Master Sergeant

by Mel Odom

  “Okay. Got it. Most of it.” Kiwanuka still sounded tense.

  “Confirm target?” Sage asked.

  “Roger that.”

  Below, the private quarters of Sneys the merchant stood tall in a copse of trees. The man had chosen to build on a promontory that overlooked Makaum City. The trees were thin there and Sneys employed a large crew that kept the jungle clear of his private garden.

  According to the intel Sage had, Sneys’s home hadn’t always been so grand. The man had always been successful among the Makaum, following in the footsteps of his family’s horticulture business. Before he’d started working as a drug designer for the corps, Sneys had created new strands of fruits and nuts and trees that the Makaum people could train to grow into homes.

  The structure Sneys lived in was a labyrinth of dozens of trees that created a protective fortress against the larger predators that stalked the planet. Dozens of rooms had been created inside, and local legend had it that Sneys could coax his home into growing another room within a week.

  His privacy had been earned by the fields around his home that grew edible crops. Only Makaum people with a gift for agriculture were given large tracts of land, and Sneys owned enough to put him in the top tier of the sprawl population.

  The structure’s expansive roof was covered in a flower garden that was lush and immense and beautiful. Sage had observed the garden for the last three days they had done recon on the property. Jumpcopters had already flown over the area regularly on patrol, so getting an up-close look at the property hadn’t been hard.

  Getting onto the grounds was more problematic. One of the plants that Sneys’s family had perfected was uspkh, a sensory vine that alerted the merchant whenever anyone approached the main house on foot. Sage hadn’t been able to ascertain how the alarm vine was able to do that, but that was how the story went.

  Murad had attempted an explanation of the vine that had ended up making Sage’s head hurt and he’d finally given in. The only thing that mattered was that the vine worked as claimed.

  The road leading up to the house was guarded by tech as well as flesh-and-blood sec provided in the form of offworlder mercenaries. They didn’t, however, provide aerial support to watch over the grounds.

  Sage rolled and adjusted his glide path again, and the distance to the garden melted away. He arched his back and spun, putting the microweave against the wind and settling to the ground amid flowers and decorative grasses. He stumbled and almost fell before the microweave went inert and fell slack, then sucked back up into the suit. He cursed the suit again, but looked for Kiwanuka and spotted her in time to catch her by the foot before she crashed into a keval berry tree.

  Off balance, unable to catch herself and forgetting to relax the glidesuit’s memoryweave, Kiwanuka did a faceplant. Luckily the loam was soft and springy, so she didn’t do much more than knock the wind out of herself.

  Drawing the narco-dart machine pistol that was the only weapon they were carrying on the op, Sage hunkered down beside her while she recovered.

  Pete Bowden and Brittany Meacham completed the four-man insertion team. Both of them had a history of covert ops and more time in the glidesuits. They came down almost together, dropping the rigidity of the memoryweave while a meter in the air and coming down like they’d been born with wings. By the time they landed, they had their narco-dart pistols in hand and were spreading out in formation.

  Sage gazed around the garden, letting the nightvision prog adjust to the terrain and the light. In a few seconds, the nightvision had acclimated to the environment and Sage could see almost as clearly in the shadows as he could in the light of day.

  The only problem was the amount of nocturnal insect life flitting among the night blossoms. Their body heat was slightly higher than the prevailing temperature and they registered like a snowstorm of embers all around Sage and his team.

  Kiwanuka stood and drew her weapon.

  “Okay,” Sage said. “Let’s go.” He pushed through the thick plants and headed for the house’s skylight.

  Instead of glass or translucent plascrete, the skylight used tree resin that could be formed into thin, resilient sheets. Getting the tree resin to the right consistency was delicate work, and putting in the decorative imagery was painstaking art. The resin skylight had been formed to fit the two-meter opening. It latched from inside. Occasionally the skylight was opened to allow fresh breezes into the living quarters, but only when white noise generators were on to keep the insects at bay.

  Sage sprayed the skylight with a canister of solvent that dissolved the resin. The skylight thinned, became translucent, revealing the dark quarters below, and finally melted to the sides, leaving the opening clear.

  Kiwanuka walked the rooftop carefully and shot sonar of the structure. “Okay, I’ve confirmed the blueprints we received. There aren’t any surprises in the home. Layout’s just like we were told it would be.” She put the sonar pulse reader into her chest pouch.

  “Good.” Colonel Halladay had gotten the skinny on the house from his sources within the Quass members who had been invited to Sneys’s estate.

  Taking a self-starting piton from his equipment pouch, Sage knelt down and fired it into the thick loam. After making certain the piton was set properly, he hooked his rappelling cable D-link through the eyelet and clambered over the opening in the skylight.

  Once Kiwanuka and Meacham were set up, and Bowden had a close cover position to watch over them, Sage launched himself over the side and spun down the rappelling cable like a spider. Eight meters down, he landed on the floor soundlessly. The gel soles of his boots made no noise as he unbuckled the rappelling line and walked away.

  He pulled the narco-dart machine pistol into his hands and covered the large room’s three exits while Kiwanuka and Meacham followed him down.

  The room had become a showpiece of Sneys’s wealth. Before he’d inherited the estate, the room had probably been used for the same purpose for generations. The rough wood of the tree trunks that made up the walls had been worn smooth, but the grain showed through. Shelves had been grown in the spaces, not carved as Sage had at first believed. He’d seen some of the work the enviro-shapers had done with the local vegetation to create homes and had been amazed.

  Furniture wasn’t brought into the home. It was created within the structure, grown from the trees that made up the building. Nano fiber aboard space stations and starships could do the same thing, rise up from the floor and become furniture in seconds. What the Makaum people managed to do, even though such shaping took weeks and months, was nothing short of spectacular.

  Meacham positioned herself against a dark wall that gave her an unobstructed view of the home’s lower floor and the winding staircase that grew out of the wall.

  Sage scanned the house for biometrics and discovered four active humanoid life-forms in one of the second-story rooms. Two of the downstairs rooms each had one life-form reading.

  Moving on stealth mode, but quickly as he dared, Sage entered the first room and discovered an elderly Makaum woman sleeping in a bed.

  “Domestic help,” Kiwanuka said. “Sneys is supposed to have two live-in staff.”

  Lowering the machine pistol, Sage took a fully soluble slap patch from his chest pouch and applied it to the sleeping woman’s exposed neck. She woke for just a moment, but the drug in the slap patch stole her consciousness before she completely roused. The narcotic would guarantee four hours of uninterrupted sleep.

  A quick trip to the other bedroom and another slap patch guaranteed the domestic help were accounted for.

  Returning to the big main room, Sage crept up the stairway and turned into the hallway that led to the master bedroom, where Sneys slept. Voices and movement sounded inside, conversation and laughter, most of it from a man’s voice. Sage sampled the male voice with the suit’s limited recording features and compared it to a chunk of Sneys’s voice. In short order, the indicator flashed green, letting Sage know Sneys was present.
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br />   Another peal of laughter came from the room, and it sounded fake and forced. The man spoke again and there was more laughter.

  It would have been better if Sneys and his company had been asleep, but Sage wasn’t going to abandon the mission. He was just going to have to be quick.

  The door had been equipped with a sensor-fed locking array. Sage placed a foolie on the lock and let it do its work, nervously waiting for several seconds before the locks clicked open.

  Machine pistol tucked up under his arm, Sage disabled his nightvision feature because lights were on inside the room and he didn’t want to be blinded when he entered. Then he shoved the door open and followed it inside.

  Sneys was a pot-bellied Makaum in his middle years. From the scuttlebutt Murad had dug up with dataminers slipping through the Makaum sprawl net, Sage knew Sneys had been something of a letch even before the corps had made him an even richer man.

  Totally naked, Sneys romped in the bed with three offworlder feminine consorts. One of them was human. Another was Ehati, a race that was beautiful and intelligent, passionate in the arts. Ehati were expensive courtesans.

  The third was a Youghy, a massive female who stood nearly three meters tall, massed out at a conservative one hundred and sixty kilos, an Amazon of a woman. The Youghy were a warlike race that hadn’t achieved star flight on their own, but had been picked up by several interstellar species as laborers, and as warriors.

  The Youghy spotted Sage first and reached for her brear, a tri-bladed throwing weapon large enough and lethal enough to cut through armor or lop off a soldier’s head or limb. Youghy had a habit of never being far from their personal weapons because they were also their prayer tools to their gods.

  The Youghy female was quick, managing to grab her weapon and fling it at Sage. The blades fanned through the air and sounded like a fast-beating heart as it closed on Sage.

  “Down!” Sage ordered, throwing himself to the floor under the spinning blades and hoping that Kiwanuka managed to do the same. The Youghy female had already grabbed her spear, shaking it once to release it, expanding it from the baton-length to three meters of deadly reinforced steel. Blades jutted out of either end.

  The brear thudded into the wall over Sage’s head as he centered the machine pistol on the Youghy female and squeezed the trigger. The machine pistol’s slight recoil didn’t affect Sage. Phosphorescent fins on the five-centimeter darts glowed across the woman’s midsection, injecting her with narcotic.

  She flung the spear as a last act of defiance before collapsing to the bed and trapping the Ehati female beneath her. As Sage feathered the Ehati woman with darts, Sneys vaulted up from the tangled sheets faster than Sage would have given the man credit for.

  Getting to his feet, Sage fired another burst of narcodarts at the female and dropped her in a rolling sprawl from the bed, leaving her on the ground.

  Sneys wrapped a hand around the portable comm on the floor by the bed and tried to thumb the panic button.

  Sage kicked the device from the merchant’s hands before the outside mercenaries could be signaled that something was wrong. If the guards had been alerted and brought into the dwelling, Sage wasn’t sure if his team would have been able to handle them because they were armored.

  Sneys tried to scramble to the portable comm, but Sage kicked the man in the side hard enough to flip him over onto his back. Putting the muzzle of the machine pistol only a handful of centimeters from the merchant’s eyes, Sage shook his head.

  “Don’t try it. For now I want you alive. You don’t want to change my mind.”

  Quivering in fear, Sneys held up his hands. “All right. Don’t shoot. Just don’t kill me.”

  “Get up. Slowly,” Sage directed. “You’re going to get dressed.”

  “Why?”

  “We’re going to take a trip.”

  “I have credsticks here. I can pay you.” Sneys’s eyes were wide with fright.

  “I’m not interested.” Sage tapped the man’s face with the blunt muzzle of the machine pistol hard enough to get and keep Sneys’s attention. “You and I are going to talk, and you’re going to tell me what I want to know. Otherwise, I’m going to find a kifrik web and tie you to it.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  Special Ops Conference Room 3

  Fort York

  0443 Hours Zulu Time

  Sage stared down into the holo of the target zone and tried to peel back the jungle to see the large lab site Sneys had claimed was there. Even with the view from the satellite recon, there was no way to push back the trees and brush to get a clear view of the terrain. DawnStar had selected the site well. The maps designated the area as the Cer’ardu Heights.

  Halladay leaned on the desk and examined the territory with tense anticipation. “What do we know about this area?”

  “Not much, sir.” Sage had spent the last three hours sorting through the geographical studies and topographical maps Terran military had of the site. Adrenaline thrummed softly through his system because he knew the window of time open on the op was steadily closing. If they didn’t move soon, Sneys’s disappearance would be noted and it wouldn’t take DawnStar long to connect the dots. “Military ops are wide of that area because the Makaum have stayed out of it for the most part. It’s a hundred forty klicks out and in rough country according to the reports from Makaum hunters that intelligence has picked up over the past couple of years.”

  “If we go straight at the people in that complex, they’re going to see us coming.”

  “We can go straight at them, though, sir.” Sage had just figured that part out.

  “How?”

  “You’re looking at this as a two-dimensional problem, staying strictly on the ground. We don’t have to do that.”

  “What are you thinking?”

  “We can use dropships, launch off the DawnStar space station and hit dirt with soldiers within minutes at the end of a rapid planetfall. The people in that compound won’t know where those dropships are heading until it’s too late.” Sage waved a hand across the holo, triggering the next set of schematics he, Murad, and Kiwanuka had proposed.

  A simulated sequence showed two dropships plunging through the atmosphere, burning off landing pads out of the jungle, and hitting dirt within a short distance of what they believed was the outer perimeter of the site.

  “We’ve got troops up on the space station now on leave. We send up more troops with a dropship without alerting anyone, tag it for emergency maintenance, then stack that dropship with the soldiers we send up and the ones we bring back down in a dropship still in orbit. Instead of landing in Fort York, we put both dropships down near the lab.”

  Halladay pulled up a separate screen out of the holo and reviewed the troop numbers. “Did Sneys give you any indication of how many guards might be stationed there?”

  “He said he thinks there are around a hundred DawnStar bashhounds,” Kiwanuka said, “but those numbers are supplemented by mercenaries and local guards. Maybe a hundred and fifty.”

  “We’ve got eight hundred and seventy-two troops cleared for active duty in this battalion.” Halladay gazed at the readout panel that glowed against the virtual topography. “I can’t leave this fort understaffed.”

  “I know that, sir.” Sage looked into the other man’s eyes. “And, provided we can get that second dropship and soldiers up to DawnStar without alerting anyone—because soldiers talk, we can’t deploy more than a hundred of our people. We put fifty men in each dropship, fifty on the ground and take fifty from the men on leave at the space station, equip twenty percent of them with powersuits for heavy artillery, and have them hit the east and west ends of the lab and launch attacks.”

  “We can’t just attack that lab without proof of what they’re doing.”

  Sage nodded. “I know that, sir. Lieutenant Murad is going to lead our covert team into the lab so we can get you the proof you need. Then, after we get that to you, you can get authority to launch the dropships and hit dirt.�
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  “If we get clearance to launch an attack like that,” Halladay looked at the three soldiers around the holo table, “you’re talking about a nine-minute window before I can put troops on the ground even with an emergency fall from low-planet orbit. If you blow cover before those troops arrive, you’re on your own until we can get there.”

  “Yes sir,” Sage said. “That’s nine minutes that none of us can make go away. We’ll have to eat that time. But if we want to break the hold DawnStar and the other corps have on the black market here on Makaum, this may be the only chance we get. Once DawnStar finds out we took Sneys, they’ll know we have more intelligence on them than they were expecting. They’ll be more careful, and they’ll pump up their defenses and hit back politically if they’re able.”

  Halladay stared at the holo. The grim lines on his face deepened. “We haven’t even confirmed the existence of a lab at that site.”

  “Once we do, things will have to happen pretty quickly if we’re going to do anything about it.” Sage paused. “If we can make this happen, sir, we’ll be out in front of them instead of chasing them for a change.”

  “I know.” Halladay cursed softly. “Where is Sneys?”

  “We’ve got him and his staff on lockdown,” Murad said.

  “How soon before anyone knows he has gone missing?”

  Sage shrugged and the adrenaline inside him picked up the pace. “Hours. Sneys doesn’t keep a regular schedule, but people will know when he’s not around for a while.”

  “It would help if we had more control of that.”

  “Yes sir, it would. But we don’t.” Sage watched Halladay’s eyes and saw the conviction roll into place as the man’s gaze turned harder. The mission was going to be a go. Halladay couldn’t back off now if they were going to have a chance to strike back. There wouldn’t be another opportunity to catch DawnStar as vulnerable.

  “All right, let’s get it done. I’ll get the cavalry in order.”