by J. N. Chaney
As they walked down a long hallway, the knob to the door on their left began to turn. Searching around, they saw nothing they could hide behind, and the next room back was too far down to the hall for them to reach before whoever it was came down the hall. Making a sudden decision, Burner braced himself to grab the first person to come out that door and silence them.
But the door didn’t fully open. Instead it just cracked open, with a hand reaching out blindly from within. “Hey, anyone out there? A little help?” Burner recognized the voice as belonging to Two-Pizzas.
Looking at the direction the hand was groping, he saw a stack of toilet paper, and suddenly he knew what that room was. Shrugging at Sara, he picked up a roll and passed it to the desperate hand.
“Thanks, buddy. I owe you.” The door closed. Burner and Sara hurried on.
They walked past a row of bedrooms that were mostly bare. Suitcases were already packed, and beds had been stripped down. One of the only notable features was a picture of Burner hung up on a wall with several darts sticking out of it. Someone had gone to the trouble of doodling a fake moustache on him.
“Looks like you’re popular,” Sara whispered.
Burner placed a finger on his upper lip. “Think it’s the moustache?”
Near the front door, they found the video equipment. It was all professional grade quality, expensive and sturdy, the kind of stuff used by newscasters when they were expected to report from potentially hazardous conditions. The terrorists had everything they needed for a studio-level shoot, with portable lights, microphones, and even what he took to be set pieces. They’d use this equipment to put out their manifesto in the wake of the bombing. It was all packed up and ready to go.
Just then, the front door opened. Sara and Burner barely had time to press themselves against the wall out of sight of the door before someone came in.
Killington walked into the room and looked down at the video equipment. “Why is none of this stuff loaded yet? Cade!”
Burner silently drew his knife and crept up within stabbing distance. If Killington turned around, they would be exposed. He’d have to be quick.
Footsteps coming from the opposite direction drew Killington’s attention, and Burner realized how exposed he was at that moment, standing out in the open with a knife drawn just a few feet from Killington. Whoever came down that hall would get a clear look at him.
He dove behind the video equipment just as Two-Pizzas entered the room.
Cade was rubbing his stomach. “Remind me never to sample anything that Eggie buys. I’m pretty sure that was just ancient vinegar he was making us drink.”
Killington pointed down at the pile of video equipment. “Start getting this stuff loaded. The recording is going ahead no matter what.”
Cade looked down at the pile that Burner was hiding behind with a distraught expression. “You want me to load all that?”
The soldier rubbed at a bruise on his jaw. “Just see that it gets done.”
Killington left, and Cade looked hopelessly down at the pile he had been assigned. Suddenly his eyes widened, and Burner was afraid he had been made. He couldn’t silence him before he let out a shout.
To his relief, Cade turned and casually strolled back toward the hall he had come from.
Burner rose from his poor choice of hiding spot just in time to see Sara get out from behind hers, a console at the far corner of the room.
He and Sara silently backtracked away from the front of the house to a section they had not been to on the western side—a large room with no furniture besides a big, round table with a few tall-backed chairs. Sitting on the table was what they were looking for: a datapad with the plans for Pharbis on it.
He brought his cracking tool up to bypass the security on its memory. Once he had it unlocked, he was able to look through its recent activity, including which parts of a file had been accessed. One part of the station’s plans had been loaded to memory many times more than others recently—the core of the reactor that powers the station. That was where they were planning to put the bomb.
Just as he was showing his findings to Sara, the door to the room opened.
In walked Cypher.
26
Farm House, Unknown Location, Trion City Outskirts, Demeter
Cypher ambled up to the pad and picked it up, frowning at what he saw on the screen. Burner hoped he had been able to close all the memory access programs in time.
As the door had started to open, Burner and Sara had hidden behind the only objects in the room that provided them with any sort of cover: the chairs. The tall backs meant that, with a crouch, the two of them could hide their upper bodies from a quick glance. It was not a hiding place that would hold up well to scrutiny. Anyone who glanced under the table would clearly see their lower limbs not quite concealed by the chairs’ legs.
For now, Cypher’s focus was on the datapad, but if his gaze drifted away from the pad and below the table, they’d be made.
“Was the access really that small?” Cypher muttered while looking at the screen. “That’s going to make things more challenging.” He sighed and then continued murmuring to himself. “It won’t stop us.”
Without taking his eyes from the screen, Cypher left the room, datapad in hand.
Burner cursed his luck. He had been forced to drop the pad because if Cypher had searched the room for it, it would have taken him all of five seconds to unravel their hiding spots. If only they had found it sooner, perhaps without those plans, Cypher would not have been able to finish his mission. Of course, since they had gained access to the plans once before, they might have been able to do it again.
There was no sense worrying about what could have been. They had found what they came for: knowledge of how the bombs were going to be deployed.
Now they just needed to get out of there with that information.
They quietly crossed back through the central section of the house, past the bedrooms, and back to the kitchen. Burner stopped them for a second so he could rummage for something the farm’s residents wouldn’t miss. The stock was an odd assortment of cans and dried food, the kind of stuff that’s cheap and had long shelf lives in case you had to hunker down for a while. He noticed some fresh food someone must have procured from the local farms. Burner was tempted to take something from the fresh stores too, since he rarely got to enjoy real food, but he knew that would be much more likely to be noticed missing. Neither he nor Sara had eaten anything since arriving on the planet, so they needed something to sustain them. He settled on a couple of cans of beans, which he slipped into his pockets.
On the way out he again ensured that the cameras would have to reboot by causing a power flicker. From the inside he had a lot more options and settled on the old reliable “metal tool in power socket” trick. The house lost power for a few seconds as the generator corrected itself from the short. Somewhere inside, one of the terrorists groaned, “Not again!” Burner and Sara raced out of the farmhouse and back to the relative privacy of the shed before the cameras could reboot.
Once inside, Burner cracked open his pilfered goods using a trick he’d picked up to open cans without an opener, and the two of them ate cold beans while reflecting on what they had seen and heard inside.
Burner spoke through a mouthful. “Looks like they’re planning to move in the morning,” he observed. “But they’ve still got loading and prep work to do. We have several hours yet.”
Sara nodded as she took a mouthful. “Was it just me, or did their movements all seem sluggish? There were several times we should have been caught.”
Burner recalled each of the moments he had thought they were about to have to fight for their lives out of the farmhouse. “Their guards were definitely down. I’d guess they were all also exhausted from being still awake in the early hours.”
“You think Cypher would force them on the mission in that state?”
He saw where she was going with this. “No. However impatient he migh
t be, this mission is too important to him to risk it getting fucked up because one of his men is asleep at the wheel. I’d expect everyone is going to be assigned a few hours of rest before they move out.”
That would give them some time, at least. If they could guess when they were all going to be resting, then they might even be able to sneak back in and launch a sneak attack.
It was too risky. Cypher might have them sleeping in shifts, or someone might be assigned to watching the camera while everyone else rested. If the cameras went down for the third time in a few short hours they were going to get suspicious.
Burner turned their focus to their discovery of the space station objectives and the planned location for placing the bombs.
Sara voiced some of her thoughts. “Detonating the reactor core would certainly cause the station to be destroyed, but you know who is also aware of that: the Union. It’s not like you’re allowed to just casually stroll into the core. Even on stations in safe space, those areas are heavily guarded, and doubly so that close to the Deadlands. And with the bomb threat to the Pharbis, no doubt they’ll have beefed up security around those areas even more.”
Burner had been mulling over the same problem since seeing the plans. “Maybe they have an inside man who could get them access? We already know they have a mole.”
“A mole the second-in-command sent to assassinate the admiral,” she reminded him. There was a bitterness in her voice. “But even if they had someone in the guard detail, that wouldn’t be enough to get them in. They’d have to pass multiple checkpoints with increasing levels of security. It’s not exactly a tourist trap, you know. The only people who go in there are the occasional maintenance engineers, so anyone trying to get access is going to be under a ton of scrutiny. And that’s despite the bomb threat.”
It was a good point. If they wanted to destroy the station, there were less secure spots on the station to detonate. It would take more explosives and the coordination to set them all off at once. That didn’t seem like a deal breaker to a planner like Cypher. The most famous terrorist attack on a Union space station, the USS Nirvana, had been conducted in such a way. One bomb set off in the docking bays produced a giant hole in the side of the station, another in atmosphere control caused the sudden loss of pressure, and a third in engineering had prevented the blast shutters from automatically closing. The result was massive decompression that eventually tore the entire station apart. The incident reports claimed that it had only taken ten minutes from the detonation of the first bomb for everyone onboard to be killed. Decades later it was still used as the textbook example of terrorist plots for new recruits.
Burner scratched his chin thoughtfully. “Detonating the core is a lot flashier than any other method of destroying the station. That kind of explosion is going to just about disintegrate every bit of the station in a massive fireball. There won’t be anything for the Union to recover or rebuild with.”
Years after the destruction of the Nirvana, the Union had reconstructed the station using, at its base, materials salvaged from the destroyed station. Nowadays, the Nirvana stood as a symbol of Union defiance against the cause of terrorism, proof that it would take more than a few bombs to shake them.
Sara grimaced. “It certainly would be a flashy explosion. If they can get to a safe distance to record it from, they could use the video to rally sympathizers from all over. Still doesn’t explain how they are planning to gain access to the core though.”
“Assuming that’s even their job.” Burner remembered his early deductions about the organization and recalled he had expected a fairly large group, much larger than the small handful they had found hiding out in the farmhouse. “There could be another team whose job it is to gain access to the core. Maybe even just using pure force if the team is large enough and well-armed.”
Sara frowned. “Guess we have no way to predict. Hell, for all we know, the bomb was planted well before we even knew about it. It could already be primed for Cypher to make his big speech.”
The mention of the speech brought Burner’s mind back around to the video equipment they had found. “That was some high-level gear they were bringing with them for filming. They might have spent more on their camera equipment than they did on their weapons.”
“I saw that.” Sara took one more mouthful of beans before indicating she was satisfied. “I’ve seen the kind of videos terrorists put out when they’re making threats or claiming responsibility for an attack. They’re hardly studio productions. Isn’t the point to ensure fear in the masses? Do they think having proper lighting and make-up is going to make them more frightening?”
“The point is they legitimize themselves.” Burner polished off the last of his beans and set the empty can next to Sara’s. “Cypher doesn’t want to be seen as a terrorist. He wants to be seen as a hero of the people. They’re going to go to the space station before they set off the bombs to make a televised statement to upload, and the whole group will stand in the front of the camera without masks. They’ll look like a united front, not just a single madman who decided to kill a bunch of people. It’ll make their voice seem valid and serve to motivate others to pursue their goals. Or, so Cypher is imagining, anyway. I wouldn’t be so sure he’s going to garner the support he’s after.”
Burner’s hand was still on his chin as he mulled the variables. There was one thing that didn’t track: the earlier evidence that the terrorists were planning to make it seem like the Union was responsible for the station’s destruction. Why would they then want to take credit for the attack? It was almost as if there were two separate plans. Plans that were contradictory.
“Think they’d come back here?” Sara asked. “After the bombing, I mean. Or would they use another safe house?”
Burner didn’t even want to consider a possibility in which the bombing was successful and they were still chasing this group. But he could see the logic in Sara’s question. If the terrorists got away from them here, and got away from the station, then she needed to anticipate where they would be next.
He didn’t intend to let it get anywhere near that far, whatever the cost, but he still answered the question. “They don’t know this place is burned yet, so I’d imagine that’s the plan for now. If we reveal ourselves when we make our move, they probably have other safe houses to fall back on.”
“What is our move?” Sara shifted herself into a more comfortable position against the back of a pallet. “Two of us, at least six of them. No way to call in support. If we use the element of surprise, we might be able to outmatch them. But even if we do, if there’s another team with the bomb, like you suggested, we won’t have stopped it.”
Burner looked back to the front of the barn and toward the farmhouse. “One thing’s for sure—we can’t let any more of them leave. It might be that the only thing keeping the bomb from being set off is that they haven’t filmed their video yet.” He subconsciously touched the weapon holstered at his side. “Three-to-one aren’t the best odds, especially when dealing with targets who know how to handle themselves in combat situations, which I’m guessing most of them can. But it’s not the worst odds I’ve ever fought in.”
Sara watched the movement with concern. “Do you regret it at all?”
He gave her a bemused look. “What? Getting involved?”
She nodded, still watching him intently.
“It’s not like it was voluntary. It just all kind of worked out like this.”
Sara leaned forward toward him. “I think you might be the only person who considers traveling around the galaxy on his own credits, going where he chooses, and deciding not to just run and disappear, anything but voluntary.”
He shrugged. “I never really considered running an option. Maybe I should have but... people were in danger. I couldn’t just do nothing. It’s kind of why I joined the Union in the first place, way back when. It seemed like a chance to do some good and protect people who couldn’t protect themselves.” He shook his head sadly. �
�Unfortunately, the reality of things rarely lives up to our youthful ideologies.” He shifted his position again, leaning forward, arms on his knees, head down, his face partially hidden from her.
“Is that why you became a drifter?” She slid closer to him. “To help people? You never did give me a straight answer back on the ship.”
He reached up and scratched his head, trying to think of a good answer but coming up blank. “You make it sound like it was some conscious decision made out of altruism. But I didn’t really think about it that much when I did it. It just seemed like the kind of thing to do. And if I ended up helping some people along the way…”
She was still watching him. “And do you?” Her eyes probed the side of his head, willing him to look at her. “As you are drifting from planet to planet and station to station, do you find the opportunities to do good that you are looking for?”
He had never really stopped to think about it before. Burner didn’t require thanks or rewards when he stepped up to help someone. Nor did he do it for any of that “good feeling” he sometimes heard charity workers talk about, the rush some people got when they acted unselfishly. He did it just because he couldn’t imagine not helping someone defenseless. If someone needed protecting, he protected them because he was a protector. It was as simple as that.
Burner could still remember one woman he had failed to protect. That was a long time ago, before he had joined the Union. Before most would have even considered him an adult. It was so far in his past, and yet it was one of his most vivid memories. He always came back to her in the end. No matter how many he helped, he would always remember the one he didn’t.
He realized he had been silent for several moments and hadn’t answered Sara’s question. “Yeah. Yeah,” he muttered, coming back to the here and now. “I’ve helped people. I mean, usually nothing as dramatic as this. Helped get a loan shark off a family’s case. Stopped gangs from hassling little girls. Once I helped retrieve a kidnapping victim.” He shrugged as though it was nothing. “The kind of stuff my superiors would have considered a waste of my time and talents when I was still in Intelligence.”
