by Rick Partlow
“Completely, sir,” she nodded, mouth set grimly.
“General,” Ari interrupted, “aren’t you forgetting something?”
“And what would that be, Captain Shamir?” Kage raised an eyebrow, seemingly amused by the thought.
“The hitters that came after me, sir,” Ari said. “Someone hired them…someone who knew who I was and that I was here investigating Lee.”
“The men who attacked you were street trash from the city,” Kage informed him. “Hired because they were disposable and wouldn’t be missed. And they were indeed hired by someone who knew who and where you were.” He smiled once more and Ari felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickle.
“You hired them,” he realized suddenly. He glanced at Alida, his eyes narrowing, a film of unreality settling over him. “You hired them so I would trust Alida when she ‘rescued’ me from them. So I would work with her, help you with this investigation.”
“What?” Alida exclaimed, looking back and forth between the two of them. “General, is this true?”
“You don’t need to keep acting, Alida,” Ari told her, anger in his voice. “I would hardly abandon the operation at this point, even if I had clearance to do so.”
“Captain Shamir,” Kage said quietly but firmly. “Yes, I did indeed hire those men. I needed to find out how good you were…if a group of street toughs could kill you, then you would not be of much use to me. And it worked out very well that your ‘Alida’ arrived in time to help. But she was not informed of my tactic…I decided that I could not trust her to allow you to be put in harm’s way. It was my observation that she was already developing feelings for you.”
“Ari,” she said, shaking her head, “you must believe me; I did not know about this, and had I been told, I wouldn’t have let you go out there alone.”
“Enough,” General Kage snapped impatiently. “You can have this lovers’ quarrel on your own time. What I need to know, Captain Shamir, is whether I can count on you to help us carry this out. I can’t simply have Guard troops march in and arrest the Colonel and Captain Ali…that would burn our bridges. This must be handled quietly, and it must be the two of you that handle it.”
“I’m in,” Ari confirmed, his mouth a hard line, his face stone.
“And you will not balk at doing what must be done?”
“Accidents happen,” he shrugged.
Kage snorted appreciatively, and then turned back to Alida. “When you have the information, you may contact me again.”
Without another word, he turned and faded back into the shadows. Alida glanced from the suddenly empty darkness to the doubt in her lover’s eyes. “Please believe me, kedves.”
“I do not even know your real name,” he responded, smiling sadly. “There is no Alida Hudec…I call you by a name of someone who does not exist.”
“My name is…” she began, but he gently placed a finger over her lips.
“Wait. We have work to do first. When we have done what we must, when I know that I am speaking to who you are and not who you must pretend to be, then you will tell me your name and we will speak as a man and a woman.”
She considered that silently for a moment, then grabbed his finger and quickly and painfully bent it back. Shocked, Ari went down to his knees, mouth open as if he were on the verge of crying out in pain.
“The hell with that, Ariel Shamir,” she said forcefully, lowering her face to look him in the eyes. “I can’t make you talk, but I will make you listen. If we die doing our duty, then you will die knowing that my name is Roza Kovach, that I told you the truth about being kidnapped as a teenager, about my parents and about Pithapuram. And you will know that I am telling you the truth when I tell you that I love you.” She let loose of his finger and pushed him away, putting him on the ground on his rear. He stared at her, mouth agape. “Get off your ass, Captain. As you say,” she turned and began jogging down the path, “we have work to do.”
* * *
Valerie O’Keefe-Mulrooney felt strangely relaxed as she waited for someone to try to kill her. The Old City was, she decided morbidly, a very good place to die, if it came to that. She stepped away from her groundcar reluctantly, as if it somehow represented safety, and gazed upward at the crumbling remains of what had once been a city at the center of the world: New York. Millions of people had lived and worked there, businesses and homes had been crammed into every square centimeter of it. They had all thought, she realized, that it would go on forever. And then things had changed.
The bombs hadn’t touched the old United States directly…most had been targeted at China and the Russian Protectorate. But they had come so close, so horrifyingly close to destroying civilization and driving the whole of humanity back to the Paleolithic. There had been riots, cities had burned and people had starved. Troops had patrolled the streets.
Looking out at the shadowed, empty streets, now overgrown by grass and trees, she could feel the ghosts of those people haunting the ruins. She tried to imagine what it had been like, but it was just too alien. She was glad she hadn’t seen it, and she didn’t want to see it happen to her world…to her daughter’s world. That was worth dying to prevent.
She pulled her jacket tighter around her against the chill; the sky was grey and there was the feel of imminent snow in the air. The Old City seemed so much more real down here. She had passed over it and by it so many times in flyers, never imagining what it would be like to walk among the buildings. It wasn’t closed to the public, but very few people came here. Very few people ventured outside the megalopolises at all, she reflected sadly. If things collapsed again, those people would all die.
She started slightly when she heard the other groundcar approaching down the narrow, barely-maintained service road, but made herself relax. She was expecting it; it was why she was there. The woman who stepped out of the vehicle was familiar to her from various political and celebrity events: exquisitely dressed even for this clandestine meeting, she was blond, tall and statuesque, and she mingled freely with the glitterati of Capital City. Val knew she was a veteran who’d been in the business for decades, despite her seeming youth.
“Good afternoon, Senator,” Amanda Sanchez said, offering a hand.
“Call me Valerie,” she insisted, shaking the hand, “since we’re conspirators.”
“Then I’m Amanda,” the other woman nodded. “I’m so sorry about what happened to your husband, Valerie.”
“Thank you, Amanda, but the way I feel I can best honor his memory is to carry on the work that got him killed.”
“You really believe that someone assassinated Glen to suppress this information?” Amanda frowned. “It’s just so hard to believe.”
“I know, Amanda,” Val said, biting back the urge to snap at the woman’s inanity. “But if I’m wrong, I’m just a grieving widow with a paranoid imagination, no real harm done. If I’m right, though…”
“Yes, I can see what you mean. Well, I have the information you asked for…I was able to access Ozzie Fuentes’ last log-in to his network’s system and I just ordered the results re-computed using his credentials.”
“Have you read the results?”
“Yes I have,” Amanda told her, pulling a small tablet from her bag. She looked at it, shaking her head. “But it’s pretty thin, Valerie…basically, the program they have analyzes behavioral patterns over time to try to discern hidden variables. For some reason, Ozzie had been looking at Vice President Dominguez.”
Just tell me, you bitch! Val was screaming at her mentally. Instead, she clasped her hands tightly in front of her and asked politely: “Did the program find anything?”
“As I said, it’s pretty slim…all it found was that Dominguez was something of a dilettante until five years ago, when he became more set in his ways.”
“What do you mean ‘set in his ways?’”
“Well,” she glanced at the tablet, trying to remember, “he had never stayed with one woman for more than a few months, but he’s b
een with his current girlfriend for five years. He used to skip around from one passionate hobby to the next-competitive chess, martial arts, you know-but he’s been an avid rock climber for the last five years. Used to jump from one group of friends to another, but has been close with the same group of people for the last five years…you get the idea.”
Valerie’s brow furled. That was intriguing, but there had to be more. “Did anything happen five years ago? Before the lack of changes?”
“Um…” Amanda scrolled through the document on the tablet. “Yes, actually.” She sounded surprised. “He travelled to Aphrodite just after the war, for a conference. It was when he returned that the program noticed the discrepancies.”
Valerie felt the hackles rising on the back of her neck, but she wasn’t sure why. There was something surreal about this…something she couldn’t quite pin down. But that wasn’t why she was here anyway.
“Thank you for your help, Amanda,” she told the woman, holding her hand out for the tablet. The journalist handed it over, with a trace of reluctance. “Trust me,” Valerie said, noting the hesitation, “if and when I can piece something together, I will contact you and allow your ‘net to be the first to break this story.”
“Valerie!” A voice buzzed urgently in her ear. “Get down!”
Without thinking, Valerie grabbed Amanda and dragged her to the ground behind her vehicle, just as something passed through the air where her head had been moments before…
Shannon Stark sighed with relief as she saw Valerie’s vehicle pull up at the end of the service road. She had been lying motionless in a hide on the fourth floor of this ruined apartment building for nearly seven hours, since before dawn, and the Senator’s car had been the first movement she’d seen. Which was disappointing…she had hoped to spot whoever came to make the hit long before Valerie arrived. She’d never forgive herself if she let anything happen to Valerie…not after Glen had died trying to help her. Not to mention how Jason would feel about it…he and Valerie had a short-lived relationship six years before, when they’d been stranded alone together in the high deserts of Aphrodite during a Protectorate incursion there. It was long over, but she knew he still cared about her.
When Shannon saw the second vehicle approaching, she reflexively reached for the rifle lying beside her in the hide, even though she’d been expecting it. She recognized Sanchez, the journalist, from the file she’d pulled when Valerie had contacted her about Fuentes. The two of them had worked for the same newsnet, though Sanchez was much farther up the food chain. Shannon looked her car over thoroughly with the thermal scanners in her binoculars, but saw nothing out of the ordinary. She hadn’t expected to: Sanchez was a solid citizen with an extensive background.
Of course, so was Vice President Dominguez…
“Major Stark,” she heard a call over her ‘link’s ear bud. “Check out the building at your eleven o’clock, fifth floor, on thermal.”
“Roger,” she muttered. She shifted around to her left, playing her binoculars over the partially-burned down hotel across the street.
There. Through one of the windows she could see a shape barely moving on thermal, more visible than it would normally have been in the early afternoon because of the winter cold that had set in to the concrete and steel. It hadn’t been there only minutes before when she had done a thermal sweep of the area, which meant that whoever it was had been concealed in a thermal-masking cover of some kind, and had only taken it off because he was ready to shoot…
“Get up there now, Tom!” She said urgently, grabbing her rifle and shifting it over to target the hotel window. “Valerie! Get down!”
She raised the scope to her eye, cursing when she saw the puff of hot gas coming from the window that indicated the assassin had fired. Shannon flicked her selector to full auto and squeezed the trigger, gritting her teeth against the sharp recoil. There was little sound, since her rifle was suppressed, so she could actually hear the impact as a dozen 8mm slugs punched through the decaying concrete of the hotel, sending a spray of dust and concrete chunks into the shooter. Through her thermal scope she could see him jerk back from his hide position in pain and surprise, giving her a better view, and a better target. Letting out a breath, she put the targeting reticle on the shooter’s right leg and stroked the trigger. A single round coughed out through her suppressor, the tungsten penetrator propelled by a mass of caseless hyperexplosive powder the size of her middle finger, and knifed through the concrete wall to spear into the assassin’s right knee.
The shooter thrashed and writhed in pain, a red and yellow light show in her thermal scope as he rolled back and forth inside his hide, trying to get out of the line of fire.
“He’s lame, Tom,” she transmitted. “Take him now.”
There wasn’t a reply, but she could see a red and yellow form moving up the stairs into the shooter’s room, then duck through the doorway and raise a weapon in outstretched hands. The assassin on the floor convulsed once and then went limp.
“He’s down, ma’am,” Tom Crossman told her, and she could see him turning the unconscious form over and slipping restraints on his wrists. “I’m bringing him downstairs.”
“Roger that. Good job.”
Shannon grabbed her rifle and binoculars and scrambled to her feet, heading out of the apartment, being careful to avoid the gaping holes in the floor. The stairs were solid concrete and still in fairly good shape and she sprinted down them as quickly as she could, exiting the centuries-old building through a side door, having to jump a meter down to the street because the stoop had been washed away by the years.
“Jason goes off looking for the Protectorate dozens of light years away,” she muttered to herself as she jogged towards Valerie, “and I wind up in a damn firefight. Figures.”
Valerie was helping Amanda to her feet as Shannon approached and she could see that the journalist was ashen, shaking with fear. “Are you all right?” She asked them, putting a supporting hand on the journalist’s shoulder.
Amanda looked up and saw the woman dressed in combat utilities and body armor, carrying a sniper rifle and jerked away from her with a screech of fright.
“It’s all right, Amanda,” Valerie assured her. “She’s a friend…this is Major Shannon Stark.”
Amanda blinked, looked back at Shannon with wide eyes. “The Shannon Stark?”
Shannon sighed. While Valerie explained things to Amanda, Stark turned to see Tom Crossman and Sergeant Miller, one of their most trusted Special Operations NCOs, carrying an unconscious man between them on a folding stretcher. She stepped over to them, examining the assassin.
He was a solidly-built man somewhere in his middle years, the bushy mustache and shoulder length hair giving her the impression of ex-military, probably a gun for hire. He wore plain black utilities and a combat vest, along with a fresh smart bandage wrapped around his right knee. He was still motionless, having been hit with a fairly large jolt from the electro-dart shooter holstered at Tom’s right hip. The gun used compressed air to shoot darts containing small capacitors that could deliver enough of a shock to render someone unconscious for hours.
“That was some good shooting, ma’am,” Crossman grinned. “Didn’t even nick the artery. He’ll be good as new in days.”
“Good,” she nodded. “Get him to the flyer and get him secured.” She looked back at Valerie and they shared a grim smile. “He has a lot of questions to answer.”
Chapter Fourteen
Jason McKay watched with a predatory set to his eyes as the blackened and cracked hull slid by on the Sheridan‘s master viewscreen. It had taken some tricky maneuvering, but the big cruiser had finally matched orbits with the disabled Protectorate lighter. In the days since the space battle, it had drifted in an eccentric orbit that was eventually going to slingshot it around the system’s primary star and send it out into interstellar space, but for now it was accessible to their recovery teams. And since it was the only Protectorate ship to survive the battle
even partially intact, McKay badly wanted to see what they recovered.
He could see their shuttle hugging the surface of the pirated and converted freighter like a remora on a blue whale, but the men themselves were not visible.
“The boarding party has burned through the airlock,” the Sheridan‘s communications officer announced. “They’re broadcasting a video feed now.”
“Put it on screen, Lieutenant,” Admiral Patel ordered. He was strapped into his command couch, but McKay was making do holding onto a handle affixed to the bulkhead beside him. It wasn’t convenient, but somehow he felt more at home there than in a seat of his own.
The image on the screen switched abruptly from the exterior shot to a darkened, claustrophobic corridor in the ship’s interior. From the helmet-mounted camera, they could see the other Marines and Fleet technicians in the boarding party, all of them dressed in massively-armored vacuum suits and the Marines armed with backpack-fed lasers only practical in zero gravity.
“There’s still no sign of any survivors?” McKay asked.
“No, sir,” the Tactical officer told him, checking her sensor displays. “We have some spots that still have auxiliary power and probably life support, but no attempts to maneuver or communicate.”
“It’s been days,” Patel pointed out. “If anyone survived the battle, they’d have got out in landers or escape pods by now.”
“You’re probably right, sir,” McKay admitted with a shrug. “But a live prisoner to interrogate would be nice.”
“You spooks,” Patel lamented, shaking his head. “You always want egg in your beer.”
Jason had to chuckle at that. A few days ago, he’d felt lucky to be alive and not stranded on Peboan for the foreseeable future. It had been a close thing. The Protectorate ship that had split off to try to strike them from orbit had been close enough that he’d been able to see the explosion from the ground when Captain Minishimi’s Shipbusters caught up with it. At the time, he’d been morally certain that the blast was the Decatur being destroyed, and he’d experienced a terrifying flashback to the Protectorate attack on Aphrodite until the transmission from the patrol shuttles told them what had actually happened.