Flashpoint (Book One of the Drive Maker Trilogy)

by Adam Quinn

  That threw Cherran for a loop, but so did everything in this conversation; more concerningly, Taylor—whom Cherran presumed actually knew what was going on—looked genuinely disturbed.

  “You want us to help you hack into your own asset?” she asked.

  “Yes.” Harrison seemed to take a perverse pleasure in catching Taylor off-balance. “Since this asset is somewhat independent of our command structure, it occasionally comes up with… side projects which the MRSIS neither condones nor funds. In such instances, it is important to the security of the Meltian Republic that we ascertain from whence these projects gain their material support.”

  “I suppose this fire storm is another thing that’s too complicated for me to understand,” Cherran said. He was somewhat miffed at their secrecy, but on the whole, he did not mind if they kept their little secrets, so long as the plan went through and peace endured.

  “My apologies, Ambassador,” Harrison said.

  “At any rate, Harrison, why can’t you wait until we bring the ship in?” Taylor asked. “Then you can have all the time in the world to sift through their Project Firestorm facility.”

  “The asset could attempt to destroy some of the data,” Harrison said, “or the lab might be destroyed in the battle. Or some of my adversaries in Telahmir might conspire to keep it out of my grasp. This is the best way to ensure my access to that information, and therefore, the security of the Meltian Republic. Are you willing to do it or not?”

  “I am,” Taylor said. “The Jacobins, Trascion, and Firestorm. All of them are yours if you get me to that ship and the rest of our crew away safely.”

  “You are lucky that the Meltian Legislature has been unresponsive to my entreaties,” Harrison said. “Otherwise, I would dismiss this ‘deal’ out of hand.”

  “This is a robbery, Harrison,” Taylor said. “You should agree before I change my mind.”

  “You should be aware,” Harrison said, “that I am a very dangerous person to double-cross.”

  “I am, Director,” Taylor said.

  Cherran pressed a fist to his mouth to hide his grin. His time in PanGal had taught him, if nothing else, to recognize when a deal was about to go through—and this one was not a second too soon.

  Harrison drew in a long breath and let it out slowly. “Send me your location one hour before you wish to be picked up.”

  A confident smile snuck onto Taylor’s face. “I will, Director.”

  Taylor was jerked from her sleep by a noise so loud and awful, she thought the Alliance had captured her during the night and were torturing her with a Sonic Suppression Device.

  Then the electric instrument continued with its melody.

  Regaining her senses in some measure, Taylor found that she was not in an Alliance torture chamber, but rather on the lower bunk of one of two metal bunk beds in one of the offices the Jacobins had turned into sleeping quarters. She vaguely remembered going to sleep there the previous night—or was it earlier this morning? Between their late arrival and her conference call with Harrison and Ambassador DeGuavra, she could not have gotten more than a few hours of sleep. That felt like an insufficient amount of rest for storming an enemy carrier, but the 6th fleet was due to arrive today, so they had little choice in the matter.

  By the time Taylor swung her legs out and pulled herself to her feet, Captain Brook and the other two female IES officers with whom she shared the room had already changed into the fresh shirts and slacks the Jacobins provided. Taylor groaned as she hurried to follow suit—after years in the IES, these people’s blood must be fifty percent Space Feet.

  A few minutes later, there was a knock at the door. At Brook’s invitation, the knocker—Keagan—opened it. He was flanked by Hezekiah, Saifan, and a collection of other Archavians and humans.

  “Good morning, ladies.” Keagan pressed his hands together and offered a short bow as he entered the room. “The Meltian Republic 6th fleet will arrive in less than two hours, so if you will allow me, I will show you to our armory.”

  “Please,” Taylor said.

  As they moved out into the hallway, the music impossibly increased in volume. A crowd of humans, humanoids, and the occasional non-humanoid being jostled through the hallway, laughing at each other and singing along to the lyrics. Taylor entered the hall just in time to hear their collective voices swell for the chorus.

  “So seize the day! ‘Cause there’s no tomorrow for us!”

  Their group was moving against the direction of most of the crowd, causing considerable turbulence in the flow of people, but everyone seemed to make way for Keagan—apparently the man commanded respect among the Jacobins.

  “Don’t fight the rain! Take heart ‘cause it’s pouring on us!”

  Taylor glanced back at her group, and was surprised to find that, excluding Keagan, they were only fourteen in number. Taylor, Brook, Saifan, Hezekiah, and her two human roommates were joined by four Archavian IES officers and four human TKG soldiers.

  She asked Keagan, “Where are the rest of the surviv—”

  “Don’t need your name; won’t ask your homeworld, ever.”

  “General McHue is taking them directly to the gunboats,” Keagan said.

  “’Cause if you fight by me, then the galaxy will remember!”

  He continued, “Your captain selected this team to board the Alliance’s vessel and put Political Liaison Officer Parriburt in charge of the other survivors.”

  Political Liaison Officer? That had to be JP, which made sense—she did not place the Archavian as much of a fighter. The chorus gave way to a quieter instrumental, allowing Taylor to hear herself think. “Do you play music this loud every morning?”

  “We play this song,” Keagan said. “It is our fight song—‘Don’t Fight the Rain’ by Technical Peace.”

  Taylor was glad this was the last morning she would be spending at Trascion Command.

  Fortunately, they quickly arrived at the Jacobin armory, whose thick metal doors all but blocked out the music.

  “If this plan succeeds, we will no longer need to conduct operations on Trascion.” Keagan swept his hand across the armory. “Therefore, anything we have here is yours.”

  Taylor scanned the room. One corner held what had been recovered from the Spirit—a rack of incapacitators, black IES and blue TKG armor, and her SX-7—but the majority of the armory was… exotic.

  “Mr. Keagan, did you raid some kind of weapons lab?” Taylor asked.

  “Quite the opposite.” Humor warmed Keagan’s eyes as he plucked a meter-long square black rod from a rack. “This laser rod was taken from a museum exhibit about Galactic Age armaments.”

  “And the Kaleknarians neglected to acquire these weapons because they considered them to be antiques?” Hezekiah asked.

  “Precisely,” Keagan said.

  “I’m sure they’ll work well enough for us.” Taylor made her way to her SX-7, whose back panels were open welcomingly. The suit was scratched and pockmarked from the crash, but it would have to do. She stepped into the SX-7, retracting the visor as the back panels closed, allowing it to conform to her body.

  Taylor turned around. The TKG soldiers were donning their own sky-blue armor, while Saifan picked out a suit of the gray armor that the Jacobins used, and Brook rifled through the rack of incapacitators. The others were still standing in the middle of the room.

  She remembered with a twinge of doubt that most of her team was made up of IES officers, not soldiers. They were trained to use incapacitators in a terror situation, perhaps, but this operation was going to be a bit different from that. Not for the first time, Taylor wished she could recruit some of Keagan’s Jacobins to help, but considering that they were planning to deliver the Frankenstein into Meltian custody, any Jacobins on board would risk ending up in Harrison’s hands.

  “Everybody needs armor, if not to protect your body, then to protect your ears against the sonic weapon the Alliance used on Marissa,” Taylor said. “The gray Jacobin suits are the be
st since they’re actual combat armor, but Archavians will have to make do with IES Archavian-sized suits.”

  Brook gathered up some of the incapacitators she had been sorting through and presented them to her crew. “Take one of these—you’re most familiar with them.”

  “If you want to beat the Alliance, you’ll need better than that.” Saifan had finished putting on his Jacobin armor and now walked across the armory to a rack of bulky sear guns. “Here, take—”

  Saifan seemed surprised by the weight of the pistol he tried to grab, and the weapon slipped through his fingers.

  Taylor thrust out a hand, telekinetically grasping the gun before it hit the floor.

  “Careful,” Keagan said. “Those aren’t sear guns—those are slugthrowers.”

  “Slugthrowers?” Saifan looked like Keagan had suggested he use a baby garfland as his sidearm.

  “A slugthrower will kill an unarmored enemy as well today as it could ten thousand years ago,” Keagan said.

  “Mr. Keagan has a point.” Taylor levitated the slugthrower to her hand, then secured it in one of the seldom-used tool holsters around the SX-7’s waist. “All IES officers should add a lethal weapon of some sort. We can’t afford to play nice with the Alliance.”

  Taylor watched with a grim smile as the rest of the team fanned out to collect weapons and armor. For her part, Brook holstered one incapacitator on each hip. Taylor decided not to reprise her statement about lethal weapons—after all, Brook was probably more experienced than most of the team.

  Keagan moved to a barrel-shaped weapons holder across the armory, rummaging around for a few seconds. “For those in your team who are former members of the Cavalieri, we do not have Phase Swords, but we do have a respectable collection of these.”

  Keagan turned around, a metal short-sword in his hand. It wasn’t quite as ornate as the gold-hilted one that was perpetually buckled at Keagan’s own waist, but it appeared sharp and well-maintained.

  “Thank you, Mr. Keagan.” Taylor accepted the weapon, securing it to her waist as well. She had not used any kind of sword since she was a Cavalieri ten years ago, but she recognized it as a gesture of goodwill, and at barely half a meter in length, it would not get in the way. “Thank you for everything.”

  Keagan slapped her on the shoulder. “You help us with the crayfish; we help you with your Alliance. There is no debt between us.”

  Keagan turned around to help one of Taylor’s roommates who was struggling with a suit of Jacobin armor. As he walked away, Taylor caught Hezekiah—now clad in gray armor—giving the Jacobin a cool look. Now that they were in the same room, Taylor noticed striking similarities between the two—both had brown eyes and brown hair, though Hezekiah’s was straight and ash brown to Keagan’s curly, golden-brown locks, and both had a neat, reserved style to their clothing.

  Taylor approached Hezekiah. If there was any animosity remaining between him and the Jacobins, now would be a good time to lay it to rest. “Is there—”

  “Worry about the mission.” Hezekiah held a laser rod in front of his body. “If the mission succeeds, everything will be fine.”

  “Right.” At any rate, Keagan was not coming with them. She could ask again later.

  The survivors of the crash of the Kindred Spirit departed Trascion Command using the same fleet they had arrived in: three Jacobin gunboats plus five IES control boats. When they arrived at the location Taylor had sent Harrison—the shore of a small lake in the mountains, far from any major city—they were early for the rendezvous. The Jacobin doctors were capable if poorly supplied, so only a few of the survivors had to be carried out onto the beach on makeshift stretchers.

  Captain Brook approached Taylor as the Jacobin gunboats lifted off and soared away. The IES captain’s visor was transparent; Taylor assumed there was some sort of option for that, as she had never worn the militia armor herself.

  “How much time do we have?” Brook asked.

  Taylor flipped down her visor for a second to check her HUD. “If Harrison is true to his word, his people have fifteen minutes to get here.”

  “After that?” Brook asked.

  “We have exactly half an hour to take control of the Frankenstein before the 6th fleet arrives.”

  Brook smiled. “Cutting it close, are we?”

  “In theory, it should be a rapid operation. If we’re still bogged down fighting after half an hour, something’s gone wrong already. I figured it was better to have extra time to rest.” Then again, sleep had not done as much for her as she expected. At least her crazy dreams had not disturbed her during that abbreviated night. Taylor glanced across the beach at Hezekiah, who was conversing with an Archavian Taylor did not recognize. “Brook, if something happens to me, I want you to tell…”

  Behind Hezekiah, Taylor spotted a small blurry patch in the sky. She blinked, but it was still there, growing larger by the second. It reminded her of the superheated air the Alliance’s Firestormers could wield, but there was no obvious heat source in the mildly overcast Trascionese sky. As the blur lowered itself down over their lake, making the mountainside behind it go fuzzy, Taylor realized with no small amazement what she was looking at.

  “Taylor?” Brook asked.

  Hezekiah must have seen it too because he pointed at it, and the Archavian he was with turned around.

  To a chorus of exclamations from the other survivors, the blur morphed into a long, curved, and gray ship with four elevated panels and two access hatches adorning its bulbous front. The ship held a steady hover as one of its access hatches opened, and a thin walkway extended down to the shore.

  An MRSIS agent met Taylor and Brook as they ascended the ramp, wearing a black active-duty uniform with maroon trim that was disturbingly reminiscent of the old GG’s secret service.

  “Good morning.” The lanky, mahogany-skinned agent extended his hand. “Admiral Ghatzi, Captain Brook, pleasure to meet you. Today you will have the privilege of riding in the MRS Metellus Cimber, one of only three HULV transports in the galaxy.”

  The standing IES officers lifted their stretcher-bound colleagues, and everyone piled into the Metellus Cimber. The agent—the only other person on the ship—seemed so welcoming that Taylor had to remind herself as she followed him into the Cimber’s cockpit that he was in Harrison’s inner circle, one of the few who was fully aware of the role of the MRSIS and the Alliance in the Anniversary and Treaty Day Attacks. Still, there was no reason to be adversarial with him—at least for the moment, they were on the same team, so it would be smart to act like it.

  “So, what is a HULV transport?” Taylor mimicked the MRSIS agent, pronouncing the acronym as a word. “I assume it has something to do with its… appearance or lack thereof.”

  “Holographic Ultra-Low Visibility,” Hezekiah said. “The idea of using a hologram to mimic the surroundings of an object, rendering it nearly invisible. It’s an idea that pops up in academia every few years.”

  “We made it into reality.” The agent slid into the pilot’s seat and entered some route information into the ship’s computer.

  Brook glanced over her shoulder at JP, who had boarded with the rest of the survivors. “Can we get that for the Kindred Spirit?”

  “It’s MRSIS-proprietary at the moment.” The agent finished what he was doing, and the Metellus Cimber lifted off by itself. “Not that I’d recommend it; in my professional opinion, starship HULV is a waste of money. The Kaleknarians aren’t visually sweeping the skies, they’re doing it with scanners, which we will be able to slip by due to our scanner-jamming technology, not our HULV.”

  “You said ‘starship HULV,’” Hezekiah said. “Is there personal HULV?”

  “Not yet, sadly, but it’s in development.” The agent reached into a pocket in his uniform to retrieve a white slip of plastic and an abnormally-long datacard with a red light on the end. “However, we do have some MRSIS toys for you. This sheet here has four dot transceivers, or ceivers, as we call them, all linked to the MRSIS�
�s headquarters in Telahmir. You’ll want to stick them to the side of your throat, just below the jawbone, for best effect.”

  Taylor, Brook, Hezekiah, and Saifan each peeled a ceiver from the sheet and flipped up their visors or removed their helmets to affix the devices. JP abstained, as he would be staying behind.

  “Hello again, IES team.” Harrison’s voice was disturbingly close as if he were leaning over her shoulder.

  “Taylor, can you hear us?” Another voice, which Taylor had not expected to hear in the slightest, entered her helmet.

  “Joseph?” she asked. “What are you doing with Harrison?”

  “He asked for us,” Fanu said. “The Galactic Resistance pulled off some of the best hacking schemes in the galaxy, back during the war, and we have a lot of the Resistance’s techs in the TKG. Even the MRSIS knows when they’re outclassed.”

  The true reason for the TKG’s involvement struck Taylor even as Fanu spoke—Harrison could not trust most of his low-level hackers with a job involving the Alliance, so he turned to the TKG, which already knew the full story, to fill out his hacking team. It was still ironic that Harrison would rather trust the TKG, who knew he had ordered an attack against them, than his own low-level personnel, but Taylor was hardly one to talk, considering the unholy alliance she had built to pull off this operation. This was how the MRSIS got away with sponsoring terrorism: everyone knew they were morally bankrupt, but it was still easier to work with them than against them.

  The agent glanced at the Cimber’s control panel. “Anyway, we’re coming up on the rendezvous point, though it looks like the Frankenstein’s still in the 7th. Here’s the datacard we need you to plug into the Project Firestorm area to get us inside.”

  Taylor took the elongated datacard and put it in a compartment in her SX-7. “Do we just stick this anywhere, Harrison?”

  “Anywhere in the Project Firestorm facility or, failing that, on the bridge. The card will automatically shut down everything it can get access to, then allow us to selectively re-activate and operate systems. Which means that if you plug it into the bridge, you may spend a few seconds without functioning life support. Not fatal, so long as we are able to successfully reactivate it.”