Free Space

by Scott Bartlett

  Thatcher showed Reardon no mercy as they fled the ones they’d sought to destroy. He had his ships dog them through the asteroids in two packs, and between them they claimed three more ships.

  Not the Eagle, however. Ramon Pegg lived on, to carry the memory of what Thatcher had done to him twice, now.

  There may be a third time, Pegg, Thatcher thought, his jaw set. But there won’t be a fourth.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  New Houston, Oasis Colony

  Freedom System, Dupliss Region

  Earth Year 2290

  Tony Vermillion walked into Mittelman’s office wearing orange-tinted glasses and a leather jacket sprouting white feathers from the shoulders, which wafted with every stride. He sat in one of the empty chairs facing the desk and crossed his legs in a way that made Mittelman wince.

  “Hi, boss.”

  Vermillion was as flamboyant as ever. Strangely, it made him one of Mittelman’s top spies. No one expected the aloof, loudly dressed man to be the one listening carefully to everything you said, and even closer to the things you didn’t say. The one collecting secret whisperings, distilling them, and bringing them like offerings to the puppet master.

  Mittelman liked Vermillion, if only because he didn’t appear to give a shit what anyone thought, and the more important you considered yourself, the less of a shit he gave. That applied to Mittelman, too, but he had plenty of experience with being disrespected, and he’d grown basically immune to it, other than the occasional slow-burning resentment that manifested in brutal revenge visited upon his enemies. Other than that, he really didn’t mind it.

  Often, he wondered whether Tony Vermillion was the man’s real name. Almost certainly not, he decided now. “What do you have for me?”

  “Straight to business, as always,” Vermillion said with a quirked eyebrow. “Well, fine. Let’s see. Ursa Incorporated just switched titanium suppliers for a lower price—but more complicated logistics. It’s become pretty easy to disrupt their entire operation, for anyone interested in doing that. What else? Herwin Dirk’s been holding closed-door meetings with a group no one’s heard of before. I haven’t even been able to get a name. Not sure if they’re with another corp, the UNC, or—they could be pirates, for all I know!” Vermillion chuckled, then winked. “But I know you don’t like it when I speculate. Oh, and—’

  “Quit toying with me.”

  The eyebrow quirked higher. “Hmm?”

  “You didn’t come all the way from Kreng to feed me tidbits. If you’re here in person, then you have something important. Something we can’t afford to send by courier.”

  Vermillion’s smile stretched across his face until it nearly touched his ears. “Oh, boss. I can’t slip anything past you, can I?” He slapped the desk lightly. “Your friend from Meridian met with a Kibishii VP.”

  “And?”

  “The VP told him they still don’t trust Meridian, even after they gave them their stealth tech. The VP said he fully expected some form of trickery, and the next attack would be the last one Kibishii would suffer before retaliating, super-alliance be damned.”

  Mittelman narrowed his eyes. “Is that supposed to make me happy?”

  Vermillion frowned. “This is exclusive information, boss. You normally like the hard-to-get stuff.”

  Not when it screws with my plans. But then, Vermillion wasn’t privy to those, was he? “Anything else?”

  Vermillion sighed. “Nothing I can’t submit to you in a report. I can tell you must be busy. You’re sure testy enough.”

  “I have been overworked,” Mittelman said, by way of apology. At least, it was the closest thing to an apology Vermillion would get. “Thanks for bringing me this.”

  Clucking his tongue, Vermillion flashed him a smile and then propelled himself from the chair, sauntering across the office and leaving without another word.

  Mittelman had already forgotten about him. So. I may have bought some time. But I’ve also run out of stalling tactics.

  Sooner or later, Meridian would hit Kibishii again, and this time the Japanese corp would hit back. With or without Frontier, he suspected. There were things Kibishii could do, even without the benefit of proper warships. None of those things would be good for keeping the peace within Daybreak Combine.

  He rose, folded his hands behind his back, and began pacing in front of the floor-to-ceiling bay windows that overlooked the lush greenery of New Houston. Which was a little less lush since the Xanthic attack, but still hauntingly beautiful. Rose certainly has a nice view for herself, here.

  He decided that now would be a good time to stop delaying the installation of the instant comm unit, and instead to facilitate it. It was time to go for a walk.

  Before he did, he used his desk’s holoscreen to compile a data packet, using an automated script to hack each file’s metadata, so that it looked like he’d received them yesterday. He loaded the packet onto his eyepiece and then strolled out of the office.

  “I’ll be a couple hours, Miriam. Leave any messages on my desk.”

  “Will do, boss. Enjoy the sun out there.”

  He smiled, wondering if she’d called Rose “boss.”

  Outside, the promised sun rays kissed his face, and a smile broke out on his lips, like a Venus flytrap unfurling its leaves in spring.

  When he arrived at the warehouse Hiro Yoshida had infiltrated to commit his vandalism, he found the security stiffer than it had been before the incident. So very human, to fix things after a crisis occurs. He’d always prized preparation and proactiveness, and he practiced both every day. Then again, he often thought of himself as a different species from the people around him. Either transhuman or subhuman. Probably the latter.

  Even though the guards at the entrance knew him—or at least, knew him as Harold Wills—they still did their due diligence by inspecting his ID. Maybe there’s hope for human diligence yet. Mittelman resurrected his grin for them once they finished and waved him through.

  Three-quarters of the way to the rear of the warehouse, down a long row of shelving to the right, he found four techs circling the battered comm unit. Its metal casing bore dents all over from Yoshida’s attack, and Mittelman noticed a stack of metal sheets on the concrete nearby, waiting to replace the abused exterior.

  “Are you planning to replace every damaged part?” Mittelman asked, causing all four techs to jump, then turn toward him wearing sheepish expressions. He had to admire how focused they were on their work—he hadn’t been trying for stealth as he approached. Though he’d always been told he had a silent gait.

  “Uh, yes, Mr. Wills.” The tech who’d spoken, Rory Kincaid, was the only one who ever addressed him. The rest fiddled with eye pieces, scanners or handheld holoscreens and avoided eye contact. The one with the most social skills led them and did their talking. The alpha tech, you might say.

  “It turns out that’s a bad idea.”

  Kincaid shook his head—more of a jerk, actually. “Sir?”

  “I’ve just received a detailed message from a corp who’s managed to reverse engineer the unit and has decided to share the information with Frontier. One with a vested interest in the units proliferating throughout the Cluster.” That was mostly true, except that Mittelman’s means of obtaining the information had been a little less conventional, and a little more furtive than he’d let on. Pretty much every corp will benefit from the comm units spreading, though. Any corp interested in growing its client base, anyway. Improved comms will do that.

  By sharing the information with Frontier techs, who did not have a reputation for discretion—not when they were among their own, anyway—he was contributing to that very proliferation. Soon, corps would start developing their own internal comm networks, which would make his job as Chief Intelligence Officer harder. But that was bound to happen anyway, so it seemed just as well to release the genie from its bottle now, at a time when it served his interests. Having Frontier become one of the first corps with its own internal network was
just a nice side perk.

  As for the four techs, their expressions had only grown more sheepish, now with shades of annoyance. They’d been working around the clock to crack the instant comm tech, and the news that another corp had done it first clearly wasn’t sitting well with them.

  “If you replace everything, you’ll remove the very thing that makes it function. The circuitry, you’ll need to repair instead of replacing.” Mittelman almost winced, hoping that Yoshida hadn’t been too thorough when it came to demolishing the unit’s circuit boards.

  “That would take at least three days’ work in and of itself.” Kincaid’s annoyance had caused him to drop any form of deference toward Mittelman. Not that he really cared.

  “Nevertheless, it has to be done. Those circuits have been infused with particles entangled with partner particles residing inside the master unit, which sits in a UNC server room somewhere in Clime. Altering those partner particles is what enables the device to function. Everything is translated into binary and then transmitted to Clime, where it’s rerouted to whoever the user is trying to contact.” Mittelman pressed a button along the top of his eyepiece, transmitting the data packet to the handheld holoscreen held by one of the techs behind Kincaid. “I’ve just given you everything you need to complete the repairs. I expect to have a working unit within forty-eight hours.”

  Kincaid blinked, and his voice grew quieter. “Sir, as I said, it will take that long just to repair the circuit boards, let along figure out how to integrate them with the rest of the—”

  “Oh. I’m sorry. Did your projection include sleep time?”

  “Uh…yes.”

  “Then skip that part.” Mittelman held Kincaid’s gaze for several long seconds, which he trusted would communicate everything that needed to be communicated. Such as the real and present danger of Kincaid becoming jobless in forty-eight hours if he failed to make the deadline.

  At any rate, forty hours later, Mittelman sat at his desk with a photo-sized interface sitting in front of him that connected with the instant comm unit, which had been installed inside a supply closet in the room next door. The interface was kept propped up by a single sturdy rubber leg that prevented it from sliding as Mittelman punched in the information required for the UNC to reroute his call.

  He wasn’t overly fond of the idea that each transmission went through UNC infrastructure. Until his techs arrived at a method for encrypting conversations, and Frontier exchanged the necessary encryption keys with its frequent communication partners, it would be child’s play for the United Nations and Colonies to eavesdrop—to scrape each and every call for later digestion. To an intelligence officer, the affliction felt worse than cancer. But for the time being, he’d just have to live with it.

  At last, the UNC operator—an AI, he assumed—routed his call to the intended recipient, and to his surprise he reached the man he’d wanted to immediately.

  “Simon Moll.” The gruff, self-assured voice came over the line crisp and clear. “Hans Mittelman, I presume?”

  A moment of silence passed over the call as Mittelman made some slight adjustments to the mental file he kept on the Sunder CEO. The fact he hadn’t bothered with the usual pomp and show of keeping him waiting by bouncing him between a network of assistants and receptionists—plus the fact that he’d known it would be Mittelman on the line, despite that he’d submitted no identifying information—that was impressive.

  “Are you there? Hello?”

  “Yes. Mr. Moll. Thank you for taking my call so quickly.”

  “The operator told me the source. Your company forms a vital part of this alliance, Mr. Mittelman. If Dupliss falls, Sunder will have quite a mess to clean up.”

  A backhanded compliment, deftly delivered. Moll was a man with a firm grasp on both charisma and dominance. But that, Mittelman had already known.

  Sometimes, a less subtle touch was called for. “Speaking of the Daybreak Combine, I’d like to know why you helped build a super-alliance that’s designed to fail.”

  Now, it was Moll’s turn to fall momentarily silent. “What the hell are you angling at, spy?”

  How quickly manners vanish. “I think you know exactly what I’m ‘angling at.’ The Combine for which Frontier finds itself acting as a pillar is riddled with fractures. Nationalistic rivalries. Corporate rivalries. Meridian’s constant attacks on Kibishii are a manifestation of one of many conflicts waiting to break the alliance open. It just happens to be the one that reached boiling point first.”

  “You’ve been playing spy games for too long. You’re not doing corporate intelligence anymore, Mittelman. You’re living in conspiratorial la-la land.”

  “We both know my concerns are perfectly valid. And there must be a reason for you to behave this way. I want you to know that I’ll be watching your next moves very carefully. And I trust they’ll point to your true motives. Every man’s actions follow a pattern, even a man as inscrutable as you consider yourself.”

  Moll snorted. “Pattern indeed. I know all about your pattern, by the way, Mittelman.”

  Another silence. Mittelman became conscious of his own breathing.

  “I know about your passes at Veronica Rose,” Moll went on. “The multiple rejections, at the hands of her and a parade of other women who saw you as the pond scum you are. You were always a black sheep, even when you were among corporate defense lawyers, the scummiest people in the galaxy. Weren’t you? A loser who knows he’s a loser.”

  Mittelman’s shoulders rose and fell. A detached part of his mind was aware that his fingers were whitening, wrapped as they were around the office chair’s arm rests.

  “I know what you are, Mittelman. The sort of man you are. I’d suggest you stay in your lane. It’s far too late to leave it now.” The CEO chuckled. “Events are in motion that you can’t begin to grasp. Tell me, does your boss know you’re having this conversation?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t think so. Stop playing your inane little games, Mittelman, for your own sake. Stick to pleasuring yourself in the shadows. That’s where you belong.”

  The transmission ended, then, and Mittelman sat alone in the office for a long time, staring at the instant comm unit’s interface, perfectly motionless.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Aboard the New Jersey

  Burgee System, Lacuna Region

  Earth Year 2290

  Tad Thatcher kicked off the council of war.

  “We’ve almost reached Ucalegon, where the Xanthic’s bio-luminescent star map led us to expect their next offensive. That’s good. But I want to hear thoughts from all of you on why Degenerate Empire has allowed us to reach here.”

  Rose took in her warship captains’ expressions as they contemplated the commander’s question. Thatcher was the only Frontier captain physically present. The remaining ten were on holoscreens, along with Captain Sho of the Swan. Some of the starship captains were on screens stacked two high, since there wouldn’t have been enough “seats” to fit everyone, otherwise.

  That was a strange thing to behold—3D representations of two captains’ upper torsos, stacked one on top of the other. As though their digital bodies occupied the same space. They wouldn’t be aware of the awkward visual it created, but Rose was. She wondered if it bothered Thatcher, or Candle, or Avery, who were the only others physically present in the New Jersey’s conference room.

  I doubt it bothers Thatcher. Not much seems to.

  Vaguely unsettling visuals aside, gathering all her captains on the same ship would have been stupid. Yes, they could spot most ships from light-hours away, but another stealth attack could happen anywhere, at any time. Losing every starship captain at once, along with the CEO, would cripple the mission. Frontier XOs were trained to take over in such a situation, but it still wouldn’t be pretty.

  Instead, they had awkwardly stacked captains. And that wasn’t the only awkward thing about this meeting. There was also the fact that Thatcher was leading it, even though sev
eral of the captains outranked him. She wondered if her father would have frowned on her allowing him to become a de facto fleet commander.

  Probably, she reflected. Then: How did I allow it to happen?

  She knew the answer. It had come about during the crisis Reardon had sparked when they turned on their business partner and took an entire colony captive. Thatcher had been the first Frontier captain to show up after Ramon Pegg effectively took her hostage, and after he’d liberated her and her executives, she’d leaned on him heavily until Oasis was retaken.

  But even before he’d extracted her from Oasis, Thatcher had proved his mastery of space combat by going up against seven pirate ships with just the New Jersey and an eWar ship, and winning.

  A corp doesn’t have to be as pedantic about protocol as a national military would. That said, she recognized the importance of having a clear-cut chain of command. Doing otherwise eventually brewed a host of unwanted things, including confusion and resentment.

  I’ll need to do something about the situation soon.

  Lieutenant Commander Billy Candle was the first to break the contemplative silence, clearing his throat as he folded his hands. “When you consider it, we’ve only attacked a smallish supply cache, we’ve refrained from directly attacking any other pirates, and we’ve steered clear of the areas they seem to really care about. Perhaps that, combined with Captain Thatcher’s reputation, has kept the pirates at bay.”

  Rose didn’t miss the bland-faced glance Thatcher fired his XO’s way after his flagrant brown-nosing. It almost made her laugh, and she quickly covered her mouth, turning it into a cough.

  He doesn’t trust Candle. She’d realized that gradually over the last weeks, by observing how carefully Thatcher divulged certain information to his XO. And withheld other bits.