The Orion Deception

by Tom Bielawski

  But what was going on out there? Was it an engagement between police or Commonwealth Guard Cutters and criminals? He looked toward the flight attendant who had strapped into her seat at the front of the first class cabin. But the beautiful thirty-something woman maintained a forced jovial expression and would not meet his gaze. The other passengers were abuzz with chatter, speculating on the nature of the explosions and the terrible possibilities of piracy.

  And yet, something very strange was happening beyond the explosions and the sealing of the compartment doors. Standard Commonwealth protocol required the crew of a passenger carrying ship to inform its passengers of any dangers that were anticipated and of those dangers that occur along the flight path. Typically these disturbances consisted of bad space-weather, debris fields and other passing spacecraft. Occasionally, passenger craft in the Outer System wandered into war zones or were accosted by pirates, but the Inner System was a very safe place for space travel. Heck grimly noted that today the intercom had been silent since their captain announced he had engaged artificial Earth gravity.

  Heck pressed the button that activated the computer system that all first class passengers had access to, but the holographic console would not turn on. He was getting angry. He was locked into his cabin, the flight attendant seemed to have an idea what was happening but wasn't talking, and the rest of the passengers seemed oblivious of the danger. Had he been betrayed, set up? Whatever the case, it was time to act. He woke Lainne who looked about, bleary-eyed and perplexed. But the woman had come to know enough about Heck Thomas to understand the expression on his face meant business. "Time to go," he said.

  "Sir!" came the stern command of a flight attendant as Heck stood and helped Lainne to her feet. Then the very real sounds of one ship attaching itself to another reverberated through the hull and the entire cabin. "Return to your seat!"

  "What's the meaning of this?" Heck demanded, displaying inconsequential data streams on his holophone computer so as to appear important. He and Lainne began making their way forward in the cabin. "I have a critical business meeting on ROS!"

  "I'm sorry sir," said the woman more firmly. Her tone of voice indicated that she was anything but sorry. She unbuckled herself, still wearing a forced smile, and approached the ex-lawman. Heck noticed a confidence about the woman as she stalked down the aisle. Her arms seemed loose and she kept her hands just above her waist. It was a mark of offensive/defensive tactics training of some variety; keeping ones hands in front and just above waist level made it easy to grab or punch another person. And Heck noticed her uniform was not typical flight attendant garb, it was tight fitting but made from flexible fabric. When she stopped she was facing him in a subtly camouflaged fighting stance with her feet apart and her hands loosely held together before her. "You must return to your seat, you are creating a disturbance."

  By now Heck and Lainne were standing midway through the first class cabin, next to the emergency hatch. "Look, Wendy," he said with a glance at her name tag. The other passengers were now beginning to see that the situation was more serious than they thought. A few were alert to the disturbance that Heck was now creating. "You tell the captain of this hunk of junk to get it moving! Do you know who I am? I'll see to it that the next assignment for you and the rest of this crew will be on a trash hulk in the Outer System!"

  A smirk crept into the attendant's face and Heck's suspicions were confirmed. Her cocky over confidence told him that she was indeed part of whatever was transpiring; probably a high-jacking.

  Of all the luck!

  "Return to your seat!" said the woman, glancing expectantly about the cabin. The passengers who had been sleeping were waking to the disturbance while others were becoming aware that their computer systems had been turned off and they could not make calls.

  "This is outrageous!" he was shouting now. "You can't do this to me!" A few of the passengers nearby seemed to empathize with Heck and stood, grumbling encouraging words and demanding explanations. Yet a few others seemed inclined to intervene on behalf of the crew. Heck was playing a bigger game now and it was time to get things fired up.

  The woman put a hand on Heck's shoulder and tried to steer him back to his seat. Her grip was strong and her fingers dug painfully into bone and muscle. She was clearly trained in tactics and intentionally manipulated a pressure point in his shoulder to induce pain. But the woman didn't know precisely who she was dealing with, even though Heck now suspected she was operating under instructions from somewhere else. He anticipated this however, and drove his knee into her thigh followed by a fist to her solar plexus. With the attendant stunned, he was able to break free from her grasp. In one smooth motion he picked the woman up and threw her over a seat where she landed in another passenger's lap.

  Things degenerated very quickly then, but that had been Heck's plan from the beginning. A few passengers rose from their seats and advanced on Heck, outraged that he would behave so recklessly. Another flight attendant burst into the cabin through the cockpit door, which should have remained closed during such dangerous situations, and headed for Heck. Lainne, who seemed horrified by what her friend had just done, looked as though she might just help the other passengers subdue him.

  "Your bastard!" she screamed as they stood beside the emergency escape craft. "I've had all I can take of your madness!" Then Lainne shoved him, hard, and he fell against the emergency hatch just as shots rang out in the cabin. Passengers yelled and jumped as mores shots cracked in the enclosed space and Heck dragged Lainne down. He yanked down on the large red lever as Lainne fell on top of him and the emergency hatch opened. Then an alarm sounded and the lights in the cabin shifted from amber to red, flashing ominously. Heck slid through the open hatch pulling Lainne in behind him.

  Chaos reigned in the first class cabin as Heck closed the hatch and secured it. But just before the escape craft pressurized and the door sealed closed, a voice from Heck's past drifted through the noise and carried with it a warning. The sound of that voice shocked him to the core. And though that man was surely dead, there was no mistaking the voice.

  "I'll see you in Hell, Heck Thomas!" came the grim voice over the staticky ship intercom.

  Heck plastered his face against the porthole with a gun in his hand, locking gazes with a grim faced man still in the cabin as the automatic launch sequence began. The face of a ghost, Stephen Doolin, glared back at him with the promise of death in his eyes.

  "Who was that?" asked Lainne as the escape craft rocketed away . The force of the launch momentarily pinned Heck against the bulkhead until the effects of the artificial gravity from spaceliner were far behind. Then he drifted slowly through the cabin of the escape craft in zero-gravity, trying to make his way to the controls.

  "Not now," he growled. Heck forced himself into Business Mode. He could ill afford to be distracted by emotion or internal conflict at this critical moment and vowed to deal with that mysterious appearance later.

  He strapped himself into the pilot's seat and holocontrols flared to life before him. He breathed a sigh of relief that Dooly, or whoever he was working with, hadn't thought of locking down the controls of the escape craft. It was a simple enough thing for a novice to overlook; escape craft were designed to be entirely self-sufficient in the event that their mother craft was rendered inoperable or otherwise compromised.

  "Is there anything I can do?"

  "Yes," he said quietly. Heck reached into a pocket and removed a small, self-contained, hardware encrypted data drive that was no bigger than his thumbnail. He flicked the drive with his fingers and launched it through the zero-g air of the escape craft. "Press the rounded corner of that drive and place it on the console in front of you."

  Lainne caught the drive before it had a chance to careen off the bulkheads.

  "Thank you for playing along," he said. "I thought for a moment you were going to hand me over to the crew!"

  "Who said I was playing?" she answered, a smile playing about her lips. Lainne did as sh
e was asked and the small drive flared to life. A holographic computer interface danced before her. The words engage comm stream encryption? danced near a small holographic "OK" button. Lainne had been around Heck long enough to know not to ask him want to do next. He was going to tell her.

  "Engage it," he said simply.

  Lainne nodded and flicked the "OK" image with her finger. The interface disappeared and the communications console flared to life. A number of things that Lainne did not understand were happening at once. Virtual status meters revealed that several processes were rapidly nearing completion. When they did, the drive and the communications console shut down.

  "What just happened?"

  "We sent a coded message and activated an override for autopilot functions of this craft." Heck nodded at the controls before him, satisfied that he now had command of the spacecraft. "We've also created a false flight plan for whoever might decide to try following us."

  Lainne glanced at the consoles that displayed the results of a continual array of radial scans emanating from the craft. "It doesn't seem that anyone is."

  "Not yet anyway."

  Lainne let out a deep breath. Suddenly she remembered how tired she was and had to fight to keep her eyes open. She never thought it was possible that she would be so tired that she might fall asleep in the middle of a fight for survival.

  "What do we do now?" she asked sleepily.

  "We hide."

  "That sounds good," she said, leaning back in her comfortable chair. Within minutes she was asleep. Heck envied her that. He had long ago dulled down his own human instincts for self-preservation to gain the survival advantage. His own body was so attuned now that he would probably simply fall down dead before it made him aware that he actually needed to sleep.

  Heck thrummed his fingers on the armrest of the chair. His escape craft was the size of the archaic, double-decker, red passenger buses that cruise the streets of Churchill Drift. Fortunately the velocity with which the craft had been propelled from the spaceliner made the spectacle of the hijacking behind them visible only on the long range scanner. No one had followed them.

  There was no maneuvering required now. When Lainne had activated the device that engaged the comm stream, the device had also reprogrammed the navigation system with a new destination into the onboard computer. Heck simply had to pilot the craft in the proper direction and watch the scans for potential collision threats.

  Thoughts of the ghostly face in the porthole drifted into Heck's mind as the escape craft blasted away from the spaceliner.

  I killed him! he thought to himself. His mind reached for explanations about how Dooly could have possibly survived the fatal wound that Heck had given him. It didn't seem possible. Perhaps he was still barely alive as he lay there on the deck of the Stalin, his blood pooling beneath him. He always was a tough son-of-a-bitch.

  Perhaps someone had whisked his body away shortly after he began his futile quest to find Laylara. Could Agent Hall have been the one? David Hall didn't strike Heck as the type to go to any great length to save a dying traitor, and he didn't seem careless enough to allow a traitor to escape custody. But stranger things had happened to the ex-lawman.

  Maybe someone got to his family, he thought grimly. Or maybe Hall was on his own side all along.

  Either way it didn't really matter to Heck. Dooly was alive. There was no mistaking the man's face or his voice and Heck was certain it was no trick of an ID cloaker. It was clear that Dooly recognized Heck the moment he saw his old partner and mentor, his old friend. The fact that Dooly was out carousing with pirates, or terrorists, or whatever they were, revealed that Dooly was indeed now on the wrong side of the law. But for how long? How much had Dooly done to subvert the Commonwealth over the years the two had been partners? Heck hadn't given the subject a lot thought until now. Truthfully, the disillusioned lawman didn't really care enough about the Commonwealth now to care what damage Dooly had done to its security. And he had not felt the need to hold a grudge against his ex-partner's treachery until now.

  Now Heck made a silent vow for retribution. Stephen Doolin would pay for his crimes and for his betrayal, and Heck Thomas would see to it that he paid dearly.

  Horatio Arnold was having a bad day. He was being excoriated in the media, something he was very much unused to. He had been successful in eliminating his opposition in Parliament and replacing them with those of like minds, but suspicions from within his government were rising. Rumors of his corruption were spreading like wildfire and even the media had fallen out of his influence, something that he had enjoyed for a long time. He was now forced to face the possibility of taking over the media industry of the Commonwealth to attain his goals.

  If things continued to degenerate he might be forced to start his war before he was ready. Although war would give him the opportunity to declare martial law, something that would take Arnold most of the way to his goal of creating an empire.

  "Mike!" he shouted, sitting down behind his desk and clicking off the newsfeeds.

  "Yes, Mr. Prime Minister?" came the reply of his Chief of Staff, Mike LeFevre, over the comm system.

  "What's next on the schedule?"

  "You have a meeting with representatives of the Terran States this afternoon."

  "What's the call on that?"

  "Polling shows your message is resonating powerfully with the people of the Terran States, though their own governments are skeptical of you."

  "I don't care about the local governments, they are pawns."

  "Pawns that you cannot yet sacrifice, sir."

  "I know," he said wearily. "I will put on my game face and tell them how the money from Drift States will fix all their problems."

  "What will you tell the Drift State representatives sir?"

  "The opposite, of course."

  "Mr. Prime Minister, they will know you are lying to them."

  "I don't care. Let them accuse me of it."

  The Chief of Staff did not respond. Arnold knew the man was queasy about his plans but Mike was loyal. And Mike gave him something he did not have, the perspective of doubt. Arnold never doubted his own plans and tended to suffer from overconfidence. But the Chief of Staff filled that bill nicely, and never failed to provide the Prime Minister with the counter-perspective he needed to shore up details. If the remaining Drift States openly accused the PM of deceit, he would use that to stir the Terran States against them.

  Arnold looked out his window at Palace Drift, at the scurrying rats moving about the city to somebody else's bidding. More than likely those scurrying wretches were running at the whim of their masters in Parliament. It made him angry, he wanted to be the only one whose bidding mattered and he could not wait until the day when he dissolved Parliament.

  Soon, he promised himself. Soon.

  "Sir," piped in Mike's voice over the comm. "Fleet Marshal Vladimir is here."

  "Send him in." Anton Vladimir was a man in whom Arnold placed great trust. They were old acquaintances, Arnold having been under the older Russian's command during his own Fleet service many decades ago. But Arnold cashed in his education benefits and left the service, choosing a life of politics over service. Vladimir was a ruthless tactician and excelled in warfare. He was a natural officer and a born leader whose place was in the midst of battle. He rose through much of the ranks by skill, and when he hit a roadblock to his advancement, he destroyed it. Vladimir and Arnold were two of a kind.

  The door opened and the scar-faced old Russian marched in, stopped, and snapped smartly to attention with his cover tucked under his left arm. The chest of his dark uniform was adorned with medals, ribbons and badges. Gold epaulettes decorated the top of his shoulders and a fourragère adorned his left shoulder.

  "Vlad!" he said as he rose to face his old friend. Ever the disciplinarian, Vladimir remained stoic and quiet until told otherwise. "It is good to see you, my friend. Please, sit down."

  Now that he had been permitted to relax, Vladimir smiled broa
dly and shook his old friend's hand as he sat down in the plush anti-grav chair.

  "It is good to see you, Horatio. What can I do for you?"

  "Are we ready to outfit the Fleet with our new weapons?"

  "All is moving according to plan," replied the Russian. "When the time comes, the Fleet will be ready for war."

  "You don't worry about conscientious objectors? What about those who may not wish to take action against their countrymen?"

  "Mr. Prime Minister, I have been weeding out the officers who pose a threat to our plans for the past three years."

  "Ah, Anton. Such a practical general! That is why I chose you. We should expect those officers to defect to the other side, I suppose."

  "They will not be fighting for anyone, sir," answered Vladimir with a dark, scar-faced, smile. "The officer corps that remains will be loyal. Should any declare opposition to us, they will be executed. I have also taken great pains to root out dissidents within the ranks, but that is more problematic due to their larger numbers."

  "How have you handled it?" asked Arnold, knowing well that Vladimir had indeed handled it.

  "I have intelligence officers posing as enlisted men throughout the Fleet. Enlisted troops gossip and spread rumors. When my intelligence officers learn of an enlisted person speaking too boldly about anyone of importance in the fleet or the government, they find themselves suddenly flushed out of an airlock."

  "Clever, Vladimir," commented the PM, pouring a glass of wine for his visitor from a very expensive Lunar crystal carafe. "A campaign of fear! The young enlisted man sees what happens when another talks of treason and does not want to end up on the wrong side of an air lock. I like it. How does my fleet match up against this upstart Palmetto Defense Force?"