by Eric Thomson
A blinding flash of light near the water’s edge robbed Talyn of a reply. White like nothing else in the universe, it blotted out the sun, the sky, and the surrounding landscape. Seconds later, the rumble of a planet splitting asunder reached their ears while debris rose in the air like a geyser of solid matter, seemingly reaching almost to the edge of the atmosphere. Talyn’s first reaction, after regaining her senses was to glance at her timepiece.
“Five minutes early.”
“Aye, but what power. Didn’t that look almost like an antimatter device?” Decker stared at where the beach house once stood with a rapt expression on his face. “Either Piet’s timers were screwy, or one of the guards with access to the storage room met my anti-tamper device.”
Then, the debris, flung hundreds of meters up, reversed direction Most pieces were the size of a pea, but many approached that of a human head, and a few were even big enough to crush the vehicles parked behind Decker and Talyn’s improvised bench.
The grassy landscape in a two-kilometer radius around what was now a steaming hole turned into a surface dimpled and scarred by a thousand craters. Within moments, the waters of the Tyrellian Sea rushed in to fill a new cove where Blanca’s Folly once stood, returning the promontory to its primal state.
“That was, um, wow.” For the first time since he and Talyn joined forces, Decker found her at a loss for words. “There’s nothing left.”
“If the explosion’s main force hadn’t been directed straight up thanks to the MHX brick being at the bottom of a ten meter deep, granite-lined pit, you and I probably wouldn’t be speaking right now. Imagine a bomb fifty or a hundred times more powerful going off at the heart of a city.”
She looked up at him with an appalled expression.
“We need to stop those DSA maniacs.”
“Stop, disarm and execute. Preferably in that order.” Decker stood, brushed the dust from the seat of his pants, and offered Talyn a helping hand. “Then we find their sponsors and do unto them. But after we finish cleaning up Mission Colony. How about finding Eva and telling her she no longer has a place where she can count seashells on the seashore?”
— Fourteen —
Decker and Talyn heard laughter in the hallway before the sitting room door opened. Women’s laughter, times two. Eva Cortez had finally called it a night and come home. With someone, a complication they didn’t need. The agents exchanged a glance. He grimaced, and she shrugged as if to say, collateral damage is often inevitable. Decker nevertheless indicated the needler with non-lethal loads in his hand, one of the two taken from Piet’s guards, telling Talyn to let him shoot the other woman. She acquiesced with a nod.
The door swung inward and Eva Cortez, head turned to look behind her, waltzed in, a rosy glow on her cheeks. Upon noticing her unexpected visitors, she came to a sudden halt. Her face lost its color as her lips parted. The second woman stepped around her and also stopped, but with an air of curiosity rather than fear. Decker groaned in dismay as he pointed his gun at her.
“Good evening, Eva,” Talyn’s mouth twisted into a predatory smile. “And you must be Assistant Commissioner Kristy Bujold, the 24th Constabulary Regiment’s commanding officer and Mission Colony’s chief of police, as it were.”
Talyn raised Piet’s needler and gestured at a pair of imitation regency chairs in front of the sofa she and Decker occupied.
“Please sit. And take note, this weapon is carrying lethal neurotoxin loads. Yes, Commissioner, I know they’re illegal,” Talyn added when she saw Bujold’s eyes harden. “Weapon and ammunition belonged to the late Piet Yorik, Eva’s former head of security. I’m more partial to plasma weapons. When you shoot someone through the head or heart, they die instantly.” When neither of them moved, Talyn snapped, “Sit! And close your mouth, Eva. The yokel look doesn’t suit you.”
“What — how...” Cortez obeyed almost instinctively.
“Who the hell are you?” Bujold demanded, a little slower to comply.
“We were Eva’s friends and business partners until she decided to go it alone and ordered our murder.”
“Sherri Zadeck and Corbin Peel,” Cortez said in a weak voice. “But you’re supposed to be dead. The beach house, Piet, everything is gone. A meteorite strike, they said.”
Talyn jerked her thumb at Decker.
“Not a meteorite, honey. Blame the big guy. He found toys that go boom in your dungeon and couldn’t resist playing with them. Unfortunately, one of those toys was Alek’s present to your late husband. Sorry.”
Bujold turned to Cortez. “Who are these clowns, Eva?”
“People who wanted to make her dreams of planetary domination come true, for a piece of the action,” Decker said. “Except she took what we offered and tried to cut us out. And by us, I’m referring to the organization we represent, people who don’t appreciate betrayal and never learned the meaning of the word forgiveness. Your presence here complicates things somewhat, Commissioner. It would have been best if you’d gone home instead of succumbing to the lure of Eva’s bed.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re now utterly compromised. You were at the mansion when Gustav, a radical with known perversions died, and now you’ll be found here, where Eva, the Freedom Collective’s black widow, met her end. I’d say a team from the Rim Sector’s Professional Compliance Bureau will speak with you shortly.”
“How did you get in?” Bujold’s voice rose in frustration, while Cortez, undone by finding them in her sitting room, seemed to have become mute.
“How? Simple. The butler did it.” Decker smirked. “I kid you not. He let us in. As you well know, Commissioner, the human link is always the weakest in any security system. Employing only droids and AIs is safer, but I suppose the allure of a live human catering to her every need was irresistible. He’s alive, by the way, but will suffer from a thunderous headache when he wakes up, and then from a second one when he finds himself minus a job and without references. As will you.”
His right index finger twitched once, and a line of tiny red dots appeared on Bujold’s neck. She barely had time to understand what just happened before slumping into the chair, out for several hours.
“Eva, Eva, Eva.” Talyn shook her head. “You must be this star system’s queen of bad life choices. All we wanted was the MHX-19. If you’d hadn’t ordered Piet to kills us, we wouldn’t be here, and you’d be making out with Kristy while dreaming of a glorious future.”
“Why...” Her voice came out as a croak. “Why the MHX?”
“It belongs to the Armed Services. No one outside the Fleet, such as the DSA, should even know it exists, let alone pass it out to every scummy little wannabe revolutionary group along the Rim like your lot. In large amounts that stuff is a weapon of mass destruction. A shame you didn’t see what a single kilo did to Blanca’s Folly.”
“If you’re not DSA, who are you?” Cortez whispered as fear drove out every other emotion.
“We’re Fleet operatives, tasked with eliminating terrorists such as the Mission Colony Freedom Collective before it can cause untold civilian deaths.”
“Fleet?” She seemed unable to process the information.
“Big Boy here is a major in the Marine Corps, and I’m a Navy commander. Between us, we’ve killed more people than you could ever imagine, each more than deserving of his or her fate.”
“What do you want from me?”
“Your life. My partner should have taken a second shot to kill you right after he blew Gustav’s head away. But we didn’t know you were more than just a pretty adornment on a dangerous demagogue’s arm.”
A faint spark of defiance hardened her heretofore-slack face.
“Even if I die, the movement will continue.”
“Perhaps, but as an ineffectual talking shop. Your followers are, in the aggregate, useless, like most radicals and salon revolutionaries. And if one of them shows signs of becoming the next rabble-rouser with a plan, like Gustav or you, we’ll be back. Any last wor
ds?”
“Fuck you.”
“I doubt that will make the latest Oxford book of famous quotes. But then, you are a grubby little bitch with a limited intellect.” Talyn raised her gun and fired a volley of lethal darts into Eva Cortez’ face. She gasped, twitched, and then slumped over.
Decker stood and reached out to touch her throat. After a moment, he said, “Dead. I believe that concludes our business on Mission Colony.”
“Just one more thing.” Talyn walked over to Assistant Commissioner Kristy Bujold and wiped Piet’s needler on her clothes. Then, she wrapped Bujold’s hand around the butt and placed her index finger on the trigger, before letting the weapon go so that it fell to the floor naturally.
“Nasty.” Decker made a face at his partner. “Even though forensics will figure out right away Bujold didn’t kill her lover, it’ll make sure the PCB conducts an internal affairs investigation without you tipping it off.”
“I thought we might circumvent the lag time between here and Cimmeria and encourage her executive officer to think about the rules governing the suspension of a commanding officer for possible involvement in a murder. From there, it’s a much smaller step to finding out Bujold was either taking bribes or being blackmailed into supporting Kerlin and Cortez.
“Or sleeping with a known political foe of the Commonwealth’s colonial administration, which someone might interpret as being contrary to her oath.”
“That as well. How long before Bujold wakes up?”
“Four hours max. If you want to call it in and make sure the responding constables find this scene as is, I suggest we raise the alarm as soon as we’re a few blocks away, then dump the burner.”
“Don’t forget to take Eva’s ID. Waste not, want not.”
They left the townhouse’s front door open just a crack, to allow first responders easy access and walked back toward the downtown core at an unhurried pace. Once within sight of Founder’s Plaza, Talyn called the police emergency node and told the dispatcher a story about one dead and one unconscious victim at twelve-eighty Boll Avenue, the unconscious victim bearing an eerie resemblance to Assistant Commissioner Kristy Bujold. Knowing dispatch would ping Bujold’s communicator and find it at that precise address, Talyn shut off the burner, pulled out the power pack, and disposed of both in separate garbage containers.
Thirty minutes later, a bus left them near Salter Street and Tenth Avenue. From there, it was a comfortable walk to the safe house and one last night on Mission before boarding the tramp freighter Thebes, due to land at daybreak, inbound from Merseaux and lifting off six hours later for Cimmeria.
Their coded subspace message to Fleet HQ, attention Commodore Konstantin Ulrich, was already on its way across interstellar space via the system’s civilian relay. Though the code was unbreakable, it pointed the finger at Naval Intelligence agents operating on Mission Colony, but since they would leave in the morning, it didn’t matter. The Freedom Collective was defanged, hopefully harmless for a generation if not forever, and unable to commit acts of political violence.
The next morning, Ned Sarkin and Lena Taryen, who bore only a superficial resemblance to Corbin Peel and Sherri Zadeck, presented themselves at the security gate leading to Thebes’ landing bay and bought passage to Cimmeria from the bored purser’s mate on duty. They offered the sort of untraceable cred chips favored by starship captains skirting the outer edges of both the Commonwealth and the law and were allowed to board with no questions asked.
A few hours later, flat on their backs in the bunks of their private, albeit spartan cabin, they left Mission Colony. But it was without knowing what transpired from the previous night’s anonymous call to the Constabulary concerning Eva Cortez and Kristy Bujold’s misadventure at the hands of a person or persons unknown.
— Fifteen —
Decker’s eyes snapped open, his mind shifting from the soft, ethereal comfort of sleep to a state of full alertness in a fraction of a second. Something had roused him. A change. He listened carefully, lying on his bunk in the darkened cabin aboard the tramp freighter Thebes. They were six days out of Mission Colony after a trouble-free escape and a boring trip.
He immediately sensed that Talyn, occupying the bunk above him, was also awake. After years working as a close team, closer than most, he recognized the change in her breathing pattern.
“What is it?” She asked
He checked his internal clock.
“We should be past the heliopause and FTL on the last leg to Cimmeria by now, but we’re still running sublight.”
Talyn didn’t ask how her partner knew. Most people slept through the brief transition nausea that gripped humans when a starship jumped to hyperspace or dropped out of it, but not Zack. Besides, she knew by now that his hearing quickly became attuned to the sounds of any ship in which he traveled, and every one of them sang a different song when it was moving faster than light.
A soft, almost inaudible thump reached their ears.
“That’s the main port side airlock opening,” he said. “Something latched on to us. It’s what woke me. We’re being boarded.”
He didn’t need to add that someone boarding at the edge of interstellar space, during the ship’s night, when all passengers were in their cabins, meant one thing only. Decker sat up and donned his boots before retrieving his Shrehari blaster from the narrow shelf above his head.
They’d left the captured needlers on Mission, hidden in the safe house’s basement armory. The one that once belonged to Piet Yorik was now a murder weapon and could be traced. Lethal neurotoxin traces were notoriously difficult to eradicate entirely from a needler’s magazine, chamber, and barrel.
He shrugged on his shoulder holster, checked the blaster, and shoved it into place under his left arm. Then, he quickly strapped the Pathfinder dagger to his left forearm, donned his leather jacket, and stood.
A lithe shadow dropped from the top bunk with no more noise than a falling leaf and asked, “Ready?”
“Ready. Do you think this is for us?”
“Possible, but doubtful. No one back home knows we’re traveling on this reject from the starship graveyard; the division’s custodian didn’t issue our current cover identities, and the only one on Mission still alive who knows about us is Kristy Bujold. And she thinks we’re the Zadeck and Peel comedy duo, not a pair of unemployed mercenaries called Sarkin and Taryen.”
The Marine grunted. “Nothing’s foolproof. We become more paranoid, and our enemies merely get more inventive.”
“If someone made us, it didn’t come from an as-yet-undiscovered traitor in the division. I trust the commodore’s instincts. If he’s convinced we smoked out every last Black Sword and Sécurité Spéciale mole, then we did. Maybe it isn’t a pirate raid.”
“You’re thinking a personnel or cargo transfer someone doesn’t want the authorities to notice? Possible, I suppose. But Cimmeria isn’t exactly an example of tight import or immigration controls, so why bother?”
Decker tried the door, and when he found it locked, presumably by an override from the ship’s bridge, he dug a multi-tool from his jacket’s inner pocket and quickly pried open the controls. Disabling the automatic mechanism took only a few seconds, allowing him to open the door just wide enough to stick his head out.
“Clear,” he whispered in a voice so low only Talyn could hear.
He listened again, and this time heard cautious footsteps coming from the metallic spiral staircase a dozen meters to the left of their cabin. Crewmembers or passengers wouldn’t take such care to muffle their sounds. The muzzle of a scattergun, level with Decker’s eyes, poked out of the shaft and he pulled his head back into the cabin. If the being at the gun’s other end stepped off the landing and onto this deck, he, she, or it might spot the partially open door. But closing it now would definitely attract the wrong kind of attention.
Decker made the hand signal for ‘armed hostile,’ followed by the one for ‘wait.’ He felt her briefly touch his hand in acknowled
gment. The soft footsteps sounded closer now, indicating the intruder was in the passageway outside their cabin and headed toward them.
Ignore or strike? They might be undercover intelligence operatives, but Decker remained a Marine, a Pathfinder, one of the elite with combat skills honed fighting pirates, corsairs and marauders along the Commonwealth frontier. The being with the scattergun out there was his natural enemy: scum preying on innocent, defenseless travelers.
He sensed the intruder closing in on their end of the corridor. More muffled sounds came from the stairwell. Scattergun’s winger? Decker realized he and Talyn had stopped breathing.
The nearest footsteps stopped a few doors short of their cabin. Soon after, the second set, which had also stepped off the metallic staircase and onto this deck, came to a halt as well. Talyn pressed something in Decker’s hand. A small sensor.
He closed his fist around it, pulled a thin, flexible, translucent wire from a recess at its top with his other hand. Then, he carefully fed the tip of the cable, a probe, around the doorjamb while looking at the sensor’s small screen.
Two humans, wearing light armor and full-face helmets over black, mercenary-style battledress, both armed with scatterguns, stood in front of a cabin three doors down and across the corridor. Decker couldn’t see their faces, but by their shape, they were male, a little shorter than he was, and less bulky.
One of them held a small device in his hand. When he flicked his wrist to show the other intruder something on its screen, the man briefly exposed his skin, but it was enough for Decker to spot a telltale tattoo.
He reached back to grasp Talyn’s hand and tapped out ‘Howlers.’ It was one of the many nicknames given to members of a criminal organization notable for their ability to avoid incarceration — the much feared and even more reviled Confederacy of the Howling Stars. Involved in almost every illegal activity known, so long as it was profitable, Howlers also carried out wet work and other unsavory activities under contract to Naval Intelligence’s enemies.