Camallay: An Infinite Worlds Novel (Marik's Marauders)

by Joel Babbitt

  * * *

  Word of the attack, and especially of the casualties, passed quickly through the rest of Colonel Alexander’s team. Jack Wolf, the resident survivalist known for his bushy red sideburns, seemed unphased. Sandra Pastore, who was the team’s doctor, was in near hysteria however. There was a certain frailty about her, as if she could break at any moment, and the shock of the attack was causing cracks to show in her already-fragile psyche. She kept saying that this wasn’t what she had signed on for, and that she couldn’t believe that such a thing could happen on a Rae Liam Dominion planet. She went on and on about how the Solkin Overlords were supposed to keep such things from happening, as if they actually exerted such tight control.

  Jack Wolf wondered silently why the colonel had accepted her as the team’s doctor. He wasn’t the type to put too much stock in a woman’s looks, though if he had he probably would have been tempted to think that was why she was there; she was an eye-catching beauty with long golden hair and all the right curves. However, the sudden thought that a disgraced doctor who was without a Prexlar medical license was probably a cheap hire made him smirk. He was certain that had to be the reason she had been hired on.

  Marik was nothing if not cost conscious.

  All of the troopers got very quiet and very serious when Sergeant Thompson gathered them up and told them about the attack. Thompson didn’t have to do his normal cajoling, berating, and creative threatening to get them to move with a purpose as they set about getting all their gear ready for offloading.

  By the time Lieutenant Pete Flanagan finished his systems checks on the team’s jetcar everyone’s gear bags were loaded on a pallet, all weapons had been checked, and everyone was in their camouflage patterned nanomer-weave under armor, complete with thick black laminate outer-armor plating, or slap-plates as the troops called them. The team’s common gear, sensor packages, and communications gear had all remained packed during the weeks-long journey through the jump tunnels from Prexlar to Camallay.

  Soon, Captain Washington reported to the colonel that all was in readiness. Though they didn’t expect problems, neither had Port Operations and everyone knew what had happened to them. No, Marik’s Marauders were going down sober and ready for anything.

  * * *

  Ten standard hours had passed quickly since the attack on Taysom Island, taking with it the short night and rapid dawn of the company’s first day on Camallay. All remaining civilian employees had cleared out long before Colonel Alexander and his team landed via shuttle at the makeshift spaceport in the center of the island, so that when they arrived the only people there to greet them were a handful of local fire and police personnel. Camallay was an almost exclusively human colony planet, which Alexander found comforting. Marik had no issues with hiring other races, like the team’s kiz’zit and trillo, but Alexander had always felt most comfortable among his own kind, though there was a soft spot in his heart for yazri warriors from his days as a young lieutenant back in the bug wars.

  Alexander quickly established a rapport with the fire chief, while his troops reestablished security and dug alongside the first responders and their various helperbots through the collapsed structures in search of any other victims of the attacks. It had been a long, hard night full of the desperate work of digging through collapsed structures for bodies and collecting up remains, followed by heaving the structures themselves piece by piece into recycle bins for reclamation.

  At the end of the night, not long after dawn, the lead investigator for the area arrived. Alexander wondered why the man had waited so long to come to the scene of what had to have been the largest crime committed in his district ever. It didn’t take him long to see why, however. As the man stepped out of the skimmer the entire skimmer seemed to heave upward with an almost audible sigh. The lead investigator was a behemoth of a man. Walking with such a girth could only be possible on a lower-gravity planet like this. His waist had to have been as broad as any four other men combined, though he stood no taller than Colonel Alexander. It had taken him an extraordinary effort to walk from his skimmer to the Port Operations buildings, or at least what was left of them, where Alexander greeted him.

  “I’m afraid that the only leads we have so far point to Timmok Separatists,” the lead police investigator was saying, his untrimmed gray mustache puffed out as he talked, his gelatinous belly shaking with the effort of walking about the compound. He took a cloth out of a pocket in his suit pants and with one beefy hand wiped at the sweat that was pouring down his face, tugging at his already loose collar as the mid-morning heat came in.

  “I’ve heard of the difficulties that your government’s spending problems have created in your northernmost province,” Alexander said, referring to Timmok Province. “But why would the separatists attack this compound?”

  “You know my government bought several armored vehicle kits from Marik Corp not long ago, and that we used the vehicles we built with them to break up the riots in North Point City, right?”

  “I do,” Alexander nodded. “Though the credits have yet to clear.”

  The investigator shrugged his shoulders, a movement that reminded Alexander of a mound of jello. “Camallay is not a wealthy world, but we will eventually pay our debts. But as for the bombing, perhaps this is the separatists’ way of striking back.”

  Colonel Alexander thought for a moment, then shook his head. “I don’t know. Those vehicles didn’t come through here. They were delivered to the spaceport in First Landing City. This place really only existed for one thing; to support the MCS Venture.”

  “Well, what about your corporate rivals?” the lead investigator asked, as though this were Colonel Alexander’s investigation and not his. “Stellar Corp is known to use… aggressive tactics. And then there’s the Timmok Conglomerate. I don’t think they appreciated that load of merchandise your ship flooded their markets with two months ago.”

  “I can’t see why they would risk the Solkin Magistrate revoking their charter,” Alexander said flatly.

  The large man shrugged and his entire body shook again with the ripples of the motion. “Anyway, I’ve seen what I need to see. The line officers will report anything interesting.”

  Alexander looked the large man in the eyes with a steely gaze. “You don’t get out of the office much, do you,” he said in an even tone.

  The large man seemed taken aback at the comment. Once he realized that Alexander wasn’t joking, he huffed in indignation and turned around to make for his skimmer. Colonel Alexander just shook his head as the chief investigator stumped away.

  “Guess this one’s up to us then,” he said as he squinted toward the glimmer the mid-morning sun made on the calm surface of the Glass Sea, his situence glasses automatically dimming with the glare. “Why did they sink you, lady Venture?” he asked to no one in particular, “and who done it?”

  * * *

  Shortly after landing the evening before, Alexander had sent Captain Washington with Doctor Pastore and a pair of young specialists for their security to visit the five wounded who had been evacuated. There had been seven, but two of the civilian employees had died before emergency medical personnel had arrived and so they were lined up with the rest of the bodies.

  Washington hadn’t known any of the survivors of the attack, but she took the time to sit and talk with the one civilian that was conscious. He was a human junior port operations worker that went by Jimmy who had been returning from getting the hover ferry back into operation when the third vehicle bomb had thrown glass from the building next to him into his side, spearing his right kidney and peppering his right side with thousands of razor-sharp microshards.

  Washington joked with the young man, who was delusional with all the pain medication, about anything and everything she could think of, just to keep his mind off his injuries. It wasn’t much, and even after fifteen years in military organizations she wasn’t very good at it, but her efforts seemed to help keep his mind off the shard of glass still sticking
out of his side, at least until the doctors sent their bots to take him into the operating room.

  As the helperbots whisked the young man away on his repulsor-gurney, Washington stood up and stretched. Just then Doctor Sandra Pastore entered, the familiar confines of a medical facility helping to calm her previously frayed nerves.

  “How are the yazri, Doc?” Washington asked.

  Sandra nodded and smiled a wan smile. “The one they call Sergeant Hobbs was cracked on the head by some piece of plasteel likely off the truck bomb that blew up near the gate. He’s doing well enough—just a glancing blow really. The other one, Soar they call him… miraculously he took no shrapnel from the blast, but he’s got burns over a large part of his body.”

  Washington grimaced at that. She’d had her share of injuries in her line of work and burns were probably the most painful.

  “Their doing a scrape and replace right now,” Sandra continued. “Once the plastiflesh dries, they’re going to have to do some pretty extensive hair replication. Right now he’s as bald as us humans over ninety percent of his body.”

  “And his eyes and ears?” Washington asked tentatively.

  “Surprisingly intact… well, after the scrape and replace they’ll look right, but the organs themselves are fine. Even his skin flaps are generally intact, though they’ll be replacing the entire inside on both sides,” she said, making motions with her hands to illustrate the billowing skin flaps that served all yazri as wings for gliding from tree to tree.

  “Then it will be some time,” Washington said.

  “No, it won’t,” Sandra shook her head. “They have three medical droids here, though why such a small place would have three I don’t know, but they’re working rather quickly. We may see both Soar and Sergeant Hobbs back at Taysom Island by tomorrow.

  * * *

  Jack ‘Wolfman’ Wolf was sorting through the pieces of the attack vehicles’ wreckage under the shade of a cluster of palm trees, wondering why helperbots weren’t doing this job instead of him. He rubbed the bushy red sideburns that were his trademark. When he’d paid for the genmod that gave him abnormally keen senses his then-wife had demanded that he have them tame his unruly sideburns or get rid of them—but they were on the outs, so he kept the sideburns and got rid of her instead.

  “I think the vehicle ID plates are the only clues we’re going to find. Can’t say I see any sign of a control matrix in all this,” Lieutenant Pete Flanagan said as he dumped yet another box of shrapnel onto a tarp.

  “It don’t matter,” Wolfman said in his sing-song colonial accent. “You can empty all the boxen you want, but there be no way the control matrix survived.” He blew hard out through his nose. “I’m doubting we’ll find anything of value in this stinking mess.”

  On the other side of the tarp from them, Specialist Ya-da-na—whom they called Triplets—was sorting the mess as well, one aspect picking out interesting parts while the other two aspects sniffed and examined them.

  “I tend to…” Ya said.

  “Agree with Wolfman on…” Da said.

  “This one,” Na finished.

  Lieutenant Flanagan was standing with his hands on his hips chewing his lip, the empty box cast aside for the moment. Looking at the pile of shrapnel—almost all of it smaller than a standard dominion credit stick—he was inclined to agree with Wolfman as well. But Colonel Alexander’s orders had been clear. They were to analyze the wreckage the helperbots and first responders had gathered and see if it offered any clue as to the identity of their attacker.

  “Maybe we’re looking for the wrong thing,” Flanagan said.

  Wolf raised one bushy red eyebrow quizzically. “And what do ye think we should be looking for?”

  All three of Triplets aspects stopped what they were doing and looked up in perfect synchronicity at Lieutenant Flanagan. “Yes… what do you… mean?” the three bodies asked.

  Flanagan was taken aback by the trillo’s synchronized focus, but shaking his head, he refocused and stood thinking for a few moments more, then finally shrugged. “I don’t know. It just seems that something is eluding us here.”

  The three of them searched for a while more, using every visual enhancer they could dig up in their situence glasses’ libraries and setting their in-glass bots to provide analysis of the pieces they were looking at, before word came over the linker from Captain Washington directing Flanagan to come pick her and the doctor up in the team’s jetcar.

  There are certain perks to being the only pilot, Pete Flanagan thought as he walked out of earshot of Wolfman’s grumbling, and getting out of onerous duties like this one is certainly one of them. His pace quickened as he thought about his two beautiful passengers. Yes, flying Shannon Washington and Sandra Pastore around is definitely a perk as well, he thought. He shook his head to clear it. He couldn’t afford to think of Captain Washington as anything but his superior officer—but Doc Pastore on the other hand… she was a civilian. And other than her obvious beauty, there was a certain frailty about her that Pete Flanagan found attractive.

  While he was gone Jack Wolf and Specialist Ya-da-na finished sorting through the shrapnel. For all his enhanced senses, Wolfman passed right over some scorched and shredded parts of the lone sticker that the bomb makers had forgotten to remove, a sticker that held the slightest shred of a corporate crest.

  * * *

  Jim Ryker pulled up in his battered skimmer, which seemed to fit in eerily well in the aftermath of the four vehicle bombs that had struck Port Operations. Seeing Colonel Alexander, Ryker jumped out of the vehicle and grabbed his pack. Browsing the tags in his situence glasses on all the other folks working in the late-morning sun, he walked over to Alexander to see where things stood. Alexander was talking with one of his soldiers at the moment, so Ryker waited impatiently with his hands in his pocket, rocking back and forth in the sand. At last, Alexander noticed him.

  “Well, if it isn’t the investigator the boss sent me,” Alexander said as he extended a hand. “I assume you’re more useful than that fellow I just chased off.”

  Ryker’s eyebrows rose questioningly as he looked off in the distance where a skimmer that listed heavily to one side was making its way back off the island. Turning back to Alexander, he smiled a purposeful smile. “I’m Jim Ryker from Crimes Division,” he said, though he was sure the colonel’s glasses had already told him that.

  Alexander sized up the younger man for a moment. “I’m Colonel Marshal Alexander, but you can call me Colonel. You aren’t that nephew of the boss that used to always be getting in trouble, are you?” he said, almost distastefully.

  Ryker laughed a convicted laugh before he realized Alexander wasn’t kidding. Clearing his throat, he got suddenly serious as if he were a kid again facing the principal for the umpteenth time. “Um, I guess you could say that,” he said, glancing up with as honest an expression on his face as he could muster.

  “Well,” Alexander said, “at least you’re honest about it. I don’t have any use for a man who can’t see who he is.” Stopping suddenly to analyze something his situence glasses had pointed out to him, Alexander reached out and scraped the solkin paradroid’s microtracker off of Ryker’s pack. Holding it up to show its incognizant former host before smashing it under the heel of his boot. “Looks like you had a little run in with local law enforcement,” he said, frowning at Ryker. “Try to keep a lower profile, will you?”

  Ryker just shrugged his shoulders and followed as Alexander turned and started walking him through the disaster area. The colonel pointed out where each of the vehicle bombs had exploded, the damage the bombs had done that the helperbots had already cleaned up, the timeline of the attack pieced together from local vidcams, and anything they had been able to piece together about the attacking vehicles up to that point, which was very little. Ryker was impressed with how thorough the man was.

  Through it all, Ryker listened intently, asking questions throughout but offering no hypotheses. As they came to the end of the
tour, Alexander turned to look at the younger man. “Well, what do you think?”

  Ryker pursed his lips and thought for a moment. “I don’t think it would be a corporate rival. We all know that the Solkin authorities wouldn’t stand for such a loss in revenue caused by one of our competitors. They’d take the loss in taxes out of that corporation’s operating capital if need be.”

  Alexander nodded his head. “Yes, they seem like they’d have too much to lose, and nothing much to gain.”

  Ryker kept going with his line of thinking. “I just came from Timmok Province, and I get the separatists, but I don’t know if they’d do something so brazen.”

  Alexander nodded his head again. “It does seem unlikely. But who, then? If it isn’t a corporate rival or the Timmok Separatists, then who could have done this?”

  “Well, who else has the resources and the motive?” Ryker asked. Before Alexander could answer, he continued. “What about the colonies?”

  Alexander looked at him quizzically.

  “The colonies on the eastern continent,” Ryker clarified.

  “I know what you’re talking about; the colonies on the other side of the Glass Sea, the lawless zones where the Solkin authorities haven’t yet seen fit to make the full weight of their presence felt,” Alexander said evenly.

  “Well, wasn’t the Venture carrying a cargo of weapons to one of them?” Ryker asked rhetorically. “What if a rival warlord decided to weaken a potential rival by sinking their shipload of military gear?”

  Alexander chewed his lip for a few moments. “Half of the vehicles on the Venture were for one of the colonies, and the other half were for the Timmok authorities.”

  “So both the rival colonies out east and the Timmok Separatists have a motive to sink the Venture,” Ryker said.