She moved to the lectern to gather her belongings as the students rose and began to file out.
The man waited until the crowd had thinned before taking the steps down to her level. The woman remained against the far wall, her observant gaze sweeping the students as if assessing their threat level. The vibe she was giving off had students shying away from her as they passed.
Sam’s attention veered sharply back to the man when he spoke.
“Doctor Travis?”
“What can I do for you?” she asked.
He looked over at the last few students exiting. “I thought you were a research physicist. I didn’t expect to see you here, teaching.” His inflection made his words sound almost like an accusation.
“What you saw was my annual radiation protection presentation. A friend of mine on the faculty likes me to give it to each new next crop of medical students. Why do you ask?”
Nodding to the image on the holoprojector, he said, “Are you aware your lecture was incomplete?”
She turned, following his eyeline. “Excuse me?”
The agent stared her down. “You left out another way a person could be shielded from deadly radiation like that.”
A bit bemused by his comment, she asked, “What did I miss?”
A thin smile flashed across his face. It did not put her at ease. “All you need to do to protect yourself from a high-energy solar event like that is jump into Scharnhorst space. The Casimir bubble will shield you.”
Her suspicions about her visitors’ origins crystallized into certainty. “You think I’m going to share that with students who don’t know the military’s still using those drives? Every one of these students here believes they’ve been outlawed for more than a century.”
He shrugged. “Still, it’s a valid answer.”
Sam stared back at him. “I’m sure you didn’t come in here just to let me know my lecture was lacking. Why don’t you tell me why you’re really here.”
“We’re your escort.” With a slight tilt of his head, he indicated the shadowed figure standing in the back of the room.
“My escort? I'm sorry, I don’t understand.”
The man frowned. “You weren’t notified of our arrival?”
“No. Should I have been?” she asked.
“Yes. The NSA should have pinged you. You’ve been activated.”
She held up a hand to forestall anything else he might say as a priority override came across her wire, indicating a message was in the queue for her.
“I set my wire on Do Not Disturb while I lectured,” she explained. “But something’s coming through right now….”
She turned partially away from him as she accepted the incoming communication. The moment the connection snapped into place, she saw the seal for the National Security Agency, rotating against a sea of stars. A moment later, it was replaced by an avatar.
{Dr. Travis,} an SI said, {I apologize for the intrusion. Director Cutter has asked me to let you know your presence is requested. Please consider yourself activated, and look for your escort to arrive soon, to take you to a secure location.}
{He's here now,} she began, but her words were interrupted as the SI talked over her. She realized what she was hearing was a recording.
{Mr. Cutter regrets that he cannot escort you personally, but he had to attend to other matters that came up. I hope you understand.}
The communication cut off, and Sam swung her gaze back to the man standing in front of her. She crossed her arms. “You have some form of ID to show me?”
He nodded and held out a hand. Sam knew this was no ordinary handshake the moment her own hand clasped his.
Instantly, an encrypted icon appeared on her overlay. It unfurled, presenting the man’s ID token as Agent McGee of the NSA. A second ID accompanied it.
Sam found herself looking toward the back of the room, matching the image on her overlay to that of the tall, stern-looking brunette who stood there.
{My partner, Agent Nissley,} the man in front of her confirmed.
The missive looked official enough, and was keyed to her personal ID token. Sam felt it handshake with a secret and highly experimental nanochip, recently inserted behind a secured partition in her wire’s databanks.
The new processor adjoined the existing wire implant. Both rested at the base of her parieto-occipital sulcus, where temporal lobe met occipital. From there, fine tendrils of nanofloss branched outward, a neural lattice that went beyond the quantum encryption conventionally used across the settled worlds.
It employed a cipher that relied on holographic duality from Anti-deSitter/Conformal Field Theory correspondence. AdS/CFT processors were the stuff only elite military teams and persons high in government possessed. The encryption was impossible to crack.
She reached mentally for the document, and it opened on her overlay, revealing a mission brief sealed with Assistant Director Sullivan’s personal ID token.
{Any idea why the SI mentioned my uncle, but the document itself is from Sullivan?} She sent the query over the direct link she shared with the man via their joined hands.
Agent McGee shook his head. {Sorry, ma’am. This is Arcane class. Need to know, and compartmentalized. I’m just your transportation. Couldn’t begin to guess.}
Unease welled inside her. {I’m afraid I’m going to have to verify this before I’ll agree to go with—}
{Actually, you don’t have the freedom to refuse, doctor.}
The sharpness in the agent’s voice had her pulling away, but the man’s hand tightened almost painfully, forcing the connection to remain.
{I was instructed to tell you if you tried to back out that you signed a commission that places you at the Alliance’s disposal whenever the NSA calls,} the agent said bluntly. {That contract gives the Alliance the right to pull you away in the event of a national emergency. The CID has been informed you’ll be taking a small leave of absence.}
Before she had time to respond, the agent indicated the file sealed with Sullivan’s token.
{I suggest you read this.}
Sam blew out a breath and nodded her agreement. With a curt nod, he dropped her hand and stepped back.
She opened the file and then blinked in shock as she read the first line.
Vials stolen from Project Rufus. Agent killed, suspect Akkadian assassin.
McGee’s pale eyes met hers. What he saw in them must have convinced him she would no longer put up a fight. “Ma’am, we’re on a tight timeline. We need to go.”
Sam allowed herself to be led up the tiered stairs as she continued to scan the document on her overlay.
Risking a glance at the man who walked beside her, she asked, “Can I at least let the university know I’ve completed my lecture here?”
McGee’s expression didn’t change. He shook his head. “Sorry, doctor. No communication allowed.”
The silence remained until they exited the room. As they rounded the corner, she was surprised to see Clint Janus leaning against the wall.
She fought to hide the intense dislike her fellow scientist elicited from her. Sam was convinced the biochemist had been responsible for several deaths on deGrasse, and yet he’d come through the subsequent investigation unscathed.
She opened her mouth to ask what he was doing at the university, but McGee stepped forward, anger written clearly on his face.
Clint’s hands snapped up, palms out, a wary expression in his eyes. Sam could clearly see the jagged scar that bisected his left palm, remnants of the torture he had endured at the hands of the Akkadians. “I was just leaving.” He turned and sauntered down the hallway.
It occurred to Sam that he was the only other person around, and she wondered if the agency had anything to do with that.
Her thoughts were interrupted by McGee, who called out after the biochemist. “Dr. Janus.” The words were sharp and held censure. “If anyone asks, the doctor is on a two-month exchange to a Coalition university. Understood?”
Clint p
aused and shot a look over his shoulder at the man. Undisguised hate rolled off him. “Oh, I can guess exactly where she’s going.”
A sliver of unease whispered through Sam as Janus shot her one last, knowing look.
“See you around, Doctor Travis.” With a sly look, he added, “Or maybe not.”
HIDDEN LAB
Calabi-Yau Gate
An-Yang Heliopause
(Proxima Centauri System)
The drone caravan that emerged from An-Yang’s gate at Proxima Centauri’s heliopause carried dry goods and other trade merchandise made in Akkadia. The train was bound for the capital world of Shang. Its hidden tagalong was not.
Che had come to the bridge for the gate transition, something he made a point of doing at every opportunity. The gates fascinated him. Intellectually, he knew that the ethereal dance of light and color was merely a visual representation of the energies given off by the compactified branes when bent by the gates.
His gut, however, insisted on seeing it as a mystical, almost spiritual thing.
Che’s gaze drifted from the caravan’s aft view to the holo of the system before them. The star that glowed a deep golden hue at An-Yang’s core was a good hundred astronomical units away. Between it and them lay their goal.
The Proxima Centauri System sported two dense dust belts. The warm one circled just four AU from the star. The cold one was tilted forty-five degrees with respect to the system’s plane, and was much further out—more than thirty AU from the star.
Most mining efforts had been concentrated within the inner belt. A few enterprising souls had begun to work the outer belt in the past century, but it was still a rough and largely unregulated sector of the system, where shady deals and the less savory hung out.
Those back on Shang, the system’s capital, had too much on their hands to adequately police the Badlands, as the area had come to be known. This suited Che’s needs perfectly.
Their ship had hitched a ride, maglocked between two of the caravan’s massive cargo containers. Tucked thusly, the smaller vessel’s EM signature was obscured by the caravan’s more powerful thrusters. That, combined with the interference the gate itself generated, was enough to hide their presence from the Geminate technicians staffing the gate.
“Separation in twenty minutes,” the ship’s captain announced. “No indication they detected us.”
Che gave the captain a sharp look. “You said you’re timing this to a spectral event?”
With its unpredictable pattern of frequent flares and CMEs, Proxima’s red dwarf provided excellent camouflage for vessels wishing to hide a ship’s emissions, if maneuvers were timed appropriately to match. In addition, the asteroid that housed the abandoned lab was dense enough to hide any energy signatures that came from within.
The captain brought up a real-time emissions sensor feed of the star. “Indications are they’ll be having a small solar event—well, small by An-Yang standards—within the next hour. It’ll be enough to disrupt sensor feeds long enough for us to disengage and execute a quick burn before jumping to Scharnhorst space.”
The captain did not mention the drives were banned. Such restrictions might be considered law by the rest of the settled worlds, but Akkadia viewed them as more of a suggestion. Contact between a ship’s Casimir bubble and a gate’s field would be catastrophic, but as long as a gate wasn’t in use, there was no danger.
Satisfied, Che stepped back, giving the captain a perfunctory nod of approval, and the caravan continued its sedate, one-and-a-half g push as it cleared the gate’s star lanes.
Che knew that once the train exited the gate’s no-wake zone, its acceleration would jump dramatically. With no humans to worry about, the SI-driven fleet of containers could push to fifty gs without harm to its cargo. Che planned to be long gone before that occurred.
He turned to the citizen soldier working the vessel’s sensors. “Anything of particular interest between us and our destination?”
The soldier snapped to attention as best he could, given his seated position. “No, Citizen General. Everything is quiet. Nothing but routine traffic. Our route will place us several million kilometers away from the nearest ship, so they should not be a factor.”
Nodding in satisfaction, Che stood. His eyes sought the woman seated behind him, and she stood with a subtle grace. He turned back to the captain. “Two-minute warning, please, before we depart.”
“It will be done.”
Che spared a glance around the bridge before wheeling and following the woman out the door.
He’d commandeered the vessel’s CIC as a strategy room for this mission. It was a handful of steps down the passageway from the bridge. As he entered, he saw she already had the display up, an image of their destination projected onto the holoscreen.
The chunk of rock tucked in the outer belt they were approaching had a large facility hidden beneath its outer crust. The lab had been built by a drug cartel, and subsequently abandoned, decades ago.
A highly addictive hallucinogen had been manufactured there. It had been a hot commodity on the black market for a time. In recent years, the criminal underground had moved on to another darling, a psychotropic compound that promised better profits than the one this laboratory’s distillation plant cultivated.
Before the cartel could upgrade the facility, it had fallen into the hands of the An-Yang National Police. A specially outfitted tactical group had raided the laboratory, seizing the drugs and arresting all inside. The cartel never recovered from the raid, and none had seen fit to follow in its wake. Since then, only squatters who had fallen on desperate circumstances had frequented the facility’s frozen, barren corridors.
It was the perfect place for the mission Rin Zhou had charged him to fulfill.
“The laboratories have all been restored?” he inquired now of the woman who stood beside him.
Dacina Zian angled a glance his way. “Yes, Citizen General. The minister was quite free with the credits she funneled to our cause.”
Our cause. Che suppressed a wince at her words. He’d not expected such loyalty from the assassin he’d trained.
She’d shown up mere hours after Che had been escorted from Rin Zhou’s presence. She had pledged her allegiance to his mission before he could stop the words from tumbling from her mouth.
How Dacina had learned of Rin Zhou’s plans was still unclear to him, and it caused him some concern. Though the assassin refused to explain how she knew, she’d insisted no one else was privy to the information.
The implication was clear: for some reason, Dacina was keeping tabs on him. He had yet to discover the method by which she’d tapped into his SI, but he was certain that’s how she’d gleaned the information.
Che’s shame was not hers, yet he understood that his Dacina, his Fierce Dagger, felt equally responsible for the Leavitt Station mission failure.
He also rather suspected Dacina saw in him a father figure. He knew the assassins’ guild selected their initiates from wards of the state, unclaimed or abandoned children. The fact he’d invested so much time and interest in her training had obviously imprinted on her.
He cursed her sense of loyalty—a desirable trait, certainly, when referring to Akkadia, and the people. Not so desirable when it meant hitching one’s star to an individual whose career could so quickly be found in decline.
Despite the unfairness of the burden she’d placed upon herself, Che could not help but feel relief that he’d not had to tackle this project alone.
As for those scientists and doctors who would be carrying out the experiment….
Che’s lips curled into a private half-smile of satisfaction. His plan was brilliant in its simplicity, even though it required the reactivation of a sleeper asset, high up in the Geminate government.
It was a gamble, but this one, he felt confident would play out in the end. And pay out big for Akkadia as well.
“When can we expect our… guests… to arrive?”
Her deliberate
hesitation over the word amused Che. The Dagger was possessed of a dry wit few had the opportunity to see, but he knew she found his decision to trick the enemy into developing the means for their own demise particularly amusing.
“They should be here within the next two days,” he told her.
“Four in all, yes? From where?”
Che grunted, his mind on the diagram of the laboratory she’d thrown up onto the room’s main display. “One from Brower Biologics. Two from the Merki Institute. One from the CID.”
“The CID?” she asked sharply. “Not anyone from the deGrasse mission?”
He favored her with a look of reproach. “Do not take that tone with me, Dacina Zian. Remember who forged the Dagger.”
She made a rumbling noise in her throat, part groan, part growl. “My general,” she said, and her tone held an exaggerated patience, “what if those people recognize me? Some, if I may be so bold, could recognize you.”
He gestured vaguely, waving off her concerns. “Even if they could, they would never have the opportunity. The people staffing this operation will do all the work. I will merely observe, and review the data these scientists provide.”
“And me?” Dacina asked, her voice dangerously soft. “You would hobble me? Stay my hand? My job is to ensure the mission is not compromised in any fashion. It will be difficult indeed to enforce, if I cannot freely roam the facility.”
Che chuckled lightly, rubbing a palm over the scruff that had begun to form on his chin. It had been a long day. “You need not be seen to be deadly, my child. I taught you to be invisible. You are a specter, a shade. You will persevere, despite the limitations the situation may place upon you.”
Dacina stared back at him silently, her gaze dark and filled with foreboding. “I hope you are right in this, my general.” Turning back to the holoscreen, she added, “For all our sakes.”
The break from the caravan occurred without incident, the jump to Scharnhorst space seamless. Hours later, after the ship had come to rest in the asteroid’s hangar bay and Che had toured the new facility, he found himself before a holoscreen in the asteroid’s central command core.
The Chiral Protocol – A Military Science Fiction Thriller: Biogenesis War Book 2 (The Biogenesis War) Page 8