A soft chime in her ear reminded her it was time for the call. She stepped into the triple-shielded, soundproof QEC room hidden behind the visually seamless right wall of her office. Ten seconds later a holo shimmered into existence in front of her.
It revealed a man of indeterminate age, handsome and clean-cut but average in every way—medium skin tone, medium brown hair, medium height, medium build.
That is, until he looked up and met her gaze. Piercing, sea-green eyes hinted at intelligence and cunning, along with an indefinable spark which hinted at something else altogether. The overall effect was to transform what had been an ordinary man into one who radiated dynamism, charisma and authority.
She smiled darkly. “Marcus, it’s good to see you again.”
He raised an eyebrow in mock appreciation. “And you, Olivia. May I say you are even more beautiful than the last time we talked.”
“You may say it, but you need to work on your sincerity a bit.”
He shrugged. “It’s a finite resource, and I need to save it for the constituents. What’s the status?”
“We received the materials day before yesterday. They’re stored in a secure location until it’s time to deploy them. The team has been selected, every member screened by me, and is leaving tomorrow to train on Cosenti. The lead expects to have the final details worked out by late next week.”
“Traceability?”
“Ah, Marcus, always concerned first and foremost with covering your own ass—I know, I know, your ass must be covered for later phases to work. I get it. To you? None. To me? Virtually none. The only conceivable link is the lead, and his cover is so deep it will take Senecan Intel months to begin to peel back the layers in the highly unlikely event he’s identified.”
“Will he break under coercion?”
“It won’t be an issue.”
The muscles in his jaw flexed. “Oh, really?”
“Oh, really. I have it covered. Regardless, he and the rest of the team know nothing of you. No one save me knows anything of you. That was the agreement, and I honor my agreements.”
“True…” a hand rose to knead at his chin “…you are the sole link to me.”
She tsked him reproachfully. “If you try to kill me, you will not succeed.”
“Oh, I’m sure. And I won’t need to try, because you are nothing if not power-hungry, and this little project of ours will bring you more power than you ever dreamed of.”
“I can dream of a lot.”
“And you shall have it all—so long as you make certain Palluda goes down cleanly.”
She rolled her eyes in irritation, and this time meant it. “Marcus, who is the most dangerous, most effective, most Machiavellian criminal magnate in settled space?”
“That would be you, my dear.”
“Correct. Don’t question my methods, don’t question my judgment—and most of all don’t question my competency—and we will continue to get along just fine.”
His chin dipped in acquiescence. “I have been properly chastised. We’ll talk again after Atlantis.”
12 Atlantis
Independent Colony
Jaron Nythal stepped out onto the rooftop landing pad and felt a smile grow on his lips. A warm breeze, salty air and bright yellow sun welcomed him like the arms of a beautiful woman. He was going to enjoy this trip.
He pulled his jacket off, draped it over a shoulder and strolled across the pad toward the railing at the edge of the roof while the rest of the Senecan delegation disembarked and saw to the luggage and cargo. Until the Director arrived on Sunday evening he was in charge of the delegation, which meant someone else would get his luggage to his room.
He rolled his shoulders to work out the kinks. The transport was fast and secure, but it was still a government vessel and nineteen hours was a long time.
His smile only widened as he reached the edge and the splendor of Atlantis spread out beneath him. A tiny planet covered wholly in water, it should have lain unnoticed and undeveloped. But the pleasant temperatures and calm weather of its equatorial region had caught the eye and imagination of a developer tycoon who found himself idle after many successful ventures and with money to burn.
The outcome was a fantasy retreat unlike any other in settled space. Winding pathways suspended a mere two meters over the crystal blue water connected islands of condos, gardens, golf courses and beaches. Only small shuttles and personal vehicles were allowed in the airspace stretching four hundred meters above the waters to allow for a variety of recreational activities, from sky gliding to paracruises and wave skimming.
Casinos, pleasure houses and vacation resorts competed with—or was it complemented?—state-of-the-art conference and convention facilities. Taking advantage of its unaffiliated status and convenient location nearly equidistant between Earth and Seneca, within ten years of opening the first hotel Atlantis had become the most popular destination in the galaxy for both corporate and government conventions.
The breeze began to wash away the grime of travel; he rolled his sleeves above his elbows to hasten the effect. He intended to make every effort to find plenty of time around the preparations and even the Summit itself to enjoy the finer pleasures Atlantis had to offer. He already had a series of high-credit escorts lined up for the room at night—more than one on several nights—but not all of Atlantis’ offerings could be indulged in from a hotel room.
The flash of red at the corner of his peripheral vision banished the train of thought and brought a dark scowl to his face. And then there was that.
He supplied the decryption code, scanned the message and deleted it almost as soon as it had arrived. It contained suitably cryptic phrasing, but the point came through clear enough.
Payment had been received. Final preparations were underway. The assignment would be completed at the time and in the manner the other party deemed most efficient. If all went well, Jaron would never know the man (or woman) had ever been at the Summit. That is, except for the irrefutable evidence thereof they would leave in their wake.
He’d return to Seneca a richer man, though the new funds paled in comparison to the wealth he expected to soon follow. Yessiree…he should be able to set his wife and kids up in one of the swank new townhomes in the Pinciana neighborhood, with enough left over for a private condo retreat for himself downtown. It was a long way from his parents’ tiny apartment tucked behind their ‘herb’ shop shouting distance from the kasō shakai, the underworld slums the rest of Cavare pretended didn’t exist. A long way indeed.
Of course if all didn’t go well, he’d be facing forty-years-to-life in prison at best, permanent disappearance into the black hole of a covert intelligence detention facility at worst. It wasn’t the first high-stakes risk he had taken in his life…but it certainly carried the greatest consequences, whether win or lose.
The scowl lingered as he yanked his sunglasses off and looked around for his secretary. She tromped outside the transport cargo hull, arms flailing about to point at crates of equipment while she issued orders to the staff.
He tossed his jacket into her chest and headed for the lift. “I’ll be in the Prep Room until dinner. Be a dear and bring me a drink, one of those strong tropical concoctions.” He paused mid-step, considered the message again and glanced over his shoulder.
“On second thought, go ahead and make it a double.”
Matei Uttara departed the commercial transport amidst a throng of passengers. It wasn’t difficult to blend in with the diverse array of tourists and businessmen and women. Some were here for networking, some for relaxation, others for assorted pleasures of a daring but not truly dangerous variety. He imagined some were here for all three.
His attire was nondescript, his hair cut to the chin and dulled to a dirty brown beneath a summer cap common on the resort world. His movements were casual, his bearing relaxed as he let himself be carried along by the crowd of travelers. His pace and gait varied at random intervals such that even the best pattern-reco
gnition ware would be unable to spot anything anomalous.
He passed among giggling children accompanying their parents to the family resorts and young people already drunk on hormones and synthetic liquor. He surrounded himself with other visitors as he made his way to the levtrams and nonchalantly snuck in the last seat of a full tram headed in the correct direction.
As he exited the tram an attractive but intoxicated woman bumped into him. She stumbled, grabbed onto his arm and smiled lopsidedly up at him. He returned the smile while he reached underneath her hairline and pinched a nerve behind her ear. As her limbs relaxed he nudged her to send her momentum back toward her companions. He faded away into the crowd as one of them complained he wasn’t going to carry her all the way to the condo.
The hotel was busy but not so thick with people as the transport station. He chose a family of five and trailed them through the lobby to the front desk, where he checked in under an invented identity using an untraceable credit account.
His room was a modest affair on a middle level of the hotel adjacent to the conference center hosting the Trade Summit. The conference center had already heightened their security, and the security at the hotel was sure to soon become tighter than pleased him. But by staying here he could avoid transport complications which had foiled less talented men than he; also, it provided him ready access to staff corridors and maintenance shafts, should the need arise.
He settled in with a decent steak dinner from room service, then sat cross-legged on the bed and spread the blueprints of the conference center and hotel in the air around him. They rotated in a slow circle as he studied them.
Periodically he reached up and paused the flow to study one more closely. He intended to know the location of each and every one of the staff corridors and maintenance shafts throughout the complex.
He planned to get a tangible feel for the layout in the morning, when the area would still be dominated by tourists rather than Summit guests. The first two days of the Summit he would attend as a credentialed reporter representing the small but growing trade exazine Celestial Industrials Weekly, one of dozens of vultures hovering on the periphery of the proceedings and stalking the halls. He would schmooze and linger and talk to people, but not to any one person for so long as to make an impression.
At the end of the second day, his identity and tactics shifted. On the third and final day of the Summit, he would complete the job he had been engaged to do, again slip into the crowd, and vanish.
13 Siyane
Space, Northeast Quadrant
Alex opened her eyes to the best surprise.
The brilliant red and pink glow of the Carina Nebula filled the wide viewport above her bed. The vivid colors shone with a dazzling splendor only nature could create. She wound her hands behind her head and settled back onto the pillow to drink in the sight.
It was good practice to drop out of superluminal speeds for a few minutes at least once a day to diffuse the particle buildup. She spoiled herself by arranging it so the deceleration occurred just before she routinely woke up, and was often treated to lovely vistas as a result—but few so spectacular as this one.
There were no colonized worlds in the vicinity due to the imminent (any time in the next five hundred or so years) supernova of Eta Carinae. As such, one rarely had cause to linger so near to Carina. What she knew to be over a million stars clumped into multiple open clusters to glitter crisp and bright through the nebular cloud. She grinned, captivated, and watched until the sLume drive re-engaged and the stars blurred away beyond the bubble wall.
With a contented sigh she crawled out of bed and splashed water on her face. She slipped on an athletic tank and shorts, twisting her hair up in a knot on the way up the circular stairwell to the main deck. After a brief check of the cockpit to make sure nothing unusual had occurred overnight and she remained on course, she grabbed a water, put on Brahms’ Academic Festival Overture and hit the treadmill.
Staying in shape while spending most of her days on a ship with under two hundred square meters of living space wasn’t easy. Prenatal genetic tuning for physical hardiness and agility—a gift from her parents by way of the Alliance Armed Forces—made it easier to be sure, but even the best genetic enhancements didn’t replace simple physical activity.
Nearly a quarter of the port wall was taken up by a treadmill, pull-up bar, pulley-based weight machine and pilates pad. It wasn’t mountain hikes or barefoot beach runs, but it mostly got the job done.
Then she activated a full-sensory overlay of Discovery Park at sunset, and it effectively became a barefoot beach run. Almost.
A heavy sheen of sweat coated her skin by the time she slowed the treadmill to a stop, lowered the music to a pleasant background level and headed downstairs to shower.
One could make a reasonable case for the utility of every item on the main deck. But there was simply no denying the truth that the lower deck represented pure personal extravagance. She didn’t feel the slightest bit contrite about it either; it was her money and her ship.
Still, she occasionally had to giggle in wicked delight at the full waterfall shower, oversized garden tub, cushy lounge chair and queen-sized bed with a view of the stars. Her own personal retreat, tucked into the void of space.
She sat at the kitchen-area table and munched on a banana and peanut-butter toast while she checked her overnight communications.
First up was a cool note from her mother letting her know she would be going to St. Petersburg to attend a conference in a few days, and would tell her grandfather ‘hello’ for her.
She ignored the tone of the message and smiled to herself. She had always rather liked her grandfather. He was simple and down-to-earth in a way few people were these days. Grumpy as all hell, but in a loveable way. A brief pang of guilt struck when she realized it had been more than four years since she had seen him. She really should try to rectify the lapse once she returned to Earth.
She was about to delete the message when she noticed it included an attachment. Puzzled, she opened it, only to find a sterile listing of Alliance command postings for the previous month. A frown tugged her mouth downward as she scanned down it while wondering if her mother had attached it in error—except that was an absurd notion, because her mother didn’t make mistakes.
The name leapt off the list as if it were scripted in meter-high fluorescent neon colors.
EAS Juno: Lieutenant Colonel Malcolm Jenner
She sank back in the chair, chuckling a little at the irony. He had left her because she spent too much time in space, and now he was serving in space. God, he must be miserable. He had never been able to grasp why she loved it so much, no matter how many times she had tried to explain it, had tried to show him what a wonder the stars were.
Maybe she should send him a brief message wishing him luck…but some wounds were best left untouched, the better to fade away. In truth, he hadn’t left because she spent too much time in space—he had left because he believed she didn’t love him enough to spend less time in space and away from him. That wasn’t the way she had viewed the issue, but in declaring such he had made her realize it didn’t much matter, because the relationship was doomed to failure. He would never understand.
She didn’t know what her mother imagined she was accomplishing by sending the attachment. Whatever. She munched on her toast for a moment, thoughts adrift in memories, before straightening up and forcing herself to refocus on the task at hand.
Her brow crinkled up in bewilderment at the next message. It contained a personal note from the Minister for Extra-Solar Development asking her to reconsider the Deep Space Exploration position, increasing the offered salary by twenty percent and offering to meet with her this week to discuss her needs.
Okay, seriously?
A somewhat disbelieving laugh escaped her lips. She didn’t deny she felt flattered at the special attention; she had a great deal of confidence in her abilities, and her record spoke for itself, but damn.
&
nbsp; She chewed on her bottom lip and pondered what in the hell might be the reason behind the lavish adulation. She didn’t care for mysteries. Well, it would be more accurate to say she didn’t care for mysteries she couldn’t solve…but perhaps this mystery could be solved merely by the application of the universal law that politicians were svilochnaya peshka. Mollified by the thought, she shrugged and sent back a gracious decline.
The only other message of value came from Kennedy. It detailed her enchanting dinner with the eco-dev executive and proclaimed she was absolutely positively head-over-heels in love. This guy was the one. No doubt about it.
“What is this, the third ‘true love’ this year?” The woman went through men like most people went through flower arrangements. She responded with as much, then put away her plate and walked over to the data center.
The heart of the main deck consisted of a long table, rectangular except for rounded edges. Along the starboard wall were a set of embedded screens, a small desk and a workbench. A waist-high holo control panel, linked to both the screens and the table, spanned the gap at the cockpit-facing end. A plain cylinder twenty centimeters in diameter hung suspended from the ceiling to hover a meter and a half above the length of the table.
Both the cylinder and the surface of the table were made of a platinum-germanium based n-alloy. The inert, nonreactive platinum provided an ideal tableau upon which to display the data transmitted flawlessly through the zero-dispersive, semi-conductive and highly refractive germanium.
A series of commands entered in the control panel rendered a full-spectrum image of Metis above the center of the table. The EM bands gleamed in the traditional rainbow hues but stretched far beyond the range of visible light to cover the spectrum.
She reached into the display. One by one she pulled out each band and flicked it to the side, until eight discrete images bordered the center one. She couldn’t help but smile; the images now resembled nothing so much as an old-fashioned painter’s palette. Fitting, as to her it was pure art.
Rogue Stars Page 83
