by Rick Partlow
“Tactical,” Pirelli said, “we getting any energy readings from the ship?”
“Plasma drive is cold, ma’am,” Milankovic reported. “Their onboard reactor is active but I can’t tell you if they’re using it for anything or they just left it at standby mode. No communications, no course corrections…but they’re in a pretty stable orbit, so they wouldn’t really need any. From the interior temperature, life support still seems to be active, but I couldn’t say if anyone’s on board or not.”
“How long till we can get a look at the extraction plant?” Shannon wanted to know.
“It’s coming around now,” Milankovic told her, waiting as the pale yellow moon’s rotation brought the site into the view of their cameras and sensors. Dull white clouds swirled at the poles and streaked along the equator, but everywhere else was a mysterious haze.
“Atmosphere’s pretty thick and opaque,” he said, “so we’re not going to get much on optical. But the computer should be able to give us a good picture using thermal and infrared.”
Even as he spoke, the display zoomed downward to reveal the lines of a valley between two plateaus on the shores of a methane-filled sea. The first man-made structures Shannon could make out were the curved globes of the storage tanks that nearly filled the valley from end to end, dwarfing the rectangular box of the separation facility. The image resolved further and she could see the collection pipes running into the methane-rich ocean from the separation plant.
The last thing to come into focus was the delta shape of a heavy lift shuttle on the large landing pad beside the separation facility.
“There they are,” Milankovic said, excitement in his voice. “The maintenance building is hot…life support is active. Shielding’s too thick to spot any life signs on thermal.” He reached into his console display holo and pulled the image of the shuttle closer. “The cargo shuttle’s engines are relatively cool…it’s been down there for at least a few hours.” He shook his head. “No activity outside.”
Shannon stared at the display screen, thoughts playing out behind her jade eyes, then finally she spoke. “Captain Pirelli,” she said quietly, eyes still glued to the display, “there is absolutely no way this isn’t some sort of trap. Yet I can’t figure out the purpose for it and that troubles me intensely.”
“It doesn’t seem to make much sense, ma’am,” Pirelli agreed. “I don’t see that we have any choice but to investigate it, though.” She chuckled darkly. “Unless you order me to put a missile up that freighter’s tube and nuke the mining facility from orbit, neither of which orders would I question for one moment.”
“There’s nothing I’d like better, Captain,” Shannon said, a hint of a rueful grin passing across her face. “I think we’re going to have to do this one the hard way, though. Get your Marines to the assault lander.” She touched a control on her ‘link.
“Colonel,” was the curt reply.
“Sgt. Bocanegra,” Shannon told the NCO in charge of the Spec Ops unit on board, “get the team suited up for EVA and armed for zero gravity. We’re going to be boarding an enemy vessel.”
“Did you say ‘we,’ ma’am?” Bocanegra asked her, a wary note in his voice.
“Yes, Sergeant,” Shannon confirmed, the corner of her mouth twitching upward. “Blame it on the bad influence of General McKay. I’ll be down there in a few minutes.”
“What’s your plan, Colonel?” Captain Pirelli asked, frank curiosity warring with concern in her eyes.
“If we have to do this,” Shannon said, “we’re going to do it smart.”
* * *
The bearded man watched carefully as the workers loaded the canisters into the back of the truck. The containers were well sealed and insulated, but what would happen if one failed didn’t even bear considering.
He half-turned to the fat man standing beside him, still keeping one eye on the workers.
“There will be another load in a couple weeks,” he ordered. “No one is to enter the chamber until then, Pyotr.”
“Yes, Mr. Yuri,” Pyotr responded respectfully, hands clasping nervously in the pockets of his light jacket.
He’d been called Yuri for so long, he’d almost forgotten he’d ever had another name. In a sense, he reflected, Anatoly Simonov wasn’t just another name; he was another man, from another time. He was Yuri now, in every way that mattered.
“It’s me,” he heard Anya’s voice in his ear bud. He frowned. She knew better than to call him, even on this anonymized ‘link, unless it was important.
“Yes?” he asked, trying to keep the irritation out of his voice. It wouldn’t do to have his subordinates think he wasn’t totally in control of his passions. He turned away from the bare, sheet-metal walls of the old warehouse and took a few steps towards the trees that surrounded the clearing where it had been built.
“Camp Three is no longer operational,” she reported. Her voice was flat and unemotional, but he knew her well enough to hear the concern she was attempting to conceal. “Everything in it has been lost. Everything.”
“That…is unfortunate,” he said, feeling anger rising up inside him and forcing it down with an effort of will. Control. “But I think…” He considered his next words carefully, both how he phrased them and whether or not he truly believed them. “I think that we had tapped all the resources that particular installation had to offer. We will be fine.”
“Your orders?” Anya sounded relieved.
“Be watchful,” he told her. “Let me know if there is an opportunity to regain any of our missing assets. They may have been taken or they may have just…wandered off on their own. Either way, the assets may yet turn up.” He paused. “Is there anything else?”
“No. I will contact you if I discover anything else.”
She broke the connection and Yuri allowed himself a scowl.
Fucking Podbyrin. He knew that whining son of a bitch would be trouble. Should have killed him. Ah well, spilt milk and all that.
A loud bang distracted him, and he raised an eyebrow as he saw one of the canisters laying on its side in the bed of the truck, rolling slightly from side to side. The man who’d been holding it cursed in Russian, shaking his hand from where he’d smashed his fingers against the tailgate.
The man’s eyes flickered towards Yuri, suddenly filled with fear, and he began to quickly stutter out an apology.
Yuri very deliberately did not scream at him, despite a fervent desire to do just that. It wasn’t that the man didn’t deserve it; what he really wanted to do was pull out his shoulder-holstered sidearm and put a bullet through the idiot’s head. Ten or fifteen years ago, he might have done it to make a point to the others, but that sort of thing was no longer necessary.
“Do you wish to keep working for me, Ivan Mikhailovich?” he asked with the flat chill of a winter morning in the tundra.
“Yes, Mr. Yuri,” the man choked out, sweat beading on his high forehead, his bruised hand suddenly forgotten. He looked even more afraid at the thought that Yuri knew his name.
“You do not need to know what is inside that,” he gestured at the fallen cylinder. “All you need to know that it is my property…and that makes it the most precious thing on this Earth to you. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Mr. Yuri!” The man hurriedly jumped into the back of the truck and carefully maneuvered the canister into place in its rack. The other workers scurried back to their tasks, spurred by the incident.
Yuri allowed himself a thin, satisfied smile. As always, fear was the very best motivator of men.
Chapter Seven
“This is why I love my job,” Drew Franks murmured aside to Caitlyn Carr as they threaded through the steady stream of people on the crowded sidewalk. “I get to travel to such exotic places.”
Carr glanced at him sharply, suspicious that he was being sarcastic. Downtown Fairbanks was many things, but she didn’t think “exotic” was the best description for the place. Disorganized, squalid, crowded, ramshackle…all those ce
rtainly came to mind, but not exotic.
The street was packed with slow-moving groundcars, most electric but some running on methane or even alcohol, and the edges were filled in with two and three-wheeled scooters hauling tourists in towed trailer-cabs. The sidewalks were jammed as well, blocked here and there by kiosks run by men and women in loud, garish clothes, selling wares from the quasi-legal to the outright illegal. From pirated fabber codes to proscribed ViR programs to black-market untraceable handguns to designer pharmaceuticals, you could buy anything in the street kiosks of Fairbanks.
Looking at the locals passing her by with the ubiquity of Eastern European features and the brightly-colored and flashy dress that were common among the Russian immigrants, Carr felt hideously out of place. She, Franks and Manning were in mufti of course, but her business casual clothes made her look like a tourist or worse. Franks was concealing his well-publicized face with a brimmed hat and sunglasses, which didn’t seem obvious at all given the cloudless sky and the noonday sun. Together with their blue jeans, work boots and plain T-shirts, he and Manning could have been any of a thousand anonymous workers in the city.
I’ve spent too much of my career in an office, she thought ruefully.
Trying not to stare at the faces of the people passing by her, Carr instead concentrated on gawking at the buildings clustered together on both sides of the street. They were cheap and ugly, built from concrete blocks and buildfoam and they looked like they’d been thrown up just as quickly as possible and with no rhythm or rhyme to them. Rowhouses occupied the opposite side of the street while the side on which they were walking was mostly businesses. Fabricator repair shops were very popular, along with building contractors, bars and brothels. Even at this early hour, prostitutes of all ages and various gradations of both sexes were gathered on the covered front porches of the brothels, advertising their variety.
“This place is like a mixture of Las Vegas and Bangkok,” Manning commented drily in a voice only the two of them could catch, the corner of her mouth turning up in the closest thing Carr had seen to a smile on her face.
“I’m sure it looks better in the winter,” Franks said with a shrug. “It’s dark for a month, so you can’t see as much.”
“This is it,” Carr announced, nodding at a nondescript one-story office suite coming up on their left. The subdued holographic display on its front step announced that it was occupied by “Conner and Sons Construction” and had an animation of a build-foam dispenser laying out dome-shaped warehouses to illustrate exactly what services they offered.
Nothing about the building gave any indication that it was anything out of the ordinary, but the mapping program in Carr’s corneal implant was imbuing the building with a faint red glow, letting her know she’d arrived at her destination. Carr led them up the steps to the front door, which opened for them immediately and automatically. Carr was about to step inside when Manning slid past her, hesitating for a moment in the doorway before slipping through it, her right hand near her hip, where Carr knew that her untucked shirt covered an inside-the-waistband holster and a compact handgun.
Manning scanned the reception area quickly but completely before turning back to Franks and nodding. Carr stepped in behind her and then Franks backed in last, making sure the door shut. The reception area was decorated in a bland, generic style, accentuated by more advertising holos featuring various pieces of heavy equipment digging things up or setting them down or building utilitarian looking structures. There wasn’t so much as a chair in the room. There was a desk but no receptionist sat at it, just a floating projection of an attractive woman that turned to them, smiled and said “Please wait here until called.”
Carr glanced at the only other door to the room. It was on the other side of the desk and was unmarked; it didn’t even have a palm plate. She saw Franks and Manning looking at her and shrugged helplessly.
“It’s his office,” she told them. “He’ll let us in when he’s satisfied it’s safe.”
No sooner had she spoken the words than the door slid aside soundlessly, and the virtual receptionist spoke to them again. “Please step inside,” she urged them pleasantly. “He’ll see you now.”
Manning took point again, stepping into the dark hallway, this time with her right hand resting on the grip of her holstered service pistol. Carr felt a moment’s annoyance at what she considered unwarranted paranoia, but then shrugged it off. It was the Sergeant’s job to be paranoid, she supposed. Still, she followed Manning without concern, confident that there was no way this cover had been compromised.
The hallway was short, intersecting with a longer, better lit passage with bare, eggshell-white walls and closed doors at either end, neither of them marked. Manning looked carefully at both and was about to try the one on their left when the one on the right slid open and a man stepped through it. He was average height, average build, wearing well-made and yet unobtrusive clothes and was otherwise just very normal. His skin was dark ebony, his hair cut short and curly and he had one of those faces that seemed to be built for smiling.
“Caitlyn,” he said, nodding to Agent Carr. “You’re looking good. How’ve you been?”
His voice was pleasant and lulling in a way that reminded her of a salesman, or possibly a con artist. She had never been able to decide which was a more apt comparison.
“Doing fine, Jean-Paulo,” she said, smiling politely as she shook his hand. “I hope life here is treating you well.”
“Oh, of course!” he said with an insincere laugh. “Especially now, with all this daylight and warm weather! Don’t ask me that question when it’s 50 below and the sun doesn’t shine for a month though!”
“So,” Franks asked dryly, “are you Conner or are you Sons?”
“Captain Franks, Sgt. Manning,” Carr introduced, “this is Agent Jean-Paulo Assange. He’s officially with our SeaTac office, but they usually plant him here in the field, keeping an eye on the bratva.”
“A pleasure to meet both of you,” Assange assured them, shaking their hands in turn. “Come into my office,” he waved them forward, “and we can get comfortable while I fill you in.”
“How backstopped is your cover, Agent Assange?” Franks asked as they moved into the office. It was as ordinary-looking as the rest of the building, businesslike if your business was contract construction. The only expression of Assange’s personality that Carr noticed was an autographed Raiders football helmet on a stand on the corner of his desk. Carr wasn’t a sports fan, but she thought it had to be Assange’s personal item rather than part of his cover, since there was no logical reason for a putative Alaska native to be rooting for a Trans Angeles team.
“Completely,” Assange answered the Intelligence officer’s question. “We are an actual construction contractor, with real employees and real projects. This office doesn’t get used much---most of our business is done virtually---but we do have the occasional customer around, just to give the address legitimacy.” He grinned mischievously. “And of course, I do my share of carousing in town, especially in winter, just to maintain a persona.”
“I’m sure it’s a burden,” Carr commented sardonically. She fell into one of the three chairs arrayed on the other side of Assange’s desk and Manning and Franks took the other two. Assange moved around to the other side of the utilitarian plastic desk and popped open a refrigerator built into the wall.
“Anyone want a drink?” he asked them, pulling out a beer. “We got some great home brewers around here…hell of a lot better than the shit you get from the automated processors, let me tell you.”
Carr shook her head and assumed automatically that Franks and Manning would as well, but Franks surprised her. “Sure,” he said, with an open-faced grin. “I’ll never turn down a chance at good beer.”
Carr tried not to stare at him. He’d seemed so businesslike and stiff before… But he took the proffered bottle from Assange and enjoyed a long sip. Carr caught Manning shooting the officer a glance as well, but t
he NCO kept her face carefully neutral.
“Ah, man, that’s some smooth tasting brew,” he said with a sigh of appreciation, closing his eyes for a moment. His eyes popped open and focused sharply on the CIS agent. “So, Jean-Paulo…” He paused, frowning. “It’s okay to call you Jean-Paulo, right? I’m Drew,” he went on, not waiting for an answer to the question. “Anyway, Jean-Paulo, the reason I ask is, I can’t afford to be wrong here. If I trust that your cover is clean and we start having you put out feelers for Yuri and Anya, well…we’ve just forewarned the bratva that we’re onto them and I doubt we’ll ever see either of them again.”
Franks’ manner abruptly turned from friendly bonhomie to cold and harsh. “And this is the only fucking lead we have that can stop these attacks. So I want you to level with me, Agent Assange…just how certain are you, really, that there’s no way the bratva know who you are?”
Assange’s salesman’s smile faded and Carr saw a flash of anger in his dark eyes. “Captain Franks,” he said, leaning forward across the desk, “I know you’re hot shit on a stick with Fleet Intelligence, but you don’t walk into my town and tell me I don’t know my job.”
Franks sat back and took another sip from the beer, seemingly unmoved by Assange’s outburst. “Call me Drew,” he reminded the agent calmly. “There’s no room for egos in this, Jean-Paulo; not yours or mine. I don’t care if you know where every bear in Alaska goes to take a dump. And it doesn’t matter if I’m a movie star or a file clerk. What matters is, we get one shot at this, and if we fuck it up there’s no one else to step in and save the day. So I have to decide right now: do we use your contacts to put out feelers and see if anyone will cop to knowing where Yuri and Anya are…or do I go with Option B?”
“Excuse me,” Agent Carr said, glancing at him in surprise, “but I don’t recall discussing any Option B.”
“Well, that’d be the difference between law enforcement agencies and military intelligence, Caitlyn,” Franks told her, grinning. “We tend to keep things to ourselves…”
