The Ramal Extraction: Cutter's Wars - Softcover

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Steve Perry has sold dozens of stories to magazines and anthologies, as well as a considerable number of novels, animated teleplays, non-fiction articles, reviews, and essays, along with a couple of unproduced movie scripts. He wrote for the television show Batman: The Animated Series and was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Writing. His novelization of Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire spent ten weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. He also wrote the bestselling novelization for the summer blockbuster movie Men in Black, and all of his collaborative novels for Tom Clancy’s Net Force series have made the New York Times bestseller list. He is a recipient of the Willamette Writers Lifetime Achievement Award. For the past several years he has concentrated on books, and is currently working on novels now numbered somewhere around sixty-five. He is married to the former Dianne Waller. They have two grown children, five grandsons, two Welsh Cardigan Corgis and a cat.

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One

Quasi–serious death blew past Cutter’s helmet, the sharp and hard whistle of a hypersonic rifle round.

The shiftsuit’s tacticals IDed and tracked the bullet, backwalked the angle, and a red enemy–sig lit on Cutter’s heads–up display.

Red, because the suit’s computer was programmed to assume that anybody shooting at you was an enemy.

Must have taken the programmer a while to come up with that rationale.

Colonel R. A. “Rags” Cutter knew exactly where the sniper was—that old resiplex, third floor, two windows south of the corner, 104 meters that way. If he wanted, he could get the shooter’s height and weight from the suit’s pradar, but . . . why bother?

Cutter ducked behind a recycle bin, a stacked–everplast tub full of enough garbage to provide cover and not just concealment. There were several of these bins on the curb, and the suit’s filters didn’t cut out all the odor of rotting organics.

Obviously, it was trash–pickup day.

The suit’s computer ran a quick scan on the composition of the wall and spotted up a chart for what it would take to breach it: Their sidearms would be a waste of needles. Their AW explosive rounds would need a few hits in the same spot—the material’s Rockwell showed that it was apparently a local stone equivalent to marble, and fairly thick. The AP rockets would punch right through, of course, but at 1196 New Dollars each, those were better reserved for hard targets—spend one on a tank or a juggernaut, that was a good deal; piss one away on a sniper? Bad for the bottom line. Wasn’t like it had been in the real army, where you shot whatever you wanted and piss on the cost, Mama Terra had plenty more where those came from.

“Y’all all right over there, Colonel?” That was Gunny Megan Sayeed’s droll SoTerran vox in his sonicware. She was behind the next recycle bin, ten meters to local south.

She was aware that the sniper’s weapon was no real threat to the suits Cutter and the rest of the pent wore. As long as that was all the sniper had to throw.

If he could afford them, Cutter would use Fully–Augmented–Shiftsuits for every trooper on every stand–up–shoot–back mission. Best technology available here in the late twenty–fourth century, they were. Unfortunately, those leases also cost a small fortune, and his operating budget usually only allowed for a few unless the customer had really deep pockets. FAS’s were outstanding tactical wear. The soft and breathable fabric would harden to Class VI personal armor two milliseconds after any missile impact, and bullets would bounce right off. It would defuse charged–particle–beam pulses up to eighty watts, and lasers and masers would take all day to raise the temperature inside the suit five degrees. Well, it would take most of a minute, which was practically all day. Plus the chameleon shift could make you virtually invisible to anybody seeing in the human visual spectrum . . .

“I’d be a lot happier if one of my loyal and efficient troops would lob a boomer into that window and shut down that sniper, you know, just in case he’s waiting for us to get overconfident before he starts shooting serious AP. And not to put too fine a point on it, why hasn’t somebody already done it?”

Boomers only ran about fifty noodle apiece. They could afford that.

There was a short pause, and Gunny said, “Well, actually, Kay was gettin’ kind of antsy, so Ah let her off the leash.”

Cutter shook his head. “You know we aren’t getting paid by the hour?”

“You just got here, so Ah got to choose. ’Sides, aren’t you the one always tellin’ us to accommodate the talents when we can? That’s old school up there, Rags, he’s usin’ a gunpowder hunting rifle, for chrissake. And besides, Ah don’t think it will—”

There came a horrific scream; despite the adrenaline dampers circulating in his blood, the hair on Cutter’s neck stirred as his flesh goose–bumped.

The terrified yell stopped as if cut off by a knife.

Or by a set of really sharp, diamond–hard, alien claws delivered across a throat at inhumanly fast speed.

“—take all that long,” Gunny finished.

Cutter could almost feel her smile. “Nobody likes a smart–ass, Gunny. That’s the last one, right?”

“Yessuh, Colonel, suh, ten for ten, and mission accomplished.”

Cutter stood. Gunny was already on her feet, and the two troopers also rising behind her.

All things considered, this hadn’t been a bad operation. They’d been hired to find and take out a bandit cell that had been hijacking TotalMart’s hovervans, when the local police proved ineffective. That turned out to be because the local police were part of the cell—at least two of the KIAs were for sure, maybe more, the b.g. checker hadn’t run them all down, what with a couple of them being no more than small and bloody bits scattered over half a klick. What they got for riding in a piss–poor armored vehicle and eating an AP rocket.

An expensive rocket . . .

Cheop was a backlane planet, part of the three–habitable–worlds Filay System, and a van full of high–end augmentation gear, exotic foodstuffs, pharmaceuticals, or just semi–intelligent robotics could be worth a million or two ND, easy. TotalMart rural vans were the size of two–family houses, and packed tight, to maximize delivery–to–cost ratios. The bandits had hit three of them over a period of a few weeks. One had been destroyed, and they were holding the other two for ransom. Lot of balls to do that, the bandits; steal and clean the vans out, then charge the company to get the empties back. Since the vans were spendy hardware, the hijackers could have all retired rich—except they got greedy.

Smart crooks knew when it was time to leave the party. Always better a little early than too late. Stupid crooks stayed too long.

Enter Cutter Force Initiative, because the GU’s Army hated having to space to the middle of nowhere to protect the galaxy’s largest corporation’s bottom line. They would do it, because big money talks loud enough, so everybody has to listen, but they didn’t like it. And after the most recent revolution, they were stretched thin.

The fucking GU Army . . .

Don’t go down that corridor, Cutter. Living well is the best revenge, remember?

Yeah, I remember being booted out of the Detached Guerrilla Forces by the fucking GU Army, too.

Yeah. It was his gain, and since they were underwritten by TotalMart, it didn’t hurt to kick ass and have the veeps in Security nodding and smiling. And TM even paid on time, another plus.

TM would send people to collect the stolen trucks and a fair amount of the cargo would be retrieved. No, it wasn’t a bad op at all . . .

The purple flash on his HUD made Cutter glance toward the building. Kluthfem ambled out from the place and loped toward where he and Gunny stood. She was suitless but had a transponder. The tactical always purpled a Vastalimi’s sig, not that anybody with eyes would mistake one of them for human. They were about shoulder high to an average man and looked like a cross among a tiger, an ape, and a praying mantis. Bipeds, with a short, thick, orangish fur and almost humanlike arms and legs, but with tapering, wedge–shaped heads and big eyes, a Vastalimi was as deadly a soldier as you’d want.

Too bad more of them weren’t big...