Boneshaker

by Joshua Dalzelle

  He stared at the ceiling for a moment, not wanting to look at the screen again. When he forced himself to do so, the name was still there: Lieutenant Walton Bennet, UEN. The personal aide to Captain Marcus Webb and a man privy to most secrets at the top of Naval Special Operations Command had been in contact with Elton Hollick on many occasions. Sully was no code slicer, but he knew enough to begin to dig down and try to correlate the known address with any messaging services and see if there might be a smoking gun sitting out there somewhere before he went accusing someone of being a traitor. As he worked, he saw how Hollick and One World would have managed to wipe out most of the active Scout Fleet units with such precise, perfectly-timed strikes. Bennet would have had access to the teams' locations and status, able to pass them on in real-time.

  He'd been skeptical of Brown's almost unhinged paranoia when he'd agreed to fly them out here without clearing it with NAVSOC, but now it seemed like the young lieutenant might have been underselling the danger the whole time. Sully liked to believe the people he served beside held the same values of integrity and honor he did, so seeing proof someone at the top had been selling them out the entire time turned his stomach. If Bennet had been the one to get Team Diamond wiped out, it would be a race to see who could get to him first, Sully or Webb.

  After two more cups of coffee and another forty-five minutes, the computer had chugged through the data available. It gave Sully a list of blind-drop messaging services he would hand over and not try to access himself as well as another group of people that were in Hollick's circle he routinely talked to. Some of the names he recognized within the special operations community. Others, he had no idea who they were other than they were on Terranovus. Over sixteen people in total who appeared to be working with Earth's enemies, and that was likely just the beginning. It was quite depressing, actually.

  He slipped his headset on and keyed up the com he had tied into the local net and punched in the access code he wanted.

  "Go for Brown," Lieutenant Brown answered almost immediately.

  "It's Sully. The computer just got done crosschecking some of that data, and it looks like you were right…Hollick has been talking to someone at the very top of the chain of command. It's pretty easy to see how he's stayed a step ahead of us."

  "Who was it?" Brown's voice was…fearful?

  "Bennet. Webb's aide," Sully said.

  "Thank God!" Brown's explosive exhale was annoyingly loud in the headset.

  "What?"

  "The way you were building it up, I thought you were going to say it was Webb himself," Jacob said. "We'll figure out a way to tell the captain without his shit weasel aide intercepting the message and—Hhuh? Oh, you can do that? Why didn't you say that earlier?!"

  "LT?" Sully asked.

  "It turns out the battlesynths have a way to get messages to each other," Brown said. "707 said he'd try to let 701 know. They should still be in short-haul com range so Mettler can tell Webb personally."

  "I see. Should I—"

  "I’m being told to keep that information classified. Apparently, not too many people are trusted with the fact these guys have some sort of covert communication network."

  "Got it," Sully said. "So, I should just sit on this?"

  "Bundle it up and get it ready to transmit, but just sit on it for now."

  "Copy. Sully out."

  "So, that asshole, Bennet, was one of the leaks this whole time?" Murph asked. "I never trusted him, even after he covered for Webb during that coup that one admiral tried to pull off a year or so ago."

  "The one who tried to assume command of NAVSOC? Didn't they send her back to Earth?" Jacob asked.

  "That's the one," Murph said. "So…how does your long-range com network do its thing? Do each of you have a—"

  "It would be best if you forgot what you heard about that," 707 said, his tone making it clear the conversation was over.

  "You got it, Tin Man," Murph snorted, leaning back. Jacob gave him a warning glare before turning around in his seat.

  Jacob had managed to hire a vehicle that could be piloted manually or be tied into the city traffic management system. It was also large enough to accommodate two battlesynths in the cargo area without the humans being smashed against the windows. Now, they were on their way to the second location Murph's search algorithm indicated would have narco-gang activity after the first one had been a bust. They'd sat around in the area for two hours, and all they saw were low-level pushers and a couple of deliveries from runners, nothing on a scale like they needed. The good news was that the battlesynths were able to detect the minute thermal fluctuations with enough accuracy to pick out targets.

  "Holy shit, man…Hollick is probably already dead if he came down through this area." Jacob watched out the window as the vehicle rolled past aliens that gave them open, challenging glares, and a few even pelted their ride with whatever they had handy to throw.

  "I'll bet he had something set up already," Murph said. "Probably not this planet in particular, since that would be too coincidental to believe, but maybe a standing agreement with one of the smuggling outfits that runs drugs on the planet. He contacts them, they put him in touch with people down here who can hide him, and then he waits it out until the smugglers have a load leaving and have room for him aboard."

  "Damn. This guy is slick," Jacob said. "I don't think he's going to have his guard down enough for us to get close without him seeing us a mile away."

  "We have the advantage right now, but you are right not to underestimate your quarry," 784 said. The vehicle rolled through an area that seemed to be kept much cleaner than those they'd just passed. The buildings were free of graffiti, and there were even children running around on the walkways.

  "I believe we have just passed what we are looking for," 707 said. "Stop the vehicle up ahead."

  "The alley?" Murph asked.

  "Affirmative."

  Jacob commanded the vehicle to stop at the next legal parking spot and waited. The alley worked to their advantage, but it also made it more likely they'd be killed quickly if these thugs decided a shoot-strangers-first policy was best. Everything hinged on the fact Murph thought he could get close enough to give his sales pitch before they decided to kill the off-worlders and be done with it.

  "Let's do it," he said. They all piled out of the vehicle and moved towards their assigned places. Jacob and Murph made a direct line to the alley, the two battlesynths tried to remain as inconspicuous as they were able while getting in position.

  When Jacob rounded the corner to move down into the gap between the low buildings, he saw that there were three vehicles similar to the one he'd rented and a group of locals standing around talking. On the surface, it didn't look like anything nefarious was going on. The aliens were well-dressed and laughing, the vehicles were clean and modern, and as far as anyone could tell, it was just a group of couriers delivering packages to the street-side businesses. But if 707 said he'd spotted something, then Jacob had to trust he knew what he was talking about.

  "Greetings!" Murph said loudly, not wanting to get too close and surprise them. When they stopped talking and looked at the pair of humans, Jacob got a completely different vibe from the group. These were dangerous people.

  "You two lost?"

  "We were looking for you, actually. We have a business proposition," Murph said.

  "You don't know what business we're in," the one that emerged as the leader said. "So, how could you possibly be propositioning us?"

  "I assume you're in the business of being able to find things in your own territory," Murph said. "Like, maybe we pay you a lot of money, and you tell us where someone we're looking for might be hanging out. You're not in that sort of business? You don't like easy money?"

  "Kill this off-worlder scum," one of them said. "He reeks of military. We don't need this type roaming around down here."

  "You military?" the leader asked. "Maybe law enforcement the capital hired to clean up down here?"

/>   "I'm a person willing to pay to find my…friend," Murph said. "Other than that, we don't need to know each other."

  "My friend thinks I should just kill you. Why wouldn't I just do that, and then take any money you have on you? That easy enough for you?"

  "It would be easy, but unwise," Murph said. He pulled three, one-thousand credit chits from his pocket and tossed them over, one at a time. The alien caught them all in turn, squeezing the onyx wafers so they would display the value loaded onto them.

  "This is all you have?"

  "That's just to let you know we're serious," Jacob said. "Consider that payment for your time so far. Imagine how much we'd give you for the information we need."

  "Here's the problem," the leader said, pocketing the chits. "We see this type of thing down here all the time. You're probably a couple ex-military types hired to track down someone who ripped your boss off. We tell you where he is, but he probably isn't wanting to die peacefully, so all of you end up turning my home into a warzone. Am I close?"

  "Close enough that it doesn't matter who we really are," Jacob said. "We just want our guy, and we want to make sure nobody down here gets hurt. We'll take him without any collateral damage."

  "How can you do that? You can't even guarantee you'll walk out of this area with your lives and money still in your possession."

  "Oh, I think we'll manage just fine," Jacob said, crossing his arms in front of him.

  "What—" the leader's words were drowned out as two battlesynths roared into the alley. They'd leapt from the rooftops where they'd been waiting for the signal and fired their repulsors just before hitting the ground, but they still hit with enough force to crack the street. Both stood and moved over to flank the two humans, their eyes glowing red and arm cannons deployed.

  "Meet my other friends who ensure the fight is short and one-sided," Jacob said. There was some frantic whispering among the group in their native dialect, with fearful glances tossed the strangers' way. Battlesynths were rare, but everyone knew what they were. The stories about what they could do were wildly exaggerated in news media and entertainment, but that only served to make having two of them standing there all the more frightening. Their presence just took Jacob and Murph from being a couple ex-military flunkies to being heavy hitters who demanded a degree of respect.

  "What kind of money are you offering?" the leader asked, his entire demeanor shifting to one of almost subservience.

  "You find the guy we want and give us good intel that lets us grab him, and I'll give you forty-thousand credits, all untraceable ConFed chits," Jacob said.

  "This friend must have really made you angry," the alien said. "What's he look like?"

  "Same species as us, skin color similar to mine," Jacob said. Murph was a dark-skinned African-American, and Hollick was a pale skinned Anglo. Even though most species in the galaxy had variations in skin tone depending on where they were from on their own planet, it still seemed to cause confusion when they saw the same trait in other species. "I have an image of him on my com unit."

  The leader came over and looked at the image on Jacob's device, and then explained how he could transfer the image to them. Once that was done, and a few more credits had changed hands, the gang promised they'd be able to find the general area Hollick was in within a day, an exact location within three.

  "You'll need to do better than that," Jacob warned. "This guy is slippery, and he isn't wanting to hang around here very long. I'll be back here the same time tomorrow, and I hope you'll have something for me."

  "We can't exactly go looking in buildings that don't belong to us," the leader protested. "These things can take time."

  "It's likely he's staying in a place that's owned by one of the smuggling cartels that services this city, if that helps," Murph said. The alien seemed to consider that for a moment.

  "It does narrow it down. Come back tomorrow, and we should have something for you."

  The Obsidian crew walked out of the alley, not bothering to look behind them or even appear hurried. Once they were back in the vehicle, Jacob waited around long enough to make sure they got a good look at what he was in but didn't wait so long as to make it obvious.

  "Well…that part went surprisingly easy," Murph said. "Wanna take bets on how the next part goes?"

  "Nope," Jacob said, engaging the auto-drive. "I give it even odds that this plan backfires, or Hollick does an end-around, and Sully gets jumped again just before the asshole steals our ship."

  "There is a third option," 707 said. "Hollick might kill the two of you first, and then try to steal your ship."

  "Thanks for the vote of confidence," Jacob deadpanned. "Trust me…I’m pretty sure I know what I'm doing."

  "Good enough for me," Murph yawned. "Your dumb luck has somehow been working out better than my years of training and NAVSOC's bottomless barrel of resources."

  They spent the rest of the evening making the rest of the necessary stops to execute Jacob's somewhat complicated plan to draw Hollick out. The only part that made him nervous was the amount of time and effort they were burning when the chances were good they were already too late and the slippery operative was already safely off-planet. If Jacob had miscalculated, he just prayed he was the only one caught in the blowback and that the rest of his people could cut and run…live to fight another day.

  Either way, this would be the final confrontation between him and Elton Hollick. By tomorrow night, one of them would be dead.

  26

  "Captain Webb, you have an incoming channel request from the battlesynth on the ship sitting off our port flank."

  "Thank you, I'll take it in my office," Webb said distractedly. Securing the Eagle's Talon had been anything but straightforward now that the regular Navy was involved. When the admiralty found out they'd actually captured the ship with Edgars alive, they sent out five additional ships loaded down with parts, engineering crews, and, of course, a gaggle of flag officers who now wanted to pin their names to the successful operation. They were the same ones who would have been calling for Webb's head on a platter had things gone south. When Webb had first transitioned from being an operational asset to a desk jockey, the reality of politics in the upper ranks had horrified him. Now? Now, he barely noticed it. He wasn't sure he liked what that said about what he'd become.

  "Captain Webb," 701 greeted him once the channel encryption had synced up.

  "What can I do for you?" Webb asked. "Please tell me this isn't more bad news."

  "I am afraid it is more bad news," 701 said. "Lieutenant Brown and Lieutenant Sullivan have made progress tracing Elton Hollick's known associates within your organization. Your aide, Lieutenant Bennet, appears to have been passing information directly to Hollick for the last two years." Webb felt like someone had kicked him square in the balls before he'd even had a chance to tense up.

  "You're mistaken."

  "We are not. The data is irrefutable. The node address he is using is a relay connection on Terranovus assigned specifically to him. The full trace shows the relay was accessed by his personal com unit on multiple occasions."

  "Do you have the data?" Webb asked.

  "It will be forthcoming," 701 said. "I am simply giving you warning to have a care what information your aide is privy to. What you do with that warning is up to you. The full data package will be sent as soon as Lieutenant Sullivan has finished compiling it."

  "How about you ask my people to come back here and give it to me personally," Webb said.

  "They are not receiving communications, only transmitting," 701 said. "Lieutenant Brown fears the leaks within NAVSOC are so numerous that he cannot risk exposing himself through normal channels."

  "He's probably not wrong there, but he's still way, way off the reservation with this," Webb said. "You talk to them, you warn all the Naval personnel that I probably can't protect them from the consequences of this…but I understand why they're doing it."

  "Do you not see the nobility in what they do?" 701
asked.

  "I just said I understand, didn't I?" Webb snapped. "The problem is that when people just start doing whatever the hell they want like this, order and discipline breaks down. It's not their place to make up their own missions and fly halfway around the quadrant like they're some sort of vigilante hit squad. Brown may think he's being noble and high-minded with this sacrificial move, but what he's doing is wrong. He's damaging NAVSOC and the Navy with this selfish move."

  "He is much like his father in that regard."

  "And I'd been hoping this whole time he wasn't like his old man," Webb said.

  "You have given me some things to ponder, Captain," 701 said.

  "Yeah? Well, have fun with that." Webb stabbed at the button to kill the channel. With all the shit flying around in his orbit right now, the last thing he needed was for some enigmatic, self-aware killing machine to want to have an existential conversation about the morality of disobeying orders. And now, they'd dropped yet another bomb in his lap. How the hell could Bennet be the traitor? That was utterly impossible…wasn't it?

  "Bennet, get in here," he practically shouted at the intercom.

  "Sir?" Bennet asked, not fully entering the office. The young officer looked exhausted like the rest of them. Webb stared at him hard for a few seconds, trying to detect something he had missed this whole time with his most trusted subordinate. "Sir, is everything okay?"

  "I need you to take the next shuttle over to the Talon," he said finally. "I want you to be my eyes and ears over there. With all the Fleet brass around, I want to make sure we're documenting everything carefully so NAVSOC doesn't get screwed when they start submitting their reports."

  "You want me to go over there…just to watch?" Bennet frowned.

  "Is that a problem?"

  "Of course not, sir, but it just seems like there might be someone more suited to the task," Bennet said.

  "And I told you I want you to do it. I need someone who will give it to me straight," Webb said. "You're dismissed, Lieutenant. The next shuttle…be on it."