***
An hour later, Pearce’s head broke the surface near the shoreline, but only enough for his eyes to see. He had shed the survival suit half a klick out, and programmed the DPV to carry it back into the depths. Inside the gear bag were several smaller bags, swim flippers, and a small ten-minute rebreather which he had used to approach the shore.
As he scanned the beach before him for signs of life and saw nothing, he rose a little higher out of the surf, leaving the small breathing device hanging from his mouth. He took his time wading into the shallows, with the two gear bags strung over his shoulders bouncing lightly on his back. The surf was relatively calm here, and the water was bone-chillingly cold. The tight fitting thermal suit that he had worn underneath the survival suit during insertion helped regulate his body temperature, but he still found himself shivering.
The beach was pristine and deserted, and was about thirty meters wide and fairly steep, edged by a thick and tall forest of unfamiliar looking flora. He heard no sounds other than the light crashing of the waves. He made his way up onto the beach while scanning the tree line carefully and quickly dumped his gear bags onto the sand, kneeling down next to them.
He opened one and removed a small case, flipping open the latches on it quickly and removing the object from the foam insert within. It was a small fist-sized quad-copter surveillance drone called a HOVR, which of course was some acronym cleverly thought out by the product designers and promptly forgotten by the field operators. He quickly synced his VIA with it and activated it. The four blades spun up to full speed in just a second, and with a faint whine that could barely be heard even an arm’s length away it bolted up into the sky and began searching for anything nearby. The drone had its own onboard AI and would work autonomously for up to eight hours before it needed recharging. He spent merely a moment watching for it to spot anything in the immediate vicinity and when nothing was detected he quickly began going through the rest of the equipment.
The bag that had contained the drone also contained some other electronic equipment of various types, some medical supplies, and a 10mm QTZ-60 semi-automatic pistol with a screw-on sound suppressor. He would have preferred a weapon with an integrated suppressor or even a PB blaster, but he would be trying to blend in with the population here and while they were liberal with firearm freedoms they didn’t have access to military grade weaponry. It would have to do.
The second bag contained a set of native-style clothing, including heavy boots, a few layers of shirts, utility pants with multiple large pockets, a jacket, and a civilian looking backpack. The local temperature was averaging around 10 degrees Celsius and he would need the warm clothing to both fit in and avoid freezing at night.
He quickly stripped out of the thermal suit and began to dress, his body still convulsing involuntarily at the cold as he did so. As he slid out of the suit the scarred and fit body of a professional warrior was revealed. Pearce stood just over 1.8 meters tall and weighed in at just under 90 kilos. His lightly tanned skin was stretched as tightly as a drum over his well-defined muscles, and was glistening with droplets of cold salt water as he quickly donned his clothing. As he finished shrugging on his coat, he ran his hands through his short brown hair to shake out the last remnants of the sea.
He took a moment to take in the essence of the world he had landed on. He had of course read up on the planet many times during the planning and prep. Nouveau Toronto was in the same class as Earth but slightly smaller in diameter. Gravity was slightly lower as well as oxygen levels. Over 80% of the surface was covered by water, and the planet as a whole averaged a few degrees colder than Earth.
But these statistics couldn’t tell you how it actually felt to be on a new world. As Pearce took a deep breath and flared the modest sized nostrils on the end of his long nose, he took in the slightly alkaline smell of the air. He could feel the slightly lower tug of gravity on his body. He could see the aqua color of the sky, just a tinge greener than Earth’s blue skies.
He heard some rustling noises and turned his head towards the tree-line, deep blue eyes searching for the cause, thick eyebrows creased with curiosity. His VIA reacted to this stimuli by automatically querying the HOVR drone on station above, which instantly responded. The VIA used the HOVR’s data to superimpose the source of the noise on Pearce’s augmented reality OHUD.
A faint outline in his vision revealed a medium sized six-legged animal of some sort a few meters into the foliage, hidden from direct view. The outline was a pale green color, indicating that the HOVR had already identified the animal as non-hostile. Pearce rolled his tongue around the inside of his still salty mouth and spit into the sand, thin lips pursed in such a way that made his square jawline seem even more strongly defined.
Satisfied that there was no threat, he dumped the rest of the equipment and his weapon in the backpack, storing the more sensitive stuff in a small hidden pouch that was lined with anti-sensor material. He dug a small hole in the sand and dumped the thermal suit, the swim equipment, and the two bags in it. He then opened a small pouch of powder and sprinkled it over the contents of the hole, ignited a small magnesium flare, and dropped it on top. The resulting thermite reaction quickly engulfed the suit and bags and burned them away to dust in a few seconds. He kicked sand in on the smoldering hole and began walking up the beach and towards the woods. There would be no record of the disposal in just a few minutes.
According to his VIA, he had a 60 km walk until he reached civilization. From there, he could make his way to the target. He figured he would be wrapping everything up in less than five days. With the hard part of the mission successful and behind him, Pearce allowed himself a brief smile as he disappeared into the thick vegetation, leaving only footprints in the sand which wouldn’t last past the next tide to show he had ever been there.
TWO
Nouveau Toronto, Ontario System
Independent Colony
Pearce scratched a week’s worth of beard growth with his right hand as he pretended to be absorbed in the datapad in his left. He sat in an uncomfortable and wobbly metal chair in front of an equally wobbly metal table; his VIA had actually identified them as being made of wrought iron alloy, as ancient as that sounded.
The nature of the furniture was no surprise when compared to the backwater town itself (he could hardly call it a city regardless of what the map said). The small café that he sat outside of was made of actual wood!
The majority of the buildings in the town were concrete, stone, or wood and less than five stories tall. Almost all of them, including the neighborhood he now sat in, were built right on top of each other, with adjoining walls or oppressively narrow alleys. He felt like he was stuck in some kind of old movie set hundreds of years ago on Earth.
He was forced to admit that despite the near primitive appearance of this planet’s infrastructure the citizens themselves were another matter. They may not have advanced nanotechnology factories and grav-lift construction equipment, but they had a relatively modern communications network and VIA implants that were only a few generations behind the cutting edge. They were a surprisingly resilient people, accustomed to hard work with minimal reliance on technology. The individuals he had interacted with had been proud and strong-willed, quick to offer counsel and quicker still to call out wrongs as they saw them.
The vast amounts of political rhetoric he had encountered over the last week had confirmed that they were uncommonly engaged and fiercely independent. It was this near fanatical desire to be free of dependence on the Confederation, or any other independent world, that made them a very dangerous group. Confederation intelligence suggested that this world was one of the top recruitment sources for SepF and other even more radical groups. The dogmatic nature of their political platform guaranteed extremist viewpoints would emerge. What wouldn’t a true believer do to protect their goals? If the pistols and rifles that almost every single person carried constantly were any sign, probably nothing.
His mission
had already taken far longer than he had expected. He had made slow going from the minute he left the beach, as the dangerous and inhospitable forest he had set out in proved to be an enormous challenge to pass through. When he had finally made it to the nearest pocket of civilization around sunset almost 48 Sol hours (or nearly 3 local days) later, it turned out to be a bandit’s den of thugs and criminal types who hadn’t taken lightly Pearce’s unexpected presence or the cookie-cutter fake ID his VIA had inserted into the net.
By the time the sun had dropped behind the horizon, Pearce had left two dead men and a slowly suffocating paraplegic in an alley as he fled in their crawler. Luckily, Pearce’s cyber-warfare suite had made short work of hacking their VIAs and the crawler itself. Spoofed to transmit normal life signs to the planetary network, they had “headed north” in the same crawler Pearce took south.
At first Pearce had thought the crawler was symbolic of the age-old male fallibility towards over-compensation; it was essentially a huge all-terrain truck after all. However, the crawler had earned every bit of its namesake as the road Pearce’s VIA showed on the map turned out to be more akin to a washed-out riverbed than anything else. He bumped and bounced over rocks and through mud and streams for the better part of the next day, which should have been more than enough time for the bodies to be found and an alert raised. The HOVR and his own VIA reported no such alerts and no signs of pursuit, and Pearce realized that whomever had found them had decided that discretion was the better part of valor. No one would come looking for someone who killed a bunch of crooks.
It took him another standard day to reach the next town, having spent all but the last few hours bouncing along before finally reaching an actual paved roadway. He had ditched the crawler a few klicks from the border and begun his hunt for the target in earnest. After several more days and quite a few brutal interrogations, he was closing in for the kill. In fact, while he was pretending to read, he was actually surveilling his target’s front door in a building down the street; a lion stalking its prey from the high grass.
The office building was one of the nicer and more modern structures in the area, featuring large windows and some elaborate masonry work. The six story building, already tall for the neighborhood, further stood out by having no less than a dozen tall comm towers and dishes on the roof. Two serious-looking men wearing tac-suits stood to either side of the front door with carbines slung across their chests.
Pearce could easily identify the weapons as QBZ-135 variants and wasn’t surprised. The Sino-made weapons were eminently reliable and cheap, which led to them being a favorite of criminals and militias throughout the Local Bubble. The guards weren’t as alert and disciplined as soldiers would be, but they were clearly attentive enough for a backwater town such as this. He wouldn’t be going in through the front door.
Pearce wished that he didn’t have to enter the building at all. It would have been immeasurably easier to take out his target at his personal residence or even more preferably on the streets. He could even make it look accidental. However, the mission called for the retrieval of some sensitive data that the target only had access to at this location. The HOVR had been actively tracking him via RF-capture imaging, which used radio waves to track targets through walls, and Pearce had been watching the outline of his prey moving around on the fifth floor for the last ten minutes. The target had finally settled into a chair a few minutes ago and appeared to be working at a desktop terminal, allowing Pearce to formulate a plan. Now it was go-time.
Pearce dropped the café’s datapad on the table and stood, pushing the heavy chair back with an irritating metal-on-concrete scraping sound that gnawed at his inner ear. Swinging his pack over his left shoulder, he stepped off of the patio and into the street, careful to avoid the gutter detritus that seemed to be everywhere.
The block was narrow, with vehicles parked on the opposite side and barely enough room leftover for anything else to squeeze by. It terminated two buildings down at a T, where the target’s building was located. There was no sidewalk, but traffic was light and the only thing he had to avoid was an overactive stray dog that was hunting amidst the garbage. Pearce didn’t know how the dog could find anything; to him the entire town smelled like slightly spoiled food.
He let his right hand casually drop to rest on the butt of his pistol, worn in a leather thigh holster and strapped to his leg. He had acquired it several days back after quickly realizing that he was actually more conspicuous for not openly carrying a firearm amongst a populace where carrying was as ordinary as wearing shoes. In fact, in several cases he had seen individuals missing the latter but sporting the former.
He ambled across the three way intersection, in no particular hurry, of no particular interest, lost amidst a dozen or so others about their business. The target building straddled the “T” side of the junction, and upon reaching the other side of the street, Pearce casually headed down the block to the right, away from the goons at the front door.
While he appeared calm and relaxed on the outside, he was already in overdrive on the inside. He knew from his HOVR reconnaissance while sitting at the café that the building next door to the target was full of people; an office of some sort. The next building down the street was relatively empty. More importantly, both buildings were five stories tall and joined together in traditional row-house style. The target building itself was spaced out on both side by narrow alleys, but Pearce should be able to gain access to the rooftops and make his way across with a little effort.
As he neared the doorway to the second building, he thought an order to his VIA: “Engage Infiltration Mode”. This activated a number of functions. It transposed all detected biological signatures in the immediate vicinity onto his OHUD with the same faint outline as the target, color coded for threat level. It initiated a hack into the local network which effectively spoofed any nearby monitoring and tracking systems into thinking they were functioning properly when they had in fact been disabled. Finally, it tapped into local security, police, and military communications networks and automatically notified him of relevant updates.
With near complete situational awareness of his surrounding area, he was able to see that he wasn’t being watched without even turning his head. He quickly entered the building and shut the door quietly behind him.
The building was residential with a shared stairwell, and Pearce quickly headed up. The worn stairs creaked and snapped as he took them two at a time. There were no windows but each landing had a dim lamp that cast everything in shadows. From what he could make out, it was probably better that it was harder to see; the place was clearly not a luxury joint. At the top floor he came to a locked door leading to the roof, which clicked open before he even reached out with his hand for the knob. Another benefit of his VIA’s Infiltration Mode.
On the roof, he shrugged his pack off of his shoulders and quickly accessed the hidden compartment in the bottom, removing the suppressor for his pistol and a single padded glove. He screwed the suppressor into the barrel of his pistol and placed it back into his thigh holster, and donned the glove onto his left hand. Then he slung the pack over both shoulders again and pulled the two tightening straps until they were taunt as he walked across the rooftop towards the target building.
He hopped the short wall separating the neighboring building and halted halfway across, a few meters from the edge of the roof and the alley that separated the buildings. As he took in the scene, his VIA automatically overlaid the distances and angles on his OHUD; the gap was just under two meters wide and the rooftop of the target building, one story taller than the one he stood on, was just over four meters higher.
Pearce took a deep breath, slapped his hands on the front of his thighs, and took off in a sprint towards the edge of the roof. At the last second he shifted his weight slightly lower at his knees and then exploded into action with a tremendous leap, using his right foot to push off the raised wall ringing the roof.
If anyone had been watchi
ng, they would have thought Pearce a goner. In reality, he could have made the leap even without the added benefit of lower gravity. All Confederation SSG troops underwent intensive genetic therapy as part of their advanced training, making them incredibly strong and fast. Pearce had leapt higher than this in training hundreds of times. Biogenetic enhancement made every SSG soldier a tremendous force to be reckoned with even before they strapped on a half-ton of powered armor and grabbed a railgun.
Pearce landed on the roof of the target building in a crouch, making no more noise than a bird. He looked down, and could see through the roof the orange outlined images of dozens of people about their business. His target was still outlined in red.
He pulled his weapon from its holster and silently padded to the rooftop door on the balls of his feet. When he reached it, the lock was already disabled by his VIA, and he carefully entered and closed the door behind him. This stairway was concrete, sturdy and sterile. His boots made no noise as he slipped past the entry to the sixth floor and headed to the fifth. He stopped before the metal door, the lock indicator switching from amber to green, cradling the pistol in the grip of his right hand.
The Tango was still sitting in a room on this floor, alone. A half dozen others were spread out throughout the floor, seemingly engaged in whatever they were doing. Pearce slowly pushed the door open and stepped out into a brightly lit hallway that was downright luxurious compared to what he had seen on this world so far. His senses were now hyper acute, and he took in everything about the hallway the way that a computer processes data. Plush beige carpeting lined the floor; this would aid his stealth. The doors and trim were a deep, rich hardwood. Expensive looking artwork decorated the walls. Even the air had an opulent smell to it, purified and slightly reminiscent of flowers and honey.
He drank in several deep breaths as he silently walked down the hall. Three doors down was the closed door that led to the room the target was in. The second door down the hall was open, but Pearce could tell no one was inside. He glanced quickly in anyway as he passed, and saw a high-end kitchen, complete with stone countertops and fancy appliances. The level of wealth on display in just this short walk down the hallway dwarfed everything he had seen on the backwater world thus far. “Living like Kings amongst the peasants”, he said to himself, forcing anger aside at the thought.
Impact Event (Dargo Pearce Chronicles #1) Page 4
