Chiral Justice: A Hard Science Fiction Technothriller (The Biogenesis War Book 3)

by L. L. Richman

  He motioned Boone and Asha over, and then turned to face Micah once more. “They’ll escort you and Katie back to the base. Try to stay out of trouble between now and dinnertime. I hear you have an event tonight. You feel up for it?”

  Micah frowned. “Yeah, I almost forgot. Founder’s Cup Dinner. That gives us one last chance at the prime minister before the race… that is, if they’ll let me within two meters of him, after today.”

  He gave Gabe a wry look. “Too bad we can’t get the event planners to tweak tonight’s menu. If they served something with an orange glaze, we wouldn’t need a DNA test to confirm Garza’s a clone. His reaction would tell us all we need to know.” Remembered distaste had him grimacing. “Damn stuff tastes like turpentine mixed with pine, at least to chiral taste buds.”

  Gabe’s brows lifted at the description. “You’re right. I’m sure that’d be a hard pass for him.”

  He glanced around, body telegraphing a restless energy at odds with his usual buttoned-down demeanor. Nodding to himself as if coming to an inner decision, his gaze swung back to Micah.

  “Go. I have a man in a general’s uniform to hunt… and hopefully at least a few eyewitnesses to find and interview.”

  THE DAGGER

  Shar-Kali Correctional Facility

  and Reeducation Center

  Aksu Desert

  It had taken the Dagger a full week of careful probing before she traced Clint Janus to a secret research laboratory that Asher Dent had privately funded for the man. The lab had been buried underground, hidden inside the Shar-Kali Correctional Facility.

  It struck her that there was a certain irony to its location. In her opinion, this was precisely where Janus belonged—only, as a prisoner. Instead, he freely roamed the halls, treating the place as if it were his own personal playground.

  She’d contacted a soldier who’d been in her graduating class at the Junxun Academy; through the grapevine, she’d learned the man had served a tour as the head of the facility’s prison guard. For a price, he’d shown her how to circumvent its security. Out of fear and respect for a member of the Assassin’s Guild, he would tell no one of their transaction.

  Earlier that day, Dacina had dressed as one of the cleaning crew and melded silently into the background, unnoticed by prison personnel. She’d openly walked the facility’s halls, memorizing points of ingress, the structure’s strengths and weaknesses.

  That completed, she’d slipped away to change into the stealth Yinshen armor that was her traditional garb. When she returned, she tracked Janus down once more, following silently behind as he stalked irritably down the prison’s halls.

  Something had annoyed him while she’d been gone. Dacina hadn’t yet discovered its source.

  She paused two meters behind the man as he swiped impatiently at the pad that secured his laboratory entrance and cursed at the delay.

  She smiled inwardly, knowing the app she’d applied to the doors earlier was likely the cause of it. The packet was opportunistic… it piggybacked off Janus’s ID token, insinuating her own into the lab’s security protocol, thus allowing Dacina entrance whenever she desired.

  She had a feeling it would come in handy in the near future.

  Dacina slid quietly in behind the biochemist as he entered the room, seeking the shadows as she always did. Oblivious to the lethal killer who stood a mere handsbreadth away, Janus tossed the package he’d gone to retrieve onto a countertop filled with equipment the Dagger knew nothing about.

  “All the fucking way up to the fucking shipping department,” he grumbled. “They couldn’t have spared one of their trained monkeys to deliver it to me?”

  The doctor’s complaint washed over Dacina like so much white noise, his whine all too familiar from the months she’d spent as his keeper on deGrasse. She crept silently along the lab’s wall, her movements too gradual to even stir the air.

  The scientist ignored the package, turning instead to a console—above which floated a holoprojection of a timetable with a list of names.

  While his back was turned, the Dagger positioned herself so she could gain a better look at the package’s contents, whenever Janus deigned to open it. He wouldn’t wait too long.

  Dacina knew from her own carefully curated network of informants that the package carried the seal of the State Assembly House, and had been sent directly from the premier himself. Whatever was inside would get her one step closer to learning what had passed between Janus and Dent in the premier’s closed-door meeting the previous week.

  After a long moment spent glowering at the holoprojection, Janus wheeled, rounding on the offending package. He swiped at the seal with his personal ID token, and it opened, revealing a small stasis chamber, which then uncovered three cylindrical tubes filled with an unidentified substance, the holostickers on their sides reading ‘Biohazard.’

  Janus made an annoyed sound. “I told him I’d need an assistant if he persists in moving up the timeline!”

  Despite his ire, the biochemist lifted each tube with great care, transferring them to a chiller against the lab’s far wall, where they joined other such specimens.

  Dacina made note of where he placed the tubes, and when he turned away to activate a console, she stepped forward.

  Peering through the cooler’s transparent, clearsteel door, she read the ident tags off each one.

  Kuytu, Shen. Minister of Information.

  Obati, Mei-Win. Minister of the People’s Court.

  Nawane, Ong. Minister of the Standing Committee.

  Had her Yinshen suit’s stealth properties not been activated, she knew her expression would have betrayed the confusion she felt.

  Why is the premier sending Clint Janus biological samples of these three ministers?

  A shrill alert sounded, and she pivoted in time to see a reminder pop up in the holoscreen of the console where Janus worked. He was due in interrogation to monitor Garza during another round of questioning. The session was scheduled to commence in ten minutes, in the prison sector.

  Janus made another annoyed sound. Reaching for a medical bracer, he rose and stomped from the lab, leaving the console he’d been working on active.

  The Dagger drifted over to it. The alert was still projected, along with Garza’s file. She paged through it, committing the information to memory, noting the identity of the person with whom he shared a cell.

  Rin Zhou Enlai.

  Dacina had been around long enough to know how the system worked. This was an anomaly, a departure from prison procedure.

  This was an Akkadian power play.

  The assassin had no doubt that somehow, Rin Zhou had orchestrated this. How she’d managed to pull this off, and right under Dent’s nose, Dacina had no clue.

  Her loyalists must be better placed and more organized than I realized.

  Pulling her thoughts from speculation on the strength of Enlai’s hidden cadre of followers, Dacina returned her attention to her objective: discovering what, exactly, Asher Dent wanted Janus to do—the task he kept hidden from Che Josza, his own minister of state security.

  Carefully reaching into the holographic controls, Dacina inserted a worm that would perform a more detailed search, funneling all suspicious data to her. As it disappeared into the background, she began a more cursory search, flipping through Janus’s calendar.

  She began with the day she’d seen the biochemist slipping out of Dent’s office alone, and with a Cheshire grin on his face. A notation labeled ‘Project Obelus’ caught her attention, and she did a quick search. A file of the same name caught her eye; its contents had her inhaling a harsh breath.

  A quick look at the file’s tamper protocol revealed that any attempt to copy it or send it to an unauthorized user would result in it being flagged.

  She stifled her annoyance. It wouldn’t stop her from recording what she saw on the lab’s holo, nor would it keep her from drawing upon her Assassin’s Guild training to commit its contents to memory. It did, however, keep it f
rom being used as concrete evidence.

  Recordings could be fabricated; a secured file’s metadata could not.

  Leaving the worm to its search, she backed out of the system with cool efficiency, looking around the lab one final time. Task complete, she slipped from the room and prepared to exit the prison.

  She was halfway back to Central Prefecture when a ping over her wire announced the arrival of a secured transmission. It had been delivered to the evanescent version of a dead drop she’d set up for an informant she’d cultivated inside the Geminate Alliance.

  Opening it, she felt the first stirrings of a plan begin to form.

  The message warned of Alliance special forces operatives landing soon on Eridu. Their mission: to confirm the rumor that the empire held Raphael Garza prisoner.

  Attached to the dispatch were the dossiers of the three agents. One face in particular stood out.

  Dacina allowed a small smile to tease at her lips.

  If Asher Dent was about to embark upon what she thought, then the Dagger would embrace an ages-old war philosophy.

  The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

  Elodie Cyr didn’t know it yet, but she was about to acquire a secret partner.

  MERCHANT SHIP

  AWF Swallow

  Allied worlds Freight Hauler

  Customs Port Entrance

  Eridu Orbit

  Jonathan knew he’d been unusually withdrawn since he’d ended the gestalt with Micah hours earlier. Thankfully, everyone had been too busy with the transition from Invictus’s boat bay and the subsequent jump to Scharnhorst space for anyone to corner him and ask about it.

  Now, though, he could practically feel Yuki’s eyes drilling into him as he secured the ship.

  Mirage was safely ensconced inside its Casimir bubble, the ship ghosting deeper into Akkadian territory at three times the speed of light, their rendezvous with the Allied Worlds merchant ship now less than an hour away.

  Before Yuki could voice the questions he saw burning in her eyes, Jonathan quickly excused himself and headed aft for the head. Ducking past the row where Thad and Ell were seated, he shifted his gaze away from them, giving Valenti a terse nod, still recovering from her earlier tongue-lashing.

  He made quick use of the facilities, and then, loath to head back to the cockpit, and craving a few precious minutes of solitude, he slipped quietly into the Nadir’s small galley.

  Jonathan grabbed a pod of water from the chiller and took a seat on one of the benches, out of sight of those aboard. Tipping his head back until it rested against the coolness of the bulkhead, he closed his eyes, shutting out his surroundings.

  Gingerly, he reached out with his mind to touch Micah’s essence; not wanting to risk reestablishing the gestalt, but needing to reassure himself of his mirror twin’s safety. Not sensing anything amiss, he pulled back, rolling his shoulders forward and giving his neck a quick crack to relieve some of the tension.

  The silence he found himself in now was both comforting and disturbing. He knew he needed to confess to someone how compelling, how almost addicting, that last gestalt had felt. He hadn’t wanted to return to himself, and had only done so when Micah’s alarm had spiked.

  He also knew that if he hadn’t returned when he did… he would have been lost forever.

  With a sigh, he cupped the water between his hands and stared down into the clear bioplastic container. A small pocket of air moved about as he squeezed, idly rotating the pod around in his hands.

  A scuff of boots alerted him that he was no longer alone. He looked up and saw Thad leaning against the doorframe.

  “Mind if I join you?”

  Wordlessly, Jonathan gestured to the bench seat across from him.

  Ignoring this, the Marine walked over to where Jonathan sat, and parked himself beside him. “You’ve been talking to Micah?” he asked in a low voice.

  Startled by the implication behind the question, Jonathan slid a sideways glance at the big man. “You were there on Invictus when it happened,” he replied. “You saw. Thank stars Katie reacted the way she did—and that the rest of the team was able to get to him before those grav-suckers could take him.”

  Thad stared back at him. “That’s not what I’m talking about, ami. I think you know that.” The Marine leaned forward and interlaced his fingers, bracing his forearms on his knees, and turned dark eyes on him, pinning him with a knowing look. “You two can communicate in Scharnhorst space, can’t you?”

  His words formed a question, but his tone told Jonathan that he already knew the answer.

  Jonathan considered denying it, but he was just too damn exhausted. He gave a small shrug. “Yeah,” he said simply. “We can.”

  “You’ve been keeping it from… who? Everyone? The director? The colonel?”

  Jonathan sat back and tossed his pod of water onto the table in front of them. “We haven’t told anyone. Well, Sam knows, but she’s the only one.”

  Thad said nothing, only continued to look at him.

  After a moment, Jonathan tried to explain. “The three of us agreed that maybe it’d be too tempting for the powers that be to know that we had such an ability.”

  He gestured vaguely around. “Just look at the hard-on the higher-ups got when they learned that the two of us can communicate mentally in a way that’s totally untraceable, unhackable, unjammable.”

  Jonathan laughed, the sound bitter to his own ears. “Let’s see. Distance and light lag don’t impact it, either. It was enough to make some in the Alliance lobby for a chiral cloning program of their own.”

  He didn’t bother to hide the rancor that laced his words, and saw understanding dawn in Thad’s eyes.

  “Can you imagine what they would do if they knew that not even Scharnhorst space could stop us?” Jonathan asked quietly.

  Thad worked his jaw as he turned the pilot’s words over in his head. He looked down, contemplating his interlaced hands.

  Finally sucking in a breath, he nodded. “I get it, hoss. I do. And off the record? I think you’re right. Thanks for coming clean with me, though. It’s a good ace for us to have up our sleeves. And on this op, we just might need it.”

  Jonathan felt tension leach from his shoulders when the Marine abruptly stood, rapped his knuckles on the table, and then exited.

  He stared after the other man for a beat. Then, popping the lid off the water, he tipped his head back and downed it.

  Tossing the now-empty container into the recycler, he stood and returned to the cockpit.

  * * *

  An hour later, silently and with virtually no detectable emissions signature, the Nadir spacecraft slipped from Scharnhorst space back into realspace. Thad noted that the location Jonathan had chosen for the transition was just outside the lane assigned to ships that came and went from the Alpha Centauri gate.

  From where he sat in Mirage’s front row of passenger seats, the Marine could see that the pilot had timed their exit to coincide with the crossing of a large commercial vessel.

  The ship shuddered slightly as it settled into realspace. The effect was noticeably smoother than when ships like Wraith shed their bubbles, and Thad marveled at the Nadir’s capabilities.

  Despite its advanced stealth and the much-diminished Casmir flare, the energy from a translation out of Scharnhorst space had to go somewhere, but what little remained to be detected was effectively shielded by the ship that floated between their location and the outer customs yard.

  Valenti was already unwebbed and up. She gripped the beam separating the cockpit from the main cabin to steady herself as she pointed to an icon on the ship’s forward screens. “There.”

  A ship whose transponder ID token sported the Allied Worlds Freight logo lit up.

  “That’s our ship. The Swallow. They’re expecting us.”

  Jonathan obligingly turned Mirage’s nose toward the massive freighter, moored at the Akkadian customs clearance station. Minutes later, he’d snugged the fully cloaked ship up against
a hatch on the vessel’s topside.

  Valenti herself was standing in the airlock, handling the coupling. {Remember to blank the screens,} she called out to Jonathan just before she cycled the airlock. {Captain Knorr is naval reserve, but Mirage is classified.}

  {Yes, ma’am,} he replied, and Thad saw him do something to his pilot’s boards.

  In the next instant, every indicator went dark.

  Shaking off the slightly creepy feeling that came in the wake of such absence, Thad stood and motioned the pilot from the cockpit. “Come on, Case. Time to go.”

  Jonathan nodded and then murmured a few words to Yuki as he transferred control of the ship over to the lieutenant.

  The Unit team member that would be subbing as copilot nodded as he sidled past Thad, and the three entered into a prearranged dance. Jonathan unwebbed and stood, Yuki slid into the pilot’s cradle he’d just vacated, and then the Marine backfilled Yuki’s position.

  Ell rose as Jonathan came to a stop beside her and Thad, and the Marine captain wordlessly waved them both aft.

  A screen above the weapons locker flared to life as they approached. It showed a feed from the airlock. Thad watched the colonel cycle the hatch, saw a woman dressed in a standard civilian ship’s suit on the other side.

  The colonel—or rather, Takeko, the SI embedded inside Valenti’s head—had given them a brief sitrep on the merchanter before they docked. The woman was a retired naval ship’s commander who had captained the flagship for the Alliance’s Strike Force Ready Group One [SFRG-1]. That flagship was the one the Special Recon Units had staged from, during the border skirmishes that had plagued the Atliekas two decades ago.

  She knew spec ops. She and Valenti had a history. She’d also been Valenti’s personal pick for this leg of the mission.

  The woman saluted, and then the two shook hands. Valenti motioned her into the airlock, cycling it shut behind her.