by Terry Mixon
He accessed the battalion network, found the feed in question, and ordered it to reboot itself. The image vanished and then reappeared a moment later with a completely different scene.
The bottom floor looked as if a battle had been fought there. Lockers and bunks had been knocked over—some of them seemed to have been shot up—and there were marines scattered throughout the area.
Lieutenant Na was receiving medical attention while an obviously dead man in uniform was being examined by others. Major Martelle was there, and so were the MPs.
Dealing with recruits meant an unending parade of complications, but he’d never faced an outright attack.
The lieutenant was right, though. If the woman after Recruit Tolliver was willing to directly attack the barracks, then the risk of her attacking the recruits out in the open was far too high. He needed to get them out of here right now.
He motioned to the two marines that were providing security, and they jogged over. He filled them in on the situation and watched their level of paranoia shoot through the ceiling. They were disguised as support personnel but had flechette pistols and stunners under their uniform jackets.
That now seemed like far too little protection, and he felt just as exposed as they did. Well, they’d just have to do the best they could.
That task done, he stepped over to Gomez and stood beside her as she watched the recruits sparring. She raised an eyebrow when he gestured for her to follow him a little farther away. He wanted to be distant enough that Tolliver couldn’t overhear them with her enhanced hearing.
Once they were safely away, he turned his back to the recruits so that there wasn’t even a chance that someone could read his lips. “There’s been an incident at the barracks. It seems that Lieutenant Na surprised an intruder, and there was a fight.
“The barracks is trashed, and the intruder is dead. We can’t take the recruits back there, and worse, we don’t know that there isn’t another prong to this attack. We need to get the recruits to a safer location without tipping them off that that’s what we’re doing. Ideas?”
Gomez’s jaw dropped a little as he spoke, but then her expression clouded with fury. Moments later, her eyes became slightly unfocused with the look of someone that was accessing their implants.
“Holy shit! It looks like the LT is down. I can’t get a good look at the dead guy’s face, and when I scroll the feed back, it just goes blank. Somebody’s been screwing with it.”
She started to say something more but then froze. “Son of a bitch! That’s my brother standing there!”
Page examined the feed and tried to figure out who she was talking about but couldn’t. “Which one is he?”
“He’s the guy in the center of the third group standing next to Major Martelle. The one whose hair is out of regulation.”
That helped him spot the man. He was dressed in marine duty fatigues, but she was right. His hair was a little bit longer than regulations allowed for.
“What’s your brother doing here?” he asked, knowing that she probably didn’t know the answer.
Gomez turned her back on the recruits, grimacing. “He lives on New Dallas, but he works for Imperial Intelligence. Oh, that’s not the story he tells other people, but I know that’s what he does. He’s a tech guy, but he retired from the marines a while back. He shouldn’t be there.”
Page absorbed the information, and it all came together in his head. “So, you’re saying that he was a marine who left the service a while back. Would that be six years ago, around the same time Recruit Tolliver was rescued from the Singularity?”
It was as if a light bulb had gone off behind her eyes, and Gomez clenched her fists. “Holy crap, how could I have missed that? The timing is too close, and he has all that extra money to throw around. He was on the raid that rescued her.
“That means that he was a member of Na’s platoon. He knows everything. He’s been here this entire time because of Tolliver. He’s been lying to me for two freaking years!”
Page put a hand on her shoulder. “Tear a strip off of him later. We need to get the recruits moving. Do you have any ideas about how we can get them to safety without spilling the beans?”
Gomez frowned furiously and began pacing. “We’re going to have to jump to another part of the training. We’re not supposed to go into space for another couple of weeks, but I think we need to kick off zero-G and vacuum orientation right now.
“Next week is supposed to be field exercises, but that’s a little too accessible for my taste. If we get them straight to the landing field, we can have them on board a pinnace and into orbit before anyone knows what we’re doing.”
He considered the idea and decided that he liked it. It would put the training out of order, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. They could recover from any hiccups this caused.
He could pitch this as a surprise exercise. With some care, it didn’t have to be dangerous. Well, any more dangerous than the rest of basic training.
Another bonus would be that the small orbital the marines used was also used by Fleet for the training of their own people. There’d be a number of Fleet recruits and officer trainees present in the area doing patrols with small craft. They’d challenge anyone who wasn’t supposed to be there and provide a layer of protection that the recruits wouldn’t get on the ground.
All in all, it was an excellent plan.
“Pass the word to the other instructors while I get things in motion. I’m calling in a pinnace, so we’ll depart from here. We can’t afford to delay any more than we have to. I’ll also make sure that the orbital knows that we’re coming. That should give us a couple of weeks of relative safety while Lieutenant Na and Major Martelle get things sorted out. Go.”
Gomez ran to inform the other instructors while Page turned to face the fighting field. He stared at the recruits with his hands on his hips for a few seconds while he initiated the implant call to the field to scramble a pinnace.
Page smiled grimly. Tolliver’s enemies had tipped their hand. Now, if they tried anything else, he’d be ready for them.
He hoped they did because they’d deeply regret crossing blades with him and his people. No one threatened his recruits or attacked his officers. He’d make them bleed if they tried again.
Peter got word of the problem right after lunch. A contact he had inside the military police called and gave him the lowdown on the fiasco.
Base security was in an uproar, and his contact said that someone had confronted the man he’d sent. There’d been a fight in the barracks, and at least one person was dead. The contact didn’t know whether it was his man or someone else.
He instructed her to find out everything she could and to call him back. Then he called for his lieutenants to join him.
Jomos Carfio and Lucinda Drake took the news stoically once they’d sat down at the table to the side of his office, drinking their coffee. They silently considered their options once he’d finished laying out the facts as he understood them.
“This has the potential to go really bad, boss,” Jomos said, scratching his dark beard. “What did the guy you sent know about us?”
“I recruited him very carefully,” Peter said. “He had a sizable gambling debt with the Mackie family. I had our people pretend to be with them and offered to forgive his debt in exchange for this job.
“I made sure that we paid off the debt through a cutout, and our people told the man he was no longer welcome at any of the Mackie gambling halls. So far as he knows, he’s working for the Mackie family. So far as the Mackie family knows, this guy paid off his debts on his own. Nothing that he says or does can lead back to us.”
The burly man nodded. “That’s good, so far as it goes, but if base security finds out about the debt and manages to dig too deeply, they’ll find out that he didn’t pay it back. That’s gonna raise some questions if anybody from the Mackie organization talks. Still, there’s nothing we can do about it.”
Lucinda leaned bac
k in her chair and grimaced. “The best outcome for us is if our guy is dead. If they start asking him pointed questions, the vanishing debt will raise their level of suspicion even higher. Far better if all they have is a body and no motive.
“How long will it be before we hear back from your contact in the military police? I’d really like to know if our guy is dead or sitting in a box.”
“It’ll take as long as it takes,” Peter said, his tone calm. “She’s not going to ask any questions that would draw attention to herself, and I support that attitude. She’s our eyes and ears on that base right now, and she’ll get us the information she can as soon as it’s safe to do so.
“All our man was supposed to do was replace the girl’s body wash with a bottle that had drugs mixed in. She’d use it without ever realizing that it was tampered with.
“Once she started behaving strangely, they’d have her tested and find that she’d taken a prohibited substance. She’d have denied it, and they wouldn’t have found any evidence of it in her locker because no one would feel the need to test her body wash. It would’ve been good enough to get her kicked out of the marines.”
Jomos rose to refill his coffee mug and turned back toward the table as he stirred sweetener in. “Our guy wasn’t supposed to start a fight, I assume. How did it happen, and how did someone end up dead?”
Peter shrugged. “We might never know his motivation. Whatever the case, it’s done. We have to deal with the fallout.”
“What’s our next step, boss?” Lucinda asked.
“It looks like we’ll have to kill the girl. I want to hear what your ideas are before I make any final plans. What would you do?”
“I think we should have one of our other people on the base get their hands on the sniper rifle and kill her as soon as possible,” Lucinda said.
Jomos shook his head. “That’s going to cause them to ask even more questions. I think we should have someone sabotage one of the small craft that they use in space. If we can make it crash, lose atmosphere, or something else that will destroy the evidence of tampering and kill the girl, it might be written off as an accident.”
Peter considered the options they’d proposed. Each of them had its pluses and minuses.
“Let’s do both,” he decided. “We can set up a direct attack, and if that doesn’t work out, we’ll have the backup plan that you’ve proposed, Jomos.”
“You’ll need to arrange an accident for that damned woman too,” Lucinda said, a hint of venom in her tone. “She brought this trouble down on us, and we can’t let her just walk away once the contract is fulfilled. The way she smirks makes me want to shoot her between the eyes.”
Peter agreed with her wholeheartedly. His contacts had finally gotten back to him with her identity. Sadly, openly killing a countess would bring far more attention than he was willing to tolerate.
She had to travel home again at some point, and she was likely to do so in a commercial ship. If he sent someone along to make sure that she never completed her journey, that would satisfy him while keeping suspicion off his organization when her death came to light.
Lucinda was right. When this was all wrapped up, he and his organization had to be the only ones left standing. One way or the other, Countess Dayton was going to die too.
“We’ll talk about what can be done to her once we finish handling the problems we’ve currently got. We’ll wait for our military police contact to give us more information about what’s going on and then finish formulating our plans.
“Each of you will be responsible for the plans you’ve proposed, so I want you to get working to make them happen. We’ve got several people on our payroll at the base, but most of them aren’t going to be suitable. Find someone that you can work with and begin formulating your plans.”
One way or the other, they’d finish this stupid job. It was too bad that Andrea Tolliver had to die, but at least she wouldn’t have to live with the shame and anger his original plan would’ve left her with. He supposed it was cleaner this way.
26
Andrea’s thoughts of dinner were disrupted almost as soon as they’d finished fighting practice for the day. They’d barely formed up to begin marching to the mess hall when a roar jerked her eyes upward as a dark shadow passed across the training field.
A marine pinnace raced over them, seemingly only a few meters up, its thrusters howling as it flared into an abrupt landing next to the fighting field, generating a massive cloud of dust.
An inexperienced observer might be forgiven for believing that the small craft had just crashed, but she knew that it hadn’t. The pilot had just performed a high-speed combat drop and killed the pinnace’s velocity at the last moment. She knew that because she’d seen it done before.
Not nearly so elegantly, but Kayden Harmon wasn’t a trained marine pilot, only an ex-merchant who was very good for a civilian.
Before the dust had even started settling, the ramp at the rear of the pinnace began lowering, and Drill Instructor Page appeared at their sides as if by magic.
“Into the pinnace! Move! Move! Move!”
Even though she was unsure about what was going on, Andrea didn’t hesitate. She grabbed Diana’s arm and dragged her into a run. The two of them were only slightly ahead of the rest of the platoon. Everyone had learned that when a drill instructor told you to do something, you did it right then.
They hadn’t received any further training on the acceleration restraints since they’d been delivered to the base, so there was a lot of fumbling as everyone found seats and began strapping themselves in.
Page stalked in after them and shook his head in disgust. “Pay attention to detail, recruits! There are four lines of seats. I want this platoon separated by squad, and I want it done now. Move it! We lift in thirty seconds.”
Sadly, it took over forty seconds to reorganize themselves into the appropriate seats. While they were doing so, the last of the instructors and support staff charged up the ramp and sealed the pinnace. They strapped themselves into the line of seats not being used by the recruits.
As soon as he was satisfied with how the platoon had arrayed itself, Page strapped himself in. He must’ve sent a signal to the pilot because the pinnace lifted with a burst of heavy acceleration, pressing them all sideways in their seats.
It probably would’ve made a lot more sense to have the seats facing forward, but a marine pinnace was designed for powered armor, and that required space for them to move. That meant the seats were arrayed in lines along the outside bulkhead facing inward with matching lines of seats on the inside facing out. The wide space between them was where armored marines would move.
Even though the acceleration was pushing Andrea to the side, it wasn’t too much to deal with. The pinnace had compensators to help deal with some of the acceleration, and the seat’s padding was sloped in such a way that it provided some support, even at full acceleration.
It soon became apparent that the pilot wasn’t going to slow down now that they’d lifted off. They continued to pile on the acceleration to the point that Andrea was glad that she was physically enhanced. She felt sorry for her fellow recruits.
The drill instructors seem to be handling everything without any trouble. Of course, even if they were feeling some discomfort, they weren’t going to allow the recruits to see them sweat.
Since no one was telling her anything, she had plenty of time to wonder where they were going. Why had they left the fighting area in such a dramatic fashion?
From everything that the drill instructors had told them, there were still several days of hand-to-hand instruction left. What purpose did this little surprise serve in advancing that?
Unfortunately for her curiosity, no one seemed inclined to give them an explanation. Instead, the pinnace flew higher into the sky, its thrust seemingly unending.
Andrea attempted to interface her implants with the pinnace and was somewhat surprised when they connected successfully. They hadn’t bothered
to block read-only access to anyone with marine-grade implants, including her.
The pinnace was definitely on its way to orbit. It wasn’t scanning ahead so much as it was scanning behind, and that confused her. Were they worried about being chased? Another inexplicable mystery.
Because the pinnace wasn’t scanning the area where they were going, she couldn’t determine their destination. Perhaps they were doing a suborbital flight where they briefly left the atmosphere and then came back down to another location on the planet itself.
Her curiosity frustrated, she turned to look at Diana, who was seated beside her. She pitched her voice low to keep the drill instructors and recruits around them from overhearing her.
“Can you access the pinnace’s scanner feed?”
Her friend shook her head. “My implants don’t have the necessary authorizations. We’re not supposed to get the marine-grade implants until a few weeks before graduation. Why?”
“Because we’re headed to orbit. I’m not sure what’s going on, but this seems unusual. Weren’t we supposed to continue our hand-to-hand training for another couple of days?”
Her friend nodded. “That was my understanding. Why would they break the training regimen?”
“To surprise us,” Claudio said from his seat just on the other side of Diana, his tone condescending. “They’re obviously trying to put us off our game. They want to see what we do under pressure.”
Andrea thought about it and nodded. That would be in line with some of the things the drill instructors had done so far.
The recruits had been told that the next stage of training was going to the field. That should’ve lasted a couple of weeks, and they’d have learned to shoot flechette rifles and do all the other necessary field tasks. They’d then have moved to the orbital phase of training, where they’d start learning how to operate in space.
Everything was happening out of sequence, but maybe that was their plan. Nothing that Fei or Grace had told her indicated in what order the training would take place.
