Russell smiled at the memories. That had been a good time. Nobody at Parthenon-Three would let him pay for drinks. Even most of the hookers were giving it up for free, except he hadn’t had time for their attentions. He and the commander had barely left her room all week long.
“You got it bad, bro,” Gonzo said.
“What?”
“You heard me. First time is the hardest.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Whoever’s got you hooked on her.”
Gonzo didn’t know who it was. Good thing, too, because the witch had creeped him out when they both met her. He’d think Russell was insane. Which he probably was.
Russell shrugged and mentally put the unfinished email in its virtual ‘Saved’ cabinet. One of these days he’d send the damn thing. And she wouldn’t reply.
Part of him was worried about what would happen if she did. The rest of him figured one or both of them would get killed before any of that mattered.
Two
Haven-One, Interstellar Trade League, 166 AFC
See, the normal thing to do when faced with an impossible situation is to report back and wait for further instructions, NOT to try to solve it by yourself.
Heather McClintock chided herself a couple more times, probably not a good idea while scaling a mostly-sheer wall in the middle of the night, trying not to attract the attention of the ITL Security Force guards patrolling the grounds of their headquarters, some ninety feet below her. On the other hand, her mental grumblings gave her something to do while she painfully inched her way up towards her objective.
If you weren’t expecting to play secret agent, why did you pack a Ninja Suit, uh? You were actually looking for an excuse to use it. Well, here you are, playing hero and risking life and limb.
She reached out with her right arm, used the artificial nano-hairs of her suit to create a temporary molecular bond with the wall, and used that and the similar foothold on her feet to move a few more inches up. Ninety-one feet up: forty-seven to go. Even with her enhanced musculature, holding on to her body weight plus her equipment was not fun. If she was planning on making a habit of this sort of thing, she’d better increase her workout regimen. Or accept that being an intelligence officer was meant to be largely an office job and this sort of thing was best left to Marines, Special Ops troopers and other people too dumb to know better. Like her boyfriend.
He’d probably think I was insane if he knew what I was doing. And when a Marine captain whose Purple Heart had a full set of silver oak leaf clusters thought you were crazy, well, you were pretty damn crazy.
She had good reasons for taking the insane risk, though. This little nighttime excursion was the only quick and sure way to figure out if the Interstellar Trade League was about to throw its not-inconsiderable weight behind Earth’s enemies. The Int-Trads controlled the flow of money, goods and information over a good sixth of the known galaxy. Although the ITL claimed not to be interested in politics, it had financed – and bankrupted – entire civilizations, not to mention used its fleets for assorted and very political ends in their ten-thousand-year history. The League had declared itself scrupulously neutral in the current conflict, which meant doing business with both sides. There were rumors that the situation was about to change, however. The Agency had decided to confirm or deny the rumors the old fashioned way: by stealing some first-hand data.
Her mission was to pose as a junior member of a UPS delegation holding face-to-face meetings with the ITL and make contact with a disaffected League-Master who had shown some willingness to divulge the League’s secrets in exchange for a small fortune in highly illegal drugs. His choice recreational substance was some sort of exotic natural compound that even Level Five bio-fabbers couldn’t reproduce. Unfortunately, like junkies all throughout the galaxy, the League-Master in question had been full of it. He was in fact no longer a Master, having been recently expelled due to rank incompetence, and knew no more about the ITL’s current plans than any local denizen of Haven-One, the planet that served as the League’s corporate headquarters.
After discovering her contact had been lying through his proboscis – his species didn’t have teeth – Heather should have given up, reported the failure, and resigned herself to spending a boring week playing corpo-rat games. Maybe use her spare time to catch up on her reading or watch some flick in her media queue. Instead…
A hundred and thirty feet. Ten more to go. She got a grip on the wall and was about to move when she heard something. The approaching whirring sound made her freeze in mid-motion, with most of her weight supported by her left arm. A security drone was making a pass around the building. The flying device was unarmed and only a little larger than a sparrow, but its sensor suite scanned its surroundings in a multitude of spectra. Fortunately, Heather’s ninja suit was designed to block and absorb all emissions coming from her, everything from her infrared signature to the chemicals she exhaled with every breath, while projecting a holographic chameleon field that blended her near-perfectly with her surroundings. It was hellishly hot inside the skin-tight outfit, but it was worth it. The only thing that could detect her while motionless would be a full gravity-wave scan, and those interfered with communications, so they were rarely used.
Rarely wasn’t never, though. If the drone decided to be extra-cautious, it would spot her. The League wasn’t a government per se, but Haven-Two’s nominal authorities would be happy to execute a spy after squeezing every last bit of actionable information out of her. Heather held her breath and remained still, acutely aware of the sweat building up between her skin and the ninja suit, itches she couldn’t scratch, and the growing strain on her arm and shoulder.
The drone moved on, blissfully unaware. She could breathe again.
By the time she reached the balcony, her arms were beginning to shake. She made it over the railing and took a few seconds to recover. The ninja suit helpfully extended a drinking tube next to her mouth under the mask and she took a few sips; the water would have been tepid under different circumstances, but with her current core temperature, it felt positively cold going down.
Smuggling the suit in had been easy enough; it broke up into several parts, each of which looked like a normal garment or undergarment; it would take a molecular-level scan to identify the nano-systems woven into the fabric. Good thing she’d managed to fast-talk a friend from Operations to let her requisition it. This was supposed to be a simple intelligence-gathering op, but after her close calls at Kirosha and Trade Nexus Eleven, she’d become downright paranoid. She now felt naked without a full set of tools of the trade.
The balcony looked down on the walled courtyard where the ITL conducted its meetings. A set of sliding glass doors led to the inside of the Factor’s office. The ‘glass’ was made of reinforced transparent sapphire, tough enough to resist beam weapons for several seconds. It also had an advanced lock and scanner that would only grant passage to someone with the proper biometric signature.
Bypassing the lock and gaining entry took her about fifteen seconds. The CIA got some of the best toys in the galaxy, courtesy of their oversized and well-hidden budget. You didn’t want to scrimp when facing civilizations that were largely more advanced than your own.
The Factor’s office was surprisingly similar to what one would find in an American city. Form followed function; most of the League’s species had body shapes that could use chairs, although a few other pieces of furniture in the spacious room were designed to accommodate centauroids, creepy crawlers and other variations. The biggest chair belonged to the Factor, of course. More importantly, said chair also contained a node server filled with xenottabytes of data.
Breaking into the server was almost beyond the capabilities of her bag of tricks, but she managed. Finding the data she was looking for was only slightly more difficult. The whole thing took about fifteen minutes of hard work and an hour spent in intense boredom while she downloaded files while erasing any traces of her presence.
/> She was ready to go to bed when she was done, although that would require her to get there first, after a climb down and another slow dance through the League’s security perimeter. And once she made it to her room, she’d have to prepare a preliminary report, since she couldn’t well do it during the day, when she was supposed to be working. In other words, her bed would remain untouched.
They didn’t pay her enough for this.
* * *
By the time the red dwarf that served as Haven-Two’s sun rose over the horizon, Heather was done collating her report and hiding it inside a virtual reality program, the vital data sequestered between multimedia code lines and impossible to find without the proper decryption codes. She wasn’t looking forward to putting in a day’s work under her cover identity after a sleepless night, but those were the breaks. At least the news was mostly good for a change. The ITL had decided that remaining neutral was the best course of action, given the US victories at Parthenon and Hades systems, and the Vipers dropping out of the Alliance. Even better, the O-Vehel Federation was apparently regretting its own shift in alliances and had reached out to the ITL to serve as possible intermediaries to work out some sort of deal with the US. The League had refused to get involved, but the fact the Ovals were trying to be friends again was reassuring.
Suppressing a yawn and having her medical implants send another shot of stimulants into her bloodstream, Heather got dressed for work. She was on her way to breakfast when she ran into her titular boss at UPS, a ‘rat she’d grown to dislike almost from the start.
The man looked even unhappier than usual. “Don’t even bother with breakfast,” he said as soon as he laid eyes on her. “You’ve been recalled to Earth.”
“What?”
“Your lords and masters beckon, whoever they are. You’re on a charter ship headed Sol System. It leaves in fifteen minutes. I figure you can pack up your stuff quickly.”
Shit. Nobody at UPS knew who she really was. Until now.
“You’re fired, by the way.”
New Washington, Earth, 166 AFC
She was about ready to start dropping bodies by the time she arrived to the capital. It took a lot of self-restraint to merely walk into the office of the Deputy Director of the National Clandestine Service. The DD, a ninety-year old woman with decades of field experience, looked positively worried when Heather entered. Something about her body language betrayed her mood, or perhaps just the glint in her eyes.
“You blew my cover,” Heather said.
“Agent McClintock, I can assure you all precautions…”
“UPS doesn’t reassign a junior executive in the middle of a trade mission, let alone send her straight to Earth, damn the expenses, within an hour of getting the word. My pretend boss is a dim bulb, but he knew something was up, and by now so do the Int-Trads. Which means they sold the information in the open market in the time it took me to get back here. Six months of altering my biometrics and creating a full persona just got flushed down the toilet. I would like an explanation.”
“Your briefing is scheduled for tomorrow morning,” Deputy NCS Director Graciela Pinto said, her expression changing from worry to anger. “But since you are here, Senior Field Agent McClintock, sit the hell down and I’ll brief you here and now. I might even forget this breach in protocol, in consideration of your track record.”
Heather sat down.
“First of all, I’m sorry we pulled you out so suddenly, and in a way that burned your cover. That decision was not made at the Agency. In fact, it was the result of a cluster-fuck emanating from the State Department, with the strong endorsement of the War Department. The boss decided that playing ball was more important than your ongoing mission. I think you’ll agree, once you know the reasons behind the move.”
This better be good, Heather thought, but retained enough common sense to keep the thought to herself. Barging into the DNCS’ office had taken her to the edge of career suicide; any further steps would carry her over it.
She was still pissed off to no end. It wasn’t just the cover identity, which had taken a great deal of work to establish, but the fact that all the regular people she’d associated with would end up in some alien database, listed as possible intelligence officers. At best, it meant they would be subject to surveillance whenever they left the US, and possible even within its borders. At worst, it made them likely targets of counterintelligence operations: blackmail, extortion, and bribery attempts were all possible, simply because they’d worked with a known CIA asset. She didn’t mind putting her own life on the line, but the thought of innocent civilians becoming targets, just because some ‘rat had decided they needed her here and now, infuriated her.
“What do you know about the Tah-Leen species?” Pinto asked her. “From Xanadu?”
Heather had to think of the answer. Xanadu… “The warp nexus?”
The Deputy Director nodded. “One of the largest ones in the known galaxy. Forty-three ley lines connecting several Starfarer polities. Including both remaining members of the Galactic Alliance, as well as the US and the Puppies.”
“Right. That would make it a major war front. Except the locals don’t allow military traffic through the system.”
“Yes. For now. You’ll get the details in the briefing package. I’m sending it to you now, since you decided to so kindly drop by…”
“My apologies,” Heather said, mostly meaning it.
“We’ll let that go for now. Just don’t make a habit of it.”
“I assure you I won’t.”
“You’ve got a reputation, McClintock. Very effective agent, what the Navy likes to call ‘a good man in a storm,’ but you’re also known as a maverick, going your own way, often against protocol or even standing orders. You’ve managed to piss off a lot of people at the Agency. Success can expiate a lot of sins, but politics will eventually do you in, no matter how good you are. Understood?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Very well. In any case, Xanadu System’s main feature is a quark star, very rare out in the spiral arm of the galaxy, and very hard to live with, even though its massive gravity field is a breeding ground for warp valleys. The Tah-Leen, the little remnant of their civilization that still survives, are very old and extremely advanced. Their species was on the verge of Transcendence when something went wrong and caused their downfall. Xanadu is the only place they still inhabit, and for some reason they never leave its confines. The system is impregnable. Every fleet that has tried to invade it has been obliterated. No vessel can enter Xanadu without the permission of the Tah-Leen, and visitors can only leave after they pay the rather hefty tolls they charge for the use of their ley line network.”
While the Deputy Director spoke, Heather mentally skimmed through the briefing package. Images of Xanadu itself flashed before her eyes: the quark star was hardly visible, being only slightly below the density threshold that would turn it into a black hole. There were no planets, only a network of docking stations for transshipment purposes, and a central habitat. The latter looked like gigantic jewel, gorgeous and colorful, its crystalline shape like nothing she’d ever seen built for the purposes of space trade. The actual name of the system, roughly translated, meant ‘seasonal paradisiac retreat for the most special.’ Xanadu managed to encapsulate the meaning adequately, she thought. The Woogle article enclosed in the package translated the species name, ‘Tah-Leen’ as ‘Celebration of Special Uniqueness’ which was quite a mouthful for two whole syllables. Alternative translations included such names as the ‘Multitude of the Unique,’ the ‘Diverse Individuals,’ and the ‘True Individuals.’ Heather decided to add a new one: ‘Special Snowflakes.’ Or simply the Snowflakes. She thought it might catch on.
Multimedia depictions of the aliens themselves were not available.
Guess they are so special and unique that they don’t like having their picture taken. Or so hideous nobody can stand the sight of them. She’d have to look into that, later.
�
�Currently, only peaceful trading ships are allowed to use their warp network. When the war began, the Tah-Leen placed a traffic embargo on all combatants. Since that was a major shipping lane between between us and the Hrauwah, it hurt the US worst of all.”
That made Xanadu rather important. The Hrauwah Kingdom – better known as the Puppies – were still reluctant to join in the current galactic conflict, but they’d been steadily increasing their shipments of supplies, weapons and even warships crewed by ‘volunteers.’ The Ovals’ betrayal had further eliminated the number of trade routes available. To avoid coming close to enemy-controlled areas, deliveries now had to go on a rather roundabout trip, which meant it took anywhere between a month and six weeks to take goods from the major Puppy industrial centers and bring them to the US.
“We’ve been trying to get the Tah-Leen to rescind their embargo, to no avail. Until now.”
“What changed?”
“Apparently, their Hierophant – his full title is Keeper and Transmitter of All Sacred and Holy Revelations – has become interested in humanity. Specifically, he recently got ahold of a little Nullywood production about the Kirosha siege, and now he and his fellow Tah-Leen are just dying to meet you and the other ‘heroes’ involved.”
“Are you serious?”
“As a heart attack.”
Heather found that hard to believe. Sure, the siege of the legations had been a pretty dramatic affair, but even recent galactic history – say, the last five thousand years or so – was full of similar tales of heroism and drama. She was as much a believer in American exceptionalism as the next flag-waving ‘muricaner, but she couldn’t imagine any reason why a hundred-thousand-year old culture – she double-checked the figure on the Woogle article; she hadn’t known that any living species had been around for that long – would be all that impressed by what she, a platoon of Marines and about a thousand odds and sods had accomplished. There had to be a catch.
Advance to Contact (Warp Marine Corps Book 3) Page 4
