by Rick Partlow
“What did they think you knew?” McKay asked. “How would they know if you knew anything, for that matter?”
“They didn’t tell me,” Podbyrin said, shaking his head, rubbing the knuckles on his left hand with the fingers of his right. “They never said what they wanted from me, but I think…I think it had to do with what is on Novoye Rodina. That’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“Why would they think they could do anything with that information?” Franks wanted to know. “They’d get blown to atoms if they tried to take a ship through the gate to that system.”
“Perhaps not,” the old Russian disagreed, reluctance and distaste in his voice and his expression. “Yuri…he told me something before they questioned me. He said that what I knew would help the General.”
“Antonov?” McKay asked sharply, his eyes narrowing.
“Yes. I told him that I had seen on your NewsNet that the General was dead, that President Jameson had killed him. He told me that the General yet lived, that he could not be killed.”
Carr saw McKay and Stark exchange a look; she was sure it was significant, but she had no idea of what.
“He could have just been bullshitting you,” Vinnie Mahoney suggested, speaking for the first time since Carr had entered the room. “Trying to shake you up.”
“’Could have?’” Carr blurted, earning a dirty look from Franks. “What’s the alternative? We know Antonov is dead!” She glanced around at the others, trying to read their blank stares. “I mean, don’t we?”
It was Shannon Stark who finally answered her. “During our last…encounter with the Protectorate,” Stark said, “we were told by multiple sources that among the alien technology to which Antonov had access was a machine that allowed him to duplicate not just objects such as computers and weapons but also people.”
“My God!” Carr exclaimed, sitting straight up in her chair. “Why haven’t I heard about this before?”
“Well,” Shannon replied, obviously choosing her words carefully, “we don’t have any hard evidence to back up these claims and it was decided at the…umm, highest level that it wouldn’t be wise to spread this information without more to go on.”
“Anyway,” McKay interrupted, “the point isn’t whether or not the Protectorate can duplicate people or even whether these bratva types have a duplicate of him. The point is, they are using the promise---or threat---of the existence of such a duplicate as a tool to gain power.”
“Excuse me again,” Carr said, risking another glare from Franks, at whom she studiously avoided looking. “This is all very disturbing, of course, and I know you have to look into it…but I have to ask, what does it have to do with what happened here in Houston?”
“Well, nothing, to be honest,” Stark began, “but all of us were here…”
“Actually,” Podbyrin said, “I think there is a connection.”
Every head snapped around to stare at him and he seemed to shrink a little under the attention.
“You must understand,” Podbyrin explained, “I didn’t know this until I was brought here. I had no idea of what has gone on in the world for years now. But I heard things that they said, the people who brought supplies to us, and sometimes Yuri when he would come.” He shook his head. “It wasn’t very often. I have seen him perhaps three times in the last four years.” A look of bitter hatred passed over his face. “They got me to help them by saying I would be among my brothers from old Russia, then they stuck me in that Goddamned hole in the middle of nowhere with not a single person who spoke my language, or even one I knew two words of.”
“What did you hear, D’mitry?” McKay asked, obviously trying to bring the older man back to the point.
“To encourage me---well, honestly, to keep me from killing myself, I think,” Podbyrin said, not looking at them or anything else in the room, his eyes seeing a memory, “Yuri would tell me that my sacrifice meant something, that in my exile, I was helping the cause of all Russians in exile from the Rodina. He would never say anything specific, but I remember him and Anya, one of the others, saying something about things were starting to happen, that they were striking back and soon the whole Republic would know about us.
“And I remember this very well, McKay,” his eyes came back to the present and focused on the man beside him. “He said, ‘they care so little for their poor, we will see how they react when bread and circuses are no longer enough to keep them from rising up.’ He said this to Anya and she said ‘when the alternative is death, even those fat, lazy bastards in Houston will join us.’ And then you brought me here and I saw that.” He waved a hand in the general direction of the collapsed building.
“Shit,” McKay muttered, looking a bit stunned. “Franks, we have to track down this Yuri. Get a description from D’mitry and start a records search.”
“Yes, sir,” Franks said, getting to his feet.
“The records may not help much,” Carr said. She pushed ahead with an explanation before anyone could question her. “One of my first assignments as a RIS agent---before it became the CIS a few years back---was in the North Pacific Region field office in Greater SeaTac. I didn’t ever travel to the Alaskan peninsula, but I got a few briefings about it from the agent whose responsibility it was.”
She leaned forward, hands clasped in front of her on the table. “Things are different there. There are thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of people there who aren’t on the grid. Many of the Russian exiles were never in the system---it was chaotic after the war and some parts of the peninsula were evacuated due to radiation concerns. Families squatted in abandoned homes and sometimes the ones who had lived there didn’t come back.”
She shrugged. “After the war and the Crisis, well…the recovery efforts, especially here in North America, centered on the cities: Capital City, Greater SeaTac, Trans Angeles, Cleveland ‘plex, Atlanta, here… Some places never got modernized, especially in the Alaskan interior. There’s a whole barter economy that goes on there, totally off the books, and the Russian exiles and their crime families control a lot of it.”
“Would your people have any sort of files on the heads of the bratva?” Shannon asked her.
“Only the ones we’ve managed to arrest or get intelligence on; and believe me, no one wants to inform on the bratva. But,” she said with a shrug, “I can talk to the field office there; see if he’s heard any rumors. Not everything gets put in a file, you know?”
“Anything you can find would be appreciated, Agent Carr,” Colonel Stark said.
“There are three messages waiting from General Kage’s office,” Franks told McKay, looking up from checking his ‘link. He snorted derisively. “I think the gist of them is that he wants his new Homeworld Guard Corps involved in this if there’s any shooting to be done.”
“Everybody’s gotta have a spoon in the soup,” Vinnie grumbled. “Nothing ever gets accomplished that way.”
“Tell Kage that we’ll keep him apprised if our investigation turns up any leads that would call for the Guard’s inclusion,” McKay told Franks. “Then sit down with Colonel Podbyrin and Agent Carr and get a handle on this Yuri thing. He’s the only lead we have that ties these attacks together.”
“Will do, sir,” Franks replied. Carr could see that he was doing his best to keep his face stern and professional looking while simultaneously stifling a yawn. The man looked exhausted, and apparently McKay noted it as well.
“Grab a shower and a change of clothes before you do that, Drew,” McKay told him. “You did good out there.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you sir,” Franks said with a grateful nod, then headed out the door.
“Vinnie,” McKay went on, addressing the Special Operations commander, “make sure you pass along a well-done to Master Sergeant Manning as well.”
“Definitely, General,” Vinnie agreed. “She’s still back in Alaska, running security for the investigation team we sent in to comb that compound. Doesn’t look like there’s much to find though. Just
a bunch of Eastbloc refugees that did grunt work fabbing weapons.”
McKay stood and the others stood with him, Carr rising up a moment behind the rest; only Podbyrin stayed seated, staring at the table with haunted eyes.
“I have to make a report to the President,” McKay said with a sigh. “D’mitry, go with Shannon---she’ll show you someplace you can get cleaned up, get something to eat and a place to sleep.” The Russian nodded wordlessly, then pushed himself back from the table and stood up with a groan.
“I’ll go make those calls,” Caitlyn said as McKay moved for the door.
“You can make them from in here, if you like,” McKay told her with a shrug. “It’s about as private as you’re going to get around here.” He left the conference room, followed closely by Stark and Podbyrin.
“You need anything, Agent Carr?” Jock Gregory asked her, a pleasant grin making his otherwise squared-off and blocky face seem cheerful. “I dunno’ if you CIS types have an office here but we can scrape you up a place to bunk out here somewhere, if you need it.”
“We do have offices here,” Carr said, a bit taken aback by the big man’s friendliness. “But I think I’d rather stay close to the investigation, so maybe I’ll take you up on that.”
“I hope to hell you can help us find this guy,” Vinnie Mahoney said quietly from beside her. She turned to look at him and saw that he was staring at the wall, seeing a memory of the destruction outside, she thought.
“I want to get some justice for those people, too, Colonel,” she told him, trying to sound confident.
“That’d be nice,” Vinnie said with a shrug, “but what I was thinking was, if these Russian mafia guys are the ones behind this, we don’t even know how they did it; and what’s more, ma’am, well….” His mouth set in a hard line. “So far, every attack has been worse than the last. I just don’t wanna’ think what the next one’s gonna’ be.”
Carr felt a chill run up her back. All that destruction, three thousand dead civilians…what could be worse than that?
* * *
The star had a scientific classification and name, but no one called it that. To the locals it was Mabon, and the one habitable planet it supported was named Rhiannon. One of the newer colonies settled after the discovery of the wormhole jumpgates, it was still small, with only one major city and no orbital security to speak of. So when the independent freighter assumed orbit, the only attention it received was a perfunctory call to identify itself.
The ship responded with an automated signal giving its lading and intention to land a cargo shuttle, so it was no surprise to the monitors at the Tintagel City Port Authority when a delta-winged heavy lift shuttle separated from the freighter and initiated a de-orbit burn. Bulk materials usually came in via unmanned ion drive barges, and purchased fab programs would obviously be beamed directly from the Instell Comsats; but more precious cargoes like biological samples, custom AI chipsets, and new fabricators would often come in via smaller, independent freighters. So the arrival of the freighter with a load of chipsets gave no cause for alarm.
Even when the heavy-lift shuttle came in lower than it had been instructed over the small city, no one was worried: many of the freighter crews were hotshots who went into business for themselves because they didn’t like the restrictions imposed by the Fleet or the Multicorps. By the time anyone noticed the strange, cylindrical pod slung beneath the aerospacecraft’s wing, it was far too late to act; and when that cylinder broke open as the shuttle passed over the city and began to spray out a barely-visible mist, the damage was done.
The shuttle never came near the port’s landing field; instead it climbed back into orbit on a searing flare of superheated hydrogen, ignoring the insistent and angry calls from the Port Authority. Then the anger in those calls turned to fear, and then to pain, and finally they ceased altogether.
Before the shuttle docked with its freighter mothership, a distress call was being broadcast to the system’s Instell Comsat. Before the signal transited the four intervening systems to the nearest Fleet base, the freighter had left orbit and was heading for the system’s secondary jumpgate.
Before the ship passed through the gate, every single human being in Tintagel City was dead.
Chapter Five
Shannon Stark was growing to hate the sound of her own breath. It rasped in her ears in the claustrophobic confines of the helmet of her vacc suit as it had for most of the last twenty hours that she had walked through the ghost city that had been Tintagel.
Before she’d come to this place, she’d thought herself hardened, incapable of being shocked. She’d been through multiple battles, seen men and women who’d trusted her die, seen hundreds of young men and women fall in a forlorn hope where she herself had expected to die. But nothing that had passed before had prepared her for this.
She had never seen anything like this; she doubted anyone had since the Sino-Russian War. Bodies littered the ground: bodies of men, women, children, pets, farm animals, bodies without end. They were bloated by now, swollen and obscene in the yellow rays of the system’s primary and picked over by the insects they’d intentionally or unintentionally brought with them from Earth. The stink must have been incredible, which made Shannon glad that fear of contamination forced her and the others of the investigation team to wear vacc suits.
And yet, in stark contrast to the inexplicable and total death around them, the city stood intact, as if nothing had happened. It wasn’t much of a city, more on the order of a small, pre-war style town on Earth. The core of the town was a cluster of large, buildfoam hemispheres that had been the first shelters for the colonists when they had arrived nearly three years before. Surrounding them were the taller, more lived-in structures of local wood and stone that had gone up later to become homes and storehouses and shops.
Now they stood as tombstones to the legion of the dead that had once lived in them. It would take weeks to dispose of all the corpses and she imagined that the powers that be would wind up just burning the city to the ground and plowing it over. Shannon stopped in mid-stride as she made the mistake of looking too closely at a corpse on the ground just inside a doorway and saw that it was a young mother, and her infant child was still cradled in her arms…
“Colonel Stark.” A voice from behind her startled her and she turned quickly to see another vacuum-suited figure approaching from down the street. The IFF in her helmet’s HUD identified the man as Captain Barkley, the lead officer in the investigation team. Without the identifier, she wouldn’t have been able to tell him apart from the dozen other space-suited figures gathered in the street around her, taking samples and recording measurements from a half dozen different scanners.
“Yes, Captain?” She tried to keep her voice steady, to keep the horror she was feeling out of her tone.
“I got word from the lab, ma’am,” the Captain told her, his manner subdued, almost whispering. “They wanted to show you something.”
“On my way,” she said, grateful for the excuse to leave the haunted streets behind her.
Shannon walked back to the open-sided rover and drove the electric vehicle slowly and carefully through the streets until she cleared the city limits, then headed east through the neatly-plowed fields that ringed the city. Those fields were eerie not for their silence but for their activity: automated harvesters still ran with the dogged determination of their programming, powered by the solar collectors on all their exposed surfaces. They would run until their motors seized up or someone bothered to turn them off.
By habit, she scanned the fields that surrounded the dirt road as she drove, hoping against hope to find a survivor, but she saw nothing. She knew she wouldn’t…they’d surveyed the whole planet from orbit before they’d landed. So far, the only survivors had been a group of Fleet researchers who’d been surveying the river system of the planet’s southern continent and they’d been totally oblivious to what had happened: they hadn’t even known about it until a shuttle had landed to pick them
up.
The five klicks to the portable bio lab seemed to crawl by, but Shannon reminded herself not to complain. She’d originally thought that Dr. Lawton, the head of the Bio team, had been overly paranoid setting the lab up this far away; after seeing the city for herself, she wished it was even more distant. The lab was a sealed, self-contained dome set up on a hilltop just past the first ring of cultivated fields and at the moment there were a lander and a pair of flitters at the foot of the hill in a space burned clear for them. She drove the rover past the parked aircraft and up a short switchback trail to the top of the hill, parking it next to the lab’s airlock.
A pair of Marines stood guard outside the lab, dressed in armored vacc suits and watching the approaches vigilantly, weapons at the ready. They didn’t challenge her: there was no need since her suit’s IFF told them exactly who she was.
“Good afternoon, Colonel,” the senior of the two said, bringing his carbine to port arms in salute as she approached.
“Afternoon, Sgt. Carmichael,” she replied, sketching a salute as best she could in her vacc suit. She unbuckled her gunbelt and tossed it and her holstered sidearm to the NCO. “Hold onto this for me, if you wouldn’t mind.” The gun couldn’t go through the decon process and she didn’t want to leave a loaded weapon lying around unsupervised.
“It’ll be here when you come out, ma’am,” he assured her.
Shannon tapped a passcode into a panel on the outer wall and the airlock’s security system matched it with the IFF in her suit, confirmed her identity and then opened the outer door for her. She stepped into the bare, antiseptic confines of the lock then hit the control to close it behind her. Darkness closed around her for a moment, then harsh light filled the two meter-by-two meter space.
