by Richard Fox
“Nothing to declare,” Salis said.
“One moment please.” The VI’s features snapped from stern to pleasant, then froze solid.
Salis drummed her fingertips against her thigh and slid her passport back into her purse.
The holo walls snapped off, and Salis found her booth surrounded by police in light body armor and carrying carbines. There were three police that she could see, and certainly another behind her. More would arrive soon. None had their weapons pointed at her, but one had a hand on a shock pistol holstered to his chest. Salis’ fingertips tightened on the edge of her passport as a quick sequence of attacks ran across her mind.
“Don’t move,” said a policewoman who pointed a knife hand at Salis. “You’re carrying unsanctioned augmentations. You will come with us for further inspection. Any resistance and we will use deadly force.”
“There’s been some mistake,” Salis said, sounding too calm for a simple civilian surrounded by armed guards. The police backed away and swung their weapons to a low and ready position across their bodies.
“No mistake,” said a man with an accent Salis recognized as he stepped around a policeman. He wore a loose-fitting black jumpsuit with yellow and blue trim. His close-cropped gray hair and stern face put him in his late forties.
Salis stayed perfectly still, her body tense as a coiled spring.
The man pressed his lips together and grunted. He crossed his arms over his chest and pulled a sleeve back and up his forearm. Salis caught a flash of bronze chain mail and squares of armor the size of her palm layered over the mail.
“Bainvegna, Grisoni Salis,” he said.
Salis relaxed.
“Tgau, Capitan Royce,” she said.
“Someone want to explain this?” the policewoman asked.
“New recruit, lieutenant. I’ll take it from here,” he said.
The police lowered their weapons but didn’t take their eyes off Salis.
“You could have mentioned she was expected, Royce,” the lieutenant said. “Save us the trouble of getting all this crap on in the middle of a heat wave.”
“If you’d have let her slip by, I would have you all guarding crosswalks in full gear for failing to follow protocol,” Royce said. “But you should have pulled her before she ever got into the booth. Stay in kit until the end of your shift. We’ll go over where you went wrong once the new team takes over.”
“Yes, sir,” the lieutenant snapped and directed the rest of her armed team away with a jerk of her head.
Salis stood up and saluted.
“Were you testing me or them by keeping my arrival secret?” she asked.
“Both. Come with me.” Royce turned and walked toward a side door. “Why didn’t you announce your identity and purpose once the police arrived?”
“My instructions were to maintain my cover and present myself to you at the palace. Just because I was due some additional scrutiny didn’t mean I was going to give up.”
“The med scans wouldn’t have picked up your gestalt connections. You might well have made it through. But you broke your cover when you got ready for a fight. Businesspeople should panic a bit when confronted with guns—you became calm.”
“I am trained to protect and defend, not to be a spy. Espionage is beyond the remit of our contract. Does the King know this?”
“Of course he does.” Royce pushed the door open and led her toward an idling air car double-parked in front of a cargo truck. “The King has never asked us to violate our contract. He has a capable spy service of his own. I wanted to test your composure under stress and see if the heightened alert levels were being followed. Complacency is a problem across the system. Albion has been at peace for too long.”
The gull-wing doors on the air car rose up. Salis increased her pace and made for the driver’s seat…then came to a sudden stop.
“Yes, you should be driving.” Royce cited one of the oldest traditions of their order and stepped around her to sit in the driver’s seat. “But you don’t know where you’re going. Just get in.”
“Sorry, sir.” The air car’s front passenger seat had several more data screens than the few civilian models she’d ever been in. Salis found the air car’s weapon systems with a few taps, brought the electronic countermeasure systems online, and powered up the rotary cannon hidden within the car’s body. Data scrolled across the windows as the repulsor engines came to life with a hum.
“This electronics suite looks Cathay,” Salis said. “I thought Albion and the Cathay Dynasty were still at odds over the settlement from the last war.”
“They are.” Royce brought the car up into the air, rising above the screening building. “Albion prefers to use their own tech wherever and whenever possible, but they’ll hack a better system if they find it. That Albion has yet to reach a licensing agreement with Cathay is a state secret and not to be repeated.”
The captain angled the car upwards and accelerated forward.
“Albion steals technology? Surprising.”
“They have yet to arrange payment. The King considers that an important distinction.” Royce pointed toward a massive building built into the crater wall a few miles from the edge of the harbor. The structure was built into three tiers, the base a different kind of polished marble. Towers topped with exposed anti-aircraft cannons dotted each wall.
“As you can imagine, that’s where the King and the royal family live, Castle Loudon.” Royce joined a lane of air cars headed toward the center of the city.
“Security is higher than what I was briefed on. What’s going on?”
“What do you know about the Treaty of Reuilly?” Royce asked.
“That it should have ended the second expansion wars decades ago, but the bombing that killed most of the diplomats kept some of the key star nations from ratifying it. No one took responsibility for the attack; everyone still assumes their enemies were behind it. The academy laid out a decent theory that a mercenary named Ja’war the Black is responsible, but every crackpot conspiracy theorist over the last three decades has an idea.”
“Ja’war the Black was captured,” Royce said. “One of the King’s agents found him deep in wild space. They brought his cryo-tube in nine days ago. Since then, there have been a number of…security incidents. We’re not sure if it’s related to Ja’war’s capture, but we’re not taking any chances.”
“Still alive after so many years? That’s puzzling. Ja’war’s employer should have killed him after the attack—a fairly common occurrence after any high-profile assassination.” Salis looked down, ogling the concentric layout of the city around the harbor.
“Ja’war is a Faceless, the only specified bit of technology expressly forbidden by the Vitruvian Accords, but the worlds in wild space don’t hold to the Accords, or any extradition treaties. Explains why he eluded capture for so long. Small miracle he was caught.”
“How did they catch him?” Salis asked.
“You’ve never been bonded to a gestalt before, correct?” Royce steered the car out of the lane toward the castle. A warning screen popped up over the steering wheel and he tapped in an authorization code.
Salis knew better than to keep pressing about Ja’war’s capture. She was a fresh addition to Royce’s force. She would be told everything she needed to know to perform her duties and she would expect nothing more or less than that.
“Correct, sir. The surgeons cleared me for immediate augmentation.”
“I have two gestalts available. You’ll take on Andrin’s. The gestalt has had enough time to settle since the separation. You’ll assume the rest of his contract as well, assuming the King accepts your oath.”
“I…I thought I’d bond with a newborn. The benefits to both gestalt and body are—”
“We’re on the fringe of core space, Salis, not some place days from Geneva. Your assignment here is well out of the ordinary for an oath-sworn company, especially since Andrin was a medical issue and not a casualty. His gestalt will serve
you well. I’ll have you fit soon as we land,” he said, glancing at a clock on the dashboard, “and I supervise another matter.”
Salis wanted to ask about the second gestalt but held her tongue.
Chapter 3
The jungle buzzed with the morning cycle of insect life. Cicada analogs flit between orchid blossoms atop eight-foot stalks of daxmi plants, each reaching for a patch of sunlight streaming through the canopy above. Neon-blue dragonflies dove through the swarm of cicadas, snatching their breakfast with a snap of chitin on chitin.
Commodore Thomas Gage moved along a narrow animal path, his active camouflage fatigues shifting with each step, the new pattern flowing down the tightly wound acti-cloth over his rifle. He tested each step carefully, avoiding dried clumps of dead grass as his stalk continued.
The man behind him wasn’t so careful. He burst out of a patch of daxmi and stirred up a cloud of pollen that went straight to his face and eyes. Slapping a thick-fingered hand over his mouth, he fought back a sneeze, moved his hand away, then slapped it back as a terrible snort echoed through his sinuses. The heavy pack on his back jingled as loose straps bounced against each other.
“Bertram, I told you to double up on the antihistamines,” Gage said.
“Aye, sir, that you did. You and the Master Chief were also most adamant about me not falling asleep while we’re on this little hike. I take one too many of those purple pills and it’s my snoring to worry about and not my sneezing.”
Bertram looked at Gage with watery eyes and sniffed.
“Shouldn’t be so bad making a bit of noise,” Bertram said. “This is drop bear country. Best to scare them off a bit.”
“We’re looking for armed pirates,” said Gage as he ducked his head around a bend on the path and found his Siam guide, Kamala, squatting next to a mud puddle a few yards away. “Best we sneak up on them than the other way around.”
“You’re assuming the drop bears haven’t got to them first. Or the sabretooth pumas. Or a pollen fog. Those will smother a man sure as—”
Another man in camouflage came up from behind and shushed Bertram.
“Yeoman,” Master Chief Eisen grabbed Bertram by the pack and secured the loose straps, “you’re here to attend to the good Commodore. Making noise and complaining are not in that job description.”
“Walking around the blasted drop-bear-infested forests hoping to shoot strangers is not why most sailors choose to be stewards.” Bertram braced himself as Eisen finished fixing his pack. Eisen then grabbed Bertram by the shoulders and spun him around.
“Sir, may I have a word with this sailor?” Eisen asked.
Gage walked down the path to Kamala, leaving the senior sailor to convey whatever important bit of expletive-laced feedback Bertram needed.
The Siam scout squatted with his archaic rifle against one knee, his other hand hovering just above the mud. He wore a simple sleeveless khaki uniform, and a floppy hat hid the back of his head and sides of his face from view.
“Found something?” Gage asked.
“Two men, heavy,” Kamala said in the local dialect, an incomprehensible stream of brief syllables; the translation came through Gage’s earpiece. The Siam man flicked two fingers at boot impressions in the mud. He then picked up a blade of grass with small tufts of fiber at the end and touched a small indentation of a few toes and the ball of a foot.
“One girl.”
“The village leader said the pirates came at night, took the women out of the emergency shelters. We’re close?” Gage asked.
“There’s a clearing a few leagues on,” Kamala said. “A ravine big enough for a lander. Good place to hide.”
“We’ve ten armed sailors with us. We can handle two pirates.” Gage took a sensor pack from off his chest rig and brought it online with a shake. Error messages scrolled up the screen. “Still too many ionizing particles in the atmosphere. We’re down to mark one eyeballs and ears.”
Kamala rose up gracefully, as if he was made of smoke.
“Pirates come every so often,” he said. “Most we catch. If we let one or two get away, they spread what happens to any light-eye that thinks we’re weak. The disaster brought out the vultures, ones without fear. Come.”
The scout went on, blending into the grass. Gage signaled to Eisen and a sheepish-looking Bertram to follow. They passed the signal to the sailors behind them.
“Albion bothers with prisons for pirates, yes?” Kamala asked.
“Hard labor on Uffernau, one of our ice moons. Why?”
“No prisons for murderers, thieves, or deviants on Siam. I’ll show you what we do when we find them.” Kamala ducked beneath a bent lotus frond and led them into a thinning copse of foliage. “Albion is here to help after the disaster. I see the divine in you, in your people. But Siam has her own laws. Remember this.”
“I’ve dealt with pirates in wild space, seen firsthand what they’re capable of,” Gage said. “I know Siam’s had issues with some of the larger bands. We came here for humanitarian reasons. The chance to deal with pirates is a bonus for me.”
“Karma is just. Karma is patient.” Kamala moved along, his wide-bottomed sandals making barely an impression on the grass.
Gage felt heat rising as they travelled deeper into the jungle and onto a rocky slope choked with vines. The enviro-layer beneath his composite-armor body glove and active camo sent chilled fluid over his midsection and around the base of his neck, but sweat kept pouring down his face as the humidity became a steamy haze.
“Albion, you ever been to my world?” Kamala asked as he climbed up a boulder and onto a ledge.
“Transited through the system more than once to and from wild space,” Gage said, struggling to keep his words level through the strain of climbing. “Never touched down.”
“‘Wild space,’” Kamala clicked his tongue, “those beyond call it ‘free space,’ where people can live without some mushroom hundreds of light-years away deciding what they can and cannot do. Wait here a moment.” The scout stopped at the edge of a cliff and pointed to the fog bank that formed a gray abyss around them.
“For what?” Gage asked.
“Hunters, hikers…I used to lead visitors from Albion up here.” Kamala’s face fell. “We call this place The Word of Buddha. After the disaster, I don’t know if we’ll still hear it.”
A whistle began in the distance, air rushing through treetops.
Kamala tapped the butt of his rifle against a tree beside Gage, then he tucked his hat beneath an arm and wrapped a hand into a vine. The officer gripped a vine and planted his feet against bare rock.
The ground quivered as a low moan rose through the air. A blast of wind rocked Gage from side to side as the fog danced away, fleeing down a canyon that had been hidden from view moments ago.
The air cleared, and Gage could see out to the ocean and Lopburi City along the coast—what remained of Lopburi City, at least. Entire neighborhoods were smashed to rubble, crushed by a tidal wave almost a week ago. In the ocean, jutting up in front of the rising sun was a mountain peak not born from the planet, but a massive hunk of an asteroid that the Siam had brought into low orbit to be mined.
No one was exactly sure what caused the explosion aboard the asteroid because everyone involved with the operation on the rock was dead. But one of the larger fragments had crashed into the ocean and sent up a tsunami that killed almost a million people up and down the coast within hours. Fragments had bombarded much of the settled areas, setting fire to entire cities and kicking up enough dust that the planet would slip into a near ice age within years.
Lumps of burning meteors left long streaks across the sky as innumerable lumps of rock broken away from the mining station made their inevitable descent through Siam’s gravity well. Deep bands of yellow and orange traced across the horizon, spectacular with the mega-tones of kicked-up dust diffusing through the atmosphere.
The planet’s settlements were clustered along this coast. If they’d lived on the plane
t’s second-largest continent where the body of the asteroid had hit, none would have survived. The sight of thousands of miles of burning forests and a dirty scar spreading through the planet’s atmosphere had greeted 11th Fleet when they’d finally arrived to help.
“Blimey, that was something!” Bertram said. “Anyone get that on vid?”
Chief Eisen reached out and put a heavy hand on the steward’s shoulder.
“Almost there.” Kamala hopped off the rock and jogged to a small outcropping where he went prone. Gage crawled up next to him and peered over the ledge. Jungle spread beneath them in a wide ravine parallel to the canyon where The Word of Buddha had just swept through.
Gage watched as the trees swayed in the last of the wind gust, then narrowed his eyes. The leaves of the thin trees on one side of the meadow shifted differently than the rest, almost lagging behind the sway.
“Camo tarps.” Gage took an eyepiece from his belt and looked through it. He tabbed through infrared and ultraviolet settings but couldn’t see through the false front.
“Chief…” He held the optic up to Eisen, who took a quick glance and grunted.
“Top-of-the-line gear,” Eisen said. “Not your normal pirate hand-me-down crap that’s decades old.”
“That cruiser we chased out of system had decent acceleration,” Gage said. “You think we’re dealing with Harlequins?”
“Taking slaves and leaving their own behind isn’t Harlequin MO. Totenkopf or Wyverns is my guess,” the chief said.
“Totenkopf come to trade,” Kamala said. “They stay in the star ports, behave themselves. Wyverns demanded tribute. It didn’t go well for any of us.” He rubbed a hand over a burn scar on his arm.
“Wyverns were mostly Francia military that refused to surrender at the end of the last war, but that was decades ago,” Gage said. “Attrition…lack of spare parts after the Reich smashed their shipyards over Bordeaux…shouldn’t be too difficult.”
“You want us to sneak down there with ten armed sailors—not Marines who live for this sort of thing—and do what exactly, sir?” Eisen asked.
