by Rick Partlow
"It was supposed to happen after I raised the population here on Anansi to rebel against the humans. But there's a fail-safe....when I didn't contact them last night, a signal went out automatically." Kah-Rint sucked in a breath, shuddering. Deke could feel the vibration through his hand and it somehow made him feel dirty. "The operation will start within ninety-six hours."
Deke took his hand away from the Tahni's face and wiped his palm on the fabric of his utility pants. He felt his insides twist, his hands closing into fists involuntarily. He wanted to extend his talons and rip Kah-Rint's head off of his body.
"We have to get back to my ship," he said, barely keeping his voice below a shout. He fixed Cal with a glare. "We have to get to the nearest Instell ComSat and tell Kara. She's the only one who can stop it."
Cal was already standing, Rachel's hand in his. Her face was pale, the corner of her mouth quivering slightly; Cal's was set in a grim line.
"You can't stop it," Kah-Rint was rambling now, his voice manic. "You can't save them...can't save your world or mine...they're all dead!"
There was a smack of flesh on flesh and Deke looked around to see Pete rubbing his knuckles. Kah-Rint was lolling, his eyes unfocussed, a bruise already forming on his cheek. The younger man's face was full of rage, contained for hours now but finally free. "You're dead too, you piece of shit," he told the Tahni. Then he turned to Cal and Deke. "What the hell are we waiting for? Let's get going before that asshole is right."
Chapter Eighteen
Tyya-Khin stepped into his father's room hesitantly; there had been no answer to his kick at the door. He found the old male lying on his mat, still wearing his day clothes and having done none of the nightly ablutions, as if he were going to sleep through the night without the Cleansing or the Purging. Of course, Tyya-Khin hadn't changed or performed his rituals either...but then, he didn't intend to sleep this night.
"Father," he said, trying to make his voice firm. "I have to leave you."
The lights were out, but he could see the old male turn to look at him, his head raising off his mat.
"You go out so late?" T'Sonn-Yon-Kara-Tin said, voice sounding disapproval. "When will you return?"
"I shall not," he admitted, feeling a hollow in his insides at actually saying it. "I go to meet the fate of my brothers."
The old male grunted heavily in reply. "So, our line will die out then. There will be no one to carry on the mantle of our family to the next generation."
"There is one," Tyya-Khin told him, a hint of pleasure in his voice for a change. "I have mated with one of the Matriarch's most valued acolytes and she carries my heir inside her even now. Our line will live on." Assuming any of us live after this, he thought but didn't say.
"My heart is gladdened, my son," the former General said slowly, a rare light of perception back in his eyes. He pushed himself upright with an obvious effort, both physical and emotional. "I shall train him in the way of our people...if in truth you do not return."
"I rely on your word, my father," Tyya-Khin placed a hand over his chest in sign of an oath accepted. "I must go now, before the humans discover the feed from their machine spies is being spoofed."
He turned to leave, but his father's voice stopped him. "Are you certain this is the right path, Tyya-Khin?"
He didn't turn back as he answered. "I am certain of nothing, father, except that if I don't lead them, someone else will have to."
* * *
Kara McIntire hadn't been sleeping well. She didn't want to admit it to herself, after all those years alone, but it was hard to sleep without Deke. Which was why she was already awake when the call came in.
Major McIntire, the voice came over her neurolink communicator, there's a problem with the surveillance from the drones we have covering the possible insurgent leaders.
What is it? she responded, grateful that the synthesized version of her voice wouldn't mumble groggily the way her actual voice would have.
Our monitoring software has detected abnormalities in the feed, the duty officer told her. There's a seventy percent chance the drones are being spoofed.
Shit. She rubbed a hand across her face, pushed stray hairs out of her eyes and sat up in bed.
Get a street patrol to Tyya-Khin's house, she instructed, grabbing her uniform off the back of a chair without bothering to turn on the lights in her quarters. I want a physical confirmation of his location. I want a report ASAP.
Roger, ma'am. I'll have a team out there in half an hour.
Kara belted on her pulse pistol on the way out the door, then paused to knock on the one across the hall from hers. It slid open to reveal Holly Morai, already in uniform, gun at her side and a slight smirk on her face.
"What?" she said, shrugging. "You don't think I get updates too? Shit's going down, let's get to work."
Kara shook her head and led off down the corridor. Holly was growing on her, though she wasn't really sure the reverse was true. She'd kept a hopper on call since the night of the attack, and it waited for them just outside of the office suite, inside the thick walls of the Op center, the motors already spinning up, activated remotely by her neurolink.
The space inside the walls was lit up as bright as mid-day from the security spotlights and Kara squinted against the glare as she stepped around the curved hull of the ducted-fan helicopter. She could see Fleet personnel jogging out of barracks buildings to crew emergency stations, called out by the alert she'd sounded. No one was taking any chances after they'd come so close to losing the whole garrison.
She slid into the pilot's seat of the hopper, hitting the control to close the canopy when she saw that Holly was settled into the chair beside her, then feeding power to the fans before the clear eggshell had the chance to completely shut. The little aircraft leaped into motion, yanking the both of them fifty meters above the walls before surging forward over the coastal plain. Kara ignored the outraged chattering of base security over the hopper's communication board; she let her automated clearance codes shut them up.
"So," Holly said conversationally, tightening her safety harness, "we thinking another attack? They can't have got their hands on another nuke already..."
"Gaia knows what they've got their hands on," Kara countered, controlling the flight of the hopper with her hands rather than her neurolink just because it felt better to her, "or who gave it to them. But if they're spoofing our surveillance drones, it's not a drill."
"You don't want to take backup?" The question was more interested than plaintive, as if Holly found the idea intriguing.
"Backup will get there when it gets there," Kara said with a shrug. Beneath them, the defenses of the Op center fell away and they cruised over the partially-rebuilt spaceport, patrolled now by armored Marines as well as hovering armed drones and automated rovers.
"Yeah, I keep forgetting you were DSI Cadre," Holly said, nodding. "Just a couple of you guys on an occupied world for months at a time. Then undercover as a mineral scout for years after the war...must be tough transitioning to an office job."
Kara laughed sharply. "Does this look like a fucking office job to you?" Then she looked over sidelong at Holly. "Or were you talking about yourself?"
"Maybe," the other woman admitted, shrugging. "I have to tell you, this is the most alive I've felt in the last ten years."
"I have the authority to recruit new agents from other branches," Kara reminded her. "I can tell you the General would never turn down one of his kids." She raised a forestalling hand at the outraged look that was developing on Holly's face. "I know, but that's what he calls you all."
"It's something to think about," Holly said. She looked at Kara through narrow eyes. "Would you be my boss?"
Kara laughed. "Let's not get ahead of ourselves."
They'd crossed over into the city proper and it seemed dark and dead at night. There was a curfew, and even if there hadn't been, people seemed afraid to walk the streets night or day for fear of running afoul of Commonwealth patrols. E
xcept for the ones who'd stopped being afraid, who openly threw rocks or bricks or homemade firebombs. There were more and more of those every day, and more young Tahni males being hauled away to detention centers.
They're getting angry, Kara thought. This can't last. One way or another, it'll boil over and we'll have to leave here or kill thousands of them.
It took just a few minutes to reach the workshop/storefront/house Tyya-Khin shared with his father. The streetlights were out around it, but the hopper's sensors didn't need them; neither did she or Holly. Kara had the hatch opening when the hopper was still ten meters off the surface and she was leaping to the ground before the skid touched down, a pulse carbine cradled in her arms. She could hear and sense Holly moving around the other side of the aircraft and flanking her as they headed for opposite sides of the courtyard.
Kara went through the front entrance and up the walkway to the door, while Holly hopped easily over the low wall on the side of the courtyard and took a position to her right, back against the wall. Kara tried to access the feeds from the surveillance drones for just a moment; they showed nothing but the house, still and dark. There was no sign of either her or Holly, or even the hopper sitting out in the middle of the street. The feed had been hacked, spoofed with a looped image taken earlier in the night.
She gave Holly a nod, then kicked the door in. It was a solid, heavy door made of local wood but her servo-equipped bionic joints and bone reinforcement splintered it at the bolts and it swung inward with a creak of metal hinges. It was pitch black inside, but she saw nothing on thermal or infrared all the way to through the metal working shop to the entry to the living quarters. She crossed the shop floor quickly, taking the chance that there was no opposition wearing Stealth armor. Holly sidled through the front door behind her, watching their rear with her own carbine at the ready.
The inner door to the living quarters wasn't locked, wasn't even completely closed. A light shone through from the main living area; a single candle burning on a stand. The flickering dance of light and shadows played over the lined, craggy face of General T'Sonn-Yon-Kara-Tin as he sat on the couch-like furniture, rocking back and forth slightly.
"He's not here," the old male said in Tahni, not looking at them. Kara's translation programs told her that he seemed happy, satisfied. "You're too late."
Kara made a gesture to Holly, who nodded and split off to search the rest of the dwelling while the DSI agent stayed and kept an eye on the old Tahni. She returned in less than a minute, slashing the air with a hand in the all-clear sign.
"Nothing," Holly confirmed quietly. "Do we take the old fart in for questioning?"
Kara considered it for a moment, but then shook her head. "If he knew anything," she reasoned, "they wouldn't have left him here." She fell silent, churning possibilities around in her head and debating where to concentrate their forces for response.
Major McIntire, the transmission took her by surprise, jarring her out of her reverie. You have a priority transmission from Captain Conner coming through over the Instell ComSat. It's marked "urgent."
Put it through now, she instructed tersely. Send it to Commander Morai's 'link as well.
Deke was sitting in the cockpit of the Aurora with Cal beside him, their faces grim and desperate. Kara felt a drop in her gut.
"We got Kah-Rint," Deke said without preamble. "We interrogated him and it's the old 'good news-bad news' joke. The good news is, we don't have to worry about who's pulling his strings. No one is." He quickly outlined what they'd already found out from Reggie Nakamura's report about Kah-Rint's history with Robert Chang, and expanded on it with the subsequent betrayal of the Tahni's status as a collaborator and his abandonment of Tahn-Skyyiah to work for Cutter.
"So, apparently," Cal took up the thread, his deeper voice echoing through the small cockpit, "when Cutter abandoned his organization back on this side of the Northwest Passage, Kah-Rint saw his chance at revenge on the Commonwealth and the Tahni. He's been using the duplicates Cutter left behind to acquire access codes, weapons like the nuke he used on the Garrison station and the one he tried to use on the planetside base, and also to shape the military response to the strikes."
"We didn't have a chance to get a list of the duplicates yet," Deke cut in. "We will, but this is higher priority."
"He had a fail-safe in place in case he was captured," Cal went on. "The call has already gone out by the time you get this. The insurgents on Tahn-Skyyiah have the codes to access the cargo shuttles from the port to the Thaddeus Moore. They're going to smuggle a strike force on board and take the ship, then use it to infiltrate the orbital defenses around Earth." He paused, as if he didn't want to say the next part because it would be like accepting it as a possibility. "They're going to use the Teller-Fox drive inside Earth's gravity field, use the ship itself as a kinetic weapon to slam into the capital at relativistic speeds."
Kara felt her blood freeze in her veins. It was a brilliant tactic, looked at objectively. The Teller-Fox warp units used to open up the gate to Transition space also worked as a sublight drive, warping space locally and making it spit your ship out like a watermelon seed. But it had a weakness, a reason that ships still had to use reaction drives closer to planets: when it was used near any significantly large mass, it tended to pull the ship towards that mass at a square of whatever velocity the ship had been travelling. The military had tried to use that as a planetary bombardment weapon during the war, but it was too indiscriminate and hard to aim precisely, and far too easy to defend against. Unless you already had the codes and authorizations that would let you take your ship right into orbit...
A lump made a passage down Cal's throat before he went on. "It'll kill millions, turn everything for kilometers around into a smoking crater. After that, there'll be no way to prevent a full-scale war with the Tahni, even if we expose the duplicates."
"We're heading your way," Deke said. "Savage's people are following us, but I don't know if we'll get there in time to do anything. You have to stop them from taking the Moore, and unfortunately, you can't trust anyone. We know there are duplicates insystem and we can't be sure they aren't already on the Moore or in the command structure onplanet." He shrugged helplessly. "I hope you know what to do, love, because I don't have a clue."
But the look of anguish in his eyes told her he knew exactly what she had to do, but couldn't bring himself to say it.
Lt. Feige, she transmitted to the port duty officer, I need a passenger shuttle prepped for flight ASAP. I'm heading for the port now.
Aye, ma'am, came the immediate reply. Did you need any crew assigned?
Negative, she replied after a moment's hesitation. She caught Holly's eye and the other woman nodded. I'll fly it myself.
Chapter Nineteen
Captain Jon Einarsson was trying very hard not to lose his temper, but it was becoming more difficult with each update that scrolled across his corneal lens implant. He bit back a curse, then glanced around the bridge of the Thaddeus Moore to make sure no one had heard the muttered half-word. Everyone was still paying attention to their stations, immersed in the day-to-day, hour-to-hour duties that made crewing a ship this size tedious, even circling in a stable orbit around a planet.
Not that there was anything stable about Tahn-Skyyiah, not anymore. It rotated serenely on the bridge's holographic display, deceptively peaceful in appearance, giving no indication of the unrest that made him certain he would wind up having to open fire on its cities from orbit before too long.
Still fuming inwardly, he touched a button on his 'link to connect him to the intraship network and tried to relax. A deep breath sent him floating upward slightly, setting his zero-g chair restraints pulling with minute pressure against his lap and shoulders.
Maybe I need some more time in the gravity drum, he thought. Or even a visit planetside. Too much time weightless played hard on the psyche and it was tough making the time each day to exercise in the ship's central rotating drum. Tough making time for
anything other than work lately. He ran a hand tiredly through his tightly-curled black bowl cut and felt the anger finally slide away. Mostly.
"Engineering," the answer to his call came within seconds, the nasal voice sounding tinny in his ear bud. "Commander Lee here, sir."
"Commander," Einarsson said, firmly but quietly, "what the hell is this power surge I keep getting reports on? I must have seen a half dozen in the past hour. Why hasn't this been nailed down?"
"Sir," the engineer's voice sounded harried, "I've got three people working on it now. I'm having trouble with the diagnostics. Just when I think it's been isolated, it jumps to another system." He sighed. "If this keeps up, I may have to physically disconnect the main power trunk temporarily and reboot."
"That'll be a huge pain in the ass, Lee," Einarsson commented. "Let's try to make sure it doesn't come to that."
A scrawl across the corner of the Captain's vision indicated that Security was trying to contact him. He sighed softly to himself. "I'll get back with you, Commander," he told Lee. "Find me an answer to this." He closed off that call and opened a line to Security. "Captain Einarsson," he said.
"Sir," the male voice sounded nervous, as if this was the first time he'd spoken to the Captain, "this is Lieutenant Velazquez in Security. We have two scheduled cargo shuttles coming up from the port planetside, sir, but we're having a problem with their internal cargo scanners, with both boats, sir." A note of apology came into the already hesitant tone. "I would normally run this by Security Chief Chiang, but she's on liberty at the port and can't be reached currently."
"You've contacted the crews?" Captain Einarsson snapped, not even trying to conceal his impatience.
"They say they aren't getting any malfunctions, sir. They both say it has to be on our end."
Einarsson hissed out a sigh. "We have a power surge in Engineering, Lee...it's been jumping from system to system, causing problems. Maybe it's screwing up our telemetry. At any rate..."
