Free The Ramal Extraction by Steve Perry Page A

eats well enough so he’s carrying a few kilos padding. Like to gamble, bets on windskiff races, and has a distillery where he likes to tinker with liquor, mostly blended whiskey.”
    Jo waited, but Wink was done. She turned to look at Kay.
    Kay said, “The kidnapped girl is supposedly being held at a hunting lodge in the foothills of the Rudra mountainrange along this country’s borders with Pahal and Balaji. I do not have the PPS coordinates, but I have the name of a nearby body of water, Lake Om.”
    “What?”
That from Rags.
    It was followed by a chorus of overlapping fuck-me and aw-shit comments from the rest of the group.
    “You couldn’t have just
said
that before we all prattled on?” Wink said.
    “It was not my turn to speak,” she said.
    Jo chuckled, and most of the rest of them did the same, or at least grinned. Good that the deadliest being on the planet was so polite, hey?
    “How did you get this?”
    “There are Rel here. I asked one of them, and he told me.”
    “You believe him?”
    “Yes. Rel are prey.”
    “Oh, well, sure, I guess that explains it,” Gramps said.
    “Prey cannot help themselves. They will give up anything to avoid being killed and eaten. The Rel knew that had I caught him in a lie, he would be in trouble.”
    “Would you have done that?” Jo asked.
    “I would not have eaten him. I do not care for the taste of Rel.”
    Jo didn’t ask the obvious question: How Kay knew what Rel tasted like.
    Some of the others exchanged amused looks. Yeah. They heard what she said, and understood the implications. Must have eaten at least part of one…
    “Any information about who is holding her?”
    “The Rel did not have details. He had the basic information from a fellow Rel who got it somewhere unknown. That one is no longer in the area, else I would have questioned him.”
    I bet you would have.
“Well, then,” Jo said. “We have a focus. Let’s find out everything we can about this hunting lodge.”

ELEVEN
    One of the things that a small private military force needs to know how to do is gather intel, and CFI was as good at it as anybody. It didn’t take long to find out what was available on the area; they had tapped into weathersats, the local computer nets, and now they were gathered around a projected map of that part of the world.
    The overview was enough for them to see the green of giant forests and of an inland sea and several large lakes and rivers.
    “All right,” Jo said, “here’s the place. This is the spysat feed from twenty thousand klicks. That is Lake Om, on the border with New Mumbai, Pahal, and Balaji. These are the Rudra Mountains, and it’s in the northern reach of the Sanvi Forest—or the southern arm of the Kadam Forest, depending on how you want to look at it.
    “There is apparently some disagreement as to whether Lake Om is in Pahal or Balaji—the Pahali claim it, so do the Balajians. It has apparently changed hands a couple of times in the last thirty years.
    Jo nodded at the map. “Zoom, one centimeter to one thousand meters.”
    The map expanded to a closer view.
    “It’s rugged territory. Hilly, old-growth forest, only one road along the shore of the lake, and only a couple linking that to anywhere. Military border guards on both sides keep a fragile peace at the moment, and they have been known to throw stuff at each other every now and then.”
    “Border duty sucks,” Gunny said. “Easy to get killed by a bored sniper.”
    “Zoom, one centimeter to three hundred meters.
    “There is the only structure deemed a hunting lodge on the lake’s southern shore. There are five fishing lodges, and several summer homes, but because of the dispute, none of these are supposed to be in use, so if somebody is there, either they sneaked in, or they have somebody’s approval.”
    The others nodded. Sure. They knew how that worked.
    “Air traffic is restricted, and with the roads guarded, that means—”
    “Crap,” Gramps said. “We’ll have