Monkey's Luck Read online

  human genome in order to create LupanType. The Dogs had reflexes us human-onlies couldn’t

  even dream about. If I missed my first shot, the Lupan would drill me, plain and simple.

  I shut the flash of despair down, hard. At least I had a chance. That was more than my sisters-

  in-arms at Marg Sang had got, no matter who had killed them. I set the rifle’s sights to track bio-

  pats. If the Dog was the only one left alive in there, then the rifle would sight on him by itself. If

  not…well, it ought to be a quick death. Lupans were notoriously accurate shots.

  I pulled in a breath – and got nothing. The sudden emptiness set my head spinning. Gasping, I

  yanked the face plate open, sucked air into my lungs. The air cleared the dizziness. To hells with

  it. Without the air feed, the helmet would just hinder my line of sight. I screwed the helmet off

  and laid it beside the door. I gave myself a three-count for courage, then elbowed the doors’

  control patch. I fired as I dove through.

  The Lupan was kneeling by the comm bulb, his face toward me. Damn he was fast! He had

  his gun up before I cleared the door. He fired as my blast blazed on his chest. My bolt flung him

  backward but his answering shot still boiled the outer skin off my armor, sending acrid, metal-

  tinged heat burning up my nose. The blast glare blotted out my vision, but I heard the whump

  where his bolt blasted into the wall behind me. I had a fresh burst of terror before I realized it’d

  hit an inside wall.

  Then – nothing.

  Keeping my gun sighted on the Dog, I edged closer to the Lupan’s body. Lucky for me the

  Dog had stripped off his upper armor. He lay on his back, arms outspread, one taloned hand still

  clutching a cannon-sized rifle. Lupans apparently didn’t bother with uniforms under their armor.

  His naked torso was dusted with silver hair and muscled to make those ancient Earth gods

  jealous. A delicate plume of smoke rose from the scorched remnant of a fine silver torque around

  his neck. That torque marked him as a real ranker. The thought made me grunt in satisfaction. I’d

  gone and killed myself an officer and a gentleman. Pity it was only a Dog, but it still made a

  score in my book.

  Looking down at him, it surprised me to realize I could recognize him as human without

  having to wake up my imagination. Yeah, he had a wolf’s silver-tufted ears set high on his head;

  a wolf’s fangs showed through his parted lips. His nose was broad and straight, more like a lion’s

  than a man’s. The nose was bone, too, not cartilage like ours. Muscle bulged above his jaws

  where a human-only’s ears would be. That muscle powered fanged jaws that could bite through

  StelFleet armor. But his face was still human, with brows that swept downward in an eagle’s

  frown that made him look uncomfortably noble. He didn’t look at all like the foaming-at-the-

  mouth monster HQ kept showing us. He looked…well, hells. He looked good.

  Monkey’s luck – first man looked interesting in years had to be one I’d just killed.

  “Oh, no! You killed him!” Behind me, Roy’s voice sounded plaintive.

  “What’d you expect me to do, fool? Kiss him?” I lowered the gun and fixed the idiot with a

  scowl. “Thought I told you to stay put.”

  “Sorry.” Roy tried to look guilty. He failed. Yeah, well, that was a Sprite for you. He wanted

  to be on hand to suck up to whoever came out alive. His expression said he’d been hoping it’d be

  the Dog. And after I’d patched him up, too. So much for gratitude. “Don’t look so disappointed,”

  I told him. “You can find plenty of other sponsors when we get wherever this tub’s headed.”

  “No, I can’t.”

  “Say what?”

  “Not like him.” The synskin had sealed the gashes in his face into angry red lines. Between

  them, his baby browns shimmered with tears. “You don’t know how it felt.”

  “Yeah, well, looking at you I can guess.”

  He fluttered fingers at me impatiently. “Not that way. Not physically. It was… It was like he

  opened my soul….” His eyes focused on something only he could see. “Nobody’s ever touched

  me that way before. And now…” He squeezed his eyes closed, trying to keep his misery private.

  “Yeah, well…” Hells, wasn’t anything else to say. I’d heard about that Lupan Touch stuff

  before. The legend of Lupan men giving the best sex in the known universe went back all the

  way to Home World, to old Earth herself. Made the massacre at Marg Sang seem even more

  horrific.

  Well, nothing I could do about it. I leaned the gun against the captain’s chair. “C’mon, kid.

  No point crying now. We got work to do.”

  He didn’t answer, just ran his eyes across the bridge. The sight yanked him back to the present

  right quick. Between the scars his face turned an unhappy shade of green.

  His expression made me conscious of the stench. I’d been on enough battlefields to recognize

  it. I lowered the gun and followed his gaze, already knowing what I’d see.

  The bridge crew had been caught at their posts. No time to don armor – if they’d even had

  any, being civ. Odd, though. The bodies weren’t slashed apart. Normally, Lupans didn’t bother

  with energy weapons at close range. They preferred to use the razored talons built into their

  battle armor. I’d seen what those talons did to the human body too often these past few years.

  These corpses, though… these crew folk had been shot. At close range and by small bore guns,

  too, judging from the size of the burn holes in them. Except for the captain. His remnants

  sprawled in a crusted pool of blood near the command chair. I spotted a women’s dark-clad

  corpse over by the comm station. No burns I could see and she still clutched a needler in one

  hand. Proof, I figured, she’d managed to take the little black pill route.

  Something in that toggled a suspicion in the back of my mind. Civ women didn’t normally

  carry a suicide option. Hells, from what I’d heard, some Free World women preferred

  surrendering to Lupan men. I stepped over to her, flipped her corpse onto its back with my foot.

  Yeah, like I’d thought. She was Samurai. That dark outfit was a StelFleet uniform. An officer’s

  uniform, no less. Only she hadn’t taken poison. Somebody had drilled her right between the

  eyes.

  Gobbing hells, this was just not getting better. What was a Samurai ranker doing up here?

  That didn’t feel right, not at all. The Samurai were StelFleet’s fighter pilots. They flew their own

  hunters, they didn’t sit crew on civ ships. They sure as all the hells didn’t sit crew in a beat up

  old sow of a civ freighter. Okay, so this civ freighter was hauling troops. We were supposed to

  be slated for post-war border patrol duty. No call for us to have a SamuraiType pilot along for

  the ride.

  Unless, of course, our mission had been something else. Wouldn’t be the first time High

  Command had lied to the troops. The thought was not comforting.

  I stepped back from the dead woman to roll the captain’s body over. What was left of him

  wasn’t helpful. I glanced up at Roy. “Was the captain Samurai by any chance?”

  “No.” He started to shake his head, winced, and opted for a shrug. “New navigator was,

  though.”

  Something in that wasn’t right. Took me a moment to figure out what. “Nav station’s over

  th
ere…” I jerked my chin toward the control panel near the bulb of ShipMind. “What’s she

  doing over here in Comm?”

  “Sitting Comm, I guess.” Roy took a deep breath. He went greener and clapped a hand over

  his mouth. I swung him away from me with my rifle muzzle just in case. To his credit, though,

  the boy toughed it out. “She wasn’t the navigator,” he managed after a moment.

  “Then who was?”

  “Some officer named Sasaki.”

  Oh, gobbing hells. Sasaki was a name even I knew. Commander Hiro Sasaki, StelFleet

  Special Forces. So we had a gods-be-damned spy navigating our civ freighter. There went HQ’s

  mission statement out the hatch. One Samurai aboard was an anomaly; two of them meant we

  were scheduled for trouble. Probably explained why the Dogs attacked us, too. Gods knew the

  Dogs had plenty of sympathizers out here along the border. if the Lupans heard we were putting

  Samurai into the DMZ, they’d have reason to go rabid. Damn. This mission was starting to smell

  worse than the bridge. I frowned down at the nav post. “So where’s Sasaki’s body?”

  Another shrug. “Don’t know. The Lupans took him.”

  Ouch. In that case Sasaki was probably still alive. And dying slowly.

  I trudged back to the Dog and picked up his gun. Or tried to. Damn, that thing was heavy!

  Even with my suit’s mech boost I couldn’t lift it with any degree of control. Didn’t want to even

  think about the strength it took for that Lupan to swing it around single-handed. I settled for

  dragging it by the barrel back to ShipMind’s control bulb. I set my rifle down beside it and

  settled in to examine the damage.

  That was another shock. The bulb’s housing wasn’t damaged at all. The damage, such as it

  was, was limited to the control panels. Those looked like the Lupan had been trying to hot wire

  the controls: open components glittered within the dark shell of their housing. I scowled at the

  mess, wishing I’d paid more attention to all those mech lessons the Army kept feeding us. On the

  other hand, we were still breathing, so ShipMind must’ve managed its own on-the-spot damage

  control. Either that, or this freighter had better defenses than anybody would expect. Anybody

  else, that was. Me, I was starting to think it might have some damn fine defenses.

  Well, there was one way to find out. The captain’s chair sat just behind and above ShipMind’s

  bulb, master and commander arrangement. All I had to do was slip my hand into the chair’s sync

  link and ask. Yeah, right. I glanced up to spot Roy fanning himself by the captain’s chair. “Hey,

  Roy.”

  He looked up, still trying to fan the stink away.

  “Sync in and see if you can get this tub moving.”

  “Me?” He fanned faster. “Oh, but I couldn’t!”

  I ran a significant glance across the bridge. “You see any other volunteers?”

  “Oh, but I’m not authorized!” He fluttered those baby browns at me.

  I thought about fluttering my suit’s fingers upside his head. I settled for patience. “It’s a civ

  ship, idiot. You’re crew. So sync in already.”

  Roy just dropped his gaze to his toes and mumbled something. Made me wonder if that boy

  didn’t harbor suspicions of his own about what kind of defenses the captain’s link might have.

  Typical Sprite – afraid he might get a shock or something. Hells, worst the captain’s link was

  likely to do to him was spit him out and log a complaint. If it caught me, though…

  Roy muttered something else. “Speak up, boy,” I told him. “I haven’t got Lupan hearing.”

  “I said I’m not crew.” He snapped up eyes gone bright with defiance and shame. “I’m cargo.”

  He struck a hand-on-hip pose. “ShipMinds don’t talk to cargo, in case you didn’t know.”

  Damn. Should’ve realized. A waddling old tub like this didn’t sign on pretty boy

  crewmembers. Roy must’ve been private property. Captain’s personal joy toy most likely; crew

  whores couldn’t muster that much gumption. Didn’t matter. If he was listed as cargo, ShipMind

  would ignore him.

  I stared into the jeweled glitter of the open panel, wondering what my chances were of rigging

  an override. Didn’t have to wonder hard: I’d dodged half the tech classes Army inflicted on us

  and slept through the rest. I’d be more likely to kill off whatever was left of ShipMind than get

  us moving. Shit. That left me no choice but to sync in myself. Monkey’s Luck.

  Yeah, I could sync in. The question was whether I’d be able to get back out. Because every

  time I sync’d in I risked activating all those death warrants.

  I’d been lucky so far. The woman who found me when that pack of ‘officers and gentlemen’

  got through having their fun belonged to the Army’s sisterhood. She got me to a medic in time to

  save my life. She kept in touch, too, during the long months of my recovery. She was the one

  who taught me that un-Typed naturals like me could have a real life out in the Free Worlds. It

  was the Sisters, that band of hard-luck, hard-knock women, who helped me track down the

  bastards who’d tortured and raped me. Then, when the death warrants started piling up, it was

  the Sisters who helped me find a rogue gene-tech willing to implant a fake Aryan TypeCode in

  my DNA – and to take payment in kind. That TypeCode changed everything. That TypeCode

  made me show up in the vast AI database of NetMind as a proper, store-bought Aryan Type. It

  gave me a legal identity. It made me legally human. Okay, so the agony of having every cell in

  my body ripped open and reconfigured made rape and torture feel like a summertime picnic. The

  end result was worth it.

  At least that’s what he told me.

  One of the things the sonuvabitch did not tell me was that my nice, new Aryan gene pack

  wouldn’t replace my own genetic make-up. It just overlaid AryanType genetic markers atop my

  own DNA. Oh, it changed me all right. It bleached the melanin in my skin, leached color out of

  my hair, even lengthened my bones – which was an experience that made death seem downright

  attractive. It made me look like a classic AryanType: tall, white-blonde, blue-eyed, athletic, and

  seriously attitudinal. But underneath, I was still me – the kind of unplanned, mixed breed human

  mutt the proper Types called a monkey. The overlay let me sync in as an Aryan all right. But it

  created a weird shadow on my ID. And that shadow made me stand out just a bit too much.

  I gave up on trying to sawyer the panels. I snapped the covers back on then got up and

  trudged over to the captain’s chair.

  No way around it. I was going to have to sync in.

  Gobbing hells.

  I’d dealt enough death these past five years to expect and handle combat jitters. I’d tracked

  down and killed five of the bastards who called themselves men up close and personal. Only one

  I’d missed was the bastard who’d set me up. Either Fate or the Lupans must’ve got that scumbag

  Kriegsman without me. Sonuvabitch had just dropped off Army records a year or so ago. I’d

  come to accept that my revenge was done. Whatever had taken Kriegsman out was fine by me.

  Now… I just wanted a life again. Looking at the damn Lupan had made me realize I even

  wanted a man again. A decent man, one I could call my own.

  “What’s the hold up?” Roy asked. He sounded sharper than property ought, personal or

&nb
sp; otherwise. He noticed me noticing and lowered his head to gaze at me through lustrous lashes.

  “You need help taking off those gloves?”

  “No.” I plunked myself down in the captain’s chair and took my time unhinging my armor’s

  gloves. The long, open tubes of the synclink embedded in the chair’s armrest seemed to sneer up

  at me.

  NetMind controlled everything in the Commonwealth. You couldn’t buy a gods-be-damned,

  gobbing bulb of beer at the corner grocer without sync’ing in. And the second you sync’d in, you

  belonged to NetMind. Before the god-sized AI database let you buy that beer it cross-checked

  your ID against all its lobes. It ran your ID through FiNet, DemoNet, KnowNet – and, of course,

  SecNet. Come up wanted and you wouldn’t get your hand out of sync until some Sec op showed

  up and claimed you. Not a happy prospect when you’re wanted for murder on five different

  worlds.

  I’d been able to hide in the Marines so far – the demands of a losing war dampened the

  military’s enthusiasm for checking recruits’ IDs. But every time I sync’d in I gave NetMind

  another look at that shadow in my ID. And NetMind remembered. Someday some stupid little

  backwater link would find the last piece to my personal puzzle and connect the dots. And then I

  was dead.

  On a civ ship, sync’ing into the AI shouldn’t be a problem: ship links were limited to ship

  stations, sick bay, galley, what have you. Command post, though, got it all, military or civ. And I

  was beginning to have serious doubts about just what kind of access this so-called civ freighter

  carried. If Sasaki and his girl had some kind of Samurai mission going, then the commander’s

  link would have its own defenses.…

  Gob it. If I didn’t try I was dead anyway. I pulled in a breath then slipped my hand into sync. I

  held my breath through the stomach-spinning sense of puzzlement that sync normally gave me. I

  nearly whooped in relief when ShipMind accepted my ID and sucked me in. This being

  command post, the ship automatically fed me a complaint of what that damned Dog had been up

  to.

  That Dog hadn’t been trying to blow the ship at all. Instead, he’d been trying to find out

  where we were headed. Gobbing hells, whoever said the Lupans were smart as us human-onlys