“Now there’s a plan.” Braben lifted himself from his chair and stretched, then headed to the door.
Kodiak turned in his chair. “Maybe get me a—”
The tabled chimed. Kodiak and Braben exchanged a look; then Kodiak turned back around, Braben returning to stand over the table.
There was a manifest tag highlighted in red on the Fleet Memorial map. Another on the schematic of the Capitol Complex.
Braben let out a breath. “Well I’ll be. It worked.”
Kodiak nodded. “Damn right it did.”
He began typing, calling up the manifest ID data. The two maps slid out of the way, and the agents were presented with the image of a marine, an official portrait, the young man in full uniform, facing the camera in the customary three-quarter turn, his expression firm. His records came up next to him.
One line caught Kodiak’s eye. It was a piece of boxed text, in bold red.
Kodiak had that sinking feeling again.
Braben leaned down, reading the text off the display aloud.
“Sergeant Smith, Tyler. Seven-five-three-five-three-eight-zero. Psi-Marine Corps.” He paused. “Oh shit.”
Kodiak nodded as he read off the rest. “Killed in action, Warworld 4114. Twenty-ninth February, twenty-nine seventy.”
* * *
“They’re good, I’ll give them that.”
Avalon sat at the table in the planning room, Kodiak and Braben standing on either side of her. The two schematic maps were displayed on the table, the two red manifest tags blinking. Below the maps, right in front of the chief, was the official record of Sergeant Tyler Smith, Psi-Marine Corps.
Sergeant Tyler Smith, deceased.
Kodiak rubbed his chin. “They are good. That’s just what worries me.”
“Okay,” said the chief, “so what does this tell us?”
Braben smoothed down the front of his shirt, lining his tie up with the buttons, as he spoke. “We have a couple theories.”
“Go ahead.”
“The first is that this isn’t a real ID—the tag is genuine and belongs to Tyler Smith. But they’re using the ID of a dead marine to cover someone else, the real shooter. It’s impossible to remove a manifest tag without killing the subject—that means they might somehow have got Tyler’s tag from his body and used the data on it to spoof another tag to show his ID.”
“Which means,” said Kodiak, “that the shooter is Fleet. They’re tagged. Only it’s broadcasting Tyler’s ID.”
The chief nodded. “Like yours is broadcasting a cover identity.”
“Right,” said Braben. “Option two, the more likely one, is that Tyler Smith is not dead—according to his records he aced elective marksmanship at the Academy. Which points to him as the shooter, and the manifest ID really is his. Only that presents its own problems.”
Avalon turned to her agent. “Starting with how a psi-marine listed as killed in action three months ago is actually alive and walking around New Orem?”
Kodiak clicked his tongue. “Not only that.” He sat next to the chief and touched the table, bringing up some simple controls under his fingertips. As he rotated his hand, the timestamp on the manifest moved backward in time a few minutes.
The red tags on both maps vanished. Kodiak then moved forward to a few minutes after each shooting had taken place. The red tags blipped into view, then vanished.
Avalon frowned. She turned to face Kodiak. “How the hell is that possible?”
Kodiak shrugged. It was a big problem, a glitch in the manifest data that was hard to account for. Tyler Smith’s tag showed up at the time of each shooting, but only for a short while—a couple of minutes at each location. Before and after, there was no sign of it.
He sighed. “Neither of our first two options explain how they got in and out of each location without the tag showing up in the manifest. Whether it’s Tyler, or someone spoofing their tag to be Tyler.”
“And,” said Braben, “if you could somehow magically turn the manifest tag on and off, like this seems to indicate, then why let it show up on the manifest at all? They could go anywhere, do anything, and not show up. Doesn’t make sense.”
Kodiak cast his eye over the manifest data again. They’d gone to a lot of trouble to get it—Avalon hadn’t said much when they’d told her what had happened—in fact, all she had done was nodded, telling him she would handle it. The fact was they had the manifest data and now it showed something. It was just a matter of figuring out what that was.
“Has the Bureau been granted manifest access yet?” he asked.
Avalon shook her head. “No. Still in process, every time I ask.”
Braben folded his arms. “They really don’t want us to see this, do they?”
Avalon leaned back over the table, slowly shaking her head. As Kodiak watched, her eyes moved over the data, taking it all in. Without looking up, she asked, “What’s your next step then, Von?”
Wasn’t that the question?
“We have two hits,” he said, pointing to the data on display. “And we’ve had two events. We don’t know if that’s it, or if they plan to strike again. If we can get access to the live manifest, we can monitor it, and when Tyler’s ID pops, we can try and grab him.”
Avalon nodded and pushed her chair from the table. “I’ll go down to the Fleet Command Center myself and get the feed piped up to us.”
“Good,” said Kodiak. “In the meantime, we pull up everything we can on Tyler Smith. Full Fleet record, personality profile, Academy records, family, the works. Either he’s still alive, or they’re using his ID. Either way, they will have chosen him for a reason.”
Avalon nodded and looked at Braben. Braben adjusted his tie. “On it,” he said. Then he headed out of the planning room.
Kodiak looked at the chief. Her expression was firm, determined. Kodiak could see the muscles at the back of her jaw work as she gritted her teeth.
“We’re onto something,” said Kodiak.
The chief nodded. “Time to get that manifest access,” she said, then she left.
Alone in the planning room, Kodiak turned back to the table. The face of Tyler Smith stared back at him.
Tyler Smith. Psi-marine. Killed in action.
Kodiak pulled on his bottom lip again in thought.
So, what makes you so special?
* * *
Kodiak was fixing himself another coffee when Braben marched back into the bullpen. He trotted down the stairs onto the busy main floor, nodding at his partner to join him once again in the planning room. Kodiak acknowledged and followed.
Braben flicked the privacy shield on as Kodiak entered the room after him, and once again they were ensconced.
Kodiak nodded at his partner and took a sip of his drink. “What have you got?”
Braben held up a data stick between his finger and thumb. “Check it out,” he said, moving to the table and placing the stick on it.
A new military record appeared—it was a young woman, dressed not in full, dark marine uniform, but in the light fawn tunic of a Fleet Academy cadet. Kodiak blinked at the image, not sure if he was seeing what he was seeing. There was a distinct resemblance to the dead marine, Tyler Smith …
Braben leaned on the table, nodding at the record on display.
“Exactly,” he said, answering Kodiak’s unaired question. “Psi-Sergeant Tyler Smith has a sister—a twin sister, Caitlin. She didn’t follow her brother into the Academy until six months after he enrolled. More important, she never completed her training.”
Braben slid data around the table. More records, more personnel files. Finding the page he wanted, he tapped at it to emphasize his point.
“But she didn’t just drop out of the Academy. Three months ago she disappeared.”
Kodiak frowned. “Disappeared? She would have been tagged when she entered the Academy.…”
Kodiak’s words trailed off. Yes, she would have been tagged, like everyone and everything else in the Fleet.
&
nbsp; Like her brother.
Braben stood from the table and looked at Kodiak. Kodiak felt his mouth form a small “O.”
Braben nodded. “She’s listed as missing, presumed dead—with no tag showing on the manifest, it’s assumed she was killed, the tag itself destroyed.”
“So she’s officially dead,” said Kodiak. “Just like her brother.”
“And,” said Braben, “Caitlin’s absence from the Academy was noted March eighth. About a week after her brother was apparently killed in a Spider skirmish on Warworld 4114.”
Kodiak said nothing, but he raised his eyebrows. The two agents locked eyes for a while, Kodiak’s mind racing, no doubt Braben’s as well. Two psi-abled siblings, one a marine sent into battle, one still at the Academy. One killed in action. The other missing, presumed dead.
Yeah, right, thought Kodiak. His gut told him something different. So did the Fleet manifest—Caitlin’s tag was lost. And yet Tyler’s had shown up briefly at the shootings before vanishing again.
It was time to throw out everything they knew about how the tags worked. They were clearly hackable, controllable.
Which meant Tyler Smith was alive. And, chances were, his sister as well. It was too much of a coincidence otherwise, especially given the timings.
Kodiak sipped his coffee as he looked over the table display. “Says she was inducted into the Psi-Marine Corps accelerated program. Class of Alpha One.”
Braben nodded. “Just like her brother. Apparently his psi score was so high they leap-frogged him to sergeant and sent him into combat as soon as they could.”
“Where he was killed,” said Kodiak. “Officially.”
Braben cocked his head. “Except now he’s back, apparently.”
“If that is him and not someone using his ID.” Kodiak drained his drink, the hot, bitter liquid and the buzz of caffeine helping him clear his thought processes. “And where did his sister go?”
“That’s assuming she’s alive too.”
Kodiak shrugged. “It’s looking more likely, isn’t it? There’s a conspiracy going on, and these two might be at the heart of it.” He looked at Braben again. “I think we have two targets to find.”
There was a chime from the planning room’s door. The two agents turned at the sound, Braben moving over the control panel on the wall to unlock the door. Commander Avalon nodded a greeting and stepped in. As she walked over to the table, she pulled the silver square Bureau badge from her lapel, then, looking down at the data display, pressed the badge to the tabletop.
“Finally got a security override,” she said. “We have official access to the live manifest.”
Kodiak shook his head. Hands on hips, he moved to stand next to the chief, looking down at the table as her Bureau badge was read by the computer and the display changed to show current feed from the manifest, showing the Fleet Capitol Complex and environs.
“About time,” he said. “What the hell was going on?”
“I don’t know,” said the chief, lifting her badge and reattaching it to her uniform. “Nobody down at the command center could trace where the security block had come from.”
Braben gave a low whistle. “Gotta be someone high up, right?”
Avalon glanced up. She just nodded.
“Okay then, let’s see what we can see,” said Kodiak, leaning over the table. He began tapping at a keyboard at the bottom of the main manifest display. The schematic of the Fleet Capitol Complex and the crawl of tags all over it zoomed out until they were looking down at a map of New Orem itself. While he worked, Braben explained to the chief about Tyler’s sister, Caitlin.
“Okay,” she said, when Braben was done. She moved closer to Kodiak, leaning over the table as well, her eyes scanning the display. Kodiak finished keying the tag data, then stood back, his arms folded.
He sighed.
Nothing had happened. The map of New Orem was barely recognizable, an undulating square of tiny moving icons—the tags of every member of the Fleet in the city. He’d set the manifest to pick out the IDs of Tyler and Caitlin Smith. There were no results.
But, what had he expected? Tyler’s ID came and went—hidden, somehow—and Caitlin’s had been inactive for three months. So the plan was not to find them immediately, but to watch and wait. In the meantime, they could direct the ground search a little better. At least they had two specific targets to look for.
If they were still in New Orem in the first place.
“They could have taken them off world,” said Braben. “They might not be in the city anymore.”
Kodiak shrugged. “That’s possible. But we have the live manifest now, we can track them across all of Fleetspace.”
“That’s going to take a lot of time, and—”
There was an alert from the table. Kodiak winced at the sound, too loud in the confines of the planning room.
“Look!” said Avalon. She pulled at the map display with her hands, moving the city schematic around, focusing in on a green icon floating among the infinite sea of red.
Kodiak’s heart kicked into gear. Tyler Smith, making his third appearance. He was going to kill again. They needed to get to that location, fast. They also needed to get any high-ranking Fleet personnel out of there. He reached for the comm on his collar, ready to make the order.
“It’s not him,” said Avalon. She brought up a text panel and began scrolling through the readout. Then she looked up at Kodiak. “It’s Caitlin Smith. Her tag is active.”
Kodiak’s eyes widened. He looked at the chief, looked at his partner. Braben gave a nod. “I’ll get a drop team ready. Let’s roll.”
“Go,” said Avalon. “I’ll call ahead. You need to pick her up, now.”
Kodiak nodded and headed to the door, Braben on his heels, as the chief began relaying orders into her comm.
20
They flew in over the slums of Salt City, two thousand meters high, following the path of the two surveillance drones that had been sent out ahead. Kodiak was strapped in the transport compartment next to Braben and ten other agents, the simple box plugged onto the back of the one-man hot seat where the pilot sat. The transport, like every vehicle in the Fleet, whether designed for space travel or atmospheric flight, was modular. The hot seat was the basic structure, a wedge-shaped block that was essentially a one-man flying machine, little more than a cockpit and basic propulsive unit. Anything and everything could be attached to it from the Fleet’s catalogue of parts, creating anything from a small, agile fighter to a heavy assault vehicle, to this, a transport craft.
Kodiak hadn’t needed to change from his borrowed combat uniform, just adding a light helmet and gauntlets to the outfit. Braben had swapped his suit for gear identical to Kodiak’s, except his armored jacket had sleeves. The eight other agents were more heavily protected, as they were the ones going in first, all dressed in combat fatigues and helmets that made them look more like Fleet marines, each with a short plasma rifle clipped to the front of his flak jacket. Both Kodiak and Braben had the same weapon, but were wearing them on their backs. For maximum mobility, they would instead rely mostly on their stasers, stowed within easy reach on a thigh holster.
The object of the mission was to find and capture Caitlin Smith. Nothing more, nothing less. A precise, surgical operation. As soon as her ID had reappeared on the Fleet manifest, unmoving in a warehouse on the outskirts of Salt City, Kodiak had ordered surveillance drones in first to get a real-time picture of the area, and it looked quiet. The target hadn’t moved for hours. So either she was alive, with no idea they were coming, or somehow the dead manifest tag had been reactivated. It was more than possible they were going in to recover her corpse.
The transport banked sharply. Through the open side of their compartment, Kodiak watched the lights of New Orem sweep around below them as they changed course. The Fleet capital was blazing white, with the Fleet Capitol Complex itself a cluster of the tallest, the sleekest, the brightest buildings in the heart. The aerial view was a fa
miliar site to many, Kodiak included, but he still felt awed at the size of both the Fleet’s headquarters and New Orem itself. This was the largest city in Fleetspace, the heart of the empire.
Kodiak frowned behind his visor. From above, the city and the Capitol Complex looked just the same as they always did, but he knew that was deceptive. Down there in the Complex itself, and across the streets of the city, Fleet personnel swarmed to control the situation.
Kodiak glanced at the others packed into the transport compartment. The comm in his ear was silent, the raiding party still aside from the buffeting of the carrier as they were airlifted to the drop zone. Even Braben, strapped in next to Kodiak, so close Kodiak could feel the hard plates of their armored jackets rubbing together, was quiet, focusing his gaze somewhere on the floor of the compartment.
Caitlin Smith. How the hell had her manifest tag suddenly come back online? She was missing, presumed dead, the only possible reason she couldn’t be located by the Fleet’s systems. And yet, her tag had shown up, appearing on the manifest almost in front of Kodiak’s eyes. The fact that she was showing up and Tyler wasn’t was a mystery, but it was too much of a coincidence. There had to be a connection, which made Caitlin Smith—the prime suspect’s only surviving family—their first solid lead.
Kodiak’s comm chimed as the pilot updated them on their position. As Kodiak acknowledged, Braben tapped him on the arm and pointed to the view outside.
The bright lights of New Orem stopped suddenly, cutting a long, jagged border against what appeared to be impenetrable darkness. As the edge of the city moved out of view underneath the carrier, Kodiak’s eyes adjusted, and he could now see they were still over a built-up area, but one populated by low buildings, crosshatched with narrow streets lit with a dim, flickering orange-yellow.
Salt City. They were getting close.
“You’d never find anyone down there,” said Braben, his voice loud and clear over Kodiak’s comm. “It’s the perfect hiding place.”
Kodiak nodded. “Only if you aren’t tagged by the Fleet.”
The Machine Awakes Page 14
