4. EL MARCO DE SEGUIMIENTO
4.3. LAS TABLAS DE SEGUIMIENTO
4.3.3. Tablas C: Desagregación de Indicadores de Productividad
Arik frowned, tusks or not. “Wait for me.”
“Can’t—new timetable starts in twenty.”
Arik closed his eyes. “We can’t get there that fast.”
“You can’t—I can. Fidel and Victor will go with me. Get there as quick as you can, hey?”
“Be careful.”
“You, too.” Arik closed his phone and slid it into his pocket. The woman behind the desk was looking at him. “What?”
“We don’t allow phones up here,” she said.
Arik squeezed the credstick. He looked down at the still closed doors and breathed in deep through his nose. Perfumes and other smells per-meated the air. There was lace on the chairs. The air was warm and moist.
We’re going early, he’d said. Early, hell—you’re going before I even get my reward.
He wanted to remember it all.
“I’ll take the phone out,” he said, pocketing the credstick.
“Your appointment…”
“I’ll have to reschedule.” He walked down the hall to the elevator.
t
The car was where Arik had left it, which was saying something in Redmond.
There were a few gangers down the street, but they scampered when they saw him come out of the Union and head toward the beater. It might have had something to do with the Tir marks on the plates.
Or maybe the Union had an agreement—certainly the Seamstresses wouldn’t want their clients inconvenienced—with the nearby gangs. Pro-tection wasn’t the oldest profession in the world, but it was pretty damn old. Gangers in Redmond weren’t slags—slags got scragged.
Arik got behind the wheel, then pulled his phone back out and dialed Portland. The line rung out without anyone answering. Arik redialed and waited.
It rung out again.
“Frag.”
It wasn’t supposed to be this early. He wasn’t—his team wasn’t—set up for a night job. The port would have lights, of course, but what if they got shot out? Arik had an ork’s night vision—it wouldn’t bother him. But Achoo and Victor were humans; Fidel a dwarf.
“Frag.”
He started the engine—ignoring the rattle of the exhaust system and whatever metahuman thrash metal band was playing on the radio—and pulled out into traffic.
It wasn’t supposed to be this hard. Go tomorrow morning—after an evening at the Seamstresses Union—and see that a certain section of the waterfront was held by people loyal to Alejandro Kylisearn instead of the High Prince.
Lugh Surehand was High Prince of Tir Taingire. His people controlled the waterfront, collecting the taxes, paying the graft, and otherwise seeing that the seaborne freight meant for the elvish nation to the south was taken care of.
It wasn’t Arik’s place to be told all the details of the plan. He didn’t know why Alejandro wanted to take the Seattle trade away from his broth-er-in-law’s underlings. He didn’t need to know.
Alejandro Kylisearn paid Arik’s salary, and he’d done him any number of boons. That was another lesson his mama had taught little Arik Schofield before pushing him out of the house right before she dropped her next litter.
A man—an ork, a human, anything—kept his word and stayed loyal to his salt. Arik didn’t know what salt meant; Alejandro had never given him a condiment. But he knew what loyalty was.
And he knew it was important. Because it felt important.
So if Alejandro wanted the Tir elves off the wharf, Arik would bloody well take the wharf.
As he drove, he patted his pockets. The pistols were still there, one on his hip and another on his thigh. The knives were still on his hip, balancing the knife, and no one had been near his boots.
From the itch, his razor fingers were just fine. And the smartwire in his arm didn’t come out—there was no way he could have misplaced that.
He dialed Achoo again, praying the small human would answer, but the line rung out a third time. Arik didn’t leave a message. He was too far away to change what would happen. If Achoo said the timetable was that tight, it meant the other teams were moving, too.
Why had they gone early?
Arik didn’t need to know why they were doing it—but it might mean his life that they were doing it early.
Even Mama wouldn’t have said that was too much to ask.
t They had started the party without him.
Arik pulled the car to the side of the road a good hundred meters back from the security fence, but he could already see the flashes from the teams’ guns and the security troops at the gate. The gate was all his team was supposed to hold. That was all the plan called for. The four of them were to take out the security squad—quietly if possible but quickly if not—
and then pass the other teams through.
BUT LOYAL TO HIS SALT 44
The car Arik parked behind held one of the other teams.
He climbed out of the beater and walked to the trunk, watching the cars around him. At least one of the other teams was waiting for him to clear the gate. He unlatched the trunk and regarded the contents. What he’d had planned for the morning was out. He wouldn’t need the fake se-curity uniforms. Or the hats. Or the paralyzing gas.
Arik sighed. Along with what he was wearing, he only needed one more thing: the big Mossberg auto shotgun resting beneath the piled clothes. He put spare shells into his pockets and half-shrugged out of his armored trench coat.
The sling for the shotgun went over his right shoulder, and then he shrugged the coat back up. The gun hung down along his leg, where it wouldn’t be easily seen. He slammed the trunk and walked up to the next car.
An elf with a glowing green tattoo over half his face looked up at him from the driver’s seat. “Schofield,” the elf said. “Letting your kids play?”
“Beren,” Arik said, nodding. “You didn’t think of helping?”
“You boys got the gate,” the elf said. “Our brief is the wharf.” He shift-ed in his seat to jerk a finger behind him. “Lothiel and her little slags are two cars back on the other side of the street. Don’t bother asking for help.
They’re waiting to go in and get the security office.”
Arik looked up at the ratty van parked across the street. “You don’t think the sec office knows we’re here?”
Beren laughed. His tattoo fluoresced when he moved, flashing like a soft strobe in the darkness. Arik wondered if he had a mask or something for when the shooting started, but decided he didn’t care.
“How long they been at it?”
“Not more than five minutes.”
Arik pulled his phone out. “They could’ve called.”
Beren laughed again. “Not a lot of time to dial in a firefight, ork.”
Arik didn’t laugh.
“Guess I’ll get on, then,” he said. He started walking away from the car.
He didn’t like playing the big dumb ork, but drekkers like Beren deserved it. The stupid elf slag thought he was a god’s gift to the world since he had pointed ears and a clean smile. He’d said enough.
Five minutes. What the hell could be taking five minutes? Achoo was a better planner than that. Anything that involved shooting should’ve been over in a minute or less. Five minutes meant both sides were hunkered down and wasting bullets, convincing each other they were still there and not leav-ing. He thumbed the dial button on his phone and held it to his ear.
It rung out.
But in between the sounds of gunfire, he heard the chirping of Achoo’s phone. It came from in front of him and off to the left. Arik pocketed his
phone and squinted, looking. The entire face of that building was boarded up and blocked with brick, and the sidewalk beneath was an almost-un-broken line of Dumpsters.
He wouldn’t… Arik squatted behind the last of the cars before the street split into a t-intersection at the fence line. From where he was he could see the guardhouse. The steel-reinforced brick was enough to stop an anti-armor rocket, but it looked like Victor had been fool enough to shoot his off anyway. The facade was cracked and blackened but not bro-ken, and assault rifle muzzles poked out of each of the three firing ports on that side of the building.
Arik leaned back and closed his eyes, thinking.
Five minutes. If the guards were going to call for police help—Lone Star or otherwise—they’d have been here by now. The fact that none had ap-peared, and that Lothiel and her merry band of deckers was still nearby, meant the Star hadn’t been called. The Tir guards were trying to keep it in-house. Which means…
From down the street behind him came the howl of a siren. Not the high-pitched job the Star used, but the more whiny rawr of a private secu-rity van. Reinforcements from the Tir secusecu-rity post down the road. More of the High Prince’s Seattle-based goons.
Pulling a headset out from an inside pocket, Arik slid it over his ear. It was a tactical rig with a black rubber gasket that covered his left ear and hung a microphone down near his chin. The battery wasn’t much, which meant the range wasn’t much, but it should be close enough. He thumbed it on and leaned around the rear of the car.
“Boys?”
“Where the hell you been?” Achoo shouted, loud enough that Arik heard it twice, once through his earpiece and a quarter-second later, through the air. The syncopation was distracting in a clinical sense, but he didn’t care.
“I told you I was too far away,” Arik said. “What’s the deal here?”
“They saw us coming.”
“Might that have been the rocket?”
“Might have.”
“More sec coming from behind,” Arik said. The siren was getting loud-er. He saw the blue flashing lights reflecting off windows at the other end of the building.
“Yeah. Lothiel’s girls decked in and shut down all the calls to the Star or anyone else, but the bastards had an old, sound-powered phone to the next station down the line. They passed the alarm to the ready squad.”
Arik bit the center of his upper lip. Because of his tusks, that was all he could bite. If this had been the morning, the flying squad would have
got-ten lost. They’d already paid for that. They hadn’t even considered trying to buy off the night squad, because they weren’t going at night.
Except now they were.
The lights were bright enough and the siren loud enough that Arik knew the van was nearly there. He leaned forward, putting his weight on his feet and getting ready to stand.
“I’ve got the van,” he said.
Tir security vans in Seattle weren’t high-armored jobs. The elves didn’t want to spend that much on the largely human and ork security force they paid for in the great city. If this had been Portland, the Walled City’s secu-rity forces would’ve been riding in what was more or less a tank.
But this wasn’t Portland.
Arik leaned forward onto one knee as the van came screaming up. Raising the Mossberg, he snugged it tight to his shoulder, keeping the muzzle down, and waited. The truck was fifty meters away. Forty. It passed Beren’s car.
“Keep your head down, points,” Arik muttered, and slid out from be-tween the cars. The Mossberg kicked. The tingling in Arik’s palm told him the smartgun adapter was talking to the wires in his hand and his head, and his shots went where he wanted them.
He fired three rounds. The big automatic shotgun blasted the three buckshot loads out in just over a second. The recoil punished Arik’s shoul-der. He noticed none of it. He was watching the fall of his shots.
The first round shattered the driver’s window. The second round went through the new hole, finishing the job that the first shell and the shat-tered glass had begun, flaying the driver’s skull to the bone.
The third shot took out the left front tire in a blowout that was loud enough to rival the sound of the Mossberg’s own shots.
All of this took little more than one second.
Another second later, the three remaining tires were screaming.
Two seconds after that, the van was on its side, steel screaming and shedding sparks, sliding toward the guardhouse.
Two seconds after that, the van slammed into the guardhouse. The tough building shrugged off the impact, but noise had to have been horrendous. All three assault rifles stopped firing as their wielders flinched back.
“Damn,” Victor said over the radio.
Arik watched the van burst into flames. A man climbed out of the now-on-top passenger door, his back and arms on fire, and fell to the pavement.
He struggled, screaming, for a few moments, and then lay still.
Arik fed three new shells into the Mossberg’s magazine.
“I’m glad you showed up,” Achoo said. Then he sneezed.
And that’s why he’s called Achoo.
“I can’t see from here,” Arik said, pushing the last round into the tubu-lar magazine. “Is that wreck blocking the gate?”
There was a pause. Then, “Drek.” Achoo’s voice was filled with an odd tone of acceptance.
“Of course it is,” Arik said. Now they had to move a drekking burning van before Beren and Lothiel and all the others who were just standing around watching could get through to do their part.
“We can get them now,” Fidel cried. Arik spun on his knee and looked back toward the Dumpsters. The squat dwarf came running out from be-hind his cover, the tube of another rocket launcher jutting over his shoul-der and a subgun clutched in his hands. He moved with surprising speed for someone with such short legs.
“Get back here!” Achoo called.
“Come on!” Fidel shouted.
“Son of—” Arik reached up and covered his mike with his hand. “Get back to cover, you damn fool!” he shouted.
A burst from an assault rifle burped through the air and cut the dwarf’s legs out from under him. Another burst ripped the night when he slid to a stop, thudding into his body armor and the thin flesh beneath. Arik heard a gurgling grunt in his ear, and then nothing.
“Son of a bitch!” Victor shouted. “I’ll kill—urk!”
From the sneeze, Achoo had just tackled the other man. Arik couldn’t see them. What he did see when he looked back toward the gate was a man trying to crawl out of the passenger door that now pointed toward the sky.
Arik didn’t bother trying to shift the shotgun around—his left hand drew the cross-draw pistol from its hip holster. He aimed the gun and fired a single round in one motion, then reholstered.
He didn’t miss.
He never missed.
“Can you see Fidel?” Victor asked, over the radio.
Arik looked. “Yeah.”
“Is he alive?”
“No.”
“Frag.”
Arik looked back at the guard shack. No more firing was coming from it.
That was bad. It meant the slags inside where getting smart, not wasting rounds when they didn’t have to. It meant something drastic would have to be done.
Frag.
“Achoo,” Arik said.
“Yeah?” He could hear grunting as the smaller man sat on Victor—or whatever—to keep him down.
BUT LOYAL TO HIS SALT 46
“I need you to get their attention.”
“I think Fidel just tried that, chummer.”
“I have to get close to the building,” Arik said patiently. “Which means I have to get behind the van. To get behind the van, I have to cross the street.
I can’t do that if they’re looking at me.”
“Frag.”
“Yeah,” Arik said. “On a three count, okay?”
“Three,” Achoo said, and the snarl of a submachine gun echoed down the street. Impacts and ricochets sparked from the guardhouse’s walls. Arik leaned far enough over to see as the hammering of the guards’ assault rifles started again, counting muzzle flares. There were still three.
“Keep looking that way,” he grunted, and heaved himself to his feet, Mossberg held across his chest. A few pulse-pounding seconds later, he was across the street and sliding on his knees toward the rear of the van.
His chest burned as he sucked in huge lungfuls of air—he’d run the whole way holding his breath.
“I’m clear,” he said.
“Hooray for you,” Achoo snarled. “Now do something, ‘cause Victor got away from me.”
Arik twisted around the back of the truck. Victor was running, half-crouched, toward Fidel’s body. He held the trigger down on his sub gun as he ran and had his machine pistol out as well. More impacts sparked off the guardhouse. Arik was close enough to hear the lead going thock-thock-thock against the tough wall.
“You stupid slag,” Arik whispered, but he moved, too.
Maybe he’d be fast enough.
It’d be risky.
That was part of loyalty, too. He’d learned that the first time someone had saved his life when he’d done something stupid. A man did what he said he would do—even saving dumbass slags from themselves.
Four steps put him around the burning wreck of the van and against the side of the guardhouse. His weight slamming against the wall must’ve made a noticeable sound inside—a gunport snapped open by his right thigh, and an assault rifle muzzle poked out. It didn’t fire, and Arik didn’t move.
But he had to move.
Victor was moving.
Lifting the Mossberg, he brought the butt around and down like a sledge-hammer into the barrel, knocking it back into the guardhouse with the force of a driven railroad spike. There was a cry of pain and the rifle went off, but the three-round burst spent two of its rounds on the interior wall. Arik stepped quickly past the gunport and around the corner of the building.
If he’d been inside, the next thing through that gunport would be a gre-nade. He wanted to be around the corner if that happened. And what if the
If he’d been inside, the next thing through that gunport would be a gre-nade. He wanted to be around the corner if that happened. And what if the