Chimera Company Season 2 - Deep Cover

by Tim C. Taylor

  Bronze acted the chastened legionary as they jogged along the passageway, following the signs to the mag-rail platform, but he wasn’t convincing Osu. With all his skills and experience, the damned pipe smoker should be an asset, but there was a huge problem Osu had only just realized.

  Bronze would always think he was better than his NCO, because the SpecMish man wasn’t a real SOTL: sapper of the Legion was just a part he played when it suited.

  When he’d roused his team from their racks, Osu had finally begun to feel back in control, but all that had been undermined by just a few words from Bronze.

  Like every other jack in the Federation, Osu had always listened to scuttlebutt, and argued with gusto over beers about how to sort out the Federation’s many ills. The truth was that he’d never known what was going on outside his barracks unless he’d been briefed.

  Arunsen and his Militia comrades had been sent to Eiylah-Bremah.

  Osu had never heard of the world.

  The colonel had spoken of it as a terminal posting. The kind of place you were sent to die, which had struck a nerve, because Arunsen had claimed that was the reason he’d been sent to Rho-Torkis. But on Eiylah-Bremah, it wasn’t so much the cold as the citizens of that world who caused such a high attrition rate for Militia troopers.

  The planet was under the iron grip of a dictator, and it was the Militia who was enforcing her brutal rule, playing the bad guys in a guerilla war.

  It would be easy to die in such a place. As deserters, Arunsen and the others would be first into the meatgrinder.

  The colonel had taken the time to explain this because he’d assumed Osu would be ignorant. He’d been right too. But Osu guessed that Bronze would know more about Eiylah-Bremah than the senior officer.

  And why had he been issued orders by a colonel? He’d been too busy trying not to say anything dumb to even think of such a question. But he was asking it now.

  Damn Bronze for being right.

  Am I being a professional disciplined soldier obeying orders? Or am I a dumb jack being played for the ignorant skragg I am?

  Osu picked up the pace still further, but he couldn’t outrun his doubts.

  Veteran soldier or naïve patsy? From where he was standing, it was impossible to tell the two apart.

  TAVISTOCK FITZWILLIAM

  This wasn’t like their exuberant return from District Metz. The mag-rail carriages were full of passengers from the watch changeover, and Fitz was feeling trapped inside the small metal boxes.

  To make matters worse, he’d left his F-Cannon back on Phantom, and dispatched his wife to bring back the Militia troopers while he fetched the jacks.

  She’d advised against splitting up, and she’d been right.

  Though it pained him, Fitz needed to be apart from her for a little while. His heart and head needed to test whether the situation really was so bad that he’d have to activate his deepest contingency plan: deep cover.

  “Excuse me,” he said pleasantly to the trio in engineer’s fatigues standing by the inter-carriage door. “Would you mind letting me through?”

  One of them frowned at him beneath heavy eyebrows. “Can’t you read the damned sign? Door’s not to be used while train is in motion.”

  “Yes, I can read, thank you. But such statements only hold advisory weight for people such as me.”

  “Oh, yeah? What does that make you? The Empress’s assistant butt wiper?”

  Fitz scratched behind his ear, casually revealing his Guild token. The obstinate engineer practically dragged his two companions off toward the far side of the carriage in his haste to get away.

  I must thank Nyluga-Ree for inducting me, Fitz mused as he contemplated the doorway to the next carriage. Kanha-Wei had told him that the legionaries were somewhere aboard this train, but there had been no sign of them so far.

  He shrugged. Crossing between moving carriages was the kind of task best done and not contemplated. Besides, in comparison with traversing the gap left by a missing carriage five minutes’ earlier, this should be a cinch.

  After knocking away the safety latch, Fitz opened the door, letting in a howl of wind that was matched by the howl from protesting passengers.

  He leaped across the gap and sucked in a whiff of ozone-laden air before grabbing the handholds on the outside of the next carriage. The light inside flickered as the carriage juddered sharply, threatening to throw Fitz off into the darkness of the unlit transit tube. As he clung desperately to the worn-smooth metal handles, he asked himself why it felt as if the carriage was hitting atmospheric turbulence when they were traveling through a purpose-built tube inside a space station.

  The train snaked through an S-bend, throwing Fitz out to the side, first one way and then the other. By the time the carriage stabilized, he’d taken a good look at its interior. It was more crowded than the one he’d just jumped from, and all he could see was a crowd of tired workers just come off shift. One of them was a Tallerman: a being that more closely resembled a small rock formation than a human.

  No wonder it looked so cramped in there.

  The doors opened inward. But they wouldn’t against such a press of bodies.

  “Just as well Izza’s not here to see this.” Fitz sighed, and clambered up the outside of the carriage and onto the roof. He paused a moment to let his body acclimatize to the change in gravity.

  Away from the grav-plates in the carriage floor, the space station’s spin was pulling him backward toward the carriage he’d just vacated. And when the train braked in anticipation of the next station, he would shoot headfirst across the roof like a torpedo.

  The carriage appeared to dangle from a four-feet high flexible spine that attached around the propulsion guideway. In reality, it wasn’t dangling, it was levitating, but up and down didn’t make much sense right now, and delaying wouldn’t change that.

  Damn!

  The mag-rail had no moving parts and didn’t need lubricants. It didn’t burn fuel, either, but the carriage roof hadn’t been cleaned in a long while.

  He had to face it. His favorite jacket was going to get utterly filthy.

  He scurried across the roof, trying to ignore the pops and flashes in his head from the superconductors rapid-switching inside the guideway. Halfway across, he opened up the roof maintenance hatch and jumped inside.

  Astonished passengers looked on. Suddenly they were jolted sharply. The train was braking on approach to the next station.

  “Just in time,” Fitz said under his breath as his grin sprang to life.

  “Hey, Fitzwilliam! Nice entrance.”

  The jack Kurlei, Zavage, was waving to him from across the carriage.

  “Well, will you look at that?” Fitz said, delighted with the way events had turned out. “You never know who you might jump into.”

  If arriving through the roof of a moving carriage had gotten its passengers’ attention, the Guild token Fitz showed them had them waiting on his every word.

  “My apologies, gentle beings,” he told them. “With regret I must inform you that this carriage is no longer in service.”

  The train came to a halt, and his fellow passengers spilled out, hurrying to find space elsewhere on the train, or suddenly deciding that what they needed was to walk to their destination.

  “That won’t go unnoticed,” said Fitz to the three jacks who’d stayed aboard, “but it’s won a little privacy.” He sprayed a sound-baffling aerosol above their heads. “And that’s a little more. Well, gentlemen, it’s good to see you.”

  “You too,” said Zavage.

  Fitz shook the Kurlei’s hand. He looked happy enough, but the others didn’t. Bronze looked reticent and Sybutu appear most peeved.

  “We’re under orders,” said the sergeant. “Shipping out within the hour.”

  “Where are you headed?” asked Fitz.

  “Wherever the Legion sends us.”

  “No, no. That’s not how this works. We’re getting the team together. Chimera Company, rememb
er? “

  “It would have been… an experience adventuring with you,” said Sybutu. “Maybe a good one. But we’re jacks. The Legion’s our home. We’ll never leave.”

  “That’s funny,” answered Fitz. “I met an old friend on this station who’s been telling me that I’ll never leave the Legion either. Admiral Nuysp. Do you know him?”

  “Admiral Nuysp?” Sybutu queried. “Commander of the 4th Fleet?”

  “Yes, that’s the fellow. Bald head. Battered face.”

  “You know the admiral?”

  Fitz cocked an eyebrow at the incredulous sergeant. “I knew him. Regrettably, he was assassinated a few hours ago. I suspect it was an attempt to frame me.”

  “But…” Poor Sybutu. He seemed a highly competent soldier, but he appeared to have no idea how the galaxy really worked. What this man needed was a tour outside of his comfort zone. A tour with Chimera Company.

  “If an admiral’s been killed, why isn’t the station on lockdown?” Sybutu finally managed.

  Fitz gave him a stern look. “Indeed. Also, why was I framed and not simply killed? What do these puzzles tell you?”

  Osu had no idea. Scrunching his face in disgust, he glanced at Bronze for help.

  Bronze cleared his throat and spoke respectfully. “The implication, Sergeant, is that there are multiple factions within Legion command on this station. Those factions are concealing their intent, their actions, and probably their very existence from each other.”

  “Not for much longer,” said Zavage. “No one can hush up the death of an admiral for long.”

  The train set off again. The jolt of acceleration seemed to nudge Bronze into a decision.

  “So, Fitz, are you planning to collect us up and hightail out of here on the Phantom?”

  “Yup.”

  Bronze gave Sybutu a peculiar look that Fitz interpreted as respectful defiance. “We will need to make a decision very soon. There’s something I want to say first, Sergeant.”

  “Go on,” Sybutu growled. He looked as if he’d swallowed a wasp who’d been dining out for weeks on virulent poison.

  “Before I went off grid a little too much for my superiors, I had a mission in the Bisheesh system. A monitoring unit – probably a team based in this spinning metal dumbbell we’re inside now – was seeing red flags about the modest Legion operation there, so they sent me in to take a look. As you all know by now, I was no more a regular legionary than he” – the man pointed rudely at Fitz – “was once regular Legion Navy. I got there too late. The detachment’s command structure had already been hollowed out by the same Corruption we encountered on Rho-Torkis. We can’t be sure who we can trust, Sergeant. And that includes the man in a colonel’s uniform who issued us our orders. Whatever we’re facing seems to go for command structures first, and if there are kill squads about this station murdering admirals, then the Legion in the entire Tej Sector is compromised. Trust no one but ourselves. We should go with Fitzwilliam while we still can.”

  “I make that decision, SOTL,” Sybutu insisted. “Not you. Zavage, is Captain Fitzwilliam telling the truth about this assassination?”

  Oh, no.

  Fitz scrunched his face in anticipation of what was about to happen.

  “Have you got a hatred of my race?” asked Zavage as the fish-skinned legionary grabbed his shoulders.

  “Not yet,” Fitz hissed. “Get it over with.”

  Zavage rested his head against Fitz’s, spilling appendages over his cranium.

  Fitz expected them to be as slimy as hagfish, but they weren’t.

  He felt the blood pulsing gently through them, but he didn’t get the feeling he was sticking his head in a nest of male genitalia for a porn holo – a notion he hadn’t been too keen on either. In fact, it felt like his head was being caressed inside and out by warm peaches held by beautiful maidens wearing gladsome smiles and very little else.

  With a cough in the back of his throat, Fitz clamped his mind shut. He didn’t want the alien to see through his façade.

  “He’s telling the truth,” said the Kurlei, taking a couple of steps back. Fitz was pathetically thankful for the distance between them. “Fitz is scared. He’s lived his semi-outlaw life for a long time. But now the rules of the galaxy are changing, and he doesn’t know how to play these new edition rules. What makes it worse is his wife. Normally his swagger is fueled by her belief in him, but for some reason, he can no longer rely on her.”

  “That’s enough of your brain sucking,” Fitz snapped. “You’re a filthy, invasive creature spreading scandalous untruths. No one here’s scared. I’m merely apprehensive, and you’d be a fool not to be. A little dread now and again keeps us on our toes.”

  “What are you proposing?” Sybutu asked Fitz.

  “Izza is gathering your scruffier counterparts. Once we’re all reassembled, we’ll be on our way, tracking down that alien ship you unearthed on Rho-Torkis, getting intel on Khallini, and reporting back in time to save the Federation. And what had the Legion planned for you sappers? Digging ditches?”

  “Well that’s a good start,” Sybutu responded. “We were tasked with retrieving our Militia friends. They’ve been posted to Eiylah-Bremah. From what I was told, they’ve been shoveled up and thrown into a meatgrinder. They aren’t supposed to survive.”

  “Eiylah-Bremah?” Fitz gave a low whistle. “Oh, dear. That’s not a happy planet. Good for business in my line of work, but it’s no place for regular folk.”

  “Sorry, Sergeant,” said Bronze, “but again… why didn’t our superiors simply request that Arunsen be recalled? Why send us? It doesn’t sound right.”

  “Sounds simple enough to me,” said Fitz. “I expect someone either wants to kill you in a conveniently quiet way, or to track you first and then kill you. Speaking of which, a succession of unwanted people has been all over the Phantom, and I’m assured they have left tracking devices. Even if we get away, it will most likely be because someone thinks they can follow us.”

  “I accept that our orders are strange,” said Sybutu.

  Fitz looked on with pity as the jack NCO who was still half a conversation behind.

  “How can I tell for sure whether our orders are valid or not?” Sybutu said.

  “That’s what living on the edge is all about, my friend,” said Fitz. “You can’t know. Trust your instinct. Trust your friends too. Listen to what they say. Then make a decision, knowing you will live or die by it.”

  “I… can’t. There’s not enough time to think this through.”

  “Don’t overthink. Do. Act! If you’re in the hot zone of a battle, do you sit down and start drawing maps in the blood and dirt? Do you research the history of past battles? No, of course not. You take your experience, mix with what your eyes and your comrades are telling you, and you make a decision. You don’t have the luxury of second guessing whether you’re right.”

  The legionary blinked… and there was purpose in his limbs again.

  “I thought I’d been doubting myself,” he said. “All along, my doubts were about the Legion. We can’t trust it anymore.”

  Existential crises. Spiritual revelation and renewal. These were luxuries for people with time on their hands, and who hadn’t sent their partners off on a fool’s errand in a space station stuffed full of people trying to kill them.

  Nonetheless, Fitz bit his tongue and gave Sybutu a few moments to get his shit together.

  “Very well,” announced the big jack. “I have made a decision. We sign on with you, Fitzwilliam, not as deserters but as… ronin legionaries. Until such time as the galaxy makes sense again.”

  “Excellent choice,” said Fitz, shaking his hand. “We’ll rendezvous with Izza at the Phantom and then we’ll be away.”

  “Not so fast. I had to leave one wounded team member behind on Rho-Torkis. I’m not doing it again, and there’s one member unaccounted for. Isn’t that right, Zavage?”

  The Kurlei looked crestfallen. Literally, his head lumps flatte
ning. “Green Fish,” he said, guiltily. “I hacked the med records. There’s no one registered under her name, but there’s an Elicient Ramawathan, 24, female human, admitted the day Phantom got here. It has to be her.”

  “That’s a fine name,” said Fitz. “Maybe a little too grand for everyday Militia scum. I don’t blame her for preferring her alias, but I do know that this is the best place for her. I saw a Littorane weapon shoved through her chest. She needs proper medical care.”

  Azhanti! Fitz could actually feel the Kurlei’s anger sizzling in the air. “With all you’ve just said about JSHC being compromised, would you leave Lieutenant Zan Fey here if she were wounded?”

  Fitz took a deep breath and regarded the defiant Kurlei. This was why he was always hesitant to take on more crew. They didn’t always think the way he wanted them to.

  “I could get Green Fish out,” said Bronze. “I used to be a trauma nurse.”

  No one acted surprised at this latest revelation. He was SpecMish. Bronze would have been many things.

  “Then you go get Green Fish,” said Fitz. “You too, Sybutu. Not you, lover boy. You’re a walking fish man with snake dreads. Maybe you’ll make a valuable team member, but you stick out like a flyblown vagrant at an aristo-hat’s tea party. You’re with me. We’re going back for our other missing team member.”

  OBSERVATION TEAM GAMMA

  “It’s no use,” explained Silasja, “they’ve screwed the audio pickup in the carriage, and I can’t get a video angle to lip read. I can’t tell what they’re saying, but they definitely appear to be joining forces.”

  “Can’t be helped,” said Sergeant Fon-Derez. “Report it up the line, when you’re ready.”

  It was bad enough that he’d placed greater emphasis on the word than he’d intended. Now Fon-Derez watched in mounting horror as Silasja swallowed hard, her face reddening.

  “It’s ready now, Sergeant,” she reported gruffly.

  Shit! There had better not be tight surveillance on them, or they were completely screwed.

  He had to muster all his self-discipline to keep his eyes on his junior and not look around guiltily at the other workpods. Hell, they weren’t even manned! With the recent round of budget tightening, there was usually only one active team per watch, but somewhere in a chambered vir-space backup there would be a recording of them.