by Troy Denning
“It has?” Veta asked. Biohazard quarantine was the highest level of quarantine in the human-controlled galaxy, enforced by an orbital net of Hornet thermonuclear mines. She looked to Ewen. “Why wasn’t that in our assignment briefing?”
Ewen spread his hands. “Because we didn’t go to Barugi,” he said. “There’s a quarantine alert in most navigation packages and a net of blockade beacons on site, but neither will be triggered unless a vessel shows intention to approach.”
“And nobody saw the connection to our kidnap victims because someone buried it in a compartmentalized file.” Veta took a breath—and it did nothing to calm her. Admiral Tuwa’s assassination clearly had been a bold misdirection, an attempt to keep the investigation from focusing on the true targets of the assault. “Wow. They’ve been one step ahead of us the whole time.”
“I hate that,” Mark said. “So who do we kill?”
“I’m not sure yet,” Veta said. “But we’ll start looking on Gao.”
Ewen was quick to raise a restraining hand. “Not so fast, Inspector,” he said. “Gao is still hostile to the UNSC. I can’t drop you there on a fishing expedition.”
Veta frowned. “Captain, we know the Tuwas were held at a lab, most likely on a world hostile to the UNSC. If that doesn’t put Gao at the top of the list, I don’t know what does.”
“Being at the top of a list isn’t exactly probable cause,” Ewen said. “I shouldn’t have to tell you that.”
“I’m not with the police anymore. I’m a soldier.” Veta gave him a saccharine smile, then said, “Besides, we’re talking about Gao. An investigator’s hunch is probable cause.”
“Then I need more,” Ewen said. “I won’t risk restarting the Insurrection on a hunch.”
Veta sighed. She could actually see his point—especially since she had helped Blue Team set off no less than a nuclear explosion the last time they were there.
“This is more than a hunch, Captain,” Veta said. “It’s a circumstantial chain. To begin with, we know that Keeper pirates have been hitting Gao’s shipping harder than they’ve been hitting anyone. There’s a lot of bad blood between Castor and Arlo Casille.”
Ewen nodded and said, “I read the assignment briefing too.”
“Glad to hear it,” Veta said. “What the briefing didn’t spell out is how cunning Casille can be. He used the UNSC’s occupation of the Montero Vitality Center to seize the presidency. He wouldn’t hesitate to frame the Keepers of the One Freedom for killing Admiral Tuwa and her family.”
A glimmer of understanding came to Ewen’s blue eyes. “And have the UNSC take care of his pirate problem for him,” he said. “That does make sense.”
“It’s motive,” Veta said. “Which is enough for a search—at least on Gao.”
Ewen thought for a moment, then said, “For ONI too. But thousands of labs? It’s impossible to search that many—at least covertly.”
“We won’t have to,” Veta said. She looked down the table toward Anki Hersh. “How precise will your analysis of the tread castings be?”
“Tread castings?” Ewen asked.
“Mom—sorry, Inspector Lopis—picked up some dried mud in the detention center, sir,” Mark explained. “It probably came from the boots of the guys who planted the Tuwa corpses.”
Ewen eyed Mark with a sour expression. “ ‘Mom’?”
“I really hate that nickname.” Veta narrowed her eyes at Mark, then turned back to Ewen. “The tread castings will confirm that the operatives Mark and I encountered in the detention center came from Gao. If the analysis is precise enough, we can locate the source to within a kilometer.”
“We don’t have a forensic astrogeologist aboard,” Hersh said. “But one of our materials techs is an amateur mineralogist, and we have access to the same botanical surveys that Gao bioprospectors use. We should be able to deliver a competent analysis . . . but I don’t know how much use it will be without a comparative database.”
“Olivia will get you the database,” Veta said.
Olivia looked confused but said, “Sure . . . I guess.”
“Relax. I still have a friend or two in the Gao Ministry of Protection. They should be able to get you into the GMoP system.” Veta looked back to Ewen. “That will narrow the search down to no more than a half dozen possibilities, all fairly close together. Good enough?”
Ewen turned to Fred.
Fred shrugged. “Good enough for Blue Team,” he said. “Just tell us who to shoot.”
“Very well, then,” Ewen said. “Assuming the tread castings are from Gao and give us an actionable location, Blue Team will insert.”
“Along with the Ferrets,” Veta said. “We’re going in too.”
Ewen shook his head. “Inspector Lopis, you and your team have been through a lot already. Mark and Olivia still have unhealed wounds—”
“We usually do, sir,” Mark said. “It hasn’t stopped us yet.”
“And this is still an investigation,” Olivia added. “On Gao, sir. How can you not send us along?”
Ewen’s gaze slid toward Veta, and she realized he was thinking about her reluctance to abandon the hostages on Taram—and probably about her reaction to his condescending remarks at the beginning of the briefing. But Veta was not about to apologize. She had to keep her own conscience, and she did not look forward to the day it became easy to leave a dozen captives to be incinerated in their cells.
“Captain,” Veta said, “what you said about me earlier? That was wrong. I’m not a soldier. I’m a spy.”
Ewen held her gaze for a moment longer, then finally said, “You’ve made that apparent, Inspector.” He placed his palms on the table, then stood. “Very well, then. The Ferrets will insert along with Blue Team. But Fred retains command of the mission. Is that clear?”
“That’s acceptable,” Veta said. “Thank you.”
“It wasn’t a favor, Inspector. You just made your point.” Without awaiting a reply, Ewen turned to Fred. “And President Casille is the head of state of a sovereign world. I don’t care what he’s done or what your mission is—he will not be eliminated without a prior, explicit order. Understood, Lieutenant?”
Fred rose and came to attention. “Absolutely, sir.” He looked across the table at Veta, then said, “Even Spartans need clearance to start a war.”
CHAPTER 18
* * *
* * *
1403 hours, December 14, 2553 (military calendar)
New Leaf Extractions Field Complex, Candado de Xalapea
Yosavi Diversity Reserve, Planet Gao, Cordoba System
The New Leaf Field Complex proved easier to find than Veta had expected. All they needed to do was fly toward the smoke. It was visible from five kilometers away, a thick, dark thread rising through a Yosavi Jungle canopy that was so lush and familiar it made her heart ache. Veta loved her Ferrets like they were her kid sister and brothers, and she would never betray their loyalty. But it had been barely six months since the friends and colleagues in her GMoP special homicide unit perished in similar terrain, and the thought of their faces could still make her long for home.
The thread of smoke swelled into a pillar, and the pillar into a tower, oily and boiling out of a hole blasted down into the jungle canopy. The Turaco slowed and entered the smoke, then began to descend on its antigravity pads. Visibility was less than ten meters, and the nose spun and dipped as the pilot tried to keep watch on the tangle of scorched vines hanging just within view.
The insertion team was using the commandeered Turaco out of necessity. The Owl they normally used had been destroyed on Taram, and the Silent Joe was too small to carry a spare. Fortunately, the Turaco’s new pilot, Taj McAvoy, was a Covert Services veteran with two thousand combat hours in an assortment of craft. During the sixteen-hour slip to Gao, McAvoy had quickly mastered the controls, and he had flown the vessel flawlessly during both the atmospheric entry and the harrowing treetop approach-to-target that followed. Now he was handling the descent to t
he jungle floor with a quiet confidence that would have put Veta at ease—had her only worry been landing atop a still-smoldering fire.
But, unlike the Owl, the little Turaco lacked stealth capabilities. It had entered Gao’s gravity well under a false transponder code that would not hold up to close scrutiny—and once the Ministry of Aeronautics realized the vessel had vanished from the traffic control system without landing, there was going to be scrutiny. If Veta hoped to find a lead that pointed to the Tuwas’ murderers—or what they might do next—she would have to work fast.
The Turaco was only fifteen meters from the ground when visibility finally improved. Peering over McAvoy’s shoulder, Veta saw a hazy, almost parklike setting within a stand of giant cyathea, whose gray trunks were kept meticulously free of moss and vines. Scattered among the immense tree-ferns were dozens of cone-roofed buildings connected by a network of cart paths. With dark-rimmed holes melted through their fiberplast walls and roofs, many of the structures had obviously survived a recent fire. The rest had collapsed and were still trailing ribbons of black smoke into the air. At least two dozen human casualties lay scattered across the grounds, about half of them draped in green sheets and none showing any sign of movement.
“Somebody beat us here,” Veta said into her headset. “Our first priority will be—”
“Security,” Fred said, also speaking over TEAMCOM. “You stay aboard until we control the perimeter.”
“Negative,” Veta said. Fred was in command of the mission—Captain Ewen had reinforced that before allowing Veta and the Ferrets to accompany Blue Team—but Veta was still a civilian contractor, and that gave her a certain leeway to be pushy. At least, she thought so. “I’m coming with you. There could be a GMoP Typhoon here any minute.”
GMoP Typhoons were three-seat interceptor craft designed to protect Gao’s natural resources from bio-pirates. They had formidable air-to-air capabilities, but what made them truly dangerous were the drones they carried to identify and eliminate targets hidden deep beneath the jungle canopy.
Fred studied her through his faceplate for a moment, then said, “I thought the nearest Ministry base was a two-hour flight.”
“It is,” Veta said. To protect the jungle ecology, Yosavi airspace was so restricted that even Ministry of Protection craft were not permitted to overfly it unless they were on a mission. “But they would have picked up a blast this big on their satellite surveillance and sent a team to investigate. And who knows how long ago this happened?”
“Couldn’t have been much more than an hour, maybe two,” Kelly said. She was standing a few meters behind Veta near the boarding vestibule, along with Fred, Linda, and the three Gammas. “The smoke is still thick.”
“Which will make it even harder to find any evidence that survived the blast,” Veta said. “But someone draped sheets over those bodies, and they might still be around for questioning. That’s my job.”
“Which makes you too valuable to put at sniper risk,” Fred said. “You should’ve worn your armor.”
“I am wearing armor.” Veta tapped her ballistic vest—which, aside from her helmet, was the only actual armor she was wearing—then said, “Battle dress uniform.”
Fred snorted. “Light battle dress uniform,” he said. “And that’s not armor. It’s more like a security blanket.”
“It’s right for the job,” Veta said. She had been issued her own suit of Semi-Powered Infiltration armor during her Ferret training, but had left it aboard the Silent Joe in favor of something more appropriate to an investigation. “We’re here to question witnesses, not shoot them.”
“Understood, Inspector,” Fred said. “We won’t shoot the witnesses.”
Before Veta could reply, the Turaco stopped its descent so quickly that her knees almost buckled.
“Dirtside!” As the pilot spoke, the boarding ramp thunked open, and Veta saw that they were hovering roughly a meter above a large, flat-bottomed crater filled with still-smoking building rubble. “Dismount!”
Fred led Kelly and Linda down the ramp and dropped into the crater. The three Gammas followed close behind, the photoreactive panels of their SPI armor shifting from blue-gray to gray-green as they left the Turaco’s interior light. As physically enhanced Spartans, they had other forms of armor available to them. But the SPI’s active camouflage system was more suited to the stealth often required of Ferrets.
Veta grabbed a safety handle just inside the doorway and leaned out cautiously to get a better view. All six Spartans were already clear of the blast site and racing across the compound in different directions. With her view of the jungle undergrowth blocked by a metal-lattice perimeter fence, Veta focused her attention on the crater below.
She did not have much experience with blast forensics, but she knew the basics. There was a lot of black soot, which usually indicated a military or industrial-grade explosive. The crater itself was about seventy meters square, with a network of low ridges creating five circles, one in the middle of the rubble field and one in each corner. So there were actually five craters. All were about the same shape and depth, with similar amounts of rubble from the building piled around their edges. It seemed likely they had been created by five simultaneous blasts. All were flat and shallow, suggesting that most of the explosive force had been directed upward—an impression reinforced by the enormous hole in the jungle overhead.
The pilot’s voice sounded over Veta’s headset. “I need you back inside, Inspector.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Veta said. “I’m just trying to figure out what happened to this building. It looks like the explosions originated inside.”
“Makes sense,” McAvoy said. “It’s hard to make a precision strike through a hundred meters of jungle canopy.”
“Even with targeting coordinates?”
“The ordnance tends to deflect,” McAvoy said. “You need a drone-based delivery system, which isn’t all that useful in most other situations. And I still need you inside. The tactical feed is showing a cluster of unknowns coming through the jungle toward us.”
“A cluster?” Veta echoed. “How tight?”
“Pretty bunched up.”
“They’re civilians,” Veta said. Even before her ONI training, she had understood small-unit tactics well enough to know that a military force would never advance in a tight mass—not in the face of an enemy armed with grenades and automatic weapons. “Probably survivors, trying to figure out who we are. Hostiles would be spread out.”
“Most likely,” McAvoy agreed. “But I still need to protect the craft.”
“Understood.” Veta started down the ramp and spoke over TEAMCOM. “Lopis dismounting.”
A sigh sounded, then Fred said, “Permission granted. Ferrets, keep her covered. Blue Team, continue perimeter reconnaissance.”
A series of clicks acknowledged the order. Veta aimed for a patch of relatively even ground and jumped off the ramp, then quickly moved away as the Turaco began to rise behind her.
The rubble beneath her boots was still warm. It consisted of fist-size lumps of stone and charred wood packed into the cavities between masses of concrete held together by rods of twisted steel. Small shards of ash-coated glass blanketed everything, and lumps of melted plastic lay as thick as hailstones. Here and there, she saw a scorched limb or a crushed head protruding from the debris, and the smell of burnt flesh hung thick in the air.
As Veta drew near the edge of the blast site, the green-blurred silhouette of a Spartan in SPI approached.
“Eight humans just inside the jungle line at two o’clock, watching us through a fence breach,” Olivia said over TEAMCOM. “Mark and Ash have them flanked.”
“No armor, civilian clothes,” Ash said softly. “One 8mm Sevine Arms Defender, otherwise their only weapons are pangas and kitchen cutlery. No obvious wounds, but they look scared out of their wits.”
“No problem,” Mark added. “If they start to lose it, we’ll have them in a crossfire.”
�
��Thanks, Mark,” Veta said. She glanced in the direction Olivia had indicated and, thirty meters away, saw the breach. Whoever had bombed the New Leaf complex had blasted a gap through the metal-lattice security fence. The ground beyond remained clear for twenty meters, then abruptly gave way to an emerald wall of jungle undergrowth. “But remember: civilians.”
“Scared civilians,” Mark countered. “And scared is dangerous. Things can get out of control pretty fast.”
“Then let’s give them a little time to settle down.”
Veta turned away from the breach, then stepped out of the crater onto a feather-moss lawn dotted by chunks of stone and concrete. The soil surrounding each piece of rubble was the same reddish-brown color as the tread castings she had recovered from the detention center on Taram—which was hardly surprising, since the GMoP database had identified the grounds of the New Leaf field complex as the probable source of the samples.
In all likelihood, the ruined lab behind her had been the location where the Tuwas were held for two weeks and then murdered. Logic suggested the bombing had been meant to conceal the identity of the captors—but so far, that was just a theory. Before she could develop evidence to support it, she needed to figure out exactly who had destroyed the lab.
“Olivia, walk the crater edge with me. Use your faceplate polarizer and inspect the ground from two angles.”
“What am I looking for?”
“Boot prints,” Veta said. “Whoever set those charges didn’t wait inside for the detonation. If we can get a tread pattern, we might be able to match it to a manufacturer—”
“And match the manufacturer to a supply chain,” Olivia finished. “Gotcha.”
“What’s the big mystery?” Mark asked. “Dark Moon is obviously covering its tracks.”
“That’s an assumption,” Veta said. “I want something solid.”