Parting Moments of History III - The Hiding Game
"One of the single most arresting things about the Outer Colonies was their sense of adventure; of being out on the frontier. The lifestyle appealed to settlers of all types - traders, farmers, scouts and entrepreneurs. They were the worlds untamed, far removed from the stifling bureaucracy associated with centralised U.E.G rule.
Here on the Outer Colonies, life was what you made of it. Whole fortunes could be won and lost - between mining contracts, settlement rights, scientific endeavours - new frontiers, uncharted by mankind. There was no limit to the opportunity.
And, of course, the criminality."
- 'On the Origins of Unrest', A Treatise on the Development of Modern Crime, E.F. Aumann (first published 2535)
Debt collection is a bloody business. Leaving it is even bloodier.
Sergei soaked his weeping knuckles under the soothing water of the hand basin. The warm water ran thickly red, bloodied droplets pattering down onto the rim of the filthy porcelain. It was an old sink; the enamel battered and chipped. The mirror affixed to the wall above was cracked into a spider's web. He studied himself, his eyes hollow sockets under harsh shadow of the bare bulb overhead. The broken mirror reflected the gaunt, pale face back at him a thousand times over. Not the most glamorous of hideouts, but then Sergei's life had seldom been glamorous.
Sergei had signed up at the age of eighteen, fresh from a reform school on Reach. He'd served in the 37th Mechanised Armour Division; a Russian unit, and the skin at the base of his neck bore the ink to prove it. Eight brutal years of suppressing Innie groups across the surface of Saratoga had given him his skills, and the decade he'd spent afterward, as part of the Khulov-Shintaro Syndicate on Hadrian VII, had refined them. His pension was written in blood, and had been signed with his soul. Debt collections, intimidations, punishment beatings, targeted killings; it was amazing how broad a skillset military service provided. He'd been a trigger man for one organisation or another for eighteen years. Enough. It was time to get out.
It was the girl that had made the difference.
Change can be an insidious, sudden thing. His own had struck immediately and without warning, like a heart attack. Until then, he had been content to trade his skills for money. It got easier. The killings, the stabbings, the threats, the torture. It was Saratoga all over again. Only instead of pitched gun battles, mule-kicked doors and shrieking artillery, it was a back-alley here, an abandoned warehouse there. It was the intimacy of it that made it worse. He recalled an accountant, gibbering and sputtering through a nose he no longer had, begging through gnarled fingers that no longer had any nails to speak of. Red on the ledger, in a very literal way. Memories of a loan shark, face down on an electrical stove. Shrieking as the heat pads melded the bubbling flesh with the bone beneath. That sizzling sound, that bacon-fat stink. Sergei closed his eyes, scrunching them tight.
Enough. No more, for the girl's sake. And his own.
He met Natalya during a protection gig, down on the Lower East Pier. She was one of the girls brought in to do smile-work for Boss Khulov. Not a hooker, you understand. High class-girl, escort work. The ones you brought for dinner; the ones you dined and bought diamond necklaces for. There was a lot of money flowing through Saratoga, after the Insurrection was put down. The void left by the paramilitaries had been filled by the syndicates, the cartels and the triads, invisible to (or at least ignored by) UNSC eyes, who had far bigger things to worry about. As human space was glassed to ashes, the black market on this sorry outlier world was booming. Sinoviet, Misriah; you name it, chances are you could get your hands on it, for the right price and the promise of a favour. Escorting the girls was a side show. Fluff work, for somebody with Sergei's expertise.
It's the simple jobs that become complicated.
Natalya was beautiful. Long black hair, sculptural features; small firm breasts, perfectly shaped. For Sergei, thirty six years old and already jaded, it was lust at first sight. He wasn't sure if it his doing, or hers, or the bottle of vodka they shared during a long wait between gigs, but the damage was done. Viktorya showed up nine months later, a mewling, squealing mess of bright angry pink skin and tiny curling hands. The most beautiful thing Sergei had ever seen. Natalya vanished soon thereafter. Smart girl, that one. Sergei remembered looking down at tiny, cooing Viktorya, and feeling a wave of despair wash over him.
He'd done his best to hide her, of course. But how do you explain the disappearance of an asset like Natalya?
It started badly, and ended messily. Sergei was black-balled. In this industry, you're not cut out a severance package, or simply forced to take another gig off world. No, money doesn't enter into it at all., With Natalya having seemingly vanished, Sergei was found wanting for both cash and favours. The proper respect had not been shown. He was hired muscle that had developed a cancer, and needed to be excised. Permanently.
The first two hitmen had tried a subtle approach. Old friends, Olag and Spence, called him up and inviting him to share a bottle of vodka with them. To talk about the old times and remember the glory days. To put matters behind them, to talk things over. It was a short conversation. Syndicate thugs found them a day later. Spence, double-tapped to the forehead, Olag, with the top half of a vodka bottle protruding from his left eye socket.
That had been five years ago. Sergei had kept a low profile since, using whatever dwindling cash reserves he had to move from safe house to safe house. Cheap motels, semi-abandoned slums, short term pod-hotels. He stayed off the grid, in the darker shades of society that only a hired killer could navigate. Viktorya stayed with him, growing taller, smarter. She was a bright girl, and so very beautiful. Like her mother.
Sergei hawked up a wad of phlegm and spat in the sink. Blood spattered into the running water, and rolled away down the drain. He'd been bringing Viktorya for a medical check-up at one of the community shelters, when two Syndicate goons had jumped him. He'd been unarmed, and had to improvise.
Viktorya never blinked as he killed them. She never judged him. She understood the necessity of what he did.
Even then, there was so little of his darkness in her. He would buy her books, and read to her. School was never an option, not with things as they were, and so he took it upon himself to educate her. It galvanised him, and as they moved from world to world, from system to system, he went on to teach her the practical things he'd learned in life. How to watch for suspicious strangers, how to spot the warning signs. How to carry yourself in a situation, to command respect and exude power. How to move without being seen, both in a crowd and in the shadows. She was a bright child, and even at the tender age of six, learned quickly.
Sergei splashed water from his face, dabbing at his split lip with a towel. It soaked red, and he cast it into the disposal unit with a flick of his hand. His vest was bloodied from where an enforcer's knife had nicked his rib. Peeling it off, he winced as he reached for the medicine cabinet. A biofoam patch covered it neatly. For his knuckles, simple bandages sufficed. He moved back into the living room.
If one could call it that. The place was crumbling, quite visibly. The plaster was flaking, and beneath layers of peeling paint you could see where the original colony prefabs had been drilled down and soldered together. They were never meant to be permanent structures; you could tell by the way the ply-board floors warped and creaked after years of moisture had seeped through.
Viktorya was at the small table on the far side of the room across from the window. They didn't sit near windows; they're learnt that lesson after a close call on Crassus. She was colouring her picture book, filling in the lines of a UNSC-approved Cartoon Character (Barmy Army) with sloppy, jagged streaks of purple crayon. She had her headphones on, and they seemed to dwarf her tiny, porcelein features. Her blonde hair poked out between the headphones in thick strands. Sergei smiled down at her, not wishing to disturb her, and crossed over to the bed. He reached a hand underneath and fished about with his hand.
Sergei placed the black duffel back on the table, rummaging through it with a satisfied nod. Had to be prepared. Always a possibility that they were coming. They were on the third floor of the apartment building, a squat multi-unit block which was dwarfed by towering munitions factories and more high-rent skyscrapers in the city core. Six storeys total, two stair-cores providing access at either end of the hallway, the central elevator aside. He crossed over to the window, peeling the blinds aside and peaking out.
It overlooked an alleyway leading around the back of the building.
There was a car in the alley.
Sergei tensed up immediately. It wasn't the car that made him nervous. No, it was the two men standing beside it. Tall, imposing. Dressed for a funeral they would never attend. They wore jet black long-coats, but the coats themselves were bulky around the upper chest and shoulders. Ballistic padding, probably a moulded civilian model of the standard UNSC carapace gear. That they kept reaching a hand inside their coats as if to reassure themselves was the second red flag he didn't even need to see to know they who they were. Cleaners; a Syndicate Hit Squad, coming for him.
Sergei rested a hand on Viktorya's shoulder, giving it a reassuring squeeze. She pulled her headphones off and looked up, eyes wide.
"Viktorya," Sergei said softly in Russian, so as not to startled her, "It's time to play the Hiding Game again."
Out in the alleyway, Perón sniffed as he lit up a cigarette.
"Fuck me it's cold out here." he grumbled.
"Pay attention," hissed Antonio; a bull-necked man with olive skin and slick backed hair, "They say this guy's dangerous. Killed Lenny with his bare fuckin' hands. And Lenny was no pussy, man."
"What was it they called this guy again?" Perón winced through the twisting smoke. He was paler, with deadfish eyes and a sweaty pallor to his white-pink flesh.
"Duh", Antonio murmured, looking troubled.
"Duh, as in like 'idiot'?"
"No, you retard. 'Dooh', as in 'do a bit of fuckin' reading once in your life'. Christ, you Outties are all alike."
Perón spread his hands wide in indignation.
"Well what the fuck is 'Dooh' anyhow?"
"It's Serbo-Croat. One of Khulov's Serbian guys coined it. Back when the Antrillo hit went bad."
"What the fuck is Serbo-Croat?"
"An Earth language, you ignorant Outtie fuck." Perón guffawed.
"Oh yeah? Well then what the fuck does it mean, Smart Guy?"
Perón drew a smoothbore shotgun from beneath his greatcoat. He pumped the slide, expression wary. Antonio already had his submachine gun to hand.
"'Ghost', man," Perón was all business now as he stamped out his cigarette, expression focused, "It means 'Ghost'."
They started for the rear fire door.
Up in the adjoining apartment block, Corporal Brendan Murphy adjusted the zoom on his helmet's integrated binoculars. The VISR system flashed red as it picked up Perón' shotgun. Elevated threat detected, weapons present. Target documented and stored. Murphy activated his inter-squad com channel.
"Lead, this is Murphy."
"Go ahead, Corporal." Sergeant Randall replied.
The young ODST held a gloved hand to the side of his helmet as he scanned the two men moving toward the emergency fire escape.
"Two hostiles on the move, looks like they're going for our Package. Permission to engage?"
The voice on the other end of the link was dispassionate, professional.
"Negative, Murphy, stand by for further orders."
Corporal Fenton's voice came over the coms next. He was up on a sniper perch on the far side of the building. He had a clear line of sight on the entrance lobby of the Minerva Hotel.
"Uh, Fenton here, Sir. Four more coming in via the main entrance lobby." he tracked them in his sniper scope. His spotter, a slight ODST by the name of Watanabe, did likewise with her tracking scope.
"Concealed fire-arms and what looks to be small explosives." she reported. "Bad news."
"More heavies?"
"Unless there's a Goon Convention in town we don't know about, Sir."
"The Package?"
"Still not moving on thermals, Sir. Not yet."
Sergeant Randall turned to the man in the Black Coat, eyebrow raised in an unspoken question. The man, pale and inscrutable, smiled slightly and shook his head, before turning away and studying the bank of thermal monitors with his cold, reptilian gaze. Randall suppressed a shudder, and reached up to his own helmet and keyed the com. He kept the frustration from his voice.
"Solid copy, Arrow Three. Stand by and await further orders."
As soon as Sergei touched her on the shoulder, Viktorya nodded, businesslike, and immediately packed up her things. She slid them neatly into a pink satchel, then moved to the bed. She pulled the duvet across the floor with her. It rustled as she dragged it into the bathroom; locking the door behind her. Then she clambered into the bathtub, padding it with the duvet beneath her. She did this calmly, without panicking or hurrying. She had practiced this; had done it many times before. Sergei crossed back to the window, gave a final peak out the door, then went back to the bed. He unzipped the duffel back, spilling its contents onto the bare mattress.
An M6C "Disposable"; so-called because the serial numbers having been filed away, and that its grip would not retain fingerprints. The gun could be tossed in a hurry. Sergei picked up a sound suppressor, screwing it into place with three firm twists. He tucked the pistol into the back of his pants, and let his sweater drape over the bulge it made.
The Rudin 590 was next.
The Rudin was a Sinoviet knock-off of the celebrated MA5 design. A shorter barrel; its jacket punctuated with exhaust holes. It shared the bullpup design of its predecessor, and had an inbuilt flash suppressor. Unlike its Misriah-manufactured counterpart, the Rudin was drum fed. It was snarling, savage weapon, favoured by unsavoury types for its punishing rate of fire and long term durability.
Sergei slung the strap of the Rudin over his shoulder, then clipped a belt containing three spherical stun grenades around his midriff. He ran a hand over his shaven scalp, then moved to the front door, crouching down. The kill team knew what they were dealing with. They would be cautious. He reached down to his belt.
He had less than a minute to get this right.
Perón stepped up to the top of the stairway, shotgun raised to cover the hall behind him. It was off-season for the hotel. This floor should have been empty. He swept the weapon left to right. A low ceiling, sagging floorboards. The lights flickered and pulsed a weak, sickly glow. Clear. He nodded at Antonio, who moved up beside him and crouched, SMG raised.
Brajkovic's team were moving up the corridor, two men at a time. They were a separate crew to Perón and Antonio; former Marines, well disciplined and tightly drilled. Like Perón they were dressed in heavy overcoats concealing body-moulded ballistic armour. It wouldn't stop a hard round, not at point blank range, but it certainly beat going into a fire fight naked. Brajkovic stood back with his number two, Vladic, as the two other men took point; knees half bent, shoulders braced against the corridor wall.
Boban reached the doorjamb first. He stopped for a second, nodding silently at Perón and glancing back at Brajkovic. Brajkovic gave him a single nod.
Go.
Boban stepped in front of the door. It was a flimsy, rickety thing. He took a half step back, took a breath, and raised his boot. It struck home. The door exploded outward in a blinding flash of burning splinters, hurling Boban backward. Lighting lanced into the kill team's eyes. A bursting ring drowned out all sound.
Sergei swung out of the room on the opposite side of the corridor, ducking low and weapon sighted. The Rudin blurted as he unloaded into the two point men. Centre mass, point blank range. Boban jerked and spasmed as the rounds chopped into the small of his back. He collapsed forward into the splintered doorway of the room he was originally trying to assault. The second man - Perón never got a chance to learn his name - had been killed instantly. The recoil from Sergei's third burst ripped his throat out the back of his neck. He flopped to the ground, clutching at his neck and gurgling. Already dead, but without the sense to know it.
Sergei dove back into the doorway just in time. The threshold was torn apart by the answering deluge of return fire; the door frame reduced to matchsticks and wood pulp. It was textbook stupidity on the assaulter's part. Positioned as they were at opposite ends of the corridor from one another, the ricocheting rounds arced off the walls and snapped toward either party. One skipped against Antonio's ear, tearing it from the side of his head in a bloody burst that arced across the peeling green wallpaper. He crashed back to the bottom of the stairwell, shrieking bloody murder. Perón threw himself flat, as Brajkovic and Vladic's rounds ripped past overhead. Powdered plaster coated him in a fine white dust.
Miraculously, Boban was still alive. Spine-shot, and doubtlessly paralysed from the legs down, but alive.
He was a mule of a man, with the strength to match. Boban pushed himself over on to his back, bellowing like a stuck bear. He raked the room Sergei had retreated into with wildly inaccurate sprays. Taking advantage of the mayhem, Brajkovic and Vladic surged forward, advancing on the ruined doorway. Vladic grunted as he hauled Boban out of harm's way and into the room opposite Sergei's position. Brajkovic primed a grenade, flicking it around the corner into the ruined doorway. He flinched back as the shrapnel cloud burst detonated with a dull crump, then shoved the snout of his assault rifle around the corner, firing blind.
Something grabbed his hand.
With a snarl, Sergei drove the combat knife clean through Brajkovic's wrist, pinning him to the wall. Brajkovic shrieked, and was still shrieking when Sergei stepped out and planted the smooth muzzle of the suppressed Disposable against his eye-socket. There was a dry pfft sound, and Brajkovic collapsed in a boneless heap, the weight of his body ripping his hand free from the planted knife. In a flash, Sergei had vanished back into the drifting gun smoke curling out of the doorway.
Perón looked on in dumbfounded horror.
Vladic snarled and charged the doorway, stepping over Brajkovic's corpse, blazing from the hip. He was operating on blind hot rage by this point; fuelled by an animalistic desire to avenge his comrades rather than any rational tactical sense. He caught himself once he found himself standing in the middle of the room, his spent rifle clacking audibly. Vladic jerked around, panting, desperately confused. The room was an empty bombsite The walls were studded with shards of glinting shrapnel and gouged with bullet holes. The bed was a smouldering crater of twisted metal and burning linen. There was no one here.
Vladic turned about. Sergei was peeking over the lip of a battered bathtub of the adjoining ensuite. The circular muzzle of the Disposable was staring right at him, like a baleful eye.
"Oh, shit."
His last words.
Perón heard that piercing pfft-pfft noise again, that dry-spitting cough. Something heavy crashed to the floor. Behind him, Antonio was still whimpering as he pawed at the tattered remnants of his ear. Perón looked back up into the ruined corridor, then with a fumbling hand keyed the emergency com link pinned to his coat's lapel.
"Backup, I need backup!"
Perón didn't wait for a response. He rose shakily to his feet, the shotgun trembling in his sweat-soaked hands. Boban had finally stopped moving. Brajkovic's legs were half poking out of the doorway on the left. Sickeningly, one of the legs was twitching, the foot jerking left to right and back again. A thick pall of smoke vented freely from the two doorways, twisting and congealing in the centre of the hall. Smoke alarms finally triggered, and the hotel's antiquated sprinkler system kicked into gear. Perón jolted from the cold-shock as he was soaked by the downpour. He blinked water-slick sweat from his eyes, as he inched along the wall toward the doorway. Step by step, he got closer. The cops would be here soon. Jesus, he had to get this done quickly. Nobody fired that many rounds and didn't get noticed.
He peaked around the corner.
Vladic's body lay flat on his back in the centre of the room, legs splayed. Two neat rounds had been plugged in his forehead. The back of his head was a steaming meat-mass of bone and tissue. Perón was thankful that Vladic's matted hair covered most of it. The bathroom in the ensuite was empty. Sergei was gone. Perón breathed a sigh of relief, the tension flooding out of him.
Something cold and hard pressed against the back of his head.
"Piece of shit." a Russian voice hissed in his ear, "You threaten me? You threaten my daughter? Fuck you."
Gibbering in panic, Perón dropped the shotgun as he raised his hands in the air, begging for mercy. The shotgun hit the ground roughly. No safety catch. The weapon discharged, blowing Perón's own foot off.
It also saved his life.
Perón shrieked as he hit the ground hard, his left foot a ragged stump below the ankle. Sergei, shocked at the suddenness of it, stumbled backward out into the corridor.
Crouching at the top of the fire stair, his hand a ragged claw clutching the side of his bloodied head, Antoino opened up on Sergei with the sub-machine gun. A trio of rounds punched into Sergei's chest, cutting through the body plate like it were moist tissue. The ground rushed up and slammed into Sergei's back. Suddenly, he was staring at the ceiling, the sensation of the sprinklers on his face.
"Hah! Got you, you fuck!" Antonio snarled in triumph, triggering another blurt of the machine gun. It was woefully inaccurate, and tore into the wall beside Sergei. Sergei fumbled for the Disposable. He'd dropped it. His hands grasped about, searching for it. His fingertips only brushed sodden floorboards. Antonio appeared in his field of vision, backlit by the flickering lights overhead. The barrel of the SMG loomed large above him, like the mouth of the tunnel.
"Any last words?!" Antonio leered in to his face, eyes bulging.
Sergei closed his eyes.
"Freeze!"
The ODST fire team presented an armoured wall of opal blue visors, hardened black armour and glinting gun barrels that filled the entire corridor. Antonio looked up with a yelp, soiling himself. He went to raise his hands in surrender. Panicked hands that were still grasping the sub-machine gun.
"Drop him!" a filtered voice barked.
The wall of bullets lifted Antonio off his feet, shredding him mid-air and painting him in great splashing arcs across the ceiling. His ruined corpse flopped to the ground, all but unrecognisable.
"Clear!" Corporal Murphy yelled, lowering his assault rifle and rising to his feet.
The corridor was a charnel house.
The smoke alarm had finally been silenced. Local police had cordoned off the building. ODST troopers stood at each end of the corridor, impassive above the twisting coils of drifting gun smoke. The air stank of cordite, soot and wet wood.
The Man in the Black Coat stood over Sergei, looking down at him. The expression on his face was disappointment rather than pity. Sergei was drawing breath in ragged, shuddering gulps. Blood pulsed out of his mouth, dribbling down his cheek. Not long now.
"I wanted to see if the rumours about you were true, Duh." the man said, in flawless Russian, "Alas it seems you are only human. Still, five men. A good tally, wouldn't you say?"
"ODST," Sergei gasped. Blood welled up from his mouth. "Khulov must have want me pretty bad."
The Man in Black Coat adopted an expression of mock surprise.
"Oh we weren't here for you, Sergei." he said, "We were here for her. That medical check up you took her to confirmed everything we needed to know. A magnificent specimen. Truly magnificent. You should be proud."
One of the ODST were leading Viktorya out of the bathroom. They kept her headphones on her, and had wrapped her in the duvet. When she saw Sergei, laying amidst the fallen bodies of the kill team, she cried out, reaching for him. Her headphones slipped, clattering against the timber floorboards.
"Nata!" she screamed, squirming in Fenton's arms like a cat near a bathtub."Daddy!"
He reached for her, choking.
"Get her out of here!" The Man in the Black Coat barked in English. "Now!"
Viktorya was hauled out of sight. Black Coat glowered after the ODST, then looked down at Sergei once more.
"Of course, we could take you with us. Offer you a job. A man with your skills... you could find gainful employment working in service to the public once again. But her medicals were off the charts. She has far more potential than you could even imagine."
Black Coat knelt down over him. Idly, he picked up the Disposable, which had been discarded on the floor.
"Ah, an M6C. Excellent choice. Neat, accurate. Simple to maintain. The choice of a true professional." he twisted the small black pistol, studying it in the dim light.
"Of course I never saw the appeal of a grip like this. Such things can be traced through their suppliers. If you really wanted to save time you would have dispensed with such silly things like fingerprints long ago."
Black coat held up his palm toward Sergei. True enough, his finger prints had all been seared away by laser scalpel. Utterly smooth. Without a whorl, without a single identifying trace.
"Still, you can appreciate how fitting this is. You know the other name for a M6C kitted out like this? A man like you? Of course you do."
Smoothly, Black Coat levelled the gun at Sergei's head.
"Disposable."
Two rounds to the head ended Sergei's pain. Black Coat tossed the Disposable onto the dead man's chest with a dispassionate sigh, oblivious to the stares of the ODST commando around him. Eventually, it was young Murphy who spoke, his voice neutral. He knew better than to tangle with an ONI spook. They all did.
"Uh, Sir, we've got a live one here."
Perón's leg had been clamped with a medical seal. He looked up, face devoid of colour and utterly terrified.
"Well what do you expect me to do?" Black Coat asked, stepping over Sergei's corpse and making for the exit with a sweep of his coat. "Take care of it."
Peron's eyes widened as the ODST reached for their weapons.