by T J Mott
He gulped again. Unlocking the door, he braced himself to run and slapped the button on the hand dryer.
It whirred to life. And nothing interesting happened. But just as his heart began to sink in disappointment and fear that their mission was going to fail, the hand dryer burst into flames. His heart skipped a beat as he slammed the door open with his shoulder, turned left, and exited the building through the back door.
And then primal fear took over and he abandoned the rest of the mission. He couldn’t even remember what he was supposed to do next. All he knew was that he was two blocks away when the smoke became visible.
***
Thad heard a door in the back slam open violently, and looked just in time to watch Jason race out the back door. The two soldiers with him turned just as the back door latched shut, and then they shrugged at each other and went back to browsing the shop’s mediocre collection of booze.
I don’t blame him, Thad thought. His unexpected escort kept tripping up their plans. In a hurry, he’d arranged for Jason to meet him at this fueling station and attempt a mug-and-run, but trying to mug the shop clerk while two armed Avennians stood meters away would be suicide.
Yet the Foundation really needed those weapons…
He knew the mission was over. He and Ria had no choice but to deliver the cargo according to Avennia’s plans, and then return to the Foundation. Maybe, knowing what they knew now, they could make another attempt later, with some well-thought-out plans to deal with their escort. It wasn’t a failed mission, it was a learning opportunity.
If they could find out when the next weapons shipment was. Thad had helped Culper, a member of the Rebel Council, organize a basic intelligence-gathering structure in the city, but they were still learning. So far, most of the cargo the ARF had identified before transporting it was rather mundane. Stuff like food, electronics equipment, mechanical parts, and even troops themselves, occasionally. Discovering the weapons shipment had been a lucky break on Culper’s part.
Feeling resigned, Thad stepped up to the counter to pay the fuel bill. As he was doing so, the two soldiers walked up and deposited several expensive bottles of hard liquor on the counter. “This is going on his bill,” one of them said, pointing a menacing finger at Thaddeus.
“Of course,” the clerk said nervously, shooting a quick look of pity at Thad as he paid. The soldiers’ liquor cost more than the truck fuel.
Then the clerk made a face, and Thad knew something was wrong. At first he thought there was an issue with the Foundation account he’d been given access to, but then he smelled smoke. He followed the clerk’s eyes, turned around, and saw smoke pouring out of the short hallway which led to the restrooms and back door.
Jason? Thad thought. He smiled inwardly, but kept the look of shock on his face in case anyone was watching him. Maybe that kid’s smarter than I gave him credit for.
The clerk pulled a fire alarm somewhere behind the counter, and warning bells began to ring inside the shop. The two soldiers looked at each other, looking alert but not terribly alarmed by the situation. “Hey,” one of them said. “Go get the others from the truck. Let’s get everything we can before the building burns down!”
The other laughed and pointed a finger at Thad. “You! Hold the door open for us.”
Thad frowned. “Shouldn’t we be calling for firefighters?”
“What, are you stupid? This shop is owned by Ailonians. Come on, get moving! I want that entire liquor section in the truck, now!”
What is it with Avennians standing by and watching fires? he asked himself. First the bauxite refinery, now a fuel station…
He did his best to act like he was begrudgingly obeying the soldiers, yet inwardly he realized he could never have asked for a better diversion. Given the opportunity to loot from the locals, his escort had completely forgotten their task. The shipment of laser carbines was unguarded for the moment.
The smell of smoke intensified as the flames began to spread from wherever they’d started. Thad stood outside, holding the front door open with a foot, and as soon as all the soldiers had their backs turned to the trucks, the other ARF truck, the smaller one parked back-to-back with the one Thad had been driving, exploded into action. Ten Ailonian rebels jumped out of the cargo box, hopped into the other cargo box, and began tossing boxes between the two. To speed it up, the driver of the smaller truck started his engine and backed up until the two rear bumpers were nearly touching.
His heart started pounding as the four soldiers briskly left the building, each carrying a crate of liquor. They approached the trucks rapidly, opened the rear passenger doors, tossed their loot into the third row of seating…and then went back inside the shop for more as Ria stood near the front of the vehicle and watched.
By then, nearly half the shop was on fire. They grabbed a few more things and decided they were done. Thad followed them back to the truck, and the soldiers exchanged glances with each other. “They’re staying here,” one of the soldiers said.
“What?” another asked.
“Don’t want them reporting what we just did,” the first explained. “We’ll finish the delivery ourselves and explain we lost the two Foundation workers in the fire.”
Another soldier shrugged. “Sounds good to me.”
Thad’s heart began to pound from worry, and he braced for action. But they didn’t attack him. Instead, the four soldiers piled back into the front two rows of seating. Thad shot a worried glance at Ria, but the reassuring smile she gave him told him that she’d already flipped the tiny switch they’d hidden in the cab. The one that remotely disconnected the fuel controller’s electrical ground—and would trigger a time-delay igniter hidden near the main fuel tank.
The truck started. But rather than rumble to life, the engine instantly roared and whined, sounding like a jet engine running at full throttle. As it pulled forward, rebels quickly jumped out from its cargo box. And either the driver didn’t notice or didn’t care about the engine problem. The truck drove away, accelerating wildly with the brake lights on as the engine went into complete runaway.
Thad looked back at the building. The interior was filled with smoke and flames. He saw the two workers standing outside, looking dejected. “At least they got out safe,” he said to Ria. “I think it’s time we get out of here.”
“Yeah,” Ria agreed after a long moment, and he knew she was hurting from watching a local Ailonian-owned business burn to the ground. But there wasn’t anything they could do. Apparently the Avennian-controlled government offered little in the way of emergency services to free Ailonians.
They climbed into the cargo box of the smaller ARF truck, sitting down on the deck itself. “How much did you get?” Ria asked the others who sat back there, eyeing the boxes haphazardly tossed around them.
“We got nearly half of them before the other truck pulled away.”
“That’s better than nothing,” Ria said.
“Actually,” Thad pointed out, “I think it means we’ll get away with it. When that truck catches fire, there will be plenty of destroyed weapons at the end. They’ll see that and hopefully not realize that some are missing.”
Their truck drove out onto the main road. A klick down the road, they passed by the first ARF truck. It had died in the middle of the street, and now it was completely engulfed in flames as four angry Avennian Army soldiers stood nearby and watched.
He slid over next to Ria and put an arm around her from the side, seeing how sad she looked. “Hey.”
She smiled at him for a moment, but it looked forced, and then she shook her head. “I know we’re at war, and the other side doesn’t realize it yet. But it still hurts. Somewhere, an Ailonian businessman who avoided slavery just lost everything because we burned his shop down.”
“I know,” he said softly. “I’m sorry.”
She leaned into his side and they rode in silence.
***
Thad stood before the Rebel Council again. Ron, the ARF and Reb
el quartermaster, stood accusingly to one side.
“Mr. Messier,” Abram said angrily, exchanging glances with Ron. “You’re putting the Foundation in a tight spot. The government is forcing more and more of their logistics on us, and now you are burning out our own trucks during your covert missions!” Thad kept his face blank and nodded. His reaction only inflamed Abram further. “And furthermore, we’re falling behind on regular shipments! Ailonian slaves are not getting food or medical supplies, because our trucks are busy carrying toilet paper for the Avennian Army, and it’s all your fault!”
Thaddeus scanned the other Council members, letting his eyes momentarily connect with each of theirs in turn, except for Abram. “May I remind the Council that the resistance now has a significant stockpile of looted military and survival supplies?” he asked. Besides the four hundred laser carbines he and Ria had recently helped steal, ARF workers had been quietly skimming a few percentage points worth of cargo from each unescorted cargo run they made for the Avennians. And with dozens of cargo runs per day, over the course of a few weeks it had added up quickly. So far, the authorities hadn’t seemed to notice. Thad’s assumption was that the Avennian logistics system wasn’t very organized or astute.
And, the more he thought about it, the less it surprised him. Everything he saw, everything he heard about how the Avennians operated, both firsthand and from reports coming up through Culper’s new intelligence division, pointed at the local Avennian regime being naive and somewhat incompetent. He didn’t know Avennian history in detail, but he did know that their war with Ailon had been their first real war in centuries. They simply weren’t that experienced in occupying other territory. While they were good at enforcing via terror—everyone was afraid of the Avennians, given their proclivity to shoot down slaves for almost any infraction—they were clearly amateurs.
Well, amateurs compared to the forces Thaddeus was used to commanding, he realized. He had access to some of the best troops in the galaxy. But Avennia was just like many of the small independent governments outside of the Norma Empire. They were just another little blip in the vast, mostly-unexplored Independent Regions, with few neighbors except for their own colony worlds such as Ailon.
And, having never fought what Thaddeus would consider a real war or insurgency, Avennia still believed that the Ailon Relief Foundation was nothing more than a bunch of naive, idealistic expatriates willing to waste their own time and money and effort to support the Ailon slaves with almost no help from the government. They had led the Foundation to believe that without them, the slaves would get no food or medical attention, and in return the Foundation had led the Avennians to believe that they actually believed that. Avennia just didn’t have the experience to anticipate that the ARF was a ruse, a front, an enemy pretending to be a complacent neutral.
“What good are all those supplies,” Abram growled, his voice steadily elevating into a shout, “if all the slaves we hope to free have starved to death by the time we’re ready to fight!”
Thad raised an eyebrow. “We’ll be ready soon,” he responded. “Culper’s new intelligence network has given us lots of valuable information on the Avennians. Our plan to supply ourselves with badly-needed military supplies is succeeding. Our underground training has gone quite well, and we’ll soon be able to start a guerilla campaign.”
“And yet the Avennian Army vastly outnumbers us!” Abram exclaimed. “If we don’t begin taking them down now, before they’re more organized against us, we’ll never stand a chance!”
Thaddeus sighed. “We still have a few more things to accomplish before things turn hot,” he explained. “But I promise, we’re getting close. And if we do things correctly now, those enemy troops will not be a problem later.”
Abram grunted, and Thaddeus knew the Ailonian leader didn’t believe him. Hopefully the rest of the Council could keep him restrained, although they seemed pretty cowed at the moment. He wondered what had happened before they’d called him into their most recent session.
Whatever it was, it was about to continue, he thought. Because Abram angrily dismissed him, and though he couldn’t understand the voices through the door as he left, he could tell there was lots of shouting and anger involved.
Chapter 18
Thad and Ria had driven back to Zhale together, on one of the final covert missions before the new rebellion could strike. This one was of vital importance, and so he’d decided to handle it himself.
One major issue was that Avennia had warships. The ARF, and by extension, the Ailonian Rebels, did not, and free Ailonians could not legally own starships. Thad’s were hundreds of light-years away and he’d blow his cover by calling them in. He still didn’t have a concrete plan for any enemy warships, but the first step was to discover how many and what kind the enemy even had.
He knew the solution probably involved taking over the Avennian surface-to-space gun in Orent, but he just didn’t have enough data yet to figure that one out. All he knew so far was that the gun was staffed by the Avennian Star Navy, not the Army. He had a low opinion of the Army so far, but he knew almost nothing about the Navy.
He was still pondering when he turned the car onto the main road for the tiny Zhale Spaceport. It was the middle of the night, and the spaceport shut down after dark. There just wasn’t enough traffic for it to be open all day.
Just like before, during the mission he’d forced Ria to scrap, the spaceport had minimal security at night. And so, just like before, they simply drove right onto the premises with the lights out, easily staying out of sight of the single AFPF car which was currently patrolling the facility. Once again, Thaddeus realized just how naive Ailon’s overlords were. No slaves here, thus, no security here.
He drove slowly with the lights out, approaching the spaceport’s main sensor and communications facility. It was a squat, one-story building surrounded by a collection of antennas and dishes. A simple chain link fence with a coiled strand of razorwire at the top surrounded it. Dim red points of light slowly blinked in unison on the antennas, but otherwise the facility looked lifeless and empty.
Security is so low, especially for an enslaved world, he thought. If I could just bring in a fleet and the Marines, this world would be free in a week or two.
He parked the car and they stepped out. Thad grabbed a backpack from the rear seat and they advanced together to the fence. He then pulled a pair of cutters from his pack and began clipping at the lower wires in the fence, down near the ground.
“This is almost too easy,” Ria observed in a light whisper that easily carried. For once, the wind was not blowing.
Thad nodded as he snipped the next wire. “I know. But I see this pattern everywhere. Avennia just hasn’t considered the possibility of an insurgency. The Army is here to control the slaves, but they’re not prepared for another war.”
“Well, let’s hope the Navy is just as unprepared.”
He silently agreed as he widened the hole in the fence, creating a flap of fence that he bent upwards, then he crawled through it to the other side. Shoving his backpack through first, Ria followed. She had a much easier time since she was so much smaller.
“It’s strange that there are no guards and no cameras,” he said as they moved towards the building.
“If you get caught, you get gunned down immediately. That’s always been enough around here.” He watched her shudder as she spoke. Ria was pretty good at masking her emotions most of the time, but he could tell she was afraid.
They reached the building. Thad looked around and soon found an exterior communications junction box. All the antenna feeds came and connected here, carried into the building on some kind of high-capacity digital trunk line. And the box wasn’t even locked. Apparently, they expected the fence to be enough. It opened with a metallic creak and he then began tracing out the bundles of cabling. “Well, that was easy,” he said, seeing the signal line he needed to alter. Looking towards Ria, he tried to flash her a reassuring smile.
Her face looked tight with worry. “You’re sure you can do this?”
Nodding, he pulled a box from his backpack. It had taken a lot of black market work to get it put together, but he was certain it would work. “This bundle carries the main feed from the phi-band sensors. Almost all sensor systems do their own processing and then send out a filtered data feed. Ailon is a low-traffic system so the data output is going to be silent or low-rate most of the time. This will re-transmit it over shortwave, and should be hard to trace since it’ll only go active if the sensors pick up something.” The blank look on her face told him she didn’t really know what he was saying. “Trust me,” he added. She nodded tightly, but still looked worried.
The box contained a few off-the-shelf—although illegal for non-Avennians—electronics components. One was an optical tap that would split some of the signal from the phi-band feed, allowing two units to receive. The systems in the building would receive the data feed as normal, but the other feed went to a comm transmitter contained in the same box. One that used a radio band that was almost certainly unused on Ailon, with a simple, yet highly illegal scrambling mechanism.
They had a matching receiver in the ARF headquarters. Once connected, they would know everything the Avennians knew about the local phi-band spectrum. They’d be able to see ships entering or exiting hyperspace near the star system.
More importantly, they’d be able to see any phi-band transponders operating nearby. Which would, in theory, help them to see what kind of warships Avennia operated in the Ailon system, so Thaddeus could decide on the best way to deal with—or avoid—them.
Working quickly so he wouldn’t disrupt the sensors for too long, he twisted the locking ring on the data feed connector, disconnected the optical line, and plugged it into his box. It could be a problem if an actual phi-band event occurred during the moment he had it disconnected. Then he snaked out a matching line from the box and plugged it in where the original one had been. He tapped the device’s power button, and, satisfied at the sequence of lights it flashed, closed its case and then closed up the comm box completely. From the outside, it was not obvious that anything had changed.