by Darren Beyer
“Wait a minute!” Sophia all but yelled. “While we’re at it, should we redefine the word ‘terrorist’?”
“He is no terrorist,” Gisela shot back. “How can you say that?”
“Because I know him too—”
“May I ask a question?” Mandi interrupted.
All eyes turned toward her.
“Why,” she said, “would this Nassir guy reach out, especially months ago or more? And why to Danny Dagan, and not Jans?”
“The ‘why Danny’ is an easy question to answer,” Jans responded. “Deniability. I could have no knowledge of contact between AIC and a known terror group. Just the accusation of such was enough to help Andrews justify the invasion and his takeover of our company—our world. As to why he would reach out at all…? Grae said it was for something important. Important enough that Danny would risk communications with him to learn about it.”
Mandi felt a sudden energy, as if her mind was expanding. Her vision flashed, and she was forced to steady herself.
Her voice took on an urgency that surprised even her. “There is something to this. The question is what?”
Jans looked toward her with concern, and shared a glance with Gisela.
“Who knows?” Jans looked back toward the now-blank holo screen. “The last contact I had with him was literally decades ago.”
“Who is he?”
“He is—was—” Gisela let out a deep sigh. “He was part of our first team on Hyperion, and part of the team that—”
“The team that won Hyperion for us,” Jans interjected. “As long as I’ve known him, he’s deeply distrusted the government, the big corporations. He played no small part in the decision to keep everything we found on Hyperion a secret. But to do that, we needed the rights to the moon—all of it. And no one had ever gotten mineral rights to an entire moon before. So to get what we wanted, we had to give up something.” Jans paused, and his mouth rose in a sad half grin. “I told Danny this same story…”
Gisela placed a hand on his shoulder. “To get Hyperion,” she said, continuing where Jans left off, “we had to give up the secrets of our mass sensor technology. None of us wanted to do it, but we had to be pragmatic, to look at the bigger picture. Nassir felt differently. After everything we’d gone through to get there, he felt we should fight to keep it all, that giving up anything was too much. And his belief was unshakeable—it was deep within him, something he knew to be right. So he left us, and became sympathetic to the causes of some Outer Sphere militant groups. But he never went so far as to join them, at least overtly. Then Aqaba happened.”
“I know about Aqaba,” Mandi said. “It was my thesis subject. During the Jordanian Revolution, Coalition military contractors wiped out an entire section of the city.”
“His family lived there.” Gisela shook her head, and tears welled in her eyes.
“He became radicalized,” Sophia snapped. “And he turned up on government watch lists. The next thing we know, he’s leading an Outer Sphere group. You don’t get that label without deserving it.”
“You still hold a grudge,” Gisela said to her, sternly.
“And you’re still too attached. He left us, Gisela. When we needed him the most, he put the specter of terrorism over our heads, and left us. We can’t trust him.”
“Danny thought we could.”
“Enough!” Jans’s commanding voice put an end to the debate. Then his eyes softened and he sat back in his chair. “We need help. Andrews is bringing in his contract military power. The noose is tightening.”
“What about the other Alliances—Pan Asian, Eastern Bloc?” Sophia asked. “Why don’t we go to them?”
Jans shook his head. “They’re all being too cautious. The invasion interrupted their hyperium supply, and they don’t want to make any move that might jeopardize getting their shipments going again. So we’re alone, outnumbered, and with Andrews bringing in those gunships, the odds are worsening. If Danny were alive, I’d debate this Nassir thing with him. Security was his bag, and he knew it well. In the end, he’d likely win out. But that’s a debate I’ll never have.” He let out a deep sigh. “All I have to go on now is his voice from beyond the grave.”
“Jans—”
“Arguing will do no good, Sophia. Danny believed that Nassir has something that can change what’s going on. We must contact him.”
Sophia threw up her hands. “How do you plan to do that? Dagan said any meeting must be face to face. And at Ouricsen Station? It’s what—fifty, sixty light years away?”
“Sixty-one.” Jans shrugged. “I looked it up.”
Sophia glared at him. “So that means a long-range ship. As far as I know, we’ve only got one here: the Quantum Surveyor. Do you really think she could get past those gunships out there?”
“We could take Dauntless,” Mandi said. “Captain Stanton already dodged those things to get to Eridani.”
“Dauntless?” Sophia looked at Mandi. “I seem to remember being on board when her jump coils burned up. I’m pretty sure you were there, too.”
“I remember—I just about broke my arm.”
“Then you know they haven’t been replaced. Dauntless can’t go interstellar.”
“She doesn’t need to,” Jans said. “We’ve still got long-range haulers and survey ships hiding out all over known space. We can shoot off a jump pod, and get one to rendezvous with Dauntless in the outer reaches of this system, well beyond the range of any patrols. Then I could transfer over to it and be off.”
“Wait—you could transfer?” Sophia was aghast.
“Sophia, this won’t be easy—Nassir won’t trust just anyone. It has to be a senior representative, which means someone in this room. You weren’t too kind to Nassir when he left, and your sentiments haven’t lost their edge with time. Clearly. I doubt he’d even open the door for you. And Gisela must stay here, for obvious reasons. That leaves me.”
“You can’t go—you’re needed here. You’re our leader!”
Jans stood, walked to Sophia, then knelt and placed his hands on her shoulders. “How long do you think we can hold out? Andrews didn’t quite catch us flat-footed—hell, we’ve done some damage and will do more— but the Casimir bridge is something we never saw coming. We’re up against very long odds, and as a leader, it’s incumbent upon me to try to even them.”
Sophia couldn’t meet his gaze and lowered her head. Gently, Jans placed his fingers under her chin and drew her face up to look at him.
“You know I need to do this,” he said softly. “There is no other way.” All Sophia could muster was a slight nod.
“Okay.” Jans stood. “Let’s get word to Captain Stanton. Tell him that as soon as he brings Dauntless back, he’s taking her out again. And this time, I’ll be the cargo.”
Chapter 11: Eridani
A warbling alarm startled Grae from his sleep. Instantly alert, he leapt from his cot and ran to the control room. On the sensor display, he saw three red dots closing on his position, each with a flashing “bogey” label.
“What do you mean, bogeys? How the hell do we have incoming bogeys?” He pulled up the sensor system’s best guess at an identification. “Drone carriers.”
As he stood and reached for his helmet, his sleeve pulled back slightly, revealing a red rash on his forearm.
“What the hell?”
When he touched the welts, they itched, and he felt a similar sensation around his calves. Pulling up the leg of his flight suit, he saw a rash there as well.
“Shit,” he said as he donned his helmet. “Skimmer, emergency power-up procedure. Retract camo.”
Grae ran to the front of the base and threw open the heavy door. He knelt next to a small panel near the door and pulled it off its mount. Underneath, an old-style, manual pull fuse greeted him. He removed the safety cap and gave the finger loop a good pull, and was rewarded with a flash and the smell of cordite. He had about a minute to get the hell out of there.
He sprinted to the waiting skimmer and
leapt into the pilot’s seat. As he sped away—in the opposite direction from the incoming drone carriers—the bright flash of the self-destructing m-base filled the cockpit from behind. When his eyes readjusted, he saw the three drone carriers on his sensors.
“Skimmer, access sensor logs. Display any signals of unknown origin detected in the last eight hours.”
A list of sensor signals and communications appeared on the sensor screen. It included a litany of inane sensor pings and comm traffic, but all appeared to come from the drone carriers. Prior to their arrival, the log had been clean. That eliminated the possibility of a tracker or hitchhiker of some sort transmitting his position, and given the stealthiness of the skimmer, combined with the evasives Grae had performed on his inbound trip, the chances of him having been followed were next to nil.
He cleared the screen and focused on the three drone carriers, now falling back as he sped away. “How the hell did you find me?”
Chapter 12: Eridani
As the engines of the crowded orbital shuttle wound down, its passengers unbuckled their seatbelts and stood, jockeying for room in the narrow aisle between the rows of double seats. But Erik remained in his seat; he was in no hurry to return to the precise spot of his failure.
He looked out the window. It was here, on this very tarmac, that he had been bested by Mikel, the Nkosi woman, and this Grae Raymus. It was here that he had been taken to the brink of death. But now Raymus was within his grasp—and the others he would find in due time.
The passengers shuffled down the center aisle like lemmings to a cliff. Erik waited until the last of them had left before he stood and moved toward the exit. At the door, he looked down the wheeled staircase and across the chaotic spaceport. The ramp was packed with orbital shuttles, most of them military. Pallets of supplies crammed every open space, and vehicles of all types, both military and civilian, lined up to service spacecraft and take cargo away. Where the control tower had once stood, there was now only a tangled mess of burnt metal supports and shattered structure. Erik had launched the missile that had destroyed it. That was the first time he’d had Grae Raymus in his sights—the first chance he’d had to be rid of that troublesome man. Behind its twisted skeleton, dark storm clouds grew, signals of a maelstrom threatening to unleash its fury.
“You might want to get moving, Mister Hallerson.” The pilot slipped by Erik and pointed to the clouds. “This is going to be a bad one.”
As the pilot walked down the stairs, Erik shifted his gaze to three men, his men, standing next to a nondescript white cargo vehicle. With a single upward nod, he acknowledged them and walked down the staircase. At the last step, he paused and looked out over the black tarmac. His eyes were drawn to an area recently repaired. It was there that Grae Raymus had rigged a corporate helo with a remotely detonated bomb—the same bomb that had sent Erik through excruciating medical regeneration therapy.
Deliberately, he took one last step onto the Eridanian surface and suppressed a shudder. He felt something like a cool energy rise from the ground, course through his legs and body, and electrify his mind. Wordlessly, he walked to his men and entered the cargo van. No greeting was needed.
As they drove past the automatic gate at the perimeter fence and turned down the narrow gravel connecting the spaceport to the city of New Reykjavik, Erik looked across the low green foliage flanking the road. Large leaves gave it all a distinctly tropical look, but the shapes of the leaves were more along the lines of what flourished in Earth’s Northern European area. Just a few hundred meters farther along the road, they passed an area where downed trees, broken limbs, and charred ground betrayed the violent crash that had occurred there. But there was no other sign of the skimmer Erik and his men had brought down—the one that had carried the Nkosi woman to Eridani. It had long since been carted away, piece by piece. By now, a team was already at work trying to reverse-engineer its highly advanced technology.
During the two-kilometer drive to the edge of New Reykjavik, they passed a number of empty buses heading to the spaceport, no doubt to pick up inbound passengers. These were new—Andrews had apparently been busy.
As they passed into the city proper, Erik watched a hovering, four-engine cargo carrier lowering a boxcar-sized temporary habitation module into place. Behind the carrier, at the city center, the skyscraper once called AIC Tower loomed high above the rest of the modern city, its six tall cylinders capped by clear domes. A contemporary architect’s vision of Perlan, the iconic building in the sister city on Earth, this version was even grander, and an order of magnitude taller.
The city’s sidewalks were packed with people. A mixture of contract soldiers, Coalition military, and civilians gave the crowd a makeup Erik had seen nowhere else. And despite the damage Jans Mikel’s so-called Mace virus had done to every networked piece of equipment with a computer chip, plenty of vehicles moved smoothly along the city’s open avenues, conveying a sense of normalcy to an otherwise chaotic time.
The van stopped in front of the steps leading up to the tower. Mikel had spared no expense in building his grand headquarters, and the wide, polished, gold Eridanian granite stairs were no exception. They could have graced any palace on Earth and not been considered out of place. Erik stepped from the van and looked up at the tower with a shake of his head. As he approached the building’s bank of glass doors, a TSI security guard held out a hand, stopping him. Erik glared and displayed his security credentials. The guard quickly lowered his gaze and stepped aside to let Erik through.
The lobby possessed all the grandeur of the exterior. The same granite graced the floors, echoing the footsteps of the many people here to do the business of Gregory Andrews. A crooked grin crossed Erik’s face. Jans had had a vision of filling this building with those who would help him build this planet to match his dreams. He surely could never have imagined that those filling it would belong to his enemy.
Erik walked directly to the elevator and took it to the top floor. As the doors opened to the executive suite, the aging woman at the reception desk, Andrews’s long-time assistant, looked up, her sharp features and expression showing no loss of faculties.
“Welcome, Mister Hallerson. Mister Andrews is expecting you. I will take you in.”
If she noticed Erik’s scars—and how could she miss them?—she gave no indication. Despite her decades-out-of-date business attire and conservative look, she was not lacking in professionalism.
Without a word, Erik followed her to the office that had once belonged to Jans Mikel. Little had changed since he was last here. As he entered, the assistant closed the door behind him and left. Andrews was sitting behind a large desk—the same desk that had once belonged to Mikel.
“Erik.” Andrews grasped his cane and tapped it on the floor. “I’m glad you’re back. We’ve got a lot of work to do.” He gestured to the chairs in front of the desk. “Have a seat, and let’s get down to business.”
Andrews’s piercing eyes followed Erik as he sat.
“I thought I picked up something on our call, and now—there’s something different about you.”
Erik gave Andrews an extended stare. “I’m not the same man you left on the hospital ship. No one could go through what I have and not be changed.”
“I suppose so.” Andrews held Erik’s stare for a few moments before letting it drop. “Well, let’s talk priorities. That damned Jans Mikel and his virus. Every time we think we’ve got it knocked out, it comes back with a vengeance. The space station had to be gutted, and we had to set up a whole new planetside network. It’s a damned mess.”
“Yes. I am familiar.”
“Of course.” Andrews cleared his throat. “Well, we need to get ahead of all this. The military is starting to get involved in looking at the resistance Mikel’s people are setting up. They’re making noise about leaving even more troops behind.”
Erik’s eyes narrowed, and Andrews caught the subtle expression.
“Yes, Erik, it is a problem. I can’t affo
rd to have the Coalition sticking their noses into my business. I need them gone. And I need some wins to make it happen.”
“The intercept you provided proved useful, and I have put an intel op in process.”
“Grae Raymus?” Andrews leaned in.
Erik nodded. “Born Billings, Montana.” Erik began his recitation, devoid of emotion. “Attended Boise State University. Joined Euramerican Coalition Army upon graduation. First tour: Fourth Combat Engineering Battalion. Earned Combat Action Badge during the Panama Incursion. Subsequently stationed at Bramley Camp, England, where he joined Coalition Special Forces, First Space Division.” Erik paused as he again felt the unmistakable spark of hatred stir within him. “Six combat drops: Sri Lanka, Liberia, two in East Africa, Callisto, and Gamma Cephei.” He fought the stomach cramps threatening to force him into submission. “Distinguished Combat Medal.” He clenched his fists. “Order of Merit.”
“Enough, Erik.” Andrews studied him. “I can get that from a personnel search. The intel?”
“Of course.” Erik relaxed his clenched fists, closed his eyes, and took a breath. “The intel.” He fought the turmoil in his stomach. “I’ve discovered that a meeting will take place— senior level, between Mikel’s people and the Nashira Brigade.”
Andrews couldn’t hide his surprise.
Erik took another deep breath to steady himself. “And I know where it will happen.”
Chapter 13: Helios, Eridani System
Listen now.” Sophia held her headset tight over her ears. “There, did you hear that?”
Mandi pressed her own headset against her ears. “I think so.” She shook her head, then pulled off the headset in frustration. “I don’t know. I’m having a hard time. It all seems like noise to me.”
Sophia pulled her headset down around her neck and wheeled herself next to Mandi. “It is noise.” She smiled. “Mass sensors detect minute variations in gravitational waves caused by objects in space. The waves range in frequency from about 35 to 250 hertz. Human hearing can pick up frequencies as low as 20 hertz, so gravity waves fall squarely in the lower range of what we’re able to hear. By converting the signal from the sensors to an audio feed, you can listen through a headset.”
