by J. F. Holmes
“In case you hadn’t noticed, most places aren’t happy with UN rule.” Nick leaned back as if to put some distance between himself and the government man.
“That’s not my problem. We need your team to go in and destroy the facility.”
“No arrests?” he asked.
The man smiled and said, “No. Arrests mean paperwork, and I hate paperwork. But you’ll capture everyone so I can interrogate them. Afterward, I expect you to dispose of the bodies.”
“Collateral damage?”
Leaning back, the UN man said nothing, which the mercenary took to mean that they didn’t care one way or another.
“I’ll do whatever is necessary to keep my people safe, and no more. Entire facility?”
“Yes,” said the citizen. “Make it look like a fire or industrial accident, we wouldn’t want the residents of the nice colony of Dyson to get upset.”
They set down to negotiating, and finally agreed on a price. Citizen Haver offered his hand to shake on it, but Agostine ignored it, and pointedly held the door open for him, dragging his frozen leg stiffly. When the man had left, O’Neill came into the office and he gave her the details.
“Well, I can’t say I like it, but we need the money,” she finally said. O’Neill ran the books and acted as his corporate operations VP, so she knew how dangerously low they were on funds.
“Yeah, we do,” he sighed, “and we can’t forget the Big Picture.”
“Yes,” she said, “sometimes you’ve got to kill a little to save a lot.” She leaned down and kissed him gently. “You’re a good man, Nick.”
“Tell that to God, Brit.”
Chapter 2
“What’s this shit, capture everyone?’ demanded Sasha Zivcovic. “How are we to approach a guarded site, just walk in and say like Americans, ‘PUT YOUR HANDS UP!”? The bald-headed Serb scowled after Agostine read the mission out to them. The team was in the cargo bay of their rented light cargo hauler, coming up with an op-plan.
“Easy enough, gas the entire area with Styrine, and taser rounds for leakers,” answered Angelo. The Navajo was short but powerful, and he grinned at the angry Slav, trying to provoke him. They’d already run through the plan several times, and were getting down to rehearsals, going over satellite shots of the compound. “Is that too complicated for your thick head?”
Ziv just grinned back, but there was no mirth in it. “That is very expensive solution, where a bullet is cheap.”
Agostine said, “That’s my problem to worry about, but any expenditures are going to be covered by the UNCS. There are contract requirements that necessitate capture.” He didn’t talk about the citizen, who had kept to his own cabin throughout the trip. “Besides, the guards are being provided by Secure Solutions Interplanetary. They’ll have gas filters in place. Nope, it’s going to be stunners in the face.”
O’Neill spoke up from her laptop. “I’m going to need at least two orbits while the electro-nanos determine their compsys, and at least fifteen minutes on the ground before the attack to bring it down.” She’d spent half their transit time packing the small reentry vehicle with the microscopic machines she’d use to infiltrate their electronics. “I seriously doubt it’s going to be anything more complicated than Windows 137 or a Chinux platform. That’ll take care of any automated defenses.”
“A claymore wire isn’t automated, Miss O’Neil,” came the calm voice of their sniper.
“Well, Ahmed, that’s your job, to find that shit before I trip over it.”
“I’ll jump on any grenade for you, Brit,” interjected Jones, laughing his deep laugh. “But then you’d have to reward me, and once you go black, you ain’t never going back to old Nick there.”
Agostine smiled. The team was in rare form, recovered from the last mission they’d gone on. A corporate hit on Coopers’ World, it had started well, but Lady Luck had run away like a fleeting bitch, leaving Red wounded and Peterson dead.
He got up and left them to their bickering, and went back to the cabins. Doc Hamilton was repacking his aid kit, running diagnostics on the portable scanner. Agostine closed the door and made a cutting motion with his hand, indicating that they needed to talk.
Both proceeded to vocally discuss the plan they’d made, but their fingers flew in silent communication, using a common infantry battle sign language. Agostine was sure the citizen had emplaced passive listening devices, but video was much harder to achieve. Some risk, but negligible.
“Are we set?” asked Agostine.
“Samples are in my bag, and the packages are buried in cold storage. I’ll be loading them up in my aid kit, marked plasma, if I don’t make it,” answered his number two. Then he paused, and while still talking out loud, silently asked, “Who’s going to execute?”
“Ahmed, from overwatch, from maybe three hundred meters out.”
“Got it.”
The two men stopped signing and continued their mission conversation, then turned to other things, talking about life in the Army, and old comrades they’d known. They started making up obscene stories, each topping the other, and hopefully making the citizen think they were two old idiots, burned-out and barely effective.
***
Planetfall was easy; Dyson was a UN system, for all its problems, and one thing the UN did right was ship handling and routing. Holdover from the US Navy, maybe.
They were registered as a tourist boat courtesy of the UNCS, and made several orbits to “take in the sights”. On the second, Brit’s stealth package dropped from orbit, burned up, and let a small, invisible cloud of nanos drift down over the target site. By the third orbit, they’d formed a bit of a hive mind, vacuuming up measurements of electronic traffic, compressing it into a burst transmission, and she knew how to crack their system.
“I knew it! Windows 137, without even the ‘63 beta security patch. Amateurs!” she gloated. Her job was done, for now, and she put her computer equipment away to work on her shotgun, replacing the kinetic ammo stick with a non-lethal one. Just in case, she slipped the kinetic into her backpack.
They touched down thirty kilometers from the target, on the back side of a mountain range. The air was warm and clear; down below, the valleys would be fetid jungles. It was probably the reason the lab was there, to conceal heat signatures.
“You know,” said Jones, shrugging into his pack, “after this job, I’m going to make you get me a custom exo, so I don’t have to kill myself to keep up with you.” The man stood well over seven feet and bulged with muscle, but the military surplus equipment rarely fit him.
“Maybe we switch from Walmart stuff to real UN milspec, you know?” he continued. “Maybe even take them Indy guys up on…” He fell silent when Doc Hamilton shot him a look. The UNCS citizen had just appeared at the top of the ramp, wearing a top of the line exo and carrying a neural stunner.
“Mister Jones, I don’t care who you sometimes work for,” he said in his polished Earth accent, “but the second you step over the line will be the last. Your boss knows that.”
That brought a chill to the whole team, and they set off quietly over the top of the mountain, Jones easily keeping up with the powered suits, and descended toward the jungle below as night fell.
Chapter 3
“I’ve got hotspots on tablet,” said Jones from his hide site. His helmet-mounted scanners turned night into day, and gave probable location to each human heat source. “That makes four guards total, exterior. Two inside, three civilians.”
There was no answer; he didn’t expect any. This raid was going to be as quick as possible, with minimum wait time and maximum damage. Beside him, O’Neill gripped her shotgun easily, breathing in and out slowly. At “three,” the computer specialist hit a button on her wrist comp and cut the automated defense systems. The counter in their helmets moved to zero, and both sprang from their position, running directly at the guards.
Jones fired first, the compressed air gun launching stunner rounds at a furious rate. They burst into
a cloud of needles within three feet of the target, penetrating even light ballistic cloth and delivering a concentrated dose of soporific. His target went down just as the beanbag round from O’Neill’s shotgun hit hers in the head. The sentry flopped to the ground with a cracked helmet, and probably a severe concussion.
“Whoops!” she muttered, racking in another round.
Closer to the entrance, Ahmed’s gauss rifle spat one round, then another, self-contained capacitors that delivered a paralyzing electric shock to their targets, freezing their exoskeletons and causing the guards to drop to the ground, immobile. Both worked frantically to hit their software reset, but were still stuck a second later when O’Neill and Jones ran past them, stunning both.
Through the hole in the defenses charged Doc, Agostine, and Zivcovic, followed closely by the citizen. They hit the lab section, and before Zivcovic or Agostine could breech the door, the citizen hammered it open with a mech-enhanced glove. Return fire, a three-round burst from a submachine gun, sparked off his breastplate, one round going into his arm, but he ignored it. The citizen’s next punch hammered into the man’s sternum, breaking his ribs and driving shards of bone into the man’s heart. The security guard fell to the floor, instantly dead.
“I thought we were going for capture!” exclaimed Agostine.
The citizen turned to him with a wolfish grin, and said, “Just the scientists. That’s all I care about. Do you have a problem with that?”
“Well, these guys are SSI, and the security business is a small world. Word gets around we’re killing competitors, things could go bad for us.” There was SOME truth to that, though not as much as Agostine wanted him to think.
Not that it mattered. The citizen smiled and said, “That’s what they get paid for. But if it troubles you that much, we can just kill them all before we leave. No witnesses are the best witnesses.”
“You’re a sociopath, you know that?” said the mercenary, disgust on his face.
“Yes, of course. It allows us to see the big picture.” With that, he moved forward into the lab, stunner held high.
The remaining guard stood in front of the lab doors, weapon on the floor, hands raised in the air, a neutral look on her face. When they came up, she carefully pushed her rifle toward them with her foot. “I’m not getting paid to get killed,” she said, keeping the neutral tone in her voice.
“Be that as it may, I AM getting paid to kill,” answered the citizen, and before the other men could react, hammered his gloved fist into her neck, snapping it with an audible crunch. She crumpled to the floor, a stunned look in her unblinking eyes.
Agostine started to raise his rifle, but Doc Hamilton put his hand on his friend’s arm, pushing it downward, shaking his head no. The feed from the citizens’ helmet cam was surely being fed by ansible back to UNCS HQ, and killing him would bring a world of shit down on them.
They found the four scientists huddled in an office, offering no resistance. All except one, a petite auburn-haired woman, glaring at them with a fierce gaze. The citizen sedated them all anyway, not caring when the woman fell to the ground and hit her head on the lab floor, nor about the blood that spread out in a pool from a cut on her head.
Agostine slung the scientist over his shoulder, servos whining under the additional weight, and Zivcovic grabbed each of the others by their collars. Together, they got them all outside and laid them on the ground beside the other unconscious security guards.
“Pull security while I do some interrogation,” said the citizen, binding each of the prisoners up with duct tape. Agostine motioned for the others to form a perimeter, and they did, spreading slowly outward, watching with disgust as the UNCS operative pulled out some smelling salts. He opened the package, waving it under the woman’s nose, and she woke with a snort and a start.
“Now,” he said, pulling out a small skinning knife and laying it up against the throat of another unconscious scientist, “we know you got a shipment of non-sterile seeds from that smuggler, Dean, and that you’re the leading geneticist in the Free Farm Movement. Been looking for you for quite a while, Doctor Morano.”
“What do you want, then, if you know everything already?” she hissed at him.
“Why, Doctor, for you to come back to work for us! That plague you let loose on Kaylee, well, that was one fine piece of work. Two hundred thousand people, reduced to raving lunatics! I greatly admire your work,” he finished.
The woman’s face paled, and she shot back, “You can go to hell! I was looking for a cure for a neurological disease!”
“No doubt I will go to hell,” he answered, and lifted her onto his shoulders. Holding her tightly with both hands as she struggled, the citizen turned back to the mercenary. “Captain Agostine, dispose of the rest of these people, burn the lab down, and I’ll bring her back to the –”
He stopped when he saw the small smile on Agostine’s face, and immediately started to drop the woman, reaching for his stunner.
Chapter 4
The heavy tungsten-cored slug, moving at over four thousand feet per second, impacted on the citizen’s helmet, shattering it and driving through his skull. The dead body stood upright, locked into position by the severing of the neural connections between CPU and non-existent brain tissue.
“SNIPER!” yelled Agostine, in case the audio was still working, and O’Neill fired at the helmet which had spun off the man’s shattered head. Her buckshot shattered it even more, kicking the remains of the equipment across the dirt. Then she ran over and hammered it into pieces with the butt of her gun, making sure any transmissions were cut off.
Doc Hamilton helped the scientist to her feet, checked her over, and handed her a rag to wipe the blood off . She picked at the pieces of bone and blood that had splattered over her coveralls, then gave up in disgust.
“Please check on my coworkers,” she asked Hamilton, and walked over to Agostine, who was deep in conversation with the hired pilot, trying to reassure him that the LZ was safe. She waited until he was done, then said simply, “Thank you.”
“We have to get you out of here, Doc,” he answered simply. “Sorry about your security people.”
She grimaced, and said, “There’s always a price to pay for rebellion, Captain.”
He looked around as the rest of the team carried out the two dead guards, disgust on his face. He’d known one of them, a veteran like him of the ground war on Deiss. Reaching down, he closed her eyes, then looked away. This hadn’t gone as planned, and there would be hell to pay with SSI when they got back.
The ship cautiously landed on thrusters, scattering dirt in their faces, and they loaded the scientists aboard, along with the precious seedlings and seeds. Once safe inside, the team set about burning down the lab, leaving the bodies inside. Agostine took great pleasure in putting a white phosphorus grenade on top of the citizen’s body and pulling the pin.
With a bright flare, the lab burned furiously in the light of the planet’s soft blue-tinted sun. It lit the ground behind them as the ship’s antigrav lifted them slowly upward, gradually accelerating them toward orbit.
“So now what?” asked the doctor, drinking deeply of the cup of tea O’Neill had handed her. She was still shaky from her close brush with death.
“Now we get you to a safe place,” answered the redhead.
“And where is that?”
O’Neill sighed and said, “I have no idea. We’re going to meet up with some coyotes that are moving some people from Mars. You’ll join that group and head to a safe place.”
“Better you don’t know, huh?” said the other woman.
Zivcovic, who was cleaning his ancient AK-74 at the table, snorted, but said nothing. Jones answered her instead. “We’re playing a really deep game here, lady. The second the Uncles get a sniff of us doing anything counter to their interests, it’s the rack and torture for us all.”
“Well,” she said, “I appreciate it, on behalf of the Free Farmers Movement.”
“Save yo
ur bullshit,” said Zivcovic, “we do what we do to get paid. Nothing more.” He put the upper receiver cover back on, snapped it shut, and walked out.
“Don’t mind him,” said O’Neill, “he’s just a prick to people he doesn’t know. Inside, he’s all warm and snuggly.”
Jones started laughing, and Doctor Morano grinned, lifting her tea in salute.
Epilogue
Brit was again on the desk when a blue-uniformed citizen showed up at the door. She grimaced and let her in, giving the UNCS official a dirty look. The woman ignored her and walked right past to Agostine’s office. She did show the courtesy, and precaution, to rap in the door before pulling it open.
“Citizen Ryan,” said Agostine.
“Captain Agostine,” the she answered. “You have what I need?”
The mercenary handed over a small box, saying “DNA samples from the dead scientists. Overhead shots from the ship showing that the lab was destroyed. I’d have brought Doctor Morano’s body back with me, but what would have been the point?”
“Agreed. These damn Free Farmers, don’t they understand that they’re not going to win? Why do they do it?”
Agostine looked at her and said steadily, “Maybe they want to be free.”
Citizen Ryan laughed a bitter laugh, then changed the subject. “A shame Citizen Harver was killed in the action. Our feeds caught the shot that killed him. Did you get the sniper?”
“No, they faded back into the brush, and it wasn’t part of my contract. If you want to hire us, we can go track him down. For a fee, of course.”
Both were speaking for the benefit of any hidden microphones. While they were talking, Citizen Ryan slid an untraceable Swiss credit scan across the desk to him, making it seem to be part of the paperwork.
“Well, keep your nose clean and we’ll have more work for you. Step across the line, and your whole crew gets spaced.”