Deadland Drifter: A Scifi Thriller

by J. N. Chaney

  The terrorists were unquestionably still monitoring them, and even though they had changed clothes and were out of the hotel, there was still the possibility that they could be heard. With that in mind, Burner sent the most crucial point to Sara as text to her comm.

  -that narrows down our list of potential targets. I need to do some research to narrow it down further. I’ll work on it while we travel.-

  They decided that they needed to rent a vehicle. Carrying a sniper rifle with sketchy legal origins that they did not possess a permit for all the way across the city was too risky.

  Being a city that was designed with foot traffic in mind, there weren’t a whole lot of places to rent vehicles. The only one nearby specialized in luxury vehicles for upper class tourists. Fortunately, Sara said the Union would foot the bill, and Burner felt he was overdue a little luxury anyway.

  Pascor Rentals was a small building with tinted glass walls surrounded by the landing pads where they park their fleet of hover vehicles. Burner stepped to the side as Sara approached a bored looking receptionist to request a rental.

  The receptionist went through the standard questions with a tone like she was reading off a cue card instead of reciting from memory. “Do you understand the risks involved in hover vehicle operation? Do you agree that any damage done to the vehicle while it is in your possession will be repaired and the costs billed to the account we have on file for you? Do you understand the laws regarding operating the vehicle while under the effects of mind-altering substances?” On she went, one question after another, barely taking note when Sara replied.

  Burner had nearly forgotten the amount of regulations involved with even simple things like renting a vehicle when you were in Union space. In the Deadlands, they would have just taken a deposit upfront for any damages and you were good to go. Of course, some establishments operated as they wished, but this one was ticking all the boxes.

  At last, Sara handed over an ID for the receptionist to scan. The receptionist handed it back with the key for their rental. “You’re all set, Mrs. Parridge. Have a good rest of your evening.”

  Burner’s eyebrows climbed at the name. The fact that Sara would use an alias to rent a vehicle wasn’t the most surprising thing he had encountered today, but it was still something worth noting. Aliases served all sorts of purposes, from protecting your true identity, to giving you a background that builds trust with certain groups, to compartmentalizing different tasks of a job. They could also be used as signals, with people who have alerts out for certain identities taking note when one was used.

  He realized he wasn’t even sure if Sara was her real name. He had taken for granted that she was being truthful during their introductions, but her protocol might have had her operating under a specific alias during this mission. It didn’t really matter in the long run, but for some reason he felt a little disappointed that the woman he’d been getting to know might just be a cover.

  The vehicle they had been given was brand new with all the luxury features: seat warmers, drink chillers, adjustable privacy tinted windows, and seats so plush it was like sitting on a bed. If Burner didn’t have work to do during the flight, he might have taken a nap.

  “So, Mrs. Parridge?” Burner asked as Sara put the coordinates for Herod’s district into the autopilot.

  Sara spoke matter-of-factly, confident that the enemy couldn’t hear since they had turned off Burner’s phone, the only thing that made sense. “It’s an identity that my handler keeps tabs on. I’m leaving a trail of breadcrumbs for him to follow. He’s good enough at this game to put some things together.”

  Burner thought about that for a moment. “Because you’re worried about being alone in a car with me?”

  The vehicle lurched into the air as the autopilot activated, and Sara sat back in her seat. “That would fit with the protocol. I’m going to have to explain your involvement sooner or later, and that will be easier if they already know how involved you are. But the big thing is information. If I have to call in the assassination plot, they’ll be able to move much quicker if my handler already has data collected to back up my story.” She sighed. “That’s one of the big problems with this kind of work, you know? There’s no one to check your work.”

  It was a plight Burner sympathized with all too well. How many times had his investigations uncovered crimes like the bribery of ranking Union officials, only to be unable to prove it? Burner’s word alone couldn’t convict someone. A decent handler was invaluable in taking the bits of hard evidence, such as financial records that might seem like eldritch code to a common person, and building that into a case to back up the investigator’s findings.

  “Since I left the Union, it’s just been me.” Burner looked out at the city below them, at imagery that invoked memories of the Union both good and bad. “If I were to die on my wanderings, no one would be any wiser. No one would look into why I died, or what I had gotten myself into that led to my death. I’d just be gone one day, and leave nothing behind. It would be like I never existed.”

  Sara gave him a sympathetic smile. “No friends or family?”

  He shrugged. “No real family to speak of. I had some friends in the military, but they’ve all moved on with their own lives. They’d never notice I was gone, and even if they did, I doubt they’d care enough to do anything about it.”

  She leaned over to put a hand on his shoulder. “It’s rough, what we chose to do. It’s hard to make real connections when you are always operating under false identities and disappearing for months or years at a time. How do you make close friends with that kind of lifestyle?”

  His chuckle had a bitter undertone to it. “I once spent so long under one of my aliases, that when I came back home, my real name felt weird to me and I had to get used to it again. Yeah, that’s the kind of thing that makes personal relationships hard.”

  Sara seemed just as weighed down by the reality of it all for a moment, but she bounced back from it quickly, her quirky smile returning. “Well, for what it’s worth, if you manage to die in the next few days we are working together, I will make a note of it. Maybe even put it in the footnotes of one of my reports.”

  He laughed, genuinely this time. “What more could I ask for.”

  They talked for a while after that, both careful not to reveal the trade secrets of their respective agencies but giving each other enough that they could take comfort in their shared experiences and the knowledge that someone else had gone through the same thing.

  Once they had lapsed into a comfortable silence, Burner set to work on his tablet, going through the planet’s news and gossip to generate a list of rich and influential people who would be visiting the planet around this time. A list that would be narrowed soon, as the autopilot alerted them that they neared their destination. Everything was going to come to a head rapidly.

  This was the time when he shined.

  12

  Herod’s District, Dobulla UX8, Union Space

  As the autopilot began its landing procedures at a public parking garage, the disposable com buzzed with a text message.

  -6:55 a.m. Front of the Sparrow’s Nest. Set up on the balcony of Room 802 of the Herod Grand. Key waiting at the front desk for Frank Lian. You will receive the target’s identity at 6:52 a.m. Be ready.-

  Burner tentatively typed a short message in reply to see if it was possible to communicate with the terrorists that way, but the message was bounced back to him. Whatever proxy they had used to send the message was one way only.

  Sara’s face was serious even as her voice was whimsical. “Messages from your secret lover?”

  For now, they were going to continue to pretend that they saw no choice but to follow along with the assassination plot since Burner’s phone couldn’t stay off forever. “I got the location where the target is going to be and where I need to set up to make the shot.” He passed the com over to her so she could see. “Early morning, either an early check-in or they’re making it in time for brea
kfast. Do you recognize the names of these hotels?”

  She thought about it for a moment. “The Sparrow’s Nest is a Union building, not a hotel. Military admin. Not a particularly important one, but they do sometimes hold conferences there due to the amount of floor space. Plus, there’s a pretty swanky hotel right across the street for them to put visiting delegates up in.”

  “Let me guess: The Herod Grand.”

  She nodded. “If they’re putting us in one of the upper floors, we’ll have a pretty good view of the street and the front of the admin building.”

  He looked to the bag that contained the terrorists’ chosen weapon of murder. “A perfect sniper’s nest.”

  “You sure you want to go through with this?” She sounded concerned, but her eyes said You better not be thinking about actually doing it. She was just playing her part for anyone who might be listening.

  Burner played his. “I don’t really have much of a choice. I can’t risk them following through with their threat and blowing up a space station. That would hang over me forever.”

  Hopefully, anyone listening would be fooled into believing that Burner had given up. The fight had been taken out of him by the threat of mass violence, and now he was defeated.

  As they walked out of the garage, their text conversation revealed a different mood.

  -We will need to figure out who of any value is going to be at Sparrow’s Nest tomorrow morning.-

  Burner’s fingers were fast from years of typing up reports.

  -The time is very specific so they must be there for a meeting, that should help narrow things down. I’ve created a list of potential targets in the city, but it’s mostly celebrities and business tycoons. Union news stations tend to avoid looking too closely into military matters.-

  Sara somehow possessed the ability to type without even looking down at her pad.

  -Let me put out a request to one of my contacts. They should be able to tell me if anything important is going down tomorrow.-

  It was roughly two in the morning when they reached the street with the military admin building. Burner noticed security was tight, tighter than he would expect for a place Sara described as not having much significance. They must already be upping security for whoever they were expecting in the morning. Burner would have liked to have circled the building a few times to get a better sense of it, but there were sharp eyes everywhere and very few people out on the streets. Even a single pass risked drawing unwanted attention. So instead they made their way down the other side of the street to where the hotel stood.

  As they neared the hotel, Sara received a reply on her com. Without speaking, she passed the message over to Burner. It was a list of incoming arrivals.

  Burner scanned through the list, ranking the value of the targets in his head from highest to lowest. His kidnappers had gone through a great deal of effort to set this up, rope in a patsy with Burner’s level of training, and get the arrival schedule of the target. That meant this wasn’t a personal vendetta, or an attack of opportunity on a convenient victim. All this plotting pointed to them going after the highest value target on the list.

  Turned out, that wasn’t particularly hard to figure out. Five-star Admiral Karl Thiel was listed among the expected arrivals. Sara’s contact didn’t have specific details, but he was there for some kind of closed-door briefing. Whatever it was wasn’t public facing, it didn’t show up in any of the schedules of events, and it wasn’t referenced in any of the invitations for the conference. The contact didn’t even know what room his briefing was going to be conducted in.

  The name sounded familiar to Burner, and when he looked it on the gal-net, he realized why. He was the one with the unenviable task of overseeing the frontier space between the Union and the Deadlands. A dangerous posting without a lot of gratitude for doing it right and all sorts of hell to pay if it went wrong. Admiral Thiel had held the post for nearly a decade, though, so he must be doing something right.

  Burner’s brain was already racing to determine the terrorist’s motive. The obvious answer was that he was an obstacle for raiding Union space from the Deadlands. But Burner had already determined that his kidnappers had put in too much effort and planning for something that would yield so few rewards. The Union would just assign someone new to the position, and even if they promoted someone less competent than Thiel, Union space would still be a tough nut to crack. The Union was stronger than any one man.

  Removal of a political rival? Union politics were a nasty business, as it had been Burner’s job to learn firsthand, and he wouldn’t put it past a lower ranking admiral to eliminate the person currently holding the position they wanted. But Thiel’s post was a rough one that kept him mostly out of the spotlight, and that came with large consequences for things that might be out of your control, like increased Ravager activity. It was hard to imagine anyone looking to fill those shoes specifically.

  With the obvious motives eliminated, Burner began to think in broader strokes. What ripple effects might the death of such a high-ranking admiral create? And then he realized that the terrorist who called to threaten him over comm may have given the game away.

  Assuming that the threat was a legitimate one, and not something that had been made up on the fly to get Burner’s attention, it might be the answer to the whole thing. Blowing up a space station was a very specific and outlandish threat. If they just wanted to scare Burner into compliance with the promise of mass violence, they could have easily targeted a hospital. Or a school. The kind of places that invoke emotions of defenselessness and innocence. Claiming that you are going to destroy a space station is so grandiose it is almost unbelievable. The potential number of casualties is so great that it no longer provokes imagery of slaughtered innocents but of a faceless mass, a hard but impersonal number of victims. That made it more likely than not to Burner that there was at least a grain of truth to the threat.

  Then there was a space station that fit the bill right up against the edge of Union space, the Union Space Station (USS) Pharbis, whose protection would fall under Admiral Theil’s jurisdiction. Like Zanpus, its proximity to both the Deadlands and Union space made it an important center of trade and travel between the two. Making it large and crowded.

  But being on the Union side, it also served another important function: defense. The Union kept a fleet docked there at all times to rapidly respond to Ravagers moving into Union space. It was seen as a line of defense, the kind of thing that let Union citizens who lived on planets close to the frontier sleep more soundly at night.

  So what would happen if the admiral in charge of defending the region was assassinated? The space station that was looked to as a protective barrier was suddenly destroyed? Panic would ensue.

  The Union citizens on the furthest planets would feel the Union could no longer protect them. Whoever tried to fill Theil’s shoes would have a tough time restoring order after his predecessor was assassinated. Ravagers would become braver. Protection firms from the Deadlands would begin to offer their services. Perhaps the unrest would even grow to the point that the citizens on those planets would rise up and declare independence from the Union in order to form closer ties to their Deadlands protectors.

  It wasn’t the only path things could take. People were static things by nature. They were resistant to change, particularly when that change required effort. Fear could be a great motivator, but if the Union could dissolve those fears with big promises and a show of force, people would be more likely to take the easier option.

  But Burner could see from the perspective of an impassioned terrorist, such as the one who had called him, what it must feel like, to have that kind of burning hatred for the Union. A hate that blazed so hot it threatened to consume you. A spark of that hate existed in everyone and just needed fuel to be ignited. It could be tough for people with passion to understand that lethargy and indifference were the natural order of things, and that having that kind of burning desire actually made you the different o
ne.

  The important thing was, this terrorist believed that they could cause this chain of events through murder and fear, and that made him as dangerous an opponent as any Burner had ever come up against.

  He passed the comm back to Sara while pointing at the admiral’s name. She decided to do her own research on the man, bringing up his profile and scanning the important bits. While speaking out loud about perhaps grabbing breakfast because they never did grab a bite last night, she typed a message to Burner.

  -His ship, the Liberty Ward. I recognize that name from somewhere.-

  Burner searched the ship name on his pad as they passed through the front doors of the hotel.

  The Herod Grand lived up to its name. The lobby was cavernous and decorated with so much gold and silver that it bordered on being gaudy. A virtual assistant hologram was projected into the center of the room, repeating an announcement about the hotel’s amenities on a loop until someone came up to her with a request. Music drifted down from hidden speakers, a slow and classical melody that people associated with class. Despite it being the twilight hours, there was still a woman with a friendly smile manning the reception desk, and an eager looking bellboy standing at attention near the elevators.

  Burner exchanged the necessary pleasantries with the receptionist and handed her the ID from Frank Lian. He was glad he hadn’t tossed it. That was his usual reaction to one of his covers being blown. While the receptionist ran the ID and made sure their room was ready, he glanced back down at his comm and read the entry on the Liberty Ward. There wasn’t much information there. The ship was a newer model and hadn’t seen too much active service to speak of yet. It currently served as Admiral Theil’s base ship, meaning it was where he operated from most of the time. Whatever it was that had sparked Sara’s memory eluded his search, and her shrug told him that she hadn’t had much more luck.