Nythal cracked his neck. “It’s fine…Volosk, is it? I’m still in shock over what happened. I can hardly believe it. We all had high hopes for the Summit, and it’s a shame it went down this way. It truly is.” He dragged a hand through sleek black hair. “So what do you need from me?”
“Merely a bit of information.” Michael cleared his throat and sat down opposite his ‘guest.’ “I won’t take any more of your time than is necessary. What can you tell me about Christopher Candela?”
Nythal shrugged. “I didn’t really know him.”
“I understand if you didn’t know him socially, but he served as a staffer in your department, and you oversaw administration and coordination for the Summit. You approved his attendance, correct?”
“Well, yes. But you must realize, there were thirty-seven people in the delegation. I can’t be expected to know each of them individually. I can tell you Mr. Candela’s record was clean. He wouldn’t have been permitted to go were it not.”
“I’m sure.” He really wished the man hadn’t doped himself up, as it made it difficult to judge and interpret his body language. He considered putting the man on ice until he’d returned to a baseline state…but there was a lot to do and little time to do it in. “Do you have any personal impressions of him you can share?”
Another shrug. “He was…young. Eager to please. Seemed intelligent enough, but we hadn’t asked anything of him yet. My impression of him is he didn’t make much of an impression.”
“What about during the Summit? Any out-of-character behavior?”
Nythal leaned into the table and clasped his hands together. His thumbs continued to dance erratically. “Look, Mr. Volosk. I stayed busy two ways from Sunday during the Summit. I barely noticed what my personal secretary did, much less some no-name lackey.”
Michael maintained perfect composure, offering no hint of annoyance. “Of course you did. Do you remember the last time you saw him?”
Nythal blew out an exaggerated breath and crashed back in the chair. “Uh, I think I saw him at the dinner Tuesday night. Wednesday though? I attended meetings all day.”
“And around the time of the incident?”
His gaze drifted around the small room as if deep in thought. “No, I don’t think so. I mean I was in the ballroom, so I suppose my eyes might have drifted across him, but….”
Now Michael did show annoyance, with deliberate intent. He’d let the man play out his routine. Now to remind him he wasn’t actually in control of his situation. Nythal was a government official of moderate stature, certainly, but one didn’t get far in the intelligence business without learning to disregard political niceties. Granted, once you rose to a department directorship you needed to begin to practice them again, but not in this particular circumstance.
“Fine. Did he have a reason to be in the receiving line? He doesn’t sound like the type of person who would want to glad-hand dignitaries.”
“Maybe it was a secret dream of his. I don’t even know if he’d ever met Kouris—”
“What was his job at the Summit? It doesn’t appear as though he did much of anything.”
“He was an attaché, he…got shit for us. Ran errands. Made notes, whatever.”
“How many attachés did you have serving you?”
“Um, four, five? I don’t…remember….” The lines had begun to deepen around his sagging eyelids. The amps were wearing off.
“Seems like a little too much bureaucratic padding to me—this isn’t the Alliance. What about the following individuals: Alice Terre, Gerald Michaels, Treyson Rivers, Brandon Chao?”
“Wha—what’s special about them?”
“They also participated in the receiving line and greeted Minister Santiagar prior to his collapse. We’ll need to review their files and activities as well.”
Michael sat at his desk, the door closed. A few moments’ respite. His hands rested at his chin in a thoughtful pose. And he was thoughtful.
He’d conducted half a dozen interviews at the request of his agents, spent hours reviewing summaries of three dozen more interviews and viewed the footage of the incident from every angle and the cams of the pursuing agents. He’d confirmed the logs of every exit and patrol on Atlantis.
The man in the receiving line was Chris Candela. Scans of both Kouris’ and Santiagar’s hands minutes after the incident recovered trace DNA. Yet the man pursued into the service corridors displayed evasion and subterfuge skills which nothing in Candela’s life history indicated he should possess.
Worse, he was gone. Despite an ironclad lockdown on the facility in under two minutes—due as much to quick-moving Alliance security as anyone else’s actions—and a meter-level grid search, no trace could be found of the man.
The exit logs stared back at him from the screen above his desk. Eventually they had been forced to allow the uninvolved guests and bystanders to depart. The official Summit attendees were accounted for, save Candela. The nine attendees not present at the final dinner—an Alliance staffer, three reporters and five corporate executives—were interviewed on-scene and provided viable reasons for their absence. After follow-up they had been cleared and allowed to depart as well.
He exhaled softly, feeling every gram of the weight though it didn’t show in his posture or the bearing of his shoulders. Diplomatic relations with the Alliance hung by a dangling strand of a thread. If they could provide hard evidence of this being the act of a lone crazy, they stood a chance of at least regaining an uneasy détente. Otherwise, their claims of non-involvement came off as weak and impotent. But damned if he could find any such evidence.
He traded the exit logs for the rapidly growing file on the life and times of Chris Candela.
He had seen many criminals in his years in Division. Dangerous men and even more dangerous women. Small-time hucksters and savvy crime lords. Spies, gangsters, assassins, insurgents and wannabe-revolutionaries. True believers and soulless mercs willing to kill children for the right price.
Candela was none of these things. While the possibility continued that something in the man’s past, some event they had yet to uncover would open a Pandora’s box of secrets, it became increasingly unlikely with each passing hour. Even if—
His eVi blinked red, and a second later a brief message flashed into his vision.
We found him.
The body had floated onto a beach filled with frolicking children mid-morning Atlantis time. Once the children were corralled for counseling and the scene secured, a thorough forensic investigation was conducted onsite before moving the body to a medical facility.
The examination indicated a time of death between late afternoon on Wednesday and mid-morning Thursday; two-plus days in the water made a more precise TOD impossible. The cause of death was determined to be drowning. All evidence indicated that upon escaping the convention facility, however he accomplished it, he had simply dived off a walkway and let himself drown.
Oceans did not constitute a significant feature of Senecan topology. They existed of course, but were shallow and unexceptional, and generally far too cold to frolic in. It was conceivable Candela didn’t know how to swim. Unlikely, but conceivable.
It remained a mystery how he escaped the lockdown. But he clearly had—after which, by all indications, he committed suicide.
The evidence at this point was near to irrefutable. And despite herculean efforts and their most earnest protestations, they had nothing they would be able to show to the Alliance government to prove the assassination was anything other than a premeditated act on behalf of the Senecan Federation.
26
PALLUDA
SENECAN FEDERATION COLONY
* * *
THAD YUE LED THE FIGHTERS into Senecan Federation space. He had swung down a bit to the south so should they be tracked, they would appear to be approaching from the nearest Alliance military base on Arcadia. They were unlikely to be picked up until they reached Palluda however, as other than one tiny Alliance colon
y the region to the south of western Federation space was a desolate wasteland devoid of life.
At 0.2 AU out from Palluda they dropped out of superluminal. He signaled the other fighters to move into a tight standard Alliance approach formation, one they had practiced several times in the last week in the skies above Cosenti.
From here on out, everything needed to proceed according to the script.
“Activate transponders.”
Acknowledged.
“Switching to Alliance encrypted communications protocol. Confirm.”
Confirmed.
He consciously added a crisp abruptness to his tone. “This is Vengeance Alpha. Operation Vengeance is a go. Initiate jamming of orbital sensors on my mark. And…mark.”
Palluda became visible in the viewport moments later. It was a smallish planet, two-thirds the size of Mars, and the lone habitable world in the system. Nevertheless with a location solidly in the goldilocks zone and a stable orbit, it was a bountiful if ordinary garden world.
The colony had been founded ten years earlier as an agricultural outpost. It supported a population of under thirty thousand, for bots did most of the work tending the vast kilometers of farmland. A single town sat in the center of the cultivated land. Thankfully the first atmosphere corridors had begun operation six months earlier—corridors which helpfully included transponder monitoring, though no connected security measures.
“Bravo, Charlie, Delta, on me. Prepare for corridor transit.”
The corridor ended to the southwest of and outside town. Only the most basic defense system protected the colony, consisting of two surface-to-air turret lasers and a single patrol drone. He planned to knock out the drone immediately, and custom jamming ware would disrupt the STA turrets.
His ship emerged from the corridor and the distant outline of the town came into view. The other three fighters followed him out as he banked east.
“Vengeance, you have your targets. We are weapons heavy.”
Thomas Harnal was deeply engrossed in watching Ava Loumas saunter across the street. As such, he didn’t see the patrol drone until it crashed to the ground three meters in front of him.
“Ah shit!” His arms cartwheeled in the air as he was thrown backward to land on his ass on the sidewalk. He looked up to discover Ava staring wide-eyed at the scattered wreckage of the drone and the deep crater it had created.
He laughed gamely and climbed to his feet. “Well, there’s my brush with death for the day, eh?”
She glanced over at him, a perplexed frown animating her pretty features. “Oh…Norm…Tom? That’s your name, right? Are you okay?”
She didn’t even know his name. His shoulders sagged. “Yeah, I’m fine.” He looked back at the crater marring the park grass. “I wonder what happened to make it fail? Maybe the—”
A sonic boom reverberated, so close the ground trembled beneath him. His eyes jerked up to see two fighter jets zoom overhead. The distinctive navy Earth Alliance emblem was clearly discernable—they were flying that low.
He hated the Alliance. Alliance soldiers killed his grandfather in the Crux War. He had never met his grandfather, but his mom said he had been a great man, which was good enough for him.
A fireball plumed into the sky from the vicinity of the spaceport. Three seconds later the sound of the explosion reached them, a low rumble vibrating along his skin as it built to a malicious growl.
In a burst of adrenaline-fueled bravery, he grabbed Ava’s hand and started sprinting in the direction of the town hall. His dad worked for the Agriculture Bureau; he should be there if he wasn’t on his lunch break.
“Come on! We have to warn them the Alliance is attacking!”
Gerald Harnal sat at his desk, picking at a sandwich while he reviewed the quarterly production reports. The whole-grain hybrid fields were doing really well, which was fortunate since the food corps on Krysk were requesting an increase in shipments next quarter.
No matter how smart, how fast or how resilient humanity grew, they still needed food to survive. Sure, using adaptive cybernetic subroutines most people could now survive longer without food, so long as they had water. But the limit had only been stretched to four months at the outside, and no one wanted to live in such a state for any length of time, much less months.
So the seeds to feed humanity continued to be planted, nourished, reaped and transported across the galaxy.
He knew he was a small cog in a very large machine, but he liked to think he did his part. His great-great-great-grandparents had been farmers on the Oklahoma plains, and in his own way he carried on their proud tradition.
Nevertheless, it—
—his eVi flashed red and pushed an emergency pulse into his vision.
Dad Alliance ships are attack—
He never saw the missile, nor the ship which fired it.
The town hall appeared to implode from within, then expel an enormous red-gold wave of fire to consume all in its wake. The heat rolled over them like a blast furnace.
“Dad!” Thomas fell to his knees in horror. “No, Dad….”
Ava was pulling on his arm, trying to drag him back up. “Come on, we should get somewhere safe.”
“But my dad…he might still be alive and need our help….”
She glanced at the collapsed, destroyed building at the end of the square. It bowed in to the center, where jagged pieces of synthetic stone piled twenty meters high. Black smoke billowed out of every surface, licked by bright yellow flames.
“I don’t think so, Tom. I’m sorry. We need to move!”
He gazed at her, eyes wide and desperate. It felt like a dream, everything hazy and sluggish. Ava was talking to him…and his father was dead. Slowly he nodded and struggled up.
She tugged him around the rubble. “Come on, let’s go to the school—they’ve got a storm shelter!”
They stumbled through huge chunks of debris and upended vehicles and veered left toward the school. People were running in every direction, some panting, others screaming. A few merely huddled on their knees beside bodies.
Behind them the jets could be heard approaching again—or maybe it was different ships, more ships. The beam of one of the defense turrets chased them as they passed overhead.
He saw the beam trail off in the air to the right. Why didn’t the lasers hit the ships? The government had promised they were state of the art.
Someone crashed into him from behind, and he remembered to start running again.
Ava’s hand felt sweaty and clammy in his. Not at all like he had imagined it would feel. But she was probably scared, right? That was why it wasn’t soft and warm and gentle.
To their left the community center smoldered in ruins. A gust of wind blew a cloud of ash and smoke onto them; he accidentally inhaled some of it and doubled over in a coughing fit.
“Tom, please, we have to keep going!”
Ava was crying now. Her tears cut wet streaks into the ash coating her face, but her gorgeous green eyes, stark with terror, shone through the smoke.
He tried to stand, but another coughing fit crippled him.
She stared at him, panic bubbling forth. “I’m sorry, Tom, I don’t want to die. I have to go!” She let go of his hand and took off running.
“Ava, wait….” His voice was hoarse and cracking and there was no way she heard him above the cries and screams and thunder of collapsing buildings.
He crawled to his feet and stumbled after her. She seemed far ahead of him now. He saw her join a group of people scrambling up the stairs and fighting to squeeze through the doors all at once—
—the front of the school erupted in a pillar of fire.
His steps slackened to a halt. It was a dream. It had to be. Only in a dream would Ava finally talk to him, then have the life stolen from her.
“Ava?”
A column of thick black smoke flowed down the street toward where he stood. He let it wash over him, no longer caring if he could breathe.
NEW BABEL
INDEPENDENT COLONY
Olivia observed the feeds from the jets on a large screen above her desk as their fourth and final run began. The perfectly manicured nail of her left index finger tapped a slow, measured beat on the surface of the desk; it was the only sign of tension in an otherwise calm and poised demeanor.
She waited until the first of the final two missiles had been loosed by each ship. Twenty-eight high-powered precision Alliance missiles had done quite sufficient damage to a nascent village of thirty thousand. She entered a code on the control panel beneath her right hand. The custom ware installed on the jets to jam the defense turrets ceased to function.
Five seconds later Charlie fighter exploded. Confused chatter burst forth in the other three cockpits.
“Wha—? How’d that laser hit?”
“Jamming is down. I repeat jamming is down! Evasive maneuv—” Bravo took a missile to a wing and spun out of control to disintegrate on impact with the ground.
“Abort! Delta, abort!”
But they were too close to the town and its meager little defense systems.
“Eject!”
She checked, concerned for a moment at least one team member had somehow managed to eject. The eject mechanisms were supposed to be disabled, but mistakes did happen—and would be paid for if they did. Area scans identified no chutes, however.
She listened as Thad Yue grumbled in the final seconds before his fighter caught a laser from one of the turrets and exploded as he pulled ineffectually on the eject lever. “Qu si, gāisĭ biăo zi.”
Her eVi helpfully provided the translation: Go to Hell, you fucking whore.
A wry smile grew on her lips as she shut off the screen. “You first.”
She had told Marcus traceability wouldn’t be an issue and she had meant it. Yue had been the sole team member who knew the operation was under her direction, but they all knew they weren’t working for the Alliance. Modern interrogation techniques were quite effective, no matter the will of the captive. She simply could not risk the slightest chance of any information being revealed to either Alliance or Senecan agents.
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