The problem was Dalia had nothing to bargain with. She finally convinced him to take her, however, by telling him if he did she wouldn’t blow his head off. He wasn’t terribly thrilled with the bargain, but he led her through the tunnels that eventually carried them beyond the city without detection.
By that time she had no problem blending with the natives. She’d had very little to eat, very little sleep, no access to bathing facilities and, since the clothes she was standing in were all she had, she looked as ragged and unkempt as everyone else. She didn’t like it, but she was inclined to see it as an advantage.
The quality of the air inside the dome wasn’t that great in the lower regions, but the air beyond the dome was the next thing to unbreathable. She still had her weapons, but the lack of a mask put her at a distinct disadvantage when the smugglers had more manpower and firepower at their disposal than she did.
The moment they reached the landing area, she saw immediately that simply blending wasn’t going to be enough. There was no way she was going to get close enough to either overpower the smugglers and steal a ship, or slip on board. Releasing her ‘guide’, she watched until she was certain he was headed back the way they’d come and wouldn’t alert the smugglers, and then settled down to study them and watch for an opportunity.
She’d been fully aware that smuggling was rife, but she hadn’t realized that trafficking in stolen and/or illegal merchandise was done on quite as grand a scale as this. When she arrived, a large ship was already at the rendezvous point. More than a dozen smugglers had piled off of it. A third was busy unloading, a third loading new merchandise and the rest pacing restlessly about the activities with some fairly intimidating firepower.
Before they had even completed their business, a second craft nearly as large set down at a little distance and proceeded pretty much as the first had, off loading on one side and on loading on the other.
With decent air, or a mask, she might have been able to take four or five men. She wasn’t stupid enough, or desperate enough to consider taking on crews as large as this, particularly when she was fairly certain that it would take no more than a hint of threat for them to combine forces.
She had very little food, however, and not a great deal of time. After a little while, she decided to change positions and see if another position would provide her with a better opportunity.
To her surprise, it did, but it had nothing to do with either of the two large ships she’d been watching. As she made her way around the perimeter, a relatively small, very sleek, racer settled into the rubble-strewn field at a little distance from the other two ships.
This might be doable.
The craft was designed for short, very fast hops, from planet to planet--and required no more than a pilot as crew or perhaps a pilot and copilot. There was no way it was being employed to haul cargo. It was too small to carry much and too short-range to go far--unless the pilot was insane enough to use the wormholes--which, upon reflection, she supposed he must.
If the pilot was smuggling anything, it was human cargo--escaped slaves or criminals fleeing justice--or possibly rogue cyborgs. He would want privacy to load his cargo. The fact that he’d landed so far from the other two ships seemed to bear up her theory.
She settled down to wait. It wasn’t until the first of the two larger ships had lifted off that the gangplank was finally let down. Minutes passed. Finally, a man appeared at the top of the gangplank, stood looking out for several moments, and finally sauntered almost casually down the gangplank and stepped off of it.
The only weapons he had on him were strapped to his waist, a pistol holstered on one side and a three-foot blade on the other.
She stared at the blade. It indicated a strong familiarity with some primitive culture somewhere in the universe, but she couldn’t see it well enough from this distance to place it. Not that it mattered. In the first place, she didn’t particularly care where she went so long as she could elude the company for long enough to figure out what was going on and how it had come about that she’d suddenly become high on their list of public enemies. In the second, it supported the theory of rogues.
In general, cyborgs were at least half human, or half biological materials anyway, and all of that on the exterior, but anyone familiar with cyborgs could spot them within minutes. They were just ... not quite human, regardless of their appearance. It was often hard to put your finger on just what it was, but there was always something that gave them away, even to people not particularly looking or not particularly interested. The only way they could truly disappear was to find a culture too primitive to know what a cyborg was.
The question was, was he doing it for the money? For the adventure? Or because he was one of those fanatical assholes always trying to change the universe?
The latter made her want to puke. She despised fanatics, whatever their particular brand of insanity was, because they were not only incredibly boring and annoying, but they were also dangerous. They, almost inevitably, managed to convince huge numbers of ‘followers’ to believe them and usually managed to get them killed.
At this particular moment, however, it could prove useful.
Money was a problem. She had plenty of credits saved up, but she wasn’t certain it was enough to tempt a smuggler of this caliber. If it wasn’t, and he scanned her barcode for the money, she would be located in short order.
Finally, she decided to move a little closer and get a better look at him.
She managed to get several yards closer before she ran out of cover. She discovered it didn’t particularly help her, however. Naturally enough, it was dark. Smugglers didn’t land in the daylight, and it was smoggy as be damned, as well. The poor visibility wasn’t as much a problem, however, as the fact that her feminine side took that inopportune moment to kick in and completely distracted her.
He was, quite possibly, the finest specimen of a male she’d ever set eyes on. Even her male counterparts weren’t generally so beautifully enhanced. Her first good look at him impacted on her as physically as if she’d been hit by a grenade concussion. She felt as if she’d been body slammed, too stunned to think for several moments. Finally, her training kicked in and she settled behind the pile of rubble and frowned, wondering what had just happened.
Not only was she certain she’d never had a reaction like that to a male before, she couldn’t even remember experiencing anything even close. Her training had been thorough and nothing had been left to chance, certainly not something as predictable and inevitable as sexual attraction. Very little ever managed to break through her conditioning as a soldier and throw her off kilter. Some sort of chemical imbalance related to the gestation, she wondered?
The sounds of the second craft lifting off jogged her from her abstraction and into action.
She peered at the pilot, saw that he’d been distracted, as well, and began to move quickly around the ship while he stood watching the ship’s ascent. Coming upon him from behind, she placed the barrel of her weapon against the center of his back, directly over his heart. “I need passage off of this rock, and I don’t particularly care who I have to kill to get it. Take me, and I’ll pay you for your trouble and you can get on with your life. Give me any trouble and I’ll kill you.”
The moment the barrel of her weapon dug into his back, he went perfectly still. As she finished her little speech, however, he moved, so fast her jaw didn’t have time to drop in surprise, snatching her weapon from her hands so hard and fast she was surprised he didn’t take her fingers with it.
“I only take rogues,” he said coolly, taking the weapon in both hands and bending it into a bow, as if it had been made of putty instead of titanium alloy.
Dalia glanced from the bent weapon into the face that had launched a million flyers. It was Reuel CO469, the first of his kind, the first cyborg rogue, the leader of all who’d come after him, and the only rogue nobody had even come close to catching in all the time she’d worked for the company.
“Oh fuck!”
