by Piers Platt
“Are you worried because you think your team’s no longer officially sanctioned?” Hawken asked. “With the Intel Committee dead, there’s no one that can prove you were on Jokuan on official government orders.”
The woman narrowed her eyes. “I’m worried that if you knew anything more about me and my team, you’d want to arrest us.”
“Well, that doesn’t help reassure me at all,” Hawken said.
“Then I guess we’re at an impasse,” the woman replied.
Have I met her before? Dasi wondered. I don’t recognize her face. But Beauceron says he knows her. And there’s something about her posture … Suddenly, Dasi sat up straighter.
“Jace,” she said. “I think I know this woman, too.”
The woman shot Dasi a look of shocked surprise. “We’ve never met before,” she said.
Dasi nodded slowly. “I think we have.” She turned to Hawken. “Jace, before we got to Anchorpoint, I shared something with you, something I did before I joined the Interstellar Police.”
“Dasi,” the woman said, her tone full of warning.
“No, it’s okay,” Dasi replied. “Trust me.” She turned back to the district attorney. “Jace, do you remember?”
Hawken frowned. “Yes,” he said. Then his eyebrows shot upwards, and he turned to look at the woman. “I see. Yes, of course – that makes sense.”
“Sir,” General Childers protested. “I’m not at all comfortable with the amount of secrets and lies being thrown about.”
“General, wait,” Hawken said, holding up a hand. “I understand why this woman values her privacy. And what’s more, if she says she and her team are willing to help us, I’m damn well going to take her up on it.” He stood quickly, and held out his hand to the woman. “Stay, please – your secret’s safe with me.”
She eyed his outstretched arm. “No arrests? No investigation?” she asked.
“I’ve got a lot more to worry about right now,” he said. “As long as you and your team are on our side, your past is irrelevant right now.”
She reached out and shook his hand. “In that case, it looks like Project Arclight is back online.”
On the viewscreen at the front of the room, a man wearing the uniform of an Interstellar Police captain appeared, replacing Dasi’s footage of the PKD attack.
“General Childers,” he announced. “I have an incoming video call from Tarkis.”
“For who?” Childers asked.
The captain looked down at a notepad on his desk. “They said, and I quote: ‘Put me through to whoever is running what’s left of the Federacy.’ ”
An icy stillness fell over the room. Hawken turned to face the screen. “I suppose that would be me,” he said.
“Yes, sir,” the captain agreed. “Stand by.”
His face disappeared, and a moment later, it was replaced by a view of a middle-aged soldier standing on the bridge of an older ship. He looked up and gave them a tight smile, but his eyes held nothing but contempt.
“Who am I speaking with?” he demanded.
“Jace Hawken, district attorney,” Hawken said. “And you are?”
“General Yo-Tsai, commander of the Jokuan Forces.”
“General, I must ask you to withdraw your forces from Tarkis immediately, to prevent any further bloodshed,” Hawken said, keeping his voice even.
“And if I do not?” Yo-Tsai prompted.
“I’ll have no choice but to activate the Fleet Reaction Force, destroy your forces, and seize Jokuan to be held as a Federacy protectorate.”
Yo-Tsai shook his head. “You’ll do no such thing. I’m standing on the bridge of Ricken’s command vessel. This console gives me full control of the orbital drones deployed across the Federacy. The minute I hear the FRF has received orders to activate, I will open fire.”
“General—” Hawken said, but Yo-Tsai interrupted him.
“Furthermore, you will ensure that no Interstellar Police units try to interfere with my operations, either here on Tarkis, or on any other planet my forces land on. Again, failure to comply will result in strikes on heavily populated areas across the Federacy. Lastly, any attempt to disable the drones will be met with immediate reprisal. Have I made myself clear?”
“General,” Hawken said. “I urge you to reconsider. You’re declaring war on the Federacy.”
“No,” Yo-Tsai said. “The war is already over. Deny that fact at your peril. I’m merely occupying what I already possess.”
He severed the connection, and the screen went black.
7
In the hatch of his tank, Colonel Ikeda threw his helmet down with disgust. “What the fuck is going on?” he swore. “Only the goddamn navy would be stupid enough to lock us inside a ship smack in the middle of a landing operation.”
He pushed himself up and out of the hatch, and saw his second-in-command step out of a jeep farther down the bay.
“Stay here,” Ikeda ordered. “I’m going to find out why they closed the loading ramp. Make sure the rest of the formation is on the move as soon as it drops.”
“Yes, sir,” the younger officer agreed.
Ikeda dropped down from the tank’s armored deck, landing on the steel plating of the cargo bay with a grunt. He adjusted his pistol in its shoulder holster, and then strode off between the parked vehicles, cursing under his breath.
At the back of the cargo bay, he hurried along a short corridor, stopping at an elevator. He jabbed the button impatiently with his thumb. Then he heard a faint, metallic clank, from down the corridor to his left. Ikeda frowned. The elevator chimed, and the doors slid open in front of him, but he ignored them, and walked down the hall.
Some instinct made him pause at the intersection with the next corridor, and he ducked quickly around the corner, glancing down the hall. He saw one of his medics – the female prisoner, he realized – standing in the hall, holding an auto-rifle awkwardly. Below her, a man knelt with his back to Ikeda, pushing down on a wrench. As Ikeda watched, the man turned and said something to the medic, and Ikeda caught a glimpse of his face.
No! It can’t be!
* * *
Rath pulled open a cabinet labeled Firefighting Equipment, and rummaged through a tool box on one shelf. He took out a pair of wrenches, handing one to Jaymy. Then he knelt next to one end of the auxiliary fuel tank, setting the wrench over a nut on the tank’s release valve.
“Nope, wrong size.” He handed the wrench to Jaymy, who gave him the larger one.
This time, the wrench fit. He pushed down hard, but the valve wasn’t budging.
“The valve’s pretty tight,” he told Jaymy, grimacing as he pushed on it again. “Not sure this is going to work.” Then he felt the valve give, ever so slightly, shifting a fraction of a turn.
“Drop the rifle,” Rath heard. Jaymy gasped.
Ikeda stepped out into the hallway, covering them with his pistol.
“Drop it,” he repeated, pointing the weapon at Jaymy. She let it clatter to the floor. Rath saw that she still had the wrench in one hand, holding it carefully behind her arm, blocking it from Ikeda’s view.
Good girl.
“Now push it over here,” Ikeda ordered.
Jaymy pushed the auto-rifle with one boot, and the weapon slid across the floor, coming to a rest by his feet. Ikeda smiled cruelly, and flicked his pistol upwards. “On your feet, 621.”
Rath stood slowly, holding both hands up.
Ikeda shook his head. “You should be dead,” he said.
“I’m not,” Rath told him. “Something else to add to the list of things you managed to fuck up.”
Ikeda lined the pistol up. “This time I’ll make sure. But first: drop the landing ramp.”
Rath shook his head, inching closer to Ikeda. “No. You’ll have to shoot me.”
“If that’s what you wish,” Ikeda said. He took a step back, keeping his distance from Rath.
“Probably not a good idea to shoot me from that angle,” Rath observed, nodding his head toward the
fuel tank behind him. “That round will go right through me and explode the tank.”
“I doubt it,” Ikeda said, but he took another step to the side, moving closer to Jaymy.
Rath accessed his internal computer, pulling up the control for his vocal implants. He changed his voice to General Yo-Tsai’s, and then a sophisticated diagram appeared overlaid on his heads-up display, showing an acoustic rendering of the corridor.
“Ikeda,” he breathed, barely moving his lips. The whispered sound echoed off the far end of the corridor, bouncing back to Ikeda’s ears. The colonel looked sideways, quickly, confused, and Jaymy swung the wrench upward, smacking it into the underside of the pistol. The weapon went flying. Ikeda bellowed in anger and surprise, and grabbed the wrench, simultaneously landing a vicious kick on Jaymy’s stomach. She fell over with a cry of pain. Rath leapt for the auto-rifle on the floor, but Ikeda kicked it aside – it clattered under the auxiliary fuel tank, out of reach. Rath straightened, backing up.
The two men faced each other, and Ikeda dropped into a fighting stance, twirling Jaymy’s wrench in one hand.
“I’ve always wanted to test myself in combat against a guildsman,” Ikeda observed.
“It’s hardly a fair test if you’ve got that wrench,” Rath replied.
Ikeda ignored the comment. He swung the wrench in a wide arc, and Rath danced back out of the way.
Ikeda twirled the wrench idly. “While you were murdering unsuspecting civilians in their sleep, I was killing armed insurgents in battle, boy,” he said. “And this won’t be the first time I’ve killed an opponent in close combat, either.”
Rath kept his eyes fixed on the wrench.
“No witty remark?” Ikeda asked. “Fine. Come, 621. Show your girlfriend how skilled you are against a real warrior.”
Ikeda lashed out suddenly, jabbing the wrench at Rath’s eyes. Rath identified it as the feint that it was, and ducked aside, closing with Ikeda. The older man swung the wrench again, but Rath was too close in – he let Ikeda’s blow land beneath his armpit, and caught the man’s arm beneath his own. With a business-like twist, he broke Ikeda’s arm, then grabbed him by the throat and slammed him to the deck. Ikeda’s eyes went wide in surprised panic, but the wind had been knocked from him, and his mouth worked in silence. Rath raised his knee high, and brought his boot down hard on Ikeda’s skull.
He turned and saw Jaymy pushing herself to her knees. She coughed as Rath knelt next to her.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” she nodded. “Are you?”
“I’m fine,” he said.
She nodded toward Ikeda’s corpse. “It scares me every time I see you do that,” she told him, taking his hand as they stood up.
“Sorry,” Rath said.
“No,” Jaymy said frowning. “Don’t apologize. I’d rather be scared than dead. It’s just … hard to watch. Is it easy for you?”
Rath knelt by Ikeda’s body, taking a grenade off of the man’s tactical vest. “It’s easy when I’m doing it. It’s hard afterwards.”
He moved over to the auxiliary fuel tank, and set the wrench back in place. The valve twisted as he pushed. Rath checked over his shoulder. “Stand behind me,” he told Jaymy. “Closer to the hatch. Yeah, good. When this thing opens,” he grunted, pushing down again, “it’s gonna spray everywhere.”
On cue, the valve released, and a high-pressure jet of fuel blasted into the corridor. Rath wiped fuel from his face and pushed one more time on the wrench, and the jet became a gushing flow, running down the corridor toward the vehicle bay at the far end. Rath stood up and led Jaymy toward the exterior hatch. After a few seconds of fiddling with the controls, the hatch slid open, and they found themselves in the open air, standing several feet above the waving grasses of an open field. Rath helped Jaymy clamber down, then he pointed at a small group of vehicles idling near the front ramp of the ship.
“Head for those tanks,” he told her.
“Head toward them?” Jaymy asked, incredulous.
Rath shifted his face and hair again, taking on Ikeda’s likeness. “Yeah: we’re going to need a ride out of here. I’ll be right behind you.”
Jaymy gave him a worried look, but pulled her medic kit on and set off toward the vehicles. Rath ducked back inside, glancing down the hallway. The tank was still spewing fuel down the corridor – some had started to pool back toward the hatch, but the majority was still flowing toward the cargo bay, full of Jokuan troops and vehicles.
They must have seen the leak – or smelled it – by now. He felt a twinge of guilt, then shook it off. They tried to kill me. They kidnapped my girlfriend. They invaded my home.
Rath armed the grenade and then threw it down the corridor. It bounced off of the fuel tank once, then rattled along the floor for several feet, coming to a rest in a pool of fuel near the vehicle bay. Rath was already out of the hatch, slamming it closed behind him. He dropped to the earth and broke into a run, hurrying to catch up with Jaymy. As he reached her, he heard a muffled thump, which was quickly followed by a much louder explosion. Several of the portholes along the ship’s side burst outward, spewing jets of flame. From inside, he heard more explosions – sympathetic detonations, as the flames and intense heat reached the ammunition and battery cells in the armored vehicles in the hold.
Welcome to Tarkis, assholes.
8
Senator Foss adjusted his tie in the mirror a final time, and then stepped out of the bathroom. In the lounge of his private spacecraft, the two Senate Guards that made up his protective detail sat waiting. Both were men – he had insisted on that, upon taking office. The ship shuddered, and the pitch of the engines changed. Foss glanced out the nearest porthole, and saw that they had exited faster-than-light travel. A planet loomed in the distance ahead of them.
Jokuan. Time to cement our alliance with Yo-Tsai and his army.
“Holy shit,” the nearest Senate Guard said, glancing at his holophone. “Sir, you need to see this.”
“What?” Foss asked.
The officer turned the room’s viewscreen on, tuning it to an interstellar news channel. It took Foss a moment to realize what he was looking at – it appeared to be one of the battle cruisers at Anchorpoint, but the ship had sustained massive damage amidships. A jagged hole had been torn in the ship’s superstructure, and various small craft flew in and out of it.
“Is that Anchorpoint?” Foss asked, incredulous.
“Yes, sir,” the Senate Guard replied. “Some kind of bomb went off just after we left.” He turned up the volume on the TV.
“… Operations drag on into their second straight day, the hope of finding anyone alive decreases by the hour,” the news anchor reported. “Rescue crews have been working around the clock, but the epicenter of the blast was the Senate Chamber itself, and so far, only bodies have been recovered.”
“It was a terrorist bomb,” the other Senate Guard reported, reading a report off of his own holophone. “Someone claiming to be Anders Ricken infiltrated the State of the Federacy Address, and then detonated it. They haven’t found any survivors. Jesus … they killed the entire Senate.” He looked up at Senator Foss. “Sir, you may be the only senator left alive.”
Foss had been watching the screen in mute shock, but that revelation broke through his clouded thoughts. “Who’s running the government?” he asked.
The Senate Guard checked his phone again. “A district attorney – Jace Hawken? Apparently he was the most senior elected official they could find alive.”
“We’ve got to get back there,” Foss said. He strode forward, passing through the galley and the forward berths, with the Senate Guards in tow. When he reached the cockpit, Foss palmed the door switch.
“Turn us around,” he told the pilot. “I’m needed back at Anchorpoint.”
“We can’t go anywhere, sir,” the pilot told him. He pointed out the forward viewport, and Foss spotted a pair of angular, single-engine fighter craft keeping pace with the shuttle. The shutt
le’s pilot turned up the volume on the radio speaker.
“Federacy aircraft, this is Jester Six-Five. Second warning: you are violating Jokuan airspace. Take up geo-stationary orbit and prepare to be boarded.”
“These guys are acting like they’re on a war footing,” one of the Senate Guards observed.
“Can you out-run them?” Foss asked.
The pilot shook his head. “No way, sir.”
“Give me the radio,” Foss demanded. He held it up to his mouth. “This is Senator Gaspar Foss of Scapa. I have an appointment with General Yo-Tsai. Please tell him I’ve arrived.”
The radio stayed silent. Foss felt a bead of sweat trickle down the middle of his back.
“They’re probably requesting instructions,” the pilot guessed.
After nearly a minute, the radio crackled back to life. “You have clearance to land,” it said. “We will escort you in. Do not deviate from the designated approach vector.”
Foss handed the radio back to the pilot, and headed back toward the cabin.
“I don’t like this, sir,” one of the Senate Guards observed. “I wish you had told us we were going to a Territories planet. We have special protocols that need to be followed for senatorial visits outside the Federacy. Normally there’s an advance team, and extra personnel on the protective detail.”
“… and the Jokuans seem really twitchy,” the other bodyguard agreed. “Probably because of the bombing at Anchorpoint.”
“This doesn’t feel right,” his colleague agreed.
“Well, we’re here,” Foss told them, annoyed. “You’re not paid to like it, you’re just paid to keep me safe.”
“We can’t do that effectively if you don’t keep us informed, sir,” the officer protested.
“Noted,” Foss told him. “Now, please – let me think.”
The shuttle descended through Jokuan’s atmosphere, following the fighter escorts down toward the surface. Through the windows, Foss saw them emerge through a bank of clouds, and below, he saw the tops of trees skimming by. The ship slowed as they approached some kind of military landing field, and then hovered in for a landing on the packed earth. Foss saw a military officer waiting in the middle of the field, with a squad of armed soldiers standing behind him.
