So he’d brought something for that.
He got closer to the place where thronging masses of rioters, or resisters, or whatever they wanted to call themselves, had gathered, then ducked into a burnt-out bank that had already been plundered. Inside he found ruined stone counters, pulverized and laying in dusty sections in the lobby, charred furniture, and a vault door that had been pried open with what looked some heavy-duty construction equipment that was no longer on scene. The wealth had been redistributed by force. Or maybe it wasn’t the rioters. Perhaps one of the criminal cartels or gangs had taken advantage of the civil disobedience to go ahead and get some major-league thievery done.
Again, not the bounty hunter’s concern. Rechs deployed his stealth cloak and set it to configure to the color of black that matched the resisters’ gear. He donned a red hood, pulling it over his bucket, then produced a can of nano-camo, set it to charcoal, and covered the front of his armor.
The cloak would scramble electronic surveillance within the feed’s frame of the cloak.
And… just in case there were actual human eyes also out there and watching… Rechs hoped red and black would let him pass by unnoticed among the swarms of disgruntled youths who seemed intent on playing dress-up to the hilt regardless of the contrived uniformity.
Rechs left the burnt-out bank and moved a few streets closer to the rally. The crowds grew thicker. Thousands of kids chanted and shouted while some drank and smoked highly illegal lotus without care. Others raced tricked-out grav cycles through the streets, heedlessly forcing their fellow Soshies to keep clear as they roared up and down the city blocks, a hologame racetrack come to life. No store window remained intact. Every shop door was broken and bent. Looted goods had been used, perused, destroyed, and tossed into the street.
Law enforcement services were nonexistent.
Above all this the crowd shouted “We demand change now” as each speaker poured their platitudes into the rioters’ ears about “taking back what the galaxy owed” or “settin’ things up for the win!” The lingo was doled out in buffet-sized portions, and the crowd reacted with delight.
Rechs entered what must have once been a posh downtown apartment tower. The entrance looked to have been the site of a fantastic blaster fight, probably to get inside past the private security. Power was out in the building, so the bounty hunter climbed up through the stairwells to the fourth level and found a ransacked apartment from which to watch the events on the main stage.
From this vantage point he saw that the crowd was even bigger than he’d realized.
The Soshies were packed in, a mass of revolutionary flesh pressing toward the main stage where the speakers had been speaking their slogans. Now some musical act that couldn’t get through a sentence without breathlessly screaming profanities about the Legion and the House of Reason stomped and jumped around the stage, throwing smoke bombs out into the mass of seething, surging kids. The rock stars used denigrating slurs and vulgar invectives to refer to the wild rioters, who applauded them wildly, eating up every word as though it were some eternal-youth-giving honey.
None of that interested Rechs. He watched the crowd like some high and silent unmoving gargoyle in cloaked rags and skin of armor, waiting for his target to appear.
He spotted the operative within an hour. A mover. Or what the mobs and cartels, which were often the same kind of people behind these types of political movements, called “earners.”
Rechs tagged the kid in his HUD.
The hunt was on.
30
Hours of darkness had suddenly turned into a supernova. A searing hot burning bright white light stabbed Amanda right in the eyeballs. Men and women in masks shouting orders at one another stormed the room in a businesslike assault.
No, these were definitely not the kids in black and red. The Soshies.
These were the pros she had spotted and warned Marine Intel about. The ones mixing in with the rioting crowds. Seeking to make the most of a bad situation by turning it into something far worse.
And here she was… in their clutches.
Nice going, Manda.
They dragged her to her feet and pulled her out of the room she and the legionnaires had been held in for the last few hours. She looked over her shoulder, fighting hard to as someone with a big hand worked to force her head forward. Even so, she still got a glimpse of Lopez. The other one, Beers, wasn’t there. He’d been moved to another location.
Or maybe something worse.
“Missin’ in action,” Lopez had coughed almost deliriously, and then gone quiet on her. That was hours ago, when they’d first arrived at this location.
She’d wondered for a moment if maybe Lopez was so unimpressed with the way her “rescue” had turned out that he’d simply up and died out of disgust for her incompetence.
Silly thought.
But she was embarrassed enough to have it. Self-critical enough to think it was possible that all of this, even the riot, had somehow been her fault.
Her people, her family, they were the type who took responsibility. They had to, out on that hard and unforgiving frontier world she’d come from. She’d enlisted in the Repub marines to get away from it for a bit. If only to have one adventure that didn’t involve the quarry, the grange, or any of the other no-account landmarks within fifty kilometers of where she was born.
Just one adventure. Like her
