ATLAS 2 (ATLAS Series Book 2) Page 5

  “Proceeding to main targets,” Tahoe returned, rather stiffly.

  When I got upstairs, I hurried down the hall to Tahoe, who was crouched beside the financier and privateer captain.

  Two empty syringes lay on the rug beside him—Tahoe had injected the antidote into each man.

  It hadn’t helped: neither of them was breathing.

  Tahoe was attempting to restart the heart of the financier. Blood poured from Tahoe’s shoulder wound and onto his jumpsuit as he worked, but he ignored it, staying focused on the resuscitation.

  He glanced up in despair at my approach.

  “We’re too late,” he said.

  We confiscated all the computer equipment we could and returned to our jury-rigged privateer ship, the Royal Fortune, via the MDV (Moth Delivery Vehicle). After passing through the airlock and de-suiting, we were ordered directly to the briefing room.

  Ghost and Tahoe bid us good luck and headed to the Convalescence Ward to get their shoulder wounds treated. I almost wished I was injured too, just to avoid the epic chewing out I knew the Lieutenant Commander was going to give the rest of us.

  “Lóng Xiōng had the bank codes of every privateer he funded stored in that tiny bundle of neurons known as his brain,” Lieutenant Commander Braggs said. He was the officer in charge of Alfa and Bravo platoons, MOTH Team Seven. He towered over us from his position at the front of the room, and though he was fifteen years my senior, he still had a full head of thick, brown hair. His face was mostly hard, angular planes, like the chisel-work of some Olympian statue. Speaking of Olympian, he had the body of an athlete despite his rank, and often joined us for PT (Physical Training).

  “With Lóng Xiōng’s cooperation,” the Lieutenant Commander continued, “we could’ve identified those privateers at the ID level, and had our cyber attackers seize all their assets and shut them down without ever having to Gate into SK space. With one blow, we could’ve bankrupted half the privateers in the region, leaving them without any money to pay their crews. But now we’re back to square one.

  “What a debacle. Team Seven is supposed to harbor the best of the best. We’re supposed to be the ace up Big Navy’s sleeve. The Commander-in-Chief knows that if he has a mission whose success is critical, he can rely on us. Well guess what? He can’t rely on us anymore. You failed. You’re not the best. Not now. And you’re not going to receive the most pivotal missions. Other task units are going to get called in a whole lot more, and we’ll be the ones given the drudge work.

  “Well done, people. Bravo Zulu. I hope you’re proud of yourselves. I really do. What part of our warrior credo—‘failure is not an option’—did you not understand? Because failure is not an option. And yet you failed. You better damn well hope the data we recovered from Lóng Xiōng’s computer systems contains the IDs and bank codes of the privateers he funded. And you better damn well hope we can decrypt that data in the first place. Now get the hell out of my sight.”

  We returned to the berthing area of the ship and did our best to prepare ourselves for the long voyage back.

  Wasn’t fun. The mood was abysmal throughout the platoon. None of us liked to fail a mission.

  I couldn’t help but feel it was my fault. Firstly, because of my hesitation when faced with a woman target, a delay that had cost precious moments. Secondly, because I had ordered Trace away just before Tahoe and I encountered the balcony shooters. If Trace had stayed, we would’ve eliminated the shooters faster. More lost moments. Finally, I should have triple-checked the tranquilizer dosage. Snakeoil had prepared it, but I was the one who had loaded the darts in the end.

  I was starting to think I wasn’t cut out for this anymore.

  Did I mention I’d lost the two most important people in the galaxy to me eight months ago?

  Well that was my fault too.

  I wasn’t a MOTH anymore. I don’t know what the hell I was.

  I was broken, that’s all I knew.

  I still had another eleven and a half years in my service term. I couldn’t quit, not unless I wanted to get deported back to my native country. But I could always request a transfer to a different task unit. And being deported wouldn’t be so bad anyway . . .

  Bender and TJ, our drone operators, and two very smart guys, worked with the fleet cryptologists to decrypt the data we’d recovered from Lóng Xiōng’s computers. On the third day, Bender returned to the berthing area early. The black man wasn’t wearing his usual jewelry, and instead bore the puffy eyes and cracked lips of a man long deprived of sleep, but for all that, he had a big smile on his face.

  “We cracked it, bitches,” Bender said. High fives were exchanged all around. Mine were only halfhearted.

  So disaster had been averted by a few very smart people in our midst. We got lucky. But that wouldn’t always be the case. A time would come when the rest of the platoon wouldn’t be able to cover the mistakes of the broken people like me.

  The overall mood of the platoon improved markedly in the following days, though there was still a dour undercurrent to everything we did. By the time we reached the neutral space that was the rest of Gliese 581 and docked with the station Divertimento Grande above Gliese 581b, we were more than ready for our much-needed liberty.

  But by that point, I’d already decided I wasn’t going to hold these good men back anymore. These better men.

  I was going to request a transfer out of MOTH Team Seven.

  The Chief refused my transfer request.

  “Give it a few weeks,” Chief Bourbonjack said. Our fearless leader, Bourbonjack reported directly to Lieutenant Commander Braggs. He was a grizzled man, with streaks of gray running through both his hair and beard. His dark eyes were always observing, taking in and measuring not only the situation at hand, but the temperament of the men around him. His nose matched those hawkish eyes—hooked, like a beak.

  “If you still want to transfer to a different task unit or an entirely different Team two Stanmonths from now,” the Chief continued, “I’ll arrange a meeting with the Master Chief of Team Seven, and you guys can work something out.”

  “Thank you, Chief,” I said.

  “Dismissed.”

  That night found me in the space station’s only flesh cantina (what they called strip clubs in these parts), where I partied it up with the rest of my platoon, though inside I felt like I didn’t really belong anymore.

  We all wore dorky badges printed up by Lui, labeled “StripperAdvisor Top 500 Reviewer.” Though we had no affiliation with the aforementioned Net site, Lui said it would work wonders for customer service. I think it had the opposite effect though, because the dancers paid most of us way less attention than the last time we visited—scared of getting bad reviews I guessed.

  We’d brought along the two caterpillars recently assigned to our platoon, and they were paying for the beers tonight by unanimous vote (the two of them didn’t get a vote). So, as you can imagine, we ordered more than a few drinks each.

  I’d had about seven beers so far, but Manic was the current leader at nine. He’d pulled a passing dancer into his lap a few minutes before, and was blabbing his mouth off to her. He was bad enough when sober, but when inebriated, well, he wouldn’t shut up. Also, he liked to move his hands a lot when he talked, and in his drunken state the movements were even more exaggerated. It was like he was conducting some symphony that only he could hear.

  The most prominent feature of his face was the port-wine birthmark above his eye, vaguely reminiscent of a moth (the insect).

  Manic was bragging to his girl about the mark even now. “See, I always knew I’d become a MOTH because of my birthmark.” I could almost feel my brothers cringing around me. Flaunting our MOTH status to civilians was frowned upon. “It’s why I signed up in the first place. But I bet you—”

  The girl interrupted him, placing a finger on his lips. “You talk a lot. Would yo
u like a dance?”

  “What? No, I’d like to talk. It’s what I do best. So anyway, as I was saying—”

  The girl pouted. “Maybe later then?”

  “Later? Yeah sure. Here, I’ll buy you a drink. Stick around.”

  “I don’t drink.” She got up and turned away. She was dressed in a bikini, and her long, straight black hair reached the small of her back. As she lithely walked off, she looked over her shoulder and gave him a flirty wink, flicking that long hair of hers.

  Manic threw up his arms when she was gone. “What did I do?”

  “It’s what you didn’t do, dude,” Bender said. “You were basically jabbering about yourself the whole time. You gotta give them time to talk about themselves, you know? It’s like you’re in love with the sound of your own voice or something.” Ah Bender. He was always one to give unsolicited advice on picking up dancers, most of which only worked for him.

  “What are you talking about?” Manic said. “This is a flesh cantina. They’re here to listen to us. She sits down for two seconds and then asks me for a dance. Ridiculous. They’re like sharks here. I think I’m going to head next door and rent myself a Skin Musician for the night instead.”

  “Two seconds?” Bender said. “She was with you for at least five minutes.” The well-muscled black man had worn every last item of gold jewelry he owned: chains around his neck; big, hooped earrings; piercings on the outer tip of each eyebrow; labret stud beneath his lips; and multiple rings on each finger. Basically he’d pimped himself out to the max for the benefit of the dancers, and he looked like one tough dude. Which he was.

  Bender was one of our drone operators who operated the robot support troops embedded with the unit. He’d suffered from a severe headshot wound on the Geronimo deployment. The same deployment where we’d lost Alejandro, Big Dog, and Shaw.

  Anyway, the doc had worried Bender might experience an altered personality from the head wound, but he had made a full recovery, his charming persona completely intact.

  Manic downed his ninth beer, spilling some on his beard, and waved for another. “I’ve been thinking . . .”

  “Don’t do that,” Bender said. “It’s bad for you.”

  Manic ignored him. “What a mess the Pontus raid was. The Lieutenant Commander was right. Completely right. We botched it big time. Even if we did fix things in the end.”

  “Thanks to me,” Bender said.

  Manic’s tenth beer arrived and he took a long pull. “Course, if we’d been allowed to bring a few ATLAS mechs down with us, there wouldn’t have been any problems in the first place. But oh no, we don’t want to reveal that we’re UC. We have to pretend we’re SK privateers. I still think we should’ve brought along some SK-model ATLAS mechs. It’s not like we haven’t captured our fair share of them.

  “Or we could’ve spray painted our own ATLAS mechs to look like the SK equivalents. The mechs are manufactured by the same company after all. Sure, there might be some slightly different parts, some different decals here and there, but they’re basically the same. Speaking of SK mechs, you know what really pisses me off?”

  “Yeah,” Bender said, snickering. “When a girl rejects you.”

  Manic ignored him. “The SK military has quite a few ATLAS 6s in their inventory, while we’re still stuck with the older model fives. It’s not like the SK government has more money in their treasury or anything, but rather, they understand the value of investing in their military. I hear they pay their soldiers better, too. Of course, they don’t feed their citizens, don’t give out free robots and housing and all that, so obviously they can afford better ATLAS mechs and pay grades for their fighting men.”

  “That’s not true at all,” Lui, our resident Asian American, said. Like Bomb and Manic, he was one of the official ATLAS pilots of Alfa platoon. “The SKs feed their people, and give them servant robots. Don’t be spreading lies about—”

  Manic spoke right over him. “Maybe that’s what the United Countries should do: stop giving away free food and housing to everyone, and—”

  Bender leaned forward and grabbed Manic by the back of the head. “Manic,” he said.

  Manic looked at him, blinking rapidly, like he’d just woken up from a dream. A bad one. “Yeah?”

  The black man slammed Manic’s face down onto the table. Hard. “Shut up.”

  Manic recovered, and blinked his eyes rapidly. “Okay.”

  Bender sat back.

  Manic opened his mouth to say something more.

  Bender shot him a look.

  Manic clamped his teeth down. He got up instead, and walked to a girl dancing on a table nearby. He held up his arm, likely transferring some bitcoins to her. She immediately bent down and let him motorboat in her cleavage. I thought he needed it.

  “Manic does have a point,” Bomb said. The other black man in our platoon didn’t wear a single item of jewelry. His head was shaven on either side, and he’d dyed his short mohawk blond again. He had spiked it too, probably for the dancers—everyone had done a little extra grooming tonight. “We should’ve taken ATLAS mechs with us. I mean, come on, we were supposed to be privateers. They’ve stolen a few ATLAS 5s here and there.”

  “I wanted an ATLAS for myself down there too, but I’ll have to play devil’s advocate on this one,” Lui said. “Mechs would’ve only gotten in the way. For one thing, an ATLAS 5 would have never fit in that palace. For another, the mechs would’ve made easy targets for the robot snipers.”

  “Hey, it’s called a ballistic shield,” Bomb said. “Learn to use it.”

  Lui frowned. “Not many privateers have ATLAS mechs anyway. Except for the richer ones.”

  “Well, that’s about perfect,” Bomb said. “We could have implicated one of the richer, more renowned privateer captains in our attack. Killed two birds with one stone.”

  “Maybe,” Lui said.

  “If the dimnuts in Brass would grow some balls and let us use the tech we were trained for . . .”

  “Hey,” Facehopper said. “That’s enough. I won’t have any of you dissing Brass today. Different topic, please. We’ve already talked the mission to death. What we could have done. What we should have done. It’s pointless. It’s over. We’re on liberty now. And we’re going to have fun. I know it’s a strange concept to a MOTH. Fun. What is that? Well, you’re going to learn to have fun mates, or die trying. Stop sitting around and pouting like a bunch of spoiled children who’ve had their expensive toys taken away. We don’t need rifles and mechs every moment of our lives. We’re surrounded by beautiful women. Let’s enjoy this.” Our Leading Petty Officer crossed his arms and sat back. He had a look in his eyes that said, “Go ahead and defy me on this, I dare you.”

  Fret started laughing. “You guys should listen to the LPO. This place is a hottie haven.” Fret was the tallest member of our team, with a long neck like a giraffe’s. His eyes were locked on the main stage, where a girl was gyrating sinuously around a pole to hippie metal music. “The strippers choose the songs they dance to, right?”

  Facehopper nodded. “They choose the songs, yes, mate.”

  “I love her already.” Fret wouldn’t look away.

  “You would like hippie metal,” Bender said with a grimace.

  “She’s gotta be, what, four foot two?” Snakeoil said. He and Fret were our communicators. Snakeoil was the opposite of Fret in terms of build: he was about half Fret’s height, and where Fret was lanky, Snakeoil was all muscle. “It’s not going to work out. She’s too short, dude. What, are you going to kiss your pillow the whole time you’re having sex? Guys are visual creatures. You can’t get turned on by a pillow. She’s more my size, bro.”

  “If the pillow is soft, and moist, and furry, I’ll get turned on, I guarantee you,” Fret said. “Besides, the shorter ones have lots of energy. They bounce around a lot, especially when you let them go on top. Just th
e way I like it. I’ll be getting my visuals, don’t you worry.”

  Snakeoil shook his head. “She’s tiny, man! She’ll look like your kid when the two of you walk down the street together.”

  “I don’t care.” Fret kept staring, just rapt.

  The girl on stage had noticed his stares, and she started shooting him wanton looks. I knew she’d be making a stop by our table when she finished her set.

  Lui had ordered chicken wings earlier, and the basket arrived then, on a tray carried by a box-like robot on treads. It was kind of funny because, when you asked for drinks, one of the sensual waitresses delivered them, but when you ordered food, they sent in an old-school robot. It was almost like they were trying to discourage people from buying food.

  “Finally.” Lui shook his head. “Almost forgot I ordered these. Stupid robos. Have no appreciation for customer service. But of course they don’t care. Most of them don’t have emotions, and those that do, well, it’s not enough.”

  “What do you know about robos?” Bender said. “They got more emotions than most people I know. Course, I mostly know MOTHs, so that doesn’t say very much about you bitches, does it?”

  “I apologize for the delay sir,” the robot said.

  “Yeah, yeah.” Lui placed the basket in his lap, and his eyes defocused as he completed the transaction with his Implant.

  “Thank you.” The robot left.

  “What do I know about robos?” Lui sat back, and promptly forgot about the basket of wings in his lap. “I’ll tell you something, Bender. Back when I attended the University of Tennessee with Snakeoil, I worked part-time at Nova Dynamics. Postal Robotics division. Biggest provider of postal delivery robots. The bipedal ones, anyway. They make flying delivery drones too, but have a smaller market share in that area.

  “You’d think we wouldn’t need mail these days, what with the pervasiveness of 3D printers. But while those printers can photopolymer up almost anything people order online, the printers can’t make food. Last time I checked, there weren’t any nutrients in thermoplastics or polymers or clothing fabrics, not any that a human’s gastrointestinal tract could safely absorb, anyway. Besides, a lot of the time it’s cheaper to purchase a traditionally manufactured item over a 3D-printed one. And printing larger items like furniture is impractical at best, and cost-prohibitive at worst. Who can spare a room in their homes just to print up furniture, not to mention the cost of the printer and materials? So yes, we still need mail delivery.