The Great Game

by O. J. Lowe

  “I get the impression there is something he is not telling us,” he said slowly. “But nothing more. I don’t sense any overt duplicity; I didn’t sense a lie in his words. But that doesn’t mean there are untruths there. He might just have supreme control. Some people are harder to read than others.”

  “It’s perhaps better not to take chances though,” she said. “Perhaps he should be questioned more thoroughly.”

  “Of course, I can’t be sure,” Wim said hurriedly. “If you believe he can be of value, then perhaps he should not be tossed aside so easily. You have a purpose earmarked for him, I assume.”

  “Better dead and guiltless rather than living and traitorous,” she said. “We shall see.” She reached into her pocket and withdrew the key he had found for her. Wim was still amazed by that phenomenon privately. He’d sensed it, once his abilities had returned, it had all been just a matter of pinpointing it down, no easy task but one accomplished. “Either way, we have a trip to make, I assume.”

  “We do,” Wim said. “I will take you to the door, but I can go no further. That way lies madness for those that are not worthy. It is a path you must walk alone.”

  “If it is a road I can’t traverse alone, then I have no business walking it,” she said with a smile. It had almost as much emotion as the final one that Roper had given to him. There’d been something about the way he’d acted and spoken that had just felt wrong. Like there was some piece of the puzzle that he’d been missing. “Roper gets a reprieve until we return. Maybe then I can pass judgement. For now, I say that he shall survive. Head says he’s a risk but it’s one that my heart is telling me to take. He can be a strong asset for us.”

  She rose to her feet. “Gather your things for we depart soon.”

  He couldn’t hold it in. Nick had taken all things into consideration and now he judged it was the time to act. He either needed to get to a communications post… or even better to the cloaking device controls and disable it. If someone on the ground could see this ship, they’d investigate it in no time. Secrecy was Claudia Coppinger’s greatest weapon at this point, blow that secret wide open and she’d be exposed. Weakened. He exhaled sharply, glanced around his surroundings and sought out something, anything that’d give him an opening to deal with these two guards. Taxeen were raised to fight with the knife almost from birth and they were lethal with it.

  But not for nothing had he been trained by Unisco. He’d never stepped away from a fight before and he sure as hells wasn’t going to now either. Nick grinned, flexed his knuckles as he kept on walking. There was a doorway up ahead, that looked promising, it was already sliding open as the three of them moved on in towards it. Both the Taxeen looked bored at their duties, babysitting someone who they considered barely a threat. In a way, he enjoyed that. It wasn’t often he was underestimated.

  “Hey, guys,” he said, glancing around at them. The one on the right was bigger, his eyes less alert than the one on the left. Neither of them was really anything less than intimidating. The left one had eyes like an overgrown weasel, they skittered back and forth across the corridor, seeking out anything and everything. He’d be the faster to react, Nick guessed. If there was going to be anything to do, then it’d need to be done to him first. Of course, it was all a matter of inches and split seconds.

  Deep breath. “Any chance I can catch a break while I’m here. Bathroom?” He let a pleasantly hopeful look go across his face, walking backwards a few feet, all the way to the door. Neither of them responded, other than a slight smirk to flicker across the face of the smaller one. He understood, Nick guessed. He just didn’t care. They weren’t going back to the cells now, he’d already guessed that and he got the feeling he didn’t want to go all the way down to where they had in mind for him next.

  “Please?” he said, allowing a pathetic note of pleading to enter his voice as he carefully stepped back through the door, halting on the other side. “Give a fella a break, yeah?”

  If the smaller guy came through first, it’d be better. If the bigger guy came first; Nick’d be in trouble. By the time he had him down, the smaller guy would be all over him.

  The smaller guy came first and Nick was already in motion, throwing one of Tod Brumley’s patented love taps towards his face. He’d always thought the name was amusing, a rare piece of wit on Brumley’s part. Land it properly and they’ll be swept off their feet, he’d said with a smirk. It was completely out of the blue; he shouldn’t have seen it coming but even so he very nearly dodged it.

  Nearly. Not nearly enough. The little guy staggered, Nick’s blow bouncing off the side of his skull, it took a snap kick to his side to send him smashing off the frame of the door and out for the count. No time for a breather, he was already at the big guy, the knife was already sliding out of his sleeve and into his palm. No time to be gentle either, Nick sprang forwards and delivered a crushing palm straight into his windpipe, all his weight behind it. One free shot, Brumley had always said and he’d made it count. The big guy bellowed like a bull, fell backwards and hit the ground, scrabbling at his throat. Amidst his frenzied struggles, a wet burbling broke from his throat as he unwittingly dug his own knife straight into his chest. His eyes went wide, his struggles slowed but Nick didn’t have time to wait around as he died. Places to be and all that. He was grateful that this Taxeen hadn’t lived up to the reputation of the whole at least.

  He'd barely made it more than several feet away when the alarms went off and he froze stock still, just for a moment. It sounded like they were echoing all the way through the ship, he cursed his actions. Someone must have seen him…

  Without a choice, he ran.

  “Yeah, I see it, Director.”

  With Jacques Leclerc and Alvin Noorland behind the controls of the aeroship, they’d made good progress towards the coordinates given to them by John Cyris. In a way really, he’d been more than helpful. David Wilsin just wasn’t sure whether that was a good thing or not. People were very rarely that helpful unless they had an ulterior motive. Granted Cyris did want to be free of them minus any sort of charges levelled against him. And he did want them to stop harassing him. Having them walk into unnecessarily dangerous situations was not a good way to get that done.

  He'd told them everything, or at least he claimed he had. Wilsin wasn’t quite inclined to believe him, even if Arnholt had been very interested to hear it all. He’d taken it straight to the Five Kingdoms Senate, had managed to get approval for a task force to follow up on them in record time. Word had it he’d called in every favour he had. They’d be here in hours. Enough time for the team in the aero to get in, get Roper and deal with Claudia Coppinger before the airbase was blown straight to the hells. It was a simple plan, maybe that was what worried him so much. Everyone was here on the ship, everyone barring Arnholt and Okocha. Even Brendan King had deigned to come along, sat there in armour and muffler just like everyone else, weapon resting across his lap. It was an unusual sight.

  “Guess Cyris wasn’t selling us a pony on some levels,” Fagan remarked. “How easy is this going to be?”

  “Put it this way,” Derenko said. “Going to make our last mission to Cubla Cezri look pleasant.”

  “Fuck me, it’s huge!” That came from Mel Harper. Wilsin had to agree. It sat like a fat bloated spider amid the clouds, thick chunks of metal resting against the fluffy white background with an aura of menace. “It’s going to take most of the fleet to knock that thing out.”

  “Guess we best work fast then,” Brendan said. “I don’t want to be caught on that thing when they start to hammer it.”

  The large size hologram of Arnholt sat in the middle of the floor nodded sagely. “This is not going to be easy by any stretch. We all have our tasks to do in this, we all need to perform them to the best of our ability. This action has been sanctioned, with great difficulty, I might add and a task force devoted to it. We are the advance wave, we need to get Roper out and deal with Claudia Coppinger. Our intelligence hints at more p
ersonnel than we can deal with so we’ll be the advance guard in one of their own vehicles before the task force shows up. Hopefully we can use that as a distraction to make our moves through the facility. Lethal force. Our sources tell us that we can expect a hostile reception. Chief King will lead the force to find Coppinger, Agent Derenko will take his team and search for our missing agent.”

  The projection sighed, looked tired for a moment. Wilsin felt a brief stab of sympathy for Arnholt for just a moment. Then he remembered he wasn’t the one who was probably about to start getting shot at and the sympathy faded. Both him and Okocha were far, far away from here, well out of danger.

  “You’ve studied the data so far. Everything we have, everything we could take from John Cyris. It needs to be enough. You’ve all been well trained. You’ve all known a day like this may come. One where your lives will be put on the line for the sake of freedom. It is a cost you may have to pay but know that with what you do today, others may live.”

  “Bravo,” Lysa said dryly. “We don’t need an inspirational speech, Director. We know what we got to do.”

  “We just need inspirational music!” Wilsin quipped. “Preferably nothing by Ulysses Forty or Premesoir Dreams.”

  “I like a bit of Premesoir Dreams,” Noorland said. “Bit of Rock All Night does it for me.”

  “Really?” Fank Aldiss asked, raising an eyebrow. “That’s your song of choice for banishing pre-mission nerves?”

  “Yeah. We can’t all like Tamara Wise.”

  “Hey, I don’t…”

  “You do, Fank. You claim not to like her, but I’ve seen your playlists.”

  “Hey, she makes me feel things!”

  “She makes a lot of people feel things. With me it’s nausea but hey ho.” Noorland grinned as he said it.

  “I’d hit Tamara Wise,” Wilsin said, glancing around. “Right in every single hole. Am I the only one who’d do that?”

  “Nah,” Lysa said, giving him a thumbs-up. Towards the back of the aeroship, Anne Sullivan had sat pensively, deep in thought and not saying anything for most of the trip. She’d only shown up for the briefing, having not been available to interrogate Cyris. She looked like something was troubling her, but for the life of him, Wilsin couldn’t work out what it was. Privately he didn’t care. Nothing to do with him. Suddenly he was too busy thinking about Lysa and Tamara Wise. A nice image.

  “Anyway,” Noorland said. “Pilot normally picks the tunes, so on the way back, I’m blasting out Rock All Night all the way.” He sounded confident, Wilsin noticed. Didn’t know if that was a good thing or not.

  “Damn, almost hope we don’t make it now,” Tod Brumley said. For him, it almost passed as a joke, the silence that followed painful as they approached the ship.

  “We’re going to make it, you know,” Brendan said, breaking the quiet as Noorland and Leclerc guided the aeroship down towards the docking bay, Leclerc bluffing his way through with someone on the other end. Cyris’ details had turned out to be accurate on that front, he’d provided them with authorisation codes and proper procedures, based on what he’d managed to glean from his pilot.

  “This is it though,” Derenko said as the hologram of Arnholt faded away with the assurances that the fleet was on its way. “This is how it starts.”

  Chapter Sixty-Four. Freedom Isn’t Free.

  “Just because something sounds too unbelievable to be true doesn’t necessarily mean that it is. It means that you should reserve your opinion until you know for sure.”

  Ruud Baxter to Sharon Arventino, once upon a long ago.

  The third day of Summerfall.

  It felt eerily quiet minus the presence of most of the Unisco agents on the island. With just him and Okocha remaining, Arnholt settled back into his seat and took in most of the feeds from around him. He wanted to know as much of what was happening up in the air as possible. Mainly if it was going to blow up in his face or not. He wasn’t going to lie to himself, there’d been moments when he’d truly doubted what John Cyris had to say. The man was a proven liar, a proven cheat and one of the worst criminal masterminds ever to hit the five kingdoms. There had been no crime too depraved for him to avoid, except perhaps maybe this. His tales of a woman seeking ascension to godhood might just have been too ridiculous to believe…

  Except it tied in with a lot of what they had. It did explain a lot of things. Too much had happened for it all to be coincidence. He couldn’t just let it go now. Sometimes you had to take a chance. And a big chance this had turned out to be. If everything had proved to be false, it might have been the end of him as director of Unisco. But the audio confirmation from his team high above had lifted some of a great weight from his shoulders, now he felt vindicated. He just needed the mission to be named a success now.

  He’d moved wheels within wheels to get everything into place, he’d called in favours and although not quite reached the point of begging, there’d been moments when it had almost approached that. Cyris’ story of a flying airbase, heavily armed and exceptionally dangerous belied belief, he was aware of that. Hence the need for confirmation before the fleet came in. It was a balancing act. Cyris had told them that the airbase carried several compliments of small range fighters and enough on-board personnel to cut down any force sent against it. Hence, Arnholt knew that the fleet was not only key to blowing the base to smithereens, he needed them to draw as many of the enemy out as possible for his team to do the job.

  Eliminate Claudia Coppinger. Retrieve Nick Roper. Two simple objectives with so much potential for everything to go wrong. He’d struggled with the first, elimination seemed a little harsh for a first step but the orders had come down from above. He couldn’t do anything about it but have them followed. People who weren’t in the know about Unisco often brought it up that their remit seemed to fluctuate wildly from case to case, that those who should be killed were often spared in the line of duty and the reverse. Every mission every agent took part in had its own parameters. A good complement of agents around the world did focus more on the domestic side of things. Just as a smaller complement needed to function as little more than assassins. It was another balancing act. This mission was no different. Dead was preferable to anything else. Of course, if she could be taken alive…

  He dismissed the thought almost immediately. Deviating from orders in this instance would do nobody any favours. They had to just hope that casualties were kept at a minimum. The fleet had been given the order to go, thanks to the confirmation of his advance team. They would already be converging on the coordinates and within moments, the two forces would meet.

  “Divines help us all,” he said. Across the room, Okocha fiddling with a control panel glanced over at him. “Because only you can judge what we do here today.”

  “Might be a little late for prayer, Director,” Okocha said softly. He’d opened a can of soola and put it down on the desk next to him. Arnholt could smell the peppermint from across the room. “But I guess every little bit helps, right?”

  “I think we’re going to need every little bit of help we can get here to avoid our team being wiped out,” Arnholt said. “I’m not normally a religious man. Today I think I can see the benefits to it.”

  They came flying out of the midmorning sun, most of the advance guard spotting sight of their objective slightly before it appeared on their sensor boards. Aboard his flagship, the Wild Stallion, Allied Kingdom Admiral Gary Criffen had a bad feeling about what lay ahead. Yet stood alone in his command post aboard the great dreadnought, he tried not to show it. Whether they be ill advised or not, he had his orders and he would follow them. He didn’t believe them to be ill advised. And neither did those above him. The Senate hadn’t scrimped on the task force he had under his command. They were taking it seriously.

  He’d heard the transmission from Unisco played back. It had sounded serious trouble in every sense of the word. Enough for them to throw together everything they had at ease of hand. Not only his Wild Stallion, but the me
dical freighter the unfortunately-named Sitting Target, the carrier ship named the Lost Lucie, as well as the Bounty Snatcher and the Carrion Crow, both smaller, deadlier, more modern versions of his own ship. He’d grown attached to the Stallion though.

  All ships were carrying enough firepower to repel any threat, because he made no mistake about it, if things weren’t resolved here then it could be war. Nobody wanted that. He needed to oversee the job here properly. Twenty fighter squadrons were paced aboard the Lucie including five donated by Unisco for the duration of the mission. He felt confident. This would be another successful engagement. If there was a threat that the amount of mustered firepower below could not deal with, he didn’t want to meet it. Likely he wouldn’t survive the engagement. His thoughts drifted more to the positive.

  At least until he saw the target up ahead. He felt the sweat drizzle on his face as he stared out the view port at it. Divines, the thing was huge. Words failed him for a moment as he gripped the armrests of his seat. That bad feeling suddenly felt justified. Its size was just… monstrous. It hung like a great eye in the sky, staring out at them and although he didn’t feel terror at its presence, it didn’t do much for his confidence.

  “Technical officer, get me readouts of the scans of their offensive and defensive capabilities,” he suddenly barked, jerked into action. “Communications officer, open a hailing frequency to them, see if we can talk this out without firing a shot.” He paused. If they were lucky, this would be the case.

  The part of him that was human wanted this to be the case. In his life, he’d seen enough dead and destruction to hope that they’d back down. The part of him that was a soldier knew better. They were trying to make a point. They weren’t going to meekly go to the table when they could march up with weapons in hand. “And open up channels to every ship under this task force. I want them to hear what happens.” He said nothing else, silent with his reasons. If he was going to make them give up their lives on a mission like this that could well be fatal to them, he wanted them to go to their deaths knowing that he’d done everything to avoid reaching this end. It helped him sleep better at night.