She made a noise, indicating that she was rather impressed with the scheming that Mark and Jerome were doing already.
For the rest of the journey, they talked about how they were going to distribute the information to the gardeners, what to charge, and how they would sell the seeds as well.
They gamed through most scenarios by the time they reached Westerly sector. They just needed to try it out on some real gardeners.
Everyone pulled their scarves on, and made sure that their eye and mouth protection was good before they went into the howling winds of Earth.
They walked in a slightly bent line, so it looked more like an arrow as they moved through the streets.
The buildings were the same. But the people were all different as they passed. The people stared at them as they went by. Troopers were a rare sight, and seeing four of them – two wearing dusters – were a much stranger sight.
They kept going. Mark and Tyler knew the sector like the back of their hand, and all the major streets were open with people moving back and forth in a mass. Even the rushed people from the Slums moved out of the troopers’ way, as they passed through on the way to W3C’s tower.
“Looks like the boss was right about it still being here when we came back,” Tyler said.
The gates were different, and armor panels looked uniform instead of the thrown-together look they had before.W3C was painted across the main gate in black paint, daring anyone to defy it.
Mark went to the door and knocked on it. Someone poked their head over the side.
“Who the fuck are you?” they asked.
“I’m fucking Mark Victor. Go and tell the boss that he owes me a beer,” Mark yelled back.
The questioner seemed to re-think yelling at a pissed-off trooper again, and Mark could hear a runner going over the main gate’s metal framework.
Tyler was beginning to wonder if the boss was even still alive when the main gate started opening.
Mark walked in first, his arm close to his pistol. Everyone else’s hands were suspiciously close to their weapons as well.
They went through the kill-corridor and were met by a ground of twelve armed W3C bodyguards.
“We’re going to have to take your weapons before you see the boss,” one of them said. His tone had all the confidence of a seventeen year-old, who thought the world only existed so he could flee it through the EMF.
“We’re troopers. We don’t answer to anyone but the EMF now. So let’s be about going up to his office. He won’t be happy if you kept us waiting,” Mark said, actively resting his hand on his holster.
The seventeen-year-old made a jerky motion with their head, and the bodyguards fell in around them and escorted them to the elevators. Inside the tower, it looked better than ever. Plus, it seemed to have air conditioning and some of those expensive electrostatic veils that kept the dust at bay.
Different faces moved through familiar hallways.
Tyler saw the tension in Mark’s back, as he felt his own face harden into impassable lines. He felt Alexis’ eyes on him and turned to see her. Her face was hard, but she gave him a reassuring glimmer of a smile. Their eyes darted apart as they continued to look at the gang members who were looking at them with curiosity. The gang members were assessing if they were who they said they were, and how much of a threat they presented.
A number of the bodyguards rested at the back of the elevator. The rest stayed on the first floor as the doors quickly shut behind Tyler’s party, and they rode the elevator all the way to the top of the tower.
The doors opened, and they found more guards waiting on the other side.
They were escorted into the boss’s office. Maps were splayed over the desk, and weapons lay on racks on the wall. The collection grew from when the brothers were last in the room.
An older looking bald man sat behind that desk, his hardened face melting into a smile.
“Mark! Tyler!” He stood up and came around the desk. He looked to be about fifty or so. But Tyler recognized the eyes to be those of someone much older, through experience and time.
“Boss,” Mark said with a grin. He offered his hand to the jubilant bald man with his scarred head.
The boss swatted the hand away and brought Mark into a hug. He was about a foot shorter, but Mark returned the brief gesture.
He turned, bestowing Tyler with another radiant smile as they too embraced briefly.
“Ahh, so I see that the rumors before you left were true, Alexis,” Quentin said. His lips pressed together in amusement as his eyes sparkled looking between her and Tyler.
“Silva, there’s no issue here. Grab them a drink and the good stuff. We have much to talk about,” Quentin said.
“Yes, sir,” said one of the guards, who was a swarthy and large but not overly tall looking man. He shooed the somewhat stunned guards out of the room.
“Come, take a seat,” Quentin said, bringing them over to a private room that many important and secret deals took place in.
They settled in, and Quentin looked to Jerome.
“Hello, you must be Jerome,” Quentin said as he flashed a smile, holding out his hand.
“Yes sir,” Jerome said, shaking his hand. “Thanks for looking after them.”
“They’ve done the same for me on occasion,” Quentin grinned, as Silva returned with a tray of glasses and amber-colored liquid in a bottle.
Quentin did the honors, pouring generous amounts in each of the glasses.
“For those lost, may we never forget,” Quentin said, as his eyes darkened and his smile faded. The others in the room raised their glasses, and tapped it together with the surface before they took a generous swig.
There was a companionable pause as they listened to the wind howling at the windows of the office, memories riding into the minds on that wind.
“So what was your planet?” Quentin asked, looking to them and sinking into his chair.
“Sacremon,” Mark said, as if the word was a curse.
Quentin nodded, and had a look of regret in his eyes.
“I got the basic idea of what happened. What a shit-show,” he said, taking a gulp as if to remove a nasty taste from his mouth.
The others silently agreed.
“So how has Westerly-three-complex done?” Tyler said.
“Pretty good, seeing as we control all of three, five and seven to twelve complexes,” Quentin said with a proud smile. He was just four complexes away from controlling the entire sector. “We’ve got alliances with two of the sectors, and the other two are probably going to surrender instead of face us. It’s made us the target of more attacks, but Westerly sector has never been better,” Quentin said.
“We have a little business we need to see to as well,” Mark said. The look in his eyes made Quentin sit-up a bit.
“What kind of business?” Quentin asked.
Mark reached into his pocket and pulled out a handful of seeds, as Quentin’s eyes went round.
“How the hell did you smuggle those off of the planet?” Quentin asked, looking at the seeds in Mark’s hand.
“They were with me in an emergency cryo pod,” Tyler said.
Alexis looked at him in alarm. He might have forgotten to tell her how close he came to not getting past Growing City.
“We’ve also got the planet’s library on growing stuff,” Mark said.
Quentin sat back, taking a slow sip of his drink to buy himself time to think.
“Damn,” Quentin said after a slow minute.
He leaned forward, his brow pinched together in thought.
“Well, we’re going to have to do this one under the radar. I can get my people to bring us a number of gardeners. We’re going to have to spread this knowledge further than just westerly complex. This is going to take a while to set up.”
His serious expression turned into one of pride.
“It does look like you’re building one hell of a backup plan though.”
“It’s not even the biggest part
,” Mark said. He glanced to Jerome, giving him a reassuring look before he started to divulge his plans of opening a hauling company.
After some time, Quentin seemed to remember that Tyler and Alexis were in the room.
“I say that we let these two go and do as they wish, as we talk business,” Quentin said, looking to the bottle of amber liquid which had gone down considerably. “And get another bottle of this,” he added in a murmur.
“Suits me just fine,” Tyler said, standing. Alexis joined him.
“My people will watch out for you, so don’t worry about a thing. Have a good time, and don’t stay out too late!” Quentin warned, giving them a wink.
“Real subtle, boss,” Tyler said, seeing the alcohol was having an effect on the older man who let out a rumbling belly laugh. Tyler and Alexis clasped hands.
“They need more booze, might be an idea to get them some food as well,” Tyler said to Silva as he grabbed Alexis’ hand, and pulled her through the tower. She slapped his arm playfully but he held on, flashing her a smile. He had way too few moments like this, and he was going to enjoy taking her on a real date.
Chapter 2
Tower
Earth, Sol system
3/3206
Nivad Selvra looked over the reports from the carrier Reclaimer. His lips twisted in annoyance, as the people around the table waited in pure silence while he went through the report at his own leisure.
He had olive skin, with what might have been called sharp Asian features in another time. But in this day and age, it was called Eastern features. His hair was styled in an appealing way, but without the eccentricities that most CEO’s did to show their wealth. His suit was simple. Unless someone knew fabrics and tailoring, they would have thought it inexpensive.
He tapped his lips in thought, before he flicked through another page.
He swiped through a few more pages on the holographic table, before he pinched his fingers together and removed them from his view.
The people around the table were Nivad’s agents that kept an eye on the various colonies and other interests. The Commander of the EMF and his aides, and the first minister’s aides, all watched.
All of them waited on Nivad’s word.
“Give the carrier and the personnel a bonus for their efforts, and take it from the wages of those that won’t be collecting them. I want to show the rest of the EMF that this is the kind of thing I want to see. Approve all transfers they request from other units, as well as promotions they desire. We will see if they are capable of making a combat unit trained enough for use on even the worst planets. Upgrade their combat package from Charlie to Alpha loadout. Make sure that our agents are within their ranks. While this might be a new venture possibility, I do not want it coming back in our faces.”
His eyes found the EMF commander and the intelligence department heads as his finger tapped on the arm of his chair. He calculated their age with his own for measure.
He tilted his chair, looking to the wall which was changed to resemble a window that looked out onto a green lush planet – not one covered in dust. As he thought, others made notes on their slates..
He received his current position because he was there for the right people, and knew just where to bury the bodies of their issues. Of course, he never revealed that he remembered where they were buried afterwards.
His biggest strength was being a negotiator that could play both sides perfectly, creating a binding agreement through him and always gaining something from the experience. It was why he controlled the spy network that ran through Earth and Her Colonies, and the EMF at the same time.
He was the ultimate judge - the one who could tell corporations how things were going to go, with the might of the EMF and several uses of blackmail backing him.
“Now I want to know how these colonists got these abilities, making nerve toxin, bombs and weapon systems that took down Combat Shuttles. Someone had to be backing them. I want to know how we got to this point.” Nivad’s voice cooled, as people made sure to not look in his direction.
“Are there any other reports of interest?” Nerva asked.
“A new silent group have started up a transport business within Sol,” one of Nivad’s intelligence heads said, hastening to go on as Nivad’s eyebrow seemed to twitch. “The reason I bring it up is that it is nearly untraceable. There are no known owners, they’re running it through drop-box, and orders are going through the westerly-three-complex gang.”
“So a gang is looking to move goods around Sol. As long as they are paying the proper fees for whatever they’re transporting, we will leave them be,” Nivad said.
“Yes, sir,” his aid answered, quickly glancing down.
Nivad looked around the table.
No one raised their hand or indicated that they had anything to say.
“Very well, it looks like Sacremon has recovered in the twenty-six years since their uprising. I still want to have a Carrier on position in the area for the next twenty years.” That amount of time was trivial for him. He was a hundred and fifty years old, with science saying he was going to live for another five hundred years with current practices.
“Tell the president to cut down on the taxes on the traders. I want a plan to stimulate transport production. We’re moving more materials than ever, and we’re low on ships to move them. I want that to change,” Nivad said, as his eyes swept through the people at the table. He didn’t act to demonstrate his power. He was power. Making others wait for him was only the natural order of things.
Nivad pressed a button, and a white noise filled the room.
“Dalia,” Nivad said, as the woman pulled out file folders with papers.
“This is the latest information from Masoul. It looks like this group called Harmony isn’t going away,” he started, as people read through the folders being passed out.
Alarm was clear in their body language. More than one went pale with their new reading material.
Chapter 3
EMFC Reclaimer
Earth, Sol system
3/3206
“So let me get this right. From your sources, it looks like the fucktards running the EMF - primarily fuctardio Nivad Selvra him-fucking-self - is sending us to Masoul? Where Strike station, the only other EMF station, resides?” Ortiz asked, his eyes boring into Nerva who was smoking a cigar.
“Yes,” Nerva said.
Ortiz devolved into colorful swearing, Nerva passed him a stress ball he kept in his desk.
Ortiz barely noticed, his large arms flexing hard enough to make the veins in his neck pop out. The ball looked like it was struggling to not be a pancake under the man’s strength.
“So, we’re going to be put into limbo?” Captain Harold asked.
He was the only other person in the room.
Limbo was when a carrier’s troopers were kept in cryo while the carrier’s engineers, flight crew, and medical personnel were rotated in and out of cryo - keeping the ship functional, and waiting for orders to be sent at another battle.
It was one of the things that made carriers so insular. There were carriers that had been in limbo for nearly a hundred years.
“Looks like it, but then Nivad’s giving us all of this training time. Even if we go into limbo, I feel that we’re going to be at the front of battle in the near future,” Nerva said.
“So what do we do in the meantime?” Harold asked.
“We train. We make our troopers forget that there was such a thing as Bare Minimum. We train them to win, and make sure we’re ready to destroy whatever the EMF decides to send us at,” Nerva said, with no room for maneuvering. His words were calm and cold iron.
“Damn fucking right,” Ortiz growled, coming out of his swearing fugue. He was still mangling the stress ball to shit, but there was focused murder in his eyes. No more blind anger.
Harold nodded his agreement, looking to his trooper brothers. Their people relied on them to give them a plan to survive. It was their duty to s
ee that Nivad’s plans fell squarely in the crapper.
“What’s the plan, Major?” he asked.
Nerva exhaled a stream of cigar smoke, his eyes reminding Harold why Nerva’s nickname was ‘Iceman.’
“We plan to attack Masoul. We don’t know the particulars of how the enemy will react, but we know they’ll be probably armed and there will be a lot of them. I want us to dictate the battle, so, traps, barricades, things to slow the enemy down as we pile fire into them. It’s going to be close quarters, possibly two close to use E-twelves. We’re going to train everyone to fight with blades.”
Ortiz paused his squeezing, and both he and Harold looked at Nerva in confusion.
“We have those vibra-blades. They can get through anything. If these things get in close, our service blades aren’t going to do it,” Nerva said as he looked to them both.
Harold nodded, and Ortiz grunted and went back to squeezing.
Nerva puffed on his cigar as Ortiz spat his dip spit into a bottle.
“We’ve been given five months to train our people up. I want to implement alpha company training to the entire Division. We’re also getting new tech in the shape of new helmets. I want everyone ready for anything as soon as we hit Masoul, or any other system for that matter,” Nerva said.
“Five months?” Harold said, as he got a nod from Nerva and looked to Ortiz. They nodded to one another.
“We’ll see to it,” Ortiz replied for both of them. “Though, who in the hell is going to be leading them in fighting with vibra-blades?”
“The devil himself,” Nerva said, as a flicker of amusement passed over his face.
“Who?” Harold asked, as he looked between Ortiz and Nerva.
“Mark Victor, sometimes uses his old nickname, Diablo. He and his brother are both in the same platoon. Gets a bit confusing if people are calling them both Victor,” Ortiz explained.
“So what’s the other called?” Harold asked.
“SWAS,” Nerva replied.
“Serviced with a smile, on account of his good looks and the fact that no one that’s pissed him off should be within ten kilometers of him and his E-12,” Ortiz said, as he looked to Nerva for confirmation.
Masoul (Harmony War Series Book 2) Page 2