“Regardless of my direct report’s prerogatives in matters of fugitive retrieval and commission structures,” Pahhal continued. “I was suitably impressed by the way you and your crew handled yourselves in your endeavor. It is that type of touch I need to see in the apprehension of our next target.”
A frown crossed Jennings’ face and he said, “What good is the job offer if Ounimbongo farms it out to Petrova again just so he can take a slice? We’ve gone up against her once and come out on the wrong end. You want us to go into debt with the sharks just so we can fuel the Tryst and go off on a mission where even if we get the mark, there’s a good chance Petrova or Ounimbongo screws us out of our shares? No, thank you,” Jennings finished.
“I don’t want this matter handled by the likes of them,” Pahhal replied, leaning forward and locking eyes with Jennings. “They are thugs, criminals, blunt force trauma as opposed to surgical precision. You are a cunning warrior and a worthy adversary of conflicts past. As much as one of my kind can trust one of yours, I trust you to get the job done. You and no one else.” He paused and sat back. With a purposefully careless wave of his hand, he added, “Certainly, you might have to take on Petrova or some other puppets that get wind of the mark, which is why I am willing to be exceeding generous.”
“How generous?” Fix piped up for the first time, still not taking his eyes off his plate.
“Ten thousand dollars up front,” he replied. “Certainly enough to get your ship up and running, outfitted, and supplied. Perhaps I can even throw in some items if you make me a list. Two hundred and fifty thousand when the job is done, minus the ten paid up front of course.”
“And if Petrova gets there first?” Jennings demanded.
“Then we’ll consider the ten an apology for what happened with O’Sullivan,” Pahhal answered. “We’ll walk away owing each other nothing.”
“Sweet deal,” said Fix. He looked up at Jennings. “Take it,” he added.
Only Lafayette noticed the look of pure anguish that crossed the captain’s face as the debate raged in his mind: protect his honor or protect his crew. For a man like Jennings, there was only one choice. “We’ll take it,” he said quietly. Pausing long enough to lean forward, he then asked, “Who’s the mark?”
Chapter 4
1
Two Weeks Earlier…
Michelle Williams stared out at the skyline of her parent’s four story condominium on the 234th floor of the old Monument building. She could see White Tower, the mammoth edifice that used to house the senate and presidential offices of the Terran Federation. Now, it was the home of the Terran Autonomous Region Ruling Council. A hundred other skyscrapers dotted the sky of the Washingtonian district of Seaboard, most topping off at the one hundred and seventy-five story mark. Somewhere deep below where she stood, the cherry blossoms were just coming into bloom on the tree-lined streets. A moment of sadness crept in as she thought about what used to stand on the grounds of White Tower and what the giant white obelisk had now come to represent. She considered her parents’ own role in its conversion and how they afforded this massive home in the richest neighborhood on the planet, and she felt shame.
The megalopolis of Seaboard stretched down nearly the entire east coast of the area that was once the United States of America, which was now part of a greater governing zone simply known as the Americas. The Washingtonian district stood on the capital of that former nation and had become the capital of first a unified Earth and then the Terran Federation as an acknowledgement to the role the Americans had played in unifying the planet. The Gael had simply swooped in and corrupted the entire district from a bastion of democracy to the hand puppet of a totalitarian state. Michelle hated the Gael for what they had done to her nation and her planet with a fury that was generally reserved for the few human soldiers who survived the war- those that had failed to protect their planet. To be fair, most of that fury was the fault of her parents.
James K. and Madison Williams were both career politicians from wealthy families that had served in government for as long as anyone cared to remember. James’s family came from a long line of Congressmen and governors in the old United States, one even having been a vice-presidential nominee. The family of Madison had dominated Toronto politics and ruled Canada the way the Kennedys once ruled the world. They had both been representatives to the Terran Federation Senate during the war, and both had called for Earth’s surrender long before it came. When the Gael arrested and disappeared many of Earth’s prominent leaders, her parents had sidestepped the problem by welcoming the invaders to Earth with open arms and accepting senior leadership positions in the twelve-man Terran Autonomous Region Ruling Council.
While they managed to have a platitude or a rationalization for every action they committed, Michelle considered them to be traitors nonetheless and hated them with every ounce of her being. When she was in high school, she decorated her room with old-fashioned posters of Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, and Che Guevara along with copies of the Declaration of Independence, Magna Carta and cahiers de dolerance brought to the Estates General in France in the eighteenth century. As frequently as she dared, she wore shirts that featured the Resistance logo: the clenched fist on fire against a starry backdrop.
Now that she was a senior at the prestigious and historic College of William and Mary, Michelle had blossomed as an intelligent, thoughtful, idealistic young woman, but her opinions had not changed. Flowing red hair, ivory white skin, and deep green eyes combined with a voluptuously full figure and “legs that went on forever” (as a drunk English professor had shared with her) made her an object of a good deal of attention from the young men at the university. There was only one who had really turned her head though, and it was for his beliefs not his looks. His name was Tanner Rice, and he was the founder of an on-campus organization that called itself Common Sense. He was on his way to her parents’ apartment that very night, and they were out of town.
She did not plan to sleep with him, but Michelle had not ruled it out entirely either. Tanner had such a way with words. For hours, she had listened to him rail on issues that hit her deeply: bringing back control of the Terran government to the people, kicking the Gael influence out of human affairs, finding small ways to legally support the Resistance like staging sit-ins, nonviolent protests and rallies. Several times he had invited her to come to demonstrations that he had planned. They were not always successful and sometimes only a handful showed up, but she believed in her heart that they were making a statement just by doing something. The day they truly lost to the Gael was the day they stopped trying to resist them. Those were words he had whispered in her ear the first time she let him feel her up under her shirt, his tongue flicking her earlobe in between each bit of political rhetoric. Tanner was the same as she- one of the fighters. Michelle believed that to the bottom of her heart, and she could not wait to see him again.
The doorbell chimed, an annoying reenactment of the new Terran Autonomous Region anthem, and Michelle checked her appearance in the ornate antique mirror in the foyer of the condominium. Her make-up was on perfectly, her hair was straight, a political T-shirt was wrapped tightly over her chest highlighting her curves nicely, and a black skirt with black stockings said that she was accessible, but not easy. It was perfect, she thought to herself as she swung the door open.
“Hey,” Tanner said, his eyes trapped on her shirt for a moment before raising them to meet her smile.
“Come on in,” she said with a large star-struck grin plastered on her face.
Sweeping past her through the foyer and into the living room, he appraised the high-end furniture, the antiques, and the artwork with a clear disdain. Michelle understood completely.
“Sorry it’s so bourgeois,” she said. “It’s kind of embarrassing.”
“Yeah, definitely,” he replied, dropping his leather jacket onto the floor and pushing his sunglasses back up into his long black hair.
He was wearing a sleeveless black
faux-velvet shirt and blood red denim jeans tucked into black military boots. Seven or so bracelets adorned each wrist and he had a tattoo of some Asian characters on his right shoulder.
“This isn’t really my vibe,” he said. “Too rich. Why don’t you show me your room? You said you had some cool posters, right?”
“Absolutely,” she said excitedly. “Up this way.”
Taking his hand, she led him up the circular open air stairs past the second floor, which she said was her parents’, and to the third where her room was. She did not notice the eye roll that he had performed as she took his hand. She had better be taking me up here to fuck me, Tanner thought, his pants already feeling tighter from seeing her in that T-shirt. How much more effort do I need to put into getting into this girl’s pants, he wondered to himself.
They crossed the third floor’s landing, and Michelle swung open a door that was emblazoned with a Resistance fist. Shaking his head slightly at such lunacy, he followed her into the room and spent a perfunctory amount of time admiring the political posters that she had gotten from God knew where. They made a little small talk about what each one meant to her, and he feigned enough interest to make her happy.
Michelle was sounding like she was about to launch into some political tirade, and Tanner decided he was going to make his move and live with it. He just could not take it anymore. “Pretty dangerous wearing that shirt,” he commented, nodding at the white stenciled letters that said RESIST.
“In my parents’ apartment?” she replied. “I think it’s safe.”
“Just to be certain, you’d better take it off,” he replied. He then held up his hands as if in apology. “I’m only thinking of your welfare and what might happen if a Gael saw you.”
A look of realization crossed her face and then a coy smile, and Michelle slowly pulled her shirt off showing a white bra barely containing her beautiful breasts. An incredible hunger took over Tanner and he pulled her close, panting as he ran his tongue over her. Immediately his hands went under her skirt and pulled her stockings down to her knees.
“Tanner, I don’t--”
“Shh,” he said quickly, holding a finger to her lips and then kissing her passionately on them.
Fear surrendering to passion, she returned the embrace and Tanner fumbled quickly with his zipper and his denim pants fell to his ankles, but he was too late. “Oh God!” he shouted as he grabbed her breasts once more, and it was over.
Though feeling flushed, short of breath and entirely obsessed with his own coming back to reality, Tanner still noticed the look that was equal parts confusion and revulsion on Michelle’s face. This was replaced by a questioning look that seemed to say, “Was that what sex was supposed to be like?” It was replaced by the realization on her face that she had just been with her first lover, and he could see the look of love blossoming in her eyes as she moved closer to embrace him.
“No cuddling, sweetie,” he said, quickly stepping back. “You need to get cleaned up first- probably a shower and a change of clothes.”
“Oh,” the sound escaped her lips. There was a long pause. “Right, I’ll just do that then,” she said and headed into the adjoining bathroom.
“I’m going to get into the bed,” he called after her. “Need to get ready for round two,” he added though just within his own earshot as he pulled back the flower petal designed covers on her bed and slid in, hoping he would be able to hold his wad until the actual intercourse next time.
2
For a building that housed some of the wealthiest people on the planet, security was surprisingly lax, Pascal Jacobin thought to himself as he stood in the elevator riding up to the 234th floor. The front desk had not even bothered to call up to the Williams’s condominium to advertise that he was coming. All he had needed to say was that he was a friend of Michelle’s from college coming to visit and he had been waved through security. Places like this relied way too much on their technology to deter people such as him, and Jacobin could not entirely fault them- the technology was fairly impressive. All floors had motion, thermal and chemical sensors. Holographic cameras covered in detail every square inch of the building; there were no blind spots. Entry into the individual units involved knowing a rotating twenty digit alphanumeric code, and no cracking software could break through in anything less than a decade. Without a keycard, entry was impossible. Although human security officers existed, the whole thing was run by a computer that existed off the mainline and could not be hacked. Knowing all of that, Jacobin still smiled to himself: this was going to be a piece of cake.
Jacobin looked younger than he was and was utterly non-descript in every way. He wore a charcoal gray suit with a white dress shirt, tieless as the fashion of the day dictated. His hair was short, but not in a militaristic way, nothing that would give the hint of aggression. He was Caucasian and clean-shaven in a way that was wholly unremarkable. In a city of one hundred million people, there were at least three million that looked exactly as he did, blending into society perfectly. He could be a young lawyer, banker or the aide to a politician. Just as easily he could be a salesman or a man on the way to a funeral. His expression was perfectly even and somewhat aloof as he stepped out of the elevator and came to a stop.
Taking out a pair of eyeglasses from his shirt pocket, he put them on and the built-in heads-up display kicked on, immediately feeding lines of information on lighting, power consumption, oxygen levels, distances between objects in his line of sight, and where the holographic cameras and sensors were located in the walls. He casually stared directly into the nearest camera and clicked a small button on the side of his glasses frame. Imperceptible to normal eyesight, an ultraviolet beam of light shot out from the bridge of the glasses and hit the nearest set of sensors and cameras. It was state of the art technology and a brilliant way to upload code into a computer that controlled sensory apparatus. The code went into the system as data saved within the image itself and then wormed its way to its real target causing the system to enter a five minute loop that began ten minutes before the code had been triggered. The computer deceived itself into looking at video data from the recent past rather than the present, leaving Jacobin to carry out his mission without any interference. Had a person looked at the video monitor, they would have seen exactly what Jacobin was doing, but no one bothered as the computer was supposed to handle alerting them to any threats.
Heading down the corridor, Jacobin smiled and gave a small nod to an elderly couple headed toward the elevator. He rounded a curve and came to the door of the Williams’s home. Taking a look at the overly complex electronic lock, he had to restrain a laugh at the simplicity of his method for bypassing this obstacle compared with the techno-espionage required on the cameras. He took a keycard out of his jacket pocket and slid it into the slot. There was no door in the world that was secure when the right amount of money could buy you a copy of the key, he thought to himself. The door swung open, and he cautiously stepped inside, swinging his head back and forth to see if his glasses were picking up any heat signatures. Seeing none, Jacobin turned his glasses toward the condo’s illumination controls and sent another fragment of code into the system. This one would allow him to turn off the lights in the house at a simple command. Moving silently, he began making his way up the stairs to sweep the upper floors and find his quarry.
3
Stepping out of the shower, Michelle wrapped a towel around her torso and grabbed a head towel to take care of her hair. She had taken a brutally hot shower and had stayed in too long, mulling over the decisions that she had made. The encounter with Tanner had been what she wanted, or so she had thought, but it had not made her feel any different. He had seemed colder somehow than when they had spoken for hours on ending the occupation or returning freedom to the Terran Federation.
She wiped some of the moisture off the mirror, but it started to fog up quickly again. Staring at her own hazy reflection, she asked a dozen silent questions of herself, but got no satisfactory r
esponse. An overwhelming feeling of sadness welled up within her and silent tears began to stream down her face. This was not what she had wanted at all- not how she had imagined it. Michelle had the horrible feeling that some part of her was gone- something she could never get back. Staring into the mirror, she tried to put herself back together as she knew she was going to have to go back out and face Tanner. But then, the lights went out.
4
Intel had been right for once, Jacobin thought to himself. The parents were indeed gone, and the house was deserted except for his target. Jacobin found it odd that they wanted the daughter dead and not the parents. The parents were known collaborators and high up on the Resistance’s list of most hated humans, but the order had come down to him for the girl, so he was here for the girl.
The glasses fed a heat signature through to Jacobin, showing the girl in bed lying down, probably asleep. There was a lot of residual heat in the bathroom- she had probably just taken a bath or had a shower to relax and then curled up in bed for a nice evening nap before heading out to party or go clubbing, he mused. Young people, he thought to himself as he sent the command that killed the lights in the apartment just to be safe.
Counting to two, he swung open the bedroom door silently as he withdrew his small plasma pistol with a long sound suppressor attached to it. The target did not even wake up before he had fired six shots into the bed and had heard the customary sound of plasma striking flesh and flashing through. With the heat vision on his glasses, he could see that two of his shots struck the woman’s forehead and four more hit her chest. She was definitely dead, but he was thorough and had to check. As he reached to pull back the comforter, he switched out of heat vision and over to night-vision. Pain then exploded through his eyes, sending him reeling backwards and out through the door. Alarms sounded, loud klaxons screaming through his ear and he ripped off the glasses. The lights had come back on and white strobes had been added. Someone was trying to break into the apartment.
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