Flashpoint (Hellgate)

by Mel Keegan

  “Let him sleep,” Kim decided. “Pilot, how long till we dock on the Mercury? Thanks, guys, I’ll take the dogs back. You wouldn’t believe it, but they’re not usually paranoid and antisocial.”

  “They’re freaked, and who wouldn’t be?” Travers handed the shepherd back to him, and the smaller sheepdog dove out of Marin’s hands, back to Kim.

  Up front, Perlman had been running tacking data for some time. She had a plot of the cruiser’s position, and with a glance into the threedee Travers saw that the Mercury had maneuvered into an orbit right above StarCity, flanked by its two gunships. “We’ll be aboard fifteen minutes after we can show StarCity our sterntubes,” Perlman said crisply. “Mister Liang?”

  “She’s in the hangar,” Chandra Liang reported. “She’s coming as fast as she can … she’ll be wearing those bloody stupid spike heels, I expect. Try to run, and you’ll break your ankles.”

  “Security overview?” Marin asked softly.

  “Clear,” Perlman reported. “Jude, you see the lady?”

  Fargo was in the mouth of the docking adapter, armed with an assault rifle in one hand and a scanner in the other. “I see her. Hey, man, nice shoes. Not.”

  At last, Travers began to relax. He and Marin took the side seats right behind the pilot’s position, and as Curtis loosened up, Travers indulged himself in a self-deprecating chuckle. “We’re out of this particular wood.”

  “With an interrogation subject,” Marin added as he set his head back. His right hand rested lightly on Travers’s thigh, cupped loosely there, familiar and comfortable. “You know, Mick Vidal would have gotten a kick out of this.”His head swiveled on the padded rest to look at Travers. “Mick,” he added, “was a little mad.”

  “Only a little?” Travers smiled at the image of Vidal in the field with them tonight. He would have relished the action.

  “You miss him,” Marin said quietly.

  “A lot of people do.” Travers was thinking of Alexis Rusch. “He was one of a kind. And a good friend.”

  Marin’s fingers hunted for Travers’s, and laced into them. “Vidal’s real memorial was on the lawn outside Liang’s place – you, me and Colonel Rusch. We were the ones who knew him best, worked with him, respected him. Roark Hubler should have been there.”

  But Hubler was out of the service, with Asako Rodman on the Harlequin. They would be on Ulrand even now, where the docks would have received a shipment from the Wastrel. They would be spaceworthy in a week, and doing business between the Deep Sky and Halfway.

  The clatter of feet on the ramp announced Sonja Mei Ming Deuel. She appeared in a confusion of limbs and bags, and Liang was right. She was still dressed for the memorial, in fashionable clothes and ridiculous shoes which were Velcastran uptown chic this year. She handed the bags to Fargo and Kravitz, and let Liang pull her into a seat.

  She was frightened, Travers thought, though she was doing a fair job of masking it. In the back, Harrison Shapiro was slumped over, unconscious; on the deck were a maimed man and a bodybag, while four black uniformed, heavily armed marines secured the lander, which was far from the plush, elegant transportation she was accustomed to. To a lady from the high side of Elstrom, the scene must be a nightmare come true.

  “StarCity ATC, this is Mercury 101,” Perlman was saying, “we are undocking and leaving your airspace on a heading for orbit … copy that, thank you, ma’am, and goodnight.” She switched up from the civilian band to Shapiro’s encrypted channel. “Mercury, this is 101, coming home. Do you have us on tracking?”

  And over the loop Travers heard a thin-stripped voice from the cruiser: “Affirm that, 101. Gunships will meet you as you make orbit.” The voice belonged to the cruiser’s executive officer, a young woman called Lansdown with a homeworlds accent which sounded incongruous in the midst of this colonial crew. “Ops room is asking for General Shapiro.”

  Travers touched his combug. “He’s out cold. This is Major Travers. Have the Infirmary standby to receive him, and give me a course for Borushek, direct. The gunships will be returning as soon as we’re docked, and you can bug out to the Weimann exclusion limit, and standby there for orders to commit to e-space.”

  “Ops room, understood, Major,” Lansdown said crisply. “I have Fleet Colonel Arthur Hong at Joseph Valdez, waiting to speak to General Shapiro.”

  “Inform him Shapiro is unconscious, pending medical treatment,” Travers said curtly.

  “I’ll brief him on the situation, if he’s willing to talk to lesser mortals,” Marin offered. “It was a purely civilian matter, nothing to involve Fleet.”

  “Hold on, Major Marin, we can always ask.”

  While Lansdown negotiated with Hong’s staff, Chandra Liang was already conferencing with his own people. Madam Deuel was blank, like a rabbit in the spotlight, but Liang had set the incident behind him. While he waited for another connection he looked up at Travers and Marin and suggested,

  “If that’s Arthur Hong on the line, tell him to keep his nose out of civilian affairs. It was an assassination attempt on me, it’s for Tactical to investigate, and Elstrom Tac will be taking care of the whole thing. If Hong argues, hand him to me.”

  “You know him,” Travers observed.

  “I know him,” Liang said scornfully. “He’s an officious little bean counter who would love to worm his way into politics. He’s always intruding in civilian affairs, when the proper channels, if Fleet needs to do business with the civilian sector, involve the office of the colonial governor. I –” And then his connection went through and he returned his attention to his own comm. “Yes, Roger, it’s me, and I’m safe.”

  Travers stopped listening as Lansdown murmured into the loop, “Colonel Hong will speak with you, Major Marin.”

  “Send it to the threedee,” Marin advised, and slid into the seat where Shapiro had been on the flight down.

  Deliberately staying out of range of the lens, Travers watched him paste on a bland, pleasant face, and when Arthur Hong appeared in the threedee, he delivered an even, homogenous report which covered the event in the broadest terms and divulged none of the details. Hong was a man of Shapiro’s age, or older, stalled at the rank of colonel because he did not have the potential to go further, and chained to a desk at the Fleet facility, because an office was his natural environment.

  He was also officious, superior, more than a little pompous while addressing a colonial, and Travers would have sworn Marin’s accent thickened, the long vowels of Jagreth becoming longer yet, as soon as he perceived the colonel’s elitism. Hong spoke with some upper crust homeworlds voice, and seemed to take affront at being briefed by a colonial, and a major.

  “If you would like to confer with Mister Liang,” Marin finished, “he’s available and willing to talk at this time, but I can assure you, he can add no more.”

  Hong peered out of the threedee, studying Marin rudely. “An assassination attempt, then, and you’re certain Mister Liang was the target?”

  “Quite certain,” Marin lied smoothly. “Elstrom City Tactical is being informed of the details at this time. The matter is in their jurisdiction, Colonel Hong. There’s nothing to involve Fleet. Shall I call Mister Liang?”

  For a moment Hong seemed to consider it, and then shook his head. “No. Good enough, Major. Give my regards to General Shapiro. I trust his injures are not too dire.”

  The threedee blanked, and Marin gave Travers a pained look. “Coffee?” Travers offered.

  “Black, and strong,” Marin agreed.

  The lander was rising through a long, slow repulsion spiral, the gentlest ride to orbit Travers could remember. Vibration through the airframe was barely enough to disturb the coffee as he brought two cups back to the forward seats, where Fargo was watching Perlman adjust course and speed to rendezvous with the gunships. The Mercury was fifteen thousand meters downrange, ten thousand meters above; the sky was velvet black, with Joseph Valdez a speck of light on the western horizon of Velcastra.

  Flat on th
e deck, their prisoner had begun to groan, but Inosanto swore he was still too deeply sedated for the mind to know anything of the body’s pain. In the back, Kim’s dogs had settled down and Jon Kim himself was a cushion against which Shapiro lay limply. He would be in the Infirmary before he woke properly, and he would remain there until the Mercury was halfway back to Borushek. Kim might have had romantic notions about their reunion, but the truth was going to be about work, patience and trust. Travers liked the young man a lot, and the dogs seemed to have accepted Shapiro. If Kim was willing to slide into place as the aide Shapiro had needed for a long time, Travers approved.

  In the seat beside him, Marin set his head back and closed his eyes. “I wouldn’t want to be Robert Chandra Liang right about now.”

  “You think he was the target?” Travers tried the coffee, found it bitter and acrid.

  “It’s … possible,” Marin mused. “An hour before, he had just set up Velcastra to be the scene of the first formal battle.”

  “But who knew?” Travers demanded in a whisper. “Unless security at the house in StarCity is a joke, and they were bugged.”

  Marin’s eyes opened, dark and filled with misgivings. “We’ll know soon enough. By the time we get to Borushek, that prisoner should be fit to answer questions – and Shapiro will be fit to ask them! And till then…”

  “Till then?”

  “Till we make Borushek,” Marin said softly, “I’m going to pretend I never heard of this whole thing. Play a little racquetball with you, play folgen on the hangar deck, eat a lot, sleep … have a lot of very good sex, since the two of us are somehow alive and uninjured. Yes?”

  “Oh, yes,” Travers said with dark amusement, and raised his cup in toast. “Thank gods you trained as a fighter jockey.”

  “Thank gods Mercury 101 was hangared on StarCity,” Marin added. “That was too damn’ close, Neil.”

  He was right. For a moment Travers clasped his hand tightly, though he said nothing. Moments later a proximity alarm from the pilot’s console announced the approach of the gunships and the cruiser itself.

  Chapter Twelve

  Fleet Cruiser Mercury, Borushek

  His name was Carson Hume. He had the Afro-Eurasian genetic type, typical of the pure homeworlds human, and Marin was not surprised to hear a clipped, brittle Earth accent.

  For three days he had been confined to one of the Infirmary’s five beds. One bed was vacant, and a third was occupied for the first day by Harrison Shapiro, until he checked himself out in sheer boredom. When Shapiro walked out, Hume was still sedated after the surgery to clean up the remains of his left leg, and when the Mercury dropped out of e-space just short of the Borushek system the agent was in a hoverchair to which his left wrist was handcuffed. Tim Inosanto or Reuben Kravitz was with him every waking moment, and what Hume did not yet know was that he had been chipped. Shapiro’s AI could track him – stun or euthanize him, if he somehow got away from Inosanto and Kravitz.

  Borushek looked serene, normal, but Marin wore a frown as he watched the globe expand in the forward observation ports. One thought haunted him. They were gone. He had called Riga moments before, and only Joss answered.

  A message was waiting on the threedee, and Curtis had already buzzed Travers. Neil was with the rest of Bravo, down on the hangar deck, and though Marin would have been welcome to join them he knew he would have felt like an intruder. He had never really been a part of Bravo, though they would have opened ranks to admit him. But Perlman had called Travers to a private meeting of the old unit, to answer hard questions in terms they would understand, and knew they could trust. There was no more time to deliberate. The moment to choose was now.

  The comm loop was quiet but busy, though none of Bravo’s business was being monitored. Marin gave a thread of his attention to Robert Chandra Liang and his ex-wife, who had been talking without pause for the last hour. Madam Deuel was ordering clothes, furniture, personal effects – all the items she apparently deemed the absolute essentials, while anyone else would have called her shopping list absurd frivolity.

  She had picked up and run from Velcastra with a change of clothes and her cosmetics bag, and her first demand, as soon as her head cleared, was to know when she and Robert were going back. Neither Liang nor Shapiro could even hazard an answer, and the lady’s eyes widened as she realized she would be aboard the Mercury for an indefinite time.

  Officers’ quarters were spacious and comfortable, but the appointments were hardly appropriate for Velcastran royalty. Marin might have been scornful, but in her own way Sonja Deuel was a trouper. She either could not or would not fall in with the rest of the company, wear service clothes, sit on service chairs, eat service food, but not a word of complaint passed her lips until the Mercury dropped out at Borushek. Then the shopping began, and everything conceivable was being crated for shipment to the cruiser.

  Chandra Liang’s voice was a subtle murmur behind Deuel’s. Marin listened for a moment, long enough to know he was conferencing with Daku contacts on Borushek. All his transmissions were made in level five encryption, and the real meat of what he had to impart was buried in a data packaged, encrypted at level nine and piggybacked on the voice signal. The foundation stones of Borushek’s republican government were being cemented into place.

  Footsteps at the door of the dim Ops room made Marin turn, expecting Travers, but it was Jon Kim. Two Mercury watch officers were on duty, but Marin was otherwise alone in one corner of the vast facility. Three out of four displays were dark, and the AI was idling, negotiating with Sark ATC as the ship drove into its usual parking orbit.

  As Shapiro’s aide, Kim had access to every system, every iota of data. The Mercury crew nodded good morning; one gestured with a mug to ask if he would like tea, but Kim shook his head. He had only looked in on his way by, and said softly to Marin,

  “Harrison wants you and Neil in the medlab.”

  “Now?” Marin glanced into the threedee, where Mark Sherratt’s face was frozen, his message on hold.

  “Next ten minutes,” Kim speculated. “It’s Carson Hume.”

  So the man was fit enough for the interrogation to begin. Marin breathed a soundless sigh and bumped Mark’s message through to the threedee in the quarters he shared with Travers. “Tell him I’ll round up Neil and we’ll be there.” Kim was gone a moment later, and Marin slipped a combug into his ear. “Travers? Sorry, Neil. We’re out of time.”

  His voice was terse. “We’re done here anyway. Where do you want me?”

  Marin might have said, flat on his back on a black sheepskin before a crackling hearth, with cognac in one hand and bitter dark chocolate in the other, but he said,

  “The medlab. Shapiro’s going to tackle Hume, and frankly, I want to be there.”

  “So do I,” Travers agreed. “Five minutes.”

  “I’ll meet you there.” Marin raised a hand to the watch crew and stepped out.

  Arrangements were being made for two Daku secretaries to be cleared through Shapiro’s security screen. They would be aboard by late evening, Sark time, and Liang would continue to work. The location mattered little to him. Madam Deuel seemed satisfied with her own preparations for the ‘ordeal,’ as she called it, and Jon Kim was still riding a cushion of relief which bordered on euphoria. He was free and safe, the dogs were safe, and if the look on his face this morning was anything to judge by, Shapiro was feeling much better.

  For himself, Marin had no objection to living aboard. The Wastrel was more plush, less military, but the stateroom he and Travers shared was the equivalent of Alexis Rusch’s quarters on the Kiev. They would take a lighter down later in the day, and pack anything they wanted to be freighted out of the apartment in downtown Sark.

  There was little Marin actually wanted to take, and he kept nothing much aboard the Wastrel. He could pack everything he owned in two bags and in an hour vanish into the milling streets of the spaceport rink. It was a matter of professional security for any Dendra Shemiji operative
to be able to fade like a shadow out of the city, on an unmonitored civilian ship such as the Carellan Djerun.

  And she was gone. Marin had asked Ingrid for a comm patch when the Mercury dropped out, but Shapiro’s AI had already traded data with its clone at the office on the base, and with Joss at Mark Sherratt’s house in Riga. ‘All Resalq vessels have departed Borushek space,’ Ingrid reported baldly.

  A peculiar shiver lingered in Marin’s bones, long enough to leave his belly fluttering. They were gone, to the last individual. The Resalq had slipped away, one ship at a time, leaving Riga a ghost town running on automatics – and someone, somewhere had noticed. Someone had called CNS with the news. A curious little story was running on CityNet this morning.

  Longshots and overviews of Riga accompanied a voice track laid by one of the society journalists. Marin knew the voice but could not connect it with a name. Stills and vidclips of various Resalq who had attained a little fame in Sark society popped up – a very young one, whom everyone thought was a girl, with his long, blond hair, legs that seemed too long to be human, which they were, and the gold eyes which were natural in the Resalq, though they could be genetically designed into the human. And a young man who had won a sportplane race, collected his trophy, partied the night through in a danceshop in Sark, and was soon named as the father of two human children. The claims were ridiculously absurd, but the socialites who had fallen pregnant at the night-long party were not to know it. Resalq and human DNA were far too different to permit a natural pregnancy. Marin was not even sure they shared enough in common for a hybrid to be conjured in the lab.

  ‘The highlands town of Riga,’ said the voice track, ‘is curiously empty today. The home of the beautiful Winona Breck and two-time Arago Challenge winner Tigh Stromberg appears to have become a ghost town. For decades, Riga has been known as a tight-knit, insular community, comprising several extended families, eight global business combines, forty individual households with over six hundred billion credits in investments on Borushek alone. According to AIs across the town, the community has departed on its private vessels to attend a family gathering at an undisclosed location. Wedding, funeral, anniversary, business conference? Who can tell? But you can be certain Winona and Tigh will be in the spotlight here on CityNet when they return to the city of Sark.’