by Terry Mixon
Corporal Reece popped an access plate and plugged her tablet into the system. Once she gained access, Falcone would work with her to disable the security system.
“Huh,” Reece muttered. “That’s funky.”
“Is something wrong?” Brad asked.
“You could say that. It looks as if the security system is off-line.”
Falcone edged over beside the trooper. “Let me take a look. It might be some kind of trick.”
After a minute of tapping the screen, Falcone looked over at Brad. “It’s not a trick. Someone deactivated the security system about two hours ago. Moreover, it looks as if they didn’t do so from inside the building. I can see how they accessed it from this very port.
“This lock cycled twice after that. Once right after the security system was shut down and again about thirty minutes later.”
That didn’t sound good. In fact, it sounded really bad. For Ferarre.
“Open it up,” he said with a sigh. “We go in according to plan even though I suspect our mission is already busted.”
Falcone tapped something on the tablet’s screen, and the exterior airlock door opened.
Tucked inside the small chamber was Ferarre’s pajama-clad corpse. From the desperate and strangled expression on his face, his previous visitors had simply dragged the man out when they left and let the vacuum kill him. Then they’d stuffed his body back into the lock and departed.
“Well, this sucks,” Falcone said.
“Less for us than for him,” Brad said with a grimace. “I don’t expect we’re going to find anything, but let’s make sure he didn’t leave any evidence we can use to track the Cadre before we head back to the ship.”
Chapter Fourteen
Needless to say, there was a lot of excitement the next morning. Thankfully, they’d been careful in how they’d slipped out of the city, and no one really believed a platinum-rated mercenary company would slaughter people like that.
At that point, Brad decided that they were leaving for Io, Cadre fleet be damned. Unfortunately, he still had the crippled Alan-a-dale to factor in.
Thankfully, he’d come up with a plan to fool the Cadre. It took some sharp negotiation with Colonel Ahmed and the Pythons, but they struck a deal. Alan-a-dale couldn’t move under her own power. Any ship towing her would be a huge disadvantage in acceleration. In other words: a big target.
So, when his ships left Oberon orbit, the Cadre warships that were almost certainly still somewhere near knew he wouldn’t be going very fast. The spies they’d left in First Oberon would undoubtedly let them know the moment the Vikings departed, as well as giving them what they could about the mercenary company’s course and speed.
Brad gave them exactly what they wanted.
His fleet of ships departed with a frigate in tow. Only the frigate was not Alan-a-dale. It was one of the Pythons’ frigates.
As soon as the Vikings were on course away from Oberon and clear of direct view, they cut the Pythons’ ship loose and accelerated. The other mercenary ship would circle back around and return to Oberon on a slower course.
The Cadre wouldn’t be looking for someone coming back to Oberon. That sort of thing made no sense. They wouldn’t figure out that the Vikings didn’t have a ship in tow until it was far too late.
That meant that Brad’s three ships slipped away from the area around Uranus without being tracked. It did leave one of their frigates in orbit around Oberon, but the Cadre wasn’t interested in that one ship. They wanted Brad, and now he’d escaped.
Brad called ahead to Io and arranged a tow for his damaged frigate. It would take an extra week to get it safely to the Io shipyards, but that couldn’t be helped.
The time wouldn’t be wasted. By the time Alan-a-dale arrived, perhaps Falcone would have some information about the Cadre Bound-class destroyer.
No matter what happened, the frigate wasn’t going to be helpful in tracking down the Cadre at this point. So long as they got it into a repair slip so that Hiroshi Kawa could start getting it back into fighting shape, that was good enough.
Saburo’s father would also have to see about the repairs to Bound by Law, but since she was a former Fleet vessel, Brad was hopeful Falcone could get them to assist in providing spare parts. With luck, he’d have them both back into fighting shape by the time he needed them.
Brad’s initial hope that they’d have actionable intelligence from the Agency about the Cadre Bound-class destroyer by the time they got to the Io Shipyards didn’t pan out. They’d arrived without any word at all from the people sent to examine the Cadre destroyer’s wreckage.
Perhaps they hadn’t made it there yet. Brad didn’t know. Falcone assured him that she’d have an update for him on the status of the investigation as soon as possible.
He arranged for a room just down the corridor from his quarters for Falcone and retired to his on-station quarters with his wife.
True to her word, Falcone had information by morning. She joined Brad and Michelle in their quarters for breakfast.
The little kitchen nook there wasn’t very big, but Brad had paid good money to be absolutely certain his quarters were safe from any kind of electronic intrusion. No one would be listening in on this discussion.
Once they were all settled in over their meal and had blunted their hunger, Falcone started her impromptu briefing. The seriousness of her expression was somewhat belied by the way she was putting away her waffles.
“The Agency team made it to the coordinates you fought the Cadre,” she said between bites. “The wreckage is spread out a bit, but they were able to locate several significant parts of the Bound-class destroyer that you destroyed. It proved relatively simple to find some significant components with serial numbers.”
Michelle brightened. “So, you’ve identified the ship? That means we’ll be able to track down who Fleet sold it to. We can put the screws to them and make them tell us what they know. No way the Cadre got that ship through legal means.”
“That’s even truer than you know,” Falcone said grimly. “You see, that destroyer was lost in battle against the Cadre about a year ago. Lost with all hands. Literally destroyed when her powerplant exploded.”
“Um,” Brad said. “That ship was in pretty good condition for something blown to atoms.”
“Exactly my thought,” Falcone agreed. “Somebody faked the records of that battle so that the ship could disappear. Somebody in Fleet.”
“Shouldn’t somebody have noticed something like that?” Michelle asked. “What about the crew? If they were supposedly all killed, having them turn up somewhere later would be really bad.”
Falcone nodded. “I suspect the ship was betrayed by somebody in the crew. Not a single one of them has turned up, so it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the Cadre simply executed them when they took possession of the ship.
“We’ll probably never know all the details. The only hard and cold fact is that if it happened once, it could’ve happened again. All of those ships that you fought could very well have gone through the same thing.”
That was very bad news and Brad scowled. “Including a carrier that Fleet wants kept secret? Surely, they’d have noticed one of those going missing.”
“So far as I’ve been able to determine, none of them is missing. I’m not certain what that means, but you can rest assured I’ve got talented and dedicated people asking very pointed questions on that subject to Fleet officers on Earth and Mars.”
“It doesn’t mean anything good,” Brad said. “The Cadre has their claws deep inside the Commonwealth government and Fleet. If they can conceal the destruction of an entire vessel, even only a destroyer, that means they have so many people in place and in such positions of power that they’re not concerned about information leaking out.”
“That’s terrifying,” Michelle said. “How can we possibly fight somebody with that kind of power? Everdark, how did the Cadre even get that kind of power?”
Brad smiled grimly. �
��That’s the big question, isn’t it? We have several leads we can follow, but the end result seems clear. We need to find the Cadre’s new base and destroy it. These ships have to be supplied somewhere. If we can locate that base and disrupt their logistics chain, that’s really going to hurt their ability to use them.”
“I think that the Cadre has been playing a long game,” Falcone said. “At this point, it’s obvious to me that they aren’t the ultimate power pulling the strings. They’re a tool that someone inside the Commonwealth government is using to execute their plans. Finding that person or persons has to be our ultimate goal.”
“The first step in that has to be the Cadre,” Brad said. “This carrier of theirs changes the game. It’s a big ship, almost as big as the cruiser they have. Lioness is still out there too. Whoever is in control of the Cadre has to fuel her and the carrier. They’re not like the smaller ships. They’re going to take He-3 in fairly large quantities.”
“That ties in with what the agency suspects,” Falcone said. “There are very few locations where they can mine He-3. The Cadre attack on Saturn stole a bunch of equipment, or so we think.
“You remember the attack on Blackhawk Station, Brad? We never got a chance to directly question the woman that survived the attack on Ringbolt Associates after the attack. Svetlana Garrow. The Cadre assassin tried to blow you up, and your people got you out and off to Serenity Station. By the time the Agency moved in, Garrow was gone.
“The entire company area was thoroughly trashed during the raid, but we were finally able to determine what the Cadre had been after. Plans and equipment related to cutting-edge extraction of He-3. Based on what we’re seeing now, it has to be something that relates to their being able to fuel and operate large vessels like the carrier and Lioness. Probably other ships, too.”
“Cutting-edge in what way?” Michelle asked, taking a sip of her coffee. “Are we talking something to just make the process more efficient, or to expand the number of areas where it can be extracted from?”
Falcone pointed a fork holding a bit of waffle at Michelle. “That’s a very perceptive question. Ringbolt Associates’ plans were to cut into SaturCorp’s business at Saturn. To do that, they needed something that made the operations profitable. That’s where the increased efficiency came in.
“They hadn’t expanded beyond test-bed operations, but they believed that they had the necessary technology to get more He-3 from a similar volume of gas than SaturCorp. They’d still need drop ships like the one you used to command, but they expected to be able to get almost twice the output from a similar volume of gas.”
Michelle whistled. “That’s huge. If they really could manage something like that, they’d put even big companies like JoveCorp and SaturCorp at a massive disadvantage. They’d be scrambling to figure it out just to survive.”
“And that’s only the refining part,” Falcone continued. “The extraction technology would allow them to expand operations to cometary bodies and still get enough He-3 to make the work worthwhile.”
That news left Brad stunned. Something like that, even if the processing was inefficient, would allow the Cadre to put an extraction platform almost anywhere. Even out in the Kuiper belt. That would make finding them via the He-3 angle almost impossible. They needed to look at other angles.
“What’s Fleet doing to confirm they’re actually in control of all of their ships? That carrier didn’t just pop out of nowhere. Someone is lying to them and they need to be sure that they aren’t being misled on an epic scale.”
Falcone nodded. “The Agency is helping with that. We’re digging into the records and finding people inside Fleet that know others assigned to each ship. Not high-ranking people. Enlisted folk.
“They’re sending messages to their friends and verifying they are all right. If any ships slipped into the Cadre hands, the crew won’t be responding, so our contacts will know. It’s going to take weeks to verify which ships are still under Commonwealth control, but we’re starting with the drone carriers.
“Admittedly, Fleet is cautious about allowing people to communicate when they are stationed in critical facilities, but we’ll make it happen and still stay under the radar.”
That was one angle, Brad admitted, but there were other threads to pull on. “What about the VX-65 nerve agent? Does the Commonwealth really make crap like that? I was sure it was illegal.”
“Just because it’s illegal doesn’t mean it’s unavailable,” Falcone said. “You can get anything you want in the Outer System, for a price. The Commonwealth outlawed these kinds of weapons in its founding documents. If someone is caught making it, that’s a death sentence.
“And just such a group of people were caught a couple of years ago, tried, and executed. The exact same nerve agent. Seems a bit coincidental to me.”
“There is no such thing as coincidence,” they all intoned together.
“I’m so proud,” Falcone said with fake cheer. “Now, this group of terrorists wasn’t associated with the Cadre. Which in the end doesn’t really mean that much. We all know that the Cadre will pick up what it wants from wherever they can get it.
“The original group’s ideology was something of a crossover between nihilism and anarchy. Basically, they just wanted to kill lots and lots of people, preferably on Earth or Mars. They set up a research-and-manufacturing facility in the trailing trojans.”
Brad rose and took his dishes into the small kitchen, washing them off as he thought. The King of Planets had a large number of rocky and cometary bodies gravitationally locked about sixty degrees ahead and behind it as it orbited the sun, each cluster hosting its own set of colonies like Serenade Station. The regions weren’t at all close, and most people didn’t associate the three distinct areas, even if they were all locked in the same way by the massive planet’s gravity.
“Just a hunk of rock that nobody cared about,” Falcone continued. “They masqueraded as a mining outfit and no one knew any different until an informant let the Agency know what they were really working on.
“We passed that information on to Fleet and they raided the place. Needless to say, those fools weren’t interested in surrendering. They kept shooting until they couldn’t shoot anymore.
“Fleet confiscated everything and dropped it all onto Jupiter. They rigged it in a capsule to go deep and fast so it would’ve burned up before it released any serious contaminants into Jupiter’s atmosphere.”
“Are we sure that Fleet really did that?” Michelle asked as she washed her own plates. “Right now, I’m not certain I’m willing to believe that.”
“Neither am I,” Brad said. “I think we’d best go check the place out for ourselves. If someone in Fleet claimed they cleaned it out but left all the equipment there, the Cadre could’ve been working on something all this time.
“And if they have been, they might still be there,” he said with a wolfish smile. “If so, I think we can make them very unhappy to see us.”
Chapter Fifteen
Brad pulled Oath of Vengeance and Heart of Vengeance in for this mission. Bound by Law was already in dock and getting her damage repaired. Which was perfectly fine because they shouldn’t need a ship-killer this time.
The Cadre shouldn’t have any way of knowing that Falcone had given them the data they needed to trace the nerve agent. That meant they wouldn’t be on guard. Well, any more than people making contraband worthy of the death sentence would already be.
The trickiest part of this mission was arriving on station without tipping their hand that they were coming. The Cadre forces on the asteroid would be extremely leery of anyone trying to dock with them. So, Brad had to make absolutely certain they didn’t see them coming.
Both of his ships were equipped with Fleet-grade stealth, so if they came in slowly enough, they shouldn’t be detectable. The only way the targets—if there were any—would know that they were coming was to see one of his ships block a specific star, at least until they got very close.
He ordered both ships to come in on a direct path, taking the asteroid’s orbit into account. As they got closer, the ships shouldn’t seem to be moving side to side or up and down. They would just be growing larger.
The asteroid itself wasn’t anything to write home about. The Jupiter trojans had some seriously large asteroids and cometary bodies, but this one was basically just a piece of debris that had probably been captured millions of years before. A rocky little husk that was barely two hundred meters across.
From the records that Falcone had obtained for them, the anarchists’ base was well concealed. Since no one had any reason to bother with the asteroid, their work had gone unnoticed.
The interior was large enough for the research facility and perhaps two dozen people. After all, the fewer people who knew about what they were doing, the less chance they had of being discovered.
Not that that had helped them in the end. Someone had obviously betrayed them. Brad wondered if it was a Cadre-linked supplier of equipment and materials. If he was such a person, he’d make certain the anarchists got everything they needed, and then, once they’d achieved success, he’d turn them in.
If the Cadre worked it right, their contacts in Fleet would step in and arrest everyone. They’d leave people to dispose of all the hazardous materials and dangerous equipment. If those people truly worked for the Cadre, they’d file a report that said it was done and leave everything in place.
“We’re about twenty minutes out,” Michelle said. “Still no signs of activity. No power emanations, no lights.”
Not that they had actually expected to see anything.
Brad opened a com channel to Saburo. “Are you ready to launch, Colonel?”
The Vikings’ combat team leader and his team were already in armor aboard their assault shuttles. All they had to do was break free from the ships and start gently accelerating toward the asteroid.