Cabal of Lies

by Michael Anderle

  “I don’t think she cares about me getting married quickly as much as she likes to plan ahead. It’s another way of her exerting control.” Jia’s eyes lost focus a moment before she waved a hand. “It doesn’t matter. If I was taking her orders on my love life, I would be engaged to Corbin.”

  “You could have been Mrs. Jia Down-To-Earth Businessman,” Erik joked.

  “Don’t remind me.” Jia sighed. “He wasn’t a bad man. He just wasn’t for me.”

  “Hey, I’m not complaining. I’m also not your mother.”

  She opened her mouth for a second before shutting it, then tried again. “That’s a frightening image.”

  “I also don’t get something else,” Erik continued. “She went from thinking I’m unworthy scum to wanting me to be her son-in-law, and I’m not a down-to-earth businessman. I’m not from an elite family, and I’m about as far from a corp prince as you get without being a pusher in the Zone.”

  “You have positive traits that she likes,” Jia offered.

  “Like what?” Erik stared at her, trying to make sure she wasn’t lying to him. “I thought she was all about money.”

  Jia grimaced. “Okay, so maybe you’re aren’t rich compared to my family.”

  “I have a nice bank account,” Erik argued. “I paid for that little party in the Shadow Zone, and I’ve got a nice flitter. It’s not like I’m that poor.”

  Jia averted her eyes, her cheeks reddening. “Do you really want me to admit how many zeroes you need in your bank account for my mother to raise her eyebrows with interest?”

  Erik leaned back with a grunt. “No. Sometimes a man doesn’t want to be reminded he’s a peasant.”

  “Don’t worry.” Jia waved it away. “You’ve got something better as far as she’s concerned. You’re famous. It’s a good fallback.”

  “A good fallback.” Erik looked down at the crumbs on his plate, the remainder of his feeble sandwich. “Wonderful. I almost die a few times and take down some top corporate asses and politicians so I can stay poor, but I’m famous enough for Lan Lin.”

  “You’re not poor. You’re just poor by Lan Lin’s exacting standards. It’s why she’s always been frustrated with me. She thinks I’m living a pauper’s lifestyle.” Jia shrugged. “The point is, she likes you now. Mei likes you, too, and my dad does whatever my mother and Mei tell him to, so he likes you by default.”

  “That’s a good thing.” Erik fought off the frown that wanted to come out.

  Jia didn’t seem disappointed by her family’s reactions, which made sense. The whole goal of the fake dating thing was to take the pressure off her, but he also knew she wanted more than a fake relationship. Hell, he did too, but he just couldn’t allow it.

  Was discussing her family a way of angling for an actual relationship?

  Erik didn’t know, but he didn’t want to make a big deal out of it. Until he figured out what the hell he was doing with his life, he had no business trying to pin her down. For now, he’d stick with what worked: a real partnership and a semi-fake romantic relationship. If he minimized his time around Jia’s family, everything would work out.

  He tossed a grin on his face. “Speaking of dating, are we still on for tonight?”

  “Ahh.” She nodded. “Sure, why not? You know how to show a girl a good time.”

  “What?” Erik asked. “Large guns don’t spell ‘good time?’”

  Jia stared at him. “Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answer to.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Jia’s hot breath filtered over her face, recycled by her breather mask.

  She’d worn a breather mask before, so she wasn’t so sure why her heart was racing and it felt so claustrophobic. She looked up at the massive brown and yellow planet ruling the night’s sky.

  The sight kicked her heart rate even higher.

  When she’d been on the moon, the Earth was a beautiful thing in the distance, not some monstrous giant orb that threatened to swallow her whole.

  Despite the unsettling night sky, the surface of the rocky planet intrigued her. Gigantic crystal spires surrounded them like a forest of sapphires. It was as beautiful as it was eerie. Something zoomed past in the distance, like a cross between a hummingbird and a dragonfly.

  Jia shook her head to clear it.

  She wasn’t on an alien moon in some distant part of the galaxy. Even if she was wearing a real breather unit and the rifle she held felt real, she needed to remember it was nothing more than a tactical center simulation.

  The exotic environment was tricking her mind more than usual. She didn’t need the real tactical range as much as Erik had thought.

  “Have you been to places that look like this?” Jia asked, looking around. “This is…stunning.”

  Erik nodded. “Yeah. Maybe not exactly like this, but I’ve been on planets and moons with those kinds of formations.” He gestured at one of the crystals. “We might be terraforming everything we can to make it like Earth, but there are a lot of strange places out there, and we can only imagine what the core worlds of the Local Neighborhood races look like. It’s not like any of our beloved alien neighbors will let us near their worlds anytime soon.”

  “I’m not eager to go sightseeing on an alien homeworld.” Jia checked her rifle just to have a reason to take her eyes off the planet. “But after everything that happened in Chang’e City, it doesn’t hurt to be ready. Although I doubt we’ll be flying to any place like this anytime soon.”

  “You never know. Someday we might be flying around the galaxy in our own ship hunting down Zitark spies.” Erik chuckled.

  “A ship body would be nice,” Emma chimed in from their PNIUs. “As long it’s not another bulky transport. I’d like something with a little more maneuverability.”

  “You saying you want a sexy body?” Erik asked.

  “I can assure you, Detective, that I don’t share your sense of physical appreciation.”

  Erik smirked. “Yeah, I could do without getting into what an AI finds sexy.”

  “We’re detectives, Emma,” Jia insisted. “It’ll be a long time before we’re flying around space doing anything. I wouldn’t get your hopes up.”

  “You were stopping hijackers on the way to the moon not all that long ago,” Emma replied.

  “But…” Jia shook her head. “You know what? Just forget it. What’s the scenario?”

  Emma appeared a few meters away, a smile on her face. “It’s time to encounter new, interesting species, figure out their soft spots, and kill them dead.”

  Jia looked at Erik. She couldn’t see much of his face under his mask, but she could tell he was grinning like a fool by the crinkle of his eyes.

  “Duly noted, Emma,” Jia replied. “Again, with that stipulated, what’s the scenario? Yaoguai?”

  “No. In this scenario, hostile Zitark infantry have been inserted onto a UTC-controlled moon. Fleet vessels in the system are interdicting Zitark reinforcements, but the effort is also preventing them from reinforcing you. Intelligence suggests the Zitarks are planning to bomb a civilian dome on the other side of the moon. You have one hour to penetrate their defenses while escorting a demolitions team to destroy the Zitark vessel.”

  “What demolitions team?” Jia asked.

  Six identical men in breather masks and green uniforms appeared. They all wore large backpacks. They all saluted. None of them carried weapons. She wasn’t sure how realistic that was, but the scenario was somewhat outlandish anyway.

  Jia nodded slowly. There was nothing more annoying than an escort mission, but she couldn’t say it was unrealistic.

  With all their dealings with witnesses and suspects, they’d had to protect people. She doubted any Zitarks would ever get close enough to Earth that she would have to deal with them, but it wasn’t all that long prior that she would have doubted she would end up in the Scar fighting yaoguai. She’d learned to accept that her control over her future was more limited than she would like.

  Today�
�s wild improbability became tomorrow’s run-of-the-mill encounter.

  “I’m assuming we have intel on the location of the Zitark ship?” Jia asked. “Otherwise, it’s going to be hard to track it down in all these crystals in less than an hour.”

  “Just follow the marker on your smart lenses,” Emma replied. She disappeared. “Note that you’ll need at least four of the explosives to take down the ship, which means if you lose too many of your squadmates, you’ll have to carry multiple sets of explosives. They’re programmed to refuse to carry more than one backpack.”

  The demolitions troops all gave curt nods.

  “Let’s hope we don’t lose anyone,” Jia commented.

  Erik nodded. “That’s the plan, but it’s hard sometimes when you don’t know where the enemy is. I haven’t been in this exact scenario with Zitarks, but I’ve dealt with similar situations fighting humans. Sometimes it’s diplomats, sometimes it’s a tech. Different people that terrorists or insurgents might want to kill. I know we’re not going to get strafed in the scenario, so that’s something.”

  “A small something, but yes.” Jia walked in front of the other troops and lifted her rifle. “You guard the rear, and I’ll guard the front.”

  The squad set out, keeping a brisk but not hurried pace. Their course took them deeper into the crystal forest, the number of basic formations and branches increasing with their progress. The multiplying and narrowing paths and overlapping formations provided plenty of places for enemies to hide.

  No matter how strange the scenario, Jia intended to win. The better she could handle the wildest training, the less anything odd would slow her down in the field.

  “Shouldn’t we have some drone support?” Jia asked.

  Erik shook his head. “They’d take them out, and it’d just announce us even more. If we can get close enough, we should have complete surprise.”

  They passed under a series of overgrown crystals that formed a natural arched roof over them. The compressed space forced the squad into a tighter formation, and a single grenade or missile would kill them all. Jia took a deep breath, appreciating, if only for the briefest of moments, what Erik must have felt like on Molino, knowing he’d been outmaneuvered.

  “Do you think this is what it would be like?” Jia asked. “If we really had to fight them? It seems weird that we need to go find aliens to kill when plenty of humans are still killing one another.”

  “I don’t know,” Erik admitted. “Emma’s done her best to use what we know about them to make the encounters with the space raptors realistic, but it’s hard to be certain from the few skirmishes shortly after First Contact. The only thing we know for sure is their personal military tech is slightly better. The Zitark ambassadors have implied the troops we have fought were the equivalent of third-rate draftees, but given everything else we know about their caste system, that has to be bullshit. I think they’re trying to convince us that all their scaly little cannon-fodder troops are super-elites to scare us off from starting anything with them.”

  “Maybe they are,” Jia mused. “There’s still so much we don’t know for certain.”

  “We might find out the hard way sooner rather than later.” Erik grunted. “For now, as long as they die when you shoot them enough times, that works for me. At least the Zitarks make sense, not like those damn fung—"

  A hiss sounded from above. Jia jerked up her rifle. The bright scales of the Zitark made the reptilian creature stand out from the blue of the crystal supporting it. The alien held a twisting crystalline knife. With another hiss, he jumped from the formation at the demolitions squad. Jia fired a burst, and the alien screeched and landed roughly on the ground, his tail thrashing. Another burst blew his head off, splattering green blood all over one of the nearby squad members.

  He didn’t react.

  Jia might not be an expert scenario-designer, but Emma could have put a little more effort into their squadmates. She’d have to point it out later.

  A Zitark leapt from a dark patch between two other crystals above and stabbed a squad member in the throat. The simulated soldier vanished, his backpack dropping to the ground. The Zitark growled in triumph and pulled the blade back while yanking a pistol out with its other clawed hand from a pocket in the metallic mesh covering its body. Erik fired a burst at the alien.

  A white flash surrounded the Zitark, and the bullets bounced off. Jia fired at its head, producing the same flash. A blue-white blast erupted from the triangular tip of the pistol. Erik spun, barely avoiding the deadly shot, which exploded against a nearby crystal spire, blasting scorched chunks out of it that pelted Erik’s back.

  Erik fired again, as did Jia. This time, their bullets pierced the Zitark’s forcefield and riddled the alien’s body. It pitched forward, its tail twitching for a few seconds before it stopped moving.

  Jia glanced at the fallen aliens. “One of them had that mesh, and the other didn’t. I don’t know if we’ll be as lucky the next time.”

  “Probably not.”

  Jia walked over and kicked the Zitark to make sure it was dead. The contact splashed some of its green blood on her boot. “I read about this.” She pointed her gun at the knives. “How they tried to stab people in one of the first contact skirmishes because they have this obsession with how great they are as hunters. It’s some sort of honor thing. They all wanted to be the first Zitark to kill a human with a knife.”

  “Yeah, they admitted that in the early negotiations. They were proud of it.” Erik slung his rifle over his shoulder, then leaned down and grabbed the pistol. “But don’t let that fool you. They’re decades ahead of us in personal weapons tech. There’s a reason we have to keep an eye on them, and it’s not because we’re worried about a space raptor stabbing spree.” He slid his fingers into the grooves, but it was an awkward fit. He squeezed the grooves, and another energy blast roared out of the pistol and blew out half a small crystal formation. “I’d need the laser rifle for that kind of penetration. Whatever you do, don’t get hit.”

  “I’ll try not to.” Jia walked over to the fallen backpack and strapped it on. She sighed. “We lost one.”

  “We still have all six backpacks.” Erik nodded. He frowned. “Damn it.”

  “What?”

  “Notice anything about their attack?”

  Jia groaned. “They didn’t go after the two people with weapons. They went after the demolitions squad, which means they know what our plan is.”

  “Yeah.” Erik narrowed his eyes and raised the pistol. “Emma’s really making this hard for us. Playing defense in the field is always difficult, but the clock’s ticking. Let’s go.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  The path widened, taking the squad out of the crystal canyons into wider terrain.

  They kept low, staying near the bottom of a nearby hill wedged between another dense patch of crystal spires. Forty minutes remained until the deadline, the seconds rapidly diminishing in the upper right-hand corner of Jia’s HUD, and they hadn’t encountered any additional Zitarks.

  A flat plain separated them from another crystal maze, their navigational marker pointing them in that direction.

  Erik scanned the horizon, looking for unusual shadows or signs of movement. The occasional local bird-like creature broke away from a canyon, but other than that, they appeared to be alone. The Zitarks had surprised them before, and whether that was Emma cheating or representative of their true capabilities, it implied there would be another ambush.

  Jia jogged forward. The AI-controlled squad members picked up the pace to match her.

  “This seems like something you’d do in an exoskeleton,” she commented. “Especially on such a tight time limit.”

  “You’ve been in enough dangerous situations to know you don’t always get the equipment you need.” Erik patted his rifle. “War on Earth is easy. Reinforcements are, at most, only a ballistic transport away. War in space is different. Reinforcements might be hours, days, or weeks away. They keep a lot
of military forces on the frontier, but they’re spread pretty thin among a lot of systems. So this is just like those frontier planets—kill the enemy with what you have, not what you want.”

  “True enough.” Jia chuckled. “This is easier than normal.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because I doubt there will ever be a situation where I have to arrest a Zitark.”

  Erik snickered. “Do Article Seven rights apply to space raptors?”

  Jia thought for a moment. “I honestly have no clue.”

  Quiet minutes passed as the squad hugged the hill and crystal formations, forcing a roundabout path toward their destination. Erik was impressed. Jia didn’t even need to be told that running straight toward the target over an open area would have ended with them getting picked off by snipers.

  He was having to explain less and less to her these days. Her natural intelligence fueled excellent tactical responses once she had decent data. The main thing holding her back before had been her reluctance to use lethal force, and now she could kill when she needed and not fall into bloodlust.

  “We’re down to thirty minutes,” Erik announced. “You’re right. I’m starting to miss having an exoskeleton.”

  Jia nodded as they took a narrow path running between two steep hills. Crisscrossing crystal formations extended from the hills and alternated across either side of the path, overlapping in some cases, a few meters apart in others. Erik swept above for enemies and checked the rear. Jia rifle’s moved back and forth, her gaze steady. She was ready for another showdown with the murderous lizards.

  Erik’s attention lingered on his partner for a moment. The baggy clothes and tactical harness she wore did nothing for her figure, and the breather mask covered most of her face, but there was something compelling about her competence in battle, even in a simulated one against aliens.

  We’re fake-dating. He bit his lip.

  Erik took a deep breath and pushed the thought away, focusing again on finding an alien reptile to kill.