by Rick Partlow
“I think I just tasted the color green,” Esmeralda Villanueva said, trying to shake the indescribably strange feeling she’d just experienced.
“That was so fucking weird,” Orton said, shaking his head. “I felt like I wasn’t there.”
“Well, you’re here now,” Vinnie said, looking at a new starfield on the viewscreen. “Wherever the hell here is.”
“There’s the primary,” Villanueva jabbed a finger at the computer map slowly building on the screen as the sensors came back to life. “It’s a red giant. We’re about nine AU out from it…looks like we’re in the orbit of a gas giant. God knows where in the galaxy we are-the science types can look at our scans when we get back. Anyway, executing turnover.” She touched the thruster controls and they heard a series of “bangs” as the maneuvering rockets flipped the boat end for end, then restabilized it, facing the direction of the gate through which they’d come.
“Tactical board reads a big fat lot of nothing,” Orton announced. “Not so much as a stray radio wave. Guess that old Russian guy was telling the truth. We got the coordinates of the gate relative to the primary.” He twisted around in his chair to face the technicians. “You guys ready to place the bomb?”
“Hell yes,” the woman in charge of the team replied, unstrapping from her seat. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
“Cal,” Villanueva said to Orton, “go back to the hold with them and help them get that thing out of our cargo lock, if you wouldn’t mind.”
“Roger that, ma’am,” he said with a nod, yanking off his own restraints and grabbing his helmet before he kicked off towards the hatch in the rear bulkhead.
“So,” Esmeralda turned to Vinnie once Orton and the techs were back in the cargo hold, “glad you came?”
Vinnie scratched his head. “Well, to be honest, it’s been kinda’ boring,” he admitted, “other than the whole tasting colors and not being there thing. But the company’s nice,” he added with a grin.
She regarded him with a dubious expression. “Don’t try to tell me that you volunteered for what could have been-hell, still could be-a suicide mission just so you could be with me.”
“You may not believe this, Esme,” he said, “but it wouldn’t even be close to the stupidest reason I have volunteered for what could have been a suicide mission.” He let loose his restraints and nudged himself close enough to her that he could gently run the back of his hand across her cheek.
“Well, how’s a girl supposed to resist a line like that?” She grinned, grabbing him by the neck and pulling him into a kiss. “Damn these suits,” she murmured softly as their lips parted, leaving them floating face to face, millimeters from each other.
“Hey, we’ve got a while together,” he assured her. “God knows how long we’ll be out here scouting the Protectorate. Do squadron leaders rate a private cabin or am I gonna’ have to kick Jock out of the room again?”
She laughed full-throated at that, a husky sound that drove Vinnie crazy. “I think we can work something out,” she said with a shrug.
“If you two are done,” Cal Orton’s voice came over the speakers, “we have the bomb in the airlock and we’re ready to activate its maneuvering unit.”
Oh shit, Villanueva mouthed, her face turning red as she realized she’s left the speaker on to the cargo hold. “Ah, roger that, Cal…get the thing moving so we can get back to the ship.”
Wincing, she muted the audio pickup and glared at Vinnie, who was laughing uncontrollably. “Oh sure,” she chided, pushing him back toward his seat. “You don’t have to work with him!”
Finally, she couldn’t help it and began laughing herself.
You got it bad, girl, she told herself. Surprisingly, she didn’t much mind.
Chapter Seventeen
Shannon Stark looked up from her book when she heard the man stir. The assassin was strapped to the bed which, beside the chair in which she sat, was the only furniture in the stone-walled room. She regarded the man with an impersonal coolness as he roused from his drugged stupor, looking better than he had when he had first been brought to the secure facility several days before. His knee was mostly healed and he’d been cleaned up and dressed in fresh clothes. And, of course, he’d been squeezed like a sponge.
“Where th’ fuck m’I?” He mumbled groggily, eyes blinking against even the dim light in the room. His voice was a surprisingly pleasant baritone with a clear Australian accent.
“Someplace no one will ever find you, Mr. Finley,” she told him, laying her tablet down on the chair as she stood. “If they’re even bothering to look.”
He squinted at her, face screwing up in concentration. “You’re Stark,” he said. “You suckered me good…shoulda’ known O’Keefe wouldn’t be stupid enough to meet that reporter in the Old City.”
“I’d have expected better from someone with your training,” she shook her head. “Ten years in the Fleet Marine Corps, multiple commendations, promoted to Gunnery Sergeant…and then busted back down to Corporal and given a general discharge for assaulting an officer.”
“Let me save you some time, Major Stark,” he interrupted her, sighing and closing his eyes. “I can tell by how shitty I feel that you had me under, so you already know everything I know. And you know it’s pretty well fucking useless. Blind drops, dummy accounts, no faces, no names. So your next move is to offer me a deal: you give me a new identity and pretend you don’t know I killed Mulrooney and I go undercover for you or some such bullshit. Well, save your breath, Sheila…I’ll take my chances in government detention.”
“We considered that,” Shannon admitted with a nod. “If you’d actually known any way to meet someone in person, or if we actually thought you were important enough to whoever hired you for them to try to kill you, we’d have made the offer. As things stand, though, you’re worthless to us. We have your ‘link, we have your accounts, we have your addresses and your passcodes. We can make those connections ourselves, without you.”
He scowled in confusion. “So why are you talking to me?”
“It was my turn to stand watch,” she explained as the door to the room opened with a pneumatic hiss. Valerie O’Keefe-Mulrooney stepped through, the look on her face cold enough to freeze nitrogen. “She wanted you awake for this.”
She didn’t look at Shannon, just stepped over to the bed, her eyes locked on Finley. “Thanks for calling me, Shannon,” she said quietly. “You can go out now.”
Shannon picked up her tablet and stepped through the door without a word, closing it behind her with the press of her palm on a plate on the outside wall.
Finley snorted with amusement. “Are you supposed to intimidate me? Shame me into wanting to help you?”
“Six years ago,” Valerie said as if he hadn’t spoken, speaking slowly and calmly, “there was a man on Aphrodite named Huerta. He was a man I thought was a friend and ally, but he used me as a pawn, and wound up trying to rape me in a little farmhouse in the high desert.” Val reached into her purse and pulled out a large, broad-bladed knife. “Let me show you what I did to him, Mr. Finley.”
Outside in the corridor of the old, abandoned emergency shelter, Shannon heard the screams. She smiled grimly and waited till they stopped.
* * *
Now that the undercover part of his mission was over, Ariel Shamir was missing his old face. There hadn’t been time or opportunity to get it changed back before the flight to Houston, so he was stuck with it until the operation was over. At least, he reflected as he rubbed his chin self-consciously, he had been able to shave the damn, itchy beard.
“Stop fidgeting, kedves,” Roza whispered to him as she pretended to sip her drink.
“If this takes much longer,” he responded softly, “I’ll fucking get up and dance.”
They’d been sitting at the corner table in the out of the way bar on the outskirts of the Greater Houston Development Complex for nearly two hours, watching Colonel Lee waiting for the meet with his contact and it was pushi
ng midnight. Lee looked even more uncomfortable and impatient than Ari felt: the Colonel was sitting alone, dressed incongruously in bland civilian clothes, at a booth near the door of the place. He was studiously ignoring the two of them, his eyes only lifting from his barely-touched drink to glance furtively at the door every few minutes.
“You know,” Ari commented, “for the mastermind of a conspiracy, the good Colonel is a bit high strung.”
“I’m beginning to wonder if this guy is going to show at all,” Roza sighed. “Maybe they had an insider with Lee’s group and they know everything’s gone to hell.”
Ari shook his head. “We’ll give it another few minutes, then I’ll signal Lee to head back to the hotel.”
He let his attention drift to the news ‘net that was playing on the bar’s glitchy, flickering holotank. He couldn’t hear the sound, but the video they were showing was of Senator Valerie O’Keefe-Mulrooney-archival footage of a speech she’d given-and then it cut to President O’Keefe, looking worried and old and then a stock shot of the Old City. He frowned. What the hell was all that about?
He was about to check the news on his ‘link when the bar’s doors hissed open and Lee looked around, as he had every time they’d opened the last two hours…but this time, the expression on his face was relief mixed with anxiety.
“I think we have a winner,” Roza whispered.
The woman was somewhere in her forties, Ari judged-you couldn’t tell by appearance of course, but with practice and observation you could make a good guess by a how a person carried themselves. She was dressed in civilian clothes, but the way she wore them was so precise and tucked in that Ari knew with a moral certainty that she was recent ex-military, if not current military. Her dark hair was cut short in severe bangs and her face looked as if it were frozen in a perpetual stern frown. And by God, he knew her!
The woman took a seat at the bar beside Lee, but didn’t speak immediately. She pulled a glass from the dispenser and placed it under the spigot, then tapped the screen to dispense herself a beer. The bar read her ID from her ‘link and charged her account automatically
“I don’t like you being here, Lee,” she finally spoke, not looking at the Colonel, looking for all the world as if she were speaking to someone on her ‘link. “This is unnecessarily conspicuous.”
“It can’t be helped,” Lee said tightly, taking a cue from her and not making eye contact. “There are things I could not tell you via any method that can be intercepted, and I need guidance that can’t be given from a dead drop.”
“Well out with it, for God’s sake,” she grumbled.
“The Guard Investigative Service knows about the…operation,” he said, licking his lips nervously. “They had a plant in my staff.”
“That is unfortunate,” she said harshly, her hand tightening on her glass.
Lee winced. “She was about to call in a raid and have us all arrested, but she trusted the wrong man and never got to make that call. That gives us time, but not much. I need to know if things are imminent. If they are not, we need to grab as many recruits as we can and go find a secure location to hide until we can move forward with our part of this. If there is not much longer to wait, we can hold out where we are, perhaps with valuable hostages such as General Kage. We might even make a move into the city.”
Ari nodded slowly. Lee was performing well. He’d had his doubts, particularly on the flight from South America.
“I’m not authorized to tell you anything about the timetable,” the woman said, shaking her head. “And I don’t know, even if I were.”
“Then find out,” Lee ground out through clenched teeth. “Get authorized. Or I swear, I will find a hole and pull it in after me and that is the last you will hear of me. I will not be a distraction for you…I will not sacrifice good men and women to make things easier for your bosses. If you treat me as a valuable ally, you will have a valuable ally. If you treat me as a disposable flunky, you will have nothing.”
“Calm down, Lee,” she said soothingly. She sighed with resignation. “Give me two hours, then check the messages on our dead drop. It will be one word: ‘go’, or ‘stay.’ If it’s ‘go,’ then we’re looking at more than two weeks. That’s all I can do.” She didn’t wait for an answer, just downed her beer with one gulp and stood up. “Wait ten minutes before you leave,” she instructed him, heading for the door.
“Did you grab her ‘link signal?” Ari asked Roza as the woman walked out into the dark street.
Roza checked the tablet she’d been holding under the table. “Yes. It’s spoofed and anonymous, obviously, but it took the Trojan and it’s broadcasting the ping. I can’t say how long it’ll be before she enters a secure facility and they block it down, but we have her for now.”
“Doesn’t matter if we lose the ping,” he said, grinning. “I know who she is.”
Roza glanced up at him, startled. “You do?”
“She’s Helenne D’Annique,” he informed her. “She was the First Officer on the Patton, Admiral Patel’s ship during the war. I was on the ship as a Marine; she always struck me as a cast-iron bitch. I don’t know where she’s been the last five years…but I know how to find out.”
“Well, isn’t this interesting?” Ari mused, rubbing his chin unconsciously as he stared at his tablet screen. It had been over an hour since the meeting at the bar and the three of them had made their separate ways back to the hotel, a working-class place in a cheaper area of town that wasn’t that scrupulous about accepting anonymized accounts. Ari was seated in a chair while Lee and Roza huddled around the desk terminal, watching the dead drop account for a message.
“You got something?” Roza asked, moving to the chair to look over this shoulder.
“D’Annique resigned her commission not too long after the war,” he replied, summarizing the Fleet Intelligence dossier on the woman that he had been reading. “She lived off her savings and half-pension for a year until she was hired by a small security firm here in Houston…which pays her somewhere on the order of ten times her military salary, and is, coincidentally enough, a very, very indirect subsidiary of Republic Transportation multicorps.”
“Szar,” Roza cursed in Hungarian. “This is so above my pay grade.”
“Yeah,” Ari agreed, sighing. “This is going to be complicated. I think I’m going to have to call Major Stark and get some backup.” He twisted around to look at her. “Unless you have some GIS assets you trust?”
“We are a small department,” she lamented, shaking her head. “And this is not what we do…well, not what we have done. There are a handful of undercover inspectors such as myself, two Direct Action platoons and that’s about it. Most of the inspectors are offplanet at any given time.”
The hotel room’s doorbell chimed and three heads snapped around as one, pistols jumping into Ari’s and Roza’s hands. Ari went to the small viewer embedded in the wall next to the door and saw a tall, rangy figure in a flowered shirt and tourist shorts standing out in the hallway, his features obscured by a broad-brimmed hat and sunglasses. He looked at Roza and shook his head. She returned the motion and moved to the other side of the door, handgun at the ready, while Colonel Lee ducked behind the cover of the desk. Ari touched the intercom button.
“Yes?” was all he said.
“Open the fuckin’ door so I can take off this stupid hat,” the man said. Leaning into the camera, he slipped off his glasses and lifted the hat momentarily and then put them back on.
“Holy shit,” Ari breathed, laughing softly. He reholstered his pistol and waved Roza back as he released the door lock and palmed the panel to open it. The man slipped inside quickly and shut the door behind him, taking off his hat and glasses.
“Hey Captain Shamir,” Tom Crossman said casually as he gave the room a quick once-over. “Love the new face. Inspector Kovach,” he nodded to the woman, who was staring at him curiously, her gun still in her hand. Crossman’s gaze halted on Colonel Lee, who was slowly emerging from beh
ind the desk. “Oh, there you are, Colonel…I thought for a second they’d dumped your body somewhere.”
“Not to offend,” Roza said, “but who the hell are you?”
“He’s Sergeant Tom Crossman,” Ari told her.
“The Tom Crossman?” she asked, doing a double-take.
“Sweet suffering Jesus,” Tom muttered, rolling his eyes. “And this,” he waved a hand at her, “is why I can’t do undercover work. Fucking movie. Hell, I couldn’t even go out in public here without this shit,” he gestured at the hat and glasses he’d thrown down on the bed.
“Tom,” Ari interrupted, “as sorry as I am for the burdens of fame and as glad as I am to see you…what are you doing here?”
“Making sure it’s safe,” he replied with a shrug. He touched a button on his ‘link. “Bring her in,” he said, then palmed the door control.
The door opened and Shannon Stark strode inside, flanked by two of Tom’s recent graduates: a competent-looking, stocky woman with spiky black hair and pale skin and a tall, long-legged young man with sad, dark, hound-dog eyes. All three were dressed in casual civilian clothes, although not quite as casual as Tom Crossman’s.
“Ma’am.” Ari nodded to her as the door closed behind them.
“Ari, can I ask what the hell you’re doing in Houston?” Shannon said without preamble. “The last thing I heard from you, you and Inspector Kovach were going to arrest Colonel Lee.” She eyed the Colonial Guard Colonel, who was standing beside the desk. “I see the plan has evolved.”
“Before I answer that, ma’am,” he said, “just for my own peace of mind, how did you find us? And why are you here? In this city, I mean…you didn’t follow me here, did you?”
“We’re following up a lead,” she said. “We…” she shrugged. “We managed to get a line on the man who killed Glen Mulrooney. We got ahold of his ‘link, his accounts, everything. It was all anonymized and encrypted and bounced around, but our netdivers managed to trace some of his money to an account that we know-but can’t prove-is connected to a security firm here in Houston,”