Support Your Local Audit Chief
D.J. Butler
Arrowhawk Post crouched on the frontier of the Company’s operations on Sarovar Alpha, and you couldn’t be too careful. Law enforcement essentially didn’t exist, beyond the scarce resources of Company security. Company employees got rowdy from time to time, as did the country-setties, and even the inhuman Weavers.
John sat at the back of the chapel and stayed awake.
Technically, the building might not be a chapel. It was a long, rectangular, single room with a high ceiling and tall, narrow windows. At one end, the floor rose slightly and held a pulpit. The long part of the room was full of folding printed chairs in neat rows. The people occupying the chairs were a mixed group that included some Company employees, some Post residents who ran or worked in the local businesses, and some people from the surrounding villages—country-setties from the nyoots, as one would say in Sedjem, the trade patois of Sarovar Alpha.
Ruth always referred to the building as the “Unity Hall.” She’d built it, with volunteer labor and printed components shipped by maglev from Henry Hudson Post. The Unity Hall was ten minutes’ walk from John’s khat, his Company-owned residence, near the stockade walls of Arrowhawk Post. Church services were held here, and social events. No priest had ever blessed it, as far as John understood.
Ruth stood at the pulpit, preaching. She was tall and slender without sacrificing any femininity. Her face had high-boned features and was framed in dark red hair. She wore a bright green dress she had brought from Earth. The ubiquity of the Company’s colors had pushed her into a revolt against buff and, in particular, blue; she decorated the house and dressed herself and the girls in every conceivable color but those two.
Ruth preached most weeks. She was technically not a priest, since of course the driving force of the creation of the United Congregations had been the desire of the various constituent movements—the Traditionalist Anglicans, the Right Catholics, the Remnant LDS, and the others—to strip progressive politics and secular ideas of social justice out of their various forms of Christianity, getting back to something closer to a primitive gospel. That meant that the Unity Church didn’t ordain women, for instance. So Ruth was technically not a priest and wouldn’t become one, because she was committed U.C., from the Catholic side. Someday, when this congregation really got officially organized, she’d be the chair of the Parish Committee, or something like that—John was a little fuzzy on all things churchly—but for now, she ran the show. If Arrowhawk Post could be said to have a clergyman, she was it.
And therefore John stayed studiously awake through the sermon.
Their two daughters sat up front with Nermer, a retired militiaman who was the family’s live-in security staff. Nermer was local to Sarovar Alpha, a proud country-setty with deeply tanned skin and curly white hair who insisted on bringing his heavy staff into the chapel with him. Other congregants included Faisal, a local man of all jobs who sometimes worked for John, and who wore a tunic and trousers the color of faded roses. Faisal carried his pink frilly parasol, possibly because he regarded it as a formal fashion accessory. John also saw several country-setties he recognized, men and women who lived in the nearby village of Nyoot Abedjoo.
Ruth was casting a wide net.
John sat at the back because he volunteered as the usher. He may have been fuzzy on churchly things, but he knew enough to open the door for people when they came and went. He wore his nicest jacket—Company blue and buff—the crisp wool one for formal occasions. In his right pocket, he carried his energy pistol, and in his left, three spare cells.
He wasn’t expecting trouble, but Arrowhawk Post was at the end of the maglev line. It was surrounded by wilderness, and trouble happened from time to time. He regularly carried a weapon—so did Ruth—and volunteering to act as usher also meant he was volunteering to act as security. John was no soldier, he was an accountant. He was audit chief of the post, in fact, youngest ever audit chief in a Company post. But he’d grown up in a family of soldiers, and he knew how to shoot.
Ruth said something about slaves getting stabbed in the earlobe with a spear. John had a hard time following, but it seemed like maybe it was a good thing that they were stabbed, and they even wanted it, and everybody should want to get stabbed in the ear. This sort of story was why the Bible had never really resonated with John. He frowned and leaned forward, bending the fingers of his hands back to touch his own wrists, one hand and then the other. One day his Marfan’s Syndrome might kill him, but in the meantime, it gave him very flexible joints.
The door rattled hard.
Not a knock. Something had banged against the door.
This was an opportunity. John stood, straightened his tie, and slipped outside. He didn’t reach into his jacket pocket, but he kept his hands near his waist, where he could quickly grab his weapon if he needed to.
The sun shone brightly. It was late summer, and one of the planet’s two moons rode high in the sky, chasing out ahead of the late morning sun. A gravel street lay a few steps away. On the far side of the gravel stood buildings: a warehouse, a carpenter’s shop, a two-story building with four families living in it. Children played with stick figures at the edge of the gravel, and an old man in an undyed tunic slept in a patch of grass against the warehouse wall.
Two men stood on the porch. One leaned back and stared up at the printed cross at the peak of the façade. He had a round face and chapped skin, and his hands seemed twice as big as they should be. The second rested with his hands on his knees, vomiting off the deck into the grass.
They both wore Company-buff cowboy hats and boots, flannel shirts, and Company-blue denim jeans. Company cowboys. John had never seen them before, but he knew that the Company ran herds of cattle in the region. And he knew one of those herds was expected to arrive at Arrowhawk Post today.
John closed the door behind him.
“Hey, fellas,” John said. “Fellas” wasn’t a natural word in his mouth, but the sight of the cowboy hats drew it out of him. “You must be here with the cattle drive.”
“Hot damn, they’s got a lady preacher!” A third cowboy staggered around the side of the hall into view. He was thin and bent and had a face like a wedge of white cheese. “You can see her through the window, she’s a redhead. Looks like a juicy apple, I tell you, and I jest want to take a bite!”
“She is a preacher,” John said. “And this is a church. So if you fellas are looking for a drink, this is the wrong spot. There’s a bar called the Commissar’s Daughter, down closer to Company House. It won’t be open this early, but you can get drinks there tonight. There’s also a general store right across from Company House, you can get hanket there right now, unless he’s out of stock.” Hanket was the Sedjem word for any alcohol, and especially local beer. “Off-world beer too, if you’re willing to pay enough.”
The vomiting cowboy stood. He was a big-chested man, a little short, with bowlegs. “How’s the preacher even know when to have church?” he asked, heavy brows furrowing. “What is it, day seventeen today? I didn’t think there were Sundays on Sarovar Alpha.”
“There didn’t use to be,” John agreed affably. “There are now. At least in Arrowhawk Post.”
“If you got Sundays and churches,” the vomiter said, “maybe you got everything else a nice civilized town ought to have.”
“Oh, I think civilization is about forty light-years away,” John said. “But you can get a decent meal here. You like Indian food?”
The bowlegged cowboy’s nostrils flared. “What about a, uh. . . house of ill repute?”
John shook his head. “I’m afraid the nearest lawyer’s in Henry Hudson Post.”
The cowboy spat. “That ain’t what I meant.”
“I know,” John said. “Listen, go buy a beer when you’re off work, and maybe you’ll be lucky, and there’ll be an unattached woman at the bar who will look kindly on you. But if you’re looking for a brothel, this just isn’t the place.”
Heavy Forehead squinted at John. “I know you.”
“I don’t think we’ve met.” John extended a hand and grinned.
“From my multitool,” Heavy Forehead said. “You’re the audit chief here. Bishop.”
Now that he was audit chief, his picture and a short profile were accessible by any reasonably senior Company employee with a multi. “Abbott,” John said.
“That’s it. I’m supposed to meet with you. Name’s Hatcher. I’ve got to turn twenty head over to you.”
They shook hands. “Hatcher. What does that make you, ranch chief or something? Herd chief?”
“Trail boss,” Hatcher said. “Or ames-setty, if you’re from one of the nyoots.”
“‘Ames’ is a cow?” John asked.
Hatcher nodded and spat in the grass.
“I Sedjem my share,” John said, “but I can go with ‘trail boss.’”
The other two cowboys had gone back around the side of the building. John didn’t love the thought of them ogling his wife through the church windows, but the building only had the one door, and John was standing in it.
“So it’s Sunday,” Hatcher said. “You telling me I gotta wait until tomorrow to talk shop with you?”
John shook his head. “I’ll be in my office in a couple of hours. Come by Company House, and I’ll look at the herd with you. Or just call me. My contact details are all on that profile page.”
Hatcher nodded. “You got a pen set up?”
“Inside, against the stockade wall.” John pointed. “We have a country-setty butcher who will pretty quickly convert the animals into tasty steaks, so we don’t have to hold them long.”
Hatcher nodded and spat again. “I expect I’d better take a look at that before we drive twenty cows into it.” He stalked around to the edge of the building and whistled. “Ortiz! Payton!”
The two emerged, chuckling and scratching themselves, and then all three men turned and disappeared into the tangle of buildings that made up Arrowhawk Post. John stood on the porch and watched them go. He heard Ruth through the door, still urging her small congregation to allow themselves to be impaled with spears. He heard the sounds of feet crunching on gravel, and the babble of voices in the Post.
Somewhere, from the other side of the plastic stockade walls, he thought he heard the lowing of cattle.
Looking down the gravel street, he saw other buff cowboy hats. It was not a common style of headgear in Arrowhawk Post. The Company colors wrapping every cowpoke identically jarred with every image John had of cowboys from every Western flick he’d ever seen, but the Company did love uniforms. Maybe on their days off, the cowboys broke ranks and dressed in different colors. Or, if the Company-issued uniforms were free, maybe not.
The door behind John swung open.
“Dad-setty,” Sunitha said. “You missed the end.”
“I didn’t,” John said. “I want to have a spear driven through my ear.”
“Yes,” Sunitha said. “But why?”
“Ah,” John said. “This is the part we all have to contemplate in our hearts.”
“You’d better have a stronger answer than that before you talk to Mom,” Sunitha said. “She’ll know you’re lying.”
“Mom will not ask me what the sermon was about,” John said. “She already knows. Mom will be happy that I came, and watched the door.”
* * *
It took Ruth fifteen minutes to work her way through the parishioners who wanted to compliment her on her sermon, ask about the date and time of the coming week’s service activity, or tell her about shut-ins and invalids who needed visiting. Ruth listened patiently to them all and finally locked up.
John stood on the gravel beside the porch; his two daughters, even with thirty centimeters of extra height from the deck, were short beside him. “Ani wants us to come home,” Ellie told her mother plaintively.
“The dog isn’t telepathic, and neither are you,” John said. “Ani is fine. She’s probably having a nice nap in our absence.”
Ellie harrumphed.
“Good job,” John told his wife.
She kissed him and stepped down off the deck. “Did I see you talking to cowboys on the front porch?”
They headed for their khat. Nermer followed two steps behind them, his staff thudding on the gravel. John didn’t like the social implications of Nermer walking behind them and had argued with Nermer over it many times, but Nermer insisted that being behind the family gave him a better view of the tactical space and refused to budge.
“They’re moving one of the Company herds past Arrowhawk,” John said. “Staying here tonight, I suppose, because they can buy supplies. Maybe so the cowboys can let off steam.”
“You mean, not sleep alone in the wilderness?” Ruth asked. “In their lonesome cowboy bedrolls, singing songs of señoritas far away?”
John chuckled. “These are the mysteries of cowboys to which I am not privy. Anyway, they’re here, and they’re supposed to give the post twenty head of cattle.”
“‘Head of cattle,’” Ruth said. “You sound like a real cowpoke.”
“Twenty cows,” John said.
“Amesoo,” Sunitha told him.
“Correct,” he agreed. “The trail boss told me the country-setties call the cowboys ames-setties.”
Ellie wrinkled her nose. “Trail boss.”
“So you’re going to go count the cows,” Ruth said, “because no one else in the post knows how to count to twenty.”
“Technically, they’re inventory,” John said, “which makes them my responsibility. But also, we’re just short-handed. Sam will help me, and I’ve hired Faisal for a couple of hours’ work. Not sure how much there is to do, exactly.”
“Your private investigator is going to help you herd cows?” Ruth laughed.
“He has many talents.”
They had reached the khat and, now, Nermer moved ahead of the family. He unlocked and opened the gate. Inside, the two-story house made of printed plastic slabs textured to look like stone waited. Beyond the house, against the back fence, was the little shed that had been converted into living quarters for Nermer. Ani, the family dog, rose from a golden heap on the porch and loped forward to meet the girls.
“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” John said.
He didn’t bother changing, despite the formality of his clothing. Was it a mistake? He’d be around cattle, but he didn’t plan to brand them or ride them or herd them, just show Hatcher and his men where to put them, count them to make sure there were twenty, and note them in the Post’s financial records.
He could do that without getting dirty.
Company House was the tallest building in the post, and had the maglev station on its top floor. It was gray, bland and utilitarian. John waved at Payne, the Company security officer on duty on the ground floor and climbed to his office.
Company House was quiet. That wasn’t because Ruth had decreed this day to be Sunday—not one of the Company’s traders was a member of her congregation. But the post had lost several of its traders recently, as well as all its accountants other than John. The people who remained seemed mostly to be out of the building.
Sam Chen sat in one of the unused chairs in Audit, looking very casual in a trader’s blue-and-buff field jacket. Sam grinned his nearly horizontal smile at John and ran a finger through his bushy hair. “Where are these cows, then?”
“Thanks for helping,” John said. “New trader like you, I know you need to be out there developing business.”
“I got plenty of wats cooking,” Sam said. A “wat” was a trade meeting with the indigenous population, a radially symmetric species that resembled giant three-sided crabs. “I only got one audit chief, and he needs help.”
“Also, you like steak,” John said.
“It is the mark of a true trader. An audit chief like you can eat lamb vindaloo and skewered chicken. I need red meat.”
“There will be rib eyes,” John said. “I have not seen the cows yet, but I have seen the cowboys.”
“So have I,” Sam said. “They look sort of ridiculous in Company colors.”
John grunted his agreement.
“Distracts from the fact that they’re ugly bastards, though.” Hatcher stood in the door to the Audit office, eyeing the stacks of folders and ledgers skeptically. “Come on, I got your cows downstairs.”
“All I’m saying,” John said as he and Sam followed Hatcher down the stairs, “is you ought to have a kerchief or a bandana or something. I was reliably informed that you would have bandanas.”
“I have two in my pockets right now.” Hatched chuckled and produced two squares of fabric; one was blue, and the other buff, and both had the Company logo embroidered in a corner.
“I’m glad they give you a choice,” Sam said.
“I can get a bandana in any color I want,” Hatcher said. “But if it ain’t in the Company colors, I gotta pay for it myself. I notice you guys are in uniform.”
They exited Company House and turned toward the corral, just a few paces away.
“Saving all my sars to invest,” Sam said. “Gotta have capital to risk capital, and you gotta risk capital to get rich.”
“Careful who you talk to about that,” Hatcher warned the trader. “I can trade for my own account, but most of my men can’t.”
“They sore about it?” John asked. Company employees who were allowed to buy trade goods on Sarovar and ship them home to Earth for sale generally got rich. Employees who didn’t have the perk worked hard jobs, sometimes for little pay, generally for the hope of one day being promoted and getting the right to trade.
“Sometimes,” Hatcher said. “Sometimes they get tempted to steal. Sometimes they figure that they’re entitled to more than they’re getting, and it’s their right to just take whatever it is they want.”
“Keeping them in line must be hard,” John said.
“I expect it’s about the same as what you have to do,” Hatcher shot back.
“I guess,” John said. “So far, I don’t have anyone reporting to me.”
They reached the corral. It was made of printed slats, with perfectly sized joints that made the whole thing snap together like a child’s educational toy. The slat-built fence surrounded the space on three sides, and the post’s outer wall towered over them on the fourth. A trough of water ran through the middle of the enclosure, and a single opening lay tucked alongside the stockade wall. Just beyond the corral’s entrance was the stockade’s gate, which sprawled open, as it generally did.
Faisal stood at the corral gate, holding it open. His rose-colored clothing had been replaced by a brown tunic and trousers and short leather boots, and he stood with half a dozen country-setties in similar clothing. Two of the country-setties held what looked like pockmarked rocks, the size of human heads.
Faisal nodded at John. “Mr. Abbott.” It was a formal greeting, because they were in public.
John nodded back. “Mr. Haddad.” He greeted each of the country-setties in turn. Geeyasi, who did carpentry work during the growing season, when he didn’t have to plant or sow. Aseem, who lived in a cave at the edge of Nyoot Abedjoo that he claimed was the first human residence in the village. Sadeek, who had twin baby girls that didn’t sleep through the night yet. Wer, who had recently given up alcohol. He knew them because he saw them at church, because their children went to school together, and because he hired them whenever he could to do jobs for the Company.
“Your people know cattle?” Hatcher asked.
“The country-setties do,” John said. “We’ll butcher the meat soon enough. Where are your men?”
“Coming with the cattle.” Hatcher put two fingers in his mouth and whistled three sharp blasts, a surprisingly loud sound.
Beyond the stockade wall, John heard the crack of a whip. He stood aside and watched, and soon a line of cattle drifted in through the stockade gate. Two cowboys on horseback and a pair of black-and-white dogs moved the line, bending its head to turn it away from the center of the post and in toward the corral. Country-setties joined in, whooping and slapping the cows’ flanks, and in ten minutes, the cattle were inside the corral and the corral was shut. Their bodies packed the corral, but their smell seemed to fill the entire post. The cowboys leaned back in the saddle with their dogs sat beside them, falling silent and grinning proudly.
To John’s surprise, the country-setties set the head-sized stones on the ground inside the corral, and the cows began to lick them.
“I count twenty,” John said. “I guess that’s our business done.”
“I like a smooth transaction,” Hatcher said.
“Those aren’t Ortiz and Payton, though,” John pointed out.
Hatcher shrugged. “They’re probably with the rest of the herd outside the post. Or maybe they snuck off looking for that house of ill repute you told them wasn’t here. Discipline gets a little weak around town, and those boys had already started drinking.”
The dogs exploded into sudden barking. It took John a moment to register that the sound came from more than one direction, and then another moment to realize that some of the barking was familiar.
It was Ani. The family dog stood on all fours, pulling both her body and her ears back, with her tail low, and she barked at John. She was golden, the color of her summer coat, with white blotches on her chest and her ankles. The cowboys’ dogs barked in answer.
“Ani,” John said. “Shh. Ani, sit.”
Ani kept barking.
“Sorry,” John said.
“Dogs,” the trail boss said. “You gotta love ’em, but not necessarily because they’re smart.”
“My wife says the same thing about me,” John said.
Faisal knelt beside Ani. “She’s disturbed, John. Look at the way the hair on her spine is standing up.”
“I see it,” John said. “She got out somehow, and it has her rattled. Fundamentally, she’s still a nervous little rescue dog. Might be the cows spooking her. I’ll take her home, and she’ll calm down.”
“Well, our business is done,” Hatcher said again, “and I’ll move the herd on tomorrow morning. Really just want to give my men a chance to take a shower and sleep in a bed.”
John shook the trail boss’s hand and headed home, Ani at his side. She continued to bark at him, adopting the same posture of alarm and warning: body stiff and pulled back, tail curled down, hair on her spine standing straight up.
“Okay, Ani,” John said. “Okay, we’re going home, everything’s fine.”
He waved to Faisal and the country-setties before he left; Faisal watched him with furrowed eyebrows and pursed lips.
Ani raced ahead of John the entire way home, stopping every time she’d got twenty or thirty meters ahead of him to turn and bark at him, demanding more speed. John picked up his pace, more to shut the dog up than anything else.
When he reached the family khat, he found the gate open. Nermer wasn’t usually that careless. John examined the lock, to make certain that the mechanism hadn’t failed—and found that it was gone. Melted, as if by the hot blast of a welder, or maybe an energy pistol set to narrow beam, and then ripped from the gate.
“Ani!” John called, but it was too late to restrain the dog. She slipped through the gate, her bark rising in volume.
John thumbed the Quick Contacts menu on his multitool, then dictated a short message to Faisal. Home gate breached. In theory, Payne at Company House had access to more firepower, but John wasn’t sure Company security had a mandate to protect John’s home, and he trusted Faisal to react faster.
John drew the energy pistol from his jacket pocket, checked to be sure it was set to narrow beam and had a power cell in it—the cells in this old-model pistol only had enough power for a single shot—and headed in.
The dog’s barking had probably drawn attention to the khat’s enclosure, so John avoided the front gate. He jogged up the street and down a narrow alley that let behind his home. He’d entered this way once before, to sneak around a job-seeking mob when he had first come to Arrowhawk Post. He’d had Faisal’s help then, but even without it, he was able to scramble up the wall behind the khat and lower himself on the roof of Nermer’s hut.
Ani stood in the front yard. She barked at the door, pausing between barks to look behind her for John.
Maybe nothing had happened. Maybe some sort of accident had destroyed the front gate. But Ani was agitated, the lock was destroyed, and no one was coming out to see why the dog was barking. John had to assume that his family was in danger.
Or worse.
He dropped to the ground and crept toward the back door of the house. There was no porch here, as there was at the front of the building, but there was a door into the kitchen, and two steps that descended from the door to the flat gravel pad that would hold a groundcar or a truck, once John had saved the cash to buy one. Above the door was the large bathroom window with its yellow curtains pulled to the sides.
Pistol in hand, John moved toward the kitchen door.
The door opened, and the cowboy Ortiz stood in the doorway. His eyes were narrowed, and he held an energy pistol in his hand, at his side. He looked unfortunately sober.
John kept his own pistol low. “Come out of my house right now.”
“How do you know I wasn’t invited in?” Ortiz chuckled.
“My dog likes people who are invited in.”
Where was Payton? He wasn’t standing on the visible edge of the porch. Had John accidentally left the other cowboy at his back, by not checking Nermer’s cottage?
“Just come on inside, chief,” Ortiz said. “Slow and easy. Give me the gun. And I’ll let you see your family. They ain’t hurt.” He grinned. “I ain’t the kind of man to hurt a pretty woman.”
“And Nermer?” John asked. “Our guard?”
“I did hurt him,” Ortiz admitted. “But he’ll live.”
John’s weapon and Ortiz’s were both energy pistols. They gave a flash of light when they fired, but they were silent, so a gunfight might not attract any attention. The walls around the khat were solid, so no one casually passing by could see what was happening inside. They might hear yelling, but would they react? How long would it take Faisal to arrange help? Would he even see the message in time?
“Put your gun down, and I won’t kill you.” John felt the vein in his neck throb. “I might even testify to Internal Audit that you didn’t mean to break the Code of Conduct, you’re just a drunk idiot.”
He took two slow steps forward. He tried to lean forward onto the balls of his feet, prepared to spring in any direction, without appearing to.
Ani’s bark was more insistent.
“Not drunk anymore,” Ortiz said. “Look, we’re just going to have a little fun with your woman. You come in quiet, don’t make a fuss, we won’t hurt you. We’ll be gone by tomorrow.” He licked the corner of his mouth. “And we’ll leave the little girls alone.”
Blue flashed in the upstairs window.
John aimed and fired. The hot, barely visible beam of the energy pistol burned an instant hole in the plastic of the window and into Payton’s chest. John saw a pistol in the cowboy’s hand and a look of stupid surprise on his face as Payton sank backward, collapsing out of sight into the tub.
Ortiz punched John in the face with his own pistol. John staggered back and sank to the ground; more blows from the weapon struck him in the head and shoulders. He lost his grip on his own gun and couldn’t see where it fell.
John’s vision swam. He braced himself for a death blow but it didn’t come, and then Ani’s barking was abruptly much louder and closer.
“Get away from me, mutt!” Ortiz snarled.
John lurched to his feet, and Ortiz shoved him. Stumbling back, John saw Ani flinging herself on the cowboy, sinking her teeth into the tough material of his Company jacket. Ortiz tried to fling the dog away, but she clung tight, scrabbling at his thigh with her paws.
“I’m afraid I’m not going to let you see what I do with your wife,” Ortiz growled. “But you can watch me shoot your dog.”
“Stop!” The voice was Faisal’s. “I will happily kill you, cowboy.”
Faisal approached slowly. He held his pink parasol in front of him, close to his body like a hoplite’s shield, and spinning. The parasol concealed Faisal’s body from neck to knees.
Ortiz stepped back from John and turned slightly, to get both men into his field of view. John saw his own pistol now, a few meters to Ortiz’s side. Reaching into the left pocket of his jacket, he gripped one of his spare power cells. How long would it take him to dive for the pistol and swap out the cell?
Was he better off trying to grab Ortiz’s gun?
Ani dropped to the ground and retreated a step. She continued barking at Ortiz, the fur on her spine standing up in a discernible mohawk.
“You going to stab me with the umbrella?” Ortiz grunted.
“It’s a parasol,” Faisal said. “Umbrellas are for rain, this is to protect my complexion.”
“I got five shots,” Ortiz told him. “They’re silent. I’m going to shoot the dog first, because it bit me. Then the audit chief. That’s just on principle, because he’s an accountant.”
John edged toward his dropped weapon, just half a step.
“And I have to watch, and that’s my punishment,” Faisal said. “For being a country-setty, presumably.”
“If you like,” Ortiz said.
John eased forward another step. Was Ortiz distracted enough?
“Geeyasi and Wer are inside the house,” Faisal told him. “Unless you have some other accomplice, Ruth and the girls are being freed as we speak. Aseem and Sadeek should be bringing your trail boss along any moment. I don’t know your Code of Conduct very well, but I suspect your best move right now is to put away your pistol, admit what you’ve done, and maybe do a little time in a Company jail.”
Ortiz raised his pistol to shoot Faisal.
John leaped for his weapon on the ground.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
A firearm cracked. John hit the ground on his belly, and then Ortiz fell backward over him. The cowboy’s energy pistol went off harmlessly, firing into the clear sky, and then he dropped it and lay still.
Ani wasn’t about to let the dead man off that easy; she bit his arm again and growled fiercely.
John picked up his pistol and stood. Just in case, he swapped in the fresh cell. Vertigo nearly knocked him down again, but even with swimming vision he saw Faisal fold up his parasol, revealing a pistol he’d been hiding behind it.
“Why the parasol?” John murmured.
“I thought if he saw the gun right away, he’d just shoot,” Faisal said. “I hoped he’d surrender.”
The kitchen door opened, and Ruth emerged with the two girls. She walked toward John with a measured, determined step, but the girls broke into a run. Ani raced in a circle around the three of them. She still barked, but the sound had lost its angry edge.
John put his pistol away and crouched, spreading his arms wide to hug the incoming girls. “I’m glad you were prepared for the possibility that he wouldn’t,” he said to Faisal.
“This is Arrowhawk Post,” Faisal said. “You can’t be too careful.”