Marty stabbed a finger over toward the far side closest to the river. “Right, we jump a ride over there.”
“Okay, you can work on ‘jumping a ride’. One of those air speeders?”
“I don’t know, there may be something inside you can nab that’s better.”
I shrugged. “I’m liking this less and less, Marty. Shoddy planning, it means somebody gets killed.”
“Relax, Ruskie. You always worry too much.” He patted me on the back, again a little too hard. “Let’s go with the flow. This is a hot lead I’ve privileged your ears with. We’ve got a few hours’ lead on any other hustlers Q decides to spread the news to.”
I rounded on him, my teeth bared. “So, why doesn’t big Q do this thing himself, instead of pissing this lead your way?”
“Q’s done with Hoathville. Too many enemies here. He’ll call in his favor to me at some time. But by that time, I hope to be long gone.” He gave me that moony grin I knew too well and rubbed his chin as a flicker of past dealings came and went across that swarthy face of his. “Okay, I’ll let you in on a secret, Rusco. Word is ‘what’s going down in Baer’s crib is bigger than Lwippi’s spread back in ‘82’. Those were Q’s exact words.”
My eyes dulled. “Woo, think I’m going to faint with excitement.”
In the end I agreed to give the scope-out a shot, though I was ready to call it quits right there. Much against my better judgment, I contemplated the wire fence, ignoring that little nagging voice in the back of my head, the one that says, you stupid horse’s ass, Rusco, what are you thinking? The promise of riches to a man in a hard place though, was a hypnotic lure outweighing risk.
Baer had taken over an old welding shop. A long rectangular building—white-washed cement blocks with tall twin brick chimneys missing several pieces. Rusted metal lay ripped off the outbuildings. Some dingy cargo-holders, transports, v-gauge Cessnas with wings clipped, fly-trucks, auto-meltzers, rusty cranes, some loading docks peeked around the edges. Probably a variety of stolen goods and contraband inside, worthwhile metal parts, salvageable electronics, fuels, explosives. Baer was likely a middle man for some bigger fish up the line. Okay, I was intrigued.
One guard was way down the other end. From where we crouched by the service gate in the gravel, I could see him pacing by the wall, machine gun in hand. No dogs that I could see, fortunately. Just a single sentry.
I looked across the dark thatch of river and caught the rise and fall of heavy metal arms, moving rigs. Migrant workers toiled in the fields there, shipped in from Escaron to work those oil rigs and the strip mines. Many died there, but that was life. A source of cheap labor and cash to boot and work for them. Hard to believe, but a better place for those migrants than the war-torn planets from where they had come. Marty interrupted my reverie.
“What I figure is we take the guard down, blast the door with that dynamite I told you to bring.”
“Or maybe not,” I grunted. “It ain’t dynamite either. Pipe down, I’m trying to think.”
Marty grumbled, his fists curled.
When the guard was well down the length of the wall doing his marching soldier routine, I aimed my R4 with its muzzled silencer and took out the main camera with a single, well-aimed shot. No more sound than the buzz of an angry bee.
Marty blinked. “Why not just shoot the guard too?”
“I got something against murder.”
Marty snorted. “Give me the gun.”
I pulled the weapon back from him and gave him a sullen stare. “Save your groping for your boyfriend.”
Marty shook his head, muttering some disparaging comment.
We checked our earpieces. We were still in good working order. Marty donned the black ski-mask; I settled for soot on my cheeks, not that either would save us if it came to a firefight.
Killing the guard early on would be bad for us. First off, Marty was all too impulsive. If he thought the guard was down, he might get some cock-eyed idea, get careless and think he could slack off and just blast his way to the spoils. I didn’t feel like getting myself killed the first five minutes into our heist. Nor did I like the restless way Marty got up and started pacing from side to side. It was sloppy, and sloppiness meant disaster. More practical reasons were self-evident: cameras maybe I had missed. A dead body bleeding out on the tarmac. The other thing is that sometimes these solitary guards were wired such that if their vitals failed, it sent a signal to a command post higher up that something had gone wrong.
I was banking that nobody was checking that camera very often, if Marty’s information was to be believed. Our faces were covered, so nobody could ID us. I checked the kit strapped at my waist: pry tool, custom glock, penlight, blaster, explosives, medicaments, other useful knickknacks.
I hopped the steel-wire fence, taking care not to jingle it too loudly, dropped on the tarmac on the balls of my feet.
Marty followed, noisier than a dog. The sod made me wince with the racket. I cautioned him, and he nodded with a steel-eyed glare.
I threaded my way along the weed-eaten tarmac, ducking behind a generator post and an old dray-cart then lost sight of Marty as he dipped toward the back of the main complex.
Could I get at the guard from the roof? No. Too high. Drop a rock on his head? Dumbass, if you missed… come on, Rusco, you can do better than that. Blaster? Messy and bloody, undeniably noisy.
The easiest, simplest way availed itself. Always the easiest, and the best. The man yawned. Tired from a mindless day
