Voidstalker

by John Graham

  “You just told me that Dr Kane was ‘liaising’ with the staff of an R&D facility,” the agent repeated, “a facility which, apparently, doesn’t exist. So either our records are woefully out-of-date, or you just revealed the existence of an illegal research facility.”

  The agent paused to let that information sink in. Aster had no answer.

  “I…I…” Aster’s voice began to falter.

  “You…you…” the agent replied in a vaguely mocking tone, “You of course had no idea that your employer would break the law and lie to its own staff. Although, given that you’re the project-lead, it’s a little hard to believe that you or your staff could be left so completely in the dark about a ‘small’ R&D lab with several hundred staff.”

  “Ok, fuck you.” Aster exclaimed, rising from her seat as her patience finally ran out, “I’m going to make a call.”

  “To a legal advocate?” the agent raised a hand to stop Aster from leaving.

  “Actually, to someone a lot more senior than you are.” Aster retorted, swatting the senior agent’s hand away from her chest.

  “Oh, you mean the man who put that lovely ring on your finger.”

  Aster froze up.

  “I saw the shared surname in your file,” the senior agent continued, “and his file is off limits to pretty much everyone except the Masterminds. I mention that because a family connection to the DNI would make any charges against you more serious, not less.”

  “Do you get off on this whole routine?”

  “If you’re asking me if I enjoy putting corporates in their places,” the agent answered with a smirk, “we all do. If you found an alien doomsday weapon, you’d auction it off to the highest bidder without a second thought. Profit over people, now and always.”

  “‘Corporates’ funded most of the civil research and space exploration over the past 500 years, and they still do.” Aster shot back defensively.

  “That’s awfully high praise from a colonial.” the agent retorted.

  Aster’s eye began to twitch. This DNI bitch had just crossed a very sensitive line.

  “I hear some of the corporates really sucked the life out of a lot of their ‘investments’.” the agent remarked with barely suppressed smugness, “I’m curious, how did someone who grew up at the mercy of the corporates end up working for them?”

  Aster swung her fist at the DNI agent as she lunged forward. The agent deftly caught Aster’s wrist and twisted it behind her back, pinning her face-down on the couch.

  “Relax, sweetheart.” The agent said as she straddled Aster’s back.

  She pressed Aster’s wrist firmly against her back with one hand whilst holding her head down with the other, then spoke into her comm. piece.

  “Did you get all of that?” she asked the person on the other end.

  “You fucking government pig!” Aster snarled.

  “Understood,” the agent said, ignoring Aster, “I’ll let her go.”

  The senior agent leapt off the couch, releasing Aster’s wrist in the same motion.

  “What the fuck was that about?!” Aster demanded, climbing off the couch.

  “Physio-Behavioural Analysis,” the agent explained calmly, “it’s the most effective, non-invasive field-interrogation technique we have.”

  “So all of that was just to bait me into a response?” Aster demanded.

  “Pretty much.” Came the nonchalant reply, “You can re-join the others now.”

  Visibly fuming, Aster stormed out of the office.

  She was still fuming as she returned to the break room. What business did that DNI bitch have taunting her about her colonial background? Like it wasn’t bad enough being threatened with career-ending criminal charges.

  Even so, she had nepotistically tried to invoke her high-ranking husband as some sort of trump-card, like the DNI didn’t already know everything about her. Amidst the anger and confusion, it occurred to her that she had potentially put his credibility on the line, a short-sighted and selfish thing to do.

  The DNI agents directed her back to the break room where they still had her colleagues under guard, surrounding them like a holding pen made of black body armour.

  “Did they put you through the PBA questioning as well?” Felix asked.

  Still fuming with residual anger, Aster brushed him away without an answer.

  “I’m guessing yes.” His expression revealing that he too had been put through the process, “look, the thing works by pushing your buttons and reading your responses to see if you’re lying or hiding something. If you were in trouble, you’d know it by now.”

  “I don’t care, Felix.” Aster hissed back.

  Felix let the issue go, giving her a few moments to cool down.

  “Did you secure all the data?” Aster whispered, her anger giving way to a clearer head.

  “Yes.” Felix whispered back, “All the project data and research notes were backed up to one of the offsite servers. Even the DNI can’t touch it.”

  “Good.” Aster replied, breathing a little easier, “If I’d known the DNI was going to raid the building, I would have taken the whole day off.”

  “And leave us to face the music alone?” Felix asked, miffed.

  “That’s my prerogative as your boss.” Aster replied jokingly.

  They chuckled, covering their mouths to smother the sound.

  “Is something funny?” one of the DNI agents demanded sternly.

  “Nothing.” Aster replied, stiffening up.

  She and Felix waited until the agent had moved on before continuing their conversation.

  “Have the DNI taken Lawrence or anyone else in?” Aster whispered to Felix.

  “Not that I know.” Felix replied, keeping a wary eye on the watchful DNI agents, “plus, Lawrence was still at the Loki facility. He wasn’t due back until tomorrow.”

  “I guess we can’t help him, then,” Aster said resignedly, “The rest of us will be lucky not to get blackballed for this.”

  THE MOON

  Death was all around, and plenty of blood too. It stained the floor in semi-congealed pools, and was spattered across the bullet-riddled walls in violet stains. Freshly murdered corpses were strewn across the darkened hallways, the flickering of the half-dead lights giving briefly illuminated snapshots of the slaughter. The din of an alarm was just audible, barely registering through the deathly silence.

  Gabriel stepped over the bodies, the sickly squelching noise his boots made puncturing the morbid quietude as he walked down the corridor, surveying the grisly scene before him, the nightmarish aftermath of an ambush. By the time the crew had realised they were under attack, it had been too late to escape. Some had died fighting, others while fleeing, unable to find a hiding place in time.

  But there was at least one survivor. Gabriel heard a scrabbling sound from around the corner, and he followed it, taking care not to trip over the corpses. He turned into a side chamber where the ship’s escape pods could be accessed. The straggler was there; he had found an unused escape pod and had his back turned, frantically jabbing at a control panel to get the pod’s door to open. It was too late.

  The sound of footsteps entering the chamber made the straggler freeze up in cold terror. He turned around to face the sinister figure that had been stalking him, his silhouette just visible through the shadows. Gabriel stood in the doorway and raised his weapon, taking aim squarely at the target’s head, ready to finish what he had done. The straggler stared back, the certainty of his imminent death evident in his eyes.

  Or ‘its’ eyes, rather. Despite the expression of palpable fear, they were still the beady eyes of a cold-blooded reptilian xenotype with inhuman, slit-shaped pupils. There was no reason to anthropomorphise or empathise with it.

  Gabriel felt nothing as he pulled the trigger.

  * * *

  Gabriel awoke with a start. Just like usual, the cold sweat was absent, and the panicked drum beat of his heartrate quickly subsided as the seconds ticked by. But unl
ike the previous night, there was a lingering feeling present; an undercurrent of uneasiness about the memory. Aliens came with many different faces, but fear looked much the same on each one. It never bothered him at the time, so why would it bother him in his dreams?

  He was laying down on a set of cargo boxes in an inconspicuous corner of the vehicle bay, an excellent place to have a powernap, being quiet and out of the way. Also, when the time came to depart for the mission, he and the squad would do so from here, anyway. There wasn’t much in the vehicle bay, apart from the two Wolverine-class APCs secured to the ceiling, most unnecessary cargo having been cleared away.

  Looking around, Gabriel noticed the operators gathered at the opposite end of the vehicle bay. They were holding an impromptu bench-press competition to pass the time, taking turns lying down on a set of boxes and lifting a weighted bar. Extra weight was added after each round to see who would reach failure first. They were even using actual weight-disks, instead of an artificial gravity-assisted set-up.

  “…8…9…10!” the squad cheered as one of the operators completed his set and strained to put the barbell back on the rack above him. Sweating buckets from the workout, the operator lifted himself up off the boxes and took a water bottle offered to him, draining it in one go before wiping his face down with a cloth. As he re-joined the others, another operator took his place, laying down on the boxes and preparing to lift the heavily weighted bar.

  Gabriel watched them as they steadily upped the weight on the barbell. Everyone’s combat armour had to be attached and removed using special machinery, so they couldn’t take off their armour to make it a fair measure of their actual strength. Gabriel’s own armour and physical enhancements were far superior to those of his squad, so heading over to join them with two unfair advantages was out of the question.

  No matter. The whole thing was a pointless exercise. Even with armour, the resulting muscle strain and soreness would negatively affect combat performance, even with delayed onset. Furthermore, each operator’s combat armour, combined with surgical enhancements, significantly boosted their physical strength, thus limiting the need for intensive bodybuilding regimens, let alone idiotic displays of muscle power.

  Gabriel decided to keep that to himself; telling them what he thought of their competition wouldn’t be good for unit cohesion. After all, they were about to embark on a high-risk mission with a good chance that one or more of them wouldn’t make it back. As silly as they were, he understood that these little bonding rituals were important for squad morale, not unlike the morning group hugs with his children…

  Why did he even need a squad to accompany him?

  The question re-surfaced unbidden in his head, still unanswered. Voidstalkers were lone-wolves trained and equipped to operate without support for long periods of time in the most hostile areas. Not needing a squad to back you up – or slow you down – was the whole point of voidstalkers. And yet, that wasn’t what bothered him about it.

  The director-general must have had a good reason to put him in charge of a squad of operators for this mission – or so he assumed and so he wanted to believe. She always had plans and schemes churning in her mind – that was her job after all – and trying to discern what they were was about as useful as tarot card reading. Perhaps he should have asked her reasons when he’d had the chance.

  The operators finished another set of weight-lifting, their cheering interrupting Gabriel’s speculations about his superior’s motivations. Their competition wasn’t just frivolous, it was wasting time. His squad members weren’t children, they were grown men who needed to get ready for the mission ahead.

  He also needed to get his own equipment pack fitted.

  “This is VS-one-seven-zero-seven,” Gabriel radioed the bridge, “what’s our ETA?”

  “We’ll be landing in fifteen minutes, sir.” The ship’s captain replied.

  “Understood.” Gabriel jumped off the cargo boxes and left the vehicle bay through a side door which brought him to the ship’s armoury.

  The walls of the armoury were lined with racks of assault weapons, sidearms, metallic ammunition blocks kept in sterile cases, and assorted explosive ordnance. At the other end of the armoury was a special platform and frame equipped with robotic arms for fitting equipment modules to the back of a suit of armour. The rest of the squad had had their equipment modules fitted back on Asgard. Gabriel’s own module had to be installed separately.

  The armoury technicians were expecting him. Without exchanging a word with them, Gabriel stepped onto the platform and turned his back to the frame. A cylindrical object was extracted from a special storage safe by a pair of robotic arms and mounted onto the slots on the back of Gabriel’s armour. Then a complicated set of mechanical locks on the cylinder interlocked with those on Gabriel’s armour, locking the module in place.

  Then came the delicate part. The chief armourer opened up a second safe and removed a key with a complicated geometric arrangement of teeth. Then with the utmost care, he opened up a slot on the bottom of the cylinder and inserted the key. Once it was all the way inside, he turned it 180 degrees clockwise, causing the light to change from green to red. Then with equal care, he removed a tiny sub-key from inside the primary key and returned it to its safe, the slot on the cylinder sealing itself automatically.

  “Command module online,” one of the techs said as he consulted a chart, “all suit systems are fully functional. You’re good to go, colonel.”

  “Thank you.” Gabriel replied, stepping out of the frame and leaving the armoury.

  The squad of operators was still engrossed in their silly weightlifting competition by the time Gabriel got back. They were wasting time.

  “Wrap it up,” Gabriel ordered them gruffly as he approached, “we’re dropping down to Loki in fifteen minutes, so I want everyone ready to go well before that.”

  The operators looked surprised and more than a little disappointed; but the killjoy was in charge, and they duly obeyed. The barbell was replaced on its rack and the operators began checking and double-checking their armour, ensuring that each piece was locked and sealed in place before readying their weapons. Gabriel checked his own weapon before using the vehicle-bay controls to lower one of the Wolverine APCs to the floor.

  The Wolverine had quite a sleek chassis for such a large vehicle, with a v-shaped underside, and a rounded nose. It resembled a bullet with wheels; six monster-sized wheels with knobbles and grooves for off-road travel. Its skin had been treated to a fresh paint-job with a grey camouflage pattern, made somewhat redundant by the emblem on the underside of the nose featuring a stylised image of its snarling namesake. The top of the cockpit was also crowned with a multi-barrelled gun turret for fire support.

  “Mount up, everyone!” Gabriel ordered.

  * * *

  The director-general put on a pair of VR glasses, and inserted the attached earpieces. As she activated the glasses, a two-way link was initiated, projecting an image of a dozen other individuals seated around a virtual conference table. They were scattered across the city using similar set ups, but they all saw the same simulated conference room, complete with surround-sound and holographic images of each participant.

  Those seated at the table included the great and the good of the city: representatives from various industrial lobbies, departments of the civilian bureaucracy as well as members of the elected governing council. As per protocol, the mayor was chairing the meeting, but it was clear they had all been waiting for the director-general to join them. Even in hologram-form they looked apprehensive; as well they should be, given the situation.

  “Well, now that our illustrious spymistress has joined us, perhaps we should call this meeting to order.” The mayor announced.

  The ghost of a wry smile flickered at the corners of Red-eye’s mouth. ‘Spymaster’ would have been acceptable to her; no doubt he was trying to be polite.

  “Can you tell us more about what happened on Loki?” the mayor asked.


  “The Directorate is still investigating.” Red-eye replied coolly.

  “Does that mean you don’t know, or you don’t think we ought to know?” the Interplanetary Shipping Consortium representative asked suspiciously.

  “It means that we do not yet know, but will keep each of you appraised according to your respective concerns.” Red-eye answered.

  “So what do you know about the situation?” the Justice Ministry’s vice-minister demanded, “or, at least, what do you know that you can tell us.”

  “Jupiter Engineering Co. was operating an unregistered research facility on Loki with which they recently lost contact, whether due to a communications failure or something more serious is unknown at this stage.” Red-eye answered with the tone of a newsreader, “However, given that the facility was unregistered, it must have been engaged in illegal research.”

  “Xenotechnology research?”

  “Almost certainly, although we have yet to confirm that.” Red-eye replied, “More importantly, there is no alien threat to Asgard or to the wider system. This appears to be purely an incident of corporate malfeasance.”

  “What assets have you deployed to investigate this?” asked the economy minister.

  “The details of ongoing operations are classified.” Red-eye rebuffed him.

  “It’s a simple, fleeking question–” the economy minister pressed in exasperation.

  “An answer to which you are not entitled to receive.” Red-eye coolly cut him off.

  “But if reports come out in the news–” he began to splutter.

  “Nothing will appear in the news as long as there are no leaks to the news.” Red-eye shot back, the volume of her voice rising ever so slightly.

  Although Red-eye’s words were directed at the economy minster personally, they carried a subtle but stern warning for everyone listening. They all understood the importance of information and its concealment – or its selective disclosure – so if they really wanted to keep this under wraps, all they had to do was keep their own mouths shut.

  “Beyond that, I have nothing to add.” Red-eye concluded politely.