Charles Gannon - Raising Caine

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The howl of pain with which Macmillan came back to his senses was sure to call down his employers, so Dora made her speech quickly. “So how’s it feel having a freshly broken leg, bitch?”

Macmillan’s face was a rictus of pain; his left tibia was not merely broken, but splintered. A tooth of bone peeked through the savage wound.

“So here’s what I want to know, loving father: when your leash-holders come and find their dog laid out, immovable, what do you think they’re going to do? Take you back so you can lick your wounds in their kennel?”

“Don’t care,” Macmillan groaned. “Did this. For. Katie.”

“Yeah, well, I hope it was worth it. You’ve killed a lot of good people. Well, I’ve got to get going; don’t want to be here when your owners show up and find I’ve lamed their bitch.” She turned and darted out the other side of the bait ground, his curses following her. She ran until he was completely out of sight, then doubled back and padded toward her first ambush point, but further into the woods, virtually invisible behind the canopy of a small cone-tree.

Dora only had to wait two minutes before she saw the first signs of the attackers: movement in the brush on the eastern side of the glade. Meaning they had probably not found Riordan; if they had stumbled across that first clearing, they would have seen and followed the trail that she and Macmillan had left. In which case they would have entered this glade from the north.

It was another minute before two clones emerged, sweeping the tree line with their weapons, then staring at the occasional winged newt-gators that landed on Macmillan, took a savage tear at his flesh, and flew off again. The Scotsman, between swatting them away and occasional groans, produced and choked down a mix of pills that looked like painkillers and the amphetamines that Riordan had been popping.

After walking the perimeter of the clearing and detecting where Dora’s and Macmillan’s tracks had entered it, the clones waved an all-clear. Four more figures entered the open space.

Dora did not even have to think about identifying their leader. His weapon, a liquimix Jufeng, marked his status as clearly as his height and distinctive facial features: angular, with prominent cheekbones and a high forehead. Not only taller than the clones, he had the tigerlike build of a decathlete on steroids. The clones hung at his heels, alert to his commands, like a pack of hounds following a hunter.

The leader approached Macmillan, gestured for him to be pulled beyond the ready reach of his winged tormentors, looked down at the broken man.

“You are Macmillan.” It was a statement that bordered on a question as he assessed the man’s shattered leg. “You have been bested in a fight. And you have failed in your mission.”

Macmillan gasped out responses through his pain. “I carried out the instructions I decrypted from the file that your people added to my palmtop, the one that was in my coldcell. I got rid of the first saboteur after he crippled the Slaasriithi ship. I sabotaged the group as best I could down here, made their leader sick—”

“Not so sick that he couldn’t mount a disappointingly effective defense. Well, let us call it a delaying action. The automated weapons platform we found. It was of Slaasriithi manufacture?”

“Yes. They brought it up about an hour before you arrived. There was no way for me to—”

“Failure is failure,” the leader decreed. “I understand what you attempted to do: cripple them, yet keep them together so we could easily locate and exterminate them.”

“Yes, after you failed to take care of them in orbit and the legation split up. After that, I had no way of getting the job done myself. There were too many survivors planetside, and Riordan and Veriden were both dangerous enough on their own. No opportunity arose where I could be sure of killing one without the other being aware that I had done it. And then I would have had to kill the second one and finish off all the other survivors. So I did the one thing that ensured they would all be destroyed: I remained with them. So I could be your beacon.”

“You mean, so we could do your job. Typical low breed.”

“No, damn it. Think it through: you had the necessary force to do the entire job with no chance of failure. I was one against many and not well-armed. Besides, the longer we were here, the more the wildlife seemed to — well, adopt Riordan. I think he may be—”

“Silence. I am even less interested in your hypotheses than I am in your excuses. I agree that your concept was reasonable, but it did not succeed. There is nothing more to be said. The agreement you made was a favor for a favor. You have failed to deliver your favor to us. We shall now fail to deliver ours to you.”

Despite the pain, Macmillan heard the floating, generalized tone in the leader’s voice. “You already have delivered my favor.”

“Have we? Our factotum was overly generous, or careless, then. We shall correct this.”

Macmillan stared at the tall man. “You have no idea what deal I made, do you?” When the man’s decisiveness faltered for one crucial second, Macmillan jumped in. “You’re not even connected to the people who hired me.”

The leader shrugged. “You are relatively insightful, for an Aboriginal. No, I ‘stole’ you from the factors who originally suborned you. But I assure you that the favor was not complete. That is not how we operate.”

“You’re lying. I saw it myself. My daughter was cured of cancer.” The certainty of Macmillan’s words were undercut by the tense, desperate uncertainty in his voice.

“Oh, I’m sure she was cured — for a while. But upon returning to Earth, you would have discovered that without further service to us, she would have sickened again. And so we would own you permanently. This is our way. It has been so for many thous — for a very long time.”

Macmillan tried to lunge at the leader from his hopeless position on the ground; he didn’t even reach the toe of the other man’s boot. “You bastards. You right fucking bastards.”

The leader shouldered his weapon, waved a clone over to him. “For us family is strength. For you, it is a weakness. We recognize family — indeed, all affiliation — for what it is: an enabler of dominion, a path to power. But you confuse family bonds with love, sacrifice, and desperate tears of hope and joy.” He held out his hand for the waiting clone’s Pindad assault rifle, leveled it at Macmillan. “And so you are, inevitably, the architects of your own misguided miseries.”

Macmillan could not physically reach the leader, but now, his spittle did. “I should have killed the sniveling bastard who offered me the deal a year ago.”

The leader stared at the saliva on the leg of his duty suit. “Yes, I suppose you should have.” With strange — inhuman — speed, he raised the Pindad and fired once. A small hole appeared in Macmillan’s forehead; the big man slumped over.

Despite herself, despite the many horrors she had seen in many parts of the world, Dora sucked in her breath sharply at the calm barbarity of the scene just concluded.

The leader paused, chin raising — then turned in her general direction.

She was too well-trained to flinch back; if any part of her was exposed, he was more likely to detect movement than discriminate her shape from the surrounding foliage. She remained frozen, felt sweat run down her back.

The leader turned back to the clones, gave hasty orders: they arranged themselves into an open formation and headed toward the trail that would lead them back to the first clearing.

Back to Caine.