Hard Strike

by Eric Thomson

  “But it implies the DSA enjoys support from offworld allies.”

  “Almost certainly, sir,” Talyn replied. “Major Decker and I came to Cimmeria because of information we obtained on the DSA and its activities while investigating violent subversives on Mission Colony.”

  “Did you terminate them with extreme prejudice?” A sardonic smile curled Calvo's lips. Before either operative could answer, he raised a restraining hand. “I withdraw my question.”

  “I’ll answer nonetheless, sir. We prevented them from carrying out the sort of indecency visited on Cimmeria by the DSA.

  “Too bad you didn’t make it here quickly enough for a repeat performance.”

  “Regrettably. But our superiors will soon be aware of the Silfax attack. We sent a subspace message shortly after meeting up with Chief Superintendent Morrow’s team yesterday. They’ll track the Mayhem theft as fast as the laws of interstellar physics allow, which could give us a second avenue toward finding the DSA.”

  “And how do you intend to help us find them from this end, Commander?”

  “If you don’t mind, Prime Minister, for operational security reasons, I prefer not to answer. Radical movements often plant sympathizers within the establishment who escape notice by the police and security services.”

  “Understood.”

  “Rest assured we will do everything in our power to track these DSA clowns and give them a one-way ticket to Beelzebub’s domain,” Decker said. “It’s what Commander Talyn and I do for a living. And we’ve become rather good at it.”

  “In that case, could you tell me what this is supposed to accomplish, I mean once we ignore the asinine revolutionary language? It has to be more than just getting rid of our parliamentary system which is, I admit, at times weighted in favor of the elites.”

  Talyn and Decker exchanged a glance. Then she said, “Sir, we believe the DSA is sponsored by a secret faction with powerful friends on Earth. This faction is intent on removing star system governments which resist the idea of undoing the treaty that ended the Second Migration War.”

  “Centralizers.”

  “Yes, sir, though the term imperialists might be more apt. They don’t think of a republic the way we understand it.”

  Calvo let out a long, exasperated sigh.

  “Are these people mad? Don’t they remember that billions died the last time Earth tried to impose its will on sovereign star systems?”

  “Some of them do, but like every generation of reformers, they refuse to attribute past failure to the fundamental unsoundness of their ideas, preferring to blame a flawed implementation.”

  “The last bunch didn’t do it right,” Calvo quoted in a bitter tone. “That well-worn rallying cry to justify reviving every lousy socio-political ideology humanity ever invented. You’re not filling me with glee, Commander.”

  “Sorry, sir. But back to your question, this shadowy faction has been trying for years to install sympathetic regimes throughout the Rim Sector, since it is the most vulnerable and in certain respects the most politically volatile. Once the Rim is under the control of their fellow travelers, they can expand to more stable sectors and eventually place every single star system under Earth’s direct control.”

  “Turning our decentralized republic of equals into a de facto empire.” Calvo shook his head.

  “Precisely. Until now, attempts at subverting governments have been covert, a shadow war of sorts. Using a terrorist group and shocking violence such as what Cimmeria experienced yesterday is a new tactic. An escalation, if you wish.”

  “In what universe do they expect terrorists to take over running this star system?”

  Decker scoffed.

  “They don’t. The DSA are useful idiots whose only job is to pave the way for a strong leader promising to quickly suppress them and restore order. After you and the Cimmerian parliament walk off, stage left. It’s not a new idea by any stretch. Many of history’s worst tyrants seized power after destabilizing legitimate governments by encouraging radical front organizations to sow the sort of chaos that makes governing impossible. Terror is merely the most direct way to create political chaos.”

  A frown creased Calvo’s broad forehead.

  “But if you’re correct, who would the strong leader be in our situation? I can’t think of anyone with enough stature on Cimmeria willing to betray our citizens in such a despicable manner.”

  “No one believed the tyrants I mentioned just now capable of betraying their people right until the moment they did so, sir. We will do what we can to uncover who’s behind the DSA, however finding and securing the MHX-19 must take priority.”

  “Understood.” Calvo’s eyes slipped to one side for a moment. “I won’t take up any more of your time. Thank you for everything and good luck.”

  The display went dark before anyone could reply.

  “I don’t think our conversation will help him sleep better,” Decker remarked.

  “But it might make him hesitate before blithely resigning to appease terrorists.”

  — Thirty-Two —

  “That was quite a discussion with Caelin right before the prime minister called us,” Decker said once they recovered their bags and weapons after passing through the spaceport’s security checkpoint. The credentials Morrow provided worked as intended although the gendarme who passed them through seemed puzzled that Armed Services officers were carrying Constabulary-issue permits endorsed by his own organization. “Though she was suspiciously quick in granting your request to roam Cimmeria gun in hand with the proper credentials.”

  “Were you lying when you swore your sidearm was for self-defense only?”

  “No. When’s the last time I used them to execute bad guys as in one shot to the back of the head instead of during a firefight or to repel an attack?”

  “Precisely. And Caelin could sense you were telling the truth. Remember, she’s used to ferreting out bent cops who know every single dodge. She may not be a human lie detector, but I’d bet on her every time.”

  “Which is why you let me swear we’d be good. No one can figure out whether you’re being straight or blowing smoke.”

  “Being a soulless assassin has its disadvantages.”

  He turned a toothy grin on her.

  “Do tell.”

  She stopped to look into a souvenir shop window, one of many storefronts bordering the spaceport’s main concourse and absently used the reflection to brush her hair with extended fingers.

  “Thought so.”

  “What?”

  “Youngish woman, alone. Long black hair, dark jacket, looks like a wide-eyed, inoffensive university student. She’s doing better than the pair from yesterday. I only noticed her now, but that face crossed my line of sight as we were leaving Old Government House.”

  Decker let out a disconsolate grunt.

  “I never even twigged.”

  “Let’s not linger. I don’t want to spook her yet.” They stepped off again, headed for the suborbital departure wing. “The real test will come when we board our ride. Arno made the bookings less than an hour ago, so theoretically, our little friend should hit a snag if she can’t visit Archeron with us.”

  “Unless her lot has a hook inside the booking system and received an alert for the names Talyn and Decker. Don’t Louis Sorne and his circle of friends own most of the civilian transportation network on Cimmeria? She could have a reserved seat next to ours.”

  “Possibly. Or she’ll hand surveillance off to someone waiting for us at the other end.”

  “Too bad. She’s sort of cute.”

  “Since when are petite twenty-somethings to your taste?”

  “One can show appreciation for the human form without making it sexual, my dear.” He nodded at a nearby spaceport bar. “Let’s take a ringside seat and see if they serve Shrehari ale while we watch petite and twenty-something figure out how to keep eyes on us while remaining inconspicuous. Our flight isn’t leaving for another hour.”

&
nbsp; They took a table overlooking the concourse and Decker found a middling vintage Shrehari ale on the menu, but at an extortionate price.

  “It truly is a universal constant,” he remarked after they ordered their drinks and paid via the tabletop interface.

  “What is?”

  “Spaceports, airports, and seaports across the Commonwealth and throughout history taking advantage of a captive audience to overcharge at a rate that would make most loan sharks’ eyes water.”

  “A good thing the taxpayer is covering our costs.”

  “I love the unaccountable black ops fund almost as much as my ale.” When he saw her amused expression, Decker added, with a leer, “But not as much as I love you, my darling.”

  “Our tail overpaid for lousy coffee.” She nodded toward a cafe further along the concourse. “I’d love to know who’s covering her tab. A shame we promised Caelin we’d behave lawfully.”

  “Only as Decker and Talyn. If our newest friend accompanies us to Archeron, we can switch names and faces, and take her into a dark corner.”

  A serving droid approached with their drinks. Purplish, foaming Shrehari ale for him, a gin and tonic for her.

  Decker raised his glass. “Here’s to us, riding the storm once again.”

  “I thought you were the storm.”

  “Okay, here’s to you, who will once again ride the storm tonight, in the privacy of our hotel room.”

  “Work before pleasure.”

  “Please. It’ll be nightfall by the time we land. Doctor Zack prescribes rest and relaxation in our third-rate fleabag inn. Work can start tomorrow morning. I’d rather not stumble around a new city in the dark. Not if we’re still being tailed.”

  “I thought we desperately wanted the bad guys to try and take us.”

  “That was the old plan. Since we have names and addresses, I’d rather stay on the offensive.”

  “Ditto. Just seeing if we agreed.” She took a sip of her drink and made a face. “Overpriced crap indeed. I bet they distilled this gin yesterday and then filtered it through the dirty socks of the sapient being who brewed your ale.”

  An air of disgust twisted Decker’s face.

  “Thanks for that visual.” He took a healthy swig of his ale. “At least this stuff is the real thing.”

  Thirty minutes ticked by in companionable silence while they nursed their glasses and occasionally checked on the dark-haired woman whom Decker dubbed ‘Undergrad.’ Finally, he swallowed his last mouthful and stood while Talyn kept an indirect gaze on their tail.

  “She reacted to your movements, Zack. I think it confirms our suspicions.”

  When they strolled by the cafe, Undergrad studiously ignored them, but she was on her feet even before Decker and Talyn turned off the main concourse for the suborbital departures section. A few minutes later, they saw her enter the lounge for the Archeron flight and take a seat near the gate, looking like just another traveler.

  “Doesn’t seem fazed,” Decker muttered as he and Talyn stood by the windows, watching ground crew droids prepare the sleek, delta-winged hypersonic aircraft for its short hop across the Borrachas Sea. “Almost as if she’s taking our flight legitimately. Maybe I might get lucky, and she’ll sit beside me. Then I can charm her with my wit and find out everything we want to know.”

  “Or you could try to regain your grip on reality, Big Boy. You may be my type, but you’re not everyone’s cup of tea.”

  In the end, Undergrad spent the flight sitting two rows behind Decker and Talyn. A man of the same general appearance and age, a relative perhaps, greeted her in the Archeron spaceport arrivals hall, and she vanished, leaving them to scan their surroundings for whoever might be picking up the tail.

  **

  “Did we totally misread things?” Decker asked as they stepped out of the Archeron spaceport and into the early evening air.

  He took a deep breath, savoring the moist warmth after Howard Landing’s more spring-like air. Though the star system’s capital also sat on the shores of salt water, albeit further north, the underlying aroma of a planet’s aquatic life cycle seemed much stronger in these subtropical latitudes.

  It tickled the Marine’s nostrils with scents both eerily familiar and hauntingly alien. The purplish peaks of the Uttara Kuru Mountains, some still showing the remains of last winter’s snow, reared toward the darkening sky south of Archeron’s soft glow.

  “It would be a first. Someone else took up the tail. We simply need to exercise patience and discover who. I believe you mentioned a third-rate fleabag hotel...”

  “Which we won’t use. If they, whoever that is, saw our shuttle reservations, they’ll know about the hotel booking as well. I suggest we make a clean break here and now.”

  “My thoughts exactly.” She reached up and patted his cheek. “You’re becoming well versed in the fine art of suspecting everything and everyone.”

  “Didn’t someone say even paranoids have enemies? I can’t recall who offhand.”

  “I’m sure she must have been a wise woman.”

  An automated bus pulled up, and they joined other travelers in climbing aboard for the short drive into Archeron proper. They stepped off on the harbor front promenade and chose a down-market restaurant at random.

  There, Decker and Talyn ate a quick meal, paid, then used the guest washrooms to transform themselves into convincing facsimiles of Eva Cortez and Piet Yorik before exiting via the restaurant’s back door.

  They strolled through downtown Archeron for almost an hour, alert to any signs of someone tailing them until Decker spotted a likely hotel close to the commercial seaport.

  “Do you think it looks seedy enough for a pair of offworld revolutionaries on the run?”

  “Provided it’s managed by humans and not creepy holograms with suspect programming, I’m willing to try.”

  “Carbon-based hoteliers aren’t any more trustworthy than the photon-based sort. Not if dodgy owners or organized crime are involved. Whoever’s behind this one’s reception desk could just as easily finger us to the wrong people.” He wrapped his arm around her shoulders and squeezed. “But that’s what keeps our lives interesting, sweetie.”

  “Would you believe just once I’d like to enjoy a few days without looking over my shoulder?”

  “No.”

  He led her through the Blue Heron Inn’s tired automatic doors and across a lobby which would have benefited from a complete makeover at the turn of the century, if not earlier. Here, the aroma wafting off the Borrachas Sea combined with that of ancient furniture, carpeting whose original color was lost to history and walls impregnated by decades of neglect, giving birth to a fusty odor oddly apt for the establishment’s rundown atmosphere.

  A bearded man with sagging jowls and sad eyes looked up from the reception desk and watched them approach. His slightly unkempt appearance, casual clothes, and aura of existential fatigue fit the surroundings to a tee.

  “My name is Edgar. Can I help you?” He asked in a low, almost lethargic voice.

  “A room for the night.”

  “Then you’re in luck. I offer rooms for the night, the week, or the month. One bed or two?”

  “Depends on the size of your beds.”

  Edgar gave the Marine and his partner an owlish stare.

  “I think you’ll be satisfied with the size of our beds.” He named a per night price and asked, “How will you be paying?”

  Decker dropped a few cred chips on his desk.

  “One night, no questions asked or answered.”

  “Avoiding questions is the house’s specialty. No names, no pack drill.” When Decker gave him a hard look, Edgar shrugged. “You seem like someone with a military background.” He swept up the chips and pocketed them, tapped a screen embedded in the desk, then said. “Room five-oh-one. I keyed the lock to your faces. Enjoy your stay.”

  Edgar’s eyes turned back to the reader in his lap before they took a single step toward the lift.

  “Not an over
ly obsequious character, is he?” Decker asked when the lift doors closed. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s tripping on something not quite legal.”

  “It’s still better than a chatty, overly inquisitive AI when you’re looking for a no-tell hotel.”

  The lobby’s particular scent didn’t extend to the fifth-floor hallway, nor room five-oh-one, which enjoyed the less than spectacular view of an office building between the hotel and the water’s edge. Decker gave the room and attached bath a once-over with his sensor while Talyn performed a visual check, then thumbed on the jamming function.

  “It’s clean,” he announced.

  “Ditto.”

  “Since I saw no one trying to tail us, I think we might have made a clean break.”

  “More than likely.”

  Decker shrugged off his jacket, placed his blaster and knife on one of the night tables, and kicked off his boots.

  “Since it seems like we’re about to enjoy a rare night without worrying about work finding us, how about a little game of spy who loves me?”

  **

  A female version of Edgar sat behind the reception desk early the next morning — gray, worn-out, and disinterested. She didn’t look up as Decker and Talyn crossed the lobby and left, never to return.

  The sea’s aroma seemed no fresher in the golden glow of Cimmeria’s rising sun than it did the previous evening. Native avians, searching for sea creatures lured to the water’s surface by human activity, circled ceaselessly overhead, calling out to each other with extended chirps that seemed alien to their ears.

  Longshore workers, many munching on sandwiches and carrying steaming coffee cups, ambled along the water’s edge, preparing for another day of work loading and offloading the automated cargo ships connecting settlements strung out along the southern shores of Cimmeria’s northern continent and the north shore of Cimmeria’s southern continent. Thanks to their vaguely disreputable appearance, no one gave Decker and Talyn a second glance while they searched for a restaurant offering breakfast this early in the morning.

  “Is it wrong to feel relieved I’m no longer fettered by my true name, rank, and serial number, and the legal restrictions that come with them?” The Marine asked.