by J. F. Holmes
Jacob said nothing.
“Ah, well, it doesn’t matter.” Krugman paced in front of him. “Breaking and entering, explosives on your person, it’ll be enough to put you away forever. You made a big mistake with us. You’re lucky we’re non-violent people.” Krugman waved to the guard. “Arrest him,” he said.
“Mr. Krugman?” another voice asked. Monalisa slipped through the main door. Her eyes widened. “What’s going on?”
“It seems your newly-favored donor wasn’t as trustworthy as you assumed.”
Monalisa frowned. “I’m sorry. I had no idea. I’ll handle this from here, Michael. You actually have the ambassador to Fiji IV waiting for you in reception. I know it’s late, but he just arrived. Time differences.”
Krugman nodded. “I’ll go handle that. Please, try to be more careful with who you trust next time. Okay, Monalisa?”
“Yes, sir,” Monalisa said, sounding contrite.
Krugman padded to the exit, disappearing through the door a moment later.
“You have cuffs?” Monalisa asked the security guard.
The guard nodded and moved toward Jacob.
Jacob still kept his hands up, watching the exchange. There wasn’t a good opportunity to move or to act. He was stuck. Even if he managed to subdue the guard, he wouldn’t be able to do anything about Monalisa before she called for more help. He played out the scenario in his head, and it didn’t end well. Perhaps if they took him to a cart, he could hijack it, then…
The guard grabbed his hands and cuffed them behind his back. Monalisa produced her own pistol while he was occupied.
Krugman was committed to non-violence, but that didn’t mean everyone in the organization was. Jacob spun away from the guard, looking for cover, but finding none nearby.
Monalisa fired a shot. Then another.
The gun didn’t make much of a sound, more of a whoosh than what you’d normally hear from a pistol. A silencer. No one would come to find out what had happened. Jacob shut his eyes tight, and then opened them again.
He was still here.
To his side, the guard lay sprawled on the ground, his head leaving a trail of blood where Monalisa had shot him. Jacob turned to Monalisa. “Why?”
“Don’t think you’re the only sleeper-agent the UN sent to this world. We won’t have too much time. Krugman expects us to take you to the police, and he will double check. He’s very thorough with this operation, annoyingly so,” Monalisa said. She grabbed the guard’s cuff keys and freed Jacob.
“Got it. I was just setting the device,” Jacob said. He rubbed his wrists, which stung from the abrasive metal of the cuffs. Then he crouched to pull his pack toward him. In it, he found the small explosive device and removed it. Despite its small size, it packed enough explosive power to take out the entire warehouse. Which is what he’d counted on.
Jacob stood and turned to the Equality Engine. He hadn’t learned many specifics about how it worked, but it would make for quite the weapon if it could do everything Krugman said it could. Would the UN want schematics on it? It was something he should have asked his handler. Now he had little time to do anything but destroy it.
“What are you waiting for?” Monalisa asked, bringing him back to the moment.
With a nod, Jacob magnetically locked the explosive onto the large cylinder. He tapped the timer and jogged away from the Equality Engine. Monalisa followed after him. When they reached the warehouse door, they moved to a brisk walk. There was no point in running, it would only make them look suspicious. She grabbed him by the arm and led him toward a hovercart just before the fence line. “You’re supposed to be my prisoner,” she whispered to him.
The guards at the gate looked over, acknowledging Monalisa with a wave. She sat Jacob in the back of the cart and took the driver’s seat herself, starting its motor. The cart drifted toward the guard station, and the guards opened the gate. Once outside the fenced area, Monalisa slammed the accelerator. Jacob nearly flew forward, not expecting to take off at such a speed.
It was a good thing she did. The warehouse exploded with a kroom loud enough to make Jacob’s ears ring. He covered his ears instinctively, ducking in the back seat before turning to see the damage. A giant ball of flame rose from the building. The guards rushed toward it.
Monalisa and Jacob rounded a corner, their view of the destruction blocked by another large building. Jacob didn’t know where Monalisa was taking him, but he had to trust her. They made a couple more turns on their way out of the center’s compound, onto a thoroughfare that led them away from the city. They stood out amongst the AI-controlled cars on the thoroughfare. Several emergency vehicles rushed in the opposite direction.
“You had this worked out ahead of time,” Jacob said.
“I’ve had a lot of experience in these matters, and with the CDP.”
“Why didn’t you say something before? When I was donating?”
“I didn’t know you were an agent then,” Monalisa said, taking them on a route away from the city. “Besides, the UN likes to keep us autonomous for backup contingencies, just like this one. Deniability kept us both safe and on track. You’re going to want to hold on.”
Jacob gripped one of the side bars. “Why?”
He was answered when the hovercart shook. It dove forward, crashing to the ground below. Fortunately, they only hovered a couple of feet above the ground, but at these speeds, the impact still jarred with incredible force. Monalisa did a remarkable job of keeping the vehicle from tipping. She didn’t spin the wheel or any of the number of errors a less experienced driver would have made. The hovercart skidded on the road, its bottom carriage sparking against the ground as it slowed. Finally, it stopped.
Jacob released his death grip on the side bar before realizing the entire area had gone pitch black. No street lights, nothing in the city behind them. The stars shined a lot brighter than usual, forming a blanket in the sky. This was why they’d named it the Milky Way Galaxy. One other light shone – the fire from the warehouse explosion.
Monalisa hopped out of the driver’s seat and moved down the road. “We have to keep going to the drop point. Quickly. The whole city will be searching for us soon.”
“What just happened?” Jacob asked, jogging to catch up to her. She led them off the main road and through some tall grasses.
“The backup plan. An EMP device. You had to take out the Engine, but as long as they had the information and capability to create it again, the whole galaxy would be in danger. Their whole grid is shot now. All their computer systems and all the data they used to create their gate killer. UN relief teams will arrive in a few days, and will extract the scientists who created it. A very clean operation, really. No one hurt.”
Jacob grimaced as they continued along the road on foot. It didn’t sit right with him. The main qualms of many Detroivians was the inequality brought on by the gates, and their inability to provide basic necessities for their own people. Taking out what little infrastructure they had couldn’t be called “no one hurt” in earnest. “It doesn’t feel right,” he murmured to himself.
“Buck up,” Monalisa said. “If they’d managed to take out the wormhole gates, can you imagine the damage across the galaxy? It’ll take them a few months to get back on their feet, to where they were, but we saved billions of people from economic collapse.”
They walked over a hill and down to a clearing, which appeared to be out of the EMP’s range. There they had a small dropship awaiting them. He looked back to Detroivia one last time, still unsettled by what they’d done. He had to believe Monalisa and the UN were in the right. It was his job. He’d signed up to defend the Hundred Worlds, and sometimes, defense was messy.
Jacob boarded the dropship in silence, but he didn’t look back.
_________________
Jon Del Arroz is a #1 Amazon Bestselling author, "the leading Hispanic voice in science fiction" according to PJMedia.com, and winner of the 2018 CLFA Book Of The Year Award. As a contributo
r to The Federalist, he is also recognized as a popular journalist and cultural commentator. Del Arroz writes science fiction, steampunk, and comic books, and can be found most weekends in section 127 of the Oakland Coliseum cheering on the A's.
Leverage
by Doug Dandridge
_____________________
Present Day
“So, you won’t come clean about your group’s plans to revolt?” Donald Humphreys gave the man a cold stare from the one eye he could still open. His face was a mass of bruises, streaked with blood.
Chief Citizen Octavius Smythe-Zumwalt stared back, wondering what he could do to break this man. He had a pain tolerance like no one he had ever worked on, and he seemed to have been rendered immune to all the drugs in the citizen’s arsenal. So far he was the only lead in what Smythe-Zumwalt was sure was a massive conspiracy to get the seeds of fertile plants into the hands of the colonies. It was the only thing the United Nations had to maintain complete control of the colonies. They didn’t have enough troops to hold down all the planets, and it was doubtful they could defeat them in a space battle, not if they all revolted. But the threat of starvation kept them all in line. If they got out of line, it could be the collapse of human civilization among the stars.
Smythe-Zumwalt was as frustrated as he’d ever been when working on a subject. And frustration led to anger he couldn’t afford to show. Most people broke as soon as they were taken into UN custody. Everyone feared the authorities. Those who didn’t could be counted on to crack after some pain was applied, and if that didn’t work, the drugs always did. Always. But this man seemed to have no fear of the authorities, no fear of physical pain, and drugs were a non-starter.
“We’ll get it from you, no matter what it takes,” said the citizen, keeping his voice calm, since that seemed to frightened subjects more than angry diatribes. “And once we get some more of your people, some who aren’t as immune to our methods as you are, we’ll have all of you.”
Humphreys refused to speak, his open eye transmitting his hatred for the UN in general, and the citizen in particular. A shiver of fear ran up his spine. The citizen had no doubt this dangerous man would kill him if he got the chance. He wasn’t about to give him that chance.
The comm on his belt buzzed, and the citizen looked at the text that was displayed. Now we might get somewhere, he thought, turning away and walking out of the room. A woman was waiting for him in the corridor, a thick folder in her hands.
“What have you got for me, Becky?”
“It took some digging, boss, and I had to get through quite a few security lockouts, but I found his DNA trace from our own records.”
“You mean he was one of us? How in the hell did that happen?”
Becky nodded her head. “He was a senior sergeant in a special ops platoon on New Florida. One of our best at rooting out subversives. Wife and three daughters. It seems one of the daughters was caught in a shootout between our people and some rebels. She was killed.”
“By the rebels?”
“No, sir. By our people. Humphreys lost it and went AWOL, along with about thirty of his people. Most of the platoon.”
“And now they’re on Mars?”
“As far as we can tell, he, his wife and his two daughters, under assumed names, are now living at a village called Jakarta on Mars. He works as a foreman at the Gold Rush Mining Company. And look at these financial records.”
The citizen looked down at the indicated page. Profits, taxes, all seemed to be in order. But there were too many losses to be accounted for in an operation like the mine. And no telling where the money had gone.
I know where it’s gone, thought the citizen. To the damned rebels. The fucking traitors. To fund their rebellion, and pay for the research and development to gen-eng seeds for the other planets.
Smythe-Zumwalt handed the folder back to the assistant and marched back into the interrogation room.
“How about we take a trip to Mars?” he asked his prisoner. “I think you might want to say hello to your wife and daughters. What were their names? Let’s see. Joanna and Sandra, wasn’t it? And Haley is the mom? Perhaps you’ll cooperate a little more when we have them in custody. For their own safety, don’t you know.”
Humphreys’ glare became even more murderous, if that was possible. Then, to the disbelief of the citizen, he reared his head back and let out a deep laugh.
“Go ahead,” he said after the laugh, tears in his eyes. “You go after my girls, and you’ll die. And everyone you bring with you.”
***
“Mars traffic control has given permission for us to orbit, sir,” said the pilot over the comm.
Damned right they did, thought Smythe-Zumwalt, looking at the approaching globe on the viewer in his cabin. They’d been blasting their UN transponder all the way in. Only a complete idiot, or someone with a death wish, would have given a ship with that transponder any delay.
“How soon?” asked the citizen.
“About an hour, sir. We’ve got to get past the satellite shell while killing the last of our velocity.”
“Understood.” The citizen touched a pad and zoomed in on one of the thousands of satellites that formed a shell around the planet at Areosynch. The body of the object itself was a globe a hundred meters in diameter, with wings stretching a dozen kilometers in each direction, supporting the solar panels that powered the sat. One of the greatest obstacles to terraforming Mars was the lack of a magnetic field. With no molten core, there was really no way to make the planet produce its own, and without one, the charged particles of solar radiation would continue to be a problem. Sleeting in, disrupting cells, killing plants and people over time. Until someone had come up with the satellites, using the very power of the sun to produce the field they needed to protect the planet from the sun.
He switched the view to the planet itself. Mars was now a blue-white globe much like Earth. The largest ocean was to the north, in the lowlands, while the southern hemisphere was almost all land, with some large lakes and numerous smaller bodies of water. Green land, mostly, the home of the vegetation that was transforming Mars into a living world. It would still take some time before people could walk on the surface without breathing masks, but it was warm enough, with sufficient pressure, that suits were no longer needed most of the time. The planet had been warmed by both the thickening atmosphere and the heat generated by dropping ice balls and nitrogenous asteroids onto the world.
The terraforming of the planet had started before man had reached the stars. Even after other planets had been colonized, too much wealth had already been poured into the money-pit of Mars to stop. It would become a great place to transport a couple of billion humans to when it was ready, and it could be used to grow food. Mars was too close to Earth to use the high-handed method of threatened starvation, and its proximity to Earth meant the UN would be able to garrison the world with enough military force to keep it under control.
Smythe-Zumwalt thought it might be a good idea to talk to their prisoner. Perhaps now he would be more forthcoming, knowing that the citizen and his team were only hours away from dropping in on his family.
“Meet me at the interrogation chamber,” the citizen ordered over the comm, “and bring the prisoner.”
When Smythe-Zumwalt arrived at the chamber set aside for the nasty business of getting information, Donald Humphreys was already there, strapped down in a chair that could be transformed into a table in case they needed more active methods to entice information from their subject. Humphreys had proven resistant to all of their methods. The citizen really didn’t expect anything they could do to loosen his tongue, but maybe now he might have come to his senses. Leverage worked that way. People who didn’t care about themselves often cared too much about their loved ones.
“We’re just about to go into orbit around Mars, Donald,” he told the man, who looked back at him with hate-filled eyes. “There’s still time to tell us what we want before we have to inconvenience your
family.”
The man smiled, showing the gaps where teeth had been knocked from his head. “I don’t think you want to go down there. Things aren’t likely to turn out like you expect.”
The citizen shook his head, closing his eyes, an expression of sadness on his face. “We are the government. Whatever people you have down there who might be on your side don’t stand a chance. If you won’t be reasonable, we’ll go down there and get your children back. And then we’ll see if they might get you to see reason.”
Again the man laughed, just as he had on Earth, when presented with the fact that the UN was willing to use leverage against him.
Jonah Vandermeer, the captain of the guard force, slapped Humphreys across the face. Humphreys’ laugh died in an instant, and he looked with a murderous expression at the officer.
“We’ll see how you laugh when I have my hands on your twelve-year-old,” said the leering captain.
“I will kill you if you touch either of my girls.”
“That will be difficult to accomplish while we have you in irons,” said Smythe-Zumwalt as he looked with disapproval at the scene before him. He didn’t enjoy some of the things he had to do, unlike most of the sadistic bastards under his command. He was willing to let them be, though, since it meant he didn’t have to do it himself. “Get him ready,” he told the sergeant, who was in charge of the prisoner’s wellbeing. “We’ll be taking him down to the surface with us to meet up with a UN company, and then on to the mining colony.”
Humphreys again looked murder at the citizen. Smythe-Zumwalt looked back with a calm expression. He was in charge here, the might of the United Nations at his beck and call. And the way the man was reacting let him know, as soon as he had his family in hand, cooperation would come. There was no other possible outcome. So why did his stomach flutter so much with misgivings?
***