Flashpoint (Hellgate)

by Mel Keegan

  “So when he tries to tell you there’s no Zunshu threat,” Travers said with spurious mildness, “and it’s all a colonial hoax to get the Confederacy out of the Deep Sky, you know which team he’s batting on. The question is, which team you decide to bat for yourself.”

  “The man,” Marin finished, “is a mass murderer, a political brigand, a corporate criminal, and he’s gotten away with it for decades.”

  Hume’s face was a mask. “You’re very sure of your intel.”

  “We are.” Marin turned away.

  “I’m an Earther myself,” Hume’s voice was a bare rasp.

  “So is Richard Vaurien,” Travers said tersely. “Nationality isn’t the issue here. It never was. It’s too bad we don’t have a sensor probe to measure decency. Old fashioned scruples, or the lack of them. You want to know more, Captain? Ask Shapiro. What you’re allowed to know, he’ll tell you. What you believe is entirely up to you. Curtis?”

  He wanted a stiff drink, a clean shirt, an hour’s rest. He walked away from Hume and did not pause until the door had closed behind Marin. Their quarters were quiet, dim. His head had begun to swim with the drugs Drury had pumped into him, and when Marin pressed him onto the bed, he was pleased to agree.

  A double whisky appeared in his hand, and Marin stooped to drop a kiss on his forehead. “Rest. I’ll file the report,” Curtis offered. “We’re on our way back to Ulrand … you feel the vibration through the deck? I’ll field Shapiro, make arrangements to get Rutherford squared away. Then I’ll bring dinner to the cabin, if you like. By that time, you might feel like eating.”

  The drugs and booze were making Travers’s head unsteady. He squeezed one eye shut and looked up at Marin out of the other. “You’re going to mollycoddle me.”

  “I’ve got the right to,” Marin reminded him, teasing. “Handfasted, remember?”

  “Handfasted,” Travers echoed, watching him as he dimmed the lights and made his way to the door. There, Marin stopped for a moment, turned back and gave Travers an inscrutable look. “What?” Neil wondered.

  For some moments Marin said nothing, and then he shook his head. “Just rest awhile. I’ll give you a buzz when we take Rutherford aboard, if you want to look the man in the beady little eyeballs before we slam a door on him and lock it.”

  “Yeah. Thanks.” Travers watched the door close over, closed his eyes and became keenly aware of the shoulder. It was half numb with local anesthetic, and blazing with the nano activity which was spinning new tissues.

  Finding a position that would let him rest was impossible, and he was still awake an hour later, more than ready to hunt down another double scotch, when the comm chimed softly. Marin’s voice said quietly from the semi-darkness,

  “If you’re awake, the government lighter’s about to dock. Shapiro and Kim came up with it too, and a half dozen Ulrish secret service people are dying to hand over Rutherford and get out to Fridjof Central.”

  “I’m awake,” Travers grunted. He already had his feet on the deck, and waited a moment to let his head clear of the telltale giddiness. His body knew it had active, working nano aboard.

  “Shapiro briefed the Ulrand militia in flight,” Marin added. “They think they were hit by Fleet agents.”

  “Fleet?” Travers was still trying to kickstart his brain as he headed out of the cabin. “Where are you?”

  “Ops room,” Curtis told him. “And I agree with Shapiro – this is a Freespacer port. Ostensibly, the only crews that would assault the production complex don’t ship out of Freespace. This works better if the Ulrish authorities think it was Fleet, trying a punitive action after the battle they lost.”

  “We scored a lot of points,” Travers growled as he made his way forward from the private quarters.

  Marin made amused sounds. “They’re going to decorate everyone who took part in the defense of Fridjof Central. You want to wear the Ulrish Star of Valor, for exceptional service?”

  Surprise brought Travers up short. “You’re serious?”

  “Absolutely.” Marin chuckled. “The lighter will dock in fifteen. You want coffee, and then we’ll go down there, get Rutherford secured, and make peace with Roark and Asako. The Harlequin is standing by us, and they’re coming over to meet with Shapiro.”

  Mercury Operations was still powered up after the impromptu battle. Travers stepped in as Marin spoke, and headed directly for the ’chef, where Curtis was filling a mug.

  “Rodman,” Curtis said with grim amusement, “is ready to bite a chunk out of Shapiro. She still hasn’t completely forgiven Hubler for not breaching every trust he ever had with the service, but I think she’ll be more forgiving when she knows the whole story.”

  “God knows, she must have put half the pieces together by now.” Travers took the mug from him, tried the coffee and made a face. “Christ, who made this?”

  “I did.” The voice belonged to Margot Fedayev. “I make it how I like it. Not strong enough?”

  In fact, the coffee would have stripped an Arago engine. Travers gave the woman a crooked smile as she approached, and dumped a lot of cream into his mug. She was middle height, middle weight, middle age, dressed in the plain gray service uniform, but looks were deceiving. Fedayev had one of the sharpest brains on Shapiro’s crew, a keen sense of humor, and she was lethal at the folgen table. Travers liked her.

  “You guys did good,” she was saying as she joined them at the ’chef and took a refill. “That was one of the neatest ops I ever saw, and organized on the fly, in the field.”

  “The kudos go to Bravo Company,” Travers said with a hint of smugness. “We earned our spurs in the Drift, while Roark Hubler was flying Mick Vidal’s wing on the Omaru blockade – the Delta Dragons.”

  She knew all this, and answered with a mute nod. Marin helped himself to a second green tea and saluted Travers with it. “The Ulrish Star of Valor. After the war, it’s going to count for a lot.”

  “If,” Fedayev’s said bleakly, “any of us is still alive to collect it.” She nodded at the threedee, where the ops data was scrolling. “That was nasty. It’s the first time anyone with half a chance was in the vicinity of a Zunshu strike. The first time anyone survived to file a report. And from here, it gets worse, doesn’t it?” Her eyes were wide, dark, haunted. She was looking at Marin, whom she knew as a Dendra Shemiji agent first, and Harrison Shapiro’s trustee second. If there was any such thing as a mission specialist, Marin was it.

  “I’m afraid so.” He watched the data march through the threedee. “The ancient Resalq data says the squads will keep coming like this for the smaller targets, and then the world-killers will start to drop out of the Drift.”

  “Christ.” Fedayev’s eyes closed. “It’s like a bad dream.”

  “The Resalq would agree with you,” Travers sighed.

  “How long?” she wondered.

  “How long have we got?” Marin’s brows rose. “Long enough, if Lai’a is as good as Mark Sherratt thinks it is, and if his data, and Jazinsky’s, is up to speed.”

  Her lips compressed. “And are they? The ship, the data – good enough?”

  “I … think so,” Marin agreed. “Ask me again after I’ve talked to Mark.”

  “I will.” She stirred with a gesture at the nav-tank, which was alive and sparkling, already preloaded with the solution for the Weimann jump from Ulrand to Alshie’nya. “We’re out of here, soon as you get Rutherford locked up.”

  The styrene cup crumpled and dropped into the recycle chute, and Marin was already moving. “Time, Neil. We need to swing by Armory.”

  They broke out Zamphir and Chiyoda sidearms, and Travers held a curious silence as they headed down to the belly of the cruiser. The ’locks were busy with Shapiro’s crew and Bravo Company, milling together, eager for a first glimpse of a man they had learned to despise. Fargo and Kravitz were there, still hyped-up after the action, and chafing their hands as the freezing air of the hangar invaded the access passage.

  The acrid smell
of hot Aragos prickled the sinuses as Travers clapped his hands to bring the melee to order. The lighter was powering down as he and Marin stepped out of the lift, and the smaller hangar, just aft, was repressurizing after the Harlequin’s shuttle came aboard. Over the loop Fedayev’s voice said softly,

  “Tech crews standby. We are initiating Weimann sequencing.”

  The Mercury would slide out the Ulrand system in less than an hour, and Travers was glad to be going. The local anesthesia had begun to wear thin, and his shoulder was blazing. He wondered if Drury would give him another shot, and then a face he knew but had never before seen in the flesh diverted him from the gathering pain.

  He had seen Senator Charleston Aimes Rutherford in archival vids, security images, but the reality of the man was very different. He was Shapiro’s height, and in the months of captivity he had lost flesh and his hair had turned iron gray as the usual cosmetic treatments were either denied or shunned. He seemed small and oddly frail, and not until one reached the man’s face, his eyes, did one recognize the colossal malice which had led to the CL-389 incident, the association with Boden Zwerner, the Battle of Ulrand. Hate seemed to make Rutherford’s eyes burn.

  He was not a young man, and captivity had not suited him. Travers doubted he had been badly treated, but Rutherford had been accustomed to the best hotels, the most exclusive Companions, his own gourmet chef, a team of masseurs and therapists. For months now, life would have been a great deal more simple, and he was chafing at the imagined hardship of living under house arrest with a security crew for company, eating what they ate, dressing like them, sleeping alone.

  As he made his way through the cold, aromatic hangar today, in the whining noise of the lighter’s shutdown routines, he was clad in dark blue slacks, a cream linen shirt, a pale green jacket, and the clothes looked odd on him. In all the archival vids, Rutherford never appeared in public unless he sported priceless silk suits, his fingers and ears sparkling with precious stones. The only thing glittering about him now were the cuffs and ten centimeters of chain between his gnarled hands.

  He walked stiffly, a pace ahead of Shapiro as the party came through the hangar where the lighter had berthed, and between two of the biggest Pakrani security men Travers had ever seen. These two were daunting, taller and broader than Sergei van Donne, who flaunted his stature, and they wore a dozen sidearms about them Travers could see, which meant they would be carrying twice as many concealed.

  Harrison Shapiro’s face was grim, when Travers might have expected to see a triumphant look. As the party approached the ’lock, he had one hand to his ear, holding the combug in deeply, and he was still talking – still in conference with the Ulrish authorities. A pace behind him, Jon Kim was flanked by two secret service men and a civilian from the government. He was intent on a handy, and nodding.

  It would be the document of transfer, Travers knew. As soon as it was signed, acknowledging that Rutherford had passed out of any reasonable Ulrish responsibility, the lighter would leave. From the faces on the guards, they would be grateful to be rid of the man. He could not have been a pleasant prisoner.

  “Yes … yes, exactly,” Shapiro was saying as he stepped into Travers’s range of hearing. “Triple security on all your installations, right across the Ulrand system and be aware, the squads will be coming in with stealth procedures you haven’t yet seen. Also be aware, you’re not eliminating humans. They’re drones, Colonel, exceptionally smart, networked and extremely dangerous, with the capacity to learn from your tactics and promptly turn the data against you. I’ve told you all I can.” He paused to listen, and then, “Yes. A megavolt pulse directly into the mechanism will deactivate it for a matter of seconds, in which time you must destroy the abdominal cavity, which is the housing for the core processor.”

  So he had ascribed the Zunshu machines to a new generation of Fleet technology. “Sneaky,” Travers said softly to Marin.

  “Smart,” Marin amended. “He’s managed to get the Ulrand militia up to speed without saying one word of the truth!”

  “Exactly. You have it, Colonel Petroni,” Shapiro was saying to the comm as Kim passed the handy to him. He keyed in a nine-digit code and pressed the pad of his thumb to the scanner. He was still intent on the officer from the militia. “The Mercury will be leaving Ulrish space in a matter of minutes, for a classified location. As you know, our security on Borushek has been breached … yes, indeed. Your office will be among the first to receive encrypted transmissions from me. Good day, Colonel … and good hunting.”

  The handy was already back in the possession of the civilian government representative. Rutherford stood surrounded and dwarfed by his guards, and as Shapiro plucked the combug from his ear, he beckoned Travers and Marin closer. Marin deliberately opened his pale blue jacket to display the Chiyoda machine pistol in its holster against his left side.

  The Ulrish agents stepped back two calculated paces. The handover was made with a nod, a bleak smile, a courteous half-bow from the government representative. She gave Shapiro her hand for a moment before she stalked away on impossibly high heels toward the lighter. The Aragos were still shimmering, and as she approached the engines began to whine.

  The ’lock rumbled shut, sealed, and spinners cast red and blue light across the hangar. A siren wailed as the lighter closed up and the hangar began to blow down to partial pressure. Travers turned his back on the armorglass of the observation panel, and looked Rutherford up and down with a sense of distaste.

  “Welcome back,” Marin was saying to Shapiro. “The Fridjof data is waiting for you, if you’d like to review it.”

  But Shapiro’s head was shaking. “Later. I looked at the summary on the way here. You two and Bravo have earned yourselves the Star of Valor, and that’s good enough for me. The Zunshu refuse is in containment?”

  “In cryogen,” Marin affirmed. “It’s absolutely inert. Mark and Barb can have a look at it, see if there’s anything they can use … but I’m afraid we didn’t leave much intact!”

  “And we’re breaking orbit,” Shapiro said with a sigh which might have been gratitude. He gave Marin and Travers a wry smile. “Have dinner with us later. Robert and Sonja will be joining us. Why don’t you give us the mission report over some good food and fine wine?”

  “We’d be glad to.” Travers was still intent on Rutherford. “Will you be wanting to interrogate the senator?”

  “Eventually.” Shapiro stepped away to Kim’s side. “For the moment, have him chipped and confined to quarters with encrypted access. Make sure he has a loaded ’chef, and the plumbing works, and his threedee privileges are strictly limited to entertainment. Place him under drone surveillance with orders to sedate if he makes trouble. If he tries to do himself or anyone else any injury, Doctor Drury has reserved a cryogen tank for him. I’d be delighted to put him in it and forget about him for a very, very long time.” He gave Travers and Marin a genial smile. “Till dinner, gentlemen. And may I offer you my compliments on the Fridjof operation.”

  With that, he and Kim turned back toward the service elevators, and most of Bravo company formed up around Charleston Rutherford as if they expected the odd little man to fight.

  In fact, Rutherford seemed to shrivel, collapsing in on his own bones. His eye sockets were blue and hollow, and his lips were an unhealthy color. If Travers was any judge, the man was sick. Fury and stress would do this. He touched his combug and said softly,

  “Doc Drury?”

  She was still on shift, more than likely filing the report on the Fridjof casualties. “Infirmary. Is that Travers? You’re supposed to be resting.”

  “I’m fine,” he told her, sharing a glance with Marin. “We just took custody of Rutherford, and he looks sick to me. You might want to look at him.” Marin nodded in agreement

  “Contagious?” she asked sharply. “The Ulrish didn’t mention anything about any unusual pathogens.”

  “I don’t know,” Travers admitted. “He just looks bad.”

&
nbsp; “Cardiac, blood pressure, stress,” Marin said into the loop. “On the other hand, it could also be something local to Marak City.”

  “Bring him here,” Drury said without hesitation. “He can be cuffed to a bed right here, as easily as confined to quarters elsewhere. And I’m going to confer with the Marak medical authorities before we leave the system, find out if everyone on this ship is going to need shots!”

  “Will do,” Travers responded. He dropped a hand on Reuben Kravitz’s shoulder. “You heard Shapiro. You and Judith, set up 24 – autochef, threedee, drones, the works.”

  “He’s going to the Infirmary?” Fargo was glaring at Rutherford, studying him as if he were a venomous insect. “If it was up to me, he’d be chained to the deck in the maintenance hangar, on minimum rations, ass-naked, with one skinny blanket.”

  She had friends on Omaru, Travers remembered, most of them made on the crewdeck of the Intrepid. If CL-389 had not been stopped, she would have been grieving, and unable even to attend the memorial, because of the blockade.

  The senator had blanched as she spoke. He maintained a stony silence, head down, feet shuffling, until he walked into the Infirmary. Travers and Marin stopped at the door, and before Travers could mention it, he saw two bucket-sized security drones riding shimmering Aragos, flanking a bed in the observation bay. Rutherford’s right cuff unlocked for long enough for it to be relocked to a bracket on one of the drones, and Travers relaxed.

  In the bright Infirmary lights, Rutherford looked even worse, and Drury was already making unhappy noises as she played a hand scanner over him. “He’s a mess,” she agreed.

  “Abused in captivity?” Marin was surprised.

  “Not according to this,” Drury mused. “He’s well fed, but he’s been parked on his ass for months, mad enough to spit. Heart, arteries, BP, peripheral circulation, endocrine activity – nothing’s what it ought to be. Good call, guys.”

  Travers stirred uncomfortably as he began to feel the shoulder again. “Fixable?”