Duty, Honor, Planet: The Complete Trilogy

by Rick Partlow

“It’s the ‘CIS’ now,” Ayrock corrected her pedantically, “and we are bound by the Republic constitution and the laws of the various nations in which we operate.”

  “You want to treat this as a military operation, not a civil one,” Jameson assumed, “with all the latitude that allows you. And that’s exactly why you’re here.” He put his palm on a section of the file projection and a red light began blinking, indicating he was being recorded into the file.

  “I am officially authorizing General McKay to use military protocols to pursue the terrorists involved in these attacks. He and his agents are to be given every consideration and cooperation by any Republic, national or local law enforcement official and any complaints should be addressed directly to the office of the President.” He extended his hand again and shut off the recording, then shot Shannon Stark a look, his eyebrow cocked upward. “Does that satisfy your concerns, Colonel Stark?”

  “Yes, sir,” she said. It didn’t, not entirely, but the stern look on Jameson’s face could have been carved there by some Classical era sculptor trying to reflect Zeus in one of his vengeful moods and Shannon knew better than to take the discussion any further.

  “We’ll get it done, Mr. President,” McKay assured him.

  “I have confidence in you, Jason,” Jameson said. “And Director Ayrock will be assigning an agent to liaise with you to make sure that you have complete access to the resources of Republic law enforcement.”

  “That’s wonderful, sir,” McKay said with a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “I look forward to working in concert with the CIS.”

  Oh Jason, Shannon thought, fighting down a chuckle, the years have made you such a good liar.

  “Then let’s get to work, ladies and gentlemen,” Jameson stood, bringing the others to their feet. The CIS Director shook the President’s hand and left through the office’s public door, but when McKay approached the President, he paused and held up his tablet, with Captain Pirelli’s report on it.

  “Sir, I don’t know if you’ve had the opportunity to read the latest report from the frontier,” he said. “We just got it in from Captain Pirelli on a patrol near Kali. A raider ship destroyed a corporate oil tanker with a multi-megaton nuke…and then it tried to escape using an Eysselink drive.”

  “The raiders have Eysselink drives now?” Jameson’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. “And antimatter?”

  “Yes, sir,” McKay confirmed grimly. “And it gets even weirder. When it became clear that they couldn’t outrun Captain Pirelli’s patrol ship, they allowed themselves to be destroyed rather than be captured.”

  “What do you think this means, Jason?” Jameson asked him. There was something in his tone that indicated that he already knew what McKay thought it meant and didn’t like it.

  “Sir,” McKay began, then took a breath and blurted it out, making Shannon wince with anticipation of the President’s reaction, “I think it’s the Protectorate. Either they’re the ones doing the raiding or they’re supplying the raiders with weapons, drives and antimatter.” He held up a hand to forestall the expected protest as Jameson’s mouth began to form it. “There could be other explanations where raiders could get the drives, weapons and antimatter, although they stretch credulity, but I can think of no other reason why they’d simply destroy the oil tanker rather than holding it for ransom or pirating its cargo to sell themselves. And I certainly can’t think of any other reason why they’d allow themselves to be killed rather than captured except to protect a secret worth more than their lives.”

  “Well, that’s a disturbing thought,” Jameson admitted, shaking his head, leaning thoughtfully against his desk---not so much for support, Shannon thought, but to touch it as a talisman for comfort. “I’m not certain what we can do, though, given the huge areas of space and dozens of systems involved and our limited number of military ships.”

  A look flashed across Jason’s face that no one else would have noted, but Shannon knew exactly what it meant: it was him repressing the urge to curse. She knew what he wanted to say: “What we need to do is get off our asses and invade Novoye Rodina before Antonov gets his shit together and hits us again!”

  “Sir, I’d like to send a few more probes into the Novoye Rodina system,” McKay suggested instead, his tone as calm and businesslike as if he’d never even felt the urge to blow up at the President of the Republic. “Automated probes sent from the closest system we have a friendly gate into. They could launch observation drones then report back. It could give us a sense of the traffic in and out of the system.”

  Jameson paced across the office, absently rubbing his right thumb and finger across his lips, his eyes narrowing in thought. Shannon knew Jameson a bit better than Jason did, so she recognized this for what it was: not actual deliberation but a show to make the person asking feel relieved when he gave them less than what they wanted.

  “Here’s what I can authorize, Jason,” Jameson finally said, turning back to the two officers. “We have two automated probeships available at this time.” Shannon knew that the President had those corneal implants; she guessed that he’d called the data up onto them while they’d been speaking. “We’ll send one of them to the Novoye Rodina system and set up an observation point far enough out to remain undetected, then we’ll have it launch drones towards the inner system, as you wanted. If that can show proof of a connection between the raiders and what’s left of the Protectorate, we’ll draw up a plan to deal with it.”

  “Thank you, Mr. President,” Shannon said, offering a hand. Jameson shook it and then nodded to McKay, and then the two Intelligence officers left the office the way they’d come.

  It was a long and silent journey back through the halls and down the elevator back to the car, and more silence on the ride back to the landing pad; and the whole way Shannon could feel Jason smoldering beside her. Finally, when their pilot had sealed the doors of the flitter and raised the ducted-fan helicopter off the pad, Jason let out a subdued but heartfelt curse.

  “It has been four fucking years almost since the Protectorate destroyed the Lunar base and came pretty close to destroying that whole fucking city,” he bit off quietly but bitterly, waving demonstratively back at the receding grandeur of Capital City. “Four years since we lost the Sheridan and the Decatur, our newest cruisers, winning that battle. Four years since Admiral Patel sacrificed his life to save this whole damned planet. And we are still sitting on our asses, pretending they’re not a threat anymore.”

  “Greg Jameson won that special election because he found and killed Antonov before he could get on that shuttle and get away,” Shannon reminded him. “As far as the public is concerned, they are not a threat anymore, and it’s hardly in President Jameson’s best interest to remind everyone that they still could be. Nor is he likely to entertain the idea that Antonov had and has a bunch of duplicates of himself running around as backups, created with an alien copying machine.”

  Jason grunted in frustration. That had been the very first issue about which he and the President had butted heads. There was no proof, as far as Greg Jameson was concerned, that Antonov or anyone else had been duplicated. Kevin Fourcade and the late Vice President Xavier Dominguez had been kidnapped and brainwashed, and that was it. The Protectorate crewman who had called himself Konstantin Mironov and who had claimed to be one of Antonov’s duplicates was simply a brainwashed mole. No further discussion.

  “Who do you want to assign to the terrorism investigation?” Shannon asked, trying to get his mind off of Antonov.

  “Franks,” Jason decided immediately. “He’s smart and he’s shown a lot of ability over the last few years, but he can’t go undercover because of the exposure from getting the Medal of Valor, so this will be right up his alley.” He shrugged. “Also, this is going to require him to get his hands dirty, and I’d like to see if he can handle that end of things.”

  “Hopefully he can handle dealing with Ayrock’s liaison,” Shannon said.

  “Fuck Ayrock,” J
ason muttered. “He’s just trying to cover his ass. If he…”

  He was interrupted by a strident warning tone that came over his and Shannon’s personal datalinks simultaneously. Their eyes went wide: there was only one reason for that tone.

  “Go for McKay,” Jason said, touching his ‘link to answer the emergency call.

  “Sir,” it was Captain Franks’ voice on the line. He wasn’t their personal aid anymore and hadn’t been for nearly three years, but they both still counted on him as a go-to officer, even more so since he’d demonstrated what a capable operative he was. “There’s been another terrorist attack.”

  “Shit,” Shannon hissed, hearing the transmission over her own ‘link’s ear bud as Franks broadcasted to them both simultaneously. “How bad?”

  “It’s a disaster, ma’am,” he told her, his voice wavering with barely contained emotion. “Initial reports are probably three thousand dead, all civilians, a lot of them children. They hit a block of low-income apartments with what had to be a hundred kilos of hyperexplosives.”

  “Aw Jesus,” Jason moaned, running a hand through his short, brown hair. “Where was it this time? Eastbloc? The African Confederation?”

  There was a pause, like Franks almost couldn’t bring himself to say it. “No, sir,” he finally replied. “It was Houston.”

  Chapter Two

  The Greater Houston Development Complex---known colloquially as “Houston ‘Plex”---was a sprawling mess. Not at all a planned megalopolis like Capital City, it was instead a mish-mash of neighborhoods, industrial districts and entertainment centers that ranged in age from a mere ten years old to nearly three centuries. Jason McKay had spent little time there; but on those few occasions when he had visited it through the years, he was always left with an impression of decay and disarray buried under layers of gaudy whitewash.

  In one residential neighborhood that bordered on an industrial district, that whitewash had been stripped off, blasted away by HpE: chemical hyperexplosives. The low-income housing block was an interconnected series of apartments clustered around a central entertainment complex, school and transportation hub. It had been thirty stories tall and housed over ten thousand people, until a hundred kilos of hyperexplosives had sheared off a quarter of the structure at ground level.

  Smoke and dust still shrouded the wreckage, as if it were trying to hide the charred, black ugliness of it. Here and there among the jagged protrusions of I-beams and buildfoam dust, small sections stood almost undamaged, mocking the dead with their randomness.

  “Take us down there,” McKay told his pilot, pointing to a clear spot on the road a few blocks away from the apartments, behind the barricade set up by emergency services.

  “Yes, sir,” the young enlisted man said, his voice subdued.

  Jason knew just how the man felt. His stomach was twisting as he saw the emergency workers loading bodies---some of them heart-wrenchingly small---into sealed plastic containers and piling them onto palettes for powerloaders. There were rows upon rows of the palettes, each stacked high like Mayan pyramids: sacrifices to whatever philosophical or political god the terrorists worshipped.

  “This shouldn’t have happened,” he said softly. It was an effort to speak, an effort to think. He was gripped by an inertia that made it hard to do anything but stare in disbelief.

  “We’ve both seen our share of bad things, Jason,” Shannon responded, pitched for his ears only, her hand gripping his arm.

  “No.” He shook his head, shook off the feeling of paralysis. He turned and looked her in the eye, feeling a lurch as the flitter touched down. “I mean, they shouldn’t have been able to do this. How the hell did they smuggle that much HpE past the sensors?” He felt rage boiling up and forced himself to calm down before he went on. “Not just the sensors inside the complex, there are chemical sensors everywhere in this city---in the trains, the taxis, the loading docks, the transportation centers.”

  A grinding hum rattled through the cabin as the aircraft’s door opened out and down into a ramp, touching the concrete outside with a solid thunk.

  Shannon frowned thoughtfully, staring out the window at the mass of onlookers gathered beyond the barriers, watching the rescue effort. “This wasn’t just an opportunistic copycat,” she said. “This was no soft target with poor security in some developing nation.”

  “No,” Jason agreed, levering himself out of his seat and stepping towards the flitter’s ramp. “The strikes are connected.”

  Jason stepped from the air conditioned aircraft directly into the baking sunshine and cloying humidity of mid-afternoon in a typical Houston summer; he already felt himself beginning to sweat before he had taken two steps towards the blast area. The smoke and dust reached him almost immediately and he coughed involuntarily as he watched a large man in dirt-encrusted coveralls and a hardhat striding angrily towards them.

  “Alpha dog,” Shannon murmured softly from beside him and he nodded agreement.

  “Who the hell are you people, and why are you landing an aircraft in my restricted area?” the big man demanded as he came to within ten meters or so of the two officers. This close he could see curls of brown hair peeking from beneath his hardhat and a wispy mustache hidden beneath his hooked nose. Under the sweat-streaked dirt on his face, he was fair-skinned and there was a hint of sunburn on his neck that showed he hadn’t been prepared for the day’s work.

  “I’m General McKay,” Jason introduced himself, keeping his tone civil and professional. “This is Colonel Stark. We’re with Fleet Intelligence. The President sent us to investigate the attack.”

  That seemed to take the man back a step and he stopped in his tracks, eyes going wide as he took in their uniforms and recognized the names. His mouth tripped over the first three things he tried to say but he finally got out, “Oh. Uh, I’m Gerald Stone; I’m the Greater Houston Emergency Services director.” He wiped his right palm on the front of his coveralls and offered it to McKay, who shook it firmly. “I…uh, I guess I didn’t expect someone this high up this quickly.”

  “We were in Capital City when the word came down,” Jason explained. “We…” He shook his head helplessly. “I guess I just had to see it for myself.”

  “It’s a fucking nightmare, sir,” Stone said, his voice cracking as he lifted his hard hat and ran his right hand across his forehead. “I…I’ve never seen anything like this, not even during the Invasion.” He shuddered, going silent.

  “Who’s in charge of the investigation on the ground so far?” Shannon asked him.

  “Ummm…” The big man squinted against the sun as he cocked his head thoughtfully. “Ma’am, there’s local police all over the place, but they’ve been doing more rescue work than investigating. I haven’t seen anyone else yet, so I guess that would be you two.” He hesitated, hand going to his ear as he received a call on his implant receiver. “Sorry,” he told them, “gotta go. Call me through the Emergency Services net if you need me.” And with that, he jogged back towards the blast site, talking loudly to whoever had called him, trying to be heard over the din of the recovery work.

  “Great,” Jason said without enthusiasm, watching him go. He looked back to Shannon. “Franks is already on his way, right?”

  “His shuttle should be landing now,” she told him. “I called Vinnie, too: he’s heading down along with a Special Ops team that will be working with Franks and his crew.”

  “Times like these,” McKay sighed, “I wish Ari was still a field agent.”

  “I don’t,” Shannon said, surprising him. At his curious look, she explained. “He and Roza are expecting their first child.” Her mouth quirked towards a short-lived smile. “I’m happy for them. He’s a good trainer, anyway.”

  Jason thought he’d heard something wistful in her voice, but he filed it away for later and called up the Houston Police Department’s net address on his ‘link, then used it to locate the Chief.

  Jason turned back to Shannon to tell her where he was going and noti
ced, for the first time, the huge crowd of people standing behind the barricades, watching silently. They seemed at first like a faceless mass of humanity, but then he began to focus on individuals and saw the young mother holding a two year old, both of them coated with dust, the woman’s eyes dull and hopeless. He saw the group of teenagers huddled together, staring at the scene with a mixture of horror and the sort of intense fascination that adolescents showed towards death and destruction. He saw the old couple, their faces shockingly wrinkled and weathered---too poor, he guessed, for the anti-aging treatments that most people received as a matter of course---watching with sad resignation, hands intertwined.

  Walking behind them, oblivious to the carnage and destruction, were several humanoid figures, two meters tall and dressed in identical orange coveralls that covered everything except their hairless heads. Their skin was a light blue, like a human with cyanosis, and their lifeless black eyes were sunk deep beneath ridged brows, their faces blank and expressionless. They were heading for the blast site, undoubtedly summoned from whatever manual labor job to which they’d been assigned in order to help with the rescue effort.

  “What is it?” Shannon asked, seeing the look in his eyes.

  “I think I’m spending too much time at Fleet HQ,” he told her, looking as if he’d bit into something distasteful. “Sometimes I can forget that Jameson authorized the bill that produced those things.”

  “There wasn’t much choice,” Shannon reasoned. “With all those new colonies opening up, workers are at a premium. People willing to work are getting technical jobs and the ones who are happy to live on the dole aren’t about to go work as oil rig fitters on Inferno or hauling trash to the recyclers in Houston. The biomechs don’t ask for a raise or complain about working conditions.”

  “Shannon, I know every logical argument why we should produce biomech workers,” he said, “and I don’t care about any of them. Those things make my skin crawl and they always will. Thank God we don’t allow them on military installations.” He shrugged off the feeling. “Come on, we need to go find the Houston Police Chief and get this investigation going before the trail gets too cold.”