Colonyside

by Michael Mammay

  “I’m not—” He stopped himself. Perhaps he realized that I was purposely trying to wind him up, and he took a few seconds to gather himself. “That’s ridiculous. Pure conjecture. You can’t put that in a report without substantiation.”

  “I can’t? Governor . . . I nuked a planet from orbit. Twice. You heard about that, right?”

  “Of course.”

  “So . . . can’t? . . . That’s something that might not apply to me. You know?”

  He stayed silent for an uncomfortable amount of time, probably weighing the damage to him from what I might do against what Caliber would do if he filed the charges I’d demanded. Since I didn’t know which way he’d go, I had to make it easy for him.

  “You can blame it on me,” I said.

  “How can I do that?” He sounded like a sullen teenager, mad because his dad took away his device.

  “File the charges publicly. Privately, tell your staff that I made you do it.” I figured it would take ten minutes at best before that news made its way to Zentas. I didn’t care. I wanted him to think it was me. Zentas wasn’t a fool. In a battle between the governor and me, he’d know the likely winner. He’d have to act.

  “I’ll need some time to think about it.” He saw me frown, and hastily added, “An hour. I need an hour.”

  “Of course,” I said. I’d made my play. I could give him that much.

  Back at my quarters, I tried to predict Zentas’s next move by working through what I’d do in his place. I didn’t worry about the governor. What I’d done there was blatant, and he’d take it for exactly what I intended: an attack. Things internal to Caliber didn’t sit nearly as well. He’d tear the company apart to figure out where I got my information about the hominiverts. That would lead to my visit to the tech department, but more important, it would lead to Mae Eddleston. I hadn’t considered that when I confronted Zentas, and now it seemed like a glaring error. I needed to warn her, so I asked Fader to call.

  Eddleston didn’t answer.

  “Get an escort and go to her place. If you don’t find her, get Ganos to track her down. I want a rundown in an hour.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I give myself some credit for not yelling or throwing anything, but in truth, I couldn’t move.

  Fuck.

  I sat there and waited. I tried to think of Zentas’s other actions, but I couldn’t make myself concentrate.

  When Fader returned, she launched into her briefing. “She wasn’t at her place. When nobody answered, I had the MPs open it. Nobody home. The room appeared normal, though it looks like she may have packed and left. Her toiletries were gone, and there was no bag in her apartment.”

  On the surface, that didn’t mean anything; she could have gone anywhere. But I had a bad feeling about it. “What did Ganos—”

  “I had Ganos check the cameras that should have picked up any time Eddleston came or left her quarters. She found Eddleston entering last evening but couldn’t find her leaving.”

  “Someone hacked the cameras,” I said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Fuck.”

  Fader didn’t respond to that, waiting for me to say something else. What could I say? I’d made a mistake and someone else had paid for it. Again. I glanced at the bottle on the counter. If I started down that path, it wouldn’t end. I needed to think. After a moment, an idea came to me. “Since she obviously left—either alone or under duress—there would be more cameras. Let’s expand the search in rings around her quarters. If we check the feeds to see which cameras went out, we should be able to determine the path she took.”

  “Ganos had the same thought, sir.”

  “Did she find anything?”

  “Multiple cameras went out in several directions. They could have gone a dozen different ways. She’s still running it down, but as each camera failed, the possibilities went up exponentially.”

  “How does nobody notice all these cameras going down?”

  “Apparently cameras fail briefly all the time. They reboot themselves, and they only trigger a maintenance warning if they’re out for more than three minutes,” said Fader.

  “Which is more than enough time to move through an area and on to the next camera.” Shit.

  I thought about how this new information changed things. Even with Eddleston out of the picture, it was still Zentas’s move. He just potentially had another piece. In my mind, I connected my confrontation with him and Eddleston’s disappearance, but I had nothing to prove that. Even if he did have her, she’d confirm where I learned about the sonic technology. But I’d told him I knew about it, so it didn’t affect me. What it did was put Eddleston in danger. I couldn’t predict how he’d respond to her providing information.

  To cover my bases, I called Oxendine’s direct line and reported the missing person and my suspicion.

  Zentas used his new pawn in a way I didn’t predict. So much so that at first I questioned whether it was Zentas’s move at all. The call didn’t even come to me. It came to Fader, who came to my suite to brief me and Mac. She brought Ganos with her, so we had the entire team.

  “Mae Eddleston called,” began Fader.

  A wave of relief hit me, since I’d assumed the worst. “She’s okay?”

  “She says she is,” said Fader. “I asked her about her disappearance, and she said she freaked out and left her quarters because she realized someone was watching her.”

  “Where is she now?” I asked.

  “Staying with a friend. One who doesn’t work for Caliber. She’s scared.”

  “This feels off,” I said. “The cameras.”

  “I think so too,” agreed Fader. “If she left on her own, who hacked the cameras?”

  “What did she want?”

  “She wanted to meet, sir.”

  “Is she coming here? When?” I asked.

  “She wouldn’t come here,” said Fader. “She said they’re watching your place, too.”

  “Who? Caliber?” They probably were.

  “She didn’t say so, sir, but that was the implication, yes. She wants to meet somewhere nobody will be watching. She wouldn’t say anything else over the comm, because she doesn’t trust that someone isn’t listening.”

  I looked at Mac. “This really doesn’t make sense. If someone is listening, they now know that she wants to meet me. It could be a rookie mistake by Eddleston, but I don’t really believe that. What are the odds that this is a trap?”

  Mac shrugged. “I don’t know. Pretty high. What do you think, sir?”

  “Ninety percent?”

  Mac thought about it. “Maybe. It sounds like they got to her and now they’re using her as bait.”

  “I agree,” I said. “I think they’re coercing her into something to get to me. But for what?”

  “Well, the least harmful thing I can think of is that they want to plant false information, maybe give you something that sends you off in another direction—back toward EPV, or something. But if she wanted to do that, why wouldn’t she just come here?”

  “Right. What’s the worst case?”

  “Kidnapping,” said Mac, without hesitation.

  “Kidnapping? Not murder?” asked Fader.

  “If they wanted to kill him, they wouldn’t need a meeting. A meeting just puts us on guard. They’d be much better hitting us at a random time when we didn’t suspect it,” said Mac.

  I thought about it for over a minute. I had to give Zentas credit. He definitely knew how to set the bait. Even suspecting the trap, I was always going to bite. Even without the promise of information, I’d put Eddleston into this situation, and I had to get her out. But at the back of my mind, as small as the chance was, I also held out hope that she’d give me the thing I needed to break this open. “So how do we flip this?”

  “What do you mean, sir?” asked Fader.

  “I have to meet her. It’s almost certainly staged, probably by Caliber. They want something. How do I use that against them?”

  �
��I don’t suppose there’s any point in telling you this is a shitty idea,” said Mac.

  “We’ll take precautions.”

  “The only precaution I’d settle for willingly was us meeting her on a different planet. Or better yet, a ship in space in the middle of nowhere.” But as much as he protested, Mac would support me.

  “Before we jump into this with both feet, can we discuss options, sir?” asked Fader.

  “What options are there?”

  “The job’s done,” said Fader. “Pass your suspicions about Eddleston’s safety to the military, report that Xyla’s patrol was attacked by hominiverts, say what you can and can’t prove about the technology and how it may have had a part in the attack, and we ship out. Xyla’s dead. We’re sure of that. Everything else is another job.”

  “Are we sure?” I asked. “Isn’t it possible that Xyla Redstone is still alive? What if they faked the disappearance of the patrol?”

  “To what end, sir?”

  “So that Zentas could exploit his daughter’s fake death for political gain,” I said. “So Xyla would have cover to continue experimenting on hominiverts.”

  Her face tightened. She didn’t buy it. “There are a lot of holes in that, sir. First, there are the other five members of the team.”

  “They could have—”

  “And even if they were all in on it, they can never show their faces again,” she said, anticipating my argument.

  She made a good case, but still I couldn’t leave it alone. “If I walk away, Caliber continues to get away with what they’re doing,” I said, changing the point.

  “Like I said, sir, report it. The government can shut them down.”

  “But they won’t.” Talking to the governor had confirmed that, and I couldn’t get past that part.

  “And you can?” she raised her voice, then caught herself. “Sorry, sir.”

  “No, don’t be. Speak your mind.”

  “Is this about Eddleston or Caliber, sir?”

  I had to think about that. I wanted to get Eddleston out of the jam I’d put her in, but if I was being honest with myself, I wanted to go after Caliber more. If I proved what Caliber was doing and put it in my report—got it to the highest levels of government . . . What if I did that, and they still didn’t do anything? Was the lack of resources and oversight on Eccasis truly an oversight or part of the plan? I could always leak it to the press. That was, after all, my go-to move. No. Maybe I was being naïve, but I had to believe that if I got it to the right person in the government, someone would take action. “It’s Caliber. They shouldn’t be allowed to violate the law at will.”

  Fader glanced to the others, clearly uncomfortable. “This is going to sound callous, sir, but that’s not your mission.”

  I glanced at Mac, who shrugged. “I’m kind of with the captain on this one.”

  “How about you?” I asked, looking to Ganos.

  “Me? You don’t want my opinion on this.”

  “Go ahead,” I prodded.

  She looked at each of us. “Okay, sure. I don’t think we should be here at all.” Apparently seeing confusion on our faces, she clarified. “I don’t mean the four of us. I mean humans shouldn’t be here at all. What right do we have to take over a planet that has complex life on it? Sure, Caliber is exploiting the planet. But so is everybody else.”

  Nobody answered. I’d considered it before, of course. It’s not like hers was a fringe opinion. After my actions on Cappa, more people held it than ever. As Zentas had mentioned, politicians even ran campaigns on that stance. However, her posing the question right then helped me clarify it in my own mind. I didn’t agree with her, but I didn’t disagree with her either. What I knew was this: I was a government man. I’d spent a lifetime supporting the will of elected officials, whether I agreed with them or not. Caliber was violating that will in the form of subverting the Butler Law. The fact that Oxendine and the governor didn’t have the resources or will to stop them didn’t change that.

  Ten years ago I would have taken Fader’s advice. I’d have given Fader’s advice. I would have completed the mission assigned to me and that would have been that. I couldn’t say exactly when I changed. I still didn’t care that much about Eccasis, and I didn’t care that much about hominiverts either. But I was tired of corporations making their own rules. It had pissed me off when Omicron did it by trying to exploit the Cappans, and it pissed me off now. Zentas made me angry—the way he used his daughter’s death—the way he’d use anything he wanted and didn’t care about consequences because he didn’t think there were any. It wasn’t my job to stop him. But somebody had to do it.

  “Thank you all for your honest opinions.” I looked at each of them, but longest at Ganos. “Let’s be clear: I believe that Caliber is involved with this overture by Eddleston, and we’re going to come into direct conflict. I need to know before I make a decision: Are you with me?”

  “Of course, sir,” said Fader. I believed her. She had her orders, and they said to help me in any way possible. She’d follow them.

  “Do you need to ask?” said Mac. I didn’t.

  Ganos was the one I was worried about, but she didn’t hesitate. “I’m in. But before we do anything, if Caliber is behind this and we’re going after them, you need to know that I’m going into their system.”

  Now it was my turn to pump the brakes. “Hold on . . . I thought—can we talk for a minute?” I gestured toward the far side of the room, and Ganos headed there while Mac and Fader moved away.

  “What?” asked Ganos, once I joined her. As if she didn’t know.

  I waited for her to meet my eyes. “I thought the rule was don’t hack giant, evil corporations.”

  “It was.”

  “What’s changed?”

  “You’re going into this meeting. You think you’re the only one who gets to take risks?”

  “I’m going to meet an informant. Once I’m out, I’m out. I can go hide away again. For you—Caliber has a long reach and a longer memory.”

  “Yeah, they do. But you know what? I’m tired of living scared. I’m tired of being bullied. I want to do this. I am doing this, sir. End of debate.”

  I didn’t like it, but I’d be a hypocrite to say so. Plus, she’d do what she wanted the minute she left my sight anyway. “Promise me you’ll be careful.”

  Ganos grinned. “Of course, sir. You know me.”

  And there it was. I did know her, and she was ready. Her involvement upped the stakes, but it only made me more determined to win. “Okay, then,” I announced to the room. “That brings us back to the original question. How do we flip this thing?”

  Mac came over. “If we’re doing this, sir, we’re doing it my way. I set the location, I set the terms.”

  “Roger that,” I said. “Set it up.”

  I pulled Fader aside once Mac left. “If things go wrong, I want you to get Mac and Ganos and get out of here. You’ll have to force Mac. He won’t want to go.”

  “What are you talking about, sir?”

  “Mac’s in charge of plan A. I’m giving you plan B. The other side isn’t stupid. They’re going to have a plan too, and there’s always a chance that theirs will work better. If something goes wrong and you can’t track me, or if anything else goes wrong, you get everyone on a ship. Tell Oxendine what you know and let her deal with it, but get the team to safety.”

  “They’re not going to like it, sir.”

  “Of course they aren’t. That’s why I’m telling you.”

  “I don’t like it, sir.”

  “And that’s fine. I need you to promise me you’ll do it anyway.”

  “Can you help me understand, sir?”

  I paused. I could do that much. “Sure. If something happens to me, if I know everybody is safe, I can make whatever decision gives me the best chance. If there’s a threat to others, especially when I can’t be sure what that threat may be, it adds variables. It gives the enemy leverage.”

  “It also gives
you a source of help.”

  “Given the two options, I like the clarity of going it alone.” It had taken me a long time to get to that point. I’d always fought as part of a team when I was in the military. As a civilian, I’d come to appreciate the independence of only having to worry about myself. It would help to know my team was out of reach off planet. I’d gotten enough people killed. “I don’t expect you to understand.”

  “You’re right, sir. I don’t understand.”

  “One day you might. Tell me you’ll do it anyway.” I wouldn’t trust Mac if he told me—he’d tell me whatever I wanted to hear. But this was Fader. Her word was titanium. Once given, she wouldn’t dream of breaking it.

  “Okay, sir. I’ll do it anyway.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Mac scheduled the meeting with Eddleston in an open area—the only park inside the main dome. It allowed good observation and didn’t allow anyone to approach unobserved. It had trees and grass and even a fountain, all meant to give people some sense of normalcy on an otherwise alien planet. So much of space exploration involved being able to fool the mind into thinking things were the same. Researchers put a ton of effort and money into ways to change that need, but it always came back to the human brain. We understood it, but only enough to appease it, not enough to adapt it.

  Eddleston sat on a park bench made of painted wooden slats, the whole scene so rustic it seemed fake, like someone’s idea of home, except lifted from a sales catalog instead of reality.

  “I’ve got eyes on her, on the bench by the fountain.” The sub-cochlear implant made it seem like Mac spoke directly into my brain. I didn’t respond. I had a subvocal mic, so I could communicate back to him, and a backup mic in my belt. Mac had made great use of the gear, seeding the area with almost invisible cameras and whatever else he could find. We planned to conduct the meeting and hear what Eddleston had to say, but if things changed, we’d spring the trap and then capture whoever we could.

  Mac had also brought backup. We didn’t tell the military about our plan due to potential leaks, so Mac had requested an escort, much like we’d had on several other occasions. Once they arrived, he repurposed the soldiers to help us and convinced them not to call it in to headquarters. Bored garrison soldiers are usually up for anything that gets them out of the daily routine, so it didn’t take much for them to agree.