Hold the Line (Chimera Company Book 5) Read online

  One day, the two would fire in sequence. A decoy followed by the real threat.

  The handbells finished their ditty. The percussion drills stayed in silent reserve for another time.

  His shoulders unclenched. They weren’t coming for him today. This was just your regular kind of irritating turd gibbon who had nothing better to do with their time than hoof it up from the valley to educate the town’s most notorious wrongthinker.

  Claudio crouched to check a few last sightlines in his holo-model before dealing with said turd gibbon.

  His wife had taken their daughter to her mother’s for the weekend. As dearly as he loved both his girls, that meant he had two days to himself to finish Chapter 17 of his holo-drama.

  When he’d first married Alice, he used to take to the basement every Saturday morning to write stories using just his words. He’d gotten good at it—good enough to look into selling them—but it was soon made clear to him that he was the wrong person writing the wrong stories in the wrong way. He’d explained to the naysayers in intimate detail how little he valued their approval. After that, they’d threatened his wife, and he’d accepted that writing wasn’t the career for him.

  So he’d turned to holo-modeling, fashioning miniature figures of heroic galactic marines and sending them into animated battles against hordes of alien superfiends. He did it just for fun. Fun was a good thing, and the world had a dearth of good things. When he’d anonymously shared his holo-stories, he soon discovered people would pay to see more of them.

  Jasia, his daughter, had told him to quit his day job and earn big bucks with his stories.

  Alice told him the opposite. As she put it, “The galaxy might be headed for disaster, but it will need accountants all the way down.”

  They were both wrong, and both right. He enjoyed being an accountant. He also loved to construct his models and wrap epic tales around them. He wasn’t giving up either until they were pried from his cold, dead hands.

  Same as his other line of business, the one he never spoke of with Alice, and she had the good grace to pretend not to know about.

  Claudio Zanitch saved his progress and switched the holo-viewer to the security feed. The visitor was a droid—a crude metal cylinder with a few basic appendages—and it was hovering up the gravel path to his front door.

  “Never trust a droid,” he muttered.

  He liked them, actually. You just couldn’t trust the clown-jerk tomfoolery flesh and bloods stuffed inside their tin minds.

  “I’ve come to ask for your autograph,” the droid had said, its red vision slit regarding the welcome post, “on behalf of a fan.”

  Claudio got to his feet and took some deep breaths to clear his mind.

  He’d used every trick he knew to conceal his identity from the followers and detractors of his adventure stories. He had to face the awful truth: he hadn’t been thorough enough.

  “I’m sorry, Alice. You were right all along.” At least this moment finally came on a day my girls are safely elsewhere.

  In the live feed, the droid was almost at the door.

  With a calm that surprised him, Claudio opened his gun locker and took out the items he would need.

  He took a last look at the Fable Forge, as he called this room, and walked out to meet his fate head on.

  The doorbell announced the droid’s arrival.

  Claudio released the locks and was about to open the door when he hesitated. He grabbed his favorite fur hat from the row of coat pegs and slotted it over his untamable thicket of red hair. The fur had come from a Peryx ambush bear. The beast had exploded out of the ground when Claudio was laying the foundations to the house and tried to claw his throat out, but the bear had been too slow. Claudio had killed and skinned it with the knife slung over his hip.

  If he was making his exit today, he would make damn sure he’d do it looking cool.

  He opened the door and grinned at the droid. “Yes?”

  * * * * *

  Chapter Two: Claudio Zanitch

  “Pardon the intrusion,” said the droid in the doorway, “but my owner is a big admirer of your little stories.”

  “Oh, that’s so delightful. What a joy.” Claudio held his smile for the droid for several seconds so it had a good record of his face, his bronzed beard neatly trimmed that morning and rocking the cool bear hat thing.

  Then he spread fingers heavy with signet rings inlaid with arcane gaming sigils and placed them over the top of the droid’s casing.

  The rings activated, sending electronic warfare funk into the intruder.

  The droid bucked under his hands for a moment, then it gave a square wave squeal and fell lifeless to the floor.

  “You’ll get over it,” he told the metal cylinder.

  He backed away as fast as his heavy frame allowed and reached behind the hanging tapestry depicting one of the scenes in his stories. From the hidey hole, he took out his homemade gatler, four rotating barrels of old-school slug-throwing attitude.

  It kinda went with the hat.

  Reasoning that if the droid at the front door was a decoy, intruders were probably penetrating the rear of the house, he jogged over to the kitchen with the gatler at low ready.

  He found the window open and a man scrambling onto the kitchen worksurface by the sink.

  The intruder took one look at the big man with the big gun and raised his hands. “Please don’t be—”

  Claudio squeezed off a burst, giving a little license to the gatler’s tendency to raise its barrel, dragging the four rounds up the intruder’s torso.

  The high-pitched whine of the rotating barrels was immediately overcome by the thunderclap as the .475, 180-grain soft points erupted out their business ends.

  He’d handloaded the rounds himself and added a pinch of sulfur for that authentic brimstone aroma.

  People called him a devil, and he didn’t like to disappoint.

  Trying not to think how Alice would react when she saw he’d shot holes in her kitchen, he tracked the gatler left as he stepped back behind the kitchen island.

  There was another intruder over by the fridge.

  Another Human. A woman with a crazy cool tattoo, apparently unarmed, but he wasn’t taking chances.

  As he leveled his gatler on her, his mind caught up with what his eyes were yelling at him. He glanced at the guy he’d already smoked.

  The man still had his hands up. He wasn’t even scratched.

  Which was more than could be said for the kitchen. The diffuse lighting in the ceiling was flickering, an ugly chunk had been taken out of the worktop, and it looked as if a round had nicked the water pipe. Water was pooling around the bottom of the cupboards.

  “My floor!”

  Claudio swung his gatler back at the man who wouldn’t die. He was sitting on the ruined worktop.

  “Force field,” the man said apologetically.

  “Clown shit!”

  Personal forcefields…now that was serious pro-level gear.

  “How about you?” he asked the woman. “Let’s conduct an experiment.”

  He gave her four barrels, center mass.

  Mesmerized, he watched the rounds bounce off and wreak even more devastation through the kitchen he’d built.

  If this pair didn’t kill him, Alice would.

  Double clown shit.

  “We just want to talk,” the man said.

  Claudio wasn’t buying that donkey drent. The planet was filled with people who wanted to speak to him. To educate him over his untamed thoughts.

  Backing out of the kitchen, he safed his weapon and laid it down as if surrendering.

  He wasn’t, of course. You could never surrender to this kind of people. They wouldn’t finish until they’d destroyed you.

  Claudio turned, ran out into the hall, and hurried up the stairs, expecting a shot to the back of his head at any moment.

  He made it to the upstairs landing, where he opened the hidden panel in the wall and pulled out the most expen
sive weapon he’d ever bought.

  This was his other business. The one he didn’t discuss with Alice. He was a dealer in antique and exotic weaponry.

  The secrecy didn’t come from shame at being a gun dealer. In fact, when he’d first dated Alice, he’d been running a gun store, though it hadn’t taken long before his license had been revoked, because people hurtful to society like him shouldn’t be allowed to besmirch the retail community.

  Not shame, but awkwardness about his obsession with guns. Alice had laid it down straight. “Some people can be a gun nut and a good husband,” she’d told him, “but not you, Claudio Zanitch. It’s me or the guns. Choose.”

  He knew she was right. So he’d chosen.

  He’d given up the store, but trading in exotic weapons was his safety blanket.

  He was about to discover whether he’d turned out smart all along, because the trader who’d sold him this had claimed it could penetrate personal force shields.

  As he activated the weapon and felt it throb with unnatural energies, a pang of fear stabbed him.

  They said you relived your life on speedplay when it was time to die. Turned out they were right, because he was thinking about those first years with Alice when he should have been focused on the people who’d come to kill him.

  Did that mean this was truly the end? He wasn’t finished doing stuff yet.

  The intruders watched him from the foot of the stairs.

  “Can we talk now?” asked the man.

  “People who want to talk use the holo-comm. They don’t sneak in the back window.” Claudio lifted the gun.

  The girl joined in. “We weren’t sure whether we wanted to talk to you or not. We needed to make a little check first.”

  “And now you do, huh?”

  “And now we do,” she replied.

  Claudio shook his head. “That’s just you self-projecting gibbon shit. Your kind are always saying you need to educate me. Well, it’s my turn to pedagogue your asses. Educate this, suckers.”

  He leveled the gun on the man’s head.

  He called it the Gun. Pretty lame, admittedly, but none of the much cooler names he’d dreamed up had felt right.

  It was of alien manufacture, from an unknown species. It looked like a toy pistol designed by someone who’d never fired a real weapon in their life, but he couldn’t call it a pistol because whatever it was, it wasn’t that.

  Holographic sights rose over the barrel, focusing on the man’s head. The guy was holding out his hands. “I just want to scan you,” he said. “We won’t harm you.”

  Claudio pressed the firing stud.

  He heard the barest twittering in the weapon’s chamber.

  And that was it.

  No explosion. No case to eject. No venting of hot gasses. And the barrel stayed exactly where he’d left it, like a good boy.

  It did have a ferocious recoil kick, but not in the physical world of impulse and momentum. It slapped back against his soul. And it hurt.

  He knew that sounded utter meta-clown-world, but it was the only way he knew to describe the sensation.

  He owned the only firearm in the Federation that scared him.

  For those facing the business end of Gun’s barrel, there was nothing metaphysical about what it did. A lightning bolt shot out but missed the man’s head entirely. Instead, it smeared his outstretched hand into plasma.

  Damn! Sights were way off.

  The man rolled away, clutching his stump. The woman rolled her eyes at Claudio. “Calm down. No one needs to get hurt.” She looked at her companion and winced. “Hurt any extra.”

  Damn, that was a wild tattoo she was sporting. Razzle dazzle camo. She carried off the look mightily.

  Alice wouldn’t approve of her.

  Jasia would want to be her.

  “He’s annoying,” she told the man with one hand, who was trying to bite back the pain, “but he checks out. We need to play nice.”

  This was Seriously. Weird. Shit.

  Claudio lowered his gun.

  A combination of factors persuaded him not to vaporize the intruders and his hallway. It was partly their lack of aggression, but mostly because the gun had a box of ten rounds, and he had no idea how to get more.

  If he ever found the right buyer for this piece of exotica, he’d earn enough to retire. Never thought he’d have to fire it in anger. He was literally shooting up his retirement.

  The girl fiddled with a wrist slate while the man with a freshly cauterized stump dug out a medical kit with his remaining hand.

  “Okay,” Claudio told them. “You got my attention. You stay down there. Don’t make an aggressive move, and I’ll let you explain what the hell is going on.”

  “We want to make you a job offer,” the man said. He winced in pain as he wrapped a metal sheet around his stump. The sheet tightened around the flesh and gave a low power hum.

  “For a guy who’s just lost a hand, you don’t seem too steamed.”

  “It wasn’t really my hand,” the man replied. He was trying to keep his cool, but Claudio could tell from the way he clenched and tensed that he was wracked with pain. “When they dug me out of the ruins of Station 11, there wasn’t much left of the original me to work with.”

  “Station 11? The Station 11 in the Legiyr-Ho system? But that was…” He was about to say the famous battle there had been back in 87. He’d wargamed it as a kid. But that was decades ago, and this guy looked about 30. “You two are Legion?”

  “Former Legion.”

  “You claim someone picked you out of the rubble and pieced you back together? Who?”

  “SpecMish.”

  “Figures.” That would explain how a battle casualty could leap through his kitchen window decades later. Would explain the force shields, too. He’d always said SpecMish still had the ancient tech. But why in all the Five Hells did the Special Missions Executive want an accountant with a bad back who had a secret life making virtual adventures? Maybe it was the cool hat.

  “I should point out,” the spy said, “that I’m not with SpecMish now.”

  Like hell he wasn’t, but Claudio kept that to himself. He took a moment to listen carefully. Were these two in the hallway keeping his attention while more of them entered upstairs so they could shoot him from behind?

  He couldn’t hear anything, but that wasn’t saying much. When he’d hit 40, life had gifted an epic level booster card to his ear wax production. To put the boot in, the hair in his ears had been upgraded to black wire undergrowth. Firing the gatler hadn’t exactly helped matters. He couldn’t hear for shit.

  So he gave up and nodded at the other intruder. “What’s your story, lady?”

  “Former Militia officer, now a deserter. I’m the marine commander for a free trader. Bronze here is one of my marines.”

  Bronze. Damn! That was an awesome name.

  “Now the introductions are done,” Claudio told them, “tell me about the job.”

  They told him.

  It was a tale of superheroes and implacable alien invaders. Of rallying the few who still carried the spirit of the early Federation. Together, they would sort the damned place out and face the threat.

  They didn’t spell it out, exactly, but there would also be epic space dogfights, fat cigars, hot men and women in shiny boots, and a princess. There was always a princess.

  He should know because it sounded exactly like the stories he made up, which was why he didn’t believe them.

  “That’s a generous offer,” he told his unwanted guests, “but I’m not interested. I already have a job. Two. Well, three actually.” They didn’t look pleased, so he added, “Sorry about the hand.”

  “It wouldn’t be a permanent career change,” the razzle lady said. “Just until we got the job done.”

  “No.”

  “Oh, come on. You get to stick it to the feds. Cut back the corruption. Nuke the thoughtcrime laws, and then walk away. Nothing will ever be perfect, but your life will be freer. Like
it was back in the frontier days.”

  “Tempting. I wish you luck, but even if your sales pitch were genuine, I can’t leave Alice and Jasia.”

  “Not even for 5,000,000 credits?”

  He’d kept his cool until this point. Now his heart pounded. Five million? His mind filled with the things five mill could buy. Top of the list was protection for his girls while he was off playing with Razzle Girl and Old One Hand.

  And given the state of the kitchen he’d just shot up, a brief sabbatical away from Alice might be the safest place for him.

  He started talking practicalities. Escrow payments. How the money would be guaranteed to his girls if he never made it back.

  “Stop right there,” the woman said. “We’ve already paid upfront. If you like, check your account balance.”

  “House,” he said.

  The house intelligence responded, “Listening.”

  “Check accounts for recent bank transactions over 1,000 credits.”

  “Mr. Claudio Zanitch and Mrs. Alice Zanitch, joint account at Second Bank of Port Rojovka. Credit deposit 80 seconds ago from Phat Phantom Enterprises, 5,000,000 credits.”

  Claudio’s head pulsed as a tsunami of blood crashed through his brain, carrying thoughts of bountiful credits. The sensation sounded like heaven, but the head pulses hurt too much for him to enjoy. They were going to kill him with money. What a way to go!

  The lady added to his brain palpitations. “That’s 5,000,000 now, and you can keep it, whatever you choose to do. Another 10,000,000 if you take the job.”

  Claudio tore off his fur hat. Despite looking awesome, it only made his throbbing head overheat. He pulled at his beard. “I still don’t understand what you want me to do. My back’s not too clever these days, and I can only jog about 100 yards before I have to sit down. I’m not a SpecMish super assassin.”

  “That’s not what we have in mind, Mr. Zanitch.” This from Bronze, the man with fewer hands than when they’d started this negotiation. “We were thinking more of having you sit around in a circle holding hands with other people with your talents and singing songs.”