by Eric Thomson
“Where’s our next destination?” Decker lowered his scanner and glanced at Catlow. “I’m assuming that we’re not spending all of our time here watching in shifts. A good recon means getting a feel for the people as well as the ground.”
“You’re right.” The rebel platoon leader nodded. “We aren’t spending all of our time here. We got word that one of our guys working things in town - you know, regular job during the day, dastardly rebel at night – vanished on Monday.”
“Militia?”
“Without a doubt. They’ll have brought him to Iskellian for interrogation by the intelligence branch. Nasty people, that, worse than the uniformed thugs patrolling the streets. Anyways, we need to talk to the guy running things in this area. He owns a farm down there.”
“Cell leader?” It was Decker’s turn to grimace. “If your vanished man reported to the farmer in question, it’s only a matter of time before a snatch team comes swooping in. Nobody can resist interrogation unless they’ve been conditioned and then we simply die when the bastards try.”
“You’ve been conditioned?” Catlow sounded surprised.
“Fact. It’s a requirement in my former line of business. When were you planning on having your little coffee klatch?”
“After dark. The militia doesn’t go roaming at night, and most honest citizens are indoors. Fewer eyes on the countryside then.”
“The snatch team will likely do the same when they figure everyone in the family is in one place, ready to be cuffed and dragged off to the dungeons. Better hope that it didn’t go down while we were playing happy wanderers in the backwoods last night.”
A worried look crossed Catlow’s face.
“You think that might have happened?”
“He was taken three days ago. Assuming it was the locals who made the arrest, figure on twenty-four hours to get him to Iskellian and in the custody of militia intelligence. Few people last more than forty-eight hours, most not even that long, but some interrogators are sadists at heart and like to draw things out if there isn’t an immediate operational need.”
“So I heard.”
“The Fleet gets rid of those the moment they’re found out, but they tend to gravitate to national guards, private corporations, or militias. Chances are good you have that type here. Counter-insurgencies are like catnip for psychopaths. I think he’s spilled his guts by now. The only question is whether or not the militia went for your cell leader immediately or they’re playing it out slowly.”
“What do you figure?”
“No idea. It’s either over already, or it’ll happen before tomorrow morning. Flip a coin. The only way to find out is to go there. Carefully. If they’ve done the deed, they’ll leave a couple of troopers behind to see if anyone comes for a look.”
“Not to be too nosy, Zack, but you seem to know a lot about this kind of stuff. A lot more than me in any case.”
“That’s because you and your buddies are new at the whole guerrilla war thing. I was on the Marine end of it often enough that I’ve learned the score, and the folks who met my little buddy here,” he patted his blaster, “weren’t always the ones called ‘rebels.' May I suggest that a pair of your guys take over the observation duties so we can plan our next move?”
Catlow stared down at the plain again, clearly troubled. He raised his binoculars and aimed them at a particular cluster of buildings a few kilometers south of Tianjin proper.
“I can’t see anything abnormal,” he said after a long moment of silence, “but then I probably wouldn’t if the militia’s beaten us to the punch and are waiting for someone to show up.”
He made sure Zack was able to zero in on the farm and waited.
“I don’t know what it should normally look like,” the Marine finally said, “but I can’t see traces of a raid, which really means squat. We’ll have to go down there. The question is when.”
**
Rika Kozlev emerged from the bathroom suite and smiled at Harend, still in bed, head propped up by a muscular arm. He openly admired her lean body, fascinated as ever by the tattoo wrapped around her torso like a serpent of ancient myth.
“One more for the road, Cen?” She asked, sitting down beside him.
He ran his fingers along her jaw line and down her arm before briefly brushing her nipples.
“Still horny?”
He smiled lazily, recalling her intense craving a few hours earlier.
“You know what a good session with rebel trash does to my hormones.” She let her hand stray under the bed sheet and grinned. “Your mouth says maybe, but the rest of you is saying something very different. We have plenty of time before briefing the snatch team. Larn Takan and his family aren’t going anywhere. I’ve put eyes on his farm, remember? If we’re lucky, we might pick up a few more independence sympathizers. Get enough of them under my care and I’ll find the guerrillas’ hideouts. Then, you can have fun sweeping them up.”
The glow in her eyes when she spoke of taking prisoners into her care should have chilled Harend, but he’d gotten used to her particular tastes. Provided she got results, he was content to let her do as she pleased. Dealing with the Garonne situation was his last chance at promotion and the ability to indulge in his expensive tastes well into retirement.
Satisfying Rika Kozlev’s voracious sexual appetite to keep her happy was a small sacrifice to make. After all, an indulgence like the Glen Arcturus was hard to come by on a colonel’s pay, especially out here in the back end of the Commonwealth. And besides, she was fun in bed, something he couldn’t say about the wife he’d left behind on Celeste.
**
“Who is this?” Talyn asked, turning her screen towards Corde.
After a quick breakfast in the mess hall, the two women had set themselves the task of reviewing all of the intelligence files the rebels had amassed, not just the digests but the raw data, to see if fresh eyes could find something new in old reports.
She pointed at a woman in militia uniform with a captain’s rank insignia, smiling at whoever captured the image. She was standing close enough to Colonel Harend, who was scowling at something or someone, to suggest a degree of intimacy.
“As far as we know, her name is Rika Kozlev. We think she’s Harend’s adjutant or aide, though she keeps mostly out of sight. There’s not much on her in our files, but she too is probably Celeste National Guard.”
Talyn zoomed in on the narrow face framed by a pixie haircut and studied it in silence for several minutes.
“I doubt she’s an administrative type.” Her fingers briefly drummed against the tabletop. “Do you have any more pictures or information on this Captain Kozlev?”
“Probably.” Corde tapped her screen to launch a database search. “Why the interest in an officer who seems to be barely there?”
“Because those are the ones who might be the most dangerous,” Talyn replied, staring at Kozlev image.
What she couldn’t tell Corde was that the dark eyes staring at her seemed chillingly familiar, that she recognized a kindred spirit in the shape of the militia officer. A kindred spirit that had crossed the line Talyn had carefully avoided all her life. She couldn’t even explain to herself why this one picture seemed to reveal so much, but she’d learned to trust her instincts. They had rarely been wrong, particularly when fellow sociopaths were concerned.
If she was right about Kozlev, then anyone who fell into militia hands was doomed. And since the rebels weren’t conditioned, one interrogation could unravel more than just a single rebel cell, no matter how well compartmentalized they were, dooming more of them to a bad end.
“Hera.”
“Hmm?” Talyn snapped out of her trance and glanced at Corde, who was staring back with obvious concern.
“Are you alright? You look like someone just walked over your grave, as my grandmother used to say.”
“Perhaps someone just did. Have you found more information on this Rika Kozlev? I have a hunch that she may be more dangerous to us than
her boss.”
Corde’s expression betrayed both curiosity and disbelief, but she pushed the data over to Talyn’s terminal nonetheless.
“As you can see, we don’t have all that much.”
“Indeed,” the operative replied after scanning the files. “Maybe we can approach this from a different angle. Do you have records on independence supporters, whether they were involved in the rebellion or just politically vocal, who’ve disappeared since Kozlev came to Garonne?”
“Why is that important?” Corde asked.
“I’d rather build a dossier before committing myself, but do I think there will be a time when direct action against key members of the colonial administration becomes imperative, and who is and isn’t key won’t always be readily apparent.”
Talyn’s words sounded so matter of fact, her tone so business-like that Corde felt a chill run down her spine.
Decker, by virtue of his size, apparent strength, and calm aura of competence had seemed to be more dangerous than his partner. But now she realized that the woman so serenely discussing politically motivated assassination was, in fact, far more deadly.
“I’ll pull up what we have.”
**
Decker patiently chewed on a ration bar while he waited for Catlow to confer with his squad leaders. They were in the patrol hide, beneath the ridgeline, where those troopers not in the observation post or pulling sentry duty were sleeping soundly after the night’s forced march.
The rebels seemed to come to a decision, and Catlow rose from his crouch to join Zack on a fallen log.
“Nolan and I are going to change into civilian clothes and take a walk down to Larn’s place. We all agree that waiting until dark isn’t going to cut it.”
Zack nodded slowly while he swallowed a mouthful of the sweet-salty bar.
“Probably a good idea to not wait,” he said. “If they’ve been and gone, we need to hightail it out of here anyway. If they haven’t, then you can exfiltrate your man and his people.”
He paused, eyes narrowing when a thought that had been nagging at his subconscious finally surfaced.
“Let me rephrase that. If the militia hasn’t raided the farm yet but they’ve broken your vanished guy, I’d expect them to have eyes on the place, so we really need to make sure they get away without looking like they’re getting away.”
“You’re a real bucket of cheer this morning, my friend.” Catlow gave him a pained smile. “Would you care to go back to the OP and see if you can spot the surveillance?”
“Sure.” Decker carefully rolled up the ration bar package and stuffed it in his pack, then wiped his hands before standing. “Though I doubt I’ll see anything useful if whatever or whoever they have watching is properly deployed, and I never underestimate the opposition. The folks running grab and snatch operations on independence sympathizers won’t be the average militia pukes you guys are used to.”
“There’s that cheer again.” Catlow slapped him on the shoulder. “Tell you what; come down with Nolan and me. A pair of experienced pathfinder eyes will probably do us more good than having you sit around the hide scratching your balls. You did bring a change of duds, right?”
“Of course. I’ve been to this kind of dance before.” He nudged his pack. “I’ve got all I need. But before we go, let’s take a real good look at the Takan place. Just because they might have put a pro on the job doesn’t mean we skip a step.”
They spent a fruitless hour quartering the countryside with their sensors, but nothing and nobody stood out.
Decker slipped into the clothes he’d worn when they left Phoenix but switched over to a shoulder holster. On a Rim colony, walking around armed wasn’t unusual, but an Imperial Armaments blaster might attract more attention on Garonne than he wanted.
Like Catlow and Nolan, he had transferred some water, rations, and ammo to a small pouch, leaving his pack with any overt military equipment behind. Unlike his two companions, he had also tucked a small hand-held sensor into a waterproof cargo pocket.
The three men, looking like hikers or maybe industrial prospectors, made their way to a gravel trail running along the river and emerged from the thick forest unseen by other human eyes.
It took less than an hour to reach the road leading to the Takan farm and the only local they met on the trail smiled and nodded politely at them as if he were an independence supporter who recognized men fighting for their collective freedom. It was momentarily unnerving for Zack, who was used to being on the other side of the equation.
Once they were on the main thoroughfare bisecting the district, a few simple farm skimmers whooshed past them, but it seemed like most people in the area, on this sunny, warm morning, were hard at work growing the food that supported the colony.
Decker’s eyes never rested on one spot for more than a few seconds. He was looking for anything that seemed out of place or that struck him as odd and memorizing his surroundings, just in case they had to get out fast.
On either side of the road and right up to the foot of the nearby ridge, an ocean of golden grain, each stalk as high as Zack’s shoulders, filled their immediate horizon. Trees, precisely lined up in long rows and topped with thick green foliage, marked breaks between vast fields and provided relief for eyes tired of the endless flat vista stretching out into the west.
They reached the trail leading off the highway to the Takan farm without spotting anything, but Zack hadn’t expected them to. Surveillance would either be at long range or very close in. They couldn’t do much about someone sitting kilometers away watching the feed from a camera sitting at the top of a transmission tower, but now that they were getting near, the risk of stumbling across one or more watchers grew.
“I’ll take point,” Catlow said. “The Takans know me, and they’ll probably be edgy after Mathias’ disappearance. I know they have a security system so there might be eyes on the access road. If we find someone who shouldn’t be there, let’s try to take them down quietly.”
Zack and Nolan nodded their understanding, the former continuing to scan the environs with darting eyes while the latter glanced towards the distant farm outbuildings with visible trepidation.
Operating on sheer instinct, the Marine pulled out his sensor, taking care to keep it from being seen by unfriendly eyes and scanned the surroundings.
His pungent curse stopped the other men in their tracks, and they turned around to stare at him.
“What’s wrong?” Catlow looked around with visible alarm.
“I think we’ve been made,” Decker replied. “Keep your eyes on the road. Whatever I say, don’t look up.”
He paused to let his words sink in.
“There’s a drone floating above us.” He pointed upwards with his thumb. “We can’t see it, and I would never have noticed if it hadn’t gone live to transmit. Our crossing an invisible line on the road to the farm must have triggered something in its programming. I was lucky to have my sensor out when it happened, otherwise...”
“Militia?” Catlow realized how dumb that question sounded the moment it left his mouth and he shook his head. “What now?”
“Now? We continue with the plan, only a lot faster. They won't have bothered with a drone if they’ve already taken the place. What I’m worried about is whether they’ll move up their timetable and whether or not the snatch team is already in the area. I doubt we can pass for mendicant priests of the Great Void, much less folks with valid business. Anyone legit going around in full daylight would be riding a skimmer.”
Decker looked back at the main road, then down the lane towards the farm.
“We might not have long before we’re in a firefight, and we’d best be under cover when it happens. Right now, the only cover in sight is over there.”
Decker set off towards the buildings at a fast trot, one hand slipping into his jacket to make sure his blaster was ready to draw.
**
Kozlev stuck her head through the open office door, a cruel smile reveali
ng small, white teeth.
“Three men on foot turned down the road to the Takan farm approximately ten minutes ago. We didn’t get a good look at any of the faces, but at least two of them are armed and one of those triggered a possible match in the database – a man who we believe headed for the hills to join the rebel fighters.”
Harend gently put his tablet down and breathed in deeply, letting a sense of satisfaction replace his irritation at Cedeno’s increasing demands for detailed reports.
“Taking Mathias may have proven to be your best recommendation to date, Rika. I can only see one reason why three men would be headed for the Takan farm on foot on this particular morning, and it’s not to sell the latest in food preservation technology. What do you propose?”
“The snatch team is already in Tianjin. We could have them hit the farm now instead of waiting for darkness. Even if we miss some members of the Takan family, taking three fighters who’ll know where the rebel bases are will more than make up for it. We can always get the others later.”
“And if those three aren’t rebels?”
“Then I’ll get some entertainment at no additional cost, but I’m convinced they are. There’s a certain aura around all three that tells me they’re fighters, not farmers, especially one of them, a big guy. He moves like a pro, and he’s not visibly armed. That triggered all my bullshit detectors, especially once I saw the footage of him running moments after the drone started transmitting. We might have made them, but it’s entirely possible that he made my little eye in the sky.”
“Execute the raid, Captain.”
TWENTY-FOUR
Catlow and a gray-haired man with thick arms embraced briefly before the latter waved them into the house.
“Larn, these are Zack and Nolan. Two of my guys. We don’t have much time. Zack figures the militia are on their way here. They have a drone watching your place and what with Mathias disappearing the other day, it can only mean one thing.”
“Shit.” A look of pure disgust twisted the farmer’s tanned face.