Capture Death (The Kurtherian Gambit Book 20) Read online

  Using the .45s.

  Baba Yaga, her armor splattered with dust-encrusted gore, considered where she was on the third floor and locked down her .45s in their holsters before pulling her Jean Dukes and turned them both to 11. Aiming them at a forty-five-degree angle, she started firing at the rock ceiling above her, blowing fragments away until a five-foot chunk of ceiling broke free and smashed to the floor.

  She heard a scream from below.

  Taking a few steps, she pushed off hard and sailed through the hole to land on the roof. “Bring the Shinigami down so I can see it.”

  Once she saw the ship, she took a step and disappeared.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Planet Devon, Mid-Morning

  “I’m telling you it WILL exist on my planet,” the black-skinned female said to herself. Her white hair was flying in the wind as she stepped outside of the main buildings to head for a rumored bar.

  She was pissed.

  >>I have looked through all the data I can find, and nowhere have I located the correct invoices.<<<br />
  “It’s not all about invoicing, ADAM.” She saw three bars. “TOM?”

  Bar to the right, TOM replied.

  “ADAM?” she called.

  >>Why don’t you choose?<< ADAM suggested.

  “I’ll take the middle one,” she replied. “It seems like a bar with good taste.”

  >>The Unholy Brocken? What is a ‘brocken,’ and why would you believe it has good taste?<<<br />
  “What do you take me for?” she hissed, “an alien zoologist?” She looked at the sign again. “It looks like the kind of bar that doesn’t want to make the mistake of upsetting the MOTIP.”

  Who? TOM asked.

  Me, she replied.

  How is ‘motip’ you?

  Mistress of the Planet. M-O-T-P, so add an ‘I’ and you get MOTIP.

  Why are we doing this? You have plenty of your beverage on Shinigami.

  Because they need to learn, and after getting rid of that second group I deserve a break.

  I believe it was ADAM who took care of the second group. You just had to stand on the stage and look scary.

  How was I looking scary? I was wearing snake guts, for fuck’s sake!

  Mission accomplished, TOM replied.

  You have any idea how bad they smelled? I don’t think fish offal back on Earth was even close.

  Some experiences need to be personal, TOM replied.

  Wait a minute. She stopped in front of the bar TOM had chosen. “On Earth you could smell the difference between vampires to figure out who was their parent. Why didn’t you have problems with how I smelled back in the meeting to get those others off-planet?”

  I disconnected from your olfactory sense.

  Two large Shegalith stepped around the black alien who was speaking to the air. They looked like a cross between an old Earth Sasquatch and a T-Rex.

  If either had been nine feet tall.

  While the arms were a bit stubby, the lower feet had opposable appendages and were long enough to grab items and place them in their short arms.

  One looked over its shoulder at the crazy white-haired alien as she waved her arms in the air, still talking to nothing.

  “YOU LITTLE SHIT!” she yelled in frustration. “You told me, and I quote, “You aren’t the only one suffering here, Baba Yaga!’”

  And you weren’t. I could easily tell about fifteen of the ones who were being sent off-planet were physically ill just from smelling you.

  “I thought it was YOU who was sick!”

  It seemed like TOM sniffed over their connection. I can’t be held responsible for your leap of illogic.

  “How was that a leap of illogic?” she asked, stopping for a moment. “Never mind,” she said, resuming her trek to the door. “I know what you are doing, and it won’t work.”

  Baba Yaga ignored the feeling that ADAM and TOM were communicating inside her head.

  Outside the Unholy Brocken, Forty-Five Minutes Later

  Aert shambled up towards the bar’s entrance. This was the third night in a row he had needed a break after work.

  He reached up and scratched the little itch that was behind his carapace. At only five feet, six inches, he wasn’t one of the larger Yollins in his group of friends, but he was one of the strongest.

  He sighed. He shouldn’t bitch too much, since he had a job and it paid fairly well. Tonight was a damn sight better than it had been just three weeks ago, when he had lacked a job opportunity.

  Since he wasn’t into politics, he hadn’t understood why he had been fired from his job. The rumor was that, as a Yollin, he was untrustworthy. The owner wasn’t fond of the Empire. Now not only was he trustworthy, but he was being sought out explicitly because he had been fired.

  Being born a Yollin was so damned weird.

  His feet made a clunk-clunk-clunk noise on the street as he stepped to the entrance to the bar and shoved the door open.

  He stopped in shock, his mandibles splayed wide as he stared at the view that met him inside.

  The raspy voice issued from the red-eyed, black-faced, white-haired individual in the middle of the room. There were at least three tables broken that he could see as he looked around the sixty-foot by eighty-foot establishment.

  Everyone except the vicious lady in the middle was either up against the wall or laid out on the floor.

  She pointed her finger at Aert. “You!” He pointed his finger at himself. “Yes, you! Don’t move.” She turned her attention back to the ones standing against the wall.

  Her voice was dark, sinister, and annoyed. “All I wanted…” she said, her red eyes spearing each of the twelve, “in fact, all I asked for was a Gott Verdammt COKE!”

  She lifted a drinking glass in her left hand, which Aert hadn’t seen when he came in a moment before. “And you give the Mistress of the Planet thisssssss?”

  “It’s, uh…” The Torcellan barkeeper swallowed as the eyes came to rest on him. “It’s, uh, Pehpseh.”

  “No!” She crushed the glass and liquid dribbled from her hand. “It’s a Pepsi,” she corrected, voice dripping with annoyance. “It is the vilest of all the concoctions we humans brought to space, and when I want something refreshing after a night of cleaning up the trash, I don’t want Pepsi in the fucking morning. I wanted a damned COKE!”

  She looked down at the sticky liquid that was all over her hand disgustedly. Her head swiveled to the spectators. “I’m not done with this planet yet.” She stepped over to a table and calmly picked up a cloth, and after wiping her gloved hand she continued to consider those watching her carefully. “The next time I am in town there had better be a drink worth a damn in this place or I won’t be so patient, do you understand?

  Twelve heads nodded vigorously. One of the green aliens had liquid trickling down its leg.

  She turned and walked towards Aert, whose Yollin eyes opened in alarm. However, she just held out the rag as she approached. “Take this,” she commanded, dropping it into his waiting hands as she walked past him and through the door.

  No one moved for a few seconds, not sure yet if she was coming back or not.

  When the door opened again a few seconds later, Aert, who was straightening his back, heard a high-pitched voice ask, “What the hell happened in here?”

  The green alien against the wall moaned, rolled up its eyes, and dropped to the floor with a crash.

  The voice behind him said, “Okay, no one’s talking. Fine.” When the figure from whence the voice issued passed him, Aert saw what was basically a stick gliding along on four legs. “Can I get a Pehpseh?” it asked as it made its way to the bar.

  Twelve voices plus Aert’s yelled an answer.

  “HELL NO!”

  QBBS Meredith Reynolds

  Admiral Thomas used the stylus to scratch an itch behind his ear, then looked at Bobcat and William on the right side of the table and Marcus and Tina on the left before glancing back down at his tablet.

  “That,” he said
, pausing a moment, “is a lot of fucking lasers, folks.”

  Bobcat opened his hands wide as Admiral Thomas looked at him. “Well, you have a planet that is twenty-four thousand miles around. Then,” he opened his hands wider, “you have the first protection field at something like thirty-six thousand miles. That is just a spit away from the planet. Then,” he opened his arms as wide as he could, “you have your secondary field at hundred thousand miles. That is your main ship-perimeter protection field.”

  Bobcat looked at William. “Some help?” William snorted and held out his right arm on the opposite side of Bobcat, who turned back to the Admiral while keeping his left arm up and hand in place. “Then we need to get outside the moon’s orbit at approximately two hundred and thirty-eight thousand miles, and outside of the gravitational pull of the moon and closer to the gravitational pull of the sun. If they were all equidistant, we would be placing the satellites at about 1.5 million kilometers.”

  Admiral Thomas whistled. “So, lots of area to cover in a sphere around the Earth?”

  “And then some,” Marcus confirmed as the other two guys dropped their arms. “We can mitigate some of the effort by building three smaller versions of the ESD laser on the moon, and then we have to build one on a floating platform on the other side of the Earth from the Moon.”

  “Wouldn’t want a laser to have to shoot through the moon to hit oncoming enemies,” Admiral Thomas agreed. “So we need to figure out how to minimize the smaller weapons for production issues, and the larger ones?”

  “How many devices do you want to place on a rock the size of the moon which might explode, ripping the moon apart?” Tina asked. “I imagine the gravity of the Earth would pull quite a few chunks down.” She created an explosion with her hands. “Kiss the Earth goodbye.”

  Admiral Thomas rubbed his jaw. “Ships?”

  “What about them?” Bobcat asked.

  “I’m hearing a few disgusted noises from Lance and his team. Those who are willing to move to a Federation are hoping to strip us of our ships.”

  William asked incredulously, “Lance is ok with this?”

  “Why would you think Lance would ever be okay with someone taking away our weapons?” Admiral Thomas replied. “Hell, he’s Army, but even I give him that much credit.”

  “How would you man them for a thousand years?” Marcus asked.

  Admiral Thomas shrugged. “EIs?”

  “Not a good idea,” Tina replied. “Have you checked up on Ricky Bobby emotional progress lately?”

  “Our fighter EI.” He put up a hand. “Sorry, AI—that was spying on the Leath?” He shook his head. “No, I haven’t.”

  “Yes, him.” she agreed. “I’ve talked with Julianne, and he’s pretty messed up from being in solitude like he was. Are we thinking of maybe providing EIs with top-of-the-line military ships right outside Earth’s perimeter?”

  “For thousands of years maybe?” Bobcat added.

  “We can always come back and replace them,” Thomas said, considering the possibility.

  “How about we don’t plan on gates blowing up and shit? Not that I would ever say it could happen,” Bobcat offered.

  William cut in. “I’m thinking we can use the ships as mobile defense platforms, but we need something pretty damned awesome to run them.”

  “That won’t go crazy,” Tina added.

  “Should we ever leave it alone for too long,” Bobcat finished.

  This time Admiral Thomas reached up with both hands and rubbed his face. “When you give me the insufficient with requirements making it improbable, you finally admit you think it is impossible to accomplish.”

  “Is that a Navy quote?” Tina asked.

  Thomas grunted. “It’s a Bethany Anne quote.”

  “What does she say next?” Tina asked curiously.

  “She doesn’t,” Thomas admitted. “Dan Bosse will usually pick up the phone and start the conversation with, ‘So and so, grab two bricks…’

  Tina stared at him. “That wouldn’t be my problem.”

  Thomas chuckled. “Yes, but these guys are flinching,” he said, pointing to Marcus, William and Bobcat.

  She looked at her teammates and snickered. “Sorry, poor organic anatomical design. Sucks to be you, guys.”

  “Shows God was a female,” Bobcat muttered, “and hated men. Practiced on our design first, then looked down and thought,” ‘Wow, let’s make this super-sensitive and not place any protection around it at all. In fact,” he raised his hand, one finger in the air with his eyebrows and eyes open in glee, ‘why don’t we make it easy to locate as well? That should do the trick.’ He placed his hand on the table and leaned towards Tina. “Later, when she woke up after drinking too much, she looked down at her clay creation and thought, ‘Shit, let’s do version 2.0 and fix this mistake.’

  Tina shook her head in sympathy. “Don’t worry your little head about—” She didn’t get another word out before the snickers hit her ears. She stopped for a moment and closed her eyes, tapping the table. “Okay, poor choice of words, and pun not intended.” She elbowed Marcus, who was laughing a little too hard. “Now that we all agree God is a female…”

  “Who has it out for men,” William added.

  “And loves a good beer or two,” Bobcat agreed. “I’m starting to like this concept of a female beer-swilling god.”

  Tina opened her lips to continue, but William interrupted.

  “It does explain a few things,” he said. Bobcat raised an eyebrow and twirled his hand in the universal “continue” gesture. “Well, think about the platypus. Who but a drunk god could make that shit?”

  “Don’t forget the Black Widow spider,” Bobcat added. “Or hell, the praying mantis.” He shivered. “Have sex, kill the man, push out the babies.”

  “It does,” William considered, “speak to a female-focused deity.”

  Thomas tried to speak, but Bobcat was on a roll. “Which would mean that for millennia there was a massive PR campaign to market a male-focused deity when in reality we were being snookered each and every generation.” He shook his head. “I can’t believe we have finally figured out that we were horribly manipulated into being subservient for hundreds and hundreds of years to support a female deity which designed us in such a fucked-up way that just two bricks are able to make us cringe.”

  By now Tina was nonplussed, waiting for Bobcat to finish. Thank GOD (male or female), she thought, he didn’t have any beer with him.

  Of course, two seconds later…

  Bobcat turned to Admiral Thomas and raised an eyebrow. “You got any beer?”

  He smiled, but shook his head no.

  “Damn,” Bobcat muttered.

  Tina found her opening. “I know it must be hard to realize you have been played like a bitch for thousands of years, but can we focus on saving Earth here?”

  Bobcat looked up. “Don’t you mean saving Mother Earth?”

  William smiled.

  “Okay, playtime’s over.” Admiral Thomas, having watched Bethany Anne corral this group many times over the last almost hundred and fifty years, pulled the meeting back on track. “What do you need from me?”

  The joking stopped, and the group got down to business.

  Come hell or high water, aliens or killer asteroids, the Earth WOULD be protected!

  The Queen Bitch and her people were going to do their damnedest to make sure it had so many guns surrounding it that there would be a universal STAY THE FUCK AWAY sign permanently in place.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  QBBS Meredith Reynolds, General Lance Reynolds’ Office

  Lance heard a knock and looked up. “Yes?” he called, and the door opened. It was Frank.

  “Come on in. What’s up?” Lance asked. He set his stylus down and leaned back in his chair, glancing at the old analog clock on the wall. “Not quite quitting time, so business or personal?”

  Frank walked in, nodding to Lance before taking the second chair that faced his desk. “
Personal business,” Frank answered. “Giles.”

  “Oh.” Lance sighed and reached down to the third drawer on the left side of his desk. “Meredith?”

  “Yes, Lance?” the EI replied.

  “Please unlock my special stash,” he said, and it was done. He opened the drawer and reached in for a glass bottle filled with a blue liquid. He removed the bottle and shut the drawer.

  Frank asked, “Didn’t your drawer used to be locked with a key?”

  “It did,” Lance replied. He turned in his chair and picked up two glasses from the credenza before turning back. “Patricia took the key three years ago, and I had the lock upgraded so Meredith could open it for me.”

  “Well, of course you did,” Frank agreed, reaching for a glass as Lance poured the drinks. “We are speaking about my son, so liquor is a good idea.”

  “Kids,” Lance agreed and twisted the top back on, then replaced the bottle in the drawer.

  “Just one?” Frank asked.

  “Giles,” Lance replied as the drawer locked again, “doesn’t get the good stuff.”

  Frank shrugged. “He won’t be here in time to worry about drinks, so no harm, no foul.”

  “What is he coming here for this time?” Lance asked, allowing the fire of the Yollin special reserve to burn his throat.

  “Believe it or not, something important and relevant.”

  Lance looked over his glass at Frank and took a few more sips of the liquid before replying, “You’re right, I don’t believe it.”

  “Yes, that’s why Barb asked me to come speak to you.”

  Lance pursed his lips. “Barb has a comment?” Frank nodded, and Lance spoke a little louder. “Meredith?”

  “Yes, General?”

  “Would you connect me to Barb, please?”

  The edges of Frank’s lips curled up. “Oooh, going to the source?”

  “Of course. She cuts through the bullshit,” Lance replied.

  Barb’s voice came over the speakers. “Hi, Lance. I heard that.” Lance started to speak but she continued, “This time the request is to allow Giles access to formal and advanced training in craft and other assorted classes.”