by E A Wicklund
It didn’t take long before Aja approached Braunfels. It was small, having a population of five-thousand and it served as a distribution center for local farmers. Tall buildings were few. Instead, colorfully painted warehouses and grain silos dotted the landscape. Such towns were usually quiet with little ground car traffic, but a picturesque banner stretched across the road, advertising Braunfels’ annual Raspberry Festival. Much of the populace would fill the narrow sidewalks, enjoying the small, rustic downtown.
What Aja witnessed was no celebration..
Ground cars and sliders lay strewn about the streets, some burning, some still smoking. Shattered glass from building windows littered the sidewalks. The worst part was the bodies. Perhaps one hundred people, from infants to adults, lay in large puddles of blood and body parts. A few had been doused with fuel and set afire including a family of four, still holding each other in death after they burned.
Aja felt a little piece of her die as she witnessed the carnage. She had been the cause of an individual’s death before, but not of whole towns. Emotions threatened to overwhelm her as she passed sight after sight of horror. She steeled her spine, reminding herself that she had a mission to complete. She needed to find the courier.
The courier’s transponder was crude and tiny, something that might be overlooked even in a hospital. As a further security feature, it only sent out a periodic ping. Such small transmissions were very hard to detect and nearly impossible to localize.
To help with friendly tracking, Aja’s Zephyr system could trigger a reply from the transponder on command. The downside was the transponder relied on body heat for an energy source. If the courier was dead and his body cold, it might not operate.
She was in luck. An answering ping sounded in her Zephyr. It gave her hope he was still alive. Provided with a direction by the answering ping she climbed out of the Martinsyde and walked down a silent street littered with corpses. The stench of death and burnt flesh assailed her nose as she moved through the Faustian tableau.
She scanned the streets carefully, looking for any hint of danger as whoever perpetrated the horror might still linger. The transceiver continued pinging and receiving answering signals that diminished in strength even as she approached. That meant the courier was probably wounded and fading fast. She began running, hoping to reach him in time. It seemed certain she was getting close by a change in the ping’s tone.
Aja arrived at a small slider, still burning fiercely. Smoldering footprints led away from it into a ditch beside the road. Aja looked down upon the half-charred body of the courier. It wasn’t body heat that kept the transponder operating—it was fire.
She poked through the body, legs and pelvis crumbling to ash as she touched it. Strangely, the courier’s upper body and his clothes still appeared intact. Though the body was long dead, this part still felt warm. Wicking action, caused the body to continue burning inside the skin without flames present to burn the clothing. She had seen this before, but the effect still creeped her out.
Clearly, the courier walked away from his slider while his legs were on fire. People react unpredictably to shock and pain, sometimes doing inexplicable things. It seemed the flames went out after he succumbed to shock. Aja avoided looking at the grimace of agony on the man’s face as she searched his clothing.
At last she found it in the breast pocket of his jacket; ordinary fire could never have affected the little metal box and its important cargo. She placed the box in her pocket and stood. The courier took a chance working with IS-3. He knew it was dangerous business. At any time, he might’ve been killed, or worse, captured and interrogated. How could anyone have known he would die, not by enemy action, but by being in the wrong place at the wrong time? And what sort of lunatics committed this atrocity in Braunfels? To what gain?
A sudden shout brought her head up.
The man approached with a hunting rifle, stumbling towards her from ten yards away. The gun was cheap and common, a design hundreds of years old, but still deadly if wielded correctly.
He aimed it at her chest, choking with sobs, as he shambled across the street towards her. Tears streaked his sooty face. Blood coated his hands and soaked his shirt in a horizontal line. Aja guessed he’d recently held a body in his arms.
“You!” he shouted. “You bastards did this.”
Aja held her hands open and out to her sides. The man didn’t look like any killer, but who could guess what someone in extreme grief would do? “Wait, I just got here. Who did this?”
“You people. You Elysians. You couldn’t leave us alone, could you?”
He could easily identify her as Elysian, just as she could identify him as Madkhali. But not by skin color, or facial features. Both peoples belonged to the same ethnic mixture, all stirred up together from Earth’s originals. Still, the difference was striking. She was fully grown and well fed, but his poor Madkhali diet produced a frame too short and musculature too underdeveloped to be Elysian.
“What happened here?” She pointed to the courier. “Look. That’s my co-worker. I’ve lost someone too.”
The man spared a look. His weapon lowered a little. “I saw him die. I’m sorry.”
“Who did this?” Aja allowed a little hysteria into her voice.
“Elysians,” shrieked the man. His gun barrel snapped back up again. “Your jack-booted bastards did it.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Your soldiers! Hundreds of them. They smashed everything.” He shuffled towards her, now meters away, eyes bloodshot from hours of sobbing. “They murdered Fatima. She was only fourteen. And after…and after…” He choked on his own tears. “They kept on doing it.”
Aja wanted to cry with him. She wanted to take him up in her arms and show him all was not evil in the world. Her mother had raised her to be compassionate, to think of others, and help them in their time of need. “Good and evil are only made by people, not gods,” she had taught young Aja. “Choose to be one who makes good in the universe.”
“I’m so sorry,” said Aja.
“You will be,” shouted the man. “Tobruk was right. You hate us all. You aren’t satisfied with killing us. You have to…” He lost the words in his anguish.
The anger that she had kept leashed so far began to bubble up.That damned Tobruk had poisoned this man’s mind and millions of others like him and for what? So Tobruk’s wealthy patrons in the DPM could force a secession to gain more planets and riches for themselves. Madkhalis lived far better lives in the ESE, but now Tobruk worked to make them suffer, to feel belittled, to feel oppressed just to satisfy the avarice of rich men. This wealthy elite, so far away, could not benefit from happy people. They needed tortured souls, and torture them they would until the pawns in this awful game lost everything.
Aja wanted to help this broken soul, but another named McCray needed her badly. The Captain also suffered. She thought she knew what was in the data stick. It most likely absolved McCray, but it might not. Either way, McCray would feel defeated until he knew for sure. She had to get the dead courier’s package to him.
“Who is Tobruk?” she said, trying to buy time.
“Don’t pretend you don’t know,” he screamed, squeezing his eyes closed.
While blinded by his pain, Aja found the moment she needed. She leaped six meters before the man’s eyes opened again. Likely, the last thing he saw was the heel of her hand streaking towards his face. She connected with a tiny spot in his jaw at a precise angle. Only the violence of a heavyweight boxer could have produced a similar effect The man collapsed like a sack of potatoes, unconscious in a single blow.
She placed the man’s rifle back into his hands and walked back to the Martinsyde. As she drew closer, her Zephyr system reconnected with the more powerful comms system on board the slider. Even her Zephyr system could not reach anything in orbit, but it could if linked with the more powerful transceiver in the Martinsyde.
“FlashJack, Flashjack, come in please,” said Ando’s voi
ce.
Aja had hoped Ando wouldn’t need to use IS-3 protocols. Concern creeping in, she said, “This is FlashJack, go ahead Aerie.”
“Good. There you are. Okay…” He paused, obviously consulting his notes. “There’s Quetzalcoatl’s approaching the Barn. I mean—”
“What?”
“Oh, crap. What’s the code for that? Hang on.”
Ando was an expert comms operator, but trying to use a very different code system obviously had him flustered. She stepped into the slider and closed the door. “Just send your traffic, Aerie.”
“It’s not good. It’s—”
Aja groaned. Quetzalcoatl was code for hostile enemy forces, but that made no sense. If what he had to say was even remotely related to that she didn’t have time for Ando to pore through the book. “Just say it in the clear, Aerie. No names,” she reminded him.
“Copy that, Flashjack. There are signs of a major riot in the town of Braunfels. More serious than usual.”
“I can confirm that, Aerie. There’s bodies everywhere here.”
“Mind it! It gets worse, FlashJack. We believe a Madkhali mercenary group called the Xerxes Regiment is behind it.”
Aja gritted her teeth and snarled. She knew them. They were better described as terrorists, rather than professional fighting men. Looking around at the horrible destruction, their presence explained the insanity in Braunfels. But what the hell were they doing in Elysium territory? Sending soldiers was bad enough, but even landing mercenaries was an act of war. Had the Madkhali government lost its collective mind? “Where are they, Aerie?”
“They are at Arcoplex right now.”
For a wild moment Aja found herself calculating her chances of calling in local military units to stop the Xerxes. With their location known surely it shouldn’t be too difficult, but how quickly would they arrive? No, she would at least start the retribution for Braunfels lone wolf-style, the way she always had.
“What are they doing now?”
“They’re posing as Elysium Marines. It’s possible the staff there is unaware of the ruse. I can’t reach Arcoplex directly to warn them. They aren’t responding. And FlashJack?”
“Yes?”
“The Captain is in Arcoplex.”
Aja felt her blood go cold. McCray was in serious trouble and she had to get to him. She jammed her foot into the accelerator. The Martinsyde roared off, engines screaming.
“Keep trying to reach him, Aerie. You’ve got to warn him.”
“I’ll keep trying. We’re sending an extraction team, but first we need to leave orbit. We have an errand to run.”
Aja felt her blood boiling. Leave orbit? Now? “What the hell does that mean? Where are you going?”
“I’m about to lose you, FlashJack. Don’t believe everything you hear. Aerie out.”
Aja wondered if they had all lost their minds. But it hardly mattered.
Xerxes Regiment be damned. She was getting the Captain out of there, and then she would make those bastards pay for what they did in Braunfels, even if it took slitting every single mercenary’s throat to do it.
Chapter 14
Anderson led McCray into the Security Office. Two bored-looking guards presided over an elaborate control panel that looked like it belonged on a military shuttle. Four large holoscreens on the wall were divided up into sixteen views of locations in the facility.
“That’s a pretty complicated looking panel,” said McCray. It never hurt to give amateurs a little ego stroke.
“Yes it is,” Anderson replied. The red status lights in the room played across his oily, pale skin. “Don’t feel bad. It takes months even for professionals to figure it out and use it competently.”
McCray figured he understood how eighty percent of it worked at a glance. He couldn’t help noticing the orbital comms feed had been placed into standby. That unscratchable itch he felt started getting unbearable.
He switched his gaze to the screens. One showed the external gates. The protesters were still out there. The Elysium Marines, the three-hundred strong escort, stood in a large formation just outside the front door. The original group of protestors, still waving signs, stood on either side of the marine formation.
What bothered McCray was that no one among the protesters nor among the marines worked to keep the two groups separated. Normally, protesters lunged at military men or at least pointed accusing fingers and shook their signs. It seemed almost as though they worked in concert, but that hardly made any sense.
Behind the marines, a far larger group of about five-hundred Madkhali civilians offered up a desultory protest. Curiously, not one female stood among them. In Madkhal, women didn’t participate in politics, but here in Elysium, even female Madkhali emigres, attended politics with more fervor than the men. The lack of women triggered another alarm bell in his mind. This group appeared to be young or middle-aged men. None of them shouted very much, yet they watched intensely, as if waiting for something to happen.
McCray pointed to the view of the marines. “Would you zoom in on this group? I’d like a closer look.”
The guard looked to Anderson and received a nod. The view changed, and he could see the details of individual faces through their visors. Something didn’t look right to him, but he couldn’t quite pin it down.
“Shift to the back of the formation?”
The view changed again. Some of the men shifted in the ranks, no longer at parade rest. Some turned and talked to their neighbors in the formation. McCray had spent a lot of time around marines during his career. Most of it with Colonel Nguyen and his training cadre, while avoiding terminal boredom on the beach. Marines were an elite group of fighting men and women. They were fanatic about discipline and appearance. Shuffling around in the ranks like schoolboys would have incurred the wrath of the entire company.
This was easily the sloppiest group he’d ever seen. And there! Did that man have a beard? No real marine ever wore a beard. Other services allowed it, but not the Marines. He knew at last what that nagging itch was and it meant Warden Grey stood dead in the middle of danger. These weren’t marines at all, and anyone pretending to be them, especially while armed, did so with nefarious intent.
McCray made a quick call via Iris to Grey. “Warden!” he shouted. “Stop the transfer. Those are not Elysium Marines!” As he spoke, he turned to a different display where ten of the Sciroccos were herded into a line before the wall.
“What do you mean?” Grey said. McCray could see him holding his wrist up to answer the call. “They have the paperwork. Relax, Captain. As soon as we transfer Mallouk to them, we can discuss your concerns.”
McCray didn’t answer right away. Anderson suddenly had a pistol aimed at McCray’s head. “Drop the call,” said Anderson. “I have no problems blowing out your brains right now.”
McCray looked at the guards manning the security console. One of them just smirked. The other ignored McCray and Anderson, as if they disagreed on pizza toppings.
“Fine. Call dropped. Now, explain why you’ve got a gun on me.”
McCray’s Iris system was quite advanced. The super-high tech appeared in all the action holoflicks, but most civilians had never used anything like his. What wasn’t in most holovids was the ability to speak without verbalizing. McCray’s call hadn’t been dropped at all.
“That was a sneaky trick, setting up a decoy shuttle.” Anderson’s mouth twisted into a victorious snigger. “Fortunately, my friends out there know all about it. You just lost a high-value prisoner. Too bad.”
“Are you hearing this?” said McCray in his mind. Grey could hear everything McCray thought and everything Anderson said.
“That little bastard,” cursed Grey. “What’s Anderson think he’s doing? Hang on, McCray.”
McCray could see on the screen where the ten Scirocco crewmen were forced down on their knees. Two drones with professional-grade holocams hovered close by.
“What the hell is this, Bramani?” shouted Grey at the appa
rent marine commander. “What are you doing with these men?”
Bramani just ignored Grey and stepped to the side. He barked a command and ten of the faux marines stepped forward. They raised their weapons at the now panicking Sciroccos.
“A firing squad?” shrieked Grey. “Are you mad? Stop this at once!”
“Shut up, old man,” Bramani said. He pointed up at the drones. “You’re spoiling this historic moment.”
McCray spoke silently to Grey, “You see this is a farce, Grey. You can’t stop this execution. Just make sure they don’t get Mallouk. Somehow, he’s the key to all of this.”
“You’re right, McCray,” he whispered. He pulled the nearest guard to him and spoke quietly, “Hide Mallouk somewhere. Don’t let these bastards stop you. And listen carefully, if you see that traitor, Anderson, shoot him. That’s an order.”
“The Egalitarian Stars of Elysium has voted unanimously,” bellowed Bramani. He didn’t face the Sciroccos. Instead, he faced the cameras, practically preening before them. “You have been found guilty of practicing the illegal religion of the Church of Madkhal. The punishment for this crime is death. Let this be a message to all Madkhalis in Elysium space. Run for your lives. We’re coming for you. Firing Squad...fire!”
The far too powerful military weapons, intended for armored opponents, obliterated the bodies of the Sciroccos, showering the walls with blood, intestines, and bone. Bits of the walls fell away, shattered by the powerful weapons.
When the shooting stopped, Grey screamed at the men, “This is madness!”
Bramani whirled on Grey. “Where is Mallouk? He should be here by now.”
“Play along with him,” said McCray, offering all he could to save him. “Tell him you’ll check.”
Grey wasn’t listening, overcome with fury. “You’ll never have him. I’ve just sent him away. I’m reporting this…this massacre to the real military.” He spun on his heel and marched towards the front door.
He only took three steps before his chest exploded, decimated by a single hypervelocity round.