by Jay Allan
The vehicle was moving down the street through relatively light late-night traffic. That was good. Holsten’s truck was following another transport, and it was crucial to stay close. The dot on the screen was Andi Lafarge’s tracker, and his newly recruited agent was being taken somewhere.
Holsten was nervous, on the verge of ordering the half dozen vehicles he had in play to converge on the transport and extricate Andi from whatever situation she was in. He’d held back, not wishing to interfere with any operation she might be conducting. He knew where she was because of her tracker, but he had no idea if she was there willingly, or if she was a captive.
“I want units four and five to move up. I don’t want that transport out of sight.”
“Yes, sir.” The driver was one of his agents. Everyone involved was a Confederation Intelligence operative…except for the detachments of Marines, and, of course, Andi Lafarge. No, Andi is one of yours now, too. He had trouble thinking of Lafarge as a spy, but that was just what he’d made her.
Lafarge was an agent now, at least officially, but now he was worried about how she would handle the situation he’d put her in. Holsten had lured her to the operation, persuaded her to join Confederation Intelligence, but he knew she lacked experience in espionage, not to mention the assorted skillsets his people called tradecraft.
That didn’t mean she was helpless, not by a longshot. She was a fierce and capable fighter, an accomplished spaceship pilot, and an expert on working the slime pit of the Confederation’s Badlands border. Those last skills were not unlike intelligence work, but they weren’t exactly the same, either. He’d done his best to bring her into this, but now guilt was preying on him. Andi had been bored, having some trouble adjusting to retirement, and he had used that to get to her, to convince her to come back to Dannith.
Andi Lafarge doesn’t do anything she doesn’t want to do…
He knew there was truth to the thought his mind had shoved forth in defense of his actions. Still, he was well aware that she wouldn’t be on Dannith now, in some mysterious vehicle, possibly a prisoner—possibly facing imminent death—if he hadn’t gone to Tellurus and lured her there.
The dot turned, moving onto the main street leaving the city. He’d been on the verge of ordering his people in for the last fifteen minutes, but now he decided. If he let the transport get too far out of the city, his talking units would stick out like flashing lights amid the lesser traffic.
“All units…move in and intercept. And remember, one of our people is in that vehicle, so stun guns only.” He turned and looked to the front of the cabin, toward the driver. “We’re moving in. Get us up there. Now.”
He reached down to the seat, scooping up the weapon he’d set next to him. It was a stun gun, fully charged. Holsten couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so close to the action in an operation, but he felt responsible for Andi, and he’d promised himself he would be in the field with her, close by, ready to come to her aid any time she needed it.
Like now.
The vehicle accelerated, moving to the side to pass several others. Holsten could see the transport carrying Andi just ahead. As he was watching, he saw three of his vehicles converge, one pulling in front, completely blocking the target’s path.
He reached over and opened the hatch, climbing out, even as his peripheral vision caught almost two dozen of his people, armed agents, and—very heavily armed—Marines, moving up on the vehicle. He was expecting some kind of resistance, perhaps even a hostage situation as whoever was in the surrounded transport held Andi at gunpoint. But there was nothing, no activity at all, save his people advancing right up to the transport.
Then, the hatch opened, and a man came out, his hands high in the air. He was older, perhaps seventy, wearing a simple, non-descript outfit. And he was shaking, clearly terrified. Not at all what Holsten had expected.
He raced up toward the vehicle, and as he approached, one of his people turned and walked over to him. Isaac Stewart, the ranking agent on the op. “There’s no one else in the transport, sir. This man claims he is the owner of a store on the Promenade. His documentation seems to check out, sir, and the vehicle is registered to the store.”
Holsten’s mind raced. “We picked up Andi Lafarge’s tracker in that truck. I want it searched, completely.” It was a needless command, he knew. His people were already well into the effort.
He moved up, looked over at where several agents were questioning the clearly stunned driver. He was staring through the open hatch into the battered old truck when one of the agents said, “Found it, sir.”
The man walked right up to Holsten and extended his arm. He was holding a small bit of metal, streaked with red marks, clearly half-dried blood.
Holsten looked at the tracker, and his stomach tightened as cold realization set in. Whoever had Andi had removed the device—painfully, he suspected—and planted it in this transport. They hoodwinked me.
He looked around, at the transport, at the driver. He was sure the man had nothing to do with any of this, though he intended to make absolutely sure. He’d been taken once, and he wasn’t about to let it happen again.
He was angry, sick with worry. He was responsible for Andi being involved in any of this, and now he had no idea where she was. Her captors could be anywhere in Port Royal, even out beyond city limits by now. He’d lost her.
“Agent Stewart,” he snapped.
“Yes, sir.” Stewart had moved back toward the driver, but now he turned and rushed back to Holsten.
“I want a Priority Alpha alert declared, at once.”
Stewart looked back, a stunned expression on his face. “Sir, we’ll need the planetary governor to sign off on that order to sustain Alpha status.”
“Then get it. I don’t care if you have to shove a gun in his mouth to do it.” He paused, then added. “This is all on my personal responsibility, Isaac. Just get it done now. I’ve got a naval task force in the system. Get the order to them. I want a complete blockade, in effect now. No ships land or take off from Dannith until further notice. Not even a garbage scow. Is that clear?”
Stewart nodded and then said, “Yes, sir.” The agent was clearly nervous, but he snapped off a crisp nod and moved back toward his agents, blasting out orders.
Holsten sighed softly. He was stirring up a real hornets’ nest, he was sure of that. He’d just ordered an entire planet embargoed. He had the authority, but only in the face of a grave threat to national security. He didn’t imagine the Senate committee that would investigate his actions would consider one missing agent sufficient grounds for such sweeping action.
And he didn’t give a shit. He was responsible for Andi Lafarge being there, and for whatever trouble she was in now…and he was going to find her, if he had to tear Dannith apart one building at a time to do it.
Damned the consequences. If the Senate wanted to take him down over it, he’d bring more than one of the pompous fools with him.
Chapter Fourteen
CFS Dauntless
Zed-4 System
Year 315 AC
“I’m as sure as I can be, sir. I’ve run half a dozen different tests. That thing’s hull is an alloy we’ve never seen before, something beyond our science at present, and that means I can’t be absolutely sure. But based on every data point we’ve been able to establish, my best guess is that the…artifact…is somewhere between one hundred and one hundred fifty years old.”
“Thanks, Fritzie. I know your people have been working around the clock.” Barron was tense. He’d reconvened his senior personnel now that Fritz and her people had run more tests. There were a number of potential implications from what his top engineer had just reported, but none he could think of were good.
“Of course, sir.”
Barron looked out across the conference table. “Any thoughts? We’re short on answers, so any ideas are welcome.”
“It could be from some kind of automated production facility that’s still operating…or
that was still running a century ago.” Sara Eaton didn’t sound at all convinced, even as she made the suggestion.
“Without incoming raw materials…or other manufactured parts? And how did it get here? Not to mention, whoever programmed it would have been scheduling routine production more than two hundred years in advance.” Atara Travis shook her head as she spoke.
“We need to consider every possibility, no matter how bizarre it sounds. Captain Fritz was clear that this alloy is new to her. We haven’t satisfactorily penetrated the hull yet with our scans, and we haven’t disassembled any parts of the device, so we don’t have the whole picture. Perhaps it has some kind of anti-aging process, something that interferes with the tests we’ve done or slows normal decay.”
The likeliest explanation was simply that Fritz had somehow miscalculated, and the device was older than she thought. Perhaps the artifact had been produced just before the Cataclysm. That would make it something like three hundred seventy-five years old. But Barron didn’t believe it, not really. Fritz might not be familiar with the metal, but it was normal matter, and she had done intense subatomic scans. He’d seen her work for too long to convince himself she had made an error.
“There is another possibility, one we have not discussed.”
Barron looked across the table at Globus, and he knew just what the Palatian was thinking.
“We have assumed there were no survivors of the Cataclysm outside our own sector of space. But there has never been any real evidence to that effect, has there?”
“Are you saying the empire is still out there?” Travis asked. “Shrunken, but still inhabited?”
“Well, that is a possibility, albeit an unlikely one. Based on what we do know of the Cataclysm, it is hard to imagine that the ancient political entity survived.” Globus turned and looked over at Barron. “But isn’t it possible that more than one pocket of survivors remained? If our sector could escape extinction, why not another? We don’t even have reliable data on how big the empire was. We have to accept that we really don’t know what is out there.”
Barron found himself nodding gently. Globus surprised him with the calm, studied nature of his statement. The Palatian was the last one he’d expected to make such a suggestion. The Alliance was out beyond the Rim, and it had far less in the way of legends and histories of the old empire and the Cataclysm than its coreward neighbors…at least until the treaty with the Confederation opened up the exchange of information. Globus had apparently taken advantage of that fact and educated himself before the mission, and Barron had to admit to himself, he was surprised.
“Perhaps there’s some remnant of the empire remaining, after all…or some other sector where elements of civilization survived.” Barron paused. The entire idea was a bit overwhelming. “Or, maybe some undocumented group of explorers ventured out from our worlds, and pressed far more deeply into the Badlands than we’d previously suspected? They could have found enough old tech to establish themselves, at least temporarily. Perhaps we’ve found something they constructed. They might even have died out eventually, which would explain the lack of any contact in the intervening years. This could be something they left behind.” Barron felt like he was babbling, but he had no idea what else to do. “It doesn’t matter which of these possibilities is correct, if any of them are, but one thing is certain.” He hesitated again, and when he continued, his voice was deeper, more somber. “Our mission just became exponentially more complex. And dangerous.”
“Yes,” Globus said, nodding. “There is no question about that.”
* * *
“What do we know about that energy flash Captain Stockton saw? Could it have been some kind of communication beam? I fear we have to be concerned not only with what may be out there, but with whether or not they know we are here.” Barron had sent Eaton and Globus back to their ships. The fleet was setting out in a few hours, and the two officers would be taking the lead, their ships the first to move through the transit point, and into whatever system lay beyond. He’d asked a few of his people, old Dauntless crew all, to come back to his office for one more discussion before he gave the final order to advance.
“We can’t be sure what Captain Stockton saw, or thought he saw. His fighter’s malfunction cost us any data he might have tried to record.” Anya Fritz sat at the end of a small couch on the wall across from Barron’s desk. “I did everything I could, but the banks were wiped clean.”
“Data or no data, I’m telling you I saw an energy spike.” Stockton turned his head, looking around the room. “I’m sure of it.”
“Nobody doubts what you saw, Jake. We’re just trying to figure out what it could have been. Perhaps the thing was scanning you again, or maybe it was searching a different area.”
“I suppose that’s possible, sir, but I don’t think so. It was…different…the second time. I didn’t have time to check the readings, but it wasn’t like a scan.”
“You think it was a communication of some kind, don’t you?” Atara Travis was sitting next to Stockton, and she turned to face him as she spoke.
Stockton paused for a few seconds, looking uncomfortable. “Yes,” he finally said. Then: “But I can’t guess its purpose. My first thought was that there was something else in the system, but we’ve conducted a thorough search, and we haven’t found a thing.” Stockton had directed that operation himself, and he’d had almost three hundred fighters scouring what seemed like every cubic meter of the system. His people had scoured those areas far too closely to have missed anything.
“If there was some kind of force hidden somewhere, if that was a distress call you detected, it seems likely that whatever was out there would have responded in some detectable way by now.”
“Could it have been an attempt to send a message through the transit point, to the next system? Or beyond?” Anya Fritz seemed to be deep in thought even as she spoke.
“How would that have been possible?” Barron looked over at the engineer. “There was no indication of any physical probe being launched.” He turned his head toward Stockton. “You didn’t get any readings on anything like that, did you, Jake?”
“No, sir. Just an energy surge. Nothing material. I was within eight hundred kilometers…I can’t imagine something physical could have escaped detection at that range.” Stockton shook his head. “And, our patrols would have detected any kind of relay station located near one of the transit points. There was nothing.”
Barron glanced down, looking at the patrol reports on the tablet sitting on his desk. Transit points were poorly understood, a vestige of man’s vastly more advanced past. No one knew if the empire had constructed them, or if they were the legacy of some totally unknown, earlier civilization. But in more than two centuries of usage during recorded post-Cataclysmic history, a few things had been discovered about the portals and how they functioned. And, one of those was that only physical objects could pass through. No signal beams, or any kind of pure energy, had ever passed through a transit point from one system to another.
At least not any known to Confederation science.
“Fritzie…” Barron looked over at his engineer, but he paused, uncertain how to phrase what he wanted to say. “…what can you tell us about experiments in sending communication signals through transit points? I know there have been research programs.”
Fritz shook her head. “I can’t tell you anything, sir, except that as far as I know, every attempt to push any kind of raw energy or signal through a point has been a complete failure. As far as our science knows, the only way to send a message through a transit point is to carry it on a ship, or at least a drone of some kind, and nothing we’ve ever been able to observe has suggested otherwise.”
“But even though you feel this artifact is less advanced than something like the pulsar, you believe it’s ahead of us, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir. I am sure of that. The alloy the hull is constructed from alone is stronger and lighter than anything comparable we’ve ever
developed.”
“So, then it is possible?”
“Sir?”
“It’s possible that the artifact sent some kind of communication beam through the transit point, using technology unknown to us.”
Fritz sat for a moment, silent, looking uncomfortable. “I suppose it is possible, Admiral. We know far too little about the transit points to have any real idea what is or is not possible. All I can say is, every effort to do so in the past has been an utter failure.”
“I understand that, Fritzie, and I’m inclined to agree it’s unlikely.” Barron turned toward the others. “But it is possible, and we cannot forget that.”
“What are you suggesting, sir?” Travis asked the question, but even as he listened, he’d have bet she knew the answer. No one got inside his head like Atara Travis did. Not even Andi.
“I’m suggesting there’s at least a possibility that there were not only survivors long after the Cataclysm, but that they may, in fact, still be out there…and that now, they may know we’re coming.”
He could feel the effect of his words, hitting those present like a sledgehammer. He had some of the best and brightest the Confederation had to offer in the room with him, and he was sure the same thought had nagged at each of them. But, he’d put it out there, brought the concern—the fear—to the forefront.
“Well, sir, as unlikely as that seems, it would explain a number of things, wouldn’t it?” Stockton had been silent since Barron had asked him about the energy readings, but now he spoke up.
“Yes, Jake, I’m afraid it would.” Barron leaned back, pausing for a moment, clearly deep in thought. “It also complicates our decisions now. This is an exploratory mission. Our primary purpose, other than gathering some historical data, is to find and recover any old tech we can. We discovered a few trinkets in some of the closer in systems, and the device we discovered here is certainly of great interest. But, now we have to decide whether to press on…or head back to Megara.”
