Rogue Stars

by C Gockel et al.

  She leaned against the workbench behind her and let her eyes drift across the palette. It was time to get serious about this expedition.

  14 Atlantis

  Independent Colony

  Matei Uttara moved with deliberate aimlessness through the milling guests in the foyer of the ballroom. Dimmed lighting, standard protocol for dinner parties across millennia, gave him some measure of freedom in his movements. He took care not to abuse the privilege.

  The current conditions—here, now, for the next seven to eleven minutes—most closely mimicked the environment he expected to encounter the following evening. Politicians, businessmen and press engaged in polite, formal mingling, everyone save the intelligence agents concerned solely with the impression they created.

  Beyond the threshold eighteen dinner tables were arranged with careful precision, separated by a wide aisle cutting down the center. The aisle served as a clear demarcation of the factions present: Alliance to the left, Federation to the right. Even the corporate representatives and media were required to declare their allegiance for all to see.

  The road to peace had quite a few more steps to be trod. Yet cracks in the symbolic wall were manifesting, courtesy of several brave souls among the attendees.

  Political boundaries leaked like a sieve when it came to popular culture, but visible differences still existed between Alliance and Federation citizens. The inhabitants of Earth and the First Wave colonies preferred rather baroque clothing as the current fashion; ensembles tended to include multiple hues or a vibrant, often garish accent piece. Those hailing from Senecan worlds favored dark, more muted attire or a single dominant hue. They saw it as befitting their self-proclaimed no-nonsense, pragmatic nature.

  The distinctions faded as one moved up the political ladder of course, for political culture remained traditionalist everywhere. Still, you could see it in the details if you knew how to look. For instance, among the brave souls chipping at the wall was Thomas Kalnin, the Alliance Deputy Minister for Textiles, whose bright fuchsia lapel kerchief in an otherwise conservative suit contrasted with the subdued sepia pantsuit of his conversation partner Sara Triesti, head of the Senecan Trade Biomedics Subdivision.

  The crowd thinned a bit as those on the periphery began to wander toward their seats. He took a half-pace back into the shadows to survey the room.

  The set of wide doors in the foyer constituted the primary method of ingress and egress to the ballroom. Halfway down the left wall were two doors used by the service personnel; one led to the kitchen, the other to supply stations then a maintenance corridor. The area bustled with activity as wait staff hurried in and out making final preparations.

  Far less obvious was an unmarked door in the right wall, just in front of the dais that stretched the width of the room. It led to an engineering hub for the various screens, lighting and invisible acoustic enhancements. A single technician staffed it during events. Beyond it lay another maintenance corridor—but this one opened into a labyrinth of passages which spread through the convention center. He expected this to be his exit.

  Director Kouris entered alongside his adversary-turned-partner Minister Santiagar. They would not linger amid the patrons. Not this evening. He could feel the subtle shift in the atmosphere, the intangible pressure on the guests to disperse, to take their places as rapt observers of the performance to come.

  He watched Kouris and Santiagar move across the ballroom toward the seats of honor, aides trailing them in parallel clusters. The ‘aides’ included three Alliance and two Senecan intelligence agents identified the day before along with a dozen of their brethren elsewhere in the delegations.

  There was danger in waiting until the final event on the final night to act. He would not be granted a second opportunity. Nevertheless, his instructions were to let the Summit play out, to let this very public spectacle of diplomacy run its very public course.

  The reason for the instructions had not been provided, but it wasn’t his concern. He knew quite well his role. He was to be the Bishop’s Opening in a galactic chess match.

  His white pawn stopped to acquire a drink at the bar before heading to one of the tables. Mr. Nythal had proved adequate in furnishing necessary access and information regarding certain codes and procedures, but was of little additional use. Yet another matter which was not his concern.

  His concern reached the head table, and the pressure on the crowd to alight became suffocating. He discreetly slid into the throng of reporters flowing to the media tables.

  “Welcome everyone, to our banquet this evening. Friends, guests, press, we invite you to enjoy some of the famed Atlantis hospitality. Fellow Summit attendees, you’ve all worked extremely hard these last two days—it’s time to relax for a couple of hours with a fine meal and finer wine.”

  Jaron was already relaxing with something considerably stronger than wine. He took a long sip of the Polaris Burst cocktail while shifting to the right in order for the waiter to place a spinach salad in front of him. The first of—was it five courses or six? He couldn’t be bothered to recall.

  The dynamic voice demanded he return his attention to the stage. He truly hoped the man wasn’t intending on talking through every one of however many courses there were. The Alliance Minister was annoyingly charismatic, exhibiting an earnest demeanor which oozed sincerity and optimism. Director Kouris had spoken at the opening night’s dinner. It had been a direct and businesslike speech, as was his manner—supremely competent and utterly uninspiring.

  The Minister stepped out from behind the coral-veined marble podium. It served no real purpose beyond an oversized holder for a glass of water, but podiums were a tradition which for some reason never seemed to fade away. If the man needed the crutch of speech notes, they resided on his whisper. His easy, natural mannerisms made it unlikely, though.

  “We won’t hide from the truth of Earth and Seneca’s troubled past. To ignore it would be to devalue the sacrifices of those who lost their lives in a war both sides believed to be just. But we cannot alter the past. We can only move forward.”

  Santiagar paused to sip his water, and Jaron leaned in to chuckle at the punch line of a joke being shared by his table companions. He hadn’t caught the setup, but it hardly mattered.

  Mid-level members of the Senecan delegation surrounded him at the white-clothed table. While the Summit was by most accounts going well, few on either side were ready to mix socially yet. From a hierarchical perspective, he surmised this was the ‘auxiliary’ table—occupied by those on the fringe of real power.

  He swallowed a frown in the fiery burn of the cocktail. By right he should be seated next to the Director, but he had been bumped in favor of the Chairman of Elathan Pharmaceuticals, with the admonition that this was a trade summit, after all.

  “For though we have our differences, we are all members of the human race. We share thousands of years of history. We share a heritage, for Earth is the motherland for each of us.”

  Jaron nearly choked on a bite of ciabatta and quickly covered his mouth with a napkin. The Minister’s eyes shown with the fervor of a true believer. It was revolting.

  “We are here this week to take our first steps on a new path. A path which will bring greater prosperity to the citizens of our galaxy, no matter the affiliation of the world they call home. Director Kouris shares my commitment to forging this new path, and I give him my deepest appreciation and thanks.”

  The arrival of the soup dish provided him an opportunity to surreptitiously glance over at the press contingent. He didn’t know what he expected to see—a ninja in a mask with a saber strapped to his back? He hadn’t the faintest idea what the man looked like, or even if it was a man at all. Perhaps he might at least spot a steely gaze or an indefinable aura surrounding a dangerous person. But he could discern nothing. No sign or clue as to who among the two dozen reporters was the wolf in the fold.

  He did however notice the vision in red crossing the room on her way to a corporate table ne
ar the corner. Silver hair cascaded down sculpted shoulders to frame a plunging neckline and ample cleavage.

  Santiagar had abandoned the podium to stride along the front of the dais. His hands animated the energy of his words. “I believe, as the Director believes, commerce between private corporations and individual entrepreneurs should not be curtailed by political boundaries. Both the Alliance and the Federation espouse the principles of free enterprise and economic liberty. The time has come to practice what we preach.”

  Jaron gestured to one of the junior attachés seated at a lesser table to come over. When the young man—Cande-something—reached his side, he leaned in to mutter in his ear. “Do me a favor and see that a Velvet Fantasy is delivered to the lovely lady in red over there. And make damn sure she’s made aware it’s from me.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll take care of it.” The man—Chris Candela was his name, he thought—nodded and scurried off. Jaron relaxed back in the chair and pretended to gaze with interest at what mercifully appeared to be the conclusion of the speech.

  “Tomorrow we will be presenting a series of real, concrete initiatives which will relax trade restrictions on a number of consumer goods, opening new markets for Alliance and Senecan companies alike. In addition, I’m pleased to announce Director Kouris and I have agreed to meet again next year in what we hope will become a regular conference devoted to expanding galactic commerce.”

  The Minister stopped at the perfect center of the stage and smiled with assured conviction at the audience. “Here’s to new beginnings.”

  As Santiagar descended the stairs to shake Kouris’ hand, Jaron looked over his shoulder to catch the eye of the lady in red. She raised her drink to him with a small dip of her chin and a seductive smile.

  Diffuse lights transformed the waters to a glowing turquoise beneath the translucent walkway. Tiny ripples danced in the mild breeze cooling the air after what had been a warm, sunny day. Glare from the many hotels, restaurants and clubs fashioned an eerie blue-filtered aurora in the night sky.

  The Summit banquet had concluded three hours earlier. Afterward the attendees had practically trampled one another in their eagerness to scatter throughout the resort colony and partake in their sin of choice.

  The reputation of the man Matei followed was not that of a sinner. Those who knew him regarded him as squeaky-clean to a fault, which would be why he walked alone rather than joining any of the roving groups of his coworkers. It would also be why the man was heading toward the less well-lit area of the entertainment quarter, where his carnal lapse was unlikely to be witnessed by those same coworkers.

  Matei trailed his target into a sizeable crowd spilling out of a large theatre. The façade was festooned with garish flamingos, frolicking dolphins and a strange yellow-and-orange flying creature, all intertwined with neon magenta crystals. The marquee advertised a full-sensory interactive circus performance.

  Past the theatre the crowd dispersed somewhat, and with a right turn shadows began to fall across the illuminated walkway. Progressively seedier bars competed with body art parlors, sensory booths and ‘leisure’ clubs. He quickened his pace.

  As they passed the entrance to one of the more popular clubs and the foot traffic briefly increased, he bumped against his target. “Sorry, excuse me.” A clumsy grasp of a fleshy upper arm masked the pinprick of the microneedle.

  The man didn’t even glance at him. “It’s fine.”

  Matei blended back into the passersby to continue following three meters behind. Twenty steps later the man’s gait became erratic, then slowed to sway unsteadily.

  He sidled in beside his target and placed an arm around the man’s waist for support. “Easy there. I think you’ve had a little too much to drink.”

  Unfocused eyes looked over groggily. “Wha…you….” The eyes drifted closed as the man sagged into his arms.

  He held the slumping figure upright and guided him to an offshoot alley, then down two more alleyways, until the discordant sounds of the quarter faded to a low buzz. They moved around the corner of the rearmost building and he let the man collapse against the wall. A few incoherent mumblings escaped, but by this point all motor function control had ceased.

  Matei squatted down and placed a hand under the man’s chin to hold his head up. “Okay, smile for the camera.” His ocular implant scanned the facial features and hairstyle; he had to hold an eyelid open to get a retinal imprint. The man sank to the ground while he turned over a palm and scanned the fingerprints. Lastly, he yanked a single dark brown hair from the scalp and pressed it between the glyphs on his index fingers to extract the DNA sequence.

  Satisfied, he reached in his pack and pulled out a ball. It was a mere four centimeters in diameter, made of an ultra-dense alloy and attached to a length of fine woven rope. He wound the end of the rope around the man’s ankle and knotted it securely.

  The man had slipped into a fully catatonic state. Matei lifted him enough to shift him to the edge of the narrow walkway. After injecting the man’s neck with another needle, he straightened up and nudged the body and the ball over the edge into the water.

  Here in the deep recesses of the entertainment quarter there were no lights in the walkways or neon lights adorning the buildings. Within seconds the body vanished beneath the inky blackness.

  The rope was constructed of a special water-soluble metamat fiber. It was coated with a resin designed to dissolve over three days, after which the rope would disintegrate and the bloated body rise to the surface. The injected solution acted to keep the core organs minimally functioning long past when the man had drowned, thus delaying the apparent time of death.

  In the bright daylight sun and crystal waters, the corpse was certain to be discovered. To the world it would look like the man committed suicide shortly after committing the heinous act he intended to perform the next evening.

  He picked up the pack and retraced his path through the alleyways, where he rejoined the revelers. He wound his way back toward the hotel, where he would spend the remainder of the night transforming himself into Chris Candela, junior attaché to the Senecan trade delegation.

  15 Space, Northeast Quadrant

  Border of Senecan Federation Space

  Caleb sat on the floor in the open space of the main deck tinkering with a spare circuit panel. It was a trick he had learned as a teenager when he had spent a summer placing monitoring stations for the Park Service in the mountains outside Cavare. Occupying your hands with a detailed task became a form of meditation, allowing your mind to work through concerns in the background.

  His hands worked to separate the main and below deck temperature control circuits; his mind pondered Volosk’s oblique suggestion that he might, if he wanted, take Samuel’s place in Division.

  It wasn’t a question of whether he thought he could do the job. It was a matter of whether he wanted to do the job. Samuel hadn’t been confined to a desk in his last few years, but he had certainly spent less time in the field. Caleb liked the way things were now. He liked the chase, the intrigue…the simplicity. There were no politics to worry about and no bureaucratic entanglements; there was only the mission. He hadn’t—

  —alarms began pealing in the cabin, the high-pitched wails bouncing off the narrow walls to clash in a discordant clangor.

  He leapt to his feet and lunged for the cockpit—in the small cabin it wasn’t a great distance—dropping into the seat as he brought the alerts front and center of the HUD.

  The primary alarm alerted him to the fact that a particle beam had missed the ship by thirty-eight meters, sent off-kilter by the passive defense shielding. Weapons fire skimming the hull was the first warning of other ships in the vicinity?

  They must be sporting hardcore stealth, and since they were firing on him unprovoked they were definitely mercs. Drop out of superluminal for ten damn minutes and he’s getting shot at….

  “VI, identify hostiles and ready weapons.”

  The medium-pitched female voice respond
ed in its pleasant, forever-placid tone. “Tracking hostiles.”

  The VI represented the top-layer interface for the onboard CU which monitored and manipulated the various ship systems. In 1.7 seconds the CU used the trajectory of the beam to extrapolate the attacker’s location and analyzed the energy readings in the region to identify the unique signature of the vessel.

  A red dot appeared on the HUD’s regional map.

  Having used the information to match similar energy signatures in the area, two additional dots quickly joined the first one. The three dots flew in formation and closed rapidly.

  “Let’s do this, you bastards. VI, autopilot off.”

  “You have navigation.”

  He engaged the safety harness then activated the manual-guided controls and yanked the ship upward into a sharp arc. He sailed above the pursuers, locked on and fired at the lead attacker.

  Particle beam weapons were standard fare on merc vessels, because they were comparatively cheap, standardized and mass-produced. However they weren’t particularly agile, with limited on-the-fly adjustability and a non-negligible recharge time.

  He’d noted earlier how Division hadn’t scrimped on the ship’s hardware, and was never more grateful for it than at this moment. The dual neodymium-crystal pulse laser weapons his ship wielded exhibited far greater responsiveness than particle beams. They realigned each pulse to account for the movement of the target and were capable of firing continuously for upwards of twenty seconds before needing to recharge. Granted, each pulse carried rather less force than a particle beam shot—but in practice the continual fire more than made up the difference.