Silent Order_Master Hand

by Jonathan Moeller

  Well, finding any survivors had seemed like a long shot. Now all that was left was to take the logs and the ship’s location back to the Navy on Alexandria Station.

  He reached into his belt, drew out a thumb drive, and plugged it into a port on the engineering console. The program on the thumb drive started running, and the displays on the engineering console lit up. The thumb drive held a pseudointelligent program designed to dig through a ship’s computer, unlock the log files, and download them. March had used it several times before in his work for the Silent Order.

  The console unlocked as the program cracked the Howard Carter’s security, and March started sifting through information. The freighter had carried a crew of twenty, and March had passed a dozen corpses in the corridor and found four more on the bridge. No doubt he would find the remaining four corpses in the engineering room, or the pirates had taken them as prisoners.

  He scrolled through the ship’s logs. The Howard Carter had been away from the University of Mercator for nearly a year, conducting archaeological digs on an uncharted planet thousands of light years from the major human interstellar powers. March brought up the cargo manifest, wondering what they had found on that uncharted planet.

  His mouth tightened when he saw the listing.

  They had found relics from the Fifth Terran Empire.

  There had been five different Terran Empires, and each one had either collapsed or been destroyed. The Fifth Terran Empire, March recalled, had been destroyed in a civil war over some sort of bioengineering technology. The founders of the Kingdom of Calaskar had been refugees fleeing the destruction of the Fifth Empire, and the royal family and the noble houses of Calaskar were the descendants of those first refugees.

  The ancestors of those who would create the Final Consciousness had fled from the fall of the Fifth Empire as well.

  Once March had possessed absolutely no interest in archaeology and only minimal interest in history. He knew better now.

  He had seen too many ancient dangers dug out of the dust of the past.

  The program finished its download, and March pocketed the thumb drive. He decided to check the engine room, but to reach the engineering section, he would have to traverse the cargo bay. March took one last look around the bridge and crossed back to the corridor. He passed the corpses and paused long enough to produce his phone and take pictures of each of the dead faces. March didn’t like that task, but it was necessary – the Navy would want as much information as possible.

  With the grim job finished, March kept moving. He reached the doors to the cargo hold, and they slid open with a groan. The cargo bay beyond was huge, so large that March could have squeezed the Tiger inside with a little work. Harsh arc lights shone from the ceiling overhead, casting wild shadows across the deck. There were neat stacks of pallets, and March recognized the familiar equipment of a long-term archaeological expedition – prefabricated buildings, now disassembled, excavating machinery, stacks of tools, and lots of pallets of prepackaged meals.

  A memory went through him. The hold of Adelaide’s ship had looked like this on the day he had met her.

  Of course, he had almost been stabbed to death that day, so March tightened his grip on the plasma rifle. Most of the ship’s cargo was undisturbed, but several of the pallets had been torn apart, the packing cases ripped open. Likely those cases had held the relics of the Fifth Empire that the archaeologists had dug up.

  He took a step forward, and Vigil started speaking into his earpiece.

  “Scan has detected one human life sign aboard the Howard Carter,” said Vigil.

  “It’s not me, is it?” whispered March, his eyes sweeping the cargo hold. Vigil was a sophisticated computer pseudointelligence, her capabilities further enhanced by ten years of algorithm-driven machine learning, but sometimes even the most advanced computer could be literal to the point of pedantry.

  “Other than yourself, Captain March,” said Vigil. “In addition to you, our sensors are detecting one other human life sign.”

  “Where?” whispered March, looking around the bay.

  “In the cargo hold,” said Vigil.

  Even as she spoke, a groan and a clatter came to March’s ears.

  He whirled, bringing up the plasma rifle. A shadow moved between two of the pallets of prepackaged meals, and March waited. Another groan came to his ears, and he moved forward.

  A wounded woman slumped against the side of the pallet, clutching a plasma pistol against her chest. Her blue eyes went wide as March approached, and she started to raise the weapon. Or she tried to, anyway. Her hand was shaking so badly she seemed unable to raise the pistol more than an inch or two from her chest.

  “Wait,” said March. “I’m not with the Agotanni Pirates.”

  The woman blinked. She was in early middle age, with thin features, blue eyes, and blond hair starting to fade into gray. The woman wore a blue ship crewer’s jumpsuit, and she had been shot twice through the stomach, the plasma burns livid. From the placement of the wounds, the bolts had probably destroyed her digestive tract but hadn’t killed her.

  Yet. If the woman didn’t get serious medical treatment soon, she was going to die in a lot of pain.

  “Then…who are you?” she croaked, slumping against the pallet. He recognized her voice. She was the one who had recorded the distress call.

  “My name’s Jack March. I’m a Calaskaran privateer, and I answered your distress call. Shot down two of the pirates, but the rest fled. I’m afraid you’re the only one left on the ship.”

  “I…I know,” whispered the woman. “They killed them all. Shot me twice. I made it here. Thought…thought I would ambush them. I…”

  “What’s your name?” said March, looking around. There was a small antigrav handcart nearby, and he could use that to get her to the Tiger without much jostling.

  “Anna,” she said. For a moment she looked almost calm. “Dr. Anna Siegfried of the University of Mercator, on a…” She winced, and a shudder went through her. “Oh, God. Oh, God. It hurts.”

  “I’m getting you to my ship,” said March, shouldering his rifle and grabbing the handcart. “I have an expert medical system in the infirmary, and hopefully that can get you stabilized until we can get you to a proper medical facility.”

  Anna didn’t seem to hear him.

  “The cargo,” she said as March lifted her as gently as he could. “The cargo, they took all the cargo. I didn’t think it was dangerous. They were just relics. But the canisters. They can’t open the canisters. We didn’t know what was inside. Didn’t open them. But I suspected…I started to wonder…oh, God, oh, God…”

  Her ravings grew less coherent as March hurried the handcart to the airlock as fast as he dared.

  ###

  Two weeks later, March awoke to the sound of multiple notifications from his phone.

  He blinked his eyes open.

  An instant of disorientation went through him. The bed beneath him was softer than he was accustomed to, and the natural gravity of a planet always felt different from the artificial gravity generated by a starship’s gravitic systems. The air smelled of lavender and mint, and in the dim moonlight leaking through the windows, March saw the shadowy shapes of a dresser and a vanity table loaded with a wide array of cosmetic products.

  His mind snapped back into focus. March was in his girlfriend’s bedroom in her house on Calaskar. Her side of the bed was empty – given her chronic insomnia, no doubt Adelaide had gotten up to work on something.

  March’s phone rested on the nightstand, and it was buzzing.

  He grunted, picked it up with his left hand of metal, and unlocked the screen.

  There were a lot of notifications. He scrolled through them and saw that the messages had come from the privateering office of the Royal Calaskaran Navy. The Navy had processed his report about the Howard Carter and had paid him a bounty for the destruction of the two Agotanni starfighters, more modest bounty for calling in the location of the Howard
Carter, and a much larger bounty for rescuing Dr. Anna Siegfried and taking her to Alexandria Station for medical treatment.

  The Navy tended to prefer the carrot rather than the stick to encourage privateers to civic-mindedness.

  To March’s surprise, there was a notification from the government of Mercator, paying him additional bounties for locating one of their ships, destroying two Agotanni fighters, and rescuing a Mercatorian citizen.

  March had no opposition to getting paid twice for the same job.

  It was already 05:00, and March supposed he wasn’t getting back to sleep. He rose, donned a pair of shorts and an exercise shirt, and eased open the door to the upstairs hallway. The carpet felt soft beneath his bare feet, and in the dim glow of the night light near the baseboard, glass glinted on the walls.

  Adelaide had a lot of pictures.

  Most of the pictures were of Adelaide with her brothers and sisters, or with her ever-growing army of nieces and nephews. Usually, they were either playing soccer or dressed in workout clothing. A few of the pictures were older. One showed Adelaide graduating from high school, her mother on her left and her late father on the right. There was one picture of her wedding to her late husband. All the pictures in the upstairs hallway, March had noted, were of Adelaide with her family. The overall impression was of an energetic, childless woman who had stayed close to her siblings.

  That assessment was accurate, as far as it went. Though Adelaide had her depths. Such as the fact that two of the pictures concealed niches that contained small plasma pistols, and that one of the drawers in her nightstand held another gun.

  The hallway opened into the upstairs loft. One wall held windows that overlooked the yard and the nearby forest. Other walls held shelves holding actual, printed books, something that March had never seen in any quantity until he had come to Calaskar for the first time. There were a few easy chairs scattered around and a wooden table.

  Adelaide Taren sat at the table, legs curled beneath her, face intent as she typed at a laptop computer.

  March gazed at her. Her brown hair was piled up in an untidy bun, and to his amusement, she was wearing one of his clean exercise shirts. They were loose on her, but she was tall enough that the shirt would cover only about the top third of her thighs when she stood up. The glow from the laptop screen illuminated her face, and she looked beautiful in the dim light.

  “Going to exercise,” he said.

  She nodded, looked at him, and smiled. “Sounds good.”

  Then she went back to typing. March had wondered how she managed to write so much when she did so many other things, and he had seen the answer the first time he had stayed overnight. Adelaide dealt with her frequent insomnia by writing when she couldn’t sleep, and she wrote fast. Which was why he didn’t walk over to kiss her or talk to her. He knew that she wouldn’t get angry if he interrupted her, but she wouldn’t appreciate it, either.

  So, he didn’t. March was both amused and a little disturbed that the skills a covert operative used to assess a target’s strengths and weaknesses were useful in a relationship with a woman. Then again, Adelaide was a covert operative, too. Most likely she did the same thing with him. Which was probably why she had never asked to exercise with him.

  He descended to the kitchen. Adelaide owned three different robots, and two of them were active right now. A pair of cleaning drones moved through the kitchen and the dining room, humming quietly. Both drones looked vaguely like giant mechanical spiders that rolled on treads, each one of their arms ending in another cleaning implement. Perhaps to lessen their resemblance to giant insects, both cleaning drones were a cheerful pastel blue. Adelaide’s courtesy android stood next to the front door, currently in a low-power state. It looked like a vaguely humanoid figure of blue plastic, its shape and features deliberately vague to avoid triggering the uncanny valley reaction that had plagued the science of robotics since its inception on primeval Earth. Native-born Calaskarans all had courtesy androids to greet guests and engage in small talk, and they all seemed to love the damned things. March didn’t see the point. Still, he supposed it was no different than an ancient society that had the custom of calling cards.

  Walking through the kitchen, he put aside all thought of robots, opened the basement door, and headed down the stairs. Adelaide had refurbished her basement into a home gym equipped with a variety of weights and a treadmill, and March got to work.

  He usually exercised on the Tiger in 150 percent gravity, but planet-side workouts did not have that option. March instead increased the weight of his exercises, performing deadlifts, squats, and military presses in front of the mirrors Adelaide had installed along one wall. March never liked watching his reflection, but it was necessary to check his form.

  Once he had finished his weight sets, his arms and shoulders and knees ached, but he still wasn’t done. He fired up Adelaide’s treadmill and ran five kilometers, sweating and breathing hard. Once he was finished, he poured himself several glasses of water in the basement bathroom, and then stripped out of his sweat-sodden shirt and dropped it into the washing machine. Using so much water at once felt vaguely decadent, but Calaskar had no shortage of potable water. It was one of the advantages of living on a planet with a human-friendly ecology and a large number of water reclamation plants.

  Breakfast next, March decided. By the time he ate, showered, and dressed, Adelaide ought to have finished her writing spurt. Perhaps they would go to Stormreel City today, he thought, or maybe Sundrex. March had been part of the Silent Order for ten years, but he had seen very little of Calaskar, and it pleased Adelaide to show him the sights of her homeworld.

  His adopted homeworld, too, come to think of it.

  March climbed the stairs to the kitchen, and to his surprise, he saw Adelaide at the counter, still wearing his exercise shirt. The loose cloth concealed her torso, but it displayed her legs to good effect.

  To very good effect. The sight of her legs, and the shape of the rest of her body beneath the shirt, suddenly dominated his thoughts.

  “You’re down early,” said March.

  Adelaide turned and grinned at him. “I finished sooner than I thought. Breakfast?” Her eyes flicked up and down his torso. It still surprised him that she never showed revulsion at the sight. He had a lot of scars on his left shoulder and chest and stomach, but as she had pointed out to him, he also had a lot of muscles beneath those scars. “Bacon and eggs. The real kind, I’m afraid, not the powdered ones. I know you prefer them, but it seems a waste not to have the real thing while on Calaskar.”

  “Yes,” said March.

  She smiled again. “Unless you were thinking of something else?”

  In answer, he stepped forward, grasped the hem of her shirt, and pulled it over her head in one smooth motion. Underneath it, she wasn’t wearing anything at all. March tugged her close and kissed her, gently at first, and then harder. He was about to suggest that they go upstairs, but it wasn’t necessary. She jumped onto him, and March lifted her up, her legs coiling around his waist and her arms around his back.

  He wound up taking her against the wall next to the stove, the sweat dripping down his face and chest, her heels pressing against the back of his legs, her moans and breathing getting louder and louder.

  Probably not the most hygienic activity for the kitchen, but that was what the cleaning drones were for.

  After they finished, they sprawled on the dining room carpet, March getting his breath back.

  “Well,” purred Adelaide, “that’s one way to work up an appetite for breakfast.”

  She curled against his right side, her head resting on his chest. Her skin felt hot against his.

  “Yes,” said March.

  It felt vaguely unreal. March had been seeing Adelaide for six months, had managed four visits to Calaskar to see her in that time, and it still felt new. Waking up in a comfortable house with running water and then starting the day by sleeping with his girlfriend…at no point had his life ever been
like this. He had grown up in a Machinist labor camp on Calixtus. His adult life had been spent as a covert operative and an assassin, first as an Iron Hand of the Machinists, and then as an Alpha Operative of the Silent Order. He had spent years traveling from one end of human space to the other, carrying out the black ops missions of first the Final Consciousness and then the Kingdom of Calaskar.

  That kind of life did not usually involve starting the day by making love to his girlfriend in her kitchen.

  “What are you thinking?” murmured Adelaide. “I can hear you thinking, you know.”

  “I thought you were right,” said March. “This is an excellent way to work up an appetite for breakfast.”

  Adelaide laughed and got to her feet in a single fluid, lithe motion, and then she stretched. Now there was a pleasant sight. March found his eyes lingering on her body, watching the play of the muscles of her legs and back beneath the smooth skin. Though she had turned so that the scar on her right thigh and stomach wasn’t visible.

  That was all right. He understood.

  “I’m going to get my workout in for the day,” said Adelaide. “Since I’m covered in sweat anyway. Though I think most of it is yours.”

  “Probably,” said March. He sat up. “I’ll have your cleaning drone go over this carpet, too.”

  She laughed. “Also a good idea.” She turned and headed for the stairs to the basement, and March watched her go. He wasn’t sure if she put extra sway into her hips because he was watching.

  Adelaide paused halfway down the stairs and looked over her shoulder at him.

  “What is it?” said March. Had she wanted to see if he had been looking?