Beta Testers

by Joseph R. Lallo

  He broke the connection and hastily stowed the gear before hopping into the ash-runner and launching toward the back alleys of the little town.

  #

  Three days later, the agent stared intently at the tiny screen of his slidepad. He’d been holed up in a “hotel room,” though it was more of a closet with a bed. Thanks to the cobbled-together signal boosters and hardware decrypters, his personal communications device was able to get a reasonably stable connection when even the local service providers struggled to do so. He’d been following news broadcasts, filtering local social media, and tapping every other possible information stream. None of it was good.

  By the appointed time for the contact with his liaison, he was already working through potential contingency plans. He activated the secure connection and waited for it to establish.

  “Overlord,” stated the voice on the other end.

  “Potpie,” he replied.

  “What is your status, Agent?”

  “Bloody irritated at our intelligence. I don’t know what idiot in Team 2 picked that target, but he royally botched the mission. You can confirm, I’m sure, but from down on the ground it looks like the Piranha were transporting all their heavy weapons and ammo for this sector. With the destruction of that convoy, we crippled their local forces. The Broadliners made it away with barely a scratch.”

  “Affirmative. All intelligence suggests that retaliatory attacks throughout the region are meeting with little or no resistance.”

  “That’s what I was afraid of. I’ve been running the numbers, and to salvage this, we’re going to need a wet-works team down here, maybe two. We’re going to have to provide covert aid to—”

  “We are scrapping the mission.”

  “What!? Scrapping the mission! The Piranha are going to be crushed in this region, and the rest of their organization is going to fall like a house of cards. Broadline is going to solidify control of all Piranha territories in two months maximum. After that they’ll be wiping the Kruger Militia off their boots in a week. We’ve handed Vye-7 to the Broadline Syndicate. And if you think a paramilitary corporation with ties to drugs and arms manufacturing is going to do anything but turn this planet into a cesspool and an unstable thorn in the side of the whole sector for the next three generations, then you don’t know your history.”

  “Regardless. We have exceeded our authority and exhausted our resources. Scrap the mission, destroy all related media and equipment, and wipe the identity. This will be our final communication, and if compromised the organization will—”

  “Yes, yes. Disavow of all knowledge. I swear they tattoo that bloody phrase on your foreheads up there in central command.”

  He cut the connection and began to gather together the secure data equipment, mounding it into the garbage pail.

  “This is bloody deGrasse all over again,” he muttered. “Only deGrasse was never good for anything but tomatoes and narcotics anyway. In a hundred years this could have been a commerce center and transit hub. Now it’ll be just another place for the scum of the galaxy to hide their money and their crimes.”

  He tapped his slidepad and checked his accounts.

  “At least they had the decency to make the final payment…”

  Once all the mission-specific equipment was packed away, he threw in a pile of assorted and expertly forged documents and wrapped the whole pile up in a few more black bags. He stuffed his single change of clothes into a backpack and strapped it on before stalking out of the glorified cubicle.

  This so-called hotel had been his first choice not because of its superior quality, but because of its extreme focus on cost cutting. The lousy service and low prices meant that he had very few fellow guests to deal with, and those he did encounter were likely as interested in their own privacy as he was. There were no security guards, cleaning crew came only once a week, and the internal security cameras mysteriously malfunctioned shortly after he’d made his reservation. There wasn’t even a clerk at the front desk. The room was paid for the same way one might reserve a long-term parking spot. Nothing but an application and a few lockboxes to drop off physical items. Zero eyewitnesses as loose ends meant it was very spy friendly. There was an electronic trail, but a few digital backdoors and unfortunate archiving issues swept those away quite nicely.

  At this point in a mission, an agent was expected to wash his hands of the event and blot it from his mind. Success or failure wasn’t important. It was over, and as a covert operation, if properly executed, there should be no evidence that it ever existed.

  The harsh sun and steady wind scoured him as he stepped outside. He slid his goggles in place and gazed out across the city. In the distance, black smoke mixed with the ashy dust over the desert. Wreckage was still burning even days after the battle. His mind clicked through the loose ends that might require his touch. Officially he’d been removed from the mission. No longer sanctioned by his former employers, he had even less authority to act on this planet than he’d had three days ago. But he considered himself better trained than that. Professionalism counted for a great deal more than results, sometimes. And catching a detail that the folks in charge missed was an excellent way to line yourself up for your next job.

  “Let us see here. That RPG launcher buried out in the desert… best to see that there isn’t anything identifiable left behind. A quick scan to make sure I don’t show on any local business surveillance. That ought to do it.”

  He glanced down at his slidepad and thumbed the screen. He’d loaded the device with a suite of programs that tied him into a network of powerful computers off world. They could brute-force him into the woefully insecure networks most consumers made use of in a matter of seconds. He selected a trio of local networks and queued them to be cracked before hopping on his ash-runner and heading for the scene of the crime.

  The carefully scheduled system maintenance that had forced his targets into position had been lifted, so traveling below a few thousand meters put him beneath the notice of global monitors. As for locals, a massive firefight between the local gang and a militarized pseudocorporation had a way of making people skittish about looking out their windows or lingering in the streets for a while.

  He reached ground zero of the attack. For something that was ostensibly a bit of engineered turf war, it had the look and acrid scent of a legitimate military skirmish. The smell of spent ammunition mixed with that of the roasted remains of vehicles and their passengers brought back unpleasant battlefield memories. Deep, glassy craters peppered the landscape where energy weapons had struck the sandy soil. Relatively fresh boot prints, not quite wiped away by the wind, marked were survivors had either salvaged what they could of the equipment or raided the stockpile of the enemy.

  The explosively rearranged landscape made finding the place he’d concealed the automated launcher rather difficult, but eventually he stumbled upon it. He dug out a bit of soil with the toe of his boot until the bulk of the device was exposed, then dumped the rest of the evidence in need of disposal on top of it.

  When it came to eliminating physical evidence, everyone had their own methods. The most popular method was simply collecting every scrap of evidence and bringing it along during extraction. He was something of a full-service agent and thus provided his own extraction, so the last thing he wanted to do was waste time and resources figuring out how he was going to smuggle a few hundred kilograms of spent military hardware and incriminating electronics along with him. Other people liked explosives, but those drew attention. Fire was usually a good method, but it took an awful lot of it to render the heavier-duty things unrecognizable. Fortunately, in his uncharacteristically long career, he’d picked up a few tricks.

  He pulled a small silver packet from a pouch on the arm of his jacket. It looked like the sort of thing a takeout restaurant would toss into a bag in lieu of actually spreading mayonnaise on your sandwich. From a pouch on the other arm he revealed a plastic sandwich bag with what looked like a half-used bar of so
ap.

  “God bless you, Jessica,” he said, squeezing a greenish gel from the packet into the baggy and massaging the contents into a smooth mixture. “You’ve saved me a hell of a lot of trouble over the years with this stuff.”

  The baggy started to get warm, so he laid it upon the pile of evidence and retreated. Thirty seconds later the substance suddenly shifted to a water-thin and white-hot pool. It stayed brilliantly hot for the better part of two minutes, easily converting the military hardware and assorted electronics into a blackened chunk of slag.

  That was that. No noisy explosion, no threat of discovery, and very little chance of anything surviving in a form that might be traced. And all thanks to a little binary chemical compound he’d been introduced to a few years prior by a Special Forces soldier by the name of Jessica Winters.

  He grinned. Now that was a woman who knew how to make the best use out of what she was given. Gazing around the devastation, he couldn’t help but imagine how much more orderly it would have been if Winters had been involved. Technically she was a heavy-weapons expert with a demolition expertise, but by the way the woman used a grenade launcher you’d think it was a scalpel. Finding someone who was both precise and had a flair for explosives was a rare and precious thing.

  Perhaps it was because he had the woman on his mind, but just as he was stepping onto the ash-runner to make his final departure from this unpleasant scene, he noticed something out of the corner of his eye. He trudged over to the edge of a fairly deep crater a short distance away where a charred hunk of metal had been uncovered by the wind. Judging by the sharp, even lines and gentle curve, this wasn’t a piece of shrapnel or debris; this was part of a casing or sabot, something that was ejected before detonation. He tugged it from the soil to reveal a precision-formed bit of sheet metal maybe three millimeters thick and fifteen centimeters long. It had the near-weightless feel of something made from space-grade alloys.

  He ran through the mission briefing in his head. The Piranha were a ragtag group that made do with equipment stolen from the police and regional guard, supplemented with whatever they could cobble together in the way of improvised explosives. Broadliners were distinctly better equipped, utilizing what he liked to think of as “prosumer” hardware. Every military contractor and arms manufacturer had a weakened, neutered version of their most popular equipment to be sold to people who didn’t quite have the budget of a global armed force, but might have some disagreements with those who did. To the average person, a Cantrell Industrial Armaments rocket-propelled grenade seemed every bit as potent as the sort of thing frontline soldiers would use, but to the soldiers themselves there was no confusing them. Paramilitary equipment felt like toys in comparison. Too heavy, too flimsy, too weak, overall shoddy, and typically fifteen years obsolete.

  This piece of chassis, whatever it came from, was not a low-end part. It was custom, high quality, tight tolerance. It was legitimate, and represented hardware that the Broadline Syndicate absolutely should not have had access to. Weapons like these were tracked and inventoried, and if any went missing, heads rolled. He turned it over in his hand. No distinguishing marks. No seals, no emblems, not even a security code or serial number. The “looting and scavenging” he’d observed the other day… in light of this discovery, it might have been an attempt to recover casings like these…

  He tugged his slidepad from his pocket, then frowned and looked to the smoldering mound of burnt silicon that had once been his secure radio system. It was just as well. By now the people who had deployed him would have dismantled the communication pipeline that put them in touch. And it had already been made clear that this mission was over.

  “Someone missed something in their investigation,” he murmured to himself, approaching the ash-runner again.

  There wasn’t much room left in his bag of personal effects, but he wedged the recovered piece of hardware inside.

  “Curiosity in this line of work is ill-advised… but I’ve often been told I’m poor at taking advice.”

  #

  A single glance at the first worlds to truly take root as permanent settlements was all it usually took to determine the precise intention of early expansionist efforts. In short, there were a handful of places on Earth that humanity liked best, and as occurred with almost any worthwhile enterprise, the time had come to franchise those places. Hundreds of planets had been steadily converted to human habitable, and pending suitability, they were made carbon copies of this corner of Earth or that. Tessera was the best effort yet at replicating Beverly Hills on a planetary scale. Palm trees lined surface roads, entertainment superstars had second or third homes there, and every shop and restaurant had the words “boutique,” “gourmet,” or “artisan” added to the signage along with a 200 percent bump to the prices.

  Jessica Winters stood at attention beside a service exit in the alley between a theater and a jewelry store. She was personal security, a fact that would have been clear to anyone who had seen the dark sunglasses, radio earpiece, and humorless expression she wore. Beyond those, though, she didn’t quite match what most would have conjured to mind when they tried to dredge up an image of the typical bodyguard. She wasn’t physically imposing, falling well below two meters in height, but she made up for it in raw presence and attitude. Her build was the result of a workout regimen focused on strength rather than tone, and her outfit was similarly all business. Black canvas cargo shorts and a matching cargo vest held all the assorted nonlethal implements that she might need to dissuade would-be troublemakers. For those who were particularly dedicated, she wore a pair of heavy black boots that had left their mark on many a paparazzi.

  Counterbalancing all the professional paraphernalia were a mid-length mop of curly blond hair, a pair of pearl studs in her ears, and a pink ribbon pinned to her vest.

  She glanced along the length of the alley. Where it met the street, a fellow security guard held a ravening crowd of women at bay. She turned. Another guard at the back of the alley did the same. Winters placed her finger to her ear.

  “North and south entrances secure,” she stated calmly. “Parking structure team, report.”

  “We’ve got three fans who slipped through the fire exit. Removing them now. Clear in thirty seconds,” a voice replied.

  Winters turned. A woman with a high, clear voice graciously excused herself from a conversation on the other side of the door.

  “Make it clear in fifteen. We’re on the move.”

  She stepped aside as the door swung open to reveal a dark-skinned beauty who practically oozed “starlet” from her very pores. Even hidden beneath oversize sunglasses and a floppy sun hat, her poise spoke volumes of her years of experience in front of an audience. Her statuesque figure put her at nearly thirty centimeters taller than her bodyguard. Her name was Venus Vrill, or at least that was the name her publicists had decided upon while she was being groomed for stardom. She was one of the standard triple threats: talented musician, mediocre songwriter, terrible actress. The gathered throng at either side of the alley squealed in delight at her arrival, but security kept them a bay.

  “Jessica, darling,” Venus said, “have you been out here during the whole concert?”

  “Yes. I wasn’t happy with the monitors here in the alley. Remember last time we did a show here? There was a whole camera crew right here, waiting. You would think the venue would have a direct indoor route to the parking structure.”

  “They can’t all be as fine at their jobs as you, darling,” she said, strutting along a step behind Winters as they approached the door to a towering structure across the alley.

  They slipped through and winced at an excited cry echoing through the wide-open interior of a mostly filled hovercar garage. Two more security guards muscled a few fans around a corner and found their job made that much more difficult by the arrival of the star, whom said fans had lingered several hours to see.

  “What does my schedule look like?”

  “You’ve got reservations a
t the Wentworth where Robertson will pick up the second shift, then time enough for a stop at the hotel before your guest appearance at the DZD concert at the Rackton Amphitheater.”

  The pair reached a long black vehicle. Though it lacked wheels, it maintained the classic styling that identified it as the modern evolution of the traditional limousine. Like the tuxedo, a few centuries had done little to dislodge it from its position as the epitome of class and luxury.

  Winters pulled the door open, allowed Venus to take a seat, and then joined her inside where three members of her publicity team waited. Instantly the cushy passenger compartment filled with nonstop conversation about potential licensing deals, public appearances, sales numbers, and other aspects of the entire industry centered upon Venus’s stardom. For her part, the starlet sipped warm lemon tea with honey, nodded, and gave one-syllable answers lest her golden voice be overtaxed.

  While showbiz was unfurling itself in all its glory beside her, Winters bounced her attention between the itinerary and the window, working out what precautions would be needed along the way and making notes of who should be responsible for putting them in place. This task carried her through to their arrival at the Wentworth, a restaurant famous for serving food that cost more per gram than gold.

  She opened the door and gave a stiff nod to her similarly dressed counterpart with a small team of other security guards at the curb. Robertson was a much more classic example of a bodyguard, a wall of a man with a lantern jaw and muscles barely contained by his black canvas outfit. He and his men formed something of a dam to hold back the tide of fans who were waiting for Venus’s arrival.

  Winters rolled her eyes behind her sunglasses. “Let me guess,” she said, “someone leaked the itinerary again.”