by Rick Partlow
All things considered, they’d been insanely lucky.
Deke tried not to think about that as he followed Kara up the boarding ramp onto Chang’s cutter. It was a big ship, larger than the Dutchman and must have been a bitch to land, he reflected. Chang’s mercenaries were clustered around the ship in what could loosely be termed a protective perimeter, he observed with a critical eye, heavy weapons arrayed too close together and not interlocking fields of fire. They all shared a look, with mismatched armor and too many shiny body mods, of people more interested in appearing intimidating than in sound tactics.
Sergeant Major Ramirez, the butt-ugly and steel-hard woman who’d taught his class infantry tactics, would have had the whole bunch of them doing pushups till their arms fell off.
He noted the looks they gave Kara and him, too. It was a subtle combination that seemed to him to equal parts sneering disdain for their ties to the establishment government and almost cowed awe at their history and the canned death they both represented.
Don’t you fucking forget it, either, he thought at one of them, a bruising cyborg with bare-metal arms that disappeared into an armored vest. The man regarded him with cybernetic eyes that glinted red in the dim sunlight and Deke returned the stare before he ducked through the hatchway into the utility bay.
The bay had been turned into a makeshift interrogation cell, with the five Naga captives strapped into spare acceleration couches which had been secured to the bulkhead. There were three men and two women, all fairly normal and professional looking by exterior appearances, all dressed in slight variations of the brown and green Naga corporate uniform and all sharing the glassy-eyed blank stare of people who’d just been hit by sonic stunners.
Rachel and Trint were already there, standing to the side and seemingly trying to stay out of the way. Chang sat on the edge of a work table that protruded from a bulkhead, his arms folded impassively, watching the prisoners as if they were test subjects in a lab.
Maybe they are, Deke thought. To him, we all probably are.
One of Chang’s people, a tech from the look of her cybernetics, was plugging some sort of computer module into the ‘face jacks behind the left ear of one of the women prisoners. Identical devices were already in place on the others and Deke could see data beginning to stream across a readout screen mounted on a portable stand next to couches. Deke recognized immediately what Chang was attempting to do.
“Can you break the encryption in their headcomps?” he wondered aloud. Headcomps---implant computers---were still very, very expensive and all the ones he knew of carried encryption that would stand up to even most military cracks.
“Oh, I think we have that covered,” Chang assured him, giggling softly. Deke felt the hair on the back of his neck stand on end at the sound. “My equipment is somewhere north of what Kara has access to. The question is, will any of their headcomps hold anything of value?”
“We’d better hope they do,” Cal said from the doorway as he and Pete stepped up the ramp behind them. “We haven’t got shit from the rest of this place.” He stepped over to Rachel and slipped an arm around her shoulders---it seemed to Deke that he was reassuring himself that she was still there and uninjured. “Everything that’s not wiped clean is worthless.”
“That was a danger we had to accept,” Chang declared, shrugging. “We lacked the time for anything more subtle than a full frontal attack.”
“I think we have something,” the tech announced, gesturing at a readout with a cybernetic finger that ended in a micro-manipulator.
Chang didn’t move from his perch, just turned to focus on the readout. Deke saw his eyes flitting back and forth as if he were in a dream and assumed that the man was accessing the data through his neurolink.
“Oh yes, we do indeed,” Chang said with an unpleasant smile. With a nod, he indicated the man that Rachel and Trint had captured. “That’s our boy.” He glanced over at one of his mercenary gunmen in the doorway. “Get the rest of the prisoners out of here.”
The mercenary muttered into his mastoid comlink and in a moment two more massive cyborgs stepped up the ramp to help him unstrap four of the five prisoners from the couches, put neural restraint webs on them and walk them back out of the ship. Chang waited until the group had disembarked before rising from his seat and stepping over to the last remaining captive. The former street surgeon licked his lips as he eyed the prisoner and Deke could see the abject fear in the man’s eyes.
He wasn’t what Deke would have envisioned as your typical employee of an outlaw private intelligence agency that specialized in wetwork. His face was doughy and pasty-white from months spent on this dimly lit world, and his eyes were soft and liquid like he was on the verge of tears. Deke didn’t blame him one bit.
“So, Senior Analyst Federico Spates,” Chang said softly, caressing the man’s cheek with the back of his left hand, “you are the brains of this operation, are you not?”
The man opened his mouth, but Chang put a finger over it, shushing him gently.
“No, don’t bother to lie,” he adjured the Naga operative. “It’s all there, in your head.” He ran a finger through the man’s conservatively-cut brown hair and Spates tried to flinch away. “How un-secure of the Naga to use implanted headcomps. You can easily wipe a mainframe, but how difficult it is to wipe every single implant computer…” He chuckled. “Not everything is there, of course, but people get so lazy. They leave reminders for meetings, conferences, reports…they even keep classified files in their headcomp despite company policies against it.”
“What do you want from me?” Spates asked in a tone so hushed it was nearly inaudible.
“From your carelessness and laziness,” Chang went on as if the man hadn’t spoken, “I was able to access the details for the lading of a fleet of ten large military vessels---possibly converted freighters, but I suspect they’re actually surplus cruisers procured on the sly by Gregorian---and their support ships. The amount of supplies being laid in for this operation lead me to believe that you’ve already located the Northwest Passage and are getting ready to explore it.”
Spate’s eyes widened in disbelief.
“How do you…” he began, but then shut his mouth abruptly.
“I even know the coordinates from which that fleet will depart,” Chang said, “along with the deadline for the supplies to arrive, which gives us an approximate date. I doubt they’d trust you with the exact location of the jump point itself, but that’s simply a matter of being there when the fleet leaves and marking their entrance point.”
Chang circled around behind Spate and the man struggled to follow him with his eyes but couldn’t move his head far enough. He leaned in and put his mouth right next to Spate’s ear.
“So what do we need from you, you ask?” Chang whispered dramatically. “For the one thing that wasn’t in your headcomp. Where are you keeping General Murdock?”
Spate’s eyes bulged and he sucked in a breath like a drowning fish. “What the hell are you talking about?” he blurted. “You mean DSI Director Murdock? What do you mean keeping him? I didn’t know we had him!”
“Oh, I’m so very sorry, Mr. Spate,” Chang sighed, patting the man softly on the cheek. “That was the wrong answer.” He stood and turned to the technician. “I’m afraid we’re going to require something a bit more invasive, my dear. Please go ahead and activate the extraction program.”
“Yes, Mr. Chang,” the woman said, and her eyes glazed over for a moment as she used her implanted computer and neurolink to send out a signal to…something.
Spate twitched. Then he jerked. Then he began to seize, yanking his wrists and head and ankles against his restraints hard enough to leave bruises. Helpless grunts were all the sound he could muster but Deke had the impression he would have been screaming if he could have managed it.
“What are you doing to him?” Kara asked, her voice not quite as concerned as her words might have indicated.
“You probably know about the
ability that your friends Captains Conner and Mitchell have via their excellent wetware to force a headcomp to download sections of memory,” Chang told her, sounding like a secondary school teacher. “I’ve managed to take that to the next level.”
“I’d like to know how the hell you managed to get access to it at all,” Cal muttered with a trace of bitterness from the other side of the room. Deke suppressed a snort. His friend might have resigned from his Constable position, but he was still acting like a cop.
“Unfortunately for our friend here,” Chang went on, ignoring the question, “there are still some rough edges to the program. I’m afraid it has less than optimal effects on the subject’s higher brain functions.”
“We have the results,” the technician told him, her voice as sterile and businesslike as before, despite the fact that Spate was now foaming at the mouth, the whites of his eyes beginning to go red with broken blood vessels. The woman’s eyes lost focus for over a minute as she processed what had been extracted from the Naga analyst. When they cleared again, she turned to Chang, a hint of surprise on her face.
“He was telling the truth,” she said. “He has no idea about General Murdock.”
“Damn it,” Kara said with a hiss of frustration, slamming her fist into the bulkhead. "Then this whole thing was a waste of time.”
“Not totally,” Deke argued, putting a hand on her shoulder. She glanced back at him. “We know that Gregorian or whoever else is behind this knows where the Northwest Passage is.”
“It’s Gregorian,” the technician confirmed for him, not looking up from her work as she disassembled the equipment that had been hooked up to Spate…and not paying attention to the lolling Naga analyst who, from the smell, had soiled himself. “That was in his memories.”
“We can track them down,” Cal said, pacing into the center of the room and stepping over to Chang. “We have time to reach them before they jump, right?”
“Barely,” Chang confirmed with a nod. “If we leave within the day.”
“And Murdock has to be with them,” Deke surmised. “I mean, if Gregorian has him, he’s going to keep him close, right?”
“Maybe,” Cal interrupted, “but whether or not Murdock is there, we need to be there. If Gregorian is the one coming after us, we have to take him out.”
“You really think Gregorian would go through the Passage himself?” Kara asked skeptically, shrugging Deke’s hand off her shoulder. “He’s an office rat. A political animal. He’d send someone expendable.” She looked over at the tech. “Was there any data about where Gregorian is holed up?”
The woman shook her head as she pulled the module from the ‘face jack behind Spate’s ear. “Dead drops, anonymized accounts. Very paranoid.”
“I think,” Chang told Kara, “that he will be with that fleet. The man’s a politician, sure…but he’s also on the run. He can’t just sit on some rock and run this anonymously, not with as many irons as he has in the fire. If he did, one of his more…energetic and hands-on associates might take over and squeeze him out.”
Deke found himself nodding. That made sense. People who would sign on for something as risky as Naga wouldn’t look kindly on a boss that led from the rear.
“The fleet is our only lead,” Cal declared with a tone that Deke knew meant an end to the argument. Deke wondered if it should bother him that his best friend and the woman he was involved with were both so…well, the charitable part of him wanted to say “decisive” so he went with “overbearing” instead. “Cutter,” Cal went on, “are you in?”
“Call me Robert, Captain Mitchell,” Chang invited with a pleasant smile that still managed to creep Deke out. “Of course I’m in. Death may not be permanent for me, but it is bad for business. As I said, though, we must leave at once. I’ll have Ms. Matviyenko,” he nodded at the technician, “transfer the intelligence she collected to each of you before we jump. That way we can plan en route.”
“What about the prisoners?” Rachel asked, speaking for the first time. “What happens to them?”
Deke could see suspicion in her eyes that she already knew the answer, and he was pretty sure he did as well. He felt a slight irritation at the woman since he hadn’t really wanted to think about it.
“They’ll be taken care of,” Chang told her. Again, with that creepy fucking smile, Deke thought with a suppressed shudder.
“You mean you’re going to kill them,” she accused, a flare of anger in her eye.
“What would you have me do, Mrs. Mitchell?” The question should have been plaintive, even annoyed, but Chang never seemed anything but cheerful. “We don’t have the room to take them with us. If we leave them here, they’ll either call for help or be discovered by their fellow conspirators and they’ll know we were here and where we’re going next.” He shrugged. “They might even get a message to the fleet before we arrived and warn them we were coming.”
“I don’t like it,” she said quietly, still glaring at him. “If we kill these people because it’s convenient, what makes us different from them?”
There was a sound from outside, barely audible from the open hatchway. It was the high-pitched crack of a pulse pistol discharging. Four times it sounded and with each one, Rachel Lowenstein-Mitchell flinched. Watching her, Deke was bothered that it didn’t bother him.
“They’re dead and we’re not,” Chang answered the question. “I intend to keep it that way.”
Chapter Twelve
Mitchell:
“You really think this is going to work?” Deke said, looking as if he was trying hard not to fidget.
“Little late to be asking that,” I muttered, trying to fight off a general irritation that went back nearly a week to when we’d left the Naga base.
Kara shot me a knowing look before answering him. “No reason why it shouldn’t,” she said soothingly. “According to the files Robert dug up, the fleet is expecting a supply shuttle from the base. We even have the right codes and ID thanks to him.”
“Yeah, he’s a real sweetheart,” Deke murmured, eyes going back to the tactical display projected above the Dutchman’s main control board.
I let my gaze drift towards it as well, lacking anything else to keep me busy. The Dutchman was a hazy, blue-tinged delta shape moving at a respectable fraction of lightspeed under impellers towards this system’s only terrestrial planet: a worthless, lifeless rock-ball. We’d emerged from T-space at the inner jump point, broadcasting the codes Cutter had obtained at the Naga base, but we’d first entered the system far out near its cometary halo in the orbit of a long-period ice giant. That was where the Ariel and Cutter’s little squadron still waited, while the four of us headed for the Naga fleet which was gathered around the terrestrial like nomads around a campfire.
Heavily armed nomads, I corrected myself.
Gregorian had gathered himself together quite the little armada for a theoretical private citizen, starting with your normal corporate lighters and culminating in what had to be a Tahni War-era light cruiser, bristling with military-grade weaponry. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised that the corrupt former head of the Commonwealth’s premiere intelligence organization could scrounge together some retired Fleet warships if he needed to…but I wondered what he expected to find on the other side of the Passage that he thought he’d need that much firepower.
I wish we’d been headed for the cruiser, because I didn’t like that big of a hammer in the hands of unfriendlies, but the shuttle had been scheduled to rendezvous with one of the lighters. I had to admit to myself that even for me, Deke, Trint and Kara, taking out the whole crew of a light cruiser without alerting the rest of the ships might have been problematic.
Trint was strapped into the acceleration couch behind me, silent as the grave, his arms crossed over his barrel chest. Neither he nor Rachel had been happy after the events on the moon base and Rachel hadn’t been nearly as silent about it. Not that I blamed her. I hadn’t been too happy about Cutter’s play back on that
moon, but I wasn’t sure what she’d wanted me to do. Alienate our only ally to save the lives of five mercenaries that had deserted military service to work for an illegal private intelligence agency that was trying to kill us?
Shit, if only there was more time…
“Now comes the real test,” Kara said, a bit of tension barely perceptible in her voice. “We have to hope no one knows what the shuttle looks like.”
“These old missile cutters are pretty common,” Deke reasoned, not for the first time on this trip. “Odds are this is the kind of ship they’re expecting.”
“Plus,” I added, more trying to soothe his nerves than argue against Kara’s point, “this sort of organization is probably playing it close to the vest, right hand not knowing what the left hand’s doing. That sort of compartmentalization, I doubt anyone in the fleet knew anyone at the moon base by face.”
“Well, they’re not challenging us yet,” Kara said with a slight shrug.
“I am still concerned,” Trint finally spoke up, “that our ruse will not hold up once you board.” He tilted his head toward the three of us and our appropriated Naga uniforms, worn over our byomer Reflex armor. He wasn’t bothering with a disguise because he wouldn’t hold up to ten seconds of scrutiny…we had other plans for him. “If they discern your true intent before you gain control of the bridge, they could warn the other ships.”
“If that happens,” Kara reminded him, “the plan is to jump back out to the insertion point by the ice giant and salvage what we can from the lighter’s computers and personnel.”
