"Aye-aye, sir," Bennet said stiffly.
He wasn't sure he believed that Bennet was one of the leaks he'd been fighting. Hollick was very good at misdirection and hiding his real actions, so Bennet's name and access codes could have been used as a ruse by someone else on Taurus Station. In the meantime, however, he could stash Bennet where he wouldn't have access to anything critical coming out of Webb's office and still be performing a useful task at the same time. If it came out that he wasn't the mole, then Webb would not have accused one of the people he most depended on of being a traitor.
"I really hope that's the worst thing I have to deal with today," he groaned, digging around in his desk for the headache meds the infirmary had given him.
"It's time. I'll be right out here."
"Thanks," Jacob said. "If he kills me, make sure you return the favor."
"You got it."
Jacob climbed out of the vehicle and walked back towards the alley they'd been in the previous day. The streets and walkways were almost deserted, and there was a quiet, tense feeling about the place, as if everyone knew something unusual was happening. He hoped that was just because the gang they'd picked to help them had that much influence on their turf. That had been the indicator Murph was going by when he picked them, at least. The area was much cleaner and more orderly than others in this district, and that indicated this gang had such a strong presence that the rest of the petty criminals, like vandals and pickpockets, steered far clear.
Only one of the vehicles he'd seen yesterday was parked at the end of the alley today, and the leader he'd tossed the credits to was the only person in sight. He walked down at a leisurely pace, trying to convey a sense of calm and confidence he certainly didn't feel. The alien he walked towards leaned against his vehicle, not fidgeting or looking around, but the guy was the leader of a street gang and probably didn't spook easy.
"You have what I want?"
"You're alone?" the leader asked. "You're either very stupid or wildly overconfident."
"Maybe I just trust you'll do the right thing in your own best interests," Jacob said.
"So…stupid. Got it."
"I asked a question."
"Let me ask you one instead…did you really think this was going to work? Did you actually think you could just walk into an area you know nothing about, flash a few credits, and we'd fall all over ourselves trying to obey your commands?"
"I assumed you were a smart businessman," Jacob said. "I figured even a lowlife, gutter trash narco-pusher like you would be able to see the easy credits in what I was asking. I also didn't think you'd want to piss off someone who had two battlesynths with him."
"Yeah? Well I don't see them here now," the alien said. "We've been tracking you since you came back into our area today, so we know you didn't bring them with you. What happened? You run out of money to pay for their services?"
"I'm hearing a lot of pointless chatter from someone who is, to be honest, beneath my notice," Jacob sighed dramatically. "Either give me what I want and collect your fee, or I'll be on my way to talk to one of your competitors…hopefully someone smarter this time."
"Always with that mouth," a new voice from behind him said. "You just never shut up, do you, Brown?"
"Hollick," Jacob ground out. "Nice to see you."
"Lose the weapons, asshole. Oh, and don't worry about Agent Murphy. My good friend Pucva here has his people watching to make sure he doesn't interrupt us," Hollick said. Jacob tossed his weapons on the ground, moving slowly and deliberately. From the sound of his voice, Hollick was about five meters back, too far to try and grab him before getting blasted.
"So, you guys are good buddies already, huh?" Jacob asked the leader, whose name was apparently Pucva.
"Like I told you…you can't just walk in someplace and act like you know everything. You're so ignorant you even mentioned the truth in passing, and it never dawned on you what that meant," Pucva said. "Yeah…your guy is in tight with the cartel that runs our product and is under their protection. If we handed him over to you, they would send in a hundred enforcers to kill us, our families, and anyone who might remember our names, and then just start over from scratch."
"He doesn't need your life story, Pucva," Hollick said. "In fact, you can go ahead and get lost. I can handle this twerp."
"Gladly." The alien turned to leave.
"Pucva," Jacob said, stopping him. When the alien turned back, he lobbed the two credit chits he'd palmed out of his pocket to him. "No hard feelings." Pucva picked up the ten thousand ConFed credits Jacob had tossed and just stared at him, dumbfounded.
"Touching," Hollick said. "Collect the money and get the hell out of here. I won't tell you again."
"Good luck," Pucva said to Jacob before hopping into his vehicle and disappearing.
"Turn around," Hollick ordered. Jacob spun slowly and saw that Hollick held a nasty looking plasma sidearm. The blaster was big enough to leave a sizable hole through him at full power without any protective armor on. "Just you and me now."
"It's just you, me, and that huge ass pistol you're holding," Jacob laughed. "Don't try and act like this is anything but an execution. But since you haven't killed me yet, I'm assuming you want to know something."
"What could I possibly want to know from some pissant jarhead first lieutenant?" Hollick asked. "I'll get the real information I want later out of Murphy. No, no, no…I want you to stand there for a bit and let the fear build. You don't know what I'm going to do, and the uncertainty is beginning to eat at you. Will I torture you first? Maybe blast your hand off like you did me? Or will you luck out and I'll just pop you in the head? It's the not knowing that's the fun part."
"You're a sick fuck, Hollick," Jacob said. "I'm going to enjoy killing you." At this, Hollick laughed uproariously.
"You're nothing if not fun, I'll give you that," he said. "Before you depart this mortal realm, maybe you'd like to hear about how Taylor Levin died…all the little details from when he tried to hold out as long as he could before betraying you."
The words seared into Jacob's brain like a branding iron. He saw red, tasted blood, and heard nothing but a roaring in his ears as his high-power adrenal response—a gift from his father—prepped his body for combat. An animal snarl escaped his lips and even Hollick looked startled, taking a step back and raising his pistol. Just when it looked like he might shoot, a blaster bolt came from a trash pile to the right and blew the gun from his hands.
Hollick howled in pain and looked around wildly, spinning to his left just in time to see a battlesynth stand and shake off the remnants of the trash it'd been hiding under. Knowing he was now vastly outgunned, the spy turned to flee, but a second battlesynth stepped out of a doorway, blocking his retreat. Their glowing red eyes were brilliant points of scarlet in the darkening alley. Hollick spun around again, desperate for an exit.
"Now it's just you and me," Jacob snarled and stalked towards his prey.
"You think you can take me, kid?" Hollick laughed, but it sounded high-pitched and forced. "I've had more hand to hand training than your entire team put together."
He was right. Hollick had been one of NIS's premier field agents, trained in multiple forms of combat from the best instructors Earth could find including those from the Galvetic Legions. He was in peak shape, an experienced fighter, and backed into a corner. This was a dangerous person someone like Jacob should be afraid of.
But he wasn't. What Hollick didn't know was that Jacob had been given a terrible gift at birth, genetic mutations passed on from his father that made him faster and stronger than any human currently on Earth. Fueling all of that strength was an inferno of hatred and rage for a man who had taken two people he truly cared about and killed them with no more thought than he'd have given to stepping on a bug.
Hollick stepped into Jacob and feinted with his left before swinging up hard with his prosthetic right, trying to catch him off guard with the hard, synthetic fist. Normally, the move would have let
him pull his right arm back quickly enough to block, but he was about to learn a painful lesson. Jacob moved back just enough to let the strike miss, and then, so fast that Hollick barely saw him move, delivered a crushing left-hand blow to his exposed body. Ribs cracked, and the hit carried enough force that Hollick left his feet, flying a few meters before landing flat on the pavement.
As Jacob stomped towards him, Hollick now looked at him with genuine fear. The agent climbed to his feet, crying out as his crushed ribs ground against each other and his insides. When the Marine was close enough, he tried to step inside his guard and use the strength of his prosthetic hand to go for a pressure point, but again Jacob was too fast. He grabbed the synthetic limb and, with a quick yank, tore it off and tossed it away. When Hollick tried to counter with his remaining hand, Jacob slapped it away and slammed his fist into the agent's gut as hard as he could, lifting him off the ground again and feeling something tear under the skin.
"I might have just shot you if all you were was a traitor and a spy," Jacob said calmly while Hollick wheezed and vomited bright red blood onto the ground. He tried to crawl away, a futile action of a man going into survival mode. "But you killed my friends." He reached down and grabbed Hollick by the throat and lifted him off the ground with one arm.
"You killed them…because it was fucking fun for you!!"
He launched Hollick into the furthest building with an overhead throw that sounded like it shattered Hollick’s shoulder where it impacted. When Jacob turned to move towards him again, Hollick stared at him, but no longer seemed to actually see him. It didn't matter…he would still feel it.
An armored hand grabbed Jacob's shoulder and squeezed hard.
"You do not honor your fallen comrades by becoming like him," 707 said quietly. "You are a warrior, not a murderer, Jacob."
The words crashed down on him like a waterfall. Cold and forceful, they washed his emotions away until all that was left was the dull ache of missing his friends and the shame of letting them down. He looked at the pitiful sight that had once been a man he'd had nightmares about. Ezra Mosler would be disgusted at seeing his young protégé torturing the man just for some sense of petty revenge.
He looked down the alley and saw the small sidearm he'd discarded earlier and walked over to retrieve it. The pistol felt like it weighed a ton as he walked back over to where Hollick lay, moaning and trying to grasp at his shattered shoulder.
"Hollick…look at me," Jacob said, waiting until the agent looked up. There was still a spark of defiance and rage there. Good. There was no satisfaction in executing a terrified animal. "I could arrest you and let them take you to Earth to stand trial, but you don't deserve that. This is what you deserve. A death nobody will remember in a stinking back alley on some planet nobody has ever heard of."
"Do it," Hollick said, almost sounding relieved. Jacob squeezed the trigger.
It was over.
"Please check on Murph," Jacob said.
"784 is already there," 707 said. "He has messaged and said Murphy is unharmed, and the gang has dispersed. They are coming back towards us now."
It only took Murph and 784 a few minutes to make it from the vehicle to the alley. Jacob briefly wondered why they hadn't just brought the vehicle with them.
"You okay?" Murph asked, grabbing Jacob by the shoulders and looking him over. He'd never been happy with the plan when Jacob had outlined how he wanted to take advantage of the fact the street gang would almost certainly doublecross them. It had been a risky play with Obsidian having such limited resources available, but in the end he'd agreed it was their best shot at drawing Hollick out.
"I'm good. He's not." Jacob turned away from his grisly handiwork.
"Fitting death for the man," Murph said, looking down at the body. "What the hell? Did you run him over with a truck first?"
"We will need to dispose of his body before the authorities find it," 784 said.
"Let's wrap it in some of that sheeting, and then toss it in the rental," Jacob said. "We'll see if we can sneak him back onto the starport, and then put him in the hold of the captain's launch."
"Really?" Murph asked.
"The Navy is going to have to send someone to come get it, anyway," Jacob said. "Or we can take it with us and toss it out in orbit."
"Let's do it that way," Murph said. "It's one thing to report we eliminated a threat…it's another to have to explain dead bodies to investigators."
27
"He's in the airlock, propped up against the outer hatch. When we hit five hundred klicks of altitude, we'll cycle the lock, and he'll become a beautiful streak of light in the night sky."
"We find anything else useful on him?" Jacob asked.
"Not really…and thanks for saving that duty for me," Sully griped. "I'm a pilot, not a coroner."
"You once told me you grew up on a farm and didn't mind being around dead things," Murph said.
"That wasn't me volunteering to go rooting around through a dead guy's pockets," Sully shot back. "Anyway, he had another com unit that 784 is working on right now. If it has anything other than—"
"Obsidian, you will want to see this," a voice boomed from the galley.
"Maybe he found something." Sully shrugged.
"What've you got?" Jacob asked once they'd all squeezed into the galley.
"We were able to access one of Hollick's remote data storage sites," 784 said. "It was a combination of the access codes locked in his com unit and a biometric scan of his retina."
"It's a good thing we pulled all the biometric data off him before he started to rot," Murph said.
"Gross…but good point," Jacob said. "What did we find on this storage site?"
"At first, it did not appear to be anything of value, but when the correct decryption routines were applied, I discovered Hollick had compromised the One World communications network, allowing himself access to things he shouldn't have been privy to," 784 said.
"Sneaky bastard installed backdoors into their network," Murph laughed. "I guess that's one downside to being an organization built completely from traitors. You can't trust anybody."
"Indeed," 784 said.
"So, what sort of stuff can we dig into?" Jacob asked.
"With a more powerful computer and better com suite, there would be significant intelligence to be gleaned."
"Such as?"
"The location of Margaret Jansen, for example." 784 said it so matter-of-factly the import of it didn't sink in for a few moments.
"Ho-lee shit!" Murph drawled.
"This is it," Jacob breathed. "We can wipe out One World by taking out Jansen."
"It would probably be better to capture her alive, but decidedly more difficult," 707 said.
"Who do we even give this to?" Jacob asked. "I don't want to sound like I wear a tinfoil hat, but there doesn't seem to be any place within the UEAS chain of command that isn't compromised by One World sympathizers."
"And if Jansen is alerted her system has been infiltrated, she'll just shut it down and reset," Murph said. "But it's not like we can just go after her ourselves."
"Let's not throw that away too quickly," Jacob said. "Why couldn't we go after her? A smaller team with precise knowledge would have better than even odds of surprising her."
"What the hell? Are you serious?" Murph spluttered. "No. Not only no, but fuck no. We're already in trouble for this little field trip, but if we go that far off the reservation, we'll be hung out to dry."
"If you go after Margaret Jansen without the approval of your command…we will remain and assist you," 707 said. Jacob looked at Murph and raised his eyebrows.
"You're not helping things here!" Murph said to the battlesynth. "We can't just go rogue! We're not a—"
"Damnit, Murph…if we turn this information over to NAVSOC, Jansen will be alerted to it within days," Jacob cut him off. "This is real. We're at war, even if our side doesn't acknowledge it. One World has infiltrated every level of government, and they've just w
iped out two thirds of the active Scout Fleet units we have. Yeah, we'll have to break the letter of the law here, but we're doing it for the right reasons."
"That's dangerous thinking, Lieutenant," Sully spoke up. "That same excuse has been used by lots of people to do some pretty horrible shit throughout history. You're sure we're on the right side of this?"
"I absolutely am," Jacob said. "I’m not proposing we assassinate someone without being ordered to. But just a quick strike to grab her and drag her back to Terranovus? That would be worth looking into."
"Don't tell me you're going along with this, too?" Murph demanded. Sully just shrugged and smiled.
"I came along for the ride this far," he said. "The way I see it, if we succeeded in grabbing Jansen, it might even clear away our sins for flying out here and popping Hollick."
"So, how would we even do it?" Murph asked. "We sure as hell aren't pulling off a mission like that with this pile of garbage. Hollick's ship would be too easily recognized by Jansen's people and the captain's launch over on the other pad isn't a tactical vessel."
"I know of a ship that we can…borrow," 707 said vaguely. "It would be a vessel quite up to the task."
"You're just not going to stop, are you?" Murph glared at the machine.
"How about this," Jacob said, raising his hands in a placating gesture. "We go check out this other ship, we dig through the data 784 has found, and see if there's a workable mission plan to be made from it, and then we decide if we do it or just come back and turn ourselves in." Murph seemed to deflate a bit as it was clear he was outnumbered badly.
"What about the others?" he asked. "MG and Mettler will want in on this if we do it."
"I have an idea how to kill two birds with one stone on that front," Jacob said.
Marcus Webb read through the report four times before he even bothered to open the accompanying data. It had been sent to him by Brown and Murphy, relayed to him through the ship the rest of Obsidian still sat on as the fleet prepped the Talon for departure. It showed him that, without a doubt, Bennet had sold them out to One World. All the timestamps lined up and Obsidian had somehow managed to dig through Hollick's personal com services and cross-match all of the times Bennet had reported things to him that had directly led to NAVSOC personnel being targeted in the field. He archived the data and shut the terminal before leaning back and squeezing his head with his palms.
Boneshaker Page 22
