Chimera Company - Deep Cover 6 Read online

  SEASON-2: DEEP COVER

  ISSUE-6

  Copyright © Tim C. Taylor 2019

  Artwork by Vincent Sammy

  Published by Human Legion Publications

  All Rights Reserved

  For a free Tim C. Taylor starter library, join the Legion at HumanLegion.com

  Welcome to Chimera Company

  Welcome to Issue #6 of Chimera Company Season 2. In the twisted politics of planet Eiylah-Bremah, it seems the only way to save the Federation is to join the Rebellion that pledges to destroy it. But who is the puppet and who the manipulator when the Revered Leader and Department 9 make an alliance?

  Cover star this week is Kanha Wei who claims to represent a faction of Federation Naval Intelligence. But what is the mutant's real agenda?

  It's time to grab your gear and join the revolution with Chimera Company: Deep Cover Issue #6.

  — Tim C. Taylor, October 2019

  ISSUE 6

  YAT DARANT

  “Join the Militia and experience the galaxy. That’s what the recruitment pod told me. Never said nothing about being a goddamned milkmaid.”

  It also hadn’t mentioned to the young Yat Darant that he would spend so much of his time talking to himself.

  “Only way I’ll get a sensible fucking conversation on this goddamned stupid planet,” he shouted at the stack of refrigerated canisters filled with fresh basten milk.

  When the canisters didn’t answer back, he grunted and returned his attention to the dirt track along which a trading truck might be rolling today.

  Or might not.

  Today was the day for trading along this route. In the widely dispersed barter bays that lined the narrow road, farmers, artisans, brewers, gun traders, information brokers and all sorts could set up shop and trade to whoever came past. Farmhouse Control had even told him slavers traded on this route in bays such as the one he’d claimed. Except they didn’t use that word. Indentured servitude they called it here, but Darant knew a euphemism when he heard it. He also knew Farmhouse Control would spin any old lie to drum up support against In’Nalla’s regime, but it so happened he believed the one about slavers.

  That pretty Zhoogene girl – the one who’d led them into this mess – had said the next stage of her prison journey would have been to publicly beg either for her execution or for servitude. In’Nalla’s jailers were very good at making every alternative even worse.

  “Makes me irritable,” Darant informed the stupid planet. And it did. The idea that a few hundred yards up the road, in a leafy bay, there could be damned slavers… He shifted his butt in the folding canvas chair but couldn’t get comfortable.

  He fingered the bulges in his jacket that outlined his pistol and knife, and took comfort from them instead.

  What if there really were slavers close by? He could kill them, free the captives, and be back before anyone realized he’d gone.

  At least it would be something to do.

  He spat into the dusty ground. “Why me?” he groaned.

  Well, of course, the answer was obvious.

  In the circus freakshow which was all that remained of Raven Company, and latterly of Chimera Company, he presented as the normal one.

  Darant laughed at the notion. It was ridiculous, but true.

  Even if he could ever be parted from his damned war hammer, a hulking hairy beast like Vetch would always attract unwelcome notice.

  And as the only Muryani Darant had seen on Eiylah-Bremah, their talking insect had to stay hidden too.

  Lil’ could charm the wheels off any truck that went past if she chose to, but those morphing tattoos wouldn’t be easy to forget either. They made her look like a goddamned space sorceress at the moment. Lil’ swore her tattoos changed according to the whims of her subconscious, and that he did believe. Under her smartass exterior, Lily Hjon was bat shit frakking crazy.

  And with everyone else too dead to help – except, hopefully, Green Fish, who’d been forgotten about in a JSHC hospital bed, last he knew – it left good old Yat Darant by the side of the dusty road, the one chosen by Farmhouse Control to pass the first test set to the Raven fugitives.

  He scowled at the canisters.

  The test was to pass as goddamned milkmaids.

  “I’m not a milkmaid,” he shouted at the empty road along which no trading trucks proceeded to drive. “I’m a murderer.”

  He stormed out of his chair and walked up the road.

  The high hedges that lined it made it impossible to see beyond the bend a hundred yards ahead. They kept the road cool, too, except for a narrow sunlit strip along its center that he followed, basking in its warmth like a sodding Littorane.

  Four hours he’d been here, stewing in his own juices, and not a single vehicle had passed of any description. Even though the route was open for business today, that didn’t mean any trucks would come. According to the farmhouse – whose pronouncements were as trustworthy as a federal senator – it was 200 klicks from the nearest region the rebels claimed to control. The year before it had been 350, and the steady advance of the rebels was beginning to disrupt trade in the capital zones, encouraging worried citizens to relocate to the loyalist island strongholds off the Dicadian Peninsular.

  He rounded the bend. From here he had a good view along several hundred yards of road, but still no fleet of trucks.

  “Murderer,” he murmured.

  Vetch had done the right thing in surrendering their futures in return for giving one back to that Zhoogene girl. And since they hadn’t died fleeing the city, life of sorts went on. But he could never go back to being a trooper now, not after shooting dead a few of the poor bastards in blue and cream in Execution Square.

  Darant had originally signed on to the Militia in return for a pardon on his sentence as a convicted murderer. He’d had to confess his guilt first. Told them that the men he’d killed had it coming and that he enjoyed killing, and wouldn’t it be useful if he directed his passion at the Federation’s enemies instead?

  Now that he was a deserter and mutineer, the pardon would be annulled.

  It made no practical difference. The Militia didn’t need legal records to want to kill him.

  But it mattered to him.

  Because now that he couldn’t call himself trooper anymore, murderer was all that he remained.

  He chortled. “The milkmaid murderer. A fellow could grow into a name like that.”

  A sudden noise startled him out of his inward thoughts. A truck was coming around the bend.

  Shite!

  Darant raced back to his trading bay, but he wasn’t going to make it in time.

  Halfway there, he turned, planted himself in the center of the road and flagged down the truck.

  It was a four wheeler, twin lateral engines by the sound of her, and finished in plain brushed metal without color, marking, or any adornment.

  He shrugged at the driver hidden behind the polarized windshield. “Milk?” he said hopefully, pointing toward his trading bay.

  Darant walked back, sat down in his canvas chair and watched the truck.

  It didn’t follow. It sat there with engines idling.

  “That’s right,” he said quietly. “Check me out. Take as long as you like, I’ve got all fucking day.”

  Luckily, it didn’t take that long.

  The truck parked up alongside, and a man jumped down from the driver’s seat.

  He stood beside his vehicle and regarded Darant and his wares with a vacant but vaguely pleasant expression.

  “This here’s your finest basten milk,” Darant told him. “Squeezed it out of the little lovelies myself not far from here.”

  The trader’s expression remained fixed.


  Darant felt his pistol pushing against him from the concealed inner pocket of his jacket. He didn’t like the way this was going down.

  A breath of dusty wind blew up the hedge-lined road, causing the trader’s lower face to tremble, and Darant to understand. Beneath the man’s plain mesh cap, he wore a face flap. It was essentially a specialized viewscreen, shaped and colored to match the lower half of the man’s face set into a neutral and inoffensive expression.

  People wanted these high-tech veils to hide behind, because in this crazy-as-shit world, you kept your thoughts and feelings as secret as you could.

  A camera and microphone were attached to the lapel of the man’s faux woolen jacket.

  It was what everybody hid from.

  Darant felt convinced that this reticent guy must have seen the outline of his weapons by now. Technically, light firearms weren’t illegal, but the Farmhouse had told him to keep them hidden in case he spooked any traders.

  Well, sod the Farmhouse, because the man didn’t seem bothered by them. Darant reckoned it was his lack of a recording device that was making the guy frown.

  The man seemed to realize his thoughts were leaking, because he pulled the peak of his cap down to cover his frown. For a moment, his face flap’s illusion of his lower face failed. Then the pixels swiped away, and his mask was perfectly realigned. Neat that.

  The trader folded up a side panel on his truck to reveal tiered banks of goods for sale or barter.

  Food, entertainment, booze, medical and cleaning supplies. Power.

  Darant was careful to ignore the battery banks that were his principle trading objective, instead inspecting leafy purple balls that he decided were a local form of cabbage.

  Next, he tapped metal cannisters like those he was himself offering for trade. “Basten?”

  “Yes,” the trader replied after a tiny hesitation, just long enough for Darant to know what the man really wanted to say was, “Of course, it’s sodding basten milk, you moronic skragg. What else could it be? Cow’s milk?”

  “Dumb question,” Darant admitted in response to that pause, and it was indeed a giveaway that he wasn’t fluent at this. Humans and the other Orion Spur exiles had been foot soldiers and worker slave races in a pre-jump tech alien empire. To be of practical use to their masters, their guts had been reengineered to eat food from pretty much anywhere, including here in the Perseus Arm. Zhoogenes, on the other hand, were Perseid natives. They couldn’t digest much unless it came originally from their homeworld, such as the cute six-legged basten goats.

  With a shrug, Darant moved from the milk to the stack of battery banks that were in desperately short supply in the hideout he shared with his fellow deserters.

  Without lingering on the power banks, he made a quick tour of the available goods before making his offer.

  He pointed at the large bags of universal rice. “Twelve of these.”

  At the battery banks: “Ten.”

  Finally, he asked for one pack of water purification tabs, a couple of cheap viewscreen rolls pre-loaded with books, and sanitary gel for Lily. For laughs, he added moustache wax for the bearded monster.

  The man said nothing.

  He inspected Darant’s milk, bringing a metal cup from the cab of his truck and testing a sample. For privacy, he turned his back on Darant before removing his face flap.

  Stupid planet.

  The trader indicated his wares on the side of the truck. “Your choices in exchange for all your milk. Agreed. Except…” He pointed to the power banks. “Only five of these.”

  “Ten!” Darant insisted. He guessed that ten was a high number, but he’d never liked bartering. He considered drawing his knife and adding a sharp blade to the throat into the trading balance. It was more his style.

  He turned his back on the man, suddenly shy about the lust for violence that must be written over his face.

  Farmhouse Central had sent Darant here as a test. If they couldn’t do this, they weren’t any use to the rebellion in these parts. Darant couldn’t give two turds for the rebels, but Vetch and Lily seemed to think they were their best route off this world.

  Siding with rebels didn’t sit well with him, but he’d do almost anything to be shot of Eiylah-Bremah.

  He faced the trader. “All right, mate. You drive a hard bargain. I’ll settle for eight of those power banks.”

  The trader remained impassive behind his false face.

  “I’m not shifting lower,” Darant told him. “Take it or sod off.”

  “Six. Final offer.”

  The trader’s words were as dry as an airless planetoid.

  Six batteries. They would last for weeks. It would have to do.

  “Six,” Darant agreed, but quickly tapped four transparent plastic bottles bearing the handwritten label: ‘whiskey-scotch’. “And these too. And you’ll bring my milk cans back clean next week, yeah?”

  “Deal.”

  Without thinking, Darant advanced on the man, hand outstretched to seal the transaction with a shake.

  Naturally, given how messed up this senseless planet was, the man refused his hand, backing away.

  “Sorry, friend,” said Darant. “Here, let me help you load up.”

  Before taking the goods he’d bartered for, he helped the trader stack his cannisters of milk onto the back of the truck.

  The gesture seemed to impress the man, and when they were done, the trader hesitated.

  What’s your problem now, mate?

  The trader stared pointedly at the bulging outlines of Darant’s weapons. “Saw police up the road. Coming this way. Here soon. Maybe in an hour.”

  “Police? What’s their business? Is it a raid? Is this a shakedown? A corrupt cop looking for a payoff? What’s the deal?”

  The man panicked under the barrage of questions and fled back to his driver’s cab. Without even folding up the side of his truck, he sped away, spilling cabbages out of the open side and onto the road.

  “Strange fellow,” Darant muttered, as he picked up the fallen cabbages.

  He stowed them under a thorny bush, a short distance from the barter bay, along with the rest of his haul.

  Then he ran to Farmhouse Control.

  LILY HJON

  When Lily finally found him, Darant was observing the farmhouse from behind the low stone wall of a pig enclosure. Police trucks had parked up on the driveway, and heavily armed officers in body armor and helmets had secured the area.

  “Yat. Yat. Yat! I hope you know what you’re doing,” she muttered to herself. But he usually did, so she crept over to his position, keeping behind cover all the way.

  She got within twenty feet of him before a badly place boot squelched in the sucking mud that lined their side of the wall, making him whip around with his pistol aimed at her.

  “Easy, old man,” she whispered.

  “Damn it, Lil’. I could’ve shot you.”

  She closed the gap between them before replying, “You could have shot at me. You left your shooting spectacles back at the hideout.”

  “Vetch and Enthree with you?”

  “No. They’re holding fort, looking after the goats. Don’t worry, they’ll take good care of them. Especially your favorite.”

  “I don’t have a favorite sodding goat.”

  She opened her mouth as if in shock. “I’ll have to tell Hubert, you know. I’m not sure he’ll understand.”

  “Hubert’s a fucking goat. He can take it.” He shrugged and placed his attention on the farmhouse entrance where Carnolin’s distant cousin – Farmhouse Control as she called herself – emerged in conversation with the police commander, who was also a Zhoogene woman.

  “Hubert’s cute, though,” Darant admitted. “And I find I like a little basten milk in my coffee. A man can have his pleasures, can’t he? Now, stop taking the piss for five minutes, Lil’, and let’s see whether this is a friendly visit from the local guardians of the peace, or if we’re gonna have to shoot our way out.”
>
  Lily grinned at the eagerness written all over Darant’s face. There was no doubting which outcome he would prefer.

  It was why Lily had been the one dispatched to locate the ever-grumbling, book-reading trooper and bring him in. Of all of them, he was the most stir crazy, the one most likely to crack violently and spectacularly. Lily was the one best able to talk him down from doing anything dumb, and she had no desire to go out in a blaze of weapons fire that achieved precisely nothing.

  Without much to occupy her mind, she was still struggling to absorb the pain of losing Sward. She wasn’t ready to lose another comrade.

  Sward’s sharp eyesight and acute hearing would have been invaluable right now. Lily observed the proceedings at the front of the farmhouse through a gap in the dry stone wall, but she couldn’t hear what they were saying.

  The police commander and the farmer, who claimed to be a rebel controller in her spare time, were both Zhoogenes. If they had been human, Lily would classify what she was seeing as a cordial conversation between friends. But they weren’t. Although she’d served alongside Zhoogenes – had friends and lovers too – she’d learned never to make assumptions about aliens she didn’t know personally.

  The conversation stretched on.

  “What the hell are they talking about?”

  When Darant didn’t reply, she added, “That was an actual question. Darant?”

  But Darant had gone, leaving a trail of boot prints in the feces-strewn mud that led out into the driveway.

  She risked popping her head over the wall and swiveling it around to spot the mad bastard.

  No sign of him.

  Don’t you dare get me killed, Yat Darant.

  She slung silent curses at the trail he’d left in the mud. Then she pulled herself together and put her eye once again to the crack in the wall.

  ——

  “They were just doing the rounds,” said the farm woman after the police had left. “Checking I’m not billeting a rebel battalion in my pig sheds.”

  While Lily hid beneath a nearby trailer, Farmhouse Control spoke as she topped up the pigs’ feed trays.