by Terry Mixon
Brad nodded slowly, leaning back in the chair to study the woman. It was fascinating, really. She wasn’t using particularly aggressive body language or any of the usual tricks to project power, just a firm tone and a decisive attitude.
She was good at her job.
“Whose side do you think I’m on, Commissioner?” he asked.
“Yours, Commodore. Potentially your bank account’s. Not New Venice’s.”
“You haven’t looked at my record, have you?” Brad said with a chuckle. “About the only thing I’ve consistently been over the years is on the opposite side from the Cadre. The opposite side from the pirates.
“This isn’t my planet. This isn’t my city. These aren’t my people—but I’m being paid to help and protect them, which makes that my job. And I do my job, Commissioner, to the highest and best standard.
“Especially when innocent lives are at stake.”
She even seemed to believe him, which was nice. There were always people who’d doubt mercenaries on principle.
“I’m not asking you for data I don’t need, Commissioner,” he told her. “I can probably make do with redacted reports, but any piece of data might be critical to finding our answers. The sooner I find those answers, the sooner I find the assholes killing people.”
Lagos sighed.
“You’re asking a lot, Commodore. And I don’t see the relevance, to be honest.”
“I need the past to judge the present. I have some information on the Wreckers, but I know I don’t have it all. These people aren’t following the same paths, but I’m betting they know a lot of the same tricks.
“And I need to know who is missing because that will tell me two things: who was on those ships who wasn’t supposed to be, and our potential list of people who’ve disappeared to join a revolution.”
The Commissioner looked down at her hands.
“You’re not the first person to use that argument on me, Commodore,” she said very quietly. “And I’m suddenly wondering just what type of mercenary you are.”
“The type that is on your side right now,” Brad replied. It seemed Agent Mulroney had made contact with the Commissioner as well. That was…interesting in and of itself.
“All right. You’ll get your data,” she promised. “And if I find even one scrap of evidence that it leaked, you will get zero support from the New Venice Police for your damn contract; am I clear?”
“As vacuum, Commissioner. Thank you.”
Chapter Ten
“I’ve had better weeks,” Saburo said dryly as he dropped into the extra chair in Brad’s office. Michelle was already sitting in front of the desk, and Brad was leaning on his hands as he studied the reports on the screen.
Twelve days. Twelve days of absolute quiet and of Brad wondering if he’d been misinformed about the severity of the threat to Venus.
It was also twelve days of getting yelled at by angry transport pilots, starship captains, and merchant brokers. While the Commonwealth might regard Governor Ngu as having the full authority of every other planetary Governor, including the right to impose customs searches, the people of Venus were less convinced.
“Are they yelling less yet?” Brad asked.
“If we’d actually found something, some of them might be quieter,” Saburo admitted. “As it is, they’re yelling more, if anything.”
“Wonderful.”
Michelle shook her head as she looked at her wrist-comp.
“Report in from Grant,” she told the two men. “Captain Laurent finished her patrol. All cargos delivered successfully, no interruptions. She’s returning to High Venice for refuelling.”
Except for the three Brad had kept aboard Oath of Vengeance, newly retrofitted for Venus’s atmosphere by Mike Randall, all of their shuttlecraft were either based in the aerostat cities themselves or aboard High Venice.
High Venice was in a not-quite-geostationary orbit that kept it above the not-quite-stationary New Venice at all times, allowing it to act as the main channel to the rest of the system. A channel that Brad’s people now thoroughly controlled.
Nothing was making it in or out of High Venice or New Venice without their inspection. Some cargos were almost certainly sneaking out through direct flights from the aerostat cities themselves, but those were going to be expensive.
“No new attacks. No evidence that they’re getting cargos off-world.” Brad shook his head. “Well, we seem to be achieving the main goal of our contract just by sitting here. To my surprise, that’s actually the Governing Council’s opinion of the matter.”
“We’re burning their money just sitting here,” Michelle said. “But given the losses they were taking and the boost to their authority just having us up here gives them…yeah, I can see why they think it’s worth it.”
“I didn’t come here to play guard dog,” Brad told his people. “We came here to fix a problem, not band-aid it. If we were only in this for the money, well, I wouldn’t have six destroyers.”
“Well, we have a pattern now,” his wife replied. “We’ve got two destroyers at High Venice, four pulling low-orbit sweeps to guard the main cargo routes. Everlit, when Horatio pulled those transports out of a storm two days ago, everyone stopped complaining about that part.”
“What about our dig into the data Lagos provided?” Brad asked.
“I’ve had our people rip it apart and put it back together six different ways,” Michelle told him. “I’ve got a list of about fifteen people who were probably aboard transports they weren’t supposed to and are likely dead—and about twice that who are likely rebel recruits.”
“I can’t even blame the rebels,” Saburo pointed out. “This whole planet is a powder keg, and the Council and various city leaderships are only doing so much.”
“Something is going to explode,” Brad agreed. “And they’re trying to fix that, and power to them. But the problem right now is the pirates, and I wish we knew more. Any sign of Agent Mulroney in that data?”
“It would help if the Agency had given us more than a code name,” Michelle complained. “I’ve got a few potentials flagged, but…” She shook her head.
“What?” Brad asked.
“One of the reasons I’ve flagged them as potentials is that they were all visitors that went down to visit mining operations—and haven’t come back.”
From Oath of Vengeance’s bridge, Brad had eyes on over half of Venus’s upper atmosphere at any given moment now. Six ships moving around the planet and a link into the satellite network gave him a lot of information.
None of it was giving him any answers, but he definitely had a lot of information.
“Not even an unscheduled flight,” Lewin complained as she swept over the sensor data again. “Seriously, what kind of planet goes twelve days without someone taking an unscheduled aircraft between cities?”
“The kind that’s about two steps short of a police state for half of its citizens,” Brad said. “And I get the impression it used to be worse.”
“Such wonderful people we’re working for,” Michelle snarked. “I guess it is getting better.”
“Humans aren’t perfect. Getting better is the best we can hope for.” Brad shrugged. “Plus, well, Venus isn’t our fight. We don’t know enough about what’s going on here to get involved beyond dealing with the actual criminals on either side.”
“So long as we stick to the criminals,” his wife muttered.
“Right now, I’m sticking to active pirates and the Cadre,” he said. “I’m not being paid to get involved in this brewing revolt, and I’m not comfortable enough with the sides for getting me involved to be affordable for anyone.”
“Commodore, can I borrow you?” Xan Wong suddenly asked from across the bridge. “I’ve got an odd blip I want to run by you.”
Brad gave his wife a smile and crossed over to the coms officer.
“What is it, Wong?”
“We just got a compressed-pulse transmission. It went out omnidirectional, so it’s really weak,
and I haven’t pulled much useful from it, but what does this fragment look like to you?”
She tapped her finger at a segment on the screen, a partially scrambled list of numbers and letters.
“Code,” Brad replied. “Give me a second.”
He pulled up his wrist-comp and ran the scanner over the code. His system hummed for half a second and then popped up a partial translation. The translation was garbage, but it told him what he needed to know.
“Agency code,” he concluded. “I can’t read it; we don’t have enough here. How many of the ships and satellites would have received this?”
“Everything on this side of Venus. Probably four of our ships, at least a dozen satellites.”
“Pull it all,” Brad ordered. “Every scrap, every fragment—triangulate the source and get me as much of the transmission as you can.”
“That’s somehow less than I was expecting,” Michelle said a few minutes later as they looked over the datastream.
“It’s still incomplete,” Wong warned them. “But yeah, it’s not very long. Pulse was under two seconds and was interrupted.”
“Interrupted?” Brad asked.
“Hard to say, but I’d guess jammed at the tail end,” the coms officer told him. “Can you decrypt what we’ve got?”
He was already transferring the stream to his wrist-comp and running it through the Agency program. It was a pure text message.
Alert. Alert. Emergency Alert. Request for immediate rescue. Detail to fol—
“It’s an emergency alert, but all we got was the wrapper,” Brad told his people quietly. “Details would have told us who was sending it and any other information they tried to attach, but it got interrupted as you said.”
He looked at the message. There was no way it was anyone except Agent Mulroney—but why hadn’t the Agent made contact earlier?
“Can you triangulate it?” he asked.
“We’ve got scraps from three of our ships and eight satellites,” Wong confirmed. “I can tell you the origin to within twenty meters, even in Venus’s atmosphere.”
“Do it.”
Wong was already working, and Brad brought up a map of the planet as a series of lines rippled across it.
“Here.” A latitude and longitude marker intersected on the screen Brad was watching. An altitude measure was added a moment later.
“Transmission was from the Sagan Plateau,” Wong confirmed. “Not quite dead center. Roughly eighteen hundred meters above the surface.”
“Not much down there,” Lewin noted. “That’s above crush depth for the aircraft they send down, but not by much. Chunks of the plateau can only be reached by specialty planes from what I’m pulling up.”
“What’s there?” Brad asked.
“Nothing anymore,” his tactical officer replied. “Records say there was a mining facility built there twenty years ago, but maintenance costs exceeded any practical value of the extraction about three years ago.
“There’s something in here about a recurring plan to use the tunnels to set up a logistics base for the deep-dive ships, but nothing seems to have come from it.”
“And now I’m guessing we know why,” Brad said grimly. “Pre-dug tunnels, an existing landing site. For the same reason they’d want to repurpose for the deep-dive ships, you could easily retrofit it into a base for higher-altitude boarding craft.”
He shook his head, studying the map.
“Have Saburo meet me in the shuttle bay with first squad,” he ordered. “We’ll need to make a scouting pass before we drop a platoon or six on the place. If nothing else, only three of our shuttles can make it that deep.”
His wife and XO was silent for now, but from her look, he knew he wasn’t getting off the ship without a discussion.
Michelle caught up to him in the corridor halfway between the bridge and the shuttle bay. Brad stopped as he heard her behind him and turned to look at her with a smile.
“Yes, love?” he said. “You’re going to ask why I have to go.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “Not just as your wife who’d rather you didn’t get shot, stabbed, burnt, or lose any more limbs, too.”
He unconsciously flexed his right hand. The entire limb from just about the elbow had been regrown after it had been chopped off in one of his duels with the Terror, the previous leader of the Cadre. Even now, he didn’t have full sensation back in that bit of limb.
Full control, yes, and he was an even deadlier duelist than he’d been then, but not sensation. Everything from his right forearm was slightly muted.
“As your executive officer, I also need to remind you that you are responsible for this contract and over six hundred lives,” Michelle continued. “If something goes wrong and you and Saburo are both taken out, who takes command?”
Brad snorted.
“You inherit my shares, Saburo’s father inherits his. You become majority shareholder and company commander, and Hiroshi becomes your silent partner. You were there when we set that up.”
Michelle glared at him.
“And do you think that for one damn instant I can hold this collection of overcompetent mercenaries and ex-Fleet together without you?”
“Yes,” Brad told her simply. “Because you’re already doing half of that work as my executive officer.”
He held up a hand.
“But you’re right, for all that. It is irresponsible of me to risk myself on this scouting mission. On the other hand, we have no choice. I’m the only one with the Agency recognition codes and countersigns, and they’re locked to my wrist-comp.”
He’d tried, once, to copy the Agency sequences to Michelle’s machine. His Agency control had ended up giving him a new wrist-comp and a very pointed lecture about information security.
“We’re responding to Agent Mulroney’s assistance request, which means we need some way to be sure the Agent knows we’re legit. That means it has to be me. No one else can do it.”
He shook his head.
“You’re right,” he repeated. “But those concerns are secondary to completing the mission.”
“We need to have a long chat with the Agency about that,” his wife said after several long seconds of thought. “They don’t want you to turn up dead either.”
Brad reached for her and she folded herself into his arms.
“I don’t like it,” she murmured into his ear. “But, dammit, you’re not wrong. Be careful.”
“I’m always careful,” he told her.
“I know. That’s what terrifies me.”
Chapter Eleven
Brad had ridden shuttles into the atmosphere of Mars and into the upper reaches of Jupiter and Saturn. He should have expected the trip down to Venus to be closer to the latter, but the size of the planet had left him expecting something closer to the former.
After the second time he was nearly thrown from his seat in the cockpit, he tightened his seat belt and settled in grimly. Pale yellow air surrounded them, and thicker clouds of a sick yellow color swept over the spacecraft as it dropped.
“We’re going to be coming back here, aren’t we?” his pilot asked, almost conversationally. Bakarne Pitts was a young Spanish woman and also the best pilot Oath of Vengeance had. Like most of Brad’s crew, she traced her ancestry to specific points on Earth—and had never actually set foot on the homeworld.
“This is a scouting expedition,” Brad confirmed. “We need to learn what’s down here. Then, once we know what we’re getting into, we’re coming back with at least the full platoon from Oath.”
“Oh, good.” She sighed. “I was hoping to never have to fly this mess again.”
As she spoke, the entire twenty-meter-long spacecraft bucked underneath them as a cloud came up from below and almost physically picked up the shuttle.
“We’re basically swimming now,” Pitts continued conversationally. “What did the Chief even do to make this work?”
“Duplicated some plans from the locals, as I understand,” Brad to
ld her. “Are we going to be okay?”
“I’m not sure I trust my altimeter and we’re heading for a location that’s barely a hundred meters above what Chief Randall said was our minimum distance from the surface,” she pointed out. “So, I think we’re going to be okay, but this is going to suck.”
“Is our radar still holding up?” Saburo asked from behind them.
“Barely,” Pitts replied. “I’m focusing on keeping us in the air, but we should be close enough for at least distant sweeps.”
“I’ll run it,” Brad told his subordinate. “You make sure the squad is ready if something goes wrong.”
“Feeling paranoid?”
“Always.”
“There’s only so much we can do,” Saburo admitted. “We upgraded our gear at New Venice, but our suits won’t last ten minutes out there. If something goes wrong, I hope you can deal with it with the shuttle’s guns.”
Pitts snorted.
“Didn’t anyone tell you, Colonel?” she asked. “We took the guns off to free up the mass for the atmospheric seal.”
Brad didn’t even need to see his Colonel to realize that no, no one had told Saburo that. He’d left that to Randall and the pilots. Apparently, they’d thought he would do it.
“No guns?” Saburo asked slowly.
“No guns,” Brad confirmed as he brought up the radar array. “Sorry, I think everyone thought someone else was telling you.”
“So, this is what reply-all is for,” the Colonel said grimly. “All right. Let’s try not to die.”
“Easy for you to say,” Pitts muttered, twisting the shuttle through another buffeting storm. “I don’t know how much closer I can get, Commodore.”
“Let’s see what the radar gets us,” Brad replied. Pulses swept out from the emitters, but it was a far slower process than he was used to. “All right. I’ve got a dome, looks like local stone. That’s probably the cover for the old mine and our likely target.
“I’ve also got…towers?” he looked at the readings in concern. “Tubes connecting them to the dome, they’re self-contained, but what would they need to mount twenty meters above the base?”