Was Once a Hero

chapter Three



Rigg roused the others shortly before dawn. After securing the heavy weapons and equipment, they dressed in street clothes and grabbed a hasty breakfast.

“I have two vehicles outside,” Jenner said. “That will make our party appear smaller and we can travel separately. Rainhell, I want you to ride in the coupe, posing as an insurance consultant for the Trakia Mutual Combine. I’ll be your secretary. Rigg, you’re our bodyguard. Olympia is a semi-lawless world. An Aristo like Rainhell would have a bodyguard, even several.”

“You others will ride in the light truck. Your cover is that you are agricultural workers on a trip to the capital.”

“Good,” Kim said, slapping his hands together. “Rubes heading for the big city. It may explain any lapses we make.”

“Just so,” Jenner replied as she packed her suitcase. “Rainhell and I can cover Rigg. As bodyguard he won’t do much talking anyway.”

“Strong and silent, that’s me,” Rigg said.

Shasti looked at him with an arched eyebrow.

“Okay,” he growled, “it’s you.”

Jenner looked a little perplexed at their by-play.

“Let’s go,” Rigg said, grabbing Jenner’s case off the bed. They loaded the red sport coupe and the larger green truck-van, quickly leaving the farmhouse behind.

The team drove out of the mountains and high desert districts, making good time heading for the capital and the seacoast. When they stopped in towns and restaurants, sometimes they pretended to know each other, sometimes to meet for the first time. Other times, they didn’t communicate at all. Olympia, difficult to land on for offworlders, was not difficult to travel in. Society was factioned between the selectively bred and the genetically engineered, then between different groups of the Engineered.

In the late afternoon of the sixth day, their vehicles crested a highway and pulled into a scenic overlook. Shasti stepped out of the car and stretched, glad to be free of its confines. The others piled out too, also glad of the break from the long drive. Shasti walked over to cliff edge and looked out. The air was humid and smelled faintly of the sea; they had outrun fall for the time being.

“Marathon,” Jenner said from behind her.

The capital city gleamed in whites, blues and silver, stretching for miles.

“I can see the coastline beyond,” Minaravitch shaded her eyes from the strong sun.

“Not bad,” Rigg added. “It’s got a fair skyline. You folks like to build up. Good. I had enough of underground cities on Enshar.”

“It’s grown,” Shasti said with the faint surprise of the returned traveler.

“Population 2.1 million,” Jenner smiled. A hint of colonial pride sounded in her voice.

“You can see how it was all planned,” Rigg said. “All very orderly.”

“Olympians hate random chance,” Shasti said. “We like it all mapped and pre-planned whether it’s a city or a strand of DNA.”

“Has kind of a Mediterranean look to it,” Minaravitch said. “Like somebody grabbed a tour book of Greece and decided to update the ruins.”

“Enough sightseeing,” Jenner said. “Let’s get going. We want to make it before evening.”

On reaching Marathon, they moved into one of two safe houses Jenner’s cell set up. Shasti chose the larger, so they could be housed together. They took several apartments in the structure, connected by interior doors. The neighborhood was transitional, frequented by business travelers and Aristos either at the beginning of the way up in life or on the skids down. People minded their business. Shasti switched their cover. Now they posed as a team of disaster consultants looking for work.

Jenner contacted the other members of her cell, seeking information on Pard’s movements and the purchases of armaments. “It’s safer for both teams if we don’t meet face to face,” she answered when Rigg asked about the cell members. Rigg didn’t like it but he couldn’t argue with the logic.

Shasti began checking the places Pard had frequented during their brief marriage. She found all the changes in Marathon a bit bewildering. The population had doubled. Many of Pard’s old haunts, including his city home, were gone. Denshi’s downtown offices had not moved, though it seemed most of their operations had been transferred to the old desert training facilities outside Marathon. That facility had grown into a huge installation, nearly a fortress.

They split up and began to follow leads, seeking contact with their target. Pard remained elusive. The head of the Denshi order kept his movements secret and had not been seen in person for some weeks. Shasti began to fear they would have to take him at the Denshi’s public offices in Marathon. This made the mission far more difficult. Chances of success and survival dropped to minimal. They continued to search.

*****



Weeks passed and they were no closer to accomplishing the sanction on Pard. Shasti, Jenner and Rigg headed back to the apartment after a day’s fruitless search. They stopped at a market for groceries and necessities, which Jenner and Rigg carried. It would appear strange for an Aristo like Shasti to carry anything. The oppressive stickiness of Marathon’s tropical fall was breaking. It would be winter soon. As they turned onto the street, the same sense of wrongness Shasti had felt in London struck her again. Nothing showed in her face as she turned to the others. “Tara, I want to take a look at that electronics store.”

Jenner, addressed by her assumed name, nodded and followed. Rigg trailed her. Shasti triggered a portable music com, hoping it would defeat any sound-detecting equipment aimed at them. They stepped into the storefront. Shasti pretended to be looking at a computer monitor. “Something’s wrong,” she said to her companions over the music. “It’s rush hour and there are too few people on the street. Those here don’t look right.”

Rigg cursed and looked up at the apartment. “The towel is out on the window.”

Shasti looked at him, annoyed. “I’m aware of that. Don’t look again. The team may not be aware of any problem and have hung out the all clear. Or they are dead and someone else has hung it.”

“What do we do?” Jenner asked. Shasti looked into the older woman’s drawn and frightened face and felt a moment’s pity for her. Jenner was not cut from the same merciless cloth as she and Rigg. It hardly seemed fair.

Shasti used her excellent peripheral vision, looking beyond the others. She could see several men lounging in doorways behind them, with no obvious reason for doing so. Denshi or police, she thought. They must have trailed them onto the block. So the gate was shut behind them. There were too many people who looked like police or troops on the street. Surely more snipers and others laired out of sight. It’s sad, she thought, to die, leaving Pard to pollute the universe. She regretted not lingering on that last kiss with Robert Fenaday, lingering enough to taste it now.

“We need to run,” she said, with no hint of her interior deathsong. “There are too many hostiles on the street and that’s just the ones we can see.”

“I’m not leaving my people without trying to warn them,” Rigg snapped.

Shasti looked at him as if at a child. “They can’t get out,” she said patiently. “They will be blocked on all four sides, above and below.”

“I’ve got to try,” he said, eyes locking on hers.

She thought a second. “We’ll go into the store and use the phone. We can fight our way out the back and hope they overlooked it.”

“Hah,” Jenner said.

Shasti turned off the music com. “I’m going to buy the Zuidai monitor,” she said for any listeners. They had little chance; still even a few seconds of indecision would help. The others followed her as she pushed open the glass doors and stepped into the store. Shasti strode up to the counter with all the imperiousness of her class. She noted one man she suspected was police, then spotted the rear door. “I want the Zuidai monitor in the window,” she told the clerk.

The store clerk nodded, not meeting her eyes. His physique would be the source of much admiration offworld. On Olympia, his shortness and lack of facial symmetry marked him as a recessive and lower class. Shasti’s engineered senses detected the sheen of sweat on his forehead and the smell of chemical fear on him. So they’re in here too, she thought. “My man needs to place a call on your phone.”

“Yes, madam,” he muttered.

From outside came the sharp crack of a rifle shot, then the sounds of a fusillade. Shasti’s hand flashed out, driving the clerk to the ground. Her other hand snapped her auto-pistol from under her arm in a liquid move. Two Olympian police charged from the storeroom door. She shot both through their visors. Their visor armor was no match for the illegal, hyper-velocity, AP rounds the team’s weapons fired. People screamed, the smart ones dropped to the floor. Others ran. One man fled out the front. Police fire struck him, and he crashed into the show window.

Rigg shot the man Shasti had marked as a policeman. He didn’t see a smaller woman Shasti would never have suspected of being Olympian police. The policewoman shot Rigg in the shoulder with one round. He spun to the ground. Shasti hit the policewoman in the left eye before she could fire again. Jenner fumbled her gun out, but didn’t get a shot off.

Shasti snatched up a weapon from the floor, flicked it to full auto and emptied the weapon across the storefront, exploding the remaining glass, hopefully delaying reinforcements. Rigg, pale and white, climbed to his feet, stumbling toward the back. Jenner reached to help him, pegging shots out the front. Shasti hit the rear door and ran into two more plainclothes police. She shot the woman officer. The male officer fired, missed. Shasti and he collided. Shasti’s engineered body slammed adrenaline into her blood. Almost quicker than sight, she hauled him off the ground, flinging him into the wall. He bounced off. Shasti shot him in mid-air.

They dove out the rear door of the store and into the street. An unmarked police aircar idled just outside the door. The two police they’d just killed must have come out of it.

“In,” Shasti ordered. Rigg collapsed through the open front door. Jenner jumped in the rear. Shasti raced around to the driver’s side as shots began to come down from the rooftop snipers. A laser whiffed over her but failed to stay on long enough to bite. It was like hot breath singeing her hair. Anti-personnel flechettes cracked the pavement and dented the roof of the aircar but could not penetrate it. She slid in, firewalling the throttle. There was the sound of a huge blast from the street of the apartment.

“The explosives,” Rigg gasped. “They must have realized they were trapped.”

“Yes,” Shasti, steering frantically around traffic, climbed to the express air lane. “If pursuit is delayed, we have a chance. There’s the other safe house.” The aircar raced away at two hundred KPH, leaving the confusion and a towering cloud of smoke from the destroyed apartment in their wake.

“You’ll never make it with me,” Rigg said tightly. Jenner broke out the car’s medical kit. She sprayed the wound with sealfoam, using a trauma tab to inject painkiller into him. “As soon as we get a distance away, you two get out. I’ll take the aircar and draw the pursuit.”

“No,” Shasti said. She checked scanners and mirrors. Nothing close. She dropped out of the express lane, Changed streets and levels, heading back for the ground where the car would be less conspicuous. Rigg’s tough, she thought. If he can manage a few blocks and some public transit, we’ll make it.

Rigg smiled through the pain. “Don’t get sentimental now, Rainhell. Stay in character, willya?”

“No,” she repeated, “you were right back there. We had to try.”

“Rainhell.”

“No. Fenaday wouldn’t do it. What I’ve learned of being human, I learned from him.”

*****



Jalgren Pard looked up from his massive desk at the knock. He was working on contract negotiations for the sale of a former Dua-Denlenn merchant cruiser and had left word not to be disturbed. He didn’t need to ask who it was. His personal aide would admit no one to his presence without checking with Pard first. The doors slid open and Grigor Salmot, his head bowed apologetically, came in. The whipcord thin, dark-skinned man made no sound as he walked over the marble flooring and plush, red carpet. Stealth was second nature to Grigor.

“My Lord, there has been a development that Section Chief Vaughn believes you should be informed of,” Salmot said.

“Yes?” responded Pard. Vaughn was an enemy of Antebei, Pard’s current protégé and potential successor. The rivalry between the two young Fourth Generation Engineereds was intense and encouraged by Pard, who enjoyed it as other men might enjoy a horserace. His decision to put such young men in charge of Special Operations and Internal Security was controversial in Denshi. All the better, the assignments maneuvered rivals out of powerful positions. The two young men were loyal only to Pard and dependent on him for their survival against the earlier generations of Engineered. There was another reason. Denshi was devoted to the concept of genetic perfection. Vaughn and Antebei were the pinnacle of Engineering, especially Antebei. Leadership was thrust on them the way it had been on the young scions of royal families in the Middle Ages.

“You may recall, from Mr. Antebei’s morning report of yesterday, about the infiltrators in Sector Five. Evidently, according to Mr. Vaughn, they were not Unionists or Neo-Reformists, but probably Confederate Special Forces. Unfortunately, the ambush set by Mr. Antebei’s forces did not succeed. They did not catch them all in the apartment. Three outside detected the ambush. A rather spectacular firefight ensued, triggered when those inside spotted a sharpshooter, who then shot one of them. Either intentionally or accidentally, they set off a large explosion, which brought down a good part of the building, causing many civilian casualties. The others fought their way out of the ambush during the explosion, escaping in a police car. One may be wounded.”

Pard sighed, pushing back from his desk. It seemed the world was filled with amateurs these days. “A stunningly poor performance, wouldn’t you say, Grigor?”

“Not what one would hope or expect,” Salmot replied diplomatically.

“I imagine there are no documents, or other proof, that these were Confederate troops?”

“No Sir,” Salmot said. “These were standard humans, attempting to pass as lower order genetic trash.”

“Do not be so contemptuous of standard humans,” Pard warned. “It is Antebei’s chief weakness. He underestimates them, hence this failure.”

“Yes, Excellency, I shall remember. There were some Olympians with them. That’s what Mr. Vaughn wanted you to see. There is a surveillance datum in your inbasket.”

Pard turned to a computer screen, activating it. The surveillance video image was barely adequate. It showed three people turning into a storefront. Then the image sharpened.

She had grown her hair long, in defiance of his preference. Clearly, she had filled out in figure and muscle mass, as he had envisioned.

Nothing appeared on Pard’s heavy, immobile face, though his belly muscles tensed, as if in remembrance of pain, as he stared at the image of Shasti Rainhell.

“Mr. Vaughn thought it important you know,” Salmot said, eyes carefully on the floor.

“Of course,” Pard said mildly.

Salmot shuddered slightly; the kindly, gentle voice was a warning. Pard used it when he was at his most furious, a measure of his self-control. Actions of the most unpleasant sort often followed.

“They fled across the river into either Neo-Reformist or neutral Quest territory. We could call in any outstanding favors, possibly even with the Neos.”

“No,” Pard interrupted. “The female is not so important we should go to such expense. It might also give our enemies, particularly in the Army, the thought she could be useful to them. The greatest danger is our appearing worried about this in Parliament or among the Council. Others would seek to pry into our affairs, looking for advantage. Now is a very bad time for such inquiries and attention.

“No, this has been too public as it is. Rainhell is famous on other worlds. If she dies in the public eye, we may face action by offworld governments. Have the police back off. Assign Vaughn the task of finishing this. Tell him to use his best people, but to keep this quiet, even in Denshi. If at all possible, I want Rainhell alive.

“Have all sections dealing with Project Overman double security and minimize activity. It is unfortunate this occurred at this time. We must be careful.”

“Finally,” Pard said, turning back to his desk, “send Antebei to me. At once.”

“Yes, Excellency,” Salmot replied, not envying Antebei that meeting at all.

*****



Shasti could scarcely believe their luck so far. They escaped the area of the police attack by cutting across several of the informal borders of Marathon to an area controlled by a party unfriendly to Pard’s Denshi/ Military alliance. They were now in territory loyal to the Neo-Reformist party. Definitions meant nothing. What mattered was that the Neos hated Denshi. Cooperation in anything Denshi wanted, including searching for them, would be minimal and grudging. Their best protection lay in the incessant, internecine political rivalry of the hotpot that was Marathon. Thin armor, but all they had for now.

After nightfall, Shasti ditched the patrol car in the Ithacan River near an industrial complex. Most of the workers had gone home hours ago. There was little traffic in the commercial area after dark.

Jenner tended Rigg with the supplies from the police car’s medkit. The vehicle proved a lifesaver in more than one respect. In addition to the medkit, Shasti found a riot gun and some off-duty clothes from the male officer, which more or less fit Rigg. They ditched Rigg’s blood-soaked clothes. Shasti broke the riot gun down and stashed parts of it on them.

“Can you walk?” she asked.

He nodded grimly. They headed for a bus station. Mercifully, the hoverbus came soon, and they boarded it, heading for the poorer section of town. Jenner and Rainhell sat on either side of Rigg, keeping him upright. They changed vehicles several times under Jenner’s guidance. When no one was around to see, Shasti used her extra-human strength to carry the big ASAT. She had always respected Rigg; that regard increased dramatically as they struggled toward their goal. Standard humans were fragile, even large ones like Rigg. All he had going for him was nature’s haphazard design. Shasti’s body, exceptional even on Olympia, would already be well on its way to repairing the damage done by the bullet. Her endocrine system would have locally anesthetized it and pumped in anti-inflammatories. She’d be feeling an endorphin high.

Near midnight they reached the area of the safe house. Rigg’s endurance finally gave out. They hid him in a darkened alley, propped up with a pistol in one hand. Shasti flicked to her night-black mode and accompanied Jenner the rest of the distance. With Jenner watching from a safe vantage, Shasti scaled the side of the building. Her fingers found purchase where a standard human’s would not. She entered the fourth story apartment from the roof after crawling over much of the building like a spider.

*****



Leda Jenner looked around the alley, hoping for Shasti’s quick return. It took all of her self-control not to imagine Denshi assassins looking at her from every shadow. Minutes dragged on. “Hurry, Shasti,” she whispered to herself.

The door to the old apartment building swung open. Leda snapped her pistol up, then relaxed as Shasti, her skin now restored to its normal ivory white, exited the front door. The big woman made her way over to Jenner’s position, almost disappearing from sight despite Leda’s efforts to track her. God, she’s part shadow herself, Leda thought.

“Get into the apartment,” Shasti ordered.

Jenner, relieved to get off the street and behind walls, sped up the street and into the building. A neighbor passed her on the way, but paid no attention to her. Jenner could have sworn the pounding of her heart was audible to anyone in the area. She raced up the back stairs and entered the apartment but didn’t turn on the light. The living room windows faced the street Rainhell and Rigg would have to come up. She could cover them from here with her pistol.

After a few anxious moments Shasti appeared, her arms intertwined with Rigg’s, looking for all the world like lovers on a stroll. They disappeared from view as they reached the building. Jenner hurried to the doorway, holding it open a fraction. The elevator opened. They were there, Rigg’s head resting on Shasti’s shoulder. Shasti had what she probably thought was a pleasant smile frozen on her face for anyone who might glance at them. The effect was perfectly horrible and mercifully short. Shasti, with no apparent effort, scooped up Rigg and darted inside. Jenner sealed the door behind them.

Shasti carried Rigg into one of the two bedrooms, gently laying the unconscious man on the bed. She quickly checked the wound, breaking open the medkit. Jenner stood in the doorway, ignored, shaking. Now that they had reached some temporary safety, Jenner’s nerves gave out. She leaned against the wall, slid down and started crying softly. For years, she’d opposed the Olympian government. Tiny, inconsequential defiances, even after the Confederacy recruited her. Now, it was all too real. A dozen had people died in front of her today. The other members of their team were either dead or already in interrogation, with all its horrors. She didn’t have time to know the others well, but they were people, not numbers, to her. From the floor, through a haze of tears, she looked out the window. A few stars shone already, dotting the delicate arch of the ice crystal ring overhead. Around some of those stars were families now lacking sons, a daughter, perhaps a wife. It was horrible.

Shasti finished checking Rigg. Her cold green eyes swept over the older woman. “Stop that,” she ordered in a frozen, lifeless voice, brooking no argument, backed by eyes that seemed to feel nothing.

Suddenly afraid of Shasti, Jenner choked off her crying. It occurred to her, if she wasn’t able to pull her weight, Shasti might deal with the problem in a final manner. Jenner stood, eyeing the bigger woman warily.

“Be useful,” Shasti said. “Is there food here?”

“There should be,” Jenner replied.

“Hot soups, teas, would be good,” Shasti said, standing. “He is deeply asleep, but I judge, in no danger of dying. The bullet went through. If a lung or vital organ were hit, he would already be dead. I shot him full of trank and antibiotics. When he wakes, he should be hungry. After that, pack some food. I doubt any of the team survived to be interrogated, but we cannot be certain. Denshi does not know about this location or they’d be here. Still, we may have to run. I’ll watch the street from here. You go make something.”

Jenner nodded and scurried for the kitchen.

Shasti Rainhell moved to the window, began assembling the riot gun and wondered how much longer they would live.