Chapter Twenty-Eight
“Don’t forget to use the code words for everyone,” Jackson reminded Chalmers for what seemed like the tenth time since they landed.
“I won’t, thanks.” He shook his head. “The time delay’ll make this a stone pain in the ass.” Chalmers gestured at the communications unit’s readout, which listed the current delay at thirteen minutes, thirty-seven seconds, and some change. One thing about the universe Chalmers and the other Lost Soldiers had found themselves in: some laws of physics were a lot more in the realm of 2001: A Space Odyssey rather than Star Wars: A New Hope.
“It’s still quicker than what we have in town. We could be filling out codes and shit back on the island and waiting weeks on the communications loop to close,” Jackson said. He smiled, added quickly, “Then again, we’re gonna have to inform the rest of the crew what’s expected of us. I’m sure that’ll be tons of fun.”
The communications unit was SpinDog manufactured and used a tight beam antenna set in a cleft up the draw from where the bunker was sited.
Chalmers nodded, girded his loins with his robes, and sat down on one long side of the table the mic sat on. The spartan communications bunker they occupied was buried well up in the hills above the beach, concealed in a crease in the rock that would be subject to flash floods when the Searing was over, but remained dry as a bone as the Searing approached. While spartan, it was far cooler inside than out. It reminded him of trips to Vegas, the way the temperature dropped thirty degrees on entering a building. He didn’t know if they kept the place cool for the people who used it or the communications gear itself. Probably the latter.
“Five gets you twenty he says ‘bottom line’ in the first five minutes,” Chalmers said as the countdown went into single digits.
“With or without the delay?”
“Shit, wi—no, without!”
Jackson grinned. “That’s a bet, Chalmers.”
The comm chirped, the light indicating a connection started to glow.
Chalmers clicked the mic on. “PRIMARY is present. Coded assessment of capabilities of WORMWOOD transmitting. Parameters for BUCKET received and verified by SECONDARY. TERTIARY believes there is a window of opportunity to accomplish the mission. TERTIARY convinced PRIMARY and SECONDARY of same, but all of us agree that the mission objective is undeliverable barring additional assets.” Which was an understatement. None of them had suddenly developed the skills necessary to fly—was it fly? No, operate—a damn lighter.
The comm panel chirped, additional lights indicating both the verbal and written messages had been sent.
Chalmers clicked the mic off. He kicked back, putting his thick-soled sandals up on the table while they waited for a response. Jackson did the same on the other side of the table.
Chalmers hadn’t been a fan of sandals before R’Bak. Seemed they were a recipe for sunburn on some really sensitive skin. Or, worse yet, bug bites. But near the tropics of R’Bak, where the sun seemed to delight in making leather boots an oven, he’d been happy enough to ditch the uniform and don the sandals, especially since the local equivalent of walking-about clothes was either body paint for a laborer or thick, stifling robes for the merchant-gentry. The latter at least kept the feet from being exposed, and let some air circulate on them.
“Think he’ll update us on Elroy?” Jacks asked, drawing Chalmers from his contemplation of footwear and proper dress codes.
Chalmers shook his head. “Doubt it. Murphy’s not one to gossip, especially on a mission.”
“Can you ask?”
“Of course,” Chalmers said, lacing his fingers behind his head.
Jackson fixed him with a glare made less venomous by coming between their sandals across the table.
“What?” Chalmers said, hating the defensive note his voice held.
“Man, you don’t get to say it like that—all cool and shit. Not with the way you were on the radio when he was on mission.”
Chalmers dropped his hands, was about to defend himself when the comm went live. “PRIMARY, we applaud your team’s achievements thus far. Operation BUCKET’s last remaining piece, MENDACITY, will be arriving in three weeks, coordinates coded in the accompanying transmission. Bottom line, MENDACITY will make BUCKET deliverable. Caution in employment of MENDACITY advised. Please stand by as we integrate your most recent reports with other operational data and advise.”
“Jesus,” Jackson breathed, letting his chair thump back on four legs.
“What, pissed you lost the bet?” Chalmers said.
“No, of course not. ‘Mendacity’ not mean anything to you?”
“Should it?” Chalmers said, flogging his vocabulary for the term.
Jackson shook his head, wonder writ large on his features. “How you crackers ever came to rule the world, I’ll never understand. Can’t even be bothered to read a goddamn dictionary. Your own goddamn dictionary, at that.”
“It’s just a code word,” Chalmers said, wishing Jackson would let slip what the word actually meant.
“Sure, buddy. You would think that. Mark my words, man: this bodes ill.”
“Since when did you start dropping words like ‘bodes’?” Chalmers asked.
“What, don’t know what that one means, either?”
“Fuck you, Jacks,” Chalmers said, grinning. “Sounds like whoever MENDACITY is, they’ll require watching, but have the skills necessary for BUCKET?” He could see several ways that could go horribly wrong, up to and including acting like they were with the program right up until the lighter was taken, then betraying the whole operation to the surveyors.
“Right…a SpinDog?”
“Can’t think of anyone else with the necessary skills.”
“Someone from the wrong side of the recent unpleasantness Moose was talking about?”
“Must be…shit, we don’t know, and won’t even have a chance to formulate our opinion until the fucker arrives.” He glanced over at the coordinates the tech had up on his screen. “At least we’ll be picking them up at Fibberzs Bay on the way to Kanjoor. Convenient, if long, flight path.”
“That’s great. Just great,” Jackson groused.
“What?”
Jackson shook his head. “Crack a goddamn dictionary, would you?”
“What?”
“We’ll be picking up a guy code-named ‘lying’ at a place that translates into English, phonetically, as ‘Little Liar’s Bay’!”
“Shit,” Chalmers said, connecting the dots between the words now that Jackson had painted the lines clearly. “When you put it that way, it really does sound bad. Think Murph is trying to tell us something?”
“Ya think?”
Chalmers thought about that and his obligation to promises already made. Deciding on how to word what he was about to say, he set his sandals on the floor and keyed the mic.
“We will pay close attention to MENDACITY to ensure success of BUCKET. While we wait for you to digest reports regarding BUCKET, PRIMARY wants to know if THE KING has recovered.”
“THE KING?” Jackson said.
“Now who’s showing his ignorance?”
Jackson grimaced, flipped Chalmers the bird.
“Pretty sure Elroy means ‘the king’ in French. Creole or something.”
“No shit?”
“No shit,” Chalmers said. After a minute staring at the comm, he got up, made himself a drink, and spent a few minutes watching the readout as the data Murphy was sending trickled in. Unable to make sense of it without more and better context, he took his sweet time returning to his seat, just to find that only a couple minutes had passed. He sighed and mumbled, “This is the worst.”
“Nope. Still better than manually coding shit,” Jackson said, leaning back in his chair again.
Chalmers pretended to toss that idea in the shitter, even flushed after.
Jackson grinned. “Thanks for asking, Chalmers.”
“No sweat, man. I hope he’s better.”
They waited in a more comfortable silence. The large fan that served the bunker’s heat pump kicked on. The air grew noticeably cooler. Chalmers savored the sweet cool air across his toes.
The comm clicked on. “THE KING is doing better than expected, but still has to defeat a few rebels,” Murphy said. “We will reestablish contact in eighteen hours with further direction in light of WORMWOOD success and possible targets for BUCKET. End transmission.”
“Since we’re here another day, want to get the rods out? See if we can’t catch something edible for dinner?”
“Probably won’t be able to eat most of what we might catch, but sure.” Chalmers shrugged, dreading the heat, but content to be doing anything other than stressing over what was to come.
“He doesn’t look special,” Umaren said, voice pitched to carry over the roar of the engines as the seaplane turned to shore and the dock.
Chalmers, crammed into the space between the pilot and copilot, and trying not to hit anything important, squinted at the figure emerging from the trees on the foreshore. Unable to make out dick for details and unwilling to admit it, he simply nodded at the pilot and stepped back into the small gangway between cockpit and cargo bay.
Now that the plane was plowing through the water, the late afternoon suns began to heat her interior faster than the cooling system could rid the hull of heat. Chalmers was sheathed in sweat by the time he’d eased his way past some of the goods they’d picked up in Kanjoor and made it to the water cargo hatch. He plugged his headset into the intercom system and opened the small porthole set in the cargo hatch. Hot, humid air began to puff into the seaplane. It didn’t do much to cool him off, even standing in front of the opening.
“Man, it’s fucking hot! Crack a window, Umaren!” Chalmers barked.
“Wouldn’t have to if you hadn’t insisted on stripping her biggest cooling units to make room for your contraband!” Umaren snapped.
“Contraband that’s made you wealthy beyond your wildest dreams,” he said, sweating. The words were Umaren’s own, or close enough. The pilot and his partner had appeared at a Twin Stars soirée in Liberace-level outfits. When asked to tone it down a bit, Umaren had claimed such conspicuous display was necessary to convey their undreamed-of level of success.
He felt a strong draft of—if not cool, then at least fast-moving—air as the pilot opened one of the cockpit windows.
“Thank you, Umaren,” he said with heartfelt sincerity.
Chalmers spent the next few minutes twisting and turning to cool various body parts in the artificial breeze. That had to stop when Umaren slowed the seaplane even further for the final few yards to the docks. The heat quickly rose to sweltering again, but, not wanting to flood the plane with an errant wave, Chalmers waited for the command from Umaren to unbutton.
“Make secure,” Umaren said a sweaty minute later.
Chalmers undogged the hatch and pushed the upper half up just as they pulled alongside the dock. He reached out and cast a line across a convenient bollard, making the toss the first time, despite the prop wash. He smiled. He’d never have been so good with a rope just six months past. Hell, he’d not known a tenth of the nautical and aviation vocabulary—in English or R’Bakuun—he used on a weekly basis when they’d started this op.
“Starboard roped,” he said.
“Bow roped,” Vizzel reported from the bow hatch, just forward of the cockpit.
“Secure,” Umaren said. A moment later the engines died, props slowly spinning to a halt.
In the relative silence that descended, heat expansion summoned the occasional ping from the upper hull, a counterpoint to the gentle lapping of wavelets on the lower hull.
Chalmers looked at the shore. The vegetation that ringed the lagoon had thinned, grown ragged and dry, offering far less foliage than just a few weeks ago. It looked a little like some Vietnam-era photos he’d seen of stretches of jungle hit with Agent Orange.
Taking a long pull of water from his canteen, Chalmers dropped the lower half of the hatch to rest on the dock. He returned the canteen to his belt. The blaze of snow-white paint covering the interior of the hatch was blinding in the light. He blinked and walked off the seaplane onto the dock. Standing still in direct sunlight was brutal, but it was so hot he might pass out if he exerted himself more than maintaining a slow walk. He looked longingly at the lagoon, but knew it wouldn’t be much of a relief, either. The shallow water wasn’t that much cooler than the air here along the border of the tropics. Besides, seawater would melt the paint protecting his skin faster than sweat and he couldn’t afford the sunburn two minutes of direct sunlight would give him if his protective coating thinned, let alone washed off completely. He had a growing hotfoot going by the time he cleared the dock and approached the man standing among the native vegetation.
As instructed, the paint on Mendacity was plain white, ready for Umaren to embellish with crew markings. The paint also made it hard to tell what the guy looked like beyond the even facial features and hard golden eyes. That took Chalmers aback a moment. Upon reading the section of Murphy’s file describing the man’s eye color, Chalmers had assumed an error. But no, the man’s eyes were really gold. They also had that hard edge Chalmers had learned to associate with people who’d been in the shit a little too often and left there a little too long for safety’s sake.
Chalmers came to a stop a few feet from the other man. He did not extend a hand, and waited for Mendacity to speak first, reflecting that the mind games these people played on meeting one another for the first time were far less “sniff the other dog’s ass” as “must show them who’s boss from the get-go.”
A brief hesitation, then the man spoke. “I am Yukannak. You are Chalmers?”
“I am.”
A deep bow. “I am at your service.”
“I have your word on that?” Chalmers said, watching the other man’s painted face very closely. According to his file, he was a renegade Kulsian who had played both ends against the middle quite smoothly in the recent past, and, while Chalmers admired a good player as much as the next guy, it was his ass if Yukannak decided he could score a better deal with the opposition in the next few weeks.
“I have given my word to your Colonel Murphy,” the man said. “I give it to you.”
Good poker face, Chalmers thought.
“You have sworn on your House,” he said, sticking to the script Murphy had given him and Moose had vetted, “but I find I must wonder aloud whether that oath is binding on one so distant from the wellspring of his honor…”
The man’s lip curled slightly before he got it under control. “I have no House. I have no other path to a life than that which you and yours offer. I am entirely at your mercy. I live only because your Murphy wills it. The…others we were with would have executed me once they were done interrogating me.”
Chalmers noted the care with which the man spoke. Mentioning the SpinDogs by name was a tell he’d been told to watch for.
“And still might do, if you show the least sign of betraying us.” Chalmers could play the heavy. Hell, he might even carry through on the threat if his life or Jackson’s were threatened.
Yukannak’s expression didn’t change one iota as he bowed once more.
It made Chalmers nervous, not knowing what the hell the man was thinking. Murphy’s file said the guy was fully vetted. Murphy’s file said Yukannak could probably be relied on for the duration of the mission. Every instinct Chalmers had screamed Yukannak was anything but reliable. But he’d learned from recent misadventures that his instincts could be less than perfect.
Shit, the Mog had taught him that much.
“You have more baggage?” Chalmers asked, putting his misgivings away for the time being.
“Only a few items deemed necessary for the mission.” Yukannak gestured at a duffel a few paces deeper in the shadows of the native vegetation.
Chalmers gestured at the additional bag resting at the man’s feet. “Drop pod must have been cramped.”
A slight smile. “Very. Very cramped.”
Chalmers bent to pick up the duffel at their feet, nearly colliding with Yukannak when the man reached for it as well.
A tiny grunt of pain issued from the other man’s lips, despite a lack of contact between them.
“You all right?” Chalmers asked.
Yukannak snatched the bag up. “Some bruising from the drop, but nothing to worry about.”
Chalmers shrugged and went to get the other duffel. “You can tell me about it on the flight. The sooner we’re airborne, the sooner we’re out of this hot hell.”