Under A Different Sun

by J. F. Holmes

  It was an argument they had often enough, and in a way, LeFiere used Martel as a check on his tendency to get carried away in his enjoyment of inflicting pain. It kept him, well, balanced.

  “Of course, Aldric. I just thought you would like to know that I am doing something to avenge your brother’s death.”

  “He died doing what he loved, what we both love—the fight. It is enough. If I may, Sir?” and he stood to go, an unpleasant look on his face.

  “Of course,” said the Major. When Martel had left, he started sending the video of Midshipman Schmetzer’s torture to a contact he knew of on Miranda, one he knew would make sure Meric saw it.

  Chapter 27

  “…after the Sino-American war of 2038 CE, the population of the North American continent fell to under thirty-eight million, with most survivors living in rural areas. Infrastructure breakdowns actually caused more loss of life than the limited nuclear attacks.

  Although the United States ceased to exist as a polity in 2041 CE, elements of the American Constitution were incorporated in the chartering documents of various Star Nations, though often this was more lip service than anything. Corporations continued to manipulate various factions…”

  Meric’s office com keyed, and he called, “Come in.” Setting aside the history book, he looked up as Zlatcov stepped through the doorway. The pilot looked horrible, seeming to have aged a dozen years in the last two weeks. Unless something was done about her, he knew that she’d jump ship tomorrow when they docked at Jamesport.

  “Have a seat, Nadija,” he said, motioning to a chair. Instead she remained standing, at a rigid position of attention, and laid a piece of paper on his desk.

  Her commander ignored it, instead looking at her and waiting for her to speak. After a tense moment, she said, “That is my resignation, Captain. I wish to debark at Jamesport, and I will need to withdraw all my credits from the ship’s account.”

  “OK,” he said simply, “dismissed.”

  She stood there, looking confused. “Aren’t you going to say anything?” she said after a moment.

  He picked his tablet back up and resumed reading, saying simply, “No. Good luck.”

  After she left, Meric commed the Chief. “Sparky, remember what we talked about last night? Have you come up with a solution?”

  “I think so, Captain. I’ll handle it,” she replied.

  “No doubt,” he laughed, and signed off.

  ****

  A very troubled Nadija Zlatcov made her way back to her cabin and resumed packing her bags, only pausing when there was a knock on her own door. Wiping her eyes, she looked over at the empty bunk where Jenny O’Neill’s personal effects were boxed up to send back to her relatives. The knock came again, and she opened the door.

  Chief Sparks stood in the doorway, looked around, and walked in, uninvited. The diminutive woman sat down at the chair that had been under O’Neill’s desk, turning it around to lean on the back. She said nothing, just stared at the pilot.

  “Either say something, or get out,” said Zlatcov, turning her back on the Chief.

  Her face was slammed into the bunk, knocking her sprawling onto the floor. She tried to get up, but a boot hammered into the back of her neck, making her see stars. Then the chair legs landed on her head, pinning the Russian to the floor, the smaller woman leaning all her weight into it to hold her.

  The pilot struggled to push herself up, but a cross brace held her tightly; she couldn’t move her neck and had no leverage. Instead, she swept her legs across the Chief’s ankle, sending her sprawling. Instantly the pilot was up and kicking at her opponent.

  Sparks grinned, took a kick on her arm, and flipped onto her feet. The next fifteen seconds were a flurry of strikes, blows and blocks, all confined to the narrow area between the bunks, neither giving quarter. The Chief used her smaller size to her advantage, getting under Zlatcov’s guard and landing a blow to her solar plexus. Her breath left her in a whoosh, and the pilot collapsed onto her bunk.

  Sparks whipped out a knife from her boot and held it to Zlatcov’s neck, the razor sharp ceramic blade just along the artery. She watched as the pilot’s blue eyes grew wide, and grinned.

  “So Meric sent you to shame me into staying?” asked the Russian, shakily.

  “Nope,” said Sparks. “I came here to kill you. Still haven’t made up my mind yet.” She pressed the flat of the blade a little closer. “Better to do it now, then have you get some other good people killed.”

  “Please…don’t,” whispered Zlatcov. Her whole body was shaking.

  Sparks sat back and the knife disappeared. “So you do want to live,” she said, matter of factly.

  To her surprise, Nadija Zlatcov did. She felt it scream out from deep inside her soul, and started to weep. Sparks knelt in front of her and put her arms around the woman’s shoulders, holding her tightly.

  “It’s OK, I know all about wanting to die. I’ve been there. You screwed up, Nadija, and I have too. Just remember, we’re in a war, and the bad guys will screw up, too. We’re human.”

  “But…Jenny…” sobbed Zlatcov.

  “Was a soldier, like you, like me. She knew the risks, and took them. Was it any different when you were in the CCCP Fleet?”

  “But, we do this for money. It IS different.”

  Sparks laughed, a deep laugh made rough by too many cigarettes. “Do you really think that we do this for MONEY? We do it because we love it. There are a thousand easier ways to make money, Nadija.” She paused and looked at her with a smile, then continued, “And you’re going to keep doing it, because you want to live.”

  “What do you mean? Live? I will live if I leave this stupid war.”

  The Chief shook her head. “No, sister. Leave this life, and sure as shit, you’ll be sitting in a Jamesport alley a year from now, pushing smack into your arm, or a wire in your head, turning into a braindead vegetable.”

  ****

  Meric looked up as his door chimed again, and said, “Come in.” He was never going to finish reading his history book, though what he was actually doing was avoiding looking at the ship’s books.

  Zlatcov strode in, took the paper that was still sitting on his desk, spun, and without a word, walked out. She turned right and disappeared down the corridor, and in a moment, Chief Sparks stuck her head in the door, a grin on her bloody and bruised face.

  “Should I ask?” said Meric.

  “No, you shouldn’t,” said the Chief. She nodded, and disappeared back toward the bridge.

  Meric shook his head and picked up the book again. Some things were always better left to the crew, he knew.

  Chapter 28

  “Unidentified ship on system bearing three niner zero, shut down all engines or you will be fired on. Only warning,” came the crisp, professional voice of Jamesport Control. They could see, even from ten light minutes out, the blinding flare of antimatter drives as interceptors lit off.

  Meric nodded, and McHale cut their power. They drifted, ballistic, while Box talked to Jamesport Control, establishing their credentials. Hanging above a blue and green jewel of a planet, a replica of Earth and the premier colony on this side of the Rift, Jamesport orbital was merely an extension of the sprawling planetside shipyard and naval base. Heavy antigrav tugs lowered ships of the line down through the atmosphere to rest in drydocks for major overhauls that couldn’t be done in vacuum.

  “Damn, look at that. Frenchies must have hit them pretty hard,” said Solbliatski. The intel officer was using the Lex’s powerful optics to scan the Britannic Seventh Fleet. “I can only count eight battleships and two carriers. Too far out to count anything smaller, and two of them have bad radiation leaks. Unless they’re detached, they’re down three BB’s and a CA. Of course, some might be on the far side of the planet, but that negates integrated fire…”

  “Not really our business. We need to get our own intel, do some recruiting and put in for repairs,” said Meric.

  “Speaking of which, we
need to talk about money,” said the XO. Merrifield was tapping at things on his pad, checking off the repairs done versus what was needed at the shipyard.

  Meric nodded and said, “Staff meeting at 1600 today, all section heads. We’ll discuss it then. Starboard watch has liberty starting at 0800 station time tomorrow, day on, day off with port watch. Teams’ liberty will be run by their chiefs.”

  A quiet settled on the bridge, and Meric instantly realized that he had said “Teams”, plural. It was a rote speech he used whenever they came into port; they had lost men and woman before, but only as individuals. For a moment, his heart felt extremely heavy, and he asked himself if it was worth it. For the first time, he didn’t know.

  Chief Sparks leaned over and asked, quietly, “Are we hiring another combat crew? We’re also short a shuttle.”

  “I already have someone in mind. I think I’m going to bring on Agostine’s crew,” he said tentatively. It would kill two birds with one stone. That brought a stifled bark of amusement from McHale, who quickly looked busy. The Chief, however, started to swell.

  “Listen, Sparky, before you flip your shit,” said Meric, holding up his hand, “I know your history with them. I’m sure Jones wouldn’t have thrown you through that window if you hadn’t gotten his boss into such a bad position. They’re fiercely loyal to each other.”

  “He’s a smart guy, a good Captain,” she grinned at the memory, “but not the best at hand to hand. I could have killed him right then and there.”

  “And I’m glad you didn’t, because you’d be dead right now,” said Meric. “O’Neill had you covered with her shotgun, and it was only her sister stepping in that made her put it up.” Jenny’s younger sister, Brit, ran with a soldier of fortune crew, the Irregular Scouts, based out of Jamesport orbital. They fought hard against the French, but drew the line at hurting bystanders; no one ever turned up their noses at a good mix up between mercs and privateer crews, though.

  “I think half the problem you might have is that they ARE such a tight knit group,” he ventured.

  “We can use a well-trained crew, no doubt, but they’re going to have to operate MY way. And that pig, Zivcovic, if he spits on my deck I’m going to kill him. What makes you think they’ll sign on anyway?” she said.

  “Because when Brit O’Neill finds out she’s lost another sister, she is going to flip her shit, and become an unstoppable force of nature,” answered Meric, “and when we go for our revenge, we’re going to need it. Especially their ground expertise.”

  ****

  “So tell me again how we got ambushed,” said Chief Sparks to Solbliatski. She and the Intel chief were in his cabin, mulling over the events of the past few weeks. Along with Meric, he was the only one on board who really knew her history, not just the rumors that ran around the crew deck. The old Annie Sparks, not that that was her real name, was about to come back to life.

  “I’ve been thinking about that extensively. Yes, they overhead a conversation that shouldn’t have happened. We put too much faith in Miranda station’s security protocols.” The old man had sent off a message to Margeri Brown, detailing the reason for the ambush, though not the number of casualties they had taken.

  Ski’s leathery skin wrinkled in concentration. “The tip I received was from Cal Mason; he’s never steered me wrong in twenty years.”

  “And who gave him that tip?” asked Sparks.

  “Well, the research project was pretty well known; it had been in the press. Location, though, that was classified. The informant who gave it to him seems to have disappeared.”

  “Dead?” she asked. She knew the ansible had been going non-stop between him and his sources, at incredible expense.

  “Probably. The DSG has agents in Jamesport, just as MI7 has theirs in all the French colonies. I think we fell prey to a pretty good misinformation campaign.”

  “Give me the info on your source, and I’ll run them down,” said Sparks, a look of grim determination on her face.

  Chapter 29

  Eighteen hours later, Annie Sparks wandered the streets outside the dry-dock facilities, the places where an unsuspecting tourist would quickly lose their valuables, if not their life. The Britannic colony was better policed than most, but there were always rough places. It kept the economy flowing and the pressure off, and the authorities often turned a blind eye.

  She took a seat at an outdoor ‘café’, in reality just a couple of chairs placed in front of a grimy pub. No one who knew her would recognize her, and that’s the way she wanted it. Sparks watched the people go by, mostly dock workers getting off shift and the people who catered to them. She herself was wearing a pair of grimy overalls and had grease on her face to match. Just another local, accent and all, having a beer after a hard day.

  The man she wanted to talk to seemed to be the essence of a Britannic lower class working stiff, greying hair and overly muscled from manhandling ship’s parts. In the eight hours since she’d grounded, though, Sparks had been busy, and knew he was a deep cover French operative. There were two dead bodies in her wake—one an unfortunate accident, the other intended. She’d paid a very heavy bribe to a friend at the Jamesport police, for twenty minutes’ access to their facial recognition software. The first man she was looking for, the missing cutout man, had shown up for a brief, fifteen second identification, using the picture given to her by Mason.

  She’d made her way to the balcony of the tenement he was hiding out in, using the early hours of the morning to cover scaling the wall, and cracked the lock on the window, swinging in. Ten minutes later, she had what she needed, though killing the woman with him really had been an accident. A fight was a fight was a fight. “Two million to set us up; hope it was worth it, pig,” she said to his corpse.

  Which had led her here, outside the King’s Arms. She watched the agent drinking a beer, noting that he held himself in constant awareness, and he’d already noted that, though she fit in, she was new. An object to be watched and marked. Time to take the offensive.

  “Hi,” she said, sliding into the seat next to him. She was no Mary Sue; her combat skills had come from long and hard training, but there were always the innate female “combat” skills that had disarmed many a man. “Mindy Carstairs, just got in from Three Down. Buy a girl a drink?” she asked.

  “Piss off, Downer,” he answered, turning away.

  “Well,” she answered in her best put out manner, “you don’t have to be an asshole about it. Bye!” She’d given him what she’d wanted him to see, a down on her luck nobody from a planet with a shithole reputation, looking to make a quick buck. Sparks took her beer back to the table and sat down again, not looking at the man, only occasionally glancing in the window across the street to see if he was still there.

  When he got up and went inside, she saw the half-drunk beer glass, and figured he’d gone to relieve himself. Taking a chance, she stood and brushed by the table, dropping the micro transmitter adhesive side up on his chair, and went and ordered herself another one. Seeing him come back out and sit down again, she smiled a small smile to herself. When the Poison team got her call, there would be a reckoning.

  The man finished the beer and left, unaware that he now had a passive locator beacon attached to his coveralls. It was a tiny piece of radioactive material that would be picked up easily by a shuttle scanner; right now Zlatcov was doing practice gunnery runs at the Jamesport Rod & Gun club, a ten thousand acre free fire zone that rented out airspace and targets. In the back of the shuttle, Team Poison sat with full combat gear, Scotty Orr watching the tracker.

  Sparks let the man walk away, and said into her throat mic, “Moving. I’m staying put. Let’s see where he goes.”

  “Roger,” answered Orr.

  She could have gone back to her contact in the Jamesport police, but even that one time had been expensive, more than they could afford. Combining that with a bribe to quiet whatever ruckus developed when they hit them would put a very big dent in the Lady Lex’s b
udget.

  After twenty minutes, she drained her own beer and got up, walked over to where a couple were sitting at another table fifty meters away, and sat down. “Evening, kids, God save the king and all that. Next time, try not to be so bloody obvious, as you might say.”

  “Chief Sparks,” answered the man, the older of the MI7 agents, “we’re bloody obvious because we WANT to be bloody obvious. Your target there kept eyeing us, and it helped take attention off of you. Just please, try not to level any buildings?”

  “If you know who he is, why don’t you go after him? Or tell us where he is?” she asked.

  The woman glanced at her companion for confirmation, and he nodded. “Office politics, Chief. We have our factions too. And we can blame this one on your ship, and continue to watch the others. I will say that there’s a meeting tonight, wherever he happens to go. If you could tell us whom, before Naval Intelligence finds out…”

  “Ah, I see, MI7 vs the BNI!” she smiled. “Well, don’t worry, we’ll do your dirty work for you. Have a good evening, and I hope to never see you again.”

  “Oh, you won’t unless we want you to, Ms. Strauss.”

  Sparks froze at the mention of her real name, instantly on alert. The man smiled, nodded, and the couple walked off.

  “Goddamn, I’m glad I’m out of that game,” she muttered.

  Chapter 30

  “And we’ve got him stationary. Nadija, bring us around the city, bearing 273 degrees, and take us to fifteen thousand so we can get a hot spot on him.” Rob Knight was looking over Orr’s shoulder, watching the display.

  For this mission, Zlatcov had installed a Forward Looking Infrared Scanner pod on the shuttle, and Orr matched it to the location of the tracker. They had tied into the Jamesport GPS system, and the pilot carefully lifted and rotated the ship in the direction indicated.

  “And…there we go. Four bodies, inside a storage facility, one on the outside on each end,” said Orr.