location it seemed like they'd managed to follow him to a clandestine meeting of some sort. They'd taken as many pictures of the occupants as they could in the hopes of identifying whom the Confed man had come to meet, but that was secondary to their capture/kill objective, and it was time to get that mission in gear.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  "So what do you think about the AI Accords, then?" asked Mako as they walked the perimeter of the room.

  "I've seen AI used in combat," replied Loren. "Well, as much AI as was legal. We used some fighters with limited intelligence to attack some Priman ships once. It was fairly successful. Now, I'm as worried as the next guy about machines trying to take over the galaxy, but the pragmatic part of me has to wonder if they might be the answer to how we avoid destruction. I was hoping somebody like you could reassure me that the same problems wouldn't occur if we tried widespread AI use again. Fifteen hundred years is a long time to work on that angle, don't you think?"

  Mako shrugged. "My group is passionate about the prospect of AIs living among us. I think building them and sending them off to war is a perversion of what they are, which are living, self-aware intelligences. What you're imagining amounts to slavery."

  "So give me another option," Loren countered. "That's why I'm here. Could they pilot drones, design ships, wage electronic warfare? Maybe something else entirely? I have very little hard and fast direction about that I'm supposed to find here; rather, I am hoping you and I might find some common ground where we both see the acceptable and moral employment of AIs in an effort to not lose the entire galaxy to the Primans."

  "And you really think they'll come for us here, in the galactic core?" replied Mako doubtfully. "With regrets, I can see why they'd go after your holdings and those of the Enkarrans, Talarans, that sort. But while taking a spiral arm is one level of monumental task, subjugating the whole galaxy is quite another."

  "They did it once," Loren said seriously. "If we don't stop them, they'll do it again."

  "And if we can't or won't help your cause?" Mako's question hung in the air, the implications obvious. "Are you and I still to be friends?"

  "We're not friends or enemies, Mako," Loren reassured the man. "I told you I'm not here to come after you or your group. Confed has bigger worries right now than what you're doing. If we part ways, whatever the condition, I just leave and that's it. No troops, no surface bombardment, nothing. It's a measure of how seriously the admiral takes this meeting that his instructions were worded that way."

  Mako just nodded as he stared ahead, lost in thought. Loren was beginning to wonder if the man actually did know anything useful, or if he'd be willing to share what he had. Loren could care less about using AIs in warfare, of course, but his orders were to find out if the AIs still existed. Putting out a call to send them into battle seemed like a sure way to send up some warning flags which might point him in the right direction, if nothing else. If they were out there, he needed to find them, and if he could find them, he needed to know if they could tell him whether there was a weapon that could win the war for Confed.

  They had reached the corner of the room farthest from the point of entry between the nightclub and their meeting place when Loren noticed the reappearance of the three women, menacing looks on their faces.

  "Something wrong?" asked Mako, a worried expression on his face.

  "Three people just barged onto the balcony," Sharah replied. "They're operatives for somebody or other." They both turned to Loren, accusing glares on their faces.

  "I have nothing to do with whatever may be going on out there," he stated. "I know you don't know what my word is worth, but I gave it to you when I said I was alone."

  "Excuse me if we don't quite believe you at this point," said Sharah accusingly. She looked at Mako and his two cohorts. "We need to get downstairs and to the exit."

  Mako was just about to reply when there was gunfire at the makeshift doorway into the nightclub. Blaster bolts came flying through the door along with a human Loren recognized from the upstairs balcony that he'd walked by. The man had a smoldering scorch mark on the front of his chest; he staggered through the door and tumbled face first onto the floor.

  "Down!" Sharah called, and everyone dove behind what cover they could find. Loren was next to the woman guard with his SSK, but she was already setting up on the far end of the pile of empty drums with her own small blaster and firing at the doorway. He noticed with approval that she wasn't simply pouring fire through the door, which could end up killing innocents on the balcony.

  Sharah was next to Mako, virtually sitting on him to keep his head down. A renewed fusillade of fire came through the doorway and everyone was forced down. The third woman guard refused to duck and was hit in the process of returning fire, falling backwards amid a pile of garbage that had been stacked against the wall. Loren shuffled over to check for a pulse and found none. He turned to see the other guard watching him and he shook his head quickly, then rejoined her at her position.

  He looked over to see Mako's human associate make a run for the door against the back wall and get cut down amidst a barrage of withering fire. Mako cried out, then clamped his jaw and squeezed his eyes shut before gathering himself and turning to face Loren.

  "Who are these people?"

  "I don't know!" he replied, "but I'd be happy to help you shoot them."

  "Not a chance," Sharah replied as she swapped power cells in her own blaster.

  Their attackers took advantage of a brief lull in the shooting to make an advance. One of them came diving through the doorway and immediately upon righting herself dove sideways to cover, then added her fire to the mix coming from the doorway.

  "They're determined, I'll give them that," Sharah admitted through gritted teeth. "We need our backup."

  No sooner said than a pair of young human men appeared behind them in the doorway to whatever escape route that had in waiting. They carried submachine blasters of some sort, full auto blaster bolts slamming into the far wall and keeping the attacker's heads down. That kind of rate of fire didn't lend itself well to accuracy, though, and there was still an occasional well-aimed shot fired at them from the hole in the nightclub's wall.

  Loren sa
w an opportunity. Everyone was using blasters- energy weapons. It was hypocritical to think, but many places that allowed carry of blasters banned armor-piercing slugs, hence a relative lack of solid projectiles on the civilian market. Loren's SSK, however, had a magazine full of armor piercing ammo that would make quick work of the cover the female Priman was hiding behind.

  "Give me my gun!" Loren commanded to the woman guard next to him. "I have AP ammo!"

  "Not going to happen," she said, concentrating on the task at hand.

  Loren realized it was a losing battle, so while he regretted striking someone who wasn't ready to fight back, he punched the woman in the left side hard enough to send her crumpling to the ground. As soon as she was down, he kicked her weapon behind them and grabbed his SSK from within the folds of her outer tunic. Flipping the selector over to armor-piercing, he took two steadying breaths, then popped up from behind cover and fired four shots in rapid succession at the Priman's cover, walking his rounds across the pile of debris providing her protection. He heard a yell and saw a pair of booted feet on the floor where she had previously been firing.

  He put his weapon at his side and turned to his left where everyone else was. Sharah was pointing her weapon at him, though the two reinforcements had noticed but ignored Loren's actions and were still pouring fire at the far wall, covering each other as they changed power cells.

  "Can we get out of here?" he asked. He shuffled over to the woman he'd hit and started picking her up, getting her arm over his shoulder and preparing to stand. "Covering fire, perhaps?"

  The two reinforcements opened up again, but this time Mako, Chordus and Sharah made it through the doorway. Loren dragged the guard through and dodged sideways just as the two young men came through amidst a barrage of blaster fire. They each dodged to the other side of the doorway, smiling at their accomplishment. The smiles turned to shock, though, as the last man through looked at the cauterized blast mark on his upper chest. He looked at the other man, then at Loren, as he slumped to the ground, back up against the wall. His repeating blaster fell to the floor with a clatter, the sound piercing in the silence of the short interval between the racket of blaster fire.

  Loren looked at the other young guard, who had a confident and determined look on his face. "Ready?" Loren asked, and the man just nodded.

  They each fired a number of rounds back through the doorway to slow down pursuit, then hammered down the old rusted metal stairs to the ground floor.

  Upon reaching ground level they stepped off the stairs and out onto floor of the warehouse. Other than evenly spaced support columns, it was utterly devoid of cover or any clue as to its former use.

  "I assume your evac is coming?" Loren asked as he switched from supporting the woman guard to simply helping steady her. She wasn't ready to run sprints yet, but she was composing herself and trying to stand solo. Her expression at Loren switched from dangerous anger to surprise as he handed her the blaster she'd dropped when he hit her.

  "Sorry," he said, "but somebody had to take out that woman behind the cover up there and my SSK had the only armor piercing rounds I knew of."

  She shifted her head subtly, something between a nod and courteous incline.

  Loren saw movement out the corner of his eye and his head snapped around to his right, SSK up and level before his eyes could focus and look down the sights. There was a tall figure dodging through the shadows towards them, weapon in hand and swinging towards him and the group. He pulled the trigger quickly once, something he never would have done a couple years ago. If the war had forced him to learn something, it was that he had to learn to make decisions in a compressed timespan; there were occasions that his gut reaction was all he had time to process- there were no rules, academy classes or war college courses that could teach what it was or how to react and then live with it. All he knew was that so far, he'd always been right.

  The echoes from the shot were still dying down when Sharah reached the fallen man and inspected the body.

  "He's dead," she announced.

  "Notice anything that will tell us why he was in here with a weapon?" Loren asked. The guard he'd helped through the building had taken up residence at the foot of the staircase and readied herself to fire at the upper level when their pursuers showed themselves.

  "No documents," Sharah reported clinically as she rifled through the man's pockets while Mako and Chordus watched in shock. "Burner comm unit, unfamiliar make of blaster, lots of rings and jewelry..."

  They heard the pulsing vibrations of a repulsor field outside, and Sharah got up to defend the sliding door that granted access to the building. She looked through a hole in the wall and then slapped the release button on the doorframe next to her. The door obediently slid open into the opposite wall and a high-end repulsor car drifted into the building.

  "That's our ride," she said, somewhat unnecessarily in Loren's opinion. "Now all we need is to find out why we were attacked."

  Her blaster again began to drift towards Loren, who made it a point to draw on her, freezing her in her tracks. "I find it professionally disappointing that after all we've been through," he began in a tired voice, "you still want to shoot me. I'm not here for you. You can go, and in fact you should go, right now and to a place far from here. Because the Primans are in town and with that always comes chaos and bloodshed."

  "Primans?" asked Mako, standing near the young man with the repeater who'd come to their aid upstairs. "How can you be sure?"

  "Because these two are tall and good looking, I don't have any other enemies that would go to this much trouble, and at least one of those rings you found on the dead man over there is a Priman biosensor scrambler. If you want to waste some time, go look on a ring finger and bring me the simple brushed gold band. It'll have a nickel colored ring around the inside where it touches the skin."

  Sharah decided to call Loren on his challenge and raced to the body even as Mako and Chordus piled into the hovercar. She returned in a numbed state, then gently placed the ring in Loren's outstretched hand. "How do you know about this?" she asked quietly.

  "I have a small collection," was all Loren would say. "You need to get out now." He turned to the young man with the repeater. "What's your name?"

  "Winn," was the simple reply. Loren looked at the man and gestured to the door with the hand that still held his SSK. "You can lead me out of here, Winn. I don't think these folks want anything more to do with me."

  The door to the hovercar paused as Mako reached over to swing it closed. "Please don't look us up again," was all he said before the car zoomed off.

  In the silence that followed, Loren and Winn looked at each other. "Let's get out of here," Loren prompted. "I don't know how many more of them there are, so we need to make tracks."

  Winn promptly turned and stacked up on the door with Loren behind him. He spun around the corner, weapon raised, and Loren followed suit. After clearing the alley, they broke off into an easy trot until they were almost back to the street. They concealed their weapons and kept a fast walking pace through the crowd as they headed away from the night club.

  They heard shouts behind them, then the stirrings of a crowd that was getting out of hand.

  "What do you think is going on back there?" asked Winn.

  "Worst case is the Primans brought in backup and they're sifting through the club and its occupants in an uncivilized manner," he replied simply.

  "Where do we need to go?" asked Winn.

  "I assume you have another site close by. We can hole up there if it's secure and I'll call for a ride."

  They walked in silence for another minute before arriving at a small hole-in-the-wall restaurant. Loren's stomach grumbled.

  "Smells good," he began. "What do they serve here?"

  "Depends," said Winn as the door swung shut behind them.

  "On what?"

  "If they like you."

  "I'm a likable guy."

  They stopped in the middle of the empty restaurant and
Loren realized his hand was drifting towards his SSK, danger sense once again giving him warning.

  The young man at the register stepped out from behind the desk brandishing a large slugthrowing revolver, and a young woman stepped through the doors to the kitchen hefting a submachine gun similar to Winn's.

  "Are you people serious?" Loren asked incredulously, the gravity of the moment lost on him. "We just escaped a Priman hit squad. If I wanted to kill anyone important it would be done already. Will you people just back the hell off and calm down?"

  His remarks caught the two newcomers off guard, though Loren could swear he saw Winn suppress a smile.

  "Is he with you, then?" asked the woman of Winn, indicating Loren.

  "We're good," he reassured her, and the two hid their weapons and went about their business.

  Winn looked at Loren and raised an eyebrow, and Loren took the hint, letting his hand drop away from the gun and his jacket slid over the top.

  "I recommend the noodles," Winn said as he indicated a booth far off in the corner of the room, away from prying eyes and listening ears.

  "I'd be rude to turn down the recommendation," Loren replied, trying his best to keep up and not appear to be losing control of the situation.

  They sat down across from each other in the booth and let the silence hang in the air for almost a minute.

  "I recognize you," Loren began, to which Winn simply nodded.

  "You probably saw me in the club before I came around back to bring you some backup."

  "No, I mean in the background at the dinner where my partners were earlier. The fund raiser for the pro-AI group that they went to go meet. You were mingling, trying to be lost in the crowd, dressed like a waiter, I think. You were watching my team. And now you're here, watching me."

  "And this means?" asked Winn, lacing his fingers together on the tabletop.