She snorted and dropped her head back to rest against the curve of his shoulder. “Only if you want a gamma blade in your spine this time next week. Those thugs have no honor.”
His snicker rumbled low into her hair. “Whereas you and I, we do have honor?”
“We have standards. If someone falls beneath them, they aren’t worthy of honor. If they rise above them? Sure, we have honor.”
His hand not holding the champagne slipped beneath the bubbles to run up her inner thigh. “Is it honorable to—”
“Stop.” She shoved his hand away as she opened the message which had just arrived.
“Don’t even entertain the notion of being a tease, Olivia. You—”
“I’m reviewing something, dammit.”
He griped behind her but complied while she re-read the message, scarcely able to accept its contents. And she’d thought the Federation military requesting illegal boosters for their fighter pilots was scandalous…. “You are not going to believe this.”
“When it comes to you, I will believe anything. What is it?”
“It’s best if I show you.” She projected an aural to float above the frothy bubbles.
Ms. Montegreu,
It is with the utmost reluctance and distaste that we request, per the terms of our agreement, for you to subdue or otherwise render unable to take independent action the following agents of the Metigen enemy:
Joon Choung, CEO of Choung Pharmaceuticals
Hanse Abel, Vice-Chairman of Advent Materials
Greta Schwartz, Chief of Staff to the governor of Atlantis
Alonso Bianchi, Chief Deputy of the Shào Cartel
Karie Singh, Director of Utilities on Pandora
Vincenza Nielson, Chairman of Total Chemical Solutions on Romane
Mellie Ohara, Senior News Broadcaster, Galaxy First Communications
Action against said agents should be taken no earlier than twenty hours and no later than thirty-six hours from the timestamp of this message. Fulfillment of all elements of the requests contained herein, plus cancellation of the contract on Noah Terrage’s life, will constitute satisfaction of our agreement and your release from its terms.
— Richard Navick and Graham Delavasi
“Forgive me for asking the perhaps self-evident question, but is this an assassination list?”
“I do believe it is. Oh, and look, one of them is already dead. Isn’t that an interesting coincidence.”
“Working for the aliens, huh? I guess the more chaos sown, the better.”
“They must want these people eliminated rather badly to release me from further squeezing.”
“Who’s Noah Terrage?”
She grumbled under her breath. “A very lucky man, it seems.”
“There are some powerful individuals on the list who could inflict real damage. You’re going to need my help.”
“Don’t be coy. I wouldn’t have shown you the list if I wasn’t expecting your help.” She wiggled out of his grasp, stood and snatched the towel from the rack. “Come on. We have a lot of work to do and little time to do it in.”
EARTH
EASC HEADQUARTERS
Thirty Minutes Earlier
Devon: This signal beam’s genius, Mia. Annie’s ashamed she didn’t create it.
Mia: Meno’s ashamed he didn’t create it sooner. Who knew Artificials had inferiority complexes?
Devon: Who knew Artificials had complexes, period?
Stanley: Morgan just raised her hand. What does that mean?
Alex: Devon, can you push this signal out to the arrays at Earth and Seneca, too?
Devon: You don’t think their firepower will be enough?
Alex: I think this is not the time to hold anything in reserve.
Devon: Valid point. Let’s see.
Mia: Romane’s Chief Engineer said ours couldn’t transmit signals.
Devon: He’s just lazy. The receivers can be reprogrammed to act as transmitters as well, but how to do it isn’t taught in Introductory Electronics. I’m not lazy but I am busy. Can anyone—wait, never mind. Annie borrowed a routine from the Gagarin Institute.
Alex: Does the Gagarin Institute know that?
Devon: Almost certainly not. They shouldn’t have stored it on their private encrypted internal network if they didn’t want an insanely-powerful, unshackled human-Artificial hybrid to pilfer it.
Alex: Clearly.
Devon: All right, Earth Defense Grid is a go. Morgan, I need a bypass of the Senecan Defense Grid’s ware alteration block.
Morgan: Done. Do me a favor and forget the tunnel route after you use it, in case we go to war with each other again in the future.
Devon: Sure thing.
Mia: He says in the least convincing voice ever. Ooh, another swarmer to kill. That’s not getting old anytime soon.
Morgan: You might be surprised….
Alex: Devon, are you sure we have to provoke Hervé? Can’t we just get Richard to arrest her, tell the others what’s going on, fire the damn arrays and be done with it?
Devon: We’re not merely provoking Jules—we’re provoking all of them. It’s this thing they call a ‘test,’ and if we want to enjoy any degree of personal security when this is over we have to do it.
Alex: And if they fail this test?
Devon: Then at least we know what to expect and can act accordingly.
Alex: Dammit. Okay.
Five Minutes Earlier
How’s it looking there? I suspect we’re almost out of time.
One target left, and she should be in custody in the next five minutes. How are things in Vancouver?
Richard scanned the War Room from his position of relative—emphasis on the ‘relative’—privacy in the deepest corner. For the most part officers meandered in circles or peered intently at displays as if doing so would influence the data displayed.
The vortex of activity had a clear center, though, and that center was Miriam Solovy.
In her immediate orbit was an ever-shifting slate of advisers and department heads. Devon’s presence was via a large holo separated from the others. He reclined lazily in a lounge chair in the center of the sim room, the twitch of his eyelids the sole explicit evidence his mind was elsewhere. Occasionally he muttered or shouted announcements or observations, but his most noticeable visible action was to direct pertinent information to Miriam’s displays.
This of course only added to the veritable sea of data surrounding Miriam—more than anyone could hope to absorb. And she didn’t have an Artificial in her head to help her out in that regard.
Simply conversing with Will served as a welcome respite from the hours of tension permeating the room.
About what you’d suppose from a room full of people with itchy trigger fingers and nothing to shoot. They continue to anticipate the end of days any second now, but it appears we’re…well, it appears we’re winning.
I don’t have your catbird seat, but that’s the rumor here, too. Alex?
Alive and kicking ass across the United Fleet, near as I can tell.
Naturally. So, what’s the status on the rest of the targets?
Richard grimaced despite his best effort not to.
We couldn’t catch up to one of the military targets in time. We tracked him on his ship only to have to chase him down on the ground—and damned if he didn’t take out the Prevo on Romane before being subdued.
Jesus. Proves they were right about the threat, though, if at a heavy cost.
You’re telling me. Montegreu reported she had fulfilled her obligations in full twenty minutes ago. I shudder to think what it entailed.
It had to be done, Richard. For the safety—for the survival—of us all.
I know. Doesn’t mean I have to like it.
I doubt it helps, but Delavasi doesn’t like it either.
Maybe, but he just drowns his guilty conscience in alcohol.
And hookers.
Richard laughed loudly enough to earn a glance from
Miriam. He pointed at his ear, which seemed to satisfy her.
Hookers, really?
You have no idea.
Nor do I want to. Moving on from that disturbing image…so everything’s taken care of on your end?
As of…now, yes it is.
Thank you, Will. The next hour or two may get a bit dicey, but thanks to your help it’ll be worth it.
I love you.
And I you. When this is over you’ll come home, right?
I intend to beat you there.
Richard ended the conversation with a relieved smile. He’d kept the secret as asked; only he, Will and Graham had all the information. Montegreu had her list, and Alliance and Federation agents in the field and select military officers had their targets, but nothing more.
He wondered how long he was going to get to wait for whatever was to come. Then he noticed the transformation in Miriam’s demeanor from normal epic-battle tension to serious epic-battle tension.
Not long, it turned out.
56
EARTH
EASC HEADQUARTERS
* * *
KENNEDY PULLED HER COAT TIGHTER before beginning the trek across the courtyard to the Logistics building.
She’d given up her childish beachside sulking hours ago, enjoyed a lovely dinner at a lovely restaurant—still alone—and performed an admirable and extended imitation of window-shopping in the market district. But when the stores had closed for the night and the hour had grown late, she had finally relented and returned to the Island.
The news feeds being broadcast in every store, on every street corner and in her eVi were confused, vague and often contradictory. The most she’d been able to determine was the United Fleet hadn’t yet been annihilated. This left her maintaining a level of ignorance which simply would not do.
She doubted they were any more likely to allow her in the War Room now than they had been earlier, but even the lobby should have better information than the media, right? And if she were to happen by the War Room—
—the sky overhead illuminated in a dazzling flash. The thunderous roar of multiple blasts followed to assault her eardrums. Everyone in the courtyard halted to gape upward.
Six laser beams streamed from the heavens to slam into two hulking shadows perhaps four kilometers above. The beams’ vivid citron hue could only mean they originated from the orbital arrays, the fact the array nodes pointed outward notwithstanding. As the light of the lasers spread in the night sky, the shadows revealed themselves to be Metigen superdreadnoughts. One hovered directly above the EASC Complex, the other to the southeast over the Sea-Vac Metro.
She had but the briefest second to recognize them for what they were. Earth’s orbital defense arrays were the most powerful weapons in existence—at least built by humans anyway. Each node was the size of city block and housed a laser over five times more powerful than the weapons on an Alliance dreadnought. Two hundred individual nodes orbited Earth on ten arrays. All of this meant the force of three lasers tearing into each superdreadnought destroyed the gigantic ships in under four seconds.
Kennedy threw her head back and cackled in delight as the sky lit up like a fireworks circus. The first celebration of victory had arrived in grand style courtesy of the aliens themselves.
Then the wreckage began to rain down, and she decided she did not want to be trapped under another tonne of debris just yet, or ever again. She sprinted for the door and made it inside the instant before a thirty-meter-long shard of superdreadnought debris gouged itself into the center of the courtyard.
It should make a perfectly acceptable monument in remembrance of the Metigen War.
The orbital array weapons did not strike London or Vancouver or New York or Sydney or the other four cities seemingly in their lines of fire. Instead they struck the thirty-two Metigen superdreadnoughts hovering stealthed high above those cities.
The initial blow of the lasers disrupted the vessels’ cloaking to reveal the full size of the attacking force. The superdreadnought weapons swung up in search of the source of the attacks, but multiple nodes firing from widely disparate locations denied them an easy target.
The powerful weapons tore through the mighty ships. They disintegrated in exceptional synchronicity, cracking open in crimson flames almost in time with one another. In the next second they burst apart in massive, blinding-white explosions.
Everyone in the War Room and on holo stood in stunned speechlessness as they watched the destruction of the colossal ships. Images from every affected city on Earth and identical ones from Cavare and two other Senecan cities had replaced the battle maps above the table.
No one as yet bothered to inquire from where the live images originated, when they’d been so conveniently queued up or how they were now being displayed.
Miriam had a good idea who was responsible, though. Her main question, really, was…why the theater?
She opened a channel to Terrestrial Emergency Operations. “Mobilize rescue operations in the impacted cities immediately. The falling debris will cause damage and injuries in the metropolitan areas.”
Then she closed her eyes and breathed out. Alex, I could hug you. Then kill you.
Suddenly everyone was talking at once, but she concentrated on the important ones. Brennon’s mouth hung open and he appeared to have developed a slight tremor in his hands. “I don’t understand. How did they get past our defenses in the first place? How did thirty-two superdreadnoughts hide in the airspace above these cities?”
Devon responded, sounding unashamedly smug. “Their proficiency with the cloaking technology is far more advanced than ours, and it is a highly sophisticated technology. It was an easy matter for them to slip in one by one under stealth. Did you think just because they hadn’t used the shields yet they didn’t have the capability? They didn’t want to be stealthy until now.”
Miriam eyed Devon suspiciously. “How did you know?”
He shrugged as if to imply it had been a trifling matter. “The cloaking projection does give off a faint residual energy signature beyond whatever environment it’s replicating. We set the long-range sensors to watch for it yesterday. Once we picked them up at the Main Asteroid Belt we tracked them to their destinations. Same thing at Seneca.”
“Why didn’t you simply alert us and take them out as soon as they arrived?”
“We didn’t want to tip our hand until we’d finished securing all their agents.”
“Explain.”
Richard cleared his throat. When all eyes turned to him, he began fidgeting with the hem of his jacket. “The Prevos believed—correctly—the aliens had put in place a fallback plan to execute on should they begin losing. It involved, among other things, utilizing agents around the galaxy to sabotage our efforts on numerous levels. Alex and the others provided Naval Intelligence and Federation Intelligence a list of names. We’ve spent the last twenty-four hours arresting or if necessary eliminating those people before they were able to act. The man who destroyed Ms. Requelme’s Artificial was one such agent we were unable to apprehend in time.”
So that was the purpose of the blind authorizations. She stared at Richard in challenge; he gave her a dramatic and presumably apologetic wince in answer.
Brennon continued to look rather perplexed, and she mused whether this latest near-calamity had finally broken his admirable composure. “How is it the Prevos had names?”
Richard jerked his head toward Devon. “Mr. Reynolds, perhaps you’d like to explain?”
Devon gave an exaggerated sigh, but he was decidedly relishing the spotlight. “It was all thanks to Annie. Even before Noetica, she noticed Jules was introducing tiny, subtle errors into her algorithms to weaken the accuracy of her analysis of the aliens. After we were linked, she told me—not as if she could have hidden it from me.
“We cross-referenced Jules’ comms records with those of the other known Metigen agents—Aguirre, the assassin—and uncovered matching anomalous signals. Once we’d identified the
aliens’ signature we were able to locate additional contacts. We traced the activity of Hervé and these other agents to more agents, and so on. They were in the military, government, business, everywhere—and some of them could have inflicted serious damage. One of them did.”
Quite a piece of detective work. The explanation raised many questions; most of them would wait, but not all. “What about the Kill Switch? Why risk Brigadier Hervé using it?”
“Oh, that? It was never a true threat. We found and disabled it in the first hour.”
“Of course you did.”
It made for a daunting proposition, contemplating the true scope of the Prevos’ power. They’d made an impressive display of it in the last five minutes, and Miriam had to wonder how much further it might extend. But this too was a question for the morrow.
Her gaze returned to Richard. “Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t Alex tell me?”
He wore a pained expression. “Miriam, you know the aliens are eavesdropping, all the time and everywhere but I suspect nowhere more than in your orbit. We needed to keep it to the smallest possible group—literally three people outside of the Prevos knew the details. The rest were merely following orders. And if you learned Hervé was a Metigen agent, you would have insisted on arresting her. If that had happened, the aliens would have been tipped off before we’d secured the other agents and we would have lost any control of the situation we previously gained.”
She nodded deliberately. She was unable to refute the logic, but her pride still stung something fierce.
Brennon showed signs of recovering from his bewilderment and spoke up again. “What now?”
Gianno and Vranas had been busy handling their own fallout from the destruction of the superdreadnoughts on Seneca, but they too were now listening with interest.
“Now we intensify—”
You have our attention.
SPACE, NORTH-CENTRAL QUADRANT
SENECA STELLAR SYSTEM
The voice boomed inside Alex’s head like someone had placed a bass speaker at the center of her brain.
Aurora Rising: The Complete Collection Page 127