The Intruder Mandate: The Farthest Star from Home: a military sci-fi suspense novel

by William Cray

  Duran looked back at her as she crinkled her face in a wince. “He was my best friend.”

  Janikowlis’s face turned shade red, then she averted her gaze. She pressed the retract button, stepping around the gurney. As the body retracted into its locker Duran spoke loud enough for Floss, who remained back at the desk, to hear.

  “Certain aspects of Agent Hansen are classified. I’m going to have to ask you to seal Agent Hansen’s body until I have a chance to arrange his transport back to Earth.” Duran now looked at Janikowlis. “Doctor I’m going to need the Hyper-scans of agent Hansen turned over to me. The originals and any copies please. Also, the recorded results of your exploratory examination.” He looked at Lieutenant Floss. “That includes anything you have on me Lieutenant.”

  Floss nodded. “I’ll see what we have.”

  Duran turned back to Janikowlis, “Can you show me Agent Hansen’s things?”

  She ran her fingers through her hair. Wisps of blonde fell out of place, then sprung right back into chaotic assignment. She pointed him towards a material storage room in the back of the lab. Once inside, she showed him the appropriate locked cabinet and punched in the access code and the lock disengaged.

  Dr. Janikowlis pointed, “There’s a bag in that closet over there. It says 'evidence' on the front, but you can use it to put his things in.”

  Duran walked up to the locker, staring for a moment at the contents, unable to reach in and sort the items, some meaningful, some not.

  Janikowlis seemed to notice the hesitation, and gave him some room, “I’ll be with Lieutenant Floss if you need me.” With that she pivoted and left, leaving Duran with the soiled effects his friend.

  Duran looked at the blood stained blue shirt and black redcoat sitting on top of the pile. He expected the hammer blow of emotion, but it never arrived. He retrieved the evidence bag then came back to the open locker.

  The items inside were routine, clothing, shirt, shoes, pants, belt and tie. He gathered them and dumped them into the bag. Hansen’s specialized gear was missing, confiscated. Cole held Eric’s Talon in his office. The details of his friend’s suicide would be in the police report and the medical data file. Later, he would try to piece together Axe’s last moments.

  There were more personal effects after Duran put the top layer of items in the bag. Most were part of his current cover as an M.C.E. agent. His percom, hotel card, travelway gate documents, pass cards, and near the bottom, a simple old style I.D. tag chain with a gold banded union ring dangling from it.

  Eric and Carolyn hadn’t been married for years. It struck Duran that he hadn’t realized that Eric may have still carried strong feelings for Carolyn after all this time apart. She had left him, but maybe he never really left her.

  Eric’s union had lasted almost ten years. A relative lifetime when compared to most military unions. Duran’s had lasted less than half that. His was destroyed by the deployments, the exhaustive training schedules, and the never knowing. That’s what Elyse had called it. The ‘never knowing’ when he would be leaving. ‘Never knowing’ when he was coming back. ‘Never knowing’ if he would come back. To Elyse, every deployment was treated like she might never see him again. It was too much to ask of anyone not born into a military family. He had been too stupid to recognize that it would end badly. End badly it did. Fortunately they hadn’t had children to complicate the separation. Maybe if they had had children, he might have left Planetary Force and been home with them more. But the mission had always been the top priority. It was too intoxicating to let go of. Even after his dissolution he had tried to jettison his military career to try to prove to Elyse that he could succeed in a normal life, but he just couldn’t do it, the addiction was woven into his psyche like a junkie.

  He thought about going to see Elyse on Eridani after this mission. He hadn’t talked to her in more than twenty years, then snorted at the thought for its stupidity. Would she accept him more now? Not likely. For a moment he wondered if this is what could have led to Eric’s suicide. But no, that wasn’t the case, was it.

  Duran made up his mind to at least call Carolyn when this mission was over, not knowing what he would tell her, certainly not that Eric killed himself, but something appropriate. A soldier's death. Duran slipped the chained ring around his neck. Maybe he could deliver it to Carolyn and say “He was thinking about you when he died.” That would be the right thing to do.

  Duran tucked the sealed bag under his arm and closed the locker. Floss and Janikowlis were studying the desk flyer on the table in front of them when Duran came out of the storage room. He traversed the blue-lit room to the desk both were hovering over as he approached. Floss stood. “You should see this Agent Duran.”

  Duran came around the desk, joining the other two. The Hyper-Scan on the flyer was a split screen of two bodies. Duran assumed it was the two deceased victims on the tables in front of them. Janikowlis pointed to the two images, “This is Mr. Trevor Asawa and …” she pointed to the larger of the two “ Mr. William Abati.”

  Floss cut in, “These are the two suicides we picked up, one in and the other outside the Zone, a couple days ago.”

  The image showed two brutal deaths. One, Asawa, had cleaved massive portions of his torso, leaving gaping, horrific gashes where vital organs had been. The other, Abati, the bigger of the two, showed mangled arms and legs, broken with blunt force trauma in succession. Some parts of his smaller extremities were completely pulverized. Once again, areas of the body that were vital to the articulation of the instruments used to mangle and tear, like one arm or hand, were left unaffected. Duran zoomed in on the wounds, but Janikowlis tapped the brain areas with the filament pen she had tucked behind her ear earlier, spilling the unruly blonde locks.

  “I didn’t expect to find this,” she pointed to an area of slight swelling in the thalamus region of the brain. She continued, “We have been finding this in all the drug suicide victims, including your partner, but these two were drug tested regularly by the their employers. Abati just the day before he died. We expected this to be some kind of drug fueled trip gone bad, but what we found was that Abati had the same physical symptoms of our Black Max victims, but his toxicology came up empty.” She called up the toxicology reports. “Nothing, not even a strong cup of Jiri. Could be a masking agent but four other victims have come up the same. The swelling is the only thing I can find wrong with them other than the physiological damage that ultimately was the cause of death.”

  Janikowlis leaned back in her chair. She undid the final clip in her hair letting the staccato blonde waves fall flat. She pointed to the cadaver lockers. “Every one of those people literally tortured themselves to death, breaking limbs, burning the flesh off their own bodies, skinning themselves alive, reproductive mutilation, you name it. All normal people would pass out form the pain or shock long before they died of their wounds. It's hard wired into our nerve centers. The instinct to survive overrides almost anything. But it’s like these people were completely disconnected from their entire evolutionary history and they just wanted to see what their insides looked like.”

  She shook her head in disbelief. “The horror of it. That’s why I’ve been looking at the cortex. But it still doesn’t add up.” She pushed another button. “I was programming micro-probes to take core samples from each victim’s cortex. That’s what I was doing when you came in. I don’t know what else to do. It isn’t adding up.”

  Duran looked up at the two dead bodies, who eavesdropped eerily. “Could these be murders? Committed by one, or a group of individuals?”

  Floss cut in. “We’ve checked everything. We haven't connected any of the victims to any outside perpetrator. We have had some facial recognition hits but the system is unreliable in the Zone. No evidence to support a second party has been developed. Victim number seventeen's wife watched her husband disembowel himself on their kitchen table. He died from blood loss as he tried to remove his liver. She’s still in a psychiatric ward.” Floss shook
his head. “They’re all suicides.”

  Janikowlis pulled two data cells from her desk and tossed them onto the corner nearest Duran. “There are my originals of you and Agent Hansen. I’ve already dumped it from my data logs.” Duran picked up the cards, placing them in his coat pocket.

  She rapped her filament pen on the desk twice, then pointed to Duran. “Agent Duran,” she pointed to the rack of cadaver lockers, “… your cortex is just like theirs.”

  4

  Greenway Plaza District

  New Meridian City

  Hebes Chasma, Mars

  Eric Hansen put the gun to his head…and pulled the trigger.

  Duran watched as his friend slumped in the car. His head was distorted from the gunshot to his temple. Axe’s body still ejected beads of sweat, running down his cheek and face. One dark hole remained where an eye had been forced out from the impact but it still clung to his cheek on a thin strand of cordish meat. Duran reversed the image playback; watching each instant as it ticked back, counter by counter, to the point of raising the gun.

  The scene played back again. There was no hesitation, no wavering of will in the motion. The gun came up swift and smooth. The execution was flawless, but something in the motion seemed out of place. Before Eric Hansen could pull the trigger once more in morose repetition, Duran rolled the playback further, watching as Axe struggled in the moment’s prior. His breathing was erratic with sharp swallows of sour air, followed by a low breathy exhale that devolved into breathless a moan. His eyes were listless, tired, like he hadn’t slept in days. His attempts to turn on the car, activate its motivators and flee, were disjointed slaps at controls. His voice was unable to articulate any command and his motor skills had failed him. Somehow he had managed to turn on his info-board’s spherical imager, and record his last moments, but everything else seemed to take monumental effort. Even the action of drawing his weapon seemed difficult, the big gun leaping into his hand from its slide holster. Once the gun was in his hand he waved it in the air, as if to ward off ethereal demons in the cockpit with him before letting it slough away again.

  Duran looked into his imaged eyes. They rolled in abject terror and confusion as Hansen continued to struggle, against what? The instant before taking his own life, he lurched out a final violent sound from his lungs. Duran slowed the playback, listening to his friends’ last words, as Hansen tried to muscle out a coherent sound, but instead the strained exhalation only came out as a long groan of anguish.

  Then he seemed to regain control of his reflexes and breathing, calming perceptibly. The snap of his arm and the recoil of his weapon shattered the momentary tranquility.

  The devastation of the action replayed again in agonizing slowness.

  “What were you trying to tell me Axe?” Duran asked aloud in the emptiness of his rustic windowless guest room. “Why now?”

  For a long moment he stared at the radiation monitor on the wall, holding steady in the clear. Axe killed himself. No doubt that his hand wielded the weapon and pushed it against his temple in those last moments.

  Duran stood, human fatigue wearing on him. He took the last swig of a local concoction that had the same biting taste of all filtered Martian drinks. There were vast reservoirs of ice on Mars, and none of it suitable for consumption. It took some time for a Martian visitor to acclimate to anything but imported liquids and food.

  He walked around the small room trying to shake the images and gulp down the Martian piss water.

  Floss had dropped him off at the rundown Lead-line level hotel, telling him he would be back in the morning to pick him up before heading up to Phobos. As Duran exited, Floss had handed him a stack of four data flyers, saying only “Case files.”

  Duran took the offering, saying to Floss.”I didn’t think Cole trusted me that much.”

  Floss just smiled and said, “He doesn’t. I’m giving you these.”

  Duran nodded and shoved them in his Redcoat pocket, until now. Turning back to the small low function desk, Duran picked up the files again. He scanned them at random, scrolling through the reports and staring at the images again.

  The first case that caught his eye was one was labeled “Heath, Vincent, Case #02A7755.” Duran opened the file, folding out the four pages that made up the sum total of the investigation. He scanned the pages quickly, scrolling past the routine information.

  Heath had been one of the earliest victims. Number three in fact. He was a heavy equipment operator by trade but was working as a general laborer in the orbital tower maintenance department doing odd jobs to keep the tower from rotting and falling too much into disrepair. He had a previous drug arrest, three quarters of an ounce of a synth with the street name of Highlo but that was nothing special. Most surface equipment operators used something to keep them going during those long days sealed in their tracked movers. He didn’t serve any time over the arrest, going the first time offenders counseling route, but his friends guessed that being out of work and having to take a low paying general helpers position was too much for him. They had also told the lead investigator that Heath had been hopping over to the Zone and partying down with Phelman’s children. Post mortem toxicology revealed he had a substantial volume of Max in his synthetic blood stream. According to the report, on the night of his death he had gone down to the Zone on a RED day, gotten geeked up with his teenage girlfriend, then decided to burn his body from head to toe with a welding gun that was in the maintenance truck he was driving. When his girlfriend came out to see what was taking him so long, she saw his torched body in the front seat of the car, vomited on him, then went back to the party, bummed out.

  Thus, is the life a geek, Duran thought

  The New Meridian Police recovered the body after the still burning torch caught the rest of Heath’s truck on fire and forced them to mount a rescue. The Constabulary classified the death as a Max trip gone wrong and filed it. Case closed.

  Duran looked at the Dyna-Scan of Heath’s body on the last entry on the flyer. There wasn’t much left after the fire. The city police investigators hadn’t recognized that Heath had incinerated himself before catching the truck on fire until Dr. Janikowlis had been asked to re-examine the body, fully four weeks after the episode, when a string of such deaths were developing into a pattern.

  The second file Duran examined was similar to the first. Casual drug user has a bad trip, flips out and winds up mutilating himself to death. This one was a full time resident of the Zone.

  But the third file seemed to break the pattern. Victim number seventeen.

  Number seventeen was an engineer with the Imperial Ecological Survey Team that monitored the radiation levels from the wreck of Power Generating Dome 3. Lifetime New Meridian resident, married, two children, officer in the part-time territorial guard, good income, no past criminal or substance abuse record. He amputated both his legs and one arm with a hand held rotary saw. As he was dying he managed to gouge out one eye with the fingernails of his one good hand. Toxicology … negative, but there were common masking agents that well off Max users might have access to. On the surface there was nothing to indicate he was capable of such a thing, and his nightmarish mutilation had occurred in his own home rather than inside the radiation zone. He was the first not fitting the pattern of the others. Duran closed the files without looking at the Dyna-scan. He didn’t need to see anymore today. He closed his eyes and leaned his head against the stiff backrest, tossing the case file filaments on the desk.

  Nothing like this was in the files from the occupation or the Vendetta. If it weren’t for the dreams, he wouldn’t see any connection with the Intruders at all, but something rank lingered. There was something inhuman about the murders, but it seemed outside the scope of typical accompli behavior. The accompli his team had tracked previously exhibited no ability to directly control an individual, only use subtle but effective forms of suggestion to get what they wanted. Most accompli had devolved into criminal enterprises and were ripe for easy assassination w
ithout alerting an already frightened populace to their existence. But this was somehow different. Something far beyond what they had experienced before.

  A Nova event, possibly? The re-emergence of an Intruder alien on Mars. But these murders didn’t fit the alien’s modus operandi, or at least what they had been trained to expect.

  If an Intruder did exist somewhere in New Meridian, simple murder wouldn’t make sense. The Emperor had ordered the Intruder homeworld destroyed, despite the possibility of thousands of human hostages. Any Intruders that survived that holocaust would want revenge on a planetary scale for their homeworld’s destruction. They would want retribution in kind. Nothing short of the entire obliteration of humanity would probably sate their appetite. These murders seemed too personal to be the acts of political retribution, especially since the majority of victims seemed to be apolitical lowlifes.

  Even a terror campaign didn’t seem right with no claims of vengeance or radical demands. No accompli human collaborator had ever shown the power to do something like this. The magnitude of the deaths seemed beyond their known abilities.

  Duran took another swig from the metallic tinged concoction. He didn’t have enough information. He didn’t even know what an Intruder looked like if there was one. No one did. It was too easy to vaporize their cities and planets from space. Going dirtside and fighting it out had already proven disastrous. During the Battle of San Juan an entire battalion of Grenadiers turned on themselves under Intruder domination. Closing with the enemy had failed again and again. Even I failed, Duran thought. And we took every precaution.

  He turned back to the frozen eyeless image of his dead friend. The data cell Cole had given him contained all of Hansen’s compiled investigation to the point of death. The next hour was spent reviewing reports and following his friend’s movements through summary logs and collected data-streams during the ten days he was operating in New Meridian. The two girls being held in the weapons locker deep in the cities bowls just above the Reservoir’s waterline were an enigma. Axe had identified them in one of the Zone party spots, following an undisclosed hunch. Somehow he had zeroed in on them in the club, using the talents of his counter-Intruder training, but any further information wasn’t logged. Hacking into the cities record database he had identified one of them as Celeste Von Hieden, age twenty-six now. The last records of her in the city’s roles were almost a decade old. Duran looked at the young image, around age fifteen. She was too young to be accompli. The Intruders had bestowed their gifts carefully upon those useful to them, but Hansen had believed these two girls were somehow related, taking enough precautions to bury them behind eighteen centimeters of duridium, far from any external contact. The officers sent by Cole to investigate the two girls had disappeared from the grid despite Hansen’s unencrypted warnings not to do so.