by M. D. Cooper
He knew the woman wouldn’t interrupt him except for something important, so he excused himself from the conference holo he’d been attending with his staff and pushed away from his desk.
His office door slid open, admitting the tall, slender form of the intelligence director as he stood to welcome her.
“Mister President,” Celia greeted as she strode toward him, the sleek folds of her tailored, sage-green dress alternately hiding and revealing the well-toned legs of the athletic, auburn-haired woman as she approached.
Her hand dipped inside her jacket pocket, and then she reached out as if to shake his hand. He caught a flash of white and then felt the crisp lines of the sheet of rapid-degrade-plas she’d passed to him.
Zola palmed it, glancing down briefly. He could just make out a thin line of neat handwriting in the inside of the fold.
“I do believe spring has finally left us for summertime,” she murmured, and he looked up in time to see her glance out the window then return her gaze to him, tipping her head meaningfully toward the paper he held.
“Seems so,” he agreed absently, his thumb flipping the creased page open so that he could read what she’d written.
Find a reason to be in the Situation Room in half an hour. Alone.
He refolded it, tucking it into a trouser pocket as he eyed her quizzically.
“I was on my way over to deliver a few case files to your protection detail,” she said, “and thought I’d stop in to see if there was anything I could do to help prepare for our guests’ arrival this afternoon.”
Her gaze was guileless. Why she felt the need for such secrecy, within State House of all places, was beyond him. But Edouard Zola had learned long ago the value of his intelligence director’s instincts, so he merely nodded while wracking his brain for something banal to say in response.
“I fear they won’t be up to much pomp or circumstance, given their concern over the arrest of their ship’s captain,” he said, settling for the obvious. “I asked Elie if she would have the presidential steward arrange for a quiet meal here in one of the smaller dining rooms.”
Celia nodded in satisfaction. “Ah, well, it sounds like you have things well in hand over here, as usual. I’ll just be on my way, then.”
With a raised brow, Zola nodded and escorted her to the door.
Now, what is this all about, I wonder? he mused.
Half an hour later, excuse invented, Edouard’s detail palmed open the door to the Situation Room, glanced inside, nodded once to its lone inhabitant, and then stepped aside to allow Edouard to enter.
“Sir! I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you had planned to use the Sit Room today.” Celia’s voice carried into the hall, its tone one of carefully crafted surprise. “I’ll just see myself ou—"
Playing along, he raised a restraining hand. “No, no, please. This was just a whim on my part. Purely spontaneous. I had a moment, and thought of something I might have left in here. Please, finish what you were doing. I’ll wait.”
“Well, if you’re sure.” Her tone was pitched perfectly, delivering a flawless mix of hesitance and doubt. “I’ll only be a moment.”
Zola smiled and waved for her to continue, nodded amiably at his detail, then indicated they seal the doors as he strolled over and took a seat.
Well, at least her acting was superb. Not sure I convinced my detail that this was a chance meeting….
As the Situation Room sealed them in, Celia triggered its security protocols. Her casual pretense fell from her like a cloak, and she turned a bleak look his way.
“What’s with the skulking, Celie?” he said, invoking a nickname he rarely used. He slipped his hand inside his pocket and pulled out the thin sheet of plas, waggling it at her. “Going old-school on me, now?”
Celia’s mouth twisted in a wry smile that did not meet her eyes. “Sometimes, if you want to ensure something absolutely cannot be hacked, the best way for it to remain secure is the most antiquated of them all.”
A shaft of alarm shot through him as he considered the implications of what she’d just said. He looked down at the note he held in his hands, folding it carefully. He slid the crease through thumb and forefinger as he turned her words over in his head.
Shooting her a glance from lowered brows, he said quietly, “That’s quite something, considering where we are standing right now. You suspect we’ve been compromised?”
Celia began to pace. It wasn’t a nervous kind of thing, more the type of measured step that came as one pondered a weighty matter.
“One of our most trusted assets on Barat appears to have sent us an encrypted TS/SCI message,” she stated.
His head snapped up at her use of the acronym. Celia had just referenced the most elite security classification Godel had: Top-Secret, Sensitive Compartmentalized Intelligence.
Well, that’s one way to get my attention….
His gaze locked with hers. “You said appears to have.”
“It was from Giovanni Perelman.”
Her words had him inhaling sharply. “Your counterpart on Barat,” he said in a flat tone.
“If the message he sent is to be believed, our agent was compromised six months ago.” She crossed her arms and shot him a sardonic look. “As a ‘show of good faith’,” her fingers air-quoted the words, “and to prove his sincerity, he has provided us with the tokens of three assets here in State House who have been compromised—one of whom was actively turned by their agents here on Godel.”
The plas fluttered to the ground as Edouard gaped at her. She bent and scooped it up, pocketing it in a fluid motion.
“Stars, why?”
Celia crossed her arms, running her hands up and down them as if she were suddenly cold. Then, as if realizing her movements were revealing too much of her state of mind, she straightened, dropping her hands to her sides.
“Edouard, he claims Barat has infiltrated our planetary storehouses with a biological weapon capable of destroying half of Godel’s food supplies within a matter of hours. Worse, they’ve upped the ante, and are prepared to decimate the crops of our largest and most productive farming operations.”
A silence fell between them as what she’d said sank in.
“Celia…this…it’s verified?” Zola struggled to verbalize the question, the shock he felt at the news causing his normally facile tongue to stumble over the words.
The director nodded once, her gaze somber. “It came directly to me through one of our compromised assets using a one-time cypher. I backtraced it and cross-checked the signal myself.”
Zola stepped back, bumping into the table set into the center of the room. Blindly, he fumbled for a chair and collapsed into it, his mind racing.
“Okay. Okay,” he muttered, eyes flickering back and forth as he mentally catalogued the information and its impact on the planet. He shot a glance up at the woman who stood, waiting silently for his response. “You were right to take precautions. If it were to get back to Barat that somehow we’d learned of this before they executed their plan….”
Celia nodded. “They’d go ahead and pull the trigger on those devices before we had a chance in hell of finding them—much less stopping them.”
Zola drummed his fingers lightly against the table, leaning back in his seat in thought. “This needs to be handled, quickly and very quietly.”
“And by a small, elite task force, yes,” Celia concurred. Then she smiled crookedly, tilting her head to one side. “I hear there’s a new arrival that just might fit that description.”
Zola shifted his eyes from her jacket pocket, the one that held the plas, to her face. A speculative light gleamed in his eyes.
“You think the team from Alpha Centauri is our best option?”
She nodded. “I do. I’ve forwarded Simone’s report on their operation to recover our agent and their captain. According to her,” she added lightly, “Phantom Blade has some mad covert skills. Between you and me, I think she might be coming down with a mild case of he
ro worship for at least two of their AI members. Weapon Born of some sort or other, she said.”
Zola studied his thumb as he ran it along the table’s edge, contemplating what she’d just told him. Looking back up at her, he frowned. “They’re coming here to ask for our help to recover their captain,” he warned.
She shrugged elegantly. “Quid pro quo.”
Stepping up to the table, she perched on its edge, folded her arms in her lap, and sent him a level look.
“Simone says they’re decent people. Given the circumstances, I can’t really see them turning us down, can you? Hell, Edouard,” she said, lifting a hand in a sweeping gesture, “you’d have to be some sort of stars-be-damned monster to be willing to consign millions to death by starvation.”
His steady glance and slow nod conceded her point. “Very well, then,” he sighed. “Will you coordinate with the State House steward on a revised guest list for this afternoon’s welcome?”
She murmured her assent as he stood, straightened his suit, and glanced at his internal chrono before sending her a grimace.
“I have to get back before I’m missed,” he told her.
She nodded, but then held up a hand. “We’re going to have to handle this carefully, Edouard. We can’t let on, even to your security detail—possibly even especially to them—that this afternoon is anything more than a state visit.”
He frowned, shoving his hands in his pockets. “That could be challenging.”
She smiled. “Yes, but I have an idea….”
PART FIVE: ARRIVAL
WET CAT, ANGRY MARINE
STELLAR DATE: 03.13.3272 (Adjusted Gregorian)
LOCATION: ESS Avon Vale, Main Spaceport
REGION: Godel, Little River
The insistent chime came across Terrance’s Link, the sound slowly growing from a gentle reminder to an annoying buzzsaw-like noise that not even he could sleep through.
Sending the mental command for it to shut off, his half-awake brain toyed with the idea of rolling over and burying his face into the silky black strands of hair that teased his neck, while catching another hour of sleep.
And then he remembered. Today was the day the Vale was scheduled to arrive at Godel. He couldn’t afford to sleep in, but he could spare a few extra stolen moments with his wife.
His hands skimmed feather-light over Khela’s body, tracing from her neck, down across the strong muscled shoulders of a Marine. Across the gentle curves of her breasts, down the tapering length of a trim yet well-muscled torso, her skin impossibly smooth against the coarser texture of his hands.
She turned into him, running her hands up his bare chest. Strong hands that knew a hundred different ways to kill locked around the back of his neck, pulling his face down to meet hers as she pressed herself up against him in a quick embrace—and then she was gone, flowing out of their bed like water, her naked form stealing the breath from his body and making other parts stand up and salute.
Khela glanced back at him, her eyes dark and inviting.
“Planning to sleep in, lover, or can I talk you into joining me in the san?” Her tone was serene, even as she shot him a suggestive look.
Their san had been modified during their journey to include a real-water shower that they could use during the times when their cabin experienced at least a half-g, as it did when the ship’s habitat spun during cruise, or while they were docked at a station like Phaethon.
Khela had modeled it after a spa back in Tau Ceti, and Terrance had to admit it was pretty amazing. It was an indulgence, but she had assured him she’d make it worth his while—and she had.
He smiled in anticipation as she stretched languidly, her body all supple motion and tranquil harmony. It belied the backlash she’d endured the night before, the shuddering episodes wracking her petite frame. His smile faded as he recalled them.
A parting gift, those attacks were, a vestigal curse from the nanophage. Memory fragments, incompletely removed, left over from the AI who had perished while embedded inside Khela’s brain.
Marta, the ship’s medical officer, had assured him they weren’t harmful, although the doctor hadn’t been able to fully excise Hana’s lattice from around Khela’s brain stem, nor from the neural pathways they had wrapped themselves around. So far, the seizures—for lack of a better term—seemed only to occur after Khela had completed a mission.
Marta conjectured they were activated by some sort of neural dysphagia, a deeply integrated trigger rooted in the training she and Hana had received together in Marine country back on Galene.
As Khela slipped into the san, Terrance breathed a prayer of thanks that the remnant had yet to claim her while she was deployed on a mission. He still held out hope that one day Marta could find a way to fully neutralize the remnants that had been left inside his wife when the nanophage infected the joined pair.
Only then, he knew, would Khela truly be free, when the portions of Hana that remained could be put to rest for good.
Terrance snapped out of his reverie when he heard a yelp, followed by his wife’s muffled shriek from inside the san.
“Khela!”
He threw the covers back and was halfway to his destination when the san door slid open and forty kilos of wet Proxima cat came hurtling through.
Spying Terrance, Beck altered his trajectory and slid to a stop behind his legs.
“What the—”
“There’s a dead rat in our shower!”
Terrance tried and failed to hide a smirk. “Aren’t Marines supposed to be too tough to be afraid of a little—”
Abruptly, Khela appeared at the san entrance, one hundred and seventy centimeters of avenging fury, dripping wet and brandishing a bloody body part, entrails hanging loosely from one end.
“Finish that sentence,” she bit off as she advanced, pointing the carcass at his bare chest, “and you won’t be getting any.” Terrance’s eyes were glued in fascination to the thing she held in her hand. “Ever—” the carcass hit his bare chest with a wet splat, “again.”
Reflexively, his hand reached up to grab the squishy mess, smirk gone as he shook his head. “Getting any?”
Her gaze flicked meaningfully to their bed and then back.
He swallowed. “Wouldn’t think of it, love.”
Black eyes glittered as they held his in a fulminating glare. Into the silence, one paw crept around from behind him, angled toward the dead animal cradled against his chest. With his other hand, he eased it away.
He saw Khela’s lips twitch at the sight, but she fought valiantly to hold onto her righteous anger.
“Your cat—” Her voice quivered slightly with laughter before she cleared her throat and glared down at Beck, flinging wet hair out of her eyes, “was having breakfast all over the shower floor.”
“He’s got a point there,” Terrance volunteered. “At least now, he’s not ruining our clothes….” His voice trailed off the moment she turned her glare back on him.
“Not now, Kodi.”
“KODI!”
Khela’s shout had a snap to it that only a Marine could dish out.
In the next instant, a chime sounded, followed by Shannon’s voice.
Terrance closed his eyes and tilted his head back as Shannon’s holo faded awa
y. Khela let out an exasperated sigh and disappeared back into the san.
Khela sent him a mental snort as he felt a wet nose nudging at his hand.
He looked down to see Beck tilt his head and delicately extract the chunk of flesh from Terrance’s hands. He trotted to the door of their quarters, bloody carcass dangling between sharp incisors.
Nosing the door controls, he slipped through as it slid open, just as one of the crew walked past. The woman glanced down at Beck then up at the naked man standing in the middle of the room. Terrance could just make out her grin as she backtracked, craning her neck for a better look before the door slid closed behind the cat.
With a sigh, he glanced at the message flashing on his HUD—the one Shannon had come to deliver personally—and realized he was about to be late for a meeting.
* * * * *
Knowing they’d be docked at the New Kells Spaceport by noon made a huge difference in Jason’s outlook. He’d agreed to go along for a brief visit planetside to press the flesh with Godel’s president, but only after being assured they would be on their way to Barat shortly thereafter.
Finally.
He’d tried to get out of the presidential luncheon, but Tobias had reminded him that they needed Godel’s help to get Calista back.
The AI had also had a few choice things to say about Jason’s almost-fight with Terrance the day before. A flare of guilt arose at that, which he firmly squelched.
Not like I actually punched him…. Jason grinned at that thought.
He realized that he felt good for the first time since he’d left the bazaar. He consciously avoided labeling the incident at the bazaar as ‘abandoning Calista’, even though his gut kept insisting on calling it that.
