by Rick Partlow
“Boss?” The voice was Vilberg’s, and I glanced back and saw that he’d taken the last seat in the cockpit, a fold-down couch set in the bulkhead. “Can I ask you something?”
“You saved my ass, Vilberg,” I told him. “You can ask me just about anything.”
He seemed to struggle with the words and I didn’t know if it was the acceleration or the confusion causing it.
“Why the hell was Calderon trying to kill you?”
I snorted as much of a laugh as I could manage under the circumstances.
“That,” I admitted, “is a long story.”
Chapter Five
“Where the hell are we?” Kurt asked, staring at the computer-enhanced and lightened image of the cold, dark moon looming ahead of us.
“I’ve been all around this system back when I was in the Marines,” I said, “but I’ve never been way out here before.”
I’d followed Mom’s instructions, dropping out of T-space in the 82 Eridani system as far out as the gravito-inertial node would allow, and then sending a coded message to a dead drop using the Instell ComSat at the wormhole jumpgate. The reply had taken twenty hours on top of the six hour lightspeed turnaround from being about a billion kilometers away from the ComSat. When it had come, it had told us to head to the system’s furthest planet, an ice giant a bit smaller than Neptune, and then follow the navigational beacon to land on the largest moon. That had taken another Transition to avoid weeks of sublight travel, then four more hours of maneuvering around the tricky orbital mechanics of the ice giant, but now we were here. Wherever here was.
“The beacon’s taking us down on that plateau.” Bobbi pointed at a bare, flat spot on the hemisphere of the moon that was facing us. The rest of the surrounding terrain was wavy and broken from geological processes I couldn’t imagine and didn’t want to take the time to…
Shit.
I’d thought about it for just a second and now I knew exactly how the moon’s surface had wound up that way. My headcomp had looked it up on the ship’s database using my implanted receiver and my ‘link; and it wasn’t as if I had just read the information out of a file, it was more like I’d always known it and it had just occurred to me as a random memory.
I’m never going to get used to this shit, I thought, shaking my head.
“I don’t see a damned thing down there,” Kurt said. “Not on visual, thermal, spectrographic analysis, nothing. Just the beacon and it’s pretty short-range, too.”
I didn’t comment, just set the ship’s autopilot to do as it was told and slaved it to the navigational beacon. It took us down quickly, not sparing the reaction mass or the g’s of deceleration, and the smooth, glassy surface of the plateau rushed up at the ship precipitously in the exterior cameras. The moon had no atmosphere to speak of, so the wings and the turbojets were useless and the ship was forced to descend nose-up and drive bottle-down, with the deceleration and the gravity pushing our cushioned seats heavily into our backs.
As we approached within a few hundred meters of the surface, I switched us over to the belly jets, feeding the ship’s limited supply of liquid hydrogen reaction mass through the reactor in place of the air that usually did that job and heating it up to accelerate it. The ship levelled out and landed on the belly gear, settling easily in the quarter-strength gravity of the lifeless rock, and I quickly shut down the thrusters. We had enough stored reaction mass to lift back off and not much more, so I hoped the next place we were headed had an atmosphere.
Stars shone across the sky above a ragged canyon at the edge of our view. It was night on this side of the moon and neither 82 Eridani nor the ice giant were visible from where we’d landed.
“Well, here we are,” I announced, popping the release on my seat restraints. “Now what?”
Then the horizon began to drop in our view screen.
“What the fuck?” Kurt exclaimed.
Behind me, I could hear Sanders and maybe Vilberg cursing as well, heard a thump as one of them banged against the bulkhead with a sudden shift of balance. They’d been heading for the cockpit when we started descending.
“It’s an elevator,” Bobbi declared, nodding at the layers of rock passing by in front of the nose cameras.
The rock gave way to BiPhase Carbide rails and I realized she was right; we were on some sort of oversized hangar elevator, heading down into some facility concealed under the surface of the moon.
“Whatever’s down here,” Sanders said from the entrance to the cockpit, staring at the meters of rock and metal we were passing through, “someone doesn’t want anyone to know about it.”
I flipped through the views from the exterior cameras and found what I was looking for on the one mounted on the ship’s spine. Above us, a roof was closing, undoubtedly camouflaged to appear like the rest of the smooth rock where we’d landed.
“How far down are we going?” Vilberg wondered. He and Victor were standing next to Sanders in the cockpit hatchway, their eyes frozen on the display.
The words were barely out of Vilberg’s mouth before we jolted to an abrupt halt, rocking the ship on her landing carriage and sending those of us standing off balance again. On the screen, we could see a brightly lit underground hangar, occupied by the Nomad and one other craft, an interstellar courier that was about as small of a ship as you could squeeze a Teller-Fox warp unit and a fusion reactor into. Couriers were expensive, the toys of the Corporate Council elite…or very high-ranking military officers.
“About this far, I guess,” I replied drily. I motioned and the ones jammed into the cockpit hatchway backed out and let the rest of us through.
I was still linked to the ship’s computer remotely, so I could see the view from the nose camera on my contact lens display even as I walked back to the utility bay. There was a fire team approaching the ship out of a cargo entrance that led into the hangar; they were armored and carrying some sort of heavy, backpack-fed weapon that I didn’t recognize.
I hit the control to open the belly ramp anyway. What else could I do? We were pretty much trapped down here, and if they wanted to kill us, they could have blown us out of orbit a while ago. We’d left our weapons in their lockers for the same reason, and as I walked down the ramp to the polished rock floor of the hangar, I hoped everyone with me was smart enough to not make any sudden moves.
A tall, dark-skinned man led the fire team, unarmored, a pistol holstered at his waist his only visible weapon. He was dressed in the black utility fatigues of Fleet Intelligence and there was something familiar about him, a nagging memory I couldn’t shake.
He stopped ten meters away from the foot of the ship’s ramp and the fire-team halted a few meters back of that, spreading out carefully to cover us without sweeping him with their muzzles. Whatever they were carrying was an energy weapon of some kind, with a beam emitter that looked like it consisted of coiled electromagnets. I had a feeling that the armor built into my jacket wouldn’t do much against it.
“Are you Randall Munroe?” The tall man asked in a deep and sonorous voice that finally unlocked the memory I’d sought.
“You know I am,” I answered coolly. “And you know we’ve met before.”
The corners of his mouth turned up ever-so-slightly, and I had the impression that was the best I was going to get.
“Yes,” he admitted, “we have, though we weren’t introduced at the time. I’m Major M’Voba.”
“You were the senior field officer of the Glory Boys,” I said, not asking so much as making sure he knew I knew, “and I was just one Marine out of a whole platoon you were briefing, so that’s no surprise. I wasn’t on your ship on the trip to Demeter, anyway.”
It had been on an outpost much like this one, on another barren moon in another system. They’d flown our platoon in and dropped us off and we’d travelled the rest of the way to Demeter in Glory Boy stealth ships. I felt an irrational anger building inside me as I thought about the fact that of the ten Glory Boy commandos who’d gone on that m
ission, only two had died; of the Marines, I was the only survivor, and I’d been left for dead.
“I’m sorry about what happened on Demeter, Sgt. Munroe,” M’Voba said, as if he were reading my mind…or maybe just reading my face; I was never a good poker player. “We did our best to get your people out. The ship with those of your platoon who survived the ambush was the one we lost, along with two of my friends.”
“It was a goat fuck from the word go,” I admitted, shrugging the anger away. “Not your fault.”
He didn’t respond other than a curt nod, but I thought maybe I could see in those bottomless dark eyes a hint that it still bothered him, losing his friends that day, even after all these years.
“You wanted to speak to General Murdock.” He switched gears, getting down to business. “I’m here to take you to him.” His eyes flickered towards the group of us all gathered around the end of the ship’s boarding ramp. “Just you and your second-in-command,” he amended, gesturing towards Bobbi. “The rest of you will be escorted somewhere comfortable where you can wait for the results of the meeting.”
That last wasn’t a request, for all that it was delivered with impeccable politeness and civility. I looked back to the others and gestured to the armed guards.
“Go ahead and follow the nice, friendly fire-team, guys.” I said. “I’m sure we won’t be too long.”
“These guys must think we’re pretty fucking dangerous,” Victor commented, eyeing the heavy weapons.
That made M’Voba pause and he actually chuckled.
“Mr. Simak,” he said, “given what the few of you have accomplished over the last several years, I’d say it’s self-evident that you’re pretty fucking dangerous.”
The profanity sounded unnatural coming from M’Voba, like it might if a priest had said it, but it had the desired effect. Victor smiled and followed the leader of the half-squad as the others surrounded and escorted them off across the hangar and out the large cargo doors.
Bobbi and I went with M’Voba, in a direction perpendicular to theirs, towards a lift bank set in the far wall. His long legs ate up meters in powerful strides that the two of us nearly had to run to keep up with, even with the lighter gravity. The lift was darkly claustrophobic and almost recklessly fast; I felt my feet leave the floor as it ferried us downward into a lower level of this version of hell. How far down we went, I wasn’t sure since there was no visible display, but it stopped after about thirty seconds and the doors slid aside.
I squinted at the brightly lit corridor outside the lift, taking a second to let my eyes adjust before I followed M’Voba out. Down here, wherever “down here” was exactly, it could have passed for a normal military installation. Functionaries in black Intelligence uniforms meandered from office to office on one task or another, teleconferences visible on holotanks as doors to those rooms opened and closed. We passed a break room where normal-looking staff officers were drinking coffee and eating what might have been lunch depending on their schedule here. It all seemed very prosaic for a base no one had heard of, buried a couple hundred meters underground on a remote moon.
Bobbi didn’t seem fazed by any of it, taking it all in with a look of mild annoyance that only seemed to fade when she was actually getting shot at. I tried not to get caught up in the incongruity, concentrating instead on what I was going to say to this guy Murdock. I’d never met a General before, and Antonin Murdock wasn’t just any run-of-the-mill staff officer; he was practically a legend according to the files Mom had provided, that I’d audited on the flight from Hermes.
After the Battle for Mars, when the Tahni had caught us with our pants down and destroyed a good portion of our heavy cruisers, Admiral Sato had been elevated to run Space Fleet by President Jameson. Sato had totally revamped our military at the time, switching its emphasis from capital ships to the small, mobile missile cutters to take full advantage of the Transition drive. One of the other changes Sato had made, practically unnoticed at the time, was his elevation of what people called his wunderkinder, a group of officers who were swept into high positions despite their lower rank. Most had been Fleet Captains, but one had been a Marine Colonel who wound up as the head of the First Fleet Marine Reconnaissance Brigade, and the other had been an obscure Colonel in Intelligence named Antonin Murdock.
Most people didn’t know why he was promoted to General after the war and given command of the entire Fleet Intelligence Division, but I knew: he’d been responsible for creating the Glory Boys, the small group of augmented commandos who’d been indispensable in retaking Tahni-occupied colony worlds. Most people still didn’t know the Glory Boys had ever existed, which was a triumph of Murdock’s ability to keep a secret in a day when secrets just wouldn’t be kept.
If I hadn’t already seen his picture back on Hermes, I would have been disappointed with him when we stepped into his office. He wasn’t imposing and he wasn’t intimidating and nothing at all about his demeanor said to me that he was one of the most powerful men in the Commonwealth military. The office itself was fairly small and Spartan, with his cheap, plastic desk, a couple of cheap, plastic chairs and a coffee-maker in one corner and not much else.
“Sgt. Munroe,” Murdock said with a brusque nod, not getting up from his chair. “Sgt. Taylor.”
“General,” I responded, fighting an urge to salute. Bobbi remained silent, looking at him with something between respect and resentment.
“Sit down,” he ordered us. His voice was soft and his tone mild, but it was very clearly an order. We pulled out the chairs and did as we were told, but M’Voba stayed standing behind my right shoulder, which made me uncomfortable as hell.
“I know who you are, Sgt. Munroe,” Murdock informed me. “Patrice Damiani sent me a personal, confidential request to meet with you. Tell me why I should listen.”
“Patrice Damiani is my mother,” I told him; he might know or he might not, but I wanted to get it out of the way. He didn’t react either way. “When I was eighteen, I changed my name and my face to get away from her and join the Marines, so believe me when I say we don’t have much in common. One of the few things we do have in common is that neither of us want her brother taking over the Commonwealth government.”
“And how might he go about doing that?” M’Voba asked from behind me. I didn’t turn around to look at him because I knew he wanted me to, knew it was part of the show.
“A Corporate Council mineral scout named Kara McIntire found a Predecessor outpost with active technology. Mateo Gregorian got the location from her and tried to start a bidding war between Andre and my mother. Andre had other ideas and sent me and my squad after the DSI agent who’d retrieved the data. Andre Damiani knows where the outpost is and has access to Predecessor technology.”
Antonin Murdock was a very cool customer, I could tell; but that threw him. It was just a tick, an involuntary muscle spasm by his right eyes, but I recognized it and knew intuitively that it was the equivalent of a normal schlub screaming and tearing at his hair.
“That’s second-hand information,” M’Voba stated behind me, skepticism evident in his deep, rumbling accusation. “How do we know Gregorian wasn’t just looking for a payout?”
“Because I’ve been to the Predecessor outpost,” I said, still looking at Murdock. “I’ve seen the starships they left behind. And I’ve seen the bodies they left frozen in stasis. I’ve kept the location a secret from everyone, including my mother and my crew, but I know it exists and I know where it is. And now Andre Damiani does, too. What do you think a man like him will do with that sort of technology, General Murdock?”
There were several seconds of silence and if any deliberation was going on behind the General’s eyes, he hid it well. Finally, he leaned forward and rested his arms on his desk, looking at me intently.
“All right, Sergeant,” he said. “I’m listening.”
***
“I can’t act without evidence,” Murdock said flatly.
I sipped my coffee, fight
ing not to make a face. I didn’t really like coffee or beer, which had left me shit out of luck when I was in the Fleet Marines, but I needed some caffeine after briefing General Murdock and Major M’Voba pretty much without a break for the last two hours.
Bobbi took a gulp from her own cup like it was the nectar of the gods, eyes going back and forth between Murdock and me, a spectator at a tennis match. She hadn’t said much the whole time, which wasn’t like her.
“I gave you the coordinates,” I said, shrugging. “Can’t you send a team to go get the evidence?”
“Sergeant,” Murdock replied with just a hint of exasperation, “take a look around you. Do you think I’d be forced to meet you here if I could be certain I had that great of a control over the intelligence flowing out of my command?”
“Is it that bad, sir?” Bobbi finally spoke up, frowning.
“The director of the primary civilian intelligence agency is trying to sell vital state secrets to the Corporate Council,” Murdock said by way of a response. “The President of the Commonwealth is in their back pocket, and the only reason Andre Damiani isn’t currently running the government is that the Senate retains some semblance of independence and he knows he can’t count on the inaction of most of the military.”
“Then how the hell are we going to stop him?” I wanted to know.
“I still have allies in the military,” he said, “but they’re not going to act unless they see proof this is real. This is more than an intelligence operation.” He looked between the two of us and then up at M’Voba, who was leaning against the wall of the office. “If we do this, it will be tantamount to a coup. That’s not something these people will consider lightly.”
“What sort of proof would they want?” Bobbi asked.
Murdock seemed to consider that for a moment.
“One of the Predecessor corpses you found in stasis.” He met my eyes. “You’re going to have to retrieve it and bring it back here so I can present it to them, let them have it analyzed and see that it’s real.”