Duty, Honor, Planet: 02 - Honor Bound

by Rick Partlow

  As the sun came closer to touching the horizon, the armored vehicles and the rovers and trucks following them began to pull off the track and into a barren clearing. The armored troop carriers arrayed themselves into a ring with the unarmored trucks and rovers in the center before the officer candidates piled out to dig overnight fighting positions: one per vehicle. The armored vehicles held nine troops each. For the night halt, three would man the fighting position, three would man the vehicle’s weapons and three would sleep, in shifts.

  Ari smiled thinly as he saw Sergeant Chen fingering the cylindrical artillery simulator on his belt with undisguised anticipation. The SOP for training missions like this was to test how well the ones on duty stayed awake by throwing out artillery simulators while a patrol was outside the wire and seeing if those on watch lit their own patrol up in a panic. It was also very entertaining to watch.

  Ari stretched as he stepped out of his rover, feeling the kinks in his back from sitting too long in the uncomfortable seats on rough tracks.

  “Sergeant Chen,” he instructed, “make sure the candidates get a hot meal tonight. We want them nice and drowsy come 0300.”

  “Yes, sir,” the training NCO said with a cruel smile, heading for the vehicle of the appointed candidate platoon leader.

  Ari made the rounds as the troops settled in, checking the quality of their fighting positions, the placement of the armored vehicles and the watch rotation plan and offering constructive criticism to the officer candidate leaders. They were, he reflected, shaping up much better than he’d thought they would when he started this assignment. If Kage’s reforms held, the Colonial Guard might not be as much of a joke in a few years.

  Of course, if the mutiny and the assassination attempt actually play out, the Guard will be disbanded and reviled for decades, he thought grimly. Maybe it wasn’t so hard to understand why Kage wanted to stop it badly enough to work with his rivals in Fleet Intelligence.

  Once the sun sank below the horizon and everyone was fed, Ari rolled out a sleeping bag next to his rover and laid down to grab a few hours’ sleep before the attack came. He felt as if he had just laid his head down when there was the familiar feeling of a kick at his boot: the traditional, safe way to wake up an armed man in the field. He opened his eyes and waited for them to adjust before he spoke.

  “Captain Hassan Ali,” he said quietly, sitting up. Beneath his sleeping bag, his hand still touched the grip of his unholstered handgun. “When I sent the message, I expected you would contact me upon our return to base.”

  Colonel Lee’s aid crouched down next to him, anonymous in the dark of night in his grey guard body armor, a black watch cap pulled over his head. “Fewer prying eyes and electronic ears out here,” he replied in hushed but conversational tones. “Have you made progress recruiting the candidates?”

  “Yes, I have a couple very promising ones,” Ari nodded, leaning back against the side of the rover, getting his feet beneath him. “Candidate Matienzo for one. His father is highly placed in the Southbloc Corporate Development Council…he has little love for the policies of the current administration. We have spoken of this…I think we can count on him if I am allowed to bring him into this. And he seems to be developing into a very capable soldier.”

  “That is good to hear. But you did not contact me for this, I assume.”

  “No, I did not,” Ari sighed. “This is difficult to say, Hassan Ali. It is about Alida…Lieutenant Hudec. We have become quite close…”

  “And I salute your excellent taste, as well as your excellent luck, my friend,” Ali smiled. “She is an impressive woman.”

  “I have…noticed things, in our time together. She has made calls that she has ended abruptly when I entered the room. She has been pressuring me to ask you and Colonel Lee for more details on your plans. This has worried me. So, I took a DNA sample from her. I had some close friends in the Marines, and one of them recently went to work for Fleet Intelligence. I contacted him and did not give him her name…I simply sent him the DNA analysis and had him run it through their database.”

  “This was a hell of a risk, Captain Al-Masri.” Ali’s voice was cold and full of menace and trepidation.

  “Her name is not Alida Hudec,” Ari went on as if the man hadn’t spoken. “And she is not a Colonial Guard infantry officer.” He let out a deep breath. “She is actually Captain-Investigator Gisella Katona of the Guard Investigative Division.”

  “That is not possible!” Ali came to his feet, his voice raising instinctively before he remembered himself and crouched back down. “We ran a very thorough background investigation of Lieutenant Hudec,” he hissed in angry denial.

  “The GID backstopped her very well,” Ari nodded. “But my friend has access to files that are more deeply classified than the ones your sources used. I cannot offer you any proof of this…my friend was hesitant to reveal even this much. But now that you know what to look for, you should be able to search this out on your own.”

  “If you are wrong about this, Captain Al-Masri,” Ali said darkly, “it may be the end of you.”

  “Captain Ali,” Ari returned, “if I am right about this, it may be the end for us all.”

  Hassan Ali nodded reluctantly, swallowing hard. The man was very obviously close to panic, but he regained control of himself visibly. “Do nothing. Say nothing. I will be back in contact with you as quickly as I can.”

  With that, Ali rose and strode quickly away into the darkness, probably to a waiting vehicle, Ari guessed.

  Ari considered trying to go back to sleep, but abandoned the idea. His guts were roiling and his thoughts were on fire. This was a desperate gamble and one that could easily cost Alida her life. He knew these were the risks of the job, and he’d taken them a dozen times himself…and yet somehow, this time, he was scared…scared at what might happen to her, scared that she wouldn’t forgive him, and scared that he would never forgive himself.

  * * *

  Glen Mulrooney sliced cleanly through the water, his form perfect, his stroke textbook. He’d been swimming since he could walk and had competed as a student in high school and college; it came as naturally to him as breathing. It had been difficult to find the time when he’d been an intern for Senator Daniel O’Keefe, and his time was even more monopolized as an advisor to President Daniel O’Keefe, but at least now he had the benefit of being a member of the Capitol Athletic Club. Only a few minutes’ walk from the President’s office, the club boasted an Olympic size indoor swimming pool among its other amenities and he found the exertion both refreshing and refreshingly simple.

  He particularly enjoyed coming in late at night, after Natalia and Valerie were asleep, when the place was mostly empty, as it was now. Which was why it surprised him when he caught a fleeting glimpse of someone walking on the pool deck as he turned to take a breath. For a moment, he felt a freezing panic in his gut as he thought of what Shannon Stark had said, but as he paused at the end of the lane, he let out a breath in relief.

  The man approaching him was short and pudgy, his face nondescript, his hair and clothes so far from stylish that he seemed to be making an effort at it. But his doughy face was familiar, and that was enough to make Glen relax.

  “Ozzie,” he said, levering himself out of the water and grabbing his towel from the wall. “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m a member,” the man shrugged. “Which doesn’t speak well for this place’s standards, I’ll tell you.”

  Glen had to laugh. Oscar Fuentes was many things, but athletic wasn’t one of them. Hell, the man cared so little about how he looked that he didn’t even cheat and get a decent bodysculpting.

  “Don’t laugh, blondie,” Ozzie cocked an eyebrow. “This is a great place for getting the inside track…people tend to talk a bit more loosely when the endorphins are flowing. Plus, they don’t allow security cameras in the locker rooms…privacy laws and all. So there’s no one to see who they’ve been talking to, and no one pins it on them when the sto
ry goes out over the newsfeed.”

  “So,” Glen prompted, drying himself off and storing his goggles and earplugs in their case, “are you here trying to get information out of me? Not sure I worked out long enough to be that loose-lipped…”

  “You need a shower,” Ozzie replied, frowning grimly. “Let’s hit the locker room.”

  Shrugging, Glen snagged his swim bag and followed the reporter out of the pool deck and through the deserted hallways into the men’s locker room.

  “I have to warn you, Oz,” he said jokingly, “if this is a come-on, I’m flattered but I don’t swing that way…”

  “Shut up for a minute, will you?” the little man snapped, surprising Glen. Ozzie glanced around them, then walked through the rows of lockers and benches, making sure they were alone before he came back to Mulrooney.

  “You asked me to run a check on Vice President Dominguez,” Ozzie said, sitting down on one of the benches. “Well, I did. I used the Pattern Recognition System that RHN developed to dig up dirt on celebrities and corporate bigshots and I used it to try to find anything about Dominguez that would make him vulnerable.”

  “So, is he connected to the reactionaries in the Southbloc?” Glen asked, pulling on a T shirt and sitting down across from the reporter.

  “The only connections he has to the Southbloc are his Aunt Rosaria in Caracas and some skank clerk from Argentina that he’s been banging on the side for the last three years,” Ozzie grunted dismissively.

  “Then what was so important that you had to visit me here?” Glen wondered, an annoyed frown passing over his face.

  Ozzie sighed, shoulders setting as he organized his thoughts. “You have to understand something about Dominguez. Xavier Rosario Dominguez…58 years old, Modern History PhD from Harvard. Impressive early career and a fairly staid private life. One marriage that ended after five years, no children. A succession of short-term relationships since then that is part of my point. Dominguez is a dilettante. Not regarding his career, but socially and personally, he flits around from one woman to another, from one set of friends to another, from one hobby to another. He’s a black belt in several martial arts, a concert pianist when he bothers to play, a scratch golfer, a poet…you get the idea. Since his marriage fell apart when he was 33, he hadn’t had a relationship that lasted more than three months. Hobbies last a maximum of two or three years.

  “Until five years ago. Five years ago, when he was still a Senator, Dominguez volunteered for a relief mission to Aphrodite, to help the colony recover from the Protectorate invasion. When he came back…something changed.”

  “What?” Glen asked.

  “Nothing,” Ozzie replied perversely. “Nothing at all. Before he left for the trip, he’d taken up rock climbing. He’s been an avid rock climber ever since…he goes at least twice a month, schedule permitting. Before he left on the trip, he’d become involved with the aforementioned clerk from Argentina…and they’re still bumping uglies three years later, but they haven’t gone public, haven’t done anything but each other, despite the fact she’s been complaining to her friends about his intransigence. Before he left for the trip, he’d become a regular at the weekly poker game at the Situation Room lounge in Capital City. He still is. Do you see where I’m going here?”

  “That’s kind of weak, Oz,” Glen shook his head. “Maybe he’s just come to appreciate stability now that he has some real responsibility.”

  “So stable he won’t commit to his girlfriend? Responsible? Hell, Mulrooney, he took time off from a summit with the South American Workers’ Unity Party and the Southern States’ Government Conference to go rock climbing! He’s not stable or responsible…he’s fucking frozen. It’s just like someone told him…act just like Xavier Dominguez acted the last time he was seen on Earth before his trip to Aphrodite.”

  “So, what are you saying, Oz? That it’s not really Dominguez? That someone has taken his place? Do you know how impossible that would be? I can’t even tell you how much identity verification there is for the Vice President of the Republic, but we’re talking DNA, alpha wave, full biometrics…it’s just impossible.”

  “I don’t know what I’m saying, Mulrooney,” Ozzie shrugged. “But you told me to run him through the program, and I ran him. This is what I got. You do with it what you will. But I will tell you something, my friend, this sort of search is not something that can go completely unnoticed. You have to know what to look for, and you have to be actively looking for it, but if they do…they’re going to find out who ran it.” Ozzie stood up, shrugging his shoulders. “You might think this is nothing, that I’m being paranoid, but I’m going on vacation for a while. Don’t try to find me.”

  With that, the older man turned and walked briskly out of the locker room. Glen watched him go with a bemused smile on his face.

  Ozzie is nuts, he thought, shaking his head. He’s gotta’ be.

  And yet…

  He took his ‘link out of his swim bag and pulled up the address Shannon Stark had given to him back in the cabin. Maybe it was nuts, but she’d want to know anyway. “Major Stark,” he spoke into the ‘link, “looked into that matter. There is some evidence that…”

  Glen never saw the arm that snaked around his neck, never saw the ceramic blade that speared through his left eye and into his brain. Blackness claimed him before he could form a final thought.

  Chapter Nine

  Walking through forests darkened by the shadows of thirty meter tall trees, Jason McKay decided that the videos he’d watched didn’t do Peboan justice. The place was so much larger and more intimidating in person. There was a chill bite to the air, an ozone tang to its smell, that the recordings hadn’t captured; and a paranoid foreboding to the trackless forests that no video could convey. Added to the slight difference in gravity from Earth and the odd color cast the blue-tinted primary star gave to everything just to remind you that you were on an alien world light years from home, it was enough to raise hackles on the back of his neck.

  “I don’t think I like this place,” D’mitry Podbyrin commented quietly, eyes darting around from shadow to shadow, hands clenching like they longed for a weapon. Behind them nearly a kilometer back were the ruins of the scout base, being pored over by the technicians for any as-yet-undiscovered evidence, but McKay had wanted to get an idea of how the infiltrators had approached the place, so he had headed into the surrounding forest with Jock, Vinnie, and the Russian expatriate looking for their landing site.

  “It is a bit creepy,” Jock said with a shrug, “but all in all, I like it better than laying around up there in the ship.”

  “At least there is gravity here,” Podbyrin grunted agreement. McKay had been surprised when the man had volunteered to go down with the landing party; apparently, zero gravity didn’t agree with his stomach after so many years living planetside. “Are we sure they came from this direction?” Podbyrin wondered, looking around them at the looming trees, each thick as a sequoia, their bark an inky black. He looked out of place in borrowed Marine body armor and fatigues.

  “Well, on the west, the front of the outpost is pretty open,” McKay explained. “I doubt they would have advertised they were coming by setting down at the landing zone the scouts cleared. East has a sheer cliff about a hundred meters out overlooking a pretty steep canyon. South there are lava-rock hills…it’s a possibility, but an accurate landing on those hillsides would have been iffy. So I’m betting they came from the north. There has to be a clearing somewhere out this way they could use to land, then walk in.”

  “Fuckin’ chilly out here,” Vinnie muttered, flexing his gloved fingers for a moment before they returned to gripping his carbine. “And this is what? Summer?”

  “Close enough,” McKay nodded. “Late Spring, almost Summer. It doesn’t get much warmer than this in these parts from what I’ve heard.”

  “Feels like home,” Podbyrin said with a shrug. McKay idly wondered if he meant his home on Loki or his home back in Twenty-First Century R
ussia.

  “I don’t think they would have risked dropping too far from the outpost,” McKay mused, coming back to the subject. “The biomechs don’t have that much in the way of autonomy, and they’d have to guide them through the woods probably in the dark…”

  “Yes,” Podbyrin nodded agreement. “Three, four kilometers, no more. But your people who found the base destroyed….would not they have found any landing site already?”

  “They didn’t have time,” McKay informed him. “It was late Fall when they arrived. They had just found the rifle casings when the first big storms of the winter rolled in and dumped about a meter of snow on this place. The ship’s captain made the call to get the news back to Earth instead of waiting out the weather.”

  Stepping across the bare floor, desolate and shielded from the star’s warmth by the tyranny of the trees, they fell silent under the oppressive hush of the forest, eyes hunting for signs of intrusion but seeing only a still-frame sameness. Long, wordless minutes passed, the only sound the faint crunching of dead leaves beneath their boots, and McKay began to lose track of time and distance. A quick check of his ‘link revealed that they had walked nearly three klicks from the outpost and he had begun to debate whether he was going to go any farther on foot.

  “Hold up,” Vinnie said softly, raising fist in the air to halt them. Slowly he brought up his carbine, gesturing with the barrel to a point on their right. “Three o’clock, fifty meters, on the ground.”

  McKay scanned to their front right and almost passed over the dark shape as a root or rock before he came back to it, noticing the not-quite-right color, the too-regular shape.

  “Vinnie, Jock, stay here and keep overwatch,” McKay ordered. “Podbyrin, you’re with me.”

  “Joy,” the Russian muttered, following behind him.

  As the two men approached the object, its lines grew clearer and its color more distinct…it was globular, colored a dull grey mixed with rust. McKay nudged it with the barrel of his carbine, turning it over and revealing it for the broken remnants of a battle helmet.