by P. K. Lentz
“I sense a ‘however’ coming,” Kearn guessed.
“However,” Zerouali added deliberately, “given Lisset’s current condition and her talk of an ‘envoy’ destroying her, my admittedly unsubstantiated guess is that some other, more powerful force took exception to her ‘influence’ or to something she did.”
Kearn snorted. “I take exception to what she did. So should you, so should every human being who’s lived under the Interim. But how did you get all of this from hardly a dozen words? I’m afraid all your years alone may have given you a vivid imagination.”
“That’s cruel of you, Captain. You admit that Lisset is responsible for the existence of translight. Is the rest really so much harder to accept?”
“Sorry,” Kearn offered sincerely, mindful again of that unsociable asshole he so wished to avoid becoming. “I guess you were right not to want to bother telling me. I’d better stick to more practical things, like getting us safely away from Ona.”
“Don’t get me wrong,” Zerouali warned. “I believe Lisset and what she represents are things you should worry about. In fact, I’m afraid she may make everything else irrelevant. Her struggle, the struggle we cannot see, might be vastly more significant than our own. If my instincts are correct, someone or something is intent on erasing her past or present misdeeds, with potential consequences for every one of us.”
Kearn pondered all this briefly and managed a smile. “Seems like you have it all worked out,” he said. “Maybe you’re right, maybe not. Either way, my first concern has to be my ship and crew. I can’t wait around to find out how a war of the gods turns out.”
“I agree, Captain. If you fail here, we might not live to see humanity erased.”
Studying Zerouali as they traveled side by side, Kearn couldn’t quite tell whether she’d intended the comment as a morbid joke or honest irony. He hoped the former, suspected the latter.
Soon they approached the cargo holds, where Kearn would rejoin hid crew’s prep for the Ona trades. “I have to go,” he said, halting his motion on the hatch. “You’re welcome to come and help. I’m sure we could use a hand.”
Zerouali looked almost ashamed. “I should get back to Lisset. I don’t want to miss her if she should return.”
“See you later then,” Kearn said amiably. Then, suddenly, in a moment of boldness, fueled perhaps by stress and exhaustion, he dared to get a bit personal with the lately cool and distant academic. “Maybe when we’re through this,” he said, “you’ll spend less of your time locked up with a corpse and more with the living. You’re good company, and I hope you don’t feel unwelcome.”
Zerouali looked stunned for a half-second before delivering her graceful and measured response: “Not at all, Captain.”
“And no more ‘Captain’,” Kearn added. “I didn’t earn that rank, I bought it. Call me Kearn.”
“I’ll take that under advisement, Captain.”
Kearn gave her a smirk, deciding to accept the stone-faced remark as a joke. “I’m sure you will,” he said. “I’ll see you soon.”
Zerouali’s unspoken reply was too subtle to read, for her formidable defenses were fully online.
***
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Following the rogue I&G officer’s detailed instructions to the letter, Fyat piloted Lady’s flyer on a precise flight path designed to evade detection by Onari authorities. He found their assigned landing site three hours outside Ona’s capital city. It was stocked according to plan with ground transport, local clothing, weapons, currency, and identity papers. If all went well, he and his team would return to this spot twelve hours from now and escape in the flyer into the debris ring that surrounded Ona’s parent gas giant, where a freshly refueled Lady would be ready and waiting for translation out-system.
“Damn, ‘s’fucking cold!” Aprile griped as she disembarked. The words all but crystallized in front of her.
“Quiet,” Fyat said, and proceeded to deploy the flyer’s camouflage shroud.
The particulars of this moon’s orbit around its gas giant, and the giant’s orbit around its star, caused Ona’s seasons to alternate rapidly between scorching heat and bitter cold. It was currently deep in the midst of the latter, a winter during which Ona’s sunless ‘days’ were a perpetual red twilight brightened only by the dim reflected glow of the gas giant.
The clothing in the waiting ground transport was enough for one male and several females. Jagr’s instructions had included a detailed guide to Onari dress and customs, which the party would have to follow strictly to avoid unwanted attention. With none of them knowledgeable in the local language, any scrutiny at all could quickly become fatal. As Social Engineers, Fyat and Coleridge had the minor advantage over Aprile that their neurilace could provide reasonably quick after-the-fact translation of speech, but even that wouldn’t help them reply to the simplest of questions.
Luckily Fyat was the only one likely to be called upon to answer, given the Onari cultural injunction that forbade females to speak aloud in public outside of very particular circles. For public use, Ona’s women had a separate, gestural language of which the party remained ignorant. Jagr’s instructions had called for all but one of the rescue team, no matter what its composition, to dress as females, with just one male to act as the chaperone dictated by custom.
Inside the waiting land cruiser, Fyat slipped into the heavy jacket and boots of his own disguise, while Aprile and Coleridge draped themselves in the bright wrappings and hoods of Onari females. The last touches for them were intricate gilded masks which entirely shielded their faces. These particular masks were not of local manufacture, but rather were enhanced I&G-produced replicas with many of the same features of an SES visor, operated by whisper-sensitive vocal controls. In this sense, Coleridge and even Aprile had a slight advantage over Fyat, who could not wear his own visor without drawing attention.
Weapons provided for the operation were chemical projectile arms of local manufacture. For protection from enemy fire, the team’s bulky cold-weather garments, like their masks, were not authentic but bullet-resistant Ona Commission imitations. Since an SES agent could scarcely be destroyed by any conventional Onari weapon short of heavy artillery, this particular enhancement was really only of great import to the unaugmented Aprile.
A final set of Onari female attire they carried, minus Interim enhancement, was intended for Miryth, who after her rescue was to vanish anonymously into the city crowds and rendezvous with waiting comrades.
Within eight minutes of landing, the team was en route to the capital. The operation was right on schedule. Just under five standard hours remained until the appointed strike time, when their target was slated for transfer from her prison cell to the place of execution.
The uneventful journey into the city ended with a discouraging blow. Bad intel. They arrived outside the detention center expecting to have two hours for reconnaissance; instead they found the transfer already in progress. An armored truck sat behind a tall wire fence in the sea of armed guards and police cruisers that was the prison courtyard.
Fyat swung the vehicle around on a circuit of the block.
“We get her at the execution site,” he said.
Coleridge called up a map of the city in her faceplate and fed directions to Fyat as he drove. They arrived ahead of the prison convoy at the massive outdoor arena, and after an exploratory circuit of the neighborhood, returned in time to witness the convoy passing a cordon of armed guards and entering the stadium’s underground garage.
Now was the time to strike, before the guards brought Miryth into the stadium where tens of thousands of civilians, not to mention police snipers, could potentially interfere.
“Get down,” Fyat warned, a directive intended primarily for the weak-fleshed Aprile. He flicked a switch to lower the van’s windows. “Fire at will.”
Accelerating on a direct line for the parking entrance, the cruiser shattered a flimsy police roadblock. Fyat opened fire with his Onari m
achine pistol on the scattering phalanx of guards. Crouched in the backseat, Coleridge and Aprile followed suit. Every half-second targeted burst from the two Social Engineers felled another guard; Aprile’s fire was considerably clumsier but still served to suppress.
Some brave Onari guardsmen stood their ground, managing to raise weapons as their comrades dropped around them. But such ‘heroic’ resistance did not last long, for those who stood fast inevitably became the next to fall. Some did manage to pepper the onrushing van with a few ineffectual rounds before scattering.
A dull thud sounded on the hull as the cruiser ran down one of the last remaining defenders. Then it entered the subterranean garage a short distance behind the convoy. Ammunition spent, Fyat tossed his current weapon aside and plucked another from the heavy folds of his coat. From the backseat the two women directed persistent fire at the handful of guardsmen foolish enough to regroup in the cruiser’s wake.
Ahead, the two rearmost vehicles of the prison convoy came into view. Their brakes squealed as they spun to position themselves lengthwise across the cruiser’s path in a makeshift roadblock.
“Grenades,” Fyat said aloud. Normally no such instruction would be necessary, but with Coleridge damaged and Aprile untrained, it didn’t hurt.
Coleridge didn’t need the reminder. Even as Fyat swerved wide to bypass the obstruction, she had her launcher leveled out the window. Two dull pops were followed shortly by two detonations, then a blast of heat and a hail of flaming debris.
Fyat steered the cruiser through the tumbling wreckage of police vehicles. The armored wagon that presumably contained Miryth came into sight, flanked by its six remaining escort cars, the occupants of which opened fire. Leaving return fire to the others, Fyat focused his own efforts on weaving a path through the chaos to close in on the truck.
One, then another, of the escorts erupted into fireballs. Fyat sped on through curtains of black smoke, briefly losing sight of his target.
When he found it again, he knew it was theirs. Facing a blank wall with nowhere left to run, the truck turned and braked hard, narrowly avoiding collision with one of its own wrecked escorts. The resulting skid was uncontrollable and sent the wagon tumbling helplessly onto its side. It ground to a halt in a shower of sparks and a wail of rending metal.
The remaining escort cars, having avoided the barrage of grenades and the dead end chosen by the wagon, wisely elected to retreat.
Fyat brought the team’s cruiser to a halt beside the overturned police truck, stopping so that other wreckage blocked their pursuers’ line of fire. Instructing the two women to wait inside, he leapt from the vehicle and approached the overturned wagon. Its rear doors, which now hung horizontally rather than vertically, thumped and rattled as if someone within were desperate to escape. Fyat waited a few paces back with weapons ready.
A few more blows from within sent the wagon’s door flying outward. A bloodied guardsman swam toward the opening through a tangle of limbs. Before the man could react, Fyat put a single bullet between his eyes.
There was no further sign of motion within. Keeping the muzzle of his weapon trained on the opening, Fyat unlocked and lifted the topmost door and scanned the darkness within.
The side wall of the van, now its floor, was piled with bodies and weapons. Slight movements suggested that some of the occupants yet lived, if barely. It took Fyat only a few moments to locate his target within the mess, easily identified by her plain prison garb and head covered with sackcloth. Stepping over the fresh corpse by the door, Fyat plucked the woman one-handed from the heap of bodies.
Miryth was a dead weight in his arm, but there was no time to worry about her health. He slung her over one shoulder, scanning for hostiles on the dash back to the waiting cruiser. There he dumped Miryth heavily in the seat beside him and reassumed the driver’s station. The entire extraction had taken less than three minutes.
They met no effective resistance en route back to street level; either the defenders had been completely routed or they were rallying elsewhere.
Back on the city streets, Coleridge called out directions to the place where their instructions advised them to ditch the cruiser and obtain new transport. There was no overt ground pursuit, but very quickly a flyer appeared and kept station with them overhead. Coleridge loosed a few rounds at it, but it hovered out of range of their primitive local firearms.
Aprile leaned forward over the front seat, throwing off her thick gloves and struggling to untie the grey burlap sack covering Miryth’s head. An ominous red blotch, unnoticed before, became visible on the fabric. When the hood came loose, copious amounts of blood and brain matter spilled forth onto the seat.
“Fuck, she’s dead!” Aprile screamed.
Fyat made a jarring left and screeched to a halt underneath an overpass. “Any hope of revival?”
“Her brains are in the bag.”
Reaching into the folds of his coat Fyat drew forth a small SES-issued energy weapon which was essentially contraband on this planet. He thumbed its setting to full power and widest dispersion.
A second police flyer joined the first. Fyat watched both for several seconds, taking careful aim.
Time for Plan B.
***
A few hours into the tedious cargo arrangements, Kearn received an urgent and surprising comm from Zerouali.
“Lisset spoke again,” she announced.
“Well?”
“Her exact words were: ‘Whisper coming. Sallat friend.’”
Kearn clutched his head. More variables, more complications. “Well, that seems clear enough,” he said at length. “I hope she’s right about the friend part because we couldn’t run right now if we wanted to.”
Zerouali apparently couldn’t resist the opportunity to point out that she’d been right. “I might add that if Sallat and his vessel do appear, Captain, it would be unambiguous evidence supporting the rest of her claims.”
Kearn smiled inwardly. “I stand corrected.”
Sure enough, less than an hour later the bridge crew advised that an object with the size and signature of a Fleet voidship had been detected on approach to Ona. Soon afterward Kearn retired to a corner to accept an incoming transmission from ISS Whisper of Death.
“Civilian freighter Lady of Chaos, this is Captain Daniel Sallat. Somehow I’m not altogether surprised to find you here, Kearn.”
“Likewise. In fact, we were warned you were coming and told to trust you. I presume you’re not here to arrest us?”
After two minutes or so of transmission delay, Sallat’s reply arrived. “At the moment, you’re the furthest thing from my mind. Fleet has started cleansing non-Commonwealth worlds by the dozen. I’ve managed to save a few, if only temporarily. We’re at Ona on the guidance of what would appear to be a phantom presence on my ship. If you were given forewarning of my arrival here, it occurs to me that we might share a common benefactor. How did you receive your information?”
Torn between relief and still more frustration, Kearn stumbled to formulate a reply. By now, nothing about Lisset could truly surprise him. But something else Sallat had said certainly had.
“We have a girl aboard our ship,” Kearn explained hurriedly. “Not actually a girl but some kind of entity, I suppose, that looks like a dead girl. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s your phantom. But if you don’t mind, can you explain this cleansing business? We’ve heard nothing of it.”
Strangely enough, it seemed natural to speak to Sallat as an ally, despite their one decidedly unfriendly prior encounter. The bond of a common enemy--namely, Fleet--could be quite strong. At Merada it had been that very bond which had led Kearn to aid the less-than-likeable Zerouali in defiance of his well honed instinct for self-preservation.
“There isn’t much to tell,” came Sallat’s response after the requisite lag. “The Commonwealth decided that some less palatable worlds weren’t worth the threat posed by their existence. They are now being exterminated as a preventive measure, and a g
reat many others placed on probation in a campaign called Freedom’s Reign. I declined to participate.”
‘Exterminated?’ Kearn could hardly bring himself to accept that Sallat actually meant what he’d said. Yet even his most paranoid fantasy could not conjure a means by which such news comprised part of an elaborately laid trap for Lady. Which left only one possibility: he was telling the truth.
Lisset’s incoherent ramblings sprang to Kearn’s mind, or rather Zerouali’s interpretation of same. Consequences for every one of us. Was Fleet to be the instrument by which Lisset’s supposed misdeeds were undone? Certainly Fleet was capable of undoing just about anything.
Kearn banished the wild thoughts from his head and cursed himself for having had them. Still he found that a heavy pit remained in his chest, a sense of impending doom that made him want to curl up in a hibe capsule for three or four centuries until the madness blew over.
“You’re a good man,” Kearn said in eventual reply to Sallat. “Is there anything I can do to help?”
The minutes of lag passed at a crawl, then: “I’m afraid not, Captain. Your vessel is no use against a voidship. I advise you to make all possible haste out-system. I must engage radio silence now while we await Ona’s exterminator. Victory is by no means assured, especially now that Reissa knows of our treachery. Wish us luck, Captain. Sallat out.”
Kearn scarcely heard any of Sallat’s words after the mention of ‘Ona’s exterminator.’ What should have been obvious to him from the start had escaped his grasp until now--the reason for Sallat’s presence here and why Lisset would seem to have guided Whisper to Ona.
Ona was among the condemned worlds. Of course it was. And if Aprile was down there when it happened...
Kearn was still stunned when he received yet another comm, this time from Zerouali. Some hours ago, on her own initiative, she had begun monitoring Onari newsfeeds, translated by Lady. No doubt the activity made her observation of Lisset’s warmed-over corpse slightly less dull.
