by Rick Partlow
“Firing laser,” she heard the announcement from Lt. Milankovic.
A crimson line connected the two ships for an eyeblink in the computer’s Tactical simulation and Shannon saw in the view from the external cameras a plume of vaporized metal and polymer obscure the conjoined ships. Gravimetic sensors penetrated the smokescreen and showed the cargo shuttle drifting free of her mothership, the portside wing burned away by the laser-pulse. Shannon willed the cargo shuttle to move further away from the freighter, but it seemed to have only drifted a kilometer or so when the reactor overload went critical and the craft disappeared in an expanding white globe of radioactive fire.
“Shit,” she murmured, watching the explosion expand to nearly envelope the freighter. The white fire charred the outer hull of the ship, but, to her surprise, the freighter’s fuel stores didn’t ignite
“Colonel Stark,” Captain Pirelli called, “Tactical tells me the freighter is intact, but it’s going to be pretty hot. It won’t be safe for anything but automated probes, but at least we can get a look at it.”
“What’s the situation on Sekhmet, Captain?” Shannon asked.
“We picked up all of the platoon’s third squad, Colonel,” Pirelli reported. “They had been on rear guard outside the building and they all made it…a couple had minor blast injuries. The rest…” Her voice trailed off for a moment. “It doesn’t look like anyone else survived, ma’am,” she finished, sadness heavy in her tone.
Shannon paused for a moment, mouthing a silent prayer. Jason wasn’t big on religion, but it always made her feel better. “Get an investigation team down there, Captain,” she ordered, “and see if they can salvage anything. And get those automated probes ready to board that freighter.”
She glanced at the spacesuited figure secured between two of her troopers. With the airlock closed and the lights dimmed, she could see a little through the faceplate and what she saw was the face of a terrified young man.
“We have that ship,” she continued---to Pirelli, but half to herself, “and we have a prisoner, and I want to make damn sure they’re enough to be worth all this.”
* * *
The warehouse was at the edge of town, far beyond residential and business districts, out where people built the ugly necessities they had to have but they didn’t want to see. It was nestled amongst a dozen other buildings just like it, the whole cluster surrounded by a cloud of Inuit natives, Russian immigrants and itinerant seasonal laborers. Most worked with desultory apathy, and Drew Franks imagined they were probably dreaming of salmon-fishing or caribou-hunting or whatever passed for fun here, and cursing the need for money that forced them to spend the summer loading and unloading trucks.
Franks watched them for a moment more from the feed on his helmet reticle before he keyed his ‘link.
“Can we get the insect drones inside the building?” he asked, guessing the answer before he heard it.
“Negative,” Sgt. Mayo gave him the answer he expected. “The place is totally shielded against electronics. For an ordinary looking warehouse it’s about the least ordinary place I’ve seen. There’re underground sensor nets buried all around the place out to hundred meter radius and on the access road a kilometer each way.”
“Well,” Franks said wryly, “it’s a damn good thing we aren’t going in by land then…”
“Thirty seconds to target,” the lander’s pilot announced over their helmet speakers.
“Everyone up!” Manning announced, unbuckling and rising from her seat. She grabbed onto a fast-rope line hooked into the inner hull of the lander, then hit a control that opened the craft’s side hatch.
Even through his sealed helmet, Franks could hear the wind rushing by outside, and as the craft banked he could see the brown thread of the access road winding through the trees. This place was in the middle of nowhere, even by Alaska standards: over 300 kilometers outside Fairbanks, the buildings were all that remained of an old US Army base, and they never would have found them if not for the timely and unwilling aid of Anastasiya Orlov, the woman Podbyrin had known as Anya. Not that it had gone smoothly…
“I don’t care what authorization you have,” Jean-Paulo Assange had insisted indignantly, waving at the unconscious bulk of the muscular Russian woman restrained in a chair in one of the back rooms in Assange’s offices. “This is against the fucking law! You can’t use chemical interrogation on a suspect without a court order!”
Franks had concealed his intense irritation behind a façade of cool indifference, regarding the angry man silently for a long moment before he responded. He could see sweat beading on Assange’s forehead. He could also see Agent Carr watching him from the other side of the small room, a troubled look on her face.
“Are you a student of the Republic constitution, Jean-Paulo?” he’d finally asked.
“I know enough to be aware this violates it,” the agent had snapped.
With a tap on his ‘link, Franks had brought up on his corneal implant the last article he’d scanned. “Article Four, Section B, Subsection 3a. In times of war as defined by a Senate authorization to use military force, the President may declare martial law in limited areas that temporarily suspends protections against self-incrimination. The Senate authorization of force against the Protectorate had no expiration date, and these people are working with the Protectorate. President Jameson has declared martial law in all areas where the bratva are operating. So this,” he jerked a thumb at the injector full of psychoactives that Manning was carrying towards Anya, “is perfectly legal and constitutional.”
“So where do we draw the line, Captain?” Carr had asked him. “What separates this from a police state? What’s the difference?”
Franks had worked hard to keep his face neutral. He really didn’t want to alienate Carr.
“The difference,” he had answered, “is that we’re at war, and I,” his mouth had flickered in a grin, “am not the police.”
“Anya” had sung like a bird, but most of what she’d told them hadn’t been terribly useful. She hadn’t known where Yuri was or what his next target was; she had known nothing about the nanovirus at all or about the bratva’s connection to the raiders. She had only known about their connection to the Protectorate in the broadest terms and it was clear that Yuri was a man who believed strongly in compartmentalization. Anya’s main area of responsibility was smuggling illicit arms to the bratva muscle in various cities.
But one thing she had known, something she wasn’t meant to know, was the location of a warehouse near a place called Delta Junction where Yuri had been spending a lot of his time. It wasn’t much, but it was all they had. So here they were…
“Ten seconds,” Franks heard the pilot’s announcement as he grabbed hold of the fast-rope, his hand next to Manning’s. She glanced at him and he thought he saw a grin through her faceplate.
“Satchel charge!” Manning snapped and a Corporal surged forward, hands full of a small backpack filled with a shaped charge of hyperexplosives.
Almost as he reached the open hatch, the aerospacecraft stopped its forward motion and came to a hover over one of the warehouses and the pilot told them, “Target reached.”
“Deploy the charge,” Manning ordered. The words were barely out of her mouth before the junior NCO tossed the pack out of the hatch, aiming for a ventilation fan near the center of the warehouse roof.
The explosion was directed downward, sending a flattened cloud of smoke washing outward like a wave and punching a hole five meters across in the buildfoam between the metal crossbeams. Before the roar had stopped echoing, Manning had kicked the fast-rope out the side hatch of the lander and slapped her point man on the shoulder, yelling, “Go!”
The trooper grabbed the rope and swung out of the door, gripping it between the sole of one boot and the top of another. He was ten meters down the rope before the next trooper leaped onto it and slid down towards the entry hole in the roof. The others went down at the same interval and the fourth trooper
was on the rope before the first man was through the hole and into the building. Finally, when there was no one left but Manning and Franks, the Special Ops Master Sergeant turned to the Intelligence officer and nodded---a full-torso nod to make sure he saw it with her helmet on.
Franks felt his stomach twist just a little as he stepped out of the hatch, but it faded as his hands and feet closed on the rope and his fall was abruptly arrested. He’d fast-roped before, but only in training, and it was an inexplicably different situation when he knew the bullets were real. He loosened his grip slightly and daylight rushed by around him until it was swallowed up by the comparative darkness of the warehouse’s smoke-filled interior.
His helmet’s thermal and infrared sensors filled in where the sun couldn’t reach, showing human-shaped figures moving around in the smoke below, some of them highlighted with a blue halo that showed they were fitted with IFF signals identifying them as members of his unit. He had about two seconds to get an idea of the positions of the possible threats in relation to his own troops before the rope ended and he dropped the last meter to the concrete floor, falling into a crouch to absorb the impact.
He had a heartbeat to take in the picture around him on the dimly-lit, smoke-shrouded floor of the warehouse when a harsh chattering sounded in his helmet’s headphones from the external audio pickups and a radio call came in from one of the Special Ops troops: “Contact right!”
Franks’ first instinct was to drop to a knee to make a smaller target, but he had to get away from the rope to make room for Manning, so instead he charged directly into the nearest of the shadowy figures that were milling about in confusion around him. Even with the helmet’s optics augmenting his view with infrared, Franks couldn’t make out too many details about the man; he was tall and broad-shouldered, with a shaved head and a bushy beard, and his clothes seemed coarse and thick like those of a laborer. Everything else was lost to the dark and the smoke and the blur of motion.
Franks could see the man clawing at his waistband for what might have been a weapon and instinct and training swept his arm through in a strike across the bald man’s throat. The big man went down like a felled tree, hands going instinctively to his throat, and Franks grabbed a large, stamped-metal handgun from the man’s belt, stripping out its magazine and ejecting the chambered round before tossing it across the room. He was reaching into his chest pack for a zip-tie when another of Manning’s people stepped in and secured the man for him.
Franks could hear the hoarse stutter of suppressed gunfire coming from the east corner of the warehouse and in his helmet’s HUD he saw that Manning was a few meters behind him and moving east towards the gunfire. He felt a sudden, irrational urge to follow her and watch her back, and had to force himself to follow the plan and head for the opposite end of the building with four of Manning’s troopers in tow. He frowned inside his helmet. Sgt. Manning had more combat experience than he did; it made no sense that he should be worried about her. He shook the feeling aside and pushed on.
The warehouse was stacked high with plastic shipping crates that loomed on either side of them, battered and cracked from repeated use and partially obscured from the drifting smoke and dust from the breaching charge. The special operations troopers flanked Captain Franks in two pairs, each checking the aisles to either side as they cautiously made their way down the length of the place. Twice Franks stopped as they did and took a crouched position against a stack of crates while the junior NCOs with him secured hiding, unarmed workers with zip ties and left them in place.
As he waited, he watched Manning’s progress on the HUD and saw that she and her group were almost to the other end of the building, where Anya had told them that the offices were located. He switched over to their commo band for just a moment, but the chatter was too vague and he couldn’t figure out what was going on before he felt he had to switch back to his team’s frequency. Finally his team moved on and Franks saw a reinforced interior wall ahead of them, bathed in darkness. Set in it was a thick, metal door with a state-of-the-art biometric lock looking very out of place in the center of it.
“We got a heavy, locked door here,” he told Manning. “If there’s anything worth seeing in this place, I think it’s probably in here.”
“I’ll leave cracking it to you, Captain,” Manning responded, voice tight as if she was otherwise occupied. “We’re securing some prisoners here and some of them don’t want to be secured.”
Franks waved Sgt. Mayo forward and the tech specialist slung his carbine and pulled a cracking module from his chest pack, quickly affixing it to the lock.
“This thing is pretty stout,” Mayo opined, watching the device’s progress on its display screen. “I don’t think you can even buy this model on the open market.”
“Do we need to use a breaching charge?” Franks asked him, beginning to worry about how long the operation was taking.
“I don’t think so,” the NCO replied after a moment’s consideration. “Just gonna take a few seconds…”
Then the lock’s indicator went green and the door popped open a few centimeters with a hiss of escaping air. It seemed to Franks as if darkness rushed out through the gap, fleeing whatever was inside, and he snorted a laugh at his own paranoia. Still, he scanned the chamber carefully with infrared and thermal before he signaled the first of his team to enter. He could tell there was no one inside, but nothing else showed up in the darkness even with the enhanced vision.
A staff sergeant moved forward into the chamber, activating his weapon-mounted light and sweeping it around the room. Franks stepped in behind him, and saw the glare of the powerful beam playing over bare concrete, then dancing off the dull polymer frames that had once held objects squat and cylindrical. Five of them, he counted, loomed empty…and one not.
The cylinder was about a meter in diameter and twice that high and it seemed to be concealed in the shadows of the room’s right rear corner even when the light hit it.
“What is that thing?” Sgt. Mayo asked, a tinge of wariness in his voice.
“Nothing good, I’m guessing,” Franks told him. He looked around the room; it was bare except for the one canister. Not a speck of garbage, not a smear of grease, not so much as a dust bunny. “But what worries me is…what the hell happened to the other five?”
Chapter Ten
“We used chemical interrogation on the workers in the warehouse,” McKay reported, trying to keep his voice calm and clinical when he really wanted to gibber and panic. “They were all basically drones hired from the local indigent population, so no one knew much. The consensus was that the nanovirus canisters had been brought in by truck at least three months ago and that Yuri had taken them out a couple at a time over the last few weeks.”
McKay felt the panic starting to take hold in his gut again and, in an effort to collect his thoughts, he forced himself to glance out at the sunrise bathing the Tetons in a golden glow. The chairs on the porch of the mansion were very comfortable, but he stood at parade rest in front of the President. Hikaru Kage, seated on the other side of the table, regarded him with a somewhat bemused expression.
The mansion was beautiful and the view of the Grand Tetons from the back porch was incredible, but McKay didn’t like it because of what it represented. It had previously belonged to Brendan Riordan, director of the Executive Council of the Multilateral Corporate Interests, the Multicorps that basically controlled the Republic’s economy. The man had been one of the three most influential humans on the planet and he had been complicit in planning a coup against the O’Keefe administration. That he had been used and deceived by Sergei Antonov and one of his artificially created duplicates, Kevin Fourcade, in no way ameliorated his guilt in McKay’s opinion.
President Jameson had a different opinion and his counted more. The fact that Riordan’s Jackson Hole estate had been donated to the government as a Presidential retreat was a raw reminder of this. He’d wondered when the President had called for the private briefing to be he
ld there if the location had been significant.
“The last time Yuri showed up at the warehouse,” he continued, “and the only visit we could confirm a definite time for, was a week ago. We backtracked via satellite coverage and found out he took the last shipment to a private field outside Anchorage where he had an orbital shuttle waiting. We tracked it as far as McAuliffe Station, but the registry was spoofed and the craft that left with that identifier was a totally different model.”
McKay studied Gregory Jameson’s face as he delivered the news. He wasn’t as good at Shannon at reading people, but he thought the man seemed shaken and troubled. He couldn’t fault him for that…the idea that Yuri could use the nanovirus on a city here on Earth scared the shit out of him. But he also got the distinct impression that the President was not at all surprised.
“A week,” Jameson mused, staring a kilometer away at nothing. “He’s had a week and access to an untraceable shuttle.”
“There is no other intelligence about this Yuri?” Kage demanded. “You’ve no idea where he might be?”
“We also interrogated the crewman we captured from the raider ship at Sekhmet,” McKay went on, “the one that attacked Tintagel. He’s just a teenager, the child of wildcat miners out in the Belt. He was recruited by a crew of Belt Pirates who were hiring themselves out. He said their freighter picked up the canisters from Sekhmet and delivered them to intersystem shuttles in Cislunar space…all except two. One they used on Tintagel City, the other was still on the ship. I assume that was for redundancy in case the first one failed. They were there at Sekhmet to restock, though. He told us that the ones in charge, the ones who made the nanovirus, spoke to each other in Russian.”
“So they’ve lost their production facility,” Kage grunted. “That is, at least, something.”