by PP Corcoran
“He’s late,” commented Tim, noticing Alastair’s uncharacteristic fidgeting. “And don’t you think its damn odd of him to insist on delivering the information personally and not trust the usual comms channels?”
Alastair opened his mouth to reply when a beeping from his smart desk alerted him to an incoming call. Scrambling to sit upright, Alastair punched the accept key, and a distinctly alien head and face swam into focus in the Tri-V. Piercing red eyes stared at him from a Humanoid head, the skull and facial bones more protrusive than a Human, and the skin coloring so black it was almost indistinguishable in the low light location of the alien.
“I greet you, Bomak of the Grimm,” said Alastair solemnly.
“I greet thee, Colonel Sinclair of the Scorpions,” replied Bomak, equally as solemn.
It was only the third or fourth time Alastair had seen Bomak face to face. Well, third or fourth time that he could recall anyway, for the Grimm, often called Specters, had a naturally-occurring psionic ability to erase the memory of anyone who may have seen them.
An attribute which made them the perfect infiltrator. This skill had caused the paths of the Scorpions and the Specter to cross and for them to come to a mutually-beneficial arrangement. When the Scorpions had a particularly difficult facility to breach, Alastair had subcontracted the work to Bomak, who had been ostracized from his community for ‘misdeeds.’ What the misdeeds had been, Bomak wouldn’t say; however, he had penetrated the facility’s defenses with impunity and returned with detailed plans of the objective, giving the Scorpions an unparalleled advantage over their adversary. Afterward, Bomak had recommended the Scorpions to potential employers, leading to them securing a few lucrative contracts. Bomak’s latest contract, however, had been one of a more personal nature.
“I have the information you requested, Colonel. Penetrating the secure areas of Bartertown was simple, and I had little difficulty locating the computer server holding the data on the Bartertown’s mercenary pit. I got the details of their contracts, employers, details of duration and type of contract, which mercenary company bid for the contract, and who eventually won it. I also secured the account details from which the various contracts are being financed.”
Simple? Little difficulty? thought Alastair. Right! And that’s why I employ you, Bomak!
Alastair’s stomach tingled with a familiar sensation as excitement raged deeply in his stomach. Could Bomak’s information hold the key to the happenings within the merc community?
“However, I regret to inform you, it is not as complete as I desire, and I must apologize.”
Alastair’s excitement diminished at the alien’s words.
“While tracing the account details I inadvertently tripped a security measure which released a worm. The virus wiped the server I had accessed and proceeded to wipe every other server connected to the GalNet in Bartertown.”
What? thought Alistair.
“As you Humans say, it was akin to using a hammer to squash a fly, and it indicates some extremely capable individuals will go to extraordinary steps to keep their identities hidden.” Bomak then cocked his skeletal head to one side and exposed his neck.
The submissive gesture caught Alastair by surprise. He had been busy deciphering Bomak’s words, but he gathered himself to respond to the Specter’s cultural demand. Bomak had exposed his vulnerable neck to the razor-sharp teeth of his opponent, putting himself at his opponent’s mercy; it was his way of offering an apology.
Alastair opened his mouth wide to reveal his own teeth which were pitiful compared to the pointed, shark-like ones of Bomak. Then Alastair snapped his jaws together with an audible click that signaled Apology accepted.
In the Tri-V, Bomak returned his head to an upright position before speaking. “I am transmitting the file now, Colonel.”
A couple of seconds later Alastair’s smart desk beeped, quietly acknowledging receipt of the file. Alastair entered a command into the desk which authorized the transfer of funds into Bomak’s Yack account. Another couple of seconds passed as the transfer was verified before the desk gave the same quiet beep. Bomak’s red eyes glanced momentarily to one side as his own computers acknowledged the status change of his account.
“I believe our business to be concluded, Colonel,” said Bomak. However, Alastair detected a slight hesitation in the Specter’s wish to terminate the conversation. In the years that he had known Bomak, Alastair had always found the Specter to be nothing if not businesslike to a fault, so he was momentarily confused by the alien’s dithering.
“Something else, Bomak?” asked Alastair.
The figure in the Tri-V took a second to gather its thoughts before answering. “Colonel. Unhappy that I was unable to completely secure the information you had requested, I made some—let us call them, inquiries—among a number of other sources.” If Bomak had wanted to garner Alastair and Tim’s attention more than he already had, then the promise of additional information was a sure way to get it.
“Whatever is happening within the Mercenary Guild, it’s not confined to that one guild. I have it on good authority that there’ve been subtle actions within the Information Guild to either delay or make disappear certain communications packets between Human mercenary companies and their units off world.”
Tim gasped in sheer disbelief. Alastair’s face drained of blood. Not only were Tim’s initial suspicions about the Mercenary Guild confirmed, but now Bomak alluded to the involvement of the Information Guild.
“Your diligence in completing the contract to the best of your ability does you credit Bomak, and this additional information is indeed appreciated and worthy of requisite compensation,” said Alastair.
In the Tri-V, Bomak waved one of his long arms in a very Human act of dismissal which both he and the Scorpions’ officers knew was only for show. In the dog-eat-dog world of the modern galaxy you got nothing for free. Alastair leaned forward and his fingers tapped at the keys on his smart desk for a moment before sitting back. Bomak’s facial expression gave no hint of satisfaction as his computer showed a hefty bonus arriving in his account.
“I thank you for your generosity, Colonel,” the Specter acknowledged.
Alastair allowed a grin to tug at the corners of his mouth. “Money well spent. I bid thee farewell, Bomak of the Grimm.”
“And thee, Colonel Sinclair of the Scorpions.”
Terminating the connection, Alastair adjusted his position in his seat so he faced Tim fully. The man had both files Bomak had transmitted open and side by side in the smaller Tri-V in front of him. A series of worry lines creased his forehead as his eyes rapidly scanned the rows of data.
“You don’t look happy, Tim,” Alastair said, not attempting to hide his concern.
“Look at this, Alastair.” Tim swiped an open-palmed hand at data hovering in front of him, the action activating the larger Tri-V on the wall behind him which sprang to life and filled with the two files he had been sifting through.
“On the left is the contracts’ data from Bartertown and on the right are the message logs of the Information Guild.” In the display, Tim highlighted a line on the left-hand column. “See here? Three companies of Tortantula have been contracted for heavy planetary assault.” A tap of a key, and a line extended from the mercenary company name to a seemingly random jumble of numbers and letters in the right-hand column. “And whomever issued the contract is hiding behind a pretty serious encryption code.”
Alastair worried his bottom lip as another, then another, then another line appeared in the display as the computer’s algorithms quietly worked at matching contracts to bank accounts.
More Tortantula heavy assault units. Destroyers. Battleships. The more Alastair looked at the information, the tighter the growing knots in his stomach got. This was all too much of a coincidence. Somebody out there was building themselves an army at a phenomenal cost. Whoever it was would unleash it soon, and Alastair pitied whoever was on the receiving end.
“How long to b
reak the encryption codes and identify who is paying for all these contracts?” Alastair asked Tim.
A half grunt escaped Tim’s lips as he shook his head slowly. “Too be honest, Alastair, I don’t think that even our best guys could crack that code. Corporal Zou over in Jamie’s communications section is pretty good, if you are willing to bring him in on this.”
Alastair mulled it over for a moment. Until now, he had shared his suspicions with only one other person, Tim, choosing not to bring even his sons Charlie and Jamie into the loop.
It wasn’t that he didn’t trust them—Charlie was his chosen successor after all—it was that Tim had always been his sounding board. The Ying to his Yang, so to speak, and if anybody was going to spot a flaw in his thinking, it was Tim. However, with this new information Alastair agreed the time had come to widen the circle of knowledge.
“OK, do it if you think it’ll help,” he said.
“Maybe somebody over at the Golden Horde? They have the expertise and the resources. If this thing is as big as we think it is, it’s going to be a huge threat to them too.”
Tim had a point. The Golden Horde had a certain reputation in computer and signals intelligence. The only sticking point Alastair envisaged was that Commander Enkh was so damned paranoid that there was every chance she would jump to conclusions unjustified by the facts, and God knows where that could lead to.
“No, let’s keep it in-house for the time being. Only our own get to see the data until either Zou tells us he has reached a dead end, or something else changes the parameters of the game.”
Tim nodded in understanding. “I think it’s time to let at least the officers in on what we have found. The second we pull Zou from normal duties, they and the troops will know something is up, and the best way to squash rumors is with the truth.”
Good point well presented, thought Alastair. Nothing was worse for morale than when junior ranks thought their officers were hiding something from them. “Very well. How long will it take you to put together a briefing outlining what we think and what we know?”
“Couple of hours should be enough,” answered Tim, his brain already going over the format of the brief.
“Convene the officers and Senior NCOs at—” Alastair spared a glance at the clock which showed 0645, “fourteen hundred hours, and let’s give them the good news.”
Tim stood, took a couple of steps toward the office door, and reached for the handle, but stopped short of opening it. He turned back to face his friend, but before he could speak, Alastair held up his hand, a weak smile playing on his lips. “I know what you are going to say, Tim, and I’ll get on it the minute you leave me in peace.”
With a curt nod, Tim left and closed the door softly behind him. Alastair sat motionless for a long minute before he leaned forward and hunched over the keyboard of his smart desk. His face contorted in concentration as he entered a code. The code bypassed every control circuit on the base and re-routed its command through multiple communication servers, before being flung into space.
In the Tri-V, a gold scorpion in its enclosing band of gold rotated quietly as the connection was established. As he waited, Alastair angled his chair so that he could look out through the rain-streaked full-length window onto the sandy beach.
In the distance, he just made out the tan-uniformed figures of running troopers as they headed back to the base following their impromptu morning PT session. A double beep sounded as the connection completed, and Alastair spun around to regard the gray-haired, fine-boned woman with carved-from-flint eyes. As she recognized the caller, those eyes subtly softened until they regarded Alastair with a maternal look. Behind her, just visible in the camera’s range, Alastair made out several slightly out of focus figures moving purposefully. There was always something to do on the bridge of a ship.
“And to what honor do I owe a call from the esteemed commander of Sinclair’s Scorpions at this devilishly early hour of your day?” Kate Preissman said sarcastically.
Given that Alastair had not spoken to the woman in over a year, her words could have been misinterpreted by others as insulting and dismissive, but those others would’ve been unaware of the pair’s familial relationship. A relationship which they endeavored to hide from prying eyes.
“Aunt Kate, I need the Salamanca,” said Alastair.
If the older woman was taken aback by Alastair’s abrupt demand for her ship, the only sign was the slight hardening of her eyes. “Is it that bad?”
Alastair gave a shrug of his shoulders. His reluctance to give a direct answer was enough for Kate to switch personas from distant, convivial aunt to the captain of a merchant ship that she was. “How many do I need to lift?”
“A company plus, along with their CASPers and ancillary equipment,” said Alastair.
In the Tri-V Kate closed her eyes for a second as she did the mental math. “I’d need to dump most of our current cargo to make room and top off the F11 tanks—”
“The Scorpions will cover the costs,” interjected Alastair.
Kate gave a short laugh. “Alastair Sinclair, need I remind you that you may have hidden your tracks well by going through shell company after shell company, but, when you get down to it, the Salamanca is Scorpions property whatever the Trade Guild, the Merchant Guild, or the tax collector might think.” A gentle, gurgling laugh sounded from Kate, forcing a wry smile from Alastair. Their moment of joviality over, Kate continued in a more serious tone. “Your father always suspected that one day you would need a method to get off planet in a hurry, or he would never have spent the credits buying this old heap of junk.” Kate gave another of her infectious giggles. Heap of junk indeed! thought Alastair. The Salamanca was Kate’s pride and joy.
Like many merchant ships plying their trade around the galaxy, the Salamanca was a product of Jeha shipyards. The millipede-like Jeha may only be four feet long, but with multiple pincers combining to make highly-dexterous arms, they were prodigious ship builders, and, like most things in the Galactic Union, their ships were built to last. Salamanca was a Luka-class merchant ship, at 540-feet-long and grossing twenty-eight thousand tons she was on the limits of ships that could land unassisted by specialist support structures on the surface of planets.
Her triple fusion torches could push her hefty bulk along at over eleven Gs which had come as an unpleasant surprise to pursuing warships on a couple of occasions. Eleven hundred G-hours of reaction mass and thirty-two hundred hours of total fusion output until her F11 tanks were depleted also made the Salamanca a perfect medium-sized merchantman, and thousands had been built. Over two hundred years old, she had been patched, repaired, and updated so many times over the years that both the outer hull and the ship’s layout would have been unrecognizable to the original builders—a fact that had come in handy when the Scorpions procured it thirty years before and had made a few modifications of their own.
More powerful anti-missile laser turrets, anti-missile missiles, reinforced hull armor, more powerful shield generators, and another couple of less conventional twists that would come as a nasty surprise to any potential foe had all been added. The Salamanca may not have been able to take on and defeat a dedicated warship in a stand-up fight, but any frigate or destroyer captain had better be damned wary of her. Over the years she had, albeit sparingly, inserted and retrieved the Scorpions whenever they needed to fly below the radar; therefore, several of her standard cargo bays were not so standard. An untrained eye might have missed the adaptions for accommodating troopers and handling CASPers, but lifting 150 troopers and equipment would require much more overt modifications.
“I can make Earth orbit in—” Kate caught the eye of her Pendal pilot, Horak. With one of his lower limbs he interrogated the navigation computer which obligingly displayed the information Kate required in the bottom left corner of her display. “Thirty-eight hours, and be on the ground shortly after.”
“We’ll be ready. Sinclair clear.”
Pushing back in his chair, Alastai
r turned to once more face the silently-scrolling data on his over-sized wall display. If those numbers were correct, things were coming to a head, and soon. Really soon.
* * * * *
Chapter Three
Get Out Of Dodge
Even to Alastair’s trained eye, it looked like complete chaos, with troopers running this way and that, hauling pallets piled high with everything from MAC rounds to missile spares to rations, all disappearing at a prodigious rate up the gaping loading ramps of the Salamanca. Amid the apparent confusion, stood Cristin Lapole directing operations like a conductor would an orchestra. At her side was Hak Voslo, his blue near-feather plumage making the native Veetch more resemble the Earth avian that it was often compared to. Hak held a small slate in each of his upper hands checking off the loaded equipment as it rushed past him while the lower two grasped at the padded jacket it wore to protect it against the growing cool breeze that whipped across the large landing area the Salamanca nestled on. On the turned-up collar of the jacket, the twin silver bars glinted in the pale Scottish sunlight, indicating his status to those who didn’t recognize the Veetch as Salamanca’s second in command. Not for the first time, Alastair marveled at Kate Preissman’s ability to mold such a disparate group of Humans and aliens into an efficient crew. And, more importantly, a crew that knew when to keep their mouths shut when the Salamanca was employed on some of its more nefarious jobs. He supposed the money helped. Kate and the Salamanca were able to show a modest profit year in, year out, which kept them under the radar of any busy-body government civil servant, while each crewmember received an end-of-year, off-the-books bonus, in the currency of their choice. With such lucrative employment, the crew of the Salamanca tended to remain unchanged for many years, and close relatives often replaced retiring crewmembers.
Take Hak for example. Hak’s father, Yara Voslo, was Kate’s First Officer; he had carried out his duties for more than two decades before bringing his first born, Hak, into the family business. Thankfully, Kate had immediately taken to the no-nonsense Veetch. Besides being an outstanding Second-in-Command, Hak also attended to the mountain of paperwork, which was the lot of a starship captain while running a transport business. Kate was eternally grateful.
