As he slipped away from the scene of carnage unnoticed, he asked himself how his intel had been so wrong on this op. And what event had shocked the now dead terrorist so much back in his office.
He had a feeling he wouldn’t like the answers.
FIVE
Amiko-7 Orbital Station, Lavar System
Independent Colony
Three days later, Pearce walked into a cheap looking hotel room that smelled like sex and booze and closed the door behind him. Escaping New Toronto had proven to be far more difficult than expected, but he had finally made it to the starport and off-world by stowing away on an ore freighter. He hadn’t trusted any of his multiple extraction plans after the first few had been apparently leaked.
It wasn’t a particularly pleasant trip, but it was only a short flash to the nearby system of Amiko, one of the only active trading partners with the isolated colony. He snuck off the ship and onto the orbital station that served as the primary commercial zone for Amiko-7, as the planet didn’t yet have a planetary tether or starport on the surface.
Pearce had no intention of heading to the surface in any case. He quickly entered the dilapidated unit’s bathroom and triggered a complex key transmission with his VIA. The wall containing the commode quickly swung aside with a hiss of equalizing air revealing a small but functional living area that was nearly sterile compared to the hotel room.
This room was an Omega safe house, setup nearly a decade earlier. Omega had dozens of them setup all over the frontier, in addition to the hundreds they had setup in the Confederation. As he entered the safe room and resealed the hidden doorway behind him, he was cut off from the entirety of the station’s network. The only communication in or out was via untraceable point-to-point QE comms that completely bypassed the traditional hypernet.
Pearce sat down in front of a generic looking terminal that looked like it had been state-of-the-art perhaps thirty years earlier. He knew that it was really acting as nothing more than a dumb link between the Omega network and this location, all facilitated by undetectable quantum entangled communications processed through the large spherical device stretching from floor to ceiling behind the desk. The terminal was completely powered off, and so Pearce pressed the power button and waited a few short seconds for the machine to boot up. When completed, a single word in white letters appeared in the center of the screen; “Authenticate.”
Pearce hesitated for a moment. If he had been targeted for elimination by Omega, he would be opening himself up to significant risk simply by checking in. He wouldn’t be surprised if this entire room was wired with explosives. Yet Pearce decided that he wasn’t concerned that the Director might be out to get him. If that had been the case, he wouldn’t have failed.
He placed his right hand on a non-descript pad that set to the right of the terminal’s keyboard, which triggered several things. His fingerprints were scanned. A small needle pierced his little finger with a slight pinch and drew a microtubule of his blood. And the NFC chip embedded under the skin of his palm made a direct connection to the terminal and passed a one-time-use synchronized encryption key.
The results of all three tests were passed instantaneously via the QCOM to the Omega authentication system, which verified Pearce’s identity as an Agent and brought the terminal to life. Pearce kept his palm on the pad and initiated a transfer of the data he had stolen from New Toronto to the Omega net. As the transfer commenced he initiated a vidcall to the Director. Thirty seconds later Pearce was looking at the face of Director Allard, who was sitting over a hundred light years away.
“This is Legatus. Primary and secondary missions successful. Exfil was compromised. Additional approved targets eliminated. There were…complications.” Pearce said after pausing to seek the right word.
As he started to go on, the Director interrupted his report, a first in the long history of dealing with him.
“Have you seen the news?” he asked, with a tone that suggested that Pearce was neglectful if he hadn’t.
“Negative. I spent the last 30 hours crammed into an ore bay on a hauler. I’ve yet to connect to a non-secure network.”
The Director paused and took a deep breath. “A picture is worth a thousand words,” he said and his visage suddenly shrunk to the corner of the display, replaced by a full-screen video of a planet taken from a high orbit. The majority of the surface was covered with thick black clouds with bright lines of volcanic lava sporadically spread out across the landscape. Several ongoing eruptions were visible.
“Looks like a standard V-class planet or moon,” Pearce commented, unsure of what he was supposed to be seeing.
“Yes, well that is now. This was three days ago,” responded the Director as the video switched to show a typical garden world of blues and greens at a slightly farther distance and different angle. Pearce watched as a ship inexplicably flashed-in close to the planet, sending a cascade of plasma and aurora across the atmosphere of the doomed world before a tremendous explosion followed shortly after as it smashed into the surface. Pearce had been involved with the most advanced weaponry available to the Confed for over a decade and had never seen anything even remotely close to the destructive power on display. The closest comparison he could make was to a large asteroid impact event. Then it dawned on him that this wasn’t a classified weapons test; the Director had mentioned the news.
“Where?” he managed to grunt out as the reality of what he was watching sunk in.
“New Shanghai, Shenzen sector. Twenty-two million colonists. Casualty rates are expected to be 100%.”
Pearce swore out loud. More lives had been snuffed out in an instant than in the last hundred years of warfare combined.
“Confed Intel is painting our boys at Separatist Front as the likely culprits, using a sophisticated hack of the PAN system. They even mentioned Nathan Verdun as a possible mastermind,” The Director said while raising an eyebrow.
“Impossible,” Pearce responded while playing back the scene in the dead terrorist’s office inside his mind. “Even if they had the technical expertise to hack the PAN, which they don’t, and even if they had a motive to commit mass genocide and start the next interstellar war, which they don’t…I believe I was there when the news broke. I saw Verdun’s reaction; it was sheer panic. He had no foreknowledge of this event. He was frantic about the trading markets, he was actively monitoring them when they all went haywire. He would have been pre-positioned correctly if he knew what was going to happen.”
The Director was nonplussed. “Just because he was out of the loop doesn’t mean it couldn’t be SepF.”
“The Separatist’s don’t want a war they can’t win. They just want to be left alone.”
“Then why are they bombing trade convoys and launching terrorist attacks against military bases?”
“That’s a completely different scale and you know it. Those attacks are designed to harass and dissuade until we finally decide that it isn’t worth it and leave. They aren’t designed to provoke a response,” Pearce argued, finding it strange to be defending his enemy in such a manner. “This…this has no other outcome than a full scale war. They would know that the Confed would respond with the full might of the Fleet, and while their little defense force won’t go down without a fight they know just as we do that they will lose badly.”
“I don’t disagree with you,” the Director replied, leaning in towards the camera a bit. “But this situation is quickly reaching critical mass. This kind of attack changes the game we’ve been playing for the last fifty years. Suddenly all sorts of intelligence is coming out of the woodwork to support the theory that it was SepF. Any dissent to that analysis is being tossed aside, rather forcefully. The Fleets are already mobilizing, implementing war contingency plans drafted decades ago. The entire Confed military reserve has been recalled to active duty.”
Pearce slowly stroked his lightly bearded jaw as he listened and eventually responded. “In the face of a threat of this magnitude, those aren’t
unjustified actions. Somebody broke the PAN system and blew up an entire colony.”
“I’ve been in this business for a very long time, and I’ve never seen anything like this. Not just the military knee-jerk, but the rapid solidification of previously unknown intelligence in such a short time. It’s like someone turned on the lights at CIED Headquarters for the first time. And found the roach they were always looking for.”
Pearce thought about it. There were plenty of hawks who were clamoring for war in regular times. Governors, Admirals, and Generals who saw the unaffiliated worlds as rightful Confederation territory. ‘Leeches’, they called them. Building independent colonies on the backs of Confederation technology, science, and manpower. The independent worlds represented less than a quarter of colonized systems, and by population were less than 5% of humanity. Yet they commanded nearly 30% of Galactic GDP. There was a lot of wealth out there that many Confed’s coveted and considered theirs.
There had been a brief and abortive attempt to take them by force over thirty years ago when the Confed’s got cocky and sent a small battle group to oust the troublesome leadership of an influential independent world called Galedon. The Prime Minister and his family all ended up tragically killed during a botched raid, and the provisional Governor who was installed in the aftermath tried to take a hardline approach with the local populace. The idea at the time had been to strike fear into the remaining systems and coerce them into joining by proving ties to extremist elements would not be tolerated.
The Confederation had drastically underestimated the support that the Galedonian Prime Minister enjoyed throughout unaffiliated space, however. The independent systems created an unprecedented mutual defense pact and formed a modest armada with the combined power of their local defense fleets, and mounted a counterattack at Galedon several weeks later. The Confederation Fleet there was caught totally unprepared and lost more than half of their ships in the ensuing battle before withdrawing, with few losses for the newly formed Independent Worlds Fleet, or IWF. Galedon had remained fiercely independent ever since, though a dozen other independent worlds had eventually petitioned for acceptance into the Confederation.
In the three decades that followed, a perpetual cold war had existed, with the IWF aggressively expanding their Fleet capabilities in an attempt to counter colonial ambitions from the Confeds. Still, despite their impressive capabilities the IWF would not stand a chance against the Confederation in a stand-up fight. Instead, the independent worlds waged what they called guerilla warfare and what the Confeds called terrorism by funding, overtly and covertly, small resistance groups whose goals were to dissuade any attempts to influence or coerce further planets to join, mostly through violence.
Separatist Front was the largest and most notorious of these groups, and given the escalation he had faced on New Toronto he thought that even Omega had drastically underestimated their capabilities. Could they be capable of carrying out such a monstrous attack? Would they be willing to face the Confederation in full scale war? If they had somehow acquired Confederation gunships that they could waste providing security on backwater worlds, what other tricks were they hiding up their sleeves?
Thinking of those events triggered a thought for Pearce. “Verdun was killed right after the attack took place, but too early for the Confederation to have been officially involved. So the story will be that SepF was cleaning house and eliminating all of the evidence, won’t it?”
The Director smiled morosely. “There is a reason you are my best Agent.”
Pearce slammed the desk. “It all makes sense. Intel was badly incomplete on the op, and I think we may have a leak from inside Omega. Within a minute of the hit, SepF had a stolen Belcheri gunship on site. They defeated a grade-A cyberwarfare attack and neutralized my support drone with ease. An entire platoon of QRF troops responded. I barely escaped. Even if this SepF cell was far more robust than our intel was aware of, their response time was still an anomaly. But if they were tipped off in advance…”
“I’m not willing to make that leap yet. It’s possible that our intel was simply that bad. SepF intelligence is sketchy enough, and New Toronto is one of the most clammed up worlds on a good day. It’s also possible that a rival faction was reacting to the news of the attack by making their own move on Verdun, and you simply got caught in the crossfire.”
Pearce scowled doubtfully. “They seemed to know all of my planned extraction routes. And infighting is hard to align with how the Directorate is responding.”
“As soon as you think you understand the narrative,” Allard began.
“Step back and examine all of your premises from the first,” Pearce finished the saying the Director was fond of. “And I am. There were soldiers waiting for me at the entrance to a random utility tunnel that was included in my Control briefing. I’m telling you we have a leak.”
Allard took a deep breath before replying.
“I’ll look into it. Legatus, your new mission supersedes all existing directives. You are to acquire transport and get to New Shanghai ASAP. You will have sufficient credentials to gain access to the investigative team that is currently gathering on the CNS Scorpio. You will participate in the investigation, assess the situation, and take all appropriate action to ensure that the primary and secondary mission objectives are completed.”
“What is the primary objective?” Pearce asked.
A grave look came over the Director’s usually impassive face. “Find the bastards that actually did this, no matter who they are or what colors they are wearing. And terminate them with extreme prejudice.”
“And the secondary?”
Now the Director was back to smiling. “That one is easy. Prevent the Confederation and IWF from going to war.”
SIX
Interstellar Transit Zone, Shenzen System
United Sol Confederation
They said that you couldn’t tell when a starship transitioned from faster-than-light speed to normal space, but Pearce always felt a wave of formication whenever he flashed-in to a system. Various friends in the medical corps had told him over the years that he was merely manifesting his acute sense of time in a physical manner; he knew that the trip would take a certain amount of time and was aware when that period had elapsed. And while true that Pearce had an uncanny internal clock even without the assistance of his VIA, there had been times when he had felt the sensation without knowing the timing of the trip at all. There were a few fringe theories out there suggesting that certain individuals could detect the massive release of particles that accompanied flash-in, but the evidence was inconclusive.
Regardless of what actually caused it, the itchy-crawly sensation that Pearce now felt certainly signaled that they had arrived in the Shenzen System. As he rose from his acceleration seat and headed towards the door of the cramped cabin he had occupied for the last few days, the voice of the artificial shipboard intelligence (ASI) sounded in his head and politely informed him that they had dropped out of FTL and would be maneuvering in 3 minutes, and to secure for acceleration. Pearce knew that they would maneuvering and decelerating for the next few days and had no intention of sitting in his cabin through it all.
He quickly stepped into the passageway outside of his cabin and headed for the bridge. The ship, a small passenger vessel named The Nightingale, was designed for civilian VIP use, but you couldn’t tell from the spartan accommodations. In fact, the majority of the compartments and passageways that Pearce had seen were downright military in their look and feel.
It made sense only when you realized that the ship was designed for speed and not comfort. While the overall mass of a ship was relatively irrelevant during FTL travel, every gram mattered when striving for a craft capable of high delta-v.
As Pearce passed exposed conduits and unpainted metal bulkheads on his way to the ladder that led topside to the command deck hatch, he inwardly smiled at the thought of high-level politicians and executives boarding The Nightingale expecting luxurious VIP a
ccommodations. The laws of physics dictated that fast starships shed all extraneous mass. So they could travel on large, luxurious passenger liners if they wanted to but it would cost days if not weeks of extra travel time.
Pearce himself hadn’t had any choice in the ship which carried him here. It was simply the fastest transport that had been available, and the Captain had certainly charged him a rate commensurate with that fact once he’d realized how urgently Pearce needed to be here. Five days of maximum A-Drive later, they were arriving almost five light years from their origin. They would have a few more days of hard deceleration burn before they could dock with the CNS Scorpio and drop off Pearce, and he intended to spend every minute of it learning as much as he possibly could about the disaster that had unfolded here.
He took the ladder steps two at a time and used the handrail to nearly launch himself onto the command deck. The bridge itself was a few more doorways down the passageway and when he entered the Captain didn’t even bother with his customary but completely non-serious objection to the unauthorized entry. He, along with the three other bridge minders, were completely and utterly absorbed in watching the main viewscreen, which showed the devastated remains of a planet once called New Shanghai.
Pearce had seen many things in his life and had witnessed some spectacular acts of destruction in the military, some of which he had even caused himself. There wasn’t a word in his vocabulary that could describe the sheer destruction that he saw on the screen. The planet had originally been Earth-like in its appearance with blue, green, brown, and white colors dominant.
Impact Event (Dargo Pearce Chronicles #1) Page 8
