Habu. James B. Johnson
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told him that they’d found his range and that more missiles were being programmed to follow the first one.
He hit the “PALLET RELEASE” button for positions one through twenty, wrapped his legs around the pilot seat, tested the seat restraint, and flipped the barge over ninety degrees. Twenty pallets full of Leninist supplies tumbled into the Karg skies, with the burning army manuals making a nice trail of fire toward the ground below.
A series of explosions told Reubin that his timing had been good as the supplies intercepted energy beams and missiles which had preferred flaming army manuals to the scarred hull of an airbarge.
Reubin dumped 2K of altitude in a free fall before sliding the barge back onto straight and level. Perhaps the falling debris would mask his own descent.
The lights of the spaceport loomed in the distance.
Would he make it?
With the fall of the IPs, the rest of the off worlders in IP territory would have already been long gone. And, from what Reubin understood, the rest of Karg was into a boiling frenzy of warfare, at such a high pitch that not even Karg could sustain.
This time, he’d been careless. In his never-ending effort to disappear and resurface in a different life, he’d chosen the wrong situation. The trouble is, he thought, just such chaos is tailor-made for my purposes. Not to mention his compulsion for courting danger, especially toward the end of his lives. And Karg had provided more than enough chaos and danger to sate his desire.
It was almost time to change his life again. So, to bury his trail further, he traveled to Karg and enlisted as a mercenary. His intention was to spend some time in their internecine wars and come out with a different identity. That way, when he applied at the Long Life Institute on some world he’d arbitrarily choose, he’d already be one additional identity removed. The LLI computer would never figure it out—though, admittedly, one of these centuries it would start correlating people, files, and codes and come up with some interesting discoveries.
The people on Karg simply didn’t like each other. Religious fundamentalists of several types: Christian derivatives, Moslem offshoots, Leninists, and even a smattering of Intellectual Philosophists. They fought all the time.
Reubin Flood enlisted in the IP Army under the name of Teale. This time he’d guessed wrong.
He wound up commanding the troop guarding the City of Death, being promoted to the rank of comajor mainly because the Leninists had killed off the higher echelon of the IP field grade officers.
The City of Death was appropriately named. It was a graveyard of epic proportions which illustrated, if nothing else, the dedication the inhabitants of Karg gave to their hate and resultant warfare. The City of Death lay at the center of IP territory. Wealthy Intellectual Philosophists (Reubin thought much of their nomenclature and terminology to be contradictory) buried each other in the City of Death. Periodically they visited the graves of the deceased. To do this in style, atop the gravesites, they had erected huts, shrines, cabins, all of which they used only when visiting.
Because of his past, Reubin felt a kinship with the City of Death.
Over the years a living city of poor and disenfranchised had grown up in and around the City of Death. It was a waste of covered space to leave the veritable homes atop graves unoccupied for most of the year. Inevitably, a subculture took hold and flourished.
Reubin Flood and his unit were to guard the graves of deceased IPs, not the live peasantry who parasitically survived atop the dead city.
Enjoying the fruits of an extra heavy birth cycle some twenty planetary years earlier, the Leninists overwhelmed the miserable IP force and flooded the land with young men trained to kill the enemy without quarter.
Reubin Flood fit their criteria of enemy.
The only thing Reubin had going for him was the fall of the IP. Any off planet visitors would be considered suppliers of the IP by the conquering Leninists, Thus, any starships in port would be leaving like the proverbial rats.
Two preprogrammed drones with night view eyes buzzed the barge and hovered overhead.
Reubin hit “EMERGENCY JETTISON ALL.” Explosives sheared bolts and retaining straps. Compressed air fired the remaining thirty pallets of cargo straight up in the air. Reubin tilted the barge on its side again and flew sideways out of range of the falling cargo.
He saw no more drones.
His panel showed him to be nearing the spaceport.
“IDENTIFY” lit up on his screen. He punched in his code as major sector commander and the screen blanked.
A worried face popped up on the screen. “Comajor Teale? State your purpose.”
“Who are you?” Reubin demanded.
“Flight control—”
“Patch me through to your sector command, this equipment isn’t doing the job,” Reubin snapped. Time to write your own invitation to the party, he told himself.
Eyes flickered. “The unit has moved west—”
“Who’s the senior officer present?” Reubin put steel into his voice. He touched the power control bar to insure it was at max.
“I am Colonel Burak...sir.”
“You confirm my code, Burak.”
“The computer does.”
Reubin took a deep breath. “I am assuming command. I will land at the base of the tower and join you shortly.”
“Sir, I remind you that Flight Control is not under the Ministry of Warfare and therefore not subject to your command except through specifically authorized circumstances.”
“We’ll get it straight when I arrive,” Reubin told the IP colonel. His face was the IP sickly white and Reubin knew instinctively that Colonel Burak had tabbed him as an off-worlder. It would be difficult to cajole him into turning over his command. “Is it safe for me to land? I don’t want to get in any starship takeoff wash on my inbound.”
“The Starline cruise ship Ai Latalia is ready to launch.”
A cruise ship? Reubin couldn’t imagine anybody visiting Karg for mere vacation purposes, though he did remember something about the City of Death being a tourist attraction. And the City of Garbage, too, he recalled.
“Well,” Reubin said, thinking furiously. He needed to board that starship. “I don’t see his sequence lights yet. I think I can be under cover before he launches.”
“It’s your funeral,” Burak said.
“Your mouth, Colonel, is overreaching your rank,” Reubin snapped. “You’d best call up your evacuation programs and start memorizing.” Keep the colonel guessing. He might take offense to Reubin’s last minute changes. What he intended came under the category of desertion in military regulations. He flipped the monitor off.
No ground traffic at all below him. The lights of the spaceport sprawled ahead of him. A solitary space liner sat forlornly on one of the central launching pads. Warning lights began the five minute countdown.
Reubin snapped on the comm link. “Burak. Hold that ship until I’m clear.”
Burak came on and grinned wickedly. “Sorry, sir. The captain of the vessel is anxious to leave. I have no control.”
Just what Reubin wanted. “Gimme his freek.”
Burak reached out and touched a keypad. “Info is in your comm link. You’ll never talk her out of it.”
Reubin killed the link and called up the space liner Al Latalia.
“Unidentified barge, clear the area,” said the voice and the picture leaped onto his screen. The face was female and angry.
“Space liner, hold your takeoff,” Reubin said.
“Hah.”