by Adam Quinn
“I believe you.” Taylor held up the personal screen Marissa had given her and showed Saifan the image of the cobbled-together carrier. “Is this the Frankenstein?”
Saifan took a moment to recover his breath. “Yes. That’s it.”
In spite of Saifan’s dire situation, Taylor could not hold back a smile. Finally, they had a lead on the Alliance—more than a lead, they had a direct line of attack. The fact that Griffin might yet walk free irked her, but that was a job for JP and the legal system to mop up. She was here to find the Alliance and destroy its capability to carry out attacks on Cryzdeklith or any other world, and with their mothership identified and one of their Firestormers converted to her side, she felt like she was almost there. “Saifan, any idea how we can take this thing down?”
“We’ll want to be stealthy.” Saifan nodded slowly as if confirming the idea to himself as he spoke. “The Frankenstein is well-armed, and has a dual-spun flip drive, so it can flip away in the event of a protracted battle. We’ll need to get someone on board before we engage, so they can shut down their flip drive or their shields ahead of time. I told you my memories are few and far between—especially after my initial induction—but I spent six years on that ship; I can show you the layout.”
Saifan seemed to take to the topic with a passion—as Taylor imagined she would, too, if the Alliance had held her captive for six years.
“How do we get that someone on board?” Brook asked.
“It’ll have to be on a resupply ship,” Saifan said. “Those are the only non-Alliance ships that enter the Frankenstein. They come once a month.”
“Then I guess we’re going to have to go through GST after all,” Taylor said.
“What?” Saifan asked.
“Griffin Space Technologies,” Taylor said. “They’re the ones that supply you, right?”
“Well, most of the Alliance’s materiel is made by Griffin,” Saifan said, “but the actual resupply ships are run by the MRSIS.”
Taylor blinked. “Are you sure?”
“That’s impossible,” Marissa said.
“Why?” Saifan asked.
Taylor remembered Harrison’s smug dismissal of their case against Griffin. “Either he funded the attacks out of pocket due to a personal vendetta—which you did not account for—or he is being funded by someone else, in which case you’ve merely identified the middle man.”
He was right—they had just identified the middle man.
Because the end supplier was Harrison himself.
But why would Harrison, who claimed to love the Meltian Republic, consort with such brutal terrorists?
The answer was almost embarrassingly clear: it was a mutually beneficial relationship. The attacks were terrible, but they hardly crippled the Republic, and they created a climate of fear that was extremely conducive to expanding MRSIS influence—plus Harrison got a powerful strike force he could use with impunity against enemies at home and abroad. The Alliance, meanwhile, became nearly untouchable, as the organization responsible for hunting it actually shielded it.
Of course Harrison would religiously pursue the Jacobins and stifle any investigations that came close to the attackers’ true identity, carting away the evidence if necessary.
Of course the Alliance would have the codes to bypass Telahmir’s air defenses; the MRSIS could procure those easily.
Of course they would attack the TKG after Taylor and her friends told Harrison to his face that Joseph was taking up the IES investigation.
Hezekiah must have been following the same line of thought, because he said, “We caused the Treaty Day Attack.”
“No,” Taylor said.
Hezekiah gave her a look of surprise. A few days ago she might have agreed with him—after all, the attack was certainly a petty retaliation against Joseph for daring to aid the IES investigation. A few days ago, she would have blamed their meddling in Meltian politics for setting in motion that retaliation, even if they could have never anticipated its form. A few days ago, but not today.
“No, we did not cause the Treaty Day Attack, but someone else did,” Taylor said. “Someone by the name of Ryan Harrison. He empowered Mantradome to inflict damage across the Republic. He set up the political situation the way it is. We tried to prevent the attack, and he blocked us. We tried to help the survivors, and he stymied us. I tried to tell the galaxy what he was doing, and he used his stranglehold on the media to silence me.”
Nobody moved.
“Harrison’s won every round so far, but we now have the power—more than anyone else in the galaxy—to end this whole thing at the source.” Taylor jabbed a finger at the Frankenstein. “So anyone here can bow out right now, but if you’re going to stay, let’s talk about how we’re going to take down the Frankenstein.”
Everyone remained in place, and silence fell over the room until Brook broke it. “Well, we have to get on one of those resupply ships.”
“Monthly resupply runs, you say?” Marissa’s tone was dangerous as she punched something into her transceiver. “I have them. Registered as resupplying the MRS Dormen, which probably doesn’t even exist. You know they’re for something top-secret because they’re consistently staffed by suspiciously high-level personnel—members of Harrison’s inner circle. They’ll never approve me to take part in one, but if I call in some favors with Operations, I might be able to get myself shuffled into the crew at the last moment.”
“What about the other crew members?” Taylor asked.
“They’ll assume the fact that I’m on board means that I have Harrison’s approval. If my friends in Operations do their job right, Harrison won’t realize the crew roster changed until we already have control of the Frankenstein.”
“Marissa.” Taylor realized they were asking more of her than anyone else. Considering who they were up against, if someone saw through Marissa’s ruse, she would be risking a lot more than her job. And if for some reason they could not beat the Frankenstein, she would be stuck aboard it, with even less appealing prospects.
“Harrison’s been supplying this outfit for at least six years, maybe longer.” Marissa’s light-blue eyes were focused like the barrel of a sear gun. “I might not have been a slave like Saifan, but until yesterday, I was Harrison’s pawn. I don’t think I’m going to die doing this—I think I’m going to kick Harrison where it hurts, and all his Alliance thugs too—but if I do, I’ll die happy because this is the best thing I’ve done with my life since the Resistance.”
“That’s… excellent. When does the next supply run leave?” Taylor was caught off guard by Marissa’s conviction, but she supposed she would feel the same way if she discovered the MRES had been supporting organizations like the Alliance during the ten years she had served them.
“That’s interesting,” Marissa said. “The next one is this afternoon.”
“That’s not good,” Saifan said. “That means they are planning something. Where is the resupply ship supposed to meet the ‘MRS Dormen’?”
Marissa glanced at her personal screen. “Trascion.”
“Isn’t that the planet the Kaleknarians are occupying?” Hezekiah asked.
“Yes,” JP said.
“Wait, occupying?” Sometimes Taylor felt like she should start watching the news again. “Is it a Meltian world?”
“It was independent under Meltian protection,” Marissa said. “It’s a whole diplomatic crisis now, which just means we have to be extra careful. The rendezvous is supposed to occur a substantial distance away from Trascion itself, so with any luck, we won’t draw the Kaleknarians’ attention anyway.”
Taylor frowned. The Kaleknarian theocracy was one of the few organizations in the galaxy that could give the Alliance a run for its money in terms of depravity, but the Kaleknarians were not her focus. She had to concentrate on putting this plan together so that Marissa would have enough time to make her way aboard that resupply mission. “So how are we going to ultimately bring in the Frankenstein? The Spirit doesn’t
have any weapons, does it?”
“None,” JP said. “Not to mention that its shields are civilian-grade.”
“We don’t need to use your IES ship at all,” Marissa said. “You can request a Meltian Guard escort. They don’t know the Frankenstein is affiliated with the MRSIS, and Harrison’s not going to tell them.”
“We can’t send Meltian Guard ships into a diplomatic flashpoint,” Taylor said. “That will start a war.”
“Also,” Hezekiah said, “what about the other Firestormers? If they are at all like Saifan, we can save them. We can’t just have the Meltian Guard blow them away.”
Brook’s eyes had the same scheming gleam that Taylor saw when the captain was plotting how to nab Griffin. “We can take care of both of those problems. Instead of the flip drive and shields, we have Marissa disable the Frankenstein’s weapons and shields. As soon as the Kindred Spirit flips in, we use a few drones as kinetic weapons to smash their flip drive. Then we board their crippled ship with a mixed force of TKG soldiers and IES officers led by Ghatzi and Saifan, neutralizing the Firestormers and seizing control of the Frankenstein—which we’ll bring back to Meltia and hand over to the TKG, or really anyone except for the MRSIS.”
“I like it,” Taylor said.
“Wait a minute.” A look of realization spread across Saifan’s face. “You’re Taylor Ghatzi?”
Taylor slipped off her Newface. She was mainly continuing to wear it in order to keep a low profile, but everyone in the room except Saifan and the TKG guards had already seen her without it, and all of them had very good reasons not to report her presence to Harrison. “Is that a problem?”
“Not at all; no politics, remember?” Saifan turned his open palms toward Taylor. “I’m just astonished to be in the same room as a member of the Order Strike Team. I remember thinking, as a Cavalieri, that if I had to die in the war, this was how I wanted to go.”
“In the baby blue trauma ward of a Telahmir hospital?” Brook asked.
“Well, not precisely,” Saifan said.
“Okay, okay.” Marissa edged her way through the crowded room toward the door. “I need to get myself on that resupply ship. I’ll have someone send you some MRSIS comm equipment so we can stay in touch, but time your flip drive journey so that you arrive about fifteen minutes after us—I’ll send you the info you need. That should be enough time to take out the shields and weapons, but not enough for them to catch me. See you at Trascion.”
“Good luck,” Hezekiah said.
The door closed behind her.
“So,” Saifan said. “Now that you’ve decided I’m trustworthy enough to follow into battle, could somebody please untie me from this table?”
Even before the rich odor of incense entered her nose, the feeling of the rough red granules under her IES shoes told Taylor that she was back on the deserted beach.
She glanced around, but there was no transceiver this time, which was just as well, because if there had been, she was determined to kick it into the ocean before it could sink its tendrils into her mind.
Instead, there was a single word in front of her, formed by dark burgundy grains of sand that stood out against the red-pink tone of the beach.
SORRY.
Taylor shivered, seized by the same eerie notion that the first dream had imparted on her: that she was being spoken to. This time, though, she knew better. Telepathy was a Cavalieri deep space tale—a legend that was embellished each time it was told to pass the time during a long flip drive journey—so the only thing communicating with her via her dreams was her own subconscious.
“You had better be sorry,” Taylor told her unruly dreaming mind. The words tumbled out of her mouth, delicate flakes of charcoal that landed in front of her in a precise pattern to spell out the phrase she had just uttered.
YOU HAD BETTER BE SORRY.
Taylor’s head jerked involuntarily to the left, as if there were an invisible rope linking her face to the outcropping far down the coast, and it had just gone taut. A moment later, she was yanked from her feet and sent flying through the air. She let out a gasp of surprise, but it was not a painful experience; in fact, Taylor did not feel much of anything at all. The shoreline was curved, but Taylor’s course was perfectly straight, so she flew out over the murky bay. When she dipped her foot into the water, it raised a spray behind her, but her shoe was perfectly dry. As Taylor drew nearer, it became clear that this was not a normal outcropping, primarily from the fact that it had a partially-concealed door at its base.
A door guarded by two dead Kaleknarians with light machine sear guns lying across their corpses.
Taylor shuddered, partially from the inherently grotesque form of the centipede-like Kaleknarians, partially from surprise at seeing other beings—even dead ones—in this world, and partially from the fact that the area in front of the two machine-gun-wielding Kaleknarians was strewn with other members of their species whom they had presumably gunned down.
She blinked. The dead Kaleknarians were not randomly strewn across the ground—their bodies were painted out in some kind of drawing, or a word, written in the complex characters of the Kaleknarian language. She had no idea what it meant.
Glancing up at the rest of the outcropping, Taylor spotted a jagged hole in the top of it that had been crudely patched with sheet metal—clearly, the battle the machine gunners had died in was not the first attack faced by this facility, though the fact that their corpses were still there suggested that it was the last. Of course, she was making the dubious assumption that this dream world had some kind of coherent history—that certainly wasn’t the case for her dreams about the Order War, which tended to mash together disparate events and experiences into an incomprehensible morass of guilt.
Just before Taylor returned to land, the invisible cord snapped. Her body arced downward, flying through the shallow water to embed itself in the wet sand below. She could not feel the water or the sand, but she could feel the lack of air, and she gasped futilely for it.
As the last bubbles trickled out of her nose and mouth, the incense receded with them.
Bee-beep. Bee-bee-beep. Bee-beep. Bee-bee-beep.
Taylor’s alarm pulled her from her sleep, telling her there was half an hour before Marissa’s ship arrived at Trascion and their plan came to fruition. It was early in the morning by the Kindred Spirit’s sleep cycle, but as a visitor, Taylor was not expected to follow that, and her body was stubbornly geared to Cryzdeklith’s cycle.
Which meant it was even earlier for her.
Taylor groaned as she swung her legs out of bed. Why did all her weird dreams happen on the last nights of flip drive journeys? Then again, she knew why: her mind, trying to work through the stress of the upcoming battle—physical or political—recycled scenes from her memories or came up with new ones. Like Ciro’s mua’er trying to give her an FSO transceiver. Or a bunch of dead Kaleknarians.
Luckily, the Kindred Spirit’s cafeteria—her first stop after freshening up and getting into her mostly-repaired SX-7—had a solution to her somnolence. The handful of IES officers who were in the cafeteria at that hour gave her odd looks as she stalked through the room in her imposing deep blue armor, but those glances turned to sympathetic smiles as she grabbed a bottle of Space Feet, flipped up her visor, and took a deep draught.
The stimulant blend passed into her bloodstream quickly, coursing throughout her body and bringing her up to an almost-jittery alert as she traversed the Spirit’s barrel to meet the rest of the boarding force in the very same hallway through which she had first entered the vessel. Hezekiah and Saifan were seated in the middle of the hallway, surrounded by an even mix of human IES officers and their short, blue Archavian crewmates. Regardless of species or affiliation, everyone was outfitted the same—armored IES-black uniforms on their bodies, helmets at their sides, and incapacitators on their hips—save for the dozen TKG soldiers Joseph could spare, who had their own sky blue armor.
“Good morning, Taylor.” Hezekiah
fiddled with something that looked like an FSO transceiver but was almost five centimeters thick.
“It’ll be ‘good’ when we have control of the Frankenstein.” Taylor took a sip from her Space Feet bottle as she surveyed the TKG soldiers and IES officers surrounding them. She had no doubt that Joseph and Brook had put together a capable force for her, but they were still a small team attempting to hijack a very big ship. “And I’m not sure it’s morning, either.”
“It’s always morning somewhere in the galaxy.” Hezekiah touched a few more buttons on the bulky transceiver, then set it down on the floor of the corridor. “That should do it.”
“Bell to Kindred Spirit.” From Marissa’s intonation, it seemed like she was muttering, but her voice came through loud and distinct.
“Kindred Spirit here,” Taylor said. “Are you sure it’s a good idea to keep in contact like this? What if they wonder who you are talking to?”
“It’s fine,” Marissa said. “I’m wearing a ceiver—that’s a tiny FSO transceiver inside a flesh-colored dot that sticks to my throat. They’re pretty common in the MRSIS, so even if someone sees me muttering to myself, they’ll just assume I’m talking to Headquarters.”
“Of course,” Taylor said. Marissa was a trained MRSIS agent—if anyone could successfully infiltrate the Frankenstein, it was her. Taylor blamed her uncanny dream for making her overly anxious.
“I’ll need Saifan to give me directions once I’m inside this beast—is he there?” Marissa asked.
“Present and ready to give those scumbags what they deserve,” Saifan said.
“Looks like we timed our trip pretty well,” Hezekiah said. “We have just about fifteen minutes until the Spirit arrives.”
“Okay,” Marissa said. “We are pulling into what seems to be the main hangar. I’m seeing a lot of human workers, no Firestormers yet.”