Boneshaker

by Joshua Dalzelle

  No matter what the military judicial system would do to Edgars, the men and women aboard the Talon were still Naval spacers and officers who deserved to be treated with a certain level of respect. Some overzealous Marine bashing in the head of a technician not boarding the transports quickly enough could really spark off an ugly scene.

  "Do we have any way to track that shuttle Lieutenant Brown stole?" he asked his aide.

  "No, sir," Bennet said. "We never had access to the ship and were never able to install a tracker."

  "Perfect," Webb sighed. "Not that I expect him to accept the channel request, but I suppose I need to make some effort to contact him."

  "Looks like there will be more than just the Talon crew facing a court martial," Bennet said.

  "Maybe," Webb said. "In Brown's case, it could either be a court marital or a medal of commendation depending on how he executes his self-appointed mission. It's known we give Scout Fleet teams a long leash, and if he pulls this off quietly and actually kills or bags Hollick, it'll just be seen as a hard-charging young officer getting the job done."

  "Your opinion, sir?"

  "I agree with both points," Webb said. "This will be a real test for him. He'll need to know when he's been outsmarted or overmatched and call an abort before letting those battlesynths raze a city to the ground."

  Bennet didn't say anything more as Webb took a moment longer to watch Admiral Sisk's people reclaim the Eagle's Talon for Earth.

  24

  "Tracker is still pinging strong from the surface."

  "Which means he's either already swapped ships and is long gone, or he's set up a trap for whoever comes looking for the ship," Jacob said. "Where's it at?"

  "It's at a large commercial starport in the southern hemisphere," Murph replied. "Fine tracking puts it in a landing complex that mostly services high-speed courier ships."

  The planet they orbited was called Noelin-2, although it was the only technically habitable planet in the Noelin System. Noelin Prime was a barren rocky world without its own atmosphere and a population of close to sixty million beings living in subterranean habitats and a smattering of domes. The only thing remarkable about the system was that it was close to where the Talon had been parked. Given the speed advantage the captain's launch had on the Boneshaker—which had caused its fair share of trouble on the way there—Hollick should have had two full days already to either set them up or make his escape.

  "The ship is almost certainly under surveillance, and likely to be rigged to maim or kill," 707 said. "It is ill-advised to approach it directly."

  "Agreed," Jacob said. "But by eliminating the obvious strategy of scouring the launch for clues, we don't really have much of a plan to find a single human on a whole planet."

  "What do you want to do?" Sully asked.

  "Let's just get down there," Jacob said. "We'll come up with a plan as we go."

  "Seems to work as well as when we actually do have a plan." Sully shrugged, calling for clearance to deorbit and rigging the ship for atmospheric entry.

  After a bumpy ride, the shuttle touched down on her landing gear two landing complexes over from where the captain's launch sat. Large starports like the one they were at were built with scalability in mind, so they all started with a central main hub, and then spread from there like spokes on a wheel. New landing pad complexes would be built with all the requisite servicing needs for the ships it intended to cater to. These were usually funded by private corporations that had some business interest on a planet and wanted to have dedicated landing space without the hassle of actually owning property on an alien planet.

  The ramp had no sooner dropped down when two locals sauntered up, jabbering to each other in the native dialect. Jacob left Sully to negotiate fuel and consumables for the ship and walked back up to meet with the others. Murph looked skeptical as he looked out over the sprawling ramp. The battlesynths were as unreadable as ever.

  "I will need to be in the main terminal building in order to access the records of Hollick's landing," 784 said.

  "You can do that?" Jacob asked.

  "I would not have said so if I could not."

  "Maybe you could have mentioned that before we landed and stood around wondering what to do?" Murph asked. 784's head swung over, and he regarded the NIS agent with cold, indifferent eyes without responding. "Or…I could just keep my opinions to myself."

  "What will the landing records show us?" Jacob wondered aloud. "What I mean is, would it be worth the risk? The ship is registered to the Cridal Cooperative and is legal to land damn near anyplace, so he wouldn't have used any unique trick to put her down."

  "If he left the starport, he would have had to pass through immigration control," 784 said. "He did not have time to retrieve the falsified credentials from his own ship, so he would need to let them scan his neural implant."

  "Do we think that the officials here can be bribed?" Jacob asked.

  "All beings can be bribed," 707 rumbled. "It is just a matter of price. Bring lots of currency, and we will get the information we seek."

  "You coming with us or staying here?" Jacob asked Murph. "It seems like every time we leave Sully with the ship alone, someone sneaks aboard and steals shit or knocks him out."

  "I'll go with you," Murph said. "Even if Hollick got aboard and tossed Sully out, this pile of garbage wouldn’t get him very far."

  The foursome grabbed the things they would need, made sure Sully was okay, and headed off to the ramp that would take them under the landing pads to the underground maglev trains that moved people and cargo around the starport.

  The first train to stop had only a few beings, most ignoring them, but a few stopped their conversations to gawk at the battlesynths. The speedy maglev whisked them away and deposited them underneath the main terminal, some twenty kilometers away from their ship, in just over half an hour thanks to all the stops it made. By the time they left, they were pressed into a throng of beings heading for the immigration lanes.

  Murph, being trained in this sort of thing and also not nearly as memorable or intimidating as 784, approached one of the officials that roamed among the crowd, answering questions to speed the process along. Jacob couldn't hear what they were saying, but the official seemed scandalized, then angry, and then finally shocked when Murph discreetly pressed a loaded credit chit into their hand. A moment later, the official looked up to the other three and discreetly waved them forward.

  "Follow me." The being's voice had an odd contralto quality to it that Jacob, for some reason, found hysterical. He had to keep covering his mouth as he laughed whenever the official would talk. By the time they reached their destination, the official seemed to have caught on that Jacob was laughing at its voice and wasn't amused.

  "Through here," was all it said, waving them through a door marked as being for official use in only five different languages.

  "Could you please be a bit more professional?" Murph hissed after the door closed behind them.

  "I couldn't help it," Jacob protested, looking around the open office area they were in. "Well, at least this doesn't look like a trap."

  "We're in the landing area security office," Murph said. "Someone should be along shortly to help us."

  "That alien didn't seem too pleased about the bribe at first."

  "That was my screw up," Murph said. "I'm rusty at this. I offered way too much to start out with, and she thought I was with internal security and setting her up. She was insulted until I explained I was just some dumb rube from beyond the Orion Arm."

  "What will this office provide us?" Jacob asked.

  "For the right amount, I'll provide you with access to our landing and takeoff logs while I look the other way," a voice said from the back of the room. "If you need anything further, it will be more." Jacob looked over the alien approaching them. He was a different species than the last official had been, and one Jacob hadn't interacted with before.

  "I appreciate the direct approach here," he sai
d.

  "This is a business," the alien said. "As long as we don't let anyone access official government records, they don't mind if we make a few credits here and there letting people access the information directly. I take it you're looking for a specific shipment or vessel?"

  It all clicked in Jacob's mind. They were selling information on specific incoming cargo so enterprising pirates could figure out who carried what and jack the loads. If they were cool with that, it was highly unlikely they'd care about two humans trying to hunt down another human.

  "We're actually looking for another being, one like us." Jacob waved his hand to indicate him and Murph. "He, ah…has something that used to belong to us. Perhaps there was a misunderstanding and, in any case, we'd like it back."

  "Of course," the alien said, almost laughing. "And the ship your…friend…would have arrived on?"

  "It's the VIP launch sitting on pad eighty-one of the Sinda complex," Murph said. "He's the only passenger." The alien went over to one of the terminals and navigated through the menus until, after only a few short minutes, he had a decently clear picture of Elton Hollick exiting the ship on the display.

  "This is him, I presume?"

  "It is," Jacob said. "How much more will it cost to track him?"

  "The best I can do is tell you where he exited the starport from," the alien said. "And that will cost you ten thousand."

  "Ten thousand credits?" Jacob choked on the amount. It wasn't that he didn't have it, there was a principle involved. "You've already screwed up and told me he isn't here at the starport anymore. I'll give you five to point me in the right direction."

  "Eight and a half."

  "Six and a half," Jacob said. "I'll go as high as seven, but my friend here gets to punch you in the chest." The alien glanced at 707 in alarm.

  "Six and three quarter?"

  "Done."

  The information was already queued up so the alien entered a few commands to display it, and then stepped well back. Murph and 784 inspected the screen, then looked at Jacob and nodded. Jacob tossed the alien his payment, and then held up a five thousand credit chit.

  "This could be yours if you have a way for us to get out of here without bothering the poor, overworked people in customs," he said. The alien looked at it greedily.

  "They really do have too much work as it is, and you seem like upstanding, fine beings," he said. "I'm sure you won't be any trouble. This way."

  They were led out of the office and through a series of service tunnels that had doors interspersed along the way. Eventually, they came to the door their tour guide wanted, and he unlocked it by waving his hand in front of a scanner. When it popped open, Jacob could see they were about to exit into the terminal just behind the security checkpoint. All they'd have to do is walk out the exit and hope nobody noticed where they came out of.

  "A pleasure doing business with you." Jacob handed over the chit.

  "Of course," the alien said.

  "Let's hurry up and get out of here," Murph said. "We stick out a bit, and I don't trust him not to call security if for no other reason than to force us to bribe them also. This planet looks decent enough, but it's as crooked as I've ever seen."

  They made it outside without any trouble, walking down the wide footpath and into a crowded marketplace, where they tried their best to blend in. Jacob checked his com unit to make sure he was able to reach Sully, and then found a quiet spot for them to pull out of the rush of beings and talk.

  "So, what did you find out?"

  "Hollick left the starport much the same way we did, but he had to visit a currency exchange to withdraw chits to pay his benefactors," 784 said. "After that, he was escorted out of the terminal through a worker's entrance and last seen heading towards a part of the city that is known for high crime and narcotics trade."

  "A place for someone like him to disappear," Jacob said. "He didn't have any hard cash on him, so he'd had to have at least one account linked to his neural implant or a hand chip and used that to pay off the officials. Does that help us?"

  "Not really," Murph said. "Just knowing he has secret accounts doesn't help us find him here. Most operatives at his level have at least a few they can draw from, and they're well-shielded."

  "He has to have either contacts or know of someplace safe he can hide out if he picked that area to flee to," Jacob said. "He's a bad hombre, but he gets jumped by a local narco-gang, and they'll swarm him under."

  "The danger that exists for him also exists for us," 707 said. "I would prefer to not fight our way through a civilian area."

  "Murph?" Jacob asked. "I'm a little out of my depth here."

  "How much cash did you grab when you left the ship?" Murph asked.

  "Seventy-five thousand in various denominations, all ConFed credit chits," Jacob said. "A little less now after bribing the customs guys."

  "What the hell, LT? Were you planning on buying a house here and retiring?" Murph said.

  "I don't know how much shit costs out here," Jacob protested. "You just said grab enough for bribes!"

  "Yeah, for a couple lowly immigration officials, not the damn governor!"

  "Is this a necessary conversation to have right now?" 707 asked. "You are drawing attention to us."

  "Fine, fine," Murph said. "I think I know a way we can maybe find him and get safe passage through that area."

  "You plan to purchase protection from one of the gangs," 707 said.

  "It's a straight-forward approach, but it works," Murph said.

  "Making certain you choose the right gang to hire presents some risks, but they are easily mitigated," 707 agreed. "How would you like to proceed?"

  "One of the most prevalent drugs in this sector is called Oci-Eight, or just Eight," Murph said. "It's a neural enhancement drug that works across a broad spectrum of species and is used medically to increase nerve stimulation, though not sure why you'd want to do that since I'm not a doctor. The street gangs took the basic formula for that pharmaceutical and distilled it down to create Eight. We don't have time to work up the ladder by grabbing a user to find a dealer to find a distributor and so on…we need to grab someone higher up."

  "Is there a plan somewhere in this boring-ass lecture?" Jacob asked.

  "Eight has to be kept cool or it begins to break down quickly. Dealers have figured out all kinds of ways to hide it, but the bottom line is, that if someone is carrying a large quantity of the stuff, there will be a large thermal signature from the method they use to keep it chilled," Murph said. "We can scan the local Nexus for warnings of which areas to stay away from, then go there and grab us a distributor and make an offer."

  "This sounds dangerous as shit with a lot that could go wrong," Jacob said. "If it goes south and we're forced to defend ourselves, we'll be employing military-grade weapons against local yokels on a planet where that sort of thing doesn't really fly."

  "It's your call, LT," Murph said. "This is my best shot to get Hollick before he disappears again. It's a plan he won't likely employ himself due to lack of funds and his own incredible arrogance, so we'd have a slight advantage, but that window is closing fast."

  Jacob weighed the risks of going through the plan as opposed to letting Hollick run free. The man had done incalculable damage to the UEAS, not to mention the personal carnage he had wreaked in Jacob’s life, but now they were talking about involving the local population, and there were strict regulations governing that sort of thing. Grubby drug pushers though they may be, Earth had adopted an absolutist policy when it came to putting the populations of other planets at risk with their covert operations. He'd been lectured and reprimanded about them multiple times after he'd set off a powerful bomb in an industrial district as a diversion on his first mission.

  In theory, he agreed with the controls Earth had imposed on Scout Fleet operators, making sure they weren't out in the wild ripping and tearing and generally causing a groundswell of hatred for humans. Practically, though, Elton Hollick and those he employed
had been doing just that for some time now. Alien worlds didn't give a flying crap about human internal politics, and whatever Hollick did reflected on them all as a species.

  "Let's do it," he said finally. "We need to nail this bastard before he has a chance to come at us again. What do we need?"

  "Ground transportation that will hide the battlesynths and a throw-away device that can connect to the local Nexus," Murph said. "I don't want to leave any trace that we were here if I can help it."

  "I'm on it," Jacob said, standing and heading towards the market center with 707 in tow.

  25

  Sully sat alone on the flightdeck of the Boneshaker, sipping coffee from a mug and watching the ships come and go while monitoring the coms and watching the computer chew through the data they'd stolen from Hollick. What was in the machine represented the last of the Rocky Mountain Coffee the team had swiped from a disused NIS safe house. It had been grown and roasted on an alien planet, but damned if he could tell the difference.

  "Oh, yeah…that's good shit," he said appreciatively. A beep from the console let him know the computer had completed the first pass of the data and had results for him to review. Many of the names were codenames, but there were slip-com node addresses attached to them that the computer had automatically tried to cross-reference with those it had in its own database. It was a longshot…but there had been a couple matches. The first name that popped up made Sully forget he held a mug, and it slipped from his hand, dumping scalding hot coffee down the front of his pants.

  "Shit! Son of a bitch!" he screamed, wiping at his groin in vain and willing the pain to stop. As the liquid cooled and the pain subsided, he leaned back in the seat, sighing in relief.