He suspected that this particular crowd was feeling relieved because his daughter Ayliss was due to depart the next day, after a six-month residence. As an officer of the Veterans Auxiliary, Ayliss was being placed in charge of one of the newly-formed veteran colonies in the war zone. She’d spent the previous weeks being trained in her new duties by Olech and Reena, which some had viewed as an unwelcome rapprochement between the absentee father and the resentful daughter. For years, a rumor had circulated that Chairman Mortas hired attractive young men and women in a subconscious effort to replace the two motherless children who had grown up disliking him. The presence of his daughter at Unity had damaged the psychological ecosystem for many of its personnel, and they were glad to see her go.
The sun broke through the clouds for half an inhalation, momentarily casting the smiling faces in a bleached-out light. For that instant, in Olech’s mind, they took on the pale, empty visages of dead men and women. Olech recognized some of the blank masks as people he’d sent to the war, all of them young, all of them killed. It was not the first time he’d hallucinated in this fashion, though the experience was relatively new.
Olech maintained his pleasant façade when he reached the security wall around the enormous stone tower that was his home. Moving through the scanners on a side gate, he wondered just how the carefree staffers would feel if they could see what he sometimes saw in them. Or if they knew that Ayliss was not the only Mortas who was about to leave them.
Nabulit looked up when Leeger reentered the interrogation room. He didn’t speak, so Leeger placed an object on the table within his reach. It was a small dagger with a black handle inside a worn scabbard, and it made Nabulit look away.
“We found this hidden in your effects, along with the recordings of the Chairman’s son. Jander told me about the man who owned this dagger. Cranther, the Spartacan Scout who died saving his life on Roanum. Jan was carrying this knife, and a longer one, when he got to Glory Main. Decided to help yourself to a souvenir?”
Nabulit looked down at the weapon, but made no move to touch it.
Leeger took the dagger, and drew it from its sheath. The black blade showed some wear when he placed it directly in front of the other man. “Go on. Pick it up. I’ll fight you barehanded, and you can use the knife. You win, we’ll let you go.”
“That’s a lie.”
“It’s a chance. Troops just like Jan and Cranther are taking chances all over the war zone even as we speak. Pick it up.”
“No.”
Leeger walked to the observation window. He laced his fingers behind his back, and began examining the dark, non-reflective pane. His heart rate slowly increased as he waited for the sound of the chair, but after a few long seconds he knew nothing would happen. He returned to the table.
“This is what I hate the most about guys like you.” Leeger retrieved the weapon and seated it in its carrier. “You didn’t even try.”
The double slap on the hatch caused it to open, and the dagger went outside. Leeger sat down.
“Now you’re going to tell me everything I want to know.”
Olech stood in another darkened room, meeting with another man who specialized in personal protection. They were far beneath Unity’s central tower, looking through a sheet of bulletproof glass at a broad indoor firing range. The vista resembled a wooded countryside, a mock-up with rolling terrain, trees, bushes, and failing light. A lone figure with blond hair and black fatigues lay prone just in front of them between two fake hillocks, sighting down the barrel of a long Scorpion rifle.
“Watch this.” Olech’s companion was large, and his head was shaved almost bald. He extended a paw-like hand to press a button on a control console just below the window.
Far downrange, where the trees and bushes blocked the view, the silhouette of a human figure hopped up and began running toward them in a crouching zigzag. In the semidarkness, it was little more than a shadow. Before the moving shape had gone three steps, another one popped up from behind a mound many yards to the left and rushed forward. The first runner dived headfirst behind a low rise in the ground, and a third figure materialized off to the right, charging ahead.
The prone shooter might as well have been a statue. The moving men repeated their brief moments of exposure in a seemingly random fashion, never more than two of them up at the same time, each exposed for only a few seconds. Olech studied the runners’ movements, how they tried to reach the cover of low ground but sometimes opted for the concealment of the fake shrubbery. He noted with a combat veteran’s eye that they never popped up in exactly the same spot where they’d gone to ground, and that they alternated the direction in which they crawled or rolled before rising again.
A speaker in the room broke the silence with a sharp crack, and the prone shooter seemed to flinch just a bit. The runner on the left, two strides into his rush, flipped over backward when the slug hit him. A second shot followed almost immediately, knocking down the middle runner just as he was rising from cover.
The shooter shifted minutely, swinging the long rifle to the right before firing three rapid shots. Tall fronds of faux grass jerked and twitched with the passage of the rounds, then the last runner was up too, having been flushed out by the near misses. The shooter fired twice more, drilling the projectiles into the fleeing figure’s back and toppling it to the ground.
“Well done.” The voice of the bald man boomed out over the firing range, but the shooter made no effort to acknowledge the compliment. The light in the room brightened just enough to show the three robot targets, human in every regard, coming to their feet where they had been gunned down. Glowing circles showed where the rounds had struck them, and they stood there in mute machine accusation.
“Resetting. This iteration the opponents will utilize smoke obscurants.” The light went down again, and the robots hustled off.
“You’ve done a fine job with her, Dom.” Olech gave a brief nod to the security man, Dominic Blocker. Deep lines crossed Blocker’s forehead, but he radiated physical vitality.
“If I couldn’t teach her how to shoot in six months, I ought to hang it up. She’s a natural, by the way.”
“Takes after her old man. I was the best shot in my platoon in Basic.”
“That’s funny. The official history says there wasn’t time for Basic before you and the other kids shipped out.” Blocker’s voice was deep, the words unkind. Olech Mortas had joined the war against the Sims in its third year, when the conflict had been going so badly that a special waiver had dropped the volunteer age to twelve. Fifteen years old, he’d been thrown into battle with an army made up mostly of children. Badly wounded on a planet in a distant solar system, Olech had returned to Earth as one of the few survivors among the waivered recruits, a revered group still known collectively as the Unwavering.
“Sometimes the official story is different from the truth.”
“Is that what Ayliss and I are going to find out on Quad Seven?” The colony Ayliss was slated to administer was on a planet code-named FC–7777, the two-letter prefix standing for Force Colonized. “That what you told her here is different from what she’ll find there?”
“Reena and I told her the truth, while failing to convince her to take a different colony. It’s going to be rough out there.”
“You’ve got that right. A recently conquered planet, already being mined by Zone Quest, colonized by some worn-out combat vets who think they’re going to inherit the place. Deep in the war zone, in a part of space routinely worked by Sim raiders and human pirates. And your daughter is the Veterans Auxiliary minister who’s supposed to organize that circus.”
“Don’t sell those troops short. You’re a combat vet, older than most of the ones you’ll meet out there, and you’re not worn out.”
Blocker ignored the compliment. “It’s a guaranteed losing situation no matter how you cut it. The Zone Ques
t managers are going to ignore her, and when the vets see that happen, they’re going to reject her.”
“Zone Quest will play ball with her just fine. They know they’re only operating on that planet because I’m letting them.”
“That won’t hold up. The troops believe you gave the planet to the Auxiliary, and when they see that Ayliss is all chummy with the outfit that’s mining the place without their permission, they’ll turn against her.”
“Listen to that pessimism. Not the Dom Blocker I remember.”
“The Dom Blocker you remember was seventeen years younger. He couldn’t make you listen to him then, and apparently he can’t do it now.”
“I didn’t listen to you because you didn’t want me to do the one thing that was going to keep Ayliss and Jan alive.”
“Your kids would have been just as safe if you’d let Faldonado and me track down Lydia’s murderers. They poisoned your wife, robbed your kids of their mother, and what did you do? Pretended you didn’t care, about your wife or your own children.”
“You keep forgetting it worked.”
“And you think that was a good thing? I don’t know who else bought your charade, but Jan doesn’t trust you at all, and Ayliss is worse. The woman I’ve been working with for the last six months is nothing like the little girl I left with you. She’s fueled by blind rage, and that’s your fault. You’re just lucky that she found somebody else to hate.”
The prone figure glanced back at them, and an impatient voice came over the intercom. “You going to give me something new to shoot, Dom?”
Blocker activated the intercom. “What did I teach you? You shoot, you move.”
“But I got them all.”
“You never get them all. Move.”
They watched as Ayliss slowly wormed backward, away from the notch that had been her firing position. Slipping into a minor depression, she cradled the rifle in her elbows and began crawling toward another spot.
“Did you hear that? The eagerness? In all of the ranges I’ve been on in my life, no matter what the target looked like, I never once fantasized I was shooting a living being.” Blocker pointed. “I believe your little girl imagines she’s shooting someone every time she squeezes the trigger.”
“Me, you mean? I doubt that. We’ve been spending a lot of time together these past few months.”
“No, I don’t think she’s shooting you, or even that bastard Python. She got one hell of a rush when she pushed him over that railing. I think that’s why she took this job, why she picked Quad Seven, and why she’s set aside her anger at you.”
Olech’s voice was low. “You mean she’s kill-crazy?”
“Worse. In the fifteen years I spent in the war zone, I only saw a few guys who’d gone batshit over the blood. They were easy to spot; got all goofy whenever there was a chance of a fight. No, Ayliss is different. She knows she had to kill Python, but I think she was very surprised by how much she enjoyed it. She wants that feeling again, and she knows you can get away with a lot out in the zone.”
The crawling figure in fatigues had found a new firing point at the base of a fake tree. Slowly extending the Scorpion, Ayliss looked down the barrel to familiarize herself with the new view.
“Look at the concentration. She’s actually having fun out there. Reminds me of her mother.”
Olech snorted. “That’s the first time I ever heard that one. Everybody says Ayliss is just like me, and that Jan is just like Lydia.”
“People don’t see beyond the obvious. Ayliss resembles you, so of course she’s just like you. Same for Jan and Lydia. Add in the way she died, and all the time that’s gone by, and basically everybody forgot what she was like.”
“I remember.”
“Not sure you do. Or that you remember what you used to be like. You had the right medals, but she had the brains. She wasn’t murdered to bring you to heel; it was to stop her from feeding you ideas that some people didn’t like.”
“Whoever they were, they’ve learned differently, haven’t they? I am the Chairman of the Emergency Senate, you know.”
“You wield a lot of power, but you spend a lot of time trying to keep everybody happy.”
“Keeping everybody happy?”
“You look the other way on all sorts of things, in the name of keeping the alliance going. Like the slavery on Celestia. It’s barbaric.”
“Funny choice of words, there. Did you know that Horace and the rest of the Celestian leadership refer to the war zone as Barbaricum? Old Roman term for basically anything outside the Empire.”
“They use a lot of funny words on Celestia. It’s important to call a slave something else if you want to sleep through the night.”
“Not sure how we ended up talking about Celestia.”
“Yes you are. I’m an old personal-security man, and I can tell when something big is in the works. You’re taking a trip off-world. You’re going to use Ayliss’s departure to cover your own, and something tells me you’ll be stopping to see Horace Corlipso.”
“I’m managing a war that stretches across entire star systems, Dom. And the Step lets me go anywhere. So if I did decide to go somewhere, what makes you think it would be Celestia?”
“Because Reena’s going too. The only reason you’d take the chance of both of you disappearing is because you need her along when you see her brother.”
“You make visiting the man who runs Celestia sound like a bad idea.”
“It could be. I was long in the war zone when President Larkin got nailed, but once the Purge was done, a lot of new faces started showing up as recruits. Familiar faces. People who used to work security for some of the senators who died with Larkin.”
“Yes?”
“They told me that Horace’s bodyguards came to work that day loaded for bear—and that they killed Larkin, as well as several senators Horace didn’t like. Not by accident.”
“I’ve heard that rumor before. What are you saying?”
“Horace assassinated half the human government and made it look like an accident. I’m saying a guy like that could easily poison the troublesome wife of a promising politician.”
Olech finally reached the last shadowy room of the day. This one wasn’t far from the shooting range below Unity’s main tower, and it was almost as big. It contained one of mankind’s most important secrets, and so it was even more secure than Olech’s personal quarters.
The woman who shared those quarters stood very close to one of the room’s looming walls, the fingers of one hand resting on a glass frame just below eye level. The entire wall, and two of the others, was covered in panels just like the one she was touching. The lights in the room were low, giving a golden hue to the parchment-like material inside each of the frames. Her own face, framed by dark red hair and tinged with concern, looked back in a ghostly reflection.
At one time, Reena Corlipso had spent endless hours in that room, studying the almost-hieroglyphic messages. The meaning of the pictographs had been deciphered long ago, shortly after the panels had been found inside a deep-space probe that had mysteriously reappeared near Earth. The ease of decryption was not surprising, as the pictures were meant to be understood. They described the miraculous technology that had carried the probe back to Earth. The Step.
The faster-than-light method of travel had allowed humanity to reach out across the solar systems, colonizing habitable planets until the dark day when they encountered the Sims. Although the Step’s origin was an old secret shrouded in rumor and outright lies, the people who knew the truth sometimes wondered if the gift had been a cruel trick by a malicious and still-unidentified entity.
The room’s small door opened, and Reena knew without looking that her lover had arrived. She turned toward the tall figure and watched it resolve into the man she knew so well. Olech wore a dark suit cut in a military
style with a high collar, and the blood-red ribbon that marked him as one of the Unwavering stood out on his chest. Strong hands slid around her waist, exploring the swell of her hips and the fabric of her dress. Cut low to show off her considerable bosom, it was informal attire that she usually reserved for the bedroom.
They kissed, acknowledging the approach of a series of voyages that might separate them forever. They embraced in silence while Reena noted the unusual way that Olech’s weight bore down on her. She slid her palms onto his cheeks and raised his face from her shoulder.
“You know, two people who are finally going to get married really should look a lot happier than we do.”
“Honestly, if I haven’t learned it by now I’m just going to have to figure it out once I’m there.” Ayliss Mortas had joined her father and Reena in the subterranean room. Her blond hair, which she’d kept long her whole life, was now cut off just below her ears. She wore well-used walking boots, into which a coarse set of olive drab trousers were tucked. A long tan shirt hung down over her hips, and a leather belt crossed her waist. Conditions on FC–7777 were austere, and she’d been wearing that rig or military fatigues for most of the prior six months to get ready.
“Just a few final reminders, that’s all.” Despite the many hours Olech had spent tutoring his daughter in the past weeks, he appeared slightly nervous. “Whatever you do, don’t favor one side too much. The veterans will try to manipulate you as a representative of the Auxiliary, and Zone Quest will try to paint you as being on their side because I let them continue operating there.”
Ayliss gave him a smirk. “You know, this all sounds vaguely familiar. As if I heard it over and over these last several months.”
“How is Lee doing out there?” Reena asked. The trio stood in the center of the room, near the ancient space probe that had carried the diagrams that adorned the walls. There were many places in Unity where they could speak without fear of surveillance, but few of them were as secure as this room.
“Making lots of new friends. If I don’t get out there soon, they’ll probably make him an honorary vet—or enlist him.” Lee Selkirk had been the chief of Ayliss’s security detail until their relationship had been revealed by their nearly disastrous brush with the duplicitous Python. Fired from that role, he’d traveled to FC–7777 two weeks earlier. “You were right about sending him in without a cover story. The veterans had already identified a few moles among them, people they believed were Zone Quest spies, and they weren’t gentle when they ejected them.”
Dire Steps Page 2
