Of Bravery and Bluster

by Scott Kelemen

  Johanna drifted over to take one of the offered seats. A genuine smile rich with memories clung to her lips. “She is that.” She tilted her head to one side. “You are so sure of my answer, Sir?”

  Kard returned a fatherly smile. “I know, other Academy officials thought they knew your mind and were wrong. Call it a blind spot of Navy analysts. We want people to fit into specific types. You can plan for types. Unique individuals are harder.”

  “And yet?”

  Still bemused, Kard said, “Experience gives me some insight, and no one is completely unique. You cared about your time here, Cadet. You’ve accomplished too much for me to believe otherwise. Dreia Yager sees your achievements here as an end-state, but she’s wrong. A forgivable error. She didn’t come with you. She can’t understand that stories don’t end here. There is only preparation. Temptation. We’ve shown you a galaxy in which you can make a difference, armed you with skills to build on, and then challenged you to make that mark anyway you wish. There is no choice here. Not for someone who cares. Not until you can at least see which star you’re heading for.”

  “I can’t see the stars from here?”

  Kard answered, “We’re just about to hand you a telescope and ask you to pick your favorite. It’s too early to quit. You know that. Trust me enough to say that I know that you know.”

  Johanna did consider what he was saying. She asked, “I’m going to have decisions to make. They’re going to ask me what I should do next. My ranking apparently gives me options. What is your advice on what I should say?”

  The honor he felt in being asked showed on his face. He had the distinct impression she was not in the habit of doing so. “Making choices when you are so young is generally a poor idea. Some of your classmates will be certain that a posting to a battleship at the heart of the Alliance will gild your whole career. Others will say the same about a small, sharp little pirate hunter like a frigate or a corvette. Others will tell you the type of ship doesn’t matter. They’ll say hunt down excitement. Or variety. Or a dozen other key defining characteristics you choose to name.”

  “All of which are wrong?”

  “Exactly the opposite. They are all right. It isn’t deep wisdom what I am offering, Miz Summer. I’m telling you to be patient. If I may be so bold, that has always seemed like a strength of yours. Find value in what you are doing, rather than peering ahead into the future. In five years, you won’t remember why you chose a certain path. In twenty, you cannot imagine how many paths you will have walked along.”

  Johanna reminded him, “I tried to let the Academy pick my path during the Trip-E. I was told that implied a lacking on my part.”

  Kard smiled. “And I told you most Navy officials around here prefer neat packages. Don’t let that dissuade you from who you are. Experiences will come. No need to chase them. All of them will teach you, as long as you aren’t busy trying to pick the ones which will teach you best.”

  Johanna rewarded him with a smile of her own. “Thank you, Captain Kard. If you will allow me to say, Dreia was right to trust your opinion.”

  “Only the future will know for sure.” He gestured at the wall display. “Would you like to use my office to record a reply? I might know your answer, but I am sure she would enjoy hearing from you.”

  “If it is all the same, Sir, I will make a recording a little later in private. May I ask for you to pass through the FTL array with your level of priority? As you said, she will be concerned. I don’t want to delay her hearing my decision any longer than necessary.”

  Kard nodded. “On your time, Cadet. That’s why I’m here.”

  Chapter 21

  The Agent was stone-faced. And that stone wrapped in a shell of iron. Then dipped in battlesteel.

  The briefer continued to skim over his display, which showed an intricate web of connections between the current fourth year cadets and the influence they had. Earlier years. Proof of concept for their training. Overall reputation. “Their success has reached out and counter-acted a significant portion of the work we have done attempting to dissolve the Academy’s reputation as a solid institution. In short, they not only uncovered the failures as manufactured, but also helped reverse the damage done. If the Academy Commandant carries through with the recommended punishments, they will be lauded as effective administrators overall, despite missing the initial danger indicators that led to the Trip-E sabotages.”

  Changing the schematic slightly, the briefing officer continued, “Perhaps worse, the analysis predicts further damage when they enter the fleet as midshipmen. A fresh influx of competent recruits would complicate TSU’s work undermining the wider performance of the Alliance Navy. The cadets were isolated at the Academy. As they spread into the fleet, the odds increase that they might be involved with events of real importance to galactic politics and have a measurable positive impact.”

  The Agent’s impassive façade cracked only long enough for him to intone, “How disappointing.”

  The severe lines of Commander Ryan’s face did not possess the same control. In a flare of anger, she lashed out, “To speak nothing of losing an entire crop of Trinitian cadets.”

  Glen Sanders sat next to her, but not from solidarity. He stayed silent, letting her spit her venom. He was already considering options. He needed to strike a bargain here, a bargain in which they would help him get out beyond the system. Johanna was about to slip through his fingers, and he knew there was nothing that could be done here. The hunt would continue out into the stars.

  Ryan snapped at them, “Forgive me, Sir. You brought me behind the curtain for my advice. I’m giving it. We need to pull whatever strings we can to reduce the punishments being levied against our own kind. We owe them that for the risks they took on our behalf!”

  The Agent didn’t hesitate. “They failed. We honor success. We do not give succor to those who cannot handle the tasks assigned them.”

  The briefing officer supported his superior with details conjured onto the screen from files they had constructed days prior. “To overturn those decisions, it would require us to corrupt critical data files, ensure certain pieces of physical evidence went missing, as well as the blackmail, bribery or threat to over 60% of the Academy’s senior officers. There is also a 90% chance that our position here would be compromised, which would result in a gap of between four to five years before another Agent could achieve the same level of penetration. These are optimistic appraisals.”

  The primary assistant asked, “What is our new direction?”

  The Agent answered, once again without pause, “We have already taken it.”

  Ryan scowled. “What does that mean?”

  The Agent didn’t make threats. If she stepped beyond the boundaries of insubordination, he would execute her. It was that simple. She should expect nothing less from a TSU operative. He stared at her until that was very clear.

  Ryan swallowed hard. She saw what she had been missing.

  Having confirmed she knew her place, the Agent granted her a gift for that small bit of wisdom. “I set a contingency plan in motion several months ago. It will come to fruition shortly after their graduation ceremony. By way of a monumental accident I have pre-arranged, the graduating class will die en masse.”

  His briefing officer was already making calculations on his console. “Shall I update the analysis regarding their martyr status?” He had not been told of the contingency, but flowed along in his supporting role. He didn’t question. That was not his place.

  The Agent returned a subtle shake of his head. “Unnecessary. Whatever their notoriety here in the Havoc system, they are unknown beyond. History will forget them soon enough. Eradicating their potential is the key.”

  Panic seized Ryan. “The entire class?”

  “It is plausible that a few may survive, but the goal is remove suspicion through as messy a scenario as possible. This is no longer surgery. We are applying a cure to a virus.”

  She let out an audible whimper. “We can
save a few. Our own kind!”

  The Agent’s glare was cold. “You are acting emotionally compromised.”

  “You know I was trying to protect Tanner!”

  A hint of contempt tainted his features. “A game that did not impact the success or failure of our last gambit. I do not share your priorities.”

  A chair scraped on the cold steel floor. Glen Sanders stood. “I do not care what games she played, nor what your plans entail. We had an agreement. You know I required that Johanna Summer be spared. Her corpse is of limited use to me!”

  The Agent turned his attention to the outsider. “Our agreement covered the effort to see her disgraced and expelled. Neither is now possible. Our arrangement is concluded.”

  He didn’t make any sort of signal to the two enforcers standing up against the room’s walls. He didn’t so much as glance at them. But Glen had survived where others had not because he didn’t wait for such signals. He hunted people who worked beyond the law. He knew their methods.

  A twitch of Glen’s eye activated the latest modification he had made to his nimbus array. Even before the enforcers started to reach for their weapons to permanently tie up the loose end he represented, the sunburst emitters along his skin staggered them with a light pulse with a brilliancy that defied most nuclear blasts. Implanted eye shades fell to save his own retinas, but the pulse blasted through even hastily closed eyelids from those around the room. Screams of anger and pain echoed as nearly everyone present was blinded, perhaps even permanently.

  The strike didn’t come without cost. Glen burned out half his array in drawing that much power in a single moment. Immediately, he was contending with 95% of the full Sanctuary gravity, which was equal to 120% of the normal Lauran pull to which he had been born.

  But he was no longer the same man as the one who had left Laura’s Star in pursuit of his target. One of the fortunate side effects of spare time was preparation. New implants. And also new levels of physical training. After his last fight with Johanna, where her training in heavier gravities had evened the odds with his superior combat skills, he had made sure not to let that defeat him again.

  Glen darted at the nearest of the TSU enforcers. True, each of them came from a truly heavy-grav world. Accustomed to living in twice his normal gravity, they could break his comparatively brittle bones like eggshells. But they had to see him coming. While the guard clutched at his eyes with one hand, Glen aimed the point of his elbow right at the nerve cluster on his other wrist. Pain pressure points didn’t change overmuch, regardless of planet. Except maybe on Thresh, but the lunatics who called that planet home were more monster than human.

  Another scream of pain was ripped from the enforcer by his blow, and he dropped the pistol he had been about to aim at Glen. Glen caught it on the way to the ground, reversed it, and blew a hole through the guard to end his suffering.

  “Sanders! This way!”

  Glen twitched in surprise, spinning to see Ryan keying open the nearest exit from the hidden compound. Ryan had dropped the other guard, and was now wielding a MAAC pistol all her own. His eyes narrowed, wondering how she could still be functioning. She had not been behind any cover.

  Ryan guessed his concern. “Optical implants. I’m from Caifran, a moon around a bright planet where solar flares and eclipses are common.”

  Glen hesitated a second long, weighing the odds of trusting someone else with hidden depths.

  She hissed in frustration. “If I wanted you dead, I’d have shot you in the back! I need you to help me stop them from slaughtering my…the Trinitians!”

  A soft siren pulsed into life. The sort of siren that would not be heard outside this little secret compound, but would summon every Trinitian operative inside for support. The Agent had lost his eyes, but retained enough composure to duck for cover and summon help.

  Glen was impressed. Johanna had stolen his eyesight, and he hadn’t fared nearly so well. He aimed at the Agent’s cover and blasted a couple of MAAC rounds into the durasteel wall to keep him ducking.

  Then, he bolted to the exit leading into the office used by the Agent in his Admiral persona. He barked at Ryan, “We can reverse whatever accident he’s going to cause, but we need a way off this rock. Not to mention a jump capable ship that can get us out beyond the system.” It was a tall order.

  They ran out of the office and jogged down the corridor. A few nearby Alliance officers gave them odd looks, wondering at the faint aura of recently survived battle that clung to them. Ryan ignored them. Stopping to explain would only get them arrested or killed. That didn’t spare Glen from her superior smirk. “I told you that you needed me. The Agent has a personal long-range shuttle. He tucked it away in an Admiral’s storage hangar and locked it behind a wall of military flag officer privacy laws. It would take a court order to get searched. Rank hath its privileges.”

  “You have the codes?”

  “We don’t need them. We have a different type of key, and we aren’t trying to be subtle.” She held up her sidearm.

  They emerged onto the main Academy grounds. There were a few cadets and other officers wandering nearby, but the pair broke into a trot all the same. Weird? Yes. But time was of the essence. Glen choked out, his breath still more labored than he wished in the relatively heavy gravity. “A shuttle won’t get us to Proxima. It won’t even get us to the next star system.”

  Ryan was as Trinitian as the operatives behind them and glided through what was for her lighter gravity like a swan drifting on a lake. “This one can. Smallest ship they could cram a corvette’s jump drive into. Might look like a massive Admiral’s yacht, but it’s more like a life-pod strapped to a jump engine on the inside.”

  “Can they track it? It belongs to one of their key operatives, doesn’t it?”

  Ryan nodded, “I’m sure of it. It was provided for the Agent’s personal escape route. Probably has excellent stealth coating, but I’d bet it is programmed to auto-identify to any Trinitian ship it sees on its IFF. We’ll have to disable it once we make orbit.”

  Glen grimaced. “Difficult. Convince me.”

  Ryan shot back, “This is a partnership. I’m trusting you to save Tanner. You trust me to shut down the tracker.”

  Changing subjects, Glen added, “A shuttle this size can’t have much life support. How many can it take?”

  They rounded the corner of another staff building as Ryan confessed. “One. But if we eat light and take sedatives to spend most of the trip asleep, we’ll be -”

  Glen leveled his pistol at her and drilled a hole right through Commander Adrienne Ryan’s nearest temple. She dropped like a marionette with her strings cut in mid-stride. Her corpse tumbled bonelessly to the sidewalk pavement.

  Glen didn’t even pause in his stride, his eyes set on the shuttle hangar ahead. It would make far more sense to take a one-person shuttle if he was alone. He trusted his own skills when it came to deactivating things.

  ***

  “Energy release! I think someone just fired off a weapon on the south campus!”

  The Agent enjoyed a glow of satisfaction. The gamble had paid off.

  Finding two people on the entire campus grounds was like trying to find a specific needle in a stack of needles. Especially if they split up or didn’t run around like the wanted fugitives they were. Even worse, no one else at the Academy was looking for them, and the TSU Agent couldn’t exactly summon official help considering his own status as an illegal mole planted by an outside organization.

  But his rank at the Academy gave him a few privileges. He had arranged overflight for an optical drone, using the excuse of his need for an updated site survey. He also accessed the orbiting safety satellite systems and put in a simple request to alert him if there was an energy spike in a five-kilometer radius of the building. They were being hunted and might use those weapons of theirs.

  It worked. “Zero the drone on that location! Get me an expanding visual scan centered on that point.” He turned to face his computer,
then grit his teeth in frustration as his eyes burned at the very idea of trying to stare at a screen.

  He had been working blind since the flare Sanders set off. He summoned assistants to do his work for him, hating every second of the delay it cost. “Give me a direction of travel based on our building to the point of that energy release. Extrapolate. Where are they headed?”

  His assistant worked quickly enough, bringing up a list of possible destinations along that path. “Administration building for ground transportation?”

  The Agent snarled back his frustration. He could have scanned the map in seconds, discarding the choices and deciding on the most likely destination. Through his assistant, it was too plodding. Too methodical. “No. Next.”

  “Radar school?”

  “No. Next.”

  “The Kepplar-maggins memorial museum?”

  Was anything in there operational? A comm system? Transport? “No. Next.”

  “Admirals’ Field.”

  The Agent wanted to cut his own throat. He should have guessed it! Admirals’ Field was the campus landing point reserved for senior officers and their private shuttles. Including his own prize long-range escape shuttle.

  Did Ryan know about that? She had been brought into the inner circle, but might not have had enough time to absorb everything. He wasn’t overly concerned. She could not have penetrated his personal security, and without the disarming codes for the onboard fail-safe device, they would not get very far.

  “Sir, we have an attempted access into your private shuttle bay!”

  A second report came in a heart-beat later. “I have visual on the energy release site! Oh my God…it’s Commander Ryan!”

  The Agent barked back, “Don’t lose your focus! Describe what you’re seeing!”

  “The Commander, Sir! Looks like a MAAC pistol impact at close range. There’s…no chance she survived, Sir.”

  The Agent swelled with an odd sort of appreciation for Sanders. She had known about the shuttle, and that it was only fit for one person. The sheer practicality of the man, to execute his partner in the escape just to make sure he got out…brutal yet effective.