“Risky,” Prather observed. “It could create a political stink.”
“So could the security nightmare created by a bunch of Secessionists operating right in the heart of the Sector Capital,” Fitz snapped. “Deal with fallout first, and you might not have to worry about political blowback.”
“I hope you’re right,” Prather said. “And my misguided fellow agents?”
“I suggest you start baiting traps,” Fitz said. “Now...seeing you were kind enough to kill my dance partner, what do you know about him?”
***
“He’s one of ours,” the doctor said, as he pulled back the covering over the body. Mariko had seen dead bodies before, but there was something inhuman about this one. Five bullets had gone through his chest and head and yet, according to the reports, he’d kept trying to fight until his augments had lost the ability to keep him going. “The augmentation he was given is identical to that used by Pathfinders and Marine Force Recon operatives. He doesn’t seem to have the biomods given to augmented intelligence officers, which at least allows us to narrow down his origin a little.”
“But not enough,” Fitz said. He sounded tired and unhappy. It took Mariko a moment to realise that the man he’d fought had almost been a brother, a fellow augmented human. “Can you pull a serial number off his implants?”
“I’m afraid not,” the doctor said. “The moment they registered his brain death, they activated a suicide program that turned all of the recognisable components into dust. That includes his ID chip and any programs his superiors might have used to contact him. They also inflicted considerable damage to his genome. Getting a clear DNA pattern to compare against the records may be impossible.”
“Keep working on it,” Fitz ordered, quietly.
Mariko put her hand on his shoulder, trying to provide support. “How many augmented soldiers have been lost in the last two decades?”
“Hundreds,” Fitz said. “Nearly seventy on Han alone – and believe me, that was the most shocking loss rate for the Pathfinders in recorded history. Most of the records are highly classified; some of the nastier terrorist groups have developed a habit of locating the families of augmented soldiers and going after them. I’d have to fire a request back to Homeworld to get them to check their records...”
“Start with personnel lost in shuttle crashes,” Mariko said, remembering what Richardson had been doing to the computer files. “Or could someone have wiped him out of existence completely?”
“I doubt it,” Fitz said. “All of those records are read-only, unless someone has developed a technique that can somehow rewrite sealed crystal records. Even the later additions only cover the first files – they don’t overwrite them. No, we’d find our mystery friend somewhere in the files; we’d just have to know him when we saw him.”
Mariko nodded, remembering the pain of her broken wrist. “How...how could someone who was considered loyal enough to the Imperium to be granted combat augmentation turn on it?”
“All kinds of possibilities,” Fitz said, as he turned away from the body and started to study what little the local station had turned up on the augmented Secessionist. “Perhaps he was ordered to do something he considered really raw and decided to desert rather than obey orders. Or perhaps he decided the Secessionists had a point and deserted to offer them his services instead of the Imperium. Or he might have fallen in love with a woman on a colony world, one of the hundreds trying to get out from under the crushing weight of corporate exploitation and Imperial taxation. They’ve all happened, over the years.
“Giving people augments is always a gamble. Some start thinking that they’re superhuman and don’t have to abide by society’s laws any longer. Others find that they can no longer close their eyes and ears to short-term problems caused by the Imperium. You need people honest enough with themselves to keep themselves in check, but those people are also the most likely to question orders, particularly when the orders seem to have...unfortunate effects on the local population. And then they start feeling mutinous.”
He flipped through the file thoughtfully.
“Prather’s team did a good job,” he said, reluctantly. The mystery augment had had to go through customs when he landed on Sumter and they’d recorded his fingerprints, every time. Checking through the records had revealed that he’d come in from a starship that hailed from Paradise, every time. And, three days after he arrived, he left, heading back to Paradise. “He can’t be going much further, or he would have had no time to keep his schedule with Richardson.”
Mariko followed his line of logic. “You think there has to be a Secessionist base on Paradise?”
“I think it’s the most likely possibility,” Fitz said. “Paradise is not known for keeping good records and they pay as little homage to the Imperium as they can get away with. It will be a good place to continue our investigations. Prather and his men can finish up here; I’ll see to it that he gets some help from higher authority, once I message home.
“But approaching Paradise will be tricky,” he added. “The Secessionists might have realised that there is a link between the Wally West and the Bruce Wayne. They were interested in the Wally West...”
Mariko remembered him commenting on that, back before they’d charged into the building and almost lost their lives. “Why?”
“A fast courier ship might be very useful if one wanted to coordinate operations across an interstellar scale,” Fitz said. “Or they might have realised that it was nothing more than a cover identity and there wouldn't be any fallout from Interstellar Couriers.”
He shook his head. “The only person who could have told us is dead,” he said, nodding at the body on the table. “An accident...but that doesn't make it any easier to handle. It will look bad on my record – and Prather’s, of course. Fratricide is a risk in intelligence operations, but this time it could have cost us badly.”
“Sir,” the doctor said. “You might want to take a look at this.”
Fitz walked over to the body and peered down at its neck. “What is it?”
“There's a microscopic tattoo here,” the doctor said. He pointed a scanner at it and displayed its take on the main screen. A tiny globe and anchor shimmered into view. “What is that?”
“An Imperial Marine icon,” Fitz said, grimly. He looked down at the body, thoughtfully. “At least we can narrow the search a little.”
“Unless he was a poser,” the doctor pointed out.
“Not with that level of augmentation,” Fitz said. “You can't get anything like it on the civilian market, even out along the Rim. That’s why genetic engineering is so popular in the civilian world. They just can't get the augmentation.”
“So he was a Marine,” Mariko said. She remembered watching a recruiting film when she’d been thinking about ways to rebel against her parents. “I thought Marines were incorruptible.”
“I’m sure this one was, too,” Fitz said, bitterly. “He just saw the crimes committed in the name of the Imperium and couldn’t look away.”
***
Mai surprised Mariko with a hug when they returned to the hotel, even going so far as to throw her arms around Fitz as well. Fitz took it like a gentleman, managing to disengage himself at the earliest possible opportunity. Some of Mariko’s ex-boyfriends wouldn't have been so gentlemanly.
“I thought that you were both dead for sure,” she exclaimed, as she helped Mariko out of her worn clothes. The Imperial Intelligence officers hadn't offered them a change of clothes, which might either have been a subtle insult, or a recognition that the undeclared agents might need to slip back to the hotel undetected. “I lost the signal when you went into the intelligence building and I was all set to come after you, but...”
“Be glad you didn't,” Fitz said. He settled down on the bed, rubbing his face with his hands. “Colonel Prather would not have been happy to see you invading his headquarters, even with an ID card that marked you as a Priority-One agent.”
He shook
his head again. “Mariko, I owe you an apology,” he said, sounding tired. “I led you into a very dangerous situation because I underestimated my opponent. If you want to slap me, I will understand...”
“I’ll beat you with a stick later,” Mariko promised him, mischievously. “It wasn't your fault.”
“In hindsight, I should have been more careful, perhaps tried to recruit help from the local station,” Fitz admitted. “I just assumed that Prather was dirty and couldn't be trusted.”
“How do you know he can be trusted now?” Mariko asked, frowning.
“I don’t,” Fitz said. He looked up at her. “He lost his chance to gun us both down and swear blind that it was an accident, a case of mistaken identity – such things are common when two operations, working the same problem from two different angles, collide. But he could still be dirty. His outrage at our operation could easily have been shock that he came so close to being exposed. I would prefer not to have to deal with him more than necessary.”
Mariko grinned. “Is that why you carefully didn't tell him that we have Richardson’s files?”
“You noticed,” Fitz said, grinning back at her. “I may have to consult with Baron Yu and my...other…supporters before handing them over to Prather – perhaps copying them first so we can continue to work on them ourselves. Prather will throw a fit about how we’re concealing data and he would be right, dirty or clean.”
“I know where we’re going next,” Mai announced, firmly. “Paradise!”
Both Fitz and Mariko looked at her in surprise. Fitz recovered first. “And what makes you say that?”
“Well, since you two left me alone, I just kept number-crunching,” Mai said, a trace of resentment in her voice. “I worked my way through all the records that Richardson was ordered to erase, seeing I figured that those were the records that had something to hide. It took me some time to see the pattern, but half of them went directly to Paradise from Sumter.”
“Not bad,” Fitz said. “Where did the rest go?”
Mai smiled widely.
“Apart from two exceptions,” she said, “they went to Pechanga, Marius’s World and Freeland. All three of them are barely ten light years from Paradise. My guess is that they changed liners there, probably without ever setting foot on their official destinations, and headed onwards to Paradise. It wouldn't have meant more than a couple of days delay.”
“And it would have left a false trail for anyone following them,” Fitz said. “Where did Richardson change the records to say they were going?”
“He didn't,” Mai said. She held up one of the datapads she’d used to read the copied records. “He just wiped them completely.”
“And so anyone trying to follow up on it would have decided that they’d bought passage on a freighter,” Fitz muttered. “Something which is damn near impossible to track, which is why so much attention is paid to arriving freighters.” He smiled at Mai. “Not bad; not bad at all.”
Mai’s smile could have lit up the entire room.
“We’ll leave tomorrow morning, but we won’t go directly to Paradise,” Fitz ordered. “Once we get to the ship, we’ll set a course for Marius’s World. Almost as corrupt as Paradise, and with a great deal less reason. I think we’re going to need a new disguise before we go any further.”
He smiled, rather coldly. “Get some sleep, but make sure you’re up early tomorrow morning,” he added. “Knowing the customs here, we could spend hours being cleared for transit through the wormhole to Marius’s World.”
“Yes, dad,” Mariko said.
Fitz chuckled at the weak joke. “And once we’re in orbit, remind me to take a proper look at your hand,” he said. “I don’t trust half the doctors on the surface these days. You never know who credited them and confirmed that they were actual doctors.”
“But they worked for Imperial Intelligence,” Mariko protested.
“You haven’t met all of the doctors who work for Imperial Intelligence,” Fitz said, darkly. “When they get together, they’re more murderous than an entire Marine Division armed to the teeth.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
“We’re still having to wait,” Mai called. “I think we’re at least number nineteen.”
“Typical,” Fitz commented. “I wonder who bribed the dispatcher to let them move ahead in the list.”
The trip up from Sumter had been surprisingly quick, which puzzled them all. Fitz’s best guess was that Colonel Prather had figured out their cover identities and quietly ordered the customs officials to expedite their departure.
Mariko shivered slightly as he moved a tiny scanner over her hand.
“They did a good job of repairing the damage,” he said. “Some minor swelling, but a brief injection of nanites will help deal with that.” He opened a secure cabinet and removed an injector and a tiny tube of nanites. It was chilling to realise that there were billions of the tiny machines inside a tube smaller than her little finger. “And how about your mental health?”
“You heard me screaming,” Mariko said. It wasn't a question. She’d had nightmares the previous night, and woke up with Mai trying to comfort her. “Is that common in the intelligence world, too?”
“More common among analysts than operatives,” Fitz said. “They’re the ones who sit around dreaming up horror stories from tiny fragments of enemy operations, often demanding a bigger budget from the Grand Senate in the hopes of fixing even a tiny percentage of the gaping holes in our defences. The bastards normally turn to coffee, drink and drugs in the hopes of stopping the nightmares.”
He finished programming the nanites and pushed the injector against Mariko’s hand. There was a tiny sting, then nothing as the machines were shot into her bloodstream. The nanites would carry out their work and then disintegrate, leaving no trace behind.
He shrugged. “A psychologist would probably say that you should be on the bench for a while, but I’ve never had any faith in a profession that can twist a perfectly ordinary dream into a mental condition requiring years upon years of expensive therapy. How do you feel?”
“I want to see this through to the end,” Mariko said, standing upright. “How about yourself?”
“I don’t think it ever ends,” Fitz admitted. “Being in the Guards was simple compared to operating as a trouble-shooter out here, along the Rim. At least then I didn't have to worry about a knife in the back.”
Mariko nodded. “I meant to ask you. Can an unaugmented person defeat someone who has been augmented?”
“Not unless the augmented person deliberately wants to lose,” Fitz said, after giving her a sharp look that suggested he was questioning her motives. “Even the merest form of augmentation includes massive strength enhancement and neural computers to help the augmented man come to terms with his new status. We used to have a whole string of incidents when newly-augmented personnel would shake hands with unaugmented personnel and accidentally crush their hands because they didn't fully understand their own strength. Now, we push them through all kinds of tests and simulations first before letting them out into the real world.”
“Sounds like fun,” Mariko said, dryly.
“It was a nightmare,” Fitz said. “They treat you as a child with superhuman strength, a mixture of fear and condescension. Every test has to be completed. If you refuse to cooperate, you can be threatened with having your augments removed.” He shook his head. “More advanced augments get reinforced muscles and bones, quick-healing nanotech, implanted weapons...even some experimental systems that allow them to exist unprotected in space for a time. The laws against creating new cyborgs are bent in our case, for all sorts of reasons. Some of the really dangerous augments have battle-analysis software in their minds. They run through a thousand possible versions of a fight before they throw the first punch.”
Mariko looked over at him and saw the pain on his face.
“The whole process hurts,” he added. “They don’t tell you that until it’s too late.”
&n
bsp; “I’m sorry,” Mariko said, honestly. “I didn't realise.”
“It isn't something commonly advertised,” Fitz said, dryly. He shrugged. “If your unaugmented fighter is allowed weapons, it gets a little easier. Even the fastest augment can't outrun a laser beam, or see it coming before it hits. Automated sentry computers can respond to augmented speed far quicker than a flesh and blood human brain. Tricks like capture webbing can turn an augment’s strength into a weakness; I would have been in deep shit without you being there earlier. And the right sort of suppression field could neutralise most of the implants without actually harming the augmented person. Augments aren't superhuman – hell, do you know the percentage of the population that can actually take the full augmentation package?”
On The Imperium’s Secret Service (Imperium Cicernus) Page 24