McCade's Bounty Read online

  McCade lifted a protective cover and pushed a red button. A klaxon went off and called a nonexistent naval crew to battle stations. The ship's defensive screen went to full military power, weapons systems came on-line, and a three-dimensional tac tank appeared in front of McCade's chair.

  The tac tank was empty of movement—outside of symbols representing Alice, her sister planets, and the sun itself. There were no warships waiting to pounce, no fighters vectoring in, no torpedoes flashing through space. Nothing.

  The intercom bonged. Maggie appeared on-screen. She scowled. "You're starting to piss me off, McCade. What's all this battle stations crap? You hit the wrong button or something?"

  McCade fought to keep his temper. "We can't raise Alice and we're not sure why. They should be all over us by now. Strap in and stand by."

  Maggie nodded and the screen flashed to black.

  McCade took another longer look in the tac tank. Still nothing. A hard lump formed in his throat. Where were the robo sensors? The usual tramp freighters? The planet's five-ship navy?

  McCade swallowed hard. "Rico, full power. Phil, keep your eyes peeled. I've got a bad feeling about this."

  It took twelve long, frustrating, tension-filled hours to close with Alice. Hours during which there was plenty of time to worry, to think about Sara and Molly, to imagine all sorts of terrible calamities. But nothing, not even McCade's worst imaginings, could compare with what they actually found.

  Alice half filled the view screens when Phil spotted the first wreck. "Sam, Rico, take a look at this."

  Phil's claws made a clicking sound as they hit the keys. A magnified image appeared on the main view screen. It was a ship, the remains of one anyway, tumbling end over end. Light and dark, light and dark, over and over again. Torpedoes had taken a terrible toll, ripping huge holes in the vessel's durasteel hull, gutting the interior.

  Rico's fist made a loud bang as it hit the control panel. "Damn! That's the Free Star!"

  "It was the Free Star," Phil corrected grimly. "Wait . . . there's more . . ."

  McCade bit his lip. The Free Star had been a reconditioned destroyer, the flagship of the planet's small navy, crushed like a child's plaything. Who had done this? Pirates? The Il Ronn? It was impossible to tell.

  By the time the DE swung into orbit around Alice the crew had seen more smashed ships, a ruptured habitat, and four or five burned-out satellites. Taken altogether the destruction meant hundreds of lives lost.

  McCade thought about Sara and Molly. A muscle in his left cheek began to twitch. He had to get dirtside, had to find them, had to make sure they were okay. But what if they weren't? What if . . . Phil interrupted McCade's thoughts.

  "Hold it! I've got something on VHF!"

  Alice shimmered and disappeared as a new image formed on the main view screen. The shot showed a man, a nice-looking man, with a fleshy something on his shoulder. Was it blue? Purple? The thing shimmered like iridescent cloth. The man smiled.

  "Hello. This message is intended for Sam McCade. Everyone else can open the nearest lock and suck vacuum.

  "As for you, McCade, I sincerely hope you're dead. But if you survived . . . here's something to think about: 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.'

  "Or, how about, 'What goes around comes around'?

  "Or, the ever-popular, 'Screw with me and I will rip your goddamned lungs out'?

  "Take your pick. Just remember. You stuck your nose where it didn't belong, and I chopped it off."

  The screen snapped to black.

  Rico's chair whirred as he turned toward McCade. "Okay, sport . . . who the hell was that?"

  McCade's mind raced. Who the hell was that, indeed? Like most bounty hunters he was good at remembering faces. Yet McCade was sure that he'd never seen the man before. But that didn't make sense. The man had a personal grudge, a grudge so big he'd attack Alice, so surely they'd met. Wait a minute . . . the voice . . . there was something about the voice.

  "Play the last part again."

  Phil tapped some keys and the man reappeared. " . . . And I will rip your goddamned lungs out.

  "Take your pick. Just remember. You stuck your nose where it didn't belong, and I chopped it off."

  McCade slammed his fist down onto the arm of his chair. "Mustapha Pong!"

  Now it made sense. Pong was the renegade pirate who'd unknowingly stolen the Il Ronnian Vial of Tears a few years earlier. In an attempt to avoid an interstellar war and pocket a sizable bounty, McCade had tracked the Vial to Pong's secret base. Shortly thereafter a combined human-Il Ronnian fleet had destroyed the base and almost all of Pong's ships. That explained the grudge.

  And although McCade and Pong had spoken with each other by radio on one occasion, they'd never met face-to-face.

  Rico nodded his understanding. "So what's the weird-lookin' thing on Pong's shoulder."

  "I can answer that," Phil said grimly. "The 'weird-lookin' thing' as you call it is a Melcetian mind slug."

  McCade frowned. "A Melcetian what?"

  "Mind slug," Phil replied evenly. "I read a paper on them once. They're nonsentient symbiotic creatures who rarely leave their native planet but have the capacity to amplify human brain activity."

  "Amplify brain activity?" McCade asked. "As in think better?"

  Phil nodded. "Better, faster, and more creatively."

  Rico raised an eyebrow. "Oh, yeah? Then how come I never saw one before?"

  Phil smiled, and given his durasteel dentition, it was a terrifying sight. "Because everything has a price. In this case the price involves allowing the slug to tap into your spinal cord, filter your blood for nutrients, and feed you addictive chemicals."

  McCade shuddered as he hit his harness release. "Sounds horrible. It makes a certain kind of sense though. No wonder Pong's so good at what he does."

  A few seconds later all three of them were headed for the shuttle. Although McCade was the only one who was married, both Rico and Phil had significant others, plus a raft of friends. And as a member of the planetary council, Rico felt a special responsibility to the entire population.

  They all hoped for the best but feared the worst.

  McCade paused outside the shuttle bay access lock and touched a button. Maggie appeared on-screen. He knew without asking that the engineer had kept abreast of developments via the drive-room intercom and view screens. Maggie didn't talk much but she always knew what was going on. "We're heading dirtside."

  Maggie nodded. "It didn't take a genius to figure that out."

  "Are you coming?"

  Maggie gave him a twisted smile. "No, I don't think so. I haven't got any people down there, and besides, who'd watch the ship?"

  McCade had expected something of the kind and was secretly grateful. He hated to leave Void Runner unattended. "Thanks, Maggie. I'll call you from dirtside."

  McCade was just starting to turn away when Maggie cleared her throat. "McCade?"

  "Yeah?"

  "I'm sorry."

  McCade looked in Maggie's eyes and knew she thought Sara and Molly were dead. It was a logical conclusion but one he refused to accept. A lump formed in McCade's throat and he forced it down.

  "Thanks, Maggie. Keep a sharp lookout. There's always the chance that they'll come back."

  Maggie nodded silently and the screen faded to black.

  The trip dirtside was a dark and somber affair. Heavy winds buffeted the shuttle as it entered the atmosphere and snow fell at lower altitudes.

  McCade brought the shuttle down through the lowest layer of dark gray clouds and sent it skimming over pristine whiteness. He flew low and slow. Rocky hills swelled here and there, bare where the wind had scoured them clean, their sides covered with low vegetation.

  Then the hills were gone and the shuttle entered the mouth of a long, low valley. Days of snow had hidden most of the damage, with only wisps of smoke and a higher-than-usual radiation count to indicate damage had been done.

  McCade knew that to the nor
th and east a number of low-yield nuclear devices had exploded, each destroying a surface-to-space missile battery, but leaving the underground population centers untouched. At least that strategy had worked.

  Now, as the shuttle neared the capital city of New Home, the damage became more apparent. Shattered domes, covered with a dusting of new snow; wrecked crawlers, sitting at the center of fire-blackened circles; half-blasted radars, still searching the skies for targets long disappeared; and here and there, the pitiful huddle of someone's last stand, now little more than bumps under a shroud of white.

  McCade bit his lip and glanced at Rico. The other man's feelings were effectively hidden behind his beard, but his eyes were on the view screen, and they were as cold as the land below.

  All was not death and destruction however. Here and there signs of life could be seen. Fresh vehicle tracks in the snow, a hint of underground warmth on the infrared detectors, and the vague whisper of low-powered radio traffic. There was life down there, less than before, but life nonetheless.

  McCade stuck an unlit cigar between his teeth. "Run the frequencies, Rico. Someone's talking. Let's see who it is."

  Rico flipped some switches and ran the freqs, starting with commonly used civilian bands and working his way upward. "Rico here . . . anybody read me?"

  The response was almost instantaneous. A surprisingly cheerful male voice said. "Pawley here, Rico . . . nice of you to drop in."

  Rico grinned. "Pawley? What the hell are you doing here? I thought you were down south working the G-Tap."

  McCade knew, as did all the planet's citizens, that "G-Tap" stood for "geothermal tap," and was a project to harness the energy resident in the planet's core. A lot of effort and a lot of tax money had flowed into that project, and Brian Pawley was the G-Tap team leader.

  "We were lucky," Pawley replied soberly, "either they missed us, or thought us unimportant. In any case we survived and came back to help. Everybody's pitching in. Ranchers, miners, you name it, they're all lending a hand."

  McCade saw the landing pad up ahead. Two piles of snow-dusted wreckage marked where a ship and a shuttle had been caught on the ground. Energy weapons had cut a confusing hatch work of dark lines into the ground. McCade cut speed and prepared to land.

  "We're about to land," Rico said. "Where should we head?"

  Pawley was silent for a moment. When he spoke there was a forced cheerfulness to his voice, as if he felt one way, and was saying something else.

  "Stay on the pad . . . I'll pick you up."

  McCade killed the shuttle's forward motion, fired repellors, and settled gently onto the pad.

  A huge cloud of steam billowed up to obscure the view. As the wind blew it away McCade saw a crawler roll out onto the pad, its white and gray camouflage useless against the burnt area behind it, twin rooster tails of snow flying up behind it.

  It took McCade and Rico a good ten minutes to pull on their heat suits and enter the lock. Phil was already there, sans suit, with a big grin on his face. Thanks to his thick layer of fur the variant could stroll through winter snowstorms that would kill Rico or McCade in a few short minutes.

  The lock cycled open and they left the protection of the ship's hull. McCade had opted to leave his hood and goggles hanging down his back. The cold cut into his face like a thousand tiny knives. He removed the unlit cigar from his mouth and threw it away.

  Unlike Sara, Rico, and Phil, McCade hated the cold, and would've preferred a warmer planet. Sara . . . Molly . . . the names were like spears through McCade's heart.

  Their boots made a crunching sound as they approached the crawler. A door hissed open and released a blast of warm air. McCade scrambled inside, closely followed by Phil and Rico.

  Pawley was at the controls. He turned sideways in his seat. Though normally clean-shaven, Pawley wore a two-day growth of beard. He had short hair, a crooked nose, and thick rather sensuous lips. "Welcome aboard, gentlemen."

  Pawley's words were followed by an awkward silence. Rico was the first to break it. "No offense, ol' sport . . . but let's go straight to the bottom line. Who made it and who didn't?"

  A cloud came over Pawley's face. "I'm sorry, Rico . . . Vanessa was killed. She died defending the fusion plant."

  Rico nodded, and looked out through scratched plastic at the bleakness beyond. Tears ran down his cheeks and into his beard.

  Pawley looked at Phil. The variant stared back, trying to read the scientist's eyes, steeling himself against the worst.

  Pawley ran his tongue over dry lips. "We just don't know, Phil . . . Deena's unit went off-air more than a day ago . . . she's missing in action."

  Phil gave a grunt of acknowledgment. Missing rather than dead. There was hope at least.

  Now it was McCade's turn to look Pawley in the eye. "Well?"

  The word sounded harsh, and McCade wished he could pull it back, but there was no need. Pawley understood.

  "Good news and bad news, Sam. The good news first. Sara was wounded but she's alive. Doc Lewis says she'll be fine in a couple of weeks."

  "And Molly?" McCade croaked the words out. If Sara was the good news, then . . .

  Pawley swallowed hard. "They took her, Sam . . . along with sixty or seventy other children."

  McCade let his breath out in a long, slow exhalation. At least she was alive. Frightened, lonely, but alive.

  McCade's fingers curled into hard fists. First Molly, then Mustapha Pong. Not for money, not for empire, but for himself. McCade's Bounty.

  Four

  Molly McCade bit her lip and refused to cry. She'd done a lot of crying during the last few days and it didn't do any good. The pirates didn't care, and the other girls were just as scared as she was. She didn't know where the boys were and hadn't seen any since the attack.

  Molly rolled over, careful not to wake anyone who might be asleep. Sleep was a precious commodity for the children. It was a time of much needed rest and escape from the horror of the ship's small hold.

  The girls were packed into four-foot-high sections, with cold metal gratings under their backs, and very little room to move around.

  They were allowed to leave the hold twice a day. First came the scramble up ladders to the pressurized launch bay, then a bowl of tasteless protein mush, followed by fifteen laps around the hangar. Then they were forced through a bank of over-used chemical toilets, an antiseptic spray, and returned to the gratings.

  And since everything was done in alphabetical order, there was no hope of a better position on the gratings.

  Poor Susy Zobrist. She was stuck on the bottommost grating and cried all the time.

  Some kids threw up a lot, others had to go to the bathroom all the time, and whoever lay just beneath them took the brunt of it.

  But some dribbled past, and ended up at the very bottom of the hold where it coated everyone and everything.

  From the pirate point of view it was an extremely efficient low-cost way of transporting a lot of people at once. Not only that, but when the gratings were removed, the hold could still be used for more conventional cargoes.

  Looking up through the dark crisscross of metal gratings, and the black sprawl of supine bodies, Molly could see the glow of a single greenish light.

  It reminded her of the night light in her room on Alice. As long as the light was on nothing could sneak up and hurt her. There had been two greenish lights originally, but one had gone out two cycles earlier, and now Molly feared that the other one would too.

  "Oh, please, God," she prayed, "don't let the light go out. And if Mommy's with you, tell her I miss her, and I'm trying to be good. And, God, if Daddy's coming, tell him to hurry."

  Five

  They used hand blasters to cut down through the permafrost. After that the robo shovels moved in, their drive wheels squeaking in the cold, their scoops biting into frozen dirt.

  Steam rose from the temporarily warmed earth, eddied around the mourners like strands of errant ectoplasm, and was whipped away by a steady breez
e. It came from the south and made the minister's robes swish and pop. His words were feeble and small against the vast backdrop of frozen wilderness and gray sky.

  " . . . And so it is that we lay these valiant souls to rest, secure in the knowledge that their essence lives on, looking forward to the time when we shall see them again . . ."

  McCade felt Sara shift her weight from one leg to the other. Her right leg still hurt where the slug had ripped through her thigh. It was a miracle that she was still alive. Twenty-seven men and women had defended the main entry. Three had survived.