Marine

by Joshua Dalzelle

  The Exchange was a madhouse. As soon as they walked through the arching entryway, Jacob was assaulted by a cacophony of alien voices and accompanying smells. He closed his eyes for a moment to settle his nerves, and then walked up to the front desk.

  "My client needs to open a full-access citizen's account. Our world is a member of the Cridal Cooperative," Murph said to an alien with a plumed crest. Jacob tried to hide his surprised reaction as his partner spoke to the alien in fluent Jenovian. "We'll be activating it using a mix of precious metals and ConFed chits."

  "When did you learn Jenovian Standard?" Jacob asked under his breath. Murph just winked at him and continued negotiating with the gatekeepers of the front desk so they could get to someone who could actually help them.

  Once past the front desk, the process was well-organized and amazingly quick. There was a bit of administrative work, during which Jacob was able to open the account and set up Murph and Sully as secondary officers on it. Once that was done, they were asked to take the rented hauler around to another building behind the main Exchange where a pair of bored looking Synths—and for machines they did an admirable job of looking bored—directed the service bots there to unload the hauler, whereupon they quickly inventoried the cases and gave the Exchange officer the total amount.

  Once the chits were added up, and given the current rate for platinum on the open market, Jacob walked out just shy of two hours later with the access codes for an account containing five hundred and eighty-six million ConFed credits. For all intents and purposes, Jacob was an extremely wealthy man now and, like most lottery winners, he felt the burden of instantaneous wealth. Now that he had so much to lose, he felt like he should be more careful with his life even though the account was meant to be an operational buffer fund for Obsidian. He also kept waiting for the authorities to show up and question just who he was to be depositing so much at one time, but nobody seemed to look at it oddly until the administrator handing him his account credentials asked what business he was in. Murph told him that they were in salvage, and that seemed to satisfy his curiosity.

  "I gotta say, this has been one of the more entertaining missions we've had yet," Murph said once they were back in the hauler and heading for the ship.

  "I think Ezra Mosler would disagree," Jacob deadpanned and watched as Murph blanched.

  "Yeah, I didn't really think that through very well, did I?"

  "You think we'll be able to track down Scarponi?" Jacob asked, changing the subject. "Or if not us, someone else?"

  "Hunter-killer missions aren't really Scout Fleet's thing," Murph said. "We're the eyes and ears of the Fleet, but we're supposed to try to remain invisible. There are specialized strike teams that handle things like finding Scarponi. To be honest, I'm a little surprised you weren't recruited into one of those considering your unique abilities.

  "To answer your question, yes, Scarponi and the rest of his traitor buddies will need to be dealt with soon enough. NAVSOC has to be careful how it executes that mission because a clumsy attempt at rooting them out could end up with Earth being at war with Ull. If it comes out that we started the fight, the Cooperative may not see the need to support us with ships or material."

  "So, we just bide our time," Jacob said. "But can we afford to? This group has already shown they're still actively recruiting within the UEAS. Just letting a cancer metastasize and slowly kill the body isn't really much of a strategy."

  "Look at you with your big college words," Murph said. "I don't know. I'm a lowly agent—a junior agent—that's been assigned to 3rd Scout Corps as a Marine for so long that I'm almost thinking like one now. Maybe they will let a Scout Fleet team take a crack at Scarponi if for no other reason than to send a message to Margaret Jansen and her inner circle."

  Jacob fell silent, considering the implications of a well-equipped, and apparently growing, faction of humans that were conspiring with an alien power against their own home world and species. It was mildly depressing to think that after all they'd learned about the universe around them that humans could still be so shortsighted as to risk it all for short-term gains like political power. Jansen's lifespan was finite and short. Whatever she accomplished in that little spit of time could have lasting ramifications for generations, but she seemed to not care.

  "Looks like the fueler is just now pulling away," Murph pointed at the cryogenic tanker that had fueled their ship as it lumbered away, hovering a meter above the tarmac on its repulsor drive. Like most other interstellar vehicles in the quadrant, the ship they'd stolen used liquid hydrogen to power its antimatter reactor. The system was able to create its own stream of antihydrogen for the process, but it required a substantial power source to get it running before the reactor produced enough power on its own to be self-sustaining. Most ships also had a fusion backup reactor in case they had to shut their main reactor down. This ship did not. If they had to perform an emergency shut down in space, there would be no way to get it going again without assistance from another ship. The thought had been disquieting for Jacob when Taylor had first told him about it.

  "I wonder if we've heard from Zadra yet," Jacob mused as the hauler pulled smoothly to a stop and let them out.

  "What's the good word?" Murph shouted up to MG, the latter of whom was lounging on another transit case and cradling his plasma carbine.

  "I'll let Taylor tell you," MG said. "We heard back from our target. I think we're being played."

  Chapter 17

  "That's all she sent?" Jacob asked.

  "That's it," Taylor said.

  "Play it again," Murph said. He was the only one who didn't seem agitated at the turn of events. Taylor just shrugged and hit the control to play the video message again.

  "Greetings," Zadra's likeness said. "I applaud how quickly you've managed to get to Formenos Prime. It speaks volumes about your commitment to seeing me safely away from my pursuers. Unfortunately, I could not risk staying on Formenos any longer than it took to setup this automated response. This system is secure, my location was not. Please send a text-only reply to this message with the word, 'proceed,' in any language you wish. My pre-programmed responses will then provide you with where you need to go next in order to safely pick me up."

  "You have to be fucking kidding me!" Sully fumed. "Is she just playing games with us at this point?"

  "Perhaps, but she's still the mission," Jacob said. "Taylor, send the reply she requested and wait for our next location. Sully, is the ship ready to fly?"

  "Huh? Oh…yeah." The pilot waved him off. "Fuel is topped off and the variance between the slip-drive emitters has been corrected so it'll be a smoother flight out of here. While they were here, I also had them service the reactor cooling system and give the potable water a complete flush and fill."

  "Excellent. Go ahead and get your preflight done and, hopefully, we'll be out of here before anyone starts asking too many questions about the pair of humans who just dropped off millions of credits worth of chits and platinum," Jacob said.

  "That's true," Murph agreed. "There are informants everywhere. If the ConFed doesn't come asking, we might end up getting a visit from one of Mok's people."

  Sully paled noticeable at the mention of the notorious crime boss and hurriedly left the cramped com room. Murph, MG, and Mettler all left to keep watch leaving only Taylor and Jacob to wait on Zadra's return message. As it turned out, they didn't have long to wait.

  "Colton Hub?" Taylor asked as the new location popped onto a display along with navigational data. "Where the hell is that? It doesn't even sound like a planet name."

  "Hang on," Jacob said, running to his quarters. The name was tantalizingly familiar for some reason, and the only place he could have seen it was the former captain's logs. He grabbed the tablet off the shelf in his quarters and ran back to the com room, running a search for the name on the device.

  "Here it is," he said triumphantly. "Colton Hub shows up quite a bit in this asshole's diary. It looks like it is…not a nice
place."

  "Oh yeah?"

  "Yeah." Jacob flipped through multiple entries containing the name. "Apparently, it is a massive, privately owned deep-space platform that falls outside all of the normal jurisdictions. The ConFed leaves it alone, and no local government wants to burn the resources to clean it up, so it's a hotbed for the type of shit our pirate crew here was into. From what I'm seeing, they would actually pick up loads of slaves there and transport them to the buyers."

  "That's fairly revolting," Taylor said. "And this Weef Zadra is such a badass that she picked that as a hideout?"

  "If you're connected, it’s probably a smart place to be," Jacob said. "Any governmental types sniffing around for her would stick out. Send the nav data to the bridge. I'll tell Sully to light the fires and get us in the air."

  "We're six days away from the Hub," Sully said after the final course correction had been done and the gunboat was cranked up to her full slip-space velocity. It had been three days already since they'd left Formenos Prime. "Given how often you're saying the previous crew has been there, is it at all wise to take this ship back?"

  "That's a fair point, LT" MG said. "What happens if someone recognizes it and starts asking too many questions?"

  "The obvious answer would be to not go there," an unfamiliar voice said from the hatchway. All four men on the bridge spun around, two of them drawing sidearms. "Now, boys, that's no way to greet a guest. Any chance you have something to drink on this flying deathtrap besides water?"

  "Weef Zadra, I presume," Jacob said, holstering his weapon once he recognized the Veran's face from her video messages.

  "Jacob Brown," Zadra greeted him with a mischievous, knowing smile. "Please just call me Zadra. Weef is a little too formal and sounds like it could be a bodily function in most languages." MG snickered, earning him a playful glare from the Zadra.

  Jacob had met a Veran once before, and he knew they were a small, diminutive species, but Zadra took it to the extreme. Her delicate frame and short stature made her seem like an animated doll when compared to the bulk of the Marines around her. Their skin was a light, mottled green and, most distinctly, they had four arms. The two, smaller arms were normally tucked in close and used for more delicate tasks. They were one of the few spacefaring species in the known galaxy that had evolved to keep more than two arms.

  "So, the message game on Formenos Prime was just to give you an opportunity to stowaway," Jacob said. "Clever."

  "Thank you, kind sir." Zadra bowed. "Now, in addition to that aforementioned drink, could someone explain why I'm talking to a human pup that barely looks old enough to be weaned from his mom instead of Commander Mosler? He is still in charge of Team Obsidian, is he not?"

  "Commander Mosler was killed on Niceen-3, ma'am," Taylor spoke up first.

  "No!" Zadra looked genuinely stricken, something that surprised Jacob. Had she actually known his former CO? "How? Please say it wasn't because of someone coming for me."

  "No, ma'am," Jacob said. "He was killed by a traitor on our crew. We were attacked by the Ull in your office, and when we got back to the ship, our engineer had shot Mosler and escaped."

  "And you aren't hunting him down right now?!" The vehemence in her voice made all the battle-hardened Marines take an involuntary step back. "What kind of warriors are you to let something like that go without punishment?" Now it was Jacob's turn to push back, his temper rising.

  "Our mission—his mission—was to safely retrieve you and take you back to Terran space," he snapped. "We haven't even had time to mourn the death of our captain because of the wild fucking goose chase you've led us on, much less avenge him. Do I want the traitor dead? You fucking bet I do! But I honor Commander Mosler by carrying on and doing my job as he'd want me to, as he would do if one of us fell." Everyone was silent for a moment while Jacob and Zadra stared each other down.

  "So, the pup has inherited some of the bite after all," she said finally. "Lieutenant, is there a place I can lay down and rest? I've spent some days stuffed in the ship's hydraulic service bay, and I think I'd like to sleep on something a little softer than starship hull plating. We can talk afterward."

  "Please take my quarters," Jacob said. "It's the only luxury available on this ship, I'm afraid."

  "It will be more than adequate," she said. "Thank you. Oh, and you might want to drop your slip-space velocity to forty percent or so. We don't actually need to go to Colton Hub, but we should probably talk about a few things before heading back to Terranovus or before you call in for a rendezvous from one of your capital ships." Jacob didn't like the fact that Zadra had barged in and was now presuming to call the shots, but he wasn't so prideful that he'd put his crew at risk just to defy her or prove he was in charge.

  "Sully," he said.

  "Slip-drive power coming back to our lowest stable speed," Sully reported. "Just under forty-four percent."

  "I look forward to hearing what you have to say," Jacob said.

  "Oh, I doubt that," Zadra said, turning to leave. "None of it is good news for the Cridal Cooperative or Earth."

  After Zadra had closed herself in his quarters, Jacob told the rest of the that the mission objective had actually come to them. Murph had argued against her wishes and leaned hard on Jacob to turn the ship back for Terranovus so they could meet up with a Fleet ship and hand her over. Mettler seemed to not give a shit either way and just apologized for not noticing a stowaway after they'd left Formenos. Jacob strongly considered Murph's request, but in the end decided it wouldn't do any harm to wait until Zadra woke up and passed on the information she had.

  Chapter 18

  Terranovus, Naval Intelligence Section HQ

  "What can I do for NAVSOC, Captain?"

  "You can start by telling me why you embedded one of your agents into Team Obsidian without telling me about it," Captain Marcus Webb strode into the inner office belonging to the Director of Naval Intelligence. While Earth was still figuring out how it wanted to structure its spaceborne military, NIS had stepped in to fill a void left when the civilian oversight couldn't agree on whether their new intelligence apparatus should answer to the military or directly to the civilian government. That made the director the most informed human on Earth or Terranovus, privy to all the secrets that filtered in from beyond Terran space.

  The current director, an unimposing man named Michael Welford, was a CIA alumnus that had been part of the Terranovus project since the early days when it was little more than a military compound and top-secret shipyard. He and Webb had known each other since then, back when they were both low-ranking cogs in a wheel, and both were adjusting to their new roles as kings of their respective castles.

  "Sure, Marcus," Welford said. "I'll tell you why Murphy is there just as soon as you tell me what in the holy hell you were thinking recruiting Jason Burke's kid into a NAVSOC unit, much less a Scout Corps team. I read about how you railroaded him into a Marine Corps commission. God help us both if he finds out what you've done. He asked us to protect Jacob, not put him beyond the front lines. You know what he'll do to us if something happens to his one and only son?"

  "Kill us. Painfully." Webb shrugged. "I needed Jacob. Our own cybernetics program is decades away from being able to even scratch the surface of what that boy is capable of by random chance. So far, the Cooperative is being cagey about giving us access to their troop enhancement technology so we've been exploring other options through contacts made via Scout Fleet teams, but so far it's been slow going."

  "It still seems risky."

  "You've seen the same reports I have," Webb scoffed. "It's all about survivability. There are some tough, mean species out there, and my forward observers and special operators can't always rely on modern weaponry in the places we're forced to send them. Jacob Brown could be a bit of a stopgap. We get real-world operational data on how enhanced humans operate within a team of normals while he's with Obsidian while our scientists continue to pursue a technological answer to the problem in parallel."


  "Jacob is not his father," Welford warned. "He's young, green, and he isn't as impervious to injury, nor does he heal as quickly as Burke. You're taking an awful risk using him in an operational role right now. Why not pull him back and utilize him in a training capacity until our own enhancement program comes up to speed?"

  "Time is not on our side," Webb said. "The ConFed move against the Eshquarian Empire has the entire quadrant spooked. I'm getting word from my sources within the Cooperative that they may be forced to bend to whatever concessions the ConFed demands. I know you've seen the same reports."

  "I have," Welford confirmed, "but while I do my best to stay informed of impending threats, I don't waste undue time on things I can’t control. Earth is a two-planet, emerging power. If someone wants to come at us in earnest and take what we have, they're going to do it. I try to focus my energy on the things I can control, like the leaky boat that NAVSOC has become. I'm sorry, Marcus, but your outfit seems to be a breeding ground for sympathizers of Jansen's One World movement." When Webb just looked confused, Welford went on.

  "That's what she's calling her faction now. It's a marketing thing. If she called it 'I want to rule the world,' I don't think she'd have people lining up to fill the ranks. What she's done is take advantage of all Earth's former nation state governmental infighting to sell her insurrection as a revolution. She's promising to put an end to all the needless and wasteful bickering and focus on making sure all deals negotiated with Earth put humans first." Webb just snorted at that.

  "She tried to sell us to the Ull as a subservient worker class," he said. "They get free, skilled slave labor, and she gets to be a puppet dictator of a planet that no longer belongs to humanity. Maybe President Hightower made a serious mistake by pinning the Ull attack on Burke and hiding Jansen's involvement."