by Evan Currie
“Maybe it’s software.”
“Software for what?” Nicky challenged quietly. “What kind of software do you think can spot targets that the hardware can’t see?”
“She iced Tangos blind, Nicky,” Smith hissed. “How the hell does someone do that?”
“Classified.”
Both men started, twisting to where the colonel was still lying on her front while March was sealing up the slashes and cuts in her back.
“Ma’am?” Nicky asked hesitantly.
“You want to know how I did what I did?” Sorilla said. “The answer is classified. The exact details, anyway. I can tell you that I have a prototype implant suite, early developmental generation. Discontinued.”
“Bullshit,” Master Sergeant Chavez blurted. “If they had implants that could do that, we’d all have them.”
“There were…side effects,” Sorilla said. “Extreme nausea is the least classified one. Trust me, Master Sergeant, SOLCOM was not happy when they found out what they’d cooked up.”
She chuckled painfully as she got up, stretching just enough to get a feel for the injuries.
“Good work, doc,” she complimented March as she walked over to the suit.
The men watched as the naked woman turned around and backed into the open suit, activating the seals with a thought, and the armor sealed tightly around her. Sorilla sighed as the gel was infused around her, cushioning her and providing medical contact for the suit’s internal scanners.
She stood up from the portable cradle they’d put her suit in and started diagnostics running in the background.
“I’ll be with the major,” she said. “Secure the perimeter, set up long-range scanners. We’re camping here for a while.”
“Yes, ma’am,”
Sorilla nodded curtly, walking out of the garage and into the villa proper. With the location of the major on her HUD, she walked unerringly into the office where the three others were working.
“Report.”
Strickland looked up. “All patched up, ma’am?”
“Good as new,” Sorilla confirmed. “What’s going on here?”
“It seems we’re in deeper than anyone expected, Colonel,” Strickland said. “Our Alliance friends included.”
That did not sound good.
“How deep is the shit, Major?” she asked.
Strickland snorted. “You’re talking like a top, Colonel. We officers don’t say ‘shit.’ We choose more polite wording.”
“Fine,” Sorilla said, her lips twisting. “How deep is the doo-doo then?”
Despite turning a fascinating shade of red and shaking suspiciously, Strickland just managed to keep from laughing at that. Eri Constantine, on the other hand, didn’t even try to stop his laughter from exploding out.
“It’s deep,” Kriss grumbled, ignoring the human’s odd interactions. “Whatever this doo-doo is, it is deep.”
And that was when Strickland lost it.
Sorilla smiled, but nothing more as Kriss handed her a data cluster. It was Alliance-issue and easily linked to SOLCOM’s updated interface to her implants. She scanned the data quickly, but didn’t see anything that jumped out at her.
“What am I looking at?” she asked.
“Transport manifests,” Kriss said, ignoring the gales of laughter from the slowly recovering duo. “Every piece of Alliance production to enter this system, every piece of local resources to leave.”
“Alright…” she said slowly.
“The numbers do not match the mass of metal entering and leaving this system,” the Lucian said, “which means that someone has been using this system as a center of smuggling.”
Sorilla frowned, eyes glowing as she reviewed the data again.
“So the smugglers delivered weapons to insurgents?” she asked.
“It appears so, yes.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Sorilla objected. “I’ve run these sorts of ops in the past, more than once. Smugglers wouldn’t risk their hub by bringing down this kind of attention on it. If this were a transshipping hub for smugglers, they’d have done everything they could to shut down the local insurgency’s supplies.”
“What would you have done to get weapons in, then?” Kriss asked. “I know you would have found a way.”
“Sure, you set up a second line of delivery,” she said. “Something the smugglers don’t know about.”
“There is no evidence of that,” Kriss countered. “Perhaps we are missing something, or perhaps this isn’t as simple as we believed.”
“It’s never as simple as you believe when you go in,” Sorilla said, still reviewing the files. “People are complicated. People make things complicated. Do your people track every ship that comes into the system?”
“And everything they offload,” the Lucian confirmed.
Sorilla was quiet a moment, considering that information.
“You’re right,” she said suddenly. “It is deep.”
Chapter 13
USV SOL
Seinel looked around with undisguised interest as he was escorted through the decks of the human ship. This one was a different design—subtly in places, but different—than the ship class he was familiar with. The two human guards who stood on either side of him carefully kept him out of reach of anything he might be able to compromise.
It was amusing, honestly, and a little flattering.
They made their way out to a large area with a panoramic view of the local space. Normally that would be rather dull—space was of very little interest, in his experience—but this close to the local world, it made for something rather impressive.
“Welcome aboard, Mr. Seinel.”
“Just Seinel,” the tall alien said. “My people do not use the same identifiers as yours.”
“Seinel then,” Admiral Ruger said. “Welcome aboard the SOL.”
“A pleasure to be here.”
“We’ve been monitoring the events on the surface. I assume you have as well?” Ruger asked.
“Indeed,” Seinel confirmed. “The soldiers have turned up interesting information.”
“The sanitized weapons.” Ruger nodded. “I’m not sure I understand the importance of that intel exactly, but it is interesting.”
“The full importance is…classified, I believe you would say,” Seinel told them. “However, the fact that blanks exist and are in the hands of insurgents is concerning enough that I will have to send this information up the ranks. Likely, it will go to the very top of Alliance Command. This has become the most important aspect of my side of this investigation.”
Ruger nodded slowly, his mind whirling as he tried to understand what the hell was going on. He was missing something, that was obvious, but what it was…he could not tell for the life of him.
“I don’t understand, but we’ll adjust as needed.”
“You don’t need to concern yourself with it,” Seinel said. “Continue your side as you originally planned.”
“We intend to,” Ruger said. “There’s clearly an underground here on Arkana, funded and equipped by outsiders. That means that Colonel Aida’s theory of an Alliance source for the neurotoxin that killed your people is looking more likely than ever.”
“Yes, I am aware of that as well,” Seinel said sourly. “Locate what you can about them from your side of things. I will locate what can be found from mine.”
*****
Arkana
Grant Portman took a breath as he approached his employer’s villa.
Security was not usually a big thing on Arkana, though there were always exceptions of course. Eri Constantine had never been one for security, not of the visible sort at least. Playing the man-of-the-people role he enjoyed so much, Eri Constantine preferred to be more…approachable.
Now, however, security was quite obvious. Obvious, and not local.
Grant made himself walk up the drive, ignoring the weapons he knew were trained on him the whole way. He went, as he always did, to the side doo
r and opened it. The barrel of a big rifle met him as soon as it swung open.
He put his hands up, swallowing. “Who are you?”
“Search him,” a voice ordered.
Grant found himself yanked into the room, the door slammed shut behind him. He was roughly shoved up against a wall, something brushed along his back and sides.
“That is my retainer,” Eri’s voice called. “It’s alright. Let him in.”
“He’s clean,” another voice he didn’t know spoke up.
Grant felt himself pulled away from the wall, spun around so he could see the others in the room. The soldiers in armor from Earth where there, most of them with blank-faced helmets, but he saw the woman was still showing her face. Eri, of course, was there looking at him…and the Xeno.
“What is that doing here?” he blurted out.
“The Xeno is…invited,” Eri said, sounding reluctant about it but not nearly as disgusted as Grant felt he should be.
The whole villa would have to be cleaned now, just to be rid of the smell.
He got himself under control, though, and forced down the revulsion he felt before he turned to Eri.
“If you say so, sir,” Grant said. “What happened at the Red Room? I’m relieved to find you alright. Were you taken by these…people?”
“I was saved by these people,” Eri growled, “and I should be the one asking you, Grant. Where was the security for the Red Room? We were attacked and they were nowhere to be seen!”
“There was an incident that called security away,” Grant said, swallowing. “It was minor, but they were entirely out of position when…whatever it was happened.”
One of the armored off-worlders shifted. “A distraction then. They pulled your security out of the way so they could move. They’ve been plotting this for a while.”
Eri nodded reluctantly, his face grim.
“My decision to treat with the Xenos wasn’t the most popular among the more hard-line adherents to the ideals of the Founders,” he admitted. “However, I saw no other reasonable options, either at the time or now.”
“Fringe thinkers don’t care much about reason, except as it might agree with their established positions,” another armored speaker, but this one a woman, said. “It’s called confirmation bias. They will lock onto whatever they can find that supports what they believe, and ignore everything else.”
“That doesn’t matter now,” Eri growled. “They’ve made a declaration of war. My father and I did not agree on all things, especially not toward the end…but one thing that was absolute is that you do not treat with someone who opens negotiations by trying to shoot you in the back. If they want a war, I’ll show them a war.”
*****
Sorilla eyed the man as he made his declaration, as well as the only other local in the room. Eri was showing all the signs of someone she would normally peg as a local leader worth cultivating. The only thing that left her wondering was just how he stood in the colony’s favor overall. Did he represent an extremist opinion of his own?
That seemed unlikely, but it was possible.
The upper class of any group were more likely to be conservative, leaning toward the continuation of the system that had made them its leaders. They would protect the system because it was in their interests to do so. Most especially those who inherited their money, as Eri had, would be inclined to this.
Those who created new wealth…they tended to be the revolutionaries.
If that were the case here, then they might have just gotten luckier than Sorilla had ever imagined. Eri might well represent a large block of the population’s thinking, or if things were as bad as they might be, he might represent the old guard about to fall to the revolutionaries.
She hoped it was the former.
‘Aida, SOL.’
Sorilla stiffened at the call from the starship overhead, subvocalizing her response. SOL, go for Aida.
‘We’re tracking encrypted signals from the ambush site, Colonel,’ the watch officer told her. ‘Sorry, we still haven’t cracked the encryption.’
Sorilla wasn’t that shocked. A new encryption was difficult to break under good conditions, and working with whatever you could intercept from orbit was far from those. Even with the local armor relaying the signals, it wasn’t a shock that they would still be crunching the numbers.
She knew, however, that the SOL wouldn’t have called just to tell her that.
What is it, then? she asked.
‘We’re tracking one of those signals now. It’s coming from inside the room you’re currently in.’
Sorilla turned, eyes locking on the man named Grant as she flipped her suit’s imagers over to EM spectrum. The signal pulse coming from him was strong, showing as a blue-green pulsing light in her HUD. Analysis ran on it, and the color shifted to red as the encryption was detected, showing military-grade encryption.
The fact that he had been broadcasting at both the Red Room and now at Eri’s villa might be coincidence. Perhaps he had a tracker or personal comm system that was cloud-enabled. Just being present at both sites wasn’t enough to label him a threat.
Understood, she responded, still subvocalizing.
It wasn’t so much to keep Grant from hearing her. Her helm would do that job admirably. However, subvocalizing and compressing her messages would keep the enemy from doing exactly what she was now doing to Grant himself. There were no always-on links between herself and her fellows, or the SOL.
She shot a quick update out to the others, shifting Grant from a green contact on their HUDs to yellow. The others shifted silently, opening up their formation so they wouldn’t be caught too close together in the case of treachery.
SOL, Aida, Sorilla called back. Request ten-kilometer radius, current position, full scan.
‘Roger, Aida. Standby.’
She shifted, her right hand resting on her thigh, just below where her right pistol was holstered. Sorilla glanced over at Strickland and nodded to the window. The major nodded and gestured with his left hand, causing Smith and Nicky to casually walk over to the window and take up positions on either side.
“Casual” was a relative term, of course. A man in powered armor wasn’t exactly subtlety in motion by most people’s standards.
Grant and Eri noticed, of course, shifting their focus to the two men.
Sorilla drew her pistol quietly while they were looking away, shifting so that it was hidden from the two locals when they turned back.
“Is something coming?” Eri asked, clearly worried.
“No, probably nothing,” Sorilla said. “Just precautions.”
“For what?” Grant asked suspiciously.
“Just in case we flush anyone out with what comes next,” she said.
“What?” Eri asked, confused. “What do you mean ‘what comes next’?”
‘Pulse out.’
The signal from the SOL was what the team was waiting for, and they all killed their armors’ power systems at once.
For Sorilla, everything felt suddenly sluggish as her armor became near dead weight on her limbs, dragging her down. More disorienting, however, was the sudden loss of signal from her implants as they, too, cycled through shutdown. Her HUD went out, and she would have been blind except that the SOLCOM engineers had planned for a loss of power.
Without the low-level trickle of power that kept her helm opaque, it turned crystal clear in an instant just as a tangible hum of power built around them.
Eri moved to cover his ears as it became a whine. “What is that!?”
The scanner pulse from the SOL was powerful enough to be considered an energy weapon at close range, but from orbit it was merely enough to blow out any unshielded gear with an active circuit. Even heavily shielded gear, like their own armor, was potentially vulnerable in places.
The lights in the room got brighter, quickly, and then popped with explosions of sparks falling from them. The room barely grew any darker, though, as the display screen began to power up
despite having been turned off. Free power in the air was fed directly into the OLED display, and it showed a pulse pattern for a brief moment before also exploding.
Startled by all of that, Grant entirely missed the smoke coming from his pocket until a pop and a flame signaled the destruction of his transmitter. He yelped and beat at his pocket, putting the fire out as other devices exploded in sparks around them.
“What’s happening!?” Eri called as he covered his face.
“A SOL-class battleship just lit up your villa and a ten-kilometer radius around with a full-power scanner pulse,” Sorilla said, head tilting slightly, her focus on Grant, though she was speaking to Eri.
“Why would they do that?” Eri asked.
“Because I asked them to.”
Grant, having finally put out the flames from his pocket, twisted to glare at her. “Why would you do that?”
*****
USV SOL
“Signal return from the surface, Captain.”
Captain Nero Ramirez looked over. “Put it on the main display.”
“Aye, skipper.”
The big display that showed the planet flickered, then rushed in on the world below them as though the vessel were plummeting from the skies. In seconds it was focused on the villa below them, icons of the Special Forces unit within lighting up first. Three unaffiliated signs followed, two humans and a Lucian.
Those were expected signals all accounted for.
The seventy-five human signals closing on the villa, however, were not on the expected list.
Nero whistled. “Looks like the colonel had good reason to be suspicious. Okay, tell her what’s coming, and inform her that we can be on-site in fifteen minutes.”
“Armor reboot should be…fifteen seconds and counting, sir.”
*****
Grant Portman glared at the dark skin of the woman who was staring evenly at him from behind her armor. The arrogance in her eyes infuriated him, but he knew that he wasn’t carrying anything that could breach combat armor of any sort, let alone what he was looking at.
“Why would you make such a destructive scan?” he demanded, trying to mask his worry.
She smiled crookedly at him. “Call it a hunch.”
