“With a military mission, maybe you should . . . you know . . . listen to the military guys.”
She smiled at me like a mother humoring her child. “I’ll take that under advisement.”
“So that’s it? You came all the way down here to tell me you’re not telling me? You could have done that from your office.”
She studied me for a couple seconds. “I found it necessary to see this for myself. Sometimes you need to do that as a leader. I’m sure you understand.”
“I need more than that.”
“Oh, Carl. You’re a smart man. We both know you don’t have any leverage here.” She stood.
I stood as well, and put both my hands on the table, leaning over. “Fine. I’m not going without more information.”
“You don’t mean that. I’ve got a team that has located Ms. Ganos. I’m not bluffing.”
Shit. “At least tell me this,” I said. “When did Javier start conspiring with you? Was this the plan from the start?”
She thought about it, as if deciding whether to share or not. “He contacted me pretty soon after Mr. Gylika passed. You should thank him, if you ever see him again. I wanted to have you eliminated. It was Javier who convinced me you could be useful.”
“I’ll be sure to say thanks when I see him.”
“Don’t be so sad. This is a great opportunity.” Something in her condescending tone caused me to snap.
“I’m not doing this.” I hadn’t planned to call her bluff until that very moment, but the more I thought about it, the more I thought she wouldn’t play her Ganos card. If she did, she had no further leverage over me. She understood that.
“Very well, have it your way.” She pressed a button on her device and four guards burst through the door in gray uniforms. They had helmets on. Fucking helmets. Like I was some sort of threat. Two of them came around the table from each direction and I put my hands on top of my head.
I locked eyes with Matua, who had pushed away from the wall into a ready position, but hadn’t moved to stop the onrushing guards. He shrugged, as if to say, “Sorry.”
“Easy, folks,” I said, eyeing the stun stick a short, squat man carried. “Don’t hit me with the stunner. Neither one of us will like the result.”
“I also came for another reason,” said Haverty.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“I wanted to see your face when I told you that we hacked your email. We haven’t broken the encryption to see what you wrote yet, but we did see that it was scheduled to send to a reporter automatically in under two days. I hope that wasn’t important.”
I started to respond, but a tall female guard reached me first and pressed something against my arm. I felt a sharp burst of pain, then nothing. Auto injector.
“What was that f—”
The world went black.
Chapter Twenty-Five
I woke with a hangover, vertigo, and the sore throat that comes from stasis during space travel. Those bastards had kept me sedated until we went under for the trip. I took a moment to study my surroundings. People coming out of stasis tended to sit immobile and unaware for a couple of hours, so nobody would suspect I’d come out of it completely.
Five or six people moved around an expensive-looking travel suite. Comfortable-looking black recliners lined one wall, and small, functional tables suited for standing lined the other. At least one more person hadn’t come out of stasis and sat in her tube, like me. Three people gathered around a small galley area, and the smell of fresh coffee drifted through the cabin.
“You back, Colonel?” said Tanaka’s voice.
“That depends,” I said, my voice raspy. “Is there more coffee?”
“There is.”
“You assholes drugged me,” I said.
“In my defense, I recommended against it. Ms. Haverty doesn’t always listen.”
“I believe that.” He wouldn’t have ordered that, knowing he’d have to work with me. I had to work with him, too, so I let it go. Space is a cold place, and not a good one to keep enemies. “How long were we down?”
“A little over a month,” said Tanaka. “We’re decelerating now at slightly under one g, which is why we’re good to be up and about.”
“Great,” I said.
“Shower’s at the back of the compartment, then when you’re ready, there are biscuits and gravy.”
My stomach smiled. Finally somebody who understood space travel. It made me so happy that I didn’t care that they’d probably contacted people who know me to find out my preference for the meal. I assumed that anything I’d ever done, they knew. It made it easier. I didn’t have to seek out the roster of soldiers on board. Omicron would have done that and ensured none of them had ever worked for me before. It sounds weird, but it made me comfortable. It’s always nice to know you’re working with professionals, even if it doesn’t work in your favor at the moment.
The shower pulsed with the best water pressure I’d ever experienced on a spaceship, and I treated myself to an extra thirty seconds. I could get used to traveling corporate. I dressed in the fatigues that somebody had provided—they fit perfectly—and walked back out into the main berthing area. I counted eight people plus myself. That would make this the leadership. The rank-and-file soldiers probably traveled in a different bay with something less than our royal accommodations. I bet it still beat a standard military troop ship though.
As I moved through the room toward my prized biscuits, I made a point of meeting the eyes of everyone I passed, giving them a smile. I needed allies, and barring that, with the potential of going into combat together, I at least needed people not to shoot me in the back. A short man with dark skin nodded and returned my smile, so I stopped.
“I’m not sure of the rank insignia,” I said, though I’d pretty much figured it out. “Two circles . . . that’s . . .”
“Lieutenant, sir. Lieutenant Darce Jackson.”
“Good to meet you, Jackson. I’m—”
He laughed. “I know who you are, sir. Everybody in the galaxy knows.”
I fake cringed and sucked in my breath. “Yeah. It’s not all that it’s cracked up to be.”
He laughed again. “Probably has its perks, though.”
“I don’t know. It got me on the same ship as you.”
“True,” he said. “Don’t let me hold you up, sir. Chow is hot.”
I smiled again, and touched him on the upper arm. “Thanks.”
I grabbed a plastic plate, covered it in biscuits and then slathered it with life-giving sausage gravy. I shoveled several bites in before I made it to a table, and the miserable cryo-hangover began to creep away. The effect might have been psychological, but I didn’t care. I set my bounty down on the table where Tanaka stood with one of his lieutenants. I wanted to meet the others, but ignoring the commander would have been bad form. People would notice, and it would appear like me slighting him. That would force people to choose sides, and I didn’t pay their salaries. I couldn’t afford to force confrontation yet.
Tanaka probably expected me to hit him up for information about the mission, or whine some more about how they’d waylaid me, so I took a different direction. “You bring everybody out early, or only the officers?”
“Just us, for now, sir. We’ll get the troopers out of cryo about eight hours before we hit orbit, so they have time to recover.”
“Is Matua in that group?” I liked the big corporal, despite his role as my kind-of jailer.
“He is,” said Tanaka. “He’s going to be your security guy for the mission.”
“Good.” I gestured to the surrounding opulence, then spoke through a mouth of biscuit. “Nice digs.”
“Yes, sir. Sure beats military travel, doesn’t it?”
“If we’d traveled like this, I might have stayed in. Faster, too. Though I don’t know what day we took off.”
Tanaka smiled, taking it for the joke I intended. “It was fast, sir. And you were out less than a day when we took
off.”
I nodded as I sipped a cup of wonderful coffee.
“This is my exec, Chelsea Larsson.”
“Sir.” The woman who ate with us stood a head shorter than me, and I’m not tall. She glared at me with a face as hard as a spaceship’s hull.
“Do you keep command spaceside when we go down, or are you a fighting XO?” I asked. It wasn’t an insult. A second-in-command had two options, making it a legitimate question.
Her face softened briefly, pride radiating from it. “I fight, sir. The Operations officer keeps the ship.”
“Good to hear. I prefer it that way.” I’d have said the same, no matter which way she answered. I turned to Tanaka. “How are you organized for combat?”
“Four platoons, sir. Forty soldiers each, led by one of the lieutenants. The XO goes planetside, as she said, and of course I do. Ops officer stays spaceside, and the Intel officer can go either way. I’m leaning toward taking her with us on this one.”
“I think that makes sense. We’re not going to pick up a lot from up here, so you get her down on the planet where the information is. You’ll lose a bit in analytical power, but she can funnel stuff to her team spaceside and get that via reachback.”
“Yes, sir. Exactly how I was thinking.”
I chuckled. “Look at me, trying to take over your mission. You’ve got this.”
He smiled again, and it looked genuine. Good. My approval still meant something to him. I’d need that. “Anything you want to offer sir, I’m open.”
“You mind if I walk around and meet the team? The worst part about leaving the service is not having soldiers to talk to.”
“By all means, sir. Once everybody is recovered and we’ve had a chance to process whatever’s happened in the last month, we’ll sit down and get a mission brief.”
“No rush,” I said. I gestured with my head for him to step away from his exec for a private word, which he did. “What’s my comms situation, send and receive? I don’t want to make it a big deal in front of the junior officers, but I need to know.”
“I appreciate that, sir,” Tanaka said. “Receive is no problem. Whatever feeds we get are yours. No sending.”
I nodded. “Okay. People are going to wonder where I am, though.”
“Sorry, sir. I have to trust that somebody back in the world had a plan to deal with that.”
“Fair enough.” I’d known the answer before I asked, but I wanted him to say no out loud so that it weighed on him the next time I asked for something. I also wanted cover for when I checked the news. I needed to see if my disappearance had been reported, or at least find the cover story. If it had blown up somehow, I’d likely hear about it anyway. Possibly when they flushed me out an airlock. Tanaka hadn’t received those orders yet. If he wanted me dead, he could have done it when I was in cryo.
“I appreciate your cooperation, sir. You could have made this a lot harder.”
“No point in that now,” I said. “What story did you give your people about why I was in cryo so early? That had to have been weird.”
“Told them you were superstitious and liked to be the first one down. I made a vague reference to something that happened on a previous mission.”
I snorted. “They bought that?”
“Sir, if I told them you could fly, half of them would believe me. You’re kind of larger than life to most of the troops.”
“As long as they don’t toss me off a building to test it,” I said.
He laughed. “Right. Sir, if you don’t mind, I need to go over the latest intelligence before we brief the rest of the team. If you’ll excuse me?”
“By all means. It’s your show. I’m going to check the news. A lot happens when you’re asleep for a month.”
I scanned the headlines of the major feeds from the past month, looking for anything that might give me a clue about where I stood. I wanted to know what Plazz had figured out, and I wanted to know about Gylika, but I didn’t want to put in any search terms. They allowed me to use the system, but I had no illusions. They’d be monitoring me. I clicked on some random items as camouflage, and they helped me legitimately catch up with the last month, too. The first thing that really caught my attention was in business news. Omicron and VPC announced a joint venture. The story spanned two paragraphs and lacked detail, but hinted at work with the military on medical technology.
So that was that. It didn’t take a genius to figure out the project they’d be working on together. I was the joint venture . . . we were . . . our mission. We’d bring back the technology and the two companies who put me here would profit. Haverty said that I should be thankful to Javier, but I didn’t feel that charitable. I believed her, though, about when he contacted her. Thinking back on it, he had changed after Gylika’s death. Whether Haverty made him an offer and he traded me for corporate profit or whether he sold me out to cover his own ass, I didn’t know. I’d probably never know. And I still didn’t know what role they intended for me going forward. They had me in a bad spot, for sure, going into a potentially hostile area where both sides might want me dead. But I had some plans of my own. Most of them involved pissing on their schemes in any way possible, though in truth I suppose that was more of a purpose statement than an actual plan of action.
I pulled up the feed for the Galactic Times, where Plazz worked, and pretended to read it while skimming for her byline. She had a big piece on a high government official who apparently used his position to funnel clients to his mistress’s business, but not a word about Omicron, not a word about me. I believed what Haverty had said about intercepting my message, and I assumed they may have decrypted it, though it would be hard because it was point to point.
I kept scanning. I don’t know what I expected to find in my general search. I guess maybe I held out some slim hope that Plazz would have tried to reach me, not found me, and started digging.
Finally, I decided to risk it and search Gylika’s name. I’d thrown it in Haverty’s face in our last meeting, so it would hardly incriminate me further to check it now. It turned up nothing. The most recent result was from before they’d taken me prisoner. The case had completely disappeared from the public eye. I shook my head.
“What’s wrong, sir?” A lieutenant asked from the terminal beside mine. She looked over at me, though her thin hands still flew over the keys.
“Oh, nothing,” I said. “A friend of mine died a couple weeks before we flew. I was hoping there’d be something in the news about it.”
“Oh, that’s sad,” she said. “How did he die?”
“Murder,” I said. Best to keep to the truth as much as possible.
“That’s horrible!”
“The city can be rough. How about you? Any good news from home?” I did want to connect with the officers, but not over the murder.
“Not much, sir. Same old stuff. My boyfriend is hiking a five-thousand-meter mountain next week. I guess that’s the big thing.”
“Nice. Do you climb too?”
“When I get the chance, sir. Nothing that big, though. Too much space time. Makes it hard to stay in good-enough shape.”
“For sure,” I said. “Speaking of which, does this crate we’re on have a gym?”
“Yes, sir. A small one. But we’ll barely be spaceside long enough to use it, if everything goes to plan.”
“Quick timeline? I haven’t been briefed yet.”
“A day from here to orbit, then a quick turn down to the planet twelve hours later.”
“Huh. Guess we’re in a hurry.”
“Hard to say with these corporate gigs. Can’t beat the pay, though.”
“No, you can’t.” I wondered for a moment if VPC was still paying me. They probably were, for a cover story. I’d enjoy spending their money, if I survived.
I scanned through some more of the news, but bored of it and decided to check out the gym. Or to see if the ship had a bar. Definitely one of those two things. I was weaving my way between the cryo pods toward th
e back of the ship when Larsson stepped in front of me, blocking my path.
“I see what you’re doing, sir.” Her voice dripped with ice.
“I’m sorry, have I done something wrong?”
“With the officers. I see what you’re doing, being nice to them, trying to ingratiate yourself.”
“You’d rather I be an asshole? Because I have that setting.” I smiled, hiding my discomfort at the fact that I’d been so obvious. Not that it should have mattered.
“Don’t start thinking Captain Tanaka is the only person who knows what’s going on with you. He’s the commander. He has to be nice. Me? I’m watching you, and I’d just as soon shoot you in the face as carry you home.”
“Okay, Larsson. Thanks. Good chat.” She glared at me for several more seconds before stepping out of the way. So much for not making enemies.
I tried not to look at Larsson as the officers gathered in the briefing area to go over the mission, but she stared daggers at me, making it difficult. If anybody else noticed, they didn’t say anything. I hoped she and I flew on different drop ships. Tanaka would probably keep me by his side, and the commander and XO wouldn’t ever fly together, so I’d probably get my wish.
“We’ll go down in four ships to the landing point, here,” said Tanaka, gesturing to a holo map. “From there we’ll move by platoon along these four routes.” Four color-coded paths lit up, traveling over several forested hills. Each route measured between fifteen and twenty kilometers. It looked like a miserable walk, but the low gravity and powered suits would help. I wondered why he had the landing zone so far from the objective. Under normal circumstances I’d have asked, since it seemed like a flawed plan, but I didn’t want to draw the attention.
Tanaka lit up the potential enemy in red symbols on the map, and it became clearer. “We’re landing outside any known Cappan activity, and we’ll infiltrate as close to the expected target site as possible. If we don’t have to engage, we don’t. Let me make that very clear. If we recover the stolen data and never fire a shot, I’d consider that a perfect success.”
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