Boneshaker

by Joshua Dalzelle

  "My friends! What can I do for you?" a squat, powerfully built alien Jacob's neural implant identified as a Satorro asked, his thick arms spread wide in greeting.

  "We need a ground car big enough for all of us plus enough cargo space to provision our ship," Jacob said, gesturing vaguely towards the Eshquarian gunboat. He'd been practicing Jenovian Standard, the accepted universal language of the quadrant but, for now, stuck with English. His native language had long ago been added to the universal translation matrix so the Satorro was able to understand him with little trouble.

  "You're all such big, strong males! The only vehicle I have that's big enough won't be cheap, I'm afraid to say. How will you be—" Jacob cut him off by slapping down a chit loaded with five hundred credits on it. When the Satorro picked it up and squeezed it to display how much was on it, a wide smile spread across his face.

  "I knew you were beings of discerning taste when I saw you walk up! This way, this way!"

  The Satorro led them from the kiosk line over to a gravel roundabout, pointing as a large, gray vehicle lumbered around to them. The vehicle was boxy and appeared to be new as its owner's sign had claimed. It cost Jacob another two hundred credits to convince the Satorro to forego the normal forms required to rent the vehicle and just turn it over to them for the day.

  "He screwed you over," Murph said once they'd all piled in and told the vehicle's computer where they wanted to go.

  "I knew that the moment he didn't counter-offer on my second bribe," Jacob said with a shrug. "It wasn't so much that he'll remember us as anything more than a bunch of dumbass tourists he got over on."

  "This guy the NIS gave us…this seems like an odd place to find him," MG spoke up from the back seat.

  "Oorch Prime is the last planet with any real infrastructure and some semblance of a government before you enter into the really wild parts of the Cluster," Murph said. "Intel services from dozens of governments keen on keeping an eye on the Eshquarians have set up shop here."

  "Anybody else notice that since Murph was outed as Agent Murphy he talks like some slimy officer now?" Mettler asked. "Semblance of a government? Seriously…who the fuck talks like that?"

  "Literate people, for starters," Jacob said over his shoulder. "It doesn't hurt to not be a complete dumbass all the time. You guys should give it a try from time to time."

  "I'm getting that put on a T-shirt," Taylor said.

  They rode the rest of the way out of town in silence, the whirring of the vehicle's electric drive the only sound as it zipped up the road to the next settlement. Jacob thought it was odd that their target didn't maintain a place in the same town as the largest spaceport. It would make more sense if he had to bug-out, and he'd be closer to all the intel that rode down to the surface with the spacers that operated the ships passing through.

  When they approached their destination, Jacob couldn't help but be shocked by what he saw. It looked like the settlement had started as a ramshackle village and everybody who moved there afterwards decided to stick to that motif. Street after street of buildings that looked slapped together with a mix of local construction materials, some bits of old spaceship hulls, and some newer, shiny tech that looked completely out of place.

  "If I was trying to find someplace to hide, this would be it," MG said. "Look at this place. I'll bet we're already being watched closely."

  "That's a safe bet," Jacob said, leaning down so he could see the aliens on the rooftops staring at their vehicle as it rolled on. "Look sharp, everybody. They may try and stop us to see if we have anything worth taking."

  Despite the obvious interest by the locals, they rolled on unmolested to their destination, a three-story structure on the northern edge of town that was distinctive in that it was uniformly assembled from the same material. Upon closer inspection, Jacob thought it had probably been a pre-fab kit someone had brought in and erected quickly. That told him it was likely one of the intelligence services Murph had mentioned, but not one smart enough to put up a listening post that didn't stick out like a sore thumb.

  "Taylor and MG stay with the truck," Jacob said when the vehicle came to a complete stop. "Mettler and I will post up on the corners and watch for anyone sneaking around. Murph, you make contact."

  They all piled out and deployed quickly. The two staying with the vehicle crouched down near the front so they could use it as a blind and still cover their team. Jacob and Mettler split and went down the alley on either side of the building, making sure there weren't any surprises lurking there, or side exits the people inside could use, before coming back up to the corners and covering Murph. For his part, Murph kept his weapon slung behind him and tried to appear as non-threatening as possible while pressing the button and talking to the hologram of the AI assistant that appeared before him.

  "I'm here to see Kellska," Murph said pleasantly. "Please tell him that—"

  "Master Kellska is not accepting visitors," the hologram of an alien Jacob couldn't identify interrupted. "Please, respect his wishes and leave."

  "Perhaps if you let me properly identify myself, we could—"

  "Master Kellska is not accepting visitors," the hologram said again, now flickering wildly. "Ple— Visitors. Visitooors. Viiiisit."

  "Ah, damn!" Murph slid his primary weapon around to his shoulder and fired into the locks on the door at close range. By the time Jacob had scrambled from his position to help, the smell of burning plastic wafted through the area.

  "Move!" Jacob barked, pushing Murph aside and slamming his boot into the door with as much force as he could muster. His enhanced muscles did their thing, and the remaining lock gave way with a sharp metallic snap, and the door fell in as it jumped off its track.

  "Entering!" Murph said, sliding past and into the entryway while Jacob and Mettler automatically took up covering positions behind him. MG and Taylor sprinted from the vehicle and posted up inside the ruined doorway, sweeping the area in front of the house in case someone attacked the entry team from the rear.

  "Clear right," Mettler said quietly after he swept a small sitting room off the main entrance.

  "Main room is clear," Murph said. "Moving upstairs."

  Jacob moved ahead and checked that the rear entrance was still locked and secured and was about to follow Murph upstairs when the sergeant came flying back down, not uttering a sound as he slammed into the floor in a heap.

  "Contact! Upstairs!" Jacob shouted, running for the steps just as something came down, leaping over the rail and landing in the main room with a thud. The being was ensconced in some sort of armor that looked unpowered. He could see it had a light, thin build.

  Mettler still moved towards him when Jacob raised his plasma carbine, intent on neutralizing the threat when it moved at him in a blur, grabbing the weapon and ripping it from his grasp. The carbine was still slung to his body, so Jacob was yanked from his feet and thrown across the room with enough force to shock him. Apparently, the diminutive figure was a lot stronger than it looked.

  "Mettler, hit it!" Jacob called, struggling to get up. Mettler opened fire, bolts of superheated plasma ripping into the walls and furnishings as he tried to track the fast-moving target across the room. Their agile enemy was able to close on the Marine just as Jacob got his feet under him, pulling his tactical knife and cutting the sling away he'd gotten his left arm tangled up in.

  Mettler went down with a grunt as an armored forearm took him in the side of the head. Jacob, the blood rushing in his ears as his turbocharged adrenal response kicked in, felt time slow around him as he raised his carbine and snapped off two shots. He had to aim high to not risk hitting his own troop and managed to hit the being square in the back with one of the shots. It staggered forward and turned, pulling a sidearm and squeezing off a shot that, against all odds, hit Jacob's own weapon. The carbine let out a high-pitched alarm and sizzled and smoked as Jacob threw it across the room. The plasma chamber ruptured before it hit the ground, and the effect in an enclosed space was like a
concussion grenade going off, knocking both him and his opponent to the ground.

  "Stay down, Earth man." The modulated voice sounded as if from a great distance. Jacob pried his eyes open and saw the armored figure stood over him, sidearm aimed at his face. "I'm not here for you." The voice spoke English.

  "Who are you?" Jacob demanded.

  "Someone who doesn't take orders from one of Marcus Webb's bumbling lackeys," it said, still waving the pistol in his face. "What are you Scout Fleet buffoons doing out here, anyway?"

  "I'm not telling you shit. Either you—"

  "Stop! Stop, stop, stop," Murph said, struggling to get to his feet. "LT, stand down. She's not a threat…at least not unless you piss her off even more."

  "You know who I am?" the figure asked.

  "You know who it—she—is?" Jacob's asked at the same time.

  "Lieutenant Jacob Brown, meet Carolyn Whitney," Murph said. "Also known as the Viper, and she could have killed all of us before we even knew she was here if she wanted to."

  4

  "The Viper?" Jacob asked. "Wait…Carolyn Whitney? That's an oddly human sounding name."

  "Nothing gets by you does it, sport?" Carolyn asked, removing her helmet and winking at him. Somehow, she made the gesture seem like a threat more than a flirt. "It was that damn hologram wasn't it? When we tampered with the message, it went wonky on us."

  "How do you know her?" Jacob ignored Carolyn's jab.

  "I don't…at least not in person. I know of her. And yeah…I knew someone had tampered with the doorman program when it fritzed out in a loop like that," Murph said, limping over to where Mettler struggled to rise. "NIS agents are briefed on all known unaffiliated humans operating outside of Terran space. Omega Force and the Viper are the most notorious, but there are half a dozen others who float around out here. Carolyn here is one of the quadrant's premier assassins and has an ex-Israeli Special Forces partner who, if I'm guessing correctly, is currently holding up MG and Taylor."

  "Good guess… but I'm not an assassin," Carolyn said. "Your men weren't harmed. You know, Lieutenant…you look really familiar. Have we ever met?"

  "I'd remember," Jacob said. "I've just got one of those faces. So, Carolyn, I'm guessing it's no coincidence you're here the same time we are."

  "The timing is, but not the location," she said. "We're looking for the same informant you are, but for different reasons. I'm guessing you're trying to track this new insurrection for Earth's new intel apparatus, whereas I was hired by a private party to do the same." Carolyn appeared to be ignorant of the fact Obsidian was trying to track down a specific ship, not the actual rebellion that had sprung up against the ConFed.

  "Speaking of…where's the informant?"

  "Dead."

  "Dead?" Jacob repeated.

  "Did I stutter? Yes, he's dead…and no, I didn't kill him. From what I could tell someone popped him at least a few days before I got here."

  Before Jacob could question her further, the rest of his team was led into the room by another human. His people were disarmed and looked appropriately chagrined while the man covering them with a nasty looking plasma carbine just looked bored.

  "And who the hell are you?" Jacob demanded.

  "That's Carolyn's partner, Abiyah," Murph said. "Formerly of Israel's elite Mista’avrim, and technically considered a deserter, even though the UEAS didn't technically exist when he left Terranovus."

  "One of Michael Welford's people?" Abiyah asked Carolyn, ignoring the Marines completely.

  "Webb's," she corrected. "Okay, boys…we're going to go our own way, and it would be best if you forget about us."

  "Wait, I thought we could—"

  "I'm not here to babysit another of Webb's bumbling Scout Fleet teams," Carolyn cut off Murph. "I'm sure as shit not doing your job for you. You've hit the same dead end we did. I wish you luck from here, but I'm not wasting my time leading you by the nose. Don't try to follow us."

  "Who the hell was that?" Taylor asked once Carolyn and Abiyah left the home.

  "I'll tell you later," Murph said. "LT, we should probably get out of here. Any actionable intel that would have been here is long gone."

  "Agreed," Jacob said. "Back to the ship. We'll get off this planet and decide our next move."

  The team collected their weapons in silence, a pall of shame hanging over them after the Viper and her partner so easily disarmed and overpowered them. It was a humbling lesson to not be overconfident in numbers or to make assumptions based on the size and shape of the beings they encountered.

  "Call ahead and make sure Sully has the ship ready to fly once we get there," Jacob said. "I'm going to take one quick look upstairs, and then we're out of here."

  He moved up the stairs quickly and found three additional rooms, two of which appeared to be sleeping quarters, and the last furnished as a sort of sitting room that overlooked the street below. The body of the contact NIS had sent them to meet was lying face down on one of the beds. The early stages of decomp made it hard to identify the species, and there was the expected powerful stench coming from it.

  Jacob ignored the corpse and looked over the room, hoping against hope he would notice something that a master assassin like Carolyn Whitney would have missed. There were the expected multi-spectral holographic imagers dotting the ceilings, part of the home's security system that would upload footage to a remote server or to a recording base somewhere inside, which someone as good as Whitney was supposed to be would certainly have grabbed. But someone like their now-dead contact would have been smarter than just having the normal residential-grade security hardware protecting his property.

  Having satisfied himself that the obvious things had been picked clean by the Viper and whoever had killed their hapless contact, Jacob looked for the less obvious. He walked over to the window and, after failing to see how it opened, kicked the composite pane out of the frame with his heavy boot. The cool outside air rushed in while he pulled what looked like a pair of opaque safety goggles from his thigh pocket. He slipped them over his head and selected long-wave infrared on the menu that popped up. It was the setting that would allow him to see the room with the greatest accuracy when it came to minute thermal variations. He looked over at the corpse and saw it was slightly warmer than the room around him as the decomposition process put off a small amount of thermal energy.

  Within a few minutes, he found what he'd hoped to see: a hotspot in the wall. The thermal variance that outlined a small rectangle on the inner wall was slight and would have likely been missed if he hadn't let in the cooling air from outside. He put a hand on the wall over the spot on the wall, pulling off the goggles since his hand was so blindingly bright it made making out any detail impossible. He probed around the edge of the synthetic wall material before pulling his combat knife and slowly digging away at the fibrous material. He had barely scratched the surface when his knife dug into something he assumed was some type of sensor.

  "Taylor! Get your ass up here," he said over the team channel.

  "What's up, LT? Whoa! Is that you?"

  "No, dipshit…look to your right." Jacob rolled his eyes.

  "Ah," Taylor said after seeing the rotting corpse. "You can understand my confusion after that time you ate—"

  "What's this?" Jacob demanded, pointing at the shiny black surface of the device he'd uncovered in the wall.

  "Interesting," Taylor muttered, coming closer to inspect. "It looks like an imager. Similar to the type NIS spooks like to hide in walls. It operates a lot like a starship sensor so it can be put behind walls or under floors. How did you find it?"

  "Long-wave IR."

  "You're lucky. This looks like a rush job, and the sensor wasn't buried too deep. They don't put off a lot of heat while they're operating, but if you detected anything at all that means this one is still active."

  "Where's the recorded data stored?" Jacob asked.

  "It could be a local source, or it could even be hooked to an active slip-com n
ode and live-broadcasting the feed to another planet," Taylor said just as Murph and MG walked in.

  "This our contact?" MG nodded to the body on the floor.

  "What's left of him," Jacob said before turning back to Taylor. "Let's assume the source is still here in the house. If this was a system being remotely monitored, they'd have known this guy was worm chow and switched it off, right?"

  "Unless this was set up as a trap," Murph pointed out as he looked closely at the device in the wall.

  "We've been here almost an hour," Jacob said. "It's not a trap. New objective, find out where this sensor is storing the feed data. Everyone help, Taylor is on point."

  The team, taking direction from their tech specialist, ripped into the house as they traced the signal line from the sensor up to the roof of all places. Mettler found an access hatch in one of the closets and shot the lock off with his carbine before MG and Jacob boosted him through the hole. They took turns climbing up, with Jacob going last, his enhanced musculature allowing him to simply leap up and through the gap, landing on the rooftop with a thud.

  "That still screws with my head watching you do shit like that, LT," MG said, his voice holding equal parts awe and envy.

  "Over here!" Taylor waved them to where he was crouched. "It's underneath this environmental unit."

  They all got down onto the rough surface of the roof to see what he was talking about. Underneath the environmental unit, which sat up off the roof on metal legs, was a discreet composite box about the size of a cigar box. There were two connectors on one of the short sides, and no other markings or indicators, making it seem like it was probably part of the environmental unit.

  "How can you tell?" Jacob asked. "It just looks like a box."

  "The cables aren't shielded," Taylor said. "I'm detecting a carrier signal consistent with the type of imager we found in that wall. It's definitely not the type of data signal you'd find on an outdated enviro system like this one. Looks like it's just magnetically hooked to the bottom of this unit."