The Chiral Conspiracy – A Military Science Fiction Thriller: A Biogenesis War Prequel (The Biogenesis War Book 0)

by L. L. Richman

{Sensor feed’s clean.}

  One after the other, the team reported in. The assassin had disappeared.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Command Center

  Nimitz Base

  Ell paced restlessly behind Will and Jack while they combed through the feeds. Quinn had joined them in the base’s command center, and was working on the other side of Wraith’s crew chief.

  Where Will and Jack concentrated on data coming in from Nimitz Base, Quinn was casting his net wide, sending feelers throughout the cylinder for anything resembling the woman who had slipped through their fingers like Ceriban silk.

  Asha, Boone, and Thad were out scouring the base along with a cadre of Marines, but they’d had no hits. There was no whisper of her presence anywhere.

  It was coming up on three hours since the assassin had vanished without a trace. The ship transporting Janus to deGrasse had lifted immediately upon the biochemist’s arrival, but there was no evidence of pursuit.

  The Navy ship had stayed well within Hawking’s magnetosphere for that first hour, and registered no attempts to breach its shields. When the solar particle event had passed, it quietly resumed its journey.

  The Navy ship had been accelerating for nearly two hours, and in that time, everything remained uneventful. Other ships had since left Hawking, but none seemed inclined to follow, nor were there incoming ships on an intercept.

  Ell couldn’t figure it out. Wondering what she could possibly be missing, she stabbed her fingers through her hair in frustration and hissed as the action sent a jolt of pain through her newly-healed wound.

  Jack shot her a concerned look, but she waved him off.

  “If she’s still on Hawking, then she has to surface sometime soon,” she muttered. “These suits can’t hold active stealth for more than four hours before needing a recharge.”

  Quinn cocked his head. “I didn’t know that.” He turned back to his holoscreen. “Okay, then. If you were in enemy territory and your suit was about to fail, where would you go?”

  “I’d head to my exfil point,” Jack said, “and do my best to blend in.”

  “Yeah, but how do you identify an Akkadian’s exfil point?” Will asked, and Quinn jolted upright at his words.

  “Shit! Why didn’t I think of that?” He turned to the console in front of him, playing it like a maestro would a concert grand. Images flashed by at a blinding speed, until he stopped abruptly, a triumphant grin on his lips.

  Flinging the feed onto the main screen, he said, “Take a look at this.”

  The holoimage looked like it came from one of the loading docks on the civilian side of the Hawking spaceport. The view showed a ship’s open hold being loaded.

  Ell stepped closer, hands on hips. “What are we looking at?”

  “A merchant ship. The Lánhuā, registered to Shach’i Trading Company, out of Akkadia.” He glanced over at her. “Feed’s three hours old. She’s one of the ships that departed after our Navy transport left.”

  Jack’s fingers were now flying across his console. “I…see….” He murmured. “Interesting.”

  Quinn began skipping through various feeds around the merchant ship’s loading dock, images of maglev carts piled high with crates flashing across his holoscreen.

  “She wasn’t supposed to depart for another five hours, but right in the middle of the flare, she asks for an expedited clearance,” he told them.

  “That’s a bit obvious,” Jack looked over at them, brow raised. “SOP is ground all vessels and weather out a storm like the one that just hit us.”

  “True, but since she’s an Akkadian vessel, do those restrictions apply?” Will asked, pulling up STC logs. “Check it out; STC delivered the appropriate warnings, but Lánhuā assured them it wouldn’t be a problem.”

  Quinn froze his feed and then pinned the image in one corner of the holotank while he brought up the recording from their engagement with the assassin. He then synched the timestamps and began scrubbing slowly through them both, starting just after the team lost contact with the assassin.

  As Quinn continued to advance the feed, Jack pushed away from his console and let out a low whistle. “Well, I’ll be damned.”

  Ell found herself crowded up against Quinn’s chair. “That’s her,” she said in a low voice.

  The base’s CO, who had remained silent throughout the search, spoke up, his tone skeptical. “How can you tell? Her head’s down and with the bill of that cap, there’s no seeing her face.”

  “No, but the sleeves of her coveralls ride up when she lifts her arm. That’s a stealth suit she’s wearing.” Ell pointed. “See there?”

  Will nodded. “I’m running a comparison based off the data we were able to get from Wraith’s surveillance drones. Definitely the same build, same height. I’m getting an eighty-five percent correlation here.”

  The CO crossed his arms. “Okay, then. Roll that feed. Where did she go from here?”

  “She didn’t,” Quinn said, voice tight. “She loaded that cargo onto the ship and never returned to the dock.”

  Jack’s fingers were playing across his console once more. “And then that ship rocketed out of the spaceport, right after our transport took off.”

  Ell turned toward the intelligence officer, gut clenching. “Did it follow?”

  “No, actually.” Jack turned and fixed her with a grim look. “Both ships stayed safely inside the magnetosphere until the SPE passed. Lánhuā departed first, though, right on the storm’s tail.”

  “But why?” Ell murmured. “Are they setting up an ambush?”

  Will shook his head. “I have real-time STC feeds, all the way out to the one-AU buoy.” He nodded at the image. “That ship’s on a nice, tame burn to the Procyon gate. Definitely not the same trajectory as the ship Janus is on, and there’s no indication it’s slowing down.”

  Ell sat down in a vacant chair. “So, what? She just…gave up?”

  Quinn swiveled his chair to face her. “I hear what you’re getting at, boss, and I agree. It doesn’t fit the profile, does it? But what else can it be?”

  Ell studied the image on the main holodisplay and shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said slowly. “But I think I’ll contact Admiral Toland and warn her that Akkadia’s taken an interest in her civilian contractors. Maybe….”

  She tapped a finger on the arm of the chair, looking at Jack speculatively. His eyes narrowed, and he raised a questioning brow at her. “Maybe what?”

  She thought of the role Rafe had played in the simulation just two days earlier. “Maybe it wouldn’t hurt for her to have a ringer on her station,” she mused thoughtfully. “Just in case.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  Task Force HQ

  Midland

  Things were winding down at the emergency command center in Midland.

  Once Finn Davies had been assured that the plasma patch was holding and the Ground Level Event had passed, he excused himself and signed off.

  Rafe and Asato stayed on, managing minor snafus as they sprang up while Sam and Cass continued worrying over the misbehaving mag-field tubes.

  He trusted Thad to handle the situation with the assassin and knew better than to jog the man’s elbow in the middle of an operation, but he kept a weather eye out for any incoming message from Nimitz with Thad or Ell’s signature on it.

  Several hours had passed before Ell pinged to give him the update. When she got to the part where the assassin had left Hawking, he motioned Cass and Sam over and transferred Ell to the command center’s main holo.

  One of Cass’s techs waved at her urgently, and she motioned Sam on, turning away to deal with whatever issue had sprung up.

  “You were telling me about the woman Doctor Travis saw,” he prompted Ell as Sam joined him.

  “You mean the one who attacked Linnet?” Sam asked, and Ell nodded.

  “She managed to escape the habitat. The ship she’s on is en route to the gate, but we have people standing by to intercept.” Ell sent the physicist
a reassuring look. “Your friend is safe.”

  Rafe saw relief pass over Travis’s face at this news, but then her brows drew together in concern. “What about Bill Peres?”

  Ell hesitated briefly, and then shook her head. Rafe could see the exhaustion in her eyes.

  “At the moment, the trail has gone cold, but I promise, we won’t stop looking for him,” she assured the woman.

  “I…don’t think you need to do that any longer,” Cass said from behind Rafe. Her voice sounded strangled, and when he turned to face her, the look in her eyes was one of stunned disbelief.

  “Cass?” he asked, reaching for her arm.

  His wife blinked rapidly and swallowed hard.

  “The guys checking tube Thirty-Three just commed,” she said after a moment. “They found the problem.”

  Her gaze shifted to Ell, on the holoscreen. “And I think they found your man.”

  THIRTY

  Tube Thirty-Three

  Hawking Habitat

  While the refit team continued to wrap up their work on tube Thirty-Two, Tom and Rodney had volunteered to tackle the mystery that was tube Thirty-Three.

  They’d started on the tube’s far end and had been slowly working their way across. Currently, they were positioned at its midpoint, two hundred kilometers above the habitat’s surface.

  The view was dizzying, if either man cared to brave a look downward. Neither did.

  They stood on the scaffolding just outside one of the tube’s hatches. Each hatch was a complex series of airlocks that led inward through the cooling chamber, past the ceramic coils, and finally into the core itself.

  These were the sole access points to the plasma that filled the system’s core. They would only cycle with preauthorized clearance.

  “Hey Tom, take a look at this,” Rodney called out, pointing at the keypad beside the sealed hatch. Tom ambled over, scanner in hand.

  “What you got?” Tom asked, bringing his scanner online and pointing it at the keypad.

  Rodney frowned, kneeling beside the device. Running a hand across the surface of the keypad, he dipped his head to see the underside and then felt carefully behind the unit.

  “I think…” he began, then yelped as a shock ran through his hand. Withdrawing it rapidly, he shook the sting out, and shot Tom a knowing look.

  “Scrambler nano, boobytrapped to overload if someone other than the person who installed it tries to access it,” Tom guessed, lips firming into a straight line.

  Rodney nodded. “Yeah, felt like it,” the man agreed. He rose, pulling out his own scanner. “What would make someone come all the way up here to hack into an access hatch?”

  “No reason I can think of,” Tom said, then amended, “Well, no good reason.”

  Rodney pointed a finger at Tom, then shook it when he realized it still felt tingly. “Exactly. I’ve got a funny feeling about this.”

  One corner of Tom’s mouth lifted in a half smirk. “I’m guessing you’re not talking about the feeling in your hand, either. Yeah,” he nodded. “I think you’re right.”

  Rodney glanced at the hatch. “Tell you what. Let’s open it but not go in. Don’t want to disturb the evidence inside, but what’s out here on the keypad’s already got my DNA all over it so….”

  Tom shrugged. “Sounds fine to me.”

  Rodney shot the keypad the opening sequence over his wire. The keypad was sluggish to respond, but it finally beeped and the hatch sighed open.

  Both men trained their scanners into the opening, and Tom loosed a microdrone that hovered right at the hatch’s inner flange, its greater sensitivity gathering more data than either handheld device could muster.

  “Hey Rodney?” Tom asked slowly, his eyes trained on the opening before him, but his gaze focused on the feed the microdrone was sending to his overlay. “You seeing this?”

  Rodney swallowed, and his dark, rounded face took on a slightly grayish pallor. “That’s….”

  “Human DNA in there. Yeah.”

  The two men exchanged a look, and then Rodney nodded for Tom to do the honors. He sent a ping over the habitat’s net, using the secured Public Works emergency channel that had reserved bandwidth and an extra layer of encryption.

  He’d thought it was overkill when they’d first been told about it. Now…with a possible killer at large, he was abruptly glad it was there.

  {Hey boss?} he asked when Cass answered his ping.

  {What’s wrong, Tom?} she asked, and he knew she could tell from his tone something was up.

  {We have a situation up here at Hatch Two,} he began. {I think you might want to send someone from Hawking PD up here. Maybe someone with forensics experience. You know, like from their homicide division.}

  There was a pause on the other end, and when Cass returned, her sharp tone caused Tom to nearly jump out of his skin.

  {Are you saying there’s a body in one of my tubes?}

  {Could be.} He quickly detailed what he and Rodney had found.

  {Stay put,} she instructed them. {Don’t move from that position. I’m sending people to you right now.}

  {Trust me,} he laughed nervously, {we’re not going anywhere. And please tell ‘em we’d be much obliged if they’d hurry up and get here already.}

  When he disconnected, Tom found Rodney crouched just outside the hatch, his eyes focused intently on something just inside the door.

  “You okay, there, friend?” he asked, and Rodney looked up with a wan smile.

  “Yeah, but I might’ve found something else they’re going to want to see.”

  “What’s that?” Tom asked, crouching beside his friend.

  Rodney pointed. “You see that?” he asked.

  Tom squinted into the chamber. What Rodney indicated looked small and round and brown. His forehead wrinkled as he studied the item. “Looks like….”

  “A bead?” Rodney asked, a strange note to his voice.

  Tom nodded. “Yeah, I suppose.”

  “Yeah.”

  Tom turned to his friend, curious. “Is that supposed to mean something?”

  Rodney shrugged, looking uncertain. “I heard it when I was a kid. Old wives tale kind of thing, you know?”

  “About what?”

  “About Akkadian assassins,” he said, his eyes solemn. “They leave a bead behind to mark each kill.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  Hangar Echo-18-Romeo

  Nimitz Base

  The hangar’s door opened at Ell’s approach. Thad stood there, a smile buried deep in his brown eyes.

  “Sergeant,” he said, crossing his arms over his chest and favoring her with a narrow-eyed look. “Coming to see us off, ami?”

  She smiled crookedly. “You wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  He rumbled a laugh and stepped aside so she could enter.

  “How’s the case wrapping up?” he asked.

  Ell lifted her palm, wobbling it back and forth. “Eh,” she said. “Loads of filing to be done, but it’s almost over.”

  “So the body in the tube was Peres, huh?”

  She nodded. “DNA confirmed it.”

  Thad leaned against a nearby crate, frowning thoughtfully. “Any idea how the assassin managed to hack a tube?”

  Ell shot him a wry smile. “Yeah, actually. Quinn did a neat bit of detective work on that one. Turns out one of the maintenance worker’s tokens had been hacked. He thinks it happened earlier that night by someone who bumped into him on the street. Odd thing was, he was cleared to work on tube Thirty-Two, not Thirty-Three.”

  Thad’s brows lowered. “You’re going to have to spell it out for me, cher. Not sure why that matters.”

  Ell shoved her hands in her pockets, mind replaying the details. “The man said they were discussing Thirty-Two’s refit when it happened. Quinn thinks the assassin must’ve overheard them, and that gave her the idea to dump Peres’s body in the tube to dispose of it.”

  “And she got the wrong one.”

  Ell nodded, leaning agai
nst the crate opposite Thad. “She did, although she didn’t know it at the time.”

  One of Thad’s brows rose in disbelief. “You saying we were defeated by an assassin who can’t count, Sergeant?”

  Ell huffed a laugh. “Not quite. About six months ago, Public Works hired someone to replace the signs that marked each tube, only the guy got the numbering wrong. They’re all one number off, and they haven’t gotten around to fixing it yet.”

  Thad’s eyes widened. “You mean to tell me….”

  “Yep. Turns out everything that happened yesterday, the tube failure, the magnetic sheath going down, the emergency evac, all of it—”

  Thad started laughing. “—can all be traced to a mistake made by some shit-for-brains idiot at a sign company.”

  Ell grinned back at him. “Think we should send them the bill?”

  Thad bent over, his hands slapping his thighs and his laugh threatening to turn into a wheeze. “Stars, cher, that’s one for the books.”

  His shoulders shook in amusement as he straightened. “Wait’ll I tell Micah. Slinging four tugs in a circle for two hours straight gave him one hell of a hangover. If he ever gets that assassin in Wraith’s sights, she’s vapor.”

  Ell tilted her head toward the DAP Helios, sitting in the hangar’s shadows. “You guys all set to depart?”

  Thad sobered. “Looks like. Boone’s already grumbling about the food Yuki stocked for the trip back. Says it’s too bland for his palate.”

  Ell snorted inelegantly. “I thought Jack was the one with the delicate stomach.”

  “Heard that, Sarge.” The intelligence officer leapt from Wraith’s hold, landing lightly on the balls of his feet.

  She mock-scowled at him. “The rank is Special Agent, now, Campbell. Use it.”

  He merely grinned and cuffed the back of her head as he walked past.

  She wheeled as something occurred to her. “Hey, how many Akkadian dialects do you speak?”