by Dan Moren
“I got it, I got it,” he said. “Party at the Illyrican embassy tonight. I’ll put it on the agenda.”
“I called in a few favors and wrangled you two invitations,” said M’basa, holding up a pair of cards. “But,” she said, jabbing a finger in Eli’s direction, “now you owe me.”
“Uh. Got it. Thank… you?” He reached out and took the cards, pulling firmly to wrest them from M’basa’s grip. “Your cooperation is most appreciated.”
The woman gave him a not altogether friendly smile, turned on her heel and walked away. Eli glanced at the cards: off-white, printed on heavy-duty stock, with flowing black calligraphy engraved on it: The Illyrican Empire requests the pleasure of your company…
He shook his head and let out a long breath. Who’d have thought the Illyrican Empire would ever invite me anywhere again? He slipped the invitations into his suit’s inside pocket and then returned to the ambassador’s table.
Eli was allowed to finish his breakfast without further interruption, which he did mostly in silence as the ambassador was quickly whisked away by his staff to see to some important matter or other. Even cold, the food was still better than the fare he’d been subsisting on back in his apartment on Nova, which mainly consisted of single-serving meals he could pop in the auto-oven.
He was still drinking the last of his expertly-brewed coffee when he left the ballroom to be greeted by Tapper’s thousand-yard stare. The sergeant was leaning against the wall opposite the door, arms crossed, with an expression of one who’d fought his way through a platoon of Illyricans to claim this spot.
“Mr Adler,” he said, through gritted teeth. “I hope you had a good breakfast.”
“Uh. Yes?”
“Glad to hear it.” He pushed off the wall and grabbed Eli’s arm in a polite-looking but all too solid grip. “We’d be most obliged if you’d let us know exactly where you were going.”
“It was breakfast!” Eli protested. “The ambassador invited me!”
“Oh, the ambassador invited you,” said Tapper, rolling his eyes as he escorted him back toward the stairs. “Well, in that case, don’t let me interfere with your hobnobbing. But if you’re finished with that, do you think you could spare Ms Mulroney and myself a minute of your precious time?”
“Suuuure?”
“Great.”
They climbed to the second floor and knocked at a door that, even by its outward appearances, was somewhat less grand than Eli’s accommodations. Perks of being a somebody, I guess. Taylor answered it almost immediately, then waved them in. Eli noted the baffle sitting on the coffee table, already glowing away.
“You’ve been making friends fast,” said Taylor, sitting down in one of the room’s chairs. As Eli had anticipated, it was far more modest than his own quarters – nice enough, but it looked more like a spaceport hotel. There was a double bed, the two chairs and the coffee table, and a small sliding door that Eli guessed led to a bathroom. Hey, could be worse: at least she doesn’t have to share with anybody.
“What can I say?” Eli shrugged. “I’m a people person.”
“Uh huh. Well, we’ve got more pressing matters than being wined and dined at the ambassador’s table, Brody.” A note of stress had crept into Taylor’s voice, maybe the first time Eli had seen a crack in her professional veneer. “The meeting between the Illyricans and the Corporation is happening in a matter of hours, and we still don’t know where.” She shook her head. “We miss this, and I don’t know when our next opportunity will be.”
“All under control,” said Eli, spreading his hands and perching on the end of the bed, which either had not been slept in or had been re-made with military precision. Neither of those would have surprised him.
“Under control?” Taylor echoed.
“I just happen to have a pair of invitations to this evening’s most exclusive shindig,” said Eli, reaching into his jacket pocket and producing the cards. “I thought maybe you two might be interested?” He held them out to her. “I mean, if you’re right about them meeting at some sort of social event, this seems like the perfect occasion.”
Tapper and Taylor exchanged a glance, and the latter plucked them out of his hand. Eli leaned back and grinned. “Not bad for my first day on the job, if I do say so myself.”
Scanning the cards rapidly, Taylor tapped them against the palm of her hand, then looked up. “Not bad, Brody. Not bad at all. I suppose we’re going to have to adjust the schedule for today.”
“Why’s that?” said Eli.
She tilted her head. “To get you fitted for a tuxedo, of course.”
“Who, me?”
“Yes, Mr Adler. You. Don’t think you can go to a formal state event dressed like you just rolled out of the cockpit.” She looked him up and down. “Should have thought to bring formalwear, but there’s not a huge call for it these days.”
“I just assumed…” He looked at Tapper, but the sergeant was clearly enjoying himself. Laugh it up, old man.
“Sorry, Brody,” said Tapper putting his hands up. “Not my scene. Maybe the embassy’s security team will lend me a van. You two crazy kids have fun.”
“You can’t be serious,” said Eli, staring at them each in turn. “In case it’s escaped your memory, I’m a fugitive from the Imperium. You want me to stroll into their embassy and chat up a bunch of government officials?”
Taylor smiled. “I thought you might say that. Lucky for you, the general came up with a solution. We obviously can’t change your fingerprints or your retinal patterns or your face–”
“What’s wrong with my face?”
“–but we managed to get into the Illyricans’ central database and replace your biodata with dummy information. Take a look.” She tapped something on her sleeve and a holoscreen sprung to life between them.
Brody, Elijah Hamish, he read, followed by his birthdate, his presumed date of death at Sabaea, and a few other salient details about his life: birthplace, education history, and the like. But when his eyes went to the picture next to it, he had to blink and look again. “That’s not me.”
“Sharp as a tack, he is,” said Tapper under his breath.
Taylor shrugged. “But it fits the description.”
“Wait, that’s what you think I look like?”
Dismissing the screen, Taylor continued. “If the Illyricans scan your fingerprints, your face, or even your gait, they won’t come up with a match. Nobody’s going to recognize you. Besides, Eli Brody is officially dead, remember? You’re Elias Adler.”
Eli rubbed his forehead. “I’m just saying: I like to think I’ve made a pretty good dead man so far, but I’d prefer to avoid a repeat performance.”
“Don’t worry,” said Tapper, patting his shoulder. “They’re hardly going to shoot you at an official gala.”
“Right,” said Eli.
“They’d probably use poison,” Tapper said cheerfully. “Just don’t eat or drink anything and you’ll be fine.”
Cradling his hands in his head, Eli sighed. Maybe I can put in for hazard pay.
“Brody.”
Eli looked up to find Taylor eyeing him; for once, the commander’s expression didn’t look like she was going to chastise him for something. She smiled, and this time it went all the way to her eyes. “It’s a party, not a dogfight. No big deal.”
Right. No big deal. He exhaled. I can do this.
Looking at the rest of his team, he nodded. “OK. Let’s go shopping.”
Chapter 10
Kovalic’s eyes slid open. Air blew on his face from a vent high above, the recycled smell universal to spacecraft, spacesuits, space stations. The reassuring thrum, pervasive but muffled, of engines working somewhere deep below him. The shuttle’s lights were dimmed, which jibed with his internal clock’s impression that they still had a couple hours left in their flight. Inter-system travel was time-consuming in general, but Bayern at least was reasonably close to Nova; the whole trip only took about twelve hours start-to-finish.
Shifting in the cramped seat, he sighed and worked at his injured shoulder, which had gone stiff during the flight. Much as he’d like to drift back to sleep, he knew himself well enough to realize that there was no way that was going to happen once his brain was up and running. The time-lag of the trips could seriously screw you up if you weren’t used to it. It might be a twelve-hour trip, but the local-time of your destination often bore no sensible relation to your departure point. He’d left Nova in the afternoon; he wouldn’t land on Bayern until early evening of what would technically be the next day. It must have been a heck of a lot easier when there was just one planet with its own rotational period to worry about.
His thoughts wandered to the information he’d been given; the general had sent him a brief of the report from CARDINAL, although the old man had clearly taken pains to obfuscate the asset’s identity. Even without knowing the exact provenance, Kovalic’s gut was inclined to agree with the general’s assessment: SPT’s mission on Bayern and CARDINAL’s intelligence were no coincidence. Even on the off chance that they were, they certainly couldn’t afford to treat it as such. The first priority, then, was to find Nat and the team and pass on the information. Then he could decide whether to abort or…
He rubbed his forehead. Nat could decide whether to abort. Not him. It wasn’t his mission; the general had been clear on that. On this job, he was little more than a glorified courier. He flexed his fingers on the armrests. Of course, that didn’t mean it was easy to turn off twenty years of training and instinct, which were telling him that something much bigger was going on here, and that if they didn’t get to the bottom of it there was going to be some serious reckoning down the road.
Sighing, he touched a control on the armrest and a holoscreen sprung into existence in front of him. Slipping in a pair of earpieces, he tapped them on and began flipping through channels.
Live programming on an inter-system trip was difficult, to say the least; a wormhole jump often sent you hundreds or thousands of light years away, so unless you were prepared to wait a century or two for whatever show you’d been watching to catch up, it was probably better to tune into the local stations.
From the selection on the holoscreen, it was clear they’d already jumped into the Bayern system. Financial news from across the galaxy was the order of the day; the latest market figures from Bayern along with the latest figures from other worlds – beamed in by fast couriers on wormhole runs – ticked across the bottom of the screens so rapidly that trying to read them was like sticking your fingers into a waterfall.
Snatches of audio blared in his ears, a mélange of different voices, sounds, music, most not really registering until he’d already flipped away.
“… to buy rival company…”
“… denied allegations that he was involved in…”
“… up on rumors that the trade in…”
“… economy. Bleiden died two…”
“… the latest craze among the fashion-conscious…”
Kovalic sat forward, his fingers scrabbling for the control panel. Flipping back a channel he hit the pause button and then jumped back as far as the entertainment system’s buffer would allow. It was a talking head program, with a bland face staring into the holo-camera and jawing on about the topics of the day, but it was the subject matter, not the host, that had caught Kovalic’s attention.
“… the Illyrican mark has dropped in after-hours trading, as the market continues to react to the sudden death of Albert Bleiden, the Imperium’s Permanent Undersecretary for Trade and Commerce, who was largely thought to be a guiding force in the Illyrican economy. Bleiden died two days ago of a sudden illness. He was fifty-seven. In other news, the sixteenth annual Bayern dog show is about to get underway here in Bergfestung…”
With a roll of his eyes, Kovalic tapped the mute button. It appeared Bleiden’s death was already reaching the end of its news cycle, and he very much doubted that any further useful information would come to light – the Imperium would have made sure of that.
Still, there was nothing that irked him more than a botched job. If only they had been a little bit sharper, a little bit more on their game, maybe they could have saved Bleiden and gotten all the information he wanted to pass along. No question: it had been a screw-up of near epic proportions.
And that wasn’t even considering Jens’ death.
A wave of fatigue washed over Kovalic, as though his batteries had suddenly run down. Forcing open the lead weights that his eyelids seemed to have become, he stared at the silent head bobbing in front of him on the screen. It didn’t get any easier, even after almost two decades of leading people into battle. You never got used to losing someone – and as hard as that was, he wouldn’t have had it any other way. The day he walked away from it feeling fine was the day that he’d start to get worried.
Toggling to the map, he watched a little icon of the shuttle follow an arcing line through the blackness of space towards the blue dot that represented their destination. The white digits of the clock ticked away underneath: confirming they had about two hours before landing on Bayern.
If sleep weren’t forthcoming, he supposed he ought to do something productive. Pulling out his secure tablet, he flipped it on and started reading the background documents he’d brought with him. He’d always been able to trust his gut, and this time it was telling him that he was probably going to have to hit the ground running.
The background files on Bayern, the Imperium, and the current geopolitical situation proved to be interesting reading. Enough that the last two hours of Kovalic’s trip passed in a blur of facts and figures. He’d read all the reports of the Bayern station chief, Karl Rao, and, more importantly, he’d recognized a familiar name listed as Rao’s recently assigned number two. If nothing else, he knew where he’d be starting his inquiries.
Clearly, this wasn’t the shuttle pilot’s first time braving the somewhat treacherous winds and weather of Bayern, for the landing was smooth and quick. Not half an hour after their landing, Kovalic had passed through customs – well, “James Austen” had, anyway – and was already descending towards the city floor, gazing out across the enormous cavern of Bergfestung. Objectively, he could appreciate the amazing feat of engineering that had gone into creating it, but he’d long since gotten over his awe.
It wasn’t Kovalic’s first trip to Bayern. Granted, there weren’t a lot of planets he hadn’t been to, especially over the last five years as the galactic conflict had gone from hot war to cold. Every planet was different, of course, but it was the little idiosyncrasies and cultural differences that he found the most interesting: the Hanif, for example, had a complex set of ritual greeting phrases and responses – mess that up, and you’d never really be treated like an equal. On Centauri, it was considered the height of impoliteness to hold a door for a woman. In the Kingdom of Haran, one did not acknowledge another’s sneeze.
In other words, it was a lot to keep straight.
On Bayern, though, there was one simple rule – payment cured all ills. And there were only two types of currency that were worth anything at all: information and shares.
Information was simple enough, of course: if you knew something that the other person didn’t – or, even better, if you knew something no one else did – you could command a hefty price. Which might be a commensurate piece of information or, alternatively, shares.
Trading information on Bayern wasn’t necessarily much different than anywhere else, but shares… shares were distinctly Bayern. Not in and of themselves, per se, since corporations had existed for centuries, but in that they were used for purchasing everything from extra foodstuffs to entertainment to a better home.
Everyone on Bayern eighteen or older was an employee of the Corporation – but, they were also a shareholder, which made them part owner of the company as well. When a child was born, a certain amount of shares were set aside for them (an amount that could be supplemented by a limited bequeathment from parents,
other relatives, friends, and so on), but those shares were held by proxy – usually the parents – until the age of majority was reached. At that point, they became full voting shareholders in perpetuity. As a result, the Corporation strictly controlled its population rate; at death, the majority of the deceased’s shares were returned to the corporation to be distributed anew.
The Corporation took care of most infrastructure and societal needs for its employees – living quarters, food, healthcare, childcare, and so on – but, the Corporation being what it was, you could always find more luxurious offerings, if you were willing to pay.
This had the side effect of making things somewhat more difficult for off-worlders. Never one to miss out on a financial opportunity, however, the Corporation had come up with a solution. After arriving on planet, a quick trip to any of the automated currency exchange stations would let visitors draw funds from their off-world bank accounts and convert them into a line of credit – in Class B, non-voting shares – at Bayern’s central bank; those shares were tightly controlled in number, so their exchange value fluctuated like any other currency. If you already had an account at Bayern’s central bank, the process was even easier.
Kovalic had several. Banking and finance were a huge part of the Corporation’s interests both at home and abroad, and they treated data security and privacy intensely seriously. It was virtually impossible to get information on an account or its holder from the Corporation – a fact that Kovalic could vouch for personally. Investigations that led back to a Bayern bank account were almost always a dead end.
But, when you were yourself an operative who relied on secrecy and discretion, at least that cut both ways.
Kovalic exited the elevator at the city floor. The lighting conduits around the cavern had dimmed for the evening cycle, lending a peaceful air to the city. A currency exchange station was located – for his convenience, of course – right by the base of the elevator.
