Pearl (Murphy's Lawless Book 5) Read online

  “Get me out of here,” he said to the pilot.

  “As soon as my other passengers arrive,” she replied.

  Vat grunted, sat down, and strapped in. At least he was on his way out of Mogadishu. His papers would have him on a flight to the Czech Republic in a few hours. He would put the shit back in the horse once he got there.

  It wasn’t too late.

  * * * * *

  Chapter Two

  SpinDog Habitat

  Vat blinked and sat up with a start, the after-images of a horrific scene spinning away from his conscious mind. He was in a Blackhawk spinning toward the water. There was fire, smoke, and the screams of people and tortured metal.

  “What the fuck?” he asked and looked around.

  He was in a gray room. It was obviously a hospital, though it lacked all the usual technological accoutrements. The air smelled funny, like a military flight but not, and the light had an unusual quality to it. All the furnishings were utilitarian, cheap and drab. A dark-haired man in a strange flight suit was sitting nearby. He didn’t have any insignia, and the Velcro patches were missing except rank and name. Vat instantly recognized him from the helo, though he was dressed differently now, making the dream real with a sudden lurch.

  “We crashed,” Vat said, his throat dry.

  “Sort of,” the man said. He had bronze oak leaves on his shoulders. So, a major then. The name tag said, “Murphy.”

  “Care to explain?” Vat asked.

  “In good time. How do you feel?”

  “Fine, for a dead guy.”

  “You’re obviously not dead,” Murphy said.

  “Did I miss my flight?”

  “You could say that,” Murphy said under his breath, but Vat caught it and narrowed his eyes. Murphy plucked a file from a case sitting on the floor next to him and opened it. Printed on the front was an image of Vat from his DoD contractor dossier, taken two years after his departure from the US military. He’d always hated that damned picture.

  “Alex Finnigan,” Murphy said, reading. “Contractor with the Department of Defense.” He read the appropriate number. “You’ve done dozens of mid-level operations over the previous six years, and all reviews were favorable. You make a modest income, have a house in Tulsa, lease a 1990 Corolla, and pay your bills on time. It doesn’t say here if you help your neighbor take out the trash.”

  “Sure, all records with the DoD are public. You going to—?”

  Murphy held up a hand, silencing him. “Let me finish. A review of your dossier in 1991 revealed several inconsistencies, such as rental receipts not matching locations and a link to a Cayman Island offshore account. In essence—” he held up the file, “—this is all bullshit.” He dropped it into the case.

  Fucking hell.

  Murphy pulled out another file. This one had Vat’s old US Army file picture. He hated that one even more. “Victor Allen Thomas, First Lieutenant, US Army.” He read off Vat’s serial number. “You generally go by an acronym of your three names…Vat?” He looked up at Vat who nodded. “Graduated high school in Romulus, Michigan, summa cum laude, went to UM, where you got a Bachelor’s of Science in Global Logistics and Supply Chain Management.

  “ROTC, and, after graduating, received a commission in the US Army as a second lieutenant in August of 1984. 92D, Aerial Delivery and Material, but you often worked with the quartermaster’s office.”

  Murphy went on to detail Vat’s career until the end. “Promoted to first lieutenant in 1987, and you received a general discharge the same year.” Murphy moved the papers around, and Vat realized they were not the typical US government printouts. These had a strange metallic look to them. “Interestingly enough, there is no detail on the reason for the general discharge, be it court proceedings, JAG, or general officers’ notes. Just a separation order.”

  Murphy looked at Vat, who merely shrugged. He didn’t feel like giving the major any more information than he had given anyone else over the years. The major could go pound sand.

  “Well, fast forward to your alter ego, Mr. Finnigan-slash-Thomas. Under the guise of your contractor license, and with contacts no doubt made during your time as an officer in the US military, you embarked on a career as an international arms dealer. A rather lucrative one, based on the aforementioned Cayman Islands account. At the time of your accident, you had a balance—”

  “So, the helo did crash? We were shot down?”

  “Yes, Vat, without a shred of doubt. You and everyone aboard that helicopter should have died. But only the co-pilot and crew chief were killed.”

  “How is that possible?”

  Murphy put the file into the case, sat back, and sighed. He looked at Vat like a principal would a student who’d landed in his office for the umpteenth time. “I don’t know what to do with you, honestly.”

  “Maybe if you fucking explained what’s going on?” Vat said gruffly.

  Murphy met Vat’s stare. “You, along with all the survivors of the attack on that helicopter, were abducted by an alien race known as the Ktor and subsequently smuggled off Earth.” Vat shook his head and started to laugh. Murphy continued, “Our group represents what we believe are the last taken before the Ktor ceased such operations, likely because our technology was becoming advanced enough to spot their ships.

  “There are about a hundred more like you in this station who were abducted from Earth.”

  “You know,” Vat said when Murphy stopped, “I always loved science fiction. You should have made this into a movie!”

  “Nothing ever written is as real as this,” Murphy said.

  “You mentioned aliens?” Murphy nodded. Vat recalled the word. “Ktor?”

  “Bingo, you got it faster than I did.” Murphy smiled. “Shit, I was puking by now.”

  “Why?”

  Murphy’s face darkened. “Long story.”

  “Right. Anyway, aliens. I suppose they’re all photogenic? Look like little teddy bears, or can make bicycles fly?”

  “No, in fact, they look just like us.”

  “So, you went with the Star Trek model huh? That saves on special effects.”

  “Vat, we need to move this along. The evaluation of your file said you would accept this as good or better than many of the others, but you’re being quite a bit more stubborn to grasp the basic principles.”

  “What, that I’ve been abducted by aliens, and a handy Army major is here explaining everything?”

  “No, that you are in space now, part of a group of soldiers taken from Earth. We’re fighting an interstellar war with the aliens who abducted us. You are light years from Earth and it’s 133 years since the chopper went down.”

  Vat opened his mouth to reply, closed it, opened it again. “Oof,” was all he could muster.

  “Getting the picture?”

  “Yeah, I don’t know if I believe it, though.”

  “That’s sensible,” Murphy said. “It’s why I’m here talking to you, instead of a Dornaani. They, by the way, do not look like us. However, they are our allies. Any of this bother you?”

  “Not really,” Vat said and shrugged. “I didn’t like anyone back then, anyhow.” There was that one general…“Tell me what’s going on.”

  “So, you believe me now?”

  “I haven’t quite gotten to that point. I’m getting there, though.”

  Murphy nodded and took a device from his bag. It was not made on Earth. Vat quickly realized it was a computer far more advanced than anything available in 1993, even more than the stuff DARPA had hidden away.

  Murphy began laying out the facts.

  * * * * *

  Chapter Three

  The habitat, a hollowed out asteroid, was straight out of science fiction. Vat was pretty amazed, at first. But soon it was just boring and cold. The locals, who called themselves SpinDogs, were descended from the Ktor, just like Murphy said. They were a group of cliquish assholes, too.

  The humans from Earth, who adopted the moniker “Lost Soldiers,”
kept to themselves. A section of the habitat was given over to them to arrange a landing on the planet R’Bak, where it seemed fighting was likely to take place.

  The vast majority of the Lost Soldiers’ equipment had been snatched by the Ktor at the same time as the humans they’d kidnapped. Some of the gear was higher tech, either current-day Earth or provided by the Dornaani. There was precious little of that, though. The brains behind the operations, some guys named Nephew and Nuncle, had taken off before they’d woken Vat. They’d left Murphy and a collection of odd balls to hold the rear and prepare a base on R’Bak.

  Of course, the problem was that R’Bak already had people living on it: tribes of Ktor chased off their own worlds for some crazy political reason. They were known among the Ktor as exodates. A kind of safety valve in their society to get rid of troublemakers without just killing them; some sort of armed refugees. Those refugees were routinely victimized by other former Ktor living on a planet that orbited the other star of the binary system.

  Every 88 years, the stars came into close approach, and the increase in heat torched R’Bak pretty badly. The locals called it the Searing. Those living on Kulsis, the other planet, used the Searing as an opportunity to raid R’Bak for resources. The Searing was due to happen in two years.

  “Just gets better and better,” Vat had said as he read the reports. The reality was, he didn’t want a fucking thing to do with the clusterfuck Murphy had taken charge of. Not in the least. Of course, he’d promised Murphy he’d help, so he did odd jobs, helped newly thawed soldiers to adjust, and tried to find an angle.

  They had access to a machine from the Dornaani which allowed you to learn things in your sleep. Or at least it seemed like you were asleep. Dream learning, some of the Lost Soldiers called it. Vat didn’t touch the thing. It was mainly used for languages anyway. He didn’t need a machine to learn languages.

  “Hey, Vat, your bid, comrade!”

  Vat snapped out of his reverie and glanced at his cards. He tossed a stick of chewing gum into the growing pile of assorted items without a second thought. The coin of the realm was different items they’d had on them when they were put into the freezers. Several curses ensued, and cards hit the table.

  “Ublyudok,” Artyom spat.

  “I know who my mother was,” Vat replied, in Russian, “do you?”

  Artyom’s eyes grew hard in a way most Americans had never seen. He’d told Vat his last memory of Earth was Kursk, where’d been visited by a strange man in a suit with sunglasses offering him a chance to live, before he’d spent almost two centuries asleep. He’d survived the siege of Stalingrad too, if you could believe that.

  “Da, I know her. She was a bitch,” Artyom said and laughed uproariously. He took a deep drink of Chaat, which was basically vodka or close enough that Artyom didn’t care. “I want to see your cards.” He tossed in a cigarette: Call. Men’s eyes bugged out at the sight of the smoke. They all looked longingly at it.

  Nobody else at the table was interested in raising; they all folded. It was just Artyom and Vat. Vat put down his cards: two, seven, nine, king, and ace. All spades. A flush.

  “Blyad!” Artyom spat and threw his cards down. He had a straight. “You have the luck of the devil,” Artyom said and watched Vat collect the booty. There wasn’t much of a currency among the Lost Soldiers: a problem for every plan Vat had conceived.

  “I have it on good authority there is no devil,” Vat replied. “He’d be in this star system if there was one.”

  The other five who’d been playing drifted off, but Artyom didn’t. He watched Vat secure his winnings and carefully put the cards back into a holder. He’d traded a RockHound for the cards. RockHounds were the locals who went around space mining for resources. It cost Vat a cylinder of helium, which wouldn’t turn up missing for some time.

  “I have question,” Artyom said.

  I assumed as much when you didn’t leave. “What is it?” Vat asked.

  “You believe it?”

  “Believe what?”

  “All of this,” Artyom said, waving his big, hairy arms. “This is a spaceship, and we are long way from Earth. Everyone we know dead. How can this be?”

  Vat knew Artyom was one of the Lost Soldiers who was still struggling with the situation. There were dozens of them, and they were his nominal responsibility.

  “Shepherd them,” Murphy said. “See if you can move them along the pathway to acceptance. We need every man and woman we can get. The older ones, farther down time, are the hardest.” Down time was a way of saying pre-Vietnam. The societies which were pre-spaceflight seemed the least able to just accept it and move on. In his own way, Artyom was a poster child for them. Kind of an Extra-Lost Soldier.

  “Yes, Artyom, I do.”

  Artyom nodded for several seconds, slowly. It was distinctly Russian and didn’t mean he agreed, but that he was thinking about it. “If this true, then I would like to kill these Ka-Whores who took me from my Natasha.” It was a bastardization of Ktor, but Vat thought it was amusing.

  “Wife?”

  “Bah!” Artyom spat on the polished rock floor of the room. “She left me for party boss when war started. No, Natasha is my little girl.” The hard eyes softened and became moist. Vat knew what he was thinking. Natasha was dead. Any children Natasha had were dead, and probably their children, too. None of them were so much as a footnote in a history book.

  “They’re fighting down on R’Bak right now,” Vat said.

  “They fight Ka-Whores?”

  “They’re fighting the proxies of Ktor descendants. Kind of.”

  More nodding. “Well, I think about this more.” He took another deep drink of Chaat. He’d already had enough to launch a rocket. “You sleep well, friend.”

  “You, too,” Vat said and watched Artyom get up and leave. The man didn’t even stagger. It was a few seconds before he realized Artyom had called him friend.

  “What was that all about?”

  He turned around and saw a woman in a flight suit standing in the hallway. The impromptu poker game had happened in a little alcove not far from the Lost Soldiers’ main dining hall. It wasn’t hard to find privacy anymore, most of them were either in other areas training, preparing to deploy to R’Bak, or already there.

  She was short, with dark, close-cut hair and a lithe build. The flight suit fit her well. She had a single silver bar on her epaulet, and a pair of embroidered wings rode over the name patch: Bruce.

  “Bruce is a strange name for a woman,” Vat said as he finished putting the cards away. Her sharp eyes took notice of what he was doing before flicking back to his face.

  “My callsign,” she said. “Mara ‘Bruce’ Lee.”

  “Ah,” Vat said, nodding.

  “I’m into karate, too; it all came together.” Vat looked at her again and finally recognized the voice.

  “You were the helo pilot out of Mogadishu.”

  “Bingo,” she said. “And you were John Q. Public.”

  Vat laughed and nodded. Standing up he walked over and offered his hand. “Victor Allen Thomas. Call me Vat.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” she said and gave his hand a firm shake. None of the female service members ever offered a soft shake. “I never found out: NSA?”

  He laughed and shook his head. “Contractor.”

  “That explains why you had a different name on the flight roster.”

  Fuck. Good memory, too. “Okay, I might have been doing some secret-squirrel shit.”

  “You’re prior service, but not very old.”

  “I left the service for medical reasons.” Well, it wasn’t a lie, really. Anatomy was involved. Sort of. “US Army logistics; I was a first lieutenant as well.”

  She nodded, taking it all in. “So, what was the Russki yelling about?”

  “Who, Artyom?” he asked, gesturing in the direction his new friend had taken. She nodded. “He’s one of those who haven’t adapted well. He was taken from the Battle of Kursk.”
r />   “Holy shit,” Mara said.

  “Yeah. I think I made progress tonight.”

  “You only had to get him shitfaced and take all his cigarettes.”

  Vat gave her an overly sheepish look. “Don’t turn us in, we’re not supposed to have smokes. Not that there are very many anyway. The SpinDogs would shit themselves if they knew we were smoking up the place.”

  “SpinDogs have this herb they smoke,” she said. Vat’s eyebrows went up. He’d heard rumors. “It’s not quite like marijuana, but similar.”

  Vat made a mental note to look into this lead.

  “You don’t smoke, though,” she said, not a question.

  “No, filthy habit.” She looked confused as he finished carefully stashing the smokes, gum, and various pills in a plastic container. “Long story. You don’t work for Murphy, do you?”

  “Don’t we all?”

  “True.”

  “I’m just a pilot getting ready to head down to R’Bak. They have some Hueys down there, and I’m training some SpinDogs to fly them. What about you? Going down soon?”

  “No, I’m fine up here.” She cocked her head and narrowed her eyes. “You be careful on the planet, okay?”

  “Sure, maybe we’ll cross paths again sometime.”

  “You know,” he said, “I’d like that.” He watched her go. She was by far the best-looking female he’d seen since they woke him up. No doubt every soldier in the place was following her around like a puppy dog. “I wonder who does her hair?”

  * * * * *

  Chapter Four

  Two weeks passed, and Vat’s nightly poker crew became steady. Despite an apparent breakthrough in understanding, Artyom stayed on the habitat. Like Vat, he’d decided it was preferable to the insanity down on R’Bak. People were coming back now, mostly shot to pieces. Considering the amazing stories Vat heard about the R’Bak’s healing herbs, you had to really work to outstrip the native healers’ abilities.