Imperial Recruit (Book 2 of The Imperial Marines Saga)

by Terry Mixon

  While Riggio started doing his work gathering the data that they needed, Gunnarsdotter scowled at him. “You’re calling Tolliver by her first name. Why?”

  “When you fight shoulder to shoulder with somebody, you get familiar that way,” the young man said without looking over. “I can’t give you any information about how we met, but the kid’s got guts, and she’s smart. It’s my job to make sure that nobody keeps her from succeeding if she’s got what it takes to be a marine—which she does.”

  “He can’t tell you who he is, but I can,” Page said. “He’s the former tech specialist in a combat platoon that went on a raid into the Singularity. The same one that recovered Tolliver. Apparently, they had to fight to get out, and most of them didn’t make it. Tolliver said that she’s killed people. I’ll assume it was on that mission.”

  Riggio spared him a small smile. “It was one hell of a trip. We almost didn’t make it back at all. We had about a squad’s worth of survivors.

  “I’m going to assume that she never told you the details because she swore that she wouldn’t. That means that if you got any serious intelligence, it came from Lieutenant Na. She was our platoon sergeant back then.

  “The kid held up under fire. She killed experienced Singularity boarding troops with a damn sniper rifle from the backside of engineering on the ship we were fighting on. You can think whatever you like about her, but don’t mistake her for someone who won’t do whatever it takes to win.

  “Help me get this guy out of here so I can see if he’s got anything in his pockets.”

  “Is there a reason that we don’t have Fleet security here giving us a hand?” Gunnarsdotter asked as she grabbed the dead man by the sleeve.

  “The person behind this is an Imperial noble, and we’re trying to keep this quiet. We’ve already got the marine MPs involved, and they’re going to be taking lead on this as soon as they get up here. They’re probably an hour behind me. I just didn’t want to wait.”

  Page used one hand to brace himself against the ceiling and helped the others tug the body out of its hiding place. Whoever had put the man in there had wedged him in pretty good, but he finally popped out.

  The two drill instructors held the corpse while Riggio searched its pockets. He found nothing.

  “Well, I suppose that shouldn’t be a shock,” Riggio said. “If somebody is going to go to the trouble of killing someone, they’re probably going to make sure that they don’t leave any evidence behind. I’ll take samples now and see if I can identify him.”

  The young man pulled more equipment out of his bag and began scanning the man’s prints and retinal patterns and took DNA samples. After only a few seconds, he nodded.

  “Got a hit on his prints. Meet Jomos Carfio. He worked for some type of criminal syndicate down on New Dallas. I’ll wager that’s the same group that was responsible for the attack on the LT.”

  “So, if this is one of the bad guys, he was obviously up here to cause mischief,” Gunnarsdotter said slowly. “Who killed him and why? Do we have more than one set of bad guys? Or was this one of the so-called good guys?”

  Riggio floated a little bit away from the body and stopped himself with a touch to the ceiling. “If you’re wondering if this was Imperial Intelligence, it wasn’t. I have the lead on this mission, and we didn’t have anyone up here. I’m not sure exactly what’s going on, but it has to be on the other end. We want to capture people and question them, not kill them.”

  The young man opened his mouth to say something else but froze. Then his eyes narrowed.

  “You didn’t lock down the feed to the bay. Fleet security is monitoring us, as are a number of drill instructors, but there’s an extra pair of electronic eyes on us: Andrea’s.

  “There’s no audio to the feed, so I’m going to be able to keep talking about this without worrying she’ll overhear us. We’re too far away from the vid camera for her to read lips.

  “She’s on to me now for sure. How do I handle this?”

  It might be against regulations for a recruit to tap into the feed that way, but it might not be. In any case, it wasn’t something that Page was going to hold against the girl, though it was going to make his life more difficult.

  “You’d better figure out what you’re going to tell her,” Page said tiredly. “I think she’s going to figure out at least part of what’s going on at this point. It might be time to lay some of your cards on the table.”

  35

  Fei had to firmly restrain herself from going up to the orbital. That would ruin everything. It would also be useless, since Page and Riggio had this new situation under control. They’d figure out who the dead man was and how he’d been killed.

  Her job was wrangling answers about who was behind it. Not that all her digging had done much good over the last week. The Mackie family had come up just as dry as Still Water.

  Riggio had only been up on the orbital for ten or fifteen minutes. There wasn’t any chance that he had any answers yet, so calling him would do her no good.

  But she wanted to. Oh, how she wanted to.

  How could officers sit back and wait for other people to do the work? This was driving her crazy. She needed to do something.

  Her implant coms pinged with an incoming call, and she answered it without even bothering to see who it was. “Na.”

  “Riggio. I’ve got an ID on the body and a problem.”

  “Give me the problem first.”

  “Andrea knows that I’m up here.”

  Fei cursed under her breath. “What have you told her? How did she find out?”

  “She tapped into the vid feed to the bay, probably to watch the extraction of the body. Since that’s where I’m at, she’s no doubt seen me. I need to know how you want me to handle this.”

  Fei rubbed her face tiredly. “This whole damned thing is unraveling. I still think it’s better if she doesn’t know that I’m here, but that’s beginning to look a lot less likely at this point. You’re going to have to lie pretty damn believably to fool her.”

  “Believe it or not, they’ve given me training in that. If you want me to cover for you, then that’s what I’ll do. I work for Imperial Intelligence, so there’s no reason she has to know that you’re here. I can give her the basic story without revealing your presence.”

  Fei hated lying to Andrea, but she wasn’t going to lessen her ward’s success. Yes, Riggio revealing himself was going to prove that someone was watching over her, but he wasn’t interfering with her.

  If Andrea discovered that one of her guardians was hovering over her shoulder to make sure that she made it, that would be damaging.

  “Do it,” she ordered. “Tell me about the dead guy.”

  “His name is Jomos Carfio, and he’s associated with a crime syndicate down on New Dallas. You’ll have to interface with Earl Still Water to get more details about them, but Peter Bryant is the overall boss. That should give you enough information to move your investigation forward.

  “The dead guy has implants, but they’re encrypted. It’s going to take me a while to get into them if I can. We can’t count on it, anyway.

  “The military police will be here in about half an hour to pick up the body and do an official investigation. I’m not going to be able to crack the encryption in that time.”

  She’d stopped pacing around her office as she’d listened, but now she started again. “If he works for the bad guys, who killed him? This doesn’t make any sense.”

  “There has to be another player. I’m not sure whether the unknown party is on Andrea’s side or simply acting against the first organization. We don’t know enough about what’s going on to even guess. We need more data.”

  “Is Andrea in any danger?”

  “Undoubtedly,” he said without hesitation. “They’ve failed at eliminating her through stealthy means. That means they’re going to have to do something physical at this point. This guy’s presence in the boat bay tells us something. That’s where th
eir vacuum suits are stored, so he could’ve been there to mess with hers. I’ll give it a good look as soon as I finish with the body.

  “What I can’t be sure of is how far this third party will be willing to go to accomplish their ends, whatever they are. If this is another group that wants to eliminate Andrea, they might be willing to take more chances.

  “Planting the body behind a maintenance panel here risked having it discovered, even though that wasn’t likely in the short term. It was pure chance that one of the recruits spotted the blood leaking through the seal.”

  “And now that plan is shot,” Fei said grimly. “It’s only going to be a matter of hours before everyone knows that there was a body up there. Too many people already know about it, so the word will get out, and you can bet your ass that these people are plugged into the right information networks, and they’ll hear about it.

  “I’m going to have to go talk with this Bryant. Maybe a direct threat can make him back down. I don’t know how much Dayton is paying him, but there has to be a point of diminishing returns.

  “With Still Water backing me, that’s a real threat to any criminal organization. This isn’t the local police. His organization will have to either pay attention or pay the price.”

  There was a brief knock at the door, and it opened before she could give her permission to enter. Earl Still Water slipped in and closed the door behind him.

  She held up a finger to delay whatever it was he was about to say so she could finish the call.

  “Do the best you can, Riggio. Talk with Andrea and make up a good cover. Use as much of the truth as you can, but keep me out of it. That’s the bottom line.”

  “You got it. Riggio out.”

  She turned to face the earl. “I take it you heard.”

  He nodded. “Are you ready to go meet another crime syndicate?”

  “Damned right. Let’s go.”

  Peter’s worst fears were confirmed when his contact in the military police on the base sent him a brief message that a dead body had been found on the orbital. She couldn’t provide an image, but her description left no doubt that Jomos was dead.

  For the life of him, he couldn’t imagine how this had happened. His lieutenant was a cautious man, and he wouldn’t have allowed someone that he didn’t know into a position where he could harm him. Frankly, it was astounding because people in their line of work trusted so very few people.

  Yet what was done was done. Someone had decided to eliminate his lieutenant, and there had to be consequences for that. Worse, he knew that that meant that the authorities would come around asking questions. They wouldn’t find any evidence, but their attention would be most unwelcome at a time like this.

  The first thing he needed to do was brief Lucinda. Now she wasn’t his junior lieutenant; she was his only lieutenant. She’d have to pick up the slack and help him figure out who had betrayed Jomos.

  A quick check determined that she was still out in the field, working on getting her ambush finalized before the recruits returned to the surface. She acknowledged his instruction to return but said that it would take at least an hour.

  He spent that time going through every bit of information that he could find to figure out who Jomos had been working with. He’d narrowed it down to half a dozen civilian organizations and perhaps two dozen people by the time Charlie told him that Lucinda had arrived.

  “Send her in.”

  He hadn’t been seated at his desk while he’d worked because he’d had too much anger coursing through him. It was hard to think straight when he was so pissed off.

  He’d spent most of the last hour staring out his window. Watching the air cars move around usually eased his thoughts and made it simpler for him to come up with new ideas.

  That hadn’t worked today, but it hadn’t been for lack of trying.

  He turned to face the door with his hands behind his back as Lucinda let herself in. Her expression showed mild concern.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “Jomos is dead.”

  She’d been walking toward the chair on that side of the desk but stopped dead in her tracks. Then she took a deep breath and walked slowly forward, putting her hands on the back of the chair.

  “What happened? Was he caught and fought back?”

  Peter shook his head. “No. Someone slit his throat and then stashed his body.”

  “That… doesn’t sound like something Fleet or the marines would do. Was it his contact up there?”

  “I have no idea. It seems as though we’ve got another player in the game, and I’m wondering if this was something arranged for by the woman who hired us. It pissed her off that we weren’t moving at her speed, and she might’ve managed to hire someone to make a go of it.”

  Lucinda pursed her lips and frowned deeply. “That makes no sense. Jomos was up there to kill the girl. What would killing him before he did the deed gain her?

  “Since they’ve found his body, there’s virtually no chance that we’re going to be able to do anything up there. That makes the job harder. If it was the woman, she’s an idiot.”

  “You’re not wrong, but who else could it be? The circumstances are just too bizarre. There has to be something going on that we don’t know about. Whoever this third party is, they’ve got their own endgame, and we need to figure out who they are.

  “I’m going to put some people on figuring out who Jomos’s contacts were. One of them is the killer or helped get the killer onto the station. Honestly, that’s the only lead that we can chase.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” she said. “Nobody gets to attack one of our people and get away with it. I’ll also increase the watch we have on the woman. If she’s managed to hire somebody, I want to know who they are so that they can get their own share of payback.”

  Peter shook his head. “You got too much on your plate already. We need to finish taking out the girl, and that means we’re basically going to have one chance when she gets back on planet. We can’t afford to have another miss. Focus on your job, and I’ll find out who killed Jomos.”

  “I think you’re too close to this, Peter. Let me handle it.”

  “Somebody betrayed our organization, and it’s my business to find out who it was. I’m never going to let this go, so I might as well be the one to figure out who they are. Once I do, I’ve got a special little room downstairs where I can keep them alive for weeks while I make sure they regret ever having been born.”

  Lucinda shrugged and took a step back from the chair. “You’re the boss. I really am sorry that you made that call, though.”

  He’d only started to ask her what she meant when she reached into her jacket and pulled out a flechette pistol. At that moment, he knew who the traitor was, even though he had no idea why she’d done it.

  He went for his own pistol, but he knew he was too late. He’d trusted her too much, and she’d gotten inside his defenses just like she’d gotten inside Jomos’s. And that lapse in judgment was going to kill him just as dead.

  He hadn’t even gotten his hand onto his pistol when she opened fire.

  36

  Andrea felt as if she were being tortured. Having grown up in the crèche, that wasn’t just some saying either. No, while this wasn’t physical, psychological torture was just as real.

  Everyone else was wondering why they’d just moved back to the bunkroom. It was all they could talk about. They’d been there for over an hour now, and even the drill instructors weren’t giving them a decent cover story.

  The hydraulic leak had been good for a while, but even Claudio knew something was wrong at this point. He didn’t know what, but it was apparent something was going on.

  She knew what had to be happening but could say nothing. Not only wasn’t it her place, she really didn’t understand the implications of finding the murdered man. Or the fact that Riggio Gomez was here.

  Of the two, the latter concerned her significantly more. It was terrible that a man had been
killed, but why was somebody from the platoon that had rescued her helping investigate it?

  The man was a tech genius, so if something needed his expertise, he’d undoubtedly be the one to call, but she knew that he’d retired. Now he was back in marine coveralls, but she wasn’t sure how he could even be here, considering how large the Empire was.

  She wasn’t a big fan of coincidence, and this just reeked of manipulation. Considering that she knew Riggio, that implied that she was the one being manipulated. She just didn’t know why.

  Oh, she could guess that it had something to do with her being here for training, but how could a retired marine possibly expect to help her?

  The very idea that someone thought that she needed help pissed her off. She could do this on her own without any of the people who thought she was still a child trying to manipulate circumstances in her favor. She was an adult and could make her own way in the universe.

  And yet, that brought her back to the troubling fact that there was a dead body on the orbital. Who had killed the man, and did it have some kind of connection to her?

  She couldn’t imagine how the two events could be connected, but now she was beginning to suspect there was more going on behind the scenes than she’d been aware of.

  The suddenness of their relocation to the orbital before they’d finished their hand-to-hand combat training now seemed suspect. Had something happened down on New Dallas?

  What was really going on? If she asked, would she get a straight answer?

  While she was thinking about that, she was fielding questions and comments from various recruits in the platoon. Even though Claudio hadn’t figured out exactly what was going on, Diana definitely had.