Asbaran Solutions (The Revelations Cycle Book 2) Read online

  The freaking millipedes were armed? What the hell? Thunder looked at the knife. It didn’t seem quite as big as it had before the alien pulled the pistol. Definitely not big enough to go up against the alien’s pistol. A drop of blood ran down the blade from the wound in his hand.

  That’s it!

  Without thinking, he lobbed the Flatar in his other hand toward the millipede with the pistol. Halfway along its route of travel the creature regained its senses and began moving. The millipede caught the Flatar in several of its claws…just in time for the alien to erupt into a ball of claws and teeth.

  The millipede dropped the pistol with a scream and swatted at the Flatar with its other appendages, trying to get the creature off it. Green fluid spotted the cockpit as it flung its arms around, bleeding from a number of wounds. It finally succeeded in pushing the Flatar away, and the chipmunk dropped to the deck of the spaceship next to the pistol.

  Thunder sprang forward to retrieve it, but the Flatar scooped it up and pointed it at the human. “Step back!” it ordered. “And drop the knife.”

  “Umm, it’s an important knife to a friend of mine; he’ll kill me if I lose it.”

  “As much as I don’t want to have to clean up the mess, if you don’t drop it, right now, I will kill you.”

  The knife clattered on the metal deck.

  “Move,” the Flatar said, motioning with the pistol for Thunder to go aft. The alien said something to the pilots, and they went back to what they had been doing.

  “Down the ramp,” the Flatar said when they reached it. “I don’t want your blood on the ship.”

  “My blood?” Thunder asked.

  “Yes. You’ve seen us. I’m afraid I’ll have to kill—” His voice ceased and Thunder heard a plastic on metal sound.

  He turned to find Mason picking up the pistol, with the Flatar limp in his other hand. Mason was a mess. He was bleeding in at least three places, had claw marks across his face, and had been shot in the side.

  “Thought I…told you…not…let Flatar go,” he said. He staggered down the ramp and handed the alien to Thunder then gave him the pistol. “Call for…backup,” he ordered, before slumping to the ground.

  * * * * *

  Chapter Ten

  16th Hole, Memorial Park Golf Course, Houston, Texas, USA

  Nigel, Steve, and a small group of mercs arrived at the golf course to find a medic attending to Mason and another trooper lying unconscious in front of an alien ship. A fourth merc stood guard over a group that included Spivey, a giant bipedal badger, two oversized millipedes, and a chipmunk. Only the millipedes weren’t zip-tied; the chipmunk had both its hands and feet zip-tied. A dead Tortantula lay on the other side of the tee box.

  Nigel directed the troops he had brought to take charge of the prisoners and walked over to the trooper who was administering first aid.

  “You guys have been busy,” Nigel said to the medic. “What’s your name, trooper?”

  “Corporal Cindy Epard, sir!” she exclaimed, springing to attention. “They call me ‘Shrewlet,’ sir!”

  “My name’s Nigel,” he replied, feeling embarrassed. “You don’t need to ‘sir’ me.”

  “I know who you are, sir, and with all due respect, the use of ‘sir’ is quite appropriate. You’re the boss, sir.”

  That didn’t make him feel any more comfortable. In fact, the way her shouted answers attracted attention just made it worse; everyone was now staring at him. All of a sudden, what he was doing became very real. He wasn’t just playing at running the company, he was making decisions that could very well send troops like Epard to their death.

  Holy shit.

  “Well, uh, corporal, can you tell us what’s going on here?” he asked, indicating the three other people who had come with him. “I got a call saying I needed to bring two pilots and a bunch of troops and came as quickly as I could find them.”

  “I recognize the pilots with you, but is the other person you brought cleared for this, sir? I’ve got a lot of things to report that are somewhat…less than fully legal, sir.”

  “Yes, this is Steve Rath, my principal assistant. He is cleared for anything I am.”

  “Yes, sir. Well, First Sergeant Mason and three of us were surveilling the target,” she said, nodding toward the group that held Spivey, “when Top noticed the target had left his residence. Top and Private Allen here,” she nodded to the other unconscious soldier, “chased them down to this spaceship here and captured all of them.”

  “And then they passed out?”

  “Well, Top was already passed out when we got here, but he had caught and zip-tied most of the…enemies? Adversaries? Whatever they are, and Private Allen had them under guard. He is the one who called us after the fight, but he got bit by the chipmunk-looking thing—”

  “The Flatar,” Nigel interjected.

  “Yeah, the Flatar,” Epard continued. “He got bit by it, and they’ve got some nasty bugs in their mouth. I had to knock him out as the pain was pretty bad. Anyway, most of them beside the Flatar and the giant badger are noncombatants, so they didn’t give him a lot of trouble. I wouldn’t let the Flatar go; he’s a nasty little critter. And the mouth on him? Wow. We had to duct tape his mouth shut because we got tired of his threats. We warned him first, though.”

  “Well, that dead Tortantula over there is probably his partner,” Nigel replied nodding in the direction of the corpse, “so I guess he’s pretty pissed.”

  “Apparently, he also didn’t like being carried around by the nape of his neck,” Epard added.

  “No, they’re sensitive about that. You probably would be too if someone had you totally at their mercy just by grabbing you in a certain...vulnerable place.”

  “No, sir, I can’t say I would like that, sir.”

  The company’s executive officer, Sergeant First Class Robert ‘Turk’ Kirkland, jogged up. “We’ve got the prisoners under control, sir, and we’ve swept the ship. It’s clean. What do you want us to do with the detainees, sir?”

  “Take them back to the airfield and hold them until we determine what to do with them,” Nigel ordered, “and get rid of the corpse and as much evidence here as you can.”

  “Yes sir!” Turk turned and began issuing orders.

  Nigel looked at the sky and saw it was starting to turn gray in the east. He turned to the pilots. “We need to get the ship under wraps before anyone sees it and starts asking questions,” he added. “Can you get it back to the airfield without being seen?”

  “We’ve been trained to fly most small craft,” the pilot said, “so we can probably fly it, but I doubt we can get it back without being seen. Heck, anyone who looks up can see it. But we can fly it low and get it back to the field. It’s pretty stealthy, which is how the aliens got it here in the first place. I don’t think air traffic control will see us.”

  “Good; do it. Get it under wraps in a hangar as soon as you can and keep people away from it.”

  “Yes sir!” The two pilots raced off, trying to beat the rising sun. It would be close.

  “All right,” Nigel said to Steve, “we better get out of here too, before the grounds maintenance people get here.”

  “How did you know what all of those aliens were called?” Steve asked as they walked back to the road.

  “My grandfather. Remember I told you he used to bring me to the office? I would sit under his desk playing my game-slate while he conducted business. He always gave me the latest combat games and had them modified to show real aliens, with accurate abilities. These are the first aliens I’ve seen in real life, but they look just like they did in the game…they act the same way, too, apparently. He also made sure I knew what the MinSha looked like. He used to say, ‘Someday, we’re going to pay them back for what they did to our country.’” He shrugged. “They were some pretty realistic games.”

  “You know this isn’t a game, right?”

  “Yeah.” He sighed. “It just got pretty real.”

  Housto
n Starport, Houston, Texas, USA

  Mason lay on the bed, unmoving. Half of his face was covered in bandages where he had taken a blow to the face, but Nigel had been told he wouldn’t lose the eye.

  “Can you wake him up?” Nigel asked. “I need to ask him some questions before I decide how to deal with the rest of our captives.”

  “I wouldn’t recommend it, sir,” Corporal Epard replied. “He needs time to rest and recover from his wounds. The laser hit in particular was pretty serious. If we didn’t have the alien med tech, he would have been in critical condition by the time we got him back.”

  “Understood,” Nigel said. “The fact remains, I need to talk to him, and I need to do so now.”

  “Yes sir.”

  The medic pulled out an old-fashioned hypodermic needle and injected the soldier. After 30 seconds, he began to move. After another 30 seconds, his eye opened. “How loooong have I been out?” he asked with a bit of a slur.

  “Just a few hours,” Nigel replied. “We’ll put you back to sleep to recover, but I need to know what happened in the ship.”

  “Ship…hmmm…oh yeah, the ship.” He paused and Nigel wondered if he was going to pass out again, but then he continued, his voice a little stronger. “I went into the ship with the new guy. Allen. Needs works but a good heart. Not sure how bright he is.”

  “So you went into the ship…”

  “We went into the ship. I left Allen at the ramp and went to find the target. Came up on them. The Cochkala was interrogating your guy.”

  “Cochkala?” Steve asked.

  “The thing that looked like a giant walking badger,” Nigel replied. “Then what?” he asked.

  “Something…supposed to happen tomorrow that is going to financially break you, but I didn’t catch what it was. Sounded like the Cochkala was threatening…the target. I attacked when I heard the engines start up…was too close to the Cochkala, and it caught me with a claw. Think I won…may have zip-tied them…don’t remember…anything else.” His head rolled to the side.

  “That’s it, sir,” the medic said. “He really needs to rest.”

  “Got it,” Nigel said, and he motioned Steve and Turk to follow him into the hall. “What do you think?”

  “Interesting,” Steve replied. “We can guess what they were talking about; it’s the information we planted.”

  “What information is that?” Turk asked.

  “We knew we had a mole,” Nigel replied, “so we fed him the information we were going to sell off almost all of our remaining F11 stores to pay our bills. We already had to do it once before, so we were pretty sure they would believe it and assume it was their chance to break us once and for all.”

  “But you’re not actually going to sell it off?”

  “Hell no. Actually, we need to buy some more, so we were hoping the rumor would drive the price way down for us. We’ve liquidated some of our other investments, and we’re going to buy all the F11 we can once the bottom drops out of the market, courtesy of our friend the mole. Hopefully, we’ll make a killing when the price rebounds.”

  “So what now, boss?”

  “Now we need to talk to Spivey; he’s the human you brought back.”

  “Follow me, sir.” The enlisted man led them to a different corridor with several guarded doors. He stopped at one and motioned the guard to step aside.

  “This one’s the human. He’s handcuffed to the chair, so you don’t have to worry about him.”

  “Wait for us here, please,” Nigel said. He opened the door. “C’mon, Steve, let’s see what the scumbag has to say.”

  The two men walked into the cell room to find Spivey with his head in his hands, leaning forward on the table to which he was handcuffed. He looked up as the men entered the room, and Nigel could see the man had been crying.

  “Yeah, boo hoo, we caught you,” Nigel said. “Did you think I was too stupid to notice what you were doing?”

  “No,” Spivey replied. “There are many things you may accurately be called, but people who take you for stupid are destined to be unpleasantly surprised. I tried to tell them that, but they wouldn’t listen. They could only see the lazy, spoiled brat; they couldn’t see what lay beneath. Although you don’t have your grandfather’s work ethic, you have his brains and mental agility.”

  “So why did you betray my family? My grandfather gave your career a huge boost when he hired you; he must have seen something in you. My father must have seen it too, or he would have fired you a long time before now.”

  “Does it matter why I did it? Just kill me and be done with it.”

  “Oh, I don’t think your death will happen for quite some time. There are a lot of folks around here who have lost friends and relatives who would love to have a private ‘talk’ with you first. Unfortunately for you, there aren’t many people who know we have you, and they’re the ones looking forward to speaking with you.” Nigel shrugged. “I’ve got better things to do than beat up a helpless man, but they apparently don’t.”

  Spivey seemed to wilt into himself. “I was afraid of that. I always knew and feared it would end this way.”

  “Then why did you do it?”

  “They paid well. I wanted the money.”

  “Bullshit! My family paid you well for everything you did. I’m sure you are one of the wealthiest lawyers on the planet.”

  “Maybe…but their offer would have made me wealthy compared to even your family.”

  “I’m still not buying it,” Nigel said.

  “Fine. You really want to know why? Because I didn’t want to work for you. I have always despised you and how your family put up with your sloth. I just couldn’t work for you, so when they offered me the money, I took it. I couldn’t make them see the light about you, but I could bring you down all by myself.”

  “That’s probably closer to the truth,” Nigel said, “especially knowing the nature of our past dealings, but I’m still not buying it. You had to have been involved long before I took over. My father was too good a leader to get killed the way he did, and my brother and sister wouldn’t have blindly followed him into an ambush they knew existed. They would have tried some other strategy, and probably something that was very creatively different. With a galaxy of equipment and possibilities, they could have found any number of ways to attack Moorhouse. “Death from above” isn’t just a slogan the company bandies about lightly; we do airborne assault better than anyone else in the galaxy. It’s the reason we survived our first contract. You had a hand in getting my brother and my father killed, along with a lot of good men and women who deserved a hell of a lot better than to be betrayed by someone integral to the company. My father and brother trusted you and you got them killed. How the fuck could you do that?”

  Spivey’s face fell forward into his hands, and he began sobbing; he didn’t just cry, he wailed and bawled, crying harder than anyone Nigel had ever seen before. But Nigel didn’t care; he was far too angry. The man had killed his relatives, gotten his sister captured, and was actively plotting against Nigel as he tried to rescue her.

  “I’m going to ask you one last time before I walk out of here. Why the fuck did you betray us?”

  The sobbing slowed, but didn’t stop, as Spivey tried to talk. He had cried so hard that he had developed a case of the hiccups, which further complicated his speech.

  “They…sob…they have…hic…they have my…hic…they’ve got my daughter.”

  “They’ve got your daughter?” Nigel asked.

  “Yes!” Spivey replied, his voice the wail of a dead man.

  “Well why the fuck didn’t you say something? My family would have gotten her back.”

  “I did tell them! The only reason your father took the Moorhouse contract was that was what the people holding my daughter wanted. I was supposed to convince him to take the garrison contract there, and he took it to gain some time to figure out who was holding my daughter. When the garrison fell, he had to go take it back in order to satisfy the con
tract. They knew he was coming, and he knew they knew,” Spivey wailed, “yet he went ahead with the assault, anyway. That’s how much he valued my service; enough to throw away his life for me! He thought he could do it, but now he’s dead and it’s all my fault!” He buried his face and began sobbing again.

  Nigel’s anger evaporated. His father would have done exactly that. He would have taken a garrison contract for Spivey, even though holding territory wasn’t one of Asbaran Solutions’ specialties. They didn’t have the experience or the equipment to do it as well as they should if resistance was expected.

  Damn it, Father!

  As much as he hated his father for taking the mission, Nigel knew it was exactly the sort of thing his father had been brought up to do, because it was the way Nigel had been raised as well. The family had descended from knights who fought for the Sasanian Emperor, and when the empire fell to the Muslim advance, his family had fled to the area around Chabahar. Although they’d lost their noble status during the intervening centuries, they had never given up their code of ethics and beliefs. His father would have done whatever he could to help one of his retainers, just like Nigel’s brother and sister would.

  In fact, viewing it through that lens, he would have done the same, had he known.

  “I take it both my brother and sister were also aware of all of this?”

  Spivey replied with a muffled, “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Spivey raised his head and sniffed a couple of times, trying to get himself under control. “Two reasons,” he said finally. “First, it was all I could do to save the family, and I didn’t want to see the entire family destroyed trying to save my daughter. I thought that if I told you, you would also have felt obligated to retrieve my daughter, despite having no training or adequate equipment.”

  “I would.”

  “Like I thought.” He sniffed, then continued, “Your sister was quite the gifted leader and tactician, and her assault almost succeeded. That really scared them, and they were worried another attack might actually succeed in retaking Moorhouse. I convinced them I could financially ruin the company without them having to face another assault, and they accepted that plan. It was all I could do to save you. Yes, your inheritance would be gone, but I knew you would land on your feet somehow; you are too smart not to. And at least you would be alive.”