Hiiro
"God almighty! This place is too fucking hot." Evander complained from his chair, while sipping at chilled water, in the shade of an erected awning where he supervised those of us toiling in the sun.
"It could be worse." I said, stabbing into the loose, dry soil with my shovel for emphasis. "You could actually be working."
One of the local Vigia collapsed from heat exhaustion to emphasis my point. He wasn't the first to fall today, and I doubted he'd be the last.
"We are working." Idris said from her brother's side. "It just so happens that our job is to winnow those with the will to fight from those without."
"Anyone can strengthen their body so long as they have a strong mind, but we've yet to find a way to strengthen a weak mind." Evander added.
"Not to mention, these pigs could use the exercise. Wouldn't you say, Xan?"
"I concur, Driz"
I stabbed into the dirt again, making sure to throw my spoil as close to nattering siblings as I could. My throw was short, scattering spill over the Vigia men to exhausted to complain around me and over the women who were loading the most recent heat casualty into a wheelbarrow. I expected them to complain, but the women kept their peace and carried out their task like dutiful mutes.
"So what about me?" I asked. "Do I need to lose some weight too?"
I was the only man who'd stripped off his sweat-soaked shirt to work. The taut muscles of my upper body were gleaming with sweat, causing my tawny skin to glow like polished bronze in the midday sun. My years of hard labor as a pioneer in the savage wilds of my homeworld had served me well in hindsight and my cushy life of crime afterwards had robbed little of my masculine definition. I'd never be a hulking giant of a man with brawny arms like tree trunks, but I certainly stood apart from the pot-bellied, flabby armed gangsters wheezing around me as they inexpertly operated their digging implements.
"If anything, you should try and put some on." Idris said, her eyes rolling over me as one might a toasted snack on a cold day.
"We should have some combi-steroids in with our dietary supplements, though you might need to fight some of the big'uns for them." Evander commented.
"How many holes do I need to dig to prove I'm the best damned shovel operator you've got?" I asked, climbing out of my most recent triumph to start on the next.
"Oh you've already done that." Idris stated.
"You are a master of your craft." Evander confirmed.
"Then why am I still busting my back out here? Let the local Vigia handle this."
"No." Both siblings said simultaneously. I glared at the twins, but started on another hole spaced four meters from the last one I'd dug anyway.
"We're not judging you that their standard-" Idris started.
"We're judging you by our standard, which is much higher as you may have guessed." Evander continued.
"Plus, you're the rookie. Rookies do all the scut work, it's tradition." Idris concluded, nodding sagely.
Another man collapsed trying to climb out of his hole, his sweat-soaked sun-shawl flipping up to reveal bright red skin on his arms and face where his shawl had failed to protect him. The local clothing was designed to combat the omnipresent heat of this world, but there was only so much it could do.
I'd noticed two main fashions in the week we'd spent on the planet so far. Broadly, they were inner and outer-wear. Cruibab and the neighboring regions had three distinct weather patterns: sunny and sweltering, scorching and windy, lastly there was night which always blew in a tepid sandy/salty sea breeze. Outerwear, consisting of loose-woven shawls or ponchos, wide-brimmed hats, translucent face veils and airy balloon-sleeved shirts and trousers, protected from the worst of the daily conditions; inner-wear, consisting of sweat-wicking shorts and shirts, did not. What surprised me most about the local dress was the complete lack of gloves and shoes in favor of pockets and two-piece sandals with open sides.
Most of the Stalking Shadow's mercs had taken to the local garb with gusto in a vain attempt to beat the heat. A few, such as Evander and Idris, already had superior equivalents and saw no point in downgrading to the local knock-offs. I was one of exactly three people who didn't find the climate to be soul-crushingly oppressive— the other two being Bim who didn't seem notice the temperature had doubled and Treu who enjoyed the heat for some reason only he knew. Even the scorching sun burning high overhead at its zenith wasn't enough to make me foam at the mouth, though it was unpleasantly warm on my freshly-bronzed skin. I'd dug another thirteen holes before a tirade of disparaging remarks forced me to lift my head from the earth.
Princess, fully wrapped against the sun and hiding under a large, black parasol for good measure, was providing 'instruction' to the Vigia whose excavations failed to meet her standards. The lecture was too basic to be of any use to me, so I kept my head down and resumed digging while she questioned the intelligence, education and parentage of the men who couldn't follow basic direction. Her education lasted long enough for me to dig another four holes to completion and get halfway through the fifth before my pit was cast in shadow.
"Mudsucker!" Princess barked, "Get out of there and come with me. And put a shirt on, that cross in this light is murder on my eyes."
"Where are we going?" I asked, doing as she'd ordered.
"Command meeting."
"Another one?" I groaned, mostly from the day's labor but I was tiring of these endless meetings.
Princess led me on a long skirting lap of the defensive works on our way back to the mansion, pausing infrequently to berate any laborer who's efforts she found lacking. The estate grounds were slowly being made into a stronghold. The pale woman's grand vision of a cliffside castle had been turned down in favor of more utilitarian, non-invasive fortifications. Instead of ferrocrete walls and guard towers, they were digging perimeter trenches and blockhouses that could be turned over to the workers once the danger had passed. Of course the minefield was a separate matter entirely, although I suppose trees could be planted in the resultant craters after we left.
The hilltop estate was a massive sprawling affair consisting of the palace proper, garages, hangers, pools, ornamental gardens and a commanding overview of the surroundings. At several places across the grounds, one could see the orange-red mass of Cruibab proper some twenty-odd kilometers to the northwest, the valleys to the south and the ocean to the east. The eastern cliffside was steep but it wasn't a sheer drop to the crashing waves down below and portions of the bluff had been given over to worker apartments carved into the granite stone. From the southeast to the west and the north, orchards of exotic, colorful fruits dotted the rolling hills.
"What did you expect?" She asked as we neared the palace at the estate's heart. "This is what being a merc is about. Ninety percent of the job is preparing for every outcome, that way we never have to risk a fair fight. You can't tell me you ran into every job you had as a 'house painter' half-cocked and blind."
"Of course not, I put in my legwork, but still this is getting ridiculous." I said, finally stepping out of the sun and into the blessed shade of the palace's east wing.
"It's not just your ass on the line anymore." Princess said, doffing her outer-wear to reveal tight-fitting pale-grey clothes that did nothing for her boyish body or inhuman face. "It's mine too, and the crews', AND these local morons who don't even follow the instructions we give them. When shit hits the vents—and it will, make no mistake on that—all these meetings are going to be the reason we know what to do, how to do it and that we have the gear we need to make it happen."
The east wing had been completely turned over to our outfit. We had everything we needed and then plenty extra: apartments, gym, kitchen, three swimming pools, a motor pool, a full spa, offices, four studies, a conference hall, random rooms, and even two warehouses— one inside the east wing, the other two-hundred meters away and actively being buried under a few meters of ferrocrete to be used as our explosives storehouse. The conference hall was in with the luxury apartments on the third floor, but Princess led me passed the stairs and made for the ground floor study instead.
"Isn't the meeting in the usual place?" I asked, following her into the study where she closed and locked the door behind us.
Had our positions been reversed, this would be the part where I either pulled out my gun and asked if she had any last words, or made her an offer she couldn't refuse. Less scrupulous men in that position might have also issued a third option to the woman, if they could get passed her complete lack of feminine charms, that was. As it actually was, I found myself reflexively reaching to my waistband for a gun I wasn't wearing, just in case.
"It is," She said. "It's also scheduled in another forty minutes."
"And you've locked us in this secluded, dark room because…"
"Because these studies are lined with lead plating." She said, as if that explained everything.
"That doesn't answer my question." I said bluntly.
"Fine, because I figured if I can't see out of this room, then anyone else would have a hard time looking or listening into it."
Princess fidgeted with a tiny, pointless bauble before returning it to the shelf. Her manner wasn't the usual cold distant norm for her, but I couldn't figure out why she'd drug me in here, looking for privacy. What exactly was she expecting me to do, was this her idea of a romantic rendezvous? She hesitantly stopped scanning the room and turned her overlarge, purple eyes to me, surveying the air around me for things only she could see.
"H-How you doing?" She asked, a tone of irregular familiarity tumbling from her mouth without any grace. Her eyes flicked to my left, locking on nothing in particular before she clarified. "Freaky power-wise, I mean."
"You make a terrible spy." I stated bluntly enough to shatter the awkward air that had built. A single snort of laughter bled form Princess as she finally looked at me instead of through me.
"People aren't really my strong suit." She admitted.
"It shows. Freaky power-wise, I think I'm doing well. I'm not sure if I'm heat-resistant or just tolerant of the climate, but I'm basically immune to the weather outside."
"I've noticed. This background heat is scrambling my infra-vision. I can barely spot anyone on the lower end of my spectrum— aside from you. Your girlfriend is the complete opposite of you, she's the same temperature as whatever room she's in, which probably confuses the hell out of all the IR cameras I've seen in this place. Have you had any more cook-offs?"
"Maybe one. It was more like a near-miss than the real deal. Alice snuck up on me and I spat sparks when I yelped."
"I didn't have you pegged as a flincher." Princess said.
"Normally I'm not. But nothing's been able to sneak up on me since I was nine years old, so when she tapped my shoulder, I thought- I don't know… I thought a Byakkai was about to rip my throat out I guess."
"More evidence for the 'life or death trigger' theory. I bet that little sneak had a shit-eating grin on when she did it, didn't she?"
"Yeah, she winked and said 'she knew I was hiding something, though she wasn't expecting me to spit fireflies' and neither was I. Then she disappeared like she usually does."
"Did it burn your mouth?" Princess asked, peering at my lips.
"Not that I remember."
"Okay, so aside from spontaneous combustion and fire-parallel abilities, we can probably add flame-retardant to the list. That'd actually be pretty easy to test, if you don't mind playing with some different kinds of fires."
"There are different kinds of fire?" I asked incredulously.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
"So many, mainly its the fuel and temperature ranges. If you factor in near-fires, like arc-flashing or acidic combustion, I could burn you in more than twenty different ways by the end of the day." Princess stated with pride. "If you wanted." She added with a shrug.
"How do you know so much about this?" I asked.
"Demolitions is mostly just theoretical architecture and applied chemistry. I'm not a hack like Xadria who just uses P for plenty and hopes its enough to get the job done. I'm not a scientist or anything either, but if you need a hardened structure knocked down, I can cook up something the designer never even thought to counter."
"That's amazing." I said. Princess just shrugged off the compliment.
"Anything else new, freaky power-wise?"
"Not really." I lied. "Nothing I can think of at least. Sorry I can't be more helpful."
"Damn, whatever." Princess said. "I could always try killing you and see what happens, but I'd rather not think about what would happen if you accidentally popped my eyes."
"You'd never forget the smell." I answered, recalling it all too well.
"Can we not talk about the smell! It's bad enough just thinking about it and there's not enough brain-bleach in the galaxy to convince me otherwise." Princess shuddered at the thought, then after a collecting herself and spotting on something invisible, she continued. "What about Bim?"
"She seems to be taking things well." I answered noncommittally.
"Don't be dense."
Without an easy way of avoiding the topic, I considered my answer. Bim did seem to be taking the change in locales well, not that there was much of a shift in her behavior. She largely kept to herself, walking around like a sleepwalker, halfway lost in thought. As far as I knew she still wasn't much of a conversationalist and on the freaky-power scales she barely registered as a blip. If it weren't for the fact I was drawn to her every time we were in the same room and whatever that whole 'names have power' thing was, I would have thought she was a normal sheltered rich girl.
"I haven't seen her do anything weirder than a normal person would since we got here." I said.
My words gave me pause. I'd said normal person as if I wasn't one of them anymore. It was true, but still. I couldn't place exactly when I'd stopped considering myself normal. It was after I'd met this pale woman who'd forced me to accept the reality of my condition, but beyond that, I couldn't say. That fact struck a chord with me, though if it was good or bad was too soon to tell.
"Me neither." Princess hesitantly admitted. "I don't get why she just goes around acting like a norm. Why the hell does she have that monster following her if she just wants to play tourist?"
"She hates him. As much as you do for sure, probably more. I'd pretty sure the he feels the same way about her."
"If she's no big deal on the freak index, then what's his deal aside from hating her personally?" Princess asked.
"How should I know? Why don't you ask her yourself?" Princess took her inhuman eyes off the walls and glared at me like I'd just asked her to put out the sun with her piss. "I'm serious. She's aloof and more than a bit odd, I'll give you that, but I think we'll get further with her by cooperating rather than keeping her at arm's length."
"Who do you mean by we?"
"Us, all of us. You, me, the outfit, humanity, all nine-frozen meters of us." She raised a snow-white eyebrow at me dubiously, but I refused to back down or elaborate.
"What about her chaperon?" Princess asked. "You wanna 'cooperate' with him too?"
"I've heard people whispering about him, saying he reads minds, makes lights and how his room is always cold— plus there's the way he moves his eyes independently. If I had to guest which of the two were human, he wouldn't be where I'd put money. Granted, I haven't seen any of that except the eyes thing, so it's all hearsay, but… I don't know. Moreover, I don't want to know. After what he did in the hanger and the amount of hate everyone has for him, I want as little to do with him as possible."
"If you could see him like I can, you'd pop your own eyes just to escape the sight. When I say he's a monster, that's an understatement." Princess said, a haunted expression cast over her face as she tentatively glanced up at the ceiling. Her wristwatch chose that exact moment to chime. In the span of a few breaths, Princess collected herself and completely changed mental gears. "Come on, we do have a meeting to attend after all. It should go without saying, but just in case, let's keep these talks between us freaks. Otherwise I'll have to kill you."
"Duly noted." I said as I unlocked the study door.
This time I led the way with Princess following, her eyes practically boring into me from behind. Bim was on the stairway when we got there, examining the intricate artistry that seems to be depicting the collapse of an era the higher one climbed. The whole piece was too poetic and flowery for me to get much out of it, but the inquisitive alien woman seemed to be enthralled by the details.
"We've got another command meeting soon," I said. "Did you want to come with us?"
"I have a choice?" Bim asked in her delayed, aloof manner.
"More than I do." I answered. "I'm heading up now."
"Then I shall accompany you."
The conference hall, much like everything else we'd been allotted from the palace, was just plain excessive for our needs. The massive oval table and forty of its fifty chairs had been pushed into the corner in favor of a reasonably-sized desk we'd appropriated from on of the offices. The field deployment terminal was a smaller off-shoot of the briefing display screen used in the Shadow's ops room, with Alice and Chop already leaning over it when I walked in the room. Cables ran along the floor like a tangled root networks, linking multiple power outlets to radios and even to the window where an antenna array was haphazardly taped to the outer wall. Given the technologically regressed nature of the planet, there was a good chance this jury-rigged command center was the most sophisticated electronics depot for hundreds of kilometers around. Alice looked up at our approach but made no comment on Bim's appearance.
"I've already got the away team linked up through a relay from the Shadow. We're all here so let's get started." Alice announced. Her voice was much like the woman herself, small, unobtrusive and all to easy to miss if you weren't paying attention.
"We've only got voice on this end." Leeroy said over the radios. "If the feed cuts out let me know. I'm sending the info we have on the locally-made power armor now."
The display flicker to life with a dozen different images from every angle imaginable. My first impressions was that these warsuits were even more heavily armored than those in use by the Shadow's crew, but then I looked closer and started deciphering the wire-frame schematics and specifications. The reason these things looked like walking slabs of frontal armor was because they were exactly that and little else. Range of motion ratios for the arms and legs were pathetic, power to weight ratios even more so. The local imitations of the real deal were fat, lumbering weaklings that traded everything for ballistic protection from the front and nowhere else. Alice tapped at the terminal, pulling up a video of the power armor in action. The way the armor waddled was comical, how it had to hop on the spot in an attempt to follow a masked rioter running circles around it, even more so. The audio of the suit's panicked operator after the rioter threw a firebomb into the armor's vulnerable rear robbed the video of any comedy. The operator's panicked calls for aid shifted into ear-piercing screaming as he burned alive in his armor. The video ended, cutting his final words short.
"Those tin cans are a disgrace." Chop stated, her synthesized voice adding a layer of malice to her tone of disdain.
"That's pretty much the conclusion we came to out here too." Leeroy said. "If these things are the cutting edge of the local armorers, then I think it's safe to say we don't have to worry about going steel to steel with any domestic warsuits."
"The Client's not going to like this." Someone grumbled indistinctly over the radio.
"Based on client needs, I can't even recommend those things for field testing." Chop said.
"Which means if he really wants suits, we're going to have to import." Princess said. "Which raises a whole slew of issues and sets us back on training any of the local yahoos as mechanized infantry."
"But we've planned for this, so it's not a deal breaker." Leeroy said, blanking the display until the pixelation resolved into three different groundcars. "Up next we've got wheels."
The first was obviously a local militia surplus model, the ugly bastard child of a cross-country utility vehicle and a long-haul one-tonne truck. Six huge offroad alloy-mesh tires, deep wheel wells, front and back crash bars, reinforced roll cage, a short cargo bed behind a long passenger cabin and a wide, low profile painted in the local sandstone hues. It wasn't the same, but it was similar to the patrol ground crawlers we'd used to good effect back in my pioneering days.
The second was a tank on wheels, twelve of them to be exact. Even with that many tires to disperse the weight it was already low riding and the tall, armored, boxy body made me think of a step van. Just looking at it, I could tell that roll-hazard would handle like a brick and be about as fast on the uphill.
The final contender was a white staff car, with some kind of cloth roof I'd never seen before. It was clearly a luxury model, separating the driver and shotgun position from the slightly- stretched passenger seating. The rear seating all faced inwards, with only one door for access when the roof wasn't folded into the trunk. At a glance, you might be able to comfortable seat five people in the back, maybe twice that uncomfortably.
"We're leaning towards six option A's, with enough spare parts to build two more. Thoughts?" Leeroy said.
There was a general murmur of assent from the assembly around me. It made sense why the mercenary outfit would gravitate towards military hardware, but they'd seemed to miss an important detail.
"Are these cars for us or the Client?" I asked.
"A bit of A, a bit of B." Leeroy answered.
"For your purposes, I'd have to agree. We used similar vehicles back on Intatenrup, they were fast, agile and durable. But didn't you say the client wanted a motorcade? Isn't that the reason you're looking for groundcars for him?"
"Skip the lecture, get to your point." Princess said.
"This is about appearances to him." I said. "He came out and said as much to us. If we try and shepherd him around in a military convoy, that's not the show of strength he wants. To me that says 'I'm an invader, mess with me and I'll turn my guns on you.' I've taken a peek in his garages, he already has utility groundcars for his men and sports cars for himself. What he doesn't have, is an armored staff car."
"You think we should put our paymail in a convertible?" Leeroy asked incredulously.
"What better way to say 'look at me, I'm so unconcerned with my safety, everything must be fine.' At the minimum we should give him the choice, failing that we could use it as a decoy car. I've worked with men like him before— more money than brains. If we try and force him into doing something he's against, he'll work around us instead of with us."
"People who work against their security detail usually don't last long." Chop droned.
"And if they do survive the first bout, they usually get a lot more cooperative regarding their safety afterwards." Leeroy added. "What the hell, it's not like I'm spending our money. I'll add one to the list, finalize the purchases and we'll make it work. Hero, since your so passionate about it, I'm putting you on point for our motor pool."
"I only drove," I said. "I don't really know that much beyond the basic maintenance."
"That still gives you a leg up on most of us. I'll give you Chop, Gidget too, once we get back. Between the three of you, you should be able to handle any retrofitting we need. Last order of business, flyers."
The terminal reset once again, this time showing a vaguely familiar twin-wing, gutless helicopter. The sight made me wonder if all terraforming planets would impart a strange feeling of déjà vu. The flyer was another variant of a vehicle I knew from my pioneering days, we'd used them for logging in mountainous areas inaccessible by ground. It only took me a second to remember the sound those engines made as they flew overhead. The entire flyer looked like a fat-head tadpole with two bulky turbine propellers attached via stick-thin frames about halfway down the tail's length, landing gear dangling at the flyer's cardinal points. I knew from experience that the turbines could tilt marginally, granting the aircraft a surprising amount of speed for a rotorcraft. Various fasteners and tie-on points dotted the frail-looking body, hinting at the aircraft's improbable purpose of a heavyweight aerial lifter.
"Where's the rest of it?" Alice whispered.
"They must cut them down to save weight." Chop said.
"They're called skycranes," Leeroy said. "Which means the locals have the infrastructure to maintain rotary-wing aircraft, although the finer workings are all imports. I had Gidget and Shores give this bird a poke and they both think it'll work well enough for hauling suits, crates and the like but not much else."
"What's the weight rating look like?" I asked.
"The bird is about 32-tonnes empty, its 'rated' for 20-tonnes safely, though I've been given a personal guarantee from the seller that it can lift up to 50-tonnes in short bursts or 40 for moderate periods."
"That's impressive." I stated dumbly, unable to put that much weight into perspective.
"Four suits safely," Chop said. "Maybe eight in a pinch. That's not much in the way of cavalry if things go sour."
"It's better than the zero we have otherwise." Princess said.
"We could alway use the Black Hound." Alice countered. "It's faster, better armored, has a bigger capacity and we already know how to use it."
There was some garbled chatter over the radio that I couldn't decipher.
"Shores wants it noted that the Hound also costs upwards of sixty-thousand GSaC for every hour of orbital flight and we don't have a way of easily maintaining it." Leeroy relayed. "And I have to agree with him. Cel- the Client is footing the bill, so price isn't the issue. If the Hound gets grounded we don't have an easy way to get it back in the void for repairs. There's probably some atmosphere-capable recovery craft in-system, but until we're acting overtly I don't want to give the locals any more info on us than I have too."
"Doesn't our guy own the closest spaceport?" Alice asked. "They should have everything we need there if push comes to blast."
"Let's make that plan B." Leeroy said. "It's a conversation we'd need to take up with him first anyway. Hero, you wanted to consult him about his preference of cars, you can handle that too. While you're at it, see if he knows anyone else who is selling flyers. These blue-collar birds should haul our armor fine enough, but we'll still need something to haul personnel— whether that's an aircar, rotorcraft or whatever those skimmer planes I've seen are. That should be it for now. Anything new to report?"
"Nothing new-new, we're still weeding out the Vigia for soldiers but we're having better luck with the battle maids." Alice said. "Another week and we should be able to hand out some real guns."
"The lethal perimeter is down to thirty-five meters." Princess added.
"Limit it to at least thirty," Leeroy said with a chuckle. "Any closer and even with directional mines we won't be much better than the bad guys if they try and hit us."
"Ugh… fine." Princess groaned. "In that case, we'll be done with basic fortification inside of twenty days at this rate. Call it no later than a month when I factor in burnout and laborers getting drafted to other projects."
"It's a shame we have to ruin such nice gardens." Alice said, whisper-soft.
"There's no place nicer to be then a fortress when the shooting starts." Princess countered. "It's only a matter of time before someone tries to off our paymail."
"Aright then. Meeting adjourned; next one's this time tomorrow. Keep up the good work everyone." Leeroy said. The radio's line went dead a second later.
"That was the shortest meeting yet." I idly commented.
"They'll only get shorter," Princess said. "Right up until the shooting starts. Then we'll be in meetings until we're on the line in the thick of it with the rest of them." Princess flicked her eyes from me to Bim. "Enjoy the boredom while it lasts... The gardens too."