by Rick Partlow
He could have been any report-pushing Fleet functionary, but that was an Intelligence uniform, and as near as I remembered, the only General in Fleet Intelligence was the one commanding it.
“General Antonin Murdock,” Mother said with an indicative nod. “Head of Space Fleet Intelligence. He’s a man who can’t be bought, and Andre probably already has a plan to deal with him when the time is right. I need you to give him the location of the Predecessor cache and brief him on everything you know.”
“Why me?” I asked her, frowning. “Wouldn’t it be better if you went to him personally?”
“He knows who I am,” she pointed out. “He wouldn’t believe me.”
“And why the hell would he believe me?”
“Because he knows who you are, too, Randall Munroe.” The tone was slightly mocking, but the look on her face was deadly serious. “During the war, he commanded and was responsible for the creation of a covert action unit called Special Operations Group Omega. You might know them better by their unofficial nickname: the Glory Boys.”
I felt my mouth drop open and made an effort to close it. I did know the Glory Boys. I’d worked with two of their operators during the final battle to free Demeter, and then again during the invasion of the Tahni homeworld that ended the war. And both times, one of those two had been Roger West, the man I’d known as Cowboy, the liaison between me and Andre Damiani.
“Murdock doesn’t know about West,” I murmured.
“He will when you tell him,” she corrected me. Then a look passed across her face, a slight softening of the stone-cold-bitch expression she wore as a matter of course. “Son…if you do this, you’ll be crossing the Rubicon.”
I nodded. “I need to trust you to do something for me.”
“Sophia and Cesar,” she guessed. “I can put a full-time guard on them, or I can evac them both somewhere safe until all this is over.”
“If she’ll leave, get them out,” I decided. “You can tell her I said it was the smart move.” I caught her eye. “And you have to do it in person. She won’t believe it if you’re not there.”
“I know I’m not your favorite person,” Mom said, the corner of her mouth curling upward in the understatement, “but even when things were at their worst between us, I didn’t want to see you hurt, because you were the only family I cared about. I told myself I did all that I did because I’d let you see too much of the underside of my business, that I couldn’t let you spread that information around. But the truth was, I didn’t want to let you join the military because I couldn’t bear the thought of you dying somewhere by yourself and me never seeing you again.”
She came off the table and reached out a hand hesitantly, laying it on my shoulder with tenderness I hadn’t believed she was capable of.
“Cesar is my flesh and blood, and Sophia is his mother,” she declared. “I’ll go there myself and make sure they’re safe. You have my word.”
I didn’t move, didn’t speak for a full ten seconds, just looked into her eyes like I could judge her soul through them.
“I want us to be family,” I admitted finally, speaking softly, quietly. “I want to trust you to do this because I believe that you love me and you value my wife and son as human beings. I honestly hope to God that’s the truth, because I want it to be, because you’re still my mother.”
My voice hardened along with my face. “But I can’t know that. I can’t know that you’re still not someone who’s incapable of acting except out of self-interest and self-involvement, not yet. So, just in case what I fear is more accurate than what I hope, I want to tell you something. If I live through all this and find out that you allowed any harm to come to Sophia or Cesar, either by action or inaction…” I felt my lip curl away from my teeth in an unconscious snarl, felt her hand slide off my arm as her face paled in the realization of who, exactly, I’d become, and what she was dealing with. “I don’t care how many layers of security you have, or what hole you crawl into, I will find you.
“And even if it’s the last action I take in this life, I’ll kill you.”
***
The great thing about spaceport towns is that the bars are always open. They have to be; most of the patrons are working on some other time zone, and it’s usually not worth it to synch your personal clock to any particular part of whatever planet you’re on unless you plan on staying long-term.
Despite the fact that it wasn’t even noon yet, the Lost Horizon bar and grill in Sanctuary wasn’t just open, it was bustling. Commercial spacers, transitory military personnel and scientific research staff and locals who worked a late shift all took shelter from the unwelcome daylight in its darkened recesses, drawn by its reputation. The place was unpretentious and sparsely decorated, yet it had been the most popular watering hole on Hermes since a decade or so after the planet was settled. One of the draws was that they’d never succumbed to the temptation of using automated drink dispensers or server-bots or food processing machinery in the place of real, live, human bartenders, wait-staff and cooks.
I’d never got a chance to visit the place before the war, but since Bobbi and Sanders both lived in Sanctuary and we’d wound up recruiting a lot of our past and current team members from the Hermes colony, the Lost Horizon had become a sort of unofficial gathering place for all of us at the end of a mission, before we went our separate ways. When I’d left with Thiong’o, I’d told Victor and Kurt to wait for me at the bar; I was their ride back to Demeter. I could see them across the length of the place when I stepped inside, the “airlock” style entrance allowing my eyes to adjust before I entered the dim lighting of the interior. The two were hard to miss in a crowd, but as I got closer, I was surprised to see Bobbi and Sanders sitting with them at a high-top table near the bar. They were sharing a very large plate of gimbap and an even larger pitcher of some sort of dark ale.
“Hey boss!” Sanders said, grinning and saluting me with his glass. “I was wondering if you were going to show up or if Vic and Kurt were going to have to walk home…”
“I’m glad you two are here,” I said, nodding to him and Bobbi as I stepped up to their table. I glanced around. If my mother was to be believed, I was shielded from drones and other remote surveillance at the moment, but not from good old-fashioned eaves-dropping. No one seemed to be close enough to listen the natural way, and I figured the buzz of conversation from the crowd should be enough protection from passive sound-enhancement gear. I sat down at the last remaining stool and leaned into the midst of them.
“I think we all knew this arrangement was going to end someday,” I said, just loud enough for the four of them to hear me. “Today’s that someday.”
Sanders nodded slowly, always the most forethoughtful of us. Victor and Kurt shared a sharp glance with each other before turning back to me with matching grim expressions. Bobbi showed no reaction whatsoever, just kept chewing her food with an impassive look on her face.
When she swallowed the bite, she spoke casually, as if we were in the middle of the conversation. “What’s the op, Munroe?”
I chuckled. Bobbi was like the sea, always there and always constant. I quickly and quietly filled them in on my meeting with Mom and my intentions for the future.
“I can’t guarantee they won’t come after you guys when I’m gone,” I admitted, “so if any of you want, I can take you along on the Nomad and drop you someplace where you can lose yourself for a while.” I shrugged. “I’m sorry I can’t offer more than that, but it’s all I have time for.” To be honest, I was worried about Vilberg and the others, too, but they hadn’t been with the team as long, so I was hoping Calderon wouldn’t suspect them of collaborating with me.
“Don’t be such an asshole, Munroe,” Victor snapped with uncharacteristic harshness, refilling his glass from the pitcher. I frowned in confusion and that seemed to make him even more disgusted. He shook his head and took a drink.
“We’re going with you, obviously,” Kurt supplied, looking at me like I’d sa
id something incredibly stupid.
“Me too, Boss,” Sanders said. He stroked at his short beard, maybe thoughtful or maybe picking crumbs out of it, I wasn’t sure. “I figured this was coming at some point. Already made my decision.”
I looked over to Bobbi and she rolled her eyes, stuffing another rice and seaweed roll in her mouth to avoid having to state the obvious.
“It’s not like any of us have anything serious to hold us down,” Sanders expanded, with what might have been a tinge of wistfulness in his voice. “Us or any of the others on the team.” I nodded, knowing it was true but feeling a bit uncomfortable with it.
“Why is that?” I wondered, half to myself.
“If you hadn’t already been with Sophia before all this started,” Victor asked me, “would you have gone out of your way to find someone to have a relationship with, knowing what we do for a living? Would you put them through that kind of fear and doubt every time you had to leave if you had a choice about it?”
I didn’t answer because I didn’t have to. I hissed out a breath, feeling a load of guilt settling in on top of what I already had for what I was putting Sophia and Cesar through.
“Maybe, after this,” Sanders mused, draining what was left in his glass between words, “we can all try to have something like a normal life, huh?”
“Fuck that,” Bobbi muttered, eyes looking down at the plastic surface of the table. “I don’t want a normal life. Normal people are boring as shit.”
“Thanks for sticking with me, guys,” I said, feeling the slight break in my voice near the end and not trying to fight it.
“You’re the best commanding officer I ever had,” Sanders cracked, smiling lopsidedly at the joke.
“I’m not a damned officer,” I replied, grinning back. “I work for a living.”
Even Bobbi laughed at that and I felt the tension slip out of us all just a little bit.
“Three hours, guys,” I said, sobering. “Get whatever you need and meet me at the ship by then. I have to go make arrangements with the port authority, then send a message home.” I made sure they all met my eyes before I went on. “Be fucking careful. Calderon’s a lot of things, but stupid isn’t one of them.”
Bobbi snickered at that and I glared at her balefully.
“He sees you two,” I pointed to her and Sanders, “getting ready to head out, he might twig to what’s going on. And whether you think he’s stupid or not, he’s a ruthless son of a bitch who wouldn’t hesitate to kill any one of us.”
Bobbi shrugged acknowledgment.
“You’ve got me there,” she admitted. “Three hours. We’ll meet you at the ship.”
Chapter Four
The spaceport at Sanctuary always seemed huge to me, probably because I’d grown too accustomed to the packed-dirt landing fields out in the Pirate Worlds. The buildfoam walls that divided the individual bays towered twenty meters high, a Brobdingnagian rat-maze constructed a few kilometers outside the city, shining white in the afternoon glare of Proxima. The administration buildings looked tiny by comparison, an afterthought squeezed into the gaps between the bays despite the fact that some of them were three stories high. Maintenance tractors and service vehicles trundled in and out of narrow garages, weaving carefully through the constant crowd of people leaving and entering the port, shuffling from one end to another like ants in a colony.
I wiped sweat from my neck as I walked from the Port Authority building towards the covered walkways of the landing bays. It was unseasonably hot for autumn in this part of Hermes, and I wished I could take off my jacket without displaying my gun for all the world to see. Yeah, I had a permit for it, but that didn’t mean I wouldn’t get arrested and questioned for a couple hours if I started flashing it around; this was Hermes, not a periphery colony and certainly not the Pirate Worlds. Usually, that made it feel safe for me, a nice break after a mission before I headed home. This time, I wanted more than anything to get out of here.
I had more than an hour until the others were supposed to arrive, but I still had to record a message for Sophia and I wanted to do that at the ship instead of using a commercial office. I could have just recorded a video on my ‘link, but I wanted somewhere quiet and private, where I didn’t have to worry about being overheard by one of the hundreds of people crowding the sidewalks here.
And, honestly, there was that whole part about wanting to get out of here again. Being in the ship meant we could leave as soon as the others arrived. I just had a feeling that every minute I stayed now was one minute too long.
I let out a relieved breath as I moved under the shade of the pedestrian walkway that wound its way through the intricate labyrinth of the port facilities and felt the ambient temperature drop about five degrees as a cool breeze coursed through the man-made tunnel. I flapped the collar of my jacket to try and let the cool air get to the back of my neck…which was why my hands were nowhere near my pistol when I felt the unyielding metal of a gun barrel pressing into my back.
“Keep walking. Don’t turn around.” I didn’t have to. The voice was Calderon’s.
“What the hell are you doing?” I snapped, starting to turn anyway as I bluffed righteous indignation.
My motion was intercepted by a strong hand on my arm and if I hadn’t been surprised by Calderon holding a gun on me, I was definitely shocked to see Peyton Renzor walking beside me on my right, one hand clenched tightly on my shoulder, the other stuffed inside a pocket. I looked to the left and found Adriana DiStephano on that side, her eyes steely and her face expressionless.
“Have you call gone nuts?” I asked, eyes going back and forth between the two of them.
“I said keep walking and don’t turn around,” Calderon repeated, his mouth very close to my ear, the gun barrel jabbing me painfully over my kidney. “If you make a scene, I’ll shoot you. If you try to fight or go for your gun, I’ll shoot you. If you try to run, I’ll shoot you. And when the police come, I’ll simply have them call Monsieur Damiani’s contacts in the Patrol, who will assure them you’re a wanted criminal and I’m working as a special agent in their employee.”
“What the fuck, Calderon?” I demanded, but started walking slowly again. I searched the faces of the people passing by us in either direction, but they all seemed absorbed with their own thoughts or ‘link conversations and none even gave us a second look. “Does Cowboy know what kind of shit you’re pulling here?”
“You can stop pretending you don’t know what’s going on, Munroe,” Calderon snapped. “West doesn’t trust you any more than I do. That’s why I’ve had you under drone observation since you left the safe-house.”
“And what did your spy-bots show you, Alberto?” I ground out the question, hoping Mom had been good to her word.
“Not a damn thing. Which is exactly how I know you’ve betrayed us.”
I laughed sharply, wanting to turn around again but thinking better of it.
“That sounds nuts even for you,” I commented.
“After every single mission for the last two years,” he went on, ignoring my jab, “you’ve gone to the Lost Horizon to have a drink with Sanders, Taylor and the Simak brothers before you’ve lifted off. One drink to toast to your old pilot, Kane. This time, the drones showed you sitting in a park three kilometers outside the city until you headed back to the port.”
I felt sweat on my upper lip.
“I needed to think,” I said. “I have some personal shit going on and I wanted to be alone.”
“I could have believed that,” Calderon admitted. “Except that I sent Nemeroff to that park to check on you…and you weren’t there.”
Shit. Mom, you’re such a fucking idiot.
“It takes some serious tech to spoof surveillance drones like that. Jam them, sure, anyone can do that. But to convince them that you’re there when you’re not, to block you off from being seen somewhere else…that’s bleeding edge, and it takes big money. And who do we both know with big money and a serious interest in gummi
ng up the works for Monsieur Damiani?”
That all showed a depressingly intelligent amount of deductive reasoning on Calderon’s part and, walking down that passage with a gun shoved in my back, I couldn’t come up with a good argument to counter it. I was about to make the suicide play and go for my gun and hope that jacked reflexes and a good nanite repair suite would keep me from getting killed. And then I heard a voice inside my head, coming over my mastoid implant.
“Get down!”
I acted without thinking, stomping down on Renzor’s shin to shake loose his hold on my arm, then throwing myself off to the side and covering my head. Even with my eyes closed and hands over my ears, I could see the flash of the concussion grenade and hear its snare-drum cacophony like it had gone off inside my eardrums, loud enough that I could barely make out the screams of those unlucky enough to get caught in the blast. I didn’t wait around for my hearing to return; my eyes were working fine and I could see Thiong’o emerging from the doorway of a public restroom, one hand filled with his pulse pistol, the other waving for me to come to him.
I reached for my pistol, but there were stunned civilians staggering between me and Calderon’s group and I didn’t want to wait around to see how timely the police response would be. I let it go and followed Thiong’o through the crowd, still hearing nothing but a muted roar, a few stray spots floating over my vision, hiding the image of Alexi Nemeroff until he’d already stepped out of the throng of panicked, running civilians and shot Thiong’o in the face.
I didn’t hear the discharge of the pistol, just saw the flare of the igniting rocket engine as the round crossed the five meters between them; then another, brighter flare as the warhead of the bullet erupted in a spear of plasma as big as my pinky finger. I tasted the blood as it splattered in an arc all around Thiong’o, and I saw in my peripheral vision the open, screaming mouths of the witnesses. It looked fake, I thought not for the first time, when someone’s head came apart like that. It looked like some sort of special effect in a virtual reality simulation, or maybe the inner workings of one of the pleasure dolls they rented by the hour in brothels on Belial station. It didn’t look like something that had ever been alive.