by J. N. Chaney
Sara dropped her gaze to the ground. “It must be nice to be able to act with your conscience and help people wherever you go. I got into the Union for the same reasons as you. I grew up near the Deadlands, and Ravagers were a constant problem. The Union seemed like a good way to ensure other young girls don’t go through the same kinds of things I did as a child. It doesn’t always go that way.”
Burner shifted to look at her now. He took her chin in his hand and gently raised her head so they were looking eye-to-eye. “The only reason someone like me can spend their days helping the little guy is because people like you are keeping them safe from the threats they never see. What you do is important, and from what I’ve seen, we’re all lucky to have you protecting us.”
She looked at him with wide eyes, and for a while they were captivated by each other, her face in his hand and their eyes locked. And then she leaned in to kiss him.
Any inhibitions they had were lost in that moment. It was foolish, unprofessional, and more than that, dangerous. At any moment one of the terrorists could wander into the barn and it would be over for them. But they didn’t care. The danger only inflamed their passion, serving as an aphrodisiac as they tore clothes from each other.
The two operatives who lived by the rules of survival cast caution to the wind and became lost in each other.
27
Barn, Trion City Outskirts, Demeter
Burner slept through the rest of the morning. Not rested, not meditated while maintaining his alertness. Slept. One more thing to add to the list of dangerous things you should never do while on a mission mere meters away from dangerous terrorists.
A sign of just how dangerously unalert he had been was that Sara had apparently left at some point without him noticing. He quickly scanned the barn, just to make sure she hadn’t just ducked behind one of the rusted old pieces of equipment for some reason. She was nowhere to be seen.
His brain kicked away the sleepy haze so he could concentrate. Wherever she went, it was voluntary. Even if he had been the deepest sleeper in the world, which he wasn’t, a scuffle would have woken him. Plus, there would be no reason for the terrorists to take her and leave him. She also had not wanted him to know she was going. Perhaps she was just being polite and wanted to let him rest, but more likely she had snuck out to do whatever it was she was going to do without him.
As he located his clothes, memories of the early morning together came back to him. He wondered briefly if perhaps she had regretted what they had done and decided she needed some air. It had been, objectively, an irresponsible and impulsive decision. She could be worried about their ability to remain professional and competent. Operatives had been known to get sloppy when romance was involved.
No, she didn’t seem the type for that. Even if she regretted the decision, which Burner wouldn’t be able to blame her for, they had both taken stock of each other’s abilities and knew they could rely on each other when guns started firing. A little physical contact wouldn’t change that.
He hurriedly dressed as he made his way toward the barn door. It was slightly ajar, when he knew they had closed it securely behind them. A small sign she had left him that she had gone out and would return. Burner wasn’t about to just wait here for her, though. There was too much risk that one of them would encounter a terrorist without the other for backup.
He glimpsed outside while getting his shoes on, and once he was sure the coast was clear, he slipped outside and padded softly around the outside of the barn. He noticed his gut instinct was leading him toward the tree cover. Something must have registered with his subconscious and given him a feeling that she had headed that way.
It was possible that she had just taken a bathroom break, hence the need for the tree cover. If that was the case, they were about to have an awkward encounter. In fairness to Burner, she really should have woken him so he could keep a lookout.
Then he remembered an argument they’d had just hours before. She had wanted to contact the Union to warn them that Admiral Thiel was still in danger. He had stopped her from doing it because it was unclear just how far she would have to travel to find a comm signal. Burner wouldn’t put it past her to try anyway when she thought he was fast asleep.
Burner was going to have to track her through the woods. He again remembered his Union wilderness survival training and moaned about having to put it to use twice in as many days.
With the morning nearing its tail end, the sun made finding his way through the woods much easier than it had been when he was simply trying to follow a straight path late last night. Not that visibility was a hundred percent. The canopy overhead was still thick, casting much of the terrain ahead in heavy shadow. The focused sunlight in the areas where it did break through in tight beams forced him to shield his eyes as he passed through.
At first, he was moving by gut instinct alone, but once that feeling started to grow weaker, he had to concentrate to find other signs of her passing through. It was tough to distinguish her marks from those left by others that had been through these woods. He would guess that the terrorists had combed these areas pretty thoroughly when vetting this place to ensure there were no hermits calling it home, or strange recording devices, or anything else that might interfere with the security of their hideout. While these markings were not as fresh as Sara’s, the patches of cut bramble and stomped weeds that nature hadn’t finished reclaiming were an added layer of complexity.
A footprint in the mud was his clearest indication yet that he was on the right path. It was about her size, and more importantly, the crispness of the impressions showed that these could not have been made more than an hour ago. She wasn’t too far ahead of him, and Burner became hopeful that he could catch up to her.
Unfortunately, she knew which direction she was going and was able to travel that way at full speed, while Burner was moving slowly to pick up indications of her path. He had to make guesses now and then on a direction based on broken twigs or the directionality of the occasional partial footprint. He was eventually able to get an idea of the general course she was on, and thinking back to his drive up here, he had a fairly good guess where she was going.
There were a pair of network hubs not too far from the edge of the woods. While they were doing a piss poor job at providing satellite network access to the region, if Sara could hardwire into one of them, she could certainly get a message out.
Of course, if those hubs happened to be the only solid network access point for kilometers around, there was no doubt that the terrorists had the same idea at some point. They’d have been using the hubs every time they needed to send a message to their associates off-world. And they might take precautions against anyone trying to interfere with those messages. They might even have a way of keeping an eye on the hubs.
She could be walking into danger.
A loud rustling caught his attention and made him freeze on the spot. Something large was stomping down grass as it moved in a meandering path. Burner could hear snaps as large branches were crushed underfoot and wooden groans as trees were bent out of the way to allow the creature’s path.
Burner was not familiar with the creatures that made up the natural ecosystem of the planet and had no idea if such a large beast was a predator or just an oversized herbivore. Experience had taught him one thing: he was better off not trying to find out.
He was still close enough to the farm that a gunshot could give him away. He pulled out his knife, pressed himself against a large tree trunk, and waited for whatever it was to pass. He heard more large footfalls from the other side of the trunk and the creature slowly lumbered past his hiding spot. Curiosity didn’t compel him to look. Burner restricted his breathing to a silent waft, making himself as quiet as a human could be. He hoped the beast wasn’t using a superior sense of smell.
After a few tense moments, the creature passed. Burner quickly rushed from his hiding spot to put some distance between himself and whatever it had been. At this pace he couldn’
t precisely follow Sara’s tracks, so he had to operate on the assumption that he was right about her destination, and he headed in that general direction.
He also had to assume that Sara had been skilled enough to avoid an unpleasant encounter from whatever called these woods home.
About half an hour later, as he was nearing the wood’s edge, he heard something moving in his direction. His fingers tightened around the handle of his knife just in case it was another of the forest’s creatures. Slowly he made his way toward the source of the noise. Climbing up on a boulder gave him a better view of the landscape ahead, and from there he was able to make out the familiar blonde hair.
Burner tucked his knife away then slowly and casually moved to intercept Sara’s path so as to not startle her.
As it turned out, she wasn’t close to being startled. In fact, she didn’t seem the least bit surprised to see him there. “You know I had to get this message out,” she said with a shrug.
While she didn’t add anything more, Burner knew exactly what the contents of that message would have been. As a Constable, it would have been her duty to report all the facts, whether or not they would have been better holding some things close to their chest. She would have told them the admiral was still in danger, and that a man codenamed Stack was the new assassin. She’d have been able to confirm beyond a doubt that the Pharbis was the target, and with the plans they found, where the bomb was going to be planted. She probably even told them the location of the hideout, though they were so far out of Union space here it was unlikely that information would do them any good.
Burner knew he would have done the same thing if he was still in Intelligence. “Is it done?”
She nodded. “Yes. Hank just confirmed receipt.”
He considered telling her off for leaving on her own, for leaving him asleep and defenseless, for betraying an agreement and doing what she wanted anyway. But he realized there was no point. She was not under his command. She was a Union operative, and she should be expected to behave as one.
“How about we head back before those idiots wake up and catch us sneaking back in?” Burner gestured back the way he had come.
She put a hand on her hip and gave him a curious smile. “Is that the path you took? Here I thought you were tracking me, but I guess you just got lucky. I came from that way.” She gestured slightly to the left of his pointed path.
He pretended to be offended by her teasing. “Well, I was tracking you, but I got slightly sidetracked by a walking mountain. Maybe you saw it? It’s about as big as your ego.”
She held out her hands in a placating way. “Just like an Intelligence agent to make excuses. Not surprising, your wilderness survival training pales in comparison to ours.” She winked. “No need to feel bad about that.”
With a smile, he reached into a pocket and pulled out a credstick. “I’ll bet you my way takes us back quicker.”
Sara chuckled. “If you want to lose your credits, have at it. We’ll see whose agency prepared them better.”
They laughed at the banter as they began to pick their way back through the forest toward the farm.
28
Barn, Trion City Outskirts, Demeter
Back at the barn, Burner watched as a transport vehicle pulled up outside the farmhouse’s front door. The door swung open and two men appeared, hauling a large crate between the two of them. They loaded it into the back of the idling vehicle then went back inside and returned hauling another crate.
Burner waved Sara over to join him at the cracked opening in the barn door. “Looks like they’re finally getting ready to move out.”
Sara peered through the crack herself, and Burner moved aside for her. “Looks like those two drew the short straws. They’re the only ones doing all the loading. Based on how much we saw they had packed, it’ll probably take them an hour or so to load up. What’s our move?”
Burner had had plenty of time to think about in the past couple of hours. He’d narrowed their logical options down to just two. “Try to take these two down stealthily, hope the others don’t get suspicious about their disappearance until after we’d had a minute to question them. There are two of them and two of us. Shouldn’t be hard.”
“To take them down, yeah,” Sara agreed. “But to do it with perfect stealth? All it will take is one shout, or one of the others inside to choose that moment to look out a window, and suddenly we’re engaging the entire group while we’re standing right out in the open.”
“The other option is to follow them.” Burner gestured to the path in the woods he had trailed Two-Pizzas through. “I left a vehicle at the end of the path. We could get back to it and wait for the transport to take off, and then follow it to wherever they’re going. There’s no guarantee they’re going to the space station. There’s plenty of space on this planet to hide a ship. If we had their ship, we could get flight logs and com records. It’d probably tell us everything we needed to know.”
“But if they were headed to the space port, we’d have no choice but to try and take them down in a public and crowded place.” She shook her head. “Too risky.”
“That leaves option one. We make our move now.” He focused his attention on the two terrorists laboring over a heavy crate. “Looks like it’s Two-Pizzas and the Horndog. We could take one each. Which do you want?”
She grinned. “I’d prefer not to get too close to Horndog’s smell. He’s all yours.”
Burner sighed. “Fine, he looks like the tougher opponent, anyway. If you mess up taking out the nerd, that would be embarrassing though.” He stole a sideways, deadpan glance at her. She smiled.
Whenever spies were portrayed in the action holos, they were shown to use stealth takedowns as if it was the simplest and most effective tool in their arsenal. Sneak up behind some unsuspecting criminal, smack them in the back of the head, and watch them go unconscious for long enough for the spy to change into their conveniently properly sized uniform.
In actuality, taking down a target without being seen and without making any noise to alert others nearby was one of the most difficult tasks in the profession. Real people didn’t act like they did in the movies, staring off steadily into the distance while standing straight so that their skull was in a perfect bashing position. They were fidgety, turned around for no reason, and could sometimes just sense that there was someone else around them. Also, smacking the back of the skull was no guarantee that they were going to crumble silently to the ground. Most of the time it just caused them to stumble and shout in pain. Going for the throat was a more effective method. Cutting off their airway prevented them from shouting, but even that wasn’t a guarantee.
Burner preferred more deceptive methods if he needed to get close enough to someone to take them down quietly. Disguises were effective, as were distractions, and sometimes just walking up to them confidently while waving “hello” at them like you were old friends would usually work to at least confuse a target so you could get close enough to them for a throat chop. None of those were really options here. The terrorists all knew what he looked like, and that left gambling on a stealth approach.
He remembered a mission that had him breaking into the personal office of a colonel that had been suspected of taking bribes. The bribes had been to ensure Union presence was light on certain popular Ravager raiding routes. Burner had secured all the data he needed, but in the process he had accidentally tripped a security protocol. The system had locked the building down and filled the room with the colonel’s men. Burner managed to take cover behind the console, but the only path out took him through a young, bleary-eyed soldier. The men had spread out to scan the room, and Burner thought the soldier looked too tired to be perceptive, so he posited that a stealth takedown would allow him to get past him and through the door before the others noticed.
Burner’s movements had been perfect that day, his feet practically padding on air and his breathing nearly halted. He had gotten within a few steps of the clueless soldier
, ready to perform a quick stranglehold while gently lowering him to the ground.
Then the soldier sneezed. Burner had been just a step from him. One of the others turned and had been halfway through “Gesundheit” when he saw Burner and shouted. Burner ended up not just having to fight his way out of the building but also having to explain in his report why there was thousands of credits worth of damage to Union property and injuries to several soldiers. One of the problems of operating on home territory. The mission had long served as a lesson to Burner about how quickly things could go very wrong, and it was completely beyond one’s control.
This time, here at the farmhouse, there was the added complication of a second target. Both had to be taken down at the exact same time. Even a second’s delay would allow the other to shout a warning. He and Sara had to move in lockstep and completely trust each other to do exactly what they needed without any verbal communication.
They waited until their targets had gone back inside the farmhouse. Nodding to each other, the pair rushed across the yard toward the transport. Burner and Sara pressed themselves on the side of the truck facing the woods and waited.
Burner focused on controlling his breathing. Beside him, Sara was doing an impressive job of maintaining her composure, though he could see that she too was using a technique to stay cool and relaxed enough to pounce during the long wait. This was the big moment when they would finally begin confronting the terrorists they had been tracking for so long. Their lives, and the lives of thousands of innocents on Pharbis, relied on them. On this single moment.