A Glibertarians Exclusive:  Things Have Changed III

Rangely, Tarbos – February 2256

Well, I may not have thought this through.

Rangely was a small town, surrounded by wooded hills, about sixty kilometers inland from the Confederate capital of Mountain View.  Gomp had walked to Rangely the night before, sticking to the barely defined walking trails and away from the broad, grassy thoroughfare used by skimmers.  Once he found a good location for an ambush, he opened his datapad, turned off encrypting, disconnected from the three cut-out VPNs he normally used, and did an open-air search for Taliaferro, his own name, and the terms “bounty,” “reward,” and “Rangely.”  He was presuming, given Taliaferro’s employment of at least one cyber-criminal, that he would have others on the payroll as well – and that those others would be looking for Gomp to reveal his presence on the planetary internets at some point.

“Best not to disappoint them, then,” Gomp muttered to himself as he went through the exercise, then found a brushy spot on a low knoll overlooking a bend in a hiking trail.  The trailhead was a couple of kilometers away, down a narrow valley, which would make it necessary for anyone looking for Gomp to park and proceed on foot to the location he had so carefully given away.

The woods were friendly as such places went; the wildlife on Tarbos was mostly small and inoffensive, at least to people, so Gomp wasted little time worrying about his surroundings and more thinking about how to draw Bolivar Taliaferro and his minions out, away from the usual crowd of thugs, half-wits and dimwits that would be seeking to cash in on the reward in Mountain View.

But Gomp had been thinking like a Marine.  Now he lay in the brush, watching six men walking up a trail towards him in the early morning light, he was realizing that he couldn’t just open fire and wipe them out without facing a murder charge.

“Hell,” he muttered to himself, “I don’t even know if Taliaferro is one of them.  Hell, I don’t even know what he looks like.”

Angered at his own oversight, Gomp did a quick mental inventory.  He had one weapon, his 10mm revolver, most assuredly not a non-lethal weapon.  Since the demise of the Shade Tree and the dissolution of her crew, he knew his attitude had soured, but he wasn’t quite ready to go to prison for opening fire on an advancing group of thugs, even if he knew they were after him.

In fact, Gomp was not used to operating on his own.  In the Marines and later, on the privateer starship Shade Tree, he had become expert at executing orders given by others but had rarely been called upon to plan and execute by himself, for himself.  And during his time on the Shade Tree, he had become accustomed to Captain Jean Barrett’s strategic and tactical acumen.

But things had changed, and Hector Gomp was just now realizing how much he had avoided thinking about that.

Guess I’d better try to back on out of here – think of something else.

Gomp wasn’t aware of the remotely controlled drone, no bigger than a softball, hovering about a hundred meters overhead.  Powered by a microfusion battery, the tiny drone had infrared and ground-penetrating radar capabilities as well as one primary weapon – a high-voltage taser.

As Gomp started to slowly back away through the brush, the drone dropped lower.

Maybe I should have talked to the Captain.  No real reason to drag her into this, though.  No reason to put her in the crosshairs, too.  Maybe I should just sign on with another ship, get the hell off of Tarbos.  Maybe…  Sure wish I had at least one of the old Security team with me.  Shit, I should never have gotten myself into this mess.  Spent too much time not giving a shit lately. 

Things have sure changed since we lost the ship.

The drone dropped lower still.  As Gomp, backing up slowly, cleared the brush and came into the open, it closed the gap and fired its taser.

Gomp woke, slowly and painfully.  He opened his eyes.  He was in an enclosed skimmer limousine, which was clearly moving, presumably back to the city.  In the skimmer’s passenger compartment with him, on either side, were two big men with the obvious look of thugs.  Across from him was a striking woman, tall, regally slim, with thick black hair tied up in a severe bun.  She wore a tailored black business suit.  She smiled at Gomp as he woke.

“Can’t move,” Gomp complained.

“No,” the woman said.  “You can’t.  We put a neural cuff on you.  Blocks all your muscle impulses.  You can breathe, you can even talk, but you can’t move.”

“Nice.”

“We could have killed you where you were, you know.”

“Hope you aren’t expecting me to be grateful,” Gomp rasped.  Sure as hell they’re gonna kill me anyway.  “So, who the hell are you?”

The woman inclined her head in a sort of odd, seated bow.  “Bolivar Taliaferro, at your service.  You’ve caused me a lot of trouble, Mr. Gomp.  You caught one of my best computer geeks, and I haven’t been able to get him out of the hoosegow yet; in fact, they’re extraditing him to Earth, where I won’t be able to reach him.  You’ve messed up a lot of the street troops we sent  your way.  You, Mr. Gomp, are a lot of damn trouble.”

“Guess I didn’t hold the winning hand in the end, though, eh?”

“No.”  Taliaferro leaned forward.  “Of course, there may be a way out for you.”

“Oh, this should be good.”

“We’re heading back to my offices.  I’ll give you more specifics there, but the thumbnail is this:  You’d do well to consider working for me.  You’re smart, you’re resourceful, you’re tough.  I’ve read the news reports on the Shade Tree, during the war and after.  I’ve even dug up a little information on what happened to the ship and what you’ve been doing since.  You took a Merlin anti-armor rocket on your power armor’s breastplate and lived to talk about it – not many men can make that claim.”

“Haven’t you ever done a job?  That was the job.”  Gomp’s memory, unbidden, flashed back to that day, the last day of the privateer ship Shade Tree:

The last hatch blew as the privateer captain and her executive officer scrambled down the ladder from the bridge deck to the shuttle.  Hector Gomp and Tim McNeal blocked the corridor with their armored bodies.  Bullets fired by the advancing troops from the Vengeance pinged off their armor.  “GET IN THE SHUTTLE,” Gomp shouted.  He returned fire with abandon, stopping only when his carbine clicked empty.  He threw the carbine at the advancing armored figures, then pulled a grenade off his harness, armed that and threw it, too.  “COME ON, YOU SONS OF BITCHES!” he roared at the intruders.  He pulled his revolver from a belt harness and began firing, bouncing 10mm bullets off the advancing armored forms.

Captain Jean Barrett and the Exec tumbled through the hatch into the shuttle.  The rest of the crew was in the passenger bay already; Yvette Langstrom and Mickey Crowe dropped in after the captain, leaving only Hector Gomp and Tim McNeal facing the intruders.

“Gomp!” Jean shouted up at the hatch.  “Come ON!  We have to go!”

She looked forward.  Paolo Guerra was seated at the shuttle’s controls.  He looked frightened but gave her a thumb’s up.

Tim McNeal dropped into the shuttle.  “Gomp’s coming,” he said.  “He…”

Then the rocket hit, and Gomp remembered nothing until he awoke in the infirmary on the Corinthia Skyhook.

“Think about it,” Taliaferro urged.

“I’ll give it all due consideration,” Gomp promised.

An hour later, as it was growing dark, the big skimmer limo pulled up in an alley behind a large office building.  One of the thugs reached to the back of Gomp’s neck and removed the neural cuff, then pointed a pistol at Gomp’s head.  “Sit still,” the thug ordered.  “Don’t do anything stupid.”

“Stupid?  Me?”  Gomp flexed arms and legs experimentally as Taliaferro, accompanied by the other thug, got out of the limo.

The thug with the gun on Gomp opened his door, and that was when all hell broke loose.

A hail of bullets bounced off the front of the limo.  As Taliaferro ducked and ran for the building’s entrance, with her thug covering her, the second thug grabbed Gomp’s arm.  “Let’s go…” he began before a bullet took off the top of his head.  He dropped to the street.  Taliaferro and her thug were gone into the building.  Lights were coming on in the building.  Another burst of fire rattled across the windows.  Gomp looked around, saw muzzle flashes coming from behind a stack of crates.  A feminine voice called out:  “Gomp!  You idiot!  Get over here!  Let’s go!”

Gomp ran to the source of the voice.  He saw his rescuer; A tall, slim, leggy woman around forty, with a dancer’s grace and some of the hardest eyes Gomp had ever seen.  She was wearing a simple black coverall and held a Parks submachine gun in one hand.

“Faye?”

“Yes, stupid, it’s me.  Let’s get the hell out of here.”

“Sure thing – honey, right now I’d follow you anywhere!”

He saw her face in the dim light of the alley.  Suddenly, she smiled.  “Shut up.  Don’t get mushy.  Follow me.”

They ran, down the alley, away from Taliaferro’s building.

***

I’ve been walking forty miles of bad road

If the Bible is right, the world will explode

I’ve been trying to get as far away from myself as I can

Some things are too hot to touch

The human mind can only stand so much

You can’t win with a losing hand

Feel like falling in love with the first woman I meet

Putting her in a wheelbarrow and wheeling her down the street

 

People are crazy and times are strange

I’m locked in tight, I’m out of range

I used to care, but things have changed