by Evan Currie
“No matter,” Kriss decided. “I will endure and overcome.”
A dark thought struck him then, and he turned sharply to look at the spymaster, despite the pain he felt. “It is still my mission, correct?”
“It is,” Seinel assured him. “I had to alter a couple of the priorities on the reports sent back, but the governor is unaware of precisely how serious your injuries were…otherwise you would have been replaced with certainty.”
Kriss grimaced, slumping back and closing his eyes.
“Thank you,” he finally said.
The gratitude was real, though the expression of it short and perfunctory, and the Sin Fae took it as it was intended.
“You have nothing to thank me for,” he said simply. “I am more familiar with Lucians than the governor, and have no desire to deal with a new field commander on top of the Terrans and whatever other insanity the agitators cause. I am simply looking out for my own skin here.”
Kriss grunted once in suppressed amusement, but didn’t argue.
If the spymaster wanted to play it that way, it was fine by him. He suspected that there would be ample time to pay back any favors he might owe before this was all over.
Certainly he owed a few to the enemy that he intended to pay back…with interest.
*****
Sorilla’s lips curled up as she examined the psych profiles of the colonists on the two Diaspora vessels.
It was, without question, an example of good riddance to bad rubbish when they’d acquired their early private ships. She wasn’t surprised at all to find that a rather sizeable amount of the funding had come from outside donors, many of them just wanting the bastards gone from the country and the world.
The two ships had ironically similar lists of humanity’s “finest,” though the information available on the European vessel was a little less complete, sadly. She supposed that she should be grateful for having more experience fighting Muslim extremists, since she could fill in a lot of the blanks that way.
The sheer level of data available for the Americans, though, was stunning. She’d honestly never seen files this thoroughly detailed before, not even in her wildest dreams. The feds must have bugged their bathrooms to get some of this intelligence.
The ship’s captain had been former military, dishonorably discharged for trying to knife one of his comrades in a bar fight. His entire jacket read like something out of a bad movie. He’d spiraled down from his discharge, joined a militia movement, wound up serving under someone worse than he was.
That someone was one of the ship’s key elders, Mitchell Gain.
Gain was well-educated, a strong proponent of the benefits of eugenics…because of course he was, Sorilla thought with some disgust. Though it wasn’t even eugenics that bothered her so much as she read the file, but rather the fact that he supported the theory during a time when it was almost possible to at least attempt such a thing ethically, but he didn’t bother.
She didn’t personally ascribe to the concept, but Sorilla was aware of some of the academic arguments in favor of doing things to strengthen the genetic code of the species. In a time when direct manipulation of the genome was not only possible, but almost commonplace, those arguments were common fodder among anyone with even basic education.
The man whose file she was looking at, however, ascribed to the old school methodology. Not because there weren’t better ways to do what he claimed to want, but because he enjoyed it.
And this is one of the guys who helped form this culture. Joy, she thought dryly to herself. Just fucking perfect.
It would have been some time since he’d died, since the Diaspora ship had left during the very, very early days of medical life extension, so that meant that there would have been time for significant cultural drift. People just weren’t, by nature, evil, but indoctrination was a tough chain to break. Sorilla hoped that they wouldn’t be dealing with the worst case scenario, but it would come down to what sort of government controls they had instituted over their society.
White supremacists generally espoused a belief in personal freedom and, in the case of those who came from the U.S., the articles of the American Constitution and amendments to same. Even casual observance of those sorts of ideals would eventually undermine auto- and theocratic beliefs, which would cause a cultural drift away from the more dangerous aspects of fundamentalism.
The difficulty lay in how quickly that drift would propagate, which she had no easy way to determine.
In that, she could far more easily predict the European ship. They’d left as a theocracy, and there was no indication that would have changed in the interim. That meant she could expect that culture to be following relatively close to Sharia Law.
Of course, both ships had been crewed with more than just believers. You didn’t travel between the stars on faith, not and survive the trip at least. So they had educated elements in both groups.
This is going to be interesting, Sorilla thought as she continued to work out the cultural report of the original ship’s crews and passengers.
She honestly had no idea how this particular mix of people would have evolved. She was rather annoyed, actually, that the Alliance had happened upon them. It would have been fascinating to see what they did with another couple hundred years on their own, removed from all the variables that drove tensions on Earth.
*****
Alliance space was a few jumps from Hayden, but the annexed worlds were closer than Sorilla had generally come to expect in her dealings with the alien Alliance. So she only had a few days to work on her plans for the upcoming mission before the ship’s intercom announced their arrival at the initial contact point.
She made her way from the office she’d been given, heading for the SOLCOM deck where the rest of the team from the Fifth were likely already watching the SOL’s entry into the system.
She wasn’t disappointed when she arrived. Even the old man had come down from the admiralty deck to watch the show from there. Sorilla quietly stepped into place beside him and Major Strickland, eyes on the augmented display that could be seen through the massive surrounding transparent view of deep space that surrounded them.
“Alliance beacon is up.” Strickland nodded to the red light that had just lit off on the display. “Why aren’t there any ships yet?”
“They’re running doggo,” Sorilla answered. “Unless you catch them with their pants down, it’s tough to spot an Alliance warship that isn’t maneuvering. Tough to spot ours too, for that matter. Space is a big place.”
One by one the planets of the system were mapped and appeared on the augmented display, one key world showing up highlighted and enlarged on the screen.
“That’s our target world,” Mattan said softly. “The North American colony. The Alliance says the locals call it Arkana.”
Sorilla nodded, wishing that the Alliance files had been remotely detailed. Unfortunately, the brief they’d gotten from the alien Alliance had been rather less than, and she doubted it would get much better once they were onsite. The Alliance wouldn’t entrust them with much, just out of professional caution. Exposing what intelligence you had was always a risk, as just knowing what you knew might be enough to expose how you had gathered it.
She linked her implants into the ship’s computers and started gathering some intelligence of her own, pulling up the take from the ship’s hyperspectral scanners.
“It’s a pretty arid world,” she said. “Oxygen is on the low side, but breathable.”
She frowned, doing the math in her head. “With as many generations as they’ve had, I think we’d best be careful with the locals. They’ll be adapting to the air, unless they’ve wasted a lot of resources on enclosed environments, and that will make them tougher than you’d expect.”
“Thin air, arid environment, and it looks like a heavy gravity,” Mattan rumbled, clearly doing the same thing she was. “Sister, you ain’t lying. Proto-Ghurkas?”
“Physically, anyway,” Soril
la shrugged. “I doubt they’ll have the attitude.”
“Small mercies.”
“They’ll be generations away from the same adaptations the Ghurkas have reached,” Sorilla said, “at least, but at least some of them will be adapting already. We’ll need to keep our oxygen close.”
“Surface temperature is high,” Strickland offered up. “That’s going to affect operational capabilities on our side. Without environmental suits, we’re looking at two weeks to adapt for basic operations, six months before we’re capable of full-scale ops.”
“We’ll start adapting onboard,” Matton ordered. “SOLCOM decks will be adjusted to local temperatures and humidity, effective immediately.”
The other two nodded in agreement, but the situation just irritated Sorilla.
“They could have given us basic data like this,” she grumbled. “We’d already be ready to roll the moment we put into orbit. I don’t like this.”
“What’s to like?” Strickland asked, a little wryly. “We’re here on the behalf of an alien empire, tasked with putting down a human revolution against them. I don’t care how you cut it, that’s just screwed up.”
Sorilla snorted, smiling slightly, drawing the attention of them both. “Do you really see that as the mission, Major?”
“You don’t?”
“Not even close.” She shook her head. “This is primarily intel gathering and diplomatic outreach.”
“Outreach? We could do that from Hayden.”
“Major, we’re not reaching out to the Alliance.”
Matton chuckled. “Takes notes…Major Strickland. Yes, we would rather avoid a diplomatic incident with the Alliance, but that’s not our primary mission.”
“We have two potential groups of human infiltrators inside the Alliance,” Sorilla said. “Even if we can’t work with them, we’re here to learn how to infiltrate them. That will allow us to insert agents into Alliance space.”
“I’m not used to this,” Strickland admitted. “That would normally not be a consideration. Imitating one group to infiltrate another? Usually we just train people to imitate the group we’re really concerned with.”
“New game, new rules,” Matton said firmly. “Learn them, or step aside.”
“There.” Sorilla nodded to the display. “The Alliance ships just lit off their drives.”
“Well, game faces, people,” Matton ordered. “We’re about to meet our partners for this op. Play nice.”
Chapter 4
Seinel looked on as the human ship settled into the hangar of the big Parithalian starship. It was a different design than the ships he had been briefed on in the past, not matching any of the profiles they had on record from the war. While he was certain that the Parithalian crew were carefully recording every detail of the new ship design, Seinel did his best to commit it to memory as well while trying to work out why they had made the changes they had.
It was new, the polish on the metal still visible beneath the paint. Cosmic radiation and grit from space hadn’t blasted away the first layer of paint yet, to say nothing of the metal beneath.
They sent a completely new ship, if not a new model. Interesting.
The humans were clearly in an accelerated development phase. Exposure to Alliance technology during the war had pushed them faster than he would have anticipated based on the earlier intelligence he’d been provided. The Ross were notoriously unreliable when it came to providing intelligence, but their scanners were top rate all the same.
The initial brief on the humans matched the profile of a young interstellar civilization. They had jump drive capability, but extremely low acceleration ships, likely no more than a handful of worlds under their control. He would not have been shocked if their homeworld was still politically split, as seemed common in early space-faring races.
Now, however, Alliance Intelligence Services had their ships pegged at very nearly as fast as the best Parithalian cruisers in the fleet. In fact, Parithalians respected the Terrans as decent ship handlers, and that was before the latest series of their ships had been introduced.
Sometimes I wonder if the Ross were not correct about them. Perhaps we should have steamrolled them from the beginning and ended these people as a threat. Unfortunately, by the time that seemed the more intelligent course, it was already too late.
He knew the Alliance could still win such a war, at least by even their worst case estimates, but the will to fight such an ongoing conflict would strain the Alliance populace to a breaking limit.
A hiss caught his attention and Seinel looked up to see the blast of pressurized air from the shuttle, signaling that they’d broken the seal and were preparing to disembark.
A ramp detached from the shuttle, lowering to the deck of the hangar, but there was motion already on the ramp before it touched down. Security descended first. They were armed, obviously, but moving calmly and merely taking up positions at the bottom of the ramp. Very showy, they moved with flourishes that Seinel recognized as the mark of professional show forces.
That didn’t mean they weren’t good at what they did, of course, he was well aware of that. It just meant that one of the things they did was look very, very impressive.
It was the figures that followed them down that attracted his focus.
One in particular caught his eye almost instantly.
Oh my, they sent her.
*****
Facial recognition software was running even as Sorilla started down the ramp, and she swept the crowd at the back first. Initial hits showed two faces she knew, highlighting them in her implants.
Kriss I expected, but Seinel too? They’re taking this seriously, that’s obvious, but it almost makes me wonder if they knew I was coming. The old man said that SOLCOM didn’t provide them any information about who was being sent, though, so that is hopefully unlikely.
The little, unobtrusive alien was purported to be part of an Alliance merchant race, which made for a perfect cover for an intelligence agent. He was good at what he did, clearly, but how good…that was something she did not know for sure.
Sorilla shot off the facial hit and file on the intel agent to Mattan and Ruger before her boots touched the deck of the alien starship.
The diplo types stepped out front, making their pleasantries and the general sort of meaningless nonsense that diplo types thrived on. Sorilla tuned them out, instead filing away faces and names as she could, shooting the information to the network and then back to the ship.
Most of the faces she was seeing would be meaningless, of course. Few people at these sorts of things were anyone important…yet, at least. Some might turn out important in a few years, with some seasoning, but probably not.
There would be perhaps five faces that mattered in the crowd. Sorilla already knew two of them.
It wasn’t her specialty, though, figuring out the remaining three. She’d leave that to the intel weenies onboard the shuttle and the SOL.
The meet-and-greet was a standard sort of thing, not that she had spent much time at them before. Usually, when it did happen, she was one of the guards posted. Invisible in plain sight, often plotting how to disrupt the event in a way that would best serve her assigned agenda. It was unusual in the extreme for her to be one of the faces pressing flesh and smiling vacuously for posterity.
Sorilla desperately wanted this nonsense to be over.
Just let me do the job.
*****
Kriss hated every moment of his current existence.
The pain from his injuries was bad enough, but those he could deal with. No, it was the insufferable presence of so many mealy-mouthed politicians that drove him up the way. So many self-important fools, pretending they mattered, pretending that they weren’t there mostly just in case the Terrans decided to be troublesome.
Filling out the room with expendable shields of meat and bone meant that there was a better chance of the few actually important members of the Alliance government escaping in the worst case sce
nario.
Oh, he knew that wouldn’t happen, of course.
For one, the Terrans weren’t suicidal. They were many things—some he liked, some he didn’t—but they wouldn’t just do something that stupid without a damn good reason, which he didn’t expect them to have.
More importantly, though, if they did…Kriss was well aware that the Terrans were good enough to make sure nobody got out alive.
There was more than enough power in the reactor of the shuttle, if nothing else, to blow out the hull and cripple, if not entirely destroy, the ship they were on. And that was assuming they hadn’t brought in a shielded explosive of some sort.
Protocol dictated little things like this, however, so lots of faceless peons got to play important government official for the duration.
There was only one face in the room he gave a damn about.
It will be interesting to work with her again, he supposed.
She’d been promoted. He, like every soldier in the Alliance—Sentinels especially—had been briefed extensively on Terran rank insignia. Unless he was mistaken, he was looking at a two grade increase from her previous ranking in Alliance records.
That would make her a light colonel, I believe they call it. Why are they pushing her up the ranks? She’s a field soldier, not some office-bound bureaucrat.
It didn’t make any sense to him, but rarely did what non-Lucians do make much sense to him or any other Sentinel. The highest rank a Sentinel ever achieved was Sentinel. Field command was decided on a case-by-case basis, based on strengths and experience. A Sentinel was only promoted in two ways: through death in service or, for the very unlucky, when they were too old to continue serving.
Kriss hoped very much that the former took him before the latter.
*****
Seinel was careful to mix with the crowd liberally, talking mostly about his cover business as a mercantile professional. He actually owned a small fleet of such ships, just enough to explain his presence at these sorts of things without being enough to stand out at all. So he made small talk with various local business persons invited to the meeting, exchanging vague promises to discuss real business at a later date.
