Rick Partlow - Honor Bound

“There is one other matter that needs resolving as well, McKay,” Kage reminded him. McKay squinted curiously, but it was Shannon who answered the unspoken question.

“Antonov,” she said. “I doubt he would put his ass on the line out here in the battlefield, especially not dragging around Fourcade and Riordan. So,” she shook her head, “where the hell is he?”

Brendan Riordan had been wondering for days now when Antonov and Fourcade were going to kill him, and now he thought he finally knew. He’d had his suspicions when they’d received the transmission from… well, from someone telling them that the Protectorate cruiser in orbit had been destroyed and that Dominguez was dead. They’d been hiding out in a safe house in the middle of nowhere outside Ottawa when they’d got the news and Antonov had flown into a rage, smashing everything in the place not bolted to the floor and smacking Riordan around a bit before Fourcade had managed to calm him down.

That was when Fourcade had mentioned the shuttle, and Riordan had begun to suspect that he would shortly be a dead man.

“We just need to get into cislunar space,” Fourcade had said, trying to mollify a seething Antonov. “Then we get in contact with one of the remaining ships and have it take us back to Novoye Rodina. They still can’t touch us there with the defenses we have in place… and we can add more before they’d be ready to make a run at us. Yes,” he’d admitted, spreading his hands to forestall the outburst he had known would be coming, “we’ve lost a lot of resources, but we have the ability to make more. General… I know you’re a patient man. You waited more than a century to attempt to exact your revenge because you wanted to be ready. We just have to be patient for a little longer.”

Antonov had still been incensed, but he’d gone along and they’d taken Riordan’s private flyer, the one whose registration had been spoofed so that it would come up as a different vehicle every time it was used, and made a beeline for west Texas.

Neither of them had spoken to him the entire way, but he’d known why he was being brought along. For years now, he’d kept a private shuttle in an unobtrusive little hangar on a shut-down storage facility just outside the boundaries of the Rio Grande Nature Preserve. It was a just-in-case emergency getaway vehicle; a bit of paranoia that he’d felt was justified by the various pots into which he’d stuck his political spoon. The hangar and the shuttle were only accessible to his DNA and biometric identification, so they would need him alive to access it… and then they wouldn’t have any need for him at all.

Riordan understood full well by now that he had made several huge mistakes, the biggest of which had been the illusion that he’d ever been in control of this scheme. No, the one who had been in control was Kevin Fourcade. Oh, Antonov was giving the orders, but the one who’d arranged everything , the one who’d created an army of biomechs that Riordan had never known existed, the one who’d given the Protectorate forces a Goddamned star cruiser as well as many more warships than Riordan had ever agreed to and conveniently left off the fail-safe shut-offs he’d insisted on… that one was Fourcade.

He’d known Kevin for over fifteen years. How had he gotten the man so wrong ?

He shrugged the thought away and blinked at the blinding morning sunlight reflecting off the sand as he led the other two across the landing pad from his flyer toward the old hangar. It was a simple, cheap buildfoam structure-from the outside, anyway-with a broad awning covering the office entrance just off to the side from the three-story tall metal doors that would allow the shuttle to roll out onto the tarmac. It was an inauspicious place to spend his last moments alive.

He sighed with resignation and went to the office door, staring at it for a moment before casting one last look back at Fourcade and Antonov. Fourcade seemed impassive, as if all this were just run of the mill ordinary, another day at the office. Antonov, by contrast, was still livid, his pale skin ruddy and his breath ragged.

“There’s no need to kill me,” Riordan insisted, deciding he had little to lose by begging. “Nothing I know can hurt you. If you lock me up in here, destroy the communications gear, I couldn’t stop you from getting away, even if I wanted to.”

He tried to smile, but felt it come out on his face like a grimace.

Antonov started to speak, from the shape of his mouth it would have been nothing pleasant, but Fourcade interrupted him, his voice smooth and soothing. “Of course there’s no need to kill you, Brendan,” he assured the man. “Now just open the door for us, let us in that shuttle and we can all get exactly what we want.”

Riordan closed his eyes and felt hope fall away from him. He turned back to the door, wondering if he could try to make a break for it after he got inside…

“I don’t know about getting what you want,” the deep, booming voice made him jump, “but I do know you’ll be getting what you deserve.”

Riordan’s eyes went wide as Greg Jameson stepped around the corner from the side of the building closest to the office door. He could have been a workman, dressed in drab, dusty coveralls… except for the 10mm service pistol he held, pointed directly at Kevin Fourcade. Fourcade’s hand had been halfway toward drawing his own pistol from beneath his suit coat when he saw the gun in Jameson’s hand and froze.

“Greg?” Riordan said inanely. “How… how did you know about this place?”

“You may have forgotten,” Jameson said drily, not taking his eyes off Fourcade and Antonov, “but I used to be President of the Republic. I had complete files on quite a few important people. Nothing is as secret as you might think, Brendan.” A smile quirked on Jameson’s lips. “I figured that you fellas might wind up here… and since everyone else was way too busy with other things, I took it upon myself to arrange a greeting for you.”

“President Jameson,” Fourcade said slowly, finally seeming nervous and unprepared, “perhaps we can work out some sort of arrangement…”

“Oh, I’m sure we can,” Jameson said, his smile getting even broader. Then he shot Fourcade in the chest.

“Jesus!” Riordan screamed, falling over his own feet as he tried to back away, winding up on his ass on the packed sand, watching Kevin Fourcade stumble backwards, hands pressing at the fist-size hole over his heart as blood spread a huge stain across his shirt and jacket and down the front of his pants. In what seemed to take hours but was only a few seconds, Fourcade fell to his knees, then slumped sideways, his mouth working but nothing coming out of it except a gush of blood.

Riordan scrambled backwards, trying to stay out of the puddle of blood that spread across the ground beneath the man’s corpse, his eyes flickering back and forth in disbelief between the dead corporate lobbyist and the former President. Jameson’s aim had shifted to Antonov, whose response was much different than Fourcade’s.

“So, the hostage has grown a spine,” he said with a voice so calm that Riordan thought he might have just witnessed someone stepping on a bug rather than a man being killed. “I have to admit, Mr. Jameson, that I never thought this would be necessary, but at the time I bowed to the greater foresight of those who were interrogating you.” He grinned. “ Lodka .”

Jameson laughed quietly. “Oh, General Antonov,” he said, shaking his head slightly. “I was the President . Don’t you think I had any conditioning you gave me removed years ago?”

Antonov finally showed desperation then, lunging forward, trying to grab Jameson’s gun. The report of the large-caliber handgun echoed off the building walls and across the landing pad, out into the trackless desert. Antonov’s lunge turned into a sprawl that sent him to the ground face down at Jameson’s feet.