Decker's War Omnibus 1

by Eric Thomson

  The pinkish-beige glare of the Great Erg, a sea of sand dunes that stretched to the horizon in frozen waves under a relentless sun, held Harmon Amali in a quasi-meditative trance.

  Here and there, surrounding his private oasis, he could see rocky crags that broke through the surface, like forlorn islands standing silent sentry duty over an army of dust devils swirling along the sharp ridges, animated by the relentless wind. It seemed like nothing could live in the dry heat, yet Amali knew the desert was teeming with hidden life, most of it predatory, from the sand sharks lurking in the dunes, to the two-legged, nomadic kind moving from oasis to oasis on native pack animals adapted to the harsh environment.

  Were it not for the different luminosity of Nabhka’s sun and the occasional glimpse of strange animals, his remote, fortified compound could well have been the updated version of an old Foreign Legion outpost lost in the immensity of Earth’s Sahara desert.

  The door behind him slid open, but Amali kept his eyes on the horizon, knowing that it would be his aide.

  “Do you ever wonder why we experience thirst simply by looking at it?” He gestured towards the window with a hand holding a half-full glass of water. “A curious quirk of the human mind, I suppose. You have news?”

  “Yes, sir.” Lyle came to stand beside his employer. “We’ve lost track of Decker and his unknown companion. As you may recall, it took some effort to confirm his cover identity and track him down, which was finally accomplished once their ship docked at Merseaux station. There, however, he managed to kill two of the operatives charged with his discreet elimination before escaping to the surface under a new name and appearance. Even though our Sécurité Spéciale friends helped us, tracking his movements after that became tricky, not least because the Constabulary chose to show an interest in his movements. He was last spotted in Mishka, the second largest city on the planet. After that, nothing.”

  “This is not pleasing news, Lyle.” Amali’s voice was almost hypnotically soft. “I paid good money to have Decker removed once and for all.”

  The fact that his employer chose to use euphemisms for the word ‘murdered’ didn’t escape Lyle’s attention. Though powerful and ruthless, Amali had all his dirty work done at several removes and his choice of language reflected that detachment.

  “I’m sure he’ll be found again, sir.”

  “He’d better be. I would be chagrined to hear that he’s reached Nabhka, not only because it means we have a leak somewhere and he found out about my little retreat, but because the best hired operatives in the Commonwealth couldn’t track down one dumb non-com.”

  The statement didn’t call for a reply and Lyle, staring out at the midday glare, let it pass in silence, though he thought his employer’s low opinion of Decker to be a mistake. Any man who escaped slavery the way he had was far from stupid and if he was operating with the sanction and help of naval intelligence...

  “Just a reminder, sir,” he finally said, “Shayk Hysan will be arriving at four to present his business proposal. The kitchen has been ordered to prepare a traditional meal.”

  Amali took a sip of his rose-flavored water and nodded absently. Though he could run his vast business empire from this remote place, he enjoyed nothing more than making deals face-to-face, even the small ones found on Nabhka. Frontier planets, especially those who remained in the Commonwealth grudgingly, always presented interesting opportunities in what he liked to call the gray zone. The Shrehari occupation, some seventy years earlier, had left its mark on a planet and a population that had felt set apart from the rest of humanity long before the war, mostly by choice.

  “Indeed. Thank you, Lyle. You may carry on with your duties.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  The aide briefly bowed before leaving Amali to his silent contemplation of the Great Erg.

  *

  “Hmm,” Talyn sounded puzzled as she stared at the screen. “According to the passenger manifest, it seems that a Wenn and a Venzi did take the reserved berth.”

  “What?” Decker sat up so fast that he bumped the top of his skull against the upper bunk. “Who’d be playing a joke like that?”

  “Perhaps people who tracked us down on Merseaux? Since we seem to have vanished, they may have thought we might still take the same outbound ship under different names.”

  “Not good.” He stood and looked over her shoulder. “Either someone is way too smart, or they’ve got enough people to seed all outbound ships on spec. The only reason we’re on this one instead of another is that we need to make Nabhka sooner rather than later. If Amali decides to leave and hide elsewhere, we lose months of work tracking him down.”

  “And there’s your answer, Zack.” She turned around and looked up at him. “Aranjuez is the most obvious ship for someone in a hurry to reach Nabhka. If these iterations of Wenn and Venzi are half-way able, they’ll make us pretty quickly in confined quarters.”

  “It might already be done. We did enjoy the passenger lounge for supper and a drink after we broke orbit and weren’t particularly paying attention to folks who might be tailing us. Still, pretty ballsy to take those names. It’s almost as if they want to get a reaction.”

  “So we find out who they are and deal with them.”

  “Kill them, you mean? What if they’re gray legs and not Amali’s henchmen?”

  “Why does the word ‘deal’ always seem to mean ‘kill’ for you?”

  “Professional deformation.” He shrugged. “Why don’t we ask the purser to point them out to us at lunch? Then, we go sit at their table and have a nice conversation.”

  She considered his off-hand suggestion and nodded.

  “Sounds crazy, but sure, let’s do it. A little chutzpah can’t hurt, and if they’re Constabulary, we can fast-talk our way into a deal by showing some of our cards.”

  Aranjuez lacked even Xenophon’s primitive frills, and the passenger lounge wasn’t much more luxurious than the chow hall in a forward operating base. The drinks dispenser, however, met with Zack’s grudging approval, though he figured the only reason it held decent booze was so that passengers would get plastered enough to ignore the shitty surroundings.

  When they entered, it was already mostly full and noisy. Spotting one of the purser’s mates by the food line, they went over for a quick chat. The woman pointed at a table in the far corner, commenting that they’d come aboard literally as they were about to retract the gangplank in preparation for take-off.

  The little interplay didn’t go unnoticed by the pair who had taken on the Wenn and Venzi identities, and they looked at Zack and Hera expectantly as the two intelligence officers made their way across the compartment.

  “Mind if we join you?” Zack pulled out a chair and sat down without waiting for an answer. The woman stared at him with an amused smile, merriment dancing in her eyes. Talyn, who’d taken the other seat, looked from one to the other with a growing sense of suspicion. There was nothing remarkable about the middle-aged, bland looking couple, though, to a trained observer, their unfashionable clothing clearly hid strong, muscular limbs and possibly any number of deadly weapons.

  “I doubt they’ll mind,” she said to her partner. “If I’m not mistaken, Ser Wenn and Sera Venzi are related to Uncle Josiah. It makes a lot more sense than any of the alternatives.”

  “Indeed, Sera Pruw.” The male half of the duo inclined his head. “Word of your unpleasant experiences on Merseaux Station made it to our uncle’s ears via the subspace net, and as we were already on the planet, wrapping up another piece of business, he asked us to take on those identities and offer our assistance. HQ’s understanding is that the cousin has several teams trying to find you and remove you from the game.”

  While he was talking, his fingers were dancing on the tabletop, signaling in the secret battle language known only to naval intelligence operatives. Talyn replied in kind, acknowledging proof of their identity. Uncle Josiah was the current nickname for the head of their particular section.

&nb
sp; “So what now?” Venzi, who resembled a washed-out version of Hera Talyn, looked at Decker expectantly.

  “Now? We eat.” Decker stood up and without waiting for the others, made his way to the food line.

  *

  The cabin was crowded with all four of them. Wenn might not have been as big as Decker, but he still took up a fair amount of space on the lower bunk.

  “Let me say up front that we don’t know anything about the mission,” Venzi said, “or who the cousin and the game are. If we’re not to ask questions but only obey orders, we’ll understand. This doesn’t feel like a standard sort of outing.”

  Zack took a sip of his whiskey-soda, eyes on Talyn who, as the senior officer present, would have to make that call even though it was his personal mission.

  “This is about as black as it gets,” she started, “and if it goes pear-shaped ‘Uncle Josiah’ will disavow us. He’ll have no choice.”

  “Understood.” Wenn nodded gravely. “The Service wouldn’t have authorized it without an excellent reason.”

  “The very best. We’re on our way to Nabhka, where we believe Harmon Amali has holed up after finding out Chief Warrant Officer Decker, whom he had sold into slavery, came back from the dead.”

  Venzi let out a low whistle.

  “That’s nasty. I assume your orders are to terminate Mister Amali so no one else gets the idea that selling Armed Forces members is a fine thing to do?”

  “Terminate with extreme prejudice.” She nodded at Zack. “As a matter of fact, that’s his job – a kind of personal crusade, if you like. Mine, and now yours, is to get him where he can do it.”

  “Understood.” Venzi nodded, examining Zack in light of Talyn’s revelations.

  Between them, Decker and Talyn gave an edited account of their adventures, beginning with Inspector Grint.

  “I’m not surprised at the crooked cop,” Wenn said when they finished speaking. “The Sécurité Spéciale has infiltrated most government agencies, though hopefully intelligence remains clean. What I am surprised about is that they used him as a control for an assassination team in the first place. It’s probably what attracted the Professional Compliance Bureau’s attention and ended up with those two cops following him on Xenophon.”

  “And that earned him a broken neck. The folks we’re dealing with play for keeps.” Zack took another thoughtful sip.

  “Amali’s scared. Rich, powerful men like him, when they’re scared they lash out hard,” Venzi replied.

  “So do Marines who get sold as slaves – lash out hard, I mean.”

  “You guys have a plan, or is this on the fly?” Venzi asked.

  Decker shrugged.

  “The latest from your ‘uncle’ has Amali’s yacht in the Nabhka system, and we believe he has a gracious country home somewhere in the desert, which doesn’t exactly narrow it down since most of the bloody planet is a desert. What makes this double fun is the fact that the Nabhkans don’t really like outsiders, even those of their own faith, so finding help is going to be down to my picking up the contacts I made when I did a tour on Nabhka.”

  At the curious looks from the others, he explained.

  “The Corps rotates a regiment through there every nine months instead of posting a permanent garrison because it’s considered a hardship assignment, so that should tell you a lot. The Shrehari managed to suborn a splinter group of Nabhkan separatists at the onset of the last war, arm them and when the invasion fleet arrived got them to rise up against the Commonwealth garrison. A lot of our folks didn’t make the evacuation ships. Hard feelings die slowly on a planet like that.”

  “But they’ve let Amali set up house?”

  “Money talks when you’re dealing with their shayks. The majority of the population might be zealously pious, culturally narrow and technologically retarded, but their upper crust has no problems exchanging filthy lucre for luxuries.” Decker smirked. “Nabhka has nothing to offer except a lovely clearing house for smugglers and other assorted interstellar scum, and fat commissions tend to stick to rich fingers.”

  “How do you intend to find his place, let alone get there?”

  “Track down someone who’s got fat rich fingers, dislikes Amali, and wave some credits in his face. I can still remember how things work.”

  “Easier said than done, though.” Wenn didn’t sound enthusiastic.

  “Hey, I’m making this up as I’m going along,” Decker said, shrugging. “Intelligence work is new to me, so give me some slack.”

  “From what I’ve heard, you’re a natural,” the man replied with a friendly smile.

  “He’s a natural something alright,” Talyn muttered. Then in a louder voice, “Did anyone else aboard strike you as being not quite what they purport to be?”

  Venzi shook her head.

  “No, but that doesn’t mean much. The kind of money Amali’s got, he can pay for the best.”

  Zack snorted derisively.

  “The ones we came across on Merseaux station weren’t exactly the greatest.”

  “In a straight-on fight with you? Probably not,” Wenn agreed. “There aren’t too many assassins who can go toe-to-toe with an experienced pathfinder. But I’m speaking of hiding in plain sight.”

  “We’ll just have to keep our eyes open and our backs against the bulkhead until we get to Nabhka.” Talyn rose from the sole chair. “After that, it’ll be wild frontier territory where everything goes, including the Wenn and Venzi identities. You can revert back to whatever you were using on Merseaux the moment we step off because it’s a given your current names will raise big red flags.”

  “And yours won’t?”

  “It’s a chance we’ll have to take,” Talyn replied.

  “We just have to get through customs on the orbital,” Decker said. “Once on the surface, no one will be asking for credentials, only for creds.”

  *

  Nabhka station looked suitably dilapidated for something that passed as the primary orbital of a planet still trying hard to turn its back on the rest of human civilization. When they walked off the ship and down the gangway, a faint odor of garbage mixed with badly maintained environmental scrubbers hit their nostrils.

  “Do they do it on purpose to discourage visitors or are they just lousy engineers?” Venzi asked, not particularly expecting an answer.

  “Both,” Zack grunted. “Wait until you’ve visited the main souk dirtside.”

  The customs officer, a dark, unpleasant man with suspicious eyes, took his own sweet time to process each new arrival, making it clear that he wasn’t in any particular hurry.

  Many of the people ahead of them were ordered to the side for a detailed inspection of their luggage and persons by none too gentle underlings. When Decker stepped up to the raised podium, he handed over his ID wafer, to which he had stuck a fifty cred chip.

  “A good day to you, honorable officer.” He nodded politely. The man, feeling the little disc as he took Zack’s papers, looked at him with sudden interest.

  “Your purpose on Nabhka?”

  “Business, honorable officer.”

  After deftly removing the money, he gave the wafer back and nodded.

  “Welcome. Next.”

  “As I said,” Decker grinned at the others after they’d walked onto the station’s promenade, “leaving something on sticky fingers makes life easier and since it’s not coming out of our own pockets...”

  “Just how much of the discretionary money do you intend to pay out as bribes?”

  “As much as I have to, darling.” He blew Talyn a kiss. “And now to find a shuttle for Kish. Are you coming Ser Croyle and Sera Vasser?” The other agents had slowed their pace and were examining their surroundings intently.

  “No surveillance we could see,” the agent now known as Croyle whispered, “and no one paying us more attention than normal.”

  “First, they were looking for one man. A man and a woman threw them off,” Vasser said, “now that we’re a group of four, the
y’ll be even more confused until they figure it out, that is.”

  “Hopefully, we’ll have lost ourselves among the teeming multitudes dirt, or shall I say sandside.”

  The ticket price for the shuttle ride was extortionate, the bribes even more so, but they got first class seats on the next run to Kish, Nabhka’s capital and largest oasis. After seeing what second class looked like, they were happy to have paid extra.

  As Zack had said, it wasn’t coming out of their pockets, and the black ops fund didn’t exactly go for precise expense accounting.

  *

  “Very stylish,” Croyle said as he looked at his reflection in the mirror. “Desert chic.”

  “It’ll provide camouflage, and it really helps keep you cool in the midday heat.” Decker tossed the lower end of his kufiya around his face leaving only the eyes visible.

  They’d bought traditional robes and head covers the moment they landed in Kish, the two women going so far as to wear the veil favored by the most conservative members of Nabhkan society, which meant nearly everyone outside the wealthy classes.

  “Locals won’t talk to you if you’re an obvious off-worlder. If you respect their social rules and don’t stand out, they may decide the ancient laws of hospitality do apply just a little bit even for those, not of the faith.” Zack examined Talyn and Vasser critically, to make sure they would appear modest in the eyes of the locals.

  “It may be backward to make women cover up, but in this case, it’s pretty convenient. If the bad guys haven’t found us yet, now that we’re under a layer of Nabhka fashion, they don’t stand much of a chance.”

  “So far your ‘on the fly’ planning seems to be working out,” Croyle said, dropping on one of the sagging beds. “Any thoughts as to what we’ll do next?”

  “Find something to eat that won’t give us the runs,” Decker replied. “The locals are used to the bugs that have adapted to Nabhka. Us, not so much.”

  “We got our full spectrum inoculations within the last year.” The agent sounded dismissive.

  “Some of what can make the rounds here will laugh at your inoculations while it makes you camp out in the toilet.” Decker grimaced. “Saw a few of my troopers lose twenty percent of their body weight in less than two weeks when we were stationed here. Rule number one: never eat the street food and rule number two: never drink at any public fountain.”