Operation Cobalt Read online

  “Getting shot sucks.”

  “Yeah, I know. I got bad news for you, though.” She tore open his shirt to expose the gaping hole in his shoulder, broke the seal on the canister, and tossed away the outer casing.

  “What’s that?”

  “This is going to suck even more. Remember, no noise.” She slid the sterilized section of the redi-seal into the open wound and pressed the plunger. The foam hissed as it expanded to fill the empty space, the heat of the chemical reaction sterilizing and cauterizing the injured area as it went.

  Oran uttered a single, muted wail and then slumped over in a dead faint. She finished doing what she could for him and shoved everything back in her kit. He was stirring, but not fast enough. She made a fist with one hand and briskly rubbed her knuckles over his breastbone. “Come on, Oran, open your eyes. We need to go.”

  He groaned, but it took another sharp rub of her knuckles to get him to open his eyes. By then, his breath was coming easier, and a little of his color was back, signs that the anesthetic in the foam was taking effect. She was satisfied he’d be ready to run when the time came. If they had anywhere to run to. She looked back at Nico and was surprised to see he’d turned the pile of random junk into a workable bridge. It spanned the gap from their rooftop to the windowsill of a taller building next door. Nico was already partway across, and when he saw her looking at him, he grinned and gestured.

  “We go this way.”

  “You’re amazing, Nico. When it’s safe, I’m taking you out for all the burgers you can eat.”

  The boy’s brown eyes filled with awe. “Really?”

  She nodded, slung her medkit over her shoulder, and pulled Oran to his feet. “You get us safe, I’ll buy you an entire vat of cloned-beef burgers. Maybe even real beef if we can find some on this world.”

  “And I’ll buy dessert,” Oran chimed in weakly.

  Nico was almost dancing a jig now. “Then you better hurry. Come on. It’ll hold your weight, but we gots to go!”

  Oran was moving a little better now that the pain had eased, and he managed to get himself across the makeshift bridge with minimal help, though it took both of them longer than she liked to get through the window. I’m getting old. If she survived this insanity, she really needed to work on her flexibility…and her cardio.

  The moment her feet hit the floor Nico began hauling the bridge in behind him, erasing any sign of their escape. Tyra helped, and they had it almost inside when the air erupted with shouts and the ring of heavy boots on steel. Their mystery attackers were on their way up the fire escape.

  They ducked out of sight and dropped their voices to hushed whispers. “Where to, now, Nico?”

  “I’m taking you somewhere safe.” Nico grabbed her by the hand. “Someplace secret.”

  Safe was all Tyra cared about right now. She needed to get somewhere secure so she could treat Oran, find out if anyone else had gotten out, and then figure out who the fraxx had the balls to storm a volunteer medical center in broad daylight. If they’d been there for pharma, they wouldn’t have gone looking for her and Oran. Whoever they were, they were there to do harm, and she had a sinking feeling that didn’t bode well for the rest of her team.

  All she had was a medkit, a wounded teammate, and a street urchin whose strongest motivation was his love of hamburgers. It would have to be enough.

  Dante slammed his fist into the sparring bot with a satisfying smack. The owners of the club had issued invitations to Dante’s entire team to use their training gym while the Nova Force’s new base on Astek Station was under construction. The feel of the gym took Dante back to his life before he’d joined up, back when blood sports and hurting people for money were the only ways he knew to survive.

  “You break it, you’re buying me a new one, Strak!” Cynder, one of the cyborg owners of the club called out from across the gym.

  “Don’t listen to her. She’s broken that poor thing more times than we can count. Lieksa always manages to put it back together again,” Toro, the biggest cyborg Dante had ever seen, said before taking another swing at Cynder. The two of them were sparring in preparation for their next matches. Husband and wife pounded on each other with a ferocity that would have done real damage to a human.

  “Don’t worry ‘bout your cute little bot. I’m pulling my punches. The IAF training gyms never had anything as robust as your toys, and I learned fast not to break them.”

  Jaeger, Cynder’s other husband, looked up from the weight bench without bothering to lower the hundred pounds of weight loaded onto his bar, and stars knew how high the cyborg had the gravity dialed up in that area. Working out with cyborgs had been an eye-opening experience for Dante. For the first time in a long time, he wasn’t the strongest one in the gym. Not even close.

  “You want a real workout, Strak, you should go a few rounds with Cyn.”

  “Nope. I don’t fight ladies. Not even ones that could kick my ass while hopping on one foot.”

  There were riffs of laughter from all around the training area. Cynder didn’t laugh, though. She stepped away from Toro and looked straight at Dante, her expression solemn. “Personal rule?”

  Dante tapped two fingers to his chest. “A promise I made to myself a long time ago.”

  Cyn dropped her head in a brief nod, pivoted, and moved back into range of her husband’s blows. Some women took his stance as an affront, others as a challenge. He appreciated that Cynder hadn’t. He didn’t like to talk about the reasons behind that rule.

  Thoughts of the past cooled his interest in working out anymore. He deactivated the sparring bot and headed for the showers. The water might be recycled, but it would be scorching hot, and that’s all he really needed. The showers in the club’s gym were built to accommodate their fighters, which meant that even his six-foot-nine frame fitted comfortably in the stalls. It was yet another reason he liked coming to the Nova Club. There was nothing here that made him feel out of place.

  He’d traveled all over the galaxy, but this place was unique. It wasn’t Astek Station itself– there was nothing comfortable about its cramped corridors, battered walls, and recycled atmosphere. It was the beings who had carved out a place for themselves in this collection of platforms and stations that floated out at the edge of known space. Humans, Torskis, Jeskyrans, Pherans, and cyborgs lived side by side, laughing, fighting, and loving each other.

  It was a place where air was precious, and life was cheap. The Corp-Sec teams worked tirelessly to maintain some semblance of order, but it was a fight they’d never win. Astek catered to every vice imaginable, and there wasn’t much that was illegal, so long as you had the scrip and the inclination to indulge. Not that he indulged in anything stronger than Ja’kreesh these days. The brewed stimulant was the Torski equivalent of coffee, and most humans couldn’t handle the effect on their nervous systems. Being part Torski, it didn’t bother him. There was a brew shop on the station that specialized in the stuff, and he’d become a regular customer.

  He was still mulling over the quirks and qualities of their new base of operations when his comm-device erupted in a strident sequence of chirps and beeps. Veth. That was the priority message alert. He left the shower running and jogged over to where he’d left his belongings, rummaging through them until he found his comm.

  He thumbed the control to audio only. “Strak here.”

  “This is Rossi. You’ve been tapped for a solo mission. You’ve got ten minutes to get in uniform and report to the briefing room on the Malora.”

  “I’ll be there.” He didn’t bother asking what the mission was. He’d find out when he got to the briefing. It wasn’t common for Rossi to split up the team and even less common for Strak to be the one going in alone. For one thing, he was the Malora’s pilot, and then there was the fact his appearance made him stand out. Whatever the assignment was, stealth wouldn’t be part of it.

  Chapter Two

  This is the last time I make assumptions about a damned mission. Dante stomp
ed out of his fifth bar of the day and narrowed his eyes against the afternoon sun. Bellex 3 might have been a beautiful planet once, but the corporate-owned world had long since been drained of resources and covered in factories and processing plants. This entire system was basically one massive shipyard, creating and assembling the components for everything from small shuttlecraft to military-class star destroyers. The planet’s entire population worked for Bellex Corporation as freelancers, contractors, or indentured labor.

  His transportation here had been part of his cover as a freelancer looking for short-term work. He’d caught a ride with one of the freighters that crisscrossed the cosmos, spending several days with Royan Watson, the pilot of the Sun Sprite. Royan’s sister ran a cargo company out of the Drift and they’d been at the center of the rebellion that uncovered some of the corporations’ darkest secrets. They were solid allies in the fight against the corporations, which made Royan’s ship the ideal way to get onto Bellex unnoticed.

  He and Royan used some of their transit time to rehearse a public argument that played out once they landed. It culminated in shouts, thinly veiled threats, and Dante getting ‘fired.’ Now, he was just another transient worker looking for a job until he could find a way off the planet. It was a common story, and it explained why he’d been the one tagged for this mission. The rest of his team were too military to ever pass for drifters, and two of them wouldn’t be allowed in the system at all.

  Bellex Corp was so protective of their industrial secrets the whole system was off-limits to anyone with cybernetic implants or anything that could conceivably be used to conduct corporate espionage. Aria and Eric would only be able to enter if Nova Force stepped in to override the restriction. It was an insane level of security considering he’d been in the heart of the system for several days and hadn’t seen anything remotely classified. He hadn’t found any sign of the volunteer medical team he’d been sent to locate, either. In fact, he couldn’t find much to suggest they’d been here at all.

  The address Boundless had on file turned out to be an abandoned building, and no one in the neighborhood would admit to knowing anything about the team, their mission, or the hastily painted over blaster marks and blood stains he’d found inside a building everyone swore had been empty for years. He’d found leftover medical supplies stashed in an abandoned room upstairs. In a neighborhood as poor as this one, the fact the supplies were still there, untouched, spoke volumes. The locals were too afraid to even enter the building, never mind talk.

  By the end of his second day on the planet, Dante had grown frustrated enough he’d been tempted to ask what color the sky was, just to see if the inhabitants claimed they had never heard the word sky.

  There was something off about the population here, too. He’d been to plenty of worlds like Bellex 3. Hell, he’d been raised in places not much different, but he had never seen beings behave the way they did here.

  It wasn’t everyone. There were still some people with resigned expressions and the slow, measured pace and stooped shoulders of someone who knew that there was no point in rushing through life because every day would be the same from now until they died. But everywhere he went, there were people striding through the streets with near frenetic energy and vacant eyes. For the first time in his life, Dante found himself moving out of people’s way.

  The black marketeers, bootleggers, and pharma dealers still plied their goods and made their money by offering fleeting escapes from reality, but there were fewer of them than there should have been. Bars, brothels, and pharma dens offered their wares along every block he walked, but none of them were doing a booming business. The harder the life, the more likely people were to escape the drudgery through their vice of choice. So, why weren’t there more customers?

  His briefing included the drug crisis that supposedly gripped this world, but he hadn’t seen any of the usual signs of addiction or overdose. A former IAF medic who worked security at one of the factories had made the initial report and then disappeared, just like the Boundless team of doctors who had come to Bellex to help.

  Boundless had been here less than two weeks before vanishing into thin fraxxing air. After four days of casually worded questions and countless visits to bars and backrooms looking for scuttlebutt, he was only certain of two things. Someone had erased all trace of the Boundless medical team’s visit to Bellex 3, and whatever had happened to the doctors, it wasn’t good.

  He’d run into the same people once or twice, and it wouldn’t take the locals long to notice that the hulking newcomer kept asking questions that had nothing to do with finding a job that would get him off the planet, or at least paying for the rundown room he kept so he had a place to sleep at night. The price was steep, too, considering the bed was too small, the walls were infested with lizards, and his fellow renters were a silent, shady crew who seemed to have an aversion to daylight and personal hygiene.

  The Malora would be arriving in a matter of days with Commander Rossi and the rest of Team Three. The plan was for him to have scouted all of District Twelve and collected as much intel as he could before they got here to start the official investigation. If he didn’t find a lead soon, the plan was officially fraxxed.

  The streets were as quiet as they ever got in a place like this. The factories ran day and night, which meant the businesses did, too. It was another two hours until the next shift change, though, and the mid-afternoon sun had driven most of the off-duty workers inside. It was a good time to revisit the place the doctors had been using as a base. There wouldn’t be many people on the streets to notice he was poking around the empty building again. Maybe this time he’d find some clue to tell him what had happened.

  He scoffed at himself. “Yeah, sure. Maybe you’ll find something you missed the last two times you were there. And maybe a flock of green fairies will descend from the sky and offer you cold beers and ice cream, too.”

  He was still grumbling to himself when an odd sound caught his attention. He jogged forward a few steps, trying to figure out what it was. A trash-choked alley opened onto the street, the narrow walls amplifying what he heard until it was unmistakable. Quick, light footsteps were coming his way, fast. He froze, considering his options. Did he follow his training and investigate, or stick to his cover and keep walking?

  It only took him a nanosecond to make his decision. He turned and headed into the alley. If someone was running in this heat, they were either causing trouble or fleeing it. Either way, it was worth checking into. He only made it a few meters before the source of the noise appeared. She was short, with a matted ponytail of dark hair streaming behind her as she ran full-tilt toward him. Her head was down so he couldn’t see her face, and she didn’t see him at all.

  “Hey!” He called out a warning as she closed the distance between them.

  Her head snapped up, and he caught a glimpse of vivid green eyes wild with fear as she realized her path was blocked.

  He expected her to slow down, but instead, she accelerated, coming straight for him with her teeth bared in a defiant snarl. She feinted left and then veered right trying to deke around him. He reached for her and she dodged, ducking under his hand only to lose her footing in the garbage that littered the alley. She went flying, smashing into the wall with enough force he winced in sympathy.

  She was still trying to get back to her feet when he caught up to her. He reached down and grabbed hold of the backpack she wore, lifting her until her feet dangled half a meter off the ground. The little peskin was still fighting, thrashing in his grip and trying her best to land a blow as a string of curses in a variety of languages flew out of her mouth. He recognized Pheran, Galactic Standard, a few choice phrases in Torski, and some others he couldn’t begin to guess.

  She was far too well-educated to be a street rat, and her accent wasn’t local, either. Interesting.

  “I’m not with whoever is chasing you.”

  She raised her head to look up at him, still wary and defiant. “No? So you j
ust make a habit of wandering into alleys and grabbing women at random? I’m in trouble, so if you’re not going to help me, could you at least let me go so I can get out of here?”

  He grinned as recognition dawned. She didn’t look much like the polished and professional woman he’d seen in the holos provided at his briefing, but underneath the grime and exhaustion was the first real lead he’d found since setting foot on this fraxxed up planet. “I’m happy to help you, Dr. Li. In fact, you’re the whole reason I’m here.”

  Tyra wasn’t sure she believed the walking mountain of muscle who had her dangling in mid-air, but she was short on time and out of options. “Great! Who the fraxx are you? And more importantly, what are you going to do about the three guys trying to kill me?”

  The big guy grunted. “Only three? They can’t be trying that hard. My name’s Dante. Sergeant Strak if you want to be formal. I’m Nova Force, and I’m here to find out what happened to you and your team.”

  Nova Force. Well, that explained the attitude. They were the elite of the Interstellar Armed Forces. “My team was wiped out by the same assholes hunting me right now. I’m the only one left.” She didn’t mention Oran. He was still alive, but if she didn’t get back with the meds she’d retrieved from their old base, he wouldn’t be for long. She’d tell her rescuer about him once he’d proven she could trust him…and if they survived the next few minutes.

  He lowered her to the ground gently. “If I let go of you, are you going to bolt? I’m not really a fan of running.”

  “And I’m not a fan of dying. You protect me, I’ll stick around. Just don’t expect me to help.”

  He grinned, flashing a set of dimples that made her heart beat even faster. “I don’t need your help, Shortcake. You just stay out of sight. This won’t take long.”